Carl Brickman's Blog

Recruiting for Moms and Dads and the Importance of Making Time for New Ideas

2011-04-26T07:33:00.001-04:00

As a Christian, Easter is my favorite holiday as it is the celebration of Christ’s Resurrection and His purpose. Our family takes the time to reflect on that, and during such times I think about family. Easter promotes thoughts of my father, who died January 6, 2000. His death was motivation for what I do today. He died due to a mistake made during a routine after-surgery procedure in a hospital. I left a successful consulting career to start a medical recruiting firm to make sure that my tragedy wasn’t repeated with someone else’s parent. Today my recently-patented invention, Online Job Tour®, which was developed and motivated by my passion to do what I do, is a new recruiting product to reach today’s online jobseekers and support healthcare recruiting. You can learn about it at www.onlinejobtour.com

On this Easter I have a sincere wish for all internal recruiters – those of you who work for a hospital or their corporation and recruit new physicians and employees: Consider you Recruit for Moms and Dads and always be open to getting better for their sake.

Since I started my new career in 2000 with sorrow driving me regarding my father death, I have realized what I am doing makes a difference in the lives of other peoples’ parents. Isn’t that an awesome thing? As an internal recruiter, you deal with prospective employees who will meet, touch, care for, save, console, and impact the lives of the people you serve, and their parents.

My hope is that you stay mindful of the importance of your job that you also remain motivated to be the best recruiter you can be, which includes constantly searching for the best practices and tools – like any top professional or pro athlete, being great requires constantly pushing the limit, never being content, and always looking for the best training regimen and equipment.

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Ok, so you understand the need to constantly improve and continually seek to get better, but when is the right time to consider new ideas?

I recently had a staff member here express some disappointment that he had been in contact with a hospital regarding Online Job Tour and the internal recruiter he talked to was rude. We had mailed a package and made a courtesy follow up call to ensure its delivery and to seek a way to discuss Online Job Tour with a policymaker. Naturally, this wasn’t a personal call and the internal recruiter likely deals with many solicitations. I understand the call may have been an interruption - but it was in response to an email by someone who gave no title on an email to our company, so our staff called to learn who it was. Hopefully we reached this person on a bad day.

· When you are aware that your work impacts lives and recruiting is extremely competitive, time should always be made to consider new and better ideas and products, right?

You can’t hold it against salespeople that they are enthusiastically promoting their products. They are the delivery mechanism for new ideas as well as every product you use today, which was either sold to you or to your boss for you to use.

Maybe not today, but all internal recruiters need to be allowed by their employers the autonomy to investigate new practices and recruiting tools. Dedicate a week to it. So when solicitors call, instead of a blow off of a potentially great product because of your initial irritation, accept their information and inform them of the time you have dedicated to seeking ways to improve by reviewing new products and services. They can call back then.

If you are not the person who makes the decisions, then save everyone time by pointing out the right person – because any good sales pro is going to root that out with multiple calls; so save your employer the time of getting more calls than it needs to receive.

By reserving a specific time period to evaluate new ideas, you don’t have to be rude, and at the same time you can look forward to taking an important break to see what has been offered to you from the wonderful world of inventions, ideas and generally well-meaning people with legitimate references, who are outside of your box.

The best recruiters in healthcare are motivated by their almost-daily conscious awareness of the importance of what they do and that their work impacts lives – this motivates them to be great and to actively welcome new ideas as well as seek them out.

Consider being one of them for the benefit of the moms and dads whom you serve. Speaking from my personal experience, their children will appreciate you for it!

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2 Lessons for Recruiters from “March Madness”

2011-03-29T09:45:00.001-04:00

I think about recruiting a lot. I invented Online Job Tour after the death of my father due to a mistake made during a medical procedure so it’s a real passion – I suppose there are worse things to be obsessed about!

As I watched in amazement one upset after the next in this year’s NCAA College Basketball tournament, commonly referred to by sports fans as "March Madness," including the upset of my beloved Florida Gators by the Butler Bulldogs, I kept thinking about the analogies used in sports and how they apply to life, and certainly in business – and recruiting, too.

Here are a two things from this year’s tournament that I hope inspire you on your quest to be a great recruiter for your employer.

1) It’s about match ups – you may not be the better than every team in the tournament, but that doesn’t matter; you only have to be better than the team you’re playing. For more than six years now, a huge issue I have noticed with my employer clients is how self deprecating they are about their hospital and service area – the focus is generally making excuses for what they lack vs. exalting what they have. This is likely a combination of being told negative things but I think it’s a bit of human nature to want what you don’t have and to think “the grass is greener….”

First of all, recruiting is not about what you don’t have as much as how you compare against the other employers that your candidates are considering. For instance, if you are a smaller hospital in a relatively smaller and non-urban area, then at the point when they start getting serious, your prospective candidates have generally already decided this kind of environment and lifestyle is what they prefer. So you aren’t competing against New York City, but you need to find out what hospitals and communities the prospect is also serious about besides you – and from there you have to start considering where you stand. This makes things manageable. It’s about match ups, and how you fare against the 6 other employers of your prospect, and not against the world.

From this point, you need to break down the career opportunity regarding the job itself and how it relates to what the prospect wants, and then your facilities, but also your community and what it offers: recreation, entertainment, Arts, access to travel, Schools, the local economy, Real Estate prices, shopping, etc.

Design a protocol that is easy for you to replicate. Consider using Online Job Tour – our tool that gives your prospects a better onsite visit than the real trip. Seek to understand the needs and preferences in order, what are most important to your prospects. And then seek out and compare all these factors with your competitors. You may not come out ahead in all areas, but you don’t need to win the game 100-0 – you only need to win by a point.

I believe coming across to your prospects as an expert, and then helping them refine their considerations, will not only help you in discerning and comparing which candidates are most favorable, but also when you focus on trying to close your top choice you can be an advocate to helping them understand the positives of your employer and service area to their other options.

You need to know what their biggest issues are. You need to know your competitors to influence the outcome – you only need to be better than your direct competitors in these area.

2) On Believing in being great – you can accomplish almost anything with the right attitude and it starts with believing in what you represent: your employer and where you live.

Some of the teams who have pulled off upsets in this year’s championships had no business winning on paper. I am particularly fond of VCU, who many pundits screamed should never have been selected to be in the tournament, which keeps winning and recently beat top-seeded Kansas to reach the Final Four.

During the test market of Online Job Tour it was my intent to introduce it to rural hospitals in communities which are generally off of the Internet radar or overshadowed by larger cities nearby, or are misunderstood. By focusing on telling the story and history of the community and the employer, and focusing our work on the positive aspects of the community – which are far more than initially meet the eye, we started having great success marking these “Norman Rockwell” lives to the right kinds of candidates who were ultimately looking for that work and life situation. One client increased its closing percentage from 5% to 70% in one year, among many other positives. Another client in rural Kentucky, over three years, has a 100% retention rate having recruited more than 50 doctors in three years – the town has a beautiful lake, but no major department stores, hotels, or franchise businesses except for a few restaurants.

These clients out-recruited many other bigger, flashier hospitals, by using good recruiting tools and making solid offers, but it started with their sincere belief that they offered a great place to work and live.

Enthusiasm and genuine sincere excitement is infectious, and it reaches people emotionally. It doesn’t make the sale but it without question can help close it. In fact, there’s really nothing more important than believing in who you are and what you do. Just ask VCU!

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The Easiest Thing an Employer Recruiter can do to bring real value to the recruiting process without spending a dime – “Be an Advocate, not an Assistant.”

2011-02-21T22:32:00.001-05:00

All successful sales professionals set up an “evaluation system” to determine their effectiveness, their personal income prospects, and value to their employers. But in our test market of hospitals and physician-owned practices over the last six years, rarely did I find an employer recruiter – called an “Internal Recruiter,” who does the same thing to monitor their efficiency, costs, closing percentages, and retention, among other important statistics, in the same manner.

Although our business currently is with hospitals, my experience is that for many employers in all industries, their recruiting protocols lack basic professional selling tenets. In fact, many internal “recruiters” are NOT really salespeople but “assistants” who almost aimlessly follow their candidates.

Hospital recruiting is at a high cost (not just financial) and many have not taken a serious look at their recruiting process despite the Internet changing career search completely. But some are starting to see their shortcomings – and understand the need to better market and sell themselves, and fill jobs faster, more competitively, and less expensively – plus focus on harnessing technology.

But a great deal of recruiting losses and shortcomings can be eradicated by internal recruiters incorporating basic sales tenets that cost nothing to implement.

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Off the bat, the easiest and perhaps most important thing an internal recruiter can do to improve upon their results is to “stop following” candidates around and instead have the focus to be an Advocate for the candidate, and not the candidate’s “secretary.”

· Even if the internal recruiter is not the one who will put together the pro forma or any sophisticated compensation package, nor may not be involved in the “final close,” their responsibility is to “clear the way” or “set the table” for both sides to get to that point.

To ultimately craft a competitive, repeatable, discernable recruiting protocol, becoming their candidates’ advocate is the easy and simply takes a change in approach:

1) An advocate is expert on what candidates need to know – this knowledge promotes a proactive nature which anticipates needs which gains the candidates’ respect.

2) An advocate understands the competitive component – they aren’t recruiting in a vacuum, but aware they need to not just sell, but outsell all other options of their candidates. They provide information for comparison that favors their employer, plus help candidates recognize the more favorable characteristics of their open jobs vs. competitors.

3) An advocate must have a real commitment to technology. Today’s jobseekers are online and any good internal recruiter insists on having the best tools to exhibit their jobs, as well as to communicate to and with jobseekers/candidates.

1) Be an Expert on what candidates need to know:

If you become a bona fide expert on the issues and subjects your candidates need to know, you will gain a measure of respect with the candidate and ultimately become a confidant. In fact, your only benefit to them will be what you know and who you know. You can either be a professional whom they trust and rely on or if they see that the extent of your “help” is helping them pick Holiday Inn or the Sheraton, their “wall” will never come down – you will never have a “peer” relationship where they take you seriously.

It’s pretty easy to discern the needs of your candidates – especially if they are relocating and your service area. A relocating candidate should want to know about your area’s economy and lifestyle issues (higher-end earners will want to know about the Arts, Country Clubs, private schools, shopping, high-end real estate, etc.). Many will want to know about civic groups or have interests in investing in the community.

For example, if your candidates express that they have middle school children who are high achievers, don’t just drive past a school and drop an awful cliché like your competitors such as “our schools are great and highly-rated,” but be an expert on the details, such as how the International Baccalaureate (IB) program was founded, then set up a meeting with its director, then tour its facilities. Talk about the new middle school being built and arrange for a tool to display its technology. Introduce your candidate to the PR person of the school system. Then make a point to inquire about private schools/academies and then do the same.

If you are in a smaller town, drive past construction sites and point out what is going on. Discuss in detail projects in the community and arrange for meetings with economic development principals to review floor plans with your candidates. Introduce candidates to the Director of Economic Development.

Especially in a smaller community, you should remind candidates that they should want to know about the economy so they can project outward their career.

Here are key examples of your showing you have done homework and prepared a visit. You were proactive. You have knowledge your competitors don’t. Your competition didn’t do this, and you are setting yourself apart from competitors’ recruiters as someone who “has the answers.” You are an expert who has anticipated needs, and added real value to your candidates’ job searches. These are memorable things to jobseekers. Ultimately, knowing you have information and know the right people will promote a unique change in the attitude of your candidates which may open the real doors to learning the major issues needed to close them.

Regarding a candidate’s expertise – if he is a cardiologist – you don’t need to be able to talk on his or her level, but you should be well-schooled on all the equipment and facilities of your employer – depending on your specific role, you may or may not need to understand the financial opportunity as well as any guarantees or packages your employer with offer. This is easier than you think, especially if you aren’t the deal maker but just the facilitator to the CFO or the board who will present the offer.

I could give all kinds of examples of being a prepared expert who has done your homework, who is a student of your employer and your service area, who knows the right people – but I think you get my point! Be an active student of your employer and your service area and be proactive in sharing that information in the form of personal visits or that you know key people.

2) Understand the competitive component:

Too many recruiters forget the candidates they are dealing with – especially if they are doctors, can have as many as 8 different options when they make the commitment to interview. They speak in clichés that really say nothing and don’t serve to distinguish themselves or their service area from the other options which makes the candidates feel isolated and alone.

Cliché phrases include “our hospital is like one big family” and “our community is small and it’s great for families.” As much as this may be true, these aren’t selling points when your five competitors are repeating these clichés. Real sales professionals are taught to provide information that leads prospects to the conclusions you want them to reach. Therefore, your goal should be to present them with information in the form of visits and meetings, so they can determine for themselves these facts.

And during dialogues, asking open-ended questions such as “how do we compare vs. your other choices” will bring out discussions to give you clues as to what candidates are interested in, as well as any misconceptions or wrong facts they have.

For example, let’s say you learn a candidate enjoys golf and the wife enjoys high end shopping, and although there are two country clubs in your service area but no major malls with top department stores, you might arrange for the couple to visit and have a snack with the Director of a local golf club – and prior to the trip you might speak with the wives of a few members who agree to meet all of you, who can tell the candidate and his wife where they shop. In this case, the key is acknowledging that there is no Lord & Taylors locally, but the wife had the chance to learn where her future neighbors shop.

Let’s say your competitor also has golf, but avoids the subject of shopping and chooses to hide from it since they don’t have high end shopping either. Perhaps your arranging to have your candidates meet local people who discussed it and reassured them, may make the difference.

Or if another competitor doesn’t have a private club (who says you can’t do your homework and compare these other places?) – you not only have the advantage but you made a point to visit one of yours.

Thus, if you have a good working relationship with the candidate, as you get to closing them you have this “ammunition” to use in your favor while you help them compare their career options vs. being a secretary they would never confide in.

Another example might be in your economy, which may be more diversified than other options of your candidate, which may be looking at a one industry town. I think it’s a good thing to ask your candidate to consider how it would affect their career if the furniture manufacturer in that other town they are considering closes.

The bottom line here is open-ended questions. Talking to candidates in terms of being an expert on what they need to understand to reach real decisions for their career, and taking time to help them compare your opportunity vs. others, pays off.

3. Commit to Technology:

It’s clear that jobseekers have moved to the Internet. We have also seen a huge rise in the use of smart phones and the iconic iPad among the high-end medical jobseekers whom we assist our clients in recruiting. The facts are that high-speed Internet is 10 years old now and by 2012 that will mean 3 generations of college graduates will have graduated – the point being that the college grad will have “grown up online.”

Internal recruiters need smart phones – I personally highly recommend the iPhone (Our group made the first web-based recruiting product in 2002 but we made a “micro” product for smart phones in 2006 – well before the iPhone). Many professionals prefer to text, especially if they are busy. It may sound a little silly to text your candidates, but not so much if you remember points #1 and #2 – you want to show you have knowledge, you are at least tech-competent, and your competitors may not be doing it.

· Use an iPhone. Use it to communicate with your candidates. The iPhone is an iconic tool that you will grow to love through its applications and ease of use. It’s a “hip” technology product and I think it’s the trendsetter in mobile communications. It will send a good message to candidates. And if you can afford it – get an iPad. I believe in this product so much that our work is oriented toward our video content being fully viewable on it.

And as the Internet is so broad and open now, the days of merely referring your candidates to a handful of websites as the sum total of your using the Internet to “recruit” them shows badly and can lead to disaster.

For instance, imagine merely providing a candidate a link to your local paper – and on today’s headline is news of a drug bust at the local high school, or worse, a double-homicide. And reconsider merely providing jobseekers with the school district’s website – most all of the content has nothing to do with what the jobseeker needs or wants to know – and they can find that by themselves so you really did nothing for them.

Our company is the maker of Online Job Tour®, which is a patented invention and a great recruiting tool that “brings the onsite interview experience to the jobseeker” – here are some samples: www.onlinejobtour.com/samples.php.

· While our product is the premier tool to both communicate as well as sell careers – living in your area and working in your company, consider anything besides throwing jobseekers a handful of websites for them to ferret through to “sell yourself.” That’s obviously not proactive selling.

If not Online Job Tour, at least provide candidates with web articles that present fair information and news on subjects which are important – at least you did some homework for them vs. your competitors which really don’t do anything to help. While I believe it is far better to “reach” them with our invention/product, a streaming video with testimonials, even if relatively cheaply made, is better. DVDs are older but a delivery system for streaming videos or some kind of visual presentation. Although paper of any kind is pretty much dead to today’s jobseekers, a clean marketing slick or high-quality brochure – maybe with the DVD in it, is better than being passive and hoping.

Our product and these other options cost money. If you can’t get your senior executive to call me to negotiate some kind of deal for us to craft an Online Job Tour for your employer, then at least start collecting timely Internet pieces – and be sure to put them in categories that are relevant to your prospects. It takes your time, but they would be more appreciated by your candidates.

I hope this blog entry has convinced you that changing your approach, and a few modifications to becoming a bona fide advocate for the needs of your candidates, will impact your results in a big way.

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New Year's Resolution Fizzling Already? Resolve to be a Pawn Star

2011-02-02T14:23:00.001-05:00

Resolve to be a Pawn Star – Employer Recruiters can begin to build a hugely successful recruiting protocol by studying the shrewd negotiating skills of these owners of a highly successful Las Vegas pawn shop.

Although I haven’t checked into the figures, I wonder every year how many New Year’s Resolutions fizzle out by February. My guess is that it’s a pretty high percentage, and among many reasons could be that people tend to set their goals too unrealistically. Well, if you are an employer recruiter and your resolution is on the ropes or already kaput, I have a simple and powerful “resolution solution” that can last all year and pay dividends: Resolve to be a Pawn Star.

There is a show on the History Channel called Pawn Stars which chronicles the everyday life of a family who has run a successful pawn shop in Las Vegas for years. I imagine people from all over bring in goods such as old cars to a book once owned by Isaac Newton, from a circa 1700 musket to a vintage boom box.

I want you to quickly get past the fact that this is a pawn shop, but an extremely successful BUSINESS. And there is a very simple reason for it that experienced salespeople and sales trainers (and great recruiters) quickly recognize – the principals at the pawn shop not only win virtually every negotiation with customers who bring in their goods, but they also almost never lose.

How would you like to have a simple process that cuts to the quick virtually every time with jobseeker prospects, that drastically improves your results – from closing percentage, getting the appropriate terms your employer is pressing for with the newly hired employee, and improve your retention numbers while getting a sincere “win-win” where both you and the new employee are totally satisfied?

I’m going to recommend that you, in a general sense, model your recruiting approach around how these pawn shop owners negotiate so focus on how they do it.

The Advantages of the Pawn Stars:

Experience: The first thing to recognize is the pawn shop owners have an incredible advantage – they negotiate dozens of deals every day vs. the person off the street who has perhaps never tried to pawn or sell anything they have owned before – this is no different than the advantage an employer-recruiter has over prospective candidates from physicians to specialty nurses.

Exclusivity: The next factor is the pawn shop owners have money – in other words, they have what these people want for the goods they are pawning. Sure, we don’t know the motivations of the people – for instance, they may be desperate for cash or just curious to see what the item they have may be worth.

The point is it doesn’t really matter because the pawn shop owner is going to set the terms. These customers came through the door. Similarly, your jobseeker prospects are at least casually interested in you; after all, you have an open job and they are at least sniffing around about it. They are coming to you.

Knowledge and Expertise: These pawn shop owners must be masters of the goods and products over which they are negotiating – because they must turn around and sell anything they buy at what they want to be a considerable profit. Much of the things people bring in, from jewelry to guns, they already know what their store’s selling price is going to be based on market conditions. The more unusual the product the better – the pawn guys will simply leverage an expert to come into the store for them in front of the customer and provide an assessment of the value of the product. The experts seem to have good
credentials, and talk intelligently, they have a reputation to uphold – but they clearly favor the pawn shop owners; nonetheless, they usually provide a “retail value” of the product.

Even with a starting price from which to negotiate, the pawn shop owner has the process to win the deal while promoting a deal that will either satisfy the customer or there will be no deal.

This is similar to recruiting, is it not? A jobseeker will come in with an expected salary and compensation range while to employer recruiter needs to promote a win-win that first benefits the employer, or be smart enough to drop pursuit of a jobseeker with unrealistic expectations or who isn’t sincerely interested.

Emotion:

People buy on emotion. All good salesmen and recruiters know this. An emotional attachment to a product or a job can be used against the customer or jobseeker, respectively, just as the emotional attachment to a product by a Pawn Star or to any particular candidate by an employer, can cut into the bottom line of the businesses.

To keep this blog entry more brief and focus on my orientation of developing a “process,” let’s agree for this post that because the Pawn Star and the employer-recruiter have always done this, they should have a clear advantage on this subject and have an awareness (gut .
feeling) when emotion is playing too big of a role in their considerations. Clearly, an employer-recruiter needs to be consciously aware of attempting to generate a number of emotional responses from jobseeker-prospects – it helps to out-recruit other employers as well as in the negotiations; will a candidate accept lower terms for a job and a community they have fallen in love with? You bet!

The Negotiating process: What all great sales professionals have in common, as do great recruiters, is they have a “sales process” or “presentation” which is refined and improved as they gain experience into which they incorporate their experience and exclusivity, which can turn style and recite in their sleep.

While this is a multi-step thing to evaluate, you’ll be amazed how simple it is and how the pawn store owners operate so smoothly that what comes off as a normal conversation is a big victory almost every time for them, and equally importantly, the customer leaves the negotiation satisfied – a “win-win;” this is what employer-recruiters also hope to achieve, and it’s clear that an established, expert process gets to the bottom line expeditiously – which is also important as unfilled jobs cost money.

The Two Negotiations – as I review these negotiations with you keep in mind that the customer is totally oblivious to almost all these factors and their brain isn’t wired to pay attention and understand they are involved in an almost totally orchestrated sales process that is a great disadvantage to them. But also understand the end result is either going to be a perceived “win-win” – the customer is not going to accept an offer they don’t want, or they will part company for the best.

A) Without a third-party expert providing a price from which to start:

From the get-go, understand the pawn store owner isn’t going to start any negotiation unless they already know the value of the product being offered by the customer, and what they perceive they will get for it. With the orientation toward being able to sell the product at the highest re-sale possible as well as knowing the most they can pay, they also start the negotiations.

The pawn store owner will naturally give a low offer with the customer generally not even understanding it is a low ball offer:

Pawn Star: “I’ll give you $200 for it.” (This is the lowest the Pawn Star thinks the customer may accept and he also already knows he will only pay $275 at the most, and he thinks he can resell the item for $600)
Customer: “Well, geez, I was hoping to get at least $500.” (Generally speaking, the customer has a ballpark figure of what they hope to get for their merchandise, but it is often not really based on any facts or knowledge about the product; often they have had the product laying around the house for years and they have no reference point such as their own purchase price – all conditions which the Pawn Star knows is likely the issue)
Pawn Star: “You need to understand that I need to be able to sell this for a profit, but I want to give you a fair price. The best I can do is $250.” (Here the Pawn Star introduces a fact that the customer likely did not consider, which promotes a sympathy of sorts and this is a power statement designed to loosed the customer’s hold on any firm price they may insist upon).
Customer: “How about $300?” (This is far less than the $500 the customer just said he was hoping for, but this is the counter offer that the customer is saying he will accept)

Pawn Star: Long power pause…head shake no (that’s called a “take away”). Brow wiped. Stare at the merchandise. Look at the customer (all choreographed acts). Head shake again. “$275 is the best I can do.” (This is exactly what the Pawn Star hoped would be the number with anything below being “extra gravy” to his bottom line, but is also the firm amount he has concluded will be a fit number where it would be worth it to take the time to turn around and display the merchandise for sale)

Special Note: The Pawn Star will never speak again after making the offer. It’s a selling tenant that “the one who speaks after the offer loses.”

· Let’s say the customer does not accept this number, keeping in mind that the customer himself offered $300 – which is $25 less:

Customer: “I just can’t do it.” Usually this would not be the response because many customers who get this far do not have an absolute firm price or a need to have one.

Pawn Star: “Well, if you want to spend the money to open your own pawn shop, advertise, pay the light bill, insurance for the business, and deal with all the hassles, maybe you can sell it for $275. I’m sorry, I can’t do better than that.” (This is called a “rebuttal” and the Pawn Star follows that with the close again at $275.

· Let’s say the customer tries again to jiggle the price:

Customer: “Are you sure you can’t do any better?”

Pawn Star: (Firmly now) “$275 is the best I can do. (This is an absolute statement made to promote the close. We really don’t know if the store owner will go higher but that’s not the point. This is the art of negotiating.) I want you to come away satisfied and come back again to me in the future. That’s the best I can do.” (Another rebuttal promoting good feelings and prospective future business, which has no value to this deal, which the Pawn Star knows, but his intention is to get leverage, and then back to his close)

Customer: “Ok, I can do $275.”
Pawn Star: (Will immediately offer a handshake to consummate the agreement – this is a sales tactic, and repeat the agreed upon price) “$275 it is. Let’s write you up for the sale.”

· It is important to also understand that the Pawn Star was operating with a large profit margin on the negotiation, so he had flexibility to make adjustments based on the variety of factors – from the customer’s knowledge of the product to any insistence on a specific price. Also remember that even if the customer turns down the final offer, if there is truly a remaining profit to be had, the Pawn Star has that 40 feet from “No” until the from door to change that “final offer.”

B) With a third-party expert’s retain price estimate:

The only difference between this negotiation, when one of the pawn store owner’s “experts” is brought in to provide a retail price from which any negotiation (which is up to the Pawn Star to start, if at all), is that there is a literal starting price point that will be established by the expert.

Expert: “Considering other products like this that are in the market, the demand for it, and it’s condition, I would say the retail prince of this widget is $1,200.”

Now, regardless of what price is offered, including the Pawn Star’s experience to quickly be able to discern how easily he may be able to re-sell it and previous demand for a product like this, if any – which are obvious considerations he quickly needs to incorporate, there is going to be a percentage the Pawn Star always works from for this negotiation. Let’s say it’s 40%. That would be the best he would go – that’s $480.

But the Pawn Star is not going to throw the number out there because the customer may be willing to settle for less. So here’s the question:

Pawn Star: “How much do you want for it?”

From here, the negotiation, based entirely on the $480 mark, is going to be run by the Pawn Star in the same manner as before (the expert knows he is supposed to leave after giving the quote so as not to interrupt the Pawn Star’s deal – he was sent away with a hearty thanks and handshake by the Pawn Star).

Review: Promising that I would keep your resolution easy to follow throughout the year, these are the basic tenants I want you to come away with:

Watch the show – it’s actually the same song and dance, over and over, with the pawn store racking in money with satisfied customers leaving. The biggest thing you can learn from this is the efficiency and discipline Pawn Stars have.

· They have a specific routine. They make customers feel like it is a natural and normal process when the entire thing is choreographed without the customer knowing it. Your dealings and onsite interview visits should feel this way to your jobseeker prospects.

· Pawn Stars run the process and the negotiation; in fact, they already know the outcome of the deal – which will be terms THEY can accept, or no deal. The customer (or in our case, the jobseeker) never runs anything but are steered to choices they think they have or directions they feel they are choosing. A big criticism of employer recruiters is they allow the candidates to run things. When you start to see this happening, it’s almost a certainty that you will lose the deal or be forced into poor terms for the long run.

· Exclusivity and Firm Offers: Desperation also kills. You’ll never see emotion or desperation shown by a Pawn Star. For the employer recruiter to remember they have the desired job and stand firm in their dealings may be the most important factors – which garner first the respect from the candidate, but also a basis for credibility and real negotiating.

In the end, it is far better to know your best offer and be willing to walk away from the deal.

So for the rest of 2011, if your New Year’s Resolution isn’t doing anything for you, follow these basics and you will begin to craft an improved recruiting platform.

Remember, “Be a Pawn Star!”

The show Pawn Stars is on The History Channel and you can learn more about it and when it airs on the website http://www.history.com/shows/pawn-stars

Posted via email from Brickman's posterous

Is Facebook® is Worth Pursuing for Employers’ Recruiting Efforts?

2010-12-26T12:15:00.001-05:00

As an advocate for employers and with the orientation toward empowering their recruiting efforts, which includes maximizing the Internet, growing their skills, and limiting their requirement to outsource, a number of hospital clients have asked me over the years if they should use Facebook in their attempt to “improve recruiting.” After delving into this issue and spending a great deal of time on the social networking site in 2010, I have concluded the answer to be no - at least not for now.
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Currently, given the reasons why people access hospital web content, the far better strategy for hospitals is to improve upon their own websites (which prospective employees are certainly going to access), and focus more on better ways to reach and compete for jobseekers online while enhancing their own selling skills and recruiting and protocols.
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Given my decade-long relationships with hospital recruiting, marketing and HR personnel, those hospitals with a Facebook page likely did so due to their initial perception of it being “free.” Now they have learned it is really not free but requires someone’s time to administer it which pulls them away from other tasks they are paid to do. Hospital fan pages have few followers, their employees are reluctant to post anything on them and at the end of the day it’s a hospital – the vast majority of people visit websites of hospitals either to a) seek out specific services for themselves or family members, or b) to find a job.
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There may be some merit for Marketing purposes: From a “branding” perspective, that is, hospitals in competitive markets who are trying to compete for business, perhaps there is some merit to having a Facebook page – but that is not my niche and I am not sure what statistics are out there that may or may not show demonstrable results from having one.
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Facebook hasn’t changed much – its origins and orientation don’t “fit:” Ultimately we have to remember what Facebook was designed for and that its layout and design haven’t really changed much – it’s still a social networking site that “connects” people and offers them alternate ways to communicate and meet others (although the company’s policies promote networking only among people whom one personally already knows).
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That Facebook has hundreds of millions of users has promoted a “boom” of attempts to profit from using it. One’s ability to “generate” thousands of “friends” gives account holders a free “bulletin board” or platform from which to market a product or service, or themselves – there seems to be an ever-growing number of “life coaches” and online degrees.
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Again, although it is not my specialty, it appears that a more simple “sale” of a product, like the introduction of a new shoe by NIKE, or a new record by a recording artist – I even learned that one can buy an airline ticket on DELTA’s fan page, has merit. But for a complicated, multi-faceted career position which for jobseekers have many issues and needs, such a linear approach would not address the many outstanding questions of those engaged in a career search – especially one that requires a physician relocation of an individual (and their family, if they have one).
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Ultimately a hospital Facebook page is a site which is awkward and at best and used by hospitals to post their events (which seems redundant if they do it on their websites’ “community calendars”). Stand-alone or regional hospitals are more likely than corporations to have Facebook pages because large companies which usually have a top-down management of their affiliates requires a financial justification to assign someone to do it or pull someone from a traditional job responsibility.
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· Our work generally deals with higher end jobseekers such as physicians, who are the “revenue drivers” to hospitals; I find it hard to imagine that busy medical practitioners would use Facebook this way but go directly to specific employers with whom they are familiar are interested and access their websites directly.

· For organizations who are actually building their business around Facebook – there may be more merit in using Facebook to “recruit” and post open jobs, but even here, it seems that the company should forward them to proprietary web content that is specific to their needs.

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Internet Searches on this Subject show Employers Use Facebook to Screen jobseekers: Like doing a “social background check,” emerging on the Internet are articles which suggest or state how employers view individuals’ Facebook pages as a form of “screening” them – which I find fascinating for many reasons, but again it is not my immediate niche.
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Recruiting Services and Recruiters are on Facebook: After a decade of seeing how the recruiting industry has stayed ahead of their hospital clients by better understanding SEO strategies as well as sales and marketing to harvest candidates, the same entities are using Facebook, at least for now, to bullhorn their openings to others, no different than an “email blast.” Facebook seems like a place for them to attempt to attract the general jobseeker on Facebook and ultimately channel them to their own websites in order to “process” them – a good example of this is Career Builder www.facebook.com/CBforEmployers#!/CBforEmployers?v=wall Ultimately, it’s free advertising and a “portal” to where Career Builder wants jobseekers to go: to their website a la “bait and switch.” Given how people “network” their ways into career positions and opportunities, I can see how recruiting companies may benefit; but again, I think Facebook is a “square peg” for hospitals given the many other ways they can improve their recruiting.
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Visit www.onlinejobtour.com to learn more about me and our work.

Posted via email from Brickman's posterous

Raising Dreams and Lives...Together: 4/4: Teamwork

2010-10-31T11:36:00.001-04:00

Raising Dreams and Lives…Together
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My Four Part Series for Employer Medical Recruiters, The Final Part Four – It all comes together with Teamwork
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Employer medical recruiters and their efforts directly impact the lives of their patients and communities. It’s an incredible responsibility. Because of this, it there is a solemn and moral responsibility to be dedicated to continual improvement and professional growth. By raising the dreams of people to obtain their ideal career choice in the medical profession with your employer, your goal is also to raise the standard of care – and the lives of your patients. This series is focused on the four core components necessary for employer medical recruiters to excel and be great.
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In Part I, I made it clear that claiming “I love my employer” and your community, and showing up for work every day, and eventually filling your open jobs, is not enough! Because your work impacts lives, you owe your employer and its patients the focus on recruiting the best practitioners and not merely filling a job opening – and growing and improving in this dynamic market where there is intense competition is required, or else you are “behind” before you know it.
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Part II: This was acknowledgement that growing your marketing and selling skills and committing to being a real “sales professional” is necessary.
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In Part III I hammered you with exactly what you need to do in order to be your very best:
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You are committed to understand and then identify your “target market,” and then craft your “sales presentation.” As a sales pro you understand you are competing – you present yourself and your employer in a manner that positions you to both sell as well as outsell your competition – you are not recruiting in a vacuum. You are committed to being an expert on issues candidates need to know to promote your expertise so you are perceived as a bona fide advocate by candidates as opposed to merely an interview scheduler – a secretary can do that. You understand the importance of choreographing candidate visits (in a general sense; naturally, candidates will have different or specific needs). You need to develop a Q/A protocol that is incorporated into your position to monitor your success. All great sales pros have a sales tool – you have committed to not settling for anything but the best tool (Naturally, I recommend Online Job Tour® as the optimal approach to harnessing the Internet to achieve success).
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Before we get to Part Four – a note on acquiring/harvesting candidates. I mentioned in Part III that although this is for another blog entry, I am not a believer in the reliance on third party recruiters as the source of candidates. Employers need to understand that all jobseekers now use the Internet and there are ways to brand your employer as well as communicate with local and regional education institutions in order to obtain proprietary candidates (which are far better in most cases than those presented by contingency-based recruiters). The art of recruiting has been lost in the haste of trying to fill jobs and it can and should be focused on again – Promo Web Innovations has many solutions for our clients and is available to offer ideas to you. Nonetheless, I discuss the development of relationships with third party recruiters below.
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Now to Part Four – It all comes together with Teamwork
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Even Michael Jordan needed good teammates and everyone working together in order to win championships. Legendary basketball coach John Wooden, who won an unprecedented 10 national championships at UCLA, needed great players – and it took both years before they reached the pinnacle.
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• This is when I need to stop and remind you that greatness and the “ultimate success” will not happen overnight. Success is also elusive – your market and prospects change. But what you must have is the right motivation and mindset, developed skills, as well as tools and teamwork with others, in order to be a champion employer recruiter. At some point when you become expert, much of your work can either be put on “automatic pilot” or trained upon others.
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With our focus on your becoming a great employer recruiter, similarly, you must a good support system min the form of a staff and outside assistance – the formation of your “team,” if the budget is there, is integral to your success.
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If you are a sole recruiter (and on your own) for your employer:
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Sole employer recruiters need leverage because you are going to be so busy dealing with the logistics of communicating with candidates and your organization’s superiors. Here you need a great sales tool to “do your selling for you” and also save time if the selling tool educates, answers questions, and positions your employer to maximize your marketability and competitiveness – you have to anticipate the obvious questions and needs of your candidates and their families regarding your employer and service area.
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Again, I strongly encourage you consider our patented Online Job Tour – which is a web based system in the form of a recruitment website that does all this automatically, and our test market proves its ability to educate and compel prospective candidates while saving time and effort for both sides while helping our clients compete. Our staff is an excellent source to assist you with technical answers to your challenges up until you design proformas/offers/negotiations with physician and high end practitioners, which will likely be coordinated with your senior administrators (job offers to department directors, mid level and staff positions are often packaged by HR Directors at an employer of your size). The point here is, if your responsibility is from the point of advertising the opening through introducing a legitimate and authentically interested candidate to your employer’s key hiring personnel, then Online Job Tour can be the anchor around which your dealings with jobseekers can be coordinated along with a solidly developed recruitment protocol – which we can also assist you in crafting. For you there would be nothing better than a recruitment process that runs on optimal efficiency that you can “turnstile” easily and effectively.
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It is likely that as a sole employer recruiter you have sources from which you obtain candidates (if you are a smaller operation, then most are primary care practitioners). Due to your limited time, I appreciate your initial impulse may be to immediately turn to outside recruiting sources, but I encourage you to consider developing relationships with residency program directors in your region as well as medical academic programs, and key in on major job fair events – the former prefer to deal with you – an employer, vs. recruiters, and job fair events are great opportunities to develop and leverage relationships, talk to prospects, and get referrals. Saving the $15,000 to $30,000 “recruiter fee” would be welcomed by your employer when filling that key opening. Employers often forget to incentivize their own employees to draft prospective candidates for their open positions.
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If your employer allows for the creation/development of a recruitment team:
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Bring together different talents: Here you are a larger organization with a larger budget that includes staff, so there is the initial challenge for you to have clear responsibilities identified for your team members to promote efficiency while you can leverage what are hopefully different skills among them. For example, you may have a professional designated to deal with outside recruiting sources to help source prospective candidates as well as be responsible for your employer’s branding and proprietary recruiting efforts. You may have someone to assist you in coordinating all interview visits – a laborious task that in volume is expensive but also can be designed shrewdly to get discounts from hoteliers and other local organizations/vendors/even restaurants. Another may be a person at your employer who will work with candidates at the stage they are ready to construct offers/financial packages/incentives/benefits.
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The Selling Tools: Nonetheless, your conundrum is that jobseekers will find your job openings online – their first impression and introduction to you. And with how our culture is online and has a preference to shop there – especially the newer, younger medical jobseekers, I again recommend Online Job Tour to be your anchor tool as your first communication and continual reference point with candidates.
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• Our 2009 Survey showed our clients fill their jobs 19% faster, reduce their need for site visits by 33%, and they also reduce their use of expensive third party recruiters by 1 in 7. Among other benefits, Online Job Tour attracts the better candidates/professionals and has even served to put our hospital clients in a better negotiating position because the candidates are truly motivated and want the job vs. the employer being desperate to land them and feel the need to offer higher bonuses and guarantees.
• As an FYI, there are now studies out there which point specifically to the revenue generated by physicians and specific specialties to hospitals – your ability to fill an open physician job one month sooner can mean as much as $100,000 to your employer. So filling a key job faster with a better employee or physician can have a huge impact on your employer’s bottom line.
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Try to Curb Recruiters and their fees: And if you have a larger volume of recruiting than a 150 bed hospital or less, there should be a meaningful effort to curb third party recruiter fees, which can easily exceed $200,000 annually at your employer. I suggest learning about SEO strategies regarding marketing your openings – be on search results for Google, Yahoo and Bing for key words and phrases your target market will use when looking for jobs – Promo Web innovations has developed successful working prototypes for our clients that we can share with you. Candidates especially from contingency-based recruiters have been shopped to many places and their origins can be dubious. They are also coached in favor of the recruiter making that placement with you or anyone.
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Use the Internet Proactively: With your budget you have a great opportunity to market your employer online. There are many services out there, such as Constant Contact, which can continue dialogues with many different professionals, jobseekers – even those you do not land but may have a chance for in the future, and representatives of services. While most hospitals have a marketing department, it is usually focused on marketing the services of the hospital and there are few professional “closers” or sales pros there. Consider engaging a local PR firm to at minimum glean ideas from them as to how you can use the Internet and any other tools to grow your presence and marketability.
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Consider making vendors like recruiters feel like they are a part of your team: Because it is likely you will need to utilize vendors such as third party recruiters to source candidates, I advocate choosing professionals who demonstrate experience and an expertise that extends beyond sourcing – let’s face it, candidates pretty much come through the internet and so merely providing resumes is not an indicator of anything more than that. A vendor with prior professional selling experience who understands the art of closing a deal, and even a professional who brings skills to the table that include help with putting together offer packages can help to grow your own skills. While you generally should keep your vendors on somewhat of a need to know basis, if you have a good relationship with them and make them feel a part of your team (in a general sense), you will likely get better attention from them as well as more attention to the details of the candidates they provide.
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Your team should be a well-oiled machine where its members understand their roles, so that you can turnstile the process (at least to a reasonable degree) so that every new job opening is not “reinventing the wheel.” Those outside your inner circle (recruiters, PR groups, industry contacts, local professionals who may assist you during interviews, etc.) should be made to feel important and special to you. I am a big believer in customizing interview visits down to routes you drive them around town and people you “coincidentally” run into when out and about.
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A note about Facebook and Social Networking: Hospitals creating a Facebook page has become trendy and I am not totally convinced that the time put into it, and paying an employee to oversee a FB page, does much for recruiting. Branding itself in its service area – if there is competition, may help its business a little bit. Would employees feel obligated to post remarks on it? Probably not. What about potential problems, such as former patients posting nasty or unflattering remarks and the need to erase them, or the conundrum of leaving the posts? These things have not been though about enough; I think the fact that FB is “free” and is a social phenomenon has created this “phase.”
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• The difference with Online Job Tour, among many, with FB is that our clients have 100% control over its content and making changes to it – it cannot be compromised by outside parties.
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A note about “Retention:” I have seen some terrible figures regarding some hospital corporations and their retention numbers with physicians – some with a 50% retention rate after 36 months. With a great deal of experience and feeling as though I understand the entire recruitment spectrum and the many issues for both sides, I am convinced that the reason for poor retention among relocating medical professionals is primarily due to the hospitals focus on closing the deal and focusing on its terms and not as much focus on educating and selling their service areas and the lifestyle that relocating employees can expect – only after they relocate to the professionals learn about the communities they moved to.
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The issue is about these new employees and physicians not being fully committed to the deal – they don’t establish meaningful relationships right away and there is no connection – especially with the spouse.
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If you think about it, the hardest physicians to recruit away are those who are invested in their service areas – who have relationships, partnerships and businesses there. Our Online Job Tour has shown an incredible “transformative impact” on the recruiting process where candidates interviewing for the first time arrive with confidence and excitement vs. anxiety and unprepared – because Online Job Tour is designed to be more comprehensive than the real interview trip, which has time and money limitations, and separates spouses, among a host of other potential problems. With ultimate goal of making an ideal professional and lifestyle fit, our clients are building upon the familiarization promoted with Online Job Tour to immediately establish relationships with those community leaders featured in their Online Job Tours, as a way to start the process of getting the physicians and practitioners committed to a long term career and life with them – please contact us for more information on the work we are doing here.
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A note about Selflessness: Being a great team member or team leader means you also have a willingness to help others, cheer others on, and revel in and applaud their success. Because your job ultimately impacts lives of your patients and their families, it is important to respect all others, including your vendors, by following the “Golden Rule.” Only bad things can result when you mistreat people. I am also a believer in karma. Treat others with sincere kindness and appreciation. If you’re really good and committed, people will know and respect that you are in charge and you are important.
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Your Final Foundation Commitment:
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It’s been a long series, and I apologize for this last one being a little late – the summer and fall have been busy for me. But I am at the end of this important road with you. You are now a better recruiter for your organization.
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Your Final Commitment:.
“I understand that my work and the work of the people I include in my efforts affect lives. I will commit to seeking excellence, experience and talent to not only contribute, but make me better, when constructing a team and vendors for my purpose of being my best. I will treat others with the respect they deserve and they way I would want to be treated, in order to promote an excellent environment to exchange ideas and information, as well as to get these many influences favoring me – after all, I am in a competitive business. My commitment to being great includes how I treat and involve others in my process and thanking them when I achieve success.”
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Thank you for taking this workshop/series with me and you have my sincere best wishes as you move forward with raising lives and dreams of others. Please let me know how you are doing my contacting me through our company’s website at www.onlinejobtour.com

My Four Part Series for Employer Medical Recruiters, Part III

2010-07-24T10:11:00.001-04:00

My Four Part Series for Employer Medical Recruiters,
Part III: On getting the best possible selling tools to complement your efforts.
Employer medical recruiters and their efforts directly impact the lives of their patients and communities. It’s an incredible responsibility. Because of this, it there is a solemn and moral responsibility to be dedicated to continual improvement and professional growth. This four part series is focused on the four core components required for employer medical recruiters to fulfill this responsibility and excel.
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In Part I, I made it clear that claiming you love your employer and your community, and showing up for work every day, and eventually filling your open jobs, is not enough! Because your work impacts lives, you owe your employer and its patients that you must want to be the very best you can be, and continually push yourself by growing your knowledge and skills – you have to keep growing and improving in this dynamic market where there is intense competition.
You made Foundation Commitment #1 about your career:
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“I understand that my work directly impacts the lives of people. I commit to take a silent moment of reflection on this fact before I begin work every day. I acknowledge that I am passionate about my career position and this will be my guiding motivator to continually improve – acceptance of the status quo is never acceptable because it is never an excuse for our patients and their families.”

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Part II: This commitment led to your acknowledgement that growing your marketing and selling skills and committing to being a real “sales professional” is necessary.

· You now know the difference between marketing and selling.

· You now understand the competitive component – that you must not only sell candidates, but OUTSELL your competitors.

· You understand that being efficient carves out tremendous waste, and actually improves your results. Your sincere commitment to be a “pro” will lead to making Foundation commitment #2:

“I will be a real pro and have a proactive impact on my results. I am competing for candidates vs. other employers. I commit to crafting marketing ideas and a selling protocol that separate my opportunities from others while maximizing time and quality. My process will build my relationship with prospects in ‘steps’ and lead to a conclusion that is best for both sides.”

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At this point, you should be motivated and want to have an impact on your job because 1) your work impacts lives – you have a moral responsibility to be your best and never settle, and 2) you have the awareness that you are competing and need to continually develop a “professional marketing and sales process” in order to maximize your results.
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Part III: Now you must acquire and use the best possible tools to complement your efforts. All great sales professionals have great selling tools to help promote their message and make their entire sales protocol more efficient and effective – better tools create the competitive advantages you MUST have. Like great athletes, they are always looking to get an advantage, from the equipment they invest in to how they practice and train (and all the great ones do).
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What is your “target market” of prospects? You also clearly need to make sure that you identify your target market of prospects. If you are in a community of 50,000 residents an hour or more from a big city, then you don’t want to target practitioners who want to live in metro area. Unless you are in the position to draft a unique cooperative agreement with a group or another provider, that is, if your hospital is seeking a family practice addition, what you are competing against are all the other hospitals and communities like you – on this you build your sales presentation against all of them.
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Your First Tool: What is your sales presentation going to be?
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Before you consider any selling tools or approaches, you must first identify your strengths, weaknesses, and what you are representing – from the perspective of other hospitals of your bed size or employers of your size and specialty.
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For instance, are you a level two trauma center while other hospitals your size may be a three? You may have two Cath Labs while others your size may have one. You may have a pediatric unit when others may not. What is your hospital’s reputation? Do you have stats? Are you part of a large corporation? Is it publically traded or non-profit? Or are you a regional hospital in a system? You need to be able to present the best argument and defense, of any questions regarding these and many other considerations you anticipate jobseekers have.
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· There are the same considerations regarding your service area. How do your schools rate in your region? Are you a student of your economy and can you speak intelligently of employers, their plans, as well as government-sponsored growth initiatives? Identify pluses, like having a regional airport, country clubs, and a recreational lake – not all towns your size have these. Have you travelled to the communities of your competitors to evaluate them?

· Remember that you have already made career “foundation commitments” now, and you are not a “community welcomer” who can only place a smile on your face, set up interview visits, and speak in clichés (you aren’t a waiter!), but you are committed to being a pro and a real sales professional – this is now the requirement of your position – people’s lives depend on YOU!

· Preparing a “report” on your hospital and service area, and “tending to it,” are requisite to your success – because whatever tools or sales presentation you create, it will have to be one that constantly changes in order to be accurate and to keep you in command of the facts.

· Eventually you will develop a list of survey questions which you will incorporate into your protocol as a Q/A piece that help you hone your presentation and skills.

· Eventually you must craft a list of local professionals and people of influence to incorporate into your presentation, particularly for onsite visits with candidates and their families. Choreographing meetings and prepping these folks from all walks of life in your service area (business owners, teachers, economic development principals) to meet candidates, and practicing with them to “present” a thorough and compelling “sales presentation” while your competitors merely place physicians with a realtor who really has little command of the facts bona fide physician candidates need to know, and try to let the realtor do all the selling.

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A great pro is ultimately an advocate for your prospective candidates: Being in real command of facts about your hospital and service area, and acute knowledge of them and the people involved, will promote your relationship to candidates as a REAL advocate for them, and not merely being their assistant, or a “waiter” who caters to them – where they won’t confide in you; thus, you will never be in the position to close them.
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Although this kind of preparation may seem difficult to do, you have no choice because of your commitments. Every call you make, and every doctor you are blessed to meet, requires you to be at your best, because you have to answer to families who are trusting you to get them the best possible physicians and practitioners, and not merely to fill open jobs.
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· Developing a repeatable onsite candidate visit “protocol” that you can generally repeat is essential because it allows for you to judge yourself and measure your success. A repeatable presentation that includes all of the information that jobseekers need allows you to relax and focus on relationship building rather than the “Chinese Fire Drill” of “what comes next,” and allows for improvisation with them and their families – this is advanced level sales where you are creating connections that will help separate you from competition.

· Special Note: As a former tech sales professional, sales manager, and sales consultant, as well as 8 years as Founder and President of Online Job Tour®, our team is “the pioneer” regarding reaching online jobseekers and crafting an approach to maximize recruiting medical professionals. I am available to speak to groups and recruiting organizations, as well as consulting with employers to help them craft an ideal recruiting environment. Please contact me through our website at www.onlinejobtour.com

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On Technology: I am an admitted geek regarding technology. My very first blog is worth reading – I posted a piece on how the Internet got started and has grown. Most people don’t know the Internet’s history. I remember telling friends and relatives when I was young that someday music would not be on tapes or CDs but on bits of information on computers with no moving parts. I remember when I saw the first cell phone, which was in a satchel and looked like a briefcase, thinking “they are going to get a lot smaller.” Five years ago I was telling clients that one day they would be driving down the street and their "handheld computer device of some sort" would beep because it was in "Real Estate mode" – and now we have smart phones.
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The Internet: As high-speed Internet was ushered into our lives through the early to late 2000s, we went from the “screeetch” of the fax sound while accessing the Internet by phone, when it took a number of minutes to download a single image, to now being frustrated when huge pages with rich content don’t load immediately. As recruiters, we can forget that this 8 year period means today’s new physicians “grew up online.”
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For a variety of reasons not for this blog, hospitals and other healthcare employers, and many of their recruiters, have not kept pace with how the Internet has created a new kind of consumer and jobseeker – with unique behavior and expectations.
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· Today the Internet is no longer something we passively read, like the newspaper on a computer screen. Instead, we now interact with it. But hospitals did not really harness the power of high speed Internet to maximize their recruiting efforts (Our company’s invention fills this void, below).

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Your Sales Tool: How are you going to “present” your sales presentation?
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Clearly, you need to appreciate the Internet as the bullhorn you must use to advertise your career openings – but only a rookie would make the mistake of stopping there. Because career search has moved to the Internet – it is the “meeting place” where many jobs come together in a competing forum, with the virtual Internet there are ways to better promote your jobs and compete in an industry where there are limited candidates in many areas.
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· Referenced immediately above, many local and regional healthcare recruiting directors are older and look at the Internet as a forum to observe and not participate in; in other words, they look AT the Internet like they read a newspaper. That’s not what the Internet is anymore; instead it is a place where users “interact with web content.”

· This leads to their policy development and recruiting that doesn’t really “use” the Internet but merely “advertises on it,” like newspaper classifieds.

· The result is the overwhelming majority of hospitals wait until candidates are onsite – after the expense has been committed for the trip, all the time is committed by many people, and regretfully, possible better matches have already been turned down, to begin their selling effort.

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Our organization’s unique Invention: The “Recruitment Website:” Online Job Tour®: Patented by the US Department of Patents & Trademarks, I invented the Online Job Tour system – which is a “recruitment website” for employers which harnesses the virtual Internet to allow hospitals and medical employers to present to jobseekers and their families a “onsite interview visit experience” that is more comprehensive than the real trip – allowing for the “marketing/selling” effort to start immediately.
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Online Job Tour “brings the onsite visit to all jobseekers” in a phenomenal way that promotes authentic decisions of interest before any expensive interview visits are planned – in fact, your advertising is now not a newspaper ad, but a “virtual immersion experience” that attracts candidates who are already pre-qualified and motivated (unlike mere responders to ads who can only be curious because the ads don’t really provide enough information).
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When I invented Online Job Tour, I knew high speed Internet was going to be pervasive – but at the time (2001) just 40-50 million people had broadband (today the estimate is close to 2 billion!).
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Why does Online Job Tour work? During our multi-year test market with a large variety of hospitals and health employers, Online Job Tour has had a “transformative impact” of the recruitment efficiency and quality model for hospitals, offering the best for both sides: for hospitals, Online Job Tour is the ideal way to give jobseekers a “tour” that is similar to the real interview visit, covering all the “topics” that jobseekers generally need to know about, while also giving the employer the format to give the best possible sales presentation. For jobseekers, what is better than to be able to sit back on their own computer and “visit” a hospital and service area – in 30 minutes and at no real cost or major time commitment, they can learn more than if they visited over a weekend – and the entire family can experience the “virtual visit” as well by simply sharing the website address?
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Demonstrable Results: Our 2009 ROI Survey analyzed the invention’s impact on three factors: time to fill an open physician job, the number of interview visits, and use of third party recruiters. The result was a savings of $47,000 per placement when Online Job Tour supported the recruitment of the position, as opposed to “status quo” recruiting practiced at other hospitals.
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· Special Note: Would you like to learn more about Online Job Tour®, see some samples, and get an overview of its benefits? Please visit www.onlinejobtour.com and then give our staff a call if you still have questions.

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Other Tools are out there – this is basically all of them: Other tools that have been around since the Internet include streaming videos, DVDs, and some hospitals still mail brochures. All have significant limitations, such as they generally only scratch the surface of important subject, and they get old and need to be replaced – since Online Job Tour is web-based, it can be updated so it never gets old, and we can offer the best combination of depth of content that really makes jobseekers think they have the information they need to make a decision, along with unlimited photos as well as videos and video testimonials. While I have seen many recruitment videos, some nicer than others – the biggest issues I have is their depth of meaningful, useful information – many are made by people who don’t understand recruiting and what jobseekers need, they age very fast, and they don’t fit into the Internet anymore – what I mean by this is today’s Internet users are not passive observers who sit back and watch – they want to “interact” with web content and Online Job Tour gives them the “fix” they want, and it is a powerful “test drive” that employers can provide.
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What I most disagree with, and I term “quitting,” are the hospitals who merely, passively list a handful (the more the worse) of websites – as though a web-expert physician can’t easily find them anyway, but to rummage through the websites to pick what may be relevant for their needs as a prospective new employee at the hospital. This “practice” does not promote the hospital doing anything proactive, it leaves the “sale” in the quality and content of someone else’s website and quality standard, and there is no proof doing this is any better than doing nothing. It would be hard for any professional who has made a sincere commitment to answer to families to accept this unfortunate approach.
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· The employer can do a great deal more possible BEFORE any visits are planned – these trips take a lot of manpower to put together and at a great expense. And Online Job Tour can be used with ALL prospects to give everyone a very comprehensive virtual visit vs. the very few the hospital can afford to host.

· Online Job Tour solves the critical sales conundrum where prospects can’t make a decision simply because they don’t have enough information; in fact, classic sales studies show that “lack of information” is a larger reason consumers don’t buy products.

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Special Note on “using” the Internet: Whether or not you are in a position to invest in any of these options – you may not be the decision maker at your organization, and REGARDLESS OF YOUR AGE, you MUST find a way to get comfortable with the Internet if you are not: the biggest reason is your prospects remain the same age and get more and more web savvy, while you keep getting older. Investing in technology tools is an important part of your business, so you really need to ditch the 5 year old cell phone and get a smart phone, and get a laptop or tablet computer – or both.
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Summary: After identifying your target market, you need to have your “sales presentation” that promotes being a real advocate for candidates – you have already committed to being more than merely an “interview scheduler” who speaks in clichés who doesn’t influence the outcome. You aren’t a waiter. You have committed to being an expert on issues candidates need to know. You have not only started to think of choreographing candidate visits (in a general sense; naturally, candidates will have different or specific needs), but you have identified hospital and community principals willing to contribute to their efforts and you have begun preparing them to help you. You need to develop a Q/A protocol that is incorporated into your position with questions to ask candidates and measure your success.
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You need a sales tool on which to “present” your presentation – I introduced you to Online Job Tour® as an advancement over other recruiting tools, but my greater message is you must “harness” the Internet by first finding ways to grow your comfort and skills with technology, but also because this is where your target market goes for career search – in order to be competitive in that arena.
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Here’s Your Foundation Commitment #3: “I understand the importance of crafting a ‘sales presentation’ that is competitive and commit to using the best possible tools to complement my efforts and to create efficiency, maximize quality, and continually seek competitive advantages.”
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In my last part of this series, I’m going to help you put it all together with Teamwork and how to create an optimal recruiting protocol. I look forward to sharing it with you!
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For more information about me or Online Job Tour®, visit our website at www.onlinejobtour.com or call our offices at 813-855-5185.

Carl Brickman

Posted via email from Brickman's posterous

My Four Part Series for Employer Medical Recruiters, Part II: On being a “Pro” and incorporating marketing and selling skills

2010-06-13T12:16:00.001-04:00

Employer medical recruiters and their efforts directly impact the lives of their patients and communities. It’s an incredible responsibility. Because of this, it there is a solemn and moral responsibility to be dedicated to continual improvement and professional growth. This four part series is focused on the four core components required for employer medical recruiters to fulfill this responsibility and excel.

In Part I, I pulled no punches regarding “commitment” to one’s position as an employer recruiter in healthcare. You get no credit for claiming to “love” your community and going to church with, and knowing people in your service area, showing up for work every day, and eventually filling open jobs. I have met hundreds of employer recruiters – all who claim these “feel good” abstract descriptions of their positions, almost as a defense for mediocre results – none of these pay any bills. More important, none are an excuse to provide a grief stricken family member of a patient just lost due to a mistake made by a practitioner. I love my spouse and my Lord – the bank to whom I owe my mortgage doesn’t give a hoot.

Here is the only characteristic I care about and on it I can take a new recruiter of any talent level and make them “elite” with their results in short order: you need to acknowledge and embrace that your work directly impacts lives because if you hold this in your heart, then it will drive you to continually push yourself by growing your knowledge and skills – necessities in this dynamic market where there is intense competition. You are never good enough, and you must improve. Welcome to “tough love” recruiting excellence. You must have this “solemn commitment [Foundation Commitment #1].”

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Part II: That commitment will then motivate you to grow your marketing and selling skills and commit to the fact that you are a real “sales professional” – you also need to know the difference between marketing and selling. You need to understand the competitive component – that you must not only sell candidates, but OUTSELL your competitors. You must understand that being efficient carves out tremendous waste, and actually improves your results. You must have a sincere commitment to be a “Pro.”
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· What is a “Pro?:” A professional employer medical recruiter is a highly motivated professional with sales and marketing skills, who uses competitive, advanced tools, and understands the entire spectrum of the recruiting process, and brings value to his position with improved outcomes.

· My father, a former corporate executive, used to say a refrain many times through my upbringing which I never forgot: “There is a big difference between someone with ten years of experience and another with one year of experience for ten years in a row.” The message here is 75% of the employer medical recruiters I have met learned how to do their job in a mediocre fashion with no prior sales experience and little or no professional training – then learned their “job” and have done it for 5 and even 10 years the same way. The result is mediocrity. This happens when you have recruiters without the solid foundation commitment and with no professional sales experience or training.

· It’s difficult to get any recruiter in this position to admit they need any improvement – they are caustically defensive when new ideas or tools are suggested to them. Imagine this person and that mentality recruiting YOUR physician or pediatrician for your children.

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The Myth of not being in Sales – you are in a sales position, and if you don’t think so, this mentality automatically disqualifies you from your job. From convincing your teacher in third grade you deserved an “A” on the paper, to winning over your girlfriend in college, we are all in sales to some degree and are generally selling ideas to others, our colleagues, family, the boss, your civic group, to the kids you teach or coach in Little League, all the time. So to think a recruiter isn’t a sales professional is ridiculous.
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· I was once in a meeting with a hospital senior executive team and one of them said “I don’t like to sell, and physicians looking to work at our hospital, if they ask me for information I will give them what I can, but they are responsible for choosing where they want to practice. After they choose us, then my job is to work with them to make the transition.”

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Is this the mentality of someone who understands recruiting impacts lives? What if one of the lives was his spouse’s? He apparently hasn’t heard of the dramatic shortage of many specialists, and also thinks all physicians and practitioners are of the same competence and quality. There is no “sense of urgency” in filling jobs – which puts money into the hospital sooner vs. no acknowledgement than anything can be done, nor any awareness of the value in proactively influencing recruiting outcomes. There are gaping “opportunity losses” that result from this mentality. What a foolish thing to say.
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Of course, there are better physicians and practitioners. Some work better and more competently and limit mistakes and lawsuits, and also work more efficiently, which also impacts the budget. Studies now prove there is a direct financial benefit in filling jobs sooner (Merritt-Hawkins produced a 2006 study, and The Advisory Board Company, Inc., in May 2008 reconfirmed hospital lose over $100,000 each month a physician job is unfilled at the hospital). Hospitals must not just fill jobs, but make “the right fit” for the long term – “retention” is becoming a big issue: Imagine spending tens of thousands to fill a physician job and after spending more tens of thousands the physician and spouse choose to leave – could the hospital have taken steps to limit this possibility from happening? Not according to this hospital administrator above!

· The #1 mistake I see almost all hospitals make is they forget they are competing – (this is due to the fact that those dictating the policy of recruitment generally have no professional sales experience) that is, they not only have to attract and then sell jobseekers, but they must “out market” and “out sell” many other employers vying for the same professional. You must evaluate how jobs are advertised and how you are selling and closing candidates. In a competitive arena where everyone seems to be doing it the same way, your lack of originality in your tools and efforts to distinguish yourself from competitors is a sure way to have mediocre results and hire the mediocre candidates. (The “dead giveaway” that I am dealing with an untrained recruiter is when, for example, a community hospital recruiters or their CEOs break into the “Our community is great for raising a family,” and “we are close to big city amenities but away from their overcrowding,” “we have great schools,” and more nonsense. While these may be true statements, every community hospital says this, so it’s a waste of time and doesn’t help the jobseeker, who heard the same mantras from 6 other employers.

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Remember your Foundation Commitment #1 here. Your solemn commitment must motivate you to have a proactive orientation toward your job – this leads you to want to have a proactive impact on the results. This is essential because the employees and physicians you recruit are the foundation of the future – mediocre candidates and expensive and mediocre results, and skills that are stagnant and tools not competitive, set your hospital on a road to inefficiency, more lawsuits, poor outcomes – from physicians leaving after a year to less-than-great physicians or practitioners procedures and services.
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· The belief that you cannot, or you choose not to have a proactive orientation towards your job and its results, violates Foundation Commitment #1 and sets your hospital on the road to mediocrity.

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Differentiating Marketing from Selling: Employer medical recruiters should have prior marketing or professional sales experience with complex sales and dealing with high-end consumers. Whether you do or not, there are some “foundation basics” in these areas that you need to know and incorporate into your strategic plan and your work and it’s not that hard.
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Marketing: As it relates to employer medical recruiting, marketing is the part of the recruiting process that serves to get attention paid to the advertised job openings – it is literally the “Hey! Look over here!” feature of the advertisement of your job(s).
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· There are many approaches you can take to advertise your jobs online, during job fairs, in mailers, print advertising, in person, on the phone, or in branding efforts at your hospital in your service area, region, or even nationally. Find out what your competitors are doing. Then do it differently and with a focus on getting attention and getting the first opportunity to present your jobs vs. them. Remember there are not just a limited number of practitioners, but of them, you want to land the top 15% of them.

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(While I offer training workshops to hospitals and corporations on Marketing – the strongest conceptual focuses I recommend is to put heads together and develop a cogent plan to stand apart from competitors as the signature thing to improve recruiting results).
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Selling: Selling is the part of the recruiting process AFTER you have attracted job prospects with Marketing of the career position(s) – now that you have their attention with a well-planned marketing feature of your employment advertising, which hopefully gives them the positive emotions needed to consider your sales presentation.
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Selling is the process of developing a relationship where you try to get your prospect to see that you are an advocate for them to make the best possible decision (after all, if they choose you but then end up regretting it, this hurts both sides – so you have a genuine interest in the outcome) while convincing them to accept your job opportunity after discerning they are your choice.
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The selling process also includes pre-qualifying prospects and candidates and implementing a ranking system that is modeled on candidate quality and an efficiency model.
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Selling is also about understanding you are competing against many others, and identifying where you stand with the candidates.
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Before the attempt to compel them to accept your job offer, in order to have professional results, you must have a system where they have been fully informed and your best “presentation” has been provided to them and any other decision makers in their party, if any, you know where you stand vs. other employers they are considering, their timeline to make the decision, as well as have them ranked vs. other candidates. You need to know where your employer falls short and have an offer to offset it. You also need to know where your employer is ahead and use that to compel the prospect. It’s not that hard because you are only working with the prospect/candidate to gather information.
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From here you advance to the “Close.”
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Closing the candidates is based on your having developed your relationship with them and having made smaller agreements with them through the recruitment process; you have taken “steps of progress” with them, which includes coming to this point to decide, and then review pluses and minuses about your opportunity vs. other opportunities (you aren’t scared to review the minuses and pluses because you are their advocate – you want them to make the best decision for them).
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The presentation of your opportunity should include with physicians your proforma and financial presentation and practice set up overview with all guarantees, as well as a review of the stated benefits you and the candidates have agreed are signature with your opportunity over the others, as well as an acknowledgement of any shortcomings and your employer’s offerings to permanently offset those shortcomings – to permanently put to rest those shortcomings; in other words, you make a “deal” where the prospect permanently “puts away” any shortcomings so they never resurface.
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(The sales protocol can not only be fun, but serve to eliminate the “stress” of selling. It is important to establish a repeatable “process” so you can quickly move to having the ability to improvise as well as “grow” the process in advanced ways. Think of it this way: Imagine you are trained to give a sales presentation, which is basically to be delivered the same way every time. Once you get to the point where you can recite the presentation in your sleep, then you can build on it and keep tweaking things and accessorize it in order to keep improving on your results – both time and candidate quality.
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You are not afraid to ask the candidate for their decision because you set everything up, you both are totally aware of all the facts, and you agreed to get here. In fact, by this time the best salesmen are presumptively closing and “yes” is important, but is more of an acknowledgement by the candidate than an answer.
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(I offer training workshops that help beginner to experienced employer recruiters get advanced sales results almost immediately; it starts with crafting a basic presentation formula that any recruiter can follow, regardless of their prior experience).
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Here is your Foundation Commitment #2: “I will be a real pro and have a proactive impact on my results. I am competing for candidates vs. other employers. I commit to crafting marketing ideas and a selling protocol that separate my opportunities from others while maximizing time and quality. My process will build my relationship with prospects in ‘steps’ and lead to a conclusion that is best for both sides.”
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Review: at this point, you should be motivated and want to have an impact on your job because 1) your work impacts lives – you have a moral responsibility to be your best and never settle, and 2) you have the awareness that you are competing and need to develop a “professional marketing and sales process” to maximize your results.
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You should now naturally be asking what tools you can use to support your efforts now that you are on the appropriate path to be a real pro – and that’s what is next in Part III! Stay tuned!
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Carl Brickman

Posted via email from Brickman's posterous

Raising Dreams and Lives…Together

2010-05-31T17:06:00.004-04:00

My Four Part Series for Employer Medical Recruiters: Part I

Medical Recruiters are in the business of fulfilling personnel needs for their companies while helping medical professionals establish or grow their careers – which impact their lives and their families. And as opposed to recruiting in other fields, such as engineering, or public relations, or IT, while these are also important and have their challenges and also filled with talented professionals, employer medical recruiters and their efforts directly impact the lives of their patients and communities. It’s an incredible responsibility. Because of this, it there is a solemn and moral responsibility to be dedicated to continual improvement and professional growth.

This four part series is focused on the four core components required for employer medical recruiters to fulfill this responsibility.

Part I: You must have a sincere passion – because you are answerable to patients, to want to be the very best you can be, and continually push yourself by growing your knowledge and skills.

While professional selling experience and training would give someone a huge advantage, that background is not a guarantee for success as a medical recruiter; however, you need marketing and selling training skills and a system to track your results – both to monitor your progress as well as to be able to demonstrate your value to your employer. You need the best possible tools to both leverage your personal shortcomings as well as those (perceived by jobseekers as well as any limitations on your facilities, resources, the service area, etc.) of your employer. And you need to be a team player; that is, learn the value of bridging relationships as well as working with others.

Claiming you love your employer and your community, and showing up for work every day, and eventually filling your open jobs, IS NOT ENOUGH.

I got onto medical recruiting after my father died as a result of a mistake made during a routine medical procedure. What does “I love my community” and “the job was filled by a qualified candidate” mean after I ask the medical recruiter if they have done all they could to make sure my father had the best possible physician and staff delivering care to him? My point is that the abstract, impossible-to-measure “I love my community” and “I have been doing my job for years” and “I am doing what my employer asks of me” are acceptable if you drive a bread truck on a 9-5 job. If it were you and your parent died in the same circumstance, these statements would be excuses given by people in “status quo” career positions which they do not seek to positively influence or improve.

You don’t have to be a faith-based person to be successful as a medical professional. But I am, and my Christian faith and my church members inspire me. Acts 9:36-43 is about a woman named Tabitha who was beloved, and upon her death disciples called the Apostle Peter (Christ had died and been resurrected by this time). When Peter arrived, many of Tabitha’s friends were there weeping. Peter ushered them out of the room.

“He turned to the body and said, ‘Tabitha, get up.’ Then she opened her eyes, and seeing Peter, she sat up. He gave her his hand and helped her up.”

The reading symbolizes how Christians are asked to continue Christ’s work. I thought about my dad. I thought about how all recruiters have the solemn responsibility to do their very best. Medical recruiting is not the work of an apostle raising the dead, but it is dealing with peoples’ lives in more ways than one.

So here we are. You are an employer medical recruiter. This scenario above is a real one and could happen to you. What’s more, that patient could be someone you know, or even a friend.

Passion and Commitment changes your orientation to seek out improvement and better results – without it, your practice slips into “status quo” and mediocrity – with “success” defined in very narrow terms.

When you are dealing with peoples’ lives and permanent placement recruiting, you should always bring your heart and soul. Recruiters MUST pledge to try their very best and continue to push the limits, and move “out of the box” because of the responsibility of acquiring talented candidates, selling them, and then hiring the very best possible professional while at the same time making a “long-term fit” for both.

And in the medical profession, employer recruiters absolutely need a conscience to guide them – it cannot be merely about making a placement but seeking to hire the absolute best physician, nurse, or director – even for staff positions researching and marketing to the higher-rated schools and programs.

This is about having a sincere passion and acute awareness that what you do directly impacts the lives of others – with this mindset you will always have the motivation to understand you have the solemn responsibility to be the best you can be and that you have to keep improving, evolving, growing. This does not have to be a stress-filled orientation but simply a “frame of mind.” Consider that what you can do is simply move yourself onto another “track” that is more efficient and has shorter destinations to the places you want to go. A different mindset can do that for you.

· The truly good employer medical recruiters have this “higher calling” and are conscientious, they constantly evaluate everything, and with the added element of competition, they know they must improve – these are intuitive and born from the acceptance of the job’s responsibilities.

Why must a passion and then commitment beyond “status quo” mentalities, methods and tools exist for the medical recruiter? The real answer is without it, your career and results will be mediocre compared to others.

Real passion and commitment promotes the moral obligation to seek to hire the best possible professionals and not merely fill a job with any candidate who meets the requirements. All physicians are not alike, nor are all nurses and techs. Lesser practitioners mean less efficient workers and more problems – botched procedures, resulting lawsuits, and worse.

Intense Competition: The bell curve of the baby boomer population was in 2016 before the retirement age was changed by the government – which is promoting that the curve is being “carried” to 2020. But people are still getting older. Moreover, statistics for certain illnesses, such as diabetes, are growing. There simply are not enough medical practitioners. The need to not only get the best practitioners, but fill all openings and pools to limit short staff problems, is keen and costly if not accomplished.

Efficiency Models: Not only is it important to fill jobs with the best and most talented professionals, but now there are studies out in abundance regarding the lost revenue of healthcare employers from unfilled jobs – so filling jobs faster is also now a key issue. The Advisory Group Inc., in Washington, DC claims hospitals lose a minimum of $100,000 for every month a physician job is unfilled. It is startling that a hospital can go 9 months before filling a specialty physician job, resulting in an “opportunity loss” of a million dollars and higher.

Let’s review something important at this point: these are clear indicators that merely eventually filling an open physician job is necessarily a “success” if a recruiter doesn’t hire a better physician and it took longer than it could have taken. This is like completing a round of golf without keeping the score – and claiming that because you finished you succeeded.

Technology Changes and the New Jobseeker: Anyone except those living under rocks knows the Internet has changed the game. But the better recruiters know it is not just about posting your jobs online. The psychology of how people use the computer, “reaching” people in a new way, and how information can be not just delivered, but in a manner that improves the sale, pre-qualification of candidates, encourages referrals – improves the process for both sides, is requisite for healthcare employers who want to stay ahead of competitors out there for the better and more talented workers – who will make their companies better than the others (and again, offer better treatment to patients – which is what it should really about and motivate medical recruiters). In a future post I will address the new jobseekers and approaches and tools that will promote improved results – even for those without professional selling backgrounds or training.

Financials and Partnerships: Today the actual negotiation of the career position is a factor for medical employers and hospitals. For instance, physicians now have the option of establishing a private practice, joining an existing practice, they can choose an employed model offered by an individual employer, and there are practice management services which employ doctors and offer them to hospital clients as a “service.” Almost anything is negotiable. Medical Recruiters can impact the candidate’s choice in this regard – in many cases physicians don’t know these options. The “presentation” of career opportunities by the medical professionals, through closing the physician or practitioner while being aware of the options that can be provided, can impact landing that candidate.

Classic Selling Concepts never get outdated: Are you skilled at asking for referrals? Imagine filling a second opening without repeating a long, expensive search simply by remembering to ask a candidate you have just closed for a peer referral? I will share signature selling tenets that will promote quantum leaps in your approach regarding effectiveness, efficiency, competitiveness, and time savings – but remember we first have to make sure we have you committed to this first feature, because having a sincere passion required to be great promotes seeking to improve.

The hidden pandemic of Retention: A physician leaving after a great deal of time, effort, money, and uncountable hours of initial set up by many people, are all ruined if after 6 months the newly-recruited physician leaves – and the process has to be stared again. It is also a demoralizing experience. Here is another example of merely “making the placement” isn’t a measure of success – and also suggests you really cannot determine if the placement was successful until much later.

I laugh at the public statements made by many hospital companies who seem to brag about the amount of money spend on physician recruiting as well as the number of new physicians they recruited – because as a patient, neither would matter to me. “How are you recruiting? Are you being both economical to save money that could be better spent on me, and what are you doing to attract and retain the best talent?” Are these not the questions a patient or hospital board member, or the medical recruiter, should ultimately be asking?

Because of these factors, recruiters without the motivation to move beyond status quo recruiting and think they are “successful” merely because they eventually fill open jobs, are ignoring so many important factors that the mentality can be considered negligent.

Are you willing to be great for your patients? Do you accept the solemn responsibility that being an employer medical recruiter affects lives, so you must endeavor to continually improve?

The difference between a .250 hitter and a hall of fame .300 hitter over 550 at bats is just 27 hits. Over a six month season (26 weeks), that's effectively a hit a week. Sure, talent is a big part of it, but I can show you a basic path that is more important than talent to promote a truly fulfilling career. In my next entries I will review the basics you need to fulfill that pledge to yourself, but you must first have the foundation to build on – and it starts with your sincere motivation.

Make this Foundation Commitment #1:

Carl Brickman

For more information about me or to reach me, visit my company’s website at http://www.onlinejobtour.com/

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Raising Dreams and Lives…Together: My Four Part Series for Employer Medical Recruiters

2010-05-16T19:46:00.001-04:00

It’s not raising people from the dead. But recruiting is all about raising lives – this means especially medical recruiters have the solemn responsibility to endeavor to be great. Average, just getting by, merely eventually filling jobs, isn’t good enough for their employers or the patients.

This is a multi-entry blog regarding the examination of what is needed of today’s employer medical recruiters to excel in today’s dynamic and competitive marketplace:

I: Claiming you love your employer and your community, and showing up for work every day, and eventually filling your open jobs, IS NOT ENOUGH. Because your work impacts lives, you owe your employer and its patients that you must want to be the very best you can be, and continually push yourself by growing your knowledge and skills – you have to keep growing and improving in this dynamic market where there is intense competition. This leads to your commitment that:

II: You must grow your marketing and selling skills and commit to the fact that you are a real “sales professional” – you also need to know the difference between marketing and selling. You need to understand the competitive component - that you must not only sell candidates, but OUTSELL your competitors. You must understand that being efficient carves out tremendous waste, and actually improves your results. Your sincere commitment to be a “pro” will lead to:

III: You must acquire and use the best possible tools to complement your efforts. All great sales professionals have great selling tools to help promote their message and make their entire sales protocol more efficient and effective – better tools add to the competitive advantages you MUST have. And finally, being a sales pro means:

IV: You must commit to being a team player. The entire recruiting process requires your working with many personalities, and making the right connections (in and out of your company) to help you succeed – and often with people you may not like or choose to socialize with. In particularly the medical field, where there are acute shortages of certain professionals along with competition, being “average” is actually losing. Just filling a job isn’t necessarily doing it well. And staying isolated and not working with others nor seeking to improve by looking “outside the box,” is a recipe for failure. You also may not personally like some candidates. But it’s not about them, or you, is it? It’s about your patients, first, and then the lives you are also impacting whom you are recruiting, as well as for your employer’s long term health.

Even if you think you are “successful” and your boss may be patting you on the back regularly, this is why you still need to focus on growing and getting better:

In my sales training and consulting days, one of the first things I always came across when I arrived at my new assignment were the generally better sales professionals asking “Why do I need this guy? I’m already doing well.” First of all – I love that mentality, and I generally make friends with those people. The analogy I always used was to ask them if they were a great golfer and playing with wooden clubs, imagine if they never knew others were using today’s modern equipment – that person, despite their skills and championship mentality, would not be able to compete. Thus, a “champion” sales pro needs first to lose that mentality, and then these classic steps above, to become great, and with that a certain sense of humility, which is also needed to be the best in this business.

I can promise you that following this series will provide you with what you need to succeed in today’s medical recruiting marketplace.

Stay tuned for Part I!

To learn more about our group and our work at Online Job Tour, visit us at www.onlinejobtour.com

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The iPad Problem for Recruiters

2010-04-04T15:39:00.001-04:00

The iPad Problem for Recruiters: Because the iPad does not play Flash video, 99 % of today’s recruitment-oriented videos will not play on it. Gulp. Fortunately, Online Job Tour and our clients are already prepared for it.

What the iPad is: For what 90% of computer users use the Internet for – surfing the web, email, basic document creation – the iPad lets you do all those things totally portably and with no mouse or keypad, on a “tablet” device with a 9.5” screen that weighs 1.5 pounds. You can purchase books, movies, and music for it. There are thousands of apps for it, which are like “little softwares,” (and of course many more to come) for utilizing the Internet in a whole new way. I strongly encouraged all of my clients to buy the iPhone at its release in 2007 because of these “apps,” which in concert with Apple’s “i-technology” have become world changers.

· For most users, the iPad can/should replace their laptop computers.

What it does: For video/movie watching, the stunning HD display is a sight to behold, its interface for gaming grades off the charts, for touch-screen Internet browsing, it is special. And the size of the iPad screams down to the iPhone. If the iPad was just for books, it would be revolutionary. And it is. While I don't own a Kindle, I've played with one before, I've even tried Barnes and Nobles' Nook, I've read books on my iPhone, and I've read books the traditional way. It's a whole new reading experience that nothing else comes close to.

Limitations: As you have likely read, discerning consumers to “Apple-Geeks” have pointed out what they think are flaws that later generations of the product will correct; for instance, there is no USB port (to me the biggest shortcoming), many are unhappy there is no camera or phone, but I think these are coming in future generations. Soon we will have 10G wireless networks and be walking and talking on portable mini computers – I don’t want to write about what features the iPad currently has or may have, but why it is important.

The Future: Tablet computers like the iPad are going to be huge. They’re going to sell in the tens of millions and change the standards of how we interact with each other and with digital media. They will change written and broadcast journalism, and the way we tell stories, present ourselves, and communicate. In future forms they will ultimately will replace our computers.

How this will affect recruiting professionals: While many manufacturers will produce a tablet product, certain target jobseeker demographics – including higher professionals such as physicians and high-end practitioners, and a large majority of the +$100,000 career professionals, because Apple has a growing market in certain areas (like medical imaging, for instance) that impact their careers, will buy the iPad.

· This poses a compelling problem for almost all corporate and private recruiters of these higher-end jobseekers: because the iPad does not play Flash video, 99 % of the recruitment-oriented videos will not play on the iPad.

Although MAC users represent only 12-15% of computer users, iPhone (emphasis on “phone”) users comprise 44% of smart phone users (physicians with an iPhone over 50%). Due to their preference for the iPhone, higher end jobseeker targets who do not have a MAC will likely buy the iPad in much larger numbers as a “bridge” to Apple. [This may end up being a truly masterful move by Apple to penetrate the PC market through a “side door” that costs $499 instead of a relatively expense MAC vs. the PC.]

Online Job Tour™’s position has been to build our product to accommodate all browser platforms and for the widest audience possible. As a result, rather than a video platform that uses Adobe/Flash only, our work involves Java Scripting instead, which can host a larger number of video formats and stays away from total reliance on Flash video (a Microsoft-favored tool, which are in PCs, which dominate corporate America).

Right now, “Corporate America” is about to get caught with its pants down as their recruitment videos will not be viewable on the iPad. This is not an issue for our clients.

A revolutionary product, to learn more about patent-pending Online Job Tour ™ check out our website at www.onlinejobtour.com. Contact me if you would like to learn more about it, or about how will help our clients exceed their recruiting goals and challenges.

Sources:

http://seekingalpha.com/article/147523-apple-palm-lead-soaring-smart-phone-de...

http://gadgetcrave.com/mac-use-up-to-12-percent-users-are-more-wealthy-tech-oriented/3669/

Posted via email from Brickman's posterous

7 Years to Patent Pay Dirt

2010-03-03T10:46:00.001-05:00

[This is a posterous posting sent to many sites: to view my entire blog go to: http://carlbrickman.blogspot.com]

· It’s a satisfying feeling to invent something as an improvement over what currently exists, and then get confirmation through getting a patent awarded that nothing like it existed beforehand. It was also nice to deal only with questions regarding its authenticity, not the invention’s patentability, with the government reviewer.

How long does a technology patent take to be processed by the US Government? In May of 2003 I filed a provisional patent application for my Online Job Tour™ invention. At the time only 60 million had a high speed Internet connection (today that number is approaching 2 billion) and I envisioned a day when we all would have broadband and be tapped into the “virtual Internet.” What I invented was a development system of placing content in categories traditionally-needed by jobseekers onto a single website – as a medical recruiter I wanted to both make the jobs I was representing more attractive and deliver needed information quickly to jobseekers in order to shorten the hiring timeline.

As technology changed regarding the use of digital photography, video and web design, and through a test market among hospitals in 13 states, my company, Promo Web® Innovations, has grown the Invention while staying true to its design and concept.

The results of our work have been remarkable and also make sense – there are obvious benefits in providing a “virtual visit experience” for both sides – from photo tours of the hospital’s service area to testimonials – in our latest Online Job Tour we feature 50 people in Elko Nevada, as well as 37 videos totaling more than 2.5 hours. On a website, jobseekers can “visit” an Online Job Tour as often as they need. It is mistake-free and with no time or money limitations (unlike the real interview, which must be limited to only a few candidates). Unlike other recruiting products, like DVDs and streaming videos, Online Job Tour can be updated and added to – it never gets old and requires being remade/repurchased.

Our new website has more details, samples of our work, a demonstration of our software, which is in development, our surveys, and our patent application materials: www.onlinejobtour.com

· We have received news from the patent office within the last month, almost seven years from the official May 2003 application date, of our “Notice for Allowance,” which means a patent award is forthcoming.

The patent application and following waiting period has been a truly remarkable “journey.” It takes “forever.” Due to the changes in technology, by the time the government finally got to reviewing my invention, technologies and the widespread use of the Internet, and its influence into our culture, had changed dramatically. The patent reviewer therefore never had the opportunity to evaluate my work at the time it was applied for – he would have seen and viewed it entirely different than today.

As an example of what I mean, when I first introduced healthcare employers to my invention, they viewed it with skepticism and they did not yet put together how our culture was evolving toward the use of the internet as a “web solution” to many of our problems. Most all websites were nothing but text (due to Internet speed and few website development tools as web design was in the hands of “geeks” (I use that word with affection) who needed to understand math, code, etc. Instead of my work looking like many robust websites that cannot be differentiated at first glance due to robust home pages and images, in 2003, and certainly for job search, which was nascent on the Internet, the invention would have been a real eye opener. Today, my work is viewed as a “make sense” approach and not like it was eight years ago, which was “eye opening and totally different.” Back then, it took a “visionary person” who had characteristics of being “out of the box” while today a person with good business sense is all it takes to appreciate the benefits of my work.

As a result of my invention taking so long to get to a patent reviewer, another issue is he was confused about what it is – a good part of our dialogues and responses were explaining to the reviewer – carefully and without seeming insulting in any way, that he continually had problems differentiating the invention from online job boards themselves. In the early 2000s there were many job board services. However, their advertisements – or the job postings on them, were text-based, appearing like newspaper ads. There are a lot of reasons for this – first and foremost that slow Internet speeds were dictating how the job boards were designed and images and robust web content would bog down job search for most users. Thus, my invention wasn’t really made for that time but for the future when Internet broadband speed would be omnipresent. Even today I am not sure the reviewer had an appreciation for that. Fortunately for us, there are legal rules of patentability he followed and those rules, which my invention adhered to and qualified under, promoted the patent being awarded.

When I began introducing my work to employers, many questioned whether it was patentable – I got that out of the way early with my patent attorney, who guided me through the unusual steps of what can be patented: a technical process that has qualifications. And whether a product can get a patent is another issue entirely, requiring the government to research for prior patents or applications that may have come before it (called “prior art”) – which my lawyer also researched. It’s a satisfying feeling to invent something as an improvement over what currently exists, and then get confirmation through getting a patent awarded that nothing like it existed beforehand. It was also nice to deal only with questions regarding its authenticity, not the invention’s patentability, with the government reviewer.

I used the timeframe, as well as the general lack of how to harness the Internet by employers, to test-market the invention, and over time, it has worked out well – it is an invention that has been thoroughly tested and it not only has a positive financial, time, and competitive benefit to customers, but we have also done surveys with them and with jobseekers. As a result, we are better prepared to market it to others now that the patent award is forthcoming.

Unlike many who create and invention which peters out over this timeframe because it lacks viability because time has changed, in my case the online classified employment advertising industry will grow to $11 billion in 2010. A 7-year journey for any invention like this certainly needs this kind of luck at the end of it!

Posted via email from Brickman's posterous

Everybody’s Blogging. That’s not good news for your recruiting.

2010-02-08T20:59:00.003-05:00

Everybody’s Blogging. That’s not good news for your recruiting.

A recent study released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project produced an estimate that an amazing 1 in 10 online adults maintain a blog. The percentage of users age 30 and older increased from 7% to 11% from 2007 to 2009. The number of Internet youths aged 12-17 who blog dropped a little bit due to what most analysts think in favor of social networking sites with their increasingly brief and mobile communication habits (“teenagers,” right?). There are 30 million bloggers since 2000, when there were 0.

Major metro newspapers have shut down, and my Tampa Tribune is thin enough to sneeze at – literally, there are enough pages in it to barely satisfy a hearty sneeze, but not enough pages to get a fireplace fire going. Even my favorite sports magazines are thin now – the articles less robust and with fewer investigative, substantial stories, and instead fluff-filled ones. Facebook has boomed to be the third largest website in the world – where now everyone has a soapbox for every and any opinion, and let’s face it, much of these opinions are totally un-researched and trendy. Facebook actually has pages that incite “movements” and “fans” of incredibly innocuous things. A friend of mine once said “Facebook is when the general public gets in between great ideas and the news.” It’s difficult to disagree.

On top of real news diminishing and millions of blogs and Facebook entries blowing into the Internet, I inferred in my last blog entry that there is mounting Internet information that is already obsolete and taking up the Internet and limiting search results much like that massive island of garbage that is floating around in the Pacific Ocean.

How does this set up for your recruiting efforts? Not good. Especially for those employers who still are merely referring jobseekers to a handful of links of websites of organizations in their service area which sends the message “sell yourself” – which promotes these jobseekers go into the “Internet black hole” to find blog entries, Facebook pages of teenagers, and “glamorized news” – much of it years old, and even if it is recent, the news is often about the latest county sheriff’s drug bust, or worse.

If employers HONESTLY consider that their target jobseekers (and in our clientele’s case who target doctors and advanced medical practitioners) are in the highest tier of the intelligent people in our country (let’s call it the top 10% in the country regarding innate and learned intelligence), then sending them into the Internet hoping these professionals will arbitrarily find one source after the next which promote their careers are excellent options for them, is complete fantasy.

News, blogs, Facebook, referring jobseekers to a website the employer didn’t produce – these get in the way of professional recruiting success, and do not promote it.

Our Online Job Tour™ invention allows employers to produce and maintain and fully control the “presentation” and the information they provide to jobseekers they are competing for. This is while they use the Internet (on a single website) to maximize the recruiting efficiency model by bringing a “virtual onsite interview visit experience” to jobseekers and their families – that is better and more comprehensive than the real trip. We are about to launch our new website which has compelling testimonials of jobseekers – one Harvard-trained physician, who are contacting our clients desiring their posted jobs without a real visit to their hospital campuses and community! ‘Unheard of before Online Job Tour. The ramifications of this are compelling – from jobseekers who now believe what they see online – particularly how Online Job Tour presents content they need, to how they are fed up with the futility of Internet job search and combing through Internet "garbage."

The answer to reaching today’s web-savvy jobseekers – especially intelligent “top 10%” professionals, are with “niche” tools and approaches that directly appeal to them that serve as bona fide web solutions to the mutual needs of both parties – especially as the Internet gets bigger.

To contact me directly, email me at carlbrickman@yahoo.com. I am also on Facebook. Learn more about my work at http://www.onlinejobtour.com/

High-Speed Internet happened

2010-01-07T11:55:00.005-05:00

What happened in the last decade? High-Speed Internet happened.

As we enter into the next decade of the 21st Century, it is striking to see how the Internet – particularly Internet connection speed, has grown and influenced our world culture. In my opinion, Internet connection speed increasing was the most significant technology in the decade, because it led to everything else.

The real Internet boom was the emergence of high-speed Internet – not the Internet itself.

My very first blog entry was devoted to the beginnings of the Internet, which was technically started in 1990 (although its roots go back to the late 60s). The Web clearly did not come into the national consciousness until late in the last decade.

Remember AOL and “You’ve Got Mail!”? E-mail was the iconic new way of communicating with others, as well as text-chatting/Instant Messaging. Surely if you remember this you also remember the screech of the fax noise that connected you to the AOL server at dial up speed.

In 2000, less than 5% of Americans had a broadband connection. In 2006, still only 42% of households had broadband – or “high-speed” Internet (see compelling link below).

In the early 2000s it took forever for a large image file, such as a digital photo, to download due to dial up and 56k speeds. Until the speed would get faster, we would never have the Internet we have today.

Back then a few other factors were also still in place that were holding back the Internet: geeks/math people (not marketing or sales professionals) were still the developers of web content. Digital photography (and then video, which left film soon after the 35mm camera was made obsolete) was not yet viewed by the mainstream as a new approach to chronicling our lives and behavior, and cell phones only relayed voice (cell phones were not yet with a camera in the US, or with access to the Internet, nor text).

As Internet speed increased suddenly images could be downloaded in real time, and as “a picture is worth 1000 words,” the genie was let out of the bottle. This motivated us to develop robust web content to communicate in a new way, as well as newer (and smaller) communication tools – and we keep pushing the limits.

For instance, my Online Job Tour invention, applied for in 2003, created a new approach to advertising a career opportunity at an employer – as opposed to the text-based classifieds which appeared on job boards (like a newspaper want ad on the computer screen), Online Job Tour was a “recruiting website tool” that brought the onsite interview experience to the jobseeker on a website address. Now an employer can provide all jobseekers with a virtual visit experience that is in many ways better than the real interview trip.

Website design was moving away from the math geeks as web development tools became available to the general public. Concurrent with this was the growth of technology tools and the beginnings of social networking sites – there were many in the early days, but Facebook has emerged as the #3 website in the world with almost 350 million users (Google is #1). Now you can post a photo or video in a snap and the web is clearly replacing TV and the newspaper.

Here are the top search subjects by year:

2001: World Trade Center, Osama bin Laden
2003: Iraq
2004: Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Christina Aquilera, Pamela Anderson
2005: Katrina, MySpace, Wikipedia
2007: iPhone, Facebook, YouTube
2008: Obama, Palin, Fox News
2009: unemployment, bankruptcy, foreclosure

So is the Internet a reflection of us? You tell me.

Internet speed is now creating problems. Because huge image and video files are omnipresent (because they can be viewed and transmitted so easily online now), it is estimated that by the end of the year our world will be producing 1 million gigabytes of information annually – storage will be a challenge. Panning through old and obsolete information and abandoned websites and their old content, will be one of many other challenges.

Today the Internet is not feared like when in the late 1990s and early 2000s we were reluctant to give out our credit card number online. Today the Internet is a real time service to enhance our lives in many ways. Amazon.com, the biggest online retailer, keeps breaking records.

Internet speed is now up to 40 Mb speed from a decade ago – this is like Usain Bolt racing a slug (the slug being dial up Internet). What is possible online is limited only by our imagination. People believe what they see and read online, like TV. College students today cannot remember the days before the Internet. Long distance charges are not just a thing of the past, but today unlimited calling and text plans are the norm.

Regarding the tools we use to access the Internet, they are wireless, portable, getting smaller, and the way we are dealing with others is immediate. 3G networks will be 10G in 3 years. Just like broadband blew up the Internet, wireless speed increasing and the devices which facilitate it is where the most amazing changes will take place in the next decade.

Residential use of the Internet shifted away from dial-up to high-speed access during the mid 2000s. Still, over 40 percent of households had no type of Internet access as of 2005. Residential broadband access rates were estimated to be around 42 percent as of March 2006 (PEW Internet, 2006). http://agecon.okstate.edu/broadband/bb_status_us.asp

To contact me directly, email me at carlbrickman@yahoo.com. I am also on Facebook. Learn more about my work at http://www.onlinejobtour.com/

Online Job Tour compels a Harvard MD

2009-11-03T04:56:00.003-05:00

A Harvard physician fellow contacts client asking for a job without visiting and prior to speaking with anyone associated with the hospital – unheard of before my Online Job Tour Invention, which will change the $10 Billion Classified Employment Advertising Marketplace.

When I invented Online Job Tour in 2002 (this was when less than 50 million people in the world had a high-speed Internet connection – before Facebook, YouTube, before phones had cameras) I remember telling friends that the Web would take over how we do a great deal of our essential living – including career search. Aghast listeners heard that “one day, how employers appear online will be more important than how they are in person to jobseekers.”

My invention “brought the onsite visit experience to the jobseeker” – and the proposition of hospitals (our test market has been in healthcare) flying in every single person who came across their classified ads could not compete with a “virtual presentation.” Moreover, Online Job Tour would maximize the most marketable features of the client and their community – and unlike any other recruiting product, would never get old or need to be remade because it is web-based.

Our clients are beginning to regularly get inquiries from the highest caliber jobseekers – particularly recent graduates who “grew up Online” who are willing to accept their career openings without a real visit and before speaking to anyone – this is symbolic of this “new time” but also of the success of Online Job Tour. Here is a typical letter our clients receive via their Online Job Tours.

CONTACT FROM ONLINE JOB TOUR

Comments: Jason Scott Director of Physician Development Lake Cumberland Regional Hospital 305 Langdon Street Somerset, KY 42503

Dear Mr. Scott: My name is Dr. xxxxxxxxx and I am interested in the [Specialist Position] opportunity at Lake Cumberland Regional Hospital. I commend you and all those involved for your extremely informative and comprehensive website which provided the online job tour.

My wife and I are particularly excited about the possibility of returning to a smaller, more cohesive area in the Midwest, as is Somerset. We have fond memories of the Midwest, having previously lived in both Indiana and Missouri.

What draws us to Somerset and your facility is the readily apparent collegial atmosphere, the stability of the hospital, the devotion to providing outstanding clinical care including recent expansion projects and new state-of-the art equipment, and the safe, tranquil surroundings with outstanding schools. While we do not yet have children, it is certainly in our plans, and education of children is of paramount importance to us. The low cost of living and low taxes, of course, provide an additional draw.

I am now in my fourth and final year of radiology residency in San Antonio, Texas, and then will continue training at a fellowship at Harvard Medical School. Last year, I served as Chief Resident of my program, which has 40 residents. I will complete fellowship training on June 30, 2011 and am eligible to begin full-time employment in July 2011. I am happy to take my fair share of call including nights and weekends.Thus, the opportunity with Lake Cumberland Regional Hospital is very appealing.

While I realize that this is almost 1.5 years away, I am genuinely interested in the opportunity with Lake Cumberland Regional Hospital and wanted to introduce myself to you sooner than later since I believe I may be a fit. I look forward to speaking with you further about the opportunity with Lake Cumberland Regional Hospital and would be delighted to speak with you at your convenience.

I have attached my CV for your review. We find nothing missing from your presentation other than more specifics about the radiology position and would be interested in seeing Somerset in person if it was mutually beneficial. Your website is extremely comprehensive. I thank you in advance for the opportunity and look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely, xxxxxxxxx M.D.
Attached File: CV.pdf

Lake Cumberland Regional’s Online Job Tour is http://www.lakecregional.com/

To contact me directly, email me at carlbrickman@yahoo.com. I am also on Facebook. Learn more about my work at http://www.onlinejobtour.com/

Introducing Burck Smith – get ready, world.

2009-10-08T23:54:00.007-04:00

As President and CEO of Promo Web Innovations, a company focused on the development of web and technology tools for the online classified employment advertising industry, which is set to grow to $11 Billion by 2011, part of my position is looking at the world based and how we are changing due to our collective movement toward the incorporation of web and communication technologies into our everyday lives (and of course, how it affects my business). In short, albeit now all encompassing and certainly not simply, our world is moving online.

This phenomenon is to our world like the skin is the largest organ of our body - its influence is now so profound that we are behaving and living, in many ways, without any more conscious thought of “logging on.” The ramifications are broad and interesting to study.

We know based on statistics that “high-speed” Internet connectivity is what was the real “big boom” of Internet technology as it is the "virtual web" (as opposed to the “screech” of dial up with text-only web pages) – it grew from about 40 million using broadband in 2001 to more than 1.5 Billion today - that's hard to grasp.

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Today’s “new jobseeker” and clearly the emerging jobseeker market, moves freely between the real and Internet worlds as though there is no membrane and with no conscious thought of doing it. This is a powerful symbol and truth regarding the need to appeal to their Internet life with classified employment advertising that contains proactively produced Internet content. Being online is – I’m not stretching this – becoming in many ways more intergral to their existence and more important than what exists outside of their email account, their Facebook page, and what's on their computer devices.
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Because I am in focused on the employment advertising business, I like to advise my clients (and encourage the older garde who still have some discomfort with the Internet) that the last two graduation cycles of graduates (8 years) have “grown up online” – they think, communicate, react to web content, have defined expectations, and indeed now live on the Web as second nature. Clearly, my student Interns would die without the Internet (I’m almost not kidding). Today’s “new jobseeker” and clearly the emerging jobseeker market moves freely between the real and Internet worlds. This is a powerful symbol and truth regarding the need to appeal to their Internet life with classified employment advertising that contains proactively produced Internet content. Being online is – I’m not stretching this – becoming in many ways more integral to their existence and more important than what exists outside of their email account, their Facebook page, and what's on their computer devices.

Meet Burck Smith.

Straigherline is the brainchild of Burck Smith, a 39 year-old Internet entrepreneur with degrees from Williams and Harvard, who is bent on altering the DNA of higher education as we have known it for almost 500 years. Rather than students being tethered to campuses or an anonymous computer campus, Smith envisions a world where they can seamlessly assemble credits and degrees from multiple online providers, each specializing in subjects – and competing on price.

How does $99 per month grab you to take college-accredited courses, and take as much time as you need to complete them, no books, you already have room and board at your home, or cave with your wireless laptop, and your professor is available 24/7?

Most people are so invested in the idea of education by institution that it’s hard to imagine another way. Because Web-based higher education is still new and considered a “working class” or “second class” education by perhaps society and possibly employers (whose administrators are “old school” – pardon my pun), consumers see online courses in the same negative light.
Consumers are going to change their tune. It’s an absolute fact – here’s how I know:

First, college is becoming impossible to afford for many. Students are graduating with massive debt. There seems to be an endless spiral of tuition hikes due to a variety of hard costs of running traditional colleges (and their massive football programs, the light bills, maintenance, tenured professors, et. al). If Burck Smith doesn’t offer extremely cheap college to the hungry hordes of consumers seeking higher education and a college degree, which is the ticket to a better job and a better life, another will. The day is coming when it will be a sheer financial decision, anyway.

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– at one time music and mathematics were the only universal languages – today a third language is booming and it is that of the virtual Internet.
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Second, we’re already at a point where high school students have been accessing the virtual Internet since they could read and write. They are comfortable and many prefer dealing and communicating with others online – clearly social networking sites are metaphors for the new virtual language – at one time music and mathematics were the only universal languages – today a third language is booming and it is that of the virtual Internet. Frankly, if you haven’t stepped foot in a high school or onto a college campus lately, it is clear that students are masters of this new language already, on Wi-Fi campuses. There are entire city blocks, even small towns which are Wi-Fi. Soon we will all have a Smart Phone.

All it takes is for one generation of college students to see online courses as no more or less legitimate (that’s a college generation, which is four years – not a lifetime), and a whole lot cheaper, for the consensus of the general public to change.

Older folks remember when the computer was looked at as a curiosity and many resisted giving up their typewriters. Even today, my staff deals with employer recruiting professionals who do not buy into the need to develop proactive recruitment content to appeal to today’s obvious tech-savvy jobseekers – as though they insist on using the typewriter to continue doing their work and are oblivious to the huge losses in efficiency and opportunity.

Another college degree offered by the same professor who teaches at Duke but for $99 a month? Count me in. And set up the turnstile to count the masses that will follow me.

Check out Straighterline at http://www.straighterline.com/

To contact me directly, email me at carlbrickman@yahoo.com. I am also on Facebook. Learn more about my work at http://www.onlinejobtour.com/

The Truth about Physician Recruiting – compelling examples of the costs of ignoring wasteful traditional recruiting practices.

2009-09-01T12:41:00.008-04:00

Let’s say your hospital or practice decides to open a recruiting project for a Gastroenterologist.

Scenario A – YOU: Let’s say that you work extremely hard, you stay on the phone week after week, you acquire candidates (how you get them is another blog entry!), talk to them, try to cajole them to interview, set up the interviews, etc. You are extremely busy. You eventually fill the position in 4 months, and you celebrate!

Scenario B – Another Recruiter: On the other hand, with all things being equal, another recruiter at your employer fills the same position 3 weeks sooner.

Who is the more valuable recruiter to your hospital?

According to two major and well-known industry studies from Merritt-Hawkins as well as the Advisory Board Company in Washington DC, a hospital loses at least $100,000 for every month a physician job is unfilled. For a specialty physician such as a Gastroenterologist it can be $250,000.

The other recruiter just made your hospital at least $75,000 filling one opening three weeks sooner than you. Over 7 physician jobs filled with this disparity means this other recruiter saved your employer over $500,000.

So is always being busy, being on the phone all day, and dealing with candidates and setting up interviews and if you eventually fill your open jobs, the way to measure if you are successful?

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Today the smarter employers and recruiters understand that closing percentages of visiting candidates, hiring the better candidates, being in a position of advantage when negotiating contracts, reducing the number of expensive interview visits, retention statistics, saving third party recruiter fees, among many other factors, is the modern and appropriate way to measure recruiting to not just save money, but assure a long term foundation for the hospital and the care that ultimately reaches the patient.

Lesser-quality employees make more mistakes. They aren’t as efficient. If a physician leaves after 24 months what does that say about how he was sold on the job but not sold on the hospital and living in your area – and what is the cost to re-fill that job?

Online Job Tour Test Market: Over a four year test market, simply by providing physician candidate prospects with Online Job Tour, which provides a more comprehensive “virtual site visit experience” than the real thing, our clients have averaged the following.

Use of Online Job Tour results in filling positions 3 weeks faster (19% faster).
Use of Online Job Tour reduces third party recruiter fees by 16% (1 in 6).
Use of Online Job Tour reduces overall onsite visits by 33%.

We calculate for a small hospital filling 10 physician openings and 10 Director-level or specialty openings over a 36 month timeframe (with the assumptions noted below) – based only on these stats, the savings is $947,000.

These astounding dollars are merely due to reducing the time to fill by 19%, reducing the number of visit needed to fill the jobs by 1/3, and a small reduction in the need to use third party recruiters – which is the smallest return of the three – saving 1 in 10 recruiter fees reduces that total number by less than $50,000.

Naturally, our stats do not include non-physician recruiting, how Online Job Tour promotes a better long-term placement and reduces retention problems, and in many cases, our clients are dealing with candidates where they are the top choice – this translates into hiring better talent and serves to turn the negotiations to our clients’ favor – we have numerous examples of our clients not needed to supply huge bonuses and income guarantees because the candidates want the job and don’t need to be motivated by a big bonus. Most important is the better quality, happier physicians and employees are better workers – lest we ever forget for a moment that patient lives are in the balance.

As a former third party recruiter, I know the costs of recruiting as well as the costs for being inefficient – they are uncountable and my brightest clients tell me these ROI numbers are extremely low.

A smarter recruiting process with Online Job Tour makes a phenomenal difference.

So the next time you consider how effective your recruiting is, remember for the sake of your patients and your hospital’s budget that it’s not just about if you are busy and you eventually fill the open jobs, especially if your performance is going to be evaluated vs. others using Online Job Tour to reach today's modern, tech-savvy jobseekers.

Recruiting Assumptions for our ROI Study (conservative estimates) - contact me for the ROI study.

· The average number of candidates who interview to fill a physician opening is 4 (2 for non-MD).
· The average number of total site visits with candidates and spouses to fill one physician job is 6 (3 for non-MD).
· The average cost for one interview site visit for a candidate and spouse is $1,500.
· The average time it takes to fill an open physician job is 4 months (2 months for non-MD).
· The percentage physician or high-end positions are filled using a third party recruiter is 75%.
· The average recruiter fee for a placement is $20,000.
· Studies published by Merritt-Hawkins and The Advisory Board, Inc. conclude the average lost revenue for every month a physician opening is unfilled is $100,000. We are assigning $25,000 lost per month for Director/specialist jobs unfilled (contact us for these studies).

To contact me directly, email me at carlbrickman@yahoo.com. I am also on Facebook. Learn more about my work at www.onlinejobtour.com

Gaffney and its need for Online Job Tour

2009-07-11T11:49:00.012-04:00

After a serial killer rampages its community, Upstate Carolina Medical Center faces a huge challenge regarding its future recruiting that will impact the next generation of residents in Cherokee County. Because of the compelling "shift" of jobseeker behavior that has taken place since the emergence of high-speed Internet use, UCMC needs Online Job Tour.

I have the privilege of serving Upstate Carolina Regional Medical Center, in Gaffney, South Carolina, as a client of Online Job Tour. Todd Dixon, the Chief Operating Officer and principal physician recruiter for the hospital, is a rising talent in his company who is web savvy, iPhone-connected, and locked into the fact that his target physician and healthcare jobseekers are online. His wife Jennifer was very kind to me during our meeting, when she stopped by to take her husband to lunch. The Chief of Staff, a younger OB/GYN and beloved in the community, Steven Lewis, MD, was very engaging, and he was great on video as he spoke of his adoration of life and working in the Upstate and Cherokee County.

As Online Job Tour is designed to give a web-presentation which emulates an onsite interview visit, probably my favorite part of featuring clients and their communities is meeting such great people in these places. Gaffney is no different: Bill Pennington is an extremely talented former teacher who is steward of an impressive, burgeoning museum downtown. He could choose to do anything, but his passion is to be in Gaffney and chronicle its history by doing painstaking grant proposal work, pleading for donations, and many other things which go unnoticed to all but those who know the details of his job. One of his former students, upon coming back from a tour in Iraq, sought out Bill before visiting anyone else upon his arrival – including his own family. Former students pour into the museum to Bill to excitedly share their lives with him. According to Jane Waters, a museum volunteer, in her wonderful aristocratic Carolina accent, “Bill’s got two of the most beautiful babies - I could just eat them with a spoon.” Jack Trnavsky, a principal at a local bank and Chairman of the Chamber of Commerce, could not be more uncomfortable in front of a video camera, but I needed him, and he came through as we drove through town and he introduced his favorite spots – after all, this is to help to recruit physicians who will care for his friends and neighbors. Jackie Sellers (an appropriate name for a real estate agent), whose husband is a local pastor, is all about developing relationships with people she meets. She is charming, witty, and deeply appreciative of professionals considering living in Gaffney. In all, I met dozens of people who together weave an amazing authentic story of this community.

Located along I-85 about an hour south of Charlotte and between Spartanburg, this is a growing, modern county just far enough outside Charlotte to not be a suburb but an historic place with its own identity. A third industrial park is open with its first tenant, and Lowe’s, Walgreens, a Prime Outlets Mall with 80 stores such as Ralph Lauren, Pottery Barn, Nike, you name it, are next to a 56,000 SF Movie Mega-plex. A new community and technical college campus is there. Another YMCA is being constructed. All this among rolling hills – it’s idyllic and you all but forget the massive urban sprawl of Charlotte is minutes away.

For the right jobseeker who wants a smaller town life with a modern hospital, but close to what is afforded in Charlotte, not to mention being close to the mountains and 3 hours to the beach, Gaffney would appear to be a compelling choice – until last week.

It appears as though a recently-paroled felon, who apparently is not even from Gaffney, murdered 5 people in this community over the course of a week, before being killed in a nearby North Carolina town while burglarizing a house – saving all of us from an arrest, trial, and conviction that would have made everyone relive his heinous acts for another year or more.

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Is Gaffney still an amazing and charming community? Of course. Was this a 100 year “fluke” of a crime spree? Absolutely.

But the very best, most educated recruiting professionals understand that Upstate Carolina MC and Gaffney have a major problem – this tragedy is being stored into perpetuity on the Internet – and that’s where all jobseekers are today.
A Google Search of “Gaffney” currently surfaces multiple conspicuous articles and news stories, and photos, of the crimes and of the killer – short of multiple positive stories of equal magnitude occurring over the next decade and beyond, these stories will be omnipresent on search engines for a long, long time.

That a “fluke tragedy” like this one can so negatively impact recruiting is unfair to this hospital and to Gaffney. But life is often unfair, and so can be recruiting.

The best recruiters also know that they are not recruiting in a vacuum – they are aware of the competitive component: physicians and high-level jobseekers often consider as many as 10-12 options when they begin their career search considerations. So when one or two issues can impact the decision of a jobseeker or change their course when comparing multiple job options, this event in Gaffney can have a catastrophic impact on this hospital’s recruiting efforts when jobseekers are referred to the Web by employers, or instinctively log on without any other direction or instructions from hospitals vying for them.

Because our world and culture have made this permanent “shift” to doing many essential life activities online, which includes classified employment advertising, which will be an $11 Billion industry in 2011, while I strongly believe Online Job Tour is a necessity if a hospital wants to maximize their time, effort, money, and competitiveness, Upstate Carolina MC really needs Online Job Tour.

We access the Internet today without consciously being aware we are doing it – it is the platform for modern living. Web content is reality.

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The Gaffney tragedy is a quintessential example of my argument that hospitals who merely passively refer jobseekers to a handful of links to websites, which promotes “do the research on your own and ‘sell yourself’” is not a “strategy,” and I have always contended it can be harmful. Referring jobseekers to a school district website, a Chamber of Commerce website, or links to the local newspapers which leaves jobseekers up to their own devices and leaves things to chance, results in finding bad news and worse.
Another failed strategy is to ignore the web completely which many hospitals still do. Some hospitals in Upstate Carolina MC’s company still mail brochures, or wait for jobseekers to contact them and send DVDs. This is not the 1990s anymore. To wait for jobseekers to contact you to give them your presentation is grossly negligent, unprofessional, and inexcusable in any selling environment, much less one which impacts lives of patients.
While streaming videos are better options, they are very problematic. While I believe it is critical to control the selling environment and get your prospects into your own proprietary recruitment protocol, streaming videos age quickly and lose authenticity, they don’t cover topics that jobseekers need in enough depth, and nobody today wants to sit through a 10 minute video – in fact, my college interns refuse to do it – and they are the future jobseekers.

Web-based, Online Job Tour is truly the most modern, effective tool: it is constantly malleable – while our intent is to provide a virtual site visit more comprehensive than the real trip that all jobseekers and their families can experience, there is depth of content the employer can be a deep as it chooses, which is needed for jobseekers to feel good about their decisions, and with maintenance it will not get old (unlike any other recruiting material), and it is importantly online.

Online Job Tour gives jobseekers the “web fix” they need, but in a controlled, proactive selling environment that maximizes the sale and efficiency of the hospital’s recruiting efforts.
When jobseekers visit Online Job Tour they are really visiting - this is continually missed entirely by uneducated employers to whom we show our work.

Will a jobseeker considering Upstate Carolina Medical Center still go out on their own and Google Gaffney and find the tragedies? I would guess yes. However, properly exhibited and introduced to them, they will likely also have viewed Upstate Carolina’s Online Job Tour, already fallen in love with the uniqueness of the presentation, and settle it in their own minds that the tragedies were indeed a “fluke.” The tragedies will be neutralized. It’s psychological. It’s sales. It’s recruiting.

The absolute best way to recruit today’s online jobseekers – based on jobseeker behavior as well as addressing the traditional needs of both prospective employees and the employer, is to create a recruitment protocol harnessing high-speed Internet that is controlled, proprietary, and satisfies the questions and needs of both. Online Job Tour was invented to do exactly this.

Employers without Online Job Tour, while they eventually fill jobs, by being blind to their targets, face a myriad of problems that result in lost time, money and competitiveness. The better candidates lost loses opportunity. Even retention rates are affected when a jobseeker could otherwise be much more fully informed before being closed on the financial package and not so much the hospital and community.

In this new era with the new online jobseeker, Online Job Tour is not just a necessity for Upstate Carolina MC which has this terrible tragedy to help its community heal from and then deal with as an archived event to negotiate, but all community hospitals face enormous challenges, which begin and end with the quality of their presence on the Internet.

To contact me directly, email me at carlbrickman@yahoo.com. I am also on Facebook. Learn more about my work at http://www.onlinejobtour.com/

Come for an Interview Visit and Miss Everything worth Seeing

2009-06-24T07:32:00.006-04:00

Want a sure fire way to assure your hospital will take 4-6 months to fill your most important physician openings, close less than 50% of visiting candidates, waste half of your onsite visits, miss out on the better candidates, and have a poor retention rate? Keep ignoring the Internet in your recruiting, and wait for the onsite interview visit when you give (unprepared) candidate prospects your primary recruiting pitch, where they will merely drive past the important things at your hospital and in your service area – essentially missing almost everything, including your unique story.

The onsite visit separates spouses. Due to time, money, and logistical limitations, the candidate will interview with a handful of their principal peers, and possibly no staff members. The spouse tours the real estate market and the community. Still today, real estate agents are principal “salesmen” for the area – they speak in “cliché bombs” (“Our community is a great place to raise a family,” etc. etc.) which sound the same as the other communities and don’t serve to distinguish you from the 7-8 other places jobseeker prospects are considering. Generally, there is merely a “drive by” schools, downtown, and businesses and stores and event centers, with no time to go into them to talk to residents or community leaders, to learn “the real story” from local residents and what makes your unique thumbprint. They never step foot in a local museum or speak to a true historian of the area. There is almost never a serious discussion with the director of the economic board for the county. There is almost no contact with anyone in the community except an old board member – at best there is a “dinner” with pleasantries exchanged but no “real talk” among people going through the motions. The onsite visit does not include extended family members, children, parents and colleagues – all people who influence the decision but they remain “blind” to the employer and the area.

The onsite interview visit can also be problematic – bad weather, key people can miss appointments, and there can be mixed messages delivered by those people whom the prospect meets.

For physician jobseekers considering million dollar careers who will drive multi millions to their hospitals and other physicians, and nurse candidates for that matter, they really don’t visit the hospital entirely on an interview visit – there is often no time to take a thorough tour of the hospital campus to see the ancillary facilities and programs that contribute to the hospital’s current and long-term focus. And they simply do not have time to learn the story of the service area they are considering – they fail to learn the area’s history and don’t get a good view of its future. On the site visit, they miss almost everything and will forget 50% of what they experienced in 2 days.

And with all these logistical issues and costs and onsite visits which really don’t work, less than 5% of jobseekers who are exposed to your job postings will actually make this costly, wasteful trip. What about the other 95%? Also, how many candidates are you missing?

If you were a jobseeker, how would you feel about a 2 day interview in the pouring rain, where you don’t see the entire hospital, two of the four principals you where scheduled to meet were 30 minutes late for one hour interviews, you meet few employees, meet no future neighbors, learn nothing of the town's history or economy in order to understand where it is heading, and you were given the primary sales pitch on the community by a realtor?

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If you truly want to recruit the best professionals and maximize your time and budget you must master the Internet because that’s where your targets have moved.

In an environment where there is no professional selling, time limits, and costs which promote shortcuts, where candidates are looking at multiple options and they are given an expensive superficial site visit and largely left up to their own resources to “sell themselves,” it’s no wonder the results of recruiting seem arbitrary.

Online Job Tour has evolved into a compelling tool that is better and more comprehensive than the real onsite visit in multiple beneficial and important ways. It is mistake-free, it is on 24/7, it offsets the limitations of recruiters with no professional sales experience, negates any lack of Internet acumen, maximizes the employer’s interest in maximizing the sale, all the jobseeker’s family and friends can experience it, and perhaps best of all, it saves time for everyone, leading to faster decisions. Jobseekers become truly interested, “pre-sold” candidates who come to Interview with complete knowledge and comfort on the trip, when they leave they refer to Online Job Tour many times, and this leads to the position getting filled faster.

Our clients are experiencing 75-80% closing records among visiting candidates who are pre-qualified using their Online Job Tour. While we have been test marketing for 4 years, retention among our clients who have placed candidates following our protocol and use of Online Job Tour is double the traditional community hospitals.

The key to these phenomenal differences is in fully educating and pre-qualifying jobseekers before any substantive time is spent dealing with them – this cannot be effectively done without Online Job Tour.

Take time to review our website to learn more and read our client testimonials.

To contact me directly, email me at carlbrickman@yahoo.com. I am also on Facebook. Learn more about my work at http://www.onlinejobtour.com/

Shazam and Apple’s iPhone: Your smart phone – probably the iPhone, will soon talk to you – it will likely converse with you - in 5 years or less.

2009-06-13T17:43:00.009-04:00

While just 11-13% of cell phone users have a Smart (Internet capable) phone, this micro technical device will change the world like broadband access did. I’m not kidding. 3G networks of smart phones – soon to be 4G, offer close-to-broadband access to the Internet. In the future, our computers will be mobile and we will carry them with us like our wallets – and the smart phone is a window to that life. Remember when cameras were still film and cell phones (in the US) didn’t have a camera? That was just 10 years ago…. While service providers T-Mobile, Sprint, Verizon (Blackberry) and others offer smart phones, and the Blackberry smart phones actually out sold it by a nose in 2008, the iPhone transcends them all. Most of my friends who own a Blackberry tell me it’s because it’s paid for by their companies.

If you are a medical recruiter (my area of knowledge) or a recruiter of higher end professional jobseekers, I promise you that a much larger percentage of your target market of new graduates, advanced practitioners, and physicians have a smart phone.

My studies now show that top-shelf jobseekers today prefer that you text them through your recruiting protocol.

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The iphone is not just a smart phone but an iconic tool that you will agree is the most unbelievable communication and Internet tool you have ever used when (this is my blog, so I am insisting) you get one – in many ways it is already better than your desk or laptop.

It’s about the iphone’s applications – or “Apps”: Applications are “tools” and games you can download – some for free and others for a cost, into the hard drive of the iphone. The App market and makers of Apps, are exploding. From applications such as AAA, which allow you to, at the touch of a button see where all the AAA discounts for your membership are in your vicinity (in concert with your location as the iphone has a GPS system), to Airfare – a free App that checks every single airfare and provides the lowest prices – from the regional carriers to the majors for your date and destination. Bible verses, games of all sorts, such as a “Labyrinth,” which actually moves a ball/marble through a maze as you balance the phone and negotiate a maze. The endless application list is actually in a library on the iphone itself, which is continually updated – all you do is hit an icon and it reveals an “App store.”

I watch (commercial-free) podcasts of TV shows, and I have last year’s National Championship College Football game loaded on my iphone – when I’m feeling blue I can watch Tebow and the Gators (I paid for this podcast). I have an extensive library of music, and if I had more time, I could download feature films – and sync everything with my computer – which doesn’t have to be a Mac.

How awesome is an iphone? Take this example:
I was listing to the radio in my car with my fiancé and a really good song came on the radio which has a very catchy beat to it – I thought it would be one I might like to buy (on my iphone, of course, which is also an ipod, btw). My fiancé, who also owns an iphone, opened an App called Shazam, and pressed a button on the iphone screen – the App first literally listed to the song, and within a minute, identified it, and then the App offered that I could watch the video for the song (for free) or it could be purchased for 99 cents. Remarkable. Thalia learned of the App when she was at City Walk in Orlando and one of her friends used the app by opening it while a song was being played on the PA system.

Within 5 years, you will be driving down the street and your smart phone will beep because you have it on “Real Estate” mode – likely an App, because you are shopping for a house and one that meets multiple parameters and your price range is in the area. When a camera you are looking at drops below a price range, an App will alert you and show you which stores in the area offer it, or when an online store does - you may want to scratch this example because your smart phone will likely have a camera as good as any soon. For Job Searching, this will also happen - and we released a prototype called Online Job Tour Micro in the fall of 2006 in anticipation of this.

Your smart phone – probably the iPhone, will soon talk to you – it will likely converse with you. All this will happen in 5 years or less.

Sure, the persnickety among us have complaints about the iphone –

There is only a proprietary video player which allows for viewing of only UTUBE videos.
There is no cut & paste application (yet)
The keyboard is clumsy and it takes me 2X as long to send texts.

I'm excited to learn of the new iphones, which are now up to 32G vs. my now obsolete 8G iphone - and whether these shortcomings have been addressed.

For hard-core texters who use their smart phones to text as email replacements or for email, you can see why Blackberry still competes with the iphone in unit sales – but all the genius and imagination is in the iphone. Take longer to text or make your texts short. But Blackberry’s are not the future.

Get an iphone. It will change your life for the better. It will promote dreaming. It will inspire you. And don’t forget, soon it will be talking to you.

To contact me directly, email me at carlbrickman@yahoo.com. I am also on Facebook. Learn more about my work at www.onlinejobtour.com

Inconvenient Candidate Interview Trips – their (hidden) costs, and the most important cost factor in recruiting: Pre-qualifying your prospects

2009-06-13T16:20:00.004-04:00

Inconvenient Candidate Interview Trips – their (hidden) costs, and the most important cost factor in recruiting: Pre-qualifying your prospects.

If an employer is considering our product, Online Job Tour, for their recruiting, perhaps a great way to appreciate it is to take a trip on an airplane. ‘Been on one lately?

Gone forever are the days of airplane travel being glamorous – today’s planes like (full) buses, and the “ordeal” of checking bags after packing, making arrangements for one’s home, the uncomfortable flights, etc., make the entire experience of interviewing for a career inconvenient at best. If your job targets/candidates are physicians – young or old, then I assure you they look at entire travel and interview trip as a “necessary evil” of looking for a job. But this entry is not about the psychology or the angst candidates feel during multiple interviews and site visits to prospective employees – but the practical/logistical problems employers face, and the immense costs regarding the interview trips themselves.

The cost of the onsite interview for one candidate is pretty easy to calculate – the price of airfare (for the candidate and spouse), car rental, the nice (it better be a nice one) hotel, and the meals. What are not easy to calculate are the seemingly endless hours to prepare for them, the people involved at the employer who must be pulled from their jobs (so they cannot produce) or something else they would prefer to be doing (few people like to sell or recruit – and few physicians involved in the recruiting process of physician candidate don’t love it, and certainly aren’t making any money don’t it either).

There as many as 10 employees or physicians in hospital physician recruiting who are pulled away from productivity during every single candidate interview visit – plus more community people/board members, etc.

So it can be rather crushing when an interview visit is cancelled, bad weather ruins the site visit, or worse, upon stepping off the plane the candidate looks around and decides before their first meeting they aren’t interested – this happens a lot more than you think (I used to be a recruiter and 2 of 5 physician candidates – that’s 40%, told me that within the first few hours of their trip they made a decision about a second visit).

And from my unscientific survey of 10-12 CEOs, they believe that from the moment a physician learns about a career opening and the time they make a “decision of authentic serious interest in the position” takes 3-5 months (and often multiple trips) – it’s a grueling process.

Two studies by major organizations who know a lot about the subject, claim hospitals lose $100,000 for every month a position is unfilled.

This is certain in physician recruiting – there is a ton of waste. That means there is a ton of lost money.

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I just returned from a production trip to a new client in South Carolina and had my typical great but bruising time – I run ragged during these trips trying to get as much footage as I can, and there are so many pick ups and new things I find and want to feature after already overstuffing my itinerary.

By far, the worst part of the trip, as always, was the flight and the accommodations/hotels – and this is typical of the potential logistical problems that exist during traditional interview visits (which Online Job Tour is designed to emulate and in many ways be better than).

My flight last Tuesday was on Delta from Tampa through Atlanta with a connection to Florence, SC. (Mistake #1, says my mom, a corporate travel agent, was not booking a non-stop flight, but then I would have to go to Charlotte and have a much longer drive to the client - logistics).

Due to bad weather throughout the Southeast, and because every flight on the eastern seaboard seems to go through it, Atlanta’s control tower decided to delay my flight – which was at the gate (with me on the plane already), for 1 hour.

After the captain broke the news, I was on the smart phone to Delta re-booking on another flight out of Tampa to Atlanta – which I was able to get, but I would miss my connector and need to get a later flight to Florence. After booking the flight and getting off the plane (my luggage would stay on and actually make my connection), I was rescheduling every meeting I had that day but my last one, which I was eventually late to. The entire day was basically shot – because of thunderstorms – impossible to plan for.

Now – imagine I was a candidate for an important career position at your business – from a CRNA to a Cardiothoracic surgeon – less being purchased a first class ticket (sorry CRNAs, only docs for that perk), if the interview was going to be that day, overnight, and then the next day, virtually half of the interview itinerary was ruined – all the planning by the recruiter, all the folks – physicians and others, who planned to meet the candidate – the time missed and wasted for the initial interview visit – pretty much a goner. Because of thunderstorms.

Stress. People scrambling to try to make the best of the interview, or worse, canceling it to start over – all while the unfilled job remains unfilled.

How much money do thunderstorms actually cost employers for their recruiting?

Fortunately for me, I was able to reshuffle my first day pretty easy and there wasn’t any damage done, as I would be at my client for an entire week.

To keep this blog entry short, let me just say that if the rain would have continued, imagine driving through a community and merely peering out windows – driving past stores, businesses, schools, and missing the people and their stories.

And rain simply delays everything. Aren’t people always coming into meetings from out of a rainstorm and saying, “Sorry I’m late.”?

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Here’s my conclusion based on 9 years of recruiting medical professionals and then dealing with my clients and prospects with my company:

Pre-qualifying the physician is the single biggest factor in the economy of recruiting. “Closing” is important to get deals done, but let me say this – if you close an unqualified professional on a good deal and financial package alone, they ain’t stayin’. If that new employee and their family aren’t fully knowledgeable on the employer and the service area, then “retention” becomes an issue – and that’s another subject altogether that haunts many hospitals and employers in other industries who relocate employees to them.

Online Job Tour works because before the candidate even decides to pursue the job, they get a comprehensive “visit experience” which promotes among many benefits a better education and knowledge of the employer and life in its area – candidates come “pre-sold” to interviews instead of nervous, anxious and unprepared – to say nothing of the competitive benefits as jobseekers such as doctors generally consider 6-10 options.

Online Job Tour, while providing a better visit experience from the comfort of a computer screen viewed in the candidate’s home or office, requires no flight or interview visit, and no thunderstorms.

Imagine candidates arriving excited to meet you having already “met” you. Imagine when they arrive and the weather is awful and they exclaim, “No problem – we already visited your area using your Online Job Tour – and the weather was great online!” Better yet, imagine candidates offering to accept your open jobs without a site visit – our clients are experiencing that, which is both a symbol of our culture change as well as the effectiveness of our product.

Based on the empirical numbers – Online Job Tour can wipe away the 40% of candidates who otherwise arrive and become uninterested within a couple hours. It has already proven to shorten the time window to fill positions from 3-5 months to 2-3 months. Online Job Tour eliminates the problems (and costs) of thunderstorms.

Or after calculating the hard dollar costs of your interview expenses and recruiting and figuring all the folks involved and what they could have otherwise been doing, if these additional lost dollars don’t convince you Online Job Tour is a no-brainer investment, what may convince you simply getting on an airplane.

To contact me directly, email me at carlbrickman@yahoo.com. I am also on Facebook. Learn more about my work at http://www.onlinejobtour.com/

Facebook sends Employers a Message

2009-05-03T07:13:00.002-04:00

When I invented the Online Job Tour in 2001, only about 25 million people had a high speed Internet connection faster than 56k – half of those were in universities and the government.

Today, 8 years later, 200 million are on Facebook, Twitter easily gets almost 2 million hits per month, and the wireless industry is now breaking volume records – AT&T sold 1.2 million IPhones and they were bested by Verizon sales of 1.3 million, Alltel added 780,200 (to be fair, Sprint lost a million customers – likely dispersed among a number of carriers). 3G wireless network are being replaced by 4G.

A bad economy? Says who?

Many Dow stock companies (the Dow Jones Industrial Average is comprised of 30 companies) are still taking a beating, US Steel sales dropped 40%, Whirlpool’s net fell 27%, Toyota sales dropped 42% last quarter, Chrysler is now in bankruptcy and Microsoft is down 32% and is also struggling on the price for its Windows 7 “Starter” for netbooks (popular scaled down laptops that basically serve to surf the ‘Net) because their prior operating systems cost more than these machines. Newspapers are dying.

But Internet and wireless are growing. Amazon’s profit jumped 24%. Apple’s climbed 15% (the IPhone is an iconic device, but if the next gen can’t cut and paste or send photos via a text instead of just email, I’m writing Mr. Jobs a letter!).

The phenomenon of the growth of the Internet and wireless while many other parts of the economy are hurting is a continued sign of our world culture’s “shift” to the (high-speed) Internet to do much of our essential living and communicating, and much more.

Need more proof of it? Last year Comcast, the world’s largest cable TV company, lost almost 600,000 customers. Did these people suddenly stop watching TV? Remember folks, were Americans – they didn’t give up their “boob tubes,” but found a cheaper way to access television programming – thru their computers via their Internet connections!

As you know, my area of focus is on assisting my employer clients reach today’s online jobseekers and advertised and recruit in a manner that reaches them and is more efficient and competitive than traditional “manual recruiting.”

Whether it’s going on Facebook to see the new way people network and interact, tinkering with an IPhone, watching an Academy Award-winning film through your computer, or reading the Wall Street Journal (online), when you see things from this perspective it becomes clear that the question for employers is now how to advertise and recruit online. Don't take my word for it - Facebook's 200 million members are sending a much clearer message.

To contact me directly, email me at carlbrickman@yahoo.com. I am also on Facebook. Learn more about my work at http://www.onlinejobtour.com/

The Real Internet Boom

2009-04-21T19:32:00.003-04:00

You can scroll back to my first blog entry to learn about the basic history of the Internet and Swiss researcher and MIT professor Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the hyperlink. While an independent contractor at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) from June to December 1980, Berners-Lee proposed a project based on the concept of hypertext to facilitate sharing and updating information among researchers. On December, 25 1990 he implemented the first successful communication between an http client and server via the Internet.

In 1992, a few of the students at the University of Illinois led by Marc Andreessen came across the World Wide Web protocol released from Burners-Lee and CERN. They thought it was a great idea, but it was clumsy for most people with a minimum of skill with the computer. They decided it would be a fun a potentially worthwhile project to write a friendlier, graphical interface on the browser. Eventually they released it on the Internet, and the downloads increased steadily. In 1993, Andreessen's Mosaic browser was used by over one million people around the world. He had a hit, but he didn't realize it, and it was the school's property.

Think about it. In 1993 (that’s 15 years ago), 1 million people had access to the Internet.
In 2000, seven years later, the number reached 100 million.

I don’t think the Internet as we know it today was really born yet, because just 20 million had access to the Internet via a high-speed or broadband connection.
Many people don’t distinguish numbers between Internet users and high-speed Internet users and why it’s important – but I saw a vast difference because the high-speed Internet opened up the possibility of the virtual Internet and what made my invention, Online Job Tour, possible.

Between 2004 and 2009, the number of high speed Internet users has grown from 80 million to almost 2 Billion. An internet with immediate downloads of rich content, photos, videos, and the advance of user-friendly tools that allow novices to access and express themselves in the newly-created virtual world, has made the Internet, among many things a compelling web-solution for many activities.

My focus since 2003 since the founding of Promo Web Innovations has been to introduce Online Job Tour to selected healthcare employers as the “new approach” to reaching and recruiting today’s and tomorrow’s jobseekers – who are now online with a high-speed connection.

Formerly a “text-based world” because slow dial up Internet made it too difficult to download a single photo, today Online Job Tour is a revolutionary tool that helps employers and jobseekers connect online in today's high-speed Internet world.

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On April 30, 2007 (2 years ago), USA Today published the “Top 25” Internet-related inventions. They are fascinating to review to see how far our global Internet culture has come since Tim Berners-Lee:

1. Tim Berners-Lee invents the hyperlink.

2. Email

3. GUI (Graphical user Interface) Apple featured clickable icons on its 1984 Mac vs. blinking lines of text

4. America Online Chat Rooms/text-messaging really boomed with AOL (35 million subscribers in 2001)

5. Broadband (1% of Internet users had it in 1998. 78% had it in 2008)

6. Google

7. Mosaic/Netcape – Mosaic ruled until Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (“IE”) took off in 1998.

8. eBay – 230 million worldwide customers in 2007

9. Amazon.com - while the stock market was crashing in late 2008, Amazon posted a 7% profit – how is that for a metaphor for the Internet’s powerful growth.

10. Wi-Fi – entire college campuses, and even entire towns, are Wi-Fi (this stands for “Wireless Fidelity,” or wireless access to the Internet.

11. Instant Messaging

12. Yahoo

13. Compuserve/Prodigy – in the 1980s these were the first mainstream companies to offer consumers direct access to the Internet.

14. The WELL – this was the first “virtual community” and now there are many of them – yes, people buy and sell virtual real estate in these virtual worlds.

15. Vices – online gambling topped $12 Billion in 2006 – ever think you were in the wrong business? LOL

16. Spam/spyware – Junk email accounted for 9 of 10 emails on the Internet in 2006.

17. Flash – seen a video lately? It’s likely on a Flash player.

18. Online mapping tools

19. Napster – created in Shawn Fanning’s dorm room, Napster let more than 26 million people tap into free music downloads – record companies shut it down.

20. YouTube – in my opinion, this is a growing revolution – digital video will be bigger than digital photos.

21. The Drudge Report – this was the first blog – remember its first scoop? Remember Monica Lewinsky?

22. Bloggers – this is perhaps the beginning of the end of the traditional newspaper because the world is changing how news is exchanged.

23. Craigslist – yes, it’s named after a real person: Craig Newmark. Free classified ads and the way we find apartments, cars, and dates by users supplying “friendly neighborhood information.”

24. MySpace – the precursor and first major “social networking” phenomenon.

25. Gaming and virtual worlds – here is another industry that defies the stock market. I’m not a big user here only because I’m afraid I would get addicted! And as an “old schooler,” I have a problem with Guitar Hero and think it would be much more cool if people would actually take the time to learn to play the guitar!

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Why is this all important and what’s my point?

So much has happened in the last 5 years that suggests a new world has been created and especially for HR professionals and recruiters for companies, and compelling need to be Internet savvy and understand the Internet is essential to success because all jobseekers are now online.

A 10/25/2007 NY Times article claimed the classified employment advertising industry in 2007 was at $5.9 Billion and is expected to be $10 Billion in 2011.
The Economist published an article in 10/4/2007 that said the average American will change jobs 7-13 times and change careers 5 times.
And the Internet remains on fire as a social networking and new phenomenon to communicate with each other – Twitter has more than 6 million hits per month when it had 1.2 million in all of 2008. Facebook is a monster and Microsoft knew it would be – buying a 1.5% share of it for $240 million in 2007.

These are no longer metaphors or signs but “evidence” that employers today must embrace the Internet and be involved in the “virtual world” born from high speed Internet.

And I didn’t even mention smart phones yet – that’s another blog entry!

To contact me directly, email me at carlbrickman@yahoo.com. I am also on Facebook. Learn more about my work at www.promoweb-us.com

On Inventing Online Job Tour™ and how it evolved

2009-04-13T06:38:00.004-04:00

Online Job Tour™ is my company’s signature product around which Promo Web Innovations has built tools to support our Health Care client employers and maximize their recruiting efforts to reach today’s online jobseekers.

When I invented Online Job Tour in 2001, less than 20 million people in the world had a high-speed Internet connection. I envisioned that number would explode and create not only a new “virtual world” culture offering many “web solutions” to our lives, but it would also change how jobseekers look for, and research their career changes and options.

From 38 million in May of 2003 when I filed for its patent, today there are 1.5 Billion (yes, that’s a “B”) users of broadband Internet.

Online Job Tour is first web-based recruitment system and that provides a holistic picture of a job opportunity, offering jobseekers information needed to intelligently assess a career and life in the client’s community. Unlike prior conventional online attempts to use the Internet for recruitment, Promo Web does not merely provide a short classified ad with a few links to other websites for a jobseeker or candidate to hunt for relevant information. Instead, Promo Web lays out key features of a job opportunity and life in a community, including personally featuring individuals and organizations, in a logically organized self-contained web presentation. What would otherwise require a candidate many hours of research and a personal visit to a job’s location to determine is now packaged neatly and virtually by the Promo Web product in an easy to follow web presentation. Samples of Online Job Tour can be found on our website at onlinejobtour.com

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People often ask me how I came to invent this revolutionary tool, and if you’re interested I thought it would be an appropriate early blog entry because a lot of what I write about is specific to the subject of recruiting today’s online jobseekers.

On January 6, 2000 my father died in transplant surgery aftercare as the result of a mistake made during a routine procedure. Called a “blind insertion” to remove fluid build-up in his chest area, a major artery was punctured and he bled to death internally. My dad's passing was hard on our family. Before then, I had left a successful sales career where I had been my company’s top national producer every year I had been with them, held all the noteworthy sales records, and sought another professional challenge. I had been a consultant and sales trainer and was enjoying it, and the freedom that came with being able to choose my assignments.

I had been introduced to the staffing industry via a consulting project with Robert Half International, a publically-traded accounting staffing company where I learned about the business. Within six months after that assignment I became a medical recruiter.

In founding Healthcare Recruiters of Florida, Inc. my mission was to first learn what I could about the permanent placement recruiting business in health care, and the needs and challenges of employers. Basically, the big picture goal was to recruit for medical employers the best possible professionals – I focused on cardiology and oncology placements – physician placements as well as unusual stuff, from double-fellowship trained doctors to medical physicists for Cancer Centers. I wanted to play my small role in helping employers recruit not just a position, but fill it with the best possible candidates. I did my best to form relationships where I felt the employer client shared my mutual interest in not just filling the job, but excelling.

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Fundamental problems with how recruiting was/is set up for employers and jobseekers:

Almost immediately I noticed that most of the hospital recruiters themselves – even the physician recruiters, had no professional sales skills – they were the hospital's former employees, or someone’s spouse with experience in a public job of some kind, and some had marketing backgrounds. Professionally untrained people doing the same job over and over, while they eventually filled most of their jobs, had bad habits on top of bad habits, and didn’t have a frame of reference to measure their results – sales terms such as “closing percentages,” measuring the times it takes to fill positions, pre-qualifying questions that help to shorten decisionmaking timelines, were not a part of their work.

What I also found interesting is the recruiters did little recruiting of candidates, but instead relied on third party recruiters like me to source candidates for them, pre-qualify them, and actually help to close the candidates.

On the other side, the jobseekers were clearly befuddled – facing many challenges and anxieties about making career changes.

About this time – about 2000-2001, after getting jobseekers on the phone and trying to give them a “verbal pitch” of the job, I saw the Internet as a possible way to help me improve the way I could represent the jobs I was selling and also deliver the information I knew jobseekers needed to know – not just about the employer, but relocating involves many lifestyle factors. I decided to put together these “stat sheets” on the employer with not just the hospital’s information and features, but also information on the clients’ service area – that became more and more comprehensive. With my technology background I knew a lot of people as well as website designers. I felt that the Internet was going to grow a lot (particularly high-speed Internet, which allowed for fast downloads of content but also digital photos and images, etc.) and it would be a better way to deliver the details of the jobs I was representing directly to prospect jobseekers.

Two friends of mine who were website designers helped me place my "presentations" onto websites. They became more elaborate presentations focused in traditional “jobseeker categories” (the subjects jobseekers of all sorts generally need to know in order to make career decisions).

With my sales background and as an advocate for my clients, I understood the advantage of creating a presentation which maximized the marketability of my clients – and because my clients’ own recruiters didn’t have much sales training, the presentation was important to help to offset their limitations.

Another interesting thing was happening was that jobseekers themselves were outpacing employer recruiters with their use of the Internet, which was becoming a big problem.

I started to see that what I was doing might one day be a "bridge" to not just connect employers and jobseekers, but offset these many limitations inherent in the "manual" recruiting process.

Fast Internet connection speed struck my curiosity:

At the time the Internet had passed 100 million users, but I was more interested in the burgeoning broadband connection growth – I was convinced that the faster download speed would allow for immediate viewing of rich content (pictures/images/video/music) and much more robust presentations.

There were only about 20-25 million users of broadband Internet which had connection speed faster than 56k modems (remember those days?). I envisioned a day when everyone would have full-bore, high-speed Internet access.

How I went about making the early Online Job Tours, or “Web brochures:”

In 2001 the goal was not just to provide a “recruitment presentation” but also to have them emulate the onsite visit experience – I began to see the advantages of using the Internet not just to “bring the onsite visit to the jobseeker,” but my sales experience was such that I knew the “Sales 101” importance of getting your prospect to take a “test drive” of the product you are selling them.
In order for me to obtain the kind of content necessary for me to create the web-presentations I wanted to make – which included particularly photos and testimonials from employers as well as people in the community regarding the jobseeker-needed content I wanted to feature, my own onsite visit was necessary.

Thank heaven that at this time digital photography was becoming popular – I was not a photographer. The first full-content Online Job Tour I created was with a simple, rather bulky 3.0 megapixel camera that had a very small zoom lens.

Although I was working on a contingency basis, which meant that I was not paid unless one of my candidates was placed by my clients, in a couple cases I had their trust and believed that I was their principal recruiter source, so I took a chance and with my own money I traveled to the clients to take the photos needed to create a more elaborate website presentation.

The goal on my trips was to pretend that I was the physician on the actual interview visit and I structured my questions to profile the people I met around the kinds of questions a physician jobseeker would ask them (by this time I had been recruiting doctors so I knew what they and their spouses wanted to know) – I met hospital administrators and employees, physicians, and then I went out into the community featuring and meeting people and business leaders, schools, country club directors, community theater directors, the mayor, the hospital board chairman – I even interviewed high school seniors about growing up in the area.

After getting tons of this information and hundreds of photos (video would come later!) I came back to my home and sorted it all out and then started to “tell the unique story” of the client and its relationship with its service area around the features of the career position I was representing.

My friends and I then put it all on a URL and I got back on the phone and started cold-call recruiting jobseeker prospects – whenever I got someone interested in my verbal “pitch” over the phone and peaked their curiosity about having a “web-based” presentation to email to them, I sent the “online job tour presentation/web brochure.”

Reactions from Jobseekers and Results overwhelming & growing the invention:

I experienced many “Eureka!” moments, based on the overwhelmingly positive response.

The proof was that I was filling positions and getting letters and emails from both sides encouraging me to grow my idea.

Over a six month stretch in 2002 I made placements equaling more than $230,000 and I decided to leave the recruiting business and start Promo Web Innovations with the full-time focus on building upon this “recruitment website presentation” invention.

Since founding Promo Web® Innovations I filed for a US Patent on the invention and we have tested a model template of Online Job Tour with 17 hospitals across 15 states – clearly the clients who committed to using it have experienced tremendous results. While staying true to the original design of the invention, we have grown the product considerably as web design and development tools have grown.

We produced a Promo Web Micro presentation prototype for smart phones in fall of 2006, and the movement of videotape to digital (much like cameras went digital) led to embellishing the Online Job Tour.

Software Development:

With the long-range goal being for the product to be simple but powerful and for corporations, there has been a focus on keeping a core design that can be remade via a software program. I am currently taking to a number of organizations/programmers with the goal to have a template design tool available by 2010 which will allow for efficient large-scale deployment for a large company for multiple affiliates.

Employers Must Adjust - Jobseekers have moved to the Internet with a broadband connection and Online Job Tour is a proactive tool and web solution for both sides.

All jobseekers are online now. Continuing to recruit while being blind to them loses time, effort, money, and candidates. Today and in this poor economy, the smarter companies no longer judge their recruiting success merely by whether they eventually fill open physician and staff jobs.

Closing percentages, saving third party recruiter fees, hiring the better candidates, making a better long-term fit which lessens turnover, saving wasted interview/site visits, and filling openings faster - these all dramatically influence the budget and quality of care provided.

The Online Job Tour invention has proven to make the recruiting process more efficient and our test-clients are more competitive, and their jobs are easier – with staff recruiters still without professional sales training and many who do not use advanced technology tools, it is a “bridge” to jobseekers who are wireless and many who “live online.”

Here we are in 2009 with tech-savvy jobseekers and particularly larger corporations who have not adapted well to their target market and how the Internet’s growth of broadband created a “virtual lifestyle” for the emerging jobseekers.

We are excited to be able to “open this compelling new door” for our client employers to “reach” today’s jobseekers in our unique way with Online Job Tour!

To contact me directly, email me at carlbrickman@yahoo.com. I am also on Facebook. Learn more about my work at www.onlinejobtour.com

The Internet's History

2009-03-29T00:32:00.004-04:00

While virtually all of us use the Internet, few know its origins, so I thought that my first blog entry should be dedicated to giving you a brief history lesson on how this amazing tool, which will make or break our clients' recruiting, got started and evolved:

Carl’s Internet History Dateline/Lesson – did you know the Internet was invented during the Cold War to effectively deliver messages to military leaders in the event of a nuclear attack?

The Internet has an amazing history – knowing it isn’t just cool coffee table conversation.

1968: US Government think tank invents IP (“Internet Protocol”) as a communication system for launch codes for nuclear warheads.

1972: IP is published globally (prevents “mutually-assured destruction”).

1975: mil.net – created in Berkeley/Stanford primarily for university and military use.

1981: City College of NY/Brooklyn creates BitNet, which is the precursor to the DNS (Domain Name System).

1985: NSF (National Science Foundation) takes over the Internet – this is the official date where the Internet moves more to educational control away from the military. Congress (and yes, Al Gore is on the subcommittee!) strikes a deal with MCI to build an “internet
backbone” on fiber cabling for $85 million – the “Information Superhighway” was born.
At this stage, there are approximately 10,000 users of the Internet

1990: Tim Burners Lee at CERN (Swiss University for Particle Physics) theorizes a “web” of (shared) information (first mention of the “web”) and publishes it. The theory postulates that if there were a way to connect research published online to “link” directly to sources, a true “web” of communication would result.

1992: Two grad students at University of Illinois contact Lee that they have created Mosaic, which created the “hyperlink,” which Lee endorses.

The creation of the “hyperlink” (today we call it a “link”) was the birth of the world wide web – as differentiated from the Internet.

The students create Netscape and offer to sell it to Bill Gates for $100,000. Gates turns them down. Microsoft would go on the copy the Netscape system and engage in many legal battles with Netscape – so when people tell you Bill Gates invented the web, you can tell them the real story!

1995: Web is opened to commerce (“e-commerce”). At this stage, it is estimated the Internet passes 1 million users (mostly use for emails).

2000: The “Dot Com Boom” emerges, growing the Internet to 100 million users.

Early 2000s brings the advance of "high-speed" ("broadband") Internet/Web access - to me, this was a second and more profound "boom" as it would eventually lead to today's "Virtual Internet" promoted by real-time downloads of rich content.

In 2001 when I invented the Promo Web Online Job Tour, less than 30 million had broadband and when I filed for the patent on it in mid 2003 it is estimated that the number was 60 million.

Today in 2009, the number of high-speed Internet users has exceeded 1.5 Billion (that's a b).

Now THAT is a Boom, and many of my blog posts will be based on how this massive shift of our world culture to the Internet world has changed the dynamics of recruitment, from the expectations of jobseekers to impacting the costs of recruiting, and everything in between.

I hope you enjoyed this review of the the Web's history!

Carl

To contact me directly, email me at carlbrickman@yahoo.com. I am also on Facebook. Learn more about my work at www.onlinejobtour.com