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.
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 Marcelle Yeager
As part of our Fall 2017 Speaker Preview, Marcelle Yeager gives us a peek into her talk at our next event on Dec 7.
Elizabeth is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) who has been unemployed for almost two years as a result of moving with the military as the spouse of a service member.
Jamie is studying toward her Bachelor of Science degree, having been unemployed and unable to find work for two years as a military spouse, though she worked previously for seven consecutive years.
Sharon holds a Master of Science degree in civil engineering. As the spouse of a diplomat, she has gaps in employment and is uncertain about her ability to find work abroad.
These stories are common. According to a 2013 study by the Institute for Veterans and Military Families at Syracuse University (IVMF) and the Military Officers Association of America (MOAA), 55% percent of spouses said it was difficult to find their most recent job, and 85% said it’s difficult for military spouses to get hired.
Why? These candidates are often immediately screened out of a hiring process because of gaps in work history and frequent moves. When that happens, an employer loses a candidate with soft skills that are almost impossible to teach in exchange for a local, presumably long-term candidate who may depart within a few years. According to a recent Gallup study, State of the American Workplace, 35% of employees have changed jobs in the last three years.
While companies aim to increase the number of women and veterans in the workplace, many struggle to do so. As recruiters, we must educate and build awareness among hiring managers by effectively marketing diverse candidates. You may be concerned about longevity among military or diplomatic spouse candidates or not fully understand their resumes. As a recruiter, it is your job to uncover the whole story and convince hiring managers that there are no tenure guarantees for any new staff. It is important that we not only find a common thread but also use the candidate’s varied background to tell the story of someone unique. Take the time to engage with the candidate so you can learn and promote what he or she has to offer. By doing so, you can reach diversity recruiting goals for yourself, your team, and your company.
Source: http://vets.syr.edu/research/research-highlights/milspouse-survey/
To hear more about these stories and how to improve your military and diversity recruiting efforts, join me at the next recruitDC event at the North Bethesda Marriott on Thursday, December 7. Get your tickets today!
Ed Note:
At recruitDC, we want to actively support our sister organizations across the country, whose aim is to bring great training and content to recruiters in their local area. With the advent of ATAP, a national movement is underway, but the local organizations are the lifeblood of the grassroots movement.
Today, we wanted to share some info on Source Houston, which is taking place next week, on April 20th. To purchase your tickets, visit their Eventbrite site
Houston is the fourth largest city in the United States, and there or over 2.1M people in Houston proper with another 4M people in the surrounding suburbs. Almost 30,000 people here in Houston say they are in the business of hiring people. I bet there are exceedingly intelligent recruiters here in Houston that push the limits of what can be done every day. I’d also put money on the table that some recruiters that want to learn more about our industry, network with like minded people, grow in their careers and take it to the next level. Dollars to donuts that both of those types of recruiters would love the opportunity to share and learn in a welcoming place. This is why WE created Source Houston and that includes you (even if you’re not in Houston).
The beginning…
Source Houston came together with like minded recruiters and sourcers here in Houston. We all came from different industries, but were facing similar problems in identifying and hiring talent. So we problem solved. We started collaborating over google hangouts for brainstorming and bouncing strategies off each other, and soon working lunches and meetups ensued. We were having fun too! Working together with others who shared our interests (and struggles) made us better collectively, and we fostered great friendships in the process. Together we discovered a wealth of information, ideas, and techniques that benefited everyone in so many ways. As the old saying goes, rising tides raise all ships!
The knowledge is here…
As this is being written, a recruiter or sourcer is playing lights out at their desk, crushing goals every day. There is a leader in talent acquisition making innovative changes and streamlining their processes. We want to hear from them and share that knowledge because it only makes us better. Our industry is evolving rapidly, and while the fundamentals remain true, tons of new recruiting and HR tech is introduced almost daily. We have professionals that have taken the stage at national recruiting conferences to share their expertise right here in Houston. Alaina Rivas, Monali Parmar, and Natalie Dunphy to name a few. But what about the recruiters and sourcers in the trenches, getting things done on the daily? What knowledge can they bring to the table? That know-how and best practices are right here in our back yard. Our goal is to leverage the expertise here in Houston in the areas of sourcing, recruiting, talent acquisition, and social media to attract talent to our organizations. So let’s build and share together..
Accessibility
Not everyone can take half a week off of work or have the budget to attend some of our favorite recruiting conferences like SourceCon, Talent42, or ERE. Not many companies have a training and development plan for their TA teams. That is why it’s important to invest in your own development and collaborate with other recruiters locally. Own and hone your craft. There are some outstanding knowledge based sharing events all over the country, but rarely do they come to Houston. We aim to change that. Our conferences, meetups, and workshops are all designed to maximize the time spent there. No travel means less time away from the desk, families, and more importantly, we keep things simple and fun. We are holding out next conference at a brewery… enough said.
#RealTalk
We all have networks when it comes to our daily roles. I noticed that I am networked “well” in Houston, but, I haven’t spoken to many of them for over a year. Some of the greatest business relationships come from the cultivated acquaintances. Having a robust network of industry colleagues and leaders is another great way to find your next role or opportunity. Plain and simple; a networked recruiter is a good recruiter. We invite you to join our community. Take place in the conversation, share what you know, learn something new, and have some fun doing it!. We also stay connected through social media for continuous learning far after our conferences have ended.
Recruit Like You Mean It…
Our motto is recruit like you mean it. Collaborating with your local peers could bring you the game changer you’ve been looking for your day to day or your career. Inversely, you could end up providing that to someone. Recruiting is more than just LinkedIn and an ATS. It’s about relationships, leveraging the right tools to make those relationships, and taking the candidate experience seriously. Are you willing to start your own community?
About the Authors
Jason Vogel is a Sourcing Manager for PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), and a founding member of Source Houston. He is part of a national Sourcing Team whose focus is to identify, engage, and build a talent pipeline of passive candidates and convert them to active applicants for the firm to hire. Jason has 20 years of recruiting experience as an agency and in-house corporate recruiter.
Arron Daniels, Recruiting Sourcer at H-E-B and Founder of Source Houston,(specializing in technical & non-technical recruitment, and everything in between – a true firefighter when it comes to recruitment!) Arron started his recruiting journey in the military – recruiting military & signal intelligence and transitioned out of the service into a Sourcer role during his agency days in Houston – You can catch Arron contributing to Workology, Recruiting Daily & SourceCon
Megan Calimbas is is a founding member of Source Houston and is currently a Sourcing Manager with PWC. She is a wellspring of knowledge in recruiting and she has led projects and teams for many high profile companies. Megan specializes in talent identification and has been in leadership roles developing sourcing teams as well as an individual contributor. You can find Megan contributing and speaking with ERE Media.
RecruitDC returns to Maryland for our Fall half-day event at the North Bethesda Marriott on November 17, 2016. Save the date and we’ll let you know as soon as tickets will be made available.
Be sure to follow us on Twitter, or like us on Facebook or check our website regularly to watch for our call for presenters as well as any additional event details as they’re released! If you are interested in volunteering for the event, please reach out to Jay Perreault for more information.
See you in November!
By Kathleen Smith
It is with great pleasure that I announce recruitDC’s first Spring Event Chairperson Teresa Green, Head of Global Talent Acquisition, CEB. Teresa has been a great friend and supporter of recruitDC as a past presenter and advisor to the organization. She will provide guidance to the recruitDC leadership as we build our programs and outreach for the upcoming recruitDC spring conference on May 26th at George Washington University.
Teresa is well known to the Washington DC talent acquisition community having been a recruiting leader for several local name brands like Marriott, Capital One, and Heidrick & Struggles before joining CEB in 2010.
The Spring Event Chairperson has several roles. The first is to provide a senior leadership perspective to program agenda for the full day recruitDC conference. Recently, recruitDC received several presentation proposals from local and national recruiting organizations. Ms. Green will assist the Program Committee in determining which of these presentations best meet the needs of the local recruiting community.
A second role for the Spring Event Chairperson is ambassadorial. Ms. Green will assist in outreach to recruiting leaders in the Washington DC community to share the mission of recruitDC – which is to foster best practices and new idea discussions to elevate the recruiting profession in the greater Washington DC area – and invite them to send their teams to the spring conference.
Finally, Teresa, as the Spring Event Chairperson provides the opening remarks at the Spring Conference putting the whole day in perspective for the attendees.
Thank you Teresa for joining us! We look forward to your contributions to our upcoming Spring Conference.
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!
