Blog

It’s not a “skills gap” so much as your company/client refusing to raise the salary for the role

Little screenshot from an article my friend sent me:

Read the end part.

I’ve written before about the skills gap — I think it’s largely a joke. It’s usually the result of hiring managers and recruiters not being on the same page + companies not willing to pay for talent. It’s much less that the skills don’t exist and much more that people don’t know how to value them.

We’ve all seen the resumes that demand 17 bullet points including speaking Italian, a past in pornography, classical piano experience, and you once worked at Google. (That would be an interesting person.) You scroll over to LinkedIn salary calculator or whatever, or ask the hiring manager.

“Oh, we’re targeting $63,000 for this role.”

Right. You’ll never get a good person with 17 skill sets including porno and Italian and piano at 63. You just won’t. That’s not how — not ever — the free market is/was supposed to work. But companies believe they can work it that way, then bitch about a skills gap on the back-end, all the while doing nothing to raise wages.

Sad.

Why do companies feel this way?

Well, tons of reasons — but one of the easiest is that a lot of business decisions in companies come from guys who got a MBA somewhere along the line. MBAs are cool and valuable, but really it’s a two-year exercise in “How do I cut costs?” You’re essentially taught to make one number go down and another number go up. Many men spend 30+ years thinking this is a “strategy.” It’s not. It’s just operational efficiency in the same way most other people are doing it.

Also, people aren’t valued in companies of more than about 100 people. There’s lots of reasons for this, but if you don’t believe me, just look at where “people issues” reside in most places: HR. Executives could give two fucks about HR. We all know this. It’s just a question of how much we are willing to admit it. HR is a joke to execs. They want it to be a “seen and not heard” department. No hard-charger worried about revenue wants Sally from HR at the mahogany when he’s making the decisions to justify his self-worth. This is the reality of work; it’s just a question of how deep your head is buried in either (a) the sand or (b) “the corporate mission.”

If you stick all people issues in a department no one with authority cares about, do you really care about people? Survey says: not really.

So why bitch about the skills gap?

Allows people to hide behind an excuse when the real story is “I don’t understand where business is going or what I need, and I don’t have the authority to pay these people what they’re worth.”

What is “engagement,” really?

Ah, the fluffiest of all terms.

I’ll keep it simple for you: an engaged employee is typically one who —

  • Is compensated well
  • Treated with respect
  • Works on projects that seem to matter to others
  • Is kept in the loop

That’s it. It’s not rocket science — or wait, I guess the new version of that line is “It’s not constructing super-human robots.” But most companies miss all four, replacing them with:

  • “Maybe we’ll find more for you next year” (Exec just pulled out in a new Mercedes)
  • “Respect? No time!”
  • “You don’t look busy, can you hop on this thing for me?”
  • “Communication? No time! Q4 exec readout!”

Stop lying about the skills gap

This is how the market works:

  • “I need this skill.”
  • “I will price it here.”
  • “I cannot find people at that price point.”
  • “I now need to either take less-quality people or raise the price point.”

Not brain surgery here. (Oh wait. Not “Advanced personalization techniques.”)

If you’re going to bitch about the skills gap, and you won’t raise your wages, well, you have no right to bitch about the skills gap — and you honestly have no right to be in business, because you clearly don’t understand how the market even works.

Instead of costly searches, why not get better at identifying internal candidates?

Internal recruitment — essentially, promoting, advancing, and hiring from within — seems like a pretty fraught concept at a lot of companies.

I think the big thing here is FOMO, or fear of missing out. It’s kind of the same logic behind why companies hire consultants. The idea is that “fresh blood” is good. These people will have new ideas. They might even be poached from a competitor, so that gives you a leg up on the enemy. I also think a lot of executives know (but don’t admit) that people start to get burned out and recycle the same 3-5 ideas once they’ve worked somewhere a few years, so an infusion of new human capital could be a good thing. All this has some validity, although it’s also a bit wrong. More on the FOMO part later.

On surveys, employees often talk about wanting “opportunities for growth.” That usually means “a higher salary,” if we’re being 100 percent honest. One of the most demoralizing things ever is working for a place with poor internal recruitment. In that type of setting, you hit target after target for a boss man — and then when you’re up for a promotion, it goes to someone they found on LinkedIn. After that happens 2-3 times, why would you care about your job anymore? Clearly there’s no chance for growth. This is the dangerous side of the career ladder.

I can think of about 127 ways that internal recruitment makes sense and adds value, but let’s start with six. Seems reasonable.

Internal Recruitment Value No. 1: The FOMO Case

The most often use of “FOMO” is probably around social media. Let me be pretty upfront here. Most of social media is curated bullshit. Let’s say you see a picture of a beautiful family of four and a dog. OK? You look at that picture and say, “Their life is going well.” You have no ideawhat their life is like. 13 seconds before that picture, they could have been in a huge fight. You don’t know. Social media is snapshots in time, and it’s relative comparison on steroids. You see pictures from a party. It looks fun. FOMO! But … the party could have sucked. You have no clue. It’s a moment in time meant to convey something. It’s not necessarily real.

That’s the same problem with FOMO-driven hiring, or the opposite of internal recruitment. “Look at that big swinging dick at our competitor,” an exec bellows. “Let’s get after him.” That guy could sink your sales culture in 5.8 seconds flat because once he’s hired on, he’ll alienate every single other person you already have.

Look: you will absolutely never know how a person fits with you until he/she works with you. And because “sample days on the job” aren’t commonly part of the hiring process, everything’s essentially just a guess. Why not reduce the guess by using someone who already works there? You have a read on how they relate to the culture. With FOMO hiring, you do not.

Internal Recruitment Value No. 2: Your hiring process is a mess anyway

Your hiring process probably is not great. It’s likely set up in a way that alienates the best candidates. So why rely on that when you can rely on internal knowledge you already possess on people who already understand how your systems work?

Internal Recruitment Value No. 3: It makes people feel good

This is a fluffy reason, sure, and I can imagine some executive screeching “The point ain’t to feel good, the point is to rake in the cash!” OK. Maybe that’s true. Here’s the funny part, though: almost every executive is absolutely terrified of being seen as incompetent. They have a good deal in that most of ’em can be force-fed competence via hierarchy. “I wouldn’t have known how to do that without you, boss!” 

Executives want to feel good too. They want people to say “You’re worthwhile” and “You’re relevant” and “You’re on the right track.” We’re all human beings and we all want that. It’s demoralizing to toss 10 years in at a place and be making about $3,000 more than you did a decade ago. Then some manager is telling you 24 different things are a priority, but if you bring up promotions, he says “We don’t have the resources right now, Robert.” Meanwhile, he just bought a fucking Mercedes. We all know the game. Internal recruitment can help people feel a little bit better about said game.

Internal Recruitment Value No. 4: You chasing process?

Most companies drown absolutely everything in process, to the point that it means more than results do. If you work at that type of place, you need to prioritize internal recruitment. It’s simple math.

A new hire from outside will take at least 1 month to learn all the processes — and honestly, it’s usually longer. I’ve worked with people who came in to a company at a high level and took 9-12 months to figure out WTF was happening. That’s a year. If you’re big on quarters, that’s 4 quarters. Other higher-ups will grouse about that person within maybe 3-4 weeks. This happens all the time.

If you value process, why wouldn’t you use internal recruitment to advance someone who already understands the processes?

Internal Recruitment Value No. 5: It’s motivational

My last gig was a B2B travel consortium. Last summer, I had a few beers after work with the CFO. This place had a huge degree of homophily— people working together for years — which is a good and a bad thing. Good: feels like family. Bad: new ideas always seen as a threat. “Well, this is the way we’ve always done it.”

Me and the CFO are talking, and he admits this stunning fact: despite all the stick-around culture, only two people (maybe 3) had ever reached the top rungs via internal recruitment. Almost every SVP and higher-up at this place were from outside.

I had about four beers that night. I got home and I had 1-2 more. One of my first thoughts the next morning was “I don’t want to go to work.” It wasn’t because I was hungover. (I might have been.) It was because I saw no motivation in anything. So like, I gotta go hit target after target for someone and then I’ll probably stay around the same 1-2 levels for 10-15 years? No thanks.

Now, I got fired from that job, so that kinda worked itself out. (** Cymbal noise **) But it just underscores how internal recruitment can be an effective motivational tactic.

Internal Recruitment Value No. 6: It’s cheaper

Here’s Scenario A: someone makes $75,000. Now they make $90,000. To the best of my knowledge, a company spent $15,000 or so there. My math may be wrong.

Here’s Scenario B: you spend time recruiting someone. You spend time interviewing them. You fly them in (possibly) and put them in hotels. Your HR and hiring managers spend hours on the phone with them (that’s money too). The hire is made, and within 12-15 months, they leave or are forced out. You just spent a bunch of money for, essentially, no reason.

Scenario A is internal recruitment. If you like keeping costs down and saving money, doesn’t that make some sense?

7 Tactical Changes You Can Make to Scale Your High Volume Hiring

Make These 7 Tactical Changes NOW to Scale Your High-Volume Hiring

High-volume hiring – the one-stop-shop concept of filling 250 or more open positions – is a numbers game. As such, it must rely heavily on technologies that scout expansively and entice massive amounts of job candidates.

The simplistic two-pronged obstacle is that the need to hire hundreds of staff doesn’t typically expand available time  or resource to make it happen. Additionally, the positions for which you hire hundreds are not usually those for which you have a relocation budget. Geographic expansion of your candidate search is probably not an option.

To hire more workers, without expanding your HR team, or looking beyond your local candidates, you must rely heavily on technology that speeds up the process and enhances its accuracy. You’ll also need to enlist the help of folks beyond your HR team.

Here, then, are seven tactical changes you can make to expand your candidate scale:

1. Scour Resume Databases

It is important that you really consider the databases where you focus your attraction efforts and look at a mix of free and paid models, evaluating where the best talent is coming from in real-time. .  Filters to consider include geographic distance, education, and work experience. You can hide previously viewed or reviewed resumes and invite candidates to apply.  Some tools will also display phone and email contacts for online profiles, and find social media profiles, as well as skills, experience and education to help select suitably qualified candidates for the role you’re seeking.

Craigslist is old school and ugly, but its automation makes searching and communication a breeze. Best of all, each city has its own URL, so no need to filter by location. Just click on the Resume hyperlink at the bottom of the right sidebar, and start searching. Each resume includes an email contact with one-click messaging, and they’re all time stamped. This is one resume database that doesn’t neglect to remove resumes for people who found a job five years ago and are no longer looking.   To search multiple cities at one time, install the free CPlus for Craigslist mobile app.

2. Create or Expand a Formal Referral Program.

If your employee referral program consists of your staff submitting to their hiring manager a piece of paper with their friend’s name and phone number, it’s well past time to formalize that process. If it’s already formal, think about bonusing external referrers as well. If you have tools in place to manage referral submissions, follow them throughout the pipeline, and manage the bonuses and communication with referrer.

Do you have formal, scheduled prompts to your employees that remind them of their connections, or are you simply relying on them to think of someone? The latter is not as easy as it sounds. Think about your social networks. Can you even recall one tenth of your Facebook friends off the top of your head, and of those one tenth, do you remember the full extent of their work backgrounds and skills? Probably not.

Consider making technology available to employees that will  let them scour their social networks, and text, email, or share referrals from the social site. Yes, if using their social networks, the access is kept private.  Recruiters can contact candidates by email, including a job radio button. Employees can tweet job notices or post them to LinkedIn or Facebook. They can also be selective about their contacts by sending a personal Facebook or LinkedIn message, or texting or emailing a referral link. Good platforms will manage referral campaigns for employers and surface top referrers.

To expand the viral effect of your employee’s social job shares even further, create a multi-level-marketing type bonus. Let the employee’s network spread the word and bonus the employee and her downline as well.

Don’t forget external referrals, either. Aliro is an expansive job platform that lets you advertise bonus figures and manages the payment of them.

Of course, while you’re calling on your employees, or folks outside the firm, for ideas on who might be a good fit, don’t forget about the employees themselves. Some just might have an interest in a promotion or even a lateral move, or know a colleague or former colleague who is. Oleeo’s Talent Mobility platform empowers internal candidates to re-engage alumni, expands your shining stars’ career paths, and helps retain that top talent. With Talent Mobility both current and former employees can signal their work preferences and apply for openings quickly. Recruiters can re-deploy these career-minded folks and fast track your superstars.

3. Advertise Smarter

Let programmatic advertising tools such as Recruitix and JobAdX make your best buying and scheduling decisions based on job descriptions and your historic hiring. Both platforms handle the bidding; you only pay for qualified candidates with whom you engage. 

Recruitix analytics dashboard shows you results in one place from all sources. It reports on all jobs but specific to each, tracking job views, applicants, and conversion rates and then determines a cost-per-applicant for each.

4. Automate Your Social and Email Engagement

Social media must be a large part of your recruitment marketing strategy (which in itself must be a paramount part of any high-volume hiring campaign). A soft-sell approach is especially enticing to passive candidates! The process is about putting your firm’s best foot forward, followed by an “Oh, by the way, we’re hiring” message once the prospect takes a bite of your tweet or post.

Two important elements of your social engagement are what you post and how you track it. If you have only time to concentrate on one social network, make it Twitter. The network has about one billion registered accounts, 250 million of which are active each month. These folks are posting over 500 million tweets each day. Nor is there any other social network with so much management help, much of it free. Beyond Hootsuite and other programs that manage multiple social networks on one dashboard, we found nearly 100 free applications, most of which are dedicated to Twitter.

Twitonomy gives you visual, detailed analytics on yours or anyone else’s tweets and retweets, hashtags, mentions and replies. It monitors tweets from your chosen members, keyword searches and lists, and monitors your interactions.

Buffer finds enticing content for you to share, schedules those tweets, and analyzes their performance. Its Pablo app has a hefty database of beautiful, easy-to-share images to enhance opens and shares of your tweets.

Once you’ve socially engaged with prospective candidates, and the door is opened far enough to introduce a career opportunity, automation of an email conversation can move the engagement from social to active recruitment. With robust ATS  systems such as Oleeo you can schedule email delivery of job descriptions, assessment invitations, interview invitations, and much more. Their tool tracks candidate interaction and displays specific content depending on each candidate’s engagement level.

5. Rediscover Your Talent Pipeline

Don’t just create a talent pipeline or add candidates to your ATS or CRM for that one job to which they applied, and then walk away from them, never to re-contact.

Software within  robust ATS platforms such as Oleeo can analyze data points within talent banks for matches, and then contacts them by email and social media (if provided).

6. Automate and mobilize your interview scheduling

Natural-Language-Protocol (NLP), mobile-focused chatbots such as the new TalkyJobs and TalkPush automate pre-screening interviews as well as help schedule them.

Oleeo’s interview management product  allows candidates to self-schedule, which saves many hours of phone-tag or other frustrating, time-consuming back and forth between recruiter and candidate. It manages single, multiple or panel interviews, and offers an accelerated Super Days scheduler for high-volume interview events.   

7. Call on Other Staff to Help

Enlist the help of your firm’s employees, especially your non-supervisory shining stars in the department for which you’re hiring.  Invite them to be a part of a collaborative hiring team. Reward these workers for their creative hiring-event ideas, empower them to help coordinate the event, to observe Hackathon or other competitive group assessment participants, and to be a part of a live-interview team.  

For your hiring event, consider the Oleeo event management platform. Oleeo enables candidate RSVPs to event invitations, self check-in on candidates’ own device, shares assignments with participating staff, and automates follow-up. The mobile-friendly platform can manage live or virtual events. Oleeo’s Event Instant can be live in just 48 hours and provides on-site event registration and forms, collects real-time feedback and enables post-event email delivery to candidates.

Encourage your staff to post reviews on Glassdoor, Indeed and Kununu, and include these and their day-in-the-life videos in your job posts, and your event promotion. Your staff’s active participation will help you speed up and contain the costs of your volume hire; and, while you’re bonusing them for their participation, you’re bonusing yourself as well.  Why? Because their assistance will engage your staff, which will boost their productivity and train them for advancement.

For more high-volume hiring tips, do read Oleeo’s High-Volume Resource Recruiting Pack.

AI Corporate Boon, Changing Ways of Working, Hurting for Skilled Staff

Deloitte Study

 

According to Deloitte’s second State of the AI in the Enterprise report, one of the greatest concerns about artificial intelligence, a technology that is dominating hiring processes for 32 percent of responding firms, is the difficulty in hiring qualified staff to manage it.

Of the 1,100 AI-early-adopter executives who participated in the just-released survey, 69 percent were facing an AI skills gap either moderate, major or extreme. Where staff was most lacking were for the roles of AI researchers to create algorithms, software developers to creates systems, and data scientists to manage and analyze the information that fuels the entire AI process.

Most agreed that job descriptions will be significantly altered by the growth of AI. In fact, 72 percent had already seen substantial changes in skills and job roles.

82 percent reporting a positive return on their AI investment

Artificial Intelligence has been a financial boon to most of the surveyed firms, with 82 percent reporting a positive return on their AI investment. Overall, the median return was 17 percent, although the tech, media, entertainment and telecommunications industries realized a 20 percent return on investment (ROI.)

While about a third of respondents expressed concerns over AI security breaches, legal and regulatory ramifications, and AI-driven bias in recruitment, 78 percent were encouraged about how AI was going to drive new ways of working.

“Companies are excited about the potential of AI to improve performance and competitiveness – and for good reason,” Dr. Jeff Loucks, executive director, Deloitte Center for Technology, Media and Telecommunications, Deloitte LLP, said in the announcement. “But to reach this potential, companies must engage risk, address talent shortfalls and execute well. While AI’s upside is significant, haste can leave companies with bridges to nowhere – pilots that don’t scale or projects with no business benefit. The good news is Deloitte helps clients understand the pitfalls and how to avoid them.”

 

 New A-Pass by Aplic.io to Streamline Education, Career Search

aplic.ioVancouver, BC-based enrollment and employment marketplace Aplic.io just announced its soon-to-launch A-Pass, a universal digital passport for college and university students and prospective students.

Built with blockchain technology over the Aplic.io platform, A-Pass will retain students’ verified credentials, their work history, competencies, and achievements. Both educational institutions and employers will be able to access the platform, to review the students for school admissions or jobs. A-Pass will retain academic records and test scores.

“With Aplic.io, we are aiming to solve the problem of student and graduate unemployment across the globe and helping employers find the right candidates; with just a couple of clicks, A-Pass users anywhere in the world can apply to a bevy of institutions, embark on the student visa process, get scholarships, work experience and even arrange a full-time employment while they are studying,” Aplic.io founder and CEO Inna Bogdanova said in the announcement. “With A-Pass, by the time of graduation, a student will have a proven and validated track of academic achievements and proof of skills.”

A-Pass features include job as well as internship search.

 

To check out: Bullhorn’s “Staffing Speaks Out”

Cool resource put together by the good folks at Bullhorn whereby senior staffing industry leaders talk transparently about the real issues of the industry today — and how to rethink / even solve some of them. We love paying it forward to people trying to right the ship where it’s not right, so we want you to take a look. Here’s everything they’ve got so far.

 

Nobody likes a smart ass — unless they have data

One company we’ve met in recent weeks is SplashBI. Their marketing message is fairly common: “Use your data to make smarter decisions.” No doubt. That’s the eternal promise of data and especially of the data age we currently reside in (apparently). But as we mentioned earlier today, data isn’t everything because you have to take psychology into account too. When you approach someone in a high position in a company, they might have been working in that industry or vertical for 20+ years. If you come at them with data and that threatens their sense of self-worth (which is very possible), now you have a bigger problem. The data as a threat = the data ain’t getting used = the decision-making ain’t right = your company is just kicking the can.
There’s another problem too.

Continue reading “Nobody likes a smart ass — unless they have data”

Will “Big Data” win out in recruiting so long as Boomers are still in charge?

The Guesswork Era isn’t a real concept — I just invented it right now — so let me try and explain first what it means. In the simplest terms, it’s an executive (“senior decision-maker”) over-relying on their gut instinct when there’s a bunch of information (“big data”) they could base a decision on. Here’s an example:

HR Manager: “Well, sir, we have lots of information on what would make someone successful in this role, and as a result, Joseph is the bes–”

Executive: “No time, Susan! Joseph didn’t impress! Sam! I like the cut of Sam’s jib!”

The situation above could have been “People Analytics,” but instead it became the Guesswork Era. See what I mean?

This happens a lot. It’s not too complicated why it happens either. Most executives don’t understand data that well, and the way it’s often presented to them doesn’t jive with how other things (i.e. balance sheets) are presented to them. For this reason, you could argue two things: (1) is that Big Data might make decision-making slower(odd) and (2) is that for this all to work, we need “data translators” as a job of the future.

Everything I’ve said so far is about the logistics/process of the supposed Big Data era. I haven’t even touched on the psychology. Work is a very psychological place, although we often forget this and try to drown everything in “logical” processes. (Most processes are just invented to make a middle manager feel as if they’ve controlled a situation properly.) Stephen Dubner, who is smarter and more famous than I am, has also noted that a major problem with “data-driven decisions” is that executives want to believe in their gut. In the mind of some of these guys, they arrived at their perch for a specific set of reasons. If “Big Data” removes some of these reasons, how relevant are they anymore? (Not much.) Work is largely a quest for relevance towards self-worth, so who wants 750 rows of information if guesswork makes you feel better?

This is a topic we need to consider more.

The Guesswork Era and the science of selling

Here’s an article from Wharton on “The Science of Good Salesmanship.” I’d classify this as mostly interesting, although at some points the interviewee is like “Data will save us all!” Down near the end, there’s this:

It’s such an exciting time to be in sales and business because this scientific data takes the guesswork out. No longer must we guess our way to success. Now armed with this research, we can make decisions that are accurate and in the best interest of ourselves and those we serve.

True. Or, wait. We want this to be true. It isn’t actually true. The scientific data should take the guesswork out of how we make decisions, but it doesn’t. We’ve created 90 percent of the world’s data in the past 5-10 years, right? At the same time, we have some of the highest levels of decision-making variability in executive history. Shouldn’t all this data be putting our senior leadership teams on the same page, as the data is saying the same stuff to them? Logically, this would happen. But in reality, it doesn’t happen.

Why not?

Some reasons are described above. Other reasons:

  • The Silo Effectis pervasive in business, and many executives contextualize decisions relative to their silo — not to the overall company
  • A deep belief in data signals to some people that the robots are coming too
  • Company-building and market share-stealing is the closest thing some guys get to fun,so damned if an algorithm is going to take that away
  • A lot of “big data plays” are really just one company copying another company, and not one company having any kind of strategy around data
  • The people companies have in place as their “data team” usually are a bunch of target-whiffers who maybe understand data but don’t understand how to explain that data to anyone else

This all brought us to the Guesswork Era. We want to think this will change with more data, but it probably won’t.

A quick little story on the Guesswork Era concept

Had a job a while back where I sent Analytics reports every Friday. Website, apps, etc. Performance stuff. There’s a concept called “the tyranny of old metrics,” meaning that business changes but people cling to old numbers that used to matter. That idea was big-time in play on these emails. Most people had no clue what I was writing about, so I put some jokes and pop culture references in the emails. Eventually that rubbed a few people the wrong way, my boss snarled at me, and a few months later, I was shit-canned out the door two weeks before Thanksgiving. Hierarchy, baby!

So when I’m dead and buried at this joint, another kid takes over the Friday analytics emails. The first one he sends, he’s got about 700 rows of data in it. Mine were just images and text with some numbers sprinkled in. What happens? People go nuts. They’re forwarding his boss. “What is this? I am swamped! No time to read this!” Of course, most people could have deleted it — but people love to bitch, and bitch they did.

This illustrates (to me) a key point about the implementation of big data. It’s not about collecting the data or having it to show. That’s what most companies think. It’s about (a) empathy for how other people want to interact with it and (b) using it for better decisions. That’s it. Most companies completely miss that, and as a result, the Guesswork Era is likely to live on for another decade or more.

Your take on guesswork vs. data?

Check Out The Latest Loxo Update

 

Loxo

Loxo update makes the tech a no-brainer for any workflow

 

 

Loxo is a user-friendly CRM that we are fans of here at RecruitingDaily.  It is simple to navigate yet still packs in exciting features like task automation and AI. It’s a great fit for teams both big and small, and is used by a number of big-name industry professionals.

The app has a simple display, not unlike many other CRMs. It is easy to navigate and includes many drag-and-drop capabilities. However, within this simple interface are many unique and high-quality abilities. Furthermore, Loxo has a Chrome Extension that will allow you to easily add to your talent pool from any site.

From within the app, you can create jobs, which will serve both as a way to define your search terms and organize your potential candidates.

  • When creating the job, you can be as specific as you want, inputting things like job title, location, responsibilities, compensation, years of experience, and more.
  • Loxo’s advanced AI will search for candidates that match your specifications.
  • You can also add candidates yourself from any site using the Loxo Chrome Extension.
  • You can easily duplicate jobs if you need to create multiples with similar requirements.
  • Loxo will help you easily sort and keep track of which stage of the process each candidate falls under.

Within each profile, Loxo contains a detailed run-down of the potential candidate’s qualifications and contact info.

  • Loxo’s AI will search to enhance each profile, finding as much information and as many forms of contact as possible.
  • This information is conveniently displayed, both in brief on the job page, and in detail on the candidate page.
  • You can also easily perform and automate a variety of outreach tasks, such as sending emails and texts, or scheduling events.

Overall, Loxo is a near-perfect CRM. It packs a lot of power into a simple and user-friendly interface and is frequently updated to incorporate the newest features and technologies. Additionally, it is reasonably priced, making it especially great for individuals and smaller teams. ~ Noel Cocca

 

Look inside with Dean Da Costa:

 

 

 

Despite Elon Musk’s troubles, Tesla is still a “hot” company for job-seekers

Per Indeed:

As Indeed notes:

Besides Tesla, which marries modern tech with car manufacturing, we see five other tech firms in the top 10: Microsoft, Facebook, Honeywell, Apple and Cisco.

Phrased another way:

What’s your take on these lists? Do you think they’re accurate, logical, completely “Oh God everyone knows this,” or reflective of the modern hiring landscape?

Get With the Program, Automate Your High-Volume Hiring Events

High-volume recruitment – the sourcing and hiring of candidates to fill 250 or more positions in one campaign – is often a must in this increasingly competitive market for qualified applicants. Hiring events that gather candidates in one brick and mortar or online place can be the ideal way to efficiently and quickly assess and interview many applicants in a very short time.

While we typically think of career fairs when we think of hiring events, there are many other high-volume event possibilities. Which you choose depends on whether you’re putting out hiring fires (need to onboard multiple workers as soon as possible) or want to grow your talent database for future needs. Done well, your high-volume talent base growth efforts will significantly curtail your need for those fire-retardant events.

Hiring Events to Grow Your Talent Database

The possibilities here are about as voluminous as the number of people you solicit for ideas. Be creative! The more unusual your event, the better the possibilities of media coverage. Think of this as experiential marketing of your employer brand, with the bonus of growing your talent database, which then resides and is managed by a robust CRM system such as Oleeo.

Your market is going to primarily be passive candidates. Don’t scoff! They’re 70 percent of the current pool of candidates; 89 percent in the severely-understaffed tech industry. They’re not as easy to coax to your firm as those unemployed pavement pounders, however. Especially if you’re hiring for IT or healthcare positions, where openings far outnumber qualified candidates, it will be crucial that you promote your company, and not just your career opportunities.

One of the most engaging examples of experiential marketing is HBO’s Escape the Room game at SXSW 2017. The mega event experience recreated three popular HBO shows – Silicon Valley, Veep, and Game of Thrones. Each had its own separate room, which, when combined, created one gigantic interactive mystery and contest.  

Imagine the pre-event promotion, candidate engagement, and candidate assessment possible by making something similar a part of your hiring event! Focus the mystery and the contest on your industry and your products, and you’ll market your brand as well as teach your candidates what you’re all about. Engage your employees as well, to brainstorm the concept, help build its elements, and socially share the event. Make the various stages of its development an ongoing video that resides on your career site, talent community and employee referral dashboard powered by Oleeo .  

Hackathons and other competitions, with significant networking opportunities and enticing prizes, would draw many developers and other IT experts. Beyond assessing participant’s technical skills and their ability to collaborate with team members, you also might end up with a creative, workable new concept or two.

Want to convert your hackathon to an immediate-hire event? Simply transition your prizes from cool new gadgets and toys, to career coaching appointments, resume writing help, free haircut or makeover, gas cards, and so forth.  Use dedicated technology such as Oleeo Event Management Instant to help make these conversions as simple as possible, available from as low as $1000 per month and implemented in 48 hours.

Career Fairs

The more traditional high-volume hiring event is the career fair, which introduces the candidates and employers to each other, and creates a one-stop-shop for applications, interviews, assessments, and even immediate hires. It can be virtual or brick and mortar. It might even be both. What veers it away from the traditional ho-hum “long lines of candidates visiting endless rows of recruiter tables” is the technology you introduce.

Rather than thinking of your fair as the day and place where you’ll hire many, think of it as the lure that draws quality applicants. Enable pre-event registration, resume upload, application and even interview scheduling. You might also offer (but not require) the opportunity to jump the event-day interview waiting line by way of a pre-screening one-way on demand video interview powered by HireVue or Cammio or even just cut queues altogether using mobile-compatible QR codes to plan interview schedules in advance Don’t stand on event-date ceremony, if a great candidate has a conflict, however. Remember, your fair is the means, not the end.

Event-management applications, smartphone-enabled, are great tools for your hiring event. Some even provide gamification. Not only do they help plan, document, and share the event, but they keep candidates engaged and informed, and, by powering candidate profiles, provide recruiters with a look at the digital acuity and communication skills of each candidate. A few of the added perks to note are:

  • That the candidates see the employer as high tech and current
  • Event management applications can be quicker to activate (Oleeo Instant can be live in 48 hours). They can even be added onto your existing CRM or ATS, making the decision easy.
  • Empowering candidates to use their own devices to check in at events can help reduce long lines and enhance the candidate experience.
  • They can also create a mechanism for real time feedback and rid recruiters of paper resumes and the associated administrative (and physical) burden that comes with them.

The emulatable Career Fair Plus mobile app specializes in bringing college students to career fairs and works with more than 100 U.S. colleges. By way of smartphone the student candidates can upload their resumes, get interviewing tips, and make their way around with the guidance of interactive maps. This lets candidates schedule their job interviews, to bypass the fair’s waiting line.

To summarize, the key elements of your high-volume hiring event are:

  • Creative employer branding and marketing;
  • Automation that reduces event planning time and maximizes sourcing and promotion productivity; and
  • Smart, AI-powered tools and platforms that invite, assess, schedule and interview candidates.

The right automated tools will bring the right volume of the right candidates to your hiring event. Can you really afford to be missing out?

What do you want to see from us in 2019?

As we prepare some plans for 2019, what could we cover that would help you become a better sourcer or recruiter?

Some possibilities:

  • Tech tools
  • Picking the right tech stack
  • Cold emails
  • General candidate engagement
  • What the f*ck is the deal with AI?
  • Case studies or success stories of those who are slaying it
  • Financial/budgeting help
  • Etc.

Let us know in the comments. We want to make sure the 2019 programming we undertake (webinars, blogs, videos, events, etc.) is value-add.

Happy weekend.

How to X Ray With Rockstar Finder : Dean Da Costa Video

rockstar finder

 

Rockstar Finder is a search tool with some great potential

 

Rockstar Finder is an advanced search tool “built for recruiters by recruiters” that allows you to efficiently search across various search engines and social networks from one platform. The tool offers both a free and paid version, and though it currently still has some flaws, it does have potential.

Once you sign up, the site allows you to choose the terms of your search.

  • You select which source(s) you would like to search through, including LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter, MeetUp, and more.
  • Depending on which sources you are searching through, you may have additional options. For example, on LinkedIn, you could specify that you wish to search only for people with many connections, or only those “seeking new opportunities.”
  • Search inputs include all the basics, such as Location, Keywords, Title, Education, etc.

Once you have the terms of your search defined, you can choose to either “Search Now” or “Save Search.” This “Save Search” option can make future searches quick and painless.

The actual search process, though useful, is not that unique. Rockstar Finder simply creates an X-ray search on Google (or another engine) that pulls out the relevant pages according to the terms of your search. Additionally, and Dean points out, the current version of Rockstar Finder has a few flaws. There are some glitches in the site, causing the user to have to close and reopen the tool fairly often.   There are also a few site features that do not seem to work, such as the “Guide” tool.

Overall, Rockstar Finder is an X-ray tool. ~ Noel Cocca  

 

Look inside with Dean Da Costa:

 

Here’s a hot take: Tech isn’t saving recruiting; it’s killing it slowly

Thing I’ve never understood: until automation gets to scale (not there yet), people are a company’s biggest expense (in the form of salaries, but also hiring/recruiting). We penny-pinch everything in companies, right? And we claim to apply data to everything? Why is recruiting so rooted in subjective bullshit, then? Why are interview questions so generic? How come most of the game is about someone saying “I like him” as opposed to applying data, info about the position, context, etc. to it?

In sum: the largest amount of money we spend, often in cost-averse situations, has almost no rooting in science and objectivity? And yes, yes… you can howl back at me about “People Analytics,” but it’s very far off for most companies.

Let’s get some answers.

Why is the hiring process so broken?

Read this, then this.

OK. What else you got?

Great article from Wharton about the flaws of the hiring process here. So many great quotes. This one pops:

As organizations have gutted the recruiting function, many players with different interests weigh into the hiring process, and individual ‘hiring managers’ who will be the supervisors have disproportionate influence. Recruiters are specialists in understanding recruitment and selection. Hiring managers are not, and they are ‘going with their gut’ to sort through candidates. The reason that job seekers do not know what to do in order to be hired is because hiring managers do not know what they are doing, and as a result, they all do something different.”

Bam.

Two things to realize here

We think “Big Data” is going to win the day, but humans contextualize work around self-worth and relevancea ton. As a result, the idea of “trusting your gut” — you know what needs to be done, stud — is huge for people. That’s going to beat out Big Data for another couple of decades.

Second thing to understand is the rise of the tech stack. A lot of times now, hiring managers need something — but they have no fucking clue what they need, because the tech and processes associated with it are confusing to them. “What’s a Ruby coder? Do I need that?” Tech is playing chess and we playing checkers, and by “we” I mean hiring managers.

You have to remember too (third thing!) that most hiring managers are middle managers, and there isn’t much value in middle management anymore. That definitely applies to hiring.

Interlude: Another good quote from that Wharton article

Here you go:

“In some sense, the problem within the structure is that in order to get past it, you have to learn to be good at managing those parts of the process that are particular to the ritual. Until people change how they hire [employees] and bring them into a workplace in a way that allows them to show their skills, it’s going to be a perennial problem. How many times will writing a persuasive resume be something you have to do in your job?”

Basically it’s easier to get a job now if you “hack” the system, as opposed to, well — you’re the best candidate. That’s not good. Who cares about hacking the system? That shouldn’t be the end game. But it is, which brings us to the next issue…

Bad tech

It’s not hard to spin out software and up-sell it to people. It requires some blood, sweat, and tears, sure. But it’s not impossible and it can be done at cost. Ever seen this stat about Google and General Motors? At their respective market cap peaks, GM employed 850,000 people globally. Google was about 58,000. You don’t need to pay as many salaries when you’re spinning out a platform.

HR tech has been flooded by so many “solutions,” only some of which are actually solutions. Applicant tracking systems are the devil. AI is rushing in now, which might be good or might just create cultures of homophily.

Tech has been great for recruiting in terms of opening up new connections and potential candidates, but in a broader sense, tech has almost murdered recruiting as a function.

And again, because the check-writers in most orgs view this as “a HR thing,” they can be sold on whatever the fuck, which means some white bros in Seattle are making bank and you’re not hiring any better people. Flawed system.

What do we do in 2018?

We start by caring and understanding the costs.

Then we start thinking more critically, as opposed to rushing into every hiring process.

We also hopefully think more about what we actually need.

This is all tied to job role, yes.

Basically we just need to give a shit about hiring and recruiting, and not view it as “some HR thing” that “busy hiring managers” can’t be bothered with. All that bullshit gets in the way of real effectiveness.

What else you got?

Recruitment Startups JobUFO, Sourcr, MyInterview Get Funding

Three Recruitment Startups Receiving Funding

JobUfoBerlin-based startup JobUFO launched two years ago as a mobile app focused on video-based recruitment. Its motto is “No more fake cover letters, real cover videos.” Employers embed the JobUFO application form on their career page, their blog, within their social posts, and anywhere else they post their job ad. After registering via smartphone, applicants create a system-directed CV and record a personal video. That application and video are directed to the employer’s applicant tracking system (ATS.)

While the app is set up to register candidates from Germany, Denmark, Austria, the Netherlands, France, Switzerland, Luxembourg, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Spain, and Italy, the only employers now participating are in Germany.

That may well change, however, as JobUFO has just raised €2 million ($2.31 million USD) in seed funds led by Hevella Capital and IBB. According to TechCrunch, the money is earmarked for company growth.

“Recruiters do not read motivational letters because someone else could have written it,” JobUFO CEO and co-founder Thomas Paucker told TechCrunch. The other obstacle with the traditional application process, he said, is the length of time and the difficulty in completing the job application.

In contrast, according to Paucker, “Recruiters get more and reliable applications [via JobUFO] without changing their daily routine. For both sides, this is an uncomplicated process that continues to spur us on to expand.”

In the past year, the app has delivered more than 60,000 job applications to over 30 Germany-based firms such as Deutsche Bahn, Hertz, Ikea and Apollo.

SourcrSydney, Australia-based recruiter marketplace startup Sourcr just landed a $310,000 seed round from Sydney Angels, a group of 100 investors. The money will expand the firm into the U.K. and the U.S.

Sourcr uses an algorithm that looks at third-party recruiters’ performance metrics and reviews of their work to pair them with employers who need hiring help. Employers post jobs at no charge, and the most appropriate recruiters suggest candidates. If hired, employers pay the recruiter’s fee, and Sourcr retains 20 percent of that.

While the typical time to hire is 68 days, Sourcr claims to pare that down to 24 days.

“When you’re looking to replace mission-critical roles or high performing team members 68 days just won’t cut it,” co-founder Chris Almond told Business Insider Australia.

According to Business Insider, the funds will be used to hire sales and marketing staff, develop new products, improve the machine learning capability of the algorithm, and expand geographically.

MyInterview

Tel Aviv and Sydney-based video interview platform MyInterview has raised $1.6 million in a round led by Cliff Rosenberg, who used to be managing director at LinkedIn Australia. The money will be spent to expand into the U.S. and the UK.   It has already been integrated into the ATS platform of U.S.-based Workable. Next up are partnerships with various job boards throughout the globe.

MyInterview co-founder Benjamin Gillman told Smart Company that the next product launch will be a PayPal-like button for candidates. This will let them easily add their personal video when they submit their job application.

“That’s going to enable us to give more insight via interviews and make the experience a lot more data driven for candidates … as well as for employers to get real insights to help them along in their decision making,” he said.

The MyInterview widget can be embedded as-is into any recruitment product at no charge, in an easy five-minute process. Customization, still free, takes approximately 15 minutes.

~Congratulations to each and we look forward to taking a look inside soon.