Category Archives: Recruiting

Hiring Is About To Get Really Difficult!

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One thing was abundantly clear from speakers and thought leaders at SHRM 2015, hiring is hard, and it’s about to get much harder!

That isn’t good news for any of us in HR and Talent Acquisition. There are two forces that are currently happening that are making hiring more difficult than it has been in over ten years:

  1. Solid economy and job growth.
  1. Baby Boomers leaving the workforce.

This isn’t earth shattering information, we all kind of new this was happening.  The issue is we are now all beginning to feel this in every part of the country and in almost every job category.  This means some things are going to happen, and the top HR and Talent Pros are already preparing for these:

  • Wage Growth: CareerBuilder CEO Matt Ferguson spoke at SHRM on Tuesday and had some great data showing that organizations see wage growth of around 5% in 2015, and similar in years to come. Are you budgeting 5% increases? I’m guessing not!
  • Recruitment Process Challenges: How many steps does it take to apply for a job in your organization?  If it’s more than two, you’ve got problems!  Can someone apply for a job online with your organization without having a resume? Why not?  Matt also showed data from CareerBuilder showing 40% of HR and Talent Pros have never applied for one of their own jobs to better understand the true experience!
  • Technology Challenges: Do you have a way to reengage candidates in your system on a regular basis?  A system that allows you to let great talent know, that you already have in your system, when you have an opening that fits them? It’s called CRM, and only about 20% of companies have technology that can do this important recruitment marketing function!
  • Job Design Challenges: Too many of us are working and designing jobs like we are living in a society that was pre-internet, pre-ultra connected. We still think we need employees sitting in front of us from 8-5pm, Monday thru Friday. If they aren’t sitting in front of us, they must not be working! Indeed shared that 80% of job searches on their site include this single word: “Remote”!  Are you adjusting those jobs that can be flexible?

Those organizations that believe they can recruit and get talent like they have been doing for the last couple of decades are going to fail.  It’s really that simple.  Talent attraction will be a powerful strategic differentiator for organizations over the next decade, like almost no other time in our history.

The good news?  At no other point in our history do have access to the information on how to be successful!  Twenty years ago, doing great talent acquisition was mostly trying stuff and getting lucky.  In today’s world you can learn easily how the best organizations are attracting talent at conferences, on websites, in blogs, webinars, etc.  There are so many sources of this information, that we now have no excuse to improve what we are doing.  We just have to do it!

 

T3 – Recruiter Sidekick

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Today on T3 I take a look at the talent acquisition tool Recruiter Sidekick. Recruiter Sidekick helps take care of one of the biggest issue we all face in Talent Acquisition, regardless whether or not you are agency or corporate.  We do a terrible job a mining our own internal databases!

Your internal database in the most underutilized resource that you have.  I could go into most corporate talent acquisition shops and fill 35-40% of their jobs from their own database, without ever having to use another tool to find and source candidates!  How do I know this?  I’ve done it.

This is the primary idea behind how Recruiter Sidekick was developed.  It runs like an extension to your ATS and acts like a referral engine from your own resume database.  It basically looks at every new requisition being put into your ATS and instantly begins searching, based on their own proprietary algorithm, and sends your recruiters a “top 10” list of candidates that most closely match your requisition, that are already in your database.

Think about this concept for a minute.  Two years ago you were hiring for a specialized position in your company.  You presented a number of candidates to your hiring manager.  She interviewed three, and eventually chose the one.  Two more years pass, and you’re growing, or you had someone on your team retire, and now you need to go hire another person in the same role.

Most organizations – like 99% – just do the same thing they’ve always done. They’ll take the new position, input it into their ATS, it will get posted to your career site, maybe a few others, and you’ll begin the process of looking at those candidates who are ‘now’ available.  But, what about those other two candidates two years ago who wanted to come work for you, but someone just beat them out.  Now they have two more years of experience. Maybe one of them is the ‘one’!

In a nutshell, this is what Recruiter Sidekick helps you with.  Recruiter Sidekick doesn’t let you forget you have unmined gold in your own database.  All of this for $10 per month, per recruiter.  It’s a niche piece of software to be sure, but one that almost all of us can use.  Heck! I’m paying an intern right now to just do this, mine our own internal database for talent!

Check them out. For the price you really can’t go wrong!

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 on T3 – send me a note.

The Biggest Lie HR Tells Candidates

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No one ever wants to admit this but it can be really intimidating working with someone who is way smarter and more talented than you.  This is the basis for the biggest lie HR tells candidates.

You are Overqualified!

Truth be told, no one is ever ‘overqualified’ for a position.  You might have more qualifications than the organization needs for the position you are interviewing for, but that really isn’t the issue.  The issue is the person interviewing is scared that you are better than they are.

Back in the day, HR pros and hiring managers were trained to give the excuse to overqualified people that we won’t hire you because you’re overqualified and we are scared that you won’t stay in this position, and you won’t be satisfied.  Yeah, right! It’s not that we don’t want you! You won’t want us, because you’re so talented that you’ll get bored with this position and leave.

It’s such a lie, and yet, for decades we just accepted it as truth.

Being overqualified isn’t a negative, it’s a blessing! Companies should be bending over backwards to get overqualified hires.  We no longer live in a culture where people are going to stay in the job for 40 years. If you can get a good 3 to 4 years out of hire, you’re doing great.

Take the best most qualified person you can get for every position you have in your organization and let them do great things. Being worried the person will won’t be ‘engaged’ long term is silly.  That’s not for you to worry. Hire great talent and get out of their way.

The bigger reality we face in most organizations is we aren’t hiring ‘overqualified’ people because your hiring managers are intimidated to hire someone who is better, or who could become better than they are.  This is the mentality we must change in our organizations.  You can’t get better if you don’t hire better.  Hiring under the level of talent you have now is a slow slide to becoming an organization no one wants to work for.

T3 – @ZipRecruiter

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This week on T3 I take a look at the Talent Acquisition technology ZipRecruiter.  Unless you’ve been living under a rock the past year, you couldn’t have missed the media and marketing blitz ZipRecruiter has been putting on.  You can’t turn on the radio without hearing one of their ads, so I was intrigued to find out who and what they actually were!

ZipRecruiter is an online job distribution and job board service. The web-based platform aggregates applications from job boards and provides tools for applicant tracking and screening. It is a subscription-based SaaS for employers, recruiting firms, and staffing agencies. They have about 5.2 million resumes in their database. They also have a new product called ZipHire which helps you onboard candidates.  When you post your jobs they go out to over hundred free sites, and you have options to buying up for pay sites like Monster and Careerbuilder at a reduced rate.

For all intensive purposes ZipRecruiter/Hire can act as your ATS and System of Record.  It’s not as functional as those designed to be that, but their goal isn’t to be an enterprise level system. Their goal is to give SMB clients similar technology that the Fortune 500s are getting to play with at a greatly reduced cost, and they seem to be doing it! This is a technology designed to be used by smaller and medium sized shops for folks who might not be as technology savvy as large HR shops. Easy to use. Easy to get started.

5 Things I really like about ZipRecruiter: 

1. Zip is not shy about saying this is who we are, and this is who we aren’t. They do really well with high volume hiring jobs – service level, call centers, skilled trades, etc. They’re inexpensive to use and get your jobs out on the web to hundreds of locations and drive traffic to your postings.

2.  InstaMatch technology which automatically shows the user which candidates within their database is the closest match to their opening. For big shops this is a no brainer, for small shops this is a pretty cool function.

3. Interview type pre-screen filter questions.  For those who don’t have an ATS or don’t have this functionality within their ATS this is another great feature most SMB HR shops don’t have.

4. You can have multiple companies, divisions, locations, etc. all under one account.  Your corporate office can set the account up, then you can allow all of your locations to run their own postings, but it all roles up to the corporate account giving you visibility of who is using it and how it’s going.

5. Zip has a Job Widget you can put right onto your careers page, so people can applying directly to your jobs on Zip from your career site. Again, many SMB companies don’t even have technology to post jobs on their career site/page and this makes it super easy for them to do so.

ZipRecruiter is growing extremely fast and has hundreds of thousands of companies using them, so they are proven to work. The feedback I’m hearing in the industry is that for the price their users are extremely happy with what they are getting, especially on the non-technical/professional level job postings.

Check them out, they are pretty inexpensive and set up under a Saas pricing model where you pay monthly based on how many job you want to post on Zip.  This can also be changed month to month. One month you need to post ten jobs, but the next six months you only need a couple, Zip allows you to flex your plans to meet your needs. Their prices are public, free trial to start, but for posting 1-3 jobs you’ll pay $99 per month.  If you have high volume lower end jobs you almost have to try it for that price!

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 on T3 – send me a note.

My Big Fat Recruiting Dilemma!

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Have you had an employee who had to stop working because they became too fat? Just wait, you will, it’s just a matter of time.

I remember when my biggest nightmare as an HR pro was going to tell an employee they need to bath and wear deordorant. I can’t even imagine having to go tell an employee, “Hey Bro, you have to go home, you’re too fat.”

The U.S. Army recently came out and shared some statistics about how the U.S. obesity epidemic is hurting their recruitment efforts:

“Just under three in 10 young people [ages] 17 to 24 can join the Army today – and the other armed services for that matter – and the single biggest disqualifier is obesity,” Major General Allen Batschelet of the U.S. Army Recruiting Command told CNN. “Ten percent of them are obese and unfit to the point that they can’t join the service. It’s really very worrisome.”

“The obesity issue is one of the most troubling because the trend is going in the wrong direction,” says Batschelet. “Ten percent are disqualified today, and we think by 2020, it could be as high as 50 percent, which would mean only two in ten would qualify to join the Army.”

Our national security is at risk because our citizens can’t put down a Big Mac. Our enemies don’t need to attack us with bombs and troops; they just need to keep sending us cheap junk food to consume!  Then one day they just come ashore and roll us over to the POW camps.  I sure hope they serve good food at the camps…

Big fat Americans just aren’t a national security issue; this is a major issue facing all employers.  The reality is, no one wants to hire unhealthy people. If given a choice between people with similar skills and abilities, one in shape and one obese, employers will always hire the person who is in shape.

You want to see hiring discrimination at its finest?  Put a minority in good shape, a woman in good shape and an obese candidate, all with similar skills, in front of a hiring manager and have them rank them on most likely to hire.

The obese person will always rank last. Why?  Your hiring managers fear hiring someone who might die on their watch, more than hiring a minority or woman.  Was that too real for you? Check your analytics, you know where your problems are.

How do we fix this?

Companies have failed at wellness across the board.  I think it’s just a matter of time until you begin seeing organizations tie performance and compensation into their wellness plans.  It seems extreme, but so is this problem.  When a company reaches the point where they’ll tie your job performance to your health ‘performance’, that’s when you have an organization that truly cares about you.

The Number One Reason Hires Fail

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“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

Albert Einstein

Its about that time when the HR conference season gets into full swing, so I’m beginning to prepare myself for the hundreds of conversations I’ll have with great HR Pros all over the world.  One thing that I will hear over and over, and more than anything else is: “HR just doesn’t get…”  To be honest,  I think HR gets a whole bunch, but I think many of us lack the courage it takes, at the right time, to show how much we actually get.  So we sit there with our mouths closed, and others then have this perception we don’t get it.  But we do. We just weren’t able, or ready, to put our necks on the line, at that moment.

I do agree, though, that there are still certain things we struggle with in HR.  For me, the above quote from Albert, sums up what we still struggle to appreciate in HR. We hire people for one set of skills then upon arrival, or at another point in their tenure, expect them to perform a different set of skills.  This behavior happens everyday in our organizations. It’s a classic reason at why most people fail in your organization.

I bet if you went back and measured your last 100 terminations in your organizations, 60% of your terms would fall into this category:  person wasn’t performing, but the job they were asked to do was different from what they were hired to do originally.

So, what is it that we still don’t get in HR?

We don’t get the fact that we hire for a certain set of skills and the job changes, so we now need a new set of skills.  Training and Development are still living in this dream that they can drastically change adult learners by having a 4 hour training session and having each participant sign a sheet saying they received the training. Then, we all sit around a conference table analyzing our turnover and wondering what happened, and why all these people magically turned into bad performers.  It’s not them, it’s us!

So, what can we do about it?

The first step is realizing HR, and the organization, are part of the problem.  You can’t hire a bunch of fish because you need great swimming skills, then change the skill need to climbing and expect your fish to turn into monkeys.  It has never worked, and it will never work, even if you change your department’s title from Training to Organizational Development.

So, do you just fire everyone and start over?

Maybe, if the skill needed to change is that drastically different. More realistically, we need to have better expectations on the amount of time and effort it is going to take to get people back to “average” performance, not “great” performance.

Setting realistic expectations with your operations partners will give you a better insight to what route your organization is willing to suffer through.  Either way, there will be some suffering, so plan on it and prepare for it. Then go buy a bunch of bananas, because if want those fish learn how to climb, they’re going to need a lot of incentives!

Top 10 Sources of Online Hires

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Silkroad recently released some results from it’s annual client survey (also released by Indeed as you can imagine from the results!), which is a rather large sample. The chart that caught my eye was this one:

Source of hire

Keep in mind these are external online sources only. These don’t include an companies own career site, employee referrals, etc. Still the information is intriguing, and almost matches my own internal numbers for my company, which means I tend to believe the data!

Indeed being number one as a source for corporate hires isn’t not surprising. If a candidate is looking for a job today, they go to Indeed to start looking.  What is surprising is the LinkedIn number!

6% of external online hires are coming from LinkedIn!

So, you need to ask yourself: How much money are you spending on LinkedIn as compared to the other sources that are getting greater results?  Indeed, CareerBuilder, other various specialized job boards, etc.

Would have ever thought that LinkedIn would have been the exact same percentage as Craigslist!?!

Obviously, the candidates you are getting on LinkedIn are different than the candidates you’re getting on Craigslist. Not many professionals are looking for jobs on Craigslist, but you will find a ton looking for lower skilled, service level jobs.

Based on the data above here’s what you need to do:

1. Are your jobs being scraped by Indeed? Have you checked?  If not, you better make this happen! (Same for SimplyHired)

2. Are you using CareerBuilder? Postings? Resume database? Might want to check into what they’ve got going on!

3. If you have a LinkedIn Recruiter seat, are you getting a good ROI for your investment? Would you get a better ROI is that same amount of money was spent for things like sponsored jobs on Indeed, or most job posts on CareerBuilder? Maybe you need to do some testing.

4. Are you using Craigslist to help fill your lower level positions?  You know it’s free, right?

5. What the hell is Seek?  Oh, it’s a job board in Australia, you can forget about that.

6. Don’t forget about your other non-online sources: Referrals, your own career site, local state employment offices, alumni, your own internal database (this is the most under utilized source of most companies!), etc.  These probably fill more than all your online sources. How much money are you investing in them? (it’s usually a lot less than online sources and a huge miss for ROI)

How to solve one of the America’s Toughest Recruiting Challenges

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Hey, Tech Recruiters your job is really hard isn’t it?  Do you want to know a recruiting job that is about a hundred times harder than yours? Try recruiting Truck Drivers!

The Truck Driving recruiting industry is insane.  It’s reported that right now there are 36,000 Truck Driver open position in the U.S.!  Go to any major corporation that has a shipping component that is handled by semi-trucks and they have openings, many will have openings in the hundreds!  The largest trucking firms in the country have recruiting teams that dwarf the size any of the major Tech companies in Silicon Valley.

So, how do you solve such a major recruiting nightmare?

By doing this:

Okay, I hear you! “Wait, there still has to be a person in the seat!” You don’t solve the ‘driver’ problem at all!

The main problem with the Truck Driving profession is too fold:

1. They can’t attract younger workers into the profession.

2. They have high turnover.

Being able to use and operate the latest technology in any industry will attract a younger workforce.  Can you imagine the people lining up to be able to operate one of those trucks above?!  I can only imagine how this tech will revolutionize the profession of truck driving, and the skill sets needed.

Truck Drivers turnover because they don’t see a future in driving truck.  It’s seen as a low skill occupation, and a lonely one at that. Hours, weeks, months, years on the road.  Throw in the nasty-ass truck stops and you can see why our best and brightest are jumping at the thousands of open jobs.

Self driving technology opens up a whole new capacity level for the people sitting in those vehicles. I can imagine how organizations could begin training and teaching these operators an entire additional skill set to use while in vehicle, and even upon getting to their destination.  It would easily be foreseeable where your self driving vehicle operators could also become your field sales reps, quality control, etc.

If the operator, theoretically, only has to pay attention to vehicle operations 15-20% of the time, this gives them so much time to concentrate on other ways to add value to the company and to themselves.

From a recruiting perspective, I can sell that.  It’s hard to sell dirty bathroom and lot lizards to a kid who believes he has a future.

T3 – Greenhouse.io @Greenhouse

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This week on T3 I review recruiting and applicant tracking software Greenhouse. Greenhouse is one of the newer players in the ATS space having only been in the market about three years, but they’re making a ton of noise.  Primarily designed to be used in the mid-sized and under market, 1000 employees and under is their prime user base.  Heavily used in the startup and tech space (Pinterest, Uber, Twilio, Zenefits, etc.).

Greenhouse take a best in breed approach, partnering with some of the best talent acquisition tech vendors to deliver the best to their users. Companies like Entelo, HireVue, RolePoint, RecruiterFi, etc., all integrate seamlessly with Greenhouse.  I actually prefer this approach (for SMB HR & TA shops), because I like the best technology available, versus an enterprise ATS level system which is usually solid, but not fantastic.

As you can expect Greenhouse isn’t your Mom and Dad’s ATS.  Older designed ATS systems are designed around one core process and most fail because you don’t like that one process. Greenhouse is designed around the core principles of talent acquisition and all you need to do within that function, and you do it the way you want.  Greenhouse isn’t a talent acquisition software, it’s an organizational software, because everyone in your company as access, specific to their role.

5 Things I really like about Greenhouse:

1. The Interview Plan. One of the coolest things in Greenhouse is how they handle interviews. It’s a structured process that drives consistency, delivers interview kits to each interviewee, and describes their role and what they need to get out of the interview. This eliminates an interviewee interviewing with 5 different people and having them all ask virtually the same questions.

2. The Sourcing Plan.  Again, Greenhouse structures the sourcing plan in a way that everyone knows their role and what they are responsible for. They also have full integration with LinkedIn, if you have a LI recruiter license, to allow you to do all of that sourcing from one system.

3. Candidate Scorecard.  Greenhouse has designed a candidate scorecard that easily lets you compare candidates by more than just a rollup number, but by specific skills, cultural fit, qualifications and other details. This lets the organization make a more informed decision on who and why you should select one candidate over another.

4. Agency Portal. We all use staffing agencies. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to manage all that you use within your ATS?  Greenhouse does this, and actually will show you agency performance metrics to boot!

5. Data analytics are very robust. I really liked their pipeline stats feature which you can set up by individual or team. If a candidate is stuck at one spot in process, the system alert you that you need to go kick a hiring manager in the butt and tell them to get going on a certain candidate, etc.

It’s easy to see why Greenhouse has the buzz in the industry right now from an ATS perspective. If I was running a corporate talent acquisition shop right now, they would get high consideration from me as the tool we would be using.  An ATS is an ATS, but I love how Greenhouse has taken the traditional model of an ATS and made what an ATS designed in 2015 should be.  Easy to use, intuitive, great tech and works the way we need to work in today’s tight labor market.

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 on T3 – send me a note.

The New HR Math

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It all started with a great premise: Let’s teach kids an easier way to understand math so they won’t end up hating it. We can all buy into that, right!?

What came out was a classic organizational nightmare of project-gone-wrong, in a way only HR can truly understand—the Common Core was born. Now, there you sit at the kitchen table trying to show your kid how to do basic multiplication, but you really have no clue on how to do it the “new-math” way.

In a similar way, it used to be HR and Talent Acquisition could just run some spreadsheets, make a three-color pie graph, drop it in the middle of the conference table and—BAM—our job was done.

But, not anymore! Now you’re expected to take your people analytics and make evidence-based decisions, and prove we actually know what we’re talking about, eliminating the art and “feel” of classic HR and Talent practices.

We feel your pain, and we can’t multiply the new way either. That’s why our May installment of the FOT webinar is entitled, The New HR Math: Dumbing Down HR Analytics for Everyday HR and Talent Pros. Join FOT’s Tim Sackett and Kris Dunn for this webinar (sponsored by HireVue, a company that gets predictive analytics at a whole other level), and we’ll share the following goodies with you:

– 5 HR and Talent Analytics you should stop measuring immediately! You know what looks really bad to your leadership? When HR is using the old math, and everyone else is using the new math!

– 5 HR and Talent Analytics you should start measuring immediately! Don’t be that parent fighting the good fight, ostracizing your kid from society by not allowing them to use the new math skills! We have the new cool measures you really need to be using in HR and recruiting today.

– 3 Best Practices every HR and Talent Acquisition shop can do right now with their analytics. You now know what the numbers are, but what the heck are you supposed to do with them? Fear not, Tim and Kris watched every YouTube video possible on the new math, they can show you the way!

– A primer on what’s next once you start using these Predictive Analytics. Since you specialize in people, you naturally understand the move to using analytics that helps you predict the future is only half the battle—you have to have a plan once the predictions are made. We’ll help you understand the natural applications for using your predictive analytical data as both a hammer and a hug—to get people who need to change moving, and to embrace those that truly want your help as a partner.

You’re a quality HR pro who knows how to get things done. Join us May 27th at 2pm EST for The New HR Math: Dumbing Down HR Analytics for Everyday HR and Talent Pros, and we’ll help you understand how to deploy the “new-math” principles in HR that allow you to use predictive analytics to position yourself as the expert you are.