Category Archives: Recruiting

T3 – Halogen Software and Jobvite Partnership – What does it mean?

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This week on T3 I break down the partnership between Halogen and Jobvite. It was announced late last week that performance and talent management technology Halogen Software and recruiting platform Jobvite were teaming up to create one platform offering both products. From the news release:

“As part of the strategic partnership, Halogen’s customers will benefit from a tight integration between the solutions that creates a streamlined and efficient employee lifecycle process, including Jobvite’s comprehensive, analytics-driven recruiting platform, which accelerates talent acquisition by:

  • Removing friction for candidates and hiring teams to accelerate and optimize every step of the recruiting process;
  • Leveraging CV databases, online professional profiles, and hundreds of other sources to build—and continuously refine—a robust pipeline of qualified prospects;
  • Tapping into all employees’ networks to reach more targeted groups of candidates and enabling everyone at the company to source talent.

“Our mission is to help our customers win with talent. To do so, they need to be able to attract and recruit their unfair share of top talent quickly, as well as engage and retain their top performers,” says Les Rechan, President and CEO, Halogen Software. “Our partnership with Jobvite supports this mission. Jobvite leads the industry with a comprehensive social and analytics-driven recruiting platform, making them an ideal partner to help us deliver more value than ever to our large customer base.”

So, What does this really mean? 

– First, it’s a partnership, no one bought the other. They only fewer than 100 of the same customers, both should benefit from the partnership equally. If you use one of these solutions, you should probably look at the integration and see if it makes sense for you.

– Halogen/Jobvite Platform is unique from a talent technology perspective. Both are really strong solutions on their own, together you will literally be able to follow a candidate from the pre-applicant stage through employment succession in one solution. That’s pretty powerful!

– I’ve long held the belief that Talent Acquisition should own succession, it just makes sense. This is the first solution that will allow TA leaders to show how this might work.  It benefits TA to own succession because succession ultimately impacts the overall workforce plan, which TA owns. End to end talent management from recruiting to promotion to succession.

I haven’t demoed the new integrated platform but will soon and will report back on what I find. In the meantime, if you’re a user of either solution, you might want to set up a demo on your own, or if you’re in the market for a new ATS or talent management solution, this is one to put on your list to consider.

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 – send me a note.

The Life Span of a Crappy Recruiter!

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I have to give credit where credit is due, and Aerotek is the one that originally discovered how long it takes to figure out you suck as a recruiter! It’s right around 9-14 months.  If you’ve spent 13 minutes in Talent Acquisition on either the corporate or agency side, you’ve seen a ton of these resumes.

Just having recruiting experience, especially IT or Technical, can guarantee you a recruiting career for at least ten years or more, even if you are completely awful at recruiting! As a President of a recruiting firm, and someone who has run corporate TA shops for years, I see these candidates come across my desk on a weekly basis:

They look like this:

1. First Recruiting job right out of college, working for a big agency recruiting sweatshop – this position lasts 9-12 months. They left because “they didn’t agree with the management style of said agency”. The truth is they weren’t meeting their goals, but we give them a pass because these sweatshops are churn and burn.

2. The next gig is usually another agency or small corporate recruitment gig. This one usually lasts under 9 months. It’s more of the same, they couldn’t do it the first time, what makes you think they’ll do it for you!?

3. Now, if they’re smart, they jumped from the second gig before getting fired to a very large corporate gig where they have so many recruiters they truly have no idea what they actually do, this will buy you at least 24 months before you’re discovered as a recruiting fraud. In these big organizations you don’t even recruit, just post and pray, anyway, so you should be able to survive.

4. Big organizations finally figured out you’re worthless, but you now know the game, so you leveraged this big corporate name on your resume into your next gig, this time as a senior recruiter, with another big firm who wants you to sell out your last firm and all their recruiting secret. The big secret is, you have no idea, and the last big org gig you had, well, they had no idea.  Once you run out of fake secrets to share, you’ll be kicked to the curb, so start looking for a recruiting manager gig in about 18 months.

5. You jump at the first recruitment manager gig you’re offered. Mid-sized firm, who loves your big company experience and can’t wait for your to save them from themselves. They have super high expectations on what you’re going to do for them, this is not good for you, remember, you suck at recruiting! You’re gone in 9 months.

6. Welcome back to the agency world! You will now bounce around these companies for a while, selling the fact you have ‘contacts’ at big companies of which agency owners want to get into. You’re now 8-10 years into your Recruiting career, and you’re an awful, crappy recruiter.

If you’re truly lucky as a crappy recruiter you’ll fall into some recruiting gig with a college or university or some other sort of fake, non-profit. Those are like wastelands for crappy recruiters. Absolutely no expectations that you’ll do anything of value, just show up, collect a check and follow a process. It’s never your fault, and hey, they don’t want you to move to fast anyway!

Beware TA leaders. There’s a reason a recruiter has had 4 – 6+ jobs in ten years, and it’s not because they’re good at recruiting! The best recruiters don’t move around because they’re so valuable the organizations they work for won’t let them leave! If you’re crappy, people are hoping you leave! Please take your crappy recruiting skills to our competition!

 

The #1 Way You Can Tell Recruiting In NOT Important to Your Executives

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I had a recruiting leader reach out to me recently and ask for help.  They had some critical positions they needed to fill but weren’t having any success.  The executives were all over her to get her team to fill these positions.  The success of the company depended on it!

You feel her, right?  We’ve all been there at one point or another in our careers.

She was looking for some advice about what they could do, because they tried everything, and she was at wits end. This exchange was through email, so the first thing I did was what I usually do. First, I check her LinkedIn profile to check her background. She was solid, good recruiting experience, good companies. Then, I check the company’s career site.

This is where I find most companies and ‘we’ve done everything’ start to fall down.

Nowhere on the first page of the company web page could you find a link to “Careers” or “Jobs” or “Positions”. Nowhere! Not at the top, not at the bottom. You could click on anything on their home page to get to what jobs they actually had open.

But, I’m a pro. So are you. We know exactly where it’s at. Click on “About” or “About Us”. Then scroll down to “Careers” and click on that. Then go through another click or three and you’ll actually find the jobs they have open and “desperately” need to fill.

I sent a message back and we set up a call. The first thing I said was you need to have some sort of link or button or something on the home page where people can access your open jobs with one-click. “I’ve tried getting that changed, but the executive in charge of the website (marketing) refuses to add it.”  You need to go above that person’s head, and actually bring the executive who has the open jobs and explain to the CEO why this has to change.

“Yeah, but even then, this isn’t going to fill our jobs.” You know, you’re probably right, this one thing won’t fill your jobs, but this is indicative of how your executives don’t support recruiting in your organization. If your executives won’t allow you to make this one simple change, which is a clear best practice in every industry, they don’t truly care about filling these jobs.

Having your “Careers” site link under the “About Us” tab on the home page of your web page screams you have no idea what you’re doing in recruitment. Having executives that refuse you to move it, shows you they don’t care about recruiting.  It’s really simple, and always 100% true.

Interviewing for a new Recruitment leadership position? Take a look at how easy it is to find jobs with the company. If it takes forever, ask in your interview how easy it will be for you to immediately change this. The answer you get will tell you everything you need want to know about taking this job or not.

Having your career site linked under “About Us” on your home page is the #1 way you can tell if executives support recruiting or not in a company.

Walking Dead: Reviving Your Talent Networks!

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You have a bunch of zombies surrounding your career website right now, and you don’t even know it.

They stumble around and look at your content, lurk at your jobs and then just stumble away when they don’t find anything to take a bite out of. Well, the folks at FOT and Smashfly are here to help you turn those zombies into real-life candidates by reviving the talent networks you probably don’t even know you have.

Who said zombies can’t turn back to real live viable candidates?! Not us, because the FOT crew knows how, and we’re going to show you, too. Join us on February 24 at 2pm EST and we’ll give you the following goods:

  • Show you the difference between a Talent Network and a Talent Community. We’ll give you ways to build your talent network into active pools of great candidates. By using and developing talent networks, you’re letting those zombies hanging out around your career site tell you “I’m next…” “Pick me…”, making it super easy to identify your next victim!
  • Help you develop a Talent Network Strategy that lasts, with little effort from your team to keep it going. The biggest problem we all face is we just don’t have enough capacity to do more. Talent networks give you the more— without the work. We’ll show you how.
  • Show you 5 ways the best companies are engaging their Talent Networks to make real placements.We won’t just tell you the ways, we’re going to hear about straight from a Talent Pro who is using these now to successfully hire and fill position within her company.  The good, the bad, the dead. You’re going to hear it all!
  • Give you 3 things you can do with candidate contact information before they even apply to your company. Talent pools aren’t about the apply, they’re about getting you to apply. Some zombies are ready to eat, some are just milling around being zombies. What do you do when potential candidates aren’t ready to eat? We’ve got the answer.
  • Provide insight to how you can measure the success of your talent networks. By now we know none of this matters if we can’t back it up with measurable data that proves it works. Talent networks, and the data you get from them, will give you a ton of insight to what is working in your Talent shop and what might need some tweaking.

Don’t let your time get “eaten” up by a bunch of zombie candidates who will never fill the needs your company has. Learn how to build great talent networks that will give you real live placements, with less effort than you ever thought imaginable. It’s time to fight back and win against your walking dead applicant pool!

Come join the FOT Zombie Hunting crew on February 24 at 2pm EST and learn how you can implement and take your talent networks to the next level!

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T3 – SwitchApp @GetSwitch

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This week on T3 I review the new “Tinder” for job search app called SwitchApp.  SwitchApp is a completely mobile job search app for candidates and companies to help match them together.  It’s basically a marketplace for passive job seekers, where they can ‘swipe’ right if they are interested in a job, and a notification will go to the company of the interest.

Swipe left, and the company doesn’t get notified. For you Tinder users, you’ll get this. Obviously, to make all of this happen a job seeker first must download SwitchApp to their Apple or Android device and set up a profile. They can create a profile easily by linking their LinkedIn or Facebook profile, or filling it out manually. The profile is automatically set to anonymous, and any company on your profile will not be able to view your profile.

Swipe’s job matching algorithm then goes to work showing the jobs that the job seeker is eligible to see based on Switch’s matching criteria. If a job seeker is matched to the job, the organization can ‘like’ it to show their interest.  Then it’s up to the job seeker to decide if they’re interested. Right now, 47% of candidates matched by Switch and shown to companies are ‘liked’ by the company.

SwitchApp allows companies to post position with a structured data job posting. Basically, a company will input all of the skills they need for the position, title, location, salary range, etc. The matching technology does the rest. SwitchApp does not allow companies to ‘search’ the database of job seekers and contact anyone they want, there must be a match to make the magic happen!

Current users of the app actually love the fact that there is no searching taking place. Just post the job and see if matches come back. It eliminates much of the traditional noise you get from postings and having so many people apply that aren’t close to what you’re looking for. With SwitchApp you only get pinged when a candidate matches the criteria you put into your posting.

SwitchApp is currently free for employers to try out and use.  Primarily, it’s only going to work in New York and San Francisco (the Bay Area), because that’s where it’s being tested and launched first.  It’s not only for tech hires, the app also has finance, advertising and other business-related professions they are targeting.

It’s free. Give it a try if you’re out in those areas and looking for talent, many companies have already made hires. Eventually, Switch is going to be charging employers for usage, so it’s best to try it out now before that kicks in sometime this year.

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 – send me a note.

Job Seekers You’re Only Judged on These Two Criteria

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If you’re out looking for a job it usually feels like you’re being judged on every little thing you do, have done or potentially will do in the future. Interestingly enough, a Harvard professor discovered you’re actually only judged on two things:

“People size you up in seconds, but what exactly are they evaluating?

Harvard Business School professor Amy Cuddy has been studying first impressions alongside fellow psychologists Susan Fiske and Peter Glick for more than 15 years, and has discovered patterns in these interactions.

In her new book, “Presence,” Cuddy says people quickly answer two questions when they first meet you:

 – Can I trust this person?

 – Can I respect this person?

Psychologists refer to these dimensions as warmth and competence respectively, and ideally you want to be perceived as having both.

Interestingly, Cuddy says that most people, especially in a professional context, believe that competence is the more important factor. After all, they want to prove that they are smart and talented enough to handle your business.”

Trust and Respect.

I’ll add this is probably the two things you’re being judged immediately following the judging that gets done on your overall appearance, which is almost instantaneous! Let’s face it, we like to hire pretty people.

Once you open your mouth, you’re being judged on how well can I trust what this person is telling me, and can I respect their background, work ethic, where they came from, etc.  Most of this is based on the person doing the judging, not you.  I know, that sucks.

How do you help yourself?

1. Try and mirror the energy of the person who is interviewing you. If you come in all calm and cool, and the person who is interviewing is really upbeat and high energy, they’ll immediately question you as a fit.

2. Do research on who you’ll be interviewing with and try and get some sense of their background and story. Try and make some connections as fast as possible in the interview. This will help build trust and respect with this person. In today’s world, it’s not that hard to find out stuff on an individual. If HR sets up your interview, just politely ask who you will be interviewing with (the name).

3. Be interesting. Have a good story to tell, one that most people will find funny or interesting. Not too long. A good icebreaker to set off the interview on a great tone.

I tell people all the time. An interview isn’t a test, it’s just a conversation with some people you don’t know. We have these all the time. Sometimes you end up liking the people, sometimes you don’t. If you don’t like the people you’re interviewing with, there’s a good chance you won’t like the job!

It’s Tim Sackett Day! Celebrating Michael Kelemen aka the Recruiting Animal @Animal

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January 23, 2012 my friends made that day forever be known as Tim Sackett Day!  By January 23, 2013, those same friends thought I couldn’t take another day of celebration and honor, and decided to honor another individual but still call it Tim Sackett Day! Last year on Tim Sackett Day we honored the great Victorio Milian! So, welcome to the 5th Annual Tim Sackett Day celebration!

This year we are celebrating our first Canadian on Tim Sackett Day, the Recruiting Animal, Michael Kelemen.

I have to say when the Tim Sackett Day committee first brought up Animal’s name, I wasn’t very happy.  I think Animal is basically an asshole.  That’s when the committee reminded me that I’m basically an asshole, and it’s why I was honored to begin with.  They had a very good point.

For those who don’t know Animal, he’s original to say the least.  He took recruiting and a morning zoo radio show schtick and pushed the recruiting conversation into areas no one else would ever take it.  Not me. Not Punk Rock, Laurie Ruettimann. Not anyone in our space. He says what we all think, but are afraid to say.

So, why do I think he’s an asshole?

Animal invited me on his radio show and warned me, he doesn’t pull any punches.  He was going to come at me and challenge me about how I thought about recruiting, and wanted me to back up how I thought with very specific examples.  It ended up being Animal yelling at me for thirty minutes. Here’s the show – take a listen for yourself.

In hindsight, I wasn’t ready for the Animal show.  Animal wants controversy and conflict. It makes good radio. I didn’t bring that. I also didn’t bring a set of boobs which would have helped since Animal yells way less at the ladies on his show! He’ll disagree with that last statement, which is Animal he mostly disagrees with all statements. Laurie Ruettimann claims he’s a Teddy Bear, but she has boobs, so I discount her opinion on Animal.

Why do I think Animal is the perfect person to honor on Tim Sackett Day?

Animal loves the recruiting industry. Agree with him, disagree with him, he has an extreme passion for our profession. You have to respect that! He’s been doing this since 2004!  I didn’t even start writing for Fistful of Talent until 2008!  He basically paved the way for all of us that write and speak about recruiting in the social space.

Animal calls a spade a spade.  What he really wants is for our industry to share the great stuff, and call out the bullshit. He’s like a bullshit cop. When all these people were out three or four years ago talking about how great talent communities were, he was the first to call them out and ask them to prove it. You know what you don’t hear about anymore? Talent communities.

I think my friend John Nykolaiszyn said it best the very first time I met him (to his defense it was after a few glasses of wine):

“Tim Sackett!? Fuck you! Fuck You! Fuck You!…I love you!”

John hated that my writing challenged things he truly believed in, but also loved the fact that I made him think about things in a different way. 

That, in a nutshell, is Animal. He challenges everyone to think about what we are truly doing and saying.

Please join me in celebrating the Recruiting Animal, Michael Kelemen today! Catch him on Twitter @Animal (getting “Animal” as your twitter name also shows how far in front of the game he is!), also his website and radio show: Recruiting Animal 

T3 – SmashFly

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SmashFly.  Wierd name, really great technology for ‘Pre-Applicant’ engagement.  Basically, SmashFly is a company that will make your recruitment marketing really work. No, not that flyer you made yourself with clipart. Real honest to goodness big boy and big girl marketing, for talent acquisition.

When most people think about recruiting, sourcing, etc. There is really little thought put into talent attraction.  Wait, you mean we just don’t post jobs and candidates magically appear!?! Nope, they don’t. That’s why your hiring managers hate you!

We love to talk about ‘Talent Communities’ and ‘Talent Pools’ but few of us really know how to actively engage these, and even if you do know how, you don’t have the tool. This is where SmashFly comes in.  Most companies now probably have something like a CRM (Customer Candidate Relationship Management) tool.  It might be baked into your ATS, or it’s something like Avature. You might use tools like Jobs2Web, Work4 or TweetMyJobs.  These are all great ‘bolt-on’ type of tools that will do some of what Smashfly does.  The difference being Smashfly isn’t disjointed, it’s end-to-end recruitment marketing in one box. Job Distribution, SEO, Career Site, Talent Networks, CRM, Mobile, Employee Referral Programs and Social.

Don’t underestimate the value in bringing all these disparate solutions into one platform, the data is unbelievable!  SmashFly has the coolest analytics in sourcing that I’ve seen. You get real-time looks into candidate pipelines, their status and sourcing performance.  Recruitment funnels by source, and where your internal roadblocks are! A full dashboard that will show you exactly which recruitment marketing initiatives are providing the most applicants, most qualified candidates and the most hires.  It was really cool to see how many times the program bringing in the most applicants, isn’t your best for quality of hire, but we keep funneling money to these programs!

Companies that use someone like SmashFly are usually large mid-market to enterprise type employers.  You’ll be hiring hundreds, if not, thousands of hires per year. You are already use to spending hundreds of thousands, if not millions, in recruitment marketing annually already.  Smashfly will make this money work a lot better for you. A system like this pays for itself, year one, easily.

5 Things I like about SmashFly:

1. Unlimited landing pages.  Guess what?  Candidates like to feel special. Creating a website landing page just for a certain job or candidate makes them feel special. With Smashfly you can have a separate landing page for every job!  You could create a landing page for a specific candidate you want “Tim’s Job Page”. Go crazy!  They literally made one for me, in about 30 seconds.  Your entire sourcing and recruiting team will be able to do these easily and all will match your branding and be connected to all systems. Seamless. No extra cost.

2. Ability to Engage and Disengage automatically. Getting ready to make an offer to a great candidate and all of sudden your CRM sends them an email about another position!? Ugh! That’s embarrassing. SmashFly’s system knows where a candidate is in your workflow and will disengage them automatically without you doing anything, and re-engage if that status changes and you need to again!

3. Full Control over Brand, Messaging across all channels (job ads, career sites, social, email campaigns, etc.). Want to change some messaging for a program on your career site, it will go across the platform everywhere else as well, or not, depending on how you want it. You create it when and where you want.

4. Complete Visibility through Analytics.  It fully integrates with your ATS, so you get end-to-end analytics like nothing you have seen prior. It’s an agnostic platform so it will give you the real scoop and evaluate all channels and media to show you what is really working, and what is not!

5. Marketing automation for recruiting.  Talent acquisition shops hate working with their internal marketing departments, because you’re never the priority. A system like Smashfly puts you back in control in to focus on the technologies and tools that can help you consistently and predictably attract qualified candidates.

It’s a really great tool, so powerful.  Check them out, it will not be a waste of your time (Demo)!

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 space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be T3 – send me a note.

Oddly Enough, People Like It When You Want Them!

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If I hear one more person tell me that candidates don’t like phone calls, I’m going to shove a phone up your…

I’m not the smartest cat, but I know a couple of things.  Here are a few things I know:

1. You can’t taste the difference of well Gin and high-end Gin after 4 Gin and Tonics.

2. French Fries, Onion rings and Tator Tots taste great fried and taste awful baked.

3. Great tasting chocolate is the reason women can be single. (okay, I stole that one from my wife!)

4. Candidates with car trouble are lying.

5. People like to be told that you want them for the a job! It’s flattering. It makes them feel important. It makes them feel valued. They love to listen to what you have to say, regardless of how satisfied they are in their job.

If I called you right now with a job that was something you have always wanted, guess what would happen?  You would call me back. You would call me back almost instantly. You would run out to your car, telling the receptionist on the way out you have an urgent personal call, to hear what I have to say.

Those people. Those thought leaders. Those idiots, who are telling you candidates don’t like phone calls are LIARS!

Why are they lying to you? Here is why I think they are probably lying to you:

1. They are lazy and hope the internet will solve all of their problems.

2. They are hoping to talk the world into believing you never have to make a phone call to get a job.

3. They are scared.

I did a survey where I asked 100 people, mostly millennials, (all potential candidates, since all people are potential candidates) if I called you with your “Dream Job”, would you either pick up my call or call me back?  Would you like to know the results?

100 out of 100 said they would pick up my call or call me back! 100%!

Recruiters who say candidates don’t like phone calls are not recruiters, they’re administrative professionals. Pay them accordingly.

Should Job Hopping Be Encouraged?

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Am I old school?

No, really? Please let me know in the comments because this recent article from Fast Company makes no sense to me! Check this out:

“JOB HOPPERS ARE BELIEVED TO HAVE A HIGHER LEARNING CURVE, BE HIGHER PERFORMERS, AND EVEN TO BE MORE LOYAL…In terms of managing your own career, if you don’t change jobs every three years, you don’t develop the skills of getting a job quickly, so then you don’t have any career stability,” (Penelope) Trunk tells Fast Company. “You’re just completely dependent on the place that you work as if it’s 1950, and you’re going to get a gold watch at the end of a 50-year term at your company.”

Really? I’m not sure Talent Acquisition leaders, across the world, share Penelope’s philosophy on job hopping!

I don’t buy any of this.

In the minds of hiring managers, Job Hoppers are Job Hoppers for a reason. Which basically comes down to you weren’t good enough to stick with any one company you were with. Sure some of that hopping might be they were in a bad company who didn’t treat them like they should have been treated. At which point, a normal person, would learn from this bad fit and choice of employer, and make a better one.

I even job hopped a little in the early part of my career. I was chasing an executive title. In hindsight, it was the dumbest thing I ever did!

This is bad advice, plain and simple.

Don’t job hop. For every person that it helps, it will hurt ten others. Hiring managers still hate to see job hopping on a resume, and they’ll question what is wrong with you if your resume looks like you job hop.

Even in the tech sector, which I work in every day, hiring managers hate to see IT pros that have ten jobs in ten years. They’ll still hire you now, because the need is so great, but eventually the economy of the IT market, supply and demand, will catch up. At that point, your job hopping resume will not be desired.

So, how do you fix this, if you’re currently in this job hopper cycle?

I recommend to job seekers that they bundle many of their ‘projects’ into one consulting job, to make it, at least, appear to be under one umbrella of an employer. We see many IT pros doing this now as contingent workers and incorporating themselves. Work several projects at different companies, but all managed under one brand. It’s not perfect, but it looks a little better.

Job hopping should never be encouraged. Making a change because your career is stagnant is something completely different. Most careers don’t get stagnant in 2-3 years!