Category Archives: Hiring

T3 – The Great Facebook Sourcing Hope

Posted on by
8

About once a week I have this conversation with a fellow TA/Sourcing Pro:

TA/Sourcing Pro: “Ugh! I hate LinkedIn! If Facebook ever decided to put LinkedIn out of business they could do it overnight!”

Tim: “Yep.”

Okay, usually there’s all kinds of explanation and brainstorming around how we could ‘show’ Facebook how to do this, easily. But, you’ve already heard, or had, this conversation about a thousand times, so I won’t bore you with it again!

My plan is that Facebook does a LinkedIn type reset, but doesn’t screw it up like LinkedIn has. There is a true need for a ‘professional network’, but you can’t turn it into Job Board 2.0 like LI did. How does that help us TA and Sourcing pros? FB could pull this off. 2 billion profiles. They would have virtually everyone, and could attract back the college kids with the potential of company and job matching, by just working with college career placement offices, etc.  LinkedIn started doing this but walked away from it way too early.

FB then makes money off of company pages and postings. Plus, pay per click ads to very specialized groups of candidates that companies would easily pay to get in front of. I’m sure they’re a few other ideas they could make money on, without giving away everything like LI did.

Only about .02% of TA and Sourcing Pros are actually using Facebook to recruit.  None of those people are telling you how, because they’re making money on it, and don’t want you to know! Basically, it’s not how you think.  Almost every great sourcing product to come out has to do with IT sourcing.

It makes sense because that’s where all the cash is, so that’s where all the investment is. Facebook doesn’t play nice with others (let’s face it, they don’t have to), so you see virtually nothing coming out around Facebook sourcing. The reality is, though, you have the ability to Facebook source, by location, by a company name, by gender, etc., but you won’t do it because it means you have to do the heavy lifting.

What is heavy lifting mean? FB will get you about 80% there, but you have to go get the other 20%. There’s no easy ‘InMail’ to bail you out. You might have to search for an email, call into a company, etc. Heavy lifting…

Here’s a Facebook search engine (hat tip to Recruiting God – Steve Levy for sharing this):

https://inteltechniques.com/intel/osint/facebook.htm 

This isn’t the first and only one of these out there, but it’s a good one for sure. In fact, these types of FB search engines started showing up around the exact time FB launched Graph Search, then almost immediately took it down because it was actually too easy to search and find people! People complained FB listened (did you hear that LI?).

So, what’s the FB sourcing gold?  It’s low-end positions, not high-end. The high-end folks (IT, Engineers, etc.) figured out early that putting your title, etc. on FB wasn’t going to get you pimped constantly by recruiters and sourcers.  The lower skilled folks don’t care, because they don’t get non-stop job offers.

I know of a few recruiters making well over six figures, right now, only recruiting lower skilled and/or not your normal technical talent type pros on FB! Technicians, truck drivers, sales people, teachers, nurses, etc. Companies are struggling to find great talent at this level as well, and FB is a goldmine that virtually no one is sourcing.

Check out the search engine above. Connect with Steve Levy. He’s a great dude and one of the good guys in recruiting who is always willing to share his knowledge!

T3 – Recruiting tools from @Sourcecon!

Posted on by
2

Sourcecon, one of the premier recruiting conferences on the planet, happened last week. I didn’t attend, but kept up on the action on twitter and on the Sourcecon site. Jeremy Roberts, the editor and director of Sourecon, does an excellent job over there, and I always find great content and ideas.  It’s not just for Sourcing! I mean sourcing is still part of recruiting I think.  I’m not sure, it’s all very confusing…

Anywho. Stacy Zapar did a presentation and shared some cheap/free tools she uses to help her source/recruit better and more effectively, and I wanted to share those because I think two of them are ones anyone in recruiting can take advantage of:

1. Email Hunter – is the easiest way to find professional email addresses. Give a domain name and get the list of all the emails related to it found on the internet. I can imagine a thousand ways to use this, but one of the best has to be raiding a competitor!  Can you imagine if you’re GM? All you have to do is put in ford.com and Bam! You have every address on the web of folks with a ford.com email address.

There’s a free version for a single user with limited searches, but you can also get a paid version which is still fairly inexpensive, and they have a Chrome extension as well.

2. YouCanBookMe – Which is a booking software that integrates with your Google or iCloud calendar. This makes getting candidate screens and phone interviews set up super easy.  You just send them a link and they pick what works for them in your calendar which you can personalize to what schedule you want to offer.  This makes the go-between dance a thing of the past!

Again, YouCanBookMe has a free version you can use by yourself, or you can pay a little and get some premium benefits.

These aren’t the normal big recruiting and HR software’s that I normally highlight, but these are two the ‘inside’ secret type of tools that real recruiters and sourcers are using each and every day to make their jobs easier.

I think so many recruiting pros get intimidated by Sourcecon.  You have people talking about stuff you can’t even comprehend. The reality is, at every conference you’re going to have your 1%ers, those folks who are totally geeked out by technology and the profession.  That’s cool, I love all of those folks. They are the ones leading the profession.  But you also have the other 99%ers. The real folks like Stacy, who will give you real tools and ideas that we all can use.

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

My exact 3 minute opening Interview monologue.

Posted on by
4

Almost every failed interview can be traced back to the first three minutes. Experts will tell you the first ten seconds, but these are the same experts who have never interviewed or haven’t interviewed in the past twenty years. The reality is a little longer, but not much.

An interview doesn’t really start until you’re asked to open your mouth. And, not the small talk crap that you do while people get settled and wait for Jenny to get her coffee and find your resume.

When you get asked that first question, “So, tell us a little about yourself.” Bam! It’s on. Start the clock, you have 180 seconds to show them why they should hire you.

Here’s what I would say:

“I was raised by 6 women. My grandmother is the matriarch of our family. I was raised by a single-mom, who had four sisters, my aunts, and my sister was the first grandchild born into the family. As you can imagine, I was dressed-up a lot! The women in my life love to laugh and I was always had a stage with them to make this happen. 

The other thing it taught me was to cook, sew and iron. All of which I do to this day. My wife is the baker, but I’m the cook. Mending and ironing fall in my chore bucket around the house.

The real thing it taught me was the value of women in the world. I did my master’s thesis on women and leadership. My mother started her own company in 1979 when no women started companies. Not only that, she started a company in a male-dominated technical field.  I was nine years old, and she would pay me ten cents to stuff envelopes for her. We would sit on her bed and she made calls to candidates, and I would stuff envelopes with the volume off on the TV.

Living with a single mom, who started a business during a recession was a challenge. I learned the value of work and started my first real job the day I turned sixteen. I paid my own way through college as my parents, who could afford to help, believed I would get more out of college if I found a way to pay for it on my own. I did. In hindsight, I’m glad they taught me this lesson. It was hard but worth it.

All of these experiences have helped shape my leadership style. I set high expectations but work hard to ensure people have the right tools and knowledge to be successful. I hold people accountable to what we agree are our goals. I work very hard, but I like to have fun when I work. 

What else would you like to know about me?”

That’s it. I shut up and wait for a response.

What did I tell them in my three minutes?

I told them my story.  People don’t hire your resume, they hire your story.

If you want to get hired, you need to craft your story. A real story. A story people want to listen to. A story people will remember when it comes time to decide whom to hire.

Does it matter if a POTUS has ever hired anyone?

Posted on by
1

In the last Republican Presidential Debate, candidate Ted Cruz got in a nice jab on candidate Donald Trump about hiring illegal aliens. At which, Trump fired back (he always fires back) that he was the only candidate to ever have hired anyone.

That last part gave me pause. I don’t care who you might be voting for, Republican, Democrat, Socialist (hey, Bernie!), etc., is it important for a President to have experience hiring people?

It’s a great question to ponder. All of us who hire, as part of our jobs, know how difficult it is, and how frustrating and wonderous of an experience it can be.  We know how difficult it is to select the right candidate, and how disastrous it can be when the wrong candidate is selected.

I do get that while most political lifers have probably not hired in a sense we have hired, they do some kind of ‘hiring’ in their various political offices. They have to select staff to run their campaigns, to work with them in their elected positions, etc. So, while they haven’t had to hire for a private business, they have had to select individuals to come work for them.

Now, if you ever witness government hiring you could easily argue, as Trump did, that none of these people have ever really hired! Government hiring isn’t really hiring as much as it’s selecting the tallest of the seven dwarfs.  Not much recruiting ever takes place, it’s post and pray of the worst kind.

So, I tend to fall into the camp of I want my POTUS to be someone who has really had to go out and hire and fire. Don’t take this as I want Trump to be POTUS, I’m also of the camp that I don’t want my POTUS to be crazy!

If all you’ve done in your career is ‘appoint’ friends and associates to positions, you probably aren’t really ready to run the country. Both parties have this issue. Lifetime politicians don’t understand real world business. They understand politics, which has nothing to do with actually running a business, creating jobs, creating value, having your neck on the line for results.

I want a POTUS who has felt the pressure of having to truly perform, or you lose everything, or you get fired. At that point, they understand what the vast majority of real Americans feel every day.  Elected people don’t feel this. They get elected, and they immediately go back to work on getting re-elected, which mainly constitutes telling people what they want to hear. Again, both parties do this the exact same way.

Yes, I want a POTUS that has real world business experience. One that’s sat across a desk and had to make real hiring decisions that had a bottom line impact to the success, or failure, of a business.  I understand that person. I don’t understand politicians.

 

The Life Span of a Crappy Recruiter!

Posted on by
4

I have to give credit where credit is due, and Aerotek is the one that originally discovered how long it takes to figure out you suck as a recruiter! It’s right around 9-14 months.  If you’ve spent 13 minutes in Talent Acquisition on either the corporate or agency side, you’ve seen a ton of these resumes.

Just having recruiting experience, especially IT or Technical, can guarantee you a recruiting career for at least ten years or more, even if you are completely awful at recruiting! As a President of a recruiting firm, and someone who has run corporate TA shops for years, I see these candidates come across my desk on a weekly basis:

They look like this:

1. First Recruiting job right out of college, working for a big agency recruiting sweatshop – this position lasts 9-12 months. They left because “they didn’t agree with the management style of said agency”. The truth is they weren’t meeting their goals, but we give them a pass because these sweatshops are churn and burn.

2. The next gig is usually another agency or small corporate recruitment gig. This one usually lasts under 9 months. It’s more of the same, they couldn’t do it the first time, what makes you think they’ll do it for you!?

3. Now, if they’re smart, they jumped from the second gig before getting fired to a very large corporate gig where they have so many recruiters they truly have no idea what they actually do, this will buy you at least 24 months before you’re discovered as a recruiting fraud. In these big organizations you don’t even recruit, just post and pray, anyway, so you should be able to survive.

4. Big organizations finally figured out you’re worthless, but you now know the game, so you leveraged this big corporate name on your resume into your next gig, this time as a senior recruiter, with another big firm who wants you to sell out your last firm and all their recruiting secret. The big secret is, you have no idea, and the last big org gig you had, well, they had no idea.  Once you run out of fake secrets to share, you’ll be kicked to the curb, so start looking for a recruiting manager gig in about 18 months.

5. You jump at the first recruitment manager gig you’re offered. Mid-sized firm, who loves your big company experience and can’t wait for your to save them from themselves. They have super high expectations on what you’re going to do for them, this is not good for you, remember, you suck at recruiting! You’re gone in 9 months.

6. Welcome back to the agency world! You will now bounce around these companies for a while, selling the fact you have ‘contacts’ at big companies of which agency owners want to get into. You’re now 8-10 years into your Recruiting career, and you’re an awful, crappy recruiter.

If you’re truly lucky as a crappy recruiter you’ll fall into some recruiting gig with a college or university or some other sort of fake, non-profit. Those are like wastelands for crappy recruiters. Absolutely no expectations that you’ll do anything of value, just show up, collect a check and follow a process. It’s never your fault, and hey, they don’t want you to move to fast anyway!

Beware TA leaders. There’s a reason a recruiter has had 4 – 6+ jobs in ten years, and it’s not because they’re good at recruiting! The best recruiters don’t move around because they’re so valuable the organizations they work for won’t let them leave! If you’re crappy, people are hoping you leave! Please take your crappy recruiting skills to our competition!

 

The #1 Way You Can Tell Recruiting In NOT Important to Your Executives

Posted on by
2

I had a recruiting leader reach out to me recently and ask for help.  They had some critical positions they needed to fill but weren’t having any success.  The executives were all over her to get her team to fill these positions.  The success of the company depended on it!

You feel her, right?  We’ve all been there at one point or another in our careers.

She was looking for some advice about what they could do, because they tried everything, and she was at wits end. This exchange was through email, so the first thing I did was what I usually do. First, I check her LinkedIn profile to check her background. She was solid, good recruiting experience, good companies. Then, I check the company’s career site.

This is where I find most companies and ‘we’ve done everything’ start to fall down.

Nowhere on the first page of the company web page could you find a link to “Careers” or “Jobs” or “Positions”. Nowhere! Not at the top, not at the bottom. You could click on anything on their home page to get to what jobs they actually had open.

But, I’m a pro. So are you. We know exactly where it’s at. Click on “About” or “About Us”. Then scroll down to “Careers” and click on that. Then go through another click or three and you’ll actually find the jobs they have open and “desperately” need to fill.

I sent a message back and we set up a call. The first thing I said was you need to have some sort of link or button or something on the home page where people can access your open jobs with one-click. “I’ve tried getting that changed, but the executive in charge of the website (marketing) refuses to add it.”  You need to go above that person’s head, and actually bring the executive who has the open jobs and explain to the CEO why this has to change.

“Yeah, but even then, this isn’t going to fill our jobs.” You know, you’re probably right, this one thing won’t fill your jobs, but this is indicative of how your executives don’t support recruiting in your organization. If your executives won’t allow you to make this one simple change, which is a clear best practice in every industry, they don’t truly care about filling these jobs.

Having your “Careers” site link under the “About Us” tab on the home page of your web page screams you have no idea what you’re doing in recruitment. Having executives that refuse you to move it, shows you they don’t care about recruiting.  It’s really simple, and always 100% true.

Interviewing for a new Recruitment leadership position? Take a look at how easy it is to find jobs with the company. If it takes forever, ask in your interview how easy it will be for you to immediately change this. The answer you get will tell you everything you need want to know about taking this job or not.

Having your career site linked under “About Us” on your home page is the #1 way you can tell if executives support recruiting or not in a company.

Walking Dead: Reviving Your Talent Networks!

Posted on by
1

You have a bunch of zombies surrounding your career website right now, and you don’t even know it.

They stumble around and look at your content, lurk at your jobs and then just stumble away when they don’t find anything to take a bite out of. Well, the folks at FOT and Smashfly are here to help you turn those zombies into real-life candidates by reviving the talent networks you probably don’t even know you have.

Who said zombies can’t turn back to real live viable candidates?! Not us, because the FOT crew knows how, and we’re going to show you, too. Join us on February 24 at 2pm EST and we’ll give you the following goods:

  • Show you the difference between a Talent Network and a Talent Community. We’ll give you ways to build your talent network into active pools of great candidates. By using and developing talent networks, you’re letting those zombies hanging out around your career site tell you “I’m next…” “Pick me…”, making it super easy to identify your next victim!
  • Help you develop a Talent Network Strategy that lasts, with little effort from your team to keep it going. The biggest problem we all face is we just don’t have enough capacity to do more. Talent networks give you the more— without the work. We’ll show you how.
  • Show you 5 ways the best companies are engaging their Talent Networks to make real placements.We won’t just tell you the ways, we’re going to hear about straight from a Talent Pro who is using these now to successfully hire and fill position within her company.  The good, the bad, the dead. You’re going to hear it all!
  • Give you 3 things you can do with candidate contact information before they even apply to your company. Talent pools aren’t about the apply, they’re about getting you to apply. Some zombies are ready to eat, some are just milling around being zombies. What do you do when potential candidates aren’t ready to eat? We’ve got the answer.
  • Provide insight to how you can measure the success of your talent networks. By now we know none of this matters if we can’t back it up with measurable data that proves it works. Talent networks, and the data you get from them, will give you a ton of insight to what is working in your Talent shop and what might need some tweaking.

Don’t let your time get “eaten” up by a bunch of zombie candidates who will never fill the needs your company has. Learn how to build great talent networks that will give you real live placements, with less effort than you ever thought imaginable. It’s time to fight back and win against your walking dead applicant pool!

Come join the FOT Zombie Hunting crew on February 24 at 2pm EST and learn how you can implement and take your talent networks to the next level!

Custom Form:

Sometimes, You Quit a Job for Love

Posted on by
1

Every once in a while you an employee who decides to move out of state, or another city, or a country, to be with the love of their life. There’s very little you can do as an HR pro or leader to keep this person. You can’t beat love. This is a story about that, but way more.

When I was in middle school my Dad did something for me that I will never be able to truly thank him for. His company, Spartan Stores, started sponsoring the Michigan Special Olympics. My Dad was asked if he would volunteer to help cook food for all the participants. He brought me along, even though I really didn’t want to go.

It was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I got to see true joy. True empathy. I got to see something that changed my life. I continued to volunteer all the way through college, then got involved heavily in coaching youth athletics, and I haven’t been back. But, I will. I only say this because I have such a special place in my heart for people living with Downs and other genetic abnormalities. They have so much to show us and offer us.

To feel love this strongly over just one thing in your life, you would be lucky. To feel this love over more than one thing in life is a godsend. Take a view, it’s only 2 minutes:

New Mexico is definitely losing, but Denver is definitely gaining!

I think it’s important to point out, there are two kinds of love here. Job love, which is very strong here. Real love, which is even stronger! When you’re employees leave you for the love of another, it can be heart wrenching on them. Do them a favor, and don’t make it harder.

Just be happy for them. Support them in every way you can. You’ll find another employee. They may never find another love of their life.

T3 – SwitchApp @GetSwitch

Posted on by
Reply

This week on T3 I review the new “Tinder” for job search app called SwitchApp.  SwitchApp is a completely mobile job search app for candidates and companies to help match them together.  It’s basically a marketplace for passive job seekers, where they can ‘swipe’ right if they are interested in a job, and a notification will go to the company of the interest.

Swipe left, and the company doesn’t get notified. For you Tinder users, you’ll get this. Obviously, to make all of this happen a job seeker first must download SwitchApp to their Apple or Android device and set up a profile. They can create a profile easily by linking their LinkedIn or Facebook profile, or filling it out manually. The profile is automatically set to anonymous, and any company on your profile will not be able to view your profile.

Swipe’s job matching algorithm then goes to work showing the jobs that the job seeker is eligible to see based on Switch’s matching criteria. If a job seeker is matched to the job, the organization can ‘like’ it to show their interest.  Then it’s up to the job seeker to decide if they’re interested. Right now, 47% of candidates matched by Switch and shown to companies are ‘liked’ by the company.

SwitchApp allows companies to post position with a structured data job posting. Basically, a company will input all of the skills they need for the position, title, location, salary range, etc. The matching technology does the rest. SwitchApp does not allow companies to ‘search’ the database of job seekers and contact anyone they want, there must be a match to make the magic happen!

Current users of the app actually love the fact that there is no searching taking place. Just post the job and see if matches come back. It eliminates much of the traditional noise you get from postings and having so many people apply that aren’t close to what you’re looking for. With SwitchApp you only get pinged when a candidate matches the criteria you put into your posting.

SwitchApp is currently free for employers to try out and use.  Primarily, it’s only going to work in New York and San Francisco (the Bay Area), because that’s where it’s being tested and launched first.  It’s not only for tech hires, the app also has finance, advertising and other business-related professions they are targeting.

It’s free. Give it a try if you’re out in those areas and looking for talent, many companies have already made hires. Eventually, Switch is going to be charging employers for usage, so it’s best to try it out now before that kicks in sometime this year.

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

Job Seekers You’re Only Judged on These Two Criteria

Posted on by
Reply

If you’re out looking for a job it usually feels like you’re being judged on every little thing you do, have done or potentially will do in the future. Interestingly enough, a Harvard professor discovered you’re actually only judged on two things:

“People size you up in seconds, but what exactly are they evaluating?

Harvard Business School professor Amy Cuddy has been studying first impressions alongside fellow psychologists Susan Fiske and Peter Glick for more than 15 years, and has discovered patterns in these interactions.

In her new book, “Presence,” Cuddy says people quickly answer two questions when they first meet you:

 – Can I trust this person?

 – Can I respect this person?

Psychologists refer to these dimensions as warmth and competence respectively, and ideally you want to be perceived as having both.

Interestingly, Cuddy says that most people, especially in a professional context, believe that competence is the more important factor. After all, they want to prove that they are smart and talented enough to handle your business.”

Trust and Respect.

I’ll add this is probably the two things you’re being judged immediately following the judging that gets done on your overall appearance, which is almost instantaneous! Let’s face it, we like to hire pretty people.

Once you open your mouth, you’re being judged on how well can I trust what this person is telling me, and can I respect their background, work ethic, where they came from, etc.  Most of this is based on the person doing the judging, not you.  I know, that sucks.

How do you help yourself?

1. Try and mirror the energy of the person who is interviewing you. If you come in all calm and cool, and the person who is interviewing is really upbeat and high energy, they’ll immediately question you as a fit.

2. Do research on who you’ll be interviewing with and try and get some sense of their background and story. Try and make some connections as fast as possible in the interview. This will help build trust and respect with this person. In today’s world, it’s not that hard to find out stuff on an individual. If HR sets up your interview, just politely ask who you will be interviewing with (the name).

3. Be interesting. Have a good story to tell, one that most people will find funny or interesting. Not too long. A good icebreaker to set off the interview on a great tone.

I tell people all the time. An interview isn’t a test, it’s just a conversation with some people you don’t know. We have these all the time. Sometimes you end up liking the people, sometimes you don’t. If you don’t like the people you’re interviewing with, there’s a good chance you won’t like the job!