Viewing All Posts Tagged ‘corporate recruiting’

Talent Community or Talent Network?

It’s been a while since I posted and in that time I’ve been busy talking to companies about building groups of people they can communicate with about jobs.  For those of us old timers, this was called a pipeline and it usually resided in an excel spreadsheet.

Today however, these groups are living, interacting mechanisms and require much more attention than our old spreadsheets.

First of all, we need to delineate the terms “community” and “network”.  I see many vendors and companies using the term “community” and after we define both, you may want to rethink which term you are using.

Community; a community is a social network of individuals who interact through specific media, potentially crossing geographical and political boundaries in order to pursue mutual interests or goals (key word here is interact)

Network; a social network is a social structure made up of individuals (or organizations) called “nodes”, which are tied (connected) by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship, kinship, common interest, financial exchange, dislike, or relationships of beliefs, knowledge or prestige. (key words here are common interest)

The key differentiators are that in a “community” there is “interaction” and in a “network” there is simply shared “common interest”.  This is key to setting up your situation for one reason:

EXPECTATION MANAGEMENT

One of the things that I think all recruiting leaders can agree on is that we do a really poor job of setting the expectation in the job seeker/candidate/prospects mind.  This is the whole reason for the discontent of job seekers with applying to your company – they EXPECT that they are now going to be treated as a candidate for the  job they applied to – whether they are qualified OR NOT!!

Today, it is an emerging best practice to set up a group situation OUTSIDE your ATS for prospects to be visible to your company.  The danger to the recruiting department, the employer brand and the company brand is that if you set the expectation that these people are joining a community they are going to expect interaction. Are you prepared to interact with your community?  Allow them to interact with each other?  OR – do you want to simply connect them around the shared common interest of working for your company by forming a Talent Network?

In a previous post, I mentioned that WORDS COUNT – be assured that they are counting in your candidates’/prospects’ minds when they think they are joining something.

Ipso Facto

It is January so I still have time to get my “2009 Predictions” in along with the hoards of others.  In the Recruiting community, predicting what will happen in our industry has become not only a tradition, but a somewhat stale one at that (like Aunt Ruth’s Thanksgiving Turkey, who everyone has to eat even though it’s dry and overcooked every year) with most “predictions” being nothing more than observations of what’s happening already:  (these are actual predictions from our thought leaders)

There will be less hiring this year

There will be fewer recruiters employed this year

Social Networking will continue to expand

Recruiting vendors will suffer

Less business travel

and so on.

Not exactly Nostradamus-worthy predictions right?  Since much of this was already happening in 2008, these just don’t seem like predictions to me.

So I’m not going to make a bunch of “observa-predictions” – you can read it in the Wall Street Journal and make your own.  I’m simply making one prediction.  One thing I can see on the horizon that, if things don’t change, will come true by Christmas this year.

I call it the “Ipso Facto” prediction.  Here it is;

I predict that 2009 will be the year that Job Seekers take back their job search.  I predict a “revolution” of sorts where job seekers, tired of being treated like a commodity, begin to fire their job boards and begin to demand tranparency from corporations they apply to.  If we are going to see 10%+ unemployment and it hits all industries and socio-economic levels – I believe the 21st century internet job seeker says, “ENOUGH ALREADY”.

So why “Ipso Facto”?

There will be no one to blame for this trend but job boards and corporate career sites!  Allow me to elaborate;

Job Boards today are flush with “false” jobs – jobs put there by anyone with a checkbook  who can pay for a posting.  At worst, they are people/firms who want to lure candidates into the false hope of finding work (to feed their family) so these predators can build a multi-level marketing organization or get someone to work for commission only with false promises of big returns (Madoff style).  Anyone posting a resume on a big board should have the Arnold Schwarzenegger of spambots on their computer – it’s really ugly and people are tired of it.

Corporate Career sites have no fraudulent intents but commit similar “crimes against job seekers”.  Even though there is no law requiring private sector companies to post their jobs externally, many HR departments are convinced this is a best practice for Equal Opportunity reasons.  In times of growth and expansion it may be a good idea as you can gather the best internal and external candidates for consideration.  In times of contraction, when you are already planning on filling that role with an internal candidate or a pre-determined candidate – this “artifical posting” is simply cruel hope to the millions of unemployed Americans.  These same job seekers who gleefully complete your online profile and apply for the “artifical posting” or even the real postings are, more often than not, rarely communicated with once their application has been acknowleged.

I think job seekers will be pushed past the tipping point and begin to demand better from eRecruitment.  They will flock to solutions that put the control of their job search in THEIR hands as they once and for all tire of putting it into the hands of people who don’t handle it with the care it deserves.  They will demand a “job seeker bill of rights”:

There are recruiting solutions today that treat the job seeker with the dignity they’ve always deserved and I’m happy to say there are corporations out there who treat job seekers the same way.  The partnering of these corporations and these solutions vendors will become a force in 2009.

I’ll answer to my peers if none of this happens but I think it may already be taking hold as you’ll see when you read this post from a blog titled; “The Day I Fired Careerbuilder”.

Power to the Job Seeker!

Inaugural Blog

Welcome to the first AllianceQ Blog. Actually, this Blog represents a series of firsts:

This is the first blog on the AllianceQ website. This is also my very first post. As such, it will be simple, but will give you a flavor of entries to come. I believe Corporate Recruiting needs to change immediately to remain relevant in the new landscape of hiring. Occasionally my posts will touch upon AllianceQ updates and news, but that isn’t the focus of this blog. It’s about sharing my perspectives on industry trends and insights around what’s next in Corporate Recruiting.

This is also the first time I’ve made a move from the world of recruiting to the world of recruiting software solutions. AllianceQ is a very unique solution for Corporate Recruiting and it took something of this magnitude to pull me away from my 17 year career in recruiting.

And finally, AllianceQ is the first true recruiting collaboration of F1000 companies. As such, AllianceQ represents the change I will be advocating in this blog. When companies come together to collectively solve the issues and challenges that have been plaguing recruiting departments for so many years; we are on the precipice of true industry change! As we head into the coming “war to talent” (more on this in posts to come) it is the mantra of “we are more powerful than me” that will truly win the war. AllianceQ embodies this mantra.

I look forward to getting to know your thoughts on corporate recruiting and sharing mine with you!

Phil