Re: "Urgent" Hiring Practices & lack of candidates

[Penn Brumm <penn -at- HEALTHEON -dot- COM>]

See Bob's comments, below.  The payment of bounty to employees for personal
referrals is a common practice, because the awkward questions can be asked
prior to calling the referee. The awkward questions I'm referring to are those
such as:

     Does Don proactively go find answers or wait for others to come to him?
     Does Jayne become excited about a project?
     Does Erin actually work the hours she needs to, to get the job done?
     Have you worked directly with Tom, and what's his output look like?
     Have you seen Howard in an adversarial discussion?  How does he react?

Instead of advertising, many companies use retained recruiters to perform the
first selection/filtering process.  The input to these recruiters is often
personal recommendations from satisfied people who, in their time, were placed
by the recruiters.  Basically, what we come down to is a personal reference.

None of this, of course, is of benefit to people new to the area, or new to the
specific industry, or new to tech writing.  However, newbies generally have
time (before they graduate, before they move, or before they change industries)
to contact 'Net groups such as this one, check the library for professional
organizations (there are books for that), check also for nationally-based
recruiters (there are also books for that, too), and look in local newspapers
for meeting times for professional organizations.  The idea is to become
"known."

Penn
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Bob wrote:

> Only a small percentage of open positions are advertised "anywhere."
> We have many openings, but I haven't seen any ads to fill them.
> We pay a $1,000 bounty to employees for referrals.
>
> Bob Morrisette
> writer1 -at- Eng -dot- Sun -dot- com
>