Differentiate Yourself OR Die

Why differentiate yourself as a recruiter

As I was going through the slideshare presentation titled “Start-up of You” by Reid Hoffman, slide 21 really made me stop and think for a moment as it provided only two options: differentiate or die.

If you think about it, it’s so relevant to you as a recruiter or a recruiting leader who is trying to win the war on talent for hard-to-fill positions. In the process of winning this war, you can either differentiate yourself & win or die in the battle. The choice is yours.

This particular war on talent is won every day by a very few recruiters who know and have mastered over time how to harness the power of key Social Media platforms including Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus to source top talent within 48 hours.

But the vast majority of recruiters and recruiting leaders (97%) still think they can get away without investing time and money into learning how to actually do social recruiting to get an ROI in just 6 months. Is that you?

No worries, we’ve all been there. It’s not your fault.

Now what’s at stake here?

“For many people twenty years of experience is really one year of experience repeated twenty times”. - Andy Hargadon

In other words, if you’re just doing recruiting or filling jobs with active candidates for twenty years, you’re highly replaceable by your company. Sorry to break this to you but ask yourself sincerely, “can anyone do my job?”

If your answer is “yes”, then you’re at the mercy of your employer. How does it feel? Not good, right?

The good news is you can change that starting this week. Differentiate yourself or die.

Build something from the ground up in the space of social recruiting to source passive candidates so your employer may value you more, give you more opportunities and treat you differently.

Pick one social media platform and become an expert in it to differentiate yourself from every other recruiter in the industry who’s just recruiting active candidates through applicant tracking systems.

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Comment by Keith D. Halperin on November 12, 2013 at 4:49pm: Thanks, Shahid. Please describe what you do to quickly get a sufficient number of qualified active candidates using FB and Twitter.

Are you speaking about the pro-Nazi Henry Ford? In a letter written in 1924, Heinrich Himmler (head of the SS) described Ford as "one of our most valuable, important, and witty fighters."^{[(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford).}

Jerry has a good point., and I'd enjoy hearing anyone talk about quick and efficient SNR without including LI (which is just a giant resume bank w.o. contact info).

Good discussion, Shahid.

-kh

Comment by Shahid Wazed on November 12, 2013 at 5:48pm: For sure Keith, love these discussions as we always learn something new!

Anyway, very quickly let's say I've an accounting position to fill right now.

I could do any of the following on Twitter:

- Identify the right hashtags (i.e. #cga, which stands for Certified General Accountant in Canada) to see if I can identify few candidates going through past few conversations for the last 3 days. I just did that search by the way and found this tweet:

So if I were actually looking to hire a certified accountant, I would definitely reach out to @sharribobo14 right now and see if the person is interested in pursuing my job opportunity further. I'd follow the person on Twitter and wait for the person to follow me back. If not, google the person to see where else the person exists. So long as I get the person's current employer name, I can guess the person's work email address using "*@company.com/ca" on Google. Then get in touch and market the position to the person and see what happens.

- Dig the follower base of Accounting associations and accounting based companies as their followers will most likely be accountants.

- You can also dig wefollow.com with the keyword "accounting" and that's where you'll find many hire-able accountants in the States.

As for Facebook, you could do the following:

- Identify the companies you want to recruit from

- Use graph search to pull the exact candidates

- Contact them via Facebook or Linkedin or direct work email or phone - your choice.

- Then market your job to the person in the best way possible so the person is curious enough to explore it further.

Hope this adds to the discussion. Thank you Keith!

Comment by Keith D. Halperin on November 12, 2013 at 6:56pm: Thank you, Shahid. This is very helpful. Wouldn't it be quicker to look on LI and look for CGAs in the Greater Edmonton area and then either use Mailtester or go to the folks who charge USD$100 for up to 100 LI Profile emails/and or phone numbers? There's also a tool you can use if you don't have LIR that searches LI from the outside, though it's no where near as good as having LIR access, it's only about USD $70/mo, IMSM. Or go here: http://www.needanaccountant.org/Search.aspx?Location=Edmonton_AB.,l call the people and ask for referrals. My point these SNR may work, but not as quickly as other methods.

-kh

Comment by Shahid Wazed on November 12, 2013 at 7:13pm: You're very welcome Keith or I should say "I know you'll do the same for someone else" :) Just learned this today from an article on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20131112175357-69244073... .

Anyway, thanks for the pointer, I'll definitely check Mailtester out, thanks so much!!

As for finding candidates on LI, of course, that's given but one can fill positions with Facebook & Twitter as well :)

Have a wonderful evening Keith,
Shahid

Comment by Keith D. Halperin on November 13, 2013 at 1:10pm: Thanks, again, Shahid. I like Ciadini's work, too- very applicable to our business.

I think I won't say: You'll do the same for me." or "You'll do the same for someone else." I'll say: "You'll do the same."

-Cheers,

Keith

Comment by Sandra McCartt on November 15, 2013 at 4:52pm: Let me save you about a week of digging around on twitter and facebook and other social sites. Start with this group of people and develop your contacts.

http://www.cga-ontario.org/About_Us/Association_Officers.aspx