High Potential Hires

by admin | Jun 29, 2011 | Blog, Talent Acquisition

Continuing on our saga to hire good candidates – here is what we are looking for. I believe this applies both for our internal hiring at both Pragna and Smart Cloud companies, as well as the hiring projects we undertake for our clients. Essentially, there is a lot of difference between high potential hires/candidates and just another hire/candidate.

Though It’s not always possible to hire the “high potential” ones, one can at least try to evaluate if we have found one! There sure is a very short supply of the high potential hires, which is probably the only reason why Pragna even exists.

Let’s see what defines a high potential candidate (Hire)

1. Ambition – I would rate this higher than the others just from the fact that we are talking about a “high potential” hire and not just another hire. Ambition drives people to scale heights beyond their means and wild dreams. Makes the impossible possible. This is #1 for high potential hires. So, sometimes I get excited when I meet people with ambitions and sometimes have been guilty of overlooking other things :-(.

2. Ability – One could argue this should be #1 (maybe true for regular hires). This is to validate some qualities/capabilities that one needs in oneself to achieve the ambitions. Some of these can be tested easily in the interview process, and some probably are a gut call or a marginal call based on prior work history.

3. Agility – This is extremely important for high potential hires, that one demonstrates flexibility (especially in startup environments) and also tendency to take a step back to review/analyze, identify root causes and always to keep an open mind to change, feedback, business strategy, criticism etc. and should have openness to share thoughts and learn.

4. Achievement – If the hires/candidates have certain amount of experience, then the above must have resulted in some achievements in their careers. I would think identifying their achievements with special emphasis on the above areas would give proof points about their potential. I don’t think it’s right to measure this in terms of $ revenue achieved or the valuation of the company (which I have myself been guilty of in the past), but more in terms of overcoming the adversities and challenges to achieve meaningful outcomes.

Well that’s it, The four A’s to find the high potential candidates; gives me a little more structure to the interviews I need to do at Pragna and Smart Cloud.

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“A” Resume vs. “The” Resume

by admin | Mar 26, 2011 | Blog, Talent Acquisition

What’s the worth of a resume anyway? The answer depends on whether its “A” resume or “The” resume.

Let me explain – Majority of recruiters tend to send back as many resumes as they can find which kind of matches the text of the job description. Well – that’s what is called “A” resume. And I think it would be worth about $1. Adding up all the cost of access to job boards (probably 30 cents per resume) and labor costs of sending it along, it won’t be more than $1 especially with many shops worldwide competing to find and dump these.

“The” Resume, on the other hand, is easily worth $10,000.  Taking an average of recruiter fees (if any) or internal recruiting costs, it worth that much if not more. Big difference ha?

Now the art of finding “The” resume is what makes the recruiters and recruiting projects to succeed. The true skill and value of a recruiter are to increase the value from $1 to $10,000 or more through a careful understanding of the job, domain, candidate skills, motivation, and interest, presenting the candidate profile and managing the selection process. Its time to ask the question when you engage a company whether they are in the business of finding “A” resume or “The” resume.

Sourcing Strategies #3: Using meta-search engines

by admin | Jul 13, 2010 | Blog, Talent Acquisition

So far, we have looked at imaginative searching of active jobseeker profiles and being a good LinkedIn Recruiter. Now we will look at another strategy to get more inbound leads for your open jobs through internet marketing using metasearch engines.

There are quite a few such job search engines (specific to jobs only) that are pretty popular on the internet. In fact, I was surprised that the most popular job metasearch engine (www.indeed.com) has higher traffic ranking than Monster.com (Indeed is ranked 110 and Monster 135 per Alexa for US traffic / popularity). Here are a list of such job search engines that I have come across:

• Indeed.com
• SimplyHired.com
• Juju.com
• Workcircle.com
• jobs.oodle.com (classified site)
• vast.com/jobs (classified site)
• Sites for freshers like Jobsphere and Startuply.

Now let’s examine how to use these resources on your way to being a smart recruiter. Note that some of these are more suited for full-time jobs than contract jobs, especially those that require very fast turnaround. It may take 24 hrs for the jobs to be live on the site and since it’s inbound and advertising based, it could take sometime for you to generate good quality candidates (2-4 days or more). But definitely works for job positions that have 1 week or more turnaround time.

Here are some of the steps to utilize this resource:

1. Create an account or profile: Suggest creating an account in about 3 of these sites to start with (Indeed and Simply Hired are most popular and some others are stronger in specific domains/industry)
2. Build a job feed: These job search engines are more structure driven than the typical search engine like Google. So they expect data in certain format on your website, or you will need to build a specific XML feed for each engine. The guidelines for XML formats are available for each engine. We need to verify these jobs are picked up the search engine. This will ensure that your jobs are shown in search results.
3. Advertising: This part works similar to Google advertising. You can specify a budget (say $50/job) and also the cost per click (say $0.50 per click). This will generate a few inbound leads to your open jobs. The art of managing this advertising dollars will require a separate post to understand how to maximize the value through right choice of advertisement, keywords, CPC etc. We will cover that separately.

For more about Recruitment updates follow our Insights for more info Contact Pragna Solutions for your all RPO Recruiting and Offshore Recruiting Solutions.

Sourcing Strategies #2: Being a Linked-in Recruiter

by admin | Jul 2, 2010 | Blog, Talent Acquisition

It’s almost a month since my previous post. As part of ramping up our team, we have been training them about how to use the job boards effectively, it’s an art that takes some time to master. I keep saying, if you can locate the right candidate faster than others – relying on job boards is perfectly fine. But as you move from quick contract placements to Full-time (or FTE) positions, it becomes harder and harder to find good candidates on job boards.

That’s where the next strategy of a good “Linked-in Recruiter” comes about. True Linked-in is pretty well known and many people use it; In fact, there are 65 million users (mostly professionals). However, a majority of them, say 80% may not be actively looking for a job, so to be effective at using it and tapping into it is an art as well. Here are some of the tips to get better at using this resource.

• Prepare your profile – Create a good profile with nice picture, add a detailed description of your job role, skills, education information as well as some fun stuff like your favorite pastime or movie etc. Then make sure you describe your company and who you are recruiting for really well (should be a sales pitch for the company as well as positions you are recruiting for)
• Build your network – Besides inviting your friends, colleagues, family into your network, feel free to invite these sales/marketing professionals who have the large number of connections. These folks normally “accept” most requests on their way to reaching an astronomical number of (many have 5000 or more) connections.  After that, start joining associations related to your work – Examples could be Local “Networking Groups” in each geographic area that you belong to / recruiting in – say Seattle area professionals or south Bay Area networking events etc. In addition, join groups related to specific disciplines you are recruiting in, for example – SharePoint users and developers, Ruby on Rails etc. Also add yourself to plenty of recruiting groups that are out there. Just search for “Groups” using keywords and the majority of them are easy to join and easily get accepted. Then start inviting some members to your network to build your network. It’s pretty easy through these mechanisms to add 500 or more people in a matter of days.
• Share updates / tweets – This helps to be on top of most user feeds. It is important to post to your network the current job opportunities you have and some interesting stories/happenings from your daily life such as technology trends, funny stories about candidate conversations (minus the name of course), difficulty you are facing in certain types of positions etc. This helps to broadcast your updates to your network. In addition, you should be active in some of the groups you join – perfectly OK to ask dumb questions or add comments to ongoing threads. Another tactic is to add a bunch of LinkedIn Apps that capture some information like Trip It. All of these tactics will make you more visible.
•  
• Identify Candidates – Use fewer search terms than job boards, since it’s very unlikely candidates would put detailed skills and capabilities. Use “imaginative” search criteria I described in my earlier post such as using competing companies, university names, ethnicity/language, location etc. to target/limit your results. Then select the right candidates to contact by reading people profiles to identify good match – this is similar to looking at the resume in a job board except that you will focus more on their current/past job details, most importantly the companies they have worked for, how long have they worked etc. Look through their “settings” to see if they’re seeing job opportunities.
• First “cold” contact – Once you select a candidate to contact, a significant majority can be directly contacted by choosing them as a “Friend”. Now the trick is to write a good compelling message to them – It will help if the message is unique and targeted – for example, relating how the job opportunity is a logical extension to their careers or the job gives them higher degree of responsibility etc. Write a compelling message that highlight the company, career level, job type and how it matches their interest. Ask them to “add you to the network if they are interested, and to pls ignore the message if it does not interest them”. So that way, LinkedIn does not penalize you for adding a bunch of unsolicited requests.

Finally, be patient and diligent in your follow-ups. Do not take “Lack of response” personally and continue to chip away – remember, you are targeting the 10-20% of jobseekers within the vast user base. Also, two things that determine your response rate are (a) careful selection of right candidates to contact, which is even more important than the job boards and (b) compelling message that you include in your introduction.

P.S: Linked-in is way, way ahead of others, to be fair there is also similar sites like Zoom info, hi5, Spoke, Plaxo, Partner Up and others.

For more about Recruitment updates follow our Insights for more info Contact Pragna Solutions for your all RPO Recruiting and Offshore Recruiting Solutions.

Sourcing Strategies #1: Search with Imagination

by admin | Jun 5, 2010 | Blog, Talent Acquisition

Candidate sourcing :

Candidate sourcing is the starting point of the Recruiting Process. In a series of blogs, I will try to capture some of the nuances that I have learned.

In the first part, let’s look at maximizing the results from job boards like Monster, Dice, Hot jobs etc. They are a great resource for finding active jobseekers. But the common complaint from every client is that they have either seen the candidate profile already or they do not have the ideal skills/competence etc. Why so?

The reason is that every recruiter looks there and looks at the top few pages of results. No doubt that one should look for low-hanging fruit and quickly pounce on new candidates. But good recruiting also means looking beyond the most obvious and easy to find candidates. That’s where your IMAGINATION comes in to play to hunt down the right kinds of profiles in the vast repository of millions of profiles. Here are some ways to do imaginative searches to look for such Candidate sourcing profiles:

• Competence search – This is the most basic search, where you are trying to match competency/expertise requirements of the job. For example, if you are looking for C# and .Net developers with Networking experience, you will use those keywords in your search. Here again looking for alternative representation / expressions of the technologies, tools etc. will certainly help (for example look for “protocol development” or “TCP/IP” while looking for Networking since they are similar)
• Company / Competitor search – Look for companies that are similar to the company you are looking to hire for – they could be competing companies or complementary to the business. So add a bunch of company names in addition to some technical competency, for example (“Intel” or “Honeywell” or “Yahoo” or “HP”) and (“.Networking” or “Protocol development” or “VOIP” or “TCP/IP”). That way, you will likely locate people who worked in these companies before or worked on projects for these companies.
• Top universities / school search – always produce good candidates; identify top schools and try to put them in your search term as “OR” options so you will likely find good candidates – For example looking for Indian universities can be (“IIT” or “Indian Institute of Technology” or “NIT” or “Anna University” or “SJCE”) and (“.NET” and “Networking”). Some examples of top university lists –
  http://www.successcds.net/engineeringentranceexam/Top-100-Engineering-Colleges.php
  There are plenty of such lists.
• Ethnicity and locale search – Certain pockets of people / ethnic groups or universities have made a name for themselves and become specialized. For example, I have seen many Russians are perfect at Math. So for positions that require good analytical skills, they are a good ethnic group to look at. So your search terms can include special groups in addition to some competencies like (“Russian” or “Russia” or “Poland”) and (“.NET” and “Networking”) so you are looking for specific pockets / ethnic groups that are normally successful.

One word of advice is that when you are adding specialized keywords like university or ethnicity, then expand your search to include candidates who have updated resumes in the past 6 months or 1 year as well. That way you could dig deep into great candidates who might be dormant for a while.

Next up, let’s look at Social Networking.

Improving Candidate Hit Rates

by admin | May 17, 2010 | Blog, Talent Acquisition

1. Sourcing:

2. Technical Screening – Written

3. Technical Screening – In-depth Pragna Interview

4. Prepare a Candidate Scorecard

5. Optimization