Calm Water Business Partner, LLC

LinkedIn Recommendations

Posted on May 21, 2012 by Nancy

What value does a LinkedIn recommendation add? How much weight does it carry?

I have a few recommendations. I’ve seen some people with dozens or hundreds of them. What does this mean?

I have given recommendations to people when I know them well and believe what I am saying to be true and accurate.

Oddly, just recently I’ve seen a recommendation for someone I know well (Person A), written by someone else I know well (Person B). The recommendation was complete fantasy and totally unfounded. Person B wrote the recommendation stating that Person A was an amazingly productive worker. He improved the work flow and processes and procedures in the company and in general made the department a much better place.

In reality, Person B wasn’t in the same department and Person A was fired due to incompetence.

Will an employer hire Person A based on what was written about him? Or, has the LinkedIn recommendation already gone the way of the photocopied recommendation? Anyone can write his own recommendation on what may or may not be company letterhead and forge a signature. No one would be the wiser.

And if a hundred people have recommended you, does that mean you are a good employee or you are just very popular and have a lot of friends?

Posted in For Job Seekers, For Start-ups & Small Companies | Comments Off

The Cult of Personality Testing

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Nancy

I just finished reading “The Cult of Personality Testing: How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves” by Annie Murphy Paul.

It was an amazingly interesting book that tracked personality testing from phrenology up to almost current day testing.

I laughed out loud at many sections, however, my favorite part was the comment about the Rorschach Ink Blot Test. It said the only “logical” answer to the question, “What do you see here?” would be “An inkblot!” BUT that answer meant the person was mentally unstable.

Funny…now I think that answer means you are a very technical person and don’t believe in personality tests.

I’ve long believed that you can’t pinpoint a person’s personality by giving them a test and that the answer to almost every question is “it depends.” It’s nice to find an author who seems to agree with me.

Posted in For Job Seekers, For Start-ups & Small Companies, Random Rants | Tagged Personality Testing | Comments Off

Phone Messages

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Nancy

What does your home or cell phone message say about you?

Examples of recordings that have left me wondering if this person is seriously looking for work or what they would be like as an employee:

“You got me. Leave a message. If I feel like it, I’ll call you back.”
(Really? What if you don’t feel like it?)

“You know the drill.”
(Any chance I have the wrong number?)

“Mommy and Daddy can’t come to the phone right now…la la la la…”
(Awww…cute as a button…but did I dial the wrong number? You’re looking for a job and your two year old is recording your answering machine message?)

“Please hold while your party is being reached”…followed by music that makes your ears bleed.
(I don’t mind listening to music, but if the volume is so loud I can’t actually leave the phone anywhere near my ear…I’m not going to hold.)

The old advice is still some of the best: Smile while you are recording your message!

Posted in For Job Seekers | Comments Off

“Black Hat” Recruiting

Posted on April 3, 2012 by Nancy

During a recent phone conversation with an SEO Analyst candidate, he asked me how I thought the economy was doing and did I see an increase in job openings. I explained what I was seeing and he said it sounds like Black Hat SEO.

Black Hat SEO: “Black Hat search engine optimization is generally defined as techniques that are used to get higher search rankings in an unethical manner.”

So, I’m calling what I’ve been seeing Black Hat Recruiting: Posting jobs that do not exist in an attempt to unethically obtain resumes.

Over the last couple of months I’ve noticed hundreds of jobs being posted by anonymous posters. They don’t identify the company. In some instances, it states at the bottom that this is a current opening or an example of an opening that we normally have available. The odds are this means: This is not a real job.

There are way too many duplicate and triplicate jobs posted on a variety of job sites. Resumes go in, but there is no response from whoever is collecting these resumes.

These jobs are not real. These are posted by someone or some company gathering resumes.

There are in some cases, “confidential job searches,” but there’s no reason for a recruiter to hide the name of their own company, unless the jobs are not real.

All of my postings are real jobs. I am not hiding my company, my name or my phone number.

As an example, I have an exclusive arrangement with a client. I’ve posted their very niche type job on their behalf and have seen it reposted a dozen times on several job sites, word for word under an anonymous email. The responses are not coming to me, nor are they going directly to my client. So where are these resumes going?

I can’t answer that question. But I have a suggestion for stopping it. Don’t send your resume in to any job posting if you don’t know where it is going.

Posted in For Job Seekers, For Start-ups & Small Companies, Random Rants | Tagged confidential job search, not a real job, unethical recruiting techniques | Comments Off

Passive Job Seekers

Posted on March 14, 2012 by Nancy

I was asked recently where I find job candidates. It was a good question and I found that in order to answer it, I really had to do some serious thinking.

A large portion of the resumes I have in my database are passive job seekers. People who have been working or are currently working and have a feeling they might be happier elsewhere. That could mean they are “sort of” looking for a different position, title, line of work or just a different company doing similar work, hopefully for a higher salary.

The important parts of a passive job seekers search are:

1) They don’t have time to be looking at everything, but they are open to hearing about opportunities if something really amazing comes across my desk.

2) They want to share their resume with someone they know they can trust. Someone who will be honest about how their resume looks and how it presents.

3) They want to be certain the resume won’t magically find its way to an employer that they are not even remotely interested in working for, or worse, appear on their manager’s desk as a candidate for an opening for their current employer.

4) They want to work with someone who will not “hard sell” or “bully” them into going for a job they are not really interested in pursuing.

Having had most of these sort of things happen to me when I was a job seeker, one of my hard and fast rules is:

Never, ever submit a resume for a job without talking with the candidate first to make sure it’s in their best interest to pursue.

Posted in For Job Seekers, Random Rants | Tagged passive job search, trustworthy recruiter | Comments Off

To Control SPAM…

Posted on March 7, 2012 by Nancy

SPAM emails can be so frustrating. More often I am seeing emails such as:

“I apologize for this automatic reply to your email. To control spam, I now allow incoming messages only from senders I have approved beforehand.

If you would like to be added to my list of approved senders, please fill out the short request form (see link below). Once I approve you, I will receive your original message in my inbox. You do not need to resend your message. I apologize for this one-time inconvenience. Click the link below to fill out the request”

When you are looking for a job and send out an email to a recruiter or a hiring company, how many of them have the time to click a link, send you a message saying…you emailed me and I’m trying to answer you…and type in a string of letters and numbers?

Perhaps you have a bigger problem with SPAM than most people do, but I don’t recommend having this service enabled when you are seeking work.

Posted in For Job Seekers, Random Rants | Comments Off

Another Reason Not to Give Feedback

Posted on March 2, 2012 by Nancy

I am often asked by candidates, why they did not receive an offer. They want feedback so they can improve their interview style or technique and do better on the next interview.

Often what I hear for feedback is:

• not a good cultural fit

• lacked industry specific experience

• failed to show enthusiasm for the position

• failed to follow up with a thank you letter or email

Recently, I relayed the company’s decision and the candidate asked me for specifics. The hiring manager did not feel that the candidate connected with him during the interview and did not believe the candidate would be a good cultural fit for the company.

Why I shouldn’t have provided feedback: Seven working days, eleven phone calls and 48 emails later, I was still trying to get the candidate to understand my client had offered someone else the job.

If you ask for feedback, don’t take it as a personal attack. If you don’t want to hear it, don’t ask.

Posted in For Job Seekers, For Start-ups & Small Companies, Random Rants | Tagged asking for feedback | Comments Off

This is Just a Test…

Posted on January 4, 2012 by Nancy

It is especially important in a sales role that you show you have the right type of personality and tenacity for a sales position.

When I post a job for any level of sales opportunity, if the resume I receive looks like a possible candidate, I reply to the email with “Please call me to discuss.”

Close to ninety percent of the candidates do not call me.

It makes my job easier. If the candidate isn’t the type of person to pick up the phone and follow up on the resume and my email, then they are not likely going to be a stellar sales person for my client.

Makes you wonder doesn’t it? This is just a test…

Posted in For Job Seekers | Comments Off

The First Ten Seconds

Posted on December 21, 2011 by Nancy

Hiring managers and human resource professionals are inundated with resumes and sometimes resort to skimming them for highlights. This takes 10 to 30 seconds. In that span of time any number of pieces of information can jump out and make you look like you are the perfect candidate or not even close.

Name: Is your name on the resume? Go ahead and laugh but I get hundreds of resumes every week and more times than you would think, there is not a name on the resume.

Worse are the ones that arrive with the candidate’s first name spelled incorrectly. If you put your name in all capital letters (e.g., NANCY and you spell it NACNY, spell check will not necessarily highlight it as being incorrect). It’s not spelled wrong; it’s just all capital letters. Read the resume or reject it?

Location: In the age of identity theft and everyone afraid of disclosing too much information, at the very least include city and state. If the hiring company is not paying for relocation, they are likely not going to want to pay to fly you in from the other side of the country. Can they determine where you live quickly? Read the resume or reject it?

Telephone Number/E-Mail: Keep laughing. Beautifully crafted cover letters imploring me to please call to discuss the opportunity so the candidate can expand on their relevant work experience that do not include a telephone number or an e-mail address in either the letter or on the resume make up about 20% of the resumes I receive.

Yes, I can figure out the email address usually by finding it on the original email. However, if I save your resume and don’t have an immediate opportunity for you, when I pull it back up from the database and there is not a phone number or email on it… How many people can spend time trying to find the information?

Objective: If you have an objective on your resume and it is to become a Marketing Manager and you are applying for a SEO Specialist job, you might want to think about how that makes you look to the person reviewing the resume. Obviously you are not applying for the right job. Read the resume anyway or reject it?

Give the person reviewing the resumes what they want and what they need right up front. Why jeopardize your chances?