Viewing All Posts Tagged ‘job posting’

Open Letter to Job Seekers

After a comment on my blog (yes, some people read it!) asking “what is an exact fit?” and the general exacerbation that the job seeking process causes most job seekers, I thought I’d write an open letter to all job seekers, allowing them a peek into the recruiting process:

Dear Job Seeker,

We know you are frustrated with the job search process.  We understand that you apply and apply and are rarely granted an interview or even an email communication telling you why you were not selected.  We also understand that even when you get a phone call or email telling you that you were not selected, you would like details on why.  Here is a glimpse into the world of recruiting and HR so perhaps you will understand the method to the madness.

• Our lawyers prohibit us from giving you detailed feedback on why you were not selected for an interview.  We can give you a broad category of why but not specifics.  Why?  Because you sue us.  If the company gives you feedback that you misinterpret as discrimination or bias, we get sued.  We mitigate our risk by being vague.
• We have a timer on positions and have to get them filled.  Even in this economy, most positions have a cost of vacancy associated with them.  As such, we have to fill our roles in a timely fashion.  Sometimes, this means that the best candidate for the job is not considered because they applied late to the opening.  This TIMING element of filling jobs is the most misunderstood by job seekers.  We hire the best candidate in a given timeframe otherwise we’d never fill our jobs because we’d always be waiting for YOU to apply!
• You apply to the wrong job a lot.  Sometimes it’s because you think by applying to every job we have posted, you’ll get noticed.  You do, but not in a good way.  Most of the time it’s because we’ve posted a vague, laundry list of requirements that could be you but is probably not.  We need to do better and really put a great job description up.  A video of the hiring manager telling you what she needs in the ideal candidate would be best.  We’re working on it.
• We have less jobs to fill (75% less in some cases) but we get between 100 – 300+ applications for every job we have posted.  Most recruiters carry between 20 – 25 openings.  Do the math.  To require that we personally contact each person and give them feedback and advice is simply not reasonable.  We are trying to let you know your status.  If you get an email from us we really ARE doing our job.
• Interviewing and hiring are human processes and as such, are inherently flawed.  Recruiters make suggestions on who to interview – sometimes geting it wrong but mostly getting it right (meaning the people who are interviewed are good candidates).  Hiring Managers make hiring decisions – sometimes getting it wrong but mostly getting it right (meaning the person they hire is usually a good hire for the job).

We empathize with your frustration (there are a lot of us out of work today too) and just want to tell you that we are doing the best we can and are constantly looking for ways to get better.  One way we’ve found is AllianceQ – where at least we can offer you the option of continuing your job search with our fellow Member companies and 3000 small and medium sized businesses.

Good luck with your job search

Sincerely,

Corporate Recruiting

Revolutions are Uncomfortable Things

After hearing that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ceased operations yesterday to become the 12th major newspaper to shutter its doors I began looking into this momentous change we are experiencing.

On the website “Newspaper Death Watch” (http://www.newspaperdeathwatch.com/) (yes, I don’t like the name either) an article sums up the situation for newspapers:

The game is over for newspapers. Nothing can save the business, so it’s pointless to try. We’re in the middle of a revolution and revolutions are uncomfortable things because “The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place.”

The newspaper industry, like the automotive industry and the financial industry, is an institution in the United States.  Even 5 years ago no one would have imagined that we could be facing a time when major cities were “newspaperless”.  So what is happening?

Web sites like Craigslist have been to classified ads what the internal combustion engine was to horse-drawn buggies. The stock prices of most newspaper publishers have dropped more than 90 percent from their peaks.  Couple this with an amazing amount of debt taken on in the last 10 years as major publishers bought up smaller competitors and viola’ – the death of an industry.  Maybe.

Monster and Careerbuilderbattled over who would run the newspapers’ employment sections and traded the honor witheach other but for what?  It seems that even with big board names behind the employment sections, people were relying on them less and less.  While people were running from classified employment ads, they were running TO Linkedin and other ‘new’ ways to find work.  Revolutions are uncomfortable things.

I believe this is the next “revolution” we’ll see.  At least I’m hopeful that we will.  Just like no one wants newspapers to completely disappear (after all it IS where most of the serious reporting and reporters still reside) I’m not advocating that the big boards  disappear.  But like the newspapers, the days of “post and pray” recruiting would be a desired victim of a job board revolution.  The big boards have their place in an overall strategy but for too many recruiting departments that place takes up too much precious budget money to prove truly valuable.  Remember that a large percentage of Recruiters report getting a LOT of candidates from big boards but less than 20% of all employees actually report finding employment through the big boards.

If Craigslist can automate, facilitate and communicate better than your old classified, is it not too far fetched to imagine that a technology is coming that can do the same to “post and pray” recruiters?

It is all a question of “value” and who can provide the value faster, easier and with less cost.  If the road from consumer (Hiring Manager) to product (candidate) can be streamlined by taking out the middle person who adds little to no value to the process then the “revolution” is for the better.

The only way to reduce the discomfort of revolution is to find a way to add value to a process.  As we are seeing with the newspaper industry, if you are not adding value, you are not going to survive.

Heartburn on Monday morning.

It’s 9:27 a.m. and I have heartburn. I thought it might have been acid reflux from the bowling alley chili dogs on Saturday night but then I read a blog post by Phil Rosenberg from “reCareered & Rainmakers Global” and the dogs were off the hook.

What gives me heartburn is the concept of “Resume Search Optimization” as Phil discusses it. Basically he takes SEO (search engine optimization) and applies the concepts to creating a resume tailored to the job description for the job to which you are applying . Here’s why this concept does nothing to “optimize” the recruiting process:

• Job descriptions are rarely written any better than a resume. They are usually a complex amalgamation of inputs from HR benchmark reports, Compensation, Recruiting and some final tweaking from a Hiring Manager with too much on his/her plate. They don’t really tell you about the person needed to do the job. They simply describe the laundry list of skills and arbitrary timeframes (3-5 years? So if I have 2.5 or 6, you DON’T want to see me?) the “machine” says will produce the best employee. Matching one poorly written document to another poorly written document is not anyone’s definition of optimization!

• Optimization is not desperation. Today the talk in recruiting is all about the “passive candidate”. The virtual panacea of recruiting is locating people who are NOT looking for a job (because they are engaged at work today!) and convincing them to make a move. There is a spectrum between “passive” and “active” and in between the extremes is where quality meets quantity. None but the most active candidates are going to tweak every resume sent/posted to each job description. This means that recruiters who pull up your “rigged” resume will see it but may also perceive it as less quality once they see how “optimized” it is (indicating a very active candidate).

The system is broken and “rigging” resumes is a HUGE part of the problem. There has to be a better way; one that relies on a more reliable search methodology that produces the best resumes coming from people currently looking for a job as well as those who may be putting a toe in the water but are not desperately active in a job search. Recruiters have to balance the need for speed (easily retrievable resumes from the top of the search) with the imperative for quality (those who are not rigging and therefore lower in the search results) if they are providing the service they promise to hiring managers.

Please don’t rig your resume, it doesn’t optimize anything. Find a better way to get in front of the people who are actually looking for YOU and the unique competencies and value you can add to their company.