Viewing All Posts Tagged ‘resume’

Just in Time to Just Right

Just in time vs just right.  Reactive vs proactive.

I’ve always liked the analogy of recruiting and dating.  The stages are the same, notice, invite, woo, date, move forward or break up.  Clean and everyone can understand – been there done that.

So in looking at paradigm shifts in recruiting, it’s only natural that I venture into this analogy to make a point about where recruiting is going.

Old way of dating:

1. go to a crowded, busy bar night after night, putting your best face forward and hope to meet the perfect match
2. Repeat night after night (week after week?), having coffee or lunch with a few people but really not making amazing connections
3. become despondent, bored and willing to settle and choose a “close match” for a longer term commitment.
4. break up and start again.

Wow, that was depressing.  See how it mirrors our current “just in time” recruitment process?  We conduct the best search we can, find the best “available” talent (by the way, availability is NOT a skill set) and choose the candidate who matches most closely with our requirements and requires the least headache to close.  Hope and pray it’s a good decision but more often than not, end up repeating the process in 24 – 36 months.  Ouch.

New way of dating:

1. Complete a profile on one of the scientific matching software systems – tell it what you do and don’t want, what you will and won’t accept.
2. Only be notified when someone matches what you require.
3. Connect by phone or email, do some quick due diligence and then meet for coffee or lunch.
4. Find a lasting relationship.

In essence, what we’ve done is move about 25% of the work from the back end (really bad dates) to the front end (setting up our profile and search requirements) and free ourselves from the other 75% so we can focus on other things (like living life!).  For the recruiting analogy, the percentages are the same.  If you can move about 25% of your effort the the beginning of the process, you’ll save about 75% on the back end.  You do this by using new tools (newer than Boolean searches on the web) and shifting your energy from sifting through results to creating them.

The point of all this is that there are NEW  ways to do about everything today including dating and recruiting.  For those of you out there on a really bad date today or reviewing your 100th resume of the day – why are you living in the past?

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.