Blogs

When I received the announcement from Plaxo that they were releasing the ability to search for people in the Plaxo network I was surprised. After all, Plaxo was originally intended as a way for me to backup my contacts safely so knowing that others can now search my personal "virtual rolodex" freaked me out.

But as it turns out that's not the case. If you log into your Plaxo account and conduct a search, you will see that it is limited to only contact names. This is good because it means my contacts remain confidential.

But... 

In March, private sector employment in Phoenix generated 6,200 jobs. Although the increase is certainly good news, over the last 12 months approximately 17,600 Phoenix jobs have been lost. According to the Arizona Department of Commerce, private employment in the metro area supplied 1.66 million jobs as of March this year, which is up from the prior month, but still less than March 2007.
    

Bill Vick caught me on a great day (well a bad hair day but still I was in a great mood) and asked me a bunch of questions about sourcing, the "big" one being "With the many tools available for identifying and recruiting passive candidates, how do you measure your return on invested time and effectiveness for your favorite web tools?" Check out my answer (and what others have to say on the subject): 

With the age of the general population increasing the strain on already understaffed hospitals is growing. Since a large portion of Registered Nurses are nearing retirement age themselves, this healthcare job has one of the highest demands in the nation. Nurses who are experienced in giving care to the elderly, in particular, are desperately needed.
    

Previously searches on Zoominfo were limited to the typical fields found in most databases: Company, Industry, Geography, Job Title, etc. A new search functionality extends your sourcing scope further into the “context” of where names are found.

Why is this cool and useful?

With the state of the economy, many soon to be graduates are concerned about their chances of landing entry-level jobs and with good reason. A survey of college students, recent graduates, and entry-level employers conducted by MonsterTrak found that 59 percent of employers expect to hire 2008 graduates during the spring or summer of this year. This figure is down by 17 percent from 2007’s statistics, which shows that the all the talk about a possible national recession is effecting hiring decisions. 
   

Last Thursday I got a call from the "powers that be" behind SourceCon2008. They called to invite me to assemble and present a pre-conference sourcing masterclass. I was very flattered and honored that they thought of me again so I gave this invitation earnest and thorough consideration.

Nevertheless, I decided against participating, and thought it was important that I shared that with my gentle readers.

I'm very excited about LinkedIn's new release from last night.

When you do a search and see someone's employer in their profile, you can now click on some of those companies and see a summary page of competitive intelligence!

Over 160,000 profiles of companies will show this feature and any user can see them. The company profile contains a succinct overview of a company's industry data in combination with LinkedIn data, and it pulls information from Capital IQ.

What do you see here? 

Visual Basic for Applications jobs (VBA jobs) are a great way to drive an organization toward creation of a broad range of enhanced MS Office applications to better support the business. Interacting with the business leaders and clients is just one of the intriguing and engaging aspects of VBA jobs. And, applications are most effective when developers have a clear understanding of the business needs, business processes, and customer expectations.

Between December and January more than 36,000 South Florida jobs were lost, continuing a trend that has been going on for at least the last six months. According to a recent unemployment report by the Florida Agency for Workforce Innovation, South Florida jobs are not only disappearing quickly, but that this downward turn in the job market has been going on since last summer.