Category Archives: Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals

The Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Great_Recruiters – Real Time Recruiter Ratings!

Posted on by
1

This week on The Weekly Dose I review the Recruiter rating technology, Great Recruiters! Great Recruiters is not a yelp-type rating site type of technology. There are some on the market that do that now, but just like Yelp/TripAdvisor/etc. you run into problems with a free market unsolicited feedback sites.

Great Recruiters looked to take what we all want as Talent Acquisition Leaders and make it super simple and fast to gather data about recruiter performance from those who are actually being serviced by that recruiter. Not only does Great Recruiters measure recruiter performance, but it also measures your candidate experience in a real, timely way.

The technology is built to use with any sized recruiting team in virtually any type of recruiting – Corporate, staffing, RPO, you name it. If you have a team of recruiters or one recruiter, you can get feedback instantly from candidates on how your recruiters are doing. Great Recruiters allows you to gather recruiter insights from known candidates (candidates you know the recruiter is working with) and also gives each recruiter a unique url to gather feedback more broadly.

What I like about Great Recruiters: 

– Recruiting leaders get a dashboard of their entire team with easy access to all the feedback on each recruiter. In fact, both the TA Leader and the Recruiter get an instant notification when new feedback arrives.

– Great Recruiters gathers both solicited and unsolicited feedback. The first one is what you think, it’s the one-to-one candidate to recruiter relationship. The recruiter works with a candidate, you can easily see that in your ATS, and a survey is sent out to the candidate. The technology also allows you to gather unsolicited feedback as well through a unique url. Maybe you have a recruiter at a career fair and you want to measure that experience.

– Great Recruiters measures five key traits on each recruiter: Are your recruiters Genuine, Responsive, Experienced, an Advisor, and Transparent. 1 to 5 scale, 5 being the best. If your recruiter averages a certain level they can obtain a Great Recruiter rating badge to use on their social profiles.

– There is also a box on each survey for freeform comments, and the data shows that roughly 60% of candidates will add comments. Plus, it also asks each candidate if they have anyone who they would like to refer to the recruiter, with the hope being a great experience will lead to more referrals.

– Great Recruiters does one more really cool thing. Within the dashboard which each recruiter has access to, for their own data, they also have access to a “Knowledgebase” which is a learning tool where your recruiters can capture their best practices and share them within the team.

I feel in love with this technology because I don’t know of one Talent Acquisition leader that is responsible for a team of recruiters who wouldn’t want to use this immediately! It’s the ultimate recruiter performance/feedback tool, that will drive better candidate experience. Plus, it’s a Detroit-based team that put it together!

Clearly, if you run a team of recruiters, let’s say 10+, this is something you need to demo. If you run teams of recruiters at 100+, I would demo and implement as soon as possible, because here’s what I know. About 10% of those recruiters on big teams are just cruising and your managers have no real data to turn them over. This tech will drive recruiter behavior and performance in a way you don’t have currently.

—————————————————————————-

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

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @CrowdedWork mine the gold in your ATS!

Posted on by
Reply

This week on the Weekly Dose I review the TA technology Crowded. Crowded is a platform that fixes what’s wrong with most ATSs! What’s wrong with most ATSs? Let me explain.

A typical ATS does one thing really well. It posts jobs to your career site and collects applicants from those jobs posted. From there it basically allows you to digitally move applicants through your hiring process. That’s a normal ATS. Heck, that’s about 90% of the ATSs on the market.

What big issue then becomes what do you do with that huge database of applicants that you have? This is why Crowded was built. You spend a ton of money and resources filling your ATS with talent. If you are like most organizations in the world, that talent then sits in your ATS and dies (figuratively). Once most applicants apply for a job and enter your ATS they are never heard from again. This is a major problem!

Just because you didn’t hire this talent the first time they applied, doesn’t mean they might not be your next great hire, or a great hire a year or two down the road. Crowded is a technology that integrates with your ATS, pulls out your jobs and your applicant database and re-matches them on a constant basis. Crowded then allows you to reach out to these ‘newly’ found candidates and engage them with your current jobs.

Not only does Crowded do this matching, but Crowded also updates each candidate in your database. So, that entry-level engineer who applied two years ago, but you didn’t have anything, now becomes that Engineer with two years of experience working at your competition that is no super valuable and someone you desperately want to hire! That is why this technology is so powerful and needed by most organizations!

What I like about Crowded: 

– Can be used by both staffing, RPO, and Corporate. We all use ATSs, and we all face the same issue using ATSs.

– Bi-directional data exchange, which basically means all the cool stuff Crowded is doing, ends up back in your ATS (system of record) for compliance sake.

– Crowded allows your recruiters to communicate via email and text through their platform with each exchange being captured and uploaded back into the candidate ATS profile.

– Crowded has some built-in intelligent automation that will actually allow the system to automatically reach out to candidates that match your jobs at a certain level, so your recruiters don’t have to. Funny thing – almost no corporate TA shops use this, but staffing and RPO do! Why? You tell me! This is a brilliant use of technology and efficiency, everyone should use it.

– Data analysis from Crowded will help you make more strategic talent decisions. Crowded’s technology will show you data on what schools, companies, etc. you’re hiring from, and which ones are getting interviews, etc. This way you can be more strategic about where your team is spending its time and resources. The system will also show you apply vs. hired skills gaps.

You are sitting on a gold mine of talent in your ATS database, but you don’t ever mine it! Why? Because most ATSs suck at search, and most TA shops suck at searching our ATSs and then believing anyone in there has talent! The Crowded platform automates this process and bubbles up great talent that your team has been ignoring forever! Every single company has great hires in their ATS database waiting to be hired, but most of us never will. With Crowded, you’ll start to see these hires happen almost instantly.

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

The One Big Problem with Being Pretty

Posted on by
1

Don’t you hate pretty people? We are addicted to ‘pretty’ in America. Let’s face it, most of the world is addicted to pretty.

Pretty people get all the jobs. Pretty people get all the money. Pretty people get all the fame. Life as a pretty person is a heck a lot easier than being an ugly person! How do I know this? I’m a short, ginger with a Dad bod, I’m like the poster child for birth control!

This is why today, I’m a little excited!

Some new research shows that Ugly people actually have a leg up on pretty people when it comes to hiring! Yeah, baby! Give me a job! Here’s a bit from the American Psychological Association study:

While good-looking people are generally believed to receive more favorable treatment in the hiring process, when it comes to applying for less desirable jobs, such as those with low pay or uninteresting work, attractiveness may be a liability, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

“Our research suggests that attractive people may be discriminated against in selection for relatively less desirable jobs,” said lead author Margaret Lee, a doctoral candidate at the London Business School. “This stands in contrast to a large body of research that concluded that attractiveness, by and large, helps candidates in the selection process.”

The research was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology®.

Yeah – take that Discrimination you highly beautiful and desirable hunk of humankind!

Oh, wait, Ugly people have an advantage in getting crappy jobs…

Am I the only one crying in my office right now?

So, turns out you’re ugly. You basically have no advantages in life because the mix of your mom and dad’s genetic code produced something most people don’t find attractive. It’s like a lottery, but you lost. You lost the life lottery.

The one benefit you get is when you go to apply for a menial, low-end job, you’ll have an advantage over people who are attractive. “Sorry, Ashley, take your beautiful ass back Abercrombie, I’m running the fryer today, bitch!”

Don’t you love Life’s sense of humor?

So, the one big problem you have if your pretty is you will find it hard getting a crappy job. Yep, I don’t care that your dream is to have dirty fingernails, Stephen! Go back to that desk job making six figures and try not to get tears on your cashmere sweater.

I think what we see here has less to do with ugly and pretty, and more to do with selection profiling by hiring managers. It goes a little something like this:

  1. A pretty person applies for a low-end dirty job.
  2. The pretty person shows up for the interview.
  3. Hiring manager sees the pretty person and thinks “there is no way this beautiful person will ever stay working at this job”.
  4. Hiring manager continues to interview waiting to find an ugly enough person who the hiring manager feels lacks enough self-confidence to go look for a better job.
  5. The pretty person is denied work and is discriminated against.

We have this psychological belief as hiring managers that your looks play a role in tenure. We have a level of attractiveness internal meter we believe correlates to longevity. The better the job (and compensation) we tend to believe we can hold out for skills and attractiveness.

Go ahead and do some real-world research. Look at the most successful companies in the world and you’ll see, on average, they are more attractive across the board, then those companies that are the least successful.

It doesn’t always work out, but it mostly works out. Basically, 60% of the time, it works every time.

So, my ugly friends and peers. Go out today and walk with your held slightly higher knowing we have the advantage. Let’s just not talk to loudly about what that advantage is, okay?

2018 Talent Acquisition as a Career Survey! Take it now! @ATAPglobal

Posted on by
Reply

I need your help!

As you may know, in 2018 I became the President-elect for the Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals (ATAP). I’m pretty proud of that because I love our industry and spend countless hours advocating for Recruiting and TA pros worldwide.

One of the member benefits of joining ATAP is access to some great data and research. Our most recent project is our inaugural Talent Acquisition as a Career 2018 survey. This survey is meant for any and all Talent Acquisition and Recruiting professionals, including ATAP and Non-ATAP members.

So, PLEASE take a few minutes and complete the survey!

The results should provide us great insight into how TA professionals truly feel today about their roles and their opportunities to be successful in their TA career. We will be sharing the results of this survey publicly first at the Spring ERE Conference in San Diego (April 2-4, 2018), and then on the ATAP website.

Please do me this favor and take the survey. We are trying to get over 1,000 responses! Click here for the survey.

ONE MORE THING:

What the heck is ATAP?!? I get asked this question almost daily. ATAP stands for the Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals. Founded in 2016, ATAP’s mission is to develop a body of unified educational, ethical and measurement standards, advocate on issues that impact those in our profession, and build a global community of inspired and informed professionals. Not only am I a member, but I’m the President-elect (Hair Club for Men joke!) You should be one too – Join Here – use my code to get $5 off your first-year “ATAPDISCTS”! 

Generational Profiling – The Newest Trend in Recruiting!

Posted on by
7

We all have heard and know what Racial Profiling is, right?

Well, we get to add something new to our toolbox in recruiting, Generational Profiling!

Targeting someone because of their race is awful and illegal. Targeting someone based on their age is no different. It’s called it Generational Profiling and we are in the middle of an epidemic.

Take a look at the average age of these super popular tech brands:

You don’t have to be a genius to understand what’s going on in hiring in these companies. Remember a couple of years ago when we all got hot and bothered because Facebook and the like weren’t hiring women? Please educate me on how this is any different.

If the world, especially our work world, is moving to more and more of a technology focus, what are organizations doing to ensure they hiring for diversity across generations? I’ll tell you! Nothing! It’s not on the radar of 99.99% of organizations. We don’t give a crap if we hire older workers or not.

But, TIM, you don’t understand, older workers don’t get tech and they don’t want to work in tech!

Really?

Here are some fairly significant tech companies, compare them to the ones above:

27 years old average age of employees to 38 years old average age employees is statistically significant in a giant way!

IBM, Oracle and HP value the diversity of generations in the workplace, and are probably more likely to not be generationally profiling when hiring.

You hear “Generational Profiling” when CEOs of Fortune companies speak at shareholder meetings. They will say things like: “We need to ‘modernize’ our workforce”. They aren’t talking about re-skilling, they’re talking about getting younger, believing that’s their real problem. These old farts can’t do what we need to be done.

So, what do you do about it?

We, talent acquisition, need to start calling this crap out! If your hiring managers weren’t hiring women or minorities because of poor ‘cultural’ fit, you would call them out.

In Generational Profiling, ‘poor cultural fit’ equals ‘overqualified’. “Yeah, I don’t want to hire Tim because he’ll be bored in this role.” Bullshit. You don’t want to hire Tim because you might be challenged by having someone on your team that knows something you don’t!

We have the data to show generational profiling. You can put a report together that shows each hiring manager by age and years of experience, then show the exact same thing for their team, then show the candidates presented in the same manner. A really interesting thing will happen! You’ll instantly see which managers are profiling hires by age!

-Tim is 27 and has 6 years of experience post-college.

-Tim’s team’s average age is 24 and has 3 years post-college.

-Tim’s interviews selected average age is “X” with “X” experience.

-Tim’s interviews declined average age is “X+” with “X+” experience.

Stuff just got real!

No one, and I mean no one, likes to be called a racist or a sexist. Our hiring managers should feel the same way if they were called and ageist, but they’re not. We need that to change.

By the way, you will see this in promotions as well…

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: Will Blockchain Change Recruitment?

Posted on by
5

So, I didn’t make millions of dollars on Bitcoin and quite frankly it pisses me off when I miss bubble like this! At this point, you’re probably tired of hearing about Bitcoin and Blockchain. I’m thankful for the bubble because it forced me to learn what the heck Blockchain is!

I think Blockchain will play a role in TA Technology in the near future. When you think of how we hire people, based on some sort of profile and/or resume, we are putting a ton of trust into something that is basically made up by an individual with little or no checking to know if it’s legit or not.

We know most people exaggerate or flat out lie on their resumes, LinkedIn profiles, Facebook profiles, etc. In a very simple sense, Blockchain is built to ensure that no information about a transaction is lost and it’s validated by everyone else in the network.

What if everyone you hired had a ‘blockchain’ resume? Where you felt 100% confident that everything on their resume or profile was 100% accurate. Sounds very interesting, right!?

I’m not sure, but I think this is where Blockchain plays a role in HR and Talent Acquisition in the future. What if we had ‘one’ unchangeable profile/resume for every single person on the planet? One common way to present all of your education and work experience that was validated. It’s a little big brother-ish to think about, but it’s not beyond reason.

I mean how long until Google forces us all down this path!? 😉

It would definitely make us feel more confident in our hiring. It would force people to rethink not giving notice, starting a job, but then they leave after a few days, all kinds of crazy things we see candidates do but it never ‘hits’ their permanent record. What if your blockchain profile would show the times you accepted an interview, then no call/no showed it!? Oh boy! I would sign up for that!

What’s the benefit to candidates? This is ‘your’ profile. This is your life. You own it. If you did great work at a job and some supervisor that hated you was trying to bad mouth you behind your back, that would no longer work. Your good work would speak for itself. Unchangeable would be the facts.

Plus, Blockchain as a resume profile would be completely transparent. This would make you ‘findable’ to every employer. If you’re a rock star, you should get paid rock star money. A blockchain profile would benefit people who are really good at what they do. It would suck for people who are bottom feeders!

I don’t know if this will happen or could happen, but it’s exciting to think about a world of resumes and profiles that were easy to navigate and completely trustworthy. I can wait for flying cars, let’s get the HR Tech industry on this situation right now!

9 Ways IBM (and the rest of us) Should Be Reinventing Talent @IBMWatsonTalent

Posted on by
3

Amber Grewal is the Head of Global TA for IBM. It’s a big job. She posted on LinkedIn recently and gave her 9 ways IBM is reinventing recruiting. It’s pretty good. I’m not sure she wrote it. My experience is with giant corporations that they rarely would ever allow one person to post something so big on a social platform, but I’m sure she got in her ideas with some ‘corporate’ wordsmithing, either way, I liked it.

I like when large organizations put HR and TA leaders out in front of the brand. That’s always a risk. I like that IBM is taking that risk. They’re a big player in the HCM/TA tech space, and if you want my attention, give me less PR and marketing pitches, and more practitioner know-how!

Here is the infographic that “Amber” put together:

I’ll go through and give you my comments on all 9:

1. Upskill the Recruiting Function – Oh hell yes! The main problem with corporate recruiting is very little actual recruiting actually takes place. A whole lot of administering the recruiting function takes place. When need to flip those two things!

2. Horizontally Source – This is the Talent Pipeline. The problem with maintaining Talent Pipelines is they’re very expensive. I would rather see an On-demand sourcing function, than a pipeline function, but I like that Amber to be trying to marry the two in a ‘ready-now’ fashion.

3. Work Agile – I think what Amber is saying, and I love it, is not all requisitions are created equal. Some jobs we fill are more important and have more impact on the organization. Yes, yes they do! So, do those things first and do them fast, to maximize the impact!

4. Create a Recruiting-First Culture – This would be my #1. Talent Acquisition doesn’t own recruiting. Hiring managers own recruiting. I can help you staff your department, function, location, etc., but ultimately, you as the leader must own it. If you can get here in your organization, you’ll be great at talent acquisition. The next step is then getting every single employee to understand their role and significance in constantly attracting talent to the organization.

5. Trust-based Hiring – Yeah, I’ve got nothing. Honestly, this is a large, enterprise-level organizational issue. Here’s what happens. Manager A has a great talent, but that talent is being underutilized in their group. Manager B desperately needs the talent Manager A has. Manager A should, for the betterment of the organization, give up their talent to Manager B, but they don’t because they believe they won’t get the talent they need in return. This happens constantly in giant organizations, and it sucks.

6. Proactively Source – Maybe a good first step here would be to first ‘actually’ source! 😉 I like that Amber is focusing her team on certain things the organization needs. Hey, we suck at hiring females in tech roles! Cool, let’s make that a priority and specifically use a rifle approach to go out and get more females in tech roles. That’s just good recruiting. Might want to work with HR to ensure those females will feel like they actually belong as well, when they get into those roles or you’ll never get off that treadmill.

7. Cognitively Assist Candidates – Thanks for joining Marketing! This is where an LI post becomes a commercial and I would bet my entire salary (as a writer) that Amber didn’t actually have this on her original list! This one is supposed to be about Candidate Experience and I’m sure that’s what Amber had, but this is where Watson got shoved in. Not saying that’s bad, but it doesn’t sound like a practitioner put #7 together.

8. Personalize Offers – More Watson, but I will say personalization across the recruiting process is the key to reinventing recruiting. We all want to be recruited like a five star running back to Alabama. We want that experience. It doesn’t matter what role you get hired for, you want to feel like the most important person in the world to that company.

9. Interview with Cognitive – Okay, more Watson, but this is where I’m a huge fan! Very, very, very rarely will you go wrong when hiring smarter people who can process information faster. This doesn’t mean hiring only people who have a GPA of 3.5 or higher. There isn’t a ton of correlation between GPA and actual cognitive processing speed. Go find great cognitive pre-employment assessments and hire smart, it won’t let you down. Apparently, IBM has something like this called Watson or something, check it out.

Amber, thanks for putting this together! It’s a really strong plan for other TA leaders to follow!

 

LinkedIn’s Global Recruiting Trends 2018

Posted on by
2

Each year, over the past few years, I look forward to reviewing LinkedIn’s annual Recruiting Trends report. The 2018 version is no different! It’s sixty pages of insight and case studies and really digs into the hottest trends in recruiting we are all facing. It’s definitely something every TA pro and leader should read.

One reason I like this report is that the data comes from over 8,000 TA pros from an almost perfect cross-section of small, medium, large and enterprise-sized organizations. This is rare. Usually, these types of reports are all enterprise-focused, but LinkedIn works to get each segment to be a quarter of the respondents.

LinkedIn found four main trends across all sized organizations in Recruiting:

  1. Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging.
  2. Interviewing
  3. Data Analytics
  4. Artificial Intelligence

At first glance, this doesn’t seem very surprising. I don’t think any of us could have thought Diversity could have gotten bigger as a trend, but when you have a current political climate in America like we have, well, diversity has never been more important. Interviewing as a trend seems strange, and it makes me think there’s probably something LI is pushing from a product standpoint. The LI data shows interviewing is a trend because of how it’s evolving in selection.

Data and A.I. are also things that also seem to be solid trends that most TA pros are in the midst of trying to figure out. A.I. is an easy one, it was huge in 2017 and it’s not going away. Data was giant in 2015-16, and every HR tech vendor became a ‘data’ company, but the fact remains most TA leaders and pros still struggle to get their arms around this and the LI data shows this as well.

I read the entire report and took away two really cool ideas:

– Diversity and Inclusion are giving way to ‘belonging’. It doesn’t matter that you hired more women or more of whatever it is you needed to look like a United Colors of Benetton ad. If those you hired don’t feel like a part of the organization, you’ll never keep them anyway. 

This level of diversity is really hard. It’s actually easy to check boxes and get to a point where you’ll look politically correct as it relates to the diversity of your employees. It’s super hard to get to a point where people feel like they truly belong. Like they’re home. The LI report gives some great case studies on how organizations are doing this.

– TA uses of data are fairly robust, and nowhere to be found where those uses concerned with Days to Fill! (see picture below)

 

#1 – Increase Retention

I’ll scream this from the mountain tops until the day I die! Employee Retention should be owned by Talent Acquisition. HR doesn’t care! If someone leaves, HR processes some paperwork. The real work of replacing that employee falls on TA. HR has no vested interested, in most organizations, to retain employees. TA always does.

The easiest hire TA will ever make is the one they don’t have to make because a good employee didn’t leave.

It’s rare that an organization would place the entire bonus goal on HR around employee retention. If they did, you would see a cultural change that is incredibly positive in terms of how HR works to keep employees. The organizations that have the foresight to do this have really strong cultures.

I love that LI was able to show TA pros and leaders from every size of organization view Retention as the top use of data. It shows that TA pros are understanding the importance of data analytics a very high level. It also shows a major trend that LI kind of skimmed over. In 2018, Retention of talent is critical for organizations. It’s not sexy to report on, but it’s a fact.

Go download the report and check it out!

 

Is Your Organization Using HR Tech for Good or Evil?

Posted on by
1

Right before Christmas when things were crazy and no one was paying attention, something happened in the HR Tech world that didn’t get much press. This happens at certain times. It’s why corporations, governments, etc. release bad news on Fridays at 5 pm. It gets buried during the weekend.

The thing that happened was the announcement that many companies (Amazon, Verizon, UPS, and even Facebook themselves) were using Facebook Ads to exclude older people from applying for their jobs! That’s big news, right!?

If these same companies were using the exact same technology to exclude females or African Americans, don’t you think the world would have stopped, if only for a second until Trump tweeted again!? I think it would have, but it didn’t.

From the article:

A few weeks ago, Verizon placed an ad on Facebook to recruit applicants for a unit focused on financial planning and analysis. The ad showed a smiling, millennial-aged woman seated at a computer and promised that new hires could look forward to a rewarding career in which they would be “more than just a number.”

Some relevant numbers were not immediately evident. The promotion was set to run on the Facebook feeds of users 25 to 36 years old who lived in the nation’s capital, or had recently visited there, and had demonstrated an interest in finance. For a vast majority of the hundreds of millions of people who check Facebook every day, the ad did not exist.

Verizon is among dozens of the nation’s leading employers — including Amazon, Goldman Sachs, Target and Facebook itself — that placed recruitment ads limited to particular age groups, an investigation by ProPublica and The New York Times has found.

The ability of advertisers to deliver their message to the precise audience most likely to respond is the cornerstone of Facebook’s business model. But using the system to expose job opportunities only to certain age groups has raised concerns about fairness to older workers.

So, is this right? Well, Facebook seems to think so:

Facebook defended the practice. “Used responsibly, age-based targeting for employment purposes is an accepted industry practice and for good reason: it helps employers recruit and people of all ages find work,” said Rob Goldman, a Facebook vice president.

“Age-based targeting for employment purposes is an accepted industry standard”. Really!? Well, in one way it is. But only if you’re doing it for good, not evil! If you are out trying to specifically recruit older people because you lack an older population in your workforce, then “yes” that is accepted.

If you don’t want older people, because they don’t fit your culture, then “HELL NO” it’s not an accepted standard!

The holidays came and went and all of this is forgotten because we don’t care about older workers. That’s a fact. We treat older workers like garbage in America. Once you reach 50 years old in America, you become stupid and worthless to hiring managers, even when those hiring managers are over 50!

We would have killed Facebook if they said it was an “industry standard to run ads for only white dudes”. But they are running ads for only young people and that is now an industry standard.

It’s not. It’s prejudice. It’s wrong. It is not an industry standard. Segmenting recruitment marketing is tricky. We have to be responsible enough to know when you exclude a certain group, that better not be an underrepresented group in your workforce and not the majority of your workforce (Facebook!).

So, what do you think? Industry accepted standard or bad recruitment marketing practice? Hit me in the commnets and let me know!

Reference Checking for Employment is Dead!

Posted on by
1

I remember when I started my first job in Talent Acquisition and HR, I totally believed checking references was going to lead me to better, higher quality hires. My HR university program practically drilled into me the belief that “past performance predicts future performance.”

For all, I knew those words were delivered on tablets from Moses himself!

After all, what better way is there to predict a candidate’s future success than to speak with individuals who knew this person the best?

And it’s not just anybody: It’s former managers or colleagues who have previously worked with this person – directly or indirectly – and have a deep understanding of how they have performed, and now telling me how they will perform in the future.

Grand design at its finest.

About 13 seconds into my HR career I started questioning this wisdom. Call me an HR atheist if you must, but something wasn’t adding up to me.

It was probably around the hundredth reference check when I started wondering either I was the best recruiter of all time and only find rock stars (which was mostly true) or this reference check thing is one giant scam!

Everyone knows the set up: The candidate wants the job, so they want to make sure they provide good references. The candidate provides three references that will tell HR the candidate walks on water. HR accepts them and actually goes through the process of calling these three perfect references.

When I find out that an organization still does reference checks, I love to ask this one question: When was the last time you didn’t hire someone based on their reference check?

Most organizations can’t come up with one example of this happening. We hire based on references 100% of the time.

Does that sound like a good system? Now, I’m asking you, when was the last time your organization didn’t hire a candidate based on their references?

If you can’t find an answer, or the answer is ‘never’, you need to stop checking references because it’s a big fat waste of time and resources! There’s no “HR law” that says you have to check references. Just stop it. It won’t change any of your hiring decisions.

NEW WAYS OF CHECKING REFERENCES THAT CHECKOUT

So, how should you do reference checks? Here are three ideas:

1. SOURCE YOUR OWN REFERENCES

Stop accepting references candidates give you. Instead, during the interview ask for names of their direct supervisors at every position they’ve had. Then call those companies and talk to those people. Even with HR telling everyone “we don’t give out references,” I’ve found you can engage in some meaningful conversations off the record.

2. AUTOMATE THE PROCESS

New reference checking technology asks questions in a way that doesn’t lead the reference to believe they are giving the person a ‘bad’ reference but just honestly telling what the person’s work preferences are. The information gathered will then tell you if the candidate is a good fit for your organization or a bad fit — but the reference has no idea.

3. USE FACT CHECKING SOFTWARE

Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. have made it so candidates who lie can get caught. There is technology being developed that allows organizations to fact-check a person’s background and verify if they are actually who they tell you they are. Estimates show that 53% of people lie on their resume. Technology makes it easy to find out who is.

Great Talent Acquisition and HR pros need to start questioning a process that is designed to push through 99.9% of hires. Catching less than .1% of hires isn’t better quality. It’s just flat out lazy.

Start thinking about what you can do to source better quality hires and your organization might just think you can walk on water.

Your turn: What are your tips for checking references?