5 1/2 Things Recruiters Should Never Try at a User Group Meeting

For those of us in recruiting who have gotten used to finding talent from behind a computer screen and only meeting candidates live under the carefully controlled social conditions of a personal interview, the thought of being sent out into the "wild" to hunt for Information Technology professionals can seem terrifying.

So it isn't surprising that in the process of polishing up our business cards and intrepidly hurtling ourselves into the void errors are made. Errors in judgement. Errors in approach. Don't let these things happen to you:

1. You arrive at the user group early, pass out your business cards to everyone there, leave a stack of them on the table, and leave before the meeting starts. First of all, if you've never been to the meeting before, you have no business dropping your recruiting detritus on any table, let alone foisting a card on people who may actually be in a position to like you if you talk to them. Yes, you should bring business cards with you, and perhaps even a handout or glossy with information about your current job openings. But until you have an idea what the group is about, until you have gotten permission from the meeting organizers to leave behind some items, be a good kid, sit down, and just listen, 'kay?

2. You attend the entire meeting but clearly ignore the speaker. Even worse, you look bored and check your Blackberry for e-mails the whole time. Nothing sends a clearer message that you are a recruiter and do not view the participants at the event as anything other than a potential paycheck for you than taking this approach. Yes, you are there. That's something. And maybe you are not doing anything to upset the proceedings. But by not showing any active interest in the topic or presenter, you are demonstrating that you are not truly engaged in the only good reason for being there... to learn something. I have spoken to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of technology professionals during my career and it has been common for them to comment to me how most IT recruiters don't have the faintest clue about the technologies they recruit for. Could the average IT recruiter stand to learn a few things about technology? Heck, yes. And while the topics may become incomprehensible at some point, I have found it fascinating even then to watch how participants in the room interact, who asks the best questions, and what the group consensus is on the tech topic at hand. Isn't that what we are there for? ... finding talented people to hire?

3. While at a small user group gathering, the organizer suggests that everyone stand up and identify him/herself. Dodgily, you try to pass yourself off as a technical professional instead of as a recruiter. I am not a fan of "rusing." I do not think it ever has value in a profession in which engendering trust in your ethics and the hiring process is a desired outcome. Just don't.

4. You call up a meeting organizer and get the go ahead to spring for pizza for the group in exchange for a short commercial. You get up in front of the group, disheveled, and proceed to ramble for 20 minutes about how candidates need to have skills X, Y, and blah-blah-blah for a job with your company/client. If you've gone to the trouble to sponsor an event, the least you can do is present a neat appearance and prepare a bit. And by preparation, I also mean you need to recognize that the group is not there to suffer your comments for long. They came for the actual content the evening promises. Finally, technology professionals are people, not candidates. Get out of your industry jargon zone and think about what will appeal to your audience... not what you require of them, but what your organization can offer in terms of interesting work, career growth, and cool people.

5. The meeting organizers pass around a list of participants at the event. You falsify your information and copy the list of participants. Again, falsification does not help your cause. And copying a list? That's just tacky. Now I am not going to sit on a high horse and say that I would not look at a list and maybe even make a mental note about someone or several someones I'd like to contact, but think about how you are undercutting the trust and integrity of a user group by harvesting that list of names. The participants in user groups are giving up personal time to learn something. But if they feel like their information is being grabbed wholesale by another attendee, that group either won't last long or you're forcing the organizers to ban recruiters from the room.

And the last 1/2 item? ...

1/2. You show up once at the meeting and never appear again. It's definitely a great idea to reach out to the user community, get your name out, get word out about your great company/client. If, however, you hope to do an effective job of getting that word out, you cannot hope that a hit-and-run approach is going to yield anything more than minimal returns.

It is only by living with that group, month-in, month-out, regularly identifying yourself, not pushing but offering your particular expertise with the job market, with resume writing, with making difficult career decisions, and by demonstrating your commitment to supporting it over the long haul that you will get what you--and your company--want to get out of your participation. Great hires for your organization.

(Thank you to mag3737 for noncommercial use of photo under Creative Commons with attribution!)

When Technology Influences Behavior

When I was still in high school, I had to write my first term paper on a manual typewriter. I cringe to think about the experience. It was painful.

I kept thinking to myself how much easier it would be if I didn't have to stop mid-thought to erase what I had written so far, or, still worse, blot it out with white out. Evil stuff, that.

Thank goodness that soon afterwards, I received my first personal computer for Christmas, something that probably set the course for my adult career.

Prior to the PC, I found writing to be an odious task. It's still never easy, of course, but somehow the novelty of the word processor made the task less so.

I suspect that's what is happening now with the ongoing rise of social networks. Few of us are blessed with the gift of gab and the desire to network, especially those of us dwelling firmly in the geek community. As a recruiter, it has been my experience in the pre-social-networking days to find that asking for a name referral was usually met with head-scratching and promises to check and get back to me later. Leaving aside for a moment that perhaps I wasn't clever enough to secure those referrals then, it is certainly true now, today, that tracking down a technology professional's contacts has become a much easier task.

Social networking has taken an odious task and made a game out of it. By creating a system whereby whe build out our contacts in a public and visible way, it has become first of all easier and more fun to do so.

The way I see it, this has happened in waves. First of all, you had the early adopters, like me, the poor sods who see the potential for something new and are willing to suffer the slings and arrows of geekdom, the snarky comments of those who say "that will never have any real value." If it's a good, viable technology, it achieves broader and broader usage, perhaps only by inches at first.
At a certain point, the popularity of the new technology explodes. I think that this can most certainly be charted a few years back to Myspace first, then to Facebook, and more recently to LinkedIn (once the laggard professional community finally caught on that social networking ain't just for them crazy kids).

In this middle phase, I suspect that the growth of social networks online was driven by body count. In other words, the "game" of networking, if you will, was all about how many connections you could accumulate. The uber users tried every harebrained scheme to get as many connections as possible. I think that I even went a little nuts with this for a while with LinkedIn. To tell the truth, though, I think that the body count mentality can have drastically diminished returns after a certain point and is only necessary for people in sales or recruiting like me who want to be sure they are getting a maximized search when looking for that job seeker who is not actively in a job search, but always keeping his or her eyes open for something new and possibly better.

The game has changed, now, though. People have gotten tired of entering their information over and over again for every new social network that has come out. Instead, it's all about the portability of your data between networks and enhancing the quality of that network. If you are a technology professional and are seeking to build your online presence, it's definitely not about the numbers for you. It's about the quality of your connnections, the endorsements people have written about you on LinkedIn, the professional engagement shown in your blog, your connectedness to communities of thought leadership.

For recruiters, I think, it is about your ability to balance the need to find people while not being a network leech. On LinkedIn the other day, I came across a group that was begging "no more recruiters, please!" What this signals to me is that recruiters, bless'em for embracing the medium, are still coming down on the dark side of Obnoxious in the world of the social network. How to avoid this? The answer is simply investing more of yourself and participating in the darned community. You may have a mercantile reason for being in a social network, but if all you're doing there is hunting, grabbing names, sending solicitations, people are going to be onto you. At least part of your time needs to be spent there sincerely participating, commenting, making friends--having fun.

In the long run, it's better for everyone if the recruiter participates in this phase shift toward quality social networking. The tools are there to maintain relationships and really get to know the talent you're looking for. And the people you eventually hire will appreciate you for it.

(Many thanks to lechampiondumonde.com for use of his Creative Commons photo with attribution)

Hiring Technology is now talentline411

I've been using talentline411 as my Twitter handle for quite a while now, so I figured it was about time to eliminate any potential confusion for the three or four people who may read my bloggy goodness from time to time and buy a matching domain name.

So, does this mean the topic of the blog changes? Not really, at least not yet. I may broaden the discussion a bit over time to relate hiring technology talent to the broader topics of hiring, but I kind of already do that.

And it's my hope that perhaps by investing a bit more into one of my creative outlets here that I will force myself to be more accountable to writing on a more regular schedule.

Video ads for the rest of us? In twelve seconds?

I was tremendously curious about the new site (service?) 12seconds.tv and got my alpha invitation yesterday. So, of course, I had to try out putting a job ad into a 12 second spot. It isn't easy!

On the positive side, if you take a little care and script out what you are going to say, it's definitely possible to say something far more clever than what I was able to come up with here. But with a professional quality camera and microphone it could actually be pretty awesome. In the staffing world where requirements change so frequently, though, it's entirely possible that a short, disposable video clip could be used to sell what's cool about a project or job... enough to encourage someone to check out a web site and learn more.

On the really positive side, the site integrates fully with Twitter. And I've got Twitter fed into my Plaxo and FriendFeed accounts, so distribution is really easy.

Account setup was fast, the service is free, and I was able to attempt multiple takes to my heart's content with the generous user interface. Even better, I can tag the results... definitely tech job posting applications for this baby. I was also considering using it at work to take short interviews of employees and why they like to work at my company.

Anyhow, without further to do, here's my job ad:


Redpoint Technologies is now hiring Java software engineers on 12seconds.tv

I think this qualifies as my first ever video blog attempt (my Jobing spots don't count since a professional did those). The company I'm referring to is Redpoint Technologies, one of the SPR family of companies based in Chicago.