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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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!
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?
