Category Archives: Selection

Scared Straight – OFCCP Style!

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Being a parent of three boys I’ve always been a fan of the theory behind “Scared Straight”! Your kids don’t listen to you, they’re getting in trouble, just send them down to the local prison and have them meet with some inmates! I mean what could go wrong?

In adult life, we don’t have many ‘scared straight’ opportunities. Maybe you painted the front door of your house the wrong color and the subdivision council sent you a strongly worded letter of compliance. Maybe your dog dug up your neighbor’s flowers and she left a handwritten note in your mail box looking for reimbursement, and to be taken off your holiday cookie list. Or, maybe it’s a cease and desist letter from a big HR Tech company’s lawyer telling you to stop saying ‘they suck’ on your blog.

For the most part, it’s hard to get scared straight as adults!

The OFCCP is probably the biggest scared straight organization for HR. Worse then employment attornies for sure! I get threatened to get sued by employees daily, that’s no longer a fear, but DO NOT tell me the OFCCP is on the phone!

It used to be the OFCCP only followed up on complaints and such. You have an extremely low chance of a ‘random’ OFCCP audit. That’s all been changing because of big data. Turns out, someone at OFCCP shows them how to run a basic statistical analysis of the data you send them on your applicants and who you hired.

Check out this chart from ERE and Nicole Greenberg, Esq. (go read the article Nicole does a fantastic job and is the first person in history to make an OFCCP  article that is interesting!) 

So, this data is from a company that had to pay $1.7 Million because they discriminated in not hiring Asian candidates. No one complained that they were discriminated against. OFCCP just looked at the data and said, “Hey, if 77% of applicants are Asian and you only hire 14% of those, you’re being discriminatory in your hiring practices!”

This should scare you straight, like immediately! Especially if you work in a company that has government contracts!

Of course, how the OFCCP is doing this is fraught with bad data interpretation. Just because 77% of my applicant pool is Asian doesn’t mean I’m being discriminatory in hiring. What if, for 77% of those Asian applicants who applied for Front End QA Engineer actually had a degree in accounting and no IT background!?

Doesn’t matter, you are now in an audit that is going to uncover some stuff! Most likely with numbers that far apart, you’re going to have a hard time arguing you’re not at least a little discriminatory in your hiring!

Nicole smartly points out that the government’s own contracting language forces many companies to be discriminatory in hiring in some aspects. Most government contracts require those working on the contract to be U.S. citizens. So, you could have the numbers above in the chart, being following the requirements on the contract and not hiring foreign nationals, and the OFCCP would still find you discriminatory in hiring! Welcome to the American Dream!

So, consider this a heads up. Go run your numbers. Find your hot spots in your organization and address them.

Hyperlocal Hiring

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The BLS reports that 80% of hourly workers live within 5 miles of where they work. Snagajob’s 2017 State of the Hourly Workforce survey found that 70% of our hourly workers refuse to commute more than 30 minutes to work. When you take a look at your own total workforce, my guess is you’ll find the vast majority live very close to your place of employment.

Blue collar, white collar, it doesn’t matter. People would prefer, for the most part, to live fairly close to work so they don’t waste a ton of time commuting. Commuting hours are for the most part one of the biggest drags on balance. Sure you can be productive on your commute, but it’s not really what you would prefer to be doing!

I’m wondering what it would be like if an organization started “Hyperlocal Hiring”? What if you only hired people who were willing to live within 1 mile of your place of employment? Maybe 2 or 3 miles, but not more, the idea is you could walk or bike to work in a reasonable time.

I know of some local government services that already require this in certain positions. I knew a Fire Chief who worked for a city and one requirement of the job was he had to live within the city limits. This was a rather small town, so he was within that 3-mile distance for sure!

Play along with me for a second!

We already know that the millennial and GenZ workforce like to work for companies that have community involvement. If your employees work in the communities they live in, it makes it pretty easy for organizations to truly support their local community. High engagement equals longer tenure, increased productivity, etc.

The Advantages of Hyperlocal Hiring:

– Hyper-short commutes give employees better work-life balance

– Living close to co-workers build more natural, deeper relationships (if you have a best friend at work…)

– Working and living in the same community gives you a stronger tie to both, increasing tenure.

– It would seem the living/working in close proximity would drive a stronger culture as well.

Okay, I know you’re already poking holes in this theory, but just imagine this for a few minutes on the positive side. It could be extremely cool!

I’m sure an organization with 10,000 employees couldn’t pull this off as it would be super difficult and expensive to have housing for 10,000 employees in a mile or two radius of your place of employment. SMB organizations, on the other hand, could use this as a huge advantage in hiring and attracting that younger workforce. Of course, this also works better in urban settings, but I could imagine a billionaire building their own city!

Dan Gilbert, Quicken Loans founder, basically went up and bought much of downtown Detroit and then moved this headquarters there. 5,000+ employees, modern company, downtown Detroit! If you don’t know the area, you either live a mile or two from the headquarters, or you drive out 30 miles to the suburbs.

There’s nothing that stops you from making a proximity of where someone lives a condition of employment. As long as it’s contractually agreed to up front, you would be fine. You can’t go tell someone they’ll be fired unless they move closer to your office, but new hires coming in can have this condition.

I know most of us would say, well, you’ll limit your candidate pool, so you just can’t do this. That’s my point! I want to limit my candidate pool to others who share this vision with me. To work and build a community in a micro-community with all of us involved! Yeah, Hippies! Come join the commune, but in a very modern, free-will, capitalist sense of being!

What do you think? Would you ever want to be Hyperlocal employee?

‘Divided America’ is a myth – @Jobvite 2017 Job Seeker Nation

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Jobvite does an annual study called Job Seeker Nation where they go out and survey over 2,000 Americans. The data is fascinating from an employee and candidate perspective. This year’s study found that 80% of Americans believe the country is divided, but when you dig into the detail of their responses, you find that’s not really true!

Sure, at a high level you have Dems and Repubs. Rich and Non-rich. Big city and country. Anything from far enough away can be divided into two sets. But, when you really dig into individual beliefs, you find that Americans are that different in their beliefs.

You can access the free, 35-page report from Jobvite!

Here are some of the highlights I pulled out of the data:

– Women negotiate less than Men for salary increases. We’ve known this for a while, but the data also showed that 87% of men who negotiate get a higher pay, and 80% of women who negotiate get higher pay. So, what does this tell us!? HR pros and Hiring Managers are awful negotiators! Also, it’s a candidate market! So, negotiate!

– 68% of job seekers do not believe Diversity is very important when selecting an employer. Only 36% of Women believe it’s very important, 60% of African Americans believe it’s very important. This isn’t to say that the majority don’t find diversity important, it’s saying that most candidates actually find other things more important!

– The lower you get paid, the less loyal you are to your employer. I think we all can understand the psychology behind this. If you have a great paying job, you’re probably more likely to be loyal to help keep that job. If you’re paid like crap, you probably don’t care as much about keeping that job.

– 46% of job seekers find it harder in 2017 to find a job, than in 2016. I found this unbelievable! I can walk outside of my office, right this moment, and within a quarter mile find at least ten business begging for employees. There are more jobs than job seekers, so why is it more difficult for almost 50%!?

– Get used to Hyper Job Hopping. 46% of Millennials will change jobs every 1 to 3 years. So, those hiring managers who have job hopper-itis when it comes to looking at resumes better get over it! That being said, I still don’t buy into the candidates who’s jumping a new job every year.

– Cover letters are dead. 58% of younger workers did not submit a cover letter on their most recent job application, but 26% of recruiters still view cover letters as critical to their decision to hire. That means 1 out of 4 of your recruiters have no clue at what they’re doing!

– You have a 13 times better chance of getting a job through a referral than applying on a job board. 13 times! That’s no joke. If you really want a job, find a referral, work your network, stop applying!

– 28% of younger workers analyze your company culture using Instagram. Candidates believe IG gives them better insight into your true culture over your career site.

I could go on all day with this stuff, I barely scratched the surface of what’s in this report. Go download it for yourself. We’ll basically be seeing screenshots of this study in every conference PowerPoint for the next twelve months!

Three overall key takeaways I took from the study:

  • We are more alike than different when it comes to being job seekers
  • Companies have shaped the behaviors of job seekers more than job seekers are changing company behaviors related to job seekers
  • If you hang onto your old ways of treating job seekers, you’re only hurting your own organization, not the job seeker

 

The Number One Reason Employees 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

It’s 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 than upon arrival, or at another point in their tenure, expect them to perform a different set of skills.  This behavior happens every day 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: the 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 44-hourtraining 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!

Learn how to give the best IT interviews on the planet!

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Tomorrow (Tuesday, April 18th at 2 pm ET) I’ll be talking IT Interviewing on a Recruiting Daily webinar sponsored by eTeki – Register Here! Most organizations suck at interviewing IT talent. I think there’s a better way!
It takes tech expertise to properly gauge tech competencies and experience and let’s face it most recruiters fall short in their capacity toTim Sackett eTeki
interview for the nuances of these specialized IT roles. You and I know this, but hiring managers struggle to understand why Talent Pros will never really be able to tell them if someone is a great coder or not!
Attend this webinar and I will show you a number of things you can start doing immediately to increase your ROI! Plus, you’ll hear from real talent leaders in the field who have already put a number of these ideas into place and hear about the success and struggles they had in launching this process.

Learning Objectives:

  1. Learn five ways successful companies are doing technical interviews differently to choose great talent.
  2. Design a technical interview process that attracts talent, and learn the things that turn off technical talent in an interview.
  3. Develop an interview strategy for technical talent that will increase your hiring manager satisfaction.

 

This webinar is designed to show any Recruiter and Recruiting leader (Corporate, Agency, RPO) a better way to interview technical talent, increase hiring manager/client satisfaction, and increase the influence and expertise your team brings to your organization.

The New Definition of “Passive Candidate”

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Okay, we get it, Mrs. Hiring Manager, you want passive candidates!!! We’ll get right no that…

Passive candidates are the holy grail of candidates, right? Untouched, virgin, pure as the driven snow, fresh meat that has yet to be soiled by the dirty hands of another recruiter. If I could find a way to mainline passive candidates right into my system I’d be the best recruiting junkie on the planet!

Do you even lift bro? I mean, do we even know what the hell a passive candidate even is anymore?

The Passive Candidate Definition from ten years ago:

“A Passive Candidates is someone who is being considered for a position but is not actively searching for a job.”

So, are we buying this today?

If so, it seems like we then need to define “actively searching”. The only candidates I know who are ‘actively searching’ for jobs are candidates out of work, working in a job that isn’t their chosen career (Communications grad from B-level university, selling cell phones in a strip mall), or about to be fired from their current position.

If those are the actively searching candidates, that makes almost everyone else Passive! I don’t think our definition of Passive Candidate matches that of our hiring managers current definition of passive candidate! I think they would say anyone who is searching for a job, passively or actively, is not really passive.

So, why do we see this differently? Well, this is a bit of marketing that TA played on the hiring manager to fill positions. “Hey, Tim is a great ‘passive’ candidate, I found him on LinkedIn, he didn’t even ‘apply’ to our job! You have to interview him!” The ‘he didn’t even apply’ is like crack for hiring managers, who now believe you found Tim locked away in a vault at your competitors that has never seen the light of day.

The reality is a bit less sexy! Tim has been on LinkedIn for three years trying to get out of dead end company he’s been working for, but Tim sucks at networking and finding jobs, so he is just waiting around to be trolled by a recruiter, and he applies to jobs every week, just hasn’t applied to your job!

Let’s be honest with each other. If someone has posted a resume online, err, professional profile, they’re on the market! They might not be actively applying to jobs on a daily basis, but we all know they’re open for business. Someone can’t be passive that has a presence on any of the job boards (Monster, CareerBuilder, Indeed, LinkedIn, Dice, Zip, etc.).  They also can’t be passive if they actively applying to jobs, but just haven’t applied to your job!

So, the new definition of Passive Candidate should probably be:

“A Passive Candidate is someone you find through various methods who is not on the job market in any way.”

That means you might contact someone in your ATS database who applied for a job with you three years ago, but they are currently happily employed and totally off the job market radar. That’s a Passive Candidate. The referral your employee gave you for a former coworker that you can’t find anything online, and they tell you they’re not looking for a job. That’s a Passive Candidate.

A passive candidate isn’t someone you found who just hasn’t happened to think about applying to your job, yet. They actually might be the most active candidate on the planet, who you just happen to run into.

We know a truly passive candidate when we speak to one. They’re a bit nervous. A bit surprised. A bit flattered. You can tell they’re not used to talking to recruiters and feel guilty talking to you. This is the person you’re hiring managers are asking for when they say they want a passive candidate.

This isn’t to say passive candidates are better. That’s an entire another post, but let’s not act like we are providing passive candidates when we aren’t.

The Realities of Using a Full-Fledged Modern Day Talent Acquisition Platform

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I’m in a pretty cool place in life right now. Great job, great family, every day I get to work and talk with awesome, smart people, every week I get to see the most awesome technology on the planet. Like the t-shirt says, “Life is Good!”

If you’re a TA leader for a big shop, I’m guessing my life is better than yours! Why do I know this? Because the technology you’re being asked to use has completely passed you by on the side of the highway!

Remember that first time when you’re Mom or Dad asked you to ‘fix’ the clock on the VCR? It was simple, but they had no idea on how to set the VCR clock, so it would blink “12:00” for weeks until you decided to fix it. Most TA leaders, right now today, are looking at that clock on the VCR blinking!

The reality of using a full-fledged modern day Talent Acquisition Platform is:

– You’re not ready for it.

– It’s like you’ll be taught how to walk all over again.

– It’s like you’ll be learning a new language.

– It will be the single most valuable thing you’ll ever do in your TA career.

– You’ll be forced to teach your entire leadership something completely new.

– Most vendors selling these solutions, don’t have the capability to actually teach you and your team how to effectively use it.

– You and your team aren’t ready to unlearn all of your broken, bad habits to use it effectively.

– You’re going to have to admit to yourself and others, you really don’t know what you’re doing.

That last one is hard. Because we do know what we’re doing, damn it! But, this is where you have to remember the blinking VCR clock. You don’t, but you can learn!

A full end to end TA platform will change the way you, your team, and your organization actually attract, recruit, and onboard talent. Gone, completely, will be Post and Pray. So, will be those employees who think this is what recruiting is.

It’s not overly difficult to learn these new skills. It is uncomfortable because it’s a BIG change from what you’re actually doing today and calling it recruiting. You’re not recruiting. You’re administering a recruiting process. Those are different things. Your organization actually needs you, desperately, to attract, retain, and develop great talent.

Any monkey can collect resumes and pass them onto a hiring manager. In fact, you don’t even have to pay an admin $12 per hour to do that, I can find you an A.I. bot that can do that for pennies on the dollar.

The really, really cool part about this is you’ll completely change your career path by doing this! Once you implement and transform your organization’s recruiting practices using technology, you’ll have other organizations lined up at your door begging you to do the same for them!

The real reality is you have a choice to make. Fix the blinking clock, or keep ignoring it. What kind of TA leader are you?

Would You Pay to Interview at a Company You Really Want to Work At? @DawnOfPurple

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I love Nike. I would love to work at Nike. If the right position came along and someone said, “Tim, you can run talent at Nike, but you need to pay $500 to get in front of the right person at Nike”, I go to the ATM and hand that person $500.

Okay, at one time in my career I would have done that to work at Nike, probably not now because I’ve got peeps on the inside!

This is what a new company in the TA space is doing. For a minimum of $20 (they won’t say what the maximum is) you can get a thirty-minute “interview” with someone who works at the dream company you want work at. PurpleSquirrel.io recently launched and it’s caused a bit of stir amongst those active in the space.

Why?

Most of the TA and HR bloggers, writers, speakers, people who pay way too much attention to this crap, etc. Think organizations that prey on candidates are evil. This was the real downfall of The Ladders. When you start asking candidates to pay for something they should get for free, the thought leaders lose their minds.

Also, my tribe (all the folks mentioned above) are exceptional networkers. It’s really one of the main skills we have. We can talk to anyone, about anything, at any time, and we usually do! We’re unicorns in that way. Most of the world does not network like this. Most people keep their circles pretty tight!

This is what Purple Squirrel understands.

Most people actually suck at networking. The problem with this is that most jobs are filled because someone has a connection. My cousin works in marketing at Facebook and he’s introducing me to the director and I have a good chance to at least get interviewed. My girl Celinda works at Nike and I’m hoping she’ll put me in touch with Phil Knight!

You understand the drill. Recruiters don’t fill jobs. Relationships fill jobs.

This is where I think Purple Squirrel might be brilliant. If we already know most people suck at networking, that means most people would probably welcome the help and be willing to pay a little cash for that help. I want a connection to Google, PurpleSquirrel can help you get that connection to Google. It’s like when my mom hired that hooker for my date to homecoming! Well, kind of.

Here’s the main catch, and it’s not spelled out until you really dig into the site. The ‘interview’ you have with your new ‘connection’ at your dream company is not an actual representative of the company. Your new connection does actually work at the company you love, but what they are really giving you is a career coaching session. They might have some hiring authority, but there’s no guarantee and it’s not implied.

You still have a connection at the company you love. There’s value to that, especially if you know how to grow your network, but my guess is you probably didn’t hire a hooker to go to homecoming because you’re great at networking.

I’m all for any tool that helps people land their dream job in their dream company. So, if Purple Squirrel works at helping you reach that goal, then it’s worth every dime you invest. Just know it’s important you understand the rules before handing over the cash. This is one connection into a company that might lead nowhere. So, use your thirty-minutes to your advantage.

I applied for a position at Nike once. Never even got a “Dr. John” disposition letter. I like to believe, as I cry myself to bed each night, they already had someone internally they wanted to promote and the posting was just a ghost, and my rejection email was lost in cyberspace. If only I would have had someone on the inside, maybe my fortunes would have changed!

Hit me in the comments – I really want to know – Would you pay to interview at a company that you’ve always wanted to work for?

In Human vs. Machine – You need some Machines on your team!

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The Spring SourceCon Conference recently took place in San Diego. If you don’t know what SourceCon is, it’s basically the one place in the world sourcing pros get together to share the secret sauce!

I’ve never been invited, but I hear it’s really awesome. (The “I’ve never been invited” is somewhat of an inside joke as I know I don’t have to be invited to attend if I want to go!)

SourceCon is your NOT normal talent acquisition, recruiting type conference. You just don’t show up and go to lame sessions, then go home. They’ve added a ton of hands-on learning, so when you go home, you actually got better for coming.

One thing the SourceCon folks do is also hold an annual contest called the Grandmaster Challenge. The competition pits anyone who’s interested against each other in a sourcing challenge to see who can solve the issues the fastest and most accurate.

This year the challenge was tabbed Man vs. Machine as SourceCon decided to pit sourcing technology against real-life sourcers to see who’s better. The technology chosen to compete against the humans was Brilent. Brilent is a candidate matching tool that works with your ATS (I wrote about them in May 2016 – I really like their tech!).

The basic challenge presented was this:

  1. Download a folder of three jobs: Ground Service Agent, Systems Administrator, and Product Manager. The jobs were real but altered from when they were originally posted.
  2. Download a trove of over 5,500 resumes.
  3. Search thousands of resumes and find the people who were hired, interviewed and sourced for the roles; by an undisclosed company.
  4. Points were given when the right resumes were found and classified correctly. (i.e. This person was hired. This individual was interviewed. Et cetera.) Points were also given if contestants found the right resume but categorized it incorrectly.

Brilent uploaded the resumes and did the analysis and returned the results in 3.2 seconds! Yes, that’s seconds with an “S”! The human participants took anywhere from 4-25 hours of research to produce their results.

The machine, Brilent, ended up getting third place because the platform got some of the candidates right, but not all. Humans took first and second, for finding virtually the same list, but a little more accurate.

For my money, the machine won by a landslide!

The reality is, we’re talking about sourcing and new hires. None of us really know who is actually going to be best performers once they’re hired, so I’m not even sure just because the humans were able to find the actual hires made, that those hires will even be any good!

In 3.2 freaking seconds, the machine gave me a really solid list to work from. Or I could have waited for hours, for almost the same list. Machine – 1, Humans – 0.

I just can’t even imagine this is a conversation about who really won here. We won. We won because we can now take a tedious skill of screening and get almost the same results in a fraction of the time. This allows us to have more capacity to increase talent pools, attract higher level talent, build a stronger brand, etc.

I love having great sourcing pros on my team, but I also need to get me a couple of those machines!

Body Language Matters in Recruiting Great Talent

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So, possibly the greatest basketball coach of all time is University of Connecticut’s Women’s Basketball coach, Geno Auriemma.  He currently has a 109 game winning streak in NCAA Division I basketball. Many of his current players have never lost a collegiate game!

You have no idea how unreal that streak is. It’s not like he can just recruit every top player, every year. He might get three or four of the best high school players, but other schools are also getting great talent.

Geno has something that only a tiny few great coaches have. Watch this short video to see it in action:

Couple things about this:

1. He says when he watches game film he watches what the kids on the bench are doing. If you’re at that level of detail, you’re going to be successful! I can guarantee you Nick Saban does the same thing. Tom Izzo does the same thing. Bill Belichick does the same thing.

2. If you’re interviewing for a job, the moment you pull into the parking lot, you better believe your actions are being evaluated, and almost 100% of those actions are body language!

If you hire an Eeyore, you’re going to get an Eeyore. Don’t think somehow they’ll change from the interview. If someone can’t have good body language in an interview, they’ll never have it coming to work and grinding each day.

Most of the jobs we hire for are basically skill-irrelevant. What we truly need is someone who comes to work each day with enthusiasm, is open to learning, has the ability to learn quickly, and plays well with others. I can teach you the rest. I can’t teach you to have great body language. That’s on you!