Catch the Best » Hiring

Getting everyone involved in hiring

Ben — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 19:21:00 +0000

Kevin Merritt, the founder of blist, made a good point in his recent blog post, Get Everyone Involved in Building the Team. I commented on his blog, but I thought it worth a mention here too: this was one of my primary motivators for creating Catch the Best.

There is definitely value in involving everyone on your team in the hiring process. I found time and again that getting feedback from others on my team about the candidates I was considering helped expose concerns and opportunities that I missed. Especially if you believe in the importance of the social fit of a new hire (and you should), then the only effective way to evaluate that fit is to give everyone on the team a chance to review the candidates.

Many companies find this level of participation frightening — instead they cling to the notion that the process should be tightly controlled by HR — but I think we’ll continue to see more companies realizing they have a lot of talent in their existing teams that they can tap to improve their hiring practices.

Finding the best candidates: Write a shorter job ad

Ben — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 17:49:22 +0000

The CollegeRecruiter Blog has a good entry about getting a better response from a shorter job ad. I’ve come to the same conclusion after reviewing a number of job ads, and after having written a number of them myself. Not only will you drive up the quality response percentage by reducing the number of unqualified applicants, but you’ll also filter in the people who are more genuinely interested in your position.

If you aren’t convinced, though, just try it. With the accurate source tracking provided by Catch the Best, you can create two different job ads with different content to post at the same place and at the same time and see which one is more effective in attracting the best candidates.

If you run that test and find out we’re wrong, you should definitely let me know.

Feature Watch: Career Sites

Ben — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 14:17:30 +0000

If you’d like a quick-and-easy careers page for your web site, you’re in luck: Catch the Best now allows you to have an open jobs listing at your site with just one line of javascript.

Once you’ve created a Catch the Best account, you can enable a public listing of all your open positions by visiting the Career Site link via the account settings. Once enabled, copying and pasting one line of javascript from the Career Site page into a page hosted at your web site will load all of your open positions listed in Catch the Best on your own jobs page. Each listing on your page will have a link back to Catch the Best for candidates to apply directly from your web site.

Having your own jobs page at your site couldn’t be any easier. Try Catch the Best now to find out how easy it can be to manage, share, and rate your job applicants.

How to turn away the best candidates

Ben — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 03:32:09 +0000

Both Jobmatchbox and Cheezhead covered the recent launch of JobScore, but they both missed something big:

View full size image

Are you kidding me? Job applicants need to accept an end user agreement to apply for a job? That’s nuts.

Feature Watch: Web submissions

Ben — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 14:26:36 +0000

I recently added the ability to take job applicant submissions via the web in addition to via email. Now each position has a unique URL to which you can send applicants to submit their applications. Additionally, each source (such as Monster, Craigslist, etc.) has its own unique URL as well.

These job- and source-specific URLs allow you to get the most accurate source tracking info available in any applicant tracking system, and there is almost no set-up involved. Once you create your open position, just add the sources you want to track directly from the position detail page, and the URLs will be created on the fly.

Taking the wraps off CatchTheBest

Ben — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 19:16:52 +0000

Early this morning I pushed out a new site for CatchTheBest that reveals some basic information about what the product will be.

Check out the new site for info on the best yet-to-be-released applicant tracking solution in the world.

Interviewing Tips

Ben — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 19:59:00 +0000

Joel Dehlin, CIO for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has some good pointers on interviewing. Having gone through a number of rounds of interviewing and hiring, I can agree with what he’s saying — especially points 2 and 3 in his list. You’ll see these concepts again as you start to use CatchTheBest.

Getting started

Ben — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 17:55:02 +0000

Coming soon, news about a web application built for small businesses that hire people.