The other day I remembered that I applied for a contract recruiter role at Amazon 5 years ago and heard nothing back.

If that wasn’t bad enough, now I’m going to have to stop buying books from them.

Because that’s what a bad candidate experience requires me to do. Apparently.

What I’m really trying to say here is that candidates need to grow a…

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Back in the day, just before and during the early days of the Internet, I used to write job copy. I generated about 90% of my fees by selling this to my clients.

I’d produce a great display ad - probably not always as great as what the client would get from a decent creative ad agency, but miles better than anything produced by any other recruitment…

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It’s kind of funny that recruiters are often considered to be “too salesy”.

I suspect what people mean when they describe agency recruiters this way is that they act like salespeople. That they display all of the hackneyed stereotypes that are associated with salespeople – or more accurately, bad salespeople.

Great salespeople don’t display these characteristics, because of the very fact that they are great…

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Lesson 1 – Don’t die

This one’s a piece of piss. Somewhere close to 99.9% of us will wake up tomorrow, so the stats back-up how easy this one is.

Lesson 2 – Become famous

When people you’ve never met die and you can’t go anywhere without someone mentioning it, that normally means they’re famous.

So there’s lesson…

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As Barry Flack opens with in his excellent blog The slow death of employee engagement, there are few people who think that having an engaged and motivated workforce isn’t a good thing.

The problem is, as Barry points out, the concept is very new and with the exception of a few…

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This is a fairly consistent opinion of most agency recruiters and is, for the most part, only partly true.

Unfortunately, most buyers of recruitment agency services wish it wasn’t true at all.

That’s not because these buyers don’t like being sold to – many of them do, because buying the right stuff is part of their job and one of the ways they add value to their…

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There are two polar opposites on the ‘How To Fill A Job’ spectrum.

At Point A you have the scenario where you have to do a lot of work, from defining the brief, getting the comms done, speaking to lots of candidates, interviewing, organising the admin and managing the offer.

At Point Z you have the scenario where you submit a candidate you’ve never met,…

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Why would anyone want to post a blog here at recruitingblogs and then censor any comments it might attract?

Wouldn't that change this site from one where people engage, to one where people just broadcast?

The author of this blog has chosen to delete comments.

I doubt there is a better way of illustrating that the argument presented in your…

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More here..

http://www.fordyceletter.com/2013/07/30/what-a-brit-has-to-say-about-american-recruiting-practices/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+fordyceletter+%28The+Fordyce+Letter%29

Does he have a point or is he basing his…

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Practically every single company I’ve ever seen cited by all the social media/employer branding experts as a model in recruitment excellence have been a massive multinational with an almost omnipresent consumer brand.

Are you going to pick-up any useful scraps from the big boy’s table about how you can recruit better from reading any of these…

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Most of the recruitment training content I’ve seen seems to simply reinforce the behaviours that has helped create the state the agency recruitment market finds itself in today.

Cold-Calling (or Business Development as many seem to prefer calling it) is a popular training area – and if there is anything more circular that teaching recruiters to…

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Ever seen those training providers that promise to help you unlock the secrets to cold-calling? 

Most of the time this “secret” turns out to be something inane like sounding really happy when you make the call or only doing it when the sun’s shining.

What seems to drive of most of the recruitment sales training I’ve ever seen is the fact that cold-calling is an omnipresent part of a recruiter’s life - and so they had better get good at it.

Frankly, I think that’s…

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The author of this blog has chosen to delete comments.

I doubt there is a better way of illustrating that the argument presented in your blog post has absolutely no intellectual rigour, than deleting comments.

And for the record, the two comments that were deleted (so far) were:

1) Suggesting that it…

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Bear with me on this one.

 

It must be searingly obvious to anyone who works in recruitment that recruitment agencies (and more specifically the people therein) are receiving a lot of flak at the moment – most of it around their oafish sales tactics and their diminishing ability to deliver a viable recruitment service to either the company or the candidate.

 

With the advent of the Internet came a lot of predictions that it would spell the end of recruitment…

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The exclamation mark is known informally as a bang or a shriek. It’s frequently used in fiction and then mostly to express strong feeling in spoken dialogue.

 

There are broadly 3 types of people who use exclamations marks when writing:

1. Amateurs
2. Children
3. Fashion Journalists

Clients don’t want their recruitment agencies to be any of these things – which makes the fact that some consistently use exclamation marks in their job…

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I rarely ever hear of medium to large sized SMEs ever attempting to develop any kind of 'employment brand' or being bothered about their employer reputation. I also hardly ever see any evidence of it in any of the recruitment communications that these companies put out.



Amazingly, they then compound the problem by treating those applicants who do respond to their self-indulgent job announcements/Internet postings, with very little respect. These applicants are people who invariably… Continue