March 9th, 2010 by Hillary
Whether a recruiter or a job-seeker, it may be helpful to be reminded every now and then that soft skills are an important component to a well-rounded candidate. A recent article in SI Review reported that strong work ethic is the most sought-after soft skill, according to the respondents of an Express Employment Professionals survey.
Here’s a recap of the soft skills cited in the survey and how respondents ranked them by importance:
- Strong work ethic – 23%
- Positive attitude – 17%
- Communication – 11%
- Being a team-player -10%
- Flexibility – 9%
- Being a problem solver -7%
- Being self-directed – 5%
- Working well under pressure – 5%
- Being a quick learner – 4%
- Organizational skills – 3%
- Creativity – 1%
Soft skills are also known as transferable skills and employers are always looking out for valuable examples of those that transfer most directly to their open position. A resume should pinpoint a few (1-3) specific soft skills and how they have been applied in a current position. Substantiating them with strong examples will add more credibility and engage a hiring manager. A resume with a laundry list of soft-skills can have the opposite effect. Hiring managers will learn more about your soft skills during the interview, so on a resume be sure to highlight only those most relevant to the open position, don’t build a generic list. For more examples of how you can infuse valuable soft skills in to your resume, check out these tips from Executive Resume Writer, Laura Smith-Proulx.
Tags: employment advice, job seekers, Recruiting
Posted: Hiring Practices, Jobseeker Resources, Uncategorized | No Comments »
February 26th, 2010 by Hillary
I recently came across an article on the CareerBuilder blog titled, “7 steps to Must-Read Job Postings.” Job Postings are often the first time a candidate will get a good look at your company. That means your job posting can also be your first impression! CareerPlug’s employer-branded microsite recruiting campaigns will leave a great impression with top candidates. I’ll break down some of the steps CareerBuilder lists and show you how CareerPlug’s model
is a sure bet!
2. Don’t Be Shy About Showing Off the Goods
You have four day work weeks? The top selling agent of the year gets a new car? We can understand you don’t want to brag too much about your company’s exciting opportunities, but let us! As a third party to the candidate-employer dynamic, we have no problem highlighting the coolest parts of your open position on the microsite. Sometimes something as trivial as a company dodge ball team can attract top-notch sales professionals. Let us brag for you; you leave a great first impression and we can get qualified candidates excited about your position!
4. Don’t be Vague
This one is two-fold with CareerPlug. First, we help to create a microsite that answers all the important questions about each position. Having qualifications, responsibilities, salary and benefits included in the microsite is a great way to grab quality candidates and weed out professionals who don’t fit the position. But, even with the best job postings, unwanted candidates will surely sneak by. This is why CareerPlug suggests specificity! We can look deeper into each candidate and further weed out candidates based on what each employer is looking for. By being specific about your position with CareerPlug, we can be sure we only send exactly what you want.
7. Double dip
CareerPlug really takes care of this for our clients. No need to worry about posting a job in a million places just to find the right candidate. CareerPlug’s high-volume recruiting campaigns will find all the top candidates across multiple recruiting resources – saving you both time and money.
Tags: High-Volume Recruiting, job posting, microsite, recruiting campaigns
Posted: Uncategorized | No Comments »
February 12th, 2010 by Hillary
When it comes to recruiting there’s an obvious advantage to using several different mediums to attract the right talent. We all use email to reach out quickly and conveniently and hey, if it comes from a real person (no email blasts), with a real job offer, it can even feel really personalized. Social media connects with candidates from another platform. It can come off as less intrusive and more friendly, especially when you share a networking or social group with the candidates you’re reaching out to. Then there’s the old-school recruiting tool- the trusty phone. Recruiters have been using the phone for quite some time now but believe it or not it’s really easy to forget some of the basics that can make you a very successful recruiter over the phone.
Here are a few tips on successful phone recruiting:
- Get in the right mindset- As recruiters, our approach can sometimes come off as more of a sales pitch than a job offer. Remember to put yourself in the other person’s shoes. You don’t want to feel like you’re being solicited and neither do they. Remember you have a real opportunity to share and open the conversation with that in mind.
- Focus on building a strong rapport first- Mirroring a candidates conversational tone and even the loudness and speed of their speech will help them feel more connected to you. This is a quick way to get someone to open up.
- Remember- As Dale Carnegie will tell you, people love talking about themselves- If you want someone to talk, just listen. Well ask a question first, and then listen. You may lean something that’s not on paper. Getting a candidate to open up and discuss his/her own career objectives can save everyone time. Often the things you learn from simply talking to an individual give you a lot more information than what’s written on their resume.
These tips aren’t going to seal the deal every time, but they sure will help you to open a few more doors and have a few less hang-ups.
Tags: human resources best practices, phone recruiting, recruiting etiquette, recruiting tips, Social Media
Posted: Recruiting Best Practices, Sales Recruiting | No Comments »
January 22nd, 2010 by Hillary
In his Jan 22 post, Lou Adler from ere.net discusses both the financial gain of hiring A-level talent and the difficulty in finding A-Level talent.
Indeed, finding A-level talent is not an easy task, but CareerPlug’s high-volume recruiting model can take that burden away. Rather than typical sales recruiting, CareerPlug sources candidates from multiple outlets. Aside from sourcing active candidate markets, CareerPlug also focuses on all the major Social Media outlets.
Using Twitter, Facebook, Myspace and especially LinkedIn, CareerPlug is able to find A-level candidates who rely more on networking to find job opportunities than job boards.
Once candidates have been sourced by the CareerPlug Talent Specialists, a targeted e-mail campaign sent out to each candidate directs them to a personalized micro-site containing their job posting. As CareerPlug already has the candidate’s resume on file, all candidates have to do is simply double check their contact information and click submit – making career transitions easier and less stressful.
Once candidates express interest, the Talent Specialist team dives significantly deeper into the resumes to confirm that the interested candidates fit not only the requirements set by our clients, but really stand out as A-Level Candidates.
If Adler’s estimation that an A-Level candidate can bring a financial gain of 10-100 times his or her salary, how much money could CareerPlug help make you?
Tags: ere.net, High-Volume Recruiting, Recruiting, Social Media
Posted: Candidate Sourcing, High-Volume Recruiting, Recruiting Best Practices | No Comments »
January 6th, 2010 by Hillary
Well, it’s a new year and time for the CareerPlug blog to turn a new leaf. Although the blog may have been in hibernation over the past few months, CareerPlug has not. We’ve been really busy with the launch of our new Career Showcase recruiting service, which we set in to motion early December.
The Showcase is a lot like an online sales career fair. Multiple employers sign up to be a part of the Showcase campaign taking place in their city. (There are multiple Showcases taking place in several cities each month).CareerPlug then targets qualified sales professionals in the Showcase metro and invites them to visit the Career Showcase. These candidates will then be asked to answer a set of questions to view a list of the jobs that match their experience. Once a candidate applies for a position, theCareerPlug team reviews their resume and passes only highly qualified candidates along to recruiters.
We will be launching Career Showcases starting in January of 2010 for New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Milwaukee and by mid-year we will have hosted Showcases in almost 40 cities nationwide.
Tags: career fair, online recruiting, sales professionals
Posted: CareerPlug News, Sales Recruiting | No Comments »
June 30th, 2009 by Hillary
Is there a formula to success when hiring the top sales talent for your organization? That’s a question I wanted an answer to, and in my quest to find the answer I ran across several incredibly helpful tips from hiring managers, sales recruiters, business development professionals, and sales management experts.
The short answer is, as you may have guessed, that there is no fix-all formula for a guaranteed successful hire, but there were several points made across the board I found insightful and worth mention. Sales professionals are programmed to sell and if you want to be able to differentiate the sales pitch from the candidates true value, read on… Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: employment advice, Hiring Tips
Posted: Hiring Practices, Sales Recruiting | No Comments »
June 19th, 2009 by Hillary
Take another look…
Employee referral programs (ERP’s) are consistently used by many major corporations and it’s not uncommon to hear that upwards of 70% of new hires can be attributed to a company’s referral program. However, successes like these are all derived from an extremely well designed ERP, and a very small percentage of companies actually have it down.
The proclaimed success of ERP’s are based on the simple and statistically accurate conclusion that the new hires are normally quality, often a strong cultural match and tend to represent a low margin of early departure. What’s wrong with that, right? If a referral has the required skill set and fits well with the company culture, then where’s the pitfall?
Well, there is a potentially unforeseen factor to take into consideration the next time you resort to your ERP for a new hire. It’s an effect in the HR world know as “employee inbreeding” and
Tags: employment advice, human resources best practices
Posted: Hiring Practices | No Comments »
June 8th, 2009 by Hillary
Jon Picoult, recently wrote an article in the New York Times that caught my attention. Not simply based on the fact that a cookie was mentioned, but more so because he spoke of the current discourteous nature of the recruiting industry. It seems that, despite the growing number of unemployed out there, recruiters and human resource departments are, shall we say, less than communicative with applicants. That goes for job finalists who leave an interview feeling they’ve nailed it and then never hear back from the company again, all the way to candidates who are simply rejected and never receive notification of such a decision. The general absence of follow-up calls, status notifications, or even responses to inquiries, seems to be the M.O these days. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: human resources best practices, job seekers, recruiting etiquette
Posted: Recruiting Best Practices | No Comments »
May 21st, 2009 by Clint Smith
The economic downturn is really forcing some of the unemployed to become creative in their hunt for a new position. Take Jobless Joe, aka Zack Metzner for example. He flipped the coin on his own stint with unemployment and created Joblessjoe.com, a supportive community for those out of work. The site offers resume feedback, discussions and resources for job seekers. It’s all served with a thread of enthusiasm and a nose turned up at the media’s strict attention on the negative. It’s a refreshing example of how one person’s choice to have an optimistic perspective can be infectious.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: employment advice, JoblessJoe, positive news
Posted: Jobseeker Resources | No Comments »
April 8th, 2009 by Clint Smith
I responded to a post on ERE.net today that asked the group for advice on approaching a high-volume hiring project. Since sourcing candidates for these types of positions is our specialty, I contributed my two cents. Unlike traditional sourcing/research (for passive candidates), this situation calls for more of a recruitment marketing approach (with some logistics and event planning mixed in). Note that I did very little self promotion, unlike some other responses that proclaimed that using their service would solve everything.
Here’s the original post and my response: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Candidate Sourcing, High-Volume Recruiting, Recruiting Best Practices, Recruitment Marketing | No Comments »