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Friday January 29th, 2010 It's hard to believe that it's been a YEAR since the last Egregiously Bad Candidates blog post (don't forget to check out the October 2008 post that started it all). I think it's probably because in the abysmal economy of 2009, being out of work and/or looking for a job wasn't actually all that funny - contrary to popular belief, 99% of recruiters really do care about their candidates, and it doesn't seem right to laugh at the very people who suffer the most (i.e. the Egregiously Bad Candidates who have a tough time finding a job in a strong economy fare even less well in a poor one). But now that the economy is (supposedly) on the upswing, and the turnover increase predicted by John Sullivan is starting to happen, I think our sense of humour is coming back. So here's EBC Part V.
Why am I calling it 'The "Whoops!" Edition'? Because deep down, we all know the truth: Sometimes even the best of us say something so unbelievably dumb/inappropriate/wrong that 5 years later, just thinking about it can cause our faces to redden with embarrassment. I know I'm an A-list candidate - doesn't mean I haven't said some D-list stuff in my time. And sometimes, the funniest EBC items aren't the big bold disasters (like the guy who offered a $1000 reward to anyone who found him a job). The ones that still have you shaking your head, 5 years later, are the WTF?! statements inserted into an otherwise apparently rational conversation, and you're left wondering: "Is this person really a nutjob, or was it just an unfortunate foot-in-mouth episode that can be put down to nerves?"
Real quotes from candidates (as heard by me in the past 12 months) (Guess which one was actually said by me, circa 1998!)
"Before I apply for that job on your website, I need to know if it pays enough to cover my current debt load."
"I had to wear my running clothes for this interview because I broke up with my girlfriend and she changed the locks and I can't get my suit."
"Sorry I'm 40 minutes late. I went to your old office - I didn't know you'd moved in 2005. You should have told people."
"Sure, I hit [my co-worker]. But you would have, too - everyone agreed she wasn't productive. The lawyers made them fire me, but I know they didn't want to, really."
"I just really think I need to work in a Christian environment. Nothing against Kwaanzaa or whatever, but I don't think Muslims have the same work ethic."
"Do you have a projector? You can't get the full effect just by looking at my resume on your computer screen."
"Don't think I'm weird or anything, but I have my dead cat's ashes in my handbag. Now I can take her everywhere!"
"I don't agree. I think it's absolutely appropriate to include, in my covering email, my stance against getting coffee for my manager. If you don't think getting coffee is degrading, you may not be the headhunter for me. I can take my assets elsewhere."
[voicemail] "Um, I'm just calling back because I realized that in my previous automated phone screen process - that I just did 2 minutes ago - I didn't tell you what my name was. Ha! Ha! I promise I'm not normally that dumb. Hopefully you'll call me for an interview."
"Really? I didn't realize you could actually have a career in headhunting. I mean, isn't it really just, like, talking to people all day long? I wish I could have an easy job like that."
"Nah - let's just end the interview. The job sounds nice and all, but I don't want to work that hard."
What's your best real-life candidate quote? The best part of the Egregiously Bad Candidates series is the comments! (Did you figure out which one was said by me?)
Saturday January 16th, 2010 The truth is out there... Social media devotees - especially the Twitterverse - are always extolling the information-gathering benefits of a networked lifestyle. "It's fantastic," they say. "You can post a question about anything, and within minutes you'll have all kinds of answers, insight, research, etc." "Ha!", I say to that. Everyone's so busy using social media to build their personal brand in 140-character installments that they don't have time to stop and send a 140-word email to some random Twitter follower that they've never met. Heck, it's hard enough to get people to click on a one-question poll. The people who do have the time (i.e. the ones who are using social media primarily as a sales tool) usually have an agenda (i.e. they want to sell you something). Don't believe me? Try tweeting something about Applicant Tracking Systems, and within 12 hours you'll suddenly get 20+ new followers - all of whom are ATS vendors. [Of course, sometimes the answer is that no one actually knows the answer. Even Slate.com's 'Explainer' column - which has a whole lot more readers than I'll ever have - is left with unanswered questions.]
But I have faith in the Head2Head community!
Feel free, by the way, to post any of your own burning questions in the comments. Wednesday January 13th, 2010 Maybe I didn't 'waste' my university degree, after all. Graduating from university in 1991 was tough: Interest rates were high, property values were low, and the recession just kept dragging on and on and on. Graduating in 1991 with an English degree from a university primarily known for its business school was even worse, because not only were your parents questioning the value of a flaky English lit degree, most of your friends were, too. After all, most of them had only endured the 4-year BBA program because of the promise of a lucrative job at the end of it. "It's not about learning and enjoying it, Sarah," they'd lecture. "University is about getting a piece of paper so you can get a job. Three years from now when I'm making $100k and you're still trying to find a job, you'll regret you wasted your degree on reading books. Everyone knows that English grads have no marketable skills and never make any money."
But then came the gaping maw of the internet... ...and its relentless demand for 'content'. If there's one thing a BA in English teaches you, it's how to churn out 2500 words of clean copy a day on any subject, without wasting valuable time on actual 'research', because it's now 12 midnight, the library's closed, and you have to write a 10-page paper on "Dualism in The Faeirie Queen as it relates to the tree motif" by noon. Turns out, this skill is very marketable, after all. And guess what? Good, consistently productive writers are harder to find than you think.
The moral of our story? Twenty years ago, most of us didn't realize the internet was coming down the pike in such a big way, and how it would revolutionize the way we communicate. Ten years ago, most of us didn't realize that social media would revolutionize the way we gather and disseminate information. So the next time someone tries to tell you you're making a "huge mistake" with your career, and that you'll regret it ten years from now, you may want to just smile politely - and totally ignore them.
Thursday January 7th, 2010 So iFractal has just released a new video:
I totally give them credit for creativity, because I know how hard it is to get something like this past the naysayers. (And having lived in Philadelphia, I can attest to how paralyzingly conservative that city can be. Have I told you about the time I lost a job because my hair was too short? It was 3 inches long. I was told it was 'too cosmopolitan' for Philly.) But...is it me or is Bob Dylan kind of redolent of long-haired baby-boomers smoking doobs in the back room? And is this the kind of image we want to associate with HR, already struggling for seriosity? Monday January 4th, 2010 So, a few weeks ago we launched a new video [embedded below - just scroll down]. 'Irreverent' videos like ours are old hat in the B2C marketplace, but relatively new for B2B/professional services, and there aren't yet a whole lot of established best practices in this area, especially around recruiting. With that in mind, here's some follow-up - if you've been thinking about doing a video in the coming months, you may find the following post helpful.
Ah, the feedback... To me, the most interesting part of making a video like this is hearing what people feel/think/say about it. For example: John Zappe loved the video. Eric Shannon, on the other hand, did not. John says it could be the "....most honest career video ever made" and that it "....[nails] recruiting." Eric, however, says that it has "...crappy message and positioning" and that it "Does more damage to the brand than the attention will benefit." I've done my share of tv commercials and videos over the past 15 years, so these two extremes aren't surprising to me - in fact, it's been my experience that the more polarizing a video is, the more effective it's likely to be, overall.
Don't confuse 'total audience' with 'target audience' Eric wasn't the only one who thought the video was entertaining but totally misguided. Since the video was completed, scarcely a day has gone by without me having some version of the following conversation: NON-MARKETING PERSON: "Sarah, I've got some feedback about the video. People don't understand it at all. They think it's funny and everything, but it's too confusing - they had no idea what the 60 hours thing was." ME: "Hhmmm...how many people have you shown it to?" NMP: "Well, 3. But two of them said it was confusing." ME: "Who were they? Clients? Candidates? HR people?" NMP: "Actually, it was my mother, and my aunt who lives in New Zealand. They're retired now but they were both teachers." ME: (sigh) NMP: "Well, don't you care?" ME: "Not really. They aren't the target - we wanted to reach recruiting decision-makers. As long as the video didn't engender your mother's undying revulsion, I'm not really concerned with whether she understood the message." NMP: (secretly thinking that I probably don't know as much about marketing as I think I do) "Harumph!"
We all feel like
marketing experts. Since most of us have absorbed hundreds of thousands of marketing messages in our lifetimes, and we've been absorbing them practically since birth, it's not surprising that most of us think that we have some level of marketing expertise. But when your doctor puts a cast on your broken arm, you don't say, "Well, that looks okay for a first draft - just let me run this by 10 people in the sales and supply chain department to get their insight, and then I'll let you know the revisions."
It's really all about the results. Ultimately, the goal of marketing is simple: To sell more stuff. It's not about whether people like the video; it's about whether it's effective. It's not about how many people see the video; it's about how many of those people then do something as a result of seeing it. So what have our stakeholders done as a result of this video?
WATCH THE VIDEO:
Thursday December 31st, 2009 So it's the last day of 2009 and, like most people, I'm spending the day reflecting on the year that's passed and the year to come. I think 2009 was pretty much the 13th floor of our lives: Sure, we all know it's there, but the elevator buttons skip from 12 to 14, as though not labelling the 13th floor will somehow keep us safe from the bad luck it supposedly brings. However, I have to say I was surprised by our collective resiliency this year. The media in the first few months of 2009 was a non-stop deluge of economic disaster stories. But there's only so much of that doom and gloom a body can stand, and by August it felt like, as a society, we put our collective foot down and said, "Enough with this paralyzing economic stasis! Let's start moving forward again!" In other words, barely a year after the Bear Stearns collapse that started it all, we were able to pick ourselves up, shake off the dust, and get back on the road, as it were. Maybe we're not yet running down the road, but we're definitely striding briskly, and possibly whistling. But I found myself wondering..The 2008/09 recession was more sudden, dramatic, and global than any other economic downturn since the Great Depression. So how come we seem to be recovering - in spirit, if not yet in actual dollars - so much faster? (Remember the real estate tumble in the late 1980s? Not only did house prices take ages to recover, but everyone was just so depressed for so long. If I had a nickel for every time one of my friends, family or university profs told me that graduating in 1991 with a BA in English Lit basically qualified me for a life on the breadlines, I'd have been able to bail out Bear Stearns myself. Now that 'content is king', however, us English grads are looking remarkably prescientient.) Social media: The #1 factor in the optimism that leads to economic recoveryBack in May, I wrote that social media was saving the economy, and I still think it's true. Our connections to people far outside our previously circumscribed little worlds have given us all more of a sense of 'team spirit'. Personal economic disasters - losing a job, losing retirement investments, etc. - can be alienating and isolating. But these days, instead of holing up at home, quietly falling off the grid into an alcoholic slough of despond, we're taking to blogs, vlogs, status updates, discussion groups - and finding that not only are we not alone in our own circumstances, but there are plenty of people in far worse circumstances, so maybe we should stop moaning about how we can't afford that 52" flatscreen any more. (All of this also puts me in mind of the whitepaper we published this year on grassroots corporate philanthropy and its effect on the bottom line, actually.) Anyhow, I guess that's my Big Deep Thought for 2010: Spending so much time connecting with people via social media isn't 'wasting time' - it's these connections, which are driving the optimism that, ultimately, drives economies.
Monday December 21st, 2009
I don't know about you, but this time of year always gets me thinking about diversity-related issues - it's important to remember that not everyone is taking 'Christmas' holidays. We all know we need to be more aware of diversity-related issues. But are we really doing anything about it? This self-test will help you determine whether your organization is really doing all it can to support/improve diversity in your organization. Has your organization:
I know, sometimes all this 'diversity' stuff can seem onerous, but think about it this way: The more you know about other cultures' celebrations, the more you can incorporate them into yours! (I myself like the Moon Festival and Chinese New Year - the food alone is worth it!)
Tuesday December 15th, 2009 In order to ensure timely payment throughout the holiday season – please note the following timesheet deadlines. For the pay period December 6 to 19, 2009, your pay will be deposited Thursday December 31, 2009. Timesheets must therefore be submitted no later than 5pm, Thursday, December 17, 2009. LATE SUBMISSIONS will be paid in the following run on Jan. 15th, 2010. Please refer to the schedule for the remainder of the year on our microsite: Head2Head Contractors Should you have any questions please email timesheets@head2head.ca Monday November 30th, 2009 A BIT OF HOUSEKEEPING: A number of readers in the past couple of weeks have asked if they can reprint/reproduce these "Dear Sarah" pieces for use with their own candidates. The answer: Yes, absolutely - as long as they are properly credited, with a link to this blog and my email address (sarah@head2head.ca). Dropping me a line to let me know you're using it would be great, too - I appreciate a good ego-stroke as much as the next person. In the last "Dear Sarah" post, we talked about what happens when more than one recruiter submits your profile to a client, and how it can make everyone look bad. But does that mean you should never work with more than one recruiter? Well...no. But. Some recruiters will tell you that unless you (as a job-seeker) work exclusively with them, they won't represent you or present you to clients. Here's why: Good recruiters will tell you when they're submitting your profile to a client; the best recruiters will ask your permission in advance. But the not-so-great recruiters just submit lots of candidates to lots of clients and hope that something sticks. At the same time, many clients will engage several recruiting agencies to fill a given role, so they're getting candidates submitted to them from multiple sources. That means that your profile could currently be in front of a whole bunch of clients, and the new recruiter doesn't want to look like an idiot by submitting a profile of a candidate that their client saw 2 weeks ago from some other recruiter. Going to 8 zillion different recruiters increases the chance of your profile being submitted to a particular client, and after a while it's not just the recruiter who looks like an idiot: Once a client has been given your profile from 4+ different recruiters over a couple of months, they start to wonder just how desperate/unemployable you really are. However, putting all your eggs in one basket with one recruiter isn't wise, either, especially if you don't know how successful/connected that recruiter is in your field.
Some guidelines for working with more than one recruiter:
Thursday November 26th, 2009
While the Canadian economy has suffered less than that of the US in the past 18 months (and the recession was declared 'officially' over by June), almost 85% of Canadian organizations report they froze or reduced hiring plans throughout most of late 2008 and the first 9 months of 2009.
The result, for corporate recruiting professionals, was that after more than 2 years of steady increases (5-20% in 2007; 5-15% in 2008), recruiting salaries remained largely unchanged in 2009.
Average salaries for corporate recruiting professionals working in industries hardest hit by the recession, such as manufacturing and consumer goods, have declined by 2-5%, while salaries for those working in more 'recession-proof' industries, such as energy and utilities and healthcare, have seen similarly modest increases of 2-6%.
The biggest surprise? Recruiters working in the retail/leisure industry saw their average salaries increase by 5% - the top of the range, and equal to salary increases for healthcare recruiters. Canadian retailers had a better Q4 2008 than anticipated, so they maintained hiring levels well into 2009. But the economic uncertainty drove them to become increasingly strategic about their recruiting efforts, which meant they were prepared to pay a premium for recruiting professionals with specific retail experience.
For more on the Canadian recruiting industry - and how recruiting salaries have changed in the past year - read more in the December 2009/January 2010 issue of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, out now.
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About the Authors Paul Dodd
Sarah Welstead
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Paul has one simple goal: To help companies hire great people - and get the most out of every recruiting dollar they spend. That's why he's recognized as one of the best recruitment-industry thinkers in Canada.
Passionate about recruitment branding and delivering great candidate experiences, Sarah is a frequent author and media commentator on older workers and generational trends in the talent market.