Blog

SeekOut Social Network Capabilities

SeekOut update brings more social capabilities

As you may know, SeekOut is a great tool for making recruiting easier and more efficient. With its April 2018 update, SeekOut has added the ability to search through a variety of different social networks.  We are a bit behind in getting this update published, and the team at Seekout have done even more building so stay tuned for that update as well.

When opening the site, all of the standard features remain the same. The new “Social Networks” feature appears as a top above the search bar.

  • Choose a social network from a large selection of sites. Options include everything from Facebook and Instagram to AngelList and StackOverflow.
  • Enter the keywords you wish to search for within your chosen social network.
  • SeekOut pulls up a list of candidates matching your terms, with relevant information about each and a link to their profile on the social network you selected.
  • You also easily add each person to a project, for easy access in later research.

This new feature makes SeekOut a key tool when doing social detective research about potential candidates. You can easily access the social profiles of people that appear to be a good fit for your needs, and from there learn more about them. It is also useful to use this tool in combination with another, in order to easily pull additional information from these social profiles.

With this version, SeekOut adds a lot of useful tools. However, there will be even more added to the Social Networks capabilities with the next update. These upcoming enhancements will bring the ability to easily locate contact information right to the search results within SeekOut.  SeekOut is updating constantly so look out for more from us on the topic very soon

~Noel Cocca

See what Dean Da Costa has to say

Your Referral Process Is a Mess

Employee referral programs work. It’s been proven time and time again. In fact, just last year, these programs edged out job boards as the top channel for quality hires.

We also know that referred job candidates are faster to hire, reduce the cost-per-hire, perform better and ultimately, stay longer in the company. The benefits are tremendous. But your referral program…well, it’s a bit of a mess.

Mostly because you don’t have the processes and time to maintain it and honestly, some of your employees don’t even know it exists.

The upside is, you are not alone. The problem with referral programs is pervasive, impacting organizations of all sizes and with the very best intentions. In some instances, the program gets off to a banner start. When no longer a bright, shiny object, it fizzles out around year four or five due to diminished interest.

In other cases, the program never even gets off the ground, being pushed back in favor of some more pressing issue until it’s all but forgotten. And yet, that aforementioned value remains, sometimes totally untapped. So why not clear the dust, clean up the mess and get things moving again?

Oh right, time – and an overall lack of it.

See here’s the thing – in a perfect world we would accomplish everything we want and more – but that’s not reality. For that, we have the technology. Technology that can help automate the employee referral workflow, as determined by your specific needs.

To start, consider the early stages. If you’ve done this before, begin by figuring out where things went wrong in the past. If you’re new to the game, get strategic. Either way, set a goal for the program. Once you know what you’re hoping to achieve, be user-friendly so participation is as straightforward as possible for everyone involved. From there, consider the following:

Automate, Automatch  

Whether the program is new or a refurb, make sure it is built into your ATS. This is hands-down the easiest way to save time – and there are plenty of integrations out there that streamline the process and make it possible to distinguish referred candidates. Tools like ROIKOI take this one step further by offering the ability to auto-match passive referrals with open jobs to keep your program thriving without adding extra work. Aligning referrals with your existing ATS will also track how the program is generating hires.

Think Outside the Box

There’s any number of factors to consider in designing your process but have you thought about moving outside your employee base? Sure, referral programs are usually internal but that doesn’t mean those are the only people interested in your company. Drafted, for example, offers a solution that solicits referrals from your larger community – think friends, family, investors, alumni or even, your customers. Like employees, these people are invested in your success and probably know great candidates living right outside your scope. Just like that, your talent pool can grow from kiddie to Olympic-sized overnight.

Reaped Rewards

While incentives aren’t an absolute must, it definitely helps encourage participation. In the past, the most common reward was a cash bonus, paid once the new hire had been with the company for a certain length of time. However, the lag between referral and payout can cause added stress for recruiters, responsible for keeping track of who gets what when – on top of everything else they have going on. At the same time, hiccups and headaches in the process can deter employees from participating. Solutions like RolePoint include an incentive management feature, tracking probation periods and sending notifications for payouts directly to payroll.

Talk about It

Being overlooked is a huge reason that referral programs falter. Of course, you mention it during the onboarding meeting and have the policy captured somewhere in your employee handbook but after that, it gets no love. Let’s face it, the most effective programs are the ones that get regular promotion. So talk about it with everyone – employees, executives, hiring managers and so on. Educate your community via periodic emails, recognize top referrers, share success metrics or leverage an employee communication solution to drive participation for you.

If you build it, they will come – and in this case, they are those deeply sought after, highly recommended candidates who reduce time-to-hire almost by half and save you up to $3,000 at the same time. To get to this talent without spending some 70 percent of your time managing the process, empower your plan, design and promotion early on. Instead of the mess, you’ll hit the ground running and gain momentum, resulting in a stream of qualified candidates, an expanded network and less burden on your recruiting team.

AlumniUS

Alumni US

Search through candidates by school and graduation year

Alumni US is a useful site that allows recruiters to easily search through candidates based on which school they have attended. Once on the site, you simply select or search for a certain school, and are brought to a page containing key information about the school and its alumni.

  • You are shown contact information about the school, such as address, phone number, and email address.
  • This page also provides a brief paragraph overview of the school, mentioning its best or most well-known characteristics.
  • The school’s most famous alumni and new alumni are also displayed.

Perhaps the most useful attribute of Alumni US is its ability to search by graduation year. From a school’s homepage, you can select a graduation year, or range of years, that you wish to view alumni from. This brings up a page containing brief profiles of alumni from the selected year.

  • You are shown names and photos of each alumni, as well as location, current positions, and industries.
  • Upon selecting a profile, the site also provides more detailed information, such as school majors, any other schools attended, past positions, and noteworthy skills.
  • Alumni US also includes a link to search for candidates on BeenVerified, which can helping with locating contact information.

This tool can be particularly useful when searching for entry-level candidates, as you are able to search by recent, current, and even future graduation years. Additionally, Dean Da Costa suggests using this site with other tools, such as Data Miner, in order to pull relevant information quickly.

Overall, Alumni US is an easy and useful tool to use! ~Noel Cocca

 

See what Dean Da Costa has to say below:

Five ways to evaluate AI systems

Nearly every vendor in the HR Tech & Recruitment space claims to be using artificial intelligence. If you product doesn’t have AI, it is a clever idea to dilute the impact of tools that do by making AI into a buzzword and give rise to claims that AI doesn’t exist. But there are several tools that do utilise artificial intelligence to enhance recruiters. How do you assess who has AI? How do you assess how good it is? Here are five points, that help evaluate AI systems.  

  1. Human-Centric Functionality
  2. Built by experts
  3. Transparency by design
  4. Putting the user in control, not the system
  5. Mitigating bias

Human-Centric Functionality

The promise (and reality of AI) is that it is designed on human behaviour.

One of the big differentiators between machine learning and automation is teaching a machine to do something with similar discretion to an actual person versus teaching a computer to do a repetitive task faster than a person can.

Keyword searches are a good example of automation. No matter how advanced the search algorithm, it isn’t machine learning. Semantic search, search based on natural language understanding, is an example of machine learning:

A system looks to match key terms from the opportunity across tens-of-thousands of resumes. Once it has found those terms, it looks for supporting language surrounding those terms that give the system context. That context is critical to understanding ‘Java’ in a barista’s resume versus ‘Java’ in a software developer’s resume. In other words, can it scan the resume like an expert recruiter? Does the AI understand and replicate for example, how a recruiter thinks? What a recruiter thinks? What the interactions between candidates and recruiters are? What the interactions between recruiters and hiring managers are?

Key question: How does your system make assertions based on information in a sentence?

Built by experts

It is important to ensure the system you are using is an ‘expert system’.

Firstly, is it trained by experts. That isn’t just important for training the AI, but also for developing a user interface that is easy to use, doesn’t require much learning, and fits neatly into the recruiters’ workflow instead of trying to alter or replacing it.

Secondly, has the taxonomy been built by expert recruiters or by linguist experts?

Have the tools been built from the ground up – from tokenizing to part of speech tagging and word embeddings? The best tools have been trained on resumes and job opportunities, not romance novels or news articles and their taxonomies are built by expert recruiters, not linguistic experts.

This is very important as resumes and job opportunities present unique challenges from a language processing standpoint. Inconsistent formatting, a mix of semantic and non-semantic content, a wide range of industry/job specific terminology, and the temporal aspect of experience are all challenges that require purpose built solutions.

So buying an off the shelf product that has general AI is not good enough and will end in disappointment. Most natural language processing doesn’t sound very natural. Even Google has called out the underlying tools as not accurate enough to build complex systems on.

It needs to be an expert system, modelled on recruiters, trained by recruiters using recruitment related data and building tools that are based on the intricacies of recruitment.  

Key questions: Who and with what data has the AI been trained?

Transparency by design

Much of machine learning suffers from a black box problem. That means as models become increasingly complex, it becomes increasingly difficult to explain why a given outcome occurred. The importance of each data point in the decision-making process isn’t easily explained. When it comes to hiring, that’s a violation of both American hiring regulations and EU’s GDPR.

It is better to implement linear models instead of black box deep-learning. This approach requires smaller datasets and less learning time. It has the added benefit of being completely transparent.

Knowing what each data point is and how it’s weighted matters. Users trust what they can see and agree or disagree with. In the minority of cases where the system makes a mistake, transparency allows the cause to be obvious. When we talk to users about the system showing them a bad resume, they usually say, “But I get why it made that mistake.” Right or wrong, the answer makes sense.

It is important that users understand how the algorithm works and results are achieved, to create trust and eradicate concerns about any future regulations.

Key question: Can you prove that no decision was made based on data points which could result in age, gender, or any other protected class discrimination?

Putting the user in control, not the system

As mentioned in the last point, much of machine learning suffers from a black box problem. That means as models become increasingly complex, it becomes increasingly difficult to explain why a given outcome occurred. Humans fear that they can’t control the system, but the system controls them. We believe it is important to build systems that are built for humans, which means the system needs to listen. In data science circles it is called ‘reinforcement learning’.

Outstanding tools put the user in control, not algorithms. They give users the ability to sidestep the algorithms by putting a greater emphasis on their decisions and activities, such as candidates they select and reject. The system then learns from user feedback making each search more accurate than the last and personalizing candidates shown based on user selections, not the average selection. Let the user teach the system with every interaction.

Key question: Is the user in control or the algorithm?

Mitigating bias

Unconscious bias comes in two forms: biased data and biased parameter tuning/feature engineering.

We are in recruitment. We are dealing with people. People are biased. Every job description written by a recruiter is a reflection of their reality and desires, so is every resume. The question isn’t “Is there unconscious bias?”, but “how do you deal with unconscious bias?”.

Here are some steps to mitigate the impact of those biases:

  • Diversity of source data (resumes and opportunities) helps ensure no single data gathering bias impacts the learning.
  • Avoid topic modeling or any other algorithm that averages document contents to make a decision.
  • Focus on terms and look across thousands of term instances to determine what to search for beyond just the terms in front of you.

From a feature engineering standpoint:

  • Don’t review any protected status feature nor allow any predictor of protected status to fall into models.
  • Use linear models. Each feature is easily audited by looking at the results. Any undesirable feature is self-evident by a review of multiple results and can be overridden by the users’ selections/rejections.

Key question: How do you deal with unconscious bias?

These 5 questions allow you to filter out any charlatans early on. As a next step, I would insist on a trial, so you can use the system and experience the performance and results for yourself within your company’s and industry’s context.

Curated Recruiting and Unconscious Bias

Unconscious bias is a pervasive problem in recruitment, since those who make hiring decisions based on these biases are unaware they’re doing so.

While primarily designed to hasten hires and improve the quality of applicants, curated recruiting by way of artificial intelligence (AI) can often curtail unconscious bias. Unfortunately, in the wrong hands, it can actually enable the bias.

Dipayan Ghosh served as technology adviser for the Obama White House, and privacy-policy consultant to Facebook. Now a Harvard University researcher, Ghosh has concerns about the use of AI for assessments and other recruiting processes.

“Engineers and policymakers must be doubly cautious to assure ethical standards are adhered to in the development of new hiring technologies powered by AI,” Ghosh wrote in his Quartz at Work article, AI is the Future of Hiring, But it’s Far From Immune to Bias. “The starkest and most concerning issue is algorithmic discrimination, which can unwittingly be propagated through AI, particularly if its designers are not careful in how they select input data and how they craft the underlying algorithms.”

What is unconscious bias?

The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Office of Diversity and Outreach defines unconscious bias as “social stereotypes about certain groups of people that individuals form outside their own conscious awareness.”

According to UCSF, we all have unconscious beliefs about various identity and social groups that stem from our tendency to organize our social worlds into categories.  Unconscious bias – generally regarding race, gender, religion, age, education, location, weight, or disability – is far more prevalent than conscious bias, and often conflicts with our conscious values. Its most common impact on hiring, referred to as the similarity-attraction theory, is the tendency to highly value those like ourselves.

Lauren A. Rivera, Professor of Management & Organizations at Kellogg University, researched hiring practices of 120 employers and hiring committees. In Hiring as Cultural Matching, Rivera reported that “employers sought candidates who were not only competent but also culturally similar to themselves in terms of leisure pursuits, experiences, and self-presentation styles.”

Her research determined that shared culture was extremely important to respondents, often outweighing productivity concerns.   

Education Management Professor Heinke Rebken, of Germany’s University of Oldenburg, in Similarity Attracts: An Analysis of Recruitment Decisions in Academia, reported that personal similarities and geographical proximity heavily influenced hiring in university business administration departments.

University of Lisbon Social Sciences professor Ana P. Nunes and economic consultant Marc Bendick, Jr., in Developing the Research Basis for Controlling Bias in Hiring, cited numerous studies of unconscious bias in assessing job candidates. These researchers found that recruiters who unconsciously stereotyped a particular group inaccurately evaluated members of that group in several ways; in fact, they paid more attention to interview and resume details and interview responses consistent with the stereotype than to information that was inconsistent.

For example, they:

  • Interpreted ambiguous data as confirming stereotypes;
  • Sought information confirming stereotypes more often than information contradicting them;
  • Were not persuaded by information indicating a stereotype was invalid; and
  • Made errors in memory that were consistent with stereotypes, even in their recall of such objective facts as test scores.

According to Nunes and Bendick, these unconscious biases convinced hiring managers that they were making unbiased decisions about objective differences in applicant’s qualifications when, in fact, they were not.  

What is curated recruiting?

Curated recruiting is the process by which employers and recruiters control job-seeker access to their firms’ career opportunities, to limit for applicant volume and suitability. Curated recruiting turns the traditional post-and-pray method on its head and, ideally, saves sourcing and assessment time for busy recruiters and hiring managers.

Rather than employers posting job notices in multiple public places such as open-access career websites, and then sifting through the myriad number of candidates to find those qualified, curated recruiting narrows down the career-announcement audience to those who have been pre-determined as qualified.

Recruiters and employers typically conduct curated recruiting in three ways:

  1. Limiting job postings and announcements to a narrow group of college placement offices and trade association job boards, and industry-specific niche sites such as Dice.com and Engineering.Jobs for technical positions, eFinancialCareers for banking and other financial jobs, MediaBistro.com and TalentZoo.com for openings in media outlets, and USAJobs.com for government work.
  2. Using targeting advertising services and platforms such as Appcast, Jobvite, LinkedIn Recruiter, and Facebook, which allow recruiters to deliver ads targeted by geography, skills, experience, education, and sometimes even interests and age.  
  3. Using the services of curated online marketplaces, such as LocalSolo, Hired, FlexJobs, TripleByte, EntertainmentCareers.net, LinkedIn Premium, and Underdog.io, which require applicants to qualify for site membership, pass skills tests to get their application in front of hiring managers, and / or pay for access.

How does curated recruitment impact bias?

Curation’s effect on unconscious bias can be as specific as the site or vendor offering the curation.  Its greatest assistance in countering bias lies in the skills testing that associations, vendors and curated career marketplaces use to screen memberships and job applications. When appropriately designed, these tests prevent recruiters’ bias-related early rejection of candidates.  

Targeted ad services have the potential for exacerbating both conscious and unconscious bias, however. Facebook has come under fire several times for letting employers target their job message to a defined age group. By way of Facebook targeted ads an employer, can, for example, limit its advertising audience to 18-25-year-old scientists with a master’s degree who love to ski, and live in New Hampshire.  

The New York Times, in Facebook Job Ads Raise Concerns About Age Discrimination, told the story of Verizon’s 2017 Facebook recruitment of financial planning candidates.

“The promotion was set to run on the Facebook feeds of users 25 to 36 years old who lived in the nation’s capital, or had recently visited there, and had demonstrated an interest in finance,” NYT reported. “For a vast majority of the hundreds of millions of people who check Facebook every day, the ad did not exist.”

Facebook VP Rob Goldman responded to complaints that its targeting was illegal.

“Used responsibly, age-based targeting for employment purposes is an accepted industry practice and for good reason: it helps employers recruit, and people of all ages find work,” he said.

The problem, of course, as with any curation, is that it’s not always used responsibly.

“If curated recruitment sites negatively impact bias, it’s because their tests are created and evaluated by humans, ‘Job Board Doctor’ Jeff Dickey-Chasins told us.

Recruiters and employers who want to test the prevalence of unconscious bias in their hiring practices have several resources:

  • The highly-rated Implicit Association Test (IAT), developed by a multi-university research group of psychologists. Their Project Implicit’s mission is to research and educate about implicit cognition – those thoughts and feelings that exist outside of our awareness and control.  
  • Unconscious bias training offered on-site or online by KnowledgeStart, ReadytoWork Business Collaborative, and others.
  • Resume anonymization and blind audition services, such as BiasFreeID, and GapJumpers.

As Dickey-Chasins told us, “While curation can help stem unconscious bias, ultimately curtailing bias falls back on the employer.”

Why isn’t recruiting under business development, as opposed to HR?

I feel like we’ve been discussing HR “not getting a seat at the table” and/or flaws with recruiting for literal years. For example, consider this. It’s from an article that probably speaks too much about mindfulness but otherwise makes some good points. Look at this part:

There is a study in The Wall Street Journalinterviewing about 900 executives, and 90% of them said that the soft skills are just as, if not more, important than the technical skills. And 89% said they’re having trouble finding people with these soft skills, with the emotional intelligence to be ready for today’s workplace.

Yes — soft skills are important, and ideally executives should realize that and be hiring for that.

But there’s a problem with this quote.

That problem would be…

… this is a quote/study designed to underscore the idea that “there is some skills gap and people are not finding the people they need to find.”

I don’t actually believe in the skills gap, personally.

This is somewhat of a nuanced discussion, but here’s what really seems to happen:

  • Executives are allowed to talk about hiring and “the war for talent” in speeches, etc. —
  • — but they don’t often get their hands dirty on recruiting except for maybe near their level
  • As such, anything they say about recruiting has to be taken with somewhat of a grain of salt

For example, I worked at a big health care company in the summer of 2013. Whenever headcount opened, the highest-ranking person usually said some variation of this:

  • “Update/re-post the old job description.”
  • “Get me someone as soon as possible.”
  • “I want to see options in 2-3 days.”

Job descriptions are notoriously bad(and often not even well-tied to the job), and overall the hiring process probably should have less of a focus on speed — because of the problem of “reaction” vs. “response”— but this is often the level where the highest-ranking people enter (and what they understand).

See, a high-ranking business guy got there because he was quick on the draw with emails and decisions over the last few years. It doesn’t matter if his “quick draw” approach ran everyone in circles. What matters is that he was seen as “decisive.”That matters a lot to men who run businesses. Same with hiring.

The other problem here

Decision-makers like to talk to other decision-makers using vocabulary they understand.

That means that, by and large, they don’t want to talk to something connected to HR.

To them, that department is about:

  • Compliance
  • Payroll
  • Getting out the people we don’t like

It’s not about “facing the business” or “growing the business.”

So …

Aren’t people the lifeblood of the business, for now?

Yes.

Shouldn’t the acquisition of the right people be considered a business development activity?

Logically.

And if recruitment was under business development, do you think senior decision-makers would care more?

They would.

So why don’t we do this?

Common reasons:

  • “We’ve always done it that way.”
  • “HR has the functional knowledge.”
  • “I will mention soft skills in a meeting but as long as I like my lieutenants and revenue is good, I really don’t care that I can’t find people with emotional intelligence.”
  • “It would be too big of a change.”
  • “Business development is about leads and products, not people.”

Etc.

Bottom line: you want people to care about something at work — anything, really — here are the two things you need to adjust for them:

  • “This is the vocabulary of this new thing.”
  • “This is how this new thing impacts you and offers you incentives.”

Moving recruiting under BizDev would be a huge step in these two regards for those with actual authority caring more. More organizations should consider that.

Talentful.ai Machine Learning Tool

talentful.ai review

Talentful.ai uses machine learning to bring unique insights to the recruiting process

Talentful.ai is a cool new tool that helps recruiters quickly find and analyze information about potential talent! It works both as a Chrome extension to find information from other sites and as its own site.

The extension allows you to quickly determine whether someone may or may not be of interest, and the full site provides more in-depth profiles and options. Talentful is also unique in its use of machine learning to provide new insights into candidates.

Once the extension is enabled, the logo will be present at the side of the screen when on LinkedIn. Upon clicking the logo, an overlay will appear that provides a variety of data on the candidate, including contact information, skills, experience, and school ranking.

  • The Contact info displayed includes any email addresses or social media links that are available.
  • The Skills section contains information such as software development, coding languages, management experience, and more.
  • The Experience section determines the total number of years in the industry and provides a break down of how long was spent in each type of role.
  • The School Ranking displays the school(s) the candidate attended and which percentage this school is in on the US and global scale.

You can also choose to view the full candidate profile on the Talentful.ai website. This will show you additional information, as well as provide you with options like exporting the profile as a pdf or viewing the candidate’s personality analysis

  • You can choose to export the candidate’s profile as a pdf for future easy access.
  • You have the option to view the candidate’s personality analysis, created by Talentful’s unique AI.

Additionally, the site itself is great for searching through its database of people gathered from LinkedIn and GitHub, among other sites. You can choose to search by skills, location, and more.

Talentful.ai is still a fairly new product and is already very useful. It definitely has a lot of potential for the future, and is a good tool to keep your eye on! ~ Noel Cocca

See what Dean Da Costa has to say below.

 

 

Humans are actually inefficient recruiters

The Hard Way

Almost every employer and agency is doing things the hard way as far as I can see. I’m not one of these commentators who has never worked in recruitment. I started my career placing accountants in an ongoing winner-takes-all death match against Michael Page and Robert Half so I learned about recruiting the hard way.

To be absolutely truthful, after 2 years, I really didn’t want to talk to a candidate ever again but I loved the marketing aspect to recruitment so I moved into a recruitment marketing agency and then consulting at PwC.

Nearly 20 years later though and from my vantage point, 80% of internal recruiters and 95% of agency recruiters are still working the hard way. Most of their days are spent doing the same things I was doing in 1999. They can save a huge amount of time and, basically, fill more jobs in less time if they break from their boss’s ‘tried and trusted’ methods. So, let’s take a look at what’s changed and what recruiters today are still doing they shouldn’t be.

How’s the landscape different?

OK, we didn’t have LinkedIn when I started in recruitment but it emerged only a few years later. As recruiters, we thought it was a panacea and to an extent, it was. LinkedIn and other social networks made the world more transparent and for a period, we spammed candidates and they responded. They felt flattered to be ‘head hunted’ and gave us the time of day. Now though, many recruiters still do the same and sit with straight faces, helplessly watching their response rates declining. What they haven’t realised is that, while we were making hay, candidates were becoming used to approaches from recruiters and for them, that earlier feeling of excitement to be singled out for a job opportunity was replaced with déjà vu and a yawn. They became used to it, slower to read messages, less likely to respond.

Not only did apathy set in but candidates can find out much more information about you as an employer than they could in the past. They can find out from sources like Glassdoor and The Muse what the coffee really tastes like if they work at your organisation. So, they don’t need to talk to recruiters until they’ve been through a self-directed research journey.

Unfortunately, today, some recruiters try to adapt by increasing their ‘numbers.’ Increasing the number of people identified, number of messages sent by InMail and email and number of cold calls made is not the answer. It’s inefficient. So how can we adapt in a way that increases our performance? Simply put, the answer is in technology and here are a few ways that the smartest recruiters I know are making technology work for them so they can fill more jobs in less time.

The oft-referenced tech tools

Matching tools like Pocket Recruiter allow you to search social networks, CV databases and your own ATS/CRM to tell you which candidates have the skills you need for your vacancy. They search multiple locations faster than you can and because they are embedded with artificial intelligence (simple AI at this point), they return better results than you can, ninja or not.

In many markets, unemployment is low, candidates are in high demand and rarely interested in making a move. So how do we know who to talk to first? Talent pipeline products are emerging in recruitment which track and score candidates’ interactions with your social media, careers site / corporate website, landing pages, Glassdoor, YouTube and more. You’re then able to stack rank your database according to a real-time engagement score which this tells you who to contact first and saves vast amounts of time.

Now we know technology can help us find suitable people and identify those who are likely to be interested, we still need to paste ‘00s of individual messages to people’s email or social media accounts, right? Not right. Take a look at People.camp, GPZ and similar tech solutions which allow you to distribute personalised messages to large numbers of candidates at once.

Next, let’s say you have a large number of applicants, who has the time to do all the first interviews? Probably not you as you’re handling 30 reqs at once. I know this might sound a little futuristic but products like Robot Vera will do that for you. They will assess the candidate’s suitability based on a telephone or video interview. Israeli company Intervyo’s AI interviewing product claims to be able to measure the depths of the human soul.

Let’s bottom line this

Of course there are elements of recruitment which only humans should do, such as second stage interviews and managing offers but if you haven’t done this, my advice is to break down all the aspects to your role as a recruiter and consider, are there tech products which will give me more time to focus on the things I do better than anyone and anything else.

If you’re just starting on this journey, I recommend taking a look at Talent Tech Labs’ Ecosystem which has categorised the technologies you should be aware of, helpfully grouping them according to different recruitment activities.

GitHub Hovercard Add-on

github hovercard

 

This GitHub Hovercard add-on makes locating info simple and easy

GitHub Hovercard is an extension that makes accessing information on and from GitHub quick and simple! Created by GitHub user Justineo, the extension is available for Chrome and a variety of other browsers.

Once the GitHub Hovercard extension is installed, simply hover the mouse over a GitHub link and a box will appear on the screen containing key information from the page. This works for a variety of link types, including to user pages and issues.

  • Hovering over a link to a user profile will bring up information including the name, username, follower and following counts, repo count, user location, and more.
  • Hovering over a link to a repository will bring up a box displaying the stars, forks, and issues in the repository, as well as a short description and outline.
  • Hovering over a link to an issue will bring up a box display the issue’s contents.
  • Hovering over a link to a commit will display some key information, such as the user, date, files changed, likes, and tags.

The great thing about the GitHub Hovercard is that it works not only within GitHub but also on other sites that contain links to GitHub. It is a versatile extension and saves users a great deal of time and energy that is normally spent opening up new pages. Though simple, it works quickly and is a convenient addition to anyone’s set of tools! ~ Noel Cocca

 

See what Dean Da Costa has to say below.

 

Part 1: Technical Recruiting and Technical Assessments: What’s NOT Working

Hiring for technical positions is one of the costliest of recruiting efforts, not only in terms of money spent, but as well in terms of time spent sourcing, interviewing, and assessing. The cost in lost productivity while the position is vacant, sometimes to replace a bad hire, can be hefty as well.

The statistics are appalling:

  • According to CareerBuilder, nearly 75 percent of all firms have been adversely affected by a bad hire.
  • The U.S. Department of Labor reports that bad hires cost nearly 30 percent of that employee’s annual salary.
  • BambooHR researchers found that 16 percent of new hires leave the firm between one week and three months of hire, while another 31 percent quit after six months.
  • A recent survey by technology product and advisory service CEB (now Gartner) found that the average technical job vacancy costs the firm $500 per day.  
  • Human Resources Management, in its 2016 Human Capital Benchmarking Report, put the average cost-per-hire at $4,129.  For technical recruiting that figure soars, however. In The Hidden Cost of Hiring Engineers , Qualified.io CEO Nathan Doctor quantified the cost of one engineer hire as $22,750.

While it’s clear that efficiently hiring and retaining the right technical staff is crucial to a company’s bottom line, three obstacles typically stand in the way of this goal.

They are:

  1. Heavy reliance on human hiring decisions;
  2. Heavy reliance on resumes; and
  3. Failure to hire technically savvy recruiters.

Heavy reliance on humans

Humans, no matter how well trained or bias-averse, are flawed. They sometimes become mentally distracted during interviews, missing key points shared by the candidate. All too often they depend for recall on memory, and / or incomplete and hastily-typed or hand-written notes taken during the interview.

The biggest obstacle humans put in the way of employing the best candidate is the unconscious tendency to hire those applicants who are most like themselves.  

Lauren A. Rivera, Northwestern University Assistant Professor of Organization Management and Sociology, researched the hiring decisions of 120 employers and hiring committees, to see if cultural similarities between employers and job candidates influenced hiring decisions. Her findings:  Employers sought candidates like themselves in experiences, leisure pursuits, and self-presentation styles.

Madan Pillutla, London Business School Professor of Organizational Behavior agrees with Rivera’s findings.

“We tend to like people who are similar to us — whether that means they come from the same state or sport the same haircut,” Pillutla told Business Insider. “One way to explain that phenomenon, is that people with a decent level of self-esteem are satisfied with their personalities. So, when they see their qualities reflected in someone else, they tend to like that person, too.”

The problem with such behavior is that highly qualified candidates are overlooked, and the wrong candidates are chosen for the wrong reasons.

As Pillutla put it, “if I keep hiring people like myself, very soon I’ll have an organization of people who think similarly, who act similarly.”

Dr. Heidi Grant Halvorson, Director of the Diversity & Bias Practice at the NeuroLeadership Institute (NLI), talked about the impact of hiring for similarities in her Adobe blog post, Is Unconscious Bias Stifling Your Creativity?  

“Teams that are homogeneous—which is what unconscious biases often produce—have been shown to consistently underperform compared to teams that are diverse,” Halvorson wrote. “A strong sense of ‘group think’ develops, where everyone agrees with each other and they cease to question each other’s assumptions. These homogeneous groups also routinely overestimate how well they’re doing. They feel like they’re ‘knockin’ it out of the park,’ when in fact they’re consistently not.”

In an industry that relies on creativity and ingenuity, that’s a competitive death knell.

Heavy Reliance on Resumes

Numerous experts predict the death of the resume, primarily because resumes lack clarity and truthfulness. (Recent Statisticbrain.com research determined that 53 percent of resumes include falsified information.)

“Resumes are terrible predictors of engineering ability,” Interviewing.io founder Aline Lerner blogged. “I’ve looked at tens of thousands of resumes, and in software engineering roles, there is often very little [correlation] between how someone looks on paper and whether they can actually do the job.”

2018 will mark the end of the resume for developers, according to HackerRank co-founder and CEO Vivek Ravisankar.

“The resume works against people who are self-taught—a group that includes a sizable chunk of today’s software developers,” he told Human Resource Executive.  

According to Ravisankar, resumes emphasize schools attended and prior employers, leading recruiters to discard qualified applicants without offering them the opportunity to demonstrate their skills.   

Failure to hire tech-savvy recruiters

Most of the cost of hiring for a technical position, Nathan Doctor explained, is due to the many hours engineers spend away from their own work to interview and evaluate applicants. Unlike hiring for non-technical positions, where recruiting generalists can more accurately assess candidates, engineering and other technical position assessments require industry experts. Most companies, however, have failed to hire technical recruiters.

“All too often a company’s hiring process overuses their engineering talent for pre-screens and interviews, many times with candidates who aren’t qualified to begin with,” Doctor wrote.

Beyond the hours spent reviewing resumes and sitting in on interviews, relying on technical-department staff for pre-employment assessments has dire consequences to productivity and the bottom line.

“Seemingly small distractions can undo hours of [an engineer’s] work,” Doctor wrote. “Because it takes continuous precise focus to work toward an effective solution, this distraction can actually have a demoralizing effect as it breaks work flow — short-term memory gets loaded with all of the moving parts, leaving engineers to rebuild their mental model and take even more time to simply get back to even. An hour-long distraction can actually debase hours of work.”

——

So, if humans err in their assessments of candidates, resumes are poor predictors of job success, and relying on IT staff to assess technical candidates is far too costly for employers, what’s a hiring manager to do? What’s the smart, efficient, way to recruit technical staff?

For a look at what’s working in technical recruiting and technical assessments, stay tuned.  We’re doing a 3 part series that’s being sponsored by our pals at eTeki.  Part 2 coming soon.

How to sell a leadership job

This article was co-written with Ben Dattner, an executive coach and organizational development consultant, and the founder of New York City–based Dattner Consulting, LLC. (You can follow him on Twitter at @bendattner.) Elizabeth Wood, the other co-author, is Chief Human Resources Officer for Levi Strauss & Co.

Setting the stage

In the war for talent, successful companies think long and hard about their employer brand and the value proposition that they offer current and prospective employees. By regularly surveying employees, conducting exit interviews, and interviewing candidates who receive but do not accept offers, companies can evaluate and improve their overall competitiveness as an employer of choice on an ongoing basis. These “macro” methods can help attract, recruit and retain a talented employee population, but in order to attract a unique and talented individual, it’s also crucial to develop a “micro” focus on that particular candidate’s unique motivations and priorities. And for an individual candidate, a role is likely to be appealing if the opportunity presents them with a compelling “story” that fits well with the arc of their life and career.  

Some candidates jump at the opportunity to take a leadership or managerial job. Other qualified candidates will only accept a role with certain attributes or associated rewards. But what about potential candidates who are open to being or becoming organizational leaders in general, but who are undecided about a specific opportunity? For board members, investors, company managers, and/or headhunters, coming up with an appealing offer can involve two general strategies:  first, endeavoring to configure a role that meets the criteria that the candidate is seeking, that is to say changing the substance of the offer and opportunity. If an individual is sufficiently talented or uniquely qualified, the company might even create a new role or reconfigure an existing role in order to woo him or her to join the organization. However, it’s not always possible to reconfigure a role, so it’s helpful to know how to sell an existing role to a potential leader, involving first understanding his or her career mission and motivation, and then framing the role in a way that makes it appear more appealing. To do this, it’s important to get to know the candidate as a person, to develop an understanding of their own unique “heroic narrative” which needs to be considered along with their personality, and to carefully consider the criteria that they will use to make their decision.

How do they view the “story” of their career?

Whether we are aware of it or not, all of us are cast as the hero or heroine of our own career heroic narrative and psychodrama and have mental and emotional scripts that, while irrational at times, can help explain and predict what kinds of opportunities will be alluring and which won’t be. For example, some leaders seek situations where they are tasked with turning around a dysfunctional or underperforming team, department or company. Other leaders might have no interest in turnaround situations, but instead will seek roles where they are cast as the innovative disrupter, challenging the status quo and taking on more powerful rivals.  In both of these examples, there are likely psychological reasons why one context might be appealing and the other aversive or uninteresting, often rooted in one’s childhood and early family experience. Sometimes, the company, headhunter or board member might directly know enough about the life and career history of a candidate to understand the roots of these deep motivations, while at other times such motivations might need to be indirectly imputed based on how the leader talks about his or her potential interest in taking on a new role, and what the attributes of an appealing new role would need to be.

How do they find meaning in their work?

It is often the case that the most talented and accomplished leaders are those who are motivated by a sense of meaning in their life and work, and who endeavor to serve and assist others. Leaders vary, however, in the constituencies they are most motivated to serve. Some candidates will find a role appealing if it affords them an opportunity to better serve customers or clients of the organization. Other candidates will care more about employees and will be most motivated by the chance to improve the workplace experience of the organization’s rank and file or frontline staff. Asking a candidate to provide examples and tell stories about his or her most meaningful past career experiences and accomplishments can provide a helpful window into what future opportunities might be most interesting to them.

What are their most favorite (and least favorite) “ing’s”?

Careers in general and roles in particular can helpfully be thought of as being a “portfolio” of “activities” e.g. “ing’s.” Every candidate has “ing’s” that he or she enjoys most and least. Some leaders might enjoy “fixing” dysfunction or “re-energizing” employees, while others may prefer “disrupting” an industry or “competing” with established players. In terms of least preferred “ing’s,” some leaders might bristle at “budgeting” or “long term planning” while others will try to avoid “reassuring” disgruntled customers and “lobbying” for stakeholder support. Developing an understanding of, and a common language around, the individual’s most and least favorite “ing’s” can be very helpful in framing the appeal of the potential leadership opportunity and comparing and contrasting it with either the candidate’s current role or various other possible roles or career moves.

Who do they enjoy working with?

In addition to pitching the candidate on the “what” of the prospective role, it’s also a good idea to emphasize “who” they will have the opportunity to work with, both in terms of individuals that they would work closely with as well as the culture and climate of the broader team, department or organization. Some prospective leaders like to join more established teams and organizations where there are experienced executive already in place, while other leaders like to join startups where there is an opportunity to be the “adult in the room” for talented but inexperienced founders or managers. Giving the candidate the opportunity to meet a selected but broad sample of current members of the organization can be invaluable in terms of giving them a sense of how well they are likely to connect with, and be able to effectively lead, their potential new team.

In conclusion, to effectively compete for talent, companies are gathering and analyzing more and more data about their candidates, employees, and voluntary and involuntary “alumni.” However, individual candidates have their own unique set of motivations, priorities and systems of meaning and selling jobs to individuals is more of an “art” than a “science.” It is said that “the plural of anecdote is data” which, if true, implies that the singular of data is anecdote. Anecdotes are stories and developing an understanding of the stories of candidates, including what kind of challenges they gravitate towards, what accomplishments they find meaningful, and their preferred activities and coworkers is the best way to have them become part of your company’s story and to have your company become part of their story.

Facebook gets the No. 1 slot on Indeed’s top-rated 2018 workplaces

Surprising to an extent, right? This wasn’t necessarily the best year for Facebook overall?

Here’s the top 10:

You can find a full post from Indeed here, wherein they even acknowledge the schism of FB’s year:

Despite a somewhat tumultuous year for Facebook, the social media behemoth climbed three places from number four on last year’s list to claim the top spot. A semantic analysis of employee reviews shows that people at Facebook most often refer to the “great environment”, “amazing benefits” and “great people” (not to mention the “free food”).

Insofar as you believe “every company these days is a tech company,” well, if you’re looking at just standard tech companies, they would only be occupying the 1, 3, and 10 slot. Simple math says that’s only 30% of the list.

What can we learn from this?

A few things:

The value of employee experience. Indeed themselves speak to this:

“With so much competition in recruiting today, companies are continuing to evolve their overall employee experience in the hopes of attracting and retaining top talent for their open positions,” says Indeed SVP of HR, Paul Wolfe. “Organizations that stood out among top-rated companies have worked hard to listen to the specific needs of their employees to provide an outstanding experience through strategic and thoughtful workplace programs.”

We all should realize this is important by now, but that thinking might not be at scale.

How important is compensation? You’d argue “very important,” but interestingly in all the press releases, the word “salary” came up just once — and it was in a section discussing Costco, which is a major company but not some Silicon Valley hotshot we’d expect to be minting $250,000/year packages. Similar themes emerged on the 2016 Indeed list — while compensation is important, maybe it’s not the be-all and the end-all.

Train more and train better: This has been a theme of top companies to work for across a decade-plus, but please, please, please invest in training. Don’t allow the old “If we train them, they will leave for a competitor!” mindset to win out. That’s a killer of workplaces. And remember the inverse: “What if you don’t train them … and they stay?”

Anything else notable to you on this list?

You’re not nearly as understaffed as you think

I’ve had a bunch of different jobs, and at every single one, someone in a middle management role or higher has constantly referred to how understaffed their department (or organization) is. Whenever someone talks about their current job, they usually include some variation of how understaffed they are, leading to how busy they are, leading to how everyone is pitching in more.

The point is, everyone seems to think their team or department is completely understaffed at all times. But what if that’s a myth?

The understaffed myth and the Temple of Busy

This first part of the understaffed myth shouldn’t be that hard to follow or conceptualize. Basically, people love to be busy. They often think “busy” means “productive”– it does not — and in a world where your direct manager feels they “don’t have the time” to respect you, being busy — i.e. heaping a lot of stuff on your plate that has no real tie to business outcomes — is crucial to how relevant you feel at a job.

See, you’re not getting standard human affirmation from your boss in a lot of cases (they have targets to hit too) and you’re not getting true purpose from your company (that’s not their job to provide it), so you have to look for what you need wherever you can find it. For most people, that’s 40 hours a week (but claiming 75!) of service at The Temple of Busy.

One of the easiest ways to become a regular parishioner at The Temple Of Busy is to constantly talk about how understaffed your team and company is. Because if you’re understaffed, then obviously you’ve got to be busy. And if you’ve got to be busy, you’re one step closer to relevance. Ah-ha!

The understaffed myth and job role

Alright, check this graphic out.

Understaffed and Job Role

This is based on an idea of ‘Total Motivation’ (look it up) and shows the difference between having a poor process around something and an excellent process. So, a bad career ladder vs. an excellent one is 63 ‘total motivation’ points on a scale. Bad compensation vs. good: 48 points.

Now look up at the top. 87 total motivation points are tied to role design, i.e. what the hell is your job and what do you do.

Here are a few reasons why this ties drastically into the understaffed myth:

  • You constantly are telling people how you work 70 hours/week, but if your role design isn’t great, you probably don’t work that much.
  • You’re unclear of your role within the organization.
  • You’re unclear of OTHER roles within the organization.

Let’s get personal for a second, and philosophical. I got canned from a job in November ’15. Twas a bad scene. Now, there’s two important things to reflect on here: first off, that job had virtually no definition. The job role was unclear from the jump (my bad on accepting, possibly) and it didn’t matter to a soul, including my direct boss most at the time. I often struggled with that, and did so badly.

Now here’s the philosophical part: since my exit, I’ve heard from dozens of people that the wrap on me at the company is that I was a “bad employee.” Sure, sure. That’s logical. Here’s the deal, though: how can you be “bad” at something that probably didn’t need to exist in the first place? For a job with no real job role or design, isn’t anything you do essentially a value-add by definition?

Here’s my overall point: people’s motivation can fluctuate twice as much relative for “job role” vs. “compensation.” That’s really powerful, especially when you consider how many revenue hounds exist in this world. So maybe when we constantly talk about being understaffed, what we’re really saying is…

We have a bunch of people, but we’re not clear what they do and we don’t know how to put them in the right spots to succeed.

And that right there is the essence of shitty management, brought to life by the understaffed myth.

The understaffed myth and hiring

This all begins with hiring, of course. Typically you move from the standard cover your ass move of ‘the hiring manager shuffle’ to a bunch of people bellowing about headcount to a totally rushed process based on everyone’s belief about how busy they are and predicated on meaningless interview questions.

Now think about a CEO giving a big speech, OK? They’re going to talk about things like “building an innovative team” and “doing more with less” (which refers to being understaffed, but also essentially says “We’re keeping most of the extra money for me and my lieutenants, fuck you very much”). They’re going to discuss “mission”and “purpose” and “building the biz” and “value-adds.”

We’ve all sat in these speeches. We know the drill.

Everything being discussed begins and ends with people. It’s that simple. People are part of the innovative team. People do more with less. People drive the mission forward. You need to care about people.

One step in this whole ‘caring about people instead of screeching about revenue plays’ model of management is this: you need to objectively (not subjectively, which is how most HR practices are oddly set up) look at people, their strengths, and the structure of various departments. Rather than yelping about headcount and rushing to hire, consider job roles. I’m not saying go around firing people willy-nilly because there’s overlap in roles or something. I’m saying understand who people are, what they can do, how they can contribute to the bottom line, and where the pieces could fit together.

At that job I mentioned above, I worked with no fewer than 14 people who no one could explain the job role of. One lady basically just walked around all day and no one was sure where she even reported. You might think this is a joke, or me lobbing turds at a former employer, but it’s not. It’s just like … this happens at so many companies.

Instead of looking at real issues around people’s strengths and organizational structure, we instantly revert to screaming about how understaffed we are.

How does this benefit anyone?

I’d propose some solutions now, but you probably don’t have time to read ’em. You’re understaffed! Doing more with less! Gonna put in a solid 80 this week!

Well, two things to end then: I did propose a solution above and (b) I know you want to be deified as a workaholic, but that 80-hour/week isn’t going to be so productive, good sir.

Context Scout Is Back

Context Scout is back to help you find info quickly and efficiently

Context Scout, an extension that searches through a variety of websites in order to easily provide you with information about candidates, is once again available after being discontinued for a period of time. The new extension is very efficient and user-friendly, making the recruitment process easier in many ways!

Once the extension is installed, a visual will appear on relevant sites that shows what the tool has found about the subject of the search. It allows you to choose a category, such as “Social” or “Contact,” and then displays the information it has found in that category.

  • Choosing Contact displays any email addresses or phone numbers that the tool has found for that person.
  • Choosing Social tells the tool to search through various sites for the person’s social accounts. This includes everything from LinkedIn and Twitter to GitHub and StackOverflow. It will even display some recent content that the person has posted.
  • Choosing Skills provides you with a list of skills the person has, such as software proficiencies or programming languages.

Context Scout makes it very easy for you to switch between these different categories, so you can quickly learn as much information about a candidate as possible. It can also pull out other information, such as the location where the candidate is based or current job titles.

This tool is very user-friendly and brings together a lot of different information into one place. The visuals are neat and modern, and Context Scout is compatible with a wide variety of different websites, including Twitter, which many tools do not work on. Context Scout is a great tool from a great organization, and is highly recommended! ~ Noel Cocca

 

See what Dean Da Costa has to say below.

 

Personalization as the cousin of automation

Personal Hospitality in Recruiting

Hospitality is a major component of recruiting—just like it is at a restaurant or hotel. You help candidates with wayfinding while navigating the process; you support them if they have questions or concerns; and you make them feel welcome by highlighting your office culture.

Personalizing their “stay” matters because it’s a way to make your candidate experience more service-oriented. And investing in the candidate experience will help you attract more applicants and lock in top talent, so it’s wise to think of your candidates your guests.

Hospitality is an art as much as it is a science when you need to deliver it at scale. You can standardize procedures that allow you to make each candidate feel fantastic, without having to slow down or invent something new every time. The way to strike this balance between delivering superb hospitality and moving efficiently is to use software in some places, and use your creativity and judgement in others.

Smart software can help you deliver outstanding hospitality in two key ways:

  1. It can give you more time to invest in personal connection
  2. It can extend your best practices to more candidates

Software can free you up to invest time in “hosting” your candidates.

You use plenty of software to get the most out of your day: your ATS, your video conferencing service, your note-taking app. There are new tools on the market—many of them featuring some amount of AI—that you can add to the mix to get back the time you spend on repetitive work that requires your attention.

When AI comes knocking on the door, it’s easy to see it as an all-encompassing force that will take over your whole workflow and turn it into a cold, stiff process. AI may seem like the last thing to help with providing hospitality! But realistically, AI isn’t ready for your whole workflow—it isn’t good enough to do much of the work you do. It’s really only reliable when it’s used in very specific, narrow ways.

So instead of taking over your entire day, software can help by handling a slice of your work. And with the extra time you save, you can do more to focus on hosting your candidates one-on-one. You won’t rely on software to make these connections. Instead, the software will just clear other work away, so you can invest in relationships.

Software can increase the impact of your approach.

To deliver a thoughtful, personal experience, you don’t need to design a custom candidate journey for every person who applies for a role. (The team at your favorite hotel doesn’t come up with a unique way to prepare each individual room!) You know the ideal path for candidates to follow, and you need to get them on and through that path as swiftly as possible. So in many instances, making things personal isn’t about making them bespoke, but rather about making them clear, consistent, and timely.

Habit can help you standardize repeating best practices. For example, Brendan Browne’s standard workflow is to do walking interviews at LinkedIn. It’s become part of his habit and he doesn’t have to plan his route uniquely every time. He’s made it a standard, personal touch.

You’re already using software to do the same thing. As Sharlyn Lauby points out, being responsive with every candidate should be the expectation throughout your team. By automating follow-ups through your ATS or batched email campaigns, you can make the conversation complete, personal, and efficient.

So consider this rule of thumb: if it’s tedious or repeating, software can be really good at it. Let software handle the components of your workflows that are consistent, and ensure that every candidate has the most seamless journey possible.

It all adds up to more time with engaged candidates.

By letting software take work off your plate and ensure consistency for every candidate journey, you can get the dual benefit of having more time, and investing it in great-fit candidates. You just need to build the right workflow to get yourself there.

Building this workflow shouldn’t be intimidating. At Clara Labs, we’ve spent years making sure that bringing our scheduling support service into your workflow is simple. That’s why Clara works from the tools you’re already familiar with: your ATS and your inbox.

So consider how you can turn your candidate experience into a 5-star restaurant or a boutique hotel. With the right tools and habits, you’ll dazzle every time.