Recruitment 2.0

HR Carnival is up at Guerilla-ville!

The HR Carnival is up at Guerilla-ville!

It includes a whole host of interesting posts such as: "Employees are a necessary evil"; "Squelching team member gossip"; and "How to find out if your new boss is one to avoid".

Go on, join the fun...

-Susanna

Photo credit: gbastini

Friday 5 September recruitment roundup

We’ve condensed the week’s news to just a few links.  Read on for interesting stories and videos regarding recruiting, technology and other random topics…

• Ivy League targets Britain’s top students
• Half full or half empty? Recruiting in September 08
• CIPD Annual Conference and Exhibition preview
• Five key ways to kick start your recruitment podcast
• UK recruitment falls at fastest rate for almost seven years
• Five ways the youtube generation is replacing the MTV generation
• Too many candidates?
• Building a relationship with professors to gain an edge in recruiting
• Is Social Media Relevant To Recruiting?
• Use job satisfaction to increase your placement rate
• Graduate Recruitment Part 2: Attraction

I’ll leave you to enjoy this video about “Rookie Recruiting”.  Is this for real? Only in America…

-Susanna

HR Systems – why are they all "rubbish?"

I was with a client the other day discussing recruitment needs and we touched on a related subject: "Why are all the HR systems out there rubbish?" (their words, not mine!)

This client is a large UK company with a good proportion of their offices distributed across the country. They are going through the procurement process for a new HR IS, but they are struggling to find a decent system vendor.

How can this be? I thought to myself. There are some great vendors out there.

Our client is already using an industry leading product, but is giving it the boot because it has proved too inflexible, reporting never seems to work, and generally the service they receive from the vendor is of the old fashioned variety: "They seem to charge me £000's every time I pick up the phone to them".

Not good.

I feel a little sad for the client not only because their requirements are really quite straightforward, but I can see they are going to go through a fair amount of pain and suffering. To put this pain into perspective – they are starting the procurement process now and expecting to go-live with the system in March 2010!

Why does software like this need to be so hard?

We all know that software is often over engineered, and it shows. Just look at the backlash for Vista.  The larger a software vendor becomes, the more political it becomes to include in a simple feature. At one software company I worked for, it would take YEARS to add a feature. Good product managers can help, but it is often a software's company culture that can be its worst enemy.

So, my question for the community is: is there a decent HR IS vendor out there? Have you just been through the process and did it work? Have you found a good HR software solution? Leave a comment on our blog and let us know.

-Mike