Social Media Headhunter

Jim Durbin On DriveThru HR With Brian Wempen And William Tincup

Had a good time today on DriveThru HR, walking through what keeps me up at night about recruiting and HR.  

I covered Google Plus, Social Recruiting VS Recruiting in a Social Company, and a recent experience as a hiring manager. 

 

Listen to internet radio with Wempen and Tincup on Blog Talk Radio

The full embed is there, and you can download the full event to listen on ITunes as well.  30 minutes long.  Two smart guys with a pretty decent radio following. 

 The comments about Google Plus got me thinking, so I checked in with my friend, Recruiting Animal, and we're tentatively booked for February 15th to talk about Google Plus and Recruiting. 

There's a lot of audience participation, and Google Plus is going to encounter a lot of skeptics on Animal's show, so be prepared for a lot of yelling and a lot of dissension.   

 

Social Recruiting Versus Recruiting In A Social Company

I'm working on a training series for a client on social recruiting - how to use social sites to find and connect with candidates.  While building the deck, a flash of inspiration came to me.  Here I was writing out what social recruiting should look like, and it struck me that as new as this is for most companies, it's already old. 

Maybe it's because I've been doing this since 2005, but what is expected today isn't what is needed in the future. 

Social Recruiting is about using LinkedIn, searching and sourcing Facebook and Twitter, using other sites to connect and discover who is doing what (can't share all the secrets), and posting jobs on social websites.  It's about letting marketing and PR and customer service do their thing in the social world, and if there's a social media manager on staff, letting them do their thing.  

Most companies are not there.  

Where we're going, is not social recruiting. We're headed to Social Companies where recruiting is a knowledge collection center about the market, with the knowledge coming from our searches and being funneled back through the organization.  It's having access to the company CRM and the company ERP, so that we can make the company ATS more effective.

It's Enterprise-wide sharing of information.  I touched a little on this when I presenting in Minnesota with Paul DeBettignies and Craig Fisher.  How can recruiters make themselves more influential?  They can Drive Social Through the Corporation.

I need to think more about the concept and get it on paper.  What I really need is some iStockPhoto  clip art of a sprinter being passed by a high speed train.  Companies that get it are the sprinters, and the public is the high speed train.  There are more of them, so they learn faster.  

 

Social Media Headhunter Now Writing For Social MatchBox

My buddy Bob Neelbauer has been in the online recruiting space for as long as I have. He's out in D.C., running a series of ever more impressive events and companies, now officially called Social Matchbox. 

I trust Bob instincts, so when he told me that he's writing about technology trends in social media, and that he was interested in me contributing, of course I said yes.  My first effort was on the History of Social Hiring:

Social created mini-celebrities out of anyone who wrote for six months on a topic and stayed with it.  This wasn’t just in business.  Mom blogs, pet blogs, sports blogs, news blogs, and every other topic under the sun had their own mini-celebrities.  Early adoption of blogs, Twitter, and then Facebook (Facebook wasn’t big in that way until after Twitter was) led to a significant advantage in terms of  conference speaking, news mentions, and online buzz.  This was great for the burgeoning class of Social Consultants, but it was a bubble.  Celebrity inside a digital tribe was fun, but it didn’t make you money, and companies quickly found that early success at branding yourself didn’t translate into successful hiring.

The difficulty in finding someone with social business experience was inevitable.  And so was the response.  Internal employees, unable to tap into “experts,” started practicing on their own.  There were a lot of missteps, but internal employees by and large learned how social would impact their business units.  This was more true in some industries and some divisions.  Recruiting and Customer Service learned how to use LinkedIn and Twitter, while Marketing dabbled in Facebook and Sales ignored the wave.  As executives started to pay more attention, more departments joined in, and budgets started to be applied.

Head over and add it to your RSS feed, but as we go on, I'll be interested in talking more about the Dallas Startup Scene there as I do more.

 

 

 

The Plight Of The Young Worker: 3-5 Years Of The Wrong Experience.

I'm in the middle of a search for a marketing associate.  I have the good fortune of being both the recruiter and the hiring manager and the actual manager in this position, which means that I'm extra motivated to find the right person.  In this search, I not only get to flex my recruiting muscles and build out a network for my local market, I also get to re-experience what it's like to be a hiring manager. 

So here are my thoughts on that. 

I'm looking for someone with mid-level experience.  You know, 3-5 years of experience.  That's not my normal search pattern.  In fact, I far prefer to make fun of companies looking to hire someone with 3-5 years of experience than actually doing that kind of hiring. 

Let me explain with an old blog post. 

Every recruiter knows that the number one choice for technical hiring managers is that candidate with 3-5 years of experience.  The perception is that these candidates are still trainable, but able to contribute, and most of all, don't know their value in salary, which means they are cheaper than people with 10 or more years.  The thought, often wrong, is that the best time to capture someone is after their green but before they are too expensive.  With college hiring growing at the fastest pace we've seen since the late 90's, the supply of these intermediate employees is going to explode in the next 2-4 years.

I wrote that in April 2007, in the midst of the media boomlet about hiring Gen Y folks.  Do you know what happened the next year?  Total devastation for that hiring group.  Companies were busy laying off workers, not hiring new ones, which means much of the training that occurs in early years at small companies simply wasn't happening.  Those who had jobs couldn't get second jobs, and they were left to languish at their positions, often leaving and not finding new employment. 

Dallas was a challenge, but it wasn't too bad.  It's worse in other areas of the country.  Finding young workers with a few years of experience was not an easy task, and one of the reasons we moved to Dallas was the job prospects for hiring experienced employees was greater.  It is better down here - using my recruiting background, I've been able to quickly identify some top prospects, but it's not as robust as I would have expected. 

What I see instead is a lot of earnest young men and women with little work experience.  They have lots of internships and short tenures with companies doing work of dubious value.  When you speak and meet with them, you're not speaking the same language.  They just don't understand a workplace, or what it takes to learn.  Instead, you find young folks who drifted through corporations, untrained and unmentored.  And their resumes are easy to spot.  They're all "efficient practictioners of a wide variety of diversified and cost efficient marketing and business processes." That's all well and good until you ask them to send a fax or take notes for a meeting, and it's clear you have a lot of work ahead of you.

It's not dire.  The good news is that most of these young workers  want to be trained.  They want to be challenged.  They want someone to look them in the eye and tell them yes, no, don't do that, and go back and do it again.  Companies that need to hire are going to have to recognize this, and begin hiring in a different manner. 

Everything old is new again.   It's time once again to "hire for attitude, and train for aptitude."  The good news, is you don't have to pay high wages.  The bad news is that if you aren't a likable manager, they'll leave you in six months to a year for a better paying job at a company too inept to train their own employees.  Good luck out there.  I'm off to dust off my training manuals. 

How Can You Build Credibility In A Social World?

Robert Hernandez asks this question about journalism, and it's a great one. 

I left my comment on the site, but I want to apply it to your career.   It was an answer on how journalists can build credibility, but it applies to you as well.  In a social world, we are all self-publishers.  We can write our opinions, and people like the flowery language, and sometimes they like agreeing with us or being challenged.  That's how you build friendships.  It's how you build readership. 

But credibility?  That's a different story.  Credibility suggests trust built on some aspect of your work.  That could be your employer's brand - it could be your school - it could be your portfolio.  Or it could be your writing. 

Links to your original sources make a difference.  Even if people don't click the link, they know who you're linking. 

Corrections on a page show you're not afraid to admit mistakes.  Remember the old marketing story about the company that deliberately messed up so it could fix problems quickly?  It's told because it illustrates a point that people want the truth more than they want perfection. 

Don't make it all about you.  Even if you have impeccable credentials, the real story isn't about your experience.  It's about what you learned in your career. 

We have Ivy League credentialed elites who couldn't see the 2008 crash coming.  We have brand name executives whose companies crash and burn.  We have venerated institutions whose public  images are tarnished by scandal.  We live in an age that rejects authority - an age when credibility has to be earned, instead of assumed. 

If you want credibility, back up your writing and statements.  Engage in discussions.  Publish data.  Post pictures.  All of this shows that you walk the walk.

Here's an example:

You're an IT manager for a small business with 250 million in revenue.  If you were at a larger company, you would be listed as a Director or a Vice President, but your firm isn't big on titles.  How do you show credibility?  How do you differentiate yourself as more than network tech with two direct reports?  

You talk about budgets.  You upload presentations on enterprise software.  You attend conferences and post photos of your appearances.  You comment in industry publications about budgets and large software purchases and you link to hard data.  In short, you demonstrate your expertise as you live it.  

Another example:

You're a social media manager for a large advertising firm.  You are not allowed to post your work, and you can't discuss your clients.  You're not really even supposed to tell people what you do or where you work.  how do you differentiate yourself from the entry level copywriter who interned one summer at a rival ad agency? 

You talk about other people.  You engage in discussions where your expertise details experience in working with clients, budgets, and co-workers, while discussing landmines and political problems that prevent success.  You link the discussions to your writing. Your link your writing to the discussions.  Your credibility is that you're involved - even if you can't upload your portfolio into slideshare (oh by the way - upload something to slideshare, because it's great SEO and visibility). 

Credibility is earned. So earn it.  More from Quora on the credibility issue, a link I saw in the comments of the original story (and yes, i copied this answer into Quora, to take my own advice). 

 

hattip:  @PRNewsWire

Job Posting: Marketing Coordinator, Irving TX

I'm hiring a mid-level marketing coordinator in Irving.  This is a full-time position working for one of the Best Places to Work in Dallas, and working under my tutelage and instruction. 

The Position:

Full-scale Marketing.  We're going to tackle:

1) Branding

2) Events

3) Client and Prospect lists

4) Employer branding

5) Website design

6) Social Media and Digital Profiles

7) Digital and Print Collateral

8) Lead generation

9) Video creation

10) Copywriting

You'll be assisting me in doing all of this, and taking on the day-to-day tasks of writing, designing, printing, and report creation.  This is a position for a very hard worker.  You'll need to learn a lot on the fly, be able to work on your own, and have high standards.  

Skills:

Must Have:

You have to be a good writer.  And not just good, but quick.  This is primarily online writing, but there will be some ad copy occasionally.  But writing is subjective you say?  Then your writing has to be subjectively good to me, since I have to approve it.  The more you write, the better your chances of getting hired.  Writing is a skill set.  You either like it or you don't, and I can't afford to hire someone who isn't used to doing a lot of writing.  

Must Have:

You need experience doing small business or corporate marketing.  I'm looking for someone who wants to make this a career, and knows they like it.  You can't know you'll like it unless you've done it.

Must Have:

You have to be able to work independently.  Don't get me wrong.  I'll be working with you more than you'll want, but I won't be there in the office day in and day out.  You have to be able to do work on your own, without a team of a people.  Some people like that. Some don't.  You have to be able to function on your own 60% of the time.  

Nice To Have:

1) Coding experience in HTML, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, or Photoshop:  I can't do these things, but my company can.  In general, I've found these skills helpful, especially in digital profiles.  It's nice not to have to call a designer to take a logo and add it an about.me page, or have someone troubleshoot a blog.   

2) Print experience:  What's a source file?  Can you get business cards from a pdf?  What's offset printing?  What's the difference between digital prints and the good stuff?  The more you know about managing the process, the better I'll like you.

3) Project experience:  It's not enough to be on a project.  You have to have done it yourself to truly understand it. Most resumes come with name-dropping of big brands to impress recruiters.  I want to know what you actually did.  Resumes written in detail are a big plus, because I will grill you on what you've actually done.  In my other life, I'm the Social Media Headhunter.  Can you explain what you did and why?

 The Company:

The employer is a commercial manufacturer's rep selling industrial equipment. It's not sexy, but you and I do have to make it interesting. I know how to do that, but you're not going to be bragging to your friends about working on a national brand.  

You will be working with good people who take care of their employees, and you'll have a stable position working with an experienced trainer and business marketer.  The job is in Irving, TX, so plan out your traffic route before sending me a resume. 

Why You Should Take The Job

You'll learn more about marketing in a single year than all of your friends combined. You'll have a steady job, with a good company, doing interesting work.  You'll learn about social media, digital profiles, and you'll be on the cutting edge of learning how social media affects B2B companies.  And you get to work with someone interested in being a mentor.  Seriously, that should be a reason to take this position.  Too few people have the opportunity to train under experienced managers.  I did.  You can too. 

How To Apply:

Send resumes to howdy@brandstorming.com with the subject: Irving.  No more, no less.  Write me a short note, no more than 500 words, on why I should call you and put it in the body of the email. 

Pittsburgh Social Media Manager Search B2B

Those of you who've been around know that my job descriptions aren't exactly, standard.  Here's another one. 

I'm under contract to find a social media manager for a software modeling software company in Pittsburgh. It's a great position if you're into the business side of social, and you even get to work with a team of content creators.  The challenge is in Pittsburgh I'm mostly finding retail and ad agency experience. This is a different beast.  

As I expand the search across the country, if you think this might be something you'd look at, drop me a line on Twitter or the other hundred ways to contact me through social media (not interested in blind resume submissions), and let's talk. 

Basic Duties:  LinkedIn Groups, YouTube channel, Blog, other channels as we justify them.  

Experience: 5-10 years business experience, social media for a solid two years, and multiple enterprise clients if a consultant.  Background in software sales, engineering, or technical writing industry would be great, but I can be flexible.   

No egos on this one.  I don't want to hear about how hard it is to create change in a company when they don't buy in. It's our job to convince managers, sales people, and executives to buy in.  They're hiring for the job, right?   Also, while strategy is a key component, I've a need for a real player/coach here. It's a large company with a lot of opportunity to make changes, but you have to earn that right with your work.    

The position reports to the Director of Marketing and Communications, who runs the website, content, event, marketing ,and corp communications.  The department has 45 staff, with about a third of those reporting to your manager.  This is not a management position, despite the title.  You'd also be working with and have access to lots of SME's, a necessity as their audience is primarily technical. 


The successful candidate will have to lay out the strategy, execute it, and bring others along who can benefit.  Metrics are easy at first.  Right now, they aren't focused on Sales or Conversions, but rather figuring out where social fits, and justifying its use. Clarity of message in the right social channels is a big deal.  

One last thing.  You have to live in Pittsburgh.  Flying in and out is not going to work this time.  But we can talk about getting you there.