Subscribe to this blog
Loading ...
We’ll be taking Memorial Day off, but we’ll be back on Tuesday May 29 with another great post. Be sure to come back then.
As we wrote about yesterday, there are several ways we wanted to improve the function of job-boards. Take the fabled Black Hole effect for instance: where a candidate submits all the right information but never gets any feedback. There’s a lot of talent out there falling into that black hole. Conversely, some job boards are so big that they overwhelm candidates with contacts – some worthwhile, some bogus. About this flood of information through technology, Howard Adamsky, President of HR Innovators says “the downside to this will be that a candidate can only get so many e-mails and phone calls before they become totally non-responsive” (from his post on ERE). Without major technological shifts, there’s just no way to guarantee accuracy and validity in the opportunities posted on traditional job boards.
That’s where itzbig’s network comes in. We’ve done the research and seen the missed connections between candidates and employment opportunities. We’ve designed it so that recruiters and employers share their needs, both current and ideal. The “current” needs get quickly and accurately matched with candidates, while the “ideal” needs put you in a position to source ahead of demand. In other words, when the end-all, be-all superstar for your ideal needs comes along, you get connected just to see if it is, in fact, too good to pass up.
And the talented candidates out there get the same quality exposure. They share what they’re looking for, and give us information about skills, experience and education, while we protect their anonymity. It will eliminate tons of compliance exposures, as candidates get accurately matched with needs, and begin a one-on-one relationship with employers who need someone with exactly their talent. There are definitely good and bad aspects to traditional job boards. We think we can make them more effective for discerning recruiters. Whether you’re looking for a candidate for a great opportunity or a talented worker ready to land the dream job, we think you owe it to yourself to come check us out.
[Daily post from itzbig] Use talent’s “tech smarts” as a recruiting tool
Talented candidates expect tech-based communications (internal and external) and digital-media-driven HR sites. However, even more importantly, more and more candidates bring digital media skills to the table, and if you’re not presenting them opportunities that take advantage of those skills, you’re likely missing out on a lot of quality talent.
AdlerConcepts.com: Job Satisfaction as a Recruiting Tool
“In Performance-based Hiring, we talk about the 30% solution - offering candidates an opportunity that is 30% better than their current job. That 30% is composed of job stretch, long term career opportunity, and compensation.”
The Cenek Report: A Challenge for the Fortune 100 Best Employers
“Wouldn’t it be great to see firms of all sizes in the annual parade, or better yet, to base inclusion on third-party survey data, say from JD Powers, that validates the level of employee engagement (and not just satisfaction)in their workplaces?”
Employment Digest: IT Managers Face Crunch in Filling Open Positions
“The IT job market is improving nationally, according to several recent reports on technology employment trends. At the same time, though, it appears to be getting harder for employers to recruit people to fill the job openings they have.”
The Hire Sense: Simple Sign Of A Schmoozer
“One respondent today simply started talking about his skills which didn’t even approach the traits we listed in our ad. This behavior is often indicative of a schmoozer salesperson or sales manager.”
While it may seem to some that our use of the phrase Quiet Working Professionals is mere marketing spin applied to the old phrase “passive candidate,” there is actually a very sensible logic behind it. In fact, that logic demonstrates a need in the HR and recruiting community to update not only some of our terminology but also our techniques and technologies in attracting quality talent. To do that, we have to understand what’s at stake in the coming war on talent, what quality talent needs from employers and what makes a candidate “quiet.”
In a recent post about our use of the phrase, Colin Kingsley of RecruitingBloggers.com claims, “I can’t tell how QWPs are different from passive candidates, except that ‘the old methods of reaching them don’t work any more.’” That last part is a quote from our blog, and it is one of the most clearly distinguishing factors between passive candidates and quiet working professionals. It’s difficult to reach them because, as Colin says, the “solitary common trait of passive” candidates is that “they are not interested in switching jobs right now.” A passive candidate is satisfied with their job just enough to not actively search for another, so the old standard means of recruiting just don’t effectively reach them.
The trick is to understand how those candidates differ from QWPs. The difference is in a QWP’s latent desire for “something more” out of a job. A passive candidate is satisfied with their job and unwilling to participate in the very real stress of a placement process. However, a QWP, while not actively looking for another job, longs to be challenged in ways that their current employer doesn’t offer. A post on Sytematic HR claims that this underlying sense that a job is just OK or mediocre is why the best HR departments develop multiple career ladders. The post explains that many professionals who like their jobs aren’t necessarily interested in traditional advancement within their organization. They aren’t “on the market,” but they’re quiet (internally and externally) about their advancement needs.
Yesterday’s passive candidate was tucked safely into a world of lifetime employment, retirement plans, and far more candidates than jobs. This was particularly true in the highly skilled employment areas and with emerging technology companies springing up everywhere.
Today with mergers, acquisition, off-shoring, outsourcing, layoffs, and the usual personnel issues that can impact someone’s employment status surely we agree that most working professionals are in a different place. There need to explore possible opportunities that I might need at a moment’s notice are far more prevalent than in the days of the passive candidate who had no intention of changing jobs unless someone really enticed them.
So everyone today needs a Plan B. They need a way to discover alternate employment options that meet their specific requirements at this point in time. And they have to be ready in case the need for an change in employment occurs.
Colin suggests that “most of the passive candidates out there will magically turn into active jobseekers” and admits that “offering people a lot more than they’re worth to get them to switch” can attract them while unfortunately contributing to the last-in/first-out cycle. That’s great advice if you’re a fan of those magical conversions. If you believe that – at some point – passive candidates will become so disgruntled with their employment that they will decide to become active candidates. You also have to believe that your recruiting ability will be able to overcome the animosity they’ve developed for their employer so they don’t carry it over to the job in which you want to place them. That seems to open the door for yet another new phrase: Passive Recruiting. Of course, it doesn’t sound like it’ll place many candidates.
Understanding the unspoken needs of the Quiet Working Professional can put a recruiter in a position to source ahead of demand, to have opportunities in place that actively foster in QWPs a sense that a better job or means of the right kind of advancement awaits. Understanding those needs is going to help recruiters reach QWPs and make one-on-one connections with them so that placing them becomes a reality instead of a hope based on magic.
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.
Recent Comments