Category Archives: Recruiting

There is a huge disconnect in mobile recruiting!

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Pew Research  came out with some cool data recently on mobile usage and recruiting and a few things actually shocked me!  Check this out:

Americans with relatively low levels of educational attainment tend to lean heavily on their smartphones for online access in general, and this also play out in the ways members of this group utilize their smartphones while looking for employment. Among Americans who have used a smartphone in some part of a job search, those with higher education levels are more likely to use their phone for basic logistical activities – such as calling a potential employer on the phone or emailing someone about a job. On the other hand, smartphone job seekers who have not attended college are substantially more likely to have used their phone for more advanced tasks, such as filling out an online job application or creating a resume or cover letter.

If you’re an HR Pro like me, you believed the opposite of this was probably true! I think most TA pros and leaders would believe they couldn’t rely on mobile recruiting technology because those with lower education (thus lower income) would not have access to a smartphone. The opposite of this is true.

Lower educated individuals actually rely more on their mobile device to get online and communicate about things surrounding employment.

Currently, in the TA space most of the mobile recruiting push is around Tech hires.  Everything you read in regards to mobile recruiting will speak to the importance of having if you hire IT, but almost nothing if you’re trying to hire unskilled workers.  In fact, conventional wisdom still holds court when it comes to unskilled recruiting – paper applications, career page applications, job fairs, etc.

So, what is the major issue facing unskilled and lower skilled job seekers?  

Employers are still stuck on resumes and applications to get someone to apply.

Have you ever filled out an application on the screen of an iPhone 5?  It sucks! You won’t complete it. You’ll go to another company that is hiring and makes it easier to apply via another means, or by giving way less information.

Employers who are struggling to hire lower-skilled workers need to make some major changes to their mobile recruiting strategy.

Here are some tips: 

1. Have a mobile recruiting strategy, specifically designed for unskilled and lowers skilled candidates

2. Figure out what is the bare minimum of information you need to have some apply to a position via their mobile device. Get the rest when you see them in person.

3. Start measuring how your candidates are coming to you. Understand, while they might come to from a job board or online resource, that is still probably done by a mobile device. We need to change our mindset about how we attract lower-skilled workers via mobile.

This is a huge eye-opener to TA pros and leaders. Take note. Lower educated workers are more likely to use a mobile device to apply to your jobs than a highly educated worker!

 

 

Have You Noticed, Most Companies Suck at Recruiting

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Recruiting isn’t about hiring one person. That’s easy.

It’s about consistently hiring one person, and that person should be, at the very least, as talented as the last person you hired. But, really more talented. Then, continually do that, hire better talent, over and over.

To do that, you have to be able to continually build a better mousetrap. You have to continually get better organizationally and individually.

The reason we suck at recruiting is we get satisfied with making that one hire.

“Yay! We did it.”

“Now, what?”

Great recruiting organizations aren’t satisfied with one hire. They aren’t satisfied with having all of their positions filled. They only get satisfied when they are replacing lower talent, with higher talent.

That’s a really hard place to get to. 99.99% of organizations will never get there.  It’s really hard work. Heavy lifting.

So, we give up. Screw it. We’ll just keep filling these one positions.

This is why you suck at recruiting.  Your goal is fill positions, not to make the talent in your organization better.  If increasing the talent was your goal, you would do things differently. You would act differently. Your sense of urgency would be different.

Talent Acquisition isn’t about acquiring bodies.  It’s about making the talent in your organization better. Every day. Every week. Every year.

Most companies suck at recruiting because they see recruiting as filling positions.

What is your most valuable hiring source?

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

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

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

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

– 21% of hires came directly from using CareerBuilder.

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

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

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

What does this really mean?

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

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

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

What does this really mean, to you?

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

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

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

Happy recruiting my friends!

 

Hiring Means Your Organization Failed

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Henry Ward, the CEO of eShares, wrote a post on Medium recently on How to Hire.  It’s a great piece from an executive point of view regarding the concept of talent acquisition.  Basically, Henry feels that if your organization needs to go out and hire external talent, you’ve failed as an organization:

“Hiring means we failed to execute and need help. First, let me quell a misconception. Hiring is not a consequence of success. Revenue and customers are. Hiring is a consequence of our failure to create enough leverage (see eShares 101) to grow on our own. It means we need outside help. The perfect business is a computer plugged into the internet. Starting with me, every human thereafter is overhead. And we are increasing overhead by 50%.

I want to repeat this point. We are increasing overhead by 50% because we failed to execute. It is not something to be proud of. It is humbling to go back to the labor market, hat-in-hand, asking for help…”

Want to know why your executives don’t respect HR?  Read above.  Executives think about the business differently than we do in HR and Talent Acquisition. I’m 100% sure any head of TA would believe hiring, because of business growth, equals success, not failure.

Even if you take out Henry’s example of the perfect business model being a computer plugged into the internet, he could still argue that any organization that can’t self-sustain its own growth of labor is a failure. Think about it from a training and development point of view. You hire entry level candidates and train and develop them into every part of your organization. You have a succession plan. If everything works perfectly, you never hire ‘talent’ from the outside. You just hire new, clean, entry level bodies, and create your own clone army!

Okay, at this point we still need to use outside bodies. I would guess at some point Google will create real, live human clones, then the process could be completely self-contained.

So, how does Henry Ward hire at eShares?  Here is his hiring philosophy:

  1. Hire for Strength vs Lack of Weakness
  2. Hire for Trajectory vs Experience
  3. Hire Doers vs Tellers
  4. Hire Learners vs Experts
  5. Hire Different vs Similar
  6. Always pass on ego

Pretty solid. Some of it might depend on your industry, company, etc. I’m not a huge believer in always hiring for difference. Difference causes conflict. In some organizations that is great. In some organizations that is catastrophic. Just as similar, group think, etc. is bad in many cases, it’s perfect in some cases.

Give his article a read, he goes into detail on each step with an explanation.  One of the best executive written pieces I’ve read on hiring.

The Best Talent Expects Tougher Interviews

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I was reminded this week about the importance of tough interviews and their importance!

My friend has been interviewing at a number of good companies for high-level jobs. He’s going to be a great hire for someone, he’s a top notch talent. Great resume, experience, education and personality. He’s a five-tool player, A level talent!

He was debriefing me on some of his interviews and one thing struck me as soon as he said it. He was talking about one interview in particular and why he was interested in the company. Basically, he was interested in the company because they gave him the most challenging interview!

It was his determination that if a company was going to be that challenging in an interview, it was a place he would like to work. It was the toughest interview he has been on, and as a top talent, it seemed they were doing more to ensure they were only hiring top talent, and that made him feel like it was the right place for him!

A few things about this interview:

1. It was a long interview.

2. They didn’t force him to interview with 15 people over 8 stages.

3. They asked tough, challenging questions, they only someone who really knew their stuff, and worked at that level, would be able to answer!

The problem with saying tough interviews are better is too many HR Pros believe ‘more’ interviewing, is tough interviewing. More doesn’t equal tough, it equals more. There is a huge difference!

Tough, difficult interviews are ones where the questions asked would challenge the knowledge and skill of the person asked. Many times we end up not asking anything challenging in interviews because are spending all of our time just ‘talking’ the candidate into the job. In this instance we end up hiring the person who had the best interaction with us, maybe not the best candidate.

Top talent likes to be challenged. It’s the reason they’re top talent! If you don’t challenge them, most will not accept your offer, because they won’t view your organization as a great fit.

So, how do you challenge top talent and recruit top talent at the same time?

It’s your recruiters job to recruit and close. It’s the hiring managers job to challenge the heck out of the talent you put in front of them, then tell you which is the best. Part of the recruiters job is to ‘warn’ the candidates, that they will be challenged in this interview like none they ever have been a part of. This alone will help weed out those who aren’t up for the challenge!

Top talent wants you to want them, but they also want to know they’re going to a great organization that will challenge them and make them better!

T3 – @Lever #ATSDifferently

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This week on T3 I get to look at a rather new entrant to the applicant tracking system (ATS) field, Lever.  Lever was designed from the ground-up to be different than every other ATS on the market.  Most ATS software are built for the recruiter in mind. The thinking being this is a software used by recruiters, we need to design it so the recruiters will love it.

That all makes perfect sense, if the basis is true – used by recruiters for recruiters.  Lever decided that basis wasn’t totally true. ATS software should be used by everyone in the company. Yes, recruiters definitely need to use it. Also, hiring managers need to use it. Those in the interview process need to use it, etc. If attracting talent is a key component of your organizational success, then you need an ATS that is designed to be used by everyone, not just recruiters.

Lever is designed for organizations who are really focused on talent attraction, where hiring managers own the talent on their teams and are keenly involved in the talent acquisition process. Lever isn’t trying to be the ATS for everyone. They’re trying to be the ATS that companies in tough talent markets use, where talent is an organizational priority, not an HR or TA priority.

5 Things I really like about Lever: 

1. Lever structured their database differently so that you don’t end up with duplicate profiles within your ATS.  It’s structured around the candidate, not requisitions, so you end up with a much cleaner database overall.

2. Lever is designed around CRM functionality, it didn’t bolt on a CRM to it.  This makes a difference when it comes to the functionality of how it automatically follows up in the future for you.  The hope is you don’t end up with a gold mine of talent in your database that you can never mine. Lever is constantly working to mine the gold you already have.

3. Lever’s reporting is a step above most ATSs in that they, again, went at it from an organizational need, not HRs need. Within Lever you can instantly see your pipeline speed and conversation rates all at a granular level to see the detail you need to make quick decisions.

4. Candidate interview scheduling is built within Lever, and integrates all parties, the candidate, hiring managers, interview teams, HR and TA. No back and forth stuck in the middle go between any longer. You select who to involve and the system will instantly show you when and what conference rooms are available to get it done. All in one step.

5. Collecting candidate feedback is another strong functionality within Lever.  It’s a simple interface any hiring manager or anyone on the interview team, can use easily. Plus, there are auto reminders that will continue to bug all involved until it’s done!

Lever is fairly new but already has over 700 customers, with some major tech companies who have recently switched over from some very big ATS products, which really speaks to how they are doing things differently within the ATS space.  Definitely worth a demo if you are not happy with your current ATS, or in the market looking for something new.

Lever is led by a great team, and I suspect you’ll continue to see innovation come out of this camp.  I met with them personally at HR Tech, and their CEO, Sarah Nahm, was one of the few HR Tech executives who truly seem to care what I thought about the product and took written notes as we discussed it. Most just want the free publicity, she wanted to know how to make her product better. That’s rare, and exciting!

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.

2015 Top Post: Resumes Objectives Sent From G*D

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I’m on vacation this week, so you’re getting a best of week from The Project. These are the most read posts of 2015 to this point. Enjoy! 

This is an actual resume objective from an actual candidate’s resume that was submitted for a position at my company (HRU Technical Resources) this past week:

Objective: (As written, no corrections)
1. Move out of my apartment after 4 years of living there.
2. Buy house
3. Buy ring, find girlfriend, marry her.
4. Continue investing for retirement
5. Go to florida on vacation
6. Make documentaries
7. Do what I do best. Intovate.

Because this might possibly the best resume objective ever written, I wanted to break all seven of the objectives down:

1. Shows great forward thinking and longevity all in one simple sentence.  I want more, but I’m willing to work to get there.

2. Big goal #1 – set the foundation. Smart!

3. I’m heterosexual, just in case you were wondering.  Plus, I do things a little different.  I want to get the ring before the girl. That way I’ll know for sure the girl will like the ring that I can afford, since it will already be bought. I might even show it to her on the first date, just so we don’t run into problems later down the road.

4. Long term planning. Conservative. Can’t rely on Obama to plan for my retirement.

5. But, I like to party and have fun in the short term.

6. I also have a serious side and a creative side.  I’m the full package.

7. Do what I do best! Intovate! Not spelling. He was so proud of it, I had to look it up and make sure I wasn’t missing something! You know I’m grammatically challenged! Nope Intovate is not a word, but it sure sounds like it should be!

There is a reason that resumes are dying, and this might it.  For certain positions you need a resume, but for most you just need to fill out the application, no resume needed.  Some how, at some point in our history, everyone began to feel like they need a resume. That’s when this happens.

Happy Searching my recruiting friends! Go forth today and Intovate!

 

Where Does Retention Start?

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The biggest thing in HR and TA in 2016 will be retaining your employees. Not just top talent, but that middle of the road, shows up every day, glue type talent.  Retention is a concept that most HR and TA pros haven’t had to worry about this for a long time, but it’s quickly the hottest issue facing most organizations.

My question is, where does retention start?

My friend Laurie Ruettimann and Dawn Burke talked about this on Dawn’s FOT Videocast ‘No Scrubs‘ earlier this month. Laurie’s opinion is that retention starts at the Orientation. Solid theory for sure. You want to catch them day one and start retaining them from the start.

What Laurie knows, is that most organizations don’t start retaining employees until it’s too late. You know, when you find out that the person is out interviewing with your competition! Or when you find their resume on CareerBuilder, or see that they recently updated their LI profile, or when they turn in their two weeks notice!

I tend to believe that retention, at its core, starts with selection.  Hire people who actually want to work for your company, and crazy as it sounds, they tend to stay around longer!  Most turnover happens because of poor organizational, or positional, fit. Hire people who have a strong desire to work for your company, specifically, and retention tends to take care of itself.

So, if retention starts so early, regardless if Laurie or I are correct, why do organizations still wait so long to address it?

I think organizations are still under the belief that employees leave organizations because they hate their boss.  We’ve allowed this thought to percolate for a decade and its now become fact.  This is one small aspect of turnover, but I tend to believe now that most employees expect and deal with bad bosses fairly well.

The problem with focusing retention efforts so late in the process is that it’s, well, too little, too late!

Another piece to this retention dilemma is that HR doesn’t really believe they own it, and I tend to agree with this theory. The reality is the direct supervisor should have a better handle on retention. It should be a measure that all first-line leaders are held accountable to. Therein lies the real problem. We all take some responsibility for retention, but no ownership!

It’s the classic house on fire analogy. One person sees a house on fire and they do all they can to help. Ten people see a house on fire, and they all watch, believing someone else will do something about it. Your organizational retention is a house fire. To stop it, one person, one group needs to own it, measure it, make it public, ensure everyone sees the fire burning.

I’m not sure, exactly, when retention starts, but I always know how it will end.  With you posting a job and refilling a position, you already had filled…

The Advanced Class – Recruiting Edition

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As my friend Laurie Ruettimann pointed out last week, recruiting is easy and can be done by basically anyone, so just go hire some soldier to do it.   Laurie might not be that all far from the truth.  Recruiting isn’t brain surgery, it’s a process.  A process that is hated by the majority of human resource professionals around the world, which is why it is a $9 Billion dollar industry.  Not a hard skill, but many times, a really hard job to be successful at.  Old school recruiters like to believe recruiting is an Art form.  It’s not.  New school recruiters like to believe you can just source everyone you need off the internets. You can’t.

Recruiting is all about activity.  It’s a sales cycle.  The more contacts (phone calls, emails, handshakes, etc.) you make, the more candidates you will find.  The more candidates you find and get interested in your jobs.  The more jobs you will fill.  Not hard, right?  The problem is, ‘most’ recruiters look to do things that allow them not to make contacts!  They will buy every kind of technology imaginable to get people to call them.  They’ll do just about anything, besides picking up the phone and making that one call.

Want to be successful at Recruiting? Find people who are willing to make 100 calls per day and who love your company.  Go ahead, go find those people!  It might be a soldier, it might be your neighbor, it might a former crackhead, who knows!  The fact is, most people do not want to do this, even when you hire them and pay them to do just this!

So being a successful recruiter is basically easy.  You must find the sweet spot in the amount of activity you need to do each week that will get you the amount of contacts you need to get enough people for the jobs you want to fill.  Once you find that level, you need to maintain that level forever. Easy. I’m not kidding.  You don’t need fancy branding, and big ATS Systems and a bunch of processes.  You need people who will bang your internal resume database and job boards constantly, and faster than your competition.  That really isn’t that hard to do, because most shops don’t even do the basics well!

Now for the Advance Class participants:

Want to be Ridiculously Successful at Recruiting?

Do that which is written above and add just one thing.  Maintain a relationship with your companies Alumni.  There is this funny thing about human nature.  When we leave some place, we always want to know what’s going on back there!  If we move to a new city, we love updates from our old city.  When we run into past coworkers at the mall, we love updates on who is still there and who is running different departments, who got fired, who got promoted.  If we know this about human nature, why aren’t we giving it to our Alumni?

It doesn’t have to be constant but is has to be consistent.

Do a quarterly Alumni update via email to everyone who has every worked for you. Even the crappy ones who you are glad they are gone !  Give them some juicy details about promotions. Let them know some new things you’re working on.  Let them know what jobs you’re trying to fill, and how they can refer people.  Do this every quarter for 2 years.  Want to be class valedictorian?  On a monthly basis call a handful of alumni and just have a chat, build some relationships, check on where are they now.  As them if you mind if you share their story in the next Alumni News going out next quarter.  If you commit to do this for 24 months, you will start to see positions fill themselves.

This is advanced course stuff because 99% of companies aren’t doing this with their recruiting!

Unreasonable Expectations Killed Talent Acquisition

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The worst thing that ever happened in the history of Talent Acquisition was the phrase, “We only hire the best talent”.

In the 1980s, I suspect, or somewhere in the past, some lame CEO said this phrase.  Talent Acquisition has forever since been cursed to live up to this expectation.  You never will, for a number of reasons.

First, what the hell is “best talent”, really? You don’t truly know. No one does.  Do we mean the actual number one rated best talent? Or, do we mean just the best talent at the time we hire? Or, do we mean the best talent that will actually accept a job at our crappy company?!  I think the CEO believes it’s the actual number rated best talent, which means she is an idiot that has no concept of what she is talking about.

Second, do you even know who your own ‘best talent’ is in your organization?  Because to hire ‘best talent’ it will mean you need to hire people better than what you already have, which means you better know who the best is in your own barn!  Most of us struggle with this one as well, because we measure ‘best’ on a number of factors, which usually don’t align to what our executives feel is best.

Third, are you sure you even want ‘best talent’ in the first place?  Best talent can be a major pain in the ass! I’m willing to put up some of that best talent ass pain, but I don’t want an organization full of it.  I want to build a fantasy team at my organization. Folks who are great at certain roles, surrounded by other who are great at other roles, all knowing how their skills support each other, to make the whole better!  The last thing I need is a team with five Michael Jordans. There aren’t enough shots to keep that team happy!

We only hire the best talent is the single biggest line of B.S. that is said by executives of organizations and by TA leaders.  What they usually mean to say is:

“We only hire the best available talent at the time we have an opening, of those who actually applied to the job, and who are willing to accept the at market pay and benefits we offer!”

But, that message doesn’t look good on a career site!

If you’re in Talent Acquisition and you feel like you never measure up to your executive teams expectations, I would bet your executives probably think you only hire the best talent!  Don’t get down, the tide is turning.  Sharp TA leaders are already changing this narrative to bring some reality back to the conversation.