Job Seekers Still Mostly Offline!

Posted on January 22, 2014 by Tim Sackett

I was sent some research recently from Whale Path, a business research company, that was looking at how employers really find their employees. What they found might surprise many within the Talent Acquisition space. Their research found that a majority of employees under the medium U.S. wage scale (around $50k per year) actually found their jobs offline!

Does this jive with your hiring?

Here are some of the actual stats from their research:

– Only 7% of jobs paying $25 per hour or less are filled through online sources

– Personal referrals account for 46% of hires for positions paying less than U.S. median income, up from 41% in 2008

– Craigslist was cited by more than half of businesses as a low-cost resource for finding employees.

We tend to believe everyone is online. We then believe since they are online, they must be looking for jobs online. Do you know why you believe this?You’ve been told to believe this, over, and over, and over, through great marketing by companies who are selling online hiring solutions. We see Monster.com and CareerBuilder ads on the Superbowl. We are bombarded with emails daily about easy, fast ,cheap hiring solutions. We see constant media reports about the growth of LinkedIn. We are told everyone will be searching for a job on their phone, you MUST have a mobile solution. Yet, we don’t actually know anyone personally who applied and got a job on their phone. We are conditioned to believe everyone must be searching for a job online. Marketing is so strong, you don’t even know it’s happening to you.

But they aren’t. At least millions and millions and millions of our potential employees aren’t searching for job online.

They’re finding jobs like your grandparents found jobs. They are networking, they’re letting their friends and family know they’re looking, they’re letting the members of their church and synagogue know they’re looking, they’re letting their bowling buddies know they’re looking. Eventually, someone refers them to a job, and they get hired. We tend to thing we’re all just trying to hire professionals for $100K jobs, but we aren’t. Most of the hiring done in the U.S. is for positions under $50K, and most of your budget is being spent on tools that don’t attract these individuals. Individuals that don’t need a resume, they just need to fill out an application, because they have people who will vouch for their skills.

Interesting research, much of it we don’t normally focus on. What are you spending your hiring budget on today?

How To Pay A Headhunting Fee in 15 Easy Steps

Posted on January 16, 2014 by Tim Sackett

I hear statements like this all the time: ‘Ugh, I don’t want to pay a headhunting fee!’ I know this is because corporate HR folks think that it’s really hard to do, but I’m hear to show you that it isn’t hard! In fact, in 15 easy steps, I’ll show you how you can do this all the time!

Here are the 15 Easy Steps in Paying a Headhunting Fee:

1. Post all of your jobs and wait for applications/resumes to come into your email and/or ATS.

2. Weed out as many candidates as possible for stuff that doesn’t really matter, like: too many jobs, not enough time at a job, going to the ‘wrong’ school or not high enough GPA, working for a company that was too big or too small, making a grammatical error on the resume, not living in the ‘right’ area, etc.

3. Email the few candidates you have left with a message about their interest level and make them fill out stuff like applications and questionnaires to be considered for the next step.

4. Wait for email replies.

5. Send the 2 that reply as your ‘best candidates’ onto the hiring manager. 7 others reply after, ignore these, they weren’t quick enough to be the ‘best’ candidates.

6. Don’t follow up with the hiring manager on the two candidates you sent. If she is interested, she’ll get back to you.

7. Don’t respond to candidates following up looking for feedback on next steps, you want to keep the power position in this arrangement.

8. Send another email to hiring manager after two weeks looking for feedback on original candidates you sent. Hiring manager won’t like the two, wants more candidates. You go out and see who else has posted for the position in the past week (forget about those other 7 who first applied, they are old by now). Send 5 additional emails to the new candidates. 1 replies. Send to hiring manager.

9. Let Hiring Managers return calls go to voice mail, you know they just want to complain about the quality and lack of candidates. Call her back end of business tomorrow. She’s already gone for the day.

10. Hiring manager comes to your office. Crap. They caught you. You tell the manager you’ve been working non-stop on their opening, the three candidates are the best you can come up with.

11. Hiring manager goes back to their office. I call your hiring manager. She tells me she can’t get any good candidates.

12. Hiring Manager sets up their own interviews. Three days later, if not sooner, I send your hiring manager 5 candidates all capable of doing the job. I call your hiring manager to highlight two of the candidates who I feel would be the best fit for your organization.

13. Hiring manager picks a favorite from the great interviews they just had. I’ve pre-closed both on an offer, so I’m what they call in the business, a ‘sure-thing’.

14. Hiring manager calls you and tells you they found a candidate through an outside source.

15. You process my invoice.

See, it’s really not that hard to pay a headhunting fee, in fact, you practically don’t have to do much of anything! Just keep doing what you’re doing.

Employee Narcissism At All-Time High

Posted on January 7, 2014 by Tim Sackett

Do you feel that our fixation on employee feedback is perpetuating our narcissistic society?

It’s a question I thought of recently and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head. On one hand, I truly believe we have a major issue with narcissism in our society that is getting worse, not better. I also believe giving feedback to employees, on the work they do, is very valuable and needed to have a strong workforce.

So what gives?

We are told Annual Employee Evaluations are broken and not enough.

We are told you must give feedback to your employees frequently throughout the year.

We are also told that we have multiple generations that have gotten ‘hooked’ on feedback, like a junky is ‘hooked’ on crack. You get up and you put up a selfie waiting for your ‘followers’ to comment, to ‘like’, to give you a fix. You get to work, one more selfie – just a quick hit. Out to lunch, with my bestie, just one hit before I return to the office. Okay, it’s late afternoon, I’m going to need a little more to make it until 5pm, hello bathroom selfie, you’re my savior. Look at me! I’m home, bottle of wine selfie should at least get me through the evening.

Is it a stretch to compare the desire for social feedback to our desire for work feedback?

Here’s what I know. The more feedback you get, the more feedback you desire. If that is the case, is your new constant feedback evaluations at work creating a monster that you’ll never be able to satisfy? I feel like by solving one problem (lack of feedback), HR is helping to cause, or at least sustain, a bigger problem we are facing with an employee culture that is becoming overwhelmingly narcissistic.

Maybe the bigger question should be, what are we going to do with rampant narcissism that is running amok in our organizations? Have you created Anti-Narcissism training yet in your organization? If so, what does that entail? I’m thinking it must have some sort of aversion therapy elements (post a selfie and you get a shock from you desk chair!). Or maybe a little public shaming, which doesn’t seem to work on Narcissist, they actually like it – ‘oh look, someone is talking about me!’

I’m not sure what I dislike more in HR – employees who spent all of their time trying not get noticed, or employees who spend all of their time trying to get noticed!

Hire More Pretty People

Posted on December 20, 2013 by Tim Sackett

This post originally ran in January of 2012, and in one of the most read posts I’ve done. It as so popular, Kris Dunn, stole the idea, tweaked it, and made it his most downloaded whitepaper in Kinetix history! You’re Welcome, KD. After 2 years, I still find this concept has merit! It’s also very close to how Hitler’s Germany started! Enjoy.

What do you think of, in regards to smarts, when I say: “Sexy Blond model type”?

What about: “Strong Athletic Jock?”

What about: “Scrawny nerdy band geek?”

My guess is most people would answer: Dumb, Dumb, Smart – or something to that context.

In HR we call this profiling – and make no mistake – profiling – is done by almost all of our hiring managers. The problem is everything we might have thought is probably wrong in regards to our expectations of looks and brains. So, why are ugly people more smart?

They’re Not!

Slate recently published an article that contradicts all of our ugly people are more smart myths and actually shows evidence to the contrary. From the article:

Now there were two findings: First, scientists knew that it was possible to gauge someone’s intelligence just by sizing him up; second, they knew that people tend to assume that beauty and brains go together. So they asked the next question: Could it be that good-looking people really are more intelligent?

Here the data were less clear, but several reviews of the literature have concluded that there is indeed a small, positive relationship between beauty and brains. Most recently, the evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa pulled huge datasets from two sources—the National Child Development Study in the United Kingdom (including 17,000 people born in 1958), and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health in the United States (including 21,000 people born around 1980)—both of which included ratings of physical attractiveness and scores on standard intelligence tests.

When Kanazawa analyzed the numbers, he found the two were related: In the U.K., for example, attractive children have an additional 12.4 points of IQ, on average. The relationship held even when he controlled for family background, race, and body size.

That’s right HR Pros – Pretty people are smarter. I can hear hiring managers and creepy executives that only want “cute” secretaries laughing all over the world!

The premise is solid though! If you go back in our history and culture you see how this type of things evolves:

1. Very smart guy – gets great job or starts great company – makes a ton of money

2. Because of success, Smart guy now has many choices of very pretty females to pursue as a bride.

3. Smart guy and Pretty bride start a family – which results in “Pretty” Smart Children

4. Pretty Smart Children grow up with all the opportunities that come to smart beautiful families.

5. The cycle repeats.

Now – first – this is a historical thing – thus my example of using a male as our “Smart guy” and not “Smart girl” – I’m sure in today’s world this premise has evolved yet again. But we are talking about how we got to this point, not where are we now. Additionally, we are looking at how your organization can hire better. So, how do you hire better? Hire more pretty people.

Seems simple enough. Heck, that is even a hiring process that your hiring managers would support!

Recruiting without actually doing it

Posted on December 18, 2013 by Tim Sackett

Most recruiters believe they are actually recruiting.

They ensure they have well written job descriptions.

They have a great process set up to screen applicants.

They’ve gone out and chosen the best pre-employment assessments for their organizations.

They implemented an awesome new applicant tracking system.

They’ve posted their opening on their careers page of their organizations website.

They’ve contracted out with the best background screening company.

They’ve done everything but pick up a phone and talk to someone…

You see recruiting is a lot like painting a picture. Of course you have to have canvas, and paints, and brushes, but mainly you need to start painting. In recruiting all you really need to have is one contact to contact. That’s how it starts. You turn one contact into another, repeat. All the other stuff is great, but it’s not recruiting. Although, it’s what most recruiters will tell you recruiting is.

The hard part of recruiting, is actually recruiting.

Candidate Experience Isn’t a Real Product

Posted on December 2, 2013 by Tim Sackett

I love watching really good comics. Sarah Silverman has a new special on HBO called “We Are Miracles” it’s brilliantly funny in the way where she makes her self laugh at some of the things she is saying. I love that. I find it funnier when the comic finds themselves funny, not fake funny, but naturally tickled at what they are thinking and saying out loud. There is one part in the special where she talks about a product that is being marketed to women for a certain kind of odor, in areas we don’t talk about on family blogs like this. She describes how these odor fighting products, marketed directly at women, going after their worst fears, aren’t really products. We think they are because we see the commercials and someone holding a can in their hands and talking on TV, I mean it has to be real, it’s on TV!

But they aren’t. There is no real need for this product. Women can use soap and water, like they use on the rest of their body. As Sarah says, if you do that, your normal washing, and you still sense an odor, you don’t need a ‘perfume’ spray, you need a doctor!

This is exactly how I feel about Candidate Experience. It’s not a real product.

We think it is because we have really smart folks telling us it is. These same folks make their living off of consulting to companies who have unrealized fears of a candidate having a bad experience and then those candidates no longer wanting to use or buy their products and services. This is made up. This is private parts deodorant.

Here is what Candidate Experience is built upon:

1. At some point an executive had their sister’s kid, a niece or nephew of the executive, apply for a job with the company online. Your system/process did what is was suppose to do, it weeded out this crappy candidate, sent them the “Dear John” letter, and that was it. But it wasn’t!

2. Executive hears from her sister that her daughter Mary, a brilliant child, was not selected and not even given an interview, in fact there was no human interaction at all!

3. Executive has to save face with family. Comes down hard on Talent Acquisition leader about how can we treat our candidates like this!

This is how Candidate Experience was born. A niece not getting hired.

The executive not wanting to make this ‘about herself’ comes up with other reasons, and all the sheep follow along. “We need to treat all candidates like we treat our customers! We need to make candidates advocates of our products and services. We need to treat candidates this better than we treat each other because it’s a competitive advantage for talent.” And we begin to buy into the rhetoric. We begin to believe that we have an odor, that what we’ve been doing is bad. Our worst fears, that a candidate who feels they have a bad experience will stop using our products, is so overplayed it’s actually funny when you stop and actually think about it! You will have candidates who feel they are great, you won’t, they’ll get upset and not like your company. That is life in Talent Acquisition. A minute percentage will think this way, and there is nothing you’ll ever be able to do about it!

The reality is, for the vast majority of Talent Acquisition Leaders, what we’ve been doing is just fine. We treat our candidates like normal humans, we communicate with them if we feel they fit or not, and the process works. Sure, some of us, have some bad processes, or parts of processes that need to be fixed. But we don’t have an odor problem. The biggest lie that is perpetuated in the Human Resource Industry is that Candidate Experience is important. The reality is candidates have extremely low expectations when it comes to applying for a job. All they really want and need is to know that you saw their application and/or resume, and do you feel they would be a fit or not. That’s it! Treat them like normal humans. Give them enough respect to communicate with them the next step: 1. Thank you, but no thanks we have some better fitting candidates, try again next time; 2. We’re interested, here is step #2.

It’s not hard. You don’t need to spend time and money on this. You don’t have a real problem. I know you think you do, so many people are telling you so, so it must be real. But it’s not, it’s private parts deodorant!

This Is Only For the Advance Class

Posted on November 18, 2013 by Tim Sackett

As my friend Laurie Ruettimann pointed out last week, recruiting is easy and can be done by basically anyone, so just go hire some soldier to do it. Laurie might not be that all far from the truth. Recruiting isn’t brain surgery, it’s a process. A process that is hated by the majority of human resource professionals around the world, which is why it is a $9 Billion dollar industry. Not a hard skill, but many times, a really hard job to be successful at. Old school recruiters like to believe recruiting is an Art form. It’s not. New school recruiters like to believe you can just source everyone you need off the internets. You can’t.

Recruiting is all about activity. It’s a sales cycle. The more contacts (phone calls, emails, handshakes, etc.) you make, the more candidates you will find. The more candidates you find and get interested in your jobs. The more jobs you will fill. Not hard, right? The problem is, ‘most’ recruiters look to do things that allows them not to make contacts! They will buy every kind of technology imaginable to get people to call them. They’ll do just about anything, besides picking up the phone and making that one call.

Want to be successful at Recruiting? Find people who are willing to make 100 calls per day and who love your company. Go ahead, go find those people! It might be a soldier, it might be your neighbor, it might a former crackhead, who knows! The fact is, most people do not want to do this, even when you hire them and pay them to do just this!

So being a successful recruiter is basically easy. You must find the sweet spot in the amount of activity you need to do each week that will get you the amount of contacts you need to get enough people for the jobs you want to fill. Once you find that level, you need to maintain that level forever. Easy. I’m not kidding. You don’t need fancy branding, and big ATS Systems and a bunch of processes. You need people who will bang your internal resume database and job boards constantly, and faster than your competition. That really isn’t that hard to do, because most shops don’t even do the basics well!

Now for the Advance Class participants:

Want to be Ridiculously Successful at Recruiting?

Do that which is written above and add just one thing. Maintain a relationship with your companies Alumni. There is this funny thing about human nature. When we leave some place, we always want to know what’s going on back there! If we move to a new city, we love updates from our old city. When we run into past coworkers at the mall, we love updates on who is still there and who is running different departments, who got fired, who got promoted. If we know this about human nature, why aren’t we giving it to our Alumni?

It doesn’t have to be constant, but is has to be consistent.

Do a quarterly Alumni update via email to everyone who has every worked for you. Even the crappy ones who you are glad they are gone ! Give them some juicy details about promotions. Let them know some new things you’re working on. Let them know what jobs you’re trying to fill, and how they can refer people. Do this every quarter for 2 years. Want to be class valedictorian? On a monthly basis call a handful of alumni and just have chat, build some relationships, check on where are they now. As them if you mind if you share their story in the next Alumni News going out next quarter. If you commit to do this for 24 months, you will start to see positions fill themselves.

This is advance course stuff, because 99% of companies aren’t doing this with their recruiting!

Pity Hires

Posted on November 14, 2013 by Tim Sackett

Some of the best business interactions I have each week are on the back channel with the gang over at Fistful of Talent. It usually starts with one of our tribe asking the rest of us a question, and quickly spirals out of control. Almost every time someone will say “this email string should be a blog post”. Almost 100% it’s not, because the snark level is Defcon 1! The concept of “Pity Hire” came from one of these recent interactions and I’ll give credit to the brilliant Paul Hebert (original FOT member and if you need an expert on rewards and recognition, and almost anything else, he’s your dude!).

The conversation actually started around “hiring pretty“, which I’m a huge fan of and have written about it several times. It’s my belief that over hundreds of years, genetics has and will continue to build better hires. Hires that are more attractive, taller, etc. It’s just simple science and human behavior interacting. I won’t go into detail here, you can read my previous post to get the background. Let’s just say smart powerful rich men, get pick of women. They have kids. Better healthcare, nutrition, family wealth, access and education, lead to the cycle starting all over again. Eventually, pretty people are not just pretty, they are also smarter. Looks at our business and political leaders for the most part – usually pretty people.

So, it’s not really that hard to then make the jump to the fact that all of us really like to hire pretty people. Like it! We actually love it! Therein lies the problem. There are only so many pretty hires to go around, and let’s face it, not all pretty people are genetically superior! This gets us to Pity Hires. A Pity Hire is a hire you make of someone out of shear pity for them. They might not be so good looking, or smart, or they come from circumstances that are less than ideal. So that you can identify and help stop this kind of hiring I wanted to list out the types of Pity Hires we tend to make:

Pity Hire Types —

Second Place Hire: The second place pity hire is the hire you make when you someone doesn’t get hired initially because you actually had a really beautiful person to hire. The second place hire was probably a better fit, but not as ascetically pleasing. You find another lower level position, at lower pay, and offer that to them. You feel bad, so you give them a lessor job.

Crappy Situation Hire: The crappy situation hire happens when you interview someone who is in, or has went through recently, a crappy situation. Newly divorced and the spouse left them for a younger, more beautiful person (happens to both males and females). The boss from their old job, they were having an affair with, found a new younger, more attractive admin to sleep with. Things like that – crappy situations.

Recent Breakup Hire: They were fired from their last job, when they were let go through a layoff where their past company was getting rid of the less attractive people. You feel bad they had to go through those situations, so you hire them for your job.

No One Will Give Me My First Job Hire: One of the most common Pity Hires is the entry level hire. Many of us have given out this hire in our careers. Entry level candidate, got some worthless degree in something like “Historical Urban Anthropology” and can’t figure out why no one will hire them! They’re not good looking enough to get a job like a normal person, so you hire them.

Pity hires aren’t necessarily bad hires. It’s really a kind of HR charity. We do them for friends kids, and favors for old co-workers. They usually don’t work out well, but we can compartmentalize them for what they are, Pity Hires. As I write this I’m wondering if we might have just come up on the next great Recruiting Metric for 2014! Can you imagine going to your executive team — “Well, we lost 25 hires last year, but we aren’t counting 5 of those losses, they were Pity Hires!”

After The 4th Round Interview…

Posted on November 12, 2013 by Tim Sackett

I had a client recently that was undecided about a candidate after the 4th round interview. They were thinking that maybe a fifth round would make the difference. I told them that it wouldn’t. In fact, it was a mistake to allow them to get to four.

Do you know what the fourth round interview says about your process?

It says that your process is broken. No one needs four rounds of interviews to decide if a candidate is the right candidate for your organization. A fifth round, or any number higher, is just adding insult to injury.

Here’s what anything beyond the third round interview says to your candidate:

– “Hey, come work us, so we can totally frustrate you with our indecision culture.”

– “We need more interviews because we don’t have our shit together, but please don’t notice that.”

– “You are so mediocre we just can decide if we should pass on you, or hire you.”

– “I bet you can’t wait to come aboard and be a part of this process in the future!”

– “We like to where down candidates to see who ‘really’ wants out jobs!”

Organizations that can’t figure this out are always interviewing second tier talent. Organizations that are talent attractors have determined that less is more. Have a concise process. Move quick. We’ll get it right, more than we’ll get it wrong. If we get it wrong, don’t take long to make the correction.

The reality is, is that 99% of your interviews should never need to go beyond three interviews. It looks like this:

1st round – This is your pre-employment screening/assessments and phone interview. Perfect placement for video screening tool (HireVue, WePow, etc.).

2nd round – Face-to-face with hiring manager and any other key stakeholders (i.e., people this person might support from other functions)

3rd round – if needed- Face-to-face, phone, skype-type interview. Executive sign off. Really only needed if your line executive doesn’t have faith in the hiring manager.

More interviews after this point, yield negligible additional information, and actually might be a detriment to your hiring decision. Why? Here’s what happens happens after you talk about someone for so long, they turn into a piece of crap! This is normal human and organizational behavior, by the way. We start out talking about all the good qualities and experiences the person has, and how they can help us. We then start searching for hickeys and, no matter what, we will find them! Then we start talking about what’s wrong with the person and before you know it, that great candidate, becomes a piece of garbage and not good enough for your organization.

They’re not really garbage. They’re still the really good person you initially interviewed. We just let it go too long, and discovered they have opportunities and we don’t want to hire anyone with ‘opportunities’ we want perfect. This is what happens after round three in almost every organization I’ve ever witnessed go to four, five, six, etc. It might be the biggest misnomer by candidates who feel the longer you go in the interview process, the better the chance of an offer. It’s untrue! If you don’t get an offer after the third round, your percentages of getting an offer fall exponentially every round after!