Working for Free – Contingent Search Model Changing

Posted on July 10, 2015 by Tim Sackett

A funny thing happens when the economy is good. Corporate Talent Acquisition pros believe that agency contingent recruiters should work their job openings like its the most important priority the recruiter has ever had. There are a couple reasons for this:

1. This opening is the most important priority for the Corporate TA pro, so it should be yours.

2. When the economy was bad, you treated the Corporate TA pro like they were your number one priority.

Then the economy gets good, and the agency folks have choices and now as a Corporate TA pro you find out who your real agency recruiting friends are! Those who will actually come through for you, when you call on them and tell them you have something urgent.

My Corporate TA friends are the ones who pay me.

Don’t take that wrong. You see this is the game we all play. You want me to work your opening, but you ‘really’ don’t want to pay me if you don’t have to. I get it. You get it. It’s the world of contingency recruitment. I spend most of my time just trying to truly determine who will pay me for the work I do. Because most of the work I do is for free.

So, now that the economy is good, way too many Corporate TA pro have unreasonable expectations of their agency counterparts. If I’m working for free, mostly, I’m going to be more picky about who I work for free for. If you have me work five openings, and you then fill all five on your own, I’m probably not working your ‘urgent’ number six. If you have me work three, and I fill one, I’m helping you out. It’s simple economics.

Something new is being added to the game. This happens when times are good for agency recruiters. There are two types of recruiting on the agency side:

1. Contingent – see above. Basically, I work for free until I find you someone you want to hire, then you pay me.

2. Retained – You pay me my big fee up front, and I work until I find you the person you want to hire.

Traditionally, retained is really only used for executive search, but when talent is hard to come by, you’ll also see it used in the professional ranks.

Recently, I’ve been seeing a new hybrid model of search show up, called Retained Contingent. Retained contingent is a mix of both models. It’s still a contingent search, but you’re paying me about 10-20% of the fee up front for me to prioritize your search to the top of the workload.

Let’s say you’re searching for an Engineering Manager for $100K, and signed a 25% fee agreement. The total fee upon placement is $25K. In the Retained Contingent model you would pay me $5K to start the search up front, then $20K upon placement guarantee. If I don’t find the person, after a contracted amount of time, the $5K is for my work, no other fee is owed.

This is a win-win for both the Corporate TA pro and the agency, but only if the Corporate TA pro is sure they want to pay for the search. If that’s the case, I want the benefit of retained focus and prioritization, without the risk of paying the full fee up front and having the firm not come through with a successful hire.

I don’t want to take you cash and then fail. You’ll make sure everyone knows I failed. But, I also have limited resources and want to focus those resources on the best clients. We both have skin in the game. That creates a partnership. That creates success.

Just wait. You’ll see a lot more of this over the next five to ten years. Corporate TA pros are getting smarter, and so are the agency pros. In the end, both sides want value for their work.

T3 – @ZipRecruiter

Posted on June 9, 2015 by Tim Sackett

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

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

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

5 Things I really like about ZipRecruiter:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 5 New Rules of Work

Posted on May 27, 2015 by Tim Sackett

I’m usually a big fan of Fast Company articles, but one recently seemed like the biggest contrived piece of new-aged garbage, I just had to share!

The article has a great premise: These Are The New Rules of Work. You know, one of those articles that will show us all how we use to do work and how we now do work. Well, maybe, but also how we hope we could do work like they talk about in magazines like Fast Company, but we really don’t because we live in the real world.

Here’s a taste:

Old Rule: You commute into an office every day.

NEW RULE: WORK CAN HAPPEN WHEREVER YOU ARE, ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD.

Cute, but I actually work at a job where we go to the office each day, like most people in the world. So, while it would great to work in the Cayman Islands, my job is in Flint, and if I don’t come in, I don’t get paid. Which makes trips to the Cayman more difficult.

You get the idea. It was written by a professional writer, not by someone who actually works a real job. Writing isn’t a real, normal job. When you write freelance, you can actually work from anywhere, because you basically work for yourself!

Here are the others:

Old Rule: Work is “9-to-5”

NEW RULE: YOU’RE ON CALL 24-7.

Well, you’re not really on call 24-7, you choose to be ‘connected’ 24-7, there’s a difference. I do believe that ‘leaving’ your job at the office was a concept that was over blown for the most part in our parents generation. They claimed to do this, but only because they didn’t have email and smart phones and laptops. Let’s face it, our parents would have been just as connected given the same technology.

Old Rule: You have a full-time job with benefits.

NEW RULE: YOU GO FROM GIG TO GIG, PROJECT TO PROJECT.

There’s no doubt there is a rise in the use of the contingent workforce, but this doesn’t mean it’s necessarily chosen by the worker. True, thoughts have shifted that many people no longer want to work at one company for forty years, but much of that has been shaped by companies and economics. When you live through an entire decade of layoffs and downsizing, you begin to think of the work environment as more transient. The crazy part about this mindset is organizations still feel like candidates should want to stay at a company for forty years, even though they can’t, and won’t, guarantee that for you.

Old Rule: Work-life balance is about two distinct, separate spheres.

NEW RULE: FOR BETTER OR WORSE THE LINE BETWEEN WORK AND LIFE IS ALMOST ENTIRELY DISAPPEARING.

This is the one rule I actually agree with. Again,this is from a day when you could actually separate yourself from your work and personal life. In today’s ultra-connected world, it becomes very difficult to do this. I think most people get tired of living two separate lives, and just want to live one. This is who I am, professionally and personally, take me a whole person, or not.

Old Rule: You work for money, to support yourself and your family.

NEW RULE: YOU WORK BECAUSE YOU’RE “PASSIONATE” ABOUT A “MOVEMENT” OR A “CAUSE”—YOU HAVE TO “LOVE WHAT YOU DO.”

This is actually the single worst piece of advice ever given in mankind! Bar none. If this was actually the case, how do you think anything would actually get done on this planet? How would store shelves get stocked. Gas stations get run. Your dinner get cooked and the dishes washed at your favorite restaurant? Do you really feel there are folks “passionate” about washing dishes for you? That they want to wash dishes for your cause of having a chicken fried steak and gravy for dinner?

Get some freaking perspective.

I think it’s great if you can work at someone you’re passionate about, good for you. But it’s definitely not necessary for you have a great life. Have a cause that is special in your life? Perfect, go for it. You know what really helps most causes? Money! If you have a job that makes great money, just imagine how you can truly help that cause.

So, what do you think about these ‘new’ rules of work?

Top 10 Sources of Online Hires

Posted on May 21, 2015 by Tim Sackett

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

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

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

6% of external online hires are coming from LinkedIn!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

T3 – Greenhouse.io @Greenhouse

Posted on May 19, 2015 by Tim Sackett

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

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

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

5 Things I really like about Greenhouse:

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

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

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

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

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

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

What ATS Should You Select For Your Company?

Posted on April 29, 2015 by Tim Sackett

If you read Monday’s post on Crappy Employment Brands, I told you I would answer the most asked question in HR and Talent Acquisition of all time. It’s goes with the title to this post, and almost anytime I speak I get at least one person who will ask me this question during the Q&A:

What ATS (Applicant Tracking System) do you use?

The question is basically irrelevant unless the person asking me works in the exact same industry and business that I work in (IT and Technical contract staffing). Which they usually don’t. Usually, it’s a corporate HR or Talent Pro. My ATS software is designed for something completely different for what they want.

But, more importantly, the question is asked because so many people believe that the ATS is the secret sauce to successful recruiting in corporate talent acquisition. It’s not. The secret sauce to great hiring is only expedited by your recruitment technology. If you suck at hiring, the best ATS on the market will only make you suck at hiring much faster!

The best ATS systems will give you great functionality that includes CRM, recruitment marketing, recruitment automation, talent communities, great sourcing tools, assessment/screening technology and interview technology baked into the product, onboarding, etc. The worse ATS systems give you a basic product that will allow you to accept applicants online and process them through some sort of hiring process.

There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of ATS systems on the market. Most people will demo three or less. There is an ATS that is right for you, but you have to be willing to look at a lot of them.

So, what ATS should you select for you company? I’ll give you some tips:

1. Select an ATS you can afford. That sounds obvious, but most HR and Talent pros over-buy on their ATS, for the amount of hiring they do. If you only hire a hundred people a year, you don’t need an ATS that costs $100K per year to own/rent. You can great ATS software for a few thousand dollars per year.

2. Select an ATS that has the functionality your business needs. Again, obvious, but missed by most new buyers. If you don’t need talent communities, paying for talent communities is a waste. If you organization won’t use video interviewing, why are you buying it baked into your ATS. If you definitely need a pre-employment assessments baked in, you can find a system that will meet your needs. Don’t settle.

3. Select an ATS that most closely fits your hiring process. This sounds stupid, but the majority of ATS failures have nothing to do with the ATS and everything to do with you not willing to change your process. You take the ATS and force them to do all sorts of changes to fit your broken process, and in turn break their proven best practice process. In the end, you fail and blame the ATS. Save yourself the headache and find an ATS that does the flow exactly how you want it. Some are very configurable and will allow you to change and keep changing your process. Some aren’t configurable at all.

4. Select an ATS that you feel you could start using immediately after the demo. ATS systems should be very easy to use. If you feel overwhelmed by the demo, it’s not the right system for you.

5. Select an ATS you can grow into. If you aren’t going to grow, you don’t need to worry about this, so don’t get talked into it. Most ATS systems are designed for a certain level of hiring. The best vendors will be honest and tell you, the worst will tell you what you want to hear. Find out who their clients are that are your same size and demand to talk to them. If they don’t give you that access, run. The good vendors will bend over backwards to get you to talk to their current clients.

If you don’t have an ATS, you should be fired. There are literally four or five major players in ATS technology that will give you a one user system for FREE (and only a few hundred dollars to add other users)! Of course, you get what you pay for, but you need to start somewhere! No company that is hiring should not have an ATS. The prices range from Free to millions of dollars.

What ATS systems do I like? There are bunch: Workable, Jobvite, Bullhorn, Greenhouse, Taleo, Newton, The Resumator, Silkroad, iCims, SuccessFactors and Gr8People, in no specific order.

Here’s the funny thing. Some of you use one of these from above and hate them! That’s ATS technology. Most people think everyone elses ATS is better than what they’re using. The reality is, most do about the same thing – post jobs, accept resumes, some stuff in between, BAM you’re hired.

3 Ways Contract Staffing Fails

Posted on April 23, 2015 by Tim Sackett

Contract technical staffing is what I do for a living – so I know exactly where it falls down. I spend every day trying to talk people into why they should use contract staffing and why it makes sense. In 13 years of being in this business, I’ve never had anyone ask me why it doesn’t work. That might be kind of odd. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve talked to hundreds of corporate HR and Recruiting Pros who HATE contract staffing, but 99% don’t know why they hate it.

Most believe they hate contract staffing because it’s taking their job away. Nothing makes me smile more than to hear a really good HR Pro say “if I hire your company ‘they’ll’ have no reason to keep me around”. I always find this a little sad, because that’s not at all true. Contract staffing isn’t in competition with corporate staffing. Contract staffing fills temporary voids of talent and project work. Corporate staffing is looking for permanent, long term hires.

But, to be perfectly honest, there are some reasons when contract staffing fails. If you deal with contract staffing firms, you might find that shocking to hear, because we are trained from birth not to ever say anything negative about our service. ‘Everyone’ can use us for any recruiting need you might have! Well, no not really. Let me give you 3 Ways Contract Staffing Fails:

1. To Attract your competitions talent when you are equal or trailing in market compensation. I always like to say there is no one I can’t recruit. Given enough time and money. I could get President Obama to quit the Presidency. But if you think a contract staffing firm is going to get your competitions best developer to leave their direct job for a contract job, for the same money or less, you’re crazy and I don’t want to work with you company.

2. When you fall in love with the talent. Every once in a while I a client who gets upset. They bring on a high priced contractor, that person does great work, and the client falls in love and wants to hire them. The problem is many contractors are contractors because they like moving from project to project. They like you, they just don’t like-like you. Contract staffing works really well when it’s a win-win. We have a project, you nail project, and we both got what we wanted. It fails when one party falls in love, and the other doesn’t feel the same!

3. When You Think I’m Magical. Recruiting is recruiting. I don’t have a magical stable of candidates waiting to come to work for you. Well, I might have one or two, but not a stable. When you tell me you need something I, usually, have to go out and find the right talent, fit, etc. Just like you would, if you were looking to hire a direct position. I’m not magic, I’m just good at finding technical talent. There’s a difference.

I get why some new clients get put off by contract staffing. I call you, tell you how amazing we are and how good we are at what we do and then you expect I’m going to have 5 perfectly screened ready to work Controls Engineers in your inbox the next morning, when you’ve been searching for 6 months and don’t have one.

Expectations are a huge issue we all face in recruiting, no matter what kind of recruiting we do. I have to manage my clients expectations, just like you have to manage your hiring managers expectations. Contract staffing works really well when you find a client partner that makes sure your expectations and their deliverables all line up.

Want to discuss? Contact me: sackett.tim@HRU-TECH.com, 517-908-3156 or send me a tweet @TimSackett. I promise to under promise and over deliver.

Job Title Killers

Posted on April 22, 2015 by Tim Sackett

You know what position I would love to apply for!? Jr. Human Resource Manager, said no one ever!

I hate spending 3 seconds on job titles, because job titles just scream, “Personnel Department”, but I have to just take a few minutes to help out some of my HR brothers and sisters. Recently, I came across a classic job title mistake when someone had posted an opening and then broadcasted it out to the world for a, wait for it, “Jr. Industrial Engineer”. I almost cried.

Really! No, Really! “Jr.” You actually took time, typed out the actual title, and then thought to yourself, “Oh yeah! There’s an Industrial Engineer out there just waiting to become a ‘Jr. Industrial Engineer’!” Don’t tell me you didn’t, because that’s exactly what it says. “But Tim, you don’t understand we’ve always called our less experienced Industrial Engineers, Junior, so we can differentiate them from our ‘Industrial Engineers’ and our ‘Sr. Industrial Engineers’. What do you want us to to do, call them: Industrial Engineer I, Industrial Engineer II and Industrial Engineer III?”

No, I don’t want you to do that either.

Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to title this position as “Lesser Paid Industrial Engineer”. You’ll get the same quality of responses!

You know how to solve this, (but why you won’t) just have one pay band for “Industrial Engineer”, from $38K to $100K. Pay the individuals within that band appropriately for their years of experience and education.

This is why you won’t do it. Your ‘Sr.’ Compensation Manager knows you aren’t capable of handling this level of responsibility and within 24 months your entire Industrial Engineering staff would all be making $100K – Jr’s, Middles and Sr’s!

Please don’t make me explain how idiotic it looks when you list out your little number system on your post as well (Accountant I, Accountant II, etc.). Because you know there just might be an Accountant out there going, “Some day I just might be an Accountant II!”

If SHRM actually did anything, I wish they would just go around to HR Pros who do this crap and visit their work place and personally cut up their PHR or SPHR certificates in half, in front of them, like a maxed out credit card that gets flagged in the check out line. That would be awesome!

All this does is make it look like you took a time machine in from a 1970 Personnel Department.

But, seriously, if you know of any Sr. Associate HR Manager III positions please let me know.

HR Manager Position that Pays $364,000! Want it?

Posted on April 10, 2015 by Tim Sackett

I ran into an age old issue last week, which for some reason hadn’t come up for a very long time, but there he was staring me right in the face, and I still don’t get it! Here’s the issue, should you post the salary (or your desired salary range based on experience, yadda, yadda…) for the position you are hiring, or not?

My guess is you clicked on this post because you wanted to find out which kind of HR Manager position pays $374K! Well, none, but you clicked, I win! But, while you’re here let’s take a look at the issue at play because it’s a polarizing issue amongst HR Pros.

I say, post the salary right out in front for God and everyone to see. It will create most interest, which gives you a larger pool of candidates, which gives you better odds at filling your position with the type of talent that fits your organization. It allows you to eliminate many candidates who won’t accept your job, because you’re too cheap. Sure you’ll get some people who see $98K, and they are making $45K, but they want to make $98K, so they send their resume, hoping. But we’re smarter than that, plus, maybe Mr. $45K would be a great fit for me for another position, or in 3 more years when I have the same position open.

Posting the salary on a job post creates 137% more candidate traffic, than those posts which don’t list salary, or at least it feels that way to me when I do it that way! I’m sure my friends at CareerBuilder can probably come up with some more precise figures on this exactly, but I’ll bet my made up math isn’t too far from correct. It’s common sense. You walk by a store and see “help wanted”, and no one goes in. You walk by the store and you see “Help Wanted $12/hr”, and they have a line out the door asking for applications.

There are only 3 reasons you wouldn’t list the target salary for the position you are hiring for:

1. You know you’re paying below market, and you don’t want to the competition to know, because they’ll cherry pick your best people

2. You can’t find the talent you want, so you’ve increased the salary target, but you aren’t going to increase the salary of the poor suckers already working for you at the lower amount.

3. You don’t know what you’re doing!

Look, I get it, I’ve been there. You don’t want to list salary because your current employees don’t understand that while the position title is the same, you are “really” looking for someone with more experience. Or, we just don’t have the budget to raise up everyone already working for us, but we really need some additional talent. Or, we’ve always did it this way, and we want people who are “interested in us” and not money.

Well, let me break it to you gently, you’re an idiot. People are interested in you because the value equation of what you are offering fits into their current lifestyle! Otherwise, you could just move forward as a volunteer organization now couldn’t you?!

Do yourself a favor and don’t make recruiting harder than it has to be. Just tell people what you have to offer. “We’re a great place to work, we have these benefits, they’ll cost you about this much, and we are willing to pay “$X” for this position”, if this is you, we want to speak to you. If it’s not, that’s great to, but check back because we might have something for you in the future.

Also, let me know if you find an HR Manager job that pays $374K. I know the perfect candidate!

2 Reason Men Get Hired More Than Women

Posted on April 3, 2015 by Tim Sackett

The New York Times had an article regarding hiring practices and succession practices at Google, and G*d knows if Google is doing it, it must be important, and we all must try and do the same thing. What I liked about this article was it didn’t necessarily look at practices and processes, it looked at data. The data found that Google, like almost every other large company, does a crappy job hiring and promoting women.

Shocking, I know, if you’re a man! We had no idea this was going on! In America of all places… Beyond the obvious, though, Google was able to dig into the data and find out the whys and make some practical changes that I think most companies can implement, and that I totally agree with. From the article:

“Google’s spreadsheets, for example, showed that some women who applied for jobs did not make it past the phone interview. The reason was that the women did not flaunt their achievements, so interviewers judged them unaccomplished.

Google now asks interviewers to report candidates’ answers in more detail. Google also found that women who turned down job offers had interviewed only with men. Now, a woman interviewing at Google will meet other women during the hiring process.

A result: More women are being hired.”

Here are two selection facts that impact both men and women:

1. We like to surround ourselves with people who we like, which usually means in most cases people who are similar to ourselves.

2. We tend not to want to brag about our accomplishments, but our society has made it more acceptable for men to brag.

This has a major impact to your selection, and most of you are doing nothing about it. It’s very common that if you run simple demographics for your company, ANY COMPANY, you’ll see that the percentage of your female employees does not come close to the percentage of your female leadership.

Why is that?

Here are two things you can do to help make the playing field more level in your organization:

1. Have women interview women. Sounds a bit sexist in a way, but if you want women to get hired into leadership positions you can’t have them going up against males being interviewed by males because the males will almost always feel more comfortable with another male candidate. Reality sucks, buy a helmet.

2. Ask specific questions regarding accomplishments and take detailed notes. Studies have found woman don’t get hired or promoted because they don’t “sell” or brag enough about their accomplishments giving their male counterparts a leg up, because the males making the hiring decisions now have “ammunition” to justify their decision to hire the male.

Let’s face it, Google is doing it, so now we all have to do it. What would we do without best practices…(maybe innovate and create new better practices – but I digress…).