For my Minnesota and/or non recruiter, HR, career blogger friends there is an interesting character who goes by the name Recruiting Animal who calls his cave, err blog, Recruiting Animal. He used to go by the name Canadian Headhunter. I am not sure why the change or if one of the provinces were in revolt, probably Quebec. He is one of the coolest guys around.

Recruiting Animal has a podcast called The Recruiting Animal Show and I was his guest today.

Others on the call were Harry Joiner of Marketing Headhunter, Maureen Sharib of NameSourcer.com, and my buddy (and college football junkie) Amybeth Hale of Amybeth Hale – Research Goddess. I have a lot of respect for Harry, Maureen and Amybeth so spending some time with them on the phone was great.

Recruiting Animal recently won the award of best recruiting personality at the RecruitingBlogs.com contest and I think he lived up to it well today. This is not a button down show that would appear on the Wall Street Journal. This is more my speed with some character, a free flow of ideas, and I think I said, “suck” and “damn” a couple of times. In other words I had some fun.

After a 60+ minute conversation I came out in one piece and unbruised. We covered many topics including how I got into the business, my use of referrals, cold calls, being a IT recruiter in Minneapolis, and of course this blog.

Topic, or the line of thought, I enjoyed the most was talking about how I believe recruiting should be about creating relationships and not focused on the transaction.

There was a suggestion made that I should change the name of the blog, and/or my nickname, to “Minnesota Headhunter” from “MN Headhunter”. Recruiting Animal asked about that and I have no real answer why I went with just the “MN.” When I started doing this blogging thing there was not much thought put into it.

(and here is the disclaimer that while that has worked for me I do not suggest that for everyone)

So I am going to look into it.

If you are curious about the work he is doing you can go to The Recruiting Animal Show main page where you will find links to the previous shows, you can click The Minnesota Headhunter for my link there or click to listen here:

Many thanks to my Canadian and furry friend for inviting me to participate.

High Paw! (my version of the high five, he is an animal after all)