Something You Forgot: Sentiment Analysis for HR and Recruiting

Despite our near obsessive fixation on “employee engagement,” this term remains largely amorphous and highly ambiguous, a subjective subject at best.

Inherently, HR knows that an engaged workforce is more satisfied in their jobs, more productive at work, and generally stick around for longer tenures and lower pay.

These are all outcomes, we can agree, by which HR should be both managed and measured.

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The Neverending Story: The 2017 State of the Recruiting Internet.

If you’ve never been to Terranea just south of Los Angeles, it’s hard to describe one of the most picturesque, and privileged, places in the world.

To get there, you have to go through the industrial cities of Torrance and San Pedro, past decaying factories and dilapidated houses, blue collar turned barrio, like so much of South Bay surrounding it.

You climb up a hill, and turn onto a two way, winding road, and suddenly, you’re coasting along the Pacific Ocean; if you’re lucky, you’ll see humpback whales or the occasional school of dolphins somewhere out in there in the azure waters.

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Word Count.

I haven’t written on this site for quite some time; normally, I go through the motions of cross posting content from Recruiting Daily, which gets all my original content since, well, they pay my salary, but recently that platform has become ubiquitous enough where it seems a bit redundant these days.

The truth of the matter is, I feel like I owe the world a giant apology for underachieving of late. I know that’s not entirely the case, but for the first time in my life, really, the work has finally caught up to me. It’s not so much that I’ve lost my passion, or am burnt out – it’s just that I have suddenly found myself unable to pull all nighters any more. The single time of the day I could previously catch up and be productive has become impossible for me. The reason, of course, is because I am getting old.

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A Lesson Learned.

If you know me, you know how hard it is for me to keep my damn mouth shut. It’s against my very nature to stay silent, particularly when I’m provoked. And yet, for much of the past year, that’s exactly what I’ve had to do when shit when south for some reason I’m still not entirely sure of, and I basically found myself in the first act of an episode of Snapped.

I will not comment any further on that issue, other than to say I think my restraint has somewhat redeemed an unredeemable situation in which that silence was too often construed as guilt, but even acknowledging the situation would have somehow given it credibility.

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Predictions That Probably Won’t Happen: 2017 Talent Trends.

The thing about talent trends posts is that if it were possible to predict the future of recruiting and HR, we’d probably have figured out some way to make it suck a little less.

Of course, the glacial pace of change in these parts means that for the indeterminate present, 2017 Is shaping up to be same shit, different year.

I’m aware that trends posts are, well, trendy – and acknowledge that there’s no real need for me (or anyone else) to contribute more content to this canon of crap.

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Your Fault: Don’t Blame Glassdoor for Your Crap Company Culture.

There are few companies able to generate more mainstream media coverage than Glassdoor1, who has a long track record of using the massive amounts of proprietary data across their site to generate some analytics and insights into what’s really going on in the world of work.

While employers may bitch about the negative reviews (and their lack of ability to respond without paying a premium for the privilege), Glassdoor’s anecdotal evidence is far less interesting – or actionable – than the data the site collects in aggregate.

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Why Google Is The Ultimate Spyware.

A Google product manager filed a lawsuit in California Superior Court yesterday, alleging the company’s strict internal confidentiality policies represent a breach of California labor laws.

The lawsuit alleges that Google has implemented an enterprise wide “spying program” for current employees to voluntarily report coworkers and colleagues suspected of leaking confidential information or trade secrets.

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Underneath It All: Don’t Speak About These 10 Biggest BS Buzzwords.

For an industry whose professional certification involves “competency based assessments,” there’s a surprising amount of incompetence when it comes to sorting out the product marketing buzz and BS coming from companies offering the coolest stuff you never really needed to fix a problem you didn’t know you had.

Of course, where “best practices” are basically the same stuff everyone’s been doing since before we even started making up generational theory and talking about “Millennials.”

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Money Trees: Facebook, LinkedIn and The Future of Recruiting.

Facebook has reportedly thrown the opening salvo in its long anticipated move into the recruiting and hiring vertical, with TechCrunch reporting yesterday that the ubiquitous social network has confirmed it is beginning to roll out a “Jobs” tab, which allows employers to post (and, of course, promote) job openings directly to company’s followers and fans as an integrated part of the core Facebook experience.

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Street Dreams.

Millennial themed content is kind of like the minstrel show of the new Millennium.

It’s blatantly offensive to a protected class through sweeping stereotypes for the purposes of entertaining the masses who largely distrust this largely marginalized group, who find great pleasure in the overt, exaggerated and hyperbolized presentation of perceived Gen Y foibles.

In fact, this cottage industry of discriminatory ageism disguised as some sort of “best practice” or workforce strategy, which is akin to cryptozoology or phrenology in terms of the validity of a field that is at best, the collision of pseudoscience and pop culture.

At its worst, it’s unadulterated ageism, and often pundits and practitioners don’t even bother hiding their bias or completely irrational (and illegal) beliefs on gender theory.

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