Category Archives: HR Technology

Who Knew the World’s Best HR Technology Talks Happened in Cleveland!?

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That’s right kids! I’m coming to Believeland!

Wednesday, April 12th, from 4-6pm, I’ll be speaking at Cleveland SHRM’s – HR Technology SIG.

This will be a great night of learning and fun. It’s awesome that the HR and TA community leaders in Cleveland are putting this on, I can’t tell you how forward thinking that is for any city around the world, to the HR and TA pros and leaders in a great position to be successful! I follow my friend and HR technology guru, Steve Boese, who came out in February to speak at SIG!

The event will be held at Great Lakes Science Center in Cleveland, a great venue, and you will receive HRCI and SHRM credit for attending.

What’s the talk?

“See What’s Next! Be What’s Next! The Future of HR, TA, and Technology” 

Where I’ll present on where I see the future of HR and TA going over the next few years from a practical perspective of “what is the stuff you might actually do in your own shops!” I’ll also highlight a ton of tools that are new to the market and things you might want to take a look at, plus talk about some of the most innovative things happening in HR and TA, and if those are things you can do yourself!

If you attend this event, we’ve got 2 extra tickets (GREAT SEATS!) for that night to see Lebron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers play their last regular season home game with Me! Okay, you might not want to sit next to me, I tend to yell at the referees, a lot! But, if you do, I’ll buy you drink or popcorn and we can take selfies and try to get Lebron in on it!

It’s only $25 bucks to register for Cleveland SHRM members, $40 for non-members, and Students and Transitioning folks can get in for $15! Food and open bar at the event, so come on over and I’ll buy you a drink! Thanks to the great folks at Willory for sponsoring and taking me to see Lebron! (it’ll be my first time seeing him play live, I’m kind of excited!)

REGISTER FOR THE EVENT HERE!

Hope to see you in Cleveland! (boy, you don’t say often!)

T3 – Great Video as Part of Employment Brand and Beyond? @LaunchMediatv

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This week on T3 I present an option for doing great video for the majority of us. LaunchMedia.tv is a video production crew that has created a nice niche in the employment space. Employment branding, recruitment, safety and training videos, etc.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock you know video has exploded! Short-range video is consumed so much on all devices some days it seems like that’s all you watch. Especially if you’re in that 18-35 year old demographic. The Google machine even ranks videos higher in SEO than normal written content.

The problem with those highly produced great looking videos you see from the giants who are killing it, like GE (some of my favorite EB videos!), is that most of us have no idea of how to even get started, or believe we just can’t afford it! Sure, you don’t have GE money, but you can afford great video, which is why I wanted to make you aware of LaunchMedia.

What are some of the things you should plan on when deciding on producing employment related videos:

– Use a production company that understand employment branding and what your vision is for this product. Do you need to attract talent? Do you need to build brand awareness? What is the message you want to get out, and what is the audience?

– Plan on 8-12 weeks for a well-managed video project that is fully produced.

– You should be able to get a 2-3 minute really professional EB video for about $10-20,000. Sure, it won’t be the million dollar GE commercial, but it will be something that looks and sounds great, and something you can be proud of to present to candidates.

– Most PR and marketing firms don’t do their own video work and usually shop this out. So when your current firm say, ‘we can do that’, ask for some examples and see if they actually do the work themselves. The great thing about using a firm that specializes in video is they know what will get the most bang for the buck with your budget.

– Whatever company you use, make sure it’s delivered in a package that is instantly usable by you and your organization. The last thing you want, after spending some good money, is now trying to figure out how to get it on your site, share with your audience, etc.

The last thing you want to do is look cheap. Make sure the production quality matches your message. Also, spend some time around your distribution strategy. Too often, I see organizations spend time and resources to produce a great video, then it just sits in on their career site. Great video needs to be shared. You want it shared. You need to spend time thinking this through!

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

Honestly, You’re Not Disrupting Recruiting!

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So, there’s a ton of TA Technology on the market that is claiming to ‘disrupt’ recruiting. The recruiting they are claiming to disrupt is the agency recruiting game, for their ‘ever so thankful’ corporate talent acquisition ‘partners’. I’m going to name them, new ones crop up every day it seems, but I won’t give them the extra publicity. Here’s how their sales pitch goes:

“Hey, We’re disruptive! We’ll save you 70% off your cost per hire, just use our technology! Did we mention WE’RE DISRUPTIVE! Yeah!” 

That’s honestly the sales pitch. The reality is a little less flashy and entirely different story that real corporate talent acquisition leaders aren’t buying. Why? These disruptors are building their 70% sales pitch on agency fees as your cost per hire.

It works like this:

1. You can’t fill a position.

2. Agency can for 25% of the first-year salary on a $100k job.

3. Thus, your cost of hire is $25,000.

4. We’ll do it for $7,500!

The reality is, these tech companies are frauds. The true cost of hire for a direct hire for most organizations is less than $7,500. So, no one buys your disruptive pitch of savings. What you’re truly selling is a ‘discount’, not a technology disruption, and your soft-math is all wrong. Your ‘technology’ is basically an automated version of what an agency does (but less effective), offered at a discount.

To be fair, if you have no ability to recruit internally and you use a ton of agencies and have a huge agency spend, this might help you save some money. But, it’s a band-aid for a bullet wound, not a disruptive solution.

Discounting is a crappy world to compete in because you can never get out it. Once someone gets a discount, they always want a discount or more of discount. If discounting is your business model, you need to get out of that business.  Take a look at every single retail organization that has ever gone out of business. It started with discounting.

Okay, I’ll give you that you’re disrupting bad recruiting. I’ll give you that. But, guess what, no corporate TA leader I know likes the awful Indian-Call-Center recruiting models anyway. It’s the lowest common denominator in the recruiting world. We don’t need more of that, we need less of that.

Do you really want to disrupt recruiting?

Help TA leaders truly become better in understanding the technology that will actually help them hire noticeably better talent. Don’t just take advantage of them a little less the next company. Help them build a stack and a model where they don’t have to rely on outside organizations to do the hiring for them.

There’s some really good TA Tech on the market doing this. That’s the disruptive stuff – folks like Lever, Clinch, Smashfly, HireVue, Outmatch, Role Point, Greenhouse, Textio, Jobvite, Text Recruit, etc. (plus a ton of others I reviewed on my weekly  T3 tech blog series)

These organizations aren’t trying to take advantage of your ability not to be able to hire the talent you need, they’re trying to partner with you to make you self-sufficient. That’s disruption!

So, yeah, I run an agency. A post like this probably doesn’t help my business, but I can’t stand to see these upstarts try to sell themselves as technology when they’re not. Also, I do contract work, I don’t want your direct openings! I want your contingent openings!

Happy recruiting this week!

T3 – Talent Matching Technology – @WorkFountain

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This week on T3 I review the talent matching technology WorkFountain. WorkFountain was born in Detroit, so you know I have to give some love to my Michigan-based TA Tech!

WorkFountain is a dynamic matching system that instantly connects job seekers and employers based solely on skills, interests, and requirements. Using correlated question-sets and matching algorithms, WorkFountain sifts through thousands of employers and candidates to deliver the best possible matches in seconds.

Basically, it’s a different kind of a job board. You post your jobs and criteria for the job and organizational fit. Candidates fill out a questionnaire of what they are looking for. WorkFountain then matches you with the candidates the best match what you need and what they want. The system provides curated job matching to ensure that employers are connected to the most qualified candidates while candidates get matched to employers and opportunities that best fit their unique profiles.

What I liked about WorkFountain: 

– You can invite hiring managers directly from the system to quickly answer a set of ‘fit’ and ‘skill’ based desires to best match exactly what they’re looking for. Talent Acquisition can also ‘flag’ certain questions prior to sending to the hiring manager for those questions you don’t want them to answer, so they won’t even see them.

– WorkFountain automatically posts to hundreds of free job boards, but also you can post to your paid job boards through WorkFountain as well. This is nice because it allows you to post everywhere from one platform.

– The WorkFountain platform works behind the scenes to get applicants to answer your fit questionnaire by mimicking a real TA user when sending automated responses at varied times after applying, so the candidate feels like it’s a real person asking them to do this. The platform has a 97% completion rate!

– If WorkFountain finds a ‘match’ they set up a speed date introduction to both of the candidate and the employer. Both sides have to say they’re interested to keep the process moving forward.

– You can reply directly to candidates through the system via text and email.

– Recruiters get a candidate matching report that shows where each candidate matches on every aspect of what you’re looking for. So, they might not be an exact match, and the report will show you where the two of your differ. Also, WorkFountain generates EEOC audit reports, so you can ensure your postings are getting the results you desire.

I have to say WorkFountain’s algorithm of matching the candidates with your jobs is one of the more advanced technologies I’ve seen in the matching and fit space. It was originally built by an engineering firm working with the U.S. government for a project during the recession. The data on the back side from the work they’ve already done is very impressive.

High-value platform as you can post for $39 per posting for regular positions you have open and only $19 per posting for internships. Plus, if you get zero matches, they will refund your money. WorkFountain has some great relationships with colleges and universities, as this was an environment they first started in.

One thing I think is worth exploring with WorkFountain is using this technology on your own ATS database of candidates, and inviting those candidates to go through this matching technology. There’s a great chance you’ll find some great matches in your own database, you previously were unaware of.

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

New Recruitment Marketing Group on Facebook! #TransformRM

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Recruitment Marketing is one of the hottest concepts on the planet right now! We all have the exact same issue right now and that’s being able to attract the right talent to our organizations.

Employment branding took off a few years ago as we came out of the great recession and there are some great things that have been happening in that space. Recruitment marketing, though, is a bit different than employment branding.

What’s the difference between Recruitment Marketing (RM) and Employment Branding (EB)?

  1. EB is who your are. RM is your complete message you want to get in front of candidates.
  2. EB comes first. RM comes next, and it’s all the technology and process it takes to get that message in front of candidates in a space and a time when they’re ready to consume that message.
  3. You own your RM. You don’t always own your brand. Many times outside influences have part ownership of your brand, but they’ll never own your RM!

This isn’t a competition between EB and RM, you actually need to do a great job at both! You also need to understand the differences between the to, as you could be great at one, and bad at the other.

I’m part of a group of Recruitment Marketing leaders who decided to get together in a space where we could all share our knowledge of RM. This group first came together last year at the recruitment marketing conference Transform in Boston.

We wanted to find a way to keep the conversation going all year, so we’ve decided to start the Facebook Group: Transform Recruitment Marketing Facebook Group.

Come join. It is a ‘closed’ group, just because we want to make sure it doesn’t turn into a spam group, but you can be assured myself and Shaunda Zilich (Employment Branding Leader at GE) will approve you to join the conversation!

What can you expect from this group?

– Connecting with great talent acquisition folks from around the world, willing to share their successes and their failures, helping us all get better at attracting the talent we need.

– Me sharing the latest and greatest things I find on the planet as it relates to the recruitment marketing world.

– A willingness from all the members to interact and share.

So, come check it out, we just launched this week. I can’t wait for the conversations to begin!

How to Create an Employee Handbook that Doesn’t Suck!

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At every single company I’ve ever worked for, at some point in my tenure, I’ve gotten yanked into helping in some way rewrite the employee handbook. I’m sure most HR pros have been in the same boat!

There’s really only two camps when it comes to employee handbooks:

Camp #1 – We’ve had the same employee handbook since the beginning of time. It’s written on stone tablets.

Camp #2 – We rewrite our employee handbook each year because it’s the most important document on the planet.

The problem is both camps usually write the employee handbook that reads like a welcome packet to prison! If you forced candidates to read your employee handbook before actually accepting a position with your company 99% would decline your offer!

Gusto, an SMB HRIS provider, recently sent me a copy of a 54-page guide they put together to help organizations develop an Employee Handbook that is actually readable and engaging for your employee. It’s a really solid resource and after reading it, I’ll also pass along some of my own advice on how you can make your Employee Handbook not Suck:

1. Tell Your Story. If you can write your employee handbook in story fashion, people will actually read it. I know, I know, that takes creativity and you’re in HR and not creative! Someone in your organization is a storyteller. Have them help on the story, and you help on all the details you need to make sure get into the handbook.

2. Give them the ‘why’. We put some really dumb rules in our handbook that don’t seem to make any sense. Just give them the why. It might not make the rule any less dumb, but at least they’ll know. “No sock Thursday is because our CEO has an ankle fetish. Yeah, we know it’s weird, but it is what it is.”

3. Engage a graphic designer. Color and pictures matter to the readability of your handbook. Make it look pretty and engaging and that might cover up some of the boredom of the legalize we are required to put in our employee handbooks.

4. Use your handbook to communicate your culture. Your real culture. Don’t have a funny and engaging handbook when you have a buttoned-up culture, it sends a mix message. Also, don’t write this boring legal document of a handbook if you have “No Pants Wednesdays” in your office. It doesn’t fit your culture!

Gusto is giving their Handbook How-To Guide out for free in a download. Check it out, it has some really good information. They didn’t pay me to say this, I just liked it and wanted to share (that shouldn’t stop them from sending me these new Nike LunarEpic Low Flyknit 2‘s in size 9 as a thank you!).

 

 

Should You Be Using Facebook Job Ads?

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If you haven’t heard Facebook has been rolling out some new job posting functionality on their site for your company’s Facebook page. Audra Knight, over at Workology put together a nice little “how-to”, so go check that out if you want to give it a try!

My question isn’t how do I post a job on Facebook, but should I be posting jobs on Facebook?

Facebook designed the feature because they felt like LinkedIn, and all those organizations that only use LinkedIn, were ignoring a giant percent of the working population. Hourly workers and actively seeking employment workers. That’s not LinkedIn’s specialty. They are unapologetically, white collar and a ‘professional network’, not a job board (so they keep saying).

Facebook looked at this and thought, “Hmmm, we’ve got a couple billion people using our ‘social’ network. A majority are hourly worker types who would like to see what great jobs are open, let’s build something for companies to connect with them”. They probably didn’t really sound like that. My guess is someone at FB said, “hey, you know we can make billions of dollars charging companies to post boost jobs to our members, right?”

So, now you can post your jobs on your Facebook page in a matter of minutes. For a few extra buck Facebook will let you pick certain demographics, like location and skills, and then they’ll make sure your job posting shows up in other Facebook members timeline, even those you have no connection to!

Who will get the best results from posting their jobs on Facebook?

  • High volume, low skill jobs is an easy target and those should produce well for you.
  • But, you should be doing some testing on most of your jobs!
  • Guess what? Not only are low paid, unskilled workers on FB, so are Engineers, IT pros, Accountants, Doctors, Nurses, Truck Drivers, Cops, Teachers, Executives, okay, basically everyone is on Facebook!
  • The other thing is most people will check into Facebook daily, most check in multiple times. Most people on LinkedIn, only check in once or twice per month.

Every organization should be testing this. It’s easy. It’s fairly cheap. It actually might work you. When you test you should be doing a few things:

  1. Use multiple Ads with different titles and wording. You need to see what catches someone’s eye and what doesn’t.
  2. Use different boost amounts on the same postings to see if that makes a difference. It should.
  3. If you want white collar, professional hires, test putting in the salary level in the title, “Process Engineer – $115K”. You can do this with success with hourly positions as well, “Electrical Technician $18.50/hr”. Every time I have A/B tested this, the postings with the salary in the title produced more results. Every time.

So, should you be using Facebook Job Ads? Yes.

T3 – Fastest Growing Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) on the Market

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I’m going to share some data today because it’s the single most requested question I get in my life, professionally. Here it is:

“Tim, what ATS do you use and what ATS do you recommend?”

This got me thinking that one day people will stop asking this question, but they don’t, every month, every year, for probably the past five years! I find that fascinating, the longevity and frequency of this question.

It tells me a few of things:

  1. ATS vendors have done an awful job at positioning themselves in the market (there are an estimated 1,200 ATS systems in the world!)
  2. An average ATS system could dominate the market with some exceptional marketing.
  3. TA Leaders can’t tell the difference between ATS systems.
  4. TA Leaders have no idea how many choices they actually have to choose from.

Interesting enough another talent acquisition software, an employment branding play, Ongig, actually runs a poll (The Top 70 ATSs) and publishes the results a few times per year around the ATS market. The poll has about 3,300 participants, most in the U.S., and it’s pretty straightforward – what ATS do you use?

From this poll, they can estimate market share and growth change. Here are some of the results:

Top ATS by Marketshare:

ATS 2015 Share
Taleo 36.43%
Homegrown 11.10%
Jobvite 8.58%
Kenexa – Brassring 7.56%
iCims 6.39%
ADP 4.79%
SAP-SuccessFactors 3.72%
PeopleFluent (Formerly PeopleClick) 2.52%
Silkroad 2.27%
iRecruitment/PeopleSoft 1.74%
Ultipro 1.67%
Greenhouse 1.67%
HRDepartment 1.28%
Newton Software 0.78%
Jobscore 0.50%
Lumesse 0.50%
WorkDay 0.46%
Lever 0.46%

Top ATS by % Growth:

ATS % Increase
WorkDay 570.52%
Kronos 467.36%
HRDepartment 209.47%
ApplicantPro 209.47%
ATS OnDemand 209.47%
eRecruiting 157.89%
Cornerstone OnDemand 157.89%
Lever 123.51%
PeopleAnswers 123.51%
Ultipro (UltimateHCM) 120.38%
ADP 111.00%
HireBridge 106.31%
PCRecruiter.com 106.31%
CATS ATS 106.31%
SmartSearch 106.31%
Greenhouse 102.02%

What do these two charts tell us? 

– Taleo is dominate in the market, but not growing at the rate of most others. Taleo got that growth not by being the best ATS but because Oracle bought them and then in large organizations IT forced TA to use Taleo. Welcome to corporate politics.

– Workday must be awesome because they’re growing so fast! See the first bullet! Workday is winning huge HRIS RFPs and corporate IT is twisting some arms in TA to use the Workday recruiting platform. Workday isn’t sold a separate ATS point solution, so the only way you use is it, is if you’re the core Workday HRIS product.

– Kronos – see the bullets above! They’re not an ATS, in terms of what people think of when you think of the best ATS technology.

– Homegrown systems are always big because the ATS industry does an awful job showing us why we should pay for something we can basically build on our own. Now, the best ATSs on the market are clearly light years ahead of anything you built in-house.

– In the market share list I can basically put them into three buckets: Bucket #1 – Giant Enterprise plays with average and below average ATS technology, Bucket #2 – Super cheap SMB and Mid-market plays, bought by TA leaders who don’t really know what they’re doing; Bucket #3 – True best of breed ATS technology that should be leading the market.

It’s somewhat sad that so many giant enterprise level HRIS systems are dominating the ATS market, but it speaks to how HR and Recruiting were lead ten years ago. “We need everything to talk to each other so we can get all the data!” Yeah, you can still get that with a best of breed solution and open APIs. Too many great organizations are settling for below average technology and vanilla solutions while failing in recruiting.

This data also speaks to the fact that most ATSs today are not bought, they’re sold.  TA leaders have no idea which one to select, what the differences are, and what their choices are. So, you sell them on the fact your ATS is ‘by far’ the best one and ‘unlike’ anything else on the market. The data says different. It says that basically all of these ATSs are the same, otherwise you would see a few grab most of the market.

HR and TA Technology You’ll Fall In Love With!

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Happy Valentine’s Day! I have a gift for you!

My friend, President of Recruiting Daily, and super brilliant HR Technologist, William Tincup puts together a quarterly list of HR and TA technology that he loves titled: 100+ HR and Recruiting Technologies Worth Watching. I get so many great ideas of companies off his list to demo, I wanted to share it with you, and if you’re smart, you’ll go follow William and get his updates to this list on a quarterly basis.

Some of these companies are well known, some I haven’t even heard about, but if William tells me to take a look, I take a look!

Here’s my recommendation. You know where your HR and TA tech stack are failing. Demo one company a month in your weak areas. These demos will show you a few things. First, you’ll see what’s possible. Second, you’ll get to see how other companies are doing the same thing, only better. Finally, you’ll probably get some ideas of how to do your stuff better, with or without the technology.

Either way, you win.

If you want to give me a gift, please send me a note once you demo’d one of these companies and let me know what you think! The sharing of information between peers is the real power.

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11 Proven Tips for Landing the Perfect HR Tech Solution

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It’s no wonder we all fall in love with technology: When we pick the right tools, they can save us a ton of time and headaches–and help us make our employees’ lives easier, too.

The catch, of course, is that getting approval for great tech can be a giant hurdle, what with the constant demand that HR do more while simultaneously cutting its budget. However, as HR tech expert Tim Sackett will tell you, there’s a realistic path to getting the HR tech solutions you desire without freaking out your CFO–and in this special Valentine’s Day webcast, he’ll show you the way.

Specifically, you’ll learn:

  • 3 ways to argue that HR tech should be a top priority within your organization.
  • 5 strategies for making your pitch to your executive teams.
  • 3 ways to ensure the HR tech solutions you choose won’t come back to haunt you.

The HR technology answers to your prayers are right around the corner! (Or, at the very least, you’re just a click away from getting some great, practical advice on how to boost your tech stack in 2017 … and beyond!)

This, free, webinar will run on February 14th (that’s right, the day of Love!) at 2 pm EST, just around that time in the day when you’ll need a nice big hug from me on Valentine’s Day!

So, if you’re lonely on Valentine’s Day, like I’ll be, come on over and we can commiserate together and geek out talking HR technology, since I’ll be hosting!

REGISTER HERE!