10 Best Practices for Screening Tech Resumes and Candidates

Too Many Tech Applicants?
While your company may be laying off or freezing headcount in most areas, you're probably still hiring technology workers. If so, check out this new Best Practice guide Dice asked me to write. And feel free to share it with your Hiring Managers.

• Learn 5 techniques for filtering out the unqualified resumes, and focusing your energy on the most qualified IT/technology applicants
• Learn 5 techniques that will improve your phone interview effectiveness, and lead to better on site interviews

More best practice guides at www.RecruitingToolbox.com

Now here's a different kind of job posting (smile)

I love funny job postings. You can often tell whether a firm has an HR person - or not (probably the case with this one).

Here are some snippets from a craigslist posting (it is still live on the site as of today, but it may come down soon).

Intro includes...

• We don't want standard solutions; we want solutions so ridiculously unconventional that we shake the time space continuum.
• We want someone that can shine of truth. Illuminate Darkness.
• The Search for Truth will start with your Search Masterpiece. We just want to be there when it happens.

Requirements include...

• 3+ years experience developing in C and/or Ruby with AJAX; or you can be one of those weirdos that refused to learn anything past Fortran
• Proven track record of building Core Search Technology at another company; other acceptable places include: your garage back in Palo Alto, CA in 1998 or that dream you had.

Personal Characteristics include...

• The successful candidate will reject setbacks
• Childhood dreams of being a Rockstar are not necessary for this job, but we will question your humanity.

And my favorite part.

TO RECRUITERS:
We have come to terms that you will spam us.

Twitter Job Search

Introducing TwitterJobSearch.com
Twitter is being talked about everywhere - millions use it, especially recruiters (who seem to be early adopters on all things social media). Anyway, today TwitterJobSearch.com launched its beta service, which lets job seekers find jobs posted on twitter (usually by recruiters). Over 30,000 jobs were posted on twitter.com in the last 7 days. 7 days! In this economy! Imagine what'll be out there when things turn around?

You can search by keyword and location, or just browse job titles.
Check it out here: http://www.twitterjobsearch.com/browse

Get Demographic Data To Focus Your Recruiting

Trying to build an online media recruiting campaign?

• Ever wonder whether a popular website attracts more men than women?
  
• Or what countries or cities attract the most users?
  
• Or whether the sites visitors have college degrees?
  
• Or even what other sites - or types of sites - visitors to this site also tend to visit?

Enter Quantcast. Quantcast.com is a firm/site that independently measures traffic and demographic data for popular websites. It was started by Stanford Statistics Professors, and now can be leveraged by us (recruiting professionals) to help evaluate whether a particular site attracts the kind of users we'd want to target in specialized online ads.

While it doesn't show job titles, it does allow you to slice and dice to see how many people fit your general profile.

So, if you're trying to build a case - based on data - on why you should run online ads on a big tech blog to go after those degreed, african american, under 30, New York based, $60k+ candidates with an interest in technology, quantcast can help. They can help you identify the right site, gather current data, and compare it to other options without having to engage an ad agency.

Give it a try.

• LinkedIn's stats: http://www.quantcast.com/linkedin.com
• Dice.com's stats: http://www.quantcast.com/dice.com