Category Archives: Recruitment Marketing

First Ever Michigan Corporate Recruiters Conference!

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I’m super excited to announce I am co-organizing the first ever Michigan Recruiters Conference to be held on March 13th in Lansing, MI starting at 9am!

Jim D’Amico, Director of Talent Acquisition at Spectrum Health, and I have been talking about doing this for over a year and late in 2014 we finally just said, “Screw it! Let’s pick a date and force ourselves to get his puppy off the ground!”  And we did it!  With a lot of help from Jim’s team at Spectrum, my team at HRU, our techy guy Matt Wagmann and our friends at the Accident Fund corporation!

Register at www.MichiganRecruits.com

Our Goal for the Michigan Recruiters Conference:

We want an event similar to an ERE, but local. Great recruiting and talent acquisition content, without having to pay thousands of dollars to attend.  Our fee is $49! We want to raise the level of recruiting in the state of Michigan.  We want to offer this in an environment where the corporate Talent Acquisition folks don’t feel like it’s a meat market (i.e., no staffing agencies).

We want to bring in national speakers, corporate talent acquisition best practices and next-gen practices that aren’t even being used by the masses. We want to network and share our successes, and find ways that corporate talent acquisition pros can better leverage each other and their knowledge. We plan on having two Michigan Recruiters Conferences per year, one in the Spring and one in the Fall.

We are not doing this for profit. The sponsors (CareerBuilder is our first, but we would love more!) and fees are only to cover costs of running a great conference like this. Sounds like we want to be a bunch of Hippies!  I hope so, this is going to be great!

The format of the Conference: 

Unlike normal HR conferences we aren’t looking to do 1 hour and 15 minute sessions. Who the hell even came up with that length of time!? It’s way too long, and just encourages rambling. We are Recruiters, we don’t have time to ramble!  Our sessions will be 30 minutes, 45 minutes and 1 hour, depending on the content and presenter.  A professional national speaker can easily hold the stage for an hour.  Your local sourcing pro who has some great ideas to share, might only need thirty minutes!

We will strive to have you leave each conference with great ideas you can use immediately, ideas that will challenge what you do long term, and increase your network and tribe of other talent acquisition pros you can lean on.

It won’t be a full day.  6 hours or so. Get in, get out, go make placements.

We’ll attempt to always hold these at host corporations who are willing to have this progressive knowledge come into their walls.  Thank you Accident Fund Corporate, and Darcy Kerr, for hosting this first conference in Lansing, MI!

Why no staffing agencies? 

I’ve already gotten a ton of crap on this. “Tim, aren’t you a staffing agency?” “Tim don’t you rail against being treated as a second class citizen by LinkedIn?” “Tim this is hypocritical!”

Here’s the deal.  I speak about a dozen times a year, nationally, to HR and Talent Acquisition pros, and never once have I been accused of trying to sell my services. I’m not worried about me, but I know my industry.  I’ve already had agency folks try and sneak their way into the conference like a Catfish!  To make the Michigan Recruiters Conference a success we need corporate talent acquisition pros and leaders to see the value of a conference like this. If their first experience is some cheese-ball from RecruitTech coming on to them in the first fifteen minutes, that experience is ruined.   So, Jim and I decided, no agencies, yet.

We do see a time down the road, once the conference is established, where we will be able to invite in our agency brethren.  Minnesota started in a similar way.  Even at that point, we’ll have hard rules around selling at this conference.  It’s designed to be developmental. That’s the conference we want.

Sometimes to make something great, you rub a few folks the wrong way.  Agency folks are resilient, to say the least, I know they’ll bounce back. I look forward to the day I can invite them as well.

T3 – NAS Recruitment Innovation #HRTech

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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.

I’ve known NAS Recruitment Innovation is a company I’ve known and worked with for over ten years.  It’s definitely a company I wanted to highlight on T3.  I’ve written this before but in my mind there are two kinds of technology companies: 1. Born out of a technology solution; 2. Born out of a problem and adapted to the technology of the day.  NAS, in my estimation, is in the later types of companies.

NAS was started as advertising, marketing, creative type company 60 years ago, specifically to help ‘personnel’ executives with something that hadn’t even been termed yet, but we know it today as “employment branding.”  Today, they rival the best recruitment marketing firms out there from both a creative perspective and a technology perspective.

NAS’s main technology solution is called ACTIVATE and it’s a candidate attraction platform. With a powerful SEO engine at its core, ACTIVATE pushes branded job positions from your ATS to your career site. But ACTIVATE is more than SEO. ACTIVATE integrates decades of strategic recruitment expertise and industry-leading analysis to optimize your candidate sourcing platform and improve the overall effectiveness of your recruitment marketing program. In simple terms, ACTIVATE increases your candidate pull. NAS turns your career site into a candidate attraction site.

5 Things I really like about NAS – ACTIVATE

1. NAS’s people get corporate recruitment at a much higher level than most technology recruiting companies.  It’s not just about the technology, you have to understand recruitment and candidates.  You need people on your side in Talent Acquisition and HR that are creative and NAS does this as good as anyone!

2. The ACTIVATE platform increases your candidate experience through better design and without you having to do any heavy lifting.  NAS gets how and why candidate search for jobs and uses this knowledge to deliver a great search and apply experience for candidates.

3. You don’t care about mobile, but your candidates do and the ACTIVATE platform will optimize this for you.  A great example is recruiting Nurses. Nurses aren’t at a desktop all day, they’re constantly on the move. But they engage their mobile devices all day long. If you aren’t mobile optimized and delivering a great mobile experience, you’re missing out in a big way!

4. ACTIVATE delivers you real-time metrics from your career site.  Big or small, this is a must have in today’s highly competitive talent market.  If you don’t know what’s working, or what’s not working, you’re just flying blind. No talent acquisition leader wants to be in this position.

5. CRM functionality with custom branded email campaigns.  Recruiting and CRM isn’t new, but it’s still something way too many shops are utilizing. If you do utilize a CRM you want to make sure it’s connected with the rest of your data, and the ACTIVATE platform does this with your ATS.

I’ve used NAS so in my mind they cater a little better to the talent acquisition pro who might not as technologically savvy as they would want to be.  They definitely don’t try and shove tech down your throat, but will ease you into it and show you how you can make great strides with it in your department.

NAS recruiting innovation has the technology and know how to help your talent acquisition team take your entire organization to the next level. Check them out, I’ve personally used them in the past and they made my life easy. I don’t know if I can give a company higher praise than that!

2015 Candidate Bill of Rights

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In November 2010 Monster.com asked me to write a post on a hot topic at that time a “Candidate Bill of Rights“.  Needless to say, I’m not a huge fan of a Candidate Bill of Rights – I’m a Capitalist and believe in a free-market system of HR and Recruiting.  In 2010 (remember those days?) we had candidates coming out of our ears. In 2015, most of us are begging for talent. Welcome to the show kids!

Here were my main point back then – and what they still are today:

Candidates –

You Don’t Have To Apply:

  • If we have a crappy working environment – you don’t have to apply
  • If we don’t pay appropriately for the market – you don’t have to apply
  • If we don’t give my employees opportunities for growth – you don’t have to apply
  • If we don’t treat you like a human – you don’t have to apply
  • If we don’t give you a full job description – you don’t have to apply
  • If we don’t tell you every step of the process – you don’t have to apply

You Don’t Have To Work Here:

  • If we make you wait endlessly without any feedback – you don’t have to work here
  • If we make you an offer that you don’t like – you don’t have to work here
  • If we don’t offer the right work-life balance – you don’t have to work here
  • If we give you a bad Candidate Experience – you don’t have to work here

Candidates – if any of the above is true – you have some decisions to make:

1. Can I live with what I know about the company and the experience they put me through to get this offer?

2. IF SO, do I want to come and work for the company?

3. IF YES – welcome aboard, you’re coming on ‘Eyes Wide Open’

4. IF NO – thanks – good luck – see you next time

You see we all have choices – if you don’t like the way I’m treating you as a candidate, don’t come and work at my company.  I would hope that most HR Pros are smart enough to get this fact – treat candidates like garbage and they’ll stop applying for your jobs, thus making your job all the more difficult.  That might be a bit pie-in-the-sky thinking because I also know way to many HR/Talent Pros that don’t get this!   They have a little bit of power and have decided to torture candidates with painfully long and arduous application and selection processes – that aren’t helpful to their own companies, statistically, and definitely aren’t helpful to the candidates.  During a recession they don’t see much impact from these horrible processes, but eventually the tide turns and face the results of their actions.  Karma is a bitch!

So, do we need a candidate bill of rights – No!  Do you need to spend a ton of time, effort and resources on candidate experience – No, as well!  Don’t go right ditch-left ditch and start over correcting.  Treat candidates like you would want to be treated.  Have a few standards and etiquette, and some manners.  It’s not hard, it’s not expensive and you definitely don’t need to pay a consultant to show you how to do it!

Karma is biting a bunch of hack talent acquisition pros in the butt in 2015.

The Irresistible Power of Being Wanted

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It’s not 100%, but it might be close.  Some will deny this, but it’s pretty much universally accepted. We all want to be wanted by someone.

It makes us feel good to be wanted.  Not the crazy stalker kind of wanted. The kind of wanted where you know the other party wants you for all the positive reasons that are you.  That feeling is so powerful it could light up New York!

In a nutshell, that is talent acquisition.

You want someone. They may want you, they may not.  Either way, you are holding in your possession one of the most powerful feelings of all time!

People want to be wanted.

When you call someone and tell them, “I want you”, I can guarantee they will listen to what you have to say next.  100% of the time.

“Hi, my name is Tim. I want you.”

I now have your attention.  I might not have it for long, but I do have it in that moment.  That’s the key for successful recruiting. What you say next determines your success.

I have had four jobs in my entire career, over 21 years.  I’ve probably had upwards of 500 calls from recruiters wanting to talk to me about a job they have open. Each time I listened to what they had to say, initially, because it makes me feel good that someone wants me. That is a normal response. That is a majority response.

In recruiting you should never underestimate the power you hold in your hands.  Never believe the hype that people don’t want to be called or contacted about jobs. “Oh, those IT guys get ten calls a day, they don’t want to be contacted!” Yes, they do. That’s ten times a day they get a stroke to their ego. Ten times a day they feel wanted. Ten times a day where you might be offering them their dream job.

“Hi, my name is Tim. I want you.”

4 Reasons Corporate Recruiting Should Use Staffing Agencies

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I love those Dos Equis commercials “The Most Interesting Man in the World” where the most interesting man says, “I don’t always drink beer, but when I do I prefer Dos Equis.”  It’s great marketing that doesn’t seem to get old.  It got me to thinking as well.  I started my HR career in recruiting working for the company I’m now running, so in a sense I’ve come full circle.  I started recruiting right out of college for a contingent staffing company, doing technical contract hiring, a tough recruiting gig, but it pays very well if you’re good.

When I left my first job, and the third party recruiting industry, to take my first corporate HR job. I left with a chip on my shoulder that armed me with such great recruiting skills I would NEVER, I mean NEVER, use a recruiting firm to do any of my recruiting. WHY WOULD I?  I mean I had the skills, I had the know-how and I could save my company a ton of money by just doing it on our own.

So, I spent 10 years in corporate HR before returning to third party recruiting in 2009, and you know what? I was young and naïve in my thinking about never using recruiting agencies.  It’s not just about having the skills and know-how; it’s much bigger than that.  I worked for three different large companies, in three different industries in director of recruitment type roles, and in each case, I found situations where I was reaching out to some great third party recruiters for some assistance.

So, why did I change my philosophy on using recruiting agencies?  A few of the reasons I ran into in corporate HR:

1. Having Skill and Know-How only works if you also have the time.  Sometimes in corporate gigs, you just don’t have the capacity to get as deep into the search as you would like – with all the hats you have to wear as a corporate HR pro.

2. Corporate HR positions don’t give you the luxury of building a talent pipeline in specific skill sets, the same way that search pros can build over time.  As a corporate HR pro, I was responsible for all skill sets in my organization.  Niche search pros can outperform most corporate HR pros on most searches, most of the time. It’s a function of time and network.

3. Many corporate executive teams don’t believe their own HR staffs have the ability to outperform professional recruiters, primarily because we (corporate HR pros) have never given them a reason to think differently about this. Thus, we are “forced” to use search pros for searches where executives like to get involved.

4. Most corporations are not willing to invest in a model – people, technology and process – that puts themselves on a higher playing field than professional recruiting organizations.  I would estimate only 1% of corporations have made this investment currently – and more are not rushing out to follow suit.  Again, this comes from corporate HR not having the ability to show the CFO the ROI on making this change – to have the best talent in the industry you compete in. So, the best talent gets sourced by recruiting pros and corporations pay for it.

I didn’t always use recruiting agencies, but when I did I made sure I got talent I couldn’t get on my own, in the time and space I was allotted in my given circumstances.  When I talk to corporate HR pros now, and I hear in their voice that “failure” of having to use a recruiting agency. I get it. I get the fact of what they are facing in their own corporate environments.  It’s not failure, it’s life in corporate America and it’s hard to change.

Stay thirsty my friends…

Where Have All The Recruiters Gone?

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Originally posted on Fistful of Talent back in April 2011.   Maureen Sharib reminded me of this on Twitter and I wanted to share. Enjoy.

I don’t get it – I don’t get why somehow over the past 5 years it’s not alright to be called a “Recruiter.”

Okay, let me back up a bit. I’m sick of hearing about “Sourcers”! You know what a Sourcer is?  It’s someone who can’t close a candidate. In the beginning, recruiters had to do it all – put together the JD, come up with a marketing plan (oh, I’m sorry we call that “sourcing plan” now), go out and actually find the candidates (oh, my bad again “go out and source”) and then we had to actually call up the candidate and see if they were someone we had interest in moving forward into the process.

Look, I’ve seen the recruiting desk cut up more ways than a mom trying to be creative with a PB&J in May, after making 180 PB&J’s throughout the year (parents making their kids lunch each day get this reference, others won’t!). I get that it can be more “efficient” to separate out “Sourcing” and “Recruiting.” I read 7 Habits, you didn’t discover something new, companies have been cutting up the recruiting desk for decades. In 1993, I was hired into staffing to be a “Research Assistant”. Guess what that was? Yeah, some idiot who didn’t know how to close (yet) but could go out and find potential interested candidates (by any means necessary) to give to the “real” recruiter who could close them on a position.

So, here’s the rub, right? Who’s better, Sourcers or Recruiters? I’m guessing in most organizations  using this model, they are selling it as if they are equal, which blows all of your efficiency right off the bat. They aren’t equal, one is collecting shells on a beach and one is polishing shells and telling sucker tourists how rare and valuable they are to make a buck and keep the lights on. If the shell picker-upper went away, would the shell polisher/seller go out of business? Hell no, they’d take their butt over to the beach, pick up some shells, take them back to the shop, polish them up and sell them. Would they be as successful? No, but it’s all relative since they also wouldn’t be paying the overhead of Mr. Picker-upper.

I actually like the Sourcing and Recruiting dual model in shops that have that kind of volume, it makes sense. Someone who is exceptional at sourcing combined with someone who is fantastic at recruiting will place more great talent than 3 people all doing it on their own. But let’s not start handing out trophies to the Sourcer.  I can train anyone to source. I’ve failed many times at training someone to close. One of those skills is transactional. One is transformational.

There are a number of companies right now in India that for pennies on the dollar will source candidates for you, and they’ll do it better than Steve who is sitting on Facebook right now “building his Talent Community”. It’s transactional. It’s a process.  it can be outsourced without a slightest blip to your recruiting function.

And okay, haters, before you go all crazy in the comments, let me say this, I think the sourcing technology, tools, etc. are all great. I love reading and trying out the techniques that are shared constantly by FOT’s own Kelly Dingee, or others like Glen Cathey, Amybeth Hale, Maureen Sharib, Jim Stroud, etc. (it’s amazing industry changing stuff). I don’t hate sourcing. In the right organization it makes perfect sense, but be careful. What I find is that many organizations want to move their best sourcers to recruiting and they fail because it’s two different skill sets. Don’t make that mistake.

So, where did all the recruiters go? The fakers – the ones who don’t want to pick up a phone – want to call themselves Sourcers. Why? Because the accountability of finding someone vs. closing someone – is on two different levels. I can find who is the top developer at a company, but it’s a different story in talking that developer into why they need to join my organization. The recruiters are still there – just look for the ones with the phone to their ear.

Will ‘Facebook at Work’ be a LinkedIn Killer?

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At this point you’ve seen the announcement, Facebook has decided to go after some of that ‘professional’ networking money, with a product called Facebook at Work. A space currently owned by the LinkedIn empire.  Who does social networking better than anyone?  Most would argue Facebook. The kids might say Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.  But the numbers don’t lie.

LinkedIn owns the ‘professional’ networking space, as they’ve decided to title it.  The job board crowd now sees LinkedIn as Job Board 2.0, and have been working to see how they can get some of the billions flowing LinkedIn’s way.

Facebook is like that big giant kid in high school who was super friendly, and everyone called him a “big teddy bear’, until one day the wrong kid pushed the ‘teddy bear’ too much and everyone got to find out how strong the ‘teddy bear’ actually was.  LinkedIn is about to get ‘bear’ hugged!

The reality is Facebook had the capability all along to put LinkedIn out of business if they wanted, but they were raking in their own piles of cash, and didn’t see the LinkedIn money as a priority.  It was just a matter of time.  LinkedIn’s core weakness is two-fold:

1. They don’t go deep enough with the position you actually need to hire for.  Great you have technology candidates (who are running away from LinkedIn in droves), you have sales candidates and you have recruiters. That’s really about it. Have you searched on LinkedIn lately?

2. Users of LinkedIn rarely go to their LinkedIn profile and rarely respond to LinkedIn messages.

The two weaknesses of LinkedIn are actually strengths of Facebook.  Facebook has everyone, from skilled trades folks, to truck drivers, to teachers, to doctors, and lawyers, and bakers, and candlestick makers, mall Santas, you name it, they’re on Facebook.  Secondly, people use Facebook a lot, all day, every day.  Exponentially, more than they ever use LinkedIn.

Facebook has made it very clear they’ll keep professional and personal profiles separated, but make it easy to go between and share stuff in between. This takes away the one major fear many have at integrating their Facebook life and their LinkedIn life (although I argue this fear is also going away quickly).

For those of us who have found ways to recruit talent off Facebook, we understand the potential of the sleeping giant, err, teddy bear. I like LinkedIn and use it daily.  I wish LinkedIn met my needs for a greater number of positions.  I believe Facebook has the user base, and data, to be all things professional if it’s done in the right way.

It’s going to be interesting to see these two fight it out.