Thu
Apr
10
Quite a few of our clients have asked if we can review emailed applications from candidates. When a candidate applies to a current SourceSimple job advertisement, the resume is delivered directly to our clients without interference. This is a very effective strategy for clients who are seeking greater quantity of resumes; however we also have clients who would prefer to see only qualified applicants.
We are launching a new service called ‘Applicant Review’ to address this need. Applicant Review is very simple, and hopefully very effective — when a candidate applies to a job, we will receive the resume. We will then run it against the same criteria used to search the resume databases for that campaign. If it passes the criteria, we will forward it on; if it does not pass, we will not forward it.
Applicant Review is an optional add-on for SourceSimple campaigns. We are offering it FREE for a limited time on campaigns purchased during April. The ultimate pricepoint isn’t set yet, but rest assured that it will be appropriately low to add value cost effectively.
We recently launched a new service to make the initial contact with candidates. The service is called SelectSimple. SelectSimple is a ‘baseline pre-qualification’ service, intended to establish a candidate’s interest, availability, and attitude.
Clients using SelectSimple provide us with the candidates they would like to be contacted, and as many as 10 questions they would like the candidates to be asked. We call and email the candidates over a period of 5 days — all contact attempts are made in the evenings and on weekends. Once we reach a candidate, we conduct the baseline interview and pass along the information we received.
Clients pre-pay for the number of candidates to be contacted. We hold the pre-payment as “contact credits” and deduct 1 credit for each interview. If a candidate is not interviewed, no credits are deducted. Credits don’t expire, so any credits not used in a given campaign can be applied to future campaigns.
SelectSimple is still in pilot mode with a small group of clients. Each day of the pilot we learn a new way to improve the service. We also discovered a fairly surprising positive consequence of contacting candidates in this manner:
Because we introduce outselves as a “pre-qualification service”, candidates tend to be more open in their conversations than they might be with a recruiter. We make it clear that we are not decision makers, and that our only goal is to save everyone time and effort by determining quickly if there is a reason for the candidate and the recruiter to talk. The candidates we’ve spoken to have been receptive and have had no qualms about sharing information with us.
Fri
Feb
1
In early January 2008, Monster Worldwide acquired Affinity Labs, a San Francisco company that builds career-related communities. Among their 7 communities is NursingLink. Resumes uploaded at NursingLink go into the Monster database, and jobs posted on Monster can appear on NursingLink.
Affinity Labs also hosts communities for government, technology, education, and law enforcement. Monster is going after candidates where they are — in social environments. This will inevitably make them even more dominant in the recruiting space, and help to build out their candidate database considerably. As such, Monster will become increasingly important to SourceSimple and all baseline sourcing services.
Economists seem to believe that a recession is on the way… either a recession or a slowdown which will put a damper on everyone’s day. One of the datapoints pointed towards is a 4.9-5% unemployment rate. This is a high figure for the United States. It signals that 5% of the workforce is not working.
But look at it from another angle: 95% of the people in the workforce have a job! If you scored 95% on a test in school, you’d be overjoyed. 95% is a pretty high number. It means that when you walk down the street and a huge crowd of 100 people walk past you, only 5 of those people don’t have a job. 5 out of 100 ain’t so bad.
Will this affect your business as an employer or a recruiter? Definitely. Does it mean recruiting will cease altogether? Definitely not.
95% of the population is employed. Life hasn’t stopped. Businesses haven’t stopped. People are working. Jobs exist. Recruiting must exist as well. There’s less money out there, so everyone has to spend less. The recruiting must go on, but it just has to be done with less money.
External recruiters fill a vital function that employers can’t do without. They tap vast candidate networks and utilize extensive candidate development prowess to locate and land the perfect candidate. However, there may be less recruiting work out there than before, so recruiters may have to cut back on expenses. External recruiters can let SourceSimple handle the baseline sourcing function, saving quite a bit of cash and allowing efforts and resources to be focused on client relationships, passive candidate search, and candidate development.
Employers with parse internal recruiting resources who want to compete in the same market as powerhouses may be looking for inexpensive ways to ramp up their recruiting efforts. SourceSimple provides the resources and manpower of a much larger organization without the risk and overhead of doing it yourself. It’s a very reasonable solution at a very inexpensive pricepoint.
There are, I’m sure, ways to save money that don’t involve SourceSimple… but for some reason I can’t think of them right now. =)
Wed
Jan
30
When an employed candidate puts a resume into a database, they are expressing their desire to talk to someone on the outside. They are willing to look outside of their current employment. They understand that the best way to explore other opportunities is to start some conversations. The resume is the conversation-starter.
It’s almost a guarantee that employed candidates with their resumes online will talk to you when you call them. In other words, they are the perfect entry point for a passive-candidate recruiter/sourcer to gather information about a target company.
When you start a passive search, ask SourceSimple to send you resumes for current employees of your target companies. Call up the candidates and interview them, even if they aren’t perfect for the job. Ask them whatever you want to know: who is their boss? what project are they working on? etc. You’ll be amazed at how much information you’ll receive.