Recruiting Animal

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Guericke on The Animal Show

Jaxtr
- 100 free minutes per month
- callers don't see your number; they just press a button
- you can direct the incoming calls to your cell phone, work or home numbers
- you can set it to send all incoming calls to an online voice mail.
- you can block certain calls
- you can let specific callers or all callers get directly through to you
- you can put your jaxtr link into one of the web site links in your LinkedIn profile
- The Marketing Headhunter is putting Jaxtr.com into his email auto-responses
- The Recruiting Animal attests to the good quality of Jaxtr's sound

Personal Profile
Konstantin Guericke doesn't like to be called Tin. He doesn't know if Tin Tin's real name was Konstantin. He lives in California but doesn't know any movie stars or Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger. He doesn't attribute his success to his astrological sign. He believes that if you are persistent, you increase your opportunity to have luck on your side. He also believes that being nice to other people helps you be successful.

In terms of social networks, he favours a limited number of solid relationships over a large number of shallow contacts. He was part of a number of startups before LinkedIn. He tires of things that are well-established and likes to move into the unknown as long as it seems like a good bet.

Konstantin recommends this article for background on Jaxtr

Twitter Can Market Jobs

Turn your key candidate pool into Twitter Followers. Then tweet the entire group with alerts about jobs. All you need is a title, maybe a location and company and a tinyurl link to a full description online. Why not use email? Good question.

Source.

Click-to-Call Buttons for Recruiters

Konstantin Guericke on The Recruiting Animal Show.

Wed March 28, 1:30 EST
Special Guest: Konstantin Guericke
www.recruitinganimalshow.com
Call in and talk: (646) 652-2754

Jaxtr is an online click-to-call service. You put a link on your site. A visitor clicks it to call you free of charge no matter where you are. Both parties use their own phones.

The CEO of Jaxtr is Linked-In co-founder, Konnie Guericke. I asked him to join The Recruiting Animal Show to discuss the automation of recruiting but he said no. He'll come but he only wants to talk about jaxtr.

"Konnie, " I said, "I'm sure that jaxtr is super-cool but, please forgive me, it doesn't have any relevance for recruiters. Free long distance, so what? Long distance is already cheap enough. We don't hesitate to use it on even the most casual calls.

"Animal," said Konnie. "You are great. And everyone knows it. But where on earth is your vision? You don't get it! So, I've got to come on the show and tell you."

"I don't get it?" I said. "Where is my vision? I'll have you know that I'm the guy who certifies vision. That's right. Pretty soon, you'll be able to come to The Recruiting Animal and apply for a VTL Certificate that will show everyone that you are a true Visionary-Thought-Leader. I mean, so many people are claiming to be visionaries that there has to be some kind of proof that they are the real thing. And who better to judge than me -- and $50 ?

In the end, I gave in to Konnie, He's on the show this week telling us about jaxtr. He even made me change the time to 1:30 EST to accomodate the West Coasters. (Let's see how many call in).

Practical Blogging has a good little intro to Jaxtr and a podcast interview with Konnie. Listen to it now and if you have any questions, call the show.

More on Click-to-Call. See Newspaper adds Click-to-call to Classifieds

Blindsided By Sumser

On The Recruiting Animal Show

John Sumser surprised me. We were supposed to be talking about the effect of technology on recruiting. And we did. But according to him, that effect is rather paradoxical.

For he believes the technology that supports personal networking will allow hiring managers to bypass recruiting on the net. Inotherwords, the key technology will be anti-technology. Let me explain.

According to John, people have never been easier to find. To apply for a job, you don't need to put your resume in an envelope and stamp it. All you have to do to is press a button and, as a result, many people do.

I protested that these people are pizza drivers applying for CA jobs but John says no, they're not pizza drivers. They're ordinary accountants and engineers. But there are too many of them to sort through. So what is a hiring manager going to do? Ignore the open channel to his door and cultivate his own talent pipeline, his own talent pool, instead.

And, he adds, Gen Y managers are perfectly cut out to do this. They have been raised from early years in school to work on teams. So they know how to pick the people they prefer. And they have a stronger sense of collegiality than the people of the past. So they like to stay in touch. And technology has made it very easy for them to do so.

John even suggested that a manager can offer financial incentives to the people in his network and, I assume that he meant by this, opportunities for contract work or moonlighting.

I should note that John Sullivan has also written about this kind of talent pool so I am not entirely unfamiliar with the idea. And, it seems eminently sensible. But, I don't think too many of the recruiters who called in to speak to John agreed.

"What's a Vice President of Finance supposed to be doing?" asked super-recruiter, Anthony J Meaney, after the show. "Twittering to his friends or watching the fluctations of the German mark? I know what the president of the firm would say." But John might disagree. He said that people are going to be hired in the future to get in touch with their contacts. Inotherwords, networking will be part of the ordinary job.

The Marketing Headhunter, Amitai Givertz and Maureen Sharib were also verbal.

But, unfortunately, John was in his car and when he went under a tunnel we lost him. And for about twenty minutes I didn't know how to get him back on board. Hey, I'm an amateur, what can I say?

(A nod to Larry Laurence Haughton, too, who was waiting patiently for me to call on him instead of butting in).

Animal Show Today at Noon

Will Automation Kill Recruiting?

Wed March 21, Noon EST
Special Guest: Papa John Sumser
www.recruitinganimalshow.com
Call in and talk: (646) 652-2754

Papa John Sumser loves recruiters. Not!

According to him, they only exist to filter out the mass of unwashed humanity that is banging away at the hiring manager's door. Most don't have any skill at finding people beyond crusing Monster.com and they will be swept away by new recruiting technologies which will return recruiting power to the hiring manager where it belongs.

What kind of technology? Papa lists a few of them here. Job boards on popular blogs and various forms of widgets and Lean Staffing. Wow!

See the opinions of others here.

Will Automation Kill Recruiting?

On The Recruiting Animal Show

Wed March 21, Noon EST
Special Guest: Papa John Sumser
www.recruitinganimalshow.com
Call in and talk: (646) 652-2754

Back in January, I asked:
1. Will the expansion of online databases like LinkedIn spell the end of sourcing?
2. Would that limit recruiting to selling publicly listed candidates on jobs?

I have summarized some of the replies:

Double Dubs, SystematicHR:
Recruiting technology has enhanced the way we recruit, but it has not removed recruiting jobs. LinkedIn doesn't replace the act of recruitment. "There is so far no replacement for the intuitive nature of a good interviewer." The qualitative nature of recruiting can't be automated.

Shannon from PowerHires.com:
Automation will handle the menial tasks like reading all your resumes and posting your email address in job postings. Then you can spend your time in higher value activities like interviewing and networking. These will not be automated.

HJ Cummins, Scripps Howard, Eagle-Tribune:
Online systems can post jobs, collect resumes, vet candidates and pick a winner without involving a single human being on the hiring side. The counter-trend, however, is the need of corporations to hire ever-more-specialized employees and professionals. That means recruiters will have to listen very carefully to what a client wants.

Shally Elvis Steckerl, Job Machine:
There are 160 million working Americans but the biggest databases have only a few million leads worldwide.
Even if one single database contained all the leads, someone still would have to sort through them and figure out which ones match the requirements.

Dirty Jimmy Stroud, Microsoft Sourcer:
As soon as the people listed in online databses get tired of being contacted over and overr again by recruiters they will remove their information. Or, severely limit how they are contacted. This might reduce sourcing to looking in hundreds of other places and following up on candidate referrals and networking and everything else we do. "I am not worried."

Harry Joiner, The Marketing Headhunter:
20% third-party recruiting assignments for unspecialized line-level positions will evaporate. Recruiters will fill highly-specialized line-level jobs OR very high-level general management positions. "The days of simply throwing resumes over the fence to the client are coming to an end. Recruiters of all stripes will need to become very sharp business people with a teachable point of view on leadership, marketing, operations, and finance."

St Jimmy Durbin, Durbin Media:
The only way that recruiters need to worry is if the employment process creates a 100% effective solution. Chances of that happening when human beings run an operation? 0%.

Peggy McKee, Medical Sales Recruiter:
Tools cannot replace the recruiter who picks up the phone, asks for the referal, calls the referal, determines the fit and sells the opportunity. Work the jobs that will present the greatest challenge for the HR group and you will never be replaced.

Twitter Is Great

Says Modern Marsupial

Today, the Recruiting Animal
is on Recruiting.com

Twitter Is On A Roll

Twitter is an instant messaging system. You can use a web-based message board, your IM software or mobile phone text messages to let your friends know where you are and what you are doing.

The BusinessPundit says it's good when you are at a trade show or conference and want to stay in touch with other attendees.

Because you can use the web as a Twitter billboard, Jerry Oh! sees it as an alternative to instant messaging which he finds a distraction.

He has links to a number of commentators.

Is it of interest to recruiters? If I was running the ERE or Kennedy conferences, I would promote it there as a useful and fun tool. That's it.

What Is CRM?

A Customer Relationship Management system is like an electronic Rolodex. But it contains more than contact information. It tracks your entire business history with each customer. It can also analyze data to spot customer trends

CRM systems used to be expensive and complicated. But Forrester Research claims that in 2007, companies with fewer than 100 employees will account for more than a third of the CRM market.

Read about the major players here.