Human Resource

Mediabistro.com held its annual holiday HR breakfast Tuesday morning in New York. The festive gathering rounds out another successful year for our ever-growing job board. Recruiting experts shared their tips while Resto dished out Eggs Benedict and bottomless pastry baskets.

HR pros from almost 50 media companies including BET, Disney and UrbanDaddy squeezed in a couple extra hours of mingling and networking before heading back to the office. Some even got their own mini Elevator Pitch moment rubbing elbows with WebMediaBrands CEO Alan Meckler.

Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.

Small and midsize companies pay more than $1500 more per hire than large businesses, the Wall Street Journal reports today.

While it’s not super surprising that large businesses pay less per hire (after all, they hire so many more people!), we were a little surprised by the actual numbers: $1,949 per hire for a large company, versus $3,632 at medium firms and $3,665 at small firms.

The data comes from a new survey by HR advisory firm Bersin & Associates. The survey also noted that this recruitment cost is three times as much as the company spends on training those employees once hired.

We have posted before about bonuses for new hires at startups, which are just totally crazy, since these web 2.0, app, whatever you kids call it these days gewgaw companies are competing for very scarce talent.

Here’s a new one that has just gone off the rails (we say). Can’t there be one, just one media startup that has a hiring bonus this cool?

According to CNET, Scopely will give to any new hire (or any referrer of a new hire) the following: a year’s supply of Dos Equis, an oil painting of yourself, a tuxedo, Cuban cigars, beard grooming oil, a cologne called “Sex Panther,” and $11,000, wrapped in bacon.

The team has already made one hire through this ridiculous incentive program, an engineer named Mike Thomas. Another 899 have applied but been rejected. Congratulations, Mike.

The really crazy thing? Scopely is in “stealth mode,” raising money to do….nobody knows. All anyone outside the company knows is that it is “preparing to disrupt a segment of the social web that is ripe for innovation.”

Update 11/17/11: The Scopely folks sent us two enormous photos of what bacon-wrapped cash really looks like. We really, really want that bacon to be a clever plastic reproduction, but fairly sure that that’s actual greasy money.
Here’s one such photo. You can click it to get a huge (desktop wallpaper-sized?) version.

You might not think about entering the check-printing industry when you’re looking for a new job. That might be why Deluxe Corp, one of the largest check printers in the U.S., is turning to unconventional ways of attracting talent.

This is, if it’s not obvious, a recruitment video not for Deluxe Corp but for a specific position at one branch of Deluxe Corp.

The company also has a talent community, is on Twitter (and sounds like a human!), Facebook, LinkedIn and so on.

Lest you think that video job posts are silly (and we do think that this suffers from a number of the same problems video resumes do—to wit, poor lighting, poor sound, and this speaker just isn’t that engaging), TalentHQ says that in the final quarter of 2010, Deluxe got half of its hires from its online talent community.

TalentHQ freely admits that posting jobs via YouTube might not work for everyone. But it seems to be working for Deluxe.

We hadn’t been posting these for a while, but today we bring back our semiregular listing of webinars for HR pros. Once again you can learn without leaving your desk. Many of these are free and good for HR recertification credits, though check with the individual webinar sponsor before assuming.

It’s often the worst day of the year. You go into a small office or cubicle, sit down with an HR representative or editor, and justify your existence all in the hopes for a raise.

The job review: what an awful process. But could it be a thing of the past? According to one UCLA Business professor, they should be. Samuel Culbert, the author of Get Rid of the Performance Review!, says the practice of pretending to examine your year’s worth to the company has little point in business anymore, and thinks they should be scratched.

“They’re [the employee] is going to talk about all their successes – it becomes total baloney,” said Culbert to NPR in a recent interview. “The boss already has heard [from] his boss what they want to pay the guy, or the woman. So they come up with a review that’s all backwards.”

And that’s not all. Culbert calls the reviews an HR power play. “In part it’s because HR professionals exploit the performance review to provide them a power base they don’t deserve,” said Culbert and co-author Lawrence Rout in their new book.

Preach on, prof! Get rid of the uncomfortable pleading and just let me know what to do differently. It’s really not that hard, HR.

–JENNIFER PULLINGER

Sharon Jautz, director of human resources at Asset International, has more than a quarter century of HR experience in the media industry, but those media jobs have changed since she first started out — and so has the job interview game. Ahead of her talk on career management at Mediabistro Career Circus August 4, she tells writer Jennifer Pullinger what the new rules are for interviewing for a media job in today’s hiring environment.

“Market yourself in terms of your accomplishments rather than making your resume look like you’re a newspaper guy or a video guy. You need to market yourself in this economy as a media guy. [For example,] ‘I know Final Cut Pro. I know this content management system. I know breaking news. I know how to write feature stories, I know how to edit. I’ve managed freelancers…’ I’m looking for skill sets as opposed to background and experience.”

Sharon Jautz shares tips on managing your media career in her upcoming panel discussion at Mediabistro Career Circus on August 4 in New York.

These webinars are geared toward HR people trying to pick up a couple new skills without investing a lot of time in training. We collect the most relevant ones, most of them free, and keep this calendar up to date.

Upcoming: Technology, onboarding, and executive compensation.

Editor jobs have changed considerably now that they have to worry about page views as much as assuring the content published looks plausible and well written. But classifying someone’s online skills can be difficult.

Well Alison McPartland, manager of search at the B2B publication Questex Media, explains to Folio how her team sorts editors to highlight their online strengths and weaknesses.

“We want to show the particular strength or weakness in each editor,” says McPartland. “There are different ways to focus on how they’re preparing content online and we want to highlight those differences. If someone is our top Optimization Editor, what is he or she doing that you could be doing?”

In order to accomplish this, McPartland describes the editors in four different ways.

1) Acquisition Expert – This person is an expert at drawing people onto the site from outside sources.
2) Optimization Editor – This editor’s talents lie in using SEO tactics to bring in new users.
3) Retention Writer – An ability to keep readers on the site, looking at new material describes this type of editor.
4) Engagement Enhancer – This person has a knack for convincing readers to participate on the website, like adding a comment or signing up for the RSS feed.

The editors-in-chiefs in the company actually like the categorization strategy as well.

Read more

These webinars are geared toward HR people trying to pick up a couple new skills without investing a lot of time in training. We collect the most relevant ones, most of them free, and keep this calendar up to date.

Upcoming: The global recruiting outlook and illegal interview questions.