Transform Recruitment Marketing Live Stream Registration is Now Open! (Free!)

Posted on June 3, 2019 by Tim Sackett

June 20-21st I’ll be in Boston as the Emcee at Transform Recruitment Marketing conference. This is the 5th year of Transform and I’m super excited to be attending, but also super excited that Transform has opened up this conference to a virtual audience for those who can’t attend in person, for free!

I’m constantly speaking and writing about all kinds of Recruitment Marketing tactics, ideas, and strategies. It’s still a very new and fast evolving function within talent acquisition. What I love about Transform is they’ve gone out and really worked to bring in actual corporate TA pros who are recruitment marketing practitioners to share what they are doing and what’s working for them!

The 2019 Transform conference will have speakers from: Delta Airlines (“The Kid” – Holland Dombeck), Intel, CVS, Washington Post, IBM, Sprint, Fiserv, Cox, etc. It’s loaded with practitioners sharing all of their secrets and best practices around recruitment marketing and talent attraction.

So, what do I expect to learn at this year’s Transform?

– Connecting Employee Experience and Candidate Experience

– Next generation Talent Analytics

– Increasing Conversion Ratios of Career site Visitors

– How do we recruit Gen Z vs. all the rest

– Enabling and Sustaining Your RM Strategy

– Activating Talent Communities at Scale

Plus so much more!

I love that Transform is opening up the content to a virtual audience. Let’s be honest, so many of us just can’t afford to attend a live event each year, or you already have planned a different event. Is it the same as being there in person, no, but in TA we make do with the resources we have! If you get the chance to come next year, the real miss of not being there in person is building the connections and community of other like-minded folks that you can share and build ideas from. It’s really the reason we all go to live events!

Register for the Free Virtual Transform Recruitment Marketing Conference (who won’t get all of the content, let’s be fair some great folks paid a ton of money to be with me in Boston at the Live event, but you’ll get a lot!) Already thousands have registered, so I know this content is needed by so many!

6 Reasons Your Organization is Failing at Recruiting

Posted on May 14, 2019 by Tim Sackett

I’m out in San Francisco this week teaching a class on Talent Acquisition to some great Pros and Leaders who are doing all they can to learn more and help their organization succeed. The class is part of the process for SHRM’s Specialty Credential in Talent Acquisition. Part of the process is two days of deep learning with an ‘expert’ instructor in-person or virtually. Apparently, the expert instructor got hit by a bus, so they tapped me on the shoulder!

The course is designed for corporate HR pros and leaders who want to get better at TA. This is modern material, designed to help individuals begin to build out a modern recruiting practice. It helps build a foundation in the right way on what best practice organizations are doing in their TA shops right now.

I love spending time with HR and TA pros who just want to learn and get better. Who want to help their organizations be better. It might be one of the funniest things I do all year! At the same time, it might be one of the most frustrating because I see and feel their struggles!

What I find is almost all organizations fail at recruiting for basically the same reasons. Here are those reasons:

1. We fail in recruiting because we are trying to be like everyone else and afraid to stand out from the other competitors for talent in our market. Yes, this is mostly employment branding and recruitment marketing, but it speaks to basic risk aversion we struggle to overcome in traditional HR. What I find is most c-suite executives welcome this risk, but no one is giving them options.

2. We are flat out not persistent enough going after the talent we want. Great recruiting is about pursuing great talent. I married way above my pay grade! The only reason I was able to land my wife was that I didn’t give up. We all want to be wanted. Most corporate HR and TA pros give up on pursuing talent because they initially say they aren’t interested. That should just get us going!

3. We aren’t letting potential candidates know who we really are. Guess what, when you come here you’re going to have to work and we don’t allow you to have pet pigs. Sorry. I mean, we’ll still have fun, challenging work and we’ll support the heck out of your development, but this isn’t a playground, this is a business. If that sounds like you, we will love you and you will love us! It’s okay to help some talent self-select out of coming to work for you. I don’t want to attract every candidate. I want to attract candidates who want us and we want them!

4. We hear your advice, but we just suck at actually executing it because we are busy. Too busy to get better. I hear all the time from leaders that they would love to do all this cool stuff, but they just don’t have the time. So, I ask, are you successful? No, we are broken. So, you would rather stay broken then fix your shop? Well, we still have to keep doing what we are doing. No, you don’t. You can stop. That is an actual option if you let everyone know you have a plan and this is the plan to finally get fixed!

5. We fail because we don’t fully believe we are responsible. Ouch, that one hurts me, because I’ve actually been fully in that position. Someone finally gave me the title but somehow I felt like I still wasn’t really in control. Turns out, I was, but if I wasn’t going to take control, others above me were going to, since someone had to. Ugh. Once I took control, everyone around me and above me gave me full support.

6. We haven’t figured out how to use our network for good. I’ve been royally screwed by people that I networked with, only to watch them f@ck me over and take (Hi! Z.A., you prick!). Yes, this happens. I’ve also reached heights in my career that would never be possible if I didn’t have all of you helping me along the way. I see way too many pros scared that if they share, especially locally in their market, someone will steal their great ideas and secret sauce. So, they don’t and they miss out on so much good in the world! Go share, exchange ideas, and keep doing it, especially with those who reciprocate!

To my first SHRM TA Credential SFO class – go out into the world and do better recruiting! Also, don’t hesitate to reach out to me when you need a little help!

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: I Failed @SHRM’s new Talent Acquisition Credential!

Posted on March 12, 2019 by Tim Sackett

So, you guys know I wrote a book, right? A book on talent acquisition! I truly believe I actually know something about Talent Acquisition and Recruiting! So, it came as a pretty big shock when I took SHRM’s new TA Specialty Credential and Failed It! Well, kind of…

I’m the President of the Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals (ATAP), so I have a real interest in training and learning programs for talent acquisition. Also, because I’ve been in the TA space for a couple of decades I wanted to take the TA credential cold. No studying. Don’t even look at the materials or what it involves. If I’m good, I should still be able to pass it, right?

Right away I knew I made a mistake. Part of it is just simple word usage. What I might call something, the instructional designers at SHRM call it something else. Another part of it is how the material is taught. What’s the most important of the following four….? Well, I might believe something is more important based on my experience and situation, but if I actually studied the material and took the two-day course, I would know what was ‘the’ most important based on how the material was put together.

All of that being said, I was really impressed with the questions!

Every single question (there’s 50 that you take for the test) were really legitimate TA questions, and the questions were designed around a really modern, up to date talent acquisition function. The questions spanned a broad area of TA from workforce planning, to recruitment marketing, to sourcing, to technology.

Now, you also have to put this into perspective. SHRM didn’t launch this believing a micro-certification was the answer to educating someone to take the credential course, pass the test, and then go run a Fortune 500 TA shop. The credential is meant to help educate an HR professional who is moving into TA, or works as the sole HR pro/leader of a company that also has TA responsibility. So, you might only be doing TA as part of your role.

I’m actually teaching one of these SHRM TA credential courses in San Francisco May 13-14th. That was the main reason and desire for me to take the exam, I wanted to see what those going through the program would experience, and I can confidently say that if someone goes through and does the self-paced modules, does the two-day workshop, studies, and passes the exam, I would feel very comfortable that they have a working knowledge of how a modern-day TA department functions!

The reality is no one certification, credential, training course, etc. is going to make you an expert. You become an expert by doing many of these things and becoming a continual learner. What I love about SHRM Speciality TA Credential is that it exposes HR pros to a new world in a way that lets them know what’s important in talent acquisition, some baseline knowledge, and teaches them how to pursue each part further for expertise.

So, who should take the SHRM TA Credential?

HR Pros who don’t have TA background, but want to expand their tools across HR.
HR Pros/leaders who have TA as part of their function and they don’t feel comfortable in the modern world of recruiting
Corporate TA pros/leaders who feel behind and want some freshening up of their skills.

I think this is a great development opportunity for HR Pros who are looking to develop themselves for future promotion. Having a Talent Acquisition skill set, with your HR skill set, is a differentiator when it comes to hiring HR leaders. Modern organizations are desperate for great TA, and for HR Leaders who understand how to leverage the TA function to drive business success.

So, for all those who love to dump on SHRM for being dated or behind the times, Kudos SHRM! Your TA Specialty Credential is something that is really helpful to individuals and organizations looking to modernize their TA practices!

What Does Tim Sackett Actually Do?

Posted on February 11, 2019 by Tim Sackett

So, besides my beautiful wife asking this question, frequently, I get asked this question all the time! During the spring and fall conference season, I’m out and about all over the world speaking. At almost every stop I’ll have at least one person come up to me and ask,

“So, what do you actually do?”

Ugh! It’s the single biggest failure of my life!

I probably should start each conversation like an AA meeting:

“Hi, my name is Tim Sackett, and I run a technical staffing company!”

That’s the real job. That’s the money maker. I run a recruiting shop! Like most of you, I have to go out and buy a recruiting tech stack that works. I need to decide if I spend money on Indeed, or LinkedIn, or ZipRecruiter. I need to hire and train recruiters. At the end of the day, I’m in the weeds finding talent.

Unlike most Staffing Firm executives, I can’t really hide. I’ve been blogging and speaking for ten years in our industry. When I meet with new clients who want to use my team, I try and tell them, “I think we’re better than most, but the one thing I can guarantee is I won’t lie to you, or take advantage of you! I’m too public! You could kill my brand overnight if I was one of those cheesy staffing guys selling you a load of bullshit!”

The name of my company is HRU Technical Resources. We are a 100% certified female-owned technical staffing company. Most people believe I’m the owner, but in reality, my Mom started the company in 1980.(Check out her profile pic from the 1st day! She looks like Farrah Fawcett!) She’s the original OG Recruiter! In her 70’s, she still could out recruit probably 99% of Recruiters in the world! Old school and proud of it!

Want to work with me? I want to work with you!

Here’s what we do:

Contract staffing – helping organizations for 38 years build that part of their company that they want to maintain as contingent to add flexibility to their workforce.
Sourcing Projects – we will your funnel with talent and let you do the recruiting
Project RPO – we bundle some critical hiring for you and do the entire thing end-to-end
Traditional Direct-hire staffing

I also do a bunch of Talent Acquisition consulting with clients as well, helping them build out their own recruiting tech stack and just flat out execute better when it comes to their own direct hiring and figuring out what’s the best way to get the most out of your recruiting team.

So, yeah, I write a lot. I speak quite a bit. I do webcasts, etc. But that’s not the full-time gig. I wrote a post a few years ago titled “What would it take to get you to work 80 hours per week?” I don’t work 80 hours per week, but I probably work 60-ish. A lot of nights and weekends to make both my full-time and my side gig work.

The reality is, if I don’t work my full-time gig, my bills don’t get paid. That’s real life. So, let’s work together! I would love to get to know more of you and work with a bunch of you. Send me a note and let’s connect – sackett.tim@hru-tech.com.

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @PowerToFly

Posted on February 5, 2019 by Tim Sackett

This week on The Weekly Dose I review the D&I technology platform Power to Fly. Power to Fly is a recruiting platform used for connecting people with companies committed to building more diverse and inclusive environments.

Founded in 2015 by two females who were named one of Fast Companies most creative people in business. The original concept was to connect women with remote jobs (which it still does). From that PTW learned many organizations also wanted and needed gender diversity in their in-house teams as well. Today it’s not only women but all underrepresented talent in the marketplace.

The original concept of being a marketplace to connect one type of candidate with companies isn’t new, but Power to Fly definitely come at this from a different angle than most. While you can post your jobs on their site, which has over a million profiles of female candidates, Power to Fly focuses more on community events and interactions, both in-person and virtual.

Power to Fly hosts in-person networking events hosted by client(s) companies to bring women in a specific marketplace together. These interactions help females and underrepresented candidates build a network of their own to leverage as they grow their careers.

These live events bring together upwards of 200 women and are sponsored by some of the largest brands in the world, but can also be leveraged by a handful of employers in a market coming together to co-sponsor together. Power to Fly has found females are much more likely to apply to your jobs after attending these events (and the research into gender-specific applies echoes this as well). The likelihood of apply from those attending these events rose 60% after attending.

Power to Fly also holds virtual events with top Female executives and thought-leaders allowing women to ask live Q&A to help them in their career. Giving anyone a chance, in an ultra-safe environment, to ask questions they probably wouldn’t or don’t even have access to a mentee to ask.

I love the concept. Traditionally, men clearly have had so many built-in networking advantages to aid their career path. Building out these networks for females and underrepresented candidates is a must and long overdue.

If you are looking to add diversity into your talent pipelines Power to Fly is definitely something to check out. Job postings, live events, and virtual events, the power of their community is their real strength. It’s women helping women in the most positive ways!

The Weekly Dose – 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 The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @EmployUsApp – Referral Automation

Posted on January 29, 2019 by Tim Sackett

Today on The Weekly Dose I take a look at the candidate referral automation platform EmployUs. I actually first told you about EmployUs about four years ago when they just launched, but since then they’ve improved their tech and added a bunch of stuff, so I wanted to give you a second look!

You guys already know I’m in love with candidate referral automation. In my experience of looking at every kind of HR and TA Technology I believe it has the single highest ROI of any tech on the market, and let still relatively few organizations actually use it as part of their TA Tech stack.

EmployUS took candidate referral technology one more step and actually allows you to use it both internally and externally with your organization. Clearly we love using this tech with our employees to get more of their referrals, but what if we could also use it outside our organization to gain more referrals as well? EmployUs allows you to do that, if you choose.

What I like about EmployUs:

They jumped into the chatbot/AI world to help those referring candidates make it much easier and faster, and through the use of SMS they’ve actually made is super simple for hourly workers to now refer candidates in seconds! Always a draw back to traditional referral software.
The automation aspect truly helps make the referral process simple for your internal employees who might not be thinking of this all day, every day, but once they do decide, you need it to self-sufficient and fast.
Tailored email and texting campaigns so you can target parts of your organization for specific referrals.
A dashboard that tracks and automates payouts based on the rules you build, that also gives you the gamification aspect of internal scoreboards to keep your referral program top of mind all the time.

Here’s what we know. Most of our top hires come from referrals. Our most inexpensive hires come from referrals. Almost all of us would say we need more referrals in our hiring process.

Then we watch our old, tired, analog referral program deliver the exact same results year in and year out, and we do nothing to change it. Go demo EmployUs and take a look at what your candidate referral program should look like.

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

The Talent Fix Book Club Starts this Week!#RecruiterDevelopment

Posted on January 21, 2019 by Tim Sackett

If you are a regular reader of this blog than you clearly know I wrote a book, The Talent Fix, that was launched in April 2018. I have been overwhelmed by the awesome response and I would like to give back to the community that has given me so much.

Beginning January 23, 2019, I’ll hold a monthly book club webinar, for free, where I’ll be going over each chapter of the book in detail, from a discussion point of view. Each webinar is scheduled for one hour, it might be a bit less or a bit more depending on discussion and questions.

Each month, I’ll pull out some of the highlights and strategies, discuss them in more detail, open up the discussion to Q&A from the book club attendees, and probably bring on some micro-celebrity Recruiting guests as well to talk shop and continue to challenge the way we think about Talent Acquisition!

We’ll go one chapter at a time, and while they might be too slow for some, most people don’t even read one book a year, so we’ll go slow and make sure we have truly dynamic discussions each week!

The schedule will breakdown like so:

January 23, 2019 – Introduction to the Book Club, we’ll breakdown Kris Dunn’s Foreword and I’ll tell you the “KD” story, plus a bonus topic of what recruiting tools you need to look at in 2019!
February – Chapter 1 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
March – Chapter 2 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
April – Chapter 3 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
May – Chapter 4 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
June – Chapter 5 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
July – Chapter 6 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
August – Chapter 7 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
September – Chapter 8 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
October – Chapter 9 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
November – A look forward to preparing for 2020, looking at our next book club read, and a mini-demo of the hottest recruiting tool on the market I found in 2019!

Also, remember, I’ll bring in several surprise guests that are genius level TA leaders, sourcers, and tech experts as well!

Register for the free Talent Fix Monthly Book Club!

This will be the easiest Team Development you’ll do all year! I’ve already had multiple teams contact me about signing up! One TA leader went out and bought each member of his team the book so they could get started and be ready for January 23rd!

Buy The Talent Fix on Amazon or SHRM Members can buy it directly from the SHRM bookstore at a discount with your SHRM membership!

I can’t wait to talk to everyone on January 23rd! If you have any questions, just send me an email at sackett.tim@hru-tech.com!

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Content_App – Job Branding

Posted on January 15, 2019 by Tim Sackett

This week on the Weekly Dose I review the job branding and messaging technology Content. Content is a mobile-based SMS text-based technology (app) AI social media assistant that scales across your recruitment teams to help your business get the most from LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

Content will send you a text message when she/he/it discovers something relevant for you to share. Every share Content creates will have relevant hashtags and an image to ensure you get the best engagement.

Content will also decide the best time to share the article so your recruiters don’t need to worry about the details. Just reply yes to share it, or no to decline.

Content will also automatically grab your jobs from your career site and brand them to look like a professionally digital marketed piece of content for your team to share out to your networks and talent communities.

One of the biggest issues we face as Recruiters in sharing great content with candidates is usually we don’t know what good content is out there, and we don’t have time to go out and find good content. The Content app does this automatically for you, while still keeping the power of customization in your hands.

What I like about Content:

Content is built on machine learning algorithms that will learn what content you like and dislike, and work to deliver more of the content you want to share with your talent networks.
Solves your share issues – want to share a piece of content to your internal team so they’ll share it outwardly, Content uses SMS-text based communication to do this with a simple “yes” or “no” via a text reply.
Tracking ROI via clicks is pretty cool showing you which person is responsible, plugs into your Google Analytics on your career site, and will give you ROI verse pay per click advertising.

One of the most difficult things in talent acquisition right now is being able to measure the ROI on social media recruiting and Content gives you a tool to actually show these results, but also makes it super easy for your team to share more and better content out to the networks they are trying to engage with.

Ultimately Content does the one thing we all need more of which is to get more traffic to our career site, and with the right CRM and retargeting, this really puts our recruiting on a different level. Well worth a quick demo, as this simple to use tool will help move many TA shops to the next level.

The team behind Content is the former team behind Broadbean, so you know these guys understand recruitment and how to drive traffic to your jobs.

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

The 2018 Emerging Jobs Report is Here!

Posted on December 13, 2018 by Tim Sackett

LinkedIn released their 2018 Emerging Jobs Report today and as always it’s packed full of some great information that speaks to where we see the world of Recruiting today, but also what we need to keep our eye for the future!

So, what stood out in the latest report? First and foremost it’s what jobs are hot this year to last –

So, I think we’ve all been hearing all of this A.I. and Blockchain stuff. The reality is, we aren’t really talking about true A.I., it’s Machine Learning (ML) and we’ve seen giant increases in the needs for these skills.

Out of the top 15 emerging jobs (those jobs growing the fastest on LinkedIn) 6 of those were related to ML, Data, and Blockchain. That’s significant in terms of the products and technology that are being built by companies for the future.

What else did we learn?

While the report is designed to make us believe it’s all about Tech hiring, it’s not really all about tech hiring!

Sales Executives
Recruiters
Realtors
Account Executives (another title for sales)
Administrative Assistants

Were all super high on the list as well. What does that mean? Well, those really aren’t emerging or growing jobs, it’s more about who’s living, searching, and spending time on LinkedIn. That might not be the patronage that LI really wants long term for the health of the site, in terms of your normal mix.

The largest skills gap is still good old fashion oral communications!

Again, I’m not sure how much of this is truly a skills gap and how much of that coming up in the data is just a function of the types of roles people are trying to recruit for on LI. If the report shows that all of these A.I., Blockchain, and Data jobs are what’s truly hot, oral communication wouldn’t be the most critical thing in those roles.

But, oral communication is definitely a skill that is in short supply for most professions, and much needed by most professions outside of tech, like sales type roles.

Machine Learning is definitely a skill set that employers are begging for. I reached out to my buddy and Recruiting savant, Steve Levy, just the other day as we had a search for a client demanding 10 years of ML experience. I was like, I don’t even remember ML being used as a term ten years ago!

Steve confirmed, it most likely wasn’t. We did find some mention from 2009, but that was about it. So, the hysteria is real. Entry level position, five years of experience!

I was surprised not to see Autonomous vehicle knowledge on there as this is another skill set we see companies begging for and we are constantly helping our clients in these searches. It’s not just about cars. It’s about delivery vehicles, mass transit, freight hauling, garbage trucks, etc. If it moves people or things, it’s going autonomous eventually.

Check out the report. It’s great read at the end of the year as you’re preparing for recruiting plans for 2019!