The Recruiting Animal

Introduction To Recruiting

Someone asked me to give him the basics of the recruiting business. I sent him this brief introduction. What have I missed. Or did I get something wrong?

There are three aspects to recruiting
1. Getting the business (jobs to fill)
2. Sourcing (identifying people) online or by phone
3. Recruiting (selling them on the job and selling the client on the person)

The people who bring in the business make the most money. But finding the people is just as hard.

There are two kinds of firms
1. Contingency
2. Retained Search

And there are different ways to approach the business
1. Industry focussed (focus on a specific industry)
2. Job focussed (just sales people)
3. Generalist

If you work for a firm it works a lot like the real estate business. The firm takes half of the fee. The person who brought in the order takes 25% and the person who supplied the candidate takes 25%.

The best place online to find out about recruiting is www.ere.net

Go there. Register. Join some of the discussion groups and ask your questions there too. There are many friendly and helpful people.

Who Is David Kippen?

Animal Show in Review. Listen here.

We had a great time with Dr David Kippen PhD on The Animal Show this week. He's a quick witted fellow who can speak extemporaneously on almost any topic at all. And he doesn't say um or aw even once.

Dave thinks that Jane Austen would have been just as good an author if she had been better looking. (I disagree). He wrote his thesis on a racist South African female author (I never heard of her but I disagree).

He doesn't know much about Chop Suey but claims that you won't be as disappointed with the noodles in Shanghai like you were with the pizza in Italy.

Dave says that your brand is not just the standard set of ideas people associate with you but a picture of you in relation to the entire constellation in which you operate and especially in comparison to your competitors.

We discussed the brand changing process a bit and Dave seemed to say that you change your brand by playing with certain elements in it.

For instance, if your name is Bobby and you want everyone to think you are a stuffed shirt, you can start calling yourself Bob. You are still a rose by any other name but now your serious side is being highlighted.

Good recruitment advertising, he says, researches the wants of target market then presents the aspects of the job (elements of the brand) that will match them. It leaves the less than stellar stuff out of the picture.

Still, Dave argues that recruiting advertising cannot be too deceptive or it will spawn a problem with retention as new employees who are unpleasantly suprised make for the exits in a hurry.

We also chatted about some of the contestants in Jay Dee's contest, a bit about Madonna and Rush Limbaugh and before I knew it the hour was gone.

How To Drive Traffic To Your Blog

1. Use popular search terms in your headline.

Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool will help you. Type in a word and it tells you how many times that word was used for a search in the previous month.

2. Use good keywords in the body of your article.

Be specific not vague. "If you are writing about the Virginia Tech shooting, don’t say “the gunman,” say, “Cho Seung-Hui, the Virginia Tech gunman.” "

3. Use multimedia.

Video and audio are more viral than text. Publish the video to You Tube and link it back to your page. Then others can post your video to their sites too.

4. Link back to related postings on your blog.

A Word Press plugin automatically lists related posts at the end of a posting.

5. Make it easy to subscribe to your site.
Via Feedburner (RSS) and Feedblitz (email).

6. Leave comments on other blogs.
The signature contains a link to yours

via Shannon on PierceMattie.com

How To Target Source Companies

In honour of Ami G's first posting one year ago.

Summary: See who else is looking for people in the target field and recruit the people they already have.

1. Go to Indeed.com and search the title you're trying to fill.

2. A list of job postings is going to come up. Make a list of the companies looking for similar people.

3. These companies probably already have a team of these guys and want to add one more. Call them companies and ask for the department and start recruiting.

Source: Amitai Givertz' Recruitomtic Blog. One year old June 6, 2007.

Papa John's Pointers

He's the Recruitosphere's main filter blogger now.

Filter blogging = surfing the net for interesting articles and supplying a link for your friends. I like Papa John Sumser's filter blogging on Recruting.com. That's what I go there for.

Is Gen Y Sleazy

Or just free from constraint?

Annie Goodstein complains that a young Joni Mitchell would not be pretty enough to be a pop star today and points us, by comparison, to Avril Lavigne, almost topless and talking dirty in Blender.

Avril is looking good these days but she was just a skinny little kid when she made it big. So, I don't think Goodstein's right.

However, she might still have a point. The sixties had the sexual revolution, mini-skirts and go-go dancers in cages but I don't think pop music and porn started to merge until the late 70s (eg Lee Aaron).

Now rap and girl singer videos are far sexier than any strippers I've ever seen. And rap music is more foul-mouthed and meaner than any music I've ever heard.

So what does that say about Gen Y? Has the relaxation of censorship merely freed them to say and do what earlier generations merely felt. Or are they different?

Make Fast Decisions, Date Fast Girls

Laurence Larry Haughton Live.

Speed is the little guy's ace in the hole. Big companies are bureaucratic. They kill initiative and momentum. And you can kill them.

FREE 60 minute Microsoft LiveMeeting:
May 29 9:00 AM Pacific Daylight Time.

Sign up here. Based on the book

Letter From Australia

From Steve Kempton, The Asia Pacific Headhunter.

I just listened to some of your counter-offer show and it was mostly you asking questions about you. That goes completely against my motto for all of my conversations, which is to bring the conversation back to being about me.

Perhaps [when I come on] we could talk about loser candidates, or how to game a job interview or why companies hate self-employed people who try to return to the workforce, or why they hate old people or why they hate people from outside their industry.

Or why that's all lies, that really they just won't hire through a Recruiter anyone from "outside the box". Theres some food for thought, lets talk again in a month.

BTW, I'm convinced you're a thought leader.

Cheers,
Steven

Young Career Expert

Gets new URL.

Al Levit: only in her 20's and a Career Expert already.
Book: They Don’t Teach Corporate in College
Blog: Water Cooler Wisdom

Toronto's Downhill Slide

Canadians led astray by Great Satan.

A fourteen year old boy was shot dead at a school in Toronto last week. The mayor and others immediately blamed the killing on guns coming in from the United States.

That's an odd thing to say because the majority of Torontonians have no interest in shooting people in the street no matter how many guns those awful Americans send our way.

The gun problem is, by and large, limited to groups of young guys in social housing who participate in an outlaw gun culture.

That culture, however, is not considered to be their creation. It stems from a lack of funding for social programs and, of course, the US of A.

Note: The city's most troubled neighbourhoods are Jane-Finch, Malvern, Flemingdon Park and Crescent Town.