Jordan Taylor


Recent Posts

Testing Software Engineers? Engineer these Tests

Being persistent with your exclusive sourcing strategy will attract promising software engineers to your company, but ascertaining if they’re a good hire will mean implementing a code test or offering them a short-term contract.

Tom Pinckney, manager of eBay’s NYC R&D Center, highlights the two-way value of using a code test as a recruiting tool:

“At SiteAdvisor, Hunch and now eBay we've long been fans of making practical onsite coding projects an integral part of the interview process…What I have slowly started to learn is that this is also about the candidate learning about us: what we value in a developer, what we think is important, what kind of problems we work on, and how we solve those problems.”



Recruitment’s Best 6 Articles of The Week

As the first week of February 2014 comes to a close, we’ve decided to kick start a weekly round-up. Here, you'll find links to the best recruitment articles of the week, along with a look back at what the Entelo blog brought you over the past several days.



Are You Certified? A Look at Recruitment Certification Programs

On October 4th, 2013 Talent Blog formally announced LinkedIn’s first certification program: LinkedIn Certified Professional—Recruiter.

While the certification program has benefits—and shortcomings—it furnishes a perfect segue to talking about the possibility (or impossibility) of a formalized and universal certification for recruiters.

Why hasn’t anyone come along and created “THE certification” for the profession to act as a “rite of passage” regardless of specialization or industry? Is this even necessary? What about all the other certifications already in existence? Are they good enough?



Why Forming a Recruiter & Hiring Manager Partnership Isn’t as Hard as You Think

Building a team often requires a team effort. Why hiring managers and recruiters need to work together to hire the right people is anything but ambiguous: their collaborative efforts can make or break a company.

Cultivating a successful relationship between both parties begins with defining expectations, building trust, and creating an unshakable foundation for persistent communication.

Hiring managers and recruiters try to solve the same set of problems, yet far too often they approach the solutions with drastically different motivations and goals.



What “Queen of Twitter” Katy Perry Says About Talent Branding

Katy Perry (twitter handle not necessary) is now officially “Queen of Twitter” with more than 50 million followers—or “Katycats.”

Go ahead and ask, “What does this have to do with HR and recruiting?” The answer is social media talent branding. Branding is no longer limited to the marketing domain. Your talent is your brand, so the recruiting and talent acquisition function of HR needs to be precise in crafting social media campaigns.

Although Perry can drive engagement simply by being a pop media icon, she also had three pertinent insights when asked how she managed to tame the social media dragon:



What Engineers Truly Want Isn’t in the Break Room

The competition for software engineers is intense. And why shouldn't it be? Brilliant and engaged engineers form the backbone of your company. If you want to hire the best engineers on the market you need to focus on what they want. Many companies try to tempt talent with extravagant work perks--gourmet meals, outlandish game rooms, unlimited vacation, napping stations, fitness classes, recording studios and many more bonuses.

While this approach has its virtues, you don’t want to lose sight of enticing engineers by appealing to the very nature of their profession. You have to understand the fascinating mind it takes to engage in their field of work, and speak to their values.



What Can Recruiters Learn from Educators?

How do educators come to personally know, and intimately evaluate, their student’s work?

The answer, surprisingly, will influence an essential step in your recruitment process: sourcing. As a sourcer or recruiter doing candidate research to build your pipeline, you might want to borrow a page from an educator’s playbook: create well-defined and transparent evaluation standards.

This post is a quick outline on how to create a standardized rubric for “grading” and evaluating candidates. The hope is that this simple method will go a long way in helping you curate, assess, and share crucial details about the candidates you’ve interviewed.

Anyone who’s attended college remembers taking a general education course on rhetoric and composition. This class was the cornerstone for all the writing and research you’d be doing during your entire college career—regardless of your major. From the moment you started the class you knew your writing assignments would say a lot about you. And, at the end of the day, having your writing evaluated is a gut-wrenching experience.



Two Must-Have Traits for First-String Hiring Managers

Recruiters will at times have their motives and character in question. The best recruiters out there—those who work hard on being ethical, moral, and studious—consistently have to ward off sharp criticisms and harsh critiques of their profession. But what about hiring managers, why aren’t they examined closely under the microscope?

Hiring managers are essential to the hiring process. When appointing a hiring manager, make sure they’re innovative thinkers and intense collaborators.



How to Hire International Tech Talent

America is a complicated place. It (still) has the best university system on the planet, and the computer science programs here are so impressive they eclipse the rest of the world. According to the Academic Ranking of World Universities in Computer Science – 2013, 17 out of the top 20 universities are in the United States.

Yet all the startups, and established big fish, still can’t find enough talented people to satisfy their technical needs even when they expand their search from sea to shining sea. Tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook have taken action—they’ve jumped continents to help solve the skills gap crisis. Maybe it’s time you do the same?

There are three main tech solutions, and one human solution, to help you begin your international recruiting campaign:

  • Social Media
  • Mobile Recruiting
  • Video Interviewing
  • Incentivize with culture, compensation benefits, and relocation support



Agency Versus Internal Recruiting: Where Do You Belong?

If you’re interested in becoming a technical recruiter or you’re already a getting started as one, you need to find your niche in the business world. Keeping one important idea at the forefront of your mind helps: your future career success is highly dependent on finding a work environment that suits you best.

You need to find out where you’ll thrive—so ask yourself a question: What’s the best workplace for a recruiter like me? At an agency firm or in-house?

The answer is going to depend entirely on your personality type, long-term career development goals, and your personal ability to recognize your natural strengths.

Here are the key differences between the positions:



3 Recruiting Myths That Should Be Turning Heads

Perceptions of recruiters continue to evolve in what’s now safe to call “the new era of talent acquisition.” In light of a rapidly-changing economy, and the evolution of social recruiting, you can expect to see a rise in questions centered on the future of recruiting.

Three myths in the making stand out when looking at these futurist-like dialogues and debates.



Let it Shine: Promoting Company Culture in Job Ads

Prospective candidates need a lasting impression of your company culture. By crafting creative job ads that touch on the rich tapestry that is your company culture—you’ll give any candidate the opportunity to accurately imagine how their life would be if they were a team member at your company.



College Recruiting: LinkedIn University Pages and Entelo Search

Technical recruiters on the hunt for strategic full-time hires will continue to see increased value in LinkedIn’s University Pages. Launched in the summer of 2013, each school page is managed by university staffers who aim to help college students and recent graduates network with peers, follow university news and dialogues, and discover career path options.

You might be wondering, “If the pages are for students how can they benefit recruiters?”

University Pages can be leveraged by sourcers and recruiters in three ways: find relevant schools and professorial networks; engage in university news and events; and identify graduates and their relevant skill sets.

After covering these methods, we will provide an overview of Entelo Search features that help you target schools and filter skill sets to find the best candidates.



Educational Experience: Demonstrate Why Yours Matters

It shouldn't be relative, but it is: the value of your education depends on the perception of a given employer, recruiter, or hiring manager. Recent trends in tech talent recruitment have led employers to consider hiring self-taught candidates with no formal education. This is partly due to data that shows no predictive correlations between a student’s Alma mater and job performance. Aline Lerner outlined this paradigm shift in “Lessons from a year’s worth of hiring data.”

Tech companies are beginning to universally rely on quantitative evaluations of a prospective candidate’s work samples, potential as a cultural fit, previous work experience, and overall problem-solving skills.

None of this means that your education doesn't count. You worked hard—so show potential employers how and why it counts.



Show and Tell: Why Body Language Counts in Video Interviewing

“All right, interviewer, I’m ready for my close-up”

There’s a barrage of posts covering the rise of video interviewing. Here’s a quick list of the majority of tips you’ll encounter in these posts: look at the camera; dress well; use cheat sheets; prepare; stay calm; use your people skills; turn off (and discourage) distractions; be cordial etc.

Rather than recycle or repackage these self-evident tips—let’s look at a less discussed point: nonverbal communication (body language).