Technology Recruiting Trends

Online recruiting has come a long way from the days of bulletin board systems, résumé uploads, jobs via email, and candidate matching tools. There's a whole world of recruiting solutions that are just surfacing, and most HR and recruiting professionals aren't even aware of them.

In this article I discuss the movement from offline to online recruiting and a range of new recruiting tools that are influencing the future, plus some simple things you can do to make your own job listings easier to find online.

Let's start with a brief retrospective. In the not too distant past, if you wanted to hire someone, you'd sort through recent unsolicited résumés, run a classified ad in the local paper, post a referral notice on the company bulletin board, and call it a day. If you had an executive-level candidate, perhaps you spent $5,000 to place a display ad in the local daily or weekly business rag or a couple of national trades. If you were really desperate, you probably dialed a headhunter and prepared the boss for the bad news - the headhunter's commission.

But with the advent of the Internet, recruiters learned how to upload their job listings and ship them off to the niche and mega job boards. These tools gave recruiters access to a national bank of résumés­ - and broadcast a job posting to both passive and active job seekers. Résumé scanning technologies provided a way for recruiters to build their own candidate pools based on keyword searches.

Online Recruiting--Take Two

Then something happened. Résumés started getting stale, jobs that got posted were bottom of the barrel, and the buzz about online job searches began to quiet.

The Internet is all about creating a WOW experience, so when something Internet starts to flat line, the Internet gurus rethink the game and reengineer business models. The same is true of online recruiting, an industry with its own evolutionary cycle.

Take a simple example that's close to home. In many companies, the HR and recruiting group has won its own space on the corporate Internet. Your corporate recruiting site allows you to post jobs, email candidates and collect resumes. Ostensibly, candidate could find your jobs when they looked for them.

Then along came Google to change all of that.

On Google, the top 20 job and/or career keywords represent 10 million searches each month alone. If your job listing doesn't come up in a search result, fewer candidates are going to find you. So how do you get around this?

Optimize Your Job Listings

Job Content Optimization can help you increase the effectiveness of your own online recruiting Website by making your job listings more relevant to big search engines. Optimizing your job listings isn't brain surgery. Once you know a few simple tricks, you're well on your way to creating search-engine-friendly job postings.

Search engines zoom in on keywords, but how those keywords are presented in your job listing makes all the difference. Simply put, you have to make sure that your job listings are well written. There are a number of ways to optimize them:

Use common words, instead of your corporate code words.

You have to use words that people will search on. If you post a job for a Mechanical D/D Engineer, how is anyone going to find you? Better to use plane English, i.e., Mechanical Design and Drafting Engineer.

Expand and define your acronyms.

Many managers and recruiters will use acronyms to describe their requirements, assuming that everyone will use them when searching for jobs on the major sites. Terms such as "DBA", "SOX", "VOIP", and "PM" are common amongst recruiters, but candidates will also search for the expanded terms - and you don't want to miss your chance to get in their results.

Remember - don't avoid using acronyms, but always include the associated definitions to enhance your chances. Examples would be "We need an Oracle DBA (Database Analyst), to assist us with our SOX (Sarbanes Oxley) project, who will serve as the PM (Project Manager)." This would insure that all your acronyms would have expanded terms that will be indexed in the job search engines.

Use multiple job titles to describe the same job.

One company may call a person an account manager, but another company may have a different label for the same job, such as account executive, sales representative, inside sales rep, or the like. Explore how other companies label similar jobs by doing searches on the major job boards, then include those job titles in your job listings with a simple phrase, such as: "This job is similar to an account executive or a sales representative." That way someone searching for any one of the three job titles has a better chance of finding you.

Not Monster ... indeed

If your jobs make it into Google searches, they'll probably make it to some of the new job search engines, such as indeed, SimplyHired.com, or Google Base.

This new breed of job search engine aggregates the job listings from independent niche sites, company sites, classified job listings, and mega boards. The search results are broad and deep, encapsulating in one search what 12 or more searches across different job boards might produce.

Although getting listed in the search results is free for many of these job search engines, some offer sponsored job listings and keyword advertising. The downside is that the branding is new, so many job seekers don't know the sites exist.

Social Networking Anyone?

Another innovation is a thing called "social networking." Simply put, social networking is like a Rolodex on steroids. This pumped-up Rolodex connects you to all the Rolodexes that are connected to other ones. For HR professionals and recruiters, social networking "technofies" the old fashioned method of networking candidates into a job. The recruiter announces a job, and word spreads to everyone in the network.

LinkedIn, perhaps the most popular example of social networking tools, lets a recruiter broadcast a job through a network of linked contacts.

For example, if you have four people in your immediate network, you might expand your broader network to 24 people at 15 companies. Then if someone on your network knows someone else who is interested in the job, you get a direct introduction via email to that person. The downside is that it takes time and persistence to connect yourself, and recruit your contacts into the system.

These recruiting advancements represent the continued evolution of our profession. While awareness is the first step towards modifying your habits as a recruiter or HR group, taking initiative is how you enhance your staffing results. The key is to continually learn and adapt so that in the future you can proudly look back and nod your head knowingly when someone mentions Google, optimization, indeed, and Social Network Marketing. Ah, those were the days.

Doug Berg
Founder & CEO of http://www.hotgigs.com

Doug has a long history in the recruiting and staffing industry. He started in IT as the Director of IT for the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Doug then started his own IT consulting & staffing firm (Quantum Consulting) which he grew to over 75 consultants. In 1995 Doug sold his firm and founded techies.com which received over $100 million in venture capital and was voted the #1 IT career site by PC Week. Doug served as President and "Chief Techie." He architected not only the web strategy, but also assisted in rolling out techies.com's services to over 39 major markets.

Doug's national connections, passion for the staffing industry, and web smarts have brought him to architect and deploy the HotGigs On-Demand Staffing Exchange which he hopes will become the "Staffing Supply Chain" for corporate America.

Doug holds an honorary Doctorate Degree in Technology from Capella University, and is a national workforce expert.

The Cyber Security Recruiting Dilemma - A Contractor Solution For Cyber Warriors

In the cyber world everything happens quickly. New technology, new threats, new regulations and new players are constantly emerging and in order for the United States to compete and remain secure, qualified people are required - and we don't have them.

In a recent article entitled Cyberwarrior Shortage Threatens U.S. Security (by Tom Gjeltin, the author makes the following points:

· The United States is the most vulnerable country for cyber attacks.

· United States cyber defenses are not up to the challenge.

· The protection of U.S. cyber assets requires an "army" of cyber warriors but recruitment of that force is suffering. Conservative estimates are that at least 1,000 "cyberwarriors"

Not only are new candidates hard to find but existing agency personnel are leaving. This problem is beginning to be recognized by the community at large. This is a serious problem and the solution needs to include the private contractor community as well as direct hiring by government agencies. As a recent study concluded:

The ability of government agencies to fulfill their missions is in peril, requiring immediate and thoughtful attention to the recruitment, hiring and retention of talented IT professionals. Without the right people in the right jobs, our government's ability to accomplish its mission will be hindered by failing projects and high attrition rates. By investing in IT talent, government will ensure mission success and maintain a safe and prosperous nation. (Source ISSUE BRIEF | BUILDING AN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY WORKFORCE; Partnership for Public Service)

The United States Federal Government is remarkable successful in certain limited areas (e.g. defense and transportation) but recruiting cyberwarriors is clearly not in their core capabilities for a number of very good reasons:

· Cyber warriors are in high demand and the search process requires agile, innovative approaches. Government agencies are burdened with a great number of rules that inhibit the process.

· Government Employee hiring is notoriously slow. Turn around averages about 200 days and if high level clearances are required add about six months or 180 days to the process. Total time to recruit and hire a technically qualified person with required high level clearances (required by most of Cyber Command) - over 1 year.

· It is hard to change government employee status if requirements change or the employee fails to perform.

· Generally speaking government agencies don't expend effort on research and development required to keep up with technology and cyber attack strategy and tactics.

The above reasons are a part of the reasons that Government Cyber Security agencies (DHS and Cyber Command) look to contractors to supply cyberwarriors. Contractors add the innovation and facileness required to reduce the shortage for cyberwarriors. In addition, contractors add specific value in the following ways:

· Many contractors include aggressive recruiting in their business model and effectively use social networking for maximum job requisition exposure.

· Often, contractors recruit from existing staff, prior employees or through the use of social networking sites. These techniques are especially valuable when searching for candidates with high level security clearances. The turnaround on job requisitions averages 30-60 days.

· Each contract issued by a government agency has termination for convenience/cause clauses. The net effect is that if the government decides that it no longer needs or wants the cyberwarrior(s) provided - the agency can terminate the contract and fire the contractor. This gives the respective agency tremendous flexibility.

· Contractors generally engage in internally funded research and development (IR&D) and pass this on to government agencies in the form of better skilled experts and cyberwarriors.

Are Contract Employees More Expensive?

The answer is no.

Recently, contractor compensation has come under administration and media criticism as a waste of taxpayer dollars. Contractors have been portrayed as having an incestuous relationship with key agencies like those in the Intelligence community (IC). This criticism is unfair and not based on facts:

When contracts respond to agency Request for Proposal they must supply forward pricing and identify three levels of cost in detail: direct labor, fringe benefits (health insurance, paid time off, matching social security, workers compensation, unemployment insurance etc.), General and Administrative (Rent, office staff, executive salaries etc.) To the total of all the costs is added a "fee" which represents profit for the contractor (6-8%). A "fully burdened" hourly rate is calculated.

During the RFP process a Basis of Estimate (BOE) is prepared showing the number of hours required for a particular task (defined by the agency). To this estimate is multiplied the fully burdened hourly rate to determine the cost. If the contractor produces rates that are too high, it may lose the contract or, if it wins and costs are less that estimated, it must return to the government the excess. An agency called DCAA (Defense Contract Audit Agency.

As regards the elements of the fully burdened hourly rate the following should be noted:

· Direct labor rates (the amount of salary actually paid to the employee) of federal employees have increased dramatically as compared to contractor employee salaries. Some estimates are the government employee salaries are 25% higher.

· Generally speaking contractor employees are more flexible for overtime if required.

· Federal employee benefits are more lucrative than contractor benefits including separate health care (richer than the recent public health care bill passed), pension (richer than social security), greater paid time off and other benefits.

· The cost per hour per employee for Federal workers does not include any burden for General and Administrative costs - these heavy burdens for office space, utilities, office equipment and other support expenses are paid by the tax payer.

· The only area that use of Federal employees avoids is the contractor profit fee but when one considers the higher pay, benefits and the tax payer subsidized G&A costs, this is a relatively small item at 6-8%.

The bottom line is that the Federal Government needs highly qualified cyberwarriors and it needs them now in order to protect the welfare of the nation. When one compares this specialized need, and the need to protect the success of its cyber missions, the best choice is contractor provided employees.

Jon M. Stout is Chief Executive Officer of Aspiration Software LLC. Aspiration Software LLC is an Information Technology/Cyber Security services provider focused on the Intelligence Community (IC). For more information about Cyber Security and Employment Opportunities in the Intelligence Community go to http://aspirationsoftware.com