Category Archives: HR Technology

The Perfect Change Model for HR #VueDD17

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I’m out in Park City, UT this week at Hirevue’s Digital Disruption conference. The conference is designed for TA pros and leaders looking to ‘disrupt’ their current TA shop and the agenda is packed with great content and speakers.

Rusty Rueff kicked off the conference with a great keynote on disruption and change. (Side editor’s note: Rusty joined a growing trend of keynotes bringing their notes on stage with them and referring to them often to ensure nothing was missed. Many ‘professional’ keynoters would consider this taboo, but I find it refreshing and more authentic)

Rusty offered up this change model:

#1 – Compelling Vision: The only way you get change started is to have a great compelling vision of what this change will be.

#2 – What’s In It For Me (WIIFM) – If you need your employees to drive change you quickly have to define what’s in it for them, and it you better make it compelling. “You get to keep your job” – is not a compelling WIIFM for most people in 2017!

#3 – Lead the Way – Servant leadership is they key. Are you doing what you say needs to be done, and are you helping in every way to get everyone on board with you?

#4 – Change the work – If you want to change the way you work, you need to change the work. What!?! So many times we want to make big changes but we are unwilling to change how we do things. That’s a problem. If you can’t attract talent, you need to stop what you’re doing, and do something new!

#5 – Make it stick – Big change is hard and it’s super easy to go back and do what you’ve always done when the initial change seems to be worse or not having the results you wanted. You must be courageous to see your vision through to completion. You might fail, but if you don’t make it stick, you’ll never know for sure.

Rusty focused on big change to big things. In the end, this is what matters.

If you focus on making small changes, or even big changes, to small things, it really has little impact. Focus on making big changes to those things that are most important to your organization that isn’t working. Swing for the fences.

This is super hard for us in HR and TA. We never want to break anything, even when it’s not really working. We’re scared of screwing something up more than it’s already screwed up. I can’t tell you how many executives I speak with that fire HR and Talent leaders simply for this reason alone. The fired leader was unwilling to take the chances needed to fix what was broken.

Are you ready to make big changes to big things?

T3 – Where are they now? The Ladders edition!

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Remember The Ladders (they go mostly by “Ladders” now)? You know the website where you could search 6-figure jobs that no one else had access to! Founded in 2003 as a job board members-only site where they guaranteed every job listed on their site had a starting salary of at least $100,000 or more.

It started off really well, they found an audience of people who actually wanted to make $100,000 or more! Who knew!? The HR bloggers and influencers were not fans. Why? Remember what started to happen around 2005?

The great recession was beginning to happen. Charging candidates a monthly subscription fee seemed a business model where you were taking advantage of people who were the one group of people you shouldn’t! Those desperately seeking work.

Since the end of the great recession, you’ve virtually heard nothing from Ladders. I’m guessing many of you are surprised to hear they are even still in business, and most of you will be more surprised to hear they’re thriving!

Why?

Timing.

What happened during the recession? Netflix. Spotify. StitchFix. Etc. Membership model ‘exclusive’ service industry came into vogue in a big way. Ladders 2003 was ahead of its time. Ladders 2017 seems to fit right into what most people like.

Sure you might not be willing to pay for access to six-figure jobs and work at upgrading your own career, but your neighbor is. Just like you pay for Spotify, but your neighbor is fine listening to the commercial version. We are in more control of our lifestyle buying behavior than ever before.

Ladders of 2017 actually seems to fit right into the candidate management behavior of today, and the consumerism of today. In 2005-ish, they didn’t seem to fit, and it’s why so many in our space worked to discredit what they were offering to candidates.

The goal of Ladders has also remained the same to organizations. Eliminate unqualified candidates to companies and recruiters. Candidates only see jobs that match their background and skill sets. Candidates can’t freely search the entire database of jobs, only those jobs that they’re matched to.

Ladders also made some changes. Still, a candidate member model that allows all recruiters to view candidates and contact all candidates for free, and post jobs for free. Ladders now offers “Indeed” type sponsored jobs for recruiters, and the ability to contact candidate members outside the system for upgraded subscriptions.

Ladders also spent a ton of resources developing their own content publication. Career-minded content and development for mid-career candidates that are in management and executive roles, and those looking to move up into those roles.

I’ve been hearing some rumblings around my network that The Ladders was alive and kicking, and actually doing very well. The original founder of The Ladders, Marc Cendella, came back as CEO after being away for a while, and that certainly helped get them back on focus.

It seems like Ladders is the one job board-type organization that is focused differently than every one of their peers. Ladders is paid by candidates (for the most part) and thus what they do is shaped by taking care of who their true client is. While recruiters and organizations can clearly take advantage of some great talent, Ladders continues to focus on their members (candidates), and find that refreshing.

In the 2017 candidate market Ladders looks to be another tool we probably need to go back and take a look at. I’ll tell you some of your recruiting peers are already doing this and finding some great talent!

T3 – @Ascendify – Intelligent People Management

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This week on T3 I review the end to end talent acquisition platform Ascendify. Ascedify currently is a cloud-based platform that is completely mobile and social enabled, combining all of your talent acquisition technology needs in one platform. Ascendify is also adding talent management to its platform as well and you’ll soon get performance management and employee development as well.

Ascendify can run your complete TA tech stack – ATS, CRM, recruitment marketing, onboarding, etc. If you already have an ATS you love, or you’re stuck with, Ascendify can run all the parts of your TA tech stack that are missing on your ATS, with current integrations with Taleo, Workday, Kenexa, etc.

So, what does Ascendify do? All the stuff you read about, but can’t make happen with your ATS alone! Ascendify allows you to run your own talent communities, helps you run your employment branding and recruitment marketing, engages and nurtures prospective candidates, gives you one-click apply, source tracking, multiple forms of messaging candidates, create multiple landing pages for hiring events you have, and built in employee referral, to just name some of the functionality!

What I liked about Ascendify:

– It’s built for Global enterprise talent acquisition. High security, scalable to multiple locations, divisions, different employment brands, etc.

– Easily build out talent communities based on gender, veteran status, diversity, locations, etc.

– Ascendify will help you build and re-design your career site to better use this level of technology. You’ll be driving a Ferrari, you can’t just park it out on the street!

– You can have and build separate employment brands within your organization, but still, share candidates between the brands and divisions. Super flexible and supportive of each employment brand, which letting you all work together within one system.

– Ascedify is designed so that your TA team will spend their entire day within one system to post, communicate, source, pipeline, market, etc.

– Tag candidates under ‘champion’ status giving one who interviewed a silver or bronze medal status based on finishing as a runner up in the process, knowing those who finished second and third are many times still really great candidates who barely missed out, and then we forget about them!

What I liked most about Ascendify is they know they have a big, giant sophisticated platform they are offering you. You’ll go from horse and buggy to a rocketship! That’s pretty scary, and difficult! So, they also work hand-in-hand to help you build it all out, and show you how to use it and how to kick your competition’s butt using it!

When you purchase a piece of TA technology like this, it’s a big investment in resources and time, and it’s critical you pick a vendor that isn’t just selling you the technology, but is also selling you the talent acquisition expertise to help you build out your ‘new’ TA strategy, because that is what will happen if it’s done right!

They are an enterprise level Talent Acquisition technology to be sure. If you’re a TA leader looking to modernize your processes Ascendify is definitely a technology you need to demo.

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 – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

T3 – @Skillscout – Experiential Hiring through Videos

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This week on T3 I take a look at the employment video development company Skillscout. Skillscout is a platform for employee-generated recruitment videos. They help you develop job videos and work samples to help organizations hire candidates who are a better fit for the job and the organization.

I became aware of them when I posted the question, “Why don’t we have technology that will, easily, allow organizations to make their own employment branding videos?” I should have known, someone much smarter than me was already on top of it, and being successful at it!

Skillscout has developed a process that will allow you (yes, you, TA and HR pro) to make your own employment videos for your organization. They actually send you a video kit and step by step how-to guide. You take the kit, your iPhone and go start videoing. They show you how to upload your videos and then you sit back and wait for the final product.

They have a team of folks who take your videos and produce them into a very professional looking, branded video that you can use on your career site, with social media, etc. Here’s an example of a finished product:

Skillscout also

What I really like about Skillscout:

– They give you both options of Do It Yourself video, or they’ll also come on site and help you. Then once you become comfortable with how to do it and what to shoot, you can start doing your own shoots for all kinds of employment branded video in your organization.

– With Skillscout videos you can make video job postings for all of your jobs. This gives candidates a much better understanding of the job they are applying for and what they’ll actually be doing in the job.

– Skillscout was originally developed to be used within manufacturing to also be able to use video to screen applicants. Where the applicant watches a video within your career site then answers questions or is directed to do a certain task to demonstrate skill.

– When I first saw Skillscout I was thinking about how this could be used within a white collar environment, but Skillscout has actually used this very successfully to help companies attract more and higher quality blue collar workers.

– Cost is extremely reasonable. For a normal 90 -180 second of employment branding fully produced video you’ll pay around $20,000. Skillscout does this for a fraction of that cost. They’re pricing is transparent and listed right on their website.

I love the fact that Skillscout gives some really great direction to get you started with video, but once you get going they also will help you with more culture related videos as well. A technology and company like Skillscout truly help SMB and mid-sized talent acquisition shops to be on a level playing field with enterprise-sized organizations and budgets. If you are in the market for video, this is a must see.

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 – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

T3 – Workmates – Team Engagement & Collaboration

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This week on T3 I take a look at the workplace communication and collaboration app Workmates. Workmates is a slack-like communication app designed by the SMB HRIS technology HRCloud. I’m a fan of HRCloud, great core HR platform for a very reasonable price, so I wanted to see what Workmates was all about.

HRCloud is offering Workmates to organizations to use for free. Nothing in life is free, right!? Well, the hope is you’ll love using this collaboration app and then also fall in love with the integration within HRCloud. So, free, with a hope.

Workmates is designed for internal employee communication and collaboration. Email is dead, but messaging apps like Workmates are being used in increasing numbers by organizations of all sizes.

What I like about Workmates:

– Workmates also acts as a real-time organization directory. All contact information of each employee is available for all of your employees through the app.

– The poll feature is fun to use. You can instantly send out polls to your co-workers asking for feedback on anything from where should we go to lunch, to what do you think of my new web design.

– The Workmates app will also show you who’s in the office, remote, on vacation, etc. So, as you see messages across the Facebook-type timeline, you’ll also know where the people are in case you need to see someone in person.

– Within Workmates you can also give micro-feedback, recognition and even grant a bonus to your coworkers as recognition. Plus, a metrics dashboard allows the HR admin users to see the “Kudos” leaderboard on recognition and trending topics your employees are discussing.

Of course, if your an HRCloud user, you get even more functionality and information. If you already use Slack or a similar app, that stream can be integrated into Workmates, which seems a bit redundant except if you’re using the recognition piece of Workmates.

Here’s my take. I think HRCloud is a really solid and well-designed core HRIS. Workmates puts it a level above others selling core HRIS in the same market. Workmates by itself is good, especially given that it’s free to use. If you’re already using an internal employee communication app, this probably doesn’t interest you. If you don’t have one but you’re interested, this is a no-brainer to try.

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 – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Stop Creating HR Metrics! You Already Have What You Need #TSLive17

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I was out at Halogen’s TalentSpace Live 2017 event this week speaking to great HR pros and leaders. Halogen is the king of performance management and they just announced their merger with the king of Learning, Saba. Together, they have a pretty great 1-2 punch for organizations to check out.

TalentSpace Live brought in Patty McCord one of the main builders of the famous Netflix Culture deck (if you haven’t read this, you need to take a few minutes and do it!):

Patty was an awesome speaker for an HR audience. Real, fresh, in your face with great energy. She’s the HR leader everyone wishes their organization had.

Patty made a statement that stuck with me:

“The metrics to running HR are already in the business, you don’t need to create new ones!” 

What she was talking about was HR shouldn’t be focused on HR metrics, HR should be focused on business metrics (Profit, Revenue, Net Income). She went on to say “Retention” isn’t a business metric. Senior leaders don’t care about retention.

They care about Profit, Revenue, Net Income, Margin, etc. As HR leaders we need to show them the impact to business metrics when we suck at HR. We need to talk about what we are doing in HR using business language, not HR language and words.

“We believe we can increase margins if we put this program in place to control the amount of money we are having to spend to replace workers when they leave us.” Not, “Our retention is worse than the industry average and we have a program to lower our turnover.”

Senior leaders hear two very different things when they hear those statements, even though they basically are pointing out the same problem and solution.

We don’t need more HR metrics. We need more HR leaders focusing on the metrics of our businesses that are already in place and show us whether we are successful or not. Patty also shared she thought every single employee should have P&L training.

If your employees know how the organization makes and loses money, there will be no question on what direction they need to take in their daily job duties to have a positive impact on that outcome. Too often we tell them what to do assuming it’s too complicated for them to understand.

If you teach your employees how you make money it’s always amazing to watch behaviors change in how they do every job in your company. I find the vast majority actually want the organization to be successful but didn’t know how to help until someone connected all those dots to their job.

I really enjoyed Patty! She spoke my language! If you get a chance check her out!

T3 – Karen.ai – Cognitive Recruiting Assistant

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This week on T3 I review the new recruiting artificial intelligence called Karen. Karen.ai provides candidate screening and candidate conversation service to improve brand interactions and improve your organization’s talent.

You’ve probably heard this technology called a chatbot. That simplifies the concept, but it also misses the mark on what technology like Karen actually does. Karen’s AI is built to read a resume of a candidate like a human would read a resume, not a computer, as best that’s possible.

Before analyzing what candidate is best for the job and then ranking them for your recruiting team, Karen first pulls in three buckets of organization information. Company baseline personality insight based on the Big 5 Personality inventory, the unstructured data of your job descriptions and conceptual inference (you need someone with Word docs experience, but the resume only show Google docs experience – the AI knows this is basically the same skill set).

The company and team personality insight ensures that Karen is just a simple algorithm to match skills to job descriptions, but truly looking at a level of organizational fit, as well as the normal skill assessment to the job requirements.

What I like about Karen.ai:

– Karen is basically an invisible layer of technology between your ATS and Recruiters that is constantly working 24/7 so when a candidate applies they will immediately begin your process and start engaging with you immediately.

– Karen ranks all those that apply and makes it easy for your recruiters to know who they should be spending time with first. No more FIFO (first in, first out) recruiting, no matter how many apply for the position. So, you have a better chance at raising the quality of your hires immediately.

– Karen’s AI will also engage every candidate via chat or SMS to measure their engagement level as well, so you know which candidates are the most engaged with your brand.

– Dashboard will show you what the AI is assessing and then you can add or remove certain factors and re-rank to get even more specific to what you’re looking for.

I’m a huge fan of recruiting AI when used in a way that doesn’t degrade your candidate experience and still allows you to take advantages of the effeciency gains you get with the technology. Karen helps your recruiters know which candidates they should be at least touching first, and helps your team go through high volume while still getting talent that will more closely match your organization.

If you’re not demoing recruiting AI you should be. Karen is a great one to start with, check it out!

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 – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Why Hasn’t Employee Referral Automation Caught on? #SHRMTalent

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I spoke at SHRM Talent this week. One of the best corporate recruiting conferences around. Many people don’t believe me when I tell them, but the content, speakers, and audience are really engaging.

TA Tech companies and vendors haven’t caught on yet to the new SHRM Talent. Most corporate TA pros I spoke to might not have million dollar budgets to spend, but every one of them had decisions making over tens and hundreds of thousands of TA budget dollars!

It’s becoming one of the favorite conferences because the audience of corporate TA pros and leaders are very open to wanting to learn and get better. Their questions are genuine and the truly want to learn how to improve recruiting and talent attraction in their organizations.

One topic that I bring up during my sessions as the most under-utilized TA technologies on the planet is employee referral automation. Jobvite created the space, others followed, like RolePoint, Zao, Gooodjob, etc. Still, main stream corporate TA tech in mass aren’t using employee referral automation. It’s one of the great mysteries in the TA space for me!

When you ask corporate TA pros and leaders what their top source for talent is, employee referrals will always come in the top 3. When you ask what is the highest quality of hires by source, employee referrals are almost always number one! When you ask how much money have you invested in increasing employee referrals, it’s almost always $0!

So, help me out, what am I missing?!

The SHRM Talent audience told me I wasn’t missing anything, they just simply didn’t know this technology was available to them! Jobvite was in the expo hall, but mainly they were selling ATS, not employee referral automation (huge miss, but I know ATS margins are bigger than employee referral automation!). 97% of my audience weren’t using this tech, but almost all had an interest in learning more.

It’s really a zero-budget buy for most companies! If you use this type of technology you can basically get rid of your referral bonus program and your numbers will still go up on employee referrals. So, there’s the money you need to buy the tech that will put your employee referral program on steroids!

Truly, the bonuses per referral are not needed! You will have to actually begin recognizing those who do refer in your company, but almost all employees will refer people to your organization without a monetary gain! Also, increasing bonuses does little to actually increase the number of referrals you get.

So, why isn’t the vast majority using this tech?

First, they aren’t being sold this technology. Most corporate TA pros and leaders buy because of what is being sold to them, not necessarily what they need.

Second, I’m guessing the companies that sell this tech are for the most part fairly weak at marketing because it seems like a pretty easy sell to the groups I have in front of me!

Third, most corporate TA pros and leaders just have no idea this tech is even on the market for them, and if they do, they believe it’s too expensive to purchase.

They’ll spend a million dollars on LinkedIn and Indeed, but not $50,000 on technology that gives them more hires of their highest quality source?! There’s a major disconnect here on both sides of the market, which means there’s a giant opportunity for a company with a great brand with great tech that can make it simple for corporate TA leaders.

 

 

T3 – 100 HR & TA Technologies You Need To See!

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My friend William Tincup over at Recruiting Daily put out his quarterly HR & TA Tech watch list recently and I wanted to share it with you. It’s a great list that covers technologies ranging from: Recruiting, sourcing, onboarding, LMS, HRIS, engagement, assessments, time and attendance, etc.

It’s a really great way to help keep us all on top of this fast-changing marketplace. William tells me there are over 20,000 HR and TA technologies worldwide available for HR and TA pros to buy. That’s overwhelming, and this market is growing!

So, start doing demos! One a month. Invest one hour a month in learning about one new piece of technology that is closest to what you do in HR and TA. It’s well worth the investment for your own development!

Here’s the list:

Name || Category || Twitter

Are there other technologies not on this list that people should know about? Hit me in the comments and let us all know!

T3 – Google Jumps Into the ATS Market

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So, Google announced last week that it is getting ready to launch an applicant tracking/job posting technology called Google Hire. Google already has a number of smaller technology companies in beta, but the so far very little has leaked out from anyone on the experience and capabilities.

Google does have an initial splash page up allowing people to log in, but you can only log in if you’re actually one of those beta users. Speculation right out of the gate was that Google would allow employers to see your search history, which Google quickly went public and debunked, but it makes you wonder how something so crazy even got out?

DramaFever is one of those initial beta Google Hire customers. When you go to apply for a job on their site it throws you into the Google Hire workflow and you get a hint of what the candidate experience will be using Google Hire as your ATS. Very clean, almost generic job posting:

The apply is also quick, easy, and generic as well:

Once you apply, you get an email verification link sent to you to continue on in the process. This is the same process and design so far for all the Google Hire beta users.

So, why would Google want to get into the ATS business?

They probably don’t. What they really want is to get into the Indeed business of collecting cash for posting your jobs and collecting candidates! Google Hire then becomes their engine to making this happen.

Google made news last year when they announced the Google Could Jobs API. For 99.9% of HR and TA Pros/Leaders, this was a none event announcement. For industry insiders, it was Google saying, just wait, we’re working on some things but we need this big foundational block put into place first!

In a very simple sense, Google Jobs API allows organizations to deliver a much more robust job search for candidates. CareerBuilder was one of the initial organizations to test this out and they are still in testing. Google hopes to be able to allow anyone to use it, opening the door to all kinds of niche job boards, etc.

Basically, we all think of Indeed as being the biggest Job Posting aggregator on the planet. In reality, it’s Google, but Google just never went out and built the framework to allow job seekers to easy search for jobs on Google versus going to places like Indeed, LinkedIn, CareerBuilder, etc.

All of that will be changing. We are not sure how, just yet, but Google Hire gives us some indication that Google might be going after some of those billions that companies like Indeed are making off employers, for delivering job seekers an inferior job search product to what Google is claiming to have.

Such and interesting space! Can’t wait to see where this goes.