There is a recent news story that makes me sad to be in the recruiting business.

You can read it here: Job Interviewers Asking for Facebook Passwords

It reports that companies are starting to ask candidates for Facebook passwords during the application process or interview.

I have three problems with this…

1.  The goal of the hiring process is to determine if a candidate has the skills and abilities to perform the open position.  There is a cultural fit that also comes in to play, but this can easily be determined during the in-person interview.  Viewing Facebook information about a candidate does not provide a valid data point on the individual’s qualifications.  It gives hiring managers more information than needed.  These unnecessary data points are now factored in to the hiring decision…making our job as recruiters more difficult.

2.  It puts the candidate in an awkward position.  I can’t imagine anyone who would be enthusiastic about sharing their Facebook password with a potential employer.  At the same time, they want the job and don’t want to be seen as having something to hide.

3.  It creates a line in the sand for companies to start asking all kinds of questions that have no relevance to the job.  “What kind of car do you drive?”  “How much debt do you have?”  “Do you buy organic groceries?”  “What are your mortgage payments?” – - When this starts to happen, the hiring process turns in to a personality contest and the most qualified applicants might be left in the dust.

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I’m interested in your thoughts on this topic.  If you’re reading this on our website, you can leave a comment below…otherwise send me an email.

After over a year of planning, I launched PTCareerTree.com in June of 2008. It was the only service offering of Career Tree Network. An employer could post their opening on our website and view resumes in our database. If they wanted additional help or other options, they had to look elsewhere.

In those early days I would often hear a client say something like, “well, what else can you do for me?” These organizations had a strong need for candidates and wanted more proactive recruitment solutions. The problem with difficult to fill positions is that they are in fact, difficult to fill. Even a super-specialized resource like, PTCareerTree.com can fail to produce candidates.

This became an issue. I had clients who wanted additional services, but I had no additional services to offer.  This lead to the development of some additional services including recruitment via direct mail and email blasts.

After a few direct mail projects, I realized that a follow-up campaign would be effective to nurture relationships and encourage people to come forward. An effort like this is labor intensive. It involves making phone calls, sending emails, and contacting candidates via social media. There is no automation involved and seeks to build individual relationships with candidates.  With the added follow-up effort, we are able to consistently produce impressive results. Now, we always include a follow-up component with our recruitment direct mail projects.

Bottom Line
Technology is great, but people remain at the center of a successful recruitment effort. Often we want to take the easy road. We want to just post an open position on a website and hope that a group of highly qualified candidates respond. We want to just send a direct mail campaign and have people knocking on our door. Unfortunately, things don’t always work as planned.

Successful recruitment is relationship focused. It must involve a series of (labor intensive) follow-up activities to nurture relationships and build trust with candidates. It’s about planting the seed, watering it every so often…and then eventually seeing the benefit.

At Career Tree Network we’re moving forward with some exciting initiatives that have the potential to change the face of Healthcare recruitment in Wisconsin. Since our initial launch of PTCareerTree.com, it’s been a work in progress to effectively leverage technology while also retaining a individual relationships with candidates who use our service.

Employers want proactive options to build relationships with candidates and at the same time, candidates want a higher level of service than a website can provide. They want a personal touch and are looking for a real person to develop an understanding of their career goals…and take it a step further to help them achieve those goals.

It’s Valentine’s Day and love is in the air.  As such, it’s a great opportunity to re-visit one of our marketing campaigns that encouraged healthcare professionals to find a career opportunity that they love.

As an alternate caption, we also used: “Fall in love with your career all over again.”  This was more directed towards people who have been in the working world for a period of time and need a renewal.

Healthcare professionals and students use Career Tree Network every day to look for career opportunities to fall in love with.

Step 1: Complete your profile and keep it current
A complete profile will let other LinkedIn users know that you are active in the community. LinkedIn has a “Profile Completeness Percentage”. This can help so that you know the completeness level of your profile…make efforts to reach 100%. These efforts include uploading a picture, expanding your work history, adding an educational history, including a professional summary, and areas of specialty.

Within your LinkedIn account go to: Profile – Edit Profile
You will then see ways to edit the individual sections of your profile.
You might also see a yellow box labeled “Improve your profile”, this is a user friendly way to expand your profile on the website.

Learning Activity:
Follow the steps on LinkedIn to reach a 100% Profile Completeness Percentage.

Step 2: Add Connections of people you know and new people you’d like to meet
Adding connections on LinkedIn is very important to maximize your experience. You can add connections of people you know in the real world: current and former colleagues, classmates from educational experiences, family, friends, etc. You can also add connections of people who you’d like to network with. These are people who you have never met in the real world: potential candidates for hiring needs, industry leaders, HR professionals from other organizations for benchmarking, etc.

Within your account go to: Contacts – Add Connections
You will then see some tabs to assist you: Add Connections – Colleagues – Classmates – People you may know. Click on each tab and follow the directions to search for people. LinkedIn will make suggestions on who you might know, based on information in your profile.

When you add connections, always include a brief note to describe who you are and why you’d like to connect (especially when adding connections of people you don’t know). The focus of your message can be on “future networking opportunities”. The other person will need to approve your connection request; a personal message will help set the stage for your new relationship.

There are two primary ways to add connections of people who you don’t know:
1. Join Groups (see step 3 below)
2. Use the search function to search based on key terms, location, job title, etc. (see step 4 below)

Learning Activity: Add 5 people you know; Add 5 people you have never met.

Step 3: Join Groups
LinkedIn Groups are an excellent way to source candidates for challenging hiring needs or network with industry leaders for benchmarking, etc. Within a group you are able to post discussion topics, respond to discussion topics and send messages to other group members. There are many groups available for you to join, or you can create your own group.

Within your account go to: Groups – Groups Directory
You will see a “Search Groups” box on the left hand side. Use key terms to search available groups. Join large groups with many members. These groups will be the most active and beneficial. There is a limit on the number of groups you can join. Some groups are open and others are closed. Your request to join a closed group will need approval by the group owner.

Popular Groups for Human Resource Professionals:
Linked:HR
SHRM Networking Group
Human Capital Institute

Learning Activity: Use the Groups Directory to join three groups. Post a discussion topic.

Step 4: Use the Search Function to “meet” new people on LinkedIn
There are many industry leaders and potential candidates using LinkedIn for networking purposes. LinkedIn is a great channel to meet and interact with new people. The best way to find people with common professional interests would be to use the Groups Directory to search for topics of interest to you. Then once you are an official group member (see step 3), you can explore the other members in the group, by going to the “Members” tab within a group page. You can then browse the profiles or use the “Search Members” box to find people to meet. The “Advanced search” can be very helpful to narrow your results.

Aside from the people in your groups, you can also do a “People Search” of all LinkedIn users to find interesting people on the website. On the top right corner of your LinkedIn page you will see a search box. On the left side of the search box you can select what you’d like to search, select “People”. Then you can enter names in the box, if you know their name. Or you can click “Advanced” to search by job title, location, company, school, etc. Within any search, always remember that “less is more”. The less search terms that you use, the more search results that you will see. A very narrow search will limit your results. Start with a broad search and then add additional search terms as needed.

When you find someone to start a relationship with…add them as a connection (see step 2).

Learning Activity: Use the search function. Find five new people to interact with on LinkedIn.

Summary
LinkedIn is a great resource to expand your professional network. The website is fairly easy to use and also has a robust “Help Center” (the link is at the bottom of the website on the left side). As an active member of the LinkedIn community, you can make the most of your experience by following the four steps presented above. Best of luck and I look forward to see you on LinkedIn. You can view my profile here: http://www.linkedin.com/in/brianweidner

I wouldn’t have the moxy to tell this directly to a client.  Somehow posting on this blog feels a little safer.  It’s probably similar to how “kids these days” are asking girls out on dates over text message.  It’s a little safer then “back in my day” when we had to use the phone.

So anyway, here goes nothing, (you might want to sit down):  If your organization hasn’t seen results with recruitment direct mail, you have not taken the best approach to the campaign.  Put another way, don’t say “recruitment direct mail doesn’t work”, because the real problem is in how those previous campaigns were executed.

Let’s look for a minute at the basic concept behind a direct mail campaign.  It starts with having a difficult to fill position.  Zero candidates on your radar and for added fun, the hiring manager is applying a good level of pressure.  With the need established, a direct mail campaign will require that you obtain a list of possible candidates. Then something is sent right to their home, to share information about your hiring need and inspire them to come forward.  With direct mail you are putting your recruitment message physically in the hands of a member of your target audience.  There is no better medium to reach passive job candidates!

Ok, so let’s talk about three of the common issues with direct mail and then I’ll share how you might address those issues:

1.  Low response rate

When a candidate receives your direct mail piece, they will want to throw it away as soon as they get a feel for what is being offered.  This is natural because we are conditioned to say “no” to any sales effort.  Most recruitment direct mail is not appealing and can be easily thrown away before the recruitment message is ever read.  (This is a problem.)  If you can tell a letter is junk mail without opening it, why bother?  As a result, your campaign must be unique and artistic.  At Career Tree Network, we design recruitment direct mail with a goal to make it “refrigerator worthy”.  If we can design something that is worthy of refrigerator artwork, we have already won half the battle.

2.  Poor mailing list

The most common way to build a mailing list, in our niche, is to purchase a state list of licensed professionals for the specific hiring need.  The key (if possible) is purchasing the full list of licensed professionals, including those who have opted-out of the list and have a hidden mailing address.  (The opt-out list are people who have told the state not to share their mailing address with third parties…they are not unreachable, but are just a little harder to find.)  In this case, you now have a full list of the professionals legally permitted to perform your hiring need.  (sounds good, right?)  We then to a zip code radius and use some fancy Excel techniques to narrow the results.  If you use a poor mailing list, you are guaranteed to have poor results. At Career Tree Network, we build our mailing lists by hand.  For the opt-outs, we manually research address information to ensure that we build the best list possible.  If we can’t find a mailing address, we will look for a phone number and also attempt to contact them on social media websites.  It takes time, but the manual research here really helps to reach people.

3.  Lack of follow-up

People are busy.  They have certain interests and ambitions and then don’t take time to pursue those.  Personally, I enjoy playing chess.  I never play chess but if someone called and invited me to play…I would agree to a game.  There are many more examples about things that we have on our radar…but not on top of the priority list.  When a direct mail campaign is sent, it should serve as merely the door opener for your organization to build a relationship with the potential candidate.  It’s the first effort and the follow-up campaign then closes the deal.  A follow-up campaign should take place via phone, email, and social media.  It could also involve a second direct mail effort, such as a personalized letter.  The follow-up campaign gives people an extra opportunity to come forward.

A quick summary:

In my opinion, direct mail can be an effective recruitment channel (when used properly).  At the very foundation we are able to bring our recruitment message directly in the hands our a member of our target audience.  The key is managing a campaign effectively so that you are able to obtain the desired result.  At Career Tree Network, we do not have a 100% success rate…but on the other hand, we solely work with a very small group of satisfied repeat clients that keep us very busy.

Even if we never work together on a campaign, I do hope that you reconsider direct mail as a viable recruitment strategy.

At Career Tree Network we specialize in assisting Wisconsin healthcare organizations to source candidates for difficult hiring needs. When a client calls, they usually have a slate of zero candidates, zero leads, and zero prospects. Our client has no candidates in their funnel and needs help. Typically they have already tried the traditional sources and have not seen any result.

As you can imagine, this is a difficult starting position. Yet, it’s where nearly all of our conversations begin. From that point we develop a customized recruitment campaign to source candidates and work hard to produce results. With our sole focus on the state of Wisconsin, we rely on repeat business from satisfied customers.

Our approach will often leverage our job boards but then also incorporates a variety of recruitment strategies to produce results.

At Career Tree Network, we can help with your most challenging hiring needs.

I went to a conference recently and heard the speaker say, “The Fortune is in the Follow up”. This is similar to the advice that I gave to a recent job seeker who was frustrated when he didn’t hear back from an employer. My advice went something like this, “The key to success is learning how to follow up without becoming annoying.”

In a recruitment context, the importance of follow up is clear.
The best recruiters will use the right messages, over the right medium and at the right time so that potential candidates remain engaged with their organization.

When possible, the follow-up process should be automated so that it happens without additional work…similar to this blog update where I write one message and many people subscribe to it via email. Follow up can be time consuming…but thankfully technology is here to help.

I have a lot of clothes and don’t do a good job of keeping track of everything I own. Sometimes, I look in the back of my closet and find a great shirt that I haven’t worn in a few years.  It’s not dusty or out of style (in my opinion) but rather has been sitting back there, patiently waiting for me to find it.  Once I find it, it’s a happy moment.  I should have known that it was always available to me, but I simply forgot that the option existed.  There had been many occasions when that shirt would have been nice to wear, but instead I had to look for other options.

Can you relate to this story?  Look in the back of your closet tonight, are there clothes there that you had completely forgot about?

Let’s apply this to recruitment.  Typically organizations look to source new candidates to fill an open position.  They place ads on our websites, make cold calls, send direct mail campaigns, go to career fairs…all to attract the attention of new candidates.  I strongly support candidate sourcing, and I encourage you to use Career Tree Network as much as possible….but at the same time recruiters often lose sight of the candidates patiently waiting in the back of their “closets”.

There are candidates who you have already worked with who might like to consider your current hiring need.  Remember last year, when you filled that open PT position, but had another candidate who was not selected?  How have you kept in touch with them?  Do they know about your current hiring need?

There are many examples that I could share, but the bottom line here is that often the best candidates are those who are already familiar with your organization.  They have already been part of your hiring process, and just need to be resurfaced.  As you work with candidates you must plan to keep in touch and look to build a relationship so that you can reconnect for future opportunities down the road.

At Career Tree Network, we have developed some interesting systems and strategies on how to execute this concept.  Please give us a call if you’d like to discuss further.

We recently completed an upgrade of our websites.  I am always apprehensive to make changes because in the short-term, the remodeling process usually causes a few issues.  At this point everything seems to be fully operational…which is a reason to celebrate.

If you use our websites for your recruitment efforts, you’ll notice some nice changes to make your job easier and increase our site effectiveness.

If you haven’t used our system before, this is a great time to give it a try.

At the same time, I invite you to think about how you can be innovative in your work.  What new technology can you utilize?  How can you make your organization more attractive to top talent?

Many organizations participate in career fairs.  At these events recruiters have an opportunity to network and interact directly live and in-person with candidates.  Organizations are upset when few candidates come to their table.  Organizations lure candidates to come talk with them by handing out free logo’ed trinkets.  Relationships are built at these events and many great conversations take place.

But then at certain organizations a strange thing happens when the recruiter gets back to the office…

When a candidate calls to ask a follow-up question she receives a voice mail greeting that states that “individual calls to candidates can not be returned”.  So if she leaves a message about her interest in your organization, you won’t return the call?

With the failed phone call attempt, she might try sending an email to the address on the business card given at the career fair.  Hmmmm…..will sending an email to :  hr@organization.com really be seen by a live person?

She decides to try it anyway.  (A few seconds later)  Darn, an auto-response.  “Thanks for your message.  Please visit our website to learn more about our organization.  Individual emails can not be returned.”

She visits the website and decides to go ahead and submit an application.  After getting started, she realizes that your application is asking to recreate her resume in your system.  Wow, this is going to take a long time.  She wonders if she is really that interested to move forward?  And even if she does submit the application, what are the odds that it will be seen by a live person?  With frustrations mounted she says: “This stinks, I’ll just apply somewhere else.  Or maybe I’ll call that nice headhunter that I met.  He gave me his cell phone number and told me to call him at any time.”

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After working with candidates for many years, I’ve obtained some very interesting feedback on their view of the job search process and the associated frustrations.  This concept of the recruiter in the glass office can be most frustrating to candidates.  I know that the recruiter is there, but I can’t reach them.

Recruiters are busy and often don’t have time to handle individual requests from candidates.  Especially because many candidates are unqualified for their current hiring needs.  This is understandable, but yet at the same time…I see it as a big problem to be solved.

In my mind, we are in the people business.  If we close the door on people, we are not doing our job as recruiters.  When we close the door on unqualified candidates, we also close the door on the highly qualified ones.

One way to solve this problem is to incorporate a Sourcing Model.  This would involve a dedicated person to source candididates for your critical hiring needs.  This person would attend career fairs and be in the business of candidate communication via any method (Phone, Email, Text Messaging, Fax, In-person, Facebook, Twitter, Carrier Pigeon, etc.).  Once a candidate has been deemed qualified for a current hiring need, they would be passed along to the Recruiter for an Interview.  The Recruiter would also screen candidate applications, work with internal stakeholders, etc.

Technology and other cultural shifts have made it easier and more natural for one-to-one communication to occur.  As recruiters we need to be more accessible to candidates or be willing to pay headhunters to build relationships on our behalf.