Recruiters, enough with misguided and self-serving advice!

Long gone are the days when supply outweighed demand and job seekers had to go an extra mile to stand out and appease recruiters and hiring managers. While top headhunting firms are now recognizing the need to differentiate in order to engage potential candidates, outdated advice to job seekers still abounds.

 

Let’s take for example an article that recently ran on Market Watch, an online financial news resource, a subsidiary of Dow Jones, along with the Wall Street Journal no less.

 

In its attempt to provide advice to job seekers on how to better optimize a LinkedIn profile, this article is the epitome of all that is wrong with the recruitment industry.

 

ADVICE #1:

Rule No. 1: “Your LinkedIn profile should be public”.

 

How interesting and self-serving (not for you of course; the priority here is to make a recruiter’s life easier). Rule #1 for you to be found is not to focus on optimizing your career, not to build an impressive portfolio of achievements, but to publicize a LinkedIn page. It will come as a surprise then that some top professionals do not even have a LinkedIn page (gasp!). How do they even manage to “score the next great gig”?

 

ADVICE #2:

Most people spend so much time crafting their pitch, they forget about how they appear in a search result. “It’s the first thing that recruiters look at”.

 

If you choose to have a social media presence, as most of us do in one form of another, it is certainly important to be mindful of its impact on your job search. That aside, don’t worry about missing out on recruiters who put looking at your social media profiles as first task. If a recruiter’s number one focus is not on your experience and accomplishments, it is a predictor of the lack of focus you will receive thereon after.

 

ADVICE #3:

The title should be razor-sharp. “Don’t write senior analyst at Ernst & Young, write hedge fund financial analyst at Ernst & Young”.

 

One of the world’s top travel companies called G Adventures uses the title of “CEO” for its tour guides. And you know what? True headhunters who operate in that space will know that, as will the true headhunters who operate in yours. You do not need to customize your title for uninformed recruiters – you are better off flying under their radars.

 

There were numerous other gems about recruiters punching in keywords, recoiling at buzzwords, “looking for reasons not to court you” and getting nervous over parts of your LinkedIn profile. There was also advice dedicated to older job seekers (anything from over 10 years ago is a no-no on your CV, unless you are applying for a job of Chief Executive Officer!).

 

Dear recruiters whose views were well-represented throughout the Market Watch article, the days of your reign are fortunately coming to an end. You make it difficult for recruiters who work tirelessly on self-improvement (not candidate optimization, believe it or not!). Yet, your old school ways and inability to perfect the recruitment craft are catching up with you and job seekers are taking note.

 

Dear candidates, please know that the views represented in the article quoted throughout this post are not representative of all recruiters. You do not need to change your profile to be more searchable and your experience and career path should definitely not be reduced to a bunch of standard keywords.

 

Personally, I would not want to be spammed by individuals who believe that “Most hiring managers don’t want to hire someone who’s smarter than them”, would you?

HR is rarely the best Messenger for your Recruitment Campaigns!

Have you noticed that it is becoming increasingly difficult to find and retain candidates for your most important positions? Has it become challenging to even quickly fill roles that used to receive dozens of qualified CVs in response to your ads?

Congratulations! You are ahead of many others who still fail to recognize that the job market has turned and the decision making scale has tipped in favor of job seekers. Posting a bland job description on the same job board you have been using for the past decade, listing 20 requirements and conducting an authoritative interview that sends you on a power trip no longer works. So what to do?

Fiona Buell from Aldo Group joined us at the #NewSchoolHiring event to share Aldo’s innovative approach to using storytelling to engage potential candidates. According to her, HR is rarely the best messenger for your recruitment campaigns. Who is? Your employees!

Let me ask you a question. Who represents your company at job fairs, open houses and during on-campus recruitment campaigns? My guess would be it is your Talent Acquisition Team. Well, Aldo Group takes a different approach. Placing key importance on matching the message with the messenger, they walk the walk and engage their staff in representing Aldo to potential job seekers. When looking for interns, they let one of their former interns whose position grew into a permanent role do the speaking. When hiring for the Marketing team during an on-campus campaign, they bring an employee who is a former grad from that particular university to speak about his or her experience. Tasked with the ongoing challenge of mass recruitment for their retail locations, Aldo launched a competition that had their employees upload self-made videos on social media essentially “selling” the company’s employer brand. After Fiona played one such video, the audience erupted in applause. Profoundly effective and all she did was let someone else do the talking!

As Fiona said: “We need to start treating our candidates as we do our customers”. Your marketing department reaches customers via storytelling, media campaigns and the use of testimonials. Your HR team needs to take a step back, craft a strategic campaign and choose the best media to deliver your employer branding message to reach your candidates. Are you ready to relinquish the power and let someone else be the messenger?

#NewSchoolHiring

This month marked Pronexia’s biggest milestone so far – a high profile event we hosted on April 3^rd on the topic of Employer Branding. Our co-founder Moranne Elarar summed up the end result perfectly: “It was more than we ever expected but exactly what we had envisioned”.

We had set off to put together a unique event for Montreal’s hiring managers and HR professionals and were thrilled to have met and surpassed our speakers’ and delegates’ expectations. The venue was buzzing with excitement, and by noon #NewSchoolHiring was the #1 trending topic in Montreal on Twitter! It was thrilling to see so much engagement not only from 100 of our guests, but even from people who were not in attendance. 

We have many posts coming up to summarize the various topics discussed and to highlight the most memorable talks. Yet, we are compelled to start off by thanking everyone who made this important day for the Montreal HR community such a success. We are immensely grateful to all of our speakers who believed in our vision and agreed to share their behind-the-scenes stories and practical advice. We are humbled to have received overwhelmingly rewarding feedback from our delegates.

Here are a few of the comments sent to us in the days following the conference:

“The speakers were enlightening and allowed me to think about some changes that I can do to run a more efficient operation and create a really interesting culture.” – Director, Customer Service – Industrial Distribution

“I have many takeaways to share with my group here and if there is another event like this planned, I would definitely love to be there!” – Director, Operations – Consumer Goods

“FANTASTIC job on the event! It was great, heard some wonderful speakers and it definitely energized me to start shaking things up around here!” – Manager, Administration – Digital Marketing

“It was energizing and I learned so much. I was happy to discover how companies are doing things differently to attract and retain talent. It is rather refreshing compared to what I have experienced myself in the past.” – President - Consulting Services

“The feedback from other attendees that you had organised a Montreal conference that had a "soul" was amazing!” – Director, HR – Consumer Goods

“I was extremely happy with the conference: amazing topics and speakers, inspiring and challenging visions. Being able to connect with various talented individuals was also amazing – plus the great food and venue! I think Pronexia really put together a new, different and much more enriching type of event. Thank you for having me there! I hope you’ll have other events on other HR topics and it brings new dynamics to the Montreal HR Scene.” Director, HR - Retail

And finally, we could not be more proud of the incredible team we have at Pronexia. Employer branding was a topic we wanted to tackle not only because it is important to our clients, but also to us internally. As a young company, we have been and will continue innovating to attract and keep the city’s top talent – people who will help us drive change and revolutionize the face of our industry!

Stay tuned as we formulate an answer to the now most frequently asked question: “When is Pronexia hosting the next event and on which topic?”

What is your Reputation as an Employer?

On April 3^rd, Pronexia will be hosting our first ever Employer Branding Event. We are honored to have confirmed an unbelievable line up of speakers, all responsible for Montreal-based talent. The feedback we have received from the local business community has been truly humbling.

As always, our blog aims to bring you an inside scoop into all that we do and the reasons we do it!

If you have ever collaborated with Pronexia, then you must be aware of the core importance we place on our clients’ commitment to candidate and employee experience. We partner up solely with companies we are proud to represent and would happily work for personally.  All that equals to employer branding, a company’s reputation as an employer. We thought that it would be incredibly exciting to bring together HR professionals and business owners from companies that truly care about the most important contributor to their success – you, their People. We aimed to put together an unparalleled line up of speakers, all of whom are responsible for hiring or managing teams based in Montreal, and all of whom are choice employers.

We kept the event by-invitation only, staying true to our corporate value of “fit above all”, which translates into our relentless commitment to placing “quality’ above “quantity”. The intimate setting will allow for full candor and frank experience sharing. This will be a day full of information exchange, with no tradeshow booths or sales pitches.

Most high caliber events of this nature happen in stuffy hotel conference rooms that tend to limit the inspiration and interaction. Employer Branding 360° will take place at the visually stunning state-of-the-art PhiCentre, located in the historical Old Montreal.

Yet, the main reason we decided to undertake this ambitious project lies at the core of Pronexia’s mission – to refute old school recruitment practices and to change the face of our industry! We are proud to be hosting this event and to be facilitators of the change-inducing conversations that will be taking place on April 3^rd.

And the hashtag of our event? #NewSchoolHiring of course.

Introducing our new Manager, Client Strategy

Pronexia’s 2014 started off with a few exciting initiatives and changes, one of which was the promotion of Jordan Greenberg into the newly created role of Manager, Client Strategy.

In 2011, when Pronexia was barely a few months old we decided to host our first Open house. As we were organizing the event and looking to “wow” our clients by adding an educational component to the evening, we had the idea of inviting a guest speaker to host a presentation on Social Media and its impact on recruitment. Through extensive research we came across Jordan Greenberg, founder of a Montreal-based company called Social Media Boy. Intrigued by the catchy copy on his website and impressed with the very cool avatars on it (true story!), we gave Jordan a call.

From our first meeting to his presentation at our Open house, Jordan did not stop impressing us. So, a couple of months later, when we sat down to write up a job ad describing our ideal next hire for the position of Client Strategist, we wrote it with him in mind. And as is frequently said, timing is everything. Our first applicant to the ad was … Jordan!

Fast forward a year, our team grew, we moved into a beautiful office in Outremont, expanded, renovated, grew some more. Throughout every change, every new and crazy endeavor, Jordan has positioned himself as Pronexia’s “rock” – a relentless evangelist of our brand, passionate relationship builder and a teammate you can count on with your eyes closed.

Jordan’s promotion into the new role – catalyst of change and optimization for our corporate clients – was a natural decision. His ability to connect with people both externally and internally is innate and his potential to achieve greatness is exciting for us to see. We are thrilled to watch him cultivate and carve out his new path with Pronexia and we are eager to see how 2014 unfolds. Congrats Jordan - cheers to a kickass year!

 

Marina Byezhanova & Moranne Elarar, your secret admirers

Three recruiters contacted me for the same job via LinkedIN! Is this normal?

Could you share your opinion about the following situation: in the last two days, I have been contacted by three distinct recruiters via LinkedIn. They sent me the very same job description. It's unlikely that the employer hired three HHs to fill in a single position, so it looks like they simply took it from the employer's website. I searched and found the job description on beyond.com

Could you explain what happened? If the opening is publicly available, to me it means the employer didn't want to involve HHs at all. Then why those three guys decided to get involved?

There are two possible answers to your questions, but unfortunately neither will paint these “recruiters” in a favorable light.

Possibility #1:

The client did indeed give out the mandate to three different firms, in addition to posting the ad for the position on various sites.

Some clients do this in hope of getting a wider reach by tapping into as many possible candidate sources as possible. What they sometimes don’t realize is that most recruiters do not even take the time to re-write the job description and come up with their own creative ad. They copy & paste it onto the same job boards and spam all candidates matching certain keywords on LinkedIn. The savviest of candidates will do exactly what you did – search the description on Google and find out which company is hiring. Unfortunately most get turned off by being bombarded with the same job offer and end up not moving forward at all. These lazy and unprofessional practices certainly don’t help anyone.

I feel compelled to share an anecdote. Recently we came across one of such copy & pasted ads a well-known Montreal-based recruitment firm was running. They replaced the client’s name with the word “Company” throughout the ad, which resulted in the following sentence: “To find out more about Company, please visit our website: http://www.Company.com/aboutus. “

Possibility #2:

You might very well be right in that the hiring company in question did not even mandate any of these recruiters to assist with the search. Recruiters sending out a job description they pull from a website is becoming a widespread practice. It is a desperate move but undoubtedly one we have heard about from clients on numerous occasions. A job ad gets blasted out and if a potentially suitable candidate “bites”, the recruiter will take the resume, remove all identifying information and “market” the profile to the prospective client. A client of ours told us that one recruitment firm in particular sends him upwards of 100 resumes on a monthly basis. They never met and never mandated the firm with a single search, yet the influx of resumes is never ending.

On a separate note, I have to clarify that inMail spamming is not headhunting. LinkedIn offers extensive training to hiring managers and recruiters on crafting these inMails and sending them out en masse. This is nothing more than an equivalent of an email campaign. True headhunters build their reputation on relationship building – we pick up the phone and reach out to prospective candidates, we network actively and we conduct thorough in-person interviews.

Hope this helps shed some light!

My Journey from Leaving Pronexia to Back Again!

I started with Pronexia Inc three years ago when they were just starting out in the basement of a Westmount office. As Pronexia's first ever employee, I worked closely with the two founders - two young women like myself - who had taken a risk to leave their steady careers and open up their own business. In the year and half I was there, I was able to learn about an industry I knew nothing about, feel like I was part of growing a business.

Witnessing such enthusiastic entrepreneurs do their thing with such passion, actually gave me the courage to reach out and pursue my own dreams! Which is why I left the company last year, to go to school in New York and train in an acting & musical theatre program and pursue art as my career path.

Last week I was called by the Pronexia team to help them out with a client event, and because they wanted to know all about my New York experience. After so many laughs and memories about my time there, I couldn't help saying to myself just how much I really missed these people!

After a further meeting this week, it has been decided that I am coming back to the Pronexia team as Office Manager! I feel SO blessed to be surrounded by creative individuals who BELIEVE in me and INSPIRE me to pursue my passions and allow me the flexibility to run off to auditions.

I think it takes people with creativity themselves to be so open and push others to strive and grow and gain success in whatever they choose!

I usually don't write big things like this on social media but I am feeling lucky and blessed, and excited. Always surround yourself with people who will lift you up in life and believe in your potential. Part of me having the courage to go out there and be an artist - regardless of the struggle - was because these people actually told me I can!

They looked me in the eye before I left a while back and said:  Lanisa, you can be whoever you want to be and you truly need to believe that. It stuck with me and honestly affected me to the core.

With that ... I introduce our team! We're young, quirky, out of the box thinkers on a mission to REVOLUTIONIZE THE FACE OF RECRUITMENT!!!

HAPPY MOVEMBER ;)

Lanisa Farnsworth