Welcome to The Fordyce Letter:

The Fordyce Letter

Straight Talk for the Recruiting Profession


Debra Wheatman

Debra Wheatman is a Certified Professional Resume Writer (CPRW) and Certified Professional Career Coach (CPCC). She is globally recognized as an expert in advanced career search techniques with more than 18 years' corporate human resource experience. Debra is a featured blogger on numerous sites and posts regularly on her own site. She has been featured on Fox Business News, WNYW with Brian Lehrer, and quoted in leading publications, including Forbes.com, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and CNBC. Debra may be reached at debra@careersdonewrite.com or you may visit her website at http://www.careersdonewrite.com.

Articles by Debra Wheatman

How-To

Five Tips To A Resume A Hiring Manager Will Love

by on Feb. 5, 2013


resumes flying

resumes flyingEditor’s note: Is your candidate great in person, but the resume needs work? In this article, professional coach and resume adviser Debra Wheatman speaks directly to your candidates with the kind of direct, no-nonsense advice that they can use to turn their resume into a powerful selling tool. Email this post or a link to all your candidates.

Is your resume written with the reader in mind?  Or, does your resume scream, “It’s all about me and what I want!”?

When you accept a job, you are entering an agreement with a company that you will meet their expectations and they will compensate you.  Until that job offer is made, your task is to create a compelling case for how you can fill their needs better than any other candidate.  So, why would you

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Interviews

6 Interview Tips To Help Your Candidate’s Star Shine

by on Sep. 25, 2012


fordyce-default

Candidates must be well prepared for their interviews in today’s competitive job market. Recruiters who go through the effort to source, screen, and submit the résumé of a qualified applicant must also take time to prepare him or her for upcoming interviews. Leaving this part of the recruiting process to chance could result in the loss of a placement; and possibly even a client or two.

When I was in HR, I once had a recruiter send me a candidate who didn’t even know the title of the position she was being interviewed for. She was completely unfamiliar with the company and had no clue what the role entailed. Needless to say, she didn’t get the job and I never used that recruiter again.

Here are a few quick and simple tips for you to help your candidates with interview preparation:

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Uncategorized

It’s Not the Perks, It’s Job Security

by on Aug. 14, 2012


Adecco survey top concerns

Many of you remember in the 1999 when U.S. unemployment was 4.1%. It was heaven for employees. Companies were competing for employees. Companies were raising salaries and offering a wide range of traditional and non-traditional perks to attract and retain employees. In a market like that job security is not generally top of mind.

Now, according to the Adecco Workplace Insights Survey of 2012, Americans consider job security the number one concern when it comes to their job. The survey found 31% ranked it as the most important issue, up from 21% in 2011. Of respondents, 17% ranked salary at the top, and 16% ranked healthcare at the top. This is interesting in a time when the national discussion over healthcare is rather heated.

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Interviews

When Looking At Fit, Even CFOs Want A Sense of Humor

by on Aug. 7, 2012


CFO Sense of jumor survey

Candidates and hiring companies have at least one thing in common: Both are looking for the perfect match.

Skills, knowledge, and experience are the tangibles to determine a functional fit within an organization. Aspects of values and personality may determine one’s ability to adapt to an organization’s culture. Recruiters, human resources professionals, and hiring managers understand the value of assessing a candidate’s potential cultural fit. Poor cultural fit is something that cannot be resolved with training.

Cultural fit goes beyond simply getting along with fellow workers. For example, according to an Accountempts survey, “Nearly eight in 10 (79%) chief financial officers (CFOs) interviewed said an employee’s sense of humor is important for fitting into the company’s corporate culture.” That is important to the employer and the employee. If you are going to spend more than 40 hours per week working, you want to be with people with whom you can relate.

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Uncategorized

Boomers Look Toward Jobs With Purpose

by on Jun. 12, 2012


MetLife work survey

If you think that the career decisions of the baby boomers don’t affect you, think again.

We can’t deny that Baby Boomers comprise a large percentage of our population. According to U.S. News, there are now more Americans age 65 and older than at any other time in U.S. history. Transgenerational.org says that this year America’s 50 and older population will reach 100 million.

Now more than ever, adults are active much later in life. They are active professionally, working longer, which impacts younger people by limiting their opportunities for advancement.

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Social Media, Technology

Klout and Recruitment

by on Jan. 31, 2012


Klout-logo

For years employers have been screening candidates based on content on social networking websites. Candidates using poor judgment online may be screened out of the process.  Now employers and recruiters are turning to social media to aid in the selection of knowledgeable and well-connected employees.

Klout measures an individual’s influence across social media entities, such as Twitter.  Data under consideration are network size, amount of content generated, and volume of interaction. That data is processed to produce a Klout score ranging from 1 to 100.  The higher the score, presumably the higher the individual’s social media influence.  Klout scores are categorized into measures, including “True Reach” (size of engaged audience), “Amplification Probability” (rate of action taken on message, such as retweets), and “Network Score” (value of a person’s engaged audience).

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Business, Entrepreneurship

Value Added Services in a Slow Job Market

by on Jan. 24, 2012


Screen shot 2012-01-20 at 1.45.40 PM

In an economy of high unemployment and a large pool of qualified candidates, some employers may be under the impression that recruiters are not as necessary. This is untrue. In a market like this, professional recruiters may focus on different aspects of their practice to better support clients and increase revenue.

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Interviews

5 Candidate Cover Letter Strategies That Rock

by on Dec. 16, 2011


image source: Bruno Covas

Creating a compelling cover letter that will highlight your candidate’s expertise and entice hiring managers to make contact for an interview is a skill that every good recruiter must have. I have several close colleagues who are recruiters; they continuously ask me for advice on how to create really compelling cover letters. I thought I would share some of the strategies that have proven most effective when crafting a compelling cover for candidate submittals.

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The Business of Recruiting

Great Candidate, Lousy Résumé

by on Aug. 25, 2011


stack of resumes

If you have been an agency recruiter for any length of time, you have likely come across a candidate who has great skills and experience, but his résumé leaves a lot to be desired. I remember a time when I was an HR Director working with an external recruiter to find an IT candidate. Over the phone, the recruiter sang his praises, but when I received the résumé I was in shock.

The candidate had a photo on the résumé that looked more like a mug shot. In addition, all of the websites he worked on were highlighted in blue with links all over the page in 14-point font. There were so many bullets in a row that I felt like I had been shot by the end of the first page; and oh, by the way, there were seven pages. His title was Senior Manger of Information Technology. Need I say more?

The candidate may have been excellent at what he did; he certainly was said to have the right skills, but his résumé was a fright, and I told the recruiter I could not present it to the hiring managers in its current condition. We hired someone else, but I have always wondered, now that I am a professional résumé writer, if the result would have been different.

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