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Setting your 2019 performance goals

HR departments are great at helping other departments set goals for their teams — in fact, sometimes they’re so busy helping others that they forget to set their own goals. Just as the cobbler’s children go without shoes, so too do HR teams put others first when it comes to professional development.

This doesn’t have to be the case for your HR department as you move into 2019. You can ensure a productive year for your own team, as well as the other teams at your company, by setting performance goals for your HR department.

Whether it’s the first time you’ve ever set performance goals for HR or you’re already in the habit, you need to make sure your plan supports the team and the company’s broader strategic plan. Read on to find out how you can put your HR department on the path to success in the new year.

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AI in talent management – hype or hope?

AI in talent management – hype or hope?

The concept of Artificial intelligence actually debuted at a conference at Dartmouth University in 1956. At the time, there was a lot of optimism. Some people at the conference believed robots and AI machines would be doing the work of humans by the mid-1970s. That did not happen. What happened instead was that funding dried up and a period called “The AI Winter” began. “AI Winter” was a complete technological and financial flop for the idea of artificial intelligence. It had so much promise and then it fizzled.

The AI Winter ostensibly lasted into the 2000s, when IBM’s Watson peaked a lot of interest in artificial intelligence again. Now we’re at an interesting place. AI is on the scene, yes, but its use has taken many forms.  The adoption of AI technologies has also not been without its critics. Prominent Silicon Valley executives, like Sam Altman of Y Combinator and Elon Musk of Tesla/RocketX, while promoting the benefits of AI – also give caution of its potential ramifications if ungoverned. Regardless of those debates, some are now calling AI “the new electricity” as it is something everyone wants to understand and is   seemingly on every 2018 trends in technology list.

Why should we care about AI in Talent Management?

Marvin Minsky , one of the bigger names in the AI field (he co-founded MIT’s AI lab), has called “intelligence” a “suitcase word,” meaning you can stuff anything in there. In other words, it’s too broad and it doesn’t lend itself to precise definition. That’s fueling the hype but also the confusion.

Demystifying AI is the first step to understanding how it can benefit your current and future workforce decisions.  

Of course, you can take the safe road and ‘wait and see’ if the entire idea of AI collapses as a scalable concept, and we end up seeing perhaps some incremental changes but not the transformational shift promised by AI proponents.

However, today in your own organization, there is probably some key business area that has already implemented some form of AI, such as operations, marketing, customer support, sales, manufacturing, or distribution, Once your organizational leaders see the benefits of intelligent technologies, the expectation will be that talent practices and decisions also take advantage of those same benefits.   Being knowledgable about what advanced, intelligent technologies are already available to you today is the first step towards knowing how to prepare for the demands and expectations of the workforce of the future.

Let’s start with recruiting….

Cornerstone is hosting a webinar on 11/1 with IBM to discuss

  • What exactly is AI, machine learning and process automation,
  • How AI is currently being used to attract, select and on-board talent, and
  • What the future state in recruiting may look like for organizations, recruiters, and candidates. —

Register to get answers to these questions and more!

What happens to recruiters if robots control talent pools in the future?

This article explores the impact of automation on the future of work, the staffing industry, and how it’s helping recruiters to access new talent pools amidst a skilled talent shortage.

The short answer: they’ll embrace them.

The world of work is changing. Technology is proliferating, leaving many skills and jobs in its wake. Demand for new labor models is on the rise. The way people search for work, the types of jobs they’re willing to take, and the companies they want to work for continue to evolve. Unemployment is at an all-time low. People are quitting jobs at record rates. Skilled talent is scarce. And the globalization of business, coupled with technology advancements, means job candidates have more opportunities than ever to find work, regardless of their location.

Giovanni Ambrosini, National IT Solutions Manager and Former Acting CIO, The Adecco Group, says there are “six big global megatrends affecting the overall recruitment business landscape: geopolitical; automation and robotics; talent scarcity; reskilling; the gig economy (the move to a much more freelance employment space); and Big Data.”

The new world of work inextricably involves new technologies, and while candidates may love many of them, recruiters may not. But global staffing industry leaders and experts know digital transformation —the integration of technology into all areas of a business for the purposes of improving operations and how companies deliver value to customers—is paramount to future success. And they agree: recruiters must embrace technologies that automate the recruitment life cycle if they want to gain access to new talent pools and remain a viable option for clients in an increasingly competitive industry.

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It’s the Conversions, Stupid

It’s the Conversions, Stupid

Candidate conversion metrics are crucial to your successful hiring process. The reason is simple: What you don’t measure you can’t improve. Without studying conversion rates with the help of efficient AI-enabled recruiting tools and platforms you will still know that you hired five new developers, but you might not be aware that it took twice the time as your competitors, and that you had to interview three times as many candidates to find the right ones. You might also not realize that your employee referrals were responsible for three of the five, or that your job tweet didn’t deliver any candidates. Knowing all these things could reshape your next recruiting effort.

What is a recruiting conversion?

Simply put, conversion tracks success. If XYZ Accounting Services reaches out with a job post to 300 college students as they are job searching online, the number of the students that apply, calculated as a percentage of all 300 students contacted, is the conversion rate. Sixty student applications would, thus, be a 20 percent conversion rate.

We’ve put together a list of crucial conversion rates, with thoughts on how to maximize your success at each stage.

First engagement to career action – This is the point at which a candidate interacts with your company for the first time, compared with the number of these folks who respond to a career call to action as a result. Notice we did not say interact with your company for job purposes. That’s because everything you do, all your branding, should include a career call to action. Every news release should, in its boilerplate, offer a link to career opportunities. The display of each product blog post could include a burst of job announcements, for example. The conversion here is the ratio of prospective candidates who access any information about and by your firm and respond by clicking on or otherwise accessing the job-opening content.

To grow this ratio, you need compelling career content. Rather than just “here’s the job” your approach might be “Stuck in a work rut? Want to grow?” or “Want to learn coding? We have great on-the-job training.” HackerRank, in its 2018 study of what developers want from their jobs, determined that these IT folks sought career growth, with the opportunity to attend developer conferences. So perhaps your call to action might be: “Did you make it to SXSW? 10 of our programmers did. We might send you next!” and a link to the job description. Universum research with Oleeo also found that students in the US valued having leaders who will support their development, a creative and dynamic work environment and high feature earnings as their top 3 drivers for choosing an employer.  So, it is important that you try one approach, track its conversion. If it’s not acceptable, change your copy and keep doing this. Make sure you’re tracking specific to each source as well, to decide which sources to boost and which to cut back or even eliminate.

Application Access to Completion – This compares the number of candidates who start a job application and the number who complete it. This is one of the most crucial conversions, as studies show that two of every three candidates start an application but leave it without finishing. They abandon the process primarily because it’s too lengthy and / or too cumbersome.

“Candidates expect things to work, and to be quickly responsive,” Glassdoor product marketing manager Kira Federer said on the “Inside the Candidate’s Head” Webinar. “Candidates have many choices; we have to convince them to consider us.”

The two crucial elements of appeal, according to Federer, are a compelling brand message, and an exceptional candidate experience.

If you find candidate’s leaving your application, have a few employees who hold the same or similar positions test the process. Tweak by way of their feedback.

Mobile optimize and smartphone-enable your application process. Keep candidates engaged with one-way on-demand video assessments by way of HireVue , Launchpad or Cammio, and gamification with the help of Pymetrics , Arctic Shores or Cut-e. Introduce natural-language-protocol chatbots at drop-off points, to prompt with offers to answer questions.

Interview Invitation to Acceptance – The ratio of those candidates who passed screening and were invited to an interview, and those who accepted and scheduled the interview. Important factors here are the level of engagement and transparency you’ve had with the candidates, and the time it took to go from application to invitation. Nor are these factors relevant only to this conversion stage.

“By the time the candidate has engaged with us for the first time, they’ve given us permission to reach out,” said Federer. “We must continuously provide value. Even before we believe we’re going to make an offer, we must find a way to be of benefit.”

Recruiters must move quickly, verify receipt of each communication, be clear about timeframe at each step of the process, and keep their contact promises.

Federer suggested that a recruiter might say, “The process from application to offer is usually about two weeks. Does that work for you?” Should the candidate reply, “I have another offer, and they’re expecting an answer by Monday” then the recruiter knows to expedite this candidate’s application.

What’s also important here, especially with passive candidates, is that the scheduling process be quick, easy and mobile optimized. Vendors such as BulkSMS, TextRecruit and My Ally power bulk SMS contacts, and NLP scheduling for SMS, chat and / or email.

Interview Schedule to Show – This is a comparison of those who scheduled an interview and those who either cancelled or didn’t show. So many factors could come into play here, including the lag time between scheduling and interview date, recruiter engagement of candidate during this stage, and competitive offers. Should candidates cancel, your having engaged well will give you an easier approach to them, to ask the uncomfortable question: “Why’d you change your mind?”

Federer suggested that recruiters reach out to the candidate the night before the interview to ask if they had questions. If it’s someone who’s traveling for the interview, send them information on great local places to eat, she said.  

Job Offer to Acceptance – This is a comparison of those offered a job and those who accepted the offer. Factors to study include level, frequency and timing of your engagement with the candidate, clarity of offer, and value of competitive offers. Study your job descriptions and job posts, and tweak as needed. Make sure that your candidates are engaging with your current recently-hired employees. Encourage these employees to create day-in-the-life videos, and share those on review sites such as Glassdoor and Kununu.

Continued engagement will open the door for you to comfortably ask, “Why’d you say no?”

Oleeo has some excellent tips on how to engage candidates after the interview, including a request that they participate in a survey that evaluates their interviewers.  

Candidates to Later Hires or Referrals – Not a standard conversion rate, this is nevertheless an important metric to study. It looks at the number of applicants that were considered for positions, were not immediately hired, but were offered an alternate position later, or who ended up referring someone else who was offered a position. This metric studies your ability to evolve your recruitment from post-and-pray to an ongoing talent database. Crucial to making this work for you are robust CRM and ATS systems such as Oleeo, an enticing and interactive online talent community, perhaps a reward-driven non-employee referral program (NERP),and ongoing engagement with those not hired the first time around.

Drafted customer success manager Aubrie Przybysz extols the benefits of external referrals. Her company is dedicated to making them work for its employer clients.

“A NERP adds everyone who looks at the job posting in the first place into your recruitment team – and that’s a great deal cheaper than hiring a third-party recruiting agency,” she posted on Hubspot.

Conversion metrics are a crucial part of improving your recruitment process. Beyond tracking well, you must frequently study the rates, and, based on those results, tweak sources, content and other parts of the process as needed. Your timeliness and efficiency will need to rely heavily on AI-empowered vendors that can expedite, clarify, and organize your efforts. 

ZAPinfo Needs To Be A Part of Your Sourcing Stack

zapinfo recruitingtools

ZAPinfo makes scraping data easier than ever

 

ZAPinfo is a very efficient profile scraping tool & contact extractor that you can use on a variety of websites, and should every day. With this newly rebranded tool (read about that HERE) it becomes even more powerful, allowing you to scrape and enrich information gathered from a variety of sources. This proves extremely useful when used on a list of speakers at a conference, or participants in a particular project, for example.

Once on the webpage containing the list you want to gather contacts from, you can open up ZAPinfo.

  • You will have a few different options on how to capture the profiles from the page. Different options may work better for different sites and scenarios, but “Bulk capture from page” and “Extract record(s) from page” may both work.
  • Once one of these options is chosen, you can choose which type of information you want to capture, such as contacts, emails, and profile URLs.
  • Before importing all of the gathered information, ZAPinfo will show you the information it has found, allowing you to choose what you wish to include or what to discard.
  • Once the information is imported, and the profiles are created, you can “enrich” this information. ZAPinfo will search through a variety of other tools, helping you to build fuller profiles, and often finding valuable information like email addresses.

Once the information has all been gathered, you can view it from within ZAPinfo or export it for your convenience.

This powerful tool is a no-brainer for anyone needing to quickly gather information from lists. ~ Noel Cocca

 

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Assessing Experience: How-to Understand the Depth of a Candidate’s IT Skills

Far too often, resumes function as surface-level documents that paint an overview of the candidate. Basic stats and info, equating to little more than words on paper and hardly a full character assessment. This issue is something that recruiters have struggled with and debated for years – in particular since the advent of the ATS and the rapid rise of talent acquisition technologies. How do we fully recognize the breadth of a candidate’s experience from keywords plugged in against a job description? The short of it is, we don’t. However, without getting too into sourcing specifics, the long of it is that understanding the depth of a candidate’s skills, particularly when it comes to screening IT and tech talent, requires discussion. And of course, not just any discussion, but rather a structured interview designed to evaluate the practical application of skills, relevant hands-on work and education all at the same time.

Emphasis on interviewing

After identifying and engaging an IT candidate, recruiters and hiring managers need a way to determine if the candidate aligns with the position’s requirements – something the standard interview doesn’t always do well. Further complicating the issue is that screening and selecting highly qualified, talented candidates won’t happen overnight. Before presenting the best of the best to the hiring manager, recruiters get tasked with assessing each candidate’s experience, even if they don’t fully comprehend the technical skills in question. Not the most straightforward to resolve and yet, the interview is invaluable in the process of hiring IT workers.

This begs us to ask, can we improve the interview in a way that works for both recruiters, hiring managers and IT candidates? Of course, and it starts with reconfiguring who does the interviewing and how they present the more technical material. To complement the work of an organization’s recruiters, it helps to add the support of well-versed IT professionals with the same, or similar skillsets, trained to interview.

Experience requires conversations

Think about it. When it comes to hiring, there is just no way to engage candidates without an in-depth discussion – why not include someone familiar with both the work product required of the role and the interview method? Be it a video interview or a formal, in-person panel, an experienced someone should do the screening in a structured, measurable manner. Given that hiring needs vary, there will be organizations that care about the candidate’s work, while others may put more value on where they did their learning. In both cases, the process benefits from the informed perspective of someone who understands the technical prowess needed to do the job and do it well.  

This collaborative approach takes pressure off of the recruiters, gives candidates the opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge and saves time for everyone involved. That combined with an established interviewing methodology to keep the conversation legally compliant while evaluating the candidate’s technical skills.

Capacity to perform

Going beyond the interview and interviewer, included within this set methodology is the all-important assessment. However, unlike the standalone solutions that may come to mind, this assessment works as part of the aforementioned conversation with the candidate. With the aid of a common scoring rubric, candidate skills take center stage, helping to showcase individual talents, predict job potential job performance and eliminate bias from the process.

Creating a comfortable environment for the candidates enables them to perform at a higher level, bringing that otherwise flat resume to life and highlighting their actual abilities. Those with the right skills and experience have the chance to shine, and rise to the top of the shortlist, while those blustering on paper transition out of the process earlier on. The result is a small pool of candidates who both walk the walk and talk the talk, well before they ever interact with a hiring manager.

Clearing a direct path

There are countless ways to interact with candidates – and yet, screening and evaluating IT skills continues to elude many recruiters (even some with technical right there in their title). This is not to say that the recruiter doesn’t continue to play a significant and vital role in hiring tech candidates. Instead, this interview-based approach empowers their decision making, creates an opportunity to spotlight the organization’s employer brand and enhance the candidate experience. All the while, revealing a deeper understanding of tech skills in a way that benefits all parties involved. Easing managerial concerns about qualifications, improving time to hire, reducing the number of resources and boosting the return on investment, to name a few.

Experience speaks volumes, rather than remaining relegated to the resume, and by focusing on the interview and adding in tech expertise, recruiters clear a direct path for hiring managers.

A hardcore hacker leads eTeki’s XprTeki Network for technical interviews.

3 Hiring Mistakes That Data Can Help You Overcome

Data Driven Hiring

 

 

There’s a new role opening up on a team. Which means your business has a need and it’s your team’s job to fill the role.

You know that tapping into data to make smarter talent decisions is no longer a “nice to have,” but rather a fundamental element of success. In fact, 50% of talent professionals and hiring managers ranked data as the top trend impacting how they hire in our most recent Global Recruiting Trends Report. And HR professionals are becoming more data-savvy to step up to the challenge. Over the past five years, there has been a 3x increase in HR professionals across LinkedIn’s member base with analytics skills, according to our recent Rise of HR Analytics report.

Often, however, many companies find that getting the value they need from data remains a challenge. One challenge is accessibility; a recent Deloitte study revealed that only 8 percent of organizations report they have usable data about talent. Fortunately, there are several developments underway across the HR technology landscape to make data more accessible, not just to sophisticated people analytics teams, but also to recruiters, sourcers, HRBPs, hiring managers, and more.

A second challenge is knowing which questions to tackle and which data to use to answer them.  Here are three common hiring mistakes we see talent leaders make which can be meaningfully improved by using data.

Over-reliance on what’s worked in the past

Have you ever heard the saying, change is the only constant in life? Well, it’s true of where to find top talent as well. If your data shows that hiring from consulting firms for business operations roles has worked well, you may not be keen to explore new ways to find even better candidates. But with an ever-changing talent marketplace, something that worked in the past doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best approach going forward.

To make sure you’re using data to find the best avenues, not the same ones, consider testing different paths. Tapping into data that shows you where to find talent outside your own industry is one way forward. When it comes to software engineers, for example, we recently published a report showing that during the past two years more than 432k engineers changed jobs – with changing industries. While tech is certainly a popular destination for software engineers, our data actually shows that software developer roles outside of tech are growing 25% faster than those in the tech sector.

Which industries are pulling engineers from Tech? Financial Services and Professional Services are among the most common while the Public Sector and Healthcare were also in the top 10 industries pulling away this talent. In terms of location, we also found L.A. and Boston are great places to find this talent, not just the Bay Area or Seattle.

When you continue to hire from the same talent pools, you run the risk of homogenizing your workforce and limit your ability to diversify your team. Be confident that you can expand your view of the talent landscape by considering candidates in markets you don’t typically hire from, or evaluating which candidates from other industries have skill sets that would translate well to your roles.

Approaching hiring one role at a time

With many companies hiring thousands of employees each year, it’s easy to get lost in the day to day inflow of hiring demands. However, zooming out from a focus on filling each role to a more systematic view can develop deeper competency.

Microsoft’s default approach to hiring cybersecurity talent, for example, was to hire in Redmond, WA near their headquarters. Wanting to recruit a sizable number of professionals ready and willing to join their team, they discovered they could more easily recruit from a much larger population of talent with the cybersecurity skills they needed in another, less competitive region where they had an existing office.

With this data in hand, they had the confidence to recommend adding headcount in another market, where it was less costly to hire the talent they needed. They also had data to see how their brand is perceived there, who the main employers are, and what it would take to be successful in that market.

Missing out on engaging existing talent and developing creative career pathways.

Not knowing who’s already on your team is a missed opportunity for finding the right talent. I look at my team’s talent pool, how that compares with other companies, what their skills are, how they’re changing, and look for opportunities for them to develop additional skills.

This is particularly important in an era where many employees are unsure of their career paths and, particularly younger employees, are likely to change directions. In a recent study, we found that today’s younger generation is three times more likely to change jobs than Baby Boomers. We also learned that nearly half (47%) of professionals 35 – 44 aren’t sure what their career path should look like, and about a quarter (23%) of those professionals said they feel like they’re on “a treadmill going nowhere.”

To keep your valuable employees around, help them find their “career pivot.” Offer opportunities to develop new skills that can lead to different career pathways with your organization. We found this to be a priority for many of today’s professionals, especially younger members – 40 percent of those 24 and under say that they’d talk to their boss about making a career change if these opportunities existed.

Having this type of data about your own team allows you to start solving some of your talent and skills gaps with career development initiatives, rather than hiring. Data can support smarter approaches to engaging and creating creative career pathways for existing talent.

So, does this mean a degree in data science is required for a recruiting team to continue providing value in our data-driven economy? We think not. But taking the time to understand the current and future state of the people in and outside of your organization can give you a huge step ahead of your competition.

 

New Automated Scheduling Feature: Ari

New Automated Scheduling Feature Speeds up, Personalizes Interview Appointment Process

While perhaps not faster than a speeding bullet, TextRecruit’s brand new automated scheduling feature is your newest arsenal in the war on slow, stodgy recruiting conversations. For both candidates and recruiters, phone or email tag to find a convenient interview time are a thing of the past. Additionally, candidates can easily search job openings by zip code, to see what’s nearby.

With our new automated scheduler, recruiters simply text that great candidate a link to the scheduler. The candidate gets the friendly, engaging text: “Hi Joe, you’d be a great fit for our developer role in Phoenix. Please schedule an interview on my calendar here.” Joe opens the link to the scheduler and picks from several day and time options carefully chosen by AI-powered assistant ARI’s automated access to the recruiter’s busy calendar. The appointment then populates in that calendar. No more hours of back and forth, and no more candidate drop-off because of cumbersome application processes or the feel of being ghosted.

Want to reach out to multiple candidates? That’s a messaging breeze. Not only can you screen each candidate by way of a succinct texted question and answer session, but you can then send any you choose a personalized interview invitation, with scheduling link. 

Organizing and assessing responses are simplified with the TextRecruit dashboard. Recruiters can see response rates, see when rate changes occur, and view messages in their inbox. They can star their top-choice candidates, and add new candidates, including those imported from their own ATS or CRM. The dashboard enables grouping by several different criteria that include location, industry and job title. Want to text an interview invitation, with scheduler link, to all Indianapolis-based programmers in your passive-candidate database? Easy-peasy.

Automated scheduling is now part of TextRecruit’s LinkedIn Chrome and Firefox extension as well. With the extension, recruiters can display a LinkedIn member’s profile, integrate his contact and profile information from the TextRecruit dashboard, add her to a job campaign, and text him an invitation to interview, with link to the automated scheduler – all without leaving LinkedIn.

We’re excited about how the combination of ARI’s natural-language capabilities and the new Automated Scheduling tool further enhances the speed, ease, efficiency, and personalization of the TextRecruit platform. We’re sure you will be too!

Introducing Automated Scheduling

What to expect on seasonal wages and hiring

Snag just released a survey report that shows employers expect the average hourly wage for seasonal workers to jump to $15.40 this year – that’s up almost 32% over last year. This is mainly because of the tight labor market, but other events and conditions are shaping what is looking like a super competitive war for talent to fuel the business behind this holiday season.

These jobs that will be difficult to fill include positions ranging from warehouse and operations (supply chain and logistics) to customer service and call center support, to retail workers on site.

Here are a few trends global recruiting and staffing firm Acara has seen with its clients:

  • Workers looking for side ‘gigs’ have them throughout the year now, thanks in large part to the gig economy and access to freelance work. Workers don’t have to wait for holiday seasonal ramp-up time to get access to jobs to earn extra income, and they aren’t. Because workers don’t have to “wait” for the last few months of the year, they can spread out their extra work throughout the year, posing an extra challenge for this holiday season.
  • Companies are paying more in an attempt to attract – and retain – these resources through the end of the busy season. (As evidenced by the Snag report.)
  • Employers are also relaxing their drug screening efforts in order to fill open positions
  • Some employers are going to lengths that would have been considered extreme even just last year, including offering retention bonuses to those workers who stay for the entire seasonal assignment (typically 3-4 months for seasonal jobs). Acara has seen offers include as much as a full week of pay as an end-of-season bonus. Employers are also providing free lunches and flexible shifts – perks being made popular by the first seasonal ramp-up in a full-fledged gig economy.
  • More than ever, employers are hiring workers for support in warehousing, supply chain, and order fulfillment.

Acara is a 60-year veteran staffing provider headquartered in Buffalo, NY. In Western New York alone, they place nearly 4,750 contingent workers and around 300 direct-hire placements each year with over 70 employers in the area.

What else are you expecting from holiday hiring, especially in the context of Amazon’s news-that-wasn’t-really-news? And are you sourcing for seasonal roles right now?

Custom Search Engine for Genealogic

Genealogic

 

Custom Search Engine via Dean Da Costa to find phone numbers

 

Genealogic is a site that stores information—mostly addresses and phones numbers—for a massive quantity of people globally. However, navigating the site itself is a bit difficult, and can take much longer than it should. From the site itself, you have to search through individual locations, and oftentimes the searches come up empty.

However, Dean Da Costa has created a Custom Search Engine for Genealogic that makes searching through this site much easier. This is a fairly simple tool—just an X-ray search of the Genealogic site—but it can save you a lot of time in the search process.

  • Using the Custom Search Engine, simply enter the last name of the person you wish to search for.
  • Choose the search result that seems closest to your goal; even if the exact match does not appear, you can still easily navigate from a name that is similar.
  • Once on the site, check if your desired person is displayed. If not, scroll to the bottom and try choosing a name or location that may help narrow it down.
  • Once you locate the correct person within Genealogic, you will see the person’s address and phone number!

Though beginning your search directly within Genealogic may allow you to find the correct contact, using the Custom Search Engine can streamline the process and provide more accurate results.

Genealogic contains a lot of valuable information, and this Custom Search Engine is ready for you to use. ~ Noel Cocca

 

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LinkedIn Announces Talent Hub ATS

Directly on the heels of its Talent Insights launch, LinkedIn just announced its very own applicant tracking system (ATS), and several other recruitment products and features.

The new ATS, dubbed Talent Hub, will enable customized no-charge job posting to LinkedIn, and a robust search and sort of an employer’s talent database. Candidates will easily import from the firm’s CRM.

Recruiter, LinkedIn’s candidate sourcing platform, has been upgraded, to mesh sourced candidates, media leads and job applicants. It is able to do this by way of an integration with an employer’s ATS.

Talent Insights can now home in on gender diversity, with plans to expand to additional underrepresented groups. By clicking on the new Gender tab specific to the LinkedIn employer client, the recruiter will be able to see the company’s overall and job-specific gender breakdowns, and benchmark against industry averages. Talent Insights has also launched training courses designed to curb unconscious bias.

Talent Hub is scheduled to launch in 2019.

Two New Tech Talent Launches: Linkedin & HackerRank

Linkedin ATS

LinkedIn brings up analytic sourcing rear with Talent Insights

In the works for a year, a mere 100 companies are using it. Sheesh.

LinkedIn, which began in 2003 as a business network, slowly added a recruitment marketplace, and was bought by Microsoft in 2016. It is now adding employer services to its repertoire. The latest service is called Talent Insights. A year in the making, Talent Insights helps employers manage their HR functions and market their career opportunities. Primarily, however it helps recruiters source passive candidates, specifically those working elsewhere.

It does this with two different analytic profile features: Talent Poo; and Company Report.

Talent Pool empowers recruiter searches of the LinkedIn dataset, to find candidates with characteristics like its current employees. It then determines where these candidates are now living and for whom they’re working, and what skills they might have in common. It helps recruiters determine passive candidates who might not be fully qualified but are likely to successfully train into the position.

Company Report completes the same type of analytics profile but specific to the employer’s firm rather than candidate. It then compares the company to its competitors, looking at the workforce of each, regarding schools, education levels, and skills.

Talent Insights is not so much a smart move as a necessary one, since others such as Hiretual and SeekOut have gotten here before LinkedIn. Bringing up the recruitment rear and being rather stodgy when it does so have long been typical of LinkedIn. Moreover, these new features are likely to be hampered by less than comprehensive information sources. According to TechCrunch, it will pull primarily from its own site (profiles, posts, and job ads) and from U.S. Dept. of Labor statistics.

Talent Insights is only available to 100 firms now, and we wonder if it will ever be comprehensive enough to compete with the analytic and sourcing services of its robust competitors. LinkedIn’s volume of 575 million users, 20 million companies and 15 million active job listings will be its only advantage. Perhaps that will be enough.

LinkedIn also just announced its acquisition of employee-engagement startup Glint.

Glint will provide LinkedIn clients a way to gauge employee satisfaction and thus, hopefully, increase retention and improve recruitment. Glint conducts employee surveys, and then uses machine learning, predictive analytics and natural language processing to analyze responses. From this come reports and scoring, of employees’ attitudes about their employer’s culture, management, and compensation packages, with suggestions for improvement.

According to the LinkedIn Business Blog, the acquisition will move rather slowly, and is expected to close no later than December 31, 2019.

 

HackerRank Launches Tech Talent Matrix

To give tech recruiters data and insights to experiment, expand and strategize

Nine-year-old startup HackerRank provides AI-enabled assessment and learning tools, and a chat, audio and video interview platform for software developer and other technical positions. With 3.4 million developers in its community, HackerRank received $30 million Series C funding from JMI Equity in February 2018.  Its newly launched Tech Talent Matrix draws from an analysis of more than 150 million assessments and candidate data points, to evaluate a firm’s hiring process.

Tech Talent Matrix looks at the type of developers the employer has been able to attract, how well it has assessed these new hires, and how well hiring managers and recruiters mesh in their team efforts at hiring.  By way of the Matrix, employers can also compare their recruiting data with competitors for the same candidate types, filtering comparisons based on industry and company size.

Tech Talent Matrix assigns employers two different scores:

 

  • Candidate Response Score measures a company’s candidate outreach by tracking the journey of each applicant, from the point at which they’re invited to take technical assessments. It looks at the conversion rate, i.e. the ratio of invited candidates to those who complete the assessment.
  • Assessment Quality Score measures how well each assessment is designed to evaluate candidates for that particular role. It evaluates based on the test design and candidate feedback, looking at whether the tests screened for the right skills and the work the developer will be doing in the position. Scoring is also based on whether the assessments engage candidates well and challenge them appropriately, and whether the candidate experience is right.

 

“We power one assessment every eight seconds on our platform, and have built a deep, unparalleled data set on what makes for a great candidate experience,” founder and CEO Vivek Ravisankar said in the product announcement. “Pairing machine learning with our experience and data, we’re arming businesses with the actionable intelligence they need to make smarter technical hiring decisions and ultimately transform into tech companies.”

For recruiters who need to know more about what developers want from their employers, HackerRank recently released its 2018 report on tech recruiting.

Attracting Developer Talent in 2018 is based on a survey of 39,000 developers.

Some important takeaways:

  • There are currently 500,000 open computer jobs, although only 43,000 computer science college students graduated this year;
  • Above all, developers seek from their employers a strong work / life balance, professional growth and learning, and good compensation;
  • One of the main reasons that talented developers change jobs is for the opportunity to learn and use new technologies that are beyond their daily job tasks. They also move for a training budget that allows them to enhance their skills, acquire new skills and attend relevant conferences.

 

“If you allow more flexible work schedules, support remote working and focus on outcomes as opposed to the number of hours worked, you’re bound to attract more developers,” researchers reported. “Men, however, are especially fond of more creativity, like ability to spend 20 percent of their working time on side projects. Women, on the other hand, especially value generous vacation and paid time off benefits.”

The full report is a valuable tech-hiring how-to for recruiters.

 

OK, so … why are candidates declining your job offers?

It’s all going so well. You’ve found a great candidate who shone in their interview. You’re excited to have them join the team. But then — they decline the job.

This is bound to happen occasionally, but if candidates are frequently turning down your offers, it may be a sign that something is going wrong in your hiring process. Before making the offer to your next candidate, take a moment to consider the reasons your first-choice candidate turned you down. It will help you find ways to refine your hiring tactics and get more offer acceptances in the future.

Here are some common reasons that stellar candidates may be declining your job offers.

Continue reading “OK, so … why are candidates declining your job offers?”

Candidates should be the center of the hiring process. Kick tires on Pounse.

Couple of funny things as we wind up some articles from HR Tech in Vegas in September:

  1. On the first morning, I was low-level hungover and somehow got up, at a different hotel, at about 5:30am. Completely unrelated to being vaguely hungover, I had dropped my Chromebook outside the hotel the night before exiting an Uber. The laptop appeared not to work anymore. I go downstairs at this hotel and, wonder of wonders, they have people gambling their lives away at 5:50am but the business center doesn’t open until 8am. Vegas is a remarkable place.
  2. I go over to The Venetian and use their business center, then decide I need a badge for the conference, so I go wait for that.
  3. The badges open at 7:30 but I got there at 6:45.
  4. I start talking to some guy named Todd.
  5. Todd had worked for a big company for years — let’s say maybe it was a ATS that got acquired by Oracle at some point — and we were talking about why people really buy these suites. He agreed with me: you want to believe it’s about something like candidate experience, but on the enterprise side, a lot of times people buy this stuff for compliance. They want to legally-defensibly (is that a word?) cover their ass.
  6. Todd and I went to get Starbucks, if you’re interested.

Now flash forward a bit and I’m walking the floor later that night. Rob Hernandez from Pounse yells my name. We had interacted online a few times. This is Pounse. This is Rob Hernandez. Cool dude. I like IRL meeting people from the tweeter world. They’re usually interesting.

Continue reading “Candidates should be the center of the hiring process. Kick tires on Pounse.”

Are we thinking about high potential employees the wrong way?

High potential employees, or HiPos in some parlance, are what all organizations seem to seek. This is why we hire so much around competence, i.e. metrics like GPA or where you went to school. It’s assumed that a competence-based model will get us “The A-Players” who will subsequently become high potential employees. There are about 131 flaws with this approach, unfortunately. First: the hiring process at most organizations is hideously broken to the point of alienating, as opposed to attracting, the best candidates. Second: we live in a “VUCA” business climate, meaning we actually need curious, adaptable hires. Our recruitment methods should change, but that might take a hot second.

When recruiting is broken, the capacity to have a lot of high potential employees will also be somewhat broken. Garbage in, garbage out. Naw mean? This is not to necessarily say every hire is garbage — some will be great, some will be middle of the road, and some will be awful. But per most research, only about five percent become high potential employees. Maybe if we had better avenues to recognize employee strengths, this number might be higher. Alas, though, many managers love to classify someone who isn’t perfect on Week 4 as “a bad employee” and slap them on a Performance Improvement Plan. Seems like a good way to develop people!

Now we’ve got some research on how big a farce the high potential employees deal really is.

The cooked books of high potential employees

This research is from Zenger Folkman. Here’s some high irony: in graduate school, I did a project about high potential employees — and used research from Zenger Folkman! Everything coming full circle in a meta way.

This research is based on 1,964 employees at three organizations. It’s not a massive sample size, no, but it’s something. Now, remember just above when I said high potential employees are usually the top five percent of an organization? Keep that in your brain and now consider this:

But when we looked at the participants in the HIPO programs, 12% were in their organization’s bottom quartileof leadership effectiveness. Overall, 42% were below average. That is a long way from the top 5% to which they supposedly belong.

OK, so … some high potential employees are actually in the bottom 12 percent of their companies? Ha. I guess this shouldn’t surprise us too much.

Why does this happen?

A few theories:

Unclear definitions of what “leadership effectiveness” is: To higher ranks, it means “generates revenue.”To lower ranks, it means “is not an asshole.” Somewhat of a disconnect there.

Executives minting their friends: This happens all the time. Some CFO meows that “Joel is one of our high potential employees,” and now Joel is in the program. In reality Joel sucks his thumb under his desk all day, but the CFO likes him. That explains how “top five percent” becomes “bottom 12 percent” and no one seems to notice.

We have no idea how to value people: That’s potentially the biggest problem with the modern workforce. Hello, automation!

Companies don’t really want high potential employees: Most managers honestly want drones. If you have too many high potential employees, that means you need to (a) pay them more and (b) feel as if your perch is threatened by your direct reports.

HR owns it: The high potential employees program is typically owned by HR, which usually isn’t data-centric. Plus: executives don’t care about it because it doesn’t make money. Nothing coming out of there is typically a top-flight program.

How could we actually identify high potential employees?

Not super hard, but would be a reach for most companies:

  • Clearly identify the priorities of the company, various departments, and various teams
  • Determine what success might look like at the various levels
  • Have 2-3 key metrics to determine employee-level success in a given role
  • When employees consistently over-achieve on metrics related to priority-driven work, they are high potential employees
  • They can be placed in programs, groomed, and given more responsibility

Seems nice, right?

What actually happens?

Usually goes a bit like this:

See the difference between the first list and the second list? That’s why there’s so much confusion about high potential employees. It’s all hair on fire bullshit loosely grouped together as “tasks” or even “priorities,” none of which are anything more than someone’s pet rock “I’m relevant” project. And then add a final little pebble: the same department tasked with “developing people” is also the one that fires them and monitors them, meaning there’s absolutely no trust in the set-up whatsoever. Hard to develop high potential employees that way.

What else you got on high potential employees?