Online Privacy is a Real Issue for Job Seekers

A friend passed along this link to me today of a Microsoft survey about how online reputation can impact job seekers:

A full 70-percent of surveyed HR workers in the U.S. admitted to rejecting a job applicant because of his or her Internet behavior. Meanwhile, about 60-percent of surfers admit to being concerned that their online behavior may affect their professional or personal lives.

On the upside, "86-percent of U.S. HR workers said that a good online reputation can have a positive impact on a job candidate's chances," the article goes on to say.

How do you get a good online reputation? By building trust and not continually referring to yourself.

Are you managing your online reputation thoughtfully?

Instapaper for Lightning Fast Online Resume Sourcing?

This morning I came across mention of a nifty, fast tool for clipping online articles that you can read later at your leisure. The tool, called Instapaper, is free and easy to sign up for and works beautifully when you see something interesting but don't have the time right away to review it in detail.

Perfect for collecting online resumes and contact information, right? It's even better than that.

If you're on a sourcing expedition for new contacts and you're in a hurry, this clipping tool is a real asset in your arsenal. (If you're a job seeker, it's pretty cool, too, since you can use it to quickly clip job openings on boards or elsewhere that look interesting and return to them later.)

Getting Started

Sign up for an account. All you need is a valid email address and you're set to go. Then drag the "Read Later" button up to youlbr toolbar.

Any time you are on a web page and see an interesting article, just click the button and it will quickly and automatically be sent over to the Instapaper site for later reading.

Once it's there, you can opt to read it in its original HTML format or in plain text. It also looks like you can pull up any of the materials there on your Amazon Kindle.

Now, I suppose you can make the same argument for any web clipping tool. I've used and use both Microsoft OneNote and Evernote and they are both wonderful apps. However, for speed and simplicity when I just want to clip something and go--this is the speed demon I was looking for.

I have a feeling that I'll be getting a lot of use out of this tool. Have you used it? How do you like it? Got an alternative tool? Let's hear about it in Comments.

TalentSeekr Passive Candidate Sourcing Engine

I came across a really slick video demo for TalentSeekr today and thought I'd share it. I have no affiliation or special interests in the company--it just looked interesting and thought I'd see if anyone has had an experience with it.



As an alternative to job boards, I have to say that the product at least looks pretty good. It looks like they are getting some good press, too. The dashboard features remind me a lot of the social media listening tools that are out there. What looked most interesting to me was the simple landing page / application that can supposedly feed directly into your Applicant Tracking System (ATS). And of course targeted Pay Per Click is nothing new, but the learning model here whereby one source is discarded in favor of one that's working is interesting.

A Sourcing Checklist for Recruiters: 21 Ideas

Undertaking a new job search for a client or internal customer? While Ralph Waldo Emerson may find a foolish consistency to be the hobgoblin of little minds, a sensible consistency leads to effective hiring practices. As the 2010 market heats up and recruiters start getting more and more purple squirrel hunts, it's important for your own peace of mind to have an approach that is repeatable and efficient when approaching a brand new candidate search.

With that in mind, I've compiled a checklist of sources to approach when trying to identify communities where your next hire is coming from. Some of these are net-based while others are live events. I keep track of a new checklist for every customer using a tool called Backpack from 37signals, but a simple notebook works too. The items below are in no specific order and I welcome feedback or ideas about additional resources.

A Recruiter's Sourcing Checklist

1. Have you checked your own internal database?
2. Have you checked your personal database? (You know you have one, so cop to it)
3. Search your LinkedIn network of contacts.
4. Search relevant LinkedIn Groups and post the job there.
   
5. Search LinkedIn Answers for people with expertise relevant to your search.
6. Update your LinkedIn Status about who you're looking for (and cross-post it to Twitter if you're set up to do so).
   
7. Search Facebook network of contacts.
8. Search relevant Facebook Pages and Groups and post the job there.
9. Update your Facebook status about who you're looking to hire.
10. Update your Twitter status at least four times over the course of a day or two with the position description.
11. Search Twitter for users who are talking about topics related to your search and network with them.
12. Look for recent blog posts on Technorati mentioning skills you're looking for. Post replies where it seems relevant.
13. Build a Boolean search for Google, Bing, and Yahoo with skills, job titles, and geography information relevant to your search. Look for resumes, blogs, speakers from trade shows, and other events relevant to your search.
14. Search tertiary social networks like Plaxo.
15. Search for candidates on relevant private social networks like Ning.
16. Find relevant user groups or events you can start attending to identifying and connecting with viable candidates.
17. Try reaching out to organizers of groups or events to see if they will allow you to post a job to their web site or make an announcement at their event. Many such groups are always looking for sponsors for food or swag in exchange for a brief commercial announcement.
18. Find relevant professional associations that your target hire might join. Look for member directories or areas to post jobs.
19. Set up Google Alerts for mentions of relevant keywords related to your search and have them delivered to your Inbox.
20. Search SlideShare for relevant presentations about subjects related to your search. Contact the users to discuss their presentations and network to find relevant candidates.
    
21. Use tools like Indeed or Simply Hired to identify companies where employees with similar qualifications may be working. Using the tools and techniques above, start looking for candidates from these organizations.

Got a technique or tool not mentioned here? I'd love to hear about it. Please sound off in the comments section.

You can download a handy PDF of this list here.

Recruiter's Workshop: Thoughts about Contingency Searches

There are only a few conditions under which I would consider accepting a contingency search today. Frankly, contingency searches are to me the equivalent of neanderthals living in our modern world. Evolution has passed them by yet they are still strangely, perversely here.

Anyone who has been a third party recruiter has probably been exposed to the world of contingency searches. For those of you who are not in recruiting or HR, a contingency search is a model for working with outside, or third party firms, that promises a placement fee provided that the hiring company extends an offer and it's accepted to one of the third party's candidates.

The idea of a contingency agreement sounds great in theory. In an ideal world, the recruiter quickly and efficiently identifies the right candidate, the hiring company has an effective and timely hiring process, the candidate gets hired, and the recruiter gets the fee. Unfortunately, we live in a world that's far from ideal. Searches in this market are complex. The ability to search for candidate qualifications with pinpoint accuracy has resulted in highly specialized requirements from companies. Understaffed companies seldom have an effective or timely hiring process. And tight budgets tend to ensure that offers are not extended in a timely fashion.

Contingency Searches A Sucker's Game?
It makes far more sense for third party recruiters to take on fixed fee sourcing projects or full blown retainer searches. Otherwise, you could spend months working on a role and never see one cent for it. Yes, it happens. Yes, it has happened to me. And, yes, it's the reason why lots of recruiters are impatient, cynical, hard-drinking bastards in their off hours. Journalists and police officers have nothing on recruiters.

That being said, under what circumstances would I consider taking on a contingency search? Let me suggest a few situations:

• You know the hiring manager or internal recruiter really well.
• You have worked with the company before and you're a trusted advisor (as opposed to a vendor).
• You set an expectation that it is not your top priority (I'll help if I can).
• You create a strict service level agreement (I'll write another post about this later).
  
• You have a solid community of candidates for this requirement (better yet, it's your specialty).

Those are the only situations that come to mind for me, but I'm just a simple caveman.

Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer @ Yahoo! Video

Have you worked on a contingency search recently? Under what circumstances will you or your firm accept a search of this nature? Please tell about it in the comments section.

Seth Godin is Dead On: Hiring is not Recruiting in 2010

One of Seth Godin's recent blog entries differentiates between hiring and recruiting and gets at the heart of what I've been moving toward through all of 2009--the idea that the recruiting profession as we know it is largely dead and just doesn't know it yet.

In summary, Godin's piece asserts: "Hiring is what you do when you let the world know that you're accepting applications from people looking for a job. Recruiting is the act of finding the very best person for a job and persuading them to stop doing what they're doing and come join you."

The majority of what passes for recruiting is not recruiting at all. It's rote hiring, posting a job online and waiting for the applications to roll in. If you are an employer with a recognized brand name, you've got a fair chance of attracting hundreds of candidates instantly even if your job description is utter crap. In our still-depressed job market, maybe you don't even need to be a recognized brand.

That's going to change.

While Godin's short piece focuses on the question of whether the job you're hiring for is cool enough to be recruiting-worthy--a good question in and of itself--I'd like to focus on the question of the implications for the profession of recruiting itself.

Why Recruiting Will Change in 2010

While companies have yet to fully embrace social media technologies, they are now at least mostly aware of them and accepting of the fact that they are here to stay. Despite their terror, we're going to see companies in 2010 and beyond begin to embrace these tools for the purpose of engaging with communities of talent for their hiring activities. Why? Mainly because they're being dragged kicking and screaming in to this space by high profile customers who bring their issues there (see the Whirlpool example). Once companies get that their customers are there, it's not a huge leap to realize that their next employees will likely come from the same place.

The unfortunate aspect of all this for anyone with recruiter in his or her job title is that the technology also disintermediates. In other words, if a hiring manager has great LinkedIn connections or is simply a good networker, why bother calling the need out to recruiting? Why get lost in the bureaucracy and paperwork of an HR department's corporate hiring function?

If you are a corporate recruiter, you had better be able to do more than just post a requirement, run a phone screen, and forward a stack of resumes to the hiring manager. You need to be creative at finding, engaging with, and staying in contact with the communities of talent you want to make hires from.

If you're a third party recruiter, 2010 will mean further erosion of your fees and profit margins unless you can know and be known by the talent you mean to hire. Third parties don't win unless they are faster and better at networking, able to articulate why a position is worth leaving a stable job, and effective at winning the trust of both customers and talent.

The sky is not falling. It has already fallen, but I run into to many recruiters think it's still there. The best recruiters are those who truly do recruit and can demonstrate their valuable expertise by again and again showing their deep connections with and commitment to the talent communities from which they hire.