International Recruiting

Interested in working for the Church? Ask questions and discuss opportunities with recruiters here.
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WelchTC
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#21

Post by WelchTC »

RussellHltn wrote:OK, can someone clue me in on how this all works? I've never set up a facebook or myspace page. I kind of like to keep the different compartments of my life separate. Is that possible or is this a case where potential employers see my religion or other social aspects?
LInked in is a cool service that allows you to link to individuals you know or have worked with in the past. It then allows you to make new connections through your existing network. Go ahead and try it by creating an account and then searching for me "Tom Welch". There are many Tom Welchs in LinkedIn but you will figure out which one I am. THen add me to your network.

Tom
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thedqs
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#22

Post by thedqs »

Also it is interesting to see how many profession friends of friends one has so if one needs a connection into another company for a job then one can quickly find one.
- David
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bhofmann
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#23

Post by bhofmann »

I just signed up with LinkedIn and found a lot of long lost colleagues. It was very interesting how people connected.
aquintanal-p40
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#24

Post by aquintanal-p40 »

I couldn't seem to get the quote function to work for me today, so I'll just respond to a few things I've read in the order that I read them.

It's true that we have not always responded to every application we receive. Sometimes it does take a significant amount of time for us to filter through the resumes when we receive hundreds of applications for one position. However, there is an automated email process available to us that we should be utilizing that allows us to email whether the candidate is moving on to the next phase or to send a "regret" letter. I can bring this up in our next meeting. We appreciate the feedback.

I am the recruiter responsible for college recruiting (I've been with the Church for about 5 weeks now) :) We have never had a formalized program, but that's my goal by the end of this year. You will see us at "key" career fairs (i.e. those schools that have LDS students and good tech programs). You will see us at BYU Tech 9Sep 20), BYU Career Fair (October 3rd), USU Tech Fair (Nov 1), and BYU-I Career Fair (Oct 17?). We have been to UVSC and the U of U already. We are also expanding our internship program and looking at doing "pre-hires" - meaning, we hire you say in October, but the internship doesn't start until the following May when school is out. In the meantime, we would invite you to Intern acitvities we have for our current interns.

We are also organizing class lectures at the local schools and BYU-I. For this program, we have one of our managers give a guest lecture in a classroom. We are working on finding and connecting with the professors that will allow us to come into their classes. If any of you have the inside track, let us know! ;)

We have a Tech Talk coming up on October 3rd at the Boston Institute. The insitute class goes from 7-8:30 then David Burggraaf, Director of Software Development, will be giving a talk (not sure of the topic yet). We'll also have a recruiter there (me) who will have info on employment with the Church. If you know of any students or family or friends looking to work for the Church this is a great opporutnity.

The LDS Employment Center at Welfare Square has a Professional Networking Meeting every Monday morning. They have a speaker and then candidates bring their resumes and give a 30 second bio. Recruiters from many local companies are there, including reps from the Church. Either I attend for ICS or another rep from our Central HR (recruiting for the whole Church) every week. I'll be there next Monday. If you hand me your resume, I can guarantee it will get into the right hands. I can't guarantee you will get interviewed or hired but at least you will have a foot in the door that wasn't there before!

As Cassie mentioned, if you have a profile set up in our online system, you can keep it updated. We can use that database to find people when a new position opens. We do it all the time. :)

It's great that LinkedIn was mentioned as well as our new LDSConnect program. We just had an activity with our EIM department where we utilized LinkedIn. You should see many of our EIM group there - maybe you know someone and can connect! We love employee referrals!!

So... that was certainly long enough...hope it helped!
Amy
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HaleDN
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#25

Post by HaleDN »

tomw wrote:LInked in is a cool service that allows you to link to individuals you know or have worked with in the past. It then allows you to make new connections through your existing network. Go ahead and try it by creating an account and then searching for me "Tom Welch". There are many Tom Welchs in LinkedIn but you will figure out which one I am. THen add me to your network.
Tom
It is straightforward to search for people by name or those associated with the same companies which I have worked for, but it isn't clear how to view all of the people who have joined the LDS Connected group on LinkedIn. I stumbled across this when I happened to view someone's profile who happened to be in this group, then I could click on their LDS Connected link (127 people in the list so far, by the way). But if you didn't happen to already have people in your network who are a member of this group, there doesn't appear to be a way to view these individuals.

Did I overlook something obvious?
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mkmurray
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#26

Post by mkmurray »

haledn wrote:It is straightforward to search for people by name or those associated with the same companies which I have worked for, but it isn't clear how to view all of the people who have joined the LDS Connected group on LinkedIn. I stumbled across this when I happened to view someone's profile who happened to be in this group, then I could click on their LDS Connected link (127 people in the list so far, by the way). But if you didn't happen to already have people in your network who are a member of this group, there doesn't appear to be a way to view these individuals.

Did I overlook something obvious?
I found a way to it on the home page you are shown when you are logged in. It was at the bottom of the right column.
Recruiter-p40
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Remote workers

#27

Post by Recruiter-p40 »

bhofmann wrote:What is the Church's policy on remote workers? You might have better luck if you widen the net to allow people to work for the Church from outside of Utah.
:cool: We do realize that remote workers would bring in strong talent throughout the Church and make recruiting a bit easier. Although at this time the Church is not prepared to hire remote workers.

Recruiter
blackrg
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#28

Post by blackrg »

Well, I'll throw myself out here on a limb...

I'm actively seeking a job with the LDS Church right now. I have been since January 2007. I'm committed enough to it that I've pulled my info off of monster and am ignoring all other contacts for the moment. I'm only interested in working for the Church. I've applied for several jobs listed on the LDS jobs site. Of the many I've applied for, I was contacted back on 1 that lead to a phone interview (wasn't a good fit for that particular job), and received an email on another something to the effect that it wasn't available anymore. No response at all on any of the others (and there were several). In addition to that, most or all of those are still listed even though some are almost a year old (somehow I'm doubting they're still valid).
The one good contact I had was regarding a job that was never listed for the Family History department. They interviewed me over the phone then flew me out (March) and interviewed me. The interview went well and they really liked me as a candidate. However, months went by and they're still interviewing and still haven't made a decision (It was initially indicated they could have an answer for me in 2 weeks). During this process one of the other groups that had helped with the interviewing expressed an interest in me should the first group decide not to hire me, but to avoid competing was holding off until the first group had made a decision. Finally things reached a point where the new version of the Family Search site went live and I guess FH decided to do some major reorganizing and hiring was frozen. About this point the first group decided the second group should have a shot at me since they didn't know what was going to happen. The second group however, had moved on and had already filled their positions. As of a few weeks ago I was told that the dust was beginning to settle with the reorganizing and they were hoping to be able to make a decision soon. As of today, I'm still waiting.
My bishop, who knows I'm looking, handed me the little tech recruitment flier the church put out a few weeks ago more as an attempt at humor than anything else given that he knows how long I've been waiting. The situation is such that personally, I'm taking a lot of heat from parents about how I should forget working for the Church and go look for a real job. My spouse though, has been quite supportive.

The long and short of it is I believe there are a lot of qualified technical people out here who'd like to work for the Church, but we just can't figure out for the life of us how...

Currently, the http://www.lds.org/jobs portal is the only real way in that I'm aware of. This needs a major overhaul. There needs to be a very clear cut login process available if you have a resume on file already (not update my profile, click, click, click, yes everything is the same, okay, now I see the markers showing the ones I already applied for...)

Jobs listed need to be maintained. If they're not available anymore, remove them.

Jobs applied for need follow up. If a candidate, contact me. If I'm not, let me know.

The application window needs to be reasonable. "Okay, we'll recruit for X weeks, interview for X weeks, and make a final decision to hire, close the position, or go back to recruiting because there are no suitable candidates by X date". This window should be communicated to the candidates and tightly followed to avoid misunderstandings, problems, and keep the whole recruitment process on tract (You did need to hire someone right? If you really needed this person, something is suffering as long as the position goes unfilled.)

I get the sense that there are probably a lot of jobs that don't get listed on the site. I could be wrong. If there are, then internally, you need to get your departments behind supporting and using the job site.

Your jobs site is fairly cold. It's very much a "Don't contact us, we'll contact you if we see something we're interested in." Sometimes this is necessary. Sometimes it's just the approach to hiring that a given company decides to take. If you're short on candidates, it may be the wrong approach. Personally, I'd appreciate it if your recruiters were more publicly visible and approachable. One of the things that caught my attention about LinkedIn was for the first time I could see recruiters, information about them, and had something of a way to contact them (didn't really like LinkedIn's approach though - a readily available e-mail address would have done it for me. I tried this approach today. We'll see where it gets me. I wouldn't mind seeing the Church developing something along these lines internally that's more specialized for it's needs.

Follow up. This has been a real sore point for me. If I'm talking to a recruiter and he tells me that they should have some sort of an answer in two weeks and to call him back then (I'd think he should be calling me instead of me calling him, but that's minor), that in two weeks when I call him and spend the next week calling daily, leaving voice mail, etc. and I can't even get a call back responding to my voice mail, there's a problem. I'm not harassing anyone here, I was told to call. I'm placing 1 call every 24 hours from the point I was told to call forward trying to get a response. If you tell me to call you, I expect you to take the call. If you're not there and I leave a message, given that you told me to call, you at least need the courtesy to return the call. If you don't have an answer, that's fine, but tell me you don't have it. I've found over the years that customers are FAR more tolerant of problems if they're informed. If they're in the dark, you can pretty much bet they're going to be hostile. This wasn't a one time problem, but a repeated problem. Thankfully I had the phone numbers of some of the people involved in the hiring process and would circumvent this problem by ignoring the recruiter and calling them direct. They were helpful and I appreciated them taking time to talk to me, but, being frank, HR needs to do it's job. During the interviews I heard a number of comments about HR and none of them were positive. This leads me to believe the problem I was experiencing probably wasn't limited to issues with a single individual. If your departments don't feel that HR is properly supporting them, then this is probably a major contributing factor to the problems I've listed above.
Had this been any other company, I would have dropped the job, given up attempting to contact, and taken a position elsewhere. However it's the Church, and I'm really bent on wanting to work for the Church right now.

I'll confess that one of the first thoughts that came to mind when I discovered the tech site here was that possibly this was a way to find real people inside the Church who were involved with the recruitment process and perhaps find a job. This didn't seem to hold true at first (though I have enjoyed discussing a variety of technical topics here) I'm happy to see that it appears to be changing. (I might also note that the Family History department still seems to have little representation here formally)

As for working remote - I have a lot of experience with this. As a network engineer it's pretty rare for me to actually be sitting in front of whatever it is I'm working on, even if it's in the same building. I would have considered working for the Church long before now had it not been for this issue. I had to get over the issue of relocating before I could convince myself to talk to the Church about a job.

Anyway, I'm still here, still trying, still hoping to find a tech job with the Church. With any luck, I didn't just shoot myself in the foot.
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McDanielCA
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#29

Post by McDanielCA »

I am sorry to hear of your trouble with this. That is what this forum is for. We are aware that this has happened and have taken steps to make sure that this isn't something that happens again. I promise we are continually making an effort to perfect our process and make the customer (you!) happy.

Our technical recruiters do read this forum and I believe one is already in touch with you. I hope he can help!
blackrg
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#30

Post by blackrg »

Thanks. They have been. Given it's after 5pm your time though I assume it's tomorrow they want me to call :P
I appreciate it. I hope my post was of some help.
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