Careful Who Your Friends Are!!!

More and more of our clients are no longer resting with the 3 references that we conduct on our candidates behalf. We are getting word that many of our clients are actually searching online for potential employee's Myspace home page to learn more about their interests and the friends that they associate with. Some have even gone as far as informing us that they may call names from their Myspace page to obtain informal references.

With that being said, how is a candidate to respond to this new method of background checking.

One possible solution is to delete friends that you are concerned with. While it may not sit well to weed through friends that you deem "undesirable", when it comes to finding employment in a tough, competitive marketplace, you may need to make some hard decisions.

As this is a new techique, I would love to hear from you as to your thoughts and recommendations to deal with this new reality.

Client Communication

We have a recruiter in our Northwest region that just closed a large deal with one of our clients. He placed a Treasurer with a mid sized company. In a business like ours that is filled with extreme highs and lows ( we are contingency recruiters that can work for months on a deal and not get paid), closing this deal should have led to one of the extreme highs. In particular, this search fee was a large one and normally would warrant a few high fives and some celebrating by the recruiter and the rest of the team. In this case, it was only met with a solemn half smile and the words, " I'm just glad it's over." What a strange reaction, I thought, to see this recruiter with their head down, shoulders slumped and energy sapped. It really bothered me. In digging into the background of this situation, I have come to learn the reason for the reaction.

1. The process dragged on and on and on.
2. Our recruiter only had 2 brief conversations with the hiring manager during the entire search. All other conversions were fairly terse email exchanges, as they opted to not return calls but to exchange email ( and I do need to say that I appreciate people are busy and emails are more efficient). Getting information, apparently, was like pulling teeth.

This scenario and reaction made me take pause and realize that part of the enjoyment of what we do is not only the end result and the financial reward that we reap but it is also about the relationships we form and the comraderie we develop with our hiring managers as we work together to find the perfect fit for their opening. Hiring someone is a very personal process, outside of making sure the skill sets are a fit for the job.

The end result of all of this, was that we made a great placement and our candidate is thrilled and the company has a great new employee for a key position. I truly feel like we have given this search our all and our client is better off because of the work of our recruiter. At this point, the million dollar question is whether the client is happy and I guess we won't find out unless we get an email........