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The current state of the summer job

Remember the good ol’ summer gig? How does that ecosystem work these days?

Thankfully, we’ve got some data.

Research conducted in May 2018 by job search engine, Adzuna analyzed almost 3.5m jobs currently advertised on Adzuna.com to identify the volume, sector and location of this year’s seasonal opportunities.

The research found 46,653 summer jobs still open despite the season already being officially underway. The top five states for short term job seekers represent almost 30% of the total opportunity pool with 13,427 jobs available but job seekers in Virginia, Michigan and Massachusetts might struggle to find work, offering only 3,700 open roles across all three states.

The “Big Five:”

CA: 4,179
NY: 2,468
TX: 2,448
FL: 2,244
PA: 2,088

Not tremendously surprising there — those are the five biggest states in the U.S. by population, although TX is (2) when doing that ranking, not (3).

The 35,000-foot view

Despite term time almost being over, teaching roles account for over 20% of advertised seasonal positions as parent demand for summer schools and part-time tutors soars. A result of working parents, roles in social care including babysitting represent over 10% of open roles. Positions in PR, advertising and marketing, healthcare and finance round out the top five most prolific seasonal sectors for recruitment.

Here are the sectors with the most summer openings:

Where can summer job seekers earn the most?

Amongst the highest paying roles available this summer, the research found, were temporary healthcare or nursing roles, with opportunities listed as highly as $378 per day. Caring roles dominate the most lucrative opportunities with social care salaries coming a close second at an average of $308 per day.

Although opportunities are thin on the ground, successful candidates in Massachusetts can find themselves earning the equivalent of $76K per annum over the summer season, more than any other location in the US. New York follows closely behind at $75,593 but there are still big rewards for the sunseeking seasonal worker with Florida opportunities averaging $75,248. Workers in Pennsylvania and Ohio stand to earn least over the summer, advertising average salaries of just $32,372 and $21,911 respectively.

Want to be a happiness manager this summer?

Look at some of the quirkier roles available this summer:

It probably doesn’t say anything really good about companies if they view “Happiness Manager” or “Ambassador of Fun” — admittedly buzzword-y sounding job titles, yes — as mere seasonal employment. Shouldn’t that be a year-round concern?

Professional organizer making this list — with a decent equivalent salary too! — might show that “Spring Cleaning” has given way to “Summer Cleaning.”

What was your first summer job? And what do you think the role of them nowadays should be?

How HR Tech can help with #MeToo

#MeToo was obviously and rightfully the theme of 2017 globally in some ways; TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year last year was “The Silence Breakers.”

When I headed to #Unleash18 in Vegas, I expected #MeToo to come up — it was the subject of a panel headed by Stacia Garr of Red Thread Research — but even I underestimated the full scope of the discussion. #MeToo entered into a lot of informal conversations, vendor floor discussions, and other panels where the context was seemingly more about the tech.

But that’s the important thing: tech has flaws, sure, but it could be amazing for recruiting, and especially amazing in diversity and inclusion areas.

Continue reading “How HR Tech can help with #MeToo”

Are recruiters too obsessed with finding flaws in candidates?

JobVite just released some kind of “social recruiting survey” deal, which is in turn summarized over here on TalentCulture. I kinda get nervous whenever some “This is the current state of recruiting” thing comes out, because usually it’s just a marketing asset for some company. That’s probably the case here too. Still, one interesting thing stood out.

In the section of the report supposedly “relevant to job-seekers,” here’s what we got:

Use social wisely: 72% of recruiters dislike typos on social, and 42% don’t approve of alcohol in photos!
Appearance and attitude matter: 46% of recruiters say dress majorly impacts the first interview, with 80% of recruiters in financial services saying it can be the deal-breaker.
Tell the truth: 75% of recruiters see lies on a candidate’s resume, including beefing up their old jobs, lying about salary, time at a previous job, the dreaded “gaps,” and citizenship.

OK. So, none of this is exactly rocket science. Hopefully if you’re in an active job search, you know not to post kegstand pics, you know to dress well, and you know to avoid lying. Most decent human beings should know these things, especially in a job search process.

But there’s a bigger issue here, too.

Doesn’t this feel like an over-focus on negativity?

We supposedly live in this era of mission, values, and purpose. Admittedly a lot of that is bullshit that executives say as they count money with their other hand, but still — it’s what is force-fed to us, right? We’re supposed to believe in that.

In such a theoretical world, shouldn’t the focus of recruiting be more positive? Finding the best in people? Looking at their potential and ability? Diamonds in the rough?

All the time on surveys like this, you’ve got recruiters screeching shit like:

“Best not have typos, boy!”
“Want to see those shoes shine and that suit sparkle!”
“Lie about your salary and you’re out on your ass.”

It often feels like the focus is on finding the flaws — even assuming the flaws must be there, hiding — instead of looking for the good and building people up.

It’s kinda logical how we got to this moment, though

Think of something like supply chain or operations or whatever. Those are very scientific departments, with processes and elements to track. It’s been that way for years.

People — i.e. personnel, hiring — are a company’s biggest expense, right? But for decades, we’ve had no science behind how people come into companies. That’s only (slightly) changed in the last 5-10 years. Mostly we’ve had generic interview questions and someone “liking the cut of his jib.” The old boys’ network is alive and very well.

Because there’s no science to interviews/hiring, and because HR owns it, people with actual decision-making authority stopped caring. That’s kinda how people became an afterthought. That and “stakeholder management.”

Over time, interviews became a giant lie on both sides.

Recruiter: “Well, we don’t have a salary for this role.” (Massive lie.)

Candidate: “Well yes, I once managed a team of 10.” (It was at summer camp for two days.)

It’s amazing how the process designed to bring “the best of the best” into companies is essentially a two-way lie. Way to really put trust as a core value, eh?

Over time, the war for talent became the war on talent.

In that world, because we all have a strong negativity bias, it’s easier to pick out flaws than look for the good.

Sad, though.

How could recruiting be more positive?

A few ways:

Job descriptions: They should actually matter, not just be recycled. They should speak to where a role can go in 3-5 years.

Job role: This should also matter. It unbelievably often doesn’t, and managers just want warm bodies.

Technology: Often an impediment these days, on both sides. It alienates the smartest people, who you theoretically want. Use it better.

Look for the good in people: Recruiting is too much about “Oh he job hops!” or “OMG he had a gap in employment!” Who gives a shit? Is he/she a good person? Capable? Enthused? Seemingly dedicated? You’re probably not using an apprenticeship model, so take a gamble and see if it works. All the paper cuts we levy at resumes — “He’s lying about his salary, Janice!” — are ultimately minor. Yes, you don’t want a liar. I’ll give you that. But if lying on a resume is normative these days and everyone is in the same arms race, well, maybe we could seek to find the good instead of cherry-picking out the bad. Yaaaas?

It’s hard to look at the current state of recruiting and not think “Large exercise in box-checking, low-context discussions, and negativity.” If we’re still hiring people and not just AI bots, maybe we could try to do this better?

The Recruiting Metrics You Need Help On

The gold standard recruiting metrics of the past decade or so have been:

Time to hire/time to fill
Quality of hire

Both make sense: increasingly companies are moving to tech-driven agile road map planning, which means Project A needs to be completed before Project B, etc. In such a context, having “the right people on the bus” at the start is crucial. That’s why time to hire is increasingly important — although, paradoxically, it might be getting slower in many organizations.

“Quality of hire” is often a subjective measurement and many organizations approach it differently; from a referral standpoint it’s often tied to initial tenure + successful performance review.

While these are the “big two” of recruitment metrics — the “big three” would also involve cost-to-hire — there are others that organizations should consider tracking:

Diversity of hiring
Diversity of funnel
Voluntary exits within first year
Voluntary exits within first year tracked by manager
Notable skills gaps
Tenure by department
Tenure by recruiter
Turnover by recruiter
Offer acceptance rate
Applicants per opening
Source of hire
Hiring manager satisfaction
Selection ratio
Application completion rate

Noted: there’s many things you can be tracking.

But you do need help. Why?

Reason 1: Time

There’s only so much time in a day, and, admittedly, many humans — especially recruiters — are jammed up on task work and use said time poorly. We spend such a good chunk of our weeks in meetings, on calls, and doing sourcing/screening work that there’s often no time to do more metric/analytic work and/or be strategic. This is something that needs to be rectified. More on that in a second.

Reason 2: Background

Many of us who went into recruiting did it for the people and the chance to build relationships and place candidates in their dream jobs. Very few of us have a strict data background, and spending time on data analysis and presentations around that often isn’t super desirable to us professionally.

Reason 3: Execs want it

Executives and senior decision-makers are typically most comfortable receiving reports and presentations that are data-driven. They want to see money in, money out, data on what happened, and what it means. That’s their core vocabulary in many ways. If you can’t deliver how they are used to seeing information, it reduces your effectiveness in their eyes.

So how do we solve this?

Well, we can solve a lot of it with one word: automation.

When you start automating top-of-funnel recruiting tasks — the screening and the sourcing — you accomplish a few things at once:

Free up time for the human recruiters to build relationships, which is what they want to do
The data is within the AI-powered suite, so the suite itself can organize and analyze it
You can turn that into reports that senior decision-makers will favor

In one swoop, you just solved three major problems around using recruitment metrics. You could even set up your suite to track source of hire, diversity of pool, time to hire, offer acceptance percentage and have those numbers available from your phone at a moment’s notice. You’re saving time and pleasing the top of the hierarchy. What’s not to like?

You’ll probably like this demo too, check it out.

Elevate Your Technical Sourcing Game: A Guide for Technical Recruiters

The modern landscape

It’s a jungle out there.

Technical recruiting is perhaps more complicated than it’s ever been at any point in the legitimate global history of sourcing and recruiting.

First, you have the rise of the tech stack. There are dozens upon dozens of places to find candidates, and hundreds of ways to organize your information about them.

Secondly, also because of the rise of the tech stack, you have increasingly specialized roles that you need to place for — oftentimes roles that didn’t even really exist 2-3 years ago. 62% of CIOs struggle to find the right tech talent they need, per Harvey Nash and KPMG, and all of them list it as a major bottleneck to keeping up with the pace of change.

Third: advice is everywhere. Who should you be listening to?

Fourth: 1.3M new software jobs in the U.S. alone (upwards of 5.5M globally) will exist by 2020, but the skills gap is only expected to widen. That’s going to be another crush on technical recruiters.

And finally: with tech unemployment relatively low (or non-existent) in most urban centers, there needs to be increasing competitive differentiators apart from simply salary. Companies can’t afford to keep raising the number, even for some of the best candidates. As a result, technical recruiters are having to move beyond simply selling the role to selling the employer brand.

What it all means

It’s not enough to simply be a “technical recruiter” anymore. You need to up your sourcing and recruiting game. You need to find a warp to a new level. It’s time to elevate. That’s what this guide is about.

Step 1 of Elevation: Change how you hunt

The big fish for the last few years have been LinkedIn, Indeed, GitHub, StackOverflow, Glassdoor, etc. Interestingly, many of those companies are beginning to fall under similar corporate ownership. We’re not here to analyze M&A, though.

But the big fish, while effective, aren’t always the best place to hunt for top technical talent. They reside on different sites, niche job boards, and places that might not have been around even 10 months ago.

One such “talent pool” is the CodeFights Recruiter platform. Unlike traditional sources, CodeFights starts with over 1 million tested and vetted engineers. At its core, CodeFights is a community of developers seeking to better themselves through participation in interview practice and real world company challenges. As participants engage with challenges through the platform… CodeFight’s machine learning evaluates the participant’s skill level and knowledge of programming topics.

As a recruiter, you dive into this innovative talent pool by utilizing the CodeFights Recruiter. CodeFights Recruiter harnesses the power of machine learning to inform its proprietary candidate matching algorithm, and then adds a human touch to verify the algorithm recommendations to match the engineer’s preferences with your company’s requirements. For example, if the candidate only wants to work at an enterprise company, then CodeFights won’t submit that candidate to you even though the algorithm may identify that candidate as a technical match for your position. Unlike traditional passive recruiting, which relies heavily on the manual outreach process, CodeFights brings the candidates to you that have signaled they are looking for a new position so the candidates are far more responsive.

In fact, recruiters who use the CodeFights system enjoy a much higher candidate response rate than those who don’t — 5x the typical response rate of passive candidates, to be precise.

Step 2 of Elevation: Change how you work internally

When you get a new requisition, sit down with the hiring manager right away. Instead of letting them give you a wish list of qualifications, make them drill down to the basics. What skills and qualities does a candidate absolutely need to have in order to succeed in the role? The list you come up with will be your guide when you’re recruiting for the role.

If there’s anything in the list that you’re not familiar with, now’s the time to brush up. You don’t have to be an expert on all of the technologies and skills. But you should have a base-level understanding.

Some ways to cultivate that understanding:

Ask people with similar roles in your company
Ask the hiring manager
Use the first interviews you do to understand the role better, then use later interviews to drill down on what you learned from earlier interviews
Research it yourself
Ask former colleagues
Use a service that starts with pre-qualified candidates so you don’t waste time with unqualified candidates

The second major way you need to change how you work isn’t just communicating better with hiring managers — it’s being more effective and freeing more time for value-add work. A lot of recruiting and sourcing tends to be task-driven, top-of-funnel activity that could (unfortunately for you) easily be automated. But, a-ha! Those tasks can be automated and you can remain value-add to your organization.

To help recruiters like you free up more hours in the day, our team at CodeFights is shaking up the staffing industry through the power of skills-based recruiting. Unlike traditional recruiting that targets passive candidates through tremendous manual effort, the CodeFights Recruiter platform starts with a network of pre-qualified developers who are actively exploring new opportunities.

Our proprietary sourcing algorithm serves up a sorted list of matched talent, based on skills alignment with your needs. Our talent managers verify the skills-based matching and ensure that candidates are right for your company. For example, if you’re company is a startup and the candidate wants to work for an enterprise company, then that particular candidate would not be a match for your company even though they may have the skill set and experience that your role requires.

CodeFights also simplifies your interviewing process. Our interface is custom-tailored for hiring programmers, delivering a one-stop solution for hosting and recording interviews, posing coding questions or tasks (in 40 different programming languages), comparing candidates on a level playing field, and saving all the data so you can make more informed hiring decisions.

CodeFights testing solution also allows you to create custom tests. The reason why this is key is because you can create real-world tests that match the expectation of the position and not just test for data structures and algorithms. For example, you can create a test for backend engineers that includes a task to see how the candidate would work with an API and backend database. The other advantage of creating custom tasks is fighting plagiarism – your custom task won’t be readily available on the internet. If at some point your custom task is ‘made more public’ the CodeFights’ plagiarism detection will recognize and flag that immediately.

Step 3 of Elevation: Time to think about candidate experience

At this point, here’s what we’ve tried to do:

Move you towards new sources for finding talent
Improve your effectiveness internally on communication and time management

You have a good baseline now to really start sourcing the best people and working better on your team (and with your hiring managers). It takes time to master, of course.

But as you’re doing this, you need to be focusing on candidate experience too — remember what we said earlier about salary issues? Add to that this fact: many tech A-Players just want a great environment for learning and coding and hanging out with like-minded people. That’s all part of candidate experience. You need to be showing them that your place is the place.

There are a few different best practices for candidate experience in technical recruiting, all of which are inherently logical in terms of treating people how they want to be treated during a job search process:

Don’t drag your feet: 47% of candidates who decline a job offer do so because they’ve already accepted a different offer, according to MRINetwork. Move faster. Don’t get analysis paralysis. Don’t delay decisions. (You shouldn’t rush into decisions either, but if you’re following the rest of this list, you should be OK on who you’re arriving at.)

Close the loop with candidates: If you ghost a candidate, or keep them on the hook for a long time, that’s a bad candidate experience. And who knows who they’ll tell about their poor experience? The story will spread.

Offer constructive feedback: According to LinkedIn, 94% of applicants appreciate feedback if you don’t move forward with them. Letting them know why is instructive and enhances their experience, and giving feedback shows that you value them. Again, even if they’re not the right fit for you now, they might be in the future. (If you use AI tools and candidate rediscovery, they might be the right candidate the next time that department has an opening.

Ask for the candidate’s thoughts: … and then listen. Your company should iterate its process continually based on candidate feedback and outcomes.

Step 4 of Elevation: As you source, focus on skills and not degrees/backgrounds

Programmers with non-traditional backgrounds don’t have the educational qualifications that recruiters usually look for. Their resumes and their LinkedIn profiles will reflect this, often placing much more emphasis on personal or open-source projects than on educational or work experiences. But these candidates can be just as skilled as ones who have the “right” markers! This means they can be the solution to the tech talent shortage facing the industry today.

If companies only consider candidates with traditional pedigree markers to fill their open roles, then their pool of available prospects will be fairly small. And the competition for these pedigreed candidates is fierce. Of course, none of this is to say that people who do have these credentials aren’t great candidates! But when companies limit themselves to just these people, they miss out on amazing “hidden gem” candidates.

Recruiters need to be able to reframe how they think about finding prospects and what to look for when when they’re considering candidates. The best way to do this? Focus on skills, not on credentials.

People can (and do) list any old skill on their resumes and LinkedIn profiles, so you can’t rely on them to tell you the full story. It’s crucial to be able to verify these skills before moving forward with a prospect. Phone screens, take-home projects, or interview tasks can all help verify skills. But the best, and most efficient, way of verifying skills is at the very top of the funnel, even before a phone screening. A coding test that is emailed to prospects and delivers automatic results back to the company, like those sent from CodeFights Recruiter Test, can streamline the recruiting process because recruiters are able to verify skills right away.

Elevate, Step 5: Focus on soft skills

This is less prevalent among technical recruiters, but important.

Oftentimes in a “road map” strategy model, your technical talent will have to interact with a wide variety of teams — not just other engineers and coders.

So, you need to make sure these candidates have some degree of social skill or ability to communicate effectively interpersonally with all different types of personalities.

No “soft skill” assessment is going to be completely scientific, no.

Well, thankfully First Round Review interviewed dozens of CTOs about how to hire top technical talent, and this stands out:

Institute role plays in your interview process. For every engineering manager role, have the candidate sit with a member of the engineering team and play out a scenario 1:1. It can be about a technical process, an argument about prioritization or giving feedback with both criticism and praise. It’s an effective way to test softer skills and replicate what you’ll get in a ‘real’ situation. Of course, using your engineers’ time like this may seem expensive, but it’s more costly to bring on an engineering leader who doesn’t jive with your team. Plus, after doing it for a few years, you’ll find it becomes a rite of passage and engineers like participating in them.

Test for both technical skills and soft skills, especially in manager roles. It’s crucial.

Elevate, Step 6: Be flexible and hire adjacent skill sets

If you’re having a tough time sourcing specific roles, consider roles with adjacent skills — for example, the Python language and Ruby framework have enough overlap that someone who’s skilled in one can typically master the other.

Now, of course, this scares hiring managers — because they’re afraid they won’t get someone who can hit the ground running on a big project.

You can overcome that fear by working through these steps:

Do Your Homework: You’re probably not the first technical recruiter who has struggled with this exact same scenario. In today’s world of countless Saas tools, smartphone apps, and machine learning, there could be dozens of articles that explore the feasibility of placing hard to find developers. As with most things these days, doing a little online research could be the right place to start.

Assess the Opportunity: Your gut tells you there are more Python experts to choose from than Ruby on Rails developers. Based purely on LinkedIn developer group membership data (132K vs. 69K), you may be correct. What other data points could you use to support your theory?

Talk to Colleagues that You Trust: Does your company already have a few Ruby on Rails developers on the payroll? If so, do you have a good enough relationship with any of them to pick their brains about your idea? What challenges do they foresee?

Analyze the Opportunity Costs: Even if your idea has merit, the first objection you’re likely to hear will involve the time and cost of training. Hiring an engineer with adjacent skill sets will yield additional onboarding considerations. You’ll need to weigh this reality against the opportunity cost of prolonged vacancy. Would your developers rather have someone now who might require training, or would they prefer to wait six more months for the “perfect match?”

Elevate, Step 7: Put it all together

At this point, here’s what you should be putting together:

Source from new places
Organize yourself internally better
Focus on candidate experience
Focus on the skills of the candidates, not their pedigree
Evaluate soft skills as well
Consider adjacent skill sets

Remember: you’re looking for diamonds, not dirt. The focus needs to be on quality, not quantity. So don’t worry about how busy/slammed you are personally — that’s often tied to task work. Focus on what you’re doing and how it’s value-add. Pay that same value forward to the candidate in terms of how you communicate, explain the organization, assess them, etc. If the process is rooted in value instead of busy work/quantity, the candidates will become quality employees. That’s the ultimate goal of technical recruiting, even in the most complex landscape we’ve ever seen.

Shoutout to our pals at Codefights for sponsoring this awesome content.

Your tech stack needs to be intuitively data-driven (and data-heavy)

Your recruiting operations team can now be more data-driven than ever. To live in the numbers in real-time, look to your technology vendors to surface the right stats and help your team use them.

As LinkedIn pointed out in their 2017 recruiting trends report, 81% of talent leaders say that their team is the highest priority in their broader organization. But to make an impact on the executive team, it’s important to contextualize the data. Having data means nothing unless there is a way to present it to decision-makers in a way they understand.

Some of the impact is in choosing the right data, often achieved by working with software providers who make it easy for you to focus on the most important metrics. And some of the impact is in the telling: presenting cause and effect in a way that execs who aren’t in the recruiting trenches will be able to contextualize.

Here are a few categories of data you can use to assess the health and impact of your recruiting efforts:

Continue reading “Your tech stack needs to be intuitively data-driven (and data-heavy)”

Unleash 2018: The future of automation and talent acquisition

Automation was a big topic at Unleash 2018, for sure.

Everywhere you turned, it seemed to be part of a panel, or being mentioned on the vendor floor.

My RD partner William Tincup was on one such panel, entitled The Robots Are Out to Get YOU! The Positive Impact of Automation on Recruitment. Here was the blurb on Unleash’s site heading into the conference:

“Siri, which of my technical recruiters has the best track record in hiring top engineers that are engaged with the company?” Sounds kind of far fetched right? Well, yes and no. It’s not flying cars on Mars and it’s also not common place for today’s HR & TA leader but we all feel the anxiety that this or something like this will become commonplace. Our panelists are doing some really cool things with automation. During the panel we’ll explore what’s working, not working and where they feel this is all heading. Please join Robin, Johnny, Lars and William.

Since “automation” is kind of a scary term to many in talent acquisition — are our jobs at stake? — let’s parse this out and look at the positive elements herein.

Continue reading “Unleash 2018: The future of automation and talent acquisition”

How much is “social recruiting” really happening?

The idea of ‘social recruiting’ — the concept whereby hiring managers, HR types, and others look at your social media profiles as a way to (a) find you or (b) move you along in a job search — has been in the business media for a while now. Josh Bersin wrote about it in Forbes back in 2012, and with the Microsoft-LinkedIn deal that’s been analyzed about 98,483 different ways, you’d assume social recruiting might get a pop from that as well. (Or, at the very least, if Microsoft Dynamics is integrated with LinkedIn, sales guys can locate other sales guys through the CRM and try to poach them.)

I’m personally not that big of a fan of LinkedIn in a lot of ways, mostly around the ‘active user’ issue — they claim about 400M, but think about it logically. If you have a job you like, you’re very busy, and/or you don’t want to be seen as a thought leader and have a good Rolodex — well, in those cases (which constitute a sizable amount of men over about 48), you’d never really need to go on LinkedIn.

Continue reading “How much is “social recruiting” really happening?”

What AI can do around Candidate Rediscovery

Quick definition to begin: candidate rediscovery is the process of finding previous applicants — who didn’t get the job they applied to that time — who would be a good fit for a currently-posted role.

Candidate rediscovery has only emerged as a concept because of the rise of technology, and specifically AI. Most Applicant Tracking Systems are “dumb” technology; they’re good for storing information about candidates, but they’re not necessarily good for anything that requires a connected context.

What metrics are you evaluated on?

Most in talent acquisition would say something along these lines:

Quality of hire
Time to hire
Cost of the process

If those are a few of your key metrics, let’s see how candidate rediscovery could help.

Some simple math to illustrate the benefit here

Let’s say you have a job open and receive 100 applications. 20 of the applicants, give or take, are a good fit.

One person gets the job, and 19 resumes are kept on file.

Three months later, a similar role open up.

You can rediscover those 19 prior applicants within your ATS who met the qualifications.

AI can mine your ATS to find those resumes again for you. This helps you source quality hires while reducing hiring time and candidate acquisition costs.

Additional math: high-volume hiring

For high volume roles, 65% of resumes received on average are completely ignored. That means most recruitment departments are sitting on a goldmine of potential candidates in their ATS — but without a way to quickly, easily, and accurately access their resumes for open reqs.

Similar to how AI works for sourcing, AI for talent rediscovery can automatically find previous applicants in your ATS that are good matches for your current open positions.

69% of recruiters report their hiring volume has increased this year — but only 26% say the size of their recruitment teams has increased.

If you want to truly do more with less, you need to automate, be efficient, and do something with that goldmine of resumes from previous open roles.

This is the inherent advantage of talent rediscovery — and of AI for recruiting as a whole.6

How to tell if someone can do a job they’ve never done

This article was co-authored with Abhijit Bhaduri.

There are many good reasons for predicting human performance at work.

The vital few are truly different: First, at any level and in any job and industry, there is substantial variability in people’s performance, which explains the near-universality of the Pareto effect, whereby fewer than 20% of people tend to account for around 80% of group or organizational performance. As we have argued in a recent book, identifying these “vital few” in advance is crucial if you want to compete in the war for talent.
Most people cannot assess their own potential: Second, people will be happier and more productive if they end up in jobs that are a good fit for them, but you cannot rely on them to work this out by themselves. Indeed, most people have a fairly inaccurate sense of their own talents, especially when the question is how good they are in comparison to other people. As a consequence, too many employees end up in jobs they detest.
Traditional talent criteria are obsolete: Third, many of the traditional indicators or “signals” used to predict future job performance have been devaluated by the changing landscape of work, and this will only intensify in the future. In broad terms, we have transitioned from a world where academic expertise, hard skills, and formal qualifications were essential to predict whether someone would fit a given role, to a world where experience, soft skills, and broad talent traits have come to represent the cornerstone of human potential.

In addition, innovations in HR technologies are also changing how we evaluate these new vital attributes of potential. If AI and science can join forces, we will soon live in a world where a substantial proportion of the workforce will not need to be assessed, because of the amount of data we will have on people.

Assessing for jobs that don’t exist today

To be sure, not much has changed when it comes to predicting someone’s ability to do something they have done in the past. People have always been creatures of habit – and they always will be – so past behavior is a very good predictor of future behavior. However, if we are interested in working out whether someone is able to do something they haven’t done before, let alone predict their performance on jobs that do not exist yet, things get a lot more complicated. According to a ManpowerGroup and World Economic Forum report, 65% of the jobs that await generation Z will be jobs that do not exist today, and a recent report by Dell estimated by 2030 only 15% of today’s jobs will still exist.

Fortunately, science provides a well-established solution to address this challenge. In fact, there is a fairly formulaic process for quantifying someone’s potential for performing a job they have not done before, even if we don’t know what that role might actually be.

Ability, likability and drive

The first and most important recommendation is to focus on generic and universal ingredients of talent, such as ability, likability, and drive. As we have shown in our own research, these are the most important qualities for predicting not only people’s job performance, but also their career success. We may not know what the future jobs will look like, but it is safe to assume that people who are generally smarter, better able to deal with people, and more hard-working, will be able to perform them better than their less able, likable, and driven counterparts, and it is relatively easy to measure the degree to which people possess these qualities. Furthermore, this simple formula can be applied at all levels of job complexity and seniority, including the C-suite.

For instance, when a large steel conglomerate decided to hire a CFO, it identified a candidate who had previously worked in a petroleum company and then for a major energy firm. While the functional competencies for the role would have been common to most CFOs, the hiring team chose to use those merely as a gating criteria. What got the candidate hired was their ability to lead a business transformation. The steel manufacturer was about to undertake a large transformation to respond to the change in the global market conditions.

The CHRO told us that they were looking for a terrific business leader who could collaborate with others in the C-suite and lead the transformation. They specifically assessed their ability to analyze the barriers they would face with the frontline, middle management and the senior leaders

They viewed the candidate’s analytical skills as a great asset. The CFO was skilled at analyzing data and finding patterns and trends. The person came across as likeable and respectful without compromising on the agenda, and viewed by colleagues as persuasive and charming. During town hall meetings, this candidate listened to people without imposing his/her own ideas, and none of this stopped this candidate from driving an ambitious agenda of 10X revenue growth.

Willingness to learn what they don’t know

A second key recommendation is to bet on trainability. First, because what people know is less relevant than what they are likely to learn. Second, because the only sure way to avoid being automated is to keep learning new things, broadening one’s skill range to remain employable and competitive.

Unsurprisingly, there has recently been a great deal of emphasis on the importance of human curiosity – often referred to as learnability – vis-à-vis jobs and careers. Curious people are more likely to question things, which helps them solve problems and arrive to smarter answers. They are also more comfortable with ambiguity, which makes them receptive to change and adaptable. Finally, curious people are more likely to be self-critical and to seek out and pay attention to feedback from others, which is essential for developing and getting better.

Naturally, it is not possible for organizations to expect to hire only curious people, so investing in developmental and coaching interventions that boost trainability is also necessary. Such interventions can be expected to be more successful if they manage to prepare people for management and leadership roles, which will depend largely on their ability to coach or develop people-skills.

Ability to develop people skills

Ironically, in the age of AI and digital automation humans will mostly compete on their emotional or social skills, as these are the hardest abilities for technology to emulate.

A $43 billion corporation, the Aditya Birla Group is in the League of Fortune 500. They employ almost 120,000 employees, belonging to 42 nationalities. A couple of years ago, they took a bold stand. They decided to stop hiring external talent at the top of the pyramid, to instead invest heavily in transition coaching to prepare their leaders for success in top roles.

As Ganesh Chella, a leading coach noted, “The most common area where leaders need coaching is in the area of emotional intelligence. Self-regulation and impulse control matters a lot at the top.” At the middle level attention to detail can be a strength. At the senior level, the same quality would be a derailer. Getting them to operate as a leader who empowers – not micromanages is another important area of development.

In conclusion

Recruiters have always found roles for people where they can leverage their competencies. Could they start using their understanding of personality to identify opportunities for candidates? Talent is after all, personality in the right place. It is hard to think of Messi as a banker, and he is not even the soccer player when he plays for Argentina. That is why personality is such a great predictor of careers where the individual can find purpose and personal fulfillment. This is where good recruiters should still be able to add value and help.

The sexual harassment that never happened

I want to preface this post by saying:

Please keep an open mind.

I am not against the movements that have been going on and are continuing to gain substantial traction. I, too, was a victim at a very early age and it has shaped me into who I am.

I was raised by women, strong women who taught me how to behave and how to treat women.

Have I slipped up? Have I made an off-putting comments before?

Sure I have — and I know almost no one that has not. Is it an excuse? NO. I am not making excuses for behavior with this post.

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What HR tech trends will we be discussing in summer 2019?

In stark contrast to the outdated stereotype of bureaucratic administration, today’s HR teams are creative, innovative, and technologically savvy. They’re working in cross-functional teams, rethinking leadership and management models, and demanding vendor solutions that optimize productivity and performance. HR leaders have become their own disruptors, reimagining both the work we do and how we do it.

As a result, human capital management (HCM) platforms have made remarkable advances in a short period of time. Looking forward, there are four major technologies I expect to completely transform the industry, cementing HR’s role as a strategic partner and redefining the future of work.

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Hiring manager/recruiter relationship: Save it with one small email adjustment?

Email is a complete cluster-fuck to almost everyone. We all complain about it, but secretly love how much we get, because it makes us feel (a) busy/high and (b) relevant. Both matter a lot to work, even if we don’t admit that.

In reality, email is just a way to underscore the pre-existing hierarchy of wherever you work. To wit:

High up a chain: Never respond to a thread for days/weeks, then respond at the 11th hour on a project, change everything, and that’s fine
Low down a chain: If you don’t respond instantly at 11pm to a “stakeholder,” your next performance review will say you “lack initiative.”

That’s the main problem.

The other problem? No one knows how to write emails with any context, often because they’re doing it on-the-go from mobile. You could copy an idea from the Army — BLUF, or Bottom Line Up Front— and fix this, but that’s very rare. Most emails are a train wreck of nothingness that you need to decipher just to do your job, and that’s definitely true in the hiring manager-recruiter relationship ecosystem. And we wonder why only 15% of employees globally are engaged with their job, eh?

Maybe there’s a small fix here, though.

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Recruiters are likely underpaid by about $45,000/year

It’s a unique role that recruiters play really.

We justify our existence by making placements — yet we are objectified by the very customers that we support.

We are needed, until we are not, then tossed away for a few months while the company determines what the hell they are going to do to fix the precarious position their middle management had put them in, and that’s when the phone rings.

I have never understood how a CEO can get a gig like they do; leading a company, not listening to its employees, and only watching the ticker tape numbers fall and cut so-called overhead becomes a sad deliverance.

We, as recruiters and sourcers are not overhead. We are not dead weight, and if our skills are used in the right capacity, we could do so much to support and help drive the business forward — not drive it down.

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An office pool table isn’t how you win that “top millennial talent”

By last report, Google received three million employment applications per year. Most other companies aren’t so lucky. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, demand for service roles is spiking, with hundreds of thousands of job openings for trade and utilities roles and professional services. Why the disparity? Part of the reason is that recruiters outside of trendy tech companies are having difficulty attracting millennial talent.

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