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It seems people are confused by what “strategy” means

Here’s a new article where, seemingly, some Australian consultant gets a bunch of top dogs (execs) in a room and asks: “What is your broader strategy?” They go off and write it down. And — drum roll — here are the results:

The results are always astonishing to me and them. Here are some of the responses from the list I received at my most recent session: actions (“launch a new service”; “review our suitability to the retirement business”); activities (“marketing our products through the right channels”); objectives (“achieve $100m net revenue”) and broad descriptions of what goes on (“planning process from beginning to end of product”; “working for your stakeholders”).

I literally ROFL’ed at this. “Marketing our products through the right channels?” Good Lord. These guys are making maybe half a million per year and that’s what they come up with? I would probably punch the guy in the face who said “achieve $100M net revenue.” You know he’s a total KPI-gagger who probably last complimented his wife in 1987. Sad but true fact: if you care that much about achieving $100M net and haven’t done it yet, you’re not very good at your job.

“Strategy” has admittedly been a buzzword for years now, so maybe we should stop and ask: why?

Continue reading “It seems people are confused by what “strategy” means”

Build Talent Lists with PeopleMaven

talent lists

 

People Maven helps you view lists of top potential candidates

 

People Maven is a website that contains a variety of top talent lists, in a variety of industries and locations. These lists are created and added to by users like you. This means that there are lists for almost any search you may need, and if there is not, you can create it.

When you first open the site, it brings you to the featured lists. However, the tool becomes most useful when you search for your specific needs.

  • You can use the search feature to look for top talent with certain traits. You can put a job title, location, school, or even company into the search, and People Maven will provide you with lists matching your categories.
  • You can also search by category, choosing “Tech” or “Business,” for example, and look through popular lists in those industries.
  • Once in a list, you can click on each person in the list to find out more information. The site provides a brief description of the person, as well as a link to another site. This is most often LinkedIn, but can vary; for more famous people, for example, it may provide a link to Wikipedia.

People Maven also displays other lists viewed by similar people, quickly allowing you to search through more talent pools without completing an entirely new search. A Chrome Extension for People Maven also allows users to easily add potential talent to People Maven directly from other sites, like LinkedIn.

The lists on People Maven range from broad to extremely specific, making it a great fit for a wide variety of talent searches. Overall, it is a simple and easy tool and a great addition to the talent search process. ~Noel Cocca

 

See inside with  Dean Da Costa below:

Part 3: Budgeting for Technical Assessments

technical assessments

Don’t forget to check out parts 1 & 2 of our series on tech assessments. When budgeting for technical skills assessments it’s important not only to have an accurate feel for your ongoing recruitment needs and the price for the software and service but as well to determine the return on investment (ROI) for the assessment spend. If hesitant at all, you’ll want to look at the cost of the alternative – NOT skills-testing employees.   

Choosing your technical skills assessment platform

Before starting your search of vendors and products, you’ll need to determine:

  • Approximately how often you’ll be hiring for how many positions
  • Approximately how many candidates you’ll want to assess for each opening
  • How varied the tasks you’ll recruit for, and for which departments and jobs
  • If you need to customize the testing specific to your firm’s jobs or if you’re okay with a vendor’s standardized job-specific skills tests
  • If you want something that resides on your company servers or prefer a Web-based platform.
  • If you want to include virtual job-simulation testing
  • If you need to integrate the assessments with your applicant tracking system (ATS)
  • If you’d like an assessment product that includes an ATS, should you not already have one.

Technical skills assessment prices

Many vendors we found charge a per-applicant or per-test fee, at least for a minimal number of sporadic candidates, with that fee discounted as the number of users increases.  Most offer an annual subscription, either as the only purchase option or for clients who are doing large-volume recruiting. As with per-test pricing, subscriptions are typically volume-discounted.

Prices vary widely, from $3.25 per test, to subscriptions of more than $14,000 annually. One, Indeed Assessments, is totally free of charge. Several, such as IBM Kenexa and Wonscore, offer free trials from 14 to 60 days.

Features vary as well.

A few vendors such as Talview and programmer-focused Tests4Geeks only offer an array of standardized tests for various positions. However, eSkill, Criteria Corp., Hundred5 and many others add a customized option, with the employer clients able to create tests specific to their own hiring needs.

Some vendors focus solely on specific industries. QuodeIT, CodeAssess, and Codility, for example, only test for software developers and other technical staff.

A few, such as HR Avatar and Shaker International offer standardized and/or customized virtual job simulations.

What’s the ROI?

Shaker International offers a free Staffing Waste ROI Calculator that looks at four criteria:

  1. Hourly wage rate  
  2. Employees who left or were terminated in their first 90 days, referred to as false starts
  3. Cost per hire
  4. Costs of onboarding and training

The first calculation: (hourly wage rate x number of false start employees) x 31 days. The result is the monthly lost-wage cost.

The second calculation: Cost of training for one new hire + cost of onboarding for one new hire. Multiply this by the number of false starts, and you’ll have the cost of turnover.

As an example, 99 false starters, who were paid $16 an hour would represent $392,832  in lost wages. The turnover cost for these workers is a whopping $495,000.

Many companies offer practical guides to compare the cost of hiring with and without pre-employment skills testing platforms.

For manual pre-screening the calculation is simple.  Assume an hourly rate for the recruiter. Determine the amount of resumes you expect to peruse for each position, the number of phone pre-screening calls you’ll be making, and the number of face-to-face interviews you’ll conduct once you’ve narrowed down the candidates.

For these tasks, eSkill has estimated that a recruiter is valued at $40 an hour, that she or he can read 20 resumes each hour, do 3 pre-screen phone interviews each hour, and that 2 different decision makers (perhaps a recruiter followed by a department supervisor) each spend an hour with each candidate.  The cost, then, for 100 resumes, 30 phone pre-screens, and interviews with 5 final candidates, is $1,000.

According to eSkill, its skills assessment product reduces the cost to just over $300 by introducing pre-screening skills testing as part of the application. This narrows the resume-read step to a total of 20, and the second-step phone process down to 10 candidates, followed by a face-to-face interview of only two of the ten.

Of course, eSkill has skin in this game, and it’s important to seek testimonial and case studies of each vendor to verify and quantify its time reductions.  This calculation process is, however, a good guideline for valuation and comparison of machine versus manual assessments.

As we mentioned in part 2 of this three-part series, the manual assessment costs for hiring of developers and other technical positions is considerably greater than for other industries. When, as often happens, current IT staff must be brought into the assessment process, that $40 an hour cost for an interviewer’s time can jump to well over $100.

Quantifying benefits

Noted business research firm Aberdeen Group conducted an expansive study of employers and their pre-hire testing, to determine the value of pre-employment skills assessments. In the IBM-hosted Webinar, Pre-Hire Assessments, an Asset for HR in the Age of the Candidate, Aberdeen Human Capital Management research analyst Zach Lashey quantified assessment benefits:

  • Businesses that use pre-hire assessments are 36 percent more likely to be satisfied with their new hires.
  • Companies using assessments were 13 percent more likely to have new hires that met or exceeded performance goals in their first 12 months.
  • These new hires were also 17 percent more likely to describe themselves as highly engaged in their job, a factor that strongly influenced productivity.
  • Responding firms that used assessments realized a 39 percent lower turnover rate among the high-potential talent.  Looking again at the eSkill sample calculation of 99 false starters paid $16 an hour, with a turnover cost of $495,000, use of pre-assessment skills testing would have saved this firm nearly $200,000.

While specifically reviewing tech-focused assessment platform Codility on G2Crowd, Foresee senior software engineer Aaron Meadows spoke to benefits of technical skills assessments in general.

“Seeing how long a candidate takes, what wrong paths they took, what corrections they made, and what test cases they came up with is a great way to get a feeling for how they will work on your team,” Meadows wrote. “Being able to compare candidates on a standardized battery of tasks lets you make an apples-to-apples evaluation when selecting between them. How they performed can give you guidance on how to direct the next stages of your interview process.”

Still undecided? Most of these skills-assessment vendors offer free trials.

How can your technical hires be more diverse?

tech hiring

It’s no secret that the IT industry has a talent shortage, but just how short the shortage, and how lacking in diversity the sourcing and staffing efforts have been, is startling. And yes, the latter is significantly to blame for the former.

Manpower’s 2018 Group Talent Shortage study honed in on the tech-industry numbers:

  • 47 percent of the more than 39,000 employer respondents can’t find the tech talent they need.
  • For companies with more than 250 employees, the situation is dire. A whopping 67 percent can’t fill critical jobs.
  • The shortage varies widely from country to country. In the U.S. it’s 46 percent, while in Japan 89 percent of its jobs go begging. China’s IT employers, on the other hand, fill all but 13 percent of their positions. Ireland and the UK have plenty of candidates as well, reporting mere 18 percent and 19 percent shortages respectively. (Which, for companies in countries where the shortage is severe, suggests smart geographic recruitment areas.)

Only 26 percent of these employers blamed their inability to hire on a lack of candidates.  Another 39 percent said that the applicants lack either the required experience or skills. (Although several HR experts have said that the real problem is employers not appropriately bending requirements, not being early and proactive in their sourcing to peek interest in young folks who will then decide to learn, and / or being unwilling to take on training tasks.) Yes, diversity plays a part in the solution.

Continue reading “How can your technical hires be more diverse?”

Candidates and recruiters both need to quickly explain what they do/are/represent

recruiters

Let me cue this up for you with a section of this article:

I think we miss a huge opportunity in networking when the people who care about us and love us and want to see us succeed can’t verbalize in one to two sentences what we do so that they can be out there looking for opportunities for us.

This is a little bit more complex and nuanced of an issue than people are sometimes willing to admit, so let me break this down for you into simpler chunks if I can.

Continue reading “Candidates and recruiters both need to quickly explain what they do/are/represent”

Inside The Latest Hiretual Update

hiretual update

The recent Hiretual update delivers new and improved features

The most recent update of Hiretual keeps all the things that made it great before, but brings to the table a greatly improved user interface, a better pipelining tool, and more!

The Hiretual app combines AI sourcing, project organization, and engagement tools into one, easy to use place. Upon opening the app, you can connect it to your Gmail or Outlook account, in order to make engaging leads that much easier. You can also view all recent activity from the dashboard. From there, you can select a variety of different actions.

  • From the “Projects” panel, you can create projects for each of your search needs. You can add team members to the projects, and even create project templates for easy set-up. For each project, you can easily source candidates using AI, or import candidates separately. This AI sourcing tool allows you to put in a variety of terms—such as job titles, skills, and locations—and it will search through various sources. The Projects panel also lists all the potential candidates and their information.
  • The “Engage” panel is where you are able to nurture candidates. You can create different tracks, sort candidates into talent groups, and use and create email templates.
  • The “Reports” tab displays a variety of information, such as how you generally find your leads, how many leads you have, and other relevant metrics.
  • Your “Toolbox” is where you will find all of your sourcing tools. Hiretual uses AI Sourcing, a Boolean Builder, Cross-Referencing, and a Github Search.

Overall, Hiretual is greatly improved from the previous version. The user interface is much nicer, and it has added more project-based capabilities. You are able to easily move people from one project and process to the next, which makes it a great pipelining tool. However, it keeps all of the qualities and capabilities that made it great before.

If you didn’t use Hiretual before, you should now. ~Noel Cocca

See what Dean Da Costa has to say below:

 

 

Where is the RPO Industry Headed?

RPO ARS

Are organizations backing away from the traditional three-year RPO format?

If you follow the world of RPO, you may have noticed an interesting trend. According to the Everest Group’s annual report on the industry, the average deal length has been dropping, and for the first time since Recruitment Process Outsourcing emerged as a tool in the talent acquisition leader’s tool belt, it’s approaching just two years. Today buyers seem to be heading away from the traditional three year format.

What’s going on? Without context, these numbers may seem startling—it may look like talent acquisition is moving away from RPO as we understand it. But having worked in this field for the last 12 years, I see this shift as something to celebrate: the beginning of the next evolution of an industry that’s been pivoting since its inception.

A Short History of RPO

To figure out what’s happening, let’s take a look at some history—starting with the birth of RPO.

Somewhere shortly after the dotcom bubble, recruitment budgets tightened, and Recruitment Process Outsourcing solutions started to take shape. The economy was reeling and corporate leaders were looking for ways to pivot from costly in-house recruitment programs and agency spending to strategic, scalable, and quality focused partnerships. That budget pressure—combined with improving ATS technology and online recruiting tools—provided the perfect soil.

Early RPO providers navigated blurry lines between agency recruiting, staff augmentation, and project staffing. Interest in the new strategy grew modestly.

Then came 2008. That year marked the second economic collapse in ten years and provided the fuel to accelerate adoption and drive forward emerging pure-play (e.g. Kenexa) and blended (e.g. Manpower) RPO providers. Financial investment in the industry increased and the arms race of value, quality, and specialization began.

Firms carved out areas of expertise ranging from volume to industry sector to a higher quality of hire. Each firm also offered their own secret sauce of capabilities that promised to drive better outcomes than the competition. Many of these capabilities were aspirational, but they were a necessary tactic to try and differentiate value and defend price points. Largely this approach worked as major buyers were going through their Gen 1 experiences.

But, as customers grew wiser, competition greater, and financial investors more eager for their returns, the ability to protect price weakened and investors wanted to know how they were going to cash in. RPO leaders drove top-line revenue competing heavily on price, leading to both a major price drop around 2011 and dramatically expanded adoption by enterprise buyers, which swelled global RPO revenue numbers.

Following the sale of a few big RPO providers and some significant leadership changes in other top houses, the RPO market seemed to hit a relatively quiet period between 2013 and 2016 where fully integrating global offerings seemed to be the focus and the original value propositions and three year contracts were still the norm.

Now here we are, two years later, finishing up yet another pretty disruptive period in the industry. Better technology stacks have replaced earlier secret sauce value propositions. Average contract length appears to be dropping. And, some providers are facing financial pressure having expected tech-driven efficiencies a bit ahead of them being operational realities.

The Coming Evolution of RPO

Is this just the next chapter? If it is, it would be troubling that technology costs are rising while contract lengths are dropping, and operational efficiencies are proving harder to come by than desired.

But, I’m not sure that’s what’s going on. When one looks at industry data in aggregate one could form this conclusion but what appears to actually be happening is the RPO industry is evolving into three channels.

The first channel is the mega-provider BPO solution epitomized by organizations like IBM. Cost is the driving play, technology is relied on for efficiency, process (not recruiter) is king, and customization is minimal. In this channel the investments in technology are absolutely high but contract length is still over three years. Also, this format’s process focus and limited customization is allowing operational efficiencies to actually be achieved.

The second channel is traditional RPO. There are still many RPOs driving huge value for their customers in three-year contracts with moderate investments in technology and a balance between process, customization, and recruiter expertise. Leading RPO providers are seeing a healthy market won through RFPs, and maintain their advantage by staying a step ahead in technology and balancing their investments carefully to avoid wandering into a more rigid tech and process heavy format like their BPO counterparts.  

The third channel—and the one I’m personally most excited about—appears to be an emerging segment I’m calling Agile Recruitment Services (ARS). If RPO was born out of dotcom bubble pressure and accelerated by the financial collapse, ARS is born out of budget growth and a fiercely competitive employment market. Large scale process partnerships are complicated, culture match with strategic partners can be tough to find, and change management is a ton of work. As a result, both enterprise companies and the midmarket have been increasingly foregoing the BPO/RPO route and instead looking to build strong talent acquisition competency in-house.

But here’s the interesting thing: We aren’t seeing companies that go the internal route planning to do it completely alone. It’s difficult to maintain a dynamic, competitive, in-house function without some external partnership. Talent acquisition leaders are well aware of how hard it is to constantly scale up and down, to address event driven hiring spikes, to fend off agencies, to provide consumer level candidate experiences, and to keep up with the aggressive expansion of TA technology and capabilities.

That’s where Agile Recruitment Services are increasingly coming into play. These services are being sought by talent acquisition leaders as they invest in their own TA maturity. Such services are often formatted into shorter contracts and are much more targeted in scope. One organization may be looking for a partner focused on pulling back agency spending from independent business leaders, another may want help producing virtual hiring events a few times a year, and yet another may want services, designed in advance, to support event driven hiring spikes.

Watching this evolution is encouraging—and exciting. The relationship between service providers and client-side organizations continues to evolve and ARS’s are bringing a new format designed for talent acquisition leaders that are looking for their partners to say, “You can do it, and we’re going to help.”

ARS providers are focused on project agility, light implementation and sales processes, and organizational designs that are tuned specifically to optimization and smaller volume hiring partnerships. This is a welcome addition and a great complement to the existing RPO and BPO options today.

So this emergence of shorter, more focused ARS contracts is likely significantly contributing to that decrease in average deal length that Everest reported—but the classic three-year RPO model and the mega BPO are not yet extinct. What we’re watching is the addition of a new service format aimed at talent acquisition leaders driving their own TA maturity roadmap through deep internal capabilities and looking for external partners to help support where the needs are greatest. As enterprise-level tech trickles down to the midmarket companies, I believe we’ll continue to see tremendous demand—and growth—for these more Agile Recruitment Services in the future. 

Steve O’Brien is VP of Talent Fusion by Monster, a leading provider of talent acquisition and optimization services. Steve began his career as a full desk technical recruiter and prior to Monster, served as senior leader in IBM-Kenexa’s global RPO practice.

What LinkedIn doesn’t tell you about recruiting email

When was the last time you emailed a potential job candidate, but never heard back from them? If you’re like most people who source passive candidates, it was probably just this morning. A recent survey shows that only 5.2%* of people in the U.S. have responded to a recruiter’s message in the last three months. So, for every 20 people that you email on LinkedIn because they look qualified for a role, chances are you’ll hear back from just one of them.

Google “how to write a recruiting mail” and you’ll get plenty of advice—but many articles in the top search results were written more than three years ago. Hasn’t the talent market changed since 2015? Some of it might have been valuable advice three years ago, but there’s no way to know, because most of it’s not based on real data. It’s just someone’s opinion.

As a linguist, I’m fascinated by which language is most likely to get people to respond. The only way to know what works is to look at responses to real recruiting messages and find patterns. At Textio we’ve been collecting data on recruiting mail performance for years now, because it’s fuel for our software platform. Even though there are wide variations in effective language across different locations and different job types (and yes, the patterns that work do change a lot over time) some interesting general patterns do emerge, and some of them are not at all what you might expect.

Continue reading “What LinkedIn doesn’t tell you about recruiting email”

How To Find Leads With Sourcible

sourcible

Sourcible finds leads based on job openings and company

 

Sourcible is a very useful tool that allows you to search for certain job openings, find leads at those companies, and get in touch. The tool is more for sales leads than for recruiting, but it is a useful addition to any workflow.

For example, if you are trying to place individuals into jobs, Sourcible will help you find possible contacts so you can start reaching out that get the companies interesting in a candidate.

  • First, you create a search for hiring companies. You put in the role, skills, and location specific to your needs, and then Sourcible finds companies with open positions that match your search.
  • After you choose a company, you can click “Prospect” to search LinkedIn for relevant contacts from that company.
  • Once on LinkedIn, you can easily add leads you wish to pursue to Sourcible by simply clicking “Add.” Your new contacts are now easily accessible directly from the job search page in Sourcible, along with their contact information.
  • You can then send emails to these leads directly from within Sourcible. You can also use templates to easily reach out to many leads at a time, and even schedule follow-up emails.

This easy interface makes the task of finding leads much easier, and helps you stay organized at all levels of the process.

Sourcible works using both its site and a Chrome Extension together to easily link all aspects of your sales process. Though not directly meant for recruiting, it can also be a useful recruiting tool, especially if you are searching for higher-level candidates or recruiters.

Overall, it is a useful tool, and definitely one worth knowing about! ~Noel Cocca

 

See what Dean Da Costa has to say below:

 

How gamification helps when sourcing coders

Two of every three companies of 250 or more employees the world over struggle to fill critical IT positions, according to Manpower. Smaller firms are faring a bit better, with about 46 percent of jobs staying vacant. Part of the problem is that these skilled, in-demand employees are easily lured from their current gig for one that is more inclusive, pays better, offers greater challenge, improves their work / life balance, provides better health benefits, and / or makes them feel more appreciated.

According to Experis Engineering’s 2017 Focus on Engineering white paper, only 22 percent of engineer respondents were determined to stay with their current employer. Thirty-three percent of them intended to find a new employer, while another 31 percent were on the fence about it.

Recruiting for coders, programmers, developers, engineers and other IT staff must then be smart, efficient, long-range, and ongoing. It must focus on engaging with passive candidates.

Continue reading “How gamification helps when sourcing coders”

Guidelines for Conversational Recruiting

Concurrent with the adoption of recruiting automation, AI, and chatbots, there’s been growing talk about how to make recruiting more human and personalized. It’s no surprise then that the latest trend that’s sprung from this is conversational recruiting.

Continue reading “Guidelines for Conversational Recruiting”

Lessons in recruiting and employer branding from Groupon

What was your last Groupon search?  According to my Groupon history, the last three things I searched for were:

  1. Harry Potter
  2. Drybar
  3. Things to do

…which resulted in the following purchases:

  1. Harry Potter Wand Makeup Brush Set
  2. Drybar – one blowout
  3. 2 tickets to the Sugarloaf Crafts Festival in New Jersey

And, as with so many technological services, we rarely think about the people behind the app.  But they’re there – and in Groupon’s case, they really are getting it right! Groupon’s success as an organization largely comes down to its employer brand.  How it positions itself to potential talent determines the future success of the company.

At SHRM18, we had the opportunity to hear firsthand from Karishma Patel Buford, Vice President of Global Talent Management for Groupon.  She shared how Groupon’s employer brand is impacting employees and candidates alike after the company implemented five key steps over the past few years.  

People attend sessions for different reasons.  Some want to learn something completely new. Some want to know if they are on the right path – validation.  And some want to meet someone who has truly demonstrated success and offers advice in a particular area. For many attendees of this session, it was this last reason.  You want to know someone put the work into practice and the result was a positive transformation. And that’s really just what Groupon did.

Groupon is an ecommerce platform, but the lessons Buford shared at SHRM18 can help organizations in all industries, big and small, evaluate their employer brand and make the right changes to attract and retain the right people.  “Often when we think about engagement, we think about what happens after they are onboard,” Buford says. “Engagement starts before they walk in the door. What kind of talent are you attracting?”

Groupon asked themselves and their organization five questions:

  1. Who are you?
  2. Who will succeed?
  3. Are you hiring smart?
  4. How are you developing your employees?
  5. How are you measuring it all?

Who are you?

Oftentimes, there’s a discrepancy between what a company thinks its employer brand is, and how its employer brand is perceived.  Groupon got right to the root of this question by surveying its own employees.  Groupon is a Fortune 1000 global company, but they’re still not Google, Amazon, Facebook, or Netflix – and they recognize that.  As Buford puts it, “we don’t have what they have; we have to be different.”

So, they asked for their employees’ opinions on what makes Groupon unique and special, what brought current employees to Groupon – and what keeps them there.  By surveying their employees, Groupon was able to identify the three major pillars of their employer brand: empowerment, flexibility and support, and mission.

Groupon empowers their employees by granting them autonomy without breathing down their necks, and by letting them own something big with a global impact – from day one, Groupon employees know they can make an impact.  

When it comes to support and flexibility, Groupon knows that it’s not about how many hours you are working, but about the work you’re doing.  They recognize their employees are human beings with lives outside of work and want their employees to feel, “I can be my real self.”

Groupon’s employees feel a strong sense of mission.  Groupon was born out of wanting to help the “little guy,” the small business who wants to thrive.  That underlying mission unites Groupon’s employees, as it drives everything the organization does.

Who will succeed?

As a company, you need to know what type of employee will succeed in your specific environment.  This knowledge will help inform your hiring decisions. Groupon started by tackling performance issues within its sales organization.  By interviewing top performing salespeople, Groupon was able to create a success profile for the role.  The missing link between top performers and the rest of the team?  Organization. A great sales representative needs to have stellar organizational skills and discipline in order to essentially run his or her own business – but the Groupon team was not screening their candidates for organizational skills.  Once they optimized the hiring process and changed their interview questions, Groupon began to hire the right people for the job, who experienced success much earlier in their Groupon tenure.

Moving forward, Groupon identifies their “must-haves,” the qualities they absolutely require in a candidate to ensure their success as an employee, and creates success profiles for several positions within their organization.

Are you hiring smart?

Recruiters can often be shunted into the role of “order takers” rather than the business partners and advisors they need to be.  Groupon is shifting their mindset from seeing recruiting as a way to get someone in the door to a way to achieve the balance of short- and long-term goals.  They weighed the benefits and drawbacks of having an empty seat against the cost of a bad hire.

It’s not about just getting people in the door if they aren’t the right people.

How are you developing your employees?

The perception among Groupon employees was that the company lacked management training – even though there was a training program in place.  Groupon needed to understand its employees better, most of whom were millennials.  Although all generations want to learn and grow, baby boomers learn differently than millennials do.  

Millennials want instant, bite-sized, continuous learning rather than a concentrated data dump.  Groupon’s two-day learning events were not resonating with their employees, so they overhauled the process and designed a 90-day program for new front-line managers.  The resulting combination of social, experiential, practiced, and self-learning has successfully trained over 600 new managers by appealing to their learning style.

Groupon also builds mindsets of “lattice” rather than the traditional “ladder” mentality within its organization.  The lattice career path offers a multidimensional career model and allows your employees to focus on actual learning and growth, rather than just a title bump.

How are you measuring it all?

What you measure matters – and what matters can differ from organization to organization.  For Groupon, measurement meant implementing Glint to get the right data in the hands of all their managers globally.  Groupon managers could then take ownership of the data, learn what’s working and what’s not, and use the data to take action and create real improvement.  

What data do you need to measure?  Groupon chose to ditch the engagement survey for regular pulse surveys.

Last Minute Deal: Final Words of Wisdom from Buford

I’ll leave you to think about the “tale of two Annas” that Buford shared during her session.  Imagine you have two seemingly identical candidates for a position – both incredibly smart, with the same level of experience and a degree from an Ivy League school.  The first “Anna” is a 24/7 employee who never turns off work and is super eager to get to the next thing.  The second “Anna,” by contrast, is equally motivated but signs off at 5 pm because she values work-life balance.  Which Anna would you hire?

In either scenario, you’ll get a smart, hardworking employee who can contribute to your organization’s success.  As Buford pointed out, your choice ultimately says more about you and your company’s values than it does about Anna.  

My Next Groupon…

It’s too bad my next search on Groupon can’t be “candidates who are…” But given a proven model to emulate, all of us can test our own employer brand by not only trusting our perceptions, but also the perceptions of our own employees.  And while I really enjoyed listening to Karishma share stories from Groupon, I also walked away with an even greater fondness for the company whose app I open weekly.

Video Interviews and Personalized Hiring in the World of Automation

LinkedIn, for its 2018 Global Recruiting Trends report, surveyed 8,815 talent acquisition professionals and hiring managers about their recruitment activities, their recommendations and the prominent, effective trends they were seeing.  Four best-practice trends driving the future of recruiting dominated responses: diversity, data, artificial intelligence, and new interviewing tools such as video.  

The study’s criteria boiled down to best new processes for driving productivity and thus boosting the bottom line. Prominent success factors were improved candidate experience, and faster, more accurate gauging of best candidates. Loud and clear was concern that automation of the recruitment process might negatively impact the personalization they considered crucial. For a whopping 78 percent of respondents, diversity was very or extremely important to their recruitment success. 

The diversity Issue

While 88 percent of study respondents considered the traditional structured interview effective, the irony is that for a huge chunk of employers those “structured” interviews are …. well, … unstructured. Which, at their worst, results in a biased hiring decision, or at best, one that is poorly made due to unequal comparisons. 

Face-to-face interviews are often conducted by harried front-line supervisors and department heads who often pride themselves on “seat-of-the-pants” informal conversations with candidates, and decisions based on intuition. The thought processes that then leak into, and even dominate, these decisions are fraught with bias: “I liked him from the get-go, since he and I both graduated from Cornell (confirmation bias).” Or, worse yet, “Good creds, I admit, but I couldn’t get past that long mane of red hair. Reminded me so much of my ex-wife (similarity bias).”

Is AI the answer?

Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA), are certainly hot topics in the world of recruiting and HR. These often conflated concepts are being talked about in almost every organization, at almost every event. The truth is that AI has the potential to positively impact Recruiting and HR in many ways, some of which we are already starting to see. AI is being used primarily to automate manual, time-consuming activities that eat up precious time of recruiters and hiring managers – enter Recruitment Automation. Organizations are using automation tools to source candidates, screen applicants, schedule interviews, and even facilitate referrals.

AI – the Good

Organizations are starting to use machine learning powered tools to help with drafting effective job descriptions. Tools like Textio can predict how your posting will perform and offer real-time guidance on ways to improve it, helping to reduce bias in job descriptions so that more diverse professionals will be more likely to apply. AI powered sourcing tools use data to standardize the matching between a candidate’s experience, knowledge, and skills and the requirements of the job. Many of these solutions promise to reduce unconscious bias by ignoring irrelevant information such as race, gender and age. They reduce human intuition when it comes to resume screening and matching, thus creating more consistent decisions, and when developed correctly produce less biased results. Chatbots and other AI assistants such as Mya are able to communicate with candidates throughout your process and even help schedule interviews with qualified candidates.

AI – the Bad

As is often the case with new technology there are some use cases that may not be a good fit, at least initially.That concern has recently been brought into the spotlight with startling coverage of a facial-recognition software flaw: Some algorithms don’t recognize dark skin. Or, as Bloomberg BusinessWeek put it, AI Has a Race Problem. The problem isn’t the algorithm, however. It’s the humans designing it.

Kairos AR software developer Brian Brackeen has seen the problem first hand. In fact, he’s been the problem. As explained to Bloomberg, he was attempting to demo his facial-recognition program for a prospective client but was unable to make the program work. The snafu? He was black, and, like most facial recognition developers, most faces he had used to train the algorithms were white. When his white, blonde colleague posed for the demo, the software worked.   

Nor is the problem exclusive to small startups. MIT researchers recently determined that IBM, Microsoft and China-based Face++ incorrectly identify as many as one of every three dark skinned women, and 12 percent of darker-skinned men.  The reason mistakes are far more prevalent for women comes back yet again to the fact that algorithms are created by humans. The developers are using too few female faces to teach the program.

Joy Buolamwini, founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, interpreted the impact.

“If more white males with generally homogeneous mannerisms have been hired in the past, it’s possible that algorithms will be trained to favorably rate predominantly fair-skinned, male candidates while penalizing women and people of color who do not exhibit the same verbal and nonverbal cues,” she wrote in her New York Times opinion piece, When the Robot Doesn’t See Dark Skin

Once again, the flaw is not the machine; it’s those pesky humans.

What happens to the candidate if we automate everything?

As LinkedIn pointed out, despite extensive automation of the hiring process, companies still need people to engage candidates and employees. Without the human side of HR, recruitment and retention would suffer considerably. Especially in hard-to-fill industries such as IT and healthcare, where unfilled jobs outnumber qualified candidates by millions, passive candidates must be the bulk of sourcing efforts.

According to a recent study by LinkedIn and the Lou Adler Group, active candidates represent 5 to 20 percent of the total talent market, while casual job seekers, known as Tiptoers, make up another 15 to 20 percent. The remaining 65 to 75 percent are passive candidates.  These folks need personal engagement, persuasion and negotiation. They need the human touch, and tools that allow them to introduce themselves and showcase their skills around their current work schedule, and often at a distance.  They need video interviewing.

One of the tools LinkedIn mentions in the study is the resurgence of video interviewing. In the world of automation video ads a personalized touch that the 1’s and 0’s behind many automation algorithms cannot.

Pre-recorded video interviews are being used to add efficiency and engagement to the candidate screening process.Offered early in the application process, these on-demand assessments are specially tailored to move from the traditional unstructured “structured” interviews, to ones that are truly structured – consistent, well-planned, well-documented, and equal from one candidate to the next. As contrasted with live video conversations between candidate and recruiter, the pre-recorded videos allow candidates to respond on-demand and remotely to a pre-determined set of interview questions at a time and place best suited to their schedule. Each candidate is presented with the same prepared set of questions, so that interview formats don’t deviate from one candidate to the next. Yet, each candidate can personalize the experience, to “tell their story” at their own pace, with plenty of opportunity to erase, regroup, and redo.

The responses are recorded, organized, and easily retrievable; recruiters can compare, contrast, and share with decision-making colleagues as often as needed.  The documentation is as well a hedge against discrimination complaints.

Amy Rueda, director of strategic talent management for UCLA Development, dismisses the notion that video interviews generate bias in hiring.

“I think people who argue that this tool can be used to discriminate are the biggest hypocrites to walk the earth,” she told Workforce. “It is an argument that doesn’t hold water. If you are an organization that is inclined to discriminate, you are going to do it whether it is in a video interview or in person. If you are not an organization that is inclined to discriminate, you are going to be looking for attributes that are key to the placement.”

Although video interviews are on the rise they are by no means the holy grail. Some candidates and hiring teams still feel uneasy about trying something new. Be sure to think about your candidate population and whether or not this method of assessment is right for your position.

Finding qualified active and passive candidates requires time-effective sourcing tools powered by Big Data, Machine Learning and AI. Luring and assessing them must rely heavily on video interviewing and other virtual tools that bring humans together quickly, easily, and cost-effectively.

Why core values need to matter more than ever to the recruiting world

core values

Let’s start with a pull quote, from here:

But a couple of things have happened. One, there has been a lot more turnover and fluidity in the workforce, so you don’t have people who stay with your company over a long period. You don’t have that kind of organizational glue that naturally happens. Two, your customers and other people from the outside have way more visibility into your company now. They are starting to question, “What are your values? How are you operating? What distinguishes you from someone else?” They want to know if there’s something unique about your company that would influence their purchasing habits.

Let’s unpack this for a second.

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