I’ve really enjoyed getting to know Scott Birkhead recently. In addition to his role as Director Talent Acquisition at Korn/Ferry Futurestep, he has run his own career coaching business, is an enthusiastic student of direct marketing gurus like Perry Marshall and Dan Kennedy and is a job ad guru. We got to talking about how… Read more »
7 Steps to Writing the Best Job Descriptions
Writing job descriptions may be the single most important thing you do to attract quality talent. I recommend you use the 7 steps/sections below when writing your job descriptions. I’ve also included 20 examples of how leading employers create their job descriptions. Note: If you’re looking for an automated way to write/rewrite job descriptions, check out Ongig’s new Text Analyzer… Read more »
Uber’s Billion Dollar Job Description on Twitter
It is inspiring that Uber’s first hire was through a contrarian job description on Twitter by co-founder Travis Kalanick — with a super-fast reply from a then-stranger.. Here’s the job post from 6 years ago: A guy named Ryan Graves replied 3 minutes later (below) and got the job — Ryan is now head of Uber’s Global Operations. Uber… Read more »
The Irvine Company Gets Creative at Twitter Job Descriptions
I first heard of the Irvine Company from Kim Feistel of Arbonne (the “Mercedes of Beauty”) — she pointed out that Irvine is run by “The Other Donald” as in Donald Bren who at a $15 billion net worth is 3X richer than Donald Trump (see this Forbes profile for more). When I checked out Irvine’s talent acquisition strategy,… Read more »
Recruiting Strategies for VMware, Slack, Stripe and Dropbox
I caught up with talent acquisition pro Tom Wadlington the other day — Tom has some great experience including VMware, Liberty Mutual, Akamai and PriceWaterhouse. I asked him a few questions on talent acquisition strategy and recruitment marketing. Here’s what he had to say: Q: Hi Tom. You were part of the team that took VMware… Read more »
Uber Job Description Reveals Largest Talent Rollout Ever
A recent look at a job description for Uber (Counsel, Regulatory LATAM in Mexico City) happened to mention a new milestone: that Uber is now in 350+ cities. A closer look at data from all of Uber’s open job descriptions (there are more than 1,300 these days), courtesy of the Silk data visualization tool, reveals that Uber is likely the largest… Read more »
Slack Technologies Turbo-Charges Employer Brand with Twitter “Wall of Love”
Slack, a messaging system company that is growing like wildfire, is doing something brilliant in employer branding that centers around Twitter. Their brilliant move first got my attention when I saw this Wall Street Journal ad: The ad is based on this original tweet: It’s recently come to my attention that I’m a little too in love… Read more »
Pandora/Rdio Layoffs Are a Hiring Jackpot If You’re on “Speed Dial”
The Pandora acquisition of Rdio for $75 million turned out to be a good day for Lithium Technologies. Note: Technically, Pandora is acquiring the assets of Rdio and Rdio is laying off 100+ people — many of the Rdio product/engineering people are getting employment offers from Pandora. Lithium’s talent acquisition head Britt Ryan was one of… Read more »
4 Funny Recruiting Videos that Attracted Candidates
Recruiting videos can generate 10’s of thousands to millions of candidate views. While it’s important to have formal/serious videos that articulate employer brand and company culture, it’s also effective to show the more human, down to earth side with humor and fun. Here are a few employers and employees who nailed it with recruitment videos that caught… Read more »
5 Creative Tips to Recruit Millennials (based on data!)
Talent Acquisition leaders often ask me how to best attract the 80 million millennial candidates out there. I thought of this question the other day when I stumbled across the American Millennials report (4,259 millennials surveyed) by Barkley (the 100%-employee owned ad agency out of Kansas City), and the Boston Consulting Group. It’s a few years old now but… Read more »
Superstars Generate $12M to $105M Per Year for Companies
Some of you asked for a chart on the revenue per employee that I projected a superstar generates by industry in the recent post The 80/20 of Hiring: How Your Next Superstar is Worth More than $20 Million. Here it is! Data Source: Ongig Research; Article: Your Next Superstar is Worth More than $20 Million You… Read more »
Campus Recruiters Hire Students on the Spot (Without a Job Opening)
In case you don’t subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, I wanted to highlight an article called When a Job Offer Comes Without a Job published last week on a creative recruiting strategy called “program hiring”. Facebook and Intuit are making offers to dozens of hires without knowing which job they’d get. AB InBev is… Read more »
The 5 Qualities of a Sales Superstar
I’ve been thinking a lot about sales superstars lately — Ongig is scaling up our sales team and I’ve been studying sales pros such as Brian Tracy, Michael Bernoff, Stan Billue and Tom Hopkins. I recently nerded out on The 80/20 of Hiring Superstars (in which I learned that the average superstar generates between $12 million and $100 million per year in revenue… Read more »
The 14 Amazonian Recruiting Videos (all Women!)
I’m real impressed by Amazon’s Beyond the Badge set of recruiting videos utilizing different female team members. A few reasons: Video length — Each recruitment video is around one minute or less– this is good. Ongig’s data shows that candidates usually trail off after about 45 to 60 seconds. Diversity — The videos are all of women, which… Read more »
Bravo to Microsoft for Letting Students See and Email their Recruiter
If University Recruiting is important to you, Microsoft has a nice little feature to check out that lets students at a dozen Universities see who their Microsoft recruiter is (by school) and email them. “Tori U.” (see below) is the Microsoft recruiter that comes up if you’re a Stanford student. It’s simple, and direct, but I look… Read more »
