xScion Solutions, LLC

Who says IT candidates and football players have nothing in common? Thanks to a little inspiration from National Signing Day, I started thinking about how similar some steps in the college football recruiting process are to our own recruiting process.

The first important step in the college recruiting process is the highlight video. College football hopefuls from all over the country put together a video which showcases their best plays. If the tape is too short, coaches might write you off immediately because they haven’t been able to get a sense of what kind of player you really are in such a short amount of time. On the other hand, if the video is too long, you might bore coaches and your best plays might be buried beneath ones that weren’t absolutely necessary to include.

The highlight video bears a striking resemblance to the resume. A resume is used to showcase your best skills and most relevant experience to employers. Too short and you seem inexperienced. Too long and your most valuable assets get lost in a sea of text. It’s crucial to make sure your resume is tailored for the job you’re applying for, just as a high school student would tailor their highlight video for the position they want to play in college.

Another important step in the college recruiting process is attending camps. Camps are an opportunity for recruits to get to know the school they’re visiting. Recruits become more familiar with the school’s program and the coaching dynamic. This step can be compared to an initial phone conversation with a candidate. During this conversation, the candidate becomes more knowledgeable about the company and, in turn, the company also learns a lot more about the candidate.

Taking the SAT or ACT is a crucial step for high school students in the recruiting process.  Their standardized test scores could make or break the recruiting process. This step is very similar to a technical screen that candidates may have to take when applying for a certain position. Standardized tests ensure that the recruit meets academic qualifications, just as a technical screen ensures that the candidate meets the qualifications for the position they’re applying for.

The final step in college recruiting is the national letter of intent. This is when recruits fully commit to their school of choice. This step can be somewhat compared to an offer package a candidate receives when employers officially want them to come on board with the company.

The processes are very different in some respects, but there are some basic similarities. We both strive to find not only the best candidates, but hidden talent that others may have overlooked. Although I doubt we’ll find any developers or business analysts in the NFL, maybe the football and IT worlds aren’t so different after all.

The general assumption is that recruiting passive candidates is too time consuming and you don’t yield enough candidates.  However, this is not always the case. By recruiting passive candidates you may be able to increase your overall recruiting efficiency as well as the talent level.  Since only about 15 to 20% of candidates are active job seekers at any time and in general there will be a lower percentage of talent in this group, it does not follow to focus only on this area.  Instead, it is more effective to learn how to recruit passive as well as active candidates.

First, let’s discuss how not to recruit passive candidates. Do not generate a list of passive candidates and start smiling and dialing and here’s why; if you call 100 candidates, about 20 will take your call or call you back.  Out of those 20, two or three might be brought in for an interview and most of the time you won’t make one hire. This is not an efficient use of your time.

However, if you use the Hub and Spoke method, like Lou Adler suggests in his article The Hub and Spoke Model for Passive Candidate Sourcing, you can increase the effectiveness of each call.  In this approach, you look at candidates not as prospects, but as hubs in a network with dozens or hundreds of spokes of other possible candidates.  The secret to passive candidate recruiting is getting these initial contacts to give you names of better contacts.  In general, the referred contacts will call you back 80-90% of the time and the majority of them will consider the opportunity because they will be a dead-on fit for the job.  Furthermore, this group of candidates will more likely be the cream-of-the-crop talent wise.  So work on broadening your recruiting approach, who knows the talent you are ignoring.

With all of the technology and resources we have available to us, it would be easy to let the recruiting process lose its personal touch. Mass emails, automated voicemails, and sourcing online can all be perceived as impersonal if they’re not done the right way. However, with a little extra time and consideration, all of these aspects of recruiting can become thoughtful and personal. Something as little as answering the phone before it goes to voicemail could speak volumes to potential candidates. Responding to emails in a timely manner shows the candidate that what they have to say is important to you.

Kathy Hagens’ article on ERE.net provided a lot of insight on how important a personal touch can be throughout the recruiting process. In particular, she discusses the value of meeting someone face-to-face. A resume may not always accurately reflect a candidate’s true nature, and meeting with them face-to-face could show that they would in fact be a great asset. Hagens also makes a great point by saying that accountability comes with face-to-face encounters. We are much more likely to call someone back to follow-up if we’ve met with them in person. Putting a face to a name can make a huge difference.

Hagens leaves readers with an interesting question – Would a little bit more of a personal touch improve recruiting? I would say absolutely. Technology is continuing to evolve and it’s not going to stop anytime soon. It will only become easier to lose sight of the personal side of recruiting. So, take the extra time throughout your day to be a little more personal. It could make all the difference.

Clients are picky.  This is not news.  We are constantly challenged to find excellent candidates for our client’s open consulting positions however, even in this down economy with high unemployment there seems to be a shortage of suitable candidates.  Or is there?  This article in the Wall Street Journal says it may be the inflexibility of American companies who seek someone who completely matches the job’s requirements instead of someone who can grow into the role.

Is this true? Anecdotally it would seem to be the case.  We frequently have candidates that we know can fulfill our client’s job functions but the post interview feedback from our clients is “close but no cigar.”  We can appreciate the fact that a client may want someone who matches their position 100% or who may even be over qualified but is this really the best approach?  People like to grow and be challenged and are motivated by stretch situations.  So it would seem that clients should be more flexible in their hiring as ultimately they would end up with a more productive and motivated team and would spend less time looking for that “perfect” candidate.  But if that client exists we haven’t met them yet.

Our firm, xScion Solutions, is a small IT Professional Services firm in McLean, VA just outside Washington, DC.  For the past year we have had a tremendous amount of opportunity with our commercial clients and have struggled to find the quantity and quality of talent we need to fill our open positions.  You might think given the economy we would have no trouble finding talent, but the DC area benefits from a stable high tech sector buoyed by both public and private markets.

According to a recent article in The Washington Post (http://t.co/zlxz0q0L) the DC region lost less than one half of one percent of its high tech jobs in 2010 while the rest of the country lost two percent.  Also, Virginia ranks fourth in the country in total employment just behind much larger states.   Across the DC metropolitan region there are nearly 500,000 technology related jobs with an average salary of $94,000 according to the article.

So if you are in the high tech field and are looking for a new position you should consider a move to DC. Sure the traffic is bad but many of our jobs are near residential areas and if you are relocating you can move close to your new job.

If we can help you with your job search, just let us know.  recruiter@xscion.com

For the past few months we have been on a mission to develop our talent community, primarily through social media outreach. We have sent e-mails out to people in our Applicant Tracking System with requests to join our group on LinkedIn, follow us on Twitter, ‘Like’ us on Facebook. This is downright exhausting for people to visit us on three websites; so we narrowed the field. We targeted LinkedIn as our medium to post articles, update our group with interesting discussions, and reach out to past employees and friends for referrals. When this approach brought us a whopping two new people to our group, I decided it was time to get personal. I tabled the mass e-mail and started reaching out to my connections on LinkedIn who had some relevance to xScion, past/current/prospective employees, friends etc. I sent each connection a personalized note along with the invitation to join my company’s LinkedIn group. My personalized efforts doubled the number of members I recruited to the group, but when that number is only four new members, it hardly seems worth it.

All this time spent on attempting to build a following with little success left me questioning whether it was my efforts that were failing or was it possible that social media was slowly becoming obsolete? I stumbled upon this article, which is what inspired me to write this post. Mr. Reimgold focuses on Google+ and the fact that the website is a ghost town, completely dead; it just came too late in the game. No one wants to log onto another website, build another profile, add people to circles. I took his ideas and applied them to my experience with recruiting member to my company’s LinkedIn group. It might be that people have little interest in following another group and connecting with more people. We are on social media overload, which is perhaps causing a slowdown in the use of these websites. Of course social media will always serve a purpose in some industries, but the creation of new networking websites needs to come to a halt because if Google can’t make it work it doesn’t bode well for other companies.

I was talking to my dad yesterday and naturally he asked about the earthquake, did I feel it? Was there any structural damage to buildings? Were there any injuries? Then he asked me a question with not such a concrete answer, how was the earthquake going to affect potential candidates’ perception of the DC metro area? Would it impose a stigma on the area and therefore make it more difficult to recruit people to come live and work? I hadn’t thought about this until he brought it up. He was implying that I may have to do some damage control on any of the candidates I was talking to shortly after the quake, assure them that this is not typical of the area.

In all honesty, I think in today’s job market one, fairly minor, earthquake is not going to deter people from relocating to the DC area for a new job. People are so excited of the prospect of a job opportunity; they will overlook this minor bump in the road.

A simple search on Google for “DC earthquake” and “effects on recruiting” confirmed my theory. No one has even proposed the idea that recruiting for jobs could be affected due to the recent earthquake. So have no fear DC area recruiters, the earthquake is not going to make the ever pleasant search of finding the perfect candidate any more challenging.

Last week I attended a five day webinar put on by Brown Bag Recruiter, hosted by Amitai Givertz. The main focus was on how to get the most out of your online searches using Google, LinkedIn, Twitter and similar websites. Givertz had many good tips that I thought I’d pass along.

He says there are six rules recruiters must remember when searching through the massive amounts of information on the Internet.
1. Stay singularly focused
2. Understand the game
3. Stay lean, mean, and undercover
4. Creating avoidance will kill you
5. Stop making friends
6. Don’t bite off more than you can chew

I think the common theme in these rules is searching and networking is about quality, not quantity. It doesn’t necessarily matter if you have 20 or 200 connections on LinkedIn, but rather how you use those connections.

He highlighted the value of using Boolean search strings in Google because Google turns up with millions of websites and to have to go through pages and pages of irrelevant material is time consuming. The basic Boolean operators are: AND, OR, NOT, (), and “ “. These operators are designed to expand or limit your results and create a more targeted search.

Aside from Boolean searching he also suggested using these commands and operators for searching within Google:
Insite:
Intitle:
Inurl:
Filetype:
Ext:

Happy searching!

You can measure worker productivity, GDP, consumer confidence or unemployment numbers if you want but I measure the hotdog to hamburger ratio to get a sense of where the economy is.

A couple times a month, the community service organization I belong to raises funds by being the food vendor at a local bingo hall. Not a glamorous black tie affair with $250 a plate meals but hamburgers, hotdogs, fries, etc. I’m not being judgmental but I am pretty sure that the people who attend this particular bingo hall don’t have tuxedoes tucked away in their closets. No, these are salt of the earth types. A mix is backgrounds, ages and races but mostly on the lower end of the economic scale.

Several years ago, we used to waste a lot of hotdogs. They come in packages of eight and on a typical night we would sell maybe two at $2.00 each. The rest would be left for the cleaning crew. At the same time we would sell as many as 48 hamburgers at $3.50 each. For several years the ration of hotdog to hamburger sales was stable at about .042.

Then, about three years ago the sale of hotdogs began to increase and we would sell the entire package of eight. Sometimes we even opened a second package. As hotdog sales increased hamburger sales decreased and the attendance of bingo players remained the same.

Last week, we sold 20 hotdogs and 32 hamburgers with a ration of .625. I had to open three packages hotdogs.

So that is where the economy is. People are still paying bingo but they are making choices to save money elsewhere. To these people the $1.50 saved on dinner is important.

Until I see the number of hotdog sales decreasing I will remain pessimistic about our economy.

It is no surprise that employers can (and often do) check out their prospective employees Facebook pages. What exactly are they looking for? How far back can your Facebook and other social media webpages be tracked?

Social Intelligence is a company that assists in finding Facebook pages of potential employees and looking for content such as: violence, sexual innuendos, compromising pictures or situations, and racial remarks. The company then reports their findings to the prospective employer. Some would argue that this is a breach in privacy, but in reality when someone puts something on a Facebook page, even if their settings are ‘Private’ that information becomes available to anyone on the Internet. There is always a way of finding out information on people and the Social Intelligence website is specializing in just this.

Mark Drucker, CEO of Social Intelligence, says they are able to find information from Facebook pages up to seven years ago. Do you even remember what you were doing seven years ago? It is worth taking note of what you put on your Facebook page, and what you write on your friends’ walls because if Social Intelligence were to do a search on your name, all the content you have ever looked at or posted on Facebook will appear. Just be mindful, at least for the next seven years!

http://www.prdaily.com/Main/Articles/8996.aspx