I recently gave a webinar on job hunting for Recruiters that were unemployed, under-employed or unhappily-employed. It seems to me that there is a need for this type of information, especially in these “interesting” times. That being the case, I have decided to post the slides and notes from my webinar here for all to use. Please pass on these notes to other recruiters, HR personnel, or anyone looking for a new opportunity.

The title of the webinar was “Confessions of a Job Search Strategist.” Enjoy…

How to Find a Job (when the economy sucks) Part 1 of 3

2002 was not a happy time for me; at least, not initially.

My wife lost her job, I lost my job, I had a young child to care for, and the bills just wouldn’t stop coming. Being the responsible man of the home that I am, I started looking for work in the traditional places: career fairs, newspaper classifieds, networking organizations, and online job boards. And as I continued to do those things, I grew increasingly frustrated because I was not obtaining the outcomes I needed. In fact, since many others at the time were looking for job and acting in the same ways I was, neither was anyone else I was affiliated with.

And then it hit me, I said to myself, “Jim, do something different…” (And so I did)

I thought back on my many years of recruiting and how I had located candidates for the positions I was attempting to fill, and then I just did it the other way around. The outcome was a push/pull tactic of sorts. At the beginning of my process, I would purposefully send out my CV to businesses that I was interested in, and at the end, I would put myself in a position to be discovered by recruiters looking for passive prospects.

In our time together, I am going to show you things I did to find work in the last recession. I am also going to show you things I wish I had done in the last recession. Finally, I am going to show you how implementing all of what I show you here will place you in the most-desired position of all; referring jobs to others because you are already gainfully employed.

In preparing this webinar, I knew from experience that there were a lot of recruiters with profiles on Linkedin and inside Recruiter Networking groups, but I was curious as to how many actually had their resumes posted on a homepage somewhere. So I did the following search:

intitle:resume -jobs -sample -template -apply -submit recruiter education

At the time I ran this search, I found 16 resumes in the first 50 results. I also noticed that there were 11,900 results returned and all of them were not resumes. When I added city names and states, the results were (of course) significantly less. For example, when I added Houston, TX (194 results), San Francisco, CA (294 results) and Atlanta, GA (237 results). Of course, I could have played with that a bit more with area codes and other criteria, but I would still get a low return.

All of this suggested to me something that was very ironic; recruiters (overall) tend not to put their own resumes online. Go figure…

As I reviewed the resumes that returned in my search, what was also surprising was the fact that Recruiters did not classify themselves by the type of recruiting they did. As a Recruiter you know, going through a long list of search results can be tedious. Why not make it easier for the next Recruiter or Hiring Manager or HR Generalist? Should you decide to add your resume to a homepage, give it a title that would catch the attention of a recruiter.

Here are a few ideas:

• Resume – I Recruited 25 Executives in 2007
• Resume – I Staffed 18 Startups in 2007
• Resume – Technical Recruiter – 5 Years Experience
• Resume – I Recruit Recruiters
• Resume – Recruiting Healthcare Professionals since 1997
• Resume – Retail Staffing – I put butts in seats

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End Part 1

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