Why Recruiting Looks Easy

I discovered this article recently and just had to share it. A great read!

http://www.recruiter.com/i/why-recruiting-looks-easy/
by Miles Jennings

Miles is Co-Founder and CEO of Recruiter.com.

There is an absolutely wonderful children’s book called 20 Heartbeats about a painter who paints a horse for a very wealthy man. I hate to ruin it for you, but I have to say what happens.
 
The rich man pays this famous painter to paint his favorite horse. But years go by and the painter won’t finish the painting. The rich man finally shows up at the painter’s house and demands the painting. The painter obligingly whips out a piece of parchment, dashes off a horse in black ink with his brush, and then hands the painting to the rich man. All this takes less than the time of 20 heartbeats.

The rich man is, of course, aghast. He storms after the painter to demand his money back. However, as he walks after the painter, he sees what has been taking so long.
All along the walls are hundreds and hundreds of painted horses. The painter wasn’t procrastinating, he was practicing. The rich man then finally takes a look at the painting that he purchased so long ago, now in his hands. It’s a perfect horse, a horse so real that he whistles to it.

As every art form takes discipline and practice to look easy, every kind of work takes years of diligence to perfect. Recruiting is no different, but few professions look so simple. It’s really hard to pass along a piece of paper, right? You can almost hear hiring managers thinking to themselves, “Yeah, I’ll bet your fingers are really tired from dragging all those resumes from a folder into an email. Real hard work.” Few jobs seem so easy to duplicate.

The end product of recruiting, for one thing, is someone’s else’s work – it is someone else’s talent, ability to interview, and everything else they have that gets them hired that is the end product of the recruiter’s process. It’s hard to pinpoint the recruiter’s exact role in this pseudo-science. Did they identify the talent? Spot them? Find them? Assess them? Understand the job? The culture? Have the right database? The right connections? The right insight into the department or hiring manager psychology? Did they make a lot of calls or know some secret strings to search for in Google? It’s hard to say what it is exactly that the recruiter does and so it’s easy to discount the recruiter’s role entirely.
However, we might be looking at it wrong. A recruiter’s value can’t be found within the process of a single hire. It can’t be found in that space that sometimes spans twenty heartbeats between talking to a manager about a job to the identification of a possible talent.

You have to look at everything that comes before that identification to see the value of a good recruiter. A great recruiter creates the conditions for that magic luck to strike. They don’t talk to a lot of different people. They talk to everyone. They don’t want to know their clients or their company’s competitors. They want to know everything that’s happening at every company in their area. It’s a massive amount of work that requires constant rejection, failure, stress, and is compounded by the minutiae of job offers and the uncertainty of human emotion.

That’s why very few succeed at recruiting. It’s not like there is anything special about that one placement. There is nothing about identifying a candidate and getting them a job offer that requires any particular kind of magic, or even a college degree for that matter. Unlike a beautiful painting, anyone or any recruiter can luck out and make a placement or two. But the background required for long-term recruiting success is much different. It involves the deep study of companies, products, markets, assessment, and professions coupled with a kind of brute force stamina to doggedly pursue the talents of other people. This is the process that forges the recruiter’s talent. This talent, when functioning at its best, is impossible to find.

What’s the best measurement for success? Happiness

http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20121109141247-204068115-what-s-the-best-measurement-for-success-happiness

When opportunity knocks....

The mind of a developer is an interesting one. They're a rare breed. I'm constantly trying to figure out what makes them tick, what drives them, and what it takes to pique their interest. Of course there is no one "perfect" answer to this question, as each individual reacts differently depending on their own personality.

Take sourcing passive talent on LinkedIn, for example.  As recruiters, we are often having to go out there and find people for very specific roles. Clients love to have us chase those unicorns, don't they? In an ideal world, our networks would contain individuals spanning every conceivable job title across every industry, sector, etc. And all you'd have to do is reach out to those people and convince them to drop everything as you have found them their next "great career opportunity". In some cases, you've scrubbed your list of contacts and you've come up empty. Depending on your local market, perhaps it's as easy as posting a juicy job description on the Internet and having resumes fill your inbox...yea, right.

Relationship building is critical. Having a trusted network of talent that you can notify when you are looking for that unicorn, so that they can help spread the word to their peers, colleagues, etc. This gets tricky, though, as you don't want to be viewed as that person always asking for favors and referrals. 

So we're often having to go out there and knock on the proverbial door and reach out to passive talent. If you find a profile on LinkedIn for example, they may look like the perfect match. They may have worked in the same industry, with the same technologies, or perhaps they are even working for a competitor. So what next? You either look at your mutual connections and hope you can get an intro from a trusted peer in your network, or you reach out directly with a cleverly constructed message. A message that grabs their attention, something so exciting it almost pulls them right out of their chair, through their computer screen and right in front of your client.

Don't you wish it could be that easy?

In Vancouver's hi-tech market, we're seeing an unprecedented 2% unemployment rate. It's a very competitive field. Companies in industries like web, social media, interactive entertainment are all competing for the same local talent. Employers will sometimes enlist the help of third-party agencies or independent recruiters to assist in the search.


I find it curious how some developers on LinkedIn have their contact settings include "Career Opportunities" but when contacted about a new job opportunity will be quick to respond, "I'm not looking right now". Ultimately, it comes down to messaging.  Sometimes I've found it best to be very specific about why I contacted them. You're an experienced Web Developer and my client is looking for a Senior Web Developer for a super-exciting new project.  Sometimes it's best to go stealth and send them a message saying, we haven't met, but I discovered your profile while conducting a search on behalf of my client - and you seem to be a good match based on what they are looking for.  Other times, I've found it effective when contacting a developer to get to know them and explore what they would ideally like to find next. This is often great for relationship building, but may not address the immediate need of the client if you find someone who just isn't ready to make a career move.

In any case, I've found you have to be sincere, it helps if you include some flattery, be respectful of their time, oh - and it helps if you can be just a little humble.

So why is it that some developers either decline an opportunity or ignore a message entirely? Are they really getting bombarded with so many messages from in-house corporate recruiters and agency recruiters that they just pick and choose which messages to respond to? Perhaps you could be presenting a huge opportunity to boost their career and they turn their back on it without even finding out more information. 

Honestly, I'm flattered whenever I've been approached by a company about an opportunity. I certainly wouldn't ignore an invite to at least talk to the person and learn more about the role.  Maybe that's just me.  Not sure I would feel the same way if I was a developer being targeted daily (if not hourly).

Thoughts on this? Please feel free to post your comments below.

S*** Not to say in an Interview

S*** Recruiters Say