The Undercover Recruiter

Oh. My Gosh. Becky.

It’s a New Year!

I get pretty excited about the New Year, mostly because it means NEW (Hint: it’s in the name). Here in the middle of the United States, we had new snow, which only underscored the illusion of a clean slate. Let’s talk about NEW.

New Stuff

In 2013, you get new stuff. You know what I mean: a new calendar, a fresh desk, a new set of books. I, like a lot of people use this time to get organized. Label your folders (on line or offline), create more organized to-do lists or assemble a calendaring system you’ll actually use. My resolutions are that I will actually use Evernote (for white papers and in-depth articles) across all my devices and that I will use Shoeboxed to keep track of my traveling receipts.

New Processes

You know what’s hard? Change. Especially when you are working within a team. If everyone goes around changing their processes all the time, it makes for a very disorganized team. That’s why the first week in January makes everyone a little nuts; everyone’s personal goals are either not aligned or vocalized with corporate ones. What if you called your (virtual or in-person) team together for a bit of accountability and support? Is the manager going to work out over lunch instead of hearing complaints? Is Becky trying to have a “no-email zone” from 7:00-10:00 am? When you share your new processes with others you work or consistently interface with, you increase your chances of success. My new process for the year is no phone calls after 4 pm. When I take these calls, my children are often home from school and I either forget what was said or am worried about noise on the line. When I take calls early in the day, I remember to send notes and really focus on the call itself. I’ve already notified my coworkers and clients.

New Tech

Even if you aren’t one of the lucky ducks that received a new phone, computer or tablet this year, you can still take advantage of the new tech 2013 has to offer. In fact, much of it isn’t really new at all. I have found that I don’t really adopt new tools at the rate I used to and I believe that is to my detriment. Voice to text apps while I’m on my morning walk? Yes, please. With constant upgrades on software, new consumer and enterprise apps being developed daily and constant must-have lists, there is surely one new tech change you can make to your daily routine. I have been trying to incorporate Google+ into my sharing routine and took the last day in 2012 to go over the software and systems I am using and make all the updates. I also decided to print out and laminate shortcut cheat sheets that have saved a great deal of time. Need some ideas? Check out followup.cc and IFTT to automate like…everything. Make sure you check out the user manuals for your enterprise software or ask your rep to take you through a fresh demo, I bet there are new features you’re dying to try.

New Space

Clean, clear desktop. Fresh lines of notebook paper. Even my Facebook timeline somehow seems clearer. Even if you didn’t have a chance to de-clutter before 2012 was over, you can still organize your space and get rid of detritus post haste. The obvious tidying up has to do with “real life” but what about creating a new and organized Dropbox folder or using unroll.me to tidy up your inbox? Is your desktop looking cluttered with screenshots and to-do items? If so, take 15 minutes to de-clutter so that you can start 2013 with a clear mind (and PC). My number one item? Begin syncing my project management tool of choice, Asana with Dropbox folders. They offer the integration now and it’s a no brainer.

New Ideas

I’ll be the first to tell you that the “predictions” lists are kind of “meh” this year. That is, they say the same things as last year, basically. However, there are some gems out there. Jobcast has an interesting one, as do I (yeah like I’m not gonna put mine in here) and Ihrim’s, while long, is good. New ideas are everywhere and as a cutting edge recruiter (which you are right?) you should want to pay attention to these. I work with a ton of vendors. Their primary goal in life is to get you, yes YOU, on a demo. So call up employee referral vendor Zao or Video Interviewing platform Wowzer or ATS vendor RecruiterBox or RMS provider Skillstream. Don’t get gamification? Call Badgeville. Confused about social sourcing? Check out Entelo. Need CRM tips? Ping Avature. My point is, all these companies (and many, many more – head to Software Advice and Capterra for list after list of HR Tech Products) are interested in educating you. Sure, they want to sell but they also want to get their concepts out to market and if you understand them you only bring valuable knowledge back to your firm or organization. Carve out 20 min a week for a new product demo. At the very least, it will give you questions to ask your OWN vendor community.

New Goals

I know that it’s a bit passe in some circles to create goals, but it’s my favorite part of the New Year. If you believe, even for just a few days, that you can radically alter something about yourself, that’s still pretty impressive! It’s a childlike feeling. So give it a shot. Can’t lose 20 lbs? How about 10? Don’t want to make 40 new calls a week? Maybe try for 15. Scared to attempt to learn a language? What about planning a trip to that country instead? My point is, goals have the inherent, beautiful quality of giving you new faith in yourself and that will impact your work positively for sure. I’m trying the Daily Burn.

Happy New Year!

Maren Hogan

Maren Hogan is a seasoned marketer and community builder in the HR and Recruiting industry. She leads Red Branch Media, a consultancy offering marketing strategy and content development.

You’ve read all the blog posts, articles and ebooks. You’ve heard pundits on TV, radio and down your local pub swearing by the power of social media. It’s the solution to everyone’s customer service gripes, online dating, general time waste and of course your job search.

We’re told recruiters and employers spend all day trawling through random social networks to find their next hire. So what are you doing even reading this, you should be busy branding yourself on social media surely?

Which ones should you use?

How do you know which social tools are actually useful for jobs and which ones are a giant waste of time and effort? Well that’s not easy to tell. They all look equally shiny and typically have a decent content marketer pushing out good stories on a blog.

Is BranchOut going to get you a job? Maybe BrandYourself? No wait, try VisualCV or why not DoYouBuzz. BeKnown is definitely the one. Wait, there’s another one…

If you’re a jobseeker (or an employer) you will have noticed that almost every week there is a new shiny tool, app, plugin, add-on, extension or platform launched in the career space. They all have ‘unique’ features and promise to automate your job search (or candidate search for employers).

You might find yourself signing up to new tools every week and going through the motions of filling in your bio, uploading that photo and connecting with the same people again. By doing this it’s easy to achieve a false sense of achievement, just like spraying out 50 CVs to random companies.

Low barriers to entry

The trouble with online technology is that the barriers to entry are very low, meaning anyone can set up the ‘next big thing’ from their garage. This is of course a great leveller and you would hope the invisible hand of business would sift out the inferior products. Not so I’m afraid. Just as it’s easy to set something up, it’s easy to keep it ticking over as well whilst you decide what to do with it (that’s what they call BETA testing). This situation is not something the end-user will benefit from.

Big companies always succeed surely

And just because a large company launches a new application doesn’t mean it’s going to take off; Monster.com launched BeKnown last year. It was billed the professional network hosted on Facebook and was going to be a game changer. A year later you barely hear about it anymore – those guinea pigs that signed up and did up their profiles, connected with others and started ‘engaging’ must be regretting their early adoption.

What are some of the good ones?

There are a few tools that are genuinely useful and they have either been acquired by the bigger players, such as Rapportive or SlideShare which were both snapped up by LinkedIn. The best way to find out which ones are worth bothering with is to take a step back and let others do the testing for you. Instead of jumping on every new plug-in, wait for reviews to come in and ask your network if they get any use out of ‘Super Cool Plug-in 3.0′.

Bottom line

Social media is about people and a hiring process is about people (I would hope). Use social to identify and contact the right people within an organisation, don’t sign up for another tool that somehow automagically would contact people on your behalf.

If you think a tool looks useful, take a step back and breathe. Read the reviews, ask your peers and do your due diligence. Then you’re ready to invest your time and effort.

What social recruiting tools work for your career management? Please let me know in the comments!

photo by: futileboy

Jorgen Sundberg

The original Undercover Recruiter, after 7 years in tech recruiting Jorgen now runs Link Humans, a social media marketing agency in London.

Out With The Old, In With The…Well, You Get It!