Recruiting.com

Here's a liittle known search engine trick to get traffic. Incorporate people, places and things that have been in the news recently. It works especially well for people in the news. One example I can refer to is my recent post When recruiters go bad.

In that post I wrote about a woman Kathryn Clark Melanson, a recruiter who was in the news for stealing some money. That post got me several visitors in the days that followed. Since people had seen her on the news and in the newspaper, they began googling her. In fact my post is now #3 on the first page of Google results for " kathryn clark melanson".

I also wrote a post on SOTHJ about the Fort McMurray, Canada job market which is booming due to oilsands production. This post alone has resulted in almost 1,000 visitors to that blog. All I did was watch a piece on 60 minutes and then blogged about it the next day. Instant traffic followed.

This was posted by Chris Russell

By Anthony J.

David Perry author of one of our current favorite reads "Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters" has some bad news. If you are emailing your resume then you are a spammer.

Resume SPAM is out of control in America and employers are now fightingback, using technology that will intercept and delete or rerouteresumes to the HR department – exactly where you don’t want yourperfectly crafted resume to end up. Emailed resumes can be lost inbureaucracy and the ether of cyberspace.

Gadzooks! No one likes to be a spammer. So what's a poor job hunter to do? Well David has a helpful suggestions. Turn your clock back 10 years and pretend it's 1995 or 1985: send your resume via fax.

Faxing guarantees your nicely formatted resume gets printed anddelivered to the exact person you intended it for. For job hunters,faxing lets you “zig” when everyone else is “zagging.”

  Lou Adler has an a great post today on ERE talking about how HR Departments waste money and time getting away with things that most other organizations within a company could never get away with. His Twelfth Point I have borrowed and copied below. He says:

Make offers before the candidate has said yes. It's like asking someone to marry you before you know the answer. This is naïve at best. Get 100% formal agreement on every single term in your offer before formally extending it. Then, ask the candidate to sign it and send it back to you by the next morning. If the person refuses, don't make the offer. And please don't make excuses about why you can't do this. If you suffer from counteroffers or candidates rejecting your offers and accepting other offers, you need to do this immediately.

This is exactly how third party recruiters should be thinking and it is exactly what I wrote about a few weeks back, well kind of....

You need to let your candidates know in advance of working with them what your expectations are. Try real hard to get them to say no and then ask why not. Now you are having a real conversation.

-Jim Durbin

Freakonomics was a NYTimes bestseller, bringing economic tools to answer such great questions as why drug dealers live with their mothers, despite supposedly making so much money.

The book is really about dispelling myths by explaining how incentives drive us to act.  One of the examples is real estate agents.  Using some basic numbers, the book explains that a $300,000 house that sells yields a $4500 average commission for a real estate agent.  A $310,000 yields an average $4650 commission.  Thus the effort to hold out for the best price yields very little for the agent, but $10,000 for the seller.

Tracking the agents who sell their own homes, the book finds that the agents hold out for $10,000 more when it's their own home, but not so much when it's someone else's.  It's an example of simple math.  Effort matched to reward.

Third Party Recruiters working for national firms are in much the same boat.  During a permanent placement,  we're fond of saying, "the more you make, the more we make," as recruiters are usually paid a percentage (20-33%) of the annual salary.  But Third Party Recruiters working inside don't make the full commission amount.  On a salary of $100,000, with a fee of $25,000, the recruiter recieves half-credit, $12,500 which she then receives a percentage of - somewhere between 10-30% (depending on if they are commissioned or salaried).

So if a recruiter places a $100,000 candidate, they can expect to receive on average, $2500 in commission.  If the candidate wants to negotiate, say $5000 more, the benefit to the recruiter is only $125, but the risk is the client may refuse, and or go with another candidate at a lower salary.  The initial negotiation has the recruiter and the candidate working together, but in final negotiations, the risk of raising the salary outweighs the reward.

There are, of course, many, many comp plans in the industry, but the one I cited above is pretty standard for larger firms.   I imagine it was not created to form an economic incentive that pits the good of the recruiters against the good of the candidates, but it clearly does.  I wonder what other aspects of our industry create similar problems?

This post is part of the Recruiting Blog Swap. This week, Gretchen lays it on the line.

Lately, there’s been a lot talkabout recruiting’s movement toward less conventional sourcingtechniques such as blogs, forums, and industry events.  Nothing new, ofcourse … just more recent buzz. Kevin Wheeler talked about virtualrelationships over on ERE.

Here at recruiting.com, we’ve had Jim Stroud talking about recruitingentertainment. And we’ve had Heather disagreeing with Jim Durbin about the value ofblogs.(When does Heather *ever* agree with someone?  j/k, HH).  And, well, Ifeel like every other day, there’s a blog entry from someone talkingabout how My Space is the ultimate anti-reference of tomorrow.

But all of these nifty ideas aside, let’s say that recruiting ismoving in a new direction … that less traditional means such as coldcalling, job boards, and career fairs are out … and evolving methodssuch as blogs, referral networks, and viral marketing campaigns are in.

Have you ever read the newspaper classified ad and stumbled across:

WORK FROM HOME - EARN GREAT $$$?

Most of the time these are envelope stuffing scams and Ponzi schemes designed to take advantage of the unemployed - but a grand new business opportunity is opening up across the nation - and I read about it in the Wall Street Journal (so it must be true).

Outsourcing is a popular topic around here, but Insourcing is an intriguing backlash that may take some of the sting out of offshoring jobs.  Tech centers in rural areas are one part of this phenomenon - now check out the at-home agent.  The letter section of Work and Family in the WSJ last Thursday listed a whole slew of companies that will be hiring call center operatives to work from home.  Stay-at-home mothers, the elderly, part-time workers, the disabled, people without cars or driver's licenses and those who just don't want to drive to work anymore are all candidates.  Check out the numbers and the names of the companies below.
-JimDurbin

One of the most difficult parts of recruiting technical people is judging the quality of their technical knowledge.  Some recruiters will swear by testing systems like Proveit or Testcheck or forgive me for even bringing it up, Brainbench.

I think those are a load of hooey.  The ability to score well on an online test is rarely indicative of the ability to perform in an live situation.  Oftentimes a good test score is simply indicative that an individual read a book prior to taking a test.

You have the problems of time, accuracy, honesty, and motivation in online testing.  In some cases, you even run into the problem of one person answering the phone, one person taking the test, and a third showing up to work! 

Thus the cartoon - which as you notice is a dog cartoon, and thus brilliant.  The source of the cartoon is below the fold, but for our purposes lets say that the dog is the candidate giving technical information, and the Yay! guy, the recruiter assuming that verbal noises coming from a candidate equal technical knowledge.  There are better ways.
-Jim Durbin

Keeping with the theme of Domain Names, Here is a list of 520 Domain names that Google owns. It includes googlejobs.com and googlejobs.net. I found this info on WebProNews.com.  

While networking it is helpful to ask questions that are not sales-oriented in any way. You need to think about questions that are fun to answer and that will tell you something about the people you are meeting with. Below are a few questions that you might ask when appropriate based on the conversation. You will notice that these questions are open-ended and designed to get others talking while you listen.

• How did you get started in the business? People like to be seen as stars in someone else's mind.

• What differentiates your company from the competition? This question gives them permission to brag.

• What do you see as a new coming trend in your business? Allow your contacts to share their knowledge with you.

• What do you enjoy most about your work? People like to talk about the things that make them feel good.

• What advice do you have for someone new to the industry or just starting out? Give your contacts an opportunity to be a mentor.

• What is the strangest or funniest thing that you have experienced in your business? People love to share their war stories.

Remember, you usually only get to ask a couple of questions during a networking event or at a first meeting with a new contact.

Get out there, smile, and have some fun. Getting to know people is a great way to enhance your recruiting career!

Craig

Ragan Jones likens recruiting to almost puking and loving it!

the thought of being a mile high (or so it seemed) and plummeting to the ground at speeds too insane for human comprehension, was both thrilling and terrifying to me at the same time. Who would have thought that I would choose a career that makes me feel the same way?