Category Archives: Talent Acquisition

Who Knew the World’s Best HR Technology Talks Happened in Cleveland!?

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That’s right kids! I’m coming to Believeland!

Wednesday, April 12th, from 4-6pm, I’ll be speaking at Cleveland SHRM’s – HR Technology SIG.

This will be a great night of learning and fun. It’s awesome that the HR and TA community leaders in Cleveland are putting this on, I can’t tell you how forward thinking that is for any city around the world, to the HR and TA pros and leaders in a great position to be successful! I follow my friend and HR technology guru, Steve Boese, who came out in February to speak at SIG!

The event will be held at Great Lakes Science Center in Cleveland, a great venue, and you will receive HRCI and SHRM credit for attending.

What’s the talk?

“See What’s Next! Be What’s Next! The Future of HR, TA, and Technology” 

Where I’ll present on where I see the future of HR and TA going over the next few years from a practical perspective of “what is the stuff you might actually do in your own shops!” I’ll also highlight a ton of tools that are new to the market and things you might want to take a look at, plus talk about some of the most innovative things happening in HR and TA, and if those are things you can do yourself!

If you attend this event, we’ve got 2 extra tickets (GREAT SEATS!) for that night to see Lebron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers play their last regular season home game with Me! Okay, you might not want to sit next to me, I tend to yell at the referees, a lot! But, if you do, I’ll buy you drink or popcorn and we can take selfies and try to get Lebron in on it!

It’s only $25 bucks to register for Cleveland SHRM members, $40 for non-members, and Students and Transitioning folks can get in for $15! Food and open bar at the event, so come on over and I’ll buy you a drink! Thanks to the great folks at Willory for sponsoring and taking me to see Lebron! (it’ll be my first time seeing him play live, I’m kind of excited!)

REGISTER FOR THE EVENT HERE!

Hope to see you in Cleveland! (boy, you don’t say often!)

Honestly, You’re Not Disrupting Recruiting!

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So, there’s a ton of TA Technology on the market that is claiming to ‘disrupt’ recruiting. The recruiting they are claiming to disrupt is the agency recruiting game, for their ‘ever so thankful’ corporate talent acquisition ‘partners’. I’m going to name them, new ones crop up every day it seems, but I won’t give them the extra publicity. Here’s how their sales pitch goes:

“Hey, We’re disruptive! We’ll save you 70% off your cost per hire, just use our technology! Did we mention WE’RE DISRUPTIVE! Yeah!” 

That’s honestly the sales pitch. The reality is a little less flashy and entirely different story that real corporate talent acquisition leaders aren’t buying. Why? These disruptors are building their 70% sales pitch on agency fees as your cost per hire.

It works like this:

1. You can’t fill a position.

2. Agency can for 25% of the first-year salary on a $100k job.

3. Thus, your cost of hire is $25,000.

4. We’ll do it for $7,500!

The reality is, these tech companies are frauds. The true cost of hire for a direct hire for most organizations is less than $7,500. So, no one buys your disruptive pitch of savings. What you’re truly selling is a ‘discount’, not a technology disruption, and your soft-math is all wrong. Your ‘technology’ is basically an automated version of what an agency does (but less effective), offered at a discount.

To be fair, if you have no ability to recruit internally and you use a ton of agencies and have a huge agency spend, this might help you save some money. But, it’s a band-aid for a bullet wound, not a disruptive solution.

Discounting is a crappy world to compete in because you can never get out it. Once someone gets a discount, they always want a discount or more of discount. If discounting is your business model, you need to get out of that business.  Take a look at every single retail organization that has ever gone out of business. It started with discounting.

Okay, I’ll give you that you’re disrupting bad recruiting. I’ll give you that. But, guess what, no corporate TA leader I know likes the awful Indian-Call-Center recruiting models anyway. It’s the lowest common denominator in the recruiting world. We don’t need more of that, we need less of that.

Do you really want to disrupt recruiting?

Help TA leaders truly become better in understanding the technology that will actually help them hire noticeably better talent. Don’t just take advantage of them a little less the next company. Help them build a stack and a model where they don’t have to rely on outside organizations to do the hiring for them.

There’s some really good TA Tech on the market doing this. That’s the disruptive stuff – folks like Lever, Clinch, Smashfly, HireVue, Outmatch, Role Point, Greenhouse, Textio, Jobvite, Text Recruit, etc. (plus a ton of others I reviewed on my weekly  T3 tech blog series)

These organizations aren’t trying to take advantage of your ability not to be able to hire the talent you need, they’re trying to partner with you to make you self-sufficient. That’s disruption!

So, yeah, I run an agency. A post like this probably doesn’t help my business, but I can’t stand to see these upstarts try to sell themselves as technology when they’re not. Also, I do contract work, I don’t want your direct openings! I want your contingent openings!

Happy recruiting this week!

T3 – Talent Matching Technology – @WorkFountain

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This week on T3 I review the talent matching technology WorkFountain. WorkFountain was born in Detroit, so you know I have to give some love to my Michigan-based TA Tech!

WorkFountain is a dynamic matching system that instantly connects job seekers and employers based solely on skills, interests, and requirements. Using correlated question-sets and matching algorithms, WorkFountain sifts through thousands of employers and candidates to deliver the best possible matches in seconds.

Basically, it’s a different kind of a job board. You post your jobs and criteria for the job and organizational fit. Candidates fill out a questionnaire of what they are looking for. WorkFountain then matches you with the candidates the best match what you need and what they want. The system provides curated job matching to ensure that employers are connected to the most qualified candidates while candidates get matched to employers and opportunities that best fit their unique profiles.

What I liked about WorkFountain: 

– You can invite hiring managers directly from the system to quickly answer a set of ‘fit’ and ‘skill’ based desires to best match exactly what they’re looking for. Talent Acquisition can also ‘flag’ certain questions prior to sending to the hiring manager for those questions you don’t want them to answer, so they won’t even see them.

– WorkFountain automatically posts to hundreds of free job boards, but also you can post to your paid job boards through WorkFountain as well. This is nice because it allows you to post everywhere from one platform.

– The WorkFountain platform works behind the scenes to get applicants to answer your fit questionnaire by mimicking a real TA user when sending automated responses at varied times after applying, so the candidate feels like it’s a real person asking them to do this. The platform has a 97% completion rate!

– If WorkFountain finds a ‘match’ they set up a speed date introduction to both of the candidate and the employer. Both sides have to say they’re interested to keep the process moving forward.

– You can reply directly to candidates through the system via text and email.

– Recruiters get a candidate matching report that shows where each candidate matches on every aspect of what you’re looking for. So, they might not be an exact match, and the report will show you where the two of your differ. Also, WorkFountain generates EEOC audit reports, so you can ensure your postings are getting the results you desire.

I have to say WorkFountain’s algorithm of matching the candidates with your jobs is one of the more advanced technologies I’ve seen in the matching and fit space. It was originally built by an engineering firm working with the U.S. government for a project during the recession. The data on the back side from the work they’ve already done is very impressive.

High-value platform as you can post for $39 per posting for regular positions you have open and only $19 per posting for internships. Plus, if you get zero matches, they will refund your money. WorkFountain has some great relationships with colleges and universities, as this was an environment they first started in.

One thing I think is worth exploring with WorkFountain is using this technology on your own ATS database of candidates, and inviting those candidates to go through this matching technology. There’s a great chance you’ll find some great matches in your own database, you previously were unaware of.

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals (ATAP) first Board Meeting

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This week the Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals (ATAP) Board (of which I’m apart) met for the first time, live, and in person in Atlanta. There hasn’t been an official launch yet of ATAP, but the work continues to make this association the one global talent acquisition association that all recruiting professionals will turn to.

What the heck is ATAP? 

ATAP was founded originally by Ben Gotkin and Gerry Crispin, and then with a ton of help from a whole host of great TA advocates! ATAP was founded on the belief that talent acquisition, as a profession, needs an organization (like a SHRM) to support “US”, the TA Pros and Leaders that work in corporate environments, agencies, RPO, vendors, etc.

What the heck did the ATAP board and Executive Director Ben Gotkin (plus Gerry Crispin) do this past week? 

So, for over a year a ton of folks have put in a ton of work to get ATAP to the position it is now, which is basically build a complete foundation of an organization. That’s not easy! And this group brought ATAP into existence and gave it a soul.

The board and the Executive Director is tasked with building a Talent Acquisition specific association that meets all the needs of the stakeholders in talent acquisition. As you can imagine, just deciding on what the hell that means is a big job!

There are a number of critical things on the agenda that need to be addressed. First, you can’t have an association is you don’t have money! You don’t have money without members and/or sponsors. Why would someone want to be a member of ATAP?

That’s no small question. When you ask an HR Pro why they are a member of SHRM, they can rattle off a number of reasons. All those reasons were built over time, SHRM wasn’t launched with resources, certifications, advocacy, etc. But, you need to start somewhere!

ATAP is looking to do all those things you expect from a modern day association that represents your professional field. We need to build a complete body of knowledge for talent acquisition. We need to build a code of ethics for our profession. We need to build resources for our members.

We need to decide which pieces add the most value to our members, now and in the future, then prioritize that work. We need to do all of this with a current 100% volunteer organization, that can’t stay that way for long if we really want to gain traction and do really cool stuff for members.

How can you help? 

First, you can become a member! Becoming a member puts you in a position to be able to shape the future of ATAP and the future of talent acquisition. We have a ton of work in front of us, and we need TA pros and leaders who are passionate advocates of talent acquisition who want to volunteer and give back.

Second, join the conversation around a number of committees we’ll be launching over the next 90 days and once you become a member join the ATAP Facebook Group to give us feedback on many items we’ll be putting in front of our membership.

Third, spread the word. This is a grassroots organization that will not be successful with you. If you’re a TA leader, have your entire team join. If you’re a vendor consider being a sponsor of ATAP. For everyone, raise the conversation around how we (all of us) make recruiting better and a profession we are proud to be a part of.

I’m leaving Atlanta so energized and excited. The board of directors for ATAP is a ultra-passionate and diverse group of individuals that truly represent our profession. I’m proud to be a part of this future!

New Recruitment Marketing Group on Facebook! #TransformRM

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Recruitment Marketing is one of the hottest concepts on the planet right now! We all have the exact same issue right now and that’s being able to attract the right talent to our organizations.

Employment branding took off a few years ago as we came out of the great recession and there are some great things that have been happening in that space. Recruitment marketing, though, is a bit different than employment branding.

What’s the difference between Recruitment Marketing (RM) and Employment Branding (EB)?

  1. EB is who your are. RM is your complete message you want to get in front of candidates.
  2. EB comes first. RM comes next, and it’s all the technology and process it takes to get that message in front of candidates in a space and a time when they’re ready to consume that message.
  3. You own your RM. You don’t always own your brand. Many times outside influences have part ownership of your brand, but they’ll never own your RM!

This isn’t a competition between EB and RM, you actually need to do a great job at both! You also need to understand the differences between the to, as you could be great at one, and bad at the other.

I’m part of a group of Recruitment Marketing leaders who decided to get together in a space where we could all share our knowledge of RM. This group first came together last year at the recruitment marketing conference Transform in Boston.

We wanted to find a way to keep the conversation going all year, so we’ve decided to start the Facebook Group: Transform Recruitment Marketing Facebook Group.

Come join. It is a ‘closed’ group, just because we want to make sure it doesn’t turn into a spam group, but you can be assured myself and Shaunda Zilich (Employment Branding Leader at GE) will approve you to join the conversation!

What can you expect from this group?

– Connecting with great talent acquisition folks from around the world, willing to share their successes and their failures, helping us all get better at attracting the talent we need.

– Me sharing the latest and greatest things I find on the planet as it relates to the recruitment marketing world.

– A willingness from all the members to interact and share.

So, come check it out, we just launched this week. I can’t wait for the conversations to begin!

T3 – NetIn – Source Technical Talent (@HireWithNetIn)

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This week on T3 I review the technical sourcing technology platform NetIn. NetIn was developed by a former Twitter Engineer who found himself in a position of needing to find talent and not feeling like there was any technology that did what he wanted. Sure there were other sourcing tools that would spider social profiles, but he wanted more.

NetIn is a search engine to find technical candidates who have a social presence on the web. Nothing new on that, there might be around fifty of these techs on the market right now. What Netin did differently was build in an algorithm to only bring back results of the best talent, that goes way beyond keywords and skills.

The NetIn algorithm is built on a number of factors including ranking the top computer science schools, open source contributions, how recent and how active in open source, and companies and organizations that are known for having great technical acumen.  Your search then comes back with all the candidates ranked on this algorithm so you know where to begin your search and waste less time to get to the best candidates.

What I like about NetIn: 

– Extremely easy to use the search function that everyone will be comfortable, and a super clean design, which leads to you being able to use the system with no training.

– NetIn added in some great search functionality including ‘Open to Move’ that is measured on a person’s current online behaviors that show they’re more likely looking for a new job. Also, you can filter by security clearance, which is really important for organizations working on defense and government programs.

– Filter your search based on the availability of contact information: email and phone number. Netin invests in a number of phone number sources to make sure the numbers you get back are personal numbers, not just some main work line to a company.

– Email your search list right from the platform with easy to use interface.

Free trial to start and see if you like it, so there’s no risk. It’s designed for IT and IT related engineering searches for the most part. They have built an integration with Greenhouse, so if you’re using that ATS you can export your information right into the ATS. Depending on how many seats you need the price will run $200-500 per month, which is a fairly good price for an IT sourcing tool with NetIn’s capabilities.

 

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

T3 – Hire360 (@Hire360io) – Effortless Outbound Recruiting

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This week on T3 I take a look at the recruiting technology Hire360. Hire360 is part CRM, part sourcing technology, it’s basically automated outbound recruiting made pretty easy. Hire360 is designed for your mid-level effort jobs. It’s easy to hire entry level to mid-level jobs. Once you hit your mid-level it starts getting tough, and this is where Hire360 takes over.

Hire360 is designed to be super easy to use. Simply cut and paste a job description or manually put in a list of skills you’re looking for and the system will automatically go out and source for that position from over 150 million resumes that are floating out in the internet in various databases, social profiles, etc. Also, Hire360 will pull in the resumes from your own ATS, and add those into the final search rankings, and any paid databases you belong to.

What Hire360 comes back with is a ranked list of candidates that are the closest fit for what you’re looking for, based on their initial algorithm, and one that will continue to evolve through machine learning as you hire to get even better and more dialed in. From here the system lets you easily click on those candidates you’re interested in and starts a full functioning email campaign to reach out to them, automated or manual. All email communication on both ends is tracked, and you get great metrics on your campaign.

What I like about Hire360:

– The system is designed for low volume mid to high-level positional hiring, but it’s simple enough that a hiring manager can easily manage the system. So, it makes a great option for SMBs who have their hiring managers do their own recruiting, or organizations with many locations where each location must do their own hiring. But, I also see this tech being used at any size organization.

– You pay by position ($250 max per position) to use the system, and you can make as many hires off that one position as you want. Let’s say you posted a job for Production Supervisor and you had three openings in the same plant, you only pay for one position. Also, even after you fill your position, the CRM functionality doesn’t stop working, so there is potential to still receive candidates after the fact as well.

– The simple CRM email tracking metrics are great for an organization to know where you are in the process of filling the position. The dashboard shows you outreaches, how many sent, opened, and replied. For this level of cost, you rarely see this level of detail.

– Hire360 is set up to source only 250 miles max from where your opening is located. Why? Because it’s rare you’ll ever pull in anyone beyond that, so why market and source nationally, when 99% of your hires will come regionally?

I’m impressed with the ease of use and the simplicity of this product. You don’t have to be in TA to use it effectively to find talent, and that is tough to design. I love that it seems to be perfectly made for organizations with multiple locations where a leader at each location is responsible to hire, not a centralized recruiting department. Also, the fact it helps you uncover hidden gold in your ATS is a super bonus I don’t think they even realize how valuable it is!

Well worth a test, you can’t beat the price. They are also building out an iCims integration, so if you use iCims, a test might be a necessity!

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Would You Hire Magic Johnson?

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(this is Magic and I at a recent MSU basketball game)

You might not have paid attention to this because you’re not a sports geek, more specifically an NBA sports geek, but the Los Angeles Lakers just hired their most famous player ever, Magic Johnson, to be their President of Basketball Operations.

If you know anything about me you’ll know this:

  1. I’m a Sparty, which means I LOVE Magic. When I was 9 years old my parents let me stay up and watch him lead MSU to the National Championship. I followed him to the pros and watched him win championships with the Lakers. I think he’s pretty neat!
  2. My dream job is to be the head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers. I make this known widely. They’ve never called.

So, you would have expected I would be super happy that the Lakers went and put Magic in charge of the whole show! But, I’m not. I believe it’s a major mistake on their part. Here’s why:

– Running an NBA team is a really difficult job, that takes specific skills you only receive by coming up through an NBA organization.

– The time commitment to running an NBA team is off the charts.

– The travel commitment to running an NBA team is unbelievable.

Magic, for all of this wonderful qualities, doesn’t seem to possess any of these skills sets needed. He’s an ultra-successful business owner and an all-time great NBA player, who is well respected. He’s also on the back side of his business career, ultra-wealthy, and more than likely unwilling to travel all over the world evaluating players in small, smoke-filled gyms across Eastern Europe.

My hope is Magic, will do magic stuff for the Lakers. He’ll surround himself with the best minds in the game. The greatest data nerds who can find hidden gems. He’ll watch the Moneyball movie and understand he can’t do this on gut instinct and his unbelievable charm. Because that won’t work. Most really great basketball players, put in this position, fail.

We do this in corporations all over the world. We hire the best ‘basketball player’ for a role that has very little to do with playing basketball, and then we are shocked when the ‘basketball player’ fails in a position of not playing basketball! We do this constantly in corporations! High performance in one position does not guarantee high performance in another non-related position.

High performance in one position does not guarantee high performance in another non-related position. I think we could all agree on this concept. Yet, we equate great performance in ‘mechanical engineering’ with the potential to be a great ‘manager’ of mechanical engineers. We somehow think those two things are similar. Mechanical engineering and Managing people. They’re in fact, very different things.

I would hire Magic Johnson for a lot of positions, but running my NBA team is very high on that list. Yes, he’s the greatest employee our organization has ever had. Yes, he knows basketball and played at an unbelievable level. No, he’s probably not the best hire to run this team. But the Magic fan in me hopes he kills it!

Dear Timmy: How can I best incentivize my corporate recruiters?

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Dear Timmy,

I have a team of corporate recruiters who we pay salary and then they also get paid a bonus amount for every individual you hire. When I read your post “The Corporate Recruitment Incentive Program” at Fistful of Talent, I was encouraged we are doing the right thing. But, I have an issue. From time to time we go through periods of time when we have no hiring needs or a hiring freeze. During these times the recruiters feel shorted. How

But, I have an issue. From time to time we go through periods of time when we have no hiring needs or a hiring freeze. During these times the recruiters feel shorted. How do I incentivize them during these times? My recruiters all work remotely, hire very specialized talent, and it’s fairly low volume around 15 hires per recruiter per year. The average salary is around $150K, plus bonus.

Thanks,

Corporate TA Leader who gets it

Dear Mrs. Gets it,

Will you please hire me!? No, I mean it. I will come to work for you for only the $150K and no bonus!

So, I hear you. It’s all relative to the market, location, industry, etc. I kid about wanting a job with you, but only slightly. Very few recruiters in the world make $150K working from home making 15 placements per year in a corporate environment where all of their overhead is paid and they have a great benefits package.

So, step one of finding the right incentive would first be to understand why these recruiters feel ‘underpaid’. You might be lucky and have all rock star recruiters who are the top in the field, but I doubt they are all that level. So, then I would ask myself, is this a team incentive issue, or do I have an outlier who is truly worthy.

All that being said, your problem is a real problem if part of your compensation plan for your recruiters is to be paid by hire and you have no hires to be made!

Here are some suggestions:

– If you look at your normal hiring pattern and it’s consistently at a certain level, work your bonuses into an average hire scenario. Then give your recruiters some education on how to budget! Look you first quarter might be giant, but you better know every second quarter sucks for hires, so your bonus will be low.

– Instead of compensating by hire, maybe compensate by activities that lead to hires. Thus, just because you don’t make hires, doesn’t mean the recruiters need to stop doing all those great things that fill the pipeline. The hard part about this is it will probably drag down your candidate experience as candidates won’t be too happy to be strung along and never get hired!

– Are there other valuable activities your recruiters can do in low hire situations? I love to focus on retention and the activities that increase retention. Maybe there are project related completion bonuses you can use during these times to get some things done that have been put on the back burner, but you really need to get done now that you have the capacity.

– Ask your hiring managers for suggestions. I’m always pleasantly surprised by some of the suggestions I get from hiring managers on what my team can do for them, to help them out, even if they feel it’s not recruiting related. Many of the projects they have can be done by recruiters as well, plus it gets your recruiters more integrated into the business.

Hope this helps! Please hire me.

Tim

 

Should You Be Using Facebook Job Ads?

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If you haven’t heard Facebook has been rolling out some new job posting functionality on their site for your company’s Facebook page. Audra Knight, over at Workology put together a nice little “how-to”, so go check that out if you want to give it a try!

My question isn’t how do I post a job on Facebook, but should I be posting jobs on Facebook?

Facebook designed the feature because they felt like LinkedIn, and all those organizations that only use LinkedIn, were ignoring a giant percent of the working population. Hourly workers and actively seeking employment workers. That’s not LinkedIn’s specialty. They are unapologetically, white collar and a ‘professional network’, not a job board (so they keep saying).

Facebook looked at this and thought, “Hmmm, we’ve got a couple billion people using our ‘social’ network. A majority are hourly worker types who would like to see what great jobs are open, let’s build something for companies to connect with them”. They probably didn’t really sound like that. My guess is someone at FB said, “hey, you know we can make billions of dollars charging companies to post boost jobs to our members, right?”

So, now you can post your jobs on your Facebook page in a matter of minutes. For a few extra buck Facebook will let you pick certain demographics, like location and skills, and then they’ll make sure your job posting shows up in other Facebook members timeline, even those you have no connection to!

Who will get the best results from posting their jobs on Facebook?

  • High volume, low skill jobs is an easy target and those should produce well for you.
  • But, you should be doing some testing on most of your jobs!
  • Guess what? Not only are low paid, unskilled workers on FB, so are Engineers, IT pros, Accountants, Doctors, Nurses, Truck Drivers, Cops, Teachers, Executives, okay, basically everyone is on Facebook!
  • The other thing is most people will check into Facebook daily, most check in multiple times. Most people on LinkedIn, only check in once or twice per month.

Every organization should be testing this. It’s easy. It’s fairly cheap. It actually might work you. When you test you should be doing a few things:

  1. Use multiple Ads with different titles and wording. You need to see what catches someone’s eye and what doesn’t.
  2. Use different boost amounts on the same postings to see if that makes a difference. It should.
  3. If you want white collar, professional hires, test putting in the salary level in the title, “Process Engineer – $115K”. You can do this with success with hourly positions as well, “Electrical Technician $18.50/hr”. Every time I have A/B tested this, the postings with the salary in the title produced more results. Every time.

So, should you be using Facebook Job Ads? Yes.