Think about the time it takes from beginning to end:

• First, you get a lead on a candidate’s name.
• Then you search in multiple places to gather bits and pieces of information on their background and experience.
• Then you hunt for their contact information – all before you can even start the conversation.

And that’s just a single candidate for a single job. That time gets multiplied for each new person and each new position you add to your pipeline. The hours add up, fast.

Take 1 minute now to save time later:

See how Dice’s new social recruiting tool can replace single site searches.
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Watch in 1 minute how Open Web saves you time.
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An unconference means that there’s only a loose agenda, almost no PowerPoint, and participants are encouraged to share the stage. Everything was informal, and mingling was encouraged.
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Stalking, flirting and rejecting

For a new recruiter #truSanFran was a fabulous chance to bathe in the wisdom of veterans and the support of community. I heard two revelatory encapsulations of the recruiting trade:

During his presentation on Cool Tools for Recruiting and Networking, Craig Fisher explained to his recruiter audience “we are stalkers and professional flirts.” Seen this way, my past exploration of online dating meshed marvellously with my new recruiting career.

With his long hair shoved under a broad brimmed hat, recruiting raconteur Bill Boorman later observed that recruiters are primarily rejection managers: rejecting candidate after candidate until one is left standing. Endless rejection was a suitably sober follow up to professional flirting.
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Employer Branding? Culture Branding.

Boorman hosted a session about Employer Branding – sharing the virtues of the workplace to attract candidates. Except Boorman suggested there was something better than employer branding: culture branding. If employer branding is “tell me” about the workplace, culture branding is “show me” the workplace.

Many people at #truSanFran HR & Recruiting actively discussed the role of social media in recruiting. How can we unleash our employees to tell the mostly good stories of their work to help with aid online public culture branding? One poor guy from a large utility company bemoaned the many regulations and bureaucracy that prevent any of his people from touching Facebook, Twitter or Google+ in a work setting. Most everyone else at #truSanFran had social media kool-aid grins stained on their faces.

The #1 thing candidates want to know about a job, Boorman recounted in his British lilt, is a picture of the office where they’ll be working. Think “where’s my desk” – Boorman encouraged recruiters to encourage their employees to talk about their work in an authentic way – unvarnished. Shoot short videos on an iPhone and post them the same day.

If all this social media is effective, I learned, we might successfully lower the number of resumes we receive. Wait – reducing the number of resumes? That’s crazy! Don’t I want more candidates?

It turns out social media and effective culture branding can provide “talent de-selection” – encouraging people not to apply. Boorman put it this way: if it takes 75 applicants to hire someone, and the average recruiter is handling 30 open positions, and 70% of applicants are unsuitable and unqualified, that’s 1,500+ resumes to read that aren’t applicable. Holy smokes!

Culture branding can help create content that might dissuade casual resume spammers, while attracting people who might actually enjoy your tradition of singing when you release software, or building elaborate paperclip architecture during Thursday lunches.
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Lenny’s Dice Tech Trek Bus

Rocker Lenny Kravitz had a pretty gourmet tour bus. All leather seats, a twinkling light ceiling with TVs and sound wired throughout. Near the front, a large guitar-shaped table. I learned about Mister Kravitz’s bus since it now serves as a rolling promotion for Dice’s Open Web. During #truSanFran, Dice’s bus served as another conference room.
I took this panorama photo in the back, as recruiting futurist Kevin Wheeler declared that all recruiting for all companies was headed towards RPOs – Recruitment Process Outsourcing:

Fortunately, Craig Fisher and Bill Boorman both violently disagree with Kevin’s provocative recruiter outsourcing prognosis: I may still have an in-office job. Maybe in a few months corporate recruiting work will be primarily encouraging engineers to post videos of themselves asking other engineers to help them with hard problems.

Later in the day, I co-hosted a session on Gamification for Recruiting in Lenny Kravitz’s Dice tour bus. How can game design help find and filter candidates? How can game design drive employee referral programs inside companies? I look forward to sharing my findings here on Dice in the near future.

Meanwhile, if you were going to attend an un-conference like #GlobalTRU, what session would you want to see or host?

Like Employers on Dice on Facebook.

If you can’t make it to events like #sourcecon, #ere, #talent42, #GlobalTru or #SxSW, no worries – we’ve captured recruiter and sourcing rockstar moments for you.

Like us on Facebook and check out cool content:

• Photos, photos, more photos – From karaoke to air guitar, check out the fun your colleagues are having with Dice at HR and recruiting events.
• Real Rockstars – We’re hanging out with the original King and the King of Pop, along with real rockstars who are changing the face of hiring.
• Surprising Superfans – It took his own wedding for one Facebook friend to part with his Dice swag. See who it is – you might know him.

From industry experts to social recruiting pundits, there’s much more – event giveaways, charity connections, and content you can use to do your job better.
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Like Employers on Dice and come back to visit often.
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It’s the same thing with networks. People tend to cluster around “connectors”—people who are well-connected. Some people are not as well-connected, and that’s okay, too. If those people are connected to the highly connected people, they both have terrific networks.

This is called a “small world network.” You go to a party, meet someone, realize you know someone in common, and say, “It’s a small world.” It’s the same thing online, except that with social media, it’s magnified.

How many times have you looked around in social media and noticed that people are tweeting or posting similar stories? We see memes, or what’s trending all the time. If you look at what’s trending, you might have noticed that it doesn’t matter who started the trend. It matters that people pick up the trend.

If enough people pick up the meme, then the power law distribution comes into play. What’s that? That’s a fancy word for the 80/20 rule, also known as Pareto’s Law.

If you’re a developer or a tester or writer or business analyst (I could go on, you know who you are), you know that your customers only use about 20% of your product. The only question is, which 20%? Well, it turns out that about 20% of the people in your network are highly connected. If you catch their attention, and they promote something, they can turn that something into a trend. That’s the power law distribution at work.

What does this mean for the future of recruiting? Is there a way we can use the power law distribution and small world networks?

Yes.

If you advertise a job on Twitter and a highly connected person sees it and retweets it, their followers will see it. Boom, you’ve got many more potential eyeballs on it and the possibility of a meme, or a trending tweet. That’s not likely, but the potential for a retweet is there.

It’s much more likely that your networking for candidates will improve. Did you know that you are more likely to fill a job with a loose connection?

Recruiters have always known that you ask people, “Do you know anyone who might be a fit for this job?” But now, you might phrase that differently. You might say, “Think about your larger network, people you don’t see very often. Are any of those people a fit for this job?”

When you phrase it like that, people start thinking about their loose connections. That’s their 80%, the people who are their loose connections. If these people have been maintaining contact with these loose connections, they’ve been adding these connections to their LinkedIn contacts. Now, it’s easy to make introductions. Maybe they are Twitter peeps. It’s still easy to introduce each other. If not, it’s just a little more difficult.

You might think in this always-on world, we would be more high-tech and less high-touch. Not so. The future of recruiting is in using our tools to be more high-touch, to reach more people and make a real connection.

So, tell me, when is your birthday? Wouldn’t it be funny if it was the same day as mine?

Recruiting Rockstars
Join us: Hidden Gems Tour

Take a 5-min tour of Open Web and you may win big.

Join us for a chance to win a seat on the DICE Pre-Show VIP “Hidden Gems” Rockstar Tour Bus, along with some other cool prizes. A preview of Dice’s powerful new recruiting and sourcing tool – Open Web – could land you something special.
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HOW TO ENTER

Visit Dice Booth at #RIS13 for a 5-minute tour of Open Web.

You’ll automatically be entered to win prizes by participating in a tour of Open Web.  A new set of winners will be selected at random each day.

   Cool Prizes:

• Ticketmaster Gift Card ($250)
• Beats Wireless Headphones (retail: $280)

   EXCLUSIVE: 5/14 only

• One prize that money can’t buy
  Take an Open Web demo no later than 3 pm on Tuesday, May 14 and the last seat on the DICE Pre-Show VIP “Hidden Gems” Rockstar Tour Bus could be yours. Join us after the #RIS13 networking event for an unforgettable evening.
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  Dice’s Open Web digs deep to find the best “hidden gem” tech candidates across the social web. Now the hidden gem experience takes a delightful turn on a real Rockstar tour bus stopping at three VIP social hideaways.
  May 14, 7:15 boarding for ticket holders only

First day prizes will be announced during the #RIS13 Networking Party (sponsored by Dice) on May 14, 5:00-7:00 pm
Second day prizes will be announced near the end of the conference 

*Terms and Conditions

In the world of technology recruiting, all conferences are NOT created equal. A leader is Talent 42—past attendees have rated it “awesomely excellent.”

Since the launch of Dice’s new Open Web tool, more and more professionals are utilizing this slick social aggregator to connect with tech candidates – particularly passives.

See what Open Web is all about at dice.com/openweb.

Then check out the specific successes your colleagues are having with Open Web – they’re saving time, finding better candidates, and turning cold calls into warm opportunities.

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Online Recruiter Adopts a New Web-Based Tool
Baseline – Apr 26, 2013

“(With Open Web) we are able to identify highly qualified people who aren’t necessarily looking to change jobs,” says Jeff Winter, CEO of Gravity People. “We’re also finding better candidates than we did a few years ago.”
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Dice Unveils a New IT Profiling Tool
ERE.net – Jan 29, 2013

“Knowing more about a person than what you get from a resume can turn a cold call into a warm opportunity. That’s a plus for a…recruiter who can search the 1 million resumes on Dice.com, then use Open Web to build an updated profile before contacting their best prospects.”
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Passionate About Passives
The Houston Chronicle – Jan 31, 2013

“To find the network engineers, application developers and system administrators that his clients are clamoring to hire, Phil Vanderslice is using Dice’s new search tool [Open Web]. ‘In this business it’s all about speed,’ he said. ‘How fast can I find that person?’”
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Visit our Media Center to read more about Dice’s new Open Web search tool in the news.
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Previously a brilliant producer for mobile game maker DeNA, Justin’s curiosity about his coworkers evolved into an internal communications role. He was so well-received that he was drafted from within to become a company recruiter this past January.

“You’re good at telling the story of the company inside the company,” they told him. “Now we want you to tell the story of the company outside the company.”

Read on and relate to this talented tech professional’s journey from techie to recruiter. Leave him a comment below with your best tips and tricks of the trade.

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I joined San Francisco-based mobile games startup ngmoco:) in 2010 as a producer for Touch Pets Cats. We made hands down the most thorough free-to-play cat simulator for the iPhone.  After a fall 2010 release, Touch Pets Cats hit #8 top grossing and #2 free in Apple’s App Store—a testament to the power of ngmoco:)’s social network to drive traffic to games. Unfortunately, players of Touch Pets Cats didn’t turn out to be big enough spenders on virtual clothes and catnip.

In November 2010, ngmoco:) was purchased by a titan of mobile games in Japan called DeNA.  Japan had 3G networks starting in 2001, with most Japanese folks accessing email primarily through “feature phones” loaded with cameras and music players, even back then.  This gave the Japanese mobile economy about 10 years to figure out how people might want to play, shop, flirt, communicate, and monetize over mobile devices.  That’s why DeNA had billions of revenues and could buy a San Francisco startup, so ngmoco:) could help DeNA offer rich mobile entertainment to the United States and the western market.

I had worked around internet startups since 1994 and it was the first time in 16 years that I had a stake in an actual valued company. There’s a romance to startups; I have enjoyed raging against the dying of the light as a cofounder. But now I had a chance to see what life was like inside of a rapidly-globalizing company, where our work can reach tens of millions of people.

A wide range of creative weird folks had chosen to band together to make this future entertainment network. To satisfy my curiosity, I began interviewing my colleagues.  What did people do outside of work? What motivated them to work here?  What were they proudest of accomplishing? 

As I was working as a producer, I gathered profiles and articles to publish in a PDF internal company newsletter: the “ngmofo;)”.  Soon I heard from our leaders, “you’re decent at this game production stuff, but you’ll have more impact doing things like the newsletter.”  So, I became the Director of Culture and Communications in DeNA’s San Francisco office. Through videos, events, and emails, I worked to promote knowledge sharing and social fabric, with all of the employees as my internal customers.

Now, after two years of internal culture work, I am sharing our company story outside the company as a recruiter.  I am searching for node.js engineers who can scale a game server to hundreds of thousands of DAUs, and I’m working to build the employment brand of a company that is still somewhat behind the scenes.

I am learning the challenges of hiring good people at a global company focused on a competitive tech zone. I am learning that recruiting human individuals into groups of humans is a dynamic, fascinating field.  

I suspect I have opportunities to have a large impact through smart use of communications.  I’m quite stimulated, I’m hoping to evolve fast, and I look forward to sharing what I discover in the future of recruiting with you here.

Do you have any books or articles you would recommend about recruiting?  Please leave them in the comments here.

Check out some of the highlights and see all the stage-shredding photos at: http://on.dice.com/ERE13Pic

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Catch some more of the action:

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]]> http://resources.dice.com/2013/04/23/5-highlights-from-ere13/feed/ 0 ERE4 kevinstuder ERE1 ERE2 ERE3 ERE5 http://resources.dice.com/2013/04/23/5-ways-to-prep-for-engaging-passive-tech-candidates/ http://resources.dice.com/2013/04/23/5-ways-to-prep-for-engaging-passive-tech-candidates/#comments Tue, 23 Apr 2013 12:10:54 +0000 johnvlastelica http://resources.dice.com/?p=8688 continue...]]> I’ve got a name, now what?

In this three-part series from tech recruiting guru John Vlastelica on engaging passive technology talent, learn how to prepare for that first email or call, how to write emails and connect with tech pros in a way that gets them interested, and finally, how to overcome common objections you’re likely to hear.

Download your printable PDF here.

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Top tech recruiters know that treating passive candidates like active job seekers is a waste of time. They just won’t reply. In this first article, we’ll share some of the keys to preparing for that first email or cold call, so that you can improve the chances of getting in-demand tech pros to engage with you.

Talented tech pros get bombarded by recruiters
Many top tech pros get 20+ InMails and emails every week. Most consider the messages spam, and it’s no wonder. The messages are generic, with titles like, “We need a hot shot Java programmer in Chicago. Interested?” and the attached job descriptions are boring and loaded with 30 requirements. Why would a top tech candidate, who is not actively looking for a job, even open that message from you?!

Before you send that first email or make a cold call, you must prepare.

Personalization and customization is key to improving your response rate
So, how do you get a passive tech pro interested? Personalizing the email or phone call is critical. And the foundation of personalization is research.

1.  Research their interests and expertise
Obviously, hardware engineers are different from software engineers. And within software engineering, there are 10+ specialty areas: front end, back end, embedded systems, mobile apps, etc. Going beyond keyword matching is critical to targeting the right leads with the right opportunities. The good news is that engineers often publicly share their interests and areas of expertise on sites like GitHub, Stack Overflow, and in various forums across the web (many of which are searchable through tools like Dice’s Open Web).

So, before you write that email or prepare for that call, you must know something about the kind of technology and work that interests them. Simply knowing they’ve done Java programming is not enough. What kind of technology are they passionate about? Are they contributing code to the open source community, sharing ideas in forums, or writing blog posts that highlight their expertise? You want – no, you need – to know this ahead of time. It will help you make a more credible introduction and avoid generic approaches like, “I see you have 6 years of Java programming experience. We need someone with 5-8 years of experience, so we’d like to see if you’d be interested in this job we have … “

2.  Research their current employer
What does their company do? Is it a tech startup, a well-established non-tech company, or a well-known global leader in technology? Use that information to help differentiate your company from the work they do now. Will your smaller company likely offer them a bigger job with a larger scope than they’d have as a Software Developer II at their current company? Will your company offer them the chance to work on building something new ­– something that will impact millions versus the maintenance work they do now? Is their company doing well? Is it growing? Is it profitable? Are their products well received in the marketplace? Engineers don’t just care about the technology they work on. They also want to work with companies that are successful and growing, as these organizations offer more opportunities to lead, and often are in tech investment mode.

3.  Research their career history (What moves have they made?)
On a related note, look at their past. If you can find out where else they’ve worked, you may gain insight that will help you craft a better targeted message or reply to questions or concerns. Have they been a full-time employee their entire career, working for companies for 4-5 years at a time? If so, a 6-month contract position may be a hard sell. Have they moved around the country quite a bit? Or, are they still living in the same town where they went to college 10 years ago? If so, getting them to relocate can be a much bigger barrier than quitting a job they like. Finally, does it appear that they’re working virtually for a company that doesn’t have a tech center in their city? If so, a job that doesn’t offer the flexibility they need may be a deal-breaker.

Additionally, if you’d need them to relocate, you’ll want to proactively research cost of living differences. The salaries required to maintain a good living situation in NYC versus Kansas City, for example, are quite different. You need to know this before you target someone, because you could be wasting your time and theirs if your compensation packages and relocation offerings won’t come close to addressing the significant cost differences. Having said that, some candidates might be excited to return “home.” So, if you can tell that a candidate moved away, and your opportunity is closer to where they went to college or grew up, you may be able to offer them the chance to move back to family and friends.

4.  Research their connections (Do you know someone they know?)
Obviously, leveraging a shared connection to turn a cold email or call into a warm one is recruiting 101 stuff. So, it would be silly not to leverage social media, your colleagues’ shared work history, and your own work history to improve your chances of getting a response and/or helping to gain additional insights about this passive candidate’s motivators and interests.

5.  Research your own company and jobs
Steps 1-4 are critical – you should never go in blind when contacting a passive candidate. However, you also must know your own stuff. What’s the value proposition for a top engineer at your company? Look beyond the buzzwords on the job description to be able to share – and answer questions about – the specific projects they’d work on, the impact their work would make, the team they’d work with (including the hiring manager’s background), and the salary and relocation packages available. Depending on a traditional job description (which, let’s be honest, is probably poorly written) to persuade a top-quality passive candidate to leave his/her job is not going to cut it. Do your research and your credibility will skyrocket. (Plus, you’ll stand apart from recruiters who send spammy, “Interested?  Job description attached” emails.)

Wrap Up: The foundation of good engagement is research
So, what’s the secret to improving your hit rate? Learn as much as you can about a candidate’s interests and motivations (not just the keywords and technologies in their profile) to ensure the kind of opportunities you have align with what they likely want. In summary, customize your approach to what a candidate cares about; not what you have to offer.

In the next article, we’ll focus on how to write emails and engage passive candidates in a way that will significantly improve your chances of getting them interested.