HireCentrix - ViewPoint

Did you ever have a love/hate relationship…Can’t live with them…can’t live without them? Sure, most of us have. What makes this even more interesting is that I am talking about your ATS (Applicant Tracking System)?

On one hand, resume parsing is a miracle and saves us countless minutes of data entry time (which translates into more phone time). On the other hand, I often sit there and think, “Who does this system think it is? What does it know about my candidates!”

My experience has proven to me that most recruiters I interact with these days are simply robbing a living. They take more than they deserve, they play games to get and keep monies for hires in any creative way they can concoct. With the economy and job market the way it is today I don't know if these people are more akin to the negative stigma associated with used car salesmen or human traffickers. Either way, I - as well as everyone I speak to today about the topic - find them to be an unsavory breed and a necessary evil.

I have yet to find a reliable recruiter that lives up to their promises, delivers quality, invests effort into their placements and has any loyalty to anything other than filling their own purse.

The headline caught my attention…

One Third of Employers Worldwide Cannot Find Qualified Talent, Survey Finds.

NEWSFLASH – It is NOT a candidate problem! The candidates are out there, waiting to become part of your organization. I actually see the problem as two-fold and both lie squarely on the shoulders of the hiring organization.

A few years ago, I read a good article by Canadian SEO Melanie Nathan called "The Reciprocity Link Building Method" in which she outlined a technique she sometimes used to build up high-quality links for her clients' websites. The gist, as I understood it, was to first find a website that would be good for your client's site to link to.

Over the past several weeks we have listened to the rhetoric coming out of Washington, DC about how this action or that would lead to job killing legislation from the people we elected to represent us at the federal level. We further have over the past several years witnessed an ever growing level of unemployment in this country and also in countries around the globe. 

As underemployment continues to increase, more and more talented people are turning to the classified sections of their newspapers. At ISI this fact was impressively demonstrated a few weeks ago, when a single advertisement brought more than 300 responses from all over the United States----and a few from as far away as Germany and the Netherlands.

With so much interest focused on the Help Wanted columns, I’d like to comment on two words often included in job advertisements: Degree Required The frequent absurdity of these two words first struck me when, not long ago, I paused in front of a company bulletin board at ISI. One notice announced an opening within ISI.