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On maternity leave and employer branding

Georgene Huang’s career in the media industry was flying high when — out of nowhere — her boss, the company’s CEO, was fired. And then….so was she. No one knew it at the time, but Georgene was two months pregnant with her second child.

A graduate of Cornell and Stanford Law School, Georgene dutifully embarked on her job search the way any A-student would — by doing a lot of research. But the more she researched potential employers, the less she was able to find the answers to the questions that really mattered to her: Is this a company where women are treated fairly and where they have real opportunities to move ahead? What is work-life balance like? Will I be able to have dinner with my family? And most importantly, what is the maternity leave policy?

The question about what a company’s leave policy was proved an insurmountable obstacle in Georgene’s job search. She knew it was an essential piece of information about her future employer — and she knew it would be career suicide to ask it in the job interview.

Since the US is the only developed country in the world without a federally mandated parental leave, the policy is fully at the discretion of the employer. According to a study co-sponsored by SHRM, just 6% of companies with 50 or more employees offer fully paid leave, and FMLA provides only for job protection during their unpaid leave.

For years, most US companies towed the line and offered the minimum leave required or relied on short-term disability benefits to address parental leave. However, over the past three years, companies from Walmart to JP Morgan Chase to American Express to Nike have significantly increased the amount of leave they offer to birth mothers, as well as to fathers and adoptive parents. And now, there seems to be a full on parental leave arms race happening among top US companies, resulting in considerable media coverage and social chatter.

While it is unfortunately not yet the standard, a best-in-class leave policy can make a lot of difference to companies that are trying to attract talent — especially women. As a matter of fact, this one data point — of which job seekers are taking note — can become a proxy for a company’s overall commitment to gender diversity and to families. In a recent survey, 87% of women said that a company’s parental leave policy was important to them when considering whether to join.

And research shows that job satisfaction among women is highly correlated to the amount of paid parental leave they take.

Often, companies are hesitant to improve their paid leave policy, citing increased costs. However, part of the benefit of offering a competitive parental leave needs to be viewed in terms of the quantifiable benefit it provides in helping to attract and retain top female talent.

A best-in-class leave policy takes the following into account:

  • It is a minimum of 12 weeks, fully paid
  • It is available to fathers and adoptive parents, as well as to birth mothers
  • It provides for some sort of phased-in return-to-work
  • It is available to employees at all levels, whether they are salaried or hourly
  • Employees can take their leave without being penalized

After discovering how difficult it was to uncover what kind of leave policies employers offered — if any — Georgene ultimately gave up trying to find a job, and instead built the first-ever crowdsourced database of US corporate parental leave as an integral part of Fairygodboss.

While in the past, paid leave may have felt far out of the purview of an Employer Branding practitioner, now — more than ever — it needs to be considered a key part of your EVP, particularly as it pertains to female jobseekers. Once you get a great policy in place, it can be a core part of your messaging.

So, Your Work Isn’t Scalable

What should you be doing as a recruiter?

Most would answer this by simply shifting the word: You should be recruiting, of course.

Makes logical sense. But recruiting and sourcing involves lots of different things:

  • Relationship-building
  • Sourcing
  • Screening
  • Scheduling interviews
  • Conducting interviews
  • Working with hiring managers
  • Moving through the process
  • Working with HR on an offer
  • Moving towards onboarding

Now, science has shown that about 55 hours/week is a hard ceiling on productivity. Let’s say you work just below the ceiling: 54 hours/week. That’s still 10+ hours/day Monday to Friday.

A percentage of that time will be taken up by calls and meetings. Let’s say that’s about 35% of time, as research has shown. 35% of 54 hours is about 19 hours, so now you’re down to 35 hours/week of solid, productive work time.

On top of that — coming off those 35 hours — is a lot of top of funnel activities like sourcing and screening. Some recruiters spend close to 23 hours/week (!!) on sourcing, and another 3-4 hours on background screening. Even if you believe half that number (about 12 hours a week), we’re down to 23 hours a week of productive work.

Now add in five 1-hour lunches and we’re at 17.

Add in all those moments where someone says “Hey, got five minutes?” and it becomes 30. We’re down to about 12-14 hours/week of solid, productive work time.

As you can see here, the work isn’t scalable. There’s too much checking boxes/task work/”business of doing business” and not enough real, true sourcing and relationship-building.

Strategy? Who even has the time, right?

But now — how do the best recruiters spend this time?

Building proactive pipelines

If your company rolls out a new road map and it requires a personalization expert to get it going, you now are on the clock to find a personalization expert. So, what do many of us in talent acquisition do? Hit the job boards, LinkedIn, etc.

But the best personalization experts you could get for this role are likely already essentially gone, because they’ve already been in discussions with recruiters who are ready to pounce when they have approved headcount.

The best recruiters — and on the agency side, the ones who tend to generate the most money — build proactive pipelines. They email candidates when they don’t have a position. They work trade shows. They work hotel bars at conferences. They lean on people they’ve placed before to find A-level colleagues, and then take them to drinks, coffee, or lunch. They are always building out relationships pre-role.

The project manager that needs the hire is happy. Whoever controls the budget is happy. Everyone is happy.

Thinking more strategically

What are different departments going to need in a few months? A few years? How could the transition from hire to onboarding be more effective? How are we within the local, state, and national market on comp?

Are hiring managers defining roles clearly? Where are people exiting the recruiting process? Is our ATS too complicated and not intuitive for a candidate? What are people saying about us on Glassdoor and what do we need to be changing internally around that?

Good recruiters — and ones who get the “seat at the table” in bigger discussions about strategy and budget — ask those questions and work on solving them. That’s how they spend a chunk of their time, because that means you’re “future-proofed.” You know the potential blind spots and you have a plan.

Now what’s a sub-par way to spend recruiting time?

Spending a lot of their time on task work

Usually this falls into sourcing, screening, and scheduling (the Three Killer S’s of Recruiting).

When this takes too much time, it can feel like you’re just checking boxes and doing nothing else. There’s not a lot of engagement for the recruiter — come in, task task task, lunch, task task task, leave, rinse and repeat. People burn out.

But here’s the great promise of technology: some of the stuff you don’t like to do or shouldn’t be doing can be outsourced to tech and you get more time for the actual reasons you got into this career in the first place: finding talent, building relationships, and getting people jobs they love and deserve.

If you’re interested in more strategic plays to up your game, check out this playbook on the war for tech talent. 

The myths of HR enterprise tech

Last month I stumbled across William Tincup’s article ‘With Workday, Where Am I Wrong?’ It was a brutal teardown of Workday and HR platform providers at large. Some highlights:

“…if you [Workday] are the darling of our industry you might want to consider releasing best of breed products rather than what you’ve released…”

Ouch. He goes on…

“…they are far inferior to average point solutions.”

I couldn’t agree more. I’ve long held the view that enterprise HR platforms are the reason workplace technology is lagging so far behind our consumer counterparts.

On one hand William’s article echoed the discontented mutterings of friends and colleagues forced to use and  buy underperforming HR technology. On the other it made me hopeful – hopeful that with so many high quality point solutions we can do so much to make every employee more productive and successful.

We’ve all become obsessed with finding (and presumably keeping) the best people. And rightly so. Recruiting is hard. It’s expensive. It’s competitive. But why have we spent so much energy on elaborate physical office environments, while failing to modernise workplace technology?

Enter human capital management (HCM) providers with their promises of best-practice, mobility and lightening fast ‘8.2 month’ deployments (Workday counterintuitively supports this claim with an illustration of a rocket). If that’s not enough, SAP SuccessFactors promises to help you ‘win the talent war’, like it’s some awesome HR wonder weapon. Continue reading “The myths of HR enterprise tech”

The resume of the future will be here sooner than we think

There simply aren’t enough candidates to fill open positions.

Talent acquisition professionals have been faced with this dilemma in recent years. While the unemployment rate in the U.S. is at an all-time low (3.9 percent), there are still open jobs — 6.6. million, to be exact. This figure from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ March 2018 report is the highest number of job openings since December 2010. Though talent shortages are nothing new, the burden to fill these positions is mounting and the pressure is being felt by talent acquisition professionals around the world.

However, we can all take a deep breath and applaud as these pressures will be alleviated, thanks to advancements in technology. For the first time since the revolution of social media, we in talent acquisition have a glaring opportunity to harness technology and our next revolution by tapping into what I call the ‘Resume of the Future.’

The ‘Resume of the Future’ is going to change the way talent acquisition professionals do their jobs. This new type of resume will use the latest technology to transform how we source and attract talent and will also change the ways we can evaluate that talent. Think of the ‘Resume of the Future’ as more of a persona than a traditional resume. The idea is that individuals will have everything about them—not just their education and job history—together in one place; a Flipboard and Dropbox-like digital offering that includes an aggregated compilation of a candidate’s technical abilities, certifications, accomplishments, recommendations, skills, social profiles and personality assessments. Not something they type up from a blank template, but a collection of relevant data and information from their lifetime. For example, if a 7-year-old entrepreneur had a monopoly on lemonade stands in her neighborhood, that experience would be featured in her future resume.

Additionally, technological advancements like AI, machine learning, VR and AR will change how the future resume is displayed and how recruiters will interact with it. For instance, recruiters will use AI and machine learning to efficiently scan and match candidates with open positions based on their potential for success (not just their previously documented successes). VR will enable organizations to penetrate remote geographical talent markets while AR will enable us to enrich our candidate experiences.

Below are four technologies that will be integrated into the  ‘Resume of the Future’ and change the way talent acquisition professionals source, assess and entice qualified candidates.

Social Profiles Will Allow for a More Holistic View of Candidates

Social media recruiting has already exploded—LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram—nothing is off-limits. This was the first step in transitioning from candidates applying with a traditional resume to a more inclusive profile. At my company, 36 percent of our applicants this year applied using either their LinkedIn profile or mobile device. But in the future, recruiters will be able to use social feeds in order to match candidates to open positions. Using bio-facial recognition recruiters will be able to pull-up a candidate’s public persona and view everything from credentials, certifications and projects they’ve worked on to what type of dog they own and who they are connected with on any given social network. Then, depending on what common ground recruiters share with candidates, they can spark introductory conversations with candidates based on their entire profile—not just the standard resume.

Virtual Reality Will Allow Recruiters to Better Entice Remote Candidates

Virtual reality interviews will allow recruiters to better connect and entice remote candidates. Currently, if someone in L.A. is interviewing someone in London, then that candidate is going to have a completely different experience than someone who is able to come into the office for an in-person interview. Using virtual reality or even just a heads-up display (HUD), recruiters can create an experience for remote candidates that more closely represents both the company and the in-person experience. This is the first step in breaking down the computer wall between recruiters and candidates.

A second way virtual reality will be used to reach potential candidates is through virtual career fairs. Today, companies send a representative to attend career fairs in-person, but this is both time-intensive and costly. A virtual career fair will allow organizations to do a virtual presentation to all of the individuals at the fair, and then break-out for one-on-one interviews. These virtual career fairs would take only a few hours and enable recruiters to meet candidates from around the world.

Machine Learning Will Enable Organizations to Recruit for Potential

Machine learning will help companies identify candidates based on their potential for success in a role rather than their past experience. Today, companies tend to use years of experience as a benchmark to determine who will be a good fit for a role. But because job titles and experiences can vary greatly from one company to the next, this doesn’t give recruiters the insight they need to know if a candidate is truly a good fit. This also becomes important as we prepare for the onset of gig economy, candidates will have a variety of different experiences not necessarily exact job matches. Machine learning will enable recruiters to use an algorithm—based on the successes of employees in the organization that had similar roles—to determine a candidate’s potential for success. Recruiters will then be able to match candidates with any open positions where their skills show high potential for success. If candidates are missing a skill needed for the job, they can be upskilled internally in order to prepare them. This not only opens up the talent market to less experienced individuals, but also those with varying backgrounds.

Augmented Reality Will Enable Organizations to Enhance Experiences

Imagine holding up your camera in the Yelp app to a restaurant and all of the reviews populate on your screen automatically so you can determine if that’s where you should have dinner. This same augmented reality will open opportunities for organizations to provide information to candidates instantaneously. Whether it’s through the utilization of a HUD or via a mobile app, candidates will easily find answers to the questions they seek. For example, through the utilization of AR, candidates at Career Fairs will no longer be unaware of what a company’s mission statement is, what employees think of the company or what positions are open. By simply holding up their phones to a company’s booth, candidates will see company descriptions, employee reviews and open job listings right on their screens.

We all know this current candidate-driven talent market is incredibly challenging. The ‘Resume of the Future,’ along with the help of emerging technologies, will help ease the burden of the current talent shortages by providing us ways to open up our talent pools and create a more all-encompassing experience. These technologies will not only help us differentiate ourselves from competitors, but these are the things that candidates will start to expect in their daily lives. Are you ready for it?

Could “eBay meets recruiting” fix healthcare recruiting?

Meet Relode.

One of our bosses over at RD, Noel, was a long-time healthcare recruiter — and he can speak to you for days about the issues within that sector of the industry.

So can Matt Tant, who founded Relode. He’s also a former member of the San Diego Chargers.

Continue reading “Could “eBay meets recruiting” fix healthcare recruiting?”

How do you actually build a leadership pipeline?

A leadership pipeline is pretty important for any organization for a number of different reasons. Probably foremost among them? Even though it’s quite likely your senior leaders are terrified of retirement, they will be gone someday — either by retirement, death, or defection to another company. (Those are the “big three,” sadly.) You need a leadership pipeline to deal with that, even if you think it’s 15-20 years away. That’s a long friggin’ time for most companies — “That’s 60 quarters, and I’m drowning in this one as it is!” — but you gotta put in the work to do it right.

Unfortunately, most companies don’t do this. There are a host of reasons why not, including:

  • Leadership pipeline programs are usually “owned” by HR, and most executives could care less about HR
  • Current decision-makers want to put off discussing a time when they won’t be in control
  • There’s a belief at many companies that only those currently in power know what’s going on or can make decisions
  • A leadership pipeline inherently implies that others, down the chain, are capable of rising up; this scares the hell out of some people
  • It seems like a fluffy concept — a sales pipeline people “get,” but a leadership pipeline seems like work for the sake of work

I get all these excuses, and all are valid. And, honestly, not having a leadership pipeline won’t hurt you tomorrow. It might hurt you in eight years, but most business is about now now now, and so ignoring the leadership pipeline concept makes a lot of sense for most executives and companies.

But what if you wanted to do a leadership pipeline right? What might that look like?

Leadership pipeline: The five attributes

Here’s some research from Josh Bersin (big name in this space) on all this. (More on this research is here.) The data set is 2,000+ companies, which isn’t bad. You always have this caveat of “executives talking about HR issues,” which lends itself to lip service. “Yes, Josh, we’re a people-first company with strong mission alignment and a hell of a leadership pipeline…” An exec says that and, 15 minutes later, he’s chasing pennies in the couch cushions of his vertical and belittling lieutenants for less than 15% CAGR. We know how it goes. But take it all with a grain of salt and let’s figure out the five attributes of a good leadership pipeline.

They are:

  • Focus intensely on culture
  • Matrix management and risk taking
  • Learning through exposure
  • Knowledge sharing
  • Embed the idea in the business, not just HR

All of these are great ideas and attributes. Let’s take them one-by-one.

Leadership pipeline: Focus intensely on culture

This is a two-step process, as Bersin notes. Those steps?

  • Talk about it
  • Live by it

Now, if you’ve worked at any size company, you know that many people don’t get past the first bullet point. This is changing — maybe quickly, maybe slowly — but many companies still see “core values” as a list of words you tack on a wall. It’s way more than that, because core values — a part of culture — talk to how you operate, treat others, behave, etc. Unfortunately a lot of times these words are listed as a way to can someone’s ass (“David isn’t in alignment with our core values!”), but that will change over time too.

[Tweet “Are your decision-makers taking your leadership pipeline seriously? Uh, probably not.”]

Your culture is the bedrock of everything else you do. It would be impossible to have a strong, or logical, leadership pipeline without a focus here.

Leadership pipeline: Matrix management and risk taking

Matrix management is about cross-functional teams. There is some evidence that the whole idea of “cross-functional teams” is bullshit, probably in large part because people want to collaborate a lot less than we think. Still, matrix management makes sense on the surface — because it speaks to breaking down silos, and the more silos you break down, the better a lot of other stuff tends to get. As Bersin himself writes:

Second, these companies believe in matrix management and risk taking — both attributes are highly predictive of long-term revenue per employee and gross profit margin.

Risk-taking goes without saying. All businesses need to do that. Many do it and then don’t discuss the subsequent failure that resulted, but eh. It’s an evolution, right?

I would think “matrix management” plays into leadership pipeline ideas because then existing leaders can get a sense of different future leaders from all over the company. In reality, my fear would be that existing execs would see a potential threat to their perch and find ways to demean him and prevent his rise. The psychological side of all this does come into play.

Leadership pipeline: Learning through exposure

This is a crucial one. The way most companies approach leadership in general is BS. It’s all forced learning and HR-driven courses and webinars. No one learns that way. You learn from other human beings, from mistakes, from successes, from looking inward, etc. A thought leader on a webinar talking in generic terms about “purpose and vision” makes me want to set my dog on fire. Real human growth and learning doesn’t come from that. It’s all forced BS by people chasing cheddar, i.e. leadership consultants or whatever. You know what you call 20,000 leadership experts at the bottom of the ocean? A good start.

You have to learn through exposure. Yes, you will screw up. Bosses will bellow, screech, and holler at you about margins and returns and quarters. That’s the game at big companies. You play it, and if you’re good/tough, you win it. We’ve been deifying this cycle and behavior for generations. It won’t change anytime soon, honestly. All a “leadership pipeline” is? It’s just a collection of people that “beat the game,” instead of “got fired” or “ran away weeping.” But the pipeline comes about through people who learn via exposure, not some HR-hosted bullshit with cookies on the table.

Leadership pipeline: Knowledge sharing

I can keep this one short. Knowledge sharing is crucial — we all inherently know this — but it terrifies most existing executives. Executives at every place I work generally want to think of work this way:

  • “We own this place!”
  • “Our knowledge is proprietary!”
  • “No one knows as much as us!”
  • “This is why we make the big bucks!”

No. It’s all lies and bluster. Here’s the deal:

In short: knowledge sharing is essential. But to make it a real aspect that drives your leadership pipeline, you need to get through a lot of fears and excuses.

Leadership pipeline: Embed the idea in the business

Very simple: no one cares about it if it’s tied to HR. Most orgs run on a strict “Spreadsheet Mentality.” Here’s what most execs would want to know about a leadership pipeline:

  • What will it cost?
  • What’s the return?
  • Who can we promote that would drive the most growth?
  • Where’s the data?
  • What’s the root of the data?
  • How can we advance people and pay them less?
  • Something something margins something something

It’s that simple. People chase money. They try to chase data, and the good ones get it right, but many whiff on that too. If you want someone to take a leadership pipeline concept seriously, it’s gotta be embedded in the business. The top dogs need to understand it. The numbers need to be accessible and reported. If it’s just “some HR thing,” it dies in the flood.

Leadership pipeline: Quick fun story

Worked at a place about five years ago. Multiple billions made. Big company. I went to one leadership pipeline meeting. There was a woman about 2 levels below the SVPs at this company. She was killing it. I mean driving growth, new customers, etc, etc. Murdering targets. Now, yes, she’s a woman. That cannot be ignored here. But every time her name came up at these meetings, someone would pooh-pooh it. It wasn’t because she was a woman — well, probably partially was — but it’s because at her level, she was making the existing executives look good. Who wants to advance a person like that? There are different circles of management, and when you factor human psychology in, it makes leadership pipeline ideas very complicated.

This is why, ultimately, most people job-hop to make more money. And somehow, job-hopping is a stigma in the eyes of HR. See the brutal cycle here?

Any other thoughts on your leadership pipeline or the concept in general?

Second verse, same as the first… where do millennials want to work?

Can definitely argue that we probably discuss the differences between generations too much, and it’s also not exactly rocket science that Boomers and millennials would want different things out of the workplace, especially because they’re about 35 years apart in age. Still, though, we love us some data on what millennials want out of everything, and here’s some new stuff from Indeed.

The set-up: The Indeed data science team analyzed data from Indeed’s 72 million ratings and reviews to find out the top-rated companies for millennials. Then we’re going to ask the big old “Why?”

Continue reading “Second verse, same as the first… where do millennials want to work?”

Google Hire, AI and the Privacy Paradox

Google Hire, AI and the Privacy Paradox

In the recently released 2018 edition of her seminal annual Internet Trends report, Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker recently discussed what she referred to as the ‘privacy paradox.’

She describes this phenomenon as the fact that while internet companies are “making low priced services better, in part, from user data,” and while internet users are “increasing time on internet services based on perceived value,” that same user data constitutes something of a devil’s bargain – essentially, in order to utilize platforms such as Facebook, or LinkedIn, or even Uber, users must essentially exchange their personal privacy in exchange for what amounts to, more or less, convenience and ease of use.

As Meeker notes, there is a growing amount of legislation, regulations and consumer safeguards currently being implemented in order to protect the personal data and privacy of internet users from the services who collect and monetize this information, whether that’s through behavioral targeting or selling that data to third party services (the most notorious example of which, Cambridge Analytica, is likely the best example of Meeker’s ‘privacy paradox’ in action).

While Meeker seems to embrace a more robust online regulatory environment around personal data, her report also suggests that such regulation could have the potential to harm innovation – hence another privacy paradox, wherein company growth and industry innovation could potentially be stifled by too many consumer protections and legislative constraints.

Of course, most of these consumer protections and privacy regulations continue to regulate internet users outside of the United States, particularly in the European Union. With last month’s sweeping GDPR rules coming into effect to “harmonize data privacy laws across Europe,” according to the European Commission, individual nations have also acted accordingly.

For example, Argentina first adopted rules regarding the ‘right to be forgotten’ (similar legislation has since been adopted by the European Commission, South Korea, and India, among other countries) in 2006. After a dozen years, this legislation, described in Article 43 of the Argentine “Habeas Data” code (gotta love that Latin), still seems progressive for much of the world, promises, “

“Any person shall file this action to obtain information on the data about himself and their purpose, registered in public records or databases, or in private ones intended to supply information; and in case of false data or discrimination, this action may be filed to request the suppression, rectification, confidentiality or updating of said data.”

In other words, Argentine internet users are able to correct, delete or update any personal information about them that exists online; otherwise, that consumer data is required to remain confidential, with significant associated penalties. Similarly, in Canada, data privacy is codified by legislation as a basic human right, much like the ability to speak French or put gravy and cheese curds on fries.

One developed country, of course, lags far behind all others when it comes to protecting online privacy and user confidentiality: the good old US of A, where we’re able to carry an AR 15 around as a Constitutional safeguard of our personal freedoms, but internet companies can do damned well whatever they please when it comes to your personal information.

As the cliché goes, freedom isn’t free, which is basically the business model of most every Silicon Valley based startup when it comes to personal information – and if you’re an American, your only real option to safeguarding your data online is, simply, to stay off the internet. This is, for all intents and purposes, an impossibility for the great majority of US citizens whose lives, and livelihoods, have become so dependent on digital technologies.

Of course, the convenience comes at the price of privacy – and there’s really nothing you can do about it – cry ‘fake news’ all you want, but the real news is that, even with increased user scrutiny and awareness about such practices in the wake of the well-publicized Facebook scandals, that we’re still willing to send samples of our DNA to private companies for genetic testing without understanding the legal implications or risks involved shows we’ve still got a long way to go when it comes to doing a better job understanding and advocating for increased data protection.

Even with increased regulation, however, one company that’s got a pretty well documented track record of largely ignoring (or completely disregarding) regulatory scrutiny remains the biggest player in the internet business: Google. The Mountain View based behemoth, whose digital dossier on users includes everything from search history (for optimized ad targeting and personalized results) to detailed, real time location information (via Android or Google apps on other OS instances) to our passwords and payment information (via Google wallet or Chrome’s ubiquitous keychain).

Creepy? Sure. But fulfilling the company’s stated mission of being the single source of all the world’s information includes, inherently, having all the digital dirt on as many people as possible, too – which has proven to be pretty damned good business to date for Alphabet, Google’s parent company and one of the most valuable and profitable companies in the world. At first, Google presented its quest for ostensible omniscience as altruistic, and for years, that seemed to be the case.

However, after losing a record antitrust settlement from the European Commission, to the 1.36 billion rupee fine imposed by the Competition Commission of India for abusing its “dominant position” to engineer “search bias” into its results to the $9 billion in potential GDPR fines the firm racked up the first day the law went into effect for noncompliance (and I could go on with similar suits and pending actions), it’s safe to say that the company has established a corporate ethos of “ask forgiveness, not permission,” seeing data privacy regulations more as a cost of doing business than as a legal mandate they’re required to follow.

Hell, that 1.36 billion rupees, one of the largest civil fines ever rendered by the CCI, works out to about $21 million US, which is to say, chump change for a company valued at half a trillion (that’s trillion, with a ‘T’) dollars. An opportunity cost that’s significantly more opportunity than cost, in other words. These events shouldn’t be seen as outliers, but rather, as the prevailing mandate of Google’s roadmap. In fact, recently the company even officially dropped their famed “Don’t Be Evil” from their corporate code of conduct (and presumably making “Be Evil” acceptable under company policy, by extension).

So, why does any of this matter in recruiting and hiring?

Today, Google announced a significant set of new enhancements and updates to their Google Hire product, including “new AI powered functionality” which promises to optimize and automate many arduous parts of the recruiting process. None of these updates are particularly innovative, nor exciting – they consist mostly of features that are already more or less mainstream within the HR Technology vertical.

Google Hire ResumeThe three most prominent updates being touted by the company in today’s announcement include auto-scheduling interviews based on shared availability, “auto-highlighting resumes” (which is basically keyword matching resumes to job description requirements so recruiters can review resumes even more quickly), and “click to call” candidates, which the company reports will simplify “phone interviews with a one-tap click to call functionality and logs phone calls so team members know who has spoken with a candidate.”

Again, none of these product updates, independently, is particularly innovative nor would normally count as news, save for the fact that it’s HR Tech and anything Google does counts as a big event in an industry where Oracle is the biggest show in town. The real news here is that this marks the first time that the company has reported to “incorporating Google AI” directly into their Hire product.

Google Hire Replace Interviewer

 

The implications here run much deeper than the purported efficiencies and process streamlining enabled by these new Google Hire features. As Google notes in their blog post announcing the release:

“There’s a huge opportunity for technology—and AI specifically—to help people work faster and therefore focus on people-centric tasks. Ultimately, that’s what Hire is all about, and the functionality we’re adding today demonstrates our commitment to help companies focus on people and build their best team.”

The ‘huge opportunity’ for AI, obviously, comes with a ton of strings, and Google Hire represents the perfect litmus test for how far, exactly, the privacy paradox extends within recruiting and hiring. In the tradeoff of privacy for convenience, is saving 84% of time on reviewing applications or scheduling interviews really worth sharing proprietary candidate data, calendar information or a complete recruiting related phone log with a company whose entire business is predicated on collecting as many of these kinds of data points as possible?

 is saving 84% of time on reviewing applications or scheduling interviews really worth sharing proprietary candidate data?

This is the sort of question employers will increasingly need to answer – and while they are by no means limited to Google, the fact of the matter is that in its current iteration, Hire is uniquely positioned to set a precedent for the future of data privacy in hiring.

Currently, only customers using Google’s Cloud Services can access Hire, which means the platform is almost exclusively limited to small businesses without a ton of enterprise technology or legacy hiring systems, meaning that many regulations such as OFCCP, which would govern the way in which candidate data can be collected and shared, do not apply to smaller companies.

Additionally, Google Hire is only offered in the US, which, as previously mentioned, has the most favorable regulatory environment (or complete lack thereof) around PII and candidate data (as anyone who’s ever done a vanity search and found any sort of surprising and embarrassing result can likely tell you). Finally, Hire is offered as a free add-on for Google Cloud customers as an added incentive and inducement to utilize its service – and that price point, of course, suggests that the business value being created by Google can’t lie exclusively within the Hire platform itself.

The real value, for Google or any other company in the internet economy, is the collection of as much data as possible – and while, again, none of the features announced today are particularly sinister or even cause for concern, the fact that this represents the first “incorporation of Google AI” indicates that the company probably has bigger plans for how it links candidate or aggregate data from Hire into its broader offering of services and solutions.

Obviously, training any algorithm – such as the one required by the skills highlighting feature or the one-click interview optimization – is predicated on collecting tremendous amounts of historical data to improve future results (much like its innocuous automatic suggestions that appear when you’re typing in a search query). There’s nothing inherently wrong, or even malicious, about any of this. Yet.

The fact that Google has positioned this as only the first foray into building Hire into a component of its AI stack signals that they’re actively integrating machine learning and PII-based data into what has been, to date, little more than GSuite with a few modified workflows and basic employer enhancements. But it’s not too much of a stretch to think that within a few releases, things like keyword highlighting on resumes could have been used to train a much more robust AI instance where those same candidates are served targeted AdWords based on their experience or job interests (both obviously rely on keyword matching and object clustering).

For a company that’s got a history of ‘abusing its dominant search position,’ it’s not a stretch to believe that even in aggregate, these capabilities will serve to improve personalized ad targeting (particularly EB and recruiting based campaigns outside the Google Jobs API), serve to provide intelligence on stuff like the likelihood of a candidate to consider a role based on the signals generated by their online browsing history, or even, allow voice-to-apply features that match a candidate’s voice records with their Google Assistant (among dozens of other potential use cases).

Most candidates probably won’t mind. And for employers, the cost and time savings represented by Hire might make moot any such concerns about proprietary or personal data. The problem is, Google isn’t alone in their ability to amalgamate personal and professional information within the same ecosystem and use hiring and candidate data as a way to augment and enhance consumer offerings.

Microsoft’s acquisitions of LinkedIn and GitHub, coupled with MS Office, Azure and Dynamics, prove the power of such a business model, which is why Clippy & Co. were willing to pay such a precious premium for sites that are basically nothing more than repositories of personal data, much of it professionally focused. The value of that data, as we’ve already seen, will extend past those platforms to other products, and that utility will certainly come at a premium price. Nothing stays free forever, as GitHub users will soon discover – but as Google Hire shows, as long as their value extraction outweighs the value-add of these platforms, price is a secondary consideration at best.

Did anyone who shared a code repository or worked on a GitHub project ever think that their work would become the intellectual property of a company whose history is squarely rooted in actively antagonizing and undercutting the open source model of development (see: LINUX)? No, but that’s business.

And in the business of recruiting, there’s no doubt we have to look at products like Google Hire, consider the privacy paradox, and ask ourselves whether or not we’re willing to pay the high cost of free. After all, people might not be your greatest asset and biggest competitive advantage, but the data about them sure is. It’s an investment we should think twice about before expending the capital part of our human capital, at any price point. Period.

ATS Killer: Latest Google Hire Updates Are Massive Time-Savers

google hire

Google Hire ATS

Admittedly, I am giant fanboy when it comes to Google and its products.

I had a chance to speak with Google Hire team yesterday to get a peek at the new functionality — and, as always, they did not disappoint.

Recruiters have said that Hire fundamentally improved how they worked

With the launch of Hire last year, Google aimed to simplify the hiring process by integrating it into the tools where recruiters already spend much of their day, namely Gmail, Google Calendar, and other G-Suite apps. Recruiters have said that Hire fundamentally improved how they worked, with less context switching between apps. In fact, when they measured user activity, they found Hire reduced time spent completing everyday recruiting tasks — like reviewing applications or scheduling interviews — by up to 84 percent. 

But wait. There’s more!

Continue reading “ATS Killer: Latest Google Hire Updates Are Massive Time-Savers”

Alexa, I’m Ready To Interview

chatbot recruiting

The wakeup call: Chatbots now, voice soon

Remember in 2010 — about three years after the iPhone was released — you heard that mobile Internet was taking over the world?

That you needed to go mobile?

That recruitment was going mobile?

You said:

Continue reading “Alexa, I’m Ready To Interview”

How to Improve Your Conversion Rate

No one wants a low conversion rate in recruiting.

All that says is, “You did a lot of work and there wasn’t a large ROI to the work.” When that happens for a long period of time (or even a shorter period of time, honestly) people become disengaged with what they’re doing. Disengaged recruiters are terrible for your company, because it’s going to reduce the quality of employee coming in.

So what can you do to improve your conversion rate? Some ideas:

Continue reading “How to Improve Your Conversion Rate”

Sales managers have family-friendly jobs? Apparently.

Just after Father’s Day, we found this data set interesting from Indeed. They mined hundreds of millions of job postings to pinpoint those that have keywords signifying family-friendly or flexible work benefits.

For US parents, those jobs are hard to find: just 3.6% of job posts, or about 1 in 30 listings, contain language touting flexible or family-friendly policies.

Continue reading “Sales managers have family-friendly jobs? Apparently.”

Take Pride

“I tend to think of every month as pride month.” – William Tincup

That was the response I got when I broached the subject of a post for our site regarding Pride Month and what it means to me – he couldn’t have been more spot on.

So, do you take pride in your existence as a human person?  You could have been born non human! (Not that being a golden retriever would be so bad – I love treats.)

Imagine how different the world would be if everyone just acknowledged each other as human!  I don’t walk around announcing to people, “I am a human woman.”  I don’t NEED to announce or explain, or validate, or negotiate my existence.  Because you can’t deny that I do, in fact, exist.  Unless that psychic I called in middle school was right and we’re all in parallel universes co-existing through space and time and that we’re not actual physical beings and that time is irrelevant…

But I am here and like it or not – we all have to exist here, on this green marble, together. We are all humans with jobs, bills, pets, cars, goats, you name it.  We have all been put here to exist together.  Whether you think it’s science or god, we’ve all been put here.  None of us asked to be, but here we stand.

Pride to me is about acceptance of the human race and human rights.  Pride is about accepting humanity.  We need to accept each other for the simple humans we are.

For those that don’t know, there is an IA at the end of LGBTQIA.  The ‘A’ stands for ally.  Can you believe we, as humans, need allies…to exist with each other? Imagine if we all just existed as humans.  We wouldn’t need allies for those that are LGBTQI because we’d be focusing on what really matters, H-U-M-A-N-S.

I take pride in being human. I take pride in being an ally and a voice for those who think they don’t have one. I take pride in knowing that I am one with my race. The only race. The human race.

 

 

 

 

Editors note: the A in LGBTQAI stands for asexual, some sites list it as ally. We our proud supporters of ALL humans.

Resume 2.0 (and the bias behind coding)

It’s nearly impossible to find the number of quality engineering candidates that you need by relying on old-fashioned recruiting tactics.

Hopefully we all realize that by now.

The next wave should be skills-based recruiting, as opposed to traditional resume-based recruiting. There are dozens of reasons why skills-based recruiting makes sense. A few to begin:

  • Saves time: You get rid of the unqualified candidates immediately.
  • Verifiable: Skills are assessed throughout the hiring funnel.
  • Supports diversity: Doesn’t rely on the usual educational or experience credential markers.
  • Data-driven: This isn’t “gut feelings” or “I like the cut of his jib!” It’s “OK, this person has the skills. He/she can code in this language.”

Simple fact is: resume-driven recruiting should have died years ago. The main reason it still exists is probably “We’ve always done it that way!” and change being hard for people, especially in technical recruiting — where a million different things can fly at you every day.

We get it.

We work with people on this every day.

But ask yourself this “would you rather?” question.

Would you rather have someone with an Ivy League degree who’s average or below average as a developer, or someone without pedigree who can code like a boss?

Almost everyone we’ve ever worked with would want the latter.

That’s why you need skills-based recruiting.

We need to kill the resume

We tend to overrate perceived competence in the hiring process, and resumes are a big problem therein.

Resumes also rely on self-reported data, meaning you’re trusting the applicant to tell you the entire, accurate truth about the skills and experiences they have. There is a lot of exaggeration — and people aren’t good judges of their own skill level in all honesty, so you’re not gaining a ton of valuable intel.

The bigger issue with the resume is that, because reviewing them is ultimately time-consuming, they actually make you miss the best prospects. You prioritize certain things that can indicate a quality lead. Which school they went to and where they’ve worked might be a good indicator of whether they’d be a good fit for the role. But if you’re only looking for these, you might automatically dismiss someone who doesn’t have these credentials. You miss the “hidden gem” candidates.  Resumes promote unconscious bias – you only look at ‘pedigree’ instead of considering skill set.

Resume 2.0 is about skills

Many hiring managers just want a person who can hit the ground running. They have targets and deadlines and KPIs and, while training should admittedly be more of a focus, time is of the essence — they don’t want to train, they want someone who’s going to knock down the goal they’re supposed to knock down.

So, it’s essential to make sure a person has the actual skills of the role. It’s much less about the school, or that he/she worked for Cisco, or even the number of years of experience. It’s about “Can this person contribute to this project in a successful way? Do they have the chops?”

So how do you find those with the right skills?

The best way to never even see unqualified candidates is to use a developer-specific sourcing service. But, here’s the problem: many sourcing services and recruiting firms also rely solely on self-reported skill data (i.e. resumes), which leaves you at square one.

What we do: A service like CodeFights Recruiter, which objectively assesses every candidate based on their code-writing skills and knowledge of programming topics, ensures that you only see candidates who definitely have the skills you need.

And now, of course you’ll still use LinkedIn. Many recruiters rely on it. But LinkedIn isn’t perfect by any means. You kind of need to “power it up.”

What we do: CodeFights Recruiter Sourcing Assistant is a Chrome extension, available only to CodeFights Recruiter customers, that analyzes the skills necessary for your open roles — as well as the data that’s already being collected on CodeFights Recruiter. The assistant then uses your data to identify high-potential prospects on LinkedIn and assign them a matching score. If they seem like a good match, you can immediately send them a testing assessment.

CodeFights Recruiter is a skills-based recruiting tool for modern hiring teams that helps companies source, test, and measure technical talent. CodeFights Recruiter gives you the tools you need to stop relying on self-reported skills. Learn more about how CodeFights Recruiter helps you use objective data to make hiring decisions.