Agency and corporate recruiters have always had this love/hate relationship. It’s a sibling rivalry of sorts – in some cases each thinks the other doesn’t know what they’re doing. After 10+ years on the agency side, I have a great deal of admiration and respect for those that do it well. I also have a newfound respect for my corporate brothers and sisters as I enter my 7^th month on the dark side. I still maintain that recruiters shouldn't be allowed to go internal until they've…

I just love a happy ending. One of the great emotional payoffs of this business is how darn happy people are when you help them land their “dream job”. It’s even sweeter when someone overcomes the odds.

I sent an offer letter last week to a young lady who first applied to a position back in June. Six months ago. She got the standard rejection letter, someone else was hired for the job, and that’s the end. Or was it…? For Ann, it wasn’t. She knew she wanted to…

I just received an email from a staffing agency we asked to help us fill a position on a contingency basis. Our third party recruiter is a bit perturbed with us because several candidates have been submitted (some good, some not) and we haven’t interviewed any of them. Also, there have been some debates internally around paying a FT placement fee vs. contracting. I’m doing my best to keep our TPR up to date and informed but hey, sometimes things don't go according to plan. That’s…

My mother is on Facebook. I’ve been mildly amused by this until last week when that’s how I found out my mom lost her job. That’s right, my mom - who lives a mile away, who I see twice a week and talk to on the phone almost every day, told Facebook she got laid off before her recruiter daughter. My jaw dropped. My eyes watered. I immediately grabbed my phone and ran down the hall to call her. After two tries she finally picked up, in tears. My brother, 12 years younger…

Sometimes recruiting is just being in the right place at the right time. Oh, I know, it's lots of work and we have to be good with people, no fear of rejection, yada yada. But some days you just have to shake your head and thank your lucky stars that there is such a thing as pure dumb luck.

It's only Wednesday but so far I've had two insanely lucky breaks this week. Scenario #1 - after WEEKS of sourcing for a very tough to fill purchasing role I got a hit from a LinkedIn…

A completely unscientific poll indicates that amongst Zones recruiters I’m one of the more accessible. I tweet. I blog. I put my business cards in every fishbowl I can find (although I still haven’t won a free lunch). It probably comes as no surprise that somehow I ended up being the lucky internal recruiter who gets most, if not all of the agency cold calls. I wrote some time ago about why…

In honor of Thanksgiving here’s a brief tribute to a few of those who made “AlaRecruiter” possible. Now you know who to blame.

Justin – you were my first real recruiting boss. You taught me a very valuable lesson when you grabbed me by the shoulders and said “repeat after me – I f%^&$ed up.” Take the blame and move on – even if it really was the candidate’s fault. I’ve been doing it ever since. We laughed at you when you said you were going to be the…

I had an interesting conversation with a former candidate this week. This is someone who got the position I recruited him for and by all accounts is doing a fabulous job. Nothing unusual about that, until you understand that recruiting this candidate just about drove me nuts.

When I first sourced him, he was terrific. Had the skills and education (very specific, prestigious university grad) my client wanted. Excellent culture fit – really brought the right “start-up…

There is so much noise out there regarding the death of recruiting. We’ve got Social Media taking over. Recruitment 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4! LinkedIn will have all our jobs, but only until Facebook becomes the new job board. Thanks to Google +, any hiring manager with a computer can now search for candidates. Not only does this mean the end of recruiting agencies as we know them, but it’s only a matter of time before corporate recruiters start singing Danny Boy.

Give me a…

A Google search of “how to negotiate starting salary” netted just under 2 million results. 8 tips here, 6 steps there, all sorts of advice. For the most part, it sucks. There are some things I agree…

How many job applications are too many?  One night I was clicking around the blogosphere when I stumbled across an entry from July 2010 entitled Dear HR Pros, Be Transparent. This blog was written by a recent college grad and intern who was struggling with his job search. He thinks craigslist is a joke (don’t tell my boss, that’s where she found HER job). He wonders if…

This is not the blog you’re expecting.  I’m not going to talk about the hordes of unqualified candidates I get bombarded with.  I’m not going to discuss how hard it is to get a “passive” candidate to make a change out of fear of the unknown.  I refuse to debate the merits of 3^rd party recruiters and how some companies feel they don’t “need” TPRs because there are so many people out there dying to come to work for you.

No.  This blog is about how this recession has…

People are constantly asking me to “get them a job”.  Just yesterday I got a text from someone who heard I was recruiting for openings in Chicago.  It literally read “Sh!t! Get me a job!” (stay classy, ex-husband).

But wait, you say.  You’re a recruiter.  Your whole professional existence revolves around getting people jobs… right?

Not exactly.  A very smart boss once put it to me this way.  “I know you care a lot about getting people jobs.  That’s…

Last week, to put it mildly, was a difficult week.  Several weeks of sourcing, countless phone screens, a job description that changed more times than Lady Gaga changes hairstyles and a group of hiring managers that think they’re the Second Coming culminated in a hiring event on Thursday.  Six open positions and eight prescreened/qualified applicants.  The odds were in my favor, or so I thought.

By the end of the day I was feeling pretty good about what we had accomplished. …

Stumbled across this BNET article about what What Hiring Managers Really Look For.   Sure, there are lots of points made in the article I agree with, a few things I could probably argue against, but overall a decent read.  The author writes from his personal experience, and I have no doubt…

I’m not really a fan of job fairs.  We do attend, and have had some luck lately; but over the last 10+ years in recruiting that has been the exception, not the norm.  What I hate most about job fairs is talking to hundreds of people who are more interested in my squishy ball swag than my company and probably have no idea who we are or what we do.  I hate leaving job fairs with a box full of resumes that I will never look at again.  I also really hate never hearing back from the one or two…

Lemmings.  Junior HR twerps. Gatekeepers.  Obstacles.  Just plain “in-the-way-of-the-real-work-the-grown-ups-are-doing”.

Now before anyone starts setting the comment section on fire, please note that I am myself a corporate recruiter.  I don’t think I fall into ANY of those categories, nor do any of my excellent co-workers.  In fact, I work internally for one of the very few companies I would ever consider going in house for.  Many of these issues don’t apply to me, but some…

Fortunately I don’t get these very often… I’m one of a handful of recruiters and rather new to my company, so the vultures haven’t caught up with me yet.  However – earlier this week I had FOUR horrible voicemails in a row, from FOUR awful sales people.  Three agencies and a job board.  It went a little something like this –

“Hi Amy, this is (first name only) with (unintelligible company name).  I’m calling today to introduce you to my company.  We are the…

“I want people who are coming TO us, not running away from something bad.  You know, bad job, bad boss, they’re unemployed; I can find those people no problem.  I want people who WANT to work here.”

Interesting words spoken by one of my hiring managers during a recruiting meeting.  I was fresh off my blog “job seeking is a lot like dating” so naturally I’m picturing the goofs on The Bachelorette always running to each other… bad visual.  Then I really thought about what he…

There is a lot of well-intentioned advice cautioning job seekers from disclosing their salary history and / or requirements.  The wisdom (?) behind this is that you don’t want to get “low-balled” by asking for too little or be tagged over qualified by asking for too much.

So what’s the alternative?  Apparently you wait until the employer is ready to make an offer, and naturally you NEVER accept the first offer.  After all, who leaves money on the table,…