Introducing TalentOyster Campus

We're pleased to announce the launching of a new Beta feature of our site, TalentOyster Campus. As the name implies, this section of the TalentOyster site is geared towards students.

In it's initial setup TalentOyster Campus is a job board that features just student suitable jobs and intern postings. We will be expanding TalentOyster Campus over time, adding content speaking to the needs and issues of international students as well as newcomers who are looking to get their Canadian careers on the right path. Eventually we hope to have enough interest to justify splitting TalentOyster Campus into two micro-sites, one focused on students and another on interns. But we think our current start is an important step in the right direction of having specific content, features and jobs focused on the needs of these groups.

Be sure to check it out and tell us what you think.

Additionally non-profit agencies who have internships available should contact us regarding having them posted on TalentOyster Campus.

Our Press page

Our site has a new Press page where you can find press/media related materials. On this page you can find

• a list of our press releases (in PDF format)


• links to various articles, interviews and stories about TalentOyster by news organizations


• the contact information for media inquiries

If you know of an online property that has covered TalentOyster that we don't have listed please let us know

We were on CBC Radio

TalentOyster was covered in a CBC Radio One news piece on Sunday March 14th. The topic was increasing hiring, and the increased diversity hiring expected by Canadian employers over the remainder of the year.

This is a follow up on our press-release about the survey we recently ran on diversity hiring. We had a better than expected response from HR and recruiting persons from across the country and the results were pretty positive for those looking for work.

You can listen to a clip of the piece including a brief excerpt of an interview with TalentOysters very own John Sutton on our site

Canadian Organizations Want to Hire More Diverse Candidates

From the TalentOyster press release:

71% say they’ll increase diversity hiring this year

The official unemployment rate may be holding steady, but most Canadian recruiters are seeing a marked uptick in demand for candidates – and it's renewing their interest in recruiting candidates from diversity groups such as visible minorities and recent immigrants, according to a new survey by TalentOyster.com.

See the full press release on our site here

TalentOyster JobBadge Customizer

So following up on previous posts about the TalentOyster JobBadge we've created a simple page to help you create custom badges yourself.

Just to recap quickly the TalentOyster JobBadge lets's you display a real-time, auto-refreshing, widget-list of current opportunities on TalentOyster on your site. You can see the badge in action on the right of this blog.

Now this page wil help you create your own badge. Just set a few configuration buttons to choose your badge size, language, colours and number of jobs and click a button and you'll be able to see a preview of your job badge. Also the source code you need for integrating the badge on to your site is automatically generated for your custom badge and you can just copy and paste it right into your site.

So check out the customizer at http://www.talentoyster.com/servlets/TalentOysterBadge

Did you know? Tweeting about Jobs

Did you know you can find out about the latest jobs posted on TalentOyster via Twitter?

TalentOysterJob is a Twitter account that tweets about the most recent jobs posted on TalentOyster. We updated this blog as well and you can see the Twitter feed for TalentOysterJob on the right side of this page, which gives a feel about how it works.

It's also a good place to meet the recruiters, hiring managers, etc from our diverse employers. TalentOysterJob only follows the twitter accounts used by our employers so you can see the follower list for more.

TalentOysterJob is mainly automated so if you're looking for discussion on diversity via Twitter you should check out the TalentOyster Twitter account instead.

Assessing Assessment : with a diversity spin

An ERE blog entry that PolyPlacements tweeted about reminded me of a bunch of discussions I have taken part in recently about assessment tools in the job board world.

I think you can make a strong case that fully-automated assessment tools are the holy grail of technology when it comes to recruiting and hiring. And yet nobody really seems to have the answer. Why is that?

One point of view, as is found in the aforementioned blog post, is that the tests themselves are to blame. Well. Okay. But I think the problem is more fundamental than that. The biggest hurdle I see is that in order to have effective tests you need a system that can objectively measure subjective answers but that's a difficult proposition from both a language and computer science perspective.

So to step back and explain what I mean. In order to have an automated (at least partially) assessment tool you need to be able to "score" the answers that the test user gives. The problem comes in designing questions (and a response mechanism) that be objectively measured. In the end most of these questions end being no better than "Do you have 5 years experience with X? Yes/No" which fails in multiple ways. The most obvious way it fails is a dishonest user who replies yes to every question. But the problem is worse than that as well because it doesn't properly capture the honest person who has 4 years and 6 months experience. Or the person who didn't really understand the question but has the relevent experience. Etc.

I am of the belief that at a certain point you have to accept that you won't be able to detect users with malicious intent purely through software. But that's okay because there are other aspects of the hiring process, like background and reference checking, that are intended to deal with these sorts of problems and frankly do it well. So I think one needs to focus on improving the process so that you aren't filtering out good candidates too early in the process.

These kinds of issues are especially relevant for TalentOyster because for some of our candidates the "traditional" sorts of screening tests act as obstacles to their getting hired. For example an assessment test that isn't PWD "friendly" and causes a good, qualified candidate to be filtered out. Or the assessment test that features such culturally specific terms and language that it can't be understood by anyone who didn't grow up in Canada.

And while we are working on assessments tools from a diversity angle I tend to think that the answers we find will be helpful in general as well. That is, to say the somewhat obvious, an assessment tool that works for a diverse audience will, by defintion, work for everyone.