Holy Mackerel.  Talk about being rusty. 

My program on Day 1 and 2 has been to tackle all office things first thing and move on to my 30 day reboot-my-desk deal.  I get between 30 and 100 applicants each and every day.  I have to review each resume one-by-one.  It took seven hours on Memorial Day to get through about 240. 

These resumes are coming from all corners of the planet and only roughly 50% of them are remotely relevant to our industry.  Some may find this amazing but I do have recruiting buddies sprinkled around the country and I often share resumes with them expecting nothing in return. 

We have a morning meeting everyday at around 8:45AM and this allows us to go through some recruiting basics and talk about the *hot* JO's of the day.  At this time, we may build some pretty tight roll-up lists for recruiting and calling candidates.  We also kick off our office robot scraping the internet for industry contacts typically by name and title search.  Some e-mail blasts may go out.  Today I blew one out to 300 candidates for a cost estimating position located on the "east" end of metro-Detroit.  (Three candidates successfully surfaced and from a background stand-point are a 90%+ match.  I'm excited!)

Around 11AM yesterday and today, I was able to start marketing.  I do leave my inbox open throughout the day and parse out candidates to the various recruiters for screening.  This normally isn't too distracting. 

My marketing campaign started yesterday.  I crank phone calls into a company and target five departments:  Purchasing, Sales, Engineering, Laboratory, and Quality.  For each department, I attempt to contact two to three managers, hence 15 marketing calls per company.  So in our system, I only have to go back typically no more than 40 days to identify a marketable "real", "live" candidate to the client. 

The base marketing call is intended to intrigue the manager marketing some of the candidates successes, reason for looking, degree, and present income.  I never, ever disclose the candidate's identity.  Should the manager seek to see the candidate's resume, we always go back to the candidate to review the opportunity and company.  We NEVER EVER EVER send a resume for a "look-see". 

So let's go over some results for yesterday and today:  Nothing. Not a single returned call from 50 or so voice mail messages.  I connected with eight (yes, yes, only eight....sigh) and in every case exchanged e-mail contact information and I was sent on my way.  Every case it was exclaimed that there is no present opening.  Managers that I actually speak with are entered into our database as a matter of record.

This isn't fishing a dead spot.  I know this.  This is recruiting heartburn.  Something's gonna hit.  I am mentally preparing for a big day tomorrow and on Friday I'll start marketing much earlier.  See, we close our office at 3PM each Friday as our own small celebration that we worked hard. 

Day 2.  Out!  Time to go watch the Wings play the Blackhawks...game 7.  Gonna be a nail biter.

Cheers - Steve!