The Science of Recruiting by Lou Adler
Part 1: Making First Contact
Welcome to my series of articles, The Science of
Recruiting. Over these ten editions, we’ll look at
every skill and technique necessary to be a great
recruiter. At the end of it all, you’ll have a sense of
what you need to do to take your performance and
success as a recruiter up another notch or two, or
maybe more.
Recruiting is a multi-phase process that leads to the
discovery of a perfect job match. It starts with an
intricate knowledge of what the job requires. Finding
top candidates is another part of this process, as is
assessing candidate competency. Interspersed
throughout these activities is the recruiting,
convincing, and influencing part. Recruiting isn’t
heavy-handed, in-your-face selling, it’s finesse. It’s
about convincing top candidates to stay involved
even though their kids don’t want to move. It’s
about convincing a hiring manager to see a top
person even though he or she doesn’t have all of the
experience that had been originally demanded.
Recruiting is about taking a fuzzy, imperfect, human
process and using it to find and place perfect
candidates. The profession of recruiting will always
be a bit of a black art, but in the effort to make
hiring top people a systematic business process,
trying to find science where we can will most
certainly be a useful effort.
The Basic Recruiting Process
We all know that the best candidates are more
discriminating and therefore have more concerns,
have more opportunities, need more information, and
require more hand-holding. The ability to hire top
people correlates directly with a recruiter’s ability to
provide this information in a professional manner. This
first Science of Recruiting article will provide
recruiters with the tools they need to do just that.
(continued...)
Read the entire article...
Quick Links...
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Hello!
Last week was fun! I had the opportunity to rub
elbows with over 300 recruiters at the California
Staffing Professionals annual event in Palm Springs.
Danny Cahill and was there presenting his rookie
retreat as I presented two workshops for owners and
managers on "What It Takes to Be Successful"
and "Using Creative Marketing to Build Your Brand".
One interesting topic worth noting was the amount
of talk about the best ways to work on split
placements.
From all vantage points, the staffing industry is in
full swing. We are faced again with a tight labor
market, competition for top talent, multiple offers,
turn-downs, and increased job order flow. Life is
good in the recruiting world.
If you have been thinking about whether you should
join a recruiting network, now is the time to act.
Contact
Andrew
Stock by email or
at 503-238-5488 to take a test drive and learn how
to fill more of
your
open positions, expand your geographic coverage,
provide your clients with full service niche recruiting
support, and gain access to special partnership
offerings such as HotJobs Resume Database access,
TalentHook software, LinkedIn, or
AccordingtoDanny.com.
Enjoy the May flowers!
Craig
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Guerrilla Networking
A Radical Approach
by David Perry
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An excerpt from the book,
Guerrilla
Marketing
for the Job Hunter
Things come to those who wait, but only things
left by those who hustle.
— Abraham Lincoln
At the core of every job search lies one individual
who will determine your success—You. You are at the
core of everything that goes on in your life, no
exceptions.
You and you alone are responsible for the failure or
victory of your job-hunting mission. Let’s face it,
nobody cares more about you than you—not even
your mother. Job-hunting is all about you and
what you do for yourself. You can count on other
people but you’re the one that counts. Too subtle?
Targeted Networking
The world of work has changed dramatically over the
past five years.
Isn’t it ironic then that most job-hunters still depend
on the same old
tired ways to find a job? Traditional networking
ultimately relies on
having a fundamental belief in the kindness of
strangers. At its core,
it preaches that job-hunters must have faith that
they’ll find a job
through a friend of a friend of a friend. This is largely
a myth.
Although I’ve heard that this strategy yielded great
results in the past, it’s not enough today. With the
constantly changing marketplace, there is more
competition for fewer leads. Traditional
networking is much like casting your fate to the wind.
It is too passive to rely on. Moreover, there are three
flaws in traditional networking:
- You need to have a network at hand when you
find yourself
out of work (by the way—being out of work is not
the best
time to start building one).
- It requires you to be at least a little outgoing
because you
need to talk to strangers.
- There’s no way to guarantee the jobs people
refer will be ones you’ll excel at, much less be
interested in.
Today, networking can either be the shortest route
to your dream
job or to a lengthy series of unsatisfying lunches—the
difference lies
in how you approach it. Let me show you how a
guerrilla networks.
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"Ask Danny"
by Danny Cahill
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Hi Danny,
An account executive we had recruited for a tough
role was perfect. At the final interview, one with a
psychologist they use for a one-hour phone
consultation, our candidate disclosed that he had left
his company for seven months, after college
graduation, to go into the construction business, and
then returned. He has only worked for one company,
four years full-time while a full-time student, and now
he has been there for another three years. I called
him. He was not looking, but really wants this job
now. The hiring manager is also interested in him.
But the president of the company feels that the
candidate lied by signing his application without
disclosing the fact that he had left his current
employer - that there was a misrepresentation of his
service. They were even more upset that I didn’t
know this, that the candidate didn’t share this with
me. I explained that because he voluntarily left and
rejoined, he did not think about it as part of his
career history, but the president feels it is an ethical
issue. This is a company where I have placed several
senior folks, including the hiring manager, and don’t
know how to turn the president around. The job has
been open for three months, and ethics are a key
part of the company culture. Any ideas? Help!!
Danny's Response
The biggest mistake you could make is,
unfortunately, to react the way you want to. You
want to say, "Oh give me a break:
- he was right out of college and didn't know what
he
wanted. Can't you relate?
- there's not a resume writing how to book in the
world that wouldn't tell him to forget it since he went
back to work at the same company.
- in a world where most people change jobs 4
times a decade, and whole career paths 4-6 times,
this guy is a rock!
- most studies indicate people embellish, change or
flat out lie 25-30% of the time on some part of their
resume. Therefore, if they pass on this guy they
have a 1 in 3 chance of hiring someone else, (in 3
more months!) who is also lying, and very probably in
a more egregious way."
(continued...)
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Ask Miss J -- Fun & Advice
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Click on Miss J's photo to email your
recruitment questions and problems to her!
Dear Miss J,
You know what, Miss J? I used to be the big cheese,
the head honcho, the person billing the big bucks. I
have now gone from being a big lump of Swiss to
being a Babybel ‘cept this cow ain't laughing (well,
not quite yet, that is). The reason? I have decided
to make the switch, to grab life by the horns and
earn even more money - I am going Independent,
going out into the big wide world of recruiting with
nothing, nada, zilch, with a soupçon of
bupkis. I was a tuna in a large corporate ocean. I
am through swimming with the sharks but now I am
the only fish in the pond. Just slightly apprehensive
about it all and looking forward to making my mark
and starting to laugh – a lot - all the way to the bank.
I know,I can hear you now Miss J “this is a great
opportunity and you are likely to make more money
and be more successful this way and have huge
amounts of freedom, yadda-yadda-yadda”. I know all
that but I have a question - how do I continue to
charge the 25% fees/margins that I used to get
with the big company when there is
just me?
Fishy, from Haddock, SC
Well, Fishy from Haddock, SC
First, don’t get your gills all a-quiver. Now you are
the only fish in the pond, just think how huge
you
look as the only one? Second, the quality of what
you do does not diminish now that you are not in an
ocean; in fact, it probably gets better.
Consider this cute little quote :
“If buying oats, a good grade will be expensive.
However, if you want to wait until they’ve been run
through the horse, they’re much cheaper”.
Source unknown
(From John Koller’s Enjoy Selling!)
Think about it: (continued…)
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