Refer Madness.
Posted on March 13, 2015 Leave a Comment
Here’s the thing; as sexy as we make social out to be, and as much emphasis as we put on concepts like talent communities and targeted content, the fact of the matter is that what’s new and what’s next isn’t always the most effective when it comes to generating results.
In fact, according to the 2014 Career XRoads Source of Hire report, referrals still accounted for the top external source of hire at 19.2%, second only to the 41.9% o positions that are filled internally.
Compare that to “direct sourced” candidates – those ever elusive passives who form the focus of an increasingly inordinate amount of time and money at many recruiting organizations today.
Those represented only 12% of all hires, with another 3.1% coming from “pipeline” (or talent network) activities, which is less than those much maligned traditional job boards, which still accounted for a full 15% of all successful searches last year.
Big Data Doesn’t Always Add Up.
Posted on March 10, 2015 6 Comments
I will admit that I am not a leader in any way, shape or form. I have managed as many as a dozen direct reports at once, but the problem is, I’m a solipsist, you see, and would rather execute on my own shit than operationalize others’, which is pretty much what management is.
I like working with people I don’t have to work with, because you manage your self and know your stuff, than stuff has a funny way of getting done with minimal friction. Somehow, it works, and better, because I have to work.
This is my style, sure, but it’s simple – I mean, why make being accountable for the performance of people whose hiring you had mostly nothing to do with any more complicated than it already is when your ass is on the line?
You’ve Probably Already Read This Already.
Posted on January 29, 2015 4 Comments
One of my contributors recently complained, after about six months of blogging, that it was becoming increasingly difficult to say things about recruiting that they hadn’t already said before. I couldn’t agree more.
My friend Maren Hogan wrote a great post yesterday about how so many blog posts are more or less redundant, since they’ve already been written. Definitely read the whole thing – I never recommend blogs other than my own (I’m a whore like that) but in this case, it got me thinking.
What The Candidate Experience Really Looks Like
Posted on January 23, 2015 9 Comments
I write a lot about candidate experience, because employers can’t get enough of this stuff. Me, on the other hand, really wish we could stop just saying shit that’s common sense and treating it like some sort of breakthrough best practice.
“The longer your job application process is online, the fewer people are going to finish it” doesn’t require surveying tens of thousands of job seekers or doing a webinar or writing a case study to prove this fact. But that doesn’t stop some vendor from underwriting this content because they want their software to be associated with “candidate experience,” ostensibly to cover up the fact that their tech is one of the primary problems (and causes) of what’s supposedly an endemic issue in the industry.
Career Coaches and Resume Writers Can’t Find A Real Job, Either.
Posted on January 16, 2015 5 Comments
As the old saying goes, those who can’t do, teach; this, as we all know, is complete BS, because those who can’t do, in fact, become consultants. But in recruiting and HR, those who can’t become consultants (which is easier to get into than the University of Phoenix) do something far more insidious: they become resume writers or career coaches.
Which is a thinly veiled way of saying that they have set up a business to capitalize on their own extensive job search experience, and turning to this business largely due to the futility of their own efforts. Of course, they go to great lengths to cover up the fact that they’re functionally unemployed. The fact that their purported line of business revolves around helping other people find jobs when they obviously have no idea how, the hell, recruiting works in the first place is more than duplicitous – it’s outright fraud.
Snark Attack 