Editor’s note: Paul DeBettignies’ article was the 2nd most popular article on The Fordyce Letter in 2011. It originally ran in March.

I know, I know… smile and dial.

More phone calls equal more job orders, candidates and send outs. More send outs equal more placements.

I get it – I really do. But after thirteen years as a sole practitioner, I have learned that I need to get out from behind the desk every now and then, or I fear that the headset will become permanently fixed to my head.

My company recruits information technology professionals. Minneapolis is a very “community” oriented city and we have an abundance of IT user groups and professional associations, so I can get out and be social, learn something new, and do some candidate and client generation while curing my “cabin fever.”

And when I say abundance, it is no joke. In addition to the IT groups I participate in (there are more than 25), there are several professional recruiting associations in which I am involved, including the Minnesota Recruiters group, which I coordinate.

At this point, some of you many be thinking, “How do you manage all of that, and does it distract you from making placements?”

Does it distract me? No. How do I manage all of this? Here’s how:

1. I focus on the groups and events where I know my “targets” are going to be in attendance. Most of the groups in town use Eventbrite, and usually the attendee list is posted, so I will copy and paste the names I do not recognize into LinkedIn and/or Google to see who they are.
2. While I attend a lot of events, I make sure not to hang out with just my friends. I also find the people who look like they do not know anyone and introduce myself. I look to see who has “groupies” hanging around them – as I assume they have to be one of the “cool kids” – and introduce myself. Additionally, I focus on looking for the name tags of those I searched for online. (I write them down on a 3×5 card that I bring with me so as not to forget)
3. If I am attending an event and know no one, I will email the host ahead of time and ask if they will be willing to make some introductions for me. Over a period of time of course I get to know who is who and it makes networking much easier.

Besides being an attendee at events, I am also frequently asked to speak at them. For recruiter and HR groups, topics I am requested to cover range from closing candidates to social media, building talent pools, and so forth. The IT user groups and professional associations typically look for topics on job search, using LinkedIn, find the next consulting gig, and how to find/use recruiters.

So how does this help my business?

For starters, I am not one of those creepy “insurance salesman” networking types who quickly work a room, hand out their business card, and then head for the door. I have a reputation of being “the guy” to go to with a question, and I make it a point to invest time in those with whom I speak – whether they can help me or not. I think a lot of us have forgotten that we are in the people business, and not everyone is an instant means to an end.

Do these activities pay off? Last summer I attended a tech event at Best Buy headquarters and in a small group session of 50 Java developers, the presenter recognized me and said, “Hey, are you the recruiter guy with the blog? Come up here and answer some questions we have about how to ready ourselves for a job search.”

What a great way to be of help to others and allow them to get to know me. The number of emails, calls, and resumes I received over the next week was overwhelming – in a very good way. As a direct result of this opportunity, I was referred to a manager who I later placed. Even now, I am still seeing benefits from this event as several of the technology professionals I met are pursuing contract opportunities with us. Networking events can provide both ‘hunting’ and ‘farming’ opportunities if approached in the right manner.

Right before the holidays, I was invited by a friend to attend an HR event with her. She was surprised to learn that I knew more of those attending than she did. Not only did I know them – they were friends, too. Very rarely do I have to make a true “cold call” on the client generation side of the business.

It is good to remember that there are human beings on the other end of the phone and the other side of the computer screen. Getting out from behind your desk and mixing it up with your target audience helps them to put a face to your name and voice as much as it does the same for you of them. “Smile and dial” is a whole lot easier when the person answering the phone (or email) already knows your name – and what value you have to offer.

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This article is from the February 2011 print Fordyce Letter. To subscribe and receive a monthly print issue, please go to our Subscription Services page.

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This week we are counting down some of the most popular articles from FordyceLetter.com in 2011. We hope you enjoy revisiting these articles as we look ahead to 2012!

Facebook is emerging as the leading social network when it comes to job hunting. By a margin approaching 2-to-1, job seekers credit Facebook with helping them get their current job.

LinkedIn ran a distant second, with 46 percent of job seekers attributing their job to that business-oriented network. Twitter, the short messaging network, got a thumbs-up for its job help from 36 percent.

Those are among the findings of Jobvite’s Social Job Seeker Survey 2011 released this morning. The survey doesn’t say how the social networking helped the job-seekers. Other data suggests it may mean seekers researched the companies on social networks, reached out to their contacts for information, got a referral, or were contacted directly. Since most job seekers use more than one social network, the numbers add up to more than 100 percent.

In terms of sheer numbers, the results are not too surprising. Facebook has in excess of 800 million members, while LinkedIn has about 135 million. What is surprising, however, is that by an even larger margin recruiters in an earlier Jobvite survey reported making hires through LinkedIn.

Nevertheless, regardless of which social network they prefer, job seekers with the most contacts do more job hunting and get better results than their counterparts with fewer than 150 connections, friends, or followers. Of these “super social” job seekers as Jobvite calls them, 28 percent found a job directly through their online social networking.

As you might expect, Facebook has the largest percentage of super social job seekers — 37 percent — compared to LinkedIn’s 10 percent and Twitter’s 11 percent. Super socials, as the Jobvite survey discovered, are young and strong earners: 62% percent are under 40; 42 percent earn over $75,0;0, and 40 percent have a college degree. They divide almost evenly on gender with 49 percent female.

“Our new national survey shows that socially savvy job seekers have an advantage over their fellow job hunters and it’s paying off,” said Dan Finnigan, Jobvite president and CEO. “While referrals are still the top source of new jobs, online social networks play an increasingly important role in job hunting today.”

One curious data point is the number of workers who, Jobvite reports, say they find their job through social networking. Jobvite puts the count at more than 22 million, an increase of 7.6 million since its 2010 survey. If that’s accurate, then 15.8 percent of the 48 million jobs filled in the year ending Sept. 30 would be the result of social networks.

The President came to California this week to do a little fundraising and hold a jobs town hall meeting.

Neither of those were particularly noteworthy except that the townhaller was hosted by LinkedIn in Silicon Valley, with 80,000 people watching a live feed of the event.

During the hour-long meeting, Obama pitched his jobs bill, and fielded a variety of questions, most dealing with his plans to boost the economy, with others expressing concern about the future of Social Security and Medicare.

From a recruiting view, what was particularly interesting was the significance of the event for LinkedIn. If anyone had any lingering doubt that the business networking site was laser-focused on recruiting, the town hall meeting swept that away.

The White House hand-picked LinkedIn to host the jobs forum, at which the company’s CEO Jeff Weiner moderated. In a post-event interview, Weiner said, “We’re first and foremost very appreciative to the President and to the White House for recognizing the platform as a way to get the word out there.”

The San Francisco Chronicle‘s report on the event quoted a public relations consultant who called it “a coup of enormous value to the company and its brand.”

After last night’s bit by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, that value may be just a bit less enormous. I won’t spoil the clip for you, but Ill tell you it’s hysterical, particularly the part about how LinkedIn “helps” people find jobs. Enjoy.

As in any business, the world of Recruiters, “Headhunters”, “Executive Search Professionals”, etc. includes the good, the bad, and the ugly. There are those in it for some good cash for now, and those in it to build a great long-term sustainable business. Which are you?

This industry is characterized by a glut of new recruiters when times are good, and dramatic reductions when times get tough. It’s an easy business to get into, but it’s a tough business to stay in during economic downturns. I often tell people… “This is a business that, when times are good, there’s almost nothing better. There’s a lot of relatively easy money to be made. However, when times are bad, there’s almost nothing worse. The ‘gravy train’ dries up very quickly and companies recruiting budgets disappear.”

There are a number of factors that go into making someone successful in this industry over the long run. However, I believe one differentiator is being willing to add value for people whether you’re likely to make an immediate buck or not. Especially in a down economy, when many good prospective candidates, and perhaps some former (and potentially future) clients are out of work, finding ways to be of help to them pays great long-term dividends. Do you invest significant time and energy into people that can’t be of immediate value to you? Do you view people as people, or simply evaluate them by whether they are worth money to you or not? Are you willing to find ways to assist people that don’t even seem to be of potential value to you down the road?

Many recruiters do, and many, many recruiters don’t.

I see so many recruiters that are so unwilling to share information with others that they create the impression that they are only in it for a buck. Whether it’s a lack of trust, lack of caring, or lack of long-term vision, they sacrifice valuable long-term relationships (and revenue) for a quick hit.

I’ve been recruiting for the past 24 years. Just as any other recruiter, I am only able to place a tiny percentage of all the people I talk to. However, I have tried to find some way to be a valuable resource to virtually every new person I connect with. I may not be able to place them directly, however, I generally offer to help them in a variety of ways:

• Coach them on improvements to their resume, or approach, or interview skills
• Help them prepare for interviews with “inside information” even though it’s not my placement
• Give them suggestions of good networking groups or resources in their area of focus
• Connect them with other people that may be a source of leads
• Refer other good recruiters that may be able to help when I can’t
• …and even provide them contact names at companies they are targeting to pursue on their own!

As recruiters, we have a unique perspective on what makes a good candidate or what job search practices work best. After an interview, we get to debrief with our candidates as well as with the hiring manager. We get to hear what resonated, and what didn’t. We see how people get jobs. We hear why a hiring manager selected one candidate over another. We see these things so often and, for us, it becomes “common sense” to do certain things and not others. To many job seekers though, who aren’t exposed to the job search process as we are year in and year out, that “common sense” can be quite uncommon!

When they find a recruiter who sincerely wants to help, they are very often very willing to reciprocate that help now, or down the road. People I’ve helped have often become future hiring managers somewhere, and many even become clients. They often become great ongoing resources for referrals. They often become great resources of job leads and hiring manager names. They often become a viable candidate years later after they’ve gained more experience and/or become more professional in their presentation. And some of the most valuable long-term relationships originally were people I thought would never be of help to me at all.

Some of my best relationships are people I’ve placed multiple times in their careers. They were initially early or mid-level in their career, became hiring managers and clients, candidates again, and clients again somewhere else. I have many people I’ve never placed, but talk to often throughout the year because they are great connectors for me with referrals, information, and leads.

Have I ever gotten burned because I gave a contact name to someone who somehow used it to hurt a potential placement for me? Yes, a couple of times. Have I gotten more business because of my willingness to share valuable information when they need it for their own benefit and not mine? Yes, many times. Do I get calls back more quickly from clients and candidates when I’m seeking referrals because I’ve helped them in the past? Absolutely! Has my job gotten easier because I have people calling me proactively with information, job orders, and leads, because they know I will help them again in the future? Yes!

Keeping everything you know close to the vest may benefit you in the short-run. However, sharing information freely and helping people whether they can help you in return or not will enable you to build a successful practice over the long haul! Try it! You may not see the results this month, or this year, but results will come and make your life much more rewarding in the process!

Why should a recruiting firm start, develop, and maintain relationships with hiring managers as a key activity? We have found that over the years the largest contribution to our ability to survive in an ever more competitive environment has been our desire to establish and maintain strong rapport with hiring managers. It didn’t start as a planned activity – it just happened over time. The benefits have been many. It’s much easier to understand “the secret sauce” of openings when you have known the hiring managers over a long period of time. Having worked with them as candidates in the past adds to a level of credibility the competition cannot easily match. And being able to get their opinions about their ex-co-workers is priceless.

With the benefit of hindsight, the formula for successful networking with hiring managers is rather simple. You start by concentrating your attention on the best people in your industry. You get to know them professionally and, quite often, personally. You learn what they do and don’t do that makes them rising stars. You try to get opinions from people who know them about what makes them special and then discuss it with them.  In this way, you are developing relationships with both current and future hiring managers.

If you can create a connection when these people are happily employed and are not looking to change jobs, you build a relationship that could weather a storm for many years. Sooner or later, when they decide to look for new opportunities, you are there to help and advise. You build your rapport over a long period of time – someone with less than 10-15 years of experience in the industry is seldom senior enough to have influence in the hiring process.

So where do you begin?  Whom do you connect with? Be very careful in selecting members of your network. Concentrate on rising stars with whom you “click”. There has to be a connection at the personal level. Look for similarities such as attending the same high school or college, coming from similar small towns, an interest in sports and the like.   Then, over the years, you keep in touch by emailing them once a quarter or so, and make an attempt to meet them in person a couple of times per year (if possible). If you show genuine interest in what they do, the conversations tend to be rather easy and pleasant. The catch – it’s difficult to have a meaningful conversation with a rising star in any complex field if you are not an expert. So make yourself an expert. If not in the nitty-gritty technical details, then in learning who are the stars in your fields, where they work, what they do and what makes them special.

Information is key. Read all the industry publications you can get your hands on and every time you see an interesting story or article, share it with the people you are cultivating.  By being an expert in the people and companies in your field, you will be able to add valuable information to the exchanges you have with your rising stars. Very few professionals have the time or interest in doing the work it takes to really master this subject. As a rule, if you have an in-depth conversation with ten or more people working for a given mid-sized firm and you get them to tell you anything about the people around them, you will become an expert on that firm. This further encourages their belief that you are the only one capable of helping them.

There are challenges in maintaining these activities productively. You must work very hard at distinguishing the difference between Data and Metadata.

Data is resumes with their collections of education, firm names, project descriptions, technical skills, other keywords, visible progression of responsibilities and the like. Data is when a candidate describes to you their projects – what they did and what the results were. Data is when you collect lots of resumes or LinkedIn profiles and determine which candidates are open to the opportunities you have. Data is facts.

Metadata is the collection of opinions about all of these. You need to be as well informed about these as possible, and that gives you an edge and allows you to enhance your relationships with your rising star hiring managers. Metadata is knowledge of what are the best schools in your field at the Bachelor level and at Master level?  They may not be the same. What firms are the hardest hires? Who do they tend to select? Who can share with you internal opinions about various potential candidates? To what degree can you rely on those opinions? What do you do when you have multiple opinions that disagree? What are the hottest technical skills? To what degree do different firms have proficiency in deploying the latest technology that calls for these skills? What kinds of questions do you ask to ascertain if the candidates have these skills, and to what degree?

As your mid-level hiring stars progress in the field, you will be called upon to help them build their careers, teams, and eventually, their companies. By this point you should have a good idea of who the key firms are in your field, who are winning in the market place and who are losing. As your contacts’ levels of seniority rise they will become more and more interested in discussing their industry and where the various firms are in the competitive market place. Here again your research will pay off.

As you get more involved with your hiring clients you should become more aware of the organizational issues they are dealing with. What are the conflicts the organization is dealing with today? What problems had the organization dealt with in the past and how did they deal with these? What worked and what did not? In other words, to the degree possible, become an expert on your hiring manager’s companies.

How will this benefit you in the long run? In today’s ultra competitive recruiting environment, unless you have a sustainable edge you will be out of business soon enough. Lowering your fees is NOT a competitive edge – your competition from low labor cost countries has you beat on that one. Having a strong relationship with hiring managers where your integrity, your expertise in a competitive labor marketplace, knowledge of technological competitiveness, in-depth knowledge of what makes your clients’ firms and your clients individually tick – all of these constitute a high barrier the competition will have a hard time overcoming.

Q. Neil, I have been trying to take advantage of the slowdown to network with a lot more candidates for my future relationships. However, I was wondering if you have any tips to make it easier to source names?

A. I can’t tell you how thrilled I am that I am now getting more and more questions about the candidate side of the biz!

Sure, job orders still aren’t the easiest to come by, but the good recruiters know that the Yin to the recession Yang is that there are now great super candidates around who would have been virtually impossible to connect with a few years ago. The GOOD ONES know that this is the time to seize those relationships that will yield plenty of fruit in the future!

It makes me cringe when people tell me that they aren’t recruiting as much because they “don’t have to.”

“Job orders are what we need,” they tell me. The candidate flow drops and the focus on recruiting dwindles. They say they have plenty of people to fill any jobs they get. BUT THEY MISS the point, don’t they! So, I hope you are a good one and that you get that this is the time to CARPE DIEM! Work your tail off to meet and network with as many candidates as possible. You know how that works. Just like LinkedIn, they tell someone about you who tells someone and voila. The more you meet, the more leads you get (that’s a whole different topic), the better the quality of your sendouts (or temp fills), the less likely a falloff will be (or shortened assignment), the more likely you will get unsolicited candidate referrals from them, the more likely some will turn into clients in the future, yada yada yada.

So, start recruiting and sourcing! Now, remember this very simple tip. First, NEVER ask someone “who do you know who is looking.” UGGGGH!!! We never care about that. We just want to know good people. In fact, we just ask them to point us in the direction of any good people, “regardless of whether they are looking or not, in fact, I am sure they are not.”

That said, this still doesn”t work well, and you know it. That is why most recruiters stop asking it all of the time! Lets face it: when you ask someone that, even if you ask it the right way, they will likely tell you the famous “nobody comes to mind.” Well, that is the normal reaction. So, what you have to do is make them “come to mind.” And you simply do that via the power of visualization. It is quite simple, but to get someone to come to mind you need to direct the mind and put them in the mind.

ALWAYS ask very specific visual questions when sourcing. For example, instead of “who do you know who is really good,” you can ask a better question: “who do you know who is really good in your current department.” Even better: ask them to “picture their office right now and think of all of the players there in your discipline. Then ask them to think of the person or people who everyone seems to respect or who the go-to people are. Get it? If you recruit BIG 4 CPAs, for example, ask them to go back to last year when they sat in the bullpen waiting for an assignment and ask them who those people were and who were the good ones who were always requested. In other words, just ask very specific questions so that they can place their mind in the right place. Then, it’s just about impossible for most people to say that “nobody comes to mind.” Happy sourcing!

Ask Neil any question that is vexing you! Have trouble closing deals or selling? Neil can help! To ask your question and possibly have it published online, email Neil at Neil.Lebovits@TheDynamicSale.com and put the words Nudge Neil in the subject.

Neil Lebovits, CPA, CPC, CTS, before taking the industry by storm as a trainer, was a global president for Adecco, where he sat on the global executive team. Previously, he was the president and COO of Ajilon Professional staffing for North America, where he oversaw over 100 offices. He has done it all in the industry: Permanent & Temporary Placement, Sales, Branch Management, Regional Management, COO, & President. He founded his industry training & development company, http://www.TheDynamicSale.Com, in 2009. He shares the secrets and systems that he has developed and harnessed while working himself up over his 20+ years in the industry. A renowned leader, motivator, trainer, and speaker, he has appeared on Bloomberg TV, CNN, ABC news, CNBC, the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and Smart Money. Learn more about Neil and sign up for his free online training course at www.TheDynamicSale.Com.

What do you suppose ZoomInfo is up to?

The company launched Fresh Contacts a month ago offering participants two months free access to the ZoomInfo database just for uploading their personal contacts. Upload one or one thousand contacts, it’s all the same – two months’ access to the 45 million contacts and 5 million company profiles ZoomInfo claims.

Without a doubt, it’s a shot over the bow of competitor Jigsaw, which built its leads business on an early faith in crowdsourcing.

But as you’ll see shortly, there could be more afoot here than a front-on challenge to a competitor.

Enlisting users to provide content is not unknown at ZoomInfo, where the subjects of its machine-created profiles have long been able to correct and update them by “claiming” them.

But this wholesale pitch to users is a first for the company that built a business by aggregating personal and corporate information. Spiders quarry nuggets from all over the visible Web, which are then assembled into profiles.

“The center of our success is technology, and it always will be,” CEO Sam Zales told me at the outset of a GotoMeeting presentation Tuesday. “The secret sauce is really how we connect the dots.”

Even as he was saying that, he was introducing the company’s three-legged stool, which, besides the spidered, processed, and packaged profile content, and the “claimed” profiles, now includes the user-uploaded contacts.

The Fresh Contacts program is one of those win-wins. ZoomInfo gets fresh and updated contacts for its database. Participants, many of whom are expected to be job hunters, get free access to the database, which can make the difference between a resume in an ATS and one that goes directly to a hiring manager.

The contacts themselves get to say yea or nay to being included in the database.

This third leg of the stool is no doubt giving Jigsaw some indigestion. Founded in 2003 on a faith in crowdsourcing, Jigsaw built a community of loyal players who earn points by uploading or correcting contacts. You can buy contacts or trade your points for them.

Like ZoomInfo, it has company data, crowdsourced and presented in wiki style.

Both companies have their limitations. Jigsaw’s contacts are pretty good. The carrot-and-stick reward system tends to keep them fairly accurate. But voluntary contributions of business-card info means the bigger the company, the better the data. Smaller companies, where there are fewer players in the Jigsaw system, are less well-represented and what info there is tends to be staler.

ZoomInfo spiders keep its data fresh, especially the business intelligence. The downside, though, is that machines aren’t very good at telling one John Doe from another. And then there’s the matter of individuals and companies who make an effort to hide addresses and direct dial contact info from the search engines and the “leads” companies.

What if, though, you could combine the self-correcting mechanism of a Jigsaw, with the machine updating of ZoomInfo? And what if somehow you could convince everyone they just had to maintain a personal profile, the way LinkedIn has?

I ran that scenario past Zales as we were talking. There’s no doubt, he said, that users can mediate spidered content to improve its accuracy. They do that on Wikipedia very effectively. And spiders more quickly can keep a profile fresh and current.

But building a social network such as LinkedIn’s is not easy. That may be why Zales was emphatic in saying, “I want to be clear that we don’t want to be called a social network.”

LinkedIn, he told me, is a complimentary service to ZoomInfo. You can research companies and individuals on ZoomInfo, then go to LinkedIn to see if there is someone in your network who can help open a door to the company or the contact.

Still, something Master Burnett joked about at the Social Recruiting Summit is germane here. Burnett, who’s managing director of John Sullivan’s consulting firm, was poking fun at the digitally illiterate executives who run America’s companies when he said that their LinkedIn profiles are stuck at around 12 percent complete.

That struck a chord when I mentioned it to Zales. ZoomInfo’s spiders could build those profiles and keep them fresh, while the execs would only have to police them.

They can do that with their ZoomInfo profile now, but few do. After three years, not quite a million profiles have been “claimed” by their owners. LinkedIn hit 50 million profiles this year, all of them created by their owners.

See the potential? Zales does. I asked him if my scenario was behind his curve or ahead of it.  “You’re right there,” he said, somewhat ambiguously.

While ZoomInfo might not aspire to be a social networking site, there’s no reason it couldn’t partner with one.

If that’s the direction Zales is taking the company, he didn’t let on. In fact, the Fresh Contacts program, as it is currently structured, is all about growing the ZoomInfo contact database, rather than building a community. At the end of the two months of free access, users have to start paying if they want to continue. At $1,000 a year, the casual user and the job hunter will bow out.

But Zales is a savvy business executive with a background in marketing at American Express and B2B online sales. So he has not put an end date to the Fresh Contacts program and told me it could continue, perhaps with some changes.

Perhaps with something akin to a community?