Recruiting.com

I gotta be honest. Microsoft's JobsBlog created an overwhelming amount of email for me ... so much so that I moved from being a recruiter to being a marketing manager where one of my responsibilities was crafting pretty little replies to those emails. In total, JobsBlog took up about 1/3 of my time as an employee and probably %75 of that time was spent responding to email. But as Jim says, it's all about focus. Through those emails, I found so many great hires for the company that I otherwise would have never discovered. It was worth pulling me off traditional recruiting activity and having me focus on email volume. That activity did equal results in the end.

When I left, one thing I did that dramatically slowed the volume of email was to remove recruiters' email addresses from the site and just use an alias (jobsblog (at) microsoft (dot) com). The alias has an auto-reply that points candidates to various other resources such as the blog comments, a FAQ, the careers site, and their recruiter. The bloggers then take turns responding to the emails that don't fall into any of those buckets (which isn't much, I'm told). Before I left, I also inserted a perma "think before you post or email comment" after each post. These measures - while potentially not as pleasing to candidates - has made the blog very manageable for the new writers and still provides candidates with an outlet. I am worried that they are losing out on great candidates now that someone like me isn't there as a sounding board / catchall - but they weren't in position to slot anyone into that role so the primary goal was to slow the volume.

So, yes, the volume can be high ... or it can be low. You can control this. It just spends on if you want high volume or not. :)

Someone (cough*jason*cough*gretchen*) ought to come up with a referral bucket so that recruiter bloggers who receive resumes outside of our specialty can pass it on to other people.

Gretchen's reply was great, absolutely great. To twist her words a bit (hopefully in a direction of which she would approve), rather than focusing on the number of emails as a negative, I would focus on it as a positive. Wouldn't you rather hear from more people than less? Or is the issue really not so much the quantity of resumes that you're plowing through but instead the quality of resumes you're plowing through? If you feel that you're wasting too much time going through the resumes that you have now, then you are absolutely right that you will only be wasting more time should that volume increase. So the issue then really isn't about the higher quantity, but instead it is about how to increase the quality.

First, take corrective action with the resumes that you're already getting. Could it be that the candidates who are responding to your postings and otherwise contacting you don't have a really good idea as to your needs and wants. Could you be more explicit with them, or are you relying on the candidates (who don't know you) to read between the lines and infer what your needs are? If you're getting too many resumes from candidates whose geography isn't a match, try adding a sentence that explicitly states that candidates located outside of the X metro area will not be considered. That will greatly reduce those applications and you'll be doing the candidates a favor because they won't waste time applying to your positions or trying to follow-up with you.

Once you've improved the quality and reduced the quantity of your current resume flow, then move onto step two: be specific about your needs when you are blogging. You likely won't receive a huge amount of untargeted resumes if your blog is written specifically to the interests of your target audience. But if your blog entries are random, then the message that you're going to send to those reading the blog is that your needs are as well so you should expect to hear from a lot of random candidates. If you only want to hear from electrical engineers in San Diego, then only write about issues that are directly related to electrical engineers in San Diego.

Finally, if you really believe that you have 100 great resumes a day to look at and that your problem is therefore just one of quantity and not quality, then rejoice and get some help. Collaborate with other recruiters who find it difficult to attract such an incredible flow of talent.

On a different angle, if you feel overworked I hghly recommend, "Gettng Things Done" by David Allen. It is the best organizational system I have ever come across. Productivity doubles, stress cut in half. Time to blog, time to recruit and time to spend with two kids under five. That's what it has meant for me.

OK, I am curious...not just because you disagree with me. For the line recruiter, can you give an example of a blogging initiative that does not get them closer to hires that they should be pursuing? I'm open to changing my opinion.

Since Heather thinks I'm disagreeing with her, I wanted to chime in ...

I think it's ok for a line recruiter to blog BUT ... In my experience, it's best if the main blogger on a site is NOT a line recruiter. Not only does blogging pull the line recruiter away from his or her focus, but as Heather says, the person who blogs becomes the public face ... and as such, that person needs to be a position to route the candidate appropriately and look across all positions ... not just those specific reqs assigned to him or her. As long as a blog has a "central" person to do this work, I think it's ok for a line recruiter to join in.

Also, remember that blogging is more of a marketing tool than a sourcing tool. When line recruiters ask me to help them start a blog, my first question is, "Why?" The answer is usually because they want to generate more candidates for their open reqs ... now! Blogging is a long-term initiative. The hires will come - but they may not be here tomorrow and they probably won't be interested in one of your 30 reqs.

Management recruiter-I was talking about blogging as a professional endeavor (corporate bloggin), not a personal one. As much as I love the exposure that blogging has provided (I think all/most of us can say that), I don't think that my employer would want to pay me to do it if the goal was more personal than professional. But you bring up a good point...I'm sure that there are a number of folks that blog about professional matters but are "off the clock". And I certainly think that if a company is not supportive of blogging because there's not a business problem to solve by doing it, the individual may choose to do it on their own time to raise their personal profile. More power to them!

"I don't think that my employer would want to pay me to [blog] if the goal was more personal than professional."

This is a very blurry line. I have read dozens of Apprentice posts on your blog, and the connection between the Apprentice and your day job is dubious at best. The fact is, a professional blog is personal in the sense that it humanizes the writer -- and by proxy, their employer. Win / win.

Your initial premise was that "If [blogging] is not solving a business problem that you are encountering every day then don't do it." Yet now you admit that "... humanizing is the whole ... business problem." By that logic, shouldn't everyone blog?

re - %75 of that time was spent responding to email. -

A friend of mine set up a different email address for different sites, so when a candidate would respond from that site an utomated response would go them from their computer.

Basically said thanks for the interest, recieved a lot of e-mails, if there is a fit for the position she would get back to them, if not, she will keep them on file for a later date.

She used a particular tool that was able to discern the addresse it was coming from and the buzz words. This tool worked well with outlook

Unfortunately I don't recall the name of the tool and she passed away a few mths ago.

Karen