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T3 – The HR and TA Technology I Reviewed in 2016!

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In 2017, I’ll be starting my 4th year of reviewing HR and TA technology solutions (hat tip to my friend William Tincup for getting me started on this path, and hat tip to the OG of reviewing HR and TA Tech, Steve Boese, okay, Joel Cheeseman will probably say he’s the OG, but you get the point).

I started doing this for my development. The initial plan was to do one, one-hour demo each month. Twelve hours and twelve demos per year to begin to make myself feel a little more tech savvy in the HR space. That quickly turned into doing one per week. In reality, I probably demo about one hundred pieces of new technology each year (most at conferences where I can knock out a ton at once), but I don’t write about many.

My reviews are not meant to be critical reviews. A product I might love, you might think is a piece of crap. That’s because we live in different circumstances. My reviews were meant to educate readers on what’s available out in the market across the HR and TA tech space. From there, you can decide if a demo of that solution is right for you or not.

Most people love this as a self-development idea but hate the fact that they feel if they demo, they’ll be ‘sold’ to by these companies. I don’t have this issue. I tell them upfront, I want a demo, I’m not buying, but I heard some good stuff about you and want to see. Don’t put me in your CRM, or I’ll hate you forever! It works pretty good!

Here are the products and links to the technology solutions I reviewed in 2016:

– Modern Survey 

– Smashfly

– SwitchApp

– Beamery

– Benevate

– Halogen & Jobvite partnership

– Universum

– Recruitee 

– Boon 

– ViziRecruiter & GoSizzle

– Brilent 

– Joberate

– Textio 

– Whil 

– Ratedly

– day100

– Pilot 

– Namely 

– WeVue

– SocialTalent 

– TextRecruit

– Health Fair Connections

– Handshake

– Fitbit

– InvestiPro 

– eTeki

– Slack & Growbot

– Envoy (formerly VisaNow)

– Lever 

If you would like to be reviewed for T3 in 2017, please reach out to me at timsackett@comcast.net. It’s pretty simple. We set up a demo, I ask questions, I give you some feedback, I write about you (or sometimes I don’t if I think it won’t be helpful to the readers). I think, so far, it’s worked out pretty well for both parties. I’ve gotten great development, and the tech companies get some free publicity!

Notes to HR Vendors #6 – Client Holiday Gift Ideas

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I’ve done a few presentations titled something like, “HR Tech Buyers Guide”, “How to Buy HR Tech”, etc. The presentation is designed for HR and TA practitioners to help them become better buyers of HR Tech. To understand the crap that HR and TA Tech vendors do and say to get you to buy stuff you might not need, want, or will use.

The interesting thing about these presentations is that half the audience turns out to be the actual vendors themselves wanting to hear what it is I’m telling the real HR and TA leaders! It’s smart for the vendors. It helps make the better sellers as well. Well, at least some that actually listen!

Based on these interactions I decided to build a series of what has come out of interactions with the vendors themselves, aptly named “Notes to HR Tech Vendors”. Look I don’t alway have to be creative! Enjoy!

Notes to HR Vendors #6 – Client Holiday Gift Ideas

There two ways this post can go, 1. A post about the gifts you actually give that are awful, 2. A post about gifts you could give that people would actually enjoy. I haven’t figured out which way this one will end up, so here we go…

About this time every year I start receiving gifts in the mail from HR and TA tech vendors. Ironically enough most of the HR and TA companies I’ve highlighted on my widely popular and over-shared weekly tech review, T3, rarely send me anything, even though they share with me constantly how many sales they’ve actually made because someone read about them on this blog. But, I’m not bitter, I did it for me, not you.

The gifts I start receiving are from the vendors I’m actually paying. Makes sense. They want to keep getting paid and figure if they send me of their ‘popular’ desk calendars I’ll for sure sign up again next year to use their product or service!

It’s fashionable in the HR and TA blogging community to post pictures of the gifts we receive from vendors, thanking them for being so nice. This isn’t the real reason we post these pics. The real reason is to shove it in the nose of the other bloggers who didn’t receive the gift in a petty one-ups-manship of who’s someone better because they got a logo mug filled with stale candy and you didn’t.

I personally hate this game, but I didn’t create it, I’m just a player. Hate the game, not the player!

So, what are the best gifts you could give? It really depends on the margin business you’re in. If you’re selling background check services, you’re probably not spending much on client gifts. If you’re selling annual HRIS enterprise level software, you might be handing out Mini-Coopers for all I know.

If I was in charge of gift giving to your clients, here’s what I would suggest:

– Free Consulting Service and/or Product. Here’s the thing, you know what your clients suck at, probably better than they do. Help them fix something, something they would usually pay for, but you have the expertise to solve it with little effort.

– Something Personal to your Main Client Contact. I have a client who loves chocolate. I send her chocolate. I don’t send everyone chocolate, because Ted, another client, doesn’t like chocolate, but he loves craft beer. It takes a little more effort, but it means more. (Side note for HR Vendor Executives – this is also a good test to find out if your sales folks have been building relationships! If they have no clue, they have no clue!)

– Development Opportunity for the individual or their team. I once had a vendor ask me to do a half-day workshop with a corporate recruiting team. It was the vendor’s gift to the client for being a great client. I had this happen with another vendor who had me come and have breakfast with a TA team and share ideas and thoughts on how they could improve. I’ve also had vendors invite me to a leadership conference on their dime.

– Anything sweet that can be shared. No fruit isn’t sweet! I’m talking candy, cookies, etc. That stuff is magical, it disappears almost instantly in an office setting! Fruit get’s thrown away in about two weeks.

– A great bottle of wine or spirits. If your client is a drinker, they’ll appreciate this more than you know! Most of that appreciation will come around 7pm on a Friday night, and they’ll remember you! I can tell you CareerBuilder sent me a great bottle of wine once. Many vendors have sent me bottles of Gin from all over the country. I appreciate those vendors the most!

– A Note to their Boss. What!? It’s simple and cheap. A handwritten note to the executive they report to, or even above them all the way to the CEO, saying how great it is to work with a smart and caring partner, someone who is constantly trying to make your organization better, and I thought you should know.  Explain what makes them better than other peers in their field. That gift will give back in many ways!

– Something they wouldn’t normally buy themselves. High-end Sunglasses, Wireless Beats, Google Home, Amazon Alexa, etc. For a hundred bucks you get a “Wow! OMG! Thanks!” You get remembered. I personally had a vendor give me a Northface jacket with their logo on it. I wear it often!

There you go from free to a few thousand dollars, all will make a statement, all will make people remember you when it comes time to budget more money for your product and services. If you want to know what won’t work, hit me up after the holidays and I’ll tell you the worst gifts I got!

 

 

 

Your Recruitment Strategy Needs Focus!

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I’ve been in Chicago a couple of times this fall. The restaurant scene in Chicago is off the charts, just like it is right now in New York, LA, etc. It’s a great time to be a person who loves food!

If you like going to new restaurants you’ll find out quickly that the restaurants of today are not like the ones we grew up with. In Michigan, and my wife still makes fun of this, any non-chain restaurant serving “American” food basically has the same menu where they serve burgers, seafood, Italian dishes, Mexican dishes, breakfast, hell they would serve Ethiopian if people would order it!

Basically, they serve a little of everything, but nothing especially noteworthy!

The new restaurant scene has changed this completely and now you’re lucky to have 8 main dishes that are served on a menu, BUT every single thing kills! The entire menu is one side of page and seems like almost no options but each dish is better than the next. Chefs of these new restaurants found out the way to make money is to focus your menu and make fabulous dishes.

You have lower food costs because of less wasted ingredients, you’re more efficient in cooking fewer items, less complaints because you know each dish is awesome and you create signature asked-for dishes. Focus = success.

When I speak with most TA Leaders they are trying to serve a menu that caters to everyone with their TA strategy.

When you ask what they are focusing on you get an answer that sounds like this, “Well, candidate experience for sure, and branding, that’s really important to us, our tech stack is a disaster we need to figure that out, big project right now with onboarding, looking at some CRM products, new career site in the works, definitely analytics is a priority and working to really get our arms around the employee experience as well.”

What!? Sound familiar?

Their “focus” is to focus on everything! It’s the I can’t see the trees through the forest mentality of focus. It’s also a huge strategic recipe for failing in talent acquisition.

What should your focus be?  Well, that depends on what’s important you to and your organization, but it surely isn’t everything. What I find is that great TA shops have one main focus and one or two minor things they’re working on.  The main focus might be analytics and to help with that they’re also implementing some new technology and building out what impact those results will have. Those results will then become the next focus, and so on.

Do a few things really, really well, then move on to develop something else that will be world-class.

 

Great Culture in Born from Great Leadership!

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You know what doesn’t work but we keep hoping it might? Grassroots culture!

The kind of culture where you want your employees to establish. The kind of culture that vendors keep telling you that you must have to be sustainable. The reality is a grassroots culture is mostly chaotic and differs wildly between managers, locations, etc.

The greatest work cultures that we can point to all come from a great leader deciding what culture they want, then living it! Completely living it! You can’t have this cool, flip flops, ping pong, and free beer culture, then your leader walks around all day in a suit and tie, sipping an $12 bottle of water. It will fail.

Case in point. T-Mobile was the #4 cell phone carrier in the U.S. It’s a super-competitive marketplace. In 2012 when the new CEO John Legere was hired, he looked and acted like every single big time CEO you see on Wall Street. Suit and tie, said all the right things, always under control.

The problem was, that was not going to get T-Mobile and their #4 culture to move up. So, he decided to make a change:

This would require T-Mobile to behave like a startup disrupting the industry run by giants AT&T and Verizon, who Legere dubbed “dumb and dumber.” He may have already been in his mid-50s, but he needed to look the part. He began experimenting with different combination of loud clothing options, eventually settling with long hair, a bright magenta T-Mobile T-shirt and accessories, and usually a black jacket of some kind.

Accompanying this came the penchant for dropping f-bombs and hurling no-holds-barred insults at the competition (which occasionally got out of hand as he pushed the boundaries).

“On my very first day at T-Mobile, I demanded that every time I spoke publicly to the company, all employees across the country would be invited to watch,” he said. Legere also initiated a stock program with employees, and made sure to not omit any performance details from his speeches to employees. He said he tells them, “Listen, if some of this doesn’t make sense to you, what should make sense is the reason I’m telling you — I respect you as an owner and as a partner and I’m going to tell you this all the time. Feel free to tune out.”

Legere also has a section in his calendar book that contains a color-coded list of how many times he’s visited each of T-Mobile US’s 18 major call centers. When we spoke, he was about to finish his fifth round of trips to each of them.

“It’s not that complicated,” he said. “I go in, they meet me outside, we take selfies as I stand like a piece of furniture, I tell them about how things are going — but most importantly, I say thank you and help them see that their behavior and their work has driven the culture of the company that’s changed the industry and the whole world. It’s a bit of a love affair.”

I know so many culture consultants will say it’s not about long hair and crazy clothing. I disagree. If a leader truly wants to change their culture, to whatever that vision is they have, they must live that vision 100%. They can’t fake it! You’re either all-in, or your culture continues to be flat and goes nowhere.

So many executives try and live two lives as leaders. The leader they believe the board and the public want to see, and the visionary leader they believe their employees want to see. Most of these folks fail. The ones who succeed are the ones who live one life as a leader. They’re the same person to their board and investors that they are to their employees.

It doesn’t take ping pong and snacks to make a great culture. It takes a great leader will to be 100% invested in a vision, and allow those around them to follow that vision with the same passion.

Recruiting Secret #5

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Everyone wants to know the secret to great recruiting. Candidates want to know how to get into companies. Recruiters want to know each other’s secrets to finding great talent. No one seems to be sharing their secrets, so I thought I might as well fill everyone in…

Recruiting Secret #5

I haven’t read a cover letter to a resume since 1999.

If you are sending a cover letter with your resume, the recruiter that is receiving that letter thinks you’re a moron. If you’re being told to develop and send a cover letter, the person telling you to do that is a moron.

Cover letters died when ATSs began accepting applications and resumes. At this point, even if you are able to upload a cover letter, no hiring managers are ever going to see that, and most recruiters will never read a sentence of it either!

Recruiting Secret #11

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Everyone wants to know the secret to great recruiting. Candidates want to know how to get into companies. Recruiters want to know each other’s secrets to finding great talent. No one seems to be sharing their secrets, so I thought I might as well fill everyone in…

Recruiting Secret #11 

Hiring managers, on average, don’t hire older workers because they fear they know more than them. 99% of supervisors can’t handle that situation, and feel threatened for their job. Even though, hiring people that know more than you is the secret to success for high performing leaders.

 

 

Quality of Hire is Meaningless!

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Okay, before you go off on me in the comments, let me explain. This is a reaction post to my friend, and really smart digital PR strategist, Maren Hogan, who wrote “Quality of Hire Means Something. Here’s Why.” If you don’t know Maren, go check her out, she runs Red Branch Media one of the best B2B marketing agencies in the business supporting talent acquisition and HR from a vendor and organizational standpoint.

Here’s some of the article Maren wrote:

Quality of Hire didn’t use to be a recruiting measurement. Far from it! Even just ten years ago, the goal for recruiters and even their emerging brethren was to make sure that people met the job requirements. Terms like “cultural fit” were on the fringe and those who wanted recruiters to answer for retention, may potentially get an earful. Back then, we all decided collectively, that recruiting was responsible for bringing the people to the party but it was up to hiring managers, HR professionals and line managers to keep people dancing.

That’s not so true anymore. About four in 10 of nearly 4,000 corporate talent acquisition managers from 40 countries agreed that quality of hire is the most valuable metric for performance, although that is a dip from the 44% who said so in 2014. With the emergence of employer branding, recruitment marketing, personality and skills assessments and cultural fit, the zeitgeist has decided that yes, recruiters must answer for quality of hire. But instead of being upset, here’s why recruiters should embrace quality of hire and retention KPIs (Hint: it only makes recruiters more valuable).

I get why Maren writes this. It’s good for business. Knowing Maren, I highly doubt she actually believes it, because she’s wicked smart. 

Here’s what’s wrong with thinking Quality of Hire means something:

– 99.9% of organizations have no idea how to measure Quality of Hire. If you don’t know how to measure it, it doesn’t mean anything.

– 99.9% of organizations measure Quality of Hire differently. Without a consistent industry measure, Quality of Hire doesn’t mean anything.

– True Quality of Hire measures takes time. Like a year. You have to actually measure the performance of the hire to know if they’re quality or not. This long time makes it almost impossible to have this as a Recruiting KPI. Since performance over a year has way too many variables at play to connect the dots back to a recruiter!

– Trying to tie quality of hire to sources is also an exercise in futility of your understand basic statistics. Sure you might have actually gotten your three best developers off of Craigslist. Do you truly believe Craigslist is your best source? There are so many variables at play to why a person comes from an individual source, it makes little sense to try and tie Quality of Hire back to a source as well.

– 4 out of 10 corporate talent acquisition managers mostly have no idea what the hell they’re doing. So, why would I ever listen to this study? The same 40% also believe there are purple squirrels running around! These are also the same people who believe QofH is about retaining new hires! “Oh, look! Our new hire who has yet to find the bathroom is still here! What a great ‘quality’ hire!”

Maren is smart, she’s trying to help recruiters, I like that. This post isn’t busting Maren, it’s busting our industry! I wish we all could instead sit down and come up with one common Quality of Hire metric to compare across industries, organizations, countries, etc.

Of all the TA analytics we have out there Quality of Hire might be the most mis-understood one of them all. Do I have the answer? Nope. Would love to hear your thoughts, though, in the comments of how you measure Quality of Hire, then maybe we could begin some solid conversation about getting this standardized!

Hit me with your QofH metric below!

 

 

How To Build a Dream Team at Work

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If you pulled up any sports-related website or watched any sports news show on TV in the past few days you know that NBA player Kevin Durant left Oklahoma City Thunder and accepted a free agent offer to go and play for the Golden State Warriors.

It’s a big deal because Golden State was already pretty good, now, with Kevin, they look to be unstoppable! Basically, Golden State has built a team with arguably 4 of the top 20 players in the NBA on one team (Durant, Curry, Thompson, and Green). Most ‘great’ teams might have three top players, no one in history has had four when all playing at their peak!

Building a dream team seems to only happen in sports, but you hear talent acquisition leaders and executives talk about it a lot. How do we build a sales dream team, a marketing dream team, a design dream team, etc.? We all want to be a part of a dream team, or be a part of building a dream team for our organization!

So, how do you build a dream team?

1. You have to know how you want to ‘play’. You have to define what it is you want to do. An outcome. A style. “We want the best designed UX of any platform that supports patient safety in a hospital environment.” As an example.

2. You have to know who is the top talent in your industry that can accomplish the outcome you desire.  This is actually the hardest part of building a dream team in a non-sports environment because we usually don’t have comparing statistics or analytics to even start to understand who the best is.

3. You have to be able to recruit those individuals to your team. This is actually easier than in professional sports. In pro sports it usually takes one or two superstars to make a decision to get together, then they help recruit the others. In the real world, it helps to have a well-known professional, but it’s not necessary if you can sell the right story, compensation, and location!

4. Just having the ‘best players’ doesn’t guarantee success, they have to buy into the goal of the entire organization. This means having leadership with a clear vision that goes beyond the outcome. Yes, we want to win a championship, but we want to win that championship together, utilizing all of our strengths. This is another really tough thing in a real-world setting because it takes great visionary leadership.

5. Having a ‘Dream Team’ is about “Team”. You’ll have great talent and that great talent needs to understand that they go nowhere without those who support them to do great work. So, your dream team members have to be servant leaders. If they have great talent and treat people like crap, they won’t end up being a great talent!

I love it when great talent makes the conscious decision to get together and try and do something great. Some people don’t. They would prefer to see one great talent try and do it on their own. I love watching highly talented people get together and see how far they can push the levels of greatness! That’s what dream teams are all about, the dream.

T3 – @Textio – Words + Data = Magic

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This week on T3 I review the HR technology play named Textio. Textio is a platform that optimizes your job ads and candidate emails in seconds so you can hire better candidates faster.

Textio shows you how your job listings and candidate emails will perform before you’ve even posted them. Will the role be popular among qualified job seekers? Will it fill quickly? How gender-biased is it? Our predictive models give you analytics and feedback right as you’re typing.

Textio is like a very smart word processor. You type, edit, format, copy, and paste, just like you would in any other word processor. You’ll know how to use it immediately. But Textio does something else: as you edit, it predicts how successful your job listing or candidate email is going to be and helps you make it better.

Textio analyzed job text and outcomes data using listings from tens of thousands of companies. They look at which jobs fill the most quickly and generate the most applicant interest. Where companies choose to share additional data with Textio, they also consider candidate demographics and how many among a job’s applicants are strong enough to get called back.

5 Things I really liked about Textio: 

1. Textio gives you a ‘score’ of the document you’re working on. They’ve been able to reduce time to fill by 20% when you get your job posting to 90, on a 100 point scale! That’s a huge drop in time to fill, for doing nothing more than using better (mathematically proven) language to describe your openings!

2. Textio instantly highlights your document and gives you better options to make your job postings and emails perform better from a candidate’s standpoint. They can also assist in making your job postings are not more male or female oriented based on the language you use. The platform will help you ensure you are demographically inclusive.

3. The big win is in job postings, but HR and TA can use this in all communications and documents. Even executives can use it to help their communications!

4. Textio helps point out some written language biases we all have. Not only does it help improve your communications, it helps you uncover some biases you probably don’t even know you have in your writing style. Excellent personal and professional development tool.

5. Built in machine learning works across your entire team to help build consistency in your communications and job postings, as well as the ability to share with each other.

Textio is just loaded with data that helps your organization better communicate. Their data shows that we all like bullets! Okay, I know you knew that, but did you know the sweet spot for bulleted content in your job postings is 1/3?! Probably not, or that if you have no bullets, men will rarely engage with your job postings? Or, if you have more than 50%, you’re less likely to get women?  I have your interest now! It’s cool stuff!

14-day free trial to check out whether or not this would be helpful for you, an annual subscription is really reasonable. It would be worth one license in your shop just to get your job postings better! Check Textio out, definitely worth a look, I was really impressed.

T3 – @Joberate

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This week on T3 I take a look at a piece of technology called Joberate. Joberate’s platform tracks real-time job seeking behaviors of the global workforce by leveraging publicly available social media data. Why is that important? Well, let me tell you!

Joberate’s machine learning predictive analytics platform generates a numerical score called J-Score, which represents a person’s job seeking activity level. In addition to J-Score, the platform performs psychological profiling based on the NLP (Natural Language Processing) of CV’s and Social Data. Think of this J-score like a FICO score for HR. Instead of payment history, you get job seeking history.

Basically, Joberate lets you know which candidates you should pursue and when! This cuts your time to fill, by as much as half. The Joberate platform basically informs you of when a passive candidate begins to become active before anyone knows they’re active.

5 Things I really like about Joberate: 

1. Joberate allows you to create pools of candidates to follow and attract, letting you know through alerts when they begin to become active job seekers. This allows you to pick them off before your competition.

2. The J-Index measures the Fortune 500 from an entire corporation behavior, showing you which companies have increased employee attrition, giving you insight to which companies would be easier to target for sourcing.

3. Joberate will also show you the job-seeking behavior of your internal staff. This will allow you to use this data in a number of ways including save strategies for your high potentials. Can you imagine knowing when your best employees are just beginning a new job search, and being able to address it before it goes too far?

4. The Joberate Platform gives you insight from an internal mobility aspect as well. If you know your best employees are looking to make a move, why not just move them on your own!? You don’t even need to mention you know they’ve begun a search, just move them into a new role, and beat them to the punch.

5. Benchmark your hiring managers. The Joberate platform gives you the information to know which managers, by department, have high j-score indexes amongst their team. Why do certain managers turnover more than others? Which managers are in trouble because their entire team is out looking? How can you set them up for success?

Joberate gives you great insight to your turnover risk, unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.  The platform will actually show you a graph by individual of when their job seeking behavior spikes, and it’s scary accurate! Also, your employees have no idea you have access to this information, which allows you to manage it proactively, verse how we do it now, which is to wait for a resignation or find a resume on a job board!

On top of that, it shows you which candidates are most likely be open to making moves and easier to recruit before they’re even on the market.  Very cool piece of technology. It’s built for the enterprise level organization. But, if you have thousands of employees well worth taking a look at, the ROI on just being able to manage your turnover alone would be huge!

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – 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 T3 – send me a note.