An interesting post from Fordyce…

Placement Fees Are Cheap When You Look At Them This Way

Employers seldom complain about the services of headhunters, it’s the headhunters’ fee that has become their pain point….

 

Read more

I’m not sure that anyone knows when the end of the world will be, but the chances are that its not today, despite the predictions of the doomsday “believers”. So what will you be planning for 2013 – assuming we get there?

Personally, I’m in a planning frenzy right now, and looking at how I can reach and interact with even larger groups of Pharma candidates. Lots of ideas in the planning stage, and I hope that throughout 2013 I can report successes (and failures) of various strategies and campaigns.

In the meantime, have a great break over the Christmas period, and use it wisely!

A quick look at my calendar this morning made me realise that today is 12/12/12. Not that having the same number 3 times in a date is statistically that rare over the last 12 years (work it out if you want), but I guess its the last time it will happen this century. So are you going to make 12/12/12 important? Personally I’m going to spend as much as I can planning 2013, but whatever you do, make sure you spend it wisely.

I came across this article about Ray Avery (pharmaceutical scientist, inventor, and social entrepreneur) who uses the philosophy “Reverse Engineer Your Life and Make it Count”. That is, you know roughly how many days you are going to live, so if you work backwards from that. So it makes you acutely aware that they are in short supply, and that you’d better get on with things.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/11/sir-ray-avery-nz-makes-you-dangerous/

Obviously Ray doesn’t believe that updating his blog ranks as “important”, because it hasn’t been updated for 2 years.. but it’s still an interesting concept.

Netflix employees have one less thing to keep track of: the amount of vacation days they take. Co-founder Reed Hastings recently told Bloomberg Businessweek that Netflix has an unlimited vacation policy.

http://mashable.com/2012/04/13/netflix-unlimited-vacation/

Having looked into a range of ATS / candidate management systems, I thought I’d post my quick initial review or Resumator here.

Resumator

Signing up for the demo was a breeze. No credit cards required.

I was initially presented with a page to create a new job. This wasn’t what I wanted to do initially but I created a dummy one just to work through the process. Options on the job posting seem OK, if a little US focused, for example “states” are listed by default (on the assumption that I’m in the USA)  and the preset prequalification (canned) questions were rather US focused such as “Felony Conviction” or “Grade Point Average (GPA)” and no sign of “work visas”. However, new questions are configurable through the settings options.

The application process candidates goes through is based on  a workflow. The default being:

• 1. Filed for Later
• 2. Reviewed
• 3. Phone Screened
• 4. Scheduling Interview
• 5. Interview Scheduled
• 6. Interviewed
• 7. Checking References
• 8. Put On Hold
• 9. Made Offer

These can be changed or new workflows created, which is useful.

I have to assign “Job Board Categories” when posting a job. I can see why this might be useful for some organisations, but not for me as all jobs are likely to be in the same category… unless I use this for “departments”.

After applying through the system, candidates can be assigned by admin users to categories, and these can be defined. so for our use, I’d probably use these for the “departments” (development, project management etc) as well as “multilingual”, as this is useful for us.

All email message templates are configurable for example “Thanks for your application”, rejection emails etc

Very usefully, evaluation templates can be created, and these are used as a checklist against each candidates application. Parameters can be set for each element, so for example, you can list the requirements of the job, and assign units of measure against each (such as ranking 1-10, yes/no etc) you can also weight each item too as a %. This feature is very useful when reviewing lots of CVs as well as knowing (or proving) why a certain decision was made. So its crutial to define these for each job. There is also a feature that links to a system called Smarterer, but I’m not familiar with that yet.

From an admin perspective, job applications are processed through the system (or details uploaded manually), and  CVs are Parsed using Scribd (which seemed to take ages for the first one I added, but eventually worked ok). Some details are extracted from the CV and you’ll need to check these and add further details where appropriate.

You can also upload candidates CVs directly to a job application using a custom email address provided for each job (10 jobs at a time max) which is useful if you have a backlog of CVs.

The site creates a jobs listing for you on a sub domain on their site (eg: http://pharmiweb.theresumator.com) , and there are various options for configuring templates and display of this. This would be useful for creating a page on your existing website, although no searching or other functionality exists here other than a simple listing.

You can have unlimited users of the account, and users can be hiring leads, admins etc, so each job can be assigned to a hiring lead for example.

Overall presentation seems very good and is really quite simple to get to grips with. Its obviously USA focused, but that shouldn’t be a showstopper for the rest of us.

Price 

$99/month for 5 Job slots, $20 for each additional job slot. Pay month-to-month, and change your plan at any time. There are never any contracts to sign or any big commitments to make.

Conclusion

I liked Resumator a lot, and its in use by some pretty big names (Mashable, Pinterest etc), it was certainly the most flexible and best presented ATS I looked at, and although it may not be  prefect for everyone, it suits us at this time.

Thinking outside the box (or inside it?) worked well for Ikea when recruiting for new staff:

As you may have heard by now, Facebook have launched their new Job Board App.

By partnering with some existing boards like Monster, jobVite, us.jobs, work4labs & branchout, they have added 1.9 million jobs to their new board.

Clearly this is following in LinkedIn’s footsteps, who make most of their income from recruitment based advertising, so it must be a bit of a concern for LinkedIn themselves. However, on first viewing I don’t think they’ve got  much to worry about immediately.

In many ways its disappointing, as search is crude, results are variable. There’s definitely no WOW here, and, other than the quantity of  jobs, they’ve  a long way to go before they get anywhere near your average job board. Personally I think that the average candidate would rather see 10 really well-matched jobs than have to search 1.9 million random ones.

I guess Facebook, although they potentially know lots about you, don’t have the same sort of profile information that LinkedIn have. So they’re at a disadvantage there.

We’d better watch the space though as Facebook will have plans, and they’ve got the money to implement them, and the audience to push them to.

If you are new to an industry, the terminology and acronyms can be very confusing! So here is a short list of some of the key ones.

Read more: http://www.pharmimike.com/index.php/pharma-acronyms/#ixzz29b6Je0mJ

In the “old days” your working day was not driven by emails. These days, how many of us spend our day responding to emails and trying to fit in the work we want or need to do, around the demands that land in our in box every day.

So, here’s a radical idea. Ignore your emails. OK I don’t mean ignore them completely, but manage them. Try opening your emails at set times of the day. For a start, NOT first thing in the morning, otherwise that sets you off on the wrong path for the day.  How about 10:00am? That’s reasonable. I’m quite sure that most things will wait an hour before action, and if it’s really that important, someone will probably phone you anyway!

Once you’ve read your emails, deleted the junk, delegated whatever you can, and made a list (on paper) of the actionable tasks – turn off your email program’s auto send/receive. That way you won’t be distracted by even more emails before you’ve completed the tasks you’ve just started.  Only switch it back on at your next “online” time. How about 1:00 or 2:00, then again at 4:00. You’re still reading your emails 3 or 4 times a day, which should be enough for most people!

Taking this approach, I believe you’ll now have an extra hour or so “free” each day, so you can start to do some of the things that YOU need to do. Write that blog entry, finish off that project, proof read that article, even read the latest news. Or plan that new project that’s been on the back burner “when you’ve got the time”. If you now have 1 hour a day “extra”, you’ve got yourself almost another working day each week… use it wisely!!

Here’s a list. I’m not endorsing these in any way as I’ve not used most of them in detail. If you know of any more, drop a comment on the page. Or indeed if you have any experience using any of these.

ICIMS
“Innovative web-based solutions for streamlined recruiting and hiring”
http://www3.icims.com/candidatemanagementdemo/5200/5890

TALEO
“Providing the ONLY industry leading solutions with Talent Intelligence in every major category of Talent Management.”
http://www.taleo.com/

Evolve
http://www.evolvedb.co.uk/

IDIBU
http://www.idibu.com

Recruit Active
http://www.recruitactive.com/

Zoho
http://www.zoho.com/

Unrabble
http://www.unrabble.com/recruiting-capterra/

PCRecruiter
http://www.pcrecruiter.net/home.htm

Resumator
http://www.theresumator.com

AquireTM
http://www.acquiretm.com/