Simon Meth's Blog (19)

Some candidates are pests. They just bug you. These are the folks who work hard to take up as much of your time as they can. Here's how to identify them and how to deal with them:

1) Pests apply to every job on your corporate job site. They reason that if applying to one job is good then applying to 200 is even better. They don't realize that this is a sure fire way to be identified as a pest. Whe

Don't do it! Yes, that's right, don't do it! You may hate your current job or there may be a declining demand or zero demand for your skills in our current job market. But does that mean that you should throw the baby out with the bathwater? I think not. Now, there are lots of career counselors, resume writing experts, life coaches, and other well meaning folks who will help you figure out what skills you have that are transferable to new careers. But is that the best approach? Read on to fin

After many years in corporate recruitment I've learned a few things. At least I think I have. Read the following ten things I've learned and see if they resonate with you. Please add some things you've learned as a comment.

1. Hiring managers often complain about not receiving enough good resumes from you but they often either don't review or don't respond to the resumes you send them.
2. Candidates apply to jobs that they have no business applying to. I'm a plumber so I'll ap

I was talking with a career counseling client the other day. He's a smart guy with a PhD and loads of great high tech experience. And still there were some basic things about his resume that were hurting him. So I got to thinking about that and wondering about how widespread this phenomenon is. As a corporate recruiter, you could say that I look at resumes for a living. I've got loads of experience reading resumes and I see all sorts of funny things each day. At least they would be funny if t

One of the most reliable indicators I've found for the employment market is job postings for recruiters. It stands to reason that if companies are hiring recruiters they are planning to add to their staff. I post corporate recruiter positions in the Jobs for Recruiters forum on Recruit

I blogged recently about Things I believe in the Recruitment Space in which I asserted that Human Resources doesn’t get the respect of upper management because it doesn’t deserve that respect. Before I expand on that thought, please w

• Human Resources people hate agency recruiters.
• Agency recruiters hate Human Resources people. Now we're even so get over it and get back to work.
• Corporate recruiters hate whatever Applicant Tracking System they are using.
• Agency recruiters say they have access to the hidden pool of candidates but they work with the same pool of candidates that everybody else does.
• The passive candidate is a myt

It’s hard to keep up with the tweaks that the good folks at LinkedIn are making to their calculations of network size. Mid-December I noticed that the total users I could contact through an introduction plummeted by 8 million from 15 million to 7 million. One day later it was up to 18.5 million which was more than ever before! For the past few weeks I’ve been inching closer and closer to 20 million. Imagine my

One of my closet recruiter colleagues says that job fairs are for the “unemployed and unemployable”. That’s pretty harsh but there is definitely some truth to it. Of course, if recruiters

Lifehacker took a user survey to find the five best people-search engines. The results are in:

Making predictions is fun and lots of people do it. We all want to know what's going to happen in the future. We love hot stock tips because of the p

If you're unemployed you already know that it's tough out there in the job market. If you want statistics then check out the following information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics here,

Thanks to SlighlyLoony over at JamulBlog for pointing me to Coyote Blog for a great representation of job loss data. It seems that our recent job losses, when expressed as a percentage of the total work force, are far less dramatic than in the past. Of course the absolute num

Rarely do I watch a documentary that has such deep implications for our world as this one. Titled "How Kevin Bacon Cured Cancer", this almost

Whatever you do in the recruitment space it's likely that a significant part of your day is spent on the phone (or should be). With the incredible technological advances we've all seen over the last 20 years, the phone remains our lifeline. And still I know many people who suffer from call reluctance. They can always justify why they should spend their ti

There are more and more people looking for new jobs and many of those people need help with their resumes. If you're reading this you are probably a recruiter. I wrote the following article in 2004 and the content is equally valid today. I've found it helpful to share it with candidates. I ask them to read the article, update their resume as they see

I’ve been a LinkedIn user since April 26, 2004. In 4.5 years I’ve spen