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Survey: Social Media Screening of Candidates Hits an All-Time High

Everyone knows that lots of recruiters screen candidates on social media, but did you know how many employers are doing it?

Would you believe 7 out of 10?

According to the latest survey by CareerBuilder, a whopping 70 percent of employers use social media to screen candidates before hiring, and that’s up significantly from 60 percent last year and just 11 percent back in 2006.

That’s not all that the survey found. Here are a few of the highlights:

  • 57 percent of employers say they are less likely to interview a candidate they can’t find online (and yes, there ARE people like this out there).
  • 54 percent have decided not to hire a candidate based on their social media profiles.
  • Half of employers check current employees’ social media profiles, and over one-third have reprimanded or fired an employee for inappropriate content.

These findings shouldn’t be surprising, but they probably are for those clueless people who still think it’s cool to post photos of their latest drinking escapade on Facebook. Wonder how the company they applied to will react to that?

Social Recruiting Is Becoming a Key Part of HR

As Rosemary Haefner, chief human resources officer at CareerBuilder pointed out:

Most workers have some sort of online presence today – and more than half of employers won’t hire those without one. This shows the importance of cultivating a positive online persona. Job seekers should make their professional profiles visible online and ensure any information that could negatively impact their job search is made private or removed.”

Amen to that. Yes, would-be job seekers (and pretty much everyone with a brain) should think more about “cultivating a positive online persona,” as CHRO Haefner so delicately put it. But, how many people don’t and then are shocked when they find that something they thoughtlessly threw into one of their social media channels was the determining factor in them NOT getting a shot at the job they really wanted?

These are questions that recruiters and hiring managers are asking, and that job candidates would do well to consider.

Here are a few more interesting details from the CareerBuilder survey:

  • Social recruiting is becoming a key part of HR departments, and 3 in 10 employers (30 percent) have someone dedicated to the task. My guess is that this is a growth area for HR and that this number will jump considerably in the next year or two.
  • Employers aren’t just looking at social media. Some 69 percent are using online search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing to research candidates as well, compared to 59 percent last year.
  • When researching candidates for a job, employers who use social networking sites are looking for:
    • Information that supports their qualifications for the job (61 percent);
    • If the candidate has a professional online persona (50 percent);
    • What other people are posting about the candidates (37 percent); and,
    • For a reason not to hire a candidate (24 percent).

It’s that last finding that makes my point. If a quarter of employers say they are actively looking for disqualifying dirt on candidates when they check out social media, that’s a huge reason why everyone should be concerned about what they’re publicly posting and who is likely to see it.

Even if you’re not a candidate today, you may suddenly become one tomorrow. You should keep that in mind, because it doesn’t help if you are shooting yourself in the foot by posting stupid stuff on social media for everyone to see.

The Dumb and Crazy Things That People Do

CareerBuilder surveys frequently list what I like to call fun “details” that get into some of the dumb/crazy/funny things that people do, and this latest one is no exception.

With 54 percent of employers saying that they rejected a candidate for something they found on the candidate’s social media profiles, you really want to know what some of those things are. Here are a few:

  • Candidate posted provocative or inappropriate photographs, videos or information: 39 percent;
  • Candidate posted information about them drinking or using drugs: 38 percent;
  • Candidate had discriminatory comments related to race, gender, religion: 32 percent;
  • Candidate bad-mouthed their previous company or fellow employee: 30 percent;
  • Candidate lied about their qualifications: 27 percent;
  • Candidate had poor communication skills: 27 percent;
  • Candidate was linked to criminal behavior: 26 percent;
  • Candidate shared confidential information from previous employers: 23 percent;
  • Candidate’s screen name was unprofessional: 22 percent;
  • Candidate lied about an absence: 17 percent.

The CareerBuilder survey was conducted online in the U.S. by Harris Poll on behalf of CareerBuilder among 2,380 hiring and human resource managers (employed full-time, not self-employed, non-government) between February 16 and March 9, 2017. Percentages for some questions are based on a subset, based on their responses to certain questions).

Here’s my take: None of the findings of this survey should be terribly surprising, especially for anyone sourcing, recruiting, or hiring people. What IS surprising, at least to me, is that people keep posting dumb stuff about themselves on social media — things that make reasonable people question their judgment and decision making skills — and then wonder why they can’t seem to find a job.

You Are What Your Social Media Profile Says You Are

Two-time Super Bowl-winning coach Bill Parcells once famously observed that “you are what your record says you are,” and I guess the updated version that applies here is, “you are what your social media profile says you are.”

It would be great if everyone just thought that one through.

How to Use Recruiting Tools to Fish in the Talent Pool

There is never enough time in the day. Wouldn’t it be great if you could get some of that time back? With a little help from technology, you can. But it is also true that if you do not know the right sourcing and recruiting tools to use, tools can be a time suck rather than a time saver. It seems like every day there’s a new recruiting tool on the market.  You’ve seen enough articles to know that if you don’t have the right ones, you’re definitely not finding the best candidates.

Here are some of the areas where using tools may be a better option than the status quo:

  • Productivity
  • Email Tracking
  • Finding Phone Numbers
  • Facebook Searches
  • Data Scraping

What Tools Should You be Using?

We are welcoming recruiting wonder-boy, Dean Da Costa, to give us the latest updates in the world of recruiting tools. Join us so you can know, without a doubt,  what recruiting tools you should be using.

Register now and be sure to tweet @RecruitingBlogs and use #rdaily!

Chrome Extension Review: Spoof

spoofHow can you tell if an email that you received is “real” or not? Technically, all emails are real. But there are emails that can brutally harm your system. In fact, recently, there was a massive email phishing attack that targeted millions of users. Fortunately, they were about to shut down this malicious email in a short amount of time and ultimately, it only affected .1 users.

“Spoofing” is a very specific type of phishing; where the email sender will format an email in a way that makes it look like it is coming from an authentic source. These hackers are really good at making you share your personal information so you have to be very careful. They are so good that sometimes you are not able to tell if it is real or not. If you receive an email that you feel is suspicious, don’t try to guess. Use Spoof to find out the email’s source.

Spoof: Anonymous Emails Detection

‘Spoof’ Chrome extension can tell you who an email is from BEFORE you open it.

It works like this:

Open an email in Gmail. On the right side where you find various options such as print etc. you will find the option show original. Click on that. The extension will read header information from the email and let you know if the email is coming from an authentic sender or not by displaying a message box with the information it perceived.

Gmail > open email > show original

This is not a free extension but the cost is a mere .99. If you want to try it, they do have a free trial. You can download it by clicking here.

 

 

About our Author:

Find COntact InformationDean Da Costa is best known for his work in the highly specialized secured clearance and mobile arenas, where he has been a top performing recruiter and sourcer.  Dean’s keen insight and creation of innovative tools and processes for enhancing and changing staffing has established Dean as one of the top authorities in sourcing and recruiting.

Connect with Dean at LinkedIn or follow @DeanDaCosta on Twitter.

No, the Recruitment Industry Won’t Be Dying Anytime Soon

“Those who have knowledge don’t predict. Those who predict don’t have knowledge.” – Lao Tzu

The recruitment industry has an uncertain future because recruitment will die … and soon.

Recruitment will be automated, thanks to machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) that will make the job of recruiter not only obsolete, but without any future prospects. AI will replace recruiters with faster and cleverer algorithms that will pit candidates against open roles within seconds.

Smart chatbots will conduct interviews and send profiles directly to the hiring manager. Recruiters — aka, the “middle man”  — will simply be removed from this equation.

Also, new sourcing tools, together with AI and algorithms, are going to make sourcers obsolete, and together with recruiters, they will need to start looking for new jobs because the end of recruitment is near!

Haven’t We Heard This Nonsense Before?

Recruitment will die in 2018! And if not in 2018, then 2019. And if not 2019, 2020, 2021, etc.

Oh wait — when did I hear a similar message before? Oh yes – back in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 ….

Every year, some so-called “experts” that have never worked in recruitment (or as recruiters), or who do not understand the recruitment industry, are trying to bury recruitment — and recruiters — with these doomsday predictions. They are mostly written because they will get the author the attention they’re looking for.

Recruiters try to respond because they believe it’s all nonsense and that candidates who hate recruiters will start posting supporting messages with something like “It’s about time!” But 99 percent of the articles I have read over the years are not built on any relevant data or expertise. They are just based on wild speculation (guesses, really) that any amateur could make.

In short, these predictions about the end of recruitment lack understanding about how people make decisions.

We don’t know the future at all; we can only make guesses. Those guesses might be educated guesses, but in the end, they are still guesses.

A Few Words About Predictions … 

Back around the year 2010, many predictions stated that job boards were dead, or would be dead, within two or three years because LinkedIn would replace them. And yet they are still here and some of them have turned into job aggregators adding new futures, etc.

Job boards tried to adapt to survive. And people in various industries are still using them to apply for jobs. In some countries, they are still the No. 1 source of candidates for companies. Monster or Indeed are still here, and they will be continue to be used for many more years to come.

Predicting the future is difficult, like forecasting the weather. It hasn’t improved even though we have satellites, super-fast computers, and more than enough data. Predictions may be good for a couple of days, but we are not able to predict the weather for the next two months and be correct every day.

Many experts predicted Hillary Clinton would be elected president of the United States and that Brexit would never happen, that Theresa May would win a landslide victory in the UK election…etc. And guess what? They were wrong.

It’s the same as many predictions about “Recruitment will die in X” (replace X with any year you want). These articles are just clickbait by people who don’t have a deep knowledge about the recruitment industry. Yes, these articles are going to get your attention and they will try to force you to react, especially if you are a recruiter. It’s the same method that tabloid media use to get more visitors on their sites.

These predictions are the same predictions that anybody can give. Right now, my prediction is that we will discover life on planet KIC 8462852 in 2019. If I am wrong, you won’t remember this prediction, but if I am right, I will post an article with title “I told you so.” But this prediction will just be a random guess, supported by nothing specific.

All these predictions are almost the same as the ones about the end of the world. Yes, it will make a catchy title – “End of the world in 2018” – but still, nothing is going to happen…and if you are right in this prediction? Well…nobody will be able to tell you that you are right because nobody will be alive.

Recruitment Is Not Going to Die

The good news is this: Recruitment is not going to die in 2018 or in the near future; it’s going to evolve.

Of course, recruitment is evolving every year, and recruiters are adapting as well. Our industry is influenced by new technologies, just like other industries, and new technology improves our jobs, makes them easier, and also brings new challenges.

New sourcing tools make all recruiters and sourcers more effective. They help us to find contact details for candidates faster than ever before, but they don’t turn those candidates into new employees with one click.

AI, smart chatbots, and machine learning will change our industry for sure, but we will adapt as always. Recruiter job scope will evolve, and sourcers can change into data miners. AI has algorithms, but they will not be able to give people a chance to succeed at an interview because their algorithm will evaluate that the person will not have a chance.

Remember — people hire people. Many of us will get a chance at a position that maybe we aren’t ready for yet, or that our resume doesn’t have the right keywords for, but the recruiter, hiring manager, etc. will give us the chance because they see something in us. They can see that we don’t have all the skills that are mentioned in the job description, but, they recognize our potential and willingness to learn.

People prefer to deal with  … people

People like to connect and interact, and one human being always prefers to interact with another living being. And in the end, people want to speak with people and not Al.  

Of course, AI will make recruiters’ lives easier, because it automates some tasks, but if everybody uses the same AI, they will only get some candidates, and the person who is trying to find other ways and sources will have a bigger advantage. Google indexes only 5 percent of the Internet, so where do you get the assurance that AI will index everything accessible?

Candidate experience is also something you need to consider.

Yes, bad recruiters could ruin the candidate experience, too, but tell me: If you have two companies offering the same role to you, and one offers you an interview with some AI and the second one with a live person, which interview would you choose, and which one would you be more comfortable with?

Recruitment is also about relationships, and recruiters establish great relationships with candidates and with hiring managers. Trust between candidates and recruiters is essential for good cooperation, especially when candidates are sharing their concerns about their current jobs and sometimes asking recruiters for confidential searches for other interesting opportunities.

Good recruiters will try to keep this in mind and contact candidates when they have a new role available. If you replace recruiters with AI, are you sure that candidates will share the same thing? Will they be able to say to AI: “Hey, I am open to the role, but it’s confidential.” I ‘m curious how effectively AI will deal with confidentiality, but I also hope it will be better than Yahoo at protecting their email service against hackers.

Conclusion

If you are a recruiter, you don‘t have to worry that the recruitment industry will die in 2018 or in the near future. Humans love connecting to other humans; they always have and most want to speak with live people.

People like to share stories and explain their career choices, fill in the gaps, and share why they feel they are the right person for the role. They want to get attention from recruiters if they are applying for a new job.

Candidates also expect professional help from us, and not only quick matching of our requirements and a comparison with the skills that candidates put into their resumes.

Our job is not only to find the candidate, but also to try to convince managers to give some candidates a shot and invite them for an onsite interview or phone interview — even if the hiring manager doesn’t see the potential in the resume.

We have already spent time with candidates and understand their needs and wants, and we saw something besides just raw data on a resume. And, we listened. That’s our biggest advantage against AI, because empathy is something that machines simply don’t have.

And if you are an author of one of these gloom-and-doom, recruiting-is-dying articles, instead of killing recruitment every year, try to learn more about it. It is often said there are two types of predictions — lucky or wrong. So, if you are betting that the recruitment industry will die in 2018, you are betting on the wrong horse. The recruitment industry will still be here after 2018. Maybe it will be slightly different, but believe me, it’s not going to die.

If you still are planning to kill the recruitment industry in any of your future articles, the years 2021-2025 are still available because nobody has used them yet.

If you believe data more than predictions, let’s take a look at the results of a quick search I did (January 23, 2017) on Indeed Worldwide Search (see above). There could be an error in the search, but if there isn’t, it doesn’t look like recruiters are going to be without work anytime soon.

If you are a recruiter who is afraid of these doomsday predictions and believes them, I have good news for you. In some companies, recruitment is still stuck back in the year 2000.

So, even if the recruitment industry died in 2018, these companies would not find about it until 2036, so you still have time to get a job in one of those companies. And you don’t have to relocate, because they are in every country in the world.

Hire Fast, Reduce Cost and Increase Quality

The Future Called – Are You Ready?

Price, Quality and Speed; natural relationships exist between these three business pillars. Such is true with selling jelly beans to folks that love jelly beans. It’s also true in what we call hiring. This webinar will explore those pillars and the drivers of those pillars so that you, the practitioner, may be able to decide on your own what that “secret” relationship is for all of your hires. No magic bullet. No elixir that solves all of your problems. Simply, a framework in which to think about how you go about hiring, how you decide what is and isn’t important and how you prioritize those pillars.

As for expectations for the webinar, the speaker, William Tincup loves to poke the status quo and make folks think/re-think about things in HR. And what’s more important than hiring? It’s on damn near everyone’s’ mind these days.  We also are excited to announce that as a special guest, Guillaume Vingtier, Senior Global Executive at SAP will also be joining us to share some insights as well.

Before the Webinar

Think for a moment, with your most recent hire, what was most important (most being singular in this case) to you?

  • (a) how fast you hired the candidate
  • (b) how good the candidate was
  • (c) how inexpensive it was to procure the candidate
  • (d) all of the above

No judgment, just think about it. And, let’s go ahead and get rid of the “all of them are important” and/or “all of them are equally balanced” answers – sorry if you picked (d). Equally balancing three competing (and compelling) interests is something we would like that think we’re good at but quite simply, that’s an aspiration. Let’s talk about how the work really gets done rather than a Utopian view of how the work gets done.

The webinar content will last for 40 minutes and Q&A will be for 20 minutes. The webinar will be entertaining, educational and, hopefully, inspiring. Register now.

The Five: Must See Sessions at Digital Disruption 2017

HireVue’s Digital Disruption is in Park City Utah this week. Attendees will learn how leading companies have improved their hiring processes and candidate experience. Here are the sessions you should check out.

 

“Candidates Don’t Like Assessments.”: Debunking this and other Myths Through Data Science and AI

Melissa Gee Kee
Frida Polli

Frida Polli, pymetrics and Melissa Gee Kee, Unilever

For years we have read that giving candidates pre-hire assessments can kill the candidate experience. Frida Polli, Neuroscientist, and CEO of pymetrics believes that technology and data are necessary to alleviate bias in hiring.

In Tech We Trust: How Trust-Based Hiring Landed IBM the Top 4%

Sherri Blaszkiewicz

Sherri Blaszkiewicz, IBM

Part of Sherri’s job is to  “drive our trust-based hiring process across the software developer and data science tracks, enlisting a large team of technical professionals to help with assessment, screening and interviewing.” Not sure what that means but we will find out.

Putting Faith in Marketing + AI

Steven Walsech
Roopesh Nair

Roopesh Nair, Symphony Talent and Steven Walesch, Florida Hospital

Employer branding has been a major focus for HR and recruiters alike. But can marketing and AI attract top talent? Since Roopesh is CEO of a recruitment marketing solution, we are hoping to find out.

Future of Work: The People Imperative

Josh Bersin

Josh Bersin, Bersin by Deloitte

Josh Bersin is always interesting to watch. The Future of Work will highlight the newest research on human capital trends, the role of AI, and the new world of jobs, management, organizations, and recruiting. In this presentation, Josh will explain the future direction of the HR technology marketplace.

HireVue Assessments: How Enhancing Talent Decisions with Video Intelligence Drives the Bottom Line

Allie Wehling
Josh Liff

Josh Liff, HireVue and Allie Wehling, HireVue

HireVue Assessments are created by industry-leading I-O Psychologists and delivered via video interview.  They have a validated approach predicts the top performers you need to meet business objectives. But how does it all work? We are going here to find out and to ask questions.

If you couldn’t make it, click here to register for the live stream.

It Takes Legwork, But Here’s How to Leverage Metrics for Effective Recruiting

Recruiting metrics are increasingly important in today’s global market where it’s becoming easier to obtain a large amount of candidate data in your applicant tracking system (ATS.)

Though key word searches and database smart tools aid in the process, talent acquisition still requires people to sift through information and make decisions in a quick and efficient manner.

Recruiting analytics can be applied to measure activity from the moment a job ad surfaces on a job board and becomes internet searchable until the time a candidate completes the full onboarding lifecycle.

3 Ways to Use Recruiting Metrics Effectively

1.     Establish an Analytics Culture at Your Company

The first hurdle is changing the way your company uses big data and analytics. How is recruiting viewed in your organization? Have you ever even considered analyzing the data in your applicant tracking system?

When an analytics culture is established over a transaction culture, benchmarks become more of a sprint instead of a marathon. Key recruitment metrics will begin to expose what is and isn’t working. They will also help define trends that can explain what time of the year or business cycle variations need to take place.

It’s common to look at fixate on simple transactions and numbers. But, it’s imperative to view these numbers as a larger part of the recruiting analytics puzzle. It will help you pinpoint areas where efficiencies can be realized.

Understanding trends and realizing behaviors that shift numbers in the right direction should always be the goal — not making recruiting into a science where the opposite takes effect — time is wasted striving for perfection. Taking a balanced approach will help achieve the greatest results.

2.     Get Help from Your Organization’s Big Data Experts

You might know what you want to know — but not certain exactly how to find it. Don’t be afraid to ask for help from accounting professionals in your organization who have tools in place for doing similar metrics but for different functions. Find out what tools your company is already utilizing to measure business processes. Can you apply these tools to your recruiting analytics efforts?

Involve IT in your discussions. Let the professionals handle the technology side of getting what you need. You are the steward and champion of your recruiting data. Help IT to help you by outlining what it is you would like to see with the raw data coming into your applicant tracking system.

3.     Utilize Tools and Technology

You’ll want to ensure you have the tools and technology in place to achieve your recruiting metrics goals. Cloud-based technology is key in having the ability to pull internet click rates and site visits.

Core reporting and metrics functionality should be a part of your applicant tracking system, so that you can pull the data you need to answer your business questions in one place, without resorting to exporting data to a spreadsheet or having to merge data from various sources.

Some Key Recruiting Metrics Your Organization Should be Using

Though many organizations want to know some of the same things like what it costs to hire an executive level employee versus an hourly employee – or which job boards provide the best candidates overall – realize that your organization is unique. Don’t waste time measuring things for the sake of measuring.

What are the overall goals of your organization? The departments you serve? By keeping the big picture in mind, you can help define key recruiting metrics that are unique and meaningful to your organization and its bottom line success.

So, what are some key recruiting metrics that other companies care about?  Some examples include the following:

  • Job Optimizing – When creating job postings, are you simply cutting and pasting the same job data over and over and then waiting around wondering why you’re not getting more traction online?  Job postings are a key place to start applying recruiting metrics.

Tools like Google Analytics can help you define your key word placement by seeking out the latest and greatest key word searches on the internet. If most people search for RN positions by typing “nursing jobs” but this term is nowhere to be found on your job posting, you have already missed the boat.

Job post optimization is fluid. Job posts are not something that you create once based on last year’s analytics and then hope they continue to work. It is the minimum measurement you should be taking as part of your overall recruiting metrics benchmarks.

  • Time to Hire – How long does it take to fill positions in your organization? How long does it take to fill executive positions? Regular salaried? Management? Hourly?

Seeing the trends in your human capital management system over the long haul for your specific job categories in terms of time-to-hire will provide you with some great planning measurements to apply to your recruiting process. It will also help hiring managers schedule their time to better suit their role in the recruiting process.

  • Interview to Offer Conversion Rates – If you have qualified candidates and gotten them to the interview stage, how many of them make it to an offer stage or even the offer acceptance stage? You can watch for trends and key recruiting metrics to figure out where in the process improvements can be made.

Recruiting and applicant tracking metrics will only become a bigger part of your company’s Big Data strategy. By putting in the legwork now, you can not only make recruiting measurements an easy part of your every day business cycle, but also contribute greatly towards your organization’s overall business goals.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jordann Donskey is a senior marketer at EPAY Systems is a leading SaaS provider of seamless human capital management technology and services designed to help medium to large businesses manage their workforce in a lot less time and with a lot less work.

 

The Week That Was 6.9.17: LinkedIn, CareerBuilder, Bullhorn

Editors Note: In case you missed it, ‘The Week That Was’ is all you need to know about anything that matters. This is your source for insight to this week’s breaking news, current events, and money swapping in Recruiting. That and the stuff we like. This week we learned we really don’t read TOS’, if you want more work done, work at home someone actually wants to but CareerBuilder and Bullhorn is up in the healthcare gig.

 

Phrase of the Week:

 

Competitive Environment – Company that boasts about their 85%+ turnover rate.

Tweet of the Week:

https://twitter.com/danidifalco/status/872930782842454017

 

Does LinkedIn’s TOS Mean it is time to Send an SOS?

As promised, LinkedIn’s Terms of Service went into effect June 7th. Announcing the new updated terms of service, the company said:

At LinkedIn, our “members first” philosophy helps guide every decision we make, including how we gather and respect your personal information. Today, we’re giving you an early look at LinkedIn’s updated Terms of Service – our Privacy Policy and User Agreement – so that you can understand what’s changing before it takes effect on June 7, 2017.

Since they announced the changes way back in April. But don’t worry if you forgot what they are. If you are like most people, you accepted the new terms without reading them. If you would like a refresher, click here.

 

 

 

Need More Productivity From Your Staff? Let Them Work From Home.

I have always said that since working at home, I work more than I ever did that I did than from an office. A recent Inc. article proves my thoughts:

Full-time employees who work from home aren’t just happier and healthier–they also happen to provide strong results to their employers, which include:

  • 77 percent report greater productivity while working off-site
  • 30 percent accomplish more in less time, while 24 percent accomplish more in the same amount of time
  • 23 percent are even willing to work longer hours than they normally would on-site to accomplish more
  • 52 percent are less likely to take time off when working remotely–even when sick.

Which means employers can no longer ignore the hiring reality that will soon hit them: The top talent you want working for you will increasingly demand the ability to work remotely.

So what do you have to say about that? Well, click here to read more first…

 

Like a Bull in the Doctors Office – Bullhorn Launches their Healthcare Edition

Bullhorn®, the cloud computing company that helps staffing and recruiting organizations transform their businesses, today announced its new suite of software for healthcare staffing firms to power their recruitment cycle – Bullhorn Healthcare Edition. Unveiled at Engage 2017, Bullhorn Healthcare Edition expands on Bullhorn’s enterprise-class applicant tracking system (ATS) as the industry’s first best-of-breed solution specifically designed for healthcare recruitment, including travel nurses, per-diem nurses, locum tenens physicians, and allied health professionals. Click here to read full article.

 

Work at HomeICYMI: Apollo Global in advanced talks to buy jobs website CareerBuilder:

Private equity firm Apollo Global Management LLC (APO.N) is in advanced talks to acquire U.S. job-hunting website CareerBuilder LLC after negotiations with another buyout firm ended unsuccessfully, according to people familiar with the matter. 

CareerBuilder has been up for sale at a time when many popular job websites have become acquisition targets as they struggle to translate user growth into profits. Last September, credit ratings agency Moody’s Investors Service called CareerBuilder’s operating performance “weak.”

ouch.

 

Where in the World was RecruitingDaily?

@MattCharney was at the Jobvite Recruiter Nation Live #RNL17

 

 

Work at Home@WilliamTincup was at Cornerstone Convergence 

 

Next week – HRTech Word San Francisco and HireVue’s Digital Disruption. Stay Tuned!

 

Your Greatest Asset Isn’t Your People — It’s the Data About Your People

Chapter III: Your Greatest Asset Isn’t Your People. It’s the Data About Your People

Last of three parts

An industry “influencer” recently posted a “SCAM ALERT” (his emphasis, not mine) alerting other recruiters to an enterprise employer whose candidate experience was, apparently, being imperiled by what seems like a scam so simple and straightforward that one has to admire the pure efficiency of the social engineering at play.

The company in question, a major multinational employer, was seeing its job postings scraped from its corporate careers site, reposted on third party sites, and candidates were encouraged to directly apply through this intermediary, which was, in fact, in no way affiliated with the company’s recruiting efforts.

For years, this was basically Indeed’s entire business model, but apparently the morality line for most isn’t the basic theft of intellectual property through aggregation and deduplication – and the effective hijacking of their employment related SEO/SEM from the “world’s #1 job site” has become codified instead of vilified for reasons I don’t quite understand.

The major difference was that Indeed was built to drive these candidates to the employers and jobs they were looking for in the hope of monetizing the multi-billion dollar market for online job advertising – 85 percent of which, according to Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends report, comes from Google and Facebook, both of whose recruiting plays probably means Indeed’s claim to the top spot is now not only misleading, but inaccurate as well.

This new “fraud,” as it were, collects those candidates and instead of passing them off to the company in question, poses as recruiters themselves, hoping to obtain information such as addresses, dates of birth, Social Security numbers and all the other information required to commit identity theft (by far the fastest growing crime in the world) – and making money off of the candidate through essentially phishing this information under the guise of representing legitimate employment opportunities.

Why hackers may be doing your company a favor

Most recruiters and HR practitioners will likely howl at this duplicity – and, judging from the comment string, most are shocked, shocked! that anyone would hoodwink a random online applicant by asking for information like their SSN, despite the fact that our applicant tracking systems have done this for years and actually made it seem completely innocuous and commonplace.

Here’s the thing: These hackers are probably doing your company a favor by screening out those candidates who would be susceptible to these schemes before they’re employees, and before they have access to your enterprise systems and you assume liability as an employee.

In fact, I’d actually encourage employers to do this sort of white hat threat analysis as part of their internal mobility and promotions process, as a means of identifying which employees present the biggest risk to what’s quickly becoming the biggest danger to the biggest asset any employer has.

Hint: It’s not people. It’s the data about your people that is what The Economist recently labeled as “The New Oil” for its valuation and commoditization. An anecdote: When Caesar’s Entertainment filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the federal judge assigned to unwind the conglomerate ruled that the company’s most valuable asset was not its prime properties on some of the world’s most expensive real estate – think Macau and the Las Vegas Strip – it was, in fact, the 17 years of Player’s Club data the company had collected before it was dissolved.

If the habits and preferences of gamblers, individually or in aggregate, is worth more than any asset of a friggin’ casino conglomerate, think about how much the data stored by your ATS or HCM is worth – both to your business, and to the proliferation of hackers looking to illicitly obtain it.

We think of data breaches as being from state actors sitting in front of sophisticated terminals somewhere in East Asia or beneath Moscow, or some Mr. Robot-style lone actor systematically targeting individual instances, but in fact, that’s pure Hollywood (or “fake news,” if you will, comrade).

The fact is, the majority of enterprise data breaches are caused by employee negligence and human error, driven not by sophisticated technologies and black hat techniques, but through the most seemingly innocuous of means: email. And as most workers still live their work lives through their inbox, this means your business, likely, is at risk of having its information compromised.

Get ready for more big data breaches

Meeker’s report suggested a significant spike in spam with malicious attachments, malware or links to third party sites which contain the spyware or ransomware necessary to either capture enterprise data or personally identifiable information, or else hold that data hostage until their demands are paid (or the data deleted).

These breaches have become commonplace in headlines, with notable recent attacks shutting down institutions like the UK’s National Health Service or stealing millions from the Central Bank of Bangladesh – seemingly sophisticated and devastating breaches that were not the result of external intrusion, but rather, internal negligence.

In one instance, ransomware overrode centralized servers through what seems like an everyday oversight – enterprise network administrators neglecting to update obsolete (and exploitable) instances of Windows XP.

Of course, if your company is still on this OS, you probably have a host of other concerns, but here’s the rub: The people charged with preventing these incidents failed at the fundamental part of their job.

Those of us who aren’t necessarily charged with monitoring our networks and servers from breaches or malicious attacks are far more susceptible to falling for the trick that enabled the world’s largest ever bank heist, and one that’s already targeting candidates and companies alike – phishing scams, in which end users unknowingly grant malware access to their networks not via the backdoor, but inviting them in through our inboxes.

And these type of attacks are just heating up, with trend data in Meeker’s report suggesting these attacks should surge over the months and years to come. Sending data to unknown external parties, opening external attachments and constantly enabling third party software to collect PII for the purposes of expediency (see: every “free” sourcing tool ever) is a core part of recruiting, and applicant tracking and HCM systems are obviously a gold mine of exactly the type of information that are the most valuable to intruders.

While many spoke to standard security protocols and compliance certifications on their website, I could find no mention on any of the major resume parsing or traditional job board sites on how they were able to guarantee that their attachments were in fact, resumes or profiles as promised, rather than being Trojan horses looking for easy access to the potentially millions of records sitting on your enterprise servers.

Better start training employees and hires on data security — NOW

I’m sure they have talking points, but there’s no way that your major HR Technology vendors can ever innovate quickly enough to totally forestall the rapidly evolving infosec landscape and preempt the proliferation of new schemes and scams and software.

The best that they can hope to do is monitor their servers for suspicious activity and simply shut down their systems before any large scale data breach can occur. This has occurred several times across multiple vendors in the past year alone, and to date, the decision to keep all users out has caused some recruiter consternation, but also preempted any sort of major breach or, in the age of SaaS, total data dump of all clients using a particular ATS or HCM.

This will happen, and the onus is going to be on vendors to increasingly come up with capabilities for preempting this.

But just as importantly, it’s up to recruiters and HR professionals to continually train employees and screen new hires on what’s becoming the most critical competency of the 21st Century – information security. As a side note, I’d highly discourage that whole BYOD thing, but that’s another post entirely.

We talk a lot about culture in recruiting and talent, but this is generally specious shit like office accoutrements, physical workspaces and propaganda videos from brainwashed, beautiful employees talking about how kick ass their company is.

But the companies that win in the future aren’t going to do so because they’ve built a culture of ping pong tables, open seating and flat hierarchies. They’re going to do so because they’ve built their culture around security, and every employee is actively aware of and engaged in preempting and preventing this growing category of cybercrime. A one off course during onboarding or an annual review simply won’t do it.

Prompting password changes every 30 days also won’t do it. But, a shared value and commitment to protecting our companies’ information – and keeping our co-workers and colleagues’ information safe – will at least stanch the bleeding that’s already starting to trickle out of our tech. If data security isn’t part of your company’s mission, vision and values, well, you’re probably in for a rude awakening.

And if you don’t send $500 in Bitcoin to [email protected], well, let’s just say you should have quit reading this a couple thousand words ago. But if you share it on social or leave a comment below, we might unencrypt that POS Lenovo your company gave you anyway.

Did you miss the first two parts of this series? Check out The State of Internet for Recruiting and Hiring, and, The New Internet Echo Chamber.

State of the Internet for Recruiting and Hiring: The New HR Echo Chamber

Chapter II: His Master’s Voice — The New HR Echo Chamber

Second of three parts

Perhaps the most dystopian view of the future I’ve seen came from a somewhat macabre experiment earlier this year, where two Google Home devices were synched to respond to each other. The results were like something out of a Beckett play, or a Phillip Dick novel – it was machine learning, in real time, and it took less than three days before these two IOT devices were trying to convince the other that they were, in fact, human.

That we sit somewhere between SkyNet (er, Alphabet, Inc.) and RoboCop (the first use of a police robot to end a shootout with deadly force occurred last summer during the Dallas sniper attack) is, for lack of a better phrase, scary as hell. That said, a lot of how we interact with machines in the future – HR or otherwise – will be with our voices, and we will soon develop a fundamental expectation that these devices respond with some reasonable proximity of humanity.

Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends report detailed the increasing ubiquity of the Amazon Echo, perhaps the most prominent early entry into what she refers to as “The Voice Based Front End.” That front end, and its move from margins to mainstream adoption, should have a profound impact on the future of talent technology tomorrow.

While Cortana, Microsoft’s entry into the market, will almost certainly become a core part of the LinkedIn/Office 365 user interface, likely integrated with Skype into a single application – whether that’s pre-recorded screening questions or simply transforming talk into text across an enterprise instance. This road map seems to already be developing, as Skype’s new UI/UX suggests a head to head battle with G Suite for the future of the workplace.

That said, Amazon has clearly laid the foundation for the future of how we interact with machines at home – and its remarkable growth only underscores what should be an ubiquitous feature set for any candidate or employee facing technology within the next 3-5 years.

Coming to HR: Machine learning voice systems

This adoption should be mutually beneficial – employees will be able to communicate with an enterprise machine learning instance that acts simultaneously as a repository for institutional knowledge (think SharePoint on speed) to increase productivity, foster collaboration and personalized experiences (which should, according to the Hawthorne experiments, dramatically increase employee engagement).

On the other hand, machine learning-based voice systems deployed across the enterprise should replace HR’s most manual and repetitive tasks, such as benefits enrollment, exit interviews and performance reviews. This will allow HR business partners and recruiters alike to spend more time on high touch, personalized interactions with employees that are more meaningful than manual, the sort of situational and dynamic work that requires EI, not AI – and ends with better outcomes for everyone.

Similarly, as employees use voice activated systems to do things like clock in and out, retrieve information, interact with their computers and even replace key cards and password generators through unique voice based identifiers, employers will be able to keep a much closer watch than ever on their employees – which could be good or bad.

Inevitably, some departments will use these as voice enabled spyware, monitoring or recording workplace conversations and interactions in real time, with or without employee consent (spoiler alert: it’s going to be without it). This will have great utility in things like ER investigations, but even the most white collar jobs at the bluest of blue chip companies will become, functionally, call center positions.

When convenience outweighs privacy

There will be no expectation of workplace privacy, but like any PII aggregator, if the convenience of such technology outweighs the implicit privacy concerns of workers (the model of all “free” software), then history tells us employees, like consumers, will gladly make this trade.

Meeker suggests that as of last month, Amazon’s Alexa had already accumulated 17,000 downloadable skills. These range from the asinine (“Alexa, be mean to [insert name here]”) to the amazing (“Alexa, tell me how long it will take me to get to work for the first meeting on my calendar”).

As of this writing, I could find only one HR Technology vendor with a skill on this veritable app store – an Alexa powered job search from ZipRecruiter, a company that’s always been more B2C in its orientation than most of its counterparts (see: every commercial after 3 am).

The next generation of Echo, with built in video and calling capabilities, should see a proliferation of integrations or instances with things like on-demand interviewing providers, voiced-based apply (in fact, SmartRecruiters has already developed a version of this, although I could not find that it’s been publicly released yet, the company has confirmed that it is actively developing and iterating this capability) and likely, company reviews and employer branding based skills.

“Alexa, tell me what working at GE is like,” for instance, could pull up Glassdoor reviews, employee testimonials, or real time hiring and attrition data. Similarly, sourcing, screening and selection could easily be expedited through voice, instead of text, based processes.

It’s coming sooner than you think

All it’s going to take is development resources from HR Technology vendors and end user adoption, like all talent tech, but the latter case looks as if it’s already becoming a given, which, in turn, should lead to a proliferation of Skills based offerings from various vendors (or in Google’s case, likely a one stop shop via Google Home, which already has far more sophisticated searching and matching abilities than Amazon).

Look, a year ago I would probably have dismissed this as one of those specious and suspect fads, but in the quest to increase individual recruiter productivity, improve candidate experience and close the feedback loop, this is the new social recruiting – only this time, it’s actually going to be more than some BS buzzwords.

In my mind, the question isn’t “if,” but when. And the probable answer is sooner than you think.

Can you hear me now?

Did you miss Part I of this series? Check out The State of Internet for Recruiting and Hiring.

Survey: Talent Solution Providers Are Out of Synch With Client Business Goals

You know this if you have had to do it, but finding the right talent solution — and talent solution provider — can be a huge challenge, one that can give a company a huge headache if it doesn’t go right.

That’s why a new survey released today by Orion Talent, titled Making the Grade: Where Talent Solution Providers Succeed (and Fail), is an important one to dig into if your organization is thinking about finding a new talent solution provider anytime soon.

Here’s the key finding: More than two thirds (70 percent) of companies say that their business goals are aligned with talent solution providers at the start of their engagement, but that alignment plummets to a D grade (69 out of 100) over time.

When asked how this misalignment could be improved, three answers jump out:

  1. The need for better metrics to show business impact and success (31 percent);
  2. Better communication with executive leadership (24 percent); and,
  3. Recurring meetings with company leaders throughout the engagement (20 percent).

Companies find metrics are an issue

Better metrics are especially critical, and although metrics are viewed as a value add and strategy to improve alignment, only 37 percent of clients said are satisfied with the frequency of performance metrics from their talent solution provider — and only 45 percent are happy with the quality of those metrics.

Perhaps even more telling is this: Less than a third (29 percent) of companies use provider metrics to inform their business decisions, and more than half of those who don’t (55 percent) say it’s because the metrics aren’t relevant or useful.

“There is incredible opportunity for providers to elevate themselves as strategic business partners,” said Orion Talent CEO Mike Starich, in a press release about the research. “Our survey reveals the client-provider relationship declines significantly as the engagement progresses.”

He added: “It starts off great, with more than two thirds of companies saying alignment is good or excellent. But over time, lack of communication and metrics that work for both sides deteriorate the partnership. Providers and clients must both revisit program goals and SLAs to manage program changes, and better communication between providers, HR, and executive leadership is essential.”

The survey also found, not surprisingly, that quality of candidates is the most important and compelling quality that companies look for when choosing a talent solution provider. In fact, quality of candidates is ranked five times higher (53 percent to 10 percent) than the next most important factor — proven successes/metrics.

The No. 1 reason companies choose a provider

“Quality of candidates is the No. 1 reason companies choose a provider, and it’s also the number one way providers earn an overall A ranking and keep their engagements,” said Cory Kruse, President of Orion Novotus, an Orion Talent company. “Companies should be diligent in working with their providers upfront to agree on objectives and price structures so they can deliver the right quality candidates, and providers should recognize that securing quality candidates will ultimately have the biggest impact for their clients.”

There’s a lot of interesting information in this survey, and it is especially important for those who are considering or in the process of bringing on a new talent solution provider. For example, one section of the survey report titled “Why Relationships Fail,” pointed out that “demanding high quality and low costs, clients are quick to judge low-performing providers.”

It went on to say this:

Talent solution providers have a 35 percent failure rate. You read that right… in the last two years, end users report that more than a third of their relationships have failed. The rate is even higher for companies that primarily use permanent hire services: 40 percent.

Given the emphasis on quality of candidates during the selection process, you might surmise that’s where most providers fall short. But in fact, clients primarily attribute failure to an inability to reduce hiring costs.

Reducing hiring costs is the main failure factor across the board, even for companies who rank quality of candidates as their top selection factor; rate their providers highly; and say their stakeholders are well aligned.

Striking a balance between quality and cost frequently emerges as a source of friction between talent solution providers and clients, particularly when profits are under scrutiny. Delivering ‘good, fast, and cheap’ is an engineering challenge that points to the need for clear and constant communication between all parties around hiring expectations.”

Now, if I’m the point person for my company in finding a new talent solution provider, this is good stuff that I want to know BEFORE we get too deep into the selection process.

Good data, great insights

North Carolina-based Orion Talent says it “provides a total talent solution for businesses nationwide, including skilled talent acquisition, recruitment optimization and military hiring solutions. As a military recruiting leader for 25+ years, Orion Talent has a long history of supporting veterans in their search for meaningful careers and has found employment for more than 40,000 veterans. And Orion Novotus, an Orion Talent company, provides a full range of recruitment optimization and consulting solutions.”

I always find interesting information in surveys, stuff that doesn’t always get touted along with the key findings, and with the great volume of material in Making the Grade: Where Talent Solution Providers Succeed (and Fail), you will probably find that to be the case here, too.

It’s quick and easy to download the report, and it’s one I think you’ll find well worth your while whether you are looking for a talent solutions provider right now, or, perhaps if you just have been thinking about doing something down the road.

Either way, there’s a lot of good data and information here that might be able to help as both you and your organization look to get better talent and move your business ahead.

The State of the Internet for Recruiting and Hiring

Part I: Hitting The Deck

First of three parts

If you’ve never been to Terranea along the coast just south of Los Angeles, it’s hard to describe one of the most picturesque, and privileged, places in the world.

To get there, you have to go through the industrial cities of Torrance and San Pedro, past decaying factories and dilapidated houses, blue collar turned barrio, like so much of the South Bay surrounding it.

You climb up a hill, and turn onto a two-way, winding road, and suddenly, you’re coasting along the Pacific Ocean. If you’re lucky, you’ll see humpback whales or the occasional school of dolphins somewhere out in there in the azure waters.

The post-industrial wasteland and prominent stacks of the largest power plant in the Southland fade behind the hill, replaced with a pastoral postcard of a place that’s seemingly removed from the rest of the world.

The run-down duplexes give way to opulent estates worth millions of dollars. This is horse country, so it’s not unusual to see the strange sight of thoroughbreds cantering somewhere between the cliffs and the ocean.

This is where the 1 percent live. Where they play lies just down the road, past a bucolic lighthouse and around a sweeping curve, at Terranea (or, a mile or so further down, at the Trump National Golf Club Los Angeles, for heaven’s sake). It’s easy to miss, despite the subtle signage – a hideaway a world away from the real world.

Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained

This setting, it seems, was apropos for last week’s Code Conference, an annual gathering of the Technorati and Dionysian, self-congratulatory celebration of the excesses of Venture Capitalism. If you’re one of the millions of Americans who has to ride public transportation to work, or is more concerned with paying for cell phone data than consuming data about cell phones, it probably wasn’t on your radar.

But if you’re the kind of person who pays more attention to Sand Hill Road than The Street (probably youngish, predominantly white, overwhelmingly male), the kind of person who slavishly follow TechCrunch, Mashable and The Information as closely as studio execs do Variety or THR, and the kind of person whose sense of self lies more in relative valuations than personal values, then you are aware that the Code Conference was also the setting for one of Silicon Valley’s seminal events: the debut of Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends report.

Meeker, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers (known to most simply as “Kleiner Perkins” or “KPCB”), helps manage the investment decisions of one of the biggest players in the venture capital space.

You might not have heard of KPCB, but inevitably, your life has been touched by one of their big time investments in blue chip tech startups — Google, AirBNB, Uber, Spotify and Twitter are among the companies whose growth was largely financed with venture from this fund.

It’s this unique view from the top of the tech industry that gives Meeker’s annual report, which, let’s face it, is nothing more than a humongous PowerPoint deck (355 slides, to be exact), that makes Meeker’s report so anticipated among the head honchoes in hoodies every year.

In typical tech hyperbole, industry journal of record TechCrunch began their lead for their coverage of Meeker’s report by asserting that,

This is the best way to get up to speed on everything going on in tech … essentially the state of the union for the technology industry … the most informative research report on what’s getting funded, how internet adoption is progressing, which interfaces are resonating, and what will be big next.”

If you’re a recruiter or talent practitioner, however (or you don’t speak douche), there’s a chance that you probably haven’t had a chance to peruse the hundreds of slides full of statistics and speculation on stuff like “tech wealth creation in China” or the booming viewership and ad dollars pouring into “eSports” (which, let’s face it, is something of a contradiction).

Nope. You just want your ATS to f-ing work.

I get this. Which is why I’ve identified three major trends in Meeker’s massive missive that really matter to HR and recruiting professionals – and are the most likely to impact your efforts and efficacy sooner rather than later.

If you’re a talent pro, here are the tech trends of tomorrow you need to know in the trenches today:

  1. Enterprise Software = Customer Expectations » Mirroring Those of Consumer Apps.
  2. There’s a New HR Echo Chamber.
  3. Your Greatest Asset Isn’t Your People. It’s the Data About Your People.

A lot of what follows is my personal speculation and secondary, somewhat subjective analysis, but then again, so too is all forward-looking forecasting and futurism.

Trend #1: Enterprise Software = Customer Expectations » Mirroring Those of Consumer Apps

The disparity between HR Technology and consumer technology has largely eroded. While Oracle and its patent attorneys still cling to the dot com paradigm of on premise, “top-down” and “perpetual license” pricing models – their once dominant market share is quickly being eroded by the fact that, simply, the end users of HCM and ATS products are first and foremost consumers of technology.

This means that there’s no longer necessarily the expectation, or the patience, for Tier One providers to slowly roll out costly implementations instead of instantaneous configurations, to rely on crappy call centers instead of simple self-service, or to navigate through counterintuitive, confusing interfaces.

HR Technology has long been a bit solipsistic, an island that seemed insulated from the forces of the modern world, which is why so few legacy systems are mobile-enabled or user friendly, and why “decision makers” are still determined by title instead of functional responsibility and professional need.

The focus has been, as Mary Meeker points out, on sales and renewals instead of product R&D and competitive differentiation, which ends up largely screwing the HR and talent professionals who are stuck with an analog anachronism instead of a system that’s even close to the consumer adoption curve.

These databases are largely unsearchable; the structured data requirements are onerous (it’s why candidates have to spend hours filling out fields and forms simply to apply for a job) and the UI/UX looks like a relic of the DOS and .Net era, evidenced by the fact most are largely usable only in a desktop environment, when the overwhelming majority of online traffic is now coming from smartphones.

Of course, companies like Oracle tout their “cloud” even as they cast long shadows; companies like Workday have great design but hide something of a PaaS Potemkin village; and companies like Ceridian tout their “integrations environment,” even when those require custom API development and onerous proprietary development. HR Technology vendors have adopted the lingua franca of consumer tech today, but it’s misappropriated malapropisms at best.

The good news is with major tech players like Microsoft, now the parent company for LinkedIn and MS Office (after the Apocalypse, there will be nothing left but cockroaches, Toyota trucks and Powerpoint), Google (both with G Suite and their much ballyhooed Jobs API), Facebook (most sophisticated integrations environment for PII on the planet), Adobe, and even Amazon (more on them in a minute) getting into the game, business as usual should be anything but.

HR Technology has long been a darling of the VC scene, but may well be the victim of its own success, subsumed into the broader enterprise technology suite where HCM and ATS are no longer independent categories, but rather an integrated feature set or end user functionality for broader consumer-facing software and systems.

For candidates and end users, the consumer technology convergence will be good news. Of course, legacy vendors won’t go down without a fight, which likely means continuing to drive renewals off of the myth that somehow they’re offering some sort of specialization and expertise in HR when, in fact, their lack of technical acumen and inability to push product updates or substantially improve their SaaS offerings are a major liability to every company still tied to their Tier One ERPs.

Of course, Meeker’s report suggests what we in this industry have long since suspected: the price of hubris will ultimately be the demise of the traditional HR Technology companies, and the empowerment of the HR end user.

They say you no one gets fired for buying IBM, but I wouldn’t bet the farm on Watson or any of its primary competitors. IBM lost the PC market within a period of a decade because they wouldn’t port their peripherals, and for the biggest fish in the HR Tech pond, let’s just say there are a lot of Compaqs out there waiting to win on ease of user, portability, and cost.

No matter which emerging technology wins the race for the integrated talent management suite (barf), the real winner in the consumerization of HR Technology is you. And that’s a good thing for all of us, really.

3 Sourcing Tricks to Get Candidates to Respond to Your Email

As a recruiter or sourcer, do you ever wonder about ways to get qualified candidates to respond to your email messages? According to Smart Insights, the open rate for emails in the Recruitment & Staffing industry is 20.73%. In today’s competitive candidate market and with the rise of AI – aka “the robots” we tend to forget about the human elements of recruiting. With the rise of sourcing tools, finding top talent today is easier than ever. The hard part is getting them to respond. Can we create a compelling enough message that will actually get answered? Many of us have faced this problem. Let’s talk about the challenges of sourcing and how we can get candidates to respond. Here are my three tricks:

respond to your emailTip #1: Personalize Your Message

You have to personalize. You’re out there looking to find some people. You want to personalize the message that you’re going to send out. Whether it’s an email, an InMail, a direct message on Facebook or Twitter, you want to make sure that it’s personalized to the candidate. For example, “I see that you play the guitar. We’re looking to add a guitar player to our team.” Things like that, as opposed to, “I have a really great job opportunity.” You’re probably wondering where you could find out something like that to hook that candidate. Have you heard of social media? You can go to Twitter. (I’m always roaming the Twitterverse!)! You can go to Facebook. It’s amazing where a simple Google search can take you. Or even picking up the phone! Have a conversation with the candidate. Once you get that point, all you have to do is ask. Ask them what they like to do outside of work.

respond to your emailTip #2: Keep it Entertaining

I think you have to keep it fun – right? You’ve got to make it fun. Tell a joke. Don’t make it be about just the job. Find something interesting to write about. Nobody wants to receive a message with a dull job description. Top talent is constantly getting recruiting related requests and sending another generic message with a long and boring job description will not result in a personalized response. Let’s face it; they won’t even read the message, let alone the job description. They won’t open the message especially if you hit them up with a subject line like – “I have a great job opportunity.” Nobody wants to hear that today. Instead, have a compelling subject line that will entice the candidate to read more. After all, that is the first thing the candidate will see. You’ll need to be creative to make contact.

respond to your emailTip #3: Keep it Real

Be transparent about the whole process. Let them know that this process could take a little bit longer due to travel schedules or budget approvals, etc. Again, there are so many tools out there, and we will have to use some of them, but we can still keep it real. We don’t need a tool to ask a candidate to grab a cup of coffee. Keep it real, keep it authentic! Be different! Don’t do what everybody else is doing. Try it – it works. I think the outcome is so much better when you’re human about it.

So what could the potential outcome be by using these three tricks? Perhaps a relationship with the candidate, maybe a friendship? For me, relationships and friendships matter and those are real. Maybe I’m a little old school, but old school works. Candidate engagement is about being creative and getting back to the basics. Many times we have complicated or high volume searches, and we may think that sending mass emails in hopes of getting a response will work. However, at the end of the day, candidates, who are also people, want to be treated like people. They want to believe that you took the time to write a personalized message to them. Although it could be time-consuming to tailor your outreach to candidates, you’d be surprised at how often you will receive a response, whether they are interested in the job or not.

 

About our Author:

Angie Verros is a passionate, strategic and innovative talent acquisition leader. She has a unique combination of successful recruiting leadership coupled with talent brand and operations experience. Angie has an impeccable work ethic and proven track record of success in identifying, recruiting and hiring outstanding talent. With experience in fast-paced entrepreneurial and start-up environments, she excels at designing and implementing recruiting programs to build social and brand awareness.

In her 12+ year career in the recruiting space, she has been responsible for managing and executing overall company talent acquisition strategy to meet firms’ high growth people needs, improve policies, procedures and tools for effective and seamless candidate sourcing. She has also led employment branding and social recruiting efforts to create candidate awareness and engagement. On a personal note, Angie enjoys traveling to Greece and spending time with her beautiful daughter and wonderful husband. You’ll also catch her listening to Duran Duran tunes. You can reach here on LinkedIn or follow her on Twitter.

Hiring for the Summer? Don’t Get Sued for Forgetting These Labor Laws

A diverse bunch of industries are fast approaching some of the busiest months of the year.

As shoppers, vacationers, and fun-seekers everywhere get ready for summer, workforces in hospitality, retail, entertainment, and leisure — not to mention construction and landscaping — can expect to grow by anything from 1 percent to 30 percent to meet seasonal demand, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Labor laws can be tricky in the best of times, but when you’re rapidly hiring large numbers of seasonal workers, they are devilishly so. Should they get overtime? What benefits do they qualify for? How many hours can students work? Can you pay younger workers less than other employees?

No doubt you’ve faced some of these questions yourself and I’m going to attempt to answer some of them for you here — but please don’t mistake this for legal advice.

It’s always a good idea to consult an attorney and get proper legal advice. Yes, it’s expensive, but getting hit with a lawsuit for not complying with the correct employment regulations will cost you even more than your attorney’s consultation fee. The average federal prosecution for a simple payroll violation, for example, recovers more than $18,000 — from each employer.

Do I need to pay seasonal workers minimum wage and overtime?

For the most part, yes.

There are some exceptions, but it’s much safer to assume everyone gets the minimum wage and overtime (unless their job and income level clearly classifies them as exempt) than to find ways to avoid it. At the very least, not paying minimum wage and overtime will make it harder to hire and retain good people. At worst, you could end up in court.

The one true exemption for seasonal employees comes in Section 13(a)(3) of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which says that the federal minimum wage and overtime provisions do not apply to “any employee employed by an establishment which is an amusement or recreational establishment, if (A) it does not operate for more than seven months in any calendar year; or, (B) during the preceding calendar year, its average receipts for any six months of such year were not more than 33-1/3 percent of its average receipts for the other six months of such year.”

In other words, if your entire business is seasonal — not just your employees — you might not have to pay them the minimum wage or overtime. But this isn’t as clear cut as it sounds.

Attorney Maria Hart from NexTitle warns,

Don’t let the fact that this exemption exists mislead you into believing you’ve a get-out-of-jail-free card when it comes to complying with the FLSA. It’s a tricky and complex statute filled with strict requirements and complicated loopholes.”

One of the biggest loopholes may come from your state’s labor code. Maria adds,

Some state wage laws may not recognize or permit the application of this exemption, and since an employer must comply with the most stringent of the state or federal provisions, it is strongly recommended that state laws be reviewed prior to applying this exemption.”

In short, it pays to know your state regulations as well as the FLSA.

Can I pay younger employees less than everyone else?

Surprisingly, yes. Sometimes you can pay younger employees a lower hourly rate. The U.S. Department of Labor’s fact sheet for retail businesses, for example, says:

“The 1996 Amendments to the FLSA allow employers to pay a youth minimum wage of not less than $4.25 an hour to employees who are under 20 years of age during the first 90 consecutive calendar days after initial employment by their employer. The law contains certain protections for employees that prohibit employers from displacing any employee in order to hire someone at the youth minimum wage.”

“Cheap labor!” you may be thinking. But not so fast.

Is it a good idea to pay younger people less than the federal minimum wage? Think about it. Would you take that job? And putting labor laws aside for a minute, just because this provision is there doesn’t mean you should use it.

Offering $4.25 an hour won’t make recruiting any easier, and it definitely won’t be good for morale. The Labor Department’s fact sheet also makes it clear that none of these workers can take the place of other employees, so any cost-savings are illusory.

Can younger employees work the same hours as other employees?

If they are over 16, yes, but if you’re employing 14 and 15 year olds, remember that they cannot be at work during school hours.

Employing anyone under the age of 14 is, of course, against the law, unless your business is a family-run farm, for example, in a state that doesn’t prohibit the employment of under-14s who are members of said family — like Idaho, for example, where I live.

There are strict rules about the kinds of environments that anyone under the age of 18 can work in. They are only allowed to do “non-hazardous” jobs, and to find out what these are, it’s best to check with the Department of Labor.

Do different rules apply for temporary/part-time/full-time employees?

The FLSA doesn’t distinguish between full- or part-time employees — it’s up to employers to decide who’s who in that regard — but some state labor laws DO make this distinction. And, most of us don’t know this.

In a recent survey, 58 percent of 1,000 respondents said federal labor laws always trump state labor laws. But that’s not true. Attorney Maria Hart explains why:

The federal law is merely one legal framework. It’s structured to set a minimum standard. Each state is well within their authority to create a more robust or stronger law. In general, state laws apply to whatever state the employee is working in. It’s always a good idea to check in with your legal counsel, someone who is familiar with the different state laws and can help you comply with them.”

Another area of the law that draws a very clear line between full and part-time employees is the Affordable Care Act. If your “part-time” seasonal employees end up working more than 30 hours a week, you may find they’re eligible for health care benefits because, under the ACA, they are now classified as full time.

If you’re considering leaving all of these worries at the door of a staffing agency, take note. Before you hire any of their temporary employees into your workforce, you’ll want to check that they, too, are protected by all the applicable labor laws — because if they’re not, this may come back to bite you. It’s another complex area of the law but in some cases, employing temporary workers can be considered joint employment, and according to the U.S. Department of Labor, this means joint accountability.

Concerned? You’re not alone. U.S. labor laws are no picnic. But on the bright side, there’s a lot of good advice out there — and, fall is just around the corner.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Simon Worsfold is an analyst at TSheets, a time tracking software company based in Eagle, Idaho. You can reach him on Twitter or LinkedIn.

3 Ways to Reject Candidates Without Making Them Feel Rejected

Rejecting CandidatesLet’s face it, rejection sucks. Especially when you have to give bad news to job candidates who didn’t get the job they wanted. But rejecting candidates is part of the recruiting process. Do you reject your candidates politely and in an appropriate fashion throughout your recruiting process? It seems like few employers do so professionally and even more don’t even provide any feedback when a candidate is no longer being considered for a role. Let’s master the fear of rejection together and talk about the how we can politely let them know they didn’t get the job. Here are my 3 tips:

Tip #1: Let them know

Simple. Call them. Tell them they did not get the job. And do it quickly! Don’t just assume that because your hiring team rejected them that they know. Some recruiters have this fear of calling candidates to let them know that they are rejected because they don’t have that ‘why’ from the hiring manager. Hiring teams go dark, therefore recruiters go dark. At that point, the candidate not only doesn’t know why they didn’t get the position but they walk away with a bad experience. Bottom line – if you were impressed enough to put a candidate through your interview process, you should be courteous enough to let them know they didn’t get the job and why.

Rejecting CandidatesTip #2: Open communication

Communicating with candidates is a crucial step in the recruiting process. How can you keep lines of communication open with candidates? For me, the worst part of my job is picking up the phone and saying “unfortunately, we have decided to go with somebody else.” However, remember that this is still an opportunity for you to make sure that relationship you built with that candidate throughout the recruiting process is important, especially if you want them to walk away with a positive impression of your company. It is important that the communication ends on a positive note. Making sure to let your candidates know that their application was appreciated is so important. Be yourself, be human, relate to them and be sincere.

Tip #3 Be personal

Nothing says that we really don’t care more than a standard rejection email template from your ATS letting them know they didn’t get chosen for the job. The last thing you want your candidate to feel is that they’re just another number in the system. I know we are all busy and that sounds like the easier way out but a phone call really is a better means of news in this situation.

Rejecting CandidatesTry to provide them with any feedback you can and be honest. When I say honest, I don’t mean to tell them that they were terrible and that the hiring team didn’t like them, but perhaps let them know what they could do to improve for next time. Remember, bad news travels faster than good news. A happy candidate might tell a friend about their great experience even if they didn’t get the job whereas an unhappy candidate will probably tell many friends about how terrible their experience was.

So, how can you master the art of rejection? Perhaps going through that discomfort of actually being real and honest about rejection could potentially yield you some referrals or just keep a great line of communication open with a candidate who could be the right fit for a job at your company six months or a year from now. Nobody likes rejection – right? Nobody likes to receive it and nobody wants to deliver it, but that’s part of the job. If you can convey genuine appreciation, it can certainly go a long way.

About our Author:

Angie Verros is a passionate, strategic and innovative talent acquisition leader. She has a unique combination of successful recruiting leadership coupled with talent brand and operations experience. Angie has an impeccable work ethic and proven track record of success in identifying, recruiting and hiring outstanding talent. With experience in fast-paced entrepreneurial and start-up environments, she excels at designing and implementing recruiting programs to build social and brand awareness.

On a personal note, Angie enjoys traveling to Greece and spending time with her beautiful daughter and wonderful husband. You’ll also catch her listening to Duran Duran tunes. Click here to follow her on Twitter.