i’m looking for a job in .. wait, what?
visit a company’s website and look at their ‘careers’ page. see if their site looks anything like the image above. is this really the face of recruiting we want our organizations to have?
too often organizations use the same method of finding and acquiring talent. write a job requisition which probably says something along the lines of, “must have good communication skills. must work well as part of a team or alone.” (is there a different way to work than in teams or alone? aren’t you just asking people to be able to work at that point?) then you post that requisition to a massive database that has an interface like the one above and hope that it gets a positive hit on it and you have a collection of resumes you can sort through and pick the best one.
wow. that totally sucks.
instead, maybe look at local universities’ websites and find professors’ pages for their classes, downloaded the syllabus, and figure out where those classes are. then have someone on campus go and talk to the students who are in those classes—as they walk between classes, maybe grab lunch together—and see what their career aspirations are. if they have something lined up after college. if they’d be interested in taking on an internship with your organization.
when going to professional conferences, talk to the best breakout session presenters and gauge their current job satisfaction. meet them for drinks at the end of the day at the hotel bar and talk about motivations and frustrations. talk about the kind of environments they’d most enjoy working in.
you won’t catch all fish in this manner, but i think you’d find the quality of the fish you do catch is a lot better. what if instead of having a terrible search engine, we actually put a real face on corporate recruiting?