New videos of our clients discussing their experiences and hiring successes with JCSI are featured on our homepage tabs and in the new “Success” area of the site.  Here you’ll find a wide variety of case studies and testimonials from clients in a wide variety of industries.

The JCSI corporate blog is now front and center and we hope you’ll join us to discuss the topics and trends shaping the next generation of recruiting. In addition, the right edge of the screen has persistent links to our LinkedIn page and to our conversations on Twitter and Facebook.  In addition, throughout the site you’ll see references to our podcasts and our communities on Flickr, Slideshare and YouTube.

We’ve also added new features to expand our communications with the quality candidates that we work with each day.   Our CareerAssist team is providing career development guidance and insight on their blog and Twitter communities.  If that is too many options, you can follow everything we do over at Friendfeed.com/JCSI.

We are excited about our web communications and we hope you find the information here valuable. Special thanks to Pedro Silva, Caitlin Saint John, Ryanne Conway here are JCSI and Kate and Arik at Untapped for all their hard work getting this launched.

The report find that clean energy jobs grew 9.1% while traditional jobs grew only 3.7% 1998 and 2007. Looking ahead the  that this sector is emerging as a vital component of America’s new economic landscape.

Some of the highlights from the report include:

• The number of jobs in America’s emerging clean energy economy grew nearly two and a half times faster than overall jobs between 1998 and 2007,
• ‘The clean energy economy is poised for explosive growth,’ said Lori Grange, interim deputy director of the Pew Center
• 2008 alone, investors directed $5.9bn into American businesses in the clean energy economy, a figure that represents a 48 percent increase over 2007 investment totals and accounts for 15 per cent of all global venture capital investments.
• 65% of today’s clean energy economy jobs are in the category of Conservation and Pollution Mitigation, but  80% of venture capital investments in 2008 were in the sectors of Clean Energy and Energy Efficiency
• Large and growing. Twelve states have large and growing clean energy economies: Their numbers of jobs in the clean energy economy in 2007 exceeded the national average and have grown by an average of 1 percent annually. These states’ clean energy economies are expanding at a moderate but steady rate, and they have a strong foundation on which to build. These states are California, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina,

The free Pew report can be downloaded here. This 62 page document presents the finding of the study and  provides specific job data for each state.  A  complementary website lets you drill down to the data on the state level.

In the release, The Conference Board’s senior economist Gad Levanon said:

“The May bounce in labor demand is a very welcome sign. Labor demand typically leads the trend in both employment and unemployment, so positive signals on labor demand are always important.”

The report indicates that job junctions with the biggest increases were in management, admin and technical positions.

Over half of the 250,000 May increase in online advertised vacancies reflected increases in Management (43,600) and Office and Administrative Support Services (41,600) as well as Computer and Mathematical Science (34,800) and Health Practitioners and Technical occupations (20,100). The remaining increases were spread across the wide range of occupational categories.

As reported on ERE.net yesterday, another positive indicator came from ExecuNet’s Recruiter Confidence Index (RCI).  Their confidence index has climbed to its highest level in 11 months.  The survey of 143 executive recruiters found that 57% are confident or very confident that the executive employment market will improve in the next six months.

Measurement is one of the most important topics for HR leaders today. Whether you manage recruitment for a small company or a multinational corporation, effective measurement practices enable you to evaluate HR’s impact on business productivity and revenue.  Join us on this free online workshop to learn a proven methodology for incorporating metrics into all aspects and operations of your recruiting function. This interactive session will explore tools and methodologies ranging from measuring recruiter performance, assessing hiring manager and applicant satisfaction, metrics as a dashboard in Service Level Agreements, and of course, measurements for the CEO and CFO.

We’ll discuss key measurement best practices and you’ll leave with a proven model readily customizable for your own business environment.

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Here is the overview:

Social media has revolutionized marketing and corporate communications, and now it is shaping the next-generation of corporate staffing. Companies are applying social media practices to connect with the best minds in their industry and build relationships with them in their own environments without the excessive fees of agencies and job boards.

As a firm specializing in deep candidate research and cultivation, JCSI is bringing the leading edge social media staffing services to our clients. To help you understand how this can help your business, we’ve developed a new presentation that will discuss the impact social media is having on job candidates and HR departments in every industry. We’ll evaluate the social media platforms and discuss how they can be applied in your organization to build your employment brand and attract higher quality candidates at a lower cost. You’ll also learn the metrics and evaluations you can apply to quantify your business impact.

Social media can help you move as fast as your ideal candidates.

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1. Pipeline development is part of their growth strategy

2. They know that long-term hiring success requires a process

3. A developed candidate pipeline removes major competition from the equation

4. Having qualified candidates on hand minimize delays in production

5. A company that is actively recruiting is considered a strong company

Read the full article here.

This reminds me of a story from one of the most successful examples of a corporate Twitter initiative.  Here is Frank Eliason from ComcastCares in a Business Week article not long ago:

Thanks to the friendly Twitter network Frank has built up, customers occasionally help one another, as he discovered a few weeks earlier when he mentioned in a Tweet that he had an important family event during the day and would be unavailable. Once the event ended that evening, he logged onto Twitter at home to see which customers in the Twitt-o-sphere needed help that day.

“I found that people who didn’t work for Comcast were responding, saying: ‘Let Frank have his day. Can I help?’” he recalls. “They were saying: ‘Here, try this.’ And it was the most amazing thing. That day I understood the effectiveness of what we do.”

This is a powerful community and one where every company should participate.

The JOLTS rate has decreased from 3% a year ago, but the drop is relatively small compared to the rise of the unemployment rate from 4.8% to 8.1% during that same time.  Digging deeper into the job openings rate, the areas with more openings that the national average are  Education & Health Services at 3.2%, and Professional & Business Services is at 2.7%. Here s the graphic from BusinessWeek:

While companies like IBM are going through rounds of layoffs, they are retraining their best and recruiting actively to fill thousands of job openings for analyst positions.

As the article states, the skills companies need to grow are shifting and government needs to recognize these trends and offer the right types of training programs.

In the short term, companies recruiting people with tomorrow’s specialist skills have to focus on the passive job seeker.  The importance of attracting and building relationships with those people with the right skills currently filling these roles in competitive organizations has never been greater.  Even if the job reqs are not there yet, the identification and relationship building in social media should start now.  It is likely that competition, and salaries, for these will only escalate as the economy improves.

Here are the 5 eras that will mark the steps along this transformation – see Forrester’s blog for more information on this report.

1) Era of Social Relationships: People connect to others and share
2) Era of Social Functionality: Social networks become like operating system
3) Era of Social Colonization: Every experience can now be social
4) Era of Social Context: Personalized and accurate content
5) Era of Social Commerce: Communities define future products and services

As a staffing firm, we want to look at their vision through our own lens to understand the implications for recruiters embracing social recruiting strategies. Here are some of the key ideas of the report that relate to us:

The social web will soon enable individuals to share their friend networks from a community like Facebook with sites all across the web. So when a candidate visits your corporate site or a job posting on a career site, their browser will show which of their friends have been there and how they felt about the content there.    The collective opinion of an individual’s network will immediately shape their opinion of your company.  The influence of the collective opinion is happening now across the web, but portable friend profiles like these will pull these influences into almost every web experience.

The new currency of tomorrow’s social web will be individual influence.   Those with large and passionate followers will shape your company’s employment brand.  Companies will shift their communications to focus on influence and social recommendations that boost positive word of mouth and referrals from brand advocates.

How content is delivered on the web will also change.  With a profile that travels with individuals from site to site, candidates can choose to reveal much more information about themselves to the sites they trust.  These sites will be able to present a much more customized experience with only the most relevant content delivered in the communities where visitors want to see it.  This creates a much more distributed web for brands that reduces the importance of the corporate site and even minimizes the amount of time people will need to search and surf to find what they are looking for.   The days of pushing candidates to a one-size-fits-all corporate careers page are over. Companies can take their rich content off their corporate site, make it shareable, and integrate in areas all across the web to join the conversation with exactly the type of people they want to reach.

We are entering an exciting era for corporate recruiting  and I couldn’t be more excited about the opportunities this is going to present to us.

Since we had a large booth space this year, we wanted to try something different.  The role of social media in HR wasn’t discussed in depth at the conference so we conducted several live workshops at our booth on the impact social media is having on staffing and recruiting today.   The feedback was very positive and many people stuck around to continue the discussion on an individual level.  I thought I’d share the slides with you here.  Feel free to contact me anytime to discuss this in more detail.