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Corporate recruitment: what works and what doesn't plus other musings.
Some candidates are pests. They just bug you. These are the folks who work hard to take up as much of your time as they can. Here's how to identify them and how to deal with them:
1) Pests apply to every job on your corporate job site. They reason that if applying to one job is good then applying to 200 is even better. They don't realize that this is a sure fire way to be identified as a pest. Where I work we disposition every job that a candidate applies to. That results in a long ...
Don't do it! Yes, that's right, don't do it! You may hate your current job or there may be a declining demand or zero demand for your skills in our current job market. But does that mean that you should throw the baby out with the bathwater? I think not. Now, there are lots of career counselors, resume writing experts, life coaches, and other well meaning folks who will help you figure out what skills you have that are transferable to new careers. But is that the best approach? Read on to find out how I think ...
After many years in corporate recruitment I've learned a few things. At least I think I have. Read the following ten things I've learned and see if they resonate with you. Please add some things you've learned as a comment.
I was talking with a career counseling client the other day. He's a smart guy with a PhD and loads of great high tech experience. And still there were some basic things about his resume that were hurting him. So I got to thinking about that and wondering about how widespread this phenomenon is. As a corporate recruiter, you could say that I look at resumes for a living. I've got loads of experience reading resumes and I see all sorts of funny things each day. At least they would be funny if they didn't cause me ...
Exactly what personality, competencies, and experiences make a great corporate recruiter? No one person could possibly exhibit all of the qualities on this list. Each of us will exhibit some of the qualities but not all of them. The opportunity is to notice the areas where you excel and those areas where you could develop yourself.
Before we dive into the list, a quick word on the major sources of this information: I posted questions on LinkedIn, RecruitingBlogs.com, and ere.net. Follow the links for the great and varied responses from many of our colleagues.
And now, the list ...
One of the most reliable indicators I've found for the employment market is job postings for recruiters. It stands to reason that if companies are hiring recruiters they are planning to add to their staff. I post corporate recruiter positions in the Jobs for Recruiters forum on RecruiterSpace San Diego. Here's the data from the past few months:
Month, Number of corporate recruiter posts
June (to date), 3
May, 9
April, 8
March, 1
February, 4
January, 3
Most of the posts are either education or medical related but I suspect that we're about to see a ...
For years now I've heard people use the adjectives strategic and tactical. In most cases I believe that people who use these terms are unclear about what they mean. I'm certainly unclear too. Often they are used interchangeably. First, let's look at what the Random House Dictionary says:
stra-te-gic
1. pertaining to, characterized by, or of the nature of strategy: strategic movements.
2. important in or essential to strategy.
3. (of an action, as a military operation or a move in a game) forming an integral part of a stratagem: a strategic move in a game of ...
Dave Mendoza was kind enough to feature me in his series where he profiles people in our industry. If you’re interested in learning more than you probably need to know about me, please see his post here.
Thank you Dave. Nice work as always!
I blogged recently about Things I believe in the Recruitment Space in which I asserted that Human Resources doesn’t get the respect of upper management because it doesn’t deserve that respect. Before I expand on that thought, please watch this quick video:
My assertion isn’t really a criticism of HR, it’s just an assertion. There has been a lot written over the years about the lack of respect by upper management for HR. I’ve wondered why that is? Clearly every organization of any substance has an HR department. HR is essential for many reasons. Perhaps ...
Laurie at Punk Rock HR posted this video of Mike Rowe. I think that it is excellent!
It’s hard to keep up with the tweaks that the good folks at LinkedIn are making to their calculations of network size. Mid-December I noticed that the total users I could contact through an introduction plummeted by 8 million from 15 million to 7 million. One day later it was up to 18.5 million which was more than ever before! For the past few weeks I’ve been inching closer and closer to 20 million. Imagine my surprise when it plummeted again to just over 15 million! I wondered just what was going on so I headed over ...
One of my closet recruiter colleagues says that job fairs are for the “unemployed and unemployable”. That’s pretty harsh but there is definitely some truth to it. Of course, if recruiters didn’t actually hire people from job fairs then one would have to question the existence of the job fair industry. There is value for both the job seeker and the potential employer. I recently attended the SPIE Photonics West Career Fair in San Jose, California and noticed some interesting things.
Following are my observations:
For Candidates
1) Candidates were often almost completely unprepared. Most but not all ...
Lifehacker took a user survey to find the five best people-search engines. The results are in:
Go find some people!
Making predictions is fun and lots of people do it. We all want to know what's going to happen in the future. We love hot stock tips because of the potential to make some easy money. If we're out of work we want to hear that our skills will be in hot demand. If we're in a cutting edge business we want to know that our business segment is just about to go white hot. But making predictions is really just a crap shoot.
Consider stock market predictions. The market can do one of three things: go ...
If you're unemployed you already know that it's tough out there in the job market. If you want statistics then check out the following information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics here, here, and here. If you're unemployed then you probably don't care about statistics. You just want to find a new job. Following are some thoughts and tools you can use.
If you're out of work and want to find a new one then you absolutely must treat your job search as your current job. You ...
Thanks to SlighlyLoony over at JamulBlog for pointing me to Coyote Blog for a great representation of job loss data. It seems that our recent job losses, when expressed as a percentage of the total work force, are far less dramatic than in the past. Of course the absolute number of job losses is staggeringly large. It's all a matter of perspective. For example, I remember when a 50 point movement in the DOW Industrials Index was significant. Now it's a meer blip!
Rarely do I watch a documentary that has such deep implications for our world as this one. Titled "How Kevin Bacon Cured Cancer", this almost 60 minute Australian documentary traces the development of network science. There are many implications for our work as recruiters. I now look at my networks in a whole new way! I highly recommend that you schedule 60 uninterrupted minutes to watch. It's clear to me that LinkedIn promiscuous linkers are the hubs: the people with huge numbers of connections. You'll see in the documentary that the structure of the Internet, power grids, transportation ...
Whatever you do in the recruitment space it's likely that a significant part of your day is spent on the phone (or should be). With the incredible technological advances we've all seen over the last 20 years, the phone remains our lifeline. And still I know many people who suffer from call reluctance. They can always justify why they should spend their time doing something else but the bottom line is that they are scared to pick up the phone and call. Following are a few ideas that may help:
Have you ever started dialing a number only ...
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