Category Archives: Social Recruiting

I Need A Nurse, Stat!

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In the United States, we are facing a major nursing crisis, unlike anything we have ever seen. If you’re in the healthcare industry, you already know this and you’re living this nightmare each day.

Your recruiters are beyond frustrated in trying to fill openings, only to have more nurses leave every day. So, what can you do?

Join Cathy Henesey, ASHHRA Board member, and Director of Talent Acquisition & Workforce Planning at AMITA Health and myself for a free webinar hosted by CareerBuilder that will outline 10 things you should be doing to fill your nursing openings! The webinar is August 3rd at 1pm EST. 

What can you expect to hear:

  • Old school and new school ways to recruit great talent to your hospital or health system.
  • Metrics around what recruiting pools will be most effective for you to be fishing in.
  • What best practice organizations are doing right now to retain their healthcare talent so they don’t have to fill as many openings!
  • What technology is worth the investment when it comes to purchasing recruiting tech.

Register Here! 

It will be fun, fast-paced hour packed full of great tips and ideas to help you energize your recruiting shop!

T3 – @Ratedly

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This week on T3 I review the anonymous employee review monitoring mobile app Ratedly. Ratedly is the brainchild of the godfather of recruiting thought leadership, Joel Cheesman.  When I entered this game eight years ago there were like four people in the world that talked about the Recruiting Industry and Joel was one of those folks, so he knows the industry very well.

Ratedly was built for HR leaders to be able to monitor employee review sites. When we hear that, most of us will only think of Glassdoor, but there are literally dozens of sites with employee reviews and new ones popping up weekly. Indeed now rivals Glassdoor with the number of reviews they have, and niche sites like InHerSight, AARP, and other local sites are collecting millions of employer reviews. Heck, it even monitors Twitter for notifications about your organization.

The problem will all of this is it becomes too time-consuming to monitor all of these sites and respond in a fashion that is representative of your employment brand. On top of being able to monitor, these sites run 24/7/365, and most of our HR and TA teams don’t! Yet, our executives want these reviews, especially the negative ones, responded to immediately!

Ratedly was built on a native mobile platform, meaning it’s built to be used on smartphones and tablets. It was done this way because of the expectation that whomever in your organization was responsible for this, more than likely, they would want 24/7 access to these reviews the moment they came in, with the ability to share with others in the organization, and be able to respond in real-time.

5 Things I like about Ratedly:

1. The UX is designed to be similar to a news feed you’ll find on many other apps, so the feel is very familiar and easy to use. Ratedly allows you to scroll through your employer reviews all in one spot, at the same time.

2. Bookmarking. On the Ratedly app you can easily bookmark reviews to go back to later and find them quickly. On each review, you will also have access to read the full review, see job title, location, star rating, etc.

3. Share feature. Ratedly easily allows you to share reviews from the app with hiring managers, executives, etc. Some organizations have the leader responsible respond, some have one department like TA respond, regardless of your process, Ratedly allows you to share with whoever you want, immediately.

4. Ratedly puts the monitoring of all of these review sites in one simple easy to use app. No longer does your employment branding team need to check into all of these sites on a daily basis. Or, like most organizations, you’re lucky to check in once or twice per month, and see some bad review that’s been sitting there for weeks!

5. It’s really inexpensive for the service that it offers! $149 per month, is peanuts for when it comes to protecting your employment brand. Most organizations have so much invested in their brand, and Ratedly becomes an inexpensive way to ensure that investment doesn’t blow up overnight!

Ratedly seems to be a technology that larger to enterprise level organizations would definitely have an interest in. If I was running employment branding for a multi-national I would definitely have it in my tool chest. The price point, though, really allows SMBs to come and play as well, especially those smaller startups who are in highly competitive environments and their brand is everything to getting talent. Well worth taking a look!

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

Recruiting Blocking and Tackling!

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This week I was at CareerBuilder’s Empower Roadshow talking with a few hundred Talent Acquisition pros and leaders in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area. Great event, great group of pros that were super engaged.

I led a panel on tips and tricks for in-the-trenches TA pros and leaders and one of my panelist was Bryan Rice, TA leader from Stryker. The title of this post came from him, he was big on getting TA pros back to blocking and tackling!

What’s blocking and tackling in talent acquisition?

Here’s what I would call the building blocks of great recruiting (Bryan’s blocking and tackling):

1. Phone skills. Have your recruiters conquered their fear of being on the phone? When they need to reach someone is their first thought, “Oh, I should pick up the phone and just ask the person.” Versus, sending them an email.

2. Ability to sell the position they are recruiting for. Can your recruiters effectively talk to a candidate and get them excited about the position, the supervisor of the position, the direction of the company, all the opportunities you can provide them, etc.? Bryan believes today’s recruiters might struggle with this the most, over anything else, and yet, as TA leaders we do very little to ever develop this skill!

3. Building relationships with hiring managers. Do your recruiters meet face-to-face with their hiring managers when they are working a position for that manager? Not only the first time but every time! You don’t build a strong relationship and find out how to add value if you don’t put in quality time with hiring managers. Today’s recruiters are moving too fast, to understand this value, and how it ultimately saves them a ton of time and effort!

4. Building relationships with candidates, that goes beyond the initial screening interview. Can your recruiters share with the hiring manager the candidate’s ‘story’ for each candidate that is presented to the manager? My goal as a recruiter should be that a manager shouldn’t be able to ask me a question about a candidate that I can’t answer. That’s tough, but that’s my goal!

This all seems so basic, yet most recruiters are weakest in these skills.

Why?

I believe the industry struggles here because TA leaders don’t know how to train these skills, and we don’t have off-the-shelve training programs that really go deep on these skills. So, instead of training recruiters properly, we just give them more technology so they can do a bad job, faster.

The training for four things above is very much a hands-on, one-on-one training. Sitting face-to-face and going over and practicing what these conversations look and sound like, and correcting in the moment, and doing them again and again.

The phone skills are just down and dirty getting recruiters on the phone and seeing who will conquer their fear! My first three weeks as a recruiter in training was calling 100 candidates a day. I couldn’t leave until I made 100 outgoing calls, each day, for three weeks.

At the end of those three weeks, I didn’t know if I could recruit, but I knew I wasn’t afraid to pick up the phone and talk to someone!

Make sure you connect with Bryan, he’s one of the TA leaders in the industry that really gets it!

Why Doesn’t Corporate Talent Acquisition Change The Way They Pay Recruiters?

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For the most part, Corporate Recruiters are paid a salary. That salary ranges widely from organization to organization, industry, function and location. I’ve seen corporate recruiters who make $40,000 and ones that make $150,000. The $150K corporate recruiters are overpaid, let me just throw that out there right off the bat!

Agency recruiters are usually paid some salary and a combination of commission and bonus. The average goal for an agency recruiter compensation model is 1/3 salary, and 2/3’s bonus and commission. So, if your base agency salary is $30K, the hope is you’ll get to $60K through commission and bonus. It takes some time to get to $90K-ish total, but it’s fairly common for agency recruiters to make six figures. Again, this depends on what kind of agency, location, commission structure, etc.

On average, you’ll see more six figure recruiters working on the agency side, then you’ll see on the corporate side, by a wide margin.

So, are agency recruiters worth more than corporate recruiters?

Worth is defined by those paying! What I’ll say to this question is agency recruiters are more likely to ‘prove’ their worth than you’ll see on the corporate side. Which begs the question why has corporate Talent Acquisition not adapted their pay structure to something similar to that of a recruitment agency?

I’ve run both corporate TA shops and agency shops. I can tell you, realistically, there is no reason, that makes sense, not to at least test different pay structures on the corporate side! My goal in was always how do I get my corporate recruiters to be 2/3’s salary and 1/3 bonus. I wanted to make sure there was some performance-based compensation as part of their total compensation.

Here are some reasons I ran into each time I changed the pay structure of corporate recruiters”

  • “If you change the pay structure the best recruiters will quit!”
  • “We can’t change the salary structure, it’s the law!”
  • “Paying bonuses to recruiters in a corporate setting isn’t fair to the other people in HR!”
  • “The executives will never agree to performance-based pay in a non-sales role!”
  • “We want our recruiters to be hiring manager focused and paying bonuses would change that!”

All of these excuses are complete B.S.!

I did have Recruiters quit everything I came into an organization, but not because of pay. They quit because I made them actually recruit for the first time in their life! They had to pick up a phone, they had hard measures and weekly and monthly goals, they quit because they weren’t recruiters, they were administrators. But, being paid like they were recruiters.

Corporate TA Leaders don’t change their pay structure because they don’t know what to change it to, and change is scary!

I get it. It was the first time I did it as well, but in the long run, we had higher performing recruiters, better hiring manager satisfaction and we flat out performed better as a department, as compared to what we did previously.  Here are some tips to making this change:

– Make sure your high performing recruiters can actually make more money in the new model.

– Make sure low performers make less in the new model.

– Set black and white measurable goals before changing pay, and work with these goals for a while before aligning them with compensation.

– Be flexible to change. The first time I did this I found major holes and had to make some immediate changes that were fair to the recruiters and the organization.

– Communicate with your team and executives through this process.

– Have written outcomes you want to see from this change and watch those metrics closely.

– Paying per hire is never a bad thing, just make sure the pay matches the effort of the hire. Don’t pay the same bonus for hiring an admin as you do to hire a Java Developer. I tried to equalize this by the time and effort it took to fill each position. If it took 1/10 the time and effort, the bonus was 1/10 the amount of a full effort position. Again, you’ll have to test and adjust this for your organization. Don’t write it down in stone, to start!

– You’ll never really have to have a performance management conversation again! Oh, you want to make more money….

Recruiting, even in a corporate setting, is a sales type role and should be paid as such. There is no reason why you can’t have a more effective pay structure in your corporate TA department.

Want some help in getting this off the ground?  Contact me!

 

 

In Recruiting, Content Is NOT King!

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Something happened over the past five years. Content marketing, which is a brilliant way to connect with a customer base and build sales, became very fashionable in the recruiting space.  So much so, that I constantly read vendors telling in the trenches Talent Acquisition pros and leaders:

“In Recruiting, content is king!”

No. No, it is not! In recruiting, activity is king.  I think the confusion comes into play with people treating employment branding and recruiting as the same thing. They’re not the same thing. One build’s awareness of who you are and what kind of employer you might be, possibly you can stretch employment branding into awareness of your job openings as well.

Content in employment branding is important if you’re doing content recruitment marketing. Again, you don’t have to do this to do employment branding. Many organizations build their brand without content. If you have a great consumer brand, you are less likely to need content to build your employment brand.

I’m not against producing great content to build your brand, believe me! It can be super helpful, especially if you don’t have a larger consumer brand behind you.

The point is you can be awesome in recruiting and never produce a single piece of content. I see so many TA shops missing this right now. The question is why? Why are TA shops believing that the only way to recruit is to build content and build an audience?

Employer Branding is a huge business right now! Organizations are spending millions of dollars per year to build, maintain and grow their employment brand. For huge organizations, or organizations in highly competitive environments, this is very important. For many organizations, this is a complete waste of time and resources!

The noise in the employment branding space is so loud right now, most organizations are not going to be heard. In that case, why are you spending the resources? You’re doing this because it’s easier than picking up a phone and calling a candidate! That’s recruiting.

Recruiting are the activities you do to hire people for the jobs you have open. Included in those activities are not only candidate attraction but candidate interaction. Candidate interaction, the function of a recruiter interacting with a candidate, might be the most forgotten skill in all of Talent Acquisition.

The skill of interacting with a live person is lost on most talent acquisition shops. Sure you can connect with candidates via email, messaging, text, twitter, Snapchat, etc. Eventually, though, someone has to speak to a live person. Someone has to close this person on coming to work for you. We, the talent acquisition industry, continue to spend less and less time on this side of our business, and it’s showing.

Great recruiting organizations are activity focused and activity driven. Sales funnel. Candidates come in the top, and hires come out the bottom. It’s not difficult. It’s not art. It’s a process. It’s metrics. Teach your recruiters to be able to engage live people on the front side, and you will see a great return on that investment in more hires. No content needed.

 

 

Candidates Actually Want Human Interaction!

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TA Leaders and Executives, this is the dirty little secret that your Recruiters and the Talent Acquisition Technology industry does not want you to know!  Candidates actually prefer to have human interaction when searching and applying for a job. From a study done by ASA:

“Three of the top five ways job seekers land a job are “high touch,” according to the survey findings. Word of mouth is the most popular means (43%)—followed by job board websites and employer websites (both at 30%). Contacts or acquaintances with prospective employers (30%) and staffing and recruiting companies (25%) also rank high as resources that led to job offers.

Three in four (77%) actually prefer human interaction when searching for a job, according to the ASA Workforce Monitor.“

Recruiters and TA Tech are in bed together to pull the wool over your eyes!  TA Tech wants to sell you automation! Recruiters don’t want to pick up the phone! Put those two groups together and it’s one big circle jerk about to use only technology solutions to recruit and never pick up another phone as long they live!

Seriously! 3 out 4 candidates prefer to have a human contact them and tell them about the job you have open. I bet if you sent out an informal survey to your recruiting team, right now – today, the response from your recruiters would be that they believe only 25% or less actually would prefer a call!

That’s a huge disconnect, and should be very telling about the talent on your team!

So, how do you get your recruiters back on the phone?

1. Measure the amount of outgoing calls by person and post it publicly for all to see. You don’t even have to say one thing about it, the calls will automatically increase! True recruiters hate being on the bottom of any scoreboard!

2. Have fun with it! Run contest and provide incentives for more outgoing calls by your recruiters. For recruiters who grew up in a world where they thought they could just email and message their way to success, the phone is scary! Some will need a kind push!

3. Group call parties. Take one hour of the day and plan for every single recruiter to be on the phones at the same time. Make sure they prepare by sourcing ahead of time and have a number of candidates to reach out to. They should have at least 25-40 to call. Most calls will go to voicemail, if they’re lucky they’ll actually talk to a few people. It will be the fastest hour of their day or week! When everyone is doing this at the same time, you get great energy from the group and it seems less scary!

An average recruiter with 25 openings on their desk should be talking live to around 75-100 people each week on the phone. What I find when I first go into a new shop and measure this, the real number is more like 15-25!  It’s shockingly low! How are you going to fill 25 openings by talking to 25 people per week!? You won’t. That’s why your TA shop is failing.

I love TA Tech! I love TA Tech more than almost anyone I know. What I also know is that all great recruiters spend more time on the phone on average than weaker recruiters. It’s so simple, yet most of us fail as TA leaders not recognizing this.

 

5 Instagram Filters That Will Make HR Better at Recruiting!

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You know it’s true—you’re a great HR Pro, but you don’t really like to recruit. That’s okay, because you’re good at a million other things your company values.

But here’s the thing: A recent Deloitte report outlined the need for HR Pros to grow their skills beyond what our functional area is traditionally known for. CEOs and division heads are expecting different things from HR, and one of those areas of need is… you guessed it… Talent Acquisition/Recruiting.

(Cue the lighting, adjust the crop and apply the filter—BAM. Insta-recruiter. There’s nothing that an Instagram filter can’t transform!)

The Fistful of Talent crew is back with the following webinar, “Instagramming HR: 5 Filters HR Pros Can Use To Transform Into Better Recruiters“ (sponsored by the good folks at Jobvite). Join Dawn Burke and Kris Dunn on June 29th at 2pm EST, and they’ll hit you with the following goodies:

–A review of why leaders report the need for HR re-skilling and why recruiting rises to the top of the list for HR pros and generalists at all levels.

–Data on how talent acquisition is a key component to achieving results in the modern workforce—including areas that HR Pros love to talk about (employee engagement, retention, etc).

–A breakdown of how recruiting has become more challenging in the last 5-10 years, and why the methods HR Pros have traditionally used to recruit aren’t as effective today.

–5 key strategies that HR Pros can embrace to modernize their approach to recruiting, get better results for their organizations and be viewed as high potential by the leaders they serve. We’ll go over those strategies and tell you how to get started with each of them.

The HR Pros at FOT know you work hard and are good at what you do. You don’t have to love recruiting as an HR Pro; you just have to be good enough at it to ensure it doesn’t hurt your career. With a little editing and the perfect lighting (Nashville, amIright?) you can bring out your inner recruiter in no time.

Click here to join us for “Instagramming HR: 5 Filters HR Pros Can Use To Transform Into Better Recruiters“ on June 29th at 2pm EST, and we’ll show how to ramp up your recruiting game without giving up the things you love to do as an HR Pro!!

REGISTER TODAY!

The One Way to be Successful at Recruiting

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Eight years or so ago I started seriously writing for the first time in my life. The only other times I ever wrote in my life were school papers, a journal that my high school English teacher, Ms. Kemp, made me write in each day and love letters to my wife before we were married and email was not yet widely used and phone calls cost too much!

My good friend Kris Dunn got me to write for Fistful of Talent. He and Jessica Lee, who was the editor at the time, gave me the Friday slot at FOT. It was my job to write something snarky and fun, a piece people would read on a Friday, chuckle and know the week is almost over. That gig turned into this gig, which turned into me writing every single day, now going on five-plus years.

In all of this writing, I discovered what a lot of people discover in becoming successful. If you want to be successful at anything, you need to do it! You need to do it a lot! You need to do it every day.

I still write stuff that is crap. I make errors all the time. But, my writing has improved. Once in a while, I actually write something I think is pretty good!

That’s the secret to becoming really good at recruiting. You need to do it all the time!  I see HR Pros who try and recruit every once in a while. They suck at it and they’ll never be good at it because they don’t do it all the time. You can’t pick up a pencil and be instantly good at writing. You can’t pick up a phone and be instantly good at recruiting.

To be good at recruiting you must recruit every day.  You must always be on.  Everyone you meet. Everyone you talk to. Everyone becomes a potential part of your recruiting pipeline. Maybe as a candidate, or a lead, or a referral, etc. You don’t recruit, then turn it off and not recruit. You recruit always.

I’m, now, constantly writing. I rarely go a day when I don’t email myself ideas about something I want to write about. I think like a writer. How can I take this situation and write about it? My friends, family, and coworkers tease me about it (‘Don’t write about this!’ ‘You’re going to write about this aren’t you?’).  I’m always on.

If you truly want to be successful in anything in life you need to do that thing, always. I see recruiters constantly miss opportunities to recruit. To ask the question that would lead them to their next great hire. To pick up the phone and make one more call before they leave for the day. To take a chance and reach out to someone who they don’t think will be interested, but just maybe they will be interested.

Being good at anything is hard. It’s really hard if you want to be good by not doing it.

 

Recruiting is a Team Sport

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I was recently listening to one of my favorite podcasts, HR Happy Hour, with Steve Boese and Trish McFarland, with their guest Daniel Chait, the CEO of Greenhouse. Greenhouse is the one the hottest ATS platforms on the market and Steve attended their user conference. (I didn’t go because I wasn’t invited, even though I sang their graces over a year ago on the world renown T3 – Greenhouse!)

Daniel made a comment on the podcast that was really good:

“Recruiting is a team sport.”

He’s absolutely right! One thing I tell Talent Acquisition leaders is that you need to establish this up front when you start a new position. During the interview, find out who “owns” recruiting in the organization you’re thinking about going to. If they say, “you!” or “recruiting does”, or anything in those terms, run!!!

Recruiting in not a function of one department.  The answer I love to hear is, “the hiring managers own recruiting”. I can work with that!

Great recruiting only happens when it’s a priority by all parties involved. I tell TA pros that recruiting will happen with or without you. If an organization fired everyone in Recruiting today, they’ll still find ways to hire people tomorrow!  So, find ways to add value to the talent attraction that needs to happen with each hiring manager.

Recruiting is a team sport, but you can’t have a bunch of ball hogs on the team!  This isn’t hero ball!  I want my organization to recruit like Golden State shares the ball! Everyone’s involved. Everyone’s excited and bought in. Everyone understands the importance of each other’s contributions.

Greenhouse built their software with this philosophy. An ATS that easily gets everyone involved in the right way. This isn’t a one department function, Recruiting is an organizational function.

Check out Daniel on the HR Happy Hour Podcast and on Twitter, he’s one of the few HR/Talent Tech CEOs that will actually engage people on Twitter. He even occasionally will tweet at me and tell me he disagrees with my posts, which I love!  (which is probably why he didn’t invite me to his user conference…but, really, I’m over it…I still like their tech regardless…maybe it’s because he’s a UofM grad…)

The Secrets Behind How Google, Amazon and Facebook Hire The Best People!

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This was a headline the other day in an article over at Qz.com by Sarah Cooper. Now, Quartz does legitimate articles so it might have been hard for some to figure out if this was actually supposed to satire or if Sarah was actually trying to help you out. I have a feeling it was a little of both! I know it was getting shared a ton, and not for its humorous qualities!

Here is what Sarah said were the big secrets of Google, Amazon, and Facebook in hiring the best people:

  1. Begin phone screens 15 minutes early, 15 minutes late, or not at all

  2. Make the interview schedule as confusing and unpredictable as possible

  3. Make sure something goes wrong during the presentation

  4. During the interview, make a ton of incorrect assumptions

  5. Ask the candidate to solve your own, specific problems

  6. Have the interview frequently move between different rooms

  7. Ask the same questions over and over and over again

  8. Conduct dual interviews with a good cop / bad cop vibe

  9. Ask a question, then start typing very loudly

  10. Three months later, call and offer the candidate a job she didn’t apply for

After each point she gave an explanation on ‘why’ should do this and what it helps point out to you about a candidate. This is why so many folks read this as a real article, and since so many Talent Pros and Leaders are starving to find out what Google, Amazon, and Facebook does, they want to believe this is true! It’s not.

What is the ‘Real’ secret to how Google, Amazon, and Facebook hire the best people?

Because They’re Freaking Google, Amazon, and Facebook! 

They don’t do anything special. They post a job. A million people apply and they wade through the masses to find great talent. Sounds tough, huh?

Apple announced the other day they’re going to be hiring some new developers in Florida. It hit the national news. Every local paper picked it up. It was on every local news and radio station. It was the talk of the town!

A local software company, who was headquartered in Florida for the last twenty years, had all of its employees in Florida, is looking for the exact same developers. They’ve been struggling to find them, and no news agency or radio show could care! They’re not Apple! Who cares.

It’s probably just because Apple has such a great ’employment’ brand….Yeah, I’m sure that’s it.

Do you want to know a real secret? 

Don’t try to be Google, Amazon, or Facebook when it comes to hiring. You’ll just look silly. You’re not them. They have brand recognition you can’t even fathom. What they do in hiring has absolutely no correlation to 99% of the companies in the world. Be you. Find a path that works for you. Strive to get others in your market, your industry to want to follow you. That’s doable.