Videoconferencing as a collaboration tool is spreading like wildfire across the business world. This solution, primarily when it is in the cloud, helps professionals work together in real-time over the Web—and it’s becoming increasingly secure and robust.

Just how popular is videoconferencing? Marketing data aggregated from several industry sources suggests that videoconferencing will soon replace standard conference calls and become the preferred method of office communications.

As a result, cloud-based videoconferencing companies such as InterCall, Tely Labs, Global Crossing, Blue Jeans Network, Kaltura and Arkadin are emerging as leaders in this space. These organizations provide essential features such as Collaboration-as-a-Service (CaaS), virtual environments and videoconferencing platforms. Customers can use these companies to gain a variety of services at affordable prices.

Since many of their key targets now require HD videoconferencing, which uses much more bandwidth, videoconferencing providers are struggling to keep up with demand. Although numerous small video conferencing providers have ideal solutions, they lack the bandwidth to provide this high level of service to their customers. For this reason, the industry is rife with mergers and acquisitions; many small providers are being picked up by larger companies that want to work their solutions into existing service offerings. These companies have the infrastructure and capacity to support the demand for customer growth.

Many of these larger companies are looking for IT professionals with the infrastructure expertise needed to complete and manage audiovisual (AV) and teleconferencing deployments. They also need experts to sell the services once the technology is integrated. Leveraging an extensive database evolved over two decades in business, J. Patrick & Associates can provide your company with qualified, hand-selected professionals who possess proven expertise in the areas of unified communications, AV installation and integration, AV design engineering, and more. At J. Patrick & Associates, we have placed thousands of sales engineering professionals and back-office engineers needed to manage all facets of videoconferencing operations all across North America, including:

• Sales Executives for AV Integration and Conferencing & Collaboration;

• National Sales Directors for AV Integration;

• General Managers for AV Integration;

• Sales Engineers for Video Encoders;

• Field Engineers for Videoconferencing;

• Technical Assistance Managers;

• VTC On-Site Technicians

• And many more!

For more information about how JP+A can help with your company’s AV /

videoconferencing staffing needs, click here.

Despite it being a new year, many job seekers have been looking for a job already…in some cases, conducting that job search for a while and are burnt out.

While some job seekers have new inspiration to start a search, I know some of you may be tired and burnt out on your search and need a renewed source of perspective. Well, you have come to the right place.

When you are burnt out on your job search, you may need a mental break. Rest to rejuvenate is crucial, but what I think can be equally as effective is to give a good, hard look at the job search activities that you have been doing.

Are you setting yourself up for disappointment and job search burnout? 

Here are 5 Questions to Ask yourself

1. Have you submitted to more than 10 – 20 online job postings per week?

If yes, then you may be spending too much time on job boards and not enough time engaging actual people. You should not be spending more than 10% of your job search time on job boards. Set up Google Alerts and job alerts within notable job boards to have applicable jobs emailed to you and stop wasting time mining for jobs on the boards. 

2. Are you Reaching Out Directly to Hiring managers?

Of the job applications you applied online, how many did you find someone at the company and reach out directly to connect about your application?

If the answer is less than 50%, you are depending on the computer/database gods to get you an interview, when you need to be talking to people. You need human discussion (phone and email) and contact (in person meetings) throughout this process to stay energized and get hired. “A computer hired me,” said no one ever.

3. How Many People are you Talking to?

I suggest keeping a log of how many conversations you are having with people. If it is less than 10-15 people per week, you need to step it up. Again, people hire people–so talk to people. Computers do not hire people, so do not spend time submitting to electronic job applications for most of your time. 

4. Do You Say "I'm Open to Anything"?

If this is exactly how you ask them, I ask you: Do they know what you do, really? Do they know specifically what you want? It is much better to say, “I am looking for an accounting manager position with a mid-sized company in manufacturing” or “I am seeking a customer service position with a technology firm” than say “Hey, let me know if you hear of any job openings” — Specific is so much better than general each and every time! Specific also breeds confidence. 

5. Are you speaking to the right people in your industry?

How many new contacts are you adding to your contacts list each week–or are you circling back to the same 50 – 200 people each month? Add new people by attending industry and profession-related networking events, alumni get-togethers, former co-worker get-togethers and events in your community. Be sure your business card markets you in a memorable way.

Generally speaking, if you are not speaking to people about your job search, not speaking in specifics to people about your job search and/or not speaking to the right people, you could be spinning your wheels a bit, which will contribute to your burn out. It is important to rest and have fun to recharge…but it is also important to do the right activities suggested above to help support your success and preserve your mindset. Good luck!!

Originally posted at: Chameleon Resumes on Job Search Burn Out - Lisa Rangle

Many people assume that companies couldn’t care less about life-work balance. 

On the contrary, many companies are now trying to make sure their employees are healthy, happy, and balanced. As a result, they want to make sure that any new employees they take on (or anyone they promote) embody these same characteristics. 

The reality is only by being a balanced employee can you attract a truly balanced employer. (Note: We call it life-work balance, as we believe only by putting life first, can you start to have life-work balance.) 

Below you’ll find some reasons why companies want balanced employees as well as how life-work balance can help advance your career. These are all ideas you can implement at the office and at home.

Start hitting the gym again

If you’ve been thinking about getting healthier you can now add another reason to the list as to why you should: companies know that healthy people help make them profits. 

Think about it...

Healthy people take less sick days, look good, and have a lot of energy. More specifically, companies know that unhealthy people cost them their bottom line. To put it into numbers unhealthy employees cost companies $1.1 trillion in lost productivity. Many companies have tried to combat this by implementing healthy initiatives that encourage employees to take care of themselves, like lunchtime yoga or run clubs. 

If it’s been a while since you’ve hit the gym you may want to get yourself a new membership and stick to it. As a bonus, we all know that exercise helps us deal with stress, an attribute that is essential for high-level jobs.

Practice determining priorities

Having priorities and acting accordingly not only helps you become less stressed, but it also shows a company that you can handle getting the important stuff done. Furthermore, multitasking actually makes people less productive, so prioritizing allows you to follow through on your responsibilities at your highest capacity. 

You can start by ridding your schedule of anything that only makes you seem busy. For some this may mean leaving for lunch instead of working at their desk. For others, it may require dropping committees they joined but have no interest in. Take a look at your calendar and start getting rid of anything that is not essential.

Learn how to outsource and delegate

At an executive level, you will be expected to outsource and delegate to other employees or departments, however this a skill that many people can’t seem to master. If you have the tendency to want to do everything by yourself, stop it and start asking for help. 

By delegating to others you give yourself the space to tackle your most important tasks for the company. It also lifts a weight off of your shoulders when you realize you don’t have to do everything by yourself. This is also a skill that hiring managers are really looking out for so make sure to give them concrete examples of how you delegate tasks to others.

Start setting clear boundaries

Employees will oftentimes find themselves stressed and unproductive because they didn’t put proper boundaries in place. For instance, maybe they have an open-door policy and people pop in at all hours of the day, causing them to lose their focus and take on too much. Or, perhaps they are still answering work emails in the wee hours of the night. Neither of these scenarios help employees get their work done and could have negative long term effects on their health. 

The only way to combat this is to set boundaries and stick to them. In order to get the most out of your career, you must make sure you’re taking care of yourself. By implementing some of these strategies you not only start living a healthier life, but you also express qualities that are needed in a leader.

Organizations everywhere are choosing to bypass purchasing on-premises equipment in favor of renting hosted space and equipment.  Referred to as colocation, it provides rapid scalability, tremendous cost savings, secure connectivity and all of the stability and protection that is needed to gain a competitive edge in today’s market.

For this reason, colocation is a hot commodity as the market is currently undergoing a 15 percent growth rate that is expected to last through 2014.  And industry pundits are projecting that this growth is far from over, as it is anticipated that it will reach $10 billion by 2017.

As a result, job seekers stand to benefit significantly since manpower is needed to support this growing industry.  Colocation is fueled by data center infrastructure such as racks, servers, cables, switches and power.  Data centers are massive facilities that require both advisors and operators to function properly.

Here are some of the jobs that you can expect to find opening up in this space, and what each position entails:

Solutions Architect:  This position mandates having the highest level of pre-sales technical compliance on the data center team.  Solutions Architects typically involve managing multiple projects at once, and therefore require advanced knowledge in developing and guiding IT projects.  The Solutions Architect is responsible for developing technical project components and standardizing central processes.

Colocation Engineer:  Colocation Engineers are most often involved in providing developing technical designs for colocation, but also have a hand in providing technical support, presenting projects to clients and working closely with them to deliver need-based solutions.  This position mandates a thorough understanding of the technical components of network infrastructure.

Director of Product Management: Colocation services need to be created, priced and sent to market—and this falls under the responsibility of the Director of Product Management.  This position oversees not only data center space, but also power and cooling needs.  Essentially, Product Managers ensure that the colocation center is both marketable and profitable.

Cloud / Colocation Services Sales Executive: Once the services are created and sent to market, someone needs to make sure that the space will be rented out to businesses.  This is where Sales Executive come in.  Sales Executives are one of the main arms of the colocation enterprise as they are responsible for filling seats and making sure the operation brings in enough business to stay afloat.

Operations Manager:  Operations Managers take care of the technical components of a colocation center.  Colocation centers typically guarantee maximum uptime, and these are the people that make sure the promise does not go unfulfilled.  Operations Managers oversee the team that provides day-to-day technical maintenance and support in the colocation center.

Datacenter Technician:  Technicians are perhaps the ones who are most immersed in the daily ins-and-outs of colocation center operations, as they are the ones responding to service tickets and fixing equipment.  They work directly with hardware such as fiber optic cables and servers.

Facilities Engineer:  Colocation centers have a lot of other components outside of the network, such as water pumps and treatment systems, HVAC, generators, UPS, electrical distribution and network monitoring systems.  Facilities Engineers provide the equipment that keeps the network healthy.

Systems Administrator:  Systems Administrators typically install, configure and fix computer networks for end-users.  These administrators are responsible for service delivery and applications that are based off-site.  They typically take an active role in managing network processes for customers.

For more information about how J. Patrick and Associates, a firm specializing in data center and IT firm recruiting, can help you find quality and qualified colocation experts to fortify your team, click here.  If you are an experienced industry professional with a strong track record of success as well as technical depth and innate business savvy, contact us today.

The rising market need for flexibility and business agility is driving software-defined networking (SDN) in next-generation data center and enterprise IT environments.  In fact, 40 percent of recently surveyed IT professionals plan to embrace SDN by this time next year—and by 2016, the global SDN market will reach a robust $3.7 billion.  SDN is an innovative and disruptive new approach to solving many of today’s critical networking challenges, realizing improved security, efficiency and network utilization as well as cost-savings and automated management and provisioning across global networking operations.

In addition to spurring various mergers and acquisitions in the corporate world, the technology is also creating a big demand amongst data center operators and enterprise organizations for IT and networking-related professionals to advise, manage and direct these new SDN-related operations.  However, many are finding that this calls for a specialized set of abilities. 

Unlike its architectural approach to decouple control and data in technical applications, in the job market, SDN requires the convergence of IT and business skill sets.  This is why - as SDN continues to proliferate throughout the industry - development and operations, or DevOps, professionals will be in high demand.  These professionals maintain both tactical and technical skill sets, as well as the ability to collaborate and coordinate strategic, business-related initiatives – critical to designing the SDN networks of tomorrow.  Other in-demand skills will likely include expertise in OpenFlow™ protocol, a foundational element for building SDN solutions, and open source switch controllers.

The SDN industry is still emerging; and while most can identify the latest in-demand skill sets, experts are still working to pinpoint exactly what jobs will be in store.  For instance, many are debating the question of whether or not we will see “virtualization engineers.”  According to Research Director of 451 Research Eric Hanselman, the requirements are already there.

“We already have requirements for engineers who want to understand how virtualized networks work, because there are subtle differences between those and physical networks.”

Still, others are saying that while the position of an SDN engineer might be questionable, there will definitely be more than enough room for those with knowledge of how networks work. As Matthew P. Davy of InCNTRE explained, soon there will be little to no need for network engineers still relying on command line interfaces (CLIs) for configuring network devices.

“...there will be fewer network engineers who can perform their job while knowing little to nothing about servers, storage, hypervisors, system administration and scripting,” he explained.

One thing is certain, however.  This forecasted, exponential growth of SDN in the coming years is not only changing the face of data center and enterprise networking at the technical level, it is also evolving the landscape of the job market.  Professionals with higher-level skills that involve programming software and understanding the use of various automation tools will play a critical role in the propagation of this technology.  Keeping a pulse on this ever-evolving market is executive recruiting firm J. Patrick  + Associates.

With over two decades of experience in linking qualified executive management, sales, marketing and technical candidates within IT markets, J. Patrick and Associates has all of the tools you need to link the best talent with the best companies.  J. Patrick and Associates works directly with hiring managers and executives in industry-leading technology vendors, system integrators, telecom service providers and end-user organizations to identify the most in-demand skills as well as the latest professional requirements.

We handle sales, marketing and technical placement with Cloud-enabling product vendors and service providers.  This includes Data Center Management, Security, Storage, and other Cloud/SaaS/Virtualization verticals.   In addition to the Colocation and Data Center infrastucture firms, Cloud- or SaaS-based application providers are the backbone of our practice.

 Are you looking to ride the SDN wave? Click here for more information. 

Last month I made our annual pilgrimage to the RSA Security Show, an event chock full of clients, prospects and excellent candidates for our Security practice.  The show had grown by 30-35% since the 2013 edition, with an entire 2nd pavilion devoted to the largest vendors such as Symantec, HP, cisco, Juniper and Microsoft.  There were so many small and medium-sized vendor booth, that some of the booths were shared by more than one vendor, each having a day to themselves.  Attendance has jumped and repeat, multi-day foot traffic was tremendous.   

Literally each and every firm I met with was hiring technical people, primarily developers, and more than half were hiring revenue-side people in sales, marketing and sales engineering.  Many of the hiring managers I met had lost one of their key people since the start of year, in addition to trying to make new hires associated with increased demand and a growing sales force.  I expect that the second quarter of 2014 to look the same:  strong demand for moneymakers!

As we continued to work on searches and solicit for new ones, the demand picture has clearly emerged that the Sales Engineering talent arms race is reaching a boiling point, with 

candidates receiving multiple offers, as well as counteroffers from their current employers.

Hiring manager and their HR counterparts obsess over creating a winning team atmosphere, and work hard to be competitive on salary, benefits, quality of life and opportunity to achieve sales targets.  This helps them attract and retain the best Sales Engineers.  But in times like these a high-demand, seller’s market (especially in the NYC, SF, Boston and Northern Viriginia geo markets) where candidates have the upper hand, those factors may not be enough to build (and retain) a great team.

When the demand picture changes this drastically, hiring team must adapt their tactics and streamline their process.   You should assume any candidate that you are interviewing, and certainly the few that you deem worthy of an offer, will have multiple competing offers, from your direct competitors and from firms who compete for the same talent pool.  Too often hiring managers think of the direct competitors in their Security market product niche as their only competition.   Resellers, consulting firms and end users seeking Top Security Talent should also be considered competitive threats for the talent pool.

I’ve found in 27 years of recruiting that hiring firms react slowly to a hot market and alter their hiring process ONLY AFTER a few painful losses.  Those who adapt fastest, maybe even before the p
ain of a defection or missed opportunity for a great hire, will always thrive.  Otherwise all that effort in being monetarily competitive and team-building goes to waste.

Think aboout these when you look at how your firm is hiring:

Never stop sourcing candidates and interviewing.
Interviewing candidates fairly continuously allows managers to keep an eye on the talent pool, collect all kinds of competitive information (you know you do it!) and limit then downside risk of losing a member of your team, whether to a competitor or internal transfer and promotion.   This may not be practical for more complex hires, but the best sales VPs, SE managers and especially Inside Sales managers I know are never far from an interview.

Simplify:

Eliminating or simplifying steps may allow you to see that extra candidate, or get that Rock Star candidate through the process to an offer faster.  

Question all the steps in your process:  

Does this person really get a vote on these hires? Why does a marketing manager with no direct reports get a vote on this Sales Engineer hire?

Can we do this interview on a conference call with more than one decision maker?  In these we suggest that one person run the call and ask the questions, with others mostly listening or IMing the questions to the moderator.

Can we eliminate this step?
Can we change the order of the steps in order to eliminate "bad fit, no hire” candidates earlier and with less team involvement.   We had a client that used a sales assessment as a threshold test.  If the candidate didn’t fit their profile for a sales rep, according to their online assessment, the process ended there.  Think about which step may be that threshold, and move it to the beginning of the process.

Speed:  

• Use technology like Skype, Webinars, videoconferencing and other collaboration tools to shorten the hiring process.
• Pre-Interview questionnaires that can be submitted with resumes can make that initial phone screen highly productive, and candidates can volunteer mnore information on the areas that are critical to your decision process.
• Interviews in parallel rather than serial: conference calls, recorded calls and the like.
• Don’t assume that the candidate is at the same place in the hiring process with your competitors.   You may be in the fifth inning with a candidate, and meanwhile he’s in the ninth with other firms.  He may even be in the early innings with another firm, and they make the decision to speed the process to closure faster than you currently can.

Trust your hiring managers.  Expect them to make mistakes. 

So much of the trend towards multiple interview rounds is about CYA.  Everyone is petrified about the costs of a bad hire, particularly when there's a recruiting fee involved.   Managers must know that they can survive some bad hires.  When I talk to Sales Engineering Managers about hiring, they always remember bad hires, or bad employees that they inherited when they moved into the jobs. At some point, all of those people must have looked good enough to hire!  They can also recall the people who rose the occasion and grew into SE roles they may not have been hired for, had hey been an outside hire.   For nearly every manager I speak to, this is how they got into sales or sales engineering.  Someone gave them a shot!   You can't interview your way into emliniating the risk of a bad fit.  Frankly, interviewing is the least-best way to hire, because everyone (including the employer) is on their best behavior.  This is why people hire employees they have worked with before, even if the role or technical fit is not ideal.  They know how this person is going to work and interact with the rest of the team and more importantly, with sales prospects.

Managers need to pull the trigger on hiring decisions with a little less than optimal confidence, if they want to compete for the best people, and if they need to hire multiple people in this market. That may be very uncomfotable (especially engineers!) but that is the current market reality.

You’ve identified the winner.  Now what?

• How quickly can you generate an offer?  How many signatures are required? Can we automate that process?
• Do you have an alternate identified?
• Does the offer have a drop-dead date?  Many of our clients allow candidates no more than 48-72 hours to make a decision on an offer before it is withdrawn, and they move to an alternate candidate.
• Can we automate the offer process?   Electronic signature services such as Adobe’s Echosign.com or Docusign allow you to see if candidates have received, viewed or signed the offer letter.  No need to chase or guess on any of those status issues.

The market for revenue-producers in the IT market has bloomed, at least for the short- and medium-term.   What worked in a low-demand environment (2008-2011) will not work in this high-demand market.     

Take a hard look at your process, and choose to compete at every step.

Employment for life is increasingly a thing of the past – even at the executive levels, according to a study recently published in the Harvard Business Review. Executives are switching jobs more frequently – on average every four to five years.

If you’re looking to take the next step in your executive leadership career, here are some guidelines and keys to crafting a winning executive resume that’ll make you stand out as a candidate, whether you’re in the public, private or non-profit sector.

 1.  Who

Rather than beginning your resume with an objective, use a title – for example, as outlined in this Chief Operations Officer resume sample. You can also include a brief elevator style pitch below that, succinctly outlining why a company should hire you. This should serve as a compelling positioning statement that sets the stage for the rest of your resume.

According to the study, while elite schools still hold sway at the top levels, the majority of corporate executives today went to public universities. Whatever your education background, your qualifications are important and degrees earned should be included along with any other relevant professional certifications. Space on your resume is valuable, so ensure any qualifications you choose to include pertain closely to your roles and competencies.

2.  What

It’s helpful for someone viewing your resume for the first time to be able to see where your expertise lies. When addressing relevant topical items in your resume, under a Core Competency Section as shown in these executive resume samples, you fulfill the keyword optimization required by humans reading your document and resume databases digesting your document.

Provide an overview of the areas you have experience in (finance, operations, sales, marketing), what kinds of industries you’ve been exposed to (consulting, manufacturing, food and beverage, consumer goods) and what levels of responsibility you’ve held. This will provide context for your achievements and core strengths.

3.  Where

Following on from the last point, explain (briefly) what each organization did and put it into perspective. Was it publicly or privately held? Regional, national or global? What markets and regions did you work within? It may be helpful to describe the size of the workforce or the company’s annual revenue. Don’t assume everyone is familiar with individual companies or even the industries.  Outlining how to effectively define size and scope when describing current and previous employers is shown on this VP-Medical Affairs Executive Resume Sample.

4.  How

Particularly at the executive level, demonstrating performance is crucial. Let your accomplishments speak for themselves. Provide evidence through specific examples – what you achieved, when, and where – that will also implicitly communicate your mastery of your profession.

Sales success is easy to quantify, but other functions might not translate as easily to numbers. You may be able to point to cost savings you achieved, processes that you made more efficient, productivity increases, projects delivered on time and on budget, or other initiatives successfully deployed. Use active verbs that reflect your role in each, such as ‘spearheaded’ and don’t waste time with generic and empty adjectives.

Here are some other questions to ask yourself when building your executive resume:

• How have you been involved in setting a vision and carrying out strategy for organizations? How have you used ‘big picture’ thinking to initiate change?
• Have you hired, fired and built teams? What about personal development – have you mentored more junior employees?
• Have you been responsible for budgets, fundraising, high level negotiations or other financial matters?
• Have you been involved in any mergers or acquisitions, or other major business initiatives you can point to?
• What kinds of business relationships do you have and at what level? How do you deal with stakeholders, clients, and suppliers? Do you have a valuable network of contacts?
• What kind of experience do you have with public speaking, writing or giving presentations? How have you represented your organization to the community and the wider public?

Following the who, when, where and how model of crafting specific details in your executive resume will ensure hiring managers will see how you can add value and make a difference in how soon you land that interview.

Written by Lisa Rangel, Executive Resume Writer

Putting an Effective IT Business Ecosystem to Work

 J. Patrick & Associates has been around nearly two decades.  Over this time, we have developed a clear vision of the IT business ecosystem.  Along the way, we’ve also developed sector-specific hiring expertise and understanding that the needs of the hiring firm go well beyond matching a paper candidate to a particular position description.  You may be familiar with many of the advantages this enables us to offer you over traditional firms and database-driven hiring.

Agility, for one. We’re ready to move now and leverage unique industry insight to help drive your most favorable hiring decisions.  Market Intelligence, for another.  We are prepared to help you the right person for that key position right now--but also ensure you’re positioned for the larger demands of an evolving business environment.  And perhaps most importantly, relationships.  We’ve been placing great candidates at great firms for practically 20 years.  In the recruiting world, that’s no mean feat.  It’s no accident either; it’s proof of a winning track record.

We’ve been blogging recently about some of those more easily seen advantages to engaging a top and successful search firm like J. Patrick & Associates.  Let’s talk a bit more now about what that looks like when it’s put into action.  After all the initial legwork is done, then the real work of hiring a candidate begins.  It’s time to close the hire. I’ll start by saying that in the 20-year history of J. Patrick, we have never been the hold up during the recruiting process.  While average times to hire vary by industry, in the IT sector this is usually about 4.8 weeks.  One of the advantages we offer our clients is an opportunity to contract that time frame.

It’s worth pointing out that the cost of vacancy can be really, really painful to your bottom line, so it’s in your best interest to get the right person on the job as soon as possible. Say for example, you need a sales engineer and you’re willing to offer him or her an $80,000 annual salary.  Each day that spot goes unfilled, you’re looking at a loss of earnings potential between roughly $900 and $1,540.  That adds up in a hurry.

J. Patrick recognizes that sourcing is just the first step, and we transform interest to intention, walking you and your potential candidates through the process by preparing, communicating, qualifying and following up on each phase until it’s time for you to meet face to face.  And here is another step in the process where we help you reduce your recruiting timeframe and close the hire through hands-on engagement.

Once we’re confident that we’ve got the best of all candidates for you to select from, we bring everyone together and bring the process to a quick and successful close.  Your staff, your candidates, and the J. Patrick team converge at a select venue and, in effect, sort the wheat from the chaff.  In short, we get all the players in the same place at the same time and create an environment that enables you to be proactive, coordinated, and efficient.  You’d be surprised at how something this simple speeds up the process. But the threefold value of momentum, shared feedback, and immediacy (memory fades) is undeniable.

Why does it work so well? Simple, it’s intense and efficient.  Everything is set up for your team, and that ensures you obtain maximum return on your time and effort.  It’s a turnkey solution from the venue, the candidates, the documentation, right on down to the catering; we’ve got it covered.  You’re free to focus on building a winning team from the best candidates available.  All this takes tremendous time and effort - you won’t get this level of service (or results) from a LinkedIn Recruiter subscription.

It’s time to consider a firm with proven expertise and resources, like J. Patrick & Associates, to provide the results your business demands.  Reach out to a qualified J. Patrick recruiting professional today to see how we can help you assemble a talented, motivated, and dedicated team. 

The Value of a Recruiter in the Age of LinkedIn

Chances are, if you work in the business world and are not using LinkedIn, somehow you didn’t get the memo.  LinkedIn is a massive social media platform for businesses, job seekers, and online influencers. LinkedIn is a great way to connect to other people and substantially grow your network.  Considering the fact that over 280 million people have a LinkedIn account, recruiters see LinkedIn as the greatest tool ever invented. In fact, 93% of all recruiters maintain a presence on LinkedIn.

Not surprisingly, LinkedIn has a specialized platform for use by HR Managers and recruiters.  It’s called LinkedIn Recruiter. Put simply, LinkedIn Recruiter is a giant database of all the profiles on LinkedIn.  While one might think that all you have to do is purchase LinkedIn Recruiter and then simply select and hire the best candidates for your open positions, the process is much more sophisticated than that.  Frequently, when businesses and their in-house HR staff purchase LinkedIn Recruiter, they think can instantly replace their recruiter. However, these companies quickly realize the amount of time required to locate, attract, and hire the perfect candidate. 

How has the recruiter’s value increased in the age of LinkedIn?

LinkedIN Recruiter takes time to learn

In-house HR Departments are wrought with the challenge of optimizing the search and selection process while managing deep databases of candidates.  

This is why many turn to a firm like J. Patrick & Associates.  We have worked in the recruiting business for almost 30 years and we understand that it takes a lot more than just querying a database to land your firm’s ideal candidate.

Recruiters are personable

Recruiters are increasingly valuable in the age of LinkedIn because they offer the human connections that most LinkedIn Recruiter rookies just can’t provide.  Recruiters like J. Patrick & Associates perform a critical human role in the hiring process and we have developed sector-specific IT hiring expertise for over two decades in the business.  Because we are dedicated to understanding both the specific needs of the recruiting firm and the needs of job seekers in the IT business environment, JP&A is uniquely positioned to add even more value during the hiring process. Why?  The phone call. The phone call still remains the ‘killer app’ in the recruiting business. Sending a message via LinkedIn just doesn’t cut it.

Recruiters have Expertise

Many articles bemoan the death of the recruiter and LinkedIn Recruiter certainly has put some ineffective and uncompetitive recruiting firms out of business.  However, LinkedIn Recruiter is only as good as the person using it. Many HR professionals have a lot on their plate. Overseeing all aspects of compensation planning, training and employee relations leaves limited time they can dedicate to recruiting.  Filling critical positions requires time, resources and first-class expertise to deliver unparalleled results.

Contact J. Patrick & Associates and connect with a certified recruiting consultant to structure a plan, staff your LIR platform, and achieve optimal results for your firm.

Make no mistake--being found by the right job is not a passive job search tactic. Eliminate the vision of sipping margaritas on the deck waiting for recruiters to call. Today’s job seeker must put a lot of thought and hard work into ensuring she/he is a part of communities where hiring managers source for viable candidates.

There is much written about how to find the right job.  However, one of the most overlooked items in a strategic job search plan is how to ensure the job seeker is searchable—or how to have the right job find you.  With the prolific rise of the internet to source candidates by corporate and search firm recruiters, it is paramount that job seekers take steps to ensure they can be located and sourced for the positions they seek.

Recruiting for an open position by posting an ad is one of the last tactics a recruiter wants to utilize. It is a waste of their time to wade through a flood of resumes, which often contains many poorly-qualified candidates.  So it is not very effective for job seekers to apply through a job board posting. Recruiters source and recruit--and candidates that are present and active in those pools get attention. So how do you become that candidate? 

How to Be Found by the Right Job