A Boston Technical Recruiters Blog

Author Byline: Peggy McKee - VP of Sales & Marketing at Interview on Demand, LLC
Author Website: Interview On Demand,
The SouthWest Alliance of MBA programs partnered Interview on Demand to provide video job interviews for the annual spring virtual career fair. Interview on Demand provided recorded video job interviews of the participating students for the prospective employers.

The hiring process has been around for centuries. Before the telephone, the process was basically face to face interviews. The talent pool was limited to those who could actually meet with you in person. With the invention of the telephone and telephone interviews the talent pool was greatly increased. With Interview on Demand video job interviews, we can now see and hear candidates recorded answers to job specific interview questions, anywhere, anytime. In time, we will wonder how we ever hired without it.

The Southwest Alliance of MBA programs hosts a spring virtual career fair annually. With the help of Interview on Demand, LLC. we were able to provide recorded video interviews of our students online for our participating employees. The system is so easy to use. Working with each college, Interview on Demand, LLC. was able to invite over 1200 students to take a video interview in less than an hour of time! Interview on Demand provides a fantastic path for employers and prospective hires to move through the process faster and with reduced costs. I predict that we will see more employers embrace this technology as they realize the very real value it can provide in the hiring process. - Mel Penn, Director, Student Support Center/MBA Corporate Relations Executive at the Price College of Business – University of Oklahoma

Faculty and career center staff weren’t the only ones who saw the value of the opportunity.

In order to attend my first virtual career fair, I needed a video job interview in addition to my resume. By using Interview on Demand’s website to post a video job interview, I was able to craft and modify my responses at my own pace to create the best version that I wanted potential companies to see. The ease with which I was able to upload my responses to their website was amazing considering that it was my first time creating a video job interview. In doing research, it appears that more companies are moving towards video job interviews to save time and screen candidates. Interview on Demand has allowed me to make an easy transition to video job interviewing and what could be a new era in corporate recruiting. - Kevin D., MBA Student - SMU Cox School of Business.

If your school or organization would be interested in hosting a virtual career fair contact me at (800) 881-4557 ext. 100 to discuss how Interview on Demand and its virtual career fair technology can make it easy for you to invite and present video job interviews or video career profiles of candidates/jobseekers/students to hiring companies.

Article courtesy of the Recruiting Blogswap, a content exchange service sponsored by CollegeRecruiter.com, a leading site for college students looking for internships and recent graduates searching for entry level jobs and other career opportunities.

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Author Byline: America’s #1 Recruiter
Author Website:
www.tonybeshara.com

Finding a Job is a JOB!

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There is nothing quite like the shattering bliss that overcomes me when I figure out the answer to a Java problem or any technical problem for that matter. It might be a sad testament to my lack of Java skills that it took me about 3 hours to figure out that I had to use an accessor to get the computational method from the class I was calling after instantiating my objects with my test program to compute the difference between the two objects However, the relief of knowing the the thing works at midnight on the night the homework is due is too good to even put in words… life is good!

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Surfing the blogashere, I came across a post on a website I had networked through that pointed me to the rabbit hole and once through the rabbit hole I discovered Smorty. Smorty is a service connecting advertisers with bloggers. Advertisers can pay bloggers
to write opinion posts with links back to the advertisers site. This is a pretty solid idea since many bloggers are blogging for money.

I recently realized that if I were to only blog for money I would probably lose interest. However, if I blog about things that I really enjoy doing, such as recruiting, and get paid to blog along the way, life becomes a whole lot sweeter. Actually I think it’s a pretty solid idea to pay people to reviewed other blogs and products, it’s not a new idea, just a Web 2.0 rendition of an age old idea of critics. Critics get paid for criticizing others work so getting paid to criticize blogging is just the natural evolution within the blogasphere.

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And I sit here reading through discussion posts of C++ developers in a Java class wondering what will happen next week.

This week has been a pretty remarkable one. We received a large order from a good Boston client and by the end of the week set up 10 face to face interviews for next week. Any recruiter will tell you that a face to face interview is the best kind, while 10 of them in one week is a very good thing indeed. The potential for placing several of the candidates is quite good. (Knock on wood)

Still, it’s been a hard week in that sourcing that many candidates takes a lot of work (Tues., Wend, Thurs 830-7(working lunch)). My favorite search approach is the minimalist search string general result type. What I mean by this is that I search on very general terms, trusting my own ability to scan and figure out if a candidate is a good match or not. This approach is handy with technical candidates who may not have all the keywords on their resume. Since I know exactly what they do, most of the time I can spot a good candidate with a very general search.

Sometimes you need to make a lot of calls to source several candidates, other times I do a “home run” search and pick out the candidate that gets hired. This is rare but feels good, like a home run.

I came across a term “board scrubbers” today and I thought it was meant in a derisive way. A job board is nothing more then an ATS that you rent. Boards are extremely effective when sourcing for certain types of positions, especially contracts. Direct sourcing for contracts is not as effective in my experience. Convincing someone to drop a perm job and take a 6 month contract is usually a waste of time unless the candidate is motivated to get out fast for whatever reason…

Every recruiting tool has its use, none is worse or better then any other, it just depends how good you are at using the tools you have. I use every tool and that gives me the edge over every else who doesn’t.. So all the high brow recruiters out there who don’t do board recruiting, please keep away from the boards and give expert “board scrubbers” like me a huge competitive advantage over you. 

Meanwhile I still have to convert a procedural program into an OOP one and realized that I may have jumped ahead of myself by writing the program that was supposed to be procedural with OOP principles. Wonderful…

Between walking candidates into the client site, picking them up at the airport, my dad’s 50 birthday, my cousin coming from Israel, and my gf coming back from Florida, not to mention the ever increasing Java work load next week should be a lot of fun.

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This is a response to a post on RicruitingBlog.com by Rick Deare
http://www.recruitingblogs.com/
Here are some comments, although a recruiter possessing of all these traits is often a purple squirrel.

Evangelistic
What happens if your company is engaged in unethical behavior but whistle blowing will get you fired? You can’t always be an evangelist for an organization that does not look after your interests. A recruiting company must never place its profit margin so far ahead of the needs of its recruiters as to alienate them. And at the same time you do not always have the option of leaving. So just keep your head down and do your job. A good recruiter can leave evangelism to someone else.

Competitive
You can be competitive, but you must also be a teacher. Recruiters on these boards follow the teacher code. We share our knowledge and experience freely. These are tools you can examine and discard or adopt. We don’t hoard them, we share them. And great recruiters always teach sometimes for profit and sometimes for the sheer pleasure of telling someone how they would do it.

I find it disturbing when recruiters on LinkedIn block their connections because of the paranoid competitive fear that someone else will steal a candidate. Go right ahead! If you have a better opportunity for a candidate I have nothing for, go for it!

Why would you hide your connections and block my ability to bring them opportunities that you cannot? I call that greed. And good recruiters are not greedy.

Computer literate
I don’t have a headset. But I use Excel and Outlook to create a more effective ATS then many proprietary ATS systems I have encountered. Managing your information systems and knowing how to use them is more important then you own memory.

Skilled in Recruiting Process
This is not necessarily true. The recruiting process has many steps. Large companies separate the process into many segments, from sourcers, to recruiters, to relationship managers, to administrators. This depends on the company and really has nothing to do with the ability or a recruiter. A good recruiter leverages the system to become an even better recruiter.

Entrepreneurial Spirit
You are running your own desk. You must have the courage to take risks, to experiment, to think outside the box even if doing so can put you at odds with management. Management does not always subscribe to your ideas and that’s ok. But a true entrepreneur will find ways around this obstacle.

Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff!
This plays into a point Rick made about accepting change. Recruiters, especially inexperienced ones, get hung up on deals. Every close is a celebration; every small failure is a disaster. I used to run around the office doing cartwheels after closing a deal, while a kicked offer would kill my productivity for a day. Not anymore.

If a candidate kicks an offer, it is not the end of the world! If he does not show up for an interview, it is not your fault. Don’t constantly kick yourself over it since there is nothing you can do about it. And do not under any circumstances allow your recruiting manager to guilt trip you about it (they do it constantly). Don’t try to control candidates!!

This may sound like anathema to the “Candidate Control” mantra, but I’ve never been very fond of that mantra anyhow. Your candidate will do what is in his best interest, not yours. Accept it. Present/Sell the opportunity but be empathetic like Rick pointed out. The fact that you did this and that and marched 100 miles through snow and wind to get that offer does not obligate the candidate to do anything for you. You were doing your job.

Agency Recruiting
As a recruiter, you own a very small part of the process. Here is how it breaks down:
1. Recruiter(you)
2. Sales Executive
3. Client
4. Candidate
5. Competition
6. Luck
If you assume an equal distribution of labor… you own 18% of the process.

So don’t try to control the other factors because you will burn out! Please don’t burn out!

This was fun!

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I came across this article on ERE. The author contends that these are “outrageous” recruiting techniques, but I think they are right on.

Videogame on-boarding. Sun is making a comeback toward its former leadership position in HR. Its latest bold move is to integrate exciting and entertaining video games into a powerful, online on-boarding program. The new-hire experience covers five critical areas “accelerate, participate, learn, explore, and play”. The 30-minute video games are Dawn of the Shadow Specters and Rise of the Shadow Specters. Other firms that have successfully used videogames as part of their recruiting approach include Deloitte and the Mitre Corporation.

Trackback URL for this post:
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Author Byline: Glenn Gutmacher’s Advanced Online Recruiting Techniques
Author Website: http://www.recruiting-online.spaces.live.com

Q: I am trying to source for managers who have supervised at least 25 direct reports. Is there a way to efficiently target them in an Internet search?

A: The most elegant solution I can think of utilizes Google’s numrange command, which lets you find any number in a range, in the format lowvalue..highvalue (note there are no spaces on either side of the two dots). I explained another powerful way to find candidates via their certifications using this command in a previous post on my blog, inspired by Shally Steckerl of JobMachine.net, but this application is different enough to merit a separate treatment.

If you think about what’s in a resume or profile of somebody like this (we’ll use a software development team as our example, but you can substitute whatever’s relevant to your search), it probably says something like:

“managed virtual team of 25 professionals”, “managed cross functional team comprised of 25″, “Managed geographically distributed team with 25″, “managed and developed the development team of 25″, “managed and trained global project team consisting of 25″, etc.

Note the pattern (as all good sourcers do!). There are words between “managed” and “team”, and again between “team” and the number, which you can manage in one move with the * (wildcard). This represents a placeholder for any other word or words, so assuming you were ok with people up to 100 direct reports, it would yield this string:

“managed * team * 25..100″

which simply and elegantly finds them all! However, if it’s “managed team…” (no words in between), then you also need this:

“managed team * 25..100″

But don’t try to get too efficient, because

“managed * 25..100″

generates a lot of irrelevant results having nothing to do with one’s employees.

Of course, there are other variations like “managed 25 direct reports”, “managed multinational 25 person staff”, “managed a 25 person organization”, etc., so you should account for those if the above doesn’t generate enough results for your pipeline, a la “25..100 direct reports” and “managed 25..100 person”. However, *don’t* try putting them in an OR statement. If you search for something like:

(”managed 25..100 person” OR “managed * 25..100 person”) “software development”

it basically negates the numrange criterion. You might get a few good results at the beginning (first 5), but after that, it’s only searching for “software development”. This seems like a bug in Google to me, but it’s not hard to tell when there’s a problem, because the results count summary atop the first page changes from something like “results 1-100 of 439″ to “results 1-100 of 63,700,000″. The latter should always trigger your radar that there’s something wrong with your search string.

Last but not least, don’t expect much from (present tense of the verb)

“manage 25..100 person” “software development”

which generates only a few results. When you’re searching within a phrase, realize it’s doing an exact search — don’t expect it to find various forms of the root word. Since “managed” appears to be how most people reference it in their resumes/bios, you need to search on the past tense phrasing.

Glenn Gutmacher is a senior Recruiting Researcher at Microsoft Corporation and founder of Recruiting-Online.com, creator of the Advanced Online Recruiting Techniques self-paced sourcing course.

Article courtesy of the Recruiting Blogswap, a content exchange service sponsored by CollegeRecruiter.com, a leading site for college students looking for internships and recent graduates searching for entry level jobs and other career opportunities.

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How do you build a relationship in one phone call? It’s a challenge. My approach is very simple. I fundamentally value the time of the candidate I am calling. I greatly resent wasting people’s time with useless questions and selling tactics. I get straight to the point. Sometimes this makes my calls rather short, other times I can spend10-15 minutes on the phone with the candidate.

So what’s my goal? I want to make the candidate laugh. If the candidate is interested in speaking with me, I might get right into the thick of things or I might talk about the weather. Living in Boston provides me with an incredible array of weather conversation topics. I can usually joke about how bad it is and how much I miss the sunshine. (Even now it’s dark and gloomy outside). I want to make a connection that is natural, I don’t force it. Sometimes I compliment the candidate on their expertise, sometimes I get them to talk to me about their career, but not in a dry chronological manner, more in a philosophical way. I’ve had several people tell me; “You’re funny, not like other recruiters”.

In the world of recruiting consultants building relationships is difficult because if the candidate is on the job board, he has potentially dozens of other recruiters calling him. Building a relationship takes time, while the recruiting cycle of a consulting candidate can be as short as 24 hours. One drawback of this kind of recruiting is that while we speak with thousands of people, we build relationships with a few. National recruiting is even harder because the recruiter never meets the candidate. Passive candidates often want permanent jobs and thus are hard to recruit for contract opportunities.

So just be yourself, don’t pretend to know all the answers. Try not to waste people’s time. Qualify your candidate before you call him. And don’t ask senior people basic questions. Don’t ask a Java architect what OOD is. Don’t ask a Network Engineer if he has experience with TCP/IP. You’ll sound ignorant. It’s hard at first, but know your req before you call to build a relationship.

Good Luck!

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