Doing A Job Search? Help Career & Job Researchers Find You First

Posted by • November 23rd, 2009 • 4 Comments

Recruiting is getting more complex. It used to be that a “full service recruiter” would have a phone, a Rolodex and their sales pitch. They would spend all day finding great talent and then pitching that talent to clients (i.e. hiring managers). Many a fortune was made in this simple way with these simple tools.

Full-service recruiters still exist of course. But increasingly the recruiting profession is becoming more complex and specialized. In addition to recruiters, we now see coordinators, sourcers, researchers, communications specialist and brand evangelists. As the competition for great talent has heated up, recruiting organizations have responded with innovations that would make your head spin.

This is important for you to understand because if we are going to get you to be brand talent then you need to know who will be looking for you, and where they are going to look. That’s why you need to know about researchers, and that’s why you need to know about Shally.

Researchers are the tip of the spear, the computer and phone jockeys who are constantly trying to uncover the great people that aren’t going to the career sites or being talked about by hiring managers. Researchers make their living by understanding that you don’t strike it rich by grabbing for the same diamond everyone is else is going for. You need to look in a different place in the mine to make your fortune. But instead of diamonds, researchers are looking for talented, committed and enthusiastic people like you. Simply put, building you into brand talent often means that researchers need to be able to find you.

There are hundreds of great researchers, but one of the best is Shally Steckrl. Shally is EVP and Chief CyberSleuth at Arbita. He has been a researcher for such diverse companies as Coca-Cola and Google. I have worked with Shally over the years and have always been impressed with the new and innovative ways that he comes up with to find great talent.

Shally is always looking for great talent for his clients. And you want to be brand talent, the kind of person who is in the driver’s seat of their career, being called by people like Shally. The more you know about how people like Shally look for people like you, the easier it is for Shally to find you. That’s a big win for both of you.

When I asked Shally for some quick career advice to share with Glassdoor Clearview readers, he immediate replied:  “LinkedIn.” Just as Glassdoor is a great place for you to start your job search, LinkedIn is becoming the first stop for people looking for great talent like you. So before you do anything else, get an account on LinkedIn and fill in your profile. Then follows these three tips:

  1. Gather ALL Your Contacts – I don’t know about you, but I have contact information spread all over the place: old business cards I have collected at conferences and meetings, email addresses in my personal webmail accounts, Outlook address books from previous employers and even hand written notes. But if you want to really leverage the power of sites like LinkedIn, you have to make sure that you have as many good connections as possible in one place. Gather all those old business cards, files and slips of paper and load them into one excel spreadsheet. You can learn how here.
  2. Import Your Contacts – Having all those contacts in one place is great, but they need to be in the tool before they will do you any good. Follow the directions at the link above to import your spreadsheet. Shally tells me that people are often surprised at how many people they actually know as well as how many of those people are already on LinkedIn and ready to connect.
  3. Connect With Your Contacts- Once you see how many of your old contacts are in LinkedIn, make them new contacts by connecting with them directly. The more connections you have, the more likely you are to be found by a researcher.

Shally has actually written entire books-worth of information telling people how to brand themselves on the web and get found by specialists like him. Periodically over the coming weeks I’ll try to introduce you to more of his ideas, and his professional compatriots. But in the meantime, feel free to write Shally directly at shally.steckerl (at) arbita.net. He will be happy to provide you more information directly.

Guest Blogger Jeff Hunter is a member of the Glassdoor.com Clearview Collection and is an award-winning technologist, strategist, author and entrepreneur. He currently serves as the Vice President of HR Solutions at Dolby Laboratories. Prior to joining Dolby, Jeff served as Sr. Director of EA University at Electronic Arts, the world’s largest digital entertainment company. In 2007, Jeff launched the “Talent Unconference” a meeting of the top minds in HR, business and technology to discuss new methods for developing and driving talent-centric businesses.

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  • http://www.recruitinganimal.com RecruitingANIMAL

    Jeffrey I found your description of recruiting a little misleading. All you're doing is describing a division of labour of the various aspects of the recruiter's job and making it sound like something new. But, really, it amounts to the exact same thing.

    What's more, the division of labour existed in the past. The retained search firms always seemed to have guys who sold the search and acted as a relationship manager. Then they had the underlings who actually went out and found the people and did the initial screen.

    The only new element are the internet sourcers. Instead of going to directories or trade journals in the library they do their research online and that requires a mastery of boolean terms which were not part of the lexicon before.

    PS: If a company hires someone to be a social media specialist, that's new too but not totally unlike the guy who used to go out trade shows and networking events.

    Regards from me

  • jeffhunter

    Animal! How great to be in public conversation with you once again. Your point is well made, which makes it all the more painful to disagree with you. But disagree I must.

    First, the article was specifically about corporate recruiting departments. Perhaps your point was “Corporate recruiting departments are starting to look more like executive search firms” in which case I would have gladly agreed with you. I am not quite sure how this change represents “the exact same thing” but I have only been working in and around corporate recruiting departments for 22 years, so my experience may be eclipsed by your senescence.

    In addition, your logic that describing a division of labor is somehow pedestrian strikes me as odd. Are you saying that a house husband is the equivalent of a chauffeur, butler, launderer, cook and nurse? And that by the very fact that a house husband does all these activities that he is equally as skilled in each as the professional practitioner? That would be a strange argument indeed.

    I, as you, know many “full desk” recruiters. I, like you, know many who are exceptional at their job. But I have yet to meet a full-desk recruiter who was equally exceptional in all pieces of the recruiting arts, tools and processes: who could dive as deep as the best researcher, engage passive candidates as well as the best sourcer, manage client relationships as well as the best recruiter and manage systems and processes as well as the best HRIT department.

    And your final post script, that a “guy” who goes out to trade shows and is practiced in the art of reading facial signals, striking up in person conversations and figuring out how to attract attention to a booth is “not unlike” a person who understands SEM, SEO, design and click-throughs strikes me as equally odd as your other argument. I guess you could say that the profession of a car salesman is “not unlike” the profession of a car mechanic, in that they both work around cars, but I believe that most people would find such logic baffling.

    Always good to hear from you Animal!

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