Category Archives: Social Recruiting

7 Ways to Increase Your Hourly Hiring!

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In 2017 there will be over a thousand webinars on how to hire more IT talent, 15,285 blog posts on how to hire more IT talent, 100s of new technologies will be released on how to hire more IT talent. You won’t see a fraction of that help when it comes to hiring Hourly Workers!

Why?

The majority of hiring done on a daily basis by most companies around the world is in hiring hourly workers, yet almost no one spends time on how to make this easier or do it better. This webinar is designed to help our brothers and sisters in the trenches who are out there every single day, doing all the dirty work in their organizations. Those recruiters and talent leaders who are responsible for hiring the masses!  

Tim Sackett loves the people! (and apparently talking about himself in the third person!) The real people, who go to work every single day and keep our organizations running like a well-oiled machine, not those pretty boys sitting behind a computer screen who have no idea what we really make and do on a daily basis!

Can you hear that music playing in the background? “America, America, God shed His grace on thee…” (Okay, I’m off my rocker, but you get it, I love this stuff!)  

What you’ll learn from FOT’s first webinar on better hourly hiring:  

–7 things you can start doing to increase and simplify hourly hiring in your organization

–3 ways top organizations are leveraging technology to do massive (over 1,000 hires per year) hourly hiring

–Pitfalls most organizations fall into when hiring hourly workers, and what you can do to make sure you don’t go down this path  

Smashfly, the world’s best recruitment marketing platform, is the sponsor for this FOT webinar.  So, you know we’ll be discussing the benefits of utilizing CRM technology in mass hiring, along with so many other tips, tricks, and techniques.

Joining me on the webinar will be my special guest, friend, and HR Influencer, Robin Schooling, VP of HR from Hollywood Casinos, who every day is in the weeds with her team in hiring the best hourly talent!

Register today! Thursday, April 27th at 2 pm ET! 

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.

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?

Honestly, You’re Not Disrupting Recruiting!

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So, there’s a ton of TA Technology on the market that is claiming to ‘disrupt’ recruiting. The recruiting they are claiming to disrupt is the agency recruiting game, for their ‘ever so thankful’ corporate talent acquisition ‘partners’. I’m going to name them, new ones crop up every day it seems, but I won’t give them the extra publicity. Here’s how their sales pitch goes:

“Hey, We’re disruptive! We’ll save you 70% off your cost per hire, just use our technology! Did we mention WE’RE DISRUPTIVE! Yeah!” 

That’s honestly the sales pitch. The reality is a little less flashy and entirely different story that real corporate talent acquisition leaders aren’t buying. Why? These disruptors are building their 70% sales pitch on agency fees as your cost per hire.

It works like this:

1. You can’t fill a position.

2. Agency can for 25% of the first-year salary on a $100k job.

3. Thus, your cost of hire is $25,000.

4. We’ll do it for $7,500!

The reality is, these tech companies are frauds. The true cost of hire for a direct hire for most organizations is less than $7,500. So, no one buys your disruptive pitch of savings. What you’re truly selling is a ‘discount’, not a technology disruption, and your soft-math is all wrong. Your ‘technology’ is basically an automated version of what an agency does (but less effective), offered at a discount.

To be fair, if you have no ability to recruit internally and you use a ton of agencies and have a huge agency spend, this might help you save some money. But, it’s a band-aid for a bullet wound, not a disruptive solution.

Discounting is a crappy world to compete in because you can never get out it. Once someone gets a discount, they always want a discount or more of discount. If discounting is your business model, you need to get out of that business.  Take a look at every single retail organization that has ever gone out of business. It started with discounting.

Okay, I’ll give you that you’re disrupting bad recruiting. I’ll give you that. But, guess what, no corporate TA leader I know likes the awful Indian-Call-Center recruiting models anyway. It’s the lowest common denominator in the recruiting world. We don’t need more of that, we need less of that.

Do you really want to disrupt recruiting?

Help TA leaders truly become better in understanding the technology that will actually help them hire noticeably better talent. Don’t just take advantage of them a little less the next company. Help them build a stack and a model where they don’t have to rely on outside organizations to do the hiring for them.

There’s some really good TA Tech on the market doing this. That’s the disruptive stuff – folks like Lever, Clinch, Smashfly, HireVue, Outmatch, Role Point, Greenhouse, Textio, Jobvite, Text Recruit, etc. (plus a ton of others I reviewed on my weekly  T3 tech blog series)

These organizations aren’t trying to take advantage of your ability not to be able to hire the talent you need, they’re trying to partner with you to make you self-sufficient. That’s disruption!

So, yeah, I run an agency. A post like this probably doesn’t help my business, but I can’t stand to see these upstarts try to sell themselves as technology when they’re not. Also, I do contract work, I don’t want your direct openings! I want your contingent openings!

Happy recruiting this week!

New Recruitment Marketing Group on Facebook! #TransformRM

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Recruitment Marketing is one of the hottest concepts on the planet right now! We all have the exact same issue right now and that’s being able to attract the right talent to our organizations.

Employment branding took off a few years ago as we came out of the great recession and there are some great things that have been happening in that space. Recruitment marketing, though, is a bit different than employment branding.

What’s the difference between Recruitment Marketing (RM) and Employment Branding (EB)?

  1. EB is who your are. RM is your complete message you want to get in front of candidates.
  2. EB comes first. RM comes next, and it’s all the technology and process it takes to get that message in front of candidates in a space and a time when they’re ready to consume that message.
  3. You own your RM. You don’t always own your brand. Many times outside influences have part ownership of your brand, but they’ll never own your RM!

This isn’t a competition between EB and RM, you actually need to do a great job at both! You also need to understand the differences between the to, as you could be great at one, and bad at the other.

I’m part of a group of Recruitment Marketing leaders who decided to get together in a space where we could all share our knowledge of RM. This group first came together last year at the recruitment marketing conference Transform in Boston.

We wanted to find a way to keep the conversation going all year, so we’ve decided to start the Facebook Group: Transform Recruitment Marketing Facebook Group.

Come join. It is a ‘closed’ group, just because we want to make sure it doesn’t turn into a spam group, but you can be assured myself and Shaunda Zilich (Employment Branding Leader at GE) will approve you to join the conversation!

What can you expect from this group?

– Connecting with great talent acquisition folks from around the world, willing to share their successes and their failures, helping us all get better at attracting the talent we need.

– Me sharing the latest and greatest things I find on the planet as it relates to the recruitment marketing world.

– A willingness from all the members to interact and share.

So, come check it out, we just launched this week. I can’t wait for the conversations to begin!

Dear Timmy: How can I best incentivize my corporate recruiters?

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Dear Timmy,

I have a team of corporate recruiters who we pay salary and then they also get paid a bonus amount for every individual you hire. When I read your post “The Corporate Recruitment Incentive Program” at Fistful of Talent, I was encouraged we are doing the right thing. But, I have an issue. From time to time we go through periods of time when we have no hiring needs or a hiring freeze. During these times the recruiters feel shorted. How

But, I have an issue. From time to time we go through periods of time when we have no hiring needs or a hiring freeze. During these times the recruiters feel shorted. How do I incentivize them during these times? My recruiters all work remotely, hire very specialized talent, and it’s fairly low volume around 15 hires per recruiter per year. The average salary is around $150K, plus bonus.

Thanks,

Corporate TA Leader who gets it

Dear Mrs. Gets it,

Will you please hire me!? No, I mean it. I will come to work for you for only the $150K and no bonus!

So, I hear you. It’s all relative to the market, location, industry, etc. I kid about wanting a job with you, but only slightly. Very few recruiters in the world make $150K working from home making 15 placements per year in a corporate environment where all of their overhead is paid and they have a great benefits package.

So, step one of finding the right incentive would first be to understand why these recruiters feel ‘underpaid’. You might be lucky and have all rock star recruiters who are the top in the field, but I doubt they are all that level. So, then I would ask myself, is this a team incentive issue, or do I have an outlier who is truly worthy.

All that being said, your problem is a real problem if part of your compensation plan for your recruiters is to be paid by hire and you have no hires to be made!

Here are some suggestions:

– If you look at your normal hiring pattern and it’s consistently at a certain level, work your bonuses into an average hire scenario. Then give your recruiters some education on how to budget! Look you first quarter might be giant, but you better know every second quarter sucks for hires, so your bonus will be low.

– Instead of compensating by hire, maybe compensate by activities that lead to hires. Thus, just because you don’t make hires, doesn’t mean the recruiters need to stop doing all those great things that fill the pipeline. The hard part about this is it will probably drag down your candidate experience as candidates won’t be too happy to be strung along and never get hired!

– Are there other valuable activities your recruiters can do in low hire situations? I love to focus on retention and the activities that increase retention. Maybe there are project related completion bonuses you can use during these times to get some things done that have been put on the back burner, but you really need to get done now that you have the capacity.

– Ask your hiring managers for suggestions. I’m always pleasantly surprised by some of the suggestions I get from hiring managers on what my team can do for them, to help them out, even if they feel it’s not recruiting related. Many of the projects they have can be done by recruiters as well, plus it gets your recruiters more integrated into the business.

Hope this helps! Please hire me.

Tim

 

Should You Be Using Facebook Job Ads?

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If you haven’t heard Facebook has been rolling out some new job posting functionality on their site for your company’s Facebook page. Audra Knight, over at Workology put together a nice little “how-to”, so go check that out if you want to give it a try!

My question isn’t how do I post a job on Facebook, but should I be posting jobs on Facebook?

Facebook designed the feature because they felt like LinkedIn, and all those organizations that only use LinkedIn, were ignoring a giant percent of the working population. Hourly workers and actively seeking employment workers. That’s not LinkedIn’s specialty. They are unapologetically, white collar and a ‘professional network’, not a job board (so they keep saying).

Facebook looked at this and thought, “Hmmm, we’ve got a couple billion people using our ‘social’ network. A majority are hourly worker types who would like to see what great jobs are open, let’s build something for companies to connect with them”. They probably didn’t really sound like that. My guess is someone at FB said, “hey, you know we can make billions of dollars charging companies to post boost jobs to our members, right?”

So, now you can post your jobs on your Facebook page in a matter of minutes. For a few extra buck Facebook will let you pick certain demographics, like location and skills, and then they’ll make sure your job posting shows up in other Facebook members timeline, even those you have no connection to!

Who will get the best results from posting their jobs on Facebook?

  • High volume, low skill jobs is an easy target and those should produce well for you.
  • But, you should be doing some testing on most of your jobs!
  • Guess what? Not only are low paid, unskilled workers on FB, so are Engineers, IT pros, Accountants, Doctors, Nurses, Truck Drivers, Cops, Teachers, Executives, okay, basically everyone is on Facebook!
  • The other thing is most people will check into Facebook daily, most check in multiple times. Most people on LinkedIn, only check in once or twice per month.

Every organization should be testing this. It’s easy. It’s fairly cheap. It actually might work you. When you test you should be doing a few things:

  1. Use multiple Ads with different titles and wording. You need to see what catches someone’s eye and what doesn’t.
  2. Use different boost amounts on the same postings to see if that makes a difference. It should.
  3. If you want white collar, professional hires, test putting in the salary level in the title, “Process Engineer – $115K”. You can do this with success with hourly positions as well, “Electrical Technician $18.50/hr”. Every time I have A/B tested this, the postings with the salary in the title produced more results. Every time.

So, should you be using Facebook Job Ads? Yes.

Would You Facebook Live Your Interview?

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A few weeks ago, after an NFL playoff game, a wide receiver from the Pittsburg Steelers, Antonio Brown, Facebook Lived his coaches post-game talk to the team. That kind of talk is almost always a private conversation between the coach and the players.

Beyond the concept of betrayal between player and coach, this entire thing got me thinking about how our world has changed in what society views and private vs. public. My parent’s generation is extremely private. You don’t talk about money, political beliefs, religion, love life, family, your job, etc., with anyone outside your immediate family, and maybe not even them!

My generation was a little less, we would speak our political beliefs, talk opening about relationships, etc. The most recent generation to enter the workforce seemingly will talk about anything publicly! Somedays it seems like nothing is off limits within the walls of the office, this was not always the case.

Antonio Brown’s Facebook Live broadcast of this private moment got me to think about how long is it until we see someone broadcast an interview live!? This is truly a private moment between candidate and hiring manager. A time that both could look awesome or like a total fool.

There might be value for both sides to broadcast an interview live.

From a candidate perspective, you could show yourself in a very good light. If you nail the interview, not only do you have proof but now others also can see this and might want to hire you. If you bomb, having a video of this to analyze might be the best thing to help you get better at interviewing.

From an employer perspective, having a live broadcast of an interview might be a bonanza of publicity from an employer branding standpoint. We already know if would take a unique organization to be willing to do this, and every organization is trying to find ways to set themselves apart from their competition for talent. It would also be a great record for employment law purposes to prove you were compliant during an interview (or vice verse).

It’s easy to pick apart this idea and see both good things and bad. I suspect most HR and TA pros would see more bad than good, which is why I like it! If the majority only see negative, you can use this to your advantage.

The reality is, if you do what you should do, you have nothing to worry about and only could really use this to your advantage. If you suck and you don’t trust your hiring managers, this isn’t for you! That’s most of us, by the way!

It’s something to think about. I don’t see us, as a society, going backward as it relates to privacy. Every day another privacy barrier is broken. My question is, how long until we begin broadcasting live from the interview room?

Dear Timmy: How Do I Get Into Talent Acquisition?

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I get asked a ton of questions via email. Some are from college students who ask a variety of things. Here’s a recent one:

Dear Timmy,

I’m a college student majoring in communications (editor’s note: why do college kids major in communications? Like 80% of college kids want to major in communications. You know there aren’t real jobs in communications, right!?) and I’m looking to get into human resources, more specifically I would like to work in talent acquisition.  What suggestions, or steps, do you suggest to help me get a position in corporate talent acquisition?

Thanks,

Communication major because apparently I’m an idiot (just kidding, she didn’t sign it that way!)

Here is my response:

If you want to get into straight HR you’ll need to graduate with a degree in HR. As I don’t know of an organization that hires entry level HR pros with non-HR degrees. If you want to get into talent acquisition follow these steps –

Step 1 – Graduate

Step 2– Apply for ‘agency’ entry level recruiting roles.

Step 3 – Do your time in the agency world, at least a year, maybe a bit more.

Step 4 – Apply for corporate Talent Acquisition openings

Here’s my reasoning for the steps above.

In talent acquisition no one cares which college degree you have, they only care that you can recruit. The reality is they shouldn’t even care if you go to college, but most corporate recruiter jobs will require it. Corporate TA departments rarely hire entry level recruiters because they don’t have the knowledge, processes, and capacity to train recruiters, which is why you need to get experience on the agency side of recruiting.

Agency recruiting is known to be very cut-throat and high burnout rate, but I’m only talking about a year or so. Anyone can handle that, and it will give you valuable experience. You might like agency recruiting and you can make a ton of money, but it’s high stress. Corporate TA is mid-level money, with no growth, but virtually no stress in comparison.

Once you get your experience in the agency world, even only a year, you’ll actually be considered pretty valuable on the corporate side of TA. Think of your agency time as your TA internship. You know there’s an endpoint, then you get into the job you want.

When interviewing for agency positions you should never mention that your goal is to get into corporate TA. They won’t hire you if they feel you’re just going to leave. Also, when you interview, most agency folks are only looking to hire two things: high energy, highly money motivated. So, drink three Red Bulls before you interview, and talk constantly about how much money you want to make. You’ll get hired by 99% of the agencies that interview you.

I might be joking a little, but only a little, that’s fairly close to reality. I mean agencies are also known to hire pretty people, so it wouldn’t hurt to be good looking.

 

What is your most valuable hiring source?

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I’m taking a break from my normal writing during the holidays to share some of my most read posts of 2016. Enjoy. 

I find every year, I’ve been blogging now for 8 years, that my most read and shared posts are usually based on a fairly basic problem we all face, and quite simply just want to know what others are doing. That’s the case with the post. We all struggle to know what sources we should use and which ones are our best. 

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!