Category Archives: Hiring

T3 – NAS Recruitment Innovation #HRTech

Posted on by
Reply

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.

I’ve known NAS Recruitment Innovation is a company I’ve known and worked with for over ten years.  It’s definitely a company I wanted to highlight on T3.  I’ve written this before but in my mind there are two kinds of technology companies: 1. Born out of a technology solution; 2. Born out of a problem and adapted to the technology of the day.  NAS, in my estimation, is in the later types of companies.

NAS was started as advertising, marketing, creative type company 60 years ago, specifically to help ‘personnel’ executives with something that hadn’t even been termed yet, but we know it today as “employment branding.”  Today, they rival the best recruitment marketing firms out there from both a creative perspective and a technology perspective.

NAS’s main technology solution is called ACTIVATE and it’s a candidate attraction platform. With a powerful SEO engine at its core, ACTIVATE pushes branded job positions from your ATS to your career site. But ACTIVATE is more than SEO. ACTIVATE integrates decades of strategic recruitment expertise and industry-leading analysis to optimize your candidate sourcing platform and improve the overall effectiveness of your recruitment marketing program. In simple terms, ACTIVATE increases your candidate pull. NAS turns your career site into a candidate attraction site.

5 Things I really like about NAS – ACTIVATE

1. NAS’s people get corporate recruitment at a much higher level than most technology recruiting companies.  It’s not just about the technology, you have to understand recruitment and candidates.  You need people on your side in Talent Acquisition and HR that are creative and NAS does this as good as anyone!

2. The ACTIVATE platform increases your candidate experience through better design and without you having to do any heavy lifting.  NAS gets how and why candidate search for jobs and uses this knowledge to deliver a great search and apply experience for candidates.

3. You don’t care about mobile, but your candidates do and the ACTIVATE platform will optimize this for you.  A great example is recruiting Nurses. Nurses aren’t at a desktop all day, they’re constantly on the move. But they engage their mobile devices all day long. If you aren’t mobile optimized and delivering a great mobile experience, you’re missing out in a big way!

4. ACTIVATE delivers you real-time metrics from your career site.  Big or small, this is a must have in today’s highly competitive talent market.  If you don’t know what’s working, or what’s not working, you’re just flying blind. No talent acquisition leader wants to be in this position.

5. CRM functionality with custom branded email campaigns.  Recruiting and CRM isn’t new, but it’s still something way too many shops are utilizing. If you do utilize a CRM you want to make sure it’s connected with the rest of your data, and the ACTIVATE platform does this with your ATS.

I’ve used NAS so in my mind they cater a little better to the talent acquisition pro who might not as technologically savvy as they would want to be.  They definitely don’t try and shove tech down your throat, but will ease you into it and show you how you can make great strides with it in your department.

NAS recruiting innovation has the technology and know how to help your talent acquisition team take your entire organization to the next level. Check them out, I’ve personally used them in the past and they made my life easy. I don’t know if I can give a company higher praise than that!

Sometimes You Just Need to ‘Burn’ a Hire

Posted on by
8

I love baseball. There is a concept in baseball where a pitcher will ‘burn’ a pitch, here and there.  Basically, it means that the pitcher isn’t actually trying to throw a strike, they are using this pitch to set up another pitch.  For intensive purposes, the pitcher is wasting that pitch for the greater good.

Have you ever done that in HR and hiring?  Have you ever burned a hire?

I have.

In large organizations you sometimes have to burn hires to prove points and/or get hiring managers on your side.  I remember a time when we first started using a very complex pre-employment assessment.  The hiring managers hated it.  They didn’t believe in the science.  They didn’t believe what the assessment was telling us.

That’s the funny thing about really good assessments.  They only work if you, and your organization, are bought in to the belief that using this assessment, in the long run, is going to give us better hires overall.

In this instance I’ve allowed hiring managers to hire individuals who the hiring managers love, but the assessment told us was going to fail, knowing I was probably right.  I was willing to burn a hire, to prove a point about the greater good of the tools we were using. I wouldn’t continue doing this, but sometimes you have to be willing to prove out your beliefs.  This sets up the assessment for future success, and ultimately better hires.

I’m also willing to burn hires on executive referrals.  Too many times in my career I’ve been contacted by high level executives and board members of the companies that have ‘requested’ I get a job for their kids, or their sister’s kid, or some other family member.  For the most part, on average, these hires are horrible.  But, I’ve learned that fighting this is never a good career move, so you burn a hire.

When I talk to HR people about doing this, many a very much against burning hires, or at the very least, willing to admit they burn hires!  Rarely, will you find a HR or Talent Pro willing to state publicly they burn hires, but behind closed doors we know this happens often. Sometimes the battle isn’t as important as the war your fighting internally, so you let hires go through the process you would normally stop.

This doesn’t make you bad at HR or Recruiting, this makes you strategic. Like the pitcher, you’re just setting yourself and your organization for success. To do that sometimes you just have to burn a hire here and there.

T3 – TalkPush #HRTech

Posted on by
4

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.

It seems like lately I’ve had the chance to review some really big, really dynamic HR Tech enterprise level tools.  I’m excited today to get back to a tool that everyone can use, especially those small and medium size HR and Talent shops.  On T3 this week I’m reviewing the automated phone screening tool Talkpush.

Talkpush is just what it says it is.  The solution automates your normal phone screens.  We don’t talk about phone screens as much any more, because in HR Tech everything has gone digital with the explosion of video and video screening tools (which I love). The reality is, though, many employers just don’t need, or want, a video screening solution.  Talkpush fills the need for a phone screening tool quite well.

95% of candidates never get ‘heard’ by a potential employer.  A recruiter spends only 7% of their time, on an average week, with candidates they’ll actually hire. When candidates are interviewed about their experience with an employer it comes up constantly that they don’t feel like they ever got a fair chance to be heard. A tool like Talkpush allows the candidate to have a voice, and recruiters to more efficiently spend their time.

The system is super easy to use and you can have the system up and running for your candidates in the matter of minutes.  No need to get IT involved, just signup and start using it.  All the screens are saved into separate audio files that you can attach to a candidate in almost any applicant tracking system. These same files can easily be shared with a hiring manager, who can hear first hand how candidates respond to your own questions.

5 Things I really liked about Talkpush:

1. It’s super easy to use.  We get caught up so often on wanting purchase and use overly sophisticated systems, and then don’t use them for that same reason. Talkpush can be implemented and used even by people who could never figure out how to set their VCR clocks, or still have a VCR!

2. Inexpensive. Free trial to start with no obligation, $1 per interview and around $300 per month for unlimited interviews.  You can’t beat this cost as a screening tool.  It costs more than $1 to have a recruiter dial the phone and leave a message!

3. Great for volume hiring.  Send out mass invitations to screen hundreds of people all at the same time. I’ve had to open new locations for employers and it can be a major headache when everyone is applying all at once.

4. Audio files are searchable.  Technology is an amazing thing.  Someone says they have experience in robotic programming as part of their answer to a screening question. Months later you need someone with robotic programming skills. Talkpush has the capability of you searching all of your screens for key words, and potentially finding talent you had no idea existed.

5. Questions are in your voice, your language.  You record the screening questions that will be asked, and they can be different for every single job you have, if you want.

Talkpush has a really smart dashboard as well, that tracks all of your responses, allows you to push those responses to managers along with LinkedIn Profiles, photo of the candidate (if you wish), resume, etc.  I think some people will look at this review and think this is a ‘low-tech’ as compared to the digital platforms that are on the market.  I look at it as a different hi-tech solution for organizations that don’t need or want a video solution, but still have a great need to screen candidates.

The fact is, many people are still uncomfortable with video.  Probably not your younger candidates, but once you get above mid 30’s you’re dealing with people who didn’t grow up on video, and might just might be much more comfortable doing a screen via the phone.  Check them out, I really believe Talkpush fills a market need for so many companies!

2015 Candidate Bill of Rights

Posted on by
1

In November 2010 Monster.com asked me to write a post on a hot topic at that time a “Candidate Bill of Rights“.  Needless to say, I’m not a huge fan of a Candidate Bill of Rights – I’m a Capitalist and believe in a free-market system of HR and Recruiting.  In 2010 (remember those days?) we had candidates coming out of our ears. In 2015, most of us are begging for talent. Welcome to the show kids!

Here were my main point back then – and what they still are today:

Candidates –

You Don’t Have To Apply:

  • If we have a crappy working environment – you don’t have to apply
  • If we don’t pay appropriately for the market – you don’t have to apply
  • If we don’t give my employees opportunities for growth – you don’t have to apply
  • If we don’t treat you like a human – you don’t have to apply
  • If we don’t give you a full job description – you don’t have to apply
  • If we don’t tell you every step of the process – you don’t have to apply

You Don’t Have To Work Here:

  • If we make you wait endlessly without any feedback – you don’t have to work here
  • If we make you an offer that you don’t like – you don’t have to work here
  • If we don’t offer the right work-life balance – you don’t have to work here
  • If we give you a bad Candidate Experience – you don’t have to work here

Candidates – if any of the above is true – you have some decisions to make:

1. Can I live with what I know about the company and the experience they put me through to get this offer?

2. IF SO, do I want to come and work for the company?

3. IF YES – welcome aboard, you’re coming on ‘Eyes Wide Open’

4. IF NO – thanks – good luck – see you next time

You see we all have choices – if you don’t like the way I’m treating you as a candidate, don’t come and work at my company.  I would hope that most HR Pros are smart enough to get this fact – treat candidates like garbage and they’ll stop applying for your jobs, thus making your job all the more difficult.  That might be a bit pie-in-the-sky thinking because I also know way to many HR/Talent Pros that don’t get this!   They have a little bit of power and have decided to torture candidates with painfully long and arduous application and selection processes – that aren’t helpful to their own companies, statistically, and definitely aren’t helpful to the candidates.  During a recession they don’t see much impact from these horrible processes, but eventually the tide turns and face the results of their actions.  Karma is a bitch!

So, do we need a candidate bill of rights – No!  Do you need to spend a ton of time, effort and resources on candidate experience – No, as well!  Don’t go right ditch-left ditch and start over correcting.  Treat candidates like you would want to be treated.  Have a few standards and etiquette, and some manners.  It’s not hard, it’s not expensive and you definitely don’t need to pay a consultant to show you how to do it!

Karma is biting a bunch of hack talent acquisition pros in the butt in 2015.

Talent Isn’t Fair

Posted on by
4

We have a big problem with this concept in HR.

We want everything to be fair. At the core of what we do, though, is the most unfair dilemma that we can do nothing about. Our people come to us with talent.  It is never equal.  We can try to help our employees leverage the talents they have, but in the end it’s their talent, their desire.

I work my butt off, but Mary makes more sales than me, and she doesn’t put in half the effort I do!  Yep, she has more talent.

I am loyal to this company, and Bill hates this place, but he got promoted! Yep, he has more talent.

I just can’t seem to find a solution to our problem, then Sue finds it after working on it for ten minutes. Talent.

Everything we do in HR and Talent Acquisition comes down to us managing the inequalities of talent in our organizations.

Turns out, talent isn’t fair.

 

 

The Irresistible Power of Being Wanted

Posted on by
2

It’s not 100%, but it might be close.  Some will deny this, but it’s pretty much universally accepted. We all want to be wanted by someone.

It makes us feel good to be wanted.  Not the crazy stalker kind of wanted. The kind of wanted where you know the other party wants you for all the positive reasons that are you.  That feeling is so powerful it could light up New York!

In a nutshell, that is talent acquisition.

You want someone. They may want you, they may not.  Either way, you are holding in your possession one of the most powerful feelings of all time!

People want to be wanted.

When you call someone and tell them, “I want you”, I can guarantee they will listen to what you have to say next.  100% of the time.

“Hi, my name is Tim. I want you.”

I now have your attention.  I might not have it for long, but I do have it in that moment.  That’s the key for successful recruiting. What you say next determines your success.

I have had four jobs in my entire career, over 21 years.  I’ve probably had upwards of 500 calls from recruiters wanting to talk to me about a job they have open. Each time I listened to what they had to say, initially, because it makes me feel good that someone wants me. That is a normal response. That is a majority response.

In recruiting you should never underestimate the power you hold in your hands.  Never believe the hype that people don’t want to be called or contacted about jobs. “Oh, those IT guys get ten calls a day, they don’t want to be contacted!” Yes, they do. That’s ten times a day they get a stroke to their ego. Ten times a day they feel wanted. Ten times a day where you might be offering them their dream job.

“Hi, my name is Tim. I want you.”

Will 2015 be the year of the Quotas?

Posted on by
2

We still haven’t really made a dent in this diversity/inclusion thing have we?  The numbers don’t lie.  81% of healthcare workers are female, less than 18% of leadership positions in healthcare are filled by females.  The same is true in the service industry, the restaurant industry, etc.  Similar numbers can be said about African Americans and Hispanics in almost every industry.

The world is changing and we keep doing the same thing.

HR shops are trying to change our behaviors and how we think, but they are working against thousands of years of ingrained behaviors.  A few training courses aren’t going to change this level of programming.

People hate quotas in hiring.  They view the word ‘quota’ in the same vane as they view other words that lead to hate speech.

No one wants quotas.

That’s the problem. Quotas work.  Quotas are a measure that organizations can see and do something about.  Oh, we need five more females. We better go hire them. It’s straightforward. It’s simple to understand.

I get what’s wrong with them, we talk about that all the time.  Rarely, do we ever talk about what’s right with quotas.  When I was in HR at Applebee’s I had a ‘diversity quota’ on my leadership staffing.  It was measured as a percent of the overall staff and our diversity in leadership was measured as females, African American, Asian, Hispanic, etc. Basically, the only thing that didn’t count was white guys.

It was frustrating to me because I had very high diversity within my leadership team, but to continue to get high ratings I had to keep hiring diversity, even if it meant that one day I would have 100% diverse leadership. This rating was important to me because I got bonused on this rating. Having a diverse leadership team was very important to Applebees.

What Applebee’s leadership knew was that I was never going to get to 100% diversity.  It wasn’t their goal.  But, they knew to move the needle on diversity we needed to start measuring the color and kinds of faces we were hiring.  Quotas.

It worked.  It showed those working for our organization that we were serious about hiring diversity, so much so, that we were going to ensure this number moved.

Quotas are bad when they are used for bad purposes and good people get hurt by this.  I wasn’t passing over better white guys when hiring leadership at Applebees.  I was searching for better diverse candidates overall and hiring them.  Our leadership makeup needs to reflect our employee makeup. That is better hiring.

Don’t discount quotas in 2015.  If you truly want to move the needle in your organization, measure it.

The Key Trait of Great Hires

Posted on by
9

For twenty years, I’ve been hiring and firing people. I’ve been lucky enough to have some great performers, a bunch of good performers and an also a few crappy performers. It seems like every time I turn; someone has an answer for me on how to hire better. For years I have given the advice if all else fails, hire smart people. It’s not a bad strategy. For the most part, if you hire the smartest ones of the bunch, you’ll have more good performers, than bad performers. I’m talking pure intelligence, not necessarily book smarts.

But, just hiring smart people still isn’t perfect. I want to hire good, or great, people every single time. How do you do that? That’s the million dollar question.

To me there is one trait we don’t focus enough on, across all industries. Optimism.

Your ability to look at the situation and come up with positive ways to handle it. Think about your best employees, almost always there is a level of optimism they have that your lower performers don’t.

I can’t think of one great employee I’ve ever worked with that didn’t have a level of optimism that was at least greater than the norm. They might be optimistic about their future, about the companies future, about life in general. The key was they had optimism.

Optimistic people find ways to succeed because they truly believe they will succeed. Pessimistic people find ways to fail, since they believe they are bound to fail. This hiring thing can be difficult. Don’t make it more difficult by hiring people who are not optimistic about your company and the opportunity you have for them. Ask questions in the interview that get to their core belief around optimism:

– Tell me about something you’re truly optimistic about in life? (Pessimistic people have a hard time answering this. Optimistic people will answer quickly and with passion.)

– Tell me about a time something you were responsible for went really bad. How did you deal with it?

– The company has you working on a very important project and then decides to cancel it. How would you respond?

Surrounding yourself with optimistic people drives a better culture, better teams, it’s uplifting to your leadership style. I want smart people, but I truly want smart people who are optimistic about life. Those people change the world for the better, and I think they’ll do the same for my business.

4 Reasons Corporate Recruiting Should Use Staffing Agencies

Posted on by
1

I love those Dos Equis commercials “The Most Interesting Man in the World” where the most interesting man says, “I don’t always drink beer, but when I do I prefer Dos Equis.”  It’s great marketing that doesn’t seem to get old.  It got me to thinking as well.  I started my HR career in recruiting working for the company I’m now running, so in a sense I’ve come full circle.  I started recruiting right out of college for a contingent staffing company, doing technical contract hiring, a tough recruiting gig, but it pays very well if you’re good.

When I left my first job, and the third party recruiting industry, to take my first corporate HR job. I left with a chip on my shoulder that armed me with such great recruiting skills I would NEVER, I mean NEVER, use a recruiting firm to do any of my recruiting. WHY WOULD I?  I mean I had the skills, I had the know-how and I could save my company a ton of money by just doing it on our own.

So, I spent 10 years in corporate HR before returning to third party recruiting in 2009, and you know what? I was young and naïve in my thinking about never using recruiting agencies.  It’s not just about having the skills and know-how; it’s much bigger than that.  I worked for three different large companies, in three different industries in director of recruitment type roles, and in each case, I found situations where I was reaching out to some great third party recruiters for some assistance.

So, why did I change my philosophy on using recruiting agencies?  A few of the reasons I ran into in corporate HR:

1. Having Skill and Know-How only works if you also have the time.  Sometimes in corporate gigs, you just don’t have the capacity to get as deep into the search as you would like – with all the hats you have to wear as a corporate HR pro.

2. Corporate HR positions don’t give you the luxury of building a talent pipeline in specific skill sets, the same way that search pros can build over time.  As a corporate HR pro, I was responsible for all skill sets in my organization.  Niche search pros can outperform most corporate HR pros on most searches, most of the time. It’s a function of time and network.

3. Many corporate executive teams don’t believe their own HR staffs have the ability to outperform professional recruiters, primarily because we (corporate HR pros) have never given them a reason to think differently about this. Thus, we are “forced” to use search pros for searches where executives like to get involved.

4. Most corporations are not willing to invest in a model – people, technology and process – that puts themselves on a higher playing field than professional recruiting organizations.  I would estimate only 1% of corporations have made this investment currently – and more are not rushing out to follow suit.  Again, this comes from corporate HR not having the ability to show the CFO the ROI on making this change – to have the best talent in the industry you compete in. So, the best talent gets sourced by recruiting pros and corporations pay for it.

I didn’t always use recruiting agencies, but when I did I made sure I got talent I couldn’t get on my own, in the time and space I was allotted in my given circumstances.  When I talk to corporate HR pros now, and I hear in their voice that “failure” of having to use a recruiting agency. I get it. I get the fact of what they are facing in their own corporate environments.  It’s not failure, it’s life in corporate America and it’s hard to change.

Stay thirsty my friends…

4 Things Job Pirates Have

Posted on by
Reply

It’s the holidays, so I’m going to run some “Best of” posts from the library at The Project. Enjoy. 

Dollars for donuts, Fast Company is the best publication out their for anyone in the business world!  They hit a home run in my book recently with the article: An HR Lesson from Steve Jobs – If you want Change Agents, Hire Pirates!  “Why? Because Pirates can operate when rules and safety nets breakdown.”  More from the article:

A pirate can function without a bureaucracy. Pirates support one another and support their leader in the accomplishment of a goal. A pirate can stay creative and on task in a difficult or hostile environment. A pirate can act independently and take intelligent risks, but always within the scope of the greater vision and the needs of the greater team.

Pirates are more likely to embrace change and challenge convention. “Being aggressive, egocentric, or antisocial makes it easier to ponder ideas in solitude or challenge convention,” says Dean Keith Simonton, a University of California psychology professor and an expert on creativity. “Meanwhile, resistance to change or a willingness to give up easily can derail new initiatives.” So Steve’s message was: if you’re bright, but you prefer the size and structure and traditions of the navy, go join IBM. If you’re bright and think different and are willing to go for it as part of a special, unified, and unconventional team, become a pirate.

The article is an excerpt from Steve Jobs book: What Would Steve Jobs Do?: How the Steve Jobs Way Can Inspire Anyone to Think Differently and Win by Peter Sander, and it goes into some of the hiring philosophy that Jobs had while he was at Apple.

So, what did Jobs Pirates have to have?

1. It’s not enough to be brilliant and think differently- a Pirate has to have the passion, drive and vision to deliver to the customer a game-changing product.

2. Will the person you hire, fall in love with your organization and products?

3. A Pirate is a traveler who comes to you with diverse background and experiences.

4. Even though they’re a Pirate they still have to fit into the team and come with or be able to make connections.

“So, in Steve’s book–recruit a team of diverse, well-traveled, and highly skilled pirates, and they’ll follow you anywhere.”