Welcome back to Link Love Wednesday!

Today’s links are human resources heavy, in the best possible way.

HR is a complicated field.

Not only do you need to understand complicated technology, track data, and navigate a maze of policy, but you must have the skills required to attract, motivate, and placate real live humans.

Unlike numbers, us humans are emotional and fickle beasts, which is why excellent soft skills are a mandatory part of the HR job description.

Soft skills are important for making smart decisions about how to invest in employee engagement, health, and happiness. 

And according to John Boudreau’s recent article, To Optimize Talent, Sweat the Small Stuff, these decisions have a surprisingly large influence on a company’s bottom line. Check out his post to learn why.

Another HR related surprise is this new study by CoreBrand showing that employer branding is more influential on millennial job seekers than consumer branding. 

Jodi Ordioni points out some of the most interesting pieces of the study such as how “‘Boring’ brands like Salesforce (No. 18) and Qualcomm (No. 19), which millennials rarely encounter or use, placed ahead of ‘cool’ companies like The Walt Disney Company (No. 20) and Nike (No. 21)” when Gen Y candidates rated the companies they want to work for.

Unlike the popularity of Salesforce amongst young job seekers, most HR pros and recruiters won’t be surprised to hear that referrals are still the best candidates, which is also the title of Will Thomson’s blog post on Blogging4Jobs.

His piece is a nice little reminder that referral programs should still be a primary focus for any company looking to bring in the best talent.

And focus they must as it seems hiring just got a whole lot harder!

According to Tim Sacket this is because “There aren’t enough candidates for the jobs you need to fill.  It’s really quite simple.”

Luckily Tim also provides some excellent/cut throat advice for recruiting in a candidate driven market.

If the war for talent ever gets really ugly, I would definitely recommend staying on Tim’s good side!

Suzanne Lucas is another smart recruiting expert I would want on my side. 

She is up in arms over Entelo’s new app that they claim can predict if your employees are about to quit.

According to Suzanne “Companies should stay far, far away from this.” 

Read more about why she makes this argument in her very persuasive article, Predicting future resignations: Why it’s a waste of time.

Suzanne can be wonderfully blunt when she wants to be!

If you’ve read, or written any killer blog posts about HR, recruiting, social media, or pancakes please let us know in the comments.

Happy link loving 😀