Make Yourself Accessible!!

My thoughts today turn to a pet peeve I have mentioned before but is one that needs to be brought up from time to time. Staffing firms have a huge pool of candidates to look at when identifying candidates for job opportunities. A good recruiter will take a little time to find decent looking resumes before making calls and sending out emails. There is a darn good chance that, if you receive a contact from a recruiter, you are a reasonably good fit for the job at hand!

Time is money and I have a personal rule that I will make every effort to present several qualified candidates to my clients within 48 hours or less of learning of their staffing need. All too often, candidates take five or six days or longer to respond to me. If I wait that long to begin submitting candidates, another staffing firm will likely beat me to the finish line. This is NOT something I like to experience and I make every effort to avoid it.

Candidates will call me a week later and says things like I called their home number but they only check voicemail once a week and I should have called their cell instead. Obviously, I would have called the cell number except it was nowhere on the resume!! Another excuse I get for slow responses is that I used their casual email address instead of the one set up for job searching. Again, how can I write to an address which was not anywhere on their resume?

My rather cold-hearted opinion is that a candidate who does not put the most current or accessible contact information on their resume is not trying very hard to get a job. Some of my critics have told me I am too judgemental but, in my mind, if someone does not take complete ownership of their search I probably would not want to present them to my client companies.

Opinions will be graciously accepted and treated with respect even if I disagree!

FAQs and My Best Available Answers

During the course of a month as a Career Coach and Recruiter I hear many variations of the same handful of questions. There are probably hundreds of correct answers but I tend to stay within my comfort zone when called upon to comment. Here are a few of the FAQs I am presented with and my favorite responses.

I understand that you are a Recruiter and want to know what you have got for me today?

Once upon a time, when our economy was thriving, there were more job openings than available candidates and I could call a company and tell them about a great person and quite possibly set up an interview. Sadly, those days are long gone and staffing firms now must rely on finding candidates for the jobs employers make available to them to fill.

I need a job and want you to get it for me. How long will that take?

No one can get you a job. They me be able to help you identify opportunities but you must go in and take the interview and sell yourself to the potential employer as the best candidate available for the position!

How much does your staffing firm charge to find me a job?

Most agencies collect their fees from the hiring company. I personally do not believe you should pay a fee to a staffing firm. Employers looking to avoid a fee will usually place their ads directly onto search engines and/or into print media.

As a Career Coach, how long will it take you to get me a job?

Once again, no one can get you a job. Coaches will work with you to assess your search efforts to date and help you develop a game plan to accelerate the process and help you better identify the right fits for your skill level and professional background.

How many coaching sessions will I need to improve my employment status?

This is a very hard question to answer. Most Coaches will provide you with a free first session to get an idea of what is needed to help you. Some people stay with a coach even after they find a new job and use them as a sounding board and adviser.

Please feel free to comment and to also send me other questions!

Is It Time for New Rules?

One of my rules that I have lived by for several decades as a recruiter, career services director, and career coach during parts of my life is that there is a job for everyone and that everyone is place-able. While working at a proprietary trade school, I came across students with various challenges and obstacles to overcome and somehow managed to help most of them find jobs using at least some of the skills they were taught. As a recruiter, there have been numerous times when the candidate I submitted with the least experience was selected over more seasoned options. In my experience as a coach, I usually find qualities in a client that they do not even know they possess!

The past few months have made me wonder if perhaps my rule book needs updating. Could we really be at a stage where there are people who simply do not have any marketable skills? Have we run out of employers willing to take a shot on a career changer fresh out of trade school but with no hands=on related work experience? Are there people out there who have become so frustrated they have sadly given up all hope of finding a job in their field and are looking for alternatives sources of income? Is it realistic to say that folks out of work more than two years due to forced layoffs are of little value to employers because there skills have become outdated?

Honestly, my answer to these questions and similar ones is that my opinion is still taking shape. One thing quite apparent to me is that anyone who walks away from their search process for any significant length of time is setting themselves back dramatically. Your comments and opinions are very welcomed as I need to decide if my rule book needs some tweaking. Ideally, I hope you will convince me that my rule still applies but your thoughts will all received and taken under consideration!

Entry Level Work

Quite often, a graduate of a local college or trade school will call me looking for their first job. Typically, I explain that most employers come to fee paid recruiters looking for people with some level of work history in their desired field of work. As a former Director of Career Services, I know that most institutions maintain records of employers who have hired their graduates in the past, usually for about five years or so. There is no reason why a past graduate should not approach the proper person at the school they graduate from and ask to see a copy of that list. Naturally, they can not guarantee that everyone on that list will be interested in hiring but they are places who are familiar with the background of typical graduates of that particular school. To me, that is eliminating the first part of the cold call because the candidate will likely not need to go into great detail talking about the program they were part of as the employer should have a general idea. From personal experience, only a small percentage of graduates actually take advantage of the resources their Career Services office has available to them!

PLEASE!! WAKE UP!!

As the recession staggers along, candidates continue to amaze me at how unwilling they are to be flexible. Of late, I have been told that, even though out of work for two years, the option of a 3-6 month assignment will not be considered. Also, since this one candidate is the best in their profession, recruiters should be willing to drop everything and do a customized search! Finally, having never commuted more than 10 miles each way, a 15 mile commute is out of the question (imagine the response if I had suggested a 25 mile drive).

These are a few samples of why unemployment numbers are still too high. Yes, jobs are very, very hard to find but candidates absolutely need to realizes they have to meet the hiring company a bit more than half way right now. I dislike this reality as much as anyone (in fact, it gets under my skin daily) but I go back to a term I learned as a management trainee in the very demanding retail field over 30 years ago: WIT - Whatever It Takes! Hopefully, the day will return when the pool of available, high quality candidates is thin again and employers will hustle to hire the best regardless of price but that is not even close to reality in the relatively near future.

Contract Recruiter

A major client of mine in Northern NJ is in need of an experienced Recruiter to fill in for 3-4 months who will be responsible for the sourcing of high profile professionals for a variety of positions. Areas to be covered include Finance and Accounting, I.T., Publishing, Sales, etc. Please contact me if you, or someone you know, is interested.

A 'Finesse Recruiter'

finesse-
1.
extreme delicacy or subtlety in action, performance, skill, discrimination, taste, etc.
2.
skill in handling a difficult or highly sensitive situation; adroit and artful management: exceptional diplomatic finesse.
3.
a trick, artifice, or stratagem.
4.
Bridge, Whist . an attempt to win a trick with a card while holding a higher card not in sequence with it, in the hope that the card or cards between will not be played.

Thanks to dictionary.com for the above definition! Why, you must be thinking, does this blog entry begin with a definition? Has the blogger decided to become an English teacher? Is he considering writing a book? Has old age finally caught up with him? The answers are simple: there is a method to my madness; no; no; and not quite yet!

A candidate and I were chatting yesterday about a client of mine that he has tried to penetrate for a job for quite some time with no success. We spoke for a while and both agreed that there is a specific opportunity there that he is a strong fit for but no one has noticed this before. When I offered up my thoughts on how to submit him to the right people, he noted that it would take a recruiter with finesse to get this accomplished and he felt I should represent him.

Whether you are a recruiter, candidate, hiring manager, career coach, etc., it is important to think out of the box and come up with artful and subtle ways to do things differently than others. Early in my recruiting career, I saw many resumes of recent graduates from trade schools. They all looked exactly the same at the top: name, contact info, identical listings of skills learned and job desired. The only difference was in work history which for most of them was very limited. When I became a Career Services Director at a school, my first objective was to eliminate the cookie cutter approach to resume writing and help each student find their own identity. This takes skills, working delicately not to offend each student, some artful creativity, a little strategizing, and a discriminating eye.

Recruiters tend to lean heavily on search engines, using keywords to identify qualified candidates. Like everyone else, I do this too. At times, this is simply not enough. You need to strategize, artfully create new ways to find people, listen to your gut to find different tastes in candidate pools, and create customized search strategies. A few months ago, I was charged with the task of locating a new sales manager for a wholesale food company. The first few candidates I presented were not quite right. the hiring party told me what fields might match up well but searching that way was fruitless. I sat down late one night and thought about brand names of products in the fields he mentioned. Within two hours, I identified and contact three terrific people, one of whom got the job!

Finesse is all about doing things a bit less traditionally than most people do. Next time you are presented with a challenging task, do all the basic methods you know of then dig a little deeper and see if you could stir up the pot!

Watch Yourself!

Imagine yourself sending your resume to a recruiter, waiting several weeks before making a follow-up call then chastising the recruiter when he can not remember your resume! When he asks you for a quick overview of your background, you answer him with "come on, you have to remember me! If not, I guess you already decided I am wrong for the job. Hey man, we are in a recession, have a heart. If you cannot remember me I am hanging up!!""" ........................click, dial tone.

Names and voices stick in my brain for a very long time. Most recruiters remember their best success stories and their worst experiences!!

Remember this, professional recruiters are paid by their client companies. While we all try very, very hard to provide excellent service to candidates at all times, we must give our client companies the type of potential employees this wish to interview. All of us are in this ugly recession together and must play by the very limitted rules we have been forced to adhere to.

Simple Logic

Simple logic says that if someone is unemployed, and has been for an extended time, that the prospects of a contract opportunity, no matter what the pay rate, would be worth considering. This past week has given me the chance to have this conversation repeatedly and the results have underwhelmed me. Of course, a few realistic folks have jumped at the chance to be considered but more than half have declined because they are insisting on making the same salary they were laid off at perhaps 3 years ago. Wouldn't we all wish the world had not changed? Sadly, that is not reality and it is time to get real about prospects for the near future.

A potential candidate called me yesterday about a posting I had placed which gave a range of $25-37 hour for a supply chain professional from the manufacturing sector. She was a displaced CPA from the financial world who had some related experience going back over 10 years ago. The first thing she told me was she expected to earn over $100 an hour for the posted job and my rate must have been incorrect! After explaining the current facts of life and ascertaining she had been out of work for well over a year, it became apparent she was inflexible and the conversation stopped.

There is not a professional recruiter out there who likes paying people less than market value but the truth is that there is no market value right now. Whatever the employer feels they could afford has become today's market value.

ETC.

• Just when I thought the employment market was ready to take a giant step forward, it slowed down the last few weeks. Of course, part of this may be due to the Northeast being a frozen tundra distracting people from functioning at full speed.
• Rather than painting negative pictures, the media should look for markets where hiring is still occurring (medical devices, legal fields, machine design to name a few).
• More and more employers are asking recruiters to verify employment and performance before they interview potential contract employees. The rational is that if the recruiter is hiring the person to be on his/her firms payroll, then he/she should do the legwork. If you are a candidate, NEVER refuse a request for references. I had to drop a candidate this week he was unwilling to provide the needed information.
• If you are an engineer in the automotive industry, I would get ready to do some contract work in QA as I suspect all the major auto makers will be looking to ensure higher standards than ever before.

Personal Choices

Working in the staffing field, I talk with people with diverse work experiences and all sorts of philosophies on their careers. From very open-minded hiring managers to those who still think that recession means they will find perfect candidates for 30% below market value to candidates who will do anything to avoid unemployment to those who are collecting their government checks and refusing to job hunt, I hear a little bit of this and a little bit of that each week.

Yesterday, I had a great conversation with someone who has been in the engineering field for a very long time and never had been faced with unemployment until about 2 years ago. Insistent on remaining in his field to keep his career intact and properly provide for his family, this gentleman has juggled contract jobs that require him to at times live in a rented space about 2 hours from home and to live over 1000 miles from his family while commuting home once a month or so. He has never filed an unemployment claim and managed to keep0 plugging away no matter what.

No one has the right to tell you how to manage your career but consider how you stack up against others in your field when making very tough choices! As a recruiter, this is one type of candidate I will always enjoy dealing with as he subscribes to something I had pounded into my head when my career began back in prehistoric (or at least before texting developed) times, do Whatever It Takes to succeed!