Vol. 1 Issue 7 - March 1, 2002- Reinventing Recruiting

  • Recruiting Slump? Reinvent Yourself!
  • Thinking Out of the Database
  • Got Resumes?

REINVENTING YOURSELF THROUGH A RECRUITING SLUMP
By: David Carpe from Passingnotes.com

American recruiters are big fans of Prozacian optimism. Here we sit, broken hearted, watching our industry leaders falter, layoff and eliminate entire recruiting budgets. Over 2,000 recruiting firms in California alone have shut down within the past twelve months, industry revenue has declined by over 30%, and countless Search Firm Associates are beating the streets for work doing anything that will separate people from money. But we're all expecting things to improve - eventually.....Why?

Now it must be made clear that Americans are at a bit of a disadvantage.

As you probably know, based on anti-American literature distributed throughout European grade schools, Americans do not even begin to learn to read until the fourth grade, algebra is not taught until college, and Vanity Fair magazine is called literature (because of the well researched articles, of course).

Given these extreme developmental setbacks, it is no surprise that countless recruiters find themselves struggling to figure out exactly what else it is they can do until the market comes back. Articles in the Wall Street Journal have described former Partners now working as Construction Site Managers, Teachers, and anything else that will stop bank account bleeding.

Is this a way to weed out the weaklings? Burn the soft fat implants? Pave the way for the real producers? Not likely. The industry appears to be in decline. Just as countless service industries have reinvented their pricing and services over the years, so too will the recruiting industry evolve to reflect such widespread rejection of our pricing standards (consulting, legal, tax and advisory all went to fixed fee, capped fee and on-final-delivery-please-pay-us-c'mon-please-do models).

Already, the largest firms have been rumored to offer package deals for large clients, offering deep discounts, partial contingency fees, with new value-add services in the works (laundry?). Surprised? I'm not. Eventually people do get upset when they figure out that most of the television set is just a decorative hollow box, and countless carriers can deliver the same pictures at lower cost with greater service.

Publicly held service firms trade at low multiples of earnings. The fat margins only exist when utilization rates are high (over 80%), so it is not at all odd to see public search firms flounder and seek out protection, new buyers, new markets, new models and cheaper employees. As corporations have grown wise to the ways of recruiting, the 'black art' processes and pricing logic, they are looking for new ways to empower their own organizations and drive out such expenses. Siebel and Cisco are doing it, with internal recruiting machines similar to those of Fidelity and Microsoft - replete with sizable in-house research staffs and proprietary databases of organizational intelligence. My gut says that the survivors will find a way to create a role around this new model, a more critical partnership as an integral resource - not just another firm looking for a hit-and-run deal. So that's where I'm headed, with my phonics tapes and math workbooks in hand.

About the author:
David Carpe, BFA, MBA is a recruiting industry veteran, market research professional and wannabe artist. He is also the founder of PassingNotes.com, a leading industry website for serious research professionals who want to get something for nothing. Republished with permission of the Author.

DIGGING FOR GOLD- THINKING OUT OF THE DATABASE

I find www.secinfo.com very useful for sourcing corporate executives. Review documents that public organizations are required to publish. You can easily identify top executives and key decision makers in these documents. From www.uspto.gov you can locate scientists who apply for patents and executives who register trademarks.

A site called www.amnesi.com provides registrant information much like NSI, now Verisign, plus you can convert IP addresses from the Internet Header of e-mails you received from a company to get information about a server and/or domains at that address.

If you don't mind paying a few cents per lead, InfoUSA.com is inexpensive and worthwhile. Pay much more and you have continuous access to 7 million potential candidate profiles from www.eliyon.com at $12,000 per year for one user, or the most complete business research service in the world from www.onesource.com at $18,000 for a one-user license.

From Copernic 2001 you can search Discussion Sources on 16 different mailing list databases, forums and Web-based groups, 13 Tech News article databases, 16 Information Technology specific information sites, 16 Sales & Marketing resources, and 21 Programmer databases like CodeHound, CodeGuru and Sourcebank (especially good for software company decision makers and top engineers).

Finally, search from www.google.com for "Re:" and your target company's domain. It's a little trickier, but worth mastering. Your search would be like this "Re: @companyname.com". This may pull up postings on forums, websites or on Usenet. Look for replies from people who work at your target company.

All you need is a name, the contact info will be easy to find. Use our one stop lookups under Finding People, or go to peoplesearch.net and use the PeopleSearch Deluxe, or try www.theultimates.com and www.555-1212.com.

PROVISIONING: GOTRESUMES.COM

Our industry is overcrowded with websites crammed with expensive time-wasting redundancies. Periodically I come across a rare pearl, something with true value, resourceful and efficient. Introducing Provisioning, a new JobMachine section on the website and newsletter where we will stage those jewels we find. GotResumes.com is a recruiting center, not a traditional job board. It is built upon a directory platform like Yahoo. Their teams manually scour the Web each day in search of passive candidate resumes. Every url is reviewed to verify it is a resume, and accurately indexed by hand based on valid skills in the resume body. What is unique about them is:

Search tools: Forms using their favorite search engines return mostly resumes, no advanced Booleans needed.
E-mail their sourcing teams: They will search for you. Within a week they will have added resumes to the directory based on your request. This is free for members. Full sourcing service: $299 per search to rent your own sourcing team who will find resumes and leads pertinent to your search. Members receive discounts. Premium membership includes 1 free search each month.

GotResumes.com claims to add 1,500 resumes a week and currently lists 200,000 of the 2.1 million they estimate are available.