Category Archives: IT Staffing

The 7 Deadly Words You Should Never Say To a Candidate

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Communication is a tricky thing. It’s so easy to turn off another party by simply using just one wrong word, especially when you’re trying to build a relationship with a candidate you potentially want to hire.

I think there are some words and phrases that have a high probability of turning off a candidate to want to come work for your organization. I speak to students a few times a year about interviewing and I tell them something similar, which is what you say can automatically make a hiring manager not want to hire you!

Think about being an interview and the candidate starts to tell you why they’re no longer working for ACME Inc. “Oh, you know it was just a ‘misunderstanding’, I can explain…”

“Misunderstanding” is a killer word to use while interviewing! It wasn’t a misunderstanding! You got fired!

So, what are the 7 Deadly Words you should never use as a recruiters? Don’t use these:

-“Layoff” – It doesn’t matter how you use it. Even, ‘we’ve never had a layoff!’ Layoff isn’t a positive word to someone looking to come to work for you, so why would you even add it to the conversation!

-“Might” – Great candidates want black and white, not gray. “Might” is gray. Well, we might be adding that tech but I don’t know. Instead, use “I’m not sure, let me check for you, because I want to get you the truth.  Add

-“Maybe” – See above.

-“Unstable” – You know what’s unstable? Nothing good, that’s what! If something isn’t good, don’t hide behind a word that makes people guess how bad it might be, because they’ll usually assume it’s worse than it really is!

-“Legally” – “Legally” is never followed by something positive! Legally, we would love to give you a $25K sign-on bonus! It’s always followed by something that makes you uncomfortable. When trying to get someone interested in your organization and job, don’t add “Legally” to the conversation!

-“Temporarily” – This is another unsettling word for candidates. “Temporarily” we’ll have to have you work out of the Nashville office, but no worries, you’ll be Austin soon enough! Um, no.

-“Fluid” – Well, that’s a great question, right now it’s a fluid situation, we’re hoping hiring you will help clarify it! Well, isn’t that comforting… Add: “Up in the air” to this category!

We use many of these words because we don’t want to tell the candidate the truth. We think telling them exactly what’s wrong with our organization, the position, our culture, will drive them away. So, we wordsmith them to death!

The reality is most candidates will actually love the honesty and tend to believe they can be the one to come in and make it better. We all want to be the knight on the white horse. Candidates are no different. Tell them the truth and you’ll end up with better hires and higher retention!

An Introvert’s Guide to Recruiting Top Tech Talent

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Step 1: Listen really carefully to what your mind is telling you.

Step 2: Call someone who knows how to recruit and enjoys having one hundred small conversations per day and quickly building relationships with people they might never talk to again.

Step 3: Quit your job as a Recruiter.

Step 4: Find a career that values Introverts.

Step 5: Take that job.

Step 6: Tell your introverted friends to never go into Recruiting.

 

Thanks for the inspiration Heather Bussing, and check out her Introvert’s Guide to the HR Technology Conference. 

Live from CareerBuilder’s Empower

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I’m on the road at CareerBuilder’s Empower conference in Chicago.  This is the second annual conference designed for corporate talent acquisition and staffing agency pros. This year CB made a ton of changes to make it better from a content perspective for sure!

The first event last year seemed to be one giant commercial for CareerBuilder broken up by big name keynotes and food and drink.  It was fun, but not sure how much content and takeaways anyone really got.  This year’s Empower was totally revamped and after Day 1, I don’t think I really heard one product pitch at all!

Here are some takeaways from Day 1 at Empower:

– Sessions are practitioner-led for the most part. Great Day 1 speakers included: Kris Dunn, Jason Lauritsen, Stacy Zapar, Glen Cathey, and many others. This lineup is packed with practical takeaways that folks could take back to their shops and immediately put into action! Plus, the speakers are fun and engaging. CB did a great job putting the agenda together.

– Shinola (the Detroit Watchmaking Company) President Jacques Panis stole the Keynote show for the day. In an election year that’s all about asking ourselves whether America is great or not and how it needs to change, Panis gave a glimpse of how American companies, making American products, with American workers, is what is really great about America.

– CareerBuilder runs a first class conference and the conference this year was free for CB clients to attend. This means you need to cut money from other things like giant name keynotes and entertainment. What CB realizes is that recruiters don’t really need that stuff anyway! Give us great content and some good food and drinks, and we’ll entertain ourselves!

Best moment of the conference:

Panis from Shinola was being interviewed on stage and they opened up the mics for the audience to ask questions. One guy gets up and speaks a little bit about the challenges of hiring workers in Downtown Detroit, and asks, “Do you hire felons?”  Panis, without pause, said, “Well, they hired me!”

It brought down the house, and then he went off on a rant about America’s justice system and how we lock up way too many people in this country.  He spoke from the heart. He talked about how once you get into the system in this country you know longer have hope. He didn’t have all the answers to fix it, but one of his answers was that his company, Shinola, hires former convicts and gives them hope.

It was a great American story. Panis’s speaking fee was $50,000, and I’m sure the CB folks cringed when he told the audience this. He also donated all $50,000 to youth organizations in Detroit including the downtown boxing league that supports getting kids off the streets and teaching them discipline by providing an outlet and support.

Recruiting Secret #9

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Everyone wants to know the secret to great recruiting. Candidates want to know how to get into companies. Recruiters want to know each other’s secrets to finding great talent. No one seems to be sharing their secrets, so I thought I might as well tell you mine…

Recruiting Secret #9

We’ll tell you we only hire the best talent, but what we really mean is we only hire the talent who quickly applies to our job posting, willing to accept our at below market pay rate we are requesting, our average culture, and vanilla benefit package. Since we do minimal screening, it’s really a FIFO (first-in, first out) system. So, you might be great, but 20 other mediocre candidates beat you to it, so, yeah, you’ve got no chance.

Welcome to the world of ‘we only hire the best talent’.

Inbound Recruiting Is Killing Your Talent

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Most recruiting done today is inbound recruiting. This is organizations posting jobs everywhere, people seeing these jobs and then applying. These candidates are coming ‘inbound’ to you in some form or fashion – into your ATS, into your email, showing up at your front door, whatever it takes for them to find you.

Outbound, then, is the opposite. It’s you finding them.

Too much inbound recruiting kills your overall talent.

Why?

Inbound recruiting relies on active applicants. There are hundreds of studies about who is actually active, but most fall around the 20-25% of the total workforce are actively looking for a new job (this includes those unemployed looking and employed). So, you’re filling most of your jobs with 20-25% of the overall talent that is available.

You aren’t even touching 75-80% of the total workforce by using inbound recruiting. But, Inbound Recruiting is great because that 25% is still a huge number and boy can we still get a bunch of applicants and, well, it’s easier.

I don’t have stats on this (if you find them please share!) but I would guess 90% of organizations only use Inbound Recruiting!

Now, a bunch of people will tell you that ‘active’ applicants aren’t the only thing. CareerBuilder’s Talent Behavior study recently found that if you combine Active and Those Open to Hearing About Openings that number climbs from 25% to 75%! Okay, now we’re talking! The problem is that extra 50% isn’t responding to your Inbound Strategy!

To get the full 75% of the workforce who might be interested in your job you must have outbound recruiting strategies. These include getting your butt on the phone and talking people into why you’re the best damn place on the planet to work! These people might actually love you as much as those people who are freely sending you their resume, but they’re waiting for you to contact them!

This is confusing to many people in Talent Acquisition.

If you only post jobs and wait to see who applies to your posts, no matter how many places you post, you’re only possibly getting 1 out of 4 possible candidates.  In a perfect scenario of using both inbound and outbound, you could get 3 out of 4. No one gets 4 out of 4 because about a quarter of the workforce is considered truly passive, meaning you and G*d couldn’t talk them into leaving their current job.

Also, you calling a candidate who has applied to your job is not considered outbound recruiting! You need to go out and find talent that doesn’t even know you have a job opening and entice them to apply, to fall in love with you, to show interest! This is ‘real’ recruiting. This is the recruiting most organizations have lost, or never had, to begin with.

This is why sourcing became a thing. Sourcing, in its best form in a corporate structure, is only about outbound recruiting. About uncovering that talent that most organizations aren’t even going after and getting them interested in your organization.

The interesting piece to all of this is annual TA spend. Take a look at your own inbound vs. outbound spend. What I find is most organizations tell me they want the best talent but they are spending the majority of their budget going after the minority of the talent. Shouldn’t it be the other way around, the majority of your budget going after the majority of talent?

Recruiting Secret #36

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Everyone wants to know the secret to great recruiting. Candidates want to know how to get into companies. Recruiters want to know each other’s secrets to finding great talent. No one seems to be sharing their secrets, but I will!

Recruiting Secret #36 – 

Most hires you will make as a recruiter will find you. You don’t find them.

The secret is to make it easy for them to find you!

There is still a prevailing idea in recruiting, especially on the corporate side, you should make it difficult for candidates to be able to get in touch with and find you. Great recruiters. The best recruiters in any industry, are easy to find.

Are you?

 

The First Sign You Suck at Hiring!

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Hiring people to work for you directly is probably the single hardest thing you’ll ever have to do as a manager of people. To be fair, most people are average at hiring, some are flat out kill and probably 20% are awful at hiring.

The first sign you suck at hiring is your new hire turnover is an outlier in your organization, your market, or your industry.

So, what constitutes new hire turnover?

I find most organizations actually don’t measure their hiring managers on new hire turnover but use this to judge effectiveness on their talent acquisition team. That’s a complete joke! That is unless you’re allowing your TA team to make hiring decisions! New hire turn is a direct reflection of hiring decisions. Period.

When should you measure new hire turn?  Organizations are going to vary on this based on your normal turn cycles and level of the position. Most use 90 days as the cap for new hire turnover. That is safe for most organizations, but you might want to dig into your own numbers to find out what’s best for your own organization. I know orgs that use one year to measure new hire turn and orgs that use 30 days.

How do you help yourself if you suck at hiring?

1. Take yourself out of the process altogether.  Most hiring managers won’t do this because their pride won’t allow them. If you consistently have high new hire turn comparable to others, you might consider this, you just have bad internal filters that predispose you to select people who don’t fit your org or management style. Don’t take it personally. I suck at technical stuff. I shop that part of my job off to someone who’s better. You might be an exceptional manager of your business, but you suck at hiring. Shop that out to someone who’s better!

2. Add non-subjective components into your hiring process and follow them 100% of the time. Assessments are scientifically proven to tell you what they’re designed to tell you. If you follow what they’ll tell you, you’ll be much more likely to make consistent hires. If that assessment gives you better hires, then keep following it, or find an assessment that does give you that consistency.

3. Analyze your reasons for each misfire hire. Were there any commonalities in those? What I find is most poor hires stem from a hiring manager who gets stuck on one reason to hire, which has nothing to do with being successful in your environment. Example: “I want high energy people!” But then they work in an environment where they are stuck in a 6X8 foot cube all day. It’s like caging a wild animal! 

Numbers don’t lie. If you consistently bomb your new hire turnover metrics, it’s not the hires, it’s you! In the organizations where I’ve seen the best improvement in reducing new hire turnover, it was in organizations where new hire turnover metric results were solely the responsibility of each hiring manager, and nothing to do with talent acquisition.

It’s the 80/20 rule. 80% of most new hire turn is usually coming from around 20% of your hiring managers. Fix those issues and ‘magically’ your new hire turn improves.

Why Doesn’t Corporate Talent Acquisition Change The Way They Pay Recruiters?

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For the most part, Corporate Recruiters are paid a salary. That salary ranges widely from organization to organization, industry, function and location. I’ve seen corporate recruiters who make $40,000 and ones that make $150,000. The $150K corporate recruiters are overpaid, let me just throw that out there right off the bat!

Agency recruiters are usually paid some salary and a combination of commission and bonus. The average goal for an agency recruiter compensation model is 1/3 salary, and 2/3’s bonus and commission. So, if your base agency salary is $30K, the hope is you’ll get to $60K through commission and bonus. It takes some time to get to $90K-ish total, but it’s fairly common for agency recruiters to make six figures. Again, this depends on what kind of agency, location, commission structure, etc.

On average, you’ll see more six figure recruiters working on the agency side, then you’ll see on the corporate side, by a wide margin.

So, are agency recruiters worth more than corporate recruiters?

Worth is defined by those paying! What I’ll say to this question is agency recruiters are more likely to ‘prove’ their worth than you’ll see on the corporate side. Which begs the question why has corporate Talent Acquisition not adapted their pay structure to something similar to that of a recruitment agency?

I’ve run both corporate TA shops and agency shops. I can tell you, realistically, there is no reason, that makes sense, not to at least test different pay structures on the corporate side! My goal in was always how do I get my corporate recruiters to be 2/3’s salary and 1/3 bonus. I wanted to make sure there was some performance-based compensation as part of their total compensation.

Here are some reasons I ran into each time I changed the pay structure of corporate recruiters”

  • “If you change the pay structure the best recruiters will quit!”
  • “We can’t change the salary structure, it’s the law!”
  • “Paying bonuses to recruiters in a corporate setting isn’t fair to the other people in HR!”
  • “The executives will never agree to performance-based pay in a non-sales role!”
  • “We want our recruiters to be hiring manager focused and paying bonuses would change that!”

All of these excuses are complete B.S.!

I did have Recruiters quit everything I came into an organization, but not because of pay. They quit because I made them actually recruit for the first time in their life! They had to pick up a phone, they had hard measures and weekly and monthly goals, they quit because they weren’t recruiters, they were administrators. But, being paid like they were recruiters.

Corporate TA Leaders don’t change their pay structure because they don’t know what to change it to, and change is scary!

I get it. It was the first time I did it as well, but in the long run, we had higher performing recruiters, better hiring manager satisfaction and we flat out performed better as a department, as compared to what we did previously.  Here are some tips to making this change:

– Make sure your high performing recruiters can actually make more money in the new model.

– Make sure low performers make less in the new model.

– Set black and white measurable goals before changing pay, and work with these goals for a while before aligning them with compensation.

– Be flexible to change. The first time I did this I found major holes and had to make some immediate changes that were fair to the recruiters and the organization.

– Communicate with your team and executives through this process.

– Have written outcomes you want to see from this change and watch those metrics closely.

– Paying per hire is never a bad thing, just make sure the pay matches the effort of the hire. Don’t pay the same bonus for hiring an admin as you do to hire a Java Developer. I tried to equalize this by the time and effort it took to fill each position. If it took 1/10 the time and effort, the bonus was 1/10 the amount of a full effort position. Again, you’ll have to test and adjust this for your organization. Don’t write it down in stone, to start!

– You’ll never really have to have a performance management conversation again! Oh, you want to make more money….

Recruiting, even in a corporate setting, is a sales type role and should be paid as such. There is no reason why you can’t have a more effective pay structure in your corporate TA department.

Want some help in getting this off the ground?  Contact me!

 

 

Candidates Actually Want Human Interaction!

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TA Leaders and Executives, this is the dirty little secret that your Recruiters and the Talent Acquisition Technology industry does not want you to know!  Candidates actually prefer to have human interaction when searching and applying for a job. From a study done by ASA:

“Three of the top five ways job seekers land a job are “high touch,” according to the survey findings. Word of mouth is the most popular means (43%)—followed by job board websites and employer websites (both at 30%). Contacts or acquaintances with prospective employers (30%) and staffing and recruiting companies (25%) also rank high as resources that led to job offers.

Three in four (77%) actually prefer human interaction when searching for a job, according to the ASA Workforce Monitor.“

Recruiters and TA Tech are in bed together to pull the wool over your eyes!  TA Tech wants to sell you automation! Recruiters don’t want to pick up the phone! Put those two groups together and it’s one big circle jerk about to use only technology solutions to recruit and never pick up another phone as long they live!

Seriously! 3 out 4 candidates prefer to have a human contact them and tell them about the job you have open. I bet if you sent out an informal survey to your recruiting team, right now – today, the response from your recruiters would be that they believe only 25% or less actually would prefer a call!

That’s a huge disconnect, and should be very telling about the talent on your team!

So, how do you get your recruiters back on the phone?

1. Measure the amount of outgoing calls by person and post it publicly for all to see. You don’t even have to say one thing about it, the calls will automatically increase! True recruiters hate being on the bottom of any scoreboard!

2. Have fun with it! Run contest and provide incentives for more outgoing calls by your recruiters. For recruiters who grew up in a world where they thought they could just email and message their way to success, the phone is scary! Some will need a kind push!

3. Group call parties. Take one hour of the day and plan for every single recruiter to be on the phones at the same time. Make sure they prepare by sourcing ahead of time and have a number of candidates to reach out to. They should have at least 25-40 to call. Most calls will go to voicemail, if they’re lucky they’ll actually talk to a few people. It will be the fastest hour of their day or week! When everyone is doing this at the same time, you get great energy from the group and it seems less scary!

An average recruiter with 25 openings on their desk should be talking live to around 75-100 people each week on the phone. What I find when I first go into a new shop and measure this, the real number is more like 15-25!  It’s shockingly low! How are you going to fill 25 openings by talking to 25 people per week!? You won’t. That’s why your TA shop is failing.

I love TA Tech! I love TA Tech more than almost anyone I know. What I also know is that all great recruiters spend more time on the phone on average than weaker recruiters. It’s so simple, yet most of us fail as TA leaders not recognizing this.

 

The One Way to be Successful at Recruiting

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Eight years or so ago I started seriously writing for the first time in my life. The only other times I ever wrote in my life were school papers, a journal that my high school English teacher, Ms. Kemp, made me write in each day and love letters to my wife before we were married and email was not yet widely used and phone calls cost too much!

My good friend Kris Dunn got me to write for Fistful of Talent. He and Jessica Lee, who was the editor at the time, gave me the Friday slot at FOT. It was my job to write something snarky and fun, a piece people would read on a Friday, chuckle and know the week is almost over. That gig turned into this gig, which turned into me writing every single day, now going on five-plus years.

In all of this writing, I discovered what a lot of people discover in becoming successful. If you want to be successful at anything, you need to do it! You need to do it a lot! You need to do it every day.

I still write stuff that is crap. I make errors all the time. But, my writing has improved. Once in a while, I actually write something I think is pretty good!

That’s the secret to becoming really good at recruiting. You need to do it all the time!  I see HR Pros who try and recruit every once in a while. They suck at it and they’ll never be good at it because they don’t do it all the time. You can’t pick up a pencil and be instantly good at writing. You can’t pick up a phone and be instantly good at recruiting.

To be good at recruiting you must recruit every day.  You must always be on.  Everyone you meet. Everyone you talk to. Everyone becomes a potential part of your recruiting pipeline. Maybe as a candidate, or a lead, or a referral, etc. You don’t recruit, then turn it off and not recruit. You recruit always.

I’m, now, constantly writing. I rarely go a day when I don’t email myself ideas about something I want to write about. I think like a writer. How can I take this situation and write about it? My friends, family, and coworkers tease me about it (‘Don’t write about this!’ ‘You’re going to write about this aren’t you?’).  I’m always on.

If you truly want to be successful in anything in life you need to do that thing, always. I see recruiters constantly miss opportunities to recruit. To ask the question that would lead them to their next great hire. To pick up the phone and make one more call before they leave for the day. To take a chance and reach out to someone who they don’t think will be interested, but just maybe they will be interested.

Being good at anything is hard. It’s really hard if you want to be good by not doing it.