Recruiting Animal

Recruiting, Propaganda and Persuasion

Last week, Jerry Jerry Albright and I were talking about recruiting and propaganda. This, in essence, is what he said.

The Average Recruiter is like a bore at a party. He talks you listen.

Average recruiters tell their candidates "This job is great and you're gonna love it."
The candidate is a passive recipient.

A Top Recruiter, however, is like a Svengali. She gets her candidates to buy-in.

After you listen to a top recruiter, you're saying "Where's the kool-aid? This job is great and I'm gonna love it!"

Now, what is Propaganda?

According to wikipedia propaganda is not an impartial presentation of information. No. Propaganda presents information in order to influence opinions and behavior.

"Propaganda often presents facts selectively (thus lying by omission) or gives loaded messages to produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information."

Recruiters don't do that, do they? No, never!

Film: Jerry at work.

Author Withdraws Anti-Animal Posting

The original posting and early comments can be found here . If you copy it and paste it onto a text document the comments become clear.

More heated action, apparently, began on Saturday afternoon and continued for 24 hours but the posting was withdrawn before these remarks could be indexed by the search engines.

Here are some excerpts from Friday night.

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Susan Kang Nam, Twitterbug

Maren Hogan:  I DID NOT EVEN SAY GEN Y ONCE IN THAT POST. YOU ARE SO FREAKIN FULL OF IT!

You know, I find that no matter what I do, people are always criticizing me.

So, sure enough, last January, when I gave out The Recruiting Animal Awards, there were people on hand to say that I just gave awards to all of my friends.

Well, that's not true. It's not true at all. I didn't know all of the winners well, personally. I just watched what they online did and acted accordingly. And you know what? Lots of them didn't even like me.

Take Susan Kang Nam, for example, The Pink Olive Lady. I gave her The Recruiting Animal Award for Twitterbug of the Year. And, yes, she was a fan of mine but she wasn't really my friend. I barely knew her and, in fact, she didn't take to me at first because she wasn't into nicknames.

No, I gave her the award because I could see that she was a hyperactive networker and Twitter appeared to be her favourite means of communication.

Back in January she had over 3000 followers. Maren Hogan, my Social Media Rookie of the Year, had around 1700 at the time and I hadn't yet broken 1000. And, you know what? I'm very active on Twitter and it's hard to generate followers so I was impressed.

I also noticed that she seemed to be keeping up an active correspondence with a wide range of people. I'm only interested in recruiters, myself, but in December I got this message on Twitter from someone who wasn't a recruiter in any way, shape or form. He wasn't even in HR.

@pinkolivelady tells me you are an awesome freak, so I followed you :-)

It was from Brian Carter. He's thinks he's a comedian. So what was she talking to him for? I don't know. Susan runs a Career Club so maybe he was looking for a job. But probably not. She just likes connecting with people. Why I don't know, but she does.

And she might seem a bit frothy in 140 characters because she's always taking time to wish you the best but I've had a few conversations with her recently via email and the phone and she struck me as someone who is very capable of looking at social networking opportunities with the cold eye of reason.

So, she's built a posse, she works it well and she tries to turn the members on to eachother. I think I made a decent choice.

Where to find her:  Twitter, Linkedin, Google, Salty Legs

PS: Susan has over 5000 followers now. That's a lot to handle and I'm curious to see how she manages such a large network in the future

PPS: Way back when, she sent me an invitation to blitztime.com. It's a good speed networking tool I hadn't heard of until then and it's worth checking out.