Category Archives: The Recruiting Rules

Cybersecurity is Teaching Organizations How To Fix Their Talent Shortages

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Cybersecurity jobs are the hottest thing on the planet. Hackers out to do bad are growing as fast as the need to combat them and at this moment the bad guys are winning!

Every single organization I speak with have needs for Cybersecurity talent, or they are in denial of their needs for Cybersecurity talent!

Here’s the main problem, there are basically very few formal programs teaching cybersecurity. You can’t go to your local state college and get a degree in Cybersecurity. Even if you’re lucky enough to have a program like that close, this is such a ‘new collar’ field that the supply can not even come close to keeping up with demand.

So, what are organizations to do?

Build your own! Old school is the new black! Remember when if you needed an Electrician, no you wouldn’t because it’s been decades, you wouldn’t go hire one, you would hire an ‘apprentice’ and basically teach someone how to be an Electrician, and for this training they would give you 35-40 years of great service and you would give them a Timex gold watch and a bad back!

Remember when if you needed an Electrician, no you wouldn’t because it’s been decades, you wouldn’t go hire one, you would hire an ‘apprentice’ and basically teach someone how to be an Electrician, and for this training they would give you 35-40 years of great service and you would give them a Timex gold watch and a bad back!

Cybersecurity is bringing back the modern day equivalent of solving a talent shortage by having organizations actually solve their own problem, and not wait for higher education to catch up and fix the problem.

The new modern day fix to labor shortages involve a number of things the personnel departments from the 1960s and 70s didn’t have, but in some ways are still trying to catch up with a modern equivalent of the old apprentice programs.

IBM is on the forefront of building their own Cybersecurity workforce and they’re basically giving you the blueprint to do this on your own.

Steps you should be taking to build your own talent:

Step 1 – Reexamine your workforce strategy. You better know what skills you need three to five years down the road, you’re too late for the skills you need right now. The only way to solve that current problem is through a big checkbook because you will have to pay your way out of that problem!

Step 2 – Get really close with your community. You’re going to need training help, so start investing in programs at the high school and community college level. Your money goes further in these places than at State U., and you’ll have more direct control. You need to build a recruiting base.

Step 3 – Own the local talent pool you need most. If there are local groups, you support them in every way they need. Bring in national level development opportunities for those skill sets and give it away for free. Build a complete talent ecosystem with you at the center. This isn’t to say you won’t let others in on your market, let’s face it, it’s simple supply/demand economics. If you’re all building this talent, the overall price will come down!

Step 4 – Build Apprentice 2.0 for your Company. This is heavy lifting and hard work, but it’s the only way you can fully build the talent you need. This means great training, mentoring, hiring manager and peer ownership, continual development and upskilling, etc. The difference between old school apprenticeships and new school is you can’t just grow them and forget about them, or they’ll just leave you and waste your investment.

Step 5 (but should probably be #1 but you wouldn’t have paid attention to it!) – Forget about 4-year degrees! Your unfounded need to have college graduates in every role is silly and now hurting your company. IBM has shown you don’t need to be this ‘traditional’ peg to fit in the round hole. You can actually redrill the hole in any shape you want if you find the right attitude and willingness to learn.

But, Tim, we don’t have the money for this!

You will either pay for this, or you’ll pay at least 40% more to lead the market in wages and steal talent. I tend to believe this is the cheaper and more effective outcome because if you grow your own talent from puppies, they tend to be really, really good at your business and your problems. Hired guns might have talent, but you still have the issue of getting them up to speed at a much higher cost.

The Number One Reason Employees Fail

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“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

Albert Einstein

It’s about that time when the HR conference season gets into full swing, so I’m beginning to prepare myself for the hundreds of conversations I’ll have with great HR Pros all over the world.  One thing that I will hear over and over and more than anything else is: “HR just doesn’t get…”  To be honest,  I think HR gets a whole bunch, but I think many of us lack the courage it takes, at the right time, to show how much we actually get.  So we sit there with our mouths closed, and others then have this perception we don’t get it.  But we do. We just weren’t able, or ready, to put our necks on the line, at that moment.

I do agree, though, that there are still certain things we struggle with in HR.  For me, the above quote from Albert sums up what we still struggle to appreciate in HR. We hire people for one set of skills than upon arrival, or at another point in their tenure, expect them to perform a different set of skills.  This behavior happens every day in our organizations. It’s a classic reason at why most people fail in your organization.

I bet if you went back and measured your last 100 terminations in your organizations, 60% of your terms would fall into this category: the person wasn’t performing, but the job they were asked to do was different from what they were hired to do originally.

So, what is it that we still don’t get in HR?

We don’t get the fact that we hire for a certain set of skills and the job changes, so we now need a new set of skills.  Training and Development are still living in this dream that they can drastically change adult learners by having a 44-hourtraining session and having each participant sign a sheet saying they received the training. Then, we all sit around a conference table analyzing our turnover and wondering what happened, and why all these people magically turned into bad performers.  It’s not them, it’s us!

So, what can we do about it?

The first step is realizing HR, and the organization, are part of the problem.  You can’t hire a bunch of fish because you need great swimming skills, then change the skill need to climbing and expect your fish to turn into monkeys.  It has never worked, and it will never work, even if you change your department’s title from Training to Organizational Development.

So, do you just fire everyone and start over?

Maybe, if the skill needed to change is that drastically different. More realistically, we need to have better expectations on the amount of time and effort it is going to take to get people back to “average” performance, not “great” performance.

Setting realistic expectations with your operations partners will give you a better insight to what route your organization is willing to suffer through.  Either way, there will be some suffering, so plan on it and prepare for it. Then go buy a bunch of bananas, because if want those fish learn how to climb, they’re going to need a lot of incentives!

Everything I Know About Recruiting I Learned from my 70 year old Mother!

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So, most of you know I’m the President of HRU Technical Resources. Most of you don’t know my Mom is the CEO!

She makes sure to point that out to me about once per month! Today is her 70th birthday. While it’s been a while since she’s been on the phone filling requisitions, to this day, she can not turn if off!

She started her technical recruiting company in 1980 when almost no women started their own businesses, and it’s been successful every year we’ve been in business. Through two major recessions, constant competitive pressure, and an every changing client environment.

She’s the only person I’ve ever met in business I would not want to compete against! How’s that for a role model growing up! She resisted, before resisting became in fashion!

So, I wanted to share some of what I learned about recruiting that she taught me:

– The recruiter with the most activity will almost always have the most placements. 99.9% of the time.

– Our clients are important, but if they ask you to work for free, you won’t be able to help them for too long. Only work with companies that value the work you give them.

– Talent is the lifeblood of our business. It’s the only thing that will differentiate you from the competition. Never forget that when you’re talking to a potential candidate.

– Following the process is important until it isn’t. Don’t allow it to get in the way of making placements.

– People don’t know what they can accomplish until they get pushed. It’s your job as a leader to push them to their limits so they can see how great they can be. (Sounds like Bobby Knight, right!)

– Balance is never really the issue. If you’re successful you have all the balance you want. If you’re not successful balance shouldn’t be your biggest concern.

– Candidates always tell you why their great, or why they suck. You just have to keep them talking and ask the right questions.

– If you ever feel that a candidate has a red flag, ask the question. The embarrassment is not them having to answer the question, it’s you explaining to the hiring manager why you didn’t ask the question!

– The best thing you can do is turn down a client’s requisition when they’re completely unrealistic about what they want. It’s a waste of your time, and they think you suck for not filling it. Most recruiters won’t turn them down, when you do, they’ll want to know why. That’s the conversation you really want.

I could go on all day like this! The learning never stops. Running a business your mother started is tough. I’ll never run like her, and it’s taken us both a long time to understand that’s okay, as long as the core of what she’s taught me never changes.

Happy Birthday, Mom! Yeah, yeah, I’ll get back on the phone!

 

 

I Can’t Make You Recruit!

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My mind is still racing after coming back from SHRM Talent this week! So many great conversations I had with TA leaders and pros. I actually think the level of conversation at functional specific conferences is higher because everyone is feeling the same pain!

It’s not to say a conference like SHRM National can’t be great, but you’re surrounded by HR and Talent pros with dozens of specialties and focus. At SHRM Talent you basically had the majority of the attendees focused on how do we attract and hire better talent for our organizations! That leads to great open dialogue and connection. I came back to the office super energized!

I have to share one specific conversation I had. Great, passionate TA leader approached me with a problem she was having. She was feeling a little beat up, not as successful as she wanted her function and team to be, probably didn’t have the respect and influence she deserved for the challenges they’re facing. Her question was this:

“How do I get my recruiters to recruit?” 

It was simple and honest.  The easy answer is a performance management discussion but I knew what she was really asking. It’s a dilemma most TA leaders face right now. Our organizations are pushing us for more talent, and yet I don’t really have team and technology to provide what they want!

My answer to her was also simple and honest.

“You can’t.” 

Okay, I expanded my answer because you know I love to give advice! I explained that most likely I’m guessing you have some really lovely, caring, company people working on your team that love working for you and love what they do. She said, “that’s right!” I’m  also assuming these people are administering a recruiting process, but they’re not actually recruiting. “Right again! That’s my problem!”, she said.

Here’s what I know after twenty years in talent acquisition. If someone doesn’t want to change, nothing I do will get them to change. Making someone recruit who doesn’t want to recruit, won’t work. Never has, never will. You have to want to recruit, really recruit, to recruit. No, not what you think recruiting is, what actual recruiting is!

So, I said, here’s what I would do and laid out a plan of how I would change process and activities and hold them accountable. I also said more than likely most won’t do this and they’ll quit or fight you until you fire them. If you’re lucky you might get one or two of your “Farmers” to turn into a “Hunters”. But, my experience has been most will refuse to change, while telling you they’re desire to change!

I don’t have the time or capacity to get someone to change. Either they truly care enough to change, or they don’t. There’s no middle ground because I need to change what we’re doing, and I only need people on the team that can now do the new requirements of what I’m asking.

What I find is most TA leaders die trying to change their non-recruiters into recruiters. And by die trying, I mean they eventually quit or get fired, all the while their team keeps doing what they want to do. You can change the people, or you can ‘change’ the people.

I can’t make ‘you’ recruit, but I can find people who want to recruit.

7 Ways to Increase Your Hourly Hiring!

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In 2017 there will be over a thousand webinars on how to hire more IT talent, 15,285 blog posts on how to hire more IT talent, 100s of new technologies will be released on how to hire more IT talent. You won’t see a fraction of that help when it comes to hiring Hourly Workers!

Why?

The majority of hiring done on a daily basis by most companies around the world is in hiring hourly workers, yet almost no one spends time on how to make this easier or do it better. This webinar is designed to help our brothers and sisters in the trenches who are out there every single day, doing all the dirty work in their organizations. Those recruiters and talent leaders who are responsible for hiring the masses!  

Tim Sackett loves the people! (and apparently talking about himself in the third person!) The real people, who go to work every single day and keep our organizations running like a well-oiled machine, not those pretty boys sitting behind a computer screen who have no idea what we really make and do on a daily basis!

Can you hear that music playing in the background? “America, America, God shed His grace on thee…” (Okay, I’m off my rocker, but you get it, I love this stuff!)  

What you’ll learn from FOT’s first webinar on better hourly hiring:  

–7 things you can start doing to increase and simplify hourly hiring in your organization

–3 ways top organizations are leveraging technology to do massive (over 1,000 hires per year) hourly hiring

–Pitfalls most organizations fall into when hiring hourly workers, and what you can do to make sure you don’t go down this path  

Smashfly, the world’s best recruitment marketing platform, is the sponsor for this FOT webinar.  So, you know we’ll be discussing the benefits of utilizing CRM technology in mass hiring, along with so many other tips, tricks, and techniques.

Joining me on the webinar will be my special guest, friend, and HR Influencer, Robin Schooling, VP of HR from Hollywood Casinos, who every day is in the weeds with her team in hiring the best hourly talent!

Register today! Thursday, April 27th at 2 pm ET! 

Learn how to give the best IT interviews on the planet!

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Tomorrow (Tuesday, April 18th at 2 pm ET) I’ll be talking IT Interviewing on a Recruiting Daily webinar sponsored by eTeki – Register Here! Most organizations suck at interviewing IT talent. I think there’s a better way!
It takes tech expertise to properly gauge tech competencies and experience and let’s face it most recruiters fall short in their capacity toTim Sackett eTeki
interview for the nuances of these specialized IT roles. You and I know this, but hiring managers struggle to understand why Talent Pros will never really be able to tell them if someone is a great coder or not!
Attend this webinar and I will show you a number of things you can start doing immediately to increase your ROI! Plus, you’ll hear from real talent leaders in the field who have already put a number of these ideas into place and hear about the success and struggles they had in launching this process.

Learning Objectives:

  1. Learn five ways successful companies are doing technical interviews differently to choose great talent.
  2. Design a technical interview process that attracts talent, and learn the things that turn off technical talent in an interview.
  3. Develop an interview strategy for technical talent that will increase your hiring manager satisfaction.

 

This webinar is designed to show any Recruiter and Recruiting leader (Corporate, Agency, RPO) a better way to interview technical talent, increase hiring manager/client satisfaction, and increase the influence and expertise your team brings to your organization.

The New Definition of “Passive Candidate”

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Okay, we get it, Mrs. Hiring Manager, you want passive candidates!!! We’ll get right no that…

Passive candidates are the holy grail of candidates, right? Untouched, virgin, pure as the driven snow, fresh meat that has yet to be soiled by the dirty hands of another recruiter. If I could find a way to mainline passive candidates right into my system I’d be the best recruiting junkie on the planet!

Do you even lift bro? I mean, do we even know what the hell a passive candidate even is anymore?

The Passive Candidate Definition from ten years ago:

“A Passive Candidates is someone who is being considered for a position but is not actively searching for a job.”

So, are we buying this today?

If so, it seems like we then need to define “actively searching”. The only candidates I know who are ‘actively searching’ for jobs are candidates out of work, working in a job that isn’t their chosen career (Communications grad from B-level university, selling cell phones in a strip mall), or about to be fired from their current position.

If those are the actively searching candidates, that makes almost everyone else Passive! I don’t think our definition of Passive Candidate matches that of our hiring managers current definition of passive candidate! I think they would say anyone who is searching for a job, passively or actively, is not really passive.

So, why do we see this differently? Well, this is a bit of marketing that TA played on the hiring manager to fill positions. “Hey, Tim is a great ‘passive’ candidate, I found him on LinkedIn, he didn’t even ‘apply’ to our job! You have to interview him!” The ‘he didn’t even apply’ is like crack for hiring managers, who now believe you found Tim locked away in a vault at your competitors that has never seen the light of day.

The reality is a bit less sexy! Tim has been on LinkedIn for three years trying to get out of dead end company he’s been working for, but Tim sucks at networking and finding jobs, so he is just waiting around to be trolled by a recruiter, and he applies to jobs every week, just hasn’t applied to your job!

Let’s be honest with each other. If someone has posted a resume online, err, professional profile, they’re on the market! They might not be actively applying to jobs on a daily basis, but we all know they’re open for business. Someone can’t be passive that has a presence on any of the job boards (Monster, CareerBuilder, Indeed, LinkedIn, Dice, Zip, etc.).  They also can’t be passive if they actively applying to jobs, but just haven’t applied to your job!

So, the new definition of Passive Candidate should probably be:

“A Passive Candidate is someone you find through various methods who is not on the job market in any way.”

That means you might contact someone in your ATS database who applied for a job with you three years ago, but they are currently happily employed and totally off the job market radar. That’s a Passive Candidate. The referral your employee gave you for a former coworker that you can’t find anything online, and they tell you they’re not looking for a job. That’s a Passive Candidate.

A passive candidate isn’t someone you found who just hasn’t happened to think about applying to your job, yet. They actually might be the most active candidate on the planet, who you just happen to run into.

We know a truly passive candidate when we speak to one. They’re a bit nervous. A bit surprised. A bit flattered. You can tell they’re not used to talking to recruiters and feel guilty talking to you. This is the person you’re hiring managers are asking for when they say they want a passive candidate.

This isn’t to say passive candidates are better. That’s an entire another post, but let’s not act like we are providing passive candidates when we aren’t.

The Single Greatest Metric in the History of Talent Acquisition!

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“0.00” or “Zero”

I’ll let you decide how you want to display it, both ways work.

Oh, what is this measuring? Check this out:

The number of candidates, in the past twenty years that I’ve hired, that were willing to accept a job without first having a phone call with someone at the organization I worked for. 

That number is:    0   

I’m guessing your number is fairly close to my number! If fact, this is a universal metric between all types of talent acquisition professionals (Corporate, Agency, RPO). Across all industries and all levels of hiring, hourly, salary, temporary, 1099, seasonal, etc.

Let me ask you a couple of questions:

1. Would you be willing to accept a job without first speaking with someone about this job?

2. Would you be willing to accept a job interview without first speaking to someone about the position, details, etc.?

My guess is almost 100% will say “No” for number one, but some would actually say “Yes” to number 2. Okay, I’ll buy some of you would go to an interview before ever speaking to anyone live about a job. I don’t think it’s many, but I’ll give you some people just want a job and a text or email communication is good enough for them. I’ll also assume the quality of those people will be questionable.

The fact is there is an extremely high correlation between speaking to a candidate ‘live’ on the phone or in person, and their willingness to continue through your process of hiring. Like a .99 correlation!

Another fact, then, would be that the recruiters in your environment (corporate, agency, RPO) who actually make the most phone calls will have the most candidates willing to engage your organization in your hiring process.

Final fact, in every recruiting environment I’ve worked (corporate and agency) the recruiters who connected with the most candidates over the phone, filled the most positions. Every. Single. Environment.

It’s not Rocket Science people! It’s actually Psychology.

If you don’t pick up the phone, you don’t find candidates willing to follow through with your hiring process.

Don’t over think this. Put yourself in the shoes of your candidates. Would you be willing to accept a job without first speaking to someone at the company offering you a job?

0.00!

 

Would You Pay to Interview at a Company You Really Want to Work At? @DawnOfPurple

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I love Nike. I would love to work at Nike. If the right position came along and someone said, “Tim, you can run talent at Nike, but you need to pay $500 to get in front of the right person at Nike”, I go to the ATM and hand that person $500.

Okay, at one time in my career I would have done that to work at Nike, probably not now because I’ve got peeps on the inside!

This is what a new company in the TA space is doing. For a minimum of $20 (they won’t say what the maximum is) you can get a thirty-minute “interview” with someone who works at the dream company you want work at. PurpleSquirrel.io recently launched and it’s caused a bit of stir amongst those active in the space.

Why?

Most of the TA and HR bloggers, writers, speakers, people who pay way too much attention to this crap, etc. Think organizations that prey on candidates are evil. This was the real downfall of The Ladders. When you start asking candidates to pay for something they should get for free, the thought leaders lose their minds.

Also, my tribe (all the folks mentioned above) are exceptional networkers. It’s really one of the main skills we have. We can talk to anyone, about anything, at any time, and we usually do! We’re unicorns in that way. Most of the world does not network like this. Most people keep their circles pretty tight!

This is what Purple Squirrel understands.

Most people actually suck at networking. The problem with this is that most jobs are filled because someone has a connection. My cousin works in marketing at Facebook and he’s introducing me to the director and I have a good chance to at least get interviewed. My girl Celinda works at Nike and I’m hoping she’ll put me in touch with Phil Knight!

You understand the drill. Recruiters don’t fill jobs. Relationships fill jobs.

This is where I think Purple Squirrel might be brilliant. If we already know most people suck at networking, that means most people would probably welcome the help and be willing to pay a little cash for that help. I want a connection to Google, PurpleSquirrel can help you get that connection to Google. It’s like when my mom hired that hooker for my date to homecoming! Well, kind of.

Here’s the main catch, and it’s not spelled out until you really dig into the site. The ‘interview’ you have with your new ‘connection’ at your dream company is not an actual representative of the company. Your new connection does actually work at the company you love, but what they are really giving you is a career coaching session. They might have some hiring authority, but there’s no guarantee and it’s not implied.

You still have a connection at the company you love. There’s value to that, especially if you know how to grow your network, but my guess is you probably didn’t hire a hooker to go to homecoming because you’re great at networking.

I’m all for any tool that helps people land their dream job in their dream company. So, if Purple Squirrel works at helping you reach that goal, then it’s worth every dime you invest. Just know it’s important you understand the rules before handing over the cash. This is one connection into a company that might lead nowhere. So, use your thirty-minutes to your advantage.

I applied for a position at Nike once. Never even got a “Dr. John” disposition letter. I like to believe, as I cry myself to bed each night, they already had someone internally they wanted to promote and the posting was just a ghost, and my rejection email was lost in cyberspace. If only I would have had someone on the inside, maybe my fortunes would have changed!

Hit me in the comments – I really want to know – Would you pay to interview at a company that you’ve always wanted to work for?

In Human vs. Machine – You need some Machines on your team!

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The Spring SourceCon Conference recently took place in San Diego. If you don’t know what SourceCon is, it’s basically the one place in the world sourcing pros get together to share the secret sauce!

I’ve never been invited, but I hear it’s really awesome. (The “I’ve never been invited” is somewhat of an inside joke as I know I don’t have to be invited to attend if I want to go!)

SourceCon is your NOT normal talent acquisition, recruiting type conference. You just don’t show up and go to lame sessions, then go home. They’ve added a ton of hands-on learning, so when you go home, you actually got better for coming.

One thing the SourceCon folks do is also hold an annual contest called the Grandmaster Challenge. The competition pits anyone who’s interested against each other in a sourcing challenge to see who can solve the issues the fastest and most accurate.

This year the challenge was tabbed Man vs. Machine as SourceCon decided to pit sourcing technology against real-life sourcers to see who’s better. The technology chosen to compete against the humans was Brilent. Brilent is a candidate matching tool that works with your ATS (I wrote about them in May 2016 – I really like their tech!).

The basic challenge presented was this:

  1. Download a folder of three jobs: Ground Service Agent, Systems Administrator, and Product Manager. The jobs were real but altered from when they were originally posted.
  2. Download a trove of over 5,500 resumes.
  3. Search thousands of resumes and find the people who were hired, interviewed and sourced for the roles; by an undisclosed company.
  4. Points were given when the right resumes were found and classified correctly. (i.e. This person was hired. This individual was interviewed. Et cetera.) Points were also given if contestants found the right resume but categorized it incorrectly.

Brilent uploaded the resumes and did the analysis and returned the results in 3.2 seconds! Yes, that’s seconds with an “S”! The human participants took anywhere from 4-25 hours of research to produce their results.

The machine, Brilent, ended up getting third place because the platform got some of the candidates right, but not all. Humans took first and second, for finding virtually the same list, but a little more accurate.

For my money, the machine won by a landslide!

The reality is, we’re talking about sourcing and new hires. None of us really know who is actually going to be best performers once they’re hired, so I’m not even sure just because the humans were able to find the actual hires made, that those hires will even be any good!

In 3.2 freaking seconds, the machine gave me a really solid list to work from. Or I could have waited for hours, for almost the same list. Machine – 1, Humans – 0.

I just can’t even imagine this is a conversation about who really won here. We won. We won because we can now take a tedious skill of screening and get almost the same results in a fraction of the time. This allows us to have more capacity to increase talent pools, attract higher level talent, build a stronger brand, etc.

I love having great sourcing pros on my team, but I also need to get me a couple of those machines!