Talent Filter

A Little About Our CEO, Sean Bisceglia

Sean Bisceglia is Chief Executive Officer of TalentDrive, headquartered in Chicago. Since the company opened its doors in 2007, TalentDrive has built a solid client list, including a handful of Fortune 500. 

Prior to TalentDrive, Sean acquired and became CEO of CPRi (Corporate Project Resources, Inc) in March 2003, and sold to Aquent in July 2005. Sean’s leadership as CEO of CPRi helped to grow the organization 200%, making it the largest national marketing staffing firm. As a result, Aquent’s acquisition of CPRi crowned them the largest marketing and creative services staffing firm in the world. The firm deploys over 1000 marketers a day around the world.

Prior to CPRi, Sean founded TFA in 1992, which he sold to Leo Burnett in 1998. Joining Leo Burnett’s management post-acquisition to run the company’s Technology Group, he was the youngest corporate executive vice president in the Leo Burnett Company’s history. Under his leadership, TFA/Leo Burnett achieved a record breaking 96% growth to $210 million with over 9000 employees around the globe. In recognition of his achievements, Sean was elected to the board of directors of Leo Burnett USA in August 2000.

Beyond his relentless focus on profitable growth, Sean’s success also is attributed to the profile he keeps within the business community. He serves on the advisory boards of various companies, contributes to the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and various industry trade publications. Sean has served as guest speaker at Harvard Business School, University of Chicago, and DePaul University. In 1999, Sean was named to the Crain’s Chicago Business list of “Forty Under Forty” top business people in Chicago.

Job Boarders The Social Network

We're a big fan of job boards around here, as well as social networks, so it's not surprise that we're following JobBoarders.com, the social network put up by Chris Russell.

It's for and by Job Boarders, which fits pretty perfectly into our work on TalentFilter.

Sign up today, and add me as a friend.

What if Your Firm Fought a Talent War and No One Showed Up?

The following is a guest post from Brian Sommer, a member of the Talent Drive Advisory Council and a wicked smart guy from Chicago.

My Kingdom for a Quality Candidate

A few years ago, recruiters saw the idea of job board as a good thing. Now, a single source database for talent isn’t looking so good. Why?

•   Some of the largest resume databases may contain as much as 70% overlap in content. Is time spent eliminating duplicates a value added activity?
• Worse than the resume duplication problem is that there may simply be too many job boards in the market.  Current estimates put the number closer to 30,000 unique job boards.  No matter how effective an individual recruiter can be there is no way they could adequately or optimally scan or search all of these databases.
• Fraud and gaming of resumes are still rampant problems in online job boards.  When recruiters reject 95%+ of the resumes returned by search tools in these databases, the fault has more to do with gaming and not with the development of search strings. Worse still, the time and productivity lost sifting through these unqualified resumes is killing recruiting productivity, hurting employers and hurting the more qualified candidates. The latter point is especially important as the most qualified candidates are often the more experienced and employable workers who don’t know how to game job boards. If recruiters can’t get access to the best candidates, then what value do job boards provide?
• Recruiters are overly reliant on the very same technology solutions (i.e., job boards) as their competitors.  This virtually guarantees they will have an undifferentiated approach to human resources and recruiting. They will fish the same pond for the same fish. In this context, recruiters reduced the sourcing of quality candidates to a simple challenge: who can create the best search string.

Social networks are moving into ascendancy as far as sourcing of passive recruiting candidates.  Unfortunately, the methods being used to build out many of these newer systems for recruiting purposes are not well thought out. Users of many social networks are now finding their personal and professional data is being shared with third parties to mine for sales, recruiting and other opportunities. Social networks are making this data available as a way to generate cash for their firms; however, as they commercialize their offerings, they are disenfranchising their users.

Job Boards Make The World Go Round

Job boards get a lot of grief online. Candidates, recruiters, and software vendors spend a lot of digital ink tearing into job boards for real and imagined grievances, primarily because they're easy to attack. Afdter all, if you're catching flak, you're usually over the target.

What we know is this - the employment section of the classified ads is still the most profitable division of a newspaper.  Monster, Careerbuilder, Dice, HotJobs and all of the new Web2.0 job boards represent a multi-billion dollar industry.  And for all the complaints, recruiters inside and outside of corporations use job boards every day to fill positions in just about every profession.

So while trashing a job board may be a great way to get some publicity, the truth is that job boards work better than anything else we have.  And while social networks and blogs and podcasts may knock on the door of the hiring manager looking for elite talent, most people are better off with their names visible to recruiters, and that means more postings, more resumes, and more hiring.

So what's our place in all of this?  That's the mystery. What do you think the videos are for?

talentfilter. Coming Soon.

The Curse Of The Electronic Resume

It was over 15 years ago, but there was a time not long ago when electronic resumes seemed like a great idea.  Companies were really excited about the idea of creating digital databases of resumes that would store the collective talent of a marketplace, allowing the companies to create pools of interested workers that would quickly and efficiently move through the employment process from selection to hire.

How naive we were.

E-mailed resumes have been a great boon for workforce liquidity.  The pace of hiring has indeed quickened, and our ability to reach more people grew exponentially with digital resumes. The wonders of ATS, candidate databases, and job boards (and wonder they are), all came about when we put out career histories into pixels on the screen.  But like the paperless office, the idea of lessening our workload flew out the window.

In establishing the idea of the paperless resume that could easily be forwarded and stored, we assumed candidates would not change their behaviors in applying for jobs.  As the volume increased, we first saw it as a good thing.  More resumes = more choice.  But like the Sorcerer's Apprentice, the trickle of resumes became a rush, and the rush a flood, and today, we struggle to keep our heads above water, as the electronic resumes pour in from all corners of the globe.

It's enough to make you want to take an ax to the whole project. 

Except it works, and with the flood of resumes comes new software to help us manage.  Search technology is changing the way we look at resumes, and what was once unwelcome, is now understood as a great thing.  Job boards give us an instant look at the marketplace in a manner far superior to our old paper files.  We may moan about the resumes that come in, but it doesn't stop us from searching for more.

It's not the quantity coming in - it's the ability to search on our own terms that keeps us adding new passwords.  What we need is a new way to search resumes.

talentfilter.  coming soon.

Welcome To The TalentDrive Blog

Our blog is primarily a vehicle for discussing the use of Job Boards in hiring.  If you are a reader, a blogger, or someone involved in the industry, feel free to drop us a line.

Our first steps will be launching our series on TalentFilter, a resume software for corporations.