January 2000 Column
HAPPY
NEW YEAR
Comments
from the peanut gallery.
As
the New Year comes with a big bang for most recruiters I know, we are still
wondering how to integrate this relatively new recruiting tool into our daily
lives. Some have dived in with both feet…very successfully placing mostly
resume board candidates or ad responses. Other very successful recruiters I know
still do not have a website, still use DOS databases (or file cabinets) and
would rather use a fax machine than email any day. I tread somewhere in the
middle, as should you. The first group is not all wrong. It is easy to get
caught up in the sheer number of quality candidates that can be had on the
Internet. For a $10k or less budget, you can have more candidates dumped in your
lap than you know what to do with. This strategy will only work in a strong,
candidate-driven marketplace. The first hint of a recession (I have seen three
since I have been a recruiter) and they are out of business. They are putting
all their eggs in one basket. The second group is also making a lot of
placements but is missing out on a great opportunity to make more. If they could
learn how to source qualified candidates from the Internet, then utilize their
time-honored, traditional recruiting skills, they could have the best of both
worlds.
Part
of the problem is the magnitude of information, resources and services available
to us. Let’s assume we have some money to spend on the Internet…where do we
spend it? Wade and I have offered reviews of likely prospects and will continue
to be on the lookout for resources, products and services to recommend and maybe
take some of that burden off your shoulder.
Another
part of the problem is fear some agency managers realize when they think of
their recruiters let loose with Internet access and email at the desktop.
Although we have been highly automated in my agency for many years, it has only
been recently that I have relented and offered my recruiting and sales staff
these services from their desktop. I was afraid, but no longer am. Although I
know many successful recruiters who use the Internet regularly, I have also seen
more than one recruiter fail by placing too much emphasis on Internet
recruiting. I am happy to say my worst fears were not realized and there is
little, if any, abuse of these services by my staff.
What
about our clients receiving all this Internet training? There are many companies
out there now catering to the end-user…the large corporate client. I attend
numerous Internet product and service seminars and can assure you that the
attendees at these seminars contain mostly our clients. Companies that pay our
fees. Does that worry me? Not in the least. Internet or not…hard-to-find
candidates and still hard-to-find candidates. Even with all their big Internet
budgets and pricey Monster memberships they cannot produce the results that we
can produce. They will continue to run their ads and search the resume boards.
We must be better that they are. We must know how to take an Internet candidate
and turn that into three referrals. They won’t do that. We must learn how to
find those candidates on the Internet that are not answering ads and not posting
their resumes. They won’t do that either. It is do-able. You just need to make
up your mind that you will utilize the Internet for what it is and do not make
something out of it that it isn’t. Off my soapbox for now and best of luck in
the New Year… Mark
A
DAY IN THE LIFE...
A day
in the life of a contract Internet Recruiter, by Wade
The
day started like any other day. My
client was happy and I was on track with my plan to build my Dallas client, a
major telecom, a list of North American Network Engineers and Data Sales Reps to
go after in a campaign that was scheduled to start in January, 2000.
I was enjoying the work, using advanced sourcing techniques to find
around 100 new prospects per day. The
work was calm, planned and controlled. Then
something happened that changed everything and the plan went out the window.
The
press release hit our inboxes before 8AM. One
of my client’s competitors was stumbling and had announced layoffs and pay
cuts. Within minutes my client’s
Recruiting Project Leader was in my cube telling me to “drop everything and go
after them.” I was in the middle
of a session that was going well but, orders are orders, so I began to organize
the attack. A few minutes later the
in-house recruiters started calling to let me know that we probably had only 24
- 48 hours to make our move or we would be too late. A sense of urgency familiar to all recruiters began to
overtake me. The Director was out
of town, but his email marked urgent! arrived in my inbox fast. It was simple and to the point: “Hit them hard, hit them
NOW!”
A
quick check of my sourcing database revealed only one contact at the target
company. A feeling somewhere
between dread and panic began to set in. Many
recruiters do their best work at these times.
I quickly launched a series of search commands on the Internet…
“Please work, please work, come on baby – hit something please!” I
whispered as I pounded the keyboard. After
a few minutes I was successful and had over 200 contacts in the target company
by doing reverse email lookups on the target company’s domain using several
different search sites. One of my
client’s in-house recruiters leveraged their contact at the target to get an
additional 50 names – with email addresses!
I built a table in Access and loaded the data.
My client had recently accepted my advice to purchase Arial Campaign,
(http://www.arialsoftware.com/), a bulk email engine, so I built a project in
Arial to do a merge on names from the database table and send a message to the
target company’s contacts while my co-worker wrote alternate messages and
negotiated with my client’s Marketing Department on what message content was
acceptable for release according to my client’s communication policies.
I built a dummy database table to test Arial Campaign and ran the test
successfully. Then it was time for
the real thing. I hit the Run
button in Arial for the project and nothing happened!
Heart pounding, I dialed my client’s technical support number.
The Tech was great – he took over my computer remotely and confirmed
that I was correctly configured. Then
he pinged a mail server half a continent away and discovered that it was
unresponsive. After a few commands
it was active. “Good hunting”,
the Tech said as he disconnected. I
hit the Run button again and YES! The
messages went out at about 6:30PM (I had been in the office 12 hours).
I
recently downloaded the infoFinder Gold™ version of this resume
productivity tool to review for my client.
Essentially, the product is a meta search tool that translates your
search commands into the correct syntax to run your search on 77 of the best
resume sites on the Internet. You
can enter as many key words as you like but 4 -5 are recommended due to the
limitations of many resume sites. You
have a choice of searching free and pay resume sites (like monster.com – you
must provide your own password for pay sites) to retrieve resumes according to
criteria you establish. infoFinder
Gold™ automatically organizes the returns
to show the 100 freshest or newest resumes that match your search criteria from
each of the 77 resume sites, so you don’t waste your time with stale resumes.
Because the product is running at the client (your PC), your
passwords are secure and are not revealed to Intelligent Algorithms Enterprises,
Ltd. You can search the Internet
using 12 popular search engines for either resumes or any document that hits any
or all (essentially, you choose an AND or an OR search) of your key words.
The download was easy and launching infoFinder Gold™ was
intuitive. The user interface did a
great job of keeping me informed of the progress of the search and let me
preview the results. The results
were rated on a percentage scale, according to how well they fit my search
criteria. Being client-based also
enables infoFinder Gold™ to work efficiently with other desktop
applications. For example, if you
want to see the full text of a resume, just click a button and it is there –
as opposed to waiting for it to download into your browser from the Internet.
With one mouse click, you can turn a preview of a resume that has keywords
highlighted into a full resume in your browser that you can save or cut and
paste into your candidate tracking system.
These features allow an infoFinder Gold™
user to move much more rapidly through a set of retrieved resumes than
they could in a manual search. I
tried infoFinder Gold™ on several searches with good results.
I hope to demo InfoFinder Gold ™ w/Export Feature™
for a future article, so I can comment on its export features into a candidate
tracking system.
infoFinder
Gold™ won’t produce the results of a manual search, but it is a
great tool as it can retrieve the best resumes from a large number of sites very
quickly. Examples of potential
users include recruiters who don’t have the time or choose not to invest the
time and money learning, becoming proficient, and practicing good Internet
recruiting, but do want to reap quick results finding resumes that fit search
assignments. Even an
experienced Internet recruiter would appreciate the time savings that are
achieved by using infoGIST™ in a simple resume search.
Take a test drive – Visit infoGIST™
on the web at http://www.infoGIST.com
to download infoGIST™ Gold for
a free 14 day trial.
Pricing:
Fees range from $200 per month (or $1650 annual) for a single user (InfoFinder
Plan) to $375 per month plus $20 (or $3500 plus $125 per user annual) per user (InfoFinder
Gold w/Export Feature Plan). Also have quarterly fees available and
multi-location discounts are available on annual subscriptions.
For
more information or to obtain a subscription agreement, contact: Ms. Suzette
Craddock at Millennium e-Marketing, Inc. (240 W. Elmwood Drive, Suite 1010;
Dayton, OH 45459) at (800) 388-3298. WWW site is http://www.meminc.net