Los Angeles Tech Writer

I am not a technical recruiter, but I surely do appreciate the ones I've known. I certainly rely on them as a source of contract technical writing assignments. So in my quest to make myself more known as an active candidate, I decided to see what bright ideas might come from reading up on how technical recruiters do what they do, the tools they use and how they think.

This led me into the fascinating world of recruitment blogs. Wow, what a vibrant community. One blog that really struck me was Tech Recruiter Los Angeles, technical recruiter Kevin Jenkins' recruiting blog that specializes in Los Angeles startup and growth stage software and internet technology companies.

First of all, I found his Attracting the best candidates to your job opportunity entry quite refreshing. I've been privileged to work for several clients who’ve thought outside the box, knowing I could provide an excellent result, though going in I was lacking a major software application requirement. In his article, Kevin explains why this can be such a good idea. You'll want to check it out.

Kevin has graciously agreed to answer some questions about tech recruiting that I hope technical job seekers will find helpful. This interview focuses on recruiting for full-time, direct hire positions, as opposed to filling contract positions, which is a completely different animal. As Kevin says, there is an enormous difference between a recruiter filling contract positions and finding great permanent employees for companies, but I think every job-seeker can find helpful information here.

Kevin, let’s start off with a little about the nuts and bolts of technical recruiting. When a client and recruiter have defined a job opportunity, what does a recruiter typically do first to find qualified candidates? For example, do recruiting agencies usually have their own database? What about talent acquisition services and other data mining services? Describe a typical scenario.

Thanks for the compliments!

Obviously, every recruiter has his own style. And I’m quite the contrarian in many ways. So your readers definitely shouldn’t interpret my process as Recruiting 101.

My typical search starts with my own personal database. My database is kept online at Top-Candidate™ which enables me - or anybody else for that matter - to search it using powerful search tools. I put my database online because web technologies enable functionality that is vastly superior to what can be done on the desktop. So in essence, I built my own proprietary recruiting tools. Those tools are now available for free, by the way, to all recruiters, managers and candidates at the Top-Candidate™ website.

Next, I send the job description to every candidate who looks like a possible match. And I phone those who look like a surefire match. In combination with working my database, I identify individuals to call who are part of my extensive network. These are not always candidates, but often personal contacts that are at a higher career level than the candidates I seek.

My logic in doing so is that they may have managed or mentored this type of candidate in the past. From this process, I’ll usually get additional names of passive candidates worth contacting. As far as job boards are concerned, I don’t use them very often since my own database and network are high quality and usually yield adequate results.

The next phase of the search is intensive telephone screening. My goal always is to narrow my list of candidates down to the top 5 finalists which I will present to the manager. One of these finalists will get the job 95% of the time.

You’re probably interested in knowing what I look for in a candidate while screening. Aside from the obvious things like communication skills, salary history and reasons for changing jobs, I mostly want to feel satisfied that the candidate can do the job and is highly motivated to do it.

Motivation is extremely important to me. So I typically discuss the candidate’s past achievements, teamwork and long term career objectives. Then I’ll try to anchor these accomplishments with some of the key responsibilities of the position I’m recruiting for.

I think past performance is the best predictor of future success. So I’m looking for some correlation between the candidate's past accomplishments and what's expected in the new position. From my perspective, a job opportunity is ultimately a challenge. My job is to introduce managers to candidates who can meet their challenge. That's the core of good recruiting.

Next, I present my candidates to the manager. They usually want to see all five so I set up the interviews. Then I thoroughly prep both the candidates and the manager for the interviews. Preparation is the key! Following the interviews, I debrief both sides to get a feel for where everybody stands.

I typically learn very quickly who the manager wants to move forward with. Then I work with both sides on negotiating the offer. This process usually goes very smoothly because compensation is never the primary factor for the candidates I represent. I don’t work with candidates who are motivated by money for a number of reasons. So, the deal invariably gets done and we get a start date.

After that, I stay in close contact with the candidate and manager for the first couple weeks to ensure that the new hire is settling in well. Thereafter, monthly contact is usually sufficient. That’s pretty much my process in a nutshell.

Following this line, is it true that many direct hire jobs never make it onto the online job boards (Monster, Dice, etc.)? Can any general characterization be made about jobs posted on job boards, such as that they are difficult to fill due to unusual or special client requirements? What factors generally determine whether an opportunity is posted on a job board?

There’s a pretty substantial hidden job market out there. Many companies have openings that only the recruiters they work with are privy to. You’ll often find these jobs posted on company websites and nowhere else.

Without a doubt, fewer jobs are being posted on the popular job boards these days. I think businesses are beginning to realize that the ROI for doing so is pretty dismal. Just because you emphasize certain requirements doesn’t mean candidates who don’t fit them won’t apply anyway. So what you get is an avalanche of unqualified resumes and you end up wasting a tremendous amount of time looking for needles in haystacks. Time is money. And ad space is money. Needless to say, it's not the best utilization of an HR budget.

However, by far the most important reason for not posting ads is that companies are ultimately looking for superstars. And that’s logical. But superstar candidates don’t apply to job ads. They never have and they never will. The best candidates will always apply directly after having carefully researched a company. Or they’ll be "discovered" by a recruiter.

So, unless you're a well known company with a strong employer brand, the best candidates will not be knocking on your door. You'll need a good recruiter to bring them to you.

How commonplace is it for recruiters to receive a hundred or more resumes for each online job posting? What are your thoughts on the ideas that: 1. The applicant has approximately 10 seconds to capture the recruiter's attention with his resume, and 2. That the most relevant information on a resume must be in the top left-hand quadrant of the first page? How do you evaluate a resume?

The actual volume of resumes varies depending on the skills required. However, the more important consideration is that about 98% of the resumes received in response to a job posting aren’t even close to matching the requirements. I never pay to post job ads anywhere. It’s a big waste of money. That's not recruiting anyway, and certainly not what my clients pay me for. They can post ads themselves.

You asked about resume format. As far as I’m concerned any format is okay as long as it’s clean and the candidate has paid close attention to the details. I wouldn’t recommend getting too caught up in the psychology of content placement.

As for my personal evaluation style, it ultimately depends on the position and the manager I’m working with. If I know the manager is picky about a degree or stability, that’s the first thing I look for.

I also look carefully at what companies the candidate has worked for in the past. Most specifically, if they have a large shop or small shop background. Not that one is any better or worse than the other. It just tells me a lot about the candidate. For example, candidates from small shops have usually worn a lot of hats and will be better fits for positions that require rolling up your sleeves and helping out where needed. Candidates from large shops are usually more specialized.

Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule. Also, I can get a good idea about a candidate’s technical background from the companies they’ve worked for because I know what technologies most companies in the area are using.

When evaluating a resume, the one area I do tend to ignore is the skills summary, where you get a bunch of bullet points of skills used. That doesn’t tell me anything. I need to see where and how a candidate has used those skills in the past. This should be shown in the responsibilities and accomplishments details for each employer.

I’m not saying a skills summary shouldn’t be included in the resume, I’m just saying whatever is in the summary needs to be expounded upon in more detail throughout the resume. Otherwise, reading a resume becomes an exercise in reading between the lines. That’s fine for a functional resume where it’s impossible to describe everything you’ve done.

But if you’re a technical person and I can’t tell from your resume where and how you’ve used the technologies the position you’re applying for requires, the resume gets tossed.

Because technical recruiters generally are not themselves IT professionals, what advice can you give candidates about how to describe their technical abilities so as not to render the recruiter unconscious with "techno-babble?"

I don’t recommend working with a recruiter who doesn’t specialize in IT. Not because of the communication barrier between the candidate and recruiter, but because of the communication barrier between the recruiter and manager.

How can a recruiter who has no clue about technology understand a manager’s needs comprehensively enough to qualify the right types of candidates for them? Finding the perfect job is hard enough without complicating the process by involving recruiters who are totally clueless about IT.

These next questions have to do with how a technical candidate can gain optimum online exposure - there are varied opinions amongst recruiter bloggers on the merits of posting resumes and profiles on job boards and social networking sites, checking the job boards daily and et cetera. So specifically:

What is the value of having one's resume and completed work profile posted on major and specialty job boards? Is “more” better?

Posting a resume on the popular job boards is fine if massive exposure is the objective. In some cases that makes sense. In others it doesn’t. For example, it makes perfect sense for contractors or freelancers who work on a project-to-project basis. It also makes sense for entry-level candidates. They have little professional experience so they really need to cast a wide net in order to expose themselves to as many companies as possible.

And it’s actually a necessity for less stable, skilled or educated candidates who experience a high rejection rate due to these common disqualifying factors. They too need as much exposure as possible.

Conversely, I see no practical value at all in using job boards for candidates who are highly skilled, tenured and educated. These individuals can find a job in any economic climate in a New York minute.

Do you think the current emphasis on a candidate developing and utilizing his social networking presence is correct or over-valued? What about “personal branding?”

Social networks are not over-valued. They’re a highly valuable tool but they do require a lot more effort than posting a resume to a career site. That’s because they are about relationship building and like any relationship, it takes time to cultivate them. I don't think active job seekers have the patience for this. However, social networks are the perfect tool for passive candidates.

I believe strongly in personal branding. We’re all our own personal services corporations and that’s true whether you work for yourself as a contractor or if you’re employed. Anybody who’s serious about his professional image needs to develop a compelling personal brand. In my opinion, the pillars of a great personal brand are having a niche area of expertise combined with a clearly defined mission and reinforcing set of values.

The professional landscape is far more mosaic these days than uniform like it used to be. In other words, we’re starting to see far more demand for specialists than for generalists. This is especially true in the consulting space. That’s why differentiating yourself through a compelling personal brand is so important. To not take personal branding seriously would be incredibly negligent.

Can you give an example of this, perhaps using yourself?

Sure. My mission is very straightforward. I maximize team performance through superior people. That simple sentence epitomizes the value I offer to managers and candidates. For managers, it means I bring them superior people who'll ensure their team always performs optimally. For candidates, it means I bring them unique opportunities that enable them to work on innovative projects that represent the right level of challenge. Because of my mission, managers shine in front of their top executives and candidates wake up every morning to a rewarding job.

Obviously, a mission is baseless without the values that support it. My mission is WHAT I do. My values are HOW I do it. They are my professional guidelines. Values should always be evolving. Currently, I have four core values.

Singular Focus – This is so important, yet pretty difficult to do, because I'm often tempted by opportunities to earn money recruiting in areas outside of my area of specialization. I have to turn them down to remain faithful to my value of singular focus. The reason that I believe being a specialist is so important is that it significantly increases the value I offer to IT managers and candidates. Because I'm an IT specialist, I understand "intimately" the issues unique to technical people. I understand the career trajectory of IT professionals. I understand the challenges managers face in motivating team members or getting their teams to perform optimally.

I don't believe I would be as valuable as a recruiter if I didn't strive every day to maintain this singular focus. While I specialize in IT, you can see that my specialization is actually significantly narrower than IT in general. For example, I work exclusively with startup and growth stage software and internet technology companies in Los Angeles.

Therefore, I don't recruit for large, established companies. I don't recruit for positions outside of Los Angeles. I don't recruit for companies that don't have a software or internet product. Doing so would divert my time and energy away from my area of specialty and those who benefit most from it.

Purposeful Listening – Not enough recruiters do this. Listening is the ultimate communication skill and at the core of first class consulting. By truly understanding people's problems I'm better able to help solve them. And doing that effectively is the primary value proposition of engaging a recruiting consultant. Because purposeful listening is a core value of mine, I discipline myself daily to be an excellent listener and the people I work with clearly appreciate it.

Intelligent Questioning – This may sound contrary to Listening, but it's actually not. In fact, intelligent questioning is a logical byproduct of purposeful listening. It's only after one has listened well that he or she can truly ask compelling questions.

After listening intently to managers and candidates, I always engage in diagnostic-driven questioning. When done correctly, the individuals questioned learn so much more about their situation, and more importantly, their need, than they were aware of previously. Really, purposeful listening and intelligent questioning are Yin and Yang. As far as I'm concerned, mastering both skills is an essential part of being a great recruiter.

Relationship Building – This may seem obvious. But while everybody says they do it, very few actually do! It's an incredibly difficult discipline to master. That's why you see a lot of CRM [customer relationship management] tools out there. They attempt to automate customer relationships. Of course, large companies with thousands of customers have no choice but to implement these tools.

But the reality is that no relationship, business-to-customer included, can be automated any more than a relationship with your mother or father can. True relationships are built on a foundation of trust and respect, none of which can be done automatically since it requires human interaction.

For me, relationship building means staying in touch with candidates I've placed to ensure they're adjusting well to their new positions. It means staying in touch with candidates I didn't place just to show I'm still keeping an eye open for opportunities on their behalf. It means staying in touch with managers to see how the candidates I've placed with them are working out.

It means truly being a partner to managers and foreshadowing their needs. It means so many things, but I think you get the idea. Ultimately, recruiting is a professional services business, more so than any other type of business, so fostering relationships is inextricable from the value proposition.

Great illustration, Kevin. Now, to carry on with how a candidate can gain maximum exposure, of what value to recruiters is resume distribution (impolitely called "resume blasting") – using a service to send one's resume to dozens or hundreds of recruiters? Does it "say" anything to recruiters about the potential candidate?

I have a negative opinion of resume blasting. I don’t use these types of services. Why would I want to work with a candidate who has sent his resume to a million other recruiters?

What are your top 5 recommendations for the most effective ways for a tech candidate to market himself?

1. Choose a good recruiting partner and work exclusively with them. A candidate will get a recruiter’s best effort when the recruiter knows he has exclusivity with a top candidate. It also gives candidates more control of the process by knowing where their resume is being submitted and what the status is at all times.

2. Never blindly submit resumes. The worst thing a job seeker can do is upload his resume to a company’s online database. If the company is worth working for there will be so many resumes in the queue ahead of it that a timely response is unlikely. Furthermore, the personnel department doesn’t know anything about technology and is therefore poor at qualifying a technical resume.

3. Develop a compelling personal brand. We discussed the importance of this already.

4. Start a Blog. If a job seeker is a halfway decent writer with valuable knowledge to share, then starting a blog is a great way to get noticed. They should link their blog to their resume and include their blog URL in their resume contact info.

5. Be a smart networker. Create profiles on all of the popular professional and social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook, and ensure that your personal brand is consistent between them all. Join groups related to your areas of expertise and actively network with those members.

From my perspective as a technical writer, as long as software, hardware and electronics continue to be produced, there will be a need for documentation. The same would seem to be true of IT specialists - corporate systems will always need administration, support and upgrading. What is your outlook for the IT and software/hardware job markets for the next 12-18 months?

I’m optimistic about the outlook for IT. In fact, many companies are increasing their IT budgets because they realize that better IT services, systems and applications can help them radically cut costs in other areas by streamlining and automating other business processes.

In closing, is there a question I haven't asked that you wanted to answer? What would you like readers to know about you?

Well, I don't try to be all things to all people. I do, however, hope that I can make a profound impact on the careers of those IT managers and candidates who fall into my recruiting niche.

On a final note, I wish everybody a healthy and prosperous new year and I thank you for taking the time to read this article. Most importantly, I want to thank you, Janna, for doing this article and for thinking of me as a person worthy of interviewing.

Thank you, Kevin!