Category Archives: Sourcing

Candidates Actually Want Human Interaction!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

5 Instagram Filters That Will Make HR Better at Recruiting!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REGISTER TODAY!

The One Way to be Successful at Recruiting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Tech Companies Should Move To Detroit!

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You might have seen this chart recently over at Business Insider:

Screen Shot 2016-06-06 at 11.10.07 AMWe all probably got this. It costs a TON to live in San Fransico! Way too much. You’re crazy if you want to start a tech company in San Fran.  So, what do all those super smart folks do? Yeah, stay west coast and just go a bit more north to Seattle, still expensive, but seemingly cheap in comparison to San Fransico!

It’s one of the main reasons Austin, TX became a hotbed of tech startups and headquarters about a decade ago. Relatively cheap to place to live. Access to a major university (Univ. of Texas), which gives you young, talented, tech savvy folks. Nice weather.

Here’s the magical formula to picking a place to house your tech company:

  1. Access to talent.
  2. Place people want to live.
    1. Good weather.
    2. Hip vibe.
    3. Affordable. (not necessarily an important factor – but increasing in importance!)

Give this magical formula, I’ll give you the number 1 destination of new tech startups!

DETROIT!!!!

Well, actually it’s Ann Arbor, which is about a 15-minute drive from Detroit’s International Airport, a Delta hub and one of the nicest airports around. Which means direct flights to almost everywhere. Home to the University of Michigan and great talent pipeline (Michigan State is also 50 minutes away). So, you have two Giant universities and roughly 80,000 students within easy driving distance.  A ton of other smaller universities within a 50-mile radius as well (Eastern Michigan, Wayne State, Oakland Univ., Univ. of Toledo, etc.).

It’s super cheap to live. Ann Arbor is a great college city, with access to the bigger Metro Detroit area within a thirty-minute drive. Access to someone of the world’s largest freshwater lakes. Toronto is an easy, cheap flight, or 4-hour drive away.

Okay, you won’t get super nice weather. You’ll get four seasons, midwestern work ethic and so much more for your money you won’t understand why anyone ever went west to begin with!

Oh, I hear you. What about the talent?  The Detroit Metro Area is one of the world’s largest engineering centers in the world! You know about all the auto companies, but what you don’t know is that Google has been growing an empire in Ann Arbor for years, and doing it quietly because they don’t want others hoarding in on the secret!

So, yeah, Seattle is way cheaper than San Fransico. You only have to pay 35% of pay towards rent. In Detroit, you only have to pay about 15% of your pay towards rent!

Detroit! The new San Fransico! We even have a bridge!

Recruiting is a Team Sport

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

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

“Recruiting is a team sport.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sourcers Are The New Recruiters?

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Come listen to my story about a man named Tim.

Poor Recruiting Pro, barely kept his family fed. 

And then one day he the internet came along, 

and up on his screen came a bunch of profiles. 

Candidates those are. Money, in people form. 

For those of you that are under 40, you might want to go Google Beverly Hillbillies theme song…

What the hell is going on in this world?

No, really!?

I started my career out as a ‘Researcher’. Little did I know, that was really just sourcing (or at least what we call sourcing today). My job was to find candidates for jobs we had open. I find a candidate. Do a basic screen. Pass them onto a recruiter who sold them to the client/hiring manager.

I then got my own clients/hiring managers and did the full boat. Find the jobs. Find the candidates. Make the offers. Etc.

When I went to corporate Talent Acquisition almost every shop was doing it the same way. Recruiters were assigned departments, business units, hiring managers, etc. They would work with those individuals when they had openings. Post jobs. Screen incoming candidates. Attend campus job fairs. Maybe, just maybe, a little bit of outbound calling – those were the rock stars. And complain how crappy their ATS was, and how awful the hiring managers were.

That was corporate Talent Acquisition, as I know it, from 7 years ago.

During this time, Sourcing became a thing. Everyone needed to now, break up “Talent Acquisition” into Sourcing and Recruiting.  Sourcers found candidates. The premise being we need ‘outbound’ activity happening. Actual candidate hunting. Recruiters then did screening, setting up interviews, offers, etc.

Somewhere over the past five years. Sourcers have become what Recruiters used to be.  They find candidates. They screen candidates. They set up interviews. I know some are even closing the deal with offers.

So, my question is, today, what the hell do Corporate Recruiters do in those shops that have Sourcers?

It seems like corporate recruiters are now advanced admin professionals. They really don’t have any skills to speak of.  I’m honestly asking TA Leaders! If you have Sourcing doing all of the skill-based activities of recruiting, what are you paying recruiters for? It would seem like you could get some really good Admin Pros do all of the work you have Recruiters doing.

Am I off base on this?

This came up because I met with a TA Leader who was paying their corporate Recruiters $85-100K in salary. She was also paying Sourcers a bit less, $65-80K in salary. When I dug into what they were actually doing, it seemed to me the most valuable of the two was easily the Sourcing Pros! The Recruiters did almost nothing of value for what they were being paid.

The hiring managers in this environment even went to the Sourcing Pros to get information on candidates! Basically, the Recruiters set up interviews, made offers, and onboarding.  To be fair, they were also in charge of ’employment branding’ for which they had an outside firm doing all of that work. Sourcing Pros had candidate experience, recruitment marketing, ATS/CRM, job postings, etc.

It seems like this is coming full circle.  We split the function and now the Sourcers are just becoming what Recruiters used to be. A one-stop shop for filling positions.

What I’m quickly seeing is that the value of these two positions is quickly becoming uneven.  When “Sourcing” as a concept was introduced, it was to have better efficiency in recruiting. Take a difficult function. Split into two parts, and let folks specialize. Through this specialization and synergy, you’ll get more work then everyone running their own desk.  Great theoretical concept!

What I’m finding in most organizations is that the theory isn’t meeting the actual result.

Are you seeing or feeling the same thing? Hit me in the comments, I’m truly interested.

T3 – Brilent @GetBrilent

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This week on T3 I take a look at the candidate recommendation engine, Saas recruiting software, called Brilent. Brilent is tackling one of the most challenging obstacles to innovation by helping recruiters place great talent. Brilent’s core technology instantly matches a pool of candidates to a company’s open positions.

Here’s the problem you have with your ATS – Candidate applies for a job you have open. A candidate doesn’t get that job, or isn’t qualified, and is almost immediately forgotten. With Brilent, when a candidate applies in your ATS Brilent matches their qualifications to every job you have listed and gives you a ranking on how well they match. They might have applied to Job 1, but they actually might be a better fit for Job 2.

Also, Brilent matches all the candidates in your database to instantly find hidden talent in your ATS you didn’t even know was there, or you just forgot about.  Then gives you a ranking of which candidates in your database are the best match based on their search algorithm which is much more advanced than simple keyword search.

5 Things I Really Like About Brilent: 

1. The team is led by former Facebook Data Science pros, so they know how to play with data really well! They understand this is a core issue for 99% of ATS users, and they’re finding a way to solve it!

2. The platform automatically matches candidates with all jobs, not just the one they’re applying for, and alerts them to jobs they are a strong match for. This ensures you that the candidate isn’t missing something, plus provides a higher candidate experience with no effort.

3. The system is built on machine learning so the more you use it to search your database to find great talent, the smarter it becomes to bring back possible matches, and less likely to bring back false-positive matches.

4. Brilent integrates directly with your ATS, and basically helps to cover up the single biggest weakness most ATS systems have in not allowing you to effectively leverage your database of candidates to find that hidden gold. The candidate who applied three years ago, but never went anywhere because your hiring manager found someone on his own. Bam! There she is again – ready to be contacted!

5. The ranking of candidates gives you a great visual of who has applied and who is in your database and who you should be contacting for the position based on how they ranked.  Also, anytime a candidate applies and gets a highly ranked match of one of your jobs, the recruiter gets alerted immediately.

Sometimes the best technology is the one that makes the most sense.  Brilent knows you normally don’t want to blow up your ATS and start over, but they also know your ATS isn’t working for you like you need it to work. So, they solve that. The best tech does that, it solves a problem and doesn’t blow up everything you have.

Well worth a look and a demo. It’s quick and easy to use. Check them out!

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

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

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

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

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

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

  3. Make sure something goes wrong during the presentation

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

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

  6. Have the interview frequently move between different rooms

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

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

  9. Ask a question, then start typing very loudly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you want to know a real secret? 

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

T3 – Pimp My Job Descriptions

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I think there is one thing we all still agree on, most job descriptions flat out suck! This leads to a conversation around job descriptions versus job postings. HR pros will say job descriptions are boring because a job description is a legal document. That can be debated, but it’s why most job descriptions are boring and awful and don’t work in attracting candidates!

This is how most technology is developed. Something sucks and a technologist believes they can build a better mouse trap.

Right now most boring job descriptions are ‘jazzed’ up by outside marketing and design firms that charge you a ton and basically give you either a branded template that looks the same for all job descriptions. This is similar to dropping a SmartCar engine into a Porsche. It looks great, but its still crap on the inside!

The other thing they do is basically take your job description and totally build a microsite for that position. It looks like it’s own mini-website. This is ideal but usually very expensive. Many of the new Recruitment Marketing technologies are now doing this for a fraction of the cost.

Then along comes two new technologies that basically take your boring, stale job descriptions and make them exciting and fresh for a really low cost!

These two companies are GoSizzle.io and ViziRecruiter. I’m not writing them up separately because they virtually do the exact same thing for the a very similar price. You send them your lame job description and they give you back a landing page that is fully branded, interactive and professionally designed. For pennies on the dollar that you would spend working with a big design firm to do the exact same thing.

Both have similar metrics to show that their visual stimulating microsites will drive up to 40% more traffic to your postings.  These technologies also use machine learning to recommend to you better wording for higher SEO and higher levels of engagement from job seekers.

After uploading your job description you basically get back a hyperlink URL that you can use to socially recruit on Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, etc. For those organizations that do a lot of outbound recruiting this can be highly valuable.

If you’re mainly a post and pray shop (which most organizations are) I think this technology won’t necessarily do a lot for you. The one weakness both systems have is that while these microsites drive candidates back to your ATS process, they really do nothing for anyone who is visiting your career site and searching your jobs, or for candidates finding your job on Indeed or a job board.

This ATS integration is critical, and both are working on finding ways to make this happen. I expect some of their larger customers will help get this done soon. I’m somewhat surprised that ATSs haven’t picked up on this technology already and integrated it into their own systems. That would be ideal!

Check out both GoSizzle.io and ViziRecruiter. What they do for your job descriptions is 1000% better than what you have right now, and well worth a look, especially for the 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 tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.