Category Archives: HR Technology

Learn how to give the best IT interviews on the planet!

Posted on by
2
Tomorrow (Tuesday, April 18th at 2 pm ET) I’ll be talking IT Interviewing on a Recruiting Daily webinar sponsored by eTeki – Register Here! Most organizations suck at interviewing IT talent. I think there’s a better way!
It takes tech expertise to properly gauge tech competencies and experience and let’s face it most recruiters fall short in their capacity toTim Sackett eTeki
interview for the nuances of these specialized IT roles. You and I know this, but hiring managers struggle to understand why Talent Pros will never really be able to tell them if someone is a great coder or not!
Attend this webinar and I will show you a number of things you can start doing immediately to increase your ROI! Plus, you’ll hear from real talent leaders in the field who have already put a number of these ideas into place and hear about the success and struggles they had in launching this process.

Learning Objectives:

  1. Learn five ways successful companies are doing technical interviews differently to choose great talent.
  2. Design a technical interview process that attracts talent, and learn the things that turn off technical talent in an interview.
  3. Develop an interview strategy for technical talent that will increase your hiring manager satisfaction.

 

This webinar is designed to show any Recruiter and Recruiting leader (Corporate, Agency, RPO) a better way to interview technical talent, increase hiring manager/client satisfaction, and increase the influence and expertise your team brings to your organization.

The Secret Sauce to Landing Your Dream Job? Apply Less!

Posted on by
1

Robert Combs over at Fast Company had a brilliant article recently, and if you’re in Recruiting or HR, it’s a must read! If you’re looking for a job, it’s also a must read!

Here was Robert’s concept. A.I. (robots) are running the world. It’s the biggest innovation to come into recruiting since Big Data (wait, didn’t we always have data…). If robots can run the apply process and find you where ever you are, Robert thought, why not use a robot to apply to jobs for him. Let the robots fight it out!

So, that’s what he did, he built a robot to go out and find jobs he would want, apply to those jobs, and then even follow up! He applied to hundreds of jobs in minutes! It got a bit out of control:

So I started slowly casting about for new challenges, initially by applying (perhaps naively) to openings at well-known tech companies like Google, Slack, Facebook, and Squarespace.

Two things quickly became clear to me:

  1. I’m up against leaders in their field, so my resume doesn’t always jump to the top of the pile.
  2. Robots read every application.

The robots are “applicant tracking systems” (ATS), commonly used tools for sorting job applications. They automatically filter out candidates based on keywords, skills, former employers, years of experience, schools attended, and the like.

As soon as I realized I was going up against robots, I decided to turn the tables–and built my own….I fired it up I accidentally applied to about 1,300 jobs in the Midwest during the time it took me to get a cup of coffee across the street. I live in New York City and had no plans to relocate, so I quickly shut it down until I could release a new version.

After several iterations and a few embarrassing hiccups, I settled on version 5.0, which applied to 538 jobs over about a three-month period.

So, what did Robert find out? Here were his biggest learnings:

1. Even your ATS robots suck at giving responses! Around 70% of his applications never got a response!

2. Only 4% of 538 jobs he applied for, got a personal email response from a recruiter.

3. Only about 6% of your hires come from people applying to your career site.

Robert found out what most of us in the business already know. Applying to jobs, doesn’t actually work. Yet, we spend so much time, energy, and resources building these great tech stacks and apply processes for just his!

So, what works?

Turns out about 85% of jobs are filled by good old fashion networking. You know someone, who knows someone, who has a friend, who’s cousin works in the department you really want to work for.

“Out-of-the-box hires rarely happen through LinkedIn (or any job board, career site) applications. They happen when someone influential meets a really interesting person and says, ‘Let’s create a position for you.’”

I disagree somewhat with the above quote. I’ve worked in large corporate TA shops, we just didn’t run around all willy-nilly creating jobs for really cool, smart people! We did many times find really great people and then stick them into a job we already had open, and usually the reason we found the person was someone who knew the job was open referred the person to us.

My advice to job seekers is always the same. Stop applying to jobs, start networking with every person you have a possible shred of connection with and let them know you’re looking for a position, what position you prefer, what position you would take, and where in the world you would work.

Every minute you spend networking is a thousand times better than every minute you spend online applying for jobs. Robert just proved this!

T3 – @GlintInc – Introducing Narrative Intelligence

Posted on by
Reply

Last week I had this idea about how A.I.’s real value would be in HR and not in Recruiting. Most A.I. technology right now in the market is focused on TA and it’s easy to see the productivity and efficiency gains from A.I. in the TA space. It’s not as to see the same advantages in HR, but my theory is, very soon, we’ll see the advantages as A.I.

It’s not as to see the same advantages in HR, but my theory is, very soon, we’ll see the advantages of A.I. using Natural Language Processing (NLP) in analyzing your employee’s unstructured communication data. What?! Big brother will start listening to everything being said and then give you predictions on what might happen, and what you should probably do about it.

After I wrote that post the folks at Glint saw it and send a message saying, “Hey, we’re basically doing that now with Narrative Intelligence!” If you don’t know Glint, they are an enterprise level (1,000 employees and above) People Success Platform. Basically, Glint’s technology helps organizations drive higher levels of employee engagement through prescriptive analytics.

Ton’s of Reader’s Digest Word Power words in today’s post. “Prescriptive Analytics” = giving you advice on next steps based on what the data is telling you will probably happen. So, engagement is trending lower in your sales team, here is an action plan for the Sales Manager to do to help turn that trend around. Pretty cool stuff. Not only does Glint help you raise engagement, but they are also helping you develop your managers into better leaders.

The real reason for today’s post was to talk about Glint’s Narrative Intelligence which is a new product in their platform. Narrative Intelligence basically pulls the ‘real’ story out of what’s going on in your organization by analyzing the unstructured data comments from your employee surveys. This comment data gives you a much richer picture of what truly is going in your organization.

Glint’s NI then takes this unstructured data and puts it through their natural language processing engine, specifically designed for employee feedback data, and presents you with this awesome story around what your employees are actually talking about. From this data, you can then begin to write that next chapter of the story, whereas in most organizations now, we just wait around to see what happens in the next episode!

What I really like about Glint’s technology is it’s one more example of how technology is helping HR shape itself into a strategic partner of our organizations. To know what’s happening in your organization is one level. To link what’s happening to specific actions that will have a positive impact is strategic. It’s what our leaders have wanted from HR forever and it’s now a reality.

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

The Realities of Using a Full-Fledged Modern Day Talent Acquisition Platform

Posted on by
4

I’m in a pretty cool place in life right now. Great job, great family, every day I get to work and talk with awesome, smart people, every week I get to see the most awesome technology on the planet. Like the t-shirt says, “Life is Good!”

If you’re a TA leader for a big shop, I’m guessing my life is better than yours! Why do I know this? Because the technology you’re being asked to use has completely passed you by on the side of the highway!

Remember that first time when you’re Mom or Dad asked you to ‘fix’ the clock on the VCR? It was simple, but they had no idea on how to set the VCR clock, so it would blink “12:00” for weeks until you decided to fix it. Most TA leaders, right now today, are looking at that clock on the VCR blinking!

The reality of using a full-fledged modern day Talent Acquisition Platform is:

– You’re not ready for it.

– It’s like you’ll be taught how to walk all over again.

– It’s like you’ll be learning a new language.

– It will be the single most valuable thing you’ll ever do in your TA career.

– You’ll be forced to teach your entire leadership something completely new.

– Most vendors selling these solutions, don’t have the capability to actually teach you and your team how to effectively use it.

– You and your team aren’t ready to unlearn all of your broken, bad habits to use it effectively.

– You’re going to have to admit to yourself and others, you really don’t know what you’re doing.

That last one is hard. Because we do know what we’re doing, damn it! But, this is where you have to remember the blinking VCR clock. You don’t, but you can learn!

A full end to end TA platform will change the way you, your team, and your organization actually attract, recruit, and onboard talent. Gone, completely, will be Post and Pray. So, will be those employees who think this is what recruiting is.

It’s not overly difficult to learn these new skills. It is uncomfortable because it’s a BIG change from what you’re actually doing today and calling it recruiting. You’re not recruiting. You’re administering a recruiting process. Those are different things. Your organization actually needs you, desperately, to attract, retain, and develop great talent.

Any monkey can collect resumes and pass them onto a hiring manager. In fact, you don’t even have to pay an admin $12 per hour to do that, I can find you an A.I. bot that can do that for pennies on the dollar.

The really, really cool part about this is you’ll completely change your career path by doing this! Once you implement and transform your organization’s recruiting practices using technology, you’ll have other organizations lined up at your door begging you to do the same for them!

The real reality is you have a choice to make. Fix the blinking clock, or keep ignoring it. What kind of TA leader are you?

The real value of A.I. is in HR, not Recruiting!

Posted on by
2

What if you could catch and stop sexual harassment in the workplace before it got started? What about other types of violence, embezzlement, etc.? What if you could determine when disengagement was starting with an employee and address it immediately?

All those would be pretty powerful advantages to HR and leadership, don’t you think!?

Google is beginning to use A.I. and machine learning to find objectional content on the internet. Now, the main reason for this is a little less moral than it sounds. Google was losing advertisers because many ads they were paying for were showing up on content that was not something they would want to be associated with their brand.

Seems like most solutions to problems happen because of money…

Recently, in HR, we’ve seen some really high-profile cases of harassment come to light with Uber, Tesla, etc. These cases have had a major impact to both the consumer brand and especially to the employer brand of these organizations. While those of us who work in HR understand this is far too often occurrence, it seems like little gets done to stop it.

Say hello to my little friend!

Why couldn’t an artificial intelligence technology tell me when some creepy employee is sending inappropriate things to other coworkers, customers, vendors, etc.? What about when an employee uses threatening language to intimidate another employee? Wouldn’t you want to know about that? I think Mary just told Jennifer she’s ‘done’ and wants ‘out’ and she needs to get her resume together.

Would love to know that, so I can find out how to talk Mary off the ledge!

Say hello to Big Brother!

Yikes, right!? But, this is probably closer to reality than we realize and it will probably actually help our work environments a ton! Our employees communicate in a number of ways: email (primarily), messaging, voice, various tech platforms we use to do our daily work, etc. Almost all of which have unstructured data that A.I. could analyze and make predictions.

Some of those predictions could help you as an organization reduce risk. Tim seems to be coming very close to crossing a line with Mary, maybe we should give him a little reminder about our policy on harassment in the workplace. Bam! A nice, neat, little piece of content automatically hits Tim’s inbox and a message gets sent to his boss to stop by and remind Tim about what’s appropriate behavior in the workplace.

Some might help the organization retain their talent. There’s already predictive analytic solutions in play that predict employee turnover, add in machine learning, and A.I. will begin to show you employee who might turn before they’ve even thought of turning!

This might seem all futuristic, but the technology is really already here. Eventually, someone will launch a solution that does all of the stuff mentioned above, I’m quite certain someone already has this in development. It will only take one company to put it in place and the dominos will fall.

What you get paid to do at work is owned by your employer. We’ve all known this for a long time. What we never realized was that eventually, technology would actually hold us to not only the work but the behaviors as well!

Would you want to work in an environment where every move you made was measured by A.I.? I’m guessing not, but I’m also guessing it won’t be a choice!

T3 – @SymphonyTalent_ Are you ready to recruit like a marketer?

Posted on by
1

This week on T3 I review the end to end TA technology platform Symphony Talent. You may not have heard of Symphony Talent, but I’m sure you will recognize many of the organizations that came together to build this platform.

The dream child of Hodes (one of the top employment ad agencies in the world) who went out and bought a bunch of really good TA tech (SkillCheck, Findly, HRLogix, Innovantage, QUEsocial, and others) put it all under the same ultra-modern UI to create something in talent acquisition no one on the market can claim to have.

Symphony Talent is two talent acquisition platforms in one. M-Cloud, an artificial intelligence-based media buying platform for employers, and X-Cloud, an omni-channel experience platform for candidates, employers, and employees. X-Cloud is the ATS, CRM, branding side of the platform.

So, what the heck does it do? 

I found myself asking what doesn’t it do?! The reality is, it might be the first end to end TA platform that actually can replace almost all of your TA Tech stack, or the closest anyone has come to this point. It’s on a different planet from tech perspective than most enterprise level TA platforms.

Super smart move from the Hodes side of the business. Organizations spend a ton of money with Hodes to build out an employment brand, advertising campaigns, etc. Only to then take it back to inferior technology and watch all of that money go down the drain. Hodes built a platform that allows organizations to go after candidates like consumers.

What do I like about Symphony Talent: 

– Built in Programmatic Job On-demand Ad buying in an A.I model. This alone would have me loving it, but being built into the ATS and CRM is really a few years ahead of where the competition is in this space. This makes programmatic super simple for TA and it’s tied directly into the posting of your jobs.

– Candidate experience was taken to the next level where candidates can check-in and track their own progress through the apply process, and like a consumer site, they can come and go and the system instantly recognizes them and takes the back to where they left off.

– Predictive analytics shows recruiters how long it will take them to fill a job (based on up to the minute market conditions) as soon as it’s posted.

– The User Interface in the X-Cloud portion of Symphony is unlike any other ATS-like product on the market. Ultra-modern, easy to use, and intuitive.

– Built in CRM functionality is not light by any means. Great candidate personalization for returners built on machine learning that will continue to direct the right content and messaging as the candidate evolves their experience with you.

Symphony Talent is really packed with functionality on the X-Cloud side of the platform, but the media buy side, M-Cloud, is just a game changer! The other side of this is Symphony Talent doesn’t have to be an all or nothing platform. They’ve already integrated with iCims, Taleo, Silkroad, etc. So, you can pick the parts you really like, that you’re current stack is lacking.

Built for Mid to Enterprise-sized organizations, but I can see some real tech-savvy SMB’s with cash that will want to get their hands on this, especially in really tough candidate driven markets. Hodes has strength in healthcare, so I would imagine this would blow almost any TA Tech stack out of the water in that industry for those organizations struggling to hire nurses and other healthcare pros.

A real must see demo if you’re in the 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 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

In Human vs. Machine – You need some Machines on your team!

Posted on by
1

The Spring SourceCon Conference recently took place in San Diego. If you don’t know what SourceCon is, it’s basically the one place in the world sourcing pros get together to share the secret sauce!

I’ve never been invited, but I hear it’s really awesome. (The “I’ve never been invited” is somewhat of an inside joke as I know I don’t have to be invited to attend if I want to go!)

SourceCon is your NOT normal talent acquisition, recruiting type conference. You just don’t show up and go to lame sessions, then go home. They’ve added a ton of hands-on learning, so when you go home, you actually got better for coming.

One thing the SourceCon folks do is also hold an annual contest called the Grandmaster Challenge. The competition pits anyone who’s interested against each other in a sourcing challenge to see who can solve the issues the fastest and most accurate.

This year the challenge was tabbed Man vs. Machine as SourceCon decided to pit sourcing technology against real-life sourcers to see who’s better. The technology chosen to compete against the humans was Brilent. Brilent is a candidate matching tool that works with your ATS (I wrote about them in May 2016 – I really like their tech!).

The basic challenge presented was this:

  1. Download a folder of three jobs: Ground Service Agent, Systems Administrator, and Product Manager. The jobs were real but altered from when they were originally posted.
  2. Download a trove of over 5,500 resumes.
  3. Search thousands of resumes and find the people who were hired, interviewed and sourced for the roles; by an undisclosed company.
  4. Points were given when the right resumes were found and classified correctly. (i.e. This person was hired. This individual was interviewed. Et cetera.) Points were also given if contestants found the right resume but categorized it incorrectly.

Brilent uploaded the resumes and did the analysis and returned the results in 3.2 seconds! Yes, that’s seconds with an “S”! The human participants took anywhere from 4-25 hours of research to produce their results.

The machine, Brilent, ended up getting third place because the platform got some of the candidates right, but not all. Humans took first and second, for finding virtually the same list, but a little more accurate.

For my money, the machine won by a landslide!

The reality is, we’re talking about sourcing and new hires. None of us really know who is actually going to be best performers once they’re hired, so I’m not even sure just because the humans were able to find the actual hires made, that those hires will even be any good!

In 3.2 freaking seconds, the machine gave me a really solid list to work from. Or I could have waited for hours, for almost the same list. Machine – 1, Humans – 0.

I just can’t even imagine this is a conversation about who really won here. We won. We won because we can now take a tedious skill of screening and get almost the same results in a fraction of the time. This allows us to have more capacity to increase talent pools, attract higher level talent, build a stronger brand, etc.

I love having great sourcing pros on my team, but I also need to get me a couple of those machines!

T3 – @Ideal – A.I. for Recruiting

Posted on by
1

This week on T3 I take a look at recruiting artificial intelligence solution Ideal. Ideal uses artificial intelligence to screen resumes, uncover past applicants for new roles and initiate candidate outreach.

All of this is done seamlessly within your existing ATS. So, Ideal is a technology solution that you actually don’t see. It runs in the background and automatically ranks and contacts candidates to begin the screen process with your team doing nothing.

Ideal will automate low-level recruiting tasks, increasing the capacity of your recruiting team to work on more strategic projects. Every single applicant, for every single position, gets analyzed no matter where they come into the recruiting process. Ideal’s artificial intelligence will then quickly move top candidates through the recruiting funnel.

What I like about Ideal? 

– Ideal works with new applicants and automatically will rediscover old applicants within your ATS database and also reach out to those candidates for positions you post where there might be a fit. This will automatically increase the value of your ATS.

– Having A.I. do initial screen, score, and reach out will eliminate a ton of initial selection bias that your own team isn’t even aware they have, which will result in many candidates making to the next level of your process that would never have before.

– Every single applicant is auto-scored from A to D. “A” candidates automatically get contacted and screened by Ideal, while B through D level candidates might get recommended for jobs you have that are a closer fit for their skill set. If the recruiting team needs to go beyond A candidates, they can have Ideal screen next level candidates they select.

– This tech is invisible to your team. No additional sign-on, no additional training, it’s fully integrated into your ATS and works with your current technology and process. There is a system dashboard for the TA leader so you can see the data behind the scenes to ensure it’s working as it should.

I think solutions like Ideal are how most organizations are going to test the A.I. waters in HR and TA technology. If you are doing high volume hiring, Ideal is almost a must try! The cost of the solution is dependent on your candidate volume, but even for enterprise players, it seemed very reasonable.

I would definitely demo and speak to the Ideal team about how this solution could impact your hiring and process. I think TA leaders at all sized organizations will find this pretty attractive and want to do some testing with it!

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

What if you could predict all of your Turnover? #UltiConnect @UltimateHCM

Posted on by
4

Out at Ultimate Software’s Conference, this week and one of the cool features that Ultimate has within UltiPro is Retention Predictor. Ultimate has done a really good job at going out and buying some great data analytics companies and implementing that tech and talent into their organization.

So, what’s Retention Prediction? 

The concept is that if you analyze enough of your employee’s data points you’ll see trends that show if someone is highly likely to leave your organization as a voluntary term. As an organization, we really want and need to know data this to help retain our best performers.

UltiPro delivers a ‘score’ of each of your employees showing if someone is a flight risk based on their level of performance, so that you can filter, if you want, by high performers to low performers. The notion being, you definitely want to ‘save’ your high performers.

So, how do you save an employee that shows up as a High Risk? 

UltiPro will then deliver to the manager of the employee at risk specific “Leadership Actions”. These actions are recommendations of things the manager can do to help retain this employee. Currently, UltiPro has over 50 actions built into the system, and you can build in your own actions if you want for specific things you might want to do in your organization.

Does this really work? 

I spoke with multiple Ultimate Software customers who raved about how this one feature has literally changed their entire culture! One great example is Gregg Paulk, an executive at Anderson Center for Autism in New York.

Anderson had high turnover of their support staff, and also had an issue of lack of quality leadership training. Before they began using UltiPro’s Retention Predictor they had 30% turnover. In the two years since turning on the prediction feature, they’ve lowered their turnover to 15%! That’s giant! That’s real money that can now be used in other ways to better their organization and increase student care.

Anderson also saw higher engagement with their managers because they were now being able to deliver each manager specific actions to help them retain their staff, and ultimately help them become better managers of their team.

Paulk said one of the challenges in implementing anything like this is always the potential of false positives. One of your employees comes up a high flight risk, but in reality, they’re not. Yes, this can happen and will happen.

He said the key for them was to get their managers to understand how data prediction works. Yes, we’ll have a few false positives, but the majority of the data will be highly accurate and the percentage that is correct is so high, you can’t ignore what the predictions are telling your team.

What I really like about this feature is it puts HR into an immediate strategic position within the organization. It helps to make your entire team proactive and stop reacting to turnover as it happens. Your organization can finally become proactive in developing your team and leaders, which will naturally just help you drive a more dynamic culture.

What’s next? 

Ultimate Software is not just sitting on this, their data team is off the charts brilliant and they’re already working on their next generation product called “Perception” that will add in even more unstructured data into the algorithm and make these predictions more accurate, faster.

Check it out. I was super impressed by the accuaracy and real-life outcomes of this. It’s definitely a game changer for organizations.

Every Moment Matters! #UltiConnect @UltimateHCM

Posted on by
Reply

So, I’m out at the Ultimate Software Conference this week and they had one of the most unique keynotes, Will Smith! Yeah, that Will Smith! Fresh Prince, I Am Legend, Hancock, Men In Black, Bad Boy himself!

At HR Conferences you don’t normally get big time Hollywood. You usually get a dude who’s really good looking, who wrote a book, telling motivational stories. The HR ladies tend to like those types. Well, they really liked Will! I really liked Will!

For starters, Will Smith is an entertainer. He immediately grabbed the audience and didn’t let go. He knows how to control and audience, tell great stories, be funny, and hit on big themes that make you think and leave you feeling motivated. That’s what a great keynote can do.

My favorite story he told was about his father dying. His father was told he had three months to live and he ended up living about six months. Will said after they got to three months every single moment felt like it really could be the last moment.

Because of this, hellos became special, goodbyes tended to linger longer, embraces were more special. It went on like that for another three months, and it made Will realize that all moments with those that you love and care about, should be moments like this because we don’t know if that will be the last moment.

On the last day of his dad’s life, Will was in LA and his dad was back in Philly. Will’s dad called him on Facetime and told him he thought this was it, that this was going to be his last day. Since he was going through this, it wasn’t a shock, but he stayed on the phone with him for a while.

Will said they went about fifteen minutes without saying anything to each other, just staring at each other, just spending this time together in the only way they could at that moment. Will’s sister was with her father in Philly and eventually broke the silence and said, “Well, dad, do you have anything you want to say to Will?”

His response was awesome and it brought down the house in classic Will Smith fashion:

My dad said, “Shit, anything I haven’t told this motherfucker isn’t going to make a difference now!”

He died that night. The crowd laughed. Will laughed. At the story, not at his dad dying!

The crowd laughed. Will laughed. At the story, not at his dad dying!

Most of us won’t be as lucky as Will to know you have that time and also in that time realize the importance of those moments. Our loved ones will die today, tomorrow, next week, and we won’t have any idea that it’s coming. We live with this reality.

We also live with a reality that we don’t have to let these moments go by. We can choose to not let moments go by and let people know how much we value them and care about them. For me, that was the real message Will was sharing.

You’ll have a bunch of moments today with people you care about. Try not to miss them!