Coaching For Recruiters And Recruiter Success Transcript

Insight on Coaching Coaching for Recruiters and Recruiter Success

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Confidential | May 12, 2008

Coaching for Recruiters and Recruiter Success Transcript

Time Speaker Transcript

00:11 Announcer Welcome to Insight on Coaching with host Tom Floyd.

In the next hour, Tom explores the many facets, flavors and sides of the emerging professional coaching field.

So get ready for this insightful conversation. here's your host, Tom Floyd.

00:28 Tom Floyd Hello everyone, and welcome to Insight on Coaching.

Insight on Coaching explores the many facets, flavors and sides of the emerging professional coaching field.

I'm Tom Floyd. I'm the CEO of Insight Educational Consulting, and your host for today's show.

Well, this week, our topic is Coaching for Recruiters and Recruiting Success.

We'll discuss the outlook for recruiters in 2008. We'll talk about the challenges that companies experience in finding candidates today. We'll talk about the challenges that recruiters face in their role. And, of course, we'll talk about how recruiters can benefit from coaching. In addition we’ll discuss how coaches are successfully working with recruiters today.

With me to explore this topic are four guests, and let me give you a quick run-down of who we have with us on the show today.

Our first guest, Arlene Hirsch, is a career coach, counselors and psychotherapist based in Chicago.

She provides executive coaching and outplacement counseling to many organizations including the American Bar Association, AT&T, Citibank, and others.

For the last 25 years, she has provided career advice and counseling to individuals with work-related concerns. Arlene is also the author of several best-selling career books including How to be Happy at Work, The Wall Street Journal Premier Guide to Interviewing and Job Search, and Career Checklist.

Arlene has also made numerous television and radio appearances as an expert on career and workplace issues including ABC, CNBC, WBEZ, WGN, and Lifetime Medical Television. Welcome to the show Arlene.

01:55 Arlene Hirsch Thank you Tom.

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01:56 Tom Floyd Our second guest, Mareza Larizadeh, is co-founder of Doostang, an online career community that connects people through personal relationships and affiliations.

The site has grown to over 290,000 users and is considered the pre-eminent site among the educated and talented group of 21-34 year-old knowledge workers. Doostang is to recruiting what NetJets is to air travel – the site focuses on the best jobs and the best candidates. If you need a junior engineer (or 20) go to Monster, if you need an Ivy League graduate to work in your company, then Doostang is your answer.

Companies from Goldman Sachs to Google are now using Doostang as a core part of their recruiting system. Doostang is also a TIME Magazine pick for one of five companies that can become “The Next YouTube.”

Welcome to the show Mareza.

02:43 Mareza Larizadeh

Thanks a lot Tom.

02:44 Tom Floyd Our next guest, Carrie Pryor, is a senior partner specializing in media, entertainment and technology for Korn Ferry International, the world's largest executive search firm.

Over a 19-year career, Carries has worked with senior executives and board members for multinational and early state companies from around the world. Well-known in the industry, Carrie has been quoted in Fortune magazine and CareerJournal for the Wall Street Journal online.

Carrie's recent projects include working with CEOs and top-level executives at Westwood One, America's largest radio network; Lodgenet, the leading provider of media and connectivity solutions for the hospitality and healthcare industries; Newsweek, Fox Mobile Entertainment/Jamba, Fox Interactive Media, Credit Suisse and Biz 360.

Welcome to the show Carrie.

03:30 Carrie Pryor Thank you Tom.

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03:31 Tom Floyd Our fourth guest, Katherine Simmons, has been helping executives manage their careers serving as a coach, mentor and career matchmaker since 1992.

Katherine has worked with chief executives at Fortune 1000 companies in good times and bad, helping them take charge of their careers, and reinvent themselves for both personal and professional growth. Drawing from her early years abroad and helping people connect at diplomatic cocktail parties, Katherine understood the power of professional networking.

For the past 16 years, she has been applying her corporate matchmaking skills to build NETSHARE, an online executive career management service.

She has been a guest on CNBC's Morning Call and quoted as a career management expert by the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and Smart Money magazines.

Welcome to the show Katherine.

04:17 Katherine Simmons

Thank you Tom.

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04:18 Tom Floyd Well as we do with each show, I like to start out by sharing some data that our research team pulled together to set the stage.

According to the March 30th, 2007 issue of business industry magazine Management Issues, four of out 10 employers face recruitment problems. Additionally, a survey by Manpower of almost 37,000 employers across 27 countries has found that 41 per cent employers are having difficulty filling specific roles due to a lack of available talent.

In November of 2006, employee referral programs were the No. 1 source of hires, according to a Society for Human Resource Management poll. However, a recent Gallop poll shows that 80 percent of workers find their jobs through their networks. That number has increased tremendously since 2004, when the Internet and employee referrals accounted for more than 61 percent of external hires in 2004, among companies surveyed by CareerXroads.

Now according to the online “How To” Guide on Executive Recruiting from Inc.com, the editors note that: “First the bad news. If you thought finding good entry-level help was tough in this troublesome talent market, try locating a chief technology officer, a director of operations, or even your successor. Recruiting is a challenge in this labor drought, and recruiting executives is even more taxing.”

Also listed in the Inc.com guide: A recent study by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. observes that "companies are about to be engaged in a war for senior executive talent that will remain a defining characteristic of their competitive landscape for decades to come." The report's disconcerting conclusion? Most companies are ill-prepared for the executive recruiting challenge ahead.

Well Arlene, I'd like to start with you first.

Big picture question: with the U.S. economy the way that it is so far, from your perspective, what's the overall outlook for the recruiting profession in 2008?

06:23 Arlene Hirsch I think I may have to actually defer that question to the recruiters, because my role is to work with the individual executives who are linking up with recruiters and who then use recruiters as part of their arsenal of job search tools.

06:43 Tom Floyd Okay. Well, let me redirect that question then.

Carrie, I'm going to turn to you, same question: from your perspective, with the U.S. economy the way that it is so far, what's the overall outlook for the recruiting profession in 2008?

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06:58 Carrie Pryor I think it's a little bit schizophrenic, but overall it's actually quite good because the main factor is, what you mentioned with McKinsey, and that is that there is a severe shortage of talent for the industries that are actually growing.

And whether it's the chief digital officer for an old media company or people that have skills on the internet ad sales front, those jobs are absolutely booming, and there is a shortage of people.

I think that certain other sectors we're seeing are quite strong.

The industrial sector overall in the United States is very strong.

Because of the value of the dollar being so low, the export of widgets to different parts of the world is going quite nicely.

I think we see that the weakest sector is probably consumer overall with some of the pharmaceutical hiring being under duress because of the consolidation in that sector.

08:01 Tom Floyd Any other areas where you think it's going to be particularly tough for recruiters in the U.S., for example banking, financial services, and high tech?

08:12 Carrie Pryor Financial services have pockets that are very much in trouble but others that are not. And that's kind of a wash.

But if you're trading mortgaged back securities of some sort, that's not a good place to be right at the moment.

08:29 Tom Floyd What are some of the best places to be at the moment in the financial services sector?

08:34 Carrie Pryor Once again, CTO, CIO, consumer-based lending that has a digital focus. That's all very strong. The credit cards seem strong.

But once again, that's not my sector. But what Korn Ferry is saying is that it's kind of holding its own.

08:55 Tom Floyd Understood.

Well one question that I definitely wanted to ask on the show today, and Carrie, I'll continue with you with this question.

09:04 Carrie Pryor Okay.

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09:05 Tom Floyd Is there really a labor drought as Inc.com puts it?

I mean, I personally see a lot of ongoing articles about the labor shortage.

But I sure do know a lot of people, especially those who have lost their jobs recently in banking, financial, and mortgage industries, were having a hard time finding a job.

From your perspective, big picture, is there indeed a labor shortage or is it just hype?

09:28 Carrie Pryor Yes to both. That's the problem. That's why I said it was schizophrenic.

And if you're a state-of-the-art person in the technology application in any sector, I think you're probably in pretty good shape.

But if you are three layers down in the organization and you're a customer-facing individual and there are cutbacks coming, I think you're pretty vulnerable whether you're working at a Circuit City or a Macy's given the performance of the pure retail sector.

So it just depends where you are in the economy right now.

10:13 Tom Floyd What's the best advice you would give for some of the folks that are in areas that are tougher than others?

If we take ourselves out of the recruiter's shoes and put ourselves in the jobseeker's shoes, what's the best advice for folks out there that are having a hard time right now?

10:30 Carrie Pryor I would do everything I could to retool myself.

Go to one of your local community colleges or organizations where you can get a training program in place and redesign your strengths and weaknesses.

I think there are a lot of resources out there that are available at these community colleges or state universities where you can do just that on a part-time basis in the evening, where hopefully you're still working and you can do it in the evening.

If you're not working, you could do it on a more concerted basis during the day and evening.

11:10 Tom Floyd So it sounds like one of the best things that folks can do is almost reinvent themselves—

11:14 Carrie Pryor [Interposing] Yeah.

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11:14 Tom Floyd --to a degree or at least expand their skill sets to include—

11:17 Carrie Pryor [Interposing] Absolutely. It's a better way of phrasing it.

11:17 Tom Floyd --some additional skills that are more desirable.

11:20 Carrie Pryor Absolutely right.

11:20 Tom Floyd Okay. Well Mareza, I'd like to turn to you next.

Another big picture question to kind of build upon the information in the Management Issues magazine that we shared.

From your perspective, why are so many employers facing recruitment challenges?


People that have gone to these good schools, who are a couple years out of college, there's always positions available for them.

So if someone maybe has lost his job in banking, then he will then be able to go into the media industry.

Doostang's sort of core demographic, the majority of 400,000 plus members now, sort of mid 20s, etcetera.

These are people who kind of know what they want to do but not really. So they're just jumping about all over the place, and hence, as I think Carrie said, it's a little bit schizophrenic.

So there's not a set number of people that you can go to and recruit from, because if the bankers have left their job and they hear banking is bad, then they'll probably go to another industry.

And right now, as of last week, we heard that Morgan Stanley in New York had 200 open positions. This is just one bank in one city. Now granted that's their biggest office, but those positions are around, and it's not all doom and gloom on Wall Street.

12:45 Tom Floyd Well that's definitely good news to hear.

Another question from your perspective: what challenges do companies face, specifically in hiring executives and other individuals, for mid to senior-level management positions?

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Sure. So really Doostang, initially when we launched two and-a-half years ago and I was still in business school, we were really going off the sort of analysts and associates.

Now over the past few months, people replace VPs through us as well. Companies have hired VPs sort of mid to senior-level people. And I think generally what people find is finding the guys with the exact experience.

So say, for example, you're an analyst, and you want to transfer banks. Say the lady wants to go and work in investment banking, you know, generally a rather broad field.

At that level, you don't need to have that much experience.

But when you're a VP, you need to have your rolodex. You need to have a good, solid previous experience. You may not be looking to relocate, etc.

So it's just finding people who are willing to make a move and who also have built experience up over the years.

14:02 Tom Floyd So same question in terms of the challenges that recruiters face in finding those people.

Is it pretty much the same thing the companies face? It's just okay?

There's only a limited pool out there of people who have those rolodexes that you mentioned, who have those contacts, and who have this experience?


Yeah. I think as you go from mid to senior level, that's going to be one of your biggest challenges.

And it's just really at any level is just finding the people. That's why there's so many--obviously initially though, sort of the Korn Ferry's and [unintelligible] struggles up this wall.

These guys, they do very tough jobs of sort of going and finding CEOs and sort of senior-level executives for companies.

And hence, they get very well compensated for it.

However, it really shouldn't be that hard to go and find an analyst for, say, a salesman-creating [phonetic] job.

Yet there are a lot of smaller firms that have popped up, really over the past seven or eight years, who now charge $30,000, $40,000 per head for essentially what is--you know, there's thousands and thousands of these people.

So generally, that's just telling me that no matter what level you're at, it's hard to access talent.

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15:13 Tom Floyd And this is going to sound like a dumb question, too, but id there still a perception--or does it still occur I guess I should say. Are there still some executives, so if you are, I don't know, the CEO of a very large Fortune 500 company, and you're thinking about making a career switch.

I mean are executives or other people in the job-seeking market, from that perspective, still hiring recruiters to work on their behalf to find them jobs?

Because it seems like it switched more, that that model isn't really so much in place.

15:49 Carrie Pryor This is Carrie. [Unintelligible] actually has given companies an additive to test to use recruiters to find the very top level people whether it's a CEO, CMO, or a board member.

And the reason for that is they've got to show that they fulfilled their fiduciary responsibilities, and they looked everywhere they could to find the right person as opposed to just hiring a crony.

So that's why recruiting is very solid at that three-senior level.

16:17 Tom Floyd So it's rare, you would say, for an executive to actually hire a recruiter to kind of do the search for them?

It's more the other way around, the company and recruiters are going to go more after them once--

16:26 Carrie Pryor [Interposing] Yeah, the—

16:26 Tom Floyd --they know about them.

16:28 Carrie Pryor The senior executives wait to be asked, for the most part. Unless, if they are friends with a board member, sometimes it does happen that way.

16:39 Tom Floyd And is that true further down the chain as well, the senior directors, mid-level managers, individual contributors. Are they kind of in that same boat too or are they more inclined to try to find a recruiter to help them?

16:53 Carrie Pryor You mean does the individual hire a recruiter? Aren't you—

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16:56 Tom Floyd [Interposing] Is that still happening?


That's kind of a misconception.

17:01 Tom Floyd It's a misconception?


This is Kathy, Katherine. That's kind of a misconception that I think a lot of people have.

I know many people who come to NETSHARE have the misconception that the recruiter works for the executive.

And in fact, the recruiter's client is the company as opposed to the individual looking for a job.

17:24 Carrie Pryor Right. This is Carrie.

The idea of having something like they've got in Hollywood with an agent.

Every so often you hear of somebody trying to get a business like that launched, but the economics don't make sense.

And also it's kind of a flawed business model. We make it very clear to people, if they don't understand it, that we represent the company.

17:46 Tom Floyd Okay.

17:46 Arlene Hirsch Yeah. This is Arlene. And I work with a lot of the individuals who would like recruiters to help them.

And probably the largest, I'll say, complaint that I hear is in actually getting a recruiters attention because the recruiters do work for the companies, not for the individuals.

18:06 Tom Floyd And I'm so glad that you brought that up. It was interesting for this show, literally writing my questions down that I had for you on this show was easy because I had about 30 friends who were like oh my God. You're doing a show on recruiting.

Ask this, ask that, ask that. That was one of the questions that came up.

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18:21 Arlene Hirsch Yeah, like how do you get a recruiters attention? That's what my clients want to know.

18:25 Carrie Pryor Yeah. That's the perennial question, and I got asked about that in a Wall Street Journal article a little while ago.

And the reality is that people don't understand that a typical recruiter at a senior level works on 12 to 20 assignments in the year and that's it.

18:46 Tom Floyd Wow.

18:46 Carrie Pryor You know, email's a wonderful thing. You can send me your material. It'll get put in the database, but I get 300 emails a day.

18:57 Arlene Hirsch But you know what Carrie? This is Arlene.

18:59 Carrie Pryor Uh-huh.

19:00 Arlene Hirsch My clients, a lot of them they do know that, and that's their frustration.

So they'll say like a recruiter's only working on one or two assignments at a time, and they're going to get hundreds of resumes. What's the point?

Why would I even try and play those numbers with a recruiter when the odds are so low for me?

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19:22 Carrie Pryor Well, I think what happens is the recruiter has a pretty set specification position spec from the client, and people need to be at least reasonably close.

No one's a hundred percent, but you got to be 75 percent onboard.

And if their hot button is international experience and you've never had it, then I'm going to say to you you've got a great background, but you don't have the thing I need.

And it's no hard feelings on my side.

But it's just the client is saying you need this, or you need to have had T & L experience at the $100 million level, and if you've only had 40 million, you know.

There's a certain set of facts that you've got to have associated with your experience.

20:04 Arlene Hirsch But how would they even know what you're working on?

20:07 Carrie Pryor Well, it depends. Some of my assignments are confidential because there's an incumbent in place, and they don't know the search is going on. And that can be at the CEO level. It can be two layers down in the organization.

Korn Ferry happens to have a website where most things are posted, and people are welcome to go online and check that out. And most of the other search firms have something similar.

But we're not trying to reach everyone. That's the thing.

Each search firm and each search has a particular profile. And I'm speaking for some of my colleagues, if they're at a boutique that does high-end Wall Street stuff and you're a two-years-out-of-college person at a community bank, the interest level just isn't going to be there.

21:02 Tom Floyd But what does someone who has two years experience in the workforce at a bank, what are their options for making their next career movement?

21:11 Carrie Pryor Yeah, there are actually all kinds of options ranging from one of the people on panel here has a business model that sounds like it could be very appropriate to Monster to individual websites of companies. I mean the large corporations have their own websites where they post everything.

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21:33 Tom Floyd Got it. And Mareza, that's actually a question that I had for you as well.

Can you tell us a little bit more about Doostang in terms of what your business specifically does?


Sure. So basically, Tom, I started this in the summer of '05 between my first and second year of business school, and really got going in late '06 when we decided to raise some money.

What we wanted to do initially was we saw a lot of job specs coming to us via email. We'd get spam [phonetic] with spam people.

So we thought there's just a better way of doing this. So we went and put those job specs online, invited some of our friends.

The website was launched at Stanford, Harvard, and MIT, so the core of it is very, very strong. And essentially, it has just grown ever since. It's grown organically. We haven't sort of made any acquisitions. We haven't really spent any money on marketing, advertising, etcetera.

As Carrie said, our goal is to play sort of between the recent college graduate and the Korn Ferry's of this world in that market that's really emerged over the past seven, eight years, where sort of talent of which there is quite a bit is now being charged $40,000, $50,000 to move.

So obviously the companies that hire that talent are paying that in these recruiter fees.

And what we've seen is that there are a lot of these firms playing in that market charging sort of very substantial fees for what really, I wouldn't call it sort of a commodity, but the job that they do is definitely not as hard as something that Carrie does, for example.

Carrie probably works on three or four simultaneous searches at one time, whereas our sort of recruiters in our space work on 30, 40, etcetera.

So what we saw was that there was a void in the market where candidates at times didn't want to work with these recruiters, didn't like working with these recruiters. Some of these recruiters are very aggressive.

A lot of companies don't like working with them. So that's when this thing, that was more sort of a fun project, we decided to turn it into a company.

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23:46 Carrie Pryor I have to say that Korn Ferry's a little different than some of the other search firms in that we have quite a variety of services we offer.

And we have something called Future Step, which is just above your business in that it's mid-career executives, and they have done things like regional sales managers, ten or 20 or 30 for companies like Wal-Mart, Coke. They did, for one of my clients, ten engineers that had the highest level of security clearance based in D.C. So they do kind of bulk recruiting.

But I think the trick for any person in the workforce is the internet's a wonderful vehicle and to just get out there noodle around a little bit and go online and see if the jobs that are posted are realistically what you're shooting for. And it's kind of trial and error thing to a certain extent.

24:52 Tom Floyd Katherine, can you tell us--we're up against our break but kind of in a minute or less, can you tell us a little bit about your company NETSHARE also?


Yeah. I'd like to put a couple points in here too, and maybe after the break if I can, I'd like to come back to one of the bigger questions about particularly the job shortage and the sort of schizophrenic nature of the whole job market right now.

But also what NETSHARE does, and we've been actually around since 1991, the name came out of network sharing.

And I think the thing that's interesting is that networking has always been a part of job search whether it was done electronically in online or offline. And I think it's been a part of recruiting as well.

And I think Carrie will agree with this because recruiters traditionally send out sourcing letters. And I can remember receiving letters from Korn Ferry in the many years ago in sourcing letters when they were starting a search. That hasn't changed that much. It's just the method in which networking is happening has changed.

One of the things when I first started working with NETSHARE, I can remember one of our very first members. We post jobs, as well as provide opportunities for members to network with each other, online and offline. When we first started, I can remember a day when I got a member's, this is '92 or '93, a member's resume was faxed to me one morning. He had these incredible qualifications. He was an SDP [phonetic] for Bausch and Lomb. He had—

26:53 Tom Floyd I hate to cut you off there. I am hearing the music for our commercial break. Let's go ahead and go on pause.

Stay tuned everyone. More from Insight on Coaching when we return.

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29:36 Tom Floyd Welcome back to Insight on Coaching. I'm Tom Floyd.

Today the topic is Coaching for Recruiters and Recruiting Success.

With me are Arlene Hirsch, founder of Arlene S. Hirsch and Associates and author of How to be Happy at Work, The Wall Street Journal Premier Guide to Interviewing and Job Search, and Career Checklist; Mareza Larizadeh, founder and CEO of Doostang; Carrie Pryor, senior partner at Korn Ferry International; and Katherine Simmons, president and CEO of NETSHARE Incorporated.

Well, in this segment of the show I'd like to focus on the impact of things like the internet and social networking on recruiting success.

Some more data to quickly set the stage.

According to the May 2005 issue of Workforce Management, the year 2004 was the first time that all of the Fortune 500 companies had Web sites, and even now several dozen organizations don't use them for recruiting purposes, although the recent approval of a ".jobs" domain could change that situation.

In a January 15th, 2008 article in Liquid HR, Mark Radoff writes that the idea that recruiters can maintain exclusive control over their networks is increasingly unrealistic. There are a couple of different factors behind this.

First, the Intranet and Internet of the HR world are merging. This is leading to the more liquid flow of CVs between Internet sites and internal systems of recruiting companies.

Second, the Internet is becoming Web 2.0. This is empowering Internet users, often job candidates, to manage and control their own professional information, and encourage the flow of this information among websites and recruiters of their choosing

According to a July 2007 article by Liz Webber in Inc.com “Job Applicants Fear Impact of Online Behavior”:

Two-thirds of job applicants under 30 are not aware that employers conduct online searches of candidates, although they are the age group most likely to say their Web presence might need to be cleaned up, according to a new survey.

A 2007 poll of 600 current employees conducted by Harris Interactive for Adecco USA found that 66 percent of workers in Generation Y (ages 18 to 29) are oblivious to the online background checks employers do to research potential employees. In comparison, only 40 percent of baby boomers (ages 43 to 61) are unaware of such searches.

Analyst firm IDC predicts that U.S. spending on automated hiring software will rise from an estimated starting point of $750 million in 2006 to $1.7 billion by 2009.

So while a lot of information here in terms of how the internet and Web 2.0 have changed things from a recruiting perspective.

Good big picture question, and Carrie, I'd like to turn to you with this one. Just big picture from both a job search and a recruiting perspective, is it strictly an online world now?

http://masshightech.bizjournals.com/masshightech/stories/2006/06/12/story15.html

http://masshightech.bizjournals.com/masshightech/stories/2006/06/12/story15.html

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32:43 Carrie Pryor I think no doubt about it.

The online activities have opened the flood gates on a lot of levels.

But the more senior the position or the more specialized the position, the more hands-on the search.

So if you're in an ad sales position, you're director of ad sales, the idea of using a senior recruiting firm is probably not so important, and you can get a lot of it done through an online situation.

But just as an aside, I don't personally go onto people's MySpace pages, but I have colleagues who do. A

nd it's amazing how stupid people are. That's all I'm going to say.

Now the stuff they've got on there, if they were a hiring manager, there is no way they would hire themselves for a job with drunken photos or just inappropriate stuff.

I think tip number one in this internet world is that if you're applying for jobs, go clean up your MySpace page site first.

33:52 Tom Floyd And what are some of the horror stories that you've seen? I mean, is it just folks from generation Y who might have less experience in terms of doing a job search—

33:59 Carrie Pryor No, no. Connectivity has no age limit, you know.

33:59 Tom Floyd --and things like that, or have there been horror stories where it's a senior person in their 40s who definitely should know better where oh my gosh. This outlandish stuff is bound to be found on the internet?

34:09 Carrie Pryor People do all kinds of stupid things, so I think it's probably more prevalent at the younger level, but it's not exclusively theirs. So my advice still holds.


This is Kathy. My favorite is the CFO of a publicly-held company who also happened to be a Harley enthusiast who published, on a Harley site, pictures of herself with all of her tattoos. And it was found during a job search.

34:41 Tom Floyd And it sounds like that probably had a negative impact on her job search.

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Yeah. I don't think some of the shareholders were really pleased with that.

While I don't think that someone shouldn't have tattoos necessarily, I think it shows a lack of judgment to put it on the internet.

35:01 Carrie Pryor You know, and it's not just—

35:01 Tom Floyd [Interposing] Mareza, anything that you do with that?

35:04 Carrie Pryor I'm sorry. It's not just web pages. It's also that information is so quickly dispersed.

We had a situation where the CFO of a Fortune 20 media company was found to have a rather exotic girlfriend while he was married.

And he was retired a couple months ago due to that.

They made it very graceful, but you could give a speech in some small town and 30 minutes later it's zooming around the world. So people need to be aware of that.

35:39 Arlene Hirsch There's another piece of—

35:39 Tom Floyd Now on the opposite side of that, so let's say you're in your shoes, a recruiter.

You open up Google, you enter the person's name, and you find good things.

You find an interesting blog, a great profile on LinkedIn. I don't know, a lot of other things there.

35:57 Carrie Pryor Sure.

35:58 Tom Floyd What impact does that have?

35:59 Carrie Pryor Oh, I mean that's a plus, absolutely.

You'll be trying to find somebody, and you see that they're the president of their school board or they're hosting the Special Olympics for their state or whatever it is.

That's all a plus.

36:16 Tom Floyd Anything that anybody else would add?

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36:18 Arlene Hirsch Yeah. There's another piece of this that I think is getting lost a little bit, which is I was talking to someone, one of my clients, who was a senior in an undergraduate program and getting ready to go into the job market.

And the career services office was actually conducting workshops in how to talk to people face to face because what they were discovering is that with the advent of all the online social networking, that a lot of people don't actually know how to communicate with each other anymore when they're sitting in the same room with them.

36:54 Tom Floyd Hmm.

36:54 Carrie Pryor That's interesting.

36:54 Tom Floyd So it's almost like it becomes so--there was a movie. Gosh, it's been seven years ago, the Net I think it was called with Sandra Bullock.

37:00 Arlene Hirsch Sandra Bullock, yeah.

37:01 Tom Floyd And she was working from her computer, and it was showing she was having all her food brought to her, and she never left her apartment so to speak.

37:08 Arlene Hirsch Right, exactly.

37:09 Tom Floyd Is it the kind of same types of scenarios?

37:12 Arlene Hirsch Well, there's just a danger, I think, in thinking that you can conduct an entire job search online with or without recruiters, and that your entire presence in the universe is broadcast online. I think that's a mistake.

And it also kind of clogs things up, and that's part of why people do have trouble getting through to each other because there's so many people communicating in this way without trying to communicate in a more qualitative way I would say.

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37:45 Tom Floyd I think that's a really good point. I mean, we're coming from our show last week, which was on Web 2.0, and how coaches are using it.

And I think that you're right. I mean, there was another show a couple months ago on the differences in the generations in the workplace, and that came up particularly with generation Y in terms of well they're brilliant in terms of their use in technology and things like that.

But it's almost like the areas of interpersonal skills and things like that, they're struggling more because they're not using their skills as much as they're using some of their technical abilities.

38:16 Carrie Pryor Right.


This is Kathy.

Don't you think there's also the internet, particularly in a job search, can be very seductive because it can make you feel very busy without being very productive?

38:34 Arlene Hirsch It's the equivalent of when people used to read the help wanted ads and call that a job search.


Exactly.

38:41 Arlene Hirsch It's armchair job hunting. It's very passive.


I talk to people, and I can hear them say I answered 45 job leads and I—

38:49 Arlene Hirsch [Interposing] And nobody wrote back right?


--didn't even get out of my pajamas.

38:52 Arlene Hirsch Yeah, exactly.

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38:53 Tom Floyd Yeah. I hear that a lot of times, too. I've had several folks in my network at the moment and they were looking for jobs, and it's kind of been my advice there, too.

I'm like okay, are you going to networking events?

Are you reaching out to people that you don't know and saying hey, can we have lunch? I know you through so and so. I just want to talk more, really building that personal relationship more.

I want to switch the topic a little bit.

I want to talk a little bit about some of the challenges that recruiters specifically face in their jobs.

So when I say challenges, it's areas where recruiters may need help.

It could be skills or areas of personal growth, things like that.

And with that said, I actually have a very direct question that a colleague in my network gave me that I wanted to make sure to ask.

And that question is: many people have a perception that many recruiters are a little clueless, so to speak, and in many cases, have limited to no understanding of the job roles that they're hiring for.

Again, this was the perspective of someone in my network.

So from screening out the right candidates and recommending the wrong candidates to robotically going down a list of questions without really hearing a jobseeker's answer, is this an area of growth?

Is this something that particularly, I don't know, maybe new recruiters in the field are experiencing? Is that an area that is a challenge for some recruiters?

And I open that question up to everybody. Don't be shy.

40:29 Arlene Hirsch We're speechless.


Tom, I can take this.

40:34 Arlene Hirsch We're speechless but are we clueless?

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I mean, I've worked with recruiters Tom, and this was before, way back in the day when I was sort of in venture capital and private equity.

And I think it's like any other industry. It's across the board.

And I don't think you can be firm-specific.

I think recruiters can appear clueless when one of two things happen. One is that they really are clueless, and two is if they're really aggressive, and they're just trying to fill positions and sending your resume wherever.

And you're getting interviews, but they're not the ones you want because they're just being so aggressive, not the right experience, location, etcetera.

But I still believe in recruiters. I think that the best recruiters at the best firms are really sensational at what they do. A

nd I think it's sort of maybe just an aggressive and a lucky few who get into a bunch of companies, including the big names that sort of give people that impression of the industry.

But generally, I held a very high regard for the industry and the companies in that industry.

41:40 Tom Floyd Carrie, to loop you in, with the example that you gave where you're filling maybe ten to 20 spots a year.

I would think that that doesn't apply to that at all.

I mean, I would think that recruiters in that space, particularly the executives, have a really in-depth understanding of the jobs that they're hiring for because it's like they're living and breathing it day in and day out.

42:02 Carrie Pryor And I think at a certain level, the recruiter actually quite often comes from the industry, a medium to senior-level slot in the industry itself and is actually quite knowledgeable.

And I know speaking for my own personal situation, I am constantly reading things ranging from all the internet online publications to corporate boardroom publications to--I mean, it's never ending.

I think you just need to connect with a recruiter at any level that is still learning. And if they are, they're probably pretty good.

42:43 Tom Floyd Got it. Another perspective—

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42:44 Arlene Hirsch [Interposing] I'm wondering if we—

42:46 Tom Floyd --on another question for everybody as a group right before our next commercial break here.

So three perspectives, what are the core competencies for skills that most recruiters possess or that are needed to be successful today?


This is Kathy.

I'd like to say that I think one of the biggest skills that a recruiter needs and the best recruiters have is to be able to develop a really good collegial relationship with their client.

And that's very hard sometimes because a lot of times I think the own-ness is not always totally on the recruiter, that it needs to be on the client as well to really be able to understand what they need and to be able to communicate that to the recruiter as well.

And for the recruiter and client to have a good enough relationship that the recruiter can have a consultative relationship with the client and be able to--Carrie, would you say that in your relationships, you have the kind of relationship that you can talk back to your client that you can kind of calibrate what they need as opposed to just taking a laundry list of this is what I want?

44:07 Carrie Pryor I think that's absolutely true.

The other quality is that you have to be a very good listener.

You have to be a listener for your client and then for the candidates, too. I think you have to be kind of a little bit ruthless in getting things done and finalizing it.

Like I said earlier, nothing's ever 100 percent.

So you have to make people agree that the 80 or 90, or whatever the number's going to be, percent candidate is going to be great.

But at the same time, I think you have to be brutally honest.

And sometimes the client or the candidate goes off track, and you have to be able to tell them that. So that gets back to being the consultative as well.


And understanding the needs of both the client and the candidate so that even when one is completely sold, that you can understand that the other one isn't the right fit.

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45:00 Carrie Pryor Right, and you have to be sympathetic and cordial while you're telling someone who might have had their heart set on a particular position that it's just not going to work. And that's the least fun part of our job.

You have to make rejection palatable.

45:19 Tom Floyd And I can imagine that that's a very difficult part as far as—

45:22 Carrie Pryor [Interposing] Oh, it's horrible. I mean, this could be the first time in years that someone's had been rejected or has, in their mind, failed at getting the position.

And it's interesting watching people react to that.

And frankly, if they handle it really well, I always make note of that mentally because then I know they're self-aware, they're being realistic, and they're realistic about what's going on out there. I mean for a really great job, it's highly competitive. I mean, I—

45:57 Tom Floyd I hate to cut you off, but I’m hearing the music for our next commercial break.

Let's go ahead and go on pause again. Stay tuned everybody.

More from Insight on Coaching when we return.

48:50 Tom Floyd Welcome back to Insight on Coaching. I'm Tom Floyd.

Today the topic is Coaching for Recruiters and Recruiting Success.

With me are Arlene Hirsch, Mareza Larizadeh, Carrie Pryor, and Katherine Simmons.

Well, in this last segment, I'd like to focus on the importance of coaching in terms of helping recruiters today and ensuring that they're successful.

It's kind of a big picture question to start out just to kind of get the group's perspective on this.

Let's talk about or think about how coaching in general or how coaches specifically can benefit the recruiting profession as a whole.

And Arlene, I'd like to start with you first. Just kind of off the top of your head, based on what you know about the role of what a coach does, what are some ways, just in general, that you think coaches could help folks who are recruiters today?

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49:44 Arlene Hirsch Okay. Well, in my experience, with executive coaching, essentially what we're doing is helping individuals pinpoint their strengths and weaknesses and then work on strategies and techniques to become more successful in what they do, whether it's internally with the people they work with, whether it's with their customers, whatever that might be. So it's very individually oriented.

To me, recruiters are the same as any other executive client. If they would come in for coaching or they would seek out coaching, it would be because they wanted to be more successful at what they're doing. And then the question would be where are the weaknesses in what they're doing or whether it might be—

50:34 Tom Floyd One of the examples that we gave in the last segment, and Carrie, I think it was you that had this example.

It was really important for recruiters to have good listening skills, so really hearing both their candidates and both the folks that they're hiring for.

Based on what everybody, and I'll pose this question to the group, and it's about the recruiting role. What are some ways that a coach can help with that? What are some exercises? What is some role playing or just discussions or things like that that would really be beneficial to somebody in a recruiting role who really wants to improve against that particular skill?

51:10 Arlene Hirsch I can tell you what the greatest resistance would be—

51:13 Tom Floyd Okay.

51:13 Arlene Hirsch --although the recruiters on the phone would have to confirm or deny. Who has the time?

Like you have to listen really fast, right, and you're building relationships with candidates, for example, at the same time that you're screening them out.

And you're trying to do a match against what you know about a corporation or an organization.

There's a limited amount of time, I think, to actually interact and build quality relationships with too many people or organizations that we want.

51:54 Tom Floyd So you're saying that a recruiter might experience that I know I need to get better at this skill, but I don't have time to get better at it?

Or that they wouldn't have time to spend time with a coach one hour a week?

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52:06 Arlene Hirsch Oh, I think they'd have time to spend with a coach an hour a week maybe, but implement--I mean say what comes out of that is that they need to slow down and listen more.

That's hard to do when you're running at 150 miles an hour. To slow down and listen, that can be the hardest thing in the world to do.

52:26 Tom Floyd Any thoughts from anybody else? Everyone's being really shy suddenly.

52:35 Arlene Hirsch That would be a no.

52:37 Tom Floyd Let me—


This is Kathy. I was thinking not so much in terms of listening skills, but one of the ones that I would think if I were a recruiter, one of the hardest things for me to deal with would be always being caught in the middle because you're always being caught between the client and the candidate. I don't know. Is that true Carrie for you?

53:01 Carrie Pryor No.


No? You don't feel that at all?

53:03 Carrie Pryor No.


I guess because you worked for a corporation, right?

53:07 Arlene Hirsch You know who the client is.

53:09 Carrie Pryor Yeah.

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Yeah. I would always feel caught kind of. I mean, I'd know who the client is, obviously, but I would always feel caught between having the deadlines to meet for the--and one of the things that I remember going to a program, I don't know if it was the AASC or the ISCPR, and listening to someone talk about one of the hardest things was when your client told you that you they weren't ready to make a decision, but they wanted you to keep the candidate hot for them.

But they really weren't sure if they were going to hire them. And—

53:51 Carrie Pryor Yeah, that's tricky, but once again, I think honesty and telling people almost word-for-word what you said except keeping them hot.

I mean, it's like our client is slowing down the search because of X, Y, or Z, and I'm terribly sorry that that's going to impact what's going on here. And we're very interested in you.


But they're still very interested in your candidacy.

54:12 Carrie Pryor Yeah.


Yeah.

54:13 Carrie Pryor And the minute it heats back up, I will absolutely reach out to you.


Yeah, yeah.

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54:18 Tom Floyd Well, I hate to cut us off. I'm looking at the clock here. I can't believe what time it is, but unfortunately, we are at the end of our show today.

Huge thank you to the four of you for participating in today's show.

And, as always, a huge thank you to our listeners for spending time with us today as well. For more information about our show, you can look us up on the Voice America Business Channel, of course.

You can visit our website at www.ieconsulting.biz .

You can also always feel free to drop me an email: [email protected] .

Don't forget, you can also download the Pod cast version of this show through Apple iTunes.

Just open up iTunes, go to the music store, click Podcast on the left side the screen, and just enter Insight on Coaching in the search field.

Thanks everyone. We'll see you next week.

55:00 Arlene Hirsch Thank you.

55:00 Carrie Pryor Thank you.

http://www.ieconsulting.biz/

mailto:[email protected]

Coaching For Recruiters And Recruiter Success Transcript

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Transcript of Coaching For Recruiters And Recruiter Success Transcript