Not Your Grandma’s Recruiting

Hi Recruiters,

Reminder: 30 years ago was 1994, not 1974. Feel old yet?

While you consider if you’ve now got a pass to wear exclusively slip-on shoes for the rest of your life, I want to take a moment to go back in time and recognize just how far recruiting, and the technology and skills that power the job, have come.

Back in the day, a recruiter’s ATS was a filing cabinet, CRM a Rolodex, job board a newspaper, and ChatGPT a Yahoo! search query. The fundamentals haven’t really changed. But folks at the top of their game have always found ways to go outside of the normal tools and tactics to improve their results.

Back then, if you were too shy to talk to a stranger on the phone or make genuine connections in person, you wouldn’t make it far. Skip forward a few years, and those who didn’t bother learning how to build razor-sharp boolean strings missed out on swaths of hidden talent. Fast forward to today, and there are a seemingly endless number of tricks used to gain an advantage over the competition.

Getting the fundamentals down is still necessary. But if you’re not out there experimenting with new techniques or leveraging new tech, data, and knowledge, you’ll struggle a lot more than… necessary.

Now, I can’t teach people how to be likable (it just comes naturally to me ??), but I can give people some creative ideas to amp up their game.

Even better, I can share the genius of others.

Get Tricky

Because nobody knows everything, this week we’re surfacing recruiting secrets from some of the best in the biz:

Want a better way to source candidates from social platforms? Expert recruiter Erin Mathew has devised a brilliant method of using Followerwonk.com to search job title keywords (e.g., “UX Designer”) in specific geos to identify passive job candidates on Twitter.

Passive candidates ignoring your outreach? The ever-insightful Vanessa Raath ???????? challenges recruiters to be strategic business partners by going out to build relationships with prospective talent before alerting them to job opportunities. Vanessa says it’s key to take the time to learn more about them, their skills, and what types of work they are passionate about. That way, as a recruiter, you can understand what opportunities might interest them before they are turned off by a salesly, cold outreach message.

Hitting walls after sending offer letters? In a recent Q&A, Senior Technical Recruiter Maria Alimisis notes how you can sweeten the deal by talking to a candidate just before sending them the offer. Maria recommends getting them on the phone to make sure they are happy with all of the details first (giving you time to make any adjustments where needed to keep the process moving without pause).

Looking for ways to improve hiring performance? Take it from industry thought leader Tim Sackett, SPHR, SCP and start measuring one new thing that actually matters in your function. For example, Tim advises TA teams to start measuring conversation ratios of screened candidates to hiring manager interviews, and work on making that better.

Haven’t bothered to rethink your interview questions in a while? In a recent post , the inimitable Brian Fink suggests recruiters prepare for a future where fewer cookie-cutter interview questions lead to better talent selection. Brian challenges TA pros to trade cliche, negative questions — such as “Tell me about a time you failed at something” — with positive, unique questions to get to the truth about a candidate’s capabilities.?

Have Fun

Fundamentally, we’re only trying to connect people, and their potential, to a business need. The “fun” part is that there’s an infinite number of ways to do it better than ever.

What else is happening in hiring?

• Human Resources And Recruitment Trends For 2024 by Jack Kelly
• These 20 companies are hiring remote—some jobs pay over $100,000 by Morgan Smith
• Recruiters Say Their Job Got a Little Easier in 2023 by ROY MAURER

Kunwar’s Korner

Kunwar Ishan Sharma here! On the topic of youth, it took me a second to realize that the “Rolodex” mentioned in comparison to CRM earlier wasn’t referring to a watch. ( Steve Levy is somewhere shaking his head).

What I do know is that we’ve talked to plenty of users over the past few months about both the value of their CRMs and some of their biggest issues with them. Here were some of the biggest pitfalls that came up .?

Thank you for being a part of the community, and we’ll see you next time.

— Recruiters