As a consultant and trainer to corporate recruiting teams, John Vlastelica gets to see what many of the best recruiters do differently. In this fun, sometimes irreverent webinar, John will share 10 of the biggest mistakes corporate recruiters make, and what you can do to avoid them. We’ll discuss…

• poor assumptions recruiters make about sourcing, technology, and hiring managers,
• things that can be career-killers when you’re looking to interview for your next recruiting job,
• and some tactics to help you recruit better today.

I hope you can join us for this free webinar.

Yesterday, over on the ERE recruiting website, I posted an article on the challenges of comparing your recruiting performance across industries, companies, teams, and individual recruiters.  Your resource model, your budget, your employer brand, how much you pay – all of these things make it hard to benchmark externally. Unfortunately, too many recruiters and recruiting leaders look externally to benchmark, without a true apples to apples comparison.

Check out the article here: Recruiters: Do You Suck? (Hint: No)

And then let me know – what external data do you leverage to benchmark your performance with other orgs?  How do you use that information to help you influence execs and make business cases to justify new investments?

Date

I’m excited to return to the largest HR conference in the world, the SHRM Annual Conference, to deliver a session on Recruiting Leadership.

Session Overview: Link to SHRM site

I’m excited to return to the SHRM Annual Talent Management Conference to deliver a session on a topic that – in my opinion – doesn’t get enough of a focus: how can we better leverage our hiring managers to recruit the best talent?

Session Overview: Link to SHRM site

For all of the talk about employer branding, improving quality of hire, and competing for top talent, not nearly enough focus has been given to the role of the hiring manager.  In this fun how-to session, John Vlastelica, former Recruiting Director with Amazon.com and Expedia, will guide you through the top 10 actionable strategies you can take back to your offices to fully leverage your hiring managers as attractors of talent, direct sourcers, interviewers, closers, and talent leaders. You will learn actionable strategies to help them set up the interview process and team so that you select and sell top talent effectively. You will also learn how to lead and influence hiring managers so that they see their roles as more than just passive participants in a recruiting process; get them to see their true roles as talent leaders. Hiring managers can and should be your secret weapon!

I hope to see you there!  Contact us if you plan to attend.

Date: March 29, 2012
Location: San Diego, CA
Session: 2012 Recruiting Excellence Awards Panel Session, with session leader John Vlastelica, Managing Director, Recruiting Toolbox

I’m excited to return to ERE to host the 2012 Recruiting Excellence Awards in San Diego.  As I judge, I get the opportunity – along with folks like Kevin Wheeler, John Sullivan, Lou Adler, Ed Newman and a bunch of prior winners – to review applications from some of the best recruiting functions in the world.

If you and your teams have done some amazing things in 2011, please apply for one of the awards. Here’s info on the categories: http://www.ereawards.com/categories-and-criteria/

I hope to see you there!  Contact us if you plan to attend and would like a special registration discount.

If you can’t make it, watch ERE.net for information on live streaming.  Last year’s session, which included an award to Cisco, accepted by Greg Stock (now part of our team here at Recruiting Toolbox), is hosted here if you’d like to view it.

Resumes of top candidates — from top companies, with top Computer Science degrees — are publicly available, with complete contact info.  ”Contact me.  I dare you,” they seem to say.

As for the poor suckers recruiters responsible for hiring software engineers,  good luck with that.  A Google Android engineer posted this note to recruiters:

This Google Engineer likes his job. A lot.

These folks are sharp.  They are talented. They know their worth.  They know what they want to do.  They will only work on projects or in languages that interest them. More often than not, they can afford to work for the sheer pleasure of producing beautiful software. Their companies do everything possible to keep them.  Fully understanding the recruiting process, they flaunt their talent on the internet, making themselves even more desirable. They demand “green room’ perks.  No commute. Top-of-the-line equipment.cialis Free food. The ability to work on side projects.

For this kind of “talent” there is a “war”.  In many organizations, software developers are the key to the most important business priorities.  Their work produces innovation, increases productivity or helps to streamline operating costs.

For almost all other non-technical workers without highly specialized and in-demand skills, there is no war. Companies will continue to seek productivity gains, operating efficiencies and growth-driving innovation.  Productivity gains, once achieved, result in a smaller work force.  The same goes for reduction in operating costs.  Only growth drives the need for workforce expansion, and even that can be contained.

So the “War for Talent” takes a slightly different turn than what McKinsey & Company predicted back in 1997 (yes, the “war” is 14 years old).  The war is on — but not for all talent.  With a few exceptions, recruiting and sourcing for most positions will not experience much salary pressure or talent shortages.  Finding good people is — and always will be — a critical core competency for successful companies.  But in the U.S., there is an ample supply of good people for ordinary jobs.

So the recommendations McKinsey made 14 years ago, such as “recruit great talent continuously” or “create an Employee Value Proposition that attracts scarce talent”  still resonate.  But applying even-handed strategies no longer makes sense.  McKinsey advised organizations to differentiate investment in top performers and low performers.  That’s exactly what they’re doing in the executive suites.  In recruiter row, we should take a page from that book and differentiate our investment in recruiting and sourcing resources and tools according to talent scarcity.  The biggest investment should go to the most in-demand, scarcest talent.

Even if that means investing in improv theatre festivals or unlimited supplies of M&Ms.

Mashable published a great article recently, leveraging this G+ infographic (click here, or on the image itself, to enlarge), which highlights how people in China are using Social Media.  500 million Chinese people are online, and one quarter of the world’s social network users are Chinese.

We did a project for a client recently (hiring manager sourcing training for people in Asia, EMEA, and US), and learned about many of their “copycat platforms” (alternatives to Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, which are all blocked in China by their government).

So, what’s so different? Here’s a few highlights:

• Internet users spend MORE TIME ONLINE than people in the US (2.7 hours/day vs 2.3 in the US)
• 95% of Chinese citizens say brands that microblog are more trustworthy
• 87% of Chinese use instant messaging (38% in US), while only 53% use email regularly (91% in US)

This has big implications for recruiting in China, and from China.  Are you using social media/networks to recruit outside the US, in China specifically?  What have you learned?  Please share.

Gotta love our hiring managers!

Link to Video on YouTube: Recruiter, Fill My Req!

I recently helped Dice interpret the results of a 300-tech candidate survey they completed around the HR black hole.  No surprise, a lot of savvy candidates are finding ways to avoid HR to get their resume directly into the hands of hiring managers.  Social media and the web have made this 100 times easier.

Some companies – like Microsoft – are making great strides towards a world where candidates can connect directly with recruiters.  (They make contact with recruiters easy on sites like this: Microsoft Careers).  And a whole bunch of other companies are taking candidate experience seriously…there are even awards now, that specifically recognize the great work taking place by recruiting leaders in our industry (The Candidate Experience Award Winners 2011).  And, as a judge and the conference awards panel host for the ERE Recruiting Excellence Awards, I regularly see candidate experience as a major focus for award winners.

Our team recently started a process improvement project that’s 100% focused on candidate experience.  We’re auditing the North American recruiting process for a 20,000+ employee company, with a focus on job posting and social media presence, career site ease of use and click-apply conversion, ATS auto-replies, recruiter communication and expectation setting, and the interviewing and offer process.  More and more companies are looking at their internal and external processes to see what kind of impact – if any – it’s having on their employer brand, their sourcing effectiveness (drop-offs and conversion), and other key metrics (speed, quality, cost, diversity, compliance).

Have you audited your candidate experience (or at least surveyed recent hires)?  If so, what did you learn?

Want some ideas?  Here are 5 basic things you can do now to plug the HR Black Hole: Dice White Paper

Are recruiters rejecting candidates because of what they post online? According to this survey of 300 recruiters (infographic above), the answer is yes.

This didn’t surprise me. What did surprise me was how many – 69% – admitted to rejecting a candidate because of what they found. I think it’s been an unspoken, and even frowned upon, practice for a recruiter to look for evidence of inappropriate photos, drinking, drugs, and other non-work related information as part of the screening process.

We invited Les Rosen, an attorney from background check company, ESR, to speak to a group of recruiters here in Seattle about legal risks associated with making hiring decisions based on what you find on social media sites. What I recall most from that session was the risk of mistaken identity and the opportunity to discriminate based on a protected class status.

• How does a recruiter know that what he finds on a social media site was truly published by this person?
• What if the candidate has a very common name, like Jane Smith? How does a recruiter know that he found the right Jane Smith?
• What if the account is shared by multiple people? How does he know who wrote what?
• What if their account was hacked?
• What if the candidate posted something sarcastic on a site they thought was only accessible by their close friends, but Facebook changed the privacy settings and/or user error led to that comment being more public than what they intended?
• What if a recruiter learns a candidate’s age, race, religious background, national origin, sexual preference, marital status or something else that’s protected (presence of a disability)? How does his employer prove they/he didn’t take that into consideration when making a hiring decision?

Don’t get me wrong. Candidates can sabotage their chances of landing a good job by employing poor judgment online, and perhaps it’s well deserved. But I wonder whether employers are aware that – according to this survey – recruiter use of this source to reject candidates is so high? And if so, how they’re thinking about the risks associated with using this information to make hiring decisions.

As candidates and employees sue employers – and recruiters?! – over the coming years, we’ll have more and more case law to dictate what can and can’t be used. Until then, it’s a risk – for employers and candidates.

What are your thoughts? If this information should be used, how should it be used?