As I was reading the latest edition of the Kansas City Business Journal I ran across an article that just cracked me up so I thought I'd share some observations and thoughts about it. The headline reads "Hesse: Time to dial up some hometown loyalty". Dan Hesse is the latest CEO to be appointed to try and right the Sprint ship. Sprint is based in KC and over the past 8 years I've seen them burn through 3 executive teams, watched their stock drop like a meteor, layoff literally tens of thousands… Continue

Domain names are cheap. Websites are pretty easy to develop. There's a proliferation of sites in the social & professional networking scene that allow fairly lengthy profiles to be built. Recruiters are using all of these media to dig deeper into our candidates lives already. We all know this stuff. The question is, when do you think document that we know now will replaced as the "king of resumes"? I don't think they'll ever completely go away, but there is a time in the not so distant… Continue

I'm reading a book called Starbucked right now - it's the story of the little coffeshop in Seattle. There's a some things that we recruiters can learn from how Howard Schultz ran his company and grew it from a small niche coffeeshop to the corporate juggernaut that it is today.



Starbucks delivered quality coffee in an era when the coffee in the US was terrible and had been for decades. The majors used lots of low quality "robusta" beans to supplement the "arcadia" beans that make up… Continue

I love "My Name is Earl" - so much so that I named our new puppy Karma. I am not a believer in karma but I do believe that God's ways can be viewed as karma. I could go into the theological reasoning behind that but that's not important right now. Call it karma if you want, no sooner did I post my last blog about things not being so bad I went to my inbox and was linked to this article…



Continue

This doesn't have a lot to do with recruiting, other than to help me through an attitude adjustment and maybe provide some perspective for 2008 which has been a rough year. It seems the daily grind hasn't been this tough since 2001/2002. I've been moping around for about 90 days because business is off which means the paycheck is down and expenses are up (I never thought I'd have to spend $80 to fill a minivan full of gas). It's tight - I'm sure you can relate. And when it gets tight the…

Continue

I had a breakfast interview with a candidate at IHOP this week. I went back yesterday because I thought I had left my glasses behind. Turns out I didn't forget my glasses, but I did forget to pay my bill. It was my first "dine and dash" interview. Give it a try sometime. :-)

I think I learned something this morning. I'm not a programmer by any stretch of the imagination. I understand how to use the 4 BASIC html tags (bold, italic, underline, bullets) - that's it. Being a guy that has recruited computer programmers for the past 8 years I've had numerous candidates ask me if I write code. The only code I know how to write is igpay atinlay. So here it goes, if I have a live link in the next sentence then I officially have learned one more programming trick. Ready? (Oh… Continue

I read an article by Debra Walker at NetTemp's Crossroads Newsletter titled the "Ten Things a Recruiter will never tell you". Naturally I was curious, since I consider myself a fairly open book and am not afraid to discuss much of anything with a candidate. I still can't figure out how to paste a link into this blog, so my apologies for you having to cut and paste this into a browser: http://www.net-temps.com/adcgi/banner.cgi?ref=crnews&ch=2885&id=crs_2885.



Here's the Ten… Continue

I hesitated posting this because I'm complaining and I don't like to complain (at least not publically). But I know I'm not the only recruiter out there with this problem so I thought it might not be a bad idea to start a dialogue.



Ok, so what's this pet peeve of mine? Resumes. More specifically, poorly constructed resumes. Even more specifically, poorly constructed resumes being used by third party agencies primarily marketing sponsored candidates. Let me quickly state that this… Continue

I'm really starting to enjoy my venture into using the collberative nature of Web 2.0 to increase my network as well as knowledge. Today in one of the ERE discussion threads I follow there was a link to one of Shally Steckerl's podcasts - this one related to using the new "Company Profile" feature of LinkedIn that allows you to get all sorts of good information about a company from LinkedIn. You can see who they've recently hired, who's been promoted, what companies people come from and go to… Continue

I've talked to several of my contemporaries over the past couple of weeks and the consensus was Q1 was not great for the IT Staffing business. Many of us haven't recovered from the usual drop in headcount at the end of the year and are wondering when things will start to recover. We've seen a couple of clients start to pick up and I am hopeful that Q2 isn't the disaster (maybe too strong a word - struggle?) Q1 was. I will stick with disaster personally because yesterday we were forced to cut 2… Continue

Sometimes you just have to laugh at how people approach trying to secure employment. The following was posted at the top of a candidate's resume on Dice:



No Recruiters, DIRECT HIRE ONLY!



If you are a recruiter or work for a recruiting company, please read carefully.



You DO NOT have permission to submit me to jobs EVER!



You DO NOT have permission to add my information to your database.



If I find out that you have used my name or resume… Continue

You just got an offer for the services of your consultant from two clients - now what? Well first off this is a good problem to have - it shows that you're doing a good job assessing talent. But this situation does need to be handled delicately from many aspects, especially when there are multiple salespeople & clients involved.



From the client perspective we've got a "first right of refusal policy" that basically says first company to interview gets 24 hours to offer before… Continue

Maybe it's just me, but my Sales 101 class told me that if you leave a message 80% of the time you're not going to get a call back. Rather than listen to our team lament about how people don't call back I decided to ask a few pointed questions. Question one was "are you making more than one attempt?" and their answer told me I didn't need to ask any more questions. So I implemented a procedure using our ATS to increase our call back hits & wanted to share it with you.



First off,… Continue

Call me old fashioned, but I don't have a MySpace page. I started one several years ago to blog on, but closed it because I just didn't find any value in a professionally focused MySpace page. That also was about the time I ran into LinkedIn which to me was a more valueable professional networking tool. So I'm just scratching the surface of the Web 2.0 scene outside LinkedIn - a rookie if you will. That's why I'm going to get involved in more blogging and reading this site, ERE.net,… Continue

I met with a candidate this week - very nice fellow. Was engaging in the interview, able to articulate his background quite well, seemed to be someone that likes to go above and beyond, good image / body language / eye contact and just left me with an overall positive impression. We quizzed him about his education and he seemed offended that we'd have the audacity to ask a question about his educational credentials. That's where it all went south. It's right there on the paper - see - it says… Continue

I read a blog today that threw out the "BIG R" word - it posed the question "so, are we in a recession". So what do I think? Q1 certainly didn't set the world on fire for us. We're a contingency IT services firm in the midwest. We service a variety of industries but two of them are "early adoptors" of a recession (marketing agency & print/publishing). Both are struggling to hit numbers.

So, are we in a recession or not? I'll tell you at the end of Q2.