it's ALL about the experience

Is the Cover Letter Dead?

At the Electronic Recruiting Exchange (ERE) conference in San Diego, we had the distinct pleasure of meeting and chatting with Joyce Lain Kennedy, the nation's first syndicated careers columnist. Her work, CAREERS NOW, is distributed by Tribune Media Services and appears in more than 100 newspapers and websites.  Now, Joyce is a busy woman, what with answering countless correspondence from her readers and revising the 3rd edition of Cover Letters for Dummies, due out January 2009.  No surprise then, after writing career advice for more than 40 years and seeing the paper method of job search move to an increasing reliance in the technological domain, what's really keeping the woman up at night is, "what do recruiters and hiring professionals really think of the cover letter?  Is it dead?" 

Of course, we thought that was a lovely question to pose to those of you who frequent our blog.  So, what do you think?  Is the cover letter a relic of yesterday's recruiting?  Has it been replaced with on-line profiles?  Or, do you still think it has value?  We'd love to hear your thoughts.

Technorati tags:  cover letter; Joyce Lain Kennedy, recruiting and hiring. 

Employee engagement, or something even bigger?

Eddie LeMoine is talking this week about the role of employee engagement in the attraction and retention of great talent.  Here's a snippet of my thoughts on the subject:

...By looking at engagement as increased and continuing commitment in the whole talent supply chain, the business is encouraged to synchronize its efforts of talent management. This touches employer brand (which helps well matched talent identify and self-select to the business), recruitment (which funnels that talent to the right place at the right time in the business), AND retention (which increases business ROI). In this manner the business totally wins: more engagement, higher productivity, and less turnover from day one.

To read the whole exchange, check out his blog here.

tags: employee_engagement, recruiting, retention, employer_brand, candidate_experience