To many in the business world, recruiters are the cowboys of the wild west, swaggering into the bar, a cocky tilt to their hat, six shooters blazing, while HR the barkeep stands protectively behind the bar,  dressed in conservative fashion, running a tidy shop, trying to conserve the peace and keep any ruffians under control.

 

Below is a tongue and cheek…

Continue

I see so many companies waste a ton of money and time on advertisements , job boards, ATS’s , specialized databases,  magazine placements, search firms and much more but they neglect the most powerful tool at the disposal of corporate HR”s arsenal: “the employee referral program". Dont' get me wrong we sometime need to use everyone of these approaches to find talent but…

Continue

It was rather a fluke that I found out that private investigators make great sourcers. I had been working for a large multinational who's CEO had asked me to check on a couple of recent employees who had flown the coup to join some optical networking start-ups.

 

The thought was that they had taken intellectual property with them and the CEO wanted to see if I…

Continue

I recently did some work for a large retailer who’s executives kept talking about increasing their customer base and of course their profits. While conductiong  a recruitment audit it was clear that all candidate tracking was being done on spreadsheets with zero candidate follow- up unless the candidate was the chosen one of the day. When I suggested to senior executives that they should follow- up on each and every resume with at least an automated response thanking candidates for their…

Continue

Seems so simple but very few companies seem willing to act on one of the leading causes of why good candidates do not want to work for their company: incompetent and unprofessional managers. Believe me word gets around and when it does it sure makes a recruiter and human resource's task more difficult.

I cannot tell you how many times I have received calls or emails from great potential candidates about the terrible experiences they have had during an interview. Managers endlessly…

Continue

What’s the percentage of hires to resumes in your company in a given year? I bet you’d be surprised to hear that it’s on average only about five percent. So that means that 95% of the resumes you receive are not part of your companies recruitment strategy. Many great hires could not be made because candidates turned down your offers due to compensation, job location, lack of interest in…

Continue

Early on in my career when I was responsible for Nortel Networks recruiting I was approached by top sales executives to find out how I could help them win a key telecom account worth millions possibly billions in revenue.

The account was held by Cisco and the customer loved the Cisco sales executive and sales engineer  that supported them. The team, lets call…

Continue

I am always amazed when I am approached by a client who has a retention problem. It’s always interesting to note that they have not dealt with some of the small things that can be done to somewhat lock the door from the barbarians at the gate, those pesky headhunters.

Rule #1: Make sure employee/telephone directories are not available for download and make it extremely difficult for anyone including employees to print or copy it. It’s incredible how…

Continue