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 ...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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Laurie at Punk Rock HR posted this video of Mike Rowe. I think that it is excellent!

• Human Resources people hate agency recruiters.
• Agency recruiters hate Human Resources people. Now we're even so get over it and get back to work.
• Corporate recruiters hate whatever Applicant Tracking System they are using.
• Agency recruiters say they have access to the hidden pool of candidates but they work with the same pool of candidates that everybody else does.
• The passive candidate is a myth.
• Every candidate is an active candidate.
• Corporate recruiters say they are great at sourcing but the amount of time they spend doing it is dwarfed by their heavy administrative load.
• Most metrics that attempt ...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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Lifehacker took a user survey to find the five best people-search engines. The results are in:

pipl

Google

Facebook

spock

123people

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 ...

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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.

Looking for a New Job is a Job!

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 ...

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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 ...

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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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There are more and more people looking for new jobs and many of those people need help with their resumes. If you're reading this you are probably a recruiter. I wrote the following article in 2004 and the content is equally valid today. I've found it helpful to share it with candidates. I ask them to read the article, update their resume as they see fit, and to send the revised resume to me for review. Perhaps doing the same will be helpful to you too?

And now, the article: 

You create a perfectly crafted resume. Your cover ...

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I’ve been a LinkedIn user since April 26, 2004. In 4.5 years I’ve spent a fair amount of time building and developing my network of about 13 million people. As a recruiter the value of a large network is obvious: the more people I’m connected to the better from a sourcing perspective. So when I found out that my 5 year long contract will be ending soon, I wondered what use I could put my network to in finding my next gig? It turns out that those same tools that sourcers use every day can be ...

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So my son and I were playing golf last weekend with a couple of friends and one noticed some commotion on a nearby hole. We turned and watched as a player stormed off the tee box, threw his club high up into a nearby tree, and stomped on down the fairway. He then yanked off his glove, tore it into pieces, threw it on the ground and kept going. Now that's something you don't see every day!

Now this player was playing a game that obviously got the better of him. Of course I have no idea what ...

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Thinking about Galveston, TX and all the folks from there as Ike approaches...

I sit here pondering the future of blogging. A couple of weeks ago I penned a tweet on twitter that I was "wondering if microblogging will replace macroblogging?" Those few, deceptively simple words, caused me to continue to ponder. Have I lost you? Let's catch up.

Not too long ago we gained the majority of our written information from books, magazines, newspapers, and other printed material. Those media all still exist but the majority of us now spend far more time reading at our computers than at all other media combined! And if you're Gen Y or younger ...

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