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Category Archives: The Recruiting Rules
Are You Tired of Your Employment Brand?
You might be tired of your employment brand…but your candidates aren’t!
That’s real.
This happens all the time in organizations. Talent acquisition isn’t feeling successful, or they’re getting pressure to do more/better/faster, and they start looking for excuses. The one excuse that always comes up is ‘our employment brand is old/tired/sucks, etc.’ It might be that it is old/tired/sucks, but it’s usually just an excuse.
Here’s what happens internally at your organization.
1. You have an employment brand. If you say you don’t, you’re lying to yourself! You do, you just didn’t have a part in making it!
2. You’re having trouble attracting the talent you want.
3. You believe having a really cool new employment brand will help attract the talent you can’t attract. Which it might, but most likely not.
4. You use your old employment brand as a crutch to why you can’t be successful in talent acquisition.
The real problem has nothing to do with your employment brand. For most companies, your candidates have little knowledge of what your actual employment brand really is. Most candidates equate your employment brand to your consumer brand.
So, externally your employment brand is what it has always been. The real problem is we get tired of our employment brand really fast because we are dealing with every single day. We forget that most candidates only will engage our employment brand usually once in a lifetime. So, they aren’t tired of it at all!
Any time I hear a talent acquisition pro tell me they can’t attract talent, and blame their employment brand, I question their ability to actually recruit. Being able to attract talent has very little to do with your employment brand, and more to do with your own perception of your employment brand. Our reality is most candidates have hardly any idea of our employment brands, until we engage them with it. If you are great at selling your brand, the candidates are more than likely going to have a positive perception of your employment brand.
If you believe your employment brand sucks. More than likely so will the candidates you’re contacting. It comes back to your attitude about your company. I’ve never seen or heard from a recruiter who desperately loved their organization who said they couldn’t find talent! Coincidence? I think not. If you love your organization, and you recruit, you usually are pretty successful. If you don’t like your organization, and you recruit, you usually are pretty crappy at it.
Just because you’re tired of your employment brand, doesn’t mean everyone else is.
Recruiters! Conferences Don’t Care About You!
I’m down at ERE’s Fall Conference in Chicago this week. It’s a conference designed for Talent Acquistion leaders (FYI – they don’t like to be called ‘Recruiters’). It’s really cool the folks at ERE do a great job putting together great content and work to push the role of Talent Acquisition forward in organizations around the world.
HR Tech also does a great job for HR folks looking for HR Tech. So does Sourcecon, for people wanting to be better sourcers. So does TLNT’s Transform for HR leaders. Heck, even SHRM National has some great content.
Besides ERE, though, where does a TA leader or Recruiter go to keep up on their industry. To get better. To challenge and measure themselves and their organizations to get better? No where, that’s where.
ERE does a fall and spring national conference. If you don’t have the budget for a national conference, usually $1-2,000 to attend, plus travel which usually doubles the cost, you’re screwed when it comes to getting really good recruiting content.
SHRM has both local and state opportunities for HR Pros to get further development and expand their knowledge base. Do you have a local recruiting organization or a state recruiting organization that will offer this to you? Most likely No, unless you live in D.C. (RecruitDC) or Minnesota (Hello Paul!).
It’s crazy when you really stop and think about it. Almost no where are we really leveraging the minds and the dollars to bring these people together at a state or local level.
I’m in Michigan. I know right now I could put two days of content together, leverage some awesome Recruiting talent from around the world to come in and speak, and get 250-500 Recruiting/Talent Acquisition Pros from Michigan to attend at $400-500 each. That’s anywhere from $100-250K just in conference fees, not including probably another $100-200K in sponsors. So, some company isn’t interested in $400-500K!?
Southeast Michigan is begging for technical talent. Organizations would spend the money to spend their TA teams to something like this. All across the country many areas are hurting for talent and willing to invest (a little) to get their recruiting teams better. But, most are not willing to have those same teams travel across the country at the price tag of $3,000 each for the same content.
Build it and they will come…just don’t build it too far away!
I see this work on the HR front. Monthly local SHRM meetings will get 50-100 participants at $50 per meeting for lunch and one hour of content! State conferences give you a day and half of content for $500-750, and most of that is vendors trying to sell you crap.
It just seems insane to me that someone who actually does conference planning for living can’t figure out how to leverage the largest 25 metro areas and put together a calendar of ‘local’ level recruiting conferences.
Like I said, ERE does a good job nationally, their just leaving about 90% of the money that is available out there locally on the table.
Job Descriptions are Just Commercials for Jobs
Only Employment Lawyers and HR Pros from 1990 believe that Job Descriptions are important legal-type documents that are still needed in 2014. Most companies have given up on job descriptions (JDs). At best you’ll find them, today, using ones from back in 1990 when people thought writing JDs was an important part of human resources. You’ll still find a few HR Tech vendors around trying to make you believe this is an important skill to have.
Our reality, though, is that JDs are really just a marketing tool to get you interested in a position and company. Nothing more, nothing less.
If this is true, 99% of companies are failing at JDs in a major way!
The other 1% are using titles like “Ninja Developer” and think they’ve gotten it solved. The problem we all share is that we haven’t let marketing just take this part of our business over. It’s a legacy thing. Somehow we believe only people in HR can write job descriptions. It’s that ‘legal’ thing again. We need to make sure we put “EOE” on the bottom, and you know you can’t trust marketing to do that!
Last week a Facebook group I’m in shared the following employment branding commercial:
I know, this isn’t a job description, but do you really think the JDs at Kixeye look like your JDs? No, they don’t!
I know. I know. Your company can’t do something like this. You’re probably right. But you can do something that is more like you. More authentic. More real. More, well, you.
That’s the problem with your JDs. They aren’t you. In fact, I would argue they aren’t anyone!
Your JDs, most JDs, are just a boring list of job requirements, that may not actually be required, and skills needed to do the job, that may not actually be needed to do the job. Job descriptions have turned into those things most companies are embarrassed to even show you. Weekly, I have conversations with companies that will either say they don’t have a job description, or the job description is old and updated, or just flat out ask me to help right them a new one!
It’s time HR gave up the job description business and handed it over to marketing where it belongs.
The Inclusion Reality
Black, white, gay, straight, Christian, Muslim, Furry, Jock…
We went to the same school.
We vote for the same politicians.
We both loved Breaking Bad and our burritos with pinto beans instead of black beans.
Equals hired.
Hired doesn’t equal the most skills, it equals the most connections made with those interviewing you.
Unless you know you’re hiring people who, specifically, think different than you, inclusion is a mirage.
Would You Sell Your Backup Candidates?
Here’s the staffing game has taught me over the past 20 years.
1. Great candidates get hired.
2. The difference between a great candidate and a very good candidate is one hiring managers gut feeling (usually).
3. The very good candidate that didn’t get hired, is someone elses great candidate.
This means that many of you are just sitting on another organizations great candidate! This means you’re sitting on something very valuable to someone else. Something that others would probably pay for.
Question:
Would you be willing to pay to have access to Google’s ATS?
Yes. Yes you would. More than you pay for LinkedIn Recruiter, I’d gamble!
This begs the question: would you be willing to sell your backup candidates? The ones you didn’t hire, but would have if your first choice didn’t accept.
So, what if your organization, your talent acquisition department, decided to start calling up other organizations that you know of who had similar needs and say, “Hey, we got what you want!” Do you think you could turn your corporate in-house talent acquisition department into a money maker? Yes. Yes, you could. Will you? No.
It really wouldn’t take much. Within your staffing process you add a little disclaimer, you know the ones nobody reads, which gives you freedom to ‘sell’ the contact information to those submitting for your jobs to other companies who are also looking for similar talent. From there you establish some relationships with other companies. Negotiate a price. Sign some simple agreements. When communicating with your backups about not getting the position, you pass along some good news. While they didn’t get the job they applied for, you have another position, with another company they might have interest in.
Bam! You’re printing money.
Very little extra effort, and almost no extra resources needed. Your talent acquisition department just turned into a profit center.
No organization would do this because they believe it will ‘hurt’ or ‘damage’ their employment brand. “Tim! If candidates knew we were going to sell their information to other companies, they wouldn’t apply to our jobs!” Or, maybe they would because they actually want to work for you! If that’s your process, what option do they have? Plus, all your doing is potentially giving them more options. How many people do you know that don’t want more options?
While no one is doing this publicly, I’ll tell you it is happening privately. I’ve been approached by corporate talent acquisition pros who are willing to ‘sell’ me access to their database for a fee. I pay them. They deliver to me candidates who applied to their positions that they never wanted to begin with, or couldn’t use. I haven’t ever did this for the simple fact that each time I was approached, the person was doing this behind the organizations back, with them wanting the check made out directly to them, personally. That’s shady.
But, if a company was willing to do it all above board as a paid service…I can’t tell you I would be in!
Why I can Recruit and You can’t
TaxFoundation.org recently released a map that shows how much $100 is worth for each state. The concept being where you live has a huge impact to what you can afford to buy with that same $100 bill. Here’s the map:
It begs the question, why would anyone live in D.C.? Or New York? Or California? Or New Jersey?
I’m not a coast guy. I live in 4 bedroom, 3 bath house in Michigan that costs under $350K. It’s new. It’s in a great neighborhood. I don’t have a highway running through my backyard. I’m close to a university, shopping, good restaurants, etc. I’m getting the most out of my $100!
Don’t get me wrong. I love to visit big cities. Chicago and Detroit are both close, so those are easy. New York and D.C. are great. California and Texas are lovely. I’m always thankful to come home. No traffic. Little crime. Kids still seem to be kids. Basically, I’m Ward Cleaver.
Michigan, and the Auto Industry, is going through a big growth bubble right now. It’s a combination of the Auto industry coming back. No one bought cars during the recession, so pent up demand. Aging auto workforce that stayed on through the recession and now wants out. There are thousands of jobs in Detroit for technical workers.
Recently, I had a company contact us about helping them find automotive engineering talent to go to California for a start up. They want to build an entire car start up in Silicon Valley. My first question was, why? They don’t really have a good answer to the why. Besides the fact, well, this is where we are now. Okay. I can recruit auto engineers for you, from Detroit to Silicon Valley. But understand, Detroit talent is going to have sticker shock! Major sticker shock!
They are use to getting more that $100, for their $100, and now I’m going to tell them I’ll give you $85 for your $100. This is really like a decrease of 25% to go and do the same job. Well, they said, we’ll pay more. 25% more? Even so, my $350K house is $1.3M in Silicon Valley for less house. But you’re close to the beach! For $1.3 I better be on the beach! Is the mindset of an engineer from Michigan!
Recruiting is a mindset. You can see why I can recruit folks to the Midwest! I know the hot buttons to push. Everyone has a certain value they want for their $100. For some the ocean and the beach and sunny weather is price they will pay for. For others, they want less traffic, quiet, clean air. It’s your job as a recruiter to be able to find that value, and not let your own perceptions of that value get in the way.
My Pet Died. Should I tell the interviewer?
Last week I did an entire post on ‘excuses’ candidates give when missing or cancelling interviews, check it out here. Then I get a question sent to me from a reader, who was getting ready to leave for an interview, that very day, and had their pet die. Her question to me, “should I tell the interviewers, when I arrive, that my pet just died?”
That’s karma. As soon as you make fun of something, the world has a way of pointing out this stuff really happens!
Here’s what I know. I have had a pet die as an adult. It crushed me. I cried like a baby. No, like a b_a_b_y!! The hardest cry I can ever remember having in my life. The old veterinarian that helped me out actually had to sit down with me and put his arm around me like he was my Dad. I’m thankful he did that.
I can’t even imagine going to an interview after that just happened. I would have been a mess.
So, what was my advice?
I would have told them my pet died. I’ve interviewed thousands of people in my career. Almost all of those folks actually wanted the job they were interviewing for, and wanted to put their best foot forward. Every once in a while I had an interviewee come in and you could tell something was not right. Sometimes they would tell you (sick kid I was up all night, just lost someone close to me, etc.) and give you context to why they were off their game. Many times they wouldn’t, and it didn’t go well, you could tell they were distracted and usually that ends with not moving forward.
You see, while most people don’t think HR is at all ‘human’, I am. I get you’re going to have really crappy stuff happen to you in your life, and how you deal with it probably tells me as much about how you’ll perform in a job than any other single thing. One thing we rarely get to see is how a candidate truly handles stress. Real stress! So, having someone come in and show me that it really sucks, but life moves on and I really want this job, shows me they can handle stuff.
I think you need to be careful with this, though, because you can easily turn this into a huge negative. Let me give you two examples:
1. Pet dies in your arms an hour before you interview. Almost everyone would say that’s traumatic and very stressful. You coming to the interview and soldiering through will get you positive interview points.
2. Your sister lost her job an hour before you interview. Potentially shocking news and you feel awful. Bringing something like this up would make me question your resolve! It’s a job, it’s your sister, that isn’t really traumatic.
Do you see the difference? You gain positive points for being able to handle something universally considered horrible. You get negative points if you can’t handle everyday stresses. The problem is too many people considered ‘everyday stresses’ as horrible stresses, and no one is going to tell them differently. I see this interviews all the time.
So, feel free to share major life stresses in interviews if you know they come across as real honest major stresses, and you feel confident you can show those you’re interviewing with that you can handle it and move on. If you’re worried because your kid had a running nose before you left and you share that, you’re probably not getting asked back for a second interview.
It’s Too Long
Wait for it…
“That’s what she said!”
I saved you the trouble.
Being too long is a major problem in the world today. People aren’t willing to wait, primarily because they don’t have to. Baseball can’t attract a young audience because the kids don’t want to sit around for three hours, at a minimum, to find out the outcome of the game. Soccer is exploding in the U.S. because it’s 90 minutes and they don’t even stop the clock when someone is injured! No commercial breaks, except for a short halftime period.
People won’t read a 700 page book, they want 300. No one wants to watch a three hour movie, make it two. Why do we have to have an hour meeting, make it thirty minutes.
Being too long is not a weakness you want to have in todays world. Being too long is now a sign that you probably don’t really know what you’re doing. If you can’t be short and concise, you’re looked at as ‘old fashion’.
That’s what your candidates are thinking of your selection process. You try and tell yourself, and your leadership, that we ‘take our time’ because we want to ‘make the right decision’. But your competition is making those same decisions in half the time. You’re old fashion. You’re broken. You’re taking too long.
Moving fast used to be considered reckless. Older generations would tell us to ‘slow down’. Measure twice, cut once. But, what if I made a process where measuring once was all that was needed, and I could eliminate the second measure? Wouldn’t that be better?
The legacy of the recession in Talent Acquisition is this, you had less to do, so you filled that time trying to add value. There is a tipping point to adding value. You extending the length of your selection process at a point no longer adds value. You’re taking too long to make hiring decisions. I know this because I’m constantly hearing stories of candidates you want, accepting offers from other companies before you’re ready to make an offer.
You’re taking too long.
Can Corporate Recruiters Poach?
Before we get right in and answer this question, let’s all get on the same page. What is Poaching? Wiki defines it as:
“Poaching has traditionally been defined as the illegal hunting, killing or capturing of wild animals, usually associated with land use rights.”
It can also be a cooking term, like Poached Eggs or Poached Salmon, but that’s not what we’re talking about.
The fact of the matter is that I don’t like the term ‘Poaching’ when it is used regarding talent acquisition. Business Insider loves to use this in titles when they are talking about normal recruiting activity (Here, Here, and Here to share just a few). There’s nothing illegal about ‘recruiting’ someone from another firm. Nothing!
Google has a talented group of Software Developers. Facebook needs Software Developers. Facebook recruits Google developers to come work for them. That’s Recruiting at its most basic. Nothing illegal about that. That’s actually the basis of our capitalist society. Free market economy.
So, why is it that we use the word “Poach” when describing something that is just basic business?
It’s because when an employee leaves you for your competition it pisses you off! You feel robbed. You feel like it should be illegal. “Wait! I spent so much time and effort to get you hear and now you’re just leaving me, for her!!!”
But, it’s not illegal. It’s not ‘poaching’. It’s business. You either do it well, or you use words like ‘poach’.
Can Corporate Recruiters ‘poach’?
Let me put it to you this way. If I was running your corporate talent acquisition department, and we had a recruiter who felt like they shouldn’t ‘poach’ from the competition, I would ask that recruiter to go work for the competition! At that point, that’s basically what they are doing anyway!
I feel so strongly about this, I truly believe a really good corporate recruiting function can cripple your competition. Truly! If your corporate recruiters take the best talent from your competition and bring them to your team, your competition isn’t long for this world. “Oh, yeah, but that’s poaching, Tim.” No, that’s Capitalism. That’s free market. It’s what our country is built on.
So, what I’m trying to say is this, if you don’t poach your competition’s talent you’re not American!