The Recruiting Rodeo 🐎: UNDERSTANDING YOUR AUDIENCE
Vol. 2: A Glossary of Talent Acquisition Terms
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Howdy, partners — and welcome back to The Recruiting Rodeo 🐎. In Volume 2: Understanding Your Audience, I will be providing you with a “glossary” covering all the different people who play a leading role in the talent acquisition process — including YOU, the job seeker / candidate.
As I mentioned the last time we were in the Rodeo ring, I began my professional career as a communications and marketing executive. If there is one thing being a PR and/or marketing executive teaches you, it is to identify, segment, and understand your audience(s). And then personalize your “message,” sales pitch, ad campaign, press release, products and services — even lemonade-stand sign — to the audience(s) you wish to reach.
So it should come as no surprise that I approach executive search, talent acquisition, the hiring process — whatever we wish to call it — through the “lens” of a marketer. Day in and day out, I apply my decade-long communications and marketing experience and training, which includes working for some of the brightest communications executives and business leaders the world has ever seen — Barby Siegel, Global CEO of Zeno Group, formerly Edelman and Warner LeRoy, the flamboyant former owner/operator of one of the most famous and successful restaurants in the world, being two of them — in my current career as an executive recruiter/talent acquisition professional.
Because I have been trained to have a marketer’s mind, I am always thinking about how to communicate best with my “audience.” Sometimes, that audience is a hard-to-reach executive-level candidate I really want to speak with to see if s/he is right for a position I have been retained or hired to recruit for. Other times, it’s C-level clients I need to connect with on weekly video calls to present new candidates for their open positions I have been retained to work on.
For candidates and clients alike, my goal is always to deliver what they need and want. And I know how to do that — not from working as a recruiter, but from my first career in marketing and communications. What is HR looking for during the interviewing process that is different than what the Hiring Manager is looking for? The Hiring Manager could be the Company’s SVP of Marketing or its CRO (“Chief Revenue Officer”). It is critical to understand the different people who influence your destiny throughout the job search and interviewing process.
How you talk, how you dress, how you behave and how you express yourself to each different person, every step of the way. How you communicate to them about yourself and what you have done throughout your career. That is not something most executives have been trained to do. It does not come to them as second nature. You can be the most acclaimed Editor in the world at the most prestigious purveyor of global journalism, but that doesn’t mean you know how to put together a resume that lands you a new job when you’ve been terminated from your company after 15 years of service. You may know how to tell engaging stories that produce clicks and views while also making readers of a certain age and your colleagues in ad sales happy. However, your audience for a job search is NOT ad sales or your loyal readers.
After decades of assisting companies and their hiring teams in managing the search process end to end, in guiding clients who often don’t know what they really want and helping them figure it out, as well as in coaching the candidates I’m putting forward for open, senior-level jobs, I will share this: 💡there are ALWAYS other candidates (at least one) under consideration for the same open position you are interviewing for — right up until the 11th hour. In other words, “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over” couldn’t be more true in the world of talent acquisition. A friend running for Congress in Colorado once taught me “The Third Bagel Rule” — you don’t actually have the job until you’re sitting at your desk, eating your third bagel, bowl of granola, boiled egg, or whatever your breakfast or choice happens to be.
Likewise, if you are the person at a company responsible for finding and recruiting the talent for an open position, you will save yourself — and the hiring team for whom you are finding the talent — a lot of time and 💰 if you understand exactly WHO you are looking for. Those prospective candidates are the “audience” for your search.
My hope is that once you read my definitions for each different Talent Acquisition “audience” below and take the time to understand who does what, you will begin thinking about how best to personalize or tailor your resume, professional online profile(s), and “story” — your “narrative,” if you will — to market yourself effectively to each one of them, as well as to ALL of them collectively. And yes, you can.
In future Rodeos, we will get into “the ring” with content leaders working at major corporations and brands, at agencies, and within the media industry itself about the importance of storytelling. We’ll delve into what makes a good candidate story, and how you can better craft yours to be more successful in your job search and interviews.
For those who hire talent for a living, we will explore how to think about your prospective candidates in a more strategic way — rather than simply relying on your company’s applicant tracking system (ATS) during a red-hot, employer-driven job market (the polar opposite of the job market we saw from 2020 to early 2022).
So without futher ado, let’s ride 🐎!
A TALENT ACQUISITION GLOSSARY
The Hiring Manager
This is a term you probably see often if you are searching for advice online about getting your first job or beginning a job search for a new job. It refers to the person at a company who needs to fill a position or multiple positions on his/her team.
The Hiring Manager is typically a mid- or senior-level executive, and often a job-function and/or subject-matter expert (SME) who runs a functional job area within a company or business unit of the company. For example, the Hiring Manager may be the Company’s Chief Communications Officer or its VP Communications and this person oversees all marketing, communications/PR, social media and content strategy for the Company. Or the Hiring Manager could be the Company’s SVP of Strategy and her “job” is long-range strategic planning which could include M & A and company investments in emerging companies and tech, strategic alliances and partnerships w/other companies, etc.
In the vast majority of cases, the Hiring Manager is ultimately the most influential person in the hiring process for the open position(s), because s/he will be the new hire’s boss — meaning the new hire will “report directly into” them. The Hiring Manager often makes the decision on whether to work with the company’s internal team of recruiters and/or Human Resources professionals or to hire an external Search Firm or consultant to find, recruit, and interview potential candidates for the open position(s).
Open positions come in two flavors: 1) a “backfill,” meaning that someone on the Hiring Manager’s team left and the Hiring Manager, working with HR and company leadership, has decided that the position is going to be re-filled with a new hire, or 2) a “new role” that has been created on the Hiring Manager’s team to supplement an area or skill on the existing team that either needs more support or doesn’t currently exist. Regardless, the Hiring Manager never works alone in the Talent Acquisition or hiring process. S/he works with HR and/or Recruiters and/or possibly, external Search Firms and external Recruiters.
Candidates/Job Seekers
I use these words interchangeably to mean working professionals (including college students aspiring to be paid or working professionals) actively engaged in a search for a new or different job, interviewing for a job, thinking about starting an active job search, or being recruited proactively by retained recruiters like me for an open position at a Company. An active job search means that a person has started researching open jobs and applying to them with their resume and other information, like a professional social media profile. Jobs are typically posted/listed on online job search engines as well as on the Company’s own website. Candidates are either “passive” or “active.” The former is a person currently employed and not actively looking for a new job, while the latter is a job seeker or candidate who is either in the process of pursuing a new role or thinking about initiating a job search.
Recruiters 😊
Recruiters are those very special “souls” who work at a Company — or are contracted by the Company as an external consultant — and directly responsible for working with the Hiring Manager to find talent/potential candidates for the open position(s). Recruiters typically fall under the job function called “Talent Acquisition” — which is “grouped” more often than not, especially at large Companies, under the HR banner. At most companies with fewer than 100-150 employees, a lone Recruiter often works hand in hand with the HR leader or Chief People Officer. At larger companies, Recruiters are often divided up by and focused on specific functional job areas and/or business units. A functional job area at a Fortune 500 Company could be Finance, Operations and HR vs. Marketing and Communications. A business unit could be “cloud” at a big technology Company or “EVs” at a big automobile Company. Recruiters work on senior-level positions or mid/entry-level positions, or some combo of each, depending on the company’s size and the resources it has devoted to hiring internal Recruiters.
Some Recruiters specialize in talent acquisition for front-line positions — roles in which the workforce is largely based outside the company’s main headquarters (HQ) or corporate offices. Examples of front-line employees and positions include retail store employees, truck drivers, the warehouse supervisor who babysits the new robots that move things around the company’s warehouses and need regular maintenance, and the people who work at your favorite food and beverage establishments — a.k.a, quick service restaurant (QSR) franchises — those wonderful people who prepare your coffee and heat up that delicious egg- and-muffin combo, so you can start your day.
Positions at a company, whether at the executive offices/corporate HQ or frontline, can be designated as full-time, part-time, contract, temporary/seasonal, and/or freelance. There are recruiters that have experience in all of these different areas and pay models, including exempt vs. non-exempt.
Lastly, there are recruiters who work at search firms - like me! I operate my own retained executive Search Firm. Search firms are independent businesses that exist outside the Company and are often contracted with by a Company Hiring Manager or its HR or Talent Acquisition Leader — to go out and find top candidates for the company’s open position(s).
Executive Search Firms
A “Search Firm” is an external vendor who works with the Company that has open positions it needs filled. In the best Search Firm/Hiring Manager or Search Firm/Company relationships, a Search Firm acts as a “partner” or extension of the Company’s internal recruiting/hiring team. The Hiring Manager or a member of the company’s HR or Talent Acquisition team will contract with either one or multiple outside search firms to fill open roles. Contracting “exclusively” with one Search Firm only — is called “retained search” — and what I have done for 20+ years.
Working with “multiple” search firms is called “contingency search” and a different “contractual” relationship and operating style with the Company — than retained.
Why would a Company go “outside” for help hiring talent in the first place? There are many reasons, and I will answer this great question and provide more insights about the differences between contingency vs. retained search firms and how they operate in the next couple of Rodeos.
Human Resources
As I’m a stickler for details and insistent on accuracy, I reached out to HRCI® (www.hrci.org) — the country’s premier credentialing, standards and learning organization for the human resources profession — for a description of the job function that is commonly known as Human Resources or “HR.” I requested its working definition as well as a statement about how Talent Acquisition works with and/or as part of HR.
Re: Talent Acquisition: “Collaboration between HR and TA varies based on the organization's structure. In many instances, the HR function handles the forecasting and planning of workforce supply and demand and works with talent acquisition as hiring needs arise. Talent acquisition then aligns with hiring managers and handles the process of planning, sourcing, recruiting, screening, selecting, and hiring workers. When new hires onboard with the organization, talent acquisition turns to talent management, back under the purview of HR, as the employee lifecycle moves forward.
Hats off to you, HRCI! I will add to this very cohesive decription that at large Companies, there are multiple people working within HR called HRBPs (aka, Human Resources Business Partners) and a Recruiter is typically paired with an HRBP on each individual Search. They work together… but have very different roles to play in the Talent Acquisition process.
I hope you enjoyed my glossary. Until next time, see you out on the trail!
PS I am hyper mindful that companies do not want me ”poaching” their talent (that is my professional day job). And that many of my candidates and future candidates do not want their information and interactions with me appearing publicly. Substack has assured me that you do not have to display your email or name publicly, if you choose to create an account on Substack and become a free or paid subscriber to The Recruiting Rodeo 🐎
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