Category Archives: Recruiting

Quality of Hire is NOT a Talent Acquisition Measure of Success!

Posted on by
6

I was looking at LinkedIn’s annual Global Recruiting Trends 2017 report and it had some great information.  I have to give LI credit, this report, each year, has some really great information that always makes me think!  This year’s report was no different, and one stat struck me as really telling:

When Talent Leaders were asked: “What is the way you measure your recruiting team’s performance today?“

They said:

  1. Quality of Hire metrics (hiring manager measure not a TA measure – my opinion)
  2. Time to Hire (the single worse measure of all time – my opinion)
  3. Hiring Manager Satisfaction (has no correlation to whether or not TA is actually good or not – my opinion)

I hate all of these answers!!!  In fact, these answers are so bad it makes me question the viability of the future of Talent Acquisition!

You know what?  Quality of Hire is an Illusion for about 99% of organizations!  Most of us have no freaking idea how to actually measure the quality of hire, or that what we are actually measuring doesn’t haven’t the faintest correlation to actual quality of hire.

So, why is this interesting to me?

It shows me that TA Leaders still don’t have the guts to use real metrics and analytics to measure the performance of their teams!  Using a subjective, at best, measure, like Quality of Hire, allows them to continue to just make up what they ‘feel’ performance is, and one that doesn’t truly hold themselves or their teams accountable.

If you think this isn’t you, tell me how you actually measure quality of hire of your employees?  It’s very complex to even come up with something I could argue is an actual quality of hire metric!  Most organizations will do things like measure 90-day retention as a quality of hire. “Oh, look, they stayed 90 days! Way to go, recruiters, you’re hiring quality!” No, they’re not! They’re just hiring bodies that decided to stay around 90 days!

Quality of hire metrics only works if you are actually measuring the performance of your new hires to the performance of those employees you already have.  This measure, then, becomes one that you can’t even measure until you have a true measure of performance (which is a whole other issue!) of both the new hire and your current employees. Also, you have to give that new hire, probably a year, to truly see what kind of performer they are in your environment.

How many organizations are waiting a year to measure the quality of hire of the employees they hired a year ago?  Almost none!

The other issue here is why is Quality of Hire a recruiting measure, to begin with? Are the recruiters ultimately choosing who gets hired and who doesn’t?  No? That’s what I thought.

So, the recruiter can give the best candidate in the world to a hiring manager, but she instead hires a gal from her sorority who bombs out, and the recruiter gets killed on the quality of hire metric? That sounds fair.

Quality of hire metrics only became something because TA Leaders didn’t have the guts to tell the executives in their organizations that this isn’t really something that matters to the effectiveness of the TA function.  Quality of hire is a hiring manager metric.  You know how it’s measured? By looking at their operational measures and seeing if they actually met them.  If they didn’t it one of three things: they don’t know how to hire, or they don’t know how to manage, or both.

Regardless, check out the LinkedIn report. It has some good data points that are fun to discuss!

The Worst Hire You’ll Ever Make!

Posted on by
1

A crazy thing happens almost every day in professional sports, and it’s the one thing that separates great teams from the pack. Talent selection will make or break a team’s success and in professional sports, it’s about getting the right talent for the right price.

The problem with most professional sports team, regardless of the sport, is they continually try to improve their roster incrementally. “Oh, let’s pick up Pitcher A because he’s a little better than Pitcher B”.

Great Pitcher A is better than Pitcher B, but did Pitcher A truly solve the issue you have?

That’s the real issue!

The worst hire you can ever make is one that doesn’t solve your problem but just make it a little better. “We suck at sales, let’s hire Tim, he’s not great, but he’s better than Bob.” Wonderful, now you only slightly suck less at sales!

Never make a hire that doesn’t solve your problem completely that you are having in that specific position. Upgrading doesn’t always fix problems, and many times it actually continues your main problem longer instead of fixing it completely.

We have this belief that all we need to do is continue to get a little better each day, each week, each month until we eventually have fixed it. The problem is that this isn’t how most problems are actually solved, by getting a little bit better over time. Most problems are fixed by implementing one solution that solves the problem.

It’s basically this crappy failure paradox we continue to get sold by seemingly everyone with a platform. “Just keep failing and eventually you’ll find success!” Which is complete and utter bullshit, but we LOVE hearing this!

In hiring, you can’t keep failing and find success. You will actually find failure even faster and be out of business. In hiring, it’s critical you find success and hire the right people who will solve your problem the first time, not just make you a little better.

Another great example of this is in the NFL. It’s critical in the NFL that you have a great quarterback, but they’re extremely hard to find. So, if you don’t have an elite quarterback, most teams will continue to try and upgrade with average quarterbacks.

The better advice is work with what you have and make it the best you can until you get the opportunity to hire, or draft, that one great quarterback that can truly change your franchise. Constant change and churn, just to get a little better, is slowly killing your organization.

Make great hires. Organizational change hires. Individuals who have the ability to make things right. Too often, and we’ve all been there, we make hires that feel safe, knowing they won’t hurt us, but they probably won’t help us much either. Those are the worst hires you can make.

The Future of Sourcing is Here!

Posted on by
3

So, yeah, the future of Sourcing, as a function, is not Artifical Intelligence (A.I.).

I know that makes a ton of folks working in Sourcing really excited to hear! For the past year, all Sourcers have heard is that the Robots are coming to take your job. That is incorrect.

The correct version is that the robots are going to take most of your job.

Wait, what?!

Yeah, I know it sucks, but horses don’t pull carts anymore and they made out just fine.

Look, the reality of sourcing is that most sourcing technology on the market today, is better at sourcing than over 90% of actual Sourcers working in the sourcing function. No, not you SourceCon geeks! The true specialist will always have jobs.

When you take the current sourcing tech on the market, add in the A.I. component, you now have a tech landscape that can automatically take your openings, go out and find candidates on the internet, job boards, your own ATS database, etc., contact them to see if they’re interested, then deliver activated candidates to recruiters. And, the tech does this 24/7/365, without bitching about not having a LinkedIn Recruiter seat.

Yes, that is current reality.

So, what’s the Future of Sourcing?

Say, hello, to my little friend! The Telephone!

The future of sourcing is connecting with those millions of candidates, who don’t have a social footprint on the web, or at the very least don’t have enough of a social footprint to ever show up in any kind of crazy search you could dream up.

It’s Larry the Engineer, sitting at his desk in Detroit, MI. Larry works at GM, 20 years experience, hates Facebook, doesn’t have a LinkedIn profile, and doesn’t attend conferences or his former college events. Larry is a candidate ghost. Larry sits in a large sized office space with 35 other engineers who all do similar stuff. You know probably 25 of those engineers. You know nothing about Larry.

You only find Larry one way.

Step 1: You map out that group. You find someone on the inside that tells you about the 35 engineers. You then start piecing it together and find out you can only find 25.

Step 2: You start asking all 25 for referrals. Who do you work with? Who is great in your group? Who doesn’t anyone know about, but they should? Etc.

Step 3: You cold call Larry. You do your Sourcing magic in getting Larry really excited about going to work for Ford.

Welcome to the future of Sourcing.

The robots can’t do this. This is the real future value of sourcing.

Sounds super old-school doesn’t it!? That’s because it is. Turns out, we can find almost anyone online. The “almost” portion accounts for about 25% of the adult population. That’s about 40 Million adults in America alone that the robots won’t find, and neither will your searches. These are people you have to dig up manually, the old school way.

Okay, I’ll tell you the new old school way will be better because you can use texting and messaging and whatever else the kids are using to communicate. But, your real value as a sourcer will not be picking off people who are now online that any robot can find. Your real value will be networking your way to that talent that has no social footprint.

My mom, who started recruiting in the 1970’s would be today’s greatest sourcer! She could talk anyone into giving her anything. If you knew ten people, she could get you to make an additional one up, so she had eleven names and numbers. Your ability to get more referrals of people no one else knows about is the future of sourcing.

Everything that is old is new again.

Let’s face it, we love pretty people!

Posted on by
4

So, you’ve probably heard by now that some companies in Silicon Valley decided to hire models to attend their annual holiday parties and act as friends of executives. The purpose was not to show the executives had pretty friends, but to add some ‘prettiness’ to the party:

Along with a seemingly endless string of harassment and discrimination scandals, Silicon Valley’s homogeneity has a more trivial side effect: boring holiday parties. A fete meant to retain all your talented engineers is almost certain to wind up with a rather same-y crowd, made up mostly of guys. At this year’s holiday parties, however, there’ll be a surprising influx of attractive women, and a few pretty men, mingling with the engineers. They’re being paid to.

Local modelling agencies, which work with Facebook- and Google-size companies as well as much smaller businesses and the occasional wealthy individual, say a record number of tech companies are quietly paying $50 to $200 an hour for each model hired solely to chat up attendees. For a typical party, scheduled for the weekend of Dec. 8, Cre8 Agency LLC is sending 25 women and 5 men, all good-looking, to hang out with “pretty much all men” who work for a large gaming company in San Francisco, says Cre8 President Farnaz Kermaani. The company, which she wouldn’t name, has handpicked the models based on photos, made them sign nondisclosure agreements, and given them names of employees to pretend they’re friends with, in case anyone asks why he’s never seen them around the foosball table.

So, my HR brothers and sisters lost their minds over this on the social webs!

There were many comments all going down the path of: “Gross”, “Pathetic”, “Trumps America”, etc.

I have a different take. This is Recruitment Marketing in the real world. Most of us don’t live in Disneyland, and the real world of hiring is a bit different for the majority.

Here’s the deal. Tech hires are mostly men. White men, brown men, black men, really, really pale white men, but mostly men.

If you have a holiday party at a Tech company and it’s all dudes, well, that’s not very exciting. In fact, it’s pretty sad for all the dudes standing around looking at each other. If you were part of that party, as a dude, you probably wouldn’t tell your friends to come work with you.

Now, if you go to a party and there’s a bunch of hot women, hey, this place is pretty great! I’ve got a chance. Now, if you knew all that ‘talent’ was paid for, now it becomes depressing again. But, if you thought, these are just ‘friends’ of some of the other employees who got invited and they just love to hang with techy dudes, now it feels a bit better, again.

These models aren’t hookers. They’re at your company party to make the ‘atmosphere’ better. Basically, these models, are like the free laundry service and ping pong table you provide. It makes the environment better. You like where you work more. You don’t tell your employees, “Hey, we offer dog walking services for free because it really has been shown to help retain you.” Everyone kind of gets that.

This is no different. Having good-looking people at your employee events, makes it seem like this place is cooler than it probably really is. By the way, these pretty people, are in on the game! They are making money using their god given assets. Just as the techy people are using their big brains.

We love to hate. The reality is, America is addicted to pretty. We made the Kardashians millionaires for absolutely no reason except for their looks. We want to be pretty. We want to hang with pretty. We are a nation that values pretty over almost everything else.

Is that right? No! Is that part of the game we are in right now? Yes.

Pro Tip: I get around hiring pretty models (male and female) at my holiday party by just hiring pretty employees to begin with! Stay thirsty my friends.

 

Corporate TA is Doing Contract Hiring All Wrong!

Posted on by
2

In every university on the planet in every Economics 101 class, professors teach a very simple concept of FIFO (First In, First Out). It’s basically meant to describe the way products/material move through a system. There are two basic types, FIFO and LIFO (Last In).

FIFO is you get some supplies shipped to your warehouse, but you first use the supplies you already have in your inventory.  LIFO is you get those same supplies shipped to you, but instead of using the inventory you already have, you first use this new inventory to fill orders.

Unfortunately, in Talent Acquisition we really haven’t figured out the basic economic theory when it comes to Contract labor.

We’ve built Vendor Management Systems (VMS) and Managed Service Provider (MSP) which we thought were the answers to our prayers, but I find most corporate TA leaders and most vendors being pushed through these systems, are unsatisfied with the results on both sides.

So, How Do We Fix It? 

The pain point in bad contract hiring is caused by speed!

Yes, that same speed we desperately want is causing us to hire poorly!

Stick with me. VMSs work as a middle person between vendors and corporate TA. They’re basically a wall so your hiring managers and TA pros aren’t taking a million calls a day from bloodsucking recruiters.

VMSs have tried to fix quality issues, but the reality is in their veal to deliver talent quickly, that get caught in this LIFO dilemma. Almost every VMS on the planet runs their submission process in the same way:

  1. Job requisition goes out to suppliers
  2. Suppliers have some sort of limit of candidates they can put in (like 3 each), and the requisition has a limit of submissions it will accept as in total from all suppliers (like 25)
  3. Suppliers are on the clock to put candidates in before the competition puts them in.
  4. Riot mentality ensues and suppliers put the first garbage they can find into the system for fear of missing out.
  5. The “first-in” candidates are interviewed and a candidate is hired on contract.

The hiring manager is told this the best talent available, sorry, you’ll have to do.

This is a lie. 

One small change by VMSs and corporate TA could easily fix this problem. Do everything exactly the same way you’re doing it now, but don’t allow any vendors to submit talent for 48 or 72 hours. With this ‘window’ of time, your vendors would actually contact more talent, better talent, and not have the fear of missing out in shoving talent into your system as fast as possible. They would still be limited to three, but now they could actually select their three best – NOT – the first three they get in touch with.

Simple. Easy. Effective.

The two or three days of waiting, is nothing, compared to the increase in candidate quality you would get.

The contract hiring world has actually gotten to the point where it moves too fast. Too fast to give recruiters a chance to find the best talent that is interested in your openings. Indian call center recruiting shops are killing VMSs because of how they are set up. It’s all about meeting a number, it has nothing to do with actually finding great talent for your organization.

Contract hiring is increasing in all markets. This isn’t going away, so we need to find better ways of doing this. As you look into 2018 and beyond, and start to analyze your total workforce (ftes, contractors, temps, consultants) the portion of the total that will be contingent is growing. The more it grows, the better quality you need to have. Moving fast is great until it isn’t.

Company aren’t hiring the best contract employees they can right now, they’re hiring the fastest. There’s a big difference between those things.

Unchained! Attracting Talent That Isn’t Chained to a Desktop!

Posted on by
Reply

From manufacturing to construction to retail to restaurants to the service industries, most of our talent doesn’t actually sit ‘chained’ to a desk, but we’re still using recruiting practices that start with the notion we all sit at a desk waiting for a recruiter to find us!

It’s amazing that over the past couple decade most talent acquisition departments have recruited in basically in the exact same way for both office-type workers and those workers who never sit behind a desk. Which is to assume every person, regardless of where they actually work, apply and look for jobs in the same manner. They don’t!

Sign up for the Unchained! Attracting Mobile Talent Webinar with Tim Sackett and Samantha Herbein for a free discussion on how to recruit great talent out in the field, out on the plant floor, or out servicing your customers. This webinar will take place on Tuesday, December 12th at 1 pm EST! 

On this webinar you will learn:

  • The tactics top recruiting organizations use to find great talent out in the field
  • How to craft engaging text messages with introductions, call-to-actions, and signatures
  • Best practices for making introductions, asking questions, screening candidates, and scheduling interviews
  • As well as old school and new school talent attraction techniques that work, that you can start using right away!

This is a free webinar focusing on how you and your organization can begin to use innovative, modern recruiting practices to find that talent you need most!

 

The Talent Acquisition Trends You Need to Focus on for 2018!

Posted on by
2

Hey gang!

My buddy, Kris Dunn, and I will be leading a free webinar tomorrow talking about the talent acquisition trends you should be focusing on in 2018 that will have the fastest and most lasting impact to your talent strategy success.

Artificial intelligence, Google for Jobs and other hot topics are dominating conversations across the recruitment industry. But at the end of the day, do they really impact your business?

With new recruitment trends popping up all the time, you need to know which ones are worth getting behind — and which fleeting ones you can afford to ignore. Most importantly, you need to be able to cut through the noise and align your business around strategies that will position you firmly ahead of your competition in 2018 and beyond.

Talent acquisition experts Tim Sackett and Kris Dunn will join CareerBuilder’s Scott Helmes to address these issues and more in a new CareerBuilder webinar, “AI, Google for Jobs & More: Talent Acquisition Trends You Need to Focus on in 2018 (And Buzzwords to Ignore)” at 1 p.m. EST on Tuesday, Dec. 5th. (That’s tomorrow!) 

You will walk away with:

  • Tips on how to position your business to have the best staffing and recruiting year ever in 2018
  • Insights on key talent acquisition and staffing trends — and how they will impact your business
  • Strategies to be more efficient and productive so you can show 2018 who’s boss

Register Now

Come join the conversation and start off 2018 on a great path of recruiting success! 

4 Things Great Recruiters Do Every Day!

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve hired over one hundred recruiters in my career.  Not a ton, but a pretty good sample size.  I’ve had some of those hires go on to become great Talent Acquisition pros, as well as some who have completely bombed in the profession.  It’s not an easy profession to be successful at, but I’ve seen some basic things that the most successful recruiters, I know, do every single thing day:

  1. Daily motivation. Great recruiters are self-motivated by nature, but the best ones still find ways to give themselves that extra little kick every day. It might be one client or job order they decide they will close on that day. It might be an activity number they challenge themselves with for the day.  It might just be re-centring on a larger overall goal they are chasing and what they’re doing in that day will mean to reach that goal.
  1. Critical of their own work. The best recruiters I’ve worked with own their orders, candidates, interviews, etc. There is no blame.  An interview is a no-show, they own it.  They can look inward and go, next time I won’t have this happen because I’m going to do that one more thing to ensure it’s successful.
  1. They step up. Hey, guys, we have a really critical position that just came open from a hiring manager, who wants it? The best recruiters always step up and want to work those high profile openings.  They want the challenge, and they are comfortable with the pressure.  They also step up with their ideas on how the organization can get better, and share freely.
  1. Daily focus. Successful recruiters can focus in and finish, every day. It’s so easy in recruiting to get pulled in a hundred different directions.  The most successful people stay focused on the job at hand and don’t allow the ‘noise’ to take them off their plan.  They find ways to lock themselves in and keep going until they reach their outcome.

HR and Recruiting both have the same main daily issue we face, we turn ourselves into firefighters.  We run from made up emergency to made up emergency.  It feeds our need to feel like we accomplished something today and became a saviour.

The most successful recruiters are no different.  They get the opportunity to be firefighters, just like we all do, but they make a conscious decision not to allow themselves to slide down the pole. How can you make yourself more successful today?

What is the right diversity mix of employees for your organization?

Posted on by
8

This is a question I think many executives and HR and TA leaders struggle with. SHRM hasn’t come out and given guidance. ATAP has not told us at what levels we should be at with our diversity mix. So, how do we come up with this answer?

Seems like we should probably be roughly 50/50 when it comes to male and female employees. Again, that’s a broad figure, because your customer base probably makes a difference. If you’re selling products and services mostly women buy, you probably want more women on your team.

The more difficult mix to figure is when it comes to race. Should we be 50/50 when it comes to race in our hiring? Apple has taken it on the chin the last few years because of their demographic employee mix, and even as of this week, are still catching criticism for having only 1/3 of their leadership team is female, and only 17% of their entire team being black and Hispanic. 55% of Apple’s tech employees are white, 77% are male.

So, what should you diversity mix be?

The most recent demographics of race in America show this:

  • 61.3% are white
  • 17.8% are Hispanic/Latino
  • 13.3 are black
  • 4.8% Asian

Some other interesting facts about American race demographics:

  • 55% of black Americans live in the south
  • White Americans are the majority in every region
  • 79% of the Midwest is white Americans
  • The West is the most overall diverse part of America (where 46% of the American Asian population live, 42% of Hispanic/Latino, 48% of American Indian, 37% of multi-race)

So, what does this all mean when it comes to hiring a more diverse workforce? 

If 61.3% of the American population is white, is it realistic for Apple to hire a 50/50 mix of diversity across its workforce? I go back to my master’s research project when looking at female hiring in leadership. What you find in most service-oriented, retail, restaurants, etc. organizations are more male leaders than female leaders, but more female employees than male employees.

What I found was as organizations with a higher population of female employees hired a higher density of male employees as leaders, they were actually pulling from a smaller and smaller pool of talent. Meaning, organizations that don’t match the overall demographics of their employee base have the tendency to hire weaker leadership talent when they hire from a minority of their employee base, once those ratios are met.

In this case, if you have 70% female employees and 30% male, but you have 70% male leaders and only 30% female leaders, every single additional male you hire is statistically more likely to be a weaker leader than hiring from your female employee population for that position.

Makes sense, right!

If this example of females in leadership is true, it gives you a guide for your entire organization in what your mixes should be across your organization. If you have 60% white employees and 50% female. Your leadership team should be 60% female leaders.

But!

What about special skill sets and demographics?

This throws are demographics off. What if your employee population is 18% black, but you can’t find 18% of the black employees you need in a certain skill set? This happened in a large health system I worked for when it came to nurse hiring. Within our market, we only had 7% of the nursing population that was black, and we struggled to get above that percentage in our overall population.

Apple runs into this same concept when it comes to hiring technical employees because more of the Asian and Indian population have the skill sets they need, so they can’t meet the overall demographics of their employee population, without incurring great cost in attracting the population they would need from other parts of the country to California.

Also, many organization’s leaders will say instead of looking at the employee base we have, let’s match the demographic makeup of the markets where are organizations work. At that point, you are looking at market demographics to match your employee demographics. Again, this can be difficult based on the skill sets you need to hire.

If I’m Apple, I think the one demographic that is way out of whack for them is female hiring. 50% of their customers are female. 77% of their employees are male, but only 33% of their leadership is female. It would seem to make demographic sense that 50% of Apple’s leadership team should be female.

Thoughts? This is a really difficult problem for so many organizations, and I see organizations attempting to get more ‘diverse’ in skin color without really knowing what that means in terms of raw numbers and percentages.

What are you using in your own shops?

The Recruiter Name Generator! What’s Your Recruiter Name? @atapglobal

Posted on by
5

I’ve noticed that certain recruiters have it easier than others. If you have a ‘unique’ name, you know what I’m talking about! You might spend the first two minutes on your conversation trying to get the candidate to say your name correctly! If you leave a message and they call back to your office it’s often hilarious at what name they ask for.

It’s a real problem for our industry, especially in America, where we tend to only want to respond to names we know we can pronounce. Think this isn’t a problem? Go out on LinkedIn and search for recruiter working for Indian RPO services. You’ll find a ton of these recruiters have changed their name to a more ‘American’ version because it helps get higher responses.

The thought process is, from the candidate’s perspective, is that if a recruiter’s name is “Paul Raja” vs. “Praveen Raja” that “Paul” probably speaks great English, so I’ll call him back, but “Praveen” might not speak as well. Is that dumb logic? Yes! Is that happening? YES! (By the way, this has happened for decades with Chinese engineering students as well, who will take very American first names because recruiters are more likely to call “Joe Lee” then “Huang Lee”)

So, what does it take to the have the perfect Recruiter name to get candidates to call you back?

First, you need a name that is recognizable and easy to say for the population you’re trying to recruit, and usually, one syllable is better. Thus, if you’re recruiting traditionally Hispanic employees, you would want a traditional Hispanic name, etc.

– In America: Mary, Mark, John, Jill, Jose, Maria, etc.

– In England: Holly, Simon, Henry, Olivia, etc.

Second, you shouldn’t have a name from a TV show or movie:

– Theon, Skyler, Tristen, Miley, etc.

Third, you want a last name that is common, but not too common, like it’s made up:

– Smith is out, but Brown is okay, as long as Brown isn’t paired with Charlie

– Bonernose is out, as would be Newbutt.

Finally, you don’t want to be the person with two first names or two last names. It’s too confusing for candidates:

– Kevin Johns or Mary George

– Turner Wilcox or Lee Nelson

That’s why I put together this easy to use Recruiter Name Generator! All you need to know is the month you were born in, and your favorite color, and BAM! You’ve got your very own, easy to use, will probably get a callback, new Recruiter Name:

So, using the easy to use charts above my new Recruiter name is: Mark Wilson!

Wouldn’t you want a call from “Mark Wilson”? Doesn’t “Mark Wilson” sound official, while also being competent and kind? Of course, he does!

What’s your new Recruiter name?