Category Archives: Staffing

LinkedIn “Open Candidates” Is Going To Get People Fired

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By now you’ve heard the news coming out last week’s LinkedIn Talent Connect where LI announced a new feature called “Open Candidates”. Here’s how LinkedIn explains Open Candidates:

Open Candidates is a new feature that makes it easier to connect with your dream job by privately signaling to recruiters that you’re open to new job opportunities. You can specify the types of companies and roles you are most interested in and be easily found by the hundreds of thousands of recruiters who use LinkedIn to find great professional talent…

To enable the feature, simply turn sharing “On” and fill in some brief information about the types of roles you are interested in. Who among us hasn’t, at some point, tried to find work without our boss finding out? Now, you can privately indicate to recruiters on LinkedIn without worrying. We will hide the Open Candidates signal from recruiters at your company or affiliated company recruiters.

So, now if you’re a LI user you can let companies know you’re full on looking to change jobs without having to post it in your profile title and let the entire world know you’re looking.

So, is this a good thing? 

I have some feelings on this:

– First, this is brilliant from employer’s perspective! I can now call my buddy over at XYZ company, have him pull up his LI account and tell me exactly which employees of mine are looking for jobs. I can then pull up my account and tell her which of her employees are looking.

– If you want to turn on the “Open Candidates” feature in LI it would be best to assume that your organization’s recruiting/hr team will find out you’re looking like I mentioned above!

– Most organizations freak out when they find that their employees are out looking for jobs on company time. It’s one thing to say, “Oh, I’m just using LI at work because I’m ‘professionally networking’, not looking for a job!” It’s another when they know you’ve turned on the feature and are actually getting paid to look for your next job. That usually gets you fired.

Now, I’m sure LI will say, “Tim is just saying something that very few recruiters will actually do.” They might be right, but it was the actual first thing that came into my mind when heard of the new feature. How to get around it, and I was at HR Tech with other TA and HR leaders who felt the same way.

TA Leaders love this feature! For the first time, they’ll now actually get to find out for real what employees of theirs are actively looking and actually doing it on company time.

So, Open Candidates is not something you should fear as an employer. Embrace it! This might be best new feature LI has launched in years for employers to finally know which of their employees are actually on the market. It’s brilliant!

Check back next week when I start my blog series on how to have conversations with all of your employees who you find on LI actively looking to leave your organization!

The Cost of a New Hire is $1000-$5000!?

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Ryan Holmes, the CEO at HootSuite, recently posted an article over at LinkedIn. Ryan is, of course, an “Influencer” for LinkedIn, because he’s a CEO and because he works for a cool brand like Hootsuite. Who cares if he knows what he’s talking about, he’s from Hootsuite, muthfucka!! He must be influential!

Anywho.

Ryan was actually talking about Google’s “bungee” program (see if you’re influential you talk about Google!) and how millennials only care about being developed. Because if we know anything we know young people are great judges of what they actually want. So, Ryan and Hootsuite are actually coming up with their own copycat program and calling it “stretch”.

This program basically allows Hootsuite employees to try out other roles within Hootsuite one day per week, and if it goes well to eventually into that role full time. The basis of the program being that “great employees will be great employees in any role, given the change”.

But, one other big thing jumped out from the post. Remember this is a CEO of a major company. He based all of this program on cost of turnover and believes his cost of turnover is $5000 per employee leaving! $5000!? Now, if you spent 17 seconds in Talent Acquisition you know there is no way $5000 covers the cost of a top employee, probably not even a crappy employee.

SHRM, and other organizations, continually throw numbers at HR and TA that say they believe the cost of turnover is usually 1 to 1.5 times the salary of the person leaving. Do you see the problem with the HR math we have?

CEO believes that it cost $5000 to replace an IT Developer in your company making $85,000. You believe is costs $85,000-125,000 to replace that person. THIS is a major problem and disconnect!

It would be easy for me to say, “well Ryan just pulled some bad data from some crappy content put together by a TA tech vendor to help shape their own story”, but it’s truly the reality for most executives. This is why I constantly caution TA pros and leaders to stop using the 1-1.5 times metric and start asking your executives what they think it is.

In my experience, what I find is most executives, for a professional position will usually give you a number around $10,000. The biggest miss of executives is they never calculate the revenue and profit a great employee produces versus a bad employee or having that position left open. This is where the SHRM number comes from.

This is problematic because most executives won’t tie revenue numbers to someone who’s not in sales, wrongly, since everyone in your organization has an impact on revenue and profit. So, you can fight this battle, which you’ll mostly lose, or you can just go with what they believe and build your story from there.

$5,000-$10,000 per lost employee aren’t small numbers, it’s still significant dollars to work with as a TA leader, and you’ll get better buy-in from CEOs like Ryan!

 

Free Agent Nation: Using Talent Assessments To Build Your Superteam

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Anyone else amazed by the USA performance at the Rio Olympic Games?  Just us?

If you’re responsible for hiring and developing people, then you’d love to build a dominating team of individuals like the USA Olympic Swimming and Women’s Gymnastics teams. But how do you do it?  Executives and hiring managers tell you that the world of talent selection and team building is more art than science. Susie the manager brags about her great “gut feelings” when she hires people.

Susie’s gut feel success rate?  Um, not so good.  You’d never put Susie in charge of our Olympic talent.

You need tools to help you pick more winners. Then it would be nice to use the same tools to maximize their chances for success in that freak show you call a company, right?

That’s why we’re back with our latest version of the FOT Webinar, brought to you by our friends at OutMatch. Join us on September 29th at 2pm ET (1pm Central, 11am Pacific) for Free Agent Nation – Using Talent Assessments to Build Your Superteam (Click to Register) and we’ll give you the following goodies:

—How to research/implement assessments (and avoid getting sued) and sell the concept of leveraging external assessments to the company bigwigs. We’ll tell you how to vet assessment providers, figure out your biggest need, and partner with a firm to design an assessment process that works. Then we’ll give you the roadmap on how to get the buy-in you need to get this process started.

—How to use the profiles of your existing team to understand the candidates in your recruiting funnel that have the best chance at succeeding AND raising the overall performance of your team. You need performance.  You also need someone that can blend with the team you have and make it better.  We’ll show you how to use existing team profiles to spot the right fit.

—How to use your assessment platform to give your managers incredible leverage to onboard their new hires, with a focus on what makes each employee special – as well as what could hurt them in your unique culture.

—A roadmap for how your managers can embed behavioral observations into their performance coaching, with an eye on emphasizing each employee’s behavioral strengths while neutralizing the weaknesses that we all have.

Whether you need help getting started with or would like to do more with talent assessments once an employee has joined your company (90%+ of the world, btw), we’ve got something for you on this webinar.

Susie the manager isn’t bad, she’s just human. Join us on September 29th at 2pm ET (1pm Central, 11am Pacific) for Free Agent Nation – Using Talent Assessments to Build Your Superteam (Click to Register) and we’ll give you the plan to get started or do more with the assessments you already have!

Recruiting Secret #4

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Everyone wants to know the secret to great recruiting. Candidates want to know how to get into companies. Recruiters want to know each other’s secrets to finding great talent. No one seems to be sharing their secrets, so I thought I might as well fill everyone in…

Recruiting Secret #4

Hiring managers are more likely to hire someone who looks like them because there is a much less chance that the person they are hiring will ever accuse them of bias behavior.

Hiring managers in today’s employers are running scared! If I’m a male and I hire another male, I know that hire will never say I’m “Sexist”. If I’m a white dude and I hire another white dude, that hire won’t say I’m “racist”. Even though that behavior is probably indicative.

Hiring managers (male and female) are more likely to hire someone who looks most like them because they believe it’s a ‘safe’ hire. Safe they won’t get themselves in some kind of trouble.

 

Recruiting Secret #5

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Everyone wants to know the secret to great recruiting. Candidates want to know how to get into companies. Recruiters want to know each other’s secrets to finding great talent. No one seems to be sharing their secrets, so I thought I might as well fill everyone in…

Recruiting Secret #5

I haven’t read a cover letter to a resume since 1999.

If you are sending a cover letter with your resume, the recruiter that is receiving that letter thinks you’re a moron. If you’re being told to develop and send a cover letter, the person telling you to do that is a moron.

Cover letters died when ATSs began accepting applications and resumes. At this point, even if you are able to upload a cover letter, no hiring managers are ever going to see that, and most recruiters will never read a sentence of it either!

Want to live like a rock star? Move to Detroit!

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Glassdoor recently published a list of the Top 25 Cities where your pay will go the furthest. Who topped the list!? Yep, it’s DETROIT! GD found that the Cost of Living ratio in Detroit is 50%! That basically means that when living in Detroit you get to use 50% of your income for things other than bills! What is the Cost of Living ratio in San Fransisco (the lowest of all American cities)? 11%! Basically, you only get to use, for your own enjoyment $.10 of every dollar you earn in San Fran!

What is the Cost of Living ratio in San Fransisco (the lowest of all American cities)? 11%! Basically, you only get to use, for your own enjoyment $.10 of every dollar you earn in San Fran!

So, if you read this blog a couple times you know I’m a fan of Detroit! Everyone loves a comeback story and Detroit might be the single biggest comeback story on the planet right now. Being at the top of this list just confirms what others in and around the Midwest have already been seeing.

Here’s the Top 10 in order:

  1. Detroit, MI
  2. Memphis, TN
  3. Pittsburgh, PA
  4. Cleveland, OH
  5. Indianapolis, IN
  6. St. Louis, MO
  7. Cincinnati, OH
  8. Birmingham, AL
  9. Kansas City, MO
  10. Louisville, KY

So, what jumps out about this list?  For the most part, it’s mid-sized, midwest cities.  Low cost of living. Four seasons. A lot of Applebee’s restaurants (at least that’s what the people on the coasts think!). One southern city on the list in Bham – which I hear from Kris Dunn and Dawn Burke is a hidden treasure.

I’m a midwest guy, born and raised. Went to college in the front range of the Rocky Mountains. Have visited every big city in the U.S., multiple times. Big cities are great, but not the best place to raise a family. California’s weather is awesome if you like paying $1 million dollars for 700 square foot home next to a highway.

The reality is startups and Fortune 500 companies are beginning to see what Glassdoor found in putting this list together. Google has a growing campus in Ann Arbor, MI, located about 40 miles from downtown Detroit, about 15 miles from the Detroit airport. It’s easier to attract and retain a Midwest workforce than it is when you’re primarily trying to recruit to the coasts.

This is especially true when your workforce starts to get to the age where they want to settle down, start a family and buy a house. Sure, it’s fairly easy to get college-aged kids to relocate from the midwest to California, New York or Boston. The trick is keeping them there! In Michigan, I see this every summer. The kids come back to have their weddings. Once they’re back, they begin to feel that pull to stay ‘home’.

This is why Midwest companies that are great at recruiting all have some sort of Boomerang recruitment strategy. Most are diving deep in their databases to find students who graduated over the past five years and building a database of 1-5 year experienced pros they are reaching out to constantly, ‘welcoming’ them to come back and enjoy the riches of the Midwest!

The 7 Brutal Truths About Recruiting No One Wants to Admit

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Don’t you love Clickbait titles!?  I mean you read that title and you’re like, “JFC, Tim! Okay, I need to see what crazy sh*t he’s going to say about recruiting and who he pisses off today!”

Okay, so, here you go!

I recently got back from CareerBuilder’s Empower. It’s basically a recruiting conference for CB clients. Empower had a great recruiting content for both sides. Both corporate recruiters and agency recruiters were in attendance. You can easily spot the two groups. The agency recruiters wear suits and have big watches. Watches so big Flavor Flav would be jealous. The suits aren’t your dad’s suit, either, they’re the new ‘modern’ fit suits that look like they might be one size too small.

The agency guys don’t care. They’re making twice what the corporate sap makes, who is wearing either jeans and button-down or Khakis and a button-down. I’ll say most of the corporate TA ladies dress smart and stylish, most are also former agency recruiters!

Being surrounded by 1,000 recruiters always helps remind you why so many folks dislike the industry and function of recruiting. Here’s my take:

1. There’s no difference between selling cars and recruiting. In cars sales you make the car look as great as you can, even when it’s a piece of sh*t. In recruiting you make the organization and the hiring manager look as great as possible, even when they’re a piece of Sh*t.

2. Recruiting has nothing to do with Quality. Recruiting is all about speed. Every recruiter wants to argue it’s about quality, but it’s not. It’s not because you don’t actually know if someone is a quality hire until about a year into position, for most roles. Recruiting is about filling positions as fast as you can with the best talent that is available at the time you’re actually looking to fill the position.

3. The majority of Recruiting leaders have no idea what they’re doing. That sounds harsh, doesn’t it? It’s mostly true for a couple of reasons. First, TA was a dead function for about 8-10 years in most organizations during the recession, so most TA leaders either weren’t in TA or weren’t developed. Second, the technology is evolving so quickly, 99% of TA leaders can’t keep up with it. So, you get a mix of incompetence and old school know-how.

4. Real Recruiters have figured out Employment Branding has little impact in filling positions. Great recruiters can fill roles in a company that has no brand, or a negative brand, it makes no difference to them. What real recruiters understand is that the majority of the population pays little attention to your employment brand. Great TA comes mainly from great recruitment marketing (which I know some of you will argue is all about branding). You can be great at recruitment marketing and still have a brand no one knows about and fill your positions.

5. Your organization would fill openings with or without a Recruiting Team. Ugh! That one hurts, but it’s true. I speak with organizations every week that don’t have TA and don’t use agencies, but still fill positions. What!? How can that be!? The executives, the hiring managers, etc. all do it. They own their own staff and make sure they find people to fill the needs they have. As an organization grows this becomes harder, but not impossible.

6. Corporate recruiters will always be less effective to Agency recruiters until you change your compensation. Corporate recruiters only have to work as hard as the weakest recruiter on the team. Agency recruiters have to work to eat. Corporate TA leaders would do well to add some incentive to the compensation mix to their teams that is directly tied to individual recruiting accomplishments of the roles they fill.

7. 90% of your positions are filled by candidates finding you, not a Recruiter finding them. Take a look at your source of hires, how many are sourced directly by one of your recruiters reaching out to a candidate that didn’t first reach out to you? This number will put that giant corporate TA recruiting salary into perspective! I can find a great admin pro to run a TA process for $15-18/hr.

What are your brutal truths about recruiting? Hit me in the comments.

An Introvert’s Guide to Recruiting Top Tech Talent

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Step 1: Listen really carefully to what your mind is telling you.

Step 2: Call someone who knows how to recruit and enjoys having one hundred small conversations per day and quickly building relationships with people they might never talk to again.

Step 3: Quit your job as a Recruiter.

Step 4: Find a career that values Introverts.

Step 5: Take that job.

Step 6: Tell your introverted friends to never go into Recruiting.

 

Thanks for the inspiration Heather Bussing, and check out her Introvert’s Guide to the HR Technology Conference. 

College Students Don’t Know You Want Them!

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For part of my career, I did the standard corporate college recruiting gig. It sounds “super-cool” when you first think about it. “Wait, I get to fly around the country and go the best college campuses and recruit people who actually want to be recruited?!”

The reality is college recruiting as a corporate recruiter is much less sexy. Think a lot of Courtyard Marriotts, a pizza, and a six-pack, while you watch crapping hotel TV and follow up on work email. Then wake up early and get to the next campus. You quickly begin to hate travel, hate college campuses and miss actually being in the office!

But, corporations believe they must be on campus to recruit the best and brightest college students. Here where the problem begins. College students don’t even know you’re there! A recent study by Walker Sands found out that the majority of college students don’t even know you were on campus:

Walker Sands’ new Perceptions of Consulting Careers study, 56 percent of college students don’t even know if consulting firms recruit at their school. On top of that, 82 percent feel that major firms only recruit from a limited group of select universities.
Okay, this study focused on consulting firms, but the reality is the students don’t really know the difference between Deloitte and Dell when it comes to getting a job!
What can you do to make your company stand out and be remembered while you’re on campus? Try these five things:
1. Develop a Pre-visit communication strategy. Work with the schools you want to recruit from most to find out how you can get your message in front of them (email, text, student newspaper, billboards on campus, etc.). Each school has a way to reach every student, you need to find out what that is, and how you can tap into that, even it costs a little money.
2. Come in early and take over classes in the majors you’re most interested in. Professors are like most people, they don’t want to work hard if they don’t have to. So, if you build 45 minutes of great content, most Professors will let you ‘guest’ lecture as long as it’s not one big sales pitch. Come up with great contact professors will find valuable for their students, then go deliver it the day before the major career fair. Then invite each class to come see you.
3. Make a splash in high traffic areas the day of your visit. College kids haven’t changed much, they like free food and drink, free stuff, basically anything free! So, find the highest traffic area on campus and give away free stuff college kids will like. If you’re only interested in one specific school within the university, find out where those students hang out.
4. Stay a day later after everyone else leaves. Whether it’s the day after or even another time altogether, find a time to be on campus when you don’t have any competition to getting your message out. 99% of employers only show up on career fair day. Stand out and be the employer that is there when no one else is!
5. Post-visit communication strategy. Most organizations never contact the students who show interest in them after they leave campus.  They’ll contact a handful of the ones who stood out to them, but so is every other employer. Recruiting kids after you leave is more important than the time you spend on campus. Most kids will see 20+ employers and will only remember a couple. If you stalk them after the fact, they’ll remember you!

Live from CareerBuilder’s Empower

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I’m on the road at CareerBuilder’s Empower conference in Chicago.  This is the second annual conference designed for corporate talent acquisition and staffing agency pros. This year CB made a ton of changes to make it better from a content perspective for sure!

The first event last year seemed to be one giant commercial for CareerBuilder broken up by big name keynotes and food and drink.  It was fun, but not sure how much content and takeaways anyone really got.  This year’s Empower was totally revamped and after Day 1, I don’t think I really heard one product pitch at all!

Here are some takeaways from Day 1 at Empower:

– Sessions are practitioner-led for the most part. Great Day 1 speakers included: Kris Dunn, Jason Lauritsen, Stacy Zapar, Glen Cathey, and many others. This lineup is packed with practical takeaways that folks could take back to their shops and immediately put into action! Plus, the speakers are fun and engaging. CB did a great job putting the agenda together.

– Shinola (the Detroit Watchmaking Company) President Jacques Panis stole the Keynote show for the day. In an election year that’s all about asking ourselves whether America is great or not and how it needs to change, Panis gave a glimpse of how American companies, making American products, with American workers, is what is really great about America.

– CareerBuilder runs a first class conference and the conference this year was free for CB clients to attend. This means you need to cut money from other things like giant name keynotes and entertainment. What CB realizes is that recruiters don’t really need that stuff anyway! Give us great content and some good food and drinks, and we’ll entertain ourselves!

Best moment of the conference:

Panis from Shinola was being interviewed on stage and they opened up the mics for the audience to ask questions. One guy gets up and speaks a little bit about the challenges of hiring workers in Downtown Detroit, and asks, “Do you hire felons?”  Panis, without pause, said, “Well, they hired me!”

It brought down the house, and then he went off on a rant about America’s justice system and how we lock up way too many people in this country.  He spoke from the heart. He talked about how once you get into the system in this country you know longer have hope. He didn’t have all the answers to fix it, but one of his answers was that his company, Shinola, hires former convicts and gives them hope.

It was a great American story. Panis’s speaking fee was $50,000, and I’m sure the CB folks cringed when he told the audience this. He also donated all $50,000 to youth organizations in Detroit including the downtown boxing league that supports getting kids off the streets and teaching them discipline by providing an outlet and support.