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Do you need to be an asshole to lead successfully in white-collar?

I feel like this is a pertinent question of the modern age: can you be a good leader, i.e. possess leadership competencies and drive growth/revenue, without being an asshole? I’m honestly not that sure.

We can run down the major examples. Steve Jobs was an unbelievable jerk. He made a ton of people rich, disrupted multiple industries, and built the No. 1 company in the world. (Although that’s shifting.) Jeff Bezos, who ostensibly changed commerce, is purportedly a jerk. Amazon’s work culture is notoriously pretty awful. Wal-Mart has long been near the top of the Fortune 500; most people that have come to run it are authoritarian jerks in their own right. That’s three examples, which is the journalistic gold standard for “a trend,” but I’ll do one more. It’s nearly impossible to read anything about Travis Kalanick (Uber CEO) and not view him as an asshole. His Vanity Fair profile from a few years ago is one of the worst things you’ll ever cringe through.

Now, look, there are counter-examples. Google (Alphabet?) makes a bunch of money, and it mostly seems like a good culture — and guys like Page and Brin seem OK. (Well, OK, maybe Brin has some issues.) Berkshire Hathaway makes a ton of money, and Warren Buffett is America’s fiscally-aware grandfather. So you can be a good CEO, and possess leadership competencies, without being an asshole. But that’s the exception and not the rule. Why is this, though?

Continue reading “Do you need to be an asshole to lead successfully in white-collar?”

Five Ways to Turn Your Company Into a Gig Worker Magnet

gig worker

A recent study from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco found that the United States is operating at full employment. What does this mean for businesses?

Unfortunately for employers, it means that it’s never been more difficult to retain employees. Case in point: the quit rate in the U.S. is now at its highest level in 17 years.

To keep business going, almost every organization is increasing its dependence on gig workers. According to Staffing Industry Analysts, an estimated 48 million people took on gig work in 2017. And, much like their full-time counterparts, flexible workers also have their pick when it comes to where – and when – they’ll work. It seems everyone is looking for greener work pastures.  

Continue reading “Five Ways to Turn Your Company Into a Gig Worker Magnet”

3 Tactics to Ensure Diversity and Inclusion Are at the Forefront of Your Recruiting Funnel

 

3 Tactics

 

The benefits of having a diverse and inclusive workforce have been well documented. We know organizational diversity is good for business with positive effects on revenue, but it can impact more than just your bottom line. In fact, one study shows that organizations with inclusive cultures are:

  • 3X as likely to be high performing
  • 6X more likely to be innovative and agile  
  • 8X more likely to achieve better business outcomes

Building an inclusive culture means creating a workplace where everyone feels valued and heard. You can help gauge your company’s culture by asking questions such as this:

  1. When hiring recent college graduates, do we only recruit from a few core universities?
  2. Do we source talent from a wide variety of communities, channels, and locations?
  3. Are our employees encouraged to bring their authentic, whole selves to work every day?
  4. How are promotion and advancement decisions made by leaders?

Truly fostering a culture of diversity and inclusion means addressing these answers and embedding inclusion recruiting practices across all activities in your company — from sourcing, interviewing and hiring to how (or who) you advance or promote.

Here are three strategies to make sure diversity and inclusion remain at the forefront of your recruiting process.

Tip #1: Train yourself to identify and check biases

As recruiters, we’re all looking to find the best candidates to fill our open roles. But despite our best intentions, we all encounter moments when we, or our hiring partners, make quick decisions that can, unfortunately, expose unconscious bias — judgments or assessments of people and situations without awareness or intention. A first step in helping to combat bias is to make yourself aware that they exist.

Data shows that employers spend an average of 6 seconds reviewing a resume. And within that 6 seconds, bias has the potential to surface without our even realizing it. A few common examples I’ve encountered include:

  • Academic pedigree – Overreliance on GPA, academic history or accomplishments as a signal of intelligence or competency for a job
  • Gender – Belief that job seekers of certain genders are a better fit for specific jobs because that job has historically been filled with a specific gender
  • Company pedigree – Prioritizing past company pedigree as a measurement of a job seeker’s ability and competence for a job

So how can you overcome, or eliminate, bias the next time a resume comes across your desk or you have an intake meeting with a hiring partner?

  1. Gather objective search requirements in your intake meetings with hiring managers or clients
  2. Build inclusive searches that are focused on skills, competency, and knowledge
  3. Rely on consistent structure, standardized questions, and criteria when screening job seekers

Although there is a lot of software (free and paid) out in the market today that can help in this area, those tools don’t fully eliminate bias. While anonymizing and hiding certain job seeker attributes is a step in the right direction, you cannot overlook the need to train yourself as well as your hiring partners on how to identify and check biases from the start.  

Tip #2: Widen your recruiting net

Where are you focusing your sourcing efforts? Are you narrowing your search to one specific country, state, city or ZIP code? If so, you could be limiting your ability to identify amazing talent from underrepresented groups. Research shows that today’s workers are moving for their careers more often than anything else — with 45% of people relocating for a job offer they couldn’t resist or long-term prospects.

But you’re not alone in determining which geographic locations may help you widen your recruiting net. Resources from PEW Research, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and US Department of Veteran Affairs can help expand your search by focusing your sourcing efforts in geographies that have a high density of underrepresented communities. Once equipped with this insight, you can make strategic decisions about not only how you prioritize your location strategy but also how you manage your job advertising spend.

More and more companies today are also offering incentives to recruit people outside of their area. To attract the talent you’re looking for you may want to consider offering a relocation bonus to new hires who have accepted your offer and are moving for your company. Working remotely is also supported and encouraged by many companies. Almost three quarters (72%) of companies with remote-work policies say they make workers more productive.

Tip #3: Focus on long-term partnerships

Sourcing candidates isn’t just about finding them. It’s focused on fostering and growing relationships over a period of time. Partnerships with external organizations can serve as a way for you to access and engage with a specific community while offering a high touch experience.

At Indeed, we’ve built partnerships with a number of organizations — Catalyst, Anita Borg, Afrotech, ALPFA and Out & Equal, to name a few — that have provided us with the opportunity to access talent from specific underrepresented groups. To promote and improve inclusion in the workplace we maximize our partnerships in a variety of ways, including sourcing candidates who are members of their community, recruiting at their conferences and identifying opportunities to sponsor their local events that promote inclusion in the industry.

Many partnership opportunities exist beyond the ones I’ve mentioned above. Once you’ve found a partner organization that’s the right fit for your company and aligns to your goals, it’s important that you are thoughtful about with whom and how you invest your time to ensure you are setting yourself up for long-term success.

Conclusion

Sourcing is primarily focused on driving top-of-funnel activity. By examining this critical step and implementing a few key tactics — identifying and checking your biases from the start, widening your recruiting net and developing long-term partnerships —  you’ll ensure that diversity and inclusion remain at the forefront of your recruiting process.

What is Representative Population Recruiting?

Representative Recruiting

 

this one is going to carry weight in the coming months and years.

Recruiting, by nature, is cyclical. Talent acquisition is ongoing and repetitive, generally guided by business needs and the market at large. At the same time, it is a space of constant innovation and transformation, with each year presenting new trends and themes that influence strategies and with any luck, outcomes. In recent years, there’s been a big push toward diversity and inclusion, with anyone and everyone espousing their approach and promoting tools that promise to all but eliminate bias from recruiting. This is all well and good – on the surface – but there’s more to fostering D&I than just talking about it ad nauseam.  

Enter in: representative population recruiting, or RPR for short. Yes, another abbreviation to tuck away into the recruiting lexicon. But, mark these words, this one is going to carry weight in the coming months and years.

What is RPR?

The easiest way to understand RPR is to take the phrase in two parts. Representative population being a statistical term that gets used interchangeably for representative sample. And what’s that? In essence, it’s a sample that accurately represents a population, in an unbiased way. The second piece – recruiting – should be obvious (I hope). Put this together and what we get is the idea that employee populations should, and could, mirror that of a larger sample.

This begs the question, how do we make sure our workforce looks like the population of America? Well, it starts with recruiting a diverse and inclusive group of folks. Full circle and full stop.

Breaking it down

Until recently, RPR mostly existed in surveys and scholarly documents like journal articles. By as the calendar moves from year to year, the times, as they say, are a changing. Here are some quick facts, as provided by the U.S. Census Bureau. The estimated population size is 325,719,178, just a smidge above the country’s largest employer, which, by the way, is Walmart with some 2,300,000 employees.

Other things to consider: persons under 18 years old account for 22.6 percent of the total population, so it’s safe to venture that only a small portion is actively working. At the same time, 15.6 percent is age 65 or older. For the sake of argument, let’s say that 61.8 percent or some 201 million people are of working age. Get where this is going? The numbers here are massive.

RPR in practice

Beyond the seemingly scary math component, there’s real value in RPR. By taking the time to identify population trends, even at a state or local level, recruiters can get a sense of how their organization stacks up.

For example, though the U.S. Census only accounts for two gender options, it tells us that 50.8 percent of the population identifies as female and thereby 49.2 percent as male. Even taking into consideration other options, determining the gender breakdown of an organization should be reasonably straightforward. Set the percentages against different representative population samples to understand if current hiring practices reflect the right numbers. If not, then there’s work to be done.

Unlocking the benefits

This piece wouldn’t be truly representative of the U.S. without posing the all-American question: why? Besides the possibility of increased access to underrepresented populations, stronger communities (both internal and external) and a positive impact on everyday tools and technologies, we can point to the early results we see from companies already practicing RPR, such as Intel.

In early 2015, Intel set a goal of reaching full representation of women and minorities available in the U.S. skilled labor market by 2020. Sure, they put $300 million behind the initiative, but in writing this near the end of 2018, they’ve already made it happen. Two years ahead of schedule. And based on Intel’s latest D&I report, the shift worked, positively impacting populations across the entire organization as well as its profits.

Walking the walk

After doing the legwork and figuring out how an organization breaks down against the population, recruiters face the reality of retooling the hiring process. On occasion, this is where the trolls march in, taunting talent acquisition teams about things like bias and the impossibility of attaining equality. Breathing deep, it’s critical that we, the collective we, the royal we, as recruiters and as people, push past this and seek out other ways to create representation.

The how can range from simple tasks to new technologies. Intel credits its “Warmline,” a confidential hotline designed to help employees with personal and professional matters, with improving the employee experience and reinforcing the brand. Others might commit to removing any and all gendered language from job descriptions and careers sites, or restructuring interviews using a platform that supports data-driven decision making, rather than relying on intuition and gut feeling.

The why is what we know today – that representation matters – and it’s up to recruiters to deliver on it.

 

Here’s why the hiring manager-recruiter relationship is really broken

A list:
  1. The hiring manager probably doesn’t respect the recruiter inherently, because the recruiter is probably based in HR — that’s a department that does not face revenue — and the hiring manager probably does face at least a slice of revenue, and may even own P&L.
  2. The recruiter probably has no idea of what the hiring manager does and why his/her silo is so important (in their eyes).
  3. They are speaking different languages, essentially.
  4. The hiring manager thinks of hiring as “another thing to manage” and just wants 3-4 highly-qualified people placed in front of him yesterday. 
  5. The hiring manager has been burned by lack of recruiter knowledge about his/her space before and has guard up.
  6. We supposedly live in this data-driven time and that’s what hiring managers are being told to focus on and report up the chain, but the recruitment process seems to remain as highly-subjective bullshit.
  7. The recruiter supposedly has “the functional knowledge” and the hiring manager cannot be bothered.
  8. There’s a brawl about “the skills gap.” The hiring manager thinks the recruiter isn’t doing his job, and/or the market is weak. The recruiter thinks, “Uh, can’t we raise the salary for this role?”
  9. They only meet in rushed, disjointed 15-minute increments where nothing really seems to get done.
  10. The hiring manager is really thinking more about how to automate some of these roles.
Anything sound familiar on there?

Just Add Water: If Recruiting Was as Easy as Instant Potatoes

 

5 Tech Trends Streamlining 2019

The holidays may be ending, but there’s still plenty of celebrating to come as we ring in the New Year. Forget about the office parties, cookie swaps, white elephant gift exchanges and all that eating. Empowered by year-end reports and the promise of a fresh slate, it’s time to refocus, refresh and renew.

Sure, January 1 might seem like just more of the same after tackling a veritable mountain of work last year. But it doesn’t have to feel that way, because even though recruiting might not be as easy as instant mashed potatoes, there are still plenty of tools that help streamline the process.  Here are a few we hope you see in 2019:

Engagement

Send in the tech. One of the biggest game changers in recruiting technology, chatbots and text solutions provide candidates with one of their top demands – more communication. Gartner famously predicted that by 2020, the average person will have more automated conversations than with their spouse or partner. And it certainly seems that we’re on that path, particularly when it comes to talent acquisition.

Using natural language processing, chatbots and text recruiting provide answers to questions and keep the conversation flowing while tracking valuable information about the candidate on the other end. This approach improves the overall experience, saving both candidates and recruiters time early on and moving the process forward faster.  

Screening

Just last year, some 52 percent of recruiters said that identifying the right candidates from a large talent pool is the hardest part of their job. So, perhaps you’ve heard of this thing called artificial intelligence (AI)? Leveraging machine learning, AI is transforming the applicant tracking system, to empower resume screening and get recruiters to top talent quickly.

See at one point, candidates just needed the right keywords to outwit the ATS, but AI changed the game. With parameters in place, an algorithm works to identify the desired qualifications and recognize which candidates meet the criteria. This can also work the other way, ignoring gender, race and age demographics and keeping candidates anonymous, in an effort to increase diversity.

Interviewing

The interview used to mean sitting in a soulless conference room staring at one, two or more people at the other end of the table. Intimidating the candidate, taking forever to coordinate on the recruiter’s end and leaving managers underwhelmed. Today, the improvements are two-fold, with scheduling and interview management happening from a single interface, like Oleeo.

Mobile self-scheduling makes it easy to schedule and confirm interviews, without having to jump back and forth between stakeholders. The centralized solution readily captures feedback, promotes collaboration between managers and speeds up decision making, shaving days off of time to hire (which hovered around 24 days last year).  

Assessments

About 82 percent of companies report using some form of pre-employment assessment test to learn about candidate abilities. Typically, these seek to simulate the job in question or determine culture fit. The latest class of assessment solutions use intelligent technology, customized automation and even neuroscience principles to test skills, abilities and behaviors.   

All that, without any added burden to the recruiter. And with this level of intel, also known as predictive analytics, recruiters get a sense of how a candidate might perform once hired in the form of metrics, helping to fast-track the high-scoring ones and further accelerate hiring.

Rediscovery

Unlike regifting, talent rediscovery is something recruiters will actually want. See, according to one source, more than 90 percent of recruiters think they would spend 70 percent less time looking for candidates if they had better information in their ATS.

As an integration, rediscovery tools do just that, going in and cleaning up existing data, while working to find candidates that match open reqs. Maybe these are folks who applied a while back but didn’t get hired; maybe they went overlooked. In any event, with rediscovery, recruiters can automatically reconnect with candidates via email or social, starting new conversations around current positions. And if nothing else, this is also one way to keep data up-to-date and ensure that no stone goes unturned in the search for that next great hire.

With so many steps in the life cycle, no one shortcut will save the day and deliver that perfect new hire right to your door (or down your chimney). However, there are lots of ways to get more profound insights, improve talent pools and shorten up essential functions. The secret is knowing what to ask for – and there’s no time like the present.

Learn about using intelligent automation for successful candidate engagement and selection:

https://blog.oleeo.com/intelligent-automation-candidate-engagement-selection.

Will the real candidate please stand up?

stand up

 

 

As long as the candidate stays honest from there on out, no harm, no foul, right? Not quite.

In most hiring scenarios, the recruiter retains the power, already having the insight, experience, and technology needed to facilitate the process. But what about that person at the other end? Surely as technology evolves so do the candidates.

Case in point, during a recent conversation, a friend confided in me that they were using a popular “freelance services marketplace” to look for a new job. My jaw agape, I asked what the Sam Hill they meant. The friend continued, though gainfully employed, they hated their current role at a company that blocked most of the internet, making it incredibly difficult for employees to find something new. So rather than spend all of their free time lost somewhere in an ATS, this friend outsourced their search. For the low, low price of 50 dollars, a freelancer would look for 30 openings based on my friend’s interests and qualifications, provide a list for their review and then, apply to the winning selections on their behalf using their resume and an easily customizable cover letter.

Now, given that technology works both ways, I’m not sure why I was surprised. Our exchange prompted so many questions, some that I’ll answer later. First, let’s admit that candidates gaming parts of the process are nothing new. Resumes get inflated, interview questions evaded. Nearly 85 percent of employers report finding a lie or misrepresentation on a resume or a job app – up from 66 percent in 2012. Sometimes, it’s easy to tell if a candidate is lying, sometimes it’s not, but typically, that conversation comes further on down the road around the interview or assessment phase.

There are plenty of reasons for candidates to game the initial interaction, from the aforementioned schedule constraints to application length to an overall frustration with the process. And this isn’t to say the freelance approach is the only way candidates can expedite their search. The internet is ripe with resources like “career coaches” or content that spells out how to beat the bots or pad a resume with keywords. There’s at least one coach out there taking credit for “educating and inspiring” upwards of 265,000 job candidates.

You’re probably thinking, yeah, OK, but does any of that work? Back to my little friend. Three business days after submitting his request, a PDF appeared in his email with links to the 30 job postings. We reviewed them together, agreeing that about ten looked awesome, ten were viable though longshots and the remainder were just too far a commute. Decent results for barely lifting a finger.

Unconvinced, I figured recruiters would see right through it. After all, some 97 percent of recruiters say that discovering a lie would make them reconsider a candidate. And then, I thought bigger picture. This friend has a solid resume, a decent education and a specific skill set that seems to be all the rage as of late. They look like a catch. Unemployment is low and reportedly, job openings outnumber those looking. With all that taking place, now might be the perfect moment for candidates using this friend’s method. At least to get to the next round, rather than cast off in a pile of data. Once that happens, the candidate will likely become the point of contact, and their support system will move on to the next paying customer.

As long as the candidate stays honest from there on out, no harm, no foul, right? Not quite. As of right this second, it seems the most recruiters can do is acknowledge the possibility. Explore tracking applicant IP addresses to see if their contact information matches the submission if you suspect the involvement of a third party. Even moving from application to a phone screen could mean someone else is fronting for the real candidate. Scary stuff, that’s making ongoing due diligence necessary.

Oh, and if you’re wondering whether or not this friend found a new job. Not yet. They have to tackle six scheduled interviews first. Not too shabby for 50 bucks.

Consulting the Oracle: Moving beyond ‘traditional’ recruiting

If we really are early into the era of cloud computing, as some purport, then Oracle’s latest updates are right on time. Unlike some other platforms on the market, making big claims about artificial intelligence, the ability to scrape LinkedIn and a litany of other under-delivered promises, Oracle is working hard to make good on its Oracle Recruiting Cloud capabilities. This current version, introduced at Oracle OpenWorld in October, does two things incredibly well: focuses on improving simple, albeit essential tasks and offers up a seamless experience for candidates and recruiters alike. Here’s the 411.

The tech components

You know they had to have A.I. and machine learning, right? Everyone does! But what makes Oracle’s approach effective is how they’re using this technology. Rather than hang their whole hat on just A.I. and (Jägermeister induced mouth vomit) overpromise, the solution is leveraging chatbots (or “digital assistants”), a mobile-first, responsive user experience and adaptive intelligence where each fit into the process. More on that last bit later.

Mostly this means that candidates can get their questions answered quickly and apply right from their phone, while recruiters can use the technology to focus in on capturing the correct information and learning more about the jobseekers in the pipeline. That’s a lot right there, and we’re not even accounting for the more transactional part of the equation, powered in part, by what follows.

LinkedIn integration

You’ve probably heard the reasons why: to “help HR teams attract, engage and retain employees by growing their talent pool, improving the candidate experience, enhancing internal mobility and increasing career development opportunities.” But let’s break that down and talk about what that means in practice.

To start, if you’re an Oracle customer, using the Oracle Recruiting Cloud solution, you can now import data from LinkedIn Recruiter to build and maintain up-to-date talent profiles. That’s a real benefit. No more guessing whether or not the information is accurate, no bugging current employees to go in and manually verify and of course, no need to try and remember when that last refresh happened. This reduces your administrative load, takes a boatload of worry off your back and even makes talent mobility all the easier going forward. You’ll already know exactly who is out there (or in there, so to speak).

But wait, there’s more

Just when you thought that was enough, I’m not quite finished yet, so chew on this. Again using that integration, recruiters can search LinkedIn members and see recommended matches for any open requisitions or projects within Oracle Recruiting Cloud and Taleo Enterprise Edition. It figures this out by considering factors such as likelihood to accept, performance predictions and expected tenure, all the while trying to determine and mitigate any potential risk. This “smart sourcing” could, depending on the results, save you hours of digging around, trying to identify anyone – active or passive – who looks worthwhile. And if nothing else, it gives you a good starting place.

You can also get more details about a specific candidate through “referral recommendations,” i.e., allowing job seekers to apply for a job through Oracle and then identifying and contacting their personal LinkedIn contacts who can best refer them for that particular job. Hey, if you have the consent, I say send that InMail.

Some other stuff, too

Almost there, but not done yet. Oracle also announced several features for the other end of the talent acquisition spectrum (that’d be the talent management piece if you’ve been living under a rock for the last decade or so). These include configurable lists that use rule-based processes to simplify and automate contract management for certain types of workers, including unions; a “design studio” to help you personalize HCM tasks and activities without the need for IT’s help and involvement; advancements around workforce planning, making it easier to identify need and proactively plan; and a tie-in between the Oracle Learning Cloud and LinkedIn learning for the purpose of career development.

All around, not too shabby, as I’d think that most recruiters and TA pros would want a data-driven, customer-focused tool to help them get the job done. And with buzzwords and innovation taking up most of the headlines lately, it’s a nice change to see a suite out there that’s offering near best of breed recruiting functionality and doing it now (rather than someday).  

High Volume Hiring: 7 Ways to Speed Up Your Process

 

 

 

Say the words high volume hiring and many recruiters will start to twitch from anxiety. Once commonly associated with hourly workers, high volume hiring extends to include salary employees as well, with the level of volume contingent on the company and industry in question. In a recent presentation, Evercore, a global independent investment banking advisory firm shared its latest numbers, citing some 200 plus campus hires and 75 to 100 more advanced positions in the U.S. alone.  

There are a few reasons that recruiters cringe at the idea of high volume campaigns, but mostly, it’s due to the speed required. Whether staffing retail workers for an impending holiday season or sweeping through college students and recent grads for internships and entry-level roles, high volume hiring often involves filling multiple positions in a limited timeframe. Very limited. No easy task, this puts added pressure on recruiters already eager to find the right candidate for each opening, making the goal quantity and quality. To speed up time to hire, while remaining efficient, consider the following tips:

1. Decide what matters most

Having already mentioned two key factors influencing high volume hiring programs, there’s one more to contemplate: price. Before building a new strategy, or revising what’s in place, rank speed, price or quality by what’s most important. Remember, hiring fast won’t necessarily come cheap while saving money might not produce quality results and vice versa. An informal poll during that webinar presentation mentioned above indicated that quality and speed take the top spots with cost mattering less.  

2. Goldilocks what exists

In most high volume scenarios, certain strategies will feel too small, others too large and with any luck, one will be just right. Part of staying prepared for the next round of hiring involves knowing where the pain points or bottlenecks slowed the process down. Future needs might include another 50 roles on top of the 200 that happened this year, or maybe the whole operation will double. Smart hiring includes knowing when to let a tactic expire in order to try something else on for size.

3. Partner up

For specific initiatives within high volume hiring, such as diversity and inclusion or military recruiting, look outside the company for potential partners. In working with designated organizations, recruiters can gain access to previously unreached and untapped talent pools. At the same time, this approach will reinforce the company’s commitment to hiring diverse candidates and promote its employer brand in a way that’s reflective.

4. Improve necessary infrastructure

Being successful and speedy necessitates a strong ATS, and not all systems can tackle high volume with ease, something Evercore learned when it received 3500 to 4000 applications for its internship program alone. Without a lynchpin or cornerstone, the entire operation is at risk. Consider whether the current ATS can support needs, do things like bulk resumes and provide accurate reporting and helpful insights. If not, make a change.

5. Emphasize events management

So much of high volume hiring takes place involves hosting and attending recruiting events, that relying on pen and paper instead of a dedicated technology would slow everything down. Look for a solution, like Oleeo, that allows candidates to check-in and upload materials on-site from a mobile device or tablet. Once their information gets captured, recruiters can follow up and facilitate the next steps.

6. Talk fast

Candidates crave communication and updates about their status, with no concept of how many others are competing for these roles. Busy recruiters rarely have time to chat, let alone personally contact each and every candidate applied. Chatbots can help as a stand-in, handling some of the day-to-day by fielding and answering questions and keeping candidates both active and engaged, without piling on the recruiter. Think candidate experience.

7. Enlist automation

With just a handful of recruiters responsible for filling upwards of a hundred positions at any given time, there are parts of the process ripe for automation. This means employing a technology that can screen candidates and move them from application to interview in minutes. With smarter technology empowering this stage, application to hire can be cut down to only three days, from an average that hovers around 36 days.  

High volume hiring is both a race to the finish and carefully orchestrated initiative with lots of moving parts. To balance factors like quality against time to fill and cost per hire, recruiters need to underpin the foundational pieces ( job descriptions, compensation, qualifications, ATS) with best in breed technologies that facilitate and automate more strategic functions including event management, candidate communication, and advancement through the process. What results will be a more efficient process, more effective efforts and that desired number of quality hires – maybe even in record time.

Become a pro at high-volume recruiting with this resource pack from Oleeo: https://info.oleeo.com/high-volume-recruiting-resource-pack.

Using Human Predictions To Source Candidate Profiles

 

Human Predictions brings both high volumes of people and detailed specifications

 

Human Predictions is an app that gathers potential talent from a variety of different sites into one easy-to-use tool. Its detailed candidate profiles set it apart from other tools. Meanwhile, its large candidate pool allows you to source talent you may not have found otherwise.

Once in the app, you can search for candidates in a variety of ways.

  • Entering keywords in the search bar allows you to target specific titles, skills, companies, and more.
  • Selecting specific technologies also allows you to refine the result pool.
  • Choosing which social networks to search through allows you to target previously unseen talent. Human Predictions can search through everything from LinkedIn to Stack Overflow to Flickr.
  • Specifying a location ensures that the candidates will be nearby.

Human Predictions provides a larger list of results than many other tools, making it invaluable in the search process.

The results are displayed with name, title, company, and social links. However, much more information can be found by clicking through to the candidate’s profile on Human Predictions. Here you can find extensive work history, skills, many social profile links, important career events, education, and more.

Other useful features include:

  • Watchlists allow you to sort and easily locate candidates for future use.
  • The Human Predictions Chrome Extension enhances the information you can find about people while on other sites.

Overall, Human Predictions is a powerful tool, and well worth trying out. One downside is that the location tool runs a bit slow, but that is a small price to pay for all the other benefits. ~ Noel Cocca

 

Look inside with Dean Da Costa:

 

Recruiting is Still Marketing: The Innovator’s Dilemma for Talent Acquisition

Recruiting is one of the toughest challenges facing businesses today. Finding the right talent is critical for success, but record-low unemployment, the flood of digital information, and a shift in the generational workforce (and their attitudes) have made recruiters’ jobs more difficult than ever.

most talent acquisition pros are still mastering the marketing skills that it takes to be a good recruiter in this digitally transformed landscape

With the rise of new technologies, companies have an increasing amount of both candidate and employee data. This data is the fuel needed to power innovation and drive machine learning algorithms,  setting the stage for AI (artificial intelligence) as the next big trend in recruiting. At least, that’s what we keep hearing, but I think we have a long way to go. As the tech-savvy early adopters continue to look to the future of AI, most talent acquisition pros are still mastering the marketing skills that it takes to be a good recruiter in this digitally transformed landscape. Figuring out ways to cut through the noise and start a meaningful exchange with future employees is the single biggest challenge facing recruiters today.

With average turnover among millennials (the biggest demographic in today’s workforce) at 33 percent, you’re effectively hiring an entirely new company every 3 years.

With average turnover among millennials (the biggest demographic in today’s workforce) at 33 percent, you’re effectively hiring an entirely new company every 3 years. The only way you’re going to do that successfully is by building a pipeline of talent and establishing an employer brand. In addition, the shift from desktop/laptop to mobile devices, coupled with the continued popularity of job review and networking platforms such as LinkedIn and Glassdoor, further compounds the importance of your online presence. In this environment, your employer brand is going to become increasingly critical for acquiring top talent. Simply put, to win the talent of tomorrow you need to focus on the tactics of today, and at least for now, recruiting is still marketing.

Marketing tactics remain king in hiring

It’s been fascinating to observe the parallels between marketing and recruiting over the course of my career. It happens time and again — there’s an innovation in the world of marketing, and a few years later, we see the recruiting industry demand similar technology. Over the last decade, it’s become increasingly clear that marketing is a telltale indicator for the next trend in the talent acquisition landscape.

They have cropped up in various forms, modernizing how we approach the recruiting process. With the last decade of bullish growth and hiring demand at an all-time high, the industry’s leading recruiters are making the shift to talent pipelining. Branding and outbound efforts to drive career site traffic and interest in your company (push style marketing tactics) are fast becoming the most valuable thing a recruiter can spend time on. The struggle is balancing the short term demand to fill today’s jobs, while still finding time to focus on building a long-term talent pool. It’s the innovator’s dilemma for recruiters.

Putting the ‘personal’ back in ‘personnel’

To say that employer brand is more important than ever is an understatement. It’s not only key to acquiring top talent, it’s crucial to your company’s very survival. Corporate and recruiting brands are bleeding together. It’s kind of scary — for nearly half of the people surveyed, a bad candidate experience means not only never considering working at your company again, but also not using your products either! So, you might not only be losing out on talent but also customers too.

And in a market this competitive, it doesn’t take much for them to remove you from the consideration set. For example, according to Jobvite, nearly one-third of young people won’t hesitate to preemptively reject a company that has poor reviews on Glassdoor.

You don’t necessarily see that “Glassdoor effect” in your hiring reports, but it’s clearly an external factor that can have a huge impact. Thanks in part to millennials — who share an increased focus on values, transparency, and authenticity than previous generations — employer brand today requires a distinctly human touch. AI may help solve this problem someday, but for now, talent acquisition teams are looking to recruitment marketing and a personalized candidate experience to drive improvement.

That’s why it’s critical to build a proactive strategy around your employer branding, and more specifically, a strategy around candidate interactions with your brand. Poor experiences today can range from a website that isn’t properly optimized for mobile to slow response times from recruiting and hiring managers after an interview.

The rejection business

Recruiters are in the rejection business — having to reject sometimes thousands of applicants to make just a single hire.

The sales and marketing funnel shares distinct similarities with the recruiting funnel. However, one of the key differences between marketing and recruiting is that while we are both moving our “prospects” through a funnel, marketers want everyone to flow through the process and all become customers. Recruiters have the difficult job of narrowing that hiring funnel down to the one person that gets the job. Recruiters are in the rejection business — having to reject sometimes thousands of applicants to make just a single hire.

This is where recruiting software and artificial intelligence can make an immediate impact. AI and machine learning have advanced enough to help recruiters automate some menial tasks such as posting to job boards, digging through resumes, initial candidate screening, and interview scheduling. Full-cycle recruiting platforms equipped with automation in these areas can help solve the innovator’s dilemma for recruiters, freeing up valuable time to focus on the more human elements of recruiting.

People are the lifeblood of a company, and recruiters are the heart that keeps talent pumping into the organization. And CEOs are increasingly aware of its strategic importance — consistently citing attracting top talent as one of their top 3 challenges. Like marketers struggling with balancing the short-term demand for “leads” vs. the long-term corporate brand, recruiters too must consciously work to strike their own balance. If you’re only spending time on the short-term demand to fill open requisitions, you’ll be caught flat-footed whenever you have increased hiring demand or decreased employee tenures.

Think like a marketer, strive to engage with passive candidates who aren’t actively looking to keep your company top of mind when those A-players decide to make a change. Challenge yourself to further drive that change in 2019, deepen your talent pool, and be ready for the next hiring push.

Using PAS Network AI Tool To Source & Build Profiles

PAS Network AI tool makes sourcing research easy

 

PAS Network is a site that allows you to search by job title and discover a great deal of valuable information. It provides research about the most common skills, education, and experience for people with each job title. This can be particularly useful in your talent search by helping you determine the best keywords to use, what skills your candidates should be expected to have, and more.

When you log in to PAS Network, you are prompted to enter a job title.

  • The tool asks whether you would like to view your results in a visual or textual format. You can decide which is the best fit based on which you find most helpful, or what you are planning on doing with the information.
  • The information is then broken into categories such as educational background, experience, skills, and retention period.
  • For the visual option, this information comes in the form of easy to read graphs. The information is displayed based on percentages of people with your search job title that have a certain degree, or know a certain skill.
  • For the textual option, you are given the same information written out instead of displayed in graphs.
  • Additionally, the tool provides recommended searches, allowing you to move from one job title to the next seamlessly.

PAS Network uses an AI tool that is built to understand job profiles and careers, allowing it to do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.

The depth of the information provided and the user-friendly options for how it is displayed make PAS Network the perfect place to start your research.  ~ Noel Cocca

 

Look inside with Dean Da Costa:

 

Use SalesIntel to locate senior-level talent

 

SalesIntel is a great tool for targeting senior-level talent

 

SalesIntel is a powerful tool that helps you locate talent and contact info using specific search terms. There are two main sections of the tools: “Companies” and “Contacts”.

In the “Companies” tab, you can search for companies by name, domain, location, and more. Once a company is chosen, you are shown a variety of relevant information.

  • Standard information such as industry, size, annual revenue, location, and contact info is made clear and easy to find.
  • More advanced information, such as the names of top executives or the company’s partners in areas like cloud services and software, is also available.

The “Contacts” tab is also vital, as it allows for both very broad and very specific searches, and gives you the option to view contact info.

  • You are given a choice of what information to include in your results, such as title, phone, and address.
  • The search engine offers a wide variety of filters, including Job Level, Department, Title, Company, and more. This makes it especially good for locating senior level talent.
  • You can choose which contacts you want to view more information, including contact information, for.
  • Alternatively, you can search for information on specific people based on name and email address.

SalesIntel produces many verified contacts, and even allows you to export these as a csv in order to view later or import into other tools. Additionally, the tool provides you with some free contact reveals, and more contacts are reasonably priced.

SalesIntel is a powerful tool and is definitely worth testing out! ~ Noel Cocca

 

Look inside with Dean Da Costa:

 

Navigating the island of misfit candidates

On the top of every recruiter’s Christmas list this year is a pool of perfect candidates. Finding the right talent with the right background, skills and experience can be a daunting and time-consuming task for HR and recruiting teams alike. And of course, that’s only the beginning of the process, followed by interviews, screenings, references, offers, onboarding and more. With the holiday season already busy enough, finding the time to tackle all of these tasks seems impossible.

Thankfully, emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can streamline manual processes and help HR and recruiting professionals focus more of their time on tasks that matter. New tools that leverage AI and ML, like Oracle’s Best-Fit Candidate feature, can help organizations take a smarter approach to sourcing, increase hiring success and save significant time. These technologies can help prepare organizations for the future and make work enjoyable, smarter and supportive. Here are some of the top advantages to using AI in recruiting:

Continue reading “Navigating the island of misfit candidates”

California court voids nonsolicit agreement with recruiters and defeats trade secret claims

California Court of Appeal held that enforcing such an agreement signed by a recruiter-employee would constitute the enforcement of an illegal covenant not to compete under California law.

Employers that engage recruiter-employees should be on alert that California Courts will not enforce standard nonsolicitation of employee agreements as such nonsolicitation agreements act to prevent former employee-recruiters from carrying out their chosen profession. While Loral Corp v. Moyes, long ago, upheld an injunction restraining a former executive from raiding his former employer’s employees based on a similar nonsolicit agreement, on November 1, 2018, the California Court of Appeal held that enforcing such an agreement signed by a recruiter-employee would constitute the enforcement of an illegal covenant not to compete under California law.

AMN Healthcare, Inc. and Aya Healthcare Services, Inc. are competitors that hire employees to recruit healthcare workers, such as travel nurses, for their respective hospital and other medical care facility clients through the country.  AMN required its employees, including recruiters, to sign a standard non-solicit agreement whereby they agreed not to solicit AMN’s employees, including travel nurses that AMN placed, to leave AMN’s service for one year after the employee-recruiters left employment with AMN.  Four of AMN’s recruiters were hired by Aya and, subsequently, recruited or worked with Aya to recruit travel-nurses to Aya for placement by Aya with Aya’s clients.  AMN sued the former employee-recruiters and Aya claiming that they breached their contracts, misappropriated trade secrets, interfered with prospective economic advantage, aided and abetted misappropriation of trade secrets, and unfair business practices AMN’s trade secrets, for a total of 11 claims. 

The Court of Appeal in AMN Healthcare, Inc. v. Aya Healthcare Services, Inc. upheld summary judgment in favor of employee-recruiter defendants and their employer defeating the complaint. In addition, the Court of Appeal upheld an injunction against AMN from attempting to enforce such agreements in the future, suing over other former employee-recruiters purported breach of contract, and awarded the defendants $190,000 in attorneys’ fees.  

Nonsolicit Not Enforceable

void under California’s Business & Professions Code 16600

The AMN employment agreement provided that “during Employee’s employment with the Company and for a period of one year after the termination….Employee shall not directly or indirectly solicit or induce, or cause others to solicit or induce, any employee of the Company…to leave the service of the Company….” AMN sued the former recruiters after they were hired by Aya to recruit travel nurses, and it appeared that Aya had some success doing so.  Of import, the Court focused on California’s broad public policy to allow persons to seek employment and held that Loral Corp. v. Moyes’ enforcement of a similar nonsolicit provision may survive Edwards v. Anderson, where an employee functions as a recruiter, enforcement of such a provision would restrain the employee-recruiters from engaging in their profession and therefore was void under California’s Business & Professions Code 16600 to distinguish it from prior caselaw.

Employers Beware:  Not Everything is Trade Secret

former employees sent email to her personal email account shortly before accepting new employment

AMN claimed that the recruiters violated California’s Uniform Trade Secrets Act by soliciting travel nurses that had been placed by AMN, claiming that the travel nurses names and contact information was a trade secret.  However, on summary judgment, the undisputed evidence showed that the recruited nurses had applied to work at Aya years before and had given Aya their contact information before being solicited to work for Aya by the former AMN recruiters.  And, the Court concluded that therefore there was nothing secret about the travel nurses contact information under CalUTSA.  The Court also pointed to a social media network, the Gypsy Nurse Group, as a public source of information from which the recruiters could prospect.

In addition, one of the defendant employee-recruiters, while employed by AMN, sent Aya an internal AMN email that AMN contended constituted trade secret information about its plans to compete with Aya.  The Court gave short shrift to this claim, and held that as a matter of law the email did not disclose trade secrets but contained very general information that AMN wanted its team to use to compete against Aya.  The Court showed no concern about a current AMN employee-recruiter providing her soon-to-be employer with AMN’s internal communications.

Moreover, one of AMN’s former employees sent email to her personal email account shortly before accepting new employment, attaching a list of persons and contact information that she had placed for AMN.  While the Court assumed that the list was trade secret, it concluded that AMN was not harmed by the disclosure and that the disclosure was not a substantial factor in causing harm based on the employee-recruiter’s sworn testimony that she did not use that list to compete against AMN.  Again, the Court looked past the act of sending a trade secret document outside of AMN and then credited the employee-recruiter’s declaration that she never used the information to compete but instead relied on Aya’s internal information, social media or other referrals to solicit those employees for Aya. 

Injunction and Attorneys’ Fees

In addition to defeating the Complaint, the Court of Appeal concluded that the injunction against AMN from attempting to enforce its agreement against other California employees was appropriate as it concluded that the provision was void and no other employees should be subject to claims or expenses associated with litigation.

And, while the trial court awarded attorneys’ fees to the defendants based on CalUTSA and due to the enforcement of an important right affecting the public interest under California Code of Civil Procedure section 1021.5, the Court of Appeal limited its decision to conclude that the fees were appropriate to a prevailing party on a matter of public importance.

Lessons Learned

review all existing employment agreements with recruiter-employees

Employers that have in-house recruiting departments or employers that are strictly in the recruiting business, like AMN, should review all existing employment agreements with recruiter-employees with their counsel to update those contracts to have best assurances that they provide the highest level of deterrence from future departures of employee-recruiters and against attempts to poach the employers’ other employees.