How to solve one of the America’s Toughest Recruiting Challenges

Hey, Tech Recruiters your job is really hard isn’t it?  Do you want to know a recruiting job that is about a hundred times harder than yours? Try recruiting Truck Drivers!

The Truck Driving recruiting industry is insane.  It’s reported that right now there are 36,000 Truck Driver open position in the U.S.!  Go to any major corporation that has a shipping component that is handled by semi-trucks and they have openings, many will have openings in the hundreds!  The largest trucking firms in the country have recruiting teams that dwarf the size any of the major Tech companies in Silicon Valley.

So, how do you solve such a major recruiting nightmare?

By doing this:

Okay, I hear you! “Wait, there still has to be a person in the seat!” You don’t solve the ‘driver’ problem at all!

The main problem with the Truck Driving profession is too fold:

1. They can’t attract younger workers into the profession.

2. They have high turnover.

Being able to use and operate the latest technology in any industry will attract a younger workforce.  Can you imagine the people lining up to be able to operate one of those trucks above?!  I can only imagine how this tech will revolutionize the profession of truck driving, and the skill sets needed.

Truck Drivers turnover because they don’t see a future in driving truck.  It’s seen as a low skill occupation, and a lonely one at that. Hours, weeks, months, years on the road.  Throw in the nasty-ass truck stops and you can see why our best and brightest are jumping at the thousands of open jobs.

Self driving technology opens up a whole new capacity level for the people sitting in those vehicles. I can imagine how organizations could begin training and teaching these operators an entire additional skill set to use while in vehicle, and even upon getting to their destination.  It would easily be foreseeable where your self driving vehicle operators could also become your field sales reps, quality control, etc.

If the operator, theoretically, only has to pay attention to vehicle operations 15-20% of the time, this gives them so much time to concentrate on other ways to add value to the company and to themselves.

From a recruiting perspective, I can sell that.  It’s hard to sell dirty bathroom and lot lizards to a kid who believes he has a future.

T3 – Greenhouse.io @Greenhouse

This week on T3 I review recruiting and applicant tracking software Greenhouse. Greenhouse is one of the newer players in the ATS space having only been in the market about three years, but they’re making a ton of noise.  Primarily designed to be used in the mid-sized and under market, 1000 employees and under is their prime user base.  Heavily used in the startup and tech space (Pinterest, Uber, Twilio, Zenefits, etc.).

Greenhouse take a best in breed approach, partnering with some of the best talent acquisition tech vendors to deliver the best to their users. Companies like Entelo, HireVue, RolePoint, RecruiterFi, etc., all integrate seamlessly with Greenhouse.  I actually prefer this approach (for SMB HR & TA shops), because I like the best technology available, versus an enterprise ATS level system which is usually solid, but not fantastic.

As you can expect Greenhouse isn’t your Mom and Dad’s ATS.  Older designed ATS systems are designed around one core process and most fail because you don’t like that one process. Greenhouse is designed around the core principles of talent acquisition and all you need to do within that function, and you do it the way you want.  Greenhouse isn’t a talent acquisition software, it’s an organizational software, because everyone in your company as access, specific to their role.

5 Things I really like about Greenhouse:

1. The Interview Plan. One of the coolest things in Greenhouse is how they handle interviews. It’s a structured process that drives consistency, delivers interview kits to each interviewee, and describes their role and what they need to get out of the interview. This eliminates an interviewee interviewing with 5 different people and having them all ask virtually the same questions.

2. The Sourcing Plan.  Again, Greenhouse structures the sourcing plan in a way that everyone knows their role and what they are responsible for. They also have full integration with LinkedIn, if you have a LI recruiter license, to allow you to do all of that sourcing from one system.

3. Candidate Scorecard.  Greenhouse has designed a candidate scorecard that easily lets you compare candidates by more than just a rollup number, but by specific skills, cultural fit, qualifications and other details. This lets the organization make a more informed decision on who and why you should select one candidate over another.

4. Agency Portal. We all use staffing agencies. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to manage all that you use within your ATS?  Greenhouse does this, and actually will show you agency performance metrics to boot!

5. Data analytics are very robust. I really liked their pipeline stats feature which you can set up by individual or team. If a candidate is stuck at one spot in process, the system alert you that you need to go kick a hiring manager in the butt and tell them to get going on a certain candidate, etc.

It’s easy to see why Greenhouse has the buzz in the industry right now from an ATS perspective. If I was running a corporate talent acquisition shop right now, they would get high consideration from me as the tool we would be using.  An ATS is an ATS, but I love how Greenhouse has taken the traditional model of an ATS and made what an ATS designed in 2015 should be.  Easy to use, intuitive, great tech and works the way we need to work in today’s tight labor market.

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

T3 – Breezy.HR

This week on T3 I take a look at the recruiting software Breezy.  Breezy is part of a new genre of HR and Talent technology. In the past we might have called them technology ‘light’, because they are less expensive and simple to get started with, so they must have less. In today’s world that isn’t really the case.

For all intents and purposes, Breezy is to recruitment, as BambooHR is to HR.  They are a perfect fit to be your first ATS, even though they aren’t what you think of when you think about your old traditional ATS.  Breezy is mobile native, which is just a fancy way to say it was designed to be mostly used by mobile devices, although it works on desktop perfectly as well.

It was designed to be used by smaller teams who are moving fast. Startups, smaller companies wanting to add recruitment technology for the first time, etc.  It’s user interface (UI), the part you and I see and use, feels very similar to using social technology you use every day like Facebook and LinkedIn.  It’s also designed to be used by your entire team, not just recruiting and HR.

Breezy is designed to have almost zero implementation time.  In literally minutes you can be adding jobs and candidates into the system, and scheduling interviews. It’s an ATS for the next generation, who is just getting started.

5 Things I really like about Breezy

1. Breezy has an iPhone app that allows you to text candidates and have a conversation with them, via text, and all of that gets automatically stored in their profile on the system. You can also email directly from the system to candidates and that communication is also stored in the candidate record.

2. Easy drag and drop interface, allows you to put candidates on jobs by just dragging their ‘card’ onto the job.  This same design allows you build out your own hiring process very easily, so you can simply customize the process the way you want it to run.

3. Chrome extension which easily allows you to upload resumes and profiles into the system with one click.

4. The system auto links social profiles of candidates you upload from a resume, if they have them, which almost everyone has something these days.

5. Interview feedback loop with hiring managers, allows you to request and obtain interview feedback easily and seamlessly with hiring managers.

Great technology use to be something only large organizations could have, because it was so expensive. Breezy’s pricing model is extremely affordable, and it’s based on the number of positions you post monthly. Which is nice because it also allows you to flex the plan from month to month, as you hiring needs go up and down.

If you’re in the market for your first ATS, or you’re using a dinosaur you bought long ago and need an upgrade, but you’re still a small to medium sized company definitely check out Breezy.

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

Sometimes You Just Love Someone At First Sight

We aren’t supposed to be those people in HR.  We aren’t supposed to fall in love with a candidate the moment we see them. We tell ourselves we’re better than the rest, than our hiring managers.

The problem is, we do. We do fall in love. In fact, it happens all the time.

For the most part when you go to hire and you start interviewing, you either fall in love with a candidate or you don’t. There really isn’t any in between.  If you don’t fall in love, you never really feel comfortable making an offer, and if you do, you feel it’s probably going to eventually fail.

I’m not saying that those you fall in love with succeed all the time, because they don’t.  Without the love feeling, though, you never feel confident in the hire.

Here’s where I really start to think we might just be over-thinking this entire hiring thing.

If I fall in love with a candidate in the first 2 minutes, why do I need to go on with the interview process?  Do you ever fall out of love with a candidate, you fell in love with at first sight? I haven’t.  If I loved them in two minutes, I loved them after 2 hours of interviewing.  Sometimes you just know.

This doesn’t work for every position. Falling in love works best when you’re really hiring for organizational fit.  When you have a position that you could teach to almost anyone willing to learn, good work ethic, etc. If the primary goal to achieving a great hire is organizational fit, falling in love at first site usually works pretty good on the selection scale.

None of us in Talent Acquisition and HR ever want this to get out. It goes against our secret handshake to make hiring really difficult in our organizations. But, when you really go back and analyze your best hires, almost all of them will have the ‘love’ factor!

I believe in two things when it comes to hiring:

1. Do I really love this person as a hire?  If I can’t immediately answer that question, I need to keep looking.

2. Does this person scare the shit out of me?  Meaning, is this person so talented that eventually they’ll take my job! I hope so. I want to be scared, it makes me work harder. I want people who are better than me. Most people do the opposite. If the candidate is better than you, they pass, because they lack the confidence on how to handle that situation.

If I can answer ‘Yes’ to both of the above questions, I’m going to make some really strong hires.

 

What ATS Should You Select For Your Company?

If you read Monday’s post on Crappy Employment Brands, I told you I would answer the most asked question in HR and Talent Acquisition of all time.  It’s goes with the title to this post, and almost anytime I speak I get at least one person who will ask me this question during the Q&A:

What ATS (Applicant Tracking System) do you use?

The question is basically irrelevant unless the person asking me works in the exact same industry and business that I work in (IT and Technical contract staffing). Which they usually don’t. Usually, it’s a corporate HR or Talent Pro.  My ATS software is designed for something completely different for what they want.

But, more importantly, the question is asked because so many people believe that the ATS is the secret sauce to successful recruiting in corporate talent acquisition.  It’s not.  The secret sauce to great hiring is only expedited by your recruitment technology.  If you suck at hiring, the best ATS on the market will only make you suck at hiring much faster!

The best ATS systems will give you great functionality that includes CRM, recruitment marketing, recruitment automation, talent communities, great sourcing tools, assessment/screening technology and interview technology baked into the product,  onboarding, etc.  The worse ATS systems give you a basic product that will allow you to accept applicants online and process them through some sort of hiring process.

There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of ATS systems on the market.  Most people will demo three or less. There is an ATS that is right for you, but you have to be willing to look at a lot of them.

So, what ATS should you select for you company? I’ll give you some tips:

1. Select an ATS you can afford. That sounds obvious, but most HR and Talent pros over-buy on their ATS, for the amount of hiring they do. If you only hire a hundred people a year, you don’t need an ATS that costs $100K per year to own/rent.  You can great ATS software for a few thousand dollars per year.

2. Select an ATS that has the functionality your business needs.  Again, obvious, but missed by most new buyers. If you don’t need talent communities, paying for talent communities is a waste. If you organization won’t use video interviewing, why are you buying it baked into your ATS.  If you definitely need a pre-employment assessments baked in, you can find a system that will meet your needs. Don’t settle.

3. Select an ATS that most closely fits your hiring process. This sounds stupid, but the majority of ATS failures have nothing to do with the ATS and everything to do with you not willing to change your process. You take the ATS and force them to do all sorts of changes to fit your broken process, and in turn break their proven best practice process. In the end, you fail and blame the ATS. Save yourself the headache and find an ATS that does the flow exactly how you want it. Some are very configurable and will allow you to change and keep changing your process. Some aren’t configurable at all.

4. Select an ATS that you feel you could start using immediately after the demo. ATS systems should be very easy to use. If you feel overwhelmed by the demo, it’s not the right system for you.

5. Select an ATS you can grow into. If you aren’t going to grow, you don’t need to worry about this, so don’t get talked into it.  Most ATS systems are designed for a certain level of hiring. The best vendors will be honest and tell you, the worst will tell you what you want to hear. Find out who their clients are that are your same size and demand to talk to them. If they don’t give you that access, run.  The good vendors will bend over backwards to get you to talk to their current clients.

If you don’t have an ATS, you should be fired. There are literally four or five major players in ATS technology that will give you a one user system for FREE (and only a few hundred dollars to add other users)! Of course, you get what you pay for, but you need to start somewhere! No company that is hiring should not have an ATS. The prices range from Free to millions of dollars.

What ATS systems do I like?  There are bunch: Workable, Jobvite, Bullhorn, Greenhouse, Taleo, Newton, The Resumator, Silkroad, iCims, SuccessFactors and Gr8People, in no specific order.

Here’s the funny thing. Some of you use one of these from above and hate them! That’s ATS technology. Most people think everyone elses ATS is better than what they’re using. The reality is, most do about the same thing – post jobs, accept resumes, some stuff in between, BAM you’re hired.

Job Title Killers

You know what position I would love to apply for!?  Jr. Human Resource Manager, said no one ever!

I hate spending 3 seconds on job titles, because job titles just scream, “Personnel Department”, but I have to just take a few minutes to help out some of my HR brothers and sisters.  Recently, I came across a classic job title mistake when someone had posted an opening and then broadcasted it out to the world for a, wait for it, “Jr. Industrial Engineer”.  I almost cried.

Really!  No, Really!  “Jr.”  You actually took time, typed out the actual title, and then thought to yourself, “Oh yeah! There’s an Industrial Engineer out there just waiting to become a ‘Jr. Industrial Engineer’!”  Don’t tell me you didn’t, because that’s exactly what it says.  “But Tim, you don’t understand we’ve always called our less experienced Industrial Engineers, Junior, so we can differentiate them from our ‘Industrial Engineers’ and our ‘Sr. Industrial Engineers’.  What do you want us to to do, call them: Industrial Engineer I, Industrial Engineer II and Industrial Engineer III?”

No, I don’t want you to do that either.

Here’s what I want you to do.  I want you to title this position as “Lesser Paid Industrial Engineer”. You’ll get the same quality of responses!

You know how to solve this, (but why you won’t) just have one pay band for “Industrial Engineer”, from $38K to $100K.  Pay the individuals within that band appropriately for their years of experience and education.

This is why you won’t do it. Your ‘Sr.’ Compensation Manager knows you aren’t capable of handling this level of responsibility and within 24 months your entire Industrial Engineering staff would all be making $100K – Jr’s, Middles and Sr’s!

Please don’t make me explain how idiotic it looks when you list out your little number system on your post as well (Accountant I, Accountant II, etc.). Because you know there just might be an Accountant out there going, “Some day I just might be an Accountant II!”

If SHRM actually did anything, I wish they would just go around to HR Pros who do this crap and visit their work place and personally cut up their PHR or SPHR certificates in half, in front of them, like a maxed out credit card that gets flagged in the check out line.  That would be awesome!

All this does is make it look like you took a time machine in from a 1970 Personnel Department.

But, seriously, if you know of any Sr. Associate HR Manager III positions please let me know.

T3 – GR8People

This week on T3 I take a look at the recruiting platform Gr8People.  Gr8People bills themselves as an all-in-one recruiting software solution, with it’s goal to eliminate the need for ‘third party’ software solutions.  What they are trying to do is be the Oracle or SAP of recruiting software. A suite, where you don’t need to bring in any other pieces into your recruitment process.

The folks who are behind Gr8People are the same folks who developed and launched VirtualEdge back in the day. VirtualEdge was purchased by ADP, and ADP recently decided to sunset that product. When VirtualEdge was launched is the cutting edge.  Gr8People is attempting to be as cutting edge in today’s terms.

The challenge most talent acquisition shops face today with technology is they can’t get everything they need in one piece of software: CRM, Sourcing, ATS, Branding, Search, hiring manager collaboration/approval/process, recruitment marketing, referrals, etc. Most shops will have 4-8 different solutions and pieces of tech to get all this done. Gr8People is trying to give you a one-stop shop for your entire talent acquisition process.

5 things I really like about Gr8People:

1. I say this frequently, but they are led by a group of folks who have been in the recruiting business combined well over a 100 years! That makes a huge difference.  They are familiar with both the SMB market and enterprise.  They just flat out get talent acquisition from the corporate side of the fence!

2. It’s module based so you don’t have to scrap your current ATS to begin using Gr8People, but most will once they start using the pieces. You can start with Sourcing and Branding, and it will integrate with your current ATS. What you’ll find is most will try this, but eventually dump their old ATS. The entire reason is because you want a suite of products that are designed to work together for your shop.

3. Extremely configurable to how you want your process to run.  They’ll set up in a best practice model, but you can easily move things around to how your shop runs very easily.

4. One click apply from Facebook and LinkedIn! This is awesome and powerful, more companies should be doing this.  If you really want passive candidates, don’t make them go through your 23 step apply process!

5. Embedded analytics that run throughout all the modules so you get complete metrics from marketing to source to apply to interview to hire.

There’s so much more: candidate self interview scheduling, built in talent communities, internal communication tools, real recruitment marketing. Like I said, these guys get recruiting automation and technology at a different level than most companies!

I will say, it’s not completely all-in-one. You still have some integration with outside technology that they partner with, although it’s invisible to you as they build and bill the integration on their end, for posting and searching across multiple job boards/sources.  Also, they still have some pieces I would like to see added, like interview automation, selection assessments, onboarding, etc. (some of this is done with the organization’s system of record)

If you’re running a Talent Acquisition shop, you definitely need to demo Gr8People and check them out. At the very least they’ll give you some great insight to current best practices, and help you think about your own shop.  At the best, they’ll give you a great option for a pretty strong recruiting platform!

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

Surprise! You’re an HR Manager! Now what?

It’s graduation season and soon many new HR brothers and sisters will be entering into their first real HR gigs. Many will be titled, “HR Manager”, even without one day of experience.  That’s because in many organizations, HR Manager is the only HR position they have, and they’ll gladly take a young, fresh new HR grad.

The tendency for new managers, especially HR Managers thrust into a generalist role, is to get buried with tasks.  We all know the drill, you get started at the new company, and by day 3 you already have so many projects, improvements, process changes, etc. that need to be made you determine you probably have about 18 months worth of work.

Whether you’re a new manager, or seasoned HR Pro, we tend to forget the above concepts from time-to-time and get bogged down in the everyday details within HR Departments.  So, for the new HR Managers (and maybe some seasoned vets) I wanted to give you 3 tasks that should be accomplished everyday as a HR Manager who wants to be strategic and add value to your organization:

1. Keep Track of the Score,

2. Find Better Talent,

3. Be a Relationship Bridge.

Keeping track of the score, means you must create and track metrics, for your people practices, that have bottom-line impact to your organization. Communicate these constantly and educate your organization on how they can impact these results.

Finding better talent for your organization is really the only reason the HR Department exists.  If you did only this all day, every day, your company would be better for it.  No, having a better dress code policy isn’t going to make you world class. In the end, talent wins.

The single largest factor to inefficiency isn’t bad processes, it’s bad, or non-existent, relationships. It is your job to develop your leaders, and part of that is helping them understand the value of each part of the organization and getting them to dance with each other.  Being a bridge, and bringing leaders together, with understanding will have the greatest impact on efficiency.

Leaders understanding, and actually knowing, each others pain will solve most organizational problems. Why? Because you hire great talent, and great talent with good relationships will move mountains and get you to world class.

Never underestimate the power of relationships (good and bad).

Show me a leader who claims they can “work around” someone (meaning they don’t get along with that person), and I’ll show you a below average leader who needs to leave your organization.  New, and seasoned, HR Managers underestimate the leverage they have at helping organizational efficiency through better relationships.

Good Luck new HR Managers!

Recruitment Non-Poaching Agreements and Bad HR

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

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

Sounds good, right?

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

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

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

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

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

HR Manager Position that Pays $364,000! Want it?

I ran into an age old issue last week, which for some reason hadn’t come up for a very long time, but there he was staring me right in the face, and I still don’t get it!  Here’s the issue, should you post the salary (or your desired salary range based on experience, yadda, yadda…) for the position you are hiring, or not?

My guess is you clicked on this post because you wanted to find out which kind of HR Manager position pays $374K! Well, none, but you clicked, I win! But, while you’re here let’s take a look at the issue at play because it’s a polarizing issue amongst HR Pros.

I say, post the salary right out in front for God and everyone to see.  It will create most interest, which gives you a larger pool of candidates, which gives you better odds at filling your position with the type of talent that fits your organization.  It allows you to eliminate many candidates who won’t accept your job, because you’re too cheap. Sure you’ll get some people who see $98K, and they are making $45K, but they want to make $98K, so they send their resume, hoping.  But we’re smarter than that, plus, maybe Mr. $45K would be a great fit for me for another position, or in 3 more years when I have the same position open.

Posting the salary on a job post creates 137% more candidate traffic, than those posts which don’t list salary, or at least it feels that way to me when I do it that way!  I’m sure my friends at CareerBuilder can probably come up with some more precise figures on this exactly, but I’ll bet my made up math isn’t too far from correct.  It’s common sense. You walk by a store and see “help wanted”, and no one goes in. You walk by the store and you see “Help Wanted $12/hr”, and they have a line out the door asking for applications.

There are only 3 reasons you wouldn’t list the target salary for the position you are hiring for:

1. You know you’re paying below market, and you don’t want to the competition to know, because they’ll cherry pick your best people

2. You can’t find the talent you want, so you’ve increased the salary target, but you aren’t going to increase the salary of the poor suckers already working for you at the lower amount.

3. You don’t know what you’re doing!

Look, I get it, I’ve been there.  You don’t want to list salary because your current employees don’t understand that while the position title is the same, you are “really” looking for someone with more experience.  Or, we just don’t have the budget to raise up everyone already working for us, but we really need some additional talent. Or, we’ve always did it this way, and we want people who are “interested in us” and not money.

Well, let me break it to you gently, you’re an idiot.  People are interested in you because the value equation of what you are offering fits into their current lifestyle!  Otherwise, you could just move forward as a volunteer organization now couldn’t you?!

Do yourself a favor and don’t make recruiting harder than it has to be.  Just tell people what you have to offer. “We’re a great place to work, we have these benefits, they’ll cost you about this much, and we are willing to pay “$X” for this position”, if this is you, we want to speak to you. If it’s not, that’s great to, but check back because we might have something for you in the future.

Also, let me know if you find an HR Manager job that pays $374K. I know the perfect candidate!