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I’m not in the Mood: Measuring Employee Happiness

“Feelings….nothing more than feelings…” 

The song “Feelings”, written in 1974 and performed by many artists since that time, is running through my head as I pen this post.  And now, with the addition of some new “human capital emotional monitoring tools” that have recently hit the market, perhaps HR professionals and business owners will soon be singing the same tune.

As the world continues to capitalize on the explosive use of mobile devices by building apps that make you look pretty or help you make your friends look fat, innovation in the HR space is no different.  Two recent
tools to hit the scene, emooter.com and morale.me, are hoping to help HR professionals better gauge the mood of their employees.  A third, called happi.ly, is rumored to be coming out later this year. 

Basically, the way these tools work is pretty simple.  As an HR administrator, just download the app or log in to the web site, set up the administrator account, and invite your employees to participate.  Employees then can click a smiley face or frowny face, or use a slider bar and tell the app how their feeling about their job.  Your employees can do this real time and as many times a day as they desire.  This data is then aggregated from all of the participating employees across the company and can be used to get a real time pulse on how your employees are feeling.  Think of it as an electronic mood ring for your employees.  Clever.

John Sumser, HR technology & recruiting expert, in a recent blog post discussing emooter, said “the upshot of the whole big data thing is that static measures will be replaced with ongoing constant streams of data.  Everywhere you see something that takes a periodic measurement, expect it to be replaced with something that measures continuously”.  I agree.  The question is, are HR departments--who are traditionally behind the 8-ball to adopt change--ready to handle the onslaught of real-time data that these tools could provide for their organization?

“Annual face-to-face reviews are obsolete,” says Joel Cheesman, mobile & online recruiting expert, and founder of Morale.me.  Joel sees his mood monitoring apps as a way for HR folks to get deeper demographic information about their staff.  As user adoption within the organization increases, eventually you’ll be able to use the data to determine that women employees are more happy than men, or that the the Dallas office isn’t happy, but the employees in the New York office love their jobs.   As more people begin to use his app, Joel plans to build out new features like heat maps and data reporting that would be accessible via a freemium\premium model.  Pretty cool. 

Joel goes on to say, “If you don’t want to replace your workers every quarter, tools like Morale.me can help Human Resources better gauge employee happiness and demonstrate that the employer cares about their workers.”  There’s no doubt that retention of key employees is important in every company.  More consistent and systemic monitoring of employee mood –as well as making changes based on the data--can help curb attrition. 

Most employees don’t just decide to up and quit. Every job has its ups and downs.  Some days, we leave work feeling like a rock star because we accomplished some goal or got complimented for a job well done.  Other times, after a clash with a boss or a stupid management decision that we don’t agree with, we leave the office saying “I’ve got to find a new job”.  When employees start thinking this way, they’ve crossed an invisible demarcification line.  It’s only after crossing the line consistently over a period of time that the employee finally makes that firm commitment to start looking, and moves from passive to active job search mode.  Tools like emooter and morale.me could curb this attrition by tracking the negative and positive ebb and flow of a company, helping management to recognize troublesome trends--and hopefully nip them in the bud before they grow.

Still, something doesn’t sit right.  I’m all for more communication between employer and employee.  Are these types of tools simply yet another way that technology replaces real human interaction?  Shouldn’t a good manager already know how his or her direct reports are feeling?  Work is work, and few of us are lucky enough to have a job that leaves us in a constant state of happiness.  By communicating frequently and face-to-face with the people they manage and asking direct questions like “are you happy here” or “is there anything that would make this role more enjoyable for you” can uncover deeper emotions about how employees feel than pushing a smiley face on an app. 

User adoption.  Will employees use it? Experience would suggest that those feeling negative will be more likely to consistently participate, but perhaps that is okay--after all, you can benchmark and react to the trend, not to the specific votes. But, given how difficult it can be to get people to fill out the once-a-year “How are we Doing” HR survey -- can we expect the same employees to open a mood monitoring app throughout the day?

Impetus for change.  Will HR departments and companies act on the data they’ve collected in a productive way? The major challenge with big data is that we sometimes confuse a lot of data with intelligence.  We may have the data, but it still needs to be interpreted and applied to the business.  If HR departments are slow to drive change with the current model of once-a-year reviews and surveys, how will they be able to handle a constant flow of real-time information?  If nothing changes, employees will stop voting, and morale will be worse off.

I like the innovation.  Just thinking realistically.

To step back for a second…is there a bigger picture for apps like these outside of HR?  Definitely.  Could restaurant owners get a real-time snapshot of how their patrons are feeling while they’re eating their meal?  Would psychologists or therapists benefit by the use of this type of data collection method to keep an eye on their patient’s emotional state in real time?

This first wave of online & mobile mood management tools is only the beginning of a new evolution of how HR can use mobile and technology to improve the organization.  I applaud the entrepreneurs who are focused on doing things better.  As Tim Berners Lee once said, “innovation is serendipity, so you don’t know what people will make.”

OK, I’m done with my diatribe.  And in the words of James Brown, “I feel good!”

 

About the Author:

Joe Stubblebine is Vice President of Corporate Outreach at Beyond.com.  Beyond.com, The Career Network, focuses on helping people grow and succeed professionally through 75 unique career channels and 3,000 industry and regional communities.

Joe has over 14 years of entrepreneurial recruitment products & services experience.  Prior to joining Beyond.com, Joe was the Co-Founder and CEO of JobCircle.com, a robust regional career site.  JobCircle.com was acquired by Beyond.com in 2012.  Joe was the founder of hired! Magazine, an employment publication in the Greater Philadelphia region.  He also founded SocialMediaPlus, a series of B2B social media conferences.  Joe has served as an IT consultant & project manager for many notable brands.  He has been featured in the Philadelphia Inquirer “Who’s Who Under 30”, “Top Tech” by Computer User magazine.  His company, JobCircle.com, held the 11th spot on the Philadelphia INC 100 List in 2002. He has made appearances on The Nightly News with Tom Brokaw, WWDB Executive Leaders Radio, and The Eye Opener, PHL17 in Philadelphia. Joe attended Clarion University of Pennsylvania, where he majored in Accounting.

 

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Who will win the war for Resume 2.0? Ten Visual Resume Tools Reviewed.

Before it was easy to build your own blog, before Facebook was hot, before the ability to tweet a message to the world…getting your skills and qualifications in the hands of the right people was much different than it is today.

Not so long ago, job search meant sweating over an IBM typewriter—or in later years—a word processing program, driving to the local stationary store, picking up the parchment paper, and getting just the right stamp for the outside of the envelope.  And, most of the time your envelope would be opened by a real person, who would experience your application from both a visual and tactile sense as they unfolded your resume and cover letter and perused the contents.  Back in the day, these were just a few of the resume rituals that were quite commonplace.

Fast forward to now. At the push of the button, you can apply to almost any job, anywhere. A job seeker has access to more jobs, more companies, and more opportunities. And, of course, employers have their pick of more candidates, with more experience, from more places. Job seekers have more jobs at their fingertips, but are competing against far more people. Employers have more talent at their disposal, but struggle to identify the best talent amidst the sea of applications.

In the process the resume has been downgraded to mere words in binary format, competing for the attention of computer systems that are the gatekeepers to recruiters. The traditional resume still persists but, as renowned HR expert Peter Weddle recently said, it is about as “inspiring as a brick.”  In fact, in a recent Beyond.com poll, over 57% of the HR professionals we polled said that an infographic or visual-style resume would help them more quickly evaluate candidates over a traditional resume.  And, 79% of jobseekers said that they wish they had a better way to present themselves online.  Resumes are primed for an upgrade.

In the age of social media, your personal brand is king.  You are the marketing department for the product of “You”.  You are the sales person for yourself.  And the cacophony of available self-publishing, self-branding, self-broadcasting tools is exhaustive and overwhelming.   Every day, a new social network pops up or some new-fangled job search site promises to give you all the jobs, handle the apply for you, and make your job search quick, easy, and painless. And yet, most job seekers still must rely on a few pages of largely unformatted copy and bullets to get hired.

At present, that is the reality. A more evocative resume doesn’t play well with Applicant Tracking Systems (ATSs), and 93% of hiring managers are still going to ask for the traditional resume at some point during the hiring process.  But, recruiters and HR folks are already stepping outside of their systems to get a fuller picture by searching Google and looking people up on social media to find out who they really are.  A growing number of companies are developing alternatives to the traditional resume. Over the next few years, these formats will continue to gain traction, become better integrated with ATS systems and other technology, and grow more widely used and accepted by job seekers and recruiters.

Here’s a look at 10 companies that are leading the charge in enabling professionals to craft a more visual resume and make a better online elevator pitch.  I graded each tool based on eight important criteria to demonstrate their value (see addendum).

#1. About.me (http://about.me/joestubblebine)

About.me is an AOL product that is probably more of a visual calling card then a true online profile.  Some of you may be old enough to remember emurse.com, which ran the race with VisualCV (reviewed below) back in the day.  Emurse was acquired by AOL in 2009, and AOL killed the service in July 2012 to focus on about.me and Huntsy.com, a jobseeker job organization tool.  About.me provides you with the ability to pop in a paragraph or so about yourself and link up to your other social profiles.  Although you can change background pics, drag and drop stuff around, and change some fonts and styles, there’s no resume upload feature, or any other especially useful tools that would be especially helpful for job search.  This site may be more useful for public speakers, artists, or singer/songwriters who simply want a visual calling card that is quick and easy to set up and has a slight artistic flair.  Out of all of the profile sites reviewed, this was the only site that had any real traffic outside of LinkedIn, Beyond.com, and Facebook.

Ease of Setup:	A
Editability:	B
Look & Feel:	B
Career Focus:	D
Social Connectivity:	C
Community Value:	D
Sharability & Contactability:	A
comScore Unique Visitors (Feb 2013):	392K

 

#2.  Beyond.com (http://Beyond.com/JoeStubblebine)

OK…full disclosure: I work for Beyond.com, and I’m a big fan of the Beyond.com Career Portfolio.  I had no part in the design of this product, it was in the works before Beyond.com acquired my company.  If you still think I’m being biased, try it for yourself and you’ll see.  Beyond.com’s new  Career Portfolio was just announced about two weeks ago, and literally takes about 2 seconds for a new user to set up a portfolio.  Simply email your resume to portfolio@beyond.com, and your profile and member account will be created instantly using information parsed from your resume.  If you’re one of the 30 million members that already have joined Beyond.com, then the next time you log in you’ll see the start of your personal portfolio based on the information that the site had already received from you.

Beyond.com’s Career Portfolio is a really visual way to clearly display your skills and abilities, and incorporate a few cool marketing snippets that can catch a recruiter’s eye and call out the things that make you unique.  Editing and organizing the information is a piece of cake.  You can also add videos, references, and an intro/cover letter.  Basic customization (i.e. color schemes, header tags, section sorting, etc.) is also provided.  The portfolio allows for all types of information to be presented, including certifications, education, interests, skill tags (up to 20), and creates a very nice visual timeline that incorporates both your education and work experience.  I especially like the accomplishment chicklets that gives you the ability to quickly create some cool stats to brag about yourself.  It’s shareable, and one click to the Text version allows recruiters to cut and paste your resume into their applicant tracking system.  This tool is pretty much a one-stop shop for a career-focused portfolio product. 

The only drawback is that I can’t pull in my profile from LinkedIn to start the process, but I guess I could dump out my LinkedIn profile as text and just send the text version to the parser at portfolio@beyond.com and it would work.  I’d also like to have the ability to plug my other social communication outlets in to my Beyond.com Career Portfolio so that I could display my last few tweets and Facebook comments and make my profile feel alive, current, and connected.

Overall, given Beyond.com’s 5.7 million monthly visitors, and the fact that Beyond.com serves the recruitment needs of tens of thousands of employers through its 2,500 niche geographic and industry-specific sites, I’d say that it’s worth the time to set up a profile here.

Ease of Setup	A
Editability	A
Look & Feel	A
Career Focus	A
Social Connectivity	D
Community Value	B
Sharability & Contactability	B
ComScore Unique Visitors (Feb 2013):	5.7M

 

#3.  CareerCloud (http://social.careercloud.com/sr/jstubble)

A fairly new player on the scene, CareerCloud was built by a friend of mine, Chris Russell.  I refer to Chris as the “Mad Scientist of Recruiting”.  He’s a very smart entrepreneur who’s always creating new products and new ventures, and he also happens to be a respected player in the online recruitment and product services arena. 

Overall, not bad for a first pass.  However, providing for only a LinkedIn import as the main source of data, it didn’t give me the option to edit my LinkedIn profile after importing it, or upload a resume.  As I was setting up the visual resume, it only allowed me to add up to 8 skills, it didn’t tell me that my glamour URL would be my username, and there was no way to change it after you set it up (thus my ugly glamour URL).  Site speeds were fairly slow at times, and the end product--while functional--didn’t wow me visually.  On the plus side, setup was a breeze, allowing me to quickly connect with and pull in my social platforms quickly.

CareerCloud is still in beta, and in recent conversations with Chris, he says he’s adding new features and will be improving site speed in the next few months.  If you want to help out a friend of mine, build a profile and provide him some feedback via his CareerCloud profile.

Ease of Setup	C
Editability	D
Look & Feel	D
Career Focus	B
Social Connectivity	A
Community Value	D
Sharability & Contactability	A
ComScore Unique Visitors (Feb 2013):	N/A

 

#4. Facebook (http://Facebook.com/JoeStubblebine)

While Facebook is not a pure-play recruiting platform, it is still worth mentioning here.  As Facebook Graph Search continues to be rolled out, more and more employers will turn to Facebook to recruit candidates.  I covered this in detail in my Don’t Get Caught with your Pants Down blog post last month.  Facebook allows you to publish your “Work and Education” section publicly, and you can choose to allow search engines like Google to index your Facebook account.  As this catches on, Facebook has the potential to radically shift where recruiters go to find talent.  Although the Work and Education section doesn’t allow an import from LinkedIn, doesn’t allow you to share locally, and is pretty much a boring list of your past jobs, Facebook is the largest social network in the world.  And now that employers can search for you based on skills, likes, and employers through Facebook Graph Search, it makes it worth your time to ensure the professional side of your Facebook account is up-to-date and set to be visible to the public.

Ease of Setup	B
Editability	B
Look & Feel	D
Career Focus	D
Social Connectivity	B
Community Value	A
Sharability & Contactability	C
ComScore Unique Visitors (Feb 2013):	143.1M

 

#5. Kinzaa.com (http://Kinzaa.com/JoeStubblebine)

The site still says “beta” at the top, but with the stiff competitors out there, I’m not sure if this one should even make it past beta. 

The Kinzaa experience starts by pulling in data from LinkedIn, and provides nifty little visual tool to quickly identify top skill keywords (up to 3) to associate with each job and allocate percentage of time spent on those skills.  I hit a couple of site errors that created a bit of a hassle, but setup wasn’t too painful.  The result is a pretty standard infographic that left me feeling a bit blah.  I wasn’t given the ability to incorporate my social channels, point to my videos on YouTube, or even add more than 4 skills.  Social sharability was non-existent.

Ease of Setup	C
Editability	D
Look & Feel	C
Career Focus	C
Social Connectivity	D
Community Value	D
Sharability & Contactability	D
ComScore Unique Visitors (Feb 2013):	N/A

 

#6. LinkedIn (http://linkedin.com/in/joestubblebine)

LinkedIn.  The big daddy of online profiles.  In just three short years since going public, LinkedIn’s revenues attributed to recruitment grew by 100.7% in 2012 to $523M, while Careerbuilder’s North American revenues only increased 5.4% to $661M.  LinkedIn is catching up fast, and employers are shifting dollars quickly to the professional networking giant.   

Overall, Linkedin’s profile is fairly unimpressive and generic, but they have HUGE eyeball power, and a LinkedIn presence is a must-have for any jobseeker.  Of course, if you didn’t know this, you’ve got bigger problems than I can help you with.  Setting up the profile is one thing, but the value that LinkedIn brings to the table (outside of the networking, connections, groups, and the entire social platform), is that the endorsements, recommendations, and connections can be a big boost to create an impressive online image with validation from others in your network.

Establishing and maintaining an up-to-date profile on LinkedIn is a must for everyone, even if you’re not actively looking for a job.

Ease of Setup:	B
Editability:	A
Look & Feel:	B
Career Focus:	A
Social Connectivity:	D
Community Value:	A
Sharability & Contactability:	A
ComScore Unique Visitors (Feb 2013):	42.2 million

 

#7. ResumUP (http://resumup.com/me/5563296#) 

Not just a visual portfolio product, ResumeUp attempts to solve the lofty challenge that has been tried by many throughout the years.  Not only does the site allow you to create a marginally attractive infographic, it also provide you with career planning tools that attempt to help you get from where you are now to where you’d like to be.  Another heavy user of pulling in LinkedIn data, ResumUp provides a decent interface for allowing you to edit your portfolio once you’ve pulled in your info.  I couldn’t find any way to change my Glamour URL, and there was no way to upload a resume.

The biggest differentiator was the fact that ResumeUP provided a career planning tool.  However, in my experiments, it didn’t seem all that effective.  As a commenter on an earlier product review that Melanie Pinola of LifeHacker pointed out…the recommended path from CEO to US senator:  CEO -> Natural Sciences Manager -> Operations Research Analyst -> Human Factors Engineer and Ergonomist -> Soil and Plant Scientist -> US Senator.  Not good.  I wouldn’t recommend spending too much time on this one--just get yourself a good career coach.

Ease of Setup	C
Editability	C
Look & Feel	B
Career Focus	A
Social Connectivity	D
Community Value	D
Sharability & Contactability	B
ComScore Unique Visitors (Feb 2013):	N/A

 

#8. Re.vu (http://Re.vu/joestubblebine)

Re.vu is a pretty cool way to create a visual profile.  The experience starts with your LinkedIn account, and then provides for the addition of several types of self-promotional data, including skills, education, proficiencies, quotes, and personal stats.  Overall, it’s pretty easy to edit and customize, but the graphics don’t wow you visually.  It also allows you to provide a “traditional” resume that visitors can download. When logged in, Re.vu displays the number of visitors, time on page, resume downloads, and how many times you’ve been contacted.  Overall, not bad, but with traffic figures that are too low to register, building a profile here is like putting a billboard on a deserted island.

Ease of Setup:	B
Editability:	B
Look & Feel:	B
Career Focus:	A
Social Connectivity:	D
Community Value:	D
Sharability & Contactability:	B
ComScore Unique Visitors (Feb 2013):	N/A

 

#9. Vizify (http://Vizify.com/joestubblebine)

Vizify starts the process by putting its hooks into your social profiles, including LinkedIn, Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram…and BAM!  Really cool looking profile.  Visually, this site’s offering is pretty darn cool.  More than just a one-page profile, it presents your information in 15 or 16 pages, creating a sort of visual slideshow that could be tedious to recruiters.  For marketing, advertising, creative, or media types who are heavy into social media, this could be neat; but for the average guy who doesn’t tweet, doesn’t really use Instagram, and is reticent to share access to Facebook, this tool may not be for you.

Ease of Setup:	A
Editability:	C
Look & Feel:	A
Career Focus:	C
Social Connectivity:	A
Community Value:	D
Sharability & Contactability:	A
ComScore Unique Visitors (Feb 2013):	N/A

 

#10. VIsualCV  (http://VisualCV.com/joestubblebine)

VisualCV was one of the early visual resume players to market.  When they were on the verge of shutting down in 2011, Talent Technology swooped in to save them at the last minute—yet the site feels a lot like a ghost town today.  The site has all of the basic features to build a profile, but the overall functionality and usability is pretty 1.0.  The resulting profile isn’t very sexy.  They claim to also get you exposure to hiring companies, but clicks to pretty much all of the 6-7 companies that were listed that use the site led to broken links.  I’m a big fan of Talent Technology and they’ve got some really awesome products, but I think that VisualCV needs some updates to remain competitive.

Ease of Setup	C
Editability	C
Look & Feel	B
Career Focus	B
Social Connectivity	D
Community Value	D
Sharability & Contactability	B
ComScore Unique Visitors (Feb 2013):	N/A

 

Conclusion

In summary, LinkedIn has the breadth of professionals using their tool.  Facebook has active social connections, and a very powerful Social Graph search.  Beyond.com may have the edge with a graphical career-oriented tool that also helps get you in front of the eyeballs of employers.  Overall, as evidenced by the healthy landscape of online visual resume products, entrepreneurs and innovators are hearing the cry of jobseekers to create better tools.  But, we’re still in the early phases.  As more and more jobseekers seek and adopt solutions that break the norm, then perhaps the impetus will arrive for the traditional resume—and the thought processes behind it—to evolve.

Addendum:

My Methodology

Category	Description
Ease of Setup	How long does it take to set up a profile?  How fast and simple was it?
Editability	Can I quickly edit and customize my profile?
Look & Feel	How am I represented online?  Was the profile visually compelling, and did it tell a good story?
Career Focus	Did the site represent me professionally?  Was the site recruiting/hiring focused?  Are recruiters likely to be there?
Social Connectivity	Can I pull in my Twitter feeds, LinkedIn Data, or Facebook posts into my profile?
Community Value	Does my setting up a profile on the site give me good exposure?  Will I be able to connect and network with others easily?  Does the site have a large user audience?
Sharability & Contactability	Can I socialize my profile quickly and easily?

 

About the Author:

Joe Stubblebine is Vice President of Corporate Outreach at Beyond.com.  Beyond.com, The Career Network, focuses on helping people grow and succeed professionally through 75 unique career channels and 3,000 industry and regional communities.

Joe has over 14 years of entrepreneurial recruitment products & services experience.  Prior to joining Beyond.com, Joe was the Co-Founder and CEO of JobCircle.com, a robust regional career site.  JobCircle.com was acquired by Beyond.com in 2012.  Joe was the founder of hired! Magazine, an employment publication in the Greater Philadelphia region.  He also founded SocialMediaPlus, a series of B2B social media conferences.  Joe has served as an IT consultant & project manager for many notable brands.  He has been featured in the Philadelphia Inquirer “Who’s Who Under 30”, “Top Tech” by Computer User magazine.  His company, JobCircle.com, held the 11th spot on the Philadelphia INC 100 List in 2002. He has made appearances on The Nightly News with Tom Brokaw, WWDB Executive Leaders Radio, and The Eye Opener, PHL17 in Philadelphia. Joe attended Clarion University of Pennsylvania, where he majored in Accounting.

 

 

 

Beyond.com Launches New ‘Career Portfolio’ for Professionals to Create a Visual Resume in Minutes

Leading career network provides a new way for professionals to supplement their traditional resume with a dynamic infographic of their career history

Beyond.com, The Career Network focused on helping people grow and succeed professionally, today announced that they have launched an all-new Career Portfolio, a compelling, engaging and visually-informative snapshot of a person’s career that can supplement a traditional resume. This new tool, available for free to the over 30 million members of the Beyond.com community, maps career accomplishments into a timeline, allowing re cruiters and HR professionals to quickly scan for the most relevant information on the candidate.

Career Portfolio creates a pictorial layout that transforms often restrictive resume templates into compelling storyboards of a person’s career. The end result is an infographic that serves as a vibrant representation of all relevant work experience , skills, education, certifications and interests. The average recruiter only spends 30 seconds or less on a candidate’s resume and the Career Portfolio’s concise gathering of data is a highly efficient and effective way to convey large amounts of information quickly and clearly.

“The traditional resume is hard to decipher, at least efficiently, and is as inspiring as a brick,” said renowned HR expert Peter Weddle, CEO of WEDDLE’s, a research and publishing firm. “In today’s hypercompetitive job market, job seekers need a way to stand out, and I think that Beyond.com’s Career Portfolio is a big step in the right direction.”
 
The moment Career Portfolio launched, over 27 million people transformed their traditional resumes, giving them the option of supplementing any traditional professional career material with something much more unique. While traditionally formatted resumes blend together when placed side-by-side, Career Portfolio separates job candidates from the competition and presents information in an easily digestible format.

With almost 4 billion resumes sent out annually, there is extensive frustration among job seekers that their communication to prospective employers is lost in a sea of sameness. While the economy is certainly a factor in the increased competition, Beyond.com conducted a comprehensive survey of HR professionals and recruiters to find out why candidates might remain anonymous among the masses:

• 55% of respondents thought that “job seekers do not know how to use the traditional resume format effectively”
• 67% of all respondents thought that one of the most common mistakes job seekers make is “not clearly demonstrating relevant skills and expertise”
• The majority of respondents (58%) said that an infographic-style resume would enable them to evaluate candidates better and/or faster

Since launching in 1998, Beyond.com has changed the way people search for employment by connecting job seekers and companies through 75 unique career channels and 2,500 industry and regional communities. Members have 24/7 access to a suite of personalized tools, as well as networking features, statistics and social and industry research. The all-new Career Portfolio is the culmination of a long-term vision to radically rethink the status quo of job search.

“People tend to be visual learners and Career Portfolio provides a guidance technique that leads the eye to the most relevant information about a candidate, thus creating a powerful memory and lasting impression,” said Rich Milgram, CEO of Beyond.com. “Each job candidate has a unique story to tell and now they have a much-needed tool to bring their distinct narrative to life. Career Portfolio enhances a candidate’s resume the way a telescope focuses on a singular image, distinguishing its qualities among a universe of stars.”

Those not yet members of the Beyond.com community are able to send their resume as an attachment to portfolio@beyond.com, where Beyond.com’s technology will  automatically transform it into a Career Portfolio and provide free membership to their vast network of available jobs and career tools.

For more information on Career Portfolio, or to sign up to become a part of Beyond.com, please visit: www.beyond.com, or email your resume to portfolio@beyond.com.

Facebook Graph Search: don't get caught with your pants down

OK, so it has finally happened.  We’ve talked about it for years, we’ve argued about it in the bar and in the board room:

“Facebook will always be for my personal stuff and Linkedin is always for my professional stuff.”

Not so fast. 

With Facebook's new Graph Search, your personal life and your professional life have just collided.  In a VERY big way.
 
Released in Beta in January, 2013, Graph Search is Facebook’s new people search tool.  The name isn't very sexy, but what it can do for recruiters, marketers, and those of you looking to troll Facebook to find a date is actually pretty powerful.  Almost scary.

Facebook has been collecting data on us for years.  With 1.6 billion people logging in every month and more than 600 million users connecting to Facebook daily, Facebook knows where we go, what we eat, who we’re friends with and what we like.  Now, with Graph Search, that information is available to ANY user, whether they’re a Facebook friend or not.

According to a recent JobVite Employer survey, 92% of companies use or plan to begin using social media to support recruitment efforts, 66% of employers use or plan to use Facebook for recruiting, and 26% of employers have reported hiring employees through Facebook.

Career sites like Beyond.com will always have their place in the overall sourcing landscape and are great resources for sifting through large amounts of candidates.   But, as tools like Graph Search unlock our social movements, recruiters will quickly add these tools to their candidate sourcing toolbox.

If you’re one of the lucky ones who has access to the BETA Graph Search, then you’ve probably spent some time playing around with it.  The Graph Search opens up the recruiting power of Facebook in a brand new way.

Let’s pretend we’re a recruiter, and see what Graph Search can do for us.  Graph Search replaces the old search bar at the top of your Facebook home page. 

To begin searching, simply type what you’re looking for into the search bar:

...and we get 1,000+ results, including a guy’s profile showing himself in his underwear. A Quench marketing executive in his underwear, to be exact.  Oops for him.

OK, lets stay focused and move on.  Let's find out who lives nearby and works in a marketing capacity:

...129 people. Bam!  Look at all of these great job titles:  Director of Sales & Marketing at Sheraton Philadelphia, an Account Executive at TE Connectivity, the Hiring manager of the Marketing & Sales Department at PC Helps Support.  Almost every person has a message button next to their profile, allowing you to easily reach out and introduce yourself.

The possibilities of Graph search are only limited by your imagination.  Here are a few more searches to demonstrate the power of Facebook as a recruiting tool:

Hiring for java folks in my area (29 people found):

Want to steal nurses from my competitor (26 people found):

Find graphic designers who have expertise in a certain product (19 people found):

Targeting a specific occupation at a specific location (1 person found):

Looking for a referral-based candidate lead in accounting who likes comedy TV shows (2 people found):

You get the drift.  Hiring companies can now use Where you work, where you live, who your friends are, your age, gender, and what products and services you like for good or evil.. 

Now that I’ve hopefully convinced you that Graph Search has the potential to be a pretty powerful tool for recruiting, let’s go through the six things you should do to prepare your Facebook presence for the onslaught of recruiters who will descend upon Facebook’s new Graph Search:

1.  Update the Work & Education section of your profile.  This section of your profile should be completely filled out.  Add every single one of relevant prior jobs and be sure to exploit the About Me section to include a professional bio of yourself, as well as links to your career site profiles on sites like Beyond.com and Linkedin.com.  Even if you may not be actively looking for something new, a great job could find you!

2.  Clean up your likes.  It’s time to inventory those likes and make sure that Mom would be proud of what you’re liking, because now they can be used against you.  There are some Graph Searches where you never want to appear:  “Single women who live nearby and who are interested in men and like Getting Drunk” is one of them (yes, this search actually works, as pointed out by Tom Scott, Internet & Social Enthusiast).

3.  Check your activity Log.  Even though you think you’ve got your Facebook stuff pretty tight, if others have tagged you in photos and have their settings to Public, it’s available in Graph search.  How about that crazy night at the casino last year when wine erased parts of your memory?  All it takes is one friend’s photo upload and tag to make a less-than-desirable image available to any prospective (or current) employer.  Review the photos you’re tagged in, and if you wouldn’t show ‘em to your boss, untag yourself.  This prevents them from showing up in Graph Search results when people are searching for you.  And, when you untag, it’s instantly removed from the search index.

4.  Review & delete your profile photos.  All Facebook profile and cover photos are public.  If you’re like most people and have made profile picture changes, you’ve probably got a number of old photos out there that you may not want seen by a potential employer.  Pick the few of them that represent who you are, and delete the rest.

5.  Like the companies and products that make you visible.  Are you a web developer?  Like HTML, CSS, JQuery.  If you want to work at Merck, like their Facebook page.  Are you a Microsoft Administrator?  Like Exchange, Sharepoint, Microsoft 365.  Recruiters are more likely to search for people who already have a relationship with the product or company that their trying to hire for. 

6.  Privacy settings.  Take 20 minutes and thoroughly go through your privacy settings, and consider making these changes:

• Lock down your profile so that only friends can see the stuff that friends should see.  “Friends of Friends” can leave you vulnerable.  The average Facebook user has about 220 friends, which means that about 48,400 people can see your information with the “Friends of Friends” setting.
• Make sure you’ve told Facebook that you want to approve all photos you’ve been tagged in before they go live.
• Modify the Work and Experience section and the About Me section so that recruiters searching on Google can find you publicly, but only allow YOUR friends to see your full timeline and ’About Me’ section.

I’m sure I don’t need to even tell you this, but I’ll say it anyway:  employers react negatively to drug use references, posts of a sexual nature, profanity in posts or tweets, pictures of irresponsible alcohol consumption.  Review what you’ve made available publicly to ensure that you’ve cleaned yourself up.

Facebook’s Graph Search is still in Beta, so only a limited number of people have access now.  But, with a database of over 900 million members, recruiters are sure to include Facebook Graph Search in their mix of recruiting tools.  Is Graph Search a good thing?  Will people feel like Graph Search is invading their privacy? As more people use Graph Search, will it cause people to be more cautious about what their sharing and posting, or even close their Facebook account completely?  Younger audiences, who tend to view their privacy differently, may feel it’s no big deal.  Older audiences who may feel a greater concern over privacy might resist any mix of their private and public data.  

It’s time to prepare now.  Don’t get caught with your pants down.  Literally.


About the Author:

Joe Stubblebine serves as Vice President of Corporate Outreach at Beyond.com.  In his role, Joe is responsible for the development and execution of corporate outreach initiatives to increase awareness of the Beyond.com brand.  He has more than 14 years of experience as an entrepreneur and product and recruitment services developer.  Joe was the co-founder and CEO of JobCircle.com, a robust regional career site.  Joe is an advocate for businesses to embrace social media as a tool to increase sales and engage with employers and customers. He is a frequent speaker on the topic.

Related articles

What is Graph Search?

Should The New Facebook Graph Search Scare You?

10 Ways to Use Facebook Graph Search for Business

How to Protect Your Photos on Facebook's Graph Search

Facebook moves to make Graph Search less creepy

What Facebook's Graph Search Means to You

The History Behind Facebook's Graph Search

Facebook Graph Search a Missed Opportunity

Easy Way To Increase Your Job Posting Views & Applies

With so many short snippets of information thrown at us from every direction online with Facebook statuses, Tweets, and YouTube clips most people are becoming intolerant of reading text (which is why I’ll keep this short).  As we change the way in which we choose to digest information online, the recruitment industry is also changing as the recruitment video is taking off (and helping to increase the number of online job views and applies). 

 We at Beyond.com also offer this dynamic feature to hiring managers, and Jennifer King, HR Analyst at Software Advice, recently wrote a blog post that does a great job explaining how to create and promote an effective recruitment video. Read Jennifer's blog post here.

Read the blog now!

Yay or Nay: Employers Asking for Candidates' Facebook Passwords

I can’t let this topic slip by and not mention it. 

Employers are asking candidates for access to their Facebook accounts.  Today, when a job seeker applies to a job they should not be surprised that an employer will scour the Internet for info on the candidate—and their first stop will most likely be Facebook.  However, if they land on the candidate’s page and find the page to be privatized, they may now start asking the candidate for their password.

When I read this last week I was shocked! Sites out there train us to know that this kind of behavior is not okay.  Usually in their terms and conditions there’s even some kind of language that says “No one from our site will ever ask you for your password, if someone ever does do not give it to them.” So how do employers expect candidates to respond if they’re pressed for their Facebook password? 

With so many job seekers out there competing for jobs and the attention of employers, I would hate for candidates to think that by handing over the password to their Facebook account that they now have a leg up on the competition.

I expect that this practice will fizzle fast because employers that engage in this behavior will have a hard time recruiting candidates because no one wants to work for an organization that doesn’t trust its employees.  What kind of message does that send?

Facebook has taken a stance on the issue as well, saying that this is an invasion of privacy, even threatening to take legal action against organizations that ask for candidate passwords.

Everyone has a right to their privacy—if a candidate’s Facebook page is private, their references check out and they’re not a serial killer—there is no need to ask for their password—after all there’s a password for a reason.

Tips to Avoid Crossing The Line in Social Recruiting

This week we have a guest blogger, Kyle Lagunas, the HR Analyst at Software Advice–a company that conducts human resources and applicant tracking software comparisons.

When it comes to using social media websites for recruiting - what we call social recruiting - how far is too far? Beyond learning the hard way what works and what doesn’t, there are some best practices emerging to help recruiters know when they’ve pushed the proverbial envelope too far. And hiring professionals are discovering a new line of recruiting applications and tools built into applicant tracking software to help them rise above the same old hashtag to better identify, connect with and place viable candidates.

For all their good intentions, many folks using social media in their recruiting efforts are running into the same issues. Here are the top three:

• Spamming job posts. Want to render your social recruiting efforts ineffective? Spamming people with your job opportunities is a surefire way to do just that. The key to social recruiting is to be social and engaging. Share industry news and articles of interest, exchange personal messages, etc.
  
  
• Prying rather than researching. Some positions require a flawless social media presence. For the rest, you shouldn’t be digging too deeply into their profiles. Screening should be focused on general impressions of candidates to see if they would fit within your company culture.
  
  
• Penalizing candidates for level of access. It’s not unusual for candidates to deny recruiters access to their Facebook profile, inviting them to connect via LinkedIn instead. Many people use Facebook for personal, rather than professional networking - especially in Generation Y. Don’t write off candidates for showing a bit of backbone and managing their public image - it’s hardly something to penalize.

Lessons Learned from the Trenches

Some people are experiencing more success in social recruiting than others, and have picked up a few tricks worth sharing. Carolyn Betts, CEO of Betts Recruiting, is one such person, and was recently featured in a New York Times article, for leveraging social media to grow her recruiting success. She and I chatted last week, and she shared some lessons she’s learned from the trenches.

• Focus on strategy. You won’t be able to make the most of social media if you’re going into it blindly. You need to have a plan for how you want to accomplish your goals. Betts suggests starting with one social media site, familiarizing yourself with it, then growing your presence gradually.
  
  
• Have realistic expectations. When you consider the industry you’re in and the position you’re hiring for, are your deal-breakers realistic? You need to determine upfront how much weight you are giving a candidate’s social media presence.
  
  
• Leverage the right apps and tools. Many successful social recruiters know that in order to make the most of your social recruiting efforts, you need to leverage the right tools. Why go it alone when there are applications with built-in best practices for recruiting more effectively?

Software Expanding Recruiters’ Reach

Human resources software is growing to help recruiters make use of social media in their hiring strategy. But before recruiters can fully harness these helpful tools, they must determine whether or not they are in the right social media playground.

According to a recent study, approximately 85 percent of U.S. companies used LinkedIn for recruiting last year, though only 30 percent of active job seekers are on LinkedIn. As such, many recruiters are finding LinkedIn a bit overcrowded. Where are the candidates? The large majority of them are on Facebook.

Because the data recruiters are looking for is a little harder to find on Facebook, however, many miss the sourcing opportunity this vast network provides. Fortunately, there are third-party software developers devising methods to put actionable candidate information into the hands of recruiters quickly and efficiently. Some of these recruiting solutions are standalone applications that leverage recruiters’ networks. Others - like Bullhorn Reach - are applications designed specifically for automating social recruiting.

For further reading, check out Kyle's HR blog at: http://blog.softwareadvice.com/articles/hr/social-recruiting-how-far-is-too-far-010271/

If You Don’t Factor Mobile Into Your Recruitment Plan You’re Making a HUGE Mistake

Sometimes when I’m in a public place—riding a train, walking down the street, or even sitting in a restaurant, I love to observe how many people are engrossed in their cell phones.  And I will tell you I’m no different. 

My Smartphone is my lifeline, I don’t leave home without it—I don’t even leave a room in my home without it (but don’t tell my mother that, because then she’ll wonder why I don’t ALWAYS answer the phone when she calls).

But I have become so addicted attached to my phone that I do EVERYTHING on it, from paying bills, checking movie times—and buying movie tickets, sending emails, playing Words With Friends (I recently discovered that “Nachos” is not an acceptable word—I know I was shocked too!), to reading my favorite blog, EmploymentMetrix (shameless plug!).  So with so much reliance on our Smartphones and unfortunately a large number of people out of work, it is little surprise that job searching and recruitment has gone mobile—in a big way!

Mobile job search apps are BOOMING and the number of candidates searching for jobs on their mobile devices has skyrocketed by more than 100% in the last year alone. So if you’re an HR Pro that has yet to factor in mobile into your recruitment plan, you’re making a BIG mistake.

Check out the latest infographic from Beyond.com—it shows that more than 77% of job seekers use mobile job search apps.  Job Seekers use these apps to quickly react to new job postings, discreetly search for jobs, and simply the freedom it allows them to search for jobs anytime from anywhere.  Potential candidates are no longer tied down to their home computer to search and apply for jobs, now they can do it on their commute to work, while they’re waiting in the doctor’s office, or even waiting for that barista to make their favorite tasty beverage.   So if you have yet to jump on the mobile bandwagon you’re going to be left behind—that goes for HR pros and job seekers alike!

Beyond.com and HireADroid Partnership Delivers Top Job Search App for Android Users

Android App Helps Job Seekers Find Job Listings Quickly from Anywhere, Anytime

Beyond.com, today announced its partnership with HireADroid, the number one job search application for Android, enabling users to search jobs across Beyond.com’s thousands of top-tier industry and local career sites directly from their Android device. In today’s competitive employment market, the mobile device is an imperative tool for job seekers needing to search, share and react in real-time to job opportunities.

Beyond.com is the number one tab amongst a roster of six major job search engines, which feed job search results into the HireADroid application through one single query. The Android app boasts a simple user interface and a wealth of features to help job seekers more easily find the ideal job by allowing users to save jobs to “your favorites,” search based on a current location, send an email or tweet the opportunity, and apply for the position right from the phone. Job postings span across multiple countries, so non-U.S. residents can also benefit from the HireADroid app.

“As the mobile recruitment space continues to evolve, Beyond.com is broadening its reach across all mobile devices with the most reliable and inclusive set of tools to help job seekers navigate through today’s highly competitive job market,” said Rich Milgram, CEO of Beyond.com. “With the power of the HireADroid app, we’re able to share the Beyond.com network with a growing audience of Android users through the app’s unmatched functionality and tools to connect job seekers with the most relevant and latest job postings.”

With more than 230,000 downloads, the HireADroid app has been positioned on Apple’s Top 100 list in the business category for the past year, currently holding at number 45. The traffic to Beyond.com increased by more than 11 percent since the engine rose to the number one tab on the app, demonstrating the demand for Beyond.com’s unique niche approach to within the Android job search app market.

“Beyond.com has helped drive downloads and brought tremendous value to not only the success of the HireADroid application, but to the thousands of users who, particularly in the challenging economic landscape, often depend on job search apps for its immediacy in accessing the latest job postings, along with the ability to easily search, apply and share jobs when, how and where they want to,” said Bo Stone, founder of HireADroid. “Through this partnership with Beyond.com, we’re looking forward to continuing to make upgrades and add new features to help job seekers find the right job – through the convenience of their mobile device.”

The Benefits of Searching for Jobs and Candidates via Mobile

Beyond.com CEO, Rich Milgram recently had the opportunity to create a guest post on the HR blog, Recruiting Trends on the topic of mobile recruitment strategies for both employers and job seekers. With the trend of mobile phones to do everything but make phone calls, this post further examines the benefits of searching for jobs and candidates through mobile devices.

Read the full post.