Archive for September, 2008

It ain’t Utopia

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008

Go Google your company. I’ll wait.

How many hits did you get?  My company had about 38,000. Now I love my company, but there is no way that there are 38,000 cool or even uncool things to say about it. I Google’d some of our competitors and they had similar results and there definitely aren’t that many things to say about them.

So what is going on here? It is job postings that have been multiplying like rabbits out there in the rat’s nest of job boards. I am not sure how it actually happens, but I found job postings for my company on boards I didn’t even know existed. Good news is we didn’t pay for them. Bad news is that they were old. Really old. We got a call last week for a job order that we had closed two years ago! The poor woman who called was so excited about the opportunity that when I told her the opening had closed, she yelled at me. I informed her that we don’t actually control all the content on the web, Bill Gates does. She felt much better because everyone already has their opinion and hates Microsoft for some reason.

The job boards certainly serve a purpose. The main ones (Monster, Yahoo/HotJobs, CareerBuilder) are so entwined with most company’s recruiting processes that you would be silly not to look there, but man you have to plow through a bunch of trash to get to jobs you are really interested in. Not to mention the ads everywhere.

Perhaps worse is that recruiters are a little sick of plowing through resumes like you are sick of plowing through job postings.

Imagine if you will, job openings coming to you. Imagine recruiters giving you some feedback. Imagine your friends happy about your new job and not envious. It ain’t Utopia, but you can see it from there. Standby. We are getting closer.

Buzz This     Tweet This Tweet this

Tags: ,
Posted in General | No Comments »

Poor Sally

Wednesday, September 10th, 2008

Dear job seeker, I have some bad news for you. A conversation like the one below happened at thousands of companies today.

Betty the Hiring Manager: Hey Sally, where are my candidates?

Sally the HR person: I must have looked at 200 resumes on Monster today. I talked to 15 people who were not looking, 3 who couldn’t understand what I was saying and left messages for 20 more. Bottom-line: at this point I am where I was yesterday. Nowhere.

But you say “I applied directly. How come Sally hasn’t called me?”

Well, this is not really Sally’s area of expertise as she is an HR specialist not a recruiter. Unfortunately, recruiting typically ends up in the hands of HR where people with no vested interest and perhaps no deep understanding of the job requirement are asked to find the right person.

Imagine if Sally is tasked with finding a Senior Software Engineer with J2EE, Hibernate, and ETL experience. Do you think Sally knows what all that means? How can she screen these people?

So what happens? Sally puts recruiting on the back burner and focuses on her “real” job. Betty in the meantime gets further and further behind on her IT project and eventually loses faith in the company and leaves.

The good news is that there is now an IT Project Manager opening at the company. The bad news is that Sally is tasked with identifying the right person for the job.

Be patient. We have the silver bullet for Sally and it is coming soon.

Buzz This     Tweet This Tweet this

Posted in General | 2 Comments »

Welcome to ChumBonus – Times have changed

Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008

Over the coming days and weeks we will be exploring IT Recruiting, the advent of the internet as it relates to recruiting and how you can get noticed in a hyperactive, hyperconnected web-based world.

Times sure have changed.  Remember when you used to apply for a job and actually get a response from the company?  No, then you are under 40 years old.  Remember when you understood what a company was looking for and how they were going to hire?  Remember looking through the paper on Sunday and circling jobs you were interested in?  Remember when Recruiters actually conducted interviews and met you face to face?  Were those days better or are we just nostalgic?

Been to the job boards lately?  How many are there anyway?  Are the job postings real or are they just trying to respond to an RFP?  What is the status of Internet-based recruiting and what does it mean to you?

Standby and we will tell you.

Buzz This     Tweet This Tweet this

Posted in General | 2 Comments »