Category Archives: Competitive Data

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!

3 Things HR Pros Don’t Want for the Holidays!

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It’s that time of year when you start receiving holiday gifts from HR Vendors.  My own company even does it.  For the most part, we send out a holiday card to the vast majority out our contacts, but those ‘paying’ clients or ‘Friends of the Company’ (former or future paying clients) we do something special.  Most companies go through the same kind of decision-making process when determining what should you do for your clients.

Some companies really get creative when determining what to send their clients. My friends Kris Dunn and Shannon Russo, who run the RPO firm Kinetix, decided a few years back to give out books to their clients and friends of the company.  Not just any books, they really dug in and got creative around a book that thought would challenge how people were thinking.  They would put together a thank you note and send out the books.  It’s different, it’s eye-catching, it’s memorable.  I’ll say, though, Kinetix is not the norm.

My friend, Eric Winegardner, at Monster.com, personally makes peanut brittle each holiday, packs it up for hundreds of clients and friends, and sends it out all over the country.  It isn’t easy. It’s very time-consuming. He could easily shop it out and buy store bought stuff.  It shows that he cares.  It shows that he is thinking about you.  Whether you like peanut brittle or not, it becomes a personal gift from him to you.

The norm is boring, safe and sometimes laughable.  Let me give you examples of the worse corporate/client holiday gifts:

1. Pinup Calendar!  Okay, I have to bust on a company that I actually like a lot, Dice.com!  But, they send out a Pinup Calendar each year, and I’m not sure if it’s meant to be a joke, or if one of their executive’s spouses runs a calendar printing company and they are forced to send these out, but it doesn’t fit their brand at all!  “Hey, we’re a tech company, take this 1970 pinup calendar and put in the wall next to your 26 inch LCD screen with your Outlook running on it.”  My grandpa had a pinup calendar in his garage he would get from the gas station!  I’m not sure who makes the Dice.com calendar decision, but I would love to hear about it!

2. Pre-printed Holiday Cards!  You know the ones that say something like “Happy Holidays from the Gang at HRU!”.  You shove it in a pre-printed envelope with a pre-printed address label of your client that your admin ran off an excel mail merge.  It says ‘Classy’!  “We care so much about you as a client that we won’t even sign our name to the card!”  Really!? I don’t care if you’re sending out 1500 cards, sign your freaking name on the cards. It might take a couple of hours and your wrist will hurt, but you’ll live.  Your clients deserve your very least!

3. Company Logo Coffee Mug!  No one really wants your crappy logo coffee mug, unless you’re going to spend some real money and get something that is really nice.  No, I take that back, we still don’t want your expensive logo crappy coffee mug!  Again, what this says to your client is: 1. You must drink coffee and 2. You must drink coffee in our crappy mug and think about us!  I don’t drink coffee. Send me Diet Mt. Dew with your logo on it and I’ll drink every last drop and sign your praises in a caffeinated baritone that would make angels blush!

So, what should you do to show your clients you really care about them and want to thank them for another year of doing business?  It doesn’t matter, big or small, but make it something personal to them, not to you.  If your first thought is: “what is something that is cheap that we can throw out logo on and send it out” — you’re doing it wrong! If your thinking what does this client (the individual I have a relationship with) really into, and what’s something I can send them to show them I was thinking of ‘them’ specifically when they open it — you’re doing it right!

BTW – for any HR Vendor reading this – I’m totally into Gin, Michigan State University and Sprinkles Cupcakes!  Have a great holiday season!

T3 – @Phenom_People

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This week I get to review Talent Relationship Marketing (TRM) technology Phenom People (who apparently, like @Kris_Dunn, think it’s good to put an underscore in your Twitter name!). So, what’s TRM? TRM is a new entry into the Talent Acquisition/HR technology space. It’s basically, the technology that you use from visitor to applicant, whereas your ATS is applicant to hire.

Phenom People, formally iMonentous, has its roots in mobile recruiting. Back in 2010 when they started it was under this idea that ‘hey, looks like a lot of people might use these smartphones to search for jobs!’ Turns out, they were really right! Phenom People has grown into a technology that attempts to make the job search more like online shopping. Think Amazon, but for searching and applying for a job on your own career site.

Online shopping has evolved to a point where it seems like the site you’re visiting knows what you want before you do. Phenom People does the same thing for your candidates! It tracks everything about a job seeker who enters your career site. Where did they come from, what did they look at, where did they go, etc. Tracking over 400 data points in the process. Phenom can tell you an amazing amount of information about the people coming to your site, and give you the inside track to source and engage those people again, even if they don’t apply!

5 Things I really like about Phenom People: 

1. Look Ahead Search. You know when you start typing in Amazon and auto fills in what you think you’re searching for? Phenom does that for your job seekers. You might not think this is a big deal until you use it and see the difference as a job seeker. It’s awesome.

2. Careers Page turned Shopping experience.  Job seeker personalization is very 2016!  If you ever shopped online, especially at Amazon or similar sites, you can kind of picture what Phenom People will do your career site. Jobs, for sure. But, also, personalized curated content, designed specifically to the user, even when you don’t know that user. Reviews, through a great API integration with Glassdoor, where the job seeker never leaves your site, but can still do their research!

3. Analytics that will scare you! In a totally good way! It’s unbelievable what Phenom People can tell you about each and every person who visits your site, plus the information they can give you to re-engage those people who never even gave you one piece of information! It’s big brother for talent acquisition, and you’re going to be amazed!

4. A complete history of every job seeker who visits your site.  Sourcing and recruiting is tough. It gets much easier when you’re given a complete history of what, where and how the job seeker found you, how long they stayed on pages, what content they engaged with, etc. Stuff the job seeker use to believe was secret, you now know, and can use to build a great selling strategy to get them interested in your organization and jobs!

5. The upside is very impressive! Many of the technologies I review are great, but they lack capacity to grow into anything else than what they really are. That’s fine, if they’re good at what they do and ROI makes sense. Phenom People is just scratching the service of what they can do with the information and data they have on your job seekers! Imagine a day, soon, where you can go to your executives and show them exactly how many of your competitors workers came to your site, how many applied, how many you hired, how many you can still go after! That’s a game changer. That’s when Talent Acquisition becomes a competitive advantage. When TA can systematically weaken your competition!

Phenom People works in the mid to enterprise level market. 50 jobs/around 1,000 employees is probably the low end of where they’ll get enough data to make a difference for your organization. They won’t replace your ATS, this is pre-ATS stuff, but they work in conjunction with your ATS. Great technology. Take a look, well worth the 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 tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

Quality of Hire Metrics are an Illusion

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LinkedIn released their annual Global Recruiting Trends 2016 report last week and it had some great information.  I have to give LI credit, this report, each year, has some really great information that always makes me think!  This year’s report was no different, and one stat struck me as really telling:

When Talent Leaders were asked: “What is the single most valuable metric that you use to track your recruiting team’s performance today?”

They said:

“39% of Talent Leaders agree the quality of hire is the most valuable metric for performance!” 

It was the single highest answer to this question!

You know what?  Quality of Hire is an Illusion for about 99% of organizations!  They have no freaking idea how to actually measure quality of hire, or what they’re actually measuring doesn’t haven’t the faintest correlation to actual quality of hire.

So, why is this interesting to me?

It shows me that TA Leaders still don’t have the guts to use real metrics and analytics to measure the performance of their teams!  Using a subjective, at best, measure, like Quality of Hire, allows them to continue to just make up what they ‘feel’ performance is, and one that doesn’t truly hold themselves or their teams accountable.

If you think this isn’t you, tell me how you actually measure quality of hire of your employees?  It’s very complex to even come up with something I could argue is an actual quality of hire metric!  Most organizations will do things like measure 90 day retention as a quality of hire. “Oh, look, they stayed 90 days! Way to go recruiters you’re hiring quality!” No they’re not! They’re just hiring bodies that decided to stay around 90 days!

Quality of hire metrics only work if you are actually measuring the performance of your new hires to the performance of those employees you already have.  This measure, then, becomes one that you can’t even measure until you have a true measure of performance (which is a whole other issue!) of both the new hire and your current employees. Also, you have to give that new hire, probably a year, to truly see what kind of performer they are in your environment.

How many organizations are waiting a year to measure the quality of hire of the employees they hired a year ago?  Almost none!

The other issue here is why is Quality of Hire a recruiting measure to begin with? Are the recruiters ultimately choosing who gets hired and who doesn’t?  That’s what I thought.

So, the recruiter can give the best candidate in the world to a hiring manager, but she instead hires a gal from her sorority who bombs out, and the recruiter gets killed on the quality of hire metric? That sounds fair.

Quality of hire metrics only became something because TA Leaders didn’t have the guts to tell the executives in their organizations that this isn’t really something that matters to the effectiveness of the TA function.  Quality of hire is a hiring manager metric.  You know how it’s measured? By looking at their operational measures and seeing if they actually met them.  If they didn’t it one of three things: they don’t know how to hire, or they don’t know how to manage, or both.

Regardless, check out the LinkedIn report. It has some good data points that are fun to discuss!

5 Tips for Creating a More Human Workplace #WorkHuman

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Better Than Robots: Why Your Employees Deserve a More Human Workplace

This is a Free Webinar sponsored by Globoforce – Register Here – Wednesday, October 14th at 2 p.m. ET | 11 a.m. PT | 1 p.m. CT | 6 p.m. GMT

This is going to be fun! We won’t be coming to live from my Camry, but we will be Live! Just two HR guys sharing the tips and tricks on making your workplace and environment more human!

Admit it. Life would be a lot easier if our employees were robots. They’d be more predictable, and a heck of a lot more manageable. As we seek to gain more and more big data in HCM it seems like that’s exactly what we’re trying to do. Measure and manage our cultures into a robot paradise. But that way lies danger. It is the humanity in our employees that provides the creativity, the innovation and the heart that makes our businesses really succeed.

We’re in the ‘real’ people business, and our employees need a real human workplace and culture to thrive and prosper. This webinar will give you the insight to what works and what doesn’t, and help you reimagine the concept of work-life balance.

You will learn:

  • 5 tips for creating a more human workplacGloboforce
  • A case study of how one company built a better culture
  • HR “best practices” that actually hurt workplace culture

 

What else will you get? 

Kris Dunn is coming on to talk about how he and his team are building a more human workplace at his company Kinetix.  Get some great insight and tips from Kris on how you can begin building this in your own workplace as well! The Kinetix team has one of the best cultures around, and you’ll want to hear how they’ve built from the ground up.

This isn’t your normal webinar. This is real advice, brought to you by real practitioners, letting you know what works and what doesn’t!

Register Today! 

 

Live Streaming Today @Glassdoor’s Employer Branding Summit

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Today from 10am EST to 6:30pm EST – Glassdoor is Live Streaming their entire Employer Branding Summit from San Francisco!

Kris Dunn and I will be hosting the Live Stream with a Special Kick Off show starting at 10am EST, Halftime show at 3pm EST and special segments at breaks throughout the day!  We will be giving out special prizes to those watching the Live Stream and interacting with us throughout the day!

You can watch Live Stream for FREE by clicking on this Link.

The agenda is packed with some of the best Employment Branding minds in the business:

Glassdoor Speakers

 

 

Check it out! It’s like the next best thing besides actually being there with us, which is pretty cool. I mean you have Kris and I doing our best ESPN SportsCenter acting jobs!

 

THE TOP 20 BRANDED HR & TALENT PROS: Meet Jim D’Amico from Spectrum Health

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Let’s face it – Fearful of the spotlight and conservative to a fault, HR pros generally aren’t the best examples to look towards when it comes to professional branding. Kris Dunn (Kinetix RPO, The HR Capitalist) and Tim Sackett (HRU Technical Resources, TimSackett.com) think that needs to change.  That’s why they created this series – The Top 20 Branded HR Pros(sponsored by the team at Glassdoor).

KD and Tim searched the globe for HR Pros who used the tools at their disposal (writing, speaking, social and more) to brand themselves in the HR space, but limited the results to actual practitioners in the areas of HR, Recruiting and Talent Management.  No consultants, no vendors. They found out well-branded HR pros who are actual practitioners are hard to find.  

Tim and KD are running the Top 20 they found here on the HR Capitalist and at TimSackett.com.  No rankings, just inclusion in the list and some notes on why.  There are at least 20 well-branded HR Pros in the world.  These are their stories. 

____________________________________

Jim D’Amico was born to work in Talent Acquisition.  He’s the kind of guy who strikes up conversations with you while you wait in line at Starbucks hoping no one will strike up a conversation with you!  The great part of about Jim, is once he does strike up that conversation, you find out you just had a pretty cool conversation!

Jim is the Director of Talent Acquisition at Spectrum Health in Grand Rapids, MI.  Jim is personally responsible for branding his TA team, “The Best Damn Talent Acquisition Team on the Planet!”  To back up this assertion, ERE voted Spectrum Health the #1 Talent Acquisition team of 2015.  Jim is also the co-Founder of the Michigan Recruiters Conference, held bi-annually across the state to help other corporate TA shops develop into greatness!

Check out Jim’s player card:

Glassdoor Top 20 - Jim D'Amico

 

Jim has 15 years of experience in the Talent Acquisition game, with both domestic and international assignments.  His current role in healthcare supports an employee base of 24,000 and his team will hire over 5,000 in 2015 alone!

Jim’s branding game is anchored around his writing and speaking.  He’s a regular on the ERE speaking circuit, and a frequent contributor to the ERE writing side as well.  Jim also has been active and involved in many local grassroots efforts to support recruiting as a function in the communities he lives.  Most recently with the Michigan Recruiters Conference, but he also has worked on similar projects in West Michigan and Minnesota as well.

Jim is the poster child for being a Brand Ambassador. I mean, seriously, who comes in and names their TA team “The Best Damn TA Team on the Planet!” Jim Does!  That takes a ton of confidence to know that while we might not be ‘that’ yet, we are going to be!  ERE’s award this years solidified the title.

A fun fact about Jim?  He moonlights as a standup Comic!  He also does a ton of volunteer work in around Grand Rapids, MI.  Basically, branding, professionally and personally is who he is.   If you get a chance to catch him on Recruiting/HR speaking circuit make sure you do, he’s well worth it. Otherwise, connect with him on LinkedIn, you can try on Twitter (he’s a not a huge Tweeter), and don’t even try on Instagram!

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The Top 20 Branded HR Pros is brought to you by Glassdoor, who invites you to attend the Annual Glassdoor Employer Branding Summit on September 25th, where a stellar speaker lineup of industry experts and thought leaders exploring the intersection of employer branding and talent acquisition, the candidate experience and employee engagement. 

Tickets are sold out, but wait!  You can attend the livestream online featuring studio coverage with Kris Dunn and Tim Sackett by registering here (click to register).  Fun and games are sure to be a part of that coverage.

 

It’s Always Someone’s First Time

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Sometimes I forget that many other HR and Talent pros aren’t as geeky about the profession as I am.  I like to break down the profession of HR on the following scale:

1. The 1%ers.  These are the people who really get HR and Talent. They are the ones who actually decide what the future of the profession will look like, because they are smarter than all of us.  I am not one of these folks. I love to hang out with these folks, and I’m happy to call some of them friends, but I’m sure I annoy them with my questions and trivial insights.

2. The First Ten. The top ten percent of our profession.  Most of these are folks are the people you see running big HR shops, HR thought leaders, pundits in the space.  Smart folks to be sure, but also folks are involved beyond just doing the job of HR. They are the foot soldiers of the one percenters. They carry the message. I like to think I’m here most days.

3. The Masses.  These are the good men and mostly women who do the work of HR and Talent Acquisition on a daily basis. These are SHRM members, who might go to a national conference, state conference and definitely attend local meetings every once in a while. They are in the trenches every day, fighting the good fight, trying to make organizations better through great people practices. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

4. The Why We Hate HR pros. These the bottom ten percent folks.  These are the HR and Talent pros that make the organization hate HR. They use their power in HR for bad, not good.  They take out their crappy, meaningless lives on unsuspecting employees.  These folks should be hung publicly. They work to bring down the entire function of HR as a whole, but think they actually do good HR work.

I try to remember this scale when I talk to HR and Talent pros around the world.  Most just want to do better, and most are seeing problems and issues for the first time.  It’s not that they “don’t get it”, they have never seen it.  It’s there first time.

Someone might be very experienced in HR and Talent, but seeing something for the first time, or have made the decision to try something they have never tried.  As a first ten it’s my role, I believe, in the industry to help those folks in any way I can to get better.  That helps the entire profession to get better.

So, what does this all mean?

I want to encourage HR and Talent pros to reach out.  If I can’t help you, I’ve got great friends who can.  The community will help you get better, if you really want to move your organization forward.  We love success stories!

At one point in time we were all first timers doing this HR and Talent thing.  We either learned through trial and error, or through someone helping us that had already experienced what we were trying to do.  The cool part about the community I hang out with, is we all remember our first time, and want to help you with yours.

Hiring Is About To Get Really Difficult!

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One thing was abundantly clear from speakers and thought leaders at SHRM 2015, hiring is hard, and it’s about to get much harder!

That isn’t good news for any of us in HR and Talent Acquisition. There are two forces that are currently happening that are making hiring more difficult than it has been in over ten years:

  1. Solid economy and job growth.
  1. Baby Boomers leaving the workforce.

This isn’t earth shattering information, we all kind of new this was happening.  The issue is we are now all beginning to feel this in every part of the country and in almost every job category.  This means some things are going to happen, and the top HR and Talent Pros are already preparing for these:

  • Wage Growth: CareerBuilder CEO Matt Ferguson spoke at SHRM on Tuesday and had some great data showing that organizations see wage growth of around 5% in 2015, and similar in years to come. Are you budgeting 5% increases? I’m guessing not!
  • Recruitment Process Challenges: How many steps does it take to apply for a job in your organization?  If it’s more than two, you’ve got problems!  Can someone apply for a job online with your organization without having a resume? Why not?  Matt also showed data from CareerBuilder showing 40% of HR and Talent Pros have never applied for one of their own jobs to better understand the true experience!
  • Technology Challenges: Do you have a way to reengage candidates in your system on a regular basis?  A system that allows you to let great talent know, that you already have in your system, when you have an opening that fits them? It’s called CRM, and only about 20% of companies have technology that can do this important recruitment marketing function!
  • Job Design Challenges: Too many of us are working and designing jobs like we are living in a society that was pre-internet, pre-ultra connected. We still think we need employees sitting in front of us from 8-5pm, Monday thru Friday. If they aren’t sitting in front of us, they must not be working! Indeed shared that 80% of job searches on their site include this single word: “Remote”!  Are you adjusting those jobs that can be flexible?

Those organizations that believe they can recruit and get talent like they have been doing for the last couple of decades are going to fail.  It’s really that simple.  Talent attraction will be a powerful strategic differentiator for organizations over the next decade, like almost no other time in our history.

The good news?  At no other point in our history do have access to the information on how to be successful!  Twenty years ago, doing great talent acquisition was mostly trying stuff and getting lucky.  In today’s world you can learn easily how the best organizations are attracting talent at conferences, on websites, in blogs, webinars, etc.  There are so many sources of this information, that we now have no excuse to improve what we are doing.  We just have to do it!

 

Live from #SHRM15 – Secret Sauce Recipes!

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Yeah, I know it’s Sunday and I normally don’t post on a Sunday, but I’m at the annual SHRM National Conference in Las Vegas and it starts today. The opening keynote speaker is Coach K, the Duke University head basketball coach.  I’m not a big fan.  His team beats my team way too often! So, he’ll be painful to listen to as I remember each defeat.

The SHRM expo floor also opens today with a big reception.  The SHRM expo is hard to describe.  Part flee market. Part carnival. Part car show. All HR and Talent.  Everyone who ever wants to sell stuff to HR is here.  They hand out pens, stress balls, mints, hand sanitizer, t shirts, frisbees, candy, basically, anything to get you to stop and talk to them.

My favorite free stuff that vendors give out is information!  You see, all of these vendors have clients that actually pay these vendors money to use their products and services.  These vendors know what others are doing to be successful.  If you take a few minutes they’ll gladly share the secret sauce recipes of all kinds of organizations!

We all want secret sauce recipes!

It’s probably the greatest weakness of HR and Talent Acquisition, in general, from industry to industry, is we suck at getting competitive data on what other organizations are doing in their HR and Talent shops.  We don’t network with our competition. We think if we share what we are doing, we’re somehow sharing national secrets. So, we fumble around through life, trying to figure it all out on our own.

That is why I spend most of my time at SHRM meeting with vendors.  I treat them like normal people, and they in turn give me great insight to what is working and not working in the world of HR and Talent.  I get smarter. I learn what I can take back to my own shop.  I gain some understanding of what the best organizations are doing that is successful. That’s valuable!

I don’t really care what Coach K does to cheat his way to national titles and stealing recruits.  What I care about is being on the cutting edge of what the best companies are doing to gain an advantage with their employees and getting the best talent.

Check me out on Pericope, where I’ll be live streaming during the conference!

*image credit to Gaping Void.