She comes to you.
Super-Recruiter, Dave Staats says candidates who initiate a contact with a headhunter are useless.
Over 90% of the people who have approached him do not produce placements. In the past 5 years an approach by a candidate resulted in one deal. He makes his money by accessing candidates who aren't actively looking for a job.
Source: Fordyce Letter
Before the advent of department stores, small retailers used their front windows in a straightforward manner to put their goods on display. The big department store windows were different. They were used to put on a display meant to charm and amaze.
Frank Baum, author of The Wizard of Oz, was a window dressers and founded the National Association of Window Trimmers. "Even the male mind, naturally obtuse upon such matters, is forced to marvel at the beauty of the display," he said.
What's the lesson here? Sell the sizzle not the steak. The plain goods are not as emotionally compelling as the context in which they are presented.
That's why some recruiting firms rent fancy offices in downtown towers. But how can theatrics make a job seem magical when the person you are presenting it to understands it quite well? Doesn't familiarity with something that is probably not a dramatic change, rule out big dreams?
Reference: Froma Harrop
Topic: The primaries from a recruiter's point of view.
Guests: Jim Durbin, Colin Kingsbury
Call in and Listen Only info here: recruitingshow.com
And, once starved for intellectual stimulation, she is now refreshed by her regular contact with stimulating people.
How does Ms Fitton use Twitter? She posts links to her blog postings and multi-media experiments on Seesmic, Qik, Utterz, YouTube, Blip.tv, TwitterGram and Flickr. These are all used to "send out little snippets" of her life. Some are business-related; most are personal. (When her car was robbed, Laura complained to the Twitosphere and was love bombed with support).
She does believe, however, that Twitter should be used for business. "You miss out massively," she says, "when you dismiss this stuff as new-fangled and faddish.... Find the people in your organization who are drawn to it, and give them a little space and encouragement to discover and play."
Laura believes that Twitter can be "a great vehicle for a brand extension if you are willing to produce feeds of cool, useful things." She also believes that Twitter should be a mainstay of internal communication in every department.
She believes that Twitter won't encourage the wasting of company time. It will merely take up some of the time that is already being wasted.
She does admit that it takes a while to connect with a critical mass of brilliant people but after that the "ROI can be extraordinary."
Laura's prediction: Within 4 years social networking will be as pervasive as email. Her management advice: "Hire smart people, give them conditions to succeed, and get out of their way."
From and interview with Sheldon Israel. Hat Tip: xtremerecruiting.tv
Soon, Facebook will allow you to send highly targeted recruiting ads to its members.
Facebook will not replace job boards. Job boards will pay the pay per click fees to lure people from Facebook into their databases where employers can see them. This is cheaper than having each employer do so herself.
Every year there is a hot new technology that promises to deliver passive candidates to your doorstep.
Monster is a proven resource. Linkedin makes people tons of money. But most recruiters don't know how to use any kind of database search engine well.
Shally doesn't recommend long search strings. He recommends a search that takes ten minutes or less.
Shally claims no contact manager is robust enough to handle the hundreds of thousands of contacts recruiters must have to do their jobs well.
Maureen Sharib, the Queen Bee of Telephone Sourcing, is leading real time chats about telephone sourcing on her new Magic Method social network. It's terrific.
If you think my claim is mere social boosting, check it out and see if you disagree. There's no charge and you can see the transcripts of the chats here. (Scroll down the page till you see the yellow Magic Talk bubbles).
Days: Tuesday and Thursday
Time: NOON Eastern Daylight Savings Time (New York time)
You don't see any reward in action.
You don't see how you can get your task done on time so you do nothing.
It really might be too late to finish the task on time if you start now.
But that's a reason to go into action. Why?
There are two possible rewards:
1. Better late than never.
2. You are building the habit of being in action and that is one of the greatest rewards you can ever receive.
The success of the immediate product is a secondary issue. It is primarily a vehicle to build the action habit, an absolute requirement for a decent life.
One more time:
a. The procrastination habit is a killer.
b. You have to create a counter habit.
c. Use any task, pointless or not, to get into the habit of action.
Reference: Dave Bohl at Dumb Little Guy. His recommendations are quite different but the title meant a lot to me: Beating Procrastination is Easy – Once You Get Moving. Movement is the goal. Not a payoff from the project at hand.
After battle over personal branding.
Today I joined the Recruiting Animal as his radio show guest for a high-energy debate about personal branding. You can listen to my defense, err, the debate here.
It is strange to me that so many people react to personal branding as a farce or a non-event. Being the best isn't enough when there are a lot of people who are the best (make the company the most money, are "A" players, land the blue chip clients). ....
So for all you detractors out there, please go ahead and keep doing a great job at work. A lot of people do a great job. If you're one of them, how do you stand out? What combination of features, of behaviors make you the one that's remembered?
Here's what happens when you invite people who don't like to talk.
There is an interesting story behind these two guests. The guy was a member of a cultish group called The Lyman Family in Boston. He had an affair with his co-star during the movie and took her back to the group. She didn't like it and left.
A few years later, he and two other members robbed a bank for political reasons. They were caught and he died in prison lifting weights. The girl, Daria Halprin is now a dancing instructor.
Dave Bryant (edited)
1. Never be afraid of experimentation.
2. If uncertain, ask a coach or experienced player to help you....
3. Accidents are the result of poor preparation.
4. When tiredness creeps in skills seep out.
5. No matter how long the match, believe you can keep trying longer than your opponent. Stay unwaveringly patient and hang on until he breaks down.
6. A true professional in any sport must remain cool, unemotional in the application of his shots yet be sensitive enough to raise his game in a critical situation.
7. If you feel tension taking control.... soothe your nerves by using breathing
Word-of-mouth information is extremely credible. Especially in face-to-face conversations with family, friends and co-workers.
On a scale of 0 – 10, 80% of consumers ranked word-of-mouth advice as credible at a level of 7 or higher.
49% of all receivers of word-of-mouth product information say they are highly likely (9 or 10 on the 10-point scale) to relay the advice they have received to someone else.
And, nearly half of all receivers of word-of-mouth advice say they will likely make a purchase based on the conversation.
Source: Natural Marketing
Dave Staats on xtremerecruiting.tv
Here are a few of the ideas presented:
He sounds a bit like a low key Bill Cosby, slightly slurring his words. He was taught to build relationships and after 22 years in business still has relationships with with people he met in the first two years.
He has two specialty areas and finds that recruiting helps him live in a happy world. The candidate and company are happy and he never has to talk to the company he recruits people from. (What about the candidates he rejects?)
Believes that if he focuses on a narrow niche he shouldnt have to go to far to find the right guy. He doesn't even want to have to call a hundred people. "Why dig a new hole if you've already got the tree planted and there is fruit on it."
Linkedin is good. Facebook and Myspace are useless because his candidates aren't there. Likes Deskflow as an ATS.
He has a simple mission and tells the same story to everyone he meets: He sells access to people they can't get
He doesn't negotiate fees. Charges the same to everyone and passes up those who won't pay it.
Find four or five things that make a big difference and do them every day.
Don't be afraid to ask tough questions right at the start of a relationship.
You're at a party and someone asks you what you do. You say you're a recruiter. That's a very general definition and it means trouble because if you look just like your competition, no one has any special reason to come to you.
If you want to stand out, you have to stand for something special. It could be your market niche. It could be your price. But it's got to be something.
Recently, I've been reading critiques of marketing successes in the political field.
Martin Kramer shows us how you can use an over-simplified interpretion of the facts to misrepresent them. Here's what he means.
If two percent of your survey sample says they would commit terrorist acts and twenty percent says they strongly agree with those acts, you announce that only a tiny fraction of the people surveyed are extremists.
And we all recently saw a shifty but powerful interpretation of Barack Obama's Jeremiah Wright problem, as well. The press reported that Obama had opened a much needed conversation about race when, in fact, he was merely forced into rationalizing his support for a lunatic mentor.
Hillary ran into problems, however, because in her creative marketing she didn't merely interpret facts, she invented facts about her visit to Bosnia that were very easy to check and, so, was immediately refuted with videos of the actual event .
The lesson: it's easier to lie when you are merely spinning the facts rather than out and out lying about them. And it's easier to lie when the truth about your facts cannot be easily discovered.
Twitter is like chatting with someone at the next desk or your pal on the phone. That's the primary function it fills.
smheadhunter heading to TJ's to get eggs and chicken. Wonder which I should get first?
gautamghosh after a dinner of daal roti am feeling hungry again.. Haldiram's snacks at 11 pm now, I guess
richrecruiter Hoping the Chicken Border Bowl is kind to my stomach.
ATLRecruiter it's a BEAUTIFUL spring day in The ATL!
ATLRecruiter working leads provided by our awesome research team - woo hoo!
gautamghosh searching for my nokia charger... help!
JesseStay Trying to get things all taken care of before Web 2.0 Expo tomorrow.
jasonalba 30 minutes till lunch appt - I still have time for one more e-mail don't I
seerysm Having a pretty productive Day so far. Looking at different employee onboarding document handling solutions
richrecruiter Lunch/haircut extravaganza
jasonalba hitting the shower, I have a lunch in 1 hour, and then lots of work to get ready to leave to Santa Rosa tomorrow!
jjbuss is having a case of the monday's
http://is.gd/: An even shorter version of tinyurl
LinkBunch lets you put multiple links into one small link. A link package.
via infoman
An ongoing discussion of its value in your life and career.
Today's feature: Chelsea C
Cheezhead Sponsors "I Hate Monster" Fest.
He's become the number one go-to gossip guy in the Recruitosphere.
Scoop From Twitter: Jason Buss is a good husband.
Quote for the Day
"a ruthless partisan indifferent to the truth when it cannot be harnessed to the wielding of power."
-- Andrew Sullivan
A thorough guide. Hat Tip Social Median
David Brooks makes Obama's errors look worse than I thought.
It was inevitable that the period of “Yes We Can!” deification would come to an end. It was not inevitable that Obama would now look so vulnerable.Back in Iowa, Barack Obama promised to be something new — an unconventional leader who would confront unpleasant truths, embrace novel policies and unify the country. But....
....the aura around Obama has changed. Furiously courting Democratic primary voters and apparently exhausted, Obama has emerged as a more conventional politician and a more orthodox liberal.
He sprinkled his debate performance Wednesday night with the sorts of fibs, evasions and hypocrisies that are the stuff of conventional politics.
Do I hate Twitter? Kind of. My account lay dormant for a year. Then all of a sudden people started linking to me. I thought, "Wow, I must have been wrong; something is going on here." No, it wasn't.
I read an interesting article by Jerry O and a few by Dan Schwabel because they link to their blogs. And I found out that BL Offman has planters wart and now I know every day when Michael Specht is going to bed. But, nothing else was quite as exciting and I started to think that I'd had enough and then, today, the comic opera started.
Family dinner. My husband feeds the kids while a NYT photographer takes a photo of me for an article about my blog posts about our divorce.New York Times front-page article: I look fat in the photo. No wait, it's worse. I look structurally ugly. Crap.
Stressed. But I want to look fun, laid back and breezy. So I take orders for lunch. Then go to the wrong place. And come back with nothing.
Panic at my divorce lawyer's office. He says not to worry, he represents top entrepreneurs. I ask him to set me up with one on a blind date.
Buying NoDoze at Walgreens; I don't want to interrupt work later to get coffee. Good time manager, yes? But I feel like a drug addict.
Prayer of the novice twitterer: Please god, let this not suck.
Don't worry, it doesn't. (But everything else does).
When I think about blogs I define them as non-corporate, non--managerial, ongoing communications. The voice of the free-wheelin' little guy, the heir of the fanzines.
But, I'm not as narrow-minded as that might sound. Three years ago, I was looking for a Director of Internal Communications for a large, international firm and I believed that a blog would have been a great way to let all of its 13,000 employees know what was going on.
I didn't expect the company blog to read like mine, but I didn't expect it to suck either, because a blog has to have some life to it or else it won't be read -- except by head and job hunters who are forced by necessity to snoop through masses of dull information.
So, I'm happy to report that (in my humble opinion) the Recruitosphere is still a living, breathing thing. And I've chosen to make this announcement today because I wanted to suck up to pay tribute to Papa John Sumser.
Why do I want to compliment John? Because, although his site doesn't look like a blog, he's a blogger in spirit and has been for a long time. And, the willingness of an industry fixture to indulge in bold, humourous criticism of the people and companies in his field reinforces the tone for everyone else.
Now, I didn't say Papa was always right. In fact, some people think he's a crank, inclined to act out his personal peeves in public. True or not, in blogging terms, that's a virtue. For, it's only those who are a little cranky who have a motive to shake things up. No one else wants to rock the boat.
So, let's say John is cranky; what could he be cranky about? Here's my guess. He uses the royal "we" but I think he's a militant populist.
I know he was open to regular conversations with Jay-Dee Jason Davis when the latter was a stranger and complete unknown. And Anthony and I were pleased to be noticed in his list of noteworthy bloggers in February 2005. Jay-Dee was there too but not the Microchicks. And why not? They were good bloggers but they worked for a big firm and my guess is that the honour was reserved for the little guys.
So why, then, did he go after JGo? Jobster was still new on the scene. But, maybe it seemed a little too cocky? It's possible, for a presumed arrogance was the red flag that led Papa to zing the Ma'am when she dismissed blog metrics with a wave of the hand.
But, Papa's not the only writer keeping it real, only the most prominent. Last week, Don JGo Jason Goldberg, king of Jobster, publicly taunted the boss of Indeed.com for not keeping his blog up to date. I liked it.
And, a couple of weeks ago I sent Louise Fletcher a blogswap posting which warned job hunters not to barf on their resumes. When I got a fast reply I thought she was sending it back but, no, she was thanking me for my delightful work.
And, of course, the Dog Lady knows how to take a joke. And, even the Ma'am -- who doesn't like to be mocked -- has it in her to write about peanut butter on a business site. She's not built for humour but she's not really strait-laced either. There's also Colin the Snob and the Marketing Headhunter; they're funny guys and there's more coming out of the woodwork all the time.
Amitai Givertz of Recruitomatic appeared out of nowhere, well-informed and with a pugnacious streak I can count on every day.
So, I'm just letting you know, Papa, that things are going well. Even as the virus spreads it hasn't lost its charm -- at least, not yet.
And, please, don't come after me for this critique of you. In writing this way, I'm only honouring you. (Amen.) And, finally, I'm not saying that the straight business writers are letting anyone down. Not at all. I'm only collecting examples of irreverent behaviour to indicate that the field as a whole has not yet been burdened by any staid, hidebound (life-threatening) protocols.
When Jim Stroud was a little boy he decided that he wanted to be a police detective.
Shaft was all the rage back then but Jim refused to be pidgeon-holed by narrow minds and, in the playground, he insisted that the other kids call him Dirty Jimmy after Dirty Harry Callaghan.
Jim never became a detective. He didn't want to deal with spineless politicians who were more interested in making the evening news than protecting their cities against deranged criminal minds. So he became an online sourcer which is a digital version of his childhood dream.
At the beginning of his career, he used to march around the office shouting, "Come on punk. Make my day. This is the most powerful search engine in the western world. You think you're going to get away from me? From ME !"
But, he changed as he got older and, now. I'd say he is more Shaft than Dirty Harry. Why, look at his motto, "Can you dig it?" You know what he's thinking:.
"Who's the "bad" online sourcer
That's a search machine for all the chicks?
Stroud. Can ya dig it?"
You bet I can. He's an innovative man whom no one understands but other bloggers. So I invited him to spend some time searching for a true blogger for our Post of the Week contest and, of course, he couldn't resist.
Jim is a Technical Sourcing Consultant for Microsoft but he's done everything in recruiting and worked with everyone too, including Google, Siemens, MCI and lots of start-ups. He's got a blog called Jim 2.0 and The Recruiters Lounge where he "gets diggy" wif famous recruiting personalities like..... like me, The Recruiting Animal, star of.....
|
Here's Dirty Jimmy's bio on the Microsoft Jobs Blog.
No one paid for this. It's from a friend.
I'm behind on a project
Upcoming: Susan Strayer, Foster Williams, Scotty Herman of Visualcv.
Tentatively: Colin Kingsbury, Jimmy Durbin and Don JGo on
"Political Candidates and Other Job Hunters."
If you want to plan the human resources needed to execute a project, you have to know what people can normally do. How do you find out? By measuring performance.
First you decide what you are going to measure (speed, quality, customer satisfaction). Then, by comparing the records of various workers, you figure out what experience and personalities the good workers have.
Then you create a list (a taxonomy) of the required experience and personal qualities and use it to guide your recruiting and selection.
Also, once you know what kind of performance is reasonable to expect, you can record your ongoing performance measurements on software that automatically lets you know when it drops below that expected level.
Source: Kevin Wheeler, ERE. See also: What Is A Talent Supply Chain
First they banned the headscarf in schools, now ads featuring skinny people. Even if you agree with the motivation, doesn't this seem scary?
Source: The Toronto Star
Andy Baron of Rocketboom has about 1400 followers on Twitter. He is not going to use his personal account any more so he is auctioning it off on ebay.
(From Mashable via Social Median)
Eat Coffee!
The Luwak, a cat-like Indonesian marsupial, climbs trees, eats the ripest coffee beans and evacuates them in fermented clumps. Then locals sell it for $75 a pound. (Source: Daily Nugget)
Car-makers get regular reports of car sales, then they plan production around these sales trends. They order the parts they need and arrange their shipping based on these plans.
All of the steps involved in getting the resources required to meet business goals are (together) called a supply chain.
And you can create a supply chain for skills. You figure out what skills you'll need to meet your customers needs. You draw up a list of these skill requirements and then you recruit to satisfy the needs.
The list is called a taxonomy and you have to keep it up to date to maintain the proper skills inventory for your needs.
Business planners use skills taxonomies and reports of available talent pools to assess the realism of their plans and to develop plans of action and budgets to supply the people they need.
As talent becomes a scarce resource, this sort of skills planning will become more important. Right now, IBM is a leader in this field.
Skills
1. Recognize when the customer needs assistance
2. Active Listening to discover customer needs;
ask questions before pitching a solution
3. Recognize Buying Signals; knowing when to close and when not to
Personality
4. Emotional Resilience: able to recover from rejection;
not take things personally
5. Perseverance: able to keep focusing on your goals
when the success rate is low
6. Self Starter: can work in an unstructured environment;
don't need someone telling you what to do and how to do it
7. Mastering Luck: recognition that you have to put yourself
in the right position to get lucky
8. Culture Match: share the values and behaviour of your company;
otherwise you won't be happy
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Source: Networking is a load of crap! by Tim Proctor (edited)
A recruiter calls me up and asks if I can hire a .NET Developer friend of his. I tell the guy I can’t pay the 20% percent fee. He says that since it is a friend of his that he can work something out.
It sounds like I got an applicant for free so I get the guy in for testing. He doesn’t do so well but the recruiter begs me to hire him because he's a friend and points out all of his good points. So I agree.
So the recruiter says "Great I’ll get the invoice for the placement to you momentarily."
I said "I thought you said that because he was your friend you would give me a deal"
"I am," he says, "Instead of the the regular 20% I'm giving him to you for 18.
I’m like, "I thought he was your friend. Isn't the main point to just get him a job?"
"Yeah, I found him through networking and I’m friends with everyone that I network with."
I hung up the phone.
Depends on what you are presenting.
The length of your sales writing will depend on:
1. Lead generation needs less detail;
an ad that aims to sell must address every potential objection
2. The higher the price, the longer it takes to justify or create the need.
3. The benefits of an unfamiliar product or service require a lot of explanation
4. The more features, the more writing required.
You have to test the results of your writing using various approaches
to see what works best.
Featuring the Animal Panel and anyone else who shows up
For all call in and listening information, go here www.recruitingshow.com
Some of the topics we might discuss:
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