Category Archives: Sourcing

The Advanced Class – Recruiting Edition

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

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

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

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

Now for the Advance Class participants:

Want to be Ridiculously Successful at Recruiting?

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

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

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

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

T3 – @Anthology;

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This week on T3 I’m reviewing the career/job site Anthology; (formerly Poachable). Anthology; (the Semicolon is part of the logo/name, for those who aren’t wondering what weird grammatical quirk I now have going on!) is a confidential career matchmaking tool for people who aren’t “looking” but open to learning about new, screened opportunities.

Anthology basically works as a partial replacement for traditional job postings and headhunter found candidates. I say partial, only because they are newer and their member network is limited, but growing. Primarily, about 80% of their members reside in the IT and/or Sales space, and in the geographic areas of San Fransico, NYC, Seattle, Chicago and Boston. They do have members in all fifty states, and will use recent investor funding to begin quickly building out across the country.

So, what does Anthology really do?

The idea behind Anthology is true passive candidates want complete anonymity when searching for a new position.  Companies want more passive candidates. Anthology is giving these two groups a platform to get together.

Anthology allows their members (mostly passive candidates) to answer a number of questions regarding what it would take to get them to move from their current position/company. Anthology’s system then matches this candidate against it’s the employer member positions they have open on the site (currently 500 companies, 1500+ registered recruiters).

Once this match is done, it will comes back to the candidate with a weighted score of how close they might match the opportunities available. The candidate then gets the first stab at letting the employer know they are interested. All of this is confidential to this point, neither sides knows of the other.  Once the candidate expresses interest, both sides are revealed to each other, and the traditional process moves forward from there.

Another great aspect about Anthology is, unlike traditional job sites, both parties can search for each other. It’s based on matching criteria. If the candidate matches what you have open, they’ll be presented your opening. If the candidate does not match, they’ll never see your opening, thus saving you from wasting time on candidates who are just blasting out to everything even close.

From the company side, Anthology does show you potential matches of candidates in their system and allows you to send out introductions to the candidates. It is still up to the candidate to decide if they have interest and want to know more. If the candidate doesn’t want to accept the introduction the company gets direct feedback on why! This is awesome because companies are getting instant feedback on why their organization or positions are not connecting with candidates.

So, what does Anthology cost? 

Anthology has two different pricing models. The first model is a thirty day $500 job posting.  It what you basically think of in regards to job site, job posting. You post and if candidates are ‘matched’ within the thirty days, you’ll get those folks.  The other option is designed for longer term success, and will cost you 12% of the first year salary of the candidate. This option posts your opening until it is filled, no matter how many candidates you plow through! You pay nothing if you never hire a candidate.

Anthologies own data shows that most of their filled job postings are filled by the fifth introduction of a candidate to the company. About 10% of the job posted on Anthology are filled by candidate members, and 80% of the final candidate selection have an Anthology candidate in the mix. Those are actually pretty decent numbers when you think about the passive candidate market!

Anthology has an interesting model and its one of a number of technologies that have been released in the past 24 months attempting to disrupt the traditional recruiting industry. Ultimately, they’re going to need to reach mass to be effective for most organizations, and it looks like they have strong funding to make that jump!

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.

GE’s “Owen” Employment Branding is Brilliant!

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If you haven’t seen these TV commercials for GE (they also have a ton of radio ads in the same genre) you’re missing out on one of the best employment branding campaigns that have come out in years! “What’s the matter with Owen?” is the series and they’re very funny!

The ads show that GE knows who they are and what the perception is about them in the technology industry.  They also know, like many other giant established primarily manufacturing companies (see Big 3 Autos, Boeing, Lockheed, General Dynamics, etc.), that they need engineering and IT talent, just as bad as those companies in Silicon Valley.

Here are a couple of the ads:

We talk constantly about how important employment branding is to organizations to attract talent. We also say that small companies have an advantage in employment branding because they can be more creative.  I think GE just gave big orgs a roadmap to how they can flip the script when it comes to be creative and having fun with their employment branding!

Want to have a better understanding at how bad the labor market, truly, is for STEM talent?  GE, one of the most established brands in the world for decades and one of the most conservative with their branding, is making fun of itself and it’s perceived culture!  I can’t even explain at what a huge shift this is within the industry!

Does Buying Sex Go Too Far In Getting The Best Talent?

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Louisville’s basketball program is under fire because of recent allegations by former recruits and players who claim that Louisville paid for strippers to entertain them on recruiting visits, that included paid sex.  From ESPN:

“Five former University of Louisville basketball players and recruits told Outside the Lines that they attended parties at a campus dorm from 2010 to 2014 that included strippers paid for by the team’s former graduate assistant coach, Andre McGee.

One of the former players said he had sex with a dancer after McGee paid her. Each of the players and recruits attended different parties at Billy Minardi Hall, where dancers, many of whom stripped naked, were present. Three of the five players said they attended parties as recruits and also when they played for Louisville.

Said one of the recruits, who ultimately signed to play elsewhere: “I knew they weren’t college girls. It was crazy. It was like I was in a strip club.”

Before you come down on Louisville, the reality is, this is probably happening at many institutions. Jalen Rose, former NBA player, University of Michigan Fab 5 and ESPN Commentator, also said his recruiting visits to UofM, MSU, Syracuse and UNLV were like bachelor parties and all included having sex and alcohol.

I think most of us would completely agree that taking seventeen and eighteen-year-old boys onto a college campus for this type of activity is wrong.

My question is where does recruiting cross the line when it comes to adults and working for your company?

I can’t imagine ever ‘paying for sex’ for a recruit, since it’s mostly illegal, unless you’re in certain counties in Nevada.  I also can’t imagine providing drugs to potential recruits for any company I might work for, but then you see what’s going on in Colorado and Oregon.

I think you cross the line in how you recruit when you cross the line of your moral makeup of the majority of your employees and stakeholders. Some companies are very comfortable taking recruits out to bars and getting drunk. Many companies can’t even fathom that kind of behavior!

But, doesn’t wining and dining have a place in professional recruitment?  If you could get a great software developer, one that might cost you a $25K headhunting fee, doesn’t it make sense to drop a few hundred dollars on a potential candidate?   It certainly does, if you know who your best candidates are!

That’s the problem, right?  Many of us don’t know ‘better’ talent when we see it.  So, giving out hundreds of dollars in recruiting swag doesn’t work when you give it out to everyone!  It only works when you give it to the best.  Then, it also doesn’t work every time. It’s like the famous line from Anchorman, “60% of the time, it works every time!”

Louisville didn’t get every recruit who they paid hookers to have sex with them, but they landed some of those recruits.

Buying Beats headphones with your logo and sending them to software developers won’t land everyone you send them to, but it will attract some to take that next step.  Those cost $199.  Is hiring great talent worth $199?  Oh, hell, yes it is!  But, no one is sending Beats to software developers.

I’ve always said that college athletics is always on the forefront of what true recruiting is.  Highly sought after talent. Hard to attract to your organization. They find ways to make the best candidates feel extremely special. This is way beyond candidate experience. This is closing.

Paying for sex goes beyond what I’m willing to do, to get the best talent to come and work for me.  But, I’m willing to do alot of other stuff to attract the best talent! What about you?

Sustainable Talent Acquisition

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Here’s what I know.  A sustainable talent acquisition process can’t happen if it’s human run. A manual, human run talent acquisition process eventually falls apart.

Think about your employee referral program.

It was an awesome program when you launched it last month, last year, etc.  Now it’s dead in the water. Why?  Because it’s almost impossible for you, and your team, to keep it going on your own.  Other things become a higher priority, things move fast, eventually, even the best programs get pushed to the side, or forgotten about completely.

I’m not just talking about employee referrals. Every part of your TA process is exactly the same.  Sourcing, assessments, background checks, onboarding, exit interviews, etc.

To make talent acquisition sustainable, you need to integrate technology, it can be human driven.  TA technology allows you to automatically sustain these efforts simultaneously without you actually having to do anything.  Technology can reach out and source and attract. Technology can screen and assess. Technology can drive employee referrals 24/7/365, without you ever touching it. Technology can interview.

Basically, technology allows you to sustain and ongoing recruitment effort without you ever taking your foot off the gas.  The best of us fail at this. We have the best intentions, design the best programs, then life happens and things fall through the cracks. We then come to a point, where we do it all over again.  This is where and why most talent acquisition processes and functions fail, because they are just not sustainable.

Everything is going great, then Mandy leaves for a new job, Sue goes on maternity leave, and Tim who used to be great, has now lost his mojo, and we can’t seem to do anything right. Humans screw up your process! We need them, because humans also make hires, but boy can they make it difficult sometimes!

How can you make your talent acquisition sustainable for years in your organization?  Utilize your technology to it’s fullest. Add technology to the parts that give you the biggest headaches. Then, utilize your humans to build relationships with candidates and hiring managers. Let the tech run the process, let the humans run the people.

Will Recruitment Marketing Automation Make Sourcing Obsolete?

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I keep hearing about companies that are increasingly struggling hiring the talent they need currently and for future growth. The one solution that continues to be thrown out is adding a sourcing function within their talent acquisition department.

Adding sourcing to your talent acquisition team is definitely an option to help you obtain the talent you desire.  It’s also a really expensive option! Anytime you’re adding headcount, you’re adding the most expensive resource to your team of all options.

I was at the HR Tech Conference this past week and one thing was for certain, talent acquisition technology is coming after your sourcing work!  Recruitment marketing and recruitment automation technology was clearly the fastest growing segment of technology vendors at the HR Tech Conference.

Large companies can get some of the best tech on the market to help them source and attract candidates for about $25-$100K per year, ballpark, depending on what you need and choose. Your average Sourcing Pro is going to run about $75K on average. One person, no technology.

I know the biggest and best firms will have both.  I also know that most of us will have to make a choice between these two options. Some will try and do both, by limiting the spend on both sides, get some tech and an entry level kid to bang on the internet to find talent. I believe you’re probably best by going all in one way or the other, if you have limited resources.

Based on what I saw at HR Tech this year, and the growth from just last year, I can tell you I would bet my resources on buying the tech!

Recruitment marketing and automation technology can provide you with much of the attraction muscle that you need, plus continue on the backend to retarget and continually connect with potential candidates you don’t even know you need yet.

It’s hard for me to write this because I have a bunch of friends who are great sourcing pros, and do excellent work.  I think there will always be a place for great sourcing pros in the world, like most great talent. The problem is most sourcing pros aren’t great, they’re just average. Technology is better than average. Which is why I ask the question if the technology will make most sourcing obsolete as we know it right now?  I think it probably will.

By the way, I also heard non-stop all week at the conference how technology is also going to make Recruiters obsolete. Which begs the question what human interactions will be most valuable to Talent Acquisition in a future technology driven attracting and hiring process?

It’s going to be the ability of one person talking to another person about why they need to come and work at your company. Sounds simple, but the best Sourcing Pros and best Recruiting Pros do this exceptionally well. They build relationships with candidates, build trust, find ways to make candidates believe working for your company is better than any other option they have.

So, they can sell.  The tech will run the process, screen, test, assess, communicate the basics, etc. What the tech can’t do is sell. The future of sourcing and recruiting is selling. Ironically, it’s also the past!

The Uber of Recruitment #hrtechconf

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Apparently, the new marketing message for Talent Acquisition technology is to call yourself the “Uber of Recruitment”. I have had six different companies actually use this phrase to explain what their product is, and how it works.

Marketers love to play up being a ‘disruptor’, like Uber did to the taxi industry.  I love using Uber, and I think most people that use it really like it as well. So, making the jump in marketing to use that positive image and tying it back to your product makes perfect sense.

Lazy, but I get it.

Here’s the bigger story, companies are trying to cash in on the multi-billion dollar recruitment industry. Okay, it’s not a big story, it’s been happening for decades, but we are getting to a point where you can see technology making a serious play at truly changing the way companies interact with traditional recruitment agencies.

This is my game, so I’m definitely interested in checking out all these new Uber of Recruiting plays.

Here’s how most of these technologies work:

Step 1: Use our technology to connect with candidates

Step 2: We charge you about 75% less than traditional recruitment agencies

Step 3: We cut out the middle man

Step 4: You get same talent, faster, cheaper, happier.

The basic premise is Uber simple. Put the power of recruitment into the hands of the candidate.  Let them easily connect with those companies that seek their expertise.

Here’s why this is hard.  All of these Uber of Recruitment plays don’t really have an answer on how do we get people and/or companies to use their product.  The need to use Recruitment Agencies are based on a few main premises:

1. The most desirable candidates are not looking, and must be found.

2. You don’t have capacity or skill in-house to find this talent.

3. Agencies can find better talent, than other options (remember this is the premise of use!).

The Uber of Recruitment plays don’t necessarily address all of these premises. I do believe that this technology is going to have an impact to a part of recruitment industry market segment that has issue with cost.

The technology makes it easier for organizations to almost run their own type of agency in-house using this technology, and it makes it easy for candidates to connect.  But, the huge miss is that these technologies still don’t go out and sell a talented person, who is not looking for a job at your company or any company, on why they need to consider this job.

That’s called recruitment, or sales, which is recruitment. Uber of Recruitment technology doesn’t recruit, which is why these plays won’t end the industry as we know it. Uber as an example doesn’t really fit as a recruitment industry killer, but it might work in terms of disrupting and pushing bad agencies to get better.

 

5 Signs You Shouldn’t Make That Offer

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If I have learned anything at all in my HR/Recruiting career it’s that everyone has an opinion on what makes a good hire. If you ask 100 people to give you one thing they focus on when deciding between candidates, you’ll get 100 different answers!

I’ve got some of my own. They might be slightly different than yours, but I know mine work!  So, if you want to make some better selections, take note my young Padawans:

1. Crinkled up money. Male or female if you pull money out of your pocket or purse and it’s crinkled up, you’ll be a bad hire!  There is something fundamentally wrong with people who can’t keep their cash straight. The challenge you have is how do you get a candidate to show you this? Ask to copy their driver’s license, or something like that!

2. Males with more selfies on their Instagram, than all other photos. I don’t even have to explain this.

3. Slow walkers.  If you don’t have some pep in your step, at least for the interview, you’re going to be drag as an employee.

4. My Last Employer was so Awesome! Yeah, that’s great, we aren’t them. Let’s put a little focus back to what we got going on right here, sparky. Putting too much emphasis on a job you love during the interview is annoying. We get it. It was a good gig. You f’d it up and can’t let go. Now we’ll have to listen about it for the next nine months until we fire you.

5. Complaining or being Rude to waitstaff.  I like taking candidates to lunch or dinner, just to see how they treat other people. I want servant leaders, not assholes, working for me. The meal interview is a great selection tool to weed out bad people.

What are your signs not to make an offer?  Share in the comments!

Your CEO is a Better Recruiter Than You

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Lou Adler, a great thought leader in the recruiting industry (I love to refer to him as “Uncle Lou” – endearingly), has one of the best recruiting articles of the year up on Inc. titled, “An Open Email from a CEO to All Outstanding Candidates“.   The concept of the email was getting your CEO to send out an email directly to candidates you are trying to source.

Just that idea alone is a brilliant strategy, because 99.9% of organizations will never do it!  That means, you’ll standout from the crowd. That’s good recruiting practices.

The article goes on to give you how you should actually write the email and what you should say:

1. No silly, classic job descriptions.  Instead tell them about what they’ll actually be doing.

2. Describe why the job could be a career move to the candidate.  They’ll believe this from coming from the CEO.

3. Don’t tell them to apply. That can actually be the last step. Get them interested first. Applications scream we have no idea what we are doing.

4. Provide an open invitation and a direct way to have a real conversation with someone with direct knowledge of the opening.

5. Let them know what the process would look like and next steps, if they are actually interested in moving forward.

6. Make sure the candidates have access to your hiring managers as well.  I’m assuming if your CEO is this involved, your hiring managers will be onboard as well!

Great stuff, right?!

It probably doesn’t work for high volume hiring when you have a lot of candidates. This isn’t meant for that, it’s meant for hard to find, critical to the business type positions.

I absolutely love this technique!

Here’s what I know. Most companies, and most CEOs, will never do this. Those who do, will have great success in getting candidates to respond. Put yourself into your candidates shoes. You’re sitting there some idle Friday and an email pops up from a name you don’t recognize. You open it and find out it’s coming from the CEO of a pretty good company in town. You better believe you’ll read it.

You will also ‘trust’ what is in that email, over if the exact same thing is sent by a recruiter. Why?  You believe that a CEO would never put themselves in a position to lie.  Right or wrong, you believe this. Plus, you’re flattered that a CEO sent you a personal email, not some marketing email, from their ‘real’ work email address, with their contact information in it.

None of your friends have gotten an email from a CEO telling them they are wanted! This is cool. This feels good. This feels different.

This is a winning strategy.

Thanks Uncle Lou!

The Only Candidate Available

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Almost every single week of my life for the last twenty years I’ve had to deal with an issue that just seems to never go away. I didn’t matter if I was in a HR or TA role, I was always involved with working with hiring managers who always had some sort of opening, even in bad economic times.

The scenario went something like this:

1. Hiring Manager  has an opening. I/We find this hiring manager a really good candidate. Not perfect, but probably better than many we have already hired in the same position.

2. Hiring Manager interviews candidate. Likes Candidate.

3. I go to speak with the Hiring Manager.

4. You know what happens next…

5. Hiring Manager says she really liked the candidate, but (wait for it)…She would certainly like to see other candidates to compare.

6. I put gun in my mouth and pull trigger.

This same scenario has happened weekly for twenty years across multiple companies, multiple industries and multiple states. It’s an epidemic of enormous proportion across the world.

Here’s the real problem that we face with hiring managers, and it’s completely psychological. The Hiring Manager always assumes that the ‘last’ option, or ‘only’ option is a bad option.

Pretty simple.  We all do this.  If you go to a farmers market and you go to pick out some produce, let’s say a head of lettuce, and the farmer only has one head of lettuce left on the stand. We will assume something must be wrong with that one head of lettuce!  If the farmer puts three other heads around that one, you would gladly pick up the original head, now believing you ‘picked’ the best head of lettuce.

Candidates are heads of lettuce!

When you show a hiring manager one, they assume it’s not as good as the others they are not seeing.

This is actually pretty easy to solve, but very hard to do. Never present a hiring manager with one candidate.  HR and TA are classic economist when it comes to candidate generation. We are FIFOs! Do you remember your Econ class from college? First In, First Out.  The first candidate we find, we immediately send out to the hiring manager.

This starts the problem.

The hiring managers seeing one candidate will discount this candidate as bad. If you just wait a few days, put one or two other candidates with this candidate, not the hiring manager will ‘pick’ the best.  This works pretty well, most of the time.  But, it’s hard to do because we get so excited about finding a good candidate we want to show it the hiring manager as fast as possible.

Stop that!

Be patient. Find a good ‘slate’ of candidates to present all at the same time. Reap the benefits.

The only candidate available will always be that lonely head of lettuce on the farmers stand.  Find more heads, and present them together. No one likes to pick from a pile of one!