Temps vs Suits

Blow off some steam by blowing away your boss! Ordinary office equipment turns into deadly anti-managerial weapons as the executive suite becomes a corporate battle ground. Make it to the boardroom and you'll have to fight a gang of marauding CEOs. This "Doom" inspired first-person-perspective combat game gives new meaning to the term "Hostile Takeover."
From The Temp 24-7 Website

• Temp Tales of Terror
• Gripe of the Week
• Dear Blabby
• Temp Term of the Week

Little Things Mean A Lot

Enter HotJobs, the Manhattan based service. During a recent onsite demonstration, we discovered that HotJobs has very quietly pioneered an alternate approach. Take a look at their resume submission process!

When a candidate cuts and pastes a resume into the HotJobs form, their intelligent parsing database instantaneously extracts core information into a form. Cut and paste the resume, click the button and the form fills itself out. This apparently simple innovation is the result of development efforts of the extraordinary HotJobs technical team.

Think about it. It's reasonably clear that core response rates (the number of visitors who actually submit a resume) are related to the complexity of the data entry process. The simpler the form, the higher the response rate. Most services require at least some data entry beyond pasting a resume. By removing the process complexities, HotJobs has focused its efforts (again!) on making their system candidate-friendly. The result? Higher response rates from candidates.

Wow!

More Than Digits

We visited the MBAFreeAgents monthly gathering. Part social network, part temp agency, and part professional advancement, the core operation places MBAs in permanent, temp to perm and sweat equity slots. Their straightforward website profiles candidates who are willing take interim positions.

Gathering the members of the network for a meeting each month positions the company as a powerful creator of results. It's easy to forget that all of those resumes in your database represent living breathing people. By bringing the membership together, they allow an extraordinary development. The resumes talk with each other and make connections.

Pioneered by early service (like the Well), marrying virtual and physical groups can yield powerful results. Electronic communications offer a fast way to begin an intimate relationship. (We certainly have many useful email only associates.) When you add a face to face component, however, the potential of the web to jump start working relationships really shines through.

Building on a base of common skills and interests, MBAFreeAgents is adding refinements to the integrated model provided by Mindsource (the Silicon Valley supplier of Unix contract professionals). Like Mindsource, they increase the overall power of their network my combining the strengths of the web and more conventional networking techniques.

We're sure that any hiring manager looking for MBAs would have loved to take our seat as we watched a sea of candidates in action.

Tidbits

CareerCast is powering iMALL's Career Center exclusively. CareerCast's database is republished on iMALL, so all the CareerCast Job and Resume Databases are searchable from iMALL. With over 2.5 million unique visitors last month, iMALL is one of the largest e-commerce and shopping malls on the net and is a publicly traded company. iMALL was launched in 1994 and also just received new funding that will fuel a $5 million+ promotional campaign. iMALL is partnered with AT&T, American Express and others in offering a variety of shopping, travel and financial services.

The Recruiter's Online Network is rolling out a series of improvements including Smart Match. In their words:

SmartMATCH is launching over the next two weeks. Phase one will allow us to automatically match resumes to your posted jobs. Each day you will be alerted by email of those resumes we have received that match your jobs on a sliding scale of 1 to 4 with 4 being resumes that fit over 80% of your posted positions parameters (location, industry, function and keywords) and 1 being a 20% fit. You will be able to easily download the resumes or preview them online. Phase two of SmartMATCH will alert candidates of the jobs hosted by RON that fit their background, etc. when they submit their resume and daily as new jobs are posted.

It continues to be the case that the decline in overall resume quality is a function of the declining unemployment rate. We'd love to see a service that fuels its matching services with a proactive resume development program.

Tidbits

The bottom line in deciding which job posting service to use? Measure your results by testing several. Results can vary by industry, profession and phase of the moon. Only you can tell where the right intersection is for the results that you need.

One area in which you can exercise control: The quality of your job postings determines their success. Read the archives at dreamjobs. It is a stellar compilation of effective job postings.

It's easy to get confused by a title. Job postings are not postings (like you see on internal bulletin boards). They are ads. They need to be written like ads. They are called postings because advertising was a no-no in the early days of the web. That is no longer the case.

In general, the more jobs posted in a database, the lower results. Unless your provider has a clearly articulated traffic development plan, each new job in the database will diminish the effectiveness of all of the others.

It's important to remember that as the net doubles in population, the average experience of users falls by 50%. This will remain true until service is universal. It means that your sophistication is increasing while the average is declining. It's a recipe for bad design. You have to fight to remember this one.

Push technology is finally dead. See today's New York Times (paper version) for the belated obituary. We told you last year!

Seminar I: Management, Strategies and Tactics
Don't jump on the bandwagon to be cool. Don't use technology without a clear view of the payback. This intense seminar addresses the questions any manager, owner or director should ask before continuing to invest in Electronic Recruiting.

Seminar II: Advanced Searching and Sourcing
Learn how to mine the data fields. This one day presentation covers spidering, flipping, and depth searching...all of the tools required to unearth the passive candidate. The course includes a A CD Chock-Full Of Net Software and Tools.

Graduates of both receive:

Enroll today, seats are still available. There is a discount available for early registrations.

This is our Winter 1998 Seminar Schedule. We will be delivering both seminars in each city.

Feb 23: Cleveland, OH Feb 25: Minneapolis, MN		Feb 27: Chicago, IL Mar 02: Kansas City, MO Mar 04: Seattle, WA

Call our offices for more information at (800) 358-2278