Twitter Haiku

Never has so much
Effort been expended by
So many for naught

InMail

I’ve been too busy to indulge myself here lately but I just had to stop and take a complaint break. I can’t believe that LinkedIn has the gall to put a $10 price tag on these stupid InMails. I know it is not just me and how I write them because I ask lots of others. The success rate, defined by me as even getting any acknowledgement including a decline, is about 10%.

I doubt anyone is dumb enough to pay that price but it’s frustrating that they cost at all and they don’t do for me as well as a plain old email.

While I am complaining, let’s throw in the beta of LinkedIn Signal. You can’t use it on Internet Explorer so I had to download Chrome just to find out it is barely anything at all. I thought I’d get a filter that would allow me to turn off the news/RSS feeds on the 70% of my LinkedIn network that I don’t want to see. THAT’S the one thing they should be trying to sell me. C’Mon guys!!

You Send Me

I thought it might be better to start this pressure-release mini-rant with a nice Sam Cooke song title from the year of my birth instead of pasting in a picture of Lou Ferrigno in green paint which is closer to how I feel right now.

I should actually have said You re-Send Me. I am just getting REALLY weary of people I send information to asking me to send it again. I have let myself become known as ‘the guy who knows how to organize and find his information’. That’s a good thing until I find I have become that for everyone else too.

I am pretty sure that my kids,wife,candidates,clients friends and other associates don’t even bother to look for stuff anymore. They just ask me to send it again.

I AM pretty damned good at it. Most of the time I can have it sent before they finish asking for it. So, why crab about it then? Well…1 or 2 requests a day from 1 person would not be so bad but when the total is about 10 or so, there comes a time when I just have to stop and bitch about it.

Storage is basically free now. My latest PC came with a 1 terabyte hard drive. Most people do not know what a terabyte is…and the real truth is that most people don’t have enough truly useful information to fill a wallet.

Whether you have an old 2 drawer file cabinet or access to God’s memory please learn to keep track of it. Unless, of course, you are my paying client. In that case, I’ll send you the damned resume every hour on the hour if you ask me nicely.

If you need something during the 6.5 hours I sleep…try using the SEARCH function just once…it is pretty easy and it doesn’t stop every few weeks to complain.

How Many Times is Enough?

Something made me think of this today. A couple years ago a potential candidate asked me something like “Can’t you take a hint?” after a dozen or so attempts to reach him. “When do you stop trying?” he said. My answer was “When this happens.”

I said sometimes it takes a dozen and sometimes it takes 3 dozen and sometimes I actually do move on and try someone else. Generally though, when I do reach someone after multiple attempts (note I didn’t say ‘calls’ anymore ) it’s about a 50/50 split between reactions like above and people who are glad we kept trying. Maybe even better than 50/50.

So I have no idea how many times is enough. How could I? I know the circumstances under which I answer my own phone and door and email. Sometimes it depends on the mood or the need for whatever I think they might be offering. Sometimes I don’t answer because I can’t get to it. I have to operate as though I know they want to talk about whatever it is I am calling about but it has to be the right time,place and mode (call,email,txt,meeting,whatever).

It’d be much easier if there were some way to let people know I’ll keep at it. Then the ones who yell ‘Can’t you take a hint?’ might politely say ‘No’ at the beginning and save themselves some time.

Gotta’ go, phone’s ringin’ and I think it is someone I might be in the mood to speak with…

Fun with LinkedIn Groups

Not many people will ‘get’ this but time is too tight to explain a lot more. The guy who responded to my post sent me an unsolicited resume years ago. I did what I could then which wasn’t much. But when I needed a simple bit of advice years later I got nothing for 6 or 8 emails and calls until I posted in public that the reqs are ‘fake’. One of the people posting the reqs actually told me they were fake. The rest don’t understand what fake means…No hard feelings. Just frustrating. Here’s my posting and what ensued.

NASIC ATEP Candidate

If I read right this is the perfect place to ask if any recruiters have an “in” to a client on this contract. Everything I find says all the reqs we see are fake and there’s no real money applied to them. I know a guy who’d be perfect and would love to be in Dayton. He wants it so much he’ll probably even see this. We have worked for close to a year and had no luck. This guy is worth 2 or 3 fees. PHD,Algorithm Dev. MASINT CIPoly.

Dave,There are 3 ATEP primes Ball, NG and GD, all have the same job ads out they are not fake, its just everyone of the primes and the subs post the same positions because they are all competing.

Wow, there you are… Maybe I sent those other messages to a dead email address? I guess ‘fake’ is a strong term but I got it straight from some of the people posting these things that they are just collecting resumes and the positions are not funded. People can’t get hired. So, independent of my role as a headhunter that qualifies as fake just like when Circuit City advertises a TV $100 cheaper than anywhere else but has none in stock. Maybe that’s why Circuit City is gone… In any event I hope you are doing well.

Do YOU know anyone who can actually staff that? I am so frustrated on my candidate’s behalf I am ready to ‘give him away’. Thanks,Dave..

Why Do We Need These Clones?

A good old-fashioned quick-rant. I like Yahoo Groups. It was the first version I saw for what I needed at the time. Now there’s Ning and Google and LinkedIn and many others doing what they do best but also trying to copy Yahoo Groups.

And Yahoo is messing with me too now. I got an invite from someone to share pictures and status updates and all the same crap that’s on FaceBook via Yahoo. Why do we need 10 different versions of FaceBook now? They won! Let it go! Just stick with your main Yahoo stuff.

Just yesterday I saw a new search aggregator that says it’ll search about 10 of those things at once for info on people.

Maybe we all need a ‘personal portal’ that will handle all these requests from all these entities so we can actually get something done.

Now I need to go update my LinkedIn status so it’ll go out on Twitter and FaceBook so people will know I have a new blog entry. If I send it on Plaxo and my Yahoo Profile it’ll also go to people who spoke to me once and could not care less. In fact, what I should really do is just call Tom,Ron and Clyde. Then the only three people who were going to read it anyway can say…he’s at it again…

LinkedIn question on Cold-Calling in the Intel Community

Well, since it is still too busy to write much I have to get good use of what I do write. Here’s a response to a question about whether Cold-Calling is effective in the intelligence community.

Cold calling is not as effective as it used to be. That could be due to me or the industry or a combination of factors. I still try it now and then but I try to let my ‘target’ know that I know he/she gets a lot of attention and that I still think it may benefit him/her in the long run to know us. I don’t even answer my own phone when I don’t know who it is and I am sympathetic to David Simpson’s plight. In fact, I recommend having an email address for that kind of thing. David’s challenge is to find someone on whom he can rely for advice. Someone who does well enough that he doesn’t need to push his own search at his candidates’ expense. It’s tempting to shut off all of them until you want to move but when that happens it pretty much takes me out of the game. I can sometimes refer people who are active and posted but job boards are not the way to meet people. My clients don’t need me to scour job boards for resumes and then upcharge them by about 600%.
Other methods, networking,referrals,advertising are also increasingly challenging. It’s the cost of all the information being so easy to access now. It’s what our clients expect us to do. They don’t care how we engage people they just care that we DO engage people. These days I’d expect to leave 10 or 15 emails and calls for someone like David just to let him know we ARE different as opposed to just saying it. The intel community has to be even more careful about whom they speak to than the general population. I just assume we’ll be looked at and checked out before we are responded to. Thanks, Bill for stimulating a great thread.
P.S. After hammering for 25 years I can usually offer someone who knows me to people if they want to check my references before calling me.

Fordyce Forum

If I don’t stop to do this at lunch I just won’t do it. It’s been busy for a few months so I have not been blogging. Q1 was busy because clients were all filling their shopping carts, getting in line, and then leaving the store. NOW, they seem to be lining up 5 deep to fight over the same “Code me Elmo” doll. And, it also seems the ‘commercial world’ is coming back. This has to be short because we have hot new clients who want us calling people which is always a good thing. Maybe I can get back to finding something to poke at on Fridays.

Until then, I just had to stop and reiterate something I said at the end of our Pinnacle Panel at the Fordyce Forum in Las Vegas last Friday. I told David Manaster, in slightly less detail, that I have really appreciated how the Fordyce name has been honored since ERE took over. Having read almost every issue of TFL since I started recruiting in 1985, I was very worried about what would happen when Paul Hawkinson left. It has been long enough now that I think the best comment I can pay is that it just doesn’t seem a lot different. I also want to thank ERE for making the last four Fordyce Forums happen. I have been to 3 of them and want to say, for anyone considering the next one, that there’s nothing like a Pinnacle Society meeting for me…but if I didn’t have them the Fordyce Forum comes pretty close. This year’s venue ,The M Resort and Spa, was a great place for this event and the content is stuff that just isn’t available elsewhere. The Fordyce brand remains dedicated to search and placement.  No other organization is that I know of. No offense intended NAPSers. I am a member and a CPC but just not into ‘staffing’. David, Todd, Kate, Amy and AmyBeth…oh and that Jeff character…Thank you VERY much for a great event!

Here Be Dragons

Here be dragons, indeed. It’s been a while since I stopped to write. It’s just so strange to be SO busy yet SO unproductive at the same time but I think I am starting to ‘figure it out’.  Actually, I take that back. I can’t actually figure out anything but I can certainly see enough of what’s going on to believe it is a good idea to cultivate some business with some clients  who appreciate what we do. 

We are not unappreciative of our clients and candidates. We always knew we were working in a very difficult space but the reasons for doing it no longer outweigh the reasons for working in niches that understand the value proposition our service in general has to offer.

When it comes down to discovering long-established and valued clients are doing things people should not do to each other and brand new prospective clients are warning us with the quote above it is probably time to make a move.

If one of my favorite quotes from another recruiter is “We have to have a common goal,total trust and care about each other as people”…yet from the current clientele in general (with noted exceptions) we get signals that only a chump would value a quote like this…then I sure don’t need more clients in that ‘community’.

The Best Jokes Are True

Ok…it’s funny, I am used to it. Absolutely does not bother me anymore but this happens so often. A guy walks into a bar… wait…wrong joke.

A guy calls a headhunter and says “Can you do for me what you did for my cubemate? Headhunter says, you mean get you 8 interviews,8 offers and a new job with a raise next week? Guy says yes,exactly. Headhunter gets him 5 interviews in one week. Guy says ‘don’t push me’ as he cancels all 5 interviews because he told his boss he was interviewing. Says to headhunter… I have no hard feelings because you pushed me (by doing what he asked for). In fact, I really appreciate it because I got a bonus and a raise for cancelling my interviews.

Headhunter says “Congratulations! Who can you introduce me to that I can also do this for? Guy says…Oh… I couldn’t do THAT to my FRIENDS…