Tag: talent acquisition

The Truth About Older (50+) Salespeople

Posted on by The Organic Recruiter in Diversity, Employment Retention, Employment Value Proposition, Generational Gap, Hiring, Interviewing, Latest News and Articles, Millennials, Workforce Cuture

Wisdom is the knowledge base that will assist our future leaders.

Imagine if you will a time when you are getting a little bit older, a touch grayer and you start reflecting on what are you going to do when you get too mature for the industry you are in.

I have always had this question, but never bold enough to write about it. I’ve had a lot of opinions on this as the market is getting younger by the minute. People want to put millennials on pedestals and assume they are the next coming of…well whatever. I do not. But what I do say is they are dang smart. We Xers can learn tons from them.

The problem, however, is they lack the experience of hitting a curve ball. This can be taught of course, but won’t happen until they have failed a number of times. Knowledge and wisdom come from experience, not case studies.

I don’t fear getting older. I love it. I don’t fear millennials, I encourage them. 1+1 = power. Let’s embrace learning from one another. By the way, I am not 50+!!!

~The Organic Recruiter

Published on

The Truth About Older (50+) Salespeople

 | Technology Sales Author, Sales Researcher, Founder Heavy Hitter Sales Training, USC Faculty

It is still hard times for salespeople (and sales managers) over 50 today. When companies downsize, they find themselves five times more likely to be let go when compared to their younger counterparts. They also have a more difficult time finding new jobs because younger sales managers have five basic fears about hiring someone older than themselves:

They are Un-coachable. Younger sales managers fear older salespeople are set in their ways and won’t take their directions.

They aren’t Technically Savvy. Younger sales managers fear they haven’t ingrained technology (smartphones, e-mail, and web-based sales force automation) into their daily working routine (nor are they up-to-date on the internet, social media, etc.).

They are “Washed Up.” Younger sales managers fear older reps are burned out from too many years “carrying the bag.”

They Have a Poor Work Ethic.  For a variety of family, personal, or health reasons, younger sales managers question how hard they will work.

They Really Want My Job! Perhaps the biggest fear of a younger manager is that he is hiring someone who may upstage him or her in the eyes of senior management in order to fulfill an ulterior motive of taking over their job.

Given these fears, I would like to offer five factors sales managers should consider when choosing between younger and more senior salespeople.

  1. Do you have to Sell to the C-Level? The C-level Executive sell is based upon establishing credibility and trust. Who do think has an easier time establishing rapport with senior executives; a 26 or 56 year old salesperson?
  2. It’s about relationships (not Rolodexes). Never hire any salesperson solely based on their Rolodex (if you’re under 30 you might have to look this word up) of customer contacts they claim to possess. Hire the salesperson who has a successful track record at penetrating new accounts and proven their ability of turning aloof prospects into close friends.
  3. Wit. Most companies make previous experience in the same industry their main criterion for hiring. Since these salespeople command the industry nomenclature, they are assumed to be qualified candidates. A more important hiring criterion is how candidates respond to pressure. In other words, how quick-witted or fast on their feet are they? What is their ability to learn quickly? Are they able to solve complex problems in real time? In this regard, don’t judge a book by its cover and assume a little gray hair means a lot less grey matter.
  4. Sales is a Mentor-based Profession. Sales organizations are mentor-based environments. Inexperienced salespeople don’t know what they haven’t seen for themselves. Usually, it’s through the “school of hard knocks” that they gain their experience. Unfortunately, this takes time. The entire sales team can benefit from emulating salespeople who have accumulated a reservoir of experience working with customers.
  5. Who Do You Trust!?! Peek into the cockpit as you board your next commercial flight. Chances are you are putting your life in the hands of one of the 70,000 airline pilots that are over 50 years old.

About the Author:  Steve W. Martin is the author of the “Heavy Hitter” series of books for senior salespeople on the human nature of complex sales. The Heavy Hitter corporate sales training program has helped over 100,000 salespeople become top revenue producers. Steve is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review and he teaches at the University of Southern California Marshall Business School MBA program. Visit www.stevewmartin.com to learn more.

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

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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.

Understand Recruitment Cycles to Give Your Job Search an Edge

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

What do 23, 21, 20 and 36 mean to you? Seasons come in all walks of life to include the right time to get serious about your job and when it just might be a little harder to be seen. Enjoy this read to find out more about what these numbers mean.

~The Organic Recruiter

by John Rossheim, Monster Senior Contributing Writer

When it comes to connecting with the right job opportunity, timing isn’t everything, but it’s certainly something. Tuning into industries’ and employers’ annual recruitment cycles just might give you a decisive edge.image

That’s the consensus of recruiters and employers with fingers on the pulse of seasonal variations in hiring. Here’s a quarter-by-quarter summary of how these hiring dynamics play out.

First Quarter: A New Year’s Wave of Hiring

Sometimes peaks of hiring correspond with workplace factors that are only loosely related, like when people take vacation. “Hiring seems to be done by consensus more than any other decision,” says Scott Testa, chief operating officer of Mindbridge Software in Norristown, Pennsylvania. “So most hiring decisions have to be made when people are in the office.”

Major hiring initiatives may follow close on the heels of the holidays and summer. “The big months for hiring are January and February, and late September and October,” says Testa. “Job seekers who make contact right at the start of these cycles have the best chance of being hired.”

Strong hiring periods like the first quarter, when demand for talent may outweigh the supply of qualified candidates, may be a good time to go for a job with more responsibility or higher pay. “If you’re currently employed and looking to improve your status, you’ll want to look during the peak hiring season,” says Glenn Smith, president of search firm Precise Strategies in O’Fallon, Illinois.

Second Quarter: Gearing Up for Summer

For those whose livelihood depends substantially on fair weather, spring is when hiring peaks. In the construction industry, hiring in April, May and June proceeds at double the pace of December, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS).

Tourism and hospitality hiring is also very strong in the spring. And businesses looking to hire professional workers before fall often do so now, before key decision makers start rotating out for summer vacation.

Third Quarter: Recruiters Relax a Bit, and Vacation Plays a Role

Hiring slows down in July before picking up at the end of August. For those with nontraditional but impressive employment backgrounds, there’s an advantage to looking in relatively slow hiring months like July and December, says Smith.

For example, recruiters, less pressed for time than in peak months, may be willing to take a longer look at an experienced professional woman seeking to return to work after taking years off to care for children.

Fourth Quarter: A Rush, Then a Lull

The fourth quarter presents the most complex hiring dynamics of the year, with its mix of fall activity, holiday retail hiring, Thanksgiving-to-New Year’s slowdown, and end-of-year financial and budget maneuvering.

“Hiring managers and bank CEOs will typically try to reduce their operating profits by incurring search fees towards the end of each year, to avoid paying taxes,” says Josiah Whitman, an executive recruiter with Financial Placements of Lake Oswego, Oregon. His firm’s job orders are distributed this way: first quarter, 23 percent; second quarter, 21 percent; third quarter, 20 percent; fourth quarter, 36 percent.

Although December hiring is at low levels in many industries, recruiters are determined to fill the year’s remaining openings by December 31, and the supply of applicants dwindles as Christmas and the new year approach.

Major industries classified as information, financial services, and professional and business services, having hired heavily in the second quarter, see their lowest level of hiring in December, says JOLTS.

But December isn’t as slow as it used to be, say some observers. And applications tend to slow down during the holiday season more than openings do — tipping the balance in favor of those who do apply.

“It seems that business just keeps going through the holidays,” says John Challenger, CEO of outplacement and search firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas in Chicago. “There doesn’t seem to be the kind of letup that there used to be.”

So playing the recruitment peaks doesn’t mean waiting out the rest of the year. “You need to be out there looking for opportunities, not finding excuses to avoid looking,” says Tom Johnston, CEO of SearchPath International in Cleveland.

Original Article

Are You Doing Your Part For Your Military Initiative?

Posted on by The Organic Recruiter in Diversity, Employment Value Proposition, Hiring, Interviewing, Military, New Job

 

Fleet week 2Every year I get excited to hear about Fleet Week and often wonder what it would be like to go to one. Fleet Week is a United States Navy, United States Marine Corps, and United States Coast Guard tradition in which active military ships recently deployed in overseas operations dock at major cities for one week. The crew members have the opportunity to enjoy the local cities for that week while the public can take a guided tour of the ships.

This year, in fact today, was my first time as LA is having its inaugural Fleet Week. We at Military.com / Monster.com have the opportunity to team up with the office of Mayor Garcetti of Los Angeles (thank you Blas Villalobos and Lorraine Perales) to be a part of a celebration of our servicemen and servicewomen who protect the seas for us. As an organization that that truly believes in our servicemen (military.com) and my own personal advocacy to help (brother served in the Army for 28 years), I find myself privileged to walk the hanger, cruise the outskirts of the ships with the likes of the men and women that serve.

One of my personal goals have been and always will be is to serve the ones who serve us to make sure they are gainfully employed after serving a career (short or long) in the military. So today my goal was to share our transition app as well as our military skills translator with the military, veterans and equally important, the spouses. Our families of the United States Armed Forces have skill-sets that are unparalleled to most. Our problem in talent acquisition is we don’t speak their language and it takes too much time to work with them to figure out how they fit…or rather fit in (culture is for another article).

In LA County, 3% of the population is comprised of veterans, while 11% of the homeless population is a veteran. This equates to 2,733 of our homeless brothers and sisters are the folks that served you proud in the military.

Now Military.com is one of the few places to go to for a preventative measure for our military (and spouses) to be proactive about their career in the afterlife of service so they are not stranded and underemployed after separation. There are a ton of tools to prepare for transition and we have some of the best.

My brother used to recruit for the Army more than 10 years ago and we all know the big draw for young adults is they will have the skills to do any job they want when they get out. The unfortunate truth is when they transition out, albeit they have the skills, they do not and cannot (self-doubt) get the job they are qualified for because there needs to be a better bridge between recruit and separation. Then on the flip side, recruiters (in the civilian world) do not have the time or the patience to see where these candidates are qualified for the job they applied for, therefore pass on them.

I am not advocating that recruiters take their own time to learn MOS (military occupational specialty) codes, however I am asking for you to open up and grab the tools to learn what they do and have more patience. Because I tell you, they can blow away some of your current staff and they can also add some new light and flavor to your culture.

To learn more about what Mayor Garcetti’s team is working on to  help our homeless veterans, please go to www.lamayor.org/ending-veteran-homelessness for more information. I encourage you to reach out and see how you can help. If you are not from LA, inquire what your city is doing to help the veteran homeless predicament.

~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.