Recruiting

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

flickr: praveengupta

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.

An oldie but a goodie.

Designer Robert S. Donovan says the recruiting system is broken. He’s spent fifteen years hiring people and the system no longer works.

Back in the day (15 years ago), if I wanted to hire an entry-level designer I would start off by calling around to people I knew locally to see if they were interested or knew of anyone who was. I’d call the regional design schools and see if they knew of any recent grads that fit my needs that either lived in my area or were willing to relocate. If I ran up dry I would then run an ad in my local newspaper, usually requesting candidates apply in person with their portfolios. While this process typically only generated a few leads, I was always able to find good people with little wasted effort.

Fast-forward to 2007… I knew that placing an ad over the telephone with the local newspaper would result in my ad being visible on the newspaper’s local internet job board, what I didn’t know was that it would also get picked up by CareerBuilder.com, a world wide searchable internet job board. I was to be traveling at the time so I requested that candidates submit their resume and portfolio samples via e-mail. My e-mail locked up while I was in China after having received over 300 responses from all over the world, some with portfolio attachments as large as 50MB! All for an entry-level position targeted at local candidates.

Same story we’ve heard all over the country. Here’s Donovan’s suggestions, our emphasis added:

First, hiring companies need to remember that it is the candidates that are doing them the favor of trying to help fill their needs and not the other way around.

Second, if you post an ad on-line be sure that you give enough information about who you are and what you are looking for (beyond simple technical skills). I read way too many ads that I have no idea what the job is and/or what it would be like to work there. Make me want to work for you, not just apply because I fit the qualifications. Better yet, make me not want to work for you so I won’t bother applying.

Also, if you are going to put it out there and make me spend 30 minutes filling out your on-line application, respect my time investment in the process and at least send me a personalized rejection letter if you decide I’m not what you are looking for. A little feedback goes a long way, too.

You know what, that actually makes way too much sense. If you have a very specific person in mind—somebody with exactly X years of experience and exactly Y attitude—make that clear. The fewer applications a recruiter or hiring manager has to sift through, the more time s/he can spend with each. Which can’t possibly be a bad thing.

LinkedIn gets a lot of press for being a great recruiting site. It’s a bit cheaper to post a job on LinkedIn than on most major job boards, which is why companies like it.

But you can recruit on LinkedIn for free, says The Business Insider.

For one, you can post to groups you’re a member of, advertising a job. Some groups even have “job boards” that are separate from LinkedIn’s job board; it’s free to post to a group’s board.

Second, you can update your status to let your network know you’re hiring. (It wouldn’t hurt to broadcast that out on Twitter, either, but we’re focusing on LinkedIn right now.)

Third, Business Insider suggests answering questions on LinkedIn Answers, which will boost your reputation on the site as well as, some say, boosting your search ranking on Google. Both result in publicity and help to make your company an employer of choice.

Any other LinkedIn tricks for people on the hiring side?

Via Fistful of Talent, the recruiting divide between active (looking for a job) and passive (if you call me, I might work for you, maybe) candidates is continuing to be an issue for those on the street sending out resumes right now.

The mentality, even after so many qualified people have been laid off through no fault of their own, is that people still employed are still higher-quality.

None of that is news, but Dawn Hrdlica at Fistful of Talent says that one thing’s now clear: “The companies you want to work for, (forward thinking, cutting edge, employee friendly) are proving to the C-Suite that the time it takes to cull the passive candidate is a better return on the investment than the quickly attained active candidate…The biggest advantage active candidates have is immediate accessibility. Typically the active candidate is one who is either unemployed or is so disengaged from their current job they are ready and willing to follow a recruiting process on the company’s terms. They can interview on demand, they can start tomorrow, the recruiter says jump and…you know the rest. If quick accessibility is not a primary driver for the companies you want to work for anymore, you have lost your ace-in-the-hole.”

But here’s the good news. Hrdlica’s riffing off a Workforce article profiling a company with a highly-selective recruiting process (only 1/10 of applicants that get to the interview stage actually get a job offer). This company gets mostly passive candidates, yes, but it also has a 36 percent hire rate from referrals.

Hrdlica says: “Passive recruiting…is really a hybrid version of referral recruiting. Why? Both types are based around a relationship being formed before the hiring process.”

So if you need a job, those relationships are more important than ever.

Via Fistful Of Talent, Yale University’s new branding video to attract new students is sure to go viral.

Why does Yale need a recruiting video? Why indeed. FoT explains:

think about everything you think you know about Yale already. For me it was…

1. Competitive….
2. Stuffy and conservative.
3. Somewhere Northeast.
4. Lack of diversity.

And when you add in the $47,500 a year price tag? Sorry, Yale. It’s hard for me to imagine sending my future kiddies there.

So even an objectively great choice, and I think nobody can argue Yale isn’t great, still needs to stand out. Which is why this video, a 17 minute musical number with over 200 current and former students, is so awesome.

It also explains why there have been no new episodes of College Musical for a while. Sam Tsui, we’re looking at you.

If you’re hiring for a media position, you know the first place you should look.

No, not craigslist, sillies.

Mediabistro.com’s job board not only attracts the best and brightest in media (aka everyone reading this, right?) but job advertisers sometimes get neat stuff. It’s karma. Like Ray Vollmer, HR director at NewBay Media (which just purchased Broadcasting & Cable and Multichannel News from Reed Business Information), who just won two tickets to see the Knicks play the Lakers, an incredible $440 value. (Do people really pay that much to watch sports in New York?)

Vollmer, when interviewed by our sales department about the win, said he was “surprised” to hear that he’d scored the tickets. “I never win anything,” he added.

And why does he advertise on Mediabistro? “Because it is a one stop shop for great candidates within the media industry,” he told our sales team.

So hey, recruiters and HR people. Post some jobs, and we might send some bakshish your way. Sort of.

flickr: tiffa130

What’s happening in the recruiting world in the coming year? Dr. John Sullivan predicts ten things:

1. Continued churn of labor (simultaneous hiring/layoffs)
2. Increased use of contingent labor types
3. Increasing demand for proving a business impact in $
4. A return of the War for Talent
5. Increased growth of direct sourcing initiatives
6. Relentless demand for continued innovation
7. Increased visibility of brand-damaging viral messaging by current/former employees
8. Accelerated obsolescence of recruiting tools/approaches
9. Accelerated obsolescence of apathetic talent
10. Increased importance of formal retention efforts

Churn is the maybe the most important trend for jobseekers to be aware of: low churn is what’s contributed to the unemployed staying unemployed while the employed hop from career to career (or at the very least, hunker down and continue to get that paycheck). Sullivan suggests that employers ramp up their training efforts (to help recently unemployed people start making a difference as soon as they start their new job) and focus on making sure their temps, contractors, and freelancers are being used properly. This sounds like it could be a big opportunity for entrepreneurs, so keep an eye out for your target companies opening their doors to contractors.

waiting. flickr: milena mihaylova

Ere.net’s latest post touches on “The Godot Effect,” aka the “Dr. Staff” problem, or what we might call “computer jesus.”

Some years ago [writes consultant Stephen Balzac] I was sitting in a product design meeting. The discussion kept circling around some particularly knotty issues that no one in the room actually knew much about.

In one sense, this wasn’t a serious problem given that the company was still actively hiring and there was a recognition that more people were needed. Someone finally commented that we’d have to make sure to hire someone with the particular expertise in question, and in one fell swoop, that task was assigned to a non-existent person. Again, this is not necessarily a problem … yet. It became a problem, however, as the meeting progressed:

“We don’t have anyone on the team who can handle [...technology...] either.”

“That’ll be the next hire.”

“Wasn’t the next hire supposed to be [...original problem...]?”

“We’ll need someone who can do both.”

And so it went, he says, with every problem the company needed to solve assigned to the mysterious “next hire.” “Those who have ever read a college catalog might have noticed the vast number of courses in a wide range of subjects taught by Staff. Well, by the end of that meeting, Dr. Staff was probably the only person who could have handled the job.”

This is what creates job postings like this one—as ludicrous as this sounds, somebody was thinking “Okay we only have the budget for one hire, and we need both A and B, so…”

Hiring #fail!