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.

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.

Here are a few tips on successful phone recruiting:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

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?

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.

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…

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

In his article, Picoult wrote about a story of a manager from Nabisco who, when at an HR industry conference, shocked the audience by stating that his company responded to each and every resume they received.  When a dumbfounded peer asked why on earth the company did this, the manager responded, “Because- everyone eats cookies.”

This response struck a chord.  It made me think about CareerPlug and our approach to communicating with candidates.  I can happily say that we are no-doubt, a company who recognizes that “everyone eats cookies.”  In fact, our specialty is personalization.  Everyone wants to feel they’ve been heard, so we make sure that happens; it’s less a rule of business but rather a simple gesture of kindness and human decency. As soon as we know the status of a candidate, they are notified, within moments. This concept of attentive correspondence seems to have slipped through the cracks within the industry.

So, if very few recruiters are doing it these days…does that make us in style? I think it does.  Personalization is the new black.

Other sites like HelpIWasLaidOff.com also offer a community resource for jobseekers, promoting a “help you, help yourself” approach.  We think these sites deliver a healthy measure of buoyancy in the morale department for those out of work.  Folks who have grown weary from swimming in the deep end of the unemployment pool may find refuge in these new supportive online communities.  We’re also really proud to see such creative optimism sprout right out of Austin, Texas!

Here’s the original post and my response:
Original Post:
I have a friend who has a 90-day deadline to fill 150 positions based on a government contract in her new position with a healthcare company. The contract is based on 150 hires (100 call/claim and various support staff, 25 nurses and 25 other mgmt/supervisory roles.) Does anyone know where she should start? She has done recruiting before, but not this many positions at the same time. I told her I would ask this experienced and talented group!

My Response:
Sheila,

I would recommend that your friend approach this challenge from a marketing perspective.

For each position type, she should develop a strategy to:
1) Build multiple channels to generate candidate leads.

2) Drive these candidates to a website where they can explore the opportunity, assess their candidacy, and register for a hiring event.

3) Conduct hiring events that streamline the process for reviewing a high volume of applicants.

Here are the lead generation channels that I would consider:
– Job postings on major/niche boards (+ craigslist)
– Email campaigns to candidates within job board databases
– Post on the job search engines (Indeed, SimplyHired)
– Pay-per-click ads on Google
– Employee referrals (if applicable)
– PR (local news will certainly cover this)
*Note – she may need a different approach for the nurses since the active candidate market for them is relatively weak

As for the landing page website (or microsite), it should be simple, yet informative. As part of the application form, she may want to include some pre-screen questions (“Do you have at least 2 years of call center experience?”) and an option to register for a specific hiring event. We use personalized microsites for our outbound email campaigns and general microsites for our inbound candidates – both work really well.

With the hiring events, I would try to get as much done there as possible (including phone simulations and computer literacy tests for call center candidates). Beware that if you publicize the event on the local media (instead of directing viewers to a website), you may get an overwhelming turnout which could result in negative press.

Please feel free to have your friend contact me if she would like some additional advice on high-volume recruiting.

Good luck!
Clint