Category Archives: Hiring

Are you Persuading or Convincing candidates to take your jobs?

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Convince – To cause someone to believe firmly in the truth of something.

Persuade – To cause someone to do something through reasoning or argument.

So, are you persuading or convincing candidates to take a position with your organization?

I think the majority of us try and convince candidates that our job, our organization is the best decision for them.  We have this belief, wrongly, that we don’t want candidates who don’t want us.  So, we shouldn’t ‘push’ them to take our job.  We’ll try and convince them we are a good choice, but ultimately the candidate needs to make that decision.  We do this because its the easiest on us, as Talent and HR Pros, not because it’s the best way.  It’s the most non-confrontational way to offer up our jobs.  We all like non-confrontational.

Persuasion involves a bit more.  The Talent and HR Pro who can persuade candidates to come with them, is much more valuable to their organization.  Persuasion might make you challenge a candidates beliefs, and get them to think about their career, their life, in a new way.  Ultimately, they still might make the choice not to go with you, but you want to make that decision very, very difficult on them.  They should agonize in saying ‘No’ to you.

Persuasion causes a Talent or HR Pros to become a sales person, a marketer.  To persuade means to get a person to ‘do’ something, not believe something.  I don’t want a candidate to believe my job is the best, but decide not to take it anyway.  I want her to take it! To do it!   Most people ‘believe’ that smoking is bad for them, as they put a cancer stick in their mouth and light it up.  Very few stop smoking.  Believing and doing are two very different things.

With candidates, persuasion can become an organizational dynamic, especially in hard to fill roles.  You have to have everyone on board the persuasion bandwagon!  From the hiring manager to executives to the admins who might speak to this candidate only to set up an interview time.  Everyone has to be ready, at all times, to close the candidate. A number of years ago I was offered a role, that I turned down, and the Chief People Officer of that organization called my on Christmas Eve Day to try and change my mind.  He made it very hard for me to turn down the role. He was very persuasive, to the point that I felt like I could be making a bad career decision to not take it.

We are coming into a time in our history where persuading, versus convincing, candidates to come work for you, will become a strategic advantage (it actually always has been an advantage, but this becomes more important as great talent is hard to find).  It should no longer be alright to allow candidates to just make the decision if they like you or not, and you just sit back and wait for that decision.  Your organization needs you to turn up the heat, in a positive way, to get candidates to take your jobs.  Persuasion appeals to emotions and fear and creativity.  People make emotional decisions when changing jobs, not rationale.  Are you feeding them documents and spreadsheets, or stories or glory?

Have I convinced you to change?

Corporate Recruiters Don’t Fear Agency Recruiters

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Do you believe the title?  It’s common belief, in most Talent and HR circles, that most corporate recruiters fear agency recruiters.  Go ahead and argue if you would like, but it seems a little silly.

The reality is, true recruiting professionals don’t fear amateurs.

It’s like a really great professional Photographer.  They charge money because they offer something someone is willing to pay for.  Professional photographers don’t fear the mom at the soccer game with her $2,000 dollar camera and $5,000 dollar lens.  Who cares that you have the equipment, if you don’t know how to use it!?  Pros don’t fear amateurs.

So, if you are a really good corporate recruiter who knows how to really recruit, agency recruiters don’t scare you, because you know your stuff!  That’s the problem, though, right?  The reason so many people feel the title of this post is true is because we all know so many corporate recruiters, who really don’t know how to recruit.  They aren’t pros, they’re amateurs.  Amateurs fear professionals when it comes to meeting head to head in competition.

The best professionals love it when a talented amateur tries to play at their level.  These types of individuals help to push both parties to do the best work they can.  Or, at least, they should!  A great agency recruiter, should push an average corporate recruiter to want to get better.  An amateur agency recruiter will starve, that’s why you only see amateurs in the agency ranks for a very short period of time.  If they aren’t good, they don’t eat! That is why on average, agency recruiters tend to have more recruiting skills than corporate recruiters.  Agency folks aren’t full salary. How they are compensated forces them to have better skills, on average.

So, how do corporate recruiters ensure they become professionals?  Well, I love Malcom Gladwell, so I’ll steal a little of his 10,000 hour concept.  You must make yourself a true recruiting professional!  You need to invest time and development in yourself, in the recruiting industry, to become a pro.   That means as a corporate recruiter, you focus on recruiting, not becoming an HR Pros. What?!  Most corporate recruiters are corporate recruiters because that’s their path to get into a straight HR position.  Their endgame is not recruiting, it’s HR.  That’s a problem, because they are not fully vested into the recruiting game.  This is an amateur move.

Your reality is, those who get promoted are usually professional at something.  Become a great recruiting pro and the powers-that-be will take notice, and you’ll find yourself in positions you never thought possible.  True professionals don’t worry about promotions, they worry about becoming a better pro at their craft.

The next time you start feeling yourself pushed by an agency recruiter, don’t curse them for what they do, embrace them for what they push you to become — a better recruiter.

 

Reasons To Try Stuff

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Last week I got a chance to speak at the 5th annual Michigan HR Day on Social Recruiting.  The group was great, I had fun, we gave out some Coach Bags and I made some HR ladies uncomfortable.  I don’t actually intend to speak and make anyone uncomfortable, that isn’t a long term plan of speaker success.  But it usually happens to a small number of folks.

Here’s how it normally goes:

1. I talk about how to use a social networking site like Facebook to recruit great talent.  Show them how to do it.  Show them how they can get really specific in who they are searching for by skill, gender, location, company name, Likes, etc. All really good information, and the crowd eats it up! Things are going really well for me.

2. “Um, I have a question?”  Here it comes.  You probably noticed it yourself in the line above. He said ‘gender’ didn’t he? You can’t do that mister!  I’m an HR lady. You can’t do that. Then she pulls out her HR lady badge.

3. I say, “Yeah, you can do that”, and pull out my HR Guy badge.

4. She says, “No you can not!” Like my Mom, but scarier. “If you use a program like The Facebook to recruit, you’re going to have ‘disparate impact‘!”

5. I’m a pro, I’ve been here before. So I start asking questions, like, “Do your hiring managers ever see your candidates?” Yes.  “What the difference if they see them as a candidate or as an interviewee?” Well. “If you have a hiring manager willing to discriminate, that isn’t a Facebook issue, that’s a manager issue, isn’t it?” Yes. “Do you have any set of demographics you would like to have more of in your organization, like female engineers, let’s just day?” Yes. “What are you really worried about when recruiting on Facebook?”  Silence.

We don’t try stuff, because trying stuff could cause change.  When I speak about things people haven’t tried, a very small group, no matter where I am, will immediately try to come up with reasons on why they shouldn’t try it.  Not why they should. Our initial reaction to change is to find reasons to not change.

It really has nothing to do with recruiting on Facebook.  Facebook’s own demographics will show almost a 50/50 gender mix. LinkedIn, admittedly, is heavily male dominated.  Do you recruit on LinkedIn?  Do you see pictures of potential candidates on LinkedIn?  Aren’t you, the HR department, the ones pulling potential candidates, who have been trained not to discriminate when it comes to hiring?  So, what’s really the issue?  You see, it breaks down very quickly.

We aren’t really concerned about disparate impact or being discriminatory, we concerned about this guy asking me to do something I’m not comfortable with.  I just like playing Farmville and watching so funny kitty videos on The Facebook.  Do make me feel like I should have to do work on there as well!

The problem we tend to have in HR is that we don’t find reasons to try stuff.  We are pros at finding reasons not to try stuff.  Find some reasons today to try stuff, you’ll be a better HR Pro because of it.

Tattoo Hiring

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A tattoo is basically forever.

I know, I know, you can get them removed by laser now. But most people don’t go into a tattoo proposition thinking I can’t wait to pay a couple of thousand dollars to get this removed! It’s permanent baby. Like a Sharpie, but better!

Most organizations do Tattoo Hiring.  They believe we are going to hire this person forever.  In fact, go ahead and tattoo the logo on their butt while their in orientation.   But the life cycle of most hires is similar to that of your tattoo you got on Spring Break back in 2001.

Tattoo Hires:

1. Day 1 – it’s a little painful, but your so excited to have the person on board.

2. First couple of weeks – pain has gone away, still doesn’t look right, but you can tell you’re going to love them. And you keep showing the new hire to everyone you see, that has yet to see them.

3. Years 1-3 – Tattoo Hire is awesome. You’re proud of your tattoo hire. People comment on what a great hire.  You couldn’t be more proud of your tattoo hire!

4. Somewhere past year 3 – the first Tattoo Hire went so well, what the heck, time for another Tattoo Hire!  This time we’ll go bigger and better!

5. Into Tattoo Hire #2’s first year – you begin to notice your original Tattoo Hire doesn’t look as good anymore. Isn’t performing as well. You think it might be time to change your original Tattoo Hire.  While Tattoo Hire #2 is more awesome than you can imagine!

6. Time to remove Tattoo Hire #1 – You’ve finally made the decision, Tattoo Hire #1 has to go. It’s going to cost you thousands of dollars to remove, but Tattoo Hire #1 just isn’t what you want anymore.

That’s alright you’ve got Tattoo Hire #2!  I mean what could go wrong, a Tattoo Hire is forever, right?

Organizations that hire with a Tattoo philosophy are bound to fail.  It’s not that you can’t expect, or want, employees to stay with you their entire career.  You can.  The problem we face is when we don’t set up our organizations to support forever hires.  The new tattoo always looks better, because it is usually more defined and brighter and you put more thought into it.  An employee is no different.  You can’t let a more tenured employee fade.  You must keep them vibrant and up to date.  Or, many times you will spend a ton of money replacing them.

 

Everybody Knows How To Hire

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I could argue, although many HR/Talent vendors don’t want to hear this, that hiring is still a black art.  Our reality is we, still in this day and age, have no idea how someone is actually going to perform in our environment in the position we put them in. Although, we truly believe we do know exactly how they’ll do.  Until they fail, then we blame them, not our own inept ability to select the right talent for our organizations.

I have two quotes from Seth Godin regarding expertise.  The first:

“It’s easy to pretend expertise when there is no data to contradict you.”

That’s all of us and our hiring managers who claim we are ‘great’ at hiring, yet have no concrete measures to back up this assertion.   We also allow ourselves to ignore what our data is telling us, if we don’t believe it fits the story we want to tell.  “Well, Ted is a one of our best managers, he’s been here a long time. Sure his 90 day turnover is twice as high as the next hiring manager, but that’s not Ted’s fault, he has high turnover positions.”

Here’s the other quote:

“Relying on the ignorance of a motivated audience, isn’t a long term strategy.”

These two quotes go together in my view of hiring.  Many times we allow hiring decisions to be made by very motivated people who need talent and are being pressured to get things done.  When you add these two things together, you have disaster.  Not in the short term, but in the long term.

Have you ever seen the resume of the HR Pro who tends to make it three to four years at an organization, then moves on, and on, and on?  Every three years or so? This is what happens.  Ignore data. Rely on the ignorance of a motivated audience.  Eventually it all catches up on you, and you need to go perform your black HR magic somewhere else!

Everyone knows how to hire.  Very few people know how to hire well.  The best are the ones who listen to their data, and don’t allow those incapable of hiring, to hire.  This isn’t easy.  This takes courage.  You will have some battles to fight within your organization to make this happen.  But it beats moving all of your stuff every three years.

7 Ways Recruiters Can Reinvent Themselves

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It’s that time of the month!  No, not that time – a better more enjoyable time!  It’s the FOT monthly webinar!   This month FOT will be doing Recruiter Makeovers and giving Recruiters 7 ways they can reinvent themselves as Marketers!  As always it’s FREE and comes with HRCI credit for all those SHRMies.

We know – you’re feeling stale as a recruiter. We get it, that’s why we’re partnering with Jobvite for the May FOT webinar – The Recruiter Makeover – 7 Ways Recruiters Can Reinvent Themselves as Marketers. The world’s full of great products/services that became commodities, and unfortunately, there’s a lot of recruiters in danger of becoming commodities if they don’t change with the times. Odds are you feel the shift under your feet – great candidates are less responsive than ever to average recruiters, which means you have to become a more effective marketer of the brand and opportunities you represent to keep your closing rate high.

If you’re still reading, that means you haven’t been average in the past. Join us for this FOT webinar and we’ll give you the roadmap for a career makeover that includes the following goodies:

—The Ugly “Before” Picture – We’ve all seen the “before” pictures used in makeovers and this one is no different. Using your “average joe/jane” recruiter, we’re going to take a snapshot of the recruiter most in need of our makeover. Brace yourself, because “before” pictures in makeover workups all look like mug/prison shots of Lindsay Lohan, right?

—Trendspotting 101 – We can’t start prescribing the skill equivalent of makeup or liposuction for recruiters until we tell you about the trends that are causing the need for the makeover. Candidates have more options and messages flowing to them than ever before. Whether its the emergence of Indeed, Glassdoor, LinkedIn or the social recruiting scene, recruiting is morphing into marketing. We’ll compare and contrast some of the trends to tell you why recruiters are evolving into marketers even as they keep their core recruiting skills strong.

—7 Ways Recruiters Can Reinvent Themselves As Marketers – Makeover time. We’ll hit you with our list of things you can do to reinvent yourself as a marketer who just happens to recruit for a living. You can do this. Don’t believe the naysayers that will say this is hype. Those people are just trying to keep you average.

—Our Top 5 List of Recruiters Who Have Strong Marketing Game – It’s all empty talk until we give you examples, right? The FOT crew will break down our top 5 list of recruiters who have added the marketing toolkit to their games, complete with emphasis of which of our “7 Ways” list they specialize in. Everyone in the world needs role models – even recruiters. We’ll tell you who to connect with and emulate to become a marketer in the recruiting game.

Evolving your game as a recruiter isn’t easy – it takes thought, expertise and time you don’t have, because you’re busy filling positions. Join us for the May FOT Webinar and we’ll show you how to add marketing chops to your personal recruiting brand so you don’t get left behind.

CLICK HERE IF YOU’RE A SMART TALENT PRO!

Evolving Just In Time Talent

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If you’re in the talent/recruitment game you are well aware it’s a Just In Time (JIT) game.  Has been that way since we were called the Personnel Dept. and will be that way for the foreseeable future.  Executives and hiring managers hate this about recruitment.  They think we should have this ‘pipeline’ of great candidates waiting to come into our organizations the moment we lose someone, or have a need to add additional talent.  But, we all know that while in theory that sounds really nice, it’s not reality.

There is a faction that tries to sell that this can happen, through things like talent communities, etc. Again, the reality is this is these types of things are just a show for our organizations, they really don’t do what our hiring managers are desiring.  Having a pipeline of candidates, who have yet to be screened, interviewed and offered (i.e., your talent community) is still just JIT talent.  Maybe a little quicker, but still far short of expectations from hiring managers.

So, how to you get On Demand Talent?

Eventually, we are going to see companies take a page from the contracting talent world and they are going to ‘bench’ their next hires.  In contracting great talent gets ‘benched’ in between their projects.  They actually get paid not to work, but be ready for the next major project they’ll be working on.  Could be a week, could be a month.  Corporate benching will be slightly different. Let me give you a peak of how corporations will eventually evolve JIT Talent to meet the expectations of their executive teams and hiring managers:

1. Active sourcing of top talent, even when they don’t have an opening.

2. Full screen, interview process and selection decision of this talent, even without an opening.

3. Contractual offer and benching bonus to be the next hire for a certain position.

What does all that mean?

Let’s say you have a group of Engineers.  You know at some point, based on your annual metrics over the last 10 years, you will lose an engineer to turnover within the next 12 months.  It’s critical that when you lose that engineer you have a replacement quickly, but the current cycle time of sourcing, interviewing and accepting is taking 8-12 weeks for your critical skill set.  Sound familiar?  Your hiring managers expectation is you’ll have someone in 2 weeks.  Which is impossible in your current process.

An On Demand Talent model would have you, without an actual opening, go through your full engineering search. Find that person who is right for you and extend them a hiring contract for the next available opening in the next 12 months. For accepting this ‘spot’ on your depth chart, you will pay this candidate a bonus.  Could be a one time bonus, could be a monthly bonus.  In the mean time, they continue to work at their current position and company, and wait.  When they get the call, contractually they have two weeks to give notice and start.

You meet the expectation of your organization, you have succession ready to go, you just created a better talent demand system.  Yes, it costs money.  But, so does having an opening in your organization for two to three to six months, while projects sit idle.

What do you think?  Blow holes in my theory of On Demand Talent in the comments.

 

Breaking Down The 6 Seconds Of Your Resume

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The Ladders released some research in the past couple of weeks that focused on how a recruiter reads your resume.  It was really good stuff for job seekers to pay attention to, but it was mostly sent to HR and Recruiter types who shrugged their shoulders and thought ‘Yeah, so.” Basically, what the study showed was that a recruiter really only spends about 6 seconds initially viewing your resume (that first screen)!  For years the industry has used ten seconds as a staple, regardless, we knew it was a very short time.

The study also shows where a recruiter’s eyes focus while looking at your resume for six seconds.  This is even more brilliant! I’ve first saw this technology used with the design of Facebook’s UI.  They were able to see how people stared at their Facebook page to determine the best place for their ads.  And you thought they just put them on the side to get them out of the way!  It’s very scientific, and researchers use technology that will show a heat-map like image that indicates where you gaze the longest. On a Facebook page, on a resume, etc. It can used in a number of fashions to show where an individual focuses their attention.

So, in the six seconds a recruiter is looking at your resume, where do they look?  Here are the main areas by emphasis:

1. First job listed – Current Position.  That one you list, hopefully, right under your opening “Objective” header.  A recruiter will immediately scan to that section as they quickly scan by your objective, and spend a little more time looking at the Job Title, Dates and opening sentence (so make it a good one!).  They spend very little time on all those paragraphs and bullet points you put below that.

2. Next job listed – Previous Position. Okay, she is working here, and she use to work here.  It’s that quick.  They don’t care that you ‘totally re-processed’ the supply cabinet, and led the company in quarterly metrics, blah, blah, blah contests, are you still reading this, no one reads this far into your resume!

2. Education.  From your first job listed (let’s be clear, it’s not your actual first job ever worked, but the first job you have listed on your resume) the recruiter will quickly move to Education.  Why?  Basically, they’ve determined you’re working, or have worked, in the right kind of job for what they are looking for, so now they want to know what kind of education you have.

That’s it. Your six seconds is over.

I just saved you $1000 on getting your resume professionally done. It’s not needed, unless you have my grammar skills, than you might want to invest. The reality of today’s recruiter, and even hiring managers, is that your resume will won’t get read until you get to the next level.  This is actually an advantage to you if you know how to design your resume, using the data from the study!

All you really need is a USA Today style resume.  Do you know why the USA Today is such a popular national newspaper?  Because almost all of us are really stupid and lazy.  We like big pictures, colors and bullet pointed lists.  That is all the USA Today delivers in terms of news.  No details, just the headlines and the sexy stuff.  That is what your resume should be.  At least on that initial first page.

5 Traits of Lousy HR Leaders

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The things you can always count on in life are: death, taxes and a lousy HR leader in your organization.  I think I saw that on a t-shirt at SHRM National one year!  The reality is, HR leaders are selected a little different than most leaders in our organization.  Most leadership is selected this way (right or wrong):

1. Perform really, really well

2. Get promoted into a position of leadership, whether you can lead or not.

I call this ‘Best Performance Leadership Selection’.  This is the selection process for leadership by roughly 97% of organizations worldwide!  You’re great at your job, you will be great as a leader.  Pretty sound selection process, right!?

HR leaders are selected almost the same, but with a slightly small difference:

1. Have really long tenure in the HR department at your organization.

2. Get promoted into a HR leadership position.

Sound familiar?  I call this ‘I’ve Been Here The Longest Leadership Selection’.  This is the selection process for HR leadership in roughly 97% of organizations worldwide! You might be great at your job, but we don’t really care, you’ve been here longer than anyone else in HR so now you’re the leader!

Sometimes reading what we do, in black and white, is depressing…

The problem with this type of HR leadership selection (besides the painfully obvious things) is we usually end up with lousy HR leaders.  Here are the traits of really lousy HR Leaders, just so you know if you have one or not:

– Rely on Faulty Metrics to make Major HR Decisions, and fail to track results. Well, we’ve been using time to fill and turnover for the past 20 years here, why would we stop!  Also, let’s keep using these subjective measures to determine if we are successful, because, well, hey, they’re subjective and at the end of the day I want to show our executives we are successful, whether we are or not.

– Not Championing Weighted Risk.  Lousy HR leaders love to cover their own ass more than any other single thing they do.  In HR we advise of risk, and give opinion on how to move forward.  Lousy HR leaders will not champion risk at any level, for fear it might come back on them.  Organizations take risk every single day. It’s not HR’s job to eliminate risk, it’s our job to champion appropriate risk and be all in with our business partners.

– Not Having the Tough Conversation.  Most leadership fails at this, but HR can’t.  We have to be the coaches for all other leadership in our organization.  If anyone knows how to have a tough conversation, it has to be HR.  Yet, most fail at this miserably.  Lousy HR Leaders are superficial and shallow in their opinions and directions, and don’t seek clarification on things in the organization that people are leaving to assumption.

– Not Aligning their Vision with the Organization’s Vision.  This is a definite sign of lousy leadership.  If your group, department, function leader can’t create a vision at their level that aligns with the organization, they have no direction.  Another sign of lousy leadership is when your leader just uses the organization vision and can’t break it down to a functional level.  This is just flat out lazy.

– Not being able to Lead Employees Equally Different.  Yes, all employees are created equal.  That doesn’t mean that all employees are treated equal. There is a fine line between treating everyone the same, and making people feel equal.  I want all my employees to feel like no one is better than another, but we also have to have a fundamental organizational understanding that at certain points and times some employees must be treated differently, for the good of the organization.  Lousy HR leaders are uncomfortable with this concept because it’s easy to just fall back on ‘we treat everyone the same.’

Candidates with Hickeys

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(I’m on vacation – I originally posted this in Feb. 2010 over at Fistful of Talent. Also going on 16,123 days of never having a Hickey!)

Kris Dunn, our the HR Capitalist, had a blog post “How To Destroy a Lifetime of Trust as an HR Pro in a Single Day…” where he explained how a direct report broke the cardinal rule in HR and shared confidential information, or more specifically tried to use confidential information for personal gain. It wasn’t something illegal, it had nothing to do with their individual functional performance as a Director of HR, but what this person did was destroy the trust they had with their leader (although I could argue that if a HR Pro can’t keep confidential information confidential – you probably do have a performance issue). Good post – go over and read it, if you haven’t.

The post got me thinking though about how a person recovers from this type of transgression. (Also take a look at this WSJ article “How a Black Mark Can Derail a Job Search“.  As a leader, Kris was pained for sure, because this person had “High-Potential” and was an “A” player.  But when certain things happen, professionally, you have to cut ties and move on.  So now, this Hi-Po has a huge Hickey.  Interestingly though, this Hickey can’t be seen when you look at their resume or interview them in person, but it’s a Hickey they can’t get rid of.  So, barring a life-turtleneck how does one cover this puppy up?

It’s interesting because I think that probably the best of us have a hickey or two that we would rather not have our current or future employer know about.  Sometimes they’re big-giant-in-the-back-of-a-Chevy-17-year-old-I-will-love-you-forever hickeys and sometimes they’re just oops-I-lingered-a-little-too-long type of hickeys. Either way, I would rather not expose my hickeys and have to worry about how this will impact the rest of my professional life. And here’s where most people drive themselves crazy.

As HR Pros I think it’s important for us to be able to help our organizations determine the relative value of individuals.  This person was a rock star at ABC company – did something wrong, couldn’t maintain that position any longer with ABC because of said incident, and lost their job – now we have a chance to pick up a Rock Star (and probably for a discount).  The question you have to ask is not could we live with this person if they did the same thing here?  Because that really isn’t the question – you already have that answer – No.  The question is: do we feel this person learned from said wrong doing and is there any risk of them doing it again?  You might come to the conclusion – yes, they’ve learned, and yes, there is potential they might do it again (let’s face it, if they did it once, they’ve shown they can do it, so there’s always a risk) – but it’s a risk we are willing to take.

So how does someone come back from a transgression at work? The answer is that they have some help.  Eventually, someone is going to ask the question, “why aren’t you with ABC Company anymore?”  They’ll give you the canned answer they’ve been developing since the moment they lost their job. If you’re a good interviewer, you won’t buy the first answer:  “I mean really?!  So, you decided it was better off not to have a job. Is what you’re telling me?!”,  and you will dig to see the hickey.  Hickeys are funny in that you really can’t take your eyes off of them, but for those who can get by the hickeys, you might just find a great talent who is grateful for the second chance.

But, you also might find someone who just likes being in the back of that Chevy and getting Hickeys. You’re the HR Pro, though, and that’s really why your company pays your salary, to mitigate risk versus the quality of talent your organization needs to succeed.  So, you have to ask yourself, can you live with a Hickey or not?