Use Your E-Mail Signature for Recruiting

How many e-mails to you send out every day? 10? 50? 100? And how often are those e-mails forwarded?

Here’s an idea for you: Add a recruiting message and website link in your signature. Sure, your work fax is interesting, but if you’re looking for talent, why not use that space? It’s free.

Getting your people to add an e-mail signature is one of those easily implemented elements that can be a real win for HR. Here’s how to do it:

Develop a pithy recruiting tagline (or at least one that’s clear, something like You’re Looking. We’re Hiring. Wanna Meet?)
Create a short recruiting URL and redirect it to your long one (http://www.yourcompany/history/about/work/careers won’t work)
Enlist the help of IT and create a signature protocol with instructions that can be understood by a 3rd grader
Send out an e-mail to employees explaining the business reason for adding a recruiting message to their signature
Sit back and let the passive recruiting begin

Shifting Careers and a Little Advice

I had lunch yesterday with an intriguing senior executive who had spent his entire career in one industry. He’d risen to the top of organizations and not only delivered financial results, but he also built high performance teams doing it. So, been there, done that.. And now he’d like a change of pace. How does a person do that?

I’ve known people who have done career shifts. The idea isn’t new, Bill Bridges wrote Job Shift over a dozen years ago, and in that book he predicted that there would be a displacement from the career track to the skills track. All that’s well and good, but what happens in practicality? How does someone who’s spent 20 or 30 or 40 years in an industry tell a story that says, “I can be productive and thrive in a new place”?

When I was talking to this senior executive, he told some very interesting stories about creative entrepreneurship that would make a Sand Hill Road VC sit up and take notice. He had done lots of interesting and varied jobs and led major projects that were super interesting. And none of them were on his resume.

I suggested a couple of books that have really influenced how I’m thinking about jobs and working these days. I told him to pick up a copy of Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist and look at the chapter about resumes and how to market yourself. And along those “interrupt the pattern” lines, I told him to grab a copy of Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek and read about mini-retirements and finding your bliss. I know that’s a bit of the recency effect, but they’re what’s on my mind now. I’m sure there’s more to be said and read.

What advice would you give a person who’d spent a career in an industry and was ready to make a move? Would you hire someone who was outstanding as a manager but came from outside your industry?

Keep Track of Who You Interviewed

Have you ever sent out a recruiting letter to a candidate and found out that he already rejected an offer a year earlier? Maybe that hasn’t happened to you, but it did happen to Google.

In Google Hiring Funniness, Robert Scoble writes about a highly-regarded candidate that Google was chasing:

Jeff Barr is an evangelist at Amazon on its Web Services team. He’s getting some funky recruiting email, says that the recruiters don’t have a good database of who has interviewed there before. Doesn’t make one confident that they have their act together when it comes to hiring “Googly” people.

It’s interesting, and this is newsworthy because this story involves Google, the people who own the search business. If they’re not doing it right, what does that say about other companies? I’m sure there are lots of contact tracking software companies out there just drooling. But software doesn’t fix bent or broken processes. How do you make sure that you chase who you want to chase and know that you’ve chased them before?