Hot Quora Recruitment Threads to Follow Immediately

The popular question and answer forum Quora, in addition to being a terrific time sink and recruitment tool, is also jam packed with great recruitment threads full of useful information from both sides of the interview table. It's good to check in every once and a while and see the newest additions to topics like Recruiting, Hiring, and Engineering Recruiting, and because we care about your recruiting success and general happiness, we've compiled some of the most interesting recent questions for your reading pleasure. 

Awesome Company Culture Videos Part II

A great company video can go a long way. It can function as a recruitment tool, a display of your mission and values, and perhaps even as sales enablement to show your prospects the kind of people they're working with. A while back, we listed off a few of our favorite videos, and since then we've found a handful of others that were a delight to watch. Read on to see a few more great examples of company videos, as well as some procedural looks at them from a high level.

GitHub Repo Tracks Women in Software Engineering Stats

Over the past year, it's become somewhat fashionable for companies to publicize data about their employee diversity. The goal here is to draw attention to the long ignored issue of homogenous workplaces, and take the first step in building a representative workforce. While a transparent blog post with colorful pie charts isn't going to undo centuries of institutional hiring and sourcing biases, only when we start to understand the breadth and depth of a problem can we begin to solve it. While a handful of companies are doing their part in this regard, the numbers surrounding employee diversity, in particular that of women in software engineering, are largely and woefully under-reported. 

Stacy Zapar on Employer Brand through Community

When it comes to building great teams, much is said about the importance of your employer brand. Of course, everyone can offer competitive salary, a handful of perks, and medical coverage, but it's not until you're able to delineate exactly what makes your company unique that you can begin to formulate your employer brand. Having expertly navigated this process at Zappos, and now doing it again at TripAdvisor, is most connected woman on LinkedIn and friend of Entelo, Stacy Zapar.

Google Releases Updated Diversity Data

This time last year, in an effort to provide some transparency to the issue of workplace homogeneity, Google launched a dedicated page detailing their employee diversity. After recognizing their numbers as shamefully low, they pledged to focus on making their workplace a more representative atmosphere, via various outreach programs, community groups, and by sourcing candidates through more creative channels. 

So, did it work? This week, via a post on G+, Google discusses the progress they've made in the last year. Here are some of the highlights:

Industry Leaders Team Up In HR Insights Magazine

What if I told you there was a beautifully designed HR themed e-zine out there, just jam packed with great recruitment guides, and that you could access it without even surrendering your email address? Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, the folks over at Imprimis Group have done just that. Their latest issue of HR Insights Magazine is out, and it's a doozy. 

To Tweet or Not to Tweet? A Discussion on Social Recruiting Nuances

The notion of social recruiting has already enjoyed quite an illustrious lifecycle.  It's been praised as the next big thing in recruitment, lambasted as a fad, and shrugged at as just another tool. Even if you're don't believe it's the harbinger of a recruiting revolution and will forever change the way you do your job, candidates are still putting their professional selves out there, and their social footprint is a great way to find, qualify, and built rapport with potential hires.

Let Me Tell You Why Your Job Descriptions Are Awful

"A positive self starter who needs minimum oversight."

"Proactive and demonstrates sound judgment in managing multiple tasks and requests"

"Growth potential."

The above are to job descriptions as "excellent communication skills" are to resumes. They're essentially space fillers, claims based on having nothing else to say, and they don't actually add anything of real evaluative utility. If you want to attract relevant, qualified candidates, you need to have detailed job descriptions devoid of fluff. Let's go through a few ways to optimize your job descriptions and attract only the candidates you want.

Merit Based Interviewing and Building Engineering Culture

 Great news, Recruiters! Hiring On All Cylinders has taken the to ether once more, this time joined by the illustrious Engineer-turned-Recruiter, Aline Lerner. Aline's just started a new company, interviewing.io, aimed at making the interview process more merit-based via an exciting double-blind interview tool. Aline shoots from the hip while having the data to back up some exciting takeaways that run counter to traditional recruiting wisdom, and we sat down to chat about her new company and much much more.

Developers Read Bad Recruiting Emails [VIDEO]

It's no secret that top technical talent receive a torrential amount of emails and Inmails requesting their services. They range all the way from personal, tailored, and informational, to nonsensical, broken, and irrelevant. Kudos to the devoted Recruiters taking their time and sending the first instance, but let's all be honest, there's nothing funny about a great recruiting email.

Classic Recruiting Methods That Will Never Go Out Of Style

The importance of mobile-friendly application process, social recruiting, and advanced x-ray search strings in recruitment is difficult to understate. People connect and learn differently, and recruitment has to adapt to constantly know the best way to find and engage with individuals in order to help your company grow.

What Recruiters Say vs. What They Mean

Happy Friday, tireless scrutineers of the job market's top talent. Rather than deliver you another post about the importance of recruiting metrics or making your application process mobile friendly (zzzz), let's take a moment to collectively shake our heads at the regrettable scores of lazy corner cutters giving you a bad name out there on the front lines of the war for talent. I've seen, received, and responded to enough questionable recruitment messages to know their true meaning, and I've listed them all below. 

Engineers Reach Out to Tech Candidates, Response Rate Skyrockets

Here's something Recruiters aren't going to like hearing: engineering candidates don't want to deal directly with you. It's a shame, but many of them just have a bad taste in their mouth from the outreach of bad Recruiters. The real issue here isn't an implacable hatred, but rather an expectation that in a Recruiter they'll be talking to someone who doesn't truly understand exactly what they do. For this reason talent often prefer to talk to a Hiring Manager or future teammate right off the bat, as they know they'll be chatting with someone who speaks their language.

Best Practices for Recruiting Recent College Graduates

Are you as tired of seeing millennial-centric blog posts as I am? Good, I promise I won't use that word again. Either way, chances are you'll find yourself interviewing recent grads at one point or another, and it can be difficult to properly assess someone based merely on their GPA, role as Club Treasurer, and Intramural Softball Captaincy. Despite the lack of clear "real world" office experience, if you approach your phone screens and interviews correctly, you can adequately determine if someone's got what it takes to succeed in your role. Below are a few angles I've found to be effective when interviewing fresh graduates.

What I Learned From Sourcing 30 Sales Reps

Selling a salesperson is no small feat. They're used to getting pitched, they know exactly how they want to be comped, and when they've developed a streak at their current company, they're not likely to want to move. So when you're ready to build a list of candidates and begin reaching out to them, where do you start?