Tag: resume

A Speedy Sourcer’s Guide To Conquering The Intake Session

Posted on by The Organic Recruiter in Hiring, Interviewing, Latest News and Articles, Tools, Uncategorized

There are many ways companies want to set up their processes to find the right people. From finding the people,to who talks to them first and how many people are in the interview process. One thing is for sure, you need to hire people. So why is it taking so dang long? This is the first time I read an article from Nicole Nespeca and I find myself to be in love with what she has to say about sourcing.

Time to fill is taking far too long. You can blame it on the supply (just ask me for supply and demand information), the economy or even the election for some weird reason. But I think it is time for some reflection and accountability that you are just getting in your own way.

Let’s look at the 5 techniques Nicole has put in front of us and see if that makes it easier for you to make that sound decision quicker.

~ The Organic Recruiter

elephant-700x467

By  Sourcecon

Now that the election is over, we no longer have to listen to donkeys or elephants. However, if you are a sourcing professional, you probably don’t mind purple squirrels and pink elephants and the PETA-approved hunt. Consequently, you will need to do the quintessential intake session and must prove just how valuable you are to your company’s talent acquisition team.

So where do you start? Should you read the job description first and start researching, or wait until you speak to with the hiring manager? Every recruiting paradigm is different and therefore will continue to shift. Some talent acquisition teams have intakes between the sourcer and the hiring manager and some are with the aligned recruiter only. The most advantageous are with the hiring manager and recruiter as it’s more streamlined. Anticipating the needs of your hiring manager and/or aligned recruiter is crucial to your success in finding the right candidate.

Here are five speedy techniques a sourcer can do to master the intake meeting.

  1. Forget about refreshing your Facebook page every two minutes, you need to research as quickly as possible before the intake session. I recommend focusing on market intelligence, specific demographic candidate pools, and the potential difficulty of the search.

Primarily, you must research the demographic of the open position as well as the candidate supply and demand. You can get this free data from Salary.com, Glassdoor or just by using a search engine. You want to know what the market looks like. Research this before the intake so you can speak to the statistics of the candidate pool and how you will circumvent any supply challenges. You want to come to the intake session armed with as much information as possible. This leads to my second action you should as a subset of research.

  1. Remember the old adage “In a race, I never look back?” Well, ironically it’s just as important when knowing your competitor.

Know your competitors and the market intelligence of the industry you are hiring for.  Sourcers are quick studies. They are fast and know how to speed read. One must be able to do this expediently prior to the intake session. Understanding the back story is pertinent to the search. You will impress the hiring manager and recruiter alike if you know what companies are downsizing candidates that could fit into the open opportunity. Furthermore, gaining knowledge as to where to find untapped talent is paramount.

  1. Use past resumes to source candidates in the future. Nothing compares to reading a resume in terms of learning about a person.

Once I reviewed a resume that had “Atari” as a skill. Until I saw that, the candidate looked like a match for the open requisition. You need to see resumes of previous candidates to succeed in a hire. Consequently, please get the resume of the person in the position being filled and read it carefully. Use the keywords in that resume to make Boolean searches and resume matches on social media. If the hiring manager or recruiter doesn’t have the resume, you can usually find it in your company’s ATS. If it’s a new position and therefore no resume exists, ask the hiring manager what keywords you should look for in your search and where the hiring manager has hired from previously in terms of competing companies to your own.

  1. Lighten your link’s load. It only takes two seconds to make a Bitly.

Every sourcer should construct a Bitly link because it makes campaign drivers and website pages much shorter for sharing on social, email, and SMS and directs applicants to an application typically. I highly recommend you write a catchy social media blurb to drive prospective candidates to your open requisition. When speaking with your hiring manager and recruiter on the intake you should share the blurb you will use on social media and ask them to share the same blurb. Leveraging another’s network is significant in giving visibility to the open requisition.

  1. “Organizations, schools and trade shows…oh my” as I say in my best Wizard of Oz impression.

When summarizing the job on the intake, make sure you ask about any organizations, schools or trade shows the team hiring might belong too. Part of being a good sourcer is uncovering lists of candidates online from job fairs or symposiums for example. In order to find these types of lists, you must delve deep into the hiring manager’s repertoire. Also, connect on LinkedIn with your hiring manager. Not only is doing so good for building a relationship, but it also allows you to see your hiring manager’s connections which could yield a hire.

Researching fast prior to your intake will help you establish credibility right away with your hiring manager and recruiter. You must perform this due diligence in order to be effective in hiring. Coming to the intake already understanding some of the challenges involved and then sharing resolutions to circumvent these issues will impress on the intake. Coming prepared is tantamount to being a successful sourcer. And all triumphant sourcers study and educate themselves on each position they recruit for. I hope these five tips will help you nail your next intake and if you can get a hold of an old Atari to play after a hard search, even better.

Time Management For Sourcers And Recruiters – Resume Reading

Posted on by The Organic Recruiter in Hiring, Interviewing, Monster, New Job, Uncategorized

I’ve written a few articles on the importance of knowing your candidate because unfortunately, your hiring managers consider these awesome people as a resume and not an actual person. And you as recruiter spend 6 seconds on a resume if the candidate is lucky. Why is that? Not enough time, patience or the formatting is bugging you? I don’t know your answer, but these are the top ones. Kevin wrote some great points in managing your time.

This article has some good tips to manage your time but time-management is the most important tool you can use. You are missing great people and without a semantic tool (like Monster has a number of them), you’ll need to rely on your boolean prowess and great ctrl+F. But remember, that doesn’t mean you know the person behind the not-so-pretty resume.

Please practice time-management and get to know the piece of paper.

~The Organic Recruiter

timem-700x467By  Sourcecon

We first started with Time Management for Sourcers and Recruiters – Schedule Building which, discussed how to plan your day to be effective and efficient. In this article, I will go through various techniques that will help you be even more effective and efficient for better time management that I am sure will increase productivity for you.

In our business one thing we must do is read a resume, in doing so we are expected to decipher the “code” embedded in the resume, compare work experience to the requirements from the hiring manager, and decide to or not to call/email the candidate. Then after we have all of our notes we need to make a decision if this is a viable candidate for the opening. This is a process that is repeated on every candidate we come across.

This is very time-consuming. Now that you have built your daily schedule and are staying on track with that schedule which you’re already seeing yourself being more effective and efficient, now we need to take it up a notch. Follow these proven steps in order to do just that.

First, after you craft that beautiful award winning Boolean string and enter it into whichever job board you prefer, you return a list of potential diamonds, and now the issue is to go through as many as candidates possible and build your list. The issue we all have is time, so why not use it to our advantage.  One thing we are all guilty of is getting sucked into the words on a resume or maybe the format is horrible and we’re just lost in translation. You need a two-minute sand timer.

When you pull up that list of potential diamonds and compile a bunch of resumes to filter, flip over the two-minute sand timer. You shouldn’t spend more than two minutes viewing a resume. Our attention on one aspect loses its ability to decipher new information after about two minutes and we need to take a minute to reset. With timing yourself you don’t get lost and develop the ability to say, yes this candidate looks great on paper, I still have a few questions regarding some of the experiences and technologies, or this candidate is not on the right track of what we are looking for.

As time goes on once you get the repetition down you will see yourself having time left out of the two minutes and becoming a resume reading legend.

Second, when you are getting ready to start using your timer and reading resumes, make sure you are prepared to understand the technology and what the surrounding words should be. Here are some red flags that will arise questions on candidate profiles:

  • Titles
    • A title is either what they want to be called or what they are given upon hire. This can be miss leading because each company may have a different ranking system however if you see someone progress from a help desk tech to a system engineer, to a desktop support tech, to a senior project manager, then there are some immediate red flags there.
  • Tenure
    • Look at the dates. Months and years are huge. If someone is only in one to two month positions for several years that raises a concern for a hiring manager that is looking for a stable candidate. If someone has gaps in the resume for more than six to nine months that is also concerning, but should be discussed with the candidate to dig deeper.
  • Description
    • This is where the research comes into play. If someone lists themselves as a project manager, they should be describing project manager work in that role.
  • Technologies
    • Candidates who put EVERY technology they have EVER worked with may just be looking for fluff. Tech is changing so fast that something they did in the 90s is irrelevant today!
  • Education
    • If your hiring manager requires a degree in a certain field of study views this first. Be sure it is listed and aligned with what you’re looking for.

Another cool trick is Ctrl + F (Find) which I’m surprised a lot of people are not using. Each opening role we have listed three to five skills that are MUST HAVES. A quick way to filter through other than the highlighted words on the resume from your Boolean string is to use Ctrl + F and pull up alternative spellings. You would be surprised what you may miss.

For example when candidates love abbreviations or alternative spellings so they are “hard to find:” Manager – Mgr or Mangr; SaS – S@S, $a$, or $@$; Citrix – Zen, ZenApp, ZenDesk, XApp, or XDesk etc. Now you may be thinking, well how many candidates actually do this? Who knows, but I have seen them and wouldn’t have found those candidates without doing just this. If you are searching for a hard to find skill set and need to take a different approach craft two Boolean strings, one narrow and one broad.  When you pull up the candidates that are found using the broad string, this is a tip that may work best with that.

If you are searching for a hard to find skill set and need to take a different approach craft two Boolean strings, one narrow and one broad. When you pull up the candidates that are found using the broad string, this is a tip that may work best with that.

I’m confident with this best practice you will see yourself being more successful with resume reading and utilizing the limited time you have to be more effective and efficient.

Gone in 6.0 Seconds

Posted on by The Organic Recruiter in Hiring, Interviewing, Latest News and Articles, New Job, Uncategorized

That’s how long it takes a recruiter to go to the next resume if they spent some time on yours.

According to most articles in the last 5+ years, recruiters spend no more than 6 seconds to disqualify you. So you better make an impact quick. Ladders wrote: Recruiters spend 80% of their six-second scan looking at these 4 areas:

  • Name
  • Current Position: Title, Company, and Dates of Employment
  • Previous Position: Title, Company, and Dates of Employment
  • Education

I am curious, I created a copy of my resume in the same 1 sheet format that is circulating with Yahoo!’s Marissa Mayer. Hers is getting mixed reviews, mostly good, but from the traditional, old schoolers I am seeing they are not so excited about it. From the more progressive, creative recruiters it is getting much praise.

my-experience-2016 (b)How do you put detailed accomplishments; numbers; accolades; history; culture fit; education; philanthropy and other details into a 6 second read? I am not quite sure that can be done.

So what do you do to get the recruiter’s attention quick because they do not have time to go through your 4 page resume? Some would say call the recruiter but the recruiters will tell others how that annoys the heck out them. Others would say use your network. I recently sent an email out to 164 recruiters I know in my network asking for help for a friend. I received 4 responses back. These guys and gals are busy. Getting back to you on a hope, is not that easy. In my case it was 2.4% return.

It’s not they don’t want to speak with you. It’s more about having 30 jobs to work on, hiring managers saying where are my resumes while turning down the ones the recruiters spent hours interviewing, prepping and dissecting their skill-sets. As well as sourcing like crazy and spending 6 seconds on your resume. We cannot blame them for not getting back to everyone, although it would be nice. But the best way to get noticed is to be noticed.

How quickly do you get noticed in a crowd? If you are in an analogue world without a smart phone, I am sure you do not find your friends at a concert so easily. Same with your resume. The analogue, dot-matrix format your resume is in is quite frankly just that…out-dated.

Now I am not saying throw pictures of your family and pets on it, rather I am saying find a way to professionally get the recruiters to notice you. Once they call you, get them to know who you are and how you are perfect for that job as it is their job to sell you. Ask them what the manager is looking for that is not plainly written in the job description. Then have some backup ready to articulate that in 6 seconds so when the recruiter sells you, it pops out.

Getting the interview is the hardest part as it is like professional baseball. You have so many divisions, in our case levels of people to impress. But if you know where you are awesome and equally important, you explain in detail where you may have failed or lost an account / project, then you are ahead of the curve.

The challenge is to get noticed or you will be gone in 6.0 seconds.

~The Organic Recruiter

For Job Seekers, the Black Hole Persists

Posted on by The Organic Recruiter in Employment Value Proposition, Hiring, Interviewing, New Job
By LAUREN WEBER

Why am I not getting calls back for my application? What’s the deal…am I not good enough? These are the thoughts of job applicants these days. They are being treated like a piece of paper and not an actual person.
People invest time in their career. Isn’t it fair to treat them like humans, not paper? Referring back to my Optimization page (Gail and Richie) depicts the life of a recruiter and how hiring managers think of applicants, “where’s my resumes?”. 
People, we need to open our eyes as this article shows, recruiters are acting as if these real people are merely a piece of paper and it is okay if we don’t call them back. I’m here to tell you, it is not. These people want to work for you and they should not have to put their lives on hold until (if ever) they hear from you. 
Thank you, Lauren, for this great article below. ~The Organic Recruiter
Most of today’s online job applications still enter a black hole.

Frank N. Stein had a stellar resume—he was an Ivy League graduate, with stints as a corporate recruiter at Johnson & Johnson and Russell Reynolds, and his CV was loaded with the keywords needed to float to the top of today’s automated job-applicant software.

He was also not a real person, a fact noted at the bottom of his one-page resume.

Even so, recruiters at only two of the 100 companies where he applied for jobs read far enough to discover that Stein was a fiction designed to “mystery shop” the job-seeker experience. The ruse was created by recruiting consulting firm CareerXroads, according to a report released Monday.

What does that tell Mark Mehler, a founder of CareerXroads?

“Recruiters read the first three paragraphs of a resume,” he said. “That’s all the job seeker is going to get.” And that only counts those whose resumes pass through the automated keyword screening that winnows a set of applications from hundreds to a few dozen.

Every year, Kendall Park, N.J.-based CareerXroads submits a fake resume through the career websites of the companies on Fortune magazine’s 100 Best Companies to Work Forlist, to assess the recruiting practices of some of the most well-respected employers in the country, including Google Inc., Goldman Sachs Group Inc., and Deloitte LLP.

The results are generally dismal, as they were again this year. Job seekers’ main complaint—that they shoot their applications into a black hole—was confirmed.

Out of the 100 companies, 64 never sent Stein any notification that he was not being considered for the job for which he had applied. Months after submitting his resume, he “was left hanging in the breeze,” said Mehler. Overwhelmingly in job seeker surveys, candidates tell CareerXroads “they just want to know, ‘am I in or out?’ They don’t want to keep chasing and wondering.”

Six of the employers followed up with Stein wanting to schedule interviews, two uncovered the ruse, and 28 eventually notified him that the position had been filled, or at least that he wasn’t in the running.

Worst of all, 28 is the highest number of companies extending that courtesy in the twelve years CareerXroads has conducted the Mystery Job Seeker survey.

There’s no excuse for those oversights, Mehler said, given that those communications can be automated easily in today’s applicant tracking systems, the software that stores job applications.

Most systems have the capacity to do this, but major corporations don’t use those features because they’re scared that opening the lines of communication will lead to lawsuits, too many phone calls to recruiters, and too many questions they can’t answer, he said.

There were bits of good news from Frank N. Stein’s experience. Nearly all employers now send an email acknowledging receipt of a job application. In addition, career websites are easier to navigate than in previous years, and employers have gotten better at streamlining the application so that it takes less time to complete – in most cases, 10 minutes or less.

Another pleasant surprise, according to Mehler: Stein had been unemployed by choice for a year (he had rejected six job offers as poor fits for him, then took a 6-month sabbatical to bicycle across the country), and still received interest from six of the 98 employers who thought he was a real person. “That’s huge,” said Mehler. “It shows that if you write a good resume and have great experience behind you, you can still find a job.”

Lauren Weber

Reporter, The Wall Street Journal.
Lauren Weber writes about workplace issues and careers for the Wall Street Journal.