The Big Reference Check Scam!

Posted on March 23, 2016 by Tim Sackett

I remember when I started my first job in Talent Acquisition and HR, I totally believed checking references was going to lead me to better, higher quality hires. My HR university program practically drilled into me the belief that “past performance predicts future performance.”

For all I knew those words were delivered on tablets from Moses himself!

After all, what better way is there to predict a candidate’s future success than to speak with individuals who knew this person the best?

And it’s not just anybody: It’s former managers or colleagues who have previously worked with this person – directly or indirectly – and have a deep understanding of how they have performed, and now telling me how they will perform in the future.

Grand design at its finest.

About 13 seconds into my HR career I started questioning this wisdom. Call me an HR atheist if you must, but something wasn’t adding up to me.

It was probably around the hundredth reference check when I started wondering either I was the best recruiter of all time and only find rock stars (which was mostly true) or this reference check thing is one giant scam!

Everyone knows the set up: The candidate wants the job, so they want to make sure they provide good references. The candidate provides three references that will tell HR the candidate walks on water. HR accepts them and actually goes through the process of calling these three perfect references.

When I find out that an organization still does reference checks, I love to ask this one question: When was the last time you didn’t hire someone based on their reference check?

Most organizations can’t come up with one example of this happening. We hire based on references 100% of the time.

Does that sound like a good system? Now, I’m asking you, when was the last time your organization didn’t hire a candidate based on their references?

If you can’t find an answer, or the answer is ‘never’, you need to stop checking references because it’s a big fat waste of time and resources! There’s no “HR law” that says you have to check references. Just stop it. It won’t change any of your hiring decisions.

New ways of checking references that checkout

So, how should you do reference checks? Here are three ideas:

1. Source your own references

Stop accepting references candidates give you. Instead, during the interview ask for names of their direct supervisors at every position they’ve had. Then call into those companies and talk to those people. Even with HR telling everyone “we don’t give out references,” I’ve found you can engage in some meaningful conversations off the record.

2. Automate the process

New reference checking technology asks questions in a way that doesn’t lead the reference to believe they are giving the person a ‘bad’ reference, but just honestly telling what the person’s work preferences are. The information gathered will then tell you if the candidate is a good fit for your organization or a bad fit — but the reference has no idea.

3. Use fact checking software

Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. have made it so candidates who lie can get caught. There is technology being developed that allows organizations to fact-check a person’s background and verify if they are actually who they tell you they are. Estimates show that 53% of people lie on their resume. Technology makes it easy to find out who is.

Great Talent Acquisition and HR pros need to start questioning a process that is designed to push through 99.9% of hires. Catching less than .1% of hires isn’t better quality. It’s just flat out lazy.

Start thinking about what you can do to source better quality hires and your organization might just think you can walk on water.

Your turn: What are your tips for checking references?

T3 – The Great Facebook Sourcing Hope

Posted on March 15, 2016 by Tim Sackett

About once a week I have this conversation with a fellow TA/Sourcing Pro:

TA/Sourcing Pro: “Ugh! I hate LinkedIn! If Facebook ever decided to put LinkedIn out of business they could do it overnight!”

Tim: “Yep.”

Okay, usually there’s all kinds of explanation and brainstorming around how we could ‘show’ Facebook how to do this, easily. But, you’ve already heard, or had, this conversation about a thousand times, so I won’t bore you with it again!

My plan is that Facebook does a LinkedIn type reset, but doesn’t screw it up like LinkedIn has. There is a true need for a ‘professional network’, but you can’t turn it into Job Board 2.0 like LI did. How does that help us TA and Sourcing pros? FB could pull this off. 2 billion profiles. They would have virtually everyone, and could attract back the college kids with the potential of company and job matching, by just working with college career placement offices, etc. LinkedIn started doing this but walked away from it way too early.

FB then makes money off of company pages and postings. Plus, pay per click ads to very specialized groups of candidates that companies would easily pay to get in front of. I’m sure they’re a few other ideas they could make money on, without giving away everything like LI did.

Only about .02% of TA and Sourcing Pros are actually using Facebook to recruit. None of those people are telling you how, because they’re making money on it, and don’t want you to know! Basically, it’s not how you think. Almost every great sourcing product to come out has to do with IT sourcing.

It makes sense because that’s where all the cash is, so that’s where all the investment is. Facebook doesn’t play nice with others (let’s face it, they don’t have to), so you see virtually nothing coming out around Facebook sourcing. The reality is, though, you have the ability to Facebook source, by location, by a company name, by gender, etc., but you won’t do it because it means you have to do the heavy lifting.

What is heavy lifting mean? FB will get you about 80% there, but you have to go get the other 20%. There’s no easy ‘InMail’ to bail you out. You might have to search for an email, call into a company, etc. Heavy lifting…

Here’s a Facebook search engine (hat tip to Recruiting God – Steve Levy for sharing this):

https://inteltechniques.com/intel/osint/facebook.htm

This isn’t the first and only one of these out there, but it’s a good one for sure. In fact, these types of FB search engines started showing up around the exact time FB launched Graph Search, then almost immediately took it down because it was actually too easy to search and find people! People complained FB listened (did you hear that LI?).

So, what’s the FB sourcing gold? It’s low-end positions, not high-end. The high-end folks (IT, Engineers, etc.) figured out early that putting your title, etc. on FB wasn’t going to get you pimped constantly by recruiters and sourcers. The lower skilled folks don’t care, because they don’t get non-stop job offers.

I know of a few recruiters making well over six figures, right now, only recruiting lower skilled and/or not your normal technical talent type pros on FB! Technicians, truck drivers, sales people, teachers, nurses, etc. Companies are struggling to find great talent at this level as well, and FB is a goldmine that virtually no one is sourcing.

Check out the search engine above. Connect with Steve Levy. He’s a great dude and one of the good guys in recruiting who is always willing to share his knowledge!

T3 – Recruiting tools from @Sourcecon!

Posted on March 8, 2016 by Tim Sackett

Sourcecon, one of the premier recruiting conferences on the planet, happened last week. I didn’t attend, but kept up on the action on twitter and on the Sourcecon site. Jeremy Roberts, the editor and director of Sourecon, does an excellent job over there, and I always find great content and ideas. It’s not just for Sourcing! I mean sourcing is still part of recruiting I think. I’m not sure, it’s all very confusing…

Anywho. Stacy Zapar did a presentation and shared some cheap/free tools she uses to help her source/recruit better and more effectively, and I wanted to share those because I think two of them are ones anyone in recruiting can take advantage of:

1. Email Hunter – is the easiest way to find professional email addresses. Give a domain name and get the list of all the emails related to it found on the internet. I can imagine a thousand ways to use this, but one of the best has to be raiding a competitor! Can you imagine if you’re GM? All you have to do is put in ford.com and Bam! You have every address on the web of folks with a ford.com email address.

There’s a free version for a single user with limited searches, but you can also get a paid version which is still fairly inexpensive, and they have a Chrome extension as well.

2. YouCanBookMe – Which is a booking software that integrates with your Google or iCloud calendar. This makes getting candidate screens and phone interviews set up super easy. You just send them a link and they pick what works for them in your calendar which you can personalize to what schedule you want to offer. This makes the go-between dance a thing of the past!

Again, YouCanBookMe has a free version you can use by yourself, or you can pay a little and get some premium benefits.

These aren’t the normal big recruiting and HR software’s that I normally highlight, but these are two the ‘inside’ secret type of tools that real recruiters and sourcers are using each and every day to make their jobs easier.

I think so many recruiting pros get intimidated by Sourcecon. You have people talking about stuff you can’t even comprehend. The reality is, at every conference you’re going to have your 1%ers, those folks who are totally geeked out by technology and the profession. That’s cool, I love all of those folks. They are the ones leading the profession. But you also have the other 99%ers. The real folks like Stacy, who will give you real tools and ideas that we all can use.

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 – send me a note.

T3 – Halogen Software and Jobvite Partnership – What does it mean?

Posted on March 1, 2016 by Tim Sackett

This week on T3 I break down the partnership between Halogen and Jobvite. It was announced late last week that performance and talent management technology Halogen Software and recruiting platform Jobvite were teaming up to create one platform offering both products. From the news release:

“As part of the strategic partnership, Halogen’s customers will benefit from a tight integration between the solutions that creates a streamlined and efficient employee lifecycle process, including Jobvite’s comprehensive, analytics-driven recruiting platform, which accelerates talent acquisition by:

Removing friction for candidates and hiring teams to accelerate and optimize every step of the recruiting process;
Leveraging CV databases, online professional profiles, and hundreds of other sources to build—and continuously refine—a robust pipeline of qualified prospects;
Tapping into all employees’ networks to reach more targeted groups of candidates and enabling everyone at the company to source talent.

“Our mission is to help our customers win with talent. To do so, they need to be able to attract and recruit their unfair share of top talent quickly, as well as engage and retain their top performers,” says Les Rechan, President and CEO, Halogen Software. “Our partnership with Jobvite supports this mission. Jobvite leads the industry with a comprehensive social and analytics-driven recruiting platform, making them an ideal partner to help us deliver more value than ever to our large customer base.”

So, What does this really mean?

– First, it’s a partnership, no one bought the other. They only fewer than 100 of the same customers, both should benefit from the partnership equally. If you use one of these solutions, you should probably look at the integration and see if it makes sense for you.

– Halogen/Jobvite Platform is unique from a talent technology perspective. Both are really strong solutions on their own, together you will literally be able to follow a candidate from the pre-applicant stage through employment succession in one solution. That’s pretty powerful!

– I’ve long held the belief that Talent Acquisition should own succession, it just makes sense. This is the first solution that will allow TA leaders to show how this might work. It benefits TA to own succession because succession ultimately impacts the overall workforce plan, which TA owns. End to end talent management from recruiting to promotion to succession.

I haven’t demoed the new integrated platform but will soon and will report back on what I find. In the meantime, if you’re a user of either solution, you might want to set up a demo on your own, or if you’re in the market for a new ATS or talent management solution, this is one to put on your list to consider.

T3 – Top 25 HR Related Mobile Apps

Posted on February 23, 2016 by Tim Sackett

This week on T3 I’m sharing something that someone else put together, but it’s a great resource nonetheless.The folks at GetApp, a site with reviews of workforce management software, put together the top HR Mobile Apps.

Take a look:

It’s a great resource to check out since you get reviews on 25 of what they consider some of the top HR related apps on the market. I don’t know the company GetApp that put this together, and while they claim each App listed didn’t pay them to be on the list, what I normally find in the industry is while they didn’t pay to get on the list, they did pay for something else, then ‘surprising’ ended up on a list!

I’ll be honest, many of these I’ve never heard of, so you’ll have to check them out on your own, but there are some big names on the list to be sure.

One really interesting thing you’ll notice from their list is that there a ton of time keeping employee time tracking type of apps. This makes sense since such a high percentage of our workforce have smartphones, these apps are easy to implement, especially at those level of jobs where you need to clock in and out.

The app world is intense. Hundreds of apps come into the market on a daily basis, and I continue to see more and more in the HR Technology space as well. While the majority of HR pros still probably don’t use an app to do their daily work, you will in the future. All the major HRMS products have an app that allows you to access information from your smartphone, and let your employees access their information as well.

Click on the image to get a larger view of the list.

Walking Dead: Reviving Your Talent Networks!

Posted on February 10, 2016 by Tim Sackett

You have a bunch of zombies surrounding your career website right now, and you don’t even know it.

They stumble around and look at your content, lurk at your jobs and then just stumble away when they don’t find anything to take a bite out of. Well, the folks at FOT and Smashfly are here to help you turn those zombies into real-life candidates by reviving the talent networks you probably don’t even know you have.

Who said zombies can’t turn back to real live viable candidates?! Not us, because the FOT crew knows how, and we’re going to show you, too. Join us on February 24 at 2pm EST and we’ll give you the following goods:

Show you the difference between a Talent Network and a Talent Community. We’ll give you ways to build your talent network into active pools of great candidates. By using and developing talent networks, you’re letting those zombies hanging out around your career site tell you “I’m next…” “Pick me…”, making it super easy to identify your next victim!
Help you develop a Talent Network Strategy that lasts, with little effort from your team to keep it going. The biggest problem we all face is we just don’t have enough capacity to do more. Talent networks give you the more— without the work. We’ll show you how.
Show you 5 ways the best companies are engaging their Talent Networks to make real placements.We won’t just tell you the ways, we’re going to hear about straight from a Talent Pro who is using these now to successfully hire and fill position within her company. The good, the bad, the dead. You’re going to hear it all!
Give you 3 things you can do with candidate contact information before they even apply to your company. Talent pools aren’t about the apply, they’re about getting you to apply. Some zombies are ready to eat, some are just milling around being zombies. What do you do when potential candidates aren’t ready to eat? We’ve got the answer.
Provide insight to how you can measure the success of your talent networks. By now we know none of this matters if we can’t back it up with measurable data that proves it works. Talent networks, and the data you get from them, will give you a ton of insight to what is working in your Talent shop and what might need some tweaking.

Don’t let your time get “eaten” up by a bunch of zombie candidates who will never fill the needs your company has. Learn how to build great talent networks that will give you real live placements, with less effort than you ever thought imaginable. It’s time to fight back and win against your walking dead applicant pool!

Come join the FOT Zombie Hunting crew on February 24 at 2pm EST and learn how you can implement and take your talent networks to the next level!

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T3 – HR Tech Conferences for Spring 2016

Posted on February 9, 2016 by Tim Sackett

The T3 series delivers you all things HR and Talent technology. This post won’t be highlighting an individual piece of HR tech, but instead introduce you to two brand new HR Technology conferences in the U.S. that will both be taking place this Spring, 2016 – PeopleTech and HR Tech Fest.

Of course, the granddaddy of all HR Tech Conferences is The HR Technology Conference that takes place in the fall, this year in Chicago, but traditionally in Las Vegas. It’s one of my favorite conferences of the year, but I love that we are able to give HR and Talent Pros and Leaders a couple of other options that might be more cost effective and closer to home!

PeopleTech Conference – Dallas, TX April 13-14th

PeopleTech is a conference designed for HR and Talent Acquisition Leaders who are exploring and interested in all things related to the technology within the HR industry. The sessions are a combination of industry experts, HR Pros, and vendor driven content. Here’s a flavor of some of the sessions:

Current Trends in Human Capital Metrics/Analytics – Taking it to the Next Level
Getting to the Finish Line in New Software Implementation: An Exercise in Effective Change Management
Designing for the Workforce of Tomorrow
Building a Magnetic Culture: How to Attract & Retain Top Talent
And of course, my session! HR Pros Buyers Guide to HR Tech!

For those who are really looking to invest in new HR technology and upgrading your tech in the next year or so, you will get some great insight from others who are currently going through implementations and beyond. Many of the sessions are lead by HR leaders who have recently gone through this process.

These sessions are definitely more specific and directed to HR and Talent Acquisition specifically, unlike many HR conferences where they’re the sessions are heavily centered on soft-skills and management. It’s great that PeopleTech decided to hold their conference in Dallas since HR Leaders have so few options for really good content down south!

HR Tech Fest – Washington D.C. April 20-22nd

HR Tech Fest is an organization that I first came into contact with when I spoke at their conference in Sydney, Australia late last year. HR Tech Fest is unique in that they don’t “sell” any of their sessions to vendors. It’s a fairly common practice in today’s conference scene where a vendor will pay to ‘sponsor’ a session, and get to put their own client into that slot. What it turns out to be normally is an hour commercial for their project, unwittingly being sold by their client who is paying for their software. Brilliant strategy really (to make money), but many times it makes for poor content.

So, all the sessions at HR Tech Fest are either delivered by actual HR and Talent Leaders, who were chosen regardless of the tech they use, and by industry thought leaders. What I found at HR Tech Fest in Sydney was that this dynamic really opened up the audience and the interaction between audience and presenters was very high, in and outside of the sessions.

Here’s a flavor of some of the sessions at HR Tech Fest:

HR of the Future: Where is Technology taking us?
Navigating Organizational Evolution with Talent Analytics (delivered by SVP of Hulu)
Digital Gondola: Career Development Ride (delivered by HR executive at Google)
Open Source Comes to HR (delivered by the VP of Talent at Hootsuite)
I’ll be hosting a session track and be a part of an HR Tech expert panel

While this is a new HR Tech conference in the U.S., the Eventful Group has put on these conferences in other countries for years, and they really know what they’re doing. I also love that they decided to offer this on the East Coast, where so much HR Tech innovation comes out of, but rarely is a conference held in this area.

I’ll be attending both conferences. What can I say, I’m an HR Tech geek. If you’ll be coming, please connect with me so we can meet in person!

Recruiters – Have You Figured Out Snapchat? You better…

Posted on February 4, 2016 by Tim Sackett

I’ll be the first to say, I don’t currently use Snapchat. My sons do. In fact, they use it constantly. So, do their friends. Teens and College students are using Snapchat to communicate with each other in a major way, and you are starting to see major stars and athletes join as well. Unless you have kids from the ages of 12-22, you probably have no idea what Snapchat even is.

Why should you care? Check out this chart:

Two years ago the use of Snapchat didn’t even register. In the spring of 2015, it was 13%. What do you think it’s right now? My guess is over 25%, maybe even more!

This isn’t necessarily about recruiting on Snapchat. Although, I know some folks will do this and find a way to be successful in some certain areas. Most of won’t.

Understanding and using Snapchat is about knowing how the talent you want to recruit likes to communicate. It’s about building your brand on a communication channel of your target audience. You can dismiss it, but your competition probably won’t.

Another interesting thing about the chart is the dramatic shift from teens out of Facebook. We’ve seen this in the industry for a while. As Mom and Grandma jumped on Facebook, the kids jumped off in a major way! I suspect, and we’ll eventually see the data to support this, is that when they stop being kids, those kids will come back! Either way, Facebook is still an important tool to understand as well, because we recruit more than young adults!

Check out this tutorial on Snapchat to see what it’s all about:

Also, check out this great piece by SocialTalent on How to Use Snapchat to Recruit.

T3 – Beamery @BeameryHQ

Posted on February 2, 2016 by Tim Sackett

This week on T3 I’m reviewing the recruitment marketing platform Beamery. Beamery is fairly new to the market being launched in 2014, and jumping into the hottest sector in HR and Talent technology: CRM, recruitment marketing, recruitment automation. They are carving out space by billing themselves as candidate engagement software, knowing almost every company in the world is concerned with candidate experience.

Beamery records and helps you track every single candidate that engages with you and your career site, whether they apply or not. That is important because a solid 70% of those people coming to your site will never apply, but if continue to engage them, you’ll get many to eventually apply. Beamery’s strength is creating an inbound marketing machine for your recruiting department.

You can develop unlimited talent pools by whatever criteria you select, and engage each pool of candidates differently based on how you decide. The talent pool management, built on machine learning, is definitely a powerful piece of what Beamery delivers. Beamery integrates with your ATS and is already partnered with Greenhouse.io, one of the hottest new ATS products on the market.

5 Things I really like about Beamery:

1. Beamery has integrated Candidate Experience surveys into their platform, that you can automate to be sent at a certain point within your process, manually push, change by position, etc. All the analytics are then put together on the backend within Beamery analytics engine. This is something not all recruitment marketing plays have right now.

2. Beamery uses predictive analytics for automated followups based on algorithms they have developed. This truly helps recruiters stay onto of what’s important, and helps them not to forget. It’s a classic recruiting weakness because so many of us end up putting out fires, and we forget about a possible great candidate from a few days ago. Beamery automatically reminds you to follow up.

3. Their email sync with outlook and google is very powerful. One problem every recruiting shop has is getting information from email strings to where it needs to be within a system of record. Beamery uses machine learning to pull any email communication between recruiters and candidates in automatically, without the recruiter having to do anything.

4. Like many of the Recruitment CRM software, Beamery also does unlimited landing pages for jobs, events, etc. Allows to push simple calls to action to build talent pools and easily moves these pools back into your ATS. They also allow one-click action by candidates to engage with you by sharing any kind of social profile – Facebook, LinkedIn, Github, Google profile, etc.

5. Beamery is the first platform I’ve seen that truly has separated the function of Sourcer and Recruiter – working to define that Sourcers use Beamery, Recruiters use the ATS, and they’ve built a workflow to help organizations really build out this practice. For large organizations that have both functions, this will really help define the roles for your team.

I really liked Beamery’s technology and ease of use. Clearly, recruitment CRM software is for more sophisticated recruitment shops, who work in competitive marketplaces. That doesn’t mean just technology jobs. Finding Truck Drivers, Machinist and Retail Managers are super competitive! But you have to want to embrace the technology to help you reach your goals.

Beamery has a great introductory price point for 1-5 seats, and will work with you on enterprise pricing. I was shocked at how low of a cost a SMB shop could get into this software! Check them out, Beamery is well worth a demo.

T3 – SwitchApp @GetSwitch

Posted on January 26, 2016 by Tim Sackett

This week on T3 I review the new “Tinder” for job search app called SwitchApp. SwitchApp is a completely mobile job search app for candidates and companies to help match them together. It’s basically a marketplace for passive job seekers, where they can ‘swipe’ right if they are interested in a job, and a notification will go to the company of the interest.

Swipe left, and the company doesn’t get notified. For you Tinder users, you’ll get this. Obviously, to make all of this happen a job seeker first must download SwitchApp to their Apple or Android device and set up a profile. They can create a profile easily by linking their LinkedIn or Facebook profile, or filling it out manually. The profile is automatically set to anonymous, and any company on your profile will not be able to view your profile.

Swipe’s job matching algorithm then goes to work showing the jobs that the job seeker is eligible to see based on Switch’s matching criteria. If a job seeker is matched to the job, the organization can ‘like’ it to show their interest. Then it’s up to the job seeker to decide if they’re interested. Right now, 47% of candidates matched by Switch and shown to companies are ‘liked’ by the company.

SwitchApp allows companies to post position with a structured data job posting. Basically, a company will input all of the skills they need for the position, title, location, salary range, etc. The matching technology does the rest. SwitchApp does not allow companies to ‘search’ the database of job seekers and contact anyone they want, there must be a match to make the magic happen!

Current users of the app actually love the fact that there is no searching taking place. Just post the job and see if matches come back. It eliminates much of the traditional noise you get from postings and having so many people apply that aren’t close to what you’re looking for. With SwitchApp you only get pinged when a candidate matches the criteria you put into your posting.

SwitchApp is currently free for employers to try out and use. Primarily, it’s only going to work in New York and San Francisco (the Bay Area), because that’s where it’s being tested and launched first. It’s not only for tech hires, the app also has finance, advertising and other business-related professions they are targeting.

It’s free. Give it a try if you’re out in those areas and looking for talent, many companies have already made hires. Eventually, Switch is going to be charging employers for usage, so it’s best to try it out now before that kicks in sometime this year.

The Tim Sackett Project

TA & HR Expert, Dad, Backup Point Guard on my over 40 men's team

Category Archives: TA Technology