Category Archives: Engineering Recruiting

T3 – @Teamableme – Recruit the Best Talent from your Employees Networks

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This week on T3 I review the employee referral technology Teamable. I’ve been a big fan of employee referral technology for a few years now, so I thought I already knew what Teamable was before I demoed. What I found was Employee Referral Automation 2.0!

Jobvite kind of created the industry of employee referral automation and leveraging your employee’s social media networks. For the money and the ROI, employee referral automation is still the most underutilized technology in talent acquisition. Almost every TA leader will tell you employee referrals are their highest quality hires and one of their top sources, but the spend almost zero dollars on technology to better these stats! It’s completely insane!

So, Teamable takes employee referral automation and says, how do we make it better? What do current users of employee referral automation like, and what do they wish they had that they don’t with this tech, and what is no one doing with this tech? This is what I think will ultimately set Teamable apart from other players in the space of employee referral automation is their innovation and ability to show organizations new ways to leverage this technology.

Teamable also found a game changer when it comes to using their technology to potentially increase your organization’s diversity hiring. That’s huge!

What I like about Teamable:

– Employees in your organization have the ability to see both the referrals they’ve made and what’s going on with them, but also those they’ve requested and where those are at as well. It’s one of the major gripes employees have after making a referral, that they don’t know what going on with it.

– Gamification is integrated very well into the dashboard showing a leaderboard of most referrals, which employees are most active, which employees have the most connected network, etc.

– The ability to segment out within your organization which employees you want to send specific job postings to. Why is that important? Diversity hires more diversity. Let’s say you had an opening for a Sales Rep. Your team was top heavy with dudes and you wanted more females. Instead of sending out this posting to all the sales reps you only sent it to your other female sales reps. What would happen? More than likely the referrals that came back with other female referrals. It’s not a guarantee, but the percentages are pretty good. BTW – works with any segment of your employees!

– ATS integrations already built for Jobvite, iCims, Lever, Greenhouse, etc. and Teamable will give you a visual cue if the person being referred is already in your current ATS, which is super helpful in letting those who referred know as soon as possible.

– Great UI/UX with their dashboard and ability to pull metrics and see the full funnel.

If you don’t have employee referral automation this is a must demo. I don’t know how to make that any clearer, this technology is a game changer for hiring more employees for less money and higher quality. I’m shocked that it’s not used by 100% of organizations who rely on and desire more referrals.

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 – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

The Top 7 Sources of Hire for 2017!

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Silkroad released their annual Sources of Hire 2017 report and I always love looking at big sets of data around the source of hire because I think the vast majority of organizations are misallocating their talent acquisition resources in a big way, and this data just gives me more evidence to point to!

Check out this chart:

So, it looks like Employee Referrals remain king! That doesn’t surprise anyone, what should be surprising are two items from this list:

1. Organizations are wasting more time on Indeed than any other place. 2nd place of a waste of time is LinkedIn. What? If the vast majority of your interviews are coming from Indeed, but a much smaller percentage of your hires are coming from Indeed, you have a misallocation of resources. LinkedIn has the same thing happening but from a much smaller overall number.

2. CareerBuilder is exponentially a better overall value than LinkedIn, but when I ask most companies to give me their #1 spend LinkedIn is almost always their largest single purchase when it comes to the source of hire, even though it’s #7 overall.

So, what does this data tell us?

First, if you are not investing in automating and increasing your employee referral program, you should probably not hold a TA leadership position at any company in the world. I find most organizations spend the least amount of money ‘marketing’ and ‘automating’ their referral program than any other single source they have. Yet, it’s their number one source and their number one quality of hire source.

Second, Indeed does drive a ton of traffic, and for many companies that’s organic (free) traffic, so you can’t beat that. It’ll be nice to see if Google Jobs changes all of this when it’s fully live. You should see a traffic shift from Indeed to Google as a source of hire. But, this doesn’t mean Indeed will go away. Just like the job boards, people will find value and talent at Indeed.

Third, if you’re single biggest spend is on LinkedIn, yet, it’s not your single biggest source of hire, you’re being taken. By whom? Most likely your recruiting team who claims LinkedIn is awesome when it’s really not that awesome, for you. If your hires per source and cost per hire per source work out that LinkedIn is number one for you, great! Spend more! This data shows it probably won’t.

Lastly, you should be striving to make your sources and interviews be fairly equal if possible. If you’re interviewing a ton from a source because you get great traffic, but you don’t make many hires, it’s a greater waste of time than those sources where you get a high interview to hire ratio.

One final cool stat:

3:1  

14 Million applicants, 655,000 interviews. This data tells us what the magic number is that we already all know, it takes three interviews to make one hire.

Feels right, doesn’t it?

Why Hasn’t Employee Referral Automation Caught on? #SHRMTalent

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I spoke at SHRM Talent this week. One of the best corporate recruiting conferences around. Many people don’t believe me when I tell them, but the content, speakers, and audience are really engaging.

TA Tech companies and vendors haven’t caught on yet to the new SHRM Talent. Most corporate TA pros I spoke to might not have million dollar budgets to spend, but every one of them had decisions making over tens and hundreds of thousands of TA budget dollars!

It’s becoming one of the favorite conferences because the audience of corporate TA pros and leaders are very open to wanting to learn and get better. Their questions are genuine and the truly want to learn how to improve recruiting and talent attraction in their organizations.

One topic that I bring up during my sessions as the most under-utilized TA technologies on the planet is employee referral automation. Jobvite created the space, others followed, like RolePoint, Zao, Gooodjob, etc. Still, main stream corporate TA tech in mass aren’t using employee referral automation. It’s one of the great mysteries in the TA space for me!

When you ask corporate TA pros and leaders what their top source for talent is, employee referrals will always come in the top 3. When you ask what is the highest quality of hires by source, employee referrals are almost always number one! When you ask how much money have you invested in increasing employee referrals, it’s almost always $0!

So, help me out, what am I missing?!

The SHRM Talent audience told me I wasn’t missing anything, they just simply didn’t know this technology was available to them! Jobvite was in the expo hall, but mainly they were selling ATS, not employee referral automation (huge miss, but I know ATS margins are bigger than employee referral automation!). 97% of my audience weren’t using this tech, but almost all had an interest in learning more.

It’s really a zero-budget buy for most companies! If you use this type of technology you can basically get rid of your referral bonus program and your numbers will still go up on employee referrals. So, there’s the money you need to buy the tech that will put your employee referral program on steroids!

Truly, the bonuses per referral are not needed! You will have to actually begin recognizing those who do refer in your company, but almost all employees will refer people to your organization without a monetary gain! Also, increasing bonuses does little to actually increase the number of referrals you get.

So, why isn’t the vast majority using this tech?

First, they aren’t being sold this technology. Most corporate TA pros and leaders buy because of what is being sold to them, not necessarily what they need.

Second, I’m guessing the companies that sell this tech are for the most part fairly weak at marketing because it seems like a pretty easy sell to the groups I have in front of me!

Third, most corporate TA pros and leaders just have no idea this tech is even on the market for them, and if they do, they believe it’s too expensive to purchase.

They’ll spend a million dollars on LinkedIn and Indeed, but not $50,000 on technology that gives them more hires of their highest quality source?! There’s a major disconnect here on both sides of the market, which means there’s a giant opportunity for a company with a great brand with great tech that can make it simple for corporate TA leaders.

 

 

The New Definition of “Passive Candidate”

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Okay, we get it, Mrs. Hiring Manager, you want passive candidates!!! We’ll get right no that…

Passive candidates are the holy grail of candidates, right? Untouched, virgin, pure as the driven snow, fresh meat that has yet to be soiled by the dirty hands of another recruiter. If I could find a way to mainline passive candidates right into my system I’d be the best recruiting junkie on the planet!

Do you even lift bro? I mean, do we even know what the hell a passive candidate even is anymore?

The Passive Candidate Definition from ten years ago:

“A Passive Candidates is someone who is being considered for a position but is not actively searching for a job.”

So, are we buying this today?

If so, it seems like we then need to define “actively searching”. The only candidates I know who are ‘actively searching’ for jobs are candidates out of work, working in a job that isn’t their chosen career (Communications grad from B-level university, selling cell phones in a strip mall), or about to be fired from their current position.

If those are the actively searching candidates, that makes almost everyone else Passive! I don’t think our definition of Passive Candidate matches that of our hiring managers current definition of passive candidate! I think they would say anyone who is searching for a job, passively or actively, is not really passive.

So, why do we see this differently? Well, this is a bit of marketing that TA played on the hiring manager to fill positions. “Hey, Tim is a great ‘passive’ candidate, I found him on LinkedIn, he didn’t even ‘apply’ to our job! You have to interview him!” The ‘he didn’t even apply’ is like crack for hiring managers, who now believe you found Tim locked away in a vault at your competitors that has never seen the light of day.

The reality is a bit less sexy! Tim has been on LinkedIn for three years trying to get out of dead end company he’s been working for, but Tim sucks at networking and finding jobs, so he is just waiting around to be trolled by a recruiter, and he applies to jobs every week, just hasn’t applied to your job!

Let’s be honest with each other. If someone has posted a resume online, err, professional profile, they’re on the market! They might not be actively applying to jobs on a daily basis, but we all know they’re open for business. Someone can’t be passive that has a presence on any of the job boards (Monster, CareerBuilder, Indeed, LinkedIn, Dice, Zip, etc.).  They also can’t be passive if they actively applying to jobs, but just haven’t applied to your job!

So, the new definition of Passive Candidate should probably be:

“A Passive Candidate is someone you find through various methods who is not on the job market in any way.”

That means you might contact someone in your ATS database who applied for a job with you three years ago, but they are currently happily employed and totally off the job market radar. That’s a Passive Candidate. The referral your employee gave you for a former coworker that you can’t find anything online, and they tell you they’re not looking for a job. That’s a Passive Candidate.

A passive candidate isn’t someone you found who just hasn’t happened to think about applying to your job, yet. They actually might be the most active candidate on the planet, who you just happen to run into.

We know a truly passive candidate when we speak to one. They’re a bit nervous. A bit surprised. A bit flattered. You can tell they’re not used to talking to recruiters and feel guilty talking to you. This is the person you’re hiring managers are asking for when they say they want a passive candidate.

This isn’t to say passive candidates are better. That’s an entire another post, but let’s not act like we are providing passive candidates when we aren’t.

Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals (ATAP) first Board Meeting

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This week the Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals (ATAP) Board (of which I’m apart) met for the first time, live, and in person in Atlanta. There hasn’t been an official launch yet of ATAP, but the work continues to make this association the one global talent acquisition association that all recruiting professionals will turn to.

What the heck is ATAP? 

ATAP was founded originally by Ben Gotkin and Gerry Crispin, and then with a ton of help from a whole host of great TA advocates! ATAP was founded on the belief that talent acquisition, as a profession, needs an organization (like a SHRM) to support “US”, the TA Pros and Leaders that work in corporate environments, agencies, RPO, vendors, etc.

What the heck did the ATAP board and Executive Director Ben Gotkin (plus Gerry Crispin) do this past week? 

So, for over a year a ton of folks have put in a ton of work to get ATAP to the position it is now, which is basically build a complete foundation of an organization. That’s not easy! And this group brought ATAP into existence and gave it a soul.

The board and the Executive Director is tasked with building a Talent Acquisition specific association that meets all the needs of the stakeholders in talent acquisition. As you can imagine, just deciding on what the hell that means is a big job!

There are a number of critical things on the agenda that need to be addressed. First, you can’t have an association is you don’t have money! You don’t have money without members and/or sponsors. Why would someone want to be a member of ATAP?

That’s no small question. When you ask an HR Pro why they are a member of SHRM, they can rattle off a number of reasons. All those reasons were built over time, SHRM wasn’t launched with resources, certifications, advocacy, etc. But, you need to start somewhere!

ATAP is looking to do all those things you expect from a modern day association that represents your professional field. We need to build a complete body of knowledge for talent acquisition. We need to build a code of ethics for our profession. We need to build resources for our members.

We need to decide which pieces add the most value to our members, now and in the future, then prioritize that work. We need to do all of this with a current 100% volunteer organization, that can’t stay that way for long if we really want to gain traction and do really cool stuff for members.

How can you help? 

First, you can become a member! Becoming a member puts you in a position to be able to shape the future of ATAP and the future of talent acquisition. We have a ton of work in front of us, and we need TA pros and leaders who are passionate advocates of talent acquisition who want to volunteer and give back.

Second, join the conversation around a number of committees we’ll be launching over the next 90 days and once you become a member join the ATAP Facebook Group to give us feedback on many items we’ll be putting in front of our membership.

Third, spread the word. This is a grassroots organization that will not be successful with you. If you’re a TA leader, have your entire team join. If you’re a vendor consider being a sponsor of ATAP. For everyone, raise the conversation around how we (all of us) make recruiting better and a profession we are proud to be a part of.

I’m leaving Atlanta so energized and excited. The board of directors for ATAP is a ultra-passionate and diverse group of individuals that truly represent our profession. I’m proud to be a part of this future!

New Recruitment Marketing Group on Facebook! #TransformRM

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Recruitment Marketing is one of the hottest concepts on the planet right now! We all have the exact same issue right now and that’s being able to attract the right talent to our organizations.

Employment branding took off a few years ago as we came out of the great recession and there are some great things that have been happening in that space. Recruitment marketing, though, is a bit different than employment branding.

What’s the difference between Recruitment Marketing (RM) and Employment Branding (EB)?

  1. EB is who your are. RM is your complete message you want to get in front of candidates.
  2. EB comes first. RM comes next, and it’s all the technology and process it takes to get that message in front of candidates in a space and a time when they’re ready to consume that message.
  3. You own your RM. You don’t always own your brand. Many times outside influences have part ownership of your brand, but they’ll never own your RM!

This isn’t a competition between EB and RM, you actually need to do a great job at both! You also need to understand the differences between the to, as you could be great at one, and bad at the other.

I’m part of a group of Recruitment Marketing leaders who decided to get together in a space where we could all share our knowledge of RM. This group first came together last year at the recruitment marketing conference Transform in Boston.

We wanted to find a way to keep the conversation going all year, so we’ve decided to start the Facebook Group: Transform Recruitment Marketing Facebook Group.

Come join. It is a ‘closed’ group, just because we want to make sure it doesn’t turn into a spam group, but you can be assured myself and Shaunda Zilich (Employment Branding Leader at GE) will approve you to join the conversation!

What can you expect from this group?

– Connecting with great talent acquisition folks from around the world, willing to share their successes and their failures, helping us all get better at attracting the talent we need.

– Me sharing the latest and greatest things I find on the planet as it relates to the recruitment marketing world.

– A willingness from all the members to interact and share.

So, come check it out, we just launched this week. I can’t wait for the conversations to begin!

Dear Timmy: How can I best incentivize my corporate recruiters?

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Dear Timmy,

I have a team of corporate recruiters who we pay salary and then they also get paid a bonus amount for every individual you hire. When I read your post “The Corporate Recruitment Incentive Program” at Fistful of Talent, I was encouraged we are doing the right thing. But, I have an issue. From time to time we go through periods of time when we have no hiring needs or a hiring freeze. During these times the recruiters feel shorted. How

But, I have an issue. From time to time we go through periods of time when we have no hiring needs or a hiring freeze. During these times the recruiters feel shorted. How do I incentivize them during these times? My recruiters all work remotely, hire very specialized talent, and it’s fairly low volume around 15 hires per recruiter per year. The average salary is around $150K, plus bonus.

Thanks,

Corporate TA Leader who gets it

Dear Mrs. Gets it,

Will you please hire me!? No, I mean it. I will come to work for you for only the $150K and no bonus!

So, I hear you. It’s all relative to the market, location, industry, etc. I kid about wanting a job with you, but only slightly. Very few recruiters in the world make $150K working from home making 15 placements per year in a corporate environment where all of their overhead is paid and they have a great benefits package.

So, step one of finding the right incentive would first be to understand why these recruiters feel ‘underpaid’. You might be lucky and have all rock star recruiters who are the top in the field, but I doubt they are all that level. So, then I would ask myself, is this a team incentive issue, or do I have an outlier who is truly worthy.

All that being said, your problem is a real problem if part of your compensation plan for your recruiters is to be paid by hire and you have no hires to be made!

Here are some suggestions:

– If you look at your normal hiring pattern and it’s consistently at a certain level, work your bonuses into an average hire scenario. Then give your recruiters some education on how to budget! Look you first quarter might be giant, but you better know every second quarter sucks for hires, so your bonus will be low.

– Instead of compensating by hire, maybe compensate by activities that lead to hires. Thus, just because you don’t make hires, doesn’t mean the recruiters need to stop doing all those great things that fill the pipeline. The hard part about this is it will probably drag down your candidate experience as candidates won’t be too happy to be strung along and never get hired!

– Are there other valuable activities your recruiters can do in low hire situations? I love to focus on retention and the activities that increase retention. Maybe there are project related completion bonuses you can use during these times to get some things done that have been put on the back burner, but you really need to get done now that you have the capacity.

– Ask your hiring managers for suggestions. I’m always pleasantly surprised by some of the suggestions I get from hiring managers on what my team can do for them, to help them out, even if they feel it’s not recruiting related. Many of the projects they have can be done by recruiters as well, plus it gets your recruiters more integrated into the business.

Hope this helps! Please hire me.

Tim

 

Does Uber’s HR Really Suck?

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Clearly by now if you’re in HR you’ve read this post by a former female engineer from Uber. It’s very detailed and sounds almost exactly like most companies in the world. No, not the part of ignoring sexual harassment, but almost every other part! Worker gets wronged. The company seems to do nothing. Worker gets more and more frustrated. The company loses patience with the worker. It always ends bad. 

The former IT Engineer at Uber, Susan Fowler, left the company and on her way out she, figuratively, burned every bridge in sight with a scathing blog post about her experience!

From her post:

When I reported the situation, I was told by both HR and upper management that even though this was clearly sexual harassment and he was propositioning me, it was this man’s first offense, and that they wouldn’t feel comfortable giving him anything other than a warning and a stern talking-to. Upper management told me that he “was a high performer” (i.e. had stellar performance reviews from his superiors) and they wouldn’t feel comfortable punishing him for what was probably just an innocent mistake on his part.

I was then told that I had to make a choice: (i) I could either go and find another team and then never have to interact with this man again, or (ii) I could stay on the team, but I would have to understand that he would most likely give me a poor performance review when review time came around, and there was nothing they could do about that. I remarked that this didn’t seem like much of a choice, and that I wanted to stay on the team because I had significant expertise in the exact project that the team was struggling to complete (it was genuinely in the company’s best interest to have me on that team), but they told me the same thing again and again. One HR rep even explicitly told me that it wouldn’t be retaliation if I received a negative review later because I had been “given an option”. I tried to escalate the situation but got nowhere with either HR or with my own management chain (who continued to insist that they had given him a stern-talking to and didn’t want to ruin his career over his “first offense”). 

Ouch, that’ll leave an organizational mark! Go read the post, there’s much more than this little bit.

I’m in HR so I realize a few things about this scenario:

  1. There are always, at least, two sides to every story. If what happened to Susan, actually happened as she wrote, shame on Uber. But, there are always two sides.
  2. Susan just happens to have launched a new book and is writing another. The timing on this couldn’t have been better to sell books. (that’s just the cynical HR guy in me).
  3. The former head of HR at Uber during Susan’s time there, Renee Atwood, left to go be the CHRO at Twitter after only 2 years. After seven months she then left that role at Twitter. This might speak to the lack of leadership at Uber in HR during Susan’s tenure, it might not, it’s just one piece of data. Prior to Uber and Twitter, Atwood had only held Director level roles at a giant banking company. Taking on the full show is a completely different monster, then a narrow hr director role in a giant organization.

So, the blogosphere is ripping Uber apart for being a bad organization. They might be right, maybe they’re awful. What I hear from reading Susan’s piece is a disgruntled employee that sounds like they were in a bad situation. In her post, one HR pro points out to her that the common denominator in all of this is Susan. Which she takes offense to, and if everything is as Susan says, rightly so.

I can’t get over how familiar all this sounds and feels, though. I’ve been the HR pro sitting across from a ‘Susan’. A ‘Susan’ who claims to have ‘evidence’ but really has nothing. Who claims to have witnesses, yet none come forward. Who claim some very, very bad stuff, yet, I found it not to be true, and some really solid people getting tarnished in the process.

Uber might really suck at HR and be awful people. I can’t tell that from one person’s story. I’m in HR, I need to see all the sides!

What do you think?

I Love the Buzz of a Recruiting Team in Full Motion!

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On a Tuesday night recently I stayed late at the office, took my laptop and sat out in our recruiting bullpen. Hearing everyone at once on calls, talking to candidates, selling, recruiting, is like music to me. There’s an energy you can feel, and so can everyone else that’s in the middle of it!

If you do one thing to make your recruiting team better this week, schedule a full team calling party! It doesn’t have to be at night. For agencies, that’s the best time, but I know most corporate TA leaders would struggle to make this happen.

Bring your team together and give them time to prepare, source, etc. Let them know from 10 am to noon, we are all going to call candidates all at the same time. No sourcing, no setting up interviews, no following up with hiring managers, no working on projects. Just one thing, dialing and talking.

Make a contest out of it. The recruiter who makes the most calls in this time will get a prize, or the person who talks to the most people will win. You can play around with different ways to incentivize this behavior.

It’s an amazing feeling having the entire team doing that one activity, together, that is the core of all that you do. The nervous energy, the elevated voices, the positivity is infectious! I can guarantee you that if you do once, you’ll want to do it again.

It’s too easy for us to sit there at our desk and send emails. Source on the internet. Do all that work we do, but not that one thing we all need to do more of and that’s one-on-one conversations with candidates. That’s how you make more hires. That’s how you decrease days to fill. That’s how you increase your hiring manager satisfaction. That’s how you increase candidate satisfaction.

At our core, this is what we are. Recruiters find people, talk to people, and connect people. Most of this can only be done with live conversations. Do yourself a favor and give this a try!

Dear Timmy: How Do I Get Into Talent Acquisition?

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I get asked a ton of questions via email. Some are from college students who ask a variety of things. Here’s a recent one:

Dear Timmy,

I’m a college student majoring in communications (editor’s note: why do college kids major in communications? Like 80% of college kids want to major in communications. You know there aren’t real jobs in communications, right!?) and I’m looking to get into human resources, more specifically I would like to work in talent acquisition.  What suggestions, or steps, do you suggest to help me get a position in corporate talent acquisition?

Thanks,

Communication major because apparently I’m an idiot (just kidding, she didn’t sign it that way!)

Here is my response:

If you want to get into straight HR you’ll need to graduate with a degree in HR. As I don’t know of an organization that hires entry level HR pros with non-HR degrees. If you want to get into talent acquisition follow these steps –

Step 1 – Graduate

Step 2– Apply for ‘agency’ entry level recruiting roles.

Step 3 – Do your time in the agency world, at least a year, maybe a bit more.

Step 4 – Apply for corporate Talent Acquisition openings

Here’s my reasoning for the steps above.

In talent acquisition no one cares which college degree you have, they only care that you can recruit. The reality is they shouldn’t even care if you go to college, but most corporate recruiter jobs will require it. Corporate TA departments rarely hire entry level recruiters because they don’t have the knowledge, processes, and capacity to train recruiters, which is why you need to get experience on the agency side of recruiting.

Agency recruiting is known to be very cut-throat and high burnout rate, but I’m only talking about a year or so. Anyone can handle that, and it will give you valuable experience. You might like agency recruiting and you can make a ton of money, but it’s high stress. Corporate TA is mid-level money, with no growth, but virtually no stress in comparison.

Once you get your experience in the agency world, even only a year, you’ll actually be considered pretty valuable on the corporate side of TA. Think of your agency time as your TA internship. You know there’s an endpoint, then you get into the job you want.

When interviewing for agency positions you should never mention that your goal is to get into corporate TA. They won’t hire you if they feel you’re just going to leave. Also, when you interview, most agency folks are only looking to hire two things: high energy, highly money motivated. So, drink three Red Bulls before you interview, and talk constantly about how much money you want to make. You’ll get hired by 99% of the agencies that interview you.

I might be joking a little, but only a little, that’s fairly close to reality. I mean agencies are also known to hire pretty people, so it wouldn’t hurt to be good looking.