Category Archives: Talent Acquisition

I’m Back!!!

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Some of you might have noticed it’s been a while since I’ve posted. I was writing my second book, The Talent Fix, Vol. 2! The new book should be released in April 2024, and the plan is to launch it at the SHRM Talent Conference in Las Vegas!

Last week, I was in Nashville at RecFest USA – the first time RecFest has come to America. RecFest is a large outdoor recruiting festival, and it’s such a fun and interactive event. I can’t wait for next year’s event, and I’ll definitely be taking my full team to Nashville to experience RecFest!

What was the tea coming out of RecFest?

  • Recruiters and Recruiting leaders out of work – This was a little strange for me to hear because in reality, this is very industry-specific. The tech industry has gotten hit hard with layoffs, and TA teams are some of the first to go. At the same time, many of those companies had TA teams that were way too big for the hiring they were doing. So, some of this is simple right-sizing. The problem is, you had recruiters making $150-$200K, and they honestly believe they are worth that much. They aren’t. The downturn is hard on people who were making monopoly money and not really performing at that level.
  • AI was all the talk, but it was mostly talk. My friend Matt Charney says roughly 69% of TA teams currently do not have AI in their recruiting tech stack. I think some of their vendors would disagree with this as most vendors are utilizing machine learning, but the tech nerds would argue this isn’t really AI! AI will transform how we recruit talent, but this will be an evolution that will take years, and most of the true AI will be buried in your tech in a way you won’t even notice most of the tactical pieces of recruiting going away until one day you wake up and we no longer do tactical work in recruiting.
  • There’s a major Candidate and Employer Disconnect. I ran across a GenZ/Millennial candidate panel, and it was laughable listening to it. Candidates complain that they get ghosted and don’t get great feedback. They also are unapologetic about applying for 300 positions in 30 minutes. TA pros complain about being ghosted and do not understand why candidates don’t reply to their spam emails. The Talent Board still shows that 47% of candidates still don’t even get dispositioned for the positions they apply for. Both sides feel wronged, and neither side is willing to take any responsibility for the behaviors. All this means is that the candidates who act professional and the TA pros who act professional will stand out and be rare in today’s world.
  • There is still a lot of talk about DEI, but the talk is changing. If we are honest with each other, the entire DEI talk began as simply we need more black faces in our organization. That started probably twenty years ago. Since then, the world has changed a bunch, and the conversation amongst HR and TA pros has evolved, but in reality, most of the C-suite still sees this as counting faces. The faces might have expanded to include more, but we still are stuck in so many areas. We still are not willing to use data around DEI and have real conversations about what is possible and what is just posturing.
  • Everyone is a unique and special butterfly. Which, for all intents and purposes, makes no one unique and special. We now have Trans Recruiters and Nero-divergent Recruiters and Furry Recruiters and fill in the blank of whatever you are recruiter. If you are a Gay Recruiter today, sorry, you’re just a recruiter! Oh wait, that’s right, we are all just recruiters! Honestly, the next evolution is this will be my AI telling me what kind of recruiter they are! Just fucking recruit! Okay, I say this, but honestly, this is also the solution to more inclusive recruiting. Want more female engineers? Hire females to recruit engineers. Want more Black Sales Reps? Hire Black Recruiters to recruit your sales reps. Want more military hires? Hire former military professionals and teach them how to recruit. We aren’t launching spy balloons, people. This isn’t that hard!
  • Technology recruiting vendors are currently struggling to make their numbers. So, why should you care? I love to get a bargain, and right now you can get a bargain! If you’re super smart, you’ll sign a multi-year contract and lock that bargain in for when it will no longer be a bargain! Right now, you have some major negotiating power if you are in the market for technology or if you’re getting pushed to sign your next contract. Vendors are super competitive with their pricing at this moment.

That’s what I got today.

Moving forward for the rest of the year, I’m going to be hitting the reviews and updates hard on the recruiting technology market. There’s a lot of stuff being developed and the space is moving really fast again with AI development, so my hope is I can help keep you all informed on what’s new and hot and worth your money!

Welcome back!

The Reason You Got Ghosted by a Candidate!

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Yesterday I answered a question from a candidate about why an employer ghosted them after their interview. Many readers were upset because they were also getting ghosted by candidates. In fact, like all the time, way more than then they would ever ghost a candidate. Oh, two wrongs do make a right!

All ghosting is sh*tty behavior by candidates and by those of us who hire. Period.

The reality is that this is hard to admit, and as a professional, we own a portion of the candidate ghosting. Are candidates awful for doing it in the first place? Yes. I will not let them off the hook. But I also only control what I can control, and that is my process, behaviors, etc.

Why are candidates ghosting us?

1. We are moving too fast. Wait, what?! We are told to move fast because that’s what candidates want!? Yes, but when you move so fast, the candidates don’t really know you (your company and you personally), the job, the boss, or the reasons why they should come and interview. It all doesn’t seem real. So, it becomes easy to just not show up. (Que Taylor Swift – We need to slow down!)

2. We aren’t giving candidates a way to easily tell us they moved on with another offer. Hourly candidates, especially, are moving fast and have multiple offers. You might have scheduled them for an interview later in the week, but they have already decided to go with another offer. While we gave them instructions on where to go and when we could have made it easier for them to opt out. Many organizations are using auto-scheduling tools like Paradox, which sends reminders and lets candidates choose to reschedule or cancel via text. Those organizations get significantly less ghosting!

3. We believe that once a candidate schedules an interview, our job is done. The most powerful human emotion in existence is being wanted by others. Candidates come to you for a number of reasons, all of which they can most likely get from someone else as well. But, you showing them more desirable than someone else is a key to great talent attraction. You still need to do that with your messaging even after the interview is scheduled.

4. We allow it to happen without any ramifications. (Okay, this might be a bit aggressive!) What if, every time a candidate ghosted you for an interview, you posted their picture and details on social media!? Yikes! Right?! “This is Tim Sackett, a cute redhead. He ghosted us for an interview yesterday at 3 pm. If you see him, tell him we are thinking about him!” Do you think it would get noticed? Heck, yes, it would!

5. We are making it too easy for candidates to interview. This is a catch-22. We need talent, so we reduce every roadblock possible for candidates. It’s so easy. Most don’t care if they burn the bridge or not. That is truly why employee referrals are so valuable for most employers. Referrals are far less likely to burn a bridge. That might be a trick to use. Ask a candidate: Do you know anyone at our company? Begin to tie the personal connection back to them, and they will be far less likely to ghost. Also, make it super hard to get an interview, and people will hold it as a higher value! “Only 1% of people who apply to our company ever get an interview! it’s a rare thing we offer to only the top candidates.” If you knew that was the case, you would show up for that interview!

I think most of the candidate ghosting is truly reflective of the poor morals and values of the people who are doing it. You made a commitment to someone. You keep that commitment, or at the “very” least, you inform that person you will no longer be able to keep that commitment. It’s a pretty basic human condition. Those who ghost probably had crappy parents and mentors in their life who didn’t teach them the basics. I’ve never once spoken to or met an upstanding individual who thought highly of themselves that would ghost. High-quality people don’t ghost. Low-quality people do.

People don’t like to hear that. They want to talk about circumstances and bad employers, etc. The reality is high-quality people will contact someone and let them know they no longer want to be considered, regardless of how crappy the employer may or may not be. Low-quality people just don’t show up. Don’t hate the player. Hate the game. I’m just telling you the truth. You already know.

If you’re an employer and you ghost candidates after interviews – You (not your organization). You, personally, are of low quality, just like the candidates who ghost you. I don’t like to hire low-quality people. But I also want to give every opportunity for a low-quality person to become a high-quality person.

The Reason You Got Ghosted After Your Interview

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Dear Timmy,

I recently applied for a position that I’m perfect for! A recruiter from the company contacted me and scheduled me for an interview with the manager. I went, the interview was a little over an hour, and it went great! I immediately followed up with an email to the recruiter and the manager thanking them, but since then, I’ve heard nothing, and it’s been weeks. I’ve sent follow-up emails to both the recruiter and the manager, and I’ve gotten no reply.

What should I do? Why do companies do this to candidates? I would rather they just tell me they aren’t interested than have them say nothing at all!

The Ghost Candidate

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Dear Ghost,

There are a number of reasons that recruiters and hiring managers ghost candidates, and none of them are good!

Here’s a short list of some of these reasons:

– They hated you and hope you go away when they ghost you because the conflict is uncomfortable.

– They like you, but not as much as another candidate. They’re trying to talk into the job but want to leave you on the back burner, but they’re idiots and don’t know how to do this properly.

– They decided to promote someone internally, and they don’t care about candidate experience enough to tell you they went in another direction.

– They have a completely broken recruitment process and might still be going through it believing you’re just as happy as a pig in shi…

– They think they communicated to you electronically to bug off through their ATS, but they haven’t audited the process to know this isn’t working.

– The recruiter got fired, and no one picked up the process.

I would love to tell you that ghosting candidates are a rare thing, but it’s not! It happens all the time! There is never a reason to ghost a candidate, ever! Sometimes I believe candidates get ghosted by recruiters because hiring managers don’t give feedback, but that still isn’t an excuse I would accept. At least tell the candidate that!

Look, I’ve ghosted people. At conference cocktail parties, I’ve been known to ghost my way right back up to my room and go to sleep! When it comes to candidates, I don’t ghost! I would rather tell them the truth so they don’t keep coming back around unless I want them to come back around.

I think most recruiters ghost candidates because they’re in over their heads with the amount of work they have, and they mean to get back to people but just don’t have the time. When you’re in firefighting mode, you tend to only communicate with the candidates you want, not the ones you don’t. Is this good practice? Heck, no! But when you’re fighting fires, you do what you have to do to stay alive.

What would I do if I was you? 

Here are a few ideas to try if you really want to know the truth:

1. Send a handwritten letter to the CEO of the company briefly explaining your experience and what outcome you would like.

2. Go on Twitter, and in 140 characters, send a shot across the bow! “XYZ Co. I interviewed two weeks ago and still haven’t heard anything! Can you help me!?” (t will work on Facebook as well!)

3. Write a post about your experience on LinkedIn and tag the recruiter and the recruiter’s boss.

4. Take the hint and go find a company that truly values you and your talent! If the organization and this manager treat candidates like this, imagine how you’ll be treated as an employee.

A 30-Minute Commute is all Most Employees Are Willing to Make

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We all kind of know this fact. Once you get more than 30 minutes away from your job, no matter how you actually come to work, it starts to feel like a chore. You begin to hate the commute. Doesn’t matter if you drive, take a train, walk, etc. 30 minutes, one-way, is our max!

It’s called Marchetti’s Constant: 

Marchetti’s constant is the average time spent by a person commuting each day, which is approximately one hour. It is named after Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti, though Marchetti himself attributed the “one-hour” finding to transportation analyst and engineer Yacov Zahavi.[1] Marchetti posits that although forms of urban planning and transport may change, and although some live in villages and others in cities, people gradually adjust their lives to their conditions (including the location of their homes relative to their workplace) such that the average travel time stays approximately constant.

I can’t tell you how many times, as a Recruiter, I was talked into believing this wasn’t true by a candidate who then screwed me by ghosting on an interview after driving to the location and seeing it was too long, declining an offer late, started the job but then quickly left because the commute was too long, or we had to over-compensate to make up for the time the person spent on the commute.

Probably one out of one hundred people can actually take a longer commute and live with it. 99% of people will eventually crack if the commute is over thirty minutes. So, what does this mean for us trying to attract talent to our organizations? There are certain locations in the U.S. that are much easier to have a thirty-minute commute than others:

On average, large metro areas with the shortage commute time:

  1. Grand Rapids, MI
  2. Rochester, NY
  3. Buffalo, NY
  4. Oklahoma City, OK
  5. Salt Lake City, UT
  6. Kansas City, MO
  7. Milwaukee, WI
  8. Louisville, KY
  9. Hartford, CT
  10. Memphis, TN

All of these metro areas have the majority of their citizens with a commute time under 30 minutes.

Who has the worst commute times? Think about the largest metro areas, even when you take into account their transit options: New York, San Francisco, D.C., Philly, Boston, Seattle, Chicago, etc.

So, it’s thirty minutes one-way or one hour per day, or five hours per week, that the average person is willing to commute. I wonder if this plays itself out when you begin to factor in work-from-home options.

Let’s say you ask someone to commute one hour each way, two hours per day, but you let them work from home two days per week. Total commute time is still more at six hours per week, but would that make a difference enough to retrain and attract more talent to your organization? I have a feeling it would. It’s worth a test for those who have longer commutes at your work location.

Also, I have seen this done by any company, but I would love to see turnover data by commute time! I have seen data on hourly worker turnover, and it’s amazing to see the differences by miles from a worksite in a radiant pattern. Every mile you get farther from the work site, the turnover increases exponentially until you get to about five miles, where it skyrockets. So, we know if you hire hourly, low-skilled workers, your best bet for retention is less than five miles from your location (this also is about a 15-minute commute – car, public, walking, bike, etc.).

So often, we want to focus on the stuff we control versus stuff the candidate or employee can control, but we think it’s ‘their’ decision. The problem is we allow people to make bad decisions and don’t think it will affect us, but it does in high turnover. All things being equal, or close to equal with candidates, take the one with the shorter total commute!

Skills matter. Experience matters. Performance matters.

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Skills, skills, skills, skills…

If you’ve been around HR tech for two minutes in the last five years, “skills” is basically all you’ve heard. Well, okay, “skills” and “AI.” The HR Tech community is jamming skills down your throat like a new pharmaceutical drug that cures narcissism.

Why do we feel “skills” are so important?

  1. Hiring by skill is thought to eliminate bias. It’s not about relationships, or what school you went to, or that you went to school at all, or what color your skin is. If you have the skill to do the job, you should be hired to do the job.
  2. As a concept in organizations, skills seem to connect a lot of dots. We can measure skills and make a giant inventory of all the skills we have, and our all-knowing executive team can tell what skills we need in the future, and we can build those skills to be ready.

In theory, hiring and promoting people based on skill makes a lot of sense. In reality, it’s super hard to pull off. It’s difficult to truly assess someone’s skill in most areas. We just don’t have enough black-and-white skills measures that truly differentiate nor do we have the ability to build all the skills we believe we need.

Does “experience” matter?

The folks on the skills side of the fence want you to believe experience is an outdated concept being sold to you by “the man.” Or, more specifically, by men who have traditionally controlled the world in so many ways. Some of that is also true. But that doesn’t mean that experience doesn’t matter. It does.

You are about to go to prison for a crime you didn’t commit. You can choose between two lawyers. Both passed the bar to demonstrate their “skill” as an attorney. For one, this will be their first case. For the other, it will be their 2,000th case. Who will you choose? You are about to go into a life-saving brain surgery. You have two surgeons to choose from. Both of whom passed their boards at the highest level. One has performed over 1,000 of this specific operation. One has done 50. Which one will you choose?

There is a piece of this skills revolution that also is veiled in ageism. One of the reasons “skills” has risen is that young people are sick of old people getting hired and promoted over them. Old people who might not have the same skill level, but definitely have more experience. We can’t just say stop hiring them because they’re old, but we can say stop hiring them because I have higher “skill.” So, if it’s only about skill, we eliminate the ageism bias.

Your experience actually does matter.

Wait, what about performance?

Here’s where I get a bad feeling in my stomach around “skills.” It’s not just that a person has a certain skill, but how they perform in that skill. The reason we say “experience” doesn’t matter because there are dozens of academic studies that have shown that when we measure new hires and we take a look at their resumes and their previous job experience, there is very little correlation between where they worked previously and the job they had, to success in the new job and company.

That isn’t because experience doesn’t matter. It’s because high-performing experience matters!

Therein lies our problem. We can’t measure the performance of someone’s past job.

Let’s get back to our lawyer and doctor examples. What if I now told you that our lawyer, who has tried over 2,000 cases, actually lost every case? You would obviously try the inexperienced lawyer! Same with our doctor. The doctor who had 1,000 brain surgeries under their belt has a success rate of 10%. But our 50 case doctor has a success rate of 90%!

But wait, what if I tell you the “experienced” doctor only takes on the most difficult last-chance cases? And the less experienced doctor is given the “easy” cases where the vast majority of patients are thought to recover. Does that make a difference? You see how complicated “experience” as a factor can be.

Performance matters a great deal!

If you are looking to hire the best talent, it’s not only about skill. It’s about choosing individuals who have the skill to do that job at a baseline, then looking at their experience and their performance, and probably their intrinsic motivation. This is why a job sample is the number one predictor of a new hire performing well on the job. If they can actually do the job, successfully, then it stands to show they will probably be successful when we hire them. Although, even that isn’t guaranteed. We then add in factors like culture, leadership, peer support, etc.

It turns out hiring is really hard.

So, why is everyone saying the future of talent is skills?

I believe it’s because this is something we can control. It’s tangible and feels like something that can work. I can try and measure for skill. I can assess and build for skill. It seems obtainable, and it seems like something better than our past hiring based on experience.

In reality, hiring and promoting should have always been about skill. And experience. And performance. I want to hire highly skilled people that have amazing experiences and have performed in their previous jobs at a very high level.

What I don’t want to do is blindly hire and promote based on someone’s ability to demonstrate they can do a bunch of random skills. A job and performing in that job is not just about doing a bunch of random skills. That simplifies what employees do down too far. People and work are much more complex than just skills.

Skills. Experience. Performance. I want to hire the complete package. Be careful selling “skills” as a strategy to your executives. Most executives have great experience and high performance, and they actually believe that matters. Because it does.

An easy way to know if a candidate is batsh*t crazy!

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Have you ever hired a batshit crazy person? Yep, we all have. Wouldn’t it have been nice to know if that person was batshit crazy before you hired them? Again, 100% yes! But it’s hard, right? Candidates lie to us. They don’t give us their true selves.

Well, this is why you read this blog, my friends. I give you all the inside, pro recruiting tips and tricks you want but never knew you needed!

Okay, here’s how this will go down.

At some point, every organization will have this in a different part of the process, you will ask some form of this question. I recommend you do it early, but some organizations actually wait to do this in the background check.

The question is this: “Have you ever gone by a different first name, and/or do people in your life call you by a different first name?” Now, I’m not looking for something like my Mom calls me “Richard,” but my friends call me “Dick.” Those are the same thing. Mike and Michael, check those are the same. Also, I’m not asking for your median name and married name. We expect that to happen. Also, I’m talking about gender changes like I grew up Bruce, but now I’m Caitlin.

I’m talking about something like I grew up “Tim,” and I was “Tim” until I turned 16, and then I decided I wanted to be called “Trevor.”

Um, what?!

No sane person, not in witness protection, randomly decides to be called a different name unless there is some batshit crazy in the mix.

God bless my sister. I love her, and her name is Michelle. One day in high school, she came home and said, “Call me Chelsea now. All my friends call me “Chelsea.” And we immediately said nope. That’s not happening. Your momma named you Michelle, and everyone is going to call you Michelle. That’s what those who love you do. They put an immediate stop to anything that looks batshit crazy. By the way, to this day, she’s Michelle.

So, it’s an easy question to ask during an interview. “So, Tim, have you ever gone by a name other than Tim? Maybe something like Mark or Ted?” That response and answer you’re looking for is someone staring back at you, perplexed. Almost now, like they think you’re batshit crazy for even asking. That is the correct response! The correct answer is not, “Oh, yeah, for like a decade, my co-workers called me “Billy”!” If that happens, you immediately end the interview.

Look, I’m just out here spitting recruiting wisdom for free.

Some of it is going to hit home, some of it you’ll pass on. Pass on this gem at your own peril!

2023 @LinkedIn Research Proves Compensation is Number 1 Priority for Employees! #GlobalTalentTrends

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LinkedIn Talent Solutions flat-out gets me! They recently released their 2023 Global Talent Trends report, and you all know I’m a nerd for talent data, and this report is always impressive. I encourage you to download and check out this report (2023 LinkedIn Global Talent Trends report).

Here are my takeaways:

  • Hiring is slowing down from its historic pace over the past few years.

While slowing, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s equal across all industries and segments. Tech hiring has taken a huge hit, but hospitality, healthcare, and education remain challenging.

  • Internal mobility is taking a foothold in the consciousness of workers. We’ve always known that changing companies and jobs is very stressful. One of the most stressful things you’ll go through in your lifetime. So, finding ways to keep your workers by allowing them to move within the company is an excellent way to increase retention and job satisfaction. Interestingly enough, LinkedIn Talent Solutions found in this most recent report that older generations are actually finding more success with internal mobility than their younger counterparts, generationally. GenX experiencing the highest internal mobility rate of all the generations. Most likely, this is because the more experience you have and the deeper your professional network, the more desired you’ll be by other functions and departments within your own company.
  • We can finally erase the decades-old quote, “People don’t leave jobs. They leave managers”! I’ve always thought that quote was B.S., but people would show “academic” research to prove it. Well, now I can prove it’s wrong with this research!

SHOW. ME. THE. MONEY!

LinkedIn actually measured 15 priorities that employees value. Where did “Management” and “Leadership” fall in those 15? 9 and 11, respectively!

Also, another huge takeaway we’ve been trying to sell as thought leadership for the last two decades is great talent wants to work with other great talent. Actually, “Talent” as a priority, meaning, it’s important to you and your career that you work with other highly talented people, actually came in at 15 out of 15! We don’t care about that at all, in comparison.

“Security” will continue to raise up the chart as the economy slows and finding and keeping a job gets harder. It’s currently seventh on the list, but it was much higher in industries like Tech, which has been hit hard by job losses.

The report is jammed packed with amazing data and insights. Go check out the full 2023 LinkedIn Global Talent Trends report.

TA Tech Vendors, You all are sleeping on #SHRMTalent!

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I just returned from the SHRM Talent Conference in Orlando, and while it’s growing and getting bigger, I was somewhat shocked at the lack of big-name TA Technology vendors in our space who weren’t there.

The argument from the vendor community has been, “Well, Tim, SHRM Talent doesn’t have enterprise buyers.” The thought is that SHRM’s audience is roughly 65% SMB HR professionals. This is when the vendor community shows their lack of math skills. Or really it’s their marketing teams, so I guess we should probably have lower expectations on math skills.

Let me give you some personal data from my 2023 SHRM Talent experience. I was told there were 2300 participants at SHRM. It definitely felt that way. I had two sessions there that were packed with TA professionals, and the rooms were big (500+).

My connection numbers from SHRM Talent 2023:

Total LinkedIn connections: 163 (90% TA-specific titles)

Total downloads of an eBook offer: 141

NPS score of my talks (this is just bragging): 87%

Title level of connections by percentage: Over 50% were “Manager” or above. Of those, over 25% were “Director” titles and above.

Of the 163 connections, how many came from organizations over 5,000 people? 68 and 26 were from organizations over 20,000. Including Toyota, Boeing, Siemens, Johnson and Johnson, Gannett, large universities, large health systems, banking and finance, state and fed gov’t, and large franchise organizations.

In one of my sessions, I asked how many folks were using Workday Recruit, and more than twenty hands went up. There were massive amounts of Greenhouse users, Paradox users, and HireVue users. None of those brands cared to show up. These are some of the biggest brands in our industry.

The SHRM Talent Attendees Are My People!

They are in the trenches, real talent acquisition professionals doing the work and using the tools. They are leaders of TA in organizations that are spending real money and buying technology. In my sessions, these professionals stood up and spoke about the tools they were using. The vast majority are desperate to find recruiting technology to buy, and they believe they have limited options because they aren’t being sold options.

I get asked weekly, by recruiting technology vendors, how they can get connected to our potential buyers. Every single time I tell them they have to get out and put themselves in front of them. It takes time to build the pipeline. People have to see your brand multiple times before they buy. They just don’t get an email and buy. I tell them to go to SHRM Talent, but most don’t listen.

The SHRM Talent Conference continues to grow. When I went a few years ago, there were 50 vendors at the expo. This year there were 100. Next year, it’ll be bigger. The reality is SHRM Talent is one of the only talent acquisition-specific conferences in the US that is really delivering content for TA leaders trying to get better. The sessions aren’t sold to vendors like most conferences in our space.

We (Talent Acquisition) need a great conference in our industry. SHRM is getting close. Having the great TA tech companies show up would definitely put it over the top. It’s a huge miss for the attendees who are there not to have access to all the great tech.

SHRM Talent attendees are the top 10% of talent acquisition professionals in the world. Why? Because they are few who made a conscious commitment to investing in their development. To be at the forefront of TA. To be interested in what’s next. To be open to new ideas and new technologies. You won’t change my mind on this. The vast majority of TA professionals in our industry just show up and do the job, and don’t look for further development. These folks did and I celebrate you.

Generative AI and ChatGPT RoundUp in TA Tech! (Video)

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My friends Madeline Laurano, Kyle Lagunas, and I had a big conversation about all the recent generative AI announcements happening in our industry.

We are going to hear about so many more announcements coming the rest of the year, and we’ll try to keep everyone updated as they come in.

If you haven’t had a chance to go out and test ChatGPT go do it! It’s super simple to login into Open.Ai and get an account.

Inbox Zero as a Measure of Performance for Talent Acquisition!

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I have a new #1 question I get asked by Talent Acquisition Leaders! My old number one question was, “Which ATS should we be using?” That stood the test of time for almost a decade! But I now have a new number one.

“How should we be measuring success in Talent Acquisition?”

That question comes in a lot of versions:

  • What is the best metric in recruiting?
  • What do you use to measure the productivity of your recruiters?
  • How do you show your organization that TA is doing its job?
  • What are the metrics you use to measure TA?

I like using “Measures of Success” terminology primarily because of how I want to live my life. I never want our metrics, analytics, and data to be used as a hammer to obtain performance. I want to hire people who want to be successful in what they decide to do in life. Once they make that decision, I want to treat them like adults and help them obtain that success. I use data to help them track outcomes and measures of success to lead them on this journey.

Does that sound like a load of B.S. hustle culture or what?! LOL!

But, honestly, I genuinely believe in this philosophy, even though it’s sometimes hard to follow.

If a recruiter wants to be successful, I know there is a specific set of measures that will help them be successful if they follow the process, use the technology, and are diligent in their follow-up. They don’t have to work over 40 hours per week. They just have to work the 40 hours they work.

Every company could have a varied set of metrics that will make them successful. Most will have some similarities, but the actual numbers within the measures will be uniquely yours.

Inbox Zero is a measure a few TA Teams are using as a measure of success.

First off, I don’t necessarily believe that “Inbox Zero” has a high correlation to TA Team or Individual success, but herein lies the problem with measuring the success of TA teams today. The measures most of us use, suck! Time to fill = awful, zero correlation, you should be fired as a leader. (Editor’s note: Okay, Tim, breathe in, we know you’ll die on this hill.)

I find about 90% of TA Leaders work to build measures of success that look good without really having any real impact on actual recruiting success in their organization. That hurts, I know, but it’s true. Inbox Zero is just another sexy attempt at measuring sh*t with little accountability to success, but you can actually measure it, so it must be important. (sarcasm alert)

Just because you “can” measure it, doesn’t mean you “should” measure it.

Okay, what the hell is “Inbox Zero”?

It’s basically what it sounds like.

As a recruiting measure, some brilliant TA lead believes if every recruiter ended their day with zero emails in their inbox, they must be more successful than someone who didn’t end their day with email in their inbox.

There is some science behind inbox zero, although not a measure of recruiting success, just life success. It was developed in 2006, and here are the tenets of this email management strategy:

  • Some messages are more equal than others. On any given day, only a handful of emails are important and timely. Stop treating every email “like a Christmas present that must be savored.”
  • Your time is priceless and wildly limited. Few people have time to respond to every email they receive or even read them in detail. Accept that your workload exceeds your resources and slavishly guard your time.
  • Less can be so much more. Quit thinking that one-line email responses are rude — you’re not helping anyone by sending wordy responses. When it comes to email, economy is key, at least for most messages.
  • Lose the guilt. Out-of-control email is bad enough. Don’t make it worse by beating yourself up because of your overflowing inbox. Forget the guilt and just get busy cleaning up the mess.
  • Lying to yourself doesn’t empty an inbox. Learn to be honest and realistic about your true priorities and time expectations, while developing a “baseline gut check on what you really intend to do about any given message.”

The reality is we are addicted to data that we can measure that is clean. We love “time to fill” because we can accurately measure it. We like things like Inbox Zero because we can accurately measure it. We can show the business the black-and-white numbers we are confident in. No matter if they actually matter or not!

Inbox Zero is a time management strategy. The hope is if you can manage your inbox well, you’ll be a better recruiter. It’s a hope. That is all it is. It’s not a measure of success for talent acquisition. That being said, I need to manage my inbox better!