Recruiting Wasn’t Broken Until You Came Along.
Posted on April 15, 2015 13 Comments
Every day, I’m lucky enough to get to talk to the people on the cutting edge of the recruiting technology industry; most of these are entrepreneurs who share a passion for their mostly cookie cutter products and the belief that, somehow, they’re going to help fix recruiting, which every single one seems to think is either “broken” or “a problem.”
The problem, at least as I see it, is actually entirely the creation of these companies looking to create a market for solutions and, in doing so, adding unnecessary layers of complexity to something that’s pretty straightforward and simple. Recruiting isn’t that hard.
If you know how to source, how to soft sell a candidate in the guise of a screen and how to present and package those candidates to hiring managers, you can fill a position with or without social, mobile, big data or automated matching algorithms.
Running Numbers: The Social Recruiting Shell Game
Posted on April 14, 2015 9 Comments
As someone who’s more or less grown up with the commoditization and corporate adoption of social media, and as someone who gets paid to do this stuff, I’ve seen a huge shift in the way analytics play a role in informing that particular marketing function.
In fact, because it’s more or less a fire hose of structured data tied up in a bow of integrated APIs, social media has become the canary in the coal mine when it comes to analytics—the earliest adopter of some of the most advanced approaches to collecting, interpreting and visualizing the billions of input points going on at any time in real time.
The ability to forecast the relative volume of search engine queries or the reach of a target professional demographic segment on social is how people get paid on the Internet, after all.
Phoning It In.
Posted on April 9, 2015 2 Comments
If you want a business case or case use for the importance of mobile recruiting adoption and optimization, you don’t really have to look far. Hell, there’s a cottage industry of content marketing and conferences dedicated specifically to the whole “mobile” category – which is all kind of silly and specious.
Talking about the potential power of mobile seems a lot like talking about the wonders of air conditioning or indoor plumbing – sure, those kick butt, but they’re kind of just a part of every day life that it’s hard to imagine life without them.
Tell Me About A Time When You Didn’t Suck at Interviewing.
Posted on March 31, 2015 3 Comments
At its core, recruiting is more or less an exercise in making a good first impression; from the 6-8 seconds the average recruiter (if such a thing exists) spends reviewing a resume to the reported 35 seconds job seekers spend, on average, reading an online job description, making an immediate impact is imperative for both employers and job seekers.
Even as applicants become actual candidates during the hiring process, next steps continue to emphasize the importance of making a good first impression.
Every recruiter can tell you that it takes about a minute to figure out whether or not a potential candidate is going to pass a pre-screen, with phone presence as much of a prerequisite to moving on as their actual answers.
Holla Back.
Posted on March 24, 2015 Leave a Comment
Today over at RecruitingDaily.com, which, as my day job, has replaced this site as the repository for most of my bylined content, Derek Zeller wrote a post about the proliferation of recruiting and HR “influencer” lists. As I edited and formatted the post (which was pretty good, by the way), I started thinking about my position on lists, since this seems to be a hot topic for some reason, despite this being the oldest form of content this side of cuneiform.
And of course, being lazy content, this seemed like an ideal topic for me to weigh in on, since, well, I’m a lazy content marketer, mostly. If I had ambition, I’d probably not be a professional blogger, let’s be honest. Although it’s a hell of a lot more work than it probably looks like – much to my chagrin, because I’d rather be rocking my XBox than the back end of WordPress. But hey, it’s a living – which is why I personally kind of like lists, since for some reason, the people who write checks sure seem to.
While stylistically and philosophically, I’d like to shit on these lists as link baiting BS, I’ve got to be at least a little bit equivocal, since I’ve actually benefitted from being included on many of these “most influential” or “top people you should follow in HR or recruiting.”
Snark Attack 