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Hiring Veterans? Here’s How to Compete for the Best Military Talent

If there is one thing we can be sure of it’s this: Combine a persistent shortage of skilled talent, a 2.7 percent Veteran unemployment rate, and a surge of organized efforts to prioritize hiring Veterans, and you have the perfect ingredients for a hyper-competitive military hiring space.

What a dynamic backdrop for the semi-annual meeting of the Veteran Jobs Mission (VJM) coalition, held in Chicago in late October. Led by JPMorgan Chase, the VJM is the leading private-sector coalition addressing U.S. military Veteran unemployment and is now 240 members strong.

As a panelist at this year’s event, it was inspiring to see how many of the largest companies in the U.S. are rallying together to bring Veteran unemployment to a 17-year low and secure some of the best talent in the world.

Why hiring Veterans is so important

The current hiring environment for hiring Veterans has never been stronger. However, it wasn’t that long ago that Veteran unemployment was a hot topic because the jobless rate among recently separated Veterans was significantly higher than the general population.

By 2011, the unemployment rate for post 9-11 Veterans was 12.1 percent, compared to an overall unemployment rate of 9.1 percent. However, the unemployment rate for young male Veterans was as high as 29.1 percent.

Then things began to change.

A host of helpful new initiatives began to take shape beginning with the formation of Joining Forces in 2011, led by then First Lady Michelle Obama. Private sector coalitions such as JPMorgan’s 100,000 Jobs Mission formed. Both non-profit organizations and traditional job boards started to expand their offerings to specifically target Veterans.

In March 2014, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) passed new regulations for the Vietnam Era Veteran’s Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA), strengthening requirements for affirmative action and requiring all companies with at least $100,000 in federal contracts adopt an annual benchmark (currently 6.7 percent) for Protected Veteran Status hiring. Plus, federal contractors now have to adhere to a list of requirements for attracting and hiring Veterans, including outreach, job listings distribution, applicant tracking, requests for self-identification, and reporting.

The result? Even greater focus on, and demand for, hiring Veterans.

What does this mean to you, the hardworking recruiter? Go ahead and search online for “Veteran jobs” and you get around 89 million hits for job openings and resources, far more than you would have gotten just five years ago.

Today’s Veteran or transitioning military service member looking for employment has a bewildering number of options to choose from. This makes it much harder for you to distinguish your brand, and, it makes it tougher for Veterans to make their own best choices.

How to compete for the best military talent

There is no denying that building an effective military talent program has its challenges, yet more and more companies are doing it successfully.

While you can apply a general template to shape your program, every company’s situation is fairly unique. Engage those with experience to help avoid the pitfalls and friction points. At the very least, follow these basic best practices:

  • Get the buy-in you need. Align key personnel (decision makers, talent acquisition professionals, human resources and operations managers) to support your goals in military hiring.
  • Set measurable goals and objectives. It is always critical to be able to track and measure results including metrics on hiring, performance data and retention rates.
  • Do your homework before determining your hiring model. Should you “in-source” or “out-source” your military hiring program? Consider using firms that regularly work with military Veterans so your team can spend time only on the candidates that are the best matches for your industry and positions. Whatever model you opt for, build a hiring process that supports a positive candidate experience. If you don’t, the negative word will spread about your company.
  • Determine the right positions to target for military hires. Are you clear on the “business case” for hiring Veterans? Or, are you just trying to hit an OFCCP benchmark number? Determine what positions are best for separating military or former military with some industry experience. Not all military candidates will be a fit for your company and that’s OK. It’s far more important to do your homework and get the right candidate for the job.
  • Build a strong referral network. With all of the noise these days around Veteran hiring, we still see compelling data that shows military-experienced candidates are leaning more on referrals or past experience to determine how to approach their job search.
  • Make onboarding a priority. Create networking opportunities, mentorship programs and pay special attention to benefits that will appeal to Veterans in order to assist them in continuing their transition in the civilian world.
  • Work with Student Veterans of America (SVA) There are 100,000 Veterans graduating with degrees each year, the vast majority of those being 4-year degrees heavily oriented towards business, STEM and health care. Figure out a way to use the SVA within your own college hiring programs, as larger schools will have an SVA chapter.

A final word of advice for recruiters

Far too many Veterans walk away from their new company within the first 12 months on the job. So, if you are truly serious about doing this right, make sure you fit Veterans into roles where their skills and preferences are closely aligned.

And lastly, be willing to take the risk to get a Veteran in the position where he or she has the opportunity to truly flourish — and grow. 

We Get No Respect: Why Sourcing Is the Rodney Dangerfield of the TA World

I’m going to say something that might get me into trouble later on. It’s something that many other fellow sourcing professionals have probably felt for a long time.

It’s this: A sourcing role is tougher than a recruiting role.

Sourcers can sometimes get overlooked completely. They handle all the grunt work of sourcing, and sometimes, get no credit from the leadership team at all.

As a Sourcer myself, I have always felt that my role was more of a challenge than being a full-cycle recruiter. Don’t get me wrong; the recruiter’s job is very important, but the ultimate challenge in recruiting is actually finding the applicants. That takes the most time and energy.

Separating sourcing from recruiting

Finding, screening, pre-qualifying applicants is the real grunt work of recruiting. It’s something that gets overlooked and undervalued. I’ve fortunate to be in both a Sourcer and Recruiter role. My passion is in sourcing. It’s the the hunt – ultimate challenge. It’s something that doesn’t even feel like work to me.

Fortunately, I’ve been in different sourcing models during my career. I know what works and what doesn’t work in order to be a good Sourcer. Creating a functioning recruiter vs. sourcing model really is important for your success as a sourcer.

Here’s the basic recruitment model:

  • The recruiter handle most of the relationship with the hiring manager. They handle the second phone screens, interview feedback, salary negotiations, offer letters, and onboarding. They do not handle much of the actual sourcing parts of recruiting. They may do a general search but the deep dive is meant for the sourcer.
  • The sourcers role is to seek out passive talent. They are invited to the initial intake meeting with the hiring manager. But, after that point the recruiter continues on working directly with the hiring manager.
  • The main goal of a sourcer is to hunt down the best possible talent based on the skill sets. After, the sourcer does a quick pre-phone screen and after that point they submit them to the direct recruiter.

However, there are problems with this model:

The biggest issue with this model is it’s a “reactive” approach to sourcing. The recruiters react to new position and ultimately the sourcers have to react to whenever the recruiter decides to include them in the process. If the recruiter is not good at communicating with the sourcer, this will cause a lot of issues later on.

This strategy basically creates an artificial hierarchy.

It creates the feelings of superiority by the recruiter because they get to dictate the flow of roles, how they’re prioritized, and how support is divided up. Without a clearly defined structure things can turn bad. Ultimately, this creates a bad experience for the candidates and for the sourcer.

Fixing the broken model

In order to fix the broken model I’ve included different scenarios and how to work through them:

  • Becoming the Guinea Pig — Are you the first sourcer on the team? This can be a good or bad scenario. Right away, you need to sit down with your manager and strategize a successful relationship with the recruiters. I’ve personally succeeded and failed at being the only sourcing resource for a team of recruiters. Remember, the sourcer really needs to set the course right off the bat.
  • Handling the Non Communicator —  Say you’re working with a recruiter who won’t loop you into the process. If you’re not getting good communication throughout, this will make you fail as a sourcer. You need to continuously remind the recruiter of certain things you need to know. Also, make sure you’ve worked out a game plan with your manager on handling this.
  • Dealing With a “Red” Recruiter — This means dealing with a red personality, that is, someone who takes all the credit and doesn’t include you in the process. I’ve had recruiters that won’t include me on on the intake calls and refuses to mention my name to the hiring manager. Basically, this type of recruiter needs sourcing help but takes all the credit. There are two ways to confront this:
    • You need to bring this sort of stuff up with your manager and get them involved; and,
    • You need to have a heart-to-heart with that recruiter. I’ve told recruiters my true feelings, and to combat the competition scenario, I’ve told them that, “I’m here to support you and we’re on the same team here. We need to be able to work together.” Some recruiters have difficulty working with a sourcing resource. If you’re patient and kind, eventually you will gain the respect and trust from a “red” recruiter.

Proactive vs. Reactive sourcing model

As the sourcer, you need to clearly set the overall guidelines and get your manager’s blessing. The sooner the sourcer gets looped into the communication over the position to be filled, the better things will be. This will help forecast the needs ahead of time and allow them to proactively source for talent.

jedi sourcing mind tricksThe more proactive you can be, the better you can be at building out a pipeline of candidates.

A sourcer’s job is really dependent on building a good communication’s channel with the recruiter, and a good recruiter is someone who is highly organized, efficient, good with candidates, and also good at giving credit to the whole team.

I recommended having some guidelines between the recruiter and sourcer to help smooth out their relationship. Keep this in mind:

  • A recruiter needs to continuously update the sourcer throughout the recruiting and hiring process.
  • The sourcer needs to get recognized for all their efforts in finding candidates for the recruiter to consider.

Since they generally do not have a direct relationship with the hiring manager, a good recruiter should include the sourcer in the final offer stages. Shoot them a thank note and CC the hiring manager.

Overall, recruiting teams need to recognize both attributes of a sourcer and recruiter relationship, because in the end, a recruiter and sourcer are all on the same team.

Hey Recruiters: Here’s What Makes Top Talent Want to Stay — and Want to Go

Here’s something that just about everyone in talent acquisition really wants to know: What is it that causes some good people to leave a job, and in turn, what makes others that you consider top talent want to stick around?

Retention is at the heart of talent acquisition, because the better job your organization does retaining employees, the less energy you have to put into finding new ones.

This is at the heart of Ceridian‘s new 2017 Pulse of Talent Report, because the theme of the research is the Key Factors for Retaining Top Talent, “a deep dive into why high-performing employees leave, or remain in their jobs.” 

In fact, the report on the survey gets to the key question quickly, and its this: Why does talent quit?

Top 5 reasons employees are looking to leave

Here are the top 5 reasons job hunters are looking to leave their current employer, according to the Ceridian research:

  1. Non-competitive salary;
  2. Long commute;
  3. Uninteresting work;
  4. No opportunities for growth;
  5. Poor manager relationships.

As the analysis points out:

Salary was a top motivator for respondents to leave their jobs. In fact, just over one in four (27 percent) respondents across North America listed it as a reason for quitting a previous position, while 17 percent listed it as the primary reason for their departure.”

And, the analysis goes on to add this:

While salary might be a sticking point for employees, once the decision is made to leave a job, people tend to take stock of what’s important to them, and while financial stability is significant in the decision-making process, work-life balance (which includes how long people are stuck in traffic) and career growth tend to take greater priority.”

Nearly 40% of high performers are “actively job hunting”

Yes, salary is the big issue that fuels employees — particularly high performing employees — to look for a new job, but once they start looking, other important personal factors enter into their decision-making process.

“While salary creates a baseline for happiness at work, it isn’t everything,” said Lisa Sterling, Chief People Officer at Ceridian, in a press release about the survey. “Organizations looking to retain their most effective employees need to invest in a culture that will keep them happy. Work-life balance, opportunity for advancement, and a positive work environment all play a role.”

By the way, the 2017 Pulse of Talent Report also found that when it comes to high-performing employees — defined as “people who had received an ‘excellent’ on their last performance review and had been promoted at least three times throughout their careers” — nearly four in 10 (38 percent) are actively job hunting.

And the reasons top talent are looking to leave are pretty much the same as other employees in the workplace. A better salary is still the main reason they leave (24 percent), while good relationships with colleagues and interesting work are primary reasons people stick around (49 percent and 47 percent, respectively).

As you can see, there’s a lot to this research that’s worth digging into, and it’s impossible to get into all of it here, but there’s another part of the analysis that resonates with me because it is near and dear to my heart.

It’s this — how an organization’s culture can really help to retain their top talent.

Culture WILL retain top talent

The 2017 Pulse of Talent Report‘s results show that an engaging work culture – measured by positive relationships with managers and colleagues, as well as interesting work – will convince employees to stay put in their jobs. In addition:

  • Nearly half of all high performers (49 percent) listed co-workers as a reason to stay at their current employer – slightly more important than salary (48 percent).
  • Other reasons included interesting work (47 percent), good working conditions (46 percent) and job security (46 percent).

“Organizations looking to attract and retain tomorrow’s best workers need to get beyond engagement,” said Ceridian’s Lisa Sterling. “They must begin thinking about their culture holistically – what their values are, how those values will encourage positive relationships, and allow employees to grow and develop in their careers.”

Here’s my take: I used to be a big proponent of employee engagement, but after a number of years of terrible engagement numbers, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s really an organization’s culture that is most important.

In other words, if you get the culture right, good engagement will follow, but engagement itself won’t matter much if a company’s culture isn’t embracing and motivating employees.

Here’s what drives a “culture of excellence”

The final summary of the 2017 Pulse of Talent Report makes this very point:

And while even your highest performing employees might leave, when it comes to employee retention, there’s a lot to be said about preventative measures. Unsurprisingly, employees who work in positive environments, with good colleagues, strong relationships with managers and are treated fairly – both in terms of growth opportunities and wages – are more likely to stick around.

And it is no coincidence that high performers tend to work at companies that have well-communicated values and business goals. What it all comes down to, Ceridian’s Lisa Sterling says, is when you put your people first and take care of them, they put you first and give you that discretionary effort that drives a culture of excellence.”

Amen to that, and it’s a good reason why you should take a look at Ceridian’s 2017 Pulse of Talent Report (you can find it here), because there are some really interesting insights that should give you food for thought as you ponder how to improve your own organization.

It’s a never-ending struggle, but some of the insights in this report will surely help.

The 2017 Pulse of Talent Report was conducted by The Nielsen Company through its online research panel over the summer of 2017. Some 1,600 respondents from the U.S. and Canada were polled. Respondents represented salaried and hourly workers, as well as a mix of full-time and part-time employees 18 years of age and older.

Congrats! Amazon Picked Your City for HQ2. Now Get Ready for Recruiting Pain

We’ve all been witness to the bidding frenzy by cities wanting to become Amazon’s second home.

Lured by the promise to hire 50,000 workers with salaries at $100,000 annually, and an investment of $5 billion in new construction, 238 cities from around the U.S. and Canada have submitted proposals to entice the retail giant.

We have seen offers of impressive incentive packages with multibillion dollar tax incentives. The mayor of Kansas City ordered 1.000 items on Amazon and posted reviews on all of them. Birmingham, Alabama placed giant Amazon boxes around the city. The city of Stonecrest, Georgia even offered to make CEO Jeff Bezos its mayor and change its name to Amazon.

The bidding war in this unique corporate expansion strategy finally came to a head with the October 19 submission deadline. Now, the competitors remain in a holding pattern until Amazon announces its choice for HQ2 sometime in 2018.

But, what will this mean for recruiting? 

Amazon HQ2 brings great promise to the winner, but ….

The opportunity to grow your labor base, attract upscale and well-educated residents, enjoy an influx of economic activity and tax revenue, and get on the map as a much coveted “tech hub,” is highly attractive to most cities and states. Then there is the huge billion dollar construction investment creating tens of thousands of additional jobs in construction, rental properties, retail, leisure and related products and services.

But once the back-patting stops, the less-than-stellar realities begin to emerge: An influx of 50,000 largely white collar workers and their families can lead to a rise in housing costs, making rents and new home ownership less affordable for many lower income wage earners.

This scale of gentrification can easily displace mom-and-pop stores and public schools could quickly become overcrowded. There would be pressure on public transportation, traffic-clogged roads and bridges, and expensive infrastructure improvements – all at taxpayer expense.

In addition to the problems mentioned above, your all-powerful new resident brings something else: A major disruption to the local workforce.

Who wouldn’t want to work at Amazon, right? Local employers looking to hire and retain reasonably priced professional talent will be under intensified pressure not only for tech talent, but also in marketing, sales, logistics, finance and all the other areas where Amazon will staff up.

6 talent acquisition ideas if your city has a real shot

Amazon has very deep pockets and is in the enviable position of not having to report high margins. Since this is probably not the case with your company and you are already dealing with a tight market, you need to act now so you can continue to attract new talent and retain current employees in your new hyper-competitive hiring environment.

Here are six (6) ideas to keep in mind:

  1. Retention is big, so consider moving to more of a remote employee model to accommodate for the demand for flexible schedules. Being receptive to a remote model can go can a long way to address the skilled labor shortage as many highly experienced candidates (think Baby Boomers!) are looking for jobs that allow a more balanced lifestyle.
  2. Invest time in enhancing your employer brand. With one of the brightest brands in the world in your backyard, the bar will be officially raised. Make sure your openings are posted on the right job boards, social media,  and news feeds. Strive for a tech-savvy workplace and take a thoughtful look at perks and benefits. Be flexible on qualifications and pay. Standards will change. Tout your company’s benefits.
  3. Focus on on-the job training. Developing internal training and development programs can be an attractive incentive, especially for millennials and college students, and is an effective way to broaden your skilled talent pool.
  4. Look to recruit talent from other cities. Strengthen programs to attract talent from other areas by partnering with universities and vocational schools and offer quality internship opportunities.
  5. Assess your Applicant Tracking System (ATS). New technology and automation is transforming how teams recruit. When hiring managers are hindered in their ability to zero in on problems in the candidate pipeline, you can bet that your ATS is not up to par.
  6. Make better use of your data. Data collection and analysis is the bane of existence to more than a few HR teams. With the challenges ahead, make sure you have a qualified individual on the team who understands how to deliver the kind of predictive workforce planning to deliver what your business needs.

Staying competitive for talent in the shadow of Amazon

We can’t deny the many benefits of becoming HQ2, but the potential downsides are very real as well – particularly as it impacts your employee retention and pool of potential candidates. Message to recruiters: Take this challenge to heart and have a pro-active, well thought out plan in place so you can stay competitive in the shadow of Amazon.

My prediction? Think Uber Test.

Being a disruptive company, Amazon is looking for a market that can support disruption:

  • A steady supply of college-educated labor;
  • A pool of existing tech and professional talent; and,
  • A high mix of IT/Engineering talent from a large existing or growing base of tech companies.

I’ll defer to the experts, but my bet is that the new Amazon headquarters will end up in either Austin, Atlanta, or Denver.

For Retailers, Is It the Most Wonderful Time of the Year for High-Volume Hiring?

This year’s holiday hiring started before the first leaf fell.

First, Target – 105,000. Then, UPS – 95,000. Next, Amazon – 120,000.

Even earlier than last year, the biggest names in retail, logistics, and e-commerce announced the number of temporary employees that will swell their ranks this holiday season.

In fact, the number of job openings for retail sales positions surged by 70 percent in August and 25 percent in September compared with the same months last year, according to data from iCIMS, a recruiting software provider, which analyzed more than 300,000 jobs across roughly 70 customers.

Intense competition for seasonal employees

“It appears that the holiday hiring cycle will prove to be earlier than usual this year,” iCIMS Chief Economist Josh Wright said. “It may be that retailers are gearing up to retool their in-store experiences to compete with the convenience of online shopping, and that they need more staff to help with this.”

As retailers urgently start their holiday hiring during warmer months, they face an intensifying competition for a shrinking crowd of seasonal talent needed to facilitate the busiest time of the year.

They no longer compete with just each other, but also logistics and e-commerce employers thriving in the digital age in which more people opt for online shopping, an improving economy in which fewer people rely on supplemental income, and the explosion of the gig economy – think Uber – that offers plenty of other sources of it.

With so much resting on retailers’ ability to recruit seasonal talent, some of them may reside among the 70 percent of companies that plan to invest in solutions with recruitment marketing capabilities through March 2018, according to a recent report by Aptitude Research Partners.

Rather than rushing to make hundreds of thousands of hires in just a few short months, retailers that invest in a best-of-breed candidate relationship management software solution would gain the capability to proactively build talent pools of passive candidates, who they could then nurture into seasonal employees by the holidays.

More sales, less holiday hiring

While retailers expect more sales this holiday season and started hiring for it earlier, they will actually hire fewer total seasonal employees.

The timing will help sales, as Christmas falls 32 days after Thanksgiving this year, one day later than last year, and on a Monday instead of a Sunday, which means a full extra weekend for shopping.

That will translate into $678 billion to $682 billion, up 3.6 to 4 percent from $655 billion last year, marking the ninth consecutive year with a rise, according to estimates from the National Retail Federation (NRF).

“Although this year hasn’t been perfect, especially with the recent devastating hurricanes, we believe that a longer shopping season and strong consumer confidence will deliver retailers a strong holiday season,” NRF President and CEO Matthew Shay said in a statement.

Yet, retailers will only hire as many as 550,000 or as few as 500,000 seasonal employees to handle this year’s sales, down from four to 13 percent from 575,000 last year, marking the fourth straight year with a decline, also according to projections from the NRF.

However, that appears due to retailers’ already-strong year of hiring, as they find themselves less in need of help. Job openings for retail sales positions jumped by 42 percent from January to September, while hires for those openings rose by 38 percent at the same time, according to iCIMS.

Nurture now, hire later

While holiday sales and the number of seasonal employees may fluctuate every year, retailers’ need for both remains constant.

To make sales possible, retailers must hire for a variety of jobs that extend beyond storefront functions to behind-the-scenes tasks, such as running websites, fielding customer service inquiries, and handling shipping and returns.

In fact, 54 percent of consumers begin researching holiday purchases in October or earlier, 24 percent cite customer service as the factor that convinces them to make a purchase, and 60 percent hesitate to buy from a retailer after a difficult return process, according to the National Retail Federation.

Given those statistics and the make-or-break nature of the holiday season, retailers may consider a proactive approach to holiday hiring, as procrastinating so many hires for such a diversity of positions risks rushing into poor hiring decisions and falling short of the necessary headcount.

By using a CRM tool, retailers can add passive candidates for seasonal jobs into talent pipelines, and then use automated recruitment marketing materials, relevant job recommendations, and other tools to nurture them into seasonal employees well in advance of the holidays.

What You Can Learn From How Recruitment Firms Managed Disaster Relief

When I started this, my intention was to focus on how companies manage disaster relief efforts both internally and externally, particularly with Hurricanes Harvey and Irma.

As I began to reach out to contacts I knew who were impacted, the tragic Las Vegas shooting happened and then the Northern California fires struck, all affecting hundreds of thousands of people and organizations.

While Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is a core component of a solid marketing strategy, sharing your organization’s efforts around a disaster plays by a different set of rules. It’s a highly sensitive situation where marketers concerned about brand reputation tread lightly.

In a quest to better understand how recruitment agencies in affected areas managed their disaster relief support efforts, I interviewed three company leaders. A common thread emerged and it’s this:

Have a specific purpose — and stay authentic to your brand.  

Strong internal communications during California wildfires

Bill Peppler is the Managing Partner at Kavaliro, a technology recruitment firm headquartered in Orlando, Florida, with a half dozen offices throughout the U.S. Kavaliro offices were affected by the 2016 violent riots in Charlotte, the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting, Hurricanes Matthew and Irma, and most recently, the Northern California wildfires.

Here’s what Bill said about all of that:

The silver lining from being affected by so many tragedies is that Kavaliro has built a strong communication system among internal staff, contractors and clients. Community is a company pillar and our primary focus during disastrous times.”

Kavaliro’s efforts started with a simple social media post that read, “Kavaliro’s hearts go out to California. We will do our best to help our California community during this time.” Ongoing efforts, however, were far from simple.

Kavaliro immediately accounted for all internal team members, contractors and clients affected by the fires, opening their Northern California office to those whose sites were shut down to ensure mission-critical work could continue in a safe environment. They remained in constant communication with their internal community and worked with their clients to provide additional resources such as making sure contractors received their weekly paycheck, even if they were unable to work.

Kavaliro felt the stories from their relief efforts were too personal to share on social media, keeping their focus on getting employees, contractors and clients get back on their feet. As a result, Kavaliro strengthened their brand by reinforcing one of their core values: building community.

Harnessing social media for valuable hurricane relief efforts

Colleen Whiteside is a Senior Partner and Marketing Director at Orion Talent, a full-service recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) organization that specializes in military hiring and skilled talent acquisition. Headquartered in Cary, North Carolina, Orion Talent has offices around the country including Houston, where Colleen resides.

When Hurricane Harvey hit, flooding thousands of homes in her town, there was an immediate and overwhelming need for many basic essentials.

A local mom created a Facebook group specifically for donating items to those in need. From that group, Colleen created an Amazon Wish List, and shared this with the internal Orion Talent community as well as on Orion Talent’s Facebook page. As items were donated, Colleen matched them to those with that specific need.

Colleen used Facebook to enable the Orion Talent community to provide hundreds of items to directly support flood victims. Although Colleen shared the wish list link on Orion Talent’s Facebook page to solicit donations, she chose not to share how their efforts positively impacted those affected by the hurricane on social media.

She said:

The story of personal loss experienced from Harvey was not Orion’s to tell. What we share on social media is driven by our goal in sharing, and intent behind it. Due to the personal and direct nature of the help we were providing, sharing on social media would’ve felt disingenuous — the opposite of what this initiative was all about for us.”

Orion Talent used social media to bridge their community to those affected by the hurricane and quietly make a loud impact.

Using social media to inspire others to get involved

Jordan McGuire is Vice President of Marketing at Medix, a leading provider of workforce solutions for clients and candidates across the Healthcare, Scientific and Information Technology industries. Headquartered in Chicago, Medix has 14 offices across the country including Houston.

In response to Hurricane Harvey, the Medix team set out to help Houstonians get back on their feet by organizing an emergency 12-hour fundraiser.

Medix opted to share its efforts on its website, social media channels as well as through emails and newsletters distributed to internal teammates across the country.

She said:

For us, sharing our experiences in Houston with our teammates, talent, clients, friends and families is not self-promotional. It’s a reflection of our core purpose as a company to positively impact lives. It’s less about sharing what “Medix is doing” and more about inspiring good stewardship in all companies and individuals, so that in periods of disaster or tragedy, we can rally together and feed off of positive energy to create true impact in our communities.”

By making their disaster relief efforts a collaborative process, Medix sought to reinforce its employee brand message.

4 ways to balance disaster relief efforts and brand strategy

While we can’t control natural disasters or when tragedy strikes, we can control how we manage our responses by formulating effective disaster relief response guidelines that protect our brands. Here are four (4) things you can do:

  1. Have a specific purpose for sharing information externally on social media. Whether it’s a call to action or a quest to inspire others, have a purpose behind sharing your relief efforts. This allows your organization to be a proponent of corporate social responsibility rather than appearing opportunistic. Medix’s purpose for sharing their relief efforts was to inspire both their internal employees and external community to actively work together to support victims.
  2. Extend your internal resources — Take inventory of every stakeholder including internal employees, contractors, clients and suppliers and see who has capacity and resources to help victims. Part of what made Kavaliro’s Northern California wildfires relief efforts so effective was their ability to extend resources to clients and contractors misplaced by the fires.
  3. Be authentic to your brand — When you get involved with disaster relief efforts, be authentic to your brand in how to share your efforts with internal and external communities. Orion Talent strengthened their brand identity by staying true to their corporate beliefs.
  4. Listen to how employees want to get involved — Whether you offer volunteer release time or help an employee start an internal relief initiative, ask your employees how they want to participate in relief efforts. For Orion Talent, Kavaliro and Medix, employees came together as a community to support a greater cause.

Here’s one more important thing to remember: Inappropriately sharing relief efforts can be a potential disaster. Do it with tact and empathy in a way that is authentic to your brand, and when you do, you strengthen the respect of both your internal AND external communities.

It Shouldn’t Be So Hard to Send Candidates a Decent Rejection Letter

Here’s a question that has been on my mind: Why don’t we send out rejection letters anymore?

I know — your company sends out rejection letters, and if they do, congratulations because I believe that puts you in the minority of companies that still think it matters to do the right thing and let job candidates know they didn’t make the cut.

But, I also know firsthand how bad some recruiters, hiring managers, and their organizations are at giving applicants a professional and courteous kiss off. That’s because I spent a good chunk of the past year (before my current gig at RecruitingDaily) applying to all sorts of jobs, and in my humble experience, I got an official rejection from very few of them.

To put some hard numbers to it, I applied for 57 jobs over a 10 month period. Most of them were for editing positions that I was very qualified for — Senior Editor, Director of Content, Managing Editor, and jobs like that — but despite my many years as a top editor in newspapers, magazines, and online, I only got one interview and I’m still waiting for a final rejection on that even though they hired somebody else back in May.

Would you believe a 12% rejection letter rate?

Mostly, I heard crickets and pretty much got nothing back in response. Overall, I received a whopping seven rejection letters — 12 percent.

A few years back, Mental Floss published a blog post about 10 Rejection Letters Sent to Very Successful People. Just the names of those who got rejection letters should make you sit up and notice: Bono, Andy Warhol, Kurt Vonnegut, Tim Burton, Steig Larsson (author of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), and Hunter S. Thompson, among others.

The BBC posted a similar article last month titled 8 Rejection Letters That Will Inspire You Not to Give Up that dug into an equally impressive list of music celebrities — Madonna, Kurt Cobain, Nina Simone, Nick Cave, and Dave Grohl from Foo Fighters — who all got a kiss off letter sometime in their career and consider themselves better for it.

I’m always amused by rejection letters in general because they seem to reconfirm what we already know — that people who are paid to assess and measure talent frequently get it very, very wrong.

Corporate America stinks at responding to candidates

Yes, I have first-hand evidence that tells me this is true: people who evaluate talent frequently and repeatedly get it so wrong that you wonder sometimes how they manage to keep their jobs. And, the Mental Floss and BBC articles simply make this point again by showing us how people who we know today to be great talents got rejected once, too.

But there was something else that jumped out at me from this article: who actually gets a real, live rejection letter anymore?

Today it’s very rarely an actual letter and more likely a rejection email you’ll see, and even those can sometimes go terribly wrong. But, most people today get no rejection at all — no letter, no email, no nothing.

In fact, job applicants are lucky to get more than a simple acknowledgement that they applied for a job, much less a rejection, as my 57 job applications with only a 12 percent rejection letter rate seems to confirm.

Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler, who run Career Xroads, have researched this for years, and the sad fact of the matter is that their work shows that a great many companies on Fortune‘s 100 Best Companies to Work For list don’t even bother to send a rejection letter.

In other words, as bad as the people evaluating talent may be in doing their job, they (and their organizations) make it worse by not even being courteous enough to respond to those who took the time to apply.

Yes, Corporate America really stinks at responding to job candidates.

Hunter S. Thompson’s famous rejection letter

Say what you will about the traditional rejection letter, but it actually showed a degree of civility in giving applicants a final answer about their status. On top of that, rejection letters frequently fuel the recipient to work that much harder to do what they need to do so that they don’t get rejected the next time.

My guess is that many of those featured in 10 Rejection Letters Sent to Very Successful People reacted in that very way, and now view such letters as part of the fuel that pushed them to be so successful.

We’re a lot worse off in recruiting today by being so cavalier and pretty much taking the old-fashioned rejection letter out of the process. 

And here’s one more thing: the letter in the article listed for Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson was actually a letter Thompson wrote back to William McKeen, the author of Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson. The response from Thompson is so wonderful that it’s worth repeating here:

McKeen, you s**t-eating freak. I warned you about writing that vicious trash about me.

Now you better get fitted for a black eyepatch, just in case one of yours gets gouged-out by a bushy-haired stranger in a dimly-lit parking lot. How fast can you learn Braille?

You are scum.

HST

Here’s how NOT to reject a candidate

Here’s my take: As with so many things going on today, the rejection letter has nearly gone away because civility and manners have nearly gone away for far too many people.

Recruiters and talent acquisition professionals like to whine that they’re simply overwhelmed by candidates, but even the automated responses they send out to candidates can come off as condescending and rude. For example, here’s an actual response that I got during my job search, and it’s a doozy:

As a courtesy, we wanted to let you know that the Managing Editor job with Ca*****o Media has been closed. As we open or identify other jobs that may be a good fit, we will be in touch.

Yes, this company actually wanted to make clear they were going out of their way and doing me a big favor by telling me that “As a courtesy … (the job) … has been closed.”

My reaction: When did it become such a big deal to be courteous and just do the right thing?

Let me break down how wrong this response is:

  1. They didn’t thank me for applying, or even tell me I didn’t get the job, or that they were hiring someone else.
  2. What they sent me as a response came off as condescending, rude, and wrong.

Is this what you want YOUR recruiters and TA professionals to be telling rejected candidates? Is this how you build a great organizational “brand?”

You know the answer to those questions.

Yes, recruiting is a lot harder today, and the “fire hose effect” — also known as “drinking from the firehose” — makes it tough for hiring departments to handle the overwhelming number of resumes and applications that they get.

Lots of good candidates get lost in the shuffle, and all that great technology to handle applicants that I saw last month at HR Tech in Las Vegas doesn’t seem to get used properly by many companies who clearly are in need of it.

You want to check on how your recruiting department is doing in this regard? Get some of your people to test the system by creating a resume and applying for some jobs you’re trying to fill. I guarantee that if you do, a great many of you will be taken aback at how you’re treated. And, don’t be surprised in the end if you don’t get a rejection letter.

Yes, it’s all about that — treating people the right way, aka, The Golden Rule. Why do so many people in recruiting and hiring get that so wrong?

With a Passive Candidate, How Do You Know When an Applicant is Truly Interested?

As the market for talent continues to get more competitive, companies are increasingly turning to Talent Sourcers to find and recruit the best people.

But remember, candidates simply don’t apply for jobs like they used to anymore — and that’s why sourcers are needed to find interested applicants.

The term “passive” candidate has become a buzzword to reflect the state of the market, however, it’s become an overused phrase that may not even reflect what’s happening anymore.

The majority of applicants we speak with today are considered to be “passive.” Being a talent sourcer myself., the majority of applicants I speak with on a daily basis fall into the passive candidate category.

The hard work of finding a passive candidate

Here’s how we define the term “passive” candidate:

A passive candidate is employed but not currently looking for a new employment opportunity. When you include the 15 percent of professionals who are tip-toers defined as (those who aren’t actually applying for jobs but are preparing to move) this group accounts for 75 percent of the workforce, according to LinkedIn’s Blog.

The true benefit to speaking with passive candidates is that they may not be looking for a new opportunity, and that means they may not be interviewing with other companies. With 60-70 percent of the workforce not actively looking for a new role, it takes skill to actively engage these type of individuals.

You may already know this, but it takes a lot of boolean searching, cold calling, and social media outreach to find an applicant. You also have to go through a lot of initial rejection before you actually get to speak with someone on the phone.

So, how do you actually know if someone is truly interested in your job opportunity?

Winning the conversation by asking these questions

You might have to cast a wide net when you first start doing your outreach. The role you’re looking to fill might be very niche and require an immense amount of time searching for candidates.

So, you finally convince 2-3 applicants to speak with you further. Now, how to do you distinguish between active and passive candidates?

Junior level recruiters fall into the passive vs. active trap frequently, and it’s good to trust your intuition and experience when speaking with applicants. Overall, it’s a hard game to play, because an applicant might say all the perfect things.

I recommend going through all the possible barriers before you proceed further. Here are some important ones:

  • Are they within the compensation range?
  • What’s their commute time like?
  • What team, project, or culture are they looking for?

After, you’ve addressed all the barriers, try to dig for more intelligence on the candidate:

  • How many interviews are you taking?
  • Are you the first recruiter to reach out to them?
  • Why are they looking to move? You need to address all the reasons for why they are now looking.

Make sure they’ve answered all your barrier and intel questions thoroughly. If your gut is telling you differently, make sure you proceed with caution. Sometimes, an applicant may be talking with several recruiters at once, and it’s important to encourage your applicant to be honest and open with you throughout the process.

Finally, have the applicant directly apply for the job, and then, submit them to the lead recruiter.

As a sourcer, it’s your job to keep them updated on the process, because focusing on the candidate experience should be a top priority for your team and success.

If the process takes more than a week or so, make sure to send follow-up emails, or perhaps even reach out to them over the phone. You can leave this up to the recruiter on who should handle the candidate updating duties.

Some things to remember with a passive candidate

Since the majority of applicants today are passive I would consider treating everyone like they are passively interested in your job opportunity.

Never just focus on one candidate. My goal is to have at least three (3) submittals for each role I’m finding candidates for because the market is very competitive and you need to have several options for your hiring manager.

Remember, the term “Passive Candidate” is an overused buzzword that shouldn’t be relevant anymore. You need to make sure you treat EVERYONE like a passive candidate, and make sure that the candidate experience is a key concern and at the top of your mind throughout the entire sourcing and recruiting process.

Good luck — now go find those “passive candidates”!

Weed, I-9’s and Compliance in The Stoned Age

Compliance in the Stoned Age

Never expected to lead an article ostensibly about HR compliance by discussing marijuana, but 2017 was a weird year for many of us. There’s an increasing amount of states where medical marijuana is legal, and in Alaska, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, and Washington D.C. recreational marijuana is legal (with some restrictions). As you might imagine, this has become a headache for HR departments all over the U.S.

While the increasing spread of marijuana legalization probably isn’t going to turn a Fortune 500 office into a Richard Linklater movie (alcohol’s been legal since 1933 and, generally speaking, people aren’t hammered all day at work), it does point to this bigger picture around how much HR compliance is shifting. You know all the cliches about how dynamic the working world is today — DISRUPTION!!! — but one thing we’re not discussing as much is how all these changes impact long-held compliance notions.

Put weed aside for a second. (Puff, puff, pass?) In September 2017, the I-9 form was revised. The White House blocked potential changes on EEO-1 reporting. (The goal there was better reporting on pay discrimination; some smaller employers still have to complete sections on race and employment by March of 2018.)

And obviously, one of the most divisive issues in America the last 18-24 months (if not longer) has been immigration. That continues to affect HR compliance in organizations of all sizes, especially as the courts and the executive branch go back and forth on where the laws and lines actually reside.

2018 might be even wilder

Pause for a second and consider where we are right now and what we’re discussing:

  • Marijuana legalization
  • Immigration
  • Pay transparency
  • Form/logistics revision

A decade or so ago, you could see HR teams handling 1 of these items. Now they often own leadership of the issue for their orgs in terms of compliance. Let’s be honest: not to get political, but a lot of these issues are also currently moving targets in terms of where legislation might land.

2018 is going to be another Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride on the compliance side. Another 3-6 states will probably legalize marijuana, for example. Pay transparency is going to remain a hot button issue. Immigration isn’t going anywhere. More and more white-collar jobs are actually moving to Texas, where the economy is deeply connected to immigration.

Compliance is only going to get trickier.

What are companies currently doing?

On the marijuana issue, everyone does need to remember that marijuana is still federally illegal, and it’s a controlled substance. Most of the laws that have passed in the last 10 years contain some form of workplace protection. For example, in California Prop. 19 (years ago) didn’t have workplace protection and it failed. Prop 64, which did have workplace protection, passed. What that means is that companies can go status quo/”how we’ve always done it” with regard to weed, even if it’s recreationally legal.

In Massachusetts, for example, the law includes language stating that “the authority of employers to enact and enforce workplace policies restricting the consumption of marijuana by employees” is not changed.

Millennials: HR Isn’t Your Friend (maybe)

In short: many companies on that front are doing things exactly as they have done them, but that might need to adjust in the next 2-3 years. There is an increasing realization by the millennials and Gen-Z’ers that HR isn’t a friend to them. Marijuana probably won’t be the tipping point issue there, because coming to work high consistently isn’t necessarily the best sign of adult maturity, but if there’s a huge disconnect between state laws and how work punishes usage, that could cause disconnects.

On the immigration front, companies are consistently looking for talent anywhere they can find it. The HB-1 Visa program status may shift. There are companies hiring immigrants consistently, with Chobani’s founder Hamdi Ulukaya getting profiled on 60 Minutes for his efforts in this regard.

There were a number of forward-thinking companies who offered up something in response to the travel ban efforts. AirBNB offered free housing anywhere in the world, Google created a crisis fund to support immigrant rights orgs, LinkedIn expanded a refugee job support program to the U.S., and more. Yes, those are mostly tech companies — and that’s logical, because tech companies are usually founded and built by immigrants.

Companies are taking stands and trying new approaches on some of the biggest compliance issues that come down the pike. But tech companies also have a lot of money, which means more resources on the legal and HR sides. With the legislation underscoring some of these issues consistently changing, how can an org with less resources know how/where best to focus their time?

What can you do to prepare yourself for the new era of compliance?

Join us on our upcoming webinar

 

Have TA Professionals Forgotten That We’re Really in the People Business?

Twenty years ago, I worked in the staffing industry.

Thirteen years ago, I worked in recruitment.

Seven years ago, my career took a turn into Talent Acquisition, also known as TA.

These terms have different meanings for different industry professionals reflecting connotations around their importance, relevancy, and strategic impact. While this dissection, wordplay, and debate may be important within the industry and function, like having 50 words for snow is important to Eskimos, hiring managers and job applicants want one word — “results.”

They need all of it, the yin AND the yang!

10 current HCM trends

Results from, uh, “hiring people” are in great demand and under great scrutiny. Organizational outcomes, evolution, even viability depend on them. Deloitte’s 2017 Global Human Capital Trends report offers 10 HCM trends:

  1. Organization of the future;
  2. Careers and learning;
  3. Talent acquisition;
  4. Employee experience;
  5. Performance management;
  6. Leadership (disrupted);
  7. Digital HR;
  8. People analytics;
  9. Diversity and inclusion; and,
  10. The augmented workforce.

Hiring plays a critical role in and is critically impacted by all of them, some more than others, and for all the partnerships are keys to organizational success.

How TA partnerships help build strong employer brands

One good example is employee experience.

The hiring team may not own that, BUT, you bet your “kanut” (fresh snow without any ice), that a bad employee experience, translated on to Glassdoor, Indeed and Facebook posts, sink hiring efforts faster than you can say “hikuliaq” (thin ice).

I’ve seen and heard debates questioning the alignment of TA and hiring people with Human Resources. They are SO different – hiring is like marketing and sales requiring a lot of people interaction and creativity whereas human resources is like, I don’t know, PARENTING!?! As if hiring people do not have compliance concerns and human resource people have never had to sell 10,000 employees on a new benefits package.

They need each other yet … are not so very different.

Consider the partnership required at Eventbrite, whose “Eventbrite for New Grads” (ENG) program was highlighted in the Human Capital Institute webcast, “Designing and Refining Talent Acquisition.” New hires have three weeks to learn about and get used to coding at Eventbrite, meeting with each engineering team then choosing the team on which they will work.

Who does that!?! Oh ya, Eventbrite does with the objective of strengthening their employer brand to attract engineering talent. Yin-yang baby!?!

Big issues that require organizational involvement

How about diversity and inclusion? Bring it on TA people! — but show up with support, less your efforts and results be frustrated by bad juju.

Careers and learning or leadership (disrupted)? These are big issues requiring involvement from the whole organization.

In a September 2017 Smashfly blog, Staples’ Vice President Talent Acquisition and Workforce Planning, Lisa Pueschel talked about their efforts around creating a culture of mobility seeing that “survey after survey shows that career development is one of the top motivators for employees.” Career development is, not coincidently, at the top of Deloitte’s list.

Their efforts? Recruiting internally. She describes it as pushing recruiters to call employees about open roles in the company instead of being passive. If you recruit your internal candidates, you’ll win more battles than you lose. And in the long run, I believe internal mobility is a win-win for everyone.

She started using AI technology to facilitate it (See No 7 above: Digital HR). Internal recruitment is a blizzard of an initiative that I’m guessing was met with a cold response requiring significant yin-yang as leadership was (you guessed it) disrupted.

While increased employee movement may challenge managers, it can also reward agile leaders who recognize how developing and supporting employee growth benefits them in reputation by attracting new top talent and in influence as their internal network grows.

Is internal solicitation staffing? Recruitment? Talent Acquisition? Sacrilege? I hear Steve Browne in my head emphatically insisting, “IT’S AWESOME!”

We are after all, regardless of title, in the people business — and we have been since the very start. So, let’s clear some of the snowpack and come together in new or previously unheard-of ways to address the people needs of your organization.

3 Smart Applicant Screening Tools You Really Need To Know About

According to a recent SHRM/Mercer survey, only 20 percent of recruiters said they were confident in their employers’ ability to assess job applicants.

This lack of confidence in traditional screening methods has given rise to some recent headline-grabbing innovations.

Here are three (3) applicant screening tools that are getting a lot of attention right now.

1. Facebook’s resume posting feature

Facebook’s recent move into applicant screening is significant for a number of reasons, but especially for this one: It means that LinkedIn is no longer the only game in town.

According to Jobvite’s annual recruiting survey, two-thirds of candidates use Facebook during their job search. And, Facebook is now the second most popular social network for recruiters to screen candidates — after LinkedIn.

Facebook hasn’t been ignoring this activity.

To facilitate its recruiting function even further, it’s currently testing a new resume upload feature that allows users to share their work experience on their profiles.

This feature comes soon after Facebook added integration with ZipRecruiter in September and the ability to post jobs on company pages in February.

While Facebook’s 2 billion users far outnumber LinkedIn’s 467 million members, it remains to be seen if Facebook can evolve beyond its perception as a personal, rather than a professional, social network.

2. Google’s ATS for small businesses

In addition to all the talk about artificial intelligence, the buzz at this year’s HR Tech Conference was Google’s entry into the recruitment tech market with their ATS.

Geared for the small business (SMB) market, Google Hire is an ATS integrated with the G Suite. With more than 3 million businesses currently using G Suite, the potential market for Google Hire is significant.

According to the #HRWINS Future of HR Technology Report, the biggest challenge employers face with their HR technology is this: integration between different systems.

Hire’s “baked in” integration with Gmail and Google Calendar alone might prove to be a big game changer.

Google Hire comes at the heels of the Google for Jobs launch, which was created to find better search results between job seekers’ skills and preferences and a job’s requirements.

With Google’s unprecedented access to data on both sides of the recruiting equation, Hire is either going to make a big impact on the ATS market or disappear with a whimper like some of Google’s former products.

3. Ideal’s AI screening software

Artificial intelligence (AI) is being applied everywhere these days to streamline or automate work processes.

Applicant screening is no exception.

Recruiting software like Ideal that uses AI promises to improve applicant screening in two major ways:

  1. AI can be applied to non-conventional data sets — such as video and phone interviews — in order to extract insights on a candidate’s personality, skills and cognitive ability.
  2. Machine learning algorithms can be used to combine candidate data such as resumes, social profiles, psychometric assessments, and interviews to analyze how qualified the candidate is for a role.

Along with its potential to improve candidate quality, AI is already proving to be an advantage for recruiters in terms of reducing time-to-fill rates by up to 75 percent.

AI software is a game-changer in applicant screening

There’s no doubt that AI will change recruiting. For example, AI for screening is already being used by major retailers like Indigo and Hot Topic.

Here’s the bottom line: How well AI software demonstrates it can screen applicants as good as – or better – than human recruiters will determine how fast this technology gets adopted.

Hey Recruiters: Here’s How You Can Be Frank and Honest With Candidates

It’s hard for hiring professionals to be frank and honest with candidates.

I recently got a note from someone on LinkedIn about my RecruitingDaily post on companies that bring in candidates for a series of interviews only to kiss them off with a standard “Thank you for your interest” email.

It seems to have struck a nerve with people who are sick and tired of how so many companies treat job candidates.

You need to read it to get the full flavor of the argument, but here is the point I was making:

We need to get rid of “thank you for your interest” emails altogether. I know some will say that this is a polite way to respond, but it has become the ultimate bad kiss-off and is now making companies look bad.”

I’ve written about this a lot, but it’s pretty clear to me that the candidate experience is really bad in a great many organizations, when being frank and honest would serve them a lot better.

So, how SHOULD companies be treating job candidates?

At any rate, here’s the comment that I got from a reader via LinkedIn. It resonated with me as it might with you:

“Thank you for your interest ” — It challenges the ‘well accepted ‘ but deeply disrespectful norm of sending out such generic rejection messages. You’ve stirred a much needed dialogue on how to be more kind, compassionate and professional towards our job applicants.

Thank you also for providing advice to the candidates on how to approach and deal with this behavior while it still exists and to not take it too personally. I have read way too many posts in my newsfeed from people who feel deep anguish after such treatment.”

This raises a good question: How SHOULD companies deal with applicants if they want to be frank and honest, and in turn, improve their candidate experience?

I know a lot about this, because I have applied to somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 companies for a job over the last year, and I can count the number of respectful and timely responses — and that should be the hallmark of a great “candidate experience” — on the fingers of one hand.

7 tips to help be frank and honest with candidates

So, given my experience as a recent applicant AND as a long-time hiring manager, here are seven (7) tips for companies looking to improve their candidate experience.

  1. Communicate early and often: The best organizations respond and communicate with candidates quickly when they first apply, and then as often as they can during the entire application and selection process. More is always best, and the more you keep them informed, the better they will feel about the process.
  2. Help candidates manage their expectations: I applied to a blind ad that turned out to be from a company that I used to work for and had been happy with me. When I was contacted about the job, I went through a whirlwind three days of interviews. Then, nothing for a week except a text on Day 8 saying they were far down the road with another candidate but hadn’t hired anyone yet. Well, they eventually did hire someone, but not me. My expectation was that they would at least tell me I wasn’t going to get the job. I’m still waiting.
  3. Communicate the outcome, no matter what it is: This past year, I’ve had two companies that said they wanted to hire me, then suddenly fell off the face of the Earth and would not respond to any of my communications asking what happened. Yes, it’s hard to give bad news and say that a situation has changed, but that’s what good companies do. Leaving people hanging isn’t being frank and honest; it’s never a smart approach.
  4. Don’t give false hope: Has anyone ever been contacted again by a company that tells them, “we’ll keep your application on file” ? I’m sure it happens, but broken clocks are right twice a day too. Telling a candidate something like this gives false hope — and that’s wrong.
  5. Remember Tim Sackett’s rule for multiple rounds of interviews: How many interviews do you need to have to decide to hire someone? Well my friend Tim Sackett has this rule, and it’s pretty simple: “No one needs four rounds of interviews to decide if a candidate is the right candidate for your organization. A fifth round, or any number higher, is just adding insult to injury.” 
  6. Be completely clear with someone who really MIGHT be good candidate later. My son had a job interview for a position he didn’t get, but one of the executives at the firm told him, “We like you a lot. We’ll be in touch again because we have job opening up all the time.” THAT’S how to keep a rejected candidate engaged and do it right.
  7. At the end of it all, remember the Golden Rule. Yes, at the end of it all the Golden Rule still applies — treat others as you would like to be treated. If more companies handled candidates with that in mind, nobody would ever be talking and writing about how bad the candidate experience is.

Walking away feeling respected and appreciated

These seven tips won’t make your candidate and hiring experience perfect, but they will help you to be frank AND honest with candidates — and that is a huge step to having applicants feel more respected about your company and your organization’s hiring process.

Meghan Biro articulated this perfectly when she wrote this in Forbes a few years back:

Hiring lies at the very heart of HR and Leadership. When candidates are hired after a positive experience, they hit the ground running, their commitment to your organization having been nurtured and strengthened during every step of the process.

When candidates aren’t hired, they walk away feeling respected and appreciated, and are far more likely to recommend other talent look into your organization. This is world-class HR. And you can make it happen!”

Why Do 56% of Candidates Fail to Negotiate Pay With a New Job Offer?

Sometimes, you come across a survey that gives some insight into human behavior that is surprising, confounding, or simply head-scratching.

So it is with the latest CareerBuilder survey. It found, for some reason, that more than half of candidates (56 percent) don’t push for a better salary when they’re negotiating for a new job.

This raises a good question — why?

According to the research, “those who avoid it say they don’t attempt (to negotiate) because they don’t feel comfortable asking for more money (51 percent), are afraid the employer will decide not to hire them (47 percent), or, they don’t want to appear greedy (36 percent).”

Why candidates NEED to negotiate a job offer

Yes, it’s a real head-scratcher why people don’t do what they can to get the best deal they can when somebody wants to hire them. Here’s what Liz Ryan said about negotiating a job recently in Forbes:

How many of us were taught to negotiate a job offer when we were in school? Not many of us were!

Most job-seekers don’t negotiate job offers, but they should. You communicate your value through your actions even more than your words. Some people might fear that if they negotiate, (the prospective employer) could rescind the offer altogether. If any manager would consider doing that, can you really afford to trash your mojo by working for them?

No company will ever love you more than they love you when they are trying to recruit you. If they don’t show the love in that critical juncture, they never will!”

Somehow, a whole lot of job candidates have never had someone like Liz Ryan tell them that.

Many employers expect candidates to dicker with them

Despite the fact that the CareerBuilder survey was headlined by how many job candidates DON’T negotiate when they’re given a job offer, it also found out what happens when they DO get into a give-and-take, because as the research noted, “the majority of employers are expecting a counter offer” from them. In fact:

  • More than half (53 percent) of employers say they are willing to negotiate salaries on initial job offers for entry-level workers.
  • Some 52 percent say when they first extend a job offer to an employee, they typically offer a lower salary than they’re willing to pay so there is room to negotiate.
  • More than a quarter of employers (26 percent) who offer a lower salary say their initial job offer is $5,000 or more less than what they’re willing to offer.

The CareerBuilder analysis of this survey also sliced and diced the research in a variety of other ways, especially by age, gender, and industry/job function. Here’s some of the analysis in those areas:

  • Older and more experienced candidates are more willing to negotiate — The survey found that a new hire’s willingness to negotiate the first job offer may come with more experience, with 45 percent of workers 35 or older willing to negotiate their first offer, which is higher than workers ages 18-34 (42 percent).
  • Men negotiate more than women — Nearly half of men (47 percent) say they negotiate first offers, compared to 42 percent of women who say they do.
  • IT workers and salespeople dicker the most — Information technology workers (59 percent) are the most likely to negotiate salary, followed by salespeople (55 percent), financial services professionals (53 percent), and health care workers (48 percent).

Are employers really ready to pay more?

Here’s my take: There’s a lot more detail to the CareerBuilder survey and it’s pretty interesting. But will it have any impact on how recruiters, hiring managers, and talent acquisition professionals operate?

I seriously doubt it.

Job seekers won’t get what they want unless they’re willing to ask for it, and expecting employers to be magnanimous and simply give them a cushy offer right out of the gate just isn’t in the cards. Some dickering over the details may be involved.

But, there is a wrinkle to consider here.

It’s this: The CareerBuilder survey also found that 63 percent of employers “say they feel they have to pay workers more because the market is getting more competitive for talent.” Whether employers truly believe this is debatable, of course; it may just be them telling the pollster what they believe people want to hear.

They’re right about one thing however — the market IS getting more competitive for talent, although perhaps not nearly as much as the unemployment numbers would suggest. That’s because the Labor Department data doesn’t do a very good job of capturing all the many ways people work today, and some believe that it under reports the number of people who are underemployed and really want a full time job.

Why won’t candidates demand more?

As Forbes recently noted:

There are two glaring reasons there isn’t more talk of underemployment: the myopic focus on unemployment numbers, and the shameful experience of underemployment itself.

Focusing solely on the employed versus the unemployed obscures a large portion of the workforce that is underemployed. For these purposes, the underemployed count as employed, but a look into their lives paints a different picture: they’re educated and working, but maybe they aren’t making a living wage, they don’t have health insurance, or they don’t have regular or full-time hours.”

This is a bigger issue worth getting into in more depth in another post, but for recruiters and TA professionals, it’s clear that although many job candidates want a better salary, a number of them aren’t willing to negotiate for it.

Until candidates get aggressive about asking for more in their pre-employment negotiations, TA pros can continue to drive hard bargains on what they are paying new employees. That may change in the near future if employers truly believe they need to pay more to get good workers, but for now, it’s still largely up to the job seekers to push hard to get more salary up front.

That may be good news for employers, but it doesn’t exactly help build an engaged and happy workforce that won’t be tempted to leave at the first good opportunity.

The CareerBuilder survey was conducted online by Harris Poll on behalf of CareerBuilder from May 24 to June 16, 2017 (which included representative samples of 2,369 full-time employers and 3,462 full-time U.S. workers across industries and company sizes in the private sector) and August 16 to September 15, 2017 (which included a representative sample of 2,257 full-time employers across industries and company sizes in the private sector).

How Sourcers Can Find Just About Anyone’s Contact Online

If you want to succeed at sourcing, you need one important tool — your brain.

Luckily, your brain cannot be stopped by any LinkedIn Terms of Service. However, saving time in sourcing is also important, and if you want to save time and be more effective, you need to use the right tools.

There are hundreds of plugins and tools for recruiters; every month a new one appears, and many are also disappearing. My guess is that we will see a huge amount disappear this year.

It’s hard to follow or test every single one. There is probably only one person (Dean Da Costa) who knows them all.

I’m trying to test every new tool I discover or that I get tipped off about from others. And because I am also a geek who loves new technology, I like to test everything, and I did new test of 10 plugins that will help you to find anyone’s contact details.

This test was done during April 2017, and since that time a few things have happened. Many of these tools improve their databases, and Hiretual in particular did pretty good job in this area. However, the most important news was the update of the LinkedIn User Agreement.

Right now it’s hard to predict how sourcing tools will be affected by LinkedIn and new LinkedIn Terms of Service, but I don’t think many of these tools revealing contact information will be still with us.

How I Set Up My 10 Plugin Test

I tried to compare these tools and find out how effective they are, how effectively they can find email addresses, and, if the email address that is found is valid or not.

And the best way how to do that is a prepare test scenario and run a test case. Here’s what I did: 

  • I selected 50 random profiles on LinkedIn;
  • All the profiles were my 2nd or 3rd connections;
  • All profiles were checked to see if there is no email or phone;
  • The roles I targeted were: Finance Manager, IT Director, Senior Developer, Project Manager, UX Designer, Accountant;
  • The locations I targeted were: Hungary, Germany, France, United Kingdom, Slovakia, Brazil, Finland, Czech Republic, Spain, and the USA (the Greater Seattle Area);
  • The plugins I tested were: Prophet, Connectifier, Hiretual, Contactout, Hunter, Jobjet, Lusha, Rocketreach

The first thing I did was my own search, so I tried to find emails on all 50 profiles without these tools and I only used Google. After 4 hours and 57 minutes, I found 29 private emails. As you can see, I didn’t find all 50 emails, but I learned a lot about these candidates. I also learned about new sites to use to look for people like them, especially in countries that I usually do not target during my search.

With these plugins, I found email addresses within a few seconds or minutes. During this test, I also checked if the email address provided by the plugin was valid and connected with the right person. I also tested every single email I found to see if it was live and working.

Google Chrome Extensions

Because one plugin can show the company email and the second plugin a private email for the same profile, I decided to split that test results on the group “private email” and the “company email” section.

People often use their company email address for their LinkedIn accounts, but there is no way I can double check if the company emails I found through these plugins are also primary email addresses connected with their LinkedIn profiles. Alternatively, if they used private email, and these plugins showed me their company email addresses, it is because they tried to guess them based on their database.

These plugins offer various tools and options; I don’t want to write a long review about all of them, so here is a quick one-sentence review.

  • Connectifier – Was acquired by LinkedIn, and I’m not sure if it’s still working, but it was my first plugin that I used, which is why I added it here.
  • Hunter – Hunter is the great in guessing company emails with just one click.
  • Prophet – A great plugin, and if you use it with Hiring Solved Search and Rai, you will be amazed how powerful combo you can get. Note: The Prophet plugin is temporarily unavailable.
  • Hiretual – I like this plugin a lot. It’s very complex and you can see that they are adding new functionalities often.
  • Contactout – Simple and effective plugin with a simple option on how to save profiles on your Google Drive.
  • Jobjet – Great plugin and with their CRM system, you got a powerful tool.
  • Lusha – This plugin did not reveal more emails than others, but it showed me more phone numbers than other plugins.
  • Rocketreach – Interesting service also offering API so you can create your own tool.
  • Boolean assistant – An effective and simple plugin.
  • People Search – People Search is a Chrome extension for candidate sourcing from Workable (great ATS).

Results

All working emails

All functioning emails are all the private and company emails these plugins found. I tested these addresses, and if they worked, I added them into the graphic.

I’m using some of these plugins every day. Sometimes, the email address that the plugin shows you for one person belongs to somebody els. so it’s good not to blindly trust every email address they reveal, but it’s wise to double check to make sure that the email belongs to the right person you’re looking for.

Private emails

This graphic is only informative, because some people can use the company e-mail address as a primary email for their LinkedIn account.

Results: All Plugins

How is the future looking for these plugins?

The new LinkedIn Terms of Service could affect many of these plugins; if that happens, they will either end or stop working. However, I’m sure that more new plugins will appear in the future, and it will be interesting to see how they will coexist with LinkedIn.

Even if these plugins survive, one challenge for them could be how to prevent sharing a candidate’s contact details through these apps and plugins if they don’t want to share anything. Right now, there is no way to reach them all and tell them to hide or remove your email address from their databases (and if you are planning to use this idea for a new startup, you should give a big reward for it!) :).

It will also be interesting to see how they will follow all the privacy regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (Regulation (EU) 2016/679) and other similar regulations in future. This will be one of the biggest challenge not only for these plugins, but also for applicant tracking systems (ATS) and technology companies.

Keys to finding more contacts

These plugins are great, but don’t rely solely on them. Contact details and emails are everywhere on the internet; you can use these plugins and try to learn how to create Custom Search Engine (CSE). You will also need some time to master CSE and get on the level of CSE experts, like Irina Shamaeva or Mark Tortorici.

You can also learn how to find the contact details on people on Stack Overflow through this lesson.

These Chrome plugins are used for sourcing, but they could also be used for sales or marketing activities. I tested 50 random LinkedIn profiles to get these results. If you want to get more relevant results, I recommend testing at least 500 profiles.

And, every plugin has its own pluses and minuses. During this test, there was one candidate profile when the email was found only through Hiretual and Prophet plugin. For one profile, the only Prophet located the work email, and the others showed nothing. Remember: Every plugin I mentioned here is worth a try.

I am running more of these tests, and some plugins are more successful for some areas and locations than others. Don’t take all the results from this test as final, but test all these plugins yourself. Try to test more of them and find the ones that are working for you. And if you are planning to do a similar test, please, share it with others.

These plugins offer free credits every month, but the Premium accounts give you not only more credits, but also more interesting analytics and tools. Moreover, the ROI from these plugins is also pretty good.

If you use these plugins and you are planning to contact the candidate or potential client, you should run (every time) this three step checklist before you hit the send button.

  1. The candidate you are planning to approach is matching the requirements; you spent some time to learn more about them, so will the role you are offering be to the benefit of that candidate?
  2. Are you sure?
  3. Are you really sure?

There are many tools out there you can use for finding contact details within few clicks, but it’s really essential to learn more about the person you will contact. We all should learn from people like Willem Wijnans, who is doing great work in this area and learning a lot about the candidates before reaching them.

Remember this too: Good research is the key if you would like to get a good answer from candidates.

The spray and pray sourcing method is not working anymore, so try not to spam others even if you have an email address.

Finally, remember that sourcing is not about quantity, but about quality! If your KPI is the number of emails, Inmails and Facebook messages you send per week, you should start thinking about whether you are working at the right place.

Don’t forget that you are not only representing your company, but you are representing yourself, and it’s your work that people will remember.

Yes, We’re All Pretty Delusional When It Comes to Social Recruiting

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 400 million, 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. In those cases (which constitute a sizable amount of men over about 48), you’d never really need to go on LinkedIn.

Then we come to the social recruiting space.

Just a few months ago, CIO Magazine was claiming that “recruiters are increasingly using social media to find talent,” although I feel like we’ve heard some variation of that phrase since about 2007. I think there are some awesome people who work in HR and recruiting circles, and some young ones who really “get” how to maximize the technology inherent in something like LinkedIn.

But, I’ve been in literally 3-4 elongated job searches in the last decade, and most recruiters you interact with have absolutely no clue how to use LinkedIn, even remotely. If LinkedIn would be the backbone of social recruiting, it makes me wonder: Is social recruiting really out there happening?

Social recruiting: It’s kind of a funny story

I’ll start with this story because it may make you laugh. A few years back I was living in Minneapolis, and I didn’t want to stay there, so I got recruited for a gig in Austin, Texas.

Here’s the first thing to know: I got recruited — yes, by social recruiting! — via LinkedIn. Then, the recruiter and I set up a time to speak. She had literally found me and looked at my profile and messaged me all through LinkedIn. We get on the phone for Call No. 1 and she says: “So, you’re based in Austin presently?“

Now, you may think to yourself, “That’s a logical question,” since, well, the job was in Austin. But she had probably looked at my profile six or seven times and I had told her in messages that I didn’t live in Austin.

I had literally given her all the info she needed to get us off on the right foot. She had almost nothing to do as part of her “social recruiting” deal — and she still had no clue.

I once called a recruiter on their “I-have-no-idea-how-to-use-LinkedIn” BS because I was frustrated with the overall direction of my life, and he said to me — no joke — “It’s hard to use and not intuitive.”

Well, that’s how a lot of the rest of us feel too, baby!

Social recruiting and some new research

LinkedIn’s in-house economists did some research on the effectiveness of social recruiting with regard to first-degree connections and various other slicing and dicing of the data. Since the supposed “power” (and the $26.2 billion company valuation) of LinkedIn is in the data, this is an interesting rabbit hole to go down. Here’s one section that pops out:

When we started with the survey data, we inferred that these referrals were first connections, people that you know directly,” says Guy Berger, LinkedIn’s in-house economist. “But when we looked at our data and looked at who people knew six months before they switched jobs, only about 11-12 percent (roughly one out of eight or nine people) had a first-degree connection to their new company.”

So, a half-year before you bolt, only about 1 out of 8 people have a first-degree connection at their new company. I guess that makes some sense. The last full-time job I had, I probably didn’t know a first-degree person there six months before I started — especially because I was living in a different state.

There’s a few different ways you can look at this data:

  • Weak ties mean more than strong ties for your career — This has already been proven by research too, because it’s about the overall social power of your network.
  • HR teams are getting better at using the LinkedIn tools for social recruiting — This explains why there’s a low-degree of first-level connections but people are still getting into the pipeline for jobs at Company X.
  • LinkedIn doesn’t really matter on a referral basis and is more a resume bank to a lot of people — I think this one is probably closest to the truth. I’ve worked with hundreds of hard-charging guys that make a lot of money, and they either, (a) don’t have a LinkedIn profile; or, (b) have one with a blank picture and 72 connections. It’s not really an active site, per se, which explains the active user stuff I mentioned above. For a lot of people, there’s not a reason to visit it every day. I visit it often, but I’m chasing freelance gigs all the time and I write stuff on there. It’s hard for a site that isn’t really “active” to be a referral-driver, per se.

Social recruiting and the Type-A, hard-charging male

If you bring up the idea of social recruiting to a lot of guys — maybe use different words, because they might not know the buzzword concept that is “social recruiting” — most of them will instantly yell one of two things, diametrically opposed, at you:

  1. “LinkedIn is garbage! I don’t use that! I smile and dial and pound my targets into submission!”
  2. “I get tons of paid speaking gigs via LinkedIn and everyone’s always head-hunting me!”

There’s almost NEVER a middle ground.

I’ll be transparent about this. I’ve been pretty active on LinkedIn since August 2012. I have over 2,500 connections, and some of my writing is followed by about 7,000 people. I get jobs and messages and offers now and again, but it’s not like every day by any means.

I also don’t sit on LinkedIn all day and pound the keys because I’ve got other stuff going on. So maybe I’m using it wrong or I have no idea or whatever else the case may be. But, I just don’t think social recruiting is happening at the grand scale we all seem to breathlessly claim it is in the business press.

Social recruiting’s core equation

Follow this bouncing ball:

When you add all that up, are we really doing “social recruiting?” Or are we just casually glancing at someone’s LinkedIn profile, thinking they might be a good fit, and reaching out to them?

What’s your take? And don’t bellow at me about how many jobs you get from LinkedIn. I know you hit all your targets and everyone loves you.

I’d rather that you tell me if you think social recruiting is ACTUALLY happening in the way, or at the level, we think it is.