Tips for Candidate Relationship management

In my last post on “Do we need to manage candidate relationship?”, I talked about the common reasons why sourcers/recruiters run away from managing candidates. Lets now look at some pointers  for managing candidate relationships.

1.       Present yourself and your company professionally while maintaining a concerned, helpful and positive attitude
2.       Talk to the candidate- Email is not the best tool to Convey feelings or building rapport. Call candidates for status updates. Break the news personally. Follow it up with an email.
3.       Don’t promise the moon - What can’t be given or delivered, Don’t promise. Even if a candidate may not be ft for a current position, he will be either in a capacity to provide you a referral, or will be suitable for some other position. The extent to which they remain approachable, depends how much they trust you.
4.       Add value. - Maintain a concerned, helpful, positive attitude. Assist the candidate in his quest for finding the next job. Simple tips on writing resumes, go a long way in establishing yourself as a consultant. Don’t be afraid to pass on tips of openings in other organizations, if he is not a fit for your open positions. This will harbor loyalty. Always emphasize the “what’s in it for me” of your candidate is important for you.
5.       Keep the Candidate informed. – Don’t keep the candidate guessing. Keep him engaged and informed. Ensure status updates reach them on time and accurately.
6.       Make notes through the screening and recruitment process, and use old communication in further discussions. Make them know you valued the time discussing with them and that you remember them.
7.       Keep in touch -Don’t forget a candidate. Wherever they are, they have referrals to offer. Ensure you track them on social networks, or use birthday/anniversary reminder tools to send them Ecards or updates on any new position that may fall under their area of interest.
8.       Add them to your social networks: An acceptance of an invite gives you the foot in the door required for building a long term relationship. Tag or categorize them wherever you can. This will help you to engage with them more effectively
9.       Seek help -Seek their assistance, but don’t spam. They don’t mind helping you, as long as they believe that you genuinely require their assistance. Make them feel special
10.   Remain accessible - Ensure that the candidate has your contact details and remain accessible 24/7. Ensure that your respond to communication promptly. IT sends a signal to your candidate that you treat them on priority and genuinely care for them
11.   Gather their Pain points- Try and uncover what is bothering them in their current situation. Understand their need to change and address your job as a solution to their challenges. Do your research, and pick up some points, you would like to use to understand the pain points. Don’t assume what they want, find out.
12.   Get an applicant tracking system -Low cost to High end. Applicant tracking systems are available to suit your needs. Pick one. If used effectively, it will turn your dead database into a goldmine of interested candidates.

Similar Posts
Do we need to manage candidate relationship? 

Do we need to manage candidate relationship?

Do we need to manage candidate relationship? I always thought it was a no brainer and everyone will agree that it is a big  “MUST HAVE”. To my surprise I was dragged into a discussion on the importance of Candidate Relationship management.

While in principle people agreed that it is good to have, but quite a few believed, we can live without it happily. Let’s look at some of the arguments and contemplate

1. Takes too much time – the time spent in managing candidates, especially if there are too many, could well be utilized in finding more candidates.
2. Too complex – Too many loose ends. Too much to remember and plans do not get executed most of the time.
3. Candidate irritant- Candidates get irritated with irrelevant calls from recruiters. Call , only if you have a job in hand.
4. Recruitment is not about making friends- As a recruiter, your relationship with the candidate ends once he is out of the recruitment process.
5. Employer branding is not the sourcers/recruiters job – Candidates will always crib if they don’t get through. Nevertheless, branding is not the job of recruitment or sourcing
6. Networking doesn’t work for quick to fill and volume requirements- You need time to find candidates through networking, and only job boards can provide the numbers required for volume hiring. Niche hiring is a different case
7. Only important, when you are doing a passive search- Active candidates, do not need cajoling. It is the passive candidates who need to be dealt with carefully

Whats your take????

History of Microblogging in China

While trying to Sync my ushi account with microblogs I expected to see twitter somewhere.

It was not twitter, but Sina and Sohu its Chinese counterparts / Clones.Tried logging in but couldnt make much progress. Though not Greek or Latin, the microblogs are in Chinese. No English versions available.
Digging a little deeper came across these fantastic articles that give you an idea about how microblogging has transformed within china.

Sina Weibo Controls the “Holy Shit Idea of a Generation”, Launches New URL Weibo.com- (Weibo.com translates to microblog.com). this article gives a wonderful pictograhic image displaying the history of microblogging in China

Can Ushi.cn Outcompete JingWei and LinkedIn? - this post gives an excellent narrative on the social business networks like linkedin in china.

Happy reading

Move your Jobs to Facebook

Imagine, candidates and employees advertising your jobs to their friends and network at one click. With Facebook, the word of mouth just got stronger.

Many companies have now started using Facebook as a medium for attracting candidates. Following are a few methods of putting your jobs on Facebook.

1)      Like button plugin on your career site:

The Like button lets a candidate or employee share your job with friends on Facebook. When the candidate clicks the Like button on your site, a story appears in the user's friends' News Feed with a link back to your career site.

This will not only make your job more visible to the relevant group of candidates, but also increase the volume on your career site

2)      Facebook Page:

This will allow you to mirror your career site jobs on Facebook and provide the candidates with a single page for open jobs.

3)      Like box plugin on your career site:

The Like Box is a social plugin that enables your candidates / visitors to your website, to like your Facebook Company Page directly from your website.

You will also be able to check the candidates, who visited your page and display recent posts from your page.

4)      Registration plugin:

If you have a career site, and want users to create a new account with ease, the Registration plugin could be of tremendous help. When logged into Facebook, users see a form that is pre-filled with their Facebook information where appropriate

This allows the candidates to easily sign up for your career site with their Facebook account.  Also, Liking and Sharing jobs using the Like button / box from your website will need a facebook login. Ease of sharing should translate to more jobs being broadcasted.

5)      Referral applications:

There are a lot of referral applications like hireplug, jobtonic etc which will provide a platform for posting and viewing jobs and make referrals with the chance of being rewarded

With a concentrated pool of candidates interested in referring, it is an ideal method, if you are willing to pay.

6)      Facebook Advertisements:

Facebook Ads allow you to easily advertise a destination on Facebook such as a Page, Event, Application or Group, or your own website

You can use it to advertise walkins, careersite, an online event, specific jobs, or your facebook page. They will attract people, which your network may not be able to reach.

Related links

Like Button

Like Box

Registration

Facebook ads

Searching candidates on Facebook – Find your friend

Linkedin Employee Referral engine- an ethical issue?

Social Media Optimisation in recruitment- Employee referrals

Job Aggregators- the new job boards??

Indeed has launched its "Indeed Resume" service, which allows candidates to upload their resumes. Job seekers can now create a resume from scratch or upload an existing resume in any common formats including Word, PDF, RTF, TXT, and HTML.

They already have a job post option, where employers can post their jobs, directly to Indeed.

What can follow next with them..
Search resumes on job aggregators?
Social network posting directly from aggregators?

Social networks, have already started competing with job boards, for job broadcasts and are well placed with larger populations in their networks. Employee referrals has also started to run on social networks. With Job aggregators, joining the competition, wondering, what can the job boards do to hold their own. Will they be at best restricted to niche boards? Will only sponsored job postings be charged, and others free? Will they have their own social networks?

Love these transformations!!

Links
Indeed resume
Add jobs to Indeed
Linkedin employee referrals 
Social Media Optimisation in recruitment- Employee referrals

Searching candidates on Facebook – Find your friends

Facebook has good one of the largest pool of candidates outside the job boards. Challenge has always been trying to search for candidates, using its search option.

“Find your friends” gives you an extension to your Facebook search. Following is a stepwise approach that will enable you to search beyond your colleagues, classmates and friends

Step 1: Click on Find your friends from your homepage (Look on your right side of the page)



Step 2: Click on “Show more” from the “Find Friends” page





Step 3 Utilize Search options

On your left side of the screen following options are available

* Current City
* High school
* Mutual friends
* College or university
* Employer

Below each head, you respective schools, colleges, companies... etc will be given as options. Below each option set you will see a textbox. You can use this textbox to do a targeted search

Example: If you want to search for people within Hangzhou china

Type Hangzhou, and select the appropriate option from the dropdown. As you type, the dropdown changes. Will help you with typo errors too

After you select the appropriate option a text box will appear. You can add more locations in a similar fashion.

Using multiple search options
You can use multiple search options (company, school, employer, university, city, etc.) to narrow your search results

Example Accenture+ (Hangzhou OR Shanghai)

And you will get all Accenture employees currently on Facebook and staying in Hangzhou or Shanghai China

Happy Sourcing!!

Links
Move your jobs to Facebook
Your Next Hire: The Social Media Sourcing Specialist
Four Reruiting tools
Recruiting / Sourcing Via Twitter

Linkedin Blocked in China??

This landed in my inbox this morning, though I would share

"
"Cannot access Linkedin? Did you read the news? LinkedIn blocked in China | VentureBeat

Anyway, Ushi is better so please join my network in Linkedin instead. The Ushi Linkedin import tool is here, and it is so easy to use. Just a friendly reminder so that you can keep on successful networking."

Interesting Article, would also give you an idea about Chinese Linkedin Clones. Also a perspective of how social media is shaping up in China.

I have tried Renren, but due to the language, found it impossible to use effectively. Ushi, has been a very comfortable to use network, and has a good mix of English and Chinese.

Happy networking!

Links

No one goes to Linkedin.. Believe it???

Intersting Posts on Linkedin network size  

Linkedin Employee Referral engine- an ethical issue?

Redefining the Passive Recruiter/Passive Sourcer

Read a post on Boolean Blackbelt “Passive recruiting doesn’t exist” and it has pierced my long founded assumption of Passive recruiting/sourcing as opposed to Active recruiting/sourcing. Let’s redefine the two terms

Active sourcing / recruiting : Reflects a conscious effort towards finding a candidate
Passive sourcing / recruiting: Reflects a laid back approach towards finding a candidate.

Differentiators between the two breeds…

	Active sourcers/recruiters	Passive sourcers/recruiters
Job post	Well made adverts designed to attract candidates. Responses reviewed and adverts refined accordingly. Will respond to all / most of the candidates. Spread the posting across job boards, universities, social communities and other sources	Post jobs and wait for responses. Candidates not responded to. Rely on Print and Job board adverts.
Social Media	Active on social media with sizeable and quality networks. Publicise their company, jobs and themselves. Create / Participate in communities, where candidates are active.	Social media is for personal use
Job board search	Use alerts to keep a tab of which new candidates are posted in their domain. Extensively search job boards, for candidates and referrals.	A weeks search, max a month. Skim through the results.
Agency reliance	Carefully choose the requirements to be given to agencies. Mostly fill the requirements on their own.	Agencies are their best friends. Rely on agencies to fill most of the requirements.
Employee referrals	Push jobs to employees and impress upon them to refer.	Policy is published. Wait for employees to refer
Friend networks	Build friend networks within competitor companies, and keep a tab of what’s happening there	Not bothered about what’s happening with the competition
Mass emailing	Will send customized mailers	Make a draft, and send to all.
Telephone/internet sourcing	Utilise both, depending on the situation	Mostly internet focused. Telephone utilized only for interviewing.
Reason for contacting candidate	Events, birthdays, seminars, referrals, jobs… etc	Only for a job
Candidate network	Build a network of candidates, within their domains and geographies proactively.	Search for candidates when required. Don’t spend energy in building a network.

A Passive sourcer/recruiter will be an inbox recruiter as aptly described by Sarang Bramhe “A Recruiter 1.0 is one who gets a job requirement; post it to various job boards, newspapers etc and waits for his inbox to deliver goods. It’s a classical case of recruiter who “Post and Pray” to get good resumes and fill in the requirement”

An active sourcer/recruiter will work towards expanding his network by increasing his reach across multiple channels (colleges, SPOCS, associations, social networks, Phone sourcing... etc. And strengthen this network by being in touch on a regular basis. This sourcer may
even help the candidate with jobs with other companies, if required.

More than how they utilize the sources, it is the basic approach towards finding candidates and filling positions, that marks them out as passive or active sourcers. At the centre of this approach lies the willingness to keep candidates engaged and build an active network of candidates within the scope of requirements available.

Who are you???? Active or a Passive sourcer/Recruiter!!

Related Posts

10 Myths – Passive candidate sourcing 
Beliefs of a passive candidate sourcer

Passive recruiting doesnt exist

Social Media for recruiting- Post and Pray approach

No one goes to Linkedin.. Believe it???

Just read a post by Tony Garcia, "LinkedIn Admits That No One Goes to LinkedIn"...

Though the title is misleading, it does make you think... The abstract from the SEC site states ….

"The number of our registered members is higher than the number of actual members, and a substantial majority of our page views are generated by a minority of our members."

As any other social community, I am not surprised to read that. What will be interesting is to know the percentage of the majority.
It is natural that most of the activity on any social network will be by the ones with a reason to utlise the network. Could be recruiters, sales or marketing guys, experts... majority of the people do not contribute.

This raises a question on your inmail responses. I generally look at 15 to 20% as a decent hit ratio.

Wondering if LinkedIn can put an activity meter against each member? Moreover, if that activity meter could classify the activity across categories... you will have less inmails... more returns.

Related Links
Interesting Posts on Linkedin network size
Linkedin Employee Referral engine- an ethical issue?

Linkedin Employee Referral engine- an ethical issue?

An employee referral engine from a big social network has finally landed.

Why a referral engine?

The most prominent challenge in employee referral is that mostly it will happen through chance encounters. Not many or in most case not any employee will proactively find friends or associates who fit the job opening. For an employee referral to happen following have to prudentially happen together

1) Know someone who is looking for a job
2) The job seeker says that he is looking out
3) The referee remembers that a matching job exists

Thence I call employee referrals as a result of chance encounters.
If something could eliminate the chance aspect of the encounter, the referral volume will multiply exponentially and as the LinkedIn tool puts it “turn all of your employees into powerful sourcing agents.”

Ethical challenge

No doubt it will be a big boost to sourcing, but there is a challenge, can call it a moral, or ethical challenge.

Employee Referrals are people referred and is it right to refer someone you don’t know well enough? Would you recommend someone for a job if you can’t vouch for him? Have we taken the willingness of the employee for granted? Is referral about getting more reliable and productive candidates, aloowing the employee to select his colleagues and other jazz about traditional referrals or is it just another sourcing channel.

One argument is that we are just tapping into the first level network of the candidate, but in today’s world of online networking, how well do we know our first level connections?

Would love to see how Linkedin deals with this issue and how the ground rules of employee referrals change

Related posts
Social Media Optimisation in recruitment- Employee referrals

Social Media Optimisation in recruitment- Employee referrals

Internal Referrals

Internal Reference are considered to one of the most effective way to get a stable man power with a very good branding alongside. Most of the companies encourage IR by providing a good incentive schemes and a various promotions. However, it has been observed that, most of the employees tend to forget or loose the focus on any job posted as they are busy with their current day to day works.
Approach
1) A Job Roll will be created for the jobs in pipeline and all the employees will have a unique login for the same.
2) Employees can publish their respective job rolls on their social networks, sites, blogs etc.
3) Whenever any one applies through those job rolls, the respective employee would be entitle to IR schemes with a proper tracking system.
4) Any time employee can see their respective IR incentives and also the pipeline referrals generated though their job rolls.

External Referral tool
External Reference are also considered in some of the organization from their ex employees and even with some external sources. This is also done with a good reference scheme or some promotional events. The approach will same as for internal referrals. The only difference will be to add a payment solution (electronic/cheque) similar to google adwords, etc.

Recruitment technology at work

CV formatting
The client will be able to choose from an existing format or a customised format will be generated. Dataminers will enter the CV into a specified template and the system will automatically convert the given data into the desired client format

CV Parsing
Users will enter the CV in text format. The tool will automatically convert it into database fields and enter into the system

Quality system (QMS)
Critical incidents and profile parameters logged into the system. System will generate quality profiles of client in relation to their comfort level with company

Resource allocation system
One point of resource allocation to all individuals and reports on resource utilisation


Job board
Group of Niche Job boards with possibility of group subscriptions. Build a string of niche job boards, . Link it to a social networking site and feeds coming in from Vacancy tracker. Later link it to Salary benchmark, Training, Resume writing, video resumes and other potential services.

Passive Database
Database of contacts found using internet and telephone research. Can be sold along with CV search subscriptions on Job boards


Knowledge Library
Structure the resources and technical information in a database for easy retrieval

Email generation software
Use functions to derive potential emails and verify emails using email verifiers and mass mailing techniques


Social networks
Social networks including features like, forums, discussion,voting, blogs, videos, chat around specific industry sectors, jobs. To be tied with Job boards for jobs. Where we don’t have a job board, we tie it with Vacancy tracking feeds

Your Next Hire: The Social Media Sourcing Specialist

Donald Breckenridge Jr talks about the information overload on recruiters in this digital age and a need of Social media Sourcing Specialist to counter it in his article " Your Next Hire: The Social Media Sourcing Specialist".

He mentions some basic and intuitive resources and tools to get started and talks about restructuring the current staffing firm model, where sourcing specialists will work hand-in-hand with recruiters to provide well-researched, qualified candidates based on a variety of resources – both online and offline. This allows the recruiter to focus on income-producing activities.

RPO firms like OS2i provide sourcing services which include both Job board and Passive Search.

Internet Passive Sourcers harness Social media and online databases to generate candidates.
Telephone names sourcers are on the Phone all the time getting past gatekeepers to generate candidates which may not be available on the net
Prequalifying/Prescreening experts will contact the canddiate to do the initial Prescreening
Recruiters can then take over the candidate and spent most of their time in closing deals or geerating new business

The beauty of this approach lies in the way the team functions. Its like a relay race. If they work together, give their best and pass on the baton properly, its a sure shot Winner



Link
Your Next Hire: The Social Media Sourcing Specialist
Donald Breckenridge

OS2i

Four Reruiting tools

Kevin wheeler in his post "Four required Recruiting tool" talks about the Famous Four recruiting tools.
1) MySpace/Facebook
2) Linkedin
3) Twitter and
4) Personal Blog

Mention of blogging as a tool, is the one that has made me think in a new direction

Links
Four required Recruiting tool: Article

Recruiting / Sourcing Via Twitter

Ritesh nair has posted a tip on using Twitter in his article Recruiting/Sourcing via twitter

Following is a list of Boolean operators that you can use

(Alternatively, you can use the advanced search form to automatically constuct your query.)

Operator	Finds tweets...
twitter search	containing both "twitter" and "search". This is the default operator.
"happy hour"	containing the exact phrase "happy hour".
obama OR hillary	containing either "obama" or "hillary" (or both).
beer -root	containing "beer" but not "root".
#haiku	containing the hashtag "haiku".
from:alexiskold	sent from person "alexiskold".
to:techcrunch	sent to person "techcrunch".
@mashable	referencing person "mashable".
"happy hour" near:"san francisco"	containing the exact phrase "happy hour" and sent near "san francisco".
near:NYC within:15mi	sent within 15 miles of "NYC".
superhero since:2008-05-01	containing "superhero" and sent since date "2008-05-01" (year-month-day).
ftw until:2008-05-03	containing "ftw" and sent up to date "2008-05-03".
movie -scary :)	containing "movie", but not "scary", and with a positive attitude.
flight :(	containing "flight" and with a negative attitude.
traffic ?	containing "traffic" and asking a question.
hilarious filter:links	containing "hilarious" and linking to URLs.

Links
Article
Twiiter search operators
Twitter Advanced search
Twitter Search tool
Searching twitter: helpful tools

CV Gadget: People search tool

CV gadget is a Cool tool to find out people across various databases and networks like linkedin, myspace, zoominfo, xing, ebo, facebook.

Use this tool essentially to find people across the net and verify information posted across networks. As any other names search tool it is not very useful if the person you are searching for has a common name. Its unability to search on location or any other criterion makes it tougher to search. Hopefully some day, we will have a "boolean search string" capability on it.

Links
CV gadget

Happy hunting
Core sourcing

Recruiting on Twitter

Thomas Licari has put a very useful video on Youtube explaining how to use Twitter to recruit candidates.

If you are interested in expanding your sourcing sources, you cant afford to miss this


Links
Powerpoint presentation
Video

Common Social Networking Mistakes

This article from Rebecca Beasley on social networking is like stating the obvious. The "obvious" that we generally let past our perepheral vision. Atleast I do make most of these mistakes.

Thought of sharing with you all.

Links
Common Social Networking Mistakes

Finding resumes on Scribd

Another gem from Jim Stroud for all sourcers who intend to go beyond job board sourcing.

As so many other passive candidate sourcing , the key is to know how to use them. Jim Strouds article "How to find free resumes on Scribd (Part 1)" on Recruiters Lounge

Happy reading!!

Links
Article

New LinkedIn End User License Agreement

If you are a regular linkedin user you need to have a look at their new aggreement

Some spooky highlights from a network which has turned into Big brother.

"LinkedIn may limit the number of connections you may have to other users and prohibit you from contacting other users through use of the Services."

" LinkedIn reserves the right, but has no obligation, to monitor disputes between you and other members and to terminate your account if LinkedIn determines, in its sole discretion, that doing so is prudent."

"Dont upload a cartoon, symbol, drawing or any content other than a photograph of yourself in your profile photo;"

"Dont upload, post, email, transmit or otherwise make available or initiate any content that: includes telephone numbers, email addresses, street addresses or any personally identifiable information for which there is not a field provided by LinkedIn;"

"Dont upload, post, email, transmit or otherwise make available or initiate any content that: adds to a content field content that is not intended for such field (i.e. submitting a telephone number in the “title” or any other field)

"LinkedIn may terminate the Agreement for any or no cause, at any time, with or without notice, which shall be effective immediately or as may be specified in the notice"

Links
New Linkedin user aggreement
Summary of changes
Linkedin Answers

Coresourcing