It’s Tim Sackett Day – Celebrating Victorio Milian @Victorio_M

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January 23, 2012 my friends made that day forever be known as Tim Sackett Day!  By January 23, 2013, those same friends thought I couldn’t take another day of celebration and honor, and decided to honor another individual but still call it Tim Sackett Day! Last year on Tim Sackett Day we honored the great Kelly Dingee! So, welcome to the 4th Annual Tim Sackett Day celebration!

Tim Sackett Day is about honoring and giving respect to fellow HR and Talent Pros that we don’t think get enough respect.  They are wicked smart.  Great at their profession.  Helpful towards others.  Really, just good all around people, we think you should know more about.  Yes, everything I’m not!  Laurie’s original goal was to introduce our little HR and Talent social world to people they might not know, but really should.

That’s why I’m excited on this day, January 23, 2015 for Tim Sackett Day, we are honoring Victorio Milian. Victorio is a Sr. HR Consultant for Humareso, writer with HRExaminer and his own blog CreativeChaosHR.Tumblr.com.  You can also check him out at HireVictorio.com.  You can easily find him on Twitter: @Victorio_M, where he is prolific!

I first came to know Victorio years ago when he was in the midst of a job search.  I’m not sure exactly who introduced us, but I could tell immediately he was one of those HR Pros who ‘got it’.  He wasn’t about traditional HR and spending each day just doing administrative work. He wanted to make a difference in the organization he worked for, and he wanted his organization to make a difference in its employees.

He is passionate about his profession and about his family.  He used to be passionate about his signature long dreadlocks, but cut them off and went short.  I loved his long dreads and couldn’t believe he cut them loose. But,  I also love his new look as well!

What I know about Victorio is he has a huge heart and willing to help anyone in need, especially HR pros!  I couldn’t be more happy and excited to share my day with Victorio. Please tell him congratulations today on the social webs, and make sure you connect with him, you’ll be better for it!

HR Can Learn From Target’s Failure in Canada

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If you haven’t heard, America’s darling department store chain Target, failed miserably in Canada and will soon close all of it’s locations in Canada.  I like Target.  I like Target way more than I like Walmart.  Target is more expensive, but I think they offer a better product selection, with higher quality, in an environment I like shopping in.  Walmart sometimes scares me.

For those who don’t know, I spent a little over three years of my HR life working in mass retail (not for Target or Walmart). I find it interesting that a store I like so much could fail in an area I consider not much different than my own environment. I’m sure my Canadian friends and readers will have fun with that statement, but when I go to Canada I don’t feel like I’m necessarily in a different country from where I live in the U.S. in Michigan. It’s cold. People like donuts, beer and hockey. I mean, we’re almost Canadian!

Target’s failures in Canada parallel many of our own failures in HR:

1. Target bought out a failing chain in Canada and many of those locations were in bad, or not convenient, areas.  We do this in organizations.  I had a client who was in the most awful area to try and attract talent. I said, why do we just open up an offsite office in the bigger city near by. They lost their minds I would even suggest that. Two years later, after losing out on so much business, they finally did just that.  Location. Location. Location.  How is this an HR issue?  Lack of talent is an HR issue, even if it means part of the strategy is to open new locations or move. Don’t think that’s only a leader issue.

2. Target charged more in Canada, then the U.S.  Nothing pisses off someone more than to find out they’re getting taken.  Canadians that lived close to the U.S. border would go to U.S. Target locations and see lower prices. This kills your brand.  We do this with employees salaries. Once people find out you pay differently based on some silly reason, you’re done.  Well, Tim makes more because when we hired him he asked for more. Okay, why didn’t you raise up Mary’s salary at that point as well? Well, Mary didn’t ask. Dumb!

3. Target wasn’t prepared for growth in Canada and couldn’t keep its store’s shelves full.  No one is impressed by a half empty store, and they won’t come back.  You only get one chance to impress that first-time customer. You also only get one chance to impress that first-time candidate.  Blow it, and they won’t come back, and blow enough of those, and it gets around.  Soon, you are known in your market as the place no one wants to go to work for.

It didn’t help that Walmart had a two decade head start over Target in Canada as well.  Entering a market, you better have full understanding who is on top, and why are they on top.  Target didn’t give Walmart the respect they deserved and the learning they endured breaking into Canada.  They tried to do what was successful in the U.S. I’m sure my Canadian friends will be quick to point out, unlike me, they know Canada isn’t the U.S.!

A Bachelor’s Degree in Recruiting

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When will a college or university have a degree program in recruiting?  We have hundreds of universities and colleges that now offer human resources programs.  Two of my good friends, Matt Stollak, and Marcus Stewart are both professors of HR programs.  I have yet to see one program in Recruiting and Talent Acquisition.

For the most part the degree programs that fill recruiting positions are:

Communications

Business Administration/Marketing

Liberal Arts degrees – history, art, other things you won’t ever get a job in.

Sports Management

Human Resources

The recruiting industry takes all degree programs where people can’t get a job making enough to live on!  An entry level recruiter can usually make around $40,000 to $50,000 in their first year. The best recruiters make six figures.  Not a bad professional, white collar level compensation for a four-year degree program.  Many professions would love to be in that compensation level.

I think we could easily come up with two years’ worth of undergrad classes. Let’s face it, you only need about 60 credits or 20 classes, to have a complete major in most programs. The rest of the classes are the ‘basics’ we all take when attending university in the first two years.

Here are some of my ideas for classes in my Bachelors of Recruiting program:

Recruiting 101 – History of Recruiting

Recruiting 102 – Recruiting Processes and Procedures

Recruiting 103 – Recruiting Communication and Marketing

Recruiting 104 –  Sourcing

Recruiting 105 – Negotiation, Offers, and Recruiting Finance

Recruiting 106 – 100 ways to connect with people – #1 is the Phone!

Recruiting 107 – Writing Job Descriptions like a Marketer

Recruiting 201 – Employment Branding

Recruiting 202 – Candidate Experience

Recruiting 203 – Recruiting Technology

Recruiting 204 – Advanced Sourcing

Recruiting 205 – Specialty Recruitment

Recruiting 206 – Recruiting Analytics

Recruiting 207 – The Law & Candidates

Recruiting 301 – Senior Project – solving real-life recruiting problems in real-world companies

Not quite a full class load, but I think we could easily build that out with great content.  So, here’s the big question.  If a university offered a degree in Recruiting, would you look to hire those people into your shop?

I would!  I think many of us would.  Any classes you would add to the above list!

T3 – Jibe #HRTech

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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.

This week on T3 I reviewed the mobile recruiting and analytics solution Jibe.   The one thing everyone knows in talent acquisition in 2015 is that candidates no longer just apply via their desktop computer.  Candidates now apply to your jobs using a many different devices, smartphones, tablets, ultrabooks, etc.  Organizations can no longer ignore mobile as being one of their largest potential candidate drivers.  This is Jibe’s sweet spot!

Jibe is mobile native. This means they weren’t first a desktop software that developers made fit to the small screen.  Jibe developed their solution specifically for the small screen.  Jibe dramatically improves the candidate experience to candidates on your mobile experience.  Jibe works with your current ATS to give candidates a best in class apply process via mobile.

Statistics show that anywhere from 50-80% of candidates will begin their job search process with you via mobile, but only 10-15% will actually complete that process via mobile. That’s a huge miss. You are forcing those candidates to another platform to finish, and when you do that most drop off.

Jibe also has a great recruiting analytics backend called Jibe Insights.  Jibe basically takes your ATS data and fuses it with their apply data and can show you where in your process you’re falling down.  The analytics behind source performance, and how Jibe can segment this down, is one of the best I’ve seen.   Jibe also has a CRM module that has exceptional application for field and campus recruiting with one click mobile connect onsite at career fairs and other offsite locations.

5 Things I Really Like About Jibe:

1. Jibe doesn’t do what most of your ATS vendors will do and basically make your site a mini-site for mobile. It gives your candidates an industry leading mobile online experience, they believe is all you.  From an employment branding perspective this is huge. You might not actually be the most technology advanced HR shop, but Jibe allows you to hide that fact!

2. Most ATS systems have analytics but they are really weak on the apply process side, which ends up being where most of your TA budget is spent. Jibe connects your ATS data with the apply data and specifically shows you what is giving you the best ROI and what isn’t.

3. Recruiting is a process, and it’s meant to be improved. Jibe uses supply chain type process models to help you improve your processes. Most corporate TA folks don’t think in the supply chain type mode, so it truly helps make you better at getting candidates into your pipeline.

4. Jibe’s Candidate Connect CRM has great application for field and campus recruiting.  This process was just so easy, I was amazed. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spend on campus, only to go back and spend more hours trying to get those candidates into our system, or having most fall off when they don’t complete the process. One click and their in, right now, on campus, no waiting. That’s cool!

5. Jibe started on the social recruiting side as well, back when we just called it social media. Their ‘Get Referred’ product uses your employees professional networks to increase your referrals, and put your employee referral program on steroids.

If you take anything away from this review, it better be mobile is important.  Look around you, everyone is using a device, and it’s usually not a desktop computer.  We as Talent Acquisition pros need to embrace mobile and make sure candidates can find us and apply, easily via these channels. If you don’t, you’re going to be left behind.

 

 

4 Things Successful Recruiters Do Every Day

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I’ve hired over one hundred recruiters in my career.  Not a ton, but a pretty good sample size.  I’ve had some of those hires go on to become great Talent Acquisition pros, as well as some who have completely bombed in the profession.  It’s not an easy profession to be successful at, but I’ve seen some basic things that the most successful recruiters, I know, do every single thing day:

  1. Daily motivation. Great recruiters are self-motivated by nature, but the best ones still find ways to give themselves that extra little kick every day. It might be one client or job order they decide they will close on that day. It might be an activity number they challenge themselves with for the day.  It might just be re-centering on a larger overall goal they are chasing and what they’re doing in that day will mean to reach that goal.
  1. Critical of their own work. The best recruiters I’ve worked with own their orders, candidates, interviews, etc. There is no blame.  An interview is a no-show, they own it.  They can look inward and go, next time I won’t have this happen because I’m going to do that one more thing to ensure it’s successful.
  1. They step up. Hey, guys we have a really critical position that just came open from a hiring manager, who wants it? The best recruiters always step up and want to work those high profile openings.  They want the challenge, and they are comfortable with the pressure.  They also step up with their ideas on how the organization can get better, and share freely.
  1. Daily focus. Successful recruiters can focus in and finish, every day. It’s so easy in recruiting to get pulled in a hundred different directions.  The most successful people stay focused on the job at hand, and don’t allow the ‘noise’ to take them off their plan.  They find ways to lock themselves in and keep going until they reach their outcome.

HR and Recruiting both have the same main daily issue we face, we turn ourselves into firefighters.  We run from made up emergency to made up emergency.  It feeds our need to feel like we accomplished something today and became a savior.

The most successful recruiters are no different.  They get the opportunity to be fire fighters, just like we all do, but they make a conscience decision not to allow themselves to slide down the pole. How can you make yourself more successful today?

Are You Staying In Your Lane?

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I think there are two types of people in the world:

  1. People who stay in their lane
  2. People who don’t stay in their lane.

The first group, lane stayers, are the type of people who follow a natural life path.  Basically, these are the people who don’t push the natural evolution of their lives. I started at this company. I worked my job. In a certain time I’ll get promoted. There is a sequence of life that I’ll follow, and for the most part, things will work out.

Those leaving their lane, don’t agree with their natural order of things. Nope, I don’t want to wait for my things to happen. I’m going to make my own things happen.  I don’t believe there is a path for me, so I’m going to create your own.

We have both of these types of people in our organization.  Unfortunately, we try and sell to people that those leaving their lane are somehow better.  When in reality, if you diagnose the best organizations you will usually find a higher percentage of people who stay in their lane.

The natural order of organizational effectiveness relies on people staying in their lane.  If we had everyone leaving their lane, it would cause chaos.  Our organizations would be in constant turmoil.

Staying in your lane is a weakness.  I started out in my career as that person who couldn’t stay in their lane.  I wanted to leave my lane constantly because I thought that was my way to success. As I got more tenured in my career, I realized that those friends and peers, who stayed in their lane, tended actually to reach a higher level of success faster!

Part of it is patience.  Part of it is loyalty.  Part of it is confidence in your abilities in the environment you’re in.

Staying your lane isn’t easy to do.  We get so much media thrown at us that tells us to get out of our lanes.  They call it a challenge.  They say we are pushing ourselves to a higher level. They are ones who also believe they need to get out of their lane.

Those, who stay in their lane, don’t usually feel a need to tell people about it.  That’s why it’s not popular. That’s why you don’t see books about it, and TED talks about it.  Staying in your lane is the new black. Try it out.

Talent Isn’t Fair

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We have a big problem with this concept in HR.

We want everything to be fair. At the core of what we do, though, is the most unfair dilemma that we can do nothing about. Our people come to us with talent.  It is never equal.  We can try to help our employees leverage the talents they have, but in the end it’s their talent, their desire.

I work my butt off, but Mary makes more sales than me, and she doesn’t put in half the effort I do!  Yep, she has more talent.

I am loyal to this company, and Bill hates this place, but he got promoted! Yep, he has more talent.

I just can’t seem to find a solution to our problem, then Sue finds it after working on it for ten minutes. Talent.

Everything we do in HR and Talent Acquisition comes down to us managing the inequalities of talent in our organizations.

Turns out, talent isn’t fair.

 

 

The Irresistible Power of Being Wanted

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It’s not 100%, but it might be close.  Some will deny this, but it’s pretty much universally accepted. We all want to be wanted by someone.

It makes us feel good to be wanted.  Not the crazy stalker kind of wanted. The kind of wanted where you know the other party wants you for all the positive reasons that are you.  That feeling is so powerful it could light up New York!

In a nutshell, that is talent acquisition.

You want someone. They may want you, they may not.  Either way, you are holding in your possession one of the most powerful feelings of all time!

People want to be wanted.

When you call someone and tell them, “I want you”, I can guarantee they will listen to what you have to say next.  100% of the time.

“Hi, my name is Tim. I want you.”

I now have your attention.  I might not have it for long, but I do have it in that moment.  That’s the key for successful recruiting. What you say next determines your success.

I have had four jobs in my entire career, over 21 years.  I’ve probably had upwards of 500 calls from recruiters wanting to talk to me about a job they have open. Each time I listened to what they had to say, initially, because it makes me feel good that someone wants me. That is a normal response. That is a majority response.

In recruiting you should never underestimate the power you hold in your hands.  Never believe the hype that people don’t want to be called or contacted about jobs. “Oh, those IT guys get ten calls a day, they don’t want to be contacted!” Yes, they do. That’s ten times a day they get a stroke to their ego. Ten times a day they feel wanted. Ten times a day where you might be offering them their dream job.

“Hi, my name is Tim. I want you.”

T3 – Avature

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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.

This week I’m excited to review the recruiting technology platform Avature.  I have to tell you I had at least five people send me private messages, from my network, requesting I review Avature once I started doing these T3 reviews.  As always, my tribe was right, I love recruiting and technology, so Avature was a perfect fit.

Most people who have heard of Avature probably think of them in one of two ways: CRM and/or ATS (Applicant Tracking System).  CRM is a marketing acronym for Customer Relationship Management.  It’s basically a fancy name for a system that automatically keeps in contact with people. Candidates are people, so CRM became a perfect fit for talent acquisition.  The reality is, though, Avature actually started out as a RPO (recruitment process outsourcing) company and platform, by the founder of HotJobs (remember them!?).   So, Avature was in the recruiting business before deciding to become a recruiting technology company.

What Avature is best known for is their CRM product and it’s extremely powerful.  The use of CRM in recruiting is life changing for talent acquisition. The Avature system can get a candidate to apply in under a minute. It can automatically send out communications to possible candidates, but also skip that one candidate you are already working with, so you don’t look like a fool when the person you are about to make an offer to suddenly receives a “please apply” email from you.  You can import lists and spreadsheets, and the system will automatically create records.

Throughout the entire process everything is always tied to one candidate record.  Every time stamped communication. Who sent it. Who spoke to them. Where they came from. Where they are in the process.  It is fully integrated with your Outlook, but all of those communications still show up within the one candidate record as well. Source external databases (CareerBuilder, Monster, Dice, etc.) from Avature as well, and one click the person into your database.

Avature also has a great ATS, and they are finding most of their CRM clients are migrating to their ATS as legacy contracts fall off.  If you demo Avature, you’ll see why. The CRM is so ridiculously powerful, you can’t help but want to keep it all together within the ATS, but they integrate with Taleo, Kenexa, SuccessFactors, etc.

5 Things I Really Like About Avature:

1. Configuration within the CRM is amazing, intuitive and couldn’t be easier.  This is where their background of actually being a recruiting company, first, shows up.  The system is designed and thinks like a recruiter thinks. No one client of Avature uses the system exactly the same.

2. Application process that can easily be designed based on position. How many of you only have one application process? Most of you! But what about the job that has hundreds of applicants versus the job that you get no applicants?  Those should be different, right? One you need a lot of filters to get to the right candidate. The other you want no barriers of entry in hopes of getting a candidate!

3. Avature can re-engage applicants that fall off in your process.  Many times those drop off rates are 60-70% of those looking at your jobs.  Most of us don’t even know those numbers! Avature will tell you this, plus it’s designed to go out and get those people to come back.

4. Truly global company. They have non-US clients who don’t even have employees in the US.  Multiple data centers globally. Being used in 100 different countries.

5. Because of their history in recruitment, the entire process is designed around candidate experience. Company started in 2008 and 7 original developers are still with the company in 2015!  They designed the product not to be a suite of products, but one platform, thus one record throughout.   What does a candidate expect when they come to apply to your organization? What do they expect from the communications you send out? Etc.

I joke with the folks from Avature that they are one step away from eliminating recruiters altogether! They then shared a story of how Starbucks, an Avature client, actually has hired baristas without any personal contact from a recruiter within the Avature platform!

Just as CRM was the future of marketing a decade ago. Products like Avature are the future of high performing talent acquisition shops today.  Check them out. At the very least you better do some research into CRM technology for your talent acquisition function.

5 Reasons I Got My SHRM-SCP

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I’ve been known to rail against the man (SHRM) once in a while.  I only do it, because I care.  If I didn’t care about my professional organization, I could really care less how bad they come off, or the bad decisions they make.  When they decided to ditch HRCI and bring HR certification in house, I thought they butchered the communication.  Maybe one of the worst rollouts I’ve ever seen by a professional organization.

I also thought, though, that it was a smart business decision.  Why let HRCI rake in all the dough, when you can do it just as well yourself.  In fact, I wish they would have just come out and said that, originally. We don’t see any reason why as stewards of our business, we should give all this cash to some other organization. I would have loved that!

So, at the time of that announcement, in May 2014, SHRM was going to force all HRCI certified members to pay and take the new SHRM certification. This made complete sense if SHRM was doing what they said they were doing, which was to create a ‘new’ assessment of HR based on competency, because that’s what was really needed for the profession.  I was cool with that, but I wasn’t going to pay and take another test.  I’ve reached a point in my career where I don’t need letters after my name to prove my proficiency.  So, I was riding the HRCI train until it ended.

‘Surprisingly’ SHRM changed direction last week and created a new pathway for already certified HRCI members to gain the new SHRM certification by following a simple process that takes about an hour, and costs nothing. Again, brilliant, now no one really has any reason not to get the new SHRM certification, and convert over.  It’s what they should have done originally, but they couldn’t because they were trying to keep up the illusion they needed a new and improved certification, not just a money grab. Thankfully, someone came to their senses, and grabbed the money!

All of that being said, here are the 5 reasons I decided to get my SHRM Sr. Certified Professional certification:

1. We all hate conflict, and I wasn’t picking sides in some fight over money. SHRM is my professional organization.  HRCI is basically a testing center. I’ll stick with SHRM.

2. No one knows HRCI. Everyone knows SHRM. Let’s get real for a second, up until May most people thought HRCI was a department within SHRM. No one had any idea they were a separate company, unless you were deeply involved in SHRM.  Outside our industry, no one knows HRCI. SHRM is a brand for HR.

3. Ultimately, SHRM is right. Competencies assessments are better than knowledge based assessments.  Anyone can memorize answers. It takes critical thinking to answer competency based assessments correctly.

4. It was free! I wasn’t going to pay a dime to get SHRM certified and tested.  Well, maybe a dime, but not a quarter.

5. It’s hard being a pimp. Running a professional organization like SHRM and getting everyone to move in one direction, is tough! I want HR to move forward. SHRM has an advantage because of its size and scope to make this happen. Ultimately, I love the career I chose and want to see the function move forward and not fractured.

Does Hank and the crew still need to get their shit together? Yes.  A first year communications student could have launched the new SHRM cert better.  It’s a common issue that crops up for SHRM continually, and obviously is a blind spot.  They need to fix that.  You don’t need more opinions on how it should be communicated, and more input. You just need to get the right input.

Not getting this right, the first time, made our industry look like a bunch of idiots, “same old HR”.  SHRM has to do better moving forward.

Now, go get your SHRM certification, you would be silly not to.