Posts Tagged ‘Brand Talent’

Arrogance of Talent Supply Threatens To Continue Resume Black Hole

Posted by • February 12th, 2010 • 13 Comments

Job candidates are uniting and are demanding to be heard. Employers should take heed and note on the verge of doing the same. And what are they demanding? They are demanding to be treated with a degree of graciousness, that they be communicated with and told if they are qualified for the position applied for or not. They are tired of sending their resumes into the corporate ‘black hole’!

In our book ‘Talent Force: A New Manifesto for the Human Side of Business’, Rusty Rueff and I noted how companies over the past 30 years had become accustomed to an ‘Arrogance of Supply’ which resulted in hiring processes and practices that were not gracious to rejected candidates. Our hiring process took a turn for the better during the Internet bubble when competition for talent was high and dollars flowed, alas when the market turned and unemployment moved to 10 % employers were forced to save dollars and stopped hiring. And, worse, thanks to the Internet the flow of talent has increased, and companies are not motivated nor do they have the processes or systems in place to respond and in turn the talent cauldron of frustration is beginning to boil.

But, why should companies care about fixing the resume black hole?

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How To Connect With The ‘Best’ Contacts on LinkedIn

Posted by • November 30th, 2009 • Leave a comment

Last week we discussed how corporate recruiting is changing. Recruiting departments are starting to act more like executive search firms, looking for ways to gain advantage by finding great talent before their competitors. Researchers are used in order to achieve this objective. We discussed how part of being brand talent is ensuring that researchers can find you. And finally, you were introduced to Shally Steckrl, one of the industry’s most widely recognized and respected researchers. The topic of last week’s article was tips from Shally setting up your LinkedIn account.

There was a lot of positive feedback to the article, so I asked Shally to keep showering us with his wisdom. Here are the next couple of tips. Remember, you will need to set-up your LinkedIn account first before following this advice:

Connect with “Power Networkers”: Over 37 million people have profiles on LinkedIn. But only about 52,000 of those people (0.2%) have more than 500 connections (or “links”, which is where the name of the service comes from). These “Power Networkers” can be an invaluable resource for you in your job search. They often have first-hand knowledge about the health of an industry, the movers and shakers in a company and ...

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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 ...

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What Is the Job Search Velvet Rope?

Posted by • October 26th, 2009 • 9 Comments

Have you ever been to a movie premier? Great nightclub? Concert? Then you have experienced the “velvet rope.” It’s the barrier that separates the people who are watching the event as spectators from the people who are a part of the ‘in’ crowd. In the world of work you are often a spectator or a star. The purpose of my posts over the last six weeks has been to get you behind the velvet rope.

Contrary to popular opinion, recruiters are people. And that means they have relationships and connections. Recruiters know that their success often depends on having a list of relationships that they can call on at a moment’s notice to fill a hiring manager’s sudden job vacancy. Some call this their “stash”, a term which comes from the days when recruiters would literally move from company to company with a folder holding the resumes of the top talent they knew.

I know a recruiter at a famous high-tech company who actually has over 500 people in his stash. These 500 relationships travel with him wherever he goes. Imagine the benefit of being in this recruiter’s list of relationships. As Liz Ryan has pointed out, your chances of getting a ...

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