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For a guy like me, the six most terrifying words in the English language are, “Could I get your bio, please?” I hate describing myself and what I do. My LinkedIn profile has been reworked several times trying to do just that before I got it to its current, less fluffy stage.

For professionals in the talent business, your social media profiles — and especially your LinkedIn profile — are probably one of the first encounters potential employees have when they are looking at or researching your company.

Is it full of clichés and buzzwords or does your profile deliver a clear message that won’t sound like every other inane profile out there?

LinkedIn has recently released some data on the most used buzzwords throughout their network. It’s a good template of words to avoid using when describing yourself.

According to the release, the most used words for US-based professionals are: keep reading…

It’s amazing how many companies say that “people are at the heart of our business.” Oh really? So how come so few employers bother to really develop their careers site to try to attract absolutely the best person for the job? How many bother to develop it beyond a simple list of current vacancies?

Most companies don’t have a very good careers site. Some suggestions follow:

Avoid Visibility and Death by Clicks keep reading…

We have finally found the reason why the American economy has been able to do so much with so few employees. Before we explain the roots of this high productivity we need to explain that a new survey shows that “nearly 50% of men are hiring the women they date in this economy.”

Who were the respondents to this survey? None other than 40,000 members of SeekingArrangement.com, which bills itself as “the world’s largest dating website where women seek (the) ‘well-to-do.’” Yes, this totally perfectly clearly scientific report shows that “46% of ‘Sugar Daddies’ have employed, gone into business, or helped start a small business with their ‘Sugar Babies.’” keep reading…

I was talking to an old client of mine the other day. He was the CEO of a fast-growing manufacturing company in the 1990s, and now he’s on the board of seven mid-sized companies in southern California. My firm placed about 10 people on his management team in the company’s heyday. While I don’t do much real executive search anymore, he asked me if I had the script we used then to convert traditional skills-based job descriptions into performance profiles — aka performance-based job descriptions.

Many of his companies now need to replace some of their senior executives and he wanted to make sure their CEOs totally understood where the incumbents were falling short, and why they need to hire a new person. He believed this type of weak vs. strong performance comparison would get the hiring executives to move more quickly.

Following is roughly how the discussion went for a CFO position. You can use the same approach to better understand how work should be defined for any type of job, and if the current office holder is performing adequately.  keep reading…

In my September 12 article called “The Smoke and Mirrors of Job Descriptions”, I took a stab at a job posting I happened upon during my usual perusing of LinkedIn. The issue was simple: the job title in the posting was completely left of what the company was advertising for. This posting troubled me so much that I decided to take a stab at explaining the ramifications of being misguided, overtly vague, and/or blatantly misrepresenting job duties and KSA’s.

Since I have addressed what not to do in a job description, I thought it would be helpful to talk about how we (including me) can get our job descriptions right. Luckily for me, I had some help in my research. David Clark, senior product and operations manager at CareerBuilder, was kind enough to indulge me in my rant about companies that continually miss the mark where job descriptions are concerned.

Let’s start with some facts. keep reading…

As the new fall television shows are starting to air, viewers across the U.S. are deciding which shows they want to check out. This sort of judgment process is nothing new to recruiters. In fact, the recruiting process is much like getting a new TV show on the air. Television is broken down into three primary areas: the pitch, the pilot shoot, and the acquisition of viewers, all of which contain valuable lessons that recruiters can learn from.

The Pitch

Writers get at most 10 minutes to convince a network executive that their ideas are worth pursuing. A good pitch is a lot like a good job description: dynamic but concise; intriguing but clear; persuasive but direct. Here’s how to pitch a position: keep reading…

I recently came across a job posting for an organization that was looking for a human resources business partner. It was intriguing so I clicked on to see what it was all about. As I continued to read on and review the minimum requirements, I saw requirement after requirement reeks of recruiter. I read on further with the intention to find something in this job description that had the makings of a human resources business partner and still more recruitment duties.

Don’t get me wrong: every organization has their own internal titles that define what people do in an organization. However, there was nothing in this job description that screamed human resources business partner except for a one-liner asking for someone who has a generalist background. This posting got me thinking about all of the negative feedback I have received over the years not only from candidates, but in conversations with other practitioners about the poor manner in which job descriptions are put together and then broadcasted to the masses.

Companies shouldn’t arbitrarily choose a title for a position. keep reading…

Charlie Brown never got much respect. Not from Lucy, who when she wasn’t snatching the football away at the last minute, was making fun of his pitching skills, nor from the Little Red-Haired Girl, with whom he was so infatuated.

Now, as it turns out, Charles Brown doesn’t get much respect from Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For. Out of his 100 applications for a job as a marketing manager, the Charlie Brown of our story has no idea where he stands with six out 10 of the companies.

Six weeks after applying, Charlie heard directly from only 28 companies that he isn’t getting a job. Seven more gave him a reference number, but despite having an MBA from Michigan and BA in mechanical engineering, Charlie didn’t know what to do with it. Three companies allowed him to check his status through their website. One — REI, the outdoor company that has been on the 100 best list for years — actually gave him a call.

As the other Charlie Brown would say, “Good grief.” keep reading…

It’s pure genius. The approach that I call “Compelling Job Titling” involves giving a job a compelling title, and because it costs virtually nothing, it may have the highest ROI of any single recruiting and retention tool.

That may sound like an outrageous statement but consider the example of “the genius bar” at Apple’s retail stores. From all accounts, the job itself is not particularly unique (you simply help resolve customer product problems) but with the job, you get the official company bestowed title of “genius.” Simply by giving this job a compelling name, Apple has been flooded with applicants and once in the job, geniuses stay longer than the average Apple retail employee. And the best part is that these powerful recruiting and retention results from providing exciting job titles come at no cost to the company. Currently popular compelling job titles include Jedi, Rockstar (used for over 2,000 jobs) and Ninja (used for over 8,000 jobs).

The Power of the “Genius” Title keep reading…

There’s little left in the discussion of whether Facebook is a good recruiting medium. The real issue is how long it will be until you get started. Nielsen reports that 23% of all online hours are spent on Facebook.

The goal of this article is to define the three basic elements of any social recruiting process.

Effective recruiting always begins with a single question: Who do you want to recruit? Without a clear answer, your results will be muddled. In order to use Facebook (or any social media) as a recruiting tool, you need to have a good idea about:

• Who you’re recruiting and when you need them (workforce plan)
• What kind of person who makes a good fit at your company (culture)
• Who they know/how to find them (networks)
• What you want the to know about your company (messaging)
• How available they are as a class (scarcity)

The most important thing to understand about using social media for recruiting is that each channel is a closed ecosystem. Your work on LinkedIn garners no credit on Twitter and so on. Social media is the ultimate “what have you done for me lately?” communications channel. What matters is what you’ve done most recently in the channel that you’ve chosen.

In each case, effective outreach involves the balancing of three elements. The core page, dynamic content (including jobs), and the development of traffic are at the heart of any successful Facebook recruiting initiative. Successful execution of all three elements is required for sustained success. And, each of the three elements require continual and continuous improvement in order to keep the right traffic flowing.

Facebook Pages (the Company Page) keep reading…

You’ve written a compelling job ad that hits all the hot points. You’ve distributed it widely. You’ve even managed to get it high up on search results pages. Despite all that, the number of applications is disappointing.

What went wrong?

The problem, says CareerBuilder, could very well be technical. Bad links, computer or Internet difficulties, and cumbersome applications are the top reasons cited by interested candidates for not responding to a job posting. keep reading…

Recruiting is important at any firm, but it is super critical at startup firms. This is because when you have thousands of employees, you can still get by after hiring a few turkeys. At a startup, however, you are so lean that every hire must count and a single bad hire can cause incredible damage.

To further complicate the matter, large firms have a product and employer brand that can attract applicants. Startups have no name recognition, no recruiters, and only an informal recruiting process. The recruiting is made even more difficult because startups are often targeting engineers and IT staff, which are the second- and third-most difficult-to-fill jobs.

Don’t despair. It is possible to recruit great people to a startup if you are aggressive and you know the right tools to use. The following is a list of recruiting approaches and tools that are tailored to the limited resources and the special needs of startup firms.  keep reading…

The most important part of the recruiting process is the recruiter’s initial meeting with the hiring manager. With the right approach you can save an incredible amount of time and energy, and hire better candidates. In addition, you raise your standing with hiring managers to that of a true business partner.

In any profession, whether it is in business or sports, one must study the best to learn what they do that sets them apart. In sports, athletes like Kobe Bryant, Lionel Messi, and Lance Armstrong are legendary for their relentless drive for perfection and extraordinary work ethic in training. In recruiting, we can study executive recruiters who are given key assignments by business leaders and regularly command large commissions.

I recently spoke with Robert Fong, a managing Partner for the Global Advanced Technology Practice at Nosal Partners, an executive search firm in San Francisco. We discussed the importance of the first meeting with the hiring manager.

Two key factors that set them apart are the time reserved, and the order in which they approach gathering information:

• An hour to an hour and a half is typically reserved for the meeting.
• The recruiter spends the first part of the meeting learning about the business and what priorities the position will address.
• The position description and how it relates to the business priorities is then addressed.
• Only after learning the above, does the recruiter gather information about the candidate qualifications.

This is the diametric opposite of the approach taken by most in-house and agency recruiters. They:

• Spend 10-30 minutes at most in the intake meeting.
• Focus almost solely on the candidate qualifications.
• Spend little time on the position description.
• Spend no time on learning or understanding the business.

Let’s break this down step by step: keep reading…

Before we experienced the 2008 economic disaster, the phrase “war for talent” seemed to be overused by every corporate and agency recruiter I came in contact with. It seemed to go away until the first or second quarter of 2011 and now seems to be back on every executive and recruiter’s mind. Recruiters across the country have shared with me the excitement they have about recruiting again — about building talent pipelines, implementing social media, bolstering up their LinkedIn connections, and creating new and compelling candidate value propositions.

Let me start by giving one word of advice: stop!

If you are serious about recruiting the best talent, take this as an opportunity to build a recruiting culture throughout the entire organization — up to and including the CEO. Don’t make the mistake of throwing all of your time and money into new-fangled technologies, building talent communities, or costly social media campaigns unless you have the basic principles of recruiting drilled into both your recruiting staff and your hiring executives.

Let me ask a few questions:

1. What is your organization’s candidate value proposition? Does everyone involved in the recruiting process understand these points? How is this information communicated to candidates?
2. Are you really using your social networks/connections? Are you continuously broadcasting your open positions to your networks? Are you growing your LinkedIn connections?
3. Are you building talent pipelines? How do you create a talent pipeline? How do you communicate to and track those in your pipeline?
4. Are you interviewing consistently and effectively? What questions is the recruiter asking? What questions is the recruiting committee asking?

Most of those reading this can probably provide a detailed answer as to what they are doing in each of these areas. For example, every time I ask the question “Why would someone want to join your organization” I get a very lengthy answer. Whether I ask the CEO or the recruiter, both can rattle off 10-15 bullet points of why any particular candidate should pack up their current offices, quit their jobs, and walk across the street to a new, fantastic, opportunity.

In the same way, everyone talks about growing their social networks, particularly LinkedIn, and the value this brings to their recruiting effectiveness.

On the surface both of these issues seem like great news — but are they really?

As the competition for finding, engaging, and attracting the right candidate heats up, every organization needs to reassess their understanding of, and strategy for, implementing each of these focus areas.

Let’s go through the four questions I asked earlier. keep reading…

As recruiting and staffing professionals, we all need to be detailed and diligent when interviewing our hiring managers to ensure we are prepared for both effective advertising and sourcing strategies. But what things do we really need to ask a hiring manager?

It all depends on what we currently know and don’t know about the position we are recruiting. List the things we do know about the position to make filling in the gaps much easier when discussing them with the hiring manager.

Let’s take a look at some topics that we may to discuss depending upon the current relationship we have with the hiring manager. keep reading…

by John Sullivan and Laureen Edmiston

Several weeks ago ere.net published an article that asked the question “what are the dumbest things that recruiters do.” After surveying recruiters on ere.net, Twitter, and at the recent SMA symposium in Seattle, it is clear that most feel the dumbest thing recruiters do is…

Not managing the candidate experience — the candidate experience is the perception of the sum of interactions with an organization throughout the hiring process. It includes every communication, the design of the process, the fairness of process elements, the quality of information exchanged, and the honesty with which questions and concerns are addressed. Providing a poor candidate experience can have many negative consequences, including an increased candidate dropout rate, negative word-of-mouth, and decreased loyalty to the overall brand.

The rest of the “Top 10” are… keep reading…

Director of Fun.

That was the title I was looking at on a resume for a marketing director position. As I read through the applicant’s accomplishments and responsibilities, I could see that it was clearly a marketing-type position. It stuck out, just not in a good way.

What may have seemed like a great little thing to have on a business card as an attention-getter had now turned into a liability. Nobody knows what a “Director of Fun” does. And sure, maybe “Marketing Director” isn’t all that specific on its own, but give me some context (industry, company size, and market) and I can pretty quickly figure out what you’re doing.

Using these fun titles externally is a mistake.

What’s in a Title?

Now listen, I’m not a super stickler for titles. I know it’s what you actually do that’s the real important point.

If you’re an HR manager but you’re doing HR assistant work, I’m going to treat you as such (and vice verse as well). And we know title inflation is a big part of the hiring process and it can help make business transactions flow easier. Go into large banks and insurance brokerages, some with hundreds of branches and I’ll bet you find a VP or SVP in the building.

Wacky job titles simply confuse most real people.

So yes, titles can be B.S., but I think most people know that. If you walk into a brokerage and find most people are managers and directors and the top guy is a SVP, you still contextually know people’s roles and who is in charge. It might be a shift in thinking, but you aren’t reinventing the wheel.

Now “Director of Fun”? Or “Corporate Magician”?

Fun titles Not So Fun in the Real World

Some organizations think funky job titles are a great way of expressing a company’s culture or to stand out from the crowd. Moo.com sent over some of the most interesting examples of this. Here are my top 10 head-scratching titles Moo listed, in no particular order:  keep reading…

You can’t recruit and hire passive candidates using the same workflow nor the same recruiters used for active candidates.

We conducted an in-depth survey with LinkedIn last year that indicated that 82% of their fully-employed members were unlikely to even consider switching jobs unless directly contacted by a recruiter or through an employee they’ve worked with closely in the past. This increased slightly to 83% in this year’s survey. This is shown on the graph, with the dark blue line representing the satisfaction level of those surveyed (4,550 fully-employed LinkedIn members) comparing their job seeking status and job requirements over time.

From a strategy standpoint, the idea is to find candidates either the moment they actively enter the job market, or before. But to do this, you need a different process for sourcing and recruiting the 83% who are not actively looking than used for those who are. This is what is meant by an “Early-bird Sourcing Strategy.”

The surveys also highlighted the fact that most companies spend most of their recruiting resources targeting the 17% who are actively looking. Making matters more challenging, while most passive candidates are open to a discussion with a recruiter, they would only consider a significant career move to switch jobs.

Over the next several weeks I’ll be hosting a few webcasts describing how to develop this type of early-bird sourcing program. Part of this will describe some of the workflow process changes required to support the strategy, and the specific competencies a recruiter needs to possess in order to implement it. These changes are not insignificant. keep reading…

If you have posted a position on a job board and not received the response you were expecting, you have probably been through adaptive preference formation to reduce your cognitive dissonance. To put it simply, you became Aesop’s Fox and decided that the job board you posted on did not work.

Posters remorse happens a lot when it comes to job postings, and as a result sometimes recruiters may not fully appreciate the power of advertising their open positions. In fact, when speaking about job postings, many technical recruiters see them as an ineffective way to attract talent.

Not surprisingly, a lot of the apathy around postings is directly related to job boards, even though over the years leaders within this space have adapted their offering to make sure that postings get distributed to more relevant candidates. Forward-thinking job boards have made significant strides in developing a solid job distribution network, and yet recruiters generally remain unimpressed with the “post and pray” model.

You cannot really blame recruiters for being disappointed in the results they are getting; however, there is a need to address the posters’ accountability in the whole process.

Job postings do work. They can attract great candidates both passive and active. They can also generate referrals. Passive job seekers often glance at the job email that arrives fresh in their inbox each morning. Recruiters tend to forget that they have a significant influence on the response quality they receive.

Over the last 12 months the number of poorly written postings being submitted to sites within the technology recruitment field has increased significantly. Fewer candidates combined with low-quality postings means poor results for everyone. As a result, organizations are investing more in the proactive searching and networking side of things, but not on postings. In fact the lack of focus on quality postings is getting worse, and some organizations are missing out big time.

Postings do have a place in the talent acquisition mix; they can even act as the recruiter’s recruiter if optimized correctly.

Below are some tips to help you increase your chances of success with job postings. keep reading…