Michigan Recruiter’s Conference – November 1st – Detroit, MI! Registration is Now Open!

Posted on July 30, 2018 by Tim Sackett

The 4th Annual Michigan Recruiter’s Conference will take place on November 1st, 2018 onsite at the GM Headquarters RenCen in downtown Detroit, MI. Registration is now open for this event. There is limited seating because of space constraints. Only 250 registrations will be accepted! This event will SELL OUT, don’t wait!

Okay – all that nonsense is out of the way! Why should you and your corporate recruiting team come? Yes, I specifically said “corporate” recruiting team. No staffing, RPO, or vendors will be allowed to register. Hate me if you want, but it actually works really well. Corporate TA leaders and pros can learn without being pimped constantly!

When Jim and I started this conference 4 years ago we did so that our teams would have world-class recruiting development in our own backyard. National conferences are great, but they are expensive! We couldn’t afford to send our teams, but if we had one local, we could bring our entire team!

Jim and I knew most of the great Talent Acquisition speakers personally, or we knew someone who knew them personally, and we felt pretty confident we could talk them into coming to beautiful Michigan! Okay, they all owe us favors and we just happen to be in Michigan! Either way, the Michigan Recruiter’s Conference has worked out wonderfully!

The 2018 Michigan Recruiter’s Conference lineup is Awesome!

– Torin Ellis – Diversity Strategist speaking on “Conversation to Commitment”

– Angie Verros – Sourcing/TA Expert speaking on getting more candidate replies

– Michael Arena, Ph.D. – Chief Talent Officer at GM speaking on TA Transformation

– Dawn Burke – HR and Talent Expert speaking on getting more out of your hiring managers

– Holly Fawcett – Sourcing Ninja at Social Talent sharing the latest and greatest Sourcing magic!

– Plus, additional sessions on DIversity Recruiting and Recruitment Marketing!

I want to thank this year’s sponsors: General Motors (just exceptional automobiles), Greenhouse (just an exceptional ATS) and Smashfly (just an exceptional Recruitment Marketing platform). They allow us to keep the cost of the entire conference down to just $89 per person, that includes, coffee, breakfast, drinks, lunch, snacks, oh yeah, and all that great freaking TA development and thought leadership!

Register Today! (over 100 tickets have already been sold in the 1st week!)

@SocialTalent’s Talent Talks with Tim Sackett and Johnny Campbell

Posted on July 19, 2018 by Tim Sackett

Hey gang!

When I was over in London a few weeks ago speaking at the Sourcing Summit UK, Social Talent’s CEO Johnny Campbell and I sat down to talk shop on how can organizations fix their recruiting.

We probably shot 45 minutes to an hour of footage, the team then broke it down to a really great 20 minutes!

For those who don’t know Johnny or SocialTalent you should really check them out. I’m a huge fan of their platform, so much so, my own team has been using it for 2 years!

Here’s the promo video for it – click the link below to watch the full 20 minutes!

Watch the full video! (just click the link)

The 4 Things Great Recruiters Do Every Day!

Posted on July 18, 2018 by Tim Sackett

I’ve hired over one hundred recruiters in my career. Not a ton, but a pretty good sample size. I’ve had some of those hires go on to become great Talent Acquisition pros, as well as some who have completely bombed in the profession. It’s not an easy profession to be successful at, but I’ve seen some basic things that the most successful recruiters, I know, do every single thing day:

Daily motivation. Great recruiters are self-motivated by nature, but the best ones still find ways to give themselves that extra little kick every day. It might be one client or job order they decide they will close on that day. It might be an activity number they challenge themselves with for the day. It might just be re-centering on a larger overall goal they are chasing and what they’re doing in that day will mean to reach that goal.

Critical of their own work. The best recruiters I’ve worked with own the positions they’re trying to fill, their candidates, and their interviews. There is no blame to pass around when something goes wrong. They own it. An interview is a no-show, they own it. They can look inward and go, next time I won’t have this happen because I’m going to do that one more thing to ensure it’s successful.

They step up. Hey, guys we have a really critical position that just came open from a hiring manager, who wants it? The best recruiters always step up and want to work those high profile openings. They want the challenge, and they are comfortable with the pressure. They also step up with their ideas on how the organization can get better, and share freely.

Daily focus. Successful recruiters can focus in and finish, every day. It’s so easy in recruiting to get pulled in a hundred different directions. The most successful people stay focused on the job at hand and don’t allow the ‘noise’ to take them off their plan. They find ways to lock themselves in and keep going until they reach their outcome.

HR and Recruiting both have the same main daily issue we face, we turn ourselves into firefighters. We run from made up emergency to made up emergency. It feeds our need to feel like we accomplished something today and became a savior.

The most successful recruiters are no different. They get the opportunity to be firefighters, just like we all do, but they make a conscious decision not to allow themselves to slide down the pole and jump on the fire truck.

How can you make yourself more successful today?

DisruptHR Detroit Speaker Applications Now Being Accepted!!! But, you probably can’t handle it! #8Mile

Posted on July 16, 2018 by Tim Sackett

Look, I just like being honest. This isn’t DisruptHR Brentwood or DisruptHR Nantucket! This is Detroit! We do real HR in the D!

Come on, just be real with yourself for a moment, you can’t handle Detroit. It’s okay, you’ll do fine at DisruptHR Sun City. Just slow down and do some tour stops before you come to Detroit!

You see, we actually make stuff that sells for money in Detroit. We have employees who get their hands dirty. We have to live in snow and cold for six months out of the year, which tends to leave us a little less likely to be willing to consume your weak B.S. When you come to DisruptHR Detroit, you better bring it!

Alright, I hear you feeling yourself. You just might be ready to hit 8 Mile and the rap battle that is HR in Detroit. DisruptHR Detroit will take place on September 20th onsite at Quicken Loans awesome event space in the heart of downtown Detroit.

Want to speak at DisruptHR Detroit? (what you need to know)

– It’s 5 Minutes, 20 slides, the slides automatically move every 15 seconds (this is not something you can change!)

– If you’re a vendor you try selling your product in the 5 minutes, we’ll Gong Show your ass right off the stage!

– DisruptHR is about emotion – make us laugh, make us cry, make us angry, make us motivated. Just make us feel something!

– There will be over 250 HR and Talent Pros in the audience cheering you on. (FYI – many in the audience will be drinking!)

– You will get a video recorded, professionally produced copy of your presentation!

Apply to Speak at DisruptHR Detroit!

The Talent Fix Now Approved for @SHRM CP & SCP Recertification Credit!

Posted on July 12, 2018 by Tim Sackett

By now I hope you know I wrote a book! If not, guess what I wrote a book! The Talent Fix: A Leader’s Guide to Recruiting Great Talent is a top-rated Talent Acquisition book on Amazon and the best selling book at SHRM’s Talent Conference (Top 8 at SHRM National, which was really cool!).

Also, it was recently approved for SHRM CP and SCP recertification credit!

So, you buy the book. You read the book. And SHRM and I will approve you for recertification credit of your SHRM CP or SCP! Okay, I have really have nothing to do with approving your SHRM CP and SCP! 😉

One Big Takeaway

I had a reader reach out to me last week. They just got done reading the book and they shared one of the big takeaways they got from the book, and it wasn’t one I would have expected!

When you think of Employment Branding and Recruitment Marketing (Chapter 7) we tend to think that it’s first Employment Branding (EB) and then it’s Recruitment Marketing (RM). In fact, these two functions within Talent Acquisition are really completely separate!

This reader, like most us, believed these two were attached at the hip. You first created your EB, you then used RM to get your EB shared to the audience you were going after.

After reading my book she realized these two functions really have nothing to do with each other. Both can live without the other. You can use a great RM strategy to promote your jobs and organization and get very good results.

You can create an awesome EB and share that with candidates without any type of RM strategy or technology and it can be great. There is no need to have both, but both working together create a synergy that one does not have without the other!

Create a great EB and create a great RM machine and you will see results that are far better than anything else you’ve done. Far too often I see organizations that focus most of their effort and resources on one side and not the other.

I naturally put these two together within the chapter because I would never do one without the other. It doesn’t make sense to me, but you can. In reality, we all have an employment brand within the market, whether you actually created it or not.

Many times we internally think way higher of our EB than the actual market in which we are hiring gives us credit. Most of us will have an EB that the majority of our hiring audience has no idea about. Which is why a great RM strategy is critical to finishing off great EB work.

You can do one without the other, but rarely will it ever make sense.

Okay – that’s like 1/16th of a SHRM CP or SCP credit – go buy the book and get the rest!

The Candidate Bill of Rights (revisited)

Posted on July 10, 2018 by Tim Sackett

In November 2010 Monster.com asked me to write a post on a hot topic at that time a “Candidate Bill of Rights“. Needless to say, I’m not a huge fan of a Candidate Bill of Rights – I’m a Capitalist and believe in a free-market system of HR and Recruiting. Here was my main point then, and what they are still today:

Candidates –

You Don’t Have To Apply:

If we have a crappy working environment – you don’t have to apply
If we don’t pay appropriately for the market – you don’t have to apply
If we don’t give my employees opportunities for growth – you don’t have to apply
If we don’t treat you like a human – you don’t have to apply
If we don’t give you a full job description – you don’t have to apply
If we don’t tell you every step of the process – you don’t have to apply

You Don’t Have To Work Here:

If we make you wait endlessly without any feedback – you don’t have to work here
If we make you an offer that you don’t like – you don’t have to work here
If we don’t offer the right work-life balance – you don’t have to work here
If we give you a bad Candidate Experience – you don’t have to work here

Candidates – if any of the above is true – you have some decisions to make:

1. Can I live with what I know about the company and the experience they put me through to get this offer?

2. IF SO, do I want to come and work for the company?

3. IF YES – welcome aboard, you’re coming on ‘Eyes Wide Open’

4. IF NO – thanks, and good luck, we’ll keep trying to get better in case you want to apply again some other time.

You see we all have choices. If you don’t like the way I’m treating you as a candidate, don’t come and work at my company. I would hope that most HR Pros are smart enough to get this fact. Treat candidates like garbage and they’ll stop applying for your jobs, thus making your job all the more difficult to fill. That might be a bit pie-in-the-sky thinking because I also know way too many HR/Talent Pros that don’t get this!

They have a little bit of power and have decided to torture candidates with painfully long and arduous application and selection processes that aren’t helpful to their own companies, statistically, and definitely aren’t helpful to the candidates. During a recession, they don’t see much impact from these horrible processes, but eventually, the tide turns and face the results of their actions. Karma is a bitch!

So, do we need a candidate bill of rights? No! Do you need to spend a ton of time, effort, and resources on candidate experience? No, as well! Don’t go right ditch-left ditch and start over correcting. Treat candidates like you would want to be treated. Or don’t, and pay the price! Have a few standards and etiquette, and some manners. It’s not hard and it’s not expensive.

The Top 7 Rookie Hiring Mistakes!

Posted on June 28, 2018 by Tim Sackett

One of my awesome recruiting managers at HRU (the technical staffing company I run) is in the process of making his first hire! It’s pretty exciting. Do you remember the first hire you ever got to make on your own?

You get nervous! You don’t want to make a mistake, because you know how awful it is to have a bad employee working for you, so the last thing you want to do is make a wrong decision. You want this first hire to be a rock star!

All of our managers who are going through the hiring process for the first time all face the same issues. They are unsure of what to really do. If you’re a parent, the best analogy I can give is when the hospital lets you leave with your newborn! Do you remember that?

You get to the lobby. You have your baby strapped into that car seat like they are about to enter a crash test site! When you reach the doors, they slide open, and you kind of look around. You’re waiting, for just a second, for someone to stop you! You can’t believe anyone would just allow you to walk out of the hospital with a baby! Did you guys even check who I am! I have a hard time throwing my clothes all the way into the hamper, and you’re just letting me leave with a baby!?!

That’s the feeling all of our managers get when they hire for the first time! Wait, you’re letting me choose!? Are you sure you’re okay with this?!

To help our new managers I put together the Top 7 Rookie Hiring Mistakes for managers to avoid. Here they are:

1. You wait for HR and/or Talent Acquisition to control the process. This is your hire, that you’ll have to manage, live with, and fire if they suck! Get involved! Immediately!

2. You fall into the trap of wanting to hire someone who is perfect. You’re not perfect. Your CEO is not perfect. No one is perfect. Hire someone who can succeed in your job, your organization, under your leadership. Don’t hire perfect.

3. You try and hire someone who is just like you! You were successful in the job, which is why you are now the leader. So, it makes sense that someone just like you will also be successful. This tactic fails more times then it succeeds because we actually suck at managing ourselves! Find someone who compliments your weaknesses, and has the skills to do the job and you’ll have a better chance to find success. You’ll also add more diversity to your team!

4. You don’t move fast enough. If you interview a very talented person, there is a good chance someone else is also interviewing this very talented person. Pull the trigger and get them before someone else steals them from you!

5. You wait too long to fire a miss-hire. First-time leaders are the worse with this. They feel like they can make anyone work! Plus, they feel more ownership since it was their first time. Stop it! This won’t be the last time you make a bad hire. Give yourself the best leadership gift ever and fire a bad hire quickly!

6. You don’t believe it’s your job to recruit and source talent. Guess what, champ? The organization gave you the keys to run a department. They believe in you. If I’m given the keys to run anything, I’m running the whole thing! It’s my department, which means I own the talent, which means I’m going to help find the right talent for my team. I know what is needed better than anyone! TA can help me, that’s great! But I own this!

7. You believe that leadership will judge you based on this hire. Leadership won’t judge you based on one hire. Leadership will judge you based on a pattern of hiring success, or lack thereof. One hire will not define you. Many hires will. R.E.L.A.X.

So, what do you think, HR and Talent Pros? What are the biggest mistakes you see Rookie managers making when it comes to hiring? Hit me in the comments!

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Filtered_ The 1st Objective Tech Interview Platform

Posted on June 27, 2018 by Tim Sackett

Today on the Weekly Dose I review the technical interview platform Filtered. Filtered is not the first technical interview platform on the market, but they might be the most advanced interviewing platform for IT talent that I’ve seen on the market.

Filtered was built by engineers who turned into Recruiters, but decided to turn back into engineers because the tech interview world was so broken they felt compelled to do something about it! What they did was build an IT interview platform that stops all of the cheating that is currently going on in the industry!

If you hire IT talent and you use some kind of coding test, etc., you already know how the game is played and won. There are massive corruption and cheating going on in IT hiring, because the current interview platforms allow for one person to log on and take an interview for another, pass it, and then the person who can’t do the work shows up, or shows up at a much higher pay rate then they should because they tested higher then what they are really capable of.

Filtered puts a stop to this in a number of ways using technology that constantly scans works, takes facial snapshots every few seconds, and utilizes machine learning to raise red flags of potential cheaters in progress of assessment.

What do I like about Filtered?

– Filtered security is groundbreaking when it comes to stopping the cheating that is going on with your IT hiring. Filtered doesn’t allow cutting and pasting of code, it doesn’t allow the person who starts the test to get up and someone else to sit in and finish, it shows you exact GPS data of where a person is taking the test.

Why is this important? When Filtered ran a recent test for a client they were able to show one IT Contingent company the client was working with had 20+ IT assessments take place for 20+ different candidates from the exact same house in New Jersey! Cheating is going on, you are either ignoring it or don’t care!

– The Filtered team works with your IT team to create the right assessments and challenges that are needed to not just find qualified candidates but to actually find candidates that are the best that are applying.

– Recorded video interviews explaining why they did an assessment or challenge in the way they completed the task.

– Real-time data ranking so corporations can see which recruiters or which contingent firms are providing the best talent for your organization.

– Filtered shows verified skills being assessed, but also allows candidates to show other skills they might have as well, which can be verified within the system.

I love interview technology that helps organizations make better selections. One problem we’ve found out within the industry is that if people can cheat, they’ll find a way to cheat, so the technology has to stay out in front of the cheaters! Filtered is at the forefront of stopping the corruption that is taking place in the contingent IT industry.

There’s a great chance your contingent providers of IT talent are cheating your system. It’s rampant coast to coast. The most common is having someone else take the assessment, which gives you the belief you’re getting senior talent and paying for senior talent, and in reality, a junior/entry level IT person shows up to work.

I would encourage you all to demo Filtered and compare them to other technical interview platforms you are using. Filtered also has built a Data Science specific assessment as well, which is the only one I’ve seen in the industry. In a growing field like data science, it’s easy to make bad hires, so this is one more reason to look at the platform!

The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market. None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion. There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find. If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

What’s the difference between Recruiting and Sourcing?

Posted on June 21, 2018 by Tim Sackett

I’m on the road this week at SHRM National and at The Sourcing Summit UK. Two very different groups. The SHRMies will be more traditional HR and Recruiter types that wear a lot of hats. The SOSUites will be very specialized in sourcing.

I get asked a lot about what’s really the difference between Recruiting and Sourcing? Or, where does Sourcing end and Recruiting begin? Or something similar to these questions.

The answer is it doesn’t matter.

The organization has a need for talent.

The organization has to find or grow talent.

You and others in the organization need to figure this out.

So, figure it out!

Everyone is going to design and process this differently. Some will have Sourcers take it all the way until the candidate is screened, then the Recruiter will come into finish the process. Some will have the Sourcers just find the talent, then have the Recruiter work to contact, screen, etc.

It doesn’t matter how you design it if it works for your organization, and, this is key, it’s replicable no matter who you have in the role.

Stop. Think. Let that process for a second.

One of the biggest mistakes I see really good organizations make is they build and design process around the talent they have right now. One piece of that talent changes and all of a sudden it no longer works.

“Well, Tim, did all the sourcing and just handed me great talent!” Great, Tim quit because he was doing most of the work and you took all the credit. How is that process working now?

Talent Acquisition is really hard when you have to make it up new each time you have an opening! Talent Acquisition becomes sustainable when you can plug in skill sets you need and the machine keeps spitting out talent no matter who it is.

Is it Sourcing? Is it Recruiting? It doesn’t freaking matter. Make it work for your organization.

What I find with the most innovative TA shops on the planet is they didn’t look at what everyone else was doing. They looked at what their organization needed and they solved for that problem. Many times the solution was doing something no one else was doing.

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @AltruLabs – Humanize Your Employment Brand

Posted on June 12, 2018 by Tim Sackett

Today on The Weekly Dose I review the employment branding technology Altru Labs. Altru Labs is an employment branding platform that will transform the way you create content, market your company’s employer brand and personalize the candidate experience.

How?

That’s the cool part! Mostly through your own employees, like a brand ambassador program, but different!

It’s kind of like Quora for your own company. Quora basically is a platform where people ask questions, and people who know answers will answer back. Altru Labs, through video, lets candidates ask questions and your employees answer using Altru’s simple mobile video app.

These videos are then embedded into your career site and searchable, so candidates can come onto your career site and discover almost anything they want about you, your jobs, your culture, etc.

On the talent acquisition side of Altru Labs, you have a great dashboard where you can actually funnel certain questions to certain employees who you think will be great at answering. Candidates can also pull all answers for a certain employee to see all of their content.

On the content side, you can share your employee videos on your career site, directly on a job description posting in your ATS, or through direct social promotion of your recruiters and employee ambassadors.

What I like about Altru Labs:

– Mobile-first design so you are using the power of every smartphone each of your employees is carrying with them as a potential employment branding distribution tool through short-range video.

– While it’s designed, originally, for recruiting talent, this is a mobile video sharing platform that can be used across your enterprise in L&D, HR, inter-team communications and knowledge share, etc. The usage is almost unlimited because of the ease of use and ability to search and share content.

– This truly gives you a tool to highlight your best employee advocates in a way candidates will love. Want to know what it’s really like to work at your company, at that location, in that position, for that manager? Yeah, that specific!!!

Very new technology on the market that has the potential to grow very quickly. Some very large brands, with employment marketing and branding teams, are already testing. The pricing model is currently designed for TA, but soon you’ll see this evolve as organizations will see other uses across the enterprise.

If you are looking to really energize your employment brand and/or employee ambassador program this is a must demo!