Guerrilla Marking for Job Hunters 2.0 - Jay Conrad Levinson [83]
Just like any other employer, these firms can offer the employee a full menu of benefits, a highly competitive hourly rate, and sometimes employment for many years at one location. You’ll find contract employees in almost every conceivable profession. A contract employee may be anything from an information technology professional to a human resource manager, to an engineer or a nurse, an interim CEO or teacher, and just about everything in between where specialized skills are required. Due to the critical shortage of some skill-challenged organizations, some contract placement firms may even handle visa and immigration sponsorship matters to help ease these employee shortages.
Although many younger workers are contract employees, expect to see many baby boomers who “thought” they would be able to retire end up at the same company working in the same department and at the same desk that they did prior to retirement. This time around, however, they will be contract employees.
• Tools they use: In-house database, bizjournals.com, LinkedIn for specialized skills, referrals, networking, regional and/or niche job boards, newspaper classifieds.
➤ Behind the Scenes of the Recruiting Process
Recruiters are matchmakers. Their role in the hiring process is to bring together strangers in an economic marriage that is good for both parties. If you understand the mechanics of the process, you will be in a better position to work the outcome to your advantage.
Most recruiters have created a logical process for finding and attracting top candidates that looks something like the following:
1. Needs analysis: Every search begins with understanding what is required by the client in the role to be filled. The depth of understanding at this stage will determine the search’s success.
• What you need to know: This is where most searches die. Understanding why will save you a load of grief during your job search. It often happens that clients do not have a clear understanding of exactly what they expect from the person they are hiring, so they don’t give precise direction to the recruiter. You may have experienced this yourself if you have ever been on an interview where it was clear the interviewer wasn’t certain of what he or she was looking for. All too often hiring managers will give recruiters only the vaguest of ideas about what they want, saying to the recruiter “I’ll know them when I see them.” That’s a fact and often it’s enough for most recruiters to begin. This happens less frequently when a recruiter is on retainer but it still happens. You need to be able to ask enough intelligent questions to gather the information yourself about the opportunity before the interview without alienating the recruiter.
2. Research: Here the firm will make a long list comprised of the names of individuals they want to contact from companies and organizations that directly relate to this search. In the “old days” (5 years ago), this was a 3- to 4-week process for a researcher /project manager whose sole purpose was to gather names and up-to-date contact data of potential candidates. Research is an ancillary function of the recruiting process. Tools like ZoomInfo, LinkedIn, and Google have streamlined the process considerably.
• What you need to know: Today if you’re not on the long list, you won’t get the call. In the old days, recruiters had to ask, “Who do you know?”—now they already know. The search will be over before they know you even exist. Take me, for example. I have a paid subscription to ZoomInfo and I consult it before I start any search. I’ll take the top 100 people from ZoomInfo and cross-reference it with my search of LinkedIn. If you’re in both databases, I