Recruitment and Job Search Advice

For Job Seekers

How to stand out to Recruiters - The first step in understanding what recruiters want from job seekers, therefore, is to gain an accurate picture of how recruiters work and why. Once you have that perspective, you can appreciate what it takes to be a stand out candidate for recruiters. Read more...
It doesn’t matter how well educated, trained or senior you are in your field, change your image in the job market. How? By fixing your career. By building up its strength, its fitness. Read more...

For Recruiters

The Scourge of Bureaucratic Correctness
The Really Big Impact of a Small Number of Sentient Specifics

Who is Peter Weddle?
Peter Weddle is a recruiter, HR consultant and business CEO turned author and commentator. Described by The Washington Post as "... a man filled with ingenious ideas," Peter has earned an international reputation, pioneering concepts in human resource leadership and employment. He has authored or edited over two dozen employment-related books, including his latest, Work Strong, Your Personal Career Fitness System, and has been a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, The National Business Employment Weekly and CNN.com. Today, Peter writes two newsletters that are distributed worldwide and oversees WEDDLE's LLC, a print publisher specializing in the field of human resources. WEDDLE's annual Guides and Directory to job boards are recognized for their accuracy and helpfulness, leading the American Staffing Association to call Weddle the “Zagat of the online employment industry.”

How to Stand Out With Recruiters

For many job seekers, recruiters are a strange breed lacking most or all of the traits job seekers associate with their own peers in the workplace. Recruiters seem to have a very different set of priorities and often to act in ways that simply don’t make sense to those who operate in line units. The first step in understanding what recruiters want from job seekers, therefore, is to gain an accurate picture of how recruiters work and why. Once you have that perspective, you can appreciate what it takes to be a stand out candidate for recruiters. There are many ways to do so, but I believe there are five key steps you should take. I call them the Five Phenom Factors – the five steps that will set you apart for all the right reasons.

Phenom Factor #1

As I explained in the first column of this series, recruiters are very pressed for time. They are typically juggling 15-20 openings at any one point, and the only way they can possibly get all of their work done is to have very efficient procedures. It does no good to install such procedures, however, unless every single candidate adheres to them. So, the way to stand out with a recruiter is to prove that you can follow direction:

For example, if a recruiter specifies that they want candidates to embed their resume in an email message when applying for a job, don’t attach it. If they specify that you should attach your resume, don’t embed it. Follow directions.

Similarly, if a recruiter schedules an interview for 9:00 AM, don’t show up at 9:15 or 9:30. If they ask you to send in additional information right away, don’t send it in two days later. Follow directions.

Phenom Factor #2

The second thing recruiters want from job seekers is a sense that they are really interested in the opening for which they are applying. The want to know that the candidate has read and carefully considered the recruitment ad to which they are replying. They don’t have the time to waste on throw-away candidates – those who apply for virtually any job that sounds interesting to them whether or not they are qualified or even interested in the work. So, the next way to stand out with recruiters is to prove that you care.

When applying for a job, don’t describe your qualifications with a generic resume that could be sent in for just about any opening. Prove that you care about the opportunity by investing the time and effort to tailor your resume so it describes how your specific credentials match the specific requirements the recruiter has stated for the opening.

What recruiters don’t want, however, is a candidate who cares too much and pesters them with daily emails about the status of their application. Granted, not every recruiter shows job seekers the simple courtesy of keeping them informed about what’s going on, but one of the fastest ways to irritate recruiters is to stand out by being a pest.

Phenom Factor #3

The third thing recruiters want from candidates is the truth. They hate being misled by inaccurate or false claims, whether they’re made on a resume or in an interview. They know that, unfortunately, a fairly large percentage of people exaggerate or misstate their credentials so the third way to stand out with recruiters is to reassure them they are getting straight information from you.

Recruiters are going to be double-checking everything you submit and say so learn how to provide persuasive responses. There are, of course, boundaries to what recruiters can ask you – they cannot question you about your religion or marital status or sexual orientation, for example – but as long as they are within those boundaries, you should always be honest and straightforward when answering a recruiter’s questions.

If a particular matter or incident doesn’t put you in the best light, it’s not only appropriate, it’s essential that you provide a full explanation of your side of the situation. There are, however, three rules that you should follow when doing so:

One, admit mistakes if you’ve made them. Recruiters often like to see that candidates have the self-awareness to appreciate when they’ve slipped up and learned from the experience.
Two, rehearse what you’re going to say about a less than flattering situation so that you don’t sound defensive or cocky or, worst of all, indifferent. Recruiters like candidates who have the self-confidence to speak calmly and rationally about difficult issues.
And three, never badmouth a former employer or boss, even if you feel you’ve been unfairly treated. Recruiters want to know that you won’t be speaking ill of their organization should you be hired and then subsequently leave for another position.

Phenom Factor #4

The fourth thing recruiters want from job seekers is preparation. Candidates who apply on a lark are seldom able to participate in the recruiting process efficiently or effectively. As a result, they slow the process down and, worse, increase the odds that it will be derailed for some unexpected reason. So, the fourth way to stand out with recruiters is to enter their process ready to be evaluated and raring to go if selected.

How can you demonstrate that you’re prepared?

First, recruiters want you to think through and rehearse how you can best describe your skills and experience for the opening. They don’t want to have to wait while you struggle to figure out how to articulate what you’ve done or how that background is relevant to their opening. You don’t have to be a public speaker, but you do have to show you can clearly describe why you think you should be hired for the position.
Second, recruiters want you to have done your homework on their organization and thus be able to ask good questions about it. What are good questions? They are those that provide you with the information you need to (a) understand the mission, values and culture of the organization and (b) make an informed judgment about whether you would like to work there. What you should ask about, therefore, is not the obvious stuff you can find on your own, like how much revenue the organization reported last year, but rather information only an employee can provide, like how does the work get accomplished inside the organization.

Phenom Factor #5

The fifth thing recruiters want from job seekers is good manners. The “finalists” they select will be presented to hiring managers to interview and consider for their openings. Given that those hiring managers are their customers and that the managers’ satisfaction is a big part of their own performance evaluation, recruiters cannot afford to be embarrassed by a candidate who acts unprofessionally or worse boorishly during those interactions. The fifth way to stand out with recruiters, therefore, is to give them the confidence that you will represent them well to their peers.

How can you convince them you will?

First, dress the part. As part of the homework I mentioned in Phenom Factor 4, make sure you find out what kind of dress is the norm for the organization. If it’s business formal, don’t arrive in slacks and a polo shirt. If it’s business casual, don’t walk in dressed in a suit. Follow the lead of the organization.
Second, be polite. Or to put it another way, remember what you learned in preschool. Treat others as you would like to be treated. So, begin each request with a please and end each response and every kindness with a thank you. That includes after the interview, should you have one. Always thank both the recruiter and the hiring manager for their time and interest in you and, if you want your message to stand out, send it by old fashioned postal mail rather than by email. Email is acceptable, however, but text messages aren’t.

So, let’s summarize: Recruiters may often seem to take illogical steps or engage in inefficient behavior during the recruiting process, but there are good reasons for the way they work. The key to success, therefore, is not to fight or get frustrated by their practices and procedures, but rather to accommodate and, if possible, leverage them to your own benefit. In short, you want to know and take advantage of the Five Phenom Factors. They’ll ensure that you stand out with recruiters for all the right reasons.

Thanks for reading,

Peter

Visit me at Weddles.com

Peter Weddle is the author of over two dozen employment-related books, including WEDDLE’s 2011/12 Guide to Employment Sites on the Internet, The Career Activist Republic, Work Strong, Your Personal Career Fitness System and Recognizing Richard Rabbit. Get them at Amazon.com and Weddles.com today.

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The Job Market Version of Catch 22

Billions of words have been written about job search tools and tactics in this job market of our discontent. Job board dos and don’ts. Twitter. Facebook. Building a personal brand. Improving your “findability.” It’s all good advice, but none of it will work if your career is sick. To put it in another and admittedly blunter way, don’t bother looking for a job if you have a wimpy career.

You see, that’s what’s different about today’s job market. Come as you are has been replaced by come as you need to be. The good old days of searching for employment with stand pat qualifications are gone. If you’re out of work, your career needs resuscitation.

It doesn’t matter that you got superior ratings on performance appraisals in your last job. It makes no difference that you have a track record of being loyal, dependable, and hard working. And, it is totally irrelevant that your employer went out of business, was acquired or for whatever other reason was the cause of your unemployment.

The plain, hard truth is that employers view people in transition as damaged goods. It’s not fair. It’s certainly not true. And it stinks. But it is reality. You won’t find many recruiters who will admit it. And in most cases, they work hard to avoid the appearance of such a bias. But deep down inside, it’s there. An everyday event confirms it: when presented with a choice between two equally qualified candidates, one employed and the other not, the offer will almost always go to the person who already has a job. It’s the job market version of Catch 22.

So, what can you do?

Reinvent yourself. It doesn’t matter how well educated, trained or senior you are in your field, change your image in the job market.

How? By fixing your career. By building up its strength, its fitness. There are many techniques involved in doing that, but perhaps the most important is pumping up its cardiovascular health. The heart of your career is your professional expertise, so go back to school. Right now. Even as you are looking for a job.

Build Career Fitness

Revitalizing your career in the middle of a job search involves two important steps:

Step 1: Begin acquiring a new skill or refreshing one you already have. You might, for example, take a course in a second language at a local community college or attend a new certification program offered by your professional or trade association. You can choose almost any topic just as long as it will clearly and meaningfully enhance your ability to contribute on-the-job.
Step 2: Add the fact that you’re back in school to your resume. Note it in the Summary at the beginning of that document and, in its Education section, provide the name of the course you’re taking, the institution or organization that’s offering it, the formal outcome if there will be one (e.g., the certificate or degree you will earn) and the term “On-going.”

Those two simple steps will instantaneously transform you into a new person. First, they will enhance your skill set, making you a potentially more valuable employee. Second, taking a course of instruction or training program even as you are searching for a job demonstrates attributes all employers want but find it hard to identify in a candidate: resolve, fortitude, and determination.

Most importantly, this course of action will set you apart from other candidates by demonstrating that you have two very special attributes: you understand that in today’s rapidly evolving world of work, staying competent in your field is an ever-moving target AND you take personal responsibility for keeping yourself at the state-of-the-art. You recognize the responsibility and accept it.

Become that person, make that transformation, and the playing field will level. You may be in transition, but you will no longer be at a disadvantage when compared to employed candidates. You will have reinvented yourself as a career activist, a person who is committed to continuous self-improvement no matter how senior or experienced they may be. An individual who has the right stuff—the skills and the attributes to be a champion at work.

Thanks for reading,
Peter
Visit me at Weddles.com

Peter Weddle is the author of over two dozen employment-related books, including Recognizing Richard Rabbit, a fable of self-discovery for working adults, and Work Strong, Your Personal Career Fitness System.

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The Scourge of Bureaucratic Correctness

There is today a scourge of bland communication oppressing the performance of corporate and staffing firm recruiting teams. While social media have captured their imagination, the vast majority of recruiters continue to rely on job postings—placed on commercial job boards and in the Career area on their own sites—to reach and reel in top talent. And the content of those postings is so dull it would put a brick to sleep.

Why do we engage in such blandness even as we try to acquire the high performers and rare skill holders our organizations so desperately need? I think it’s because we are reluctant to step outside the bounds of “bureaucratic correctness” or BC for short. We want to be fair and accurate, so we use the formal organizational title of our openings to ensure we don’t inadvertently mislead or misinform prospective applicants. We also know that there will be no subsequent recriminations if we use a term that has already been approved by the corporate general counsel or the chain of command.

But here’s the rub. There’s not a single candidate on earth who thinks of him or herself as a Legal Secretary 2 or a Systems Analyst VI or a Junior Med Info Coder/Abstractor. Yet, those are real titles that I’ve pulled off of job ads posted on the Web. They may be bureaucratically correct, but they will never motivate anyone but the most desperate of job seekers to apply.

So, here’s my simple proposition. Let’s agree that a job posting is not an official statement positioning a job within the organizational structure of an employer. It is a sales document. Its role is to convince talented and often passive individuals to “buy” your company’s or client’s employment value proposition. And the key to accomplishing that goal is the title of the posting.

When prospects search a job database or the Web at large, the results they receive aren’t the results they want. They don’t get back a list of jobs; they get a list of job posting titles (and maybe the first line or two of the ad). If the title works, it will induce them to click open and read the ad. If title doesn’t work, the ad is a waste of money because no one (or only someone with no other options) is going to view it.

How do you create a job posting title that works? It has to be unusual enough to catch a prospect’s attention despite all of the information clutter in contemporary society. It has to be compelling enough to get them to invest their most precious resource—their time—in reading about and considering your opportunity. And, it has to do all of that in just 30-35 characters, the space typically provided for the title of a posting.

Here’s a simple, two-step process for developing a job posting title that will work even with passive prospects.

Step 1: Figure out the “triggers of acceptance” for your target demographic.
Pull together a focus group of some of your “A” level coworkers in the career field for which you’re recruiting. Ask them to identify the single most important factor that convinced them to accept your employer’s offer. Don’t worry if you don’t get universal agreement on a single factor. That’s normal. While there will often be a couple of outliers, however, your colleagues will probably divide into two or, at most, three groups, each of which favors a different “trigger of acceptance.”

Step 2: Create your title with three distinct elements, following the formula LSS.

The L stands for location because even in today’s down economy, most people don’t want to move to take a job or simply can’t. They want or need to work where they already live.
The first S stands for the primary skill a person must have to accomplish the job. That’s how candidates think of themselves. They are people with a specific talent, not someone who fills some BC slot on an org chart.
The second S stands for sizzle, a phrase that communicates the trigger(s) of acceptance you identified in Step 1. To optimize your yield, you will have to connect with all of the groups in your prospective candidate pool, so post the ad multiple times, each with a title that communicates one of the triggers.

Here’s what such a job posting title might look like: WI—C++ Programmer—$1.2 million bonus. That’s an actual title from a job posted on the Web in 1999 by a company in Wisconsin. I don’t program, but I was intrigued enough to click on and read the ad, so you can bet that anyone with C++ on their resume probably did so, as well.

The recruiters in this company had conducted a focus group of their best programmers and found that there were two primary reasons why they had agreed to work there. One group was motivated by money. The company had promised its IT Department that if they stayed around to fix what everyone thought was going to be the Y2K problem, they would split a $1.2 million bonus.

The second group had a very different motivation. The company was located in upstate Wisconsin, and their decision to work for the company was based on the quality of life it afforded. How did the company reach other prospects who might be similarly motivated? They posted the ad a second time, but with a little bit of sizzle just for them. It read WI—C++ Programmer—Great Fishing!

Employers and staffing firms continue to spend billions of dollars every year on job postings. To ensure that you get the best return on the investment you make in these ads, avoid BC titles. They may communicate on org charts, but they say nothing at all to top talent.

Thanks for reading,
Peter
Visit me at CareerFitness.com

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The Really Big Impact of a Small Number of Sentient Specifics

Recruitment ads posted on the Web generally fall into two content categories. There are the really brief notices that offer the job title, employer’s name and maybe a couple of candidate qualifications that are deemed essential to satisfactory performance. And then, there are the novellas that run on and on and on with enough job and organizational detail to impress even a government bureaucrat. Unfortunately, both are unlikely to motivate the kinds of talent most employers and recruiters want to hire. Whether they’re posted on a job board or on LinkedIn and Twitter, ads that are too brief or too long are too weak to have a big impact on “A’ level talent.

The key to developing high impact content for a job posting is to remember what it—the ad—is supposed to do. Recruiting is definitely a sales activity—we are, after all, trying to convince prospects to buy the employment value proposition of our organization. That’s our job, however, not the job of our ad. A job posting has a much more limited sales goal. Its role is to convince the prospect to invest a little of their most precious resource: their time. The ad must sell them on the value of paying attention to what we have to offer while ignoring everything else going on around them.

To accomplish that objective, a job posting must be developed in a two step process:

Step 1: Figure out what matters to your target demographic.
To sell your employer successfully, you have to know what triggers your best customers to say “Yes” to its offer. In other words, you aren’t interested in what motivates “C” level talent; you want to know how you can effectively engage the “A” level talent your employer needs. Since such prospects are almost always employed, even during a Great Recession, you must figure out what factors have the power to induce them to do the one thing we humans most hate to do: change.

Ironically, these factors seldom include the kinds of information we typically provide in a job posting. They are rarely the requirements or responsibilities of a job. But don’t take my word for it. Ask the experts. Ask the “A” level talent you already have in your organization.

Pull together a focus group of the top performers in the fields for which you’re recruiting and ask them what triggered their decision to say “Yes.” Encourage them to be as specific as possible and to rank order or prioritize the factors they identify. As our colleagues in sales have long known, there probably won’t be universal agreement on any single factor, but there will almost always be consensus on the top two-to-five motivators. These are the triggers—the specific benefits of employment—you want to highlight in your job posting.

What are these factors likely to be? The following list is by no means exhaustive, but it is a place to start.

The reputation of the organization, its products or services, or even its leaders;
The kinds of people who will be a new hire’s coworkers or the caliber of their boss;
The location of the facility and the quality of life available in that area;
The opportunity the organization presents to do interesting and/or important work;
The prospects for professional growth and/or advancement that would come from employment.

Step 2: Express the triggers in sentient language.
The dictionary defines sentient as “endowed with feeling.” Sentient language, therefore, is a word or words that touch the reader, that have an emotional impact on them. An idea expressed with a normal vocabulary might be very clear and comprehensible to the reader, but it doesn’t have the impact necessary to trigger them to make a change. Sentient language, on the other hand, conveys the same idea in a way that matters to a group of prospects—in this case “A” level performers—and influences their behavior in a direction conducive to their recruitment.

For example, if you learn that your organization’s reputation is one of the key motivators for “A’ level prospects, you can express that idea several ways. You might say:

Our organization is a Fortune magazine “best company to work for.”
or
Our organization empowers you to do your best work.

The first expression is an abstract statement of fact. It provides helpful information, but does not include an emotional wallop sufficient to motivate a passive prospect. The second statement, in contrast, uses both a single term (“empowers”) and a phrase (“do your best work”) with sentient impact—the ability to touch and influence a prospect.

Why worry about something as mundane as word choice in your job postings? Well, there are at least three reasons for doing so:

First, most postings on the Web today have the emotional appeal of a brick. That’s true whether they appear on job boards or on LinkedIn and Twitter. As Noam Cohen recently noted in the The New York Times, “Tweets are generally banal,” and banal doesn’t recruit top prospects.
Second, we are still in a War for the Best Talent. Despite an unemployment rate that is steadily creeping toward 10%, it is still very difficult to recruit people who have rare skills or are “A” level performers. In that kind of environment, a high impact job posting is one of the best weapons at your disposal.
Third, despite all of the brouhaha recently about social media’s role in recruitment, the message remains just as important as the medium. You can be on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter and be just as disappointed with your yield if you use a message with little or no impact as you would (allegedly) be using more conventional sources.

“Less is more” is clearly an overused phrase. However, if your less is more impactful than a longer expression or even a shorter but duller one, you’ll have enormous success in recruiting top talent.