Openings at Cypress Semiconductor

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Cypress Semiconductor Corporation (NASDAQ: CY) is a Silicon Valley-based Semiconductor design and manufacturing company founded by T. J. Rodgers and others from Advanced Micro Devices. Its headquarters are in San Jose, California, and it has divisions in the United States, Ireland, India and the Philippines as well as a fabrication plant in Minnesota. Cypress delivers high-performance, mixed-signal, programmable solutions that provide customers with rapid time-to-market and exceptional system value. Cypress offerings include the flagship PSoC® programmable system-on-chip families and derivatives such as PowerPSoC® solutions for high-voltage and LED lighting applications, CapSense® touch sensing and TrueTouch® solutions for touchscreens. Cypress is the world leader in USB controllers, including the high-performance West Bridge® solution that enhances connectivity and performance in multimedia handsets.

Please feel free to visit cypress career website for latest openings (www.cypress.com).

Job Title: Product Engineering Group Lead

Department	Data Communications Division
Education	B.Tech/M.Tech or equivalent
Experience	5-7yrs
Tracking…

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A Recruiter Competency Model for Passive Candidates

The key principle underlying these articles is that you can’t recruit and hire passive candidates using the same workflow, nor the same recruiters, used for active candidates. According to a  recent survey conducted with LinkedIn, 83% of fully-employed members on LinkedIn consider themselves passive when it comes to their job-hunting status. While this is a huge and important pool, most companies over-emphasize the 17% of candidates who are active. Then to make matters worse, when they do target passive candidates, they clumsily use their active candidate processes.

Here’s a quick summary of each of the competencies and the differences between active and passive recruiting requirements:

1. Results-driven: Drive for a recruiter handling passive candidates requires the ability to tenaciously, but subtly, cajole and urge passive prospects through the hiring pipeline while deftly overcoming concerns. For a recruiter handling active candidates, drive is more about numbers and being sure there are enough reasonable candidates in the pool.
2. Someone Worth Knowing and Subject Matter Expert: When a recruiter contacts people who are not looking, these people are deciding not only if the career opportunity is worth pursuing, but also if the recruiter is credible. This means the recruiter knows the company strategy, the company’s basic financial strength and position within the industry, and why the company offers a strong foundation for a career move. This type of expertise is much less important when working with active candidates who just want to get an interview.
3. Partners with Hiring Manager: Recruiters have very little credibility with a top person who’s not looking if they don’t know the hiring manager. More important, if the recruiter and hiring manager are not working in tandem, it’s impossible to move top people through the extra steps required. This partnership is much less important when recruiting active candidates.
4. Converts Job into Career Move: Passive candidates will always want to know a few things about the job to determine if it’s worth a more serious discussion. Recruiters must be able to present this on multiple levels, including the job’s importance and some of the key projects and tasks involved. Messages and postings must be creative and appeal directly to the prospect’s career needs.  It doesn’t take this level of ability to attract, recruit, and close active candidates.
5. Develops Sourcing Planning and Strategy: This is essential whether targeting active or passive candidates. While different, the development of a comprehensive sourcing plan involves workforce planning, a geographic supply/demand analysis, and the continued upgrading of sourcing channels based on hiring needs and channel effectiveness. Active candidate sourcing done well is more complicated than passive candidate sourcing, and represents the critical differentiator among active candidate recruiters.
6. Uses Social Media and Search Engine Marketing to Develop Active Candidate Pool: Getting active candidates as soon as they enter the hunt for a new job makes a huge difference in hiring the best ones. This requires constant application of  the latest social media tools for sourcing, ensuring your company is getting first choice. This competency is less important for passive prospects.
7. Use LinkedIn and Networking to Develop a Passive Candidate Pool: People who aren’t looking need to be contacted and persuaded to evaluate your opportunity. While getting names is relatively easy, getting on the phone and developing deep networks of highly qualified prospects is an essential component of passive candidate recruiting. Much of this involves Bridging the Gap on the first call. This competency is almost unneeded for active candidates.
8. Ensures a Professional Candidate Experience: While different for active and passive, it’s essential for both. There’s a lot more hand-holding for passive candidates, and recruiters need to ensure that everything is done right. Due to the volume involved with active candidates, candidate care is more about ensuring the process is effective.
9. Organizes and Plans Work: Active candidate recruiters have it tougher on this score. Effectively handling a high number of requisitions requires exceptional planning and organizational skills combined with an ability to prioritize work and get hiring managers to actively participate.
10. Technical and ATS Savvy: It’s pretty easy for a passive candidate recruiter working a reasonable number of reqs to keep the ATS current. Active candidate recruiters need to be whizzes at this. In fact, this competency might be the difference-maker for an active candidate recruiter. Aside from this, all recruiters need to be tech-savvy, using the latest tools and techniques to uncover new ways to find and reach the best candidates.
11. Accurately Assesses Competency, Motivation, and Fit: Recruiting passive candidates is generally a full-cycle role, requiring accurate assessment skills. As part of this they need to be able to fully assess candidates on all dimensions of performance and fit. Active candidate recruiters need to be good screeners on more than just skills, but rarely need to conduct a full assessment.
12. Recruits, Advises, Negotiates, and Closes Top Prospects: Persuading top prospects who are not looking, getting them to engage in a series of career discussions, pushing the process along, and then closing the deal on equitable terms is what recruiting passive candidates is all about. Recruiting and closing active candidates who want your job is more a transactional process with fewer variables and an emphasis on compensation.

Unless you have a big employer brand, it’s impossible to attract the 83% of fully-employed professionals who aren’t looking using the same sourcing and recruiting techniques used for the 17% who are. As a result, the recruiters involved and processes used must be different. Just recognizing the basic differences between active and passive candidate recruiting is a huge step. Getting the whole team to do it the right way, every day, on every search is the real challenge. It’s also how recruiting managers become sought after talent acquisition leaders.

35 Fast Tips to Make This Your Best Year Yet

I’m sitting on an airplane thinking about what the best performers and most successful people do to continually outperform everyone around them.

As we enter what I hope will be the single best year of your life yet, I’ve come up with 35 Tips that I invite you to concentrate on. Share these tips, reflect on then, post them where you can see them – and allow them to infuse your mindset:

1. Remember that the quality of your life is determined by the quality of your thoughts.
2. Keep the promises you make to others – and to yourself.
3. The project that most scares you is the project you need to do first.
4. Small daily improvements are the key to staggering long-term results.
5. Stop being busy being busy. This New Year, clean out the distractions from your work+life and devote to a monomaniacal focus on the few things that matter.
6. Read “The War of Art”.
7. Watch “The Fighter”.
8. In a world where technology is causing some of us to forget how to act human, become the politest person you know.
9. Remember that all great ideas were first ridiculed.
10. Remember that critics are dreamers gone scared.
11. Be “Apple-Like” in your obsession with getting the details right.
12. Take 60 minutes every weekend to craft a blueprint for the coming seven days. As Saul Bellow once said: “A plan relieves you of the torment of choice.”
13. Release your need to be liked this New Year. You can’t be a visionary if you long to be liked.
14. Disrupt or be disrupted.
15. Hire a personal trainer to get you into the best shape of your life. Superstars focus on the value they receive versus the cost of the service.
16. Give your teammates, customers and family one of the greatest gifts of all: the gift of your attention (and presence).
17. Every morning ask yourself: “How may I best serve the most people?”
18. Every night ask yourself: “What 5 good things happened to me this day?”
19. Don’t waste your most valuable hours (the morning) doing low value work.
20. Leave every project you touch at work better than you found it.
21. Your job is not just to work. Your job is to leave a trail of leaders behind you.
22. A job is not “just a job”. Every job is a gorgeous vehicle to express your gifts and talents – and to model exceptionalism for all around you.
23. Fears unfaced become your limits.
24. Get up at 5 am and take 60 minutes to prepare your mind, body, emotions and spirit to be remarkable during the hours that follow. Being a superstar is not the domain of the gifted but the prepared.
25. Write love letters to your family.
26. Smile at strangers.
27. Drink more water.
28. Keep a journal. Your life’s story is worth recording.
29. Do more than you’re paid to do and do work that leaves your teammates breathless.
30. Leave your ego at the door every morning.
31. Set 5 daily goals every morning. These small wins will lead to nearly 2000 little victories by the end of the year.
32. Say “please” and “thank you”.
33. Remember the secret to happiness is doing work that matters and being an instrument of service.
34. Don’t be the richest person in the graveyard. Health is wealth.
35. Life’s short. The greatest risk is risk-less living. And settling for average.

I genuinely wish you the best year of your life.

Stay Great.

Thanks to Robin Sharma …………..

9 Things That Motivate Employees More Than Money

Don’t show ’em the money (even if you have it). Here are nine better ways to boost morale.

The ability to motivate employees is one of the greatest skills an entrepreneur can possess. Two years ago, I realized I didn’t have this skill. So I hired a CEO who did.

Josh had 12 years in the corporate world, which included running a major department at Comcast. I knew he was seasoned, but I was still skeptical at first. We were going through some tough growing pains, and I thought that a lack of cash would make it extremely difficult to improve the company morale.

I was wrong.

With his help and the help of the great team leaders he put in place, Josh not only rebuilt the culture, but also created a passionate, hard-working team that is as committed to growing and improving the company as I am.

Here are nine things I learned from him:

1. Be generous with praise. Everyone wants it and it’s one of the easiest things to give. Plus, praise from the CEO goes a lot farther than you might think. Praise every improvement that you see your team members make. Once you’re comfortable delivering praise one-on-one to an employee, try praising them in front of others.  
2. Get rid of the managers. Projects without project managers? That doesn’t seem right! Try it. Removing the project lead or supervisor and empowering your staff to work together as a team rather then everyone reporting to one individual can do wonders. Think about it. What’s worse than letting your supervisor down? Letting your team down! Allowing people to work together as a team, on an equal level with their co-workers, will often produce better projects faster. People will come in early, stay late, and devote more of their energy to solving problems.  
3. Make your ideas theirs. People hate being told what to do. Instead of telling people what you want done; ask them in a way that will make them feel like they came up with the idea. “I’d like you to do it this way” turns into “Do you think it’s a good idea if we do it this way?”  
4. Never criticize or correct. No one, and I mean no one, wants to hear that they did something wrong. If you’re looking for a de-motivator, this is it. Try an indirect approach to get people to improve, learn from their mistakes, and fix them. Ask, “Was that the best way to approach the problem? Why not? Have any ideas on what you could have done differently?” Then you’re having a conversation and talking through solutions, not pointing a finger.  
5. Make everyone a leader. Highlight your top performers’ strengths and let them know that because of their excellence, you want them to be the example for others. You’ll set the bar high and they’ll be motivated to live up to their reputation as a leader.  
6. Take an employee to lunch once a week. Surprise them. Don’t make an announcement that you’re establishing a new policy. Literally walk up to one of your employees, and invite them to lunch with you. It’s an easy way to remind them that you notice and appreciate their work.  
7. Give recognition and small rewards. These two things come in many forms: Give a shout out to someone in a company meeting for what she has accomplished. Run contests or internal games and keep track of the results on a whiteboard that everyone can see. Tangible awards that don’t break the bank can work too. Try things like dinner, trophies, spa services, and plaques. 
8. Throw company parties. Doing things as a group can go a long way. Have a company picnic. Organize birthday parties. Hold a happy hour. Don’t just wait until the holidays to do a company activity; organize events throughout the year to remind your staff that you’re all in it together. 
9. Share the rewards—and the pain. When your company does well, celebrate. This is the best time to let everyone know that you’re thankful for their hard work. Go out of your way to show how far you will go when people help your company succeed. If there are disappointments, share those too. If you expect high performance, your team deserves to know where the company stands. Be honest and transparent. 

Thanks to  Ilya Pozin for such a lovely post.
 

17 Tips to Double Your Productivity In 14 Days

One of the modules is on “Doubling Your Productivity in 30 Days”, based on my work with some of the most successful entrepreneurs in business.

I wanted to share 17 of the best tactics I’ve learned that I know will help you lean into your productive best in this age of dramatic distraction:

17 Tips To Double Your Productivity In 14 Days

1. Turn off all technology for 60 minutes a day and focus on doing your most important work.

2. Work in 90 minute cycles (tons of science is now confirming that this is the optimal work to rest ratio).

3. Start your day with at least 30 minutes of exercise.

4. Don’t check your email first thing in the morning.

5. Turn all your electronic notifications off.

6. Take one day a week as a complete recovery day, to refuel and regenerate (that means no email, no phone calls and zero work). You need full recovery one day a week otherwise you’ll start depleting your capabilities.

7. The data says workers are interrupted every 11 minutes. Distractions destroy productivity. Learn to protect your time and say no to interruptions.

8. Schedule every day of your week every Sunday morning. A plan relieves you of the torment of choice (said novelist Saul Bellow). It restores focus and provides energy.

9. Work in blocks of time. Creative geniuses all had 2 things in common: when they worked they were fully engaged and when they worked, they worked with this deep concentration for long periods of time. Rare in this world of entrepreneurs who can’t sit still.

10. Drink a liter of water early every morning. We wake up dehydrated. The most precious asset of an entrepreneur isn’t time – it’s energy. Water restores it.

11. Don’t answer your phone every time it rings.

12. Invest in your professional development so you bring more value to the hours you work.

13. Avoid gossip and time vampires.

14. Touch paper just once.

15. Keep a “Stop Doing List”.

16. Get up at 5 am.

17. Have meetings standing up.

Stay Productive and Make Your Work Matter!

Social Media as Personal Branding Tools for Recruiting

We all know that branding impacts the choices we make as buyers of products, services and ideas. We buy things, will pay a premium, and choose to work someplace over another because of what we know of companies’ brands. Similarly, as hiring managers and recruiters, you can shape your personal brand—what buyers of your services know about you—to recruit the best talent and win new business.

Why social media for personal branding?

Given what we know about who’s using social media, it should be clear why social media are excellent vehicles for spreading the word, as a hiring manager or recruiter, about who you are and what you know. Here are two other reasons why social media should be preferred channels for personal branding:

Reason #1:

Social media provide passive channels for sharing knowledge. Flipping their function as intel-gathering tools, social media are great for telling people what you’re thinking, reading and doing—without directly telling them. You can use your social media to broadcast to everyone in your network (1), without the risk of seeming overly aggressive. Many in the industry are fully aware ofthe negative perceptions of aggressive recruiting tactics.

Reason #2:

Social media provide ways to make your messages more interesting and relevant. Being interesting and relevant is a prerequisite for getting noticed among the buzz. Social media provide ways to share photos, videos, and audio (among other media) – not to mention links to others (2). Using rich media to enhance how others experience your brand can give you an edge in the struggle to get people’s online attention. Differentiation as a service provider is essential to building a successful recruiting practice.

Basic social media personal branding tools

Online personal brands can be as varied as the persons they’re branding. That said, here are basic tools you can use to shape your online personal brand:

Profiles. Your social media profiles should convey what you want people to know about you. Start with the basics: make certain visitors can understandwho you are/what you’ve done, what you offer and why they should care. But, as said, differentiating yourself can sway someone’s choosing your services over others’.

Updates. Your updates are your primary means of sharing with your online networks. Platforms like Facebook and Tumblr give you ways to post content directly, while LinkedIn and Twitter are primarily channels for brief commentary and links to outside content. Updating on these platforms is useful for recruiting, and new tools are making it easier to update to your most important social media profiles at once.

Secondary interactions (3). ‘Like’-ing (on Facebook or LinkedIn), sharing or retweeting, following a person’s twitter feed, and commenting on others’ updates are secondary ways of communicating online. Doing one or all of these shows that you care and puts you on others’ radars. This can be an effective tactic for keeping in touch with loose connections like recently-met prospects.

Blogs. Post your recruiting-specific thoughts in long-form (4) to demonstrate your capacity as a communicator and thought leader. Start your own blog (5)and create your own content hub, to which you can link from your social media updates.

But, there are many ways to use social media develop your personal brand. This isjust the start!

Determining a Sourcer’s Worth

Determining a Sourcer’s Worth

I am worth $1.83 million.

No, seriously, I am — at least, that’s what http://www.humanforsale.com told me. I took their survey and the resulting value on my person was nearly $2 million. Of course, I’d like to think that I am priceless. (Waiting while you all vomit…) Try it for yourself and see what you’d go for on eBay…

But getting serious (and because that site doesn’t take into account the fact that I’m a sourcer) — let’s talk about what sourcing is worth. What are you, as a professional people-hunter/sourcer/search ninja actually worth?

If we knew the answer to this question, we wouldn’t be asking you, our readers. It’s a question that comes up often and almost never receives the same answer. Some people think that sourcing is only worth about $6/hr. Others command a hefty $100+/hr billing rate for sourcing projects. Regardless of how you approach this question, the answer will almost never be accurate and I believe that is because there is no cookie-cutter framework in which “sourcing” fits. For instance:

• Some sourcers do lead generation
• Some sourcers do lead generation + initial outreach
• Some sourcers do lead generation + initial outreach + pre-screening
• Some sourcers do all of the above as well as strategic initiatives, including pipeline development and employment branding projects

…yet they are all “sourcers.” To say that each of these types of individuals should be paid the same since they are all classified as “sourcer” would be as incorrect as saying a person working in sales at a retail storefront should be making the same as a person working in sales at a multi-national ERP software manufacturer, because they both carry the same title.

In my personal opinion, sourcers’ compensation should be determined based on two main items and one sub-item:

• Level of expertise (usually determined by years of experience, but not always)
• Scope of function

If you want experience, you must pay for it. If you want more work to be done, you have to pay for that, too. And if you are not willing to pay for either (translated — you are looking for a “top-notch sourcer” at at $13/hr) then you will engage in a never-ending search — either because you’ll never find a sourcer willing to take your job, or you’ll end up hiring all the wrong ones.

Geography also plays a role in determining a sourcer’s compensation. Where you are in the world makes a big difference — for example, sourcers in the United States and Australia typically get paid more than sourcers in Asia. Cost of living in a given location makes a big difference in what a sourcer could/should earn.

With this in mind, I invite all of you who are sourcers to participate in our Salary Survey so we can get a snapshot of what the actual compensation of sourcers is today. Please follow this link and take a few moments to anonymously fill out the survey. Once we get a good sampling we will share this information on SourceCon.com to give everyone a better idea of how sourcing is compensated.

8 Skills Recruiters Should Have

When I attend career fairs, hiring conferences, recruiting events, or through conversations with prospective candidates, I keep learning that the wrong people are attending these events and working as recruiters. As I walked the room at a recent career fair, prior to the event starting, I sought to introduce myself to some of the other company representatives. I was surprised that many of them were unable to communicate at a level that would properly represent their company.

The behavior I witnessed at this event and many others is predictive of how these recruiters behave in the office and how they represent their company through other communication tools such as social media. Later as the candidates flowed into the fair to meet the companies, I witnessed these individuals sitting behind their tables, eating food, talking on cell phones, and displaying body language that suggested they didn’t want to be bothered.

Fortunately, I witnessed several individuals that did exhibit proper career fair behavior and strong recruiting traits. They were the ones that had long lines of candidates and also the ones whose companies are always recognized as recruiting industry leaders. The difference in success was clear.

We can all gain market intelligence by speaking with prospective candidates and finding out where they have applied, who they have interviewed with, and what their experiences have been like. Some of the experiences that I have heard are horrific, yet not surprising. So why do HR and recruiting leaders continually hire or put the wrong people into recruiting positions? I don’t get it.

Each year there are new tools, technologies, and platforms developed to help take “recruiting to the next level,” as the cliche goes. The problem is, all of these wonderful breakthroughs can be fruitless due to inadequate operator behavior. Moreover, if companies and organizations really want to eliminate or lower their agency recruiting spending, then start hiring similar profiles and not promoting an individual out of customer service or demoting someone from another department and sending them to recruit.

Regardless of where your next recruiter comes from, I have developed some essential skills, traits, and qualities that successful recruiters should possess. Aside from the regular “good communication, ability to work hard, team player” skills that everyone wants — here are a few of the most important must haves:

1. Strong sales skills — if you haven’t figured it out by now, recruiting is sales. If you disagree, you are in the wrong business. Not only do recruiters need to sell their clients (internal or external), but they need to sell candidates on opportunities and be able to articulate why company X is an employer of choice and why a particular opportunity is not just a great opportunity, but how it is the opportunity of a lifetime.
2. Ability to cultivate and build relationships — anyone can pull a name out of a database and place a call. It’s another thing to actually cultivate and build relationships with the candidates we recruit. Perhaps knowing a little about what makes them tick, what their hobbies are, engaging in a conversation rather than just following a script, etc. Social media, smart phones, and other communication platforms have built bridges straight into our personal lives. By creating a more open, friendly, and communicative relationship with candidates, the candidate experience will increase, making the recruiter and company stand out professionally and as an employer of choice.
3. Hunter’s mentality — there are so many ways to source for talent these days. There is an abundance of sites, networks, tools, and platforms all built in some fashion to make a recruiter’s life easier. But it is how each recruiter uses these tools that will make the difference. It all starts with the mentality of the individual. Recruiters are big-game hunters, and having the mindset to hunt and be relentless until the hunt is done is a priceless skill set. If a recruiter is going to sit at a desk, log in to Monster and keyword search all day — that is not the hunter mentality you want. You want someone who will use cold calling, social media, Boolean searches, networks, etc. in order to find the strongest and most-qualified individuals.
4. Big-picture thinking — simply focusing on single searches each day is great, but having the ability to see how candidates can fit into an organization, the potential value they can bring, or even knowing where a superstar candidate could fit in, even if there is no immediate position available, is invaluable. Moreover, keeping an eye on future tools, technology, and best practices and knowing what is coming down the pipeline will keep your company well versed and competitive in a tough talent market.
5. Strong follow-up skills — probably the #1 topic that irks me the most about recruiters – follow-up skills. How hard is it to return a call or an email — I will tell you that it is not hard at all nor does it take a severe amount of time to update a candidate, hiring manager, co-worker, etc. on events. I have heard all the horror stories of a recruiter (agency or corporate alike) calling someone frantically, building them up and setting them up to interview, only to never reach back out to the candidate again. All that does is breed negativity and it is not part of the relationship-building process what so ever.
6. Listening — anyone else ever had the recruiter-talk-your-ear-off presentation about how great they are, the database they have access to, successful placements, etc.? Recruiters need to listen first and talk second. Recruiters must possess the uncanny ability to listen and take a proper job order. Too many recruiters run their traps to no end. It’s annoying.
7. Consultative in nature — recruiting is a science and there are methods and processes. The majority of hiring managers need to be consulted on these procedures and processes in order to build long-term success and proper process flow. Good recruiters have the ability to advise and push back on their clients if need be. A good recruiter will act as a trusted advisor for their clients, and in return, clients will respect and act on given advice.
8. Personable and approachable — how many times do candidates call or meet a recruiter at a career fair and they are nervous on the other line or on the other side of the table. I love taking an approach opposite that which a majority of other recruiters take. I answer my phone calls and return emails. People will call me and are surprised that I even answered my phone. They are even more surprised that I am in a good mood, ask them how they are doing, thank them for their call, and take one minute of my time to let them introduce themselves and follow up with me. My mother always told me that I could catch more bees with honey than I can with vinegar. There will be people reading this that say they don’t have the time to return calls or emails, that they can’t talk to everyone at a career fair, that their clients are too tough to work with — and to me they are all excuses. No one is perfect. I have probably missed an email or call in my time; however, we can all make a better effort to be better recruiters.

The next time you are reviewing your analytics and you see a high time-to-fill number or whatever data is important to you — put the brakes on and see if what you really need to do is recalibrate your recruiting team and get the right people on board first.

Recruiting According to Steve Jobs

Recruiting According to Steve Jobs

In a recent Harvard Business Reviewblog I came across this quote attributed to Steve Jobs (this has been paraphrased for the ERE audience):

Screw the channel.

Manage the present for optimum performance.

Reinvent the future.

The equivalent for recruiting goes something like this:

Screw sourcing.

Maximize quality of hire.

Become a great recruiter.

The point: hiring great talent is not about great sourcing; it’s about great recruiting. And if you continue to chase the next sourcing silver bullet you’ll wind upexactly where you are today in 5-10 years from now. In fact, those of you who have followed the “chase-the-sourcing-silver-bullet” strategy have not improved quality of hire in the past 5-10 years. The only companies who have shattered this fundamental truth in the war for talent have been those who have a great employer brand. For everyone else, improving quality of hirerequires great recruiters.

In a nutshell, here’s my secret formula for hiring great talent:

Great Hires = Good Sourcing plus Great Recruiting

If you follow this formula you’ll be seeing and hiring far better people. Here are some ideas on how to reinvent the future of recruiting:

1. Don’t post job descriptions. These only work for those who have an economic need to apply. A great ad that leads with the EVP and emphasizes the impact of the actual work involved will increase your response rate at least 5X. There is no law, even the OFCCP’s, that says your postings have to be boring. Here’s an article for more on this important topic, but the key is to attract as many good people at the top of your sourcing funnel and then making sure you keep the best ones engaged from beginning to end.
2. Bridge the gap. The criteria top people initially use to engage with a recruiter is not the same as that used for deciding to accept an offer. Most people, especially if they’re fully employed, always ask about the compensation, the company, the job, and location when first contacted by a recruiter. These are very short-term tactical issues. When these same people decide to accept an offer, they consider different things, typically the growth opportunity; the impact the job can make; what they can learn, do, and become; the compensation and work-life balance issues; and the company and the mission. These are long-term and career strategy issues. Good recruiters know how to finesse the conversation to shift the discussion away from the short-term to the long-term in the first five minutes. As a result, they increase their opt-in rate on every call and contact. If you don’t know how to bridge this gap, you’re then forced to find more candidates. That’s why recruiters who can’t pull this off look for more new sourcing techniques to find more candidates rather than recruit the ones they already have.
3. Follow the 80/20 rule for passive candidate sourcing. Passive candidate sourcing is all about networking, not name generation. You need to get 1-2 pre-qualified referrals on every call to anyone on LinkedIn, then spend 80% of your time calling the best of these people. The payoff: they’ll call you back and they’ve been prequalified. That’s why bridging the gap is such a critical technique. Developing a relationship with a top person takes about 10 minutes, at least. If the person is not appropriate for the job then the process of networking can begin. As a minimum this consists of connecting with the person and then asking about their first-degree connections by cherry picking the best of them.
4. PERP your ERP. The new big thing in sourcing is auto-connecting your company’s open jobs with your employees’ LinkedIn and Facebook connections. LinkedIn, Jobvite, and Jobs2Web (among others) are now offering this important capability. This auto-connecting ability is getting smarter day by day and will represent a huge opportunity for those who know how to take advantage of this and target passive candidates. One way is to proactively seek out your employees’ best connections using the cherry picking mentioned above. This is the P in PERP: proactive. To turbo-charge your PERP and to lead the effort for reinventing the future, get your employees to connect with the best people they’ve worked with in the past. Then, sometime in the future, when you open a new requisition, the best people will be immediately identified through your employees’ LinkedIn network.
5. Minimize your opt-out ratio: aka, plug the leaks in your sourcing bucket. Top people don’t look for new jobs the same way average people do. They have different needs, they use different criteria for applying and accepting, and they move at a far different pace. Designing your sourcing processes around the needs of top active and passive candidates, rather than average candidates, will maximize the percent of top performers who ultimately apply. To get started on this, conduct a complete process review of your entire sourcing, interviewing, and hiring process. At each step, ask yourself if this is the best way to engage with a top-person who is not looking. After about an hour, you’ll have figured out the 4-5 things you need to do immediately to increase your end-to-end yield.
6. Defend your candidate from dumb decisions. If you do all of the above well, you’ll have 2-3X as many top candidates without having to do much else. Even better, you’ll have gotten out of the trap of “chasing the next silver sourcing bullet” mentally. However, if your hiring managers tend to overemphasize skills and/or aren’t very good at assessing candidate ability and/or aren’t very good at recruiting the best people to work for them, then you’ll need to coach them every step along the way. One way to do this is become a better interviewer than your hiring managers. You’ll never be able to out-yell a hiring manager, but you can out-fact them. Providing specific in-depth details about the candidate’s past performance can often override a biased or superficial assessment. If you do this often enough, find stronger candidates whom you’ve recruited and can close more top people without giving away the farm, you’ll soon be recognized as a true co-equal partner in the process.

Stop chasing the next sourcing silver bullet. Instead become a great recruiter, design your hiring processes around the needs of top people, offer careers instead of jobs, and partner with your hiring manager clients. As Steve Jobs would say if you asked him about recruiting:

Screw sourcing.

Maximize quality of hire.

Become a great recruiter.

How to organize a recruitment drive

What is a recruitment drive?

Generally recruitment drives (or events) are conducted when the requirement is generic but critical and number of positions is more. Here on a predetermined day ideally 50-60 candidates turn up for interview and 4-5 panel members keep taking interviews of candidates all along the day. Number of panel members varies according to number of candidates. Mostly recruitment drives are conducted on weekends as candidates have off that day.

Recruitment drives can be of two types:

Walk -ins : In case of walk-ins, an advertisement regarding the drive is published on news paper or job boards. Any candidate with suitable education and skill set can attend the interview. Mostly it is done for 0-2 yrs candidates.

Scheduled Interview: In case of a scheduled interview large numbers of candidates are scheduled by consultants or company to come on the same day for same requirement. In this case their profiles are already seen and shortlisted by the technical people.

Preparation:
In case of scheduled interview, please ensure that all the candidates get the mail with Interview venue, timing, contact person detail and Job description.
Also candidates should be called a day before for conformation and if possible consultants should do follow up calls also.
Also ensure that all interviewers are informed about the timing and requirement properly.
Discuss the process of interview (number of rounds, written test) with the hiring manager.

On the day of drive:

• Reach the venue at least 1 hour before the starting time. This will give you necessary time to make arrangements.
• If a written test is planned then arrange a long room with sufficient chairs.
• Arrange sufficient chairs in waiting room.
• Arrange enough candidate information forms and interviewer feedback forms.
• Arrange rooms for the interviews to be conducted.
• Have a small talk with the panel members about the hiring plan.
• Discus with the hiring manager and decide on the average duration of an interview. Convey it to panel members. If interviews stretch for very long time, it may be difficult to finish the process for all the candidates.

Once candidates start coming in :

• As candidates come, give them information form to fill. Mention the time of candidate’s arrival so that you can send them for interview serially.
• Immediately start interview process.
• Don’t make candidate’s wait for very long time. At the same time don’t let interviewers sit idly. Once a candidate’s interview is finished, take his feedback and send another candidate. If a candidate is rejected, don’t make them wait. Rather inform them about the feedback politely and send them back.
• Keep proper records (candidate name, interview feedback, panel member name etc) of the process in either excel sheet or any other paper.
• Arrange second round of interview for 1st round shortlisted candidates. And if he clears the final technical rounds try to arrange HR rounds also. If you can finish the whole process in the same day it is good for both the sides. Candidate need not come again and you need not bother to schedule him for HR round again.
• Look at the candidate turn out ratio and if necessary change your plan accordingly.

(Sample record sheet. Can be modified according to need)

Some difficult situations and how to handle them:

• Low turn out ratio:

Suppose candidate turn out ratio is very less ie: you have scheduled 100 candidates and only 30 have turned up and hiring manager is really angry.
What to do:
Call all the consultants who have done sourcing and ask them to follow up the candidates again and push candidates to come for interview. Then go to the hiring manager, apologize to him for inconvenience caused and inform about the steps you are taking. It will help to cool him down.

• Appearance of uncalled candidates:

Sometimes candidates hear about some recruitment drive from their friends and just show up with their resume. Here either you can ask them to leave as they were not scheduled or let them sit for interview.
My suggestion is: take their resume and show it to the panel members. If they find the resume to be suitable, let them sit for interview.

Parameters to measure the success of recruitment drive:

• Turn out ratio: The ratio of candidates scheduled versus candidates turned up should be good. Generally 70-80% turn out ratio can be termed as good.
• Offers: Number of offers will definitely be criteria for success of any recruitment event.
• Smooth proceedings: How well organized the drive was? Did candidates have to wait for very long time? Did you goof up any time?

Well, this is the whole recruitment drive process explained.Simple! isn’t it ? 🙂

Plan properly, maintain a calm demeanor and act diligently. Drive will surely be a success.