Category Archives: Hiring

T3 – Fastest Growing Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) on the Market

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I’m going to share some data today because it’s the single most requested question I get in my life, professionally. Here it is:

“Tim, what ATS do you use and what ATS do you recommend?”

This got me thinking that one day people will stop asking this question, but they don’t, every month, every year, for probably the past five years! I find that fascinating, the longevity and frequency of this question.

It tells me a few of things:

  1. ATS vendors have done an awful job at positioning themselves in the market (there are an estimated 1,200 ATS systems in the world!)
  2. An average ATS system could dominate the market with some exceptional marketing.
  3. TA Leaders can’t tell the difference between ATS systems.
  4. TA Leaders have no idea how many choices they actually have to choose from.

Interesting enough another talent acquisition software, an employment branding play, Ongig, actually runs a poll (The Top 70 ATSs) and publishes the results a few times per year around the ATS market. The poll has about 3,300 participants, most in the U.S., and it’s pretty straightforward – what ATS do you use?

From this poll, they can estimate market share and growth change. Here are some of the results:

Top ATS by Marketshare:

ATS 2015 Share
Taleo 36.43%
Homegrown 11.10%
Jobvite 8.58%
Kenexa – Brassring 7.56%
iCims 6.39%
ADP 4.79%
SAP-SuccessFactors 3.72%
PeopleFluent (Formerly PeopleClick) 2.52%
Silkroad 2.27%
iRecruitment/PeopleSoft 1.74%
Ultipro 1.67%
Greenhouse 1.67%
HRDepartment 1.28%
Newton Software 0.78%
Jobscore 0.50%
Lumesse 0.50%
WorkDay 0.46%
Lever 0.46%

Top ATS by % Growth:

ATS % Increase
WorkDay 570.52%
Kronos 467.36%
HRDepartment 209.47%
ApplicantPro 209.47%
ATS OnDemand 209.47%
eRecruiting 157.89%
Cornerstone OnDemand 157.89%
Lever 123.51%
PeopleAnswers 123.51%
Ultipro (UltimateHCM) 120.38%
ADP 111.00%
HireBridge 106.31%
PCRecruiter.com 106.31%
CATS ATS 106.31%
SmartSearch 106.31%
Greenhouse 102.02%

What do these two charts tell us? 

– Taleo is dominate in the market, but not growing at the rate of most others. Taleo got that growth not by being the best ATS but because Oracle bought them and then in large organizations IT forced TA to use Taleo. Welcome to corporate politics.

– Workday must be awesome because they’re growing so fast! See the first bullet! Workday is winning huge HRIS RFPs and corporate IT is twisting some arms in TA to use the Workday recruiting platform. Workday isn’t sold a separate ATS point solution, so the only way you use is it, is if you’re the core Workday HRIS product.

– Kronos – see the bullets above! They’re not an ATS, in terms of what people think of when you think of the best ATS technology.

– Homegrown systems are always big because the ATS industry does an awful job showing us why we should pay for something we can basically build on our own. Now, the best ATSs on the market are clearly light years ahead of anything you built in-house.

– In the market share list I can basically put them into three buckets: Bucket #1 – Giant Enterprise plays with average and below average ATS technology, Bucket #2 – Super cheap SMB and Mid-market plays, bought by TA leaders who don’t really know what they’re doing; Bucket #3 – True best of breed ATS technology that should be leading the market.

It’s somewhat sad that so many giant enterprise level HRIS systems are dominating the ATS market, but it speaks to how HR and Recruiting were lead ten years ago. “We need everything to talk to each other so we can get all the data!” Yeah, you can still get that with a best of breed solution and open APIs. Too many great organizations are settling for below average technology and vanilla solutions while failing in recruiting.

This data also speaks to the fact that most ATSs today are not bought, they’re sold.  TA leaders have no idea which one to select, what the differences are, and what their choices are. So, you sell them on the fact your ATS is ‘by far’ the best one and ‘unlike’ anything else on the market. The data says different. It says that basically all of these ATSs are the same, otherwise you would see a few grab most of the market.

The Single Point of Failure in Your Candidate Experience #TheCandEs

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The Talent Board (founders of the CandE Awards for the employers with the best candidate experience) recently released their 2016 Talent Board North American Candidate Experience Awards Research Report. This report is well written, packed with exceptional data, and one that I look forward to reading each year.

As you think about your own candidate experience, and as I read this report, one thing screamed out from the pages:

Dispositioning Still Sucks!

From the report:

Disposition Communication Is Still a Struggle. In 2016, 47 percent of candidates were still waiting to hear back from employers more than two months after they applied. Plus, only 20 percent of candidates received an email from a recruiter or hiring manager notifying them they were not being considered, and only 8 percent received a phone call from a recruiter or hiring manager notifying them they were not being considered…

What Candidates Want After six years of candidate experience research, candidates still have one basic expectation of employers when it comes to screening: feedback and communication. Screening and dispositioning is one of the most intimidating aspects of the recruitment process as the majority of candidates do not get the job…Sixty-five percent of candidates receive no feedback after they are dispositioned and only four percent of candidates were asked for direct feedback during dispositioning

Candidate experience is a bit like going to that new restaurant in town. You’ve heard good things. You’ve seen some marketing. It looks awesome from the outside, so you decide to give it a try. Reservations were a snap and easy to do. You get sat almost immediately. Wait staff is tremendous. The menu is easy to understand and enticing. The food comes and it’s brilliant.

You almost can’t believe a place could be this good. You decide you must try the dessert. So, you order it and it comes out. The first bite is taken and it tastes like you have a mouth full of crap! It’s the worst! Oh lord, I’ll never forget that taste!

This is your dispositioning in your candidate experience. It doesn’t matter how good you do on all the steps if you don’t awful on the last step. Still, most of us still suck at dispositioning. It’s the single point of failure on almost every organization’s candidate experience.

Dispositioning sucks so bad, we call it dispositioning! Candidates don’t call it dispositioning. The real world doesn’t call it dispositioning. It’s called, “sorry, you suck, we selected someone we liked way, way better than you”.

So, what can you do about it?

First, you must understand why it is you suck at this. The majority of the people in the world hate conflict. They’ll do anything to avoid it. Telling someone they won’t get a job they applied for, that they truly believe they’re the best for, is big time conflict! HR and Talent Acquisition professionals based on their career path, are probably even at a higher percentage of being conflict avoidant.

Once you come to grips with this, you can design a dispositioning process that actually works for both sides. The other part is to understand the goal of dispositioning is to not make someone happy or satisfied because they won’t be, it’s to inform and educate. Your measures, then, around dispositioning measure those facts, not satisfaction.

I’ve never met someone who didn’t get a job they really wanted and they were ‘satisfied’ or ‘happy’. No, they were pissed and couldn’t understand why. This is why dispositioning, and the measurement of, is so difficult.

Here’s what I would do: 

  1. Set realistic goals around dispositioning. “We will let each person know if they got the job or didn’t within one week of the position being filled.”
  2. Find a process that communicates this message in the best way for the level of position and interaction with the organization. Mass apply positions with no interview, probably is best through email or SMS. High-level white collar job that went three interviews deep, yeah, that gal better receive a phone call and explanation.
  3. Pick people to communicate that have been trained on how to give dispositioning feedback to candidates.
  4. Let everyone know in your company how this looks, since most of your best hires come through referrals, most of your worst dispositions come through referrals.
  5. Spell out your dispositioning process to candidates up front.

Moneyball Rules: Offering More Experienced Workers Less Money!

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For years I’ve been trying to get people to understand this Moneyball concept as it relates to hiring, but few really listen. I know you saw the movie, Moneyball, where a major league baseball general manager finds success by signing and drafting ‘undervalued’ players. The players are undervalued for a number of reasons, it doesn’t matter, what matters he was able to get talent on at a discount rate!

Don’t you want to hire employees at a discount rate!?

Hired.com recently came out with a survey that once again demonstrates the most undervalued talent in any market are older workers, 50 years old and up. Apparently, once you become 50 years old, you start becoming worthless! Don’t kill the messenger, “you” are the ones saying this:

Basically, our average salary offer increases every single year of age. It makes sense because as you age, you gain more experience, more experience is more valuable. Or is it?

The chart, also, shows that once a worker turns 50 years old or so, employers (but not you…) start offering those workers less money, even though they have more experience!

Why!?

This has nothing to with wages! This is pure age bias shown towards younger workers. We believe, even older hiring managers, that once someone gets to a certain age, and Hired.com shows us that age to be 50 years old, older workers start losing their effectiveness even as they gain experience.

Somehow, in our minds, that 35-year-old, with three screaming kids and soccer practice four nights a week, is more effective than the 50-year-old with no kids at home, who is willing to work wherever and whenever you need them.

So, now you can play Moneyball!

You already know that most employers in the world hate old people. Thus, there are tons of gray hairs limping around out there willing to take all of your crappy low-ball offers, and they’re probably more loyal for those low wages then any younger worker you have on staff.

Yeah, for capitalism! You get great talent at low rates. Who needs H1B’s when we have old people!

“Well, Tim, it’s not about age bias! It’s about fit and culture and inclusi… I mean, we hire the best available candidate for the job!”

I’m sure you do.

Your reality is as hiring gets tighter, you can continue to overpay for younger talent with less experience, or you can pay a cheaper wage for more experience. Sooner or later, someone is going to ask the right questions. Are you going to have the right answer?

 

America First: The White Collar Workers Who Got Outsourced

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Your liberal friends want you to believe everyone who voted for Trump are racist, low paid, middle-aged white dudes from the Midwest. It’s nice and clean when you put it into that box. It fits the narrative they are selling really well.

 They don’t want you to know about the black female in California who lost her high paying salaried job to an H1B worker. Or the Asian-American male and female who lost their jobs, as well. Or the 60-year-old plus Hispanic male who lost his job. Those folks also are hoping ‘America First’ takes off.

This from the New York Times (I think this is still ‘real’ news, the NY Times?):

Audrey Hatten-Milholin, 54, was notified in July that she would be laid off from the University of California, San Francisco, at the end of February after 17 years in its technology department. Along with eight others, she filed a complaint in November with California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing, charging that replacing her and others with “significantly younger, male” workers “who will then perform the work overseas” was discriminatory.

“We are at a disadvantage as Americans,” Ms. Hatten-Milholin said. “They look at it like, where can we get it cheaper? And for U.C., it’s not here.”

From the same article:

In other words, it’s true that cheaper labor helps employers increase profits and grow, and having more skilled workers in the United States contributes to economic innovation. But at the same time, individual American employees do face more salary pressure from newcomers who will work for less. And in some cases, they risk losing their jobs entirely, especially older employees who earn higher salaries.

After 11 years working in the I.T. department of Northeast Utilities, a Connecticut-based company now named Eversource Energy, Craig Diangelo was among 220 employees laid off in 2014. Before leaving the company, he was told he needed to train his replacement if he wanted to receive his severance.

Mr. Diangelo, who is now 64 and was receiving $130,000 a year in salary and bonus, said he trained an employee from the Indian outsourcing firm Infosys who was an H-1B visa holder making $60,000 a year. There was also a team of workers in India making $6,000 a year that shadowed him on the computer.

There’s a reason Tech companies are screaming as loud as they can for the current administration to expand the H1B program and it’s not because they can’t find candidates for their jobs. The candidates are there, but the companies don’t want to pay the salaries of the American candidates who are available!

About half of all the H1B’s issued annually go to outsourcing firms. What are those? These are basically companies who perform modern day indentured servitude. They find a foreign worker with great skills who desperately wants to come to America, pay them a very good rate as compared to where they are coming from, but much less than a similar American worker. Since the outsourcing company holds the H1B, they basically have this person at the lower rate for six years.

The tech companies get great talent, for a much lower wage than a similar American worker. Everyone is happy. Well, almost everyone. Miss Hatten-Milholin and Mr. Diangelo from above, they’re not too happy, they are really hoping this America First thing takes off.

If you really dig into what the new administration is trying to do with the H1B program it’s not to eliminate it, it’s to bring it up to an equal footing of the American worker. If the American worker gets paid $100K to do the job, you also have to pay the H1B worker $100K for the same job. The theory being if everything is equal American companies will hire American workers. Or, in the case where a true shortage exists, then hiring H1B workers will make sense without limits.

Ah, equality, it’s what I love about America. There are at least two sides to every story, this side rarely gets shared.

Would You Facebook Live Your Interview?

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A few weeks ago, after an NFL playoff game, a wide receiver from the Pittsburg Steelers, Antonio Brown, Facebook Lived his coaches post-game talk to the team. That kind of talk is almost always a private conversation between the coach and the players.

Beyond the concept of betrayal between player and coach, this entire thing got me thinking about how our world has changed in what society views and private vs. public. My parent’s generation is extremely private. You don’t talk about money, political beliefs, religion, love life, family, your job, etc., with anyone outside your immediate family, and maybe not even them!

My generation was a little less, we would speak our political beliefs, talk opening about relationships, etc. The most recent generation to enter the workforce seemingly will talk about anything publicly! Somedays it seems like nothing is off limits within the walls of the office, this was not always the case.

Antonio Brown’s Facebook Live broadcast of this private moment got me to think about how long is it until we see someone broadcast an interview live!? This is truly a private moment between candidate and hiring manager. A time that both could look awesome or like a total fool.

There might be value for both sides to broadcast an interview live.

From a candidate perspective, you could show yourself in a very good light. If you nail the interview, not only do you have proof but now others also can see this and might want to hire you. If you bomb, having a video of this to analyze might be the best thing to help you get better at interviewing.

From an employer perspective, having a live broadcast of an interview might be a bonanza of publicity from an employer branding standpoint. We already know if would take a unique organization to be willing to do this, and every organization is trying to find ways to set themselves apart from their competition for talent. It would also be a great record for employment law purposes to prove you were compliant during an interview (or vice verse).

It’s easy to pick apart this idea and see both good things and bad. I suspect most HR and TA pros would see more bad than good, which is why I like it! If the majority only see negative, you can use this to your advantage.

The reality is, if you do what you should do, you have nothing to worry about and only could really use this to your advantage. If you suck and you don’t trust your hiring managers, this isn’t for you! That’s most of us, by the way!

It’s something to think about. I don’t see us, as a society, going backward as it relates to privacy. Every day another privacy barrier is broken. My question is, how long until we begin broadcasting live from the interview room?

Ugh! I Did a Video Interview and I Sucked! @Hirevue Edition

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First, let me say I’m a giant advocate for video interviewing. I think it’s brilliant and I absolutely love the technology and truly believe it’s only a matter of time until every single pre-screen organizations do are most likely done via video.

All that being said, I had never done a video interview, personally, until a few weeks ago.

No, I’m not looking for another job! I got asked to apply for a Board position with the new organization the Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals (ATAP). Being someone who probably spends too much time advocating for TA Pros, I couldn’t say no.

Part of the interview process was doing a video interview because the committee selecting the board members were located all over the world. Having candidates do a video interview would make it more effective from a time and cost perspective, plus this is for a TA Pro association. If we don’t use TA tech, how can we lead others in these efforts!?

Thankfully, Hirevue donated the use of their software to the selection committee to help with this process. I’ve known Hirevue for years when they were just a small up-and-coming vendor in a small 10X10 booth in the back of the vendor hall at SHRM national! The first time I saw the technology, I was a fan. I’ve demoed them a number times as they’ve improved and grown the system beyond just video interviewing. I don’t think there’s an analyst in HR or TA that has shown Hirevue more love than I!

So, doing a video interview with Hirevue should have been super easy for me!

I wanted to write about this because it wasn’t super easy for me. I sucked! It’s hard. It’s awkward. And, I still think it’s brilliant!

What you don’t get about video interviewing, unless you actually do one for real (real, meaning you actually want what you’re interviewing for, not some fake demo interview to see how it works) is that it’s hard talking to a camera and getting no facial or body language cues from your interviewers!

Normally, when you interview, you get asked a question and you start talking. Based on the non-verbal clues you get from those interviewing you, you continually auto-adjust. Your tone. The length of your answer. Your tempo. Etc. When you answer a question to the camera, you get none of this, and it’s a heck of a lot more difficult than you think!

I was even given the questions beforehand so I could prepare my answers, which might have made it worse since then you feel like you should memorize your answers. Regardless, the entire thing comes off like a bad monolog by a D-level actor!

This is important to talk about because I think if your organization is going to use video interviewing, you need to put every single one of your hiring managers, and yourself, through one of these interviews, then allow everyone to watch each other! You and your team need this perspective to understand, what you see on video might not be the best representation of that individual.

While younger generations will probably be more comfortable videoing themselves, we still have a great number in the workforce that will come across awkward. Hiring managers using this technology have to understand this, not everyone will rock the video interview.

I will say, using the Hirevue platform was super simple and easy, anyone could do it. It’s almost too easy!

For the record, I got the position. You are now looking at, err reading, about the next Board member to the Association for Talent Acquisition Professionals. So, apparently, I sucked a little less than some other folks! But, I’m super excited, along with the other board members, to begin growing and working with ATAP! I can’t tell you how long I’ve desired and hoped for an association like SHRM, but for Talent Acquisition.

Check us out and join! My goal is that organizations around the world will seek out ATAP members when they look to hire great TA Pros and Leaders for their openings.

Here’s how to JOIN the Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals!

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!

Why do we still hate hiring older workers?

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Over two years ago I wrote a post for Halogen’s Talent Space blog titled: The Gray Wave: Why Companies Refuse to Hire Older Workers. It was very popular when it launched and it still gets great traffic because apparently there are a ton of older people Googling things like “why won’t companies hire older people?”

In the past two years, little has changed within organizations when it comes to hiring an aging workforce. A study in 2015 actually showed that recruiters, in a corporate environment, actually had lower call rates to older female candidates, than to younger female candidates.

Why? Why would a corporate recruiter prefer, consciously or subconsciously, to call a younger candidate over an older candidate? Age alone would tell us that the older candidate probably has more experience, thus, probably should be the first one they would call. But that doesn’t happen.

This is happening because this is exactly what organizations want to happen. 

I know. I know. This isn’t “your” organization. You hire old people all the time. It’s all those ‘other’ organizations. Stop it. It’s you. Now, I’ll give you that you’re fighting against centuries of organizational dynamics to change this, but demographics are going to force this upon you whether you like it or not.

Organizationally, we’ve been trained to hire this way. The oldest employees moved up the career ladder to the top of the organization. Below them on the next rung of management are people slightly younger than them. It continues in this fashion until you get to the entry level employees in your organization that is the youngest.

Sure, once in a great wild, a young buck will rise up and leap over a generation or two into leadership. But, for the most part, we march along, waiting our turn, waiting for retirements and death. This sounds very traditional but if you were to run your demographics for age only by position, you would see this very clearly in almost every single organization, industry, and location around the world.

To be fair, organizationally this started because it was experienced based. The carpenter with 20 years of experience is much better, usually than the carpenter with ten years of experience, and the apprentice has even less experience. It made sense hundreds of years ago.

What this means is that you hire younger, because the hiring manager you’re recruiting for wants someone younger than them to manage. Most hiring managers are intimidated by managing someone who is older than they are, for numerous reasons. Very few would ever admit this fact because it’s akin to saying your racist, but if you run the numbers in your organization you’ll see very few older employees being managed by people who are younger than them.

So, how do we change this?

You have to get your leaders to see the problem, agree that it’s a problem, and be a part of changing the problem.

Your organization needs talent. You have hiring managers turning down talent for reasons that make no sense. If you call them out, you burn your relationship. So, this becomes really hard to change at the individual level.

If your organization values experience and hiring an aging workforce, I would begin tracking this by department and publicly posting this for all to see. When I was at Applebee’s we wanted more female leaders and we made this a measure that executives owned and were measured on, and it got changed very quickly. There is no difference here. It’s a simple bias, just like not hiring females.

Hiring managers who refuses to hire older workers has nothing to do with older workers, and everything to do with a hiring manager who can’t see their own bias.

 

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.

 

The Biggest HR and TA Questions for 2017

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I guess ‘biggest’ really depends on where your organization is with your HR and TA practices. My biggest might not be your biggest! I taking a run at this from the 30,000-foot view, not ground level.

2017 will for sure be a challenging year for both HR and TA leaders. With a new administration that is eager, to say the least, to make policy changes, both functions will be looked to for answers on how to deal with all of this, plus you have your normal day job to handle as well!

Here some of the biggest questions HR and TA will have to answer in 2017:

1. What will a repeal of Obamacare, in its current form, do to your benefit plan? If we’ve learned anything from Trump, it’s he doesn’t like Obamacare. So, you can pretty much guarantee that we’ll see changes to the Affordable Care Act. Which changes we’ll all have to wait and see!

2. How do we keep our talent from leaving us? It used to be, how do we keep our ‘best’ talent from leaving us? But, let’s face it, you have so many employees leaving now this isn’t about putting your finger in the dyke, this is about building a new damn! Retention will be one of the hottest topics in 2017, and probably 2018, 2019,…

3. What policies do you need to add, change or get rid of to make your organization better?  We always think about improvement in terms of adding, but in 2017 your greatest accomplishment might be to delete a policy or two that no longer have a positive impact in your organization. We added so many things during the recession that no longer make sense, but in HR and TA we hate deleting policies!

4. How do we fix Millennials? He didn’t say what I just think he said, did he? You need to watch this video by Simon Sinek. He thinks corporations need to fix millennials. His reasoning is solid. Corporations have the most to lose by broken millennials, they also have the most to gain. So, get ready to ramp up your development programs like never before, but these won’t be the same types of soft skill development programs from two decades ago! Millennials are broken. We can blame their crappy parents, at least that’s what Simon does.

5. How do we attract talent to our organizations? You don’t have to ping pong tables and free beer to attract great talent, but you do have to market to prospective candidates that you want them! This means that the post and pray strategy that 90% of organizations use, no longer will work (not that it ever worked). If I’m you, I have a serious conversation with my executive team about bringing marketing into help talent acquisition do some things differently. Yeah, you still need to sell whatever it is you sell, but if you don’t have talent to run the company, you won’t need marketing.

What are your biggest HR and TA questions for 2017?