Strategies for Implementing Career Goals and Ambitions via Social Networks



Photograph by Ron Henggeler (http://www.ronhenggeler.com/)



Career oriented professionals understand how to set and achieve business accomplishment via strategy and long-term commitment to achieving that goal. The same tenacity and flexibility used to achieve a business solution should be applied to developing and achieving your desired career goals and ambitions. Conquering interim steps and staying focused on a career path helps to build self-esteem, affirms your ability to achieve short-term goals, and strengths your resolve to achieve the long-term goals you expect of yourself. Being focused and knowing what you want to achieve help you to deal with rejection as well as help you to decide if an employment offer is really ideal for you.

An organization creates a business strategy in order to leverage company capabilities, talent and resources in ways that result in leverage over competitors and creative ways of doing business. This competitive advantage depends on the company’s management being able to attract and retain the talent necessary to achieve the goals of the business strategy. How the company is perceived in the marketplace can determine if your company attract, acquire and retain the necessary talent or whether that talent goes to a competitor (Phillips & Gully, 2009)



Career focused individuals should have career ambitions that are more than just an objective written at the top of a resume. A resume documents your past career history. The evolution of the resume is your social network profile URL. Your social network profile should be much more than just a copy-and-paste of your resume along with a few nicely worded recommendations from past employers, peers, and coworkers. Many organizations are limiting employees in their abilities to provide recommendations or a reference (whether written or verbal) for current or past employees or consultants, so now is the time to get as many relevant recommendations and reference postings you can. We might find employees working for some major corporations chasing after senior level consultants and freelance professionals, in order to get recommendation postings on their LinkedIn profile.



Posting a history of attendance of local MeetUP or LinkedIn networking events demonstrates your commitment to a particular technology, industry standard, or particular skill or talent. Posting a list of books you’ve read or are currently reading in your LinkedIn profile shows prospective employers you’re intelligent and an active reader of relevant and topical reference material. You can post writing examples, portfolio, PowerPoint presentations, technical documentation, and whitepapers via Box.net. Social network profiles can be connected to Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, and Wordpress – providing prospective employers a venue to view your social profile, contribution to online communities, blogging, social branding, and how you choose to portray yourself to the world via social networks and social media.



Employment websites like DICE and JobFox are building website-based social networks providing tools to provide a good overview of candidates experience and capabilities. JobFox’s “Interactive View” provides candidates with a marketing URL used to give prospective employers a more complete picture of who the candidate is and what that person has to offer an employer. JobFox feels suggests candidates:

• Let employers know who you know by sharing a subset of your social network connections, highlighting your industry connections and showing how you are linked to customers, vendors and business partners

• Impress employers with real-world examples of what you've done by including samples of your work (files or other websites) and linking them to the other information in your Interactive View

• Give employers a more complete picture of who you really are by adding answers to the Q&A section of your About Me page

View and an example of a JobFox “About Me” page at: http://www.jobfox.com/people/sarahSmith

Social networks should be more than just an online resume. A social media profile demonstrates (over time) your commitment to your career goals and ambitions as well as your success with past career achievements. Do not let your profile seem like your career was something that just happened. Make sure your profile demonstrates your ability to establish career goals in 2011 – so that it can later on document your ability to achieve those career goals and ambitions three-to-five (3-5) years down the road.



Reference:

Harris, P., JobFox Customer Service Email Broadcast. View and an example of a JobFox “About Me” page at: http://www.jobfox.com/people/sarahSmith



Phillips, J.M. and Gully, S.M., Staffing to Support Business Strategy (2009), Summary viewed via Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) Publications Website: http://www.shrm.org/Publications/Books/Pages/StaffingBusinessStrategy.aspx Read More!

Sticker Shock When it Comes to Recruiting Costs (even in this economy)

About a month ago, a customer called us at SayHired, stating that he needed help with filling some of his commission-only sales positions. He wanted to find out what our recruiting services entailed and how much they cost. I explained to him that we focus solely on the sorting of resumes and phone screening of candidates, and that the prices ranged from $45 to $75 per phone screen. He let me know that he didn't need help with sorting through resumes or calling candidates, but instead needed help in sourcing (finding) new candidates.

When I let him know that the types of services he was requesting are what traditional contingency recruiting agencies charge anywhere from $10,000-$30,000 per position to fill, he couldn't believe it. "How can recruiting be so expensive?" he asked me.

This question conjured up memories of my recruiting agency days when I would get this same, astonished reaction when I would tell clients how much our full life-cycle recruiting services cost. They just couldn't believe how expensive it was to use a recruiting agency. Even companies that prefer to bring recruiting in-house by using a contract recruiter generally end up shelling out anywhere from $70-$100 per hour for a solid recruiter to work on anywhere from 8-12 positions at a time. These are the prices of hiring a high-flying IT consultant, not a recruiter, right?

Wrong. The biggest reason for the expensive costs associated with recruiting is that because the recruiting industry is very cyclical (i.e. companies are generally on either big hiring sprees or big lay-off sprees, but rarely in the middle), recruiters need to be able to make all of their money in the narrow window when companies are actually hiring. Also along these lines, you almost always see a spiked demand for recruiters by companies all at the same time (during periods of economic growth and hiring), which of course leads to an imbalance in supply and demand, and thus driving costs up.

Secondly, with specific reference to contingency staffing firms, recruiters there only get paid for positions that they actually fill. They could end up working on 10 positions and only fill 2 of them (through no fault of their own). So if they didn't charge high fees for the ones that they filled, they wouldn't make much money. In other words, there's a premium that a customer needs to pay for not having to pay unless a position actually gets filled. And given the uncertainty around the boom/bust cycles that recruiters go through, there needs to be some payoff at the end to make it worthwhile for professionals to stay in this industry.

There are of course many other reasons behind the fees charged by recruiters and recruiting agencies, but hopefully this is a good starting point for understanding what's baked into typical recruiting pricing. Read More!