Take This Smog and Shove It (Or Ignore It and Sell the Weather)

Where’s it easier to get candidates to move to, and where’s it harder? That’s a question the search firm Heidrick & Struggles asked 50 of its U.S. search consultants. The least “recruitable” cities: Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Detroit (we’d have posted the results sooner, but we were stuck in LA traffic).

The easiest place to get people to move to is Atlanta, followed by Chicago.
It depends on the industry. San Francisco did better, for example, for technology, finance, and professional services.

What candidates don’t like is bad schools, bad weather, a bad commute, high housing costs (or trouble selling their current homes) and limited opportunities if you end up leaving the job you’re being recruited for. They also want a good business culture with big companies, partly for job options for the spouse, as well as an airport with good flight options, and as safe a town as they can find.

Living in LA, we can tell you the weather is a plus, though some natives do complain that’s it’s too hot when it’s over 75 and too cold when it’s under 74. But with so many folks we know looking to flee the city because of the schools, as well as having a tough time with underwater homes, we get all that.

An Embarrassment of Riches

With all the whining about how hard it is to find quality hires we thought we were in a parallel universe when we read that the supply of “extremely bright, qualified, and eager candidates is so high that it is nearly problematic.”

If Sally Ezra was recruiting English or history majors that would be one thing. But she’s talking about actuaries. Seriously! We didn’t even know what an actuary was until Google incorrectly auto-completed a search term for us a while back. Sally, though, says companies who hire these professionals are finding they have the enviable job of pouring through dozens of high-quality applicants for every job they post.

Don’t you just wish you had that problem?

Leave the Recruiting to Us

Ever gone to a recruiting conference and been told that it’s “the whole organization’s responsibility to recruit” and that “at our organization, everyone’s a recruiter”?

Well, a new video from Notre Dame tells people that not everyone’s a recruiter. It’s meant to dissuade every Tom, Dick, and Harry from recruiting for Notre Dame. Enjoy.

Recruiting 101

Quiz: Here are a few tips we’ve pulled from a blog post. What’s the topic?

Focus on helping your recruit reach their objectives.
Try to ask one amazing question at the beginning of each new type of contact.
Believe in your program.
Ask for the sale.

If you said recruiting, well, duh. What kind? Here’s a hint: Make a mistake in this kind of recruiting and your employer can get punished big time, and it won’t be by any government agency. You peeked, didn’t you? The tips are for coaches recruiting top talent for their schools. Amazing, though, how it applies to recruiting (and to sales, we should add).