Recruiting Advice...from a wee kitty

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Bane of My Recruiting Existence

"Whoops! HootSuite Sends Recruiting Email to Competitor's CEO"

http://pando.com/2013/12/12/whoops-hootsuite-sends-recruiting-email-to-competitors-ceo/

This article highlights three things I've had issues with as a recruiter: mass-mailing, social recruiting, and confidential searches.  

Here's my two cents on each:

Mass-mailing - It's funny when it's called out, irritating when you're the recipient, and begrudgingly tolerated by those whose job is it to do it.  It's cheesy and I've never enjoyed it, but the reality is I've done it due to the forces of recruiting execution.  When your job or your commissions depend on 1 out of a couple hundred mail responses...it's easy to not focus on the people you've inconvenienced. As touted as surgically precise sourcing is, the reality is that most recruiters are canned quickly if their outbound message numbers are low.  

Social recruiting - doesn't yield the kind of results you might think it would...yet.  Much of the activity relating to offline referral mining still happens the good old fashioned analog way.  Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) that lead the charge in social recruiting are doing well because they (a) market themselves well and anything "social" is hot and (b) do something else well.  For example, in the case of JobVite, they tackled Outlook integration early and aggressively, at the cost of UX and overall site performance; both of which are still nagging issues.  However, I would argue that it was a good trade-off: No more copy and paste for recruiters between Outlook and the web app!  JobVite is where they are now because of this feature, not because of the amazing number of hires its social media plug-ins yield.  

Confidential searches - aka recruiting a replacement for an employee who doesn't know yet they're going to be fired or asked to resign.  Any business has the right to mitigate risk.  But there is a classy way to do it and then there is making a management failure a recruiting problem. More recently, I've been asked to recruit replacements for a couple hiring managers by their bosses.  And keep it hush-hush, which is awkward, to say the least, when I am working with these managers, having lunch with them, getting to know them as people.  In the HootSuite case, the person being replaced was helping out with finding his own successor, but I'm sure plenty of his peers haven't been so lucky.  

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Heh, this test is for Ikea customers, more like it.

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Wisdom nugget

Don't eat shit with a smile.

-Langoliers founder Pam L.

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Job-hopping:  More and more people have non-linear career histories, e.g. long gaps, no clear trajectory upward, odd career shifts, etc.  These are more common in some professions (tech, for example) than others (nursing).

In this day in age, we’re not relegated to ronin status, condemned to wander the land hopelessly, if our daimyo lord-and-master gets axed by the shogun or dispenses with us. Major external factors are at play, and most HR folks and hiring managers acknowledge this (largely because they themselves fall into this category).  

So don’t fret.  Just be honest.  If they can’t take it, there’s not much you can do about it.   If you want to provide a sanitized but still truthful reason as to why your job history is, shall we say, less than traditionally ideal, just let them know that you were willing to take a risk on the opportunity, you tried some tweaks to improve things, but it didn’t pan out like you had hoped, and you’re not the type of person, clearly, to stay in a situation that didn’t make sense in the long-run.  If you respect the person you’re telling this to, they should pick up on that and in turn appreciate that you’re not feeding them a load of mass-produced bologne.  

Keep this in mind: The market is on your side.  While your resume may get rejected out of hand for job-hopping, the crux is that you weren’t qualified to begin with.  There’s always a hidden, unstated, unconscious, and sometimes illegal, requirement in each job opening - e.g. the ability to withstand a difficult VP, need a chick to balance out this sausage party of a team, or must have established relationships with potential customer firms, and so on. If you have enough going on in your resume, even if it’s far from ideal, that address the real needs of the role, you will eventually be contacted for an interview.  They can’t afford to ignore you.  

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Want to understand HR? Start with Catbert

Grain of truth...

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2010-10-19

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Salary Negotiation

Know your limits...upper and lower.  

Lower limit = every other parameter (commute, projects, team, culture, etc.) else is better than ideal, what's the lowest base salary I can accept?

Upper-limit = every other parameter is poop, what base salary will I need to make up for that (and refuse all other opportunities, aka the "Thanks but No Thanks" number)?

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Cover Letters

They need to be there, but they don't need to be slaved on like the Great American novel. 20 calories of effort per cover letter, tops.