Category Archives: IT Staffing

True or False: Corp Recruiters Fear Agency Recruiters

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True or False?  It’s a common belief, in most Talent and HR circles, that most corporate recruiters fear agency recruiters.  Go ahead and argue if you would like, but it seems a little silly.

The reality is, true recruiting professionals don’t fear amateurs.

It’s like a really great professional Photographer.  They charge money because they offer something someone is willing to pay for.  Professional photographers don’t fear the mom at the soccer game with her $2,000 dollar camera and $5,000 dollar lens.  Who cares that you have the equipment if you don’t know how to use it!?  Pros don’t fear amateurs.

So, if you are a really good corporate recruiter who knows how to really recruit, agency recruiters don’t scare you, because you know your stuff!  That’s the problem, though, right?  The reason so many people feel the title of this post is true is because we all know so many corporate recruiters, who really don’t know how to recruit.  They aren’t pros, they’re amateurs.  Amateurs fear professionals when it comes to meeting head to head in competition.

The best professionals love it when a talented amateur tries to play at their level.  These types of individuals help to push both parties to do the best work they can.  Or, at least, they should!  A great agency recruiter should push an average corporate recruiter to want to get better.  An amateur agency recruiter will starve, that’s why you only see amateurs in the agency ranks for a very short period of time.  If they aren’t good, they don’t eat! That is why on average, agency recruiters tend to have more recruiting skills than corporate recruiters.  Agency folks aren’t full salary. How they have compensated forces them to have better skills, on average.

So, how do corporate recruiters ensure they become professionals?  Well, I love Malcolm Gladwell, so I’ll steal a little of his 10,000-hour concept.  You must make yourself a true recruiting professional!  You need to invest time and development in yourself, in the recruiting industry, to become a pro.   That means as a corporate recruiter, you focus on recruiting, not becoming an HR Pros. What?!  Most corporate recruiters are corporate recruiters because that’s their path to get into a straight HR position.  Their endgame is not recruiting, it’s HR.  That’s a problem because they are not fully vested in the recruiting game.  This is an amateur move.

Your reality is, those who get promoted are usually professional at something.  Become a great recruiting pro and the powers-that-be will take notice, and you’ll find yourself in positions you never thought possible.  True professionals don’t worry about promotions, they worry about becoming a better pro at their craft.

The next time you start feeling yourself pushed by an agency recruiter, don’t curse them for what they do, embrace them for what they push you to become — a better recruiter.

7 Words Mathematically Proven to Get You More Hires!

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Wired recently worked with OkCupid and Match.com to find out which words were used on the most popular dating profiles on their sites.  Millions of data points were done for this data analysis and they came up with the most popular 1000 words.  What they came up with were the exact words to use in your profile descriptions to get the most clicks.

I’m going to take this one step further and say if these words attract singles to another single, I’m quite certain they would attract a job seeker to a job.  My theory being singles are also job seekers.  Okay, I hear you, just because some words might attract one person to another person doesn’t mean those same words will attract a person to a job – but it might.

It is my belief that we can totally re-write Job Descriptions in a way that is a lot less HR’ish, and much more real, which will make more people want to work in the jobs you have.  Here is one I put together for hiring a Recruiter for my staff.   The positive is, it lets us in HR get our ‘creative on’.

Let ‘s give it a shot. I’ll give you 7 categories of words that were mathematically proven to get more dates hires:

1. Active Words: Yoga, Surfing, Surf, hiking, athlete, etc. These words were popular because people want to be associated with things that are good for them. Do you highlight active things you do at your organization in your job descriptions?

2. Pop Culture Words: 30 Rock, The Great Gatsby, Homeland, Arrested Development, The Matrix, The Big Bang Theory, The Hunger Games, etc.  People want to work with an organization that has a personality.  Pop culture references in your JD give you a personality.

3. Music Words: (FYI – some of these could also be considered Pop Culture) – Radiohead, Nirvana, live music, guitar, instruments, etc .Does your organization have a musical preference? Why not?  Maybe you’re a little country, maybe you’re a little rock and roll, either way, it’s alright to let candidates know!

4. Calm Words: Ocean, meditation, beach, trust, respect, enjoy, planning, dedication, openness, etc. Words that project a feeling of safety and security. In today’s employment marketplace, don’t discount the value of your jobs based on how calm and secure the work is.  Anxiety is at an all-time high.  Having the ability to say “we’ve never laid off in our history!” could pay you huge dividends.

5. Food Words: Chocolate, cooking, foodie, pizza, sushi, breakfast, etc. Food is a gathering and sharing point in most cultures.  If you do food related things in your work environment it brings all of your people together. Everyone eats. Not everyone will do Yoga or want to watch movies.  Chili cook-offs, company happy hours, Donut Fridays, etc.

6. Descriptive Words: Creative, motivated, confident, driven, passion, awareness, etc. Most HR pros see JDs as a means to an end.  They’re a legal necessity.  We should be looking at them as mini-commercials for our jobs.  I would love to see a company go full video JD – nothing written, just watch our Job Description. 60 seconds of someone telling you what this job is.

7. Spontaneous Words: Tattoos, F*ck, wasted, kissing, puppies, sucking, lucky, etc.  Words that most people would never expect to see in a JD.  This word has absolutely no usefulness in a JD – that’s exactly why we put it in there.  It might not attract an older conservative candidate, but it might be just what a newer generation is looking for.

I’ve never met a senior executive that had a problem with any job description I wanted to write – not matter how bland or how crazy.  That being the case, why do we continue to write JDs that put people to sleep?

The Best Recruiters are Competitive, A Hypothesis

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I’ve worked in recruiting and HR for about twenty years. At this point in my career, I estimate that I’ve hired about 100 Recruiters.

I’ve hired recruiters that come from almost every environment and education. I’ve gone the Enterprise Rent A Car route and hired college athletes. I’ve gone to colleges and hired HR graduates. I’ve hired seasoned recruiting veterans from both agency and corporate. I’ve hired uneducated individuals from service backgrounds. I’ve hired specific practitioners who have deep knowledge of what they’re recruiting – nurses, IT pros, etc.

None of these things made one bit of difference when it came to performance as a recruiter, in either environment, corporate or agency.

The only thing I’ve found to be a differentiator of true recruiting performance is the level of competitiveness an individual has internally. This is why it’s so popular to hire former athletes as recruiters, we assume since they are athletic, that they must be competitive. But, this also fails, many times.

You see, you don’t have to play sports to be competitive.  You might just be that kid you threw the Monopoly board across the room when you lost to your sister. You might be that person who can’t stand that your neighbor’s lawn looks better than yours. Who knows why and what you’re competitive with, but it’s the key to being great a recruiting.

Many will wrongly assume that males are more competitive than females. In my experience, I’ve found this not to be true. Both sexes can be very competitive, it’s finding which ones are competitive that becomes the difficult thing.

So, why does being competitive help make you a great recruiter?

I believe competitiveness is a great trait for recruiters because it leads them to want to ‘win’.  What’s the win in recruiting? It’s filling the position! Recruiting is just one small game, after another. Each one that is slightly different, with new complexities to complete.  Each time you fill an opening, that is like making a point on your scoreboard.

If you put a group of these people together, even though they’re all working on separate openings, they see each other making placements and they want to do this as well. This competitive drive, alone, makes an individual succeed or fail at recruiting.

This becomes the main issue of why selecting non-proven recruiters is such a crap shoot. It’s very difficult to measure someone’s competitive drive accurately, and interview questioning is unreliable. In my 100 hires, I would say I’m 50/50 in getting it right. When I talk to other agency executives and TA Leaders, many share the same ratio.

Want to hire better recruiters?

Focus completely on finding ultra competitive people, who love keeping score, and throw them into the game.  I like to say Recruiting isn’t hard, but I know that it is.  Recruiting is easy if you’ve got the right people, who will do whatever it takes to win. That’s the competitive difference!

The Big Reference Check Scam!

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I remember when I started my first job in Talent Acquisition and HR, I totally believed checking references was going to lead me to better, higher quality hires. My HR university program practically drilled into me the belief that “past performance predicts future performance.”

For all I knew those words were delivered on tablets from Moses himself!

After all, what better way is there to predict a candidate’s future success than to speak with individuals who knew this person the best?

And it’s not just anybody: It’s former managers or colleagues who have previously worked with this person – directly or indirectly – and have a deep understanding of how they have performed, and now telling me how they will perform in the future.

Grand design at its finest.

About 13 seconds into my HR career I started questioning this wisdom. Call me an HR atheist if you must, but something wasn’t adding up to me.

It was probably around the hundredth reference check when I started wondering either I was the best recruiter of all time and only find rock stars (which was mostly true) or this reference check thing is one giant scam!

Everyone knows the set up: The candidate wants the job, so they want to make sure they provide good references. The candidate provides three references that will tell HR the candidate walks on water. HR accepts them and actually goes through the process of calling these three perfect references.

When I find out that an organization still does reference checks, I love to ask this one question: When was the last time you didn’t hire someone based on their reference check?

Most organizations can’t come up with one example of this happening. We hire based on references 100% of the time.

Does that sound like a good system? Now, I’m asking you, when was the last time your organization didn’t hire a candidate based on their references?

If you can’t find an answer, or the answer is ‘never’, you need to stop checking references because it’s a big fat waste of time and resources! There’s no “HR law” that says you have to check references. Just stop it. It won’t change any of your hiring decisions.

New ways of checking references that checkout

So, how should you do reference checks? Here are three ideas:

1. Source your own references

Stop accepting references candidates give you. Instead, during the interview ask for names of their direct supervisors at every position they’ve had. Then call into those companies and talk to those people. Even with HR telling everyone “we don’t give out references,” I’ve found you can engage in some meaningful conversations off the record.

2. Automate the process

New reference checking technology asks questions in a way that doesn’t lead the reference to believe they are giving the person a ‘bad’ reference, but just honestly telling what the person’s work preferences are. The information gathered will then tell you if the candidate is a good fit for your organization or a bad fit — but the reference has no idea.

3. Use fact checking software

Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. have made it so candidates who lie can get caught. There is technology being developed that allows organizations to fact-check a person’s background and verify if they are actually who they tell you they are. Estimates show that 53% of people lie on their resume. Technology makes it easy to find out who is.

Great Talent Acquisition and HR pros need to start questioning a process that is designed to push through 99.9% of hires. Catching less than .1% of hires isn’t better quality. It’s just flat out lazy.

Start thinking about what you can do to source better quality hires and your organization might just think you can walk on water.

Your turn: What are your tips for checking references?

T3 – Recruiting tools from @Sourcecon!

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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.

The Life Span of a Crappy Recruiter!

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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!

 

Walking Dead: Reviving Your Talent Networks!

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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!

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T3 – SwitchApp @GetSwitch

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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.

Oddly Enough, People Like It When You Want Them!

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If I hear one more person tell me that candidates don’t like phone calls, I’m going to shove a phone up your…

I’m not the smartest cat, but I know a couple of things.  Here are a few things I know:

1. You can’t taste the difference of well Gin and high-end Gin after 4 Gin and Tonics.

2. French Fries, Onion rings and Tator Tots taste great fried and taste awful baked.

3. Great tasting chocolate is the reason women can be single. (okay, I stole that one from my wife!)

4. Candidates with car trouble are lying.

5. People like to be told that you want them for the a job! It’s flattering. It makes them feel important. It makes them feel valued. They love to listen to what you have to say, regardless of how satisfied they are in their job.

If I called you right now with a job that was something you have always wanted, guess what would happen?  You would call me back. You would call me back almost instantly. You would run out to your car, telling the receptionist on the way out you have an urgent personal call, to hear what I have to say.

Those people. Those thought leaders. Those idiots, who are telling you candidates don’t like phone calls are LIARS!

Why are they lying to you? Here is why I think they are probably lying to you:

1. They are lazy and hope the internet will solve all of their problems.

2. They are hoping to talk the world into believing you never have to make a phone call to get a job.

3. They are scared.

I did a survey where I asked 100 people, mostly millennials, (all potential candidates, since all people are potential candidates) if I called you with your “Dream Job”, would you either pick up my call or call me back?  Would you like to know the results?

100 out of 100 said they would pick up my call or call me back! 100%!

Recruiters who say candidates don’t like phone calls are not recruiters, they’re administrative professionals. Pay them accordingly.

Should Job Hopping Be Encouraged?

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Am I old school?

No, really? Please let me know in the comments because this recent article from Fast Company makes no sense to me! Check this out:

“JOB HOPPERS ARE BELIEVED TO HAVE A HIGHER LEARNING CURVE, BE HIGHER PERFORMERS, AND EVEN TO BE MORE LOYAL…In terms of managing your own career, if you don’t change jobs every three years, you don’t develop the skills of getting a job quickly, so then you don’t have any career stability,” (Penelope) Trunk tells Fast Company. “You’re just completely dependent on the place that you work as if it’s 1950, and you’re going to get a gold watch at the end of a 50-year term at your company.”

Really? I’m not sure Talent Acquisition leaders, across the world, share Penelope’s philosophy on job hopping!

I don’t buy any of this.

In the minds of hiring managers, Job Hoppers are Job Hoppers for a reason. Which basically comes down to you weren’t good enough to stick with any one company you were with. Sure some of that hopping might be they were in a bad company who didn’t treat them like they should have been treated. At which point, a normal person, would learn from this bad fit and choice of employer, and make a better one.

I even job hopped a little in the early part of my career. I was chasing an executive title. In hindsight, it was the dumbest thing I ever did!

This is bad advice, plain and simple.

Don’t job hop. For every person that it helps, it will hurt ten others. Hiring managers still hate to see job hopping on a resume, and they’ll question what is wrong with you if your resume looks like you job hop.

Even in the tech sector, which I work in every day, hiring managers hate to see IT pros that have ten jobs in ten years. They’ll still hire you now, because the need is so great, but eventually the economy of the IT market, supply and demand, will catch up. At that point, your job hopping resume will not be desired.

So, how do you fix this, if you’re currently in this job hopper cycle?

I recommend to job seekers that they bundle many of their ‘projects’ into one consulting job, to make it, at least, appear to be under one umbrella of an employer. We see many IT pros doing this now as contingent workers and incorporating themselves. Work several projects at different companies, but all managed under one brand. It’s not perfect, but it looks a little better.

Job hopping should never be encouraged. Making a change because your career is stagnant is something completely different. Most careers don’t get stagnant in 2-3 years!