Whether you’re a recruiter posting jobs, a “quiet working professional,” or an Unserved job seeker, navigating the employment process online can be daunting. Figuring out how to maximize your online exposure is tricky enough, but with an ever-increasing number of fake job sites out there, it’s getting even trickier. Posting your resume (or any other potentially sensitive information) on a job board can open you up to some serious security risks, even if that job board is well-known and considered reputable. Even the pros are subject to job-search scams and phishing.

In his post over at InfoWorld Daily, Nick Corcodilos, President of North Bridge Group and a 28-year headhunter, tells a story about a recent solicitation that looked like it was from CareerBuilder (but – of course – wasn’t). Similarly, a recent InsideRecruiting post tells of blogger Tabitha Marshall and her fight against job-hunt scams:

Writer Tabitha Marshall is not actively looking for employment, but she has decided to turn her resume into phish bait as she tests the big job boards.

After months of blogging about her correspondence from pyramid scheme “opportunities” and other scams, she reports that “after making my Monster resume private, I was actually able to enjoy a scam-free inbox for a couple weeks.”

On her own blog, Marshall argues that “a lot of big-name companies are using those job boards and haven’t even got a clue what it’s like for the poor schmuck on the seeking end.” Job boards admit that they aren’t in the practice of carefully screening each and every “employer” or “job-seeker” out there, so there’s very little being done to weed out the scammers from the legitimate users. They don’t have much incentive to, either.

As a PDF invoice attached to Nick Corcodilos’ post shows, the resumes collected by HotJobs.com HotResumes.com earned them over $1,400. He points out that the value for the fake resume he posted with them comes out to $0.33622. Since that’s not much of a margin, job-boards apparently try to compensate with volume, and that’s going to expose job-seekers to a lot of scams.

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We briefly visited graciousness in recruiting several months ago, but the topic is an important one, so we thought we’d take another look at it. It may seem at once like common sense and counter to your company’s interests, but maximizing communication with job-seekers, developing relationships even with people you aren’t going might not hire, and in general being gracious to prospects are easy tools for business success.

It’s important to remember that a recruiter is often an applicant’s first contact with your company, so it’s incredibly important for that “face” of your company to be a smiling one. The reason it’s so important is because, as itzbig’s Hank Stringer and Rusty Rueff argue in their book Talent Force: A New Manifesto for the Human Side of Business that each applicant is not merely a job-seeker:

but also a potential customer, partner, investor, and evangelist. In a world where a lot of people inside of companies have simply forgotten how to treat others the right way, the recruiter who approaches his or her relationships with graciousness… introduces another way to help differentiate the company over time.”

Imagine carelessly (or callously) passing on a candidate only to meet the candidate later as a buyer for some other company, a potential business partner, or an investor representative. Suddenly the thoughtless treatment of the candidate can translate into very real losses for your company.

Graciousness is a top-down implementation; it should begin with the CEO and trickle down to every employee, especially those in HR. As Steven Rothberg pointed out in his post at CollegeRecruiter.com

“CEOs have many responsibilities and one of them is to influence company culture. Company culture affects everything from employee morale to the extent which internal controls are emphasized.”

This post opened up by pointing out that a recruiter is often the first face a company presents itself. If that’s true then the CEO, as the “face” that influences all other company “faces,” bears a great responsibility to encourage graciousness among her or his recruiters.

Blogger and recruiter Jenna Adorno stays pretty busy. In a post from a few months ago she claimed that she

“received 189 emails [today]: most with resumes, questions and employee referrals. I also received 4 unsolicited phone calls about employment and another 123 people applied to jobs I have posted. This makes grand total of 316 people looking to talk to me today. Keep in mind I also run a team of 8 direct reports spread over 2 different businesses and I spent a large portion of my day running two separate meetings with the business VP and my direct team.” (from JobsBlog.com).

She goes on to explain that “the truth is that it’s impossible to treat each person the way I want. So you can hate me (and all of the above rationale), and the truth is I hate it too.” However, that apathy in the face of “knowing-better” is precisely when graciousness becomes the most important. As David Maister points out in his blog post about business politeness, the “best way to test what good manners are would be to identify what think we should do.” In other words, recognizing an opportunity to be gracious and passing it by because you’re busy or stressed-out is exactly what differentiates the gracious from the callous, and it could lead to a major backlash down the road. He also offers a simple manners test for when you’d be likely to return a business phone-call; go give it a shot and see how polite you can be.

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The world of job recruiting is changing at an ever faster clip. What are you and your company doing keep up? In this first installment of a new weekly series, we’ll take a look at the factors causing a seismic change in the recruitment process.

As baby-boomers begin to leave the workforce and members of Generation Y, Z and beyond begin to fill those vacancies, the pools of talent from which employers draw is changing drastically. Couple those changes with an increasingly globalized economy, and the effective shrinking of the world that entails, and that talent pool seemd even more fragmented. Why, then, do recruiters and HR departments insist on exclusively using traditional hiring methods for finding candidates? Today’s talent prospects are increasingly dependent on smooth-functioning, user-populated online environments.

Now, in the dawn of Web 2.0, there should be a paradigm shift for hiring. Welcome to Recruitment 2.0.

In their book, Talent Force: A New Manifesto for the human Side of Business, Rusty Rueff and itzbig’s Hank Stringer argue that many companies’ web environment is not “sticky” enough to successfully capture talent prospects. They explain that companies need to ask:

What happens when potential talent submits a resume on your careers site? Giving you the benefit of the doubt, we will assume your system automatically e-mails the person an acknowledgement. This e-mail is the first direct communication your company has with that talent. Does it say,’Welcome to our talent community?’ Or does it say, ‘We will call you if something comes up?’”

In other words, are talented individuals being sufficiently engaged during those early hiring phases?

In a post on interactive media blog EXCELER8ion, bloggers Julian and Shannon Seery Gude argue that “companies [need to] harness social networking features and collaboration tools such as blogs and wikis to allow employees to connect and collaborate with one another.” They go on to explain that

Such an evolution could easily replace flat “corporate” directories and also work as a way to further transparency and by giving the outside world the ability to become members of the network (i.e. job seekers…and I guess recruiters as well for that matter) with corresponding levels of access to feeds of “public” information (read the full article here).

Again, according to Stringer and Rueff, “as many as 98 percent of visitors to that [submit resume] page ‘back out’ without submitting anything” because that area of a corporate website fails to actively engage a prospect; it fails to “capture the relationship.” Instead, they recommend “attracting and communicating with talent online” by utilizing interactive technology and responding to the communication from talent. However, that component of Web 2.0 interactivity should be coupled with the anonymity most social media users also enjoy. Don’t solicit their phone numbers or other personal information in the early hiring stages. Instead, wait for the talent to offer that information and then employers can follow up on it. Many job seekers with social media savvy are skeptical of online solicitation, even from potential employers, and, as the blog Employment Digest points out, they have a right to be so.

In a survey of 100 executive recruiters in June, 77 percent said they use search engines to learn more about candidates before extending an interview, according to ExecuNet, an executive job search and recruiting network. Of those recruiters, 35 percent said they have passed on applicants because of material they find online. (from Employment Digest).

These new notions of recruitment are just now beginning to see some widespread usage among companies.

If you are a staffing executive who has begun to sense that things are rapidly changing, give some thought to how online social environments are changing the rules for job recruiting. If you’d like to get ahead of all these changes, check back every week for a new installment in this series, and send everyone of these posts to your boss.

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