KCRecruiting

A Real Recruiting Job" Enterprise Rent-A-Car

Sometimes you just have to give props to major player.  Enterprise RAC is one of those players in the college recruiting space.  Don't believe me?  Check out their numbers, courtesy of Steven Rothberg from CollegeRecruiter.com. 

• 200,000 applications received per year with far more contacts made with potential candidates at venues such as career fairs, on-campus information sessions, etc.
• 70,000 interviews
• 7,000 hires
• 700 human resource professionals
• 250 recruiters

And you thought your 20 req were keeping you late at the office. 

Ask The Headhunter: The Job Market

One of the first people I read in online recruiting was Nick Corcodilos, an engineering recruiter and author in Silicon Valley who writes the wildly popular AskTheHeadhunter website.

I'm not ashamed to admit that when I first started selling, I copied his style of recruiting to a tee, adopting his philosophy of the American employment system as my own.

That philosophy, based on over 20 years working as a headhunter, is based on the idea of proactively searching for employment instead of following the traditional model of apply-and-pray.

Companies are familiar with this model, but they call it post-and-pray.  You post your jobs to your careers site and job boards, and then pray the right people apply.  For candidates, you apply to jobs posted on career sites and job boards, and hope someone responds.

Nick has been telling us for years that the system is broken.  In his words, Human Resources has built up a wall around the modern corporation, and they're the only ones selling ladders.  And the ladders are too short.

So how do you fix this?  You start by reading his Basics.  Here's his post on Mistakes that Kill.

Analyzing the Job Market
Poring over job postings
Overemphasizing the Resume

Your assignment is to read the Basics and report back. I've used this system to build my network and find jobs.  You can too.

Buy the Book:

How to Use Technorati to Get Found By A Recruiter

Everyone who has worked with a recruiter knows that recruiters don't get found, they find you.  As the client pays the bills, each recruiter spends their time looking for open positions, not answering calls and e-mails from random jobseekers that don't fit their current positions.

Rather than submitting resumes blindly online, you should try some proactive measures to increase your online profile.

Here's one using Technorati.

Put your resume up on line.  It can be anywhere, as long as it is accessible by an url. Blogs are best, but your own site, yahoo site, or myspace page will work.  In the links section of your page, link to every local association you can find.

In Kansas City, three examples are the user groups listed to the right.

The KC Dot.Net User Group
The KC JUG
The Association of IT Professionals

Those links are easily traceable by smart recruiters looking for programmers, when they use Technorati's link search.

Go to Technorati.com.  In the search field, enter the url for the Java User Group.

http://kcjava.org/kcjava.htm

What you see is the websites that link to the KC Java User Group.  In this case, the only one you see is KCRecruiting, but if you are a programmer looking to be found, linking to the site will mean you're the only one in KC that will be found by a recruiter.

Bonus:  If you can find a recruiter that blogs, linking to their site is a great way to get on their radar.

Firefox Whee!

I'm a big fan of the Firefox browser.  I simply find it far superior to Safari or any of the IE versions, and one of the first things I have my clients do is download it for easier web surfing.

Recently, fans of Firefox have been making videos and putting them at FirefoxFlicks.

My favorite, so far, is called Whee:

Go ahead, click him (you need Quicktime)

The Indeed Job Search

To the left of your screen, you'll see a list that says All recruiter job in Kansas City: Indeed.com

This is a vertical search powered by the company, Indeed.  It tracks jobs from a number of different sources (job boards, craigslist), and puts them all in one spot for you to search.

Basically, you can go to indeed.com, or simplyhired.com, or jobster.com (all vertical search engines),  type in your search, and centralize your online job-seeking.

There are five jobs listed to the left, but they are constantly changing - they just represent the five latest jobs posted for the Kansas City Area.  Not a bad little trick, huh?

If you are a recruiter, imagine if you could post all of your jobs to a central location, and have your candidates streaming that feed directly to their website.  Rather than requiring them to come to your website, your jobs would appear in front of them, every day.

That may seem like a bit much if you have hundreds of jobs, but consider what happens if you only want to send Java jobs to a pre-selected list of Java candidates.  Or better yet, what if your java jobs were streamed live at the local Java User Group webpage.

And what if it were free?  It is.  Do you want to know more?

Google Search: Biggest Kansas City Employers

With all the hype you hear about search engines, you'd think that all of the world's information is available with a few letters and a click of the mouse. That's not always the case, as we attempt to find information doing a search for the largest Kansas City Employers.  The results:

1)  A wikipedia entry with detailed information on Kansas City and its suburbs. 

2)  A JobBank USA entry short on the list of employers (it misses HR Block and Sprint), but long on other sites that can help.

3) A link to the largest employers in Kansas (we're halfway there - Some of Kansas City is in Missouri)

1) Spirit Aero
2) Cessna
3) Fort Riley
4) Raytheon

Sprint is number 15 on the list.

And a list of Kansas City Recruiters (not very comprehensive, but better than a Google search that pretty much talks about Armed Forces Recruiting and College Sports Recruiting.

I guess that's better than this list from Oya's, which lists nobody.

Never fear, brave fellow midwesterners.  We're going to generate a recruiting community and a rich search engine experience for job-seekers in Kansas City. E-mail your site your jdurbin@durbinmedia.com

KC Recruiting Launch

Welcome to KCRecruiting, a new site for Kansas City recruiters.  KC Recruiting is a recruiting blog, part of a family of local recruiting blogs started by Durbin Media Group designed to help local staffing firms and corporate recruiters learn the best online tools for finding great candidates.

The links, the tools, and the best jobs will be featured, as well as interviews with local recruiters, announcements and job postings.

For an interview or to post a job, please contact jdurbin@durbinmedia.com