Imagination is more important than knowledge, for knowledge is limited while imagination embraces the entire world.
– Albert Einstein
Category: Recruiting
Recruiting
Billy Dexter – MTV’s Chief Diversity Officer
Billy Dexter is a power networker in Keith Ferrazzi’s league. I had the priviledge of seeing Billy speak this week at a National Black MBA event here in Chicago. He is dynamic, funny and charming. He currently serves as MTV’s Chief Diversity Officer, it was not a job he asked for, they asked him. To study Billy is a great case study of the importance of personal branding to future success.
Billy was working as a headhunter on the search at the time. MTV couldn’t decide which candidate to select and met with Billy to discuss the issue. After the meeting, MTV HR called Billy and said they changed their mind, they wanted to hire Billy instead! He thought they were joking, but they weren’t. They asked him to make his offer for them. In his words, he went “real ghetto with it”. They accepted his initial proposal untouched and h felt like he should have asked for more! I’m not doing the story justice with this blog entry, you should hear him tell it one day!
One of his networking tips that is distinct is that Billy says, “people need to feel comfortable with you.” It’s an interesting concept, one that Billy himself is a bit challenged to explain more deeply, though he claims not to be a natural.
Here are some of Billy’s tips for success:
– Develop a script to engage people and your “30 second commercial”
– Attend an opportunity event frequently
– Develop both up and down mentoring
– Study, refine and prioritize your personal and professional networking contacts
– Put your execution plan on paper by date and context
– Find ways to make connections with others
– Constantly monitor you results celebrate your accomplishments and adjust your plan, if required
As I stated, Billy Dexter is both interesting and enganging, I look forward to building a relationship with him over time.
If you ever need someting to start a conversation about with Billy – try golf, he is an avid golfer!
You May Hire Another Candidate
But I may work for your competitor…
An Indeed.com Alternative
Getthejob.com is a new job aggregator that differentiates itself from indeed.com in that it doesn’t pick up postings from headhunters, third party recruiters or too-good-to-be-true scam jobs. They claim that 70% of the postings can’t be found on commercial job boards. They do have Ladders affiliate ads however, so the option is still there, it’s just in a less spammy format on an ad on the side. I like this and it’s potential. What it lacks in comparison to Indeed is the freshness date of the listing, this is a major oversight that, once rectified, would make it a superior product.
What I’m not certain about:
– Mr. Amato states, “Most employers don’t post ALL of their openings on traditional job sites because it would be cost prohibitive, but they do post them to their own corporate career center, which costs nothing, we help jobseekers find these hidden jobs.” This is not 100% true – for some reason many employers do not post all open jobs, choosing to keep senior jobs private and undisclosed. This is most unfortunate as many qualified and passionate seekers are not enabled to be looked at and more employers need to look at becoming fully transparent.
– How does one know that these companies actually utilize posted resumes and not primarily from recruiters?
– Mr. Fulton then states, “This allows jobseekers to read the entire job description and apply for the job using the companies preferred application method. It is believed that resumes passed directly through a company career site are more visible than those transmitted through a third-party site.” Based on what?
– Not having a searchable resume database is interesting, but it’s very time consuming to fill out things with an uncertain outcome.
Overall, I appreciate Bob Etheridge for calling me and informing me about the service, with a few tweaks, I could see it becoming a strong player in the marketplace.
Is Your Resume Going Into Spam Oblivion?
This excellent article discusses the major problems with this issue. While you can’t eliminate it completely, it contains some good tips to reduce the issue.
Chicago GSB Named #1 MBA by Business Week – 10 Metrics to Redesign
The University of Chicago Graduate School of Business (Chicago GSB) was rated the top MBA program in the Business Week bi-annual MBA survey of recruiters and students.
As a proud alumni, I want be clear that I appreciate the quality students, alumni and faculty at Chicago GSB.
However, theses surveys have not changed much since the rating systems were started several decades ago. What’s missing from that survey is alumni and the alumni experience now that MBA programs are a mature and not a growth industry. The metrics and experience here is much more unclear and are overdue for significant redesign.
Some questions I’d like to see in a redesigned survey that should carry a one third weighting alongside current students and alumni:
1. What is the alumni satisfaction rating of the institution from alumni at the 5, 10, 20 year mark?
2. What Internet based networking tools are in use? For example, I’ve asked Ted Snyder for a Simple Machines Message Board for all alumni (privacy set to no outside view) for several years and this has not been made a priority which is sad as it’s simple to implement. I want to be able to post obscure topics and find that needle in the haystack, whether I’m going to Shanghai and need to network, what to find others interested in using blog buzz to help price options or other new topics of interest. In other words, which school has not only the best network, but a culture of lifting all boats and leaving nobody behind?
3. What percentage of the alumni does the institution have accurate contact data for in a shared directory for all alumni to use? What is the strategy to create value so that all alumni are excited about staying in touch with the school and the network?
4. What is the ratio of dollars spent on alumni every year versus new student attraction? If it’s a quality alumni experience, the ratio will be less. This is a simple metric to calculate once the data is transparent.
5. What percentage consider themselves fully employed and utilized?
6. Do salaries really go up from graduation level or are most of these salaries higher due to churn and burn industries with long hours? Stated a different way are the salaries the GMAC publishes for the sole purpose of student attraction misleading? Some suggest that they are. Considering the GMAC publishes these studies during the application season, the business school self-reported salary data is highly suspect.
7. As the baby boomers age and pockets of shortages arise, we need to change the campus recruiting policies to focus on hiring gifted thought leaders based on competencies regardless of year of graduation – there are pockets of underemployed MBA’s form the 2001-2003 era that should be redeployed fully to roles worthy of their skills – the current process doesn’t allow this to occur and it is obsolete – it exists only to encourage student attraction and influence each year’s performance stats – you see it in the Business Week stats – it’s all about salaries (which are inflated because they are mostly not jobs with normal hours) – isn’t there more to life than just salary?
8. What percentage of the alumni are currently giving gifts to the school?
9. What percent of alumni are living in the geographic region of their choice?
10. Does the school have functional and relevant alumni activities both in industry verticals and in geography?
These are just a few of the metrics that I would invite Business Week, Wall Street Journal and Financial Times to explore fully for overhaul. Please feel free to comment and add ideas to this discussion, link to this post or forward it to anyone via e-mail whom could influence this positive and needed metric changes. Thank you for joining the conversation for needed reform.
Another Established Personalized Service Put to Rest by Macy’s
Marshall Field’s was slaughtered, now Macy’s killed the personalized stationary in the store too. It’s interesting how much this relates to recruiting.
Personal stationery makes you feel like you’ve arrived. For the person on the receiving end, opening the envelope is like opening a gift.
The ladies of the Personalized Stationery Team were like fairy godmothers. They knew their products, their manners and what was appropriate for every occasion. They helped customers create a first impression that made a statement before the recipient read a single word.
It could easily take hours to choose stationery, which is nothing when you consider it can take years to use it up. A few weeks after placing an order, the stationery arrived in the mail, appropriately. Inside the cardboard mailing boxes were the stationery boxes themselves, sturdy, tasteful yet fancy. The stationery fit perfectly inside its box. The paper was bundled with a sealed paper ring, the envelopes underneath neatly stacked like folded laundry.
It then goes on to say:
The online stationery shopping experience promises the full dose of isolation and frustration. There we’ll be, staring at the computer screen, clicking down endless selections of paper, trying to discern on a flickering screen the true texture and weight of paper, wondering what color it will it be in real life. No one will be there to suggest the perfect color of ink, or a squiggle or flourish or icon that will turn mere paper and ink into a personal trademark.
Sounds to me like an exact replica of what is happening in online recruiting, a working process has been replaced with and isolating and frustrating process that doesn’t bring true thought leaders into leadership roles. What is the quality of the paper and sentence structure – who is this person? We need to put the most talented hiring managers back into the final selection of sourced resumes before recruiters call.