Getting everyone involved in hiring
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.
March 10th, 2008 - Posted in Hiring | 0 Comments
Finding the best candidates: Write a shorter job ad
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. 
February 16th, 2008 - Posted in Hiring, Job ads | 0 Comments
Feature Watch: Brandable jobs page and Reminders
I have released a couple of new features this week: the ability to have a public job listing hosted by Catch the Best and to set reminders related to a candidate.
For a while now you’ve been able to use a Javascript snippet to display your open positions from Catch the Best on a web page on your own site. Now I have added another option for displaying your jobs list… now you can simply link to yourdomain.catchthebest.com/jobs from your existing web site for visitors to see what jobs you have available. Even better, you can completely customize that list and the web submission form, so now the layout of the public Catch the Best pages can exactly match your existing site. The end result is you can have a dynamic careers page for your web site based on your data from Catch the Best that is consistent with your current web site’s look and feel.
By popular demand, you can now add a reminder for yourself when looking at a candidate’s profile page. This is handy for recruiters who want to periodically check on passive candidates, or for anyone who just needs a little help with checking back on a promising applicant. It’s simple to do, too: just click “Add reminder” on the candidate profile page, enter a brief message to yourself and a time to be reminded, like “next month”, and choose whether you’d like to receive the reminder via email. Once you set it, you’ll never have to worry about dropping the ball on a good prospect again.
February 14th, 2008 - Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comments