Category Archives: Branding

T3 – Employment Branding Activation tool @Universum_eb

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A couple times a year I get to demo a product that totally blows me away.  This week on T3 that product is Universum! Okay, let’s first get out of the way they Universum uses an underscore in the Twitter name which is a kiss of death in marketing! I have to let this go, because what they have is so industry changing, this might be the only mistake they’ve made along the way!

Universum is an employer branding digital research company. What the hell is that? Basically, they measure both sides of employment branding. What candidates want and expect from employers, and what you and your competition is actually doing. All of this information runs on a platform they call “Iris”.  It was originally built in conjunction with 12 of the largest employer brands in the world, and they leverage data from 3,000 universities worldwide, over 2000 individual employer brands and 55 countries.

This is a product that is used by large companies who have an employment branding function within HR or a dedicated social media role in HR or as part of a larger social team. After going through the demo, I can’t imagine any large organization not utilizing this tool. In fact, I would question the capabilities of the leadership and CMO that didn’t use this tool. The data insight and direction Iris gives you is simply a competitive advantage over those not using it!

5 Things I really like about Universum:

1. Universum has figured out the science behind social. Right now most organizations still hire under-experienced marketing pros, or HR grads who think they know social, to run their employment branding and have them basically test crap out and see what sticks. Iris will show you exactly what works and what doesn’t work in your branding.

2. Universum will show you what your competition is doing that is working really well. Competitive data is the holy grail of what HR can provide strategically to an organization. This one product will elevate your practice, strategically, like no other technology I’ve seen in HR or Talent.

3. Iris can give you exact insight to what content and language you should be using to attract specific talent to your organization.  Most employment branding is one message, way too broad. Iris lets you build specific branding tailored to the exact talent your organization is struggling to find.

4. Iris helps you create great content by showing you what is working, with what audiences, and in which countries. Truly a global company, that will give you global views about how branding needs to change based on which locations you’re trying to get talent. They have over 1.3 million pieces of content curated in their platform and growing. No inspiration needed.

5. Universum is an Employer Branding Spy Tool! Probably the coolest feature of Universum is its ability to show you exactly what and how your competition is leveraging their employment brand, and exactly how you can beat them for the same talent!

Universum is an employment branding activation technology.  Most of us either have a nonexistent employment brand or a brand that is basically on life support. Universum does more that just give you knowledge, they show you step-by-step how to activate and win your industry with your employment brand.

As I mentioned at the beginning this is a product for large companies. Probably Fortune 2000 types, or organizations that have dedicated employment branding folks on staff in their HR shop. The cost is fairly reasonable. When they told me the price point, I was surprised, I would have paid way more for what I was getting.

Check them out, I guarantee a demo Universum/Iris won’t disappoint!

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

The First Rule of Recruiting

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Sometimes we go so far into the weeds in recruiting we forget what is really important.

We have to have a brand!

We have to have an ATS! Or a new ATS!

We have to have a CRM! What the hell is a CRM!

Our job descriptions need to be better!

Our career site sucks! Don’t they all!?

We need to relaunch our employee referral program!

There are literally a million things you could focus on in recruiting and you still would have a list of crap you never even got to.

You know recruiting isn’t difficult. It’s not like we’re trying to launch the space shuttle. Recruiting is finding people for your organization. People are everywhere. We just need to talk them into coming to work for our organizations.

It’s the first rule of recruiting – Just let people know you’re hiring.

We make it so difficult when all we have to truly do is let people know we actually want to hire them. Do you have any idea how many people would really want to work for your organization, but they never know you are hiring or were hiring?

Recruiting is really only that. Just letting enough people know that you want them to work for you until you’ve reached the right people. It’s okay that you will reach some you don’t want. That’s part of the game.

To reach the people who you want, and who want you, you have to let a lot of people know you’re hiring.

Letting people know you’re hiring goes beyond your career site. It goes beyond job boards. It goes beyond employee referral programs. It’s a philosophy throughout your organization. It’s about an understanding that you want everyone to know that you’re hiring.

Most organizations don’t do this. It’s a combination of issues, but mostly it’s conceited belief that letting people know you’re hiring seems desperate. That we are too good of an organization to let everyone know we are hiring, because we don’t want everyone, we only want a few.

This is why most talent acquisition departments fail. Simple conceit.

Great recruiting isn’t conceited, great recruiting is about being humble enough to let people know you want them.

My exact 3 minute opening Interview monologue.

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Almost every failed interview can be traced back to the first three minutes. Experts will tell you the first ten seconds, but these are the same experts who have never interviewed or haven’t interviewed in the past twenty years. The reality is a little longer, but not much.

An interview doesn’t really start until you’re asked to open your mouth. And, not the small talk crap that you do while people get settled and wait for Jenny to get her coffee and find your resume.

When you get asked that first question, “So, tell us a little about yourself.” Bam! It’s on. Start the clock, you have 180 seconds to show them why they should hire you.

Here’s what I would say:

“I was raised by 6 women. My grandmother is the matriarch of our family. I was raised by a single-mom, who had four sisters, my aunts, and my sister was the first grandchild born into the family. As you can imagine, I was dressed-up a lot! The women in my life love to laugh and I was always had a stage with them to make this happen. 

The other thing it taught me was to cook, sew and iron. All of which I do to this day. My wife is the baker, but I’m the cook. Mending and ironing fall in my chore bucket around the house.

The real thing it taught me was the value of women in the world. I did my master’s thesis on women and leadership. My mother started her own company in 1979 when no women started companies. Not only that, she started a company in a male-dominated technical field.  I was nine years old, and she would pay me ten cents to stuff envelopes for her. We would sit on her bed and she made calls to candidates, and I would stuff envelopes with the volume off on the TV.

Living with a single mom, who started a business during a recession was a challenge. I learned the value of work and started my first real job the day I turned sixteen. I paid my own way through college as my parents, who could afford to help, believed I would get more out of college if I found a way to pay for it on my own. I did. In hindsight, I’m glad they taught me this lesson. It was hard but worth it.

All of these experiences have helped shape my leadership style. I set high expectations but work hard to ensure people have the right tools and knowledge to be successful. I hold people accountable to what we agree are our goals. I work very hard, but I like to have fun when I work. 

What else would you like to know about me?”

That’s it. I shut up and wait for a response.

What did I tell them in my three minutes?

I told them my story.  People don’t hire your resume, they hire your story.

If you want to get hired, you need to craft your story. A real story. A story people want to listen to. A story people will remember when it comes time to decide whom to hire.

Chipotle’s HR Just Had a Major Screw Up!

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If you pay attention to the news at over the past few months you’ve heard about the E. coli outbreak at a number of Chipotle restaurants all over the U.S.:

“The FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) along with state and local officials are investigating two separate outbreaks of E. coli O26 infections that have been linked to food served at Chipotle Mexican Grill restaurants in several states.

As of January 27, 2016, the CDC reports a total of 55 people infected with the outbreak strain of STEC (Shiga toxin producing E. coli) O26 from a total of 11 states in the larger outbreak: California (3), Delaware (1), Illinois (1), Kentucky (1), Maryland (1), Minnesota (2), New York (1), Ohio (3), Oregon (13), Pennsylvania (2), and Washington (27). There have been 21 reported hospitalizations. The majority of these cases were reported from Oregon and Washington during October 2015.”

No restaurant wants this to happen, ever! It has an immediate and lasting impact to sales. I worked for Applebee’s, one of the largest restaurant chains in the world, food safety was our single biggest focus and a constant worry.  Chipotle’s entire company went into immediate crisis mode when all of this was going down.

So, much so, that they decided to do an unprecedented all store closing to ‘re-train’ all employees on current, new and additional food safety measures. From Fast Company:

The company is still not clear on which ingredient brought on the E. coli outbreak, though it again confirmed that the norovirus was spread through employees who came into work while sick.

“If you are feeling sick, or if you have vomited, either at work or at home, you need to tell your manager or field leader immediately,” co-CEO Monty Moran told workers. Managers are also expected to report if an employee gets sick at work, and if a worker or customer vomits in a restaurant, the location must be shut down immediately.

Most people won’t catch what just happened. E. coli is major! Both Chipotle and the CDC never found out where the E. Coli came from. Norovirus is completely different. Restaurants have norovirus outbreaks. It’s not frequent, but more frequent than you think. It’s usually caused by a worker with stomach flu coming to work and spreading it to cooking areas, thus giving it customers and other workers.

Two very different things!

But, since we can’t find out where the E. coli came from, which was more than likely a supplier of some fresh ingredient – since it showed up in so many states and so many locations, not connected any other way, let’s show our customers we solved something else!

The problem is, Chipotle doesn’t really have a Norovirus issue. Sure they might have had one or two restaurants with an outbreak, but that is solved with a good bleach cleaning and some retraining.  Chipotle’s executive team and HR went off the deep end and instituted the following things:

  • Sick employees who have vomited at work or at home, now get 5 paid days off before they can return to work. 
  • If an employee or customer vomit at a restaurant, that restaurant must be closed down immediately. 

This is unsustainable. HR should have advised the executive team that this isn’t sustainable.

Do you know who goes and works at a Chipotle? Mainly college aged kids who love to drink and eat giant burritos!  Can you imagine the number of Chipotle employees who will be calling in sick the Monday of Spring Break to tell their manager they just vomited!? Sorry, but I’ll take my five days of pay, and I’ll do my recovering someplace warm!  I can see Chipotle restaurant managers pulling their hair out already!

Also, dumb drunk people throw-up all the time at restaurants. They don’t have Norovirus. They have the brown bottle flu! You don’t close a restaurant over that.  You clean it up really, really well. Investigate the circumstances and make a decision on what you really need to do. Chipotle just made a black and white decision, that will hurt their company.

So, I’m so freaking smart, what would I have done?

1. Give individual restaurant General Managers and Area District Managers more control over how to handle these situations, like when to close, or force an employee to stay home, and make sure it doesn’t hurt them financially by making these decisions. Local managers don’t want to close a restaurant because it impacts their bonus, which is a huge part of their compensation.

2. Hire a PR firm to explain to America that what happened at Chipotle, what really happened with the E. coli outbreak, had nothing to do with local restaurant food safety procedures. Also, what they did to ensure a higher level of safety moving forward.

What they did was all smoke and mirrors, to make people feel like they have the problem handled. By the way, they probably could have done nothing and still be in the same position. Young people are notoriously forgiving on these types of cases because they believe it still won’t happen to them!

Okay, I’m off my soapbox. What do you think?

Recruiters – Have You Figured Out Snapchat? You better…

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I’ll be the first to say, I don’t currently use Snapchat.  My sons do. In fact, they use it constantly. So, do their friends. Teens and College students are using Snapchat to communicate with each other in a major way, and you are starting to see major stars and athletes join as well. Unless you have kids from the ages of 12-22, you probably have no idea what Snapchat even is.

Why should you care? Check out this chart:

Screen Shot 2016-02-03 at 8.17.52 AM

 

Two years ago the use of Snapchat didn’t even register. In the spring of 2015, it was 13%. What do you think it’s right now? My guess is over 25%, maybe even more!

This isn’t necessarily about recruiting on Snapchat. Although, I know some folks will do this and find a way to be successful in some certain areas. Most of won’t.

Understanding and using Snapchat is about knowing how the talent you want to recruit likes to communicate. It’s about building your brand on a communication channel of your target audience.  You can dismiss it, but your competition probably won’t.

Another interesting thing about the chart is the dramatic shift from teens out of Facebook.  We’ve seen this in the industry for a while. As Mom and Grandma jumped on Facebook, the kids jumped off in a major way!  I suspect, and we’ll eventually see the data to support this, is that when they stop being kids, those kids will come back! Either way, Facebook is still an important tool to understand as well, because we recruit more than young adults!

Check out this tutorial on Snapchat to see what it’s all about:

Also, check out this great piece by SocialTalent on How to Use Snapchat to Recruit.

The Best Talent Expects Tougher Interviews

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I was reminded this week about the importance of tough interviews and their importance!

My friend has been interviewing at a number of good companies for high-level jobs. He’s going to be a great hire for someone, he’s a top notch talent. Great resume, experience, education and personality. He’s a five-tool player, A level talent!

He was debriefing me on some of his interviews and one thing struck me as soon as he said it. He was talking about one interview in particular and why he was interested in the company. Basically, he was interested in the company because they gave him the most challenging interview!

It was his determination that if a company was going to be that challenging in an interview, it was a place he would like to work. It was the toughest interview he has been on, and as a top talent, it seemed they were doing more to ensure they were only hiring top talent, and that made him feel like it was the right place for him!

A few things about this interview:

1. It was a long interview.

2. They didn’t force him to interview with 15 people over 8 stages.

3. They asked tough, challenging questions, they only someone who really knew their stuff, and worked at that level, would be able to answer!

The problem with saying tough interviews are better is too many HR Pros believe ‘more’ interviewing, is tough interviewing. More doesn’t equal tough, it equals more. There is a huge difference!

Tough, difficult interviews are ones where the questions asked would challenge the knowledge and skill of the person asked. Many times we end up not asking anything challenging in interviews because are spending all of our time just ‘talking’ the candidate into the job. In this instance we end up hiring the person who had the best interaction with us, maybe not the best candidate.

Top talent likes to be challenged. It’s the reason they’re top talent! If you don’t challenge them, most will not accept your offer, because they won’t view your organization as a great fit.

So, how do you challenge top talent and recruit top talent at the same time?

It’s your recruiters job to recruit and close. It’s the hiring managers job to challenge the heck out of the talent you put in front of them, then tell you which is the best. Part of the recruiters job is to ‘warn’ the candidates, that they will be challenged in this interview like none they ever have been a part of. This alone will help weed out those who aren’t up for the challenge!

Top talent wants you to want them, but they also want to know they’re going to a great organization that will challenge them and make them better!

The Next Generation Just Named Itself! #NicknamingYourselfIsStupid

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Have you ever had a nickname you didn’t want?  You were in the third grade and crapped your pants and some dumb kid called you ‘Stinky’ and it stuck, for life! The rest of your life you got to go around being called ‘Stinky’ and having to explain this to people.

I think most people in those situations try to create a new nickname!  “Hey, guys, just call me Dice! I was at summer camp and all the guys there called me “Dice”! We played this game with dice and I was really great at it, anyway, it stuck. So, you guys can call me Dice, I’m cool with it.” Okay, Stinky, we got you!

There’s only one rule in nicknames. That rule? You can’t make your own nickname!

To my surprise the great folks at MTV decided it would be a great idea for the kids over at GenZ, that generation under the Millennials, to just come up with their own generational nickname.  The MTV crew actually surveyed thousands of high school kids from across the country to determine what they would prefer to have their ‘generation’ called.

Say hello to The Founders!

Why the founders?  Well, apparently this next generation has attached itself the Silicon Valley culture of founding companies.  Not they have really actually done this, but it’s what they identify with, so why not act like you started this whole dot com, startup thingy.

What do we really know about these Founders? A few things for sure, that I think will help organizations understand this next generation entering the workforce:

1. They were raised during the Great Recession. Not since the Great Depression, have so many kids witnessed parents and adults close to them lose so many jobs and struggle financially. This will impact their work ethic, the importance of keeping a job, etc. Think the opposite of how Millennials view work! The Founders probably have more in common with the Greatest Generation, than the Millennials.

2. They have never not had a Smartphone. This will impact how they do their work, how they socialize and how they communicate. The Millennials had flip phones to start!

3. The media has bombarded them with unrealistic views of what work looks like.  Google is an outlier, not the norm. Yet, they tend to believe it’s the norm because the ‘Googlized’ work environment gets so much publicity. 99% of work environments do not look like Google. This will cause some ‘hey, I didn’t expect this’ moments for a ton of kids in their first jobs.

I hate naming generations. Millennials, Founders, Gen-X… They’re kids.  They won’t know their ass from a hole in the ground, and you’ll have to teach them most everything they’ll need to know about your company and your jobs, because our educational system continues give them real-world skills to compete.

Call them whatever you want.  Entry level always seems to fit best.

2015 Top Post: Resumes Objectives Sent From G*D

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I’m on vacation this week, so you’re getting a best of week from The Project. These are the most read posts of 2015 to this point. Enjoy! 

This is an actual resume objective from an actual candidate’s resume that was submitted for a position at my company (HRU Technical Resources) this past week:

Objective: (As written, no corrections)
1. Move out of my apartment after 4 years of living there.
2. Buy house
3. Buy ring, find girlfriend, marry her.
4. Continue investing for retirement
5. Go to florida on vacation
6. Make documentaries
7. Do what I do best. Intovate.

Because this might possibly the best resume objective ever written, I wanted to break all seven of the objectives down:

1. Shows great forward thinking and longevity all in one simple sentence.  I want more, but I’m willing to work to get there.

2. Big goal #1 – set the foundation. Smart!

3. I’m heterosexual, just in case you were wondering.  Plus, I do things a little different.  I want to get the ring before the girl. That way I’ll know for sure the girl will like the ring that I can afford, since it will already be bought. I might even show it to her on the first date, just so we don’t run into problems later down the road.

4. Long term planning. Conservative. Can’t rely on Obama to plan for my retirement.

5. But, I like to party and have fun in the short term.

6. I also have a serious side and a creative side.  I’m the full package.

7. Do what I do best! Intovate! Not spelling. He was so proud of it, I had to look it up and make sure I wasn’t missing something! You know I’m grammatically challenged! Nope Intovate is not a word, but it sure sounds like it should be!

There is a reason that resumes are dying, and this might it.  For certain positions you need a resume, but for most you just need to fill out the application, no resume needed.  Some how, at some point in our history, everyone began to feel like they need a resume. That’s when this happens.

Happy Searching my recruiting friends! Go forth today and Intovate!

 

Millennials Are Buying Your B.S. Employment Branding

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I’m a huge fan of Malcolm Gladwell and he recently said some things to say at a data analytics conference in Seattle. He had a number of points but one that interested me most was him discussing the trust levels between younger people today, versus older people in the baby boomer range. Here are his comments:

“Data can tell us about the immediate environment of people’s attitudes, but not much about the environment in which they were formed,” he said. “So which is right? Do people not trust others, as the polls say … or are they lying to the surveys?”

The context helps, Gladwell said.

That context is a massive shift in American society over the past few decades: a huge reduction in violent crime. For example, New York City had over 2,000 murders in 1990. Last year it was 300. In the same time frame, the overall violent crime index has gone down from 2,500 per 100,000 people to 500.

“That means that there is an entire generation of people growing up today not just with Internet and mobile phones … but also growing up who have never known on a personal, visceral level what crime is,” Gladwell said.

Baby boomers, who had very personal experiences of crime, were given powerful evidence that they should not trust. The following generations are reverting to what psychologists call “default truth.” In other words, they assume that when someone says something, it’s true … until they see evidence to the contrary.

“I think millennials are very trusting,” Gladwell said. “And when they say they’re not … they’re bullshitting.”

Why should you care about this?

Employment branding is marketing.  In HR we get so concerned about making sure what we say is the honest to G*d truth and nothing but the truth. We can’t tell a candidate we ‘rock’ when we really don’t ‘rock’. Guess what?  You can. Guess what else?  They’ll believe it.

Why?  Because the younger people today are a trusting lot.  They’re already a bit naive based on their age and lack of experiences. Add this to what Malcolm says above and they are ripe to be picked off.  Is that fair? No, probably not.  But, hey, as my good friend Kris Dunn loves to quote from Jerry Maguire, “this is show friends, this is show business”.

Tell the story you want. People will listen.  And skip the comments, I know this strategy is fraught with issues.  The truth is, it doesn’t matter. The difference between great employers and average employers just isn’t that great in candidates eyes.

GE’s “Owen” Employment Branding is Brilliant!

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If you haven’t seen these TV commercials for GE (they also have a ton of radio ads in the same genre) you’re missing out on one of the best employment branding campaigns that have come out in years! “What’s the matter with Owen?” is the series and they’re very funny!

The ads show that GE knows who they are and what the perception is about them in the technology industry.  They also know, like many other giant established primarily manufacturing companies (see Big 3 Autos, Boeing, Lockheed, General Dynamics, etc.), that they need engineering and IT talent, just as bad as those companies in Silicon Valley.

Here are a couple of the ads:

We talk constantly about how important employment branding is to organizations to attract talent. We also say that small companies have an advantage in employment branding because they can be more creative.  I think GE just gave big orgs a roadmap to how they can flip the script when it comes to be creative and having fun with their employment branding!

Want to have a better understanding at how bad the labor market, truly, is for STEM talent?  GE, one of the most established brands in the world for decades and one of the most conservative with their branding, is making fun of itself and it’s perceived culture!  I can’t even explain at what a huge shift this is within the industry!