Recruiting is not an easy business. While some may argue that it’s simple, that viewpoint is often skewed by the position a recruiter finds him or herself in. For third-party recruiters, the maxim, we find people for jobs holds true and the interaction may stop one to two weeks after the candidate’s first day. Meanwhile the corporate recruiter is not only expected to interface with marketing to create an employment brand but to sort through employee referrals, job board advertisements and a complex legacy system to find the right candidate. But even these examples don’t begin to cover what recruiters all over the world do day in and day out.
Recruiters often like to use the site: command on search engines to find LinkedIn profiles (a method we first described five years ago) because search engines avoid the 100 results per search limit imposed on queries done within LinkedIn’s own Advanced search (for free LinkedIn account users) and because they reveal unblended profiles of people outside your three-degree network (only LinkedIn corporate account holders can view virtually all users), especially handy when you’re sourcing in new areas where you don’t have a strong network.
With all the fires we have to put out daily, is it really surprising we have no time left to build our skills, network for our career path, or plan adequately and be proactive about creating strategies? If we can barely come up for air once a week, then how are we expected to decide which new tools we test or invest in?
