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The Bay of Pigs: HR Ladies, Havana Nights and Me.

“A revolution is a struggle to the death between the future and the past.” – Fidel Castro.

It’s taken me a while, this post. The reasons, you see, are contrary to popular belief, I actually take great pains not to personally attack people, only institutions – which means that while I can attack “HR Ladies” in general, writing a response to my most recent trip to Cuba would require a bit more nuance than I’m used to.

Second paragraph, second communist quote, but Stalin once said, “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.”

And sure, while I spent a couple of weeks on a bus full of “HR Ladies,” this time, something strange happened: I actually got to know them.

And now, I’d feel bad criticizing a group of pretty amazing professionals who, up until now, were all some sort of Coach bag clutching cypher, (and Robin Schooling) who only emerged from their lairs to snag a donut and write someone up for something stupid.

The Struggle Is Real.

Of course, I’ve worked with plenty of HR Ladies when I was a recruiter, but frankly, when you’re on the TA side of that fence, HR is the worst.

They slow down the process or throw up unnecessary policies around stuff like internal mobility approvals and tell you that you have to lose candidates because the comp range they gave you didn’t factor in shit like “compression.”

So in an actual practitioner setting, please know that the fire breathing dragon ladies who had to sign off on my offer letters before the candidate (and always came back with some minor change) deserve every bit of shade that’s ever been thrown their way.

But get them out of the office, and out of their comfort zone, and turns out, they’re pretty nice people with normal lives outside of work, funny stories, interesting anecdotes and the other sort of humanizing stuff that human resources for some reason seems to leave at home along with their sense of humor and ability to somewhat chill the f out once in awhile.

And they were most decidedly out of their comfort zones in Cuba.

I’m not going to go through the litany of complaints they had about the trip, but apparently while I was expecting some fading postcard from the Eisenhower era (complete with Howard Johnson style amenities), or at best the Miss Havisham version of the place where they take out Hyman Roth in Godfather 2, they thought they were going to Club Med.

Bay of Pigs.

I was told not to mention these kinds of complaints specifically because after asking about whether or not I should go ahead and write up my thoughts on the trip that would probably offend a delegation that had become people I thought of as, well, kind of friends (barf, I know). This self-censorship is weird for me, but I was told something to the effect of needing to be me.

The only caveat was a request not to bring up hotel related complaints, because “we’d come across like your stereotypical entitled Americans.”

Here’s the thing: that’s exactly what we were, myself included. I mean, even as a blogger, I make like five years worth of a Cuban state employee’s actual legitimate or skilled work – and bitch about the fact that while some guy is out there sweating his ass off in the tropics while plowing a field with a donkey, I’m having a bad day if I get stuck in a middle seat or have to go to an HR conference in Orlando.

I write blog posts with poop jokes for a living, they weld household objects into rotary fans for 1952 Bel Aires – and not even for a living, but instead, so they can do stuff like go to the store. It’s funny how being immersed, even for a short time, in a completely foreign culture can completely change your perspective on things.

As my realization that the people who append stupid shit like “GPHR” after their e-mail signatures (before the 20 lines of legal disclaimers) are actually decent individuals once they’re off work should prove.

Thing is, after almost a decade of SHRM events, I actually thought y’all were worse outside the office than in it (trust me, drunkasaurus Rex, it’s possible).

So, that changed my perspective on the people who I formerly thought of as Dr. Claw, sitting there stroking their cats and unleashing evil on unsuspecting children and animals – the HR leadership lunch and learn crowd, if you will. “I’ll get you next time, Gadget!”

Miami Vice.

What didn’t change, though, was the attitudes of the mostly older, mostly female and almost exclusively Caucasian delegation of well fed, wan skinned HR leaders waddling from welcome drink to welcome drink. Which, by the way, was quite welcome indeed as these ubiquitous cocktails inevitably came first thing after getting off a bus filled with HR people, for crying out loud.

I stood there many times, listening to this actually really smart, really accomplished delegation ask things like, “Do you know who Oprah is?” to the head of the University of Havana’s American Studies Department (he lived in New York while serving at the UN for 17 years), thinking: we are doing our jobs as the HR Delegation, alright.

I know why they kicked us out back in the 50s – because some poor kid had to drive pedicabs full of these people through cobblestone streets because they refused to walk a block in the rain back then, too, I’m sure.

Back then, as now some one with enough money to talk about their “vacation houses” (plural) – many of which were likely down the road before they became expropriated for the working class – would come into the market and start negotiating over the equivalent of a few cents just to get a good bargain.

And I’m sure before the embargo, they also ignored the amazing cultural milieu of one of the most vibrant cities in the world in favor of whatever passes as shopping over there.

And then long aloud for a Nordstroms because the shoes she brought were hurting her feet. She was not entertained by my offer of flip flops, although a young boy eyed them wistfully during the exchange.

I’m thinking, ‘lady, I can’t afford that shit and I live in Dallas’. And actually, you know, work and stuff. She seemed quite passionate, however, whenever women’s rights or equality came up, so good on ya, sister. Even at his worst, Castro at least liked baseball and golf and got to chill with Che. But at least he could talk about stuff other than compliance updates in social settings, you know?

He wasn’t, you know, an entitled American – who were the primary supporters of the anti-Communist Bautista regime, who just so happened to also hate dissidents, homosexuals and Jehovah’s Witnesses and systematically slaughtered thousands of them during his regime.

Bautista also started that whole Miami craze (thanks for Don Johnson, by the way) when he fled to his tens of millions in embezzled funds when he was disposed from power, and the US, of course, was cool with that, because at least he was a reliable ally against the Soviets.

If there’s one thing HR can understand, it’s the fear of the unknown and the willingness to look the other way to stay out of trouble, after all.

The Cold War Continues.

This is why, I’m sure, so many of the people on the trip were in the middle of an extraordinary time, in a place that’s always sounded as exotic and unapproachable to me as Timbuktu or Inner Mongolia, and worrying about whether or not we were going to have adequate time at the breakfast buffet prior to the day’s meetings.

When you don’t like change, when you’re afraid to immerse yourself in something different – like a Santeria ceremony or social media – there’s no “learning agility” (a popular buzzword with this crowd). There’s just a whole lot of bitching about any minor deviance from a familiar status quo.

That’s when I realized why the tongue-in-cheek post I was going to write about how HR is actually the Castro regime, all repression and earth tones, but the thing is, HR is HR, and some systems, particularly those running the show (and status quo), never change. They just run away to Miami.

Those entitled Americans who lost their property to the Cuban state, those entitled companies who lost their assets after the Revolution, these are the same ones who have understandably perpetuated this myth of Cuba as North Korea in the Western Hemisphere and vilify Castro, because they were the ones who “lost” the most in what was, largely, an avoidable situation.

The thing is, they were too busy sitting behind the gates of their huge estates or swimming in the azure waters off the shore where fishermen and locals were forbidden from going near to realize that the will of the people was going to overwhelm them.

And then, one New Year’s Eve, they were stuffing suitcases and running off into the night, grateful for their lives and sure that they’d be back just as soon as all those rabble-rousers got a stern rebuke or some shit like that. 60 years later, here we are. But yet, here we are.

Why were we there, exactly?

Why was it that, without regime change, the Castros (Raul, who led the armies during the revolution while Fidel got photo ops and wrote books about Marxism and occasionally captured and imprisoned, is still solidly in control) would let back in the very entitled Americans they fought a Revolution to drive out?

Simple.

They, unlike HR leaders, clearly understand that change can’t ever be fully controlled nor avoided, and while the tensions between the establishment and progressives, the young and the old, have occurred throughout human history, the status quo has never won – even if it’s taken a while for a regime to crumble.

Hell, the US is only a couple hundred years old, and Havana was a booming metropolis while the Dutch were cornering the Manhattan real estate market for a couple of beads. It’s all a cycle.

Employment Is A Right And A Duty.

The Castros are letting capitalism (and American tourism) in for one simple, pragmatic reason: because, unlike Bautista, they know that they won’t outlive their legacy, and that without a controlled transition, there’s going to be complete chaos. So they’re protecting what they’ve built by allowing it to be dismantled, and doing so with dignity.

Their revolution, after all, was for the people. In fact, some quotes from that dirty Red whose commie crew the US Department of State still budgets around $40 million a year to subvert through anti-Castro propaganda apparently no one on either side actually looks at (like benefits enrollment notices), but is just one of those policies that keeps on renewing every year because no one said, “hey. Is this really necessary?”

Nope, if the people want reliable internet access, processed foods or to trade stable, guaranteed jobs and pensions for the high risk market that is private enterprise, they’re not going to stand in the way anymore. In the past, dissension has always been dealt with like a problem employee: “If you don’t like it here, then leave.”

After so many did during the Mariel boatlift that the country was left with a skills gap that actually hurt more than the bottom line, they decided this time around, they were going to try a little bit softer approach. “I believe that all of us out to retire relatively young,” Castro once said, and realized that you can’t stay isolated on an island forever. It’s a changing world, and sometimes, you have to know when to step back.

That’s why I think we need to step back and realize that for all we bitch about, for our disgustingly conspicuous displays of capitalism (when Castro wrote, “capitalism is using its money; we socialists throw it away,” he’d clearly never heard of “social recruiting” or “integrated talent management systems), my biggest takeaway came off of the itinerary.

Happiness Is A Warm Gun.

One night, we tipped a doorman the equivalent of like a month’s salary (nothing to us), and he thanked us and offered to take us for a tour of the historic property afterwards.

“You’ve really helped my life,” he said in decent English, and eventually revealed he was a psychiatrist by day, but, of course, his day job didn’t pay nearly as well as his night gig hustling for tips. Which were way more than the $2.10 an hour we pay over here for tipped labor, I’m guessing.

At this point in the week, I’d realized this moonlighting was actually kind of the norm in this changing world just taking its first tentative steps into the future – whatever that might be – was becoming the norm. That “freelance economy” thing we all predicted? It’s just capitalism growing up, which is why that concept over here died with the recession, thank goodness.

I met a girl at a market selling cigar boxes with chintzy “Cuba” decorations who was actually a programmer and knew C# and Ruby, but couldn’t find work because that’s a tough gig to find in a place with 2% internet penetration who over here, as a diverse female computer scientist, could pretty much buy out the entire inventory of the entire open air market many times over with her signing bonus.

Many of the senior leaders from government ministries and the country’s largest trade unions weren’t ashamed to take bags of toiletries and first aid supplies after we’d shaken hands across the boardroom and had our photo ops. Imagine some K street big wig doing that in DC – “yeah, Kotex!” Not so much. Those lobbyists are just on the other side of the Potomac (boom).

This psychiatrist, who openly expressed his frustration with having to be a doorman after spending the day at the hospital, who showed us a picture of him and the Pope shaking hands just a few weeks earlier and talked with shocking frankness of his disdain for Fidel and Raul (I’m so paranoid I’m actually being as sparse on details as possible in case, you know), told me what sounded like bullshit.

There is no depression in Cuba.

Come on, I asked. None? How the hell was that possible?

“It’s because we always have the hope things are going to be better. They can always be worse,” he told me, and I guess that pretty much sums up my thoughts on HR, Cuba, and the intersection that formed one of the most formative experiences of my life.

Which, let the record show, puts me squarely on the revolutionary side of the equation.

So if you don’t like me, well, we’ll end with a Che quote this time:

“The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.”

And I’m doing my best, dammit.

Editor’s Note: A special shout out to Shon Burton and the HiringSolved team for proving that capitalism isn’t all bad and paying my way on this trip. It was a once in a lifetime experience, and I can’t thank them enough for making it possible.

You don’t have to rule a totalitarian state to know everything about who people are and what they’re doing – turns out, there’s a pretty kick ass sourcing platform for that. Check HiringSolved out today – it’s a killer product, and I’m seriously not just saying that. But I do want to say thanks again. You guys rock almost as much as your technology.

The Big Score: A Recruiter’s Guide To Hooking Up.

I’m passionate about helping good companies recruit good people, which is why I’ve dedicated so much of my time and effort to building solutions designed to make those matches happen as quickly and as painlessly as possible.

As proud as I am of my product, and as excited as I am about transforming talent acquisition through systems and software, I’m acutely aware that tools and technology alone aren’t enough.

I know this sounds strange coming from someone whose business model is predicated on SaaS sales, but I know enough to know that it’s PEOPLE, not products, that are the true differentiators in recruiting.

While the technology and channels we use are important for finding and engaging candidates, ultimately, it’s high touch, not high tech, that’s the real weapon of choice for winning the war for talent. Personalization beats automation any day of the week, period.

Two of Hearts.

It’s become a tired and hackneyed cliche to compare recruiting to dating, and sure, the similarities are pretty superficial. But I’ll let you in on a little secret: most people suck at dating for the same reason companies struggle at recruiting. Success all comes down to emotional intelligence. Data is great, but if you want to score, you’ve got to go for the heart, not the brain. And as anyone who’s ever hired (or dated) already knows, emotions almost always trump logic, which makes all of this more of an abstract art than a hard science.

We all know recruiting and dating are similar, and there are already a ton of asinine articles out there outlining this inane idiom; the problem is, almost none of these extraneous extended metaphors acknowledge the fact that in dating, like recruiting, playing by the rules isn’t always the best way of beating the odds.

“Getting lucky” has nothing to do with luck in either pursuit, since both are a game of skill, not a game of chance.

And chances are, if you know how to intelligently use emotional intelligence, you’ll end up winning that game every time. Because, like it or not, you don’t get play playing by the playbook everyone else is using.

As a disclaimer, they say to write what you know, so this extended metaphor only extends to guys trying to date women. The applicability of these approaches to recruiting, however, is more or less universal.

Here’s how to use emotional intelligence to make sure your hunt ends with a happy ending, every time.

Never Wing It Without A Wingman.

We all want to be Maverick in Top Gun, but let’s face it – without Goose, his highway to the danger zone would have been a far bumpier ride. If you want to take someone’s breath away, make sure you always have a wingman watching your back.

For example, if you’re going to a bar to try to meet someone, a wingman will distract a potential match’s friends long enough for the pilot to try to land his target.

Like most things in life, the power of a little teamwork goes a long way. The goal of any initial interaction in dating, or recruiting, is to establish credibility and trust, which is why having a reliable source vouching for you is so essential.

In both recruiting and dating, there’s an inherent level of distrust operating as an unseen but ubiquitous bias; getting past that means having someone else have your back, because they’re certainly going to come across as more credible than you are. Winging it rarely works, but having a wingman sure does.

If you’re not using a wingman in your recruiting efforts, your calls to action are likely landing on deaf ears. If you want to break through, building credibility means letting someone else do the talking – which is why flying solo is such a bad idea when trying to attract or engage top talent. Make sure you never take off without having your employees and hiring managers watching your wing – and talking you up so you don’t have to.

Sure, we talk a lot about the idea of “brand advocates” or “employee ambassadors,” but are they really working with you to make sure you’re able to hit your target, or are they just providing a diversion without actually helping increase your own odds? If you’re not letting your hiring managers communicate directly with candidates, or try to act as an intermediary for all communication instead of facilitating connections, you’re not doing yourself any favors.

Just like a good wingman will always be on the lookout for you, your wingmen should be actively facilitating referrals and helping hook you up with the best talent they know. It’s always easier when you’re the friend of a friend than just another random person hitting you up out of nowhere. Your colleagues, clients and coworkers are the best wingmen you’ve got – and if they’re not already working their network to help you hook up, you’ve got way bigger relationship issues to deal with.

Going Dutch Won’t Get You Anywhere.

Again, as someone who lives in Amsterdam, I know this is a weird bit of advice, but even I know that “going Dutch” is a terrible idea. Of course, in the Netherlands, it’s fairly standard for guys to make their dates split the bill, which is how this euphemism got its name, and also, why so many Dutch guys go home alone at the end of the night.

Being equitable or fair doesn’t make you more attractive to women – it just makes you cheap, and, likely, still single.

Recruiters, like my countrymen, often turn away potential matches by making it really damn hard for candidates to actually like them.

Sure, they might be attractive at first, but it’s what happens when that check comes that counts. And if you don’t put your money where your mouth is, you’re going to have a whole lot of rejected offers (or unreturned calls, if your reputation precedes you – as it so often does).

We’re often our own worst enemies, and if you’re undermining your own efforts by turning off people by either leaving a bad initial impression or making it harder to hook up down the line by making the process way too difficult or time intensive to be worth the effort, then you’re paying peanuts and getting monkeys.

My point: if you’re investing in recruiting top talent, you should be investing in recruiting top recruiters, too. If you’re skimping on the costs required to have the right people, the right systems and the right employer branding or recruitment marketing in place, you’re not going to get any action – but you’re most certainly screwing yourself. And you could have stayed home for that.

Don’t Be A Douchebag.

Everyone hates immodesty, which is to say, there’s no worse turnoff than someone who’s their own biggest fan or believes their own hype (even if no one else does).

While having a kick ass, high end new car is going to make you more attractive to potential partners – and like it or not, a little materialism still goes a long way – if that car is the only damn thing you talk about, then no matter how nice a ride you have you’re going to drive home alone.

Like Fight Club, the first rule of being a badass is to not talk about being a badass. It’s why anyone who tries to call themselves “cool” is almost always a giant loser.

My point: all your shiny employer branding collateral, career site copy and recruitment advertising isn’t working if it’s all about you.

If you truly are as awesome as you say you are, then people will inevitably take notice. There’s no need to talk about how great you are if your people are happy – they’ll do most of the work for you.

If your own colleagues, coworkers and even candidates have great experiences, then all you have to do is show up, open the door and have potential new hires enjoy the ride. They should already be on board before they onboard. You know anyone with a nice car who talks about their nice car is compensating for something.

And almost always end up getting the short end of the stick.

Shut Up and Listen.

Keeping with that point, we all know that no one likes to be sold to, and while desperate candidates are likely to play the game, top talent has a choice – and nothing turns off the truly hard to get than the smell of desperation. Instead of talking about what the candidate can do for a company, the real thing you need to understand is what the company can do for a candidate.

Great people want to be challenged; I’ve been selling stuff since I was literally 8 years old, and challenging my customers is the only way I’ve ever successfully sold anything at all. It’s when you sell that sales start to suck.

So shut up about how great you are, already. You want to get to know them, and hope they feel the same way – but make sure you ask good questions, stay engaged and actually listen to what they want and need. People are drawn to people who care about more than a quick close; after all, that’s not a great foundation for any long term relationship.

The last thing you want is to wake up with buyer’s remorse. That’s how rumors get started – and bad reputations, too. You can’t know if you can fulfill anyone else’s needs if you’re only looking to satisfy your own.

So shut up, and get to know your candidates as well as you expect them to get to know your company before inviting them over. Best case scenario, they’re going to see all your warts anyways. Might as well get them all out there.

Swinging For the Fences.

While you should never rush anything, slowing down or stopping any process is a surefire way to suck the energy (and initial attraction) out of any great interaction.

The more time you take to call someone back after getting their number, or between dates, the more likely they are to have found someone else or forgotten you (or both), which is why once you find someone you’re interested in, you’ve got to keep in constant contact.

Don’t give them time for insecurities or doubts to creep in, or more time to evaluate their options or do too much digging for dirt – they’ll probably find it, and you’ll have to start all over again, which really takes way more time than, say, picking up the phone to say hello or somehow letting them know you’re still thinking of them, even if you’re not ready to take that next step just yet.

As they say, it’s a marathon, not a sprint. Just keep things moving. You’ll get to home plate eventually.

Give Options, Not Choices.

I’ll let you in on a little trick – you can get what you want by making suggestions, but you’ve got to at least create the illusion of choice if you ever want to actually get yours.

Diplomacy is everything – and you don’t ask someone if they want to go out, you ask them where they’d prefer to go out. If you’re asking whether they’d like to meet you for dinner or drinks, you’re not giving them the chance to say “no,” and all you want is a yes – and you’ll get to that no matter which option they choose.

Candidates, like potential partners, can smell insecurity a mile away – and even if you don’t think you’re good enough for them, you can’t ever show that. If you’re going to have a chance, you have to act like you deserve one. Give a candidate options, but never suggest too many – choice is good, too many choices means you’re probably desperate or just looking for a warm body.

Which is cool, but no one really wants to be a backup plan. If you want to get together with the most attractive candidates, don’t give them a choice – lead by giving them options, instead.

Sex Sells.

Look, let’s face facts. If you’re hot, it’s way easier to have your pick of partners – which is why companies like Google and Facebook can focus on quality, not quantity, because, well, they have options. But then again, looks can be deceiving, and if you don’t have natural beauty, well, you’d better have a pretty killer personality.

This is the same reason company culture counts for so much, even if you don’t have the hottest employment brand on the outside. You can’t control how you look, but you can control how much that really matters – and secure, stable and nice are often enough to differentiate a company – and a recruiter – from far flashier competition.

Nice guys don’t finish last in recruiting – for career minded professionals, this is a search for someone you know your parents and friends will approve of. So there better be some substance to your style if you want a long term relationship – and if you have both, you’re pretty much able to pick and choose who you end up with instead of simply settling for who’s available.

Look for the Long Term.

I’ve never met anyone who prefers a one night stand, no matter how amazing it might have been, to a great relationship.

Ultimately, we’re all looking for something that’s going to last, ideally forever (even if, intellectually, we know that’s improbable). Similarly, the best candidates don’t want just another job – they want a career destination.

The chance at making things work and finding that right match is the real “opportunity” every candidate and potential partner really wants.

I think many recruiters and employers try way too hard to go after “top talent” – the same candidates everyone else on the planet wants – with no idea how to convince them not just to consider working for their company, or, more importantly, how to convince them they’re going to want to keep working from them when it’s time for them to move on.

And we almost always move on. It’s an inevitable part of our existence.

But if you’re worth sticking around for, even after the changes that come with time and proximity, well, you’re unlikely to find long term love when you’re looking for a one night stand.

But you’d better make sure you’re being open and honest up front, and make sure they know what they’re getting into, or else, they’re probably not going to stick around long enough to even have breakfast in the morning. And it’s what happens the next day, not that night, that really determines whether or not a relationship has any lasting potential. No one wants to wake up with a headache, some hazy memories and a whole lot of regret.

If you’re going to go for the transactional, one-off approach, well, might as well pay that agency fee so you don’t have to go through any effort whatsoever. But like “going Dutch,” you know you’re probably going to have to start over from square one, anyways. So might as well invest enough time, money and attention to doing it the right way.

Call Me Out.

I realize that some of this might have offended your sensibilities, or might not be actionable enough for you since I was speaking in the abstract, without mentioning any concrete strategies or specific technologies. The reason I wanted to take this approach is simple: this is me being me, and you can love or hate me for it, but ultimately, it all comes down to affinity.

But at least you know I’m a real person, and a real human – and I’m not trying to push product or marketing messaging. That’s not how I make money – so if you’d like to challenge any of these points, well, I’d love to hear from you. But if you agree with me, maybe we should meet up sometime. If you’re offended, well, go ahead and swipe left.

See? It’s really that easy.

René Bolier is one of the founders of OnRecruit, a technology company designed to help employers and recruiting agencies increase qualified applications and conversions through automating and optimizing pay-per-click advertising while also providing tools to help employers manage and measure their campaigns anytime, anywhere.

As a technology enthusiast, Rene passionate about helping other entrepreneurs use market insights, trends and feedback to bring their own products to market globally; in addition to leading sales and marketing at OnRecruit, Rene is also an active speaker and blogger on topics such as online recruitment, technology, advertising and social media.

Follow Rene on Twitter @ReneBolier or connect with him on LinkedIn.

Creative Recruiting Techniques Gone Bad

For years now, companies have decided to create videos as a tool to lure potential candidates. And why wouldn’t you? Heather R. Huhman, contributor on Entreprenuer.com, said:

“Video-job posting platform Ongig‘s new study shows candidates spend on average 55 seconds viewing a text-only ads, whereas job seekers spend 5 minutes and 23 seconds watching a video advertisement (when they choose to play the ad.)”

I don’t doubt that you can get better feedback from creating video job advertisements. I just think you should use it to the professionals.

Some of the videos you have made to recruit new candidates are just weird.

I love new inventive and creative recruiting techniques, but you have to draw the line somewhere. Watch this video and see the weird, the rude and the ugly creative recruiting techniques along with my recruiting video pick of the day. Some of the selections will shock you – and not all in a good way…

Should You Try Video Recruiting Campaigns?

In a word yes. Creative recruiting techniques such as including images in and links in job posts and have always gotten a greater response rate than those that do not. With more and more candidates using their phones to look for jobs, this is especially true. In order for this to be effective, however, make sure to emphasise your company’s brand and give the viewer a reason to want to work with you.

Garbage In, Garbage Out: Why Changing Your ATS Won’t Solve Your Recruiting Problems.

Sometimes you just need a scapegoat. For the staffing industry, the applicant tracking system (ATS) seems to be taking on that role as recruiting challenges grow and results disappoint. Why aren’t we beating our competition to the talent?

It must be the ATS. Why aren’t our candidates being selected? It must be the ATS. Why aren’t candidates saying yes to the roles we offer? It has to be the ATS. Doesn’t it?

At the staffing and recruiting industry conferences I have attended in recent weeks, a solid majority of the staffing business owners and leaders I speak with are looking to change their ATS in the near future.

Jibe’s 2014 Talent Acquisition Survey found that “64% of recruiting professionals expressed some dissatisfaction with or plans to replace their current applicant tracking system (ATS).” A year later, I can report that the ATS frustration Jibe identified is still running high.

These staffing industry professionals feel strongly that technology can help them edge out the competition and better find, engage and retain talent. And they are right.

Smart technology is essential to meeting that goal, but the ATS may not be the right system to focus on. Here’s why.

Garbage In, Garbage Out.

One of the main complaints I hear about the average ATS is that their data is either weak or inaccurate (or in some cases, non-existent). Recruiters don’t trust the ATS data they have.

The irony there is that the majority of data entered into the ATS is being put there by recruiters. As they add candidates and job requisitions to the ATS, they are often missing or muddling information.

In the rush to move from data entry to candidate placement, recruiters (human as we all are) make mistakes. The greater the hurry the more mistakes and oversights there will be.

Recruiting has become a global high-speed competition for talent. Hurry is what recruiters have to do to compete, but that mad hustle leaves the ATS incomplete and its data unreliable. Garbage (bad data) goes in and that is exactly what staffing firms find they will get out of their ATS.

To me, it’s not a failing of the ATS but a reality of staffing workflows and the human and technical architecture beneath them, from job boards and vendor management systems to CRMs and ATSs. Each of these disparate systems has valuable sourcing, recruiting and candidate data. But as long as that data is walled off—whether inside or outside of the ATS—it’s of very little use.

Furthermore, as long as recruiters are designated the primary liaisons between these systems who must manually pull and parse data in and out, the data flow will remain limited and full of flaws.

Migration Is For the Birds.

Switching from one ATS or CRM to another is not a simple or quick transition, even in the best of scenarios. Sourcing and recruiting processes are disrupted and a business can quickly lose traction and talent in an effort to do just the opposite.

Before embracing another wide scale migration process, the staffing organization needs to consider the risk of the disruption and whether the gains will offset the losses. Often an ROI exercise is what is needed to determine if a new ATS will fuel greater performance and profits.

I have seen some cases in which staffing firms simply believe that the “grass will be greener” with another ATS. After months of migration and frustration, they then find themselves dealing with the same sourcing and recruiting challenges they faced with their old ATS. The goal is not simply to move on to a system that might be better.

Before considering migration, a staffing firm must first determine exactly how much better the new system will be and what will be gained.

The losses of any migration are clear–time, resources and costs. The hard work (work that can’t be ignored) is identifying and quantifying the true gains.

Deep Impact: Why Bigger Isn’t Always Better.

We are in a technological renaissance across the staffing industry and there are a myriad of innovations that can help staffing firms make big improvements in efficiency and performance no matter their ATS.

From time card systems to candidate importing tools, there are a lot of targeted fixes and strategic ATS add-ons that can make a big impact on efficiency, productivity and bottom-line results.

One area where innovation seems to be occurring at light speed is mobile recruitment. As recruiters and job seekers look to leverage their mobile technologies more and more, new tools and apps are launching nearly every day to increase the efficiency and improve the experience of mobile job searching and recruitment.

Automation tools are also helping staffing firms reduce the copious amounts of data entry that have long been associated with building talent databases and managing VMS clients.

In embracing automation, staffing firms are eliminating the time and cost of uploading candidate and requisition data while bringing separate systems and their data together. It’s one giant step closer to a seamless and end-to-end talent flow and it doesn’t require a lengthy ATS migration.

In recruiting and staffing, we all know that it can pay off in big ways to give an imperfect candidate a shot. Today, that imperfect candidate might just be your ATS in need of strong support tools that can integrate its resources and capabilities into the full talent life cycle.

My advice is this: before you start on the place to full replacement, take time to make sure you understand what you have and what you need. Sometimes a smaller approach will deliver the bigger, better results.

After all, size doesn’t matter. It’s what you do with your tool that really counts.

About the Author: Tim Arnold is the CEO of Fyre, a cloud based software for staffing agencies and HR teams designed to bring recruiters the opportunity to harness big data in the recruitment process while accelerating lead generation and conversion by working with existing applicant tracking systems and sourcing sites to help find better talent faster, increase engagement and allow staffing firms to work less while making more placements.

With almost a decade of recruitment and technology industry experience, Tim has been named one of Orlando’s “20 Coolest People” by Axis Magazine and has been a speaker at TedXYouth. A native of Orlando, Tim is a graduate of the University of Central Florida.

Follow Tim on Twitter @TimKArnold or connect with him on LinkedIn.

Make Hiring Great Again: Why You Suck At Recruiting (And What To Do About It).

According to a recently released report conducted by the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (CIPD), the UK’s professional body for HR and talent development and global recruitment process outsourcing firm Hays PLC, a staggering 78% of all employers surveyed reported recruiting related problems as one of the most pervasive organizational challenges (and growth impediments) for their business and bottom line growth.

The biggest talent challenge reported by survey respondents was that fully 8 out of 10 were unable to find the professionals they need in order to fill the open positions and mission critical roles their organizations need to survive today – and thrive tomorrow.

The most obvious culprit for this and the manifold surveys and studies showing similar results seems pretty obvious. But if you think that the “talent shortage” is to blame, think again.

Sure. the lack of supply and cutthroat competition for in-demand skills may be partly to blame for your hiring woes, it’s too often used as a convenient scapegoat for the much more significant problems with recruiting processes and policies that are largely to blame for most employers’ hiring challenges and “talent detraction” woes.

Before blaming the bigger economic picture, throwing a ton of money at talent technology, recruiting systems or the next shiny sourcing or SaaS solution to come along or simply resigning yourself to the B Team instead of continuing to find, attract and hire truly top talent, there are some pretty obvious things every employer should look at fixing, first.

5 Reasons You’re Not Finding the Best Candidates.

If you’re looking for the best talent, there are some fundamental best practices that no recruiting or talent professional should ever overlook. If you suck at recruiting, then here are 5 things you’re probably doing wrong (and how to fix them).

5. You Don’t Have An Employer Brand.

I know, you’re probably as sick of hearing about the importance of building and maintaining a strong employer brand as I am talking about it, but let’s face the facts.

Today’s job seeker doesn’t just apply for any job they find online, but are increasingly selective with their submissions (no matter what recruiters may think).

More than ever, candidates are digging for dirt on prospective employers, including what working in that job or for your company is really like, before even applying for a job.

Despite the proliferation of employment related information, from company career sites to Glassdoor to social networks and search, however, many of those job seekers reported to having difficulty when it comes to doing their due diligence on employers prior to deciding whether or not to apply for a job or even accept an extended offer.

A recent LinkedIn poll of professionals who had transitioned between jobs in 2015 underscored the fact that there seems to be a growing divide between increased candidate expectations for transparent, authentic company career information and a dearth of companies providing them with the information they need to know what working at an organization is really like. 49% of “active candidates” surveyed reported that their biggest obstacle in their most recent job search was the sense that they didn’t feel as if they had enough insight into company culture to make an informed career decision.

In other words, no matter how sophisticated we get with recruitment marketing or employer branding, fully half of all successful candidates still make a leap of faith every time they leap into a new role. And it’s not for lack of effort that so many job seekers feel so many employers still remain so opaque; another study from the Talent Board found that in 2014, half of all candidates surveyed reported to attempting to research an organization even before the point of application; 68% spent at least two hours doing so.

Here’s a pretty obvious idea: help these job seekers help themselves by actually creating a strong employer brand and recruiting related buzz instead of just talking about it or rolling out some generic social media presence or cookie cutter career site.

Share stuff like videos, employee photos, company events and personal testimonials featuring real talk from real employees if you really want them to want to apply for a job. Providing a job seeker FAQ, any insight into your hiring process or what to expect as a candidate will get you bonus points – and likely, win over top talent, too.

Fit happens. All you have to do is give job seekers enough insights and information to make an informed decision. Because no career move should ever be a leap of faith.

4. You Don’t Care What Your Candidates Have To Say.

Recruiters often prefer to screen candidates on the basis of how they look on paper (or how their professional profile looks online).

The problem with these traditional screening methods, however, is that they often don’t tell the whole story about what a person is really like, or what they’re capable of in the future.

Fact is, most recruiting related documentation focuses squarely on what a candidate has already done. This means we’re hiring people based on the past instead of their potential, which is a potentially fatal flaw in many recruiting processes.

To really get a true sense of any candidate’s skills and personality, you’ve got to go past their profiles, resumes, cover letters or that staid, static, traditional stuff recruiters have relied on for far too long.

If you’re not hearing their voices, shut up and listen. Because candidates have a ton to tell you, if you’re willing to actually hear what it is they have to say (and how they say it, too).

A new study conducted by researchers at the University of Chicago found that when recruiters listened to job candidates’ qualifications, they rated them as more competent than those whose qualifications they read — even when the words were the same. The results showed recruiters liked these candidates more and were more likely to hire them.

Make your screening process more personal with phone or video screening interviews. And most important of all: let them tell you their own story, in their own voice. That way, you can figure out if it’s worth working together on that next chapter or not. Forget resumes. This is what real recruiting is really all about.

3. You’re Making It Harder Than It Has To Be.

We talk a lot about candidate experience, but the fact of the matter is that many employers have to strike a balance between making the application, screening, interviewing and selection processes as painless as possible with getting to know enough about a candidate’s experience and aspirations to make the right choice when extending an offer.

Screening tools, behavioral or group interviews, assessment technologies or other solutions might be great ways to get to know more about candidates, but using too many can kill your chances at scoring top talent.

Requiring candidates to jump through hoops before hiring them makes the process long and difficult, and they’re likely to accept another offer before they reach your final interview stage.

In fact, the LinkedIn survey found that 44 percent of respondents took less than a month to search for and accept a new job. If your hiring process is too long, you could lose the best candidates to your competition.

What’s more, a survey conducted by CareerBuilder found that 58 percent of employers surveyed said they don’t communicate with applicants about how long the interview or application process will take. If your multi-stage interview process drags on without an end in sight, candidates are bound to get frustrated and look for another opportunity.

Let candidates know what to expect from your hiring process, and don’t make it any longer and more complicated than it needs to be.

2. You Can’t Make Up Your Damned Mind.

You’ve made it through the hiring process and you’ve decided on the candidate you want to hire. But before you make an offer, you need to iron out the details, get the offer approved, and get feedback on your choice to make sure you’ve selected the best candidate for the job.

In fact, the CareerBuilder survey found that 38 percent of employers wait more than three days after the interview to extend a job offer to a candidate. In that time, your perfect candidate is losing interest and searching for other opportunities.

If you find the right candidate, send them an offer as soon as possible. The longer you wait, the more likely it is they’ve moved on. Because sometimes, getting recruiting right means getting it “right now.”

1. Your Offers Are A Joke.

When you do make an offer, make it worth the candidate’s while.

According to the CareerBuilder survey, 18 percent of candidates surveyed rejected the initial job offer extended to them by their current employers, successfully holding out to negotiate for a more lucrative package, higher salary, better bonuses or benefits or some combination thereof.

Here’s the thing: if we all agree that our people are our greatest assets, you need to be willing to pay the premium top talent commands and put your money where your mouth is.

Candidates know how much the market is paying; if you’re low balling them or offering a lateral move, you’re probably wasting your time.

The LinkedIn survey found that 74 percent of respondents ultimately expect to make more money when switching jobs – and if you can’t pay, they stay. Want to win top talent? Paying more than the other guys isn’t a silver bullet, but it’s one hell of a good start. Because talent is scarce, and the risks – and rewards – of recruiting and retaining the best and the brightest have never been higher.

Which is why, when it comes to fixing the real reasons why you suck at recruiting, sweating this small stuff can make such a big difference.

About the Author:

Josh Tolan is the CEO of Spark Hire, a video interview solution used by more than 2,000 companies across the globe.

Follow Josh on Twitter @AllThingsBiz or connect with him on LinkedIn.

Recruiting Content: How To Catch A Purple Squirrel.

I bet you’ve already noticed how much harder it has gotten in the last year or two. The economy is improving, so everyone’s willing to look for a new job, so your hiring managers assume it must be the time to start looking for purple squirrels – those crazy-good candidates with such strange combinations of skills or rare quality levels that they come at a premium.

Assuming you can even find them, that is.

Your ads are increasing overall awareness and are solid at driving people who are already looking for a job. The same can be said for job boards. But your purple squirrels don’t click ads, and they don’t look on job boards.

Start your purple squirrel hunt by having the right bait.

The Hunt Begins: How To Feed A Purple Squirrel.

So, demand is going up while supply stays flat, and you see the outcome: it takes longer to find purple squirrels, and longer to induce them to apply.

You can’t ignore purple squirrels because they have the potential to make deep impacts to your business’s goals. The proficient writer is useful, but a proficient writer with experience in the financial sector who can make complicated ideas clear is a purple squirrel because they make wonky subjects available to whole new audiences.

So if ads and job boards don’t work, what’s left? How do you hunt the majestic purple squirrel?

If it were me, I’d start my hunt by having the right bait.

You might think of purple squirrel bait in the usual terms: high salaries, perks, great office space, ability to work from home, a brand that connotes excellence, etc. And those work, obviously. The problem is that very little of that bait is under a recruiter’s control. Maybe you can work for a few weeks to show that getting that particular purple squirrel will require a salary adjustment, but that’s not your call to make.

But there is purple squirrel food that you can make yourself. You can start building recruiting content. More to the point, you can start collecting stories.

Once Upon A Talent Time: Purple Squirrels & Recruitment Storytelling.

As a recruiter, you have dozens of stories about the company in your back pocket.

You talk about the time the company had to come together across three offices and pull an all-nighter to complete a complex project the client was amazed by. Or about the recent publications by your staff.

Or how the last person in this position was promoted to oversee a huge new project. Or the patents this team has been granted. Or the annual corporate retreat. Or that the manager of this job was named “boss of the year.”

Or that you have a volunteer program that paints and repairs local schools once a year. Or that people in this job never leave because people love the company and the mission. You don’t create the stories, but you collect them. The issue is that you know exactly how useful they are in compelling action, so you hoard them.

If something works as well as your stories, stop hiding them and put them front and center in your search for talent. Because those stories are purple squirrel food.

Purple squirrels became that way because they fell in love with something, either a separate skill set, or a job or an industry or process or something.

They fell in love with it to the point of near-obsession, and now they are an expert. They didn’t become an expert because there was a raise in it, but because they discovered a passion in themselves for it. Ask a writer or an editor: they are in love with words. If they became an expert in the financial industry or health care, it’s because they also fell in love with that, too.

So don’t try and think money will draw their passion. Passion attracts passion, so tell stories that show off that passion. The real mission of the company, the department or the people who will surround them is what’s going to draw them close enough to pitch. Stories and content are the only way to illustrate that passion.

Gotta Keep ‘Em Compensated: Why Recruiting Content Is Currency.

At the same time, content has a viral quality. Unlike a job description, an interesting story gets shared to people you might never know (or who aren’t obsessively polishing their LinkedIn profile).

Finally, content doesn’t draw people to you – it enables better hunting. Turning those stories into content helps close the deal on a purple squirrel.

When a recruiter pitches me, I know we’re in “first date” land and everything is happy and shiny. To that end, I take everything said with a grain of salt. The same story I discount when a recruiter tells it to me over the phone takes far more authenticity when it’s been “published” online.

Recruiters can leverage that authenticity by sending the same story to the prospect rather than telling it, putting them in the position of selling an idea or story that purple squirrels can envision themselves in.

Yes, building content can be a slow process. But it is an investment in landing purple squirrels over the long run. Which is ultimately an investment in you.

Read more at Meshworking from TMP Worldwide.

About the Author: James Ellis is a Digital Strategist for TMP Worldwide, the world’s largest recruitment advertising agency.

For more than 15 years, James has focused on connecting cutting-edge technology to marketing objectives. As a digital strategist for TMP Worldwide, he helps some of the largest companies in America answer their most pressing digital questions.

Follow James on Twitter at @TheWarForTalent or connect with him on LinkedIn.Learn more about TMP Worldwide at www.tmp.com.

Need Holiday Cash? Find Missing Recruiting Fees With Hirabl

My mouth is still hanging open since meeting with Hirabl. Hirabl helps you find missing recruiting fees owed to you by clients who hired a candidate you presented but didn’t quite remember to pay you. (Your mouth is hanging open now right!??!!? They also reveal leads for new hiring managers. Watch:

So what is it?

HIRABL has created recruitment analytics that deliver a superhuman return on investment. Their software empowers recruiters to put their data to work identifying “backdoor hires” and targeting new business opportunities that accelerate revenue. We’ve already identified tens of millions in missed fees for clients worldwide and are continually finding new ways to make the job market more efficient for recruiters, employers, and workers.

So we can agree that companies not paying the fees when hiring a candidate we presented is rare. But it happens. You know the deal, you are working with a hiring manager and they go dark for various reasons or suddenly the position is canceled, etc. But then it opens a few months down the line it opens and rather than call you, the recruiter who submitted them in the first place, they call the candidate directly and hires them. How are you supposed to find out that this occurred?

Hirabl’s technology scrapes the internet looking at things like press releases, LinkedIn profile changes, and other social profiles to see a change based on the data you supply them on your clients. If the software sees that you may have been left out of the loop when a candidate you presented is hired, it sends an alert to you so that you can send a friendly reminder to the client letting them know that they “found” this candidate through your efforts.

HIRABL helps finds money owed as well as find new clients by:

Alerting you if there has been a back door hire(when a client hires one of your candidates without your knowledge) so that you can collect missed fees immediately.

2. Letting you know when your hiring managers move to preserve existing business and target new business.

3. Letting you know when your candidates move, and there are openings that need to be backfilled. Identify new clients who are hiring.

This is a great product. Request a free blind audit of your data to learn what you’re missing here: http://www.hirabl.com/request-demo

About the Author: An international trainer, Jackye Clayton has traveled worldwide sharing her unique gifts in sourcing, recruiting and coaching. She offers various dynamic presentations on numerous topics related to leadership development, inclusionary culture development, team building and more.Her in-depth experience in working with top Fortune and Inc 500 clients and their employees has allowed her to create customized programs to coach, train and recruit top talent and inspire others to greatness. Follow Jackye on Twitter @JackyeClayton and @RecruitingTools or connect with her on LinkedIn.

ATS Review – Lever

A few weeks ago I promised a story about Lever, and why they should be used when you take hiring seriously. Today, in my ATS review, I will talk about how Lever can help you doing better hiring. You know, the things that make you successful as a recruiter. It kind of turned into a review.I got Lever on my radar when I read Aline Lerner’s review of Lever about them. She starts out with the exact same feeling I have been having for quite some time: ATSs suck big time. It doesn’t matter if you are Taleo, Jobvite, Jobscore or any other thing from this list: you kinda suck. I’ll tell you the one and only reason why they suck: they have no sourcing capabilities (and if they state they do, it’s a lie). The only two products who can effectively manage a pipeline of sourced candidates are Lever and Workable, period.

So, first things first, if you are into sourcing talent, Lever can make it so much easier for you but also for your whole team. Their belief, and I totally back them on this one, is that everyone on the team should help finding talent. This is an invaluable and wise thing to evangelise. Developers find better developers, period. Marketing guys can find better marketing guys and I can spot a decent tech recruiter from miles away. This product canget your whole team into sourcing people, instead of just dumping your roles with a recruiter who does not understand the role he is hiring for. They challenge the status quo, the central role of the recruiter / HR for hiring everyone is long overdue, and that’s what makes them such a damn good product to do hiring with in the first place. Lever will empower your whole team to approach the recruiting challenge together.

So how does it work? Like many other PaaS / SaaS products, they have a Chrome extension. This makes it easy to get people’s online profiles into Lever (Github / LinkedIn / Angel.co / Dribbble). This thing is not exclusively available for recruiters, but for everyone on the (Google Apps) domain. That’s the power of it — you can turn your organisation in a sourcing power machine. I think this approach got adopted from how they work themselves and how many startups do hiring: hire with everyone on the team and make it fun again. At some point recruiting or just hiring new co-workers became a drag because it was so damn hard (and ruined by recruiters). With the right use of Lever and proper training of your team, hiring can become fun again, which it should be.

So that is the main reason I personally love Lever, but I also like it because they have some other aspects that are important. In no specific order: it looks good, it works, it gets updated regularly, it’s (partly) open-sourced and they are very nice people. Lets dig a little deeper:

It looks good

I’ll be honest and short about this: I like good looking things. It’s clever use of the modern web standards. It’s a good looking web application. UI is good, UX feels great and they often revise their looks to make it look even better.

It works

Like stated above: Lever has a really good integration tool, a chrome extension that lets you import candidates from sites like LinkedIn, Github, Angel.co, and they are integrating with even more sites as we speak. I already pointed out that Stackoverflow is a must have, as well as Bitbucket, Tech.pro & Coderwall for tech and maybe Behance & Dribble for design. I am not familiar with any other sites Marketing / Sales recruiters utilize, so if you know some that should be added to the tally do comment on this piece.

The tool just works. You install it and whenever you land on a page that Lever integrates with, you can scrape off a candidate’s (shown) information into Lever. It often gives you candidate’s email addresses as well, which is really useful when sourcing. Let me show it to you:

https://youtu.be/ewsJ-800qWw

Next to the tool they provide a very good, but lean, ATS (Applicant Tracking System). Scheduling interviews is easy across the board, leaving feedback on candidates is done within seconds and all kind of reports can be made. You can tag people with specifics, there is a snooze button (❤) and you can use the open API to build a killer careers page. For instance,check out the careers page of Clinkle — you can’t even see Lever anymore.

To be honest, hiring is a very administration-heavy job. This administrative aspect is the biggest pain point for me, but with Lever I actually suck less, which can only benefit the people I am trying to hire☺.

Their support is good

Like with any other software, you sometimes need some support from one of their members, or if you are like me, you are missing things that would make the software even more interesting and therefore better to use. They take your requests seriously. ven last week when I visited them, they did a project called ‘Polish’ to fix all the minor issues and take user requests into production that were stacked over the previous period. Also I have seen many product updates in the limited time I have used Lever at 3DHubs.

It is built on open-source technologies

Its all built on open source technologies: Derby.js (whom their CTO Nate Smith is an author of), Share.js and Tributary.io. This gives them an advantage over all the big fish I named before. It will certainly make it easier for your engineers to start liking this software. Also they are currently building out their API’s: which for instance makes the custom build career pages possible. Check out their Github account here.

They are a very nice bunch of people

Last week I had the opportunity to visit Lever HQ in San Francisco. They took me out to dinner, and we discussed the future, the past and the present of recruiting. As some of you might have heard, they recently landed a nice Series A funding lead by Matrix Partners so they are going to scale and push even a better working Lever into the market. This puts a smile on my face, since this market is full of ancient ATSs that need to be overthrown. Every single person I met is bright, young and driven to make their program succeed. You know you will be in good hands when you start using them.

So those are some things that really make my mouth water. It’s all subjective of course, but since I think there will be more people who will take on a pro-active way of hiring and could benefit from software built on those pillars.

The case: 3D Hubs

3D Hubs is a startup from Amsterdam, they recently completed theirSeries A funding and are going overseas (NYC) to get more API penetration. The service they offer? They allow you to find and order 3D prints from printers in your area. It’s very cool for the 3D printing industry actually.

Now in this case that I am going to describe I had the luxury to hunt developers while using Lever. They needed Front-end (JS/CSS/HTML) and Back-end developers (Drupal/PHP). I did not even have to advise them on getting Lever, simply because their ‘Growth guy’ Rob Draaijer had already implemented Lever long before my arrival (well done).

So, the overview screen is as follows:

As you can see it is my own personal pipeline. This is a snapshot of current state. You can see the underlined green sources. Though it looks like most candidates came from LinkedIn, this isn’t strictly true — I hunt people on Git / StackOverflow / BitBucket / Drupal forums or whatever and then import them through LinkedIn (if I can find their profile). Some guys only have AngelList or Github, and then I import through those sites. Note to self: need to take care of specifying where I got people from, it seems Linkedin is doing an great job now while it I mainly use it for cross referencing or checking up on people (and importing them into Lever ;)).

80 people archived, click it and see it in-depth:

Most of the people have been sourced by me (27 leads, and in the archived slot there are the guys who withdrew etc), doing Stackoverflow searches (tag:Drupal and check out top-answerers in the EU area for them Back-end guys), LinkedIn searches and some Github searches.

The good thing is, if you are in to bulk emailing, you can send out a nice introduction email about the job and company, and why you think they are an added value to your mission. ONLY bulk email people who actually 100% MATCH to the job you are filling, and make it special. Do your research about the people you put in your pipeline. And if you are unsure, ask an engineer if the profile is good. Stop randomly spamming people with random jobs who match your random keywords, (there I said it again).

I always do research and make every introduction specific to the person. I’ll give you one tip: it works pretty good to let the people know how you have found them, showing them your boolean search or X-rayed Github / Stackoverflow query and where they rank. I am not going to post screenshots about the emails I send since I am giving away too much already.

Then, the beloved snooze button ❤.

So rule of thumb: no-one is looking for a new job at the moment you reach out to them. There are some exceptions but just know that this is a snowball game. The more you reach out, the more matches will be added to your snowball. Reaching out on a creative way also does some advertising work: Developer X to Developer Y: ‘I got this recruiter email the other day, it was actually personal and matching. Finally someone who gets it although I am not really looking. Oh yeah? What company? Oh 3DHubs, they seem a nice bunch’. etc etc. Word of mouth is still very powerful, especially in niche-recruitment projects. But let me get back to the Snooze button. The famous reply: ‘Not really looking right now, but I might be in ‘x’ months. BAM, snooze that guy for 3 months and he will pop up in your screen to be followed up upon then. So, when you do this frequently enough, people will start popping up in your screen all over the place, and that’s what I call the snowball effect of sourcing talent. The power is to have an active pipeline at all time, not to hire people now you needed yesterday.

So in the candidate profile you can schedule interviews, leave feedback, send emails, add or remove followers and check status. I was about to do like 20 screenshots, but why not make one video showing its power:

https://youtu.be/JPSAHPNf7Ng

Then their reporting tool is sophisticated. You can run numbers of reports so the data driven recruiter will have some fun using it.

As a matter of fact, they have one engineer working for them who was solely focussing on data visualisation. The outcome is quite unique and you can definitely run a lot of reports with Lever:

I do want to show you the Conversion Rate (beta) reporting tool, the one I like the most:

https://youtu.be/Km_4t4CNbjg

The not so good

Unfortunately, Lever does not come without flaws. There are some things that bug me. For instance, I am on currently working on a 13″ Macbook and the overviews are hard to manage in such a small screen:

The candidate profile excerpt overlaps the pipeline ☹Posting your jobs to free job boards is not included and will most likely not be in. I kind of like that, since I don’t rely on people from these sources anyway. But for the enterprise businesses I can understand that this is a problem, as they would still get a lot of inflow on their (marketing / sales / whatever) jobs. Jobs on your job board do get picked up by Indeed, I believe, and setting up Glassdoor is easy by just adding the link of your careers site to the Glassdoor settings. All other free job sites: N/A.

Workflows can only be changed with help from one of their team members. I’d like to have freedom creating my own workflows per job, as they differ quite a lot.

I am missing a mobile application that lets me do things remote.

Sometimes bugs pop up, showing inconsistencies as having 5 people on snooze but instead lever is showing you the active candidates. A simple refresh (⌘+R) fixes this, but if it happens frequently I get irritated sometimes. Remember, Lever is still being built and they are on it when it comes to fixing bugs. (The project ‘Polish’ being one that addressed many of them).

One thing I think they can do better is showing how they do data-migration and on-boarding. The fact is the decision of switching ATSs is mostly with a member of the hiring team who will not use it as much and will always throw in ‘The fear of change’. They will come up with all kinds of BS not to change and stick with systems as Taleo, Jobvite or insert any random ATS here. The biggest one is always ‘losing their data’ or ‘training new members’. If Lever would put up more information about how they go about these topics, these so called decision makers would have no reason to stand in the way of change.

Conclusion

All in all, if you are a startup and you are still using spreadsheets, give Lever a try. I have no doubt that you will like it. To get the most out of Lever, right out of the gate, get EVERYONE on your team involved in hiring / recruiting. If you incorporate this mindset from the beginning and embed it in your culture, you will reap the benefits later: a healthy pipeline on any job and people enjoying recruiting instead of dreading it.

For all you recruiters / hiring managers who are reading this and want to change from legacy stuff ASAP, do it. Stop giving your money to products that do not work or are hampering you hiring talent. Start using tools and embrace the fact of change, instead the state of fear.

So that’s about it, I do want to thank some people and products before I conclude this:

Aline Lerner, for being such a kick-ass person when it comes to fixing tech hiring and introducing me to Lever through her original Quora postwhere she reviews Lever. I really can not recommend her blog and posts highly enough.

Skitch by Evernote, for making such cool tools to edit my screenshots and good old Quicktime to record screencasts☺.

The team of Lever, giving me the apparel to hike Clouds Rest and Glacier Point in Yosemite.

For building this product and for the nice lunch and dinner and time I had with them while visiting San Francisco.

Oh yeah, they are hiring!

This article was originally posted on Sourcingmonk.com and was written by Willem Wijnans About the Author: Willem Wijnans Willem builds the product and platform teams at Improbable.io, an a16z backed startup from London. He is also a mentor at Rockstart, a startup accelerator in Amsterdam. Follow him on Twitter or add him onLinkedIn!

Free Your Head: The Cognitive Dissonance of HR in Cuba.

Editor’s Note: Thank you to our sponsor HiringSolved for making this trip possible.

“One pill makes you larger, And one pill makes you small. And the ones that Mother gives you, don’t do anything at all.” – Jefferson Airplane, White Rabbit.

The year was 1967. I was 20 years old, and I remember the first time I heard Grace Slick’s seminal siren song to psychedelia distinctly, and I think I spent most of that summer listening to Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow.

It became something of a soundtrack for those months that will be remembered by history (although it’s foggy at best for most of those who actively followed Slick’s suggestion to “free your heads,” which is to say, most of us lucky enough to live through this seminal year).

Some other stuff that happened in 1967, to give you a little bit of context: Lyndon Johnson was in the White House, the Beatles’ Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever were at the top of the charts, Jimmy Hoffa and Muhammad Ali were in jail (the first for jury tampering, the latter for refusing the draft), Vietnam was still a “military action” and a washed up former actor named Ronald Reagan swept into the California governor’s mansion in what was widely considered a stunning upset at the time.

Frank Sinatra dominated at the Grammys, A Man for All Seasons swept the Academy Awards, and a young Dustin Hoffman was informed that “the future is plastics” (here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson). I had a full head of hair. In other words, 1967 is, for most of the world, ancient history, and those of us who happened to be around were living in what seems like another world, at least in the world we live in today.

Return from The Rabbit Hole.

And yet, after returning from Cuba, I can’t seem to get that summer, or Jefferson Airplane’s lyrics, out of my head, the soundtrack to the bucketfull of contradicting images from the last week that I’m still trying to pull together.

As far removed as we are from 1967, it seems odd to consider then, as now, the Castro regime ruled Cuba – as it had for nearly a decade by that point. The antithesis of his initial counterparts in the White House, the fleeting possibility Camelot was cut tragically short, but La Revolucion, then, as now, continued to define Cuba, its people, and its collective psyche.

In 1967, over four years removed from the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and just six years after the Cuban Missile Crisis nearly sent the US and the USSR over the edge into Nuclear War, of course, I was in college, and like most college students, I argued passionately, poetically and prosaically about the very precepts, from political systems to business structures, that formed the foundation of our ‘society,’ and, naturally, just what exactly the meaning of that ‘society’ was (and should be).

This kind of ideology gets tempered over the years, of course. We get stuck in our ways and worldviews, and largely become more myopic, insular and resigned to the often enigmatic way the world works – the natural byproducts of growing older.

But after spending a week in Cuba, I feel like I last did back the first time I heard Surrealistic Pillow – some sort of challenge to my personal status quo, some whisper in the back of my mind sounding like a clarion call to look closer, to look critically, at the bigger picture of business, society and the inevitable interplay between the two.

Soy Cuba.

First off, let’s start with the facts. Sitting just to the south of Miami, a mere 90 miles off the coast of one of the fastest growing, most celebrated and trendiest urban areas in the United States, lies an island that, in essence, most of us seem to have forgotten even exists – a land so close, yet so far removed, from us.

That small stretch of ocean straddles two very different worlds, and two even more divergent ideologies.

The good news is, these two worlds seem at long last to be finally converging; during the last five years, Cuba has slowly shifted from being the New World’s last bastion of pure Marxism-Leninism to something that, superficially at least, looks a lot like the same sort of hybrid socialism that has propelled Bernie Sanders to the top of the polls on the other side of the Straight.

Emphasis on hybrid; gone is the staunchly socialist society we think of when we think of Fidel (if we even do, these days) and in its place, the first nascent seeds of capitalism are starting to sprout, finally coming to fruition after the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Communist bloc, leaving Cuba isolated politically and economically, suddenly stripped of its staunchest supporters and their generous subsidies.

Slowly at first, faster now, Cuba has started evolving and moving, inexorably, into a future where 60 years of controls are suddenly being rolled back, loosened or reevaluated in favor of a decidedly different approach than the last six decades or so since the Revolution first swept Castros into power.

But make no mistake, for all the changes in Cuba, that Revolution is not dead, but instead, responding to the necessity of changing the country to meet the needs of its citizens today – those children (and grandchildren) of the Revolution who have long anticipated the day when the regime, and the Island, would finally change for the better.

It’s a change that’s palatable, even if no one seems able to describe what the end goal of that change will be, or even what it will look like within the next year. While there’s the certainty of change, there’s the uncertainty of not knowing what to expect – and it could be no one, not even the Castros, fully know for sure what the future holds for Cuba.

Si Se Pueda.

I will, however, promise you this much: it certainly won’t be capitalism. But it won’t be Communism or pure socialism, either.

Whatever it is, this mix represents what’s new and what’s next, and Cubans are fully engaged in seeing that change through to a better society and a better tomorrow. Because for once, the Revolution is looking to revolutionize itself, which is, if you think about it, pretty revolutionary.

It was against that backdrop that I found myself in Cuba, with few expectations about what I would actually learn on the trip; it became almost immediately clear, however, that all the advice I’d been given by my Canadian, British and other foreign friends who have been vacationing and visiting the island for years now was decidedly out of date. Of course, it’s hard to stay up with the breakneck speed of change that’s occurring there, too.

It was less than one year ago – December 17, 2014 – that the United States announced it would be restoring full diplomatic ties with Cuba, and would allow its citizens, finally, to enter the country, albeit under some pretty strict guidelines. And it is as one of these first citizens lucky enough to see the situation in Cuba first hand that I can firmly report that unfortunately, much of what’s in the minds of most Americans – and debated incessantly – isn’t just out of date, it’s decades old.

When it comes to the real Cuba, sadly, we’re seemingly all still stuck in 1967 (if not earlier). While we might have reestablished diplomacy, we still have not lifted our embargo against Cuba, which continues to profoundly, negatively impact Cuban society. Nor, it seems, have we lifted the massive case of cognitive dissonance and ignorance about Cuba from which so many of us here in the US seem to suffer.

It’s a story badly in need of an update, because the chance that it might end with all of us living happily ever after is now more than a pipe dream – it’s a real possibility, and, for HR, a real opportunity, too.

HR in Cuba: The View from the Frontlines.

The week long sojourn I made with 21 HR leaders and TA colleagues may have come to an end, but when it comes to defining an experience that’s more or less inexplicable, it will take a little longer for most of us to unravel. Instead of a central thesis or cogent theory on what I experienced, I’m left instead with a few disjointed scenes I still need to string together.

Our official HR Delegation had official meetings and exchanges with dozens of the top government officials, university professors and academics, state ministers, labor union representatives and the leaders of both some of Cuba’s largest state owned companies as well as the small business owners representing the burgeoning “new modality” of the new Cuba.

We even attended a Bloc Party (pun intended) for the Committee of the Defense of the Revolution (CDR), which is like a nationwide social club for socialists, a kind of neighborhood watch for watching your neighbors that exists in every Cuban neighborhood.

No matter what the setting, no matter who we were meeting, we were allowed to ask pointed questions (as time allowed), and had the freedom to talk to and interact with citizens whenever the opportunity presented itself about their work, their attitudes, their hopes and their dreams for the future. But it wasn’t until the last day, when we travelled to a collective built around a vocational school dedicated to training barbers (of all things) that I finally got what was at stake.

I just can’t describe what those stakes are just yet to my satisfaction – but in this case, a whole community, from the children playing in the salon-themed open air park built by the collective to the senior citizens in the rehab center we visited, as all students in the collective do as part of their service every Wednesday, is thriving thanks to reforms that can best be described as tenuous.

The implications for whatever comes next I’m still trying to put into words, but needless to say, this is a system that encapsulates this new hybridization between socialism and capitalism that is the new Cuba, and all its possibilities and tensions that come with an unknown future, but one that, one would think, has to be better than the past. Best to look to the future, whatever that future may be.

Of course, the trip wasn’t all business – in between our packed schedule of meetings we found time for a recently opened museum dedicated exclusively to contemporary Cuban art that was extraordinary in its scripting, surprising in its quality, and politically explosive in its subversion. The contradiction that such a collection could exist in a state sponsored exhibit with works from artists that have been jailed for their beliefs or for the messages embedded in their art is another tangible sign of the tensions between old and new just now getting sorted out by the state and its society.

We also explored Hemingway’s Cuban home, the respite where his beloved fishing boat, the Pilar, stands sentinel as a reminder of a time when our two countries coexisted, culturally at least, and the trip between Key West and Havana was only a matter of crossing a few miles distance and not a few decades worth of time, too.

We spent a day touring Las Terrazas, an eco tourism park that encompasses thousands of pristine acres of reclaimed coffee plantations and tropical forests just in the foothills of Havana – a site originally built to exploit the local workers, but one that may be the kind of enterprise critical to ensuring their future.

Our delegates took every advantage to absorb what we could. In general, internet access was terrible (or non-existent, in most cases), the food was fabulous, the wine adequate, and the accomodations reasonable – and all, it seems, are only going to be getting better as the service industry evolves and matures in the coming months, too.

But on the trip itself, the conversations – between those on the bus and those ordinary Cubans we met with – will last a lifetime. Here’s hoping that change comes quicker – for both the Cubans, and for all of us, too. Because it’s really quite an extraordinary place.

Stay tuned for comprehensive Cuba coverage this week with exclusive insights and observations as we take the frontlines of HR in Cuba online only at Recruiting Daily.

About the Author: Gerry Crispin, SPHR is a life-long student of staffing and co-founder of CareerXroads, a firm devoted to peer-to-peer learning by sharing recruiting practices. An international speaker, author and acknowledged thought leader, Gerry founded a non-profit, Talentboard, with colleagues Elaine Orler and Ed Newman to better define the Candidate Experience, a subject he has been passionate about for 30 years.

Gerry has also co-authored eight books on the evolution of staffing and written more than 100 rticles and whitepapers on similar topics. Gerry’s career in Human Resources spans is also quite broad and includes HR leadership positions at Johnson and Johnson; Associate Partner in a boutique Executive Search firm; Career Services Director at the Stevens Institute of Technology, where he received his Engineering and 2 advanced degrees in Organizational/Industrial Behavior.

Follow Gerry on Twitter @GerryCrispin or connect with him on LinkedIn.

MYnority Report – Diversity Recruiting Meet Lesbians who Tech

OK – You may have snickered at the title, but if you are doing any sort of diversity recruiting, you will know, this is no joke. Lesbians Who Tech is a community of queer women in tech (and allies) that started in San Francisco in December 2012. Since then, we’ve built a community of over 9,000 queer women in 22 cities, including 4 international cities. Leanne Pittsford is the founder of “Lesbians who Tech,” and invites participants to, “Get geeky with techy folk just like you, enjoy tasty adult beverages, land gigs, make new friends and connections.”

So you may be wondering why we need an organization that highlights women in technology. When asked, Leanne had this to say:

“I saw that LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, Questioning) women in tech were under-represented in all of the communities in which they were a part – women, tech and LGBTQ. I wanted to connect and elevate the lesbian community in a way that brought value to individuals and made our community stronger.

I spent the last decade involved in various ways with the gay and lesbian community – from a staff position for Equality California to a nonprofit board member to running a mentoring program for lesbian entrepreneurs. Over and over I saw LGBTQ communities and organizations miss the mark with queer women. After spending three years in Silicon Valley, I saw an even more specific underserved market — LGBTQ women in tech. There were women events and LGBTQ events, but nothing tailored specifically for LGBTQ women in tech. I wasn’t able to fix this problem within a larger structure so I decided to go out on my own and try to fix it.”

Now that you have the answer to that question, you may be asking, “Jackye, why is this a RecruitngTool.” (Really, I hope you didn’t ask that question, it should be obvious.) It is a recruiting tool because it give you yet another place to recruit unicorn riding purple squirrel candidates. The organizations is growing quickly and have now begun to have annual summits. The Lesbians Who Tech Summit is the only event focused on increasing visibility and tech participation in two historically underrepresented communities: the women’s and queer communities.

While reading this, don’t miss the point. The search for top tech candidates is real. The struggle in diversity recruiting is real. My hope is that you are continuously searching to find top talent all while finding underrepresented groups to fill the open seats at your company.

Here are some other places to find LGBT candidates:

StartOut.Org

StartOut is a national 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to creating great business leaders by fostering Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) entrepreneurs. Since its founding in 2009, StartOut has produced over 200 events with more than 14,000 participants nationwide to inspire, educate and support LGBT entrepreneurs. StartOut has chapters in Austin, Boston, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, with Seattle and Denver in development.

LGBT CareerLink – Out and Equal Workforce Advocates

Out & Equal Workplace Advocates is the world’s premier nonprofit organization dedicated to achieving lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender workplace equality. Out & Equal collaborates with Fortune 1000 companies and government agencies to provide a safe, welcoming and supportive environment for LGBT employees.

Out for Work

Out for Work functions as a complimentary component in the total educational experience of LGBT students, primarily in the development, evaluation, initiation and implementation of career plans and opportunities. OFW’s programs, resources, and services provide assistance to students in the cultivation and enhancement of skills to explore career options, master search techniques and strategies and research employment opportunities.

National LGBT Bar Association

The National LGBT Bar Association is a national association of lawyers, judges and other legal professionals, law students, activists and affiliated lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender legal organizations. The LGBT Bar promotes justice in and through the legal profession for the LGBT community in all its diversity.

Diversity recruiting is about more than filling seats with people who look different or love different than you may. It is about creating the workplace possible and spreading hope in building a corporate world that looks like the world outside. When a company pledges to do diversity recruiting, it should mean that they are looking to support and nurture candidates who may have been overlooked in the past. Lockheed Martin understands this and took the challenge one step further.

In support of the Trevor Project and It Gets Better, Lockheed Martin employees have a message for LGBT and questioning youth. Take on the tough challenges and you can do anything. LGBT thinkers and doers, throughout history and today, always have. And we are proof: It does get better. If your company does not have a diversity recruiting initiative – I hope that you share this with them.

Creating Job Advertisements That Attract a Multi-Generational Workforce

The most common conflict we see between the current generations in the workforce is actually one that isn’t new: the older generation thinks the younger generation isn’t fit to work. While it’s comforting to know that someday Millennials will look down on the Gen-Zers (or whatever nickname they’ll have) the way Baby Boomers look down on Millennials now, it also means that multi-generational job force have more in common than we give them credit for. This is good news, since it makes writing your job postings that much simpler. All you have to do is keep these few things in mind.

An Honest Policy

One thing all generations want from their employers is honesty. Though younger workers are less likely to report misconduct in the workplace than older ones, all employees want their employers to be fair. In fact, it may be the one thing they all agree on: 35% of employees in every generation value ethics and fairness in leadership as a top trait an employer should have.

When preparing to post your job ad, think about your first impression with the candidate. If you value fairness in the workplace, make sure your description talks about how you’re dedicated to treating employees equitably and maintaining a respected place in your industry.

Candidates look for specific things in an organization; 30% of Millennials and 27% of Baby Boomers look for a company that does meaningful work. You have the power to provoke that sense of meaning in the job description, and you should use that to your advantage. You’re more likely to get candidates from all walks of life to apply that way.

Emphasize Flexibility

What benefits appeal to all generations? Baby Boomers want to know their retirement plan is in order, while Millennials want to save the planet. Gen-Xers, as in most other areas, lay somewhere in between. But no matter how old they are, candidates look for one thing: flexibility. Although flexibility is typically valued, most by Millennials (30%), 22% of Baby Boomers also look for flexibility in the organizations they work for.

And for the younger crowd, flexibility in scheduling fits them perfectly. Currently, 38% of Millennials are taking on some form of freelance work, so being able to pick their own hours would help them slide into their outside work. If you want a quick way to appeal to just about anyone, make sure you emphasize anything from flex hours to flexible retirement plans in your job posting.

Make them Mobile

As soon as you see the word “mobile”, you probably think, “Okay, this one’s for the younger candidates out there, but at least it’s good advice.” You’re right and wrong. It is good advice to update your job advertisement and make it mobile friendly. But you’re wrong in assuming that it only applies to Millennials and Gen-Xers. Baby Boomers benefit from mobile job ads, too! Almost half (48%) of Baby Boomers look for job postings on their phones. Keep in mind, your postings need to be easy to read and extend to an easy-to-follow apply process because although 22% of Boomers believe they are tech-savvy, HR pros say only about 6% of the generation understands modern technology.

They may not be as into mobile as Millennials (73% of whom look at job ads on their phone) and Gen-Xers (71%), but if most of your candidates are from the generation born shortly after World War II, you could entice a good portion of them just by making sure your job ads read well on phones. The fact that it will help you win over the younger generations simply means it’s a win-win. And in recruiting, we have a precious few of those!

Clearly, Baby Boomers, Gen-Xers and Millennials are more alike than we might think, at least when it comes to the things they want to see in a job posting. So if you’re at a loss as to how to write a job posting, emphasize your ethical standards, fairness to employees, flexibility, and keep up with mobile and small business trends, and you’ll wind up with a job ad that reaches across generations.

Joe Weinlick is Senior Vice President of Marketing for Beyond, the right job distribution software to maximize your exposure to top talent, smart target your recruitment messages, and connect with millions of candidates. Joe has over 20 years of experience building brands, and is an advocate for consumers and the user experience. Connect with him on Twitter (@jweinlick), LinkedIn, and visit the Beyond blog for more recruitment and hiring tips.

Chopsticks or Fork? LineHire

I love Pad Thai, and pretty much anything that comes out of an Asian kitchen! Apparently lots of folks like what’s coming out of Mama Fu’s Asian House. This fast Asian restaurant is opening up new locations faster than you can say ‘egg roll’! When you’re the HR manager for this growing business, trying to keep so many ‘plates spinning’, what do you do? You look for recruiting tools to help. Specifically ones that fit within your existing recruiting processes, are easy to learn and use and and that make you more efficient. This is what Sarah Shanklin, Mama Fu’s Human Resources Director did.

Sarah needed help in finding talented General Managers and Assistant General Managers to join her team. These individuals form the backbone of every great restaurant and good ones aren’t that easy to find. Like hiring for most roles, there is significant time invested, researching, contacting, qualifying candidates just to get them to the point of interview. Not able to clone herself, Sarah decided to let LineHire do those functions for her. That is, deliver interview-ready candidates via its “part technology, part human” platform. Running a pilot hiring campaign with LineHire in October, 2015. To her delight, LineHire delivered her several qualified, interested and available candidates right to her ‘kitchen door’ that were ready to interview. She in-turn set-up phone screens and in-person interviews after by-passing the time-consuming research tasks. This worked out so well that Mama Fu’s is continuing its use of LineHire for additional locations.

Here’s a quick 2 minute video to walk you through how LineHire works.

https://youtu.be/XAU30uMMt2I

I hope that Mama Fu’s makes it to North Carolina soon. My chopsticks are ready!

About the author:

Chuck Solomon is an experienced recruiter and marketer with over 15 years professional experience. He has recruited for the Fortune 500 and SMB’s.Chuck earned a Masters degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He successfully exited a local business he started and grew serving the maintenance and repair needs of homeowners and local businesses. He has published two books related to home improvement and has served as a business adviser to start-ups and growth-oriented SMB’s. He currently is serving as Client Success Chief at LineHire. Connect with Chuck on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/chucksolomon1 and Twitter @housefixer

About Mama Fu’s:

Mama Fu’s Asian House is an Austin-based restaurant concept specializing in fresh and innovative Asian cuisine. Currently operating in more than a dozen locations and planned expansion throughout the Southern US. Learn more at www.mamafus.com

About LineHire:

You CAN find your ideal candidates without a recruiter, and LineHire can help. LineHire is an enterprise grade tool that helps in-house recruiting teams get their internal fill rate to 100%. LineHire is as easy to use as a job board, but brings the qualified passive candidates you’re looking for. On the web at linehire.com and on Twitter @linehire

LineHire was founded in 2014 and is based in Chapel Hill, NC.

I’ll Tumble 4 Ya: 6 Tools When Recruiting For the Culture Club

“They aren’t a good fit.” As a recruiter, I heard that more often than I would like to admit. And it irked me. I mean, what does that even mean? My first thought was that they hiring managers just didn’t like my candidate, and I would move on pulling on needles in the candidate haystack until I found someone who would “fit.” But what is the “right fit?” In this article, I will attempt to shed some light on you can start recruiting for culture as well as skill.

Do you Really Want to Hurt Me?

“Wow! What else can I do to make recruiting more difficult for myself?” asked no recruiter ever! We know that recruiters are asked to do much more than simply find talent. So among your marketing, social media, reporting and communication expertise, it is time to add something else to your arsenal of recruiting tools. Culture fit. Yes, you now have to be an expert in company culture in order to be a solid recruiter. I don’t see how it is possible to recruit for a culture that is constantly changing. In order to do this, you need to know the culture of the company as well as the individual departments. When the world has been trying to hire for diversity, it escapes me as to why we are suddenly now looking for candidates that fit in. You can’t have it both ways. If you are hiring candidates that fit in, you won’t be hiring candidates that are different. Saying that someone doesn’t fit in is the new “politically correct” way to relieve yourself of the guilt when you admit that you don’t like hiring people that are different than you.

“I try to exist in a world where there is freedom of opinion, where you’re allowed to make jokes. I don’t want to live in some PC world where no-one’s allowed to say anything.” – Boy George

Karma Chameleon

It seems “culture” is the buzzword that has taken the place employee engagement. I am assuming that after all of the survey’s were taken to see how to best engage, company’s found out what most of us have known all along. That the reason that your employees are not engaged is because the company culture is crap. What I continuously have a hard time with is figuring out if this is a trend that will last or just another fad that will “Come and go, you come and go.”

“A difficult crowd will always test your true ability.” – Boy George

Church Of The Poison Mind

The first step to hiring for company culture is figuring out what type of culture you have. The employees that you have, right now are deciding your company’s culture. If your people are defining your culture and not the other way around, that means that every time a person leaves or joins the team the company culture changes. Need help finding out what the current state of your company culture is? Here are tools that want to help:

CultureIQ:

CultureIQ is a company culture management software. This startups provides a SaaS solution to help companies measure, understand, and strengthen their company culture through research-driven and flexible employee surveys, actionable analytics, communication tools, and culture resources.

CultureIQ helps to both quantify and humanize corporate culture so that human resources professionals and company stakeholders can make data-driven decisions, and connect with their workforce. (Vendor Description)

Employee Net Promoter System℠:

NPS® practitioners have developed an approach to employee engagement based on the Net Promoter System℠ itself. They systematically search out those forms of employee engagement that have the biggest potential impact on customer loyalty. They identify and strive to improve workplace characteristics that support high customer loyalty.

To reinforce the cultural support provided by the Net Promoter System, they align their approach to collecting and acting on employee feedback with their approach to collecting and acting on customer feedback. They explicitly tie together their customer system and their employee Net Promoter System.

Weirdly:

Whether you’re talking about a candidate or a business, the thing that makes them great is often also the thing that makes them a bit weird. After 20 years in the recruitment industry, we know that if you can find just the right kind of brilliant weirdos for a business, magic happens.

But it’s easier said than done – even if you spend weeks interviewing hundreds of candidates, it still comes down to an experienced gut instinct. That’s where Weirdly comes in. We’ve systemized our expertise, to make filtering through your recruitment candidates (and applying for jobs) easier, faster and heaps more fun. (Vendor Description)

RoundPegg:

Your key business objectives cannot be achieved without the focused and synchronized work of your team members. RoundPegg unleashes your organization’s true business potential using culture science to galvanize your workforce.
Culture science is quantifying how things really get done within each organization’s unique culture. By aggregating the personal values of everyone in a company, RoundPegg is able to provide data-driven culture insights that inform strategy, while delivering customized tactics to hire, develop and engage employees in ways that are consistent with each organization’s culture.
By understanding what motivates your workforce, the RoundPegg software platform is able to help you accomplish your goals – whether they be driving innovation, boosting revenue, increasing engagement, changing culture or retaining your top performers. (Vendor Description)

https://youtu.be/QELDJD_ulYc

CultureAmp:

Culture Amp is Culture Analytics for your company. Surveys and insight for engaged employees.
We provide world-class surveys that can be customized to suit your organization. This is combined with a powerful, intuitive dashboard and analytics engine. You can survey all your employees, parts of your organization, or “pulse” survey different employees in real-time. Metrics and instrumentation for Employee Engagement, Exit, Onboarding, Manager Effectiveness and many more. (Vendor Description)

https://vimeo.com/111698539

TINYPulse:

TINYpulse is dedicated to making employees happier around the world.
We empower leaders with the information they need to pinpoint problems in the workplace before attrition becomes a nightmare. Our lightweight and easy-to-use tool gives managers a pulse on how happy, frustrated, and burnt out their team is.
We’re based in lovely Seattle, WA, and growing every day. We always looking forward to engaging with others with a similar passion for helping employees become happier. (Vendor Description)

https://vimeo.com/52587746

It’s a Miracle

In closing, I think these tools are a great place to start, but it would be a miracle if you could effect company culture using these tools alone.

“I’m being honest, I say what I think.” – Boy George

5 Things LinkedIn Can’t Do for Your Company’s Recruitment

It used to be embarrassing to admit you met your spouse online, but now countless websites like OkCupid and Match.com are dedicated to streamlining the dating process. Singles no longer have to rely on blind dates or bar scenes to narrow down potential mates.

But for all of our tools to find matches in our personal lives, the business world still lacks software that can find great matches with ease. Overreliance on LinkedIn is partly to blame.

A Jobvite survey revealed that LinkedIn is ubiquitous in the business world — 94 percent of companies use LinkedIn in their recruitment efforts. This high usage rate isn’t without reason: LinkedIn was the first organization to create a vast network of hiring managers, influencers, co-workers, and potential employees. It’s great for networking, but it has some serious shortcomings as a recruitment tool.

Here are five ways LinkedIn can’t help your company recruit the talent you need:

1. It can’t match the right candidates to companies.

LinkedIn can give you access to a huge number of people, but the labor of vetting those candidates is still entirely on the recruiter. The tedious work of sending invitations, evaluating candidates, matching them to your needs, and conducting negotiations all falls in your very busy hands. And without advanced tools, recruitment is an imperfect science at best — as many as 95 percent of companies admit to recruiting the wrong people annually, and the Department of Labor estimates each mis-hire costs a company upwards of $11,713.

Finding smart talent that’s a great fit for your company requires more than a generic search function. To make the recruiting process more efficient and effective, recruiters need robust intelligence systems with prescreening algorithms. Considering that many large companies receive hundreds of applications for each open position, this sort of software could reduce recruiters’ workloads to just a dozen or so of the most viable candidates per position.

2. It can’t show you the full picture of candidates’ skills.

LinkedIn is not designed to showcase a person’s skills. It’s meant to show what positions people have held, their educational backgrounds, and some of what they want to do. Users’ connections can endorse them for skills, but this doesn’t provide much information other than who endorsed whom for what.

When you look at a LinkedIn profile, you can’t tell the true experience level a person has in the skills they say they possess. If someone lists “Java programming skills” on his or her LinkedIn profile, it doesn’t describe the level of skill, how often it’s used, years of experience, or whether it’s a periphery or primary skill. The recruiter has to dig to learn information that’s actually relevant to his search.

3. It can’t capture passive candidates.

LinkedIn functions as a networking event that’s been digitized, so just because somebody has a profile, that doesn’t mean he or she wants to work for you. To learn about a candidate’s availability, her job interests, her salary requirements, and more, you’ll still need to reach out the old-fashioned way. LinkedIn doesn’t do much to help you woo passively interested talent.

LinkedIn itself has found that 85 percent of candidates are passive job seekers. Software that can accurately connects passive job seekers with opportunities that interest them would quickly steal the show from LinkedIn.

4. It can’t allow unlimited messaging with candidates.

Despite the importance of communicating with people you’re considering hiring, LinkedIn’s recruiter lite license only allows 25 to 30 InMail messages per month. Considering that employers receive an average of 39 applications for every graduate-level job, it’s easily possible for recruiters — especially those hiring for multiple positions — to use up their monthly limits in just a couple of days.

5. It can’t keep recruiting efforts organized.

LinkedIn is only useful for a small part of the multistep recruitment process. The platform lacks a sophisticated interviewing tool, and the platform makes it difficult to track and manage candidates. The overarching paradigm through which all tools should be measured is how those tools will get recruiters closer to the best candidates for jobs — but LinkedIn can leave recruiters feeling like they’re swimming in an endless sea of seekers without hooking real catches.

Alternative software options can help keep your efforts organized. Taleo, cloud-based talent management software, can even help you support the career path of talented people after they’re hired; Bullhorn has a useful applicant tracking system that LinkedIn lacks.

The bottom line is that recruiting software should lower barriers between candidates and recruiters — not create them. LinkedIn can be great for networking, but its recruiting tools are inchoate at best. If online dating can be streamlined, so can recruitment operations.

Kashif Aftab founded SkillGigs, an auction-style job marketplace, in 2012 in Houston. Kashif caught the entrepreneurial bug at age 10 while visiting his father’s manufacturing facility and developed a love for programming after writing his first lines of code at age 11. At age 25, he founded his first company, an IT consulting firm. Beyond growth hacking his way to success, Kashif enjoys traveling the world with his culturally curious taste buds in tow.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.com.

Once On This Island: A Closer Look At HR In Cuba.

Editor’s Note: Thank you to our sponsor HiringSolved for making this trip possible.

I’m taking off at o’dark thirty Saturday morning on a charter flight to Havana with a ragtag assortment of 21 assorted HR & Talent Acquisition leaders.

This motley crew consists of such delegates as a former SHRM exec, a former SHRM Board member, a former HRCI Board member, a former SHRM Foundation Board member, a handful of job board owners and VPs of TA from Fortune 500 companies.

There will be consultants, authors, coaches, students, bloggers, writers and – oh yes – a reformed recruiter or two in the mix.

Among these talented and experienced professionals are a few delegates whose blog posts would surely bear watching in a country that hasn’t been known for its 1^st amendment rights – hint: one of them works as the Executive Editor for Recruiting Daily. Not worried in the least.

Editor’s Note: Mr. Crispin is right not to worry. What’s the worst that could happen in a place where Hunter S. Thompson & Hemingway both went off the deep end? – MC

Cuba Libre: Hemingway, Havana & HR in Cuba.

It may take two weeks to post another blog. Not only is internet access questionable in Cuba, but cell phones might well prove useless (more so than usual).

The only listening devices I expect to encounter will be embedded in phones made by Westinghouse. The one with the rotor dial option. I’m thinking of leaving my Microsoft Surface Pro 4 at home and bringing my Radio Shack TRS Model 100. The one with the rubber cup accessories to fit that Westinghouse.

Ok, I really hope I’m wrong about all this.

Friday, I’m in Miami getting some last minute advice from John Nykolaiszyn (@CigarSPHR). John is a college administrator here in South Florida.

He’s also a career service professional, prolific blogger, writer and all around HR pro. John is not coming with us.

He lives and works with Cuban colleagues who would disapprove.

Apparently folks here feel that no one ought to return to the island before all those who caused their diaspora are dead and buried. I respect their passion and the pain of their loss but, after 60 years and, not being in their shoes, it’s time.

I love Cuban food, music and culture in general having lived here in Hoboken for ten years while I misspent my years in college (I’m a slow learner, which is also why I’m a lifelong student). Next to Hoboken is Weehawken and I visited often. Next to Southern Florida, Weehawken has always been the hotbed of Cuban expats in the United States.

Friday night I’m meeting John at Quattro, a recommended Italian restaurant in downtown Miami. My reasoning was simple- they have a better wine list- something I’ll be missing the next 7 days. I pretty sure I’m not wrong about that.

I’ve had advice from two Canadian friends urging me to decant good bottles of wine into thin plastic bladders, line my suitcase with them and smuggle them through customs. Not happening.

I’ll go with the bad rum and enjoy a good bottle Friday night. I also want to get John’s take on whether concerns over the opening of Cuba is a generational and plan on plying him with just enough good wine for him to open up and not enough for me to fail to listen.

HR In Cuba: When Castro Meets Capitalism.

I’m wondering whether the older generation, those who actually left Cuba after the fall of the Bautista regime, if they were truly satisfied that the Castro era was done, would eventually return to their homeland, be it above ground, or, when and if the time came, below.

I also wonder how many of the youngest generation of US citizens of Cuban descent would even return if a real market economy were possible?

And so, we will soon invade this historic Caribbean island legally at the end of our 40 minute hop from Florida with visas and a group license in hand.

This precious document certifies that we’re going to be the first Americans from the HR profession formally allowed entry to the island since the Eisenhower administration. Those 40 minutes, of course, should take us back 60 years.

OK, I lied. Speaking of going back a half century in time, in fact, we’re actually the second (or maybe third) group to go, as SHRM led a delegation there last month, and repeated the trip with a small delegation around the time the government normalized trade relations.

Of course, we’ve got more HR street cred, a full agenda, and a working Klout score above 60. Having the HR beard and hat brigade represented on our trip will likely bode well in the country of Castro, too – although to be fair, SHRM’s subject matter expertise in anachronistic autocracy might level that playing field.

Viva la HR Revolución!

Americans, as a rule, tend to obsess too much over Cuba’s most recent 60 years. This ignores the larger historical picture; humans first found themselves on this spit of land just a few miles from the US mainland tens and thousands of years ago.

Even the capital, Havana (that’s Habana, to the locals) was first settled in the fall of 1515, which, if you’re doing the math, is exactly 500 years ago!

It was only 23 years after Columbus first “found” Cuba, claimed it for Spain and began a history of Western imperialism that continued more or less uninterrupted until Castro seized power (as seen in Godfather II).

I can only surmise that the indigenous Arawak were not pleased with these visitors, who brought smallpox, slavery and Spanish conjugations to their once serene shores.

Cuba is only the latest in a bucket list of countries I’ve managed to get to, with (and without) professional colleagues over the course of my career; I’ve always found it so much more fun to go with HR professionals than without them. It changes your perspective completely.

The subject of some of those earlier adventures included China, India, Japan, Russia, Brazil, Argentina, Israel and more – I am the Phileas Fogg of HR, I suppose – meeting with (and sometimes living with) recruiters, once in a while shadowing them at work and, of course, always looking to learn about the personal and professional family, political, social, educational and economic realities of their country and its circumstances.

I know I’ll learn a great deal in Cuba. I have in every single country I’ve visited. Even Canada. I just don’t know what that’s going to be. I’m fascinated by history and culture, but recognize every observer tends to fit their observations through a personal lens which makes it nearly impossible to get a true reading. I hope to focus on outcomes I can deal with…how people find jobs, how the jobs find people.

As a student, I’ll follow the job seeker. And If I do take a detour it is likely to be about a recipe for food, drink or, perhaps a cigar.

Editor’s Note: As this publication’s editor will also be going to do some Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights with this delegation, RecruitingDaily will not be published next week. We know you’re disappointed, but encourage you to check out Recruiting Tools and Recruiting Blogs for your daily dose of the news and views recruiters need to know. Also, thank you to our sponsor HiringSolved for making this trip possible.

Stay tuned for comprehensive Cuba coverage the week of November 23.