Social Networks Positive For Job Recruiters

Online social networks are having positive results on sourcing for recruiters with 57 percent reporting that the online social network they use most often has a fair to high impact on their time-to fill. Sixty percent of respondents said that social networks have a fair to high impact on their placement ratios. Sixty-nine percent said they felt social networks have a fair to high impact on profitability.

Linkedin is the most used social network for 65 percent of respondents. Around 30 percent of respondents have used Zoominfo and the Electronic Recruiting Exchange network.

Respondents use Monster more than any other job board, with 45 percent saying it was the job board they used most often for candidate searches. CareerBuilder trailed with 31 percent saying they used it most frequently.

Sixty-nine percent of respondents said they use blogs to search for candidates less than once per month. Only 9 percent said they used blogs daily and that blogs are rarely used for finding job candidates.

"Recruiters are faced with an increasingly difficult task: a variety of online sourcing tools are available to them, but sorting through them for true business value can be on a trial and error basis," said Art Papas, CEO and co-founder of Bullhorn.

"Additionally, the recruiting and staffing industry is becoming increasingly competitive and the importance of business metrics inside the process of recruitment has become progressively more important in order to survive and thrive in the industry. In order to stay ahead in a fiercely competitive industry, recruiters must be aware of the usefulness of online social networks, job boards and blogs that offer them the best candidates and networking opportunities."

I would at this point say no.

Over the last week I have had multiple calls from various recruiters to have me fill positions, but I do not think they read the resume fully through.

I was careful enough to spell out exactly what I was looking for in a job, and it is all about technology management, PM, Security PM, Security Lead, right there in the title of the resume that I refreshed on Dice and Monster (this is an annual thing to get a feel for the job market) yet no one seemed to notice what I was saying.

I was recruited for a job I held previously, and while I love the company I used to work for, the essential reasons for leaving still apply, the company while excellent to work for, is finished with the high quality high value projects that we did for 3 years in regards to legal requirements. If the recruiter had really read the resume, they would have seen that I had previously worked in that same job that I was being recruited for and figured that if I worked there two years ago, that odds are good that I would not go back. As well, my ambitions spelled out in the resume, was not for just another security engineer job.

I was also recruited for a packet head job, another one of those 24X7 on call sweat shop kind of information security jobs (where it states must be on site physically present within 20 minutes of the call, but I live an hour away kind of information security jobs). I have been working in security architecture, senior security engineering, systems integration and design now for 5 years at various levels of management positions. It would be great for an entry-level person, but not for where I am now.

While I understand the need to fill positions, two recruiters wasted probably a couple of hours of their time, and between the two of them an hour of my time, when they really did not do their homework.

The job market is not that hot, its not warm body hiring like it was in 1999 and 1998.

Since recruiters are the bridge point between candidates and jobs, they also need to make sure that there is a good fit, both in the job skills, and everyone’s interest in the job. Given what I put on my resume, the recruiter was not doing their job, more going through the motions of trying to fill a position, with an unsuitable candidate for the position.

Recruiters also need to take the time to make sure that both, the company and the potential hire are a good fit, based on resume, and if the resume spells it out, ambitions of both sides.

It would make the whole process so much simpler rather than looking at a series of core skills, do a pre interview of the candidate and find out if they are interested, talk to them, determine if there is a good cultural fit, and determine if there is a way to make the job work.

What I got was a 10 minute telephone call are you interested, followed by a standard HR job description (no company mentioned) followed by another telephone call to find out who the company was (very important to me) and then the eventual “I don’t see myself fitting into that position at this time” answer.

HR and Recruiters need to stop for a minute and really read the resume that makes it though the initial 30-second screening. One the stack has been whittled down, then it is time to sit down and see what the candidate wants, if they really match (beyond simple buzz/keywords) the job description.

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Dan Morrill has been in the information security field for 18 years, both
civilian and military, and is currently working on his Doctor of Management.
Dan shares his insights on the important security issues of today through
his blog, Managing
Intellectual Property & IT Security, and is an active participant in the
ITtoolbox blogging community.

For Monster to gain at CareerBuilder’s expense, they have to bring in the non-captive CareerBuilder affiliates. To date, Classified Intelligence has noted Monster’s wins have come from independent papers or ex-Knight Ridder properties.

That changed when Monster signed up The St. Petersburg (FL) Times, and persuaded the top 25 circulation paper to dump its non-captive CareerBuilder affiliation. The Times still has its CareerBuilder logo in place, so it looks like the switch has not happened yet.

The rationale for the change beyond a statement from Times director for electronic publishing has not been disclosed. However, Classified Intelligence claimed the old standby, money, played a role:

The job boards market seems ready to accelerate on the growth charts. A report from Borrell Associates noted recruiters spend more with online efforts than they do for print.

That trend should continue, at a pace of 10.3 percent annually over the next five years, according to Borrell. By 2011, job board spending should approach $11 billion.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

The first time he called he said he was looking for someone to do work for Fortune 400 clients. I told him I was really busy and that I usually deal with smaller clients. He didn’t think that would be a problem he was very insistent to talk to me. I suggested I’d call him back, so we left it up in the air and for a few weeks I forgot about him.

Then he called me a second time, telling me I was supposed to call him and set up an interview. He practically begged me to do a 45-minute phone interview to see if I was right for the “job.” He e-mailed me and sent me a very generic job description that was more like a newspaper ad than anything else.

Well, hey, something smelled fishy about the whole thing, but if it was for real how could I turn down a chance to get some high-paying work from Microsoft, so I agreed to the interview and we set a date.

The phone interview was unlike any job interview I have ever had while working for Fortune 400 companies in the past.

The man never mentioned my resume, never asked about my work experience or salary requirements, had absolutely no interest in me as an individual or asked any of the usual questions a company asks when trying to size up a potential employee.

Instead he was interested in my clients, their budgets, my current involvement in search word optimization, how much time I spend on each client and was very interested in only the most negative experiences with clients, asking me to name them more than once (which I refused to do). This went on for about half an hour, with him finally asking me “Can you give me some of the specifics of an optimal life-cycle and what happens in that life cycle?” Almost like he didn’t know.

I answered that with “I can’t give you specifics without looking at my data.”

Then came the kicker

“Do you have your data with you?” he asked, grinding his teeth in desperation.

“On the first phone interview?” I thought, blushing madly.

Man, this guy really wants everything doesn’t he? He wants to know nothing about my qualifications for this “job” but he sure doesn’t mind asking me everything about my clients, my strategies and pretty much how a small, successful web design and online advertising and marketing company like Valor Cross Media keeps its clients and now he wants to see my data?

Hell that’s like asking for sex after a bad meal at Denny’s on a first date.

So I said “No.”

Well, you can actually hear the groan of defeat from this guy. He obviously wasn’t trying to hire me, he was data mining pure and simple.

I recently did a search to see if Microsoft is actually hiring for MSN in New York and though there are a few ad-marketing positions open in the Big Apple, most are 3,000 miles away in Washington State.

Who is Kenexa anyway?

If you go to the Kenexa website and wade through all the double speak they use to describe their company and what it does for employers and business, a rather sinister picture emerges about a company that not only helps recruit employees but has developed software to screen all candidates by profiling their behavior, as well as other factors.

“Kenexa Selector behavioral profiling tool combines personality, experience, situational judgment problem-solving assessments for hourly, sales and management positions (it) relies on a broad range of proven performance-predicting questions designed to reveal candidate personality traits, biographical history and problem-solving ability one click provides immediate results.”

Whew!

That is from their website and is just one of the many “tools” they have created to turn applicants from human beings into a series of measurements to increase performance from Kenexa recruited employees.

They also have a recruiting program called Kenexa Recruiter which Wachovia Corporation has decided to use as a recruiting tool. Wachovia loved the software so much they decided to install it internally “behind the firewall” as Wachovia’s Brian Drake, VP of Recruiting Practice Technology put it.

Hey, maybe it works, but shouldn’t we all be afraid of any technology that reduces people to a series of bits and bytes?

The Kenexa web site has a big fat quote that says “If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist.” That may be true when it comes to measuring distances and size, but how do you measure the intangibles a productive employee brings to a job? Hiring someone is always going to be a crap-shoot, whether you think you can use the psychological approach or Kenexa’s high-tech software to weed out undesirable candidates. Even Bill Gates, in a quote from Fortune Magazine in 1996, agrees that without his best people there would be no Microsoft. “Take our 20 best people away, and I will tell you that Microsoft would become an unimportant company.”

So Kenexa is wrong about that. But watch out, they are after your information and even if the interview was somehow legitimate who’s to say they wouldn’t use anything you say for their own purposes.

There was a moment at the end of the interview after I refused to give up my data when Kenexa’s interviewer said, “I don’t think I’m getting the answers I’m looking for.” Though Bill Gates himself feels the human factor is the most important part of any company, the Kenexa recruiter (or whatever he was) showed no interest in me as a person. Everything about the interview revolved around my clients and my strategies and was as cold and impersonal as if I was one of the programs I was being recruited to work on.

Could the interview by Kenexa be nothing more than the company testing a new piece of software? It’s hard to tell, but it is pretty obvious that to test any software of this type, you need human subjects. What could be better than picking the brains of an independent freelancer to find out the “human factor” under the guise of a job interview? Except it isn’t fair, it’s underhanded and should be illegal. For a giant Human Resources company to use the experiences of a small company to fine-tune its software without compensation or foreknowledge is an outrage. If it really was a job interview and is the wave of the future watch out when Kenexa contacts you it’s really Big Brother cashing in.

Galina Arlov is a E-Business Professional with 15+years work experience working for Fortune 400 companies like Disney, Priceline, ABC and more. She is a founder and owner of Valor Cross Media a Creative Web Site Design Services company located on Upper East Side in New York City Where Substance Supports Style.

For comments or questions about this article contact galina@ValorCrossMedia.com or visit http://www.ValorCrossMedia.com

The first rule, use of correct format, is crucial. There is one, and only one, proper resume format for recruiters–chronological. Recruiters’ do not have time or patience to figure out the complexities of a functional resume. To recruiters, time is money. A second danger of using a functional resume is that recruiters automatically assume the candidate is attempting to hide something. This is a universal assumption. No job seeker on earth is able to hide unpleasant facts within a functional resume. Recruiters are trained from the start to pick up on any possible “red flags” that identify the job seeker as an undesirable candidate.

The second rule, use of quantifiable accomplishments, is essential in helping the recruiter see you as money in his pocket. Remember this point–you will only capture a headhunter’s attention when he sees you in terms of commission potential. Since recruiters earn their fee by providing better candidates than their competition, your resume should shout “ACCOMPLISHMENTS.” Quantifiable accomplishments are most convincing when connected to bottom-line results: revenue earned, money saved, market share increased, costs cut or time saved. This type of information gives the recruiter selling points to market you to their clients and put you in front of employers quicker.

The third rule, liberal use of keywords, is important not only in the short term, but also leads to future opportunity. At any given time a recruiter may have 10 to 100 specific positions to fill. Recruiters categorize their positions by qualifications identified by keywords. When reading resumes the recruiter scans for those keywords. The recruiter may be so tuned into finding specific words that he is oblivious to anything else in the resume except keywords.

The best way to make sure your resume is filled with keywords is to scour job postings of target positions and identify keywords of qualifications. Find the most commonly used keywords in 12 or more target postings and use those words as the language of your resume. For future use, recruiters save resumes in candidate-tracking databases to sort later by keywords. If your resume does not have the correct keywords, it may never be seen by human eyes. Correct choice of words means that your resume will get recruiter attention every time he queries by keywords contained in your resume.

Once your resume is showcased in the proper format, packed with quantifiable accomplishments and strong keywords, be sure to follow proper etiquette in contacting recruiters and headhunters. The most effective initial contact is through email. Recruiters spend 80% of their time proactively calling prospective candidates and employers. They do not appreciate spending phone time with unsolicited callers. Once a recruiter has your resume he will call you if he is interested in you. It does no good to call him up asking if they he has received your resume. You risk ticking him off permanently.

When emailing your resume to recruiters it’s best to send it as both a Word attachment as well as in ASCII (plain text) format in the body of the email. This allows the recruiter to access your information in the quickest manner in order to contact you sooner.

Recruiters and headhunters can be a tremendous resource to your job search efforts. They are privy to a great number of opportunities in the hidden job market. They are experts at presenting candidates’ best selling points. They also act as go-between for candidate and employer, allowing the candidate to learn important employer feedback. Designing your resume with recruiters in mind is an important first step toward building relationships with influential recruiters who have the power to introduce you to your next boss.

Deborah Walker, CCMC

Resume Writer ~ Career Coach

For more tips on resumes, job-search strategy and interview skills, check out the article archive at my website: www.AlphaAdvantage.com

Email: Deb@AlphaAdvantage.com

Toll-free phone: 888-828-0814