This is (some of) what I learned at the ERE 14 Conference

I was fortunate enough to attend the ERE 14 conference in San Diego last week.

Mostly, I helped to man the Randstad Sourceright booth and speak with potential clients.

However, I was able to tip away every now and then to strike a pose with a pal…

And snap a couple of hollywood selfies…

And participate in a moustache growing competition! It was a 4-way tie.

Somehow, in between all of that, I did manage to attend some sessions at ERE. One of the more fascinating sessions was hosted by John Vlastelica. (He did an outstanding job by the way.)

His session featured recruiting leaders from Facebook, Yahoo and Zappos. I am sharing my notes from the fascinating conversations that happened then. (If you were there and notice that I have missed something, please do leave a comment? Cool.)

# Zappos ran a successful referral campaign where they awarded people trips to Las Vegas for every software developer hire referred to Zappos.

# Facebook aligns their recruiting and sourcing teams around pipelines of talent, rather than requisitions. For example, a team of recruiters and sourcers may focus exclusively on finding quality assurance engineers and only that. This method helps said team to really, really learn what QA people do and better discern who would be a fit for Facebook.

# Facebook recruiters are extensively trained on interviewing and candidate engagement. Once training is completed, new recruiters observe (or as they call it, “shadow”) experienced recruiters for a period of time. Afterward, the new recruiters are shadowed by the experienced recruiters for a while. The whole process takes a YEAR before a recruiter is left to his own devices. Wow!

# Yahoo holds non-recruiting events where a speaker will come and present on a topic of relevance to the technical community. NO RECRUITERS ARE ALLOWED to participate as it is about building a community of tech geeks. There is plenty of food and drinks. Yahoo execs pop-in to say hello and spend a VERY short moment praising Yahoo as a wonderful place, then speaker comes in and presents. EVERYONE who attends has signed up on a mailing list that recruiters leverage later. Cool.

# The tool that Facebook, Yahoo and Zappos all use is “Facebook Graph Search.” Other tools mentioned were Entelo and Connectifier.

# A sourcing strategy that Facebook, Zappos and Yahoo all used was hackathons. Zappos relayed a story where someone from their call center won a hackathon and went on to work for another company that the Zappos CEO invested in.

# Facebook and Yahoo both stressed the need to personalize your candidate emails, since candidates are inundated with recruiter emails all day. Most recruiters / sourcers do not take the time to research candidates and get an idea of who they are prior to emailing them. Yes, it takes more time and will cause the quantity of emails you send to decrease. However, it will increase the quality of your connections and that is a better payoff long-term. (I thought this was great advice as I have been preaching that for a long time.)

# When Zappos finds people via Facebook Graph Search, they pay the $1.00 fee for their message to reach the recipient, then ask them to reply back on LinkedIn.

# One way Facebook reaches passive candidates is by building Facebook pages dedicated to their products and foster community around them.

# Facebook evaluates its recruiters and sourcers differently than most. They set an annual goal of so many hires and monitors how the team met or exceeded that goal (primarily) and how the individuals contributed (secondarily).

# Like Facebook, Yahoo focuses on core profiles (15 actually) and constantly searches for them.

# When it comes to tracking sourcing intelligence, Yahoo uses a tool that they developed in house. Facebook uses Salesforce. Zappos uses “Jobvite Engage.”

So, what do you think of how Facebook, Yahoo and Zappos handle their recruiting needs? Leave a comment and let me know! Thanks…

Jim

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One thought on “This is (some of) what I learned at the ERE 14 Conference”

  1. I was in the “little boys room” when the “selfie” shots were taken… devastated!!

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