Category Archives: Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals

TA Technology Buyers Guide: How to select the right vendor to solve your recruiting challenges

Posted on by
1

Hey gang!

ATAP (Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals) is putting on some great webcasts, designed for recruiting leaders and professionals and I’m leading one September 12th at 12:30 pm ET! Basically, I’m going to be telling you how you should buy recruiting technology and what to watch out for! I’m going to be telling you stuff that the vendors don’t want you to know about the buying process.

Check out the details: 

Talent acquisition technology is moving faster than ever and very few TA pros and leaders have the ability or capacity to stay on top of all of these changes and innovations. The TA Tech landscape has over 10,000 different pieces of technology worldwide. The average TA leader can probably name 10-20 pieces of the technology and/or vendors. Currently, most TA technology is not actually chosen by Talent Acquisition, but by IT and Finance leaders. This is a major problem in our industry!

TA Tech expert Tim Sackett (Hey, that’s me!) will help simplify the complex world of TA technology and let us know how we can take back control of recruiting tech stacks. Tim personally demos over 100 TA technologies every year and is constantly sharing this information across our community.

Bottom Line, tech vendors don’t always have your best interest at heart and Tim will show us how to uncover the right tech and right vendors that will lead us to better candidates, faster.

Join us for this fast-paced webinar that will be both entertaining and informative, and you’ll probably never look at doing demos the same way again!

Register Here! 

 

 

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Eightfoldai – AI Powered Talent Intelligence Platform

Posted on by
Reply

Today on the Weekly Dose I take a look at Eightfold. Eightfold.ai is a recruiting technology that kind of is hard to define, like many of the new AI-driven technologies within the TA space right now. Eightfold does automated matching of candidates to your jobs with rankings, it can build personalized career sites, help eliminate hiring and screening biases, and even be used for internal mobility.

See what I what I mean? What do you call that? They call it a talent intelligent platform. It can integrate with your ATS and/or CRM and help you automate much of the front-side of your recruiting screening and matching process.

What I find in most organizations is we have recruiters, and they might be really good at the job of recruiting, but they don’t have the specialized knowledge to truly know what candidate will be better at a certain job than another because they lack the technical skill knowledge. Eightfold uses AI and deep learning to match candidates much more accurately and quickly than a human recruiter can do.

The process of Eightfold is fairly lightweight. They can pull in your jobs from your ATS or you can create a job in Eightfold and it will go to work ranking candidates who are the best fit and most likely to respond to the job you have open. This gives an instant target list for your recruiters to go after.

What do I like about Eightfold? 

– Eightfold can help organizations better leverage the resources and data they have invested in talent attraction that has previously not been available to most organizations. Technology like Eightfold will move organizations faster, but also with a higher quality of hire.

– Eightfold personalizes the career site experience for candidates who are coming to your site. Candidate has the ability to upload their resume/application and immediately get a personalized experience that is different from the next candidate who comes to your site.

– Eightfold will help organizations do a better job at hiring for diversity by masking certain information on profiles, but also delivery funnel diversity statistics so TA leaders can have a real-time view of diversity pipelines within the organizations and see where diverse candidates are falling through.

– Because Eightfold’s match technology is so robust, organizations are using it for internal mobility as well, but uploading all of their internal talent and giving a view to leaders of the organization of where you might already have someone internally who is the best fit for a position, and should go down that path first, before looking externally. Too often we see great talent turnover because a position was filled from the outside, and they were never even considered for it, and didn’t even realize it was a possibility.

This type of technology can be used across all kinds of industries, not just tech. From a cost standpoint, and a data standpoint, it works much better at larger volumes, so you’re probably looking for at least 500+ employee organizations to be most effective. It’s certainly dynamic and eye-opening when you demo and I encourage to take a look! While there is an investment to get technology like Eightfold, the ROI is huge in comparison to hiring another recruiter or sourcing pro.

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.

Bad Hires Worse!

Posted on by
1

If I could take all of my life, leadership and HR education and boil it down to this one piece of advice, it would be this:

Bad Hires Worse.

In HR we love to talk about our hiring and screening processes, and how we “only” hire the best talent, but in the end we, more times than not, we leave the final decision on who to hire to the person who will be responsible to supervise the person being hired. The Hiring Manager.

I don’t know about all of you, but in my stops across corporate America, all of my hiring managers haven’t been “A” players, many have been “B” players and a good handful of “C” players.  Yet, in almost all of those stops, we (I) didn’t stop bad hiring managers from hiring when the need came.  Sure I would try to influence more with my struggling managers, be more involved but they still ultimately had to make a decision that they had to live with.

I know I’m not the only one it happens every single day.  Everyday we allow bad hiring managers to make talent decisions in our organizations, just as we are making plans to move the bad manager off the bus.   It’s not an easy change to make in your organization.  It’s something that has to come from the top.  But, if you are serious about making a positive impact on talent in your organization you can not allow bad managers to make talent decisions.

They have to know, through performance management, that: 1. You’re bad (and need fixing or moving); 2. You no longer have the ability to make hiring decisions.  That is when you hit your High Potential manager succession list and tap on some shoulders.  “Hey, Mrs. Hi-Po, guess what we need your help with some interviewing and selection decisions.”  It sends a clear and direct message to your organization we won’t hire worse.

Remember, this isn’t just an operational issue it happens at all levels, in all departments.  Sometimes the hardest thing to do is look in the mirror at our own departments.  If you have bad talent in HR, don’t allow them to hire (“but it’s different we’re in HR, we know better!”) No you don’t, stop it.   Bad hires worse over and over and over.

Bad needs to hire worse, they’re desperate, they’ll do anything to protect themselves, they make bad decisions, they are Bad.  We/HR own this.  We have the ability and influence to stop it.  No executive is going to tell you “No” when you suggest we stop allowing our bad managers the ability to make hiring decisions, in fact, they’ll probably hug you.

It’s a regret I have in my career and something I will change moving forward.  If it happens again, I won’t allow it.  I vow from this day forward, I will never allow a bad hiring manager to make a hiring decision, at least not without a fight!

Your Job Posting Requiring a Bachelor’s Degree is Discriminatory!

Posted on by
Reply

From the world of sports this week in 2019 –

The NCAA (collegiate sports governing body) came out with rules for agents working with college athletes who are underclassman but trying to make a decision to test the NBA waters before graduation. Take a look at what they had to say:

“With this in mind, we benchmarked our new rules against requirements for other organizations that certify agents, like the NBPA, which also requires agents to have a bachelor’s degree. While different and distinct, our rules taken together, which is the manner they were meant to be examined, provide a clear opportunity for our student-athletes to receive excellent advice from knowledgeable professionals on either the college or professional path they choose.”

So, this is being called the “Rich Paul Rule” around the NBA circles. Rich Paul is Lebron James agent, the most famous basketball player on the planet. Rich Paul is a childhood friend of Lebron James, both of them skipped ‘college’ and went directly to the pros! James went and played basketball in the NBA, Paul went and trained as an agent and now has his own sports agency, Klutch, which Lebron happens to be a minority owner.

So, why is this discriminatory?

Rich Paul, like Lebron, grew up black and with little resources. He probably could have gone to college, given the right support system, but when you grow up black and poor, usually access to those support systems are non-existent. Lebron and Rich have had some great success getting young NCAA basketball players to want to sign with them. So, the NCAA makes a rule whereas Paul will not be able to ‘tamper’ with these young men.

Rich Paul, by all accounts, is a successful sports agent for his clients. He’s a very wealthy man, running a very successful business. He’s smart enough to have an army of lawyers, CPAs, etc. surrounding him to ensure his clients have the exact representation they need to be successful in negotiating great contracts.

Rich Paul does not need a bachelors degree. The role of a sports agent does not need a bachelors degree. The NCAA is forcing agents to have a bachelor’s degree if they want to have access to these athletes.

So, let’s get back to HR. We, organizations and HR pros, are pretty much like the NCAA. We often require education for positions where there is no correlation between educational obtainment and success on the job. We do this, like the NCAA, because we are either:

  1. Discriminatory
  2. Lazy
  3. Lazy and Discriminatory

Well, we’ve always hired Account Managers with bachelor’s degrees, so that is why we keep requiring a bachelor’s degree. I would say probably 80% of the positions we hire for in organizations do not need a formal education to do that job, but there will be a formal education requirement on the job description.

Let’s not be stupid and you make comments below about how we definitely want doctors to have degrees. Of course, there are formal educational programs that are critical to success. But there are more jobs that require education where it’s not critical for success. Using education as a screener because you have too many candidates is flat out lazy and you’re probably missing great talent.

Since we know who has and doesn’t have access to higher education, requiring higher education for jobs that don’t really need it, you’re basically saying “we just really don’t want to hire minorities”. The NCAA doesn’t want Rich Paul around “it’s kids”, so they change the rules. The reality is, these are more Rich Paul’s kids than the NCAA’s. At least Rich is upfront with his clients about how he’s making money on them!

 

Want to build a community?

Posted on by
1

I get asked quite often by folks who want to build a community and/or are already starting a community to be apart of their community. My first question is always, “Why do you want to build this community?” It’s pretty straight forward. It should be simple to answer.

Most will go all guru-like about wanting to get like-minded folks together, etc., but in the end, it’s mostly about starting a group so they can sell them something. Almost 99% of the time this is the reason. Which is actually fine, if you follow the steps and don’t actually sell!

Here is really the only way I’ve found to build a successful community:

Step 1 – Find some folks who are like you.

Step 2 – Announce that you are starting a community together.

Step 3 – Draft the purpose and some ground rules around that community.

Step 4 – Show up every day, even Saturday and Sunday.

Step 5 – Never sell your stupid shit.

Step 6 – Give.

Step 7 – Go to Step 6

Step 8 – Eventually the community will give you more than you ever gave it.

It’s super simple, and super hard, to build a community, because it’s all about you giving, and giving, and giving, with absolutely no expectation that you’ll get anything back from the community. Those who go into building a community with this mindset and action, though, almost always get more out of it than they put in it.

 

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @SparcStart launches Amplify Video Management System

Posted on by
Reply

Today on the Weekly Dose I take a look at SparcStart‘s newest product, Amplify. Amplify is a video management system/platform where you can store all of your employment branding and recruiting-related content no matter where it was produced. So, you can bring videos in from professional third parties, YouTube, employee-generated videos from their phones, videos generated on other video-enabled apps, etc., and have all of that content in one place.

Why is this a big deal? Video has increasingly become the go-to content for talent acquisition, and the growth of video being used is off the charts when it comes to employment branding and recruiting. The problem is we don’t have one place to catalog all of this content. We don’t have one place to share this content and measure the views. We don’t have one place to approve and ensure the right video content is being used by our teams.

Well, until Amplify.

What do I like about SparcStart’s Amplify VMS (Video Management System)? 

– Super simple and easy to use dashboard to upload all of your EB & recruiting videos so you have them all in one system. Plus, from the dashboard, you can share them on social, get a URL to share with candidates that will bring them to your company branded micro-site to view (less noise then sending them to YouTube).

– Create videos as well, without the need for your employees to download an app. Basically, through the dashboard, invite them, tell them what it’s about, they get an email to click through on their phone, record, and upload all in two clicks total! You then have the ability to view and approve to be added to the content library on the dashboard. (click the pic below to see me use Amplify in action)

– Having a video management system allows you to have one spot for quality control across your entire environment. The one problem with quick-video is that we lose control of our brand when all of this is being generated and no one seems to be in charge. Amplify is a great tool to have for any organization that potentially has many locations, divisions, regions, and countries using corporate branded video.

– Early users are already figuring out how to use this system in ways it wasn’t even designed for! Some early adopters are increasing their offer acceptance rate by having hiring managers send a quick offer video link, along with the offer letter, to make the offer super personalized for each candidate. Organizations can send out personal interview videos within seconds.

SparcStart was started as a video job description tool, which is how most of us will know them. The addition of Amplify, which is a stand-alone product, really is something that is needed in the industry and most people are just figuring out they need as video content has exploded. The pricing model is very affordable (like $1K/month for 50 vids!), especially when you figure out all the ways you can use it. The video below literally took me under thirty seconds to click on the email link, record, and upload, with the ability to use! The simplicity of Amplify is why I really think it will take off! Well worth a demo!

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.

Sure! I can give you my “Free” staffing firm option!

Posted on by
7

I’ve gotten a chance to work both sides of the fence for an extended period of time in the Talent Acquisition/Recruiting/Staffing game. For ten years I ran corporate talent acquisition shops for some very large organizations.  One organization spent over $3M annually on staffing agency fees! Obviously, prior to my getting there!

I’ve spent almost fifteen years on the agency side, sandwiched in between my corporate experience. What I’ve learned along the way is that there isn’t a “free” option when it comes to hiring great talent.

Frequently, I get asked from clients for discounts to my fees on the agency side.  I get that. When I was on the corporate side, I would never take an agency’s first offer.  Here’s the main problem with all of this:

Corporate talent acquisition pros don’t want any of it. They don’t your 20% direct fee, they don’t want your retained plan, they don’t want your RPO plan. What they want is Free. A free option.

Therein lies everything you need to know about staffing agencies and corporate talent acquisition.  One side wants free. One side needs to get paid.

The reality is, even staffing on your own on the corporate side isn’t free.  Corporate talent acquisition done right has a ton of costs. Recruitment tools, automation, branding, job boards, applicant tracking, college strategy, recruiter training, and hiring, etc. None of that is free.

All of this, though, should be screaming to the agency folks that something isn’t right.  What corporate talent acquisition pros are saying is “we don’t like the options we are getting from agencies”.  This should be of serious concern because there are companies trying to design other options for corporate talent acquisition pros.  Options where they’ll feel like they are getting the value they want.

These options aren’t free, either, but they are less than all of the traditional options that 99% of staffing agencies are offering.

When I was on the corporate TA side of the desk, here was my decision matrix to when I would use a staffing agency.

This matrix made me feel good about my decision to use an agency:

1. Does my team have the capacity to do this search? If Yes, why would I pay to have this done? If No, the cost is justifiable.

2. Does the agency offer me recruitment expertise and/or pipeline I don’t have on my team?  See #1 for Yes and No options.

3. Is it financially feasible for me to add more capacity to my team, as compared to an agency option? This one took some more work. If I had a need for an agency to fill, let’s say, three positions and it was going to cost me $100K, well, obviously I could hire a pretty good recruiter for $100K. But, would I need that Recruiter in year 2, 3, etc.? Adding headcount isn’t a one time cost for an organization.

Ultimately, for me on the corporate side, it was almost always a capacity issue.  I had the expertise, but we had bubbles of work I needed extra support with.  Too often, I see corporate TA leaders upset over agency spend and it’s based on the fact they don’t have good recruiters on their team, yet they’re unwilling to change this fact. I’ll pay for additional short term capacity. I won’t pay for expertise I should have on my team every day. That becomes my issue!

Corporate TA leaders become frustrated over agency spend because ultimately it’s a reflection on the team they have created.

The Woodstock of Recruiting! #RecFest19

Posted on by
2

Yesterday I got to have an amazing experience in London. I was invited to speak at RecFest! What’s RecFest?

RecFest is the brainchild of Jamie Leonard and the team over at Recruitment Events. It started five years ago with 95 participants. Yesterday it sold out with 3,000 in attendance.

RecFest is an outdoor recruiting ‘conference’ of sorts. There are five outdoor stages, like a music festival. There are food and drinks, and adult beverages. There are vendor ‘booths’, which are really smaller tents that participants can visit. There are large open spaces for the community to network and talk shop.

Did I mention there are bars inside huge circus tents of all five stages!?! This isn’t your normal “HR” conference.

The content is awesome. Thirty-minute segments coming at you on all the stages all at once, so you need to pick which sessions you want to see. Fifteen minutes in between so you can feel free to go check out other stages, and some breaks so you can check out vendors, eat, drink, etc.

Oh, and at that end, why not, let’s throw a party with DJs and bands on the stages like a real music festival! Yeah, why not! It might the coolest recruiting/HR event on the entire planet! The conference pass includes all the content, food, drinks, and after-party.

I couldn’t help but think why can’t we have something like this in America? 

London and how compacted the UK and Europe, in general, makes this a bit more feasible.  Where in the US could you get 3,000+ Recruiter pros and leaders to show up for a one-day event, outdoors, in a park for about $250 per person? New York, Chicago, LA? It’s problematic from a logistics standpoint.

Most Recruiting conferences in the US can’t even get 1,000 people to show up. SHRM Talent, LinkedIn Talent Connect, and Indeed Interactive are the only ones who have an audience even that big, and two of those are vendor conferences.

How could we make a Woodstock of Recruiting in America? That’s really the question I leave London with, because it was awesome! For our community, for learning, for team development. But it’s also super difficult to pull off and we need to give credit to Jamie and his team for putting together such a great event.

If you get the chance, make sure you check out RecFest 2020! I hope to be back!

Should You Measure a Candidate’s Desire to Work For You in Response Time?

Posted on by
5

I have expectations as a leader in my organizations for other employees who are in a leadership position in my company. One of those expectations is, if I call or text you on off hours, weekends, vacations, etc., for something that is urgent to the business, I expect a reply in a rather short time frame.

Some people would not like that. I don’t care. You’re a leader, the business needs you, there’s no time clock for that.

That expectation is set for someone at a leadership level in my organization. They know this expectation before taking the job. Also, I’m not an idiot about it. I can probably count on one hand the number of times in the past five years I’ve reached out to someone on weekends or vacations expecting and needing a response.

But, what if you measured candidate quality in the same manner? Seems unreasonable, doesn’t it!?

Well, check this out:

Nardini is the CEO of the sports and men’s lifestyle site Barstool Sports. In a New York Times interview, she detailed her process for vetting job candidates. After saying she was a “horrible interviewer” because of her impatience, she explained a unique process for gauging potential hires’ interest in the job.

“Here’s something I do,” she said. “If you’re in the process of interviewing with us, I’ll text you about something at 9 p.m. or 11 a.m. on a Sunday just to see how fast you’ll respond.”

The maximum response time she’ll allow: three hours.

So, Erika believes if a candidate doesn’t reply back to her on a Sunday at 9 pm within three hours, they are not interested in a job.

This is why recruiting is hard.

You have moron leaders who come up with stupid ideas of what they think is ‘important’ and then they make you live by these dumb rules. This rule is ridiculous. Erika’s assessment of why this works is ridiculous. But, she’ll get a pass.

Why?

She’s a she. If some dumb white dude came up with the same rule the New York Times would write an expose on how this guy is a complete tyrant and out of touch with today’s world, and how crappy this candidate experience is, and how bad leadership this is, etc. But, no one will. She’s just leaning in and doing what the guys do!

Yes, she is. She’s being an idiot.

Now, I’ll say I actually agree with her on her assessment on response time, assuming the roles she is expecting a reply from in three hours are time critical roles. She runs a media site with breaking stories. Twitter has these things up in seconds, media sites need replies to what is happening within minutes and hours. So, there could be some legitimacy to something as arbitrary as measuring candidate desire by response time.

It’s fraught with issues, to be sure, but for certain roles, it might find you some good talent. Should it be a golden rule of hiring for your organization? No, that’s just dumb.

If you really want a silver bullet I ask every candidate if they’re a dog person or cat person. Works every time!

Why Don’t We Have a ‘Yelp’ for HR Tech?

Posted on by
11

The HR Technology ecosystem is a multi-billion a year enterprise. It is estimated that there are over 20,000 different HR technology solutions in the marketplace. If you can think of it, there are at least a dozen solutions on the market or in development in our space.

Every single day, in some form or fashion, I have some ask me a question about which solution they should select? While I demo and review over a hundred different technologies across the entire landscape of HR technology each year, I only see a small fraction of what’s on the market, and within a year of seeing a certain technology, most have changed so much that you would need to demo them all over again.

All of this makes me wonder why don’t we have a practitioner lead site, like Yelp, where we all share and talk about the technology we’ve used, implemented, demoed, purchased, etc.

There are small pockets of this in certain spaces. Chris Hoyt and Gerry Crispin, the two principles at CareerXroads, started something like this for their members. ATAP has talked about starting this for our members. SHRM has chat boards that are active with members who are asking these questions and sharing. But the reality is, there isn’t a one-stop shop to get these answers, especially if you’re an SMB HR shop!

The enterprise HR shops will go to places like Bersin by Deloitte, Gartner, Forrester, IDC, etc. and pay a ton of money to work with specialized analysts in the field who work to try and stay on top of the tech. Some will go with smaller specialized firms shops like Aptitude Research, Lighthouse, HRWins, H3 HR Advisors, etc.

It seems crazy to me that we can’t just log into a TripAdvisor-type site, search for “Workday” and hundreds, if not thousands of reviews come up. New reviews, old reviews, reviews segments by module, etc. Segmented chat groups talking about how good or bad a tech company is at implementation. A group about how much they are paying for a tech!

Why isn’t this a thing!?!

I think there might be some reasons:

  1. We all think our tech stack is some big differentiator and the secret sauce of our success. (This isn’t true, by the way)
  2. The HR Technology community, especially the biggest players, have nothing to gain from a site like this.
  3. You have to start something like this without a revenue model and hope that somehow down the road, the revenue model is the data you collect. (I would think someone like TechStars, etc. would easily find funding for a site like this)
  4. It’s so hard to get all those parties together in one place – HR, benefits, compensation, recruiting, LOD, etc. We all have our own associations and spend time on separate sites.

I wish we had this. Imagine the power of our collective knowledge of what we are using that is working and what we are using, or have used, that isn’t working!? Holy crap, the time and resources we could save our organizations!

What do you think? Do we need this? Why don’t we have it?