Category Archives: strategy

The 2016 Fall Michigan Recruiter’s Conference!

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This is the third annual conference we’ve done and they just keep getting bigger and better! We’ll have 150 Corporate TA Pros and Leaders joining us this conference, all working to become the best damn TA pros we can be!

This year’s lineup includes:

– Laurie Ruettimann – Mrs. Punkrock HR-Cynical Girl-Marathon Runner!

– Gerry Crispin – The Godfather of Candidate Experience & Co-Founder of CareerXRoads!

– Ambrosia Vertesi – Mrs. HR Open Source

– Chris Bailey – Mr. TEDx Seven Mile Beach, the King of Cayman Islands HR & Anything Over Ice!

– Kerri Mills – 2015 SourceCon Grandmaster Sourcing Champion, Indeed TA Pro & @TheJobGirl

Friday, October 14th onsite at the Amway World Headquarters in Grand Rapids, Michigan!  You can check out more details here – Michigan Recruits! 

Registration is now open! It’s $49! Why?  Because we think paying thousands of dollars to attend a great conference is out of reach for most Talent Acquisition budgets! At least it was in almost every organization I went to!  We wanted to bring great recruiting content, national level content, to our own backyard in Michigan!

REGISTER HERE! (It’s filling up quickly, we have limited space!)

We’ve designed this conference to be a corporate Talent Acquisition safe-zone! What does that mean?  Third party agency recruiters will not be invited. It’s not that we don’t like the agency folks. It’s that agency folks can’t shut themselves off when it comes to selling!  We want an environment that is about learning and development, about raising the recruiting game of all those attending.

Check it out! You won’t find a better one-day lineup anywhere in the world for $49! It’s crazy. Also, a big shout out to our two main sponsors – ViziRecruiter and CareerBuilder – without them we couldn’t keep it this cheap!

 

T3 – @SocialTalent – Recruitment Training

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This week on T3 I review the recruiter/sourcing training platform Social Talent. Okay, before we get started on Social Talent, I have a confession to make. I’ve actually known about Social Talent for a while but haven’t written about them because I was taking my entire team through their training! I didn’t write about them because I didn’t want to share how awesome it is!

Social talent is an on-demand platform that trains your recruiters to get a ‘black belt’ in internet recruitment. Social Talent also has an advanced black belt and an inclusion and diversity recruitment certification. The program is micro-video driven, enforces learning through quick quizzes on the learning and of course the big black belt certification assessment at the end.

The program is recruiter-driven and takes about an hour or so per week to complete, over 16 weeks. My recruiters actually spend a little more time than an hour per week because Social Talent continually adds in the newest information around sourcing and recruiting and the platform constantly engages your recruiters to learn more and get higher level skills.

5 Things I really like about Social Talent:

1. Built by recruiters for recruiters. The platform is built around learning, recruiting and performing. The training has changed the way my recruiters tackle an opening and opened up the number of sources each of them uses.

2. The bite-sized video in Social Talent is consumed easily and reinforced by practice. The training is developed in a way that allows both new recruiters and experienced recruiters to get the most out of it.

3. Social Talent isn’t only teaching the tech skills of Boolean Search, Advanced LinkedIn searching, etc., it’s teaching recruiters to build their own personal brand and how, to build networks and pipelines, and how to build your employer brand.  It’s the gift and the curse of the platform, your recruiters will make themselves more valuable by going through this training. This is true development for recruiters just not skill-enhancement.

4. Metrics platform gives talent acquisition manager great insight to who is using the platform, how they are using the platform and gives them the ability to send social positive reinforcement. One of the best training platforms for recruiting I’ve seen that truly helps you ensure you get full user adoption and most out of your investment.

5. Ongoing bi-weekly live training sessions to reinforce all the new skills that your recruiters are learning, plus gives it lets them challenge the Social Talent team on their harderst searches and shows them exactly how the ‘pros’ would use the system.

I have to say this again, I didn’t want to share this with you because I truly believe it gives my recruiters a competitive advantage over every other company who doesn’t use it! But, I started T3 to share, so asmuch as this hurts me, I’m sharing this with you.

Socical Talent is the single best recruiter training tool I’ve used in my twenty-plus years of recruiting and managing recruiting teams. It’s not a small investment, but I can tell you that my team took full advantage and we feel like we’ve gotten a full return on our investment and my team, across the board loves it!

Check them out, you won’t be disappointed!

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 HR, 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.

Inbound Recruiting Is Killing Your Talent

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Most recruiting done today is inbound recruiting. This is organizations posting jobs everywhere, people seeing these jobs and then applying. These candidates are coming ‘inbound’ to you in some form or fashion – into your ATS, into your email, showing up at your front door, whatever it takes for them to find you.

Outbound, then, is the opposite. It’s you finding them.

Too much inbound recruiting kills your overall talent.

Why?

Inbound recruiting relies on active applicants. There are hundreds of studies about who is actually active, but most fall around the 20-25% of the total workforce are actively looking for a new job (this includes those unemployed looking and employed). So, you’re filling most of your jobs with 20-25% of the overall talent that is available.

You aren’t even touching 75-80% of the total workforce by using inbound recruiting. But, Inbound Recruiting is great because that 25% is still a huge number and boy can we still get a bunch of applicants and, well, it’s easier.

I don’t have stats on this (if you find them please share!) but I would guess 90% of organizations only use Inbound Recruiting!

Now, a bunch of people will tell you that ‘active’ applicants aren’t the only thing. CareerBuilder’s Talent Behavior study recently found that if you combine Active and Those Open to Hearing About Openings that number climbs from 25% to 75%! Okay, now we’re talking! The problem is that extra 50% isn’t responding to your Inbound Strategy!

To get the full 75% of the workforce who might be interested in your job you must have outbound recruiting strategies. These include getting your butt on the phone and talking people into why you’re the best damn place on the planet to work! These people might actually love you as much as those people who are freely sending you their resume, but they’re waiting for you to contact them!

This is confusing to many people in Talent Acquisition.

If you only post jobs and wait to see who applies to your posts, no matter how many places you post, you’re only possibly getting 1 out of 4 possible candidates.  In a perfect scenario of using both inbound and outbound, you could get 3 out of 4. No one gets 4 out of 4 because about a quarter of the workforce is considered truly passive, meaning you and G*d couldn’t talk them into leaving their current job.

Also, you calling a candidate who has applied to your job is not considered outbound recruiting! You need to go out and find talent that doesn’t even know you have a job opening and entice them to apply, to fall in love with you, to show interest! This is ‘real’ recruiting. This is the recruiting most organizations have lost, or never had, to begin with.

This is why sourcing became a thing. Sourcing, in its best form in a corporate structure, is only about outbound recruiting. About uncovering that talent that most organizations aren’t even going after and getting them interested in your organization.

The interesting piece to all of this is annual TA spend. Take a look at your own inbound vs. outbound spend. What I find is most organizations tell me they want the best talent but they are spending the majority of their budget going after the minority of the talent. Shouldn’t it be the other way around, the majority of your budget going after the majority of talent?

Great Talent Supports Great Talent

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Too often leaders put up with a great talent who’s shitty to other employees. The belief is that because the employee is so talented we should be willing to put up with how they treat others. It happens all the time in organizations! All. The. Time.

Ichiro Suzuki is a very successful Major League Baseball player for the Seattle Mariners who just hit his 3,000 hit in the major leagues, that just adds to his thousand plus hits he had in the Japanese professional baseball league. All those hits make him arguably the greatest hitter of all time at the professional level of baseball.

ESPN did an article about Ichiro recently as he was coming very close to the 3,000 hit milestone in the MLB, a very rare feat. What most people don’t know is Ichiro almost left the MLB after only one season because his teammates treated him so badly:

“Suzuki explained later that in the middle of his career with the Mariners, when the team wasn’t playing well but he was an All-Star and Gold Glove winner, his teammates called him selfish and said that he cared only about individual accolades. After Griffey, Sweeney and Ibanez arrived, he says, they stood up for him and encouraged their teammates to worry about their own play first.”

It wasn’t until Seattle brought in other MLB All-Stars that Ichiro felt welcomed. Great talent, supports great talent. Okay, everyone on an MLB roster is talented, but even within those rosters, there are levels of talent. Ichiro is a hall of fame talent. Griffey is a hall of famer.

The point to all of this is your best talent should support the other best talent of your organization.  If you have great talent that isn’t supporting each other, you need to make a move. Great talent is talented if they don’t support the other talent in the organization. That might be the single most difficult thing for leaders to understand.

Your talent is wasted if you can’t find ways to lift up the other talent around you. Seattle was able to find talent that was willing to do that and Ichiro turned his talent into one of the greatest of all time, but he was also very close to just packing it in and going home.

I wonder how much talent walks out your door based on how they are being treated by others in your organization?

I Need A Nurse, Stat!

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In the United States, we are facing a major nursing crisis, unlike anything we have ever seen. If you’re in the healthcare industry, you already know this and you’re living this nightmare each day.

Your recruiters are beyond frustrated in trying to fill openings, only to have more nurses leave every day. So, what can you do?

Join Cathy Henesey, ASHHRA Board member, and Director of Talent Acquisition & Workforce Planning at AMITA Health and myself for a free webinar hosted by CareerBuilder that will outline 10 things you should be doing to fill your nursing openings! The webinar is August 3rd at 1pm EST. 

What can you expect to hear:

  • Old school and new school ways to recruit great talent to your hospital or health system.
  • Metrics around what recruiting pools will be most effective for you to be fishing in.
  • What best practice organizations are doing right now to retain their healthcare talent so they don’t have to fill as many openings!
  • What technology is worth the investment when it comes to purchasing recruiting tech.

Register Here! 

It will be fun, fast-paced hour packed full of great tips and ideas to help you energize your recruiting shop!

The Rooney Rules Killed NFL Diversity Hiring

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What the heck is the Rooney Rule?

“The Rooney Rule is a National Football League policy that requires league teams to interview minority candidates for head coaching and senior football operation jobs. It is sometimes cited as an example of affirmative action, though there is no quota or preference given to minorities in the hiring of candidates.”

Basically, in 2003 the NFL decided that finally, enough was enough in a league where the majority of its players are black and the majority of its head coaches are white. The Rooney Rule was established to try and fix this issue. When it first started it was more effective than previous hiring cycles and 26% of hires in the NFL for head coaches were of minority hires.

ESPN’s Outside the Lines discovered the problem has gotten worse, not better, over the past five years only where 1 out of 22 hires has been a minority head coach.

So, what happened?

It’s classic corporate problem fixing. The try and cure a symptom of the problem and not the problem. Follow my logic:

  1. We need more minority hires!
  2. The problem is perceived to be we don’t hire minorities, if we did, it would solve our problem. Minority coaches are just as good as white coaches, they just aren’t getting interviews.
  3. Look it works! We started mandating you had to interview minorities and instantly minority hiring went up. Give us a trophy!

Then, it stops working.

The Rooney Rule stopped working because interviewing potential minority head coaches was not the issue. The issue is we have a lack of minority coaches in general. I’m not sure why this is, but I have a theory.

When I was growing up many of my white male friends had a dream. That dream was to play college sports. Probably very similar to most black males of that same age. The other part of that dream was that would come back, teach gym and coach. I think this is where the paths separated in the coaching funnel.

I have three sons, all of whom play sports. When I hear them talk with their friends, I still hear the difference. The white kids want to be teachers and coach as a profession. The black kids don’t talk about this path as often. All of them want to play college athletics, but it would seem from my experience that at some point white kids believe teaching and coaching as a viable career and blacks are less likely to believe this is their career path.

Obviously, this is very anecdotal. I’m one guy with one experience, but I did coach youth sports for 17 years and saw this happen time and time again.

The Rooney Rule is failing not because minorities aren’t getting interviewed. The Rooney Rule is failing because not enough minorities are getting an opportunity to coach, or are not choosing the coaching path as a career.  One other issue that comes into play here is obtaining at least a four-year college degree and the access to affordable education.

For those who don’t know most NFL coaches get their start by coaching in the NCAAs. To coach in the NCAAs you must have a four-year degree at almost every school I’ve ever heard of. In fact, there have been NCAA head coaches fired for lying about having a degree and it was found they actually didn’t when switching jobs and the new institution did a degree verification.

So, why should you care about NFL diversity hiring?

In a nutshell, this is all of our organizations trying to diversify our workforce.  If you don’t try and fix the real problem, getting minorities to believe your profession is a viable career path, you’re never going to fix your issue, you’re just going to poach the few in the field from each other.  That means you need specific minority scholarship programs, minority internship programs, etc. At a level, that is commensurate with the level of hiring you’re trying to achieve!

I hear executives all the time talk about increasing minority hiring, but it’s just talk, not programs and dollars. This is the NFL’s issue as well. The NFL needs to specific program under the Rooney Rules that gets teams to hire more minority coaches in general, not just head coaches. They’ve begun with the NFL Minority Fellowship, which in 2015 had 134 participants, and their is hope this will have an impact in the future. Programs like these are what organizations need if you’re serious about diversity hiring.

The True Cost of a Bad Hire

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If there is one constant in HR and Recruiting it is the fact that no one will ever agree on how much a bad hire costs an organization!  Never!  It doesn’t matter how much time you put into coming up with some algorithm, how much research to back up your numbers, it’s still going to be 90% subjective/soft numbers at best.

This is the main reason executives in our organizations think the majority of HR/Talent Pros in the world don’t get business!   We come to them with stuff like this:

“We need to reduce turnover because of Engineer who leaves us, costs the company $7,345,876.23!”

Then you go through a 73 slide PowerPoint deck showing how you came up with the calculations all the way down the parking meter expense during the interview, and when you’re done, no one believes you’re even close to an actual number.

The gang over at National Business Research Institute put together a pretty good infographic proving my point – take a look:

NBRI - The Cost of a Bad Hire Infographic

97%+ of the ‘lost’ cost is from “Training” and “Productivity Loss” and those, my friends, are considered very subjective measures in almost all organizations.  What that says is, ‘Oh, Jimmy isn’t working out – fire him – and because he wasn’t working out we lost ‘X’ percent of productivity over any other possible replacement (which in itself is a whole other leap)’.  And, we lost 100% of training we put into Jimmy because he is now not here.  Which again is subjective, since most training isn’t one-on-one, and resources used to train are almost always not used just on one person, etc.

What that says is, ‘Oh, Jimmy isn’t working out – fire him – and because he wasn’t working out we lost ‘X’ percent of productivity over any other possible replacement (which in itself is a whole other leap)’.  And, we lost 100% of training we put into Jimmy because he is now not here.  Which again is subjective, since most training isn’t one-on-one, and resources used to train are almost always not used just on one person, etc.

So, here’s a better way to figure out the cost of a bad hire:

1. Ask your head of finance or accounting what they think it costs? “Ballpark it for me?”  $10K? Sounds great! We’ll use $10K.

2. Use $10K as your cost of bad hires.

Your reality, HR’s Reality, is it really doesn’t matter what the number is.  Only that the powers that be in your organization all agree on the number. Stop wasting your time trying to come up with a better number, just come up with a number that those signing the check agree is probably legit.

How To Build a Dream Team at Work

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If you pulled up any sports-related website or watched any sports news show on TV in the past few days you know that NBA player Kevin Durant left Oklahoma City Thunder and accepted a free agent offer to go and play for the Golden State Warriors.

It’s a big deal because Golden State was already pretty good, now, with Kevin, they look to be unstoppable! Basically, Golden State has built a team with arguably 4 of the top 20 players in the NBA on one team (Durant, Curry, Thompson, and Green). Most ‘great’ teams might have three top players, no one in history has had four when all playing at their peak!

Building a dream team seems to only happen in sports, but you hear talent acquisition leaders and executives talk about it a lot. How do we build a sales dream team, a marketing dream team, a design dream team, etc.? We all want to be a part of a dream team, or be a part of building a dream team for our organization!

So, how do you build a dream team?

1. You have to know how you want to ‘play’. You have to define what it is you want to do. An outcome. A style. “We want the best designed UX of any platform that supports patient safety in a hospital environment.” As an example.

2. You have to know who is the top talent in your industry that can accomplish the outcome you desire.  This is actually the hardest part of building a dream team in a non-sports environment because we usually don’t have comparing statistics or analytics to even start to understand who the best is.

3. You have to be able to recruit those individuals to your team. This is actually easier than in professional sports. In pro sports it usually takes one or two superstars to make a decision to get together, then they help recruit the others. In the real world, it helps to have a well-known professional, but it’s not necessary if you can sell the right story, compensation, and location!

4. Just having the ‘best players’ doesn’t guarantee success, they have to buy into the goal of the entire organization. This means having leadership with a clear vision that goes beyond the outcome. Yes, we want to win a championship, but we want to win that championship together, utilizing all of our strengths. This is another really tough thing in a real-world setting because it takes great visionary leadership.

5. Having a ‘Dream Team’ is about “Team”. You’ll have great talent and that great talent needs to understand that they go nowhere without those who support them to do great work. So, your dream team members have to be servant leaders. If they have great talent and treat people like crap, they won’t end up being a great talent!

I love it when great talent makes the conscious decision to get together and try and do something great. Some people don’t. They would prefer to see one great talent try and do it on their own. I love watching highly talented people get together and see how far they can push the levels of greatness! That’s what dream teams are all about, the dream.

Why Doesn’t Corporate Talent Acquisition Change The Way They Pay Recruiters?

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For the most part, Corporate Recruiters are paid a salary. That salary ranges widely from organization to organization, industry, function and location. I’ve seen corporate recruiters who make $40,000 and ones that make $150,000. The $150K corporate recruiters are overpaid, let me just throw that out there right off the bat!

Agency recruiters are usually paid some salary and a combination of commission and bonus. The average goal for an agency recruiter compensation model is 1/3 salary, and 2/3’s bonus and commission. So, if your base agency salary is $30K, the hope is you’ll get to $60K through commission and bonus. It takes some time to get to $90K-ish total, but it’s fairly common for agency recruiters to make six figures. Again, this depends on what kind of agency, location, commission structure, etc.

On average, you’ll see more six figure recruiters working on the agency side, then you’ll see on the corporate side, by a wide margin.

So, are agency recruiters worth more than corporate recruiters?

Worth is defined by those paying! What I’ll say to this question is agency recruiters are more likely to ‘prove’ their worth than you’ll see on the corporate side. Which begs the question why has corporate Talent Acquisition not adapted their pay structure to something similar to that of a recruitment agency?

I’ve run both corporate TA shops and agency shops. I can tell you, realistically, there is no reason, that makes sense, not to at least test different pay structures on the corporate side! My goal in was always how do I get my corporate recruiters to be 2/3’s salary and 1/3 bonus. I wanted to make sure there was some performance-based compensation as part of their total compensation.

Here are some reasons I ran into each time I changed the pay structure of corporate recruiters”

  • “If you change the pay structure the best recruiters will quit!”
  • “We can’t change the salary structure, it’s the law!”
  • “Paying bonuses to recruiters in a corporate setting isn’t fair to the other people in HR!”
  • “The executives will never agree to performance-based pay in a non-sales role!”
  • “We want our recruiters to be hiring manager focused and paying bonuses would change that!”

All of these excuses are complete B.S.!

I did have Recruiters quit everything I came into an organization, but not because of pay. They quit because I made them actually recruit for the first time in their life! They had to pick up a phone, they had hard measures and weekly and monthly goals, they quit because they weren’t recruiters, they were administrators. But, being paid like they were recruiters.

Corporate TA Leaders don’t change their pay structure because they don’t know what to change it to, and change is scary!

I get it. It was the first time I did it as well, but in the long run, we had higher performing recruiters, better hiring manager satisfaction and we flat out performed better as a department, as compared to what we did previously.  Here are some tips to making this change:

– Make sure your high performing recruiters can actually make more money in the new model.

– Make sure low performers make less in the new model.

– Set black and white measurable goals before changing pay, and work with these goals for a while before aligning them with compensation.

– Be flexible to change. The first time I did this I found major holes and had to make some immediate changes that were fair to the recruiters and the organization.

– Communicate with your team and executives through this process.

– Have written outcomes you want to see from this change and watch those metrics closely.

– Paying per hire is never a bad thing, just make sure the pay matches the effort of the hire. Don’t pay the same bonus for hiring an admin as you do to hire a Java Developer. I tried to equalize this by the time and effort it took to fill each position. If it took 1/10 the time and effort, the bonus was 1/10 the amount of a full effort position. Again, you’ll have to test and adjust this for your organization. Don’t write it down in stone, to start!

– You’ll never really have to have a performance management conversation again! Oh, you want to make more money….

Recruiting, even in a corporate setting, is a sales type role and should be paid as such. There is no reason why you can’t have a more effective pay structure in your corporate TA department.

Want some help in getting this off the ground?  Contact me!

 

 

2016’s Newest Benefit – Baby Sign-on Bonuses!

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According to this USA Today article, the U.S. birthrate is in sharp decline and is at it’s lowest levels in the past 25 years.   Here are probably a few facts you don’t know:

– Projected 2013 birthrate in the U.S. is estimated to be 1.86

– Birthrate needed to maintain a population over a 20 year period is 2.1

Why should this concern you?

There are a number of reasons one might be concerned that you need as many young people as old for the simple fact of having enough young people to take care of your older population.  If you turn that equation upside down (Taiwan 1.1 or Portugal 1.3) you have a society full of older people and not enough young people to fill the jobs needed to keep running your society.

The U.S. already has 3 Million jobs left unfilled because of lack of skilled employees today. Imagine if you now have millions of fewer workers to even choose from, and by the way, skilled workers aren’t coming from other countries because their societies are growing and need them as well.  That is what our country’s employment picture will look like in 2032.  I know for many people right now this sounds very good – because of our high unemployment – but this will be

That is what our country’s employment picture will look like in 2032.  I know for many people right now this sounds very good – because of our high unemployment but this will be an HR/Recruiting nightmare for those young HR/Talent Pros starting out their careers in the next 20 years.

Being the Futurist that I am, I’ve already provided a solution to this problem back in 2011 over at Fistful of Talent, Should You Encourage Your Employees To Have Babies, check it out. Basically, my advice remains the same as U.S. employers we need to create a positive, encouraging environment for our employees, with family-friendly policies that make our employees feel like starting a family is a good thing, and that if they do start a family their job and ability to get a promotion won’t be compromised.  This is not the case as many U.S. employers right now for both men and women in the workforce.

As HR Pros and organizations we tend to think this isn’t our issue.  It will take care of itself.  But as we look at countries with low birthrates the issue doesn’t take care of itself and those countries have a worker crisis going on right now.    We need to change our ways right now. We need to be family friendly employers. We need to, as HR Pros, be concerned and find solutions for our employees around daycare, flexible schedules and other practices that will help our employees with families.   I know it sounds a bit the-sky-is-falling-ish, but the numbers don’t lie we are headed for some of the hardest

I know it sounds a bit the-sky-is-falling-ish, but the numbers don’t lie we are headed for some of the toughest hiring this country has ever seen.

One solution I’ve thought of, that I didn’t bring up in 2011, is baby sign-on bonuses!  We already do it for college students! I think we start doing for babies of our best employees.  I mean if parents can arrange their kid’s marriage, what stops us from arranging their first job?  Nothing! That’s what.  Imagine how happy your employees would be to cash a $20,000 check to help with baby expenses for the simple task of forcing their kid to come to work with your company upon college graduation.  It seems so simple, I’m not quite sure why no one has started this yet!

It seems so simple, I’m not quite sure why no one has started this yet!