Category Archives: TA Technology

Is Mobile more Trump or more Hillary?

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If you’re into broad political strokes, let’s play a game. Let’s say for the sake of this game, what would be considered traditional Democratic supporters tend to have less resources at their disposal than traditional Republican supporters. Most of us in HR would then believe that Trump probably should have a larger mobile strategy than Hillary, given the assumption that Republicans tend to have higher incomes and therefore more access to mobile devices.

 

We tend to act this way in HR. We believe that if you want to attract high-tech talent you must have a mobile job strategy. Our young, educated tech-savvy workforces want to do everything via mobile. Payroll, benefits options, retirement, transfers, etc.

 

The reality is, we have this totally backward!

 

The Pew Research Center found that low-educated, low-income wage earners – your hourly employees – are more likely…

 

Check out the rest of my article over at Paychex’s Worx Blog! Along with the 4 things you need to launch mobile-enabled software to your employees! 

 

T3 – Handshake @JoinHandshake

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This week on T3 I take a look at the recruiting platform for college students called Handshake. If you recruit new grads from college campuses you know the pain of not having a one-stop shop to get the students you need. Most companies still waste a ton of resources attending career fairs and negotiating individual college career offices one-on-one.

Handshake looks to break that cycle by doing what LinkedIn has failed to do, give college students one place, one networking site that is all their own to look for jobs and connect with companies. On the flip side, they are also providing a platform where employers can search for students by posting jobs or searching millions of student profiles by the university, major and grad year.

Handshake isn’t a new idea. Kris Dunn famously loves to tell people I singlehandedly put MyEdu out of business when I keynoted an event from them and the next week they went out of business! I get pitched probably twice a year from new companies trying to do what Handshake is attempting to do, build a platform that connects college students with employers. LinkedIn for college students, except they would hate to be called that, but you get the picture.

What I like about Handshake?

– Free to both students and employers! What to build critical mass, like LinkedIn? Give it away for free, except Handshake actually sells their platform to college career services offices on an annual subscription. Also, they will make money on premium services to employers. (See? LinkedIn!)

– Unlike most student-to-employer techs I’m pitched, Handshake has figured out you need to get some VC and use that money to grow your user base, both colleges, students, and employers. They currently have over 150 colleges using (Stanford, Michigan, Texas, Cal, etc. – a who’s who of universities), 140,000 recruiters/employers, and over 2.5 million student profiles.

– College career fairs aren’t going away anytime soon, as most employers still want to build a reputation on campus. Handshake helps out both employers and career services with tools to plan events, schedule interviews, etc. on campus. While most recruiting will be done on the site, the best employers will still maintain a presence on campus.

– They have a brand that feels like it will stick. Let’s face it, the student-to-employer space won’t be shared by multiple technologies. Someone will win this space and control the vast amount of college hiring that takes place. I like the Handshake brand and story, I think it could stick. That’s important in a game that has yet to be decided.

– They’ve built a UI/UX that students will feel very comfortable with and it’s as easy to use as any social media site they use now, and it’s clean. By uploading your resume most of the profile is auto-filled and it can be tweaked from there.

If you recruit on campus or from colleges, you need to check out Handshake.  The technology makes it easy to find kids on campus whereas college career service offices tend to be a pain in the butt to deal with and only want to post openings for you, versus give you direct access to students when you need them, not when the annual career fair is scheduled.

LinkedIn will have a say in how all of this ends. I can’t believe they’ll sit on the sidelines for this and watch Handshake just take the college market from them without a fight and a product of their own. Handshake has some first round funding, enough to make some noise, but not enough to send fear into LI! Stay tuned, it should be interesting.

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.

Michigan Recruiter’s Conference 2016 Takeaways

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Last week the 3rd annual Michigan Recruiter’s Conference took place in Grand Rapids, MI onsite at our corporate host Amway World Headquarters. 150 Corporate Talent Acquisition Leaders and Pros participated and heard from an outstanding lineup of speakers including Gerry Crispin, Laurie Ruettimann, Chris Bailey, Kerri Mills and Katie Born.

I leave each time amazed at the talent we are able to bring into Michigan! Some of the brightest minds and ideas in the talent acquisition industry, but also the passion the TA pros in Michigan show in coming in and engaging with each other on a peer level.

My Takeaways from MRC 2016: 

– It takes a very confident HR and/or TA Leader to want to bring in another 150 corporate TA pros into their own shop. We’ve been extremely lucky with Accident Fund, Spectrum Health and now Katie at Amway over the past three years. I think it demonstrates how important TA is to the organizations that host and how important developing their team is to that leader.

– Gerry Crispin comes in and looks like he’s been in TA for 40 years. Wait, he has! But, for those who haven’t seen him, they believe, “oh, here comes some old dude to tell us how he recruited people back in WWII!” Gerry always blows them away!!! He is so on top of how the best, most innovative TA shops are doing it on the planet, he leaves with jaws dropped. I always chuckle at the young bucks who had no idea they are about to get completely schooled by an old dude!

– You know you have a great speaker when people can’t write down the ideas fast enough! Kerri Mills had pens burning up at MRC. I had a feeling she would kill after seeing her presentation at SourceCon and she did awesome. Side note: when you work at Indeed, people expect you to know everything about Indeed!

– People who can tell a good story, are great speakers. Laurie Ruettimann and Chris Bailey both killed with great stories! They had great content as well, but you could tell me how to make Mac and Cheese and if it’s wrapped in a great story I’ll be entertained for an hour! Also, if you have a British accent you’re automatically considered brilliant, funny and adorable by an American audience. (Note to self: work on British accent)

– In classic HROS.co fashion, Amway’s TA Leader Katie Born figuratively opened her Kimono and shared what she and her team were working on to the entire talent market in their area. The good and the bad. What’s working and what they still need to get better at? What tech we’re using and what tech we’re looking at? It was a great example of what we should all strive for as TA Leaders.  Bravo!

I had one trainwreck moment. The idea was to speed network. I hate when people go to a conference and either sit alone or sit with the only people they know, so my idea was to get them to meet 4-5 new people and make some connections. Great idea! But 150 people trying to find smaller groups of three in a room was comical and loud! In the end, people did meet new people!

Our goal for MRC 2017 is to be in the Detroit Metro Area! To bring Detroit its first ever corporate talent acquisition conference specifically for Michigan TA Pros and Leaders! Want to be a part of it?  We are currently looking for a corporate host! What does that mean? We need a big room that can hold 150 or so people, with tables and some AV equipment!

We’ll bring the food, the talent, and the TA Pros!  We just need to use your space for the day. Let me know if you’re interested (timsackett@comcast.net).

 

Women in HR Technology Summit #HRTechConf

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Last week I was at the HR Technology Conference in Chicago and when I arrived on Tuesday afternoon there was this buzz in the air and folks talking about this great pre-conference event called “Women in HR Technology“.

Steve Boese, Co-Chair of the HR Technology Conference, was behind the creation and had this to say prior:

“In the traditionally male-dominated technology industry, there are many successful women leaders introducing new ideas, developing transformative solutions and leading their companies to success. We are proud to hold this long overdue ‘Women in HR Technology’ event, which will not only showcase more than 15 of the most successful women changing the industry, but also provide new insights for how other women can create their own professional roadmaps.”

The agenda was loaded with the leading women from various HR technology companies from across the globe. I spoke with a couple of the speakers including, Brynne Herbert, founder, and CEO, of MOVE Guides. Brynne shared with me that women trying to start their own firms in HR Technology have some serious challenges in that only 7% of Series A funded companies in HR Tech are founded by women, and that number drops to 3% that make it to Series B funding!

Herbert shared with me the three main reasons she believes women backed companies in HR technology struggle:

  1. Females are more risk adverse and starting your company is a risky proposition.
  2. Females don’t tend to be the ones to brag themselves up and when you’re starting a company it’s an important part of making your company success.
  3. You must be able and willing to evangelize your idea against all odds. Many people will tell you that it won’t work, and you have to truly believe it will.

Hebert also mentioned that another challenge is most new HR technology companies rely on VC-backed funding and only about 8% of VC’s are run by women. Like most things in life, we tend to back that what we feel most comfortable with. That makes is super hard for women to get backed by male-run VC’s.

Many people don’t know, but I’m extremely passionate about the concept of women in leadership. I was raised by a single mother who started a technology company back some 35 years ago when no women did this, and my master’s thesis for my HR degree was a study on women and leadership.

It was a big step for the HR Technology Conference to first recognize this issue and second make actually begin to do something about it. I look forward to seeing what will come out of this and I was told by Boese and Herbert that they definitely want to continue the conversation beyond just this one summit. As soon as those next steps become solidified I’ll make sure to share how you can also become part of this conversation.

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!

2016 HR Technology Conference Themes #HRTechConf

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The 2016 HR Technology Conference is in the books!  I’ve said this a number of times, but it’s my favorite conference of the year. I love the interaction between attendees and all the great technology vendors at the conference, the energy is unlike any other conference on the planet.

Each year there are major themes that come out of HR Tech. Many we know even going in. We knew this year would be the year of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. You could not talk to a vendor that didn’t have some take on this. The problem is still what everyday HR and TA leaders believe A.I. is, is not what you’re being sold.

Here are the themes I took away from HR Tech 2016:

1. Confusion by the buyer is at an all-time high and getting worse. This is going to be a problem for vendors and most don’t get it. The main point of confusion is that so many of the technologies are now overlapping each other and claiming to do what the other does, but it’s usually to a lesser degree. The buyer is the one having to try to figure this out, and they can’t. That usually turns into a “no buy”.

2. A Talent Acquisition Tech Stack is starting to emerge and the HR Tech Stack (HRIS core providers) folks are trying to stop this from happening by offering up their own watered-down, vanilla version of what you really need.  The reality is today, HRIS providers don’t offer up the same level of TA technology that you can get from TA-specific tech vendors. What I haven’t seen yet is the TA Tech vendor community providing a model of what that TA Tech stack looks like – the first one to do that effectively will have a huge advantage in positioning.

3. Conferences, not just HR Tech, have a real problem that needs to be addressed and it doesn’t seem to me like anyone cares. Sessions are lightly attended. This has been a criticism of HR Tech in the past, but I think the HR Tech team addressed it by providing really strong content. The sessions I attended were really good, but not seen by most people. This is a problem because practitioners won’t keep coming if they think they’re going to sit in a mostly empty room. They want to feel the same energy as those folks on the expo floor, which happens when you have full session rooms.  Right now conference organizers don’t view this as a problem because vendors are falling over themselves to shell out more and more money to attend and sponsor. That bubble will eventually burst.

4. HR and TA Leaders still have this belief that you must have one system talking to each other at the enterprise level.  I heard more and more examples of this belief getting blown up and enterprise-level organizations starting to use the latest greatest HR and TA Saas-based software on the market. I don’t need by TA stack and HR stack connected for it to be great. Onboading can be my bridge point and any good BI software will pull the data I need from both.

5. If you are a CHRO of an organization that has 5000+ employees and you don’t have HR Data pros on your team, you’re losing out to your peer group and you have no idea why. Do yourself a favor and take a deep dive into this side of HR. Organizations are transforming themselves because of what their HR and TA data is telling them, and those not utilizing this information are falling behind fast.

Next year HR Tech 2017 will be back in Las Vegas for a three run.  If you haven’t ever gone to the HR Technology Conference and you’re an HR and/or TA Tech geek, it’s a must attend conference.  You can spend three straight days on the expo floor and not come close to seeing all the tech that’s available, and there are tons of great sessions as well.

HR Tech in 5 Minutes! #HRTechConf

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Gang! I’m at ‘The’ HR Technology Conference this week in Chicago. Steve Boese, Co-Chair of the conference, has added some really exciting and fun content to the program and I attended a session yesterday called “Discovering the Next Great HR Technology Company”.

It’s a Shark Tank-style presentation where 8 up and coming technologies were picked from an applicant list of 150 to present to a panel of HR Tech experts and ultimately the crowd voted on who they believe is the next great HR Technology. It was fast and furious, and actually fun to watch!

The companies that got chosen were all winners (that’s what we say when we feel bad for the losers!):

  • Invesitpro – Employee relations investigation software. Not sexy, but the most practical of the bunch and something almost everyone I spoke to said, “I’d use that!”
  • Clinch – Candidate CRM, microsite builder, powerful recruitment communication tool.
  • Qwalify – Spoke about their new product called Talent Dojo – scalable two-way communication to find out if a candidate is the right fit for you, and you for them.
  • RolePoint – Employee referral automation talking about their new product for internal Talent Mobility.
  • LifeWorks – Employee engagement app and recognition.
  • Chemistry – Candidate assessment using unstructured data, so basically assessing your candidates without making them take an assessment.
  • Click Boarding – Onboarding, but very personalized.
  • HighGround – Performance management reinvented, very cool UX.

Here’s what we learned: 

1. 5 minutes is too short to try and do a demo in front of a giant crowd. It turns into people talking way too fast and flying through screens and seems confusing.

2. If you only have 5 minutes you need to get three things out: 1) Tell me what you actually do and how I will use you in my daily life. 2) Give me your twitter name so I can tweet about you at the conference during this session – you get 5 minutes of free publicity, help me out! 3) Invite me to a full demo later to see the full show. None of the 8 did this. 6 of the 8 I’m still not sure what they actually do!

3. Love this format and the audience loved the format. Most practitioners won’t come to your booth for a full demo, but they do want to know what’s out there and if they have an interest in finding out more about you. I could see this going to ten or twenty minutes and being even better!

4. If you only have 5 minutes, it’s a risk to rely on technology to tell your story! (Which is very ironic being that this is a technology conference!) But the reality is you’re relying on conference wifi, other people, a foreign environment.  The people who fared best just told a 5-minute story about what it is they solve.

5. British, Irish, Australian accents play really well with an American audience. We believe those accents are smarter, even when they’re not! So, even if you’re an American company, find a Brit to get on stage and sell your product!

Check out all of the eight vendors highlighted in the session. All the tech was awesome and did different things.

T3 – @TextRecruit

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This week on T3 I take review the talent acquisition software TextRecruit. TextRecruit is the first centralized platform designed exclusively for recruiting teams to assist in texting, engaging and measuring the effectiveness of texting candidates.

TextRecruit does what most of our ATS systems won’t, which is give you an effective and easy to use platform to reach out and engage with candidates via text. If we know anything right now it’s that candidates are getting more and more savvy to recruitment communication. Emails and phones calls, which are the two standard ways to communicate with candidates get less effective each year.

Text response to candidates continues to have a high response rate, quite simply, because most recruiters still don’t use it. Let’s face it, email has made recruiters lazy, and more and more candidates would prefer to communicate via text or some other form of short range messaging.

5 Things I really like about TextRecruit:

1. TextRecruit makes it super easy for your recruiters to mass text (create a messaging campaign), personalized text messaging to candidates and make each candidate feel like they were the only one being texted by your recruiter.

2. TextRecruit gives your entire team one platform to text from, gather responses, measure campaign effectiveness, etc. You can also embed unique URLs to drive traffic to specific landing pages, jobs, Google maps for interviews, etc.

3. Compliance with texting is still a new frontier. If your recruiters are using their own phones, or individual work phones, you have very little insight or control of what’s going on. Using a platform like TextRecruit makes all of this heartburn go away! Messages can’t be deleted from the system, so you see everything your recruiters send, candidate responses, and the entire message chain between the two.

4. TextRecruit Chrome Extension easily and instantly allows you to text candidates from LinkedIn. For those recruiters who are LI super users this is an awesome tool.

5. With traditional response rates hovering anywhere between 10-20% (on the high side with email), TextRecruit clients are currently seeing response rates, on average, of 37%. That’s giant!

I’ve been a huge fan of using text messaging in recruiting for the past few years, but it’s always been a struggle with most ATS technologies on the market. TextRecruit seems to have this figured out completely and works well in conjunction with any ATS you’re using.

TextRecruit also has some other pieces to their platform to check inclusing TextApply (self explanatory) and TextHR (an employee engagement and communication tool via text). TextRecruit is a price per recruiter model based per month.

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.

T3- Jobvite’s Annual Recruiter Nation Report

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Talent Acquisition software provider Jobvite released their annual Recruiter Nation 2016 report today. This report always has some gems I love to share and usually use in presentations throughout the year. Here are some of my favorites from this year’s report:

– 51% say that employment branding is their #1 investment that they will make in the next 12 months! In case you’re bad at math, that is over half! This doesn’t really speak to a “real” need for EB, it speaks to a lack of understanding of what their organization truly needs from TA. For most companies, this will be a waste of resources. An organization can be great at attracting talent with a brand no one knows. The fact that half of all organizations will have this as their #1 investment is a painful reality of a lack of great TA leadership in the industry.

– Internal hires (38%) are ranked highest quality by recruiters — followed closely by employee referrals (34%). I actually laughed out loud when I first read this! Really? I mean REALLY!? Internal hires rank as your highest quality? Well, isn’t that surprising…They better be your highest quality!!! They already work for you, Moron! Sometimes I just don’t get why we ask stupid questions. Another stat you might find surprising, water is wet! Also, stop giving internal recruiters credit for internal hires. They didn’t do anything to fill that job.

– According to recruiters, 43% of them rated diversity as somewhat or very important when making a hiring decision. But 40% of them were neutral about diversity and its influence. Want to know why your organization isn’t moving the needle on diversity recruitment? It’s this stat! Your recruiters hear that it’s important, but they don’t believe it’s important. Why? Because you don’t show them any internal statistics that more diverse work groups, in your own environment, perform better than those lacking diversity. Show them, or shut up.

– 60% of recruiters rate culture fit of highest importance when making a hiring decision — topped only by (you guessed it) previous job experience (67%)! What didn’t matter? Cover letters (26%), prestige of college (21%), and GPA (19%). Yep, all you haters that still think cover letters are a thing! They aren’t, go back to 1997.

– This year, recruiters are most focused on growing talent pipelines (57%) and the quality of their hires (56%). 

Can we be real for a second? I mean really, really!? You’all are pissing me off!

56% of Recruiters are concerned with Quality of Hire. That’s nice. Tell me how you measure that? Oh, it’s when a new hire stays 90 days in the job. That means quality? How does that align with the industry? Oh, you don’t know, because everyone measures QofH completely differently and it’s a freaking meaningless metric! I WANT TO SHOOT MYSELF IN THE HEAD!

Quality of Hire is not a Recruiting metric. Quality of Hire is a hiring manager metric! It’s something that starts with TA, flows through HR, ends up in Performance Management and ultimately is tied to Hiring Manager decisions and their ability to develop and onboard new hires. TA has very little to do with quality of hire. TA is responsible for Quality of Source, that is a different thing.

So, just stop it. Stop doing this. You’re giving me an aneurysm!

And now back to the survey…

– 87% of Recruiters use LinkedIn to find candidates, the largest of all networks. 67% of Candidates use Facebook to search for a job, the largest of all networks. Do you see a problem here?

Definitely, go download the report! It’s loaded with a ton of data that can help shape some of your TA decisions in the near future, or just get you to do more of what everyone else is doing because you were told by idiots like me it’s the new hottest thing on the market to do, and fun wasting most of your budget developing your brand no one will ever know about.

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!