Category Archives: IT Staffing

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.

The New Definition of “Passive Candidate”

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Okay, we get it, Mrs. Hiring Manager, you want passive candidates!!! We’ll get right no that…

Passive candidates are the holy grail of candidates, right? Untouched, virgin, pure as the driven snow, fresh meat that has yet to be soiled by the dirty hands of another recruiter. If I could find a way to mainline passive candidates right into my system I’d be the best recruiting junkie on the planet!

Do you even lift bro? I mean, do we even know what the hell a passive candidate even is anymore?

The Passive Candidate Definition from ten years ago:

“A Passive Candidates is someone who is being considered for a position but is not actively searching for a job.”

So, are we buying this today?

If so, it seems like we then need to define “actively searching”. The only candidates I know who are ‘actively searching’ for jobs are candidates out of work, working in a job that isn’t their chosen career (Communications grad from B-level university, selling cell phones in a strip mall), or about to be fired from their current position.

If those are the actively searching candidates, that makes almost everyone else Passive! I don’t think our definition of Passive Candidate matches that of our hiring managers current definition of passive candidate! I think they would say anyone who is searching for a job, passively or actively, is not really passive.

So, why do we see this differently? Well, this is a bit of marketing that TA played on the hiring manager to fill positions. “Hey, Tim is a great ‘passive’ candidate, I found him on LinkedIn, he didn’t even ‘apply’ to our job! You have to interview him!” The ‘he didn’t even apply’ is like crack for hiring managers, who now believe you found Tim locked away in a vault at your competitors that has never seen the light of day.

The reality is a bit less sexy! Tim has been on LinkedIn for three years trying to get out of dead end company he’s been working for, but Tim sucks at networking and finding jobs, so he is just waiting around to be trolled by a recruiter, and he applies to jobs every week, just hasn’t applied to your job!

Let’s be honest with each other. If someone has posted a resume online, err, professional profile, they’re on the market! They might not be actively applying to jobs on a daily basis, but we all know they’re open for business. Someone can’t be passive that has a presence on any of the job boards (Monster, CareerBuilder, Indeed, LinkedIn, Dice, Zip, etc.).  They also can’t be passive if they actively applying to jobs, but just haven’t applied to your job!

So, the new definition of Passive Candidate should probably be:

“A Passive Candidate is someone you find through various methods who is not on the job market in any way.”

That means you might contact someone in your ATS database who applied for a job with you three years ago, but they are currently happily employed and totally off the job market radar. That’s a Passive Candidate. The referral your employee gave you for a former coworker that you can’t find anything online, and they tell you they’re not looking for a job. That’s a Passive Candidate.

A passive candidate isn’t someone you found who just hasn’t happened to think about applying to your job, yet. They actually might be the most active candidate on the planet, who you just happen to run into.

We know a truly passive candidate when we speak to one. They’re a bit nervous. A bit surprised. A bit flattered. You can tell they’re not used to talking to recruiters and feel guilty talking to you. This is the person you’re hiring managers are asking for when they say they want a passive candidate.

This isn’t to say passive candidates are better. That’s an entire another post, but let’s not act like we are providing passive candidates when we aren’t.

Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals (ATAP) first Board Meeting

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This week the Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals (ATAP) Board (of which I’m apart) met for the first time, live, and in person in Atlanta. There hasn’t been an official launch yet of ATAP, but the work continues to make this association the one global talent acquisition association that all recruiting professionals will turn to.

What the heck is ATAP? 

ATAP was founded originally by Ben Gotkin and Gerry Crispin, and then with a ton of help from a whole host of great TA advocates! ATAP was founded on the belief that talent acquisition, as a profession, needs an organization (like a SHRM) to support “US”, the TA Pros and Leaders that work in corporate environments, agencies, RPO, vendors, etc.

What the heck did the ATAP board and Executive Director Ben Gotkin (plus Gerry Crispin) do this past week? 

So, for over a year a ton of folks have put in a ton of work to get ATAP to the position it is now, which is basically build a complete foundation of an organization. That’s not easy! And this group brought ATAP into existence and gave it a soul.

The board and the Executive Director is tasked with building a Talent Acquisition specific association that meets all the needs of the stakeholders in talent acquisition. As you can imagine, just deciding on what the hell that means is a big job!

There are a number of critical things on the agenda that need to be addressed. First, you can’t have an association is you don’t have money! You don’t have money without members and/or sponsors. Why would someone want to be a member of ATAP?

That’s no small question. When you ask an HR Pro why they are a member of SHRM, they can rattle off a number of reasons. All those reasons were built over time, SHRM wasn’t launched with resources, certifications, advocacy, etc. But, you need to start somewhere!

ATAP is looking to do all those things you expect from a modern day association that represents your professional field. We need to build a complete body of knowledge for talent acquisition. We need to build a code of ethics for our profession. We need to build resources for our members.

We need to decide which pieces add the most value to our members, now and in the future, then prioritize that work. We need to do all of this with a current 100% volunteer organization, that can’t stay that way for long if we really want to gain traction and do really cool stuff for members.

How can you help? 

First, you can become a member! Becoming a member puts you in a position to be able to shape the future of ATAP and the future of talent acquisition. We have a ton of work in front of us, and we need TA pros and leaders who are passionate advocates of talent acquisition who want to volunteer and give back.

Second, join the conversation around a number of committees we’ll be launching over the next 90 days and once you become a member join the ATAP Facebook Group to give us feedback on many items we’ll be putting in front of our membership.

Third, spread the word. This is a grassroots organization that will not be successful with you. If you’re a TA leader, have your entire team join. If you’re a vendor consider being a sponsor of ATAP. For everyone, raise the conversation around how we (all of us) make recruiting better and a profession we are proud to be a part of.

I’m leaving Atlanta so energized and excited. The board of directors for ATAP is a ultra-passionate and diverse group of individuals that truly represent our profession. I’m proud to be a part of this future!

T3 – NetIn – Source Technical Talent (@HireWithNetIn)

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This week on T3 I review the technical sourcing technology platform NetIn. NetIn was developed by a former Twitter Engineer who found himself in a position of needing to find talent and not feeling like there was any technology that did what he wanted. Sure there were other sourcing tools that would spider social profiles, but he wanted more.

NetIn is a search engine to find technical candidates who have a social presence on the web. Nothing new on that, there might be around fifty of these techs on the market right now. What Netin did differently was build in an algorithm to only bring back results of the best talent, that goes way beyond keywords and skills.

The NetIn algorithm is built on a number of factors including ranking the top computer science schools, open source contributions, how recent and how active in open source, and companies and organizations that are known for having great technical acumen.  Your search then comes back with all the candidates ranked on this algorithm so you know where to begin your search and waste less time to get to the best candidates.

What I like about NetIn: 

– Extremely easy to use the search function that everyone will be comfortable, and a super clean design, which leads to you being able to use the system with no training.

– NetIn added in some great search functionality including ‘Open to Move’ that is measured on a person’s current online behaviors that show they’re more likely looking for a new job. Also, you can filter by security clearance, which is really important for organizations working on defense and government programs.

– Filter your search based on the availability of contact information: email and phone number. Netin invests in a number of phone number sources to make sure the numbers you get back are personal numbers, not just some main work line to a company.

– Email your search list right from the platform with easy to use interface.

Free trial to start and see if you like it, so there’s no risk. It’s designed for IT and IT related engineering searches for the most part. They have built an integration with Greenhouse, so if you’re using that ATS you can export your information right into the ATS. Depending on how many seats you need the price will run $200-500 per month, which is a fairly good price for an IT sourcing tool with NetIn’s capabilities.

 

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

America First: The White Collar Workers Who Got Outsourced

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Your liberal friends want you to believe everyone who voted for Trump are racist, low paid, middle-aged white dudes from the Midwest. It’s nice and clean when you put it into that box. It fits the narrative they are selling really well.

 They don’t want you to know about the black female in California who lost her high paying salaried job to an H1B worker. Or the Asian-American male and female who lost their jobs, as well. Or the 60-year-old plus Hispanic male who lost his job. Those folks also are hoping ‘America First’ takes off.

This from the New York Times (I think this is still ‘real’ news, the NY Times?):

Audrey Hatten-Milholin, 54, was notified in July that she would be laid off from the University of California, San Francisco, at the end of February after 17 years in its technology department. Along with eight others, she filed a complaint in November with California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing, charging that replacing her and others with “significantly younger, male” workers “who will then perform the work overseas” was discriminatory.

“We are at a disadvantage as Americans,” Ms. Hatten-Milholin said. “They look at it like, where can we get it cheaper? And for U.C., it’s not here.”

From the same article:

In other words, it’s true that cheaper labor helps employers increase profits and grow, and having more skilled workers in the United States contributes to economic innovation. But at the same time, individual American employees do face more salary pressure from newcomers who will work for less. And in some cases, they risk losing their jobs entirely, especially older employees who earn higher salaries.

After 11 years working in the I.T. department of Northeast Utilities, a Connecticut-based company now named Eversource Energy, Craig Diangelo was among 220 employees laid off in 2014. Before leaving the company, he was told he needed to train his replacement if he wanted to receive his severance.

Mr. Diangelo, who is now 64 and was receiving $130,000 a year in salary and bonus, said he trained an employee from the Indian outsourcing firm Infosys who was an H-1B visa holder making $60,000 a year. There was also a team of workers in India making $6,000 a year that shadowed him on the computer.

There’s a reason Tech companies are screaming as loud as they can for the current administration to expand the H1B program and it’s not because they can’t find candidates for their jobs. The candidates are there, but the companies don’t want to pay the salaries of the American candidates who are available!

About half of all the H1B’s issued annually go to outsourcing firms. What are those? These are basically companies who perform modern day indentured servitude. They find a foreign worker with great skills who desperately wants to come to America, pay them a very good rate as compared to where they are coming from, but much less than a similar American worker. Since the outsourcing company holds the H1B, they basically have this person at the lower rate for six years.

The tech companies get great talent, for a much lower wage than a similar American worker. Everyone is happy. Well, almost everyone. Miss Hatten-Milholin and Mr. Diangelo from above, they’re not too happy, they are really hoping this America First thing takes off.

If you really dig into what the new administration is trying to do with the H1B program it’s not to eliminate it, it’s to bring it up to an equal footing of the American worker. If the American worker gets paid $100K to do the job, you also have to pay the H1B worker $100K for the same job. The theory being if everything is equal American companies will hire American workers. Or, in the case where a true shortage exists, then hiring H1B workers will make sense without limits.

Ah, equality, it’s what I love about America. There are at least two sides to every story, this side rarely gets shared.

I Love the Buzz of a Recruiting Team in Full Motion!

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On a Tuesday night recently I stayed late at the office, took my laptop and sat out in our recruiting bullpen. Hearing everyone at once on calls, talking to candidates, selling, recruiting, is like music to me. There’s an energy you can feel, and so can everyone else that’s in the middle of it!

If you do one thing to make your recruiting team better this week, schedule a full team calling party! It doesn’t have to be at night. For agencies, that’s the best time, but I know most corporate TA leaders would struggle to make this happen.

Bring your team together and give them time to prepare, source, etc. Let them know from 10 am to noon, we are all going to call candidates all at the same time. No sourcing, no setting up interviews, no following up with hiring managers, no working on projects. Just one thing, dialing and talking.

Make a contest out of it. The recruiter who makes the most calls in this time will get a prize, or the person who talks to the most people will win. You can play around with different ways to incentivize this behavior.

It’s an amazing feeling having the entire team doing that one activity, together, that is the core of all that you do. The nervous energy, the elevated voices, the positivity is infectious! I can guarantee you that if you do once, you’ll want to do it again.

It’s too easy for us to sit there at our desk and send emails. Source on the internet. Do all that work we do, but not that one thing we all need to do more of and that’s one-on-one conversations with candidates. That’s how you make more hires. That’s how you decrease days to fill. That’s how you increase your hiring manager satisfaction. That’s how you increase candidate satisfaction.

At our core, this is what we are. Recruiters find people, talk to people, and connect people. Most of this can only be done with live conversations. Do yourself a favor and give this a try!

Dear Timmy: How Do I Get Into Talent Acquisition?

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I get asked a ton of questions via email. Some are from college students who ask a variety of things. Here’s a recent one:

Dear Timmy,

I’m a college student majoring in communications (editor’s note: why do college kids major in communications? Like 80% of college kids want to major in communications. You know there aren’t real jobs in communications, right!?) and I’m looking to get into human resources, more specifically I would like to work in talent acquisition.  What suggestions, or steps, do you suggest to help me get a position in corporate talent acquisition?

Thanks,

Communication major because apparently I’m an idiot (just kidding, she didn’t sign it that way!)

Here is my response:

If you want to get into straight HR you’ll need to graduate with a degree in HR. As I don’t know of an organization that hires entry level HR pros with non-HR degrees. If you want to get into talent acquisition follow these steps –

Step 1 – Graduate

Step 2– Apply for ‘agency’ entry level recruiting roles.

Step 3 – Do your time in the agency world, at least a year, maybe a bit more.

Step 4 – Apply for corporate Talent Acquisition openings

Here’s my reasoning for the steps above.

In talent acquisition no one cares which college degree you have, they only care that you can recruit. The reality is they shouldn’t even care if you go to college, but most corporate recruiter jobs will require it. Corporate TA departments rarely hire entry level recruiters because they don’t have the knowledge, processes, and capacity to train recruiters, which is why you need to get experience on the agency side of recruiting.

Agency recruiting is known to be very cut-throat and high burnout rate, but I’m only talking about a year or so. Anyone can handle that, and it will give you valuable experience. You might like agency recruiting and you can make a ton of money, but it’s high stress. Corporate TA is mid-level money, with no growth, but virtually no stress in comparison.

Once you get your experience in the agency world, even only a year, you’ll actually be considered pretty valuable on the corporate side of TA. Think of your agency time as your TA internship. You know there’s an endpoint, then you get into the job you want.

When interviewing for agency positions you should never mention that your goal is to get into corporate TA. They won’t hire you if they feel you’re just going to leave. Also, when you interview, most agency folks are only looking to hire two things: high energy, highly money motivated. So, drink three Red Bulls before you interview, and talk constantly about how much money you want to make. You’ll get hired by 99% of the agencies that interview you.

I might be joking a little, but only a little, that’s fairly close to reality. I mean agencies are also known to hire pretty people, so it wouldn’t hurt to be good looking.

 

What is your most valuable hiring source?

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I’m taking a break from my normal writing during the holidays to share some of my most read posts of 2016. Enjoy. 

I find every year, I’ve been blogging now for 8 years, that my most read and shared posts are usually based on a fairly basic problem we all face, and quite simply just want to know what others are doing. That’s the case with the post. We all struggle to know what sources we should use and which ones are our best. 

As many of you know I’m a writer over at CareerBuilder’s recruiting blog called The Hiring Site. Great group of industry practitioners writing about everything related to talent and recruiting. Because of my relationship, they share cool data with me, that I can share with you!

Some of the most eye-opening stuff I’ve gotten recently is all around hiring sources, and it’s not stuff you normally hear about or see.  Let’s face it. We (Talent Acquisition Pros) hate sharing our data because it makes us feel like we’re giving up our secret sauce!

It’s not really secret sauce, that’s the secret, we all pretty much do the same thing when it comes to talent attraction. We get referrals, we leverage our internal databases, we use job boards and postings, we pray. We pray a lot!

Here’s the data that CB shared with me from crunching the data of 1600+ CareerBuilder clients in 2015:

– 21% of hires came directly from using CareerBuilder.

– 41% of hires actually could have come from CareerBuilder, if the client was fully utilizing the technology they purchased!

– 45% of companies added more sources of hire over the past five years

– On average a candidate will use 18 sources to search for a job!

What does this really mean?

Every organization’s talent acquisition strategy has to have a multi-pronged approach.  You have jobs that you can post on CareerBuilder and find great talent. You have jobs that you will need a great referral strategy to fill. You have jobs that you’ll need outside specialized help to fill. You have jobs that need hardcore sourcing and bust-your-butt on the phone recruiting to fill. You need all these approaches, just one won’t work.

You need all these approaches, just one won’t work.

The key is are you fully utilizing the easiest, fastest sources you have?  We tend to want to discount our job board vendor (mine is CareerBuilder), but the numbers usually tell a different story.  41% of hires seems like a lot, but the data is deep! 1600 clients equal ten’s of thousands of recruiters banging on CB technology. The data is real.

What does this really mean, to you?

1. Make sure your recruiting staff is fully trained on the technology you give them. Then, retrain them!

2. Make sure you’re accurately measuring your source of hire. This is the single most important thing that recruiting leaders miss, consistently. It drives all of your purchasing decisions. I can’t tell you how many recruiters I speak with that truly believe LinkedIn is their most valuable source, and, so far, 100% of the time, the data says it’s not when we pull the numbers.

3. Are you looking at your existing internal database first? It’s the most valuable source in the industry and this is consistently underutilized.

Happy recruiting my friends!

T3 – VISANOW Rebrands as Envoy

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It’s no secret that recruiting technical talent in the IT and Engineering sectors is next to impossible. Because of that, more and more organizations are digging into the aspects of hiring foreign technical talent for positions they have open throughout the world.

VISANOW is a technology that provides an immigration management platform allowing you to seamlessly hire and manage a global workforce with an army of internal staff and attorneys on retainer. VISANOW announced today they are rebranding as Envoy. The comprehensive brand relaunch includes a new logo, positioning, website, content hub (www.worldreadyworkforce.com) and URL (www.envoyglobal.com).

From the press release:

“Nearly 20 years ago, VISANOW was founded to simplify and expedite the arduous immigration process by combining expert legal representation and proprietary technology. As the HR industry and global talent marketplace has evolved, we consistently hear from our customers that they’re seeking an end-to-end global workforce management solution so that they can take advantage of opportunities — wherever they beckon. This rebranding effort combined with the recent release of the latest generation of our immigration management platform underscores our ability and commitment to serve as our customers’ envoy as they build and manage a world-ready workforce,” said Dick Burke, president and chief executive officer of Envoy…

Envoy’s patented cloud-based platform aids companies leveraging both inbound and outbound international talent — offering transparent and simplified immigration services that help save time, money and stress as well as increase efficiency and security. Its features include organization, collaboration, planning and compliance modules that allow businesses to manage their international workforce around the world from one intuitive online platform. Dedicated teams of experienced and knowledgeable immigration attorneys and a global network of local practitioners provide Envoy customers consistent, proactive and personalized counsel. This combination of expert counsel, high customer touch, automation, and transparency offers an unparalleled user experience — driving a net promoter score of 77.

Envoy empowers companies to acquire the best talent regardless of where they are in the world; helps mobilize employees around the world to take advantage of business opportunities; and enables the management of entire global workforces, providing a strategic, proactive view into workforce and financial forecasting and compliance.

Simply, Envoy helps take the fear, stress and complication out of your immigration hiring process. Hiring visa candidates was always a stressor for me in the past because I didn’t feel I fully understood it clearly and I didn’t want to pay high priced attorneys. Envoy can help walk you through the hiring process, step-by-step, for a fraction of the cost of shopping this work to the outside.

T3 – Technical Interview Technology – @eTeki_Inc

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This week on T3 I take a look at the technical interview technology eTeki. One question I get asked often by TA pros and leaders is around finding a technology that will help them select technical hires better.  There are some ‘test’ type technologies on the market, but those are really difficult to actively select from and the tests are usually super generic.

It’s not a hidden fact that most HR and TA pros/leaders have little functional knowledge when it comes to technical positions. Internal IT groups are stretched thin, so using your own staff as part of the selection process becomes a huge hindrance to most organizations. Still, hiring managers are expecting TA departments to do a better job at filtering out technical candidates who can’t walk the walk.

Along comes eTeki. eTeki is an interviewing platform that uses screened functional IT talent to do live interviews. It’s like ‘Uber’ for selection. Need to interview a developer? eTeki will partner your organization with a developer skilled in the same technology you have, plus skilled in interviewing technical candidates.

What I really like about eTeki:

– eTeki interviewers don’t tell you who to hire or not hire but give you detailed scoring and comments based on the technical skills you want assessed. Since these interviewers have no vested interest in who gets hired, you get more of an unbiased assessment than with your internal team.

– Every eTeki interview is recorded with video, so you and your hiring managers can go through and see the entire thing if you want. Also, the interview platform has a collaborative code editor in 50+ languages so you can see code snippets of the candidates you’re assessing. The platform also has a shared whiteboard function and screen sharing.

– Super simple to use for all three parties, the candidate, the company and the interviewer. A coded personal link is sent to the candidate with a password, face to face video, nothing to download, mobile enabled.

– Crowdsourced interviewer rating system ensures the interviewers who are using can actually do what they say they can do. You can see comments from other organizations who have previously used these interviewers to screen their talent. Currently, they have over 1200 interviewers in their marketplace, 80% are U.S. based. Basically, experienced technology pros looking to supplement their income by doing interviews (where the Uber comparison comes into play).

– The platform gives freedom to the interviewers to dive into skills they see a candidate has, as well, that you might not have asked, but will find valuable based on the role and job description you provided them, on top of assessing all the stuff you asked them to assess as well.

The cost per interview varies on the interviewer who sets the price, but the marketplace usually keeps them in the $40-60 per interview range. That’s a real bargain when you think about how much per hour you pay your own internal technical employees, plus the training and information you get on each candidate.

Another piece of this I like is that if you find an interviewer that you really like and they’ve shown to give you really good information to make your selection decision, you can personally request them for additional screens as well. The platform continues to evolve as more and more organizations use it and have different requests for additions, and eTeki has shown they’ll work to evolve the platform even more in the future.

Well worth a look if you are in need of a great technology screening tool and need to move candidates through the process quicker.

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 HR, 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 – send me a note.