Hi Friends – Tech recruiting is hard, and many would say it’s getting harder. We’re doing something about it. And we’d like you to be a part of it.

Introducing Talent 42, the first ever 100% tech-focused national recruiting conference.
It’s designed to help you and your teams – tech recruiters, tech recruiting leaders – discover the best ways to attract and recruit world class technologists.

We’ve got phenomenal speakers – engineering leaders and recruiting leaders – lined up to share the best practices and tools you need to attract, source, and close software developers and engineers.

Where, When, Cost?
We expect this national tech recruiting conference to pull in 200 tech recruiting pros from all over the US.  We already have tech recruiters and tech hiring managers attending from companies like Whitepages.com, Disney, Nike, SAIC, Microsoft, Amazon, Yammer, Groupon, Nintendo, T-Mobile, Rhapsody, Expedia, Living Social, and many more large and small companies.

• June 13-14, 2012
• Seattle, WA (world class conference center, on the water)
• $895 for 1.5 days of tech recruiting goodness

World Class Speakers
The folks putting on this conference (Carmen Hudson and I) are former tech recruiting leaders with companies like Amazon, Expedia, and Yahoo. They’ve pulled together a fantastic lineup of speakers, including…

• SVP Product, Groupon , Jeff Holden, owner of this rapidly growing company’s product vision and global commerce operating system, and a fiercely competitive tech hiring leader
• Sr Engineer, Google, Steve Yegge, avid blogger, internal Google recruiting tech champion, and former Amazon Bar Raiser
• Engineering Director, Jocelyn Goldfein, Facebook, who is working not only to build a world class engineering org for new products, but is also seeking ways to grow the tech talent pie
• Director of Recruiting, Zynga, Flo Thinh, who has built and scaled up a kick-ass tech recruiting function for this fast growing games company in Silicon Valley and Seattle
• VP Recruiting, Informatica, Brad Cook , who has built an award winning global tech recruiting machine
• Director, Global Talent Labs, Microsoft, John Phillips, who is building aggressive tools and innovative strategies – at a huge scale – to go after global tech talent
• Advanced sourcing gurus, Shally Steckerl, Eric Jaquith, and Dave Mendoza
• And more.

How is this different?
This isn’t your typical recruiting conference.

• It’s 100% focused on tech. You won’t learn how to hire sales people, accountants, or customer service. All tech.
• We’re hearing from tech/engineering leaders! Not just recruiting pros – which is critical – but also engineering leaders who push and partner with their recruiting teams to recruit world class talent.
• It’s advanced – we’re assuming you know the basics of good recruiting already. So our speakers are being asked to challenge us to go beyond the foundational elements that are typically covered at recruiting conferences.
• The agenda is being built by tech recruiting pros for tech recruiting pros.
• No squishy balls or yo-yos. Yes, we’ll have the opportunity to meet reps from some hand-picked exhibitors and sponsors, but they are banned from doing the trick-or-treat conference bag thing.

How do I register?
Go to http://talent42.com

I hope you can join us!  Email me if you’d like a special friends and family $100 discount.

John Vlastelica, Founder, Talent42

Our team is getting ready for the craziness that is Spring time for consultants.  We’ll be hitting the road next week for the first of many stops along the conference journey, starting with ERE next week, and wrapping up in June with SHRM’s Annual Conference in Atlanta.  Here are the highlights – details at http://recruitingtoolbox.com/events/speaking/calendar/

MARCH

• Next week: Spring ERE – I’ll be back for my 3rd year as the ERE Recruiting Excellence Awards Panel Presenter.  I’m really excited to help highlight some award winning best practices by recruiting teams small and large.  We’ll do a live-streamed general Q&A session with companies like Sodexo, Informatica, Ernst and Young, US Navy, Accenture, UPS, T-Mobile and others sharing what they did to earn a finalist spot.  Let me know if you plan to attend the event in San Diego next week – would be fun to connect live.

APRIL

• In April, Carmen and I will travel to NYC.  I’ll be a keynote speaker at the Avature Global User Conference, speaking on one of my favorite topics: How to create a phenomenal candidate experience.  One of my friends over at Viacom is trying to score us VIP tickets to the Daily Show with Jon Stewart – how cool would that be?
• The very next week I’ll be in Washington, DC, speaking at the SHRM National Talent Management Conference.  I’m going to share some very pragmatic ways to turn your hiring managers into your secret (recruiting) weapons.

MAY

• In May, I’ll do a 1 hour webinar with ERE, titled, “How to avoid the 10 biggest mistakes corporate recruiters make” – that should be interesting!
• And then, it’s back to DC, to keynote the recruitDC event.  I’ll be sharing techniques to help recruiters and recruiting leaders LEAD.  Choose Your Challenge: Lead or be Led.  This is a really fun one – loaded with pictures of Charlie Seen and Donny and Marie (text-heavy powerpoint slides can be so boring)!

JUNE

• In June, we’re very excited to host our own event: Talent42.  This is a different kind of conference – it’s 100% focused on tech recruiting.  We’re bringing world class engineering leaders and recruiting leaders to Seattle to share best practices for sourcing, interviewing, and selling tech candidates.  Carmen is facilitating one of the panels (sourcing), and I’ll be MC.  It will not suck.
• And then, a few weeks later, it’s off to HOTlanta, for the SHRM Annual Conference.  I’ll be delivering one of my greatest hits presentations, called, “5 keys to successful recruiting leadership.”  I’m very excited to see Jerry Seinfeld there – he’s one of my comedy-heroes.

We’d love to connect with you live if you plan to be at any of these conferences.  Just let us know.

Thanks!

John Vlastelica

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.

Finally, an article FOR hiring managers

However, for this article, her goal was to write to hiring managers - not recruiters – to help them understand how to better partner with recruiters.  A sort of “reality check” for frustrated hiring managers who often think hiring – especially in this economy – is easy! I.buy cialis Love. It!  Rarely do we see good articles written for hiring managers. Check it out here: Fortune.com

Hiring Managers are our secret weapon!

One of my favorite focus areas as a speaker is around this very topic – how can we, as recruiting professionals, help our hiring managers succeed as hiring managers? This article is really timely, as I’m in the middle of building some custom training for a company that’s hell bent (in a great way!) on leveraging internal and external best practices to help their hiring managers attract, interview, and sell candidates really, really well.  They compete  for talent with better known, better resourced companies, and – as they’ll hear me say in a few weeks in the workshop – I believe their secret weapon is their hiring managers.

Here’s some content that didn’t make it into the article, that captures a few of the common denominator characteristics of the best hiring managers I’ve worked with in the last ~18 years.  It really boils down to this: Ownership.  Hiring managers who really own recruitment – like Nimrod at Ooyala (who leverages social media and old-school tech talks to find engineers) or Tom at Marchex (who built out a micro career site) – get the best hires.  As recruiters, we play a critical role in enabling that behavior, and those of us that do our jobs really well often find, screen and close the person they ultimately hire – but it’s those active, engaged hiring managers who  are true magnets for top talent.

Would love to hear what you think separates the good from the great hiring managers.  Sound off in the comments, please!

The key is ownership!

• Hiring Managers who are successful are NOT passive, “wait for my recruiter to hire me someone good” types. They own recruiting for their opening. Recruiters are critical partners, but the hiring managers who hire the best talent are actively engaged in networking, soliciting quality referrals from inside and outside (think LinkedIn, alumni sites, associations) their companies, communicating the hiring standards/bar for the interviewers they select to help them hire, and uncovering – and selling to – a top candidate’s core motivators throughout the process.

• In today’s economy, too many Hiring Managers believe there are a lot of A-player candidates dying to work for their company, in the role they have open, on their team, right now. “They should be lining up to work here!” – NOT! The reality is that A-players have a ton of options – in this or any economy – and they’re often not actively looking for a new job. They have to be recruited! And even though a great recruiter can get an A-player on the hook, it’s the hiring manager who must be able to ‘reel them in’. A-players need to experience the investment a hiring manager makes in them as a candidate, as it tells them volumes about how good – or how bad – it may be to work for that same manager once hired.

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.