CoolTools

Craig and Lars welcome 2017 and discuss Amazon Echo Vs. Google Home, some killer app, and great tunes. Plus Lars talks about writing his new book Employer Branding for Dummies available now on Amazon!

This podcast is a follow-up to an article Craig Wrote for SHRM prior to the 2016 annual conference about how background checking can challenge your candidate experience. Gerry Crispin and I talk with Richard Seldon at Nick Fishman of Sterling Talent Solutions to discover just what is the right approach to the background screening process to ensure a great experience for job candidates.

Craig and Lars dish tech on this mid-summer 2016 episode of The Cool Tools Show featuring mobile text scanning apps CTRL-F, Scannable, and more reviewing which are the best and features of each as well as blog and research paper writing apps WriteWell and Grammarly. We mix in a great website forum tool called Muut as well as an email helper called MixMax. As usual we have lots of fun and silliness with some cool tunes at the end. Can you say Yacht Rock? Join us, won't you?

Craig and Lars kick off 2016 with a list of their top 16 apps for 2016. Learn what's interesting about Evernote, Wonderlist, Sunrise, Balanced, Hootsuite, PhotoShop Fix, Headspace, Suggestions, IceCream, Podcasts, Facebook Pages App, Kindle, Font Candy +, TuneBox, and more.

More job seekers are applying for work from their cell phones. Employers who are trying to push mobile recruiting say that in the tightening job market, it's important to be on the small screen. http://www.npr.org/2015/12/08/458889853/mobile-recruiting-is-the-new-way-to-reach-job-seekers

Marcus Buckingham chats with Craig Fisher at the 2015 SHRM annual conference about his research that shows performance management is broken and that we determine promotions and raises in the workplace based on bad data. He also discusses how he rebuilt his company, TMBC, to better address these issues at a team leader level by strategically combining technology and coaching to help organizations know and grow.

Meddle™ is a content marketing tool for subject matter experts What if you could become an industry influencer by simply offering perspectives on content you read, without quitting your day job? Or even better, what if your entire workforce became influencers and ambassadors for your company? Imagine the reach and impact you would have; the market share you would win. Cool Tools Show hosts, Craig Fisher and Lars Schmidt talk with Meddle founder Vidar Brekke and CMO Ted Coine in this fun exploration of the tool, plus much more. We end as always with more cool tool recommendations plus some cool tunes as well. And in this one there is some bonus material you won't want to miss.

Craig Fisher and Lars Schmidt went to Twitter HQ in January of 2013 for our first of 2 chats with Twitter's recruiting team to discuss using Twitter for job search and recruiting. And we previewed National Public Radio's #NPRTwitter chat that was organized by Lars and featured Lars, Craig, the Twitter team, William Tincup, and Jennifer McClure. We pulled this audio from our old BlogTalkRadio page so our Soundcloud and iTunes listeners can enjoy it here.

Craig and Lars wrap up 2015 with a show that features some of the tech, apps, and tunes they will be checking out in 2015.

Cool Tools Show hosts, Craig Fisher and Lars Schmidt talk with CEO of startup Brand Amper, Jason Seiden, about his new tool that helps companies give their employees a voice and a better way to talk about work in a more Profersonal (TM) way online.

Sprout is a social media communication hub that allows businesses to more effectively connect with their audience through social channels like Twitter. The @CoolToolsShow Interviews @SproutSocial VP Mktg @AndrewCaravella Cool Tools Show hosts, Craig and Lars, talk with Sprout Social's VP of Marketing, Andrew Caravella about Sprout's history, features, current hiring needs, internship program, and much more. Sprout’s engagement product is a social media communication hub that allows businesses to more effectively connect with their audience through social channels like Twitter and Facebook. The platform routes, manages and stores more than 30 million messages a month for more than 8,000 leading companies across the globe. Their tools help companies provide better customer service, drive sales, decrease churn and build deeper relationships with their customers. Sprout tracks the communication history with their customers and more than 100,000,000 consumers, turning every interaction into valuable business intelligence rather than fleeting, uninspired communication. As consumers send billions of messages a month to brands, and increasingly favor Facebook and Twitter as the channels to communicate, Sprout Social is the technology that powers social business.

Today's Cool Tool Quickie is a new tool aimed at replacing the contacts app on your phone - Humin. Humin takes your phone address book to the next level, providing contextual information about your contacts (where you met, location, company, etc.). It integrates to social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook, as well as your email and calendar clients, to provide rich profile data on your contacts. It's currently available on iOS, and coming soon to Android. You can download Humin in the app store, and learn more at www.Humin.com. About Humin: Co-founded in 2012 by five good friends (Ankur Jain, Jake Medwell, Jonathan Shriftman, Daniel Pourbaba and David Wyler), Humin wants to make technology feel more human, starting with your contacts. We've assembled an amazing team to help address the problem. Simply put, Humin is a replacement for the old phone app on your device. Think of it as a smarter, evolved phone that remembers everyone you meet in the way that you naturally think. No more scrolling impersonal contact lists.

We demo Twitter user stats app Riffle. Social aggregation and twitter profile data by CrowdRiff, Riffle is a Google Chrome extension that integrates with all major social media dashboards, including Hootsuite. Find Riffle at http://crowdriff.com/riffle/ Check out more cool tools at our blog on www.evolverco.com

The Cool Tools Show's Craig Fisher and Lars Schmidt discuss wearable tech and how it is effecting the workplace. Guest Brady Bruner from RevolutionHR chimes in on it's impact on performance management. Learn more about Craig and Lars at www.evolverco.com and on Twitter @fishdogs and @thisislars

This week's Cool Tools Quickie is an iOS app called Steady. It's a cool video recording tool that uses your iPhone's accelerometer to stabilize your recording. It's great for on-the-fly branding and recruiting videos. You can also shoot in slo-mo, so get creative! More about Steady: Record action videos, with cinematic Stabilization and Slo-Mo. Shoot while walking, running… and get cinema quality, smooth footage. Record and share Slo-Mo clips, set when Slo-Mo starts and ends. Export square videos for Instagram, Vine or Replay! Download it below: itunes.apple.com/us/app/steady-ca…id881459978?mt=8

Craig and Lars discuss the changes in one of their favorite Gmail extensions, Rapportive, and how to replace the functionality that Linkedin has removed from the app. Learn some new cool tools for your Gmail productivity. We also discuss some recent criticism of the "reality" recruiting show, Top Recruiter. Chris Hoyt has a point, and Chris LaVoie may have been a bit hasty in his retort. But is reality TV worth arguing over? Of course! That's the point.

Craig and Lars discuss how to find interesting apps and tools to make your life and work easier, find and connect people online, and how to keep track of the tools you find and use. We discuss Evernote as a way to keep track of and pilot various tools and apps. How to use iPhone Notes and iCloud for tracking. How to use Twitter and RSS Feeds to monitor your favorite app sites. We discuss content automation through Buffer, Hootsuite, RSSGraffiti, and Twitterfeed for discovering and tracking apps. In this episode we also talk World Cup, #SHRM14, our new Spotify playlist, mascots, Camtasia, Instagram, SocialRebootCamp.com, and plenty more. Learn more about Craig and Lars and the Cool Tools Show at www.Evolverco.com. This episode is brought to you by www.Candarine.com and the Recruiting Daily Network: www.RecruitingBlogs.com, www.RecruitingDaily.com, and www.RecruitingTools.com

In this Cool Tools podcast Craig and Lars spoke with HireVue COO, Chip Luman, about ditching your laptop and working in the cloud. Chip is a frequent business traveler and has taken to using small devices on the road and keeping all his data stored in the cloud. This episode covers our top tips, apps, and strategies for being more lightweight in the air and on the ground.

Cool Tools Show hosts Craig Fisher and Lars Schmidt discuss the latest changes on Linkedin affecting apps like Rapportive, Nimble, Card Munch, and more. They also discuss the new Linkedin premium features like the banner background. Also on this show are tips about how to track your links out of Instagram, ways to measure your influence on Google+ with CircleCount, productivity app Mynd, and ideas on recruiting with traffic app WAZE. Learn more about Craig and Lars and the Cool Tools Show at www.Evolverco.com. This episode is brought to you by www.Candarine.com and the Recruiting Daily Network: www.RecruitingBlogs.com, www.RecruitingDaily.com, and www.RecruitingTools.com

Craig and Lars spend talk recruiting with Twitter's recruiting team on the eve of #NPRTwitterChat.