For several months, I’ve been taming my office Outlook account. I’ve worked for my employer for almost ten years and during this tenure my in-box has taken on a life of its own, increasingly resembling some kind of mutant swamp monster, the office refrigerator or a man-eating tiger.

Six months ago, I probably averaged 500 daily in-box messages, a garbled mixture of the following in descending order of prevalence:

1. Spam that escaped our corporate spam filters. Yeah, this stuff dominated my in-box.
2. Resumes.
3. Ads from HR, management, training, safety, wellness, benefits and compliance vendors.
4. Newsletters and blogs from HR, management, training, safety, wellness, compliance, benefits professionals.
5. Actual e-mail correspondence.

Notice what was at the bottom. Argh! (author screams!)  It was out of control, no fun, took an inordinate amount of time to wade through. And I was always up against my storage ceiling.

I am not a techie, but because of the frequency of complaints from other (non-techie) kindred souls I know I’m not alone and would like to share what I’ve done to make my in-box less frightening: Read the rest of this entry »

This summer, my in-box almost crashed after I advertised an HR position.

Nightmare!!

Never again, I resolved, would I slog through such a deluge. I quickly implemented several application tracking systems (ATS) to help manage the resume flow.  When candidates  tried to email or fax applications, I stubbornly showed them “the hand” and redirected them to apply online.

Fast forward several months. We have a high profile, hard-to-fill position. The resumes have sloowwwwwllly trickled in, and none have had me jumping up and down. (Have you seen me jumping up and down? If not, you got to see it!!)  Some resumes were lackluster, some atrocious, a few adequate but not inspiring.

Then today, out of the blue, a perfect candidate dropped off a resume to the front desk. The resume quickly passed hands and made its way to my my office.  Glancing over the document with my highly practiced (cough, cough) eye, I saw:

• Flawless resume. No typos, errors or formatting issues.
• A beautiful, natural writing style that made me froth at the mouth with envy.
• Cover letter painstakingly customized to the position.
• Well established connection to our nonprofit mission and purpose.

I took notice. I phoned the candidate fourteen minutes into her drive home; and later that afternoon, she came back for a first interview.

The lesson to my job-searching friends is that sometimes it’s okay to break the rules. I must stress:  I really, really want all my applications to come through my ATS. But I also really, really want to fill the position. If the perfect candidate breaks the “rules” to drop a perfect resume under my nose, believe me, I will set the rules aside and take notice. After all, the outcome is more important than the means designed to achieve the end. Especially when the resume and cover letter flow like silk, with no jarring errors to distract me from the message that she/he is a perfect match for the job.

In this economy, it’s worth considering doing something different. Mail your resume. Drop it off. Overnight it. Put it on a Tshirt or billboard.

None of this will work with a crappy resume. But if you a the perfect candidate with a top notch resume, the chances are in your favor that you might be noticed.

Photos by  SOCIALisBETTER’s and Ari V

Looking for an HR Assistant in 2009 has been interesting to say the least! I ask candidates to share their favorite HR discipline and the most frequent answer is, “Helping people.” I’m sure they really do love helping people; so do I. But helping people is not one of the established HR disciplines.

Seriously, don’t tell me you love people, explain how you will advance our organization’s business objectives through your mastery of benefits, compensation, technology, etc. Show me you ‘get’ what HR is, that your understand your role. Tell me how you’ll crank out the work, ‘cuz there’s a lot of it.

Why do I bring this up? Because if applicants were doing more of activities recommended in my next post, they would have the HR foundation to give an answer that has me thinking “yes, yes, yes” instead of “next, next, next.”

Another angle is the social media boom since I last hired an HR assistant. This time around, I check out web footprints of promising candidates. I stay away from FaceBook, but I Google to see if they blog or are on LinkedIn or Twitter.

What am I finding online? Not as much as you’d think. Little carousing, profanity, offensive behavior….but not much of anything else, either. Most had a LinkedIn profile, but none was especially robust or active. Some information was outdated, most had few connections, and few if any had group affiliations or other signs of life. I found a couple people on Twitter, one person who started a Yahoo HR group, and no blogs, not a single comment on anyone else’s blog, either.

This was a bit surprising to me. I meet so many earnest people who want to get into HR and profess to be absolutely passionate about it. Yet many of them don’t seem to be taking advantage of the technology that would connect them to HR leaders, colleagues and groups at great advantage to their careers.

As you can imagine, I have some thoughts about that and also five tips (plus a freebie) for developing your young HR career. More about all that in my next post: So You Want to Work in HR?

image credit: Nereski

Needless to say, many people would probably not describe their own life experience or their own workplace as glowingly as I described the Twitterverse. Which got me wondering how we could adapt twitter principles to quote, unquote real life; how can we “tweet offline,” so to speak?

Questions to consider about taking the Twitterverse offline:

RT (Re-Tweeting or forwarding others posts): Away from social media, how often do you pass on other’s great ideas, blogs, articles and contributions? Doing so is an integral part of the twitter culture.

Tweeting (Posting): Are you talking to yourself in a monologue, or are you engaging in two way conversation, building connections and relationships? Does what you say add value to others’ lives? If not, on Twitter, you’ll eventually be un-followed. Offline, people just tune you out or fail to take you seriously.

Follow Friday (Recommending other people to your following, typically done on Fridays): How often do you recommend others to increase their sphere of influence, realizing that it detracts nothing from your own stature and in fact adds to it?

Trending Topics: Do you staying current with emerging trends in your field?

Followers: Are you actively seeking out new people to add to your circle of contacts? Are you networking? Can you see every interaction (lunch counter, elevator, train station, etc.) as an opportunity to reach out to others? Are you able to learn from everyone you meet, not just those who are at or above your perceived social standing?

Twitter & Me. For me, joining Twitter has been a shot in the arm of creativity. I’ve met fantastic minds and I’m loving swimming in a sea of knowledge, new ideas, with unlimited opportunity for self-expression. And I’ve been more intentional about increasing my network away from my computer, tweeting offline. I hope your own experience has been similarly positive.

And to my husband: honey, I’ll be more than glad to follow you online or off!