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Welcome Back To recruitDC, Matt Charney!

May 10, 2017 by recruitdc Leave a Comment

We’re excited to welcome Matt Charney back to recruitDC this May, and he has pulled together a great closing keynote, with some great information to share with attendees. Always one to look past what’s shiny on the surface, and well-known for calling things “as they are”, Matt will bring a fresh perspective to some important topics in the Talent Acquisition space. This presentation will take a look at some of the biggest trends and emerging technologies impacting recruiting and hiring today. It’s a must-attend whether you are running a desk, or managing a division of recruiters.

From NGOs to Fortune 500 companies to Mom and Pop shops, we will look across markets, industries and specialties to identify what talent leaders can do today to compete – and win – the top talent of tomorrow. Matt will discuss the real issues that really matter to real recruiters, and focus on identifying what’s really new and what’s really next. He’s going to encourage ditching the buzzwords and fluff for a data driven look into the changing world of work – and what that means for the work of HR and recruiting.

Here’s what you can expect to take away from Matt’s session:

  • How to follow the trail of venture capital and influx of cash to determine which startups are being built to last, which categories of technology and tools are the hottest segments of the talent business, and how recruiters can stay ahead by staying on top of the bigger business picture without a whole lot of work (or any special knowledge).

  • What the future of work looks like after on boarding, and how the blended workforce and gig economy models, coupled with a rise in knowledge work, globalization and remote workers, are already shaping the way companies hire, and what the upending of the traditional social contract means for traditional recruiting and Human Relations. 

  • How to build a business case for talent acquisition to get the resources required to recruit the talent you need, and how to work with internal stakeholders and employees to tie talent acquisition efforts directly to bottom line results. We’ll talk about how to make friends, influence hiring managers and finally make your people the greatest asset in the business – only with the P/L to prove it.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Still need tickets?

Buy them here before they sell out!

Filed Under: DC Area Conferences, recruitDC Conference, recruitDC Events Tagged With: Conference, HRTech, Matt Charney, recruitDC event, recruiting

HRCI Credits For Fall 2016 Event

December 1, 2016 by recruitdc Leave a Comment

Many people have inquired about the HRCI credits for the Fall 2016 event. We’re happy to share those with our attendees. 

 

In order to receive the code for HRCI credits, please email us and we’ll be happy to send it to you.

Email recruitDC

Filed Under: recruitDC Conference, recruitDC Events Tagged With: HRCI Credits, recruitDC event

Session Recap – Maren Hogan – Employer Branding for Dirty Jobs

November 28, 2016 by recruitdc Leave a Comment

ed. note: Because there was so much information to capture in Maren’s presentation on November 17th, we wanted to make sure that we could provide you with some more details. Enjoy! 

 

So many times, we find ourselves listening to how one giant company with an abundance of ping pong tables and fat jack stock options found itself on the receiving end of tons of lovely Glassdoor reviews and adoring candidates.

I am happy for those companies of course and I won’t lie and say that building a recruitment marketing strategy for them isn’t super fun. I mean, who doesn’t want to work for a company with free dry cleaning and a rock climbing wall?

At the very least, many companies in the service sector are offering things that many companies simply can’t compete with:

  • WFH days or telecommuting
  • Flat hierarchies
  • Or a pleasant work environment

While these are nice to have, there are many places where people have to work to continue to push our economy forward, that are dirty, nasty, and downright boring. You can’t have a ping pong table in a slaughterhouse and you can’t work from home if you’re a forklift driver. You can’t have a flat hierarchy if you work for a government contracting agency that spends ALL its time trying to figure out if you’re a SQL Programmer II or III.

I always tell my employees when they come to work for me that it’s going to be hard. And not a little bit hard like selling jeans, or Oreos or marketing a sports drink, but really freaking hard, like selling a quarter of a million dollar HRIS to every person in the org it touches; from the daily user to the person writing the check. THAT’S hard.

Just like B2B marketing is straight up harder than B2C marketing, recruitment marketing is harder when the sell is harder. How could the sale be hard? Here are some common difficult to market jobs or workplaces:

Unsafe or hazardous working conditions. While we’re no longer living in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, there are still jobs that are inherently dangerous. They may surprise you!

  • Airline Pilots
  • Fishers and Fishing Workers
  • Loggers
  • Roofers
  • Trash Collectors
  • Farmers
  • Structural Iron and Steel Workers
  • Drivers/Truck Drivers
  • Electrical Power Installers
  • Taxi Drivers and Chauffeurs

How about gross jobs or dirty jobs?

Many of those same jobs fall onto this list. Trash collectors, preppers at a nail salon, working the kill floor at a slaughterhouse, working with industrial dyes. You name it!  These are jobs that lack an intrinsic value proposition, or do they? More on that later.

Then there are boring jobs. Data entry, call service centers, and of course, sometimes recruiting for government or cleared jobs fall into this category.

Finally, you have places that are hard to recruit TO:

It boggles the mind that we spend all our time at conferences trying to figure out how to solve the competition issues in Silicon Valley when many of us are recruiting for jobs and locations that look nothing like it. I’m from Omaha, and at the same time as everyone I meet at this conference gives me a blank stare when I tell them that, our city and state currently have an unemployment rate of 3.6%.

Now that we’ve determined what these jobs look like, let’s talk about HOW to build a brand and a marketing strategy to recruit for them. As we’ve already determined, these jobs have to be filled, so let’s fill them!

Find Your Value

Well, it starts with the value proposition. I know I mentioned earlier that these jobs often don’t have an intrinsic or obvious value proposition, but they do have one.

For example, a trash collector may seem like a job I would never want to do, but for someone, having their afternoons free, physical activity, the chance to be outdoors and more, are all benefits.

No matter how difficult it is, determine the values your job will potentially give applicants. A blog post by RJ Morris, discusses how he successful did this during his time recruiting for a light industrial firm.

Early in my career, I took a turn doing light industrial contract recruiting. Temp work for lots of warehouse workers, forklift drivers, mechanics, etc. Physically demanding, low wages…these were tough gigs, and recruiting for them was a bear.

Boiler room environment, fast pace, demanding clients, low margins, high tempers.  “Hey, R. J., we need a third shift warehouse tech, three week assignment, starting tonight at 11 pm. Go get em.”

All of the jobs were hard to successfully recruit for, but by far, the worst job we worked on was to place folks at a food color company. The company’s model was to bring temporary employees in before offering them full time roles, and their first job was in the color mixing area. It was appropriately nicknamed the “Blender.”

Imagine fifteen workers, mixing powdered and liquid colors in huge vats with long oar-like paddles, twelve hour shifts at a time. The powdered color floated through the air everywhere. At the end of the shift, the guys (all were guys) had semi-permanent tie dyed tattoos.

These were industrial strength food dyes, used to make the different colors of Skittles, for example. Apparently, when you worked with them for twelve hour days, they also dyed skin.

It took a guy 30 minutes of scrubbing with Lava Soap to get the stains off.

He started with a 55% voluntary attrition rate. How did he turn it around? By asking who was already successful in the position. Morris looked at the numbers and realized that after 3 months, attrition dipped to 12% and then after one year, it was a mere 5%. So he started asking questions:

  • Why would anyone want to work in this job?
  • What’s the benefit to the employee?
  • What types of people will respond to that offering and where can we find them?  

He spent time at the company, interviewing new and tenured employees and found out that if you HAD the chutzpah to stick around, you stuck around for good. Did it make his job easier? No. But the numbers kept getting better. The company had realized their value proposition was to promise a better future, if you could make it today:

Come in, get along, work hard, don’t whine and you’ll get rewarded.  If you complained too much or did not get along with your Blender Buddies, you were out. If you lasted six months, the company offered you a full time role, including benefits and a decent raise.   Most importantly, employees rotated out of the Blender after one year.  No more blue arms and orange ears.  We just found the value proposition.

At Red Branch Media, we did something similar with a survey project with a large pharmaceutical company. While the company was an employer of choice in their HQ city, they wanted to compete for scientists near Harvard and Stanford, meaning the tactics they’d used as “the only game in town” before were going to be less effective. Plus, their pay was going to be less competitive in these areas.

To find out what types of people were successful in the role, we surveyed employees at all levels of the company to determine what made them successful, both inside and outside the company. And, while I am generally not one for anecdotal data, we did dive deep to find out what made them happy. The values rang through loud and clear, from sales people who had never set foot in HQ, to those who were safely ensconced within the building. We used those values and articulated them throughout the recruitment marketing campaigns. For these people, it wasn’t about big money, or even the benefits, it was about making a difference in people’s lives through medication.

Find Your Value

TO DO:

  • Survey Employees
  • Ask Questions
  • Create a Value Prop for THAT Job
  • Make Positives out of Negatives

Get Your Values Straight

I have no control over what people offer by way of compensation, or how they treat employees or contractors once they’re brought on board. However, I do know when a company cannot offer benefits like work from home or a
short commute, or even a safe or pleasant working environment, there are ways to reward them internally. As a recruiting professional, you can make a case for why employers should explore wellness programs, revamp their bonus structure or offer other benefits to workers who can’t have the more traditional stuff.

For example, an owner of a warehouse that packs and ships unconventional and risque items tries to foster a family atmosphere in the office and warehouse and buys his 11 employees lunch on Mondays and Wednesdays. Plus his company offers raises, health insurance and an informal atmosphere where employees can dress as they wish and listen to the radio all day.

Ask yourself, your employer, or your client if there is something you can do to offset some of the negative brand equity of working that gross, ugly or dirty job.

Get Your Values Straight

TO DO:

  • Find Ways to Make It Up To Them
  • Highlight In Postings
  • Be an Advocate
  • Find the ROI

Find Your Audience

Much of this is standard but keep new audiences in mind. The average age of a government employee is 47 years old, but over one-third of the current job market consists of Millennials, and they are expected to make up 46% of the working population by 2020. These statistics are already affecting the pool of cleared candidates, so being prepared to hire and manage a younger workforce is key.

Now, how do we get these kids to pass a security clearance? Present it as a challenge.

Millennials are more likely to be drawn to challenges that have tangible results, which includes successfully navigating the vetting process of security clearance. When communicating with younger workers, highlight the specific skills needed to make it through the clearance process, encourage them to rise to the challenge, and remind them that the reward is an in-demand clearance status. Also, giving current college students an opportunity to intern with your company allows you to gauge the skills of individual candidates and can give you confidence that a costly clearance sponsorship will be worth the time and investment.

–Olivia Landau

If you’re not already, seek out passive candidates, competitive candidates and of course, veteran candidates. While these are great networks to tap into for cleared jobs, they can also be useful for jobs that are less than ideal.

When we worked with the world’s largest protein company, we quickly realized that behind the fancy pants name, was a string of slaughterhouses located in some of the most remote and boring locations in the world. Which makes sense, you don’t want a slaughterhouse in your backyard now do you?

Anyway, we realized as we were defining our candidate persona, that many of them had things in common with a military recruit. Here’s that persona:

These are often people who grew up in or near a rural environment, wanted a family and valued a college education. The recruitment marketing strategy encompassed many things but military stood out with good reason, as did restaurant managers. We knew those groups also valued similar things, had some overlap in their backgrounds and also understood living in remote locations or third tier towns (bases).

Find Your Audience

TO DO:

  • Identify Audience
  • Build Personas to Speak To
  • Find Overlap

Get Your Channels Together

Recruiting on cleared and niche boards is absolutely a great idea. But when reaching out to millennials for ODD jobs, consider the source. It’s easy to spend a lot of money for very little return when it comes to recruitment advertising. So when you’ve got your buyer persona complete, think about what that person does. When we recruited for plant supervisors at the aforementioned plant, our initial plan included diversity initiatives on campus and mobile phone advertising for internal candidates to promote from the floor. Guess what?

Diversity was NOT going to happen from a gender perspective and having a phone on the kill floor is a fireable offense. Whoops? So what did we end up with?

  • A robust career fair plan supported by social and resources for career centers
  • Meet and greets and curriculum support for their schools of choice
  • Geo-location around universities that had the degree programs they were most likely to recruit from
  • Spotify advertising on study and country station
  • Bathroom advertising…yep
  • Table Tents
  • Lunch Room Announcements
  • Revamped LinkedIn Careers Page
  • Separate Career Site that focused on location benefits

While some of these might seem shockingly old school, it worked! We got all 55 positions filled in 9 months. So, when you think about marketing, even recruitment marketing, think about where your candidates go (college bars, career centers, the lunchroom) what they need to know (which classes to take, how to achieve security clearance, how to interview, any risks associated with the job) and what they are consuming (on-demand streaming content, flyers, facebook, billboards and heaven help me, Snapchat).

Of course, you can also reverse engineer this information. For the guy trying to get workers for his novelty sex toy business, we can safely avoid, say, Christian radio stations or the Panera Bread where your aunt always goes.

Get Your Channels Together

TO DO:

  • Where are they?
  • What do they do?
  • What are they listening to?
  • What are they reading?
  • How can you solve their problem or meet their need?

Be Honest (and Funny!)

Okay, writing job requirements is one thing…and writing job advertisements is an entirely different thing. I always say it’s the difference between a shoe ad in your favorite magazine and the description on the side of the box. Size 7 WIDE Black Heel. The latter is the requirement, the former is the ad. Let’s talk about transparency in advertising. Transparency means you don’t sell a job that’s not there:

 

“Want to work in a dirty and messy warehouse that is full of weird and embarrassing stuff that people buy online?”

vs

“We need a team player to foster warehouse synergy.”

Building out a job description for a gross, dirty or non-glam position means you have to create a clear picture of what it’s going to actually look like. It may not be fun, it may not even be comfortable but if you sell it as something that it isn’t, people will walk.

Realistic job previews, where you honestly tell people what the job entails, will create a condition where more peopl
e will not take the job, but the ones who do will be much more likely to stick around. You need to find the right person for the right job.

–Industrial psychologist Jeffrey Saltzman

Conversely, the people who apply DO want the job, because you’ve stated the risks or downsides right up front! I use this all the time in my own agency, because while we’re a marketing firm, it’s not glamorous. In fact, most days it’s downright boring.

Be Honest (and Funny!)

DOs:

Be honest. If the work is hard, say so. Our work is. It’s nothing like Mad Men. We spend a lot of time typing away at keyboards with our headphones on. I won’t tolerate loads of chit-chat, or sitting on one’s laurels. In fact, one section of our interview process is titled: This is the part where I scare you.

Point out the positives. When I tell people that we’re in a quiet work environment and everything we do is posted on the company intranet, it can scare them. So at the same time, I also focus on how the office is always empty by 5 pm or how we have a company wide eating meeting on Friday. Other plusses people rarely think of? The ability to use your phone on the job, lack of oversight, casual work environment and the chance to create your own schedule.

Create an awesome headline. You don’t have to lie to create a great headline.

“This Sales Job in Dallas is Shagadelic” worked to attract 50 awesome JC students for an entry-sales job for the Yellow Pages when the first Austin Powers movie came out. @LouAdler

Use their motivation as a sales tool. Motivations can be as simple as wanting to be outdoors or as complex as doing one’s patriotic duty. Whatever it is, make sure you use it to weed out undesirables AND pull in those who have a keen sense of what motivates them.

Learn, Do, Become. In RJ’s example in the dyeing factory, one key motivator was the stability and benefits a person would receive if they “ran the gauntlet”. In the case of an RBM medical client, we use things like referrals and leaderboards to encourage people to take new assignments and build their skill base. This has the added bonus of adding performance expectations and goals right in the job ad.

Tell a story. This can be about big goals, overcoming an obstacle or about the prospect’s future path. Whatever it is, it negates the need to discuss the need for a master’s degree or proficiency in thus and such. If you can tell a compelling story about the position or the company, it makes you job recruiting someone there (even if it’s gross or in BFE) that much easier.

Add a step. This may go against everything you’ve ever known to be true. But adding a step can take out the undesirables and loop in those who deserve your first consideration. Start with a quick email and then follow up with a call. While the person may still be in your ATS, at least you know their level of interest if they’ve taken the time to do the extra step (whether it’s email or whatever).

Don’t:

  • Add a laundry list of skills.
  • Use adjectives that can apply to literally anyone. Self starter comes to mind.
  • Add in your generic boilerplate (if you must, at least do so at the bottom)
  • Avoid the obvious with stupid titles
  • Forget to say what makes this job special

When important jobs are advertised cafeteria-style like this, with the garnish being the only differentiator, even the semi-desperate make the decision to apply based on location, job title and the company’s brand name. When they accept these jobs the size of the compensation package then becomes the prime negotiating factor. This is always the case with commodity products in a buyer’s market.

–Lou Adler

A Clear and Present Stranger

Knowing where to advertise is great. Knowing how to advertise is great. Understanding your value prop is also great. But none of these things alone are going to bring people to your door eager to working your terrible, difficult job. So, here are some other things guaranteed to help boost your business.

Career Fairs. It’s not just BEING at career fairs, it’s doing them right. It vexes me when people pay for a booth at a fair and then just make the marketing budget whatever it took Joe from campus recruiting to get there AKA his Hertz budget and a lunch at Applebee’s. For our meatpacking client, we totally rebranded their swag (so it was stuff students would actually keep) and built out a booth that was as informative and approachable as possible. We also use social media, email and referrals to get people to the booth. Once there, we made sure our career site was mobile ready so we could guide them through the process without unnecessary awkwardness.

Poaching. One organization developed 15-second low budget but intriguing commercials to air at a local movie theater near their headquarters.The same organization created a mobile hiring center with a cheap RV to drive to targeted competitors during the lunch hour. You can set a Yelp review to go to your careers page or test the mood at the local watering hole. But poaching in this sense, is legal.

Create puzzles. Creative challenges or contests can help you uncover top talent. But don’t just create a puzzle, put it out there! Think websites, wraps on company cars or billboards. Challenges can include hackathons, photo contests or even trivia. Dyson recently released a challenge hidden inside a recruitment video on its website.

Be Smart. Look you’re recruiting for clearance, high level jobs, and I’m recruiting for loggers, industrial warehouse workers and people who shoot cows in the head. Maybe the Valley can afford to blow off contractors if they mess up, but we’re dealing with a different deck, so make it easy on your prospects.

Make it easy for a candidate to apply, and give them a second shot if they botch an initial contact. I’ve spoken with many recruiters who say they give candidate one chance – if that individual blows off a phone screening or fails to submit the appropriate paperwork, they’re done. That strategy may work in less in-demand industries but if you’re vying for competitive talent you’re going to have to give a little wiggle room. Keep in mind that a passive candidate has anothe
r full time job. If they get pulled into a meeting and miss a phone screening, see that as a sign of their commitment to their work – a skill they will bring to the table with your company.

 

 

Maren Hogan is a seasoned marketer and community builder in the HR and Recruiting industry. She leads Red Branch Media, a consultancy offering marketing strategy and content development. A consistent advocate of next generation marketing techniques, Hogan has built several successful online communities, deployed brand strategies in both the B2B and B2C sectors, and been a prolific contributor of thought leadership in the recruitment and talent space.

Maren’s websites include www.redbranchmedia.com and www.marenated.com

 

Filed Under: recruitDC Conference, recruitDC Events Tagged With: employment branding, Maren Hogan, recruitDC event

Fall 2016 Speaker Preview – Will Staney

November 15, 2016 by recruitdc Leave a Comment

This week, I’ll be headed Washington D.C. to speak at recruitDC’s 2016 Fall Conference. My session will be about attracting top talent with an unknown or misunderstood employer brand. Whether you’re a startup or established organization you may have a misunderstood brand where the market perception is different from your actual company culture and employee experience. In both cases, trying to compete with the Googles and Facebooks of the world to attract and hire top talent may feel like an impossible tasks. But it doesn’t have to be.

In my session I will share four key components you need in order to build a great talent attraction strategy to help transform your employee brand. Those four components are developing a compelling EVP, sharing authentic stories, empowering your employees as brand ambassadors, and building your marketing machine.

Developing a compelling EVP

The EVP or Employee Value Proposition is a simple, overarching statement that ultimately becomes the essence of your employee experience and employer brand commitment. This is one of the most important steps because it lays the foundation of how you communicate what’s unique about your company as an employer. So before you launch any employer branding efforts, take time to really build out your EVP.

Tell authentic stories that resonate

The key is to give your candidates an insider look into your company, and paints an authentic and accurate picture of what life is really like working at your company. So for example, ask your employees to share what they love most about their job, the impact they get to make on your customers through their work, how their job contributes to the company’s mission, and what makes them proud to work to work at your company.

Empowering your employees as brand ambassadors

Employer branding is as much an employee engagement strategy as an external talent attraction strategy. So before you start any employer branding efforts, you really need to take a hard look at your company culture first. Is a great culture that your employees feel proud to talk about and share with their friends? If not, you need to fix that first.

Building your marketing machine

Once you’ve got your EVP research, you want to start defining your audience and creating your candidate personas – by company level, organization level, and even at the job level. For example, when meeting with your hiring managers, asking questions beyond work experience and education level that they’re seeking, and learn more about the types of personality that perform best on their team, where their team goes to learn online, what sorts of events and conferences they attend, etc.

To learn more join me on November 17, 2016 starting at 10:30am at the recruitDC Fall 2016 Recruiting Conference. Register here. 

Filed Under: recruitDC Conference Tagged With: recruitDC event, speakers, Wil Staney

Fall 2016 Conference – IMPORTANT PARKING INFORMATION!

November 14, 2016 by recruitdc Leave a Comment

The Fall 2016 recruitDC event will be located at the Bethesda North Marriott Conference Center located at 5701 Marinelli Rd, North Bethesda MD 20852 – conveniently located next to the White Flint Metro Stop on the Red Line

If you plan to drive to the event, please note that due to construction at the conference center, recruitDC attendees will park at an off-site location. Attendees should park their cars at 6130 Executive Blvd, Rockville, MD 20852 – a lot that is about 0.5 miles from the Conference Center. As you approach the parking location, there will be signs directing you to the “Conference Center Parking” area within the lot. At this location, flaggers will help you find a convenient spot. There will be a designated area where shuttle buses will pick you up and take you to the event. Please be sure to get a parking ticket.

Once you arrive at registration, you will be given a voucher that will allow you to exit once you return to the parking lot. 

Our hosts at the Bethesda North Marriott have worked hard to make this process as easy as possible for you as they deal with the construction. We apologize for any inconvenience, and hope that this information helps make things smooth for you. 

 

Filed Under: recruitDC Conference, recruitDC Events Tagged With: Event Details, recruitDC event

Engaging Human: Speaker Preview – Steve Levy

November 2, 2016 by recruitdc Leave a Comment

Late last month, I traveled to New Zealand to speak at RHUB NZ – left New York at 6PM, arrived in Auckland at 8:30AM Wednesday morning, departed Auckland on Saturday at 2:20PM, and finally arrived home in New York at 4:15PM Saturday. So in one week, I missed a Tuesday and experienced two Saturdays. 

But on Thursday morning I ate breakfast at The Ugly Bagel.

Without WiFi, I was left to ponder a delicious sandwich and listen to the morning sounds called Breakfast in Auckland. I heard three different conversations about coding projects, one fella discussing UX design in between bagel bites, and 2 folks talking retail and dating. I smiled and thought to myself just one thing… “This place is a sourcing goldmine.”

At the conference, one of the first things I asked was if anyone recruits at The Ugly Bagel.

Crickets.

Seems as if many involved in sourcing and recruiting are still performing their identification and engagement of people using traditional methods; nothing generally “wrong” with these approaches but are there other ways to spread the word of your openings, your organization, and its opportunities?

My goal is to introduce you to (a) sources of people – both digital and analog – that are non-traditional and perhaps far less traveled, but are nonetheless geysers of greatness, and (b) a model of engagement that produces higher response rates. This is where employment branding meets sourcing, and it is instrumental in helping you develop talent networks and sustainable talent pipelines for your roles.

Steve Levy is well respected as one of the best sourcers in the business, combining old school and new cool technologies to identify and engage exceptional talent – and actually knows those mythical “purple squirrels.”

Levy, a member of the RecruitingBlogs Editorial Advisory Committee who has been referred to as “the recruiting industry’s answer to Tom Peters” has been recognized as one of the Top 100 Most Social Human Resources Experts on Twitter;

Follow Steve On Twitter @LevyRecruits or connect with him on LinkedIn.

Filed Under: recruitDC Conference, recruitDC Events Tagged With: recruitDC event, sourcing, Steve Levy

Fall 2016 Speaker Preview: Dave Galley

October 24, 2016 by recruitdc Leave a Comment

On Becoming an Applicant Fracking System: Look Deeper

 

Do you recruit for the same basic positions, over and over? Do you search in a very specialized niche, with a limited pool of potential candidates? Maybe both? Whether you’re a search novice or a Boolean badass with a list of all the best search queries typed out in Excel, you can still find yourself in this situation: there’s no one new to contact about your current req. So, what do you do when you’re stuck, when it seems like you’ve already contacted “everyone”? That’s an excellent question, and I’m glad you asked! 

My talk focuses on identifying the best ways to get those hard-to-reach candidates from the bottom of the pile to the top of your search results. People you (and probably your competitors) have been missing during your searches. I’ll also be talking about how to take this approach one step further to identify new sources of information that you might not have considered, but should! The presentation answers two questions I hear from every new client. 

1)    “Could you please avoid using ______ for your research? We’ve already contacted everyone good from there.”

Umm… sure? There are always other sources we can use to find the professionals our clients want. But it’s a frustrating request, because ten times out of ten, I find awesome candidates from ______ (whatever site that is) who my clients haven’t spoken to, and never would have uncovered, which brings us to,

2)    “What are some new places to source candidates? We’ve exhausted all the usual resources, and need some new ideas.”

A closely related question, and it comes up again and again for the same reason as the first question: because candidates are terrible!

They don’t seem to get that as cool they might think it sounds to their fellow audit nerds, recruiters are searching for SOX, maybe Sarbanes-Oxley, but almost never SarbOx! Don’t they know that we need candidates with FPLC experience, and no matter how many proteins they’ve purified via HPLC, we’ll never find them without the more specialized acronym? That poly is a common prefix and -graph isn’t even in the top ten most common words it modifies? How hard is it to fill out every single one of your online profiles? To keep track of every site that recruiters are using to find professionals like you? To continually update and tweak your resume, so it has the most contextually appropriate keywords? To generate reams of publicly available online content that we can use to evaluate them before we ever pick up the phone? What are they doing? Don’t they want us to find them?!?

You’ll pardon, perhaps, a bit of tongue-in-cheek venting, because you’ve thought something similar yourself at least once in the last week. But it’s true that, while it’s a lot of work, that can be what to takes to ensure your resume gets found by everyone you might want to see it. Unfortunately, only the most active candidates, or the most public figures, in a given field will come close to doing everything on that list. So we need to cut those candidates a little slack and learn to fill in a few blanks for them.

When we’re searching our ATS, or our job boards, or social media, or whatever it is we’re using to figure out who to call next, we need to keep in mind that no one sets out to get a job by asking “How can I make life easier for recruiters?” Since they’re not putting themselves in our shoes, we have to step into theirs. We need to take it for granted that even the lengthiest resume will be incomplete, and learn to see what isn’t there.

For example, you may already know that 95% of active military personnel are US citizens, along with an even higher percentage of retired and reserve forces. So, when a job board doesn’t include a search for “US citizen” as an option, you can run a search for former military personnel and be reasonably sure that the results include citizens. Do you know how many veterans explicitly state their citizenship status on a resume or online profile? Significantly fewer than 95%! Or how about this: LinkedIn has about 1.18 million US-based members with a second copy of their profile written in Spanish. Only a little over 13 thousand of these members have the keyword “bilingual” anywhere on their profile. That’s just over 1% of likely Spanish-English bilingual members who can be found using the most obvious keyword.

Those are just two of the many examples I’ll be talking about in my presentation, “Applicant Fracking Systems.” Come on down to recruitDC’s Fall Conference and check it out!

 

Hi! I’m Dave Galley, and I hate third part speaker bios. You know we write them, we know we write them, why not be up front about it? Along with my awesome business partners at Brain Gain Recruiting, I spend pretty much all my time either helping other people find top talent, or teaching them to get better at it themselves. Through our training brand, the People Sourcing Certification Program, we’re advancing the sourcing profession with standardized training and testing. In my free time, I like break recruiting software and help vendors put it back together. I’m not hard to find online (in fact, that’s your first test!), but if you need a starting point, I tweet intermittently @theDaveGalley.

 

Filed Under: recruitDC Conference, recruitDC Events Tagged With: ATS, Dave Galley, recruitDC, recruitDC event

Fall 2016 Conference Agenda Announced!

September 29, 2016 by recruitdc Leave a Comment

Visit Our Eventbrite Page For Tickets!

 

We’re taking recruitDC back to Maryland for the Fall 2016 Event! Please join us at the North Bethesda Marriott on Thursday, November 17th for our half-day event.

The 2016 recruitDC Fall Event Agenda!

7:30 am – 8:45am      Registration and Networking

8:45am – 9:00am       Welcome Remarks

9:00am – 10:00am     Hacking LinkedIn Beyond the Great Recruiting Paywall                                            

Brian Fink | Relus Cloud | Head of Technical Recruiting          

LinkedIn, otherwise known as Frankenstein’s Job Board Social Network and Center for Recruiters who Want to Recruit Good, is one of the most important and costly tools for recruiting today.                    

It doesn’t have to cost any more than Facebook, Pinterest, Github, Twitter, or Flickr. Instead of facing the limitations of different memberships and add-on features, Brian Fink takes on LinkedIn and shows you how to access Active Candidates, Phone Numbers, Email Addresses, Unlimited Profiles, Unlimited Connects, Sync Contacts without pesky downloads, Referrals, “Real” Experience, Education, and Diversity … And more of the “paid features” for free! If you are looking to cut your LinkedIn addiction or accelerate your sourcing needs, Fink shows you how you can immediately put these actions to work for your teams.

10:00am – 10:30am   Networking Break

10:30am – 11:15pm: Breakout Sessions

**Choose one of the following sessions**

Back to Basic Tracks:

Applicant Fracking Systems

David Galley | Brain Gain Recruiting / Sourcing Certifications | Director, Training Programs

If you, or your clients, have ever said “I have found EVERYONE on _____ (LinkedIn/Monster/DICE/Nursingjobs/OilPro/RoadTechs/etc)”, then this session is for you.

Getting the most out of your recruitment tech is harder than getting the last spoonful of peanut butter out of the bottom of the family size jar. No matter how you run them, your searches turn up the same 10 people each time. This presentation provides an overview of best practices for making your candidate data sources “good to the last drop”, with plenty of real examples taken from among the world’s most (and least) well-known sites to recruit from.

Key takeaways:

  • Constructing “deep” searches, to find less obvious candidates on LinkedIn, job boards, or your own ATS.
  • Reframing the questions you ask during a search.
  • Identifying new “data rich” resources, for when the usual suspects just won’t do.
  • Getting the most out of non-traditional resources.

Advanced Recruiting Skills and Techniques Track:

Reality of Recruiting: Making Dirty Jobs into Glamorous Positions

Maren Hogan | Red Branch Media | Founder & CEO

Hiring for a company located in a buzzing city with an established positive employer brand that is teeming with perks is what most recruiters consider “the dream.” Similar to just about every other dream, only a few actually get to live it.

In this session, Maren Hogan discusses her experiences in building recruitment marketing and employer brand strategies for the less glamorous jobs. From finding hard hitting selling points to pinpointing a particular target audience to creating honest, yet appealing job ads, Hogan will ensure session attendees leave with actionable processes to build out their very own successful recruiting program, no matter how dirty the job description.

Management & Strategy Track:

How to Attract Top Talent as an Unknown or Misunderstood Brand

Will Staney | Proactive Talent Strategies, LLC| Founder & CEO           

Are you losing candidates because they misunderstand your employer brand without giving you a chance? Are they familiar with your brand but unaware of what you’re like as an employer? Recruiting for a company without a well-liked or well-known employer brand makes a hard job even harder. But according to employer branding veteran, Will Staney, it makes it all the more exciting too – it’s one more challenge to be cracked. Join this session to learn how he’s led and advised companies from VMware and SAP to GoDaddy and Realtor.com, through incredible employer branding transformations that reinvented their ability to attract and hire top talent – and how you can too. 

You’ll learn:

  • How to roll out a new employer brand so it sticks, internally and externally
  • The secrets of crafting an authentic story that resonates
  • How to turn your employees into powerful brand ambassadors
  • Building a content strategy that aligns to your recruiting initiatives
  • The key steps to a compelling EVP (employee value proposition)

And real-life success stories from some of Will’s most transformed clients and employers    

11:30am – 12:30pm  From Intake to Engagement Old School and New Cool Strategies and Techniques

Steve Levy | Recruiting Inferno Consulting | Principal  

Anything but post & pray! How to manage an expanded intake meeting as the launching pad to creating old school & new cool ways to finding & engaging people.

12:30pm – 12:40pm                             Close-Out

12:45pm – 2:00pm                               Lunch

 

**This event is pending HRCI credit approval.**

 

See you in November!

Visit Our Eventbrite Page For Tickets!

Filed Under: DC Area Conferences, recruitDC Conference, recruitDC Events Tagged With: Event Details, recruitDC event, Upcoming Events

Spring 2016 Slide Decks Available!

June 1, 2016 by recruitdc Leave a Comment

Thank YOU!

Thanks for a great conference last week! 

Please be on the lookout for our post-event survey. Your feedback helps us shape future events!

Presentations!

If you missed any presentations or content during last week’s conference, you can view the presentations on recruitdc.org or our Slideshare page. Enjoy and happy hunting!

Visit our Slideshare page or check out the presentations section on our site. 

Filed Under: recruitDC Conference, recruitDC Events Tagged With: presentations, recruitDC event, slideshare

Getting Ready for recruitDC This Week!

May 23, 2016 by recruitdc Leave a Comment

Yes! recruitDC is this week. Are you ready for it? Lots of new things going on to make the spring event fun, creative, inspirational, and most importantly better connections with your colleagues.

Get Connected: 

recruitDC events are about learning best practices but also connecting with new friends! We have two great ways to connect and reconnect. First, check outthe Whova – a mobile event app in the app store of your choice. Once you’ve created your account, find our recruitDC event and join us. If prompted to enter an event code, use rdc16spring. Also at the event, you will be getting Networking cards. These cards are important because you have to answer the questions by finding folks with the right answer.  Once the cards are complete, you turn them into the sponsor tables. Why bother? Well the networking cards are going to be used to draw the day’s winners for great prizes from our sponsors and the special graphic images created throughout the day.  So find out who has season tickets, who was a past presenter or who commutes in from West Virginia!

Get Creative: 

Bring your creative energies to create your own name badge. Yes, that’s right! You can write your name, Twitter handle- anything you want ( keep it clean) on your name badge. We will have creative stickers so that you can personalize your name badge.  No more boring name, what you do and company you are with. This is the time to show off who you really are!

Get Fit:

The Washington DC area is home to many great schools and George Washington University isone of the most iconic universities in our area. Having our event at GWU allows us to keep the cost lower and allow more attendees. However, we do have to have the event on two different floors. So all you FitBit, Jawbone, Misfit, and Garmin wearers you will definitely getting your steps in. You will also want to wear comfortable shoes. Most of the activity will be occurring on the third floor – registration, coffee, lunch, the Back to Basics and Advanced Recruiting Breakouts and of course, the AfterParty! The keynote sessions and Strategy and Management breakout sessions will be happening on the Ground Floor in the Betts Theatre. 

Get Inspired:

We have Inkquiry Visuals joining us to graphically record some of the day’s keynote sessions and breakout sessions. You will have a chance to win any one of these images. We are also asking the community if they have a testimonial about recruitDC to share this on a testimonial card that will be given to the artist and she will create a full pictograph of how recruitDC has changed the community.

Get Pixilated:

Yes we are bringing back the Pixilated Photo Booth and this will be set up by lunch time through the end of the After Party. Stop by, multiple times if you would like, to take pictures with your friends and colleagues to share.

Get Fed:

Thanks to the generous sponsorship of Indeed and HiringSolved we will have a great Mediterranean buffet lunch available. During lunch you will have a chance to either network, or join a table with specific topics so you can continue the networking and learning over lunch.

Get Ready to Boogie:

We are fortunate to have a great DJ in our community! @RadRecruiter is bringing his turntables and turning the day into an afternoon dance party! Join us at the After Party out on the East Terrace sponsored by the Muse.

Due to venue and security requirements you must register for the After Party. Register at our Eventbrite site. 

 

Filed Under: DC Area Conferences, recruitDC Conference, recruitDC Events Tagged With: Event Details, Eventbrite, recruitDC event, Upcoming Events

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