An Article on GPA's in the Resume

I was recently quoted in an article on Examiner.com about whether or not to include your GPA on the resume if you're an entry level job seeker.

Credit where it's due, it happened when I signed up for the "Help A Reporter Out" (HARO) site, which was put up by Peter Shankman. You basically get a couple of e-mails a day from Peter with literally dozens of requests for expertise on a broad variety of subjects. By being a qualified commenter and offering exactly what's being asked for you stand a pretty good chance of becoming a quotable resource. It worked extremely well for me -- this was my very first reply to a query.

Beyond my own plug, think about the application for your business's employment branding. Without depending upon a PR agency, you can get solid publicity for yourself merely by paying attention to a few e-mails each day and replying when you've got something to say.

TalentHook comes out with a mean left hook in 2009

Last year, I wrote a comparison of TalentHook and Infogist, data mining tools for the serious Internet sourcer and recruiter. Late in December (yeah, I'm just catching up with my posts), I had the opportunity to revisit the TalentHook tool and, man, have they made some neat improvements.

First of all, one of my biggest complaints last time around was how Web 1.0 the interface looked. I mean, seriously, it was a bit of 1992 UI. I'm glad to say that's all done. We're into a more Vista-like look and feel (see the round upper-left control button) and the app has been upgraded in several significant ways. Over time, I had gotten used to the old TalentHook interface, and the new one is not so critically different from the old one that you would not recognize it:

Nevertheless, it is more streamlined and intuitive.

In addition, there are quite a few (700) new sites that TalentHook spiders and finds resumes from, but, to me, and I think for most recruiters, the most useful and impressive one is LinkedIn. I spend a proportionally greater amount of time on the social networking platforms as a part of my work these days and being able to search and organize profiles from LinkedIn through this tool is a huge bonus. I don't know whether this new feature is something that the TalentHook folks had to negotiate for or whether it's part of LinkedIn's new, seemingly more open platform policies (what I believe to be an effort to compete with Facebook, whose functionality was for a while late last year threatening to eat LinkedIn's lunch). In either case, those of us in recruiting and sourcing get to reap the benefit.

Finally, I was pleased to see that some work was done under the hood as well. Namely, the search feature has been upgraded in at least one extremely meaningful way to include what they're terming extended criteria. In a nutshell, when you ran searches on multiple sites using TalentHook before, you'd be out of luck when trying to drill down into special search functionality of Monster.com's zip code radius search as opposed to, say, Dice.com's. Now, when you are setting up a search, you can take advantage of specific functionality called "Extended Criteria" which appear as a separate tab in your search setup screen:

Using Extended Criteria, you can take advantage of the special search criteria of multiple sites all within a single search query.

Finally, during my updated demo of the product, I was told that TalentHook now supports multiple recruiters on a network. I asked whether this were some sort of SaaS setup and they explained that it is not but a client-side install of the software with data sharing that syncs up when someone is connected to the company network. I'm still a little bit unclear as to how that would work out exactly if I were outside of my company's firewall and just connected to the net, but it is an intriguing way to ensure that if a recruiting team is using TalentHook as their ATS they will be able to see whether someone from the team has existing relationships and prevent downloading duplicate resumes. Avoiding duplicates is the bigger deal, considering the draconian protectiveness of the job board databases that count each downloaded resume.

Bottom line, I like what TalentHook has done and think that the company has been making serious efforts to reflect the needs of the recruiting profession. Now if I can just get my candidates and clients to behave.

(Special thanks to the folks at TalentHook for permission to use screen shots from the application. In the interests of full disclosure, I was asked by TalentHook to take another look at the application, which I was only too happy to do).