Look For These In Applicant Tracking Software

For HR departments everywhere, no HR software acquisition plan is ever as daunting as the one where they need to find the right applicant tracking software. They need to find software that is capable of handling all the talent management of the company in one package.

Now just about any commercially available applicant tracking software is going to easily have the ability to keep track of resumes and cover letters. You don't really have to worry about making sure that your choice of software has that. There are other must-haves though that you may neglect to check for. Let uss take a look.

The first thing you need to look for is a requisition capability. Departments in your company need to be able to requisition talent. They need to be able to draft a great requisition for talent of a certain kind, and send it to HR. In fact, automated requisitions are a very important ability.

With this functionality, department managers will be able to automate the whole requisition process. The software will be able to identify positions and assignments that need new talent. Any applicant tracking software that that doesn't have this has to be an amateurish effort.

Once said requisition has been created and there are resumes from applicants coming in, your software needs to be able to screen those resumes automatically. It should be able to draft elimination questions,  automatically, filter out applicants who don't meet the minimum requirements, and so on.

Managers at organizations everywhere have to keep wasting their time with recruitment metrics. They keep having to provide informativereports about what the cost per hire is or what the time to hire is and so on.

When you don't have software tools to calculate these things, they easily become too expensive to have. So basically, your software needs to be able to do this - create custom reports - automatically.

Whatever existing human resource information system you have, your applicant tracking software has to be able to fit right in. Sure, any HR software is going to be able to integrate any applicant tracking software. That's not really the point.

The point is that needs to be ready-to-integrate - ready to go. If it isn't designed for and tested with a particular system, give it a pass. The same goes for integration with the company's website.

And finally, do look for compliance-based reporting tools. The US, the poetic CCP is and very strict rules for employment practices. Your software needs to be able to provide the reasons why a qualified applicant hasn't been selected. It needs to be able to capture compliance data, create logs in audits and so on. Without this, again, it's just no use.

E-book publishers apparently, just love DRM

Remember how before the iPod came out, playing anything on Windows Media Player was so unpredictable? It would frequently talk about DRM. And then, Sony made that terrible DRM mistake of putting a DRM virus on their CDs. Well, thanks to Steve Jobs, we no longer have DRM to worry about when it comes to music. But e-books are a completely different matter. The e-book publishers are running amok with DRM madness these days.

Let's say that you have a Sony Reader today. It's working just fine, but one day, you let it slip and it drops into the bathtub. It does work somewhat, but not really dependably. So you decide to go with the Kindle, instead. Now at this point, you will bump against a minor copyright glitch that brings you to the bad old days of DRM all over again. How do you transfer the books you have stored in your Sony Reader to your Kindle?

The books you buy for the Sony Reader are in a proprietary format. They won't open in the Kindle. To do that, you have to have to hack into those Sony e-books with special software. Apple's iBooks are in their own format, Amazon's books are in their own format – it's just a really unfortunate situation.

And even if you do buy a book that's in a universal format, they are still going to do something to it so doesn't open on another manufacturer's device.

Customers can get really outraged when this kind of thing happens. They feel that they've bought their books, and they have a right to read on whatever device they choose. The e-book publishers see things differently. They feel that of course, if it's just you reading your book on different devices, it should be fine. But how do they know if you aren't lending it to someone else? What if the new Kindle you just bought was not your Kindle, but belonged instead to a friend? How does Amazon know? If they let this happen, before long, people just be making copies and getting their books to all their friends.

Basically, when you buy an e-book Reader, you're locked to that format for avery long time. Perhaps for life. If you want to move to an e-book reader by another company, you may have to either find a reliable way to hack into your old reader and get all the books out so that they will open in the new reader, or you will have to just say goodbye to all the books that you havebought so far. It can be a terrible situation.

Does Your Company Video Have Video Search Engine Optimization Done For It?

Often, to many website owners who don't really understand how marketing on the Internet works, a video marketing undertaking appears very simple. They just shoot a video, put it on YouTube, and that's it. What else is there to do, they think. Well, they haven't done video search engine optimization for one thing.

When you don't do this, you really miss out on a number of very effective ways in which you can exploit the video you just made. There are all kinds of video search engine optimization methods that you can make use of to really put your new video on YouTube or any other service, out there. This will get many people coming in, they will possibly visit your website as well, and so on. It can be a major source of traffic to your website if you do it right.

Of course, it goes without saying that if you want your new video to do well with the search engines, you have to offer viewers something that's worth seeing. No matter how much do video search engine optimization you do, if it isn't something that has mass appeal, people who discover it through the search engines won't pass it on to their friends. That kind of word-of-mouth is what really gets you traffic.

Here's a little tip - search engines and computers and all those things just don't understand pictures or video. As far as they're concerned, these are just blank windows. If you want to optimize your video for the search engines, you will have to find ways to put descriptive keywords into the video or the page that carries the video. Whatever kind of searches you may hope to see your videos come up on top of the search engines for, you have to put those words into your video.

It's simple enough - you just have to to put a few subtitles in, think of the right kind of category listing, keyword tags, title tags and so on. The more words you have on your video for the page that carries it, the better your chances of having your video appear in all the right places and all the right searches.

Here's another little tip - why just put your video on YouTube? It isn't the the only game in town, you know. There's DailyMotion, Vimeo Google Video and so much more. Yes, it'll be a little extra effort. But you will see better returns on your investment this way.

Most people don't know this, but YouTube has an analytics tool, just the way, Google does. Make sure that you take a good look at all the information and all the suggestions you get there.

Not Letting The Google Freshness Update Pull You Down

The year 2011 wasn't a very happy one for many business owners. Google opened the year with two major updates that did a lot to change the way websites are ranked. The infamous Panda update went and tried to push down websites that Google considered low-quality content. And then in November, they came with the  Google Freshness update.

With this, they were saying to all website owners that they couldn't just put something out there on their website and hope it would be considered relevant forever.

Not only does Google want quality content, they want quality content on a regular basis as well. With these updates, Google is trying to help its users find quality, relevant, up-to-date information.

Of course Google's search algorithm is smart enough to not apply this to every kind of website. For instance, a website that tries to talk about the history of powered flight, is not going to be affected. Google estimates that only one out of three websites will see any difference.

Google wants to look for websites that deal good news and opinion, and websites like arts and crafts tutorials that in general should offer fresh and interesting content on a regular basis.

Well, Unless you are running a history encyclopedia, chances are that the Google Freshness update will affect you. There are a few ways you can simply do what Google wants and continue at the top.

So Google wants you to publish new information, right? That's not very hard. You just need to set up publishing calendar. You need to have the publishing calendar  remind you that constantly putting up new content. In general, you have to do this more than once every two weeks or so. You just need to prepare a little content or have someone do it, and you're golden.

Being up-to-date isn't just about looking at the latest news and then doing something about it. It's also about being an industry mover yourself. You want to keep on top of the developments in your industry and post stories on it before anyone else does. When this happens, other websites are inevitably going to quote you. And that's invaluable for your rankings. You want other people to quote you and to link to you.

All it requires is that you  employ someone who has the time to keep on top of everything that's going on in the industry, so that something can be written about it.

So What Exactly Is The Deal With This Software As a Service Thing

You know, cloud computing or "software as a service", isn't new. It's the year 2012, and it's hardly to be considered an innovation. We have actually been using Google Docs for how many years now - six? And yet, the concept still feels new. More and more enterprise level software is now being offered as a cloud application. Any business that wants to use their enterprise accounting software or point-of-sale software or supply chain software just subscribes to the service, and they don't have to worry about maintaining a large computer department in-house.

And yet, people aren't quite sure yet how the whole software as a service concept is supposed to work. Well, that's what we're here to talk about.

Let's first get the basics out of the way - what exactly is SaaS (that's how they abbreviate it. They pronounce it Sass). It goes by another name - on-demand software. Basically, the software is on the computer somewhere else. They take care of installing it, upgrading isn't everything else.

When you subscribe to the service, they open an account for you, and every time you wish to use the software, you log into your account, you do what you have to do, and all your data is stored right there on their computer. You don't ever have to worry about a thing - they back it up, they keep everything in perfect working order.

It's great for you, because you just have to learn to use it. You don't have to learn to maintain it or anything.

Okay, so the idea seems good to you. How do you know if software as a service is right for your business? How do you know if you should use this and not get regular software and install it on your own computer?

The best way to determine this would be to think about how complex your software needs are. If you run a small business or even a medium-sized business, if your business needs are relatively straightforward, you probably don't need any customization. In this case, the software as a service model will work great for you.

If yours is a business that needs that needs customized software or if you need niche software that isn't yet there on the cloud, you would be better off going the regular route. The most customization you can do with software as a service is to choose a new skin or something. There is very limited customization available at this point. But this isn't the way it's going to be forever.

Even if the software does belong to someone else, the data on the computer is yours. Typically, it's much, much safer than anything you could ever put together on your limited budget. And you own your data. Your only problem is if business you've chosen goes under. You just need to look for a vendor who will actually tell to an explicit language that your data is yours.

If you have  a great and reliable Internet connection, there's really nothing that stops you.

Home plugs can help share your internet connection

As many people are aware, you can share your internet connection through your WiFi ADSL router box. This WiFi ADSL box gives you WiFi connection possibilities throughout your home - or at least to a range of about 100 meters and three internal walls. Some people fear WiFi for reasons of security or they may even fear low levels of radio radiation.

WiFi is also facing a new challenge: modern building thermal insulation standards. Cheap thermal insulation building materials are foil backed. Foil is really good at bouncing back any WiFi signals causing your WiFi network to be unable to travel from room to room or from room to outside your home. You maybe unaware of this because the foil thermal barrier is inside the external walls of your home. If you suffer from this you can quickly get a good idea by looking at your mobile cell phone signal strength while you walk among external windows and the internal doors. Foil radio shielding will appear as strong radio signal strength by the window which quickly fades as you go behind your external walls.

The security concerns of WiFi are proper and valid but it is still unknown if the radio waves themselves have a medically damaging influence on some people who may be sensitive to such radio radiation. Some schools are known to banish WiFi if only one child is susceptible to the radio waves. You can argue that this is fair and reasonable so long as alternate ways of internet sharing are possible.

There are some reasonable and cost effective alternatives to WiFi. WiFi is cheap and flexible because it does not use copper cables for its transmission. We normally have copper cables surrounding us everywhere - the mains electricity power points.

It's possible to safely have the mains electricity cables to carry your internet connection between rooms. This works so long as the mains wiring uses the same phase of the electricity. In a normal domestic home there is only one supply cable coming in and this supplies one single phase of electricity for the whole house. The Ethernet home plug adaptors inject high frequency signals along the wires in the same way as ADSL injects high frequency signals across audio copper phone lines. When paired, such adaptors share a channel of signals so that they can communicate together and carry network signals over the mains wiring.

Mains based local area networks work like any other network once you connect to the standard RJ45 network socket. You can choose to connect a simple four or eight port network box to share the connection locally behind your television, personal video recorder or at your home office desk. You can even get home plug adaptors with multiple hub connections already built in.

The best thing about these plugs is their safety. If you want to extend your internet connection to an outhouse or garage then they offer real safety benefits. Should you use traditional Ethernet cabling you may expose the wires to external elements such as lightning. With mains cabling you probably have the cable protected already and the cable will carry an earth wire as well. This protects the electronic circuits against peak lightning spikes. The mains earth cabling will have the effect of dampening the lightning spikes during a storm.

The efficiency of mains Ethernet signal transmission will be effected by the core size of the house wires as well as the appliances connected to your house mains. If you use lightning protection strips, or extensions, on your mains electrical outlets then some of the transmission will be soaked up by the capacitors inside of these extensions. Ordinary domestic appliances may incorporate some mains spike protection. You may expect this in some earthed appliances such as HD televisions and washing machines which need to protect their internal electronics and on board computers.

Home plugs are a truly adaptable and an effective way to extend your internet network without raising any cause for concern about WiFi signal transmission.