How to Use LinkedIn for Your Job Search
Heather pointed to How to Use LinkedIn in Your Job Search. Holy moly. I had no idea.
1 comment December 14th, 2009
Posts filed under 'recruiting'
Is Your Interviewing Helping or Hurting Your Recruiting?
Art Petty has a great post, Capturing Talent and Creating Great Customer Experiences: They Go Together. I really liked this part:
A manager that takes mid-interview smoke breaks and badgers a talented candidate about salary expectations is someone that I want working for my competitor.
I’m still astounded when I hear stories like that.
2 comments July 22nd, 2008
How Do You Know if a Recruiter is Trustworthy?
Matt Buckland had some great comments about my post Why You Should Make Friends with Recruiters. In his post, Why you should make friends with Recruiters, Matt rebutted a couple of points (which is just fine!). He made a great point at the bottom:
I’d add one major exception to the list, make friends with a recruiter you trust.
So the question is: How do you know if a recruiter is trustworthy? There are two parts to the answer, and I’m assuming we’re talking about external recruiters here, not people who are part of your company.
Part 1: Looking for trustworthiness if you’re a hiring manager:
- Is your recruiter willing to work with you on your hiring strategy and job description? You might not know exactly what you’re looking for at the beginning of a search, and a good recruiter is, at least partially, a consultant.
- Does your recruiter trust you to do your own phone screens? I stopped working with a recruiter who tried to assure me he knew best. BS.
- If the recruiter offers the job to the candidate, does he or she offer exactly what you explained the offer was? I’ve never let a recruiter offer a job to one of my potential hires, but some hiring managers do.
Part 2: Looking for trustworthiness if you’re a candidate:
- Does your recruiter want a blank check to send your resume to his/her client companies? If you’ve been working for more than three or four years, you know a bunch of the local people in your field. (Ok, I hope you do.) You and the recruiter should expect to talk about places to send your resume.
- Does your recruiter blast your resume to “everyone who’s hiring” without considering whether you would be right for the organization or the hiring manager? If so, run away.
- Does your recruiter not want to show you your resume on his/her letterhead? I stopped working with certain recruiters when I was a candidate and a hiring manager, when I realized they just *lied* about me or their candidates.
What other actions help you know if a recruiter is trustworthy?
1 comment May 9th, 2008
Why You Should Make Friends with Recruiters
In response to my first recruiter interview, a colleague wrote in with the reasons he stays in touch with recruiters:
- Some of the best jobs / candidates are rarely advertised
- If you refer people to your friend the recruiter, there is the possibility of a finders fee
- They can keep you aware of trends in the local market
- You might be able to get a free lunch every so often
I still keep in touch with recruiters I’ve known for over 30 years. When I refer someone to these people, my referral means something. I’ve even sold books and landed one consulting engagement based on meeting someone through a recruiter.
Think about it and make friends with a recruiter today!
2 comments May 6th, 2008
What Do You Want to Learn from Recruiters?
I have a lot of recruiter contacts, especially through recruitingblogs.com. I’m planning a Q&A series with recruiters, and would like to know from you: what do you want to learn from recruiters? Email me or leave your questions in the comments here.
1 comment April 2nd, 2008
Recruiting Trends Column About Writing and Speaking, Part 2 Posted
My column at Recruitingtrends.com has evidently been up for a while, but I missed the email telling me. Gotta clean out that inbox.
The column is: Using Writing and Speaking to Recruit Candidates, Part 2
You can’t leave comments there, so please do so here.
Add comment March 28th, 2008
Flipping the Bozo Bit on Recruiters
Recruiters are people, too. But when they do something not-so-bright, candidates tend to flip the bozo bit–not just on the recruiter, but on the company also.
A colleague is looking for a job. His resume clearly states 5 years at BigCompany. Recruiter from BigCompany sends him email in response to his resume posted on a job site. Email says in part, “Have you ever heard of us before?”
Ouch. That recruiter doesn’t inspire a candidate to call back. If the recruiter can’t read the resume, why would a hiring manager?
Be careful with form emails. They can easily backfire.
1 comment December 9th, 2007
Recruiting “Failed” Candidates Posted
See my article on Recruitingtrends.com, Recruiting “Failed” Candidates. You can’t leave comments there, so leave them here.
1 comment September 4th, 2007
Time to Start Continuous Recruiting
At the Better Software tutorial yesterday, several managers said their hardest problem was finding good people. If you haven’t started continuous recruiting yet, it’s time to start.Continuous recruiting is not just the “keeping your eyes open” part of recruiting, it requires your (and possibly your team’s) active participation. It means you bring a couple of hundred business cards with you to conferences, professional group meetings, they gym–anywhere you might meet people. When you attend conferences or meetings, you always carry job description flyers. You ask where you can post them, or have them announced. And that’s just the beginning.Continuous recruiting is a form of marketing. You’re marketing your company and yourself.Ask yourself why people would find it valuable to work for your company in your group. Have a good story to tell? Write an article. Give a talk (local or at a conference). The more visibility you have, the more likely you are to attract the passive candidates, the ones who are already employed. And the more you provide exposure to your team and company, the more likely you are to help people screen themselves in or out for cultural fit.
Labels: manager, recruiting
Add comment June 20th, 2007
Is the Hiring Crunch Headed Your Way?
On my recent trip to NZ and AU (to speak about project management), I had some informal conversations with people who could not find enough people for their projects.From my non-scientific survey, it appears that we have started a technical hiring crunch (not enough candidates for positions). Consider people you might not have considered before:
- Part-time workers
- People over 40. Yes, we can still see and hear. Development is not just a young person’s job.
- People over 65. Not everyone enjoys retirement.
- People who may not have a degree, but have an avocation for software.
I’ll be thinking about this for a while, because if we really are headed for a hiring crunch, it will be global this time.
Labels: agile hiring, recruiting
4 comments April 10th, 2007