Category Archives: Sourcing

True or False: Corp Recruiters Fear Agency Recruiters

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True or False?  It’s a common belief, in most Talent and HR circles, that most corporate recruiters fear agency recruiters.  Go ahead and argue if you would like, but it seems a little silly.

The reality is, true recruiting professionals don’t fear amateurs.

It’s like a really great professional Photographer.  They charge money because they offer something someone is willing to pay for.  Professional photographers don’t fear the mom at the soccer game with her $2,000 dollar camera and $5,000 dollar lens.  Who cares that you have the equipment if you don’t know how to use it!?  Pros don’t fear amateurs.

So, if you are a really good corporate recruiter who knows how to really recruit, agency recruiters don’t scare you, because you know your stuff!  That’s the problem, though, right?  The reason so many people feel the title of this post is true is because we all know so many corporate recruiters, who really don’t know how to recruit.  They aren’t pros, they’re amateurs.  Amateurs fear professionals when it comes to meeting head to head in competition.

The best professionals love it when a talented amateur tries to play at their level.  These types of individuals help to push both parties to do the best work they can.  Or, at least, they should!  A great agency recruiter should push an average corporate recruiter to want to get better.  An amateur agency recruiter will starve, that’s why you only see amateurs in the agency ranks for a very short period of time.  If they aren’t good, they don’t eat! That is why on average, agency recruiters tend to have more recruiting skills than corporate recruiters.  Agency folks aren’t full salary. How they have compensated forces them to have better skills, on average.

So, how do corporate recruiters ensure they become professionals?  Well, I love Malcolm Gladwell, so I’ll steal a little of his 10,000-hour concept.  You must make yourself a true recruiting professional!  You need to invest time and development in yourself, in the recruiting industry, to become a pro.   That means as a corporate recruiter, you focus on recruiting, not becoming an HR Pros. What?!  Most corporate recruiters are corporate recruiters because that’s their path to get into a straight HR position.  Their endgame is not recruiting, it’s HR.  That’s a problem because they are not fully vested in the recruiting game.  This is an amateur move.

Your reality is, those who get promoted are usually professional at something.  Become a great recruiting pro and the powers-that-be will take notice, and you’ll find yourself in positions you never thought possible.  True professionals don’t worry about promotions, they worry about becoming a better pro at their craft.

The next time you start feeling yourself pushed by an agency recruiter, don’t curse them for what they do, embrace them for what they push you to become — a better recruiter.

7 Words Mathematically Proven to Get You More Hires!

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Wired recently worked with OkCupid and Match.com to find out which words were used on the most popular dating profiles on their sites.  Millions of data points were done for this data analysis and they came up with the most popular 1000 words.  What they came up with were the exact words to use in your profile descriptions to get the most clicks.

I’m going to take this one step further and say if these words attract singles to another single, I’m quite certain they would attract a job seeker to a job.  My theory being singles are also job seekers.  Okay, I hear you, just because some words might attract one person to another person doesn’t mean those same words will attract a person to a job – but it might.

It is my belief that we can totally re-write Job Descriptions in a way that is a lot less HR’ish, and much more real, which will make more people want to work in the jobs you have.  Here is one I put together for hiring a Recruiter for my staff.   The positive is, it lets us in HR get our ‘creative on’.

Let ‘s give it a shot. I’ll give you 7 categories of words that were mathematically proven to get more dates hires:

1. Active Words: Yoga, Surfing, Surf, hiking, athlete, etc. These words were popular because people want to be associated with things that are good for them. Do you highlight active things you do at your organization in your job descriptions?

2. Pop Culture Words: 30 Rock, The Great Gatsby, Homeland, Arrested Development, The Matrix, The Big Bang Theory, The Hunger Games, etc.  People want to work with an organization that has a personality.  Pop culture references in your JD give you a personality.

3. Music Words: (FYI – some of these could also be considered Pop Culture) – Radiohead, Nirvana, live music, guitar, instruments, etc .Does your organization have a musical preference? Why not?  Maybe you’re a little country, maybe you’re a little rock and roll, either way, it’s alright to let candidates know!

4. Calm Words: Ocean, meditation, beach, trust, respect, enjoy, planning, dedication, openness, etc. Words that project a feeling of safety and security. In today’s employment marketplace, don’t discount the value of your jobs based on how calm and secure the work is.  Anxiety is at an all-time high.  Having the ability to say “we’ve never laid off in our history!” could pay you huge dividends.

5. Food Words: Chocolate, cooking, foodie, pizza, sushi, breakfast, etc. Food is a gathering and sharing point in most cultures.  If you do food related things in your work environment it brings all of your people together. Everyone eats. Not everyone will do Yoga or want to watch movies.  Chili cook-offs, company happy hours, Donut Fridays, etc.

6. Descriptive Words: Creative, motivated, confident, driven, passion, awareness, etc. Most HR pros see JDs as a means to an end.  They’re a legal necessity.  We should be looking at them as mini-commercials for our jobs.  I would love to see a company go full video JD – nothing written, just watch our Job Description. 60 seconds of someone telling you what this job is.

7. Spontaneous Words: Tattoos, F*ck, wasted, kissing, puppies, sucking, lucky, etc.  Words that most people would never expect to see in a JD.  This word has absolutely no usefulness in a JD – that’s exactly why we put it in there.  It might not attract an older conservative candidate, but it might be just what a newer generation is looking for.

I’ve never met a senior executive that had a problem with any job description I wanted to write – not matter how bland or how crazy.  That being the case, why do we continue to write JDs that put people to sleep?

The Most Powerful Talent Attractor

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We make talent acquisition much harder than it needs to be.  We focus on things like employment branding, candidate experience, recruitment analytics, etc. All important stuff, but a lot of this focus takes away from what’s really basic and critical to being great at acquiring talent.

At its core, the most powerful talent attractor is simply just being desired.

This might seem ultra-simplified to you, but it’s not. Think about yourself for just a moment.

When you get a call from a recruiter, yourself, about going to work someone place else, doesn’t that feel really good?  No, I mean, REALLY, good! “Oh my gosh, you guys, I got this call today, from ABC Company, and they tried to recruit me! I was like, heck no, I’m great here, but I thought it was funny, they wanted me!”

We Love to be wanted! It’s a basic natural feeling and emotion.

The key to great talent acquisition is getting your team and your organization to understand this. If TA would act more like the nerdy guy trying to get a date, and less like the super pretty girl acting like being interested is the farthest thing from her desire, we would be so much more successful!

But, we don’t. We act like candidates should want us. Not we should want them.

Now, imagine that same recruiting call to yourself. This time instead of the company wanting to recruit you, they actually say, “well, we’re not interested in you, but wanted to see if you could refer someone else at your company.”

How would that fell!? It would feel awful and you would be pissed!

We want to be wanted. We wanted to be desired.

If you can get your recruiters to have that mindset, you’ll be amazed at how much easier it is to pick up the phone and talk to candidates.  If we all just truly understood that the candidate on the other end of the phone was just like us, they just want to be wanted, recruiting them seems like a breeze.

“So, you mean I don’t treat them like I’m doing them a favor by talking to them?”

Now you’re getting it! Treat them like you really hope they’ll go on a date with you! Just don’t actually ask them for a date! Just think about your own personality in these terms of how you’re communicating to the candidate.

#SHRMtalent – Is This a Recruiting Conference?

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I’ve been pretty outspoken throughout the years about the lack of great Talent Acquisition conferences on the national stage.  There are some great local and regional recruiting conferences, like Recruit DC, Talent 42, Minnesota Recruiters and, of course, the Michigan Recruiters Conference.

I really love the folks at SourceCon, and they do a great job, but for many corporate talent acquisition pros, SourceCon can get really way too far into the weeds, and most will feel intimidated by what’s being discussed. ERE continues to trip over themselves and hasn’t never fully turned itself into that national TA conference.

This is my first time to SHRM Talent and I have to say SHRM is well positioned to create something really big for corporate Talent Acquisition leaders and pros!

Much of the content was on the same par you would find at any of the top recruiting conferences around the world. Of course, I’m doing a couple of sessions and people were highly engaged, asking great questions. Some of the others here include:

Johnny Campbell from Social Talent who had another super engaged session!

Chris Hoyt, the Recruiter Guy, sharing great information on Candidate Experience!

Dee Ann Turner, head of talent for Chick fil a, one of my favs, and say what you want about them, they hire super nice and friendly people, consistently, at every location I’ve ever been in.

Great Keynotes by Jim Knight and Kat Cole – again solid, solid, speakers and talent pros.

Chloe Rada, Recruitment marketing at Sodexo, talking employer branding.

And just a ton more talent practitioners sharing really solid information.

These are people you would expect to see at the top TA conferences in the world, challenging people with some really innovative ideas and best practices.

Of course, in a large national conference, you need content at all levels, so all of it won’t be for everyone. I’ve come to grips with that. I sat in a session and found myself wondering ‘how the heck did this person ever get picked to come to a TA conference?’ When you have 50 plus speakers, not everyone is going to be for every attendee.

But, for the most part, I’m thoroughly impressed with what SHRM put on, and you all know I don’t normally say that! There were around 1400 attendees at SHRM Talent, and I really thing SHRM can position themselves as the premier TA conference in the world, just as they’ve positioned SHRM National as the premier HR conference in the world.

What are the next steps for SHRM Talent, in my opinion?

  • They need a technology track – TA corporate pros are hungry to learn more about what technology can do for them.
  • They need a few more hardcore recruiting, sourcing speakers.  Some folks who will get into the weeds for those who desire that.
  • I would love SHRM play around with session times. An hour and 15 minutes is your parents conference presentation. Most attendees, now, would prefer TEDx style presentations. This becomes a logistical issue, but I think if you move speakers and not attendees, they could test some of these things. No one wants to sit for 75 minutes and hear speakers drone on.

I’m leaving Orlando encouraged about SHRM and the direction of SHRM Talent. Corporate Talent Acquisition is in desperate need of a great conference and SHRM might actually be able to fill this need for the future!

T3 – Boon

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This week on T3 I take a look at Boon. Boon is a new talent crowdsourcing marketplace. Basically, Boon is a referral marketplace for sharing relevant opportunities with your personal network. Ther are some others in this space, that do it a bit differently, but it’s basically a recruiting disrupter that cuts out the middle man.

Boon is set up a bit differently, by allowing agency and independent recruiters to set up a profile and work within their system as well. This would allow a recruiter, or any employee, to refer their ‘network’ to your openings. The real goal though is to allow anyone to do this kind of referring.

Membership is free, both for companies and for the individuals who sign up to refer candidates. If the employer hires someone via Boon, it’s billed $5,000. Boon then takes a 10% cut—and passes $4,500 to the member who made the referral.

5 Things I like about Boon:

1. Boon uses a matching algorithm to automatically match your network with jobs on their platform, so you don’t have to do the work. It then shows you who might be a good match, so you can decide which ones you want to refer easily

2. You could easily use Boon as an internal employee referral program. From the dashboard you can input all of your employees, they can decide if they want to tap their own networks, but the system makes it easy to share and match their company jobs to their networks, plus it also eliminates tracking and paying out of referrals.

3. From the referral side, Boon, auto tracks your referrals and the dashboard shows you where your referral is within the process, so you don’t ever have to wonder what happened to that person you referred.

4. Boon takes 10% off the top of the referral to the referring person, the company pays Boon directly. Currently, the Boon referral is $5000, but soon a company using Boon for employee referrals will be able to customize that amount as a percent of the hiring salary.

5. Boon also allows organizations to post their jobs privately, to only your employees, or publicly to all Boon users, in case you wanted to give your employees first shot at referring a friend or peer.

Boon is really simple to use and upload job descriptions. The matching technology to the referring user’s network sets it apart from similar technology on the market.  Well worth taking a look, especially if you don’t have any technology for employee referrals, this could be a very inexpensive alternative!

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.

Rerun – The #1 Cause of Bad Hires

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It’s Spring Break in Michigan, so I’m going to step away from the daily grind and throw some Reruns at you! You guys remember Rerun, from What’s Happening? (look it up, kids!) So, enjoy the Reruns, they’re some of my favorites!

Originally ran May 2013 – 

A while back I interviewed a lady that would make a great recruiter. She was high energy, great on the phone, could source and an HR degree.  She applied for the job we had open for a recruiter and 100% positive she would have accepted the position if I would have offered it. I didn’t. 

She wasn’t a ‘fit’.  The job she truly wanted, her ‘dream’ job, was in straight HR, not recruiting.  She was willing to recruit – she really didn’t want to recruit.  We walked away from a terrific candidate.

Poor job fit is the #1 reason most people fail at a job.

Organizations spend so much time and resources ensuring they’re hiring the right skills, but most totally fail when it comes to organization and job fit.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s not easy to determine organizational fit.  Sure you can design an assessment, do peer interviewing, etc. But it always seems like a moving target, and it is.  Job fit also has multiple components:

1. The job you have open.

2. The company culture.

3. The job the candidate actually wants to do.

4. The job the candidate is willing to do and how good of an actor they are to prove to you that is the real job they want.

5. Your inability to see your perception of the candidate and their perception of themselves doesn’t align.

How many of you have ‘Poor Job Fit’ as a reason for termination on your exit interview form?

My guess is almost none.  Most managers and HR pros will list things like: performance, personality conflict, attitude, low skill set, personal reasons, schedule, etc.  We don’t want to use something like “Poor Job Fit” because what that says is “We suck at our jobs!”

The reality is – probably 75% of your terminations are because of poor job fit.  You hired someone with the skills you wanted, but the job you have doesn’t use or need most of those skills.  The job you have doesn’t meet the expectation you sold to the candidate.  The job you have isn’t really the job the person wants.

Most organizations would be farther off to hire by fit, than by skills. True statement.  HR pros hate to hear that – because it discounts a lot of what we do.  Job fit is the key to retention – not skills.  Find someone who wants to be a recruiter – and they probably

HR pros hate to hear that – because it discounts a lot of what we do.  Job fit is the key to retention – not skills.  Find someone who wants to be a recruiter – and they probably be a decent recruiter.  Find someone with great skills who doesn’t want to be a recruiter – and they’ll be a terrible recruiter. 

In almost every occupation where you don’t need professional certifications (doctor, lawyer, CPA, etc.) this holds true.  I know a great Accountant who never went to accounting school – better than anyone I’ve met you graduated from accounting school.  Some of the best teachers – never went to college to become a teacher – but they love teaching.

Do one thing for me the next time you interview a candidate for a job – ask them this one question:

“If you could have any job, in any location, what job would you select?  Why?” 

Their answer doesn’t have to be the job they’re interviewing for to be the ‘right’ answer.  Their answer should be in line with what you’re asking them to do – or you’re going to have a bad fit – and either you will eventually be terminating them, or they will eventually be resigning.

The First Rule of Recruiting

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Sometimes we go so far into the weeds in recruiting we forget what is really important.

We have to have a brand!

We have to have an ATS! Or a new ATS!

We have to have a CRM! What the hell is a CRM!

Our job descriptions need to be better!

Our career site sucks! Don’t they all!?

We need to relaunch our employee referral program!

There are literally a million things you could focus on in recruiting and you still would have a list of crap you never even got to.

You know recruiting isn’t difficult. It’s not like we’re trying to launch the space shuttle. Recruiting is finding people for your organization. People are everywhere. We just need to talk them into coming to work for our organizations.

It’s the first rule of recruiting – Just let people know you’re hiring.

We make it so difficult when all we have to truly do is let people know we actually want to hire them. Do you have any idea how many people would really want to work for your organization, but they never know you are hiring or were hiring?

Recruiting is really only that. Just letting enough people know that you want them to work for you until you’ve reached the right people. It’s okay that you will reach some you don’t want. That’s part of the game.

To reach the people who you want, and who want you, you have to let a lot of people know you’re hiring.

Letting people know you’re hiring goes beyond your career site. It goes beyond job boards. It goes beyond employee referral programs. It’s a philosophy throughout your organization. It’s about an understanding that you want everyone to know that you’re hiring.

Most organizations don’t do this. It’s a combination of issues, but mostly it’s conceited belief that letting people know you’re hiring seems desperate. That we are too good of an organization to let everyone know we are hiring, because we don’t want everyone, we only want a few.

This is why most talent acquisition departments fail. Simple conceit.

Great recruiting isn’t conceited, great recruiting is about being humble enough to let people know you want them.

T3 – The Great Facebook Sourcing Hope

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About once a week I have this conversation with a fellow TA/Sourcing Pro:

TA/Sourcing Pro: “Ugh! I hate LinkedIn! If Facebook ever decided to put LinkedIn out of business they could do it overnight!”

Tim: “Yep.”

Okay, usually there’s all kinds of explanation and brainstorming around how we could ‘show’ Facebook how to do this, easily. But, you’ve already heard, or had, this conversation about a thousand times, so I won’t bore you with it again!

My plan is that Facebook does a LinkedIn type reset, but doesn’t screw it up like LinkedIn has. There is a true need for a ‘professional network’, but you can’t turn it into Job Board 2.0 like LI did. How does that help us TA and Sourcing pros? FB could pull this off. 2 billion profiles. They would have virtually everyone, and could attract back the college kids with the potential of company and job matching, by just working with college career placement offices, etc.  LinkedIn started doing this but walked away from it way too early.

FB then makes money off of company pages and postings. Plus, pay per click ads to very specialized groups of candidates that companies would easily pay to get in front of. I’m sure they’re a few other ideas they could make money on, without giving away everything like LI did.

Only about .02% of TA and Sourcing Pros are actually using Facebook to recruit.  None of those people are telling you how, because they’re making money on it, and don’t want you to know! Basically, it’s not how you think.  Almost every great sourcing product to come out has to do with IT sourcing.

It makes sense because that’s where all the cash is, so that’s where all the investment is. Facebook doesn’t play nice with others (let’s face it, they don’t have to), so you see virtually nothing coming out around Facebook sourcing. The reality is, though, you have the ability to Facebook source, by location, by a company name, by gender, etc., but you won’t do it because it means you have to do the heavy lifting.

What is heavy lifting mean? FB will get you about 80% there, but you have to go get the other 20%. There’s no easy ‘InMail’ to bail you out. You might have to search for an email, call into a company, etc. Heavy lifting…

Here’s a Facebook search engine (hat tip to Recruiting God – Steve Levy for sharing this):

https://inteltechniques.com/intel/osint/facebook.htm 

This isn’t the first and only one of these out there, but it’s a good one for sure. In fact, these types of FB search engines started showing up around the exact time FB launched Graph Search, then almost immediately took it down because it was actually too easy to search and find people! People complained FB listened (did you hear that LI?).

So, what’s the FB sourcing gold?  It’s low-end positions, not high-end. The high-end folks (IT, Engineers, etc.) figured out early that putting your title, etc. on FB wasn’t going to get you pimped constantly by recruiters and sourcers.  The lower skilled folks don’t care, because they don’t get non-stop job offers.

I know of a few recruiters making well over six figures, right now, only recruiting lower skilled and/or not your normal technical talent type pros on FB! Technicians, truck drivers, sales people, teachers, nurses, etc. Companies are struggling to find great talent at this level as well, and FB is a goldmine that virtually no one is sourcing.

Check out the search engine above. Connect with Steve Levy. He’s a great dude and one of the good guys in recruiting who is always willing to share his knowledge!

T3 – Recruiting tools from @Sourcecon!

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Sourcecon, one of the premier recruiting conferences on the planet, happened last week. I didn’t attend, but kept up on the action on twitter and on the Sourcecon site. Jeremy Roberts, the editor and director of Sourecon, does an excellent job over there, and I always find great content and ideas.  It’s not just for Sourcing! I mean sourcing is still part of recruiting I think.  I’m not sure, it’s all very confusing…

Anywho. Stacy Zapar did a presentation and shared some cheap/free tools she uses to help her source/recruit better and more effectively, and I wanted to share those because I think two of them are ones anyone in recruiting can take advantage of:

1. Email Hunter – is the easiest way to find professional email addresses. Give a domain name and get the list of all the emails related to it found on the internet. I can imagine a thousand ways to use this, but one of the best has to be raiding a competitor!  Can you imagine if you’re GM? All you have to do is put in ford.com and Bam! You have every address on the web of folks with a ford.com email address.

There’s a free version for a single user with limited searches, but you can also get a paid version which is still fairly inexpensive, and they have a Chrome extension as well.

2. YouCanBookMe – Which is a booking software that integrates with your Google or iCloud calendar. This makes getting candidate screens and phone interviews set up super easy.  You just send them a link and they pick what works for them in your calendar which you can personalize to what schedule you want to offer.  This makes the go-between dance a thing of the past!

Again, YouCanBookMe has a free version you can use by yourself, or you can pay a little and get some premium benefits.

These aren’t the normal big recruiting and HR software’s that I normally highlight, but these are two the ‘inside’ secret type of tools that real recruiters and sourcers are using each and every day to make their jobs easier.

I think so many recruiting pros get intimidated by Sourcecon.  You have people talking about stuff you can’t even comprehend. The reality is, at every conference you’re going to have your 1%ers, those folks who are totally geeked out by technology and the profession.  That’s cool, I love all of those folks. They are the ones leading the profession.  But you also have the other 99%ers. The real folks like Stacy, who will give you real tools and ideas that we all can use.

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 #1 Way You Can Tell Recruiting In NOT Important to Your Executives

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I had a recruiting leader reach out to me recently and ask for help.  They had some critical positions they needed to fill but weren’t having any success.  The executives were all over her to get her team to fill these positions.  The success of the company depended on it!

You feel her, right?  We’ve all been there at one point or another in our careers.

She was looking for some advice about what they could do, because they tried everything, and she was at wits end. This exchange was through email, so the first thing I did was what I usually do. First, I check her LinkedIn profile to check her background. She was solid, good recruiting experience, good companies. Then, I check the company’s career site.

This is where I find most companies and ‘we’ve done everything’ start to fall down.

Nowhere on the first page of the company web page could you find a link to “Careers” or “Jobs” or “Positions”. Nowhere! Not at the top, not at the bottom. You could click on anything on their home page to get to what jobs they actually had open.

But, I’m a pro. So are you. We know exactly where it’s at. Click on “About” or “About Us”. Then scroll down to “Careers” and click on that. Then go through another click or three and you’ll actually find the jobs they have open and “desperately” need to fill.

I sent a message back and we set up a call. The first thing I said was you need to have some sort of link or button or something on the home page where people can access your open jobs with one-click. “I’ve tried getting that changed, but the executive in charge of the website (marketing) refuses to add it.”  You need to go above that person’s head, and actually bring the executive who has the open jobs and explain to the CEO why this has to change.

“Yeah, but even then, this isn’t going to fill our jobs.” You know, you’re probably right, this one thing won’t fill your jobs, but this is indicative of how your executives don’t support recruiting in your organization. If your executives won’t allow you to make this one simple change, which is a clear best practice in every industry, they don’t truly care about filling these jobs.

Having your “Careers” site link under the “About Us” tab on the home page of your web page screams you have no idea what you’re doing in recruitment. Having executives that refuse you to move it, shows you they don’t care about recruiting.  It’s really simple, and always 100% true.

Interviewing for a new Recruitment leadership position? Take a look at how easy it is to find jobs with the company. If it takes forever, ask in your interview how easy it will be for you to immediately change this. The answer you get will tell you everything you need want to know about taking this job or not.

Having your career site linked under “About Us” on your home page is the #1 way you can tell if executives support recruiting or not in a company.