Facebook Unveils Yet Another Recruiter-Friendly Feature

The hits just keep on coming.

Facebook means more than sharing photos and whining about the election. It means business. In the past few months, the most popular social network on the planet at almost 2 billion people strong has introduced Facebook at Work and job postings on Pages.

It’s also getting serious about how it makes money through messaging, which has been historically elusive for apps.

We already know that candidates who apply to job openings via Fan Pages in the future will engage with an employer via Messages. And now we know there’s another way for employers to target prospects and engage with them on Facebook with newly introduced Sponsored Messages.

How Employers Can Leverage Sponsored Messages

There are two ways recruiters can leverage Messages to hire more effectively with Facebook. Let’s take a look.

Communication integrated into advertising. You already know what an ad on Facebook looks and acts like. Similar to just about every other online ad you’ve ever seen, there’s usually text, and image and a hotlink. The hotlink typically takes users to another website.Facebook’s new solution allows a user to directly message the advertiser, remaining in Facebook. So, imagine a button within an ad that says, “Message” or “Contact.” From there, a window pops up that leverages chatbot technology that’s been available for some time now. Candidates will be conversing with a robot that emulates a human. Similarly to how Olivia works, the chatbot can take a candidate through an application process by asking questions like What’s your name? Do you have a driver’s license? Ideally, developers will be able to dump data into a bucket that’s manageable outside of Facebook.
Direct marketing. Employers will be able to send unsolicited messages to users who have previously participated in threads with that brand. Facebook users are comfortable messaging with friends, but not so much with brands and advertisers. Well, get ready for more Messenger traffic from advertisers. Who advertisers will be able to message is a bit gray at this point, but I’m guessing anyone who Likes a company, comments on Page posts or clicks on a company advertisement could be fair game. It’s also unclear how these messages will be sent, but similar to how messages are sent through services like Mailchimp or Aweber seem logical.
Direct marketing via Sponsored Messages.

It’s important to note that users can block advertisers for any reason, so it’ll pay to be prudent with recruitment marketing. A smart strategy might be to send a message to any prospect that may have clicked an ad promoting a job fair with a reminder message highlighting the event the day before.

Sponsored messages isn’t a product specifically built for the workplace, but it can undoubtedly be utilized to do so. Messaging is the most popular activity on a mobile phone, and it’s only getting bigger. And don’t forget Facebook owns Instagram and WhatsApp, both of which lend themselves to moving the needle on monetizing messaging.

If you haven’t boarded the messaging bandwagon in your personal life, it’s time to jump on. Because all signs are pointing to it having an impact on the success of your professional life.

About the Author

Joel Cheesman has over 20 years experience in the online recruitment space. He worked for both international and local job boards in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. In 2005, Cheesman founded HRSEO, a search engine marketing company for HR, as well as launching an award-winning industry blog called Cheezhead.

He has been featured in Fast Company and US News and World Report. He sold his company in 2009 to Jobing.com. He was employed by EmployeeScreenIQ, a background check company. He is the founder of Ratedly, an iOS app that monitors anonymous employee reviews. He is the father of two children and lives in Indianapolis. Yes, he’s on Twitter and LinkedIn. You can hire him too.

Transformational Talent: Portrait of the High-Potential Workforce

We’ll reveal how to find and attract transformational talent and how to create high-impact opportunities that retain the team that you have already hired.

Transformational Talent: Portrait of the High-Potential Workforce

Talent professionals know the allure of the exceptional hire. Those whose impressive resume, career path or charisma seem to guarantee high performance. We’ve been told the workforce contains a finite pool of these invaluable employees—but does it? What if you could look beyond standard recruiting assessments to identify more candidates? Ones with a high potential to transform your organization?

Too often, business strategies fail because the organization lacks the talent to implement those strategies. While it’s important to remember that strategic workforce planning isn’t an HR process, it’s a business process.

Join us as we reveal how to find and attract transformational talent. Learn how to create high-impact opportunities that nurture, develop and retain the game-changers that you have already hired.

You’ll learn:

Develop actionable strategies to transform your recruiting
Build repeatable processes that attract high performers to your organization
Use Indeed data and tools to identify top performers

Meet our presenter:

Bianca Rehmer, Recruitment Evangelist, Indeed
As a Recruitment Evangelist with the Indeed Employer Insights Team, Bianca Rehmer pairs platform data with industry trend analysis. She shares Indeed’s story and brings the value of the company’s programs and solutions to life.
Connect with her on LinkedIn.

Rational Recruiting: Big Data Myths Debunked

Have you ever been inside a factory? The sounds of machines cranking, the hustle and bustle of the room, the smell of steam. There’s something to admire about this image of efficiency, where every element has been tuned just right to produce whatever product it makes at the maximum rate while every piece of the system works synchronously like a metal orchestra.

So often we talk about recruiting as marketing or metaphorically compare it with dating but when I see that image of process and synchronization, I really wish our best practices lent themselves to a manufacturing metaphor. See, manufacturing is all about operationalizing and optimizing to make a better product in the future. Their most core philosophies revolve around making something work more efficiently based on measured inputs and outputs. They look at every widget and cycle to assure timeliness and production efficiencies. It’s a far cry from many of our own models, if we’re being honest.

Often times when it comes to recruiting, the over-stated, under utilized philosophy goes something like this: understanding the success of how we hire means measuring our progress every step of the way, much like an operations expert might look at a machine. Most recruiters (and recruiting listicles) can agree that measurement is the key to making better decisions down the line and ultimately hiring exceptional candidates.

With that philosophy in mind, we’ve adopted a standard of metrics that we continually leverage to make our hiring processes more intelligent and our businesses more successful: cost-per-hire; time-to-hire; number of applicants; applicants per position; the list goes on. No doubt these metrics are effective at keeping our companies streamlined, our budgets under control, and our teams fully staffed — but there’s a change brewing in the industry that might surprise you.

Diagnosing Culture: The New Big Data

According to Jobvite’s annual Recruiter Nation Report 2016, recruiters now care more about what happens after the hire, instead of before. While traditional metrics do still matter, recruiters know they’re successful today when talent ramps quickly and performs at high levels. Almost 40 percent of recruiters rate performance of a new hire as the most important metric for evaluating their success, followed by almost 25 percent who report retention rate is most essential. From there, it drops all the way down to just 13 percent of recruiters who state that time-to-hire is most important, while 11 percent answer cost-per-hire.

And it makes sense right? This is a metric we should have been focused on all along. It’s the most rational measure of recruiting success and the importance of fast ramp times and higher performance is only compounded by an alarming trend in decreasing employee tenures. With millennials switching jobs every 3-4 years and a shortage of STEM workers, recruiters must constantly compete to hold onto the best quality talent. It’s simple math – with these short tenures, you’re going to turn 25-35% of your millennial workforce every year. Yes, you read that right – minimum 30% turnover year over year, coming soon to a hiring department near you.

The why here is pretty simple. To keep up with the Joneses (in this case, other recruiters), it’s time to reevaluate how we measure success. The how, though, is where it gets a bit tougher. Guaranteeing that a candidate is going to be a perfect fit and immediately produce results has never been possible — and it’s an equation recruiters have always tried to solve. Based on our data and experiences, we believe there are three areas where companies can start to measure and hire better people.

Who Do You Serve? Variables for Employee Success

We know “culture” is a huge part of the hiring decision. In fact, it’s now one of the top concerns for both job seekers and recruiters when it comes to finding a good fit. According to the same Recruiter Nation Report, 60 percent of recruiters rate culture fit of high importance when making a hiring decision — topped only by previous job experience (67 percent) — trumping other factors like cover letters (26 percent), prestige of college (21 percent), and GPA (19 percent). Moreover, 51 percent of recruiters plan to increase efforts in branding their employee culture in the coming year.

Where many companies struggle on culture is establishing what culture even means to your organization without creating some mirror image of Zappos or some other big brand that conferences point to as a case study; a true, authentic definition that accurately captures your team’s motivations and approach to problems.

Look around – do you value team bonding, and host game nights every Friday? Are you into furthering employee education, therefore helping your team to invest in learning new skills? Perhaps collaboration is key and is supplemented by an open floor plan and a flat structure. Whatever it may be, knowing in the first step. You have to find what makes your company most unique and use that as a primary value proposition in the hiring equation from day 1. Be honest. Persuading people with an inauthentic employer brand is the same as not know what yours is at all, just with a prettier cover story and will drive your turnover rate even higher.

Culture feeds the two areas where we believe recruiting can make the largest impact on hiring.

Focus on the Onboarding Process

Let’s not forget that how employees enter your company will set the tone for the rest of their stay. Unfortunately, most recruiters aren’t spending enough time onboarding employees. Only 27 percent of hiring professionals have a dedicated onboarding solution, while 41 percent just use spreadsheets and email. And 42 percent of them spend 8 or fewer hours training new employees.

We’ve all been there – it’s a scary thing walking into a completely new company on the first day. Building and communicating a strong (and accurate) employment brand can go a long way to take the mystery out of “the first day.” And once they’re at their desk, you need a simple and collaborative process for getting employees ramped quickly because the reality is that the top performers aren’t going to stay as long as you’d like. So every day counts. According to a blog from O.C. Tanner, 69 percent of employees are more likely to stay with a company for three years if they experienced great onboarding.

Invest in Employees Long Term

The last piece of the puzzle is a seemingly obvious one — but one that is worth repeating. If you want an employee to feel compelled to stay with your company for the long term and perform at a high level, make sure you show them how much you believe in their potential. No employee wants to stay at a company where they can’t visualize their future, so it’s essential to invest in them for the long term.

What does that look like? Whether it’s professional development, salary negotiation, education opportunities, or simply support via mentorship, investing in employees just means helping them live up to their full potential in your company and ensuring them that you’re always thinking of their future. However it makes sense for you, the key to this is simply being genuine and caring about your employees. A little bit of investment goes a long way, I can promise you — so long, in fact, that you might have some staying for longer than four years.

About The Author

Matt Singer is Jobvite’s fearless marketing leader. He’s officially been in marketing and sales for the past 15 years, but informally for 30+ years starting with cookie, lemonade, and lawn mowing businesses in his neighborhood at the age of 8.

Outside of work, Matt is a proud husband, father, and “manphibian.” He tries to spend as much time as possible in the water abalone diving, fishing, and surfing.

A self-proclaimed data geek, Matt has spent his career channeling that data obsession into building great brands and scalable marketing machines. His career in B2B has focused primarily on the world of HR software, but recruiting is his biggest professional passion.

Follow him on Twitter @matthewdsinger or connect with him on LinkedIn.

Facebook Looks to Take a Serious Bite Out of LinkedIn with Latest Move

It’s amazing how $26.2 billion can wake-up a sleeping giant. After selling to Microsoft for that amount, it’s no surprise others, like Facebook, are taking notice. I imagine the conversation at Facebook went something like this:

Random Facebook employee: “Hey, Mark, did you see Microsoft bought LinkedIn for $26.2 billion?”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: “What, we have, like four times as many users, and way more actual active users. Let’s start getting serious about this enterprise, employment, jobby-job stuff. We’ll add an additional $100 billion to our valuation in no time.”

Or something like that.

In the past year, Facebook has launched @Work, gotten more serious about classifieds, and now Techcrunch is reporting that Facebook is testing a Create Job feature for company pages.

Post Jobs on Company Facebook Pages — Facebook testing a Create Job feature on Company Pages.

Jobs are shared on the feeds of followers for free, but employers can promote jobs to their followers, as well as others through Facebook advertising’s ad solution which targets users in a variety of ways, such as location, education and age.

Applications are sent as messages, which are similar to the ones customer service reps current receive via Facebook. Whether or not Facebook users can upload a resume, copy/paste or use their LinkedIn profile is unknown, but this might be the part for many employers to swallow.

facebook-eats-linkedin — Will Facebook take a bite out of LinkedIn?

Post a job? Sure. Show it to Fans? Yeah. Promote it to a targeted audience? Straight butter, baby! Manage responses via Facebook? Cue the crickets.

Now, could Facebook open its platform to allow messages and resumes to be uploaded into ATS’s that build an app? Sure. That, or they could enable employers to connect via API. Or, as startups like Olivia show, maybe candidates don’t need to be stuffed into an applicant tracking system to work.

As such, this new Facebook feature looks to only be appealing to small businesses and companies that have hard-to-fill positions like trucking or healthcare for the time-being. If at some point, similar to LinkedIn, Facebook users are able to add a professional profile that compliments their already-available personal pages – which, let’s be real, is eventually going to happen – and attach that profile to a job opening, and companies can manage and search those profiles, then I think they’re really onto something.

No doubt big players with deep pockets have attempted to claim real estate around help wanted ads for a long time. Google first attempted it with Base 10 years ago, eBay launched Kijiji and Yahoo had HotJobs. None of them set the world on fire, and maybe Facebook will fall on its face too.

But I’ll make the bold and usually misguided statement that this time it may just be different. Big job boards are on the ropes as Indeed gobbles-up marketshare. We’ve never really had a web property that had a billion active users on it. Messaging is hugely popular, and mobile is redefining how we consume content and engage with people and brands.

It’s worth noting that Google is rumored to get into the job search game again and that Microsoft is going after Slack. What’s next? Maybe Amazon’s Echo will find you a job, or drones can start dropping off your resume at nearby employers someday.

It’s also worth noting that applicant tracking systems and other solutions that integrate into Facebook Pages will find themselves at a possible disadvantage with this move. Solutions like Recruiting.com, iCIMS and Jobvite provide Facebook career site tabs on Pages for a fee, and might lose clients to a native, free option.

About the Author

War Ready: Why Job Postings on Facebook Are The Beginning of the End for LinkedIn.

Facebook has reportedly thrown the opening salvo in its long anticipated move into the recruiting and hiring vertical, with TechCrunch reporting yesterday that the ubiquitous social network has confirmed it is beginning to roll out a “Jobs” tab, which allows employers to post (and, of course, promote) job openings directly to company’s followers and fans as an integrated part of the core Facebook experience.

For the first time, Facebook has rolled out an option for Page Admins within the status update composer to post job descriptions as a separate content class, similar to Events, Photos or Places. This new update option allows employers to augment these posts with position specific details such as compensation range, specific location, and job classification (e.g. full or part time, temporary or permanent).

By creating job postings as a differentiated content category, Facebook seems to be sending the signal that these postings would stand out from other status updates cluttering most users’ News Feeds, with special formatting designed to delineate job postings from other company content (similar to how Life Events display differently on your personal timeline).

Here I Am: Why Recruiters Should Care About Job Postings On Facebook.

The job postings, TechCrunch reports (see image), will be displayed through a default “Jobs” tab that will ostensibly become a core component of a company’s Pages presence; this jobs tab will link to a dedicated landing page where companies can drive job seekers.

Admins will receive real time updates whenever a new follower or existing fan engages with the job description as part of the broader moderation workflow, a critical capability missing from existing employer focused Facebook recruiting efforts, which are often limited to separate, dedicated destinations clearly differentiated from a company’s consumer focused presence on Pages.

Additionally, current Facebook Careers pages largely require redirects to company career sites or external job postings; the new Facebook job postings will purportedly include an “Apply Now” button that works on both mobile and desktop instances of Facebook.

Using Facebook Connect to prepopulate application forms with user information (similar to the “Apply With LinkedIn” functionality) directly from Facebook itself. This, TechCrunch notes, “could help people quickly apply for multiple jobs without typing in redundant information.”

In other words, when it comes to candidate experience, it looks like Facebook’s newest offering might finally fix that whole notion of the “black hole” – recruiters receive any completed application directly through Facebook messenger, in an apparent attempt to increase utilization of this functionality among B2B users and advertisers.

Coupled with the increased rise in recruiting specific bots being developed for recruiters through the Facebook Bot Exchange, such as Mya and RAI by HiringSolved, which work natively with applicant tracking systems and messaging tools such as Facebook or Skype to ask questions to screen applicants for qualifications and automatically update candidates on their application status, Facebook looks positioned to quickly become among the most efficient and effective sources of hire available to employers.

While job postings will be free (for the time being), Facebook is leveraging its rich user data, unrivaled reach and highly sophisticated ad targeting capabilities to offer employers the ability to use Facebook Ads to increase the reach and impressions of specific job ads through programmatic campaigns priced on a PPA/PPC basis, with job openings appearing to targeted passive candidates’ News Feeds based on their online behaviors, user profiles and demographic data.

You The Boss: Why Facebook for Recruiting Should Be A Sourcing Silver Bullet.

Of course, targeting job ads using Facebook’s native ad exchange has recently come under fire; just last week, with a lawsuit filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California (long a hot spot for potentially precedent setting tech test cases) charging that Facebook violated federal employment laws prohibiting job related discrimination by allowing companies to exclude specific audience segments (such as African and Asian Americans) from seeing selected advertisements.

The suit notes that the “multicultural marketing” practices not only allow employers to systematically exclude diverse job seekers from their recruitment related advertising, but conversely, does not allow companies to exclude “White or Caucasian Americans” from similar targeted campaigns, unique among ethnicities.

By creating a separate job posting product as well as a different content (and likely, ad type) from its core consumer offerings, Facebook seems to be anticipating similar legal challenges while creating the compliance capabilities required for additional investments or product offerings for recruiting and hiring.

Facebook has already publically confirmed that it’s experimenting “with a slew of recruiting features,” which should come as no surprise, given the billions of dollars a year employers spend on online recruitment marketing and advertising – only a small fraction of which, it seems, is being spent on Facebook.

For a company whose growth is predicated on ad revenue, the move into owning more of this lucrative (and growing) market should come as no surprise. After all, as Facebook adroitly admitted, it’s already got a bunch of market research and historical data to inform its recruiting related initiatives.

As a Facebook spokesperson noted, the company is merely standardizing and optimizing an established, entrenched process of posting job openings on Facebook – as more than 4 in 5 companies currently do without a formal product offering as part of their social recruiting strategies – explaining:

“Based on behavior we’ve seen on Facebook, where many small businesses post about their job openings on their Page, we’re running a test for Page admins to create job postings and receive applications from their candidates.”

This should not only scare the shit out of traditional job boards and developers like Work4 or Jobscore, whose products are predicated on offering these sorts of native recruiting capabilities directly within the Facebook environment, but, most obviously, LinkedIn. And here’s where it gets interesting.

The Devil Is A Lie: Facebook, LinkedIn and the Future of Recruiting.

With Microsoft reportedly announcing it would complete its close on the LinkedIn deal by the end of Q4, the company has made a $26 billion dollar bet on the professional networking market traditionally dominated by this “social network.”

With the recent release of the new Microsoft Teams, a collaboration platform similar to Slack, as part of the core Office environment, as well as the integration of Skype for Business and redesign of Sharepoint, it appears as if Microsoft has the workplace squarely in its sights – and LinkedIn’s user data is a key component of that strategy (not to mention its monetization plan for Bing, targeting capabilities for Dynamics CRM Online and core selling points of the new Enterprise Mobility Suite).

It should also be noted Microsoft for Business has also started touting its ability to “keep your employees securely connected to business critical apps wherever they are,” specifically signing a “global strategic partnership” with Workday this past September to “connect HR data to the data underlying Microsoft Office,” a philosophy that ostensibly extends to the future roadmap of LinkedIn (and their justification for such a hefty price tag, too – it’ll be interesting to see if MSFT ends up making a play for Workday at some point, given their chummy channel sales relationship, and the fact that Oracle and Salesforce have a similar global product partnership and strategic sales alliance).

The battle lines are shaping up, and they extend as far as bot development, where Facebook and Microsoft, respectively, are the two dominant development platforms for these emerging technologies.

Of course, Workplace by Facebook (aka Facebook at Work), launched just a few weeks ago, challenges many of the collaboration and productivity capabilities Microsoft touts as a primary selling point of its platform – essentially offering a product that competes head to head with Yammer (Facebook Groups), Sharepoint (Pages) and Skype (Messenger). This already made them a player to watch in HR Technology – but their sudden move into the workplace seems to solidify the fact that Facebook is playing to win when it comes to HR Technology.

And all I can say is, game on.

Matt Charney is the Executive Editor of Recruiting Daily. Follow him on Twitter @MattCharney or connect with him on LinkedIn.

10 Executive HR Tech Trends for 2017

Where are trends

taking us in 2017?

Wouldn’t you like to know the future? Of course, you would.

As an HR Executive, it’s your responsibility to lead your organization with confidence and resolve. You don’t have time for a webinar where the information isn’t adaptable to your organization or you’re walking away with important information. What are the trends?

We can promise you that this learning session will be worth your time. It is not going to be a “speak at you” type of webinar.

We’ll share what we believe are the 10 most critical trends in HR Tech of 2017. If you are responsible for making technology purchases, serving as a resource “at the table” or simply want to drive change this year, you will want to reserve these 45 minutes to listen in.

You’ll Learn:

An executive, impactful overview so that you are aware of new and upcoming technologies and trends in our space
Real stories with real decision making data that will make you the go to resource at any table where HR tech is the topic
A road map to how you can bolster your technology platforms within your organization as you look towards 2020 planning

San Francisco-based Hired Officially Launches in Australia

With continual societal shift towards living life online, technology skills are amongst some of the most sought after by recruiters throughout the global market place. Any company, or even country, lacking in this vital talent arena or the ability to acquire it, comes to the worldwide economic bazar crippled in its ability to compete.

According the LinkedIn’s recent “Global Recruiting Trends” report, 45 percent of Australia’s talent acquisition leaders plan to increase their hiring volume in 2017. Another statistic gathered during the survey shows that 57 percent of those polled said that competition for talent is a concern. One thing that Australia lacks is a large talent pool with the necessary technological skills recruiters are looking for. Data from ManpowerGroup’s Talent shortage survey reports that IT employees are the fifth most difficult to hire in Australia. As a result, Australian employers are 32 percent more likely to try to make connection with foreign talent than companies in the US.

In order to remain competitive, the Australian government announced in April of this year their National Innovation and Science Agenda. It focuses on creating jobs through a $1.1 billion stimulus package, divided over the course of four years, while fostering an environment conducive to attracting new industries and growing a new generation of innovating scientific talent. With surveys showing a 50 percent decline in Australian IT graduates over the course of the last decade, recruiters have been in search of a way to attract talent from a small pool of national candidates or reach out to foreign jobseekers.

San Francisco-based Hired, which matches tech talent with companies in need, started beta testing in the Australian recruitment industry in February of this year. Only recently did it announce the official launch of its job marketplace in that country. Already, they have attracted over 550 local companies, enabling employers to reach out to roughly 17,500 available software engineers, data scientists, and UI/UX designers, making the Australian market one of Hired’s “fastest growing”. Amongst those to utilize Hired’s services are Canva and Über.

Hired at HR Tech — Hired exhibiting at recent HR conference.

Though not yet profitable and still private, Hired raised $40 million in Series C funding during 2016. This brings the company to total of $72 million since its 2012 launch. Big name investors have included Google Ventures, Lumia Capital, Comcast and Crosslink Capital. Hired CEO Mehul Patel said that it projects it will be in the black by next November and intends to use the funding to continue growing the company’s international presence. Currently Hired has offices in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, Singapore and France.

The Australian/New Zealand office of Hired is in Melbourne, which Victoria’s Minister for Small Business, Innovation and Trade, Philip Dalidakis, seems to be quite proud proud of. He publicly stated that Hired’s choice of location “confirms our reputation as a leading global location for tech and business investment.” The Victorian tech industry currently employees more than 91,000 people and generates approximately $34 billion in annual revenue.

“Victoria,” Mr. Dalidakis went on to say, “has more tech graduates than anywhere else in the country and having Hired’s innovative jobs platform focusing on high skill roles will be a significant driver of more jobs and better jobs for Victorians into the future.”

Other overseas technology companies recently attracted to Melbourne includes, GoPro, Zendesk, Square, Cognizant, and Slack.

Hired’s service differs from many in the industry in that it allows employers to send interview requests to both active and passive jobseekers. According to the company’s website 95 percent of these requests are answered, and just under 50 percent result in interviews.

Hired believes employers approaching talent is a successful way to recruit. According to ZDNet, Patel has stated that company ran surveys found that 87 percent of the world’s workforce is unhappy at their current job, but only 20 percent said they planned to do anything about it.

Hired.com Executives — Hired CEO Mehul Patel, left, and co-founder Matt Mickiewicz.

“We asked ourselves,” Patel continued, “‘Why is that?’ We think finding a new job is actually more miserable than the pain you feel in your current job.” The survey Hired conducted said workers liken looking for a new job to divorce or dental surgery. Approaching the candidate, instead of traditional application process, helps to draw the attention of the 67 percent of the population resigned to stay miserable with their current job rather than go through looking for another.

Hired offers its service free to professionals and its flexible payment option for employers has attracted a lot of startups in Australia. It offers both a per-candidate option and several different subscription levels determined by the company in questions’ size and hiring needs.

While Hired currently focuses predominately on the tech industry, they plan to branch out into the new graduate and freelance talent markets. In addition to global expansion intentions, Patel told ZDNet that Hired will soon focus on attracting employers and job candidates in industries such as media, law, and finance. In its U.S. Market, Hired is already bringing together matches in the marketing and sales sector.

About the Author

Brandy Hagan graduated from Florida State University with a Bachelor’s in Social Science. She has over 3 years experience writing about the employment industry and creating SEO-rich content for marketing purposes.

Previous articles have appeared on the award-winning recruitment blog Cheezhead.com. She has also provided extensive coverage of the SHRM national conference in the past. She resides in North Augusta, South Carolina and devotes most of her spare time to writing fiction. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

Bill Warren of DirectEmployers Announces Retirement, Organization Names Successor

Bill Warren is an industry icon. The online employment business might be a vastly different place had he not started Online Career Center in the ’90s, eventually selling to Monster (becoming its first president), then following up that act with launching and heading up DirectEmployers Association for the next decade and a half. A mild-mannered midwesterner, he doesn’t get the limelight he deserves, in large part because he doesn’t draw much attention to himself.

As such, it’s no surprise the recent announcement that he’d be retiring at the end of this year went largely unnoticed. “I want to emphasize that I will forever be grateful to this organization for having granted me one of the greatest opportunities of my life, to be a part of the accomplishments and the great times we have had over the years,” Warren said via the company’s blog. “It has truly been a privilege leading DirectEmployers.”

“Bill is truly a visionary and industry leader whose presence will be missed,” said Paul White, president of DirectEmployers board of directors. Indeed. He’s meant a lot to a lot of people, including me. I also count some of their employees as long time friends and supporters.

Who’s Got Next?

I was very curious to see who would replace Bill. Tough shoes to fill. Would it be a current employee? There are more than a few loyalists who have been with the organization since its early days. Would it be a board member? Or would it be someone from the outside?

We finally have our answer.

Michael Goldberg - New Executive Director — Michael Goldberg and Candee Chambers Take the Reins at DEA

In a recent release, Michael Goldberg was named the organization’s new leader. Said the company,

For the last five years Michael has been a DirectEmployers Member with Freeman and the American Heart Association, serving as a Board Member the last two years. Michael is hands-down one of the Association’s biggest brand advocates and has played an active role contributing to the Member Awards program, beta testing the new member community and sharing his love of DirectEmployers’ services in white papers and through speaking engagements. Along with his enthusiasm and desire to innovate, he brings over 25 years of Human Resources and Talent Acquisition strategy experience to the Association. In working over the last two years with Michael, and after presenting his business plan to the interview committee, we believe that Michael’s energy, vision and passion for the DirectEmployers’ mission will serve our employees, Members and partners very successfully.

Goldberg will begin transitioning responsibilities on November 7, and fully move into the executive director role upon Warren’s retirement on December 15. He’ll also have some help. Candee Chambers, an employee since September 2013, will serve as deputy executive director.

In her new role, Chambers will report to and work closely with Goldberg to provide strategic direction for the compliance and partnership solutions team. As for other members of the existing executive team, sales and service lead Tom Eckhart will now report to Chambers, while Heather Hoffman, digital strategy, Nancy Holland, marketing, Hal Cooper, product development and Dan Jordan, CFO and legal counsel, will report directly to Goldberg.

About the Author

Microsoft Introduces Slack Killer, and Slack Should be Crapping Themselves

Microsoft Teams launched this week. It’s Microsoft’s new office chat platform, which is a bit odd, because Yammer, a business they bought a few years ago, is also an office chat platform. Anyway, it looks like Microsoft created Teams to bring together users of Office365, which includes Microsoft properties like Skype, Word, Excel, Outlook and, at some point, I’m guessing, LinkedIn.

Microsoft Teams Screenshot — Microsoft Teams

Teams is currently available as a customer preview. It will be included in all Office365 subscriptions in early 2017. According to Microsoft, Office 365 boasts 85 million monthly active users.

That news, however, falls flat when looking at the response from spunky competitor Slack. Believe it or not, the startup purchased a full page ad in the New York Times. Check it out.

Slack's Full Page Ad in New York Times — Slack’s Full Page Ad in The New York Times

You can also read the ad’s content via Slack’s blog here, but it boils down the following response:

What Slack does is hard. “We’ve spent tens of thousands of hours talking to customers and adapting Slack to find the grooves that match all those human quirks. The internal transparency and sense of shared purpose that Slack-using teams discover is not an accident. Tiny details make big differences.”
Open is better than closed. Slack has an app store, saying to Microsoft, “if you can’t offer people an open platform that brings everything together into one place and makes their lives dramatically simpler, it’s just not going to work.”
Slack loves what they do. “If you want customers to switch to your product, you’re going to have to match our commitment to their success and take the same amount of delight in their happiness,” Slack said.

They ended the letter saying they weren’t going anywhere, and in many ways they were already entrenched. So noble.

Now what?

I don’t buy it. Put a fork in ’em. Slack is cooked.

As I recently opined after the debut of Facebook at Work, the startup needs to sell itself as soon as possible. In fact, the Times ad may a strategic move to make the company more appealing to a potential buyer that might be having second thoughts seeing all these big boy competitors popping up everywhere.

Don’t get me wrong. Slack is a nice business. The people I know who use it, like it. But this is business. Slack is a feature and won’t last as a standalone product for long with platforms like Microsoft and Facebook launching serious businesses. Salesforce also has Chatter, remember. Could revenue-starved Twitter be far behind? Microsoft-owned LinkedIn integration is probably a foregone conclusion.

Then there’s commoditization. The pricetag for messaging services is racing to zero. It’ll either be part of a bigger platform subscription like Office365, or become super cheap like Facebook’s offering. Slack won’t have the pricing power they currently enjoy for long.

Lastly, think about security. If you’re a corporation, are you going to feel better about communications behind a firewall developed by Microsoft, Facebook and Salesforce, or an itty-bitty mobile app? Sure, the workers might prefer Slack, but the suits are going to opt for what they already know and trust.

“Just like Outlook brought email, contacts, and calendars under strong user scaffolding, Microsoft Teams will bring together chat, meetings, notes, and a host of other extensions to help teams get work done,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

Nadella’s right. My letter to Slack? “Dear Slack, find a buyer before the party runs out of sugar daddies.”

About the Author

Enough Is Enough: You’ve Got Email

Derek Zeller and Steve Levy share a series of snarky emails – the kind you write in a fit of fury and then quickly realize you can never send.

When I call Steve Levy, I know it’s going to be a good conversation. After the years we’ve spent recruiting, if we didn’t have stories – well, we wouldn’t be recruiters. Our industry talks to so many people so many times a day that we experience the best and worst of human behavior. The good, bad and terribly ugly of people’s lives.

The other day, we got on the topic of the crazy emails we’ve wanted to write over the years to both recruiters who think they broke the Davinci code and candidates who just don’t get it. After lamenting about the topic for at least an hour, laughing until my stomach hurt, we figured out a plan. We’d work together to write a series of these snarky e-mails. The kind you write in a fit of fury and then quickly realize you can never send? The ones that end up in trash cans instead of inboxes?

We hope you enjoy the snark, we sure did. #truestory

Dear Recruiter: Why Don’t You…

Dear Recruiter,

Please treat me like a person. Is that a lot to ask? You say that you want to help me. Do you? Really? Because here’s the thing. You, sir, are not original. I know. I see all of your e-mails mixed with every competitor you have across the country. The weekly calls you make to my mobile, office and home daily is liken being chased after by a bill collector.

Here’s the deal. I’m too busy working. I propose you do the same by flipping the script and stop with the automation.

Dear Recruiter,

I saw the last 15 emails you sent. I unsubscribed but somehow, I can’t avoid you so here I am – spending more time writing. To you, not my candidates. Yes, I am a recruiter, not a JavaScript developer. I realize that particular word, Java, is on my LinkedIn profile so I can see the mistake your algorithm made here.

You see, it is on there because that is what I am looking to fill, too. So, let’s make a deal, okay? I won’t write you another sarcastic email or find your boss’ email and forward this pathetic, lazy, excuse of communication. Mmmkay?

Dear Recruiter,

Apologies in advance but you’ve forced me to check the Obituary sections of 17 local area newspapers to see if you had died. Since there was no sign of your name anywhere, including on your Facebook and Twitter pages (yes, I admit it – I’ve been stalking you for signs of life; what’s good for the goose is just as good for the gander.) Your Instagram pics show that you’ve apparently been eating and drinking, I’m confident that you’re still alive. Considering this, please let me know if I’m still in the running because frankly, I’m dying to work with you.

Hope you see what I did there.

Dear Candidate: Hello? It’s Me.

Dear Candidate,

I have sent multiple emails and left several messages after you applied to our role. Normally when a person does this, the intention is to actually want the job you applied for. That’s how this whole thing works you see. You apply, I call you, we chat, you interview and we come to an inevitable conclusion that we are either right for each other or it’s a “not you it’s me” situation. Most of the time it’s you, though, really. Believe me, it’s you. However by not getting back to me we cannot start this process so I can, after multiple calls, emails, and interviews either not get back to you or tell you that you are not the candidate we are moving forward via a form email. I really need you to get back to me so we can start this whole truncated process moving forward.

Thanks, I guess.

Dear Candidate,

First of all, let me thank you for taking the time to send me your resume from my spam like email spread from two weeks ago. I was excited as your profile and background seem entirely suitable for the software position I am trying to fill right now. It was a pure thing of beauty to see what you have been doing and you floored me with your answers to my silly and basic questions that IT gave me. Unfortunately, you totally blew the interview because we are, in fact, looking for a JAVA developer, not a JavaScript developer. Frankly, you never should have actually made it as far as you did in the interview. For that, I as you totally blew it. I mean the manager actually yelled at me for wasting his time like you did with me. I certainly hope you die soon.

____________

Let it out. Go ahead write a “should probably throw this away” e-mail in the comments section. We would love to see what you would like to say.

This post was co-written by contributors Steve Levy and Derek Zeller.

HireVue Goes Beyond Video Interviews to Tackle Artificial Intelligence

Trovix was my first contact with what I envisioned A.I., or artificial intelligence, to be when it came to recruitment.

It was 10 years ago and vendors claiming to be “eHarmony for employment” were all the rage. The business model failed for a few reasons, but the clearest one was the fact that the success of these platforms was predicated on users, both job seekers and employers, filling out very lengthy questionnaires.

Human beings will invest a ton of time if it means getting a shot at having sex and finding a soulmate, but the potential of landing an interview and a job doesn’t have quite the same appeal, I guess.

Trovix came along and offered the following: Just post your resume and your job as usual. Our magical technology will parse out the relevant content and bring employer and candidate together. No extra effort required.

Monster thought enough of Trovix to buy it for $70-plus million. The resulting product was 6sense, a semantic search technology promising to find the best candidates significantly quicker by analyzing resumes as a hiring manager would. The product has pivoted and the brand has withered. Turns out A.I. is hard.

Fast forward to this year’s HR Technology Conference and A.I. is trending, along with buzzwords like “engagement,” “cloud” and “big data.” It’s early days for machine learning, and most companies are simply paying lip service, hoping prospects will take notice, chasing the shiniest new objects in the market.

One company, however, may be on the right track to laying the groundwork for legitimate A.I.

HireVue is well known for its video interviewing technology, although they offer a wide variety of solutions and have been a pioneer in the machine learning space with their Insights product. This summer, however, they made a significant move toward real A.I. with their Digital Assessments tool.

HireVue's Digital Assessment Tool — HireVue Uses Text, Audio and Video Data to Predict Best Candidates

“HireVue has brought much needed structure, data and consistency to the interview experience and now we’re bringing a new level of assessment science to it,” said Mark Newman, founder and CEO, HireVue. “Many assessments used today were created 50 years ago and deployed to make up for terrible interviewing processes.

“Their methodologies may be sound, but the candidate experience is no longer relevant. With HireVue Digital Assessments, we’ve married deep machine learning with Industrial Organizational Psychology to offer a faster, more modern and mobile hiring experience for companies and candidates that we feel is second to none.”

The product works by capturing thousands of attributes within a short 10-15 minute video interaction that uses HireVue Insights to analyze audio, video and text that is then mapped and validated directly against business outcomes.

Think about that for a second. By getting video on candidates, HireVue is able to go way beyond text on a resume to assess candidates. In addition to a traditional resume, they’re able to transcribe the audio, capture variances in someone’s voice and analyze the visual nuances in the answers a candidate gives.

By doing so, they are then able to cross reference the attributes that make a good hire with what made a good candidate. According to the company, the results are significant. “We’ve been able to greatly reduce time-to-hire,” said Amanda Hahn, director of product marketing at HireVue. “By replacing the pre-screen, phone screen and assessment process with our Digital Assessment solution, we’re able to take the traditional period of 42 days to hire down to seven, which is 80 percent faster.”

So far, HireVue says customers are happy. “It allows our recruiting team to focus on reviewing the best quality candidates first, rather than sitting through hundreds of thousand of candidates to find the diamonds scattered throughout,” said Carolyn Shuster, senior director of corporate recruitment, global systems and programs, Hilton Worldwide. “We were able to shorten time-to-hire from 6 weeks to 7 business days.”

HireVue also landed a pretty smart guy to head-up the development. Dr. Nathan Mondragon, who formerly held Chief Industrial Organizational Psychologist roles with both Oracle and Taleo, is now on the roster as Chief IO Psychologist. “HireVue Digital Assessments help companies better predict important job and organizational outcomes via a more simple, powerful and efficient candidate experience,” he said.

The product is currently an add-on to other HireVue products. The pricetag is custom, based on needs.

About the Author

Eat This, Not That: Slimming Down Interviews

There’s a health and nutrition book series called Eat This, Not That. It’s designed to provide readers with options to substitute common ingredient choices with healthier selections without sacrificing flavor or enjoyment of favorite menu items. It’s a more pragmatic approach to eating healthy for people who think it’s crazy not to eat carbs or sugar for the next 6 weeks. It makes sense. No donuts makes a person go crazy.

In all seriousness, removing everything just isn’t a good program for sustainability – one of the most significant elements of diet success. You need a program that you can maintain for months, not days, to actually see change. Even bigger picture, most people don’t like to live in an all or nothing world with food or any other thing in their life. It’s just not realistic. Even suggesting eliminating any one kind of food in a group immediately creates a defensive and defeatist response: “I can’t do that!” That’s fear talking, really. It’s that voice inside your head that says you can’t realistically give it all up. Not forever.

Stepping On The Scale: Weighing In On Interviews

Like the intent of leaner or lighter food recommendations, I don’t want to issue a sweeping directive for anyone to start or stop doing something altogether, but to consider alternatives or variations in the form of “ask this, not that” when interviewing. I’m well aware that suggesting elimination of popular and frequently asked interview questions probably won’t please those who are fond of their methods or methodology. With that approach, most would have a similar response to the “I can’t” in a diet scenario.

Sure, we can’t dump everything we’ve ever learned about interviewing. I’m not naive enough to believe my ideas are a one-size-fits-all fix for broken hiring practices. My goal, as should be yours if you’re interviewing candidates, it simple to help develop a more welcoming, comfortable and productive interview interaction for all involved.

See, I’m a professional interviewer at this point. I feel like I’ve been in the interviewee seat almost as much as the interviewer seat. Unfortunately, that first-hand experience on the opposite side of the table has given me an endless supply of material about how unbelievably messed up the hiring processes can be. It’s especially bad because I despise irrelevant, lazy and cliché interview questions or any other employer behavior that promotes an unpleasant candidate experience. Needless to say, there is plenty of room for improvement all around.

Eat This, Not That: 6 Alternatives To The Same Ol’ Interview BS

Rather than create philosophies and theories on what great questions address, I wanted to dive right into the questions we’re all most tired of hearing with alternatives that actually address the answer you want to get. That’s the thing about most of these interview questions. While they’re staples in most people’s interview repertoire, they don’t actually answer the important questions both sides of the interview equation need answered to make this hiring decision.

Why do you want to work here? This puts the interviewee in a position of having to come up with some type of butt-kissing response about how much he/she adores your marvelous company when in reality the interviewee just wants a job. Isn’t that pretty much why anyone works anywhere or works at all? Instead of assuming the interviewee is in awe of your firm, how about expressing a few key tidbits about what sets your business apart from any other company? From there, perhaps the interviewee will be able to express genuine interest in something instead of spewing a practiced generic suck-up line.
What do you know about our company? Obviously, you expect an interviewee to have done some preliminary research. However, many employers seem to ask this type of question as a trap or test to gauge whether the candidate is seriously interested in that job or just any job. Even if your company is one of the handful of firms idolized by best-practice article writers, chances are most job seekers are only enamored by the resume building qualities your brand name offers. Regardless of how recognizable a company is or isn’t, I always appreciate when the company representative shares background information with me first, then asks if there’s anything else I’d like to know about the company. By doing that it creates the opportunity to comment and/or ask additional questions, which essentially shows interest.
Tell me about yourself: Asking open-ended questions is fine, but this one is way too broad. Some interviewers ask this as an ice-breaker to ease into the interview. The problem is, there is nothing easy about answering such a vague question. It sets the tone for a guessing game of what to say, what not to say, how much to say and how to say it. If the interviewee keeps it brief and professional, he/she risks being boring. If the interviewee veers into personal territory he/she may overstep by oversharing. Instead, try asking something specific about the person’s field. For instance: what advice would you give someone thinking about a career in …. ? Or, what do you think are the most important success attributes for a person in the … field?
Why did you leave your prior job(s)?: It’s natural to be curious about someone’s decision making process leading to a job change, but most reasons fall into a few basic categories. Sometimes, it might even be combination of factors. No matter what, the interviewee is expected to spin something potentially negative into a positive description. Aside from demonstrating political correctness, not much else is revealed. It would be impossible for the person conducting the interview to fully grasp another person’s circumstances, yet many fancy themselves clairvoyant relying on past career choices to predict future outcomes. Not only is that an unfounded theory it likely stems from the interviewer’s own personal bias more than the interviewee’s reality. Instead of asking why the interviewee left every prior job, try asking him/her to describe times when he/she felt most engaged at work. Or, perhaps ask what contributes to his/her ability to perform successfully. Doing so, produces a more objective look into motivations and ideal working conditions.
Walk me through your resume: Along the lines of tell me about yourself, this request is simply too generic. Instead of asking someone to guess what and how much to recite from his/her resume, try actually reading and reviewing in advance so you can come prepared to ask for elaboration on specific items. Or better, yet pick out crucial aspects of the person’s experience that pertain to the job and ask questions based your company’s needs.
“Creative” questions: Some interviewers are fond of asking off-the-wall questions presumably to gauge things like how well someone thinks outside the box, handles pressure or thinks on his/her feet as if anyone can effectively determine any of that or translate it to on-the-job performance by asking a random question. Ben & Jerry’s interviewers might be on-target asking someone about their favorite flavor ice cream, but that’s probably not the case elsewhere. The problem with quirky questions is that they waste time that should be spent delving into real business issues. The questions asked should provide clear evidence of job-relatedness. Otherwise you end up treating interviewees as if they’re there for your entertainment and amusement like some sort of carnival attraction. That kind of treatment is insulting and offensive.

Healthy Habits and Interviews

If you’ve read this far, you might be seething and ready to pounce on your keyboard to give me a piece of your mind. Or, perhaps, you’ve also questioned why the bulk of traditional interview questions just seem out of place and outdated.

Welcome to the dark side of cynicism and reality.

The real story here is that there are so many ways to assess qualifications that there is no guarantee the selected interviewee will be the best choice or that these questions will help you move interviews along more quickly. Now, while we may not be able to reliably predict job performance from interview performance, don’t give up hope. You’ll learn. Just don’t rely on that all or nothing advice or a listicle to tell you every question you should ask.

About the Author: Leveraging her unique perspective as a progressive thinker with a well-rounded background from diverse corporate settings, Kelly Blokdijk advises members of the business community on targeted human resource, recruiting and organization development initiatives to enhance talent management, talent acquisition, corporate communications and employee engagement programs.

Kelly is an active HR and recruiting industry blogger and regular contributor on RecruitingBlogs.com. She also candidly shares opinions, observations and ideas as a member of RecruitingBlogs’ Editorial Advisory Board.

Follow Kelly on Twitter @TalentTalks or connect with her on LinkedIn.

How This Recruiter Defines “Great” Talent May Surprise You

How do you describe “great” talent?

I’d say you know talent when you hear it, but articulating why someone is great isn’t so simple. Whether you work at a staffing agency or in human resources, the way you screen, share, cooperatively review and communicate talent with hiring managers speaks volumes. But, how does your company describe “great” talent?

I’ll never forget my first recruiting job in New York City. Like most recruiters, I stumbled into this profession and soon found myself spending days on the phone talking to talent. With back-to-back phone conversations with a wide range of business and technical professionals, I was fascinated to learn more about software development and the evolving digital landscape. It was eye-opening to discover the complexity of professional skill-sets, job functions, companies and industries, and how businesses work from a people perspective.

The challenge was not only discovering “great” talent, but getting candidates from phone screen to on-site meetings with clients. After a 30 minute phone call to assess soft/skills and interest (and do my best to understand technical skills), I knew talent when I heard it.

But how do I describe what I heard that makes this candidate “great” and worthy of a placement fee with our client? I would throw around terms like ‘great communication skills’, ‘enthusiastic and motivated’, ‘subject matter expert’ or ‘solid culture fit’ when trying to describe “great” candidates, but these phrases were tired and often sold high-potential candidates short.

My boss would often want to have a second phone screen with a candidate, to hear ‘soft-skills’ and interview answers for themselves, before we introduced candidates to the account manager. Within a highly-commissioned business, trust and credibility didn’t come cheap.

Our recruiting team’s interview notes and subjective opinions weren’t enough and the sales team would frequently speak with the candidates a third time, to ensure they ‘check all the boxes’ and to protect their personal reputations. When we finally submitted a resume and written summaries to clients, I always wondered why it took weeks to hear back from human resources and internal recruiters, whom we called the gatekeepers.

I soon became a gatekeeper after making the transition into corporate recruiting at MTV Networks (Viacom). In addition to full-lifecycle recruitment, I was responsibility for managing 15 technical staffing vendors. Once inside, the reason for the push back on staffing agencies became obvious.

As an internal recruiter, my reputation was on the line for every candidate that gets to a hiring manager. But before forwarding a resume, I had to know the candidate had clear communication skills, reasonable insight on the job function and was genuinely interested in our company. The problem was that the recruiter only shared a resume and a written summary of how incredible their candidate was.

Every recruiter writes the same thing – ‘excellent candidate’, “awesome communicator’, ‘technical expert’, ‘passionate’ – but these words quickly lose their meaning. Without a way for me to hear the candidate for myself, another phone interview, was required.. Are you keeping count? It’s hard to ignore the terrible candidate experience, answering the same questions over and over, before getting to visit the office.

Because MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and VH1 were all great brands, we usually had a healthy pipeline of in-bound talent, in addition to candidates I reached out to and sourced directly. Our internal pipeline was in direct competition with candidates submitted through agencies. Because agency candidates required a 20-30% placement fee, candidates from staffing agencies were put aside.

It became clear that sharing written notes from a phone interview wasn’t sufficient to describe talent, build trust and earn buy-in even from internal stakeholders. As a corporate recruiter, the output from my rich phone interviews became the very same scribbled interview notes and summaries I would receive from an agency recruiter.

It’s no wonder why a busy hiring manager didn’t want to read my written summary (‘great communicator’, ‘enthusiastic and motivated’, ‘subject matter expert’ or ‘solid culture fit’) wasn’t sufficient and why managers had to speak candidate for another 30 minutes, before we invite them on-site. How many phone interviews are we at? I’m losing count.

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to effectively describe talent. With specialized skill-sets and job functions, how do recruiters ensure clear and consistent communication between candidates, staffing agencies, corporate recruiters and hiring teams. Sharing our opinions is no longer enough, and the shift to sharing unbiased evidence, will greatly improve and accelerate the way recruiters discuss talent with each other and with our clients.

Hiring Managers know a great answer when they hear it, but how many phone interviews must a candidate make to get to visit the office and meet the hiring team?

Most practitioners would agree a resume is not sufficient to determine the best candidate. Similarly, communicating a candidate’s strengths or areas for improvement via scribbled notes, introduces more bias and complicates the process.

About the Author

Nick Livingston is CEO and co-founder of HoneIt, a phone interview data and insights solution for employers. Before HoneIt, he was most recently the Director of Global Recruiting at TubeMogul, experiencing the hyper-growth of 60 to 360 employees through IPO ($TUBE), while concurrently attending business school at Haas. Joining the company as the first staff recruiter, Nick grew the talent acquisition team to nine full-time recruiters supporting all functions across 12 cities globally.

Prior to TubeMogul, Nick was the Director of Strategic Staffing at MTV Networks (Viacom), overseeing talent acquisition across the Global Digital Media and Interactive Technology organizations. Nick also worked for two SaaS HR technology companies and began his career as a technology headhunter. He has an MBA from the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, BS Applied Mathematics.

Things Change: Measuring An Evolving Culture

Back in my corporate marketing days, we would plan for brand perception evolution in the same way.

Every couple of years, we would examine market trends, consumer behaviour trends, the long-term growth strategy for the business, our product roadmap, the company’s long and medium term financial forecasts – basically any data we could get our hands on to help paint a picture of where the brand and company and consumer market was heading. Then we would plot out key “brand milestones”. These were points where we predicted our brand perception would need to change a bit – either due to things happening in the company (like a new product direction), or market (can you say “global financial crisis”?) or due to consumer forces (eg. consumers starting to care less about say, reliability and more about nostalgia).

We’d start slowly, bit by bit, introducing those new themes or messages into our marketing. It would be subtle. A new sponsorship property that edged us into nostalgia territory. Or slightly tweak in-store displays that would allow us more flexibility if we came into an unusually pressured sales season.

Evolving culture like evolving brand – steal the marketer’s method

Here’s the thing. We were not, ultimately, in control of our brand perception. Our consumers were the ones who determined exactly how our brand was perceived, what it meant to them and how it was defined.

Our job was to:

Be clear on what we WANTED them to think, and what we wanted our brand to be.
Make the best predictions possible, based on the data we could analyse.
Create an environment in which it was easy and logical for our consumers to create the brand perception we wanted them to have.

In the exact same way, hiring for culture should be a predictive, strategic exercise.

All companies, from global behemoths to tiny startups, are about progress and growth. It’s literally plastered to their walls in those really stale culture and inspiration posters. But here’s the thing. If our business is constantly changing and evolving, why don’t we proactively plan for an evolving culture too?

A company’s culture is determined by its people. As recruiters and HR people, we know this better than anyone. We also know that people are dynamic. They change and grow and influence each other to change and grow some more. So when we’re recruiting for culture fit (or culture add), it makes sense to consider how our company culture will need to evolve over the next few years.

So how do you do that? How can you subtly move your culture forward? Or, more accurately, what people do you need in which places to create the right “culture influence” – an environment in which employees will naturally evolve the company culture in the right direction?

Hiring for the culture you have today is a waste of time

Analyse the culture you have now, sure. But don’t leave it at that. Use trends, data and business goals to predict what kind of culture you’re going to want and need in the next couple of years. Think about where the gaps are. What kinds of people are going to help you get from where you are now to where you want to be tomorrow?

Bottom line is, we’ve got to stop hiring for the culture we have, and start hiring for the many new versions we want tomorrow and next year, and in 20 years. Because by the time your new employee has been onboarded, the culture you hired them to fit, or to add to, won’t exist anymore.

It’s an infinite progression. There’s no point where you sit back and say “Hurrah! We’ve done it. Let’s stop improving and evolving now”. Your culture, like your business, will always keep growing. And at the end of the day, isn’t that what makes it fun?

About The Author

Keren Phillips is a co-founder of Weirdlyhub.com – a customisable screening tool that helps in-house recruiters find candidates who’ll drive your culture forward. In the Weirdly team, she heads up marketing and vision. Which really means she spends all day digging through trend research, telling people about the awesome work Weirdly does with their customers and ATS partners, and dreaming about a day when HR, TA and Marketing can work together in perfect, harmonious unity. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

RecruitingLive with Sedef Buyukataman

Building a team has to be one of the most challenging aspects of working in recruiting. Not only do you have to make a match on an array of hard-to-find skills, you have to find someone with the personality to compliment the rest of the team, too. That means we’re not just hunting purple squirrels at this point but rather rainbow centaurs with mohawks.

When we don’t get it right, it costs an obscene amount of money, time and everything else we put at a premium when we’re constantly moving from role to role. There is a pretty wide range of numbers provided for what it actually costs a company and that’s because we’re looking at so many variables like seniority and skills, just to name a few. For example, the Labor Department estimates it can cost on average one-third of a new hire’s annual salary to replace him or her and that those costs increase the higher up in the organization the turnover occurs. In some cases, it can total in the millions of dollars if that person is the CEO.

Others say it could be even higher than that. According to a SHRM study, it could cost up to five times a bad hire’s annual salary. Even for a recent college grad in the middle of nowhere, that could be somewhere around $150,000. Enough to make your head hurt and the corporate bank account not only empty, but disappear altogether.

That’s big stakes for hiring mistakes. A six figure reason to make better choices and to keep learning how to build your hiring brand so people who are right for you end up in your database before you’re trying to beg them to apply. That begins, of course, with knowing who they are in the first place.

Our guest this week, Sedef Buyukataman has sat on every side of the hiring equation from her roles as a human resources director at Ernst & Young International to university relations at Cisco to her current (and most recent) roles in employer branding with Proactive Talent Strategies. She gets the full cycle of recruiting and the bottom line costs. She’s going to answer your questions about persona marketing – the magic behind getting the right fit.

How Employers Can Leverage Sponsored Messages

About the Author

Transformational Talent: Portrait of the High-Potential Workforce

You’ll learn:

Diagnosing Culture: The New Big Data

Who Do You Serve? Variables for Employee Success

About The Author

About the Author

Here I Am: Why Recruiters Should Care About Job Postings On Facebook.

You The Boss: Why Facebook for Recruiting Should Be A Sourcing Silver Bullet.

The Devil Is A Lie: Facebook, LinkedIn and the Future of Recruiting.

Where are trends

taking us in 2017?

You’ll Learn:

About the Author

Who’s Got Next?

About the Author

Now what?

About the Author

Dear Recruiter: Why Don’t You…

Dear Candidate: Hello? It’s Me.

About the Author

Stepping On The Scale: Weighing In On Interviews

Eat This, Not That: 6 Alternatives To The Same Ol’ Interview BS

Healthy Habits and Interviews

About the Author

Evolving culture like evolving brand – steal the marketer’s method

Hiring for the culture you have today is a waste of time

About The Author

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