If you're a Chicago headhunter, human resource manager, or looking for Chicago area jobs, you have one of the most varied of local resources in the United States.
The Big Three recruiting Web sites - Monster, Careerbuilder and Yahoo! HotJobs - offer several thousand job listings each in the Chicago area. Here is where Careerbuilder can excel through Tribune Company’s partial ownership, providing co-posting with the Chicago Tribune. Employers who advertise their job openings in the Tribune also do so on Careerbuilder, with the opportunity to choose access to its voluminous resume database. In the last seven days alone well over 3000 jobs were posted on the Tribune / Careerbuilder sites.
The Chicago Sun-Times, the "other" daily, is part of Sun Times News Group, which includes dozens of other daily and weekly papers in the area. The Daily Southtown, for example, covers the south suburbs of metro Chicago, while Suburban Chicago Newspapers advertises jobs in the Chicago suburbs of Batavia, Plainfield, St. Charles, Wheaton, Fox Valley, and 13 other communities. Pioneer Press, a weekly Sun-Times publication, offers zoned Chicago job hunts or job postings in the employer’s choice of Chicago central, Northwest Chicago, Lakeshore, West Chicago or south Chicago's The Doings.
With a Sun-Times online recruitment ad package a recruiter can cover Chicago center and all the suburbs for those hard-to-fill jobs that require a broader reach, or neighborhood-focused advertising for semi-skilled or unskilled jobs. On the Daily Southtown site alone there are 1260 current job postings.
Another highly-focused local recruitment product, ChicagoJobs.com, is the brainchild of Shaker Recruitment Advertising and Communications, a Chicago-based three-generation family-owned recruitment advertising agency. What Joe and Joe Shaker Jr. began in 2003 has now expanded to about 15,000 job postings a month, through a partnership with 17 newspapers in the 11-county metropolitan Chicago area.
When a Grundy County employer posts metro Chicago jobs in the local Morris Daily Herald, for example, she or he pays $75 to repeat the ad on ChicagoJobs.com. The site also provides a resume database, company profiles, and banner ads. So successful has ChicagoJobs.com been for area newspapers, recruiters and job candidates that seven papers in Rhode Island approached the firm in 2005 to create RIJobs.com. Other offshoots include ILCareers.com and CTJobs.com in Connecticut.
Craigslist.org, another job hunt choice, currently displays more than 17,000 positions on its Chicago site. Here employers post for free, although it's a very basic word ad and not well policed. Job seekers should realize, therefore, that when it comes to the legitimacy of the job offerings on Craigslist it’s definitely buyer beware.
Job seekers have an excellent "one stop shop" for Chicago jobs in Oodle.com. This directory boasts 15 million classified listings from 60,000 sites. Chicago is one of the major search regions, and accessible from its home page. Today there are more than 71,000 Chicago area jobs listed on Oodle, easily narrowed down by zip code, category and keyword.
When you need to find or fill Chicago jobs you clearly have many local and expanded options.
Las Vegas, Nevada's unemployment rate has decreased since July's 4.6 percent. Currently the casino-filled city has a 4 percent unemployment. In the mid-summer there were approximately eight hundred and sixty thousand people working in Las Vegas jobs and now there is almost nine hundred thousand, which is a fairly decent increase. The major problem in Las Vegas at this time is a shortage of qualified individuals to fill the available positions.
Las Vegas-based Recruiting Nevada has partnered with the Greenspun Media Group, The News, In Business Las Vegas and the Nevada Broadcasters Association to make a serious effort towards solving this employment shortage through Winter Job Fair 2007. This career fair seeks to actively attracts individuals from areas other than Nevada to find employment within the city. It will take place on Thursday, January the eighteenth, at the South Point Casino (previously known as South Coast Casino) from 12:30pm-5:30pm.
The job fair aims to attract the right out-of-state people to fill open Las Vegas positions and reduce internal competition among qualified residents. The Winter Job Fair will be followed by three others annually.
The fairs are marketed by Recruiting Nevada, which has attracted out-of-state employees to Nevada for the last fifteen years. Their ultimate goal is to strengthen Nevada's economy through constantly recruiting new employees to Nevada through the use of the internet. They are also responsible for publishing the state's largest network of employment websites. One of their main ways to attract jobseekers across the country is through their job postings on NVJobsearch.com
The last job fair, which occurred on September 20th, attracted one 1,200 job seekers to the area.
Las Vegas has an increasing need for individuals to fulfill positions in such fields as accounting and other professional and business services, hospitality services, construction, manufacturing, and even educational and health services.
Anyone seeking more information on Winter Job Fair 2007 or Recruiting Nevada can visit their website at RecruitingNevada.com or call (702)240-4100.
Over the course of the last 25 years, the word "diversity" has become firmly entrenched in the global business lexicon. But what exactly is diversity and why is it so critical to corporate success?
Imagine a company where every employee shares not only the same physical characteristics, but also the same level of intelligence and emotional range. After awhile, the idea-well would start to run dry, making it nearly impossible for the company to compete in an evolving marketplace.
Conversely, a company with a diverse set of employees embraces differences in perceptions and opinions. Instead of dismissing, or even fearing alternate viewpoints, it chooses to explore and learn from them, thereby significantly expanding its market share.
So what exactly are these "alternate viewpoints"? Diversity goes beyond race and culture to encompass a range of individual traits including gender, sexual orientation, religion, personal beliefs, age, and even disabilities—both physical and mental (i.e. depression and anxiety).
The most obvious negative consequence for companies that lack a diversity policy is a discrimination lawsuit. Employers that are taken to court will need to allocate significant time, effort and money towards their case, not to mention time and resources from HR, IT, legal and other department managers.
Resolving a workplace discrimination issue can take months. This could be a period filled with anxiety and stress not only for executives and the plaintiff, but for all employees. Conflicts of this nature can also reduce morale and productivity; and the increased tension has the potential to trigger stress-related illnesses among those directly involved. Once the media gets wind of it, scandalous headlines will be hard to avoid, regardless of the outcome. This sort of brand damage can take years and millions of dollars in crisis public relations to reverse.
Companies that embrace diversity gain the confidence that comes with taking the moral high-road and generating goodwill. Beyond that, internal diversity reflects the real society outside, enabling a firm to truly identify with a range of people, not just one homogenous segment. In this respect, diversity is not only a source of opportunity, but also of many personal and business benefits. These include:
* Fostering good practices, which raise the company to the ranks of "Employer of Choice." * Enhancing brand and reputation (remember, it takes only one negative headline to tarnish these.) * Maintaining and strengthening your workforce, which bolsters recruitment and retention. * Increasing morale and productivity. * Reducing workplace conflict and the litigation costs that might arise in the opposite situation. * Fortifying the moral and ethical values of the organization.
Diversity experts maintain that companies can increase profits by up to 10 percent by implementing a diversity strategy at every level. A team that can get inside the minds of its customers and understand cultural differences offers a significant advantage over a competitor with a one-dimensional workforce.
Conversely, companies that do not value diversity sharply reduce their competitive edge by not fully understanding their future target market. A strong diversity strategy creates and maintains a specialized workforce that can recognize, attract, and retain the clients of tomorrow.
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the health care sector is one of the largest industries in America, employing over 13.5 million individuals. A common misconception about this field is that you have to be a doctor to find physician jobs or a register nurse to find a nursing job benefit from the employment opportunities. This is not so. There are numerous jobs that do not require a Ph.D. With an expected twenty seven percent rise in wage and salary employment by 2014, many employees will be needed to fill those positions.
These jobs include, but are not limited to patient representatives, billing, transcription, and informational specialist. Deciding if one of these positions is worthy of your consideration can be a difficult task. Having a general knowledge of what each entails and the required training/education is a must.
Patient representatives are administrators who handle and address the concerns of the families and the patient themselves. They evaluate the level of satisfaction with treatment and investigate complaints. A degree in either social services or health care is preferred. These individuals can work with a myriad of different establishments from nursing homes and private practices to public health organizations.
Medical billing positions entail submitting claims to insurance companies and government agencies such as Medicaid so that doctors can receive the payments due to them. Good typing skills and a basic knowledge of medical terms are preferred. There are no set educational requirements, although there are certain certification programs that can make getting hired easier. In some circumstances it is possible to actually work from home through the use of medical billing software and the internet.
A medical transcriptionist listens to reports dictated by doctors and transcribes them into medical reports and other administrative materials. These reports then become part of a patient’s permanent medical file. Like medical billing, the internet has made it possible to do this job from home. An associates degree or certification is preferred, but not necessarily required, although basic grammar and editing skills are a must along with the ability to type proficiently.
Health care informational specialist is a general category broken down into several different subgroups. Record administrators organize various information and handle some supervisory responsibilities. Record technicians double check different medical records to make sure the information is correct. Many places offer on job training for these positions, but passing an exam is required to become certified.
Along with these specialized jobs there is also a great need for regular clerical staff. Receptionist, book keepers, and informational clerks currently make up over twenty percent of those in the health care industry.
Whether one is looking for a career that will utilize their knowledge of medical terms, their efficient office skills, or their ability to carefully handle the concerns of others, the medical profession offers many opportunities. As the general populace ages, the employment needs of these professions will continue to increase and recruiting more competitive, much to the benefit of jobseekers.
In the context of unabated talent shortages in the foreseeable future, organizations will be well served by focusing on optimizing the benefits brought in by the interns they receive via recruiting efforts.
The urge does not stem from the employerss capacity to make immediate productive use of the intern during his/her tenure (e.g. to get the individual to produce revenue, reduce cost). Instead, we see internships as a key variable to the development of the employee value proposition, which is the pillar of an organization's employment branding efforts.
Naturally, there are a few preconditions for interns to become an additional source of branding intelligence and execution. These vary in focus but are not necessarily complex or involved:
Internship attraction: Organizations should be keen to update or enrich their careers websites with information regarding work experience with them. The message herein will be similar in breadth as that included for potential employees (program details, types available, benefits of joining, pre-requisites, online applications, email or RSS alerts to stay in touch).
Intern Induction: No need to go overboard with an all day program or heavy investments. Induction can consist of a session with basics details ranging from the general logistics and administrivia, through to key contacts, settings of expectations on each side, and the opening up of the communication/feedback channels (more below)
On-site responsibilities: If the highlight of the day for an intern is to stuff envelopes, wander the intranet or ‘see what's needed that morning', stop praying because miracles will not happen. The existence of an intern role description, however general, will have a positive impact in creating more focused effort and purpose in an individual who - by definition - needs a compass. This, as stated earlier, is not aimed at deriving short term gains but enhancing the intern's experience throughout the tenure
Communication and feedback: Whether an intern is having the time of his life or utterly bored and unhappy, organizations must want to know about the individual's impression of the experience as it unveils. This opens the opportunity for immediate adjustment of responsibilities and/or expectations; and the subsequent enhancement of the employment branding message to attract interns in the future.
Exit interviews: Gathering overall impressions from the intern at the end of the period should be a key activity of risk management In all likelihood, this is the core message to conveyed by the individual about the experience with the organization to his/her network
In the end, interns will be outsiders again; their unencumbered impressions may translate into compelling references for your organization, for good or bad.
Whether you’re a professional recruiter, a hiring manager for a large or small firm, or an entrepreneur seeking one employee, you’re going to consider Internet recruiting. The only exception might be if you are trying to fill unskilled or semi-skilled positions from the local neighborhood – nursing homes looking for CNAs, fast food restaurants seeking crew workers, and so forth. Even then, if your nursing home or fast food restaurant is a multiple location franchise, Internet recruiting might still be a good fit.
What, however, are the online recruitment choices and how do you determine which is best? The first thought of those considering Web recruitment are generally the national job boards - Monster, Yahoo! HotJobs and Careerbuilder, the Big Three. These career behemoths attract millions of daily job-seeking visitors and resumes.
One of the best Internet recruiting alternatives to the Big Three might surprise you. It’s your local newspaper. Newspapers offer some of the most robust Internet recruiting options you’ll find anywhere, and they often discount them heavily when you advertise in their print publication.
With an “if you can’t link ‘em join ‘em” approach to Internet recruitment advertising, savvy newspaper executives have designed robust Web sites that provide employers not only with job postings, but also resume databases, candidate tracking systems, Employment TV, broadcast collaborations, mall and workforce center kiosk options, virtual and on-location career fairs, and tons of interactive bells and whistles.
With the help of The Boston Globe and its BostonWorks job site, for example, not only can you advertise in the paper and on the Web but you can also design your own list of pre-qualifying interview questions, peruse a resume database of over half a million job candidates, and send out a direct bulk e-mail to those candidates. You can even enlist the help of the recruitment experts at the Globe to help you compose the message. You can target just the job or industry-specific demographics you’re interested in as well. You can purchase keyword-relevant tile ads, display your openings on the BostonWorks home page as a featured employer, and keep your eye on the progress of your applicant search with the robust BostonWorks Web-based applicant tracking system.
What makes many newspapers an even smarter choice is that you don’t necessarily have to forego advertising in the Big Three we mentioned earlier – Monster, HotJobs and Careerbuilder. That’s because each of these recruitment sites has partnered with newspapers to share each other’s online job postings.
If, for example, you place an ad in the Wilkes Barre (Pa.) Times Leader, the Honolulu Star- Bulletin or California’s Orange County Register, you’ve also placed it on Monster’s site. If you post a job with The Dallas Morning News, The Denver Post or The Salt Lake Tribune it will appear on HotJobs. If you advertise your openings in the pages and on the site of The Sacramento Bee, Chicago Tribune or The Detroit News, you’ve scheduled it on Careerbuilder.
The best place, then, for your Internet recruitment dollars may well by your local newspaper. It’s not just the print want ads anymore.
“Step right up; get your background checks here! No waiting, no worries, and did I mention cheap!?” Sound like a carnival atmosphere? While few people would seriously consider it, asking the opinion of the Age/Weight Guesser at the county fair about your candidate’s criminal history may actually rival the accuracy of a cheap, instant criminal database background check.
Simply stated, the faster and cheaper the background check, the more likely it will have overlooked existing criminal records. It is also more likely that you’ll violate personal privacy laws by using ineligible or illegally obtained information against a candidate (or the wrong person) without even knowing it. The worst way to find out you are using poor information is under the scrutiny of a criminal or civil lawsuit for negligent or discriminatory hiring practices.
Cheap, instant background checks inevitably involve commercial databases. Private companies purchase information from a wide variety of sources across the country, often claiming to catalog “millions” of criminal records. Among the problems inherent in instant criminal database searches is that it is extremely difficult to correlate the geographic areas covered by the database with the areas in which your candidates have lived. Most databases can sound extremely comprehensive by rattling off a variety of sources of information: county felony/ misdemeanor records, sex offender registries, departments of correction, and “proprietary” databases, among others. The problem is that database vendors cannot mandate information or updates from any of these sources, leaving significant coverage gaps in the midst of each of them.
There are entire states, including California, that do not supply county felony/misdemeanor records to commercial database vendors. Furthermore, once a criminal record is entered into a database, it becomes static information. Criminal records are maintained in county courthouses, not in national databases. If a county court expunges a record, or deletes it through a first-time diversion program, it cannot be used as criteria for an employment decision. Similar to the geographic coverage gaps present in database searches, no one can say if or how often these updates make it into the databases.
To minimize your risk of negligent hiring litigation, a process must be put in place that maximizes the probability that existing criminal information will be found, while providing safeguards and oversight to ensure any records found are current, accurate, and associated with the correct individual. Criminal records should be researched on a county-by-county basis, corresponding with your candidate’s address history. Criminal databases by themselves do not accomplish these goals and will provide little defense under negligent hiring scrutiny.
At the fair, a bad guess usually costs management a stuffed animal or other inexpensive trinket. Making a bad guess in hiring can cost your company significantly more. Contact BIS for more information on tailoring a reliable and legally compliant screening program to the specific needs of your company.
Background Information Services, Inc. is an industry leading provider of employment screening solutions that will manage risk in the unlikely event of employment litigation.
