Category Archives: Interview

9 Ways IBM (and the rest of us) Should Be Reinventing Talent @IBMWatsonTalent

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Amber Grewal is the Head of Global TA for IBM. It’s a big job. She posted on LinkedIn recently and gave her 9 ways IBM is reinventing recruiting. It’s pretty good. I’m not sure she wrote it. My experience is with giant corporations that they rarely would ever allow one person to post something so big on a social platform, but I’m sure she got in her ideas with some ‘corporate’ wordsmithing, either way, I liked it.

I like when large organizations put HR and TA leaders out in front of the brand. That’s always a risk. I like that IBM is taking that risk. They’re a big player in the HCM/TA tech space, and if you want my attention, give me less PR and marketing pitches, and more practitioner know-how!

Here is the infographic that “Amber” put together:

I’ll go through and give you my comments on all 9:

1. Upskill the Recruiting Function – Oh hell yes! The main problem with corporate recruiting is very little actual recruiting actually takes place. A whole lot of administering the recruiting function takes place. When need to flip those two things!

2. Horizontally Source – This is the Talent Pipeline. The problem with maintaining Talent Pipelines is they’re very expensive. I would rather see an On-demand sourcing function, than a pipeline function, but I like that Amber to be trying to marry the two in a ‘ready-now’ fashion.

3. Work Agile – I think what Amber is saying, and I love it, is not all requisitions are created equal. Some jobs we fill are more important and have more impact on the organization. Yes, yes they do! So, do those things first and do them fast, to maximize the impact!

4. Create a Recruiting-First Culture – This would be my #1. Talent Acquisition doesn’t own recruiting. Hiring managers own recruiting. I can help you staff your department, function, location, etc., but ultimately, you as the leader must own it. If you can get here in your organization, you’ll be great at talent acquisition. The next step is then getting every single employee to understand their role and significance in constantly attracting talent to the organization.

5. Trust-based Hiring – Yeah, I’ve got nothing. Honestly, this is a large, enterprise-level organizational issue. Here’s what happens. Manager A has a great talent, but that talent is being underutilized in their group. Manager B desperately needs the talent Manager A has. Manager A should, for the betterment of the organization, give up their talent to Manager B, but they don’t because they believe they won’t get the talent they need in return. This happens constantly in giant organizations, and it sucks.

6. Proactively Source – Maybe a good first step here would be to first ‘actually’ source! 😉 I like that Amber is focusing her team on certain things the organization needs. Hey, we suck at hiring females in tech roles! Cool, let’s make that a priority and specifically use a rifle approach to go out and get more females in tech roles. That’s just good recruiting. Might want to work with HR to ensure those females will feel like they actually belong as well, when they get into those roles or you’ll never get off that treadmill.

7. Cognitively Assist Candidates – Thanks for joining Marketing! This is where an LI post becomes a commercial and I would bet my entire salary (as a writer) that Amber didn’t actually have this on her original list! This one is supposed to be about Candidate Experience and I’m sure that’s what Amber had, but this is where Watson got shoved in. Not saying that’s bad, but it doesn’t sound like a practitioner put #7 together.

8. Personalize Offers – More Watson, but I will say personalization across the recruiting process is the key to reinventing recruiting. We all want to be recruited like a five star running back to Alabama. We want that experience. It doesn’t matter what role you get hired for, you want to feel like the most important person in the world to that company.

9. Interview with Cognitive – Okay, more Watson, but this is where I’m a huge fan! Very, very, very rarely will you go wrong when hiring smarter people who can process information faster. This doesn’t mean hiring only people who have a GPA of 3.5 or higher. There isn’t a ton of correlation between GPA and actual cognitive processing speed. Go find great cognitive pre-employment assessments and hire smart, it won’t let you down. Apparently, IBM has something like this called Watson or something, check it out.

Amber, thanks for putting this together! It’s a really strong plan for other TA leaders to follow!

 

Reference Checking for Employment is Dead!

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I remember when I started my first job in Talent Acquisition and HR, I totally believed checking references was going to lead me to better, higher quality hires. My HR university program practically drilled into me the belief that “past performance predicts future performance.”

For all, I knew those words were delivered on tablets from Moses himself!

After all, what better way is there to predict a candidate’s future success than to speak with individuals who knew this person the best?

And it’s not just anybody: It’s former managers or colleagues who have previously worked with this person – directly or indirectly – and have a deep understanding of how they have performed, and now telling me how they will perform in the future.

Grand design at its finest.

About 13 seconds into my HR career I started questioning this wisdom. Call me an HR atheist if you must, but something wasn’t adding up to me.

It was probably around the hundredth reference check when I started wondering either I was the best recruiter of all time and only find rock stars (which was mostly true) or this reference check thing is one giant scam!

Everyone knows the set up: The candidate wants the job, so they want to make sure they provide good references. The candidate provides three references that will tell HR the candidate walks on water. HR accepts them and actually goes through the process of calling these three perfect references.

When I find out that an organization still does reference checks, I love to ask this one question: When was the last time you didn’t hire someone based on their reference check?

Most organizations can’t come up with one example of this happening. We hire based on references 100% of the time.

Does that sound like a good system? Now, I’m asking you, when was the last time your organization didn’t hire a candidate based on their references?

If you can’t find an answer, or the answer is ‘never’, you need to stop checking references because it’s a big fat waste of time and resources! There’s no “HR law” that says you have to check references. Just stop it. It won’t change any of your hiring decisions.

NEW WAYS OF CHECKING REFERENCES THAT CHECKOUT

So, how should you do reference checks? Here are three ideas:

1. SOURCE YOUR OWN REFERENCES

Stop accepting references candidates give you. Instead, during the interview ask for names of their direct supervisors at every position they’ve had. Then call those companies and talk to those people. Even with HR telling everyone “we don’t give out references,” I’ve found you can engage in some meaningful conversations off the record.

2. AUTOMATE THE PROCESS

New reference checking technology asks questions in a way that doesn’t lead the reference to believe they are giving the person a ‘bad’ reference but just honestly telling what the person’s work preferences are. The information gathered will then tell you if the candidate is a good fit for your organization or a bad fit — but the reference has no idea.

3. USE FACT CHECKING SOFTWARE

Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. have made it so candidates who lie can get caught. There is technology being developed that allows organizations to fact-check a person’s background and verify if they are actually who they tell you they are. Estimates show that 53% of people lie on their resume. Technology makes it easy to find out who is.

Great Talent Acquisition and HR pros need to start questioning a process that is designed to push through 99.9% of hires. Catching less than .1% of hires isn’t better quality. It’s just flat out lazy.

Start thinking about what you can do to source better quality hires and your organization might just think you can walk on water.

Your turn: What are your tips for checking references?

It’s Really Hard to Judge People?

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I was out walking with my wife recently (that’s what middle-aged suburban people do, we walk, it makes us feel like we are less lazy and it gets us away from the kids so we can talk grown up) and she made this statement in a perfectly innocent way:

“It’s really hard to judge people.”

She said this to ‘me’!  I start laughing.  She realized what she said and started laughing.

It’s actually really, really easy to judge people!  I’m in HR and Recruiting, I’ve made a career out of judging people.

A candidate comes in with a tattoo on their face and immediately we think: prison, drugs, poor decision making, etc. We instantly judge.  It’s not that face-tattoo candidate can’t surprise us and be engaging and brilliant, etc. But before we even get to that point, we judge.  I know, I know, you don’t judge, it’s just me. Sorry for lumping you in with ‘me’!

What my wife was saying was correct.  It’s really hard to judge someone based on how little we actually know them.

People judge me all the time on my poor grammar skills.  I actually met a woman recently at a conference who said she knew me, use to read my stuff, but stopped because of my poor grammar in my writing.  We got to spend some time talking and she said she would begin reading again, that she had judged me too harshly and because I made errors in my writing assumed I wasn’t that intelligent.

I told her she was actually correct, I’m not intelligent, but that I have consciously not fixed my errors in writing (clearly at this point I could have hired an editor!). The errors are my face tattoo.

If you can’t see beyond my errors, we probably won’t be friends.  I’m not ‘writing errors, poor grammar guy”.  If you judge me as that, you’re missing out on some cool stuff and ideas I write about.

As a hiring manager and HR Pro, if you can’t see beyond someone’s errors, you’re woefully inept at your job.  We all have ‘opportunities’ but apparently, if you’re a candidate you don’t, you have to be perfect.  I run into hiring managers and HR Pros who will constantly tell me, “we’re selective”, “we’re picky”, etc.

No, you’re not.  What you are is unclear about what and who it is that is successful in your environment.  No one working for you now is perfect.  So, why do you look for perfection in a candidate?  Because it’s natural to judge against your internal norm.

The problem with selection isn’t that is too hard to judge, the problem is that it’s way too easy to judge.  The next time you sit down in front of a candidate try and determine what you’ve already judge them on.  It’s a fun exercise. Before they even say a word.  Have the hiring managers interviewing them send you their judgments before the interview.

We all do it.  Then, flip the script, and have your hiring managers show up for an interview ‘blind’. No resume beforehand, just them and a candidate face-to-face.  It’s fun to see how they react and what they ask them without a resume, and how they judge them after.  It’s so easy to judge, and those judgments shape our decision making, even before we know it!

 

2017 Michigan Recruiter’s Conference is October 25th in Detroit!

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That’s right gang! We’re back and better than ever!

The 2017 Michigan Recruiter’s Conference will take place on Wednesday, October 25th from 9 am to 4 pm in downtown Detroit onsite at our wonderful corporate host Quicken Loans!

Registration is now open – the cost of this event is $69 per person. This is a corporate talent acquisition event, no agency or third party recruiting pros will be allowed to register. It’s not that we don’t love you all, it’s that this is a development event, not a come pimp us with your services event.

Space will be limited, so please register early if you want a seat. You can transfer registration to another person on your team if plans change.

Who’s on the Agenda I hear you asking yourself! Oh, boy did I hit a few home runs this year!!!

SPEAKERS:

Carmen Hudson, Principle Consultant at Recruiting Toolbox, and Co-Founder of Talent42

Shaunda Zilich, Employment Brand Leader at GE

Will Maurer, Global Talent Acquisition, Sourcing Manager, General Motors

Holly Fawcett, Curriculum Development Manager at Social Talent

Margie Elsesser, VP of Talent Brand & Strategy at Quicken Loans 

Mike Bailen, VP of People at Lever and former Head of Talent for Zappos

Killed it, right?!?!

ERE, SHRM, and TEDx wished they had this line up coming to their events!

Thank you to our sponsors for making this happen – Lever and Quicken Loans.  We could not offer this at such a low price without their financial assistance and support! So, support them!

Can’t wait to see you all in Downtown Detroit! Bringing it to the D!

 

 

 

 

Midwest Recruiter’s Bootcamp! Minneapolis July 31st-Aug 1 (LAST CALL!)

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My good friend and recruiting guru, Paul DeBettignies, is hosting the Midwest Recruiting Bootcamp in Minneapolis next week, and he asked me to come and speak at it. He also asked some of the top recruiting minds in the business as well! The camp is next week July 31st and August 1st in Minneapolis, and you can still register and be apart of this!

Check out this list:

  • Maren Hogan – Create Winning Employer Brand for Knockout Recruitment
  • Jim Durbin – 8 Mistakes You’re Making: The New Rules Of LinkedIn
  • Shannon Pritchett – In OR out? Creative Sourcing Techniques to Find Your Candidates OUTside the box
  • Caroline Karanja – 10 ways to build diversity, practice inclusion and increase engagement within your organization
  • Paul himself – Create and Grow Your Recruiter Brand
  • Nick Roseth – Selling Minnesota: Strategies And Tools to Improve Recruiting To The Region
  • And me – hugging mostly! Okay, not really, I’m going to be sharing the 10 Truths Of Recruiting And Why You Are Failing At Them! And, how you can not fail at them!

When Paul first talked to me about the concept of the Midwest Recruiting Bootcamp I knew instantly it would be a hit and something I wanted to be apart of! Why? This is real Recruiting development for recruiting teams! It’s what I wanted to bring to Michigan with the Michigan Recruiter’s Conference.

National level development and speakers, in our own backyard! 

Paul let me know today he still has some space open for any recruiter’s or recruiting managers who want to join us. We’ll be onsite at the University of Minnesota. It’s two days that are packed with great material. If you can’t make both days – come one day, then send someone else on your team the other day! Or just come one day – you’ll still get a ton out of it!

REGISTER FOR MIDWEST RECRUITING BOOTCAMP! 

This might be the biggest bang for the buck in recruiter training budget history!

Here’s Paul telling us a little more:

The Best Recruitment Marketing I’ve Seen in Years! #VueDD17

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Okay, the last post from HireVue’s Digital Disruption, but it was something I had to share! TA leader Molly Weaver at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City is killing the game! If you do an interview with Children’s on the HireVue platform, they have actual kid patients ask you the interview questions via video!

I shared one on Twitter this week under the #VueDD17 stream and I haven’t been able to get those actual videos to share, but here’s one you can get a taste of how Children’s recruitment marketing is just amazing:

You’re in 2017. Molly and the TA team at Children’s is in 3017!

Seriously, talk about driving culture through your hiring process! It’s hard not to get emotional watching these kids ask you screening questions and then you have to go answer it!

This one single idea is the best recruitment marketing I’ve seen in years.

Imagine how you could take and use this idea in your own TA shop. Casual dining, go have actual guests ask the questions for your server screening questions. Get some half-drunk guy at the bar to ask bartender questions! (okay, just kidding!)

Go connect with Molly, she’s a brilliant TA leader and if you’re at CHRO in healthcare with a crappy TA team, back up a dump truck of cash on Molly’s door and talk her into coming over to your team!

Besides transforming their screening and interviewing, Molly’s team also added in HireVue’s “Introduce Yourself” tool that gives every possible candidate to your organization the ability to tell you who they are and why you should hire them.

Molly had some awesome stories of finding and hiring candidates from this tool that they might never have found without it. Some of these folks applied to jobs at Mercy several times and never made it past the first stage. Also, an amazing 28% of these hires were diverse candidates!

Before you say you don’t have the resources to do all this awesome stuff, know that Molly and her team did this on a shoestring budget! Found the kids on their own, filmed them, kept it as real as possible, and it’s brilliant!

Really amazing stuff, I’m starting the Molly Weaver fan club, let me know if you want in!

Why Am I Being Ghosted After I Interviewed?

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Dear Timmy,

I recently applied for a position that I’m perfect for! A recruiter from the company contacted me and scheduled me for an interview with the manager. I went, the interview was a little over an hour and it went great! I immediately followed up with an email to the recruiter and the manager thanking them, but since then I’ve heard nothing and it’s been weeks. I’ve sent follow-up emails to both the recruiter and the manager and I’ve gotten no reply.

What should I do? Why do companies do this to candidates? I would rather they just tell me they aren’t interested than have them say nothing at all!

The Ghost Candidate

************************************************************

Dear Ghost,

There are a number of reasons that recruiters and hiring managers ghost candidates and none of them are good! Here’s a short-list of some of these reasons:

– They hated you and hope you go away when they ghost you because conflict in uncomfortable.

– They like you, but not as much as another candidate they’re trying to talk into the job, but want to leave you on the back burner, but they’re idiots and don’t know how to do this properly.

– They decided to promote someone internally and they don’t care about candidate experience enough to tell you they went another direction.

– They have a completely broken recruitment process and might still be going through it believing you’re just as happy as a pig in shi…

– They think they communicated to you electronically to bug off through their ATS, but they haven’t audited the process to know this isn’t working.

– The recruiter got fired and no one picked up the process.

I would love to tell you that ghosting candidates is a rare thing, but it’s not! It happens all the time! There is never a reason to ghost a candidate, ever! Sometimes I believe candidates get ghosted by recruiters because hiring managers don’t give feedback, but that still isn’t an excuse I would accept, at least tell the candidate that!

Look, I’ve ghosted people. At conference cocktail parties, I’ve been known to ghost my way right back up to my room and go to sleep! When it comes to candidates, I don’t ghost! I would rather tell them the truth so they don’t keep coming back around unless I want them to come back around.

I think most recruiters ghost candidates because they’re over their head in the amount of work they have, and they mean to get back to people, but just don’t have the time. When you’re in the firefighting mode you tend to only communicate with the candidates you want, not the ones you don’t. Is this good practice? Heck, no! But when you’re fighting fires, you do what you have to do to stay alive.

What would I do, if I was you? 

Here are a few ideas to try if you really want to know the truth:

1. Send a hand written letter to the CEO of the company briefly explaining your experience and what outcome you would like.

2. Go on Twitter and in 140 characters send a shot across the bow! “XYZ Co. I interviewed 2 weeks ago and still haven’t heard anything! Can you help me!?” (Will work on Facebook as well!)

3. Write a post about your experience on LinkedIn and tag the recruiter and the recruiter’s boss.

4. Take the hint and go find a company who truly values you and your talent! If the organization and this manager treats candidates like this, imagine how you’ll be treated as an employee?

 

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

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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.

Body Language Matters in Recruiting Great Talent

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So, possibly the greatest basketball coach of all time is University of Connecticut’s Women’s Basketball coach, Geno Auriemma.  He currently has a 109 game winning streak in NCAA Division I basketball. Many of his current players have never lost a collegiate game!

You have no idea how unreal that streak is. It’s not like he can just recruit every top player, every year. He might get three or four of the best high school players, but other schools are also getting great talent.

Geno has something that only a tiny few great coaches have. Watch this short video to see it in action:

Couple things about this:

1. He says when he watches game film he watches what the kids on the bench are doing. If you’re at that level of detail, you’re going to be successful! I can guarantee you Nick Saban does the same thing. Tom Izzo does the same thing. Bill Belichick does the same thing.

2. If you’re interviewing for a job, the moment you pull into the parking lot, you better believe your actions are being evaluated, and almost 100% of those actions are body language!

If you hire an Eeyore, you’re going to get an Eeyore. Don’t think somehow they’ll change from the interview. If someone can’t have good body language in an interview, they’ll never have it coming to work and grinding each day.

Most of the jobs we hire for are basically skill-irrelevant. What we truly need is someone who comes to work each day with enthusiasm, is open to learning, has the ability to learn quickly, and plays well with others. I can teach you the rest. I can’t teach you to have great body language. That’s on you!

The Single Point of Failure in Your Candidate Experience #TheCandEs

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The Talent Board (founders of the CandE Awards for the employers with the best candidate experience) recently released their 2016 Talent Board North American Candidate Experience Awards Research Report. This report is well written, packed with exceptional data, and one that I look forward to reading each year.

As you think about your own candidate experience, and as I read this report, one thing screamed out from the pages:

Dispositioning Still Sucks!

From the report:

Disposition Communication Is Still a Struggle. In 2016, 47 percent of candidates were still waiting to hear back from employers more than two months after they applied. Plus, only 20 percent of candidates received an email from a recruiter or hiring manager notifying them they were not being considered, and only 8 percent received a phone call from a recruiter or hiring manager notifying them they were not being considered…

What Candidates Want After six years of candidate experience research, candidates still have one basic expectation of employers when it comes to screening: feedback and communication. Screening and dispositioning is one of the most intimidating aspects of the recruitment process as the majority of candidates do not get the job…Sixty-five percent of candidates receive no feedback after they are dispositioned and only four percent of candidates were asked for direct feedback during dispositioning

Candidate experience is a bit like going to that new restaurant in town. You’ve heard good things. You’ve seen some marketing. It looks awesome from the outside, so you decide to give it a try. Reservations were a snap and easy to do. You get sat almost immediately. Wait staff is tremendous. The menu is easy to understand and enticing. The food comes and it’s brilliant.

You almost can’t believe a place could be this good. You decide you must try the dessert. So, you order it and it comes out. The first bite is taken and it tastes like you have a mouth full of crap! It’s the worst! Oh lord, I’ll never forget that taste!

This is your dispositioning in your candidate experience. It doesn’t matter how good you do on all the steps if you don’t awful on the last step. Still, most of us still suck at dispositioning. It’s the single point of failure on almost every organization’s candidate experience.

Dispositioning sucks so bad, we call it dispositioning! Candidates don’t call it dispositioning. The real world doesn’t call it dispositioning. It’s called, “sorry, you suck, we selected someone we liked way, way better than you”.

So, what can you do about it?

First, you must understand why it is you suck at this. The majority of the people in the world hate conflict. They’ll do anything to avoid it. Telling someone they won’t get a job they applied for, that they truly believe they’re the best for, is big time conflict! HR and Talent Acquisition professionals based on their career path, are probably even at a higher percentage of being conflict avoidant.

Once you come to grips with this, you can design a dispositioning process that actually works for both sides. The other part is to understand the goal of dispositioning is to not make someone happy or satisfied because they won’t be, it’s to inform and educate. Your measures, then, around dispositioning measure those facts, not satisfaction.

I’ve never met someone who didn’t get a job they really wanted and they were ‘satisfied’ or ‘happy’. No, they were pissed and couldn’t understand why. This is why dispositioning, and the measurement of, is so difficult.

Here’s what I would do: 

  1. Set realistic goals around dispositioning. “We will let each person know if they got the job or didn’t within one week of the position being filled.”
  2. Find a process that communicates this message in the best way for the level of position and interaction with the organization. Mass apply positions with no interview, probably is best through email or SMS. High-level white collar job that went three interviews deep, yeah, that gal better receive a phone call and explanation.
  3. Pick people to communicate that have been trained on how to give dispositioning feedback to candidates.
  4. Let everyone know in your company how this looks, since most of your best hires come through referrals, most of your worst dispositions come through referrals.
  5. Spell out your dispositioning process to candidates up front.