Category Archives: The Recruiting Rules

Have You Noticed, Most Companies Suck at Recruiting

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Recruiting isn’t about hiring one person. That’s easy.

It’s about consistently hiring one person, and that person should be, at the very least, as talented as the last person you hired. But, really more talented. Then, continually do that, hire better talent, over and over.

To do that, you have to be able to continually build a better mousetrap. You have to continually get better organizationally and individually.

The reason we suck at recruiting is we get satisfied with making that one hire.

“Yay! We did it.”

“Now, what?”

Great recruiting organizations aren’t satisfied with one hire. They aren’t satisfied with having all of their positions filled. They only get satisfied when they are replacing lower talent, with higher talent.

That’s a really hard place to get to. 99.99% of organizations will never get there.  It’s really hard work. Heavy lifting.

So, we give up. Screw it. We’ll just keep filling these one positions.

This is why you suck at recruiting.  Your goal is fill positions, not to make the talent in your organization better.  If increasing the talent was your goal, you would do things differently. You would act differently. Your sense of urgency would be different.

Talent Acquisition isn’t about acquiring bodies.  It’s about making the talent in your organization better. Every day. Every week. Every year.

Most companies suck at recruiting because they see recruiting as filling positions.

Hiring Means Your Organization Failed

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Henry Ward, the CEO of eShares, wrote a post on Medium recently on How to Hire.  It’s a great piece from an executive point of view regarding the concept of talent acquisition.  Basically, Henry feels that if your organization needs to go out and hire external talent, you’ve failed as an organization:

“Hiring means we failed to execute and need help. First, let me quell a misconception. Hiring is not a consequence of success. Revenue and customers are. Hiring is a consequence of our failure to create enough leverage (see eShares 101) to grow on our own. It means we need outside help. The perfect business is a computer plugged into the internet. Starting with me, every human thereafter is overhead. And we are increasing overhead by 50%.

I want to repeat this point. We are increasing overhead by 50% because we failed to execute. It is not something to be proud of. It is humbling to go back to the labor market, hat-in-hand, asking for help…”

Want to know why your executives don’t respect HR?  Read above.  Executives think about the business differently than we do in HR and Talent Acquisition. I’m 100% sure any head of TA would believe hiring, because of business growth, equals success, not failure.

Even if you take out Henry’s example of the perfect business model being a computer plugged into the internet, he could still argue that any organization that can’t self-sustain its own growth of labor is a failure. Think about it from a training and development point of view. You hire entry level candidates and train and develop them into every part of your organization. You have a succession plan. If everything works perfectly, you never hire ‘talent’ from the outside. You just hire new, clean, entry level bodies, and create your own clone army!

Okay, at this point we still need to use outside bodies. I would guess at some point Google will create real, live human clones, then the process could be completely self-contained.

So, how does Henry Ward hire at eShares?  Here is his hiring philosophy:

  1. Hire for Strength vs Lack of Weakness
  2. Hire for Trajectory vs Experience
  3. Hire Doers vs Tellers
  4. Hire Learners vs Experts
  5. Hire Different vs Similar
  6. Always pass on ego

Pretty solid. Some of it might depend on your industry, company, etc. I’m not a huge believer in always hiring for difference. Difference causes conflict. In some organizations that is great. In some organizations that is catastrophic. Just as similar, group think, etc. is bad in many cases, it’s perfect in some cases.

Give his article a read, he goes into detail on each step with an explanation.  One of the best executive written pieces I’ve read on hiring.

The Best Talent Expects Tougher Interviews

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I was reminded this week about the importance of tough interviews and their importance!

My friend has been interviewing at a number of good companies for high-level jobs. He’s going to be a great hire for someone, he’s a top notch talent. Great resume, experience, education and personality. He’s a five-tool player, A level talent!

He was debriefing me on some of his interviews and one thing struck me as soon as he said it. He was talking about one interview in particular and why he was interested in the company. Basically, he was interested in the company because they gave him the most challenging interview!

It was his determination that if a company was going to be that challenging in an interview, it was a place he would like to work. It was the toughest interview he has been on, and as a top talent, it seemed they were doing more to ensure they were only hiring top talent, and that made him feel like it was the right place for him!

A few things about this interview:

1. It was a long interview.

2. They didn’t force him to interview with 15 people over 8 stages.

3. They asked tough, challenging questions, they only someone who really knew their stuff, and worked at that level, would be able to answer!

The problem with saying tough interviews are better is too many HR Pros believe ‘more’ interviewing, is tough interviewing. More doesn’t equal tough, it equals more. There is a huge difference!

Tough, difficult interviews are ones where the questions asked would challenge the knowledge and skill of the person asked. Many times we end up not asking anything challenging in interviews because are spending all of our time just ‘talking’ the candidate into the job. In this instance we end up hiring the person who had the best interaction with us, maybe not the best candidate.

Top talent likes to be challenged. It’s the reason they’re top talent! If you don’t challenge them, most will not accept your offer, because they won’t view your organization as a great fit.

So, how do you challenge top talent and recruit top talent at the same time?

It’s your recruiters job to recruit and close. It’s the hiring managers job to challenge the heck out of the talent you put in front of them, then tell you which is the best. Part of the recruiters job is to ‘warn’ the candidates, that they will be challenged in this interview like none they ever have been a part of. This alone will help weed out those who aren’t up for the challenge!

Top talent wants you to want them, but they also want to know they’re going to a great organization that will challenge them and make them better!

What Would It Take To Get Your Employee To Leave You?

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Anthology (formerly Poachable) came out with a fun survey recently that polled where current employees of some of the hottest tech companies would go if given the chance.  The results are interesting and really speak to organizational fit, and the appetite for risk, in the employees you hire.

On the outset, I would assume any talented person working at companies like, Microsoft, IBM, Apple, Facebook or Google would be willing to accept a job at another tech firm, given the opportunity, location and pay are all that they are looking for.  Turns out that the employees at each of these organizations have a particular career taste when it comes to possible change, take a look:

Microsoft: 74% would prefer to go to another Public Company, only 32% to an early stage startup. (this limits the competition you’re up against, right?)

IBM: 72% to a Profitable Private Company, only 23% to an early stage startup.

Apple: 62% would prefer well-funded startup, or the same 62% to a public company, only 28% to early stage startup

Oracle: 69% to a public company, only 29% to early stage startup.

Amazon: 75% to public company, only 35% to early stage startup.

Google: 73% to well-funded startup, 45% to early stage startup and only 59% would want a public company.

So, what does this mean?  All those startups looking to attract folks from big tech companies might want to rethink your sourcing strategies! While some organizations like Google and Apple have employees with a higher tolerance for risk, most big tech companies are filled with non-career risk takers.

Organizational fit is so critical to making good hires, and most of us tend to overlook the risk appetite of the employees we are hiring versus the risk culture of our own organization.  This can be vetted out in an interview process, or even with an assessment, but we just forget about it most of the time.

You can usually see it on a person’s resume. Conservative company, conservative company, conservative company, oh hey, come interview over here with us at ‘our pants are on fire’, you’re going to love it! No, they won’t, but they might be attracted to the fire initially, and seem very interested.  The problem is, they’ve already shown you who they really are, you just aren’t listening!

The Advanced Class – Recruiting Edition

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As my friend Laurie Ruettimann pointed out last week, recruiting is easy and can be done by basically anyone, so just go hire some soldier to do it.   Laurie might not be that all far from the truth.  Recruiting isn’t brain surgery, it’s a process.  A process that is hated by the majority of human resource professionals around the world, which is why it is a $9 Billion dollar industry.  Not a hard skill, but many times, a really hard job to be successful at.  Old school recruiters like to believe recruiting is an Art form.  It’s not.  New school recruiters like to believe you can just source everyone you need off the internets. You can’t.

Recruiting is all about activity.  It’s a sales cycle.  The more contacts (phone calls, emails, handshakes, etc.) you make, the more candidates you will find.  The more candidates you find and get interested in your jobs.  The more jobs you will fill.  Not hard, right?  The problem is, ‘most’ recruiters look to do things that allow them not to make contacts!  They will buy every kind of technology imaginable to get people to call them.  They’ll do just about anything, besides picking up the phone and making that one call.

Want to be successful at Recruiting? Find people who are willing to make 100 calls per day and who love your company.  Go ahead, go find those people!  It might be a soldier, it might be your neighbor, it might a former crackhead, who knows!  The fact is, most people do not want to do this, even when you hire them and pay them to do just this!

So being a successful recruiter is basically easy.  You must find the sweet spot in the amount of activity you need to do each week that will get you the amount of contacts you need to get enough people for the jobs you want to fill.  Once you find that level, you need to maintain that level forever. Easy. I’m not kidding.  You don’t need fancy branding, and big ATS Systems and a bunch of processes.  You need people who will bang your internal resume database and job boards constantly, and faster than your competition.  That really isn’t that hard to do, because most shops don’t even do the basics well!

Now for the Advance Class participants:

Want to be Ridiculously Successful at Recruiting?

Do that which is written above and add just one thing.  Maintain a relationship with your companies Alumni.  There is this funny thing about human nature.  When we leave some place, we always want to know what’s going on back there!  If we move to a new city, we love updates from our old city.  When we run into past coworkers at the mall, we love updates on who is still there and who is running different departments, who got fired, who got promoted.  If we know this about human nature, why aren’t we giving it to our Alumni?

It doesn’t have to be constant but is has to be consistent.

Do a quarterly Alumni update via email to everyone who has every worked for you. Even the crappy ones who you are glad they are gone !  Give them some juicy details about promotions. Let them know some new things you’re working on.  Let them know what jobs you’re trying to fill, and how they can refer people.  Do this every quarter for 2 years.  Want to be class valedictorian?  On a monthly basis call a handful of alumni and just have a chat, build some relationships, check on where are they now.  As them if you mind if you share their story in the next Alumni News going out next quarter.  If you commit to do this for 24 months, you will start to see positions fill themselves.

This is advanced course stuff because 99% of companies aren’t doing this with their recruiting!

GE’s “Owen” Employment Branding is Brilliant!

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If you haven’t seen these TV commercials for GE (they also have a ton of radio ads in the same genre) you’re missing out on one of the best employment branding campaigns that have come out in years! “What’s the matter with Owen?” is the series and they’re very funny!

The ads show that GE knows who they are and what the perception is about them in the technology industry.  They also know, like many other giant established primarily manufacturing companies (see Big 3 Autos, Boeing, Lockheed, General Dynamics, etc.), that they need engineering and IT talent, just as bad as those companies in Silicon Valley.

Here are a couple of the ads:

We talk constantly about how important employment branding is to organizations to attract talent. We also say that small companies have an advantage in employment branding because they can be more creative.  I think GE just gave big orgs a roadmap to how they can flip the script when it comes to be creative and having fun with their employment branding!

Want to have a better understanding at how bad the labor market, truly, is for STEM talent?  GE, one of the most established brands in the world for decades and one of the most conservative with their branding, is making fun of itself and it’s perceived culture!  I can’t even explain at what a huge shift this is within the industry!

The Starting Point of a Great Recruiting Practice

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I love to taking a look back at great things and trying to determine that one point in time where the path to greatness was started.  It happens all the time in sports with teams. It’s usually a great hire of a visionary coach or a draft pick of some player who ends up being an all-time great. You almost always point to an exact time and place when the path to becoming great started.

You can do this with organizations as well. When did Apple make that turn from just being that educational Apple II computer company selling to schools, to the company they are today? The rehire of Steve Jobs? The launch of a certain product.

It’s more difficult when it comes to individual departments within an organization. When I hear about a great recruiting practice, I always wonder how did they become great, but also what started them on the path to greatness.  I always ask the person who is probably most responsible. Rarely does this person ever really have an answer.

The starting point of a great recruiting practice is always going to be different for each organization, but they all have one thing in common. Great recruiting practices all started with one person deciding they were going to make a change.  They didn’t even start out believing they were going to be great, but they knew something had to change to start making it better.

The starting point of a great recruiting practice is making the decision that the status quo will no longer be something that is acceptable. A great recruiting practice comes from the interactions of people who seek to make a change.

You’re Not Bill Simmons!

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On Friday, right before the end of the business day, ESPN announced that it was shutting down its very popular site Grantland.  Grantland was a site started by sports author Bill Simmons, and it was purchased by ESPN a few years ago and Bill came over to ESPN to continue to run it successfully. Bill Simmons is an exceptional writer, and assembled a great writing team, and Grantland was a blog I read every day.

This is from ESPN on the announcement of shutting down Grantland:

“Grantland distinguished itself with quality writing, smart ideas, original thinking and fun. We are grateful to those who made it so. Bill Simmons was passionately committed to the site and proved to be an outstanding editor with a real eye for talent. Thanks to all the other writers, editors and staff who worked very hard to create content with an identifiable sensibility and consistent intelligence and quality.”

So, what happened?

Bill Simmons was let go by ESPN in May.  Bill had creative differences with ESPN executives. This happens with great talent and management. One is trying to make great art. One is trying to make great money. Those two things many times don’t travel a parallel path.

Since his leaving, many of the great writers and editors that he brought onboard at Grantland, and stayed at Grantland, left ESPN, either to follow Bill to his new projects, or to other media outlets. These were really talented people, who worked at Grantland because of Bill Simmons.

You are not Bill Simmons!

In my career in HR I’ve seen a ton of talented people decide to leave companies I was working at, and they truly believed the company couldn’t go on without them.  In every single case the company did go on, and usually prospered.  You see, very few us are a Bill Simmons.

Bill left Grantland, and it failed.  Some would say, he was Grantland, or Grantland was him, either way, the site could not live without him.

You probably don’t have one employee in your entire company that is that important that if they left the company would fail to go on without them. Most of us are in similar situations.  Your executives know this as well, even if they won’t admit it. The organization will live on without them. It’s a tough pill for us all to swallow, but it’s 99.9% true in almost all cases.

We are not Bill Simmons!

Which is to say, you don’t have a defining discernable talent that is unique enough to carry or bring down a company. That’s okay! The world needs ditch diggers, and lawyers, and accountants, and developers, and clerks, and trash collectors, etc. It sucks to replaceable. It’s just a fact of life for almost all of us.

Bill Simmons couldn’t be replaced.  That’s might be the ultimate job performance review you could ever have.  I’m so f’ing good at my job, if I leave this place will fall apart.  We all want to believe we are that person, but we aren’t!

 

10 Solutions to Your Worst HR and TA Headaches!

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CareerBuilder did a funny thing at their booth at the HR Tech Conference this year and had people vote on their worst HR and TA headaches. CB then had a running total scoreboard on which headaches were the worst.  Kris Dunn and I loved the idea and we are putting on a webinar next Tuesday, sponsored by our friends at CareerBuilder, called, “Why Can’t All My Recruiting Tools Get Along?!” – which is one of our biggest TA headaches!

In this webinar, you’ll get our Top 10 HR and TA Headaches, but also the solutions to those headaches!  Basically, KD and I will give you are secret headache solutions!  Here are some the headaches we’ll be discussing:

  • “My hiring managers won’t give me feedback on candidates!” 
  • “I can’t get 100% of my employees to complete our mandatory training!?”
  • “We just had another candidate no call – no show! Our we allowed to shoot them?!” 
  • “Hey, Recruiter Tim, I ‘really’ like the candidate you sent me, but can I see just a few more?!” 
  • “I know I told you I would accept $75K for the job, but I really meant to say $90K!” 
  • And many, many more!

Do you need an aspirin? I do.

But, don’t fret, Kris and I will give you our guaranteed migraine knockout solutions, and none of which include you having to hire a hitman to ‘take care’ of business for you!  This webinar will be fun and lively, but like everything we do, also give you some real practical ideas and advice on helping you solve your worst HR and TA headaches!

WHEN:  Tuesday, November 3rd

TIME:  1 pm EST

WHERE: CLICK HERE! 

Does Buying Sex Go Too Far In Getting The Best Talent?

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Louisville’s basketball program is under fire because of recent allegations by former recruits and players who claim that Louisville paid for strippers to entertain them on recruiting visits, that included paid sex.  From ESPN:

“Five former University of Louisville basketball players and recruits told Outside the Lines that they attended parties at a campus dorm from 2010 to 2014 that included strippers paid for by the team’s former graduate assistant coach, Andre McGee.

One of the former players said he had sex with a dancer after McGee paid her. Each of the players and recruits attended different parties at Billy Minardi Hall, where dancers, many of whom stripped naked, were present. Three of the five players said they attended parties as recruits and also when they played for Louisville.

Said one of the recruits, who ultimately signed to play elsewhere: “I knew they weren’t college girls. It was crazy. It was like I was in a strip club.”

Before you come down on Louisville, the reality is, this is probably happening at many institutions. Jalen Rose, former NBA player, University of Michigan Fab 5 and ESPN Commentator, also said his recruiting visits to UofM, MSU, Syracuse and UNLV were like bachelor parties and all included having sex and alcohol.

I think most of us would completely agree that taking seventeen and eighteen-year-old boys onto a college campus for this type of activity is wrong.

My question is where does recruiting cross the line when it comes to adults and working for your company?

I can’t imagine ever ‘paying for sex’ for a recruit, since it’s mostly illegal, unless you’re in certain counties in Nevada.  I also can’t imagine providing drugs to potential recruits for any company I might work for, but then you see what’s going on in Colorado and Oregon.

I think you cross the line in how you recruit when you cross the line of your moral makeup of the majority of your employees and stakeholders. Some companies are very comfortable taking recruits out to bars and getting drunk. Many companies can’t even fathom that kind of behavior!

But, doesn’t wining and dining have a place in professional recruitment?  If you could get a great software developer, one that might cost you a $25K headhunting fee, doesn’t it make sense to drop a few hundred dollars on a potential candidate?   It certainly does, if you know who your best candidates are!

That’s the problem, right?  Many of us don’t know ‘better’ talent when we see it.  So, giving out hundreds of dollars in recruiting swag doesn’t work when you give it out to everyone!  It only works when you give it to the best.  Then, it also doesn’t work every time. It’s like the famous line from Anchorman, “60% of the time, it works every time!”

Louisville didn’t get every recruit who they paid hookers to have sex with them, but they landed some of those recruits.

Buying Beats headphones with your logo and sending them to software developers won’t land everyone you send them to, but it will attract some to take that next step.  Those cost $199.  Is hiring great talent worth $199?  Oh, hell, yes it is!  But, no one is sending Beats to software developers.

I’ve always said that college athletics is always on the forefront of what true recruiting is.  Highly sought after talent. Hard to attract to your organization. They find ways to make the best candidates feel extremely special. This is way beyond candidate experience. This is closing.

Paying for sex goes beyond what I’m willing to do, to get the best talent to come and work for me.  But, I’m willing to do alot of other stuff to attract the best talent! What about you?