Top 100 Influencers in HR, Recruiting & Talent Acquisition

Auren Hoffman v1.31

Posted on 25. Sep, 2009 by John Sumser in Blog, Top 100

By John Sumser

There’s an explosion of tools that try to harness social media for recruiting purposes. One of the most interesting is something called Rapleaf. It’s the product of a guy named Auren Hoffman who is a serial entrepreneur in the Recruiting and Staffing Industry. He’s founded a fistful of companies and successfully sold them while building a cultural network with deep influence in valley political and cultural life.

Widely respected well beyond the industry, Hoffman is one of those voices that drive external perceptions of HR. Like David Perry and Penelope Trunk, his influence is best seen on the outside pointing in. He is a routine contributor to Business Week with pieces on job hunting, career management, social media and the intersection of technology and politics.

Rapleaf is an interesting project. Fully integrated into at least two Applicant Tracking Systems, the service captures all social media data and integrates it around individual email addresses. For large commercial customers, they can help provide segmentation by social platform. For recruiting processes, they provide an integrated data dump as supplemental background information. When an address goes into the ATS (or, more likely, Candidate Relationship Management tool), a full social media profile is instantly assembled. The rapleaf database actively includes over 375 million email addresses.

One of the most interesting services is a public tool that allows you to see your online footprnt.

His blog, Summation, is a constant source of stimulating insight and wisdom. Here’s how he frames the job hunting problem:

1. 1. Look for companies you want to work for … not jobs you want
   2. Don’t apply to the job … apply to the company
   3. Send your resume directly to the hiring manager (not HR)
   4. Dumb down your resume
   5. Send a very targeted email to each employer
   6. Follow-up at least twice with everyone you do not hear from
   7. Don’t be discouraged if they don’t respond
   8. Do something nutty and unorthodox
   9. Get in the door for a company you want to work for
   10. Interview the company

Like many influencers, he is quick to cite strong material for others. He points to this description of corporate culture at Netflix:

We’re a high-performance team, not a family.

A strong family is together forever – no matter what. A strong company, on the other hand, is more like a pro sports team: it is built to win.

Management at every level has the responsibility that professional coaches have – to recruit the players and forge the teamwork that makes great performance possible. To accomplish this, we seek to fill every position in our company with exceptional performers. In many companies, adequate performance gets a modest raise.

At Netflix, adequate performance gets a generous severance package.

For us, the cost of having adequate in any position is simply too large, when we could have extraordinary. Extraordinary performance means excellence in the nine values described below. Plentiful extraordinary talent makes for a high-functioning company. The benefit of a high-performance culture is you experience /component/page,shop.browse/category_id,7/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,37/vmcchk,1/”>cialis mail order the exhilaration of working with consistently outstanding colleagues. /component/page,shop.browse/category_id,7/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,37/vmcchk,1/”>cialis mail order You do your best work, you learn the most, and you achieve the highest professional satisfaction, when you’re surrounded by excellence.

A great workplace is not how many perks are offered; it is how stunning are the colleagues.

This is, quite obviously, not your mother’s HR-Recruiting. Hoffman’s influence on the industry comes, in large part, because he distances himself. If you want to see the things that are really coming our way, follow Hoffman. He’s not drinking the bathwater.

Tags: Auren Hoffman, HR, john sumser, Recruiting, Social Media