Will Recruitment Marketing Automation Make Sourcing Obsolete?

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I keep hearing about companies that are increasingly struggling hiring the talent they need currently and for future growth. The one solution that continues to be thrown out is adding a sourcing function within their talent acquisition department.

Adding sourcing to your talent acquisition team is definitely an option to help you obtain the talent you desire.  It’s also a really expensive option! Anytime you’re adding headcount, you’re adding the most expensive resource to your team of all options.

I was at the HR Tech Conference this past week and one thing was for certain, talent acquisition technology is coming after your sourcing work!  Recruitment marketing and recruitment automation technology was clearly the fastest growing segment of technology vendors at the HR Tech Conference.

Large companies can get some of the best tech on the market to help them source and attract candidates for about $25-$100K per year, ballpark, depending on what you need and choose. Your average Sourcing Pro is going to run about $75K on average. One person, no technology.

I know the biggest and best firms will have both.  I also know that most of us will have to make a choice between these two options. Some will try and do both, by limiting the spend on both sides, get some tech and an entry level kid to bang on the internet to find talent. I believe you’re probably best by going all in one way or the other, if you have limited resources.

Based on what I saw at HR Tech this year, and the growth from just last year, I can tell you I would bet my resources on buying the tech!

Recruitment marketing and automation technology can provide you with much of the attraction muscle that you need, plus continue on the backend to retarget and continually connect with potential candidates you don’t even know you need yet.

It’s hard for me to write this because I have a bunch of friends who are great sourcing pros, and do excellent work.  I think there will always be a place for great sourcing pros in the world, like most great talent. The problem is most sourcing pros aren’t great, they’re just average. Technology is better than average. Which is why I ask the question if the technology will make most sourcing obsolete as we know it right now?  I think it probably will.

By the way, I also heard non-stop all week at the conference how technology is also going to make Recruiters obsolete. Which begs the question what human interactions will be most valuable to Talent Acquisition in a future technology driven attracting and hiring process?

It’s going to be the ability of one person talking to another person about why they need to come and work at your company. Sounds simple, but the best Sourcing Pros and best Recruiting Pros do this exceptionally well. They build relationships with candidates, build trust, find ways to make candidates believe working for your company is better than any other option they have.

So, they can sell.  The tech will run the process, screen, test, assess, communicate the basics, etc. What the tech can’t do is sell. The future of sourcing and recruiting is selling. Ironically, it’s also the past!

The Uber of Recruitment #hrtechconf

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Apparently, the new marketing message for Talent Acquisition technology is to call yourself the “Uber of Recruitment”. I have had six different companies actually use this phrase to explain what their product is, and how it works.

Marketers love to play up being a ‘disruptor’, like Uber did to the taxi industry.  I love using Uber, and I think most people that use it really like it as well. So, making the jump in marketing to use that positive image and tying it back to your product makes perfect sense.

Lazy, but I get it.

Here’s the bigger story, companies are trying to cash in on the multi-billion dollar recruitment industry. Okay, it’s not a big story, it’s been happening for decades, but we are getting to a point where you can see technology making a serious play at truly changing the way companies interact with traditional recruitment agencies.

This is my game, so I’m definitely interested in checking out all these new Uber of Recruiting plays.

Here’s how most of these technologies work:

Step 1: Use our technology to connect with candidates

Step 2: We charge you about 75% less than traditional recruitment agencies

Step 3: We cut out the middle man

Step 4: You get same talent, faster, cheaper, happier.

The basic premise is Uber simple. Put the power of recruitment into the hands of the candidate.  Let them easily connect with those companies that seek their expertise.

Here’s why this is hard.  All of these Uber of Recruitment plays don’t really have an answer on how do we get people and/or companies to use their product.  The need to use Recruitment Agencies are based on a few main premises:

1. The most desirable candidates are not looking, and must be found.

2. You don’t have capacity or skill in-house to find this talent.

3. Agencies can find better talent, than other options (remember this is the premise of use!).

The Uber of Recruitment plays don’t necessarily address all of these premises. I do believe that this technology is going to have an impact to a part of recruitment industry market segment that has issue with cost.

The technology makes it easier for organizations to almost run their own type of agency in-house using this technology, and it makes it easy for candidates to connect.  But, the huge miss is that these technologies still don’t go out and sell a talented person, who is not looking for a job at your company or any company, on why they need to consider this job.

That’s called recruitment, or sales, which is recruitment. Uber of Recruitment technology doesn’t recruit, which is why these plays won’t end the industry as we know it. Uber as an example doesn’t really fit as a recruitment industry killer, but it might work in terms of disrupting and pushing bad agencies to get better.

 

Who Should I Connect With? #HRTechConf

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By far the question I get asked most often at the HR Tech Conference is, “Who should I connect with while I’m here?”  Both vendors and attendees ask me this. I probably face this question a half a dozen times a day, or more.

I really don’t have an answer for that. It’s a very personal question.

Who I might want to connect with, could be very different from who you want to connect with. It all depends on what you’re trying to get out of the interaction.  I know a bunch of people and connect with many more at each HR Tech Conference, which is why I enjoy this conference so much, but I don’t have your ‘secret’ connection list.

Here is how I usually respond:

1. Why are you at the conference?

2. What is your current pain point at work?

3. Ultimately, what do you want to leave the conference with?

Once these are answered you can easily come up with a hit list of who you should be connecting with.

The expo and the amount of sessions can be overwhelming, but if you focus on what you are really here to do, it becomes a little easier to handle.

The one thing I’ve found is that almost everyone I’ve ever met at HR Tech loves to make new connections, both attendees and vendors.  That puts it back on your back to be open to these connections as well

One Pro Tip: Leverage one contact to introduce you to a new contact. Repeat.

If you come here knowing no one, find a vendor that you use, and have them introduce you to another one of their customers.  Also, I find session speakers are usually really open to connect, just stop and say “Hi” and thank them for their session afterwards.  That makes for a good conversation starter!

So, whom should you connect with at HR Tech?

That’s a really good question!

 

Awesome New HR Technology #HRTechConf

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It’s that time a year again for one of my most favorite HR and TA Conferences – the HR  Tech Conference 2015!  On the first day of the conference this year Human Resource Executive Magazine announced the 2015 Awesome New Startups for HR.  These are are companies I’ll be checking out and keeping my eye in the near future:

Bridge US

Bridge US has reinvented how companies secure visas and green cards for foreign talent. The company’s cloud-based platform eliminates the time and paperwork associated with immigration processing, tracking and compliance. Bridge US streamlines the immigration process for hundreds of happy customers, ranging from leading startups to publicly-traded companies.

 Great Hires

Great Hires will showcase its mobile-first candidate experience platform that helps companies deliver an awesome on-site interviewing experience. By providing information about the company, job and people they meet with before they walk in the door, candidates are better prepared for their interview, ensuring a positive candidate experience.

 Kanjoya

Kanjoya Perception pushes the frontiers of workforce analytics with its integration of employee engagement, performance review and unstructured text data to understand and predict which employees will do well and why. Created with state-of-the-art natural language processing and machine learning, the solution delivers targeted intelligence to help businesses attract, retain and motivate the best employees for their organizations.

 One Model

HR applications use data but they don’t share it. One Model will demonstrate how it can help deliver a true HR data strategy across a company’s technology investments so that analytics, planning and integration can flow naturally from all of their data. One Model helps companies take control of their HR data, including the data’s history and predictive capabilities, and put them to work.

 OrgVue (a company I reviewed this past year on my T3 series) 

OrgVue is the leading tool for business transformation. It gives HR and OD teams a new and better way to design, transform and operate their organizations. From merger & acquisitions to organizational restructures, the company helps deliver change faster, fairly, with lower risk and lower cost.

 TMBC

TMBC’s StandOut is revolutionizing engagement and performance through next generation HR solutions. StandOut provides the technology to meet the needs of the present and the future with dynamic teaming, real-time statistically reliable measures of engagement and performance, and machine-learning algorithms to increase the precision of measurement over time and to deliver personalized, calibrated coaching to each user.

Besides these companies there is also a Startup Pavilion with twenty other up and coming companies I’ll be checking out as well. Stay tuned for more great information on HR Technology coming over the next few days, and of course all year on my T3 series every Tuesday!

 

Who Will Your Pallbearers Be?

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I had lunch last week with a good friend of mine.  We’ve been trying for six months to get this lunch set up, but just haven’t been able to make it happen.

This is a guy I love!  We worked together at Applebee’s, spent basically every day together. He’s the best operations person I know, great leader, and one of the few people I would ever go to work for.

So, why haven’t we been able to find time to get together more often?

Well, he told me, “Tim, you know I think you’re great. You are the best HR person I’ve ever worked with. But, I’ve been trying to focus on who my Pallbearers will be!”

What!?!

He’s been trying to focus on six relationships. The six people who will carry his casket when he dies. His Pallbearers!

His theory is I can’t keep up with everyone. I’ve probably got six relationships that I can really focus on in my life. These six people I call my Pallbearers. They are the ones who will carry me to my final resting place, and given that, I better focus on having a really good relationship with them.

So, two things:

  1. I didn’t make his Pallbearer list. Which I’m actually okay with. I loved hearing the philosophy to behind why he’s dodged me for six straight months, and how he selected his six!
  2. I don’t have six!

It really got me to thinking.  Who the hell would my Pallbearers be?  If you take out family, because I really don’t want them to work to hard the day I go six feet under, who would carry my casket? Sadly, I couldn’t come up with six.

I’m 45 years old, and I couldn’t think of six people who would carry my casket. Not if they were asked. I’ve been asked to be a pallbearer, and you can’t say No, even if you really don’t know the person. I mean six people who wouldn’t allow anyone else to carry my casket because they wanted the honor!

In my mind, I’m thinking six men.  I have some close friends that are ladies, but I’m a little traditional in that you don’t normally see ladies carrying a casket. I’ve either got a bunch of relationship building to do, or I need to lose a bunch of weight! If I’m super skinny, maybe I can get away with just four pallbearers!

Another thought was cremation. If I get cremated I really only need one person to carry the ashes.  That would be way easier to find just one!

I still kept coming back to the pallbearer six.  Why don’t I have six male relationships in my life who would really want to carry my casket?  Need to change that.

In the end, it comes down to priorities.  For the better part of 19 years I’ve put my time into my family and raising kids. And, I don’t regret a moment of that! But, my friendships suffered because of it. Pallbearer type friendships take time and effort. Time and effort I didn’t give.

Do you know who your pallbearers will be?

 

5 Signs You Shouldn’t Make That Offer

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If I have learned anything at all in my HR/Recruiting career it’s that everyone has an opinion on what makes a good hire. If you ask 100 people to give you one thing they focus on when deciding between candidates, you’ll get 100 different answers!

I’ve got some of my own. They might be slightly different than yours, but I know mine work!  So, if you want to make some better selections, take note my young Padawans:

1. Crinkled up money. Male or female if you pull money out of your pocket or purse and it’s crinkled up, you’ll be a bad hire!  There is something fundamentally wrong with people who can’t keep their cash straight. The challenge you have is how do you get a candidate to show you this? Ask to copy their driver’s license, or something like that!

2. Males with more selfies on their Instagram, than all other photos. I don’t even have to explain this.

3. Slow walkers.  If you don’t have some pep in your step, at least for the interview, you’re going to be drag as an employee.

4. My Last Employer was so Awesome! Yeah, that’s great, we aren’t them. Let’s put a little focus back to what we got going on right here, sparky. Putting too much emphasis on a job you love during the interview is annoying. We get it. It was a good gig. You f’d it up and can’t let go. Now we’ll have to listen about it for the next nine months until we fire you.

5. Complaining or being Rude to waitstaff.  I like taking candidates to lunch or dinner, just to see how they treat other people. I want servant leaders, not assholes, working for me. The meal interview is a great selection tool to weed out bad people.

What are your signs not to make an offer?  Share in the comments!

New for 2016 – Organizational Micro-Cultures

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It’s actually not new, it’s been around since Culture, we just kind of ignored it.

It’s similar in concept to Micro and Macro Economics.  Big and Little.  In terms of culture, it’s the main reason changing your overall company culture is so hard. You don’t just have one company culture, you actually have tens, hundreds, thousands of cultures, that make up your big over culture.

The problem we are having advancing our company culture is we keep doing it top-down. Get the guy with gray hair, or the lady with the navy blue pant suit, to tell us his/her vision and we’ll shove that culture down everyone’s’ throat and tell them what our culture is now.

Obviously, this doesn’t work, but we don’t know of another way, so let’s keep trying, it will work eventually, right?

Take all these functions, divisions, departments, regions, subsidiaries, locations, mergers and acquisitions, etc. and let’s tell them what their culture will be now. Until we have new leadership, than we’ll just do this all over again.

The reality is you don’t have ‘a’ culture. You have many cultures. HR has a different culture than IT. Albuquerque has a different culture than New York. Manufacturing has a different culture than Sales.

These microcultures added up, make your company culture.  It’s not top-down, it’s bottom-up.

So, what can we do?

You need to get down to the lowest level of leadership that you can. The frontline leaders of your organization are the ones creating your organization’s microcultures.  These are the people ultimately responsible for your overall organization’s culture. Your CEO is a puppet to this process.

To influence these microcultures you need to start planting seeds at the frontline leader level. Don’t worry about even driving this down from the top. Skip the C-suite, skip the SVPs, skip the VPs, skip the Directors, skip the managers, go right to the supervisors. You know the folks, the ones doing the work. The ones who have 8-15 direct reports they see everyday, talk with everyday, work side by side, everyday.

The builders of culture in your organization are not executives and they are not HR.  Executives and HR are framers. The builders are your frontline leaders. 90% of your time and resources spent on building culture need to be spent at this frontline level.

It’s not easy. When you get down at that level, you’ll see what your organization is really about. Most of your executives will disagree with what they see, and not believe this is your actual culture.  That is very typical of most organizations. Executives and HR are the worse at creating and judging culture, because they’ve drink the koolaid.

Influence culture from the bottom, not the top.

T3 – @HalogenSoftware #HRTechConf

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This week on T3 I’m taking a look at Halogen Software. Halogen is a market leading provider of cloud-based software solutions for performance management, succession planning, learning, compensation, and recruiting and onboarding.  Years ago when I first ran into Halogen I knew them as ‘the’ company for performance management, but they’ve grown so far beyond that!

As a Talent Management vendor, they built all their own stuff to make implementation seamless. This is unlike many HR Tech vendors who buy up smaller technologies, then cobble it all together. At Halogen every module relates back to improving and supporting employee performance – from job descriptions and applicant tracking through to succession, learning and compensation, all parts of the suite are linked to supporting performance.

They are deeply focused on improving the areas that matter most to employees and managers when it comes to performance. They give them tools and training to simplify the process, and focus on the things that make performance management ongoing – for real. Feedback, goals, development and coaching convos are at the heart of their performance management solution – including 1:1 Exchange – to really make the process ongoing, forward-focused and effective.

5 Things I really like about Halogen:

1. Halogen’s 1:1 Exchange.  Look at this point we all already know that performance feedback should not be a once a year deal. Halogen not makes it easy for your managers to provide ongoing feedback, but the software actually teaches them and helps them with wording on how to do this most effectively!

2. Halogen’s 360 Multirater. I’m a big fan of providing 360 feedback to all of your employees, executives to mailroom. It has been some of the greatest performance and development feedback I’ve ever gotten in my career. Again, Halogen, makes it easy and inexpensive to do in-house on your own. I love this!

3. Halogen’s Job Description Builder. I like this module because it’s something 99% of us need right now!  Let’s face it, your JD’s suck! But, guess what? So do 99% of JD’s in the industry, and that is why this part of Halogen’s software is so useful.

4. Halogen Succession.  This is another thing that almost all companies are doing an awful job at, and something most need help with right now based on your workforce’s demographics.  The research shows that HR departments biggest need right now in HR Tech is Succession solutions.  Halogen embedded theirs right into Performance Management. Hey! Wow, that makes sense!

5. Customer Service. One thing I’ve learned jumping in with both feet into the HR Tech pool, is that there is some really, really cool technology available on the market.  I’ve also learned that many of these companies bomb when it comes to implementation and ongoing support. Halogen is the exact opposite of this!  I’ve talked with Halogen users on my own, and 100% of the time, they rave about Halogen’s customer service. This matters.

Halogen will be out at the HR Tech Conference next week at booth #2335. Make sure you check them out if you’re going to be in Vegas.  If you do, stop by around Monday at 2:45pm, I’ll be interviewing some of their customers in the booth, and finding out what real problems they solved after implementing Halogen.

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 space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

You Don’t Have to Solve Problems in HR to be Succcessful

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I keep hearing everywhere that all organizations want from employees is people who are problem solvers! Executives when asked what they are looking for in future and current employees will wax poetically about we just need ‘good’ people (which is really slang for more people who look and act like ‘us’) who can ‘solve problems’.

Even my kids teachers and the public education system constantly talk about how we are just working to teach our kids how to solve problems.

If we just had more problem solvers in our work environments, everything else would take care of itself!

Wrong!

Our reality is everyone ‘can’ solve problems, but you don’t want their solutions. Most people have no ability to really solve problems, they usually just end up causing the problem to be bigger, or creating new problems that are worse in the long run.

In HR you don’t need to solve problems to be successful.  You do, though, have to one thing very well.  You can’t create problems!

This is tough one.

Most HR pros I know love to create problems, under the disguise of then being able to solve those made up problem. By the way, HR isn’t alone in this quest, every other function has their fake problem solvers as well.

The one I hear recently is companies that are having this candidate experience problem.  You know the drill. HR can’t find enough good talent to fill the jobs they have open (real problem), so they go to their executive team and tell them it’s because our candidate experience is awful (fake problem). The reality is HR is doing an awful job attracting talent, candidate experience isn’t the real issue, things like having recruiters pick up the phone are, but those are just details.

To be successful in HR,  you just have to not create any new problems.  You’ll have plenty of problems crop up on their own without your help! If you do nothing but come in and do the work of HR and not create new problems, you’ll be better than 90% of HR pros in the world. That’s pretty successful.

Success in HR = not creating new problems. That seems simple enough. Now getting into the top 10% means you might have to solve some of those existing problems you have, but we’ll save that for another time.

Your CEO is a Better Recruiter Than You

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Lou Adler, a great thought leader in the recruiting industry (I love to refer to him as “Uncle Lou” – endearingly), has one of the best recruiting articles of the year up on Inc. titled, “An Open Email from a CEO to All Outstanding Candidates“.   The concept of the email was getting your CEO to send out an email directly to candidates you are trying to source.

Just that idea alone is a brilliant strategy, because 99.9% of organizations will never do it!  That means, you’ll standout from the crowd. That’s good recruiting practices.

The article goes on to give you how you should actually write the email and what you should say:

1. No silly, classic job descriptions.  Instead tell them about what they’ll actually be doing.

2. Describe why the job could be a career move to the candidate.  They’ll believe this from coming from the CEO.

3. Don’t tell them to apply. That can actually be the last step. Get them interested first. Applications scream we have no idea what we are doing.

4. Provide an open invitation and a direct way to have a real conversation with someone with direct knowledge of the opening.

5. Let them know what the process would look like and next steps, if they are actually interested in moving forward.

6. Make sure the candidates have access to your hiring managers as well.  I’m assuming if your CEO is this involved, your hiring managers will be onboard as well!

Great stuff, right?!

It probably doesn’t work for high volume hiring when you have a lot of candidates. This isn’t meant for that, it’s meant for hard to find, critical to the business type positions.

I absolutely love this technique!

Here’s what I know. Most companies, and most CEOs, will never do this. Those who do, will have great success in getting candidates to respond. Put yourself into your candidates shoes. You’re sitting there some idle Friday and an email pops up from a name you don’t recognize. You open it and find out it’s coming from the CEO of a pretty good company in town. You better believe you’ll read it.

You will also ‘trust’ what is in that email, over if the exact same thing is sent by a recruiter. Why?  You believe that a CEO would never put themselves in a position to lie.  Right or wrong, you believe this. Plus, you’re flattered that a CEO sent you a personal email, not some marketing email, from their ‘real’ work email address, with their contact information in it.

None of your friends have gotten an email from a CEO telling them they are wanted! This is cool. This feels good. This feels different.

This is a winning strategy.

Thanks Uncle Lou!