Category Archives: TA Technology

T3 – @Phenom_People

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This week I get to review Talent Relationship Marketing (TRM) technology Phenom People (who apparently, like @Kris_Dunn, think it’s good to put an underscore in your Twitter name!). So, what’s TRM? TRM is a new entry into the Talent Acquisition/HR technology space. It’s basically, the technology that you use from visitor to applicant, whereas your ATS is applicant to hire.

Phenom People, formally iMonentous, has its roots in mobile recruiting. Back in 2010 when they started it was under this idea that ‘hey, looks like a lot of people might use these smartphones to search for jobs!’ Turns out, they were really right! Phenom People has grown into a technology that attempts to make the job search more like online shopping. Think Amazon, but for searching and applying for a job on your own career site.

Online shopping has evolved to a point where it seems like the site you’re visiting knows what you want before you do. Phenom People does the same thing for your candidates! It tracks everything about a job seeker who enters your career site. Where did they come from, what did they look at, where did they go, etc. Tracking over 400 data points in the process. Phenom can tell you an amazing amount of information about the people coming to your site, and give you the inside track to source and engage those people again, even if they don’t apply!

5 Things I really like about Phenom People: 

1. Look Ahead Search. You know when you start typing in Amazon and auto fills in what you think you’re searching for? Phenom does that for your job seekers. You might not think this is a big deal until you use it and see the difference as a job seeker. It’s awesome.

2. Careers Page turned Shopping experience.  Job seeker personalization is very 2016!  If you ever shopped online, especially at Amazon or similar sites, you can kind of picture what Phenom People will do your career site. Jobs, for sure. But, also, personalized curated content, designed specifically to the user, even when you don’t know that user. Reviews, through a great API integration with Glassdoor, where the job seeker never leaves your site, but can still do their research!

3. Analytics that will scare you! In a totally good way! It’s unbelievable what Phenom People can tell you about each and every person who visits your site, plus the information they can give you to re-engage those people who never even gave you one piece of information! It’s big brother for talent acquisition, and you’re going to be amazed!

4. A complete history of every job seeker who visits your site.  Sourcing and recruiting is tough. It gets much easier when you’re given a complete history of what, where and how the job seeker found you, how long they stayed on pages, what content they engaged with, etc. Stuff the job seeker use to believe was secret, you now know, and can use to build a great selling strategy to get them interested in your organization and jobs!

5. The upside is very impressive! Many of the technologies I review are great, but they lack capacity to grow into anything else than what they really are. That’s fine, if they’re good at what they do and ROI makes sense. Phenom People is just scratching the service of what they can do with the information and data they have on your job seekers! Imagine a day, soon, where you can go to your executives and show them exactly how many of your competitors workers came to your site, how many applied, how many you hired, how many you can still go after! That’s a game changer. That’s when Talent Acquisition becomes a competitive advantage. When TA can systematically weaken your competition!

Phenom People works in the mid to enterprise level market. 50 jobs/around 1,000 employees is probably the low end of where they’ll get enough data to make a difference for your organization. They won’t replace your ATS, this is pre-ATS stuff, but they work in conjunction with your ATS. Great technology. Take a look, well worth the demo!

 

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.

Quality of Hire Metrics are an Illusion

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LinkedIn released their annual Global Recruiting Trends 2016 report last week and it had some great information.  I have to give LI credit, this report, each year, has some really great information that always makes me think!  This year’s report was no different, and one stat struck me as really telling:

When Talent Leaders were asked: “What is the single most valuable metric that you use to track your recruiting team’s performance today?”

They said:

“39% of Talent Leaders agree the quality of hire is the most valuable metric for performance!” 

It was the single highest answer to this question!

You know what?  Quality of Hire is an Illusion for about 99% of organizations!  They have no freaking idea how to actually measure quality of hire, or what they’re actually measuring doesn’t haven’t the faintest correlation to actual quality of hire.

So, why is this interesting to me?

It shows me that TA Leaders still don’t have the guts to use real metrics and analytics to measure the performance of their teams!  Using a subjective, at best, measure, like Quality of Hire, allows them to continue to just make up what they ‘feel’ performance is, and one that doesn’t truly hold themselves or their teams accountable.

If you think this isn’t you, tell me how you actually measure quality of hire of your employees?  It’s very complex to even come up with something I could argue is an actual quality of hire metric!  Most organizations will do things like measure 90 day retention as a quality of hire. “Oh, look, they stayed 90 days! Way to go recruiters you’re hiring quality!” No they’re not! They’re just hiring bodies that decided to stay around 90 days!

Quality of hire metrics only work if you are actually measuring the performance of your new hires to the performance of those employees you already have.  This measure, then, becomes one that you can’t even measure until you have a true measure of performance (which is a whole other issue!) of both the new hire and your current employees. Also, you have to give that new hire, probably a year, to truly see what kind of performer they are in your environment.

How many organizations are waiting a year to measure the quality of hire of the employees they hired a year ago?  Almost none!

The other issue here is why is Quality of Hire a recruiting measure to begin with? Are the recruiters ultimately choosing who gets hired and who doesn’t?  That’s what I thought.

So, the recruiter can give the best candidate in the world to a hiring manager, but she instead hires a gal from her sorority who bombs out, and the recruiter gets killed on the quality of hire metric? That sounds fair.

Quality of hire metrics only became something because TA Leaders didn’t have the guts to tell the executives in their organizations that this isn’t really something that matters to the effectiveness of the TA function.  Quality of hire is a hiring manager metric.  You know how it’s measured? By looking at their operational measures and seeing if they actually met them.  If they didn’t it one of three things: they don’t know how to hire, or they don’t know how to manage, or both.

Regardless, check out the LinkedIn report. It has some good data points that are fun to discuss!

T3 – @ElevatedCareers by eHarmony

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This week on T3 I take a look at new careers site being developed by dating site eHarmony, called Elevated Careers. Elevated Careers was one of the new companies this year at the HR Tech Conference in the startup pavilion. While their peers in the startup pavilion didn’t really like this, Elevated is actually being run like a startup, they just have one really big investor!

Elevated has taken the successful compatibility matching technology of eHarmony that is responsible for 438 marriages per day – that’s 4% of all marriages in the U.S. per day! – and applied the same scientific methods to match employees with jobs and companies. Just as eHarmony came about because Dr. Neil Clark Warren knew there had to be a better way to finding love than just luck, Elevated believes that if jobs and employees are matched based on compatibility, people will be much more satisfied and fulfilled in their jobs, and companies will have higher rates of employee retention, motivation, engagement, and productivity.

If you’re like me, the first time I heard of Elevated Careers, I chuckled a bit. I admit, I’m sophomoric and a twelve-year-old at heart! Once I got a chance to see the product, and smart minds behind it, I was chuckling for a different reason. These folks know what they’re doing, and they have a giant captured audience to leverage. Think what you want about dating sites, but they know how to build trust, get massive amounts of data on their members and at that point is just a matter of leveraging that data.

5 Things I really like about Elevated Careers:

1. Elevated Careers gets what most career sites don’t even focus on – Fit Matters!  Their backbone is a freaking dating website; they’re going to be better at matching and fit than almost anyone!

2. eHarmony has been public about making this work. This bodes well for ensuring they’ll get the investment needed to make a great product. The UI is already very tight and intuitive. They made a very easy to use product.

3. Elevated will have a unique talent pool to leverage, that is unlike any other product on the market. You won’t be able to contact dating website members, that would kill that brand, which they have to very protective over, but you will be able to market to those members through Elevated.

4. Their fit technology will give candidates a Compatibility Score. This will help candidates know how well they will potentially fit with a potential company, but also show them where and why they fall short.

5. The job function is more than just an aggregator, as organizations will have to validate themselves before their jobs will show up in search. This way candidates know the jobs they’re applying for are current and up-to-date.

Elevated Careers is in Beta and hopes to be completely live end of first quarter of 2016, but it shouldn’t stop you from jumping on the Beta is you can get in.  One thing I wasn’t excited about is there is a piece of their product that will have candidates “buy” for certain functionality. Before you go down The Ladders path, you have to understand where they’re coming from – Dating Site.

Their data shows that people don’t value free sites.  If you offer a dating site membership for free, no one shows up. If you make them pay, add some exclusivity to it, people will pay for it.  While that works on dating sites, I don’t know if it will work on a career site, but we’ll see. I didn’t get from them that they’re married to this idea, and it might change out of beta.

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.

Sustainable Talent Acquisition

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Here’s what I know.  A sustainable talent acquisition process can’t happen if it’s human run. A manual, human run talent acquisition process eventually falls apart.

Think about your employee referral program.

It was an awesome program when you launched it last month, last year, etc.  Now it’s dead in the water. Why?  Because it’s almost impossible for you, and your team, to keep it going on your own.  Other things become a higher priority, things move fast, eventually, even the best programs get pushed to the side, or forgotten about completely.

I’m not just talking about employee referrals. Every part of your TA process is exactly the same.  Sourcing, assessments, background checks, onboarding, exit interviews, etc.

To make talent acquisition sustainable, you need to integrate technology, it can be human driven.  TA technology allows you to automatically sustain these efforts simultaneously without you actually having to do anything.  Technology can reach out and source and attract. Technology can screen and assess. Technology can drive employee referrals 24/7/365, without you ever touching it. Technology can interview.

Basically, technology allows you to sustain and ongoing recruitment effort without you ever taking your foot off the gas.  The best of us fail at this. We have the best intentions, design the best programs, then life happens and things fall through the cracks. We then come to a point, where we do it all over again.  This is where and why most talent acquisition processes and functions fail, because they are just not sustainable.

Everything is going great, then Mandy leaves for a new job, Sue goes on maternity leave, and Tim who used to be great, has now lost his mojo, and we can’t seem to do anything right. Humans screw up your process! We need them, because humans also make hires, but boy can they make it difficult sometimes!

How can you make your talent acquisition sustainable for years in your organization?  Utilize your technology to it’s fullest. Add technology to the parts that give you the biggest headaches. Then, utilize your humans to build relationships with candidates and hiring managers. Let the tech run the process, let the humans run the people.

Will Recruitment Marketing Automation Make Sourcing Obsolete?

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I keep hearing about companies that are increasingly struggling hiring the talent they need currently and for future growth. The one solution that continues to be thrown out is adding a sourcing function within their talent acquisition department.

Adding sourcing to your talent acquisition team is definitely an option to help you obtain the talent you desire.  It’s also a really expensive option! Anytime you’re adding headcount, you’re adding the most expensive resource to your team of all options.

I was at the HR Tech Conference this past week and one thing was for certain, talent acquisition technology is coming after your sourcing work!  Recruitment marketing and recruitment automation technology was clearly the fastest growing segment of technology vendors at the HR Tech Conference.

Large companies can get some of the best tech on the market to help them source and attract candidates for about $25-$100K per year, ballpark, depending on what you need and choose. Your average Sourcing Pro is going to run about $75K on average. One person, no technology.

I know the biggest and best firms will have both.  I also know that most of us will have to make a choice between these two options. Some will try and do both, by limiting the spend on both sides, get some tech and an entry level kid to bang on the internet to find talent. I believe you’re probably best by going all in one way or the other, if you have limited resources.

Based on what I saw at HR Tech this year, and the growth from just last year, I can tell you I would bet my resources on buying the tech!

Recruitment marketing and automation technology can provide you with much of the attraction muscle that you need, plus continue on the backend to retarget and continually connect with potential candidates you don’t even know you need yet.

It’s hard for me to write this because I have a bunch of friends who are great sourcing pros, and do excellent work.  I think there will always be a place for great sourcing pros in the world, like most great talent. The problem is most sourcing pros aren’t great, they’re just average. Technology is better than average. Which is why I ask the question if the technology will make most sourcing obsolete as we know it right now?  I think it probably will.

By the way, I also heard non-stop all week at the conference how technology is also going to make Recruiters obsolete. Which begs the question what human interactions will be most valuable to Talent Acquisition in a future technology driven attracting and hiring process?

It’s going to be the ability of one person talking to another person about why they need to come and work at your company. Sounds simple, but the best Sourcing Pros and best Recruiting Pros do this exceptionally well. They build relationships with candidates, build trust, find ways to make candidates believe working for your company is better than any other option they have.

So, they can sell.  The tech will run the process, screen, test, assess, communicate the basics, etc. What the tech can’t do is sell. The future of sourcing and recruiting is selling. Ironically, it’s also the past!

The Uber of Recruitment #hrtechconf

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Apparently, the new marketing message for Talent Acquisition technology is to call yourself the “Uber of Recruitment”. I have had six different companies actually use this phrase to explain what their product is, and how it works.

Marketers love to play up being a ‘disruptor’, like Uber did to the taxi industry.  I love using Uber, and I think most people that use it really like it as well. So, making the jump in marketing to use that positive image and tying it back to your product makes perfect sense.

Lazy, but I get it.

Here’s the bigger story, companies are trying to cash in on the multi-billion dollar recruitment industry. Okay, it’s not a big story, it’s been happening for decades, but we are getting to a point where you can see technology making a serious play at truly changing the way companies interact with traditional recruitment agencies.

This is my game, so I’m definitely interested in checking out all these new Uber of Recruiting plays.

Here’s how most of these technologies work:

Step 1: Use our technology to connect with candidates

Step 2: We charge you about 75% less than traditional recruitment agencies

Step 3: We cut out the middle man

Step 4: You get same talent, faster, cheaper, happier.

The basic premise is Uber simple. Put the power of recruitment into the hands of the candidate.  Let them easily connect with those companies that seek their expertise.

Here’s why this is hard.  All of these Uber of Recruitment plays don’t really have an answer on how do we get people and/or companies to use their product.  The need to use Recruitment Agencies are based on a few main premises:

1. The most desirable candidates are not looking, and must be found.

2. You don’t have capacity or skill in-house to find this talent.

3. Agencies can find better talent, than other options (remember this is the premise of use!).

The Uber of Recruitment plays don’t necessarily address all of these premises. I do believe that this technology is going to have an impact to a part of recruitment industry market segment that has issue with cost.

The technology makes it easier for organizations to almost run their own type of agency in-house using this technology, and it makes it easy for candidates to connect.  But, the huge miss is that these technologies still don’t go out and sell a talented person, who is not looking for a job at your company or any company, on why they need to consider this job.

That’s called recruitment, or sales, which is recruitment. Uber of Recruitment technology doesn’t recruit, which is why these plays won’t end the industry as we know it. Uber as an example doesn’t really fit as a recruitment industry killer, but it might work in terms of disrupting and pushing bad agencies to get better.

 

Who Should I Connect With? #HRTechConf

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By far the question I get asked most often at the HR Tech Conference is, “Who should I connect with while I’m here?”  Both vendors and attendees ask me this. I probably face this question a half a dozen times a day, or more.

I really don’t have an answer for that. It’s a very personal question.

Who I might want to connect with, could be very different from who you want to connect with. It all depends on what you’re trying to get out of the interaction.  I know a bunch of people and connect with many more at each HR Tech Conference, which is why I enjoy this conference so much, but I don’t have your ‘secret’ connection list.

Here is how I usually respond:

1. Why are you at the conference?

2. What is your current pain point at work?

3. Ultimately, what do you want to leave the conference with?

Once these are answered you can easily come up with a hit list of who you should be connecting with.

The expo and the amount of sessions can be overwhelming, but if you focus on what you are really here to do, it becomes a little easier to handle.

The one thing I’ve found is that almost everyone I’ve ever met at HR Tech loves to make new connections, both attendees and vendors.  That puts it back on your back to be open to these connections as well

One Pro Tip: Leverage one contact to introduce you to a new contact. Repeat.

If you come here knowing no one, find a vendor that you use, and have them introduce you to another one of their customers.  Also, I find session speakers are usually really open to connect, just stop and say “Hi” and thank them for their session afterwards.  That makes for a good conversation starter!

So, whom should you connect with at HR Tech?

That’s a really good question!

 

Awesome New HR Technology #HRTechConf

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It’s that time a year again for one of my most favorite HR and TA Conferences – the HR  Tech Conference 2015!  On the first day of the conference this year Human Resource Executive Magazine announced the 2015 Awesome New Startups for HR.  These are are companies I’ll be checking out and keeping my eye in the near future:

Bridge US

Bridge US has reinvented how companies secure visas and green cards for foreign talent. The company’s cloud-based platform eliminates the time and paperwork associated with immigration processing, tracking and compliance. Bridge US streamlines the immigration process for hundreds of happy customers, ranging from leading startups to publicly-traded companies.

 Great Hires

Great Hires will showcase its mobile-first candidate experience platform that helps companies deliver an awesome on-site interviewing experience. By providing information about the company, job and people they meet with before they walk in the door, candidates are better prepared for their interview, ensuring a positive candidate experience.

 Kanjoya

Kanjoya Perception pushes the frontiers of workforce analytics with its integration of employee engagement, performance review and unstructured text data to understand and predict which employees will do well and why. Created with state-of-the-art natural language processing and machine learning, the solution delivers targeted intelligence to help businesses attract, retain and motivate the best employees for their organizations.

 One Model

HR applications use data but they don’t share it. One Model will demonstrate how it can help deliver a true HR data strategy across a company’s technology investments so that analytics, planning and integration can flow naturally from all of their data. One Model helps companies take control of their HR data, including the data’s history and predictive capabilities, and put them to work.

 OrgVue (a company I reviewed this past year on my T3 series) 

OrgVue is the leading tool for business transformation. It gives HR and OD teams a new and better way to design, transform and operate their organizations. From merger & acquisitions to organizational restructures, the company helps deliver change faster, fairly, with lower risk and lower cost.

 TMBC

TMBC’s StandOut is revolutionizing engagement and performance through next generation HR solutions. StandOut provides the technology to meet the needs of the present and the future with dynamic teaming, real-time statistically reliable measures of engagement and performance, and machine-learning algorithms to increase the precision of measurement over time and to deliver personalized, calibrated coaching to each user.

Besides these companies there is also a Startup Pavilion with twenty other up and coming companies I’ll be checking out as well. Stay tuned for more great information on HR Technology coming over the next few days, and of course all year on my T3 series every Tuesday!

 

T3 – Microsoft Excel

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Wait a minute, this isn’t April Fool’s Day is it?

On a daily basis I’m reminded at how much of HR and TA (Talent Acquisition – but I’m now just going with TA for the rest of time) Technology is really just Excel spreadsheets and Word docs.  That isn’t a knock on HR and TA pros. That is just a reality of resource limited universe most HR and TA shops live in every single day!

The awesome thing about HR and TA is that you really don’t need that much technology to be great.  This proven out by Men and mostly Women that run HR and TA in SMB shops everyday around the world, who use mostly email, Microsoft Office, a copy machine and a phone. I don’t have exact numbers, but if you take away a payroll system, over 50% of HR shops run on the technology listed above.

Microsoft Excel can be used to provide your organization with front-line HR and TA metrics, like turnover, sourcing information, days to fill, benefit enrollment information, employee relations log, etc. You can track time and attendance. Performance management records. Total compensation statements. Succession planning. Interview guides. And on and on.

What Microsoft did with the launch of office in 1988 is tell HR and TA that you no longer have an excuse in not providing great service to your organization, because we just gave you the backbone of every process, procedure and product you’ll ever want or need to do great work.  We look at Microsoft Excel now like we look at the internet.  We can’t imagine not having access to it to get our jobs done, and if you took it away we would lose our minds in a short period of time!

5 Things I really like about Microsoft Excel: 

1. It makes you look way smarter than you really are.

2. It makes your data look official even when it’s kind of made up to present a case to get you something you want.

3. It gives you something to blame when executives don’t buy your bullshit numbers. (Must be an Excel error, I’ll go back and check that!)

4. The learning barrier to begin using is very low, but ceiling to what you can potentially do with it is very high.

5. Almost everyone running HR or TA has access to use it, and learn how to use it for free.

In a few weeks I’ll be at the annual HR Technology Conference and I’ll be on the front-line of the best and newest HR and TA technology the world has to offer.  Every single product is designed to solve specific pain points we have in HR and TA. None of these products will have the ability to match the scope and breadth of what Excel can do, and almost all will be more expensive. I’m still super geeked to see the new stuff, and can’t wait to share what I find with you!

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 space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

Michigan Recruiters Conference #MiRecruits @MiRecruits

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Over a year ago Jim D’Amico and I started talking about how cool it would be to have a Recruiting only conference right here in our great state of Michigan! We had some models of how some others did it, primarily Paul DeBettignies out of Minnesota, and we decided to give it a try.  HR has thousands of conferences! National, state, local. TA has somehow become the redheaded stepchild of HR! Jim and I love redheaded stepchildren so we wanted to change this!

The first one was held on Friday March 13th in Lansing, MI, onsite at Accident Fund who was a great corporate sponsor for our first event.  We had over 100 corporate talent acquisition leaders and pros come in from all over the state. We had a great speaking group that included Paul and Jennifer McClure. It was everything we hoped for and more.

The 2nd Michigan Recruiters Conference will also be held on  Friday October 2nd onsite at Spectrum Health System in Grand Rapids, MI. This time we’ve added more speakers including Kris Dunn, Lori Fenstermaker, David Dart and Troy Farley.  As was the first event, the intent is to help develop and educate corporate talent acquisition pros and leaders to be great.

You can follow the action on the Twitters at #MiRecruits. Also, you can check out my Periscope throughout the day and I’ll bring some Live action to the social stream as well – which you can watch following me on Twitter @TimSackett and download the Periscope App on iTunes or Android.

If you’re just learning about this for the first time, I apologize. The reality is, the demand has been great. We sold out both shows without really even trying.  Turns out, Corporate Talent Acquisitions Pros like development, and we all don’t have very many options! We hope this is a great option, that is close to home.  Send me your contact information and I’ll make sure you get added to the contact list for the Spring 2016 conference. (timsackett@comcast.net)

So, What’s next? 

Our original idea was to try and do this event twice per year. We keep it cheap through great sponsors like Velocity Resource Group and CareerBuilder, as well as corporate sponsors (who provide us with space to hold the one day Conference/Summit) like Accident Fund and Spectrum Health.

That means the next conference will be held in the spring of 2016 and we would love to have it in the metro Detroit area – we just need to find a corporate sponsor, who has a large conference/ballroom type space that can fit a couple hundred people.  Hello, GM, Quicken Loans, Ford, Chrysler, Blue Cross/Blue Shield/ Detroit Medical Center/ Etc.!?  If you have interest in being a corporate sponsor please reach out to me directly, I would love to answer any questions you might have. I promise, we try and make it painless! Plus, it’s huge boost to your employment brand within your market!

You can check out more at www.michiganrecruits.com!