Finding
Job Orders on the Internet - STOP! Before
we go any further, have you read what Finkel and other industry leader have been
saying for years (and in recent TFL articles)?
Have you surveyed your clients to learn who will be hiring?
Are you focused on the known opportunities and scouting for new ones
based on a structured plan? Are you
working with the "best of the best" candidates?
(Hint - The best candidates are still employed, so I hope you aren't
losing time competing with corporate recruiters to place the tens of thousands
who are flooding the Internet with their resumes).
The Internet can help you build your structured plan to find clients/job
orders. The Internet can also help
you find the best of the best candidates.
Here's
how:
Expanding
to adjacent niches locally - If your clients are not planning enough hires for
you to achieve your profit goals in your local market, you can explore expanding
into an adjacent market locally. For
example, if you place Web developers in Dallas, you can expand your scope by
also placing Business Analysts, Database Administrators, Web Graphic Artists,
Middleware Developers and Server Administrators in Dallas. All you need to do to
expand this way is to survey your current clients about the adjacent services to
find out whether it is going to be profitable for you.
You may find after surveying current clients that you need to add more
local clients. To find them, look
at your market like an investor. Visit
sites like www.ceoexpress.com and www.corporateinformation.com to learn about
local companies. To continue with
our Dallas example, I visited www.corporateinformation.com, scrolled down to
option 7 and clicked Texas. You can
quickly see the top 100 employers in Dallas, or the Top 100 Companies in Dallas
by revenue - both reports include phone numbers.
Let's try the Dallas Chamber of Commerce. I don't know where to find it on the web, so I went to
www.mamma.com (a meta search engine), and typed "chamber of commerce"
+Dallas. This immediately lead me
to the Dallas Chamber's site, where I learned that I could purchase a Business
and Industry Journal listing over 700 businesses, including the top 200
businesses ranked by employment, along with the top 20 employers in 35
industries. All the listings
include the address, fax, phone, contact names, and URLs for just $40.
Its only $15 for members! (You
are a member of your local chamber aren't you?) Ok, we have a means of identifying local businesses.
Now all we have to do is make the calls to survey the market, build a
plan, and start finding and delivering the best candidates.
Would
you like to make the market survey calls in the form of candidate marketing
calls?
Great!
As part of your planning process, visit www.flipdog.com and find out what
jobs the companies on the list are posting on the web. At www.flipdog.com, click
the Find Jobs tab, then click Texas in the U.S. map on the next screen, unclick
'show recruiter and staffing agency listings' (on the left under step 3), click
computer/MIS (continuing with our example), narrow your search to Internet
Development in the Job Function category and click next.
Up comes a list of companies that have Internet Development jobs posted
right now for a total of 286 jobs at the time of this writing.
You can cross reference the names to the data in your Business and
Industry Journal Directory to obtain the contact names and company backgrounds
or you can look them up on the web. If
you want to see the actual job postings, just click finish.
If you are still planning and just want to know how many Internet
Development postings a company has, just click on the company in the list and
the number appears. For example,
American Airlines had 4 such openings when this article was written. If you
wish, you can select just one company or up to 20 companies to see all of their
job postings. Flipdog provides the
job title, job description, company background, date of posting, and location of
job.
What
if your niche is completely dead?
Expand
your research to adjacent specializations.
Continuing with our Dallas Web Developer niche example, suppose there
weren't enough jobs. We could expand our scope in Dallas by selecting additional
Job Function categories in Flipdog, such as Database Administration or Software
Development, or we could stay with our niche and expand our territory by
selecting additional states.
Here's
a tip.
Build
agents to notify you of new jobs in your specialty or with your clients so you
don't have to keep checking - you can do this on the job boards themselves or
create automated JobHunters on Flipdog.com that find the kinds of new jobs you
want to call on as soon as they open almost anywhere on the Internet.
Bottom
line.
The
jobs are out there, but you still have to make a plan, pick up the phone, find
out whom the decision maker is, and call them using great technique in order to
get the job order. Whether you
choose to make a candidate marketing call or a business survey call is up to you
- either way, the Internet can help you build your research faster so you can
get on the phone.
As
always, whenever we offer information of this nature to the readers, we
recognize a lot of you would like to take advantage to this type of resource but
do not have the time and/or inclination to obtain this information personally.
Not everyone wants to become an Internet research expert. It’s not for
everyone. For those, I would recommend contacting your favorite researcher and
outsourcing this job for what I am sure would be a very reasonable fee. If
anyone is interested in a list of qualified researchers, let me know and I will
provide one.
But
first…the year just passed. A hard time for many and at the very least, an
interesting time for all. As far as Internet recruiting goes, there were many
changes as well. This was the year that the employers…our clients, took full
advantage of the power of Internet recruiting, and cut out a lot of agency fees
in doing so. We have written about more than one company completely replacing
their agency budgets with internal Internet recruiting resources. This was also
the year we saw major consolidations among the major fee-based career centers.
There are only three or four major players now with all our clients going to the
same places. This was also the year that we saw the first economic turndown in
almost 7 or 8 years. Events in September and October made things even worse.
My industry contacts tell me there has been a major shakedown among
recruiting agencies, a lot of closures and mergers of smaller firms. Now…
The
year to come…what is next?
First
of all, those of you still using Monster and other large Fortune 500 sponsored
career sites need to move away from those services. You need to realize that
although you probably make placements from this service you take up so much of
your time with deadbeat candidates that you are not making as much money as you
could by giving that up and utilizing more traditional, time-honored recruiting
methods. Give passive Internet candidate recruiting a try. It is much more
rewarding in that you actually feel like you are recruiting someone.
I
am happy to report that I practice what I preach. In my day job (Berger/Nowlin,
Inc.) I am now 100% passive. I am no longer a member of any fee-based services
and, when recruiting Internet candidates, am utilizing nothing but tools and
techniques that direct me to the type of candidate my clients are looking for.
Part of my new marketing plan is to sell myself as the recruiter who “can find
you candidates that are not on Monster”.
This
coming year, one thing I know we will be talking about is the invisible Web (or
deep Web). This is simply a mysterious name for an easy way to use specialized
search engines to search for passive Internet candidates on the Web. The
un-indexed portion of the Internet. We wrote about this last year when we first
heard about it and, as it is another way for us to locate candidate our clients
miss, we will be writing more about it for sure.
Many
people I talk with, both recruiters and employers, seem to think that things
will pick up after the first. Many companies have shared with me that they
actually have jobs open but are holding them until after the first. It is almost
like everyone has talked himself or herself into the fact that nothing will
happen before then. Thankfully, it is only a couple of weeks away at this
writing. Stay tuned in 2002.
Once
again I have had the pleasure of reviewing this book, now in it’s 6th
edition. I last took a look at this material for the September, 1999 issue of
Fordyce Letter. It received an excellent review then and read on for more of the
same.
The
first thing I notice is that Barbara has expanded the book from two to three
volumes. Also, although there is a charge for the book, of course, a good many
of the resources discussed in this book are 100% free, available to anyone with
an Internet connection. In Volume 1, Sourcing Candidates, she starts out with a
brief on Internet recruiting in general, where she writes about recruiting
destinations, including some I haven’t used (ever used ICQ to recruit
someone?), Internet culture, and recruiting ethics. A lot is written about
adding value to your recruiting service, both to the candidates and employers.
She teaches you how to beef up your Web site with content of interest to both
parties, how to create a solution to the needs of your visitors that keeps them
coming back to your site and referring their friends. There are also many
examples of emails you can send to prospective candidates and other types of
contacts that get results. Do you use autoresponders? I never have but will
start right away.
My
favorite part in this first section is the 82 pages of search engine specifics
for twelve large public services including detailed information on about.com,
altavista.com, alltheweb.com, excite.com, and a number of others. Included are
detailed examples, where you are walked through a typical search, for using
these sites for recruiting purposes, both searching for resumes and developing
candidate and job order leads. These pages will provide hours of fun for any
serious student of Internet recruiting and alone are worth the price of this
book. She doesn’t stop at the search engines. Many specifics searching the
newsgroups (groups.google.com), or you can try the communities (www.aol.com)
are included as well. There are many great ideas in this section worthy of a
try.
To
round out the first volume, you learn a bit about posting jobs on the Internet.
If you were looking for jobs on the Internet, would you be more apt to apply to
one with the subject line:
Subject:
Web Administrator
Or
Subject:
NJ – Middletown – Web Admin. - Cutting-Edge Technologies
See
what I mean? There is also a lot of information on singling out specific
newsgroups to post messages (not ads) to induce qualified people to check you
out, regional job Web sites, career-focused Web site, association/organization
Web sites, classified ad Web sites and your own company’s Web site. Included
is a template for posting jobs on the Internet.
Volume
two is titled: Becoming the Recruiter of Choice. She starts out by writing about
a very important topic that Wade and I wrote about earlier this year, and one
that will probably become more and more a part of our column next year, the
Invisible (or Deep) Web. This is another way for us all to stay ahead of the
client-knowledge curve. Here are some of the specialized search engines and
other tools that you can use to search the unindexed portion of the Web, find
those resumes that do not show up on AltaVista, AOL or other typical resume
hunting resources.
How
do you locate company directories or other employee lists from a target
companies site? What about corporate alumni? Does your target company have an
employee association? How do you locate Executive biographies? Ever subscribed
to a mailing list for recruiting purposes? Do you have a need for diversity
recruiting sources? What about ex-military candidates? How can forums and
bulleting boards help? Where can you run free classified ads on the Internet?
Can you locate a user group for your target candidate’s skills? What good are
online magazines? How do I locate a specialized professional organization or
association? All these questions and more are fully answered in this section. A
lot of information for sure but you don’t have to memorize it all. It sits on
the shelf until you need it.
The
targeted email section has an excellent example letter we should all use for
initial contacts with prospective Internet recruits.
It
is going to be hard to cover everything in Volume II as Barbara goes on and on
with one good Internet recruiting idea after another, many I have never tried
myself. Almost every page has a Web site to visit and an example of how to
extract the information you need from that site, be it a resume or a lead of
some type, or sometimes raw information that gets you to the next place more
quickly.
A
few more, though. Do you have a phone number on caller ID with no name, go to www.anywho.com
and find out who it is at the Internet White Pages? Robots? Why leave all the
fun to the big guys. Use you own robots to locate anything you want on the
Internet. OK, I’ll stop but I could go on and on.
A
lot is written on the recruiter Web sites. Do you have the correct design, the
right message, attract the right audience? Additional information on text and
graphics; interactivity; content; search engine visibility tips; keyword tips;
header text; image tag keywords; customer testimonials; site hosting options;
domain name selection and Web site security. If your site is lacking in any of
these suggested items you are probably not getting everything you could out of
your Web site as it pertains to recruiting new candidates and better
establishing you Internet identity. At
the end of Volume II she suggests hiring your own Internet specialist. Leave the
recruiting to the recruiters and leave the computer knowledge, site publicity
tips, advanced recruiting techniques to the specialists. Food for thought.
Volume
III, The ZEN of Internet Recruiting, ties everything together and talks about
how you actually make a profit with all of this. She stresses long-term
networking strategies versus short-term quick fixes. One chapter, Step-By-Step
Zen, actually outlines a detailed process you can follow all the way from
obtaining your job order through sourcing and recruiting your candidate,
assuming you know what to do from there. Last but not least is the 10 page
Internet glossary and 111 pages (3600+ sites) of Internet links and resources of
interest to recruiters. By itself, another feature worth the cost of the entire
set.
Thankfully,
a companion CD-Rom is included with the set that contains hyperlinks to all of
the resources listed, plus references to many of the items written about in the
hard copy including the examples of email letters, which is very helpful.
This
book, incredibly, lists for only $149.00 but Barbara has generously offered this
resource to Fordyce Letter readers for $99.00 plus S&H. As I had mentioned
before, there are several features in this product that, alone, that would be
worth the $149.00 so I think the set is a steal at this price. It is packed full
of information, much of which you do not get with the more expensive Internet
recruiting training available. A lot of hands-on information you can use
immediately. Barbara has set up a special Web page for Fordyce readers to visit
to order the book and take the discount: http://www.barbaraling.com/fordyce.
You can order directly from the site using a credit card. Anyone with any
comments or questions for Barbara can contact her directly at btl@barbaraling.com.
Since
I just finished a review for a book packed with Internet recruiting tips I may
as well steal one from Barbara for the Tip section this month. She mentions the
“anchor” tag a couple of times in her book. I have not used this tag before
but plan to later today. This tag is used in the AltaVista advanced search
feature to let you locate Web pages that have links to specific phrases.
When searching for resumes, you can type in anchor:”view resumes”
which will get you to all the indexed pages having a link entitled “view
resumes”. Theoretically, these pages will be the front door to pages and pages
of resumes for you to view. Yes, some will require passwords but many will not.
Give it a try.
Wade and I both hope everyone had a happy holiday season and thank all for another fun year.