Yogesh Kumar Global Talent Sourcing & Employment Branding Specialist

How does confidence relate to sourcing? I am referring to the entire process of sourcing for any position you work on. How many times do the following questions hit your mind before starting to source candidates for a requisition? How will I fill this requisition, what are my sources, what are the channels I can get help from, will my job postings bring great results with candidate applications – and if not, then what kind of impression will it deliver to my recruiters, am I choosing the right source in the beginning, and many more.

Being a sourcing professional you are actually a person who becomes the face of an organization/client and then jumps on to the market with his weapons (sourcing tools).

Where does confidence come from? It comes from the entire sourcing cycle you are following to kill/fill a requisition, and it is also very important that you know your sourcing cycle very well. Improving it continuously is another key to be confident.

Everybody has different strategies and different questions (especially those mentioned on the list above) when they run through their sourcing cycle.

Let’s now start solving the questions above and pedal the sourcing cycle which will help us generate confidence.

The sourcer starts with a requisition with the first few steps of going to job boards and posting a requisition to the major channels like LinkedIn, Monster, Facebook, Twitter, and other powerful resources. This generates the following sourcing cycle:

Resume search on Job Boards>>>Posting the Job on web channels>>> Waiting for response from the postings/paid postings & Not being confident!

The only thing missing here is the confidence and I have no doubt that even this cycle will bring results. However, I am not too sure about the confidence piece. Everyone follows the job postings, they run searches on job boards, etc. However, are we actually in a position to think of a perfect sourcing cycle which will surely bring the confidence in advance to fill a position?

It only comes when you have been improving your sourcing strategies (sourcing cycle), prioritizing tasks and gaining knowledge about 95% of the sources in advance..

I have been talking to sourcing professionals, taking their suggestions and thoughts from different countries, and I find the majority of them are highly focused on a few sourcing channels and they are able to fill their requisitions through this strategy.

How do I build confidence? I am going to share my strategy here which will include 95% of sources to pull the talent from.

For the remaining 5% I have an interesting example to share.

For example, you never found a Java developer who created a profile on the Web. However, you found him solving someone’s query on a technical troubleshooting forum with his contact details. This Java developer comes from that list (5%) of unknown tools/sources which do not feature profiles of people but include some information about them.

Now I  want to highlight my strategy (sourcing cycle) to build confidence.

I am going to take a SharePoint developer requisition and I will work on it now with confidence and with reasons for confidence.

My Sourcing Cycle

■  I will directly hit the job boards. Why? First, I have got access to them (provided by clients/my organization). Second, this is the only database which has one potential thing in every corner and that’s what I need to have, i.e., resumes. I will do the deep search with all specifications to pull out the cream (solid candidates) and will make contact with them to field out their interest. I will also save an alert for this search query to receive the strongest candidates right into my mailbox. First step is done here.

■  I will then use LinkedIn (including X-Ray search) and will make the strongest string to pull the highly relevant profiles. I don’t stop here. The moment I find the profiles, I will not be going to LinkedIn to make contact with these candidates since LinkedIn policies don’t give you full freedom to make contact with people. I will try to locate these candidates again on job boards. I know I made the best string already to pull the cream out of job boards but there is a huge difference between the search syntax used by LinkedIn, Google, and job boards. So, you may not find the same candidate with the strongest string you ran on the job board but you may find them on LinkedIn/Google and other sources with that string.

You may not always find a LinkedIn candidate on a job board, but nothing is better than finding them there and making a contact with them instantly through email/phone to field out their interest. With this step I have covered the most important part of sourcing channels.

■  My next step is always to look for candidates in a database which is usually called “my friend” by me; I am referring to my Application Tracking System.

You have been receiving applications on this tool and this is one of the richest sources. An ATS is one of the best weapons (tools) a sourcer should utilize. Approximately 90% of the candidates who applied for a position went to your ATS database. They are still external candidates. The remaining 10% are the ones you hired and are your internal candidates.

Now the key is you have a mix of talent in this huge pool of 90% candidates which gives you immense opportunities to search for your target, i.e., SharePoint developer. If you have even five good candidates with all the details of their progress from past requisitions, then you are giving the highly qualified candidates to your recruiter with this step.

Also, you never know if these candidates applied to a role earlier which was not relevant for them due to reasons like location, salary expectation, work hours, and many others. Here you have a chance to tag them to the relevant requisition and let them know about the opportunities. You must search the LinkedIn candidates in your ATS as well – never miss a source to get the contact information faster. By completing this step I have a strong pipeline that follows me – I am not following it anymore – and I am confident enough to see the results.

■  Now I will post the job to relevant sites, groups, tools, social media, etc. to make sure that I have penetration of application going on, while I am busy with working on the cream I found from the last three steps. It will keep me confident that the people are applying to the position and I will have something handy in case there is an alarming situation (which should not happen often). Do you see some confidence now? I certainly do.

There are a few more steps here which can be followed to keep your efforts secure and to keep yourself away from the questions we mentioned in the beginning.

1)    Generate referrals through internal employees.

2)    Review all the applications within a time frame of not more than 48 hours since the application was submitted to your requisition.

3)    Manage the response and follow up with the four major tasks you performed above for results.

Give a thought to this strategy while you have a new requisition in front of you and see the confidence you will build to get great results without having too many questions in mind before you hit the Web tools.

Yogesh Kumar is a Sourcing & Social Media Employment Branding professional with about 6 years of total work experience. He has worked with Aon Hewitt for the last 4+ years, supporting the organization with Global Sourcing initiatives and Social Media branding for India.

Yogesh Kumar Global Talent Sourcing & Employment Branding Specialist

Sourcing. In my world, it consists of countless innovations as well as renovations. We are presented with innumerable opportunities to do new things every time we perform a search on the Web. One might find the number of resources, techniques, strategies, and approaches to sourcing to be insurmountable to achieving a certain level of success. However, a sourcing professional does not need to be an expert in everything. One main skill is required to become a successful sourcer: I call it curiosity.

Curiosity is the first thing I would look for in a person if I were to hire him/her onto a sourcing team. A successful sourcer is one who is ALWAYS curious to know new things.

I am not necessarily referring to “new things” in the context of technology, concepts, and so forth, but the things of which one is not aware. Anything I don’t know is new for me, and I am always curious to learn.

As such, I want to share a few things I do each day in my curious pursuit of knowledge while sitting in my “sourcing shop” and playing with various resources. I hope they will provide NEW THINGS for many of you.

Search Engines. Search Engines are great resources, but how do we use them? Do you need to run every role you are recruiting for through a comprehensive Web search?

There are multiple answers to this question, but what it boils down to is that you should “Never miss a source.” You can assume many things, however you can’t be 100% sure if the info you are searching on the Web will be available.

If you look at every source you feel will not get potential results, you find they actually take you towards curiosity which is good and the first need/skill to get into the sourcing game.

In some training sessions I conducted I had the opportunity to learn from my peers how curiosity led them to great success and cracked many challenges they faced. Instead of getting used to those challenges they became determined to crack them. Success was only possible if they searched for something new, a new solution or a new way.

I remember a few great questions asked by my peers during the training sessions that led me to talk to them personally and learn how curiosity became a real reason for success as they sourced.

Here are few facts I got to know from them.

I asked one of my peers about the role curiosity plays in being a sourcer. He wanted to talk about a lot of things. However, overall, he talked about his curiosity to understand the “industry structure” of the competitors he sourced and attracted the talent from for his current employer.

It was certainly impressive that he is always curious to know the structure of his competitors, management of competitors, business practices, locations, people and much more. (You know research doesn’t have any limits.)

He has done lots of research on finding out information about his competitors using Web tools and it helps him by saving tremendous amounts of time to close a position.

He has gained great intelligence from his curiosity. By doing research on his competitors, he now knows the structure, management, hierarchy, and much more about them. For example, if he has to kill a position of “Quality Manager” who is Black Belt certified by his/her current organization only, he would not just hit the Web tools to find the candidate which has keywords like “black belt,” etc. Rather, he would recall instantly the work he has already done, and identify and target the specific organization and person for it. He would play this strategy in various aspects of sourcing and take highly efficient steps with the help of the intelligence he has gained. It actually saves him a tremendous amount of time.

Now I will talk about myself and share one of the smallest stories about curiosity which had the biggest impact. I am also going to share the world’s smallest Boolean string which will bring in resumes (only resumes) without any keywords.

I have always been curious to find talent through search engines, especially Google since it has immense opportunities for learning Boolean scripts. I edit the strings, make a few new ones, and try to play with keywords to bring the most relevant results.

But I have always been curious about how I can implement something in my strings so that it only shows me resumes and I don’t have to exclude too many words like “jobs”, “sample”, “books”, “templates”, “apply”, “send”, and hundreds of more.

Even I wanted to see a string which is as short as “one keyword” & “one Boolean operator”. I know I am talking about something thought to be impossible and that’s what I heard as a feedback from many of my peers, LinkedIn connections, and other sourcing professionals across the globe.

Is it really possible to just put a keyword and a Boolean operator, and nothing else in your string, and it will show only resumes? Yes, we have not added any skills, locations, company, OR anything else.

Just one keyword & one Boolean operator.

I am assuming that now you are most curious to know if it is really possible…

Please go ahead and type one of the following “world’s shortest Boolean string” to see only resumes without any keywords and without excluding even a single keyword.

Here we go:

Inurl:resume.docx

Inurl:resume.doc

Inurl:resume.pdf

Inurl:resume.rtf

I call them “magical strings.”

Yogesh Kumar is a Sourcing & Social Media Employment Branding professional with about 6 years of total work experience. He has worked with Aon Hewitt for the last 4+ years, supporting the organization with Global Sourcing initiatives and Social Media branding for India.

Carolyn Hughes, VP of People, Simply Hired

Finding someone to just fill a seat at your company isn’t hard. But finding great people—the ones who fit with your culture, who share your vision, who can make immediate and lasting contributions—can be very difficult. This is true for small and large companies, as the right people can transform any organization.

Here are 3 ways you can better source and hire truly great people for your company.

1. Create a Better Workplace

Before you even think about placing a job listing or sitting down to interview candidates, consider why someone would want to come to work for you. Be honest about your company’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as the advantages of becoming a member of your company’s team. Is it your organization’s flexible, creative atmosphere? The opportunity to do cutting-edge work? The ability to be a major contributor to the community?

You want to attract people who believe in your mission and will come to work every day excited about what they do. Believing in a company’s mission and liking one’s coworkers are the two main reasons people stay. And of course, a solid benefits package and competitive salary can also help to attract and retain great employees.

But if you have a negative atmosphere and unhappy employees, even the highest-paying salaries won’t keep them around for long. By creating a positive workplace, you can help ensure that your employees stay with the company and that you don’t lose great people to another employer.

2. Fish for Candidates

Where does your current applicant pool come from? Does it come from a major job board or Craigslist postings? If you’re only relying on one or two sources, you need to branch out. When you post on just a few sites, you severely limit the number of candidates who see your jobs. By posting in multiple places, it’s more likely that your job will surface on a job search engine, significantly increasing the visibility of your jobs.

But don’t limit yourself to active job seekers. Take a moment to think: who are three people you know that you’d hire in a heartbeat (regardless of their availability)? What is it about these people and their skills that are so valuable? Now ask your colleagues, family members, friends, business suppliers and partners the same question. Make a list of these talented people and compile their contact information. Are any looking to find a new position, change industries or know of anyone else who would be a good fit for your company? Mine your personal and professional relationships when looking for new employees; don’t wait for candidates to come to you.

The secret to successful recruiting is all about networking—and maintaining an active network.

3. Try Before You Buy

For hiring managers with limited resources, employing contract workers can be a cost-effective way of searching for ideal employees. Working with contractors allows you to staff up when you need it—whether you’re introducing a new product or entering your busy season—and then immediately downsize when you’re finished. Additionally, it’s easy to convert a contractor to full-time employee if both you and the contractor feel that there’s a mutual fit.

If you can’t afford to hire contract workers or just have an assignment or two to complete, consider project-based hiring sites like oDesk or Elance where the talent places bids on your project. You can review their credentials and choose a contractor whose bid and experience best match your budget.

Learn More

This article was adapted from SimplyHired.com’s “10 Tips for Hiring Great People.” For more ways to effectively find and hire great candidates, read the full piece.

What Do You Think?

How do you make sure you’re making a strong hire and not just filling a seat? Share your best tips for other hiring managers and recruiters to learn from.

Barbara Bruno, President, Good as Gold Training, HRSearch Inc.

You are judged on your ability to identify and attract top talent for your hiring authorities. The job market is turning from client driven to candidate driven which means the competition for top talent will continue to escalate.

It is important that you utilize all resources including referrals, social networks, website postings, job postings, networking, your database and leads. Often the most qualified candidates are the passive candidates. These candidates are currently working, have a successful track record, but would consider a move for the right opportunity.

For the past two years, many employees have stayed with their current employer because of economic conditions. They did not want to be the last one hired and therefore possibly the first one out, if cutbacks occurred. That has all changed and these individuals are just waiting to hear from you. Many of them have “quit and stayed” and don’t know how to conduct their own search.  These employed candidates are often the caliber your hiring authorities want to hire.

If you establish a reputation that you only represent the best, you will attract top talent. You need to set yourself up as an expert who represents outstanding opportunities. Write articles for trade publications, speak at association events and consider writing a blog. Job seekers will also read your professional profile on LinkedIn and other niche social media sites. Take time to build the recommendations you receive from job seekers you have placed. People like to buy on the approval of others which is why testimonials and recommendations are so important.

The application forms you’ve received are filled with sourcing leads. The supervisors and co-workers listed are all prospective candidates. If you want to double your candidate flow today, call the last, not the current employer of the candidates you have interviewed. You then ask for your candidate and as a result you will be referred to their replacement, who has the same experience!

Your hiring authorities do not want to hire the best person in your database. They want to hire the best person available which is why sourcing qualified candidates separates ordinary recruiters from those that provide extraordinary results. It is the little extra ability to source that makes the difference.

Barb Bruno, CPC, CTS is one of the most trusted experts, speakers and trainers in the Staffing and Recruiting Profession. Barb has spent several years helping Owners, Managers and Recruiters increase their Sales, Profits and Income with her top-rated web based training Course, the Top Producer Tutor. The Tutor jump starts new hires and takes experienced recruiters to higher levels of production. In addition to the class, Tutor clients hear from Barb weekly during the Tutor Training Webinars and bi-weekly during her live coaching calls! Contact Barb to schedule a free demo of the Tutor, call 219.663.9609 or Email support@staffingandrecruiting.com.

Jill Gengler, Vice President of Business Development, AccuSearch, Inc.

Sourcing talent these days is a monumental task.  According to the U.S. Labor Department’s latest monthly job openings and turnover survey, for every open position there are 5 potential applicants – a small improvement from the previous month’s survey.  However; surely this number doesn’t include the pool of currently employed (and underemployed) adults who are so stressed by the possible loss of their job due to economic conditions they can’t imagine tempting fate by applying for an open and potentially better position, with a new employer. 

In spite of accounting for fourteen million out of work Americans, the U.S. Labor Department’s survey seems markedly positive… only an average of 5 applicants per opening?  I have heard stories of enormous numbers of resumes and online applications received by recruiters in my network for each and every open position – literally hundreds of applicants for a single office administration, customer service and manual labor opening. 

Whether you are seeing 5 applicants or hundreds, the challenge of divining the most qualified applicant remains daunting. And, of course, once you find the employee whose skills and experience match your needs, most positions will require at least some level of formal, selective screening. If you are not already doing so, your organization could benefit significantly by considering a combined screening solution set to assist you finding the sharpest needle in the haystack of needles…  By a combined screening solutions set, I mean the consistent use of a number of screening components and tools.

A combined screening solution set may contain the following components – not necessarily in this order. The earlier red flags are identified in the process, the better the organization will be able to minimize the expenses and resource costs associated with the other elements of the recruiting cycle:

1)      Applicant Resume/Application Review

2)      Social Media Searches (LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.)

3)      Integrity/Personality Testing

4)      Skills Testing

5)      One-on-one Interview(s)

6)      Background Screens

-          I-9 e-Verify
-          Criminal History
-          Driver History
-          Education Verification
-          Employment Verifications
-          Reference Checks
-          Credit Report
-          Drug Screening 

Items (1) and (2) are standard recruiting practices, but keep in mind that social media like LinkedIn and Facebook should be considered less than authoritative sources of information. 

In regard to (3) Integrity/Personality Testing, it is certain that organizations that use a combination of integrity/personality testing tools and (4) Skills Testing can identify those applicants who may lack impulse control, abuse substances, have excessive absenteeism, have a tendency toward hostile acts, as well as those who may not have the skill levels necessary to successfully perform the job’s tasks. 

While background screens will identify adverse information on an individual—felonies or misdemeanors, for example—a typical background screen report will not include adverse behaviors for which the individual has never been caught or convicted.  This is where integrity/personality tests provide their true value. In addition, many integrity/personality tests include customer service and work-place attitude modules which can provide a very reliable forecast of the applicant’s ability to perform interpersonal work in a professional manner. 

Component (5), one-on-one Interview(s) with those whose application, Integrity/Personality Test and Skills Test(s) raise no red flags, should narrow the applicant pool to a point at which investing in the final,  and often most costly and time intensive tool, (6)Background Screens, is cost-effective and prudent. 

A thorough pre-employment background screening search package should include reviews of criminal and sex offender reports on the applicant, along with other searches and verifications appropriate to the position being filled, such as Employment Verifications, Education Verifications, Driver Report and/or a Nationwide Search for Wants and Warrants and I-9 e-Verify (after the offer has been made.) Lastly, your organization may implement a drug screening program which can include traditional urinalysis and or instant drug testing—administered fairly, consistently and in compliance with federal and your specific state laws. 

Obviously securing a partner or partners who can facilitate the Integrity/Personality Testing, Skills Testing and Background Screening Services components of your combined screening solution set may also present a challenge.  However, many of the members of the National Association of Professional Background Screeners (www.NAPBS.org) offer each of these components.  The Society of Human Resources Management (www.SHRM.org) hosts the “HR Talk” community and the ERE.net communities  (public forums) where members share HR-related information and experience with other members – both are excellent resources for obtaining frank feedback and recommendations for service providers.   You also have the Advisory Members and Thought Leadership Authors of RecruitingTrends to assist you by recommending potential partners or even their own organizations to address some or all of the components listed. Of course if you are attending the onrec Expo 2010 in Chicago in September – you can walk around and talk to the exhibitors, face to face! 

At the end of the day, organizations whose combined screening solution set includes the components detailed above, are able to see positive results in short order, including a dramatic reduction in time-to-hire and cost-to-hire.  The end-employer should also experience a substantial reduction in absenteeism, turnover and employee theft – and in the long run, a significantly higher performing workforce. 

This information is not intended to constitute legal advice and should not be relied upon in lieu of consultation with your organization’s appropriate legal advisors.  

Jill Gengler
Vice President
AccuSearch, Inc.
602-759-8626
jgengler@accusearch.biz

Shally Steckerl, Executive Vice President, Arbita

Is LinkedIn Actively Preventing Recruiters from Searching Profiles via Google?

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.

Lately, however, there’s plenty of Web chatter about what recruiters perceive to be LinkedIn’s effort to block searches of public LinkedIn profiles using the site: command.  While these rumors have been around in different forms for many years, recent changes to LinkedIn’s website architecture seem to have strongly reinforced this perception.

Actually this couldn’t be farther from the truth.

The fact is that today it is even easier than ever to find people’s public LinkedIn profiles. Part of the reason for this rumor is that as recruiters we tend to overthink things, and suspect we are being actively blocked, because we are so accustomed to facing and overcoming obstacles.

With LinkedIn’s new top level domain structure, profiles from countries other than the US are extremely easy to identify, and you don’t even have to use much advanced syntax. For example, if you want Chartered Accountants (like a CPA) in the UK, all you need for a search engine string is:

site:uk.linkedin.com “chartered accountant”

Did you notice that your results are almost exclusively profiles?  That’s right:  no job postings, Answers pages, company info, or other distracting results, just good old profiles. Even better, you don’t need any complex logical disjunctions and nested Boolean syntax like (inurl:pub OR inurl:in). What if you want your Chartered Accountants in Canada? Just switch from site:uk.linkedin.com to site:ca.linkedin.com and voila!  This works for 97 different countries!

Unfortunately, this simple and elegant search won’t work for US profiles because all the Answers, Company Pages, Groups, Jobs, Events and other content published on LinkedIn resides under the root domain, linkedin.com, along with all the US profiles.

So what about all the complaints that the “usual” search strings no longer work? Rumor has it that LinkedIn has somehow changed their website structure to prevent using our familiar old “site:linkedin.com (inurl:pub OR inurl:in) -intitle:directory -inurl:jobs” search string variations.

This rumor is also untrue.

LinkedIn is continuously experimenting with optimizing their indexing and improving search results. This is in everyone’s best interest and it is not being done to prevent us from finding public profiles but rather to speed up profile search. LinkedIn wants profiles to be publicly searchable, as this builds traffic to their website, which immensely benefits them.

In the past, with fewer profiles and less content on LinkedIn, we could just Google a few words and get results.  As a side effect of both LinkedIn’s search optimization efforts and the sheer volume of content, our searches must be very specific in order to get good results. There are now at least 135 million pages on the linkedin.com website which are accessible from search engine queries, but only about 25 million of those are profiles. This translates to roughly 30% of LinkedIn’s 76 million profiles, though in some industries and/or geographies, the percentage of public profiles is higher.

Our trusty old search strings don’t work so well simply because there’s too much content. Using “inurl:pub” brings back many irrelevant results with the word Pub in the name such as Pub Goers Inc, Kegler’s Pub & Pin, Pub Tours Party Bus, and so on. Therefore to use inurl:pub you must also use -intitle:pub so you can negate that effect. A similar thing happens when you use inurl:in in your search. So now the simple (inurl:pub OR inurl:in) becomes (inurl:pub OR inurl:in) -intitle:pub -intitle:in. Wow. But it doesn’t even end there!

You may have seen some suggestions to utilize the negative search term -inurl:dir to tighten up your results. While that may be a somewhat adequate technique for now, adding more negative search terms (the – is the same as the AND NOT Boolean) is just too complicated to be a real long term solution to our search problem. Each time LinkedIn changes their directory structure with things like Directory and Recently Updated Profiles, or adds features like Jobs, Events, Answers, Groups, and Company Pages, we’ll have to invent some new negative search term to eliminate those non-profiles from our results. Then we end up with something that looks too much like rocket science:

(inurl:pub OR inurl:in) -intitle:pub -intitle:in -intitle:answers -intitle:updated -intitle:blog -inurl:companies -intitle:directory -inurl:jobs -intitle:profile -inurl:dir

Instead of overcomplicating our search, why not just ask for exactly what we need?

Every public profile contains the phrase “Public profile powered by.” You will see it on the right hand side of someone’s profile, next to the familiar LinkedIn logo. If you search for that phrase you will see only profiles. The other types of content such as Answers, Groups, Jobs, Events and Company Pages won’t show up. The best part is you don’t even need any advanced syntax or field search commands such as site: for this to work.

Go ahead, give it a try! Start here: “Public profile powered by” then add some keywords like a company name and job title, even a location using the “Greater Atlanta Area” format. Try this example: http://j.mp/9pgTeM.  Note that you must turn off site compression in order to see the full set of results. Site compression is when you see this at the end of Google or Yahoo search results:

“In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 8 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.”

Clicking on that link turns off site compression and your results will expand, revealing the full power of this simple yet highly effective search. You can always manually turn off site compression on any search by appending &filter=0 to the end of a Google search result URL after you run a query, or appending &dups=1 to a Yahoo search result URL. The links above already have that included for your convenience, so save them as bookmarks/favorites in your browser and you can just add requisition/profile-specific keywords.

If you are curious to test the difference out for yourself, use the exact same criteria from your example above but instead of using our new simple solution, use the old school “long string” one:

site:linkedin.com (inurl:pub OR inurl:in) -intitle:pub -intitle:in -intitle:answers -intitle:updated -intitle:blog -inurl:companies -intitle:directory -inurl:jobs -intitle:profile -inurl:dir

and you will find nearly identical results.

However, next time LinkedIn adds a feature or changes their directory structure, then what happens?  The more complex search technique will stop working, or it may just become less effective and thus waste your time.

So go with the easier, simpler, more elegant solutions.  Those are the ones that typically have the longest-lasting value.  Ping me or comment below to tell me what you think of the “new” LinkedIn searches.

Contact me via: Text/SMS | IM-MSN | Skype | Twitter
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Read my:  Blog | Book | Resume

E-Mail: shally@arbita.net

Barbara Poole, Founder & President, Employaid, Inc.

A couple of weeks ago, I was providing some interview coaching for an Ivy college Junior. He is searching for a summer internship on where else? Wall Street. This isn’t exactly open season for hiring in Financial Services, so he has to have every edge over the competition. After explaining that interviewers are often tough, I began a series of questions that “searched for limitations”. One of them, “Tell me about a time when you disagreed with your boss” led to a response I hadn’t been counting on. The young man relayed a story about working in a running store. He noticed that people were asking for a certain model of shoe, and that it was also very popular with his track buddies. The young man approached the manager of the store, and told him that he should start to carry the wonderful shoe. He was not prepared for the manager’s push back, and was shocked when what he was asking for was out of the question. Undeterred, he went back to the counter, and wrote down the brand, model and price of the shoe, and returned to talk with the manager. “What did you do then?” I asked. He told the manager to give the note to his boss, since he could not approve buying the new model himself. Whoa! This is a living example of Gen Y attitude in the workplace. Who among our Baby Boomers and Gen X employees would have boldly stepped “out of line” to respond in the same way?

The interaction with the college kid got me thinking once again (see my September column) about behavioral interviewing vs. attribute interviewing. The once structured interview technique has to be supplemented by attribute discovery. For what we have happening is the entrance of Gen Y into a workforce that have far different values than these entry level folks. And to take it one step further, interviewers are playing the lottery if senior management in the organization does not provide the productivity coaching and follow-up to support generational differences in their organizations. There are a few ways to stack the deck for success when sourcing and recruiting multi-generational candidates.

Doug Berg, Founder & Chief Innovation Officer, Jobs2Web, Inc.

What You Need To Know About Automating Your Social Recruiting Strategy

My hunch is that most companies have started to use social networks for their recruiting, but it is most likely happening more by accident than strategy. Recruiters are setting up their own personal profiles – rather than corporate accounts – and manually building their contact networks using the social sites to source candidates and market their jobs by tweeting, wall posting, or sending group updates with each job requisition.

While many companies allow their recruiters to take this approach, there are some problems that should be addressed before letting it go too far. Most importantly, you have to ask yourself, is this is a scalable approach to social network recruiting?

Social network recruiting can be a time consuming activity for recruiters when done manually, but it can be automated if configured correctly. There are two primary activities that recruiters are involved with when doing social network recruiting:

Relationship/Network Building Mode
This is the initiative of finding people of interest and trying to add them to your network (linking, following, etc.) In this mode, recruiters are actively trying to build the network of people they have access to and are connected with in order to communicate with them when/if any matching jobs come up.

Job Marketing Campaign Mode
This is when recruiters have a particular job to fill and are trying to identify and reach the people in their social networks by sending messages and inquiring if they are interested (or if any of their friends are interested) in the specific positions.

The relationship/network building mode will require some level of ongoing involvement from recruiters, but can be augmented by creating social network pages, groups or accounts which will self-attract people to join them.

Moving From People-Oriented To Company-Oriented Social Recruiting

One thing anyone who is building a social recruiting strategy should know is that nearly all of the major social networks have the ability for companies to establish company owned assets/channels on the social network. This would move them away from individual recruiter accounts as the primary method to conduct recruiting on social networks. For example, in Facebook a company can build their own corporate pages, which allows them to attract "fans" of their company. These could be pages like "ABC Company Accounting Careers" or "ABC Technology Jobs," etc. Groups in LinkedIn can be set up in a similar way, and when creating Twitter accounts, different accounts can be set up as owned by the company versus owned by the individual recruiters.

In other words, instead of "Jane Recruiter" having a personal account and hoping people want to find her and link to her, people can instead search for, find or join a more targeted group such as "Game Developers" on LinkedIn or "Game Designers" on Facebook. On some networks candidates will even be suggested to join these groups based on keywords in their profiles that match up with the groups. This puts the social networks into recruiting mode and helps to automate the growth of these networks online. Most importantly, by creating logical company-owned groups/accounts, employers now have a company owned asset that helps them to organize social contacts within the organization versus a personal account that can walk out the door when any recruiter leaves the company.

Automating Your Social Recruiting

The campaign mode is automated when employers feed jobs and other content that is readily available into social channels by using an RSS feed as the delivery tool into the social channels. Most of the social networks allow you to link an RSS feed into them so that employers can automate the flow of targeted jobs into their social channels, eliminating the need for recruiters to spend all day posting and tweeting jobs. Unfortunately, most of the major ATS systems don’t provide a configurable RSS feed of company jobs, so employers seek to work with companies like Jobs2Web that can provide organizations with an RSS feed of the company’s jobs.

Once in place, these automated channels help employers reach people in the network automatically and direct interested candidates directly back to the company career site and ATS system when they are interested in applying for jobs. This is not unlike what a recruiter would do when/if they followed this process with any candidate via their personal network. However, by automating this process, organizations not only improve recruiter efficiency, but they also protect their social assets online. By using the right platform, employers can then measure all of these social channels through their hiring process to determine what channels are most productive online.

Without this automation, most companies will be adding these social recruiting responsibilities to their recruiters, which will pull down their productivity, or they will have to look at hiring "twinterns" to tweet jobs, and/or add other recruiting administrative headcounts, which can get very expensive over time. By automating social recruiting, organizations can answer a resounding "yes" to the question: "is your social recruiting strategy scalable, effective and able to translate to a positive return on investment?"

Jill Gengler, Vice President of Business Development, AccuSearch, Inc.

You may, or may not know that the adoption of an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) provides the means to alleviate unnecessary expenses currently embedded within the hiring process. An ATS can also greatly streamline the hiring process, multiply the efforts of a small recruitment staff, and give valuable performance feedback to managers.

Yet, with the many favorable reasons for adopting an ATS, there remain many companies which have not yet taken this step. Several reasons are offered for why they have not yet adopted an ATS, with the leading 3 reasons as follows:

1. An ATS is expensive: While this was once a very valid reason for many small and medium-sized businesses this is no longer the case today. ATS vendors have realized that one size does not fit all and have thus developed several versions (or tiers) of service in their ATS to address the unique needs of smaller organizations, as well as provide a growth path as these companies scale their operations.
2. Integration costs: This also was true in the past, however ATS vendors have worked together to create and support industry standards like HR-XML, permitting software systems and packages to exchange information more easily, thus reducing integration costs.
3. Hiring needs are cyclical; ATS costs don’t coincide with business needs: Fortunately, a number of ATS vendors have enhanced their product/service offering so that they can offer their services on a basis other than an annual subscription. There are now a number of vendors who can fill your business needs on per-use basis, thus giving you the freedom to use the ATS when you need it, without worrying about subscription costs when you don’t.

With the variety of service levels, payment options and quality of Applicant Tracking Systems available, you too could take advantage of the benefits of recruiting via an ATS.

Consider this:

• Job applicants today use job portal sites such as Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com heavily in their job searches. Having an ATS that interoperates with job portals helps to put your organization in a better position, when competing for top talent.
• Cost per hire drops immediately and significantly. According to www.workforce.com, the pre-ATS total cost-to-hire for trained employees averages just over $10,000. The post-deployment average cost can drop by as much as 60%! Even in good times, savings like that are sure to make even the most difficult CFO happy.
• Not only are cost savings significant, but so are the time savings. On average, most ATS users shave two weeks off the process – thereby making recruitment and on-boarding much more efficient.
• Many of the new ATS’s are web-based or Software as a Service (SaaS) applications which are easy-to-use and do not require any software installation or internal IT support. Web-based ATS’s can also scale with a company as it grows, adding more capacity and features proportionate the needs of a changing organization.
• HR professionals love the streamlined process. The workflow of the hiring process is modeled by the ATS and can schedule tasks, auto-generate email and postal mail, as well as pop-up reminders when tasks are due. These features allow HR professionals to focus on value-adding activities they alone can perform, rather than the mundane time-killing tasks before the ATS.

Explore and discover what an ATS can do for your organization. Typical ATS core features include:

1. Corporate Career Center
2. Proprietary Resume Databank
3. Job Requisition and Posting
4. Integrated Add-On Modules (Integrity Testing, Background Screening)
5. Affirmative Action Compliant
6. Automated Recruiting
7. Effective tools for On-boarding New Hires
8. Track and Report for Superior Performance
9. Reach Passive Candidates
10. Streamline the Hiring Process

Organizations that adopt an ATS are reporting cost savings of 60%, time savings of 66%, and a noticeable improvement in the quality of candidates entering the system, which in and of itself may justify the decision to implement an ATS.

With over 80 ATS on the market, selecting the right one for your company may seem like a monumental task. However, resources like CareerBuilder regularly publish profiles and advice on ATS options. A recent “ATS Hot List” published by Workforce Magazine is available at http://www.workforce.com/tools/hot_list/080714_hotlist_app.pdf.

As the economy stabilizes and we prepare for the coming upturn in the economy, smart companies are now laying the foundation today for their hiring plans tomorrow.

Look into it!

Rodney Abstone, Legal Executive and Staffing Consultant, Chicago Legal Search, Ltd.

Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass…
It’s about learning to dance in the rain.” — Vivian Greene

Americans remain apprehensive about the economy, their job prospects and their incomes, even as a recovery is taking shape. We as a country are going through a financial crisis, which is testing us in many ways. Although, individually, we are being and will be affected to different degrees and in various ways, as a country, we are learning how to deal with these challenging times.

It is natural for us as recruiters to be concerned about our future when we see the economy struggling and people getting laid off. Anger is building in many sectors of society. Like many others, you may be feeling fear, anxiety, anger and even hate towards those you believe are responsible for what has happened. However, these emotions will not help you deal with the situation effectively.

Each of us desires the kind of comfort that will keep us steady in times of crisis, regardless of the circumstances. The process of remaining steady in challenging times begins with our outlook. It is important to remember that during difficult moments, we are not powerless. Rather, the contrary is true. We have the power to overcome many of the challenges we face. All too often, we feel so overwhelmed by negative possibilities that we fail to see opportunities before us. It is imperative to maintain an optimistic attitude during arduous times like these.

Arming yourself with practical tools for survival has become more necessary than ever. An important factor in determining your long-term survival is having a keen understanding of market activity. This year, small and mid-size law firms have been busier than larger ones. Some of these firms are litigation boutiques whose business has increased as a result of litigation related to failed companies and financial institutions or disgruntled investors. Securities and white-collar litigation also has begun to improve. Labor and employment litigation has increased since more companies have implemented layoffs. IP litigation also has remained a strong practice area in most markets. Bankruptcy and reorganization practices have thrived as a result of the economic impact on companies. Additionally, many smaller firms are busier because corporate clients have sought (or demanded) lower fees. Undoubtedly, this trend is likely to continue in the foreseeable future.

Employers of all sizes are taking longer to make hiring decisions. Consequently, you will have to work twice as hard to recruit for those positions where critical shortages remain even in a negative economic cycle. It is a tough job market out there – probably one you never thought you would encounter in your career. Opportunities are scarce in this economic climate and this is the new reality. But we are going to be okay as long as we do not talk ourselves out of future success.

The current economic trend needs to be kept in perspective. This recession is not “The Great Depression” that some of our parents experienced. Comparatively, what we are going through today is a walk in the park. We are still living in some of the very best economic times in the history of the world. They may not be as good as they were a few years ago, but they certainly are not as bad as they were many years ago.

Recruiting seems to attract people who thrive on competition. This recession is your chance to see how much you can grow. With that said…now is the time to outdress, outspeak and outsmart your competition.

And most importantly…it’s time to learn to dance!