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Know Your Role: RolePoint Refer

While I was at Reconverse, I got a chance to talk to the folks at RolePoint. My biggest question? What is RolePoint? I realized, I honestly didn’t know all that they could do. They offered me a demo of RolePoint Refer. It blew me away.

Most internal referral software/programs just don’t work. They are barely more than the poster hanging in the company break room. RolePoint Refer is different. It doesn’t stop at giving a name, and we will give you a Starbucks’s gift card. They take referrals seriously. They made the process easy and even fun for employees to refer candidates. My favorite part was the referral inside a referral part. So you want to refer Jane, one of your contacts on LinkedIn because she has everything that the company is looking for. RolePoint will show me that I have other friends like Jane that I may have forgotten that also will be a good fit. Brilliant.

I met with Andrew Higashi, VP of Sales, and Business Development, and he immediately gave me the potential ROI from using RolePoint Refer, “ After three months of using RolePoint Refer you should expect to see an increase from 14% use to about 50% use of our referral program.

So What is RolePoint?

When I sat down to write about RolePoint though, like any good editor, I started to dig deep into the product and go over my notes so that I could write intelligently. What I found out is that they were showing me the wrong product. As amazing as their referral platform is, what they glossed over is the tool I have been dreaming of and wishing that I had for years now. A middleware product named RolePoint Connect.

What is Middleware?

Middleware is a general term for software that serves to “glue together” separate, often complex and already existing, programs. Some software components that are frequently connected with middleware include enterprise applications and Web services.

RolePoint Connect is a middleware product because it is a software that works with virtually any Applicant Tracking System or Human Capital Management platform and allows it to talk to other programs.

I Still Don’t Get It.

OK, I am going to get a little “techie” but bear with me. RolePoint Connect uses integration platform as a service (iPaaS) technology. So say I use Taleo. But I want the social media information I found on Facebook to be attached to my candidate in Taleo without having to copy and paste. By using RolePoint, Taleo will talk to RolePoint. RolePoint will talk to Facebook, grab the data and put it into RolePoint which will send the data to Taleo.

Why do I Care?

Because now you can do something you have never been able to do before; get current up-to-date candidate information by keeping data fresh. You can have real-time integration of data sources such as Twitter, Facebook, or Salesforce.com so when you connect with a candidate who may have been sitting in your database for a while, you will be able to let them know you are up to date with their skills and interests. And, you don’t have to have 3 million tabs open to get the info you need, RolePoint does it for you. This is why RolePoint Referral is so powerful. Because RolePoint allows employees to refer employees from any social media site, from any device, anytime they want. Mind was blown.

It seems RolePoint Refer is the product they like to promote most. But if you are asking me, RolePoint Connect is a true game changer.

Creative Sourcing: The Legend Continues.

It started, as so many of these sad stories do, in one of those meetings – you know the type. The one with the client, or the hiring manager, or some douchebag on your team (or so you had thought) who, after a little shop talk mixed with strategy, finishes the meeting by muttering that one godforsaken maxim destined to send any sourcing ship smashing into the path of pure peril.

Of course, to these assholes, it’s always some sort of epiphany, as if they’ve somehow made the biggest breakthrough this side of Boolean. To any experienced sourcer – who’s heard it all before – it’s like some funereal dirge, a siren song of sourcing sorrow.

Because you know as soon as you hear it, as a sourcer, you’re pretty much screwed: “we’ve got to come up with some more creative ways of finding candidates.”

Oh, great. This again? I mean, yeah, I’ve had to do the whole “creative sourcing” shit before, but I’m never even sure what the hell they even mean by the many variations on this recurring talent theme. Seriously. If you’re a sourcer, I know you feel me on this.

You’re building a pipeline, pounding the phones, somehow doing the impossible by finding and filling a slate of purple squirrels, when suddenly some asshat decides that what you’re doing, while working, just isn’t “cool” or “creative” enough.

Whatever you’re doing, it doesn’t matter about actually finding names or developing candidates to these clowns. Nah. It’s about being on the cutting edge, man, don’t you get it? Thing is, I don’t. Not really.

And I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who’s completely baffled with what seems to be this singular sourcing fixation on “coming up with creative ways of finding more candidates.

” That’s why I wanted to put together some of the times I’ve dealt with this soul shattering, nerve rattling situation and successfully found solutions that actually transformed that specious conversation into clarity – and, consequently, candidates. Maybe they might not have been the most “creative” sourcing techniques in the history of the world – but then again, when they end up with a hire, somehow, everybody’s happy.

Here are some of the lessons learned I’ve learned over the course of my career when it comes to the endemic, obnoxious and unfortunately ubiquitous myth of the “creative sourcer.”

The Legend Begins.

Like any legend, the origin myths behind the legend of the “creative sourcer” are critical to fully understanding the nemesis you’ll inevitably be dealing with. In my mind, there’s not one single conversation, convention or certification course that caused the spontaneous and inexorable rise of this legend.

I think that it happened with different people at different companies across different functions in disparate industries and geographies coming together with an underperforming recruiter.

There are a lot of them, and while they might not be the most diligent or passionate professionals out there, they share an almost unilateral skill when it comes to the art of self-preservation.

What I think happened was that instead of admitting that, in fact, they were in fact grossly negligent and/or incompetent on whatever search it was for which they were being questioned, these recruiters, inevitably, blamed resources instead of their own resourcefulness. Instead of admit ineptitude, they instead convinced the hiring powers that be the problem had nothing to do with the recruiters themselves.

Nope. In fact, those poor bastards were hardly getting by as it is. “We do not have enough qualified candidates applying for our jobs!”

No one ever suspected that competent recruiters were the real talent shortage, of course. Instead, talent organizations came up with what seemed to be a fairly obvious solution to what happens when a post and pray goes unanswered by the hire powers.

If we don’t have enough qualified candidates applying for our jobs, then what if we went out and found them, first?

I’m sure at the time, the thought that you’d actively target someone who was happily employed likely seemed like heresy. But so too did the full time, dedicated, white collar, six figure salaries that came with the rise of the recruiting function.

Sourcing was born, by necessity, to perpetuate the myth that somehow, the business of finding qualified, interesting and available candidates takes style, not substance, creativity instead of craft. This is, of course, bullshit, but then again, what about this industry isn’t? I give you the birth of sourcing. And all I can say is, you’ve come a long way, baby.

A Link to the Past.

In even the best of times, the recruiting profession has had somewhat of a mixed reputation – and checkered track record. Many people had been somehow burned by recruiters, or else were already onto the fact that finding people to fill jobs was exactly the hardest job in the world. Sourcing, on the other hand, was a specialty that remained largely enigmatic, part of recruiting yet somehow free of its reputation and largely suspect legacy.

Unlike recruiting, no one really knew what sourcers did, only that somehow, they changed talent acquisition from farming to hunting (which is why the initial concerns about “poaching” made so much sense). All recruiters knew was that these specialists did the stuff that they either didn’t want to do or, most commonly, didn’t know how – researching, engaging and nurturing prospects and converting them into candidates.

This alchemy of transforming happily employed professionals into potential new hires seemed to show that sourcing was not only an immediate success, but the future of the function, too.

As networks like LinkedIn and Facebook continued to grow and evolve, so too did the sourcing function, suddenly providing a seemingly endless supply of passive candidates with whom we could approach with opportunities, requests to network, and all that other shit that was too obnoxious to ever try in real life, but somehow OK on social.

These “professional networks” proved to be a veritable garden of Eden for poaching and pipeline building – and sourcers settled into a comfortable routine of never being able to somehow slake their insatiable appetite for passive potential hires. The deluge of leads continued to pour unabated, until, one day, largely without notice, that stream suddenly dried into a trickle.

Something was changing. Something always does. And, like all good origin stories, this professional paradise was lost forever. Sourcers were sent into exile – either outsourced, offshored or reskilled. Or some combination thereof. And we were cast out of the Garden for good – largely because online, we were the serpents responsible for social’s original sin. We colonized communities, coopted conversations and took value without ever thinking of the long term consequences of a victory that’s turned out to be largely pyrrhic.

Sourcers have somehow become far worse than recruiters ever were – and instead of surgically targeting candidates, we’re now the biggest spammers this side of CyberCoders. We have gone from being the dogs of the war for talent into merchants of Spam – an evolution that’s another tale entirely. Or, more accurately, a devolution, as sourcers went from being devoted, passionate strategic talent partners to unresponsive, ineffective and apathetic lifers no better than the recruiters we were ostensibly replacing.

As sourcing codified, it turned into the very thing it was supposed to kill – and we’ve unsuccessfully tried to fight back and fill the gap not with substance or strategy, but filler and fluff. We watched as our standard 50% response rates (minimum) to our personalized messages for targeted opportunities dwindled to below 20% or even 10% on some campaigns where automation seemed easier than segmentation, playing the numbers game even though, somehow, the math never really worked out.

It seemed just as suddenly as it had come, sourcing stood solidly poised on the very verge of extinction. Or at least, having to go back to a desk at an agency.

Link’s Awakening.

Sourcing has evolved in order to meet the most pressing talent challenges; for recruiting, historically, the biggest problem was simply finding enough qualified professionals to fill a position. Identifying, much less engaging, candidates was a major challenge – it was nearly impossible for most enterprise employers to find enough qualified people simply to fill our open jobs. In order to meet this glaring need, the singular focus of most recruiting technology over the past 15 years has largely focused around talent identification.

From Monster to CareerBuilder, Dice to LinkedIn, Entelo to Gild, the tools available in our recruiting arsenal have largely been built to attract, engage and select qualified candidates for just-in-time jobs. As a result, sourcing has largely moved from commodity to commoditized, and talent identification has become relatively simple, at least compared to the rest of the hiring cycle.

We’ve solved for what’s always been the biggest challenge in recruiting – we know every candidate, or have the seeming ability to find them at will, and to do so at scale. At least in theory and product marketing, anyway. The result is that the tools of the trade have allowed more sourcers to contact more passive candidates, prospects and potential hires in less time than ever before, effectively saturating and siphoning off our own finite market of future talent.

Ironically, the candidate flow sourcing was designed to solve has dried up largely because there are so many sourcers with so much information that more than likely, even the best in the business are mostly being ignored. The better we get at reaching people, the more likely it seems those people are to blow us off entirely. I can’t say I entirely blame them, really.

This negative feedback loop has created a new problem in sourcing and recruiting. The issue is no longer identification; the issue, as any pundit or practitioner will tell you, is far more pernicious. The problem in talent today is now engagement. And now, we come to the moral of the story, and why I think, as I’ve not so subtly implied, that “creative sourcing” is a complete and total myth.

Now, the myth for me has nothing to do with the existence of creative sourcing – it’s just we seem to have no set rules for what the hell that really means and what this amorphous theory actually looks like in actionable practice. The myth of creative sourcing is that we’ve always got some ace up our sleeves that gives us the superhuman ability to identify new prospects, and continuously build pipeline. The reality is that creative sourcing isn’t about identifying new prospects, but instead finding new ways to engage with the ones we’ve already found – and somehow find a way to break through the noise and make sure our message is heard.

As Einstein once said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking that created them.”

To me, this means that to change the way sourcing gets done, we need to change the way we think about sourcing itself. Finding an increasingly shrinking pool of potential prospects is not the solution to somehow solving the problem of candidate flow. In fact, it’s only making the problem worse.

A New World.

So, what, exactly, is the solution to fixing what’s broken with sourcing today?

The first thing we can do as recruiting professionals is to stop focusing exclusively on our external relationships and instead, put our energy and time into building alliances and connections within our own companies.

The relationship between recruiting and marketing should become analogous to the relationship between marketing and sales. In each case, these professions are tangibly tangential, but distinctly different enough to each benefit from close collaboration and a singular alignment on business outcomes and the bottom line.

The next thing we’ve got to do is work to improve the candidate experience. Yeah, I know it’s a cliche, but it’s really, really important for our redemption as recruiters. A simple way to improve the candidate experience is simply to let them know where they are in the process.

This is as easy as shooting off an automated e-mail – and making sure to close the loop with them at the end of the process, whether or not they’re selected. I know, these seem obvious by now, but for some reason, recruiters still seem to be resisting these simple but powerful steps.

Our duty to our candidates doesn’t stop when they get knocked out of process – if we have qualified, viable candidates who aren’t selected, offer to help those people you worked so hard to get through the process to ensure that no matter what, they don’t come away empty handed. Instead, work to find them another job, or else, offer to help make introductions or use your recruiting expertise to help them in the future.

Put your network to work for them, and this will do two things for you. First, it will build an actual network of people who actually will activate when needed should the occasion ever arise. Secondly, and most obvious, this is the sort of thing that generates great word of mouth and creates candidate referrals, guaranteed. And candidate referrals are a source that no technology can create or compete with.

Learn the language of marketing; understanding your target audience and how to engage them in a way that makes sure they actually answer your call to action is the single most important thing a recruiter today can do in terms of improving their personal productivity and professional efficacy. Personalize your message and always choose the personal approach over the mass blast; it’s far more effective to reach out to a handful of prospects that are potential hires than it is to hit up everyone on your list in the hope that one or two of them might respond – and even if they do, there’s no guarantee that they’re even qualified. Automation is easy, but spam machines have no soul, you know.

Finally, work with your employer branding team or other internal subject matter experts responsible for overseeing this function to understand exactly what they’re doing to engage and convert prospects. If you don’t have a dedicated EB team, reach out to marketing or even internal communications or public relations; they might be suspicious at first, but if you prove that you’re anything but another recruiter, they’ll happily help increase your skill set and your understanding of what it takes to effectively engage top talent today.

The Legend Continues.

Some closing advice for my fellow sourcers out there: start small and stay simple. Start by learning about your company, and learn how to tell the stories that make your company the kind of place where a candidate would want to develop a career.

If you can’t find stories worth telling, ask. Ask your hiring managers what impact their work has, or how their teams contribute to the bigger business picture or the company’s mission, vision and values. Ask your hiring managers and stakeholders why the work they do is important.

Understand why they come to work every day. Then, once you have those stories, share them with every candidate who will listen. Chances are that if you’re telling a story instead of selling a job, they’re going to listen.

The simplest way to tell these simple, but powerful, stories has nothing to do with social media – instead, share it when you cold call prospects or when you personalize e-mails. These make the impact of these stories somehow more personal – and infinitely more special. And that’s kind of what this whole engagement thing is all about.

Remember, you can’t have a happy ending without a story that begins “once upon a time.”

And for sourcing, hopefully, our story is really just beginning.

About the Author: Mike Wolford has over 9 years of recruiting experience in staffing agency, contract and in house corporate environments. He has worked with such companies as Allstate, Capital One, and National Public Radio.

Mike also published a book titled “Becoming the Silver Bullet: Recruiting Strategies for connecting with Top Talent” and also founded Recruit Tampa and Mike currently serves as the Sourcing Manager at Hudson RPO.

An active member of the Recruiting community, Mike has spoken publicly in an effort to help elevate the level of professional skill.

Follow Mike on Twitter @Mike1178 or connect with him on LinkedIn.

Candidate Experience by Design: Applying UX to Recruiting & Hiring.

We must accept that today’s job search and recruiting process happens exclusively online, for every position, for every candidate, for every sector (save the oddest of outliers). Paper applications are pretty much dead. Period.

In fact, in the few searches where a pipeline candidate or referral is already identified prior to opening the requisition for the requisite time period to the public (suckers), those hand-picked candidates still have to go through the online application process at some point.

Following this same logic, if candidates are rightly seen primarily as online consumers, then this mostly digital interaction, through landing pages, microsites or systems, inherently means that there’s no discernible difference between candidates and online consumers, as both are ultimately being driven towards a purchasing decision, albeit with differentiated calls to action.

The difference online is negligible – and the strong, persistent correlation proven repeatedly in studies and surveys between candidates and customers ultimately suggests that the logical conclusion to hacking the candidate experience is to ignore all the recruiting stuff and realize that there’s already a framework for what works.

It’s important for recruiters to understand that the following truths should be self-evident:

Candidate Experience isn’t a talent acquisition function. It’s a design discipline.

More specifically, when we talk about candidate experience – and it seems like we don’t talk about much else in recruiting these days (shudder), what we’re really talking about is UX.

Don’t believe me? Let me break it down…

UX & Candidate Experience: 9 Key Design Principles Every Employer Should Know.

If you’re looking for a meaningful framework for actually making candidate experience actionable, you’ve got to consider this not as a recruiting exercise, but as a design one.

Therefore, when approaching any design initiative, it’s imperative to remember the accepted framework underlying that entire discipline.

According to Usability.gov, an NGO dedicated to UX funded by the US Department of Health and Human Services:

“User experience (UX) focuses on having a deep understanding of users, what they need, what they value, their abilities, and also their limitations. It also takes into account the goals and objectives of the group managing the project. UX best practices promote improving the quality of the user’s interaction with and perceptions of your product and any related services.”

If you follow that users are candidates, the aforementioned group is your hiring team and that the product responsible for shaping those interactions are your online employer branding, recruitment marketing and application experience, then you’re catching on to the fact that what works for candidate experience really has very little to do with recruiting at all.

Even the government says so, so must be the truth, right?

The Candidate Experience Belongs To the Candidate. Ultimately, while software engineers and designers are responsible for delivering the best possible user interface, whether or not the candidate has a positive experience is up to the candidate. This is because, of course, the entire concept of “experience” is inherently subjective, meaning that it’s up to HR and recruiting technologies to provide a framework that’s as streamlined and simple as possible – and one that’s consistently designed with the end user in mind. With the necessary infrastructure of the right processes, people and platforms in place, great candidate experiences should become the rule rather than the exception.
Great Candidate Experiences Are Invisible. I’ve often said that being a recruiter is a bit like being an offensive lineman in football – you only get noticed when you make a mistake. The same goes for great candidate experiences, too. When you’ve got the right framework in place, all the hard work behind the scenes, all the process design and employer branding choices you’ve inevitably made, should be invisible – done right, they’ll just work. With studies suggesting candidates are much more likely to share a negative experience publically than a positive one, when it comes to candidate experience, the only way we’ll ever know we’ve truly won is when nobody talks about candidate experience anymore.
Candidate Experience Isn’t Just About Recruiting. The candidate experience isn’t just about the hiring cycle these days. With a strong correlation between customers and candidates, as well as the many touch points required to move a passive candidate into an active applicant, candidate experience is part of a larger system. This system not only touches your employer brand, but your consumer brand as well. Things like customer service, word of mouth marketing and company reputation will all impact candidate experience – which is why it’s imperative to make this a holistic process rather than one that sits in a silo, like so many other externally facing HR functions.
Candidate Experience is A Marathon, Not A Sprint. According to a recent Talent Board survey, fully 77% of job seekers reported to having had a “less than satisfactory” search experience, with most candidates surveyed citing time to apply and lack of personalized feedback or status updates as their two most common recruiting-related frustrations. Given the fact that so many candidates have historically had such negative experiences with employers, recruiters have to understand that change isn’t going to happen overnight, even if their tools and technology happen to. Rebuilding candidate trust is going to take time, which is why providing them with consistently world class experiences is such an imperative for winning the top talent of today – and tomorrow.
Context Counts for Candidate Experience. In the age of cloud computing and SaaS, where products are updated in real time and the estimated 21k HR and recruiting technology companies out there are waging a cutthroat war for market and mind share, it’s easy to get bogged down in extraneous features, specious functionalities and the bells and whistles which often bog down the real conversation about improving candidate experience. As fast as the pace of recruiting technology seems to be moving, it’s important to remember to continually ensure that the end user – the candidate – is never forgotten, and that every feature or function on a product roadmap is explicitly created to make their lives easier. While content might be king, for most candidates and applicants, it’s context that counts the most when it comes to world class candidate experiences.
Candidate Experience Is A Conversation. We talk a lot about “engagement” in recruiting, but the truth is what, exactly, this buzzword is supposed to mean remains somewhat nebulous. The fact of the matter is, as recruiters, it’s our goal to create an open dialogue with current and future candidates, and providing a scalable, sustainable experience is unquestionably not only the best way to achieve “engagement” but also, a conversation focused on truly helping our candidates.
Great Candidate Experiences Are About Control. If a candidate doesn’t feel like they’re in control in the process, relegated to the role of passive possibility even after they become active applicants, put simply, their experience is going to suck. Make sure you clearly communicate up front exactly how long the process is going to take, what they can expect throughout every stage of the hiring process, and how every candidate can better control whether or not they move forward in the process – or feel like they know enough to know when to bow out, alternatively. Either way, moving ahead in the hiring process shouldn’t be entirely the employer’s decision – giving candidates control, even when you can’t give them jobs, will almost always lead to improved experiences and better long term recruiting outcomes.
Keep It Simple, Stupid. In design, one of the most recurring mantras is the concept that “less is more,” that the easier it is for users to understand how to use your product, that simplicity will lead not only to clarity, but also, to improved experiences.The goal of all candidate experience, similarly, is to allow candidates to get through the application process with minimum difficulty and maximum efficiency.

Of course, as every UX professional already knows, great experiences only happen by design. And designing that world class experience for every candidate is every recruiter’s job – because it’s those experiences today that will determine whether or not our employers can successfully attract tomorrow’s talent.

Because every employers’ competitive edge is only as strong as their human capital. It’s really that simple, stupid.

If you’d like to learn more about building a great candidate experience by design, don’t miss our exclusive Recruiting Daily Webinar, Hacking the Candidate Experience, presented in partnership with our friends over at Lever.

We’ll go beyond theory to look at what candidate experience is about, why recruiters should care and how employers can leverage proven UX best practices to improve the candidate experience while achieving better recruiting ROI – and bottom line results.

Seats are limited, so register now and join me as I cut out the buzzwords and BS and show recruiters real, actionable stuff they can start doing right now to improve the candidate experience instead of just talking about it.

It’s going to be off the chain, so click here and reserve your spot today!

Boolean Power Search Series #1 “People on the Move”

Finding candidates online can be like finding a needle in a haystack; especially if you do not know how to use Boolean search. That is why we have created the RecruitingTools.com Boolean Power Search series.

We have researched the top Boolean searches recruiters are going to share them with you. Every Monday, we will share our best Boolean search secrets for finding leads, passive candidates and purple squirrels online. Of course, social media searches, posting jobs and searching LinkedIn can work, with Boolean searches, you can use keywords to find almost anyone, on the web.

In this Boolean Power Search Series we will share top searches including:

Country Coding and Top Level Domain searches
Experience searches, including patterns and brag searches
Interest search based on topic
Email searches (not the same old *.* stuff)
Activity searches
Pattern searching and Headlines

Download Slides By Clicking Here!

Why Refereeing Job Postings is Good for the Recruiting Industry.

When it comes to engagement, recruiters walk a fine but distinct line. On one hand, recruiters are faced with the intrinsic necessity to reach out to candidates and connect with top talent by any means necessary; however, too often, that communication can leave those same job seekers drowning in a deluge of spam.

While advances in recruiting technology such as marketing automation and CRM capabilities have made it easier than ever to scale candidate communications, too often these tools are used to replace, rather than augment, personalized outreach and individualized engagement.

This results in candidates often feeling inundated and overwhelmed, a volume that leaves many unable to distinguish between legitimate opportunities and the recruiting equivalent of a Nigerian prince looking for a quick bridge loan.

Refereeing Job Postings: Blowing the Whistle on Worst Practices.

It’s no secret that a small cadre of recruiters and staffing agencies out there have long preyed on unsuspecting job seekers using deceptive practices.

While these scam artists represent only a small fraction of the millions of dedicated, passionate and legitimate recruiting and talent practitioners on the market, the truth is, these outliers seem to have an oversized impact for everyone in the industry, and these worst practices are hurting all of us, every day.

The duplicitous deceptions employed by these RINOs (that’s ‘recruiters in name only’) include a fairly wide range of scams and schemes.

These range from luring candidates into giving them contacts or connections by contacting them about a fake job, or, more often, posting a job that misrepresents its true responsibilities, compensation or its actual location.

While most job seeker scams rely on errors of omission, misrepresentation or just plain old hyperbole, many involve what can only be construed as overt fraud, such as requiring candidates to pay money up front in order to be submitted for a role or considered for an opportunity. Another increasingly common example involves capturing confidential information from candidates through what’s essentially phishing, leading to a rise in recruiting related identity theft.

Whether these schemes are simply dishonest or overtly criminal, the fact is that these lies negatively impact everyone, at every level. For job seekers, there’s an erosion of trust and increase in suspicion regarding recruiters, which in turn obviously makes it much harder for real recruiters with really great opportunities to break through to top talent.

This inability to attract and engage highly skilled, highly qualified candidates, in turn, obviously has a deleterious impact on the employers who n
eed these mission critical hires to survive and thrive in the world of work today – and tomorrow.

This increasingly endemic problem plaguing our profession has emerged as a significant challenge for all of us, and everyone in the industry must play a role in cleaning up the mess. We’re no exception to this rule, and recognize the significant impact we can have on contributing to a scaleable solution for this persistent and pressing problem.

As the world’s number 1 job site, Indeed is a major source of candidates to recruiters and employers across industries, functions and locations, and as an intermediary between job seekers and the companies looking to hire them, take our role very seriously. We recognize that by taking action, we can help create real change.

While we’ve always been driven and remain committed to the high standards for search quality and pride ourselves on having the best, most relevant jobs, the fact is that even at Indeed, sometimes deceptive postings can slip in. While it’d be easy to ignore this issue, or else blame it on volume and scale, instead we’re taking specific actions at Indeed to help turn the talent tide when it comes to job search scams, fake listings and the litany of other online schemes specifically targeting job seekers.

Search Quality: 12 Job Posting Standards Every Employer Should Know.

That’s why we’ve created even stricter filters and instituted a much more rigorous vetting process than ever before to ensure that only legitimate jobs from legitimate companies are posted to Indeed.

And if our algorithm isn’t sure whether or not a posting is legitimate, then we add a level of personalization to our finely tuned automation, manually reviewing these listings with our committed team of in-house search quality professionals.

Either way, if we discover a listing does not meet our quality standards, we will immediately remove the listing from our platform, whether it’s posted directly to Indeed or aggregated from another site.

We’re hopeful that by taking these steps and doing our due diligence to preempt problematic postings, we can inspire others in our industry to take action and play their parts in cleaning up the mess left by these worst practices and change the perceptions of recruiting by changing the way recruiting gets done.

To that end, for the first time, Indeed is sharing its guidelines for job postings, and we invite recruiters, staffing agencies and other job sites to join Indeed in adopting our search quality guidelines.

Here’s a list of our search standards that we’d encourage every staffing and recruiting professional to consider before publically publishing any job posting, period.

Don’t Use Offensive Language. Ask yourself, would a reasonable person consider any aspect of your listing to be inappropriate or offensive? Can any language or wording conceivably be construed in this way, regardless of intention or context? If so, it’s got to go.
Use Specifics, Not Clickbait. Make the job title on your posting for any particular job the same title that will ultimately appear on the successful candidate’s business card. Don’t add any extraneous information or eye-catching gimmicks simply to drive applicants; the job posting must stand on its own. Every job description should include the specific information qualified candidates would look for as well as any other details about the position or your company that you think are relevant for a candidate to know to enable accurate applicant self-selection.
Don’t Use Job Content That’s Not Yours: Every job on Indeed must be offered by an authorized representative of the company seeking to fill a position, and we will remove any listing found to misrepresent or mislead candidates on the poster’s affiliation with the company they’re purportedly representing. We would encourage all online job listings to consistently commit to and follow this model; failure to do so implicitly condones this worst practice, and in fact, only exacerbates an already significant problem.
Offer Real Jobs. Indeed, like most online career destinations, are more or less search engines for jobs. Non-job content, such as spam, scams or other offers, will not be shown to job seekers nor indexed by Indeed.
Don’t Try To Game the System. Like other search engines, Indeed uses algorithms to provide the freshest, most relevant content in response to searches. Listings that attempt to exploit these principles by reposting roles within a short timeframe or posting roles in more locations than the job is offered for increased visibility will not be given the same visibility as a more relevant job.
Tell the Truth: Job seekers deserve to know the true details of your job, including its location, duties and whether the job is being offered and by the hiring company or by a recruiter on the company’s behalf.
Fill A Job, Not a Pipeline. Online job search engines or career sites can be an invaluable tool for recruiters, but each posting should represent a real job that’s really available – use job postings for just-in-time recruiting, all the time. Attracting applicants for the purpose of building a potential pipeline of possible matches isn’t an honest use of a job posting.
Don’t Discriminate: Jobs posted online must be made available to qualified candidates without regard to age, race, gender or sexual orientation. There may be specific exceptions for some kinds of jobs, but these exemptions must be specifically outlined and justified within the posting, and employers must demonstrate that those exemptions are necessary for core job responsibilities, not “culture fit” or other nebulous and potentially discriminatory hiring criteria.
Pay Reliably and Fairly: Posted jobs should have hourly or salary wages associated with them, and include how compensation is structured within the listing, even if an exact range isn’t provided. Furthermore, no job posting on Indeed or any other website should ever charge candidates anything to apply for jobs, interview or begin work.
Make Your Application Process Accessible and Transparent: Job seekers should never have to navigate through complicated steps or spend an undue amount of time finding out how to begin the application process.
Treat Every Candidate With Respect. Applicants should hear back from companies to which they apply and if they are invited to interview, they should be updated on their status in/at reasonable intervals. Most importantly, the privacy of the job seeker is paramount and information you get in the application process should be safeguarded.

Simply put, if you try to post a deceptive job posting or any listing on Indeed that violates the above rules, you will get caught, and you will no longer have the right to post on Indeed, nor have your listings indexed or displayed in any of our searches, in perpetuity.

This is our commitment to job seekers and employers alike – and we would encourage everyone in our industry to follow our lead to eradicate this problem for good. Remember, recruiting starts with posting a job, and so too does candidate experience. And we can’t fix one without fixing the other, first.

Editor’s Note: Indeed is a Recruiting Daily client, however, Recruiting Daily was not compensated for this post. The opinions expressed in this guest post do not necessarily reflect those of the publisher, nor do they constitute an endorsement for Indeed’s products or services.

About the Author: Paul J. D’Arcy is a Senior Vice President at Indeed, the #1 global search engine for jobs. A member of Indeed’s senior leadership team, Paul is an experienced technology industry leader and digital marketing entrepreneur. His areas of expertise include workforce trends, demand generation, digital marketing, and leveraging data to drive revenue.

Paul has published articles in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, CIO, and the Huffington Post. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan University and holds an MBA from Harvard University. He lives in Austin, Texas.

Follow him on Twitter @paul_j_darcy or connect with him on LinkedIn.

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Recruiting In The Proper Context: Context Scout

Our favorite people aggregators are getting purchased left and right making it harder and harder to find social information for potential candidates. Allow us to introduce you to Context Scout. A relatively new product, Context Scout is a people aggregator that will find information about your candidates such as, blog links, social media profiles emails and more. It does have a free component for now, but the “pro” version is only $20 USD per month. Context Scout describes their tool like this:

Context Scout is a Chrome extension that detects when you are on a candidate’s LinkedIn profile page and searches the web for extra information about them.

In many cases this is as basic as email addresses, personal websites and links to social profiles.

For technical candidates, this is looking at their GitHub profiles to find evidence of programming ability. It’s also determining cultural fit by categorizing their interests based on their tweets or blog.

In this video, Dean DaCosta shows us in real time results from using Context Scout including:

How to save profiles
What type of information is available
Possible candidate profiles
Why this is such an excellent tool

Click here to download Context Scout.

About 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

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.

LinkedIn Is 277% More Effective Than Everything.

Take social media statistics with a grain of salt. An enormous grain of salt. How many times have you seen someone use the following to support some claim they are making:

LinkedIn is 277% more effective at <insert favorite task here> than other social media.

Wait.

What?

I had seen this statistic come up before so I decided to do some research. This is what I found. The actual statistic says,

LinkedIn 277% More Effective for Lead Generation Than Facebook & Twitter.

There are lies, damned lies, and statistics. -Mark Twain

You may be wondering where I got this information. Well, Hubspot gathered data from “over 5,000 businesses in a recent study.” Oddly, later they specify that they surveyed exactly 5,198 companies, but the dates in the “recent” study go unspecified. It turns out that in traffic from LinkedIn to these companies websites, the traffic from LinkedIn turned into leads more often. Since it was first published, the 277 stat has often morphed into a lot of…variations. Many authors love to cite the exactness of the 277% but then totally make up what the 277% is better than.

277% Better than what?

While researching this post I found the following post or article headlines:

“Why LinkedIn is 277% more effective at generating professional leads” What’s a professional lead? One that’s lost its amateur status?
“Why LinkedIn is 277% more effective for blogging,” The original statistic said “Facebook and Twitter”. How did blogging get in here?
“LinkedIn is 277% more effective than all of social media” We went from Facebook and Twitter to everybody.
“Why LinkedIn is 277% more effective for marketing and sales” Kind of drawing an extra conclusion from the data there, aren’t we?
“Why LinkedIn is 277% more likely to drive website traffic”An interesting distinction. The original statistic talks about the quality of the traffic (someone who came from LinkedIn is more likely to become a lead). It’s been changed here to imply quantity.
“Why LinkedIn is 277% more effective than other social networks” This is just lazy. What does “other social networks” mean? And “effective” is open to interpretation too.
“Why LinkedIn is 277% more effective at driving B2B sales” More effective than what? Wearing a sandwich board on Main Street?
“Why LinkedIn is 277% more likely to lead to a sales conversion than any other social media.” We went from leads to conversions and added any social media, not just Facebook, and Twitter.

Four Score and Seven Tweets Ago

What started me on researching the 277 stat was I saw someone using it on their website last week, and I thought to myself “that’s pretty old.” So I checked. The 277 stat was released by Hubspot on January 30th, 2012. That’s right, this statistic celebrated it’s fourth birthday a couple of weeks ago.

Well, I hear many people say, just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s not still valid. I suppose that is possible but pretty darn unlikely. LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are very different animals today than they were four years ago. Four years ago LinkedIn had Events and Signal and Polls. Four years ago, the LinkedIn Influencer program was a gleam in someone’s eye, still nine months away from its October 2012 release date. With the changes in all three of the social networks studied, you have to be pretty skeptical that this statistic is still valid. And one final anecdote. On Sept 14, 2015, someone wrote “in fact, in a recent Hubspot study…” and wheeled out the 277 stat.

Doesn’t sound quite so compelling anymore, does it?

Over three and a half years may be “recent” in some contexts, but in social media terms?Let me put it another way. If I wanted to use the 277 stat honestly, I would probably have to say:

“In a Hubspot study conducted over four years ago, LinkedIn was 277% more effective for lead generation than Facebook & Twitter.”

The lesson here is not to beat on LinkedIn’s effectiveness now or four years ago, or Hubspot’s research then or now. They aren’t culprits here. It’s people who take a statistic and twist it to their purpose, and then it’s the rest of us who swallow these things whole without question and let the writers get away with it. As we can see from the 277 stat, even with citations, a statistic may be old or taken out of context.

When you see a social media statistic that talks about the habits of “best in class” companies, be wary.

Here’s the original story on Hubspot. I don’t want to hurt feelings here but, all of the referred articles can be found by googling “LinkedIn is 277%” and then scrolling through some of the more than 11,000 results.

If you liked this post, please comment and share this post. I think it will help my business, but have no statistics to back that up.

About the Author: Bruce Johnston is sales coach and strategist specializing in LinkedIn. He believes LinkedIn is not all about your profile; it’s not all about being found. It is about being proactive. LinkedIn is a contact sport. He also trains a module on how to search LinkedIn effectively. If you would like to get in contact with him, feel free to reach out on LinkedIn, Twitter or via email brucejohnston115 [AT] gmail.com

How OKCupid Changed Hiring Forever.

Twenty years ago, if you wanted to find a specific person — whether it was the perfect romantic counterpart or an ideally suited future employee — you could expect to spend months searching for anyone who simply qualified.

The advent of the internet changed that completely. Suddenly, a tsunami of potential new candidates opened up for both personal and professional searches, and both lovers and recruiters had more options than they’d ever dreamed existed.

The introduction of the web meant that people from anywhere in the world could connect with millions of new people from anywhere else, and conversations or relationships that would have been unfathomable before were suddenly possible.

Dating sites started to spring up left and right to help connect potential matches, and traditional recruiting practices were entirely upended (think: physical job boards going digital). But this rush of new options created an entirely new–but equally problematic–challenge: too much information.

The Problem With Too Much Data.

too-much-big-data In hiring, and also in love, there can be too much of a good thing. The average job listing elicits 250 applicants, while Tinder, for example, generates 1.4 billion swipes (potential matches) per day. With volume that high, quality control becomes nearly impossible, and people end up discarding candidates (either romantic or professional) without any real review, or else giving up entirely.

For dating, you’re left sorting through a lot of… less-than-desirable options. For hiring it means that dozens of qualified, potentially incredible workers get overlooked while recruiters are forced to waste hours digging through irrelevant resumes or following false leads.

Most recruiters end up either relying on referrals or just seizing upon the first people who somewhat conform to the job description, even if they aren’t truly the best fit. The system is incredibly inefficient, and the cost to an organization is substantial.

So how do you contend with this overwhelming influx of potential new matches?

That’s where OKCupid’s technical breakthroughs set the stage for a new way of managing massive amounts of information.

There were other popular dating sites at the time of its rise to popularity, but OKCupid was the one that developed a reputation for its innovative use of data science and groundbreaking algorithm. The company also ran a notorious (now defunct) data blog in which it used its datasets to analyze romantic trends. Using user-sourced data and a single simple formula, OKCupid was able to pair each user with his or her most compatible dating prospects.

Data science enabled it to turn that data into incredibly valuable (and interesting!) insights about the landscape of modern love–which is, after all, its operational industry. It was the one of the first and most public uses of smart new technologies and information as a way of helping people find people.

What Automation and Data Science Do For Hiring.

okc Just like dating, hiring is an incredibly specific process, with several similar steps.

Hiring managers need to find candidates that are not only “appealing” (experienced, highly qualified, etc.), but also a fit for that particular company.

Do the candidate’s strengths round out the team’s weaknesses? Could he or she promote the values of the company? Does the hire promote a higher diversity of experience?

All valid considerations, but difficult to balance in an extremely competitive hiring market with a flood of prospects.

Recruiters need to operate quickly and with precision. They need to be confident in their candidate choices and equipt with the information to engage with them and draw them in as quickly as possible. Automation, like the kind used by OKCupid, helps them do that. There’s enough publicly available information about any potential candidate on the internet to make strategic sourcing exceptionally easy.

If software can combine data from social networks, blogs, work portfolios, and other sources, it can generate a pretty thorough picture of a person in nanoseconds. Then, it can present recruiters with their “top matches” before they even start the sourcing process.

That type of automation has played a key role in defining the modern hiring market. Sourcing, engaging, onboarding, growth… Everything has gotten much, much, much faster as a result. Hiring competition has reached an all-time high, and it’s largely because organizations can operate that much more efficiently.

The second component of OKCupid’s major contributions — analytics and data science — has proven equally critical. That’s because speed on its own isn’t enough. In a world where the average cost of a misplaced hire is 2.5 times that employee’s annual salary, regular mistakes aren’t sustainable.

Recruiters have to completely understand the industry landscape, the candidates, the needs of their own organization, and how each candidate would fit in. The right strategically-designed analytics solution can help them do that.

We’re living in a brave new world with more connections, more interactions and more potential relationships. It can feel overwhelming at times, but ideally what it ultimately means is that we’re all that much closer to finding our perfect match — whether that means meeting a partner or finally landing that one hire who takes your whole business to the next level.

Robert Carroll currently serves as the Senior Vice President of Marketing for Gild, where he is responsible for crafting and executing Gild’s marketing strategy including brand, sales enablement, press and analyst relations, events and demand generation programs.

Robert has more than 20 years of strategic marketing experience at both startups and Fortune 500 companies in the software, media, cloud infrastructure and SaaS industries. In addition to holding executive positions at GoGrid, Clickability, AOL, Ziff-Davis (ZDNet), Ofoto (now Kodak) and Wind River, Robert was a founding team member of GNN, the world’s first commercial website.

He is also a guest lecturer at the Haas School of Business at the University of California-Berkeley and a former multi-year board member of the Software Information Industry Association (SIIA) Marketing Executive Council.

Follow Rob on Twitter @RobCarroll or connect with him on LinkedIn.

HR Tech Buying 101: How To Choose Your Next ATS

Here’s the bottom line – and the numbers don’t lie. You need an ATS.

Implementing the wrong HR technology can hurt your brand and profits alike, not just cost you top talent. In fact, 58% of candidates who don’t hear back from an employer are less likely to buy products from that employer. That number increases to 65% if they don’t hear back after the interview. Choosing the best tech for your company can be difficult.

Sometimes you just need a scapegoat. For the staffing industry, the applicant tracking system (ATS) seems to be taking on that role as recruiting challenges grow and results disappoint. Why aren’t we beating our competition to the talent?

It must be the ATS. Why aren’t our candidates being selected? It must be the ATS. Why aren’t candidates saying yes to the roles we offer? It has to be the ATS. Doesn’t it?

As a leader of your talent organization, it is your responsibility to select the technology that supports your business. The right infrastructure is particularly critical to that mission.

But how do you strategically pick new HR technology? How do you know what pitfalls to avoid? Was that ever part of your onboarding or training? We bet not.

So in this webinar, we’ll teach you how to sort the mess from the best and find the right HR technology for your company.

You’ll Learn:

The key criteria you should consider before making a purchase decision
What you should ask every vendor before you sign anything
And more!

The Art of Seduction: The Importance of Employer Branding

If you are going to be successful in the sourcing and recruiting space, you need to know what your employees, stakeholders and customers think of you. Marketers have done this for years to attract customers, but now Sourcers, Recruiters and HR professionals have to do it too. Employer branding involves showing what you have to offer to potential and existing employees.

The official definition of Employer Branding is:

Employer branding is the term commonly used to describe an organization’s reputation as an employer, as opposed to its more general corporate brand reputation. The term was first used in the early 1990s, and has since become widely adopted by the global management community.

Want to Learn How to Create the Best Employer Brand?

You may be sick of hearing it, but have you checked out your Employer Brand lately? Candidates are making decisions about joining your company by looking at your company page, career site and sites like Glassdoor. On our Blab today, me, Zach Brown joined me and Katrina Kibben to share his best employer brand tips and tricks. Watch to learn about the best employer branding tips and tricks including:

How Employer Branding is Changing
Employer Branding Strategy
How to get EB buy in
Employee Value Proposition (EVP)
Importance of Employer Brand when it Comes to Reviews
#EBFluff
Embracing Marketing in Recruiting

You will learn all this and much more and even have few laughs along the way.

About our guest: Equipped with over 15 years of professional experience, Zach Brown joined DBI in 2014 and has been able to apply his background building and leading successful teams of creative and business professionals to deliver high quality recruiting and strategy solutions to clients around the world. As the Director of Marketing and Sourcing, Zach drives content strategy and social media campaigns for DBI in addition to leading recruitment sourcing efforts. He also acts as a consultant, advising and coaching architecture and interior design firms on the strategic and operational aspects of talent acquisition and employer branding.

Zach graduated cum laude from the Hoff School of Business at Corban University with a Master of Business Administration (MBA). He is also a proud Veteran of the United States Army Military Intelligence Corps.

Connect with Zach on Linkedin and Twitter.

Be Here Now: Making Candidate Experience Live Forever.

“I don’t want to live in the kind of world where we don’t look out for each other. Not just the people that are close to us, but anybody who needs a helping hand. I can’t change the way anybody else thinks, or what they choose to do, but I can do my bit.”

― Charles de Lint

Let’s face it. Being a recruiter isn’t always easy. We talk a ton about “candidate experience,” but the truth is having a good experience works both ways, really, and most of the time, it’s the candidate treating the recruiter like shit, not the other way around.

There’s a reason there’s so much vitriol flung at our profession by most other professionals out there, and why recruiters are so frequently derided and dismissed by the very same people we’re purportedly helping find better jobs and more fulfilling careers. Most of us care about our candidates, which is more than most of our candidates would ever say about us.

Hey. The truth sucks sometimes.

Some Might Say.

There are, however, those occasional candidates who make all the other stuff somehow tolerable – you know the type. The candidate who every phone call makes you crack up, the kind you develop that instant chemistry with that first phone call and actually enjoy getting to know during the screening and selection process.

These are the candidates who know you’re looking out for their best interests, and that they’ll do the same throughout the process, no matter how that process turns out.

These are the candidates we actually bust our asses for – not the ones who dodge our calls and show up late to interviews.

These connections, these relationships, the ones that make recruiting worthwhile, once in awhile, have always been relatively rare. These days, though, they might as well be extinct.

I sincerely miss those days when I was able to do more with my candidates than send out mass e-mails and rely more on tools then on that human touch that used to be the best way for any recruiter to get a real feel for who any candidate really was, for real.

I know this sounds crazy in the age of CRM and social, but at one point in my career, I actually insisted on meeting all my candidates in person. That’s right. I wouldn’t represent a candidate, I wouldn’t think of submitting a resume, unless I’d previously met that candidate in person – and this was a pretty standard policy at the time, at least at most agencies in those days.

In person meetings were business as usual, and they usually did a better job creating the foundation for learning more about them, their professional aspirations and personal passions.

Go Let It Out.

Spending time with candidates almost always helped with the close in the long run (if needed), and inevitably, led to a positive experience for both parties.

While these closer candidate relationships often inordinately helped with ensuring we were able to find candidates who were the right fit for our culture (and vice versa), but fit is irrelevant if you can’t get that perfect candidate to accept an offer – and every little bit helps when it comes to overcoming objections and getting a candidate to that “yes.” Which is really the whole damn point of the job.

Every recruiter looking back on those few scattered candidates spread out across the course of their career who for some reason stood out from the crowd, shaped our professional perspectives and provide the kinds of learning and life experiences you just can’t forget. I’ve written a few posts in the past about some of these candidates I’ve come across over the years before, but I haven’t told you the big one yet.

I haven’t told you about Kevin. He’s the candidate who showed me that sometimes, going the extra mile for job seekers matters not because those additional efforts are going to fill a req or generate a referral, but because it’s just the right thing to do – even if the payoff might not payoff in the ways you first expected. See, Kevin taught me that if you do more for candidates, you’ll always get more as a recruiter – and if you’re not going that extra mile, then many of the best and brightest candidates out there are likely to leave you behind.

As Wayne Dyer once said, “It’s never crowded along the extra mile.”

But it’s a distance that for recruiters, I promise, is always worth walking. Here’s why.

The Masterplan.

So back in the day, I was working in a technical recruiting role for one of those mega corporations that had so many disparate hiring needs that recruiters would get stuck filling all sorts of random reqs, because someone had to handle them, and since I was at an agency, thought was that it might as well be us instead of the competition.

This broke our normal rule to not accept non-tech type roles or projects since that was the sole focus of our agency and our business, but when your biggest client tells you they need a candidate, you take the search, even if it’s outside of your normal bailiwick.

This is how I got stuck trying to find a desperately needed corporate collections guy to support entire accounting function at one of the bigger brands out there – which, when you’re finding the guy in charge of keeping the books kept up, is a pretty big responsibility for a recruiter. We’d kicked butt for the tech group, which is how the accounting guys got wind of our agency, and why they came to us with one of their most mission critical, hardest to fill roles in a function none of us really knew a damn thing about.

Now, before I go on, let me reiterate: this was a big customer. Huge, even. The kind that keeps an entire agency afloat, the kind you don’t ever piss off, no matter what (even if that means finding an accountant).

When you rely on the commissions that come with contingency placements to pay the bills, you go where the money is, and in this case, it involved accounting, appropriately enough. Not so appropriate was the fact that we had no single freakin’ clue what the hell a controller did, what we were looking for or where we’d find them. None.

So we did what any recruiting agency would do in such a situation – pick up the phone and start pounding those phones until eventually you hit the paydirt of a placeable candidate. There’s money to be made, an agency is going to take the job; there’s no boutique or speciality shop that won’t figure out pretty much any search that comes their way if the money’s right.

This, of course, means agency recruiters get stuck with some pretty strange searches sometimes. I had my controller to find, even if I had no f-ing idea where one finds these collections types – nothing against finance recruiters, but seriously? Recruiting is boring enough without having to focus on finding accountants, much less a gig that was, in fact, the corporate equivalent of the guy who broke your pinkies if you couldn’t pay up in time – or figured out some other crafty way to get whatever outstanding debt was owed. I shit you not – Fortune 500 companies have loan sharks, too. Or something strangely similar, I suppose.

This, of course, I only found out after I was tasked with finding one for our biggest customer. I was collecting collectors, which meant as far as I was concerned, I was utterly out of my league.

Suddenly, all those software engineering searches seemed pretty easy by comparison. Compared to finding qualified corporate collectors, coders are a piece of freaking cake. Trust me.

Little by Little.

By this point in my career, I’ve pretty much recruited for every position you can think of, so this wouldn’t phase me nearly as much today as it did back in the day, when I was purely an IT recruiter who frankly could give two shits about accounting, collections or similarly boring back office work.

Accounting was dedicated to closing out the past; IT was all about opening up the future, and here I was, stuck with a shit search with literally NO database, resources or clue about where I was supposed to find these guys in the first place.

We had a huge internal resume pool readily available, but that was only for IT; there was one accountant type in there, and he did forensic auditing on computer systems. Even I knew that wasn’t even close to the same thing as collections, and that I had one big ass challenge I was going to have to figure out, and fast.

Here’s what I was given before I set out on my Quixotic quest to fill this req: a really boring job description, a vague intake meeting with the hiring manager that got cut off halfway through and gave me nothing whatsoever to go on, and one shared license to a Monster.com account I could use two afternoons a week. This is before Google and LinkedIn, mind you – which meant I was screwed, or so it would seem.

So I did what any recruiter in my shoes naturally does in this situation: I literally started flailing around every online nook and cranny, every database I could dig up and throw in searches for every keyword (or combination) I’d heard from the position description, hiring manager or the few context clues I’d come across in my remedial research.

Sourcing sucks when you have no idea what role it is you’re really filling, a big handicap considering you can’t fail, at least if you’re the kind of recruiter who has a job and reputation on the line with every single search, no matter what specialty we speciously self-identify with.

Definitely, Maybe.

I posted. I prayed. I talked to a ton of people who looked like they maybe did something similar on paper but turned out to be completely wrong, picked up what I could from them and a few scattered chat rooms, and began to drink during daylight hours. You know, the usual for a recruiter dealing with an unfillable req and a ton of pressure from a client and your colleagues alike. On second thought, in that situation, better make those drinks a double.

Here’s to failing. I wasn’t used to it, but after a few days of treading water, I was ready to concede to the inevitable, inevitably.

Then, something amazing and totally unexpected happened. I not only found a pretty good collector. I found the best in the business, or so his resume, references and blue chip background suggested. You know that feeling when you first see a resume or profile as a recruiter, and your stomach drops a little bit with that combination of excitement, relief and the nervousness that comes with making that first call? Most recruiters spend most of their careers chasing that dragon, but I’ll tell you – I’ve never felt that rush quite as intensely as I did that moment I first set eyes on Kevin’s resume.

I mean, I don’t believe there’s such a thing as a “perfect candidate” or a “perfect resume” in the first place, so I hate saying this, but this dude was the real deal.

Kevin not only was viable, but my impatient account manager and frustrated client would finally realize that this was one recruiter who wasn’t going to let them down and was going to deliver the absolute best hire out there. Because that’s how I roll…or at least, that’s what I told them, relieved I didn’t have to raise the white flag for this req.

Don’t Go Away.

While I had no doubt that anyone with the density of obscure, industry specific buzzwords and deep resume full of niche competitors no one had heard of were as good as gold, I still had a policy. This meant I had to have him come in for an actual in person meeting before presenting that perfect resume to my eager hiring manager and even more eager account manager.

We had an earlier phone screen, and it went well enough for both of us to want to move things forward, but for some reason, waiting on Kevin that morning, I was kind of nervous.

This was unusual for me, but this had to be perfect, since this was my only shot to close this job as I’m pretty sure he was the only qualified candidate out there for this client whose business a bunch of people were counting on for their lives and livelihoods.

No pressure, right? I was already sweating profusely, anxious thoughts racing through my head, when Kevin actually walked in the door – and that’s when I really started to freak the hell out.

Kevin was one of the tallest people I’d ever seen – his biceps were the size of my head, and he looked like he’d probably been a pretty damn good athlete before turning to collections, where, I’m assuming, he was even better. He looked like the accounting version of Andre the Giant, an oversized hulking mass of a man who, I shit you not, had to duck to get through the doors in the office.

It was like having Gheorghe Muresan as a random temp one day, only my giant turned out to be all bark and no bite. In spite of my initial trepidation, Kevin proved to actually be a great guy, and we got along. As we were wrapping up and I could feel what felt like familiarity, of course, I somehow managed to screw up what had been going so well. I did this as I usually do – by attempting (and failing) at making a joke.

In this case, that was my observation about his being born to be a collector, because when he came to my door, I’d give him whatever he wanted, and was sure anyone else would do the same. That is, if he could get in the door at all. If not, I joked, mine only had a seven foot clearance, so I could wait him out inside. Fie, fie, foe, f it…I realized immediately I had made a royal mistake.

Dude looks at me, and I’m thinking, “I’m about to get my ass kicked Shaq-Fu style” when Kevin does something strange. He broke down right there, right in my office, a giant of a man suddenly somehow small. He swallowed back something and told me the real story of his life and how he got into the line of business we both found ourselves unexpectedly in at the moment.

Turns out Kevin didn’t go looking for a profession specifically because of his size and somehow stumbled on a career in corporate collections. In fact, the job is obviously reliant on scaring people enough to part those fools and their money, yet he had neither intention or inclination of doing anything other than doing what he needed to in his job to take care of the two kids he was raising on his own as a widower. This was how he made ends meet, and he didn’t like having to resort to using his physique as a scare tactic to do so, but here he was, looking for work and desperate to find it.

Kevin explained he had been out of work for a while, since it seems that whenever he’d go into meet for an in-person interview (screens on the phone always went fine), for some reason, they’d be just as scared of his size as the deadbeats he would be going after – an unintended intimidation that led to his repeated rejection for positions he was more than qualified for, rejected with the greatest of care, lest he go off the deep end while being turned away.

Kevin wasn’t dumb – he saw this happen again and again, and surmised that because he looked scary, because he was a big guy, the thought of him “losing it” or being a potential physical threat in any workplace based on his sheer size terrified everyone – including me.

Now, Kevin interviewed well – so well, in fact, it was easily one of my best one-on-ones I’d had in several years, but I just couldn’t get over the what it factor – what would happen if this seemingly gentle giant had a giant meltdown on the job? The fact it even crossed my mind ashamed me, but it also demonstrated that Kevin’s job search was being exacerbated by a bias as big as his seven foot something frame.

Which, I figured, actually gave us something in common.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants.

Let’s face it. I’m not the smallest guy in the world, either. Not only am I big, I can be, let’s just say, a little loud sometimes, too – a combination I’m acutely aware has unintentionally intimidated other people in the past or left them feeling threatened by me due to my propensity to come across as, uh, “larger than life,” to put it mildly.

In other words, I totally got where Kevin was coming from, and suddenly, I knew I had to help him out, even if it meant breaking that bullshit rule you hear from agencies and RPO farms out there about keeping detached and at a safe distance, emotionally or otherwise, from your candidates. In recruiting, caring too much can come across as a professional hazard.

But I looked at Kevin, sitting there on the other side of my desk, and I saw a guy who was trying to deal with a whole lot of tragedy.

I saw a lost spouse, two kids to take care of, no steady source of income and a whole lot of uncertainty ahead of him. If I didn’t feel for anyone in that situation, I couldn’t look at myself in a mirror – if I didn’t feel that for my candidate, I knew I couldn’t keep recruiting. This meant, I knew at that very moment, that it was my responsibility – no, my moral duty – to help Kevin score this position.

We shook hands and I went to work.

The first thing I did was write up Kevin’s submission, explaining to the hiring manager and stakeholders about what a perfect match he was, and assuring them after our in person meeting, he presented himself with the sort of impeccable and consummate professionalism evidencing the character required to succeed in the client’s culture. He was, for lack of a better term, the man – and we’d be crazy not to hire the guy, I added, doing my business partner best to sound strategic when, in fact, I was just pulling for the dude as best as possible.

The hiring manager called me back pretty soon after I hit send on my submission, exceedingly impressed with his resume, his credentials, my work finding him and getting him interested in this role – the hiring manager had found exactly what he was looking for, which means I had done my job right so far. Of course, the tough part of the process was still ahead of me.

The day came for the final step – Kevin’s in person interview. For the first time in a little while, I remember, I felt excited as a recruiter coming into the office; it’d been some time since I really wanted a candidate to get a gig not because I’d make my fee, but because I was pulling for them, first and foremost, as genuinely good people who deserved a shot at happiness and qualified to be so close to maybe getting there.

This sense of altruism, of admiration for a candidate, was pretty rare since I dealt mostly with contract tech folks who, let’s face it, were arrogant, entitled assholes who could write their own checks and cash them, too. Kevin, on the other hand, needed to catch a break. And I hoped like hell we’d be the ones giving it to him.

Don’t Look Back In Anger.

I walked Kevin to the conference room and even entering the hall, could see the hiring team’s faces turn to a combination of shock and awe, the tension palpable as they looked up at a candidate who cast, quite literally, a long shadow.

I now knew what Kevin must have felt every time he went in for an interview, and why I pissed him off so much with my stupid, flippant remark. I saw he didn’t have any allies in that room from that look on their faces, and so I requested to sit in on the interview.

This was against our standard process, but damn it, I was going to get this deal closed as soon as this interview ended, end of story, case closed.

Kevin nailed his interview, answering every question like some sort of SHRM case study in behavioral based interviewing with style, substance and grace.

This was like watching a training video that had been scripted and rehearsed until it was too perfect to be true, and when he was shaking hands on the way out, I knew he had freakin’ nailed it.

Anyone who was at that table could see the fact the job was his. Kevin, however, revealed once we were out of earshot that he didn’t think he’d ever even get an offer. I told him he was crazy, and he shot me a look as he exited the building.

To my surprise (and chagrin), a few days later, Kevin proved himself right. He was absolutely everything they ever hoped for, and yet one of the managers and hiring stakeholders had vetoed moving forward, citing her physical intimidation by his size and vocally asserting her rights to a safe workplace would be in jeopardy were he to join the company. Of course, this was stupid, but they’d made up their minds, and I wasn’t going to convince these dumbasses otherwise. I thanked them, and walked off in disgust.

A few steps from the door, the manager stopped me and asked if I’d stick around for a word in private. The others left, and she waited until we were alone to tell me that although she thought he was a great candidate, she just couldn’t see his size not causing a significant issue in the workplace and spark concern, perceived or otherwise.

She was doing her job of making her workers and clients feel safe, even at the expense of a great candidate. So it goes, and she hoped I understood.

My response was simple; I told her that his job, if I understood it right, was to collect outstanding money from people who didn’t want to pay, and that in fact, that “intimidation factor” should be a preferred qualification, not a knock out. I argued every angle I could, laid it on pretty thick, and tried as hard as I could to get a win for Kevin. He deserved one, more than anyone, really.

Whatever the hell I said must have worked. The very next day, I received a call telling me to move forward with an offer to Kevin – albeit their willingness extended to an initial six month temp-to-hire contract, so it wasn’t a perfect score for me. Still, in recruiting, a win is a win, right? And this was a win, my friends, pure and simple.

Live Forever.

I picked up the phone and gave Kevin a call, told him to come back by the office and bring the kids if he could. I really wanted to meet them, plus I knew they’d all probably walk away happy considering the news I was going to share. Sure enough, Kevin walks in with two of the most breathtakingly beautiful little boys you’ve ever seen – I mean, I’m not a huge fan of kids, but his were ridiculously cute – and we all made our way to the conference room.

There, I closed the door, told him about the change to the temp-to-perm arrangement that they’d agreed to, apologized for that bullshit but assured him in six months, he’d get the gig full time – and I’d have his back to make sure he’d wind up with that offer. After all, I recruited him for a full time role, and somehow, someway, that was what I was going to do for him. I did – but it was largely his doing, as it turns out.

The moral of the story shouldn’t be so surprising. Suddenly, as I could see his eyes process what was happening to him – that at last, a good job was happening to him – this giant whose intimidation had been such a point of contention suddenly broke down in tears, unable to control himself. He cried openly in front of me, his kids, and my account manager. And guess what? We cried, too.

The next thing I remember is literally being swept off the floor in his oversized arms – and that is one hell of a physical feat to get me off the ground, let me tell you – and gave me the biggest, most sincere bear hug I’ve ever gotten and am likely to ever receive.

He kept thanking me for making a difference, and for once, I knew that I had – and I had done so by not giving up on Kevin, because everyone else had, and sometimes, walking the extra mile might not be the most expedient choice for a recruiter, but can significantly, profoundly impact those of the candidates who are putting their lives and livelihoods more or less in our hands. It’s an awesome responsibility – we all have our Kevin stories, and should always be fighting of them every day, since making the right hire is almost never the wrong outcome for any recruiter.

Kevin, of course, was the right hire – it didn’t even take the full six months before they converted him to a permanent employee, and he’s been working his way up in that company ever since. In the past fifteen years or so, he’s gone from collections to the C Suite, and turned his life into the quintessential American success story.

His sons are now both enrolled in college, and he’s hoping to finally retire after the next couple years sitting back in his new found position in upper management – a well deserved payoff for years of amazing service.

Kevin’s changed a lot in all these intervening years, obviously, but one constant still remains: every Christmas, he still sends me a card in the mail, and it always has nothing in there but the two same words that reappear in his annual handwritten message to me: Thank you.

That’s the welcome every recruiter should work for – and one that’s always worth going the extra mile for, no matter what. #TrueStory

About the Author: Derek Zeller draws from over 16 years in the recruiting industry. The last 11 years he has been involved with federal government recruiting specializing within the cleared Intel space under OFCCP compliance. Currently, he is a Technical Recruiter for Oracle.

He has experience with both third party agency and in-house recruiting for multiple disciplines and technologies. Using out-of-the-box tactics and strategies to identify and engage talent, he has had significant experience in building referral and social media programs, the implementation of Applicant Tracking Systems, technology evaluation, and the development of sourcing, employment branding, military and college recruiting strategies.

You can read his thoughts on RecruitingDaily.com or Recruitingblogs.com or his own site Derdiver.com. Derek currently lives in the DC area.

Deep in the Heart of Texas: A Recruiting Road Trip.

Just the word Texas alone prompts stereotypes galore. Cowboy hats. Guns. Wranglers and bull riders, just to start. If you’re a born and raised Texan, you probably have some more realistic Texas-centric stories about Buc-ees and bulls but for the rest of us, it’s left up to the media who doesn’t really do the great state justice.

But stereotypes don’t tend to do anyone any justice. From frumpy HR ladies to asshole recruiters and the array of cognitive biases we inevitably use to make our hiring decisions, we approach everything through our own version of rose-colored glasses.

As someone who sits around listening and reading to our industry as a full time job, I had a bias about the context of bringing HR technology sales people into a room with real practitioners – especially in a landscape of CRMs and standardized prompts.

We’ve learned to expect checklists, tchotchkes and countdowns to expo halls floors instead of valuable conversations. We all know we’ve gone down to “check out” the expo hall floor before, looking for something like sunglasses or a stuffed animal to take home.

All of which adds up to… what? Certifications? Exhaustion? A series of unwarranted calls from marketing teams trying to get rid of iPads? It sucks.

That model is exceedingly awful for everyone involved. To even be noticed, HR tech companies are dropping hundreds of thousands of dollars just to sit in a booth, and everyone involved pays a ton of travel expenses then spend weeks afterwards sifting through bad leads while nursing hangovers and sourcing lost receipts, instead of new clients or candidates. The P&L statements look horrible, yet we do it because we “have to.”

Our concept followed suit in my bias bin; in my mind, we were basically selling speed dating – or at least that was my perception based on a few calls and looking at marketing materials. On the surface, at least, I was right.

This whole model isn’t that creative. I mean – we’re talking about speed dating. If we really want to talk about great stereotypes and stories, there’s no better place to start.

But that wasn’t the purpose of getting on the road.

Day 1: Cleared for Liftoff in Houston.

I arrived with a bit of panic. Honestly, I didn’t know what was actually about to happen. See, speed dating has a really shitty connotation. You’re probably picturing your own awful experience or that eHarmony commercial with the date from hell that gets screwed up when that creepy old guy plays third wheel.

It’s like Tinder in real life and we all know Tinder can get really weird. Not Austin weird, CSI weird.

So, we started the day by setting the stage for these speed dates and breaking down what stereotypes and biases they may have brought to the day, explaining that this was our first Reconverse event in the United States and that these were learning opportunities, not speed dates at all.

We set the stage for the day with a quick lesson on how to validate a vendors credentials from Matt and in minutes, the looks on their faces had me convinced that maybe we were doing something great.

That great thing was something I’ve never done before. In all my years of working in marketing to the recruitment industry while poking and prodding at fundamental issues, I’ve never asked the question “how did you learn to do this?”

I never realized, or acknowledged, that in all the key decisions we make, we aren’t necessarily taught the key criteria for making better decisions, especially in technology. I mean, how many other industries do we make million (or more) dollar decisions without any education pipeline, other than falling on your face? I don’t know about you but I’m thankful that our proclivity for education is limited to our industry rather than, I don’t know, structural engineers?

But there was still that speed dating thing next. And somehow, that’s where the magic happened- and I say that in all sincerity. We kicked off the day hearing these personal connections are different and then, there it was.

Surprisingly, this wasn’t like speed dating at all. These vendors knew who was coming so they were able to prepare, to think about fit and really help people, rather than entertaining a conversation about bullshit and hangovers in Vegas. On the other side, the senior executives from companies didn’t want to have a sales conversation. They wanted a consultation, to talk about tech and their implementation and why it mattered, and they got just that.

Read that one more time. They WANTED to talk to a sales person.

If you’ve ever sold technology, you probably know what percentage of calls in a day you sit on that have no interest in speaking to you for any extended period of time. That 30 minute call is painful for everyone.

In all fairness, free event with a steak lunch – how could it not work? But these folks hadn’t even eaten yet so I can’t give all the credit to the lunch.

Day 2: A Confederacy of Dunces (Houston – Austin).

You know I’m skipping the after party coverage because that’s our little secret. I mean, we’re traveling Texas with a bunch of Brits – we had to show them a good time. That good time came in the form of a giant cast-iron beaver and a LOT of Twinkies, at least on this particular Tuesday.

If you have yet to experience the phenomenon of Buc-ees, the only way I’ve found to succinctly describe it is Cracker Barrel meets Walmart, in a gas station. If you can picture it, it’s exactly what you’re thinking. Texas regalia and country kitsch sprayed across the walls and t-shirt, then a food section that looks more like a grocery store than a gas station.

They sell everything from barbeques to a full jerky bar and walls of chips that anyone with a buzz and a case of the munchies would never leave. Not to mention, everything is a fraction of the cost for our overseas friends.

Of course, the relatively cheap burritos, brisket and Beaver Nuggets (the ‘house special,’ as it were) didn’t actually save anyone any pounds – even if they were a fraction of what they’d cost in the UK. Quote of the day:

“Over the course of thirty seconds, I’ve just seen a Confederate Flag, a house made of tin and an eagle. It’s like America just slapped me in the face.”

Nope. Just Texas, turns out. We also watched a bootleg copy of the Revenant along the way, and watching a western while driving through the Hill Country might just mean the Brits on the bus are now more American than most of us.

Day 3: Keeping Austin Weird.

The magic continued in the most progressive town in Texas, according to most people, anyways, but the group looked much different, proving every Austin stereotype to be more or less true. It’s basically Brooklyn, but with better BBQ. Tech recruiters in a town that hosts an event like SXSW are a little different than a group in Houston, down to the dress pants (or lack thereof) and much more accelerated understanding of the talent technology space.

Our vendors were amazed at the technical prowess and interest in the “next big thing” instead of replacing legacy systems that hold them back from making better decisions. It speaks to Austin, both as a market for HR but as a test for the next revolution in recruiting.

Even with its reputation as innovative, we all know innovation can’t happen in a vacuum. Innovation is not what you picture – happening in a dorm room. It happens when we collaborate and ask questions. It happens when we ask the hard questions, pass on that whole idea that maybe we’re being rude and pursue relationships. It does not usually happen, even in an innovation hub, when selecting HR technology.

The stories echoed in Austin – we Google what we need – an ATS, CRM, pick your acronym – evaluate them with a template comparison chart and then make a decision. Now, even though this group made purchasing decisions more frequently than their counterparts in Houston, they similarly struggled with what should happen after the buy.

William Tincup led this conversation of discovery, helping our attendees understand the cost of bad technical vendors and the real value of a relationship. In a universal moment of “ohhh”, the room quickly realized that the costs, of course, may not hit your bottom line but they always hit your political capital. You know the moment – the one that, to your vendor, is just a glitch but costs you far too much in political capital. Executives are constantly reminding themselves, and you, of that bad decision and if you’re gunning for a seat at the table, the gun just turned on you.

Tincup advised that the outcome of these meetings as drivers for technology decision making should be a true relationship, not just a one night stand. What it really takes to make a great partner relationship requires the same commitment on the part of recruiters as the vendors selling them software: trust, compassion, honesty. Even in implementation, how many times have you bought before you met them? How many times would you get married before you met the parents?

Exactly – you wouldn’t. The same goes for vendor relationships.

Day 4: Red Dirt Road Trip (Austin – Fort Worth).

In all fairness, there were a lot fewer cows, confederate flags or tin houses on this leg of the route, in exchange for strip malls, stadiums and kolache signage.

And yes, we went to Buc-ees again. Coonskin caps, brisket and burritos galore.

Day 5: Does Fort Worth Ever Cross Your Mind?

Following this format twice before, I knew Forth Worth would be great. Plus, there’s a glitter saddle chandelier in the middle of this bar that seats 6000 so I knew it couldn’t suck. What I didn’t expect, perhaps, was the realization that we’re hurting each other.

In the midst of all the human elements to help create great cultures and companies, it’s easy to forget that we have to share what went wrong, too, not just our best in class case studies. When was the last time you asked for a reference, not for a candidate, but for an ATS? Instead, we suffer the slings and arrows of outrageously shitty talent technology because, well, we don’t have a choice after the contract is signed. And too often that happens with nothing more than a few false promises, an RFP and a roadmap to nowhere.

Stop that right now. If you get bad food from a restaurant, you tell people. Why are we being quiet about such a linchpin in our success? We really can make things better by speaking up about HR tools and talent tech that sucks – and helping educate and inform others in our industry about what’s working and what’s not to advance our industry, our careers and our employers.

You have a moral obligation to your team and our community to be open and honest about this and it’s rare to get the chance to connect and build local peers who can help, unless you’ve somehow had the bandwidth to master this social media thing in between meetings with hiring managers and software selection.

Deep in the Heart: Recruiting Lessons Learned.

Too often along this road, I heard: “We don’t like egg on our face, so we don’t eat eggs at all.” As a recruiting and HR industry, we fight for the opportunity to do big projects and implementations and then we shoot the egg in our own faces by not taking advantage of expertise and experience.

We seek out trade shows instead of training programs for HR Tech purchasing decisions and connections when we need to lean on each other. The problem with trade shows is that somehow it’s never a fair trade – and vendors always have the upper hand, unfortunately.

In the end, I realized I was all wrong. We weren’t selling a sales opportunity. We’re not even selling disruption, we’re selling the prompt for change. We’re teaching people how to ask the right questions.

To have better conversations in a context that actually helps build relationships instead of simply selling software is something that’s not only great for vendors, but it levels the playing field for buyers, too.

And when the buyers make smarter decisions about the products powering their people, everyone wins. There might be a lot of bulls in Texas, but for once, when it came to HR and recruiting technology selection, there wasn’t a whole lot of bullshit. I shit you not.

About the Author: Katrina Kibben is the Director of Marketing for RecruitingDaily, and has served in marketing leadership roles at companies such as Monster Worldwide and Care.com, where she has helped both established and emerging brands develop and deliver world-class content and social media marketing, lead generation and development, marketing automation and online advertising.

An expert in marketing analytics and automation, Kibben is an accomplished writer and speaker whose work has been featured on sites like Monster.com, Brazen Careerist and About.com.

You can follow Katrina on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

The Haunted Man: Lies, Damn Lies and Recruiting.

“To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature. I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart.”

Charles Dickens, Master Humphrey’s Clock (Vol. 1), 1840

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times….and no I’m not quoting Dickens, I’m just talking about the wretched state of talent acquisition today. Never has one industry been so despised, respected, wretched, admired and cursed all at the same time. Small wonder, really.

Recruitment is an emotional roller-coaster and the highs can make you feel like a god sitting on Mount Olympus, while the lows will throw you into the depths of Hades.

There’s no safe middle ground, no shades of gray. You’re winning or you’re losing, you’re billing or you’re not, you’re either a hunter or you’re dead meat. You’re constantly shifting between polar extremes because the game can change in a hiring manager’s heartbeat, and those extremes will always attract a certain type of person.

Bleak House.

Unfortunately for us, that person normally comes with a host of lies in one hand, and a God complex in the other. Which incidentally, is a God awful combination and should be avoided at all costs.

In the halls of academia, they call this the Dunning-Kruger effect. In recruitment, we call it being a dickhead. It’s the idea that you’re hot shit at what you do and you’ve probably billed in the millions this quarter alone while building a red hot desk and simultaneously helping executive leaders at blue chip clients build their staffing strategies and talent pipelines, to boot. Bollocks.

I hear things like this all the time and while I’m politely smiling and nodding, I’m really rolling my eyes so hard it’s sending me into some kind of seizure on the inside.

It’s not just recruiters who are guilty of this either. Our clients suffer from this and pitch us jobs that any average worker out there would be jealous of. They promise beanbags and Foosball tables, lunch clubs and training, puppies and massages, and all with the ‘autonomy’ (I loathe that word) to innovate.

As you’re taking down the job spec you think you’ve hit upon some kind of recruiting rainbow, complete with a pot of gold at the end, because in their right mind wouldn’t want this role, right?

Yet as you start to send resumes across and as screening, slating and selection begins, you realize that those beanbags are full of holes, that slaving away all day leaves little time to play Foosball, your millions in billings put you at break even with your outlandish draw, the training consists of a bunch of bullshit PowerPoint presentations, your boss’ dog is the only puppy they allow at the office (and that mean little guy really smells quite foul), the massages only were offered once at the annual Christmas party, and that “culture” has evaporated into productivity metrics, KPIs and call times – the exact sort of stuff that kills innovation.

No one has the time to try untested waters when they’re struggling just to stay afloat.

Suddenly, strip away the shit and you’re left with a “dream job” that’s more or less a nightmare role when it comes to attracting candidates.

The candidates can really suffer from this affliction too, and they spend a lot of time telling you how they built Rome in a day, invented the Internet, taught leadership to Jack Welch, launched and sold a startup and they’re definitely the person for the crap job they’re deigning to interview for.

Either that, or they go to the opposite ends of the spectrum and don’t say much at all, and that’s not good for someone in an interview setting. These tight lips may sink ships, but they also sink candidates, their resumes discarded or ignored along with the rest of your rejects.

Then, as often happens, you realize some months later that your colleague at another recruitment company placed him for a six figure salary because actually, he was shit hot at his job but was just humble, soft spoken or thought you’d take the time to at least Google him before bringing him into process.

This lack of self-promotion and humility, of course, is something no one is completely used to, so in all fairness it can’t easily be recognized as easily as a “guru,” “expert,” “thought leader,” or whatever else it is incompetent people with few skills and a lot of ego call themselves these days.

The Old Curiosity Shop: A Look at Lying Recruiters.

While clients and candidates do fall victim to the Dunning-Kruger effect, however, for some reason, it’s almost always the recruiters themselves who are the poster child of this particular phenomenon.

You’ll find it mostly in big multinational, enterprise kinds of employers where the methods are old, the coffee stale and the mindsets (particularly the executive leaders, who got their jobs by hanging around long enough) somehow even staler.

All you have to do to spot the Dunning-Kruger Effect at work in the workplace is sit on the sidelines with the staffing sales and biz dev guys and you’ll figure out who’s suffering from this affliction almost immediately.

It’s in the way they walk and the tilt of their head. It’s also the absolute oblivion they have to their own incompetence, and because they played the time game, and won, they truly believe they’re the Rain Man of recruitment. Obviously they do not seem to understand that Rain Main had severe autism, which might be another mental malady they share in common with this character.

Pro tip: if you want to find people who are too stupid to realize how stupid they really are, you’ll find them the fastest in the recruiters specializing in Finance and Banking, for some reason.

I don’t know what it is about finance recruiters and bankers coming together, but it’s a terrible mix of ethically challenged, self-aggrandizing shysters and unbridled, unconscionable capitalism that is more or less a codependent relationship that’s about as healthy as acute cirrhosis, but with more booze.

Great Expectations.

Now that all sounds pretty damning, but here’s the thing – it’s not always true about recruiters (there are many wonderful exceptions to this rule), nor does the sweeping stereotype about staffing even need to exist in the first place. We basically all just need to calm our shit down and stop swinging from such intense emotional states because it’s slowly, but surely, turning us into lunatics.

If we continue like this, very soon we’re going to end up blowing up in a ball of flame from all the hot air we’re letting out all the time, and all that will be left is a bunch of recruiters rushing for the exits once billings dry up and the boom times turn even a little lean.

It’s not just going to be the shit recruiters who suffer, either – the stench clings to all of us, as does the stigma. Recessions are a crap time to be a recruiter.

And winter is coming.

Hard Times.

And here’s the thing, and this is the special ingredient we’re missing, we don’t actually need to tell lies to be great at what we do.

Recruiting and talent acquisition will always be necessary. People will always need a job, and take it from someone who hates job hunting, people will always pay other people to do it for them – just as employers will always pony up a fee to let someone else deal with shit storm that is front line recruiting and hiring.

Here’s a way we could cut the lying without a whole lot of effort, systemic change or strategy. Just a thought, but would it be the worst thing in the world if someone – a client or hiring manager, likely – just took the time to do a job spec right, without all the sprinkling of fairy dust and scattered superlatives that are noxious to read and impossible to believe?

Look, if it’s a decent job, someone qualified will want it – as will tons of people who don’t even come close, but then again, it’s a decent job, and those aren’t easy to come by.

We blame candidates for dishonesty or hyperbole, but how can we blame them for not telling the truth about themselves when we don’t reciprocate the favor from even the first point of contact? You want an honest answer, you’ve got to be honest in the way you’re representing your reqs, too.

Here’s another thought: honest job specs make for quicker screening for both sides. Either they fit or they don’t, but both sides know up front what they’re getting instead of dancing the talent tango for weeks or months before figuring out you’re both not just that into each other, which happens all the time, and is an epic waste for everyone.

Most recruiters justify their bad behavior because a placement, at the end of the day, represents a person for whom they helped find work or a job and therefore, their shadiness and scheming are in fact altruism and “tough love.” Please.

You get paid, don’t have to suffer what happens to a candidate who was mislead or cajoled into a job that’s not at all what was promised, and the second a job seeker stops being placeable then they stop hearing from you, because their utility is spent. That’s not altruism, that’s being an asshole.

Closing a job order or requisition is often the fruition of months of work and effort, and should be commended in most cases, but still, placing someone in a role doesn’t make you an upstanding individual who should be considered for the Nobel Peace Prize or anything, so let’s just chill out for a second.

We’ve probably all been guilty of being a dickhead, douchebag or dumbass at one point or another. Even me, and definitely you. I don’t care what you say, it happens to the best of us. Still, it’s our ability to realize we’re being awful or screwing up and making the proper amends that sets us apart. Check yourself before you wreck yourself, as they say.

Self-awareness in recruiting is the absolute key to self-preservation. Either you can address your actions or someone else will for you, and that likely isn’t the resolution any recruiter wants, since it normally means losing a client, candidate or job.

And a little bit more credibility for all of us out here trying to be better than the “recruiter” everyone thinks of when they think of recruitment.

Our Mutual Friend.

The other difference recruiters can truly make in staying truthful is pretty obvious: honesty really is the best policy. The recruiters and talent consultants I’ve fallen in love with personally, who are the most exceptional professionally (and there have been many) all share one rare trait: they tell the truth, even if it’s an inconvenient one. Most in this industry are.

The best recruiters aren’t afraid of honesty – they embrace it in every facet of their work and their interactions internally, externally and otherwise. These are the good guys, and good thing is, there are a whole lot of them out there already. It’s not impossible to be a recruiter and a decent human being at the same time, despite conventional wisdom to the contrary.

They tell it like it is, they’re straight up with facts and they get right in your face with their honesty. They’re honest enough to know how good they are and what they can and cannot do. In other words, they’re self-aware.

This should not be the exception to the rule, but then again, the rules of recruiting tend to favor duplicity over transparency. This might make placing candidates and collecting billings easier, but at what cost?

In a post-recession world, we no longer have time for business jargon, buzzwords and bullshit. We’re making way for a new generation of candidates with different sensibilities and a desire for brutal honesty and continuous feedback.

The emerging workforce doesn’t have time for lip service or patience for the corporate games and company politics that used to proliferate in every profession. Nope. Their refusal to do business as usual usually means you’d better change the way you do business if you want to keep doing business at all.

When recruiters call me, I cut off their scripted, specious Shakespearean style soliloquies because honestly, these validations validate that there’s a reason they have to sell their shit job so hard up front.

I just want the facts, because that’s really going to determine next steps for both of us – yet too often, they just keep on telling a fable while I bang my head on my desk before hanging up on them.

Hey, you had your chance to sell me on a job, and instead, you sold me on an ideal of a job that’s so far removed from reality that it’s not even fabrication, it’s fiction (fantasy, at that). Well, reality bites, but not as bad as this crap, I promise.

The Uncommercial Traveler.

I know that as recruiters we’re born to sell. It’s in our blood and we eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner, so it’s a little hard to step away from the sell. But people ultimately want what we have, will always want it, and now they want it in a way that’s best for them.

It’s fine that the job you’re pitching me isn’t the job of my dreams. I know that it’s probably just a stepping stone to a happier place, and that’s okay.

The sales pitch that’s full of self-importance and sprinkled with lies about how many lives you’ve changed or livelihoods you’ve improved, how the job is ‘just like working at Google’ and the millions you’ve billed out this year might be an expedient short term way to fool some people sometimes, but you can’t fool all the people all the time. And the people are onto recruiters and their lies by now.

It’s time to start giving recruiting a bad name today if there’s going to be a tomorrow. There’s nowhere to go but up from here, and the better we can make our reputation, the better we can do our jobs, the more we’ll bill and the better off we’ll all be. Seems simple enough, I’d think.

Here’s the thing: recruiters, start giving it like it is, not how you think it should be to sell the candidate on saying “yes.” And maybe, just maybe, you’ll stop hearing “no” so much from candidates, clients and colleagues – and that would be a good thing, since one can only handle so much rejection before one realizes the problem isn’t them – it’s you.

Recruiters, you can do better. No lie.

About The Author

Salma El-Wardany, Head of Marketing, Recruitment Entrepreneur cut her teeth in recruitment at a global Plc, working in business development to win new clients and accounts into the company. She gave up corporate life in favour of the startup world, specifically recruitment startups.

Salma spends her days advising recruitment companies on their marketing, digital and branding strategies, and how to make their voice heard in an industry that is already overcrowded and full of voices clamoring to be heard. By night, she writes about many things, mainly all the things in recruitment that vex her.

Follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

Full Circle Recruiting: 360Social

If you haven’t in a while, it is time to look again at 360Social especially with the recent purchase of Connectifier by LinkedIn. You may remember them from the past. It was around back in the day and then it was gone. But it has come back and is 10 times better than it was when it left.

Can You Name 200 Social Media Sites?

360social is a Chrome Extension that scrapes social networks to find additional information on the contact you select. When you are on a social media site, you click the 360Social button in your browser it will automagically create a list of social sites that are associated with the person you are researching. I know I can’t name 200 Social media sites but 360Social searches over that number. That is reason enough to try it.

Right now, it is free to “early birds” but I would get it now because of the looks of their website, they will be charged eventually. In the video below, Dean DaCosta shows us how he uses Social360. You can use it to by clicking here.

About 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.

The Rise and Fall of LinkedIn: A Recruiting Requiem.

There’s nothing new about M&A in the HR Technology Industry; after all, big fish swallows little fish is how most top tier talent vendors have ended up so bloated they can hardly move, much less run at the same speed as the smaller SaaS startups starting to dominate the landscape.

I’m not naming names (Taleo) but let’s just say when you have a user conference headlined by Maroon 5, you’re basically printing your own money living in the past.

The Rise of LinkedIn and the Decline of HR Tech.

You literally cut the checks, then it doesn’t matter how the hell your sourcing functionality works, because your average employee could care less about your pipeline or the future of talent.

They just want to get paid on time, and the companies that do the decidedly unsexy job of providing payroll software and solutions fill a void that also means they get to use your money to hedge on overnights and make a killing of f(x).

If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry. That’s why you haven’t ever thought much about the mechanisms of that direct deposit program or why the front end of the time clock looks like it was built on Windows 3.1.

Somehow, LinkedIn has become one of those bloated behemoths, turning into the recruiting version of Jabba the Hut. This is one of the biggest problems with the evolution of what’s become a ubiquitous part of talent acquisition today – the fact that in order to continue the kind of growth required to keep shareholders happy (epic fail), much like an IBM or ADP, since it went from potential acquisition target to rich Uncle Pennybags after gobbling up so much market share that it became unrecognizable.

While its product leaves much to be desired, LinkedIn has established its current positioning in the HR Technology marketplace because, well, it’s got enough cash to do whatever the hell it wants, thank you very much.

No matter how much hubris there might be, if you’re a recruiter, whatever LinkedIn does becomes by far the biggest news in the industry because it’s the one product pretty much every. one. of. us. uses.

Yesterday, as word spread about the Mountain View Death Star’s latest purchase, content information aggregator Connectifier, the recruiting world again nearly fainted with people opinion on this latest M&A move (and a fairly minor, mundane one, in the grand scheme of things).

These opinions, while uninformed as is often the case, were interestingly much more split on the move than the usual pro-LinkedIn propaganda that’s somehow been passed off as “thought leadership” by some Omnicom subsidiary.

In fact, it was fairly negative, with recruiters’ responses to the news ranging from “This is the end of Connectifier as we know it,” to “Meh. Another one bites the dust” to “LinkedIn is the world’s most evil company and are hated by pretty much everyone”

All of these, somehow, seem to be simultaneously true when it comes to LinkedIn at the moment, as this latest announcement evidences.

But let’s forget LinkedIn for a moment (probably impossible) and ask for a minute, what this news means for Connectifier, one of those rare tools that recruiters and sourcers actually like using and doesn’t totally suck when it comes to delivering actionable information on direct sourced candidates.

I’d call it the love and goodwill Connectifier somehow managed to achieve “unbridled passion,” but I’m sure there’s got to be at least one contrarian out there who hated it, this being recruiting and all.

But it was the closest to a lovefest that you’ll ever see in sourcing, to say the least.

Rapportive – Never Forget.

Connectifier wasn’t the first aggregation tool to sweep sourcers off their feet. One of the earliest offerings in this space was Rapportive – a tool which was often the first time recruiters had ever had a technology capable of displaying social networking and other PID results directly in your inbox – in this case, GMail, which somehow remains in beta long after products for it get bought and sold on the open market.

Rapportive was revolutionary and it quickly became indispensable, so of course LinkedIn snatched it up in 2012 for a cool $15 million, no small change for a product inherently a cut API away from doomsday.

Rapportive was small, backed by about a million bucks in VC cash and a very small team working with a very agile approach suddenly getting snatched up in a massive exit – and payday – for a product whose roadmap was headed the right direction, but still hadn’t gotten the destination down just right.

Fast forward a few years, and Rapportive is at best a fading memory for most of us – its features, however, live on as part of the LinkedIn platform, where they’re now just a small part of a huge solution offering most recruiters barely even knew still existed. Most of the cool bells and whistles were killed off somewhere along the way, leaving, well, a more unwieldy LinkedIn and a couple really rich, really lucky guys who figured out profile aggregation first.

Roadmap to Nowhere: RIP, Connectifier.

Which makes you wonder what’s going to happen to the next generation of this sourcing software, where Connectifier was one of the most prominent products in a pretty niche market that’s now waiting with baited breath to see what, exactly, LinkedIn plans on doing with its latest purchase.

Along with Prophet by HiringSolved – less we forget that beloved tool – Connectifier became one of those products inextricably linked to most sourcers’ processes.

The reason these tools were so popular, of course, is that they let people get past the very expensive, very UI/UX unfriendly piece of product that is the LinkedIn Recruiter product and bypass the paid firewall to get contact information that they’d otherwise have to spend an arm, a leg and more than most companies spend on all HR Technology combined to obtain through an actual LinkedIn license. This information was already out there, after all, so it’s not like LinkedIn has a claim to any of this data – Connectifier just made pulling it all together much, much easier for recruiters.

Connectifier worked, and that fact alone helped it build a momentum that was no joke within the small circles of sourcing pros out there. The biggest names and most prominent pundits in the industry, people like Stacy Zapar, became outspoken evangelists and vocal (unpaid) advocates of a tool widely perceived as game changing (or just really damned helpful) by anyone using it for sourcing or recruiting.

With Connectifier, all you had to do was pull up a social page or personal profile, and boom, right there in the browser, like magic, candidate contact information would appear, the kinds of stuff like personal e-mails and home phones that are like gold for sourcers or anyone trying to contact a passive candidate directly.

While Connectifier wasn’t 100% accurate, nor was it able to pull up personal contact information 100% of the time, it sure felt close. The average was good enough where it could be trusted enough to send an e-mail or call a potential candidate without a second thought – and most of the time, that trust was reciprocated with some sort of success at finding the right information on the right candidates so the right person could reach out.

In short, it helped recruiters do their jobs better, and it worked while delivering as promised. That alone is pretty rare for a product in this space – and that reliability, inevitably, led to loyalty.

This, of course, is a big problem for LinkedIn, because the fact that they were viable made Connectifier a potential competitor, which, historically, LinkedIn generally tends to seek and destroy – by any means necessary.

Rapportive became a competitor, and subsequently got swallowed up and sold for parts. Problem solved, as far as LinkedIn is concerned.

It was inevitable, then, that Connectifier would see a similar fate, since these types of tools are the HR Tech Hunger Games as far as Mountain View is concerned.

They’re entertaining until they threaten to kill off the sacred cash cow that is InMail, which relies on this public data and lazy recruiters to rake in the Benjamins – a need products like Connectifier obviously threaten (and, more importantly, a major revenue stream for LinkedIn). Shit talks, VC walks, and somehow LinkedIn keeps on keeping on in spite of its diminishing returns and functionality that’s starting to fray up along the edges.

Without InMail, there is no LinkedIn – at least not at this point. This means, if you’re LinkedIn, any price they pay is more or less an insurance policy underwriting their entire existence and continued viability. And that, my friends, is always a hell of a deal.

Now, we don’t actually know the terms of the deal, leading to the widespread whispers that this “acquisition” was really just a lawsuit settlement in disguise, but for now, there’s no way of knowing any facts except when the dust settled, LinkedIn was the proud owner of one piece of software that recruiters really liked.

Time will tell, but given their track record, many in the recruiting and sourcing world are already coming to grips with the fact they just lost another of their most beloved tools to the evil, moustache twirling VC villains that are LinkedIn’s executives, spokespeople and biggest remaining “fans” (Second Life and MySpace have them still, too). Frankly, we might as well assume right now that Connectifier is another victim of the vagaries of unbridled capitalism and corporate litigation.

RIP, Connectifier. It’s been real.

We don’t know the terms of the deal, and whispers are widespread that the acquisition was a pseudo-settlement for a lawsuit that LinkedIn threatened Connectifier with. We’ll have to wait this one out and see how it shakes out, but needless to say many in the recruiting world are in fear of losing another tool to the giant.

Bear Market Blues: The Future M&A Impact for LinkedIn.

From Bright.com to Cardmuch to Careerify to Slideshare, LinkedIn hasn’t had a particularly successful run at the M&A market – at least for the purported purposes of building a portfolio of complementary products and offerings into a more comprehensive offering with more robust capabilities and feature sets.

It’s probably not too soon to call their Pulse acquisition a dud (unless you really want your recruiting product served with a side of crappy content), and it’s not looking great for the staggering $1.5 billion the company dropped just last August for e-learning platform Lynda.com, acquisitions designed to create additional revenue streams instead of much needed reinvestment in what’s becoming a pretty outdated product.

One can only assume that LinkedIn got the Merrill band back together, because they’re building a product that’s pretty much the software version of a subprime mortgage – a bunch of junk assets bundled together and sold at a price that doesn’t reflect the fact that it’s about as good an investment opportunity as oil futures or multilevel marketing schemes.

This house of cards finally seems to be tumbling down, as Friday’s stock sell off suggested, but of course, the fact that a company that can’t turn a profit was ever valued at 40 billion in the first place makes about as much sense as a potential Trump presidency or your average HCM user guide.

The reason this terrible M&A track record hasn’t been previously punished by investors seems pretty simple – they’re not buying companies to add long term value and maximize shareholder profits. They’re essentially hedging their bets and business model.

The real reason LinkedIn seems to acquire companies in the first place, looking back at their deal history, is fairly obvious. With billions of VC dollars floating around in their collective war chest, they don’t need to actually beat the competition since they have the cash to just buy them outright just to eliminate them from the marketplace.

Make no mistake; the Connectifier acquisition represents one of these situations, another sacrificial lamb sent to the SaaS slaughter. The exception this time, as opposed to say, previous acquisitions like B2B marketing platform Bizo, is that their core constituency of talent and recruiting professionals (who represent 62% of their overall revenue) are actually paying attention this time around – and have a significant stake in the outcome of this deal, both in practical product terms as well as long term industry implications.

Death Wish: How LinkedIn Screwed Itself.

I truly believe that if LinkedIn holds true to form and does another hatchet job to a product like Connectifier, chopping it up for scraps and burying the few features they don’t kill off deep in the recesses of their labyrinthine stockpile of features and functions no one needs or uses, they’re going to likely finish expending the little good will they have left from their major revenue source.

The publicity surrounding this acquisition, furthermore, will likely make it difficult for them to pursue future targets or find a warm reception as a potential buyer, who are starting to figure out the game and likely to refuse to play by LinkedIn’s rule book.

That said, LinkedIn’s deep pockets and litigation hungry legal team may just resort to the same bullying and scare tactics that led to their out of court settlement with HiringSolved, one of the principal competitors of Connectifier and one whose willingness to fight LinkedIn rather than sell their company to save face ended in a resounding victory by settling while still remaining viable.

The fact that LinkedIn not only ostensibly lost this settlement – and attempt to shut down Hiring Solved – but also were forced to buy the competition, and therefore raising the viability and market share potential of the David who fought Goliath and won, represents a double whammy. It’s also a cautionary tale that by spurning the most hated company in talent (and SaaS) today, it can ultimately lead to more value for startups than a quick or convenient liquidity event. Fool me once, as they say.

I know what you’re thinking when you read this: capitalism will always win out, even if shareholders saw nearly half of their investment wiped out in a single day on the market precipitated largely by a single financial disclosure (and fact is, if they can’t meet targets now, this is likely as good as it’s going to get as they lose product innovation, competitive edge, reputation and goodwill across the board).

While this may indeed be a “market correction,” and the fact is that Reid Hoffman and Jeff Weiner and some VC partners are still going to wind up filthy rich no matter what, that even their institutional investors and most loyal customers seem to be turning on them is even more capitalistic than the “create, amp value, cash out, order mai tai” mentality by which Silicon Valley normally operates.

Capitalism always wins, yes – but where customers have the power of the pocketbook and there are manifold other options for recruitment technology investments, LinkedIn is unlikely to triumph over the competition, at least in the long term.

Once recruiter spend has been spent, then all they’ll have left are a set of products, like display ads and Lynda subscriptions, that no one is going to buy, and LinkedIn will have to sell off their acquisition portfolio for liquidity to compensate for their lost Talent Solutions revenue, likely at a steep loss considering the marked up prices they’ve paid for the few deals they’ve done where the purchase price (unlike Connectifier) was made public.

LinkedIn is a giant corporation, a massive Death Star still sitting comfortably atop the Silicon Valley and Wall Street food chains – at least, for now. But eventually, the fact that there’s nearly universal hatred from them in the talent acquisition space means that they’re increasingly opening the door for other companies to challenge and unseat them from the top of the talent tool hierarchy.

Back when they first launched in 2004, LinkedIn was the right product at the right time, a perfect storm of SaaS, social, social and search which filled a huge gap in the existing technology available to talent practitioners – demand which the product almost perfectly met.

That’s why they enjoyed such a rabidly loyal, dogmatic following among recruiters and sourcers for so long – it was a good product that worked better than anything else out there, and there were no real competitors in terms of market offerings.

This is no longer the case, and any loyalty from their now dozen years of existence has been completely killed off by their detachment, hubris and greed. The fact of the matter is that based off the response from their recruiting customers regarding the twin announcements of their Connectifier acquisition and subsequent stock sell off, their cash cow, big ticket customers seem to want LinkedIn to crash and burn. This is not a great sign for renewals, and an even more foreboding sign that their stock will only plummet further, even if it makes up some of its losses over the short term.

LinkedIn will never be what it was ever again, and that, my friends, is the reality of the situation. Sentimentally, it sucks, but pragmatically, it’s probably a good thing for an industry that had almost become too reliant on a single product and open the door for alternative platforms and smaller solutions which produce way better recruiting ROI than LinkedIn ever did. That won’t be hard to do.

While Connectifier is in a “wait and see” mode as to the future of this beloved product under its new corporate overlords, anyone who’s still hoping that it’s going to be a viable standalone offering that will deliver the same results at the same price point as before should stop holding their breath.

History does repeat itself, and if the killing off of Cardmunch, Rapportive, Connected and Bright are any indication, the requiem for Connectifier might as well begin now.

That’s the bad news. The good news is, it looks like while Connectifier is already as good as dead and buried, LinkedIn seems to be planning its own funeral, too.

I can’t wait to read the obit on that one, but let’s just say I’m pretty sure there aren’t going to be a whole lot of recruiters out there in mourning over the crumbling of the Evil Empire.

Connectifier, on the other hand – you will be missed. RIP, old friend.

About the Author: Pete Radloff has 15 years of recruiting experience in both agency and corporate environments, and has worked with such companies as Comscore, exaqueo, National Public Radio and Living Social.

With experience and expertise in using technology and social media to enhance the candidate experience and promote strong employer brands, Pete also serves as lead consultant for exaqueo, a workforce consulting firm.

An active member of the Washington area recruiting community, Pete is currently a VP and sits on the Board of Directors of RecruitDC.

Follow Pete on Twitter @PJRadloff or connect with him on LinkedIn, or at his blog, RecruitingIn3D.