Category Archives: TA Technology

T3 – Workmates – Team Engagement & Collaboration

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This week on T3 I take a look at the workplace communication and collaboration app Workmates. Workmates is a slack-like communication app designed by the SMB HRIS technology HRCloud. I’m a fan of HRCloud, great core HR platform for a very reasonable price, so I wanted to see what Workmates was all about.

HRCloud is offering Workmates to organizations to use for free. Nothing in life is free, right!? Well, the hope is you’ll love using this collaboration app and then also fall in love with the integration within HRCloud. So, free, with a hope.

Workmates is designed for internal employee communication and collaboration. Email is dead, but messaging apps like Workmates are being used in increasing numbers by organizations of all sizes.

What I like about Workmates:

– Workmates also acts as a real-time organization directory. All contact information of each employee is available for all of your employees through the app.

– The poll feature is fun to use. You can instantly send out polls to your co-workers asking for feedback on anything from where should we go to lunch, to what do you think of my new web design.

– The Workmates app will also show you who’s in the office, remote, on vacation, etc. So, as you see messages across the Facebook-type timeline, you’ll also know where the people are in case you need to see someone in person.

– Within Workmates you can also give micro-feedback, recognition and even grant a bonus to your coworkers as recognition. Plus, a metrics dashboard allows the HR admin users to see the “Kudos” leaderboard on recognition and trending topics your employees are discussing.

Of course, if your an HRCloud user, you get even more functionality and information. If you already use Slack or a similar app, that stream can be integrated into Workmates, which seems a bit redundant except if you’re using the recognition piece of Workmates.

Here’s my take. I think HRCloud is a really solid and well-designed core HRIS. Workmates puts it a level above others selling core HRIS in the same market. Workmates by itself is good, especially given that it’s free to use. If you’re already using an internal employee communication app, this probably doesn’t interest you. If you don’t have one but you’re interested, this is a no-brainer to try.

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 – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

T3 – Karen.ai – Cognitive Recruiting Assistant

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This week on T3 I review the new recruiting artificial intelligence called Karen. Karen.ai provides candidate screening and candidate conversation service to improve brand interactions and improve your organization’s talent.

You’ve probably heard this technology called a chatbot. That simplifies the concept, but it also misses the mark on what technology like Karen actually does. Karen’s AI is built to read a resume of a candidate like a human would read a resume, not a computer, as best that’s possible.

Before analyzing what candidate is best for the job and then ranking them for your recruiting team, Karen first pulls in three buckets of organization information. Company baseline personality insight based on the Big 5 Personality inventory, the unstructured data of your job descriptions and conceptual inference (you need someone with Word docs experience, but the resume only show Google docs experience – the AI knows this is basically the same skill set).

The company and team personality insight ensures that Karen is just a simple algorithm to match skills to job descriptions, but truly looking at a level of organizational fit, as well as the normal skill assessment to the job requirements.

What I like about Karen.ai:

– Karen is basically an invisible layer of technology between your ATS and Recruiters that is constantly working 24/7 so when a candidate applies they will immediately begin your process and start engaging with you immediately.

– Karen ranks all those that apply and makes it easy for your recruiters to know who they should be spending time with first. No more FIFO (first in, first out) recruiting, no matter how many apply for the position. So, you have a better chance at raising the quality of your hires immediately.

– Karen’s AI will also engage every candidate via chat or SMS to measure their engagement level as well, so you know which candidates are the most engaged with your brand.

– Dashboard will show you what the AI is assessing and then you can add or remove certain factors and re-rank to get even more specific to what you’re looking for.

I’m a huge fan of recruiting AI when used in a way that doesn’t degrade your candidate experience and still allows you to take advantages of the effeciency gains you get with the technology. Karen helps your recruiters know which candidates they should be at least touching first, and helps your team go through high volume while still getting talent that will more closely match your organization.

If you’re not demoing recruiting AI you should be. Karen is a great one to start with, check it out!

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 – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Why Hasn’t Employee Referral Automation Caught on? #SHRMTalent

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I spoke at SHRM Talent this week. One of the best corporate recruiting conferences around. Many people don’t believe me when I tell them, but the content, speakers, and audience are really engaging.

TA Tech companies and vendors haven’t caught on yet to the new SHRM Talent. Most corporate TA pros I spoke to might not have million dollar budgets to spend, but every one of them had decisions making over tens and hundreds of thousands of TA budget dollars!

It’s becoming one of the favorite conferences because the audience of corporate TA pros and leaders are very open to wanting to learn and get better. Their questions are genuine and the truly want to learn how to improve recruiting and talent attraction in their organizations.

One topic that I bring up during my sessions as the most under-utilized TA technologies on the planet is employee referral automation. Jobvite created the space, others followed, like RolePoint, Zao, Gooodjob, etc. Still, main stream corporate TA tech in mass aren’t using employee referral automation. It’s one of the great mysteries in the TA space for me!

When you ask corporate TA pros and leaders what their top source for talent is, employee referrals will always come in the top 3. When you ask what is the highest quality of hires by source, employee referrals are almost always number one! When you ask how much money have you invested in increasing employee referrals, it’s almost always $0!

So, help me out, what am I missing?!

The SHRM Talent audience told me I wasn’t missing anything, they just simply didn’t know this technology was available to them! Jobvite was in the expo hall, but mainly they were selling ATS, not employee referral automation (huge miss, but I know ATS margins are bigger than employee referral automation!). 97% of my audience weren’t using this tech, but almost all had an interest in learning more.

It’s really a zero-budget buy for most companies! If you use this type of technology you can basically get rid of your referral bonus program and your numbers will still go up on employee referrals. So, there’s the money you need to buy the tech that will put your employee referral program on steroids!

Truly, the bonuses per referral are not needed! You will have to actually begin recognizing those who do refer in your company, but almost all employees will refer people to your organization without a monetary gain! Also, increasing bonuses does little to actually increase the number of referrals you get.

So, why isn’t the vast majority using this tech?

First, they aren’t being sold this technology. Most corporate TA pros and leaders buy because of what is being sold to them, not necessarily what they need.

Second, I’m guessing the companies that sell this tech are for the most part fairly weak at marketing because it seems like a pretty easy sell to the groups I have in front of me!

Third, most corporate TA pros and leaders just have no idea this tech is even on the market for them, and if they do, they believe it’s too expensive to purchase.

They’ll spend a million dollars on LinkedIn and Indeed, but not $50,000 on technology that gives them more hires of their highest quality source?! There’s a major disconnect here on both sides of the market, which means there’s a giant opportunity for a company with a great brand with great tech that can make it simple for corporate TA leaders.

 

 

T3 – 100 HR & TA Technologies You Need To See!

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My friend William Tincup over at Recruiting Daily put out his quarterly HR & TA Tech watch list recently and I wanted to share it with you. It’s a great list that covers technologies ranging from: Recruiting, sourcing, onboarding, LMS, HRIS, engagement, assessments, time and attendance, etc.

It’s a really great way to help keep us all on top of this fast-changing marketplace. William tells me there are over 20,000 HR and TA technologies worldwide available for HR and TA pros to buy. That’s overwhelming, and this market is growing!

So, start doing demos! One a month. Invest one hour a month in learning about one new piece of technology that is closest to what you do in HR and TA. It’s well worth the investment for your own development!

Here’s the list:

Name || Category || Twitter

Are there other technologies not on this list that people should know about? Hit me in the comments and let us all know!

T3 – Google Jumps Into the ATS Market

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So, Google announced last week that it is getting ready to launch an applicant tracking/job posting technology called Google Hire. Google already has a number of smaller technology companies in beta, but the so far very little has leaked out from anyone on the experience and capabilities.

Google does have an initial splash page up allowing people to log in, but you can only log in if you’re actually one of those beta users. Speculation right out of the gate was that Google would allow employers to see your search history, which Google quickly went public and debunked, but it makes you wonder how something so crazy even got out?

DramaFever is one of those initial beta Google Hire customers. When you go to apply for a job on their site it throws you into the Google Hire workflow and you get a hint of what the candidate experience will be using Google Hire as your ATS. Very clean, almost generic job posting:

The apply is also quick, easy, and generic as well:

Once you apply, you get an email verification link sent to you to continue on in the process. This is the same process and design so far for all the Google Hire beta users.

So, why would Google want to get into the ATS business?

They probably don’t. What they really want is to get into the Indeed business of collecting cash for posting your jobs and collecting candidates! Google Hire then becomes their engine to making this happen.

Google made news last year when they announced the Google Could Jobs API. For 99.9% of HR and TA Pros/Leaders, this was a none event announcement. For industry insiders, it was Google saying, just wait, we’re working on some things but we need this big foundational block put into place first!

In a very simple sense, Google Jobs API allows organizations to deliver a much more robust job search for candidates. CareerBuilder was one of the initial organizations to test this out and they are still in testing. Google hopes to be able to allow anyone to use it, opening the door to all kinds of niche job boards, etc.

Basically, we all think of Indeed as being the biggest Job Posting aggregator on the planet. In reality, it’s Google, but Google just never went out and built the framework to allow job seekers to easy search for jobs on Google versus going to places like Indeed, LinkedIn, CareerBuilder, etc.

All of that will be changing. We are not sure how, just yet, but Google Hire gives us some indication that Google might be going after some of those billions that companies like Indeed are making off employers, for delivering job seekers an inferior job search product to what Google is claiming to have.

Such and interesting space! Can’t wait to see where this goes.

Learn how to give the best IT interviews on the planet!

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Tomorrow (Tuesday, April 18th at 2 pm ET) I’ll be talking IT Interviewing on a Recruiting Daily webinar sponsored by eTeki – Register Here! Most organizations suck at interviewing IT talent. I think there’s a better way!
It takes tech expertise to properly gauge tech competencies and experience and let’s face it most recruiters fall short in their capacity toTim Sackett eTeki
interview for the nuances of these specialized IT roles. You and I know this, but hiring managers struggle to understand why Talent Pros will never really be able to tell them if someone is a great coder or not!
Attend this webinar and I will show you a number of things you can start doing immediately to increase your ROI! Plus, you’ll hear from real talent leaders in the field who have already put a number of these ideas into place and hear about the success and struggles they had in launching this process.

Learning Objectives:

  1. Learn five ways successful companies are doing technical interviews differently to choose great talent.
  2. Design a technical interview process that attracts talent, and learn the things that turn off technical talent in an interview.
  3. Develop an interview strategy for technical talent that will increase your hiring manager satisfaction.

 

This webinar is designed to show any Recruiter and Recruiting leader (Corporate, Agency, RPO) a better way to interview technical talent, increase hiring manager/client satisfaction, and increase the influence and expertise your team brings to your organization.

The Secret Sauce to Landing Your Dream Job? Apply Less!

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Robert Combs over at Fast Company had a brilliant article recently, and if you’re in Recruiting or HR, it’s a must read! If you’re looking for a job, it’s also a must read!

Here was Robert’s concept. A.I. (robots) are running the world. It’s the biggest innovation to come into recruiting since Big Data (wait, didn’t we always have data…). If robots can run the apply process and find you where ever you are, Robert thought, why not use a robot to apply to jobs for him. Let the robots fight it out!

So, that’s what he did, he built a robot to go out and find jobs he would want, apply to those jobs, and then even follow up! He applied to hundreds of jobs in minutes! It got a bit out of control:

So I started slowly casting about for new challenges, initially by applying (perhaps naively) to openings at well-known tech companies like Google, Slack, Facebook, and Squarespace.

Two things quickly became clear to me:

  1. I’m up against leaders in their field, so my resume doesn’t always jump to the top of the pile.
  2. Robots read every application.

The robots are “applicant tracking systems” (ATS), commonly used tools for sorting job applications. They automatically filter out candidates based on keywords, skills, former employers, years of experience, schools attended, and the like.

As soon as I realized I was going up against robots, I decided to turn the tables–and built my own….I fired it up I accidentally applied to about 1,300 jobs in the Midwest during the time it took me to get a cup of coffee across the street. I live in New York City and had no plans to relocate, so I quickly shut it down until I could release a new version.

After several iterations and a few embarrassing hiccups, I settled on version 5.0, which applied to 538 jobs over about a three-month period.

So, what did Robert find out? Here were his biggest learnings:

1. Even your ATS robots suck at giving responses! Around 70% of his applications never got a response!

2. Only 4% of 538 jobs he applied for, got a personal email response from a recruiter.

3. Only about 6% of your hires come from people applying to your career site.

Robert found out what most of us in the business already know. Applying to jobs, doesn’t actually work. Yet, we spend so much time, energy, and resources building these great tech stacks and apply processes for just his!

So, what works?

Turns out about 85% of jobs are filled by good old fashion networking. You know someone, who knows someone, who has a friend, who’s cousin works in the department you really want to work for.

“Out-of-the-box hires rarely happen through LinkedIn (or any job board, career site) applications. They happen when someone influential meets a really interesting person and says, ‘Let’s create a position for you.’”

I disagree somewhat with the above quote. I’ve worked in large corporate TA shops, we just didn’t run around all willy-nilly creating jobs for really cool, smart people! We did many times find really great people and then stick them into a job we already had open, and usually the reason we found the person was someone who knew the job was open referred the person to us.

My advice to job seekers is always the same. Stop applying to jobs, start networking with every person you have a possible shred of connection with and let them know you’re looking for a position, what position you prefer, what position you would take, and where in the world you would work.

Every minute you spend networking is a thousand times better than every minute you spend online applying for jobs. Robert just proved this!

The Realities of Using a Full-Fledged Modern Day Talent Acquisition Platform

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I’m in a pretty cool place in life right now. Great job, great family, every day I get to work and talk with awesome, smart people, every week I get to see the most awesome technology on the planet. Like the t-shirt says, “Life is Good!”

If you’re a TA leader for a big shop, I’m guessing my life is better than yours! Why do I know this? Because the technology you’re being asked to use has completely passed you by on the side of the highway!

Remember that first time when you’re Mom or Dad asked you to ‘fix’ the clock on the VCR? It was simple, but they had no idea on how to set the VCR clock, so it would blink “12:00” for weeks until you decided to fix it. Most TA leaders, right now today, are looking at that clock on the VCR blinking!

The reality of using a full-fledged modern day Talent Acquisition Platform is:

– You’re not ready for it.

– It’s like you’ll be taught how to walk all over again.

– It’s like you’ll be learning a new language.

– It will be the single most valuable thing you’ll ever do in your TA career.

– You’ll be forced to teach your entire leadership something completely new.

– Most vendors selling these solutions, don’t have the capability to actually teach you and your team how to effectively use it.

– You and your team aren’t ready to unlearn all of your broken, bad habits to use it effectively.

– You’re going to have to admit to yourself and others, you really don’t know what you’re doing.

That last one is hard. Because we do know what we’re doing, damn it! But, this is where you have to remember the blinking VCR clock. You don’t, but you can learn!

A full end to end TA platform will change the way you, your team, and your organization actually attract, recruit, and onboard talent. Gone, completely, will be Post and Pray. So, will be those employees who think this is what recruiting is.

It’s not overly difficult to learn these new skills. It is uncomfortable because it’s a BIG change from what you’re actually doing today and calling it recruiting. You’re not recruiting. You’re administering a recruiting process. Those are different things. Your organization actually needs you, desperately, to attract, retain, and develop great talent.

Any monkey can collect resumes and pass them onto a hiring manager. In fact, you don’t even have to pay an admin $12 per hour to do that, I can find you an A.I. bot that can do that for pennies on the dollar.

The really, really cool part about this is you’ll completely change your career path by doing this! Once you implement and transform your organization’s recruiting practices using technology, you’ll have other organizations lined up at your door begging you to do the same for them!

The real reality is you have a choice to make. Fix the blinking clock, or keep ignoring it. What kind of TA leader are you?

T3 – @SymphonyTalent_ Are you ready to recruit like a marketer?

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This week on T3 I review the end to end TA technology platform Symphony Talent. You may not have heard of Symphony Talent, but I’m sure you will recognize many of the organizations that came together to build this platform.

The dream child of Hodes (one of the top employment ad agencies in the world) who went out and bought a bunch of really good TA tech (SkillCheck, Findly, HRLogix, Innovantage, QUEsocial, and others) put it all under the same ultra-modern UI to create something in talent acquisition no one on the market can claim to have.

Symphony Talent is two talent acquisition platforms in one. M-Cloud, an artificial intelligence-based media buying platform for employers, and X-Cloud, an omni-channel experience platform for candidates, employers, and employees. X-Cloud is the ATS, CRM, branding side of the platform.

So, what the heck does it do? 

I found myself asking what doesn’t it do?! The reality is, it might be the first end to end TA platform that actually can replace almost all of your TA Tech stack, or the closest anyone has come to this point. It’s on a different planet from tech perspective than most enterprise level TA platforms.

Super smart move from the Hodes side of the business. Organizations spend a ton of money with Hodes to build out an employment brand, advertising campaigns, etc. Only to then take it back to inferior technology and watch all of that money go down the drain. Hodes built a platform that allows organizations to go after candidates like consumers.

What do I like about Symphony Talent: 

– Built in Programmatic Job On-demand Ad buying in an A.I model. This alone would have me loving it, but being built into the ATS and CRM is really a few years ahead of where the competition is in this space. This makes programmatic super simple for TA and it’s tied directly into the posting of your jobs.

– Candidate experience was taken to the next level where candidates can check-in and track their own progress through the apply process, and like a consumer site, they can come and go and the system instantly recognizes them and takes the back to where they left off.

– Predictive analytics shows recruiters how long it will take them to fill a job (based on up to the minute market conditions) as soon as it’s posted.

– The User Interface in the X-Cloud portion of Symphony is unlike any other ATS-like product on the market. Ultra-modern, easy to use, and intuitive.

– Built in CRM functionality is not light by any means. Great candidate personalization for returners built on machine learning that will continue to direct the right content and messaging as the candidate evolves their experience with you.

Symphony Talent is really packed with functionality on the X-Cloud side of the platform, but the media buy side, M-Cloud, is just a game changer! The other side of this is Symphony Talent doesn’t have to be an all or nothing platform. They’ve already integrated with iCims, Taleo, Silkroad, etc. So, you can pick the parts you really like, that you’re current stack is lacking.

Built for Mid to Enterprise-sized organizations, but I can see some real tech-savvy SMB’s with cash that will want to get their hands on this, especially in really tough candidate driven markets. Hodes has strength in healthcare, so I would imagine this would blow almost any TA Tech stack out of the water in that industry for those organizations struggling to hire nurses and other healthcare pros.

A real must see demo if you’re in the market.

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 – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Would You Pay to Interview at a Company You Really Want to Work At? @DawnOfPurple

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I love Nike. I would love to work at Nike. If the right position came along and someone said, “Tim, you can run talent at Nike, but you need to pay $500 to get in front of the right person at Nike”, I go to the ATM and hand that person $500.

Okay, at one time in my career I would have done that to work at Nike, probably not now because I’ve got peeps on the inside!

This is what a new company in the TA space is doing. For a minimum of $20 (they won’t say what the maximum is) you can get a thirty-minute “interview” with someone who works at the dream company you want work at. PurpleSquirrel.io recently launched and it’s caused a bit of stir amongst those active in the space.

Why?

Most of the TA and HR bloggers, writers, speakers, people who pay way too much attention to this crap, etc. Think organizations that prey on candidates are evil. This was the real downfall of The Ladders. When you start asking candidates to pay for something they should get for free, the thought leaders lose their minds.

Also, my tribe (all the folks mentioned above) are exceptional networkers. It’s really one of the main skills we have. We can talk to anyone, about anything, at any time, and we usually do! We’re unicorns in that way. Most of the world does not network like this. Most people keep their circles pretty tight!

This is what Purple Squirrel understands.

Most people actually suck at networking. The problem with this is that most jobs are filled because someone has a connection. My cousin works in marketing at Facebook and he’s introducing me to the director and I have a good chance to at least get interviewed. My girl Celinda works at Nike and I’m hoping she’ll put me in touch with Phil Knight!

You understand the drill. Recruiters don’t fill jobs. Relationships fill jobs.

This is where I think Purple Squirrel might be brilliant. If we already know most people suck at networking, that means most people would probably welcome the help and be willing to pay a little cash for that help. I want a connection to Google, PurpleSquirrel can help you get that connection to Google. It’s like when my mom hired that hooker for my date to homecoming! Well, kind of.

Here’s the main catch, and it’s not spelled out until you really dig into the site. The ‘interview’ you have with your new ‘connection’ at your dream company is not an actual representative of the company. Your new connection does actually work at the company you love, but what they are really giving you is a career coaching session. They might have some hiring authority, but there’s no guarantee and it’s not implied.

You still have a connection at the company you love. There’s value to that, especially if you know how to grow your network, but my guess is you probably didn’t hire a hooker to go to homecoming because you’re great at networking.

I’m all for any tool that helps people land their dream job in their dream company. So, if Purple Squirrel works at helping you reach that goal, then it’s worth every dime you invest. Just know it’s important you understand the rules before handing over the cash. This is one connection into a company that might lead nowhere. So, use your thirty-minutes to your advantage.

I applied for a position at Nike once. Never even got a “Dr. John” disposition letter. I like to believe, as I cry myself to bed each night, they already had someone internally they wanted to promote and the posting was just a ghost, and my rejection email was lost in cyberspace. If only I would have had someone on the inside, maybe my fortunes would have changed!

Hit me in the comments – I really want to know – Would you pay to interview at a company that you’ve always wanted to work for?