T3 – Behind the Curtain at LinkedIn

Posted on by
1

I got invited to LinkedIn! Yeah, me, the guy who was blacklisted from LinkedIn because I tend to write stuff that isn’t so flattering about the organization. Before I tell you what I learned while at LinkedIn, I have to tell you that I had to sign an NDA the moment I walked into the building! So, what I’m about to say is what I can say without getting myself in trouble.

The meeting at LinkedIn was something dreamed up by Chris Hoyt and Gerry Crispin at CareerXroads after hearing feedback from some of their Colloquium members (FYI TA Leaders – if you haven’t checked out becoming a member of CareerXroads, you need to!) they felt LinkedIn would definitely want and need to hear. Everyone says they want critical feedback until you get it! To LinkedIn’s credit, they were willing to hear this feedback, which can be tough to take! No one likes being told their baby is ugly! This wasn’t going to be some vendor advisory meeting, this was going to be something completely new and different!

LinkedIn had multiple people from their leadership team attend and were highly engaged. It helped that the clients who attended were whales! Giant clients, clients that move your needle. These kinds of clients ensure you get heard.

So, what did I learn:

– LinkedIn has a vision and that vision has a lot to do with helping organizations attract and get talent from a product perspective. They also think member first, not a buyer of LinkedIn Recruiter seat first. That’s important. The true value of LI is not their clients paying for products, it’s the network. Without the network, LI is worthless.

– A ton of companies in the TA tech space want access to LinkedIn member data so they can make money. Not shocking, but most of the money they would make is directly at the expense of what LinkedIn has built and is making money on. Welcome to Capitalism, that’s not going to fly. So, you can complain that LI won’t allow access, to this or that, and you can continue to complain because it makes no financial sense for them to do so.

– What LinkedIn sees as important is probably not important to you, yet. That’s most of the disconnect between user and company. Recruiters can come up with many things that are wrong with LinkedIn and probably believe LinkedIn doesn’t have a clue. They do have a clue, but they’re also focusing on the future and fixing the problems as a set, not one at a time.

– LinkedIn can do way better from a PR standpoint of letting the user base know they are being heard and what they are doing about what they are hearing. Or more importantly, why they are not doing something. Many times not doing something is causing the most friction, when in reality there is a real reason why they are not fixing something you believe needs to be fixed or added.

– LinkedIn, like most HR and TA Tech companies, love their fans. If you only listen to your fans, you begin to believe you’re really, really good. The problem with this in Recruiting and HR is 80% (my number) of pros really don’t know any better. If you give them anything that helps them, they’re going to be super happy and think it’s the best, because they don’t know any better. LinkedIn has made a conscious choice to start listening to some of the people who are critical and finding the value in that feedback as well.

– Fake profiles, catfishing, etc. are a problem. They heard it. They heard it from their largest clients. This isn’t an easy problem to fix, and it has nothing to do with network growth numbers, even though almost every recruiter you speak with thinks that this is actually the case. My opinion is, after attending this meeting, that LI is less concerned with the overall total member number, and more concentrated on the number of ‘active’ member users on a daily and weekly basis. They want to raise engagement of all members.

– LinkedIn knows they have data you want as a Recruiting pro and leader, and they’re working on ways to bring it to you in a more robust, easy to consume manner. Again, it’s the 90/10 rule. 10% of power users want everything, but that would be overwhelming to 90% of the rest of us. Great tech gives you what you need, when you need it, in a way you can easily consume it. That’s not easy.

– LinkedIn Fangirl Stacy Zapar was there with me. I know people view Stacy as a walking billboard for how great LI is. I will tell you that out of everyone in the room, Stacy challenged LI’s leadership more than anyone and did it continually. She was fighting the fight for recruiters at the feet of the throne. If you love a product, you’ll fight to make it better. She has a unique ability to share negative feedback in the most positive way!

That’s it for now. I hope I don’t get a cease and desist email today! I tried to be as specific as I could without giving details. I was impressed with LinkedIn’s team. They came across as they cared very much about what everyone in the room had to say and are working to address all of the concerns.

I left believing, for the very first time, that LinkedIn actually cares about what we as a recruiting industry think. Thanks to Chris Hoyt and Gerry Crispin at CareerXroads for convincing some of their Colloquium members to come and provide this feedback. I highly recommend them to other HR and TA tech vendors who truly want to know what your clients and the industry think about your company and your products!

One last thing. I looked for blue Kool-Aid everywhere on LI’s campus and couldn’t find it! I secretly wished they would have it everywhere in those water coolers on every floor, that would be so awesome and funny at the same time! Maybe they hid it away knowing I was coming! Stay tuned. My hope from this meeting is I’ll have more to share in the future on LinkedIn and its going-ons.

The Death of “No”

Posted on by
4

Want to make a huge change to your HR career? No, really?

Okay, do this one thing:

Stop using the word “No”.

That’s it. Just stop it. Don’t say “No” ever again. HR pros lose credibility faster than anyone else because we are known as the “No” police. Employees, hiring managers, vendors, everyone comes to you expecting, knowing you will probably have one answer to their question and 99.9% of the time that answer is “No”! Or a variation of “No”, like “I need to check on that and get back to you”, which is just a “No” with an added delay so you don’t have to say “No” to their face.

HR Pros need to stop saying “No”.  As soon as you say “No” people withdraw from you and stop listening. You become the same old HR person they’re used to dealing with. You just got lumped into the heap of other crappy HR pros they’ve known in their career. Over one little stupid two-letter word.

So, what should you do instead?  Say “Yes”! Say “Yes” to everything and everyone!

“Tim, can we fire Jane?” 

“YES!!!”  “Yes, you can! Do you want to fire Jane now, after work, on Friday! Let’s do this! Yes!” 

Instead, we say, “Well, slow down, do you have the right paperwork? Have you followed the steps? Have you…” All these are “Nos” in other forms! As soon as you start down this path, your ‘business partner’ shuts down and believes you are not a partner, you’re a typical no-help HR person.

But, I know the documentation is important! I still say, “Yes!” It just sounds a little different:

“Heck, Yes! I’ve been waiting to fire Jane’s lazy ass for years! Let’s do this!” 

Now, what happens? I mean after your hiring manager picks their jaw up off the floor?  They come forward! The want to hear more. They weren’t expecting this! I also, follow it up with something like this:

“Just a quick second before we shoot Jane, I need to let the CHRO know we are doing this, totally supportive! But we’ll probably end up in court knowing we’ve got no documentation, but don’t worry we’re still doing this! I’ve been to court and I can help you prepare for your questioning on the stand, we got this!” 

It’s around this point where every hiring manager does one thing:

“COURT! I don’t want to go to court!” 

Well, Okay, I can help you with that, let’s make a plan!

Never in there did I say “No”, and in the end I got what we both wanted, and the hiring manager felt supported, not like I was against her.

Can we please kill “No” already!

The Best Recruiters Don’t Get Surprised!

Posted on by
2

Talent Acquisition 101.

If there is one thing I could give a new Recruiting Pro it would be this simple advice. No matter how prepared you think you are, you really only need to prepare yourself, for one thing, being surprised.

You don’t really get judged on your daily stuff.  Let’s face it, 99.9% of the time that goes off without a hitch.  You get judged on how you handle surprises.

Surprises make and break great Recruiting Pro careers.

There’s really only way to prepare for surprises.  You need to expect that a surprise will always happen. That one interview you desperately want, who calls to cancel with ‘car trouble’, the candidate who backs out of the offer after signing the paperwork.  Talk about it, plan for it, and basically come to grips that it will happen.  Then it will happen, and you’ll be the only one not surprised by it.

The best Recruiting Pros I’ve worked with had this one common trait, they were unshakeable when surprised.

Almost like they expected it.

Having a Friend at Work is Harder than you Think!

Posted on by
3

We’ve been told for years now, based on the Gallup research, that having a best friend at work is one of those anchors that will lengthen a person’s tenure with an organization. New research is proving this might not be as easy it sounds! Business Insider:

Plos One recently released a study where they asked students to rate their friendships and also rate whether or not the ‘friend’ would reciprocate by telling researchers they also believed they were friends. Here the results:

In 94% of these perceived friendships, students expected them to be reciprocal. So if John rated Jack as his friend, he expected Jack to rate him as a friend also. But this was so in only 53% of cases; less than half of the students had their friendship beliefs about others reciprocated.

Ouch! Almost half of your friends, do think of you as a friend!

The researchers point to the social network style of so many friendships today of why people have this wrong perception. People are now building so many friendships with individuals they rarely see or interact with but feel like they have a strong friendship with.

So, what should you be doing as an HR Pro to take advantage of the Friend Anchor?

1. Help provide real life interactions with your employees to build ‘real’ friendships, not just social network friendships.

2. Give employees the opportunity to work with employees of their choosing on projects. Give an employee a project and let them pick their team to work on it.

3. Don’t ignore those employees who don’t interact with anyone. This is usually the first red flag you’ll get that a person is unhappy at work and more likely to turnover.

I know, you didn’t get into HR to play friendship matchmaker! But, if you value retention and want to lower turnover, being a great matchmaker might be the best tool you have in the HR toolbox!

Also, remember, you can pick your friends and you can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your friend’s nose. Unless they’re a really, really, really good friend, but even then, that’s creepy, don’t do that.

Transform Your Recruitment Marketing

Posted on by
3

I’m headed off to Boston this fall, November 2-4 to Emcee the 1st ever Recruitment Marketing Conference, called Transform! Developed by the great team over at Smashfly, this is not a user conference this is a pilgrimage of the top recruitment marketing minds in the world being brought together in one place! I’m super geeked! I’m nerdy that way!

You can register now for the early bird pricing of $795, plus if you use the super awesome code TIMSACK you can get an extra $50off and a personal, not creepy hug from me until August 31st. After that is jumps up to $1195. So don’t wait, book it now! We can all show-up and make fun of Boston accents and say stupid stuff like, “wicked smart”.

So, besides the not creepy hug by me, what else will you get? Check it:

– Mel Robbins keynoting! – CNN commentator, author, and TEDx famous for her “How to stop screwing yourself over!”

– Great Practitioner-led content sessions on, developing your RM strategy, increasing your candidate experience, how multiple organizations built their RM from the ground-up, and the hottest trends in RM today that you’ll be killing your competition with tomorrow!

– Tom Cheesewright – A futurist keynote on how you can shape your own future outcomes!

– Plus, so much more, the agenda is packed!

Session I’m most looking forward to?

Shaunda Zilich from GE telling us how she and her team at GE built a billion dollar recruitment brand with $0 budget! We all love to think big brands have big dollars for marketing, and they do! But, not for recruitment marketing! GE’s recruitment marketing story is fascinating! 

If you’re in recruitment marketing, responsible for recruitment marketing, or just need to get better at recruitment marketing this is a must-attend conference! 

T3 – @SocialTalent – Recruitment Training

Posted on by
Reply

This week on T3 I review the recruiter/sourcing training platform Social Talent. Okay, before we get started on Social Talent, I have a confession to make. I’ve actually known about Social Talent for a while but haven’t written about them because I was taking my entire team through their training! I didn’t write about them because I didn’t want to share how awesome it is!

Social talent is an on-demand platform that trains your recruiters to get a ‘black belt’ in internet recruitment. Social Talent also has an advanced black belt and an inclusion and diversity recruitment certification. The program is micro-video driven, enforces learning through quick quizzes on the learning and of course the big black belt certification assessment at the end.

The program is recruiter-driven and takes about an hour or so per week to complete, over 16 weeks. My recruiters actually spend a little more time than an hour per week because Social Talent continually adds in the newest information around sourcing and recruiting and the platform constantly engages your recruiters to learn more and get higher level skills.

5 Things I really like about Social Talent:

1. Built by recruiters for recruiters. The platform is built around learning, recruiting and performing. The training has changed the way my recruiters tackle an opening and opened up the number of sources each of them uses.

2. The bite-sized video in Social Talent is consumed easily and reinforced by practice. The training is developed in a way that allows both new recruiters and experienced recruiters to get the most out of it.

3. Social Talent isn’t only teaching the tech skills of Boolean Search, Advanced LinkedIn searching, etc., it’s teaching recruiters to build their own personal brand and how, to build networks and pipelines, and how to build your employer brand.  It’s the gift and the curse of the platform, your recruiters will make themselves more valuable by going through this training. This is true development for recruiters just not skill-enhancement.

4. Metrics platform gives talent acquisition manager great insight to who is using the platform, how they are using the platform and gives them the ability to send social positive reinforcement. One of the best training platforms for recruiting I’ve seen that truly helps you ensure you get full user adoption and most out of your investment.

5. Ongoing bi-weekly live training sessions to reinforce all the new skills that your recruiters are learning, plus gives it lets them challenge the Social Talent team on their harderst searches and shows them exactly how the ‘pros’ would use the system.

I have to say this again, I didn’t want to share this with you because I truly believe it gives my recruiters a competitive advantage over every other company who doesn’t use it! But, I started T3 to share, so asmuch as this hurts me, I’m sharing this with you.

Socical Talent is the single best recruiter training tool I’ve used in my twenty-plus years of recruiting and managing recruiting teams. It’s not a small investment, but I can tell you that my team took full advantage and we feel like we’ve gotten a full return on our investment and my team, across the board loves it!

Check them out, you won’t be disappointed!

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 HR, 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.

Recruiting Secret #9

Posted on by
1

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 tell you mine…

Recruiting Secret #9

We’ll tell you we only hire the best talent, but what we really mean is we only hire the talent who quickly applies to our job posting, willing to accept our at below market pay rate we are requesting, our average culture, and vanilla benefit package. Since we do minimal screening, it’s really a FIFO (first-in, first out) system. So, you might be great, but 20 other mediocre candidates beat you to it, so, yeah, you’ve got no chance.

Welcome to the world of ‘we only hire the best talent’.

A Recruiter’s Boolean Search Nightmare!

Posted on by
1

One of my favorite recruiting thought leaders (I hate that phrase ‘thought leader’, it sounds so pompous! What are they actually leading anyway? Okay, you had a thought, who decided it was a ‘leading’ thought? I’d much rather say ‘Super Smart Chick’ or ‘Brilliant Dude’) is Glen Cathey. He’s a 1%er when it comes to recruiting industry knowledge and he’s willing to share it freely.

He’s a 1%er when it comes to recruiting industry knowledge and he’s willing to share it freely. That makes him a really awesome person in my book. If he wants me to call him a ‘thought leader’ I will, heck, I’d call him ‘The Almighty Recruiting G*d of Love’ as long as he keeps sharing his super smart takes on how to make recruiting better!

Anyway, he put me on to this video. It’s super funny when you think of it in the context of how Recruiters are constantly searching all day long through databases. We feel this guy’s pain! Check it out, it’s like 90 seconds:

&nbsp

Inbound Recruiting Is Killing Your Talent

Posted on by
Reply

Most recruiting done today is inbound recruiting. This is organizations posting jobs everywhere, people seeing these jobs and then applying. These candidates are coming ‘inbound’ to you in some form or fashion – into your ATS, into your email, showing up at your front door, whatever it takes for them to find you.

Outbound, then, is the opposite. It’s you finding them.

Too much inbound recruiting kills your overall talent.

Why?

Inbound recruiting relies on active applicants. There are hundreds of studies about who is actually active, but most fall around the 20-25% of the total workforce are actively looking for a new job (this includes those unemployed looking and employed). So, you’re filling most of your jobs with 20-25% of the overall talent that is available.

You aren’t even touching 75-80% of the total workforce by using inbound recruiting. But, Inbound Recruiting is great because that 25% is still a huge number and boy can we still get a bunch of applicants and, well, it’s easier.

I don’t have stats on this (if you find them please share!) but I would guess 90% of organizations only use Inbound Recruiting!

Now, a bunch of people will tell you that ‘active’ applicants aren’t the only thing. CareerBuilder’s Talent Behavior study recently found that if you combine Active and Those Open to Hearing About Openings that number climbs from 25% to 75%! Okay, now we’re talking! The problem is that extra 50% isn’t responding to your Inbound Strategy!

To get the full 75% of the workforce who might be interested in your job you must have outbound recruiting strategies. These include getting your butt on the phone and talking people into why you’re the best damn place on the planet to work! These people might actually love you as much as those people who are freely sending you their resume, but they’re waiting for you to contact them!

This is confusing to many people in Talent Acquisition.

If you only post jobs and wait to see who applies to your posts, no matter how many places you post, you’re only possibly getting 1 out of 4 possible candidates.  In a perfect scenario of using both inbound and outbound, you could get 3 out of 4. No one gets 4 out of 4 because about a quarter of the workforce is considered truly passive, meaning you and G*d couldn’t talk them into leaving their current job.

Also, you calling a candidate who has applied to your job is not considered outbound recruiting! You need to go out and find talent that doesn’t even know you have a job opening and entice them to apply, to fall in love with you, to show interest! This is ‘real’ recruiting. This is the recruiting most organizations have lost, or never had, to begin with.

This is why sourcing became a thing. Sourcing, in its best form in a corporate structure, is only about outbound recruiting. About uncovering that talent that most organizations aren’t even going after and getting them interested in your organization.

The interesting piece to all of this is annual TA spend. Take a look at your own inbound vs. outbound spend. What I find is most organizations tell me they want the best talent but they are spending the majority of their budget going after the minority of the talent. Shouldn’t it be the other way around, the majority of your budget going after the majority of talent?

Quality of Hire is Meaningless!

Posted on by
11

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!