Category Archives: HR Technology

T3 – Life Guides

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This week on T3 I’m reviewing Employment Branding technology Life Guides.  Life Guides philosophy is that pretty much all candidates are Googling you to find out more about your company. In fact, there research shows that 73% of candidates report that they first Googled an employer before applying for a job.

Add in sites like Glassdoor and LinkedIn, and you can imagine that 100% of candidates are probably checking up on you in some sort of fashion. So, the big question is how do you get a transparent, real version of who you are out to potential candidates?  They won’t believe the marketing you put on your own career site, and you might not want them to listen to disgruntled employees on Yelp type site. This is where Life Guides fill in the blanks.

A Life Guide is information about certain position you choose in your company that can be displayed on your career sites, social media feeds, etc. The employees who actually in the job are the ones who fill out the information about the actual job, environment, interview tips, true career path, what it’s like working day to day, etc.  You can have individual Life Guides for the same job in different locations as well, knowing this sometimes changes based on location.

5 Things I really like about Life Guides:

1. Life Guides give your candidates some real information to help them decide if you’re the right fit for them, and if so, more information on how to actually succeed at getting the job.

2. Filling out Life Guides has a secondary benefit for your employees in the way of positive engagement.  When your employees write about their actual experiences, it gives them a positive outlook on their job, their company and their career.

3. Life Guides help you control your brand. Unlike other ‘transparent’ sites Life Guides does keep the control of the message in the hands of the organization and HR.  HR has edit capability. Is this fully transparent?  No, but I like that! I want transparent light! Like the aging movie star who uses fuzzy filters to make themselves look younger. I want the truth, just the best looking version of truth I can get!  To Life Guides credit, they recommend to their clients not to edit, but sometimes, especially for English as a second language employees, it might be necessary.

4.  There is some gamification components with badges and such to help encourage your employees to get active with Life Guides, and also use their Life Guides as a portfolio for their own career advancement.  Life Guides sees their client employees linking their Life Guide responses in their LinkedIn profiles.

5. It’s really inexpensive, and super easy to use, and takes just minutes to complete on both the HR end, and the employee end.

If you’re concerned about your employment brand and want to leverage your great employees to help share your true brand, give Life Guides a look.  The demo takes thirty minutes or less, and they can show you some great examples of how some of their current clients are using their solution.

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

The New “Radio” Job Ads

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Have you listened to an actual radio station lately?

I’m guessing you probably haven’t. You see radio, as a media consumption, is down to 12% of your total consumption, from 19% in 2009.  One big change during that same period, is that a large number are switching to from 25% in 2009 to 55% today. Also, listening off various Apps on your smartphones, in your car, have increased to 35% today. In 2009, it was under 5%!

We are changing the way we consume music and talk programs.  Radio used to be a solid medium to advertise jobs. Especially, those jobs in the service sector, skilled trades, etc.  The advantage of job advertising on the radio was that the radio station had great data on their demographic of listeners. Age, location, gender, income, etc.  This meant you could select fairly accurately who was listening to your job message.

Today, over 140 Million people are listening to Pandora and Spotify.

No longer when entering an office building do you hear the local ‘easy listening’ station, with about 20 minutes of commercials per hour.  Now, you usually hear some version of internet radio, and usually that means Pandora or Spotify.

So, what does this mean for HR and Talent pros who still want to advertise their jobs on radio?

I think there is a huge opportunity, depending on your hiring demographic, to test using Apps like Pandora and Spotify to market your job openings.

Think about the advantages you could get using internet radio for job postings:

– They have similar demographics as traditional radio, plus you can get more targeted by location. Pandora and Spotify take user information to target local advertising, for unpaid subscribers.  Let’s say you have a major competitor in Lincoln Park, IL.  You want to advertise in just that market, and those users who self-identified to be in that market.

– The advertising model is based on impressions, so you can say I have a $100 per day budget, and only want it to run for 5 days. The ads will stop once he limit is hit. If it’s not hit, let’s say your advertising in a small market, the money comes back to you.  So, this type of advertising is fairly inexpensive, as compared to traditional radio and other formats.

– The audience is going to skew millennial and younger.  For those looking to hire in that demo, it’s not a guarantee, but the numbers don’t lie.

Truth be told I haven’t done this, but I would love to hear from someone who has tried this medium for job advertising.  What I know is that there is a huge audience, and almost no employers are advertising in this space.  That means one of two things: 1. It’s ripe for some great, cheap hiring; 2. It’s a total bust.  I don’t think it’s a total bust.  I think it’s just something people haven’t thought of, yet.

Let me know if you try it, and what your results are!

It’s Always Someone’s First Time

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Sometimes I forget that many other HR and Talent pros aren’t as geeky about the profession as I am.  I like to break down the profession of HR on the following scale:

1. The 1%ers.  These are the people who really get HR and Talent. They are the ones who actually decide what the future of the profession will look like, because they are smarter than all of us.  I am not one of these folks. I love to hang out with these folks, and I’m happy to call some of them friends, but I’m sure I annoy them with my questions and trivial insights.

2. The First Ten. The top ten percent of our profession.  Most of these are folks are the people you see running big HR shops, HR thought leaders, pundits in the space.  Smart folks to be sure, but also folks are involved beyond just doing the job of HR. They are the foot soldiers of the one percenters. They carry the message. I like to think I’m here most days.

3. The Masses.  These are the good men and mostly women who do the work of HR and Talent Acquisition on a daily basis. These are SHRM members, who might go to a national conference, state conference and definitely attend local meetings every once in a while. They are in the trenches every day, fighting the good fight, trying to make organizations better through great people practices. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

4. The Why We Hate HR pros. These the bottom ten percent folks.  These are the HR and Talent pros that make the organization hate HR. They use their power in HR for bad, not good.  They take out their crappy, meaningless lives on unsuspecting employees.  These folks should be hung publicly. They work to bring down the entire function of HR as a whole, but think they actually do good HR work.

I try to remember this scale when I talk to HR and Talent pros around the world.  Most just want to do better, and most are seeing problems and issues for the first time.  It’s not that they “don’t get it”, they have never seen it.  It’s there first time.

Someone might be very experienced in HR and Talent, but seeing something for the first time, or have made the decision to try something they have never tried.  As a first ten it’s my role, I believe, in the industry to help those folks in any way I can to get better.  That helps the entire profession to get better.

So, what does this all mean?

I want to encourage HR and Talent pros to reach out.  If I can’t help you, I’ve got great friends who can.  The community will help you get better, if you really want to move your organization forward.  We love success stories!

At one point in time we were all first timers doing this HR and Talent thing.  We either learned through trial and error, or through someone helping us that had already experienced what we were trying to do.  The cool part about the community I hang out with, is we all remember our first time, and want to help you with yours.

T3 – @RocketLawyer

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This week on T3 I take a look at legal benefit provider Rocket Lawyer.  Rocket Lawyer allows your employees to manage, virtually, all of your legal needs online. Employees can create legal documents and legal forms instantly with safe & secure storage, e-signatures and lawyer review.

This is one of many fringe benefit options that an employer can pick up for their employees, like pet insurance, dry cleaning, free lunch, etc.  Some employees will find this service invaluable, and some will never find a use for it.  What I know is HR pros get way to many inquiries from our employees for legal advice and help!

While my employees might like a free lunch, the HR person in me really would like them to have another outlet for legal advice and services!

The one issue that I see happening constantly, and it’s only going to get worse based on demographics, is employees having to care for aging parents.  Rocket Lawyer can help your employees set up power of attorney, ask real lawyers in their state and area about their legal rights and advice in regards to dealing with their parents estates, etc.  This is one issue I just continue to hear from more and more employees on, where they need real legal advice, not my ‘legal’ HR advice!

Rocket Lawyer is not an EAP.  It’s a full blown legal technology that allows employees to take care of a ton of legal documentation on their own for no additional fees.  Handle landlord and rental contracts, Immigration and Visa issues, Pre-nuptial agreements, set up a will, etc. It’s self serve legal services, online, for a few dollars per month, per employee.

The other piece I like about Rocket Lawyer is that as an organization and HR the service is totally separate and confidential.  This takes the burden off you and your organization in dealing with your employees legal issues, but at the same time you are giving the professional support to help them take care of their business.

I was impressed. Great, easy to use interface.  Simple to set up documents online.  The service could easily save your employees thousands of dollars in basic legal fees.  Check them out, and get a demo.  Could be a great add to this years open enrollment plan!

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

T3- @Hirabl

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This week on T3 I take a look at the specialized staffing vendor software technology called Hirabl.  Hirabl is designed to help staffing companies catch revenue they missed because a client, or potential client, hired one of of the staffing vendors candidates, but never paid the fee. What!?!

Yep, it’s actually a fairly common occurrence in the staffing and talent acquisition game.  It can happen a number of ways. I don’t want my talent acquisition brother and sisters thinking I’m called them cheats.  99.9% of are completely above board, but .1% are sneaky!

Here’s how it all might go down:

An organization is contacted by a staffing company to help on an opening. A good staffing company will insist on a signed contract.  The get the signature and begin working.  The organization decides not to move forward with any of the staffing companies candidates. Both parties go on their way.  This happens a lot in the staffing world.

Fast forward six months down the road and the organization has the same opening.  They post the opening and a candidate comes into their ATS. The same candidate the staffing company presented six months prior.  By contract, that candidate is still ‘owned’ by the staffing firm. The organization hires the candidate, but never thinks about paying the staffing company. The staffing company has moved on and doesn’t even realize you hired their original candidate.  By contract the organization still owes the fee, but it’s rarely collected, because on one comes asking!

Hirabl has technology that goes out and through social profiles and your internal data, finds these circumstances.  You then get an alert, so you can go ‘remind’ the organization you presented the company to that they indeed owe you some money.  Depending on your volume, Hirabl, on average, is finding hundreds of thousands in lost fees.

You need a couple of things to make this successful: 1. Good, signed contracts; 2. Good data for them to search on. Most staffing companies, using a decent ATS, will have the data.  The contract question might be more difficult for some. In my organization we don’t do anything without signed contracts, so we would be good on that front as well.

I wanted to write about this for a couple of reasons. First, I know a lot of staffing folks who read my blog that can use this and get back some lost revenue. Second, I wanted those corporate talent acquisition folks to know that staffing vendors are getting more sophisticated, and some things that you might have gotten away with years ago, will soon be coming to an end.

Be careful signing a staffing contract. Usually, most staffing vendors are going to ‘own’ candidates they submit to you for at least twelve months.  That means if you hire one of those folks, even if that candidate came to you on their own, you contractually are liable for that fee. That’s why you should be signing a ton of contracts.  Find a few good firms. Work with them closely, and you won’t have any surprises.

You can better believe I’ll be trying Hirabl!  We do a ton of volume, and as much as I would like to think no client hired one of our folks, I know we’ll find some where it happened. Stay tuned!

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

Live from #SHRM15 – It’s a Wrap! Lessons Learned.

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The largest HR conference in the world, SHRM National 2015, concluded this week on Wednesday.  As I reflect back on the conference for 2015, I wanted to share some thoughts and learnings I got from the conference.

Here are my thoughts in no particular order:

1. The Expo is still overwhelming.  700+ vendors and some of the SHRM veterans tell me it’s smaller than in year past.  Who cares! It’s still freaking huge!  The funny part is these 700+ companies are truly only a fraction of sellers who are coming after HR and Talent Pros on a daily basis.  I’ve been coming to SHRM for years, and the size of the Expo never stops fascinating me.

2. SHRM is missing an Gigantic opportunity.  15,700 SHRM members attended the annual conference.  About 235,000 did not.  SHRM should be Streaming content live to the members who can’t make it.  Not all the content, just some of the content. Give those that can’t come a taste of what they’re missing.  Of course, some of the big keynotes won’t allow this, contractually. But, almost, 100% of us speaking for free, would welcome the streaming opportunity.  If SHRM streamed content from the national conference, they could get another 50,000 members watching remotely! I can’t tell even implore to you how bad of a missed opportunity this is for SHRM.

3. We are all not Zappos and Google.  I think SHRM speakers get this more than most.  99.9% of SHRM attendees work for organizations that have daily struggles in real HR and Talent problems.  The members come to get better, not to hear how the .1% do it better.  We don’t have Zappos culture, we don’t have Google’s resources, we are Real HR people, give us real HR examples.  I think in 2015, SHRM did a good job of getting speakers that were like the rest of us, and I appreciated that.

4. I’m confused how SHRM schedules speakers and space.  I wish SHRM would tell you up front what size room you would be speaking in. Kris Dunn and I had one of the smallest venues to speak in. Probably a room of 500 and it was packed. People sitting on the floor, standing, etc. My friend Mary Faulkner, who was really good BTW, from Denver Water, had a giant room that probably sat 2,000!  It was Mary’s first time speaking at SHRM, the room was too big. Ours was too small.  SHRM had to know this.  Socially, Kris and I could have gotten 500 people to show up in the parking lot and hear us do our thing.  We’ve worked for years to build an audience.  Why doesn’t SHRM take that into context?

5. HR Vendors Have Learned the ROI on big parties just isn’t there.  Back in the day at SHRM National, you could jump from party to party, every night of the conference.  Huge parties! Free food, drink and entertainment.  This year, there was only one, and it was the SHRM party with Jennifer Hudson. Great party, but it was the ONLY one!  There were private parties, dinners, etc. But nothing for the masses.  That was a change, and I don’t see it coming back.  Vendors are getting more specific and smarter with their spend. Why spend a couple of hundred grand on everyone, when you can spend $25K on a few that you’ll know will more than likely buy?  That’s just good marketing.

6. The SHRM App continues to get better.  Early in the conference I threw SHRM VP of Conference, Lisa Block, under the bus when I tweeted out what “idiot” password protected that SHRM App, which was a first.  I quickly had to eat crow when Lisa tweeted back and said she was the idiot and the reason why was because now the App had all the content of each speaker’s presentation.   Which was totally awesome!  And, I’m the idiot! Lisa did good. Can’t wait to see what she has up her sleeve next year.

I hope to see you all at SHRM in 2016 in D.C.!

 

 

 

Live from #SHRM15 – S#*t HR Tech Salespeople Say!

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That’s right SHRMies today is the day!  2 pm West Coast time, because you know it’s the best coast, Kris Dunn, and I will be dropping knowledge at SHRM 2015. Our presentation will give you the ins and outs of selecting your next HR and/or Talent technology. We’ll also be talking HR vendor negotiating and give you keep insight to getting the best deal you can!

Check us out, if you’re here.  If you’re not, here’s a little taste of what you’ll be missing:

S#*t HR Tech Salespeople Say and How to Translate It!

“This software/tool pays for itself!”

Yeah, and so does that travel insurance you bought to protect your vacation last year!  This always goes well with another line they throw into the mix, “you’ll save so much money, you’ll be able to put money back to the bottomline of the business”.  If you believe this I’ve got some great land to sell in the Everglades!

“Buy now, before the price goes up in September!”

Every single time I hear this from an HR Tech salesperson I hang-up or end the conversation.  This is the cheesiest, of cheeseball lines that a salesperson can use when negotiating.  If you’re giving me a price in June, but I need a couple of months to get this decision through the proper channels, the price better be the same in sixty days.

“We don’t have that yet, but it’s in a future release!”

You know what else is in a future release?  Their ability to use 3D printers to make real rock star candidates!  Sure that future release might be 100 years down the road, but technically they didn’t lie to you!  If the product you’re looking at doesn’t have the functionality you need now, and it’s critical for you to have it, you need to walk away.  Too many things happen in the tech industry to plan on ‘a future release’ to make the product work for you.

Want some more?!?

We’ve got plenty, stop on down to the live show and check us out.  Kris and I are like the movie Twins, with Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwartzneggar.  He’s the big one. I’m the good looking one! I think that’s how that movie went…

Anyway, it’ll be fun.  If you couldn’t make it to SHRM, hit me with an email, and I’ll make sure you get a copy of the slide deck for the presentation.

Live from #SHRM15 – Secret Sauce Recipes!

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Yeah, I know it’s Sunday and I normally don’t post on a Sunday, but I’m at the annual SHRM National Conference in Las Vegas and it starts today. The opening keynote speaker is Coach K, the Duke University head basketball coach.  I’m not a big fan.  His team beats my team way too often! So, he’ll be painful to listen to as I remember each defeat.

The SHRM expo floor also opens today with a big reception.  The SHRM expo is hard to describe.  Part flee market. Part carnival. Part car show. All HR and Talent.  Everyone who ever wants to sell stuff to HR is here.  They hand out pens, stress balls, mints, hand sanitizer, t shirts, frisbees, candy, basically, anything to get you to stop and talk to them.

My favorite free stuff that vendors give out is information!  You see, all of these vendors have clients that actually pay these vendors money to use their products and services.  These vendors know what others are doing to be successful.  If you take a few minutes they’ll gladly share the secret sauce recipes of all kinds of organizations!

We all want secret sauce recipes!

It’s probably the greatest weakness of HR and Talent Acquisition, in general, from industry to industry, is we suck at getting competitive data on what other organizations are doing in their HR and Talent shops.  We don’t network with our competition. We think if we share what we are doing, we’re somehow sharing national secrets. So, we fumble around through life, trying to figure it all out on our own.

That is why I spend most of my time at SHRM meeting with vendors.  I treat them like normal people, and they in turn give me great insight to what is working and not working in the world of HR and Talent.  I get smarter. I learn what I can take back to my own shop.  I gain some understanding of what the best organizations are doing that is successful. That’s valuable!

I don’t really care what Coach K does to cheat his way to national titles and stealing recruits.  What I care about is being on the cutting edge of what the best companies are doing to gain an advantage with their employees and getting the best talent.

Check me out on Pericope, where I’ll be live streaming during the conference!

*image credit to Gaping Void.

T3 – PeopleDoc

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This week on T3 I’m reviewing PeopleDoc.  PeopleDoc is a cloud-based HR Service Delivery and HR document management solutions.  What does that mean?

PeopleDoc has four components to what they do. First, they manage all of our employee and HR documents.  Almost like an HR system of record, but more focused on maintaining your documentation and compliance of all those docs.  Let’s say you had 5,000 employees spread over 500 locations. Maintaining your I9 compliance alone would be a nightmare. For example, PeopleDoc allows you within seconds to pull all 5,000, see which are not compliant and immediately communicate out to those individuals to correct it.

PeopleDoc also has an Employee Self-service Portal that allows your employees to get in and see all of their documentation. Make updates. See pay stubs, etc. This also acts a communication vehicle for the organization to communicate to employees anything they need, but also act as a compliance vehicle when you need to verify that each employee actually got and understood such communications.

Case management is another huge piece of the software that most companies desperately need.  This allows the organization to track every single question and problem coming into HR, and document how it was handled, auto assigns certain questions and problems to certain groups. Allows you pull metrics on almost anything related to the metadata of all these calls and emails coming in.  Need to know what location is your problem-child? Done. What about by manager or employee? Done. Show data around what your biggest issues are across the organization. This is a must have for employers working across multiple locations, where it’s hard to really understand what’s going on from location to location.

The last piece of PeopleDoc is new employee onboarding, with all electronic documents and electronic signatures.  Most companies are moving in this direction, and many ATS and Systems of Record are getting into the electronic onboarding business. PeopleDoc can easily do this for you as well, across any system you are currently working.

5 Things I like about PeopleDoc:

1. Part of their Employee Portal functionality is a blog like content developer that allows HR and Talent Acquisition to easily develop content and push it out to employees from with the system. You can even share videos. With this they also show you and your employees what the most popular content is.

2. Backend dashboard for HR to see the status of all your pending issues, who owns them, what’s been done since they’ve come in, and how long they’ve been sitting there.  With this function you can also ‘private’ message others in HR to explain what needs to be done, your opinion on the matter, etc., and it’s automatically documented as part of the record, but the employee doesn’t see it. You can also quickly message the employee on the answer to their issue, or what you are doing.

3. Acknowledgement forms that allow you to ensure CYA. It’s something we all have to do in HR. There are just certain things we need to be compliant on 100%, and it’s really hard to get there and maintain. PeopleDoc makes it so simple!

4. The data analytics you can pull are so powerful to show what HR is really working on, and where your HR capacity is going. This is particularly important for HR executives, to show the senior leaders of the organization what work is really done by HR on a day to day basis.  It might feel like all you do is put out fires all day long, but now you can actually prove that’s what you do!

5. eSignature capabilities. This sounds like a small thing, but if you don’t it, you spend so much time just tracking down signatures on documents. It’s a waste of HR and organizational resources to spend one minute on something like with today’s technology.

Check them, I did an hour demo and I ask a ton of questions, you could probably get through it faster.  Primarily, systems like this are designed for enterprise level clients, 2,000 employees and above. But, it really depends on how you are structured.  I can see this tool being invaluable to organizations that have multiple locations, even if you only have a few hundred employees.

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

T3 – Recruiter Sidekick

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Today on T3 I take a look at the talent acquisition tool Recruiter Sidekick. Recruiter Sidekick helps take care of one of the biggest issue we all face in Talent Acquisition, regardless whether or not you are agency or corporate.  We do a terrible job a mining our own internal databases!

Your internal database in the most underutilized resource that you have.  I could go into most corporate talent acquisition shops and fill 35-40% of their jobs from their own database, without ever having to use another tool to find and source candidates!  How do I know this?  I’ve done it.

This is the primary idea behind how Recruiter Sidekick was developed.  It runs like an extension to your ATS and acts like a referral engine from your own resume database.  It basically looks at every new requisition being put into your ATS and instantly begins searching, based on their own proprietary algorithm, and sends your recruiters a “top 10” list of candidates that most closely match your requisition, that are already in your database.

Think about this concept for a minute.  Two years ago you were hiring for a specialized position in your company.  You presented a number of candidates to your hiring manager.  She interviewed three, and eventually chose the one.  Two more years pass, and you’re growing, or you had someone on your team retire, and now you need to go hire another person in the same role.

Most organizations – like 99% – just do the same thing they’ve always done. They’ll take the new position, input it into their ATS, it will get posted to your career site, maybe a few others, and you’ll begin the process of looking at those candidates who are ‘now’ available.  But, what about those other two candidates two years ago who wanted to come work for you, but someone just beat them out.  Now they have two more years of experience. Maybe one of them is the ‘one’!

In a nutshell, this is what Recruiter Sidekick helps you with.  Recruiter Sidekick doesn’t let you forget you have unmined gold in your own database.  All of this for $10 per month, per recruiter.  It’s a niche piece of software to be sure, but one that almost all of us can use.  Heck! I’m paying an intern right now to just do this, mine our own internal database for talent!

Check them out. For the price you really can’t go wrong!

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.