Need some Recruiting & Sourcing Juice to get you going these days? Feel like you’re connecting with lots of people in the Talent Pool, but they’re not yielding the information you’d like (referrals, intel, leads, “word on the street”, etc.)? Perhaps it’s time to step back and think about the structure of the Talent Pool itself . . .
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.
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.
Recruitopian Footnotes [October 26, 2009]
Here are the slides from my presentation for the Human Capital Institute and the first in their Talent Acquisition Learning Track which is sponsored by Trovix.
I am answering some of the questions from attendees here, in the comments. Feel free to chip in.
Don’t miss Jim Durbin and his webcast Talent Scouting and Social Networking: The New Employee Referral Program on Tuesday, February 19th, also for HCI. Register here…
As a child, I remember being amused for hours by the fish in Mrs. Frostick’s pond. I can’t recall what species they were, but I do recall that when I dropped a small blob of bread in the water the fish would all make a mad dash to the surface and frantically splash around. The writhing would subside until another blob of bread was dropped in and the wriggling and splashing would resume. What fun!
I want to thank Dave Lefkow for reconnecting me to this wonderful childhood memory. In his article Why They Hate Recruiting he references a piece published last year in Fast Company. The work was entitled: Why We Hate HR, and at the time it generated its own feeding frenzy of comments and debate. The blob of bread Dave dropped in the pond has again provoked the same frantic reaction. And it is as amusing as it was the first time round.
Please don’t get me wrong. Of course we should be debating issues relating to HR, recruiting, strategy, C-level engagement, strategic direction, the whole megillah. But we should also be conscious of what’s really going on here – here in the pond.
As I reflect on my childhood experience, I wonder whether feeding Mrs. Frostick’s fish was the real attraction for me, or the realization that I – Son of Man – had the power to turn this splish-splashing on and off at will. I conclude it must have been the latter. It didn’t take me long to realize that a glob of spit would have the same effect as a blob of bread. The fish never had a clue.
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