Tell Me About a Time You Felt Defeated

[JeffAltmanCoach]

 

A tough interview question and two ways to address it.

 

TRANSCRIPT

There’s a lot of conversation amongst third party and corporate recruiters about ways to network with passive job hunters. Not long ago, I was on a webinar that was run by someone, I’m not going to mention his name or the firm he’s associated with as a corporate recruiter, who sources talent on the web. He came up with some remarkably creative ideas.

For example, if there’s a book on a particular technology skill, and he sources  technical talent and, because he’s in a startup environment, has a specific skill set his firm looks for repeatedly. So, he gets on the web and he goes to Goodreads and looks to see who might have commented on a particular book, that is a core book for the skill set he that he looks for. He does the same thing on Amazon as well, looking for people who’ve read this particular book and commented on it, and shows a degree of intelligence and maturity.

Then he tries to find them online with LinkedIn or through the web, so he can reach out to them. I’ll simply say, there are a lot of great techniques and he unintentionally revealed something about this approach that I thought was very striking. And that’s when he said, “You know, they got back to me, but they weren’t really interested.”

As a third party recruiter as I was for so many years, and I have this seen as a corporate recruiters, there’s a lot of frogs, you kiss, using approaches like this, and then a lot of time we get sucked up into doing this kind of source that I don’t think any of us has. So, I gotta ask you, “How many of these frogs can you afford the kiss before the management goes, “Hey, you got anyone for me?” Or before a hiring manager says, “You know, I’ve got some space on my schedule. You got someone I can put into it?”

It’s goofy, how much time gets wasted! I want to be clear. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do this. But it is ideal for firms that hire one homogeneous technology over and over again, to be out there sourcing talent in this particular way. So, I know there’s this firm that I know of it uses Python and Django that constantly looking for people. So, if you’re recruiting this kind of talent, yes, you want to advertise. Yes, you want to promote using all the obvious distribution channels to get what . . . I don’t know why it’s called low hanging fruit, let’s just call it the active job applicants, the active job hunter.

Concurrently with that, you can use techniques to source talent, to reach out to people and find out who they are in unconventional ways and engage them. If you do this exclusively, you’re never going to fill all the jobs that you have available, or you’ll get fired because you’re just not going to fill enough of them to make sense.

So, I just want to encourage you, from a time management perspective, be smart about this. If you’re in corporate HR, you’re being hired to fill positions, you’re not being hired to engage people who aren’t interested. So, you can’t use all your time in this particular way, you’ve kind of manage it  so it’s a part of your day but not all of it.

 

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