Ways to Set Realistic Expectations with your Recruiter

The worst time to have to negotiate a salary offer is after you've had all of your interviews. There are few worse feelings a recruiter gets than extending what is believed (by the recruiter at least!) to be a fair market offer and to be met with a stunned silence.

Especially now, during a slow market recovery, companies are doing their best to balance fair offers with expenses. I know that may not be a very palatable thing to hear, but that's reality. However there are ways to avoid these gotcha scenarios earlier in the hiring process. These approaches will probably work best if you are being represented by a recruiter, whether third party or internal, but the ideas will apply to most hiring situations.

Build Goodwill After the "Money" Interview

Usually sometime after the first or second interview for a job, the question of money will arise. This is an opportunity to set expectations so that both you and the recruiter are proceeding from the same set of assumptions. During this early stage, a good recruiter will broach the subject in a non-threatening way. In past placements, I have said things like The interviews seem to be going well and the question of money is inevitably going to come up. Let's discuss your compensation requirements. During our early conversations you stated that you were looking for a base salary in the low $100K range. Now, since neither one of us would enjoy nasty surprises at the end of the interview process, let's talk about a few scenarios. I know that money is never an easy subject, but it's my job to make sure we understand one another. That understanding sometimes takes the form of me asking if it hurts when I poke you in the wallet. Let's say that all the interviews went well and you think that this is the right place for you to build your career, but the offer comes back at $95K. Would that be a situation in which we could still talk? What about 98K and we could get you an offer for an extra week of vacation? Negotiation begins early this way and can be approached without the high emotions of it coming at the end of the placement.

Be Forthright About the Offer

It's not a perfect world and sometimes having this up front conversation is simply isn't possible. In those cases, there are many appropriate approaches to negotiation that others who are far better at it than me could comment upon, but the one inappropriate, unhelpful approach is to clam up. When you're working with a recruiter and that recruiter is authorized to extend a verbal offer of employment, when the pit of your stomach makes you feel like you just stepped onto the down elevator from the Sears (Willis?) Tower, when that free falling sensation subsides and is replaced with simmering anger and resentment that you have been so insultingly downgraded in pay, let me emphasize again that shutting up is not the answer. Take a deep breath. Try to separate your emotion from the conversation and express your concerns.

Trust me, if you're getting an offer, that means that the company and especially the recruiter and you all want the same happy ending. It is in your best interests to be forthright and negotiate, even if that means you need to ask to call back in an hour after you've walked out to your balcony and practiced a primal scream.

Ask Yourself If It's Always About the Money

Nobody wants to get an offer that they feel lowballs or undervalues their skills. But if you give yourself a little time to think about it, maybe the cash isn't the be-all and end-all of what you need. Be sure to examine the entire offer, including the benefits and paid time off. One of the points on which many organizations are willing to negotiate is paid time off. And it's during the offer stage that companies should hear about it. Other considerations may include a signing bonus, potential overtime pay, and incentives. A creative recruiter will help you to work out these details and get you to where you need to be.

Remember, though, at the end of any negotiation, there needs to be a compelling enough reason for you to take a new position. If you have doubts about some aspect of the job, whether it's people or requirements, any company worth its salt should be willing to talk to you about your concerns.

Wisconsin Professional Recruiters Resource

If you're a recruiter based in Wisconsin, you should consider joining the Wisconsin Professional Recruiters Resource (WISPRR). Started back in 2000 as the Wisconsin Technical Recruiters Network, the group has always provided great opportunities to network, hear great speakers and have fun with professional colleagues. Recently, we started up a new online network on Ning and it's growing every week.

If you have a colleague in recruiting who might be interested, please consider forwarding this flyer. We hold live events in the Milwaukee area quarterly.

About Wisprr

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Milwaukee and Southeast Wisconsin Economic Outlook ... Current Downturn Masks an Alarming Talent Shortage

Last week, the Wisconsin Professional Recruiters Resource was fortunate enough to have Betsy Falk, labor economist for southeastern Wisconsin, present to our group an economic update and outlook for Milwaukee and the seven county region. Betsy had fascinating information for us, dispelling some common misconceptions about unemployment and offering a picture of the labor workforce that looked kind of grim to many of us--especially for Milwaukee.

Check out the statistics on workforce age segmentation as well as the graduation rates and I think you'll see what I mean.

Betsy Falk Labor Market Review Sept 2009

View more presentations from Todd Nilson.

What's your view on the current economic situation here in Milwaukee? Across Wisconsin and elsewhere? I'd love to hear from you.

Farewell SonicRecruit, Hello JobScience

October is going to be a bittersweet month. After seven years of great experience using Cytiva's SonicRecruit as my company's Applicant Tracking System (ATS), we finally made the difficult decision to move to a new one.

Like many companies that went through the tough economy, my firm looked hard at all of its expenditures, including the technologies we use for hiring. While SonicRecruit gave us what we believed to be great pricing, I was directed (along with a colleague) to investigate what else was out there. We reviewed a number of ATS solutions and, to SonicRecruit's credit, there's not a lot out there that offers anything compelling.

However, in the end, after reviewing about twenty ATS's, we decided to try Jobscience. Our reasons? I won't lie that price was a consideration, although it was less of one than one might think. No, it came down to the fact that Jobscience fully integrates with Salesforce.com, which our sales team uses. For years, we heard unhappy mutterings from the business development team about having to enter new job requirements in a different system. Now, we get to be one big happy family, in theory at least. In addition, Jobscience offers integration with social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter--functionality that exists with SonicRecruit but which we never used with our instance of the ATS.

In any case, welcome Jobscience! I bid a fond farewell to SonicRecruit with no ill will. It's a great SaaS ATS and one which I would heartily recommend to anyone. I maintain that it's still one of the most straightforwardly usable ATS softwares out on the market.

More on Jobscience in future posts. We're still going through implementation and I'll be posting a full review of our experience soon.

Job Hunting on Facebook

Facebook occupies an odd place in the social media spectrum when it comes to finding a job.

As someone who talks about social media technologies often in public forums, I regularly hear about how reticent they are to open up their Facebook profiles to recruiters for searches. Due to the nature of how Facebook grew up as a personal and truly social site, the reaction is completely understandable.

However, it's also unrealistic to believe that recruiters aren't going to gravitate here. They can and will use Facebook to recruit for the following reasons:

• Compare the 45 million users on LinkedIn vs the 300 million on Facebook. If four out of five adults in the US use social media once a month as Forrester says, that's a much wider net of active users.
• It is in Facebook's interest to broaden its appeal in the professional space since it will attract more mature users. At present, Facebook's fastest-growing demographic is individuals 35 years and up.
• Facebook serves up a younger demographic than LinkedIn. The average Facebook user is about 31 and the average LinkedIn user is 41.
• Although it's easy enough to skip, Facebook allows you to fill out your work history just like LinkedIn
• A recent CNNMoney.com article points out that Facebook's friendships are more authentic and therefore more reliable than the more narrowly focused LinkedIn platform. The stronger the relationship, some recruiters reason, the better the chance for a warm referral to your next hire.
• A recruiter who finds a viable candidate for a position on Facebook stands a better chance of connecting with him or her immediately via messages, pokes, SMS, or live chat--all built into Facebook. LinkedIn only supports message updates.

With that in mind, you may want to reevaluate how you're using Facebook. While many of us may be uncomfortable with the thought of the world of work colliding with our goofy high school friends and all the embarrassing photos they have posted about you, the collapse of the personal and professional may well be inevitable.

You've got a few choices. You can continue to wall off your personal profile on Facebook and lock down the privacy settings for your account so that your profile reveals nothing about you. Creative recruiters can and will continue to find ways around this, but it may keep you inaccessible for a time.

You can blend your professional and personal profiles. This isn't always something easy to do. In fact, it may be impossible without 'rebooting' your profile (something more than one of my friends has decided to do) and being more selective about what goes up in this public space.

Finally, the least likely alternative but probably the safest if you really don't companies finding you in this venue is to simply delete your account and leave Facebook forever. It seems a shame that you'd be so worried that you'd want to kill your online presence for fear of an employer maybe finding you, but if your profile has something deeply embarrassing or inappropriate on it, that may be the only choice.

On the other hand, if you do want to be found, there's a lot to recommend using Facebook as part of your overall strategy to find a job. Fill out your profile, open up your privacy options to show information about your work history, and make it easy to connect with you.

Milwaukee JobCamp Video Posted by Jobing.com

If you're not familiar with Jobing, they're a provider of employment opportunity posting, but where they really stand out in that space is how deeply they support the local communities in which they operate. Brian Weis, who runs the Milwaukee offices for Jobing, has been a friend for years and has again and again shown his dedicated support of community efforts within the employment community. When I told him about the second JobCamp event held in July, despite the tough economic times, he not only supported us as a sponsor but also volunteered to bring in Colin Bridgham, Jobing's amazingly talented videographer, to capture video from the event.

This week, I received the results of his work that day. The person being interviewed is Angela Harris, the executive director for the JobCamp events. Angela does a great job of talking about what the JobCamps are about.