This year’s winners are:

• Excellence in Recruiting Ethics – Accolo
• Excellence in Mobile Recruiting – AT&T and TMP Worldwide
• Excellence in College Recruiting – Athenahealth and HireClix
• Recruitment Personality of the Year – Chris Hoyt
• Excellence in Military Recruiting – Combined Insurance Company
• Innovation in Recruiting – GE Healthcare and KellyOCG
• Excellence in Candidate Experience – Glassdoor (We’re hiring)
• Best in Social Networking Recruitment Efforts – Hard Rock Café and Work4Labs
• Excellence in Sourcing Innovation – Informatica and Dave Mendoza
• The Recruiting Team of the Year – Intuit
• Excellence in Global Recruitment Innovation – PCO Innovation
• Effective Recruitment – The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas and Shaker Recruitment Advertising and Communications
• Excellence in Inclusion Recruiting – Sodexo
• Excellence in Employer Branding – UCLA Health Systems

Congratulations to all the winners of this year’s award! Thank you again to THE RECRUITING CONFERENCE for another great event.

Glassdoor Wins Award for “Excellence in Candidate Experience” is a post from: Glassdoor Blog

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Here are five things I learned at Talent Net Live. None of these things has to do with recruiting, yet every one of them will help you land better talent with less work:

1. Tech works against you until you start using it right. One presentation I saw included PowerPoint slides that added nothing, yet drew peoples’ eyes. The speaker had to compete with his own graphics! Shame; he had a great message. The recruiting take-away: being on social media doesn’t help if you don’t consider the tools at a strategic level.
2. People appreciate the little things. The washrooms at our location had motion activated doors. That sure put a smile on peoples’ faces! The recruiting take-away: remembering a birthday, promotion, or child’s name can go a long way. Social media provides a great set of platforms for keeping in touch with people without much investment.
3. Content matters. And so does presentation. The most crowded sessions were those with the most promising content. The most popular were those with the most useful content. The recruiting take-away: take the time to be excellent in everything you do.
4. Logistics makes or breaks you. TNL had a good flow. Rooms were always nearby. Meeting areas weren’t too spread out. Couches made networking easy. The recruiting take-away: Shoulder the hard work to make your process easy for candidates and clients. Make connections smooth.
5. People love stories. People seem to be hard-wired to learn from stories. “Don’t tell me what to do, talk to me about someone else who’s done this and I’ll draw my own conclusions!” The recruiting take-away: paint a picture. Help the candidate envision the work. Ever hear a waiter describe something from a menu in a way that brings it to life and makes it sound delicious? Your job as a recruiter is to do that with the job description (or resume).

Thanks to everyone at the conference who taught me something. It’s made me better already! - Originally posted on MonsterThinking by Jason Seiden

5 Tips For Landing Better Talent With Less Work is a post from: Glassdoor Blog

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2. How To Create A Social Recruiting Strategy
3. The Resume/Profile/CV Tsunami – Hit by the Talent Wave

When creating a social media recruitment strategy, there are three 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.

The Big 3 Questions of Talent Acquisition

Hiring managers, HR business partners, recruiters and executive leadership (not to mention current employees) are all crucial stakeholders in the talent acquisition and retention process.

That’s why it’s important to remember that no matter what your role or the size of your company, recruiting relies on performance based feedback. Like whether or not top talent accepts your offer.

1. What’s your biggest challenge when it comes to finding and retaining top talent?

There’s always that one req or passive candidate profile that’s the most pressing, the most critical, and, by general rule, the most difficult for which to source. The one with an empty pipeline where “just-in-time” was yesterday. And, of course, market demand’s creating a revolving door for the A players you’ve already managed to bring on board. No matter what the title or department, if it’s the role which is the most imperative to your company’s business objectives, it’s the one you need to concentrate your social recruiting efforts on. Because it’s likely the one that’s taking up most of your time, anyway.

Bottom Line: Social Media saves time and should enhance, not replace, your current talent acquisition strategies.

2. What are you doing to overcome this challenge for recruitment and retention?

To build an effective social recruiting strategy, you have to know your objectives. And if you’re in the business of people, there’s only one objective: to find the best talent the most efficiently as possible. According to Career XRoads 10^th annual Source of Hire Study, for all the sourcing and spend dedicated to identifying external talent, the top source of hire (by far), was internal promotions and transfers. Internal movement accounted for 50.3% of all hires. #2 on the list, and the top source for external referrals (27.5%) was internal referrals. Following closely on both lists? Job boards, which accounted for 24.9% of all external hires in 2010. And that same study showed that 88.9% of blue chip brands and global employers surveyed in the study attributed at least one hire to Monster.com. Just thought that was worth a mention since actionable data is key to strategic recruitment.

Bottom Line: Engage your employees and hiring managers; they’re your most likely candidates, or the most likely to have that next hire in their network.

The easiest way to connect the dots? Social media. The content engine driving online engagement: job postings. To put it in Boolean terms, you can’t operate with OR anymore. It’s AND. That’s logic.

3. Why should top talent want to work for you?

The war for talent is heating up. If you find and engage a qualified, interested and available candidate, chances are so has the competition. That’s why when creating an employment value proposition and communicating it through employer branding, you’ve got to appeal to the head and the heart.

Bottom Line: Job descriptions, title, compensation and recruitment advertising looks a lot alike, but at the end of the day, top talent makes its decision based on one single competitive differentiation: your company’s culture and the people who create it.

That’s why the most valuable recruiter you’ve got is your current employees. Lucky there’s social media to put a face to the name (or Twitter name, or Facebook photo). - Originally Posted on MonsterThinking by Matt Charney

How To Create A Social Recruiting Strategy is a post from: Glassdoor Blog

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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:

• Add a reality requirement to job requisitions

It’s bad enough to see job requisitions that require applicants to hold three specific degrees and eight certifications, have twenty years of experience in ten-year-old technologies, and also have superpowers. It’s worse when the imaginary job candidate is expected to bring all these assets to a firm for a shockingly low wage. If you wanted your recruiting process to make sense, you’d reality-check your job requisitions before they can be posted. Beyond the critical few job requirements, every other ‘nice to have’ bullet point would cost the hiring manager in budget dollars. After all, the more skills we demand, the more expensive the search will be and the longer it will take.

• Consider internal candidates and friends-of-employees first

Whether it’s the world’s tackiest smokescreen or just a pathetic process breakdown, the outside candidate who goes through three interviews only to hear “You know we also have an internal candidate” is a person with a very good reason for being ticked off. It’s only responsible for an employer to look at internal candidates first, before wasting anyone else’s time. After internal candidates, we should be telling our employees about our job openings so they can let their friends know. Only after those two channels have been exhausted should we put our job openings out for public display. Where are the Process Quality folks when we need them?

• Mandate that the requisition expires in 30 days

If a manager needs help, he or she should jump on it. Yet job candidates sit waiting while processes creak forward, then stop, then lurch forward again. It’s ridiculous. If a hiring manager, aided by a competent HR person, can’t fill a job in 30 days, then the job requirements are unrealistic. Instead of turning over every rock on the beach, we should simplify the job spec so that an actual human being living on Earth can fill it. A great rule to install is the one that says that a job opening explodes on the thirty-first day after posting, and once exploded; it can’t be re-opened in the same year. A couple of those missteps and the manager loses all hiring privileges, if not his or her job. Remember the old

adage, lack of planning on your part doesn’t constitute an emergency on my part? Same deal. Get people in the door fast and fill the dang opening already, or throw in the leadership towel and let more effective people do the hiring for you.

• Focus on the first forty-eight

Can you think of a good reason for a hiring manager to take more than two business days to update a job seeker after a face-to-face interview?

I can’t. If you want to boost the quality of your hires and your organization’s overall leadership quotient, make a rule that every job candidate brought in for an interview needs to get a yes/no message within 48 hours after the interview, no exceptions. That will get your managers thinking about timeliness in the recruiting system. If the manager hasn’t checked in with the candidate by the 48-hour mark, that candidate will be handed to another hiring manager in the company while the slowpoke manager gets to go find new contenders. If you snooze, you lose, right?

• Install quality in hiring metrics

We evaluate HR people in countries across America on the stupidest yardstick ever invented: it’s called ‘Time to Fill’. Once we put in place a thirty-day explosion clause (described above) we can forget about ‘Time to Fill’ and focus on new-hire quality and quality in the recruitment and selection processes themselves. We should evaluate our managers and HR people on how well they lead the charge of bringing new people onto the team, and base our promotion decisions in part on our leaders’ ability to recruit (not just vet, but also sell) talent. If we want to do this right, we’ll ask the job candidates – I’m talking about the people who WEREN’T hired – how well the managers and HR people have done at communicating and answering questions throughout the process. Eye-opening!

We can get much better at managing recruiting now, before the post-bust exodus begins and employers are scrambling for talent. From the language on your careers site to the way you greet interviewees in the lobby, every bit of the process contributes to your message to the marketplace. Is it “We’re dying to get the best people in here, and we suspect you may be one of them” or “You just sit there and wait, ’cause you’re a low priority for us.”?

Fixing The Broken Recruiting Process In Five Easy Steps is a post from: Glassdoor Blog

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John Sullivan, a recruiting guru, laid out an enormous number of statistics around hiring failures. Here are some of the high points:

• “Within a year, hiring managers regret 50% of the hiring decisions they make.” – Recruiting Roundtable
• “46% overall hiring failure rate and a modest 19% great hire success rate.” – LeadershipIQ
• “Only 10% of attempts to hire a top performer are successful.”  - Recruiting Roundtable
• “Nearly two-thirds of hiring managers come to regret their interview-based hiring decisions.”  - DDI
• “Of all the ‘perfect resumes’ sent out by mystery shopper candidates, only 12% were actually scheduled for interviews.” – Hodes™ Healthcare
• “Nearly half of new executive hires quit or are fired within the first 18 months at a new employer.” – Corporate Leadership Council

So hiring is a crap shoot.

From the perspective of the people writing the pay checks, the odds are no better than flipping a coin that the next hire will feel right in retrospect. In the 2009 edition of an annual job satisfaction survey conducted for The Conference Board, only 45 percent of Americans said they were satisfied with their jobs, which is a marked drop from the more than 61 percent who said they were satisfied in 1987, the first year the survey was conducted.

It looks like both sides agree. The hiring process is kaput. You might notice that if both sides see a 50% failure rate, the odds are 1 in 4 that you and your boss will be satisfied with your next job.

Hiring ought to be seen as a process that just begins at the point where employment begins. Both employee and manager are faced with a period of getting acquainted and ought to have guidelines and support for making the relationship and the work, well, work. Unfortunately, most recruiting stops just as the relationship is getting started.

There are a number of disciplines that might have an effect on these statistics after the hiring decision is made.  On boarding, which is the process of attempting to ensure the success of a new hire, is increasingly well understood. Retention programs are becoming the object of serious quantitative analysis. These approaches will help but can’t undo the damage done by getting the wrong person into the job.

It is worth considering the fact that hiring failures make for recruiter job security. Under most circumstances, there is little incentive for a recruiter to care for or try to influence the success of a new hire. Just the opposite is true. Recruiters depend on high attrition rates as a part of their role in the company. If recruiters were constantly generating great hires, you’d need far fewer of them.

Job Recruiting Is Kaput is a post from: Glassdoor Blog

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1. It’s Not You: Recruiting Is Broken!
2. Fixing The Broken Recruiting Process In Five Easy Steps
3. Clearview Counterpoint: Is Corporate Recruiting Broken? Career & HR Experts Debate

Smart employers will overhaul their creaky, off-putting recruiting-and-selection processes now before the economic uptick puts them at a hiring disadvantage. They’ve realized that the most marketable candidates won’t stand for bureaucratic, unfriendly treatment during a job search. As a service to those forward-looking employers who want to get a jump on the action, here’s our guide to building your own Gold Standard Recruiting System. Employers who can claim these 12 top-drawer, talent-aware Gold Standard recruiting practices will gain a huge advantage in the war for talent, by removing obstacles that deter great candidates from pursuing jobs in their organizations.

We’ve listed the 12 elements of the Gold Standard Recruiting System in the form of an announcement from one (imaginary) Gold Standard employer, explaining each item and its purpose. Take a look: How does your employer measure up?

Gold Standard Recruiting Practices

Dear Friends of Angry Chocolates, Inc.:

I am thrilled that you’re considering employment with our company. Here’s a statement from me, our CEO, to let you know our commitments to the talented people who inquire about jobs with us. If your experience in our recruiting pipeline doesn’t meet these standards, I would like to hear from you at my email address right away. Thanks for taking a look at Angry Chocolates. We think it’s a great place to work. We know you could use your talents at a lot of different, great employers and we would love to sit near the top of your list.

Yours,

Declan McManus

CEO

Angry Chocolates, Inc.

Practice 1: You Write, We Read

If we post a job opening and you apply for it, we will read your resume — no ifs, ands or buts. We won’t use a keyword-searching algorithm to scan your resume for buzzwords. A living human being in our office will review your resume within three business days after we receive it. We don’t cast a huge, wide net for candidates and then ignore most of them. We cast a small net (starting with employee-, customer- and vendor-referrals) and grow the net as we need to. That way, we don’t get so many resumes that we can’t read ‘em all.

Practice 2: We Read, and Then We Write

If you apply for a posted job in our company, we’ll write to you and let you know what we think about your resume. We won’t insult you by writing “Your background doesn’t meet our needs.” We’ll say “We need someone with more Direct Marketing experience for this job,” or “Your experience is great, but we don’t have anything in Purchasing available right now.” Our agreement with candidates is that after we share this feedback, we won’t have time to talk on the phone or begin an email correspondence about it; there are too many candidates for us to be able to do that. Still, we hope that the specific feedback is more helpful to you than a generic “No Thanks” or no communication at all.

Practice 3: Are We Your Kind of Place?

If you don’t see a great match for yourself among the jobs posted on our website, you can apply for employment with us anyway. In that case, we don’t commit to read your resume right away or respond to you quickly, because we can’t predict how many people will contact us. Still, we’ll let you know that we received your resume, and this group of candidates will be our first resource when new openings pop up. From time to time we’ll write to you to ask you whether you’re still interested in swimming in our talent pool.

Practice 4: Busywork is for Ninnies

We don’t ask our candidates to fill out long, tedious online applications to tell us where they’ve worked since high school and what they earned at those jobs and what their supervisors’ names were. Heck, we can barely remember what we had for breakfast. We let our candidates compose a free-form essay that tells us why they contacted us and how they might be able to help us. Then we let them upload a resume. No application form, no dates, no bureaucracy. We hate bureaucracy. Don’t you?

Practice 5: No Arbitrary Rules

We’ve heard that some companies shun job seekers with resume gaps, career changes or outside-of-the-industry experience. We think this is goofy. We love people who’ve done adventurous things and spent time with their kids and stepped out of traditional career paths to take chances and learn amazing things. We don’t follow any arbitrary rules in our hiring processes, and we don’t believe that all the knowledge that can help us will come from people with chocolate-industry experience. (If we did, I’d never have started this company, myself!). Quirky candidates are welcome here.

Practice 6: Horse First, Cart in the Rear

We think your time and your privacy are important. We won’t ask you for the names and phone numbers of your references, or permission for us to do a credit check, or your social security number or your past W-2s before we’ve even met you. (As for the W-2s, we won’t ask for those at all.) We want you to feel comfortable with us before we start poking and prodding into your personal life. If we need to run a credit check (for instance, if you’re handling cash) we’ll do that in good time.

Practice 7: We Trust Ourselves

We trust our managers and our HR team to decide whether a candidate is a good fit for our team and whether we’re a good match for him or her. We don’t ask job seekers to give us copies of old W-2s or other kinds of income verification. If we did, we’d be saying “Hey, we don’t trust ourselves to decide whether you’re worth the salary we’re contemplating!” That would be very embarrassing.

Practice 8: Let’s Talk When It’s Convenient
When our recruiters call candidates to conduct phone-screens, they don’t disappear if the call can’t happen then and there. We know that you have a busy life. We try to use email to schedule phone interviews a couple of days in advance, but sometimes (especially if we love what you’ve sent us) we may call to see if we can grab you live. If the time isn’t good for you, just let us know. Once we commit to talk with you, we’re not going anywhere. As long as you’re available sometime during the next three business days, we’ll conduct the phone interview and we won’t knock you out of the running. We work hard to hire the best candidate, not the most-available or the most-compliant one.

Practice 9: Ask Your Questions – It’s Your Interview Too

We think that a job interview is a great place for you to learn about us and to decide whether it’s worth your time to continue the conversation. We try to do the same thing, so that we don’t waste your time if we don’t think a given job is a great match for you. Our telephone and face-to-face interviews are based on the notion that you get as much time to ask questions as we do. Please bring lots of questions with you to the interview. We love ‘em!

Practice 10: Everything But My Prom Pictures

If you’re interviewing with us, we’ll share any relevant information with you that we can. Employee handbook? Just ask for it. Sales comp plan? You’ve got it, if you’re interviewing for a Sales job with us. We figure that we’d rather get your reactions to our plans and practices before you join our team, rather than have surprises later.

Practice 11: Pick Up the Red Phone

When we contact you for a telephone or face-to-face job interview, we’ll introduce you to the Talent Coordinator on our team who’ll be your point of contact during the recruitment and selection process. You’ve got a hotline to that person, and can expect an answer to any question you ask him or her within 48 hours (weekends not included). We don’t believe in shipping job candidates to Radio Silenceland. So we don’t.

Practice 12: Decisions, Decisions

If we make you a job offer, we’ll give you five business days to decide whether you’d like to join our gang, or not. If you need an extension because of an international trip or illness or some very big deal, we’ll grant it. We don’t like to make offers that aren’t accepted, but we really, really hate to make offers that are accepted because a candidate was pushed to make a fast decision. Accepting a new position is a huge life decision. We want you to have all the information you need and all (or nearly all) the time you need to sift through the facts and issues. By the way, we’d never ask you to make a yes-or-no decision without the full details of the written offer in front of you. (We’re horrified to think that any employer would.)

Questions about our recruiting practices? Please write to us at goldstandardrecruiting@angrychocolates.com and let us know. Now that you know where we’re coming from, please tell us more about yourself!

12 Gold Standards For Recruiting: How Does Your Employer Measure Up? is a post from: Glassdoor Blog

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1. Clearview Counterpoint: Is Corporate Recruiting Broken? Career & HR Experts Debate
2. It’s Not You: Recruiting Is Broken!
3. Fixing The Broken Recruiting Process In Five Easy Steps

If you can answer “yes” to any of those questions then you are a rare person indeed. You hear stories all the time about people who don’t buy a product or service because of how they were treated. But buying or investing because you are treated well? Not so much.

Here is the harsh reality of the present recruiting landscape:

• Jobseekers know it’s broken. Badly. Liz Ryan has done a pretty good job of making this clear, and I agree with most of what she says.
• Recruiters and recruiting management often know it’s broken. I speak at a lot of conferences that are filled or overflowing with recruiting executives desperately looking for a new innovation that can help them make a bad situation better.
• The recruiting process isn’t likely to get better any time soon. Even with billions of dollars invested in new technologies, processes, recruiters, sourcers and every other solution under the sun.

There isn’t a premium on the stocks of companies that treat their talent or prospective talent well. I have read the studies that attempt to disprove this fact, but they are almost universally proving something called “negative correlation” (i.e. companies that have bad employment practices have lower stock prices, but you can’t prove one causes the other). What is needed is proof of “positive causation” (i.e. companies with good hiring practices have higher stock prices because of those practices).

Without proof of the positive relationship between how a company treats their prospective talent recruiting ends up being treated like administrative overhead.  But you, the job seeker, employee or consumer, have the power to help change that. Here is how you can help make recruiting better and smarter:

Take To The Sites - Use Glassdoor.com to share information. If there aren’t enough positive motivators for change (i.e. increased stock price) then fear of being called out publicly for bad behavior will have to do.

Give Direct Feedback – If you believe a company is treating you like crap then let them know it. Most companies would really prefer to know about a problem and get a chance to fix it rather than lose a customer or damage their brand (notice I said “most companies.”) As Liz points out, if you are professional in how you deliver the feedback it can often been seen as a sign that you are a problem solver. And be open to the feedback in return. After all, it sometimes takes two to tango.

Tell Your Friends – If you have a great recruiting experience then buy that company’s product or service, or invest in their stock. Even if you can’t afford that approach (perhaps you have a great recruiting experience with a Ferrari dealer) then at least go public with your love. Tell people that you would (or did) buy or invest in a company that treats people with courtesy and respect.

If you do these things you will give recruiting departments the ammo they need to fight this battle. It won’t always work, but I’ll bet you that it will make things better.

3 Ways To Help Companies Hire Smarter Sooner; Hint – Go Public is a post from: Glassdoor Blog

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What does this mean? I think it means that recruiters and HR professionals are starting to point out that in this economy jobseekers should beware thinking that populist rage is a solid strategy for finding a job.

According to many “experts”, jobseekers are getting screwed by (take your pick): incompetent recruiters, stupid management, ignorant hiring managers, HR dullards, bad processes or general incompetence. Reading these “You should be mad as hell and not take it anymore!” screeds are intended to make jobseekers feel good about where they find themselves. “It’s not you, it’s them!” Wrong. Recruiters and HR professionals are getting tired of taking it on the chin.

If you are serious about finding a job you need to drop the victim narrative. For every jobseeker who is angry because of their job hunting experience, there is a recruiter who is just as mad because of jobseeker behavior. The experts are stoking a blame-delegation and finger-pointing exercise that can only lead to fewer real solutions and more bad blood. And in this economy the jobseeker is going to be the ultimate loser.

Think that the jobseeker is the only one with a right to complain about the awful recruiting experience? Think again:

• Do you hate it when companies post jobs that aren’t really open? How is that different than a jobseeker applying for a job that they really don’t want? Every recruiter I know has to sift through hundreds of applications from candidates who later admit “I didn’t really want that job; I just thought I would get noticed if I applied for everything.” You will be remembered for all the wrong reasons if you are applying for jobs in batches.

• Do you hate it when companies put all this great language in the job description about how wonderful the job opportunity is, and then you take the job and find out that the “marketing language” was nothing but baloney? How is that any different than a jobseeker making a community college algebra class into a “training in advanced mathematics?” You will definitely make an impression (the wrong one) when the recruiter finds out you “exaggerated.”

None of these behaviors is acceptable by either party. Recruiters shouldn’t do it, jobseekers shouldn’t either. When jobseekers spam resumes, batch apply, exaggerate (or worse) on resumes, and fail to show up for interviews or phone calls they waste recruiter’s and hiring manager’s time. This is time that should be spent responding to jobseekers who have an honest shot at the job, guiding people through the recruiting process, answering questions and otherwise creating a superior jobseeker experience.

Does this mean that jobseekers are to blame for the poor state of recruiting? Of course not. But so what? Does your indignation about the recruiting experience increase your probability of finding meaningful employment? No. All you can control is your beliefs, perspectives and behaviors. So let me give you an alternative point of view which can help you skip the cynicism and frame your interaction with recruiting in a more positive light.

Most of the people I know in recruiting and employment pursued their profession because they love the feeling of finding someone work. They believe that they are helping people, doing good things for jobseekers, companies and hiring managers. It genuinely hurts them when they have to tell someone they are not qualified for a job. They really do want a good outcome for you. Not all of them, and not all the time, but most of them and most of the time.

Recruiters are going to make mistakes. So are you. We need to cut each other some slack and focus our time and energy on getting you a job and fixing the system, not on blaming each other for a crappy reality. Please, be remembered – positively.

Victims Don’t Get Jobs is a post from: Glassdoor Blog

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1. Why Recruiters Don’t Get You Jobs
2. Active Job Seekers Beware; Get Screened In Before Your Next Job Search
3. Trust: The Most Important Component of Your Job Search

How do you build trust with a recruiter? We’ll review a number of tips over the coming weeks, but here is the way you need to start: ASK QUESTIONS!

First, please, take a risk and shut-up. It may be the hardest thing for a candidate to do, but talking too much is always a bad idea. I call it “Talking Your Way Out of a Job.” It happens all the time, with great candidates blathering away, boring the recruiter. The recruiter ends up convinced of one thing and one thing only: I can’t possibly put this person through to the hiring manager. I’ll look like an idiot!

In short, no trust!

Candidates think that they have to sell themselves by having a great pitch. But it is hard to talk your way to trust. Better to ask lots of questions, listen to the answers and then show you were listening by asking questions about what you just heard.

I advise candidate to ALWAYS start a conversation with a recruiter with the following question “Would you mind if I took a minute to ask you some questions about the job?”

Recruiters spend their days listening to people instruct them: where to look for candidates, what qualifications matter most, what the business needs and what is unique and special about every candidate. Most recruiters start their day expecting to be talked at constantly and rarely end up disappointed. So I guarantee that you will blow a recruiter’s mind if you ask them for permission to get their opinion.

Now that you have the recruiter’s attention, take the next step. Say the following: “I have read the job description, but I would like to know you opinion about what is the most important qualification for this job.”

Again, the recruiter’s mind will spin with delight “Wow! First the candidate wants my permission to ask questions, and then they want my opinion! I can’t believe it!” Step two to build trust.

And now, for the final killer stroke. Whatever the recruiter tells you, ask “Why?”  As in “Why does the recruiter think that that particular qualification is so important?”

This three step process (May I, What, Why?) will always build trust with a recruiter. At the very least the recruiter will believe that you are interested in their opinion. And a good recruiter understands that only engaged, intelligent people ask serious questions. Ironically, questions (an admission of ignorance) builds trust in your experience, confidence and intelligence.

So if you want to win the job, start by being ignorant.

Next Week: Study the bio.

Win the Job Through Admitting Your Ignorance is a post from: Glassdoor Blog

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1. Trust: The Most Important Component of Your Job Search
2. Don’t Let Your Ego Ruin Your Interview
3. Two Essential Tips To Interviewing Well

Over the course of many interviews it became clear that most recruiters agree on one thing: they want you to give them straight and honest answers. Honesty and integrity ranked amongst the most important attributes they are looking for in candidates.

This makes sense. After all, a recruiter is like your agent: they are representing you to the hiring manager. They are giving you their professional stamp of approval, their word that you are worth the hiring manager’s time. The recruiter understands that, when all is said and done, their “word” is really how they make money and keep their jobs. A recruiter who earns the trust of a hiring manager is more likely to fill the position quickly and reliably. When a candidate breaks their trust the recruiter ends up hurting their position with the hiring manager. A candidate’s casual shading of the truth could end up costing the recruiter money, or worse, their job.

Admittedly trust is not a two way street, at least not with many recruiters and hiring managers. As Liz and others have pointed out, companies usually treat candidates poorly, failing to give them complete information or even treat them with basic respect. As a job seeker you may find yourself in a position where you think you will be disadvantaged by telling the truth, or where you feel that the lack of transparency on the part of the recruiter or hiring manager warrants a similar response from you.

Don’t give into that feeling. If you are interested in a job you need the recruiter on your side. Regardless of how poorly you have been treated, you have to maintain the recruiter’s trust.

Over the next couple of pieces we are going to talk about the following questions:

• How do you build trust with a recruiter?
• How do you position yourself in the most favorable light without shading the truth?
• How do you deliver bad news while minimizing its impact?

Trust: The Most Important Component of Your Job Search is a post from: Glassdoor Blog

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1. Win the Job Through Admitting Your Ignorance
2. Ten Secrets From A Staffing Pro For Your Job Search
3. Active Job Seekers Beware; Get Screened In Before Your Next Job Search