Recruiting is not Marketing – Here’s why!

Posted on October 26, 2018 by Tim Sackett

We love, I love, to say Recruiting is Marketing! I love Recruitment Marketing and the technology behind it, I think it’s brilliant! Recruiting is also not sales!

Why is Recruiting neither Marketing or Sales?

What’s the core function of marketing and sales? To welcome as many people as possible into your funnel so that all of those people will buy your product or service, or give to your charity, etc.

In Recruitment we in the Rejection business!

Can you imagine you walk into a Cadillac dealership? You saw the commercial for the new SUV, you decide you want that SUV. You saw the billboard for that same car, heard the radio commercial, heck you even saw an Ad on Facebook, it’s almost like they’re listening to your brain! You’ve got a pocket full of hundred dollar bills and you walk into the dealership because today you’re driving away in that brand new, beautiful Cadillac SUV!

Dealer – No!

Me – Um, what?!

Dealer – No, we aren’t selling you that new Cadillac SUV, you’re not a Cadillac “Man”!

Me – A what!?

Dealer – Yeah, sorry, you don’t get a Cadillac today, we’re saving those for only certain people!

It’s funny because we know this would never happen! I could walk into the dealership holding a severed head and the first words out of the salesman’s mouth would be “the trunk on our new sedan could hold a hundred of those heads!”

Recruiting isn’t Marketing or Sales, because true Marketing and Sales is in the business of ‘All’, not one. No one really gets rejected in marketing and sales if you have the means. In Recruiting, you could fit every single thing the organization is requesting and you will still get rejected. Recruiting is in the Rejection business, not the sales and marketing business!

If we/recruiting are in the Sales and Marketing business, we are in a really sick and twisted business! Hey, “Everyone” come and apply to our jobs, because I get really excited when I get to turn you down and say “no”! So, let’s not kid ourselves. Our business is about Rejection. Hey, come on over here and let me tell you what’s wrong with you, and then I’ll make the decision if we want you to be a part of our team or not.

Marketing campaigns sometimes try to fake like they’re being exclusive. “Only ‘you’ are being invited to buy this new SUV! You’ll be the first to own it! No one else!” Until next week when everyone will own it and actually have a better color than you. That’s not true rejection for those who don’t get it first, it’s just a game we play to increase demand.

So, why does this manner?

If we know we are actually in the Rejection business, and we are, we/recruiters have to have an empathy level that is off the charts if we want to survive. Let me get this straight, you want me to talk as many people as possible into loving our company, then you want me to reject 99.9% of them? Yes!

To be able to do that and not drink yourself to sleep every night takes a really high ego or an endless supply of empathy towards all those great people who just wanted you to pick them, but your organization picked someone else, but they left it on your desk to share the bad news!

This is probably the main reason so many candidates never get dispositioned. We can all just crush only so many souls in a day! It’s easier to ghost candidates than to crush their dreams!

Rejection business is a hard, hard business to be in. Sales and Marketing are easy. Can you imagine how easy your life would be if you were able to give everyone the job!?

Your Weekly Dose of HR Technology: @ZipRecruiter – Connecting the Right People with the Right Jobs!

Posted on October 23, 2018 by Tim Sackett

Today on the Weekly Dose I take an updated look at ZipRecruiter. Often I’m writing about technology on my site that none of you have ever heard of. I’m 100% sure almost every single person who reads my blog has heard of ZipRecruiter! At the very least you’ve heard their commercials on TV, Radio, Podcasts, etc. They are everywhere!

ZipRecruiter started in 2011 primarily as the job board for hourly, blue-collar types, to help SMBs hire better and faster. They didn’t try to hide who they were, they set out to build a job board, and they did it through advertising everywhere and anywhere. Come hire people fast and cheap. Bam, that’s who we are.

Fast forward to 2018 and a fresh round of over $150M in new capital and ZipRecruiter is now one of the most trafficked sites on the internet! Over 1.5 million businesses have used Zip, and they have received over 430 million applications for jobs listed on the site. And still, the Recruiting Community loves to dump on ZipRecruiter!

On Facebook last month someone posted a comment about ZipRecruiter and some of the biggest recruiting brains on the planet immediately started talking “ish” about Zip. I had one simple question, “Hey, have you used them in the past year, two, three?” Not one of them!

I hesitated writing this post because I actually didn’t want to give Zip publicity! Why? Because it works, and if it works and I’m using it, and you’re not using it, I win!

Privately, I’ve been having this conversation with TA leaders for a year or so:

Tim – “Hey, are you guys using Zip?”

TA Leader – No, we tried them three years ago and they sucked!

Tim – “Okay, you might want to test them again!”

TA Leader – “Oh, you mean for hourly openings?

Tim – “No, for everything!”

Zip doesn’t get industry love from folks like me because Zip has never played “the game”! Meaning, Zip has never wined and dined the industry thought leaders or analyst. The belief is “hey, our customers are SMB and the vast majority of folks hiring for SMB will never read anything from an industry pundit”. Okay, that’s correct, but come one play the game with us, I love free steak! Instead of playing the game, they run more commercials and have built industry-leading technology behind the scenes!

As their leaders are proud of saying “We do things. We don’t talk about doing things.”

Zip has put a tremendous amount of resources and focus on engaging job seekers to make the experience sticky. That comes from ensuring Zip is matching jobs to candidates that actually match their skills and desires, not keywords. I can’t tell you how often I get sent emails from other sites for Nursing jobs! Why? I used to run TA at a health system and recruited Nurses! That’s bad tech. Zip doesn’t do that!

Zip’s recommendation matching technology is second to none. Netflix-like in the way it continues to improve based on the jobs you engage in and apply to, the more an applicant uses the technology the better the matching algorithm gets in returning great jobs to them the second one comes up on the site.

Google for Jobs (GFJ) also has had a tremendous positive impact on Zip’s candidate traffic. GFJ leveled the playing field for sites like Zip, and SEO is one other thing they are good at and prepared for when the opportunity came around. And Zip plans on using a bunch of that new cash to hammer home some machine learning SEO technology to continue to stay out in front and take advantage of the GFJ changes.

Is ZipRecruiter a silver bullet? No. Nothing in the industry is a silver bullet right now. Can ZipRecruiter be one of those bullets you have to finish the job? 100%. Will ZipRecruiter fill your Java Developer opening in BFE Wisconsin? Probably not, but nothing else will either! Will they drive additional traffic to most of your jobs, for a fairly inexpensive cost? Yes, they will, and that’s what they set out to do all along.

I’m a huge fan of testing annually. You’ll rarely hear me say, “Yeah, that didn’t work three years ago, so we don’t use it!” Really, three years ago? Okay, well, good for you! In TA we need to be a function of constantly testing and trying. You will be amazed at what doesn’t work in January, amazingly will work in July, etc. So, if you haven’t tried ZipRecruiter recently, it might be worth a test!

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.

5 Things Great Employers are Doing to Drive World Class Candidate Experience in 2019!

Posted on October 19, 2018 by Tim Sackett

I’m still struck at how for the most part, we treat candidates like garbage. Historically in Talent Acquisition, we had this really weird power dynamic that took place. We believed we (TA) had jobs to give out or not give out, like prizes, so we would force candidates into our processes and make them jump through hoops.

It’s been a super hard habit for many of us to break! Even with historic low unemployment numbers!

I have some help for you!

I’m partnering with the folks over at Candidate Rewards to put on a free, live 1-hour webinar titled:

5 Things Great Employers Are Doing to Drive World-Class Candidate Experience in 2019!

What can you expect to get from this webinar?

– 5 Rock solid strategies and tactics you need to be using to deliver more candidates to your organization!

– 3 Things great organizations never do to candidates, and that you can easily change in your own TA Shop!

– Candidate Experience data that will give you the ammunition you need to change your executive’s mind and give you more budget money to fix your Candidate Experience issues!

– Live Q&A with me on your toughest Candidate Experience questions!

Candidates Experience has been one of the hottest topics over the past five years, and it’s never been hotter when it comes to the hiring environment that we are in right now! Right now is the perfect time for most of us to look at our 2019 strategies around Candidate Experience, because for most of us it’s TA Budget Time!

If you don’t plan, you plan to fail! That’s what we are always told, right!? So, let’s sit down for an hour and discuss how to make 2019 the best year you and your TA team has ever had!

REGISTER NOW for this free webinar!

I’m looking forward to presenting this information, it’s the first time I’ve ever done a Candidate Experience presentation, and I’m sure my takes will probably be a bit different than most, but you’ll have to let me know!

How do candidates find your company?

Posted on October 18, 2018 by Tim Sackett

I have a brain crush on Smashfly’s Tracey Parsons. She’s a great Recruitment Marketer who flat out gets what you and I should be doing to get candidates to find us!

I only tell you this because Tracey shared something online this week that I had to share. I came on a LinkedIn post by Joel Cheesman (you can look him up as well, he’s way less impressive than Tracey, but he might be your flavor! JK, Joel! He’ll cry himself to sleep tonight if I don’t say that!) where Joel was stating a stat “80% of applicants start at Google“.

Cool stat. You probably didn’t know that. About a year and a half ago, Google said it was 47%, before they launched Google for Jobs, so it shows that GFJ is actually already having a big impact on candidate behavior.

Tracey’s response was this:

“And approximately 0% of those searches involve your brand name”

Bam! Mic drop! Walk off stage.

She’s dead on 100%-ish percent accurate!

No one is going to Google searching for “Jobs at Amazon” or “Jobs at ABC Manufacturing”. If they already know they want to see your jobs, they’re just going directly to your career site, or corporate site, where you’ll make them click around for five minutes to find your jobs. Oh, wait, maybe they should be Googling jobs at “X”!

I think Tracey’s point is that you shouldn’t be focused on SEO to drive people to your ‘brand’. You should be focusing on SEO to drive people to the market and the jobs you have, the brand at this initial point, doesn’t matter.

We love to think it matters, but 99.8% of us have an unrecognizable brand to the majority of candidates. That’s not a negative statement, that’s just reality. They don’t see any difference in what it’s like to work for us unless you’re a Unicorn brand.

But we aren’t all Google or Facebook or Amazon. We’re just good, solid companies to work for, that are virtually indistinguishable from every other good, solid employer who’s out there.

So, what can you do?

Truly understand the impact Google is making on candidate behavior.
Turn yourself into a Marketer. Think like a marketer. What would it take to get people to know who we are?
Turn your employees into Brand Advocates.
Stop paying Referral Bonuses, and buy Employee Referral Technology.
Build and turn on a Recruitment Marketing machine for your shop.

Also, go read and learn from super smart people like Tracey and Joel. That’s what I do.

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Hiretual – Find, Engage, and Pipeline Candidates

Posted on October 16, 2018 by Tim Sackett

Today on the Weekly Dose I review the sourcing technology Hiretual (Hire-Tool). So, I’ve been hearing from my sourcing friends for about two years that Hiretual is awesome and I need to check them out. Hiretual is a modern sourcing technology platform that allows a Sourcer or Recruiter to quickly search for possible talent online from dozens of different possible sources.

There’s now an entire verticle in the recruiting technology industry dedicated to sourcing technology and Hiretual falls squarely in that camp. I’m keen on saying that it’s never been easier in the history of recruiting to find talent, and it’s that way because of sourcing tools like Hiretual. Hiretual spiders the web finding profiles of potential talent that meet your exact search criteria from over 30 different channels. Places like LinkedIn, Github, Facebook, etc.

Hiretual is simple to use. You can build a custom search for what you’re looking for, or simply drop in a job description and the system will automatically pull the data it needs to begin the search. It will then do an initial search and have you rate the quality of the candidates. This helps the AI within Hiretual to begin learning what it is exactly you’re looking for and return better candidates.

What I like about Hiretual:

– You can target competitors or specific companies you want to see candidates from and the technology will search for just individuals with a background at those organizations.

– If you search for candidates with government clearances, Hiretual can specifically help you with this. I’m amazed at how many times a year I’m asked directly about this capability.

– You can run multiple searches simultaneously, and save searches you run frequently.

– You can message and nurture candidates right from Hiretual.

Sourcing technology, like Hiretual, aren’t a recruiting silver bullet. I’m in love with this type of technology, but it won’t magically find you, candidates. It will magically find you talent, that you then have to ‘sell’ them a reason on why they should want to talk to you and come work for your organization. For the most part, Hiretual is returning passive candidates, not active. This is a struggle for recruiters and sourcers who only know how to work with active candidates.

Hiretual is super powerful in helping you find people with the skills you desire, but you still need to get them interested in you. If you and your team are ready to start recruiting passive candidates than this is definitely a technology you need to demo!

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

Your Weekly Dose of HR Technology: @Dice4Employers – New IntelliSearch Helps Uncover More IT Talent!

Posted on October 9, 2018 by Tim Sackett

Today on The Weekly Dose I review Dice’s new product offering IntelliSearch. IntelliSearch is a proprietary recommendation engine simplifies the complexity of candidate search by allowing recruiters to input a job description, the ideal resume, or a list of skills to return relevant matches. Boolean expertise is no longer required.

IntelliSearch is super easy to use. Just cut and paste a job description or even a resume of a hire or candidate your hiring manager loves and IntelliSearch will go out and find others that fit the criteria you need.

Dice’s IntelliSearch uses machine learning and A.I. to quickly match candidates to your requirements without you as the recruiter having to have deep technical knowledge about the type of candidates you’re looking for.

One of the issues I hear about constantly from corporate TA Pros around new sourcing technology is that they now have way too many candidates to search through and while they can find more ‘potential’ candidates than ever before, the tech has actually made their job harder!

Dice attempts to solve this problem with the IntelliSearch matching technology. The Dice funnel starts with hundreds of millions of potential profiles that can be found around the web, and quickly gets that number down to a few millions of actual candidates in the hiring pool in the U.S.

From there they return the best possible fits with contact information and a new feature to Dice which is “Likely to Switch” signal based on a number of factors in their algorithm. Based on these factors Dice will give you a Green, Yellow, or Red signal in terms of the potential that a candidate is ready to switch to a new job.

IntelliSearch is also driven by Semantic Search, not Boolean Search. Why does this matter? Semantic search describes a search engine’s attempt to generate the most accurate results possible by understanding:

Searcher intent.
Query context.
The relationships between words.

In layman’s terms, semantic search seeks to understand natural language the way a human would. Whereas Boolean is basically searching on keywords. Semantic search will produce a higher quality of search results.

The Bottomline?

If you haven’t taken a look at Dice recently, it’s worth a new look, especially if you’re struggling to find IT talent, and you don’t consider yourself a full time IT recruiter. I find those who are less ‘techy’ will really be helped by Dice’s new IntelliSearch!

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

Your EEOC Job Posting Statements are Hurting Your Diversity Hiring!

Posted on October 8, 2018 by Tim Sackett

Employers discriminate in hiring. This is a fact. It’s been a fact for generations. It’s the main reason anti-discrimination statements show up on job postings. That and it’s the law for Public employers and Government contractors who are required to have these statements. Many private employers use these as well to show they don’t discriminate in hiring.

For fifty years we’ve seen these statements on job descriptions and job advertisements. Recently, two Economists from the University of Chicago did a study looking at the impact of candidate behavior when these statements are added to a job posting and their findings were shocking!

In their study, the two economists posted advertisements for an administrative assistant job in ten large American cities. Of the 2,300 applicants who expressed interest, half were given a standard job description and the other half were given a description with an equal-opportunity statement promising that “all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to sex, colour, age or any other protected characteristics”.

For racial minorities, those who received the pro-diversity statement were 30% less likely to apply for the job—and the effect appeared to be worse in cities with white majorities (see chart). In a follow-up survey, the prospective applicants said the statement prompted worries that they would be token diversity hires.

30% Less Likely To Apply!!!

What the what?!?!

This isn’t a study that was done decades ago. This was done in the past twelve months!

So, what should we do?

One thing the study found that had a positive impact on increasing diversity application is to show your senior executives, including your CEO, talk in a ‘real’ transparent way on the impact that diversity has on your organization.

No, not some overly-produced puff piece about how we are all part of the same rainbow. Include video on your career site with your CEO telling stories about how D&I isn’t just a marketing tactic, but how it’s really impacted the organization in a positive way.

Have diverse employees ask the CEO question that gets to the heart of where D&I is in your organization. Don’t be afraid about keeping this conversation open and maybe a bit uncomfortable. The more real, the more candidates will understand that you’re really trying to make a difference.

If you really want to make sure you’re not missing great minority applicants who are skipping even applying to you, embed these videos right into your job postings!

Don’t think that when you put an “EEOC” statement at the end of your job posting is letting a diverse candidate pool know you’re a great place for them to work. They don’t buy it! You have to be better than that!

7+ High Volume, Low Unemployment Recruitment Strategies!

Posted on October 4, 2018 by Tim Sackett

Gather ‘round talent buffs and let me tell you a story – of a time not so long ago in a land not so far away. A little agency called The Bureau of Labor Statistics (you may have heard of them) released a report claiming that the unemployment rate dropped below 4% for the first time in 15 years. Did I mention that this is a true story?

That’s right, in April 2018 the unemployment numbers dropped to 3.9% in the good ol‘ US of A. This information is great for the domestic economy, but not so great for employers who are using outdated tactics to build their teams.

But have no fear – Fistful of Talent and Canvas have put me on the case to help organizations refresh their TA approaches during our WEBINAR, Help! We Can’t Hire Anyone! How to Hire When Unemployment is at Historic Lows (Click to register), on October 9th at 12 PM ET.

I’ll be dropping the following silver bullets of recruiting wisdom. When used together these bullets can help you hit the hiring bullseye every time:

* Not one, not two, but SEVEN new strategies to attract the best of the best during this low-unemployment era, from hourly workers to C-suite-grade talent

* The top talent attraction technology working for high-volume recruiting teams RIGHT NOW to level the playing field in this hot job market

* Three moves you are currently making that are putting a damper on your hiring efforts, and how you can make your recruiting dollars really count

It’s all going down on October 9th at 12 PM ET – register to save your spot for our WEBINAR, Help! We Can’t Hire Anyone! How to Hire When Unemployment is at Historic Lows (Click to register), TODAY to make your TA shop full-employment environment proof)

Register Here!

I won’t be handing out one silver bullet in this webinar, I’ll be handing out handfuls! There isn’t a single silver bullet that will fix the problems we have, but a bunch that when used together, will help your organization succeed in hiring…even when unemployment drops below 4%.

About Canvas:
Canvas is the first text-based intelligent interviewing system that empowers organizations and recruiters to screen more job candidates and market employment brands. For more information, visit www.gocanvas.io and follow Canvas on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Everyone Wants a Talent Brand That Candidates Love, But…

Posted on October 1, 2018 by Tim Sackett

Everyone wants a talent brand that candidates will love, but almost no Talent Acquisition function is actually willing to love those same candidates back!

You get this, right!?

Do you know why you love certain brands? It’s usually a combination of an experience you had with that brand. You loved their product or service, how they/it made you feel, how you were treated, etc. The brand made you feel like you were apart of it. That it ‘loved’ you, just even a little.

We all want to have these amazing talent brands (employment brands), but part of having that amazing brand is you have to actually truly like the candidates who are reaching out to you. This is the single biggest struggle most organizations have with establishing a real Talent Brand. We want candidates to love us, but we don’t want to love them in return!

In fact, we don’t even really want to be friends with them! Or at least that’s how we act! Most TA shops treat candidates like they’re the enemy. Very similar to how celebrities treat the media. Love us! But, we’re going to act as you annoy us! Um, what!? This is about 90% of TA shops, and they’re completely flabbergasted when the data says candidates think they’re crap!

So, you want a Talent Brand candidates will love? Try doing some of this:

1. Change your internal TA culture to start believing candidates are our friend, not the enemy! Without these wonderful candidates, we don’t have jobs! We need you!

2. Do not allow your recruiters to talk negatively about candidates. This is really hard. It’s the teacher’s lounge mentality. Well, we’re behind locked doors they don’t know what we say. It’s not about what you say, it’s about the mentality of us vs. them you’re allowing in your shop!

3. Treat your candidates like you treat your hiring managers. Unless you also treat your hiring managers like crap, then don’t do that.

4. Invite random candidates in to talk to your team about their experience, especially those who didn’t get hired. This will really open eyes.

5. Don’t allow your team to use the excuse “we don’t have time”. Nothing is more important than communicating with candidates. Nothing. It’s really your only job. Stop doing everything else, except this. Then you’ll have time.

The reality is, it’s much easier to love a brand when you believe they love you back.

What Makes a Great Talent Acquisition Conference? #SourceCon

Posted on September 27, 2018 by Tim Sackett

Hey gang! I’m back from attending and speaking at my first ever SourceCon conference. Can I be real for a second? I never attended SourceCon in the past because I was intimidated. For real!

Let me explain. I’m not a Sourcing Nerd! I’m not going to sit down on my laptop and go deep diving into the national archives to find names of whatever or build search strings that are 5,000 characters long, so I thought, yeah, this just isn’t for me. I was wrong! It is for me! Okay, not the super sourcing nerd stuff, but I even like watching that!

SourceCon was filled with passionate Talent Acquisition pros and leaders, not just Sourcing Pros. Like I’m just going to come up and introduce myself and start asking questions about how I can better and share with you on how you can get better. The interactions at all levels at the conference is off the charts, and unlike I’ve seen at other recruiting conferences, especially around how to make you as a professional better!

So, what do I think makes a great Recruiting conference like SourceCon?

– Leadership to break away from the normal content stream and put different stuff on stage. Shannon Pritchett and the ERE leadership are always willing to push the envelop and try stuff!

– A culture of sharing! Everyone at SourceCon seems to be there to share openly with everyone else, and it makes for interactions and conversations happening everywhere!

– Feeling like you’re being welcomed into the trust circle! That was my initial fear. I’m not really one of them, they won’t want me, what do I have to give them!? It’s the opposite, truly. Steve Levy, an industry veteran is just one of a bunch of actual “Welcome Wagon” pros who volunteer to introduce you into the inner circle and make instantly feel like part of a movement.

– Content where you can’t write fast enough! The content at SourceCon is packed with “oh, crap, I’m stealing that idea and taking that back to my own shop and we’re doing that tomorrow!” Like every session!

– Content that forces you to think differently about what you and your organization are doing. That challenges you, and might even make you feel a bit uncomfortable. Not every session, that would be exhausting, but you need a little bit to force you to think differently about the profession.

SourceCon 2019 is in Seattle, and Shannon and the team just keep finding ways to make it better. Definitely check it out as a great development option for you and your team next year.