Category Archives: Sourcing

1 Sign That Shows Google Now Controls HR

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It was just a matter of time. The company that vows to do know evil, would eventually take over the function that is the most hated in the world.  Don’t get me wrong, Google didn’t come into your organization and start giving your employees performance reviews, yet.  What Google does is much more stealth.

Remember back in April of this year (2015)? Laszlo Bock, the head of HR for Google, released his book “Work Rules!” He then went on a national book tour and was famously interviewed, everywhere, telling anyone who would listen that you don’t need a college degree to work at Google. In fact, Google has found that your college GPA and transcripts to be ‘worthless’ in terms of making a quality hire.

We all kind of chuckled.  Well, there goes Google, being Google again.

Let’s fast forward to today. Jobvite recently released their 2015 Recruiter Nation Survey.  It’s always an interesting read, with great data and metrics, but one metric stood out, to me, above all others:

“57% of Organizations now report that GPAs are unimportant.”

Do you see what just happened?

If Jobvite would have asked organizations and recruiters in January of this year, this same question, prior to Laszlo’s announcement, how do you think this number would be different?  I’m telling you the number would have been around 5% or less!

GPA are unimportant. Really?

Here’s what Google, I mean Laszlo, forgot to tell everyone about why Google can hire people who have never gone to college.  THEY HIRE FREAKING GENIUSES THAT HAVE BEEN CODING IN THEIR PARENTS BASEMENTS SINCE THEY WERE 12! These kids don’t need college. College would bore them. They know more than the professors teaching them. Google gets to hire the top 1% of people, not just college grads.

You won’t get these geniuses, who don’t need to go to college.  You get half-baked nitwits who need college, a good spanking, a few years to grow up and probably deep therapy.  You are not Google.

Yet, here we are, and you are answering Jobvite’s survey questions and acting like your Google.  Thank you Google.  Thank you for setting HR back a decade.  For not telling the full story, just swaying opinion by making bold statements.  We now get a generation of workers who think they can just jump off their Xbox and into a job paying six figures.  That’s really helpful.  You’re brilliant Laszlo.

Check out Jobvite’s 2015 Recruiter Nation Survey, it’s good stuff, even the stuff that Google brainwashed you to answer.

Watch Me LIVE Right Now! #CBEmpower15

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That’s right, someone made the brilliant decision to put me on TV LIVE. Lights, camera, action!  Today, I’ll be bringing you all the cool stuff happening at Empower 15 in Chicago!

The Live Stream will start at 8am CST today and go all day until 5pm CST (that’s 9am for you East Coasters – and way too early for those on the left coast!).

My friend Laurie Ruettimann will be joining me to kick it off in this morning, then I’ll be bringing you many other great HR and Talent Pros/Celebs throughout the day.

If you want to ask a question on the Live Stream – hit me on the Twitters at #CBEmpower15 or @TimSackett and I’ll try to make you famous!

Click below to get to Live Stream feed:

Empower 15 Live Stream

Remember! This is LIVE, who knows what might happen…

 

The 1 Miracle That Can Make Your Corporate Recruiters Better Almost Instantly

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I’ve had 3 opportunities in my career to step into traditional corporate recruiting departments and make changes that would ‘turn’ these departments around so that the organization would see them as a positive producing department, where previously that had not been viewed as this.  As you can imagine there are numerous changes that can be made to do this.  You could go out and hire more talented recruiters.  You could redesign and launch a new employment brand.  You can redesign your processes.  You can launch a new career website.  Add in recruiter specific training.  Get hiring managers and leadership involved in ‘owning’ their talent in their individual departments.  All great stuff.  All things that I eventually did – all which take considerable time and resources!

When you are stepping into a new organization and taking over, those who hired you expect instant miracles.  Why?  Because that’s what you told them you could do when you interviewed.  One problem.  You told them this without truly knowing what you were going to find when you started opening up closet doors in the department and skeletons began falling out all over the place.  You didn’t realize your staff of recruiters were really just HR admins in disguise.  That your ATS was an advance spreadsheet, and nothing more.  Your hiring managers believed the only way to get talent was to wait for you to deliver it to them on a silver platter, just so they could say “I don’t like that kind – bring me another platter!”  You didn’t know your major vendor was the CEO’s cousin who had no clue and no sense of urgency – but was entitled all the same.

Doesn’t matter now – deliver the miracle!

There is really only one thing I know that works in recruiting.  Doesn’t matter if you’re an agency or corporate.  Doesn’t matter the industry.  Doesn’t matter the recruiting experience level you have on your staff.  It’s been the one miracle that in good times and bad has always sets recruiters apart – at all levels.  Activity.  Outgoing phone calls, number of candidates interviewed, number of resumes sent to hiring managers, etc.  Higher activity level = higher recruiting department satisfaction and results, 100% of the time.  It’s a simple miracle.

So – how do you do this tomorrow?

Step 1:  Instantly track the number of ‘outgoing’ phone calls made per recruiter.  If you don’t have technology to track this – develop a simple call sheet that tracks candidate name, phone number, position called for and result.  Track calls for 2 weeks. (outgoing calls only – keep it simple, establish a habit – great recruiters call candidates)

Step 2: On week 3 – set daily outgoing call goal 25% higher than the two week daily average.  (don’t let on you will do this on week 3 or you’ll have low numbers your first two weeks)

Step 3:  Hold those recruiters accountable who aren’t reaching their call goal.

You’ll hear every single excuse in the world – you have to stay strong.  “I have too many meetings” – tell them you are giving them permission to no longer attend those meetings.  “I have to much paperwork” – stop doing paperwork – that’s for after 5pm and on weekends (recruiting isn’t a 40 hr per week job). Only concentrate on calls.  Calls. Calls. Calls.

Miracle, delivered, almost instantly.

Want to hear some more?  Call me – I’ve got more miracles. Sackett.tim@hru-tech.com; 517-908-3156 or @TimSackett  – my company delivers staffing miracles every freaking day!

CareerBuilder Empower 15 Live Stream Wednesday Sept. 10th!

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Next week Wednesday, September 10th, CareerBuilder has asked me to Host their Live Stream of Empower 15!

That’s right, someone made the brilliant decision to put me on LIVE. Lights, camera, action!  To bring to you all the cool stuff happening at Empower!

The Live Stream will start at 8am CST and go all day until 5pm CST (that’s 9am for you East Coasters – and way too early for those on the left coast!).  My friend Laurie Ruettimann will be joining me to kick it off in the morning, then I’ll be bringing you many other great HR and Talent Pros/Celebs throughout the day. Click on the link above for Wednesday’s lineup of great presenters!

Click below to get to Live Stream feed:

Empower 15 Live Stream

What is Empower?

DISCOVER. ELEVATE. INSPIRE.

The act of connecting employers and job seekers to make meaningful matches has changed dramatically over the past 20 years. And new economic, digital, and social trends have introduced an entirely new set of challenges. We’re giving you a front row seat to share the journey as we look back and, more importantly, ahead to the next 20. Join CareerBuilder and 1000+ other leaders for the talent acquisition event of the year where we’ll identify opportunities to continue to move the industry forward and work together to make recruitment easier and more effective.

Empower is Talent Acquisition’s version of all those cool HR conferences your HR peers get to go to, but they aren’t really designed for true Talent Acquisition leaders!

Blame the Search Firm for Your Crappy Hires

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It’s become common practice in high level NCAA Division Athletics to use retained search firms to hire Athletic Directors and Coaches.  Recently, the University of Minnesota Athletic Director resigned, before UM could terminate him for inappropriate activity, after being on the job for two years.  How did the University of Minnesota respond to this termination?  Well, they blamed the original search firm of course!

Both the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and UMD (each part of the state’s public University of Minnesota system) hired Atlanta-based Parker Executive Search to find athletic directors.

It’s easy to see why they chose Parker, as the firm has been profiled by ESPN as one of the most influential search firms in college athletics and has had Indiana, Kentucky, Notre Dame, Oregon and Northwestern as clients.

Parker’s searches in Minnesota resulted in the 2012 hiring of Teague, who resigned last week while facing reports of sexually harassing employees. It also brought Athletics Director Josh Berlo to UMD, where he is facing criticism for firing five-time national champion women’s hockey coach Shannon Miller.

One Gophers booster told the Pioneer Press he won’t give any more money to the university if it uses any search firm again.

How much blame should the search firm get for Teague’s hiring? That’s a question likely to come up when the University of Minnesota Twin Cities conducts an outside investigation into the case.

I get it.  If I paid $125K for a company to do a retained search, I would hope they would let me in on every single thing in the candidates background, and even stuff that wasn’t in his background but they found anyway! It seems like the search firm, in this case, missed that Teague, Minnesota’s ex-Athletic Director, has previous issues related to harassment.

I doubt highly they hid this information. One placement fee, no matter how big, is worth burning a client.  I’ve never met anyone in the search business who was willing to burn a client over one placement fee.  I’m not saying it doesn’t happen. I’m sure there are firms that have done it after they’ve made the decision they no longer care if they have a long term relationship with a client.

What I rarely see happen is that the organization takes responsibility for making the hiring decision. In this case, the University of Minnesota wanted to hire Teague, who had help VCU rise to a national basketball power.  They were hoping Teague could bring some of that magic to the twin cities.  My guess is, even if they new of the harassment issue, they still would have moved forward with the hire.

The reality is search firms don’t hire anyone.  You hire.  You make the final decision.  The best search firms will advise you on the candidate and the market, but none hold a gun to your head.  When that decision goes south, it has very little to do with the search firm, yet, and I see it constantly, organizations love to blame search firms for their bad hires!

What’s the morale to this story?  Never pay $125K for a search.  You will never feel like you got value for that cost!

There’s No Free Staffing Option

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I’ve gotten a chance to work both sides of the fence for an extended period of time in the Talent Acquisition/Recruiting/Staffing game. For ten years I ran corporate talent acquisition shops for some very large organizations.  One organization spent over $3M annually on staffing agency fees! Obviously, prior to me getting there!

I’ve spent almost fifeteen years on the agency side, sandwiched in between my corporate experience. What I’ve learned along the way is that there isn’t a “free” option when it comes to hiring great talent.

Frequently, I get asked from clients for discounts to my fees on the agency side.  I get that. When I was on the corporate side, I would never take an agency’s first offer.  Here’s the main problem with all of this:

Corporate talent acquisition pros don’t want any of it. They don’t your 20% direct fee, they don’t want your retained plan, they don’t want your RPO plan. What they want is Free. A free option.

Therein lies everything you need to know about staffing agencies and corporate talent acquisition.  One side wants free. One side needs to get paid.

The reality is, even staffing on your own on the corporate side isn’t free.  Corporate talent acquisition done right, has a ton of costs. Recruitment tools, automation, branding, job boards, applicant tracking, college strategy, recruiter training and hiring, etc. None of that is free.

All of this, though, should be screaming to the agency folks that something isn’t right.  What corporate talent acquisition pros are saying is “we don’t like the options we are getting from agencies”.  This should be of serious concern, because there are companies trying to design other options for corporate talent acquisition pros.  Options where they’ll feel like they are getting the value they want.

These options aren’t free, either, but they are less than all of the traditional options that 99% of staffing agencies are offering.

When I was on the corporate TA side of the desk, here was my decision matrix to when I would use a staffing agency. This matrix made me feel good about my decision to use an agency:

1. Does my team have the capacity to do this search? If Yes, why would I pay to have this done. If No, the cost if justifiable.

2. Does the agency offer me a recruitment expertise and/or pipeline I don’t have on my team?  See #1 for Yes and No options.

3. Is it financially feasible for me to add more capacity to my team, as compared to an agency option? This one took some more work. If I had a need for an agency to fill, let’s say, three positions and it was going to cost me $100K, well, obviously I could hire a pretty good recruiter for $100K. But, would I need that Recruiter in year 2, 3, etc.? Adding headcount isn’t a one time cost for an organization.

Ultimately, for me on the corporate side, it was almost always a capacity issue.  I had the expertise, but we had bubbles of work I needed extra support with.  Too often, I see corporate TA leaders upset over agency spend and it’s based on the fact they don’t have good recruiters on their team, yet there unwilling to change this fact. I’ll pay for additional short term capacity. I won’t pay for expertise I should have on my team everyday. That becomes my issue!

Corporate TA leaders become frustrated over agency spend because ultimately it’s a reflection on the team they have created.

 

The New “Radio” Job Ads

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Have you listened to an actual radio station lately?

I’m guessing you probably haven’t. You see radio, as a media consumption, is down to 12% of your total consumption, from 19% in 2009.  One big change during that same period, is that a large number are switching to from 25% in 2009 to 55% today. Also, listening off various Apps on your smartphones, in your car, have increased to 35% today. In 2009, it was under 5%!

We are changing the way we consume music and talk programs.  Radio used to be a solid medium to advertise jobs. Especially, those jobs in the service sector, skilled trades, etc.  The advantage of job advertising on the radio was that the radio station had great data on their demographic of listeners. Age, location, gender, income, etc.  This meant you could select fairly accurately who was listening to your job message.

Today, over 140 Million people are listening to Pandora and Spotify.

No longer when entering an office building do you hear the local ‘easy listening’ station, with about 20 minutes of commercials per hour.  Now, you usually hear some version of internet radio, and usually that means Pandora or Spotify.

So, what does this mean for HR and Talent pros who still want to advertise their jobs on radio?

I think there is a huge opportunity, depending on your hiring demographic, to test using Apps like Pandora and Spotify to market your job openings.

Think about the advantages you could get using internet radio for job postings:

– They have similar demographics as traditional radio, plus you can get more targeted by location. Pandora and Spotify take user information to target local advertising, for unpaid subscribers.  Let’s say you have a major competitor in Lincoln Park, IL.  You want to advertise in just that market, and those users who self-identified to be in that market.

– The advertising model is based on impressions, so you can say I have a $100 per day budget, and only want it to run for 5 days. The ads will stop once he limit is hit. If it’s not hit, let’s say your advertising in a small market, the money comes back to you.  So, this type of advertising is fairly inexpensive, as compared to traditional radio and other formats.

– The audience is going to skew millennial and younger.  For those looking to hire in that demo, it’s not a guarantee, but the numbers don’t lie.

Truth be told I haven’t done this, but I would love to hear from someone who has tried this medium for job advertising.  What I know is that there is a huge audience, and almost no employers are advertising in this space.  That means one of two things: 1. It’s ripe for some great, cheap hiring; 2. It’s a total bust.  I don’t think it’s a total bust.  I think it’s just something people haven’t thought of, yet.

Let me know if you try it, and what your results are!

Working for Free – Contingent Search Model Changing

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A funny thing happens when the economy is good. Corporate Talent Acquisition pros believe that agency contingent recruiters should work their job openings like its the most important priority the recruiter has ever had.  There are a couple reasons for this:

1. This opening is the most important priority for the Corporate TA pro, so it should be yours.

2. When the economy was bad, you treated the Corporate TA pro like they were your number one priority.

Then the economy gets good, and the agency folks have choices and now as a Corporate TA pro you find out who your real agency recruiting friends are!  Those who will actually come through for you, when you call on them and tell them you have something urgent.

My Corporate TA friends are the ones who pay me.

Don’t take that wrong.  You see this is the game we all play.  You want me to work your opening, but you ‘really’ don’t want to pay me if you don’t have to.  I get it. You get it. It’s the world of contingency recruitment.  I spend most of my time just trying to truly determine who will pay me for the work I do.  Because most of the work I do is for free.

So, now that the economy is good, way too many Corporate TA pro have unreasonable expectations of their agency counterparts. If I’m working for free, mostly, I’m going to be more picky about who I work for free for.  If you have me work five openings, and you then fill all five on your own, I’m probably not working your ‘urgent’ number six. If you have me work three, and I fill one, I’m helping you out. It’s simple economics.

Something new is being added to the game. This happens when times are good for agency recruiters.  There are two types of recruiting on the agency side:

1. Contingent – see above. Basically, I work for free until I find you someone you want to hire, then you pay me.

2. Retained – You pay me my big fee up front, and I work until I find you the person you want to hire.

Traditionally, retained is really only used for executive search, but when talent is hard to come by, you’ll also see it used in the professional ranks.

Recently, I’ve been seeing a new hybrid model of search show up, called Retained Contingent.  Retained contingent is a mix of both models. It’s still a contingent search, but you’re paying me about 10-20% of the fee up front for me to prioritize your search to the top of the workload.

Let’s say you’re searching for an Engineering Manager for $100K, and signed a 25% fee agreement. The total fee upon placement is $25K. In the Retained Contingent model you would pay me $5K to start the search up front, then $20K upon placement guarantee. If I don’t find the person, after a contracted amount of time, the $5K is for my work, no other fee is owed.

This is a win-win for both the Corporate TA pro and the agency, but only if the Corporate TA pro is sure they want to pay for the search.  If that’s the case, I want the benefit of retained focus and prioritization, without the risk of paying the full fee up front and having the firm not come through with a successful hire.

I don’t want to take you cash and then fail. You’ll make sure everyone knows I failed.  But, I also have limited resources and want to focus those resources on the best clients. We both have skin in the game.  That creates a partnership. That creates success.

Just wait. You’ll see a lot more of this over the next five to ten years.  Corporate TA pros are getting smarter, and so are the agency pros.  In the end, both sides want value for their work.

Hiring Is About To Get Really Difficult!

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One thing was abundantly clear from speakers and thought leaders at SHRM 2015, hiring is hard, and it’s about to get much harder!

That isn’t good news for any of us in HR and Talent Acquisition. There are two forces that are currently happening that are making hiring more difficult than it has been in over ten years:

  1. Solid economy and job growth.
  1. Baby Boomers leaving the workforce.

This isn’t earth shattering information, we all kind of new this was happening.  The issue is we are now all beginning to feel this in every part of the country and in almost every job category.  This means some things are going to happen, and the top HR and Talent Pros are already preparing for these:

  • Wage Growth: CareerBuilder CEO Matt Ferguson spoke at SHRM on Tuesday and had some great data showing that organizations see wage growth of around 5% in 2015, and similar in years to come. Are you budgeting 5% increases? I’m guessing not!
  • Recruitment Process Challenges: How many steps does it take to apply for a job in your organization?  If it’s more than two, you’ve got problems!  Can someone apply for a job online with your organization without having a resume? Why not?  Matt also showed data from CareerBuilder showing 40% of HR and Talent Pros have never applied for one of their own jobs to better understand the true experience!
  • Technology Challenges: Do you have a way to reengage candidates in your system on a regular basis?  A system that allows you to let great talent know, that you already have in your system, when you have an opening that fits them? It’s called CRM, and only about 20% of companies have technology that can do this important recruitment marketing function!
  • Job Design Challenges: Too many of us are working and designing jobs like we are living in a society that was pre-internet, pre-ultra connected. We still think we need employees sitting in front of us from 8-5pm, Monday thru Friday. If they aren’t sitting in front of us, they must not be working! Indeed shared that 80% of job searches on their site include this single word: “Remote”!  Are you adjusting those jobs that can be flexible?

Those organizations that believe they can recruit and get talent like they have been doing for the last couple of decades are going to fail.  It’s really that simple.  Talent attraction will be a powerful strategic differentiator for organizations over the next decade, like almost no other time in our history.

The good news?  At no other point in our history do have access to the information on how to be successful!  Twenty years ago, doing great talent acquisition was mostly trying stuff and getting lucky.  In today’s world you can learn easily how the best organizations are attracting talent at conferences, on websites, in blogs, webinars, etc.  There are so many sources of this information, that we now have no excuse to improve what we are doing.  We just have to do it!

 

Too Small, Too Slow, To Succeed

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Regular readers of this blog know I’m a huge Michigan State fan, and a basketball fan. So, this week, when the Golden State Warriors won the 2015 NBA Finals I was excited.  Not because I’m a big Warriors fan, although I do love their style of plan, but because former Sparty, Draymond Green, is on the Warriors and played his butt off!

Three years ago Draymond was the National Collegiate Player of the year, then he got drafted in the second round.  Normally, a player reaching that level is a for sure lottery pick, but DayDay was told he was too small, too slow, didn’t have enough skill to play in the NBA.  What they didn’t measure was his ability to lead and his heart to win:

CBSSports.com’s Zach Harper captured Green yelling to his mother, Mary Babers-Green, “Mom, they told me I can’t play in this league!”…”That’s what they said,” Green said postgame. “I won the national player of the year award in college. Consensus all-American. I made every single first-team all-American [team] that you could possibly make. And I was a second-round pick and a lot of people said I could never play in this league. Too slow, too small, can’t shoot well enough, can’t defend nobody, what does he do well? He doesn’t have a skill that stands out. I got heart and that’s what stands out.”

Constantly, throughout the playoffs you heard the Warrior players and coaches say that Draymond was the heart and soul of this team.

That’s the secret sauce to hiring.  You need to hire more employees like Draymond Green.

Employees who appreciate the opportunity they’ve been given.  Want to prove to everyone they are better than other think, but confident in their own abilities.  Willing to work harder than almost everyone else to make it happen.

Sounds easy, right!?!

It’s not, it’s almost impossible to find individuals that have those traits and also fit within your culture!  The Warriors got lucky.  Second round picks in the NBA are throw away picks, most of those players never make an NBA roster.  You can get lucky as well.

Most of the traits you are looking for can be screened if you’re looking for them. The problem is we are usually screening for two or three main criteria when looking at candidates: Do you have the skills for the job? Are you willing to accept the salary we have for this job? Are you ‘hickey’ free? If yes to all three, move forward to hiring manager.

This is where we fail. Things like heart and passion and desire are the differentiators that make someone success. You still need to have the skill, but all skills being close, you then need the intangibles.  Too often we choose someone based on their skill was slightly better.  Once you get to a certain point in skill, a little more skill doesn’t make that much of a difference.

At that point you want to look someone who has a chip on their shoulder. Something to prove. To show the world, yes, I can do it.

“Mom, they told me I couldn’t play in this league!”  Said the man holding the championship trophy.