Category Archives: Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals

The Rise of the Super Star Employee

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Artificial Intelligence is changing the future of work, but there’s one thing that AI won’t be able to do. AI will not be able to create more ‘geniuses’.

A recent study by MIT professors found that as the digital versions of labor grow and will continue to grow, and labor will be able to reproduced cheaply in a number of industries and positions, but the one thing that can’t be duplicated by digital technologies are genius employees. Those employees who are your truly lift your organization to another level.

We all know those rare superstar employees. The one person who has built a product for your organization that will be the future of what you do. The one person who sells 40%+ more than any other person on your team, consistently, year after year. The one person on your team that consistently attracts A players to your team and great talent from other organizations want to work for.

These aren’t your 20/80 employees. 20% of your employees do 80% of the work. These are your employees who are above that. They would rank as your number one employee out of that top 20%. These are the employees that if you had an employee draft on who starts a new company, these folks would always be number one pics.

Our reality as HR leaders, TA leaders, organizational leaders is we will have to start focusing on how do we keep and attract superstar employees. Right now we really work to fill roles with solid hires. Basically, that’s the goal. With the rise of AI-driven automation of transactional work, it will be critical for us to hire a few superstars, more than a bunch of rank and file.

I have a feeling the future of TA team design will have a component of superstar recruiting. In college athletics, the superstar recruit is a 5-star kid. There are very few 5 stars. If you get one, you hit a grand slam in recruiting. Very few schools get 5-star kids. Most schools will be fighting for 3-star and 2-star kids.

I had a feeling that Sourcing automation was going to kill sourcing as a function, but I now see this design where really high-level sourcers will continue to have a very valuable role in finding not just ‘a’ person to fill a position, but finding ‘the’ person to fill a position. Where it will be the job of a part of the TA team to discover who are truly the superstars in certain skill sets across an industry and then work to attract those few potential 5-star employees.

AI will take away a big subset of work that can be easily automated. It won’t be able to take away genius-level, superstar work because those individuals create the future and make things work that aren’t working. They solve unsolvable problems. They predict the unpredictable. You need them more than most of your other employees.

The future of TA is your ability to find, attract and hire superstars. Not everyone will get one. Some will get more than one. The real value of great TA in the world of AI is your ability to hire 5-stars.

Recruiting Trends and Trends and Trends… #HRERecruitTalent

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I’m out this week at the Recruiting Trends and Talent Tech Conference and guess what I’m speaking on!?!?! Recruiting Trends!

It’s pretty insane when you look at the recruiting landscape. When I was doing research on what trends I should talk about at the conference my initial list had over 50!

That becomes the big question – what’s really a trend and what’s mostly B.S.?

We think we can spot the B.S., but it turns out we are all pretty dumb when it comes to spotting bad trends. Remember QR codes in Recruiting!? How many of you had, or still have, one of those on your recruiting materials!?

Video Interviews! That’s a fad, no one will do a video interview! Until it becomes fairly normal. You should be texting candidates! No, you don’t understand Tim, “OUR” candidates wouldn’t respond to text.

Um, yeah, how’s that working out for you!? Everyone responds to text! I can’t call my parents anymore, who are in their 70’s, but they’ll respond in seconds to a text! Hourly workers, executives, nurses, truck drivers, everyone responds to text.

So, it would seem like the big one is A.I., Machine Learning, chatbots, etc. All of ‘that’ stuff. That automation, the machines can do your job better and faster than you technology stuff. Yeah, that’s a current trend for sure, but in one way it’s not.

We’ve been automating in Recruiting since we have had recruiting. So a major part of the A.I. trend is just next generation, evolution of automating the recruiting process. It’s definitely something to be embraced and understood, the reality is most of the technology you are using probably is already leveraging it in some form.

When I take a look at the landscape from the point of view of someone who follows this stuff way too closely I think the biggest trend is confusion. The in the weeds TA team and leaders are overwhelmed by options, by decisions.

The vendor community is so focused on selling you their ‘one’ product, solution, that they miss helping their clients on the bigger picture of how it should all fit together. The ‘buyer’ of our trends, hasn’t changed. They need to fill jobs, faster, with better talent.

Most will already have some semblance of a tech stack they are being forced to use, and they aren’t sure how you fit in and make it all work better. At the very least they probably have a core ATS who is telling them they can do it all, when in reality they probably do 25% of what’s needed to be competitive.

The winners in the recruiting technology space will be those who can make it idiot-proof. If you’re a TA pro/leader don’t take that as a put down. The reality is every leader or practitioner just wants tech that works, without thinking about it.

I have a job I need to fill.

I turn on your switch and the tech makes it easy for me to fill this position.

We aren’t launching the Space Shuttle, we are filling roles. Ultimately, the TA Leader in me doesn’t give a hoot about your trends! Trends are for early adopters. Work through your issues. Find what works and what does’t. Then let’s talk.

Unfortunately, we don’t live in a world where the trend is selling stuff that just works…

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: Pocket Recruiter (@pkrecruiter)

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Today on The Weekly Dose I review the recruiting technology, Pocket Recruiter. Pocket Recruiter drastically reduces the time it takes to screen, source and evaluate candidates, helping recruiters achieve a higher interview to placement ratio. 

Pocket Recruiter is one of these new recruiting technologies built around the concepts of Machine Learning and A.I. Basically, it integrates with your ATS and will automatically scrap every new job (or you can manually put in jobs as well) and then it will go out and source candidates for each job you have from both your internal database and external data as well.

Where Pocket Recruiter stands out is it’s ability to match candidates to your job, and it’s ability to learn and get better. The recruiter gets a list of matching candidates that are scored out and ranked based on, pattern recognition, the internal algorithm, etc.

Your recruiter gets a shortlist within minutes to go out and start connecting. Organizations are seeing savings of up to 60% in time to source and screen, because most of the heavily lifting of sourcing is done, and the matches are of higher quality, so you’ll need less screens. They are also seeing improvements of 90% from resume submitted to the hiring manager to request for interview. So, the quality is definitely improving.

What do I like about Pocket Recruiter:

  • Your recruiters can override the algorithm within Pocket Recruiter to bring back different results almost immediately, if something isn’t coming through like it should. This might seem small, but it’s huge as we that recruit usually quite a bit more than the algorithm in terms of what we are looking for.
  • You can add your internal employees into the mix, making Pocket Recruiter a great tool for internal mobility.
  • The Performance Metrics might be one of the best I’ve seen in any recruiting tool, as it basically replicates your recruiting funnel for you on each individual recruiter. So, not only are you finding talent faster, but you also now have this great performance management tool for your team. I also loved the ROI tool built into Pocket Recruiter.

For me, technologies like Pocket Recruiter are the future of recruitment and how I see A.I. having the biggest early impact to how recruiting evolves in the near future. Pocket Recruiter ensures you are utilizing all of your candidates to the fullest, and it speeds up the entire process to get to hires quicker. 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.

What’s the Difference between Great Recruitment Marketing and Bad RM?

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Smashfly released their annual 2019 Recruitment Marketing Benchmarks Report this week and there are some real takeaways that I think help TA teams become better right away tactically at RM. 

In the middle of the report on pages 11-13 the report shows what great TA teams are doing differently than those who are failing at RM. There are stark differences between the two, and most are things we can all improve on fairly easily!

Great RM vs. Crappy RM:

  • 85% of great TA teams publish non-job content and share on social. Crappy TA teams only publish jobs on social.
  • Great TA teams nurture all of their candidates with 85% getting a monthly email of some kind. Crappy TA teams do not nurture their database of candidates.
  • 76% of great TA teams have career sites that are optimized for Google for Jobs. 13% of crappy TA teams are optimized for GFJ.
  • 17% of great TA teams send a reminder email to have an applicant complete the application. 1% of crappy TA team actually do this. (so a lot of room for all us to improve stuff like this!)

*FYI – ‘Crappy’ is my language not Smashfly’s! 😉

I only gave you a little taste of all the data that’s in the report, so go check it out for yourself. I counted at least ten different tactical things you could do immediately to improve your TA team and TA processes as it relates to becoming great at RM.

For the 2020 report I’ve already pushed back on the Smashfly team to start asking about SMS/Text communication as it relates to RM, and keep digging into the personalization aspect. While I love the Nurture data in this report, and we know nurturing works. I also believe the future of RM is in personalization at scale, which is so hard to do! Especially if you don’t have the tech to do it!

The report also goes really deep into the world of Talent Networks/Talent Communities. I’ll be honest, I think most organizations suck at maintaining talent communities and most of them are just used to spam candidates with jobs.

I’m not sure if the future of TA is talent communities. I say this, primarily because they are difficult to maintain and engage properly. You don’t actually want talent pipelines, you want on-demand talent. If Supply Chain theory has taught us anything it’s that maintaining inventory is super expensive and wasteful. So, the key is how do we engage a pool of talent quickly, without having to spend all of this time and resources stringing them along.

I don’t have that answer, but I ‘m sure automation plays a giant factor in all of it.

Want to talk more about all of this RM stuff? Come join me at Transform in June!

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Jobvite goes shopping!

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Big news out of the world of the Talent Acquisition technology. Jobvite, with a major investment from K1 Investment Management, went out and bought three best of breed recruiting technologies:

  • Talemetry – CRM, Recruitment Marketing technology
  • RolePoint – Employee referral and internal mobility technology
  • Canvas – Text-based screening and interview technology

All four of these technologies, separately, I’ve recommended that TA pros and leaders should demo. They are all top rated recruiting technologies on their own.

I think these acquisitions are just one more signal in what we see is a growth of the Talent Acquisition Suite, away from core HRIS suites. The TA Suite of the future is a stand alone tech stack that can become a competitive edge for organizations.

The one part of this acquisition that confuses me, a little, is Role Point. While I love them as a point solution, Jobvite already has Jobvite Refer, so this acquisition seems a bit redundant. I mean Jobvite invented Employee Referral technology. While I’ll agree RolePoint is better than Jobvite Refer, I’m not sure they are that much better tha I would spend millions of dollars to acquire.

I will say that that Internal Mobility is a hot topic in almost every organization, so I’m assuming this is the main reason for the acquisition.

Regardless, I believe this positions Jobvite uniquely in the space to be able to offer an advanced Talent Acquisition suite that no one else in the space can put forth, at this point.

One thing to consider is how other ATSs like iCIMS and Greenhouse (we also see Ultimate Software/UltiPro doing this on the HR suite side) are building out their stacks for their customers. Both have taken the App/Marketplace concept. Think of this like your Smartphone. You buy your base iPhone, and then add the apps you want.

That’s the big question! Will the market want a suite or will they want a marketplace of pre-built integrations that you can select and plug and play?

Both buyers are in the market. We already see the suite buyers who want one enclosed technology that does almost everything they need under one umbrella – what it looks like Jobvite is building with these acquisitions. We also know some buyers love to select specific technologies and somewhat build their own stack, based on their own unique needs. It’s really just positioning, I’m not sure we’ll see one strategy win out ultimately.

Definitely an aggressive move by Jobvite. They were falling behind the market a bit and this will definitely thrust them back into the lead pack. I think we all felt like 2019 would be a great year for acquisitions and Jobvite has come out of the gate making a giant swing!

Doing Time in Recruiting

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Have you done any time? I asked the unsuspecting young lady sitting next to me. She just stared at me not sure if I was joking or serious, and really not wanting to engage either way. 

Old recruiters tend to be a bit forward. Their time has worn away the niceties and cultural norms society places upon us when you go through the system.

Mine have been gone for a while now.

“Have you done time?”, Is me asking you, if you have ever worked in staffing? Corporate TA isn’t time! Corporate TA is an all expenses paid trip to Disneyland, with the Disney Princess breakfast included.

How long was your sentence? 

It seems like most recruiters do a cup of coffee and get out for parole within a year. A fucking year! I’ve got searches on my desk longer then a fucking year! 

What can you learn in staffing in a year? That you suck at Recruiting is really the only thing I can think of. You don’t even learn the language of what you’re searching for in a year!

I think everyone in talent acquisition should do some time in staffing. It produces calluses, it thickens the skin. Staffing doesn’t come close to giving you all you need for a corporate TA job, but it gives you one thing that is desparately lacking. It teaches you how to fill positions.

I’ve worked in both staffing and corporate TA and I loved both. Both a very different and I loved them for different reasons, but I’ve always been extremely grateful that I had experience in staffing before I went into corporate. Both sides have lifers, and it makes sense. Some people know that one side is just for them and the other isn’t.

So, on this day, hit me in the comments and let me know how long your sentence was, or has been, and let us celebrate our time served!

Budgeting Yourself to Below Average Recruiting

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I was with a great group of TA leaders this week at the ATAP annual board meeting. One of my colleagues made a comment during a break:

“You can’t budget yourself to great TA”

A Great TA Leader Once Said

Meaning, if you keep cutting your TA budget year after year, eventually your tech is going to be so dated, or behind the times, that you won’t be able to ever pull yourself out of the hole you budgeted yourself into. While you’ll save some money in the short term, ultimately these ‘cuts’ to the budget will cost you more overall when it comes to filling positions.

Ideally, you work for a c-suite that actually understands this and they aren’t coming to you asking for you to cut your TA budget and produce more quality hires, faster! That doesn’t really work, unless you’ve gone a run of ten straight years of padding your TA budget year after year with extra and this budget cycle is about getting back to a midpoint.

I’m not saying you need a ton of budget to have solid TA tools and processes. Too often we overspend on technology that has a lot of promise, but little actual, proven ROI. Also, we hang on to bad budget investments. Most TA leaders I speak to don’t have a real clear picture of what their best sources are and how much they are paying for each source.


When they run this analysis and really dig in, they always uncover a bucket of money that is being thrown away, but it’s a ‘legacy’ tool that at one point they relied on, but now it’s not producing like it once did, but they hope it’s going to come back, so they keep throwing money at it. It’s really scary to cut a tool that is actually producing hires, even when that tool is expensive, because we believe if we cut that over-priced tool we won’t get those hires from somewhere else.


Let me give you a Pro TA Tip! You will! Cut that $50K tool, take $25k of that money and give it to your most productive source in some way and you’ll most likely actually get more hires from that investment then you got on your weaker performing over-priced tool.

I don’t like to go backwards on my TA budget unless we know we’re going to have less hires for that budget year, or we are doing something to increase retention that will impact our capacity in a positive way. Every single time I’ve been asked to cut TA budget, but still produce, we didn’t get better, we fought like crazy to stay the same, or we got worse.

Be careful my TA friends when that budget director, CFO-type comes to you looking for cuts, but also wants you to produce the same or more. If you get trapped into this scenario make sure they give you some concessions on what they are willing to give up when it comes to your team’s services and make sure to continually remind them of your budget cut each time they complain that recruiting isn’t getting the job done!

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @PowerToFly

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This week on The Weekly Dose I review the D&I technology platform Power to Fly. Power to Fly is a recruiting platform used for connecting people with companies committed to building more diverse and inclusive environments. 

Founded in 2015 by two females who were named one of Fast Companies most creative people in business. The original concept was to connect women with remote jobs (which it still does). From that PTW learned many organizations also wanted and needed gender diversity in their in-house teams as well. Today it’s not only women but all underrepresented talent in the marketplace. 

The original concept of being a marketplace to connect one type of candidate with companies isn’t new, but Power to Fly definitely come at this from a different angle than most. While you can post your jobs on their site, which has over a million profiles of female candidates, Power to Fly focuses more on community events and interactions, both in-person and virtual. 

Power to Fly hosts in-person networking events hosted by client(s) companies to bring women in a specific marketplace together. These interactions help females and underrepresented candidates build a network of their own to leverage as they grow their careers. 

These live events bring together upwards of 200 women and are sponsored by some of the largest brands in the world, but can also be leveraged by a handful of employers in a market coming together to co-sponsor together. Power to Fly has found females are much more likely to apply to your jobs after attending these events (and the research into gender-specific applies echoes this as well).  The likelihood of apply from those attending these events rose 60% after attending. 

Power to Fly also holds virtual events with top Female executives and thought-leaders allowing women to ask live Q&A to help them in their career. Giving anyone a chance, in an ultra-safe environment, to ask questions they probably wouldn’t or don’t even have access to a mentee to ask. 

I love the concept. Traditionally, men clearly have had so many built-in networking advantages to aid their career path. Building out these networks for females and underrepresented candidates is a must and long overdue. 

If you are looking to add diversity into your talent pipelines Power to Fly is definitely something to check out. Job postings, live events, and virtual events, the power of their community is their real strength.  It’s women helping women in the most positive ways! 

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.

@SHRM Making a Stand for Hiring Candidates with Criminal Record!

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When it comes to hiring bias in America we HATE hiring 3 types of candidates:

  • Old People
  • Fat People
  • People with a Criminal Record

SHRM decided to try and make an impact and help those with past criminal records get hired with their new initiative called: Getting Talent Back to Work. 

GTBW is an initiative launched by SHRM to get employers to join in and take a pledge that their organizations will work to put people with criminal records back into their hiring pools. Koch Industries, a multi-billion dollar corporations with over 120,000 employees was SHRM’s launch partner, which drew some eyre from some of the HR blogging community.

When I first heard of the program, and HR blogging blow back, the first thing came to mind was the quote:

“Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows” by William Shakespeare from the Tempest

There are millions of American workers right now who are miserable because they have a record and we will not allow them to pay their debt to society.

This was the same language used by Torin Ellis and Julie Sowash on their entertaining podcast Crazy and The King. Where Julie was really upset by the Koch relationship because of their conservative political stance, and Torin saw it a little less so, which I thought brought great balance to this discussion. Not blind at all to what is going on, but also hopeful and realistic to how difficult this issue really is to change.

So, what do I think about all this?

Making change is messy business. Getting people with criminal records real jobs isn’t something we’ve done really well in our society. 1/3 of Americans have some sort of criminal record and we can’t just throw all of these people away. We have to start truly believing that a debt paid, is actually paid.

Johnny Taylor has a giant association to lead. Some of those SHRM members are ultra liberal. Some are ultra conservative. Some are socialist. Some are religious zealots. Some are atheist. While some HR bloggers hate him for allowing Koch Industries to be apart of this program, I find this view to be exclusive and not inclusive of all.

Odds are there are as many people who love that SHRM has Koch Industry as a partner, as there are people who hate that SHRM has Koch Industries as a partner (with 300,000+ members the stats will play out like America in general). By the way, SHRM also has over 500 other organizations that have stepped up and taken the Pledge! Which is what this is really all about!

Like the ex-criminals we are trying to help get them back to work, why is it we believe that Koch Industries can’t help in this situation? We all have things in our life, in our past, that some wouldn’t agree with, and things that people would love, no matter our political persuasion.

Our reality is almost every organization is or has probably done some crap we all can’t agree on, but they probably are smaller, or keep a lower profile, or believe in what you believe in, so we give them a pass.

I have many friends who lean very heavily liberal. Also, some ultra-conservative. Also, some socialist, and Libetarian, and who knows what else! I don’t agree with their politics and they don’t agree with my moderate politics, yet we can work together to help others and solve problems. It’s not all or nothing. That’s not how our country works. If my neighbor views the world differently than I, I don’t watch his home burn down with him in it, I run in and save him.

We are intelligent beasts that have the ability to separate one ideology from another, and while we won’t always agree it doesn’t mean we can’t find value in one another. We are HR! We own D&I. We need to stop making Inclusion, exclusive to one belief and not all beliefs.

So, kudos for SHRM in launching this initiative in getting organizations to really dig into this issue of hiring people with previous criminal records who have paid their debt to society. Kudos to each and every company that has taken the pledge to help these people who desperately need it.

I encourage you to go take a look at the site and decide if taking this pledge is right for your organization!

2019 Transform Recruitment Marketing Conference

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Recruitment Marketing is on the hottest trends and functional areas in talent acquisition right now! I hate even calling it a trend, because the conference is in it’s 5th year, so five years ago it was a trend! Now it’s a must have in your talent strategy!

What I love about Transform is it’s less about “thought leadership” and more about actual in the weeds TA leaders giving the tools and insight to do great Recruitment Marketing on your own. I’m always inspired about how freely they share their knowledge with this community!

The Transform Conference will take place on June 20-21st in Boston and the lineup is a who’s who of RM leaders and strategist including:

  • Holland Dombeck – Delta Airlines Head of Employer Branding & Recruitment Marketing
  • Julie Levy – Global TA Leader at Fiserv
  • James Ellis – Former Head of Employment at Groupon
  • Torin Ellis – Diversity Strategist & Author
  • Erik Qualman – Digital Futurist
  • Leon Logothetis – creator of the Netflix show Kindness Diaries
  • A couple of idiots that call themselves Chad and Cheese! 😉 (fyi – the run the single best podcast in the HR & TA Tech space)

Oh, and me! I’ve Emceed every Transform conference because early on they saw I was a super geek for this stuff, so they let me geek out both days and ask the speakers all the dumb questions that pop into my head as a practitioner trying to figure this stuff out!

So, come join me and hundreds of others in the EB and RM space who are trying to get smarter. The space is extremely limited, so don’t delay your decision to attend (No, really, I mean it – this will be a tight group of smart folks at a cool venue that has limited seating capacity)! 

You can register by clicking on this link for Transform 2019! When you register use the code: Sackett for an extra $100 off your registration fee.