5 Ways to Strengthen your Candidate Recruitment – Guest Post

Careerleaf was originally founded from a belief that there was a better way to connect talent with employers through technology. Even with the progress we’ve made through the years, our journey is far from over; in fact, it will never end. Philosophically, we believe that our products (as well as our team) can always be improved upon.

So in the spirit of continuously bettering the recruitment process, Wayne Fleming, recruitment and HR consultant from Flexi Personnelis making a guest contribution to our blog this week on how to strengthen one’s candidate recruitment.

Continue reading “5 Ways to Strengthen your Candidate Recruitment – Guest Post”

‘Women in Leadership’ features Afifa – Careerleaf’s CEO and Lead Chocolatier

It’s no secret – when it comes to the CEO position, women are grossly underrepresented in the Canadian workplace. If this list of Canada’s top 100 earning CEOs serves as an appropriate sample, women only represent 3% of these business leaders. Just three percent! The rest of the workplace is 47% female.

It’s a contrast for those of us at Careerleaf, where we’re led by our CEO Afifa Siddiqui. As it turns out, we also came upon the opportunity to feature her for Women in Leadership, a national charity that aims to inspire Canadian women to fulfill their potential by assembling communities, providing mentoring, and organizing networking events.

Curiously, WIL was more interested in telling Afifa’s story as an entrepreneur, rather than her role as our office’s primary merchant of chocolate. Even so, we jumped at the chance, and the feature has just gone live. Check it out here!

Continue reading “‘Women in Leadership’ features Afifa – Careerleaf’s CEO and Lead Chocolatier”

Reimagining your Professional Association as a Recruiter

I think bamboo is a fantastic material. From construction scaffolding, human edible food, and entire luxury houses, the grass has been employed in an endless variety of ways through some creative reimagining of what the material was and what role it could play.

The human brain does, in fact, act oddly when faced with different assumptions and frames. Simply asking a question in a different way, or considering a different perspective can derive a different result. Consider the following based on Kahneman & Tversky’s often cited study:

An outbreak threatens to kill 600 people. There are two possible courses of action:

  • Program A will save 200 people.
  • Program B has a ⅓ chance of saving everyone, and a ⅔ chance of saving no one.

Now, imagine the same scenario, but different options:

  • Program C will kill 400 people.
  • Program D has a ⅓ chance of saving everyone, and a ⅔ chance of saving no one.

All four plans theoretically deliver the same result – save 200 people – but 72% of those surveyed would choose program A over B (certainty instead of risk), yet 78% would choose program D over C (risk instead of certainty). The dramatic difference can be accounted for the way A and C are framed – one is positive and one is negative.

So for professional associations out there looking to do more for your membership and increase revenue: it’s time to reimagine your organization…as a recruiter.

Continue reading “Reimagining your Professional Association as a Recruiter”

Data Security & Online Recruiting: How Safe Are You?

No corporation seems to be safe these days. Target, Home Depot, Sony, and most, recently Ashley Madison are just some of the billion-dollar brands that have suffered lapses in digital information security. Literally, just a couple days ago, we received a phone call from a job board owner who had been victim of a data breach.

The Careerleaf team is currently prepping to launch exciting new software in the coming months. In this effort, our updated FAQ features a question about approach to data security. However, given the level of attention currently being devoted to the topic (Ashley Madison specifically), we felt it prudent to delve deeper with an entire blog post.

If you’ve taken data security for granted, this blog post is dedicated to you! Ask yourself, when was the last time you considered:

  • How much do you know about the handling of your data?
  • Where do the servers physically live?
  • Who is the hosting company, and what kind of security do they offer?
  • Are databases shared among a vendor’s portfolio of customers?

Continue reading “Data Security & Online Recruiting: How Safe Are You?”

Your job board’s brand and why it matters

Every organization, as small or insignificant as they may be, has a brand – even my aunt’s bookkeeping sole proprietorship. It will never be as recognized around the globe as Apple or Coca Cola are, but to my aunt and her clients, the business’ brand is imperative for ongoing success. As the idiom goes, “you are judged by the company that you keep”, and the same wisdom can be applied to an organizational or personal brand (in my aunt’s case, much of the business’ brand is made up of the associations with her actual person).

Cast your mind back to 2013, and the damage that the Joe Fresh brand suffered (and is still defending against) when it was associated with the Savar Building catastrophe in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The unfortunate disaster stands as a reminder of how quickly a brand’s equity can be destroyed, and that the associations stakeholder make with your brand – both positive and negative – can linger for extended periods of time.

Noting that an organization’s brand as an employer is as important as ever, job board owners should be asking themselves whether they are doing everything they can to ensure that their board is a brand that employers wish to associate with.

Continue reading “Your job board’s brand and why it matters”

Enhancing Recruitment Marketing with SEO

I can still recall, quite vividly, the days when my whole household had one cellphone, and it was carried by the family member who could justify the greatest need for it.

In 2007, I reluctantly purchased my first cellphone that I didn’t share with a family member. I was 22 at the time and being a late adopter was a point of pride – I wanted to see how long I could hold out before being swallowed by the mobile revolution. Tell that to my parents, and they’d laugh thinking about the technology they had when they were 22. Tell that to one of my cousins in high school, and well, they’d probably laugh as well – who waits till they’re 22 until getting their very own phone?

Fast forward to today, and I’m more likely to leave my house without my wallet than my cellphone – a sentiment that I believe is quite significant in terms of how the Internet and proliferation of mobile devices has truly changed our society.

Continue reading “Enhancing Recruitment Marketing with SEO”