Most com­pa­nies I deal with haven’t been doing much hir­ing lately. In fact, there’s been a hir­ing drought around here. So, this week when I took 4 inquiries for assis­tance with recruit­ing and leads you couldn’t wipe the smile off my face. I love new begin­nings and unless this was just a blip in the cos­mic vor­tex I am hope­ful for renewed karmic equi­lib­rium of the unem­ploy­ment rate.

These callers were an HR man­ager, a sea­soned inde­pen­dent Recruiter, and 2 small busi­ness own­ers. With the excep­tion of the sea­soned Recruiter who in all fair­ness was doing his job turn­ing over rocks look­ing for refer­rals, the com­ments were all very sim­i­lar in nature.

It’s been so long since we have hired the resumes we have on hand are no good and the news­pa­per ad isn’t work­ing. I can’t find the tal­ent I need, can you help me?

I’m pre­sent­ing on this very topic at THE Con­fer­ence on Octo­ber 6th here in Nepa­land but the troops are needed now. So, I began each con­ver­sa­tion ask­ing for basic infor­ma­tion and asked to be emailed job specs. Then I went down the path of bread­crumbs like Gre­tel did.

Do you have an employee refer­ral pro­gram? No.

Did you ask the appli­cants you had on hand for refer­rals? No.

Have you tried non-traditional means of recruit­ing? What does that mean?

The one hour con­fer­ence gig isn’t going to cut it. I was plan­ning on a series of job seeker sem­i­nars to teach them how to use social media to aid in their job search but I see I have to get more involved with those respon­si­ble for hir­ing them first…

Are your IRL col­leagues tak­ing advan­tage of new recruit­ing tech­niques and prac­tices or are they still hang­ing on to the tried and true and miss­ing out on where many of today’s job­seek­ers are hang­ing out?