Do you have something you want to share with the talent acquisition community? Do you also want to help create a transformative experience for other recruiters?
If your answer is “yes,” we’d love to have you as a speaker for recruitDC May 2023. You can find all the details on our call for speakers page.
A: It was an employee referral, which is the best way to get hired. I was referred by a friend of a friend. I didn’t have a particular background in the area I was hired for, but I did have exposure to recruiting through my time in the Marine Corps.
A: First, there was my recruiting experience with the Marine Corps, which intrigued me. I was also interested in the HR side of house, but not the typical policy/benefits side. Then, once I started working in recruiting, it opened my eyes to how many areas you can specialize in.
Recruiting is not just recruiting. There is so much variety. There’s everything from sourcing, research and the candidate experience. There’s also the technical side of it, with recruiting systems and tools. And each part of the process has different steps, and you can specialize in each of those.
One aspect to recruiting that particularly appealed to me is I love a challenge. Not just a team challenge, but a personal challenge. When you’re working with people, every single person is different. Every experience and every conversation you have is different. You can’t expect an experience with an individual that you’re potentially trying to recruit will be the same as the one before. It never will be.
That creates other challenges that interest me. One, you’re trying to see if this person is the right fit for the role you’re trying to recruit for at the time. You’re also trying to build a relationship with them. Sometimes, you don’t know them at all. So you immediately have to find ways to learn who they are, from the way they say hello when they pick up the phone to what their body language tells you when you meet them in person. It’s a constant challenge, but you can challenge yourself even more. You can ask yourself, Did I do that well? Is there a way I would handle it differently next time?
A: I have several pieces of advice.
Self-assessment: I suggest spending time, if you haven’t already, doing a self-assessment to understand what your strengths and weaknesses are. And then decide what aspects of recruiting will play to those strengths or if you need to improve in some areas.
Organization: The more organized you are and the faster you learn to be organized, the easier your job will be over time. In recruiting, it’s rare to have someone standing over your shoulder all the time telling you what to do. There can be a lot of ambiguity in your day. Therefore, you have to organize yourself to succeed. And being organized can make and break you later on in your career. Once you become a senior recruiter, for example, you’re expected to be able to track your numbers, track activity, and provide accurate information.
Curiosity: Another piece of advice is to be curious and seek out information. When I started out, YouTube and how-to videos didn’t exist. Now there’s so much fantastic information out there now, besides just books and classrooms.
Phone skills and grit: You’ll need to get comfortable with the phone and develop a thick skin. If you’re just starting out, you may be scared to get on the phone with a candidate. The truth is, you’re going to have phone calls that don’t go well, you’re going to have uncomfortable silences, you’re going to rub someone the wrong way. But the more you do it, the easier it becomes. Don’t be afraid to call people, especially the ones whose resumes intimidate you. Those are the people you want to talk to. You may fail, but you’ll learn from it. You either have the grit or you will form it over time. You have to be able stand up, dust yourself off, and try again.
A: The first is my smart phone. I’m a visual person, so my phone makes it easy to look at an app, see a picture of a person, and review my call history to help me remember an individual. The second is not a specific ATS, but rather having a user-friendly tool that functions for the whole team and provides accurate reporting. Once I had the responsibility of managing the data coming through an ATS and how that data was being reported on and presented, I thoroughly understood how important that information was to an organization.
A: I have the confidence and a positive mindset; there is no problem we can’t solve through creative approaches. The “we” in problem solving is important, because it’s never just one person with the answer.
I also look at recruiting challenges with a strategic mindset. I understand how important hiring the right people quickly can impact organizational outcomes and how our daily actions either lead to success or failure. I bring my teams together to identify the issues and solve them together, whether it’s sourcing, outreach or engagement, a systemic problem within an organization, or interpersonal conflicts. Together we make the decisions to move us forward towards a better future.
A: When I was a junior recruiter, I got really excited about a hard-to-find candidate. This was a person where you needed to think carefully about how to best approach them.
I used a parsing tool to put their information into the ATS and emailed them from what I got from the ATS. Unfortunately, I was so excited to contact them as fast as I could that I didn’t pay attention. Instead of addressing the person by their name, I addressed them by their street address. They let me know very quickly that that wasn’t their name. I apologized immediately, but I never heard back from them.
As recruiters, we can make a big difference in how our organization’s branding – and our personal branding – is perceived. I learned that it’s not how fast you contact someone. It’s about paying attention to the details and getting it right.
A: I would be outdoors with a camera in hand. I love to look through a lens and capture the beauty of a moment that doesn’t happen again.
A: We spend too much time focused on how to find people and not enough time learning how to interact and engage with them. We need to spend more time learning how to having meaningful and helpful conversations with people who are potential candidates or looking for a job. That will help us get to know them, make them feel good about the hiring process, and ensure their needs are met.
A: While there’s no college degree in recruiting, there are a few things I look for.
Tag them and me (linkedin.com/in/comriechris) on LinkedIn and say which role they fill!
If you haven’t picked up your tickets to recruitDC yet, you can do so here! Can’t wait to see you in DC!
Chris manages Recruiting Leaders, the fastest growing high quality community of recruiters on Facebook. He uses his experience to mentor and consult recruiters on how to scale and automate their business and reach so they can earn more revenue while freeing up time. His writing and videos on how to leverage the power of community in a saturated recruiting market gets over 50,000 impressions per month. He is a LinkedIn and Facebook Influencer and enjoys giving back by teaching webinars and speaking at conferences about the power of community and how others can scale their audience too.
by Jeremy Bonewitz
Are you new to recruiting/sourcing? Have you reached a dead-end in your searching repertoire? Are you ready to use the SOURCE?!
Sourcing can be intimidating for those new to recruiting and talent acquisition field. However, I hope to relieve your stress by showing you some of the sourcing techniques that I have learned and used over the past few years to help find potential candidates more efficiently. Having taken a variety of sourcing classes and webinars I hope to be able to teach those new to the industry a better and more efficient way of sourcing candidates on social media!
This Back to Basics seminar will provide you with the tools & resources to learn and embrace social media in your weekly sourcing and recruiting efforts. We will cover everything from sourcing and recruiting on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter along with other profile sites such as Zoominfo, Slideshare and others that you can use in your daily sourcing routine to help you find those hidden candidates. Finally, we will cover resources that can help you learn about new tools, sourcing and recruiting techniques: LinkedInTalent Blog, ERE Media.com, and SocialTalent.
Ready to take your sourcing to a new level? Then join me on Thu, May 24, 2018 at the Spring 2018 recruitDC Conference in VA and use your new knowledge to beat your competition! Get your tickets today!
Jeremy Bonewitz has been recruiting for over nine years both on the third-party side and corporate side. For the last seven years he has been a corporate recruiter in the engineering, environmental, and construction fields. He is currently a global talent consultant at Stantec in its Laurel, Maryland, office.
by Ryan Healy
It wasn’t that long ago when recruiters relied on a phone, a Rolodex and a pile of resumes. With little else to work from, it was up to the recruiter to determine whether or not the candidate had the qualifications as stated. The problem with this process was that it was time-consuming and it was easy to let candidates fall out of the pipeline if they weren’t engaged soon enough. Along came technology which attempted to fix this. Automated emails, AI, and CRMs are just the tip of the iceberg. Technology, however, has become a double-edged sword. That’s because at the heart of the matter, recruiting is personal and needs to be tailored to the person, the hiring manager, the company. It’s never one size fits all. So, are we better off returning to days past or sticking with what we got? Or, is there a third way?
Tools like predictive analytics are tremendously helpful – provided the organization has the resources in place to make sense of all the data. But even then, is the information gleaned from a major predictive analytics project worth the investment in statisticians and data scientists? It might be, but I’m here to argue that there are universal behaviors and indicators that recruiters can start to take advantage of right now without employing those with this specialized skillset. It’s predictive analytics without the algorithms. It’s predictive best practices. But this doesn’t mean it’s not supported by data, as we’ll see.
So, what is predictive analytics without algorithms? Let’s start with an analogy that most everyone is familiar with: the Nigerian prince email scam. I’m assuming you’ve received a similar email from a supposed Nigerian prince that explains that he is in dire trouble. Maybe his parents were murdered in a local conflict or he had to flee the country because his home was raided by a rival gang. In any case, the Nigerian prince needs somewhere to quickly transfer his large sums of money to keep the fortune protected. And he reached out to you to be his savior. All you have to do is give him access to your bank account so he can transfer his money. And by doing so, he’ll give you a large reward.
Sounds ridiculous, right? But that’s exactly the point. The scammers don’t want to waste their time with those that find the email ridiculous yet still respond. For hypothetical purposes, let’s say the scammers send out an email like this to a million email addresses. Ninety percent will ignore it but 10% will respond in some way, shape or form even if it’s just to say, “leave me alone!.” Of those 10%, only a fraction are actually going to fall for the scam (yes, people actually do fall for the scam). But to find that fraction would require the scammers to weed through 100,000 emails! And time is money. Plus, if it takes too long for the scammers to weed through all those emails, they may miss their diamond in the rough.
Instead, the scammers make the email sound as ridiculous as possible to reduce the number of false positives. The scammers only want those that are eventually going to fall for the scam to respond. The more ridiculous the email sounds, the fewer responses the scammers will receive. And those that do respond are more likely to be duped.
So how does this apply to hiring? Well, if recruiters can eliminate the false positives (candidates that fill out applications or send in resumes that aren’t a fit) then they’d be able to save time which could then be used to wine and dine only the best candidates. And this is extremely important because in this candidate-driven labor market, recruiters need to maximize their time with only the best otherwise they risk missing out on a really great candidate.
One way we’ve found to do this is by offering candidates the option to chat online with your recruiters. Firstly, chat is a much more welcoming option than Apply Now, so it leads to more candidates. But we don’t want just more (remember, we want to eliminate false positives). We also want qualified. Well, chat does this, too. As welcoming as chat is, it also requires a candidate to talk with another human being. Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t typically engage with people in conversation unless I am serious about the person. So, by offering your candidates the option to chat online with your recruiters you are increasing the number of qualified candidates in your funnel and decreasing the number of unqualified ones.
I promised you numbers. Our clients that are using chat are seeing a doubling in the number of hires compared to traditional recruiting methods and this all stems from the fact that recruiters are better able to predict which candidates will be good and which ones will be bad (or not good) based on their behavior. Namely, the behavior to enter into a chat with a recruiter.
And that’s predictive analytics without algorithms.
Chat has other predictive value and it relates closely to what Google found when it created its own predictive analytics models for what predicts quality of hire. I’ll talk about this and more at my upcoming presentation at reruitDC.
Attendees of recruitDC Spring 2018 will learn more about the relationship between candidate behaviors and quality of hire and the role recruiters play in shaping this dynamic on May 24 at 2:00 p.m. ET. In addition, gain insight into the strategies that enable top talent to find hiring organizations, instead of the other way around. Make you get your ticket today by clicking here! See you there!
Reference: http://www.businessinsider.com/why-nigerian-scam-emails-are-obvious-2014-5
As the president of Brazen Technologies, which provides a text-based messaging platform for recruiters to engage candidates, Ryan Healy, has led the company to triple-digit sales and revenue growth year-over-year since 2012. He has been named one of the Top 25 Online Influencers in Recruiting. He has nearly a decade of experience in the Human Capital field and has appeared in national media outlets including 60 Minutes, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.
by Jo Weech
I will never forget my first ever recruitDC. It was Spring of 2014. I have not missed one since!
“Where do I begin, to tell the story of how great a love can be?”
The first I heard about this event was from a job seeker I was helping through a career transition group. Since I was new to cleared recruiting, I knew I had to check it out. I didn’t really know anyone except for recruitDC board member Mike Bruni, who I had met through Project S.A.V.E. Little did I know that Mike would become a most trusted advisor and friend. His wealth of knowledge and insight exceeds his youth and tan! By the end of that event, I had met many, many industry greats who are my friends to this very day.
Here are a few of those stories:
Always, there are choices for workshops, and I really, really needed Derek Zeller’s information on OFCCP compliance, which was in the “other” room. I reached out to him afterward, he sent me his slide deck, and then agreed to meet me for lunch to discuss. At the time, I had no idea that it would be the first of countless meals shared, from Arlington to Portland. (You can move away, but I will hunt you down and I will find you, and I will sup with you!)
Ben Gotkin agreed to meet with me so that I could pick his brain about employee referrals. This led to enrolling in a Recruiting Toolbox training, hosted by Pete Radloff at ComScore, as well as a conversation about legitimizing our profession. I then became the first paid charter member of the Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals (ATAP), of which Ben is the Executive Director. The most highly regarded Carmen Hudson conducted sessions in this training, and I learned Boolean for the first time! Little did I know just how deeply and vastly Carmen’s expertise and friendship would guide me through many, many dilemmas. Of my many mentors, I hold Carmen in the highest esteem.
Neal Anders and I both connected with Matt Duren, who successfully recruited him to work at Tenable. I formed a professional alliance with Neal and have hosted him at a recruiter breakfast, and have enjoyed sharing stories and referrals with him since. All because I asked him to lunch after meeting him at the happy hour after recruitDC.
Many, many professional and personal friendships have been formed through recruitDC events. I remember seeing the infamous Gerry Crispin hat in the revolving door of my hotel during one event. I ran to track him down but missed him on the elevator. I had attended his session at SHRM Talent in Nashville, and couldn’t believe he was here at recruitDC! As history now has borne out, he has become my trusted mentor, adviser, and it is an honor to call him my friend.
Nando Rodriquez was frequently featured on my friend Celinda Appleby’s FB page. I was like a schoolgirl when I spotted him at the Spring 2015 event. Ran over to him practically asking for his autograph! He took a selfie with me, as we were both sporting ‘dos that were “on fleek” as he called it. That same day, I met J. T. O’Donnell, who I feature when I speak at events for job seekers, which has been over 60 times in the last two years. She has the best, most trusted advice for those in transition, and those of us who are on one side of the table should invest our intel to help candidates be the best they can be when auditioning for roles.
I met Moe Hutt somewhere along the way, and she enlisted my help on a committee for recruitDC. I became enamored of her organizational skills and am proud to call her my friend. She brings the “professional” to her role on the board, and I have enjoyed being the recipient of many of her event optimizations.
Christopher Kurtz did his first ever speaking engagement at recruitDC, and he and I forged a friendship that will stand the tests of time, as we support one another’s speaking engagements around the country.
Do not even know what to say about Audra Knight. (Holding back tears as I type.) Met her through Matt Duren, recruitDC board member, and the rest, they say, is history. Which includes planes, trains, and automobiles. She is the quintessential go-to person with questions about recruitment marketing. After her session at recruitDC, I went home and implemented nearly every suggestion from her presso. My personal brand was born!
John Nixon is the quiet one who likes to stay out of the limelight, but I want to give honor to whom honor is due. John provides financial support of this amazing conference year after year through his company ClearedJobs.net. If you have ever put the recruitDC lanyard around your neck, you will have seen that name. Do yourself a favor and find him at the next event to thank him. Don’t tell him I sent you. I don’t want to be in the doghouse for that!
Kathleen Smith has leveraged her knowledge of events, social media marketing, and branding to lead the board of recruitDC as its Director. These events have hundreds upon hundreds of meetings behind them, as you can only imagine! This takes a lot of stamina and endurance. She does all this with a bit of pizzazz. (Look for her shoes at the next event!)
So many people to honor. So little space. Many heartfelt thanks to Mike Bruni, John Nixon, Kathleen Smith, Lars Schmidt, Ben Gotkin, Doug Munro, Michael Heller, Jay Perreault, Tiffany Balve, Kara Yarnot, Moe Hutt, Matt Duren, Suzie Greco, Pete Radloff, Elizabeth Guevara, Lee Wanless, Brenden Bo Wright, Tony Palma, Carrie Oliver, Denise Slaysman, Bob Wheeler, Shannon Smedstad, Danielle Boykin, Brigit Freedman, Amy Rau, Mark Horning, Conor Nicholson and countless other local DMVers who I have enjoyed getting to know and getting to work alongside of in this, our most proud profession. Contrary to the Google search of “Recruiters are…” well, we are the few, the proud, the tireless, and the dedicated. I am honored to share my craft with y’all!
All this to say that you could just come and be a butt in a seat in the sessions, or, you could network the heck out of it and cultivate lifelong friendships with your peers and colleagues. I am pretty emotional trying to recount these stories, because the investment of just one day can change up your entire career. I speak from experience. Connect with me on LinkedIn. Come talk to me at the next event – better yet, come see my presentation Talent Sleuthing in the Intel Community. We could have a lifelong friendship ahead in our future!
It’s not too late to have create your own recruitDC story! Tickets are still available and you can get them here!
Jo Weech loves to assist everyone from hiring managers to recruiters to job seekers. Speaking engagements include job fairs, career transition groups, and national HR and Recruiting conferences such as HIREconf, Social Recruiting Strategies Conference, Talent Success, ERE Recruiting, and will take the main stage at RECFEST18 in London. Jo was awarded the 2016 HRLA Leadership Excellence award, and the 2017 Gary Cluff Award for Recruitng Excellence. Jo was named by RecruitingDaily as one of 300+ Women In HR Technology to Follow and Support. In November 2017, Jo traveled to Japan in a US delegation of top HR and Talent Acquisition Professionals and will represent the US again this fall to Prague and Budapest. In December 2017, she won the award for Best Presentation in the Category of “HR is Awesome” for DisruptHR NYC. Additionally, Jo serves on two advisory groups for the National Initiative for Cyber Security Education and is an Adjunct Professor at Montgomery College in their CyberAdvantage Program.
By Lauryn Sargent
I’m really excited to speak at recruitDC on December 7th where I’ll talk about three different story-based recruitment marketing campaigns for Dell, Sodexo and CVS Health.
Over my thirteen years in the DC talent space, I’ve seen our local employers care more and more about giving positive work experiences to their team… and they have the proof (employee stories) to back it up. In this post I want to celebrate them! Here are two DC companies who use stories to showcase their unique culture.
Visionist is a government contractor in Columbia, Maryland that’s unlike any other. When we interviewed their team, we were struck by how being on “the bench” between projects is actually an opportunity to stretch professionally. And one team member asked to continue the training he started in between projects:
“I was on the bench for about a month before going on program. In that month I was working on R&D projects at Visionist HQ and I really enjoyed it. I was learning every single day and it was amazing. Once I got on program I was working with entirely different technology. I wanted to stay sharp on what I was working on at Visionist HQ as well, so I asked the leadership if I could come back and they said, ‘Absolutely.’ I was really appreciative that I could learn two different things (simultaneously).”
Even though the employees we interviewed couldn’t talk specifics about what the team actually does every day, we were able to get a clear sense of culture because we heard so many stories about what the organization does for their employees. Three themes emerged based on the stories told from people in analyst to executive levels: a sense of purpose in the work they’re doing to defend our nation, a strong culture of innovation, and how they put employees first (even before clients). The first story in this video is a personal story from one of the founders about why Visionist:
Even though they are a small government contractor with a modest budget, Visionist bought targeted Facebook ads and each video was viewed over 5,000 times. Even better: candidates in and outside of the industry told the CEO they only applied because they were looking for a company with a strong culture and felt they found it after watching the videos. One candidate said they never even considered working in government consulting before learning about Visionist.
Frontpoint is a Virginia-based company dedicated to the safety and security of people and their homes.
When we sat down with the Frontpoint team, one thing was very clear: values from Day 1 still show up in Year 10. One of Frontpoint’s core values is building trust. In this video, Aaron, one of the founders, tells the story of how he treated their very first customer:
Stories Inc has been lucky to not only work with, but learn from, DC-area companies like The Motley Fool, The Menkiti Group and Keller Williams Capital Properties, Visionist, Frontpoint, MBP and New Light Technologies… all companies who care immensely about building strong cultures and have the stories to back it up. And these are just the ones we’ve worked with — not representative of all the great DC area companies providing great growth experiences for their employees. Are you working somewhere you love? Leave your own story in the comments! And I hope to see you in December!
Lauryn Sargent is a cofounder at Stories Incorporated, a recruitment marketing content creation agency based on employee stories. Along with the Stories team, she has collaborated with some of the most people progressive companies in the world to develop powerful and authentic employer branding and recruitment marketing content. She has spoken at NACE, Social Recruiting Strategies, and Employer Branding Strategies conferences, instructing audiences on how to create story-based content to educate and engage potential candidates.
Prior to starting Stories, she was a talent acquisition manager for a publicly traded company and recruited for Fortune 500 companies as well as growing entrepreneurial environments.
By Audra Knight
I was rather nervous the first time I attended recruitDC. Now, let me clear here – I knew I was going to learn a lot at RecruitDC in 2016, but what I didn’t expect was the friendships that would come out of attending the conference.
For me, it was great to catch up with some old friends like Katrina Collier, Jo Weech, Kerri Noone and some other great DC people who make our industry and community so special. As for new friends, I ended up at a meal with one of my favorite podcasters, the Mad Scientist of Online Recruiting Chris Russell. Not surprisingly, we’ve kept in touch and I have learned so much about HR Tech from him over the past year. It was also at this event that I first met Chris Kurtz, whom I now consider one of my best friends and someone I am so thankful to have in my life. Derek Zeller taught me that you should always celebrate who you are, and he continues to blow me away with his recruiting knowledge and writing skills, even from the other side of the country in Portland. As a side note, the most surprising aspect of any connection I made while I was there was the valuable parenting advice that I got from Lorne Epstein. I bet he doesn’t even remember but it has really helped me. Hat tip to you, Lorne.
This year I’m returning to recruitDC, and by far, the learning is again a strong pull for me. The event covers everything from sourcing to closing the candidate, which we can always use a refresher on.
In my presentation, I will be sharing why and how personal branding will benefit everyone in recruitment. Candidates are researching us online just as we are researching them, and trust me, the cost of a bad online presence is high. Don’t believe me? Just check out the hashtag #RecruiterFail. I I most certainly appreciate that we are all super busy, so what you’ll see from me is a few easy tips and tricks to put in action in no time.
Beyond the learning, I am really looking forward to another chance to meet new people and make new recruiting friends. Here are my “pro tips” for networking at this event:
See you next week!
RecruitDC 2016 – One old friend and one new friend
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.
By Kathleen Smith
As we enter into the seventh (!) year of recruitDC, it was time for the board to take stock of where we have been, what we are doing and where we would like to go. Thanks to Susan LaMotte and exaqueo team we were able to do research and focus groups with the community.
From this research and after board discussion, we would like to share the mission of recruitDC.
“recruitDC is a networking community that hosts events with the goal of fostering best practices and new ideas discussion to elevate the recruiting profession in the greater Washington, DC area.”
The greater Washington DC community is a very large one, and we know that we have a lot more to do to provide networking opportunities for all the recruiting professionals in Maryland, Virginia and Washington DC. We are looking forward to engaging more volunteers for programs and events to assist with providing the community with more networking opportunities.
This year, our spring conference will be in Washington, DC while our fall conference will be in Bethesda, MD. In order to make things easier for all, we have selected key dates for our conferences. The spring conference will always be on the Thursday prior to Memorial Day and the fall conference will always be on the Thursday before Thanksgiving.
We were excited to announce our first networking breakfast in Hanover for the end of February and it was so popular the event sold out before we had an opportunity to promote the event! Thanks to Jo Weech, Lee Wanless and Matt Duren for producing and presenting at this event.
recruitDC has added a fresh approach to the programmatic material by having Call for Proposals for the conferences and networking events. For the spring conferences we are featuring three tracks: Back to Basics, Advanced Tactics and Management Strategies. If you have a great story or best practices to share, we would love for you to submit a proposal to present! The deadline is March 1st.
From the community research, we also had a recommendation to have more involvement from the senior talent acquisition executive community. The board has created a volunteer position of Spring Event Chairperson to support program development and outreach for the spring conference. We are excited to announce who this year’s Spring Event Chairperson will be in the coming weeks.
Finally we couldn’t grow without the help out of community of volunteers, and we are honored that the ranks of volunteers has grown over the years. Volunteering is a great way to learn new skills or reinforce your current skills, tackle new challenges, meet new people and more importantly give back to the community. We love that so many people help out with the programs and events. And we would love to have more people join us!
We’re looking forward to a great year ahead, and to sharing it with our community. Please join us in the conversation on all our social channels, and we’ll see you at the events!
