Standout Jobs

I’m very pleased to be announcing a partnership with CUhire to provide credit unions with our product, Reception. CUhire focuses exclusively on helping credit unions with their recruiting efforts, and there was a natural fit for us to work together - leveraging CUhire’s expertise in the space & their services, alongside our focus on employer branding & job marketing with our product.

Here’s the official press release:

MONTREAL, March 26 - Standout Jobs has partnered with CUhire, a recruiting solutions provider to the credit union industry, to provide credit unions with free Job and Career Sites. With Standout Jobs’ RECEPTION product, CUhire customers can create employment branding and recruiting sites in minutes, with no I.T. support or resources, by visiting http://standoutjobs.com/cuhire.

Standout Jobs’ RECEPTION product is a do-it-yourself interactive career site with social media tools like video, blogging and RSS feeds that make it easy for companies to promote their employment brand and hire the best talent. RECEPTION also includes applicant tracking features that make it easy to identify, interact with and track candidates at the click of a button. RECEPTION is a software-as-a-service solution that can be integrated into existing sites or operated as a stand-alone website to power companies’ recruiting efforts.

Sharon George, Senior Partner at CUhire, said: “We echo Standout Jobs’ philosophy that in order to win the war for talent, companies need a Career Site for candidates that is dynamic, engaging and interactive. You need to open the doors and show off your culture and team. Standout Jobs’ RECEPTION makes it easy for credit unions to compete in a competitive talent market — for free.”

Benjamin Yoskovitz, chief executive officer of Standout Jobs, said: “RECEPTION simplifies the recruiting function so companies can continue to focus on doing what they do best. Credit unions of all sizes can now easily set up Career Sites that engage job candidates with high-quality information, interaction and communication.”

To showcase the ease and effectiveness of setting up a site, CUhire has created its own Career Site at http://creditunionjobs.standoutjobs.com. Other CUhire partners in providing recruiting solutions for credit unions include Back Track Screening, Dot Jobs, Jobster, NEI Global Relocation, Prime Advertising, and The David Group.

RECEPTION features include:

• Create fully customized career sites and modify the colors, layout and look using drag-and-drop widgets
• Seamlessly integrate video into job postings and create behind-the-scenes company tours
• Post to multiple free and paid job boards at the click of a button
• Bookmark candidates’ information from popular sites including LinkedIn
• Centrally track, review and collaborate on candidate resumes, interview notes and status
• Promote hiring content directly to candidates via blog postings, employee profiles and photos
• Develop better relationships with job candidates by allowing them to track newsfeeds and selectively disclose details about themselves as they build trust.

About CUhire, Inc.

CUhire, Inc. is a national leader and total recruiting solutions provider to the Credit Union industry, and creator of the leading-edge Credit Union job network site http://www.cuhire.com. In addition to providing both candidates and credit union jobs, CUhire has partnerships with organizations to provide additional tailored services for clients. All of this is aimed towards fulfilling the mission of the firm: “Delivering Credit Union Talent - On Demand”. CUhire operates nationally, with associate offices in Los Angeles, Seattle, Minneapolis, Green Bay, Boston, and Orlando.

About Standout Jobs, Inc.

Standout Jobs provides tools to help companies recruit great candidates more effectively. Standout Jobs’ RECEPTION product is a suite of web-based tools to power companies’ online recruiting efforts and help them stand out from the crowd. For more information, visit http://www.standoutjobs.com.

Andy Sernovitz has a simple rule of thumb for determining whether or not a vendor is healthy: look at their Jobs page.

He writes:

1. If they are hiring, that’s a good sign of growth.

2. If they are hiring engineers, that means that they are investing in building a better product

3. If they are hiring more sales people than engineers, they may be using sales to cover for a weak product.

Interesting analysis. I’m not sure what Andy has to support his analysis, because other people certainly see it differently. Pat Moore left a comment on Andy’s blog with a completely different view.

One thing I know for sure — people do look at a company’s job page or career site to gage the company’s health.

I don’t think most people look at the specific breakdown of jobs; they just want to see if the company is hiring at all. I would never suggest that you post jobs on your career site for the sake of it, just to look like you’re alive and well. But, I would suggest that you post jobs on your career site even if you’re not hiring immediately, if you believe you’ll be hiring for those jobs in the future. That’s just smart planning.

You should always be:

1. in recruiting mode; and,
2. building a talent pipeline.

Can you just throw more perks and rewards at people in an effort to retain them as employees?

I’m not sure it really works. Ultimately, people are motivated by bigger things than perks and rewards, including the quality of the work they’re being asked to do, the people they’re working with and money. And, as I’ve posted before, employee motivation really comes from within themselves.

But Chris Russell asks a very good question in a recent blog post, Why don’t companies give more vacation time?

I’ve always asked myself this question. The standard 2 weeks is pretty lame. And while I don’t think you can up the ante on rewards as the primary means of retention, offering a better vacation package to entice people into the company, and to create a great employer brand makes a lot of sense. And the truth is that offering 1 or even 2 more weeks isn’t going to negatively affect productivity. If anything, I think it will improve it, because you’ll get fresher, more energized employees. Your employees will see that you care about their well-being by trying to balance work and life just a little bit more, and they’ll be all the more effective and productive for it.

And the same logic holds true for startups.

There are lots of good tips on hiring for startups and you should also think about offering more vacation. While we all understand that startups are absolutely crazy work environments, and often require people to work much more than they would elsewhere (and the people in startups should thrive on that sort of challenge), being able to balance that with more time off makes complete sense.

Chris Russell and I finished our second Social Media Recruiting Show today along with guest, Dennis Smith from WirelessJobs.com.

You can listen to the show (app. 1 hour in length) below:

We talked primarily about blogging and how to use blogs for recruiting purposes both for corporate recruiters and third party recruiters. I think it was a great discussion and we even had a caller ask a great question. So it was a lot of fun and hopefully our listeners learned something.

The next show will be on Thursday, April 3rd @ 12pm EDT. I won’t be there, because I’ll be attending the ERE Expo in San Diego. Actually, I was invited to speak and present Standout Jobs. Chris will still do the show and probably invite another guest to join him.

We’d love to get your feedback - so feel free to email us or leave a comment. Thanks!

The first episode of The Social Media Recruiting Show was a great success. Chris Russell and I had a lot of fun talking about social media recruiting, and we received some great feedback after the show.

Our second show is coming up this week: Thursday, March 20th @ 12pm EDT

Please come listen: The Social Media Recruiting Show

We’ve invited a guest — Dennis Smith from WirelessJobs.com so that we can focus most of the show on blogging and how to use a blog in recruiting.

I’m a huge believer in blogging and its value in building a reputation (for people and/or companies), and reaching into the community to join the conversation. I’ve been blogging for over 2 years (primarily at Instigator Blog) and its brought me a lot of great things - tons of valuable contacts, friends, business opportunities and more. You can’t go wrong with blogging - and it can most definitely be used for recruiting purposes.

So don’t forget — this Thursday (March 20th) @ 12pm EDT — come to http://www.blogtalkradio.com/SocialMediaRecruiting/ and listen in. We’ll also have phone lines available for people to call in and ask questions.

Hiring at startups is hard. You’re swamped, running in a ton of different directions and don’t necessarily have a big budget set aside for recruiting. But hiring top talent at startups is essential. You can’t afford to hire anything but A-players. Sadly, too few startups dedicate the time needed to recruit properly.

David Lefkow has a great article titled Recruiting Guide for Startups. It’s a must-read for any startup founders (or employees). It’s also extremely valuable for non-startups too — smaller companies from 200 people and down will have all of these issues.

I want to follow-up on David’s points with some extensions and a few others:

1. Get everyone involved in the hiring process. David rightfully says that the CEO must be involved in the hiring process. It’s surprising how rare this is in so many companies, including startups. I see the problem most acutely with slightly larger startups (once they get past 30 or so people), because they now have “department managers” or even the makings of an HR department. CEOs have to be involved in the hiring process, but so does everyone else! Most companies - when hiring a programmer for example - will have a developer conduct at least one interview. But I would recommend having the applicant speak to multiple developers (even at the same time) as well as people in other departments. In a startup, everyone has to work very closely together and be completely aligned, so get as many people involved in the hiring process as possible.
2. Recruit constantly. In David’s post he talks about having a talent pipeline. I agree 100%. The fact is that you and everyone at your startup needs to be recruiting constantly. This is one of our fundamental beliefs at Standout Jobs.
3. Build a positive reputation in the local community. Most startups hire locally because of the cost & time involved in hiring people from elsewhere. And one thing startups can do to help is build up a positive reputation and brand in their local community. Make sure you participate at local events. Make sure current employees are speaking openly about the work environment. Make sure people know your story as a startup, and where you’re headed. Get people excited. Get them feeling like they know your startup is a great place to work, even if they haven’t worked there. That positive reputation will work wonders to draw people to you.
4. Focus on personality and cultural fit above everything else. Startups live and die by the quality of the people. It’s as simple as that. And many things can be overcome - like a lack of experience - but you can’t fix a broken culture or team spirit without going through some serious problems first. It only takes one bad apple in a small startup to derail everything. So make sure the person you’re hiring fits in culturally. That’s a big reason to have lots of people involved in the hiring process. And don’t compromise on this - no matter how desperate you are to bring on additional people.
5. Don’t oversell stock options. All startup employees expect stock options. And they should be a part of a startup employee’s compensation package. But don’t try and oversell them. Don’t try and blow people away with the huge valuations you’ll get in the future, and how you’ll IPO for billions in 2 years and the soon-to-be-hired employee will be rich beyond his wildest dreams. It shows a lack of respect to candidates if you try and dazzle them too much with stock options. They’re there, every employee should get them, and I hope they’re worth something someday … but you better have more to sell candidates than that.
6. Don’t over-hire. As Mark MacLeod points out, salaries are your biggest expense, so you need to be extremely careful about your growing ranks. Mark makes the point that you should question every hire, and really be sure that the position you’re making available is a necessary one, and once it’s filled that will bring incredible value to the startup. If that’s not the case, don’t hire. Plus, the more you control your hiring, the more likely you’ll avoid hiring the wrong person.

Every hire in a startup is critical. Make a mistake in the first handful or so and you can literally destroy your startup in a flash. Recovering from bad hires early in the game is extremely tough. And costly. But hire the right people - get top talent in the door that gel beautifully - and magic happens.

I’m not sure including hobbies on a CV really makes much sense, but people still do it. All the time. I suppose it shows another side of the applicant, but oftentimes they’re pretty dull sounding and don’t really do the applicant justice. Well here’s a list of hobbies (found at Sirona Says) that definitely stand out (although that’s probably NOT a good thing in this case!):

1. Chinese Folk Dancing
2. Dog Surfing (???)
3. Painting toy soldiers from the Crimea War
4. Abnormal psychology of sharks
5. Ladybirds (??)
6. Medieval Re-enactment Society
7. Vampires
8. Collecting Tea Pots
9. Body Piercings
10. Collecting Fighting Boomerangs

I’ve seen lots of resumes, but I’ve never seen any of these hobbies/interests listed. Most often, the hobbies that stand out for me are related to martial arts. People who are black belts in karate, or experts in Krav Maga. What happens if you don’t hire them? Or you do hire them, only to reprimand them later on for something? I like my teeth where they are … and the rest of me, for that matter.

Today, Fred and I attended the press conference announcing the launch of Montreal Start Up, a new fund dedicated to early stage investments in Montreal. It’s a great initiative run by John Stokes and Daniel Drouet.

And we’re pleased to announce that Montreal Start Up (or MSU for short) is one of our angel investors. When we announced our funding with iNovia Capital we did make mention of other angel investors coming on board as well. Montreal Start Up was one of those angel investors, we just couldn’t properly announce it at the time.

One of the great things about Montreal Start Up is the number of high quality investors and entrepreneurs supporting it. That means that Daniel and John and the companies they invest in can tap into a wide array of people who bring additional value in the form of strategy, experience, contacts, business opportunities, investment and more.

We look forward to working with Montreal Start Up and welcome them officially now that their fund is released.

We just launched a new Standout Jobs Tour that goes through a greater amount of Reception’s functionality in 6 short videos. Each video covers one element of what we’re doing:

• Customizing your Career Site
• Adding Content to your Career Site
• Posting Jobs to your Career Site
• A Dashboard Overview for Candidates & Employers
• Candidate Tracking
• Candidate Sourcing & Research

If you’re interested in learning more about Reception please visit the Reception Tour.

Chris Russell and I finished our first episode of The Social Media Recruiting Show and it was a great success. We had a bunch of listeners, a few people who called in (although didn’t ask questions!) and a number of follow-ups after the fact. The show ran for an hour. Chris and I talked about social media recruiting, Facebook, blogging, etc.

We are going to do it again, and I hope we’ll get more listeners and people calling in with questions. Certainly if you want us to discuss a topic or answer a question, just get in touch (email: ben@standoutjobs.com).

In the meantime, jump right in and have a listen with the embedded player below.

The next show will be Thursday, March 20th @ 12pm EST at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/SocialMediaRecruiting/.