Category Archives: Branding

The New “Radio” Job Ads

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Have you listened to an actual radio station lately?

I’m guessing you probably haven’t. You see radio, as a media consumption, is down to 12% of your total consumption, from 19% in 2009.  One big change during that same period, is that a large number are switching to from 25% in 2009 to 55% today. Also, listening off various Apps on your smartphones, in your car, have increased to 35% today. In 2009, it was under 5%!

We are changing the way we consume music and talk programs.  Radio used to be a solid medium to advertise jobs. Especially, those jobs in the service sector, skilled trades, etc.  The advantage of job advertising on the radio was that the radio station had great data on their demographic of listeners. Age, location, gender, income, etc.  This meant you could select fairly accurately who was listening to your job message.

Today, over 140 Million people are listening to Pandora and Spotify.

No longer when entering an office building do you hear the local ‘easy listening’ station, with about 20 minutes of commercials per hour.  Now, you usually hear some version of internet radio, and usually that means Pandora or Spotify.

So, what does this mean for HR and Talent pros who still want to advertise their jobs on radio?

I think there is a huge opportunity, depending on your hiring demographic, to test using Apps like Pandora and Spotify to market your job openings.

Think about the advantages you could get using internet radio for job postings:

– They have similar demographics as traditional radio, plus you can get more targeted by location. Pandora and Spotify take user information to target local advertising, for unpaid subscribers.  Let’s say you have a major competitor in Lincoln Park, IL.  You want to advertise in just that market, and those users who self-identified to be in that market.

– The advertising model is based on impressions, so you can say I have a $100 per day budget, and only want it to run for 5 days. The ads will stop once he limit is hit. If it’s not hit, let’s say your advertising in a small market, the money comes back to you.  So, this type of advertising is fairly inexpensive, as compared to traditional radio and other formats.

– The audience is going to skew millennial and younger.  For those looking to hire in that demo, it’s not a guarantee, but the numbers don’t lie.

Truth be told I haven’t done this, but I would love to hear from someone who has tried this medium for job advertising.  What I know is that there is a huge audience, and almost no employers are advertising in this space.  That means one of two things: 1. It’s ripe for some great, cheap hiring; 2. It’s a total bust.  I don’t think it’s a total bust.  I think it’s just something people haven’t thought of, yet.

Let me know if you try it, and what your results are!

The Power of Written Notes

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My oldest son graduated from high school this spring and we had one of those big old traditional open houses with a tent and tables and a slushy machine.  It was a nice gathering of 200+ family, friends, neighbors, teachers, coaches, people I don’t recall ever meeting, kids looking for a free desert, bums looking for a free drink, etc.

The whole idea of an open house is so your kid can get cash to start off their life in the ‘real’ world.  Invite as many people as you can. Update and clean your house for a year.  Decide on a menu that won’t break your bank account, but will impress all the other moms in attendance who are also throwing open houses.  Put up a lot of pictures and awards.

Side note: My wife won the 2015 Open House competition.  It wasn’t an unanimous vote, but she pretty much ran away with it. Also, she is a front runner for 2016 and my middle son’s graduation open house. We’re Sackett’s, we only get bigger and better!  I’m already having the back-2-back Open House Champs shirts printed up! #Confidence

We got lucky.  His real world consists of a college scholarship to play baseball.  The big expenses like tuition and books will be paid for, he has to pick up some living expenses, but his hard work paid off.  He now feels what it’s like to have more than a few hundred dollars in his bank account.  Which basically means he eats out almost every meal. He’s ghetto rich.

One really cool thing happened from having the open house.  Our son had to write thank you notes to all those who came, and all those who sent cards and cash.  He was lucky to have to write a ton of thank yous!

I voted on just getting the preprinted Thank You notes.  I bet half of the thank you notes we received of were this variety. Thanks for coming. I’m so grateful! Here’s a post card that was preprinted and my mom addressed the envelope. I probably would have went with a 10% off your next appetizer at Applebee’s or something to make it more special, but again, Sackett’s go big!

My wife is a traditionalist, he was going to be hand writing his notes.

It took some time to get them done, but to his credit, he really put in some time and thought into writing these notes.  I’ve heard from so many people congratulating me on his thank you notes!  Most commented on how much detail he added, and how he made it personal to them specifically.  That definitely makes us proud parents!

The entire experience just reminds me of how important it is to sometimes take the time to write a note out by hand.  In our world of messaging and emails, it just gets so easy to tune out so many of these communications.  Rarely, does a handwritten note get tuned out.  Remember that kids when you go looking for a job.  Your resume might get eaten up by an ATS, but most handwritten notes and cards get passed on directly to decision makers without being opened by a gatekeeper!

T3 – CoPilot by NuCompass

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Today on T3 I take a bit of a departure away from my normal talent acquisition technology offerings and review a new product from NuCompass called, CoPilot.  CoPilot is a new, affordable cloud-based solution for managing relocations. It’s a comprehensive platform that empowers employees to manage their move and access our vetted partners online, while giving you full visibility and budget control.

Being a person has gone through three corporate professional moves, I can tell you it can be a major stress and pain in the butt! Relocation is also a pain for TA pros who end up, usually in most organizations, doing most of the heavy lifting when it comes to relocating new employees as well.  This is why CoPilot intrigued me so much.

When I relocated I used one of those traditional relocating companies. I had a ‘relocation’ agent I had to work with at a third party company, and having this middle person was more of a hassle than a help.  I constantly wished I could just get online and set this stuff up on my own and not have to deal with the middle person all the time. In today’s world, I think more people, especially younger employees, think I like I do. Let me do it myself!

5 Things I really like about CoPilot:

1. The obvious one! Employees get the flexibility to manage their own move, under parameters you set, in a really easy to use dashboard that lays out everything for them, with links to vendors that are pre-negotiated and they select who they want.  Don’t underestimate the power of the freedom of choice as a benefit in relocation!

2. Full estimation tool built in to the software to give you and the hiring manager an estimated cost of relocation, before you even make an offer. Full electronic signature and all forms are auto-generated. Makes starting a completing the paperwork process for relo a breeze!

3. Online expense reimbursement that let’s employees take pictures of receipts and upload them for reimbursement. Plus, the HR team has full access to all the reporting in real time through the dashboard.

4.  Dashboard allows HR pros to manage exceptions completely online, and you can choose what employees see and don’t see. You can also give the flexibility to allow employees to move dollars around to other benefits of the relocation they want to use more than others. Again, giving each employee the feeling this plan was designed specifically for them and their move.

5. Live online chat function for quick answers to questions. Face it, people don’t want to pick up the phone and make live calls anymore! But, CoPilot let’s them do that as well, if needed.

CoPilot was one of the cooler things I’ve seen the very uncool relocation space in a long time.  The other great benefit is the cost! The system costs like $250 per move! No matter how many people you are moving, so it makes it a great option for SMB HR shops that don’t make many moves, but still want a very professional well designed relocation plan.  Also, great for organizations that need to make a ton of mid-range moves and don’t want the full expense of a traditional professional relocation company.

If you do any amounts of relocation, CoPilot is definitely worth a demo!

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – 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 space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

The Path to Becoming a Highly Selective Employer

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We all think it, don’t we?  We all want to believe in this notion that we only hire the best and brightest. We only hire quality.  We are ‘highly’ selective.

We’ll show our executives really cool data that shows how ‘highly’ selective we are.  Stats like number of applicants per hire. 25,000 people applied for this position, and we only took the best one!

Time magazine  took a look at college admissions at highly selective colleges. Schools like Harvard, Yale, MIT, etc.  Schools that are super hard to get into because of how selective they are.  You know kind of like the hiring process of your organization. From the Time’s article:

“What many parents and students don’t realize is that increasing numbers of applications isn’t necessarily a sign that it’s harder to get into a selective school; rather, it’s a sign of changes in behavior among high school seniors. More and more people who aren’t necessarily qualified are applying to top schools, inflating the application numbers while not seriously impacting admissions. In fact, it has arguably become easier to get into a selective school, though it may be harder to get into a particular selective school…

The most recent study available from the National Association for College Admission Counseling shows that between 2010 and 2011 (the most recent years available), the percentage of students applying to at least three colleges rose from 77% to 79% and the percentage of students applying to at least seven colleges rose from 25% to 29%. In 2000,  only 67% of students applied to three or more colleges while 12% applied to seven or more.”

The net effect of this behavior is to create an illusion of increased selectivity. Especially at the most selective schools, an increase in applications leads to the acceptance of a smaller percentage of the students who apply. However, students who meet the academic and extracurricular thresholds to qualify for competitive schools will still get into a selective college; it’s just less likely that they’ll get into a specific competitive college. These schools work hard to not admit students who won’t attend;  the acceptance rate and the matriculation rate (the percentage of accepted students who attend) are key measures in many college ranking methodologies, so both admitting too many students and admitting students who don’t attend can hurt a college’s ranking.”

An illusion of increased selectivity…

You see, just because you turn down a high number of candidates doesn’t make you more selective. It makes you popular.  Too many organizations, and HR departments, are marketing that they are highly selective based on some simple numbers that give an illusion of being highly selective, when in reality, they’re just good at processing a high number of applicants. That’s different from being ‘more’ selective.  Just because you turn down 24,999 candidates doesn’t make you selective. It just means you have a high number of applicants.

So what does make you selective?

I would say Quality of Hire, but that measure is totally subjective in most organizations. Can you demonstrate with real measurable items that the applicants you’re hiring are better or getting better than those previously hired?  Most organizations can’t.

You need to being some sort of pre-hire selection science model that you and your hiring managers believe in. This science gives you measures that you can compare over long period of times and every applicant has the same measure.  This creates a real evidence that you’re becoming ‘more’ selective and on your way to becoming ‘highly’ selective.

 

Ladies, would you prefer not negotiating your salary?

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An article recently written on NPR speaks to a ‘new’ trend in organizational compensation.  What’s that trend? Apparently, companies are now not negotiating new hire or promotional salaries.  Basically, here’s what we pay for this position, take it or leave it.

Do you believe this would work?

Here is more from the article:

When it comes to negotiating salaries, the research is pretty clear: women are less assertive than men. It’s one reason women who start their careers with a narrower pay gap see it widen over time.

Carnegie Mellon economics professor Linda Babcock, who studies the gender pay gap, says men are four times more likely to negotiate their pay. That keeps women at a disadvantage, though they’re not always aware of it.

“The standard now is that people don’t really know what each other earns, that some people negotiate and some people don’t, and so there’s tremendous inequities in salary,” Babcock says.

Here’s what I’ll say, Yes, we have inequities in salaries.  Having non-negotiable salaries can help these inequities, but this isn’t a solution. The reality is organizations need flexibility to negotiate salary, especially when it comes to attracting hard-to-find talent. Organizations that take a hard stance on this, will lose in the talent attraction game.

What organizations need to do is have a policy on making quicker market compensation moves when they begin hiring in individuals, male or female, at higher rates than someone who might have started a few months prior. Most organizations are very weak on this practice, which causes most of the inequity.

You hire someone last year at $50K, and this year you hired someone into the same position, doing the same job, with a very similar resume at $58K. You now need to go back to your employee making $50K and give them an increase to $58K.  This hurts, but it needs to be done. That’s why it is critical for your talent acquisition team to have great negotiation skills.

It’s not a $8K increase to your budget, it’s a $16K increase to your budget. Now, think about in terms of a company that has hundreds, or thousands of employees in the same situation.  That $8K dollar negotiation can turn into hundred’s of thousands of dollars across the organization in market increases.

This is why most companies turn a blind-eye to market increases, and why so many organizations have pay inequalities. If females are less likely to negotiate higher salaries, and your organizaitons is going to ignore the difference, you’re going to have a growing problem that only gets worse the longer you ignore it.

I recently had a situation with a Fortune 500 client you completely gets this, and refuses to let it becomes a problem. We had a female candidate interview and get an offer. She wanted $47K. She was way under market for the position, and for the company. They knew she only wanted $47K, and they came back and paid her $63K! That was the value of her position to the organization and what similar people in her role were going to make, with her experience.

Like I said, this isn’t a salary negotiation issue. This is a do-you-want-to-do-the-right-thing organizational issue.

What do you think?

How Do You Turn Around a Crappy Employment Brand?

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I get two questions more than any others since I started blogging in HR and Talent over six years ago:

1. What ATS do you use?

2. How can we turn around our bad employment brand? (You can also replace “brand” with “culture” – I get that a lot as well!)

For question #1 on the ATS selection is for another post. Check back Wednesday and I’ll tell you.

Question #2 isn’t necessarily difficult, but it does take work!

There’s a reason you have a crappy employment brand. You need to find out what that reason(s) is and solve it. Sometimes the reason is difficult to solve, sometimes it’s very simple.  If you have a bad employment brand because you have a history of treating employees like garbage, that is going to take some time to turn around. If you have a bad employment brand because you recently had one bad issue in the news, you can recover pretty quickly.

The first step to turning around a bad employment brand is knowing what the problem is.

Sometimes you just know, sometimes you need to do the employee surveys. I love doing employee alumni surveys for this as well, and only sending to those you voluntarily left on their own. Those folks usually give you better, more productive, feedback, than those you laid off and fired.

The second step to turning around a bad employment brand is you need to get your entire leadership team to agree on why you have this problem.

It doesn’t matter what you do in HR, if your leadership is not in agreement, you will never fix this problem. And, it can’t be just the CEO who agrees with the problem. Any leader with influence needs to buy in completely and drink the Kool aid. Once you have this buyin from leadership, it becomes fairly easy to fix.

The third step to turning around your employment brand is your current employees have to begin believing that real change is happening.

They need to hear it, constantly, and they need to see it.  It starts from within. If your current employees believe it’s changing they’ll begin to refer people to be apart of the change. One step I suggest, that almost no organization ever does is to find your true believer employees. Those who you are 100% sure are on board for the change, and do a special referral bonus for only them. You want your true believers referring people, you don’t want your cancer employees referring people.

The fourth step to turning around your employment brand is to change the perception externally.

Most organizations flip-flop steps three and four, and it’s the main reason they fail. They try and change external perception with commercials and marketing, news releases, etc. This creates buzz on the outside, but your internal folks kill it as soon as that first person interviews or is hired.  Do steps 1-3 first, and step four really is just fairly easy employment branding marketing strategy and plan.

The first three steps will take 90% of your time to fix. You’ll be shocked at how hard step two will be, and how long it will take to come to agreement on the ‘real’ problem. That’s because most bad employment brands start with bad leadership.  Bad leaders don’t easily take responsibility for this, and want to blame everyone and everything, besides themselves.

There’s no silver bullet for a bad employment brand. Unfortunately, marketing firms are going to sell you step four as a silver bullet, which is much like putting lipstick on a pig. The pig might look a little better, but it’s still a pig.

The True Value of Working for a Crappy Company

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As some of you may have realized from recent posts (Wanted: People Who Aren’t Stupid), I’ve been interviewing candidates recently for the position of Technical Recruiter working for my company HRU. I love interviewing because each time I interview I think I’ve discovered a better way to do it, or something new I should be looking for, and this most recent round of interviews is no different.

Like most HR/Talent Pros I’m always interested in quality work/co-op/internship experience. Let’s face it, it’s been drilled into us, past performance/actions will predict future performance/actions.  So, we tend to get excited over seeing a candidate that has experience from a great company or competitor and we’re intrigued to know how the other side lives and our inquisitive nature begs us to dig in.

What I’ve found over the past 20 years of interviewing is that while I love talking to people that worked at really great companies, I hire more people that have worked at really bad companies.  You see, while you learn some really good stuff working for great companies, I think people actually learn more working for really crappy companies!

Working at a really great companies gives you an opportunity to work in “Utopia”. You get to see how things are suppose to work, how people are suppose to work together, how it a perfect world it all fits together.  The reality is, we don’t work Utopia (at least the majority of us) we work in organizations that are less than perfect, and some of us actually work in down right horrible companies. Those who work in horrible companies and survive, tend to better hires. They come with battle scars and street smarts.

So, why everyone wants to get out of really bad companies (and I don’t blame them) there is actually a few things you learn from those experiences:

1. Leadership isn’t a necessity to run a profitable company. I’ve seen some very profitable companies that had really bad leadership.   Conversely, I’ve worked for some companies that had great people leaders and failed to make money. Leadership doesn’t equal profits.

2. Great people sometimes work a really crappy companies.  Don’t equate crappy company with crappy talent.  Sometimes you can find some real gems in the dump. I talk with idiots, every day, that work for really great brands. Blind squirrels…

3. Hard work is relative.  I find people who work at really bad companies, tend to appreciate hard work better than those who work a really great companies with great balance.  If all you’ve ever known is long hours and management that doesn’t care you have a family, seeing the other side gives you an appreciation that is immeasurable.

4. Not having the resources to do the job, doesn’t mean you can’t do the job. Working for a crappy company in a crappy job tends to make you more creative, because you probably won’t have what you need to do the job properly, so you find ways.

5. Long lasting peer relationships come through adversity.  You can make life-long work friends at a crappy job who you’ll keep in contact and be able to leverage as you move on in your careers.  And, here’s what each of you will think about the other: “That person can work in the shit!”; “That person is tough and get’s things done”; “That person is someone I want on my team, when I get to build a team”.

We all know the bad companies in our industries and markets.  Don’t discount candidates who have spent time with those companies. We were all at some point needing a job, a first experience, a shot at a promotion or more money, etc., and took a shot at a company we thought we could change or make a difference.  I love people who worked for bad companies, in bad jobs with bad management, because they wear it like a badge of honor!

Talent Acquisition’s 2032 Nightmare

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According to a recent USA Today article the U.S. birthrate is in sharp decline and is at its lowest levels in the past 25 years.   Here’s probably a few facts you don’t know:

– Projected 2013 birthrate in the U.S. is estimated to be 1.86

– Birthrate needed to maintain a population over a 20 year period is 2.1

Why should this concern you?

There are a number of reasons and one might be that you need as many young people as old for the simple fact of having enough young people to take care of your older population.  If you turn that equation upside down (Taiwan 1.1 or Portugal 1.3) you have a society full of older people and not enough young people to fill the jobs needed to keep running your society.

The U.S. has 5 Million jobs left unfilled because of lack of skilled employees, today. Imagine if you now have millions of less workers to even choose from, and, by the way, skilled workers aren’t coming from other countries because their societies are growing and need them.  That is what our country’s employment picture will look like in 2032.  This will be a HR/Recruiting nightmare for those young HR/Talent Pros starting out their careers in the next 10 to 15 years.

Being the Futurist that I am, I’ve already provided a solution to this problem back in 2011 over at Fistful of Talent. Should You Encourage Your Employees To Have Babies, check it out. Basically my advice remains the same, as U.S. employers we need to create a positive, encouraging environment for our employees, with family-friendly policies that make our employees feel like starting a family is a good thing, and that if they do start a family their job and ability to get a promotion won’t be compromised.  This is not the case as many U.S. employers right now, for both men and women in the workforce.

As HR Pros and organizations we tend to think this isn’t our issue.  It will take care of itself, but as we look at countries with low birthrates, the issue doesn’t take care of itself and those countries have a worker crisis going on right now.   We need to change our ways right now.  We need to be family friendly employers. We need to, as HR Pros, be concerned and find solutions for our employees around daycare, flexible schedules and other practices that will help our employees with families.   I know it sounds a bit the-sky-is-fallingish, but the numbers don’t lie we are headed for some of the hardest hiring this country has ever seen.

One solution I’ve thought of, that I didn’t bring up in 2011, is baby sign-on bonuses!  We do it for college students. I think we start doing for babies of our best employees.  I mean if parents can arrange their kids marriage, what stops us from arranging their first job?  Nothing! That’s what.  Imagine how happy your employees would be to cash a $20,000 check to help with baby expenses for the simple task of forcing their kid to come to work with your company upon college graduation.  It seems so simple! I’m not quite sure why no one has started this yet…

Stop Hiring Generics

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I know, I know, you only hire ‘top talent’.  The problem is you don’t have a top talent brand. You have a generic brand.  So, while you keep telling yourself you hire top talent, you don’t. You hire generics.

That’s okay, generics are just like top brands, right?  I’ve tried generic drugs and name brand drugs and I have to be honest, I didn’t see (err, feel) a difference.  So, based on my formal study of generics, you have nothing to worry about! Yay!

Generics suck. You know it, and I know it.

You are hiring generics.  Most organizations are hiring generics.

Here’s how you can tell.  Ask yourself why you hired one of your recent hires.  If it was because they had the skill to do the job, and a really nice personality, didn’t smell funny, you hired a generic.  If you hired them because they can do the job and  you can specifically say why they fit your culture, you hired a brand name!

Therein lies the problem, you have a generic employment brand.  It doesn’t have to be generic. You made it generic because it sounded safe and professional. Because it sounded like every other boring brand you have heard or seen. “Tim, you don’t get it, we aren’t Google or Tom’s”.  Thank G*d. No one really likes those crappy shoes and Google probably hires worse than you.

The question is, who are you? Really?

At my company, we’re grinders. We’re a little more blue collar, than white collar. We might swear in a meeting and no one will notice. We like kids and dogs and both are welcome to come visit the office, and no one will ever feel odd about that.  We like making money, and we love watching each other succeed.  We don’t get sick on Mondays or Fridays.  We like to try stuff. We probably hold on to bad clients longer than we should, but that’s because we get involved and relationships are hard to end.  Most of us like Michigan State, the ones that don’t get brutally harassed as much as possible.  We like to give everyone nicknames.

That’s not generic. That’s specific.  We don’t hire generic. We hire folks who fit our brand. The ones that get hired that don’t fit, get weeded out pretty quick.  Generics don’t fit well in with Brands.  There’s always something that just isn’t right. Strong brands build strong cultures. Generic brands build cultures where people don’t feel any connection.

Stop hiring generics.

Everyone in HR Sucks at JDs

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“So, how are your Job Descriptions (JDs)?”

Ugh! It’s the question we hate to get asked because we know they suck!  There’s only like five companies in the world that have good job descriptions and that’s because they only had to hire like three different kinds of people.  Most of us are stuck with JDs written in the 1970s, and while we know they suck, we can’t seem to find anyone to write a better one.

By “anyone” I mean the hiring managers, who usually ask for the ‘latest’ JD we have.  We blow the dust off Mr. 1970 and send it along.  To which the hiring manager goes, “yeah, that’s about right.”  You then send her the candidates you get from the sucky job description and she says, “these people aren’t even close!”

Shocking…

Sucky job descriptions are like a right of passage for HR pros.  I can’t tell you how many corporate meetings I’ve been in when the topic of conversation was somehow swayed to JDs and it always ended with, “we should hire an intern this summer to redo all those.”  Which never happens. Even the interns know how bad of a job that is!

The real problem doesn’t have to do with HR, but we own it because we own the bible of JDs for the organization.  Obviously, hiring managers should own their own JDs for their departments, but most just won’t do it, or don’t care to do a good job until they can’t find anyone for their open position. Talent Acquisition wants to get all ‘cute’ with them and turn them into marketing commercials, which could be cool if done right, but they also suck at it!

HR is the worst of all to write JDs because they turn them into something SHRM would have an HR boner over, but no one else in their right mind would ever read.  It becomes of a game of how many acronyms can shove onto a piece of paper and for gosh sakes don’t forget the say if it’s “salary” or “exempt”. I mean who would apply for a job unless they know that data?!?

ATS vendors and many of the suites have tried to solve this by auto generating the most boring JDs known to the history of man for you to just cut and paste.  The only good thing about these systems is they give you someone to blame for how sucky your JDs are.  “It’s not us, it’s this crappy software they make us use!”

Some Silicon Valley companies attempt to have “cool” job descriptions and titles, but really how cool can you get with “Brogrammer” and “Coding Ninja”? It’s like watching your high school robotics team try and pick up the cheerleaders.  You root for them, but in the end you know it’s not happening.

What can you do?

I like in-take meetings.  HR and Talent Acquisition pros hate these because it forces them to spend quality time with hiring managers, but they work. A funny thing happens when you sit in front of a hiring manager for more than 45 seconds. They begin to really talk and tell you what they need.  Not the bullet point stuff, your 1970 JD already has that, but the real stuff they want. The stuff that gets people hired and gets the req off your desk.

We all have sucky JDs. It’s nothing to get embarrassed about.  I would have a contest and reward the suckiest JD in our company as a kickoff to making better ones.  Have fun with it. Embrace it.  Just do something to stop it!