Category Archives: Candidate Experience

In Recruiting, Content Is NOT King!

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Something happened over the past five years. Content marketing, which is a brilliant way to connect with a customer base and build sales, became very fashionable in the recruiting space.  So much so, that I constantly read vendors telling in the trenches Talent Acquisition pros and leaders:

“In Recruiting, content is king!”

No. No, it is not! In recruiting, activity is king.  I think the confusion comes into play with people treating employment branding and recruiting as the same thing. They’re not the same thing. One build’s awareness of who you are and what kind of employer you might be, possibly you can stretch employment branding into awareness of your job openings as well.

Content in employment branding is important if you’re doing content recruitment marketing. Again, you don’t have to do this to do employment branding. Many organizations build their brand without content. If you have a great consumer brand, you are less likely to need content to build your employment brand.

I’m not against producing great content to build your brand, believe me! It can be super helpful, especially if you don’t have a larger consumer brand behind you.

The point is you can be awesome in recruiting and never produce a single piece of content. I see so many TA shops missing this right now. The question is why? Why are TA shops believing that the only way to recruit is to build content and build an audience?

Employer Branding is a huge business right now! Organizations are spending millions of dollars per year to build, maintain and grow their employment brand. For huge organizations, or organizations in highly competitive environments, this is very important. For many organizations, this is a complete waste of time and resources!

The noise in the employment branding space is so loud right now, most organizations are not going to be heard. In that case, why are you spending the resources? You’re doing this because it’s easier than picking up a phone and calling a candidate! That’s recruiting.

Recruiting are the activities you do to hire people for the jobs you have open. Included in those activities are not only candidate attraction but candidate interaction. Candidate interaction, the function of a recruiter interacting with a candidate, might be the most forgotten skill in all of Talent Acquisition.

The skill of interacting with a live person is lost on most talent acquisition shops. Sure you can connect with candidates via email, messaging, text, twitter, Snapchat, etc. Eventually, though, someone has to speak to a live person. Someone has to close this person on coming to work for you. We, the talent acquisition industry, continue to spend less and less time on this side of our business, and it’s showing.

Great recruiting organizations are activity focused and activity driven. Sales funnel. Candidates come in the top, and hires come out the bottom. It’s not difficult. It’s not art. It’s a process. It’s metrics. Teach your recruiters to be able to engage live people on the front side, and you will see a great return on that investment in more hires. No content needed.

 

 

Candidates Actually Want Human Interaction!

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TA Leaders and Executives, this is the dirty little secret that your Recruiters and the Talent Acquisition Technology industry does not want you to know!  Candidates actually prefer to have human interaction when searching and applying for a job. From a study done by ASA:

“Three of the top five ways job seekers land a job are “high touch,” according to the survey findings. Word of mouth is the most popular means (43%)—followed by job board websites and employer websites (both at 30%). Contacts or acquaintances with prospective employers (30%) and staffing and recruiting companies (25%) also rank high as resources that led to job offers.

Three in four (77%) actually prefer human interaction when searching for a job, according to the ASA Workforce Monitor.“

Recruiters and TA Tech are in bed together to pull the wool over your eyes!  TA Tech wants to sell you automation! Recruiters don’t want to pick up the phone! Put those two groups together and it’s one big circle jerk about to use only technology solutions to recruit and never pick up another phone as long they live!

Seriously! 3 out 4 candidates prefer to have a human contact them and tell them about the job you have open. I bet if you sent out an informal survey to your recruiting team, right now – today, the response from your recruiters would be that they believe only 25% or less actually would prefer a call!

That’s a huge disconnect, and should be very telling about the talent on your team!

So, how do you get your recruiters back on the phone?

1. Measure the amount of outgoing calls by person and post it publicly for all to see. You don’t even have to say one thing about it, the calls will automatically increase! True recruiters hate being on the bottom of any scoreboard!

2. Have fun with it! Run contest and provide incentives for more outgoing calls by your recruiters. For recruiters who grew up in a world where they thought they could just email and message their way to success, the phone is scary! Some will need a kind push!

3. Group call parties. Take one hour of the day and plan for every single recruiter to be on the phones at the same time. Make sure they prepare by sourcing ahead of time and have a number of candidates to reach out to. They should have at least 25-40 to call. Most calls will go to voicemail, if they’re lucky they’ll actually talk to a few people. It will be the fastest hour of their day or week! When everyone is doing this at the same time, you get great energy from the group and it seems less scary!

An average recruiter with 25 openings on their desk should be talking live to around 75-100 people each week on the phone. What I find when I first go into a new shop and measure this, the real number is more like 15-25!  It’s shockingly low! How are you going to fill 25 openings by talking to 25 people per week!? You won’t. That’s why your TA shop is failing.

I love TA Tech! I love TA Tech more than almost anyone I know. What I also know is that all great recruiters spend more time on the phone on average than weaker recruiters. It’s so simple, yet most of us fail as TA leaders not recognizing this.

 

Sourcers Are The New Recruiters?

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Come listen to my story about a man named Tim.

Poor Recruiting Pro, barely kept his family fed. 

And then one day he the internet came along, 

and up on his screen came a bunch of profiles. 

Candidates those are. Money, in people form. 

For those of you that are under 40, you might want to go Google Beverly Hillbillies theme song…

What the hell is going on in this world?

No, really!?

I started my career out as a ‘Researcher’. Little did I know, that was really just sourcing (or at least what we call sourcing today). My job was to find candidates for jobs we had open. I find a candidate. Do a basic screen. Pass them onto a recruiter who sold them to the client/hiring manager.

I then got my own clients/hiring managers and did the full boat. Find the jobs. Find the candidates. Make the offers. Etc.

When I went to corporate Talent Acquisition almost every shop was doing it the same way. Recruiters were assigned departments, business units, hiring managers, etc. They would work with those individuals when they had openings. Post jobs. Screen incoming candidates. Attend campus job fairs. Maybe, just maybe, a little bit of outbound calling – those were the rock stars. And complain how crappy their ATS was, and how awful the hiring managers were.

That was corporate Talent Acquisition, as I know it, from 7 years ago.

During this time, Sourcing became a thing. Everyone needed to now, break up “Talent Acquisition” into Sourcing and Recruiting.  Sourcers found candidates. The premise being we need ‘outbound’ activity happening. Actual candidate hunting. Recruiters then did screening, setting up interviews, offers, etc.

Somewhere over the past five years. Sourcers have become what Recruiters used to be.  They find candidates. They screen candidates. They set up interviews. I know some are even closing the deal with offers.

So, my question is, today, what the hell do Corporate Recruiters do in those shops that have Sourcers?

It seems like corporate recruiters are now advanced admin professionals. They really don’t have any skills to speak of.  I’m honestly asking TA Leaders! If you have Sourcing doing all of the skill-based activities of recruiting, what are you paying recruiters for? It would seem like you could get some really good Admin Pros do all of the work you have Recruiters doing.

Am I off base on this?

This came up because I met with a TA Leader who was paying their corporate Recruiters $85-100K in salary. She was also paying Sourcers a bit less, $65-80K in salary. When I dug into what they were actually doing, it seemed to me the most valuable of the two was easily the Sourcing Pros! The Recruiters did almost nothing of value for what they were being paid.

The hiring managers in this environment even went to the Sourcing Pros to get information on candidates! Basically, the Recruiters set up interviews, made offers, and onboarding.  To be fair, they were also in charge of ’employment branding’ for which they had an outside firm doing all of that work. Sourcing Pros had candidate experience, recruitment marketing, ATS/CRM, job postings, etc.

It seems like this is coming full circle.  We split the function and now the Sourcers are just becoming what Recruiters used to be. A one-stop shop for filling positions.

What I’m quickly seeing is that the value of these two positions is quickly becoming uneven.  When “Sourcing” as a concept was introduced, it was to have better efficiency in recruiting. Take a difficult function. Split into two parts, and let folks specialize. Through this specialization and synergy, you’ll get more work then everyone running their own desk.  Great theoretical concept!

What I’m finding in most organizations is that the theory isn’t meeting the actual result.

Are you seeing or feeling the same thing? Hit me in the comments, I’m truly interested.

Would You Be Willing To Pay For Interview Feedback – Take 2

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“I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.”

– Howard Marks

Yesterday I wrote a post called Would You Be Willing To Pay For Interview Feedback that caused some people to lose their minds.  I asked what I thought was a simple question: Would you be willing to pay for interview feedback?  Not just normal, thanks, but no thanks, interview feedback, but really in-depth career development type of feedback from the organization that interviewed you.  You can read the comments here – they range from threats to outright hilarity! Needless to say, there is a lot of passion on this topic.

Here’s what I know:

– Most companies do a terrible job at delivery any type of feedback after interviews. Terrible.

– Most candidates only want two things from an interview.

1.  To Be Hired

2. If not hired, to know a little about why they didn’t get hired

Simple, right?  But, this still almost never happens!  Most large companies, now, automate the entire process with email form letters.  Even those lucky enough to get a live call, still get a watered-down, vanilla version of anything close to something that we would consider helpful.

When I asked if someone was willing to pay for interview feedback, it wasn’t for the normal lame crap that 99% of companies give.  It was for something new. Something better. Something of value.  It would also be something completely voluntary.  You could not pay and still get little to no feedback that you get now — Dear John, Thanks, but no thanks. The majority of the commentators felt like receiving feedback after an interview was a ‘right’ – legal and/or G*d given.  The reality is, it’s neither.

The paid interview feedback would be more in-depth, have more substance and would focus on you and how to help you get better at interviewing.  It would also get into why you didn’t get the job.  The LinkedIn commentators said this was rife with legal issues.  Organizations would not be allowed to do this by their legal staff because they would get sued by interviewees over the reasons.  This is a typical HR response.  If you say ‘legal’ people stop talking about an idea.  They teach that in HR school so we don’t have to change or be challenged by new ideas!

The reality is, as an HR Pro, I’m never going give someone ammunition to sue my organization.  If I didn’t hire someone for an illegal reason, let’s say because they were a woman, no person in their right mind would come out and say that.  Okay, first, I would never do that. Second, if I did, I would focus the feedback on other opportunity areas the candidate had that would help them in their next interview or career. No one would ever come out and say to an interviewee, “Yeah, you didn’t get the job because you’re a chick!”

This is not a legal or risk issue.  It’s about finally finding a way to deliver great interview feedback to candidates.  It’s about delivering a truly great candidate experience.  So many HR Pros and organizations espouse this desire to deliver a great candidate experience but still don’t do the one thing that candidates really want.  Just give me feedback!

So, do you think I’m still crazy for wanting to charge interviewees for feedback?

Would You Be Willing To Pay For Interview Feedback?

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I get my ideas in the shower. I have a busy life, so it seems like my down time is that solid 5 to 10 minutes I get in the shower. I usually shower twice a day—once first thing in the morning, then before I go to bed. That’s 10 to 20 minutes daily to think and clean. I like going to bed clean. I like waking up with a shower. You’re welcome. You now know my daily cleaning habits. Thanks for stopping by today!

I’m not sure why ideas come to me. My wife says I’m not completely “right.” I get weird things that come into my head, at weird times. This morning I decided to stop fighting the candidate experience freaks (those people that think candidate experience actually matters, which it doesn’t) and finally help them solve their problem. You won, freaks. But I damn well better get a lifetime achievement award at the next Candidate Experience Awards!

Here’s your solution: Charge candidates a fee to get feedback on their interviews.

<Drops mic, walks off stage, give me my award.>

Yeah, that’s what I just said. Let me give you the details; apparently, a couple of you just spit out your coffee.

Candidates want great feedback on their interviews, desperately. When someone really wants something, that certain thing becomes very valuable. HR shops in organizations have the ability to deliver this very valuable thing, but they don’t have the resources to do it well. By well, I mean really well: making that feedback personable, meaningful, and developmental.

Are you willing to spend 15 minutes debriefing a candidate after an interview… a candidate you don’t want? Of course not. What if that candidate paid you $10 for that feedback? That’s $40 per hour you could make just debriefing candidates. Couldn’t you go out and hire a sharp HR pro for like $30 per hour to do this job?

Yeah, that’s why I deserve awards. My ideas are groundbreaking. It’s a big burden to carry around.

Think of this like an airline. Airlines figured out that certain people are willing to pay an extra $25 to get on the plane first, or to be first in line. This is all you’re doing. You’re not taking advantage of anyone; you’re just offering a first-class candidate experience for those willing to pay for it. For those unwilling to pay for first class, they’ll get your coach experience. They’ll get a form letter that says thanks, no thanks, here’s a 10% off coupon on your next use of our service, or whatever you do to make that candidate experience seem special.

A first-class candidate experience for $10. Do you think candidates would pay for that? You’re damn straight they would! Big companies would actually have to establish departments for this! Goldman Sachs, give me a call, I’ll come set this up for you! GM, Ford and Chrysler, I’m like an hour away, let’s talk, I can come down any day next week.

It’s easy to dismiss a crazy idea that some guy came up with in the shower—until your competition starts doing it, it becomes the industry norm, or Jobvite orHireVue or Chequed builds the app and starts selling this a service. My Poppi (that’s what I called my Grandfather) always use to say, “Tim, it only costs a little more to go first class.” People like first-class treatment. People want first-class treatment. People will pay for first class treatment.

Would you pay for great interview feedback, so great it could be considered personal development? How much?