Category Archives: Technical Recruiting

Recruiter Roundtable with Loxo CEO Matt Chambers and I!

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In this discussion, Loxo CEO, Matt Chambers, and I discuss trends in recruiting that is here to stay, and how modern recruiters will need to evolve to address these changes.

 

Question 1: What do you see as the most impactful changes you’ve seen in the recruiting industry?

Tim’s Answer:

It continues to be the speed at which recruiting is expected to find talent for openings. We’ve gotten to a point where hiring managers have this expectation where you’ll start showing them candidates in a matter of hours, not days or weeks. All of this is driven by technology.

Matt’s Answer:  

Let’s start macro and work our way down to share why these changes are happening.

A generational transformation is underway.  Baby Boomers are retiring, millennials are taking over their leadership roles, and Generation Z is entering the workforce as the first digitally native generation.  This generational transformation is hitting at the same time that the web 3.0 is emerging and we are going to cross a tipping point to broader market adoption.

Unemployment is at an all-time low, and we are also on the longest bull run in history.  A tight labor market magnified lazy hiring practices which relied exclusively on job board postings. Ineffective hiring and subpar results created a robust demand for recruiting agencies and passive recruiting solutions.   Today talent acquisition is strategic; having top recruiters either in-house or as recruiting partners is a major competitive advantage.  We are starting to see a hybrid RPO boots on the ground model becoming very popular.

Executive search, staffing, RPO, and recruiting agencies are facing pressure to find ways to differentiate. Five years ago, the biggest changes were happening on the corporate side, but now executive search, RPO, and recruiting agencies are playing catch up.  It’s a lot of energy and effort for an organization to change software solutions and to consider new approaches to recruiting.  It also can take a year or more for an organization to switch out and upgrade their technology, so those who wait risk putting themselves out of business to modern recruiting practices that just have too significant an advantage.

Matt’s Thoughts on Tim’s Answer:

Hiring managers are being sandwiched by both technology innovation on the vendor/supply side but also from their C-levels measuring progress via KPI metrics.  I think Tim and I would both agree that quality of hire is the most important metric, but as he said to be successful in today’s world you have to get the job done fast or someone else will be there to beat you to it. 

Tim’s Thoughts on Matt’s Answer

As much as we see recruiting evolving and changing, it’s still out on the edges for the most part. The most used recruiting strategy across all functions, markets, and industries is still “Post and Pray”. Post a job, pray someone will apply. While we see the leading edge of recruiting at an advanced stage, it’s still mostly in the minority. One issue, especially on the corporate side, is recruiting is still part of HR and HR hates to recruit. So, they’ll do almost anything else besides picking up a phone and reaching out to a potential hire.

The growth of RPO is a straight-line direct reflection of this failure. Organizational leadership is giving up on recruiting at a colossal level because CHROs can’t figure out how to fix recruiting and make it work, so let’s just shop it out to experts. The reality is, you’re not shopping it out to experts, you’re shopping it out to 25-year-olds working in call centers who are paid to call candidates. That is now your employment brand, a 25-year-old who probably have never been to one of your locations and knows nothing about you.

It’s not a hit on RPO, they are hired to find talent and fill a position, and they need to do that as efficiently as they can to produce a profit. Turns out, many do a great job at that, but many organizations give up too easily instead of just fixing the core issue. Talent Acquisition is not HR. It can’t be run like HR, or it will keep failing.  

 

Question 2: Process-wise, where do you see recruiters putting in the most effort into moving forward?

Tim’s Answer:

I would love to tell you it would be quality over speed, but I fear it’s still going to be speed. For me this isn’t either/or, it’s both. Yes, I want you to find me talent fast, and, yes, I want you to find me great talent. Far too often, in most shops, recruiters turn this into one or the other. It doesn’t have to be that way. But, that takes a really great process, supported by great tech, supported by high expectations and performance management. BTW – it also costs money!

Matt’s Answer:

At the very top of the funnel. 

Executive search firms and internal talent acquisition teams are focusing most of their effort at the very top of the funnel.   Relying exclusively on job boards for “sourcing” is lazy and results in the lowest quality, yet still remains the primary way most organizations (and even most staffing agencies) recruit.

We have crossed the tipping point, and it is no longer cost-effective to source manually, when there are superior sourcing options on the market that can programmatically deliver an extremely high-quality talent pipeline at a fraction of the cost. 

To give you a concrete example, Loxo AI™ helps our customers build extremely high-quality talent pools.  It removes 90% of the hours spent sourcing by recommending only the very best people for each open position.  This is automated.  Why would you have a dedicated sourcing team when you could have this? Solutions like Loxo AI™ are gaining popularity as more recruiting organizations learn about them and realize how big of a game changer it is to their productivity.

The largest recruiting organizations have started to invest in building their own in-house technology systems.  I think almost everyone except these organizations realizes this is a catastrophic mistake that will lead down a black-hole.  The pace of technological innovation in the open market is 100x faster, so the tens of millions of dollars of investment will cost these organizations a decade of lost opportunity cost.

Corporate recruiters are relentlessly testing and trying new solutions, but often have to figure out workarounds or even pay out of pocket due to the slow and bureaucratic nature of big enterprise. As a compromise, I think you are starting to see market forces demanding open API integrations so their recruiters can use best of breed solutions rather than being forced to use these monolithic systems that put the recruiter’s needs last.  Recruiters will select and choose solutions that they want to use and that solve their problem, even as big enterprise struggle to keep up with the pace of innovation and global regulatory environment.

Matt’s Thoughts on Tim’s Answer:

Spot on –it’s always about the time, quality, cost tradeoff!

The Project Management Triangle is one of the most important constraint models in business operations. Clients always want it faster, better, AND cheaper and service providers always have to remind them that we can do two at once, but you Mr. or Ms. client select the two you want and we’ll adjust accordingly.  Technology innovation in a fully optimized system is the only thing that can improve all three at the same time, but technology will only get you so far so if you don’t have exceptional leaders, process, and people.  If you do you can achieve better quality hires faster than ever before. 

Tim’s Thoughts on Matt’s Answer

Totally agree with you, Matt. Although, I don’t see corporate recruiters “relentlessly testing and trying new solutions”, I would encourage them that they should. They should be demoing and looking at new tech at least once per month. It has to be a priority or the function just falls too far behind, too fast.

I do think as we see more and more of the top of the funnel be automated the real value of recruiters comes back to can you influence the decision of a candidate to believe that the position you have open is right for their career path? Can you get them to say, “Yes!”? That only happens when they trust you and believe that you have their best interest at heart. That takes expert-level relationship building at scale and speed.

 

Question 3: Where do you think the biggest opportunity is for recruiters to drive more value?

Tim’s Answer:

Click over here to finish reading this interview! Matt and I went back and forth for a few more questions!  (FYI – I get asked this A LOT – Loxo is our ATS and it’s awesome! Also, Individual Recruiters you can sign up use Loxo for FREE! Give it a try.) 

Through the Eyes of the Hiring Manager

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On Wednesday I was sitting on The Talent Fix Book Club webcast with one of my Recruiting Managers, Zach Jensen, and Zach made the comment that great recruiters do something a bit different, they look at applications and resumes through “the eyes of the hiring manager”. It’s a brilliant piece of advice, but what does it mean!?

New, or lesser experienced, recruiters look at candidates like a checklist:

  • Do they meet the minimum qualifications? Check.
  • Can they work when we need them to work? Check.
  • Will they fit the compensation band we have for the position? Check.
  • Are they interested in our company? Check.

Get enough checks and you send this candidate over to the hiring manager.

The hiring manager receives this candidate and immediately looks at this person completely different from the recruiter who was checking boxes. The hiring manager will look at the candidate and immediately think, can this person do the job I have, and do it well? Will this person fit into my team? Do I think I can manage this person? Will this person be challenged by my position, or will they be bored? Is this person better than me or someone on my team? Does this person make me/us better? Etc.

Great recruiters have enough of a relationship with their hiring managers that they are less concerned with checking boxes, and more concerned about these questions that are in the hiring manager’s head. They want to have those answers, so when the hiring manager asks, “What do you think?” What they will respond with is not checked boxes, but strategic explanations that help the hiring manager make a decision.

It’s a transition we usually see happen around year 3 with our recruiters. Checking boxes isn’t all bad, it’s how we all start. The reality is we don’t know much, so we have to go on something. Some, though, never make the transition. They just think recruiting is about checking boxes.

It’s the one reason I’m not concerned about ‘technology’ taking my job, and why the best recruiters I speak with aren’t concerned either. In fact, they welcome it. Technology will eliminate box checkers. A.I. can check boxes faster and better than you or I. A.I. can’t get into the head of a hiring manager and know what she really needs for her team. I can. Zach can.

Great recruiting happens when you build relationships with your hiring managers where they trust you know what they are really looking for. How do you get that? Mostly time and consistency. Keep showing up. Show them you have some interest in helping them improve their talent. Be persistently annoying. Rinse. Repeat.

What Does Tim Sackett Actually Do?

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So, besides my beautiful wife asking this question, frequently, I get asked this question all the time! During the spring and fall conference season, I’m out and about all over the world speaking. At almost every stop I’ll have at least one person come up to me and ask,

“So, what do you actually do?” 

Ugh! It’s the single biggest failure of my life!

I probably should start each conversation like an AA meeting:

“Hi, my name is Tim Sackett, and I run a technical staffing company!” 

That’s the real job. That’s the money maker. I run a recruiting shop! Like most of you, I have to go out and buy a recruiting tech stack that works. I need to decide if I spend money on Indeed, or LinkedIn, or ZipRecruiter. I need to hire and train recruiters. At the end of the day, I’m in the weeds finding talent.

Unlike most Staffing Firm executives, I can’t really hide. I’ve been blogging and speaking for ten years in our industry. When I meet with new clients who want to use my team, I try and tell them, “I think we’re better than most, but the one thing I can guarantee is I won’t lie to you, or take advantage of you! I’m too public! You could kill my brand overnight if I was one of those cheesy staffing guys selling you a load of bullshit!”

The name of my company is HRU Technical Resources. We are a 100% certified female-owned technical staffing company. Most people believe I’m the owner, but in reality, my Mom started the company in 1980.(Check out her profile pic from the 1st day! She looks like Farrah Fawcett!) She’s the original OG Recruiter! In her 70’s, she still could out recruit probably 99% of Recruiters in the world! Old school and proud of it!

Want to work with me? I want to work with you! 

Here’s what we do:

  • Contract staffing – helping organizations for 38 years build that part of their company that they want to maintain as contingent to add flexibility to their workforce.
  • Sourcing Projects – we will your funnel with talent and let you do the recruiting
  • Project RPO – we bundle some critical hiring for you and do the entire thing end-to-end
  • Traditional Direct-hire staffing

I also do a bunch of Talent Acquisition consulting with clients as well, helping them build out their own recruiting tech stack and just flat out execute better when it comes to their own direct hiring and figuring out what’s the best way to get the most out of your recruiting team.

So, yeah, I write a lot. I speak quite a bit. I do webcasts, etc. But that’s not the full-time gig. I wrote a post a few years ago titled “What would it take to get you to work 80 hours per week?” I don’t work 80 hours per week, but I probably work 60-ish. A lot of nights and weekends to make both my full-time and my side gig work.

The reality is, if I don’t work my full-time gig, my bills don’t get paid. That’s real life. So, let’s work together! I would love to get to know more of you and work with a bunch of you. Send me a note and let’s connect – sackett.tim@hru-tech.com.

Doing Time in Recruiting

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Have you done any time? I asked the unsuspecting young lady sitting next to me. She just stared at me not sure if I was joking or serious, and really not wanting to engage either way. 

Old recruiters tend to be a bit forward. Their time has worn away the niceties and cultural norms society places upon us when you go through the system.

Mine have been gone for a while now.

“Have you done time?”, Is me asking you, if you have ever worked in staffing? Corporate TA isn’t time! Corporate TA is an all expenses paid trip to Disneyland, with the Disney Princess breakfast included.

How long was your sentence? 

It seems like most recruiters do a cup of coffee and get out for parole within a year. A fucking year! I’ve got searches on my desk longer then a fucking year! 

What can you learn in staffing in a year? That you suck at Recruiting is really the only thing I can think of. You don’t even learn the language of what you’re searching for in a year!

I think everyone in talent acquisition should do some time in staffing. It produces calluses, it thickens the skin. Staffing doesn’t come close to giving you all you need for a corporate TA job, but it gives you one thing that is desparately lacking. It teaches you how to fill positions.

I’ve worked in both staffing and corporate TA and I loved both. Both a very different and I loved them for different reasons, but I’ve always been extremely grateful that I had experience in staffing before I went into corporate. Both sides have lifers, and it makes sense. Some people know that one side is just for them and the other isn’t.

So, on this day, hit me in the comments and let me know how long your sentence was, or has been, and let us celebrate our time served!

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @EmployUsApp – Referral Automation

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Today on The Weekly Dose I take a look at the candidate referral automation platform EmployUs. I actually first told you about EmployUs about four years ago when they just launched, but since then they’ve improved their tech and added a bunch of stuff, so I wanted to give you a second look! 

You guys already know I’m in love with candidate referral automation. In my experience of looking at every kind of HR and TA Technology I believe it has the single highest ROI of any tech on the market, and let still relatively few organizations actually use it as part of their TA Tech stack.

EmployUS took candidate referral technology one more step and actually allows you to use it both internally and externally with your organization. Clearly we love using this tech with our employees to get more of their referrals, but what if we could also use it outside our organization to gain more referrals as well? EmployUs allows you to do that, if you choose.

What I like about EmployUs:

  • They jumped into the chatbot/AI world to help those referring candidates make it much easier and faster, and through the use of SMS they’ve actually made is super simple for hourly workers to now refer candidates in seconds! Always a draw back to traditional referral software.
  • The automation aspect truly helps make the referral process simple for your internal employees who might not be thinking of this all day, every day, but once they do decide, you need it to self-sufficient and fast.
  • Tailored email and texting campaigns so you can target parts of your organization for specific referrals.
  • A dashboard that tracks and automates payouts based on the rules you build, that also gives you the gamification aspect of internal scoreboards to keep your referral program top of mind all the time.

Here’s what we know. Most of our top hires come from referrals. Our most inexpensive hires come from referrals. Almost all of us would say we need more referrals in our hiring process.

Then we watch our old, tired, analog referral program deliver the exact same results year in and year out, and we do nothing to change it. Go demo EmployUs and take a look at what your candidate referral program should look like.

The Weekly Dose – 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 The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

The Talent Fix Book Club Starts this Week!#RecruiterDevelopment

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If you are a regular reader of this blog than you clearly know I wrote a book, The Talent Fix, that was launched in April 2018. I have been overwhelmed by the awesome response and I would like to give back to the community that has given me so much. 

Beginning January 23, 2019, I’ll hold a monthly book club webinar, for free, where I’ll be going over each chapter of the book in detail, from a discussion point of view. Each webinar is scheduled for one hour, it might be a bit less or a bit more depending on discussion and questions. 

Each month, I’ll pull out some of the highlights and strategies, discuss them in more detail, open up the discussion to Q&A from the book club attendees, and probably bring on some micro-celebrity Recruiting guests as well to talk shop and continue to challenge the way we think about Talent Acquisition! 

We’ll go one chapter at a time, and while they might be too slow for some, most people don’t even read one book a year, so we’ll go slow and make sure we have truly dynamic discussions each week! 

The schedule will breakdown like so: 

  • January 23, 2019 – Introduction to the Book Club, we’ll breakdown Kris Dunn’s Foreword and I’ll tell you the “KD” story, plus a bonus topic of what recruiting tools you need to look at in 2019! 
  • February – Chapter 1 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • March – Chapter 2 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • April – Chapter 3 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • May – Chapter 4 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • June – Chapter 5 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • July – Chapter 6 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • August – Chapter 7 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • September – Chapter 8 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • October – Chapter 9 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • November – A look forward to preparing for 2020, looking at our next book club read, and a mini-demo of the hottest recruiting tool on the market I found in 2019! 

Also, remember, I’ll bring in several surprise guests that are genius level TA leaders, sourcers, and tech experts as well! 

Register for the free Talent Fix Monthly Book Club! 

This will be the easiest Team Development you’ll do all year! I’ve already had multiple teams contact me about signing up! One TA leader went out and bought each member of his team the book so they could get started and be ready for January 23rd! 

Buy The Talent Fix on Amazon or SHRM Members can buy it directly from the SHRM bookstore at a discount with your SHRM membership! 

I can’t wait to talk to everyone on January 23rd! If you have any questions, just send me an email at sackett.tim@hru-tech.com! 

The 2018 Emerging Jobs Report is Here!

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LinkedIn released their 2018 Emerging Jobs Report today and as always it’s packed full of some great information that speaks to where we see the world of Recruiting today, but also what we need to keep our eye for the future! 

So, what stood out in the latest report? First and foremost it’s what jobs are hot this year to last – 

So, I think we’ve all been hearing all of this A.I. and Blockchain stuff. The reality is, we aren’t really talking about true A.I., it’s Machine Learning (ML) and we’ve seen giant increases in the needs for these skills. 

Out of the top 15 emerging jobs (those jobs growing the fastest on LinkedIn) 6 of those were related to ML, Data, and Blockchain. That’s significant in terms of the products and technology that are being built by companies for the future. 

What else did we learn? 

While the report is designed to make us believe it’s all about Tech hiring, it’s not really all about tech hiring! 

  • Sales Executives
  • Recruiters
  • Realtors 
  • Account Executives (another title for sales)
  • Administrative Assistants 

Were all super high on the list as well. What does that mean? Well, those really aren’t emerging or growing jobs, it’s more about who’s living, searching, and spending time on LinkedIn. That might not be the patronage that LI really wants long term for the health of the site, in terms of your normal mix. 

The largest skills gap is still good old fashion oral communications! 

Again, I’m not sure how much of this is truly a skills gap and how much of that coming up in the data is just a function of the types of roles people are trying to recruit for on LI. If the report shows that all of these A.I., Blockchain, and Data jobs are what’s truly hot, oral communication wouldn’t be the most critical thing in those roles. 

But, oral communication is definitely a skill that is in short supply for most professions, and much needed by most professions outside of tech, like sales type roles. 

Machine Learning is definitely a skill set that employers are begging for. I reached out to my buddy and Recruiting savant, Steve Levy, just the other day as we had a search for a client demanding 10 years of ML experience. I was like, I don’t even remember ML being used as a term ten years ago! 

Steve confirmed, it most likely wasn’t. We did find some mention from 2009, but that was about it. So, the hysteria is real. Entry level position, five years of experience! 

I was surprised not to see Autonomous vehicle knowledge on there as this is another skill set we see companies begging for and we are constantly helping our clients in these searches. It’s not just about cars. It’s about delivery vehicles, mass transit, freight hauling, garbage trucks, etc. If it moves people or things, it’s going autonomous eventually. 

Check out the report. It’s great read at the end of the year as you’re preparing for recruiting plans for 2019! 

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Indeed takes Away Free Traffic to Staffing firms!

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Today on The Weekly Dose I dig into Indeed’s recent announcement to stop scraping the jobs from staffing companies. If you didn’t hear Indeed announced as the Staffing World conference that beginning January 7, 2019, they would no longer include “recruitment-based” jobs in their organic search results due to ongoing search quality issues (link to the official Indeed Policy on Recruitment-based companies).

I was able to talk directly to Paul D’Arcy, the SVP of Marketing for Indeed, about this decision. Paul was refreshingly frank about the announcement. Here are some of the things that came out of that conversation:

Think of the jobs Indeed posts on its site in four type of buckets:

#1 – Organic Jobs listed on Corporate websites scraped by Indeed

#2 – Promoted Jobs listed by corporate TA teams willing to pay to get those jobs to show up higher in the search results

#3 – Organic Jobs listed on Staffing Industry websites scraped by Indeed

#4 – Promoted Jobs listed by staffing firms (recruitment-based organizations – in Indeed’s wording) willing to pay to those jobs to show up higher in the search results

Of those 4 kinds of jobs, three out of the four have very similar rates of candidates getting hired. One of those types doesn’t do well at all because of a number of factors. Basically, Organic staffing jobs that Indeed has been scraping do very poorly. “Analysis shows that impacted jobs represent approximately 5% of applies but just 2% of hires on Indeed.”

So, the decision is made, by Indeed’s Search Quality team, to no longer scrape staffing jobs.

THIS IS SUPER UNFAIR TO STAFFING FIRMS!!! (I hear a collective 3 trillion dollar industry shout!)

Is it?

No one on the planet has lit up Indeed worse than me over some of their practices! (Hi, Todd!) I’ve been in Indeed Jail since early 2018 when they first shut off my free organic traffic. But, let’s be real, Indeed isn’t saying they won’t work with staffing firms or kicking staffing firms out. In fact, every single product Indeed sells is still available for staffing firms to use. They just aren’t giving you anything for free anymore, and that stings a bunch.

It’s like that first time the crack dealer tells you that you have to pay for the next hit! It sucks, and then you hand over some money.

Indeed understands the optics of this, according to D’Arcy, and they also know this will take some work to repair some relationships within the staffing industry. The fact is, staffing companies have been making millions of dollars off of free traffic from Indeed and it hurts to lose that!

The reality is, we (staffing) basically did this to ourselves. No not you! It was always the other guy! There was location spamming, posting ‘evergreen’ jobs that you would never fill, etc. Like most good things in recruiting, the staffing world found ways to exploit it and Indeed is shutting that down.

It’s D’Arcy’s hope that Indeed will find a way to begin bringing back some of the ‘real’ staffing jobs that out there. Think of contract and temporary jobs. Indeed corporate clients will be impacted if those jobs aren’t filled, as many now rely a great deal on their contingent workforce for large parts of what they do. Those are real jobs, that real candidates, will want to apply for and Indeed just took those away from candidates. They do realize this and they are trying to come up with a way to bring the real jobs back, without opening up the bad jobs again.

This is just Indeed making a move into the staffing world!

Wouldn’t be a bad business move, let’s be honest! I would do it, so would you, but Indeed is telling me this isn’t part of the strategy behind making this decision. Take it at face value, some will believe it, some won’t. The reality is Indeed is making hundreds of millions of dollars off staffing firms as clients right now, and for years have also been working in the staffing industry simultaneously, so I’m not sure it really makes that big of a difference, short term.

What does this mean for staffing firms!?!?! 

If you want to keep making hires on Indeed, you’re going to have to start paying up! Indeed’s short-term revenue will increase because of this decision because most staffing firms will initially just fork over some money to keep the faucet on. Eventually, they’ll find our avenues to find candidates. Optimize their postings for Google Jobs and the traffic and hires will come from others sites and sources.

You might decide to start testing other tools like LinkedIn Recruiter, CareerBuilder, Monster, Dice, ZipRecruiter, Programmatic job postings, maybe even pick up the phone, build a recruitment marketing machine, grab some sourcing technology, etc. Staffing firms don’t know this yet, but the reality is not relying on one tool so heavily is a blessing in disguise for your longterm success.

One piece of good news from Indeed is they’ll still allow staffing firms to use their paid resume database product.

What does this mean if you’re in Corporate TA? 

The hope will be you’ll actually see more traffic to your jobs, but understand that Google is no longer indexing Indeed’s job pages, so traffic has been going down and will continue to go down unless Indeed buys that traffic through marketing efforts. What does that mean? You’re probably going to be paying a lot more for the same or less traffic.

Now, with less staffing firm jobs clogging up the search results the hope is that you’ll see more candidates, faster to your jobs that are scrapped as part of your organic Indeed feed, and potentially even better results using Indeed’s job promotion products.

What do I think?

From someone who has been living in Indeed Jail for almost a year, you’ll survive. It’s not fun losing your free organic traffic, but you’ll figure it out and you’ll be a stronger recruiting shop in the end.

I think Indeed really screwed up by announcing this without first figuring out the contract/temp/consultant jobs. The contingent workforce is the fastest growing segment of the labor market, and someone at Indeed completely dropped the ball. I’ll blame Matthew in search quality because that’s kind of the inside joke at Indeed, if a client is pissed, blame search quality. But, my hope is Paul and the team will stick by their word and figure out a way to get those jobs back on Indeed for candidates.

I’m not sure this was a wise business move, really by Indeed. You never want to wake a sleeping giant. The staffing industry has been a sleeping giant over the past decade ($3 Trillion). Fat on Indeed free traffic and LinkedIn Recruiter licenses, the normal staffing recruiter today is not the staffing recruiter of a decade ago. Indeed just kicked them awake to see if they wanted to pay the check or go find somewhere else to spend their money. Some will go elsewhere.

I also know that Indeed produces results, so many of us, myself included, will continue to use them and pay for the products that work, but it won’t stop me from continuing to test everything and figure out how to lessen my team’s reliance on any one product. That’s just good recruiting strategy for both corporate and staffing leaders.

The Weekly Dose – 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 The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

Your Weekly Dose of HR Technology: @ZipRecruiter – Connecting the Right People with the Right Jobs!

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Today on the Weekly Dose I take an updated look at ZipRecruiter. Often I’m writing about technology on my site that none of you have ever heard of. I’m 100% sure almost every single person who reads my blog has heard of ZipRecruiter! At the very least you’ve heard their commercials on TV, Radio, Podcasts, etc. They are everywhere!

ZipRecruiter started in 2011 primarily as the job board for hourly, blue-collar types, to help SMBs hire better and faster. They didn’t try to hide who they were, they set out to build a job board, and they did it through advertising everywhere and anywhere. Come hire people fast and cheap. Bam, that’s who we are.

Fast forward to 2018 and a fresh round of over $150M in new capital and ZipRecruiter is now one of the most trafficked sites on the internet! Over 1.5 million businesses have used Zip, and they have received over 430 million applications for jobs listed on the site. And still, the Recruiting Community loves to dump on ZipRecruiter!

On Facebook last month someone posted a comment about ZipRecruiter and some of the biggest recruiting brains on the planet immediately started talking “ish” about Zip. I had one simple question, “Hey, have you used them in the past year, two, three?” Not one of them!

I hesitated writing this post because I actually didn’t want to give Zip publicity! Why? Because it works, and if it works and I’m using it, and you’re not using it, I win!

Privately, I’ve been having this conversation with TA leaders for a year or so:

Tim – “Hey, are you guys using Zip?”

TA Leader – No, we tried them three years ago and they sucked!

Tim – “Okay, you might want to test them again!” 

TA Leader – “Oh, you mean for hourly openings?

Tim – “No, for everything!”

Zip doesn’t get industry love from folks like me because Zip has never played “the game”! Meaning, Zip has never wined and dined the industry thought leaders or analyst. The belief is “hey, our customers are SMB and the vast majority of folks hiring for SMB will never read anything from an industry pundit”. Okay, that’s correct, but come one play the game with us, I love free steak! Instead of playing the game, they run more commercials and have built industry-leading technology behind the scenes!

As their leaders are proud of saying “We do things. We don’t talk about doing things.”

Zip has put a tremendous amount of resources and focus on engaging job seekers to make the experience sticky. That comes from ensuring Zip is matching jobs to candidates that actually match their skills and desires, not keywords. I can’t tell you how often I get sent emails from other sites for Nursing jobs! Why? I used to run TA at a health system and recruited Nurses! That’s bad tech. Zip doesn’t do that!

Zip’s recommendation matching technology is second to none. Netflix-like in the way it continues to improve based on the jobs you engage in and apply to, the more an applicant uses the technology the better the matching algorithm gets in returning great jobs to them the second one comes up on the site.

Google for Jobs (GFJ) also has had a tremendous positive impact on Zip’s candidate traffic. GFJ leveled the playing field for sites like Zip, and SEO is one other thing they are good at and prepared for when the opportunity came around. And Zip plans on using a bunch of that new cash to hammer home some machine learning SEO technology to continue to stay out in front and take advantage of the GFJ changes.

Is ZipRecruiter a silver bullet? No. Nothing in the industry is a silver bullet right now. Can ZipRecruiter be one of those bullets you have to finish the job? 100%. Will ZipRecruiter fill your Java Developer opening in BFE Wisconsin? Probably not, but nothing else will either! Will they drive additional traffic to most of your jobs, for a fairly inexpensive cost? Yes, they will, and that’s what they set out to do all along.

I’m a huge fan of testing annually. You’ll rarely hear me say, “Yeah, that didn’t work three years ago, so we don’t use it!” Really, three years ago? Okay, well, good for you! In TA we need to be a function of constantly testing and trying. You will be amazed at what doesn’t work in January, amazingly will work in July, etc. So, if you haven’t tried ZipRecruiter recently, it might be worth a test!

The Weekly Dose – 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 The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

5 Things Great Employers are Doing to Drive World Class Candidate Experience in 2019!

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I’m still struck at how for the most part, we treat candidates like garbage. Historically in Talent Acquisition, we had this really weird power dynamic that took place. We believed we (TA) had jobs to give out or not give out, like prizes, so we would force candidates into our processes and make them jump through hoops.

It’s been a super hard habit for many of us to break! Even with historic low unemployment numbers!

I have some help for you! 

I’m partnering with the folks over at Candidate Rewards to put on a free, live 1-hour webinar titled:

5 Things Great Employers Are Doing to Drive World-Class Candidate Experience in 2019! 

What can you expect to get from this webinar?

– 5 Rock solid strategies and tactics you need to be using to deliver more candidates to your organization!

– 3 Things great organizations never do to candidates, and that you can easily change in your own TA Shop!

– Candidate Experience data that will give you the ammunition you need to change your executive’s mind and give you more budget money to fix your Candidate Experience issues!

– Live Q&A with me on your toughest Candidate Experience questions!

Candidates Experience has been one of the hottest topics over the past five years, and it’s never been hotter when it comes to the hiring environment that we are in right now! Right now is the perfect time for most of us to look at our 2019 strategies around Candidate Experience, because for most of us it’s TA Budget Time!

If you don’t plan, you plan to fail! That’s what we are always told, right!? So, let’s sit down for an hour and discuss how to make 2019 the best year you and your TA team has ever had!

REGISTER NOW for this free webinar! 

I’m looking forward to presenting this information, it’s the first time I’ve ever done a Candidate Experience presentation, and I’m sure my takes will probably be a bit different than most, but you’ll have to let me know!