Amitai Givertz’s Recruitomatic Blog

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A Contrarian View of Life in the Recruitosphere

Recruiter Training: Online Threats, Swamis and Promiscuity

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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Memo to Mr. Zappe: It’s called “Bait and Switch”

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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Looks Like Training…Not!

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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Material Damage, Collateral That Is

Rogue recruiter and sausage salesman David Perry was nice enough to include me as one of the co-authors in his recently published, run-away best-seller, Guerrilla Marketing for Job Seekers 2.0. Yowzer!

If you’re lucky enough you might still pick up a copy on Amazon.com. If you’re really, really lucky you won’t need to.

The chapter I wrote is entitled Guerrilla Googling and the Job Hunters’ Dashboard.

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The Unknown Cybersleuth

John Sumser’s controversial post Digging Into RecruitingBlogs.com v2.08: The Death of Sourcing has has inspired a great debate about the state of our industry and the area of specialization we call “Sourcing.”

John suggests that “Former sourcing luminaries will be familiarizing themselves with the alarm on the French fry machine and the relative difference between Rare, Medium and Well done.”

Oh, dear.

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Recruiting 2.0 – The Flow of Information

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…

My Job: A Description of Failure

I thought Lou Adler’s recent post Why You Must Eliminate Job Descriptions was interesting, didn’t you? You did read it, right?

I know I shouldn’t generalize but I can’t help myself in pointing out that readers of online recruiting stuff fall into one of three categories:

  • The first are those who scan the content, hardly pay attention to it and leave feeling that they have just made an earnest attempt to improve their effectiveness as recruiters. In so doing, they believe they actually have;
  • The second are those who read the content and decide as a result to act on it — invariably doing nothing;
  • Third are those who mean to read their favorite gurus, get distracted and never come back, missing something that might help them become more successful — like understanding why we get distracted in the first place.

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The 2008 Recruiting Landscape

Read my take for the coming year just published by ZoomInfo

Amitai offers a different take, predicting that early adopters of social media for recruiting will remain in the minority. Too few frontline recruiters will risk the perils of transparency in corporate environments that need to mitigate risk and innovation and apply bottom-line metrics instead. As the economics of recruiting come under closer scrutiny with a softening economy and an inability to quantify the ROI on social media, there will be a slowdown in the rate of adoption by recruiters.

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Social Media and Recruiter Babble: Going Up!

Bill Vick gave an excellent — albeit abbreviated — presentation last week at John Sumser’s Dallas Recruiting Roadshow. It was interesting on many levels. Taking the elevator up, first floor…

Bill’s presentation introduced “bleeding edge” technology to recruiters who by and large — by their own show of hands — were hemorrhaging on old notions of how to use the Internet. It was that that was was most interesting to me. I wondered, “Is the so-called war for talent going to be won with what most recruiters are currently equipped with?” I don’t think so.

Mezzanine level, going up: On the topic of the importance of online profiles — why recruiters should have them, how they are used in recruiting, and how they will be used in the future — Bill made an interesting comment, something to the effect that the day is coming that everything that could be known about a person will be available for anyone to sniff out online. Hmmm…that may have some downside, don’t you think?

First floor: Listening to Bill, I was reminded of a couple of things taken off my morning reader earlier in the year. The first was a post by John Sumser on ERN called More About Search and the other was posted on Proverbs31 titled He Knows My Name. Somewhere there was a stream of conciousness that went from technology for recruiters to playing cards to house of cards to, well, frankly I don’t remember — I’ll have to read the posts again!

Second floor: Somehow in that flow of confused recollection I concluded that in what Bill was suggesting — our being sorted according to relative value [good deeds] and reputation [good name], and all that for some omnipresent recruiters’ advantage — it would be just as well to remember what happened the last time tried to create such a thing — a whole heap of confusion!

Roof top parking: Just a thought.

Just Another Brick in the Wall

How out of synch are employers with the next-generation workforce when our schools are so out of synch with their students?

In the same way as brick-and-mortar schools can barely contain a wireless generation how well are they preparing them for future jobs the likes of which we haven’t imagined yet?


[Can't see the video? Click here to view on YouTube]

How many entry-level job descriptions read like they were scratched out on chalkboards, the required skills, competencies, attitudes and what-have-you reminiscent of workplaces that predate Google?

I wonder.

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