Category Archives: Data Analytics

Scared Straight – OFCCP Style!

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Being a parent of three boys I’ve always been a fan of the theory behind “Scared Straight”! Your kids don’t listen to you, they’re getting in trouble, just send them down to the local prison and have them meet with some inmates! I mean what could go wrong?

In adult life, we don’t have many ‘scared straight’ opportunities. Maybe you painted the front door of your house the wrong color and the subdivision council sent you a strongly worded letter of compliance. Maybe your dog dug up your neighbor’s flowers and she left a handwritten note in your mail box looking for reimbursement, and to be taken off your holiday cookie list. Or, maybe it’s a cease and desist letter from a big HR Tech company’s lawyer telling you to stop saying ‘they suck’ on your blog.

For the most part, it’s hard to get scared straight as adults!

The OFCCP is probably the biggest scared straight organization for HR. Worse then employment attornies for sure! I get threatened to get sued by employees daily, that’s no longer a fear, but DO NOT tell me the OFCCP is on the phone!

It used to be the OFCCP only followed up on complaints and such. You have an extremely low chance of a ‘random’ OFCCP audit. That’s all been changing because of big data. Turns out, someone at OFCCP shows them how to run a basic statistical analysis of the data you send them on your applicants and who you hired.

Check out this chart from ERE and Nicole Greenberg, Esq. (go read the article Nicole does a fantastic job and is the first person in history to make an OFCCP  article that is interesting!) 

So, this data is from a company that had to pay $1.7 Million because they discriminated in not hiring Asian candidates. No one complained that they were discriminated against. OFCCP just looked at the data and said, “Hey, if 77% of applicants are Asian and you only hire 14% of those, you’re being discriminatory in your hiring practices!”

This should scare you straight, like immediately! Especially if you work in a company that has government contracts!

Of course, how the OFCCP is doing this is fraught with bad data interpretation. Just because 77% of my applicant pool is Asian doesn’t mean I’m being discriminatory in hiring. What if, for 77% of those Asian applicants who applied for Front End QA Engineer actually had a degree in accounting and no IT background!?

Doesn’t matter, you are now in an audit that is going to uncover some stuff! Most likely with numbers that far apart, you’re going to have a hard time arguing you’re not at least a little discriminatory in your hiring!

Nicole smartly points out that the government’s own contracting language forces many companies to be discriminatory in hiring in some aspects. Most government contracts require those working on the contract to be U.S. citizens. So, you could have the numbers above in the chart, being following the requirements on the contract and not hiring foreign nationals, and the OFCCP would still find you discriminatory in hiring! Welcome to the American Dream!

So, consider this a heads up. Go run your numbers. Find your hot spots in your organization and address them.

‘Divided America’ is a myth – @Jobvite 2017 Job Seeker Nation

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Jobvite does an annual study called Job Seeker Nation where they go out and survey over 2,000 Americans. The data is fascinating from an employee and candidate perspective. This year’s study found that 80% of Americans believe the country is divided, but when you dig into the detail of their responses, you find that’s not really true!

Sure, at a high level you have Dems and Repubs. Rich and Non-rich. Big city and country. Anything from far enough away can be divided into two sets. But, when you really dig into individual beliefs, you find that Americans are that different in their beliefs.

You can access the free, 35-page report from Jobvite!

Here are some of the highlights I pulled out of the data:

– Women negotiate less than Men for salary increases. We’ve known this for a while, but the data also showed that 87% of men who negotiate get a higher pay, and 80% of women who negotiate get higher pay. So, what does this tell us!? HR pros and Hiring Managers are awful negotiators! Also, it’s a candidate market! So, negotiate!

– 68% of job seekers do not believe Diversity is very important when selecting an employer. Only 36% of Women believe it’s very important, 60% of African Americans believe it’s very important. This isn’t to say that the majority don’t find diversity important, it’s saying that most candidates actually find other things more important!

– The lower you get paid, the less loyal you are to your employer. I think we all can understand the psychology behind this. If you have a great paying job, you’re probably more likely to be loyal to help keep that job. If you’re paid like crap, you probably don’t care as much about keeping that job.

– 46% of job seekers find it harder in 2017 to find a job, than in 2016. I found this unbelievable! I can walk outside of my office, right this moment, and within a quarter mile find at least ten business begging for employees. There are more jobs than job seekers, so why is it more difficult for almost 50%!?

– Get used to Hyper Job Hopping. 46% of Millennials will change jobs every 1 to 3 years. So, those hiring managers who have job hopper-itis when it comes to looking at resumes better get over it! That being said, I still don’t buy into the candidates who’s jumping a new job every year.

– Cover letters are dead. 58% of younger workers did not submit a cover letter on their most recent job application, but 26% of recruiters still view cover letters as critical to their decision to hire. That means 1 out of 4 of your recruiters have no clue at what they’re doing!

– You have a 13 times better chance of getting a job through a referral than applying on a job board. 13 times! That’s no joke. If you really want a job, find a referral, work your network, stop applying!

– 28% of younger workers analyze your company culture using Instagram. Candidates believe IG gives them better insight into your true culture over your career site.

I could go on all day with this stuff, I barely scratched the surface of what’s in this report. Go download it for yourself. We’ll basically be seeing screenshots of this study in every conference PowerPoint for the next twelve months!

Three overall key takeaways I took from the study:

  • We are more alike than different when it comes to being job seekers
  • Companies have shaped the behaviors of job seekers more than job seekers are changing company behaviors related to job seekers
  • If you hang onto your old ways of treating job seekers, you’re only hurting your own organization, not the job seeker

 

The Single Greatest Metric in the History of Talent Acquisition!

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“0.00” or “Zero”

I’ll let you decide how you want to display it, both ways work.

Oh, what is this measuring? Check this out:

The number of candidates, in the past twenty years that I’ve hired, that were willing to accept a job without first having a phone call with someone at the organization I worked for. 

That number is:    0   

I’m guessing your number is fairly close to my number! If fact, this is a universal metric between all types of talent acquisition professionals (Corporate, Agency, RPO). Across all industries and all levels of hiring, hourly, salary, temporary, 1099, seasonal, etc.

Let me ask you a couple of questions:

1. Would you be willing to accept a job without first speaking with someone about this job?

2. Would you be willing to accept a job interview without first speaking to someone about the position, details, etc.?

My guess is almost 100% will say “No” for number one, but some would actually say “Yes” to number 2. Okay, I’ll buy some of you would go to an interview before ever speaking to anyone live about a job. I don’t think it’s many, but I’ll give you some people just want a job and a text or email communication is good enough for them. I’ll also assume the quality of those people will be questionable.

The fact is there is an extremely high correlation between speaking to a candidate ‘live’ on the phone or in person, and their willingness to continue through your process of hiring. Like a .99 correlation!

Another fact, then, would be that the recruiters in your environment (corporate, agency, RPO) who actually make the most phone calls will have the most candidates willing to engage your organization in your hiring process.

Final fact, in every recruiting environment I’ve worked (corporate and agency) the recruiters who connected with the most candidates over the phone, filled the most positions. Every. Single. Environment.

It’s not Rocket Science people! It’s actually Psychology.

If you don’t pick up the phone, you don’t find candidates willing to follow through with your hiring process.

Don’t over think this. Put yourself in the shoes of your candidates. Would you be willing to accept a job without first speaking to someone at the company offering you a job?

0.00!

 

The Damaging Problem of Chasing Satisfaction as a Performance Metric

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I was recently asked to dig into talent acquisition metrics, determining which metrics drive success, which are window dressing, which are just CYA, etc. Two metrics kept coming up from TA leaders are being very important, candidate satisfaction (candidate experience) and hiring manager satisfaction.

I don’t disagree that both of these metrics are important to an effective talent acquisition strategy. You want candidates to be satisfied with the experience they have going through your recruitment process, and you want your hiring managers to be satisfied with the quality of recruitment they get from your team.

The problem happens when you don’t know the point when positive satisfaction turns into negative satisfaction.

A good example is in healthcare. Currently, in the healthcare world, patient satisfaction is a huge deal. Many hospitals are losing their minds to try and figure out how to continue to raise patient satisfaction. You can see the logic. Healthcare is an extremely competitive environment. If a patient isn’t satisfied with their care, they can easily decide to spend those dollars at another healthcare facility. Probably sounds a lot like most of our businesses, doesn’t it? (customer satisfaction, client satisfaction, etc.)

The problem is, nurses and doctors aren’t employed to keep patients satisfied. They’re employed to get patients healthy and save their life. In that process, many times, a patient’s satisfaction is meaningless. The doctor and the nurse are the experts, and before I care about your satisfaction, I care about your wellbeing.

But, as healthcare organizations continue to be run more and more like a business, doctors, and nurses and constantly pressured to put patient satisfaction above wellbeing. As long as Mary loves us, just give her what she wants, even if that isn’t the best treatment.

Now, take this back to candidate satisfaction and hiring manager satisfaction. There’s a tipping point. It’s important that you have a consistent candidate experience that is fair. This will be satisfactory for many candidates, but for some it might not be. As you continue to push resources into increasing satisfaction of those who aren’t, you begin to see a negative return on resources. 100% satisfaction, should never be your goal.

Hiring managers aren’t much different. Most of your hiring managers will be great people to work with and you’ll prove to be a great resource for them in filling their openings. They’ll be satisfied with the job you do. Some will never be satisfied, and many times those who are unsatisfied are usually causing their own dissatisfaction. Again, 100% satisfaction, should never be your goal. Because if it’s obtainable, it’s probably not valuable in this circumstance.

My job in talent acquisition is not to make everyone feel satisfied. My job is to increase the talent in the organization. To do this, it might actually mean I make some folks unsatisfied. That’s okay. I’m the expert in talent acquisition. I need to do what is best for the organization. I’m always unsatisfied with our marketing folks, but guess what, they never asked me if I’m satisfied or not.

Too Many Recruiting Tools Are Killing Your Recruiting Efforts

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You’ve heard of this concept of the Inverted-U Curve, right? It’s fairly straightforward. In the beginning, you have nothing or very little. As you increase the resources you begin to become more effective. Eventually, as you add more resources you’ll actually reach maximum potential.

In the attempt to go even higher, you keep adding more resources, but you don’t see an increase in effectiveness or output, you actually see a decrease. This is the basic concept of the chart above.

This happens in recruiting too many organizations.

We start out with a bunch of recruiters and some phones. That’s not enough we need to add some other stuff, these recruiters need tools! So, we give them email and an ATS. Then comes the job boards, postings, InMails, etc. Might as well automate background checks and references. We really need to fill the pipeline, here comes sourcing tech!

Wish we had a way to get our messages out to candidates more effectively! CRM, branding technology, data analytics, SMS messaging, etc. Just keep adding more tools! That’ll a fix it!

Except it doesn’t!

What happens to your recruiting team as you add more tools?

  • The complexity of the process increases.
  • Core recruiting skills diminish, or at the very least don’t increase. (Laziness factor)
  • Increased points of failure in communication with each piece of new tech.

What we know is technology doesn’t make you better at recruiting. Technology makes you faster at recruiting, but if you suck at recruiting, technology will only make you suck faster!

Great recruiting starts with your people. Your recruiters. That’s your foundation, not your technology. Technology can help cover up some hickeys of bad recruiters temporary, but eventually, we will all see the real hickeys!

So, before you sign that next contract for some new technology, first take a look at your team. Do you have the right people on your recruiting bus? Do they have the core skills they need? How will I get them the skills they need?

The continued increase in technology will only take you so far. You can either solve this problem on the front side, or eventually, you’ll face it on the back side, but either way, it’s coming. In my experience, it’s easier to solve up front then wait for it to come up when twelve technologies deep into your TA stack!

Is Mobile more Trump or more Hillary?

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If you’re into broad political strokes, let’s play a game. Let’s say for the sake of this game, what would be considered traditional Democratic supporters tend to have less resources at their disposal than traditional Republican supporters. Most of us in HR would then believe that Trump probably should have a larger mobile strategy than Hillary, given the assumption that Republicans tend to have higher incomes and therefore more access to mobile devices.

 

We tend to act this way in HR. We believe that if you want to attract high-tech talent you must have a mobile job strategy. Our young, educated tech-savvy workforces want to do everything via mobile. Payroll, benefits options, retirement, transfers, etc.

 

The reality is, we have this totally backward!

 

The Pew Research Center found that low-educated, low-income wage earners – your hourly employees – are more likely…

 

Check out the rest of my article over at Paychex’s Worx Blog! Along with the 4 things you need to launch mobile-enabled software to your employees! 

 

Your Recruitment Strategy Needs Focus!

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I’ve been in Chicago a couple of times this fall. The restaurant scene in Chicago is off the charts, just like it is right now in New York, LA, etc. It’s a great time to be a person who loves food!

If you like going to new restaurants you’ll find out quickly that the restaurants of today are not like the ones we grew up with. In Michigan, and my wife still makes fun of this, any non-chain restaurant serving “American” food basically has the same menu where they serve burgers, seafood, Italian dishes, Mexican dishes, breakfast, hell they would serve Ethiopian if people would order it!

Basically, they serve a little of everything, but nothing especially noteworthy!

The new restaurant scene has changed this completely and now you’re lucky to have 8 main dishes that are served on a menu, BUT every single thing kills! The entire menu is one side of page and seems like almost no options but each dish is better than the next. Chefs of these new restaurants found out the way to make money is to focus your menu and make fabulous dishes.

You have lower food costs because of less wasted ingredients, you’re more efficient in cooking fewer items, less complaints because you know each dish is awesome and you create signature asked-for dishes. Focus = success.

When I speak with most TA Leaders they are trying to serve a menu that caters to everyone with their TA strategy.

When you ask what they are focusing on you get an answer that sounds like this, “Well, candidate experience for sure, and branding, that’s really important to us, our tech stack is a disaster we need to figure that out, big project right now with onboarding, looking at some CRM products, new career site in the works, definitely analytics is a priority and working to really get our arms around the employee experience as well.”

What!? Sound familiar?

Their “focus” is to focus on everything! It’s the I can’t see the trees through the forest mentality of focus. It’s also a huge strategic recipe for failing in talent acquisition.

What should your focus be?  Well, that depends on what’s important you to and your organization, but it surely isn’t everything. What I find is that great TA shops have one main focus and one or two minor things they’re working on.  The main focus might be analytics and to help with that they’re also implementing some new technology and building out what impact those results will have. Those results will then become the next focus, and so on.

Do a few things really, really well, then move on to develop something else that will be world-class.

 

The Cost of a New Hire is $1000-$5000!?

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Ryan Holmes, the CEO at HootSuite, recently posted an article over at LinkedIn. Ryan is, of course, an “Influencer” for LinkedIn, because he’s a CEO and because he works for a cool brand like Hootsuite. Who cares if he knows what he’s talking about, he’s from Hootsuite, muthfucka!! He must be influential!

Anywho.

Ryan was actually talking about Google’s “bungee” program (see if you’re influential you talk about Google!) and how millennials only care about being developed. Because if we know anything we know young people are great judges of what they actually want. So, Ryan and Hootsuite are actually coming up with their own copycat program and calling it “stretch”.

This program basically allows Hootsuite employees to try out other roles within Hootsuite one day per week, and if it goes well to eventually into that role full time. The basis of the program being that “great employees will be great employees in any role, given the change”.

But, one other big thing jumped out from the post. Remember this is a CEO of a major company. He based all of this program on cost of turnover and believes his cost of turnover is $5000 per employee leaving! $5000!? Now, if you spent 17 seconds in Talent Acquisition you know there is no way $5000 covers the cost of a top employee, probably not even a crappy employee.

SHRM, and other organizations, continually throw numbers at HR and TA that say they believe the cost of turnover is usually 1 to 1.5 times the salary of the person leaving. Do you see the problem with the HR math we have?

CEO believes that it cost $5000 to replace an IT Developer in your company making $85,000. You believe is costs $85,000-125,000 to replace that person. THIS is a major problem and disconnect!

It would be easy for me to say, “well Ryan just pulled some bad data from some crappy content put together by a TA tech vendor to help shape their own story”, but it’s truly the reality for most executives. This is why I constantly caution TA pros and leaders to stop using the 1-1.5 times metric and start asking your executives what they think it is.

In my experience, what I find is most executives, for a professional position will usually give you a number around $10,000. The biggest miss of executives is they never calculate the revenue and profit a great employee produces versus a bad employee or having that position left open. This is where the SHRM number comes from.

This is problematic because most executives won’t tie revenue numbers to someone who’s not in sales, wrongly, since everyone in your organization has an impact on revenue and profit. So, you can fight this battle, which you’ll mostly lose, or you can just go with what they believe and build your story from there.

$5,000-$10,000 per lost employee aren’t small numbers, it’s still significant dollars to work with as a TA leader, and you’ll get better buy-in from CEOs like Ryan!

 

T3- Jobvite’s Annual Recruiter Nation Report

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Talent Acquisition software provider Jobvite released their annual Recruiter Nation 2016 report today. This report always has some gems I love to share and usually use in presentations throughout the year. Here are some of my favorites from this year’s report:

– 51% say that employment branding is their #1 investment that they will make in the next 12 months! In case you’re bad at math, that is over half! This doesn’t really speak to a “real” need for EB, it speaks to a lack of understanding of what their organization truly needs from TA. For most companies, this will be a waste of resources. An organization can be great at attracting talent with a brand no one knows. The fact that half of all organizations will have this as their #1 investment is a painful reality of a lack of great TA leadership in the industry.

– Internal hires (38%) are ranked highest quality by recruiters — followed closely by employee referrals (34%). I actually laughed out loud when I first read this! Really? I mean REALLY!? Internal hires rank as your highest quality? Well, isn’t that surprising…They better be your highest quality!!! They already work for you, Moron! Sometimes I just don’t get why we ask stupid questions. Another stat you might find surprising, water is wet! Also, stop giving internal recruiters credit for internal hires. They didn’t do anything to fill that job.

– According to recruiters, 43% of them rated diversity as somewhat or very important when making a hiring decision. But 40% of them were neutral about diversity and its influence. Want to know why your organization isn’t moving the needle on diversity recruitment? It’s this stat! Your recruiters hear that it’s important, but they don’t believe it’s important. Why? Because you don’t show them any internal statistics that more diverse work groups, in your own environment, perform better than those lacking diversity. Show them, or shut up.

– 60% of recruiters rate culture fit of highest importance when making a hiring decision — topped only by (you guessed it) previous job experience (67%)! What didn’t matter? Cover letters (26%), prestige of college (21%), and GPA (19%). Yep, all you haters that still think cover letters are a thing! They aren’t, go back to 1997.

– This year, recruiters are most focused on growing talent pipelines (57%) and the quality of their hires (56%). 

Can we be real for a second? I mean really, really!? You’all are pissing me off!

56% of Recruiters are concerned with Quality of Hire. That’s nice. Tell me how you measure that? Oh, it’s when a new hire stays 90 days in the job. That means quality? How does that align with the industry? Oh, you don’t know, because everyone measures QofH completely differently and it’s a freaking meaningless metric! I WANT TO SHOOT MYSELF IN THE HEAD!

Quality of Hire is not a Recruiting metric. Quality of Hire is a hiring manager metric! It’s something that starts with TA, flows through HR, ends up in Performance Management and ultimately is tied to Hiring Manager decisions and their ability to develop and onboard new hires. TA has very little to do with quality of hire. TA is responsible for Quality of Source, that is a different thing.

So, just stop it. Stop doing this. You’re giving me an aneurysm!

And now back to the survey…

– 87% of Recruiters use LinkedIn to find candidates, the largest of all networks. 67% of Candidates use Facebook to search for a job, the largest of all networks. Do you see a problem here?

Definitely, go download the report! It’s loaded with a ton of data that can help shape some of your TA decisions in the near future, or just get you to do more of what everyone else is doing because you were told by idiots like me it’s the new hottest thing on the market to do, and fun wasting most of your budget developing your brand no one will ever know about.

Free Agent Nation: Using Talent Assessments To Build Your Superteam

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Anyone else amazed by the USA performance at the Rio Olympic Games?  Just us?

If you’re responsible for hiring and developing people, then you’d love to build a dominating team of individuals like the USA Olympic Swimming and Women’s Gymnastics teams. But how do you do it?  Executives and hiring managers tell you that the world of talent selection and team building is more art than science. Susie the manager brags about her great “gut feelings” when she hires people.

Susie’s gut feel success rate?  Um, not so good.  You’d never put Susie in charge of our Olympic talent.

You need tools to help you pick more winners. Then it would be nice to use the same tools to maximize their chances for success in that freak show you call a company, right?

That’s why we’re back with our latest version of the FOT Webinar, brought to you by our friends at OutMatch. Join us on September 29th at 2pm ET (1pm Central, 11am Pacific) for Free Agent Nation – Using Talent Assessments to Build Your Superteam (Click to Register) and we’ll give you the following goodies:

—How to research/implement assessments (and avoid getting sued) and sell the concept of leveraging external assessments to the company bigwigs. We’ll tell you how to vet assessment providers, figure out your biggest need, and partner with a firm to design an assessment process that works. Then we’ll give you the roadmap on how to get the buy-in you need to get this process started.

—How to use the profiles of your existing team to understand the candidates in your recruiting funnel that have the best chance at succeeding AND raising the overall performance of your team. You need performance.  You also need someone that can blend with the team you have and make it better.  We’ll show you how to use existing team profiles to spot the right fit.

—How to use your assessment platform to give your managers incredible leverage to onboard their new hires, with a focus on what makes each employee special – as well as what could hurt them in your unique culture.

—A roadmap for how your managers can embed behavioral observations into their performance coaching, with an eye on emphasizing each employee’s behavioral strengths while neutralizing the weaknesses that we all have.

Whether you need help getting started with or would like to do more with talent assessments once an employee has joined your company (90%+ of the world, btw), we’ve got something for you on this webinar.

Susie the manager isn’t bad, she’s just human. Join us on September 29th at 2pm ET (1pm Central, 11am Pacific) for Free Agent Nation – Using Talent Assessments to Build Your Superteam (Click to Register) and we’ll give you the plan to get started or do more with the assessments you already have!