The Best Talent Acquisition and Recruiting Articles of 2014

We live in the noisiest market ever conceived. So how can your talent acquisition message stand out in this Times Square of banner ads, movies, blog posts, likes, retweets, text ads, animated gifs, infographics, commercials, mobile ads, stories, factoids, listicles, etc?

It was the best of times, it was worst of times according to Dickens. But Charles never had to hire top notch talent in this climate. It was the age of the personal touch, it was the age of the mass message, it was the epoch of connections, it was the epoch of distance, it was the season of transparency, it was the season of opaqueness.

Every hiring manager and recruiter measures themselves on how well they can tell the future. They have to, because that's what judging a person based on their resume really is. When we talk about resumes, be it applicant or employer, we talk about it like it's your permanent record, the complete and total summation of your career thus far.

To steal from an old joke, everyone talks about content, but no one does anything about it. More accurately, everyone frets about content for their brand, but no one really builds a strategy. A well-considered content strategy turns a bunch of random dots into a pointillist masterpiece and doesn't have to require months of planning.

Responsive web design is a framework that allows a website to work on large screen devices and small screen devices equally well. But since this advance in user experience comes with a cost, we've picked our favorite three reasons Talent Acquisition and Human Resources should invest in responsive web design.

While SEO is a critical element in your digital marketing strategy, there will probably come a day some time soon when everyone is properly optimized for search engines. What happens when there's a level playing field and tricks don't push your pages to the top of Google's search results.

Those big numbers you see at the top of your analytics reports look, feel and smell like real information. But they aren't. They are aggregates and averages, taking the raw materials of insight and throwing them into a blender and then hitting "puree." What looks like information are really lies.

Talent Acquisition has to keep track of hiring at every level, which can get chaotic. Here's a simple way to think about your prospects that helps you think about and find marketing message gaps.

It's probably pretty clear to everyone that content marketing takes time, but there's a common misconception in just how much time. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand warns us of an overly optimistic mindset, and shows us how things really (usually) end up happening. For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!

A look at LinkedIn's recently released Talent Trends 2014 report provides some interesting data about what's on the minds of today's professional workforce. As the study confirms, we live in an age of unprecedented transparency: " More job opportunities are viewable online, and the available context - information on the company, its culture, and the team including the hiring manager - has never been richer.

These days it doesn't do to simply write a blog post. It needs to stand out. Better still, it needs to be epic. So how do you ensure your blog posts kill? You need to go deep. You need to know where and how to find great ideas and credible sources.

Yes, we know there aren't enough women in tech. Yes, we know we need to change the ratio. One college has found the answer. With a three-step method, Harvey Mudd College in California quadrupled its female computer science majors. The experiment started in 2006 when Maria Klawe, a computer scientist and mathematician herself, was appointed college president.

Over the past year, my firm Collegefeed met with more than 300 companies to understand their college hiring strategies and tactics - from employers with large university hiring infrastructures to recently funded start-ups looking to hire fresh grads, interns, and young alum. Not surprisingly, 84% understand that college hiring is important.

If you're an average reader, I've got your attention for 15 seconds, so here goes: We are getting a lot wrong about the web these days. We confuse what people have clicked on for what they've read. We mistake sharing for reading.

There's a Zen saying that you can never step into the same river twice. The same is true for technology. It changes every day, not just by adding new channels and platforms, but by suggesting new strategies, new tactics, new messaging, new touch points, and entirely new ways of thinking about our own jobs.

This is the second part of a three-part series on the future of digital talent acquisition. In part one, I looked at content. Content will be the watchword of the next few years and there are some very specific ways talent acquisition professionals can ride that wave.

This is the third part of a three-part series on the future of digital talent acquisition. Previously, I looked at the power of content and social media. While content has power in itself, that power is enhanced when driven via social channels. Today, I move from content to content's best friend: mobile technology.

This might hurt: Facebook is more than 10 years old. Launched originally as thefacebook.com, it has been around since February 2004. Twitter is eight years old. LinkedIn is celebrating its 11 th birthday this month. Brand "new" social darling WhatsApp will have turned five by the time you read this.

People have lamented that there are few valuable key performance indicators when it comes to social media. Despite having been in existence for more than a decade, many social media platforms seem to spend more time trying to convince you that they are giving you useful data than actually giving you valuable KPIs.

I bet you've been thinking about content marketing in your talent acquisition strategy lately. How could you not be? It surrounds the industry like kids on a birthday cake. Whether you've just launched a content marketing program, or are thinking about how much it might take to get started, it's on everyone's mind.

Talent acquisition professionals regularly say, "I don't want more applications, I want better applications." When they look for marketing solutions, they don't want yet another solution that simply generates more resumes and paperwork. Those are a dime a dozen.

Everyone in talent acquistion wants to get social media "right." And because of that, many are scared into paralysis. But there's is no right, only what's good for your organization right now. Once you get involved in social media, you'll quickly see that its an evolution and everyone you consider experts at it went through the same evolution.

Do you remember those weeks before you got hired at your current job? Do you remember being excited by the prospect of finding a position that interested you and, despite knowing you were qualified for it, the nervousness of not knowing if you would be selected for an interview?

But from a talent acquisition standpoint, let's start with the obvious one first: Cost Per Hire. All those ads aren't free, obviously. And just because someone clicks on the ad doesn't mean they stay for more than ten seconds on your site, let alone apply.