ReThink Recruiting Blog

MindField was there...

The team at MindField was lucky to be front row for the early morning celebrations. Large crowds gathered right at our front door and our team was in the middle of all the action. 

Some candid shots from the sidelines below. Go Canada!

 

 

Photo credits:

Joel Schurman - Customer Success Manager

Jeff Summers -   Director of Technology & Systems

From one entrepreneur to another

Last holiday season, the MindField team decided to forego  the traditional gift exchange and sponsor an entrepreneur through an organization called Kiva. Kiva's mission is to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty and is the world's first person-to-person micro-lending website. 

Use Web 2.0 sophistication used to empower individuals and give them the ability help others, even those on the other side of the globe???!!!

In a time where information sharing via social networks, blogs and wiki's  has removed a large amount of face to face interactions, it is important to remember that Web 2.0 tools can also allow us to reach out and help others time zones away. 

So from one entrepreneur to another...all the best Mariamu! We wish you continued success!

__________________________________________________________________

Dear Mariamu,

Mambo! Thank you for your letter, the team here is always excited to hear from you and your continuing success. Three new sewing machines must allow you to run your business so much more efficiently and turn that vitenge, and kanga into beautiful pieces of clothing.

Please send our warmest greetings to your children, we trust they are working hard as ever in school!

Hope to hear from you again soon,

Sincerely,

The team at MindField

 

 

Picture of Mariamu at her tailoring shop in Tanzania.

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Social media recruiting - Should you hire another recruiter? A sourcer?

With the rising influence of social media in the business world, the recruiting function may be transformed to include a new role. As well described in this article here:  The Community Manager is a real consideration for recruitment departments. 

Let me summarize:

1. With social media, people (ie., candidates) interact, connect and learn about your company in new ways, through many different channels. It only makes sense to consider a shift in your recruiting operating model and your technology platform to keep up with the times.

2. Consumer marketers who aim to build demand for products or services are all over this stuff like flies on shizzle. Your modern day Marketing Manager is responsible for attracting, engaging, nurturing and retaining customers all in support of sales and brand. Creating Demand. AND - they are well funded to use the latest tools in driving the business, and truly understand the customer base.

3. Translate that Marketing Manager function into a Community Manager responsible for attracting, engaging, nurturing and retaining candidates all in support of recruiting top talent and your employment brand. AND - now invest and give them the tools to drive top talent and really understand what candidate profiles are the best fit. The intention is to get your organization connected, relevant and differentiated in this multi-channel world. The Community Manager will help increase the likelihood that you can develop an engaged and sustainable candidate community.

4. So where do you position a Community Manager? 

The community manager would be a direct report into the recruitment function team leader and interfaces with traditional recruiters, HR, marketing.  The community manager is focused on building pipelines and community not on individual open vacancies.

5. What is a Community Manager profile?

Communicator = listener.  Conducting conversations with an "authentic voice" of the company. Give real stories that give life to the company's brand.  Share intel back into the organization giving insight to HR and Operations.  They are able to manage a strategy that includes blogs, microblogs, social networks, user groups and email.

Company acumen =  The community manager is most effective when they master the company's authentic message to the world. They translate business into a conversation and align with all your corporate brand elements

Technically Adept = This role is a combination of conversationalist, sourcer, and marketeer. It's the social media technology that is the common denominator connecting all of it together

Persistently Curious = They are intrigued by social media, how people interact, they experiment, engage in discussions online and give insight to the company's recruitment strategy.

 

(Source: Talent Synchronicity)

How HR builds ‘street cred’ at the executive roundtable

You need data.  Facts.  Trending information.  Insights from numbers.  Baselines.  Graphs.  Benchmarks.

HR Metrics are a hot topic over at the BC HRMA.  In fact, BC HRMA's HR Metrics service is a comprehensive web-based HR metrics and benchmarking service with a survey and reporting system

Here's the simple steps:

• On a quarterly basis, you submit your organization's data online to BC HRMA
• Indicate on their survey which organization sector you prefer to benchmark against
• BC HRMA validates and audits your data
• Check your email inbox for your organization's metrics and benchmarking report 

To participate:

• You can submit all possible data points but you are only required to provide a few standard data points
• Data must be submitted within the survey timelines
• Your organization commits to submit data on a quarterly basis, at least three times a year
• You pledge to submit the highest quality data that is available and commit to improving the integrity of HR data; where accurate data is not available, you will not submit the data

 

As Snoop Dogg says "Drop it like it's the Profit Hot 50"

I figured we would get more eyeballs on this by quoting Snoop Dogg.

Last week MindField Group was ranked the 8th fastest growing company in Canada on the Profit Hot 50 list and I wanted to take this opportunity to thank some people for their guidance, support, belief and dedication to this organization... in no particular order:

- Our two longest standing employees who have had every job in the company since they started with MindField Group and continuously went through brick walls to see this company succeed in the early days, and still do...: Jennifer Summers and Corey Brooks
- Jade Bourelle, Karen MacPherson and Ken Miller for their advice, guidance and mentorship
- Praj Patel and Terry Hibbert for providing me with the opportunity to learn how to recruit... and for their patience :)
- Diane Campbell at Mr. Lube for believing that social media will work to recruit auto technicians
- Carol Crow at Growthworks for being the greatest client to ever work for and her support and advice along the way
- Ian Kato for truly being a partner and giving a small company a huge opportunity
- The entire MFG team for their ability to continuously adapt, flex and bend to whatever needed to get done that day and to have fun while doing it.

Sincerely,

Cameron 

What's The Social Technographics Profile Of Your Target Candidates?

Twitter is for old people...

I recently did a presentation on starting a business that I presented to 40+ grade 11 and 12 students at the UBC Enterprize forum.

I spoke at length about leveraging social media in marketing and how MindField Group uses it for recruitment.  I spoke about Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter....

Not one person in the audience had even heard of Twitter... this totally blew me away.  Has Facebook create such dependency amongst its younger users that there is no need to find, test and adopt new social networking applications?

Is this what Facebook saw... $15B valuation, it leads me to believe that the 20 and 30 somethings were never really the target, but in fact it was the tweens 3-4 years ago.  Unlikely... but interesting to ponder.

Video: Twitter Explained

There is obviously a lot of noise about Twitter right now. Marketers are starting to use it agressively and recruiters and HR professionals are learning how to use it for attracting top talent. Here's a great video from Guy Kawasaki explaining how to use Twitter.  This was his speech at a Vancouver Entrepreneurs Organization (EO) event last month.  Hope it clarifies a few things, it did for me!

 

Where it's at - Recruitment Advertising Report

From www.cheezhead.com

One of the best recruiting blogs on the planet

"Where do your best candidates come from?

That’s the million-dollar question that the AIM Group, experts in online media revenue, wanted to know for their annual Recruitment Advertising 2009 survey. They asked 75 recruiters, HR professionals, managers, and recruitment agents where they are spending their limited ad budgets to find out what is and isn’t working for them."

Link to full article and report: http://www.cheezhead.com/2009/05/14/ved-recruitment-advertising-2009/  

"Recruiters in the U.S., U.K. and Canada gave social and professional networking platforms and niche job sites the highest marks for bringing in quality candidates, supporting empirical evidence that recruiters are funneling more effort into these services. According to the report, when asked to rate alternative recruiting methods, networks and niches tied with 16% of respondents saying that both were great for bringing in quality candidates. No other recruiting methods came close in the “great” ratings.

Recruiters noted the two best networks for recruitment activity are Facebook and LinkedIn, with Twitter closing in fast. This is not surprising considering that Facebook is like a giant candidate playground for recruiters, 175 million potential applicants strong, while LinkedIn picks up about one new user per second. And both, for the most part, are free."

 

Four mistakes that cause civilizations to self-destruct

Using a framework developed by Dr. Jared Diamond on the self-destruction of civilizations I'm hoping to provoke some thinking here applying his framework to ... you guessed it ... the recruiting function.

Dr. Diamond's "self-destruct framework" is interesting.  He maintains there are four mistakes that cause civilizations to self-destruct:

Will your recruitment function self-destruct?

The core business of an organization rarely includes recruitment technology (like Applicant Tracking Systems) or the recruitment process itself.  However, many organizations still choose to own this function end-to-end in house.  They design, implement and run a recruitment function that attempts to be a best practice model across technology and process - often to marginal results. 

Times are changing, and they are changing at an increasing rate of change. This means we will all be pressed to keep up, and in many cases we will be at a deficit for experience.

Example:  "We've never experienced times like these before!"  This lack of experience may manifest as the first mistake - failure to anticipate a problem in how your recruitment function operates. This may eventuate in losing out in the war for talent.

Let's assume an organization believes people are core to its business and we'll apply Dr. Diamond's framework to an executive team and a recruitment context:

1. Executive fails to anticipate a problem in its recruitment function

E.g. - How will we handle the exodus of boomers from our aging workforce?

2. Executive fails to perceive a problem that has arrived in the recruitment function

E.g. - How do we screen through the thousands of applications we get each day?

3. Executive fails to even attempt to solve a problem that has been noticed in the recruitment function

E.g. - Our ATS isn't really working for us anymore, but it's all we have right now and I don't have time to fix it

4. Executive fails to solve a problem - full stop

E.g. - We can't seem to attract great hires because our process is broken. Our competitors seems to be getting all the good candidates.

Many organizations are looking at ways of redeploying internal resources toward CORE business issues and increase the return on such investment.  This movement makes the hunt for outsourcing partners red hot. 

As organizations de-layer and regroup toward core business, they are weighing the business case to buy expertise - and - this movement includes recruitment process outsourcing. Let experts manage it for you.  You will pay less in the long run and keep your head when all about you are losing theirs.