CareerBuilder Empower 15 Live Stream Wednesday Sept. 10th!

Posted on September 4, 2015 by Tim Sackett

Next week Wednesday, September 10th, CareerBuilder has asked me to Host their Live Stream of Empower 15!

That’s right, someone made the brilliant decision to put me on LIVE. Lights, camera, action! To bring to you all the cool stuff happening at Empower!

The Live Stream will start at 8am CST and go all day until 5pm CST (that’s 9am for you East Coasters – and way too early for those on the left coast!). My friend Laurie Ruettimann will be joining me to kick it off in the morning, then I’ll be bringing you many other great HR and Talent Pros/Celebs throughout the day. Click on the link above for Wednesday’s lineup of great presenters!

Click below to get to Live Stream feed:

Empower 15 Live Stream

What is Empower?

DISCOVER. ELEVATE. INSPIRE.

The act of connecting employers and job seekers to make meaningful matches has changed dramatically over the past 20 years. And new economic, digital, and social trends have introduced an entirely new set of challenges. We’re giving you a front row seat to share the journey as we look back and, more importantly, ahead to the next 20. Join CareerBuilder and 1000+ other leaders for the talent acquisition event of the year where we’ll identify opportunities to continue to move the industry forward and work together to make recruitment easier and more effective.

Empower is Talent Acquisition’s version of all those cool HR conferences your HR peers get to go to, but they aren’t really designed for true Talent Acquisition leaders!

There’s No Free Staffing Option

Posted on August 12, 2015 by Tim Sackett

I’ve gotten a chance to work both sides of the fence for an extended period of time in the Talent Acquisition/Recruiting/Staffing game. For ten years I ran corporate talent acquisition shops for some very large organizations. One organization spent over $3M annually on staffing agency fees! Obviously, prior to me getting there!

I’ve spent almost fifeteen years on the agency side, sandwiched in between my corporate experience. What I’ve learned along the way is that there isn’t a “free” option when it comes to hiring great talent.

Frequently, I get asked from clients for discounts to my fees on the agency side. I get that. When I was on the corporate side, I would never take an agency’s first offer. Here’s the main problem with all of this:

Corporate talent acquisition pros don’t want any of it. They don’t your 20% direct fee, they don’t want your retained plan, they don’t want your RPO plan. What they want is Free. A free option.

Therein lies everything you need to know about staffing agencies and corporate talent acquisition. One side wants free. One side needs to get paid.

The reality is, even staffing on your own on the corporate side isn’t free. Corporate talent acquisition done right, has a ton of costs. Recruitment tools, automation, branding, job boards, applicant tracking, college strategy, recruiter training and hiring, etc. None of that is free.

All of this, though, should be screaming to the agency folks that something isn’t right. What corporate talent acquisition pros are saying is “we don’t like the options we are getting from agencies”. This should be of serious concern, because there are companies trying to design other options for corporate talent acquisition pros. Options where they’ll feel like they are getting the value they want.

These options aren’t free, either, but they are less than all of the traditional options that 99% of staffing agencies are offering.

When I was on the corporate TA side of the desk, here was my decision matrix to when I would use a staffing agency. This matrix made me feel good about my decision to use an agency:

1. Does my team have the capacity to do this search? If Yes, why would I pay to have this done. If No, the cost if justifiable.

2. Does the agency offer me a recruitment expertise and/or pipeline I don’t have on my team? See #1 for Yes and No options.

3. Is it financially feasible for me to add more capacity to my team, as compared to an agency option? This one took some more work. If I had a need for an agency to fill, let’s say, three positions and it was going to cost me $100K, well, obviously I could hire a pretty good recruiter for $100K. But, would I need that Recruiter in year 2, 3, etc.? Adding headcount isn’t a one time cost for an organization.

Ultimately, for me on the corporate side, it was almost always a capacity issue. I had the expertise, but we had bubbles of work I needed extra support with. Too often, I see corporate TA leaders upset over agency spend and it’s based on the fact they don’t have good recruiters on their team, yet there unwilling to change this fact. I’ll pay for additional short term capacity. I won’t pay for expertise I should have on my team everyday. That becomes my issue!

Corporate TA leaders become frustrated over agency spend because ultimately it’s a reflection on the team they have created.

The Most Important Question You’ll Ever Ask a Hiring Manager

Posted on July 20, 2015 by Tim Sackett

How are those hiring manager “intake” meetings going?

You know, those meetings you have with a hiring manager every single time they have an opening. You sit down with your hiring manager, face to face, and ask them a page full of questions. Why is this position open? What would make a candidate most successful in this role? What color of skin would you like this candidate to have? Boobs or no boobs? Whoops! Scratch those last ones, we would never ask those…

The reality is Talent Pros really only have one question they need to ask hiring managers. That question is this:

“Do you trust that I can find the talent you need?”

Ultimately, this is all that really matters for your success. If they trust you, they’ll give you all the information you need to be successful. If they don’t trust you can find the talent they need, they tend to hold stuff back.

Yes, I know that doesn’t make sense, but that’s real world talent acquisition stuff! Welcome to corporate America, a lot of stuff doesn’t make sense!

Most hiring manager have no faith you’ll find them great talent. They have this belief because so many bad Talent Pros before you failed them. So many before you didn’t really go out and find the best talent, they just delivered whatever warm body came into the ATS.

I just come out and ask the question. The first answer you’ll get from 99% of hiring manager is a weird, “Well, sure, I do.” If you really dig into this answer, you’ll get the true answer which 90% of the time is, “Hell no! Why would I? Your department has really never gotten this right!”

Thank you! That’s what I really needed. I needed to get that out in the open, so now we can really build trust, and make great things happen. They’re mostly right. Talent Acquisition fails many of our hiring managers for a number of reasons. Right now, your hiring manager doesn’t need to hear those reasons, they need to hear why this time will be different.

Then, you have to live up to ‘different’! You have to be better. You have to get it right. Getting it right earns trust.

Once they trust you, great things will happen. Earn that trust.

Working for Free – Contingent Search Model Changing

Posted on July 10, 2015 by Tim Sackett

A funny thing happens when the economy is good. Corporate Talent Acquisition pros believe that agency contingent recruiters should work their job openings like its the most important priority the recruiter has ever had. There are a couple reasons for this:

1. This opening is the most important priority for the Corporate TA pro, so it should be yours.

2. When the economy was bad, you treated the Corporate TA pro like they were your number one priority.

Then the economy gets good, and the agency folks have choices and now as a Corporate TA pro you find out who your real agency recruiting friends are! Those who will actually come through for you, when you call on them and tell them you have something urgent.

My Corporate TA friends are the ones who pay me.

Don’t take that wrong. You see this is the game we all play. You want me to work your opening, but you ‘really’ don’t want to pay me if you don’t have to. I get it. You get it. It’s the world of contingency recruitment. I spend most of my time just trying to truly determine who will pay me for the work I do. Because most of the work I do is for free.

So, now that the economy is good, way too many Corporate TA pro have unreasonable expectations of their agency counterparts. If I’m working for free, mostly, I’m going to be more picky about who I work for free for. If you have me work five openings, and you then fill all five on your own, I’m probably not working your ‘urgent’ number six. If you have me work three, and I fill one, I’m helping you out. It’s simple economics.

Something new is being added to the game. This happens when times are good for agency recruiters. There are two types of recruiting on the agency side:

1. Contingent – see above. Basically, I work for free until I find you someone you want to hire, then you pay me.

2. Retained – You pay me my big fee up front, and I work until I find you the person you want to hire.

Traditionally, retained is really only used for executive search, but when talent is hard to come by, you’ll also see it used in the professional ranks.

Recently, I’ve been seeing a new hybrid model of search show up, called Retained Contingent. Retained contingent is a mix of both models. It’s still a contingent search, but you’re paying me about 10-20% of the fee up front for me to prioritize your search to the top of the workload.

Let’s say you’re searching for an Engineering Manager for $100K, and signed a 25% fee agreement. The total fee upon placement is $25K. In the Retained Contingent model you would pay me $5K to start the search up front, then $20K upon placement guarantee. If I don’t find the person, after a contracted amount of time, the $5K is for my work, no other fee is owed.

This is a win-win for both the Corporate TA pro and the agency, but only if the Corporate TA pro is sure they want to pay for the search. If that’s the case, I want the benefit of retained focus and prioritization, without the risk of paying the full fee up front and having the firm not come through with a successful hire.

I don’t want to take you cash and then fail. You’ll make sure everyone knows I failed. But, I also have limited resources and want to focus those resources on the best clients. We both have skin in the game. That creates a partnership. That creates success.

Just wait. You’ll see a lot more of this over the next five to ten years. Corporate TA pros are getting smarter, and so are the agency pros. In the end, both sides want value for their work.

T3- @Hirabl

Posted on July 7, 2015 by Tim Sackett

This week on T3 I take a look at the specialized staffing vendor software technology called Hirabl. Hirabl is designed to help staffing companies catch revenue they missed because a client, or potential client, hired one of of the staffing vendors candidates, but never paid the fee. What!?!

Yep, it’s actually a fairly common occurrence in the staffing and talent acquisition game. It can happen a number of ways. I don’t want my talent acquisition brother and sisters thinking I’m called them cheats. 99.9% of are completely above board, but .1% are sneaky!

Here’s how it all might go down:

An organization is contacted by a staffing company to help on an opening. A good staffing company will insist on a signed contract. The get the signature and begin working. The organization decides not to move forward with any of the staffing companies candidates. Both parties go on their way. This happens a lot in the staffing world.

Fast forward six months down the road and the organization has the same opening. They post the opening and a candidate comes into their ATS. The same candidate the staffing company presented six months prior. By contract, that candidate is still ‘owned’ by the staffing firm. The organization hires the candidate, but never thinks about paying the staffing company. The staffing company has moved on and doesn’t even realize you hired their original candidate. By contract the organization still owes the fee, but it’s rarely collected, because on one comes asking!

Hirabl has technology that goes out and through social profiles and your internal data, finds these circumstances. You then get an alert, so you can go ‘remind’ the organization you presented the company to that they indeed owe you some money. Depending on your volume, Hirabl, on average, is finding hundreds of thousands in lost fees.

You need a couple of things to make this successful: 1. Good, signed contracts; 2. Good data for them to search on. Most staffing companies, using a decent ATS, will have the data. The contract question might be more difficult for some. In my organization we don’t do anything without signed contracts, so we would be good on that front as well.

I wanted to write about this for a couple of reasons. First, I know a lot of staffing folks who read my blog that can use this and get back some lost revenue. Second, I wanted those corporate talent acquisition folks to know that staffing vendors are getting more sophisticated, and some things that you might have gotten away with years ago, will soon be coming to an end.

Be careful signing a staffing contract. Usually, most staffing vendors are going to ‘own’ candidates they submit to you for at least twelve months. That means if you hire one of those folks, even if that candidate came to you on their own, you contractually are liable for that fee. That’s why you should be signing a ton of contracts. Find a few good firms. Work with them closely, and you won’t have any surprises.

You can better believe I’ll be trying Hirabl! We do a ton of volume, and as much as I would like to think no client hired one of our folks, I know we’ll find some where it happened. Stay tuned!

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.

Hiring Is About To Get Really Difficult!

Posted on July 6, 2015 by Tim Sackett

One thing was abundantly clear from speakers and thought leaders at SHRM 2015, hiring is hard, and it’s about to get much harder!

That isn’t good news for any of us in HR and Talent Acquisition. There are two forces that are currently happening that are making hiring more difficult than it has been in over ten years:

Solid economy and job growth.

Baby Boomers leaving the workforce.

This isn’t earth shattering information, we all kind of new this was happening. The issue is we are now all beginning to feel this in every part of the country and in almost every job category. This means some things are going to happen, and the top HR and Talent Pros are already preparing for these:

Wage Growth: CareerBuilder CEO Matt Ferguson spoke at SHRM on Tuesday and had some great data showing that organizations see wage growth of around 5% in 2015, and similar in years to come. Are you budgeting 5% increases? I’m guessing not!

Recruitment Process Challenges: How many steps does it take to apply for a job in your organization? If it’s more than two, you’ve got problems! Can someone apply for a job online with your organization without having a resume? Why not? Matt also showed data from CareerBuilder showing 40% of HR and Talent Pros have never applied for one of their own jobs to better understand the true experience!

Technology Challenges: Do you have a way to reengage candidates in your system on a regular basis? A system that allows you to let great talent know, that you already have in your system, when you have an opening that fits them? It’s called CRM, and only about 20% of companies have technology that can do this important recruitment marketing function!

Job Design Challenges: Too many of us are working and designing jobs like we are living in a society that was pre-internet, pre-ultra connected. We still think we need employees sitting in front of us from 8-5pm, Monday thru Friday. If they aren’t sitting in front of us, they must not be working! Indeed shared that 80% of job searches on their site include this single word: “Remote”! Are you adjusting those jobs that can be flexible?

Those organizations that believe they can recruit and get talent like they have been doing for the last couple of decades are going to fail. It’s really that simple. Talent attraction will be a powerful strategic differentiator for organizations over the next decade, like almost no other time in our history.

The good news? At no other point in our history do have access to the information on how to be successful! Twenty years ago, doing great talent acquisition was mostly trying stuff and getting lucky. In today’s world you can learn easily how the best organizations are attracting talent at conferences, on websites, in blogs, webinars, etc. There are so many sources of this information, that we now have no excuse to improve what we are doing. We just have to do it!

T3 – Recruiter Sidekick

Posted on June 16, 2015 by Tim Sackett

Today on T3 I take a look at the talent acquisition tool Recruiter Sidekick. Recruiter Sidekick helps take care of one of the biggest issue we all face in Talent Acquisition, regardless whether or not you are agency or corporate. We do a terrible job a mining our own internal databases!

Your internal database in the most underutilized resource that you have. I could go into most corporate talent acquisition shops and fill 35-40% of their jobs from their own database, without ever having to use another tool to find and source candidates! How do I know this? I’ve done it.

This is the primary idea behind how Recruiter Sidekick was developed. It runs like an extension to your ATS and acts like a referral engine from your own resume database. It basically looks at every new requisition being put into your ATS and instantly begins searching, based on their own proprietary algorithm, and sends your recruiters a “top 10” list of candidates that most closely match your requisition, that are already in your database.

Think about this concept for a minute. Two years ago you were hiring for a specialized position in your company. You presented a number of candidates to your hiring manager. She interviewed three, and eventually chose the one. Two more years pass, and you’re growing, or you had someone on your team retire, and now you need to go hire another person in the same role.

Most organizations – like 99% – just do the same thing they’ve always done. They’ll take the new position, input it into their ATS, it will get posted to your career site, maybe a few others, and you’ll begin the process of looking at those candidates who are ‘now’ available. But, what about those other two candidates two years ago who wanted to come work for you, but someone just beat them out. Now they have two more years of experience. Maybe one of them is the ‘one’!

In a nutshell, this is what Recruiter Sidekick helps you with. Recruiter Sidekick doesn’t let you forget you have unmined gold in your own database. All of this for $10 per month, per recruiter. It’s a niche piece of software to be sure, but one that almost all of us can use. Heck! I’m paying an intern right now to just do this, mine our own internal database for talent!

Check them out. For the price you really can’t go wrong!

The Path to Becoming a Highly Selective Employer

Posted on June 1, 2015 by Tim Sackett

We all think it, don’t we? We all want to believe in this notion that we only hire the best and brightest. We only hire quality. We are ‘highly’ selective.

We’ll show our executives really cool data that shows how ‘highly’ selective we are. Stats like number of applicants per hire. 25,000 people applied for this position, and we only took the best one!

Time magazine took a look at college admissions at highly selective colleges. Schools like Harvard, Yale, MIT, etc. Schools that are super hard to get into because of how selective they are. You know kind of like the hiring process of your organization. From the Time’s article:

“What many parents and students don’t realize is that increasing numbers of applications isn’t necessarily a sign that it’s harder to get into a selective school; rather, it’s a sign of changes in behavior among high school seniors. More and more people who aren’t necessarily qualified are applying to top schools, inflating the application numbers while not seriously impacting admissions. In fact, it has arguably become easier to get into a selective school, though it may be harder to get into a particular selective school…

The most recent study available from the National Association for College Admission Counseling shows that between 2010 and 2011 (the most recent years available), the percentage of students applying to at least three colleges rose from 77% to 79% and the percentage of students applying to at least seven colleges rose from 25% to 29%. In 2000, only 67% of students applied to three or more colleges while 12% applied to seven or more.”

The net effect of this behavior is to create an illusion of increased selectivity. Especially at the most selective schools, an increase in applications leads to the acceptance of a smaller percentage of the students who apply. However, students who meet the academic and extracurricular thresholds to qualify for competitive schools will still get into a selective college; it’s just less likely that they’ll get into a specific competitive college. These schools work hard to not admit students who won’t attend; the acceptance rate and the matriculation rate (the percentage of accepted students who attend) are key measures in many college ranking methodologies, so both admitting too many students and admitting students who don’t attend can hurt a college’s ranking.”

An illusion of increased selectivity…

You see, just because you turn down a high number of candidates doesn’t make you more selective. It makes you popular. Too many organizations, and HR departments, are marketing that they are highly selective based on some simple numbers that give an illusion of being highly selective, when in reality, they’re just good at processing a high number of applicants. That’s different from being ‘more’ selective. Just because you turn down 24,999 candidates doesn’t make you selective. It just means you have a high number of applicants.

So what does make you selective?

I would say Quality of Hire, but that measure is totally subjective in most organizations. Can you demonstrate with real measurable items that the applicants you’re hiring are better or getting better than those previously hired? Most organizations can’t.

You need to being some sort of pre-hire selection science model that you and your hiring managers believe in. This science gives you measures that you can compare over long period of times and every applicant has the same measure. This creates a real evidence that you’re becoming ‘more’ selective and on your way to becoming ‘highly’ selective.

Top 10 Sources of Online Hires

Posted on May 21, 2015 by Tim Sackett

Silkroad recently released some results from it’s annual client survey (also released by Indeed as you can imagine from the results!), which is a rather large sample. The chart that caught my eye was this one:

Keep in mind these are external online sources only. These don’t include an companies own career site, employee referrals, etc. Still the information is intriguing, and almost matches my own internal numbers for my company, which means I tend to believe the data!

Indeed being number one as a source for corporate hires isn’t not surprising. If a candidate is looking for a job today, they go to Indeed to start looking. What is surprising is the LinkedIn number!

6% of external online hires are coming from LinkedIn!

So, you need to ask yourself: How much money are you spending on LinkedIn as compared to the other sources that are getting greater results? Indeed, CareerBuilder, other various specialized job boards, etc.

Would have ever thought that LinkedIn would have been the exact same percentage as Craigslist!?!

Obviously, the candidates you are getting on LinkedIn are different than the candidates you’re getting on Craigslist. Not many professionals are looking for jobs on Craigslist, but you will find a ton looking for lower skilled, service level jobs.

Based on the data above here’s what you need to do:

1. Are your jobs being scraped by Indeed? Have you checked? If not, you better make this happen! (Same for SimplyHired)

2. Are you using CareerBuilder? Postings? Resume database? Might want to check into what they’ve got going on!

3. If you have a LinkedIn Recruiter seat, are you getting a good ROI for your investment? Would you get a better ROI is that same amount of money was spent for things like sponsored jobs on Indeed, or most job posts on CareerBuilder? Maybe you need to do some testing.

4. Are you using Craigslist to help fill your lower level positions? You know it’s free, right?

5. What the hell is Seek? Oh, it’s a job board in Australia, you can forget about that.

6. Don’t forget about your other non-online sources: Referrals, your own career site, local state employment offices, alumni, your own internal database (this is the most under utilized source of most companies!), etc. These probably fill more than all your online sources. How much money are you investing in them? (it’s usually a lot less than online sources and a huge miss for ROI)

T3 – Greenhouse.io @Greenhouse

Posted on May 19, 2015 by Tim Sackett

This week on T3 I review recruiting and applicant tracking software Greenhouse. Greenhouse is one of the newer players in the ATS space having only been in the market about three years, but they’re making a ton of noise. Primarily designed to be used in the mid-sized and under market, 1000 employees and under is their prime user base. Heavily used in the startup and tech space (Pinterest, Uber, Twilio, Zenefits, etc.).

Greenhouse take a best in breed approach, partnering with some of the best talent acquisition tech vendors to deliver the best to their users. Companies like Entelo, HireVue, RolePoint, RecruiterFi, etc., all integrate seamlessly with Greenhouse. I actually prefer this approach (for SMB HR & TA shops), because I like the best technology available, versus an enterprise ATS level system which is usually solid, but not fantastic.

As you can expect Greenhouse isn’t your Mom and Dad’s ATS. Older designed ATS systems are designed around one core process and most fail because you don’t like that one process. Greenhouse is designed around the core principles of talent acquisition and all you need to do within that function, and you do it the way you want. Greenhouse isn’t a talent acquisition software, it’s an organizational software, because everyone in your company as access, specific to their role.

5 Things I really like about Greenhouse:

1. The Interview Plan. One of the coolest things in Greenhouse is how they handle interviews. It’s a structured process that drives consistency, delivers interview kits to each interviewee, and describes their role and what they need to get out of the interview. This eliminates an interviewee interviewing with 5 different people and having them all ask virtually the same questions.

2. The Sourcing Plan. Again, Greenhouse structures the sourcing plan in a way that everyone knows their role and what they are responsible for. They also have full integration with LinkedIn, if you have a LI recruiter license, to allow you to do all of that sourcing from one system.

3. Candidate Scorecard. Greenhouse has designed a candidate scorecard that easily lets you compare candidates by more than just a rollup number, but by specific skills, cultural fit, qualifications and other details. This lets the organization make a more informed decision on who and why you should select one candidate over another.

4. Agency Portal. We all use staffing agencies. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to manage all that you use within your ATS? Greenhouse does this, and actually will show you agency performance metrics to boot!

5. Data analytics are very robust. I really liked their pipeline stats feature which you can set up by individual or team. If a candidate is stuck at one spot in process, the system alert you that you need to go kick a hiring manager in the butt and tell them to get going on a certain candidate, etc.

It’s easy to see why Greenhouse has the buzz in the industry right now from an ATS perspective. If I was running a corporate talent acquisition shop right now, they would get high consideration from me as the tool we would be using. An ATS is an ATS, but I love how Greenhouse has taken the traditional model of an ATS and made what an ATS designed in 2015 should be. Easy to use, intuitive, great tech and works the way we need to work in today’s tight labor market.

The Tim Sackett Project

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

Category Archives: Technical Recruiting