A Boston Technical Recruiters Blog

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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/

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I always held big I-banks in awe because I know they take only the best talent from the best schools and pay top dollar.  Recent events in the economy have begun to shake my esteem for these institutions.  While my humble opinion may mean little to them, it is beginning to be obscene at how blatantly these companies manipulate the markets. 

The most recent example is a Goldman Sacks analyst predicting that oil will jump to $150/barrel.  When such an influential company makes a statement like that in a very volatile market where crude is believed to be $60 overpriced in a speculative bubble it is irresponsible and clearly meant to benefit no one but the company. 

So is the analyst irresponsible? Absolutely.

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This is pretty cool, especially the mountain glow effect…

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That’s right! Today I had the Java final. It was brutal. But a realization came to me as I studied: “If push comes to shove, I could be a Java Developer.” There is nothing particularly difficulty about java, it’s just that 6 weeks can be a short time to go from zero to polymorphism and inheritance. I found that procedural programming came much easier to me in the first 3 weeks and that object oriented development takes a little getting used to.

I had failed Pascal in high school because I could not figure out how looping statements worked, but that was just a mental block since loops are probably the simples control structures. Loops were not the problem this time around, but passing methods between classes and calling constructors was. Luckily by the time of the final (today) I had an “Aha” moment after looking at much code and figuring out why it didn’t compile in my mind before. Hopefully I didn’t bomb the final… it was pretty hard.

So now that I have a base in Java what am I going to do with it? I’m not sure. I know I can screen developers on a more advanced level and know what they are talking about at least in the basic levels. More importantly though, is that my initial fear of java in this program has been replaced with a confidence that if need be, I can do it.

(I got a B+) By the way…

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That’s where I am… I’ll write more when I get out of this 6 week loop of stress, sleepless nights, and panic without  an else clause in sight…

 
You get the picture..

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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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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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Do you think that your business idea is unique? Do you want to patent it? Do you think that if there was no patent law people would just stop coming up with ideas? That’s absurd.No idea is truly a new idea, since every thought in the human collective is a thought that is build in the prism of our civilization. Every idea has been thought of, every thought has been thought by someone else.

How can you prove that no one has ever come up with your idea? How can you be certain that the brilliant design you concocted is not sitting in someone else’s mind? You can’t. Your idea is build on the foundations laid by the ideas of millions that have come before.

I find it amusing every time I visit the Monster.com site that they actually patented their site. Wonderful! Did they really think that no one else had though of this before them? Intellectual property is a construct of our capitalist system created as a barrier to entry and a monopolistic barrier to fair trade and competition.

Sometimes I have this paranoid feeling that if I write something, someone else may steal my ideas. New business owners often have this fear. This is a ridiculous though that has no merit. If someone takes my ideas and builds something with them, I’ll be honored. Ideas are great, but like the IBM commercials suggest, ideas are worthless without proper action to execute them. If you can’t build around your idea, just keep “ideating”.

So go ahead, keep hoarding your patents, someone smarter will figure out a better way around you while you are sitting on your antiquated thoughts.

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