US Recruiting vs EMEA Recruiting

Hi everyone.

This is my first post on this blog. I thank Ted for inviting me to participate.

Briefly, I am a 15 year recruiting veteran in the U.S. I have a passion for what I do and I am always looking to learn more and grow. I have emersed myself in continuing recruitment education here is the U.S., but for the last 3 years I have been on the search to learn about recruiting practices abroad. I have been taking language classes and researching as much as I can about the various countries I would like to eventually recruit in.

I read many forums and blogs and the general consensus is that there are many differences in recruiting practices here and abroad. I have reached out to many Recruiters via Linked In and ERE to try to determine exactly what the differences are. I have learned in my career that there is no one correct way to do things. Even though I have been recruiting for 15 years I am always learning new things. There doesn't seem to be much on the internet regarding recruitment practices outside of the U.S.

If there are a few people out there who would be willing to share their knowledge on this blog I would truly appreciate it. One point that is constantly made is the availability of resources similar to ERE is limited. What can be done to rectify this? Has anyone tried to create forums to rectify this? What could I, as a U.S. Recruiter contribute to such a forum? How can we begin to assess the clear and not so clear differences in practices? What are some typical processes for the recruitment function in organizations abroad? Have there been Recruiters who have patterned their recruitment practices after U.S. companies? What are some things that can be done here in the U.S. that are not acceptable in EMEA? Are the internal recruiting teams actively involved or do most companies rely on third party agencies? If agencies are used, how involved is the in-house team?

As you can see, I am full of questions and have a tremendous thirst for knowledge. :) Of course, I'm not asking for direct answers to those questions right now. But they are at the forefront of my mind when I do research. I am sure there are others who share the same quest as I (on both sides of the pond). I would love to see a collaborative effort to bring cross-international training to fruition for both sides. SHRM is a great forum, but I find it limiting in the recruitment area. So let's start talking about it. You never know where it may lead.

I would love to be able to exchange ideas and offer advice to my fellow recruiters. I thank Ted for allowing me to join this blog and I am looking forward to learning and sharing.

Adrienne Graham
Atlanta, GA, USA

Experience with Experteer

Has anybody got experience with https://www.experteer.com/?

The focus on 60K+ jobs and I spoke to a headhunter in Germany who told me that it works very well.

thanks!

Hiring Metrics - TAT

Recently I've been thinking about hiring metrics a lot (yes, very exciting stuff :-) and the more I thought about Turn Around Times (TAT) where we measure the time it takes to fill a req from getting it approved to getting the offer accepted, the more I started wondering whether that was actually a very good indicator for your performance.

It does not say anything about how good you are at managing the workforce plan which I my eyes is a better indication of the strength of your staffing organization. Besides that it's a one-size fits all and all exempt positions have a target of 60 days.

One of the problems we run into is that there is a bit of disconnect between the business plans and staffing and we are always the last one to hear the headcount plans. Hence, we always are surprised by new hiring projects and then are struggling with the deadlines as the managers for some reason still think that you can open a can and the candidates will crawl out. I did some searching and came across this one:

Time: The Time metric is the Actual Time-to-Start divided by the Contracted Time-to-Start and multiplied by 100 to yield a percentage. Outcomes of 100% or less indicate that new employees are starting on or before the contracted time, while percentages over 100% indicate that recruiting efforts are taking longer than expected.

Time = (Actual Time to Start / Contracted Time to Start) x 100

What are you using in your company and what do you think about this metric?

What's your Niche?

Many successful recruiters have developed niches in their attempt to become more specialized and more effective. Has anyone out there followed this lead and become specialized to one type of technology or industry. What is your niche?

EMEA recruiter blog goes live!!!

Welcome to the blog of EMEA recruiters! This is the place to share experience about recruitment in Europe. Enough blogs on sourcing and AIRS, ZoomInfo and stuff on Sourcon 2007 but very little on how we source in Europe, what do we think of Monster here, or Stepstone or any other job sites. How do we deal with diversity in Europe. How can we best recruit in Poland, Romania or in the crazy Dutch labor market. This is the place where you can talk about stuff that your partner in life doesn't understand and finds utterly boring :-)

Everybody can become a co-author on this blog. People that are a member of the EMEA recruiter group on LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/36902/6D93A971DA34)
are already added as a co-author. If you happen to come to this site by accident and you want to participate, simply send me an email (tedmeulenkamp@hotmail.com) and I will let you in. That is, if you are a recruiter.

Some basic house rules;

1) This blog is for recruiters to talk about recruitment. It is not intended to sell your services or boost your company. You will be kicked out if you do so, sorry to be harsh but I would like to keep this blog nice and clean.

2) On this blog we try to respect each other and each other's opinion. Being rude or disrespectful means you get kicked out.

That's it! Nice and simple right.

I would of course recommend that you reach out to each other on LinkedIn and grow your network.

Jim Stroud gives more international exposure

Wow, the interview with Dave Mendoza is leading to international fame. Even the great Jim Stroud mentions our interview!

Where will this end? An invitation to the White House is becoming more and more likely ;-)

European Recruiting Institute

just the other day I came across a message from the recruiter network in the Netherlands. It talked about the European Recruiting Institute http://www.recruitinginstitute.eu/

Obviously very interested in this material as I'm developing a global training program for all Agilent recruiters I decided to check out what it was all about. Turns out that this is a purely Dutch initiative led by a recruitment agency together with an educational institute. That of course directly makes you wonder about a potential hidden agenda of the recruitment agency. How much indoctrination will they try to push through by marketing all the material and showcasing their stuff? Why are they calling the the European Recruiting Institute where there is nothing European there? anyway, perhaps I'm just having Monday morning blues so let's have a look.

Any way, I decided to have a closer look and it actually looks pretty nice. Well, unless you find it surprising that the site is actually one static page and that you have to download a pdf for more information. Any internet sourcer would already raise his eyebrows, right?

There are 3 levels to start at: entry, advanced and master (well that's how I read it). The entry level seems to be designed for people who absolutely have no clue about recruitment. Topics: the importance of recruitment for an organization, the recruitment process from a-z (is there one generic process?) and then some bits and pieces on how to write a job profile, how to interview (STAR) and some stuff on the legal side of things. Program seems nice for a beginner but I doubt that anyone with 2 weeks of experience is really going to be blown away by this.

Second level seems a bit more serious but still seems a bit theoretical: recruitment planning (welcome to the world where your planning will be obsolete within 2 weeks), the different forms of recruitment (agency, corporate, head hunter etc) branding and sourcing. I don't get any feeling in how far recruiters will actually be trained on these topics and especially on sourcing I'd be interested to learn what material they will show (just sourcing on the average Monster database or are we going deep on Google and Live.com)

The Master level is for recruitment managers and unfortunately that one seems to be kind of theoretical as well: mission and vision of the organization, doing a recruitment SWOT and developing a recruitment strategy. They do organize workshops and work sessions so I hope that the learning will come from best practices.

It seems that the effort is nice but I'm very curious to hear from the experiences of participants whether this is just a way to sell more recruitment processes or something very serious where recruiters can learn something for real. They mention that the professors are top recruiters from all over the world but fail to provide any names, the one thing that might have given their program a bit more "cachet"

The big question is whether the recruiters feel that such a "degree" would add something to their curriculum or not. Would you be interested in do this?

International Fame through Six Degrees for Dave

Thanks to Dave Mendoza I'm achieving international fame!

A bit of insight in the ways European Staffing works (well at least how I see it)
SixdegreesfromDave
The nice side effect is the multitude of requests for linkedin connections! 3200 right now and increasing rapidly. Now I need to start thinking about how I can better leverage all those contacts and get more hires out of them.