ATLANTA – Employing a video of a stealthy gorilla on a basketball court, a rather unenlightened 1938 rejection letter from Walt Disney, and a story about some monkeys and an electric banana, Dan DeMaioNewton, director of strategy and business development at Monster Worldwide, tried to demonstrate to HR and recruitment managers just how much the hiring game has changed nowadays at Tuesday afternoon's View from the Top session, "Finding Keepers: The New Rules for Recruiting Healthcare IT Talent."
Simply put, said DeMaioNewton, newfangled social media and evolving business models have completely changed job recruitment. And getting the best healthcare IT talent in the 21st century will require employers to adapt to a completely new talent landscape.
Unemployment may be high at the moment — and "even HR folks are competing for jobs" — but DeMaioNewton emphasized that the IT job market will "heat up a lot more as healthcare legislation comes through and the economy starts to recover." And he said that it's incumbent on employers to be proactive and creative in their recruiting practices and office culture in order to avoid being left with the "bottom of the barrel" of prospective job seekers.
"The old processes, the old ways of doing business, aren't working," he said.
To pick one example: whereas employers may have been pleased at first with the ubiquity of social networking sites, offering, as they do, the chance to see potentially compromising photos of job-seekers at keg parties (thus weeding out undesirable candidates), few companies realize that the reverse is also true: job-seekers read up on — and employees complain about — companies on online message boards.
A poor reputation will prevent companies from attracting top talent. "In the information age," says he said, "authenticity and integrity" are key.
Although he said he had "75 hours" worth of material to discuss, DeMaioNewton tried to distill his spiel down to an hour's worth of instruction on new ways of doing business. His basic thrust: out with the old (arcane job announcements, long hiring processes), and in with the new: smart use of social networking, guerilla and embedded recruiting, "rapid capture tactics."
Proper targeting of "poised" job seekers could reap big rewards, he argued. But he stressed the importance of following the lead of a company like Google, which is the most desirable place to work in the US.
"The way you treat your candidates matters," he said. "One of the things that Google has done differently is they're changing the rules of the game."
