Recruiting.com

TX Barbeque and MagicMethod

Maureen Sharib is coming to Austin, TX to present her telephone names sourcing seminar "The Magic in the Method" LIVE in a one day event on Friday, September 7 at Dell and you're invited! We have seats for forty more so make your reservations today.

Novotus is sending over their "smoker" to provide lunch for all happy fifty few of us and if nothing else you don't want to miss out on this delicious event!

You may view the particulars here.

If you're interested in attending the one day seminar on Friday, September 7, send an email to bob at techtrak.com or visit http://www.techtrak.com/magicmethod/purchase.htm to register and pay online.

We hope to see you there!

Fascination is one step beyond interest.
Interested people want to know if it works.
Fascinated people want to learn how it works. ~ Jim Rohn

Maureen Sharib
Telephone Names Sourcer/Trainer and Sourcers Guild Guide
513 899 9628
maureen at techtrak.com

The BOOK OF SCRIPTICALS is ready for purchase! Telephone names sourcing scripts THAT WORK!

2nd Ever RecruitingBlogs.com contest!

How often do you get a chance to be immortalized in a cartoon?

Today (Tuesday, June 5) is the LAST DAY to submit your funniest telephone names sourcing story.

Not only that, but you could win the Fordyce Letter - seminal reading for our Industry. Don't miss out on this chance to win a ONE YEAR FREE SUBSCRIPTION - you can't WIN if you don't ENTER!

WIN ONE FULL YEAR SUBSCRIPTION to the Fordyce Letter for just submitting your FUNNIEST Telephone Names Sourcing Tactic and be immortalized by the talented Jim Stroud in one of his famous cartoons in his “The Recruiting Life” series! The winner will also receive, in addition to the fabulous prizes mentioned above, a one year subscription in the only-of-its-kind telephone names sourcing training course, "The Magic in the Method".

Startups Help Clean Up Online Reputations

Morning Edition, November 15, 2006 · It used to be a lot easier to keep your indiscretions private. But in the age of Google and social-networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, people's most embarrassing details are increasingly out there for the world to see. In some cases, it's affecting their ability to land a job. more

Hiring in India

Frequently, I get emails from HR and Recruiters in the US and Canada about how they can go about hiring people in India. For whatever ends, hiring people in India is subject to a lot of half-truths and myths.

In this post we at the first pitfall of hiring in India.

Using same or similar job-descriptions when hiring in India

Having worked in three US firms that try to hire in India, it is amazing how small things like job descriptions end up messing the chances of a firm to hire in India.

Details like “being an equal opportunity employer” makes no sense for the Indian job-seeker. That holds true for terms like “Diversity and Inclusion initiatives” or “Work-life balance”.

Designations are often not in tune with what the market understands. For example “Assistant Manager” is often a designation rather than a role. In US firms, being called a “Manager” means that one is managing people. However, Indian job-seekers want a “manager” designation within 2 years of having completed their MBA. Most of them do their MBA directly after their graduation or at the most with 2 years of work-experience. So if you are expecting fresh MBAs with an average age of 27-28 years then you need to re-look at your job specifications.

“Under-graduate” as a term is fairly new to the Indian workforce. People with B.Sc/B.Com/BA/BE degrees are called “graduates” and any masters degree or diploma is called a “post-graduate” certification.

If you want to have effective people in the job in India then you have to start with making the job descriptions context specific.

Best of luck!

Next post: Your branding in India counts more than your international branding as an employer.

The 3 R’s of successful job-hunting: Research

In grade school we learned the 3 Rs of Reading, wRriting and aRithmetic. Those were our most important lessons [ok so I’m dating myself here]. For job-hunters it is Research, Relevancy, and Resiliency that will deliver an A+ interview.

Research

As a job-hunter you need to research and determine:

♦ which are your marketable skills;

♦ which industries/companies you should target that use those skills;

♦ what are the specific needs of each company in your target market;

♦ who’s in a position to hire you in those companies; and

♦ what’s the best way to approach them?

The way you approach people will be determined by your research. We’ll talk a great deal more about research specifically in the book. 

For now understand that your research will help you determine what your going to sell to whom - with YOU as the product.  It may sound silly or even daughnting if you don't have any formal sales trainging but really it's very straight forward.   I can do this and so can you!

Where are the men?

No, this isn’t the cry of a single women, although it easily could be!  The NYT ran several stories on Sept. 4th about the state of workers in the U.S.  Coverage included compensation for workers in private Vs public jobs, immigration, wage concessions in exchange for jobs, wage gains Vs inflation, and gender participation in the workforce.   A number of indictors were referenced across each story and the one I found particularly interesting was the decline in participation rate of men in the workforce, especially those under the age of 55.

Let's look first at the increases.  The percentage of women participating in the workforce has increased across all age ranges – but this has been a trend for almost 30 or so years.  Workforce participation for both genders over age 55 has increased between 2% to 15% for women and .1% to 8.2% for men, depending on age.  Also not too surprising as people are living longer, the cost of living is increasing and the economic downturn of 2000-01 took the steam out of many retirement accounts.

Now here’s where it gets interesting.  According to the stats, BLS/Haver Analytics, the percentage of men between 20 and 49 participating in the workforce has declined over the past 20 years.  For example, between 1986 and 2006 participation of men in the workforce between the ages of 40 and 49 has fallen 2.4%. and 1.5% for men 40-44, two out of the top three decreases.  The only group with a higher rate of decline, 3.7%, is those men ages 20 – 24.  This could potentially be due to a generation coming of age in a more prosperous economy and a decreased need to work through college, as well as a greater likelihood to continue on with advanced degrees.  This was also the only age group to show a decline for women.

So if this is a trend is it a concern?  Is gender balance in the workplace an important component of overall diversity?  Should employers be concerned?  I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on the data.  Unfortunately the article didn’t go into much depth, especially on this particular trend.  Here's a link to the story – also unfortunate is that the NYT wants $$ for access so see if you can get a trial account.

Susan

Wiki.com

This happened last month but here it is anyways. The domain name wiki.com was sold for $3 million. Not bad at all.

Here is an interview on Red Herring with the new owner who's name is John Gotts. The domain name was for sale for a year before John Gotts (lots of money) bought it.

So for the tie into recruiting, here goes my attempt:

There is a guy amongst us with the domain name recruitingwiki.com (it's not me) but I talk to him almost every day. He's got a recruiting related blog. Maybe a live site soon?

Jason Davis

Wetjello Partners with TurnHere

-Jim Durbin

Pete Altieri of Wetjello has scored a huge coup with a new partnership with TurnHere Productions.  His press release today covers the story, but here's some background on Turn Here, including an article in Ad Age.   

From the press release:

Riverwoods, IL (PRWEB) September 11, 2006 -- RecruiTV, a leader in online video recruitment, and TurnHere Productions, a digital media firm specializing in Web video, today announced a partnership to deliver online video recruitment production services around the globe.

Under terms of the agreement, TurnHere will provide video productions services for the employee recruitment campaigns developed by RecruiTV. The relationship promises a uniquely scalable approach to enable companies of all sizes to recruit and retain the best possible employees through the use of a dynamic and engaging medium.

This is a huge deal in the video world, and it brings RecruiTV the extra resources to tap specific cities and markets.  Expect to hear a lot more about this in your local communities soon.

5 Years Ago

-Jim Durbin

I called my boss in Phoenix and told him that two airlines had just crashed into the World Trade Center in New York, other planes were unaccounted for, and we needed to call everyone and warn them not to go into our downtown office in Los Angeles.

He thought I had suffered a mental breakdown. 

Five years later, I still occasionally turn the television on early in the morning, just to make sure.

Turning a Negative into a Positive

By Anthony J.

Plenty has been written about how to answer difficult questions in an interview. Like "what is your greatest weakness" or if you were fired from your job why? Or what was your biggest mistake you made in your past job?

Most of the advice people give you around this is crap. The best answers are usually the honest ones - but how to give an honest answer that at the same time puts you in the best light?

Well take a gander at this excerpt from an article on Craigslist on how to apply for a job at Craigslist:

5. Win me over by being open and honest.

I respect failure, and I look for potential. Yet, it seems to be common practice to BS on resume's nowadays. It's ok to be proud of your accomplishments, but a little modesty makes you look human. I'd much rather meet with someone who admits they've failed, than someone who pretends they've always been successful.

"I successfully led a ten person team to generate sales of $200,000"

Yeah, ok... but I'd respect that person even more if they had the balls to write this :

In my last job, I had ten people working for me. It was stressful, and I didn't have a clue about how to manage at the time. Two of my team resigned in the first month, and I found it difficult to motivate the other eight who were all older than me. We still met our quota, but I was let go. To be fair, I was in over my head at the time. I have since been to two leadership training seminars, and I can see now where I went wrong.

Which one would you rather talk to?

Get it? Read the rest it's fantastic.