When a trusted employee is promoted into management, generally what is their first task?   Replace themselves.  How do they interview candidates for their replacement?  Go to HR and ask for a list of acceptable questions to ask.  If they are lucky, HR has a list of “approved questions.”  Are the questions targeting the skills required to be successful in the position?  Generally not, they are simply acceptable interview questions.  Do those questions include, “If you were an animal, what…

"How To Find Passive Candidates Under The Radar" is the topic of this episode of The Jim Stroud Show. If you want to learn how to get more bang for your sourcing buck, be sure to tune in on this one! Also, Jim shares pictures and a few comments about his time at the SourceCon 2012 event in Atlanta, GA. Finally, are you single on Valentine's Day? If so, Jim Stroud has a tip for you. (smile)…

If you’re a follower of the NBA, live in New York or maybe just somebody who has a twitter account, you might have heard of a guy called …

In a day and age when the national unemployment rate still remains more than 8 percent, it is safe to say that it remains an employer’s market.

That being said, we know or should know what most employers are looking for when it comes to hiring new workers.

Among the things traditionally sought are:

• Dependability;

• Trustworthiness;

• Attention to detail;

• Ability and desire to pitch in where needed.

While those may be common sense things on…

I was having lunch the other day with a long time friend and they asked me what I thought about the idea of her changing careers to become a recruiter.  My initial thought was to laugh as you and I both know that nobody sets out in life to become a recruiter.. in fact that is one of my favorite interview questions when interviewing a potential recruiter.  "How did you get sucked in".

It's never a quick story, which is why I like it.. it shows me how this person can communicate and…

I suppose I could probably write something for each letter that describes some of the things I don’t love about recruiting, but thinking about what I have come to love about it over the last few years reminded me to think about how fortunate I am to be a self-employed recruiter!

R is for the rare glimpses into so many different industries and companies.

E is for everything and everyone I been able to learn…

When I ran a search firm the number one conversation around the watercooler was fees; clients trying to reduce them.  They'd site competition, the economy, whatever.  My response was always the same; NO, unless there was exclusivity, volume or some other circumstance that compensated the reduction. The principle is simple: the belief that the value received from my service is far greater than the fee itself.

It goes something like this: After having a 20 minute conversation with a…

It’s one thing to convince a new client to abandon the old way of engaging a recruiting firm and embrace the best way to conduct a search by retaining a true search professional, and it is still another thing to get them to dispense with the old mindset of “interviewing” the potential candidates that a well executed search yields. Their "default" tactic is to have the standard “behavior based” interview questions and ease into increasingly complex follow up questions to really vet the…

Hiring is hard because you don't do it so often. Yet the impact of a bad or a good hire can be either disastrous or miraculous.

Here's 5 of my favourites:

• Hiring Religion by Paul English
• • Paul is the co-founder of Kayak. This…

Agonizing over decisions and the strive for perfection are like a bicyclist attempting to compete in a NASCAR race. You must be nimble in your decision making, decisive in your choices, swift in your actions, and persistent as you follow through to completion. Anything less ensures that your more agile competitors will always have the upper hand, leaving you choking on their exhaust.

For those thinking that you have to get everything “right” or “perfect”, you must remember that those…

It’s an age old conflict that is as old as the recruitment industry itself. Like cats and dogs, chalk and cheese, Yin and Yang, there seems to be an unnecessary mistrust or dislike between both parties.

In the UK recruitment industry rookie recruiters are taught from day 1 to avoid HR like the plague as it wastes time and is unnecessary instead they are told to contact the line managers directly to sell in their “perfect candidate” or cold call.

It is all too…

The Recruitment landscape is changing once again fuelled by social media and the squeeze from hiring managers to get a greater return on their recruitment campaigns amid greater financial pressures due to our struggling economy.

Now more than ever online recruitment is proving the preferred choice by companies across the UK. Why? Because in this virtual world everything is at the click of a button and candidates can easily apply…

On a daily basis whilst posting my client’s vacancies onto the job boards it amazes me how poor the vast majority of the adverts are on major UK job boards. Poor grammar, spelling mistakes, little detail and no call to action are just a few of the issues I see daily.

I am shocked that major UK businesses are trusting agencies with their vacancies to be represented in such a shoddy fashion. Rant over!…

Joe Contractor was feeling good about himself six months ago.  He was looking to hire a Project Executive to lead the companies' Health Care Market Sector, and wasn't having any luck with the job boards, or his own personal networks. Therefore, Joe decided that he would hire several recruiters, but decided to  talk them down on their fees.

The position that Joe Contractor was looking to fill would pay a $150,000 salary, and if he agreed to a 30% recruiter fee, he'd be on the hook for…

In 2010 I wrote an article Recruiting Goes Mobile In 2010 predicting that with so many candidates on mobile, this is where we need to be.  I attended SourceCon last week and the topic much of the content was surrounding mobile sourcing.  It made me ask the question...Why are we behind always in recruiting technology?  Why are we not making it happen BEFORE the trend hits?  2 years ago I was…

It is tough applying for jobs these days. Must apply online, the resume black holes with automated responses. At least you know they got the resume but who knows if it ever gets looked at. I know there are a lot of people out of work or looking to change. I hope we all find what we are looking for.

I have been applying for entry level recruiting positions and project coordinator/recruiter/HR. There are a lot of jobs out there but not a lot of feed back. I did get one interview but it…

@Ray_anne Thorn is a Recruiting Animal Show Regular.  She is also The Marketing Manager for Broadbean.com . They post jobs on job boards for recruiters. Rayanne said that her boss, @KellyJRobinson is a smart guy who knows a lot about recruiting so we had him on. He was a bit shyer than he is in real life (IRL) but it was…

Robbie Recruiter was excited.  He just secured a search agreement from a client.    The client had told Robbie that the other recruiters were willing to work under a 15% agreement, and he should as well.  The position would pay around $100,000, and Robbie rationalized that $15,000 would be better than nothing, and accepted the agreement.   He didn't know it at the time, but later learned this was a bad decision for several reasons including the following:

Opportunity…

Here is our weekly feature in which we share the top articles we enjoyed from the past week about recruitment marketing, social recruiting and anything else in the recruiting space. In this article, we’ll be talking about sourcing, recruiting the individual, Sodexo case study, creating your employment stories and Oracle acquiring Taleo.

Here are the articles our that interested us this week (in no particular order),…