KCRecruiting

Live LinkedIn Training February 19th In Kansas City

I'll be in Kansas City (one of my favorite cities - they have the best house architecture in the Midwest) February 19th-21st, primarily to train the local NAPS Chapter on the use of LinkedIn for recruiting.  Lunch will be served, and in addition to the presentation, you'll be taking home a LinkedIn: Recruiting CompanionTraining DVD of the presentation, ensuring that the knowledge you hear is available for review.

The registration link is here for the event. Thursday the 19th, from 11:30-1:30, at the Hereford House in Leawood, Kansas.  This event is specifically intended for third party and independent recruiters.  For more information, be sure to check out the Kansas City MAPSS Site. You can also register by contacting Shelley Seibolt.

Call Shelley Seibolt 913.663.5627 or Email: shelley@staffingkc.com

I will be in town Friday as well - if you are a local firm looking for more information on using social media, whether in recruiting, sales, marketing, or public relations, schedule some time and let's sit down and talk.

Here's a sample presentation on the impact of Enterprise 2.0 on the Modern Corporation.

Impact of Social Media On the Modern Corporation

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: marketing interactive)

Live LinkedIn Training For Kansas City

I've had some real success with live training courses for recruiters, so I'm working on bringing it to Kansas City.  My course, LinkedIn: Recruiting Companion was a success in St Louis, and I'm scheduled in December to head to Springfield. I'd ideally like to work with a local organization and set up a way to come in, do a training session, and leave behind our training DVD's for you to take back to the office.  If you're interested, drop me a line, and if you'd like to organize a training for January or February, please let me know.  This course works for third party firms, corporate recruiters, and sourcers.

Jim Durbin is a veteran recruiter specializing in Social Media.  He is an experienced expert in using social media to hire premier candidates. In this 90 minute presentation, Jim demonstrates a step by step walk-through of how to use LinkedIn to source, connect and hire candidates.  If you want to see how effective Jim is at social marketing and SEO, Google “Jim Durbin Recruiter”!

LinkedIn is increasingly becoming the social network of choice for businesses and passive job-hunters.  In an age where e-mail and voicemail can easily be avoided, LinkedIn represents a new and exciting channel that many candidates prefer to use as an initial contact with recruiters. 

The Social Media Headhunter Series is a DVD training regimen based on live walkthroughs of social media tools.  Training is broken into easily understood chapters. 

Video playback by chapter allows for quick review of key points, giving the recruiter access to the information they most need.

Chapters for LinkedIn: The World's Database include:

1) Introduction to LinkedIn
2) Sourcing For Candidates
3) Connecting With Prospects: Messages That Work
4) Checking References Inside LinkedIn
5) LinkedIn Tools and Packages
6) The Salesman's Guide To LinkedIn
7) Do's And Don’ts Review
8) LinkedIn Marketing

LinkedIn has the potential to be a game changer in the recruiting field.  While most recruiters have signed up for LinkedIn, very few are using the site to hire more people.  Learn from one of the few trainers that runs a desk every day. 

Marketing And Advertising Search

I had the chance to speak with Jenny Meade of DF Bryant last week.  DF Bryant is a marketing and advertising executive search firm with a good pedigree and some smart people working for them.

We talked about using blogs as a passive candidate tool, something similar to Harry Joiner and his remarkably successful MarketingHeadhunter.com.

If you're in that space, or if you need to hire someone in that industry, Jenny certainly sounded like she knew what she was working on.  We hope to see a blog up of some kind, soon.

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Find more on diversity in the workplace at DiversityJobs.com.

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Finding jobs for people, not people for jobs...

by Doug Burris

Have you noticed how much attention candidate management has gotten recently?

Just to mention and credit a few of the better recent posts…

Lou Adler – The Elements of Applicant Control on ERE.net

Jason Davis – Getting Credit for a Candidate Submission on recruiting.com

Alison Boyce – 10 things candidates hate; 10 things they love on ERE.net

Jim Durbin – Questions for a candidate market on recruiting.com

Candidate management is the key to success these days. Candidates are getting increasing numbers of calls and being submitted to multiple opportunities and employers. We are hearing on a daily basis from candidates that it is obvious agencies are feeling the pressure of the market and their inability to find a deep pool of candidates for any position. This has once again become a game of speed of delivery and unfortunately we are hearing that the quality of candidate management is dwindling. Candidates are being submitted to positions they are not qualified for, without ever meeting a representative from an agency and are not being properly positioned for the interview. Ex. (Being submitted to a perm opportunity when they are only seeking contract roles, being submitted to .net architect positions with only 2 years development experience, etc.)

We are actively and constantly reviewing the historical needs of our clients, meeting with them to strategically plot out their hiring needs for the coming months and pro-actively sourcing/networking candidates to meet those needs.

The successful recruiter will already have a pipeline of candidates identified that fit the technical requirements, culture/environmental nuances and compensation window of their clients.  Being reactive to the client needs is no longer enough.  We must be ready to counsel our clients on the state of the candidate pool in their specific areas of business and pro-actively market talent to the potential hiring need.  Ex. To be seen as a business partner, you cannot merely have a list of your Top 5 .net developers available immediately. You must have those candidates screened for perm vs. contract, commuting limitations, a full skill set profile, identify candidate culture and environmental preferences that matches the culture of the clients, etc.  Recruiters and Account Managers need to be in lock step, determining why John Q Analyst is a fit for Acme Widgets and not a fit for Fred Farknuckle Inc, despite the fact they are both looking for IT Business Analysts.  You are wasting your time, and more importantly the candidates time, by throwing his resume at potential jobs you know they will not like.

The time of reactively searching for candidates upon requisition approval has passed.  We can no longer find people for jour jobs, we need to find jobs for our people.

Next: Making love to your candidates...even if you do not place them.

Buying AdSpace at KCRecruiting

Attention Recruiters:

25% of the readers that have come to KCRecruiting.com in the last two days come from search terms at google that say things like; List of KC Recruiters, KC Staffing firms, and KC recruiters.

When candidates are looking for a firm, how do they find you? 

Consider advertising here at KCRecruiting, with a targeted message and a blog expert who can help drive the right people to your recruiters.

The Buy AdSpace advertisement to the right will take you to StlRecruiting's advertising space - that's one of my other local blogs.  Blog advertising and SEO all wrapped up into one package - how can you resist?

The Problem of Timing

We like to think that staffing is the result of a carefully prepared plan of action that begins with identifying job requirements and budgets, and moves steadily through interviews to an offer and a start.  There is a sense that we somehow control the process, or that we can control the process without the circumstances of life interfering.

I have no official statistics, but I wonder how often chance is the biggest factor in employment.  Does the race go to the swiftest, or the luckiest?

Two top candidates are brought in for interviews.  One has a pipe burst in their kitchen in their home and gets only an hour of sleep the night before.  The second, less qualified candidate sleeps like a baby.  The sleep-deprived candidate is also a person of high moral standards, and makes no excuses for his interview.  The well-rested candidate doesn't do great, but how hard is it to beat someone who didn't sleep the night before?

Who gets the job in this case?  Or worse yet, what if the pipe bursting occurred at 8:00 and the first candidate has to cancel a 9:00 interview?

We get these stories all the time in staffing - parents dying, cars breaking down, flu striking a family and once, just once, an arrest following a bachelorette party.

As a hiring manager - what do you do?

Anecdotally, my experience is that when something is going bad, it tends to only get worse - so if a candidate has more than two misfires in the time I'm working with them, I'm real nervous about giving them a third chance.

It's not particularly fair, but in a business where intuition counts for so much - I've learned that disaster tends to breed disaster when you're living on the edge. And too many people are living on the edge.

Should we have disaster recovery plans for candidates?  And is our process geared towards finding the best candidate, or the one who is untouched by unkind Fate during the interview process?

We like to think that staffing is the result of a carefully prepared plan of action that begins with identifying job requirements and budgets, and moves steadily through interviews to an offer and a start.  There is a sense that we somehow control the process, or that we can control the process without the circumstances of life interfering.

I have no official statistics, but I wonder how often chance is the biggest factor in employment.  Does the race go to the swiftest, or the luckiest?

Two top candidates are brought in for interviews.  One has a pipe burst in their kitchen in their home and gets only an hour of sleep the night before.  The second, less qualified candidate sleeps like a baby.  The sleep-deprived candidate is also a person of high moral standards, and makes no excuses for his interview.  The well-rested candidate doesn't do great, but how hard is it to beat someone who didn't sleep the night before?

Who gets the job in this case?  Or worse yet, what if the pipe bursting occurred at 8:00 and the first candidate has to cancel a 9:00 interview?

We get these stories all the time in staffing - parents dying, cars breaking down, flu striking a family and once, just once, an arrest following a bachelorette party.

As a hiring manager - what do you do?

Anecdotally, my experience is that when something is going bad, it tends to only get worse - so if a candidate has more than two misfires in the time I'm working with them, I'm real nervous about giving them a third chance.

It's not particularly fair, but in a business where intuition counts for so much - I've learned that disaster tends to breed disaster when you're living on the edge. And too many people are living on the edge.

Should we have disaster recovery plans for candidates?  And is our process geared towards finding the best candidate, or the one who is untouched by unkind Fate during the interview process?

Interview with Doug Burris

I had the opportunity to interview Doug Burris and Grant Gordon of Intronic Solution Group on where their company is going and what makes them different in the recruiting space.

The interview is here at StlRecruiting.com

You ought to check out Doug's answers - we're working on adding him as an author to the KCRecruiting site, and you're going to hear more from him.