Big 3 Recruiting Mistakes – Continued - RecruitingBlogs.com

Corey Harlock

Big 3 Recruiting Mistakes – Continued

Reputation is HUGE, especially now with social networking and immediate feedback. People talk, especially when they feel like they have been treated unfairly.

Your reputation is a consideration at every level of your business. Here are some areas you may not have thought of:
How you advertise your positions. Are you targeting the right people or using the “dirty bomb” method? Post it everywhere and hope the right person sees it. I can not stress the importance of posting the right job in the right place. Too many advertisements can = desperate.
Your selection process. Do you take the time to send a “thanks, but no thanks” letter? Here is what I know – over 70% of applicants in our industry receive a response to their online application 60% of the time or LESS. Too busy to respond? You should make time because 36% of those people you didn’t respond to WON’T re-apply! Talk about shrinking your candidate pool. You think finding good people is hard now – keep finding reasons not to respond to their application and you will find it very hard!

Your hiring process. Don’t make the candidates wait. In today’s world of instant feedback and information, making candidates wait for interviews and feedback can kill your reputation too. Here are some more scary stats and remember these are Execs & Mgrs. 42% of candidates think the interview process should be a maximum of 5 business days. Another 41% think the max should be 10 business days. Yep, take longer than 5 days and you have not met the expectations of 42% of your applicants – that’s 2 in 5. That number jumps to 4 in 5 if you go past 10 business days. Here is the worst news, take to long and 70% of these people will never re-apply again! No “thanks, but no thanks” and you lose 36% of your candidate pool. Then take to long to interview the people you actually liked and lose another 70% of your candidate pool. Ouch!
Your retention policy. Do you know what really keeps your managers working for you? Do you want to know? Here it is – 62% want the training, coaching and mentoring they need to get promoted to the next level of their career. The 2nd most important reason an employee stays with you is… input and collaboration which came in at a whopping 16%. To put this in perspective salary and bonus came in at 3.6% and 3.1% respectively.

People talk, that’s a fact. And more importantly they talk more when they feel undervalued or disrespected. The ol’ “if you don’t like it, there’s the door” mentality doesn’t work anymore (I don’t know if it ever did). You need to recognize and meet the needs of your most important asset or an equal side of your triangle or the topic of your vision statement or whatever! The fact of the matter is – good people are hard to find. As the market recovers their stock will rise and finding good people will be challenging. Now is the time to address any concerns – fix your reputation and get ready for the future.

Follow These 3 Networking Tips

Original Post Here



image by Joe Pemberton

“Networking for a job change or to get off unemployment is nearly essential, since people -- not computers -- hire other people,” says Matt Noah, CEO of Chanhassen, MN-based, NetSuds.com, a firm that helps professionals build and enhance their network of contacts.

Here are 3 ways you can network better and find your next job faster …

1) Attend Industry Events

No matter what you do, there’s probably a regular event of some kind where potential employers in your industry gather. Identify events or venues that will most likely help your job search, then go there!


“Typically, the more focused the event, the better,” says Noah. “If you are a plumber, don’t go to an electrician’s trade show, for example. And size matters -- events are popular and well-attended if they provide value to the people in attendance.”

So, attend well-focused, popular events. You can find them advertised in trade journals, the business section of the Sunday paper, or search for them online at www.google.com


2) Join a Job Club

These aren’t very high-tech or exciting. Just plain effective.

In a good job club, you’ll meet weekly or monthly with 10-30 other people to share leads, provide support and practice such skills as interviewing and negotiating for salary. Job clubs are usually free, so don’t fret about membership costs.

You’ll find job clubs all around you. Contact your local library, church, community groups and state employment agency for help in contacting one or more that suit your needs.

If your city publishes a free employment weekly newspaper, be sure to check the announcements section to find job clubs; you may also find them listed in your phone book.

3) Perfect Your Pitch

No matter how you network, you’ll eventually have to tell people what kind of job you’re after. So develop a 20-30-second “pitch,” describing who you are and what you do.


Focus on your unique combination of specific skills, knowledge and experience.

Example pitch: “I’m a tech support professional with five years of helpdesk experience. I’ve encountered and solved just about every problem imaginable. Before that, I completed officer’s training as an ROTC student while earning my MIS degree. This gives me a broader range of technical, leadership and problem-solving skills than most folks.”


According to marketing expert Larry Chase at www.larrychase.com, “I find people appreciate it when you can deliver your pitch in less time than they anticipated. It telegraphs that you are clearly focused and waste no time getting to the point.”

Action Step: People – not computers, Web site or fax machines -- ultimately hire people. You’ll have to work effectively with people AFTER you’re hired, so you might was well get skilled at meeting and networking with people BEFORE you’re hired.

Complimentsof David Perry and Kevin Donlin

Grab your Free Guerrilla Job Search Audio here.


Can You Be Personal and Professional in Social Media?

Original Post Here January 7th, 2010 (12:00pm) Dawn Foster



There have been plenty of blog posts and discussions recently about how you need to be “personal” across the various social media web sites, even when communicating on behalf of your company or brand. Social media is about conversations, and people have conversations with other people, not faceless corporations. So you want to come across as a person talking with people, not at them, unlike the traditional one-way marketing broadcasts of yesteryear.
In this post, I am going to focus specifically on how to balance the personal with the professional, but you should also read Aliza’s post about revisiting her 10 golden rules of social media for more best practices.
You can actually be professional and personal at the same time in social media without too much effort. When we talk about “being personal” on social media web sites, I think that many people confuse “personal” with “private.” The reality is that you get to decide what to share and what not to share, so you can still keep most areas of your private life private. Think about this like the beginning of a conference call on Monday where you spend a few minutes talking about how you spent your weekend. You probably aren’t going to reveal anything private, inappropriate or unprofessional in a conference call with a client or coworkers, but sharing a little personal information does help you get to know each other on a level that is slightly deeper than just having strictly work conversations. This is exactly the type of personal information you can easily share on social media.
Value is an important consideration for both personal and professional social media posts. Before you post something, think about the value that you can offer along with the observation. For example, “making pizza for dinner” is going to be of little value and less interesting to people than if you get detailed about the type of pizza and include a link to the recipe. While you may be thinking it’s silly to post about food, the reality is that people really bond around food; they enjoy talking about it, and it’s way more neutral than politics or religion. In other words, it’s a relatively safe topic, but one that people are very passionate about. Now, you probably wouldn’t post something like this to a corporate account for your brand (unless you are Tony Hsieh from Zappos), but you can talk about your products in a personal way by adding a note about your experience with the product as the author of the post. Maybe you helped with the design or product definition, and you can mention your personal contribution to the product.
Variety can also play a big role in how well you balance the personal and professional. You should strive for an appropriate balance based on your situation with a nice variety in your posts. For example, if you use Facebook mostly for personal reasons, and you start posting almost exclusively professional updates, your personal friends will probably be irritated. Likewise, if you use Twitter mostly for work, and you start posting only personal updates, you’ll lose the people who are following you for your professional insights. The trick is to come up with a balance between the personal and professional that works well in your situation, without swinging too far into either direction. I make a point of looking at my Twitter stream every few days to make sure that I have an appropriate balance of personal and professional along with a few other things that I try to balance (informative vs. fun, self-promotion vs. promoting others, etc.)
Context is also important. Being personal is very important in some cases and less important in others, so you need to think about the context and what you are trying to accomplish as a brand, and make the right decisions for your company. The tricky part is that no one approach will work for everyone and no one piece of advice fits well in every situation. This means living within the norms of the various web sites or networks where you are participating, but coming up with an approach that makes sense for you and your company. No blogger, consultant or industry expert can make the decision about the right balance for you.
How do you balance personal with professional in social media?
Photo by Flickr user D. Sharon Pruitt used under Creative Commons.

24 Free iPhone Apps for Job Hunting

Original Post Here

If you’re looking for a new job, I’ve rounded up some useful iPhone apps that can help you with your search and preparation for interviews. Here are 24 free apps to get your job hunt moving in the right direction.



asapLocal displays many different types of information specific to your location, including job openings.




Career Bliss provides inside information about companies, including salaries.




HireSyndicate shares real-time job info from recruiters.




CLBFree provides mobile access to Craigslist, including the job section.




BusyBee finds freelance and contract opportunities in your local area.




JobTweet Job Search
utilizes Twitter for search for open positions online.





JobRadio.FM is a 24/7 Internet radio show dedicated to careers advice.




InterviewBuddy offers a slew of advice, tips and tricks for interview preparation.




GetApps Done is a little different than the other apps in this roundup. It caters to the development community, connecting those who are looking for development work and those looking for developers.





Interview Buzz Lite is another interview preparation study app with 32 free questions. The Pro version includes 300 questions.




A Mighty River specializes in assisting African-Americans with finding new job opportunities and goes beyond that with career guidance.





CBT Nuggets lets you watch many free IT training videos to help you sharpen your skills.




JobServe Connect is the official iPhone app for the service that’s been around since 1993.




UK Jobs is useful for finding jobs in the UK, not just for those living there but also for those thinking about moving across the pond.




Job Search provides a bunch of videos with advice on how to find the right job for you.





techVenture Job is from a Silicon Valley search firm that connects investors, developers and co-founders.




JobFinder serves the U.S. and UK with a powerful search engine that taps into some large job sites such as Monster.com and Indeed.com.





LinkUp Job Search Engine is different from the other apps here, in that it only lists jobs from company web sites.




TechCareers searches the niche markets for tech and engineering jobs.




SnagaJob uses your iPhone’s GPS to locate jobs within a five mile radius of where you’re standing. It also uses zipcode searches to locate positions anywhere else.





JobCompass is another job search app that utilizes the power of the GPS and displays available jobs surrounding your current position. This comes in handy when traveling to a new town or even while you’re on your way to a job interview. You just might find other positions while en route!




CareerBuilder
taps into its massive 2-million job database and provides notification of any replies to job applications you’ve made on its system and new positions that become available.




High Paying Jobs claims to search more job sites than any other free job app.



ALB Legal Jobs caters to finding positions in the legal sector.


Which apps have you found useful in your job hunt?

8 Top Twitter Track Tools to Organize the People You Follow

Original Post Here

twittertoolsThe proliferation of tools created to support Twitter is astounding due to the early adoption and usage of the Twitter API by developers worldwide. While there are plenty of web applications to choose from to analyze and visualize your activity with Twitter, the Twitter tracking apps that help you manage all of your friends and followers with ease are indispensable.


Here’s a rundown of eight of the best Twitter tracking apps to help you keep track of your friends and followers, and decide among them who are adding value to your usage of one of the world’s most popular social networking tools.



TwitterKarma


twitterkarma


While it may not win awards for its aesthetics, Twitter Karma makes up for its simple design by providing a quick solution to see all of your friends and followers sorted in a variety of ways. You can follow and unfollow quickly and easily among your friends, followers, and mutual friends.


FriendOrFollow


friendorfollow


Another Twitter tracking app for a simple sorted visualization of your friends and followers is FriendOrFollow. It’s a fast way to find all of the people you follow who aren’t following you back. If you’re curious, you can also see who the top 100 most followed users are, or the top 100 users following the most other users.


ReFollow


refollow


For someone who wants even more control over their Twitter account, ReFollow provides a slew of features for any power user. You can view not only your friends and followers, but those who are friends or followers of any other particular user, or any user who has ever @mentioned you. These can all be sorted by last tweet, tweet count, alphabetical by username, or their friend/follower counts. There’s also a ton of filterable options if you need to get very specific. You can show only users with unique keywords in their bios, their geographic locations, or even if they have a custom avatar or not.


Twittangle


twittangle


For people who like to manually label their friends and followers to get a better handle on who’s who, Twittangle allows users to form groups to better manage who they follow, or who’s following them. It also displays your friends and followers with a unique column view. You can rate them, add and apply tags to each of them, add them to unique groups, or see other users’ groups.


Tweepler


tweepler


To best sort your followers, Tweepler takes a different, visual approach by presenting two “bucket” columns that you “process” your followers into. This allows you to assign certain followers into an ignore state that you don’t wish to follow back. You also have many sorting and searching options to help determine who gets dropped into each “bucket”.


Twitterless


twitterless


Are you looking for more statistics and visualized graphs to help you sort out your friends and followers? Twitterless will graph your follower history over time and inform you of the users that stop following you. You can filter your friends and followers with keywords, words in their descriptions, or their location in relation to you. Twitterless also has a notion of forming groups to help you better organize your network.


Tweepi


tweepi


For the geekiest Twitter users, Tweepi delivers a mathematical breakdown to help you decide if you have spammers or deadbeats among your friends and followers that you need to purge. The four modules Tweepi showcases are a Follow, Flush, Reciprocate, and Cleanup – all of which help to manage your network quickly and with plenty of numerical detail to help you make your tougher decisions.


Twerpscan


twerpscan


The last Twitter tracking app in the roundup is self-dubbed “anti-fool contact management”, which serves as a concise description of yet another visual solution which assists you in listing and sorting your network of friends and followers. The “Drilldown” feature allows you to research more about users, while the management tools present lists with ratios, tweet counts, and other info to decide who stays and goes.


All of the above tools are good choices for doing a better job of managing your network than what Twitter.com provides. It’s really a matter of how much control you’d like, and how quickly and easily you want to make changes. There’s plenty of ways to look at the users on your lists, and these 8 web apps can provide simple solutions, detailed analysis, or fine-tuned management solutions that help improve your experience with Twitter, and get more out of the service by narrowing the amount of people you stay in contact with to only those that matter most – for you.

Keep Twitter from Overtaking Your Personal Site in Search Results with a Line of HTML [Online Identity]

Original Post Here

Recently, a lot of folks have noticed their Twitter pages superseding their blogs in Google search results for their name. Tech journalist Marshall Kirkpatrick has an easy HTML workaround to keep Twitter from becoming your primary online identity.

Having a say in what Google says about you is extremely important these days, especially for professionals such as freelancers, for whom a Google search result of their name is a first impression for potential employers. You definitely want your blog or professional web site to show up before your non-professional social networking profiles. Kirkpatrick discovered a small HTML tag that was missing from his own blog, yet present in Twitter, that could make all the difference:

So the long and short of this story is that if you want to make sure that Google understands your blog to be your primary beacon on the web, then you should add the words rel='me' to a relevant link on your blog. I've added that tag to the link on my sidebar that goes to my feedback page, because that's a good page for me. It's as simple as making the link text read a href='http://marshallk.com/feedback' rel='me'.

It's not necessarily a foolproof solution, but it should help (and certainly shouldn't hurt). If you've got any other useful tips to keep your blog or personal site at the top of search engines, let us know in the comments.

When You Network, Use Your Ears, Then Shake Hands

Original Post: Here


Image by NixieMichelle
I was sitting at a meeting the other day, when a gentleman started to ask a very long question. The woman sitting next to me had started a networking company, and about mid-way through his question, she leaned over and said, “You should be sure to introduce yourself to this guy - he’s passionate about the same things you are.”
The funny thing was, I had completely tuned him out because the question was so long. Meanwhile, she was listening and realized that he was passionate about my work, and that he might be a huge fan, supporter, or even asset to us some day.
It was a valuable lesson for me about one little thing (listening) that you can do to improve your networking skills.
What can you teach your employees about connecting with clients, co-workers, supervisors, or strangers that will improve your business?