Sourcerer's Apprentice

Maximizing Your Costs: Using Push Technology to Effectively Source Your Candidates

Fri, 06 Jan 2006 14:01:05 GMT

Ask most large companies and they well tell you that they presently use some fee-based resume service such as Monster, Career Builder, or Hot Jobs. Not only do they post their job openings on these sites, but they regularly extract resumes to put into their applicant tracking systems for further review.

There normally is a cost associated with job postings, and this fee can be reduced substantially when placing a larger number of requests. The site also charges for access to its resume database, and in some cases, places a limit on the amount of resumes that can be extracted in one day, or even a certain period.

The main problem in posting a job on these massive sites is knowing that a large percentage of your responses are going to be way off from your acceptance threshold, and that your recruitment staff is going be saddled with unnecessary time spent looking for those few needles in the haystack. Think about the metrics and costs associated with posting a $300 job, reviewing all the responses, and eventually arriving at a handful of prospective candidates – your process costs will easily be tenfold or more in manhours.

The alternative, or as these sites will promote themselves heavily on this other ability, is that you can look at their ever renewing database of professional candidates. So you begin a simple search and then refine it to arrive at a sampling of 20-30 folks, who you now have to review, and then make a decision whether to accept or reject, contact now or in the future, and ultimately bring closure to this search. How long did this exercise take? How often do you repeat it for each requirement you have?

Is there a best practice metric that says the average cost from identification of job need to hire should be $XXX, If there is, I haven’t seen one. I have seen time-to-fill statistics in terms of days, and other similar metrics measured more by time. Not knowing the actual costs associated with a hire, because it’s sometime hard to determine the actual equation or what resources you will use in the formula, can eventually take the wind out of a lot of sails.

But what if there was another way. An extremely inexpensive and efficient system. A way in which metrics could still be used, but not so much to measure monetary expenditures, but to track best practice models.

I call this system “push technology”. The opposite would be a scenario whereby you were tasked to go and catch (pull technology) 100 perch. So you set out in your boat with your super-duper fish finder and eventually (about 100 gallons of gas later), you find that “perfect” spot and start baiting your hooks with tasty live worms and put out several rods. A hour or so later, you discover that your catch is okay, but not nearly what you need to complete your task, so you call out on your mobile radio to have someone send over more fishing poles so you can make your goal before nightfall. Those 100 perch will end up costing two to three times per pound than if you just went to your local market.

To maximize your costs, you need to leverage technology that specifically targets a candidate based on your specific requirements. This technology must reach out and communicate this need, effectively respond to the reply, and then provide some sort of follow-up to ensure an ongoing relationship.

The answer is no more job postings in the conventional sense. No more extraction of resumes to be processed either manually or in a limited fashion by any applicant tracking system. No more wasted time hanging a shingle out and seeing what traffic comes to your door.

Since 1998 I have used this application in my daily recruiting practice. I have reviewed it countless times in my newsletter, demonstrated it both at major conventions, and included it as a mainstay and top ten tool in all my classes and guidebooks. It literally transforms me into a superhuman recruiter on a shoestring budget who can outperform a staff and budget that exceeds his cost a hundred fold.

The product is made by a Dayton, Ohio firm called Infogist (www.infogist.com). This flagship application for recruiters is called Resume infoFinder Platinum. Platinum is an ever evolving tool that rents for $4200 per year for one user and then $200 more for each additional user.

In the right hands, regardless of company size or number of requirements, one licensee could easily maximize this technology and deliver the results expected by company management.

I encourage you to take it out on a test drive. If you need more time, beyond the initial free trial usage, please call their big chief, Ron Crompton, at (800) 547-9117, x202, and tell them that you read about their product from the Sourcerer’s Apprentice, and would like to get a further extension of time to properly and comprehensively evaluate this cutting edge tool for Internet recruiters.

In my next blog posting, I will detail the various ways I leverage this application in my daily use. You will learn how to use this incredible technology, along with pitfalls to avoid, in reaching out and grabbing all your future hires.

Those were the days my friend...

Fri, 30 Dec 2005 03:09:24 GMT

Do you remember the heady days of recruiting (circa 1997-2001), when companies were relabeling their HR Recruitment division as a core competency and lavishly spending thousand of dollars on their staff for training and conferences and the best giveaways trinkets at job fairs.

Those were the days my friend. I thought they’d never end. Oh, to resurrect another Computerworld conference on recruiting. That was the hot ticket then. Even an opportunity to talk to a lot of non-recruiters at a SHRM conference was a blast as well.

Of all my trips down memory lane, the most resounding shocker was the aftermath of all that knowledge that was bestowed to a recruiter attending a conference or a specialized course on recruiting. If you happened to see them again at their office, you would be proud to find a copy of their conference manual or even their training course book. Not a page was bent, it resided firmly in the bookcase for all to see, and upon closer inspection one could discern a little bit of dust.

Could they have digested that information overload? Were they perceived as the new recruiting disciples of their company? Had their salaries jumped several folds since that training a long time ago?

In 2003, while waiting for my connection back to the US, I was hovering over a display monitor at Narita Airport in Japan. Out of nowhere, someone reaches over my cubicle and lightly taps me on the shoulder and says, “Are you Bret Hollander?”

At that moment, I was conjuring all the things I could have said, but all that came out was “Yes.”

It turns out that this individual had attended both a presentation I made at the national Computerworld conference in 1999, and had also attended one of my hands-on classes at the University of Virginia campus in Falls Church, VA. She proceeded to lavish me with all sorts of accolades and just the amazement to have run into me so far from home.

As the conversation eventually circled back to how she was doing in recruiting, what she had learned, and how she was applying her knowledge, she halted for a moment and then secretly admitted that she found most of the information too daunting to try, or had failed after a few tries, and had resorted to just plying the fee-based resume sites paid for by her company.

As I sat in my seat on the way home, I reflected on her admission. Were most recruiters still doing their recruiting, as if nothing had passed by their eyes or ears? Was all this information just cool to talk about?

Of the thousands of recruiters I had personally taught, attended a conference session that I gave, or were avid readers of this newsletter, how many are truly at the forefront of their art today, and applying those lessons learned five years later?

Please use the COMMENTS section to boast about how far you have come with recruiting, and how you have applied the knowledge. It will be a great sell for you as other recruiters learn about you.

Finding Resumes on Google

Fri, 30 Dec 2005 00:45:38 GMT

The other day I received an email from a colleague of mine, detailing another unique way of exploiting the Google search engine to identify candidate streams. His Boolean formula used several of the Google Advanced Operators to target a specific application extension file that is commonly created to track a large list of people.

And then I thought about what I hear often, as to the phrase, “thinking out-of-the-box.”

As a recruiter, when someone talks about a resume, I normally think of either an attached file to an email message in Microsoft Word, or some proprietary format displayed as a dynamic link culled from the search of a resume database.

Yet, there are many ways that a resume can be created. Here are some of the more common applications and their extensions.

Microsoft Word (doc), Rich Text Format (rtf), Ascii Text (txt), Adobe (pdf), WordPerfect (wpd), Microsoft Works (wps)

When people go online looking for work they often either post their resume on an existing database or get more creative and develop a personal web space to store a copy of their resume or even showcase it in HTML format.

So, if you were looking for someone indexed by Google, who had a resume using one of the above common word processing applications, you can imagine how simple it would be to construct a Boolean search string to find these types of documents.

(filetype:doc OR filetype:wpd OR filetype:wps OR filetype:pdf OR filetype:rtf OR filetype:txt) AND (intitle:resume OR inurl:resume) AND "software engineer"

The search string above uses all five application extensions with an OR operator, followed by another targeted operator that says the word “resume” must lie either in the HTML title or somewhere within the body of the URL. The last item is simply what skill set or job position, or anything you want to target your specific search should be. It can be a single phrase as I have shown, or a series of “must haves.” For example:

…AND "software engineer" AND java AND j2ee

Before you shift back to sourcing mode, remember that there are many names for a resume as well…

The Sourcerer's Apprentice Has Moved to MSN Spaces

Tue, 27 Dec 2005 08:50:30 GMT

In 1999, at the height of my recognition as one of the foremost experts on Internet Recruiting, I decided to begin writing a monthly electronic newsletter called the "Sourcerer's Apprentice", that attempted to offer both recruiters and HR professionals a variety of tools and techniques in which to leverage their time when using the Internet.

Almost seven years later, I can look over the playing field and find many of my past students and conference attendees, who have taken this knowledge and leaped forward into some really amazing stuff. And the best part is that they have used the blog format to inform and educate.

So, as I begin to sort through the myriad of articles and tools that I have reviewed over the past years, please take a look at some of my favorite blogs on recruiting.

Advanced Online Recruiting Techniques - by Glenn Guttmacher

Cybersleuthing - by Shally Steckerl

Jim Stroud's Digability Blog - by Jim Stroud

If you would like to get a jump on the tools and techniques I will revisit here on this blog, you can always visit my original ezine site at: http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/SourcerersApprentice/