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Busting A Buzzword: Semantic Search

If you’re one of those billion or so people who thinks that Google “knows” what you’re searching for, this may be of interest to you.  Let’s take a search such as “local florist purple lady slippers.”  I might enter that search because I want to buy some Lady Slippers (a rare flower.)  My top results show local florists (none of which mention Lady Slippers but pay a lot for Google Ad Words) and two obscure references to US Forest service website about how to grow these rare flowers, neither of which mention florist.

What Do You Mean?

Apart from the fact that the Google algorithm is heavily influenced by advertising dollars, it’s that some of the words in the search are extremely rare while others are very common, so the model returns documents that have a lot of the common phrase, even if they entirely lack the rare words.   Wouldn’t it be better if I could somehow say, “Hey, regardless of whether there are a thousand mentions of the first topic, I want to see documents that have both topics mentioned and that would have a better chance of finding a florist that has these flowers?  Imagine how different a search result would be if you could control which of these topics are important, to what extent and whether they are required or optional.  The results would change dramatically.

Semantic Search

Remember when you’d enter a keyword and Google would simply return whatever it “thought” you meant? Of course, this went just about as well as trying to interpret what you “thought” your partner said when you lost connection just before you walked into the grocery store.  Or what you “thought:” a date meant by “I’ll call you next week.” You can easily misinterpret the results and are left tweaking your phrasing or Boolean search to every extent to try to explain what you really meant to the search engine and get the right results.

Today, Google operates on a mix of semantic search, user history, loosely associated adwords and other information they’ve secretly gathered about you so they can make some assumptions about what you mean and try to assess intent. Of course, we use Google for search a lot more often than, say, our ATS.

Semantic SearchSemantic – The “Secret Sauce”

If you’ve been in the recruiting industry for awhile now, you’ve heard of semantic search. It’s the “super secret sauce” behind job boards and used to be all the rage. The first time I really remember hearing about it was when I worked at Monster.com, and they released their 6sense product ( ). The whole deal was that it simplified search. The intent, of course, was simply to improve accuracy by trying to make sense of what you really mean when you type one thing or another.

But there’s a catch, and it’s that semantic search isn’t programmable by you – a fundamental flaw in the whole idea, if you ask me. Semantic search builds on a library of shallow word associations, formal grammar rules, and inputs from technicians with no recruiting experience.  Those techies tried to build this complex matrix of assumptions that keyword A= keywords B, C, and D, sanitizing all nuance in the process, using the lowest common denominators and resulting in a lot of false positives that often make it harder to find that needle in the haystack. Business intelligence regularly departs from standard use terms, as does a vast array of other topics, such as sports, art, street jargon and a world of colloquialisms.

Semantic SearchJava or Java?

The reality is that it’s really hard to cover every instance. For example, a semantic search might know that Java isn’t coffee, but it might not know that Java is also a small town in Georgia. Inevitably a keyword match would bring back all the Java – not some of the Java PLUS the related terms. Since you are now thinking about coffee, grab that morning cup of joe. I’ll wait.

Princeton University’s has a search capability that allows you to query the standard semantic library. Are you surprised that when you search for “Programmer” there’s no synet for “Developer?”   Google “knows” a lot less than you may think.   

Now that you’re caffeinated, you’re thinking “Wait a minute.  Smart search isn’t so smart then, is it?”   You probably knew that already if you’ve done a search lately.   Of course, that doesn’t stop your job board rep from coming in and selling it like it’s the best thing since Google. The more you know, the more you can debunk this snake oil sales tactic.  At the end of the day, you can’t control the results, and you can’t evaluate them because you just don’t know why you got such results. 

What we really need, and I only know one company that does this (shout out to TalentBrowser, powered by DataScava , and founders Janet Dwyer and John Harney) is a completely customizable white box  “profile” search built on input and personalized rules that you the user control, not a black box semantic search engine that thinks it knows what you “really mean.”  Profile search allows you to specify many individSemantic Searchual topics in a search, with thresholds (minimums) to be met by each topic. This twofold process bubbles the best candidates right to the top.


So this year, when the sales people come stalking – and we all know they will – don’t fall for the same ol’ semantic search “innovation” sales tactics. Don’t let the buzzword bingo fool you. Semantic is the same old shit, different job board.  All semantic tools use the same shallow library of terms. At best, it’s a rookie recruiter.

 

Why “Talent Acquisition” Isn’t Actually Recruiting.

It’s widely considered a best practice in recruiting to use job titles that are consistent with market conventions and candidate expectations. If you’re trying to hire an accountant, for instance, calling the position a “General Ledger Specialist, Accruals & Reporting” (what one of my employers called the poor bastards balancing the books and budget), while very specific and somewhat sexy, is not likely to yield a whole lot of passive candidates or even active applicants.

If you’re an accountant looking for another accounting job, obviously, that’s the term you’re searching for online, where job openings are almost always stack ranked by job title relevance.

So the hundreds of open positions for an “accountant” available in any given market at any time will ostensibly show up before that kick ass sounding, descriptive, but completely company specific and overly complex job title, no matter how creative or cutesy that title might be.

Brain Cells.

The only exception to this rule, certainly, are the handful of major enterprise companies with enough employer brand equity where top talent is searching for roles by company name, not job title, although according to Google data, that taxonomy is only used in about 10-15% of job related search queries.

This means that statistically, relying on brand cache is probably not a great strategy for recruiting success. The data is pretty straightforward, and most hiring pros have turned this convention into conventional wisdom at this point; it just makes sense to call a spade a spade, so to speak.

Except, that is, when it comes to what the hell it is we call ourselves. And I’m not talking about the Great Schism between sourcing and recruiting that’s a perpetual trending topic and flash button issue in our industry. I’m just talking about the fact that it’s become relatively rare for a recruiter to actually be referred to as such.

I’m not sure whether this is due to the subconscious stigma that title seems to hold (at least in the minds of most job seekers and hiring managers, who consider “recruiter” a four letter word), or whether it originated as part of recruitment’s continuous quest for credibility (or penchant for professional hyperbole).

All We Got.

The fact of the matter is, for whatever reason, most recruiters aren’t, on paper at least, “recruiters” at all. Which is too bad, really, particularly for an industry trying so hard to codify itself and create some standards around the profession. We should probably start by standardizing whatever the hell it is that we call what we do.

But we need to stop calling it “talent acquisition,” already.

My own career evidences the strange phenomenon of this nonstandard nomenclature. I started out in sourcing, where I moved from being an “analyst” to a “sourcing lead” to a “candidate developer.” When I moved onto full cycle recruiting, I was a “staffing consultant,” then a “talent strategist,” and at one cringeworthy point in my career, a “Sr. HR Specialist,” despite the fact that the job duties and functional responsibilities for these in-house jobs at major multinationals involved pretty much the exact same thing: Source, slate, select, repeat.

You know the drill.

Smoke Again.

I spent years in recruiting without ever actually being a “recruiter,” and suspect that I’m far from an anomaly, statistically speaking, in our industry.Instead, most recruiters and recruiting departments (at least at enterprise employers) have adopted the haute term “talent acquisition,” which, of course, sounds far more strategic and sexier than plan old “recruiting.”

The term “talent scout,” in fact, is what got me into this business in the first place, as I erroneously applied to an RPO for what I had assumed was a casting position thanks to the complete cooption (and, frankly, misappropriation) of that job title.

The Army has recruiters. Hollywood has talent executives. It is of no great surprise that an industry fixated on perception and “personal brand” has opted for the less descriptive, but connotatively cooler, lexicon to describe the business of hiring.

It’s a trend that’s only become increasingly pervasive over the intervening years – today, “talent acquisition” and “recruiting” are used interchangeably, more or less.

This is a mistake, I believe, that’s far more than pedantic, because the truth is, “recruiting” and “talent acquisition” are not actually synonymous.

In fact, the term “talent acquisition” not only minimizes the actual role of recruiters, but by definition excludes internal mobility and hiring – which not only make up the single biggest source of hire for recruiters (therefore, “talent acquisition” technically precludes a majority of the work we actually do), but also discounts “quality of hire” as a meaningful (if elusive) metric.

Somewhere in Paradise.

If our job is exclusively acquisition – that is, if we sit solely upstream, as the oil industry would say – then we’re implicitly admitting that anything which happens after point of hire has no reflection on our relative performance, since acquisition stops when an employee starts, at least according to HR convention.

I know that this probably sounds silly, but that’s because “talent acquisition,” as a convention, is so conventional that it’s taken for granted at this point. Take a step back, though, and you’ll see that these seemingly insignificant and innocuous business buzzwords are, in fact, symptomatic of a much larger problem that not only minimizes recruiting’s efficacy and efficiency, but also its organizational impact.

It’s a well worn cliche by now that “recruiting doesn’t stop with an accepted offer,” but it’s nevertheless still true, too.

Our jobs aren’t just about acquiring new talent, despite our overt fixation on sourcing, employer branding and similarly specious strategies we’ve embraced in our quest to disassociate ourselves with being just “recruiters.” Hiring the right person isn’t even the most important part of a recruiter’s job, frankly.

Even more important is making sure that once the right hire is made, your company can keep that employee, too. Recruiting and retention are two sides of the same coin. Done right, real recruiting actually should involve very little acquisition of talent at all – the acquisition has likely already happened. Our real jobs are taking that asset and maximizing its total lifetime value – in other words, internal mobility and professional development.

Last year, fully 40% of new, salaried hires left their jobs within 6 months of on boarding; this means that 2 out of 5 times we acquire talent, we fail, given that the 6 month mark represents what’s widely seen as a break even point for recouping the associated costs of recruiting and training new hires.

Those costs are estimated to be between 14-30k a pop, although given the variance, a good rule of thumb is to assume 20% of the employee’s median first year salary when calculating the relative cost of “talent acquisition.”

With more and more companies using proactive sourcing and external pipeline building as a core component of their recruiting strategies, their singular focus on targeting “passive” candidates – that is, those people who already have jobs – the resources required for “talent acquisition” are steeply climbing, not least because fully employed candidates are, obviously, more expensive than “active” job seekers.

No Problem.

The competition for highly skilled, hard to find “passive” job seekers means that more employees are voluntarily turning over than ever before, even those who are satisfied with their current companies or roles.

The grass is always greener, the money’s normally better, and the end result is that you’re paying not only to hire top talent into new roles in your organization, but more commonly, to backfill employees that were poached by the same competitors you’re probably sourcing from. This creates a vicious cycle that’s not only asinine, but imminently avoidable.

That is because for our fixation on talent acquisition, the real reason most candidates voluntarily leave companies is due to lack of career progression or advancement opportunities, which, according to a recent CEB study, are the most commonly cited reasons for leaving for another employer – surprisingly beating out even compensation as a driver for departures.

Meanwhile, despite internal mobility representing fully 59% of all hires made at enterprise employers, according to SHRM data – and around 41% of all new hires came from referrals generated by those employees last year, by far the top performing external SOH – a Harvard Business school study concluded that only 24% of Fortune 500 companies reported having a structured program or policies for internal advancement and lateral transfers within an organization.

Around 1/3 of those employers admitted that their internal mobility issues were “ad hoc,” while over 1 in 10 admitted they had “no internal mobility program or policy in place” whatsoever (a number that’s likely low due to self-reporting).

If you’re sinking money into job ads, career sites, “employer branding” or even straightforward external sourcing, and are focused exclusively on “talent acquisition” and not talent retention, too, then it’s probably about time you realize that there’s a good chance you already know your next hire.

The Finish Line.

Instead of “talent acquisition,” it makes sense for organizations to reinvest both budget and headcount to looking inside the organization instead of exclusively focusing on external candidates, which seems to be the default strategy for almost every organization out there.

Look, if you have to publicly post a job for any other reason than to check that compliance box for OFCCP, you’ve already failed. But for so many recruiters out there, that’s the first step, not a last resort.

This is fundamentally flawed. Recruiters should not be measured on how many hires they make, but on the number of referrals, promotions and transfers can be attributed to these new employees after they’re hired.

Anyone with enough money or resources can get new hires in the door – talent acquisition, in fact, is the easy part.  It’s increasing the equity value of those acquisitions, as any hedge fund, PE or LBO manager can tell  you, that’s the hard part.

But if our function needs to be aligned with our businesses and our bottom line, then we need to spend more time managing our existing assets than doing due diligence on future acquisitions all the time. Our current practices are wasteful, inefficient and just bad business (and workforce management, TBH).

But if you’re a great recruiter, then you shouldn’t really have to worry about talent acquisition at all.

Matt Charney is the Executive Editor of Recruiting Daily. Follow him on Twitter @MattCharney or connect with him on LinkedIn.

 

Things Have Changed: Why Overtime Pay Rule Changes Are Long Overdue.

With a new presidential administration poised to take office, the outlook for many areas of public policy remains unusually uncertain. Not least of these, of course, is the federal rule changes regarding overtime pay, which has lately been relegated from landmark legislation to policy purgatory. While an estimated 4.2 million American workers were scheduled to start receiving overtime pay once the new rules from the US Department of Labor went into effect on December 1, 2016, a federal court injunction blocked the long anticipated changes just days before the implementation deadline.

This decision, of course, raised the prospects that the judiciary could strike down the rule changes altogether. Meanwhile, there seem to be signs that the incoming Trump administration will seek to roll back, repeal or weaken the overtime rule change regardless of what happens in the courts. Between the political transitions and pending court cases, the final policy remains very much up in the air.

Blowing In The Wind.

While some employers are adopting a “wait and see” approach until the details and deadlines are finally determined, a new study from iCIMS has found evidence that many companies have actually already responded to – and implemented – the original rule change in advance of its original December 1 deadline.

That’s a qualified “many,” of course, because obviously, this group of early adopters by no means includes every employer out there (or even the majority, more than likely). This is obviously problematic, as it essentially means that as long as the rule changes remain stuck in legislative and legal limbo, not all employers are playing by the same rules, creating a potentially uneven playing field in the cutthroat competition for top talent today.

This inequity is a shame, frankly, because the underlying concept behind the proposed rule changes is far simpler and straightforward then the regulatory nitty-gritty and dense legislative legalese would probably have you believe. Like many current political debates, the controversy around the new overtime rules are really just the most recent iterations of some of the most contentious and prominent public policy platforms: labor relations, income inequality and job creation, in this case.

 

The ostensible purpose of the Obama Administration’s proposed rule change was as a way to work around the gridlock and partisanship surrounding the federal minimum wage, providing a substantive and meaningful change in quality of life for millions of American workers without actually moving the mandatory minimum, which has stayed stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009.

This works out to $15,080 a year before withholdings or taxes (assuming they average a full 40 hour work week), or just under the official household poverty threshold of $15,940 a year, which unlike minimum wage has actually increased over the past few years, much like inflation and the cost of living, among many other pressing considerations that make this policy such a high priority for millions of American workers who stand to benefit from the proposed rules changes.

Gotta Serve Somebody.

Overtime pay is explicitly designed to protect lower income workers from exploitation by their employers. The tricky part, however, is ensuring that these people policies don’t deleteriously impact profit margins. This is not an all or nothing proposition, of course – the more money an employer is able to make, the more they’ll grow, ostensibly allowing them to hire more workers and create more jobs over time.

The traditional tension between people and profits is one of the key themes in business – this is nothing new – but it’s up to our elected officials, not employers themselves, to determine which workers qualify for this protection by setting the salary levels required for overtime eligibility.

In their finite wisdom – and even more finite political capital – those same officials have agreed to establish these thresholds on two separate occasions, but neglected to factor in the impact of increasing inflation on real earnings. This means, not unlike the minimum wage or Social Security, we find our public officials spewing the same rhetoric and rehearsed political arguments about where this magic line actually belongs.

The heart of the proposed rule changes, as outlined in iCIMS’ full report, is that the level of salaries eligible for overtime protections would more than double, from a minimum salary of $23,660 a year to $47, 476 a year. This obviously significant increase would have marked the first raise in the federal overtime threshold in over a decade, causing celebrations among many workers and deep dread among employers and business owners alike.

The bottom line: those millions of workers newly eligible for overtime protections would make 1.5 times their regular pay for hours worked beyond 40 a week – a protection that extends to salaried workers and traditionally exempt employees, too.

The Times, They Are A Changing.

The private sector can ill afford to stand still amid these political crosswinds. And it hasn’t. In a comprehensive review of iCIMS data on estimated salary levels among new hires, there seems to be some emerging trends and probable patterns when it comes to determining not only which companies are the most exposed by the rule changes, but also how these companies are already preparing for the implementation of these regulations.

Looking at the numbers, a few industries stick out; most of these, like the retail trade or financial services sectors, seem fairly obvious. A deeper dive, however, reveals that one of the broadest patterns is that the largest companies – that is, enterprise employers with more than 5,000 employees – also have the largest exposure to these new rules, too. There seems to be a direct correlation between overall headcount and the proportion of new hires whose salaries make them eligible for overtime pay under the proposed rules. In other words, the bigger the business, the bigger the potential impact.

Looking at specific job markets, the numbers also suggest that the highest exposure to the rules change can be found in those areas with the lowest costs of living. The five major markets which would have the highest proportion of salaried employees eligible for overtime pay clearly evidence this correlation, with Cleveland, Salt Lake City, Tampa, Phoenix and Las Vegas topping the list. Las Vegas, for example, would see the percentage of its overall workforce newly eligible for overtime pay climb by a whopping 50%, including a large share of the leisure and hospitality industry.

Since the rule change was first announced, many employers, particularly those with the potential greatest exposure to these new regulations, have taken proactive steps to implement the proposed policies, including raising base salaries for exempt workers or stricter scheduling policies, among other measures.

The largest employers seem to have been the most proactive, likely due to the relative impact and exposure these rules will have on their bottom line as well as the amount of resources these businesses are able to allocate to both lobbying and compliance efforts.

Not Dark Yet.

Those employers who have already proactively implemented the proposed policies will find themselves in a bind, however, if the rule change is rolled back, repealed or ruled against by the courts. The companies who have already announced these changes would either have to suffer the burden of having to pay more than their more cautious competition, or else find themselves forced to backtrack.

Neither option is particularly tenable, considering the direct costs associated with the former, and the significantly negative impact the latter decision would likely have not only on the overall morale and productivity among current staff, but also their recruiting efforts for future hires, too. How much this will impact or influence their more conservative competitors remains to be seen. Suffice to say, many employers who haven’t made changes may find themselves forced to do so in order to ensure competitiveness when it comes to attracting and retaining top talent.

While these big rule changes may create big changes in the way big companies approach compensation – or labor market competition – the biggest impact will inevitably be felt by the 4.2 million workers potentially impacted by these regulations.

The new rules mean that the percentage of full time, exempt employees eligible for overtime pay would rise from just 7% to an estimated 35% of the salaried workforce – a significant increase, but still nowhere near the estimated 60% back in 1975, the last time the federal government altered their eligibility requirements.

Of course, like any complex political discourse or policy debate, there’s a twist when trying to determine the “magic line” for overtime eligibility, one that’s highlighted by the federal court case that precipitated the initial injunction: not only have price and income levels risen since 1975, but there have been some sweeping and seismic changes when it comes to the composition of the workforce and the U.S. economy as a whole. From the rise of the gig economy to globalization, many of the factors at work in the world of work have irrevocably and fundamentally changed.

Whatever we think of those changes, we cannot turn back the clock. We cannot fight the inevitable. And we cannot continue to leave our most valuable assets without the protections implicit to overtime pay eligibility. How we go about determining where that magic line gets drawn, or which trade offs employers should be forced to make between wage adjustments and job creation, remains a topic for debate.

What’s inarguable, however, is the fact that this is a debate that’s well worth having – and long overdue, too.

About the Author: Josh Wright is the Chief Economist at iCIMS, where he’s responsible for analyzing proprietary and external data in order to produce fresh insights on the U.S. labor market. He authors blog posts and quarterly reports on emerging trends in talent acquisition and ad hoc labor topics.

In addition, Josh supports the development of software that allows iCIMS customers to analyze their own performance relative to industry benchmarks, in collaboration with our data scientists, software developers, and marketing executives.

A former Federal Reserve staffer, Josh helped build the Fed’s mortgage-backed securities (MBS) portfolio of more than $1 trillion, among other responses to the global financial crisis. As a researcher at the Fed and Bloomberg, he has published on labor and housing markets, as well as U.S. monetary policy, and advised policymakers across the legislative and executive branches of government.

Follow Josh on Twitter @JWrightStuff or connect with him on LinkedIn.

People are not your Greatest Asset

Companies always like to say that, “people are our greatest asset.” They forget that people are also the greatest burden. Lawsuits, turnover, insider fraud, for example, all happen by the acts of a company’s  “assets.” Our greatest asset is the ability to manage talent properly so that employees are better engaged.

Talent Management

Talent Management Systems

Engaged Employees are a Company’s biggest asset. Not people. It is important to note, however, engaged does not mean happy. So how are do you engage employees? Believe it or not, there is software for that. Talent Management Systems. Having a real Talent Management System (TMS) can help.

Good Talent Management Systems include:

  • Workforce Planning
  • Recruiting
  • Onboarding
  • Performance Management

Capterra surveyed 500 HR professionals to examine their use of TMS products, what they are looking for in a Talent Mangement System, and the benefits of actually having a TMS.

Talent Management

Key Takeaways

  1. Even small business adopt Talent Mangement strategies. 66% of buyers earning less than $50M in revenue.
  2. 68% of talent software buyers spend less than six months researching their purchase.
  3. Test more than one TMS system. Companies who do are 20% more satisfied.
  4. Respondents spent on average $26,000 per year on talent management software.
  5. Talent software has the biggest impact on hiring. 66% reporting a significant improvement in their process. 46% said the cost of training improved, and 43% said employee retention increased.

Don’t take my word for it; you can find the entire report by clicking here. If people really are your greatest asset facilitate engagement by helping them succeed, encouraging diversity and acknowledging accomplishments.  If you don’t know how to do that, it is time to look into a TMS.

 

Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Recruiters (But Were Afraid To Ask).

Too many people throw way too much shade at recruiters. The fact is that most recruiters, contrary to popular belief, actually go the extra mile for their candidates and clients, working hard to make meaningful matches between job seekers and companies currently hiring.

Now, I admit: if you’re on the outside of recruiting and the hiring process, looking in might look like the work of finding work is overly complex, confusing and arbitrary.

And you know what? You’re probably right about that.

Recruiting can be confusing, which is why making the most meaningful matches requires more engagement, clearer expectations and improved communications between employers and candidates throughout the talent acquisition process.

Whatever Works: Six Things Recruiters Might Not Explain To Their Candidates (But Should).

A more transparent hiring process starts with better informed candidates; most recruiters actually spend a great deal of their time working with potential placements on improving job search related skills. From preparing candidates for interviews, assisting them with rewriting their resumes and providing job search coaching and counseling, great recruiters are a great resource for connecting the best candidates and the best companies.

So while there are, admittedly, a few recruiters out there who give the rest of us a bad name, most recruiters are actually worth working with. Of course, it’s not always easy to tell the difference.

Here, then, are 6 things you should know to make sure you’re informed and prepared to work with a recruiter, and what every candidate needs to discuss with recruiters directly in order to figure out whether or not they’re worth working with, and whether or not they’ll work for your best interests – or theirs.

1. A recruiter’s job isn’t to find jobs for candidates. It’s to find candidates for jobs.

I know that this might sound like the same thing, but the difference between these two concepts is far past pedantic. Companies hire recruiting agencies and search firms for the explicit purpose of finding a very specific set of candidates for a very specific job order.

This is just the way the recruiting business works – and it means recruiters are held to very high standards in terms of the quality of candidates we’re able to present to our clients.

Our credibility depends on us being as selective as possible when making submissions – in recruiting, you’re only as good as your last candidate, so it’s imperative that we we’re super choosy on who’s worth the risk involved in putting that hard fought relationship on the line.

A recruiter, therefore, is working only on finding candidates who meet a very specific set of skill sets, or who has some esoteric industry experience or functional expertise that the company can’t find on their own.

Our clients often turn to us because that professional background that’s so critical for business success is so rare or so in demand that it requires leveraging a recruiter’s network, experience and proven track record of kicking butt and filling reqs with top talent.

Before our clients will even consider looking at a candidate, recruiters are required to source, screen and submit candidates who often possesses not some, but all of the following minimum qualifications, period.

  • Experience in a specific industry

  • Current, real-world experience with definitive technical skills and/or products, including current versions of those products

  • A minimum number of years of experience in a given field

  • Experience working for companies of a certain size

  • A degree in a specific area of study

  • Ability to commute a distance within a reasonable radius of the company

  • Specific certifications

  • Willingness to accept a salary offer within the range the company has budgeted to pay

If we can actually identify a candidate who meets these exhaustive list of requirements, and actually convince them to consider the roles we’re recruiting for, and actually get them excited about careers at our clients, then we’re still only half way there. In addition to hard skills, a candidate must also fit the amorphous and ambiguous “company culture” at our clients.

If fit happens, then the candidate will also somehow come across as having the right “chemistry” with the hiring manager and potential teammates – a skill set, of course, that’s impossible for recruiters to screen for given the extreme subjectivity and situational application of this catch-all candidate concept. But that “chemistry” – so often simply a gut feeling – plays a powerful part in the talent selection process that simply can’t be ignored.

Of course, culture fit and chemistry are just as important for candidates as they are for clients, since your career objectives and aspirations should align with the company’s mission, vision and values.

It’s essential that before committing to any company, they’re willing to commit to you, too: always do your due diligence to make sure any potential employer has the structure to allow for continual learning and professional development, transforming that job into a long term, rewarding career.

Obviously, finding the perfect match isn’t easy. But when a recruiter does his or her job right, then it’s a win-win for our candidates and our clients. Which is really what recruiting is really all about.

2. Recruiting Isn’t About “Not Right.” It’s About “Not Right Now.”

There’s a pretty pervasive misperception that if a recruiter or agency tells a job seeker that they can’t help them with their search, that somehow means that they’re not hirable or aren’t viable. The confusion this common misconception causes can often lead to a lot of overt frustration, negativity and aggression directed at recruiters. The truth is, this vitriol is completely uncalled for. It’s not our fault.

Although most of us would absolutely love to, unfortunately, no recruiter can help every candidate they come into contact with.

There are a lot of great professionals out there who we wish we could work with somehow, we have to focus on finding candidates who meet the rigid criteria outlined above, first. If you don’t match those minimum qualifications, most of the time, we have to move on.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that very same company might not have a great role that’s a perfect fit for you sometime in the future, or that same recruiter might not open a req which you meet every requirement for. Once we connect with you, we’ll consider you, considering top talent is hard to find, and if you’re placeable, it’s really just a matter of time before the right req opens up.

But if you’re actively looking for a job, and you need something right now, then you might have better job search success if you do so on your own, without the help of a recruiter. Building a relationship with a recruiter can take time, and if we don’t have any open jobs that meet your needs, then we’re probably not the best resource if you’re looking right now. But if you’ve got time or the luxury of being selective, working with a recruiter can be a great option.

Just know it’s not you. It’s us. Really.

3. Recruiters want to help you. Trust me.

Recruiters definitely want to find a way to place you or help you find that perfect opportunity – despite many rumors to the contrary, most of us believe that our success is defined by the success of the candidates we help place. After all, getting people jobs is, well, our only job – which is why we want to hook up or help out our candidates throughout the hiring process.

Anything a recruiter can do to make you more marketable to the companies we work with, or in any way improve your odds of successfully getting hired, is not only in your best interest, but the recruiter’s, too. They want you to get the job – after all, they get a placement out of it.

Sometimes, though, recruiters struggle when our clients are very strict with their requirements. There are times that no amount of coaching or prep is going to help overcome the inherent limitations that our clients often impose on us.

If a recruiter really doesn’t think they can help you out, don’t take this as a personal attack or pointed professional criticism. It’s just that most recruiters out there are direct with candidates where possible, particularly when it comes to expectation setting, and most of us would rather give you bad news than no news.

Recruiters work hard to avoid leading candidates on any longer than we have to. Telling you we can’t help is our way of helping. Sometimes, it’s the only way we can help – but honesty is always the best policy, which is why the best recruiters will always be direct, no matter what direction their clients happen to be heading.

4. The F Word.

As discussed above, recruiters really believe that there is no such thing as too much feedback, which is why we’re constantly pressing our hiring managers for insights and information on every candidate we submit for consideration. The more feedback we have from our hiring manager, the better we can align our work with their wants, and the more efficiently and effectively we can be in sourcing, screening and selecting the candidates required to fill reqs and make placements.

Sometimes, though, some of our clients suck at providing any sort of feedback to recruiters, much less the sorts of actionable insights or useful information we can pass along to our candidates. While recruiters try to figure out some sort of feedback on why a resume wasn’t selected or why someone didn’t make it past the first interview, often times, we get no more than a “no.”

Of course, many hiring managers do a great job of telling us exactly why they’re passing on a candidate or specific feedback on their decision making process, but it’s really the luck of the draw on how much feedback we can get and how quickly we can get it. Fact is, many hiring processes get held up precisely because it can take a little time to close this feedback loop in the first place.

There are times when we don’t get feedback for two, three weeks – and sometimes we don’t get any at all. While this isn’t the norm, it certainly does happen, despite the recruiter’s best efforts and intentions. It’s frustrating for both the candidate and the recruiter, and certainly doesn’t make our clients look all that great, either.

If a recruiter has no feedback to share as to why you won’t be moving ahead in the process, know that recruiter did whatever they could to get specifics they could share with you – and are as pissed off as you are that there isn’t anything more helpful than a “thanks, but no thanks.”

Don’t hold it against us. We don’t get any better without specific feedback, either.

6. Recruiters are people, too.

Recruiters who care more about placements than people and more about commissions than their candidates or clients won’t be recruiting for very long. Trust me. It’s inevitable that in this business, if you can’t build build relationships, you’re going to fail miserably.

The one thing that recruiting is about is that personal connection that a recruiter has with a candidate, and the trust both sides have to have in each other is crucial for ensuring that any recruiting relationship works out for both sides. Relationships don’t happen overnight, but recruiters know that success lies in ensuring every interaction is approached honestly, ethically and with integrity.

If you can’t reciprocate that same level of respect to a recruiter, then you should probably consider looking for a job on your own – or be prepared for the fact that the only recruiters who will be willing to work for you are the ones in it for a quick buck instead of a long term, lasting relationship. Our goal is to get great people great jobs. Sometimes we can do that, sometimes we can’t.

No matter what, though, almost every recruiter you will ever meet deeply cares about the people they work with, their profession and possesses a shared passion for making the world of work work better – because, ultimately, we’re all in this together.

 

Are You Using Gmail Productively?

Sending and reading emails is a major time suck. If you need more time in your day, learning how to manage your email should be at the top of your To-Do list. An Adobe study that was published on October 3, 2016, workers spend an average of  7.4 hours per weekday on email. Don’t start to get depressed because I found a tool that can cut some of that time.

I came across a new Chrome Extension called Vocus.io, built to help you manage your Gmail and I kinda fell in love with it.  The capabilities of this tool are sick. (The good kind of sick.) This thing will take the place of at least four tools that you are currently using.

How Does it Help with Email Productivity?

Here are some of the features that Vocus.io offers:

  • Find Email Addresses
  • Create Email Templates
  • Track Emails
  • Automate Followups
  • Create Mail Merges
  • Create Polls
  • Schedule Meetings
  • Report on Email Success

How Does it Work?

You can download the Chrome Extension by clicking here. After you agree for it to integrate with your Gmail, every time you go to compose an email, you will see a yellow box at the bottom. Click there and see all of the magic right in front of your eyes. All of the features I discussed above are available just by clicking that little yellow box.

Email Productivity

Does it ever feel like you type the same thing over and over and over again? Of course, you do. And this kills email productivity. Vocus.io has a “Snippet” feature that allows you to customize messages that you send all the time, so all you have to do is click and go.   A snippet can be anything from a simple, “Great meeting you the other day, ” to paragraphs about your company and the types of people you hire.

Email Productivity

How Much Does it Cost?

If you are not super excited already about this tool, I know something that will blow you away.  They offer a 30-day free trial; the “Starter” package is $4.99 per month, and the “Professional” is $7.99 per month.  I am totally not kidding.

This is a great tool that will dramatically improve your email productivity. And as a bonus, it is inexpensive, and according to Founder Ahmad AlNaimi, there more features coming soon.

 

Jackye Clayton Editor RecruitingTools.comAbout the Author: An international trainer, Jackye Clayton has traveled worldwide sharing her unique gifts in sourcing, recruiting and coaching. She offers various dynamic presentations on numerous topics related to leadership development, inclusionary culture development, team building and more.Her in-depth experience in working with top Fortune and Inc 500 clients and their employees has allowed her to create customized programs to coach, train and recruit top talent and inspire others to greatness. Follow Jackye on Twitter @JackyeClayton  and @RecruitingTools or LinkedIn.

Recruiting Is A Game of Constraints. Play It.

I’ve had the chance to talk to quite a few recruitment marketers and talent acquisition leaders over the years, and if there’s one thing that I can safely say about talent pros, it’s that they’re a pretty cynical bunch. Maybe it’s because they think that I’m there to sell them something (I’m not that guy).

Maybe it’s because they get approached by so many different vendors or “partners” that they assume that anyone who’s not a candidate or hiring manager isn’t worth taking the time to talk to.

But within the first five minutes of any conversation, recruiters are almost guaranteed to tell you, in one way or another, that they don’t have a whole lot of budget to spend (and are probably not spending what they have with you).

Look, I get it. Quick show of hands: has any talent acquisition professional ever had enough money to spend on all the stuff they wanted to?

Has anyone ever had all the resources they probably need to be the most efficient and effective they can at filling reqs? No one? That’s weird.

Let’s try another one. Who in the consumer marketing space, or any other business function, really, ever feels like they just have too much money and resources?

Still no one? That’s what I thought.

The High Cost of Transfer Fees.

So, let’s go ahead and agree that no one has money (or at least, not as much as they’d like or need). Cash might be king, but it’s certainly not the only consideration limiting recruiters from hiring the best talent available for every role, every time. I know most of these probably sound familiar (if not downright cliched): not enough recruiters.

Not enough headcount to support the overall work. Not enough hours in the day. Not enough tools or time to actually engage candidates and develop real recruiting relationships.

Considering these often steep limitations and constraints commonly placed on recruiters, it’s easy to throw up your hands and give up. Or at least, have a little pity party at how badly you have it, poor you.

How can anyone ever expect you to actually do your job of filling reqs efficiently and finding the best candidates on the market when you don’t have the money, people, time or tools to actually keep up with that market? How can you possibly overcome the probability of perpetual failure?

I mean, statistically and anecdotally (at least from the recruiters I’ve talked to), you’re already pretty screwed. So why bother doing anything more than the bare minimum required and simply post, pray and hope for some halfway decent applicants to somehow find you.

If you can fill a req cheaply and quickly, it shouldn’t really matter if the candidate is an all star or a B player to the talent organization. You think if you keep making hires, you’ll keep everyone happy, right?

Think again.

Championship Manager: Running The Talent Tables.

It’s like soccer (or football, for the rest of the world), in which part of what makes “The Beautiful Game” so compelling is that you’re forced to play without the ability to use some of your most important appendages. Doing so, even accidentally, is an automatic penalty.

That is, unless you’re the goalie, which is the position most recruiters find themselves in – playing a defensive and predominantly reactive role instead of pushing the ball forward and proactively going after the competition.

Attacking, though, means going ahead knowing you’re going to have to play on the field with 11 other people who are comfortable working with constraints.

You can’t win without coming out of the box and figuring out how to beat the competition with your hands effectively tied behind your back. This extended metaphor, obviously, has some important lessons for recruiters.

Look, if everyone could use their hands when they played soccer, it’d be called rugby. Which is to say, if you’re not willing to recruit without a whole bunch of external restraints (and personal restraint), you should probably consider a playing a different entirely.

Because this business probably just isn’t for you. But if you recognize that those constraints are a commonality shared by pretty much every recruiter out there and start focusing not on limitations, but how to overcome them, then you’re going to be way more effective at making great hires.

Everyone is more or less on a level playing field in today’s candidate driven talent market – too many demands, not enough time or money to handle them all. We get it. So, talent acquisition professionals and recruitment marketers must realize that no one has the assets they want. No one probably has the tools and staff they need to succeed. No one.

Not even the biggest brands or budgets are ever truly enough to corner the candidate market. It really all comes down to the connection and relationship between an individual recruiter, and an individual candidate.

And that’s something money can’t buy (although it sure can do a decent job faking it for a while).

Pro Evolution: Learning To Stay Onside In Talent Acquisition.

Once recruiters realize that they have a choice between complaining and bitching about the impossible jobs they’ve been given, or they can shut up and put up results against every other employer out there who are effectively competing with the same restraints. Those that can actually put up, well, they’re the ones who win the war on talent. And they’re not content to sit around and let applicants come to them.

The best recruiters in the business, the employers of choice the choosiest employees choose the most, know how to overcome recruiting restraints and break through to the truly top talent every top employer is competing for at the moment – including you and your company.Don’t just stand back in the box and hope that you can make a last second block.

Because no matter how good a recruiter you are, if you’re playing goalie instead of striker in this game, sooner or later you’re bound to get burned. Promise.

So once you realize that this is scratch golf, where all handicaps are wiped out and everyone’s playing for the same score, you realize that you’re not really competing against the other players out there – you’re competing against yourself. If you focus on doing your best instead of constantly looking to the leaderboard and waiting for lucky breaks, you’re going to come out ahead.

Failure happens when you get distracted from the singular goal of beating par on every hole. And the best of us may get the occasional double bogey, but as badly as that sucks, that doesn’t mean you should suddenly stop shooting for eagles, either.

When the Wright Brothers first developed the airplane, of course, they didn’t have all (or really any) of the answers. They were bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, after all, not wealthy by traditional standards nor formally trained in aeronautics, physics or engineering. The one thing they did know from bicycles, though, was the concept of lightweight mechanized propulsion.

That’s a fancy way of saying they studied how to go the furthest distance possible while putting in the least amount of effort, and built their prototypes around the core concept of efficiency.

This didn’t extend just to the actual plane, of course: economy was everything in the nascent days of aeronautics. Finding donors with enough vision and capital to fund their highly experimental enterprise proved nearly impossible. They had no idea what mechanical or material resources they’d need, how many people it would take and the improbability of actually achieving the long dismissed dream of human flight.

They just knew what they did have: a first class understanding of the mechanics of lightweight propulsion, an ideal site for the winds and climate required to literally get their business off the ground, and two brothers who had the willingness to do whatever it took to accomplish their vision, even if that meant figuring out a way to make it happen with next to no money or material resources.

There’s a reason it’s called “doing the impossible,” but sometimes, as with the Wright Brothers, the impossible gets done.

Champions League: How To Take Home The Hardware.

Visionaries who push ahead despite knowing the odds against them are objectively overwhelming are often seen as naive or even ignorant, but theirs isn’t a “glass half full” sort of optimism, operating on blind faith and dumb luck alone to tilt at those windmills. The willingness to actually try to confront – and conquer – the steepest of all odds is a gift.

But like all gifts, it comes with certain strings or expectations attached.

In recruiting, getting huge returns on no investment other than time, expertise and elbow grease means making choices. This can be tough. It’s important to remember that “choices” isn’t some thinly veiled code for, “OK, so maybe you can’t do every cool idea that comes into your head.”

Instead, it means being able to judiciously and justifiably allocate your limited resources for maximum impact. There’s no magic formula for doing that, no best practice or case study, really, for telling you the best recruiting resources for ROI, since every req and requirement is different.

Just remember success or failure in recruiting lies primarily not only in being decisive, making hard choices and accepting tradeoffs, but in making sure those are the right choices, too.

Sometimes, that means taking a chance. Just know that you no longer have to spend money on a tool or technology nor time on a tactic or talent strategy just because it’s what you’re expected to do, forget business as usual and start figuring out what actually works for you.

The cool thing about experimentation is that if something doesn’t work, you can pretty easily throw it out and keep iterating until you find what’s going to work best for the work you do. Rest assured that no matter how confident recruiters sound when they assert that they know what they’re doing, we’re all mostly making this up as we go along.

Realize that recruiters today are expected to try new things, and that the only way to systematically find out what works is by first seeing what doesn’t work. Eventually, you’ll figure it out, or you’ll fall out of recruiting like so many others who just couldn’t deal with the challenges, ambiguity and hard work this business requires.

Those who survive – and thrive – in recruitment do so because instead of being content with using your budget based on what the status quo might say you’re supposed to do and instead focus on what you have to do to do your job, instead.

Man of the Match: Standing From the Competition.

Most recruiters know their weaknesses, but too few know their strengths. That’s because we’re too busy with business as usual to figure out what’s really working to get the best business results.

If you want to beat the competition, it’s critical to focus on looking yourself in the mirror, forgetting everyone else for just a minute and really being honest about what you have that no one else out there on the market can offer top talent.

This shouldn’t be aspirational, but self aware. You know what’s good and what sucks about working at your company. It’s essential to accentuate the positive, rather than minimize the negative. Doing so means remembering that it’s just as important to figure out what sets you apart from other recruiters as it is to focus simply on what sets a role or req apart from other opportunities at other employers.

So, what is it that makes you, well, you? Is it your engaged workforce, compelling corporate culture or your killer employee generated content? Is it your great employer brand and word of mouth reputation?

Is it your internal mobility initiatives, flexible policies, amazing benefits or unique perks? Whatever that answer might be, focus on figuring out how you can extend and amplify those assets within your employer brand and recruiting conversations.

If you have an amazing mission, compelling employer value proposition or  share real people talking about their real jobs in their real voices that really resonate with your candidates and customers alike, you don’t need to spend any money or time on accentuating the positive and transforming these assets into real recruiting results really quickly.

It all comes down to being able to tell stories that effectively engage and excite external candidates and internal stakeholders alike while conveying what it is that really makes working at your company different.

Professional Premiership: The Key to Avoiding Recruiting Relegation.

If candidates don’t know what makes you special, they won’t think you’re anything special. And you’ll probably not get a whole lot of special candidates, either. The focus on differentiation not only works to attract the right candidates to your organization, but also screens out those who might not be a great fit for your culture, vision or values.

If your candidates don’t want the same things your organization can offer, well, there’s no sense in wasting anyone’s time – which, of course, is one of the most precious resources any recruiter’s got, really.

When you’re focusing on employee generated content and finding out the best way to craft and share the stories in a way that will resonate best with the top talent you’re looking for, it’s important to remember you don’t have to get too cute or creative. You don’t have to be conceptual or abstract, you don’t have to hyperbolize too much or try too hard.

You just need to make sure that the stories you’re telling represent life at your company, and your company’s impact on its employees lives. This can be surprisingly straightforward.

For example, SAS is renowned for its amazing perks related to work/life balance and employee flexibility – a well known benefit that pays far greater dividends than offering huge salaries or spending a ton of money on recruitment marketing.

They know that their commitment to work-life balance is unique, and extremely attractive to both current and potential employees, and really use that as the foundation for their recruitment messaging and marketing. Everyone claims to be a great place to work, but it’s your job to explain to candidates why you’d be a great place to work for them.

In other words:

Ask not what candidates can do for you. Ask what you can do for your candidates.

Listen to what they really want. And find out how to deliver on those unique career aspirations and expectations, even if playing that game means doing so with constraints.

The sooner you figure out how to dominate your competition, even with your hands effectively tied behind your back, the sooner you can start scoring the points required to run the talent table in 2017 – and beyond.

About the Author: James Ellis is a digital content strategist focused on helping Fortune 1000 companies and other enterprise employers develop recruitment marketing strategies to find and attract the best talent.

James has served in a variety of recruitment marketing and employer branding leadership roles, and has almost a decade of experience managing content and inbound marketing projects and initiatives for some of the world’s biggest brands.

A graduate of the University of Wisconsin, where he was the social media voice of Bucky The Badger, James currently lives in Chicago, where he is one of the branding brains behind SaltLab and also anchors the popular TalentCast podcast.

Follow James on Twitter @TheWarForTalent or connect with him on LinkedIn.

Hire Mad Skills: Why We Need To Rewrite The Code For Tech Recruiting.

I haven’t been in high school for quite some time but I still remember wondering what I was supposed to do after graduation.  I figured I would go to college because that’s what most people did and what my parents wanted me to do.  But the actual decision of finding a school, getting accepted and picking a major aren’t exactly easy. In fact, that’s a load of pressure – especially if you want to specialize in something.

Marketing was not my first choice as a major – I started with history.  A few classes in I realized I was very wrong about my choice.  I liked history in high school, but I also liked lunch and I definitely wasn’t at culinary school.

Marketing seemed like a good option because I associated it with people and creativity.  I envisioned myself having a career that involved advertising and problem solving – using my powers for the greater good.

Then I realized I had made a very GOOD choice because MY school had a fantastic business program – something I had never really thought about when applying. It suddenly dawned on me that my resume and future job opportunities were going to be based on the piece of paper I was going to get at MY school.  I sure as shit hoped it was worth it.

Kind of a Big Deal…

How much is your piece of paper worth?  You know – the one that says you spent a lot of money and a few years attending classes at a special place?  Yeah, that one.  I don’t actually want to know.  I don’t actually care – I’m not the one hiring coders.  But the companies that are hiring them seem to care – and that’s a huge mistake.

According to a recent study by HackerRank – the schools that are stereotypically known as the best for your coding needs aren’t.  The study basically says throw your assumptions out the window when it comes to the best schools for coders, because you’re way off.  After surveying 126 schools and over five thousand students the list was narrowed down to the top 50 colleges that have the best coders in the world.  Guess what ‘Merica?  

We got fourth place.  Not. Too. Shabby.

I’m not here to throw shade.  We are lucky to have so many options on the globe for higher education.  Not everyone is afforded the opportunity – but those who are really rely on that piece of paper to validate their level of talent.  Sadly, employers do the same thing.  In my experience, some of the most qualified candidates for a position don’t even HAVE a fancy piece of paper with a dollar amount attached; they have a resume with this stuff called skills and experience.

They also have hustle – something you can’t measure and is never taught. The survey agreed:

“While the traditional academic rankings, like the US News & World report, are one indicator of quality of education, it’s not the only place to find great coders. Great coders can come from any university in the world. In fact, as the students at San Yat-sun prove you don’t even need a degree to be able to code well.” – Ritika Trikha , HackerRank

Funny thing is a lot of companies want to see your paper – crazy right?  I read an interview on The Huffington Post and have heard enough in recruiting circles to say, sadly, that many companies are plain old ‘snobby’ when it comes to selecting candidates.  I’m well aware that there is a certain level of bias when it comes to say, an Ivy League school versus ITT Tech or community college.

However, as a human being with a brain and a heart (and courage too) I refuse to believe that only the “best” candidates out there come from the best schools. Or even the most widely “known” schools. Hell, or even a school at all.  

Forbes proved it in their survey of recruiting and international managers.  When you compare the results of the Forbes survey to the HackerRank you’ll notice the lists don’t exactly “match”.  (I know that the Forbes study wasn’t solely based on the need for coding candidates – but maybe as recruiters we are way off base with how we approach finding the right fit.)

Never Heard of This.

 

Ignorant.  The definition most people associate with the word is uneducated however the informal use (thanks Google for confirming) means rude.  Both definitions describe one too many recruiters.  Why are we so quick to judge based on this piece of paper?  Imagine living your entire life, making all of your decisions based on whether or not you have ever heard of something.

Could you go an entire day functioning without aggregates?  Rocks.  Rocks people.  The same thing applies to recruiting.  You never heard of the college so it must not be great – ignorant.

Check out this list on student.com.  Look at number 5.  The Georgia Institute of Technology is listed as one of the 10 BEST universities.  Guess what?  It made the Hackerrank survey as well-number 2 in the U.S. for coders.  But you’ve never heard of it.  The same thing goes for schools outside the U.S.  Why just fish in your own pond?  Go across it and you’d be surprised.   

Guess where the best coders are.  Ready? They’re in Russia…not Cambridge, although that might not be too surprising after the latest headlines. It’s sad – Russia is #1 for coders and they can’t even use LinkedIn.

Rethinking Your Process.

 

Would you recommend someone for a position based on the name of their school or the fact that said a school was actually number 1 in educating people with the skills you need?  If you’re hiring a coder, you don’t base your decision off of the fact that they went to MIT, do you?  You know what they say about assuming…it makes an ass out of U and MING – and Ming is probably a dude who had more credentials for the coding position because China is #2 in the world for producing the best coders, but you didn’t hire him because his piece of paper wasn’t as impressive as the dude from MIT. By the way, MIT didn’t even make the list.

Basically, your fancy piece of paper doesn’t mean shit unless you’re an MD.  I don’t think you can just BE a doctor – you need that piece of paper.  And plenty of doctors out there aren’t great.  We can’t forget about skill when we hire, yet we do.

“Not all doctors got A’s.” – Chick McGee, The Bob & Tom Show

Know your candidates skills, not just their piece of paper.   My piece of paper is great and all – but I have had jobs with plenty of people that were much smarter than me and way more qualified – and they had no fancy paper to prove it.

 

About the Author: Alexis Gingerella is the operational brainpower behind RecruitingDaily, responsible for managing client deliverables and tracking results, keeping the team on task and on time. Alexis has over 8 years of marketing and sales experience for companies such as Magnetics, Verizon and NetBiz.com.

Follow Alexis on Twitter @Alraet or connect with her on LinkedIn.

 

Tools for the Modern Recruiter

I have yet to meet anyone who went to college to become a recruiter. That being said, most of us are just winging it until we can find something that works. It also means that some of you have no idea what you are doing. When you know better, you do better. Here are some tools for Recruiters that will up your game.

Build a Candidate Pipeline

Think about it. How long does it take you to find candidates when you get a new requisition? If your answer is, “Longer than I want,” you are not alone. That is why building a pipeline of vetted candidates is so important. When I first started recruiting, my pipeline was an Excel spreadsheet. Thankfully, today I could use Hello Talent. Hello Talent is a free recruiting and sourcing tool that will help you build, organize and collaborate your talent tools.

Focus on Inbound Recruiting

Inbound Recruiting is not just a buzzword. It is about building relationships and attracting top candidates to your open positions. According to the Indeed Talent Attraction Study, 64% of employed adults say they would feel more confident that a job is a right fit for them if they picked the company and applied versus if a recruiter contacted them. You can attract candidates through professional looking career pages, email campaigns, and holding events. Too busy to do all that? Take a look at Beamery Brand. Beamery Brand is a tool that includes a comprehensive product includes everything I listed above plus features campus recruiting and will give you your Talent Promoter score.

Tools For Recruiters

Take Bias out of Your Job Posts

We all have biases. It’s not that we want to turn people off; we just can’t help it. That is because they are subconscious preferences that we may not even know we have. And therein lies the problem. If something is biased, but we don’t realize it is biased, how the hell are we supposed to know if we are being biased? Before you go crazy, I found tools that can help. Textio, IBM’s Personality Insights and Gender Decoder for Job Ads all work great. During my research, however, I found a product I was not aware of called Unitive.

Tools For Recruiters

Unitive not only fixes your job description but also conceals items within a resume that could be subject to unfair bias. It was super easy, and it is free for now.

Get Organized

When sourcing, I try to go really really fast.  I do not have time to write everything down. I hate just using copy paste on websites because it can screw up the formatting. Sometimes, I try to look at my search history to see if I can find something I just know I saw earlier. If this sounds familiar, I don’t have to tell you that it is a totally sloppy and ineffective way to search. Fireshot, or “Capture Webpage Screenshot Entirely – FireShot” is a great, free, Chrome Extension that allows you to grab entire web pages. Fireshot is particularly useful when sourcing candidates from Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.  Instead of this:

Tools For Recruiters

You can get this:

Tools For Recruiters

Awesome right? You can save as a PDF or an image. It just helps me to remember where that perfect candidate was that I saw on that site I forgot I was on.

We live in an age where you are just a few clicks away from learning anything. If you are passionate about recruiting, never stop learning about how to improve your craft. Remember, it isn’t just about education; it is also about having the right tools in your toolbox.

 

Can’t Knock The Hustle: Revealing the Unwritten Recruiter Rulebook.

When you’re a recruiter, you’re always only as good as your last placement. You’re constantly sourcing, screening and submitting enough viable candidates to ensure your pipeline can fill whatever reqs you happen to be working on.

Of course, candidates are really only half of the equation. Recruiting, really, is a delicate balancing act between those candidates and the clients you’re finding them for.

Recruiting requires the ability to think on your feet, quickly read a person and identify their bottom line values while evaluating where they’d make the best match – or, more often, moving quickly if you determine they’re simply not a fit, for some reason or another.

There’s no exact science, algorithm or mathematical formula for determining the optimal alignment between candidates, companies and culture; recruiting is highly situational and inherently subjective.

But there are a few best practices for figuring out how to make fit happen – and increase your efficiency and efficacy when it comes to attracting and converting top talent.

Here are a few of the unwritten rules of the recruiting road to point you in the right direction.

The Come Up: How To Build A Killer Recruiter Brand.

First, it’s important to remember that the best recruiters are also excellent at both marketing and branding. After all, if no candidates know about the opportunities that come across your desk or the positions you’re working to fill, recruiting is really hard. Generating interest and even excitement about these roles, however, requires a fundamental understanding of how to build buzz through recruitment marketing while building brand, which is one of the most essential elements for recruiting success.

Employer branding remains more important than ever, but just as important is the concept of your own recruiting brand. These essential elements of awesome talent acquisition go hand in hand, but are distinct concepts that shouldn’t be used interchangeably.

See, just like it’s important for companies to position themselves and their culture as an employer of choice to candidates, ever recruiter should similarly have a recognizable personal brand – one that’s built on credibility, trust and, most importantly, integrity.

By having a strong recruiter brand, top talent will often come to you – and in this business, your reputation always precedes you. If you have a strong brand, your job will become infinitely easier, generating goodwill, good leads, and great referrals without an inordinate amount of extra work.

A good recruiter can be just as hard to find as any hard to find candidate out there – and the best recruiters are the ones who actively manage their own brands as well as their companies.

Case in point: from 2007-2011, I quite literally pounded the pavement for candidates and sales leads, fighting for business at a time where there wasn’t a whole lot of hiring to be had. I knew that there were always dozens of recruiters fighting for the same business as I was – and ultimately, the same candidates, too.

I realized that winning both rested almost exclusively on recruiting brand equity, and I’ve spent every day since trying to build mine while actively building my clients’ employer brands, too.

Being the intermediary isn’t always easy, but I’ve learned that if you’re successful, recruiting sure can be. In fact, since 2011 (when hiring finally picked back up), I haven’t had to continually pound the phones or dial for dollars daily since. The work I put in up front to building my recruiter brand has generated enough inbound referrals that all I have to do is deliver as promised.

And that implicit promise that I’ll deliver for both candidates and clients in the future is based entirely on the successful placements I’ve made in the past, period. That, my friends, is why brand matters so much when it comes to recruiting and hiring. With a hot recruiter brand, you never have to make a cold call – and word of mouth marketing speaks louder than any sales call ever could.

When you’re developing your own brand, remember that the point of this public persona is to drive candidates to choose you in pretty much the same way companies attract consumers. If you’re trustworthy, passionate about the business of hiring and have a proven track record of helping people and companies produce results without screwing anyone over in the process, you’re as good as golden. This personal brand building is even more important when you work for a company or employer brand that people might not be as familiar with.

After all, people don’t work for companies, as they say – they work with people. That’s why a strong recruiter brand can almost always compensate for a weak (or non-existent) employer brand. I love Jeremy Goldman’s observations on what people and corporations have in common when it comes to building brands:

“Just like household name brands, you have characteristics that define you; ways that you think of yourself and ways that others think of you. Effective personal branding isn’t about putting on a show or figuring out how to do as little work as possible while getting the most financial reward. That’s not something that I believe in. Life’s just too short to not be focused on building the best possible version of yourself.”

Can I get an amen?

Play On, Player: The 5 Unwritten Recruiting Rules Every Talent Pro Should Know.

 

Look. It’s no secret that in recruiting, reputation is everything. If you’re just starting out in your career, remember that building the right kind of reputation takes a whole lot of work, but starting off your career with a bad reputation takes no work at all.

If you’re a backstabber, if you can’t be trusted, if you half ass your way through your reqs and are more interested in making a placement than finding a fit, then these elements will define your brand.

Given the reputation of most recruiters, obviously it’s not very hard to build this kind of brand – but changing minds and perceptions after the fact can be close to impossible.

So if you want to build your recruiter brand the right way, remember that’s just a means to an end: our number one job as recruiters is to provide the maximum possible value for our candidates and our clients. Period.

Here are some ways you can best maximize that return on recruiting investment – and generate enough brand equity value to keep a step ahead of the recruiting competition when it comes to partnering with candidates and clients:

5. Recruiting and Robotics Don’t Mix.

Look, your candidates aren’t robots. Neither are your clients. That’s why personalization beats automation every day of the week. Anyone can copy and paste the same stale message to every candidate on a mailing list or in your database, but if you don’t take time to tailor your message to the unique wants, needs and aspirations of individual candidates, you’re treating talent like robots – which means you could easily be replaced by one. Nothing kills a recruiter brand faster than mass blasts and a spray and pray approach to “sourcing.”

No template on earth can speak to the unique experiences and particular expertise that makes a candidate a good fit for an open position, which is why you’ve got to appeal to candidates’ emotions and aspirations when recruiting – and that’s something no robot can successfully do. But the best recruiters know their candidates and connections beyond just superficial information like what’s on their professional profile or in their resume.

When you interact with candidates for the first time, the most important thing you can do is to establish what they want from their next job, not just selling them on why they should want yours. That means when the right position comes along, you’ve got more than a one-off submission; you’ve got a great fit who’s got a better chance of getting hired. Even if they don’t, the extra effort and time you took to personalize their experience and focus on fit will inevitably buoy your recruiter brand.

Word gets around, particularly when you can make a job search as painless as possible. Making finding a job not feel like a job is all our jobs – and if you take the time to fulfill this basic baseline, then you’re probably going to have a job (and a pretty killer book of business) for life.

4. Your Brand Is Only As Strong As Your Candidates’.

Since recruiters’ brands rely so heavily on the candidates we place, then it only makes sense that a big part of successful talent acquisition starts with helping job seekers brand themselves, too. This starts by getting to know what really makes them tick, and figuring out all the stuff that’s not on their resume that defines their unique personal and professional perspective.

Remember, when you submit a candidate to a client, you’re sending in more than a resume and a recommendation – you’re basically packaging a persona. Helping job seekers craft strong and compelling stories around their values, what they’ve done and where they’re going in their careers can make the difference between a closed req and a rejected resume.

Candidates have to be marketed to your clients, too – and the more consistent their social media and online presence can be with those clients’ mission, vision and values, the better off you’ll both be. Of course, many of the traits of top performers are universal, so just as important as selling a candidate is ensuring that you’re able to best represent who they are, what they’re looking for and why you think it’s a fit. When employer and job seeker brands align, culture fit happens.

And that’s really what we’re all looking for, right?

3. Transparency Is A Two Way Street.

 

If you expect candidates to be honest with you in terms of what they want from a job and what they’re looking for in an offer – and, perhaps more importantly, what’s not negotiable when negotiating an offer, then you’d better be prepared to provide that same level of transparency, too. Sometimes, this means telling people news they might not want to hear. Being a good recruiter means being the bearer of bad news sometimes.

And as much as we associate building brands with accentuating the positive, we all know that not every part of every job or company is always rainbows and butterflies. If there’s an issue, be as honest as possible as soon as possible.  Ultimately, candidates are going to find out the truth about your clients for themselves (and vice versa) – and your job is to make sure that happens before a hire happens. Honesty and trust are inexorably interwoven, and let’s be honest: most candidates recruiters work with will never receive an offer, statistically speaking.

But letting them know why they’re not a fit (or why they are, for that matter), providing them with feedback, tools and most importantly, giving them an honest assessment instead of a generic put-off not only can help make better informed decisions for both parties, but smarter, more successful hires, too.

2. Communication Is Key.

Similar to transparency, communication is critical to building your brand – and your business – the right way. When you stay engaged with candidates and clients, even if it’s just to tell them there’s no news, you’re doing everyone a favor. Hiring processes too often falls apart because of miscommunication (or lack thereof) between the recruiter, client and candidate – and there’s no sound worse to job seekers or employers than silence.

Making sure everyone is informed can not only help keep expectations reasonable and egos manageable, but is also one of the more critical parts of every recruiter’s responsibilities. It’s our job to make both sides of the table feel like they have as much information as possible as soon as possible, however possible. Since sometimes searches can stagnate, of course, it’s important to remember that effective communication should feel like a conversation, and information should flow both ways.

Make sure both candidates and clients know that you’re there as a resource and they can reach out with any questions, thoughts, comments or concerns that might come up. If they feel like you’re a resource who has their back, they’ll have yours, too. Conversely, the worst thing any recruiter can do for their brand is to go silent or suddenly become unresponsive – loose lips may sink ships, but silence is the one noise that no client or candidate wants to hear. Because being there is half the battle.

1. Give A Crap.

This might sound obvious, but if you want to successfully build a recruiter brand, you have to actually care about recruiting. You have to give a crap about your candidates and clients.

Passion is one thing every recruiter needs, and no recruiter can fake for long. If you’re dedicated to delivering the most value possible and care about improving careers and companies by finding the right talent for the right job, you can never go wrong.

If you’re committed to your candidates, and if you care about your clients, and have some sort of personal investment in professional outcomes, then you’ve got what it takes to build a killer recruiter brand. If you don’t give a crap, well, don’t worry. You won’t be in recruiting for very long.

Trust me.

Nicole SmarttAbout the Author: Nicole Smartt is a shareholder and Vice President at Star Staffing, one of the top search firms in Northern California, where she manages the company’s day-to-day operations and client engagements. Nicole has almost two decades of recruiting industry experience, having worked in a variety of roles prior to joining Star Staffing in 2009.

This extensive background and wide range of experiences help Nicole leverage her knowledge of what makes the ideal match between employer and employee on behalf of Star Staffing’s clients and employees. Nicole is active in many local organizations, including community organizations and chambers of commerce, throughout the North Bay Area. She is also the co-founder of the Petaluma Young Professional’s Network and serves on the board for Santa Rosa’s Wednesday Night Market and the Active 20-30 Service Club, and was recently appointed to the Young Professionals Entrepreneur Council.

Nicole is the youngest person to be awarded the Forty Under 40 Award by the North Bay Business Journal, and has been featured in publications such as Forbes Online, the Washington Post, Fox Business and the American Express Business Forum, among others.

Follow Nicole on Twitter @Nicole_Smartt or connect with her on LinkedIn.

No Quick Fix: The Biggest Sourcing Mistake Recruiters Make.

There seems to be an overly obsessive focus on sourcing as a core component of the talent acquisition process, with an inordinate amount of time, resources, products and punditry dedicated to doing what’s become a mundane and relatively easy task: finding people on the internet.

That’s not to say that sourcing isn’t, by any measure, one of the most important parts of the talent acquisition process. After all, you can’t make a great hire without great candidates, and proactively finding top talent takes some modicum of time and work.

The problem with the state of sourcing today, however, is that there’s an unnecessary layer of complexity being added onto the front end of the hiring process, and it’s time to reevaluate exactly what role – and more importantly, which resources – sourcing occupies in a world where it doesn’t take a particularly high degree of skill to successfully research a slate of successful candidates.

The average high schooler would scoff at the notion that creeping people’s information on the internet is a specialized professional function. They probably can’t tell you what the hell a Boolean string is, but no doubt they could hang in there with the top sourcers in the talent acquisition business.

Keep It Simple, Stupid: Why There’s No Magic Formula For Sourcing.

This isn’t to say sourcing doesn’t require some degree of skill, particularly when it comes to building a strategy; it takes some business acumen to know both who you’re looking for and whether they’d be a fit. And, ultimately, the cliché holds true: finding people is easy. It’s getting them to respond that’s the real skill required for sourcing success.

But we don’t talk a whole lot about how to communicate, beyond some vague aphorisms on even vaguer tropes like “personalization,” “engagement,” and “authenticity.” Such a conversation, of course, is specious and spurious in the first place. The fact is that there’s no magic formula for this sort of stuff; being able to build enough trust and credibility with a candidate to get them to respond is often trial and error, highly subjective and extremely situational.

Sourcers, at least the self-aware and savvy ones, know that the real competitive advantage lies not in how to find candidates, but what you do once they’re found. These are, sadly, a seemingly small minority.

This is why the sourcing conversation, online and otherwise, has become fundamentally flawed – because the majority of recruiters remain focused almost exclusively on finding, not converting – and instead of the sweat equity required to build relationships and cultivate a closed network of converted candidates (the kind who actually get hired), most continue to seek out a non-existent silver bullet, an easy fix for a hard problem.

Sourcing has nothing to do with the tools. Or the tech. Of course, the tendency of sourcers to fall victim to “shiny object syndrome,” of course, is well documented.

Most sourcing “experts” suffer from an Asperger’s like fixation on different plug-ins, extensions, widgets and websites which all pretty much serve the same functional purpose: finding personal information.

The Secret To Sourcing Is There Is No Secret To Sourcing.

A quick review of some of the more mainstream sourcing sites reveals articles within the last month such esoteric topics as building custom search engines, esoteric search engines (because obviously, Dogpile or DuckDuckGo are viable alternatives to Google in 2017), and, most nauseatingly of all, How To Source With SnapChat.

This is, of course, only the most recent iteration of an entire sub-genre of specious sourcing content – whether it’s Pinterest, Instagram, VR, or whatever Mashable happens to be fixated on that week, recruiters, in turn, remain constantly fixated on where to go, not what to do.

This quest for the “next big thing” misses the obvious fact that the pervasive focus on what’s new and what’s next are diversions from the real requirement for sourcing success: creating scalable, sustainable strategies that actually render replicable and repeatable results when it comes to filling real reqs.

The rest of this is kind of BS, frankly – and recruiters need to stop talking about the tools and the tech, ignoring the “what ifs” inherent to emerging platforms and trendy tech and focusing on the “what works” instead.

It’s not about how elaborate your sourcing strings are, or what search engine you use, or how some app or social network could theoretically be used for filling some theoretical position. It’s not about how fancy your search string is, or how wild, unusual and elaborate your sourcing technique – in the end, sourcing comes down to results.

While some degree of experimentation is necessary to drive innovation, if you actually think that finding people on the internet is hard, or that there’s actually some platform out there that’s going to increase quality instead of potentially yield more quantity, then you are a recruiting tool.

Which is probably why no candidate ever calls you back, frankly. Because the thing is, the secret of sourcing is that there is no secret for sourcing – so ignore what everyone else is doing, or what you think you’re supposed to be doing, and focus, instead, on what you’re doing that’s working. Chances are, that’s got nothing to do with SnapChat, Search Engine Marketing or Social Media.

Unless, of course, you’re totally wasting your time. In which case, you might want to think about getting into employer branding, instead.

Matt Charney is the Executive Editor of Recruiting Daily. Follow him on Twitter @MattCharney or connect with him on LinkedIn.

Inside Job: 4 Signs You Need To Rethink Your Hiring Strategy.

Running any kind of business is hard work. Hiring people for that business, of course, can often be even harder. The amount of time and energy we dedicate to making every successful hire happen can leave most of us feeling downright exhausted.

Sometimes, that fatigue can set in, often in the form of picking the first candidate who walks in the door – if they’re even reasonably close to a fit, then you’re willing to make that hire simply so you can stop working 14 hour days all the damn time – you get to the point where you’re too tired to really care all too much about “top talent.” You’d much rather take a little rest.

Recruiting isn’t easy (contrary to popular belief).

The energy it takes to make a hire requires more than most successful business owners can handle – even the most hands on entrepreneurs, turns out, are trigger shy as a result, generally slow to hire and quick to fire.

Problematic employees, of course, represent an obvious liability, and selectivity in hiring preempts you ending up in the unfortunate situation where its your employees, not you, who are ultimately steering the ship and making decisions on their own, without any input from you. This, of course, creates a ton of tension – and can ruin an otherwise robust business and healthy bottom line.

Just Breathe: 4 Signs You Need To Rethink Your Hiring Strategy.

If you’re experiencing the repercussions of reluctant hiring managers and indecisive stakeholders, then these issues will probably sound a bit familiar. But knowing these signs of hiring manager sabotage is the only way to recognize and prevent it from happening to you.

If any of these has happened to your hiring, it might be a good sign it’s time to take a step back and rethink your hiring strategy.

4 . State of Love and Trust: Killing Off Cliques.

Maybe you’ve noticed that your entire team feels a bit like being back in high school – an insular clique that tends to operate within a closed social circle. Whether it’s hanging out together before, during and after work, sharing SnapChats and social updates with each other throughout their days, or having each other’s back when someone needs to recover from being too hung over (or simply can’t show up because they’re too drunk, high or simply out of it).

This is often interpreted as a warm and fuzzy sign of camaraderie and collegiality, but in fact this sort of inherent insularity may prove to be something of a bad omen.

If your entire team is so close that they’re practically inseparable, it’s only a matter of time before big problems can begin to arise – and make your job even more difficult. For example, if you get to the point where you need to initiate an employee relations investigation or discipline one of your workers in some way, the rest of your workers will often turn against you as a natural defense mechanism for any ostensible office offense (justified or not).

And as a rule, the more severe that offense may be, the more intense the backlash from the team you’ve hired will probably be. For every HR action, in this scenario, there seems to be a disproportionate reaction.

Sometimes, this can lead to lower productivity and worker disengagement; occasionally, if the team is close enough, you may find other employees willing to martyr themselves and walk out, quit without notice, or find other ways to actively antagonize or sabotage you or your work. The best way to preempt this, of course, is through inclusive hiring practices; a team with diverse perspectives, experiences and disparate backgrounds not only underscore the power of diversity in shaping corporate culture, but also preempt the sort of groupthink mentality and insularity that undermines talent acquisition success.

Of course, the business case for diversity is well documented; diverse teams are not only more productive and profitable, but less likely to cause the sorts of problems that can arise from teams who operate more like a social circle than a high performing team.

3. Sirens: How To Resolve Employee Complaints.

While you can’t keep everyone happy all the time, sometimes clients, colleagues or coworkers can have legitimate complaints about the behavior of your new hires. The last thing you want to do is minimize this feedback or treat it as some sort of anomaly best swept under the rug. While often employee complaints can simply be a case of sour grapes or making mountains out of proverbial mole hills, more often than not, these sorts of problems are severe enough to require some sort of intervention or resolution.

If you’ve got a proverbial problem employee, particularly one who’s the subject of repeated complaints (formal or informal) from other internal stakeholders, it’s incumbent on you to deal with the problem immediately and comprehensively before it escalates further.

Create a clear plan of action and know how to communicate the issue not only to the employee in question, but make sure the rest of the team understands any required action you ultimately take, and don’t be afraid to answer any and all questions that arise (within reason) in order to preempt future problems or further complicate the issues.

The last thing anyone wants is to get ground down by the rumor mill.

2. The Fixer: Making Compensation Pay Off.

Let’s face it: most employers only give compensation increases or performance based bonuses on a definitive, pre-determined schedule because that’s how business has always been done, and many companies make the mistake of assuming that planning these increases periodically drives retention – the assumption being employees who know when they’re going to get a boost are more likely to stick it out in order to cash in.

The problem with this approach is that these increases rarely reflect individual performance or are based on merit – meaning most of the time, your employees aren’t actually earning your raises. This can often translate into hiring people who aren’t willing to do more than the bare minimum, much less move the needle – and this can leave your business mired in mediocrity or stuck in the status quo.

If your company uses scheduled raises and bonuses as a long term employee engagement and retention tactic, it may be time to consider a new strategy – one that will not only help you hire people committed to raising the bar, simply rather than raising their paycheck. When you hire people who want to grow professionally, not just financially, you’ll see increased innovation, better employee engagement and improved business outcomes.

By paying your employees for performance and not simply for sticking around, you’ll create a strong incentive for workers to go above and beyond the bare minimum – and create a competitive culture that almost always has a significant impact on bottom line results. From improved retention to higher productivity, a merit based approach almost always works better than an annual increase alone.

1. Not What It Seems: Don’t Be Afraid To Discipline.

If you’re afraid or reticent to actually intervene and either discipline or reprimand an employee for any offense, minor or severe, than you’re not only doing your entire workforce a disservice by implicitly condoning bad behavior, but you’re signaling that you’re not really the one running the show. As a business leader or senior manager, you’re likely the person who created many of the policies and processes in place to begin with – so don’t be afraid to enforce the rules you created in the first place.

If you’re afraid to discipline an employee – from a slap on the wrist to termination for a more serious offense, then that’s a sign that you’ve lost control over your workers, and that the issues created by these employees are likely symptomatic of a more pressing, pervasive problem. As a business leader, never feel like you can’t put your foot down. If you’re a manager, it’s your job to manage – which means sometimes, you have to step in and deal with conflict and confrontation, however unpleasant it might be.

Often times, though, this problem can be easily resolved by simply having a conversation, reiterating the rules and coming up with a plan for corrective action – most “problem employees” probably don’t even know that their behavior has crossed the line. The earlier you can take corrective action and at least make these workers aware that their actions aren’t acceptable, the more likely you are to have an amenable outcome – and a salvageable working relationship.

Remember, feedback is imperative – even if it’s not always positive. But with a solid strategy in place, you can proactively preempt the most severe issues from arising in the first place.

Period.

About the Author: Larry Alton is a professional blogger, writer and researcher who contributes to a number of reputable online media outlets and news sources. A graduate of Des Moines University, he still lives in Iowa as a full-time freelance writer and avid news hound.

Currently, Larry writes for Inquisitr.com, SocialMediaWeek.org, Tech.co, and SiteProNews.com among others. In addition to journalism, technical writing and in-depth research, he’s also active in his community and spends weekends volunteering with a local non-profit literacy organization and rock climbing.

Follow Larry on Twitter @LarryAlton3 or connect with him on LinkedIn.

Recruit Creative Talent with Chainy

You use GitHub for tech talent. You use LinkedIn for executive talent but where do you go to recruit creative talent? If you are looking for the marketing, graphic design and PR types, try Chainy. Chainy will help you easily find creative people. If you have a great opportunity, but your needs into Chainy and relevant users get notified in real time. Dean DaCosta explains Chainy in the video below. Click here to check it out for yourself.

 

Dean DaCostaAbout the Author: Dean Da Costa is a highly experienced and decorated recruiter, sourcer, and manager with deep skills and experience in HR, project management, training & process improvement.

Dean is best known for his work in the highly specialized secured clearance and mobile arenas, where he has been a top performing recruiter and sourcer.  Dean’s keen insight and creation of innovative tools and processes for enhancing and changing staffing has established Dean as one of the top authorities in sourcing and recruiting. Connect with Dean at LinkedIn or follow @DeanDaCosta on Twitter.

Defying Gravity: The Year’s 10 Most Popular Posts On RecruitingDaily.

Let’s face it. Unless you’re a member of the Chicago Cubs, an editoral staffer for Breitbart or Beyonce, 2016 has pretty much been a giant dumpster fire of a year. A year ago, Ziggy Stardust and Princess Leia were still active on Twitter and Facebook, you could buy tickets to a Prince concert and Harper Lee had a new book out.

All, of course, fell victim to a year that sucked ever since last New Year’s, when the major national news story involved that Afffluenza Kid’s impropteau family vacation in Puerto. As the year went on, its inherent shittiness, by any standard, only intensified.

Consider what’s happened beyond just the good dying young, or Bruce Springsteen writing the best non-fiction book of the year, IMHO (although next to Dylan’s Nobel, the Boss’ long form version of “The River” seems kinda pedestrian by comparison).

In 2016, Drake went from Rhianna to J. Lo (that’s like going from a Macbook to a refurbished Dell); politics went from reforming the Affordable Care Act to Linda McMahon, Chair of the Small Business Administration (appropriations now decided by cage match?), and the year that started with Deadpool as its first tentpole release somehow finished with a friggin’ musical with that dude from the Notebook.

And for all the changes in recruiting, everyone was still stuck using Taleo and having major issues getting their job done because it, like every Oracle product, is pretty much an anachronistic piece of shit.

No One Mourns The Wicked.

Oh, and we talked about candidate experience and diversity some more, some startups (or never-weres, more accurately) fizzled out – Sayonara, SimplyHired – and even established players somehow screwed up with some spectacular failures in 2016, behooving of a year that we couldn’t be happier to see fade off into the sunset.

But 2016 had some decent moments here at RecruitingDaily – don’t get us wrong. Hell, we survived (and thrived) over the past year, thanks to some killer content, a growing readership, new leadership, a new event imprint (#HRTX, which had a hell of a rookie campaign) and, most importantly, historic highs in unique visitors, time on site, opt-ins and overall posts published.

One of the big reasons why people keep coming to RecruitingDaily, of course, is the fact that it’s our goal to put out content related to the world of recruiting and hiring today that isn’t, well, boring or obnoxious.

We want to add value to practitioners and leaders by giving them the tips and tricks they need to find top talent today – and introduce them to the companies who can help. In short, it’s our mission to help you make better hires faster through better content, connections and community.

That’s not a pitch, that’s context to understand that we don’t really give a shit about product releases, PR ploys or platforms well past their prime. We care about bringing our audience all the recruiting news and views they need, all in one place, and turns out, in 2016, we did a pretty damned good job of delivering on that promise.

While this was inherently intentional, we were pleasantly surprised to discover that our list of the most popular articles of 2016, in fact, represented such an ideal microcosm of what RecruitingDaily is all about.

Hell, we’re still figuring that out; we’re new at this, and every partner here is a former recruiting leader – we’re not in this for a buck. We’re in it because we’re giant geeks when it comes to recruiting and hiring, and we care about this industry and making it better for recruiters and job seekers alike. Yeah, that sounds cheesy. But truth is, we’re all in this together.

Editor’s Note: Speaking of, if you’re interested in partnering (which is a nice way of saying “spending money”) with us, please drop me a line, and I’d be happy to help. – Matt Charney, Executive Editor and Incentive Pay Recipient. Hey, a brother’s gotta try, right?

We appreciate each of the hundreds of thousands of recruiters all around the globe who read a post, listened to a webinar, opened an email, attended an event or engaged on one of our social sites in 2016.

It’s because of you that we’re able to get the word out about RecruitingDaily and increase our readership and reach every day, so thanks for spreading the love and taking the time out of your busy schedule to regularly read, spread the love and share (or comment) on our content.

Popular: The 1o Top RecruitingDaily Posts of 2016.

You also have immaculate taste, as the 10 most popular articles of 2016, as measured by social shares, post traffic and whatever else our “Most Popular Posts” plug in uses to figure out what to put in that part of the dashboard.

Yes, this list has a bunch of stuff with my bylines, but I didn’t do anything but see what the numbers said. Please know if I were to manipulate these numbers or selectively choose which posts to include, I’d never have had so many by Pete Radloff on here (kidding) – but his final tally was impressive. Unlike his beloved Mets or Islanders this year, he put up great numbers in 2016, too.

Just wanted to address the elephant in the room and let you know homey don’t play that.

Besides, even if the algorithm automatically calculating our most popular posts is ultimately wrong, we still think that this list turned out to be a pretty good primer for what you missed in 2016, what you need to know in 2017, and what RecruitingDaily is really all about.

For reals.

10. How Recruiters (And Candidates) Can Still Have Love for Job Interviews by Matt Charney

 Job interviews not only suck, but they’ve been proven to be ineffective in the past. This post looks at how you can measure, manage and maximize job interviews in the recruiting process – whether or not you’re a recruiter or a candidate: Click Here to read more.

9. The Good Wife’s Guide: Straight Talk About Shit Advice by Amy Miller

 Amy is a corporate recruiter for Microsoft, but somehow her posts are more raw and more real than pretty much anything else we post, period. She’s basically a badass – and so too is her content.

This post is a great introduction to one of our favorite bloggers. She’s also absolutely right in this scathing attack on “influencers” and “thought leaders” –and why you shouldn’t listen to their bullshit advice. It’s easier to tell someone what to do than do it yourself, which is why we’re telling you this one’s worth a read: Click Here to read more.

8. The Rise and Fall of LinkedIn by Pete Radloff

 This post from February lays out how LinkedIn’s market and product strategies looked like they couldn’t be sustained for much longer without either an exit event or insolvency. These predictions, of course, turned out to be prescient just a few months later: Click Here to read more.

7. Five Things Every New Recruiter Needs To Remember by Pete Radloff

 Pete has been in this business a while, and as recruiting lead at Comscore, continues to add to the long list of painful lessons he’s learned since his early days in the recruiting industry. That’s why this list of the five most important recruiting lessons any recruiter should know should be required reading for anyone just starting out in TA.

But the advice in here should prove indispensable for any recruiter or talent leader at any level, anywhere: Click Here to read more.

6. Going Dutch: Why Randstad Really Acquired Monster by Matt Charney

 I started my marketing career at Monster, and as a PR and corporate communications representative during the recession (God help us all), I still feel a strong sense of connection to the place where I first encountered this industry and built the foundation for my career.

That’s why I had to break down my thoughts on what this acquisition means for recruiters, and what I think will happen next as the “New Monster” emerges – and why I sincerely hope that it’s not a Fiddling Beaver this time. Click here to read more.

5. The Top HR and Recruiting Technologies of 2016 by Matt Charney

 I do one of these every year, and while the 2015 one performed way better, this year’s list is worth checking twice, particularly if you’re putting together your 2017 budget. There are a ton of turds out there, but these are my picks for the ones worth every employers’ time – unlike, say, Elevated Careers by eHarmony or Z2 by Zenefits.

Although unlike recently departed Zenefits CEO David Sacks, something tells us that Dr.Neil Clarke Warren probably doesn’t won’t become an advisor to the White House when he makes his next move (although since he’s a rich, old, white and homophobic millionaire who’s famous for being on TV, he’s basically qualified for any Cabinet position). Click Here to read more.

4. LION Hunting: Why LinkedIn Open Networkers Deserve to Be Shot by Pete Radloff

 This was one of our most controversial posts ever, but let’s face it – those people who connect with you on LinkedIn only to hit up your extended network or your inbox with a bunch of requests for introductions, business asks or other bullshit are the worst. Pete takes aim at the worst of them in this post that totally hits its target (unlike, say, LinkedIn advertising). Click Here to read more.

3. What the Microsoft Acquisition of LinkedIn Means for Recruiting by Matt Charney

 Spoiler alert: a lot. And even though this is old news, it’s still probably pertinent – and even if not, it’s got a whole bunch of gratuitous Clippy references. Hey, when you’re watching dinosaurs inch towards a tar pit, you need something to keep you entertained. Click here to read more.

2. Why Job Postings on Facebook Are the Beginning of the End for LinkedIn by Matt Charney

Here’s a life hack for content marketing pros: if you’re going after recruiters, LinkedIn is like the Kardashian of HR Technologies – everyone has some morbid fascination in every little thing that goes on in Mountain View. Obviously, that means we write a lot of these stories – although this one shows that Facebook might soon be the destination every recruiter loves to hate, instead. At least there isn’t InMail. Click here to read more.

1. 100+ HR Technologies to Watch in Q4 2016 by William Tincup

 William wrote only one post this year, and it was by far and away the most popular. The reason’s pretty obvious – it’s likely one of the most comprehensive lists of recruiting and HR related resources (particularly startups) on the market, and every buyer should probably print this out as a reference. It will come in handy – and we can’t wait until the Q1 2017 edition.

In the meantime, have a happy New Year and from all of us at RecruitingDaily, thanks for helping us have an amazing 2016 – and putting up with our occasional drama, take no prisoners approach  and perpetual contrarianism.

We can’t wait for you to see what we’ve got cooking for 2017 at RecuritingDaily – but let’s just say, the fun’s only beginning. Which makes sense, considering that’s about the last word anyone would ever use to describe 2016. Unlike, “craptastic” or “douchetacular.”

But the good news about 2016 is, it’s over. These most popular posts, however, proved that even in the worst of times, you can still have the best of content – and we hope you enjoy these posts as much as we did. See you next year – and thanks again for being a part of RecruitingDaily.

Have A Happy New Year. See You Next Year!

Tech Candidates are Getting Easier to Find. Tool Review: AmazingHiring

One of the reasons that recruiters are so valuable is because they know where to find candidates. Tech candidates seem to be more elusive than the average candidate. The passive ones seem to be even harder to find. AmazingHiring is here to help by offering a search engine for tech candidates.

AmazingHiring looks at more than familiar places like GitHub, StackOverflow, Facebook and LinkedIn. This tool searches on Kaggle, Twitter, Dribbble, Behance, and About.me. They also offer a free Chrome Extension that activates when you are viewing social media profiles. Click here to take a look at AmazingHiring for yourself.

Watch below to see Dean DaCosta’s review with a little help for RecruitingTools Editor, Joel Cheesman.

Dean DaCostaAbout the Author: Dean Da Costa is a highly experienced and decorated recruiter, sourcer, and manager with deep skills and experience in HR, project management, training & process improvement.

Dean is best known for his work in the highly specialized secured clearance and mobile arenas, where he has been a top performing recruiter and sourcer.  Dean’s keen insight and creation of innovative tools and processes for enhancing and changing staffing has established Dean as one of the top authorities in sourcing and recruiting. Connect with Dean at LinkedIn or follow @DeanDaCosta on Twitter.