Category Archives: Relationship Building

Do You Have the Proper Perspective in Recruiting?

Perception and PerspectiveIt is all too easy for sourcers, recruiters, HR professionals, and hiring managers/teams to develop a skewed, distorted, and decidedly one-way view of the world. Perhaps spending 99% of the time on only one side of the recruiting process is to blame.

Regardless of the cause, it is absolutely critical to regularly take the time and think about, understand, and appreciate the recruiting life cycle from the candidate’s side – the job seeker, the passive candidate, the non-job seeker, and the elusive “A+ player.”

In this article I’m going to walk you through over 10 different scenarios in which I think recruiters and hiring teams can benefit greatly by taking the candidate’s perspective into careful consideration.

If you don’t take well to being challenged to think differently from time to time, or if you don’t like long blog posts, you may not want to read any further. This one clocks in at 3700+ words.

Consider yourself warned. :-)

Continue reading

The Future of Recruiting: The More Things Change…

The Future of Recruiting - image by Silverisdead via creative commonsNow that we are on our way into exploring the new year, I’ve seen some articles on what’s coming next for the recruiting industry this year, and even as far out as 10 years from now.

When I read one such article written by Kevin Wheeler, I was struck by his comment that although sourcing remains a topic he is interested in, he feels that “the need to conduct in-depth Internet searches and apply Boolean logic to searches is no longer relevant in the majority of cases.”

I was prepared to write an article just in response to that thought, but as I sat down to review his post again on Sunday in preparation for my post, I noticed that Kelly Dingee had commented in defense of electronic talent identification.

In response, Kevin wrote “I think that intensive Internet searching, for most internal recruiters, is a sign of their failure to develop a community of potential candidates. If the position is a unique or one-of-a-kind search, they should probably use a third party recruiter. For volume and routine hiring there should be no need to use anything beyond a network of potential candidates whether proprietary or not. Building that community is what a recruiter’s job is all about – not running searches or becoming a computer nerd.”

Wow. Where do I begin? Continue reading

Candidate – Recruiter Relationships: Overrated?

What is the ultimate value you provide to candidates as a recruiter?

I want you to really think about that question before proceeding. In this post, there will be more questions raised than answers provided. Please take a moment to ensure that you have your thinking cap on and that your mind is open

Who Defines Value?

From the candidate’s perspective, what do you think the real value provided by a recruiter is? There are countless recruiting articles and blog posts (such as this one referencing Guanxi) that will tell you that the relationship is more important than the transaction itself. But for the majority of candidates, is it? Really?

I’m a little bit of a Lean freak. One of the core principles of Lean philosophy is Value – every activity in a business should be scrutinized for how it adds value to the final product or service provided to the customer. A lot of activities previously thought to be essential in a business turn out to be non-value adding when evaluated from the perspective of the customer. Continue reading

Recruiting Technology is Not Anti-Relationship!

Technology and Relationships are not Oil and Water

When I write posts about creating Boolean search strings to source and find talent/human capital – I often get responses from readers and those I train, especially staffing industry veterans who focus on executive search, that state that the foundation of recruiting is based on relationships built by human interaction and networking.

I couldn’t agree more.

Why does it seem to be ingrained in human nature to have an either/or mentality – as if things have to be one way or the other, but not both. Like phone sourcing vs database sourcing. You can and should do both, and I hope you are trying to contact and develop relationships with people identified via both methods.

If I wanted to be obtuse, I could argue that the phone is impersonal – and that to be a really good recruiter, I should never leverage the phone to make contact with people. Instead – I’ll just wander around looking for people to meet in person to establish a wonderful professional relationship with.

By the way – there isn’t anything instrinsically impersonal about leveraging technology to find or communicate with people. In case you haven’t noticed, there’s this thing called email that quite a few people use these days, and you know what? – it seems to work. I’ve also heard that there are millions of people communicating with something called text messaging, and that there are more text messages sent every day than phone calls made. How impersonal! :-)

Let’s face it – if it didn’t work, it wouldn’t exist and be used by so many people so often.

When I talk about leveraging technology for talent identification and acquisition, my primary point is NOT that it is a replacement for any other method of candidate identification, nor am I saying technology is a replacement for human interaction and relationship building. My point is that there is more and more information stored about more people somewhere electronically every day – and you can either learn how to harness the power of using Boolean logic to create search strings for Talent Mining that can ACCELERATE your ability to establish MORE relationships with MORE of the RIGHT people, MORE quickly…..or not. Continue reading