Recruiting

You and your recruiter are not besties, as much as you wish you were.

According to Google recruiter Michael Junge, that’s one of the biggest mistakes job applicants make.

“A lot of people see us as a necessary evil; others see us as a powerful ally. It’s interesting how that plays out in people’s attitudes and behaviors and the way they interact with us,” he tells PEHub. “The reality is that we’re trying to make sure we’re hiring the best people, including people who have the best attitude as well as skill set. Any time someone tells me, ‘I would never say this to a hiring manager, but…’ whatever comes after the ‘but’ does not advance their cause.”

Other problems: being late for phone calls or people “who get wrapped up in little details” make poor hires, Junge says. “You can also learn a lot, usually later in the process, by how someone handles the negotiation around their salary. I’ve seen people become very emotional when we start talking about money. I’ve also seen them make commitments and then back out. One specific red flag is not being willing to share salary history, or misrepresenting salary history…if a candidate blatantly exaggerates his pay, if someone making $80,000 says they are making $110,000 in order to get a better offer, that can be [a conversation ender].”

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Jobseekers get a lot of flack for being totally ridiculous (flip-flops to an interview?) or doing things that, in retrospect, weren’t such a great idea, but as readers of MediaJobsDaily hopefully know, sometimes the person sitting on the other side of the desk is worse.

Here’s two blog posts from Kristin, a NYC-twenty-something who was emailed by a recruiter she’d never heard of about a position. Sounds good, right? Sadly, it started to spiral downhill almost immediately….

Part one: Recruiter is patronizing, comes up with silly requirements (like “ask her to write a two paragraph bio about herself in third person, explaining why she is right for this job. Right now, please. (It’s 4:30 pm)”) and forwards correspondence from the hiring manager directly to Kristin, when the hiring manager clearly thought she was just talking to the recruiter (which seems like it should be a big nono).

Part two: Recruiter sends this amazing email (go read the whole thing; neither we nor Kristin added this formatting, though):

Despite that, the writer says she went to the interview anyway and that the people at that company were nothing like this recruiter.

The happy ending: According to a later post on this blog, Kristin accepted a job offer. No telling whether it was this one.

Are job descriptions doing more harm than good? Lou Adler thinks so.

How could this be? You go to a job board and find a posting and if it doesn’t say “the candidate must have 10 years of experience in PR” then how do you know what they’re looking for?

But consider this, says Adler. “Top performers tend to get promoted more rapidly than under-performers. As a result, after a few years, they have less overall experience than the average person in the same job. If average years of experience and skills is used as the cut-off for screening when hiring from the outside, then the best people — those in the top-half (sic) — will automatically be excluded…Top people, including diverse candidates, don’t decide to apply for a job, or compare multiple offers, based on the job description. They are more interested in the challenges and growth opportunities, the leadership qualities of the hiring manager, the company culture, and overall impact they can make…Job descriptions are the lazy way out.”

Wow. Does this make sense to you? Or do we need some sort of description to help jobseekers make decisions?

photo: aussiegall

Earlier this week, BreakingMedia CEO and editor in chief Jonah Bloom expressed his frustration with trying to hire journalists and PR people.

“I used to think it was just me who had to dig for days to turn up a single good candidate,” he wrote. “Maybe…I just wasn’t offering sexy enough jobs, after all the jobs I was looking to fill definitely required some business reporting skills. But…in just the last month I’ve spoken to the editor of a section of a major national newspaper, the editor of a pretty-damn sexy magazine/web brand and a couple of editors of online properties, all of whom have been struggling to find the right candidate.”

What’s the problem, then? “There’s no single hub effectively bringing together employers in the media space with the right potential employees in the media space,” he says. Not even mediabistro.com: “I have nothing but respect for Laurel Touby’s entrepreneurship in building that brand, and certainly it’s the closest thing we have to what I’m talking about. But even the folks at Mediabistro know (and privately admit) that jobs posted to that site often result in an e-mail flood of unqualified candidates whose pitches very rarely seem to have been tailored for the employee.”

Now, Mediabistro director of strategy Bill Conneely is responding to Jonah; we’ve printed his open letter here. Click the jump to read the whole thing.

Dear Jonah,

As the former director of the Mediabistro job board and now the director of strategy for Mediabistro, I read your July 13 blog post “Why Is The Market For Journalists and PR People So Inefficient?” with great interest.

I had just addressed this same exact question for my intro to the July Mediabistro’s Media Jobs Monthly newsletter!

The market is not inefficient.

The difficulty you and others experience in finding the qualified candidates you are seeking for writing and PR jobs is the result of a tight labor market, not an inefficient one.

The first driving factor comes from the fact the overall unemployment rate for people with at least a college education is 4.5%. By just about any economist’s opinion, that is close to full employment. The second factor comes from the fact that what supply there is (all those out of work journalists we know) isn’t well matched with the demand (the kinds, location and level of the jobs you are offering).

What we know from our jobs traffic on Mediabistro is that lots of qualified people are looking at jobs like yours. But they are not applying. Why?

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Would you take money from a recruiter to accept a job? Would you, as a recruiter, pay part of your fee to close a deal?

Apparently it’s happening. Jessica Lee, writing at Fistful of Talent, says she heard of this practice through a friend.

“I’m still kinda baffled by this and something about the scenario just doesn’t sit well with me,” she writes. There are a few reasons why this is strange:

In this third party recruiter’s mind – he’s doing the client and candidate both a favor. The candidate is right for the job. The client is a great fit for the candidate. It’s a match made in heaven and to please all parties – the client, the candidate – what’s $5K in the grand scheme of things? To deliver the ultimate client service possible, to get that candidate in the door and the offer package he really wants, why not give $5K to the candidate personally if that’s what’s needed to close the deal?
If really, truly I can’t squeeze another ounce out of my company’s budgets to add in that $5K needed to seal the deal, but you as a third party recruiter will close the gap, doesn’t this bode poorly for the candidate that a third party is literally stepping in to meet their expectations? Because really, that third party surely won’t be around come time for future bonuses or performance reviews… If salary expectations can’t be met from the get go, how will they be met later?

More troublingly, a recruiter that’s essentially bribing a candidate to take a job may be concerned with more than a good match. If you have to have money thrown at you, maybe it wasn’t such a good fit in the first place…then nobody wins except the recruiter who pocketed all but $5000 of his or her fee.

To be fair we’re not saying that any but a small minority of recruiters engage in this practice. But hearing that it happens at all is pretty eye-opening.

Harry Joiner is sick of headhunters.

“I am a reasonably bright guy with an incredibly diverse professional background…and I couldn’t find a job to save my life,” he writes. “All that mattered to recruiters was I was a round peg, and they had square holes to fill.”

Sucks. It’s true: most headhunters will reject you for not being a fit, because a recruiter gets paid based on the number of placements he makes, not the number of jobseekers he helps. So it’s not in his interest to work with someone who isn’t a perfect fit.

But, says Joiner, there’s someone out there who will work with “round pegs” to make sure hiring managers understand your value. Who could it be? Joiner himself, of course, who’s now a headhunter.

So as with most good blog posts, this one degenerates into an ad for Joiner’s services, but it’s nice to know that at least with one headhunter, you’ll be rejected not because your resume was wrong, but because you weren’t good enough.

Over at PRNewser a guest post from Lindsay Olson, a partner and recruiter with Paradigm Staffing, is saying that the job market, at least for PR folks, is picking up. Not just picking up, but really picking up.

She writes:
“If you had asked me in Q4 2009 if I expected 2010 to be a good year for the PR job market, the hesitation in my voice would have clearly shown I wasn’t too hopeful. By the end of January of this year, despite my doubts, I couldn’t even count how many times I’d heard myself saying how good 2010 is going to turn out.”

But you don’t have to take my word for it.

Recruiters and HR, take note: Shally Steckrl and colleagues are presenting the Total Recruiting Symposium 2010 National Tour, and if you want in, you may want to register by NEXT FRIDAY (eek!).

The Symposium will stop in four different cities: New York, Seattle, Boston, and Portland Maine, and cover tricks and sourcing strategies for recruiters who want to find top talent using the latest Web 2.0 tools.

Presenters include Don Ramer, Conni LaDouceur, and Shally Steckrl, who bills himself as the “world’s #1 Internet sourcing expert”—except with this guy, his dubious claim may actually be entirely correct. I mean, have you seen this guy’s stuff?

Disclaimer: We have no financial involvement with this conference or any of the speakers, but we really thought you’d be interested. The glowing praise is honest.

Full agenda after the jump…or if you’re interested in learning more, check out Steckrl’s blog.

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Recruiting is going to get more difficult as talented people negotiate new ways of working, argues Kevin Wheeler at ERE.net. When once a company could hire John Q. Smith, now maybe John says “Yeah, I’ll work for you, but I don’t want to quit my freelance business either.” Or “…but I want flextime.” Or “…but I’m on the board of Startup X and I want to help that company grow too.”

Wheeler writes:

Negotiating the conditions of employment, hedging one job with another, being wary of accepting full-time jobs that put at risk other work or that compromise skills—those are becoming the normal patterns for accomplished professionals.

This requires companies to be flexible and recruiters to be persuasive. (“Yes, he only agreed to twenty hours a week, but look how much he can get done!”) And this is all Gen Y’s fault.

Okay, Wheeler doesn’t go that far, but since the piece is written from the perspective of a recruiter who’s job has become more difficult (for whatever reason), we thought we’d take this and spin it the other way: Jobseekers moonlight because they don’t trust their employers, often rightly. They ask for flexible scheduling because they know if they don’t ask, they’ll be at the office until 8 every night and never see their kids. They hedge their bets, in essence, because they believe their employer isn’t looking out for them.

A worker takes on a second income.
Employers see most of their workers have side jobs, so they feel less worried about initiating layoffs.
More workers pick up second jobs out of fear that they’ll be laid off.

Can’t we just go back to the time—even if it was an imagined golden age—where you put in 40 years of service and left with a pension and a gold watch?

photo: gadl

Smaller businesses are taking the opportunity to scoop up talent that might’ve come at too high a price, if not for the recession, massive layoffs, and career advisors everywhere (including us) have been saying “Look, just take a pay cut to get back to work. Anything’s better than nothing.”

But there’s a problem, says Workforce: The new guy, used to big corporate culture, might not fit in at a small, relaxed startup. And the new guy’s new coworkers will be incredibly resentful. (Wouldn’t you be?)

And hiring companies need to beware of high-profile people just looking for a temporary gig. (Conversely, if you’re looking for a job that you think you might look “overqualified” for on paper, make sure to address that issue—so hiring managers don’t think you’re just a serial job-hopper or just looking for a six-month thing ‘until the economy turns around.’)

How do you assess fit? Read the Workforce article to find out.