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Four Big Barriers That Will Impede Talent Acquisition This Year

Given that 2017 marked a 17-year low for unemployment, there will be a big battle for talent this year – especially in technology, health care and professional services.

With the rapidly changing career climate and low unemployment, recruiters and hiring professionals must do everything they can to find and retain talent.

Since a variety of barriers exist that inevitably hinder the process of today’s talent acquisition professionals, here are four (4) of the top disruptions recruiters are facing in 2018, as well as a strategy that can help to navigate the hurdles.

Barrier No. 1 – A negative candidate experience

Candidate experience ranks high on the list of factors contributing to a company’s ability to attract and hire top talent. Poor candidate experience, whether that’s due to lack of feedback, inconsistent communication or an antiquated job portal, can cause employers to miss out on valuable applicants.

Unfortunately, the candidate experience at most companies is likely worse than recruiters think it is.

According to a study by CareerBuilder, only 47 percent of employers do a good job of setting communications expectations at the beginning of a hiring interaction. With the same study reporting that 78 percent of applicants say the overall candidate experience rating they receive is an indicator of how a company values its current employees, it’s time to make improvements so companies put their best foot forward.

Barrier No. 2 – Ineffective employment branding

If you aren’t actively cultivating a strong employment brand, your organization could be negatively affected.

Poor employment branding can have a tremendous impact on attracting talent in today’s competitive job market. In fact, CareerArc reports that 55 percent of potential applicants who have read a negative review about a company have then decided not to apply there.

It’s no secret that today’s job seekers are vying for positions at notable companies like Google and Amazon — and the statistics above indicate why. It’s due to their employment branding which touts that these businesses are inventive, not only in the products they offer but in the way their organizations are structured and run.

For those organizations that aren’t tech goliaths, it’s important to build rapport with potential applicants by showcasing employment branding materials to generate positive buzz. Share employee testimonials, culture videos and benefits or tell candidates all the amazing ways your company is giving back.

Barrier No. 3 – Ignoring the introverted candidate

Today’s recruiting methods and decisions largely favor extroverts as those candidates typically make great first impressions, are more outgoing and showcase confidence and enthusiasm throughout the interview process. Hiring professionals perceive many qualities of an extrovert as showcasing a higher level of intelligence.

Unfortunately, this practice alienates the introverted applicants, who prefer to connect one-on-one and typically require alone time for their best performance. A 30-minute interview simply isn’t conducive to the introvert candidate who likes to thoughtfully consider their responses before speaking.

Overlooking an introverted candidate can be a major roadblock to talent acquisition as workplaces usually perform best when there is a balance of both introverted and extroverted members.

Barrier No. 4 – A lengthy to-do list

Recruiters are juggling applicant tracking system (ATS) management, job listing updates, and mounting pressure from hiring managers and executives. These activities (while necessary) steal time from meaningful engagement that could be happening with active and potential candidates.

Freeing up recruiter time can have a strong impact on your talent funnel, especially given that the length of the interview process has already grown immensely over the past decade. Research from Glassdoor indicates that time-to-hire in America has grown from roughly 3.3 days in 2009 to 22.9 days on average.

Truly validating these listed challenges impeding talent acquisition is the fact that today’s on-the-go workforce would rather hit “send” on a text than swipe right to accept an incoming call. In fact, the KPCB 2016 Internet Trends Report notes that only 12 percent of Millennials and 29 percent of Gen Xers favor the phone for business communication.

Begin a conversation with candidates via text and continue the interview process in a more traditional manner through a phone interview or in-person discussion if needed. Text screening candidates helps recruiters get to know a candidate in a less formalized manner, which may result in a better hire in the long term.

As hiring professionals look to maximize efficiency and minimize barriers to talent acquisition, text screening can help attract and hire top talent in today’s competitive job market.

A Guy Can Dream, Can’t He? Here’s My Ideal Talent Acquisition Process

It occurred to me recently that we look at the recruitment process in pieces and rarely as a whole. I can’t find any articles about what the dream process looks like, how long it takes, what tools it utilizes, and, how do you do it anyway?

I might not be able to answer this for everyone, but I’m going to take a shot at it for what I believe is about 60 percent of corporate America.

I’m going to break it into parts and look at each one, and, where the handshakes occur.

I’m going to look at sourcing, the interview process, and then the job offer and onboarding, as my main umbrella.

In my dream, I’d first set up my sourcing tools …

Sourcing is perhaps my favorite topic in recruiting. The challenge of identification and engagement have been ever present in the life of a recruiter.

To help with this, I would use a few tools:

I would use Joberate to map out my competition and track my high value prospects for job seeking behavior;
I would use Teamable to leverage my existing employee’s networks to drive employee referrals, and;
I would have an aggregator, like Hiring Solved, Hiretual or Entelo.

The objective of all of that software is to increase the initial engagement rates from a so called industry standard 20 percent to a number that is consistently north of 80 percent.

… then I would have candidates apply …

Once I have the candidates identified, engaged, interested and qualified, I would then have them apply to my job.

Of course, there would be a “AI” chatbot to help them apply. Gone are the days of uploading your resume and then filling out an application about your job history. My chatbot will engage my candidate in text chat and help them fill out their application.

After that it will even offer them the chance to interview on the spot! After the candidate finishes their application and their initial screen, thanks to my chat bot, the resume then will land softly in the recruiter’s in-box.

After reviewing the stack ranked results, the recruiter enables the AI to access calendars and it sets up all of my recruiter screens. The recruiter screen goes well and now it is time to set up the in-person interviews, and with the help of my AI assistant, the in-person interviews are scheduled.

and then do interviews, get feedback, and extend the offer

After the interviews my AI assistant will help me follow up and collect feedback from my interview team. Once I have my feedback into my modern ATS, I’m able to move the candidate to the offer stage.

From there I use my ATS and my AI assistant to help me get the details of the offer together and approved. The AI uses text messaging to get all of the necessary approvals in a much shorter period of time.

At that point, I call my candidate and extend the job offer. After the offer is accepted, I update the system and there is a seamless handshake between the ATS and the HR onboarding system. I get the signed offer returned and I’m able to move the candidate along to onboarding.

Maybe it is just a dream, and maybe we can’t get there yet, but I think it is something we should have a new conversation about.

What does your dream process look like?

Stolen Valor and Fake Resumes

As a Gold Star Dad, I have a strong sense of respect and admiration for the men and women who support our country by serving in the military. Every single one of them contribute to the backbone of our national security. Their service is essential to preserve the American way of life.

I have had the honor to meet Medal of Honor recipients, the Secretary of Defense, the Captain of the most famous US warship (the USS Enterprise), the base commander of the largest US naval base in the world, Navy SEALS, Army Rangers, heroic survivors from Iwo Jima to Benghazi, and many more who are part of that backbone of our national security.

As a prior professional information technology services provider, I also respect and admire the men and women of IT who support our country’s economic backbone. They drive the engine of commerce that is critical to fund our military, as well as our educational institutions, healthcare systems, and all the government services that create this melting pot we call America.

I see a lot of similarities between our military personnel and our information technology personnel. The basic similarities are obvious: drive, dedication, working long hours to complete a mission, striving for advancement, and a belief that a strong team can accomplish more than a group of individuals.

But there’s an issue.

The rise of the fakes

The respect and admiration that all of these men and women have earned is being ripped off by dishonest people. Unfortunately, our military has seen a rise in the deplorable act known as “Stolen Valor.” There are people who parade around in military uniforms they never earned — all for undeserved personal gain. In large part they get away with their fraud because less than 0.5 percent of Americans serve in the military, and the average citizen would not easily spot the fakes.

Our IT professionals are also having their hard earned accomplishments stolen. “Fake Resumes” have become a serious problem in the IT world. Just Google “fake resumes”, and you will not only find dozens of articles condemning the practice, you will find sites describing how to get away with it.

I’ve seen this dozens of times

One of my consultants, an active directory architect, was leading an AD migration for a multi-billion dollar global corporation. I hired a junior level technician to assist the architect with paperwork, errands, and menial tasks (like getting coffee and supplies). Years later I happened to come across the junior tech’s resume on a job board. I was appalled to see that the “junior tech” claimed on his resume to have been the “active directory architect who lead the project.”

Since joining eTeki, the award winning technical interview-as-a-service platform, I have seen scores of these “fakes” exposed by our expert interviewers during video interviews. One in particular stands out. The candidate had a job on his resume, located in Portland, Maine. Portland is pretty small — about 66,000. Coincidentally, our interviewer used to work in Portland. After verifying that the candidate worked on-site, our interviewer said, “What a coincidence; I also used to work in Portland. Where did you live?” The candidate sputtered a bit, started hyperventilating, and disconnected from the interview.

Why does this happen and what are the repercussions?

There may be times where the need to hire is immediate; for example,a crucial team member on a time-sensitive project left without notice. The hiring manager ends up between a rock and a hard place. They don’t have the bandwidth to pull people off the project to conduct rounds and rounds of interviews. A promising candidate with a great resume is available, but has other offers. A shortcut is taken – a fraud gets through.

The consequences of hiring someone with a “fake resume” are many:

SLA penalties resulting from underperformance
Inability to complete job duties
Damage to your reputation
Possible legal action

How do you minimize this problem?

There are a few ways to minimize the fakes with reference checks, etc. If you reverse engineer the consequences of hiring an unqualified candidate, the first indicator will always be poor performance with the core skills necessary for the task. So, by far, the most effective way to uncover the fakes is to thoroughly validate that the candidate does, in fact, possess the skills listed on the resume.

There are many services available to help hiring managers and recruiters test a candidate’s technical skills. Most are somewhat reliable in determining whether the test taker has technical skills. If you want to protect against fakes and frauds, you will need more.

Ability to determine whether the person taking the test is really the candidate
A platform that evaluates the candidate against the specific criteria of the role
A service with depth of expertise that can provide fast results in all technology stacks
A solution that allows you to review the interview at whatever time is most convenient

The bottom line

At the end of the day, your success is measured by results. The caliber of your team is what drives those results. A stellar team produces successful results. You get a stellar team through vetting real, accomplished, driven people. You need to make sure your tech and processes are aligned to do just that.

What Companies With a Great Candidate Experience Do That Others Don’t

The longer I write about recruiting and hiring, the more I believe that the candidate experience needs to be at the heart of how every organization recruits and hires people.

And the longer I write about recruiting and hiring, the more clearly I see that is not the case.

This thought popped into my head again this week as I read through the 2017 Talent Board North American Candidate Experience Research report.

This is a serious piece of research from theTalent Board. It’s an in-depth look at how job candidates, and the companies and organizations that are looking to hire them, view all aspects of the candidate experience.

And, the North American Candidate Experience 2017 research report is based on a whopping 180,000 surveys of candidates who applied to positions at 200 companies — “most of whom did not get the job.”

4 things that set the best organizations apart

As you can imagine, there is a lot of data here so be prepared for a deep dive into it. One of the things that jumped out at me are the four (4) critical things that the top ranked companies with the very best candidate experience do that sets them apart:

With candidates, they listen more and communicate often.
They set better expectations about the recruiting process from pre-application to onboarding (for candidates).
They hold themselves more accountable for candidate experience and talent acquisition performance while measuring it regularly and consistently.
Job candidates perceive these organizations as having a “fairer” process – candidates believe they have been able to share why their knowledge, skills and experience deserves consideration for the jobs to which they have applied.

Disdain for those who “don’t know what they want until they see it”

I also found this part of the report’s executive summary had some interesting perspective on the stark differences in how candidates and talent acquisition professionals view the recruiting and hiring process:

Every stakeholder, and especially every prospect who has ever converted to become a candidate (and who is most likely rejected), sees the recruiting process through their life’s lens. As any person progresses from becoming aware of an employer to becoming interested in a position to becoming committed to competing for that position, candidate attitudes, behaviors and the attitudes and behaviors of those they influence are subject to change.

Employer decisions to improve their hiring costs, time-to-fill and quality notwithstanding, it is the parallel decision a job seeker makes to compete and accept a position in the context of a career at a specific time in their life that makes our profession, Talent Acquisition, so essential and its impact on the business of the employers they encounter so important to understand.

Hiring managers have little use for the distraction of candidates who lack the competencies or willingness to tackle their jobs. What they are learning however is that the best candidates and a growing number who are customers have a newfound disdain for employers who “don’t know what they want until they see it,” fail to set or deliver on expectations, listen without hearing, and do not hold themselves accountable for respecting all those interested in their firm.

Recruiters and recruiting leaders are most often rewarded for filling jobs according to schedule. Building and managing the pipelines of willing prospects and candidates who test their interest against an employer’s interest to hire them by applying again and again has been central to 20th-Century hiring strategy. The shift to a new paradigm where increased accountability for how candidates are treated is paramount is demonstrating that the fallout is significantly lower, that candidate replacement costs are no longer rising exponentially and that buy versus build decisions that benefit the employer are more likely.”

There’s a huge amount of information in the 2017 Talent Board North American Candidate Experience Research report, and any serious (and savvy) TA pro will want to take a deep dive into it because there is a lot of information here that will help them to not only improve their game but their organization’s candidate experience as well.

3 keys to a great candidate experience

At the end of the day, the data points to three things that North American job candidates want to know when they apply for a position:

A clear understanding of the company culture;
Solid insight into the employee experience; and,
A sense of connection with the overall brand.

“What else?” the report asks? Well, they also want “better communication and engagement along the way!”

This doesn’t sound all that hard, but for some reason, far too many companies and organizations make it so. I know this from my own personal experience, and, from great research like the 2017 Talent Board North American Candidate Experience Research report.

Here’s my advice to all TA professionals: Get a copy and get into it — now. There is a lot in there you really need to know and think about. If it doesn’t help you to do a better job, well, you probably should look for a different line of work.

The Talent Board is “a non-profit organization focused on the elevation and promotion of a quality candidate experience with data benchmark research.” They produce the annual Candidate Experience Research Report that “covers the best practices, platforms and processes that enable companies to provide an exemplary recruiting experience to their job candidates. Presenting the key research findings from the 2017 Candidate Experience (CandE) Awards and Benchmark Research Program, the report showcases the leading factors impacting candidate experience today from pre-application to onboarding.”

SeekOut.io Review

When Dean DaCosta tells us to pay attention to a recruiting tool, we listen. And so should you. In this video review, we take a look at SeekOut.io a product that Dean looked at last year and is building a lot of momentum. We have had a chance to look inside and all reports are good to go.

Today we’re bringing you the details about an amazing new tool called SeekOut. It’s new to the scene; in fact, it was just rolled out in 2017. However, don’t let this make you hesitate. At already 103 million people and counting it’s ready for sourcing. Currently, it pulls in tons of data from public web sources, particularly LinkedIn.

So what’s great about SeekOut?

The most important and best feature we feel that this tool offers is their huge variety of search features. Of course, they include all the big ones: keywords, diversity, location, current & past companies, titles, skills, schools, and degrees. From there you can get into the nitty-gritty as well. They offer searches for everything from years worked at a company, company size, certificates they’ve earned, groups they’re a part of, their interests, even honor awards they’ve received. If you might be looking for it, it’s most likely it’s going to be on there.

Find Your Candidates, And Then Contact Them

You run a search picking as many or as few of these search options as you would like. Once you run a search you have multiple options to save, use, and export the data. These include getting emails for the candidates you find, exporting the page to Excel, or adding the page to a project. The projects are within the SeekOut tool itself, to help you sort and organize your results and export more information like the emails you find to Excel.

The export to Excel option gives you a huge amount of data, all sorted into labeled and organized rows for you. This includes direct links to their LinkedIn profiles. This can be crucial for contacting them; on the off chance the tool isn’t able to find an email address. In the search we ran, we were able to find emails for nearly everyone. Often they even included a work and a personal email. Eventually, SeekOut is adding more social profiles, AI candidate recommendations, and the latest is the Chrome Extension, the SeekOut Sourcing Assistant.

If you’re looking to pinpoint your recruits, this tool is absolutely worth checking out! Seekout offers 3 different levels of pricing and support. They also have a 14 Day Free Trial so you can see if it’s the tool you’ve been waiting for.

The Keys to Attracting/Retaining Top Talent? It’s Continuous Feedback and Career Mobility

According to Gallup’s 2017 State of the American Workforce report, 51 percent of employed adults in the U.S. are currently searching for new jobs or watching for new job opportunities.

How many of your employees are doing the same?

Here’s something we all know is true: Today’s workplace is continuously changing.

For example, rapid developments in technology are transforming not only the type of work performed but also the processes and new skill sets that are required for employees to be successful on the job. Organizations face challenges to attract employees who are nimble and hungry to learn, and to retain employees who can adapt to an ever-changing workplace.

From front-line employees to the Executive Suite, attracting, engaging, and retaining top talent is essential to organizations remaining competitive in today’s talent economy.

The challenge: Coping with a multi-generational workforce

Employees can easily become enticed by new opportunities if they don’t feel rewarded or appreciated, or, if they don’t believe there are avenues for advancement at their current company. And, an organization’s search for top talent is further compounded by today’s multi-generational workplace, where employees come with varied expectations from training to work-life balance.

The modern workforce looks dramatically different than those of previous decades, leaving many executives and HR professionals struggling to engage, inspire and retain employees.

Two keys to building an attractive and motivating workplace are critial:

Emphasizing and mapping internal mobility; and,
Providing opportunities for clear, transparent, ongoing feedback, so employees can feel appreciated and heard.

Emphasize internal career mobility

People are the backbone of any organization’s success, and today’s employees expect their employers to provide meaningful work and flexible paths for career progression.

For employees to achieve success, they need a clear understanding of where they’re going. It’s critical to both show an employee what their paths are for career progression, and, how their current skills and competencies align with these goals.

If additional skills are required, organizations must provide the tools and resources necessary to develop them. By doing so, organizations can enable employee engagement and empower employees with the skills they need to move up the career ladder and contribute to the success of the business.

Both employers and employees benefit from internal career mobility, and it can also help to retain top performers and grow the organization’s talent pipeline. When organizations prioritize internal career mobility, they inspire dedication and loyalty, preserve legacy knowledge, drive employee retention, create talent agility within the organization, nurture tomorrow’s managers and leaders, and, boost the company culture.

Nurturing a culture of continuous feedback

As organizations look to attract talent and support employee growth, it’s imperative they provide opportunities for individual feedback and development. When it comes to employee feedback, organizations have often offered annual performance reviews.

The annual performance review is an antiquated process that requires a substantial time investment by managers and employees alike, and can include biased opinions and inaccurate results. Companies must radically change their process for sharing feedback to retain employees and stay competitive in today’s marketplace.

Rather than waiting a full 365 days to discuss an employee’s concerns, successes, or areas for development, leaders must reinvigorate (or entirely overhaul) their organization’s performance management process by incorporating continuous feedback.

Here’s why: Continuous feedback emphasizes in-the-moment, advice and coaching. Allowing for open, ongoing dialogue up and down the organizational hierarchy helps to ensure all employees feel valued, respected and acknowledged. It also helps them understand where they are in their professional development within the organization.

The key to retaining top talent

Articulating this clear performance strategy to recruits and new hires illustrate the organization’s commitment to workers, their well-being — and their ultimate success.

Organizations must provide intuitive, seamless experiences at all stops along the employee’s journey, from talent acquisition and onboarding through performance management, retention, learning and career development within the organization.

Creating this end-to-end employee experience and delivering a clear strategy for internal mobility will empower staff, giving companies a competitive advantage that attracts and retains top talent.

Recruiters: Do You Ever Wonder “Are You Working Close to the Money?”

“Are you working close to the money today?”

That was the question my first manager asked me every morning for my first 18 months in recruitment.

But, what is “working close to the money?”

It’s this: the philosophy that your days’ activity should be focused on doing things that give you the best chance of converting your efforts into fees.

An important question for contingent recruiters

Some 20 years on, I still ask myself the question “are you working close to the money today?” Asking this question has never been more important for contingent recruiters.

For open market recruiters, it’s easy to be sucked into working for clients, where they are looking for a purple squirrel and also using their internal recruiting team or other agencies at the same time.

In your heart, you know this is not close to the money, yet often you will still work these roles.

The trap that many recruiters fall into is that they forget that they aren’t paid to search for CVs for clients, or, paid to arrange interviews.

They are only paid when they make placements.

Yet, every day I meet recruiters who are super excited to get a new vacancy from a client, but they often forget to ask themselves, “How likely am I to get paid for the time I’m going to spend sourcing this role?

I totally get that most of the recruitment industry works on the basis of “NO WIN, NO FEE.” However, the unwritten premise is that a recruiter needs to give them the best chance of winning.

Clients aren’t there to help recruiters get paid

While many recruiters have great relationships with recruiters, their interests lie not in helping the recruiter get paid, but in finding the right candidate for their business.

I have been a line manager, and even though I wouldn’t want my team working on vacancies when they have little or no commitment from a client, I’m happy to let other recruiters who don’t work for me work hard with little prospect of being paid.

This is because for all line managers, the idea of individuals working hard to help you solve a problem but with no commitment to pay unless they give you exactly what you want, is something that is not only alluring but incredibly ADDICTIVE.

This means that line managers are unlikely to say, “You are unlikely to get paid for your time, and I’m probably going to waste your time, so don’t put much effort in.”

In many cases, multiple recruiters are being given a single vacancy to source from the internal recruiter, who is still actively working to make sure they do not pay a fee (in fact, they are bonused on this). Yet recruiters frequently stop what they’re doing and spend precious time and effort on sourcing candidates that are unlikely to be placed or result in a fee.

You need a criteria for unlocking 100% of your sourcing effort

I hear you say, “Alex, I love the concept of working close to the money. But how do you avoid not negatively affecting your client relationship when you say ‘no thank you’?” Also, you might need to find the hard to source candidates, which then leads to more of the easier stuff by building trust and a relationship based on your capability.

In this, you are completely right because whether or not you work a vacancy is not black and white. It requires judgment on the part of the recruiter to determine how likely the effort they will invest will result in a fee.

There are situations where you may work a “long shot,” such as:

You may have an existing client base that is providing a consistent flow of fees.
If you sense a larger opportunity, then you can work niche roles to prove your capability (and that you are a decent person). I worked plenty of internal audit roles in my early days to get access to the management accountant vacancies. BUT, if after a few months all I was getting was the super-niche roles, I was encouraged to jog on to find another company that would give me roles that I could fill.

The key is for the a recruiting team to have a clear definition of what criteria needs to be in place to unlock a 100 percent of a recruiter’s efforts, and a criteria that limits the amount of effort that is invested.

At Nurtureit, we believe that the two key drivers for assessing the quality of a vacancy are client commitment and sourcing effort.

High commitment and low sourcing effort = “A” grade opportunity;
Low commitment and high sourcing effort – “C” grade opportunity

What is your criteria for unlocking 100 percent of your sourcing effort?

You can also try being upfront with your client

It IS possible to tell a client that you are not going to work hard on their opportunity AND improve the quality of your client relationship.

Why? Because recruiters over promise to clients every day.

See if you can find a way to say something like this:

“Look, this is a role outside my area of expertise, and it looks like you have lots of other options at the moment, and I cannot put 100 percent into helping you on this right now. But what I can do is X,Y or Z to help you. If you can give me more commitment, more flexibility (insert other requirements here), I can put more effort in to help you find someone.”

Although I appreciate this type of statement, it needs to be tailored to the individual situation and applied with care.

But ultimately, if all you have are tough roles where you have little or no commitment from the client, then you will struggle to succeed. This is especially true:

If all you get from certain clients is the super-niche roles, and you never get a shot at the easier ones. If that happens, you may struggle, too.
If managers let their newer consultants work too many long shots, then you will end up firing them for not billing enough, or just as likely, they will fire themselves because they lose faith that that they are going to make enough placements to achieve the level of performance they were promised in their interview.

The one big question you need to ask

Judgment is key here. It needs to used at every stage of the process to determine how much effort a recruiter should continue to put into a role.

But it all stems from one big question:

“How likely am I to be paid for the effort I’m expending, either now or in the future?”

And, what if a recruiter cannot always make the right judgment, the right decision?

When that happens, it’s the responsibility of the managers and directors of the organization to continually help their recruiters make better decisions.

Happy hunting, and good luck converting your efforts into fees.

5 Unconscious Biases That Every Recruiter Needs to Recognize

Eliminating unconscious biases in the hiring process makes sense on so many levels.

Companies need to look no further than quashing discrimination and the potential for legal action. Many countries have equal opportunity laws, mandating that recruiters do not consider race, gender, age, or religious beliefs when evaluating and hiring candidates for an open position.

Simply put, waltzing around the law has its own stiff set of consequences. Justified or not, lawsuits cost money and create public relations nightmares.

On the inside, most companies desire a diversified workforce. The idea is to hire people of all backgrounds and makeups, as long as they’re qualified.

Therein lies the rub.

Subliminal tendencies often discard the right candidates and bring in the ones that hiring managers have some type of affinity for. Leaning toward preconceived notions of what the ideal recruit should be spells trouble.

Bad hiring decisions also cost money, not to mention the adverse effect those choices have on workplace chemistry and efficiency.

With all this in mind, recognizing specific biases in recruitment (aka, unconscious biases) and seeking to remedy them helps promote sound hiring practices and avoids undesirable circumstances.

**1 – Effective Heuristic (aka, don’t judge a book by its cover)**

While it may be a mouthful, Effective Heuristic its underlying meaning is quite simple and maybe reflects the most obvious bias.

It can be summarized quite succinctly: Don’t judge a book by its cover.

It’s 2018, and people express themselves in many ways. Interviewees with pink hair or body piercings might not represent the majority of folks who walk through the door but it doesn’t mean they can’t do the job. Dismissing a candidate based on a personal sense of style, albeit quirky, is the wrong move.

Solution? Keep the interview the same for everyone. Develop standard questions for each candidate and don’t stray from the formula. Make judgments based on the quality of the answers. Implement an objective grading system in which each answer is assigned a value and total those values.

Objective measures cast off any bias fostered by the sullied “first impression” slant.

2 – The Overconfidence Effect

Most hiring managers are good at what they do. They must be. No one typically gets to decide who stays and who goes without having a solid skill set themselves.

Unfortunately, no recruiter makes the right hire every time — even though they think they might.

The overconfidence effect assumes that even people who believe they’ve made the right choice 80 percent of the time never achieve 80 percent accuracy in their decision-making. Subjectivity clouds their judgment and chips away at certainty, whether the interviewer realizes it or not.

The solution? Maintain objectivity. See how well a recruit performs a job-related task before the interview and use those results to determine who moves on to the next round.

Many high-volume, high-turnover companies use brief, online psychometric tests to screen out a certain percentage of applicants. These challenges uncover a candidate’s personality traits and cognitive skills that predict the likelihood of success in a given position.

3 – The “Similar to Me” Bias

“I like this person. We went to the same school and we both despise the New England Patriots.” For many hiring managers, that’s all they need to know.

The “similar to me bias” breaks down some walls but doesn’t necessarily result in the selection of a qualified candidate. However, interviewers exhibiting this bias favor recruits who share the same gender, casual interests, or socioeconomic status.

And the phenomenon doesn’t just extend to the old boy network (example: women’s organizations that favor women, etc.). It’s the path of least resistance and won’t lead to the optimal hire most of the time, but it feels right and requires a lot less introspection.

The solution? Blind auditions. Software solutions have been developed to eliminate the chance that race, age, gender or education factor heavily into the hiring decision. These applications don’t supplant the actual interview, but rather focus on skills needed to do the job.

Companies would be wise to pay heed, especially when it comes to gender bias. A Gallup study involving U.S. retail and hospitality businesses revealed healthier bottom lines in organizations with equal proportions of males and females.

4 – System Justification Theory

It’s trite but true. Some recruiters think the process works fine because “this is the way we do things around here.”

Getting sucked into a programmed school of thought risks subscribing to organizational biases that could disregard many qualified candidates. Bucking the system and touting the need for change does not often sit well with hiring managers who feel securely nestled in the status quo.

The solution? Promote diversity. When companies set expectations for diversity in the workplace, the economic benefits abound, as do employee engagement and satisfaction.

Businesses that set diversity goals send a positive message to prospective and existing employees. It shows a commitment to a fair and just work environment in which any skillful, dedicated worker has a chance to flourish and advance.

5 – Intuition as a hiring technique

Interviewers trust their instincts, aka, their intuition. That’s fine when it comes to booking the right room for the interview, but intuition doesn’t work so well when recruiters “feel” they’ve chosen the ideal hire.

Intuition is rife with partiality and irrationality — emotions which don’t belong in an unbiased selection process. But separating the person from the personal proves to be a daunting task.

The solution? Education cures a lot of ills.

Conquering the unknown begins by confronting it. All human beings, by their very nature, allow their humanity to interfere with their reasonability. One method of overcoming inclinations involves training HR personnel in recognizing and mitigating the problem.

Harvard University’s implicit association tests are used by companies such as Google to raise employee self-awareness and manage unconscious bias.

Big Data to the rescue?

Data-driven hiring approaches fill in the spaces that biases create. Without measurable information, recruiters are left to make decisions based on emotion. Outcomes diluted by even a speck of partiality can have disastrous results, both tangible and intangible.

Companies can face costly, protracted legal battles and brand can be tarnished inside and outside the organization. This is where logic comes to the rescue. Technology puts all the players on a level playing field, minimizing risk (and unconscious bias) for the company as a whole.

As sample sizes grow and algorithms adapt, data analytics pokes rays of light through the clouds of human error.

3 Interview Questions Guaranteed to Land You the Best Hires

In the early days, I definitely made my share of bad hires: The employee who stole equipment. The salesperson who never made a sale. The woman who continually fell asleep at her desk and did her personal errands including her daughter’s wedding planning while out of the office on company business.

In the beginning, I hired based on likeability, “experience,” and references. Later I discovered that very competent people often fail due to core character issues. And while a values match is critical, toxic personalities can poison your entire culture.

So, I’ve learned to look for both character AND emotional intelligence to make the best hires.

Your success making the best hires often depends on the emotional intelligence of people you hire in strategic positions. That means you need to make hiring decisions based on solid information — and not just from gut instinct and first impressions gained during an interview.

Those interviews require well-planned questions that solicit genuine answers which surface real opinions, character traits, and values, as well as critical skills. Consider the following questions to produce meaningful information about your potential job candidates so you will end up with the best hires:

Make these 3 interview questions help land the best hires

1. Who are 3-5 people in the public arena or your personal or social life whom you admire and why?

Responses here will reveal several things:

How informed are they on local happenings, current affairs, politics, or pop culture?
Does their response suggest they can’t think of anyone, or simply that they can’t narrow their choices?
Are all choices from public life rather than personal or social circles?

That may suggest few mentors or role models in their life. Why? If all choices are personal acquaintances, that may suggest non-involvement in the community or activities outside the home. Why?

At least, their answers will reveal their values and their network — or lack thereof.

2. Tell me about a particularly bad day you’ve had this past year or two — a day when nothing was routine and almost everything went wrong. How did you deal with all the stress and calamity?

Their response gives you some perspective on what happenings they consider “routine” versus “calamity” and “particularly bad.” But what you’re really looking for is their coping mechanisms—both emotional stability and resourcefulness.

Listen carefully to the retelling for words and phrases like “so upset,” “so angry,” “had a major meltdown,” “went ballistic,” “frantic,” “just beside myself with worry.” Did they personally solve the problems or did someone else have to take charge? How much and for how long did this problem or these problems affect their work and life? How does their idea of “serious” compare with yours? Does their reaction seem appropriate or extreme? How did their judgment and solution compare to how you would have handled the situation?

How does their idea of stress compare with what happens every day at your workplace — and would their level of competence in coping be sufficient for your organization?

Failure can be a critical learning experience

3. Tell me about a time that you failed — either at work, or in your personal life. What did you learn from that experience?

If they have never failed, either they are lying or they are extremely risk-averse. Do they blame others or accept responsibility for the failure? Do they seem teachable? What does their attitude say about humility or arrogance?

Certainly, your interview questions have to meet the job criteria. Of course, these questions assume the job candidate must interact with people and use sound judgment.

Given that’s a valid assumption, these questions, among others, can mean the difference between a great hire and a bad hire or a costly termination.

Start Your Own Job Board and Earn Revenue from Your Website

In today’s competitive online space, it’s challenging to leverage audience traffic into significant revenue. Traditional online advertising methods, like banner ads and brand sponsorships, are not as popular or lucrative as they once were. Many website owners have started creating their own job boards, hosted on their site, to earn more revenue—and now, you can too.

JobBoard.io is the easiest and fastest way to start your online job board. It’s a white-label software that lets anyone launch a custom job board in just 30 seconds. Your job board can be both lucrative for you and valuable to your audience. Employers pay you to post their open positions, and anyone can use the job board to find their next great opportunity. Once you get set up, you can sell job postings directly to the employers who visit your site and start earning revenue right away.

JobBoard.io was recently acquired by the job board ZipRecruiter, which is good news for you! Now, you can now display over 10M jobs from the ZipRecruiter database directly on your job board, to bring even more valuable content to your audience. You can also opt to have jobs from your board appear on ZipRecruiter.com to get more applicants for your customers. ZipRecruiter also makes it easy to earn even more revenue from your job board. In addition to direct job post sales, you can earn revenue every time someone clicks on a ZipRecruiter job post displayed on your job board.

Here are a few more benefits of JobBoard.io:

Custom Job Posting Products
You have the ability to customize the products you sell—choose from single job posts, multiple job postings, profile database access, and more.

Brand Control
You can gain valuable insight into your audience by retaining control of your customer data, revenue, traffic, and brand experience at every touchpoint.

Admin Dashboard
You can see real-time revenue, sales, and applicant information in one place. You can post jobs, update listings, customize your boards, and set up job backfill.

Blog Tools
Built-in blog functionality allows you to attract, grow, and maintain your audience through content marketing.

Organic Traffic to Your Jobs
Automatically post jobs from your job board to ZipRecruiter and receive an organic feed of applicants to your listings.

ZipSearch and ZipAlerts
Easily opt into programs specifically designed to deliver relevant ZipRecruiter jobs to your audience, and earn more revenue.

Google Jobs Integration
Jobs posted on JobBoard.io are automatically indexed into Google’s new job search feature.

Mobile Responsiveness
The JobBoard.io product responds to all screen sizes for a seamless experience across all devices.

Sponsored by the good folks at ZipRecruiter.

The Critical First 100 Days of an Employment Branding Program

I began my career in Employment Branding in way back 2002.

Since then, a great many people have asked me about the early steps you need to take (in the first couple of months) in building a robust and cost effective Employment Branding Program from the ground up for a company that previously had no such program.

An early decision you will need to make is a budgetary one.

In other words, do you have the complete resources and budgets to partner and engage one of the big named/well known advertising firms to build your Employment Branding Program, or can you, by using in-house resources, other departments and fellow colleagues, attempt this effort yourself?

After joining the firm (or moving into the role of Employment Branding Manager/Director) your first steps should be organized around ascertaining how your organization’s employment brand is perceived by key constituents both inside AND outside your company.

4 things to help get a fix on your employment branding

Inside your company you can:

Conduct focus groups with employees to identify the state of your company’s internal brand and purpose (i.e., employee affinity groups);
Conduct a Q&A with new hires during onboarding (at new employee orientations) about your “firm’s reputation and image;”
Review the internal organizational surveys your company conducts. This effort calls for building a partnership with your Organizational Development folks);
Lastly, you should re-review exit interview results, and possibly conduct a new survey of former employees about their views on the company and their reasons for leaving.

This is a critical and necessary step, as the information you gather from all of these sources and groups will be used in developing and testing your company’s employee value proposition (EVP). Remember, your EVP will be used in:

Offer letters;
New hire onboarding and welcome emails;
Radio commercials;
Video commercials;
Marketing materials (U.S. and global);
Toolboxes;
External/internal career websites;
University campus flyers;
Table tents and trade booth displays;
Etc.

Your key steps during the first 100 days

Also, let me not forget to mention the very important role that Recruitment Marketing can play in developing and burnishing your local, regional, global and “target segmented” Employer Brand.

At the beginning of these first 100 days, you will need to review all of your Recruitment Marketing materials, websites, trade show exhibits, giveaways, trinkets, videos, commercials, slogans, and social media pages and sites. You will also need to make sure that your marketing materials are infused with diversity and lots of diversity images. In some cases, much like with your Employment Brand, I recommend that you consider and develop specific marketing materials and sites for specific talent pools, populations and channels you want to impact and nourish.

Your next steps should be establishing and building partnerships with key colleagues and internal departments which can help you implement, disseminate and communicate the future of your Employment Brand. Some of these key departments are: Organizational Development (previously mentioned), Corporate Communications, and Public Affairs (this area was particularly helpful to me at Monsanto in a variety of ways in building an Employment Brand).

Corporate Communication can help employees communicate the Brand Message, Brand Promise and Brand Mantra. And by the way, you should use the Corporate Communications staff for help with your Best Place to Work awards application effort, as I did. Some others to work with are the webmaster for your company’s overall website (and the career website), the graphics department, Human Resources, and Corporate Marketing.

Let me also point out how critical developing a partnership with Corporate Marketing must be because of the necessary alignment required for the Employment Brand with the Corporate Brand.

In my career, I was extremely fortunate that I joined Monsanto at a time when the overall Corporate Brand was being changed. I served (along with my manager) on the Marketing Department’s Corporate Brand Positioning team tasked with selecting a new Corporate Brand image and tagline for the biotech Ag Giant. Our Employment Brand program benefitted from that work.

One more thing: Measure the effectiveness of your efforts

Lastly, you need the buy in and help of HR leadership, the Human Resources generalists and line managers in implementing, executing and delivering the Employment Brand.

Another stage in this effort is to periodically measure the effectiveness of the program for possible tweaks. For example:

Consult with your Talent Acquisition department to determine if your organization is attracting (and retaining) the right candidates.
Consult with your HR groups to understand how employees are viewing the company.
Personally talk to employees about their views of the organization and attend the various Town Hall meetings throughout the organization.
Ask if your company’s turnover is decreasing.
Find out if your firm is winning (or losing) any Best Place to Work awards.
Meet with your Organizational Development people on employee survey results.
Talk to college students and campus and faculty personnel about your firm’s employment image at key colleges and universities.
Monitor social media to see what is being said about your firm’s reputation.

How to measure Employment Branding ROI

You obviously want to measure and report the results. In my Employment Branding Program, I had the following metrics for the ROI on the Employment Branding Program:

56 percent and 54 percent increases in total completed applications via the career website over a two-year period;
Increased positive media coverage – in Ag industry publications, in St. Louis and Midwest publications, in national news outlets, and, in University and Ag related organizational publications;
Greater employee engagement as measured by internal survey, and more HR prestige;
Increased diversity in the number of applicants; and,
Single digit employee turnover.

Needless to say, your firm’s Employment Brand should be synched up and consistently promoted and optimized through all of your Social Media outlets and channels. Some other things to consider would be to view (and adapt) your Employment Brand vis-a-vis specific talent pools you are targeting; your Diversity Employment Brand; and your University Relations’ Employment Brand, etc.

Top talent seeks out the top companies

Your first 100 days in developing and executing an Employment Branding Program from scratch will be exciting and rewarding. The benefits of the program are critical.

This bears repeating: Top talent wants to work at top firms. So, a world class Employment Branding Program will not only benefit your Talent Acquisition strategy, but also the company’s overall financial value to its shareholders.

In your next 100 days, you can focus on creating a Brand Ambassador Program composed of your top performing employees who best represent your Employment Brand and its message. You could also meet with senior HR Leaders and get approval for incorporating (enterprise wide) some elements of the Employment Brand messaging, as it relates to employee behavior, into the performance appraisal process.

The larger goal is simple: To reinforce the company’s expectations around the desired brand image it wants its employees to project to customers. If you can do that, you’ll have no problem landing the top talent you seek.

If You Want to Hire Rockstars, Look to Interviews to Predict Success

When it comes to interviews, remember two key things:

A résumé is nothing more than a sales brochure. Use it to decide who you might want to interview — after that, its value is minimal.
Executed poorly, interviews are a lousy tool for predicting who will succeed at your company.

A client of mine, the CEO of a professional services company, was struggling to hire talented people. Like most executives, her success rate was about 50/50. It seemed like a weekly task of firing the mis-hires, which was not only a disruption to business but also emotionally exhausting.

I asked her if I could sit in on a few of her interviews. She hesitated, insistent that she had interviewed countless candidates over the years. I promised not to say a word, just to observe.

She obliged. I sat in on a handful of her interviews, only to discover that her interviews were unstructured, almost haphazard. She was ill-prepared, random in her approach, talking far too much, making up questions on the fly.

She was making almost every interviewing mistake in the book.

Interviews must be structured and consistent from one candidate to another. Together, we created a clear sequence of standardized predictive questions, and a year later, 75 percent of her hires are keepers.

In other words, she improved her success rate by 50 percent.

Interviewing is where recruiting falls apart for most people. Too many hiring managers rely only on interviews and, frankly, those interviews stink.

Don’t believe me? You’ve been a candidate during your career — on the other side of the table. How many times can you remember being impressed by the discipline and forethought of the interviewer grilling you? Not often, I’ll bet.

Non-predictive traits

Years ago, recruiting and interviewing were black magic. The science just didn’t exist. But fast-forward to today; there are countless studies that have correlated hiring factors to candidate success. We can actually look at what is predictive and what’s not.

So, why would we possibly use the latter? Simple. You’ve been too busy to find out. I’ve dug up and examined every study that’s been done.

Turns out, executives tend to focus on many characteristics that have little to no ability to forecast the success of a candidate. So, what are those traits? Some will surprise you.

Industry experience

Experience within an industry is, of course, nice to have but isn’t sufficient by itself to predict a candidate’s success. I’ll take the right DNA any day of the week and teach the new hire my industry.

It also turns out that candidates from the industry — even from a direct competitor — often bring bad habits with them, and poor assumptions about the industry. They just have a different world view.

The fresh perspective of an outsider — of course, with the right competencies and DNA — is a better bet in almost every case. Not to mention, there are no hassles with non-compete agreements. Don’t make the mistake of assuming that because a candidate worked in your industry that they will succeed at your company.

Education

Nor does it matter where someone went to school or what their GPA was. Just because someone was a good test-taker doesn’t mean they’re going to be a Rockstar.

Intelligence and book smarts are useful, but cognitive ability — the ability to learn, make decisions, and adjust one’s approach based on new information — is far more valuable. After going back to study the correlation, even Google no longer sets a minimum GPA for all employees, a practice it once swore by.

Brainteasers

If you’re still asking brainteaser questions, stop. Things like, “Why is a manhole cover round?” or “How many birdcages are there in New York City?” will not help you figure out who to hire.

Google was famous for these questions early on; they’ve banned them, too.

Gut feelings

Meeting a candidate for lunch and asking, “So tell me about yourself,” will not reveal whether they are a Rockstar.

You may leave the interview with a comforting gut feel, but the gut misleads.

Predictors of success

Now you know some of the traits that are not predictive of success. So, let’s look at those that are.

Test drive

According to a 1998 study by Schmidt and Hunter, the single best predictor of success is the Test Drive. It needs to be a mandatory part of your hiring process.

We’ll delve into the Test Drive later, but, in the meantime, think of it as a dry run with the candidate to see how they perform in the real world. They take a bit of time, so you won’t be able to put all candidates through one. So, I use the interview process to determine whom I’d like to invest that time with.

Structured interviews

If you ask the same questions in the same order to each candidate, you’ll be able do two things:

Follow the trend line of a candidate in his or her career; and,
Assess the candidates against each other.

The key is to be methodical and consistent. This can be boring and monotonous for the interviewer, but it’s not about keeping yourself entertained; it’s about hiring the best person. When I observed my client’s questions with candidates, they were random. She hopped around from job to job; there was no structure.

This made it impossible to tell if the candidate’s growth and track record was accelerating, decelerating, or stuck. In addition, she couldn’t compare and contrast across candidates because she asked different questions of each one.

I confess. I sometimes bore myself to tears during interviews, asking the same carefully worded questions over and over and over. But by doing so, I can assess a candidate’s trendline (I think of it as analogous to a stock chart). I can compare him to other candidates. And over time, I develop a better base of interviewing knowledge because I’m asking the same questions of everyone.

Cognitive ability

This is so much more valuable than raw intellect or IQ.

Can the candidate ask questions, consume information, and adjust their approach accordingly?
Are they open-minded enough to take information that conflicts with their pre-existing mindset?
Can they separate the signal from the noise?

These characteristics aren’t easy to assess, but they’re vital in today’s ever-changing business environment.

A head of marketing, for example, can’t know every single thing about every single marketing tactic. But if she has a high cognitive ability, she will know what questions to ask, where to get the answers, how to understand the data, and adapt her approach.

DNA

We devoted an entire chapter to DNA earlier because without a DNA match, the individual will be unable to succeed within your enterprise.

Are the candidate’s ingrained characteristics a fit with the culture, the manager, and the team? No matter how good the candidate is, if they don’t work well with the hiring manager, the body’s going to reject the organ. Some studies reveal that this accounts for nearly half of a candidate’s success in the organization.

Competencies

Of course, the interview will separate candidates who possess the essential characteristics needed for success in the role from those who don’t.

Strong backdoor references

These are references that I’ve found on my own, rather than people the candidate provided as references. We’ll discuss reference checking later on.

How Candidates REALLY Feel About the Job Search

I don’t think any of us would be surprised how much the average person hates looking for a job.

A recent survey by Hired found 83 percent of people get stressed by the job search, compared to 73 percent who consider getting a root canal, and 69 percent who believe getting trapped in an elevator is stressful.

With today’s lower unemployment rates, organizations are finally starting to invest in candidate experience as a competitive differentiator to attract talent. But what do candidates really want? And what can recruiting teams do to make a tangible difference for the job search?

Candidates talk about the job search, chatbots, and more

Recently, I took to the streets to ask people about their experiences with looking for a job. I asked what their biggest job search pet peeve was, what recruiters could do to improve the job applications, how they feel about chatbots, and more.

See what they told me in the video below:

Takeaway No. 1: Reply to every candidate

Even though candidates still prefer a human touch first and foremost, receiving acknowledgement of their application in the first place is the lowest hanging fruit for improving candidate experience. In fact, CareerBuilder found 33 percent of job seekers want to receive an automated email after they apply which outlines what the next steps in the process are.

With the plethora of recruiting software and tools available these days, not replying back to candidates within a reasonable time frame is no longer excusable, especially as text messaging and chatbots become increasingly common within the recruiting context.

Takeaway No. 2: Speed up your process

Indeed asked candidates, “Once you’ve applied to a job at a company, which of the following actions builds trust?” The top reply was, “The company views your application promptly and reaches out” with 53 percent of candidates picking this option.

A SHRM survey of talent acquisition professionals found it took on average 9 days from posting a job to start screening candidates. In a candidate-driven market, taking this long to get back to candidates is just not going to cut it anymore.

With the recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) for sourcing and screening, technology can easily be leveraged to automate administrative tasks to speed up your hiring process.

Dan Shapero, LinkedIn’s VP of Talent Solutions, Careers, & Learning believes mass adoption of AI is the future of recruiting.

As he states, “The last 10 years have been all about passive talent recruiting.The next 10 years will be about intelligent recruiting.” Let this intelligence work for you by automating the administrative parts of sourcing and screening candidates to speed up your hiring.

Takeaway No. 3: Embrace new tools like chatbots

As chatbots and virtual personal assistants like Siri and Alexa become more common in our personal lives, their adoption in recruiting is only inevitable.

Candidates are clearly open to new communication tools like chatbots. Allegis found 66 percent of candidates are comfortable interacting with a chatbot. As stated in the video said, as long as the chatbot is able to provide more information about the job search, they’d welcome interacting with one with open arms.

Another interesting point raised in the video is that some candidates may feel more comfortable with a chatbot compared to a human recruiter because they feel the interaction will be more objective.

One final thought: While job searching will never be a popular pastime, recent innovations in screening and communication tools means that organizations can take some concrete measures towards making the job search a less hated and stressful activity.

Technology is Great, But Recruitment Still Needs the Human Touch

Imagine you were looking to buy a house in a specific neighborhood. The problem, however, is that you have no idea how many houses are in the neighborhood, how many are for sale, the going prices and the demand for these houses.

You could post an ad online and ask people to call you. But this strategy is unlikely to generate the response you are looking for.

You could retain a realtor, but realtors have no information on which people are considering listing their house.

I am giving you this analogy because the challenges in recruitment are not very different. Here’s an example: A whopping 95 percent of the people that companies look to hire for critical jobs are not looking for a job.

Traditional recruitment? It’s like knocking on doors

Traditional recruitment doesn’t work because it’s like roaming the neighborhood knocking on doors and seeing if the owners are interested in selling.

Recruiters typically search for talent on LinkedIn and contact people that seem like a good fit. They contact them one-by-one, hoping one of them will be interested in their offer.

It is sad to acknowledge that after almost 60 years of traditional recruiting (since employers started to pay placement fees) and more than 15 years since LinkedIn was founded, nothing dramatically has changed in the traditional recruitment industry.

Yes, recruiters — both internal and external — are still roaming the neighborhood, knocking on doors.

I believe that change is around the corner. New technologies based on AI and machine learning are changing the recruitment landscape.

With all the information available online, especially on social networks, technology can provide a picture of the talent marketplace for jobs, particularly hard-to-fill jobs. Additionally, algorithms that match candidates and predict the likelihood that someone would change jobs are changing the hiring market, eliminating manual processes.

You won’t strike recruiting gold with a blind search

To start a search, a company should know the available talent pool for its jobs. It should be able to tell how that talent pool is likely to grow or shrink if some of the requirements for the job were to change.

For example, how many more candidates would be added to the potential pool if years of experience were reduced from 7 to 5? What would happen if they accepted a candidate lacking one skill that could be learned on the job?

In my company, we often turn down recruitment projects because the data shows there are not enough candidates in the market for a particular job. The unfortunate thing is sometimes companies are unwilling to compromise on their requirements, leaving the job vacant for months, sometimes years.

For example, one company insisted that we look for a machine learning engineer with a Ph.D. What we found was that 80 percent of these candidates get scooped up by Google and Facebook. If the company had changed their requirement to a candidate with a master’s degree, there would be a larger talent pool to pick from, and we would have found them a great candidate.

What does this mean?

Companies should not start a blind search with the hope of striking gold. With a 4.1 percent unemployment rate (as of December 2017), there are not enough candidates to fill critical jobs, especially in the technology sector. Still, many companies have not developed recruitment strategies and processes necessary in to cope with this reality. Many of them behave as if we are still in 2010, when talent was abundant.

Unfortunately, it is not. The war for talent is over and the talent has won. They dictate the terms of engagement and expect to be treated like celebrities.

Do you have a recruiting process that frustrates everyone?

I have found that many recruitment processes are flawed, starting with the way companies qualify talent. Often, companies bring candidates in for an interview to form an opinion on what kind of candidate they want to hire.

There may be several opinions in the organization. HR may have one opinion, and the hiring manager another. Rather than developing a dialogue between HR and hiring managers, many companies write job descriptions that are often not in alignment with the current talent pool.

For example, one of our clients disqualified a candidate that we submitted just because they were missing one out the 10 skills that the company required. We found this candidate another job in a week and the client had no choice but to let the job go unfilled for another six months.

This is a strategy that is likely to lengthen the process and frustrate all stakeholders, including hiring managers, candidates and recruiters who work hard to find candidates and bring them to an interview.

I believe the recruitment market is ripe for disruption. With AI and machine learning, internal recruiters and hiring managers no longer need to be experts in search. Technology tools can be deployed to crawl the web to find the best candidates for the job and predict their likelihood of moving. These new technologies save time, money, and streamline operations, allowing hiring managers to focus on other mission-critical tasks.

But technology can’t do it alone.

Technology is great, but we still need human recruiters

Recruitment still needs the human touch. After all, we are dealing with people. We still need human expertise with the human touch to pre-qualify candidates or even help them put their best foot forward by refining resumes, salary negotiation or interview techniques.

In a market with a serious talent scarcity like we have today, we need to start thinking about how to re-invent recruitment by combining big data tools with human expertise. The time is now to win the war for talent so companies can grow, compete, and be successful.

Want to Collaborate With Your Recruiting Peers? Then #HRTX DC Is For You

Let’s start with a confession: I’m not actually a recruiter.

You may gasp (GASP!) at this, because if you’ve seen my byline at all — here or elsewhere — I write about recruiting topics a lot. But aside from helping my friends hire for a charter school once a few years back, I’ve never actually been a recruiter.

Here’s what I do have, though:

A Masters degree in Organizational Development (OD);
A lot of research and interviews with recruiters and recruiting leads under my belt: and,
A true belief/passion that what you (recruiters) do is incredibly important work on both sides. You make companies better when it’s done right, and you make candidates more viable in their career arc and ability to live the life they want.

It’s everything.

Sometimes, things get overwhelming

But it also moves really fast. Technology is playing chess to our checkers in some respects, and new suites and ideas are coming out every day. So, you need to stay on top of that.

Plus:

There’s also new research.
There’s also new “best practices,” which can be tweaked and applied to what you do and what niche you recruit in.
Then there’s the fire drills that happen at every job.
You still need to manage relationships with hiring managers — and with your bosses.
There are quotas.
There’s also training and professional development.
And, most of you have families and other commitments.

In short, it gets overwhelming.

I know and I understand. My own life gets overwhelming and what I do — predominantly writing about what you do — isn’t even as challenging as what you do. But in dozens of interviews, I know that the recruiting function is pulled towards more more more (do that) while there’s still concerns about what what what (is going to happen as tech continues its ascent).

I have a small solution for you

I started doing some work with RecruitingDaily over the summer. In November, I had the chance to attend one of their #HRTX events in Chicago. It was only the third time I’d ever been to Chicago, and for some reason, one of the other times was in January, so it was nice right on face.

The event was hosted at Yello and I got to meet a few execs and employees there and talk to them about their client base, their business model, how they see the industry, and all of that. It was very informative, but off the record in parts. They also had wine and Pop-A-Shot, so that’s all good too.

The format of #HRTX is going to change a little bit in 2018, but it’s still rooted in opportunities for a great discussion about various aspects of sourcing and recruiting, such as:

Diversity
College
Referrals
Candidate experience
Tech/tools/platforms
Case studies
Best practices

It’s incredibly interesting to attend #HRTX, and there are typically 8-10 vendors there as well. You don’t have to meet with everyone, but you CAN find different snippets of the solutions they offer and see what your decision-makers think.

In a way, it’s like one-stop shopping for both physical resources and new ideas and approaches. And you get slightly-more-than-half-day out of the office (these events usually start at 8-9 am and run until 1-2 pm), and you chop it all up among people facing the same stresses and challenges who are looking for the same wins as you are.

Now again, I’m not a recruiter, but in Chicago I talked to probably 12-15 recruiters throughout the day — and all of them called it a worthwhile event for these reasons:

You get lots of practical advice.
You see what vendors are out there, and some of them are ones that people may not have heard of.
There’s a lot of mingling with like-minded folks facing the same challenges.
It’s a little time to step away from the standard rat race for a few hours.
And most importantly, you get insights that help you to stretch and grow as a recruiter.

Oh, you’re a vendor and reading this?

Well, you probably know what “shelfware” is, right? It’s when someone buys your software product — so cool, you just made some money — but they don’t use it at all because they can’t adopt it properly, so you probably just lost a renewal. “Shelfware” annual recurring revenue, and your bosses quite likely care deeply about annual renewing revenue.

Now, what’s the biggest reason “software” turns to “shelfware?” It’s right above: adoption problems.

This is where #HRTX events help vendors.

You see, in a standard selling model you go right to the decision-maker. That makes sense in terms of a shorter sales cycle, and you want to talk to the person who can write the check. We all have been there.

But oftentimes the decision-maker won’t be using the product or suite day in and day out.

So another selling model is to start with those who will be using it, i.e. the recruiters, and convince them of the value and functionalities it has.

When they present it up through their management hierarchy, adoption is more logical post-purchase. The recruiters know their existing systems and know what will fit into those.

And here’s the big kicker: #HRTX events have both decision-makers/check-writers, AND day-to-day sourcers and recruiters in attendance.

So, you get both audiences. Pretty nice, right?

Here’s why we evolved #HRTX

If we want to be serious about a place recruiters need to be coming for must-have news, tips, ideas, ways to approach problems, case studies, etc., we need to make sure we had a strong “IRL” (in real life) component in different cities.

We love sharing content on channels and platforms, but we also know — see above — that days are short, you’re busy, there’s real work to be done, and your attention span is limited. You might miss some of our best stuff. That’s not your fault.

But IRL interactions allow you to learn and grow from other people just like you. We thought that was a powerful space for us to do more with.

So, come on out and see the value. We’ll have probably 8-12 of these #HRTX events them this year. The first is in Washington, D.C. (well, Arlington, VA. but right across the river) on February 8. Here’s how to sign up, and we hope to see you in Washington or in one of the other cities we’ll be at this year.

RecruitingDaily presents: #HRTX Washington, DC 2018

Thursday, February 8, 2018 (9 AM – 2 PM EST)

LOCATION: Brazen Technologies, Inc, 2107 Wilson Blvd #500, Arlington, VA 22201

Click here for more information and to sign up.