Top 10 Sources of Online Hires

Posted on May 21, 2015 by Tim Sackett

Silkroad recently released some results from it’s annual client survey (also released by Indeed as you can imagine from the results!), which is a rather large sample. The chart that caught my eye was this one:

Keep in mind these are external online sources only. These don’t include an companies own career site, employee referrals, etc. Still the information is intriguing, and almost matches my own internal numbers for my company, which means I tend to believe the data!

Indeed being number one as a source for corporate hires isn’t not surprising. If a candidate is looking for a job today, they go to Indeed to start looking. What is surprising is the LinkedIn number!

6% of external online hires are coming from LinkedIn!

So, you need to ask yourself: How much money are you spending on LinkedIn as compared to the other sources that are getting greater results? Indeed, CareerBuilder, other various specialized job boards, etc.

Would have ever thought that LinkedIn would have been the exact same percentage as Craigslist!?!

Obviously, the candidates you are getting on LinkedIn are different than the candidates you’re getting on Craigslist. Not many professionals are looking for jobs on Craigslist, but you will find a ton looking for lower skilled, service level jobs.

Based on the data above here’s what you need to do:

1. Are your jobs being scraped by Indeed? Have you checked? If not, you better make this happen! (Same for SimplyHired)

2. Are you using CareerBuilder? Postings? Resume database? Might want to check into what they’ve got going on!

3. If you have a LinkedIn Recruiter seat, are you getting a good ROI for your investment? Would you get a better ROI is that same amount of money was spent for things like sponsored jobs on Indeed, or most job posts on CareerBuilder? Maybe you need to do some testing.

4. Are you using Craigslist to help fill your lower level positions? You know it’s free, right?

5. What the hell is Seek? Oh, it’s a job board in Australia, you can forget about that.

6. Don’t forget about your other non-online sources: Referrals, your own career site, local state employment offices, alumni, your own internal database (this is the most under utilized source of most companies!), etc. These probably fill more than all your online sources. How much money are you investing in them? (it’s usually a lot less than online sources and a huge miss for ROI)

The New HR Math

Posted on May 14, 2015 by Tim Sackett

It all started with a great premise: Let’s teach kids an easier way to understand math so they won’t end up hating it. We can all buy into that, right!?

What came out was a classic organizational nightmare of project-gone-wrong, in a way only HR can truly understand—the Common Core was born. Now, there you sit at the kitchen table trying to show your kid how to do basic multiplication, but you really have no clue on how to do it the “new-math” way.

In a similar way, it used to be HR and Talent Acquisition could just run some spreadsheets, make a three-color pie graph, drop it in the middle of the conference table and—BAM—our job was done.

But, not anymore! Now you’re expected to take your people analytics and make evidence-based decisions, and prove we actually know what we’re talking about, eliminating the art and “feel” of classic HR and Talent practices.

We feel your pain, and we can’t multiply the new way either. That’s why our May installment of the FOT webinar is entitled, The New HR Math: Dumbing Down HR Analytics for Everyday HR and Talent Pros. Join FOT’s Tim Sackett and Kris Dunn for this webinar (sponsored by HireVue, a company that gets predictive analytics at a whole other level), and we’ll share the following goodies with you:

– 5 HR and Talent Analytics you should stop measuring immediately! You know what looks really bad to your leadership? When HR is using the old math, and everyone else is using the new math!

– 5 HR and Talent Analytics you should start measuring immediately! Don’t be that parent fighting the good fight, ostracizing your kid from society by not allowing them to use the new math skills! We have the new cool measures you really need to be using in HR and recruiting today.

– 3 Best Practices every HR and Talent Acquisition shop can do right now with their analytics. You now know what the numbers are, but what the heck are you supposed to do with them? Fear not, Tim and Kris watched every YouTube video possible on the new math, they can show you the way!

– A primer on what’s next once you start using these Predictive Analytics. Since you specialize in people, you naturally understand the move to using analytics that helps you predict the future is only half the battle—you have to have a plan once the predictions are made. We’ll help you understand the natural applications for using your predictive analytical data as both a hammer and a hug—to get people who need to change moving, and to embrace those that truly want your help as a partner.

You’re a quality HR pro who knows how to get things done. Join us May 27^th at 2pm EST for The New HR Math: Dumbing Down HR Analytics for Everyday HR and Talent Pros, and we’ll help you understand how to deploy the “new-math” principles in HR that allow you to use predictive analytics to position yourself as the expert you are.

Ladies, would you prefer not negotiating your salary?

Posted on April 30, 2015 by Tim Sackett

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?

Recruitment Non-Poaching Agreements and Bad HR

Posted on April 13, 2015 by Tim Sackett

Workforce had an interesting article – When the War on Talent Ends with a Peace Treaty – regarding some national non-profit teaching institutions who regularly found themselves competing against each other for teacher talent. Being “non-profit” these organizations felt that it was their “mission” to find a better way to recruit teachers. A better way, meaning more cost effective and using less organizational dollars in recruitment.

For them, non-poaching agreements were part of the answer to help save costs. Non-poaching agreement = staff retention. Less turnover = money saved. And in the end? This would allow these organizations to spend more money on their “missions” and make the world a better place to live. Amen.

Sounds good, right?

Non-profits squeezing every penny out of every donated dollar to ultimately give “our children” the best education in the world? Let’s not kid ourselves, Teach For America (TFA), KIPP, etc. are organizations that are “non-profit” by definition, but I’m positive their Ivy League educated leadership are not living in one-room apartments, eating government cheese and taking the bus to work – as many of their constituents are. And ultimately, the individuals hurt by non-poaching agreements are those professionals looking to get a job in that chosen field (in this example they’re teachers – but all the examples play out the same way).

Let me explain. Instead of education, let’s take a look at health care. Under the premise above, it would seem safe to believe that all “non-profit” hospitals should be able to come up with similar agreements, right? I mean, we are just trying to make people better, keep them healthy, it’s our mission. We won’t take your doctors, nurses, etc., and you don’t take ours; agree? Good. Now, I can go back to coming up with some policy, like dress code, how to make our lunch menu more exciting, or some other valuable HR deliverable…

Instead I have another novel idea, how about don’t suck!

Yeah, that’s right, stop sucking as a place to work, and you won’t have to come up with agreements with your “competition” about not recruiting your people away from you. Stop sucking in not paying what the market bears for pay and benefits. Stop sucking in developing your employees and giving them a great environment to work in. You don’t hear about Google or Zappos or Pepsi meeting with their competition about not poaching each other’s talent. Why? It’s illegal, it’s called collusion. It’s the main reason we have Unions and Unions suck more. so stop it!

To recap: Non-poaching agreements are bad. Bad for talent, bad for business, and bad for America (but good for HR folks who don’t want to make their places of employment better). Stop Sucking as an employer. And, Unions Suck.

Better Employee Relocation Design in 4 Easy Steps!

Posted on March 19, 2015 by Tim Sackett

I have to admit I’ve been one of those HR Pros who has had to design and develop relocation policies a few times in my career. My philosophy on relocation has changed somewhat over the years. In my career, I’ve accepted positions 4 times in which I went through “professional” relocation for various HR positions in my career. That fact has more impact on my philosophy of relocation than all other issues combined.

So, Fact #1 on getting a better relocation policy for your company: force those designing the policy to relocate, at least once. If you haven’t relocated, you can’t design the policy, it’s that simple.

People who haven’t relocated to another state for a job have no idea what impact it has on your life. It’s not the same as moving to a new house in another part of the city you live in. For the most part, if you have a significant other and some kids thrown into the mix, it’s probably one of the most stressful events you’ll go through in life. You get hired, Yeah! You now have to go show up at the new job, without family, belongings, etc. You’re trying out the new position, culture, etc., all the while your spouse is home trying to run life, now without 50% of her support resources. That person, you, is now living in a hotel or furnished the apartment, eating out each meal, sitting around doing nothing, etc. You’ll only understand if you’ve been through this!

You need to find a new house, but not until the old house is sold, find the right schools, etc., etc. Oh, and, by the way, you probably have some HR administrator going over your relocation expense reports like they’re a Zapruder Film. Oh, I’m sorry Mr. Sackett, you seem to have spent $1.32 too much on parking at the airport last week. Really!? I haven’t seen my wife and kids for two straight weeks, and we’re talking about $1.32? DON’T UNDERESTIMATE FACT #1.

I know the talk, lately, about relocation, has been about how difficult it is to get people to relocate because of falling housing values. Workforce Management’s article Recruiters Get Creative with Relocation in Sluggish Housing Market by Leah Shepherd speaks specifically to this dilemma. Clearly, it’s more expensive to get people to relocate, but I will argue that it isn’t more difficult. HR folks are classic in confusing expensive and more difficult – finance people don’t have this same issue. It’s not more difficult to get some to relocate, it’s just more expensive.

Here is where Fact #2 comes in: Never allow your Hiring Managers to get involved with Relocation.

Believe me, they will want to. It’s interesting how people who already work for a company tend to view relocation dollars spent, like the person receiving the relocation is getting a huge bonus! All of sudden your hiring manager believes they are personally responsible for every penny that is spent. They aren’t, and you the HR Pro understand this, and that’s why we keep our hiring managers out of the picture. We need them to have a great first impression of the new person, so take the money out of the picture so they can focus on the fit and skills.

HR/Recruiting Pros are in the business of increasing talent of their organizations, and this fact has to be paramount when discussing the finances of corporate relocation. This brings us to Fact #3 on how to make your relocation policy better: don’t budget relocation as a single annual amount, budget relocation by the percent of hires you anticipate in having to relocate.

Look, it’s way too easy for finance and executives to look at the HR budget and say, “Wow, $1.5M in relocation budgeted for 2010? You need to cut that by $500K.” Great, I’ll do that, but tell me which people we won’t be hiring?

Recruiting Pros need to come to the table with market data supporting why relocation is necessary and at which roles and levels. Cutting relocation isn’t a question about saving money; it’s a question about which talent is less important to the company, because that’s the real cost. Also, budgeting by hires forces departments and divisions to answer to their talent management strategies, instead of throwing it on HR’s back. Hey, it’s August, and we’ve already spent our Relocation budget for the whole company! No, Mr. Hiring Manager, it’s August, and we’ve spent your department’s relocation budget. You better talk to Mrs. CEO and tell her why you couldn’t manage your budget.

And lastly, Fact #4 – Don’t come to a Relocation Gunfight with a knife. Know what the person brings to the table and be able to show the alternatives to hiring that person, but either way show what the impact will be to the organization no matter what decision is made.

Your HR Software Doesn’t Suck!

Posted on March 11, 2015 by Tim Sackett

It’s the one of the great HR truths:

– Candidates who get a flat tire on their way into an interview are liars.

– Employees don’t really get sick on Mondays and Fridays.

– You hate your HR software.

Or so we all thought.

Key Interval, a rising HR Analyst firm, came out with some dynamic research recently that showed that 76% of HR and Talent Pros actually don’t mind the HR software they’re using!

This goes against everything I ever thought was true in HR. From the moment I stepped into my first HR position, people bitched and complained about their ATS, about their dinosaur HR system of record, about their performance management system. In reality, the research actually shows that most practitioners actually don’t mind the system they’re using, and get the work done they need to get done.

I personally can’t name one person I ever met who was using Peoplesoft or ADP who had one good thing to say about them (side note – I’ve used both, and they worked just fine), but now I wonder if that was just HR commiseration and bonding. “Hey, you want to be one of us, let’s talk crap about our software!”

The data presented by Key Interval is deep, so I tend to believe that over what I think I know about this issue. When I think about it in my own context, I have to admit, I never really hated any single piece of software I used in HR or Talent Acquisition. Did I wish I had something better with more bells and whistles? Heck yeah! There’s always a shinier toy. But, the software I was using was getting the job done, and not stopping me from doing what needed to be done.

One of the major reasons HR and Talent pros probably feel like they hate the software they use, is because they had, and have, no say in what they use. It’ the Skippy and Jif issue. If you’re made to eat Skippy peanut butter, you’ll most likely will complain that Jif is better. Jif is better, but that’s not the point. The point is we all like to have a say in the tools we use to do our job. What pen are using right now? More than likely you either have a great office supply budget and buy pens you love, or you bought pens you love on your own and brought them to work. HR pros are crazy about pens.

This concept was just one small piece from a 66 page report Key Interval just released. There’s a ton of data on for both HR pros and HR vendors on how relationships impact software selection and renewal, that is fascinating. HR vendors are completely insane not to be delivering cookies to their best clients each week, face to face! Go check it out, the guys at Key Interval are brilliant in a very pragmatic way, that gives you the knowledge you need to know to move your organization forward.

T3 – @OrgVue #HRTech

Posted on February 17, 2015 by Tim Sackett

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.

Today on T3 I get the pleasure of reviewing OrgVue a London based tech firm and management consultancy, that built one of the most awesome HR specific Business Intelligence tools I’ve ever seen! OrgVue is an integrated software platform bringing Org Design, HR Analytics and Workforce Planning together in a single product. Gartner named them the ‘Cool’ product of 2014, and ‘Cool’ is an understatement!

Think about this way, you have many systems in your organization that have employee data, and even in a suite environment, rarely does everything come together nicely. It’s messy. OrgVue takes all this messy data and brings back to you clean answers. One thing every HR shop gets tasked to do is developing Org Charts. OrgVue takes Org Charts into the next millenium. It does, intuitively, what we always wished Org Charts could do. Click on a person and gives you all their data, performance, roles they’ve been, etc.

From a workforce planning perspective it does real-time workforce modeling. Lose your head of design? What impact will that have downstream? OrgVue can show you in a few clicks. Want to re-org? OrgVue can show you cost savings of the new org before you even make the move through it’s modeling tool. OrgVue takes the HR Business Partner model to a whole new level.

5 Things I Really Like About OrgVue:

1. OrgVue gives an organization one source of true data maintained through seamless integration of multiple systems and locations. Want to compare hiring analytics between Michigan and Texas, just a few clicks. North America and Europe, a few more clicks. It’s crazy powerful!

2. OrgVue constantly is intaking and cleaning data in real-time. This means the charts and reports you pass along to decision makers are accurate and not dated.

3. So many of our executives are visual learners. OrgVue understands this and brings your HR data to life visually. Also, executives are known for asking for ‘one-more-thing’, “Can I just see this data sliced a bit differently”. It’s the vain of HR pros around the world. Not with OrgVue.

4. The organizational modeling and scenario planning tool is unlike anything I’ve seen from any other vendor, ever. In fact, I’ll say that OrgVue probably could take the jobs of some highly paid consultants that you pay to do this now!

5. Everything you create and see in OrgVue is turned easily with a click into Excel, PowerPoint and PDFs. Why fight it?! Big orgs want their paper, spreadsheets and slides, so give it to them, when they need it.

I say this too often, but I was completely blown away by this product. I would invest in this company, that’s how blown away I was!

But, let me be clear, OrgVue is for a sophisticated HR buyer. This is a big shop, Fortune 1000 type product. Regardless, I would encourage every HR executive you must demo this product. Even if you aren’t in the market, treat this a personal development, the OrgVue folks will teach you some stuff on this demo. You will never look at your data the same way again!

T3 – WANTED Analytics

Posted on November 18, 2014 by Tim Sackett

I love when I get to demo a company and I have absolutely no idea who and what they are going into it! That was me with WANTED Analytics. From the name I was guessing they were some sort of analytics HR company, like Visier, but I was pleasantly surprised that they were completely different. The name throws you, but the reality is they are a Sourcing Strategy company, not an HR analytics play.

What WANTED gives you is a complete picture of your sourcing environment, which allows you to build and plan the best strategy to attract the talent you need. What they deliver, in terms of data, charts and information is completely insane!

A common problem we face in Talent Acquisition is trying to build proper expectations when it comes to hiring with our hiring managers and our executive teams. Many times, our workforce plan is critical to a successful, or unsuccessful, launch of major programs and products. It’s critical that we provide a real-life view of the market conditions we are facing, and set realistic expectations with our hiring managers. WANTED gives you really easy ways to do this, and the ‘arts and charts’ they provide make it easy to consume for those folks you are working with you are visual learners.

You can also use WANTED to do some really cool sourcing using their historical hiring analysis. This basically gives you a quick look back in the market you’re searching of who was hiring just a few month, to year ago, for the same types of positions. So? This gives you an instant sourcing model on where to find your the talent you’ll be going after, and many times provides you with leads you never thought of.

What I really like about WANTED Analytics:

1. The data set they pull from is stupid big. Over a billion job postings collected since 2005, and 10 Million per week in the US alone, gives you piece of mind that the market data you’re basing major sourcing decisions on is better than you’ll get anywhere else. This amount of data allows you to get very specific in your sourcing.

2. They’re data source neutral. Many data companies are pulling only from a handful of sources, and sometimes specifically leaving a source out for competitive reason. WANTED is Switzerland, they pull from everywhere!

3. ATS plugin which allows your recruiters and sources to use this within their native tools, and really gives them the ability to leverage WANTED on an entire never level.

4. Gives Talent Acquisition leadership a tool they really have never had in terms of ‘live’ market data, to assist them in building realistic talent, sourcing and workforce plans. Provides unmatched competitive compensation data, job descriptions and historical competitive hiring data. Global in reach, covering the world’s largest 22 economies.

5. Really pretty Heat Maps! Let’s face it, hiring managers and executives love arts and charts, and heat maps, and WANTED knocks this out of the park. Critical in delivering the message you want. Plus, from the sourcing perspective, none of these charts are ‘flat’, everything is click through. This was super power.

For those interested, WANTED Analytics isn’t super expensive, and you can definitely make it back on sourcing alone, although, the TA executives will love it for forecasting and planning. 1 user will run your around $12K, 10 users $24K. For big shops, a tool like this easily pays for itself. SMB players will probably have to justify it more specifically.

The Tim Sackett Project

TA & HR Expert, Dad, Backup Point Guard on my over 40 men's team

Category Archives: Competitive Data