Tuesday June 23rd, 2009
Great Resource for Recruiters

I spent some time recently searching for new and interesting blogs (always keeping an eye out for recruiting/HR thought leadership!), and Glen Cathey's blog Boolean Black Belt stood out as a good resource for online recruitment and sourcing. He clearly breaks down specific techniques and search strategies, and has an easy to read style supported with graphs and graphics.

He recently put together a "best of" page with some of his top posts. Seems like an excellent starting place for up and coming recruiters, or those looking to polish or upgrade their e-recruitment skills.

Permalink  Comments (1)

Tuesday June 16th, 2009
Want media coverage in the Twitter Era? You only need to do 2 things.

So this evening I saw a tweet from @mayhemstudios (a RT from @the_gman - good lord it's hard to keep track of these complicated crediting of information sources these days) referring us to an article on The New PR:  How to write effective press releases in the age of Twitter.

Since I'm responsible for media for both Head2Head and Retired Worker - a quick Google of 'Sarah Welstead' will reveal just how shameless I've been in the past few years - I of course dashed right over to the article. 

So if this tweeted-about article had some handy hints, then I was prepared to be all over it.

Well, the article was okay, I guess - though I personally haven't ever seen any real advantage to adding multimedia to a media release, and they didn't give any concrete examples - but I've been doing this a while now and I've come to the conclusion that there are only 2 factors which make any kind of real difference in how much media coverage you get.

Here they are:

1. A stunning factoid that maps into the current zeitgeist, used as your lead headline.
   Use any number you like, but make sure it's dramatic, based on some kind of study, and correlates with the current mood of the media.  The reason the Head2Head 2007 Salary Report got a lot of coverage was because we led with "Recruiting salaries up 20%" - which was a big enough number to catch the eye of editors, even if they knew nothing about recruiting.
   
   If the headline of the 2008 report had been "Recruiting salaries down 15%", we would have had huge coverage (see below for the comparison between 2007 and 2008), because at the time, the media was actively looking for 'bad news' stories - the media was all about the doom and gloom of the recession.  Unfortunately, even I can't spin that much. 

 

2. Use a 'Tips for [whatever]' model - that also maps into the media zeitgeist.
   In the absence of 'factoids' (though SurveyMonkey and a little judicious Twittering can get you whatever factoid you want in 24 hours), you can almost guarantee yourself some quick and dirty media coverage if you put together a list of 'handy tips' (5-7 tips is best) for something that has some mass appeal.  Could be "Tips for older job-seekers", could be "Tips for recession-proofing your resume" - both of which map into current media trends - it doesn't really matter.  They sound helpful - and unbiased - so editors think "Yay!  That's 11 column inches I don't have to think about!" and copy and paste.

[Of course, it should go without saying that to be properly effective, a media release needs to be sent out across a paid newswire service - I use Canada Newswire - because for all that we're supposedly living in a social media world, most of the news channels we think of as mainstream (national newspapers, radio and television networks, etc.) are still accustomed to checking the wire services every morning, and tend to give more credence to information that comes across 'the wire' than information that turns up on a blog somewhere.]

But getting back to PR in the Era of Microblogging.  How do my two tips (see?  see how this works?) tie in?

Easy:  A stunning factoid is easily tweeted ("84% of Canadian recruiters plan to hire in the next 6 months") and retweeted with a link.  And a 'handy tips' article is one of those things with a life of its own - the December blog post about The Top 5 Job Search Tips From 2008 continues to be the #1 post on the Head2Head blog, even though it's not exactly Pulitzer-worthy journalism.  (If you feel ambitious, Google 'Retired Worker job-seeker tips' and you'll see just how that kind of thing basically disseminates itself across the web, over a long period of time.  But you may want to take my word for it.)

'The New PR' article recommends that you use all the online channels at your disposal, and they're right:  once you've distributed a media release, you should make sure it's on your website, write a blog about it, Twitter about it, post it to your Facebook and LinkedIn pages, etc. - this is how your 'news' will have a longer shelf-life and contribute to your Google rankings. 

Don't panic if you don't get the response you were hoping for right away.  PR is always a crapshoot:  Head2Head's 2007 Salary Report got a whole lot of media attention, but the 2008 Salary Report got a whole lot less.  Why?  Because, as I wrote in January, the 2008 report revealed good news (salaries were up 6-15%), and at the time, the media just wasn't interested.

At the same time, I can almost always get good media coverage for Retired Worker - there's always some radio station looking for a 3-minute soundbite on 'boomers' and  'the changing face of retirement'.

(If people knew just how much of their 'news' was being driven by people like me, writing media releases at midnight in their home office, they'd never believe anything they read ever again.  And the Toronto Sun - among many other supposedly legitimate publications - basically just reprints media releases without any attempt to turn them into articles.  But don't let me scare you.)

Permalink  Comments (1)

Wednesday June 10th, 2009
What do you do about candidates whose only flaw is bad personal hygiene?

The other day I wrote another in our ongoing series of Egregiously Bad Candidates blog posts, where we - as recruiters - get to laugh about some of the more hilarious stories of candidates who just don't get it.

One of the comments on that post was about candidates who keep on applying for jobs at your company, even though they keep getting turned down.  Specifically, why do these candidates keep applying, when it's 'obvious' you don't want them?

Except, I don't think it's always so obvious.  (In fact, I've blogged about this before.)  These poor candidates keep getting rejected, but without concrete - or constructive - feedback, they take our polite rejection ("It just isn't a fit right now, but we'll keep your resume on file...") at face value, and figure it's just a matter of time before it is a 'good fit'.

The one that makes me cringe most often is the candidate with bad personal hygiene.  You know the one:  he's (and, let's face it, it's almost always a 'he') got a decent resume and would even be a decent interview - if only you weren't gasping for air after 10 minutes in a closed room with him.

You know that all the guy needs is a bar of Irish Spring, a box of lemon-fresh Tide (because you just know that his whole wardrobe, and probably all his sheets, need a serious, um, freshening up), and a can of AXE deodorant spray, and he'd increase his chances of getting a job about 1000 percent.

So why don't you tell him?

I mean, I've had recruiters tell me what to wear to an interview ("It's a fairly formal office, so wear stockings"), how to do my hair ("You might want to consider dyeing your hair - I know they'll think that white-blond, super-short style is a little too fashion-forward"), and even advise me on shoe selection ("They have a dress code, so don't wear open-toed shoes, even if they're Christian Dior").  I don't take offense at this - both the recruiter and I have a vested interest in me putting my best foot forward, as it were.   I've also declined interviews at companies which have draconian dress codes, such as the cosmetics firm which didn't allow women to wear pants of any kind, because I probably wouldn't have liked it there much anyway.

So why are we so reluctant to tell people that they need a shower?

To the best of my knowledge, there isn't a legislative or regulatory prohibition on this in Canada - I don't think 'body odor' or 'personal hygiene' is protected under the Human Rights Code.  And I know that some US states have odd rules, but I'm pretty sure that hygiene isn't one of them.

I keep thinking about what my mother - a high school teacher - used to say:  "If I don't take these kids aside after class and talk to them about taking a shower every day and using deodorant, the other kids are going to make fun of them.  Which is much worse than the momentary embarrassment s/he feels when I talk to them about it."

Some of these poor candidates are going to go on being unemployed for months.  Surely we owe it to them to give them a heads' up?

Permalink  Comments (2)

Wednesday June 10th, 2009
Head2Head: recruiters and social media on Canada News Wire

Recruiters, 84% of which are planning to hire in the next 6 months, are using using social media to find top talent, says this newswire release.

"We knew that the Canadian recruiting market was picking up a little, but the response we had to our survey about social media and recruiting was frankly surprising," says Paul Dodd, President of Head2Head.

See the full story at Recruiters still on the hunt for top talent - and using social media to find it

Permalink

Monday June 8th, 2009
Personal Branding: Is it all about you, or not?

So tonight Dan Schawbel, self-proclaimed Personal Branding Guru (and maybe he  is a guru - after all, he's got 23,000+ Twitter followers and I haven't even cracked 1,000 yet) tweeted about Katie Konrath's blog post, "Personal Branding:  It's Not About You".

It caught my attention, because a while back I wrote "An Introduction to Personal Branding:  It really is all about you."

Of course, those of us who are out here blogging and tweeting and social media-ing all the time know that a decent title can ensure even the most dreck-filled article or PowerPoint deck gets some attention, so both of our titles were tongue-in-cheek.

However, it got me thinking...

The thrust of Katie's piece was really that people need to see 'personal branding' for what it really is:  A sales tool. 

In sales, you don't just yammer away at the potential client endlessly.  You ask them questions about their hot-button issues, the things that are keeping them up at night, how they measure success, etc., and then you show them how what you do will address these business issues.

The same, as Katie says, is true of personal branding:  Instead of telling people all the great things you've done, are doing, and could do for them if only they'd pony up your hourly fee, you should identify your potential clients' business issues and then, clearly and concisely, demonstrate how you're going to deliver against that.

So far, so good:  It's amazing how many personal-branding websites I've seen which have pages and pages of things like 'Awards I Won In 1996 When I Worked At Bombardier' and no pages like 'How working with me will deliver demonstrable results within 3 months.'  Katie is absolutely right that personal branding needs to be built on what stakeholders need/want, not what we want to deliver to them

I've written an awful lot of blog posts in the past few years - upwards of 150, at least.  My goal with blog posts has always been to add some original data, analysis or insight to the conversation.  Because at the end of the day, isn't personal branding supposed to be about establishing a unique proposition, positioning, and personality?

In Dec 2008 I did a blog post with "7 Top Tips for Job-Seekers" - which in fact was just a refresh of a blog post I'd done in 2006 - and it continues to be the single most popular post in the whole blog, even though there are zillions of 'tips for job-seekers' blogs all over the internet already.

By contrast, in Apr 2009 I published a whitepaper about grassroots corporate philanthropy which was filled with original ideas and data - and hardly anyone was all that interested.  

I spent 30 minutes on the blog post and it gets 1000+ visits a month; I spent more like 30 hours on the whitepaper and I've only had a couple of media interviews.

So what have we learned?

It's clear that my 'stakeholders' are more interested in job-seeking tips than the paradigm shift in workplace philanthropy.

If I did nothing but write blogs which were "7 Handy Tips for [something recruiting-related]", I'd get a whole lot more traffic to my blog(s).  People love retweeting articles with titles like '5 Tips For Reducing Time-to-Hire' or 'Thinking about RPO?  6 things you need to know', they love referencing them in presentations or their own blogs, and the media loves that they can just copy and paste the stuff into their publication without having to waste any time on that pesky journalism or editing.

However.

In the long-term, where does that leave my personal brand? 

I'd like to be able to say that in the long term, people who go the '7 Handy Tips' route end up with a weaker personal brand.  (I'd like to be able to say that because I'd like to think that, in the long run, all these epic-length blog posts of mine are actually going to have been worth it.)

But all of us are so new to this hyper-networked world - heck, when I wrote my first big whitepaper in 2001, hardly anyone was talking about personal branding; today, there are, like, 8 million 'Personal Branding Architects' on Twitter alone - that I don't think any of us really know what the prognosis is, or whether the brand equity delivered by a whitepaper is actually higher quality than the brand equity delivered by a '7 Handy Tips' blog post.

(Oh great - another question to ponder all week.)

Permalink  Comments (1)

Sunday June 7th, 2009
Social Media and Recruiting Facts, Canadian-style

NOTE: If what you really want are just the stats about how Canadian recruiters are using social media, just scroll down - there's a handy bulleted list at the bottom.

While there are plenty of great things about living and working in Canada, there is one drawback: The companies large enough to have offices in both the US and Canada tend to have their research and marketing functions headquartered in the US.

This means that when they're determining budgets for market research, they often figure, "Oh, Canada is pretty much the 51st state anyway - we don't have to do separate research in the Canadian marketplace. We'll just extrapolate from the US data using the 10% rule of thumb."

I'll admit, while most Canadians are adamant in their position that Canada is very different from the US, we all know that there are plenty of similarities in the two markets, and using the old "10% rule" (i.e. if the US market for a given product is $100 million, it's generally safe to say that the Canadian market is $10 million) can often be reasonably accurate at a high level.

(Though it should be noted that Canadian consumers do have very different tastes and habits than US consumers in some ways. For example, Hershey's has long used a different chocolate formulation for Canadian tastebuds.)

However, between 9/11, the 8 years of Republican control, the Wall Street meltdown and the global growth in the internet and social media - not to mention Canada's social contract regarding things like gay marriage and healthcare - which are making the differences more apparent.

The internet and social media: Canadians tend to be early adopters

Canadians, while slower to catch on to online shopping circa 2000-2001, were faster to adopt high-speed internet, and we continue to have higher per-capita internet use rates (about 83% of Canadians vs 69% of Americans).

As a result, Canadians have been early adopters of social media tools: Toronto continues to be one of the most Facebooked cities in the world, and ranks #4 in the world for LinkedIn use.

Social media and Canadian recruiting

The upshot of this, of course, is that US statistics on the use of social media for recruiting aren't necessarily accurate for the Canadian market. For example, MySpace never really addressed the Canadian marketplace in terms of job postings, so it was never a popular recruiting/candidate relationship management tool for Canadian recruiters.

Last week, Head2Head hosted, in partnership with LinkedIn, a webinar about "Leveraging LinkedIn For Recruiters" (it was so popular, we've scheduled another session on June 17 - we'd love you to join us).

Since 95% of participants were Canadian recruiters and hiring managers, we decided to ask them about their use of social media for recruiting.

Here's what they said:

• 69% of CDN recruiters use LinkedIn for recruiting
• 44% use Facebook
• 9% use Twitter
• 6% use blogs
• 3% use YouTube
• 3% use Craigslist
• 0% use Tumblr or MySpace
• Only 20% say social media delivers a clear ROI
• 77% say it’s improved their ability to connect to passive candidates
• 44% say it’s improved their quality of hire
• 36% say it’s reduced their time to hire
• 66% say no one oversees their social media stuff – it’s all rogue

So there you go: Your Canadian-source primary data for the day. Feel free to Twitter, write a blog post - whatever!

Permalink  Comments (4)

Tuesday June 2nd, 2009
7 Great Ways to Ensure No Recruiter Ever Reads Your Resume

I don't know what the heck's happened in the past couple of weeks, but the flow of Egregiously Bad Candidates has increased considerably.

The thing is, after I finish laughing at some of the emails we receive, I do feel kind of sorry for these dingbats, because they seem determined to ensure that no recruiter gets past the subject line of their email, let alone ever takes them seriously as a candidate.

So to these job-seekers, I offer the following: The 7 things most guaranteed to ensure a recruiter never looks at your resume, let alone calls you. Please, read this before you send out your next job-hunting-related email:

1. Send a blind email to a recruiting company that doesn't recruit for your profession.
   Today I got a really well-written - if really, really long - cover letter from a guy who really wants a position as a senior chef in a 5-star hotel, preferably in Halifax.
   
   Well...we don't recruit for the hospitality industry (a quick check of our job board would tell you we specialize in recruiting recruiters, and HR, Supply Chain and IT professionals), and while we are located in Canada, we don't have offices in Halifax.
   
   So I know this guy just Googled 'recruiting companies' and sent emails to every company that turned up. Whatever.
   
   

2. CC a whole lot of people without hiding their names or email addresses.
   You know the people who do this - the CC field is jam-packed with like 50 names and email addresses - would be the first to complain if you revealed their email address to a zillion other people. Not sure how un-email-literate you have to be to fail to use the BCC field, but you're clearly too email-illiterate for our clients.
   

3. Send your resume to 'info' @therecruitingcompany.com instead of to a real person or the 'proper' job application address.
   At our office, I'm the person who receives all the emails that go to info@head2head.ca - in other words, I'm the one who gets basically all the junk mail. If you're sending an email to 'info' at our address, I know you haven't taken two seconds to visit our website, which brings us to...
   

4. Don't visit our website before you send your resume.
   I don't get this one. Every single 'job search tips'-type list always says "Visit the company website before you send your application! You will learn valuable information which will will tell the recruiter/potential employer you care enough to do your homework!".
   
   Is it that some candidates still feel that it's nothing but a numbers game - that if they just blast every recruiting company with random emails, they'll eventually hit employment gold?
   
   Because nothing could be further from the truth.

5. Don't refer to what you do or what kind of job you're looking for in your cover email.
   This week alone I've received 14 emails that consist of a resume attachment. No subject line, so 'Dear Ms Welstead', nothing to indicate what these emails are about. Guess what? If you're too busy to write one sentence about what kind of job you want, I'm too busy to open your attachment.
   

6. Include a sentence like "I've been looking for over 12 months but no one will hire me..." in your cover email.
   Sure, I'm not going to delete your email quite as quickly as I do in #5, above, but here's what happens: I immediately think "What the heck is wrong with this person that no one wants to hire them?" - and then I delete the email, because I'm not putting Debbie Downer in front of our clients.
   

7. Attach your resume in WordPerfect.
   I'm sure you can't believe this happens, but it does. More often than you think. Even if I can use my document converter to open your WordPerfect resume, all I'm thinking is: Are you making an anti-Microsoft statement, or are you telling me that your computer skills stopped circa that 486 you had in 1994? Either way, we've got a problem (not least because Microsoft is a client of ours - but then, you'd know that if you hadn't done #4, wouldn't you?).

Permalink  Comments (1)

About the Authors

Paul Dodd
Co-founder and President
Head2Head Canada

Paul has one simple goal: To help companies hire great people - and get the most out of every recruiting dollar they spend. That's why he's recognized as one of the best recruitment-industry thinkers in Canada.

Links

Archives

Tags

Tag Cloud

RSS Feed

RSS Feed