Category Archives: Recruiting

The 7 Brutal Truths About Recruiting No One Wants to Admit

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Don’t you love Clickbait titles!?  I mean you read that title and you’re like, “JFC, Tim! Okay, I need to see what crazy sh*t he’s going to say about recruiting and who he pisses off today!”

Okay, so, here you go!

I recently got back from CareerBuilder’s Empower. It’s basically a recruiting conference for CB clients. Empower had a great recruiting content for both sides. Both corporate recruiters and agency recruiters were in attendance. You can easily spot the two groups. The agency recruiters wear suits and have big watches. Watches so big Flavor Flav would be jealous. The suits aren’t your dad’s suit, either, they’re the new ‘modern’ fit suits that look like they might be one size too small.

The agency guys don’t care. They’re making twice what the corporate sap makes, who is wearing either jeans and button-down or Khakis and a button-down. I’ll say most of the corporate TA ladies dress smart and stylish, most are also former agency recruiters!

Being surrounded by 1,000 recruiters always helps remind you why so many folks dislike the industry and function of recruiting. Here’s my take:

1. There’s no difference between selling cars and recruiting. In cars sales you make the car look as great as you can, even when it’s a piece of sh*t. In recruiting you make the organization and the hiring manager look as great as possible, even when they’re a piece of Sh*t.

2. Recruiting has nothing to do with Quality. Recruiting is all about speed. Every recruiter wants to argue it’s about quality, but it’s not. It’s not because you don’t actually know if someone is a quality hire until about a year into position, for most roles. Recruiting is about filling positions as fast as you can with the best talent that is available at the time you’re actually looking to fill the position.

3. The majority of Recruiting leaders have no idea what they’re doing. That sounds harsh, doesn’t it? It’s mostly true for a couple of reasons. First, TA was a dead function for about 8-10 years in most organizations during the recession, so most TA leaders either weren’t in TA or weren’t developed. Second, the technology is evolving so quickly, 99% of TA leaders can’t keep up with it. So, you get a mix of incompetence and old school know-how.

4. Real Recruiters have figured out Employment Branding has little impact in filling positions. Great recruiters can fill roles in a company that has no brand, or a negative brand, it makes no difference to them. What real recruiters understand is that the majority of the population pays little attention to your employment brand. Great TA comes mainly from great recruitment marketing (which I know some of you will argue is all about branding). You can be great at recruitment marketing and still have a brand no one knows about and fill your positions.

5. Your organization would fill openings with or without a Recruiting Team. Ugh! That one hurts, but it’s true. I speak with organizations every week that don’t have TA and don’t use agencies, but still fill positions. What!? How can that be!? The executives, the hiring managers, etc. all do it. They own their own staff and make sure they find people to fill the needs they have. As an organization grows this becomes harder, but not impossible.

6. Corporate recruiters will always be less effective to Agency recruiters until you change your compensation. Corporate recruiters only have to work as hard as the weakest recruiter on the team. Agency recruiters have to work to eat. Corporate TA leaders would do well to add some incentive to the compensation mix to their teams that is directly tied to individual recruiting accomplishments of the roles they fill.

7. 90% of your positions are filled by candidates finding you, not a Recruiter finding them. Take a look at your source of hires, how many are sourced directly by one of your recruiters reaching out to a candidate that didn’t first reach out to you? This number will put that giant corporate TA recruiting salary into perspective! I can find a great admin pro to run a TA process for $15-18/hr.

What are your brutal truths about recruiting? Hit me in the comments.

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. 

College Students Don’t Know You Want Them!

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For part of my career, I did the standard corporate college recruiting gig. It sounds “super-cool” when you first think about it. “Wait, I get to fly around the country and go the best college campuses and recruit people who actually want to be recruited?!”

The reality is college recruiting as a corporate recruiter is much less sexy. Think a lot of Courtyard Marriotts, a pizza, and a six-pack, while you watch crapping hotel TV and follow up on work email. Then wake up early and get to the next campus. You quickly begin to hate travel, hate college campuses and miss actually being in the office!

But, corporations believe they must be on campus to recruit the best and brightest college students. Here where the problem begins. College students don’t even know you’re there! A recent study by Walker Sands found out that the majority of college students don’t even know you were on campus:

Walker Sands’ new Perceptions of Consulting Careers study, 56 percent of college students don’t even know if consulting firms recruit at their school. On top of that, 82 percent feel that major firms only recruit from a limited group of select universities.
Okay, this study focused on consulting firms, but the reality is the students don’t really know the difference between Deloitte and Dell when it comes to getting a job!
What can you do to make your company stand out and be remembered while you’re on campus? Try these five things:
1. Develop a Pre-visit communication strategy. Work with the schools you want to recruit from most to find out how you can get your message in front of them (email, text, student newspaper, billboards on campus, etc.). Each school has a way to reach every student, you need to find out what that is, and how you can tap into that, even it costs a little money.
2. Come in early and take over classes in the majors you’re most interested in. Professors are like most people, they don’t want to work hard if they don’t have to. So, if you build 45 minutes of great content, most Professors will let you ‘guest’ lecture as long as it’s not one big sales pitch. Come up with great contact professors will find valuable for their students, then go deliver it the day before the major career fair. Then invite each class to come see you.
3. Make a splash in high traffic areas the day of your visit. College kids haven’t changed much, they like free food and drink, free stuff, basically anything free! So, find the highest traffic area on campus and give away free stuff college kids will like. If you’re only interested in one specific school within the university, find out where those students hang out.
4. Stay a day later after everyone else leaves. Whether it’s the day after or even another time altogether, find a time to be on campus when you don’t have any competition to getting your message out. 99% of employers only show up on career fair day. Stand out and be the employer that is there when no one else is!
5. Post-visit communication strategy. Most organizations never contact the students who show interest in them after they leave campus.  They’ll contact a handful of the ones who stood out to them, but so is every other employer. Recruiting kids after you leave is more important than the time you spend on campus. Most kids will see 20+ employers and will only remember a couple. If you stalk them after the fact, they’ll remember you!

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 #11

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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 fill everyone in…

Recruiting Secret #11 

Hiring managers, on average, don’t hire older workers because they fear they know more than them. 99% of supervisors can’t handle that situation, and feel threatened for their job. Even though, hiring people that know more than you is the secret to success for high performing leaders.

 

 

The 2016 Fall Michigan Recruiter’s Conference!

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This is the third annual conference we’ve done and they just keep getting bigger and better! We’ll have 150 Corporate TA Pros and Leaders joining us this conference, all working to become the best damn TA pros we can be!

This year’s lineup includes:

– Laurie Ruettimann – Mrs. Punkrock HR-Cynical Girl-Marathon Runner!

– Gerry Crispin – The Godfather of Candidate Experience & Co-Founder of CareerXRoads!

– Ambrosia Vertesi – Mrs. HR Open Source

– Chris Bailey – Mr. TEDx Seven Mile Beach, the King of Cayman Islands HR & Anything Over Ice!

– Kerri Mills – 2015 SourceCon Grandmaster Sourcing Champion, Indeed TA Pro & @TheJobGirl

Friday, October 14th onsite at the Amway World Headquarters in Grand Rapids, Michigan!  You can check out more details here – Michigan Recruits! 

Registration is now open! It’s $49! Why?  Because we think paying thousands of dollars to attend a great conference is out of reach for most Talent Acquisition budgets! At least it was in almost every organization I went to!  We wanted to bring great recruiting content, national level content, to our own backyard in Michigan!

REGISTER HERE! (It’s filling up quickly, we have limited space!)

We’ve designed this conference to be a corporate Talent Acquisition safe-zone! What does that mean?  Third party agency recruiters will not be invited. It’s not that we don’t like the agency folks. It’s that agency folks can’t shut themselves off when it comes to selling!  We want an environment that is about learning and development, about raising the recruiting game of all those attending.

Check it out! You won’t find a better one-day lineup anywhere in the world for $49! It’s crazy. Also, a big shout out to our two main sponsors – ViziRecruiter and CareerBuilder – without them we couldn’t keep it this cheap!

 

T3 – Behind the Curtain at LinkedIn

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I got invited to LinkedIn! Yeah, me, the guy who was blacklisted from LinkedIn because I tend to write stuff that isn’t so flattering about the organization. Before I tell you what I learned while at LinkedIn, I have to tell you that I had to sign an NDA the moment I walked into the building! So, what I’m about to say is what I can say without getting myself in trouble.

The meeting at LinkedIn was something dreamed up by Chris Hoyt and Gerry Crispin at CareerXroads after hearing feedback from some of their Colloquium members (FYI TA Leaders – if you haven’t checked out becoming a member of CareerXroads, you need to!) they felt LinkedIn would definitely want and need to hear. Everyone says they want critical feedback until you get it! To LinkedIn’s credit, they were willing to hear this feedback, which can be tough to take! No one likes being told their baby is ugly! This wasn’t going to be some vendor advisory meeting, this was going to be something completely new and different!

LinkedIn had multiple people from their leadership team attend and were highly engaged. It helped that the clients who attended were whales! Giant clients, clients that move your needle. These kinds of clients ensure you get heard.

So, what did I learn:

– LinkedIn has a vision and that vision has a lot to do with helping organizations attract and get talent from a product perspective. They also think member first, not a buyer of LinkedIn Recruiter seat first. That’s important. The true value of LI is not their clients paying for products, it’s the network. Without the network, LI is worthless.

– A ton of companies in the TA tech space want access to LinkedIn member data so they can make money. Not shocking, but most of the money they would make is directly at the expense of what LinkedIn has built and is making money on. Welcome to Capitalism, that’s not going to fly. So, you can complain that LI won’t allow access, to this or that, and you can continue to complain because it makes no financial sense for them to do so.

– What LinkedIn sees as important is probably not important to you, yet. That’s most of the disconnect between user and company. Recruiters can come up with many things that are wrong with LinkedIn and probably believe LinkedIn doesn’t have a clue. They do have a clue, but they’re also focusing on the future and fixing the problems as a set, not one at a time.

– LinkedIn can do way better from a PR standpoint of letting the user base know they are being heard and what they are doing about what they are hearing. Or more importantly, why they are not doing something. Many times not doing something is causing the most friction, when in reality there is a real reason why they are not fixing something you believe needs to be fixed or added.

– LinkedIn, like most HR and TA Tech companies, love their fans. If you only listen to your fans, you begin to believe you’re really, really good. The problem with this in Recruiting and HR is 80% (my number) of pros really don’t know any better. If you give them anything that helps them, they’re going to be super happy and think it’s the best, because they don’t know any better. LinkedIn has made a conscious choice to start listening to some of the people who are critical and finding the value in that feedback as well.

– Fake profiles, catfishing, etc. are a problem. They heard it. They heard it from their largest clients. This isn’t an easy problem to fix, and it has nothing to do with network growth numbers, even though almost every recruiter you speak with thinks that this is actually the case. My opinion is, after attending this meeting, that LI is less concerned with the overall total member number, and more concentrated on the number of ‘active’ member users on a daily and weekly basis. They want to raise engagement of all members.

– LinkedIn knows they have data you want as a Recruiting pro and leader, and they’re working on ways to bring it to you in a more robust, easy to consume manner. Again, it’s the 90/10 rule. 10% of power users want everything, but that would be overwhelming to 90% of the rest of us. Great tech gives you what you need, when you need it, in a way you can easily consume it. That’s not easy.

– LinkedIn Fangirl Stacy Zapar was there with me. I know people view Stacy as a walking billboard for how great LI is. I will tell you that out of everyone in the room, Stacy challenged LI’s leadership more than anyone and did it continually. She was fighting the fight for recruiters at the feet of the throne. If you love a product, you’ll fight to make it better. She has a unique ability to share negative feedback in the most positive way!

That’s it for now. I hope I don’t get a cease and desist email today! I tried to be as specific as I could without giving details. I was impressed with LinkedIn’s team. They came across as they cared very much about what everyone in the room had to say and are working to address all of the concerns.

I left believing, for the very first time, that LinkedIn actually cares about what we as a recruiting industry think. Thanks to Chris Hoyt and Gerry Crispin at CareerXroads for convincing some of their Colloquium members to come and provide this feedback. I highly recommend them to other HR and TA tech vendors who truly want to know what your clients and the industry think about your company and your products!

One last thing. I looked for blue Kool-Aid everywhere on LI’s campus and couldn’t find it! I secretly wished they would have it everywhere in those water coolers on every floor, that would be so awesome and funny at the same time! Maybe they hid it away knowing I was coming! Stay tuned. My hope from this meeting is I’ll have more to share in the future on LinkedIn and its going-ons.

The Best Recruiters Don’t Get Surprised!

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Talent Acquisition 101.

If there is one thing I could give a new Recruiting Pro it would be this simple advice. No matter how prepared you think you are, you really only need to prepare yourself, for one thing, being surprised.

You don’t really get judged on your daily stuff.  Let’s face it, 99.9% of the time that goes off without a hitch.  You get judged on how you handle surprises.

Surprises make and break great Recruiting Pro careers.

There’s really only way to prepare for surprises.  You need to expect that a surprise will always happen. That one interview you desperately want, who calls to cancel with ‘car trouble’, the candidate who backs out of the offer after signing the paperwork.  Talk about it, plan for it, and basically come to grips that it will happen.  Then it will happen, and you’ll be the only one not surprised by it.

The best Recruiting Pros I’ve worked with had this one common trait, they were unshakeable when surprised.

Almost like they expected it.

T3 – @SocialTalent – Recruitment Training

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This week on T3 I review the recruiter/sourcing training platform Social Talent. Okay, before we get started on Social Talent, I have a confession to make. I’ve actually known about Social Talent for a while but haven’t written about them because I was taking my entire team through their training! I didn’t write about them because I didn’t want to share how awesome it is!

Social talent is an on-demand platform that trains your recruiters to get a ‘black belt’ in internet recruitment. Social Talent also has an advanced black belt and an inclusion and diversity recruitment certification. The program is micro-video driven, enforces learning through quick quizzes on the learning and of course the big black belt certification assessment at the end.

The program is recruiter-driven and takes about an hour or so per week to complete, over 16 weeks. My recruiters actually spend a little more time than an hour per week because Social Talent continually adds in the newest information around sourcing and recruiting and the platform constantly engages your recruiters to learn more and get higher level skills.

5 Things I really like about Social Talent:

1. Built by recruiters for recruiters. The platform is built around learning, recruiting and performing. The training has changed the way my recruiters tackle an opening and opened up the number of sources each of them uses.

2. The bite-sized video in Social Talent is consumed easily and reinforced by practice. The training is developed in a way that allows both new recruiters and experienced recruiters to get the most out of it.

3. Social Talent isn’t only teaching the tech skills of Boolean Search, Advanced LinkedIn searching, etc., it’s teaching recruiters to build their own personal brand and how, to build networks and pipelines, and how to build your employer brand.  It’s the gift and the curse of the platform, your recruiters will make themselves more valuable by going through this training. This is true development for recruiters just not skill-enhancement.

4. Metrics platform gives talent acquisition manager great insight to who is using the platform, how they are using the platform and gives them the ability to send social positive reinforcement. One of the best training platforms for recruiting I’ve seen that truly helps you ensure you get full user adoption and most out of your investment.

5. Ongoing bi-weekly live training sessions to reinforce all the new skills that your recruiters are learning, plus gives it lets them challenge the Social Talent team on their harderst searches and shows them exactly how the ‘pros’ would use the system.

I have to say this again, I didn’t want to share this with you because I truly believe it gives my recruiters a competitive advantage over every other company who doesn’t use it! But, I started T3 to share, so asmuch as this hurts me, I’m sharing this with you.

Socical Talent is the single best recruiter training tool I’ve used in my twenty-plus years of recruiting and managing recruiting teams. It’s not a small investment, but I can tell you that my team took full advantage and we feel like we’ve gotten a full return on our investment and my team, across the board loves it!

Check them out, you won’t be disappointed!

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.

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’.