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The Curse of the Jobsworth in Recruiting and Hiring

While you might not ever have heard the term “Jobsworth” before, if you’ve ever worked in the business of talent, you’ve almost certainly run into at least a few of these creatures throughout your recruiting career, even if you didn’t know precisely what to call them (although for most of us, a few choice four letter words have long sufficed).

According to the indispensable lexicographic resource that is the Urban Dictionary, a “Jobsworth,” whose etymology stems from the mantra “I can’t let you do that, it’s more than my job’s worth” (spoiler alert: not bloody much, mostly) can best be defined as:

“A low ranking official who follows their instructions and procedures to the letter. Often just to piss you off and make them feel important.”

If this sounds familiar, it’s likely because this definition also aligns fairly closely with the mindset and mentality of most practitioners and leaders in the HR function, who are willing to resort to any means necessary to preserve their perceived personal power than actually “empowering” employees or those responsible for recruiting them.

Bureaucracy Now: Why Jobsworths May Be Costing You Candidates.

This has created an environment where compliance rules and legal regulations so often act as convenient crutches for hobbling change, preserving the status quo and limiting change by limiting challenges and restricting open dissent. The HR function seems largely predicated on the business of business as usual, which is just bad business, usually.

Here’s the thing: not even the strongest brand names or most recognizable logos have ever produced a scintilla of actual revenue. Even the most advanced or sophisticated business strategies can’t execute themselves, nor can search or social actually close a sale.

A company’s success is the sum of its people, and those people are more than every enterprise’s biggest competitive differentiator – they’re the biggest drivers of any organization’s P/L. In short, our people are the bottom line.

So why is it that so many companies make up so many excuses to preempt or prevent hiring top talent that truly lives up to its moniker, or becoming the employer of choice that the best and the brightest choose as a career destination? The answer, often, comes back to the persistent, pervasive prevalence of Jobsworths, who are either too lazy or too afraid to consider anyone who might threaten their carefully preserved and tightly run fiefdom.

Anyone who thinks outside that proverbial box, anyone who has original ideas or champions change, who embraces innovation and encourages experimentation – which are among the most commonly shared traits and most accurate predictors of high potential, high performing, high impact hires – is seen as a potential usurper.

Jobsworths, largely, would rather make excuses than make these sorts of hires. And some of these excuses seem so trivial, contrived and ridiculous that anyone with an ounce of sense is left shaking their head in amazement – or frustration, if you’ve ever seen how the sausage is really made.

3 Totally Worthless Jobsworth Excuses (And What Recruiters Can Do).

These are only a few of the many real excuses I’ve heard from Jobsworths lately. I know you probably think I’m exaggerating or being apocryphal, but even I can’t make this sort of thing up:

1. “We don’t allow anyone to use Chrome here at work. It’s completely unprofessional.”

Yeah, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing from the IT policy police, either. I’m not 100% sure exactly how a web browser can be unprofessional, but I looked at him, mouth agape, and my thought of “WTF?” painfully visible on my face, waiting for him to let me in on his little joke. But it was no joke, and apparently, unprofessional browsers were no laughing matter.

No. Forget, for a second, that we have more positions open than recruiters to fill them, and keeping up with demand means scouring every source possible, including paying an obscene amount of money each year for licenses and access to a slew of paid sources, from job board databases to “professional networks.”

Despite the pressures of high hiring demand and the importance of direct sourcing and proactive search in maximizing our limited recruiting resources, already stretched too thin, the talent acquisition group was forced to stay stuck in the sourcing stone age and use crappy Internet Explorer.

While this may be more “professional” than Chrome (probably because of its ugly, anachronistic interface and counterintuitive, clunky user experience), making recruiters source with Internet Explorer instead of Chrome makes about as much sense as forcing them to use Bing instead of Google. Sure, it’s a Microsoft product that’s got some enterprise security features and complies with some outdated, overzealous IT policy, but those limited benefits come at the expense of some fairly obvious handicaps.

First off, Internet Explorer produces fewer results when conducting an X-Ray Search on Google (because what other search engine would anyone ever use?), has absolutely none of the manifold extensions Chrome offers to make recruiting and sourcing a little easier, and performs about as reliably (and about as quickly) as your average Yugo.

But the thought process among the Jobsworths running point on IT policy, of course, is that letting talent acquisition have access to any product that would either slash recruitment costs or improve efficacy could potentially help recruiting move from cost center to revenue generator would at least show up tech support. It might also put them in the firing line from the higher ups for having so steadfastly stuck to this Draconian policy for so many years.

It’s not about saving time, saving money or any other halfway justifiable business case – it’s all about saving face. But it’s good to be the King, even if you’re really just a peon with no power outside the strict confines of some asinine policy. Never accept an excuse like this at face value.

Challenge. Query. Delve. And don’t be afraid to fight a little bit – this is the sort of battle worth choosing.

2. “Who needs to go source free profiles and resumes? That’s why we work with the agencies.”

When one of my counterparts informed me that she would rather pay a placement fee than deign to even look at free resumes on the likes of Indeed, I have to say I was stunned. I was speechless. And I really wanted to slap this in-house “recruiter” upside the head, if I’m being completely frank about it.

But somehow, I managed to clench my fists at my sides, restrain myself and asked how much, exactly, she was paying said agencies. “Oh, you know, the standard 25%,” she replied, as if to say, you know, that seems pretty reasonable for typing a few strings into a free database and sending off a few shit submissions.

In my head, at this exact moment, I have two thoughts. The first is that clearly this woman is a complete idiot and should be remanded to whatever asylum she escaped from. The other: “Holy shit, agency recruiters make that much money for that much work? Maybe I’m in the wrong racket.”

But while these thoughts swirled in my head, I instead took a minute (and a deep breath) and replied with what seemed a simple, straightforward question.

“So, let me get this straight,” I asked her. “You would rather pay an agency north of £15,000 per placement than spend 5 minutes running a couple searches and setting up an e-mail alert?”

I’ll take it from her response that she thought this was rhetorical – the convenience of getting away with being abhorrently lazy was apparently well worth the costs. Plus, she had it in her budget, and those are literally made to be spent, right?

If any of your recruiters have this kind of attitude, or would even dream of justifying using a search firm when a search engine will suffice, then it’s time to axe their lazy asses and send them packing to whatever time warp they jumped out of. This is 2015, and if you can’t proactively source your own candidates, you probably shouldn’t be in this line of business to begin with.

The job market has changed, and clearly, it’s long ago passed this particular species of Jobsworth by – which is why the only hope they have for a future is keeping everyone else stuck in the past. It’s this kind of silly, superficial self-preservation that’s often the most destructive.

3. “Sorry, that site is restricted.”

I thought that maybe, when I got an access forbidden message while trying to pull up Facebook on my work computer the first time, that there must be some sort of mistake. After a few futile attempts, though, I was informed that the mistake was, in fact, all mine.

“Well, the computer says no,” someone actually said. “Besides – none of our employees are allowed to use Facebook at work – no exceptions.” I started to protest, but the HR Manager raised a finger to stop me, and I staggered out of her office, stunned.

Let’s take a look at this: sure, I get how allowing rampant employee use of Facebook or carte blanche access to social networks could be a time and productivity killer for a lot of line workers and LOBs.

But putting Facebook behind a firewall is guaranteed to have the same deleterious effect this policy purports to preempt – a decision that basically means that recruiters can’t access the BILLION highly engaged users who log onto Facebook every day (which, by the way, makes LinkedIn’s usage look like chump change in comparison, despite the exorbitant price we were being charged to access their puissant profiles).

What gives? This is actually fairly typical, and a great example of times when Jobsworths, particularly those with some managerial responsibilities or direct reports, summarily dismiss solutions or explore alternative approaches simply because their response is rooted in fear, and the apprehension that in this case, what they don’t know just might hurt them.

This sort of social selectivity – Facebook bad, LinkedIn good – is more prejudiced preconception than realistic rationale, believing in product marketing and messaging to inform their position on these networks, however misinformed they might be as to the evolution of these networks or the efficacy of their individual case uses.

Jobsworths have always hated and feared social, because these networks let workers turn their conversations about their jobs, the company and, of top concern, their managers or HR Business Partners from one dictated to bureaucracy to one that’s more or less predicated on democracy.

HR would rather suppress employee’s access to these networks than cede control over intracompany communications, even if company intranet, employee newsletters and solutions like Sharepoint are completely obsolete and unnecessary when most every employee is already using social to talk to each other – and about the worthless Jobsworths they work for – with or without official permission. It’s not like blocking access via firewall is going to keep employees off, either; they’ll just use their smartphones, instead.

The digital age is coming of age, and it’s time for Jobsworths to finally grow up when it comes to employee social media usage. Again, challenge. Query. Delve.

And above all, demonstrate exactly how a network like Facebook can really work at work – and once they see what they’ve been missing, their objections should dissipate along with that sense of unknown causing their fear of Facebook in the first place.

Now, if only there was some way you could convince them that you didn’t need to send over every career related tweet to the comms team for review prior to publishing.

Hey, a recruiter can dream, can’t she?

About the Author: Katrina Collier has been showing SMEs to blue chips around the globe how to source their staff on social media since 2009. With knowledge gained from over a decade of in-house and third party recruitment and over 9 years of social recruiting experience, she understands the pressures Recruiters face attracting the best talent.

She is a social recruiting specialist, a hands-on trainer and speaker, sharing proven tips and techniques that are always outside of the main stream. As an independent consultant, Katrina cuts through the noise of marketers who say their solution is best, to give you advice that eases the pain of your recruitment and is easy to implement.

Katrina is one of The 100 Most Influential People in HR & Recruiting on Twitter and her opinion is quoted in HRReview, SHRM, The Staffing Stream, and Cambridge University’s Strategies for Success.

She writes avidly on her own blog and is a global HR & Recruitment keynote speaker. She also wrote and delivers the social media recruitment training for the CIPD, the UK’s professional body for HR and people development.

Follow Katrina on Twitter @WinningImpress or connect with her on LinkedIn.

What no one Tells you About Psychometric Testing

Psychometric testing has long been splitting opinions in the recruitment industry, with one camp of recruiters labelling them a valuable assessment resource and the other labelling them a pseudoscientific pile of crock. Despite the substantial doubt cast over their value, psychometric tests are used by some 70% of large companies in the hiring process. In fact, all evidence suggests that the popularity of psychometric testing is on the rise.

So, why is it that a practice which is widely regarded as hokum is so frequently used by recruiters? It would seem that psychometric testing is the Marmite of the recruitment world, and its advocates are just as passionate as its skeptics. If you’re in the former camp, it might be time to reconsider your stance…

What’s it all about?

As a science, psychometrics began in Cambridge between 1886 and 1889. In those days, it was a field largely interested in trying to measure the differences in human intelligence levels. Over the years, psychometric testing began to be integrated within employment procedures to gauge a candidate’s cultural fit.

Used to assess the suitability of potential employees, the most common recruitment psychometric tests of today are designed to reveal details about behavioural traits and personality which don’t come to light within the interview process. The other type of test comes in the form of an aptitude or ability assessment, devised to measure reasoning or cognitive ability.

What are the perceived benefits?

Recruiters who champion psychometric testing as a hiring tool assert that it reduces risks by revealing a candidate’s character. Personality profiling can (potentially) help to ascertain how a candidate behaves in certain working situations, providing a projection of how they might work if offered the job. The argument exists that the tests can be instrumental in making people aware of their strengths and weaknesses – leading to better self-management in the workplace.

During interviews, it is always more difficult to evaluate a candidate’s personality and performance traits than it is to evaluate their education, experience and skillset. Psychometric testing aims to solve this problem and offer as much insight into a candidate’s suitability possible. For these reasons, many recruiters use psychometric tests in conjunction with a range of recruitment strategies to inform their hiring decisions.

Are the benefits real?

Despite a century of trial and error and countless tests being given and appraised, there is still no conclusive scientific evidence that psychometric testing works. Though some tests are better than others in the sense that they have been designed specifically for the purpose of the candidate’s job performance, many are entirely irrelevant. Even the ‘better’ examples can only offer a rough measure of what they claim to show.

Psychometric testing was founded on inaccurate theories about multiple intelligences, and the tests used today are largely HR voodoo which offer no certainty of validity. Aside from the fact that people often lie on these tests and they can easily be manipulated, establishing the legitimacy of psychometric testing through means other than the tests themselves is near impossible. Given the fact that personality tests tend to confuse correlation and causation, they cannot be used as any kind of reliable indicator that s candidate is fit for the job.

Simply put, psychometric testing is inaccurate, unreliable, unfounded and easy to influence.

Could psychometric testing actually be a harmful practice?

For recruiters, psychometric testing is a waste of time and money. More concerning that the wasted resources, however, is the limitation that these tests put on a recruiter’s gut instinct. In an industry reliant on powerful and intuitive interpersonal skills, psychometric testing can often cloud the impression that was formed during the face to face interview. The instincts of a seasoned recruiter are incalculably more accurate than a pseudoscientific questionnaire, and these instincts shouldn’t be complicated with unnecessary procedure.

For candidates, psychometric testing is as impersonal as it is encumbering. A candidate looking for retail jobs in a supermarket shouldn’t be expected to spend their time completing a zany online personality test. It’s a barrier, and a barrier which can eliminate candidates who may not test well but who would make a committed and competent employee. People are highly complex, and a psychometric test takes a broad (and therein unfair) approach in attempting to understand their multifarious traits and talents.

There is also a real risk that psychometric testing puts candidates into pigeon-holes. By telling someone what ‘type’ of character they have, you label them and consequently limit them. Psychometric testing is a bad practice for recruiters and candidates alike, and should have no place in a modern hiring process.

The real impact of psychometric testing

Last year, the use of psychometric tests came under fire in the UK after a bank chief was hired based predominantly on his test results. Despite having no relevant previous experience in finance jobs, Reverend Paul Flowers was hired as chairman of the Co-op Bank for a lucrative three-figure salary after performing exceptionally well on his psychometric test. Flowers was later forced to quit in ignominy over a £1.5billion black hole in the Co-op’s balance sheet – causing psychologists to compare psychometric testing to little more than a Victorian superstition.

VIA – an American psychology organisation – recently admitted that their personality test is a failure and told a UK government agency to stop using it on job seekers. After flunking its scientific validation, the test was discredited and put out of use. To reiterate, this was a test being used by an official UK government agency. Worrying, isn’t it?

In further controversy, Carl Filer hit the news when he was offered a promotion by store chain B&Q, only to be sacked because he subsequently failed a psychometric personality test. Examples like this are alarmingly commonplace, and a quick Google search can tell you how much damage psychometric testing can have when used as a serious science.

Time to choose

In 2015, psychometric testing should no longer be given weight as a plausible recruitment procedure. In her 2006 book, The Cult of Personality, Annie Murphy Paul claims that personality tests are leading us to mismanage our companies and misunderstand ourselves. When used in recruitment, all reasonable logic would conclude that these tests also cause us to cloud rather than clarify our judgments.

With absolutely no authentic evidence supporting its validity, it’s time to cull psychometric for the sake of the recruitment industry’s credibility. Would you agree?

This article was originally posted March 31, 2015 by Roxanne Abercrombie on RecruitingBlogs.

Roxanne Abercrombie is a professional copywriter and serial blogger. You can find her working as PR, Content and Social Executive at Uniting Ambition, a leading recruitment firm specializing in delivering top talent to the market’s hottest professional services, digital marketing and IT contract jobs.

Networking Isn’t About Who You Know. It’s Who Knows About You.

There is an obvious need for agency recruiters to build a network of clients and candidates. For corporate recruiters, the benefits might not be as obvious. From a process perspective, in-house recruiters must approach networking the exact same as an agency, because it’s our jobs to connect with current applicants, potential candidates and everyone else who might help us make hires.

The problem at many companies is that recruiters think sourcing stops at finding a name and some contact information. This, of course, is absolute bollocks – this is, in fact, where sourcing more or less starts. Or at least the hard part, anyway.

Connect with People, Not Brands.

Let’s take a step back, shall we, and take a minute to look at something that we rarely think about. As recruiters, there is a process – whether by design or force of habit – we go through for choosing which candidates we reach out to when we come across them.

We want to know two things about candidates: would they be a good fit for the job, and what, would convince them to take it? The first we can figure out at first glance, but the second is much more difficult.

Finding candidate you want to engage with is one thing. Getting them to get back to you is another thing entirely. The last part of sourcing, and the most important, is actually influencing the decisions the candidate will make.

There is a large and growing gap between identifying candidates and developing them among in-house recruiting. In an in-house role, the reason we focus so much on building what has become known collectively as an “employer brand” is that the benefits of being a candidate’s first point of call when looking for a job. Being top of mind and top of the list as the employer of choice your audience actually chooses is everything.

So as recruiters, how do we make them more likely to choose us? The answer is that candidates start by connecting with people, not brands. These connections often happen well before that candidate ever comes across most recruiters’ radars.

A recent study suggests that on average, new hires in an organization had been connected to that employer for seven months before actually applying. Think about that. 7 months is ages in recruiting, and even longer if you’re the one looking to get recruited.

The truth is candidates are no longer applying to companies as complete strangers. Technology has made connecting with potential employers far easier. Candidates begin through various social and digital channels, running the gamut from following your company on LinkedIn or Twitter to joining your “Talent Community” or checking out your company’s Glassdoor reviews.

It’s this information a candidate uses to decide whether or not to consider careers at your company, and whether or not a recruiter is worth connecting with. This process of preconception is almost identical to the one recruiters go through for choosing which candidates to call. If your message misses the mark, than you’ll never know what candidates you’re missing. You cannot measure an opportunity cost, but you can be damn sure the price of turning off top talent can cost recruiters everything.

Look. You can’t control that dull employer blanding on your career site, the stock images, the cheezy copy or any of the other things corporate recruiters tend to blame for their relative neglect of their online presence and proactive networking initiatives. What you can control is what else people find when they find this stuff.

Since candidates want to find a person, not a company, when considering career opportunities, as a recruiter it’s imperative you do what it takes to be in the line of vision – and make yourself available – for the people who need to talk to you. Recruiters, always remember: It’s not who you know, it’s who knows about you.

Turning Connections Into Candidates.

The question then becomes, if I’m a recruiter, how do I become accessible?

I mean, this all sounds well and good, but how in the actual hell do you, as the recruiter, actually become the face people find when they’re looking for jobs?

How do you insert yourself in the conversation instead of waiting for a candidate to call you back, and, even better, position yourself as the person people want to work with when they’re ready for a career change?

The goal of becoming that first point of call for candidates is easier said than done, but the difference between a good recruiter and a great recruiter can be as simple as overcoming this critical challenge. But it takes some time, some planning and some patience, which might explain why so few recruiters ever succeed at this strategy.

Most recruiters put at least a little thought into who they should be connecting with, and put a concerted effort (however misinformed) into parlaying those connections into candidates. We know a fit when we see one. The question is do candidates feel the same way when they find us? That point of reference is the point you need to keep coming back to if you’re trying to build a network.

How do people know what you do, and why should they care enough to connect with you? What makes you stand out as someone worth talking to and not just another recruiter? Many recruiters think the answer is broadcasting jobs and opportunities; if you are a recruiter, what better way to demonstrate what you do than by sharing the jobs you hire for, right? Wrong.

You are, in fact, demonstrating you are just another idiotic mouth breather in recruitment who should be avoided at all costs. And trust me, this is precisely what candidates will do if the person you put out there is a complete and utter jackass. It is not sufficient just to make yourself accessible; you need people to actually want to take advantage of the access you’re offering.

I know what you’re thinking. If you don’t tweet about jobs or share a bunch of employer branding or career collateral, how will people know that you’re a recruiter, and what sorts of positions you’re recruiting for? If you think that people won’t figure out what you do if you don’t talk about doing it, think again.

The one place people always come back to in every place you’ve built a digital presence is that “About Me” section or bio. The key is making them care enough about the rest of your content to want to know more – the best recruiting connections almost always connect over everything but recruiting, at least at first.

The best way to sell anything is simply by being smart and telling the story of who you are, not just what you do. In recruiting, the most effective way to build connections is by adding value before asking for anything in exchange. Do not wait for candidates to come to you, or you might be waiting a long time.

Instead of always promoting your own content, connect first around the content candidates care enough about to share. Whether you like an update, comment on a post, respond in forums and discussion groups, retweet or reshare, the point is to share something – anything – to get that candidate to notice you.

If I’m engaging with someone I don’t recognize on social media or anywhere online, the first thing I do is go to their profile and quickly see who you are and what you’re about. For candidates, it’s very much the same thing. This is where you start the soft selling rather than the hard close that comes with blasting opportunities and automating job alerts.

I will admit that this is subjective, and there’s no hard or fast rule for guaranteeing everyone who comes across that profile information will choose to connect with or engage with you. While I could bloody well make up some “best practices”around improving those odds, if you want those, ask any one of the cottage industry of consultants who claim to have the answer.

I don’t, and do not claim to have any real insights into why candidates opt to connect or reject with recruiters online.

Network Evolution & Natural Selection.

Instead, it’s probably easier to tell you how I personally select the people I want to connect with, and those people I don’t.

The first thing I have to see when making this decision is what, exactly, they do. I expect that if someone explicitly mentions their employer or an organization they work with, there is a direct link back to that company’s social profile or official website, so I can don’t have to go digging if I care to go any deeper. I also want to be able to see what your job is, and what that job specifically entails.

For instance, I want to see that you’re Helen, you’re a tech recruiter for Organization X (with the requisite links to company or career sites or social profiles), and you specialize in recruiting C++ programmers. Now, there’s enough insight in just that minimal information to determine whether or not you’re worth connecting with, but I want more than that. There are a lot of C++ recruiters out there, or nursing recruiters, or finance recruiters – name a specialty, and you’ll see that this alone is nothing special.

What makes a recruiter (or anyone, really) special, in fact, is simple. It’s the story of you. It is this story that we should be telling in our social profiles and when presenting our online personas. I want to know more than what someone does now, but how they ended up here and where they’re going. We all have stories worth sharing, and when I meet any person or talk to any group, it’s those stories that create affinity, interest and interpersonal connections.

If I can see “the story of you,” then I might very well be interested in the story of your business, and whether or not there’s a possibility at some point those narratives might overlap. I try to do the same thing for everyone I come into contact with – I share my own story as consistently and as clearly as possible, whenever possible. This is pretty easy for me.

As you might well imagine, I get asked for my story quite a lot, since no one seems to be able to quite figure me out at first. This is not as straightforward as it might be for most – I don’t have a corporate job where I’ve got an office and come to work every day wearing a suit and tie.

This is why my bio says, straight away, I’m “The One in the Hat.” Whenever I get the chance to share my story, I always open with, “I never wear a suit, but I always wear a hat.” It’s true, and it’s memorable, and it’s 100% me. This is the kind of detail, in my opinion, that make someone’s story compelling enough to want to connect with them. I realize that not everyone is in a situation where they can tell their own story in their own voice their own way. But there is no reason you can’t tell someone a story where they at least know who you are and what you do – it might not be a lot, but it’s something.

It’s personal.

Any time I have to write a bio, I always include little things in there like, “I’m a Dad to two fantastic kids,” which everyone can relate to, or that I used to be an endurance racer, believe it or not, so I’ll throw in that “I’m a very slow marathon runner” or something to this effect. Just some little thing about me that makes me come across as a real person and not just some cipher soon forgotten.

Storytelling and Networking: Recruiting Happily Ever After.

We want to work with people like us, and it’s finding out the small things about someone – their love for a football team, perhaps, or a passion for an unusual hobby (my mate, for example, has over 10,000 Pez dispensers in his collection), a love of music (whether that’s tango or trance) or what you do for fun when you’re not at work.

It can be esoteric, it can be mundane, it can be anything, as long as it’s you – and has played a role in helping shape the story of you.

If I see something personal that says, “there’s a person on the other end of this,” then the end result of my being able to learn something about you from your profile and background is that I’m more likely to want to connect with you.

Bonus points, of course, if you actually seem interesting, but this is by no means mandatory. Many of us are boring, and that’s alright, too, as long as you own it – or anything, really, that makes you, well, you. And there’s often at least a little overlap, and if there’s some sort of commonality between your story and mine, there’s a pretty damn good chance that both of us will want to connect, since there’s something tangible for us to actually connect over.

A good recruiter finds as many of those hooks as possible, and uses these as bait when trying to lure in a new contact, connection or candidate. Maybe we went to University together or grew up in the same town. Maybe we support the same football team, or watch the same shows, or prefer the same sort of food (or beer, more likely).

No matter how esoteric, no matter how mundane, if we share something in common, then there’s a good chance that we’ll better understand each other’s point of reference. Whatever it is, you’ll give me a thing that helps me see the story of you – and that story decides if, and how, I choose to connect.

Candidates do the exact same thing with recruiters, to; your personal story is every bit as important, often, as that of the brand you represent or the employer you’re recruiting for. People don’t work for companies, they work with people.

Convincing them you’re a person they might want to connect with (or ultimately work with) is the entire point of networking; whether or not you happen to work at an agency, this remains a core competency (and core responsibility) for pretty much every recruiter out there.

If you don’t know where to begin, start with your story, first, and know for recruiters, it’s “Once Upon A Time,” all the time.

The End.

About the Author: Bill Boorman is the Managing Director of Technology & Innovation for Recruiting Daily, where he focuses on leading the global expansion of Recruiting Daily, helping drive strategy, operations and recruiting industry reach in Europe, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific.

Boorman used to have a real job, and wear a suit, and everything; now he does what he describes as “stuff he gets paid for.” He has worked in and around the recruiting space for the past 30 something years.

As the founder of #‎tru‬ (the recruiting unconference), Boorman hosts 100 recruiting related events in 65 countries around the world every year, speaking and listening to over 2,000 recruiters about how to collectively make the world of work work better for everyone, everywhere.

Boorman is the lead advisor to talent technology companies such as RolePoint, Take the Interview, Work4Labs, Job & Talent, Universum and Clinch, among others. He also advises companies like KPMG, Oracle, BBC and Hard Rock Cafe on adopting new technologies and working practice, and is a judge for the UK edition of the Candidate Experience Awards.

Follow Bill on Twitter @BillBoorman or connect with him on LinkedIn.

The MYnority Recruiting Report: Diversity Recruiting for STEM Fields

I have the answer to recruiting candidates for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields. First let me say, the lack of diversity in STEM argument is stupid and played out. No, there is not a huge pool of minorities to choose from when recruiting for STEM positions. Got it. Personally, I think this seems statistically impossible. If minorities are becoming the majority, then there should be more minorities to choose from for ALL positions. The truth is, companies are not looking at diversity recruiting for STEM fields the right way and are forcing you, diversity recruiter, to look in the wrong place. A little known secret about me is that I have a IT Business Analyst background. I was hired with a lot of passion but little experience. Yes, I was a black woman in IT in the 90s. The funny thing is, I was hired by another black woman in IT in the 90s, my mentor and hero, Dr. Bellverie Ross, PhD. She gave me a chance and I would not be who I am if it wasn’t for her.

In an article published on US News and World Report Allie Bidwell wrote, “Despite a national focus on directing more students toward science, technology, engineering and math fields – particularly women and minorities – the STEM workforce is no more diverse now (in 2015) than in 2001, according to data from Change the Equation.” I appreciate Ms. Bidwell bringing the issue to the forefront, bue I know as she was writing it she was probably like, “Duh.”

So the workforce for STEM does not seem diverse. Well, how diverse are your recruiting teams? How have you changed, if at all, the way you are recruiting? Is your company one that cultivates and nurtures the diversity in it’s employees? Maybe it is because thanks to advancements in science, the same racist, sexist, boys club leadership that was in executive positions 15 years ago are still there!

Another reason we see a lack of a STEM candidate pool is where we are getting this data from. All reports point to Colleges and Universities to see let us know what their students are majoring in to decide what type of technological future we will have in the US. Well here is some news for ya, if people cannot afford college, you will not see them on said report.”Reasons that women and underrepresented minorities do not go beyond STEM in college include insufficient engagement; lack of role models, mentoring and peer support; and insufficient mathematics preparation to thrive in STEM fields,” said Kimberly Wright Cassidy, President, Bryn Mawr College in Bryn Mawr, Pa.

Emily Cadman from the Financial Times wrote, “One of the problems is that the majority of businesses use formal qualifications and academic achievement to filter out applicants. Critics argue this locks out students from poorer backgrounds who are more likely to have attended weak secondary schools, and perhaps less selective universities, meaning their applications are screened out without a human ever considering their other achievements.”

To this MYnority, it seems simple. All you have to do is:

Hire people who are passionate about technology and math, hire them on an entry level and train them on what technology you are needing for your company. Then, pay for their college while they are working for you as part of their benefits package. Then offer a hefty bonus when they graduate.
Start a mentor program. Get with the Boys and Girls club, the YMCA, the Goodwill, your local library or other organization looking for adults to inspire others and start a STEM club. Have leaders in the club and offer summer internships for High Schoolers.
Make sure your companies environment is comfortable to people of various backgrounds. Go beyond a poster with black people in it. This will not do.

Just do something. Stop using the same old excuses as the reasons why you don;t have a more diverse staff. I am willing to guess that companies with a lack of diversity in STEM positions have a lack of diversity company wide. Add this to the fact that RECRUITERS DON’T RECRUIT ANYMORE! New technologies in recruiting and use of social media avenues can sometimes overshadow recruiting recruiters with hunter-gatherer traits.

At the end of the day, the reason there is a lack of minority STEM candidates is because of the lack of open doors to let those that are underrepresented in. For diversity recruiters, you need to educate hiring managers that some of the requirements that they may have for their open positions are just not practical with looking at recruiting underrepresented groups. Just give people who may not have attended college a chance like Dr. Ross gave me. Maybe a candidate does not have the experience you want on paper. That does not mean that they do not have heart and passion for the technology field. Times are changing. Is your company’s recruiting efforts changing with them?

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

No Shoes, No Service: Candidate Experience and the Cobbler’s Kids.

Earlier this year, I applied for a gig with one of those companies who has become the toast of the HR town, an industry darling that’s successfully positioned itself in the public eye as a passionate promoter, staunch supporter and pioneering “thought leader” (if a company can actually consider itself a “thought leader” in the first place) when it comes to candidate engagement and experience.

Hell, this reputation for treating people the right way was one of the major reasons I decided to throw my hat in the ring in the first place.

The application process raised no red flags – in fact, I was pleasantly surprised at how easy their ATS was to use, which was a good thing, considering it’s their own product.

Within two minutes of hitting the “submit” button, I received a pleasantly worded (if automated) “thanks for applying” e-mail.

Instead of just saying, “we’ll get back if there’s a fit” or something like that – a put off that’s one of the biggest lies in recruiting – they actually specified in the message that “we’ll get back to you within 7 business days.”

I thought that was kind of cool, and a promise that underscored their ostensible commitment to having a best-in-class candidate experience. It has now been 65 business days. And counting.

I am still waiting for them to get back to me.

Do As We Say, Not As We Do.

I’ve been in this business long enough not to be surprised by hearing nothing but crickets on the other end of a job application, but in this case, the silence was kind of stunning. For starters, there’s the fact that I was actually referred to this particular position – from someone pretty high up in the organization, at that – and we all know referrals are pretty much recruiting’s Holy Grail.

Most recruiters roll out the red carpet for referrals, but those that don’t give them the white glove treatment almost never give them the silent treatment.

You know, always follow up with any employee referral, if for nothing else than a matter of common courtesy? And all that jazz?

I mean, I did what any somewhat savvy (or even sentient) job applicant would do, diligently referencing the employee referring me, a highly respected person known to the hiring manager, and, I’m quite certain, to the recruiter themselves. I followed that up with a personalized note to the hiring manager, who happened to be the CEO of this organization and to whom I was directly referred. I’ve heard nary a single peep from these people, never received any kind of acknowledgement, to this day. Surprising, sure.

But wait. They’re not the only one.

Sadly, they seem more the exception rather than the recruiting rule. And when the rules are this screwed up, it just might be time to consider changing up the whole game. Before it’s too late.

What Your Dog Food Really Tastes Like.

Let’s go back a minute to October 2013. It was a simpler time – Edward Snowden was on the lam in Russia, Drake was dominating the Hot 100 and Gravity was tops at the box office. Remember?

I do, because it was around this time a very intriguing gig first came across my radar. It sounded like it was right up my alley, and was with another major HR Tech/Talent Acquisition vendor with a big name (and bigger buzz) in this business.

Now, this particular organization heavily promotes the concepts of “candidate engagement” and “candidate experience” through a deluge of content marketing and lead generation activities, ranging from webinars to white papers to blog posts with prescriptive titles like, “Candidate Experience: What To Do And How To Do It!”

They have also purportedly put their money where their mouth is, as a long time annual sponsor (and vocal supporter) of the Candidate Experience Awards (or the CandE Awards, for all you cool kids out there). Having learned about the position, I reached out to the in-house recruiter LinkedIn advised me was running point on this particular requisition.

To his credit, that recruiter responded, advising and directing me to complete an online application, which was quite mercifully painless and relatively easy. That was followed by a few perfunctory phone conversations, and once we’d felt each other out a little, finally scheduled a virtual video interview with the hiring manager. This somewhat lengthy interview, I recall, occurred on Halloween, 2013.

This proved to be something of an ominous bit of foreshadowing, but I didn’t know that when I followed up after our hour long interview with a follow up e-mail expressing my sincere interest and thanks. You probably know how this Halloween horror story ends.

I’m still waiting for them to get back to me.

Candidate Experience: Oh the Humanity! Oh the Irony!

While Alanis Morissette confused an entire generation on the difference between mere coincidence and actual irony, my good friends Merriam and Webster tell me that, in fact, the definition of irony is:

“a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result.

Situational irony, further, refers to a situation in which actions have an effect that is opposite from what was intended, so that the outcome is contrary to what was expected.”

Now, despite what Alanis taught us, in order for something to be ironic, there must first be a diametric opposition between intention of thought and practical outcome (yes, I really do think). Irony occurs when what’s said and what’s intended are at exact opposite ends.

Thus, as far as I can tell, the outcomes (or lack thereof) stemming from these two situations where I actually prostrated myself to the powers that be in recruiting and put my faith in the system to deliver as promised seem pretty damn ironic to me. Not coincidental, not paradoxical, and not even just a situation that sucks major ass. Nope.

These experiences were so rife with contradictions between the expectations (and promises) delivered by the employer’s messaging about candidate experience on the one hand, and what they actually make their own candidates go through, that can only be seen as irony, and the cruelest kind, at that. It’s one thing to overpromise and underdeliver. It’s another thing to overpromise and not deliver a damn thing to begin with.

Had either one of these organizations actually practiced what they preached and pontificated about ad nauseum at conferences, in content marketing and on social networks, even if it was just to tell me “thanks, but no thanks,” I would be singing their praises to everyone I know in this insular little industry of ours – or at least, would have had a good enough experience to at least buy what they’re selling to the HR and recruiting industry.

Do what you say, everything’s OK. Simple as that.

Instead, my own candidate experiences soured me so much on these organizations that I’ve had numerous conversations with people who probably look a lot like their target buyer – maybe because they’re mostly senior level talent leaders – about what I really thought about these two companies.

I shared my experiences, which led me to firmly realize that these VC funded blowhards were heavy on cash but light on ethics. They know how to package products and sell gullible HR and recruiting organizations a bill of goods, even if their product fails to deliver as promised (or in some cases, fails to exist at all).

I want to be clear, and this is an important caveat, that this has nothing to do with sour grapes. Just because they received my resume or I expressed interest in the job in no way means that I was the right person for the gig, or I hold any ill will to either entity for not hiring me. We all understand that.

What I don’t understand is how companies who talk about the candidate experience so much in their product marketing and company branding fail at getting even the basics right. If these entities are truly market leaders at improving candidate experience, all I can say is, we’re all pretty screwed.

Candidate Experience: Talk the Talk and Walk the Walk.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m being a little too rough on these folks. It’s not like they’re the exception to the rule, and I’m a pretty congenial kinda gal who likes giving other people the benefit of the doubt.

I totally get that there are people behind every process, and no matter how solid that process might be, there’s a fair chance that person is a hot mess.

A good portion of human beings are, you know; this is the primary business case for HR,.

Now, I’ve worked at organizations – and I’m sure you have, too – where people resign, become disengaged, stop trying or stop giving a shit about being part of the revolution by rejecting the status quo, because change is hard and no one ever got fired for business as usual.

Now, that’s not saying that some of us don’t get fed up and transition onto a pasture where the grass at least looks greener, but inevitably, that grass always has just as much excrement waiting to be cleaned up as the piles in the pasture you left behind.

On the other hand, I don’t think that expecting that these companies at least stop bullshitting and start executing even a little bit better on candidate experience and engagement are expectations that are out of line or unrealistic. Of course, what the hell do I know? My expectations have been more or less shot to hell of late.

Now, it’s one thing for some rinky dink local business – let’s say, some mom and pop insurance agency – to suck at candidate experience, because there’s probably limited employees and even more limited HR resources dedicated to the talent function whatsoever.

There are no dedicated recruiters, just a couple old HR biddies, one of whom wants nothing more than to get home to her cats and DVR full of NCIS: New Orleans, and the other who’s a part time “benefits clerk” whose primary duties consist of tracking PTO and FMLA on spreadsheets and spreading office gossip.

But when your company’s primary product shill, content marketing call to action and company brand are entirely predicated on the importance of candidate experience and you can’t even manage to send even the most basic of candidate communications, it’s another story entirely.

You can be out there barfing up buzzwords ad nauseum, spend thousands and thousands of dollars on marketing the importance of candidate experience (and your solution) to HR and recruiting decision makers, effectively commoditizing this concept, but no matter how much lip service you pay to this, you can’t hope to hide from your own hypocrisy – or karma, for that matter.

This isn’t a big industry, people talk, and once you’re outed, you’re out. So, a word to the wise: proceed at your own risk. But it’s not really worth it, if you ask me.

Obviously, I was nothing more than another candidate/job seeker to these organizations, another person not even worthy of deigning with an acknowledgment, feedback or response. But the thing they probably overlooked is that with over 20 years of HR buying experience – and someone HR buyers still call for input on their purchasing decisions.

My access to the audience all that marketing is designed to capture, as well as the advice I’m going to continue to give them to avoid you at all costs (sharing my compelling little story of course), is more likely to end up with bad blood than a buyer.

That’s not a threat. That’s just saying if you don’t practice what you preach, then I’m not going to let you lead the flock even further afield. Let’s be real; we’ve got enough problems as it is without your buzzwords and bullshit.

Good thing I’m not the sort of person to name names…well, not publically, at least.

Call me, maybe?

Robin Schooling is on a mission to make organizations better by making HR better. With 20+ years of senior HR leadership experience in a variety of industries, she consults with organizations, advises HR teams, speaks to HR and business audiences and writes for a variety of sites and publications.

Schooling has been an active and involved SHRM volunteer leader, holds a few of those HR certifications herself, and at one point in time even received an award as “HR Professional of the Year.” She has been known to search out the perfect French 75 and is a fervent and unapologetic fan of the New Orleans Saints, even if they did trade Jimmy Graham.

For more for Robin, check out her blog, follow her on Twitter@RobinSchooling or connect with her on LinkedIn.

Best of/Worst of: Recruiting Emails

In this podcast…

The Best of/Worst podcast series explores how sometimes bad examples can be more illuminating when it comes to process improvement than good examples. In this week’s Best of/Worst RecruitingBlogs Director of Marketing Katrina Kibben and RecruitingBlogs VP of Content and Community Daniel Fogel discuss Recruiting Emails, the opening volley in starting a candidate’s engagement. Sharing personal experience and horror stories from around the web, listen in to hear what works for effective engagement but even better listen to what not to do as well.

Resources mentioned in this podcast:

Dear Recruiter, You’re On The Wall of Shame

Hiring Tech Talent Is Easy…Right?

Negging

Heard in this podcast:

Katrina Kibben, Director of Marketing, RecruitingDaily

Katrina Kibben is the Director of Marketing for Recruiting Daily, and has served in marketing leadership roles at companies such as Monster Worldwide and Care.com.
Twitter: @KatrinaKibben

Daniel Fogel, VP of Content & Community, RecruitingBlogs

Daniel brings over 10 years of experience in HR and talent acquisition experience to his role at RecruitingBlogs but his passion is meeting and connecting with new people.
Twitter: @Daniel_Trending

Best of/Worst of: Onboarding

In this podcast…

The Best of/Worst podcast series explores how sometimes bad examples can be more illuminating when it comes to process improvement than good examples. In this week’s Best of/Worst RecruitingBlogs Director of Marketing Katrina Kibben and RecruitingBlogs VP of Content and Community Daniel Fogel discuss Onboarding sharing personal experience and stories from around the web. Hear what makes great onboardings great, but even better what makes bad onboardings even worse.

Resources mentioned in this podcast:

No Badge, No bathroom

Constanza & the Penske file

Paying for your own welcome basket

Heard in this podcast:

Katrina Kibben, Director of Marketing, RecruitingDaily

Katrina Kibben is the Director of Marketing for Recruiting Daily, and has served in marketing leadership roles at companies such as Monster Worldwide and Care.com.
Twitter: @KatrinaKibben

Daniel Fogel, VP of Content & Community, RecruitingBlogs

Daniel brings over 10 years of experience in HR and talent acquisition experience to his role at RecruitingBlogs but his passion is meeting and connecting with new people.
Twitter: @Daniel_Trending

You Don’t Have To Be A Douchebag To Be Good At Recruiting.

I’m not sure why in the hell recruiters seem to love manufactured motivational materials, but from self-help books to Successories posters, the talent industry has long loved the programmed passion and systemized self-improvement advocated by the cottage industry of corporate cheerleading.

This tends to be noticeably less prevalent, in my experience, in corporate recruiting functions, likely because they only close candidates, not business.

But at third party agencies, where salesmanship defines staffing success or failure, you’ll inevitably find out what color your parachute is or who moved your cheese sooner or later, whether you give a shit or not.

This stuff, apparently, is what closes candidates – recruiting is a mindset, and given how compensation is structured, this kind of content constitutes a kind of Prosperity Gospel for the people business, a personnel Jesus, if you will. In fact, I remember the first time I found myself being evangelized to by the self-help flock; it happened early enough in my career where I kept an open mind and didn’t surrender myself to being cynical, although this is precisely the sort of stuff that made me this way.

Just saying.

Pimping Ain’t Easy.

This first encounter with would-be sales salvation came in the form of the immortal Jeffrey Gitomer, who looked like a bald Sham Wow guy, sounded like a QVC host on crack and loved bad puns and spinning epic apocryphal stories illustrate insignificant points so simple any six year old or payroll provider would get it.

But getting to the point would miss the point of Gitomer’s amazing system for supercharging your sales, today!

You get extra credit if you pick up the unspoken point that nothing in life is worth saying if you can’t use an exclamation point, by the way.

And if your boss just so happens to be a hardcore Jeffrey Gitomer disciple, a dedicated student of this purported profit of prophet. My Staffing Director, it turns out, always kept a few photocopies of select chapters from Gitromer’s The Little Red Book of Selling in his desk.

As an aside, I’m not exactly sure why he chose to co-opt the name of one of Maoism’s seminal works to lay out his cutthroat approach to capitalism and salesmanship, but Gitomer clearly intended no irony. I don’t think someone who turns phrases like, “If You Want to Sell, Show, Don’t Tell!” or “Satisfied vs. Loyal: To Serve is To Rule!” has any concept of irony, frankly.

Trying to score a few brownie points with the boss, I actually cracked the Little Red Book open, and was treated to such pearls of wisdom as, “People don’t like to be sold, but they love to buy.” No shit, Sherlock.

This was only the tip of the iceberg, and I read through the book, which I forced myself to even open, I realized that something strange was going down – my cynicism seemed to be melting away in the face of cloying optimism along with my suspicions about motivational sales speakers.

In short, and in spite of myself, I was hooked.

I’m not sure if it was because I had just started my sales career and was a little less eager to call BS and a little more willing to try new stuff, even with a grain of salt. Or if I was emotionally vulnerable, under the influence or just bored the first time I read the Little Red Book of Selling. All I know is, I quickly became a Jeffrey Gitomer fan girl, and his writing resonated with me more than any book on sales or staffing ever has before or since, and likely ever will again.

I rushed out and bought every single book Gitomer had ever published, and devoured them as quickly as I could lay my hands on a new one. It was a kind of strange pastime, but as time passed, I eventually found myself rising through the ranks to become the top biller not only in my office, but was consistently sat atop the sales leaderboard for the entire friggin’ company. Coincidence? I think not.

Recruiting Is Sales. Get Over It.

Sure, the market was hot at the time, I worked in a growth industry in a boom town with tightly knit networks, and in terms of billable dollars, I was straight up killing it in direct hire placements. But I reached the point where my boss’ biggest complaint about me was my complete and utter inability to generate a single, solitary temporary placement. Full time, I was the shit. Temp and contingency? I was shit. That much was obvious. What was less readily apparent was why, exactly, this was the case.

See, I had brilliant mentors who always had an open door and the time and patience to help talk me through whatever crisis I happened to be having that day. My customers loved me, my colleagues respected me, and my candidates trusted me to do right by them. I had hustle, I had charm, and I could play closer with the best in the bigs. Most of all, I had this crazy notion that I could actually make money by helping people solve problems.

I don’t care what kind of recruiter you happen to be. You can be corporate, agency, retained, contingency, executive search consultant or high volume hiring specialist, for all I care. If you’re in recruiting, you’re in sales. I know you may not like that fact, but we’re all in this together, so might as well own it: we are ALL in sales.

Recruiters sell all day -presenting opportunities to candidates, pitching our services to employers, cold calling or closing, everything we do is centered around buying; getting the candidate and the hiring manager to the yes is no easy process. Thus, I have to believe that how we sell matters in recruiting, because by any means necessary, it’s all about getting to that end goal of successfully making a hire.

I recently presented some tips, tricks and tools for engaging tech talent on a recent webinar. My thoughts on this can pretty much be summed up in two words: be authentic. Don’t be afraid to be yourself, because you rock. Don’t be afraid to be succinct, because you can say what you need to say without saying everything.

And most importantly, sell candidates on your company by being a bad ass every time you have any kind of conversation or interaction with any potential employee. People don’t want to work with assholes, they want to work with people like them and people they like, and it’s your job as a recruiter to authentically speak to both these needs throughout each and every step of the hiring process.

Basically, you win when people like you, because while no one is going to jump ship based on a single phone call or InMail, those few of us who don’t insist on that false sense of urgency and insist our customers BUY TODAY! are the ones who might actually make a sale tomorrow.

This is a marathon, not a sprint, and treating recruiting like a race only leads to a lot of futility and even more frustration.

No One Wants To Buy Anything From An Asshole.

I know, I sound a bit self-righteous. I guess it’s because I’m a little fussy, maybe because I just had to deal with a sleazebag sales guy myself today, and it’s still too soon to have cooled down from this close encounter with the douchebag kind.

This guy sucked big time, and if you don’t believe me, well, consider what just happened to me not a few hours ago, just a few feet away from where I’m pounding keys with a pounding headache.

It started like any other Saturday afternoon, quiet and lazy, the kind of day where you can sit around the house in your yoga pants and veg out without worrying about being forced to interact with anyone, the perfect respite for a work week spent in recruiting.

I’m flipping through the channels and playing some stupid game on my cell, more or less dead to the world and loving it when, of course, I hear a knock at the door. Asshole.

I drag myself across the room, pulling up my yoga pants and cursing whoever is on the other side. He’s the type of sadist who’s not satisfied with knocking incessantly, but also has to ring the doorbell once in a while for dramatic effect, as if that’s going to make a difference. I open the door, about to go off on a mofo, when I see a preternaturally All American looking type wearing a plastic smile and a shirt in the most hideous shade of bright green I have ever seen. He looked serious. My resolve slipped for a second. Surely there was a good reason for this.

There was, this chisel jawed young man dressed in loud lime assured me. He had come to inform me that a local internet company was performing construction, right here in my neighborhood, and it was his responsibility to make sure responsible homeowners knew this news. “Were you even aware this was happening?” he asks. I did not, nor did I care. This, I told him in no uncertain terms, ready to go back to the business of doing nothing.

But no. The conversation continues. Did I use the internet at home? he queried, to which I replied that yes, I did not live in a developing nation, a remote corner of Appalachia or anywhere in the federal prison system and therefore had an ISP like everyone else.

His eyes grew wide as he took in this news, then solemnly informed me that if this was the case, I must be a customer of the competition. Sure, I said. Probably, and they do a decent job.

His lips turn up in a smirk, knowing he’s playing what must be the ace up his sales script sleeve. “Can you believe you didn’t even have a choice?” he asks dramatically, before explaining that the competition has had a monopoly on my neighborhood’s internet service since the first Bush presidency, and he knows that many people don’t think that’s right.

I am not sure how this came up over the course of casual conversation during a normal human interaction, but this guy didn’t seem like a normal human. He seemed like a sales guy, and a textbook one at that.

Objection, Sustained.

Now, let me be clear: I’ve got nothing against anyone in sales. I still sell, and having started out in contingency, have a special place in my heart for anyone hustling for commissions.

So I took the bait and asked him what, exactly, he was offering. I mean, hey – if I can get better service with his guys and save a few bucks in the process, I’m willing to at least hear the guy out. This is roughly how our conversation sounded:

Douche: So, what kind of services do you currently have with Comcast?

Me: Everything. Phone, internet, cable, everything.

Douche: And how much does ‘everything’ cost you a month?

Me: I don’t know the exact amount, A couple hundred bucks, maybe.

Douche: Hahaha, OK. So, like $250? $300?

Me: Seriously, like a couple hundred. How much do you charge?

Douche: Wait. You don’t even know how much you pay? No idea what that bill looks like every month?

Me (screaming inside): Apparently not.

Douche (giggles): Wow, smart girl. So you’re probably paying what, $250? I mean, for everything it’s gotta be at least $250. Bet it’d be close to $300 if we looked.

Me (OMG SHUT THE F&CK UP): Yeah. You should come back later and talk to my fianc. He deals with all that stuff and he’s still sleeping.

Douche: Why don’t you wake him up? I’m sure he’d like to hear this.

Me: I’m sure he wouldn’t.

Douche (This lady is bat shit crazy): OK. So…when would be a good time?

Me: You can try back Monday.

Douche: Wait. It’s Saturday.

Me: Thank you for clearing that up. I knew there was a reason I was wearing yoga pants.

Douche: So…he’s just going to, uh, sleep all day? I can come back around noon if that works better.

Me: Monday would work better.

Douche: Or sometime between 1-2 PM. I’ll be in the neighborhood.

…and sadly, it didn’t end there. We continued our repartee, with him eventually abandoning me and storming off, much to my relief, only to return a little bit later, after my fiance had gotten out of bed and into a beer, which he had just cracked open when the knocking started back up again.

Now, a word about my fiance. John is, without question, the single most laid back person I’ve ever known. He doesn’t get agitated or flustered, even at the kind of shit so egregiously idiotic that gets my blood boiling. He’s almost impossible to piss off, and even he soon got worked up by this persistent (and persistently stupid) douche canoe.

My favorite part? When John said he was interested in signing up, but needed to do a little more research before committing to an installation date. Hearing this objection, the sales guy actually scoffed dismissively.

“Research? Seriously?,” he emoted (badly, I might add). “Research. Like there’s anything else to know…”

How To Lose Friends and Influence Haters.

Actually, dude, here’s what I do know. You showed up at our door, did a shitty job trying to sell us, failed and were pretty much a giant douche lord throughout the entire interaction for no real reason other than that’s what door-to-door telecom sales guys do.

You talked down to us, pressured us, and never even bothered to ask what was important enough to us to consider switching service providers, or what our current provider could do better.

You gave no compelling reasons or actual evidence, cited no statistics nor cited any tangible benefits, of considering moving from a service that’s perfectly decent, much less to the one he happens to be shilling.

You did, however, give us every reason in the world to say no, warn the neighbors about you and write something nasty about your company in an online forum or review site.

We are not only going to not buy from you, you jack ass, but we’re going to make sure people who might don’t make the mistake of dealing with any company that would send you out as a representative of its brand, sleazy sales guy or otherwise. Clearly, your organization can’t be counted on to deliver reliable service when the first person from this brand I meet seems so inept and inconsistent.

You know what they call someone who keeps making unwelcome advances even after being repeatedly told no? A bad sales guy. Or a bad recruiter. Just remember, no means no. No matter what.

No deal in the world is worth this kind of bullshit, because the only thing you’ll ever end up successfully selling through these shady ass tactics will be your soul. And if you’re a recruiter, that’s probably not worth a whole hell of a lot to begin with. You can’t put a price tag on being yourself. That’s really the only thing of value any of us in recruiting actually have to offer.

As Jeffrey Gitomer taught me once upon a time, the key to sell a product is by being a person who cares about people and truly believes the product he’s selling will help those people improve their lives. So be a badass, don’t be a douchebag, and you’ll be OK.

Recruiters would do well to keep this in mind the next time they’re trying to wield influence.

About the Author: Amy Ala is a staffing consultant & talent sourcer forMicrosoft, where she supports the hardware division as a member of Microsoft’s in-house talent acquisition team.

Amy has over a decade of recruiting experience, starting her career in agency recruiting running a desk for companies like Spherion, Act One and the Lucas Group before making the move in-house, where she has held strategic talent roles for the State of Washington’s WorkSource employment program and Zones, an IT product and services hub.

Amy is also a featured blogger on RecruitingBlogs.com and is a member of RecruitingBlogs’ Editorial Advisory Board. Follow Amy on Twitter @AlaRecruiter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

The Recruiting P.I.M.P.

The job of a recruiter ain’t for suckas. You are either runnin’ things, are they are running you. You gotta be P.I.M.P. (Geeze, I hope my mother the reverend’s wife is not reading this…) This article is to remind you on some great recruiting best practices but can also act as a guide bringing some articles to your attention in case you missed them.

The use of P.I.M.P. is not meant to be crude, but to encourage you to remember the best recruiters have implemented the following stages steps to their daily workflow:

Preparedness
Investigation
Metrics
Persistence

Preparedness:

Know what the job requirements are. Not just the skills, what type of environment they will be working in. What type of pipeline do you have? How long will it take you to fill the position? That is information that you should be able to give the hiring manager. For the candidates that you are sourcing, be able to know the company’s and the department’s story. Candidates will want to know (whether they know it or not) why the position is open, what types of projects the department is working on and what are the key skills that are needed to fill this position. Because you may be the first person that they talk to, your professionalism and ability to answer questions are a direct reflection of the company you are recruiting for whether internal or external recruiting. Also, check out my article on RecruitingDaily, From Good to Great: How to Become a Bad Ass Recruiter.

Investigation:

Don’t just sling resumes. Be thorough and recruit with intention. To alleviate mistakes and surprises, go through a vetting process like your candidate is running for mayor. This may include testing, in-person interviews and background checks. And don’t forget to check social media outlets. Not in a discriminatory way, just to offer a bit of insight. I most recently as Senior Recruiting Manager for a large company had the Director of Recruiting insist on recruiting for a particular position. He was an idiot, which is part of why we “separated.” In any case, he made the hire and ended up hiring a gentleman that was on CNN because he was labeled the meanest man in the US for some videotaped cruelty for his treatment of an employee at a fast food restaurant. He filmed it himself…

It is also important to work with internal HR whenever possible to understand about whether or not a position is requiring any type of prehire background check, credit check or drug testing. This is just to let the candidate know that these are coming up so you don’t find the perfect candidate that either refuses to allow you to perform these checks or someone who wants to let the company know something in their background that may be red-flagged. Just try to save yourself from any surprises. For more information about Pre-Hire Testing, read my article 3 Tips for Pre-Hire Testing.

Metrics:

They suck when you have to turn them in but make they can help you in setting expectations. I usually do the 25% rule. Find 20 candidates, 15 will look good, 12 you will have some form of contact with, 8 you will do a full interview with, 6 you submit, 4 will have in-person interviews one will be hired. That means that you will need a minimum of 20 qualified sources to make one hire. Relatively new to the game are metrics regarding social media ROI. For more information on what metrics to check on when recruiting via social media, check out my article, 4 Important Metrics for Social Recruiting.

Professionalism:

Don’t be an asshole. I don’t care how sucky the candidate is. Always maintain professionalism, you never know if the person you are interviewing one day may be the person you will be working with or dependent on for a position you are seeking. Give feedback to candidates, any note will do, just don’t leave them hanging. Do not stalk them. Email them to ask permission to call them at work. Ask for the best way and time to communicate. Don’t rush when interviewing; allow them to tell you their story. My article, on RecruitingDaily, From Good to Great: How to Become a Bad Ass Recruiter has some great tips that can help sharpen up your professionalism.

So now you have the skills to make sure you ain’t coming off like no sucka. You gotta be gangsta. True recruiters are P.I.M.P; now you can be too.

Freebie Friday :Connect6°

Connect6° is a free chrome extension that can help you find additional information on potential candidates and clients all while searching the web. It is awesome being able to to get this information on the fly with the “hover and discover” capability.

“The plug-in works across the most popular websites, including Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Gmail (and other popular Web-based email platforms), Hootsuite, and even Salesforce.com. As you browse web pages, Connect6° places a small search beacon, or pointer, next to any unique identifier (e.g., Twitter handle, link to social media site or email address). When you hover over the beacon, the person’s profile is automatically displayed — revealing what a person looks like, where they’re based, and what they do.”

Like all tools out there that can help you find this information, you will have to play with them to find the ones you like. Some complaints about this tool is that it slows down the browser too much and causes a delay when using Gmail, too many icons when surfing the web and problems with full search capability often coming back with the dreaded “no results found.” I used the tool, it does what it says and hey it’s free! It isn’t perfect but show me the perfect tool please so I can sell it and retire…

(Vendor Description)

Hover & Discover: The fastest way to discover and connect with anyone.

Connect6° dynamically displays rich professional and contact details about a person, including a profile picture, title, skills summary, links to social profiles and contact information.

The Hover: Hover over the Connect6° beacon next to any unique identifier (e.g., Google search results, Twitter handles or email addresses) to activate a sidebar
Thumb-Nail Bio: Get rich professional details as your browse the web
Social Profile: Click on links to a person’s social networks to learn more about a person
Contact Details: Secure the email address and phone number for requested contacts
Find Similar People: Find similar people based on their company and job role
Connection Path: See a connection path with all the people between you and the contact to
enable warm introductions or back-channel references

Connect6° makes discovering and connecting with new people simple, efficient, and fun.

Walking the Line Between Recruiting and Marketing.

The fundamental difference between marketing and recruiting really comes down to a simple difference: in marketing, there’s no pressure (or expectation) to “get it right” right out of the gate. The fact that marketing, as a profession, places a premium on creative experimentation, relentless innovation and continuous iteration means that more often than not, marketing does “get it right.”

When failure is an option, success is almost always inevitable. As a marketer living recruiter land, it never ceases to amaze me how afraid everyone seems to be to screw up once in a while, to break things and put them back together. That’s how you learn, but it seems the threshold for failure in recruiting is non-existent, the lessons learned not worth learning. The costs of missing the mark in marketing might be a couple customers or a few bucks.

Failure in recruiting could be far costlier, from short term employee morale to long term business viability.

It Ain’t Me, Babe.

This is why recruiters would rather tread water than make waves. Not so in marketing, where we’ve got far more flexibility (in fact, often carte blanche) in how we do our jobs and far less red tape to cut through to try something new or different, and if we fail, there’s little to no accountability.

A/B testing, which optimizes results by what’s working in real time, is not only a specific skillset and functional niche within marketing, but unlike recruiting’s paralysis by analysis, marketing believes in learning by doing, even if doing doesn’t end up delivering as promised. Failure is more or less a line item in most marketing budgets.

These failures, after all, occur in private, whereas when marketing succeeds, it does so inherently in the public eye. We remember the successes, and these more than justify the many failures marketing must suffer through to get there.

Recruiters, though, have no safety net. One compliance violation can threaten an entire company; one bad hire can be a fatal cancer on a carefully constructed culture. Recruiters know that if they mess up, it could cost them more than a candidate; they risk their jobs and professional reputations with even the most mundane daily interactions. Recruiters know to play the game exactly as the rules dictate, and this slavish adherence to the protocols and policies these draconian rules entail makes changing the game almost nearly impossible.

So, most play along, even if that doesn’t always entail playing nice – which must be how recruiters get such a bum wrap. Recruiters, largely, have an almost perfect success ratio for the only metric that matters, filling almost every single job that they open (even if it takes a ton of time, money and stress to make that happen).

But like O-Linemen in football, the one mistake they make every hundred or so plays is the one time we ever notice recruiters, really – so unlike those failure-prone contrarians over in marketing, we assume this is the rule rather than than the exception.

The reason for the vast disparity between perception and reality in how we think of recruiters and marketers, that we see one as a stooge and the other as a strategic partner, likely has to do largely with the fact that marketers make more mistakes but have much less accountability than recruiters, whose asses are on the line and therefore, must change at a glacial pace, if at all, the functional laggard to marketing leaders widely lionized in business today.

The First Time I Saw Your Face.

Think about it. Look at the budget or headcount at almost any company, and there’s a damn good chance that the pole position is occupied by marketing, the high man on the totem pole of SG&A specialties.

While their work doesn’t create or sell whatever widget the business is built around, it almost always pays the bills, justifying big teams and bigger budgets, not to mention total autonomy for allocating both needs.

This means when marketing screws up, not only is no one watching, but if they are, there are enough people for the team to take it, instead of the blame being borne by a smaller department with no room to hide or money set aside for contingency plans or unexpected expenses.

When something goes wrong in recruiting, we point fingers; when something goes wrong in marketing, we call it “testing” half of the time, which is a pretty damn good excuse for avoiding any liability whatsoever. Success looks pretty damn impressive when you’ve set the expectation you’re going to fail, a lesson recruiting might stand to learn a lot from.

The only “testing” recruiters receive is the trial by fire of having to get the right people in the door, right now, with mixed verdicts. So instead chalking it all up to A/B, recruiters who don’t get it right risk getting stuck with a PIP (individually) or a RIFT (collectively). Because no one knows when marketing messes up; if an ad buy goes wrong, no one’s really that scared to fail. I’m sure if our professional reputations were staked on the success of every single element of every single campaign, marketers would be fairly risk averse, too. But while fear can be a powerful motivator, it’s really no fun.

I know if I ever somehow ended up in an HR role, I’d be petrified every moment of every day I’d ever spent on the job. I don’t like feeling the burden of constant scrutiny and unrealistic expectations, but recruiters and HR are responsible for always getting it right, facing severe consequences (“up to and including termination”) for even the tiniest of missteps or superficial of mistakes.

They say recruiting isn’t brain surgery, but man, most people treat it as such – and recruiters, as a result, get treated with mistrust and scorn. No wonder no one plans on doing this for a career and just kind of falls into it. But whatever it is you fell into, let’s be very clear that based off of the major disparity in mindset, expectations and execution each respective risk file entails, there is no way, in hell, recruiting is marketing. I hope you heard that.

Marketing is not recruiting. No way in hell, never was, never will be, and if you think that it is, you’d better think again.

Hurt.

While I concede that recruiting is, superficially, marketing jobs to qualified consumers as a means to inform a purchasing decision, that ignores the facts.

The pressures for recruiting to always get it right, the scrutiny and dismissiveness with which recruiters are widely taught and the expectation you don’t have to spend money to achieve recruiting ROI run contrary to how things work in marketing. And the view from here is that, well, you’re kind of getting a crappy deal.

I’ve made some stupid mistakes, like erroneously buying impressions in Columbia, Maryland instead of Columbus, Ohio or misspelling a word on a display ad that generated millions of impressions (none good) before our pre-set campaign buy and dates finally expired.

It costs a few bucks, some potential leads, but no one was really any the wiser. No harm, no foul, lesson learned with few shits given. Better luck next time. Recruiters make a bad hire, it’s pretty much on them, and even if they weren’t actually responsible for sourcing or selecting a candidate, recruiters are liable to assume liability for the toll in bottom line results, emotional well-being and team morale that took a hit when you signed that fatal offer letter.

Even if it was the hiring manager who cajoled you to extend that offer after ramming the candidate down your throat, going behind your back and ignoring policies to expedite the process, that hiring manager will only know that you, as the recruiter, are the douchebag who’s to blame. And Lord knows, they do. You’re that guy who’s always going to take the heat for “that guy,” and we all have that guy, no matter who that guy is, somewhere in our past.

As badly as that guy sucks, being the guy behind the guy is actually even worse. In talent acquisition, guilt by association can be a capital offense, and there’s no such thing as a fair trial in the kangaroo courts of recruiting.

I Walk The Line.

Now, one of the nice things about messing up is the learning opportunities mistakes inevitably present. I’ve burned hundreds of dollars trying stuff that failed miserably – like building a branded island on Second Life, or paying for premium placement packages when Microsoft first rolled out Bing back in the day.

I could go on, but I’m not sorry – I chalk that up to doing my job, which is to constantly optimize and iterate to produce the best results possible.

This experiential learning is not only a fertile source of lessons learned, but also serves as the foundation upon which I’ve created the marketing principals and precepts that define how I do what I do, and how I do it pretty damn well, thank you.

I’ve come to a decision and made up my mind on most of what I’d think of as fundamental beliefs about marketing by this point. Hell, I might be wrong on a few, but I base them off of what I’ve seen, and I’ve sure seen a lot over the course of my career.

And the more I sit through recruiting podcasts, webinars, conferences, whatever recently on the topic of marketing – and there are too, too many to count – I realize that the more recruiters talk about marketing, the less they seem to evidence the fact that they actually know a damn thing. From where I sit, recruiting just doesn’t get it at all, much less “getting it right.”

Ring of Fire.

I feel responsible to at least try to right some of the oh so wrong misconceptions and mistakes the HR industry seems to be making about marketing.

After all, I kind of live in both worlds, and everyday, I walk the line – and want recruiters to know more about marketing than some consulting speak or some BS that vendors create to inspire fear and push product. The campaign of marketing misinformation has become an epidemic, fundamental fallacies that have become codified as the Gospel Truth.

Best practices are the worst.

I’m sick of the evangelism of recruitment marketing, this peddling of parables and proliferation of parasites all looking for an easy buck as recruiters are told that suddenly, they have to become marketers. Or else. That’s why I’m hitting the road to talk to recruiting and HR professionals about what marketing really is and what recruiters should know, instead of trying to sell some product or service. It’s not like little old HR ladies read blogs, so since I can’t bring them to the mountain, I’ m headed to Orlando.

That’s right. I’m going to be hitting up HR Florida, the state SHRM conference for a state known, like HR, for an overrepresentation of sociopaths, the confused elderly and floral print casualwear.

I am fairly certain that the people who would show up in Orlando for the purposes of meeting benefits providers or getting hours for SCP certifications aren’t going to be reading this blog. And since I monitor the traffic of Recruiting Daily, I can safely assert that the vast majority of you aren’t going to be going to the Happiest Place on Earth to talk about learning and performance management, OSHA or succession planning.

This is why I figured it might make sense to write the rules I’m going to be covering at HR Florida down. Here’s what I’m shining some light on in the Sunshine State, and what I feel passionate enough about to subject myself to humidity, embroidered mouse ear hats, sinkholes and whatever Jimmy Buffett cover band the state of Florida’s SHRM soiree has booked for the binge drinking that passes as a “networking reception.”

On the Road Again.

We know that where candidates get information, and how they research, screen and select employers or jobs, is evolving; sites like Glassdoor, Indeed or even LinkedIn are causing the diffusion of a captive audience across an infinite number of platforms and channels, complicating which ones to target and where best to spend a limited ad budget.

What recruiting is facing right now is exactly what marketers experienced when broadcast TV suddenly had to compete with cable, or home video companies found out that the Internet might just be a bigger problem than they had originally thought.

We’ve seen this all before, and the fact that we still have traditional broadcast, print and foot traffic driving consumers and spend suggests, contrary to recruiting assumption, that you really can keep the old while keeping up with the new.

We know that candidates screen time is evolving. Marketing spent a lot of time talking about the primary screen, which was television until we had a desktop computer in our hands. Think about how awesome it was in marketing when they realized instead of competing for attention with dozens of competitors in a daily newspaper ad, they could reach a captive audience that, in theory, could be infinitely larger than any newspaper, and do so whenever they wanted, however often they wanted, and constantly reinforce their message to their audience. No wonder marketers love e-mail so much.

While you probably complain about how much spam and marketing messages you get in your inbox every day, the truth is that this is a relatively young medium, and a big change for the business of marketing. We’re still trying to figure out how to get this powerful (relatively new) medium right, and how to best use e-mail to talk to people and scale, develop and convert as many people on our mailing lists as possible. These fairly mundane challenges dominate marketing blogs and daily discourse – marketers talk about e-mail optimization so much that it’s almost annoying even to people, like me, who care about this stuff.

I’m thinking you probably feel the same way about mobile recruiting.

The good news is that more than ever, that “screen” consumers primarily focus on is no longer television, or even a computer monitor – it’s mobile, which means that marketers have figured out how to sell to the screen since the 30 second ads started appearing in the Eisenhower era. Marketers don’t talk about “mobile,” they talk about going where the people are, and just because that’s mobile doesn’t mean reinventing the entire marketing wheel.

Similarly, recruiters should realize that the phone has always been a big part of the business, and that you have to do what it takes to get your brand in front of the right people. It all comes down to reach, and today, you can’t reach most people – candidates or consumers – without being mobile first.

It’s no big revelation, but if you want to know marketing as a recruiting or HR professional, mobile is a damn good place to start. That’s where job searches begin, so you might be well served doing the same. In marketing, we call this “knowing your audience.” You better know yours. And if you do, I don’t really have to say much more about how important mobile really is to recruiting, marketing or recruitment marketing. Period.

I Won’t Back Down.

Marketers have talked a lot about how different channels and different targeted audiences require different communications methods. Personalization and customization, marketers know, are anything but platform agnostic.

That’s why we follow rules like sharing video on Facebook instead of Twitter, because that algorithm is optimized to reward video content with improved placement, whereas Twitter can’t even properly render previews from YouTube links. Or rules like personalizing Tweets through @ replies or DMs leads to higher levels of engagement than RTs or likes, as well as overall conversion rates and click throughs.

Small stuff makes a big difference – think about how a photo of your dinner from tonight could blow up Instagram, but no one on LinkedIn could give a shit about your goat-cheese crusted, balsamic infused experiment at not feeling like a complete shut in. We know every platform works differently, and if we know what those differences are, we can start figuring out the right message for the candidates we need on the channels we’re targeting.

That includes social media (no surprise), where a lot of potential new hires are turning to help find a job. Capterra, a software review site, reports some 86% of job seekers used social media during their most recent job search, a number that’s consistent with the percentage of employers studies currently recruiting on social. With that alignment, you would expect the results to suck way less, until you consider that having the right medium is worthless if you don’t also have the right message.

This, of course, is where recruiters are largely failing, posting job titles and automated links non-stop instead of, you know, being social and stuff on social media. I’m not going to go much further into this one, because we both know that you likely have a feed set up between your own account and your ATS, since you’re probably a recruiter, and therefore, like emerging technology, productivity hacks and being as lazy as possible whenever possible. It’s cool. But it’s stupid, and it should surprise no one that all that shit fails to stick.

Instead of blasting content, try connecting with candidates – you know, that whole “social” part of social media. Even better, connect other candidates with each other – being the guy who knows the guy makes you the man, and the person who brings people together is the person people most want to get together with.

That’s why I highly recommend Private Groups on Facebook as an ideal platform for concentrating your social recruiting efforts. While other social networks or professional platforms offer closed group functionalities, I like Facebook not only because it’s intuitive and easy to use, but because I’m already on it all the time, just like everyone else – so people can connect with each other, your employer and your recruiters without having to go out of their way. Might as well make it look easy and simple before they hit your ATS, right?

The reason private groups work so well is that it creates a captive community and audience you administer and effectively manage, but individual users can drive the conversation and connections themselves, and extend their network while inviting existing connections to grow the group, a win-win for everyone. People want to feel like they’re part of something exclusive, and are more willing to share “insider information” or meaningful conversation in a forum that’s not technically public information.

This strategy often works with minimal effort, as long as you can bring in the right kinds of people, and share the right kind of information with them. How you share that information is important, too – and while no one wants to be sold to, everyone wants a connection. Good marketers and good recruiters can make the distinction a dubious one at best.

We’ll Meet Again.

So, what’s the best way to share information and facilitate conversations and engagement between group members without jamming a pitch down their throats? Remember, you’re not an orator, you’re an instigator.

No one wants to listen to a monologue about you, everyone is open to a dual dialogue focused on understanding their motivations, needs and personal preferences. That’s how you get to know someone – and turn them into a potential new hire (or friend) in the process.

Groups are great for building this type of community based conversation at scale, and should be the focus of your “social recruiting” and talent network based initiatives.

I think Stacy Zapar put it best when she so truthfully stated:

“The difference between an audience and a community is the way the chairs are facing.”

I couldn’t agree more with Stacy, or many of the other sentiments about marketing for recruiters she shared on a recent podcast (click here for the full version, or check out the embed above – Stacy, as always, is bringing the awesome and is totally worth the time).

I don’t know if you’re an audience or a community, but I hope if you’re in recruiting, you’ll forget the chair, get off your ass, and actually do something more to get your marketing game on than simply paying it lip service and awarding recertification credits to anyone with a pulse and a Powerpoint on this talent trending topic. But the fact is, none of this is nothing new, and marketers have cracked the code a long time ago.

Here’s hoping recruiters are next, if for no other reason than they’ll finally shut up about marketing and how important it is and just do it, already.

Talk is cheap, social media is free, but the combination of the two, in marketing and recruiting alike, is pretty much priceless.

Does Reply.io Warm up Your Cold Call?

For the purposes of this review while I say “cold call”, I am also referring to cold emails.

The concept is simple. You need to contact someone. You send an email. They don’t reply, so you send another email. Then send another, and another and another until you get a response (or a restraining order.) Reply will help you by helping you “personalize” your automated email so that your prospect warms up a little so that eventually, it isn’t cold it is now a warm call.

Does it work? In short, yes. You can set up customized email templates and Reply will send them out according to a email cadence that you set up and stop automatically when and if they reply.

If you aren’t familiar with this type of email marketing, you may be thinking that this is spammed email. Oleg Campbell, founder of Reply.io posted an answer to this on Producthunt.com. “We connect directly to user email account and our tool act similar to regular email client. All sent emails even will appear in your sent folder and replies goes straight to your inbox.

We have daily sending limits to prevent using Reply for spamming. And usually our customers doesn’t have volume larger than 300-400 emails per day. This is pretty low volume to consider your emails as spam. As well since our customers getting usually at least 20-30% reply rate, this is good sign for spam filters to not classify your emails as spam.

Moreover, since emails sent from user email account, all emails end up in Primary tab of Gmail inbox, not Updates or Promotions one. As well we put a randomized delay between sending each email, so the replies will be coming in a more graduate way and as well for emails servers emails will not look like sent in a bulk.”

So is it spam or not? Um, kinda. That is why there is a “customizable” opt-out feature. Personally, if I get an email from a “person” that has opt-out feature, am I really getting a personal email? NO! That is how you know it is not personal, it is automated. There I said it. You cannot claim to send personalized emails that have to come with a disclaimer that you are not trying to spam them. It seems that potentially, rather than turning a cold call to a warm call, you could be turning a cold call to an icy barren tundra call.

I am down for any product that is going to help recruiters do their job better. Reply can help do that, I am just not sure why Reply is any better than other email automation tools like outreach.io, PersistIQ, Cadence or Rebump. When asked directly about the difference between Reply.io and PersistIQ, Oleg responded, “To be honest, we are very similar, since the end goal of both tools – automate outreach. High level, I would say that we have more possibilities to customize and as well working right now on some unique features. But don’t want to sound self-promotional here. PersistIQ is a great tool. I would suggest you to try both and see what work better for you.” I have noticed the main difference in all of these tools seem to be is the reporting capabilities and the pricing.

Friends, if you are trying to warm up cold calls, learn to present a better message. Some of you don’t need to work on warming up prospects, you need to learn how to communicate with people; not algorithms and spambots. The ultimate goal is to share your important and relevant message to the right person at the right time in an engaging way. Whether you send ten emails or ten thousand, if you cannot articulate your message in a clear and concise way no amount of emails will fix that. If you have the proper skills, however, it is possible to have extremely productive conversations with potential candidates, “warm” or “cold.”

Scary Movie: Mystery Applicants and Candidate Experience.

Many recruiters don’t read. Most of them don’t write. Fear not. The Career XRoads 2015 Mystery Job Seeker Survey doesn’t indict our educational systems; rather, it highlights basic failings endemic to corporate recruiting.

The study, featuring the fictional job seeker Frank N. Stein, found that many major employers do not carefully read or review resumes – that is, the rare times they take the time to read them at all. Too many of the world’s biggest brands and most reputable businesses still treat candidates like The Invisible Man.

Their methods for luring talent are anything but highly refined or sophisticated; their big budgets belie the fact that many fully one in three companies who responded to Stein’s application as if he were anything but a fictional phishing attempt to get the goods (and gather the data) on what candidate experience is really like at these companies.

The fact that a staggering half dozen recruiters actually followed up with personalized communications prompting Stein on next steps is truly horrifying. That’s right. Six recruiters in our relatively small sample, supposedly the top talent for finding top talent at some of the world’s top brands, actually expressed enough interest in a candidate named “Frank N. Stein” to call him back without noting that he is fairly obviously a completely fictional job seeker.

It is worth noting that this year’s study presented Stein as a somewhat unusual candidate, with what should have been more than enough blatant red flags and obvious reveals on that resume to give any recruiter pause. For example, we put Mr. Stein on a six month, self-imposed bicycling sabbatical as his most recent relevant experience before beginning his current job search.

The Candidate Experience Monster Is Alive. Alive!

Of the hundreds of positions at dozens of employers for which Stein threw his resume into the ring, only two – count ’em, two! – recruiters saw through the ruse.

To be sure, we give the companies who even took the time to respond in the first place, such as health services provider WellStar, credit for responding in the first place. At least they provided some kind of closure to Stein’s narrative. Most of the time, our fictional candidate never heard back at all.

This marks 12 of the last 13 years Career XRoads has produced the Mystery Job Seeker Survey, a dissection of some of the most fundamental aspects of corporate recruiting. Our data seeks to dig a little deeper into that initial interactions employers have with job seekers – and candidates have with companies. This includes the submission and processing of resumes, long one of the biggest causes of candidate frustration and applicant fatigue.

We create a fictional job seeker with a fictional resume. Then we submit that resume to companies on Fortune’s 100 Best Places To Work List. Then we sit back and wait for what happens next after we apply for jobs at such industry stalwarts as Google, Deloitte, Wegmans, Goldman Sachs and LL Bean, all considered models for consistently defining the leading edge of recruiting and HR best practices.

What these companies do in HR influences countless employers – and workers – all over the world. We engage professional recruiters as unwitting volunteers in our annual experiment – and in the actual processing and analysis of the data itself. There are many Frank N. Steins in our talent laboratory. Based on their own real world experiences, these recruiters answer a dozen survey questions, provide some additional remarks and comments and provide a practitioner’s point of view to our candidate creation experiment.

The Mystery Job Seeker Survey is designed to gauge the ease and efficiency by which candidates can access information about an employer online or apply for an open position via the company’s own career sites. We do not rank these websites in any way; rather, we believe the information more or less speaks for itself. Job seekers aren’t stupid. They can pretty easily discern the good from the not so hot, just like companies.

Weird Science: The Mystery Job Seeker Survey by The Numbers.

It’s those companies that Career XRoads primarily focuses on because it’s these sites that remain the most common entry point for sending resumes to recruiters, the destination that determines whether or not a passive seeker will become an active applicant. Given the explosive growth of mobile applications in the job search process, though, that may change.

The most cutting edge firms, of course, have steadily added resources to keep pace with this trend.

Here’s the 2015 Mystery Job Seeker Report By The Numbers.

238 Responses Received From Real Employers by totally fake, completely fictional “mystery” candidate Frank N. Stein. That total represents the combined number of replies directly from companies as well as headhunters and job boards, including Monster.com, which receives traffic for the explicit purpose of sourcing candidates for clients.

We have questioned just how appropriate unrequested or unrequited resume sharing really is before, and will do so again. If you’re confused, what this means is basically that a resume explicitly directed to one organization is being circulated to other employers online without the job seeker’s knowledge nor consent.

We hold that job seekers should have control over the information they share when submitting an application, and that companies have a responsibility to reasonably safeguard the personal data many require candidates to provide as a mandatory part of their hiring process.

Job seekers have the right to apply for a job without getting bombarded by unsolicited recruiting e-mails and unwanted communications; as Stein found out, however, some companies even send more than one e-mail as part of their marketing efforts to candidates whose resumes are subjected to unrequested sharing by recruiters.

28 companies told Stein that he was not selected for the job. As discussed, a half dozen not-so-observant recruiters called or emailed Stein, including major medical device manufacturer Stryker Corporation, which both wrote and called. It continues to shock me how many hiring professionals don’t take the time to read through a résumé, relying instead on search engines to make their selections for them.

Job seekers would be wise to take heed to this warning, frontloading their resumes with as many buzzwords and key phrases as possible so that they show up towards the top of the stack ranked results so many recruiters rely on to do their jobs for them. We do give Stryker credit for following up its initial phone call with a nice personal note. This high touch approach showed this company understood that individualized attention and personalized follow-ups are just good business in the business of talent acquisition. Even if that candidate happens to be completely fake.

2 Companies Caught Us In The Act. This year, only a paltry single pair of Top Places To Work actually called us out and caught Stein redhanded (not to mention also ruining our ruse in the process), including global synthetic materials giant WL Gore & Associates. Our 2015 Top Two proved that at a couple companies, at least, there are actually human beings in human resources and recruiting.

Houses of Horror: The Mystery Job Seeker Hall of Shame.

A few other companies stood out this year, too – for reasons not nearly as laudable, but every bit as unusual as receiving a resume from a candidate named Frank N. Stein in response to one of your job postings.

As was the case two years ago, Goldman Sachs relied on a two part recruiting process; when Stein applied for a position in HR, he immediately received a link to begin the application process accompanied by an automated response advising him that he had just 24 hours to successfully complete his submission.

We question why Goldman Sachs (or any other company) would require this additional step and send candidates off their career sites completely, forcing job seekers to return to the career site a second time to successfully apply for the position after receiving the aforementioned link in their inboxes. This unnecessarily lengthens the application process and almost unquestionably preempts otherwise interested candidates from applying for roles due to the unnecessary complexity this cumbersome, overly complex application process entails.

Another contender for the Mystery Applicant Wall of Shame, Ohio Medical Corporation, seems to have the best of candidate experience intentions at heart, providing applicants with a pretty comprehensive list of sample interview questions so that they could be ready if one of their recruiters reached out, which is good.

They did not, however, provide any way to actually access this information; while this value ad was promised to every applicant directly on the company’s career site, it failed to also provide them with the necessary credentials required to login to access these sample interview questions, tips and tricks. Not so good. The recruiting road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Another firm who followed up with Stein, early education and childcare provider Bright Horizons, actually asked Stein when he planned on decamping from his peaceful New Jersey digs to California, where the position he applied for was located, along with a reminder that no relocation assistance would be provided. Stein then received a letter from a second recruiter at Bright Horizons, containing a reference number which would allow him to track the status of his application.

I’ve long warned against the use of such numbers because they add an extra, unnecessary element to the recruiting process, forcing candidates to input a long code simply to know their status – that is, for the few candidates that actually remember them or think to write down these random numbers or characters for future reference. There’s really no reason why that should be necessary, if you stop and think about it.

0 Offers or Interview Invitations were extended to Frank N. Stein, who even after hearing directly from a few recruiters even the opportunity to speak with one of them in real life. But so it goes for our mystery candidates; Frank N. Stein joins an illustrious list that’s been bamboozling, befuddling and unmasking lazy recruiters since 2003. These include the original Mystery Job Seeker, hard driving Credit and Collections Supervisor Vinnie Boombotz.

Boomtotz was only the first in a long line up of these fictional job seekers to discover that even the best employers didn’t seem to be doing the bare minimum – or in many cases, what they publicly professed to doing – when it came to treating job seekers appropriately.

Other candidates who have learned this hard recruiting reality firsthand over the years include marketing assistant Gold E. Locks; crack environmental technician Jack Coostow; cybersecurity systems specialist and coding genius Chris Kringle, not to mention unassuming accountant Noah Z. Ark.

American Horror Story: The Skeletons in the Candidate Experience Closet.

We started this ongoing exercise with the hopes of lighting a torch for companies to make fundamental improvements to the way they treat job seekers;

The Mystery Job Seekers bride in this endeavor, the five-year-old Candidate Experience Awards, offer additional motivation by honoring best practices in recruiting and elsewhere in HR.

Whether they’re besieged by too many resumes with too few resources to adequately handle them all or simply feeling like they don’t owe any response to any applicants at all, companies over the last 12 years have shown a somewhat surprising inattentiveness to the topic of candidate experience.

I say surprising simply because every organization is quick to say that their success depends on the excellence of their workforce, and how they market to and recruit potential employees impacts the company’s overall business objectives as well as bottom line results. The way they recruit, purportedly, directly impacts that quality. But as the economy has improved, and the balance of power has shifted to the job seeker, the stakes for getting candidate experience right have growth higher, too.

Opportunities arise rapidly in the modern economy, and companies cannot have the flexibility to respond to or maximize those opportunities if they’re not ready with the right team, with the right talent, already in place. But companies clearly continue to ignore obvious problems and put off making even the most essential changes. Consider the initial communication between job seeker and candidate; it’s these exchanges that often leave the most enduring impression.

Although more than nine in 10 companies acknowledged receiving Stein’s application and provided some sort of automated receipt that it had been successfully received (a positive number), Stein had not heard back on his status on 66 applications he submitted for positions that he was qualified for (at least on paper).

No e-mails. No calls. No nothing. That means after completing an often arduous application process, only one in three companies even bothered to update Stein on where he stood.

That’s a howling oversight. While the obvious optimal outcome would have been for Stein to get contacted by a recruiter directly for next steps in the hiring process for every single position to which he applied, we – like most job seekers – preferred the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ responses we received as status updates during our search than receiving no reply at all. There’s no worse sound any employer can make than silence.

In the absence of a response, a candidate can’t really reasonably infer anything except that an organization is either too uninterested or too disorganized to even muster up an automated response or answer of any kind. Among other highlights of this year’s survey: 6 recruiters contacted Stein with the hopes of scheduling a subsequent interview, a sure sign companies are increasingly depending on automated screening tools triggered by keywords to review and rank incoming resumes instead of being thoroughly read by a real recruiting professional.

And make no mistake: we clearly identify who we are and what we’re doing at the bottom of Stein’s resume. Our disclaimerread:

“This is a Career XRoads Mystery Job Seeker. If you would like to learn why we created this resume you can contact us at [email protected] or (732) 821-6652. Congratulations if you’ve read this far as most recruiters will not.”

Which is pretty scary, if you think about what’s really at stake in recruiting and hiring today.

Candidate Experience: Not Entirely A House Of Horrors.

To be sure, it’s not all bad – candidate experience does have a bit of Dr. Jekyll thrown in with its Mr. Hyde, small but encouraging signs of improvement in progress. One of the most noticeable is that companies are getting better at helping job seekers get where they need to go; it was much easier for Stein to navigate through career sites and apply for jobs than for Mystery Applicants in years past.

In more than a third of Stein’s applications, he was able to readily navigate directly from a company’s homepage to their careers site, and from their careers site to job listings – there was much less guesswork and far fewer dead ends in actually finding what positions companies are hiring for and where to apply for them than ever before.

This improved UI/UX is also one of the reasons why time to apply for positions, on average, has become shorter, too – on fully 4 in 5 occasions, Stein needed only 10 minutes or less to apply.

Companies also seem to be doing a somewhat better job acknowledging candidates’ applications; as dismal as recruiting response rates were for Stein, they still represent a slight upward tick on our ratings, particularly the scores related to branding. In fact, employer brand related statistics were consistently up across the board this year, even if they’re still far lagging even the most reasonable or expectations for what an optimal initial interaction with a potential new hire should look like.

This is a continuation of a trend that clearly reflects more improvements in technology over the past few years than an attitudinal shift. Companies clearly have the tools to more efficiently identify job seekers and respond to candidates faster (and through more channels) than ever before. But it can still be scary out there if you’re a candidate, and there’s still ample room for improving the candidate experience.

Candidate Experience Nightmares: A Recruiting Wake Up Call.

Clearly, organizations have seen the brand benefits for taking the extra steps to connect with and inform candidates. Employers know job seekers appreciate transparency. So why are such features, then, not already an ubiquitous recruiting reality? We believe most recruiters are still mummified in their techniques, wrapped up in a time where organizations were under much less obligation (and scrutiny) for sharing much.

A skeleton crew of only 18 firms in the survey sample supported Stein’s application with additional careers-related content; 16 of these offered video.

Only 6 companies, however, enabled job seekers any way to directly talk to or connect with individual recruiters or employees; these half dozen companies provided personalized interactions for job seekers via direct e-mail and live chat capabilities, which is pretty cool (and pretty encouraging).

Similarly, only six companies offered advice on how candidates could better compete for a position, while a paltry seven provided any sort of status update on where Stein stood in the recruiting pipeline.

Make no mistake: candidate experience remains, largely, a nightmare; applying for any job or successfully navigating through increasingly automated and inordinately complex hiring processes still feels like being stuck in a bad dream.

The good news: it looks like, at long last, employers might finally be opening their eyes and waking up when it comes to improving an experience that’s been so broken for so long. Just remember: it doesn’t have to be this way anymore.

About the Author: Gerry Crispin, SPHR is a life-long student of staffing and co-founder of CareerXroads, a firm devoted to peer-to-peer learning by sharing recruiting practices. An international speaker, author and acknowledged thought leader, Gerry founded a non-profit, Talentboard, with colleagues Elaine Orler and Ed Newman to better define the Candidate Experience, a subject he has been passionate about for 30 years.

Gerry has also co-authored eight books on the evolution of staffing and written more than 100 rticles and whitepapers on similar topics. Gerry’s career in Human Resources spans is also quite broad and includes HR leadership positions at Johnson and Johnson; Associate Partner in a boutique Executive Search firm; Career Services Director at the Stevens Institute of Technology, where he received his Engineering and 2 advanced degrees in Organizational/Industrial Behavior.

Follow Gerry on Twitter @GerryCrispin or connect with him on LinkedIn.

Recruiters In Name Only: Why Real Recruiters Should Be Hunting for RINOs.

OK. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “of course. Here we go with another political post. Damn you, Zeller.” But even though my niche network of cleared tech talent in the DC area kind of qualifies me as a Washington insider, I promise I’m as sick of hearing about politics as most of you people probably are. If not more so. I mostly try to avoid it, but there’s one primary season acronym in particular I find kind of funny: R.I.N.O.

That’s the term Republican candidates like to throw out there to dismiss rivals’ Conservative credentials: “Republican in Name Only,” suggesting that like Optimus Prime, these purported Tea Party partisans are more than meets the eye. They are, in fact, Democrats in disguise, 21st century carpetbaggers towing whatever party line it takes to win – and winning at all costs is really what the game is all about. Hey, don’t hate the players, as they say.

Unless, of course, those players are the R.I.N.O.s of recruiting – those “recruiters in name only” who give the rest of us in the business a bad name. That’s right, I went there. Sorry, not sorry. See, I’ve dedicated quite a lot of copy to talking about the current state of talent acquisition and the pulse of recruiting. Right. This. Minute.

RINO Hunting: Why “Recruiters In Name Only” Piss Me Off.

Honestly, I’ve put off writing this post for a little while – it’s one that’s been pent up inside for sometime, but the thought of these “Recruiters in Name Only” so thoroughly annoys me that I go into a blind rage at the mere thought of these douchebags.

I mean, I have to deal with these dickwads enough at work without having to drive my blood pressure any higher from what has become, frankly, my biggest professional pet peeve.

After my lastest magnum opus, in which I traveled through the 9 Circles of Dante’s Recruiting Inferno, I thought after going through hell I could use a break. So instead of another journey into the fiery pits of despair, I could stay on the surface to talk hellfire and damnation this time around. After all, I’m a recruiter, and it’s true what they say.

Hell really is other people. Especially if those people also happen to be hiring managers. Or candidates, for that matter. But if you think it’s hot in here now, just wait a few years. Because at this point, I’m pretty convinced that if recruiters keep at their evil ways, we’re doomed. And I’m pretty sure eternal damnation looks a whole lot like being forced to continually search and apply for jobs online for the rest of eternity.

Anyone else smell that sulphur? Forget it. All I know is that in the 18 years I’ve been in this business, I’ve seen us move from Rolodexes to resume databases to the rise of online employer branding, social sourcing and mobile recruiting.

But the one thing that remains constant, no matter how much the technology around them changes, is the fact that at the end of the day, recruiters recruit. That’s what we do. Or at least, that’s what we should be doing. But it never fails to amaze me how many people with recruiting related titles don’t actually do any recruiting whatsoever.

Sure, you’ve got some talent title on your business card and professional profile. You probably call yourself a “ninja,” “guru,” “maven,” “innovator” or some other stupid shit that underscores the fact that if you’re not capable of thinking, you’ll never actually be a thought leader, no matter how hard you try. But real recruiters don’t give a shit about their Klout, their Kred or how many fans or followers they have.

How To Tell If You’re Not Really A Real Recruiter.

Recruiters care about controlling the process, closing candidates and making hires.

We care about making the right hire, and taking the time to get to know our candidates and the job well enough to get it right every time, all the time.

That’s what real recruiters do. We don’t sit around talking about talent trends on Twitter. That shit doesn’t make placements.

And ain’t no one got the time to do anything that doesn’t ultimately end in attracting, engaging and closing top talent today (or at the very least, building a pipeline for tomorrow).

If you don’t strategically manage the sourcing, screening and/or selection process, if you’re not involved in offer creation and negotiation, tasked with closing candidates or have responsibility for onboarding, internal mobility, workforce planning or retention – if that doesn’t match your job description, than your job isn’t really recruiting. If you do none of these things, then you are not a recruiter. So stop calling yourself one, already, because frankly both of us know better.

Look. I’m going to put this in the simplest terms possible, which basically involves reverting back to Jeff Foxworthy and pointing out that “You might not really be a real recruiter if…”

You might not really be a real recruiter if…

You hate picking up the phone and think that everything can be done through e-mail instead. This one’s sadly become somewhat standard these days, but it still never fails to blow my damn mind every single time.

Yeah, I know how important a role e-mail plays in communicating with candidates, and recognize how effective e-mail can be at attracting and engaging with targeted talent.

But even e-mail has its limitations. Eventually, every recruiter is going to have to actually talk to every new hire they make, whether they like it or not.

So might as well pick ’em up and start reaching out. It’s never too early to start pre-closing a candidate by giving them a call. It sends a more powerful message than e-mail could ever dream of delivering.

You might not really be a real recruiter if…

You give two shits about time to fill, or think that it’s in any way an accurate indicator of recruiting success.. Seriously. If you’re still this guy, just get the hell back to HR already. Sure, time matters in talent acquisition, and taking too long is one of the biggest deal killers in this business. Always has been.

But there are just too many moving parts for this metric to have any meaning whatsoever. I sincerely believe when a position is open for too long, the recruiter isn’t always at fault.

Hell, I could write a whole post on just this topic, but between hiring manager hurdles, process breakdowns and feedback delays, you can’t realistically hold any individual recruiter responsible for this metric, because our hiring teams tend to mostly fill jobs on their own damn time, time to fill be damned.

The only real standard to which a recruiter can be held is finding people who want to work with your company and having your company feel the same way, too. Real recruiting is always a win win, and you win in recruiting when you make the hire you need with the candidate you want. That’s what it’s all about, which brings me to the next point on my list.

You might not be a real recruiter if…

You think closing a candidate is someone else’s responsibility. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking – this is kind of the entire damn point of the entire job; if you have an issue with closing an offer, then you should start looking for a new line of work, because that, baby is the key to making placements.

You know, what most agency recruiters need to make to pay the rent and put food on the table.

I’d like to share this little gem of a story one of my readers recently told me.

That recruiter, who shall remain anonymous, recounted:

“Once, I had a manager go rogue and use an agency without telling anyone on the talent acquisition team. The only reason recruiting found out as soon as they did is that it came up during the final stages of a very long, very intense interview process. The total time from resume submission to verbal offer extension for this requisition was 13 days (which is FAST for us – everything from OFCCP documentation to the candidate’s background check was fast tracked so we didn’t have to stop the process while we waited around for approvals).

Part of the reason I was so proactive in pre-closing candidates for this particular requisition is that the skill set we were looking for is next to impossible to find, so using an agency actually made sense. No harm, no foul.

But because the hiring manager initiated that relationship, the recruiter had no control over the actual offer process because they’d never even talked to the agency or the final candidate – everything was done directly through the hiring manager instead of HR. But when the offer went out, the candidate wanted a week to think about it – which did not make the hiring manager or their boss happy, since they assumed it was a done deal.

The candidate eventually told the agency recruiter how surprised they were with how low the offer came in at, and how it wasn’t the money they were hoping for. After connecting with the candidate directly, the hiring manager that money wasn’t the issue – he wanted a different title, which we weren’t willing or able to give. He also told us he was in process for several other opportunities and wanted to see how those played out before making a final decision.

When the hiring manager approached the agency for help closing this candidate, the recruiter replied that this was the company’s responsibility, not theirs – they found the candidate, but closing them was up to the client, at least as they saw it.

I was a bit shocked that someone who stood to make ~30k in fees was willing to put in so little effort into the actual close (and apparently had done no pre closing, either, nor had they accurately portrayed what motivated this candidate and what they were looking for, etc). I was equally as shocked the recruiter was so unaware of what other activity the candidate had happening (and what counter-offers were coming from other well known employers, one of which he ultimately decided to take instead of ours).”

So this happened. True story. Sad, but true. C’mon, people. Seriously.

You might not actually be a recruiter if…

You’re not willing to push back a little on hiring managers or think telling internal stakeholders “no” is always a no-no. OK, this might just be a reflection of my personal experience and perspective, but the fact is that most of the time a hiring manager is just that: they’re a manager.

They manage a process, and they manage people, but they probably have little to no experience managing the processes behind those people, which is where recruiters come in.

I can’t count all the times on previous searches where the hiring manager was caught using a standard internal job spec and simply cutting and pasting those same boring bullet points as the entire basis for an external job description, without even paying attention to what keywords or qualifications are actually relevant or required for the actual job these POS SOWs purportedly describe.

I had a manager once pull their copy from the wrong statement of work, and then wonder for weeks why I couldn’t find any candidates and was having such a hard time understanding what they were looking for before they looked close enough to figure out that I wasn’t the one at fault. I wrote about this before, and I’m sure I will again – reqs have a way of going wrong in recruiting, and it happens to the best of us. Repeatedly. It’s one of those things you learn to live with in this industry.

What no recruiter should ever have to put up with, though, is partnering with a hiring manager who’s more concerned about getting the work done than the people responsible for doing it. Hiring managers should care about recruiting, but if they just want to bark out orders and put a butt in a seat, or if they treat talent acquisition as a necessary evil instead of an absolute imperative. then your job is to be an educator responsible for guiding them to a better hire, even if that means pushing back a little.

Every recruiter recruits better once they “say yes” to being able to say no once in a while. But with that great power comes great responsibility – and it’s our responsibility to make the best hire possible, no matter how bad the hiring manager might be.

You might not be a real recruiter if…

You place a premium on compliance instead of candidate experience, if you prefer filling out spreadsheets to engaging with people, or if you base your life on sweating the small stuff instead of seeing the bigger talent picture. If you can’t put the candidate first, then please – get the hell out of recruiting.

Yeah, I get that those acronyms like EEOC and OFCCP are really important to follow, but compliance doesn’t necessarily require putting the candidate through such an overly complex and incredibly painful process simply to successfully apply for the job.

We expect (and we demand) our potential new employees jump through every conceivable hoop and over every possible barrell simply so we’ll deign to consider their candidacy – and even after all that, there’s no guarantee that they’ll ever receive even so much as a “thanks but no thanks” as a reward for all of that effort. This reality is so often rooted in misplaced compliance initiatives, but the truth is, most of the time legal requirements are a thinly veiled excuse for lazy recruiting.

Hey, no one argues with the law, and no one argues with HR – so if you have a passion for these draconian HR rules and compliance regulations, that’s cool. But there’s no place in recruiting for someone who puts this sort of shit before people – playing policy police is HR’s job, and they can have you.

You might not be a real recruiter if…

You’re OK with post and pray. You need to be active and actually get to know the job, function and industry you’re recruiting for, and build a network within that professional community, too.

The only way to do that is by putting in a little face time; working places like job fairs, networking events and industry conferences should be part of our daily routine rather than an occasional exception.

You’ve got to prove yourself, and that means proving to candidates that you’re more than just another lazy recruiter. Reaching out and making a meaningful enough connection to build trust while building your network is at the crux of what we do as recruiters. We’re not farmers, sitting around waiting for the crop to come in.

Nope. Real recruiters aren’t content to simply shrug their shoulders when no one applies for their job. We’re always hunting for candidates, not twiddling our thumbs waiting for people to apply for our open positions. The only thing more suspect than a truly active candidate is a truly passive recruiter, so get off your ass and stop simply farming resumes. We’re called headhunters for a reason.

If you don’t love the thrill of the chase and would rather sit around waiting for someone else to do something so you have something to work on, then there’s some gig in benefits administration or payroll that’s probably much more your speed. Real recruiting happens fast, and if you can’t keep up with the pace, then you shouldn’t keep with this profession. Period.

You might not be a real recruiter if…

No one calls you a recruiter (or you call yourself something else). I know this sounds obvious, but if you don’t self identify primarily as a recruiter – and you’re not damn proud of that identity – then you’re probably right in not even trying to play pretend.

Good for you, you “thought leader,” “talent finder,” “staffing specialist,” “experience ambassador” or whatever the hell else it is you and your company call whatever the hell it is you do.

Just as long as we can both agree that it’s not recruiting, we’re all good.

I don’t know why we suddenly stopped calling it recruiting and started coming up with all these stupid synonyms and banal buzzwords, but I’m proud to be a recruiter, and would never in a million years dream of calling myself anything else. This is what I do, and I’m damn good at it. Even if it doesn’t sound as sexy as, say, “talent acquisition engagement specialist” or “people program manager” or whatever shit the kids are calling it these days.

I don’t get it, but maybe that’s because my self-identity and my title are more or less intertwined, and no matter what’s in fashion, I can’t see calling my work recruiting – and myself a recruiter – ever going out of fashion. I’m not sure what’s up with this talent trend; I remember being in a meeting a few years ago, and everyone was asked to go around the room and share their title.

Everyone rattled off a different buzzword, from “sourcer” to “talent attraction analyst,” and being the smart ass I am, I finally couldn’t keep myself from asking random one woman what the hell the difference was between her job (I think it was experience or engagement something or another) and just being plain old recruiter instead. She informed me that she was offended by that term. That’s right. She was offended. I was incredulous.

I asked her what, exactly, offended her so much about the term “recruiter,” and I’ll never forget her response. It was priceless, really. She looked at me and informed me, without so much as a hint of irony, that she doesn’t do recruiting, she does talent attraction, and they’re two completely different things. Recruiters just recruit, you know – she had a specialty, and that, apparently, made her more special than every other recruiter out there.

This woman, by the way, currently serves as the Chief People Officer at a major multinational organization, where, I’m sure, she still has as little to do with recruiting (and as much disdain for “recruiters”) as possible. But me?

Well, I’m still recruiting, and I’m still OK with being “just” a recruiter. Because it’s more than what I do – it’s who I am. For me, it’s recruiting is more than just a name. It’s my purpose and my passion.

It’s easy to call yourself a recruiter, but the process of actually becoming one is one of the hardest – and most rewarding – experiences I’ve ever had. Yes. I’m a recruiter. And that fact alone makes me feel pretty damn lucky, and pretty damn proud.

Even after all these years, I’m finding there are some parts of recruiting that never get old. Kind of like doing whatever it takes to make sure Recruiters in Name Only don’t give the rest of us real recruiters a bad name. Here’s hoping you’ll help keep it real in recruiting – and do whatever it takes to keep these douchebags out of our industry entirely. Hey, a guy can always hope.

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 Senior Sourcing Recruiter at Microsoft via Search Wizards.

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.

The Best Sourcing Tool You May Have Never Heard Of

Here’s a sourcing tool that hasn’t gotten near enough attention: Blockspring.

To geek out, Blockspring was and still is a library of user-generated techie code that developers could insert directly into their applications and other web and mobile tools. The approach has led to being an incredible enabler helping “integrative” tools scale their products and supercharge them with other complementary tools.

So, this is Zapier, right? Wrong.

While there certainly is an emerging landscape of API orchestration platforms, I think Blockspring is far and away more adaptable and usable for recruiters, sourcers, and salespeople.

One of the things that make Blockspring “magical” is that you run everything from spreadsheets. Yeah, you read that right. Spreadsheets.

Blockspring has focused (and been rewarded handsomely in the form of VC funding according to TechCrunch) on creating tools that enable non-technical folks to develop their own stack, hacks, and other tricks directly in spreadsheets (both Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel). So, no need to fight for dev time the next time you have a “brilliant” hack you want to “try out.”

Blockspring may be the best sourcing tool because they have integrated nearly 70 (at my last count) tools that many of us use every day. And, possibly better than that, many tools that you may not know about yet.

Here’s another sampling: http://goo.gl/T0HRdV

These integrations have resulted in over 2,000 functions that can be performed all without leaving a Google sheet. Things like:

So, while I may not be a recruiter, there is often a fair amount of overlap in the needs of sales hackers and sourcing hackers. So, I’ll demonstrate a stack I put together for a client project here and let your imaginations take it from there.

Star with a list of candidates/prospects – First Name, Last Name, and Company Name.
Utilize Blockspring’s LinkedIn integration to find a company’s email domain.
Use the now obtained first name, last name, and email domain to guess and validate emails using Email Hunter’s API via Blockspring. Alternatively or in addition to this, you can use other criteria that may be a part of your list already to query Clearbit and/or FullContact’s API. And, if you already have a list of emails, you can always just the free API provided by MailGun to validate.

Editors Note: So just because a tool is not labeled as a tool for recruiting does not mean that you can’t use it for recruiting. The true “ninja’s” in this business are the ones who can think out of the box; way out of the box.

About the Author: Matt Ekstrom is a serial entrepreneur with an expertise in business development for innovative recruiting and sourcing software companies. The experience Matt gained at companies like Monster.com, eBay Enterprise (formerly Fetchback), and TweetMyJobs gave him insight into not only who needs recruiting software but also understand how it works. He took his knowledge and co-founded HiringSolved and Sales Hack Night in Phoenix. He now runs RevenueDriv.in a sales and growth hacking consultancy in Scottsdale, AZ. You can find him on LinkedIn or connect with him on Twitter.

Bureaucracy Now: Why Jobsworths May Be Costing You Candidates.

3 Totally Worthless Jobsworth Excuses (And What Recruiters Can Do).

Connect with People, Not Brands.

Turning Connections Into Candidates.

Network Evolution & Natural Selection.

Storytelling and Networking: Recruiting Happily Ever After.

Do As We Say, Not As We Do.

What Your Dog Food Really Tastes Like.

Candidate Experience: Oh the Humanity! Oh the Irony!

Candidate Experience: Talk the Talk and Walk the Walk.

In this podcast…

Resources mentioned in this podcast:

Heard in this podcast:

In this podcast…

Resources mentioned in this podcast:

Heard in this podcast:

Pimping Ain’t Easy.

Recruiting Is Sales. Get Over It.

No One Wants To Buy Anything From An Asshole.

Objection, Sustained.

How To Lose Friends and Influence Haters.

Preparedness:

Investigation:

Metrics:

Professionalism:

It Ain’t Me, Babe.

The First Time I Saw Your Face.

Hurt.

I Walk The Line.

Ring of Fire.

On the Road Again.

I Won’t Back Down.

We’ll Meet Again.

The Candidate Experience Monster Is Alive. Alive!

Weird Science: The Mystery Job Seeker Survey by The Numbers.

Houses of Horror: The Mystery Job Seeker Hall of Shame.

American Horror Story: The Skeletons in the Candidate Experience Closet.

Candidate Experience: Not Entirely A House Of Horrors.

Candidate Experience Nightmares: A Recruiting Wake Up Call.

RINO Hunting: Why “Recruiters In Name Only” Piss Me Off.

How To Tell If You’re Not Really A Real Recruiter.

You might not really be a real recruiter if…

You might not really be a real recruiter if…

You might not be a real recruiter if…

You might not actually be a recruiter if…

You might not be a real recruiter if…

You might not be a real recruiter if…

You might not be a real recruiter if…

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