How Big Data is Taking Recruiters from I Think to I Know

How Big Data is Taking Recruiters from I Think to I Know Anyone who knows the recruiting field understands the intense workload and fast pace that recruiters must operate in. Additionally, recruiting isn’t a skill you learn once and then spend the rest of your career on autopilot, either. As a result, recruiters have always needed to be the early adopters of the HR world, passionate about finding the best tools and the hottest sources for candidates to get the job done. No  sooner have recruiters begun to incorporate the latest tool (i.e. social media) into their daily practices than they come upon the new It Girl of business:  Big Data. It would be easy to dismiss Big Data as a fad, if for no other reason than technology fatigue. But that would be a huge mistake. Data, in general, informs decisions and can help you make better decisions faster. Big Data, specifically, serves up an entirely new world of questions that can be asked and new ways to apply insights based on the answers. It is not a replacement for all other tools; it’s a new tool to be added to the decision-making toolbox. Big Data is the new frontier for innovation, competition and productivityâ€"across all industries and functions. By leveraging Big Data, recruiters can transform their image from “reactive,” responding to the “just-in-time” talent needs of the business, to a “proactive” business partner that has the foresight to make better and faster talent acquisition-related decisions. Big Data is currently being applied to the talent acquisition process in a number of ways. Here are just a few: Diving Deep to Reduce Turnover: Gate Gourmet, a provider of catering and provisioning for the airline industry, recently looked at a variety of large data sets for its one thousand employees at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. Gate Gourmet was experiencing 50 percent turnover, and they suspected that it had to do with commute time. To test this theory, they gathered the information in their internal systems â€" ATS, HRIS, performance review systems, POS data, sales performance and comp systems â€" and data from external systems â€" compensation, demographics, recruiting informatics, traffic and transportation, and social media. The company discovered that the attrition rate was closely connected to factors such as how far away an employee lived from the job site and how accessible public transportation was. The patterns that Big Data analysis revealed enabled the company to adjust its hiring strategies to achieve “fully staffed” status for the first time ever, and to lower unwanted turnover to 27 percent. Targeted Recruitment Marketing: Job boards are evolving to provide a gold mine of information for employers and talent acquisition professionals. Part of job posting evolution is the poster’s ability to tag aspects of job listings that provide essential information. This new functionality yields analysis that enables HR to precisely target sources that have the greatest likelihood of increasing candidate flow for specific positions. This builds stronger talent pipelines and accelerates time-to-filland enables smarter marketing spend as well, since you won’t be wasting money on job boards that don’t perform for you. Predictive analytics can be derived from the huge volumes of data job board collect, such as how easy or hard it will be to fill a nursing position in Cincinnati or the best day of the week to post a software engineer job on a particular board. Big Data can also help uncover valuable trends and patterns on “click decisions”â€"that is, why or why not a candidate takes the critical step to apply for your posted jobâ€"so that you can quickly adjust your course of action to attract more candidates. Mining the Internet for Hidden (Programmer) Gems: A startup called Gild has garnered a great deal of attention for its combination of data aggregation technology and a proprietary algorithm to analyze developers’ code and professional contributions. Gild says that it “goes where developers hang out” on the Internet and scores developers on the quality of their public code and professional knowledge. It then scores these developersâ€"and has done so millions of timesâ€"to offer recruiters a deeper look into a candidate’s true skills. This eliminates some of the guesswork and blind faith that recruiters who don’t happen to be developers must employ. In addition, Gild also gathers social media activity for each candidate to help you determine culture fit. Great, but what if you’re not looking for developers? Gild offers a taste of what the Brave New World of Big Data offers recruiters. The company has been featured in the  New York Times  and snagged some high-profile clients, and that means it’s only a matter of time until other enterprising souls create ways to harness Big Data to discover all kinds of talent. Proactive Talent Acquisition: For organizations with mountains of internal data and a large workforce, Big Data analysis can be put to work to help determine how many employees are needed now and forecast how many will be needed in the future. IBM is doing just that. The company recently did a Big Data mash-up of internal data from two sources: its HR database and its global services billing database. IBM’s Big Data consultants were able to detect dozens of patterns that would not have been detectable otherwise. This helped IBM forecast shortfalls in critical talent areas; they then began the process of training or hiring the talent needed to fill projected gaps. IBM also could see via this analysis where they had talent overages and trimmed accordingly. Conclusions: Big Data takes the blinders off and eliminates the element of guesswork that has been of necessity embedded in the recruiting process. Armed with predictive analytic insights, recruiters can not only anticipate what will happen but be able to act on it as well. That kind of advantage is invaluable to an organization. Big Data can take you from reactive to proactive, from gut instinct or habit to evidence-based decision-making, from “I think” to “I know.” Jennifer Boulanger, Director of Talent Acquisition at a Big Data-driven company called Opower, recently framed the importance of Big Data in a LinkedIn article  on the future of recruiting: “Recruiters will become competitive intelligence to companies. Recruiters will know what is going to happen within companies and talent markets before it happens.” Peter Cappelli, Director of  Wharton’s  Center for Human Resources, recently remarked  that until now, companies have been flying blind in their recruiting efforts. Big Data takes the blinders off and eliminates the element of guesswork that has been of necessity embedded in the recruiting process. Armed with predictive analytic insights, recruiters can not only anticipate what will happen but be able to act on it as well. That kind of advantage is invaluable to an organization. Big Data can take you from reactive to proactive, from gut instinct or habit to evidence-based decision-making, from “I think” to “I know.” Author:  David Bernstein is the VP of eQuest’s Big Data division and their Big Data for HR service. He writes and speaks regularly on how data analytics can predict future behavioral patterns of candidates and create a competitive advantage in candidate sourcing.

Tips to Write a Name of Degree on Resume

Tips to Write a Name of Degree on ResumeWriting a name of degree on resume is a very tedious job. It involves heavy calculations and formulas. In fact, in the paper documents many details are written to a name of degree.Writing a name of degree on resume should be done meticulously and correctly. You can enter the name of the person in the computer by using its name of its category. However, the name must appear in a particular category. In fact, it is not easy to write a name of degree on resume because in this field people enter as much of the information as they can and often fail to enter it at all.If you want to graduate with a professional degree, you have to write a name of a degree in an orderly manner. However, if the person with whom you are writing the resume is one of those people who wants to hide something, you can be sure that he or she will not enter the wrong information. So, in order to do this job more easily, you should consider some tips.The first thing you shoul d consider is that the person who wants to hide the degree has not chosen his or her category as well. Therefore, if you think the individual's entry is entered into the wrong category, you should not write any information about the degree. Then, you should get information about this person's category.To be specific, you can consider the major categories like Bachelors, Masters, Doctorate, PHD, JD, and so on. You can try to see what categories the person with whom you are writing the resume belongs to. If the information about the category is listed in the document, you should not write any information about the person with whom you are writing the resume.Then, if none of the information about the major categories is available, you should use the abbreviation like PhD. Therefore, if the person has chosen the Doctorate category, you should not write any information about Doctorate. You should only write that the person has a Doctorate degree in this field.In fact, you should also con sider what the person wants to hide by choosing a minor category or a major categories. In some cases, when the person does not want to be marked as a student at college, you should not write the information about his or her degree in the paper documents. The important thing is that the person does not want to be found out when he or she applies for an online job.In some cases, the student status of the person is not known but his or her active academic achievements are available. So, if this information is available, you should not write any information about the degree in the documents. Therefore, if you want to write a name of degree on resume, you should not write the information about the degree.

How To Handle The Unexpected Agony in Life - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career

How To Handle The Unexpected Agony in Life - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career Death. Divorce. Moving. Illness. Losing a job. You probably know the list of things you might need to survive, because life inevitably changes and deals you losses along with the wins. Agony often accompanies loss, because your sense of yourself is shattered. Agony rushes in when you lose your sense of safety, stability, hopefulness, peace-of-mind, and happiness. Agony is like inflammation around a good-sized puncture wound. It’s hard to even look at something that hurts so much. But you must. You must take care of yourself. The same is true for all the large and small changes that happen to you in work and life. Take a good look and decide what’s probably going to heal by itself, and what needs your attention. Being able to see the difference between major and minor factors is more than a GMAT problem. At work, the minor stuff might include your boss having a bad day, Twitter goes down, or nobody “likes” your post. These are minor problems and you know it. That’s if you’ve been pretty scrupulous about taking out the trash in your head on a regular basis. If you have not grieved the bigger losses that have been piling up, you may not be fine when the smaller ones come along. A colleague’s negative comment may be the piece that undoes the entire Jenga tower of agony. If you have experienced real loss, even if you call your current situation “the new normal,” you probably want to take the opportunity to grieve the old one. You probably want to sort through the small and large hurts you have endured, and reflect on how you’ve been changed by them. The exercise alone will provide you with some healing, just from the respect you show yourself when you pay attention to your own life. Your personal story matters at work because your mental health directly impacts your ability to succeed. Mental health gives you the resilience to bounce back and persistence to keep going after your great idea is shot down, your computer vaporizes your best (unsaved) work, or your colleague turns rogue at a meeting. Losses great and small are predictable events and yet often unexpected in the moments they occur. Be ready for the unexpected by taking care of yourself now. Take a mental health day, even if it’s already a real day off. Write out what’s behind the frustration, sadness or weariness you feel. Think about what’s gone and what is left. Maybe have a ritual or rite for blessing the passing. If there are really big issues, work with a trained counselor. It’s worth it. Feeling well is a metric that’s been underrated. Make sure you make your well-being a priority.

List of things I hate

List of things I hate Here is my second annual list of things I hate. However, it seems to have morphed into a list of types of people I hate. But this seems fair; no ones animosity should be limited to inanimate objects. 1. Perfectionists. These are people who have lost perspective and get nothing done. Of course, you can guess that I am not a perfectionist. In fact, I am a person who painted my own walls and didnt paint near the windows because I didnt want to do the detail work. I am a person who accidentally addresses the envelope upside down and doesnt get a new envelope. But there is good that comes out of a lack of perfection: I can set a lot of goals for myself because I get them done. Let me just cut to the chase: Perfectionists procrastinate because they are scared of not being perfect. Perfectionists are hypercritical to the point that they cannot support people around them. Perfectionists cant finish a project because they can always think of a way to improve it. Perfectionists are phony because no one is perfect but they cant handle showing that in themselves. 2. People with messy desks. I didnt used to hate people with messy desks. I used to just feel sorry for them. Now I have disdain, because after I wrote a column about the University of Texas study that showed that people with messy desks are not creative, all the messy desk people wrote to me. I realized, from the onslaught of mail, that people with messy desks dont think they have a problem. They are in denial. I wrote about a study. They argued with me. They did not do a study. They told me they are proof that the study is wrong. The emails were so disingenuous and defensive that they actually caused me to have less respect for people with messy desks. 3. People who complain their job is not creative. Its not your job, its you. Creative people bring creativity to everything they do, no matter what. It is inside them and no job can stifle it. Some people are driven to do art and will do it no matter what their job is: Think Kafka holding down a job as an insurance company drone. But creativity is not just art, its also problem solving. If you are good at your job you are undoubtedly creative because any form of success requires some sort of creative problem solving. 4. People who think their problems are unique. Women in finance who think they are the only ones who suffer sex discrimination. People in government who think they have a corner on bitching abut bureaucracy. Teachers who think they are the only people who have to be on all day long. If you have ever told people that your job is especially taxing for one reason or another, you are lame. Your job is not special; all jobs are hard for people who have a hard time doing a job. If you cant cope with sex discrimination in your job, you couldnt cope with it in someone elses job, either. If you cant cope with high standards in your job, you wouldnt meet anyones high standards. Stop thinking your circumstances are unique. I cant think of one situation where that sort of thinking will help further your career. 5. Grammar mavens. As a person who is not a sticklers for detail, I tire of people who call out a grammar error like they are a second-grade overachiever who will never get picked in kickball. But, any list of hated things would not be honest unless the author admits that we only hate the things that somehow remind us of ourselves. So, now that Ive admitted that, I will tell you my grammar pet peeve: You should not, ever, in any situation in the whole world, say, and myself in the workplace. Use and me or and I instead. The only way to correctly use and myself is if you are doing something directly to someone else and to yourself, so it is a grammatical construction that is basically appropriate for nothing except pornography. List of things I hate Here is my current list of things I hate. Its an on-going project that simmers week after week until it reaches boiling point and I have to spend a column venting. 1. People who are not coachable. They get good advice and dont take it because they think they know better. Everyone has blind spots that a little advice can shed light on. If you dont know how to take advice, people will stop giving it to you. And then you will stagnate. And the people who tried to help you will think to themselves, Good. I was pissed that he wasted my time. 2. Three-page resumes. Two pages are okay. Sometimes. Like, if youve been in the workforce twenty years, or if you dont know how to enlarge the margins in your word processor. But anything more than two pages is someone who has lost all perspective. There is not enough that is important about your career to fill three pages. You give away to all potential employers that you are mired in detail. 3. The high and mighty. The people who say, Id never work for someone I dont respect, or, Id never play office politics to get ahead. Get real. If you want to be able to put food on your table you will need to learn to work for someone else, to do things a way you dont agree with, to do some work that doesnt matter to you. If you can afford to lose your job constantly in order to stay on moral high ground, then you didnt need a job to begin with. 4. The 8pm meeting. I dont care if you dont have kids. I dont care if no one in your whole company has kids. Each of you still needs to get a life. Just because you have no one sitting in bed waiting for a kiss goodnight doesnt mean you should be at work. Go to the gym. Go to a movie. Participate in aspects of life that do not have a PL. Well roundedness will make you a more interesting person, and even if you dont care if youre interesting, your co-workers will, so you will do better at work if you leave work. 5. The economically alienated. Dont blow off the company party because you have season tickets to the Opera that night. Dont complain about your butler to people who dont even know what a butler does. Its one thing to have a pay scale as if you are god and the people who work for you are morons. Its another thing to shove that in peoples faces on a daily basis. Act like youre part of the team or you wont have a team to act for. 6. The people who wont change. Each week I get letters from people who say they hate their job but they cant change it because they have so much seniority. Or they want to stay home with their kids but they dont have enough money. Look, unless you are totally impoverished (and almost no one writes to me from this category except maybe recently divorced moms who have never worked) then you can do it. Sell your house. Move to Kansas. Stop sending kids to camp. If you want something enough, you will figure out how to live on less money. If you dont make the change then admit to yourself that you want money more than a job you love/full days with your kids/you fill in the blank and stop complaining. 7. People who dont make lists. Usually these are people who cant face everything they want to do. Or they dont know what they want to do. Either way, making lists can change your life. Start small: Distributing a list of items to cover in a meeting makes you look like a leader. Then get big: Maintaining a list of career goals keeps you focused at work. If you love to make lists, try branching out. Like, make a list of lists you could write. Or make a list of things you hate. Its such a big relief.

Tips For Writing a Resume Cover Page

Tips For Writing a Resume Cover PageWriting a resume cover page is essential if you want to land a job. Even if you have excellent writing skills, you are going to find it hard to impress an employer if you write a poor resume cover page. It is much better to make the first impression your resume gets on the person reviewing it.One of the simplest ways to go about this is to choose professional resume templates that you can use for free or buy. This gives you a chance to see what looks and feels like a professional resume cover page and how it is presented. While you might not be able to think of a way to improve the look of your resume cover page, this will give you a template to build off of.One thing you should consider when you are writing a resume cover page is how it is going to stand out from other similar resumes. Just because you have a resume cover that looks like every other resume cover that has been written does not mean that your resume is the best. You can go out and s pend a little money and buy a template that is different or if you do not have the money to do this you can always make one up yourself using a template.While your resume cover page is important, you need to remember that it is not the only piece of paper that you will be using. All professional resume cover pages follow the same basic design format, and you should stick to this while you are writing your resume cover. The first few lines should be a summary of your experience, followed by an introduction. Then you should have an area where you describe your education and then work your experience area into that.It is a good idea to include your education in this section, because it will make your resume look more professional. In order to do this you must be sure to list each institution where you studied. It would also be a good idea to list your work experience in the beginning of the section, since this will help to make your resume look more professional.The next section of you r resume cover should include your job description, followed by a section where you tell the reader about your skills and achievements. In this section you must focus on what you can do that will help the company you are applying for. Make sure you include all the things you can do that will make you stand out from the other resumes in the job position. Do not forget to highlight any additional skills you have that they might be interested in as well.After you have listed your resume cover in a manner that makes it stand out from the rest, you should move onto your contact information. You should list the address and phone number for the job you are applying for. Also include your email address and your mailing address in case they need to reach you during the course of the interview process.Finally, it is important to write a resume cover that is professional and appealing. Try to avoid excessive grammatical mistakes or spelling errors, and always make sure you make sure your resum e covers each area that you want to be included. By following these basic guidelines you will be able to produce a great resume cover that will get you hired in no time.

Accelerate Your Network During the Slow Summer Months

Accelerate Your Network During the Slow Summer Months When I counsel clients on their job search during the summer months, they often tell me that they plan to put their search on hold because they think that everyone is out of town and no one is hiring during this season.Actually, the summer months can be the best time to step up your search campaign because so many applicants believe this misperception of the market. Consider the following:Fewer people in town could mean more opportunity.Savvy job seekers know that the more visible they are, the greater the chances of meeting the person that can connect them with a viable job opportunity. This concept may be even more important when you are searching during the summer months. Some job seekers make the mistake of taking a break from their search during the summer months because they assume that no one is in the hiring mode. The reality is that summer networking may be more productive. Decision makers’ schedules are not as tight and they may be more generous with their time. By establ ishing relationships with the key players now, you are more likely to be remembered when the hiring picks up.People do more entertaining during the summer months.Memorial Day weekend is synonymous with firing up the grill, taking the tarp off the pool, and planning informal gatherings. These venues are excellent opportunities to reconnect with old friends and hook up with new contacts. There is always a chance to share information about what you do at these events.Networking options increase in the warm summer months.With the warm weather comes the opportunity to network in places that you can’t network in the colder months. One such place is the golf course. Golf continues to be one of the most effective places for referrals and new business. If you have children, consider spending time with them in the playground. Parks are filled with people who have connections to others. Parents tend to gravitate to certain playgrounds on a regular basis so you have a chance to establish and grow the relationship over several visits. Bring along toys that encourage cooperative play including balls, Frisbees, and jump ropes and you’ll have an audience of eager kids and adults in no time.Family obligations may be reduced during summer.If you have older children, your family obligations might be reduced during the summer months. Children typically aren’t juggling as many activities and their time away from you may be extended if they are in a day or sleep away camp program. This could be the perfect time to participate in some early morning or after hours meetings and activities that are difficult to commit to during the school year.Establishing relationships in the summer time is an excellent way to make inroads with decision makers who may be hiring in the fall. Hiring managers may be more accessible, more relaxed, and just in a better frame of mind during the summer months.

The First Steps to Starting Your Own Business

The First Steps to Starting Your Own Business Thank you to those of you who tuned in last week to the return of Making a Living with Maggie on Martha Stewart Living Radio SIRIUS 112. I was joined by four fabulous guests throughout the hour and we shared tips, advice, ideas and inspiration about Believing in Your Dreams.Its a topic I feel cant get enough air time. Callers shared their dreams, many focused starting their own businesses from a hair stylist, to a wedding planner, to a stay at home Mom returning to work. The on air conversation focused on not just believing in your dreams but making them a reality.If youve been thinking about becoming your own boss and want to know how to get started, there are great resources offered by the US Small Business Administration: Free business consulting Business planning resources Information on health insurance and other programs for the self-employed.You can also check out Marci Albohers Shifting Careers blog. She recently mentioned small business contests where you can find even more resources to support your dream.If youve been thinking about becoming your own boss, perhaps its time to believe in your dreams. With support, preparation and planning you may very well realize your true potential.Whats your dream way to make a living? What do you need to make it a reality?