ResearchGoddess

John Sumser recently posted a call for nominations for the Recruiting industry’s key influencers. He calls out a few specific categories:

1. Some people go to a lot of conferences and exert their influence through pure networking.
2. Another group of people spend a lot of time giving talks at conferences and publishing their work online.
3. There’s a third group of people who, for some reason, have the industry at heart.
4. The last group of influencers…are customers and practitioners who make the whole thing go around. 
5. John also specifically called out for female influencers, citing that he “really want[s] to understand why the leadership of our industry is predominantly male while the trench level workers are predominantly female. Of all the places in the world, our business is the last place you’d expect to see that sort of inequity.”

I think this is a great idea, especially to broaden the sphere of influence beyond strict recruiting because there are so many pieces of the puzzle that fit together to make our community a great one. So I encourage you to visit John’s post and leave a comment with your nominations. Here are a few of my own:

1. Category 1 – Networkers: I nominate Susan Kang Nam. She’s everywhere, and she seems to be well-liked. She’s also an up-and-comer and made quite an impact in a short period of time. 
2. Category 2 – Speaking/Publishing: I nominate Bill Vick. I love watching his Xtreme Recruiting TV interviews with various industry personalities. I believe he does this to help expose great skills of intelligent people who might otherwise not be recognized. 
3. Category 3 – Heart of the Industry: I can’t think of a better person to nominate than Susan Burns. She not only cares about our industry and making it great, but also the individual people who make it up. She’s like the industry mom  
4. Category 4 – Users: I will nominate Jason Davis here. He has given us so many valuable places to gather and glean knowledge from each other including the old www.recruiting.com, www.recruitingblogs.com and www.splits.org.
5. For industry female influencers, I would nominate Leslie O’Connor, she was listed as #89 on Inc. 500′s Fastest Growing Companies for 2008, as well as #4 in the HR Category and #5 in the Women-Led category. 
6. My own Category – Pure Recruiting: I’m going to nominate one of my all-time favorites Jordan Rayboy, the awesome RV Recruiter. Jordan started in this business as a young 20-something kid and work hard to rise in the ranks of MRI. He continued on to start his own recruitment company and is now living out a dream by working completely remotely from his RV with his wife Jeska. He’s going to be sharing his story at the Fordyce Forum this June.

There are so many others who deserve to be included, such as Amitai Givertz, Glenn Gutmacher, Ritesh Nair, Glenn Cathey, Traci Wicks, Jim Stroud, Suzy Tonini, Jennifer McClure, Michael Marlatt, Marvin Smith, Dan Harris, Dave Manaster, Kris Dunn, Shally Steckerl, and so many others that if I continue on I’ll hurt someone’s feelings by leaving them off.

Visit John’s blog post and leave your nomination today!

I recently read an article from The Economist titled “You’re hired—next year“. The article takes a look at some of the new direction recruiters and their companies are starting to move in when it comes to hiring during the recession period.

I’m so glad others have taken notice of this! About a month ago I was having a conversation with a colleague about this very topic, having noticed that lots of companies seem more interested in hiring contractors than permanent employees right now. My guess was that this is a sort of “test drive” option as well as not having the funds for full-time benefits and such. The article states:

“Most obviously, the hiring of freelancers and consultants has become more common, allowing companies to avoid spending on employee benefits and delay hiring decisions until the economy picks up.”

In addition, the article goes on to say that companies are marketing to candidates with different incentives than the usual sign-on bonuses and extra perks: “Their new selling points are sandwiches with the boss, opportunities for advancement, flexible working hours and more holiday time.” This sounds very much like companies are starting to understand the desires of the up-and-coming millennial generation, who tend to prefer incentives like more flexible work conditions and opportunity to further themselves.

The article also briefly touches on the fact that many companies are developing a social media presence as a low-cost way to reach potential new hires. This is apparently a topic in which companies are very interested and want to learn more about, as there are many who are offering webinars and training sessions on using these tools in a recruitment capacity. Even I’ve jumped on the bandwagon; I’ll be giving a presentation in June at the Fordyce Forum on incorporating social media tools into your recruitment strategy.

Please take the time to read the entire article here.

(hat-tip to Deborah Maggart for alerting me to this article, as well as David Simonds for the awesome illustration)

“By the time they reach an age to think about what they’d like to do, most kids have been thoroughly misled about the idea of loving one’s work. School has trained them to regard work as an unpleasant duty. Having a job is said to be even more onerous than schoolwork. And yet all the adults claim to like what they do. You can’t blame kids for thinking ‘I am not like these people; I am not suited to this world.’”

This wonderful post by Paul Graham takes a very insightful look into why we pursue certain careers and why we avoid others. Loving what you do is not something that many people have the luxury of saying, or doing. I’ve always believed that a true test of career love is if you’d do it for free. Graham says,

“To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that’s pretty cool.”

Graham goes on to say that many people tend to select professions not based on what they love deep down inside, but based on a direction in which their parents steer them, or worse yet, based on the prestige of a particular career. He says,

“Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.”

Loving what you do comes from keep yourself disciplined. Do well at whatever it is that you’re doing, even if you’re not ‘in love’ with it yet. Always be a producer, and understand that knowing what you like to work on doesn’t always mean that you’ll get to work on it. Know proper timing for working on pet projects and working on things that are required. You’ll respect yourself, and your peers will respect you. The love will come eventually.

 Graham described two routes that will lead to loving what you do:

1. The organic route, which is essentially gaining experience and gradually increasing the amount of time you spend in your job on the elements you enjoy vs. those things you don’t, and
2. The two-job route, which is working a ‘day job’ to pay the bills and pursuing your love in your spare time.

He says more people tend to work the organic route, because the two-job route requires a deliberate choice. However, my personal feeling is that with the state of the job market today, we will see an uptick in the number of people working a job that simply pays the bills in the daylight hours while pursuing a hobby, or another degree, in the evenings or in their spare time, with the ultimate goal of doing something they love.

A tip to college students: you don’t need to know exactly what you want to do with the rest of your life! From Graham:

“A friend of mine who is a quite successful doctor complains constantly about her job. When people applying to medical school ask her for advice, she wants to shake them and yell ‘Don’t do it!’ (But she never does.) How did she get into this fix? In high school she already wanted to be a doctor. And she is so ambitious and determined that she overcame every obstacle along the way—including, unfortunately, not liking it. Now she has a life chosen for her by a high-school kid.”

Want to love what you do? Explore many options before making a definite decision. Don’t lock yourself into one niche before you’ve tested out a couple of others. In my own experience, I discovered within the last three months of college that I HATED what I had been pursuing. Thankfully I was able to find a career path shortly after graduating that I’ve fallen in love with.

Finally, don’t let money be the center of your decision-making. Taking care of your financial needs should certainly be a deciding factor for sure, but would you sell your soul for a price tag? “Much as everyone thinks they want financial security, the happiest people are not those who have it, but those who like what they do. So a plan that promises freedom at the expense of knowing what to do with it may not be as good as it seems.” My advice – work hard at what you love to make yourself worthy of a higher salary. Pay your dues. You’ll appreciate what you earn more when you’ve had to work hard for it.

The takeaway here is this: take some time to figure out what you love. Don’t rush it! Sometimes it may show up nice and subtle, but it might just smack you in the face too. Be open to whatever it is – the old saying goes, “If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life.”

Be sure to read Paul Graham’s complete article, “How To Do What You Love”.

I saw a tweet about Blellow‘s new beta site from Mandi Leman a few days ago, announcing a prize of a free SXSWi pass and a VIP pass to Mash*Bash on March 16th. Since I’d do just about anything to go to SXSW (anyone wanna sponsor me? LOL) I figured I would participate in this beta and check out this new community.

So, for starters – what exactly IS Blellow? According to their website, “Blellow is a San Antonio based bootstrapped start-up” and they believe that “while there are many tools for learning, our best resources are each other.” Basically, this seems to be a community site that encourages its users to post questions and topics and engage other community members to share their expertise on various topics. Sounds OK so far.

So, I registered and set about trying to make my way around this community and check it out. The Groups seem to have a Twitter-esque feel to them. You can attribute  a message to a group or groups by adding a % in front of the group name (sorta like using #hashtags). And replies are designated by placing an @ in front of the username. There are a variety of topic areas, such as Education, Social Media, Business, and Non-Profit, and I started a group called Career Advice – hey, who isn’t looking for a tip on how to land a job these days?

So, having snooped around a little, here are some of the pro’s I’ve found:

• The design of the site encourages users to solve each other’s problems, which is great for getting people to interact with each other
• Threading of messages: when you write a question or statement, you can then actually see the thread of responses
• You can give people kudos for helping out on a query, and it visibly shows how ‘helpful’ an individual user is by displaying the number of kudos they’ve been awarded. (I have zero; I haven’t been too helpful just yet )

Now, for the areas of improvement:

• It’s still quit buggy – when I first signed on, I tried to search for groups and kept getting an error page. However, I notified Mandi of this on Twitter and within an hour, the issue was fixed. So, I’ll put expedient (and pleasant!) customer service under the pro’s as well!
• There is no people search function – you can’t search for people unless you click on their av’s within a group. I pointed this out again, and Mandi told me this was a feature that was in the works. Good!
• When looking at the Group listings, there isn’t anything to visually indicate to you if you’re already a member of a group or not.
• I would love a splash or preview on mouse-over w/ vital stats on each user, instead of having to click through each profile to learn about someone.
• I would also love email and/or text updates for replies and/or private messages. I hate having to constantly refresh my browser in order to see what’s new.

That said, I would opine that Blellow, while still a little beta-buggy, has some potential. As it seems to be predominantly driven by user contribution, ultimately the users will make or break this community. That could be its biggest victory or its hardest struggle. If the community is mostly people seeking answers, but not contributing, it won’t work. If it ends up being mostly people throwing their opinions and “recommendations” around but not asking questions, it’s going to be full of a lot of hot air and big egos. Hopefully, it will find a happy medium between the two! Good luck, Blellow – and I hope I win your contest and get to hang out in Austin. My only challenge would be actually getting there

And on that note – if any one wants a respected blogger to cover SXSW for them, I’m open to sponsorship Seriously. Inquire here!

A guy I respect a lot in the world of PR, and fellow blogger, David Mullen, recently wrote a couple of posts discussing the value of a PR pro. He first wrote “10 Clues Your PR Pro is Nothing But Show“, and followed that up with “10 Clues Your PR Pro is Worth the Dough“. With exception of perhaps 2 of the 10 items he listed, these are all also ways to determine if you have a truly strategic sourcing professional. Here’s David’s list – are they worth the dough:

1. They dive headfirst into your business and industry, and immerse themselves in learning every in and out within both.
2. They ask smart questions.
3. They are strong writers and great storytellers.
4. They proactively sync up with marketing, advertising, interactive and media planning to help create compelling, robust campaigns aimed at achieving your business goals.
5. They challenge you to step outside your comfort zones and try new things.
6. They know what they don’t know.
7. They are resourceful and create solutions to overcome challenges.
8. They listen as much as they talk.
9. They bring creative energy and a positive attitude to the table.
10. They own their mistakes, learn from them and put processes in place to minimize the chance those mistakes happen again.

Revise this only slightly, and you have a list of clues letting you know that your SOURCING pro is worth the dough:

1. They dive headfirst into your business and industry, and immerse themselves in learning every in and out within both. (true for sourcers; they’ve got to know the industry(ies) in which they source or they’ll be labeled a hack pretty quickly)
2. They ask smart questions. (not just the general salary / years of experience / degree or not types of questions)
3. They are strong writers and great storytellers. They don’t rely solely on resume databases and LinkedIn to make connections; they actively engage in the communities from which they source, and develop relationships with individuals.
4. They proactively sync up with marketing, advertising, interactive and media planning to help create compelling, robust campaigns aimed at achieving your business goals. While respecting traditional sourcing methods, they aren’t afraid of embracing new ways of doing things and find creative methods of combining old and new.
5. They challenge you to step outside your comfort zones and try new things. (will appropriately question your specs and ask you to think outside the box on candidate requirements)
6. They know what they don’t know. (no strategic sourcer can know all of the resources and all the answers to every single research question, and a good one will readily admit this and surround themselves with others who can provide answers)
7. They are resourceful and create solutions to overcome challenges. (if one tool isn’t working, they find another one, or find a way to make it work)
8. They listen as much as more than they talk.
9. They bring creative energy and a positive attitude to the table. (they find ways to draw candidates to them rather than constantly having to chase down candidates)
10. They own their mistakes, learn from them and put processes in place to minimize the chance those mistakes happen again. (can’t add much to this )

Thanks to David for being the brains behind this list. I think it’s also good to take a look at the many intangibles your sourcer brings to the table in addition to these items. You’ll find true value in a strategic sourcer who can prove themselves in each of these areas for your recruiting efforts, and also translate this value in other areas of your business.

I’ll end by asking the same question David did at the end of his post: what would you add to this list? Leave your thoughts in a comment below!