Category Archives: The Recruiting Rules

The Candidate Bill of Rights (revisited)

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In November 2010 Monster.com asked me to write a post on a hot topic at that time a “Candidate Bill of Rights“.  Needless to say, I’m not a huge fan of a Candidate Bill of Rights – I’m a Capitalist and believe in a free-market system of HR and Recruiting.  Here was my main point then, and what they are still today:

Candidates –

You Don’t Have To Apply:

  • If we have a crappy working environment – you don’t have to apply
  • If we don’t pay appropriately for the market – you don’t have to apply
  • If we don’t give my employees opportunities for growth – you don’t have to apply
  • If we don’t treat you like a human – you don’t have to apply
  • If we don’t give you a full job description – you don’t have to apply
  • If we don’t tell you every step of the process – you don’t have to apply

You Don’t Have To Work Here:

  • If we make you wait endlessly without any feedback – you don’t have to work here
  • If we make you an offer that you don’t like – you don’t have to work here
  • If we don’t offer the right work-life balance – you don’t have to work here
  • If we give you a bad Candidate Experience – you don’t have to work here

Candidates – if any of the above is true – you have some decisions to make:

1. Can I live with what I know about the company and the experience they put me through to get this offer?

2. IF SO, do I want to come and work for the company?

3. IF YES – welcome aboard, you’re coming on ‘Eyes Wide Open’

4. IF NO – thanks, and good luck, we’ll keep trying to get better in case you want to apply again some other time.

You see we all have choices. If you don’t like the way I’m treating you as a candidate, don’t come and work at my company.  I would hope that most HR Pros are smart enough to get this fact. Treat candidates like garbage and they’ll stop applying for your jobs, thus making your job all the more difficult to fill.  That might be a bit pie-in-the-sky thinking because I also know way too many HR/Talent Pros that don’t get this!

They have a little bit of power and have decided to torture candidates with painfully long and arduous application and selection processes that aren’t helpful to their own companies, statistically, and definitely aren’t helpful to the candidates.  During a recession, they don’t see much impact from these horrible processes, but eventually, the tide turns and face the results of their actions.  Karma is a bitch!

So, do we need a candidate bill of rights? No!  Do you need to spend a ton of time, effort, and resources on candidate experience? No, as well!  Don’t go right ditch-left ditch and start over correcting.  Treat candidates like you would want to be treated.  Or don’t, and pay the price! Have a few standards and etiquette, and some manners.  It’s not hard and it’s not expensive.

The Top 7 Rookie Hiring Mistakes!

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One of my awesome recruiting managers at HRU (the technical staffing company I run) is in the process of making his first hire! It’s pretty exciting. Do you remember the first hire you ever got to make on your own?

You get nervous! You don’t want to make a mistake, because you know how awful it is to have a bad employee working for you, so the last thing you want to do is make a wrong decision. You want this first hire to be a rock star!

All of our managers who are going through the hiring process for the first time all face the same issues. They are unsure of what to really do. If you’re a parent, the best analogy I can give is when the hospital lets you leave with your newborn! Do you remember that?

You get to the lobby. You have your baby strapped into that car seat like they are about to enter a crash test site! When you reach the doors, they slide open, and you kind of look around. You’re waiting, for just a second, for someone to stop you! You can’t believe anyone would just allow you to walk out of the hospital with a baby! Did you guys even check who I am! I have a hard time throwing my clothes all the way into the hamper, and you’re just letting me leave with a baby!?!

That’s the feeling all of our managers get when they hire for the first time! Wait, you’re letting me choose!? Are you sure you’re okay with this?!

To help our new managers I put together the Top 7 Rookie Hiring Mistakes for managers to avoid. Here they are:

1. You wait for HR and/or Talent Acquisition to control the process. This is your hire, that you’ll have to manage, live with, and fire if they suck! Get involved! Immediately!

2. You fall into the trap of wanting to hire someone who is perfect. You’re not perfect. Your CEO is not perfect. No one is perfect. Hire someone who can succeed in your job, your organization, under your leadership. Don’t hire perfect.

3. You try and hire someone who is just like you! You were successful in the job, which is why you are now the leader. So, it makes sense that someone just like you will also be successful. This tactic fails more times then it succeeds because we actually suck at managing ourselves! Find someone who compliments your weaknesses, and has the skills to do the job and you’ll have a better chance to find success. You’ll also add more diversity to your team!

4. You don’t move fast enough. If you interview a very talented person, there is a good chance someone else is also interviewing this very talented person. Pull the trigger and get them before someone else steals them from you!

5. You wait too long to fire a miss-hire. First-time leaders are the worse with this. They feel like they can make anyone work! Plus, they feel more ownership since it was their first time. Stop it! This won’t be the last time you make a bad hire. Give yourself the best leadership gift ever and fire a bad hire quickly!

6. You don’t believe it’s your job to recruit and source talent. Guess what, champ? The organization gave you the keys to run a department. They believe in you. If I’m given the keys to run anything, I’m running the whole thing! It’s my department, which means I own the talent, which means I’m going to help find the right talent for my team. I know what is needed better than anyone! TA can help me, that’s great! But I own this!

7. You believe that leadership will judge you based on this hire. Leadership won’t judge you based on one hire. Leadership will judge you based on a pattern of hiring success, or lack thereof. One hire will not define you. Many hires will. R.E.L.A.X.

So, what do you think, HR and Talent Pros? What are the biggest mistakes you see Rookie managers making when it comes to hiring? Hit me in the comments!

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Job_Adx Smarter Programmatic Job Ad Spend

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Today on The Weekly Dose I review the programmatic job ad platform JobAdx. JobAdx is one of a handful of new platforms on the market that talent acquisition teams can utilize to run their own digital job advertising.

So, first I probably need to explain a little about what the heck is ‘programmatic’ advertising.“Programmatic” ad buying typically refers to the use of software to purchase digital advertising, as opposed to the traditional process that involves RFPs, human negotiations, and manual insertion orders. It’s using machines to buy ads, basically.

Traditionally, you probably did very little with your own job advertising. You might have actually did some old school newspaper advertising, posted your jobs on job boards, or more than likely you used an agency, who charges a fee/premium, who would advertise your ads on various sites.

JobAdX is an advanced digital advertising technology with Pay Per Applicant model. Instead of running ads where you pay-per-click (each time someone clicks on your ad), this new programmatic technology actually only charges you for those who apply. So, ultimately, this pay-per-applicant will be more expensive than pay-per-click on a per event basis, but cheaper overall because you’re only paying for what you want, applicants.

So, what the heck does it really do? 

That’s really the big question, isn’t it! Basically, a programmatic ad platform puts your job ad in front of candidates where they are all over the internet. Traditionally, you would put one ad on one site (a professional association site, let’s say). Some potential candidates might go to that site, but many would not. But, almost all potential candidates are somewhere on the internet searching and doing things.

The programmatic ad technology finds the individuals you are looking for and puts the ad, in real-time, in front of them at whatever site they happen to be at. A great example is buying shoes. I love shoes. I bought 3 pairs of shoes this week! So, I go to a site to look at shoes. I find a pair I like, but I know my wife will kill me if I buy one more pair of shoes!

So, I leave that site and go to another site like Facebook. And what do you know there is an ad for those same stupid shoes on Facebook! How did Facebook know!?! Facebook didn’t know, the programmatic ad engine did know! Welcome to the future of job advertising!

A nurse has certain behaviors when searching online that will tell the technology, most likely this person in a nurse, which then allows the programmatic job ad platform (JobAdx) to put your nurse job opening in front of this person multiple times, across multiple sites, not just traditional job search sites.

What I like about JobAdx:

– Programmatic job advertising should be used by every TA shop, regardless of your number of hires, especially if you’re struggling to get results via traditional means. The JobAdx platform is simple to use and allows you to control your spend and budget with an “auto-pilot” feature to make it somewhat idiot-proof (which I definitely need!).

– The JobAdx platform has a great dashboard for you to actually see which jobs are performing really well, and which ones are not performing, so you can increase your spend on those you need, and decrease or stop completely on the jobs you no longer need traffic on.

– Advanced technology within JobAdx will ensure that once a candidate applies that candidate will stop seeing your job ads, which is a much better candidate experience.

– There is frequency capping within JobAdx as well, which is basically an automatic set of rules which will stop showing your job ad to a person after so many times. The theory is once someone sees your ad, let’s say six times, they’ve shown you they aren’t interested, so let’s not show them that same ad again, but go show it to others.

The goal of the JobAdx is to empower employers to advertise jobs more dynamically using the power of Real-Time Job Delivery. I’m completely enthralled by the technology and I truly believe every TA shop should be testing programmatic in their own shops. Go check out JobAdx and get a demo, then put a few hundred or thousand dollars you spend on traditional advertising and try it using programmatic.

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.

I’m in Indeed Jail! Help me!!! #FreeTimSackett

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Do you remember when getting stuck in LinkedIn Jail was all the rage!? I do! It was awful! There you were stuck on the outside looking in not being able to use a valuable tool you used every day to help you do your job.

I’m in Indeed Jail!

It’s somewhat like being in LinkedIn Jail, but different. When you got put into LinkedIn Jail, LinkedIn decided that that right thing to do was to let us know why we were in jail, and then, specifically, how do you get yourself out of LinkedIn Jail. Seems like a good business strategy.

How does Indeed get you all of those great candidates?

The Indeed model built a decade ago was freaking brilliant! Basically, the idea was scrap all the jobs from all the career sites so candidates will have one place to go to search for jobs. No one understood Google SEO at the time, so they scraped the jobs, then bought all the SEO and owned the space.

So, any candidate who was searching for a job on Google the first thing that would come up, always, was an Indeed link. They trained entire generations to search for jobs by going to Indeed. Brilliant!

Now, Google came along eventually and woke up to this and said, “Hey, wait, candidates are searching on Google for things like “Jobs near me” and we are sending them to Indeed for things that aren’t even what they are truly looking for. We can do this better!” Hello, Google for Jobs!

Google for Jobs decided “candidates are the most important thing”. Your Indeed sales rep will tell you this as well, although, they didn’t ever say this until Google for Jobs came along! So, Google changes the game, stops indexing Indeed (which is like a death sentence to companies that rely on Google search traffic), and says we can deliver a better job search for candidates.

So, Indeed is basically a dead man walking, but they have this window of time when we still have the entire world trained to go to Indeed and not Google. So, how do you take advantage of this phenomenon? INDEED JAIL!!! Cut off the non-suspecting companies of their free traffic and charge them money before they realize they don’t really need to do this because Google will give them the traffic they need.

So, what’s Indeed Jail?

Indeed Jail is when Indeed makes the decision to stop scrapping your career site and posting your jobs on Indeed. Almost every company at some point in the past decade has enjoyed a lot of free, organic traffic from having their job posting on Indeed. It was an AWESOME business strategy. It basically followed LinkedIn’s strategy, who followed basic drug dealing strategy.

Get people hooked on your product, then take it away and make them pay if they want it. I don’t say that to be mean! It freaking works really, really well! LinkedIn is a multi-Billion dollar company that got bought by Microsoft.

Indeed Jail is when Indeed stops giving you those free hits! Now, they just don’t take it away for no reason. My reason to be cut off, I was told, was because of a magical, mythical division within Indeed called “Search Quality”. My Indeed Rep didn’t shut me off, no! It was “Search Quality” who shut me off, and my Indeed Rep has absolutely nothing to do with Search Quality. In fact, they run almost as a separate company, locked away in an undisclosed, secret location!

My “Search Quality” issue was I’m a staffing company. An example of my issue is we work with a major employer to fill contract positions, not a position they would hire direct. The company gave us a job description for the contract position, which was basically the exact same JD they use to hire direct. Because the direct employer has priority at Indeed, and my posting was ‘too similar” my ‘search quality’ was bad.

Okay, I’m in Jail, Ouch, that hurts! Help me fix it! 

Let me say, I’m paying and have paid money to Indeed for various products, so it’s not like I’m not a customer. So, when you ask someone you’re paying for help, you expect help. But Indeed has no interest in helping you fix your search quality issue because that would mean you would get the product for free again!

I would love to tell you this is a staffing industry only issue, but it’s not. Little by little, and I have specific examples, corporate Talent Acquisition is also getting hit with ‘search quality’ issues and losing their free traffic from Indeed.

How can that be!?

Believe me, the corporate TA leaders I’m talking to are wondering the same thing. In one example, an Ohio-based employer is hiring hundreds of sales-related positions per year. They don’t use any staffing or RPO vendors, all the work is done in-house for direct positions. They have a big growth initiative so they went from maybe 50 openings to 200 openings, and Indeed cut them off! Because of ‘search quality’, and again, their rep would/could not help them.

I have a feeling this isn’t going to end well for Indeed. Right now they’re flying high! Going to hire thousands of more employees, which makes complete sense, because if you shut everyone off of free traffic, you’ll have a lot of TA pros panicking and buying Indeed products. At least until they discover it continues to cost more for less and less traffic as Google no longer indexes Indeed.

I’ve sent emails to the highest reaches of Indeed, pleading for help, and the only response I got back was from my rep offering to sell me more products!

I explained that I want this to be positive! Show me how to fix me, and I’ll show others how to fix themselves! Along the way, it’s a win/win since the more we understand about the Indeed products and services and feel like a vendor is truly helping us, we (as an industry) will support them!

Crickets!!! Crickets, I say, Chris Hyams!!!

So, what should you do to NOT get yourself in Indeed Jail?  

1. Never pay one dime to Indeed!!!

  • So one thing that has been pretty consistent with everyone I’ve spoken to that got put into Indeed Jail is that they were all (100%) paying customers of Indeed. Almost, like Indeed knew we were willing to pay for traffic, so they put us into jail on purpose! Up until the point of becoming a paid Indeed customer, none of the people I spoke ever had issues with being put in Indeed Jail!

2. Make sure you understand what is ‘bad’ search quality for Indeed. Good luck with this!

3. Enjoy the free traffic while you have it because eventually everyone will be shut off. Drug dealing works because we get addicted. You’re currently addicted to free Indeed traffic. That isn’t a sustainable model for a business.

So, what do you do if you’re already in Indeed Jail? 

1. Understand you’re not alone.

2. Understand that your true reality is you can live without Indeed traffic, and slowly but surely the traffic you get from Google will be greater. So, focus on ensuring your ATS and Jobs are as aligned as possible with the Google Job Schema – it’s super important!

3. Understand if you want more Indeed hits, you better get ready to pay for them from Indeed.

4. Understand Indeed has no vested interested in helping you fix your search quality issue, even if you’re a paid customer because it costs them money.

5. Look at Programmatic Job Advertising tools like: JobAdX, Talroo, Appcast, etc. Increase your posting strategy with sites like ZipRecruiter, CareerBuilder, Monster, LinkedIn, etc.  Invest in your own database with some talent rediscovery tools, use CRM technology, build and nurture your pipelines of talent.

My Offer Still Stands!

Chris Hyams, the President of Indeed, get your team to help fix my stuff and I’ll be your biggest fan in advocating and teaching others how to do right by candidates and by Indeed to make the world a better place. That’s all I ever wanted, for you to just help me. Help a paying customer fix their stuff. But you refused.

#FreeTimSackett

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @TextRecruit Drip Campaigns Really Work!

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Today on the Weekly Dose I review TextRecruit‘s new Drip Campaign feature that my team is actually really using!

So, I don’t talk a lot about my tech stack, because I think it’s a real differentiator when it comes to running a staffing company. In fact, I’m fairly cocky about telling clients I know for a fact, my tech stack is better than theirs, which is why my team can find and attract talent faster than theirs can!

We use TextRecruit.

Why?

Because being able to text candidates, more than one at a time, is critical for recruiting success. Plus, I need a way for my recruiting team to manage multiple text conversations at a time, and a platform that will capture all of those conversations.

So, we have been using TextRecruit with a high rate of success when it comes to getting more reply rates than we could with email, InMail, and phone calls.

So, what are Drip Campaigns using TextRecruit?

Drip Campaigns are a series of automated text messages built to drive deeper engagement with candidates. They help you automate text messages based on whether your candidates respond, and engage them with the right message at the right time.

They work like this:

  • Create the different messages you want to send to your candidates and decide how much time you want between them
  • Once you start your campaign, candidates that respond will stop receiving messages while unresponsive candidates move to the next drip message
  • After the campaign, you can check your analytics to see your response rates

We do a lot of message testing so it might look something like this:

Message #1 – “Hey ‘Candidate name’ it’s Tim from HRU. I’ve got this awesome position we need to talk about. Let me know when you’re available.”

No response.

Message #2 – “”Candidate Name”, it’s Tim again! Here’s the link to that position I texted you about. Contact me back and I can give you more details!” 

Still no response.

Message #3 – “It’s Tim! I’m stalking you! No, really, I really do think you’ll like this position. Just let me know “Yes” or “No” and I’ll stop bugging you about this position.” 

What!? Still no response. Remember, even a response of “No, I’m not interested” is a good response, because now you at least know something about that candidate, and you can respond back with “Okay! Is there something you would be interested in and I’ll make sure I put that note on your profile?”

Message #4 – “Last Chance! I don’t want to assume you’re not interested until I really hear from you. Here’s the link again. Just text me back!” 

We set up the messages. The candidate sees it as a personal text to them, with their name embedded, if you have that as part of the message, and the TextRecruit technology does the rest! Easy to set up and use.

So, what’s the response rate? 

70%! (this is my team’s response rate when using the drip campaign method – I can’t guarantee your results will be the same)

That’s an unreal number for recruiting response! You can send out 4 emails to 100 candidates in a drip campaign and you might get a 15-20% response rate. The cool thing is the technology is running the interactions and letting your recruiters respond to those who are interested.

TA pros and leaders ask me constantly how they can get more candidates. One thing that I know that works, is you need to start communicating with candidates in a mode they will respond to.

Editor’s note: I pay to use TextRecruit as part of my tech stack. Many will assume this is a paid commercial and I don’t pay for the tech. I do. 

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.

Skilled Trades Aren’t Sexy to Gen Z and Millennials!

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Wow! Really!?

Here are some other things that might surprise you:

  • They also don’t hang out on Facebook
  • They like Smartphones and using Snapchat
  • You shouldn’t pee into the wind
  • They think you’re old!

No shit, Sherlock, that younger people don’t find the Skilled Trades sexy!

I’m old. I was listening to NPR on way to work the other day and this well-meaning Gen X dude gets on the radio and says, “the problem we have in skilled trades is that teens don’t find them sexy”.

I’m like, of course, they don’t find the skilled trades sexy. Most don’t even know what the heck ‘skilled trades’ means, and if you show them, they still won’t find them ‘sexy’! Okay, well not ‘sexy’, but they should see what a great, stable job the skilled trades can be.

Um, yeah, no, you understand how young people think, right!?

Stable. Good pay and benefits. Something you can do for forty years and get a good retirement and pension. Are all things that will get young people to run away from whatever it is you’re trying to fool them into doing!

So, how do I get young people interested in the Skilled Trades? 

I don’t!!!

I get 35-year-old people interested in skilled trades!

You know what’s great about 35-year-old people? They can start to see the end. Sure that end is 25+ years out, but they start thinking I need to get my life together and do something that is (wait for it!), stable! Something that pays well and has ‘solid’ benefits. Something I can retire doing!

I don’t need 18-25-year-olds to fill skilled trades jobs. Those kids suck at showing up to work and listening! You know who’s really good at showing up to work and listening? 35-year-olds!

If you go into any retail store, gas station, restaurant, etc. and you say, “Hey, I’ve got a job that I’ll train you to do and you can earn a great living and have great benefits until you retire, and you’ll always have a job”, you’ll be like the Pied Piper leading people to your jobs!

The entire way we (and by “we”, I mean you!) is that you go hire 35-year-old people who have shown you that they are willing to show up to work, do work when they show up, but maybe they actually want to add something to their life that gives them a little more stability.

That 18-25-year-old doesn’t want your boring, stable, well-paying job, in which they must dirty their hands. They still have aspirations someone is going to pay them six figures to do nothing and give them a VP title.

By 35 we’ve had that beaten out of us. We’ve been humping $40K jobs for 15 years and we’ve almost, but not quite, given up on hope. You Mrs. Skilled Trades Job Lady are that beacon of hope!!!

Teens won’t solve the skilled trades shortage in America. That is something that is a waste of time for us to try and solve. “So, you, um, want me to stick my hand in a toilet!? Yeah, isn’t there an app for that?”

The 35-year-old has stuck their hands in worst places than toilets and they’re ready to work their butts off for your great skilled trades job. All they need is some love, some training, and a chance.

Skilled Trades jobs aren’t sexy to young people, but you already know that…

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @LinkedIn Makes Some Changes to Help Candidates Apply Easier!

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Today on the Weekly Dose I take a look at some recent changes LinkedIn has made to their platform to make it easier for candidates. Here is the announcement from LinkedIn on two of the new enhancements that were made:

  • How You Match on job postings shows members how they stack up to the experience needed for a role based on the skills on their profile and recruiters can save time when reviewing candidates by immediately seeing how an applicant fits a specific role, within LinkedIn’s job management page.
  • 1-Click Apply gives job-seekers the option to save basic information, including a resume,  to apply for a job with a single click (desktop) or tap (mobile).

While these two features were made with candidates in mind, with record low unemployment in so many functions and markets, employers will also take advantages of these two additions.

LinkedIn has enormous amounts of data and the “How You Match” feature demonstrates a little psychology behind the data. On the surface, I think most TA pros would look at this and think “it won’t matter! Candidates don’t care if they match a job or not, they just apply, regardless.”

From a psychological standpoint, though, I think most employers will actually see an uptick in quality from this change. When LinkedIn’s matching technology tells you that you don’t match very well, most sensible people, won’t apply to that job.

When I first heard of the 1-Click Apply feature, I got scared that this was a recipe for mass applies from non-qualified candidates. That was my initial reaction, but I think LI brilliantly put these two features together to control this behavior.

Candidates want less friction when it comes to applying for jobs (that’s what Google’s data taught us with Google for Job’s algorithm). So, LinkedIn’s 1-Click Apply is the Holy Grail of an application process! We should all be striving to get to 1-Click Apply!

The truth is, in most ATS environments, today, it’s almost impossible to get to a one-click apply process, so kudos for LI for making this happen on their platform. While many will say they have one-click apply, most of those are based on you using your LI profile to make this happen, which usually takes an additional click or two.

The time is right for 1-Click Apply from an employer’s standpoint as well. Right now, most of us in TA are begging for more applications, so anything to make it easier for candidates to apply is welcome! The key is ensuring you get good quality with those additional applies, and I think LI did a good job trying to help out employers as well by launching the matching feature at the same time.

Acting like the candidate is the most important thing has become very vogue as of late for TA tech companies. Google started it with GFJ. Indeed is now trying to act like candidates matter, for the first time in their history. Now, LinkedIn joins the welcome wagon in letting candidates know they matter, and based on demographics and economic conditions, it looks like candidates will matter for a long while!

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.

How Long Should It Take a Candidate to Make a Decision on a Job Offer?

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When you make a candidate an offer, how long do you give them to tell you they want the job or not? 24 hours? 3 days? 1 week? Immediately?

For two decades I’ve been in the camp of a candidate should be able to tell you ‘yes’ or ‘no’ immediately, or you (the recruiter and hiring manager) did something wrong in closing! But, I think I’ve changed my stance on this, if “fit” is really important for the position, your culture, etc.

Here’s the deal, if job and/or company fit is really important to your organization. The candidate should take as long as they need to, to make sure that your organization is the one for them. That might mean they need to finish up other interviews, do more research, go through counter-offers, etc.

So, if that takes two or three weeks, so be it. The fit is critical for you and you actually want the candidate to take their time with this decision.

I feel so strongly about this, I think you should actually make candidates wait 72 hours after you offer them the job, to give you an answer! Yes! You won’t accept an acceptance from them until they’ve taken 72 hours to really think about the job, the new boss, the organization, everything!

Why wait 72 hours if they already know!? 

A ‘cooling down’ period will give them some time to get through the infatuation period of getting the offer! It will give them some time to really think about your job, their current job, other jobs they might be considering. This time is important because too often, too many people get that offer and at that moment everything feels so awesome!

After a couple of days they come down from the high of being desired by you and start to think clearly, and all of sudden you’re not as pretty as you looked two days ago, or you’re even more pretty by playing hard to get.

But what if a candidate gets cold feet by this technique? 

That’s a real concern especially with historic unemployment in many markets and fields. If you force a candidate to wait 72 hours there is a good chance someone else might come in an offer them a job!

Yep! That actually would be awesome if that happened, because then you would really know! Do they love you, or did they just fall in love with someone else!? Remember, this isn’t for every organization. This is only for organizations where fit is critical to your organizational culture.

If a candidate gets cold feet by another offer or by waiting 3 days, they don’t really believe your organization is the one for them. They don’t believe what you have is their dream job or organization. Also, if you get cold feet by having them wait, you don’t really believe fit is important!

So, how long should it take a candidate to decide if your job offer is right for them? 

There is not one right answer. Each of us has our own internal clock to make those decisions. If you force a candidate to decide immediately upon offer, that speaks to your culture. If you let candidates decide on their timeline, that also speaks to your culture.

In a perfect world, I still believe if the process works as designed, and everyone pre-closed like they should, both you and a candidate should be able to make a decision when the offer is placed on the table. But, honestly, how often does our process work perfectly?

Hit me in the comments with what you believe is the proper amount of time you should give a candidate to decide whether or not they’ll accept your job offer?

“In Transition” Isn’t Helping You Find a New Job!

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I know you’ve seen this on resumes and profiles over the past few years! Someone is looking for work and they title their profile “In Transition”.

Quick – without taking five seconds to think about, be honest, what do you think when someone says, “In Transition” on their resume, cover letter, LI profile, etc.? Put it in the comments!

My guess is, like me, it’s not positive. If it’s not positive, you should remove it from your profiles immediately!

When I read “In Transition” my immediate thought is “why are you in transition? Must not be good! No one wants to be in ‘transition’!” A ‘transition’ can mean many things when it comes to your career. Some of those are positive, but I think the collective will see most of the reasons as negative.

I think the reason I read “In Transition” in a negative light when it comes to talking about careers, is that for me it makes me believe you don’t really know what you want. I’m not ‘in transition’, I’m making a change and this is exactly what I’m looking to do.

Reason’s you might be ‘transitioning’ in your career and now you are looking for another job:

Potential reasons for transitioning:

  • Retirement from your current role (which many will take as a negative because of age bias)
  • Completely switching careers (could be a positive, if you’re willing to start at entry level income for the career you’re choosing to go into)
  • You got fired
  • You got laid off/company closed
  • You had your own business, that has ended, now you’re finding your next gig
  • You took a leave of absence for personal reasons (FMLA, went back to school, child rearing, aging parent, etc.)

So, I’m on record saying that using the phrase, “In Transition” isn’t good for someone seeking a job.

The bigger question than becomes is there a good phrase for people who are out of job and want to get a job that TA pros won’t immediately believe is negative?

I’m not sure there is one, especially if the real reason you’re transitioning is negative! That seems obvious, but you would be shocked at how many messages I get from people ‘in transition’ that are wanting my advice on how to say ‘positively’ they were fired.

My advice is usually to tell the best version of the truth you can come up with, and try to back up that version of the truth is a lot of people who will give you a positive work reference. Ideally, from the place you just left, even if that last job ended in a termination for performance.

What experienced TA pros and hiring managers realize is that not every termination is really do to actual poor performance. Sometimes it’s just a simple personality conflict between the manager you worked for and yourself. That isn’t great, but it’s better than you just couldn’t do the job!

Here are some phrases I might use instead of “In Transition” –

– “I quit my last position because…”

– “I retired from my last position and I’m looking to work “X” number of years in “X” type of position…”

– “I haven’t worked in “X time” because…, and I’m looking for…”

– “I got laid off from my last position…” (This one seems easy, except so many people now use this when they were the only person laid off, but everyone else kept their jobs! That’s not a layoff, that’s just a nice way to get fired! So, you better be able to back this up because great TA pros will find out the truth!)

– “I started my own business. It failed (or it succeeded or I decided it wasn’t for me). I’ve got the entrepreneurial bug out of me and I want to help an organization succeed in the following way…”

So, what do you think TA leaders and pros? Does “In Transition” scare you off of a candidate?

 

The Talent Fix – My new book is now available to purchase! If your organization is having trouble hiring, this is a must buy! 

Talent Fix Review: My mom says it’s her favorite book that I’ve written!!! (I’ve only written one book!)

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Does This Sweater Make Me Look Fat?

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I’ve got a bit of a problem.

I love buying new clothes, jackets, and shoes. You see, I’m kind of built like a fire hydrant. Picture a fire hydrant in your mind right now. Not very sexy is it!

So, I compensate, not by eating a great diet and working out constantly! Hell, no! That’s really hard work. I compensate by buying more clothes that I think will make me look skinnier than I really am!

Do you do this?

We do this in HR and Talent Acquisition all the time!

Just replace ‘clothes’ with ‘technology’. Yeah, we suck at HR, so instead of going out and fixing our foundational issues, let’s go buy a new pretty technology to cover up all of this fat, err incompetence!

Yeah, baby, with this new shiny technology no one will ever suspect we really suck as bad as we do!

The new stuff we buy screws with our heads. Every new shirt and sports coat I buy, I look at myself, and go “oh yeah! you’re going to look so awesome when you wear this!” Then I get on stage and someone tags me in a picture and I want to starve myself for a year!

Buying new stuff to make us look better than we are is the biggest lie we tell ourselves, ever.

So, before you go buy that new technology to fix all of your problems of why you suck at HR or TA, you have to know one truth. That truth is technology doesn’t fix why you suck. If you suck, great technology will make you suck faster. Bad technology will still make you suck, you just won’t be as fast as sucking!

Just like clothes won’t make me skinnier, new technology won’t make your function perform better.

 

The Talent Fix – My new book is now available to purchase! If your organization is having trouble hiring, this is a must buy! 

Talent Fix Review: My mom says it’s her favorite book that I’ve written!!! (I’ve only written one book!)

Purchase The Talent Fix now!