Boston Technical Recruiter

I stumbled on this blog by a mysterious “Bag Lady” who had a run in with a technical recruiter and ranted about it on her blog. I have a couple of comments that every entry level recruiter should think about.

 http://baglady.dreamhosters.com/2008/08/11/what-not-to-do-as-a-technical-recruiter/#comment-2515 “So, what did Anne do wrong?

1) Didn’t know anything about my company - When you are a recruiter you are supposed to know what your client wants. Obviously this woman didn’t even do enough research to call the right number and didn’t even know the location of the company.”

This is a huge mistake. You have to know what the company you are calling into does, who their competitors are, and what current news has come out of the company. You need to do this for one not to sound like in imbecile to the person you are calling. Knowing little bits of information about the company can also help you to impress the person and get them talking about themselves or their company.

“2) Insulted a potential client - Okay, I’m not a hiring manager, but if you are trying to get information out of someone you shouldn’t insult them by calling them a weenie. That’s just excessively stupid.”

If this isn’t obvious then you need to reconsider your involvement with recruiting and possibly even quit. ASAP.

“3) Was not professional enough - As I said, I don’t care where your favorite sushi restaurant is, and most other people probably don’t care either. The way she acted was just very unprofessional.”

This is a toss up. Making small talk is probably one of the best ways to win the confidence of the person you are calling and “connect”. I sometimes joke about the weather, or a local sports team. It also depends on the person who is receiving the call. They might be in the middle of debugging a horrific piece of code and your small talk interruption into his conundrum is just one more straw.

A good recruiter will be able to tell by the first few words the tone he needs to take for the conversation not to end in a “click”. Anne obviously had no idea, but Bag Lady definitely lead her on and gave out too much information to be so angry after the fact.

Some more points The Bag Lady had…

“1) The bait and switch - A lot of the times recruiters send out emails to potential candidates saying that they’re recruiting for a position that pays a certain number, and then when you do interview or get an offer the number is much lower. That is a classic bait and switch and that has happened to people I know. I think that is borderline criminal.”

I agree. I don’t know about criminal but this is a fantastic way to destroy relationships. Since relationships are the life blood of a technical recruiter, this tactic is equivalent to attempting suicide.

“2) Obviously did not read my resume - I think a lot of recruiters search resumes for keywords, and never read the resume afterwards. So they end up spamming a bunch of people who do not qualify for the job they are recruiting for. It takes a bit of time and effort to screen resumes, but the results might be much better.”

Another critical mistake. A lot of recruiters use databases that bring up lists of candidates that may have one or two keywords associated with the search. Most of the candidates will have nothing to do with the job. When I first started out, I would pull up lists based on titles and send out emails. Most of these emails never led to any good candidates.

Building a distribution lists and blasting your open positions once or twice a month to a subscriber based list is a good tactic. Mindless mass emailing your database is worthless.

“3) Doesn’t take no for an answer - There are a couple recruiters I keep in contact with because they were professional enough to take no for an answer when I wasn’t looking. If the candidate or client company do not need the services, I think it’s best for a recruiter learn to back off politely instead of annoying the crap out of people.”

Another toss up. You have to be tactful. There are ways of getting someone to say “Yes”, but you need to be cognizant of the feel of the conversation. You are not selling a car. You are marketing an opportunity. The Bug Lady makes a good point by saying that the “yes” may come in a future conversation if you manage to make a good impression on the first call.

“4) Don’t know jack about technology - Bad technical recruiters generally have no clue what their clients need or want in an engineer because they have very little knowledge about technology and thus do not understand the resumes and requisition orders. The best technical recruiters I have met were former engineers that know what to look for.”

You need to know the technology. You don’t need to know every middleware vendor in the US, but you need to know what middleware does. You don’t need to know the difference between appliance firewalls and software firewalls… yes you do actually.

In other words, if you call me for a java job, I will assume you have no idea what you are talking about because I am a technical recruiter who happens to have a technical resume.

Read the resume, know the technology, and understand what the person does. Your recruiting manager should be able to help, if he cannot… Shoot me an email! I charge 5% of your commiss

 Please leave a Comment – Thanks!!!

Techruiter Career Advice, Career Development, General Recruiting Advice, IT Staffing

When you start recruiting, chances are that nobody will come to you and explain the caveats in recruiting business ethics: what’s right and what’s not so right. You should assume that regular code of ethics applies, but there are several important distinction you must make for yourself independently of management; ethical distinctions that will ultimately decide what kind of recruiter you will become. Here are a few that come to mind:

1. The Candidate – The candidate is the most important aspect of your success and also the greatest challenge to your recruiting ethics. It may be surprising to some, but many in the agency world place a far greater emphasis on the happiness of the client. “Client pays the bills”… this may be so, but without the candidate there is no pay. The disrespect and arrogance leveled toward the candidate is astounding.  Candidates are commoditized and represent a Revenue or Gross Profit number and some recruiters completely forget that these are human beings. Yes candidates have their own agendas, but so do you.  It’s your responsibility to make sure you are benefiting the candidate as much as yourself.
2. Give and Take – Another aspect of recruiting ethics that is just as important as the candidate. Who will make more money? The recruiter who builds a relationship on Take or on Give? Scott Love put it best when he described a relationship as a bank. Can you take a withdrawal from an account that you have not deposited money in? No. Can you mine candidates for information including references, referrals, and leads in the first conversation you have with them? Sure, but, ask yourself, would I want to be used like that? The answer is a resounding No.
3. Resume – How much can you alter a resume to get the interview? You can’t. During your conversation with the candidate, it is your job to pull out as much information as possible about their background and to perhaps have the candidate update the resume with this information.  As a recruiter you are also a professional resume consultant and one of the “gives” you can offer to your candidate is that of creating a stellar HONEST resume. What you can do that is perfectly ethical is emphasize certain job responsibilities heavier then others. How much heavier is up to your sense of recruiting ethics. This is your opportunity to give to candidate a free service after which you can ask for a withdrawal i.e referral, lead, or endorsement.
4. Rate/ Salary – Ask your candidate what they make and what they want to make. You can’t give away the house when determining rate, but if you are trying to squeeze an extra dollar or two to make a commission band, I would say you are risking a relationship. Relationships are more important then any quota, commission band, or managerial whim. So I make a little less on one deal, the relationship I build with my candidate for giving them a little more will repay large dividends in the future. While $5/h may not seem like much on paper, if a candidate works for you for a year that’s a couple hundred for you and $10,000 for them!

There are many issues in recruiting ethics that are broadly discussed in forums and blogs by many industry leaders; I’ve included a couple of resources. The most important part of your search for recruiting ethics is YOU. Talk to people, research, and think about what exactly it is that you do everyday. You would be shocked to know how many people in our industry just don’t care.

http://www.recruitersworld.com/Articles/RW/Christine/ethics.asp

http://careers.tcco.com/CampusRecruits/Interviewing_Ethics.htm

http://www.ere.net/2004/04/21/the-ethics-of-recruiting/\

http://www.fordyceletter.com/2003/02/01/corporate-recruiting-ethics-an-ongoing-threat/

http://www.scottlove.com/

http://www.glresources.com/340.html

http://www.recruitingblogs.com/

Techruiter Career Advice, Career Development, General Recruiting Advice, IT Staffing, Musings, Technical Recruiter's Career boston job candidate, boston resume help

Is that a req comes in for a heavy weight PM and you have 4 -6 hours to source for it. Alright so 4 hours may be enough to source a very solid PMP from IBM and another night to source a really awesome PMP from Siemens.

But the problem with the snoozing sales guy who fails to maintain his relationships and by some stroke of devilish luck gets the reqs 4 weeks late is that the recruiter gets short changed, the client gets short changed, and the candidate gets short changed.  Everybody loses.

You want to keep your recruiters happy and make money? Make sure your sales people bust their chops as hard as the recruiters do.

Back to limits and derivatives…

Techruiter General Recruiting Advice, IT Staffing

So I actually thought that “good” companies like Microsoft don’t use job boards. Bah!

I thought that since so many knowledgeable recruiters always speak of the best candidates being passive candidates that recruiters from top companies would not use job boards. How naive!

Well, now that my little misconception has been resolved and I know that top companies do recruit off the job boards, I will continue my crusade against recruiters who maintain that passive candidates are better then active candidates.

I was out with a couple of friends a week ago and my embedded engineer buddy happened to put his foot in his mouth in a nasty way. My other friend is a Linux Architect, probably one of the better Linux guys in the NE, happened to have posted his resume on Dice. I found him and placed him into a top game development company. So my embedded friend says to us:

“Why would anyone use you? Don’t only the guys who can’t find anything use recruiters?”

I prevented a brawl, but his comment struck me especially hard because his view is not only arrogant and ignorant, but unfortunately held by too many recruiters who tout the superiority of passive candidates.

I love the recruiters with 20 years in the industry heralding the passive candidate banner. I love those companies that specifically ask for recruiters not to use job boards.

Please continue to neglect Web 2.0… while I make $$$.

We have a client in Boston that was looking for a Data Analyst for over 6 months. None of the vendors they were using could find this elusive analyst. It took me an hour on Monster to find a candidate that will most likely get the job. I have no complaints about job boards or “active candidates”.  The candidates was for a perm job too…

 Happy Hunting!

Techruiter IT Staffing

As a recruiter I realize that I am a part of the HR structure, which is why I am incensed when I see HR recruiters blatantly hampering the efforts of development managers to recruit the best talent. One immediate example that comes to mind is a client that I’ve been working with that has difficulty procuring development and infrastructure talent while actively blocking us from helping the client. To me this defies the basic premise of talent acquisition.  It makes absolutely no sense.  While understanding that the vendor lists serve a purpose and that there is a definite dynamic that plays into the relationship of HR and vendor agencies, if an agency has a good track record of providing solid candidates, it is criminal to move away from working with this agency.  Placing personal relationships and ego in front of the need for your company to recruit good talent by not working with the right vendors is a detrimental blow to the company. 

Having worked both sides (the corporate side and the agency side) I understand how critical it is not to be overwhelmed by vendors and to manage the vendors effectively.  However, when your vendor management process begins to exclude vendors that provide quality candidates it’s your ethical obligation to reassess your vendor management system. 

Techruiter IT Staffing

I’ve worked for several IT staffing and consulting firms and there is a very large difference between the offerings of each. A staffing firm offers staffing services while a consulting firm offers solution services. There are a number of staffing firms and masquerade as consulting firms and vise versa. There is however a very clear line that distinguished a true consulting firm from a staffing firm: staff consultants.

Some agencies call their billing employees consultants, however while they are consultants, they are not consulting in the way that a consulting company consults (tongue twister for you). The only way you can be a consulting company is if you have talent working for you full time that can actually go to the client and present a solution to their problem. Staffing is a solution to a one person or 10 person problem, while consulting means to lend niche expertise for the company many times involving business process re engineering.

A perfect example of a staffing firm trying to be more then it is ready for recently occurred with a local recruiting shop. They had a client on the hook that was essentially asking them for a solution. The company got bogged down in semantics and lost the client through inaction. Instead of sending a resource to at least try to understand the client issue, the sales management took it upon them to evaluate a technical problem without the required expertise and didn’t send anyone. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

How do you solve this problem?

Hire a business analyst full time that can get on the phone with your clients and ask them meaningful questions about their pain points. If the guy also works for you, you can send him out to the client site to do an appraisal and really consult. Modern consulting companies cannot be slow, we must act fast or die.

How do you become a consulting firm out of a staffing firm?

You need to solve business problems not just fill seats.

Techruiter IT Staffing

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!

Techruiter IT Staffing, Recruiting ToolKit

So you think you are a sales executive? Let’s qualify you as a candidate:

1. Do you love to cold call?
2. Do you understand how to develop relationships with your recruiters?
3. Do you understand how to develop relationships inside large companies once you have them as a client?
4. Are you familiar with all the procedural processes and paper work of your clients?
5. Do you regularly attend trade fares?
6. Are you an active networked?
7. Do you reside on LinkedIn and Google?
8. Do you love to research new prospects?
9. What time do you make your first phone call in the morning?
10. What time do you go home at night?

These are all leading questions that could help determine if a sales executive is up to par or is just blowing smoke. There is a split within sales known as the hunter/ farmer split.
The farmer logically grows the account once the seed is sown, waters the crops, and brings in a large new harvest. He also makes sure that wolves do not prey on his sheep by knowing every sheep in the flock.

A hunter is a wolf who goes out and hunts. A wolf does not wait for the sheep to come to him, he goes out and finds it, stalks it, and takes it down. The wolf is never content, nor does it get fat. A hunter is always hunting or he is no longer a hunter.

Are you a hunter or a farmer? Perhaps you are both, or neither. If you are neither, you and those people who depend on you have a serious problem.

Techruiter IT Staffing

In the sales/recruiter split model there is this small misconception in the departments of many recruiting companies that the recruiters are meant to get sales leads for the sales people. This misconception stems directly and irrefutably from the mind numbing incompetence of the sales departments and the complicit indifference of the recruiting management.

Popular Model:
• Recruiter: Generate Leads, Prospect, Cold Call, Source, Qualify, Submit, Sell, Skill Market, Close and do all the paperwork
• Sales: Warm Call into recruiter lead, take req, forward candidate, get paid, complain that recruiter is not generating leads, come in late and leave early.

Is there a disparity here? You bet.
So, I spoke about this to a Sales Manager at Philips Medical Systems who sells about $15 million worth of medical devices per year. I asked what do you think of the sales guy who won’t prospect? He said ”He doesn’t want to do his job.” Amen.

Let’s break it down:
• Recruiter: Research, Source, Qualify, Sell candidate on job, Submit, Skill Market, Close the CANDIDATE
• Sales: Research, Generate Leads, Qualify, Cold Call Client, Skill Market, Sell candidate on job, Sell Candidate to client, Close The CLIENT

Solution:
Make your sales people do their job. It is their job to prospect, research, and cold call. If they don’t do these three things every day, you ought to fire them.

If your recruiters don’t generate leads, don’t coerce them into it. Find a way to motivate them.

Suggestions for motivating recruiters:
• Give them a referral bonus for new clients (don’t be cheap, $100 for a client that brings you $1 million in revenue is cheap).
• Create a contest where the recruiter with the most leads in a week get’s a house hit.
• Recognize your people for their efforts, even somethign as small as a card or taking them out to lunch will work wonders.

Conclusion:
If you have enabled the work ethic degradation of your sales force by requiring your recruiters to do the sales jobs you need to do something before your recruiters find greener pastures.

Techruiter IT Staffing

I model my resume on the resumes of consultants I work with. But in general a resume should be clear and should give a manager glancing over it a good idea of your technical capabilities. I’ve seen managers raving about 1 page resumes, but I don’t agree that a 1 pager does justice to someone’s experience.

Furthermore, there is always a mixed review on cover letters, I don’t really pay attention to them since they don’t say anything to me. Your resume should spell out what, where, and how. Chances are that if you do not have something in your resume a cover letter will not save you from the trash pile.  I have also received quite a few resumes with the cover letter addressed to the wrong company. What do you think happens to that resume?

  Font’s should be conservative, Arial  10-12pt, single spaced, regular round bullets, no underlines, bold only the job title, company name and date, and the heading can be a little bigger.  Make sure your education is clearly marked on your resume. I noticed many Indian consultants do not put the school name; one consultant did not put that she went to IIT, a school comparable to MIT in the US and a huge advantage at certain firms. Place your most current education first, even it is not yet completed, unless you did not complete the degree at all. 

Use action words such as develop, lead, recruited, gathered, analyzed, managed.  Do not write prose “I was responsible for blab la bla… “ boring and slow. You want your resume to be crisp and sharp.

  Include your numbers! Especially if you do sales where numbers are important. 

Feel free to email me for any questions! Comments are welcome. You can take a look at my resume for an example.

Techruiter IT Staffing