CHANGES
I
wanted to share with you more real-life happenings. If you have been reading
this column for any length of time I am sure you know Wade and I both have day
jobs (no…we don’t write this column for our living). Mine happens to be as
the co-owner of an IT placement and consulting firm in St. Louis. I write about
St. Louis a lot because I feel we are fairly average here. I think what happens
here happens in a similar fashion in most of this country. Maybe we are a lot
different than NYC or LA but I think similar to a lot of what is in between.
Due
to the perceived weakness in our economy, my partner decided to (informally)
question our HR/Recruiter friends that work for some of the large companies
around town, with interesting results. We spoke with a fellow at one of our
large, blue-chip corporate headquarters who told us that they simply were not
paying fees any longer…that the Internet was taking care of all of their IT
needs at this time. We touched base with another large, St. Louis employer who
told us they had hired 15 internal ‘Internet Recruiters’ specifically to
avoid paying agency fees. Another large, growing employer told us a similar
story…that they had no need for IT placement services. These are all large
headquarter operations that at one point in time paid a great number of agency
fees probably amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. We also
asked these companies if a reduction from our published 25% fee schedule would
have an impact on their decision not to utilize third parties. We were not
necessarily prepared to do this at this time but had used this tactic in the
recession of 1989-1991 and our candidates sold like hotcakes. But that idea
didn’t seem to excite them much either because it was still more than the zero
that they are paying now.
Do
I think this situation is limited to St. Louis? Do I think this situation is
limited to IT/MIS? No and no. I think this is going on all over the place and I
also think that almost any recruiting specialty is going to run into this
problem at some point. I also think that the companies that have not done away
with fees altogether are hiring more and more people from the Internet. I have
been writing about our client’s easy access to our own labor pools. I have
been writing about this possibility and now I am seeing it more and more.
So…what
do we do? As an industry…as individuals? You can do what we are doing, and
have been doing, at my company. Our business has not been adversely affected by
the decisions of these former clients to utilize the Internet exclusively for
their hiring needs. We sought out other clients…we looked towards more medium
sized companies…those that could not afford full time recruiters. We have
learned advanced Internet recruiting techniques in order to go to these customer
and tell them that YES, we can find you candidates that do not have their resume
posted on Monster.com. We are
working on jobs that are harder to fill…those that we know are not easily
filled by Monster, Dice or Headhunter ads. Those that actually require research,
sourcing and recruiting…not just process an ad response. We are being much
more choosy in who we deal with. You can to.
I
would be very interested in any other stories in how our client’s use of the
Internet has affected your business. Please take a minute of your time a drop me
an email at the address below. I will publish the results in a future column.
The
Recruiters Bible
For
this month’s article I had the absolute pleasure of reviewing a site that is
sure to be a hit with a lot of recruiters and sourcers alike It seems like these
people have researched the entire world and come up with an outstanding research
resource. Anyone that thinks the Internet is for IT or High-Tech only please
visit this site for links to information on almost every professional
association, mailing list, free resume bank, free job posting service, college
site, newsgroup, recruiting tool and free trial known to mankind. For a fairly
reasonable price to boot. Anyone who takes Internet research seriously needs to
at least check this out.
Established in 1998, they claim to have the largest and most up to date listings
of free we-based sites of interest to recruiters. All of their sites listed are
reviewed prior to inclusion in the database, which is completely searchable. How
would you like access to 700+ free resume banks…750+ free job posting sites…75+ free
trials…100+ free communities…200+ associations.
From
their website: “Whether your recruiting concentrates on CRM, HTML, SAP, SFA,
C++, SQL, HR, MD, MBA, or EIEIO, our database will have sites you can use. In
fact, we take requests. That's right, requests. Just drop us a line detailing a
job title or industry you would like us to research and we will dedicate an
entire search to your needs!”
By
clicking on the link to Associations, you are presented with a list of
association categories ranging from Administrative, automotive, banking,
food/beverage, health care, legal, hr, it, travel and dozens of others. Keep in
mind…these are just the categories. Delving further…let’s say you are a
Diversity recruiter. Click on that category and you have a listing of 7
associations to xray for leads. Legal has 9, IT has 24 and Advertising has 23
listings.
Taking
a look a the Resume section, again, a list of literally dozens of resume
categories, similar to the categories for the Associates. Clicking on Automotive
you see links to 8 auto related resume banks. Food and Beverage has
13…impressive. Want resume for Graphic Designers…try these 94 sites. Human
Resources…47. One more. The Restaurant category has links to 14 resume banks.
That sounds like a lot of non-IT resumes to me.
Mailing
lists…Newsgroups. Do you use these excellent Internet (not WWW) based
resources in your day-to-day research, sourcing and recruiting? If not, you
should start immediately. If so here they all are for you listed by category or
completely searchable. There are other tools on the market that can perform
these functions as well but not integrated like this. Increase your resume flow
by researching what mailing lists there are for you industry and then join a
couple.
I took a quick
look at the tools section and noticed a Bookstore, resources for Directories,
Training links, Industry Forums/Portals and Communities, HR tools, Job
Descriptions, tools for mailing lists and newsgroups, salary surveys, search
engines, etc., etc. etc. A lot of work here putting this together.
Lastly…their
free trial section. Wade and I write about free trials all the time. I think
they are the best way for most of us to assess a service. I never appreciate it
when a vendor wants you to write out a check for thousands of dollars on just
their sales pitch. Something for everyone here.
Although
there is a fee for the Recruiter Bible service, keep in mind here that each and
every site listed in this database of thousands of recruiter resources are free.
They
actually do offer a no cost service that might be fine for a lot of people. The
free option is a non-searchable list of 300+ sites that do not charge a fee to
post or search. These are reviewed. Registration is required.
The paid subscription is a service where they have done all the searching,
filtering, reviewing and updating. They only leave the searching part to you.
Not to mention having access to almost 2,000 sites. Subscribers are able to
store their favorite sites into a folder, thus creating a personalized version
of the database. The cost is, I think, a very reasonable $150 for 6 months or
$250 for the year.
In
closing, you must at least visit this site and check it out. Anyone serious
about using the Internet for more than just (but including) resume searching
should seriously consider this great service. Visit their site at http://www.therecruitersbible.com
or you can touch base with my contact for this article, Christina Bultinck at cbultinck@therecuitersbible.com.
EMAIL
MARKETING
Mark
and I received a great question this month from a recruiter wanting to know how
to manage his database to eliminate duplicates, send mass email campaigns, and
keep up with the responses. The
recruiter’s firm is currently using Act!, as well as Outlook.
This
is a common problem that we all face. Even
firms that do not practice Internet recruiting techniques have some type of
database of candidates… wouldn’t it be great if you could more effectively
communicate with them? When I
started this effort a few year ago, I used Excel to house the mailing list from
my candidate database. Then I moved
to MS/Access because it eliminated duplicates for me.
On the email side, I started with Outlook and moved to Arial Campaign to
get a more powerful mass email tool.
My idea (as though it was original) was that I could use my
Internet recruiting skills to load up a database of targeted people and then
send mass emails to the ones who fit my job orders using Arial Campaign.
Wrong! If you send out a
well-written piece to 1,000 people, you will get back 150 to 250 responses that
you must process – and you won’t be able to keep up with the database
updates and emails. You have to get
more automated. One of the
excellent books to take you into this topic is Email Marketing, Using
Email to Reach Your Target Audience and Build Customer Relationships,
by Jim Sterne and Anthony Priore.
I’ll
discuss this topic more in upcoming issues as it applies to Mark’s point about
the need for agencies adapt in order to continue to add value to their clients,
but here is the short answer to the recruiter’s question:
Where
should you start? For many of you,
it may be as simple and inexpensive as starting an electronic agency newsletter
for your candidate and client database called an ezine.
Unless you have tons of time and can afford a steep learning curve,
don’t try to do email marketing on your own.
Hire a professional firm such as Yesmail.com or emailrobot.com or
Responsys.com or SelectResponse.com to do this work for you.
Don’t have time to do the research to discover what solution is right
for you? Hire Mark and I for consultation.
The solution you select should integrate with your web site and allow you
to test, measure click-throughs to your web site, length of visit, depth of
visit, repeat visits, leads, contacts (replies), conversion ratio, lifetime
value, and return on investment.
UPDATE
ON THE SOURCING EXPERIMENT
Prior
to the test, we ran 12 searches in the corporate environment with 100% success
on a wide variety of positions in cities all over the U.S. and Canada ranging
from CRM Sales and Engineering to CPAs with international tax experience to
Optical Module Designers with Mechanical Design experience living in Ottawa.
In each of the 12 searches we were able to deliver full coverage (5 to 15
candidates) within 3 to 5 business days. By
full coverage, I mean that the recruiter said “stop, I don’t need any more
– I want to hire all of the ones you sent.”
None of the candidates was on any job board on the Internet and were
therefore not available to the corporate recruiters through their normal
sourcing efforts. The results were
also largely not available to AIRS trained Internet recruiters that so many
corporations have hired to replace agencies.
More on our results with Berger-Nowlin in next month’s issue.
DEEP
WEB, HIDDEN WEB SIMPLIFIED