Check out this video, then email me if you are interested. If you aren’t a match but know either (a) a recruiter who “gets” marketing or (b) a community manager that has a passion for talent, please tweet and share this!
Are you in London or Paris? If so, check out what I’m working on.
One recruiter’s plea for help in locating top tech talent “across the pond”:
Use Outlook signatures to improve candidate experience. Seriously.
Anybody who has ever worked with me knows that I often approach sourcing like a marketer. That is, I conduct my research, compile lists of candidates, then engage them repeatedly in volume via mail merge or InMail. This is a great way to quickly build a candidate pipeline, but it does present one issue: managing the responses.
I make it a point to correspond with every candidate who replies to me, even those who decline (ESPECIALLY those who decline). Most recruiters don’t do this (the dreaded HR black hole), so it differentiates me from my competitors, and also generates referrals. I go one step further, and set a reminder to follow up with them again after a reasonable period of time, usually 3-6 months. (more…)
Reach passive talent through blog comments
With unemployment in the tech sector near zero, active candidates are hounded by dozens of recruiters as soon as their resume goes public. While an active candidate sourcing strategy is imperative, passive candidate sourcing removes a lot of that recruiter competition, gives you more control over the process, and (some say) the talent is often better.
But how can we take sourcing beyond cold-calling and Google searches to beat our peers to the best passive candidates? One simple method is to leave comments containing your jobs URL on blogs that are frequented by your target talent pool.
Here’s an example of how a simple blog comment can inject your jobs into the web browsing habits of passive candidates for free:
Boolean strings simplified
Here’s a color coded breakdown of a boolean search string for resumes of software engineers with cloud computing experience in Seattle.
(-inurl:job | -intitle:jobs) (inurl:~resume | intitle:~resume) (distributed | parallel | multithread* | concurrent) (“C#” OR “C++”) 98000..98999
I’ll explain the color coding below:
Remember to bid on your own business name as a PPC keyword
While searching for streaming March Madness games, rather than entering the URL http://CBSsportsline.com (where I have watched the NCAA tournament the past two years), I lazily Googled “cbs sportsline”, expecting to click the first result and watch some hoops. (more…)
LinkedIn, please add this
I cross post a lot of jobs to LinkedIn groups. The only problem is, LinkedIn’s sharing tool posts my jobs to the general discussion section of each group. Group admins and members don’t like this. If LinkedIn will add the option to specify shared posts as job discussions, everybody wins. More job sharing by recruiters, more content for LinkedIn, and better candidate experience for LinkedIn group members.
Zip code targeted boolean strings
Google is a great way to find resumes, but filtering your results to local candidates is often a requirement. While including city and/or state names in your boolean search is a good way to narrow your results, it presents a major challenge.
First, resumes often include a city name for each role. This means somebody who worked in Seattle 10 years ago then moved to San Diego still has “Seattle” on their resume. Sure, you can still contact them and ask if they are interested in moving back to Seattle, but this takes time away from engaging candidates who are still in Seattle. Very often, this is the only location information that appears on resumes. (more…)
What exactly does an SDET do at Microsoft?
I have a lot of open SDET jobs at Microsoft, but good software engineers often pass on these opportunities because of the stigma attached to “test”. Here’s some info I received from one of the hiring managers I work with at Microsoft that sheds some light on why the SDET role is actually super cool. (more…)
Sourcing Automation Tips
Here are some simple things I do to automate some of my sourcing program:
1) I create Google Alerts for RSS feeds of Google resume search results. I get an update in Outlook whenever a new resume is spidered. (more…)