You just got off the phone from a Client who has not had the need to call you in 8 months as they only call you if, and only if they really need your help. Your Client has just won a huge 3 year implementation project where they are going to need an army of technical resources to include: Project Managers, Developers, Business and Systems Analysts, QAs and System Admin folks with specialized skills.

You scramble back to your Recruitment Team jumping over desks and chairs (like Vin Diesel in the Movie Boiler Room this is a must watch movie for Recruiters) to call a job requirement meeting with your Recruitment Team of 12 Recruiters which are divided into 3 Teams: the (A) Team- your hardcore real old school – back in the day ``give me a phone and a list of companies to go pull from`` types. Your (B) team – great dependable web (and, Boolean search) surfers who will post the Jobs on the Job Boards and wait for the avalanche of unqualified resumes to come crashing through their mail boxes- they troll the job boards like crab and shrimp fishermen day in and day out. And, Your (C) team – a modern bunch, they utilize Social Media tools liked LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, they join specialized technical groups more importantly they combine the techniques and skills of teams A and B.

This is a pretty powerful group - with a strong Recruitment Strategy in place they could put together a solid pool of candidates. The trail to qualified candidates for each of these teams will be different.

If we dig a little further, Team (A)’s strategy is really simple and direct: Identify the skills, identify where those skills are being utilized, usually at the Client’s competition, devise a plan of entry -break in to target Companies, find that core team, pitch them, bring them in. Will they get “Qualified Candidates” ...? This team should get their man (or Woman) atleast 80% of the time...

The (B) team after job board posting they arrive the next day with truck loads of unqualified resumes to sift through and sort out – they also have to check their existing databases to see if they don’t already have qualified candidates ... So after spending 20 years (my expression for a long time) sorting through all the resumes they come up with a few good men that are close to the mark but not dead on – ofcourse, this team knows that everyone knows atleast 10 other people in their professional circle so on to the phones to get these folks in, get references and ask for referrals smart digging leads to “qualified candidates” eventually ...

Now for the (C) team ... They have also identified from a prepared search strategy where these candidates exist –they hop on to LinkedIn ferociously, to see if any of these profiles fit the description, and hoping these potential candidates also find it necessary to be publicly exposed ... They discover, the companies their potential candidates are currently employed at; lots of professionals to their surprise, Project Managers, System and Business Analysts, QAs, Hooo Rayyyyy ....

Celebrations it seems, need to be delayed, the Project Managers don’t exactly have the Six Sigma experience needed, or the QA ‘s don’t have large enterprise implementation testing experience. They hit the technical specialized groups, they re- drive web traffic back to their job site descriptions and comb through facebook. They have a few streams to pool from, -now it's over to the phones to qualify these candidates. This is the quest...

The direct approach, Job board Surfing, and plugging into Social Media Networks – this describes the trails we take. An intelligent combination of these methods is where this industry’s future is heading.

Our Clients are watching ...