Category Archives: Hiring

7 Words Mathematically Proven to Get You More Hires!

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Wired recently worked with OkCupid and Match.com to find out which words were used on the most popular dating profiles on their sites.  Millions of data points were done for this data analysis and they came up with the most popular 1000 words.  What they came up with were the exact words to use in your profile descriptions to get the most clicks.

I’m going to take this one step further and say if these words attract singles to another single, I’m quite certain they would attract a job seeker to a job.  My theory being singles are also job seekers.  Okay, I hear you, just because some words might attract one person to another person doesn’t mean those same words will attract a person to a job – but it might.

It is my belief that we can totally re-write Job Descriptions in a way that is a lot less HR’ish, and much more real, which will make more people want to work in the jobs you have.  Here is one I put together for hiring a Recruiter for my staff.   The positive is, it lets us in HR get our ‘creative on’.

Let ‘s give it a shot. I’ll give you 7 categories of words that were mathematically proven to get more dates hires:

1. Active Words: Yoga, Surfing, Surf, hiking, athlete, etc. These words were popular because people want to be associated with things that are good for them. Do you highlight active things you do at your organization in your job descriptions?

2. Pop Culture Words: 30 Rock, The Great Gatsby, Homeland, Arrested Development, The Matrix, The Big Bang Theory, The Hunger Games, etc.  People want to work with an organization that has a personality.  Pop culture references in your JD give you a personality.

3. Music Words: (FYI – some of these could also be considered Pop Culture) – Radiohead, Nirvana, live music, guitar, instruments, etc .Does your organization have a musical preference? Why not?  Maybe you’re a little country, maybe you’re a little rock and roll, either way, it’s alright to let candidates know!

4. Calm Words: Ocean, meditation, beach, trust, respect, enjoy, planning, dedication, openness, etc. Words that project a feeling of safety and security. In today’s employment marketplace, don’t discount the value of your jobs based on how calm and secure the work is.  Anxiety is at an all-time high.  Having the ability to say “we’ve never laid off in our history!” could pay you huge dividends.

5. Food Words: Chocolate, cooking, foodie, pizza, sushi, breakfast, etc. Food is a gathering and sharing point in most cultures.  If you do food related things in your work environment it brings all of your people together. Everyone eats. Not everyone will do Yoga or want to watch movies.  Chili cook-offs, company happy hours, Donut Fridays, etc.

6. Descriptive Words: Creative, motivated, confident, driven, passion, awareness, etc. Most HR pros see JDs as a means to an end.  They’re a legal necessity.  We should be looking at them as mini-commercials for our jobs.  I would love to see a company go full video JD – nothing written, just watch our Job Description. 60 seconds of someone telling you what this job is.

7. Spontaneous Words: Tattoos, F*ck, wasted, kissing, puppies, sucking, lucky, etc.  Words that most people would never expect to see in a JD.  This word has absolutely no usefulness in a JD – that’s exactly why we put it in there.  It might not attract an older conservative candidate, but it might be just what a newer generation is looking for.

I’ve never met a senior executive that had a problem with any job description I wanted to write – not matter how bland or how crazy.  That being the case, why do we continue to write JDs that put people to sleep?

The Best Recruiters are Competitive, A Hypothesis

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I’ve worked in recruiting and HR for about twenty years. At this point in my career, I estimate that I’ve hired about 100 Recruiters.

I’ve hired recruiters that come from almost every environment and education. I’ve gone the Enterprise Rent A Car route and hired college athletes. I’ve gone to colleges and hired HR graduates. I’ve hired seasoned recruiting veterans from both agency and corporate. I’ve hired uneducated individuals from service backgrounds. I’ve hired specific practitioners who have deep knowledge of what they’re recruiting – nurses, IT pros, etc.

None of these things made one bit of difference when it came to performance as a recruiter, in either environment, corporate or agency.

The only thing I’ve found to be a differentiator of true recruiting performance is the level of competitiveness an individual has internally. This is why it’s so popular to hire former athletes as recruiters, we assume since they are athletic, that they must be competitive. But, this also fails, many times.

You see, you don’t have to play sports to be competitive.  You might just be that kid you threw the Monopoly board across the room when you lost to your sister. You might be that person who can’t stand that your neighbor’s lawn looks better than yours. Who knows why and what you’re competitive with, but it’s the key to being great a recruiting.

Many will wrongly assume that males are more competitive than females. In my experience, I’ve found this not to be true. Both sexes can be very competitive, it’s finding which ones are competitive that becomes the difficult thing.

So, why does being competitive help make you a great recruiter?

I believe competitiveness is a great trait for recruiters because it leads them to want to ‘win’.  What’s the win in recruiting? It’s filling the position! Recruiting is just one small game, after another. Each one that is slightly different, with new complexities to complete.  Each time you fill an opening, that is like making a point on your scoreboard.

If you put a group of these people together, even though they’re all working on separate openings, they see each other making placements and they want to do this as well. This competitive drive, alone, makes an individual succeed or fail at recruiting.

This becomes the main issue of why selecting non-proven recruiters is such a crap shoot. It’s very difficult to measure someone’s competitive drive accurately, and interview questioning is unreliable. In my 100 hires, I would say I’m 50/50 in getting it right. When I talk to other agency executives and TA Leaders, many share the same ratio.

Want to hire better recruiters?

Focus completely on finding ultra competitive people, who love keeping score, and throw them into the game.  I like to say Recruiting isn’t hard, but I know that it is.  Recruiting is easy if you’ve got the right people, who will do whatever it takes to win. That’s the competitive difference!

T3 – Elevated Careers

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This week on T3 I take a look at new careers site being developed by dating site eHarmony, called Elevated Careers. I actually reviewed them back in October of 2015 at the HR Technology Conference, but they were in beta. They had their big launch recently, so I wanted to remind folks to check them out now that it’s live!

I was at the launch and learned a few things to add:

  • Dr. Warren is super passionate about making this work. He truly believes Elevated Careers can match companies and candidates for the right fit.
  • Organizational Fit is still something that organizations haven’t figured out. Which makes this a giant market that is basically untapped.
  • Elevated Careers is taking great care not to become a job site for eHarmony.

Elevated has taken the successful compatibility matching technology of eHarmony that is responsible for 438 marriages per day – that’s 4% of all marriages in the U.S. per day! – and applied the same scientific methods to match employees with jobs and companies. Just as eHarmony came about because Dr. Neil Clark Warren knew there had to be a better way to finding love than just luck, Elevated believes that if jobs and employees are matched based on compatibility, people will be much more satisfied and fulfilled in their jobs, and companies will have higher rates of employee retention, motivation, engagement, and productivity.

If you’re like me, the first time I heard of Elevated Careers, I chuckled a bit. I admit, I’m sophomoric and a twelve-year-old at heart! Once I got a chance to see the product, and smart minds behind it, I was chuckling for a different reason. These folks know what they’re doing, and they have a giant captured audience to leverage. Think what you want about dating sites, but they know how to build trust, get massive amounts of data on their members and at that point is just a matter of leveraging that data.

5 Things I really like about Elevated Careers:

1. Elevated Careers gets what most career sites don’t even focus on – Fit Matters!  Their backbone is a freaking dating website; they’re going to be better at matching and fit than almost anyone!

2. eHarmony has been public about making this work. This bodes well for ensuring they’ll get the investment needed to make a great product. The UI is already very tight and intuitive. They made a very easy to use product.

3. Elevated will have a unique talent pool to leverage, that is unlike any other product on the market. You won’t be able to contact dating website members, that would kill that brand, which they have to very protective over, but you will be able to market to those members through Elevated.

4. Their fit technology will give candidates a Compatibility Score. This will help candidates know how well they will potentially fit with a potential company, but also show them where and why they fall short.

5. The job function is more than just an aggregator, as organizations will have to validate themselves before their jobs will show up in search. This way candidates know the jobs they’re applying for are current and up-to-date.

Having trouble hiring people that fit your company and culture?  Give Elevated Careers a demo and see what they’ve got.  The science behind their product is proven and very strong. They just might have found the secret sauce for organizational and job fit!

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

Rerun – The #1 Cause of Bad Hires

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It’s Spring Break in Michigan, so I’m going to step away from the daily grind and throw some Reruns at you! You guys remember Rerun, from What’s Happening? (look it up, kids!) So, enjoy the Reruns, they’re some of my favorites!

Originally ran May 2013 – 

A while back I interviewed a lady that would make a great recruiter. She was high energy, great on the phone, could source and an HR degree.  She applied for the job we had open for a recruiter and 100% positive she would have accepted the position if I would have offered it. I didn’t. 

She wasn’t a ‘fit’.  The job she truly wanted, her ‘dream’ job, was in straight HR, not recruiting.  She was willing to recruit – she really didn’t want to recruit.  We walked away from a terrific candidate.

Poor job fit is the #1 reason most people fail at a job.

Organizations spend so much time and resources ensuring they’re hiring the right skills, but most totally fail when it comes to organization and job fit.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s not easy to determine organizational fit.  Sure you can design an assessment, do peer interviewing, etc. But it always seems like a moving target, and it is.  Job fit also has multiple components:

1. The job you have open.

2. The company culture.

3. The job the candidate actually wants to do.

4. The job the candidate is willing to do and how good of an actor they are to prove to you that is the real job they want.

5. Your inability to see your perception of the candidate and their perception of themselves doesn’t align.

How many of you have ‘Poor Job Fit’ as a reason for termination on your exit interview form?

My guess is almost none.  Most managers and HR pros will list things like: performance, personality conflict, attitude, low skill set, personal reasons, schedule, etc.  We don’t want to use something like “Poor Job Fit” because what that says is “We suck at our jobs!”

The reality is – probably 75% of your terminations are because of poor job fit.  You hired someone with the skills you wanted, but the job you have doesn’t use or need most of those skills.  The job you have doesn’t meet the expectation you sold to the candidate.  The job you have isn’t really the job the person wants.

Most organizations would be farther off to hire by fit, than by skills. True statement.  HR pros hate to hear that – because it discounts a lot of what we do.  Job fit is the key to retention – not skills.  Find someone who wants to be a recruiter – and they probably

HR pros hate to hear that – because it discounts a lot of what we do.  Job fit is the key to retention – not skills.  Find someone who wants to be a recruiter – and they probably be a decent recruiter.  Find someone with great skills who doesn’t want to be a recruiter – and they’ll be a terrible recruiter. 

In almost every occupation where you don’t need professional certifications (doctor, lawyer, CPA, etc.) this holds true.  I know a great Accountant who never went to accounting school – better than anyone I’ve met you graduated from accounting school.  Some of the best teachers – never went to college to become a teacher – but they love teaching.

Do one thing for me the next time you interview a candidate for a job – ask them this one question:

“If you could have any job, in any location, what job would you select?  Why?” 

Their answer doesn’t have to be the job they’re interviewing for to be the ‘right’ answer.  Their answer should be in line with what you’re asking them to do – or you’re going to have a bad fit – and either you will eventually be terminating them, or they will eventually be resigning.

Reruns – Top Candidate Lies!

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It’s Spring Break in Michigan, so I’m going to step away from the daily grind and throw some Reruns at you! You guys remember Rerun, from What’s Happening? (look it up, kids!) So, enjoy the Reruns, they’re some of my favorites!

Originally ran July 2013 – 

Every Monday morning I have a meeting with my recruiting team – it’s a great way to kick off the week – we share what we are working on, we talk about problems we are having on specific searches so the team can share ideas and tips, maybe even a possible candidate they know of, etc.  We also share stories!  Monday mornings are great for sharing recruiter stories – horrible interviews, funny excuses candidates have, negotiating nightmares – you name it, we talk about it!

I was reminded this week how bad of liars candidates can be – we get a lot of candidate lying stories in Monday morning meetings!  So, as a shout out to my Recruiters – and all recruiters – I wanted to put together a list of the Top Candidate Lies.  When I started thinking about all the lies, I found I could break it down by category – so here goes – hit me in the comments if you have a favorite that you get – or think of one I missed:

The Education Lies

– “I have all the credits, I just didn’t graduate.”

– “I did all the classes, I just need to pay the fees to graduate.” (so you spent 4+ years going to school, got done, but that last couple of hundred dollars stopped you from graduating…)

– “I graduated from ‘State U’, but it was a long time ago, I’m not sure why they can’t verify my degree.”

– “I had a 3.0 GPA in my ‘core’ classes, but a 1.9 GPA overall…”

– “Well, it was an Engineering/Business degree.”

The Background Check Lies

– “No, I’m not on drugs.” Then fails drug screen. “Oh, you meant Marijuana as a drug…” 

– “She told me she was 18.”

– “They told me in court that never would be on my file, so I didn’t think I needed to tell you.”

–  “No, I don’t have a felony.” (Oh, that felony! But that was in Indiana…)

The Experience Lies

– “When you said Java, I thought you meant experience making coffee.”

– “I was a part of the ‘leadership’ team that was responsible for that implementation.” (So, basically you knew of a project that happened while you were working there…)

The No-Show Interview Lies

– “My car broke down.” (Either through some fantastic wrinkle in space, or gigantic amount of lying, candidates have more car trouble per capita than anyone else ever in the world who has driven a car)

– “I couldn’t find the location.” (So, your answer to this dilemma was to turn around and go home and not call and let us know you got lost?)

– “My son/daughter got sick, so I can’t make it.” (Again – crazy coincidences that happen with candidates and sick kids…)

The Termination Lies

– “It was a mutual decision that I left.” (“So, you’ll ‘mutually’ decided that you would no longer have a job?”, is the question I always ask after this statement! Candidates – this statement sounds as stupid as it reads.)

– “I (or any family member) was in a bad accident and in the hospital, so they fired me for not showing up to work.” (No they didn’t – there are some bad companies out there, but no company does this.)

– “I play on a softball team and after games we go out and have a couple drinks. The next morning my boss smelled alcohol and fired me for drinking on the job.” (This was a true lie I got from an employee – it started out as me just giving him a written warning – until I went lunch, not joking – 10 minutes later at the Chili’s down the street from the office, and there he was belly up to the bar drinking a beer…upon cleaning out his desk we found a half a fifth of vodka.)

Here’s my take on candidate lies – candidates continue to lie, because Talent/HR Pros don’t call them out on it.  We (HR) also perpetuate this problem by hiring the folks who give you the crappy lie, but don’t hire the folks who come clean and tell you the truth.

Check out my follow up to this post: Top Recruiter Lies!

T3 – @RecruiteeHR

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This week on T3 I take a look at the recruiting platform, Recruitee.  Recruitee is an all in one ATS, recruitment automation, career site builder, and employment branding platform for the SMB market, with a very intuitive interface that follows about 99% of every recruitment pipeline out there.

Recruitee allows you to build your own career site, easily, and it doesn’t look like something your twelve-year-old put together from a template at a free website builder company.  Everyone tells you doing this is easy, then you pull your hair out and call Todd from IT to bail you out. This really is easy to do and you won’t need Todd.

Recruitee also allows you to build your applicant process by just dragging and dropping the steps in your process to match the needs of your organization. Plus, you’ll move candidates through the process with the same drag and drop ease. It’s one of the only platforms for the SMB market that I’ve seen that allows you to manage so much, all in one place. There are a ton of ATS options for the SMB market, but very few that allow you to build and manage your employment brand by yourself!

5 Things I really liked about Recruitee:

  1. Sourcing Plug-in Extension makes it super easy to import candidates into the system while you’re sourcing, plus the extension will also give you the email address (if it can be found) for those candidates you are sourcing.
  2. Job Promotion to both free and premium sites through the system. Easy job push with one click. Plus, you have the option to push it to paid sites for a discounted fee from what you could probably get on your own, for most SMBs.
  3. Career Site Editor. Most SMBs have to get in line behind everyone else to ever make a change on their career site. Recruitee puts this power directly in your hands, and you can now make changes on a daily, hourly basis if you wanted. For fast moving SMBs this is huge!
  4. CRM functionality that allows you to build talent pools and keep connected with them. Great functionality for a product that caters to this size market.
  5. It’s really about as idiot-proof of a recruiting platform as you’ll find on the market for SMB. This is important because you’re usually talking about a 1 or 2 person shop in small companies and these people have to wear all the hats! That means they need a platform that can do a lot, but doesn’t break easily.

Very impressive small market recruiting platform. I continue to be amazed at what the SMB market has access to in talent acquisition technology. Recruitee gives you so much for a rather small price. Well worth a demo if you’re in that space and looking to add or expand your recruiting technology.

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

The Key to Handling High Maintenance Employees Like a Pro

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Do you know the one piece of HR technology that hasn’t been created, yet? The Diva Detector!*

Wouldn’t that be nice? “Hey, Mr. or Ms. Candidate, please look into the DD 2.0 and don’t blink….Yeah, looks like you’re a straight-up diva, and sorry, but we’re fully loaded up on those at the moment. Please feel free to test again in 30 days. If your diva levels come down to just a know-it-all, you’ll be reconsidered!”

We tend to hire high maintenance employees because they’re very good at hiding their diva-ness during the interview process. Sometimes they even hide it through the probationary period of their employment. Those are the really hard-to-handle ones because they know they’re divas and hide it long enough to make your life difficult.

The question is, what do you do once you have a high maintenance employee?

I’ve had to deal with this in every single HR stop of my entire career, usually with a line out the door waiting to one-up each other on who has the biggest diva flag.

The thing about high maintenance employees is they usually want more attention than a normal employee. It’s this need for attention that drives you nuts, their manager nuts and all the other employees around them.  The key is getting them to focus on what the organization needs from them, not what they need from the organization. So, how do you do that?

Well, usually, high maintenance employees become a problem because their direct supervisor doesn’t stop this issue immediately when it comes to light. But, this is common, especially with new hiring managers, so it’s critical to work with them and help them become better managers.

High maintenance employees are at their best when they can divide you and the hiring manager. You can’t allow this to happen. You have to make a plan with the hiring manager and stick to it. The best way to box in a high maintenance employee is to never allow them to play two parties against each other. “Well,” they might say, “my boss said I could lead, then Jenny just took over, and I’m the one…”

You see where this is going!

As soon as this starts, you just need to say one thing, ” I’m going to call in your boss and Jenny so we can all talk.” To which they’ll probably say: “You don’t need to do that. You’re in HR! I thought this was confidential!”  (I love that one, by the way. I’m not a lawyer, I’m an HR leader, there’s a big difference.)

My reply to this, delivered in very calm, even-keeled manner is, “I can see this is very important to you, so I don’t want anything to get misinterpreted, it’s best that we get all of us together and get on the same page.”

High-maintenance employees hate to be on the same page because they get their power from the lack of communication within organizations. So the best way to limit their impact is to get everyone in the same room and nip the issue in the bud before it gets way out of hand.

(*Remember how I mentioned how great a Diva Detector would be? This isn’t exactly that…but Jellyvision’s unique recruiting process is a pretty close second. Check out how they weed out divas and slackers right here. It’s good stuff.)

The Big Reference Check Scam!

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I remember when I started my first job in Talent Acquisition and HR, I totally believed checking references was going to lead me to better, higher quality hires. My HR university program practically drilled into me the belief that “past performance predicts future performance.”

For all I knew those words were delivered on tablets from Moses himself!

After all, what better way is there to predict a candidate’s future success than to speak with individuals who knew this person the best?

And it’s not just anybody: It’s former managers or colleagues who have previously worked with this person – directly or indirectly – and have a deep understanding of how they have performed, and now telling me how they will perform in the future.

Grand design at its finest.

About 13 seconds into my HR career I started questioning this wisdom. Call me an HR atheist if you must, but something wasn’t adding up to me.

It was probably around the hundredth reference check when I started wondering either I was the best recruiter of all time and only find rock stars (which was mostly true) or this reference check thing is one giant scam!

Everyone knows the set up: The candidate wants the job, so they want to make sure they provide good references. The candidate provides three references that will tell HR the candidate walks on water. HR accepts them and actually goes through the process of calling these three perfect references.

When I find out that an organization still does reference checks, I love to ask this one question: When was the last time you didn’t hire someone based on their reference check?

Most organizations can’t come up with one example of this happening. We hire based on references 100% of the time.

Does that sound like a good system? Now, I’m asking you, when was the last time your organization didn’t hire a candidate based on their references?

If you can’t find an answer, or the answer is ‘never’, you need to stop checking references because it’s a big fat waste of time and resources! There’s no “HR law” that says you have to check references. Just stop it. It won’t change any of your hiring decisions.

New ways of checking references that checkout

So, how should you do reference checks? Here are three ideas:

1. Source your own references

Stop accepting references candidates give you. Instead, during the interview ask for names of their direct supervisors at every position they’ve had. Then call into those companies and talk to those people. Even with HR telling everyone “we don’t give out references,” I’ve found you can engage in some meaningful conversations off the record.

2. Automate the process

New reference checking technology asks questions in a way that doesn’t lead the reference to believe they are giving the person a ‘bad’ reference, but just honestly telling what the person’s work preferences are. The information gathered will then tell you if the candidate is a good fit for your organization or a bad fit — but the reference has no idea.

3. Use fact checking software

Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. have made it so candidates who lie can get caught. There is technology being developed that allows organizations to fact-check a person’s background and verify if they are actually who they tell you they are. Estimates show that 53% of people lie on their resume. Technology makes it easy to find out who is.

Great Talent Acquisition and HR pros need to start questioning a process that is designed to push through 99.9% of hires. Catching less than .1% of hires isn’t better quality. It’s just flat out lazy.

Start thinking about what you can do to source better quality hires and your organization might just think you can walk on water.

Your turn: What are your tips for checking references?

T3 – Employment Branding Activation tool @Universum_eb

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A couple times a year I get to demo a product that totally blows me away.  This week on T3 that product is Universum! Okay, let’s first get out of the way they Universum uses an underscore in the Twitter name which is a kiss of death in marketing! I have to let this go, because what they have is so industry changing, this might be the only mistake they’ve made along the way!

Universum is an employer branding digital research company. What the hell is that? Basically, they measure both sides of employment branding. What candidates want and expect from employers, and what you and your competition is actually doing. All of this information runs on a platform they call “Iris”.  It was originally built in conjunction with 12 of the largest employer brands in the world, and they leverage data from 3,000 universities worldwide, over 2000 individual employer brands and 55 countries.

This is a product that is used by large companies who have an employment branding function within HR or a dedicated social media role in HR or as part of a larger social team. After going through the demo, I can’t imagine any large organization not utilizing this tool. In fact, I would question the capabilities of the leadership and CMO that didn’t use this tool. The data insight and direction Iris gives you is simply a competitive advantage over those not using it!

5 Things I really like about Universum:

1. Universum has figured out the science behind social. Right now most organizations still hire under-experienced marketing pros, or HR grads who think they know social, to run their employment branding and have them basically test crap out and see what sticks. Iris will show you exactly what works and what doesn’t work in your branding.

2. Universum will show you what your competition is doing that is working really well. Competitive data is the holy grail of what HR can provide strategically to an organization. This one product will elevate your practice, strategically, like no other technology I’ve seen in HR or Talent.

3. Iris can give you exact insight to what content and language you should be using to attract specific talent to your organization.  Most employment branding is one message, way too broad. Iris lets you build specific branding tailored to the exact talent your organization is struggling to find.

4. Iris helps you create great content by showing you what is working, with what audiences, and in which countries. Truly a global company, that will give you global views about how branding needs to change based on which locations you’re trying to get talent. They have over 1.3 million pieces of content curated in their platform and growing. No inspiration needed.

5. Universum is an Employer Branding Spy Tool! Probably the coolest feature of Universum is its ability to show you exactly what and how your competition is leveraging their employment brand, and exactly how you can beat them for the same talent!

Universum is an employment branding activation technology.  Most of us either have a nonexistent employment brand or a brand that is basically on life support. Universum does more that just give you knowledge, they show you step-by-step how to activate and win your industry with your employment brand.

As I mentioned at the beginning this is a product for large companies. Probably Fortune 2000 types, or organizations that have dedicated employment branding folks on staff in their HR shop. The cost is fairly reasonable. When they told me the price point, I was surprised, I would have paid way more for what I was getting.

Check them out, I guarantee a demo Universum/Iris won’t disappoint!

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

The First Rule of Recruiting

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Sometimes we go so far into the weeds in recruiting we forget what is really important.

We have to have a brand!

We have to have an ATS! Or a new ATS!

We have to have a CRM! What the hell is a CRM!

Our job descriptions need to be better!

Our career site sucks! Don’t they all!?

We need to relaunch our employee referral program!

There are literally a million things you could focus on in recruiting and you still would have a list of crap you never even got to.

You know recruiting isn’t difficult. It’s not like we’re trying to launch the space shuttle. Recruiting is finding people for your organization. People are everywhere. We just need to talk them into coming to work for our organizations.

It’s the first rule of recruiting – Just let people know you’re hiring.

We make it so difficult when all we have to truly do is let people know we actually want to hire them. Do you have any idea how many people would really want to work for your organization, but they never know you are hiring or were hiring?

Recruiting is really only that. Just letting enough people know that you want them to work for you until you’ve reached the right people. It’s okay that you will reach some you don’t want. That’s part of the game.

To reach the people who you want, and who want you, you have to let a lot of people know you’re hiring.

Letting people know you’re hiring goes beyond your career site. It goes beyond job boards. It goes beyond employee referral programs. It’s a philosophy throughout your organization. It’s about an understanding that you want everyone to know that you’re hiring.

Most organizations don’t do this. It’s a combination of issues, but mostly it’s conceited belief that letting people know you’re hiring seems desperate. That we are too good of an organization to let everyone know we are hiring, because we don’t want everyone, we only want a few.

This is why most talent acquisition departments fail. Simple conceit.

Great recruiting isn’t conceited, great recruiting is about being humble enough to let people know you want them.