Spotlight on HR: Jonathan Kidder

Spotlight on HR series:
A Conversation With Jonathan Kidder from Amazon corporate

We’re putting together a series of articles with innovative and interesting human resource professionals. This is an opportunity to learn from other HR managers and exchange best practices, advice, and general experience. If you’d like to participate in this series and gain exposure to relevant networks, we’d love to hear from you! Send an email to tal@recruiterslineup.com.

Tell us about your work experience in HR.

I have roughly a decade of recruiting experience. I started in the summer of 2010 after graduating with my bachelor’s in marketing and communications. At first, my role was focused on social media and employer branding projects. They had me sit by the recruiting department and several months into my job I fell into sourcing. I loved the thrill of the search. Sourcing just came to be naturally – during college I enjoyed doing research projects. I also enjoyed communications and building relationships with people. Eventually, I got into doing full-cycle recruiting and I now work at Amazon corporate in Minneapolis. My main focus has been on tech recruiting.

What are the unique talents you bring to the field?

I enjoy solving problems. The majority of the roles that I’m working on are hard to fill tech openings. I love researching a new topic and talking about it with people in the field.

I love learning about the latest sourcing tools on the market. I write a weekly blog called WizardSourcer – where I blog about recruiting and talent sourcing updates.

Share your biggest success story in HR so far.

I just filled an opening that was open for roughly 10 months. It was a really challenging SDE mobile opening that required both ios and android experience. I’m very proud that I was able to find the right applicant for the team!

What is the best advice you’ve received during your career path, and from whom?

Time management – make sure to set daily goals and stick by your calendar. It’s very easy to get distracted by the day to day duties. I like to plan out my day by blocking out time for screening, sourcing, and scheduling, etc. The more you can stick to a daily goal the better you will be long term.

What’s your favorite HR tech tool?

My favorite tool at the moment has been using automation tools – Airtable and Zapier have been great resources to automate my recruiting efforts.

As an HR professional, how do you handle recruiting to achieve the best results?

I stick to my goals. My goals are to get 10 screens per week with 8 onsites per month resulting in 1.5 hires a month. Stick to your daily, weekly, and monthly goals. You will achieve the best results by creating routines. I wrote a blog post about how this topic: The 5 Daily Routines of a Successful Recruiter.

What do you hope to achieve in 2020?

I want to focus more on personalization. Writing better messages to passive candidates.. I think that’s an area where the majority of recruiters need to improve on!

Jonathan Kidder has over 9 years of full-cycle recruiting and research sourcing experience with 80+ recommendations from his recruiting peers on LinkedIn. He started his career at one of the largest RPO staffing firms in the world. In a company with 10,000+ recruiters, Jonathan became the leading expert in sourcing. He’s sourced and recruited for many different niche-fields including: Information Technology, Marketing, Sales, Engineering, Finance, and Operations. Jonathan has trained recruiting teams across the globe in: India, Asia, & Europe. He writes a weekly blog about recruiting news called WizardSourcer.

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