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Today’s job market is unlike any other in recent memory for most of us. Certainly it is for me. As I point out in “’Headhunter’ Hiring Secrets: The Rules of the Hiring Game Have Changed . . . Forever!,” there are all new “rules” in today’s hiring “game”—and that’s precisely how you must look at getting hired in today’s job market, as a “game”—and what may have worked, say, just a few years ago to land a new job no longer works, in many cases.
Heading to the Fall ERE Expo? So are we and we’d love to see you there.
Glassdoor will be at booth #514 where we’ll be showcasing what Glassdoor has to offer and how we can help employers progress their branding and recruiting efforts.
Plus we invite all ERE attendees to attend a poker tournament sponsored by Glassdoor on Wednesday, September 7 at 8 p.m. at Rivals Waterfront Sports Grill…
When creating a social media recruitment strategy, there are 3 critical considerations every employer or talent organization must address directly and comprehensively. The good news is, you already know the answers to these crucial questions, and while unique to every company, recruiter and job opportunity, those answers provide a strategic, measurable framework for social recruiting success.
I recently met a man at a party named Will Smith. Will was a likable guy, our wives hit it off, and our families spent much of the night near one another as we continued to meet and get acquainted with other new friends. As you might expect, as Will Smith (an engineer from Alabama) introduced himself to people throughout the evening, he was greeted with a number of predictably lame responses.
The most frequently occurring was some variant of, “I loved you in Men in Black!” as the deliverer of this wit chuckled as though Will could not possibly have ever heard that one before.
I empathized with Will that evening, because telling people that you are a psychologist is a little bit like telling them that your name is Will Smith. While, “Are you reading my mind right now?” has to be my least favorite, there are a host of predictable responses to telling someone that you are a shrink.
Worse still is telling them that you are an organizational psychologist.
Attending SHRM 2011 this year? We are and we know how hectic the event can be – racing from big name speaker sessions (like Virgin mogul Sir Richard Branson and Huffington Post’s fearless leader Arianna Huffington) to useful informational speaking tracks covering everything from talent management to International HR. As you move from one session to the next, stop by Glassdoor’s booth #1267 – a preview of just some of the things we’ll be discussing are highlighted here…
“So Liz,” asks my friend Garrett on the phone, “do you want to be on a committee?”
“I doubt it,” I said. “What does the committee do?”
“It’s a committee of HR people who volunteer to review resumes for job seekers,” Garrett said. “People send in their resumes, and the HR people give them feedback.”
“Oh no!” I said. “HR people giving resume advice? That is scary.”
“How is it scary?” Garrett wanted to know.
I’ve been a Human Resources person since Cyndi Lauper ruled the airwaves, when HR was just another department. Back then, HR people complained about being assigned to menial things like toting the watermelons to the company picnic. HR folks were the Party People. HR types would get together and groan about all the party planning we had to do. That was about the worst thing we had to worry about in those days.
We didn’t realize that we’d be looking back, twenty-five years later, and calling the early 1980s the Good Old Days for HR.
Now HR people are besieged. They are embattled. Employees hate them, management hates them, and jobseekers hate them most of all. It’s no fun being an HR person with many, many employers today. HR people are the bad guys. They make the rules and enforce them, they’re forced to take away perks and benefits and they lay people off on a regular basis. HR people still talk about Engaging Employees with the Mission, creating cultural Pixie Dust, and making their organizations Employers of Choice, but they don’t say it with as much force as they used to. If they did, their co-workers would laugh out loud or suck their teeth in disgust.
So what went wrong with HR?
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 ...
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 ...
The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) kicked off their 61st Annual Conference this week amidst the 80-90 degree heat in New Orleans. The SHRM Annual Conference & Exposition is a chance for HR professionals, academics and businesses to gather and learn new strategies and techniques for improving the workplace. The conference this year focuses on HR leadership for the economy.
Speaking topics range from “Innovate or Perish! 10 Tips to Improve Your HR Processes” to “The Future of Online Recruiting: Why Job Boards and Facebook Are Only Gateways to What Is Ahead.” Are you at SHRM 2009? Tell us how it’s going and what some of the important takeaways are for HR professionals in these next few months and years.
If you’re not at SHRM’s annual conference this year, here are some highlights from Twitter that show what’s catching the interest of conference attendees:
@recruiterdude says “complacency is the exact opposite of urgency” quoting this morning’s Keynote speaker John Kotter, a Harvard Business School Professor widely regarded as the world’s foremost authority on leadership and change.
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Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? by Personal Branding Blog February 10th, 2012
6 Ways To Establish A Private Career Coach by Hank Stringer February 10th, 2012
The Power Of Social Network Transparency by Kevin W. Grossman February 9th, 2012
Anger Management: How To Keep From Losing Your Job by FINS from The Wall Street Journal February 9th, 2012
The Hiring Process May Be Flawed, But You Can Still Land Your Next Job by onTargetjobs February 8th, 2012