Amitai Givertz’s Recruitomatic Blog

Some books are simply indispensable. One such classic is How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff. I have had one of the over million copies sold on my desk since I first acquired a tatty secondhand paperback  in 1978. Of course, that’s when content was king and influence was measured in royalties, reprints and guest appearances on the Russell Harty Show.

I was reminded of what a useful reference that book is when I happened on Social Media Saturday: Who Are The HR Bloggers? posted by Laurie Ruettimann on her blog,  The Cylindrical Girl.

Social Media Saturday: Who Are The HR Bloggers? features an infographic that visualizes a survey of HR bloggers, presumably those listed in the day’s prior post  Ultimate HR/Career Blog List for 2011: V3.0.

Credit goes to Ms. Ruettimann’s lucky intern, comrades in marketing at Starr Tincup, for an otherwise delightfully decorative piece. And full props to Ms. Ruettimann for filing both posts under General Nonsense, even if it is, as seems to be the case, her popular site’s default category.

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Recruitopian Footnotes [April 7, 2011]

1. Can you tell the difference between a) a donkey and a horse; and b) a candidate and an applicant? Calling all readers, Sharlyn Lauby — The HR Bartender — needs you!
2. Are recruiters idiots? Candidates say, “Yes,” applicants say, “No.” Suzanne Lucas — Evil HR Lady — says, “Maybe.” And what say you?
3. If 84% of employees are looking to change jobs I think we can safely say that employers’ retention policies may need updating, don’t you? “Fire the manager with the lowest retention” and other let-me-eat-my-arm morsels – in a beautifully bound eBook — courtesy of Ben Eubanks — upstartHR. Whatever…

Recruiting.com has gone through many changes in the years since Jason Davis and friends put recruiting blogs on the map. So many in fact that keeping up with it has become quite a bore.

Despite this being possibly one of the most coveted domain names in the industry, like one of the corpses laid to rest in a Varanasi gutter, Recruiting.com has become one of those things stepped over by most everyone.

Long forgotten for its contributions to humanity, the drama of blogging CEOs, the experimentation with formats, threats of lawsuits, Canadian headhunters, and assorted industry louts, Recruiting.com has been reduced to a shell with no soul.

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It is a well known trick that has been spun out a million times before: announce bad news on Fridays. Not that the highly anticipated HRExaminer Top 25 HR Influencers List published today should be viewed as bad news. To the contrary. The list of seasoned blogebrities and HR A-listers is wonderful news for both the influential elite and those of us who are proud to be among the industry’s most easily led.

I am afraid that the bad news today emanates from me, yours truly. But please, don’t shoot the messenger.

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Recruitopian Footnotes [March 24, 2011]

1. Is “social recruiting” really such a new idea? I think not. After all, affiliate marketers [read: MLM] have been at it for years. Taking self-reference and self-fulfilling prophecy to the next multi-level…Black Belt Recruiting. Some lessons for us all.
2. So, you think “Sourcing Samurai” Glen Cathey can slice through the data on LinkedIn, huh? Think twice, no, three times: Understanding Web 3.0 as Data: Reid Hoffman, Founder LinkedIn.

   Conclusion: If Glen Cathey is an authority on LinkedIn it might just be question of semantics…if you know what I mean.

3. And now for something completely different…Cited in a social recruiting editorial, Florida is, indeed, among the best places to live and work:

   “We have all kinds of corruption, violence and scumbaggery. The 9/11 terrorists trained here. Bush read My Pet Goat here. Our elections are colossal cluster#@!*$s”

   And to think, I came from missing TruLondon to living in paradise…mind the gap! Personality matters more than platforms

I came across a rather curious feed today, all the more intriguing to find the post ResuWe Employer charges applicants $25 to apply for jobs had, apparently, been removed. I wondered if the author and vested interest, Dan Boersma, had second thoughts about posting dubiously self-serving drivel, or if this was an indulgence of a different kind.

Before a comment of my own, and in fairness to Mr. Boersma who I don’t know from Adam, here is the departed post in its entirety

“In an effort to cut down on the significant increase in unqualified candidate traffic, ResuWe Employer companies can charge job seekers $25 to apply to a job.  ResuWe Employer clients have been asking for this feature to reduce the time required to sift through countless resumes and to ensure each job applicant is pre-qualified.

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Industry patriarch and beloved Dumbledorian John Sumser posts on HRExaminer another in his series on branding: Traffic Development. What follows will make more sense if you begin by reading John’s post and our exchange of comments. You may also want to use the restroom first.

I spent a good amount of time trying to post what follows to the original post in reply to a rebuff from John.  To no avail. Apparently a plug-in on John’s site may have become unplugged. Feel free to post your comments here or there, at this point it may not matter.

Anyway, reluctant to break the thread, or retire for the night with this undone, here is my closing argument…

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John Sumser poses some interesting questions in a post on HRExaminer: Structural Unemployment in HR , commenting:

The market will face a dichotomy: a surplus of people with HR resumes and a shortage of people with the right skills. This is how structural employment looks within a single discipline.

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Presented at ClickThru 2008 Online Recruitment Advertising Seminar. Shannon Seery Gude shares her insight, intelligence and experience in this primer for social recruiting:

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As of the time of this writing there are somewhere between 10-20,000 online threats associated with recruiter training, maybe more. I should know. Not only have I been responsible for developing my own ingenious countermeasures to  threats like Threat 1158: “Hey Buddy, can you spare a dime-a-dozen Boolean string for my [fill in the blank] search?”, and Threat 3823: “I tweet therefore I am #socialrecruiting,” but I may have authored a few threats of my own.

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Thank you Mr. Zappe for pointing to TalentHole in your recent ERE article Have Your Problem Employee Removed and Get a T-Shirt. I share your disappointment that the service is a bait and switch, outplacement not replacement being the cuckoo here.

Back in the early 1980′s I worked for a London-based subsidiary of  NYNEX. The banking system sales were large and complex. There were many people in the prospects’ organization who could scupper a sale and for any number of reasons. We called them Heretics. It was not an uncommon practice when a heretic became a problem that a City-headhunter was called in to hire that person out of the organization, greasing the skids for an easier, highly profitable outcome. As I recall that practice was called, ironically, bait and switch.

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In reply to John Sullivan’s recent come-to-Jesus diatribe, Five Ugly Numbers That You Can’t Ignore – It’s Time to Calculate Hiring Failures on ERE.net, John Sumser now asks on HR Examiner: “Why not give the whole problem over to the training folks?”

For starters, I’m not sure changing scapegoats addresses the underlying problem.  There really is very little difference between abdicating responsibility to trainers for recruiting excellence — or whatever standard we used to aspire to — to  expecting “recruiters” to stop buckling under the weight of a hiring manager’s passed buck.

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