Posts Tagged ‘Hiring Process’

The Hiring Process May Be Flawed, But You Can Still Land Your Next Job

Posted by • February 8th, 2012 • 7 Comments

While December 2011 employment data (released in January 2012), showed the U.S. unemployment rate was continuing to trend down, the number of long-term unemployed held almost steady at 5.6 million. This group is comprised of individuals who have been jobless for 27 weeks or more, and makes up 42.5 percent of the total unemployed. The commonly flawed hiring process—lack of an acknowledgement of resume receipt, hiring managers who do not know what they want, inept interviewers, and little follow up by companies—is particularly frustrating for this group of individuals and the reasons are understandable.

Read more »

Tags:
, ,

Stop Name Calling: How Job Candidate Labeling Could Cost You A Great Hire

Posted by • June 20th, 2011 • Leave a comment

In nearly every conversation I have with Recruiters the topic of the perfect job candidate will always arise. It’s natural. We’re constantly pining for that perfect hire, sitting out there somewhere among the masses, waiting to be plucked from the ranks to lift the mantle of our corporate brand. This is the Holy Grail of candidates and they have a name. We call them the “passive seeker.”

Hardly a day goes by without a newly published blog post, mainstream media article or hardback on how to find them. But who are they, and why are they the cream of the proverbial crop? The most common definition for a “passive candidate” is employed but not looking for another opportunity. The key pre-condition, of course, is gainful employment. And therein lies the rub: you must be employed.

The idea that to be employable you must already be employed is an artificial and inaccurate assumption that just needs to go away. To me, it’s like saying only married people are worth dating. After all, if they aren’t married then something must be wrong with them, right?

Read more »

Tags:
, , , ,

5 Tricks To Get Noticed When Submitting A Résumé Online

Posted by • February 9th, 2011 • 4 Comments

Let’s face it; they call it the black hole for a reason. According to Wikipedia, a black hole is a region of space from which nothing, not even light, can escape. So if your résumé goes into this dark and dismal place, will you ever get called for an interview? Probably not. Unless you take a few proactive steps, you will be among the many who get no response and scratch their heads wondering why.

Below are some tips and tricks to help you gain more traction from your online résumé submissions; but prior to delving in, I would like to mention that applying online for jobs should only be a small fraction of your job search efforts.

In fact, the US Department of Labor estimates that online jobs comprise a paltry 10-15% of the opportunities available to job seekers. Use area networking and volunteerism, trade publications, and social media avenues to identify opportunities you won’t find online.

Read more »

Tags:
, , ,

Fixing The Broken Recruiting Process In Five Easy Steps

Posted by • July 21st, 2010 • 17 Comments

Corporate recruiting is broken – it’s dysfunctional and ineffective, and sucks time and money employers could be using to make better products and services. If you need evidence of the sorry state of the recruiting process at essentially any large or medium-sized employer, just talk to a job seeker — or a hiring manager, for that matter.

Hiring processes are too slow, too cumbersome, and too stuffed with red-tape bureaucracy to allow employers to make thoughtful decisions about the people they’re evaluating. The typical recruiting process is full of unnecessary steps and pointless slights and insults to job-seekers. None of this does an employer any good, but it preserves order (or the appearance of order) and keeps bureaucrats busy, so you don’t find many organizations willing to scrap the broken process and start over. Still, if a CEO were inclined to re-design the recruiting process to make it work for living human people, here are five ways he or she could go about it:

Read more »

Tags:
, , ,

How Companies Should Manage The Hiring Process

Posted by • March 5th, 2010 • 5 Comments

The process of communicating with a heavy flow of talent traffic requires a plan, the right technology and consistent execution. Below is an example of how the hiring process should work when looking at bringing in a person for an executive position; however the strategy can be used for any position at any level. Here I share a real world example I received from an executive recruiter:

Read more »

Tags:
, ,

In A Job Search? Follow The Pain

Posted by • November 25th, 2009 • 16 Comments

Last week we talked about why the black hole is your worst-odds job-search channel. We won’t get a job by pitching resumes into the Black Hole. We’ve got to find ‘our’ hiring manager, and reach out to him or her directly.

If the employer you’re targeting is on the small side, with a few hundred employees or fewer, your target decision-maker may be the head of your function. If the employer is larger, your decision-maker may be a few layers down from that functional VP.

How to Find A Decision-Maker’s Name:

If you’re targeting the VP of your function, the odds are good that you’ll find that person on the company’s website. Piece of cake! If you’re looking for someone a bit further down in the organization, here are four ways to find the name of your very-possibly next boss:

Conduct a LinkedIn search on the company’s name and your target person’s most likely title.
Use ZoomInfo.com to find the manager you’re looking for.
Google the company name plus the title — ‘your’ manager’s name may pop up in a search result.

It’s easy to find ...

Read more »

Tags:
, , , , ,

How To Circumvent The Resume Black Hole

Posted by • November 18th, 2009 • 19 Comments

Forget the black hole — that’s a terrible way to get a job. People say “But I called the HR department, and they told me that I have to put my resume into the company’s ‘careers’ website in order for it to be considered.”

Of course they told you that! They are amoebae – it’s their job to make that speech. They have their priorities, and those priorities have everything to do with bureaucratic practices designed to keep job-seekers coloring inside the lines. Luckily, the hiring manager has other concerns. The hiring manager is the person we need to reach. The black hole and its amoeba tenders are not our friends.

The hiring manager has pain. If he or she did not have some kind of pain, there would be no job. Our job is to spot the pain, and address it in a pithy Pain Letter that will go with our resume directly to the hiring manager’s desk. If we can spot the pain and speak to it, we can get that hiring manager’s attention. Not every hiring manager has the budget to hire us, either as a W-2 employee or a consultant. Those opportunities, unfortunately, may be unavailable to us ...

Read more »

Tags:
, , , ,