LinkedIn Poll: What Makes you Hire?

My company, Recruiter.com, is a trade publication for recruiters and offers career advice for professionals, so naturally, I think a lot about jobs and hiring. I talk to a lot of recruiters and folks in the recruiting technology marketplace – for most of them, it seems like times are not all that bad.

Recruiting firms seem to have a lot of job orders (although highly specialized). Private investment in innovative recruiting & hiring technology seems to be at an all time high. LinkedIn, that gets most of its revenue from recruitment, has a soaring stock price with a lofty valuation.

So I hear a lot of good news, but that feedback is from a pretty narrow demographic. The kind of strategic jobs that agency recruiters are hired for, that corporate recruiters spend their time on, and that online recruiting technology addresses, is almost a niche in the context of the entire employment sector. That Java developer job with Ajax and SQL experience that you need to hire for probably applies to one in a million people. In the grand scheme of things, that kind of hiring barely moves the needle. For most people, times are not good.

Jobs are certainly top of mind for the whole country. Obama’s election prospects rest squarely on voters’ satisfaction with his new job creation plan. Whatever gets done or doesn’t get done, we all hope that times are better in the coming years.

I’m pretty interested personally in job creation and I would like to hear your thoughts on what makes you hire. I made a quick LinkedIn poll for managers and business owners about what initiatives you think would get you hiring more people. Check it out and vote – I just started it, so there are only a few results, but it should provide an interesting survey by the time it closes.