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How to Recruit Sales Pros Like a Boss

Having to recruit sales professionals can be tough. Some of the reasons are obvious; they are already successful in their current position if they leave their job, they will also have to leave their commissions. In a monster.com article, Landy Chase wrote that “Twenty percent of the sales people really do produce eighty percent of the business. They also, by producing excellent results, get the lion’s share of the promotions, job perks, clients, work satisfaction, and, of course, the income.

If 20% of the salespeople produce 80% of the business, then the remaining 80% of new hires, collectively, make only 20% of the sales. The conclusion? 80% of all hiring decisions made involving salespeople are mistakes.” OUCH! To get better candidates, you simply have to recruit better. There are several job boards that can help you as you begin your search.

SalesHeads by Beyond
SalesJobs
SalesTrax
Sales Gravy (Thank God they finally updated their website!)
AA-ISP Career Center (Inside Sales)
ClearFit

The only job board listed above that I have used to find sales people is SalesGravy. Remember, this is no way a complete list. There are a million out there. These are just the ones I found during my search.

So, Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want

What traits do you need your sales professionals to have? We are always talking about casting a wider net, but for recruiting salespeople, narrow your search down enough to find the right people. Have skills and experiences that are vital for performance in your company and detail these items within the description of the job. Once that is done, always be on the lookout for top talent and ask for referrals. Don’t just ask employees for referrals, ask clients as well. The key is to know who you are looking for and be diligent about sticking to these traits.

In a 2011 study by Harvard Business School there were seven personality traits they thought made for the best sales people:

Modesty
Conscientiousness
Achievement Orientation
Curiosity
Lack of Gregariousness
Lack of Discouragement
Lack of Self-Consciousness

The study was great, but how can you write a job description that conveys that these traits are mandatory? I am of the school that if you want the BEST salespeople, you have to hunt. I was recently introduced to Betts Recruiting. “Betts focuses on fast-growing, innovative tech companies to build out revenue-generating talent roles that include sales, marketing and customer success at all levels.”

Sounds cool, but what I like is their free “Sales Team Accelerator Tool Kit.” This toolkit specifically focuses on recruiting salespeople for tech startups but proves to be an asset to anyone looking for top sales people and details Betts’ screening methodologies. In one article, Betts claims to have “achieved an interview-to-hire ratio of three to one and delivers new hires that begin generating revenue within an average of just three months.” I love free stuff! This resource looks like it is worth checking out! Click here to download a copy of Sales Team Accelerator Tool Kit for free.

Jordan Wan, Founder & CEO of CloserIQ, recently published a great article about how to interview sales people on RecruitingBlogs. Be sure to check that out too!

Do you recruit sales people like a boss? What do you do when you are looking for top talent? Share ideas here!

About the Author: Jackye Clayton is a recognized people expert who puts the Human in Human Resources. An international trainer, she 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 or connect with her on LinkedIn.

How Recruiting Can Live Side by Side With HR.

You don’t have to have read one article or post – and there are too many to read, anyway – about the disconnect between recruiting and HR to notice that, yeah, there’s a pretty big divide between those who acquire talent and those who manage it, as it were.

Even if you ignore the HR and recruiting blogosphere – and if so, I’m jealous – then chances are you’ve spotted it in your own organization.

If you’ve ever worked in this weird little corner of the business world, you already know the fact that the point of hire becomes a point of contention, since each respective faction works exclusively on different touch points in the employee experience (which, of course, inevitably starts with the candidate experience).

But most of these online “Influencers” or “thought leaders” or whatever the hell they are, they’ve never worked a day in their lives as a recruiting or HR professional, fighting in the talent trenches instead of on Twitter or Facebook. Those who can’t do, go into blogging and consulting.

I follow that old maxim, “write what you know,” which is why, after spending a few years too many doing employee paperwork, hanging OSHA posters and being the default person for picking up company parties or common spaces, I decided to write about what I’d seen out there in the wild and crazy world of HR. Which is why I wanted to weigh in on the discourse about the disconnect dividing generalists from specialists.

Think Different: The Great Divide Between HR and Recruiting.

While, as mentioned, there are thousands upon thousands of posts out there taking potshots at this prosaic topic, the gist of these conversations seems to fall squarely within one of three categories:

1. Recruiting should reside in HR. Period.

2. Recruiting and HR should be separate business functions. This means the head of TA should start reporting directly to the CEO. Right.

3. The entire HR function should be outsourced, leaving recruiting as THE organizational sweet spot where all talent decisions are made. Everything else gets sent to Bangalore, Manila or Singapore.

Where you come down on these categories, one can pretty easily ascertain, is very much a matter of personal perspective. If you’re an in-house recruiter whose official spot on the official org chart sits somewhere towards the bottom of the HR hierarchy, I’m going to bet you probably feel like you don’t belong there.

If you’re the CHRO, conversely, chances are you probably don’t want your entire function put out for an MSP while the head of TA more or less gets to do all the stuff you like about your job while the crappy back office stuff that’s kept you from making an impact finally disappears like it probably should have a few decades ago. And if you want recruiting and HR operated as separate functions, you’re in the small majority of the minority of workers who actually give a crap either way. Go you.

Here’s the thing: both recruiting and HR practitioners spend a lot of their time completely confused, shaking our heads in bewilderment as we ask ourselves the same question: “why do they do that?” Both functions are, for better or worse, professional bedfellows, but even proximity can’t preempt polarization, nor shine a light on the superimposed shadow separating these two sides. And it’s frustrating.

Earlier this year, I helped organize #truBatonRouge, an unconference designed to bring both recruiting and HR practitioners in my community together to at least try to talk things out – and even getting them involved in the same conversation in the same room seemed to be like ships passing in the night. Either that, or, for the few paying attention, as an HR practitioner who was in attendance I spoke to during a session break confirmed to me as if having some type of break through moment, “HR people and recruiters sure think differently, don’t they?”

Slow clap. Indeed, they do, wise lady. Indeed they do.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

OK, I get it. If you’re in recruiting, it’s incredibly easy to write off how banal and useless you perceive your HR counterpart to be by sweepingly stereotyping, or conveniently categorizing her, as some sort of crochet sweater swearing, resting bitch face, humorless harridan hellbent on her Quixotic quest for organizational power that she stands no chance of ever achieving.

You put every HR lady out there into the same broad bucket, it’s not hard to justify never actually paying them any attention or respect, which makes your job, ostensibly, a little easier. But I’m guessing few of you have even considered the fact that maybe, just maybe, if you went out on your own quest, you might just find the Holy Grail of what it takes to find, attract and engage top talent – both inside, and outside, your organization.

This is going to sound completely bat shit crazy, I’m an HR lady, so recruiters, I know you’re probably already thinking that, anyway – so here goes:

I want you to get to know your HR neighbor.

Imaginationland: Life in The HR and Recruiting Neighborhood

An aside for a little story. A few years back, my Neighborhood Association proved yet again that they totally justified their mandatory membership fee every year by setting us all up on this thing called Nextdoor. It was really nothing more than another social network I had to sign up for so that I could have the privilege of receiving push notifications on everything happening within a 12 block radius of my house (Bike stolen! Cat missing! Plumber Recommendation Needed!).

When someone new moved into the neighborhood, they no longer received a knock on the door and a casserole.

Nope, they received a spotlight page when you logged into Nextdoor – “Welcome Beau and Trina to the neighborhood!” – and a bunch of generic “Welcome!” responses that had all the personalization of someone pressing the birthday button on Facebook following in a flurry.

This, I’m afraid, wasn’t the worst of it. Too lazy to drive 5 minutes over to Goodwill to get rid of that useless pile of books? Post that you’re giving them away on Nextdoor! Want to let all of your neighbors know your crazy conspiracy theories and nut job political views? Why don’t you share them on Nextdoor? Want a debate on the merits of setting off your own fireworks on the 4th of July? Join the Nextdoor conversation!

I imagine this Nextdoor app was selected because the people in my neighborhood have about the same demographic as AARP or SPHR members, which is to say, I pretty much live in either a nursing home, a morgue or the social media station at a state SHRM conference. Undoubtedly, these ‘active seniors’ were terrified of Facebook, but would trust technology if approved by an august body like the Neighborhood Association. Kind of like your average HR Manager.

Look, we’re all in the same neighborhood, and whether we like it or not, are all seen by everyone outside the confines of this echo chamber as more or less part and parcel of the same function, so we’ve got to at least try to live together.

The collective property value of our professional real estate pretty much depends on it, and I, for one, don’t want to end up underwater. That’s why when it comes to getting to know your HR neighbor, it’s your choice to sink or swim.

Neighborhood Watch.

When that nice young couple moved in on your block, or when Joe and Alice, God bless them, bought the old Collins house next door, the first thing you did probably wasn’t figuring out how to make them feel at home in their new home. It was probably going online and doing some snooping into who, exactly, these people were.

You probably looked up how much they paid on either your city’s tax records or a site like Zillow, definitely googled their names (or any variant of a nickname), and made sure you found out any online profile the trail of digital breadcrumbs happened to lead you to.

Let’s say you find out that Joe used to work with your cousin a few years back at the same company – and so, of course, you get said cousin on the phone ASAP to get the scoop. Wait. Didn’t you?

Now, if you’re a recruiter, you already know that the information you want and need on your HR neighbors is pretty easy to find – and chances are, you probably already have stalked/sourced at least one HRBP on occasion – likely for blackmail. But what if you put all that aside – and the assumptions that came with it (“Who doesn’t have a Twitter account?”) – then maybe, just maybe, you’ll get some insight into what really goes on in the house next door.

Sure, at first it might feel more like a trek to a foreign country than a few steps to the common departmental breakroom, and if you’re a recruiter, although if you’re a recruiter, getting to know your HR teammate is no luxury vacation. Nope, it’s more like a death march through the jungle surrounded by bugs the size of your head, no fresh water and nothing around but rocks as toilet paper. Who says HR isn’t sexy?

As you get ready to embark on this journey, you’ll want to prepare yourself by turning to the human capital equivalent of Fodor’s or Lonely Planet (aka HR Generalists’ Tinder profiles) and visit the websites of SHRM or the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans. These will help you brush up on the native lingo and lexicon, and check out what’s new and what’s noteworthy for the HR crowd.

If you can figure this out AND avoid lapsing into a coma, you’re going to be well on your way to being able to carry on a real conversation with a real HR professional on Consumer Driven Health Plans, OSHA or handling charging employees for their work uniforms. This sort of shop talk is like HR lady foreplay, without the Hostess products.

3 Things Your HR Lady Cares About.

While you improve your HR IQ (or dumb yourself down, conversely), you’ll gain some critical information about your HR neighbors. Here are some of the divine secrets of the SHRM sisterhood you’re likely to discover.

1. Compliance is King.

Sure, HR Ladies love to talk about being strategic or supporting the business, but in reality, many if not most HR folks truly enjoy, and prefer, the cold hard comfort of eschewing ambiguities in favor of a world where everything is black and white. HR runs on precedents set through decades of case law, federal and local regulations, circuit court rulings and EEOC Enforcement guidance documents, and if you know these, boy, you’re talking the language of human resource management.

You think OFCCP and tax documentation are a pain in the ass, ask your HR co-workers about Forms 1095-C and 1094-C.

You’ll set their hearts aflutter – and likely cement your friendship.

2. Staffing: I Love The 80s.

Your average HR veteran has spent a career doing a little bit of this, a little bit of that, pretty much doing everything and anything to get her job done, and she doesn’t really have the time to understand the nuances of “talent acquisition,” nor, really, does she care to.

She firmly believes that just-in-time gets it done every time, and that recruiting involves posting a job description on a bunch of websites and gleefully winnowing them out is all recruiting really is. She could give two shits about how to source on SnapChat or build a magnetic employer brand. But she does care about making sure the employees you hire are the right ones.

And I said, what about, Breakfast at Tiffany’s? And she said, yeah, I remember that film. And she said, I recall, I rather liked it. And me, I said, well that’s, one thing we’ve got.

3. The Dark Side Is Strong.

Sure, there are a ton of downright nasty, malevolent, misanthropic people out there working in HR. But the same holds true for pretty much every profession out there. And at the end of the day, and despite all their obvious faults, most HR professionals truly want the same thing as you do: to do what’s right for employees and their employer. This isn’t always easy – and sometimes, can even border on downright evil (albeit always a necessary one).

No one who hasn’t been there can really understand why the HR department does the shit that it does – nor can they legally share the details to justify why they did the shit they did. Being a heel instead of a hero sucks sometimes. We’d all rather be the “Six Million Dollar Man” Steve Austin to “Stone Cold” Steve Austin. And, contrary to popular belief, most HR managers don’t spend their days holed out in a secret lair plotting the downfall of blacklisted employees.

Only a few do that, but assume that your HR Manager just might not be a bad guy or gal and they’ll probably prove you right – most of us aren’t terrible people. And we care deeply about what we do, too.

Like A Good Neighbor…

When your neighbors moved in, chances are you took the time to take a walk over there to greet them in person. And, of course, to scope out their taste in lawn and interior decor. It’s OK, you can admit it. And while you eventually determined that they were insufferable boors, you still took the time do drop off the requisite Christmas cards and cookies, catch up on gossip and invite them over for tequila shots. Hey, we’ve all got our “thing.”

Paying a visit to your HR neighbors should pretty much go down the same way. If you really want to butter them up, grab a box of donuts or one of those big paper thermoses of Starbucks along the way, and you’ll have them literally eating out of your hand as you stroll around the HR department.

Sure, you might have to listen to Joe make a thousand football references a day, or Barb bitch about the horrors of processing FMLA paperwork (hint: no one cares), but take a deep breath and man up. You can do it. And you know how?

It’s called being pleasant and being cordial. Manners, people, they go a long way. Didn’t your mother teach you that? If you want a seat at the table, best keep your elbows off of it. If you want to be a good neighbor to HR, here are a few simple things you can do to live with, not without, each other:

1. Confidence is Key.

If there’s one thing every HR person values, it’s the person who knows how to keep a secret. In the nascent days of any relationship with any HR lady, chances are she’ll be reticent to tell you anything, but as time passes, she’ll inevitably realize that you’re actually a member of her department – and start looping you in on any pertinent HR news.

That means you’ll suddenly get the scoop – in confidence, of course – that an internal investigation into time-stealing/time-recording violations are about to result in the termination of 5 tech support staff members. They’ll be let go on Monday.

Hey, they’re just doing their job. Even if that means someone might not get to keep theirs. Either way, the key to making sure yours is safe is to make sure that no matter what, you know how to keep a secret a secret.

2. Be A Regular.

While your HR Manager might seem like she hates nothing more than having any unscheduled interruptions in her oh so busy day (despite the “Open Door” policy promised in the back of the employee handbook no one reads), I guarantee that she loves nothing more than when someone stops by unannounced for a well-timed “social” visit.

Providing your HR Lady with a momentary respite from the tedium of entering retirement plan contribution amounts into an Excel spreadsheet and providing her with some juicy office gossip will put you on her good side faster than a box of Godiva chocolates. Well, almost as fast.

3. Remember Her Birthday.

It’s easy enough to just punch the ubiquitous “Happy Birthday!” button, give a Facebook shout out and peace out, nothing scores more points with your HR Manager than if you actually remember – and take time to glorify in her big day of celebrating through pastries, baked goods or muffins. Nothing says “I care” more to an HR Lady than a card and some cakes. No matter how inane the occasion: you bring baked goods for their cats’ birthdays, you have a friend for life.

Here’s the thing: your local HR manager, no matter what you might believe, really wants her relationship with recruiting to really succeed. Really. Because while she hates the whole idea of a “personal brand” and does everything within her power (and company policy) to make sure you tone down your personal style, deep down, she’s still a person.

A person who just wants to be accepted, treated with respect, and maybe, just maybe, getting the occasional Bath & Body Works gift basket when holiday season rolls around. Hint, hint…

Robin Schooling is on a mission to make organizations better by making HR better. With 20+ years of senior HR leadership experience in a variety of industries, she consults with organizations, advises HR teams, speaks to HR and business audiences and writes for a variety of sites and publications.

Schooling has been an active and involved SHRM volunteer leader, holds a few of those HR certifications herself, and at one point in time even received an award as “HR Professional of the Year.” She has been known to search out the perfect French 75 and is a fervent and unapologetic fan of the New Orleans Saints, even if they did trade Jimmy Graham.

For more for Robin, check out her blog, follow her on Twitter@RobinSchooling or connect with her on LinkedIn.

All Recruiting Is Mobile Recruiting.

I’m lucky (or unlucky) enough to have gone to enough recruiting related events and conferences over the past few years to realize that while mobile has progressed to the point of ubiquity, for some reason, the “thought leaders” thoughtlessly keep offering up the same old drivel as ever about “mobile recruiting.”

If you need that business case made for you, look up from your smartphone screen and pay attention. You probably won’t have to look far to see the impact of mobile in the real world, without some pundit or “practitioner” (whatever the hell that actually means) shoving a bunch of statistics and surveys in your face to realize, yeah, mobile is kind of a big deal.

Selfie-Awareness

Just look for the person who’s completely lacking in tact or self-awareness readjusting their selfie stick. Unfortunately, they’re pretty much everywhere these days – an indictment, for better or for worse, of the fact that while we’ve been talking about moving to mobile for recruiting, pretty much the entire pool of candidates we’re ostensibly recruiting for have already made the move. Any discussion about “mobile recruiting” is about as asinine and antiquated as your average employee handbook.

From here on out, let’s just agree on the simple fact that, ready or not, and whether or not you like it, all recruiting is mobile. It’s your systems that are still inexplicably stuck on premise.

I know, you’re probably rolling your eyes right now. But take a deep breath, because, well, the first rule of mobile is go where the people are, and for some reason, this audience is still stuck on the antiquated belief that “mobile recruiting” is a thing.

Fun fact: over my career, blog posts on mobile recruiting are about twice as likely to be viewed on a “mobile device” (another obnoxious term – my “mobile bill,” turns out, is just another bill that seems to go up every month.

Talk about mobility) as a post on another oh so exciting and cutting edge talking point. Like how those darned Gen Y kids are coming – speaking of (let’s not) another misconception we should clear up right now – the rise of mobile has nothing to do with “Millennials.” It’s got to do with convenience, flexibility and affordability – the exact opposite baseline, apparently, by which we select the core systems that stymie so many “mobile recruiting” initiatives and piss off so many candidates in the process.

The mobile you can’t measure is the fact that these potentially viable and qualified potential new hires move on without a second thought if they hit some Luddite landing page after coming in through any online recruitment advertising campaign. You’ll never know how much this opportunity costs really costs (spoiler alert: it’s a lot).

Like so many other aspects of our lives in the digital era, recruiting is set to finally be taken over by mobile devices. It should come as no surprise that mobile devices are quickly becoming a primary access point to career sites for job seekers. After all, a Deloitte survey found that half of people check their smartphones 25 times a day and 10 percent check them 100 times or more. With that being said, learn how mobile recruitment is rapidly changing the hiring processes of HR departments.

Mobile Recruiting: Press 1 for “Duh.”

Remember a year ago, when we still thought of Bruce Jenner as, well, Bruce, the Duggers were the paradigm of family values and Robin Thicke still existed?

These were simpler times – and even as little as a year ago, the “mobile recruiting” conversation was about if, not how.

Obviously, a lot can change in the age of constant connectivity and a two second news cycle, which is why citing any data or reports about mobile recruiting adoption or market maturity will inevitably miss the mark – a lagging indicator of a market growing faster than the “influencers” can crank out content.

But, for the sake of the argument, let’s do the time warp (again) to 2014, when a survey by strategic consulting and research firm Kelton Global found that fully 70% of respondents felt that looking for or applying for a job online took too much time or added an unnecessary layer of stress to an already arduous death march to an offer letter; more than half reported to deciding against applying for a job due to technical hurdles such as the inability to upload a resume via mobile phone.

Talk about turnoffs. Meanwhile, while many recruiters are wondering why no candidates call them back or respond to their InMails, a recent Deloitte study found that the average smart phone user checks their cell phone around 25 times a day (and 10%, ostensibly that ‘hard to find’ top talent, checked their phone a full 100 times or more a day. Guilty).

You don’t have to be smart, much less use a smart phone, to realize the math on mobile recruiting just doesn’t add up to dollars or sense at most employers. Instead, you get “thought leadership” drivel like:

“Today’s professional is constantly capable of connecting from a mobile device. They can apply, send resumes, respond to emails and networking via social media all from their Galaxy S6.”

-You Don’t Care. But the link will pay me like a penny from T-Mobile’s ad budget for backlinks.

With so much crap out there, what should real recruiters and employers really be doing to make mobile recruiting work? Glad you asked.

A Handy Dandy Mobile Recruiting Checklist.

First off, if you’re reading this, you’re probably reading it from a mobile device, but if you’re like a Jitterbug user, a 60 Minutes enthusiast or a SHRM member, feel free to print this off if you’d like – and then, pull out that cell phone. Yeah, we all have them – and if you don’t, all I can say is, what the hell? Really? Then, pull up your mobile careers site.

OK, so you’ve got some fancy, responsive design career site that you just spent way too much to have some agency build. Pat yourself on the back – and realize that when it comes to the most endemic problems facing recruitment as pertains to mobile, you’ve really done nothing more than slap some lipstick on the proverbial pig.

I mean, it’s awesome and all that your “employer brand” is out there, but the goal of any recruitment advertising, marketing or talent attraction efforts is simple: to increase the volume of qualified, interested and available applicants. If these candidates are unable to apply directly via their mobile device, even the world’s best branded mobile experience can’t fix what’s really broken in your mobile recruiting process.

Perhaps the most critical step to ensuring your potential future employees aren’t abandoning your mobile process is to ensure that you’ve created a mobile friendly application form. This means cutting down the page after page of specious, often unnecessary questions (hint: you don’t need reference contact information or a candidate’s social security number to figure out whether or not they’re a potential fit for a position) and require only the bare minimum that you’ll need to decide whether or not they’ve got the qualifications and skills required to actually become a candidate for the position for which they’re applying.

If you haven’t done so, consider auditing your process and looking critically at what information is “nice to have” versus what’s actually necessary. You’ll likely be surprised at the number of fields, forms and information that could easily be eliminated in order to drive up applicants and push down the often arduous amount of time it takes to start and complete an application.

Next, make sure that, if you require a resume (and chances are, you do), that it’s easy for candidates to upload and/or connect their social profiles to any application process. While it’s unlikely many candidates have a .pdf or .doc of their resume on their phones, there’s a good chance that many have access to these documents through cloud services like Box.net, Dropbox, iCloud, Google Docs or Windows Live (depending on the device and OS), and these integrations are easily built via API.

Most applicant tracking systems support these integrations on desktop, so if yours isn’t doing this through mobile, ask your vendor to turn on these capabilities. If they can’t, it might be time to start shopping for a new ATS (or at least a point solution capable of handling these simple workflow workarounds. These enable easy recovery, uploading and parsing of candidate resumes via mobile devices – often in a single click.

Because if it takes more than one click to enter a resume, chances are the next click is going to be your candidates moving on from your application process.

Push It Real Good.

One of the best parts about the ubiquity of mobile devices is that, since we’re constantly connected, they offer an ideal way to not only pull candidates in via streamlined applications, but also to push out information about available jobs as well as applicant status updates, in real time, all the time.

While most “talent community” updates are sent in the form of e-mail notifications, SMS notifications can dramatically improve open and click through rates for these candidate communications.

A recent survey from Experian found that while the average e-mail open rate is around 9%, with the average time to open as long as 17 hours (which means they’re a whole lot quicker in getting to their inbox than many of us), the average open rate for an SMS notification is 96%, with an average response time of 4.2 minutes.

You don’t have to be a data scientist to realize that when it comes to pulling in candidates, push notifications are a far more effective solution than standard e-mail alerts.

If your ATS or workflows aren’t yet fully mobile enabled, consider using an integration with social media apps or other professional networks, such as the “Apply with LinkedIn,” “Apply with Indeed” or Facebook Connect features, which generally can be configured for any application instance with minimal work and technical know how.

These aren’t the ideal long term solution, but with 43% of active candidates and 21% of passive candidates reporting to uploading their resumes to job applications via mobile devices, this often free and relatively painless workaround is a no brainer when considering the steep opportunity costs associated with doing nothing – or waiting for your vendor “roadmap” to finally figure out a solution for a fairly simple problem that’s quite easily fixed.

Cell Counts.

Mobile for recruiting, obviously, solves a ton of issues inherent to the talent attraction and application process, but like everything else in recruitment, there’s no silver bullet when it comes to mobile – and before moving forward, there are a few issues you should be aware of.

One obvious example is that while advertising an open position via social media can help enable easy mobile workarounds and visibility to your job ad, it also eliminates any discretion your organization might have about an impending personnel chance or selectively target candidates instead of simply posting and praying, as it were.

Similarly, if the position you’re looking to fill has had a high rate of turnover or has been posted previously over the past few months, the instant automated notification capabilities of mobile – particularly when sent to the same group or talent network – can raise a red flag about either the position in question or your larger organization’s talent challenges.

No one wants professional sloppy seconds, after all, and these are far harder to hide on mobile than desktop, if only due to the highly improved open and response rates generated by these devices.

In these cases, consider choosing a more traditional talent acquisition strategy requiring direct sourcing – or targeted communications – as a more subtle, and more effective, mechanism for recruiting the right talent.

Furthermore, most mobile devices have different security and privacy considerations and capabilities than desktop instances, meaning that you’re going to have to do some due diligence to ensure these mobile recruiting experiences are not only compliant, but that your candidate data is as safe and secure as if they were applying from their PCs.

All that said, however, these considerations are small potatoes when it comes to the huge possibilities inherent in mobile recruiting – and if you still need a business case built for why you should be considering mobile, well, you’ve clearly not been paying attention (or work for Taleo).

You are a Terrible Racist: Tools for Diversity Recruiting

Diversity Recruiting. By definition, diversity recruiters are prejudice and best, racist at worst. I have been writing about diversity recruiting for years yet; it is still a problem for most companies.

I am of the mindset that the issue is not because of a lack of diversity candidates, it is because of a lack of training on how do identify diverse applicants and personal biases.

Not sure about your personal biases? Well, there is an app for that! “Who Am I? Race Awareness Game.” It is not an app that will directly find you a diverse candidate pool, but it definitely will make you more thoughtful in your diversity recruiting.

Named as one of the top 100 educational products by Common Sense Media, “Who Am I” is a fun two-player guessing game designed to stimulate a productive dialogue the complex and sensitive issues of race and ethnicity.

The company who created this app, Interactive Diversity Solutions has also created (Don’t) Guess My Race. This interactive web-based program that makes learning about race and diversity fun, educational and meaningful to everyday life.

“Incorporating this unique program into your Diversity and Inclusion efforts is an easy, cost-effective and engaging solution with the following benefits to your workforce:

Reducing implicit bias
Creating a corporate culture where employees feel valued and accepted
Attracting and retaining a diverse workforce
Improving working relationships, communication, and collaboration
Facilitating discussions around sensitive issues
Lowering discrimination incident rates
Developing cultural competencies in a real and lasting way
Stimulating a deeper critical thinking perspective.”

I once heard at a conference that they were trained to find minorities by looking at the most common last names for every race. You know, if the last name was Jackson, they must be black. Chen as a last name must be attached to someone of Asian decent. Izquierdo? Well, I think you get the point.

Recruiting this way just perpetuates the race relations that we are already having problems with in retaining diverse candidates. How can you look at my last name and guess who I am? My last name is Clayton. My maiden name is Forster. But I am black. I am pretty sure it will not come up on your “last names of the modern African-American person” list.

If you are going to be racist, at least be an educated one. Now is where the real work comes in!

What did you say?

Are you still using the copy paste methodology for job descriptions? Companies in recent years have gotten away from posting jobs. If you are recruiting for diverse candidates, you must not skip this part. And so, your job descriptions have to use inclusionary language. Job description templates are notorious for having discriminatory language. Common words you find in job descriptions are so frequent you may miss it. Words and phrases like:

Energetic
Manual and finger dexterity
Must be a US Citizen
No more than ____ years of experience
Ability to bend down, stoop low, and
Great opportunity for student/moms/retirees
Must be able to lift 50lbs

Why exactly is your Customer Service Representative going to lift 50lbs? Don’t write someone off with job description bias. Check out my Freebie Friday JobLint Software Review to check your job description before posting “naughty” job descriptions.

Where are you?

Name a group and there is an employment site for it! CareerBuilder, Monster, and Indeed are common, but here are some sites that you may not be as familiar with to help you get started:

What do you want?

Make sure that when recruiting candidates and you are in discovery mode; ask questions that will help you get to what they do and where they excel. What are their accomplishments? How did they do it? When was it? Why did they do it in the first place?

Attention Recruiters:

Even if there is no diversity initiative at your job or you do not specialize in diversity recruiting, you should still strive to be a better recruiter. Cast the widest net to get the best candidates. Post on a new job board. Educate yourself on how to recruit a diverse candidate because the world is changing. I don’t want to get all “Big Brother” on you, but the Internet of Things (IoT) is after your job. The cute “smart” ATS’ developers are out to replace you. All Big Data and reporting will show how good you are at your job. So be smart. Start specializing and just learn to do your job better. And if you are going to be a racist, be a good one.

What tools have helped you become a better diversity recruiter? I would love to see your thoughts!

Freebie Friday Software Review : JobLint

Sometimes when writing job descriptions, you can get going so fast that you don’t notice if your language could rule a potential candidate out for the running. But there is a reason you are going so quickly; you are busy right!?!? Allow me to introduce you to a free recruiting software that can help, JobLint.

Tool: JobLint

Headquarters: Unknown

What it does: Test tech job specs for issues with sexism, culture, expectations, and recruiter fails. (Vendor Description)

The Sizzle:

Free!
Finds Potential Issues Fast
Easy Copy Paste Functionality

The Drizzle:

Maybe too Politically Correct
Cannot Format for the Country you Live in
Doesn’t Check for Ageism

Who doesn’t like free recruiting software? I found JobLint on ProductHunt.com. The concept is simple. Copy and paste your job description into JobLint and it will highlight potential wordage that could at best be potentially offensive or at worst illegal.

Pedro Carmo Oliveira, Co-founder at Landing.jobs cracked me up when he said, “I’ve been using joblint.org to check companies’ job specs before publishing them… It’s a great way to detect issues related to sexism, culture, expectations, and recruiter fails. Hint: words like “guru”, “he” or “she”, “bro” won’t pass the test :)”

At first I thought this was a silly technology but after a bit of research it became apparent to me why a tool like this is so important. Hewlett-Packard sought to get a clearer picture as to why women we were not applying for some of the more prominent executive level positions. What they found was that “Women working at HP applied for a promotion only when they believed they met 100 percent of the qualifications listed for the job. Men were happy to apply when they thought they could meet 60 percent of the job requirements.”

Wouldn’t it be horrible if a few word choices you were using prevented people from even applying to a gender biased job description when it is so easy to fix? So why wouldn’t you use this free recruiting tool?

I would check all postings just in case. I am sure the Canada Broadcasting Company (CBC) and Larissa Mair wished they had checked before adding ‘Any Race Except Caucasian’ on their job description. I searched to see how prevalent this is, and here are some of the more disturbing descriptions I found (And I am not making these up!):

“Body men needed!!! Due to growth in business and signing on with other major insurance companies, we have body technician position’s that need to be filled immediately. Bonus PAY structure for productive body men.

We are an equal opportunity employer.”

I think this one is my favorite:

“THE SAFETY OF COMPANIES MEN AND 3RD PARTY MEN, AND ASSIT THE COMPANY MAN ON SEEING THE WELL RUNS OR GOES SMOOTHLY, SAFETY MEETING PRE-TOWER, AND THE EVERY TIME IF A BIG CHANG IN OPERATIONS, AND WATCH ANN ASSIT AND HELP THE DRILLER”

If you post your openings on job boards, then you realize that to attract the best candidates, you must have wording that will attract candidates from a broad range of cultures, genders, ages, and talents. When we write, our subconscious biases will rear their ugly head without us even noticing. One of the most common results is gender coding. One way to look at gender coding is when our language targets traits of either males or females. On the Gender Decoder website, a tool similar to Joblint, it is written that “Society has certain expectations of what men and women are like, and how they differ, and this seeps into the language we use. Think about “bossy” and “feisty”: we almost never use these words to describe men.”

Don’t let the language that you use scare people away from applying for your jobs. Just check your description on JobLint. Is it perfect no, but it is better than nothing. And it is a free recruiting tool!

About the Author: Jackye Clayton is recognized as a people expert who puts the Human in Human Resources. An international trainer, she 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 or connect with her on LinkedIn.

5 Ways Visual Storytelling Drives Recruitment

Successful recruiting hinges on the stories we tell. Candidates ignore bad stories like you ignore Aunt Sally when she gets lost on a tangent for 15 minutes. And the particular stories we need to tell in recruiting – about the people on our teams, the impact of our products and services, our culture and the environments we work in – are stories for which text alone can’t do the job. If you want to craft narratives that influence candidates and help them quickly learn who you are and what makes you interesting, you’ll need visuals.

Five Ways Visual Storytelling Drives Recruitment:

1. Visuals demonstrate authenticity and activate relationships
When we watch a video or look at a picture, we develop an empathetic connection with the person behind the screen (see reason three for more information). Humans are biologically programmed to watch people’s faces – their eyes, their expressions – to relate to each other and form judgements. In fact, we have the ability to make over 5,000 facial expressions, which gives viewers a depth of meaning that influences how we feel about people and their message. Paul Graham, who runs Y Combinator, recently tweeted “One day someone will calculate the amount of information conveyed in facial expressions, and it will turn out to be enormous”. Instinctively, we draw on our memories, experiences, and past sensations to build an emotional connection with those featured in visual content.

The entire candidate lifecycle is explicitly oriented around relationships with people, so it is essential that HR and TA communications use mediums that will build trust to establish those connections. Visual storytelling allows you to resonate with talent because it is content that exudes authenticity and personality. Feature your employees with videos and photos to build a foundation of trust with your candidates and make it easier for them to picture themselves working for your company and with its people.

2. Stand out from the crowd

If you’ve crafted a poetic recruitment narrative, but nobody reads it, was it a good story? Our stories are irrelevant if we can’t get them to stick out to candidates, and that’s another reason visual storytelling drives recruitment.

Most employment branding and recruitment marketing processes are still dominated by text. Look at most corporate career pages. Look at any job posting. Look at offer letters, onboarding packets, etc. If you’re just using text heavy candidate outreach emails and bullet-point job descriptions, you’re getting ignored by the candidates you need to build relationships with. Monster, for example, has over 1 million job postings at any given time. You won’t have conversions unless candidates see your message.

And because the human brain can process a limited amount of data at any given time, data that can be consumed faster will take precedence. Using visuals as a medium to communicate to talent is your biggest opportunity to frame your story.

3. 10 visuals* (worth 1000 words) = lots more information in visuals

There are types of stories for which descriptions of places or experiences are best left to the imagination. Stories to recruit talent are not one of those types. You’re to open the door to the experience of working with you and find those who want to be a part of it.

Visuals can tell more comprehensive stories about the things we need to describe in recruiting: our people, mission, impact, culture, environment, etc. When explaining an office space for example, it can be difficult to describe everything without beginning to write a paragraph of information. However, a photo or video of your office space, can immediately deliver that same message in only a few seconds.

Consider how you might introduce someone on your team to a candidate. As an example, here’s an introduction to Karla Abea, a Customer Success Manager at Zoomforth:

Hi! I am Karla, I am the Customer Success Manager here at Zoomforth. Some fun facts about me: I was a complete tomboy when I was a little kid. I didn’t like dolls, I liked playing in the dirt and running around. I was actually the first female pitcher in my little league, when I was about 10 years old. I want to promote having just real authentic conversations with our clients and customers about what is going to be beneficial to them. That is one thing I like about Zoomforth, is that we are constantly soliciting that feedback. Something else that is a fun fact about me is that I was actually on a game show. I am not going to tell you which one it is, but I go ahead and welcome you to Google it!

Now take a quick look at the video intro, or even just glance at Karla’s photo.

The messages in both the text description and the video are identical, but the video conveys significantly more information. We get a better sense of who Karla is by emotive cues like the sound of her voice and her facial expressions.

Look, feel, tone, colors, expressions, emotion – these are all be important pieces of the story of working at your company. Don’t leave those chapters to the imagination.

4. Improve retention and conversion

On average, talent spends approximately 13 hours per week going through email – and that doesn’t include InMails and social recruiting messages. As candidates court different companies, you’ll want to stay top of mind. 40% of people will respond better to visual content than plain text. Stories create images in the mind that improve learning and motivate a person to take action. In fact, 90% of the information transmitted to the brain is visual, 50% of our brain is active in visual processing, and 70% of our sensory receptors are in our eyes. This means that the more senses your content is able to engage, the more information is retained.

5. Stay relevant in the visual era

300 hours of YouTube videos are uploaded every minute (compared to eight hours in 2007) and Facebook has increased in the number of videos posted to the platform per person in the U.S. by94% over the last year. Your candidates have already chosen photos and videos as their preferred storytelling medium.

Brands stay competitive by responding, adapting, and connecting to the emerging needs and behaviors of their target audience. Visuals are no longer an enhancement to your recruiting strategy; you can’t tell a standout story without it.

About The Author

Chris Murphy is the CEO of Zoomforth, the recruitment marketing software for the visual era. Zoomforth helps talent acquisition professionals at companies like Deloitte, AT&T, and Eventbrite quickly gather photos and videos and build beautiful, on-brand web pages that immediately show what makes them different.

*Article originally featured on the Glassdoor For Employers Blog

3 Steps for Improving Your Mobile Recruiting

It was not that long ago that job seekers forgave companies for not having a mobile optimized job page. It was all too common to not be able to apply for a job with your phone. These days, if you are not using a job page optimized for mobile devices, you are basically turning away potential hires.

Do not take my word for it! Jobvite’s 2014 survey found that “While only 27% of applicants expect to be able to apply to a job from their mobile device, 43% have used their mobile device to look for a job.”

Rayanne Thorn vice president of product marketing and strategy at Technomedia Talent Management was quoted as saying, “More and more people are using mobile for all computing and online activities — online job applications are the norm now. Gone are the days of simply walking into a workplace and filling out an application” says Thorn. “Applying online is now requisite in most pre-hire situations, and with over 7 billion mobile devices out there, applying via mobile should be an obvious standard.”

So what is Mobile Recruiting?
The bulk of Internet use is no longer done on a home computer. Most people today have either a smartphone or tablet; an on the go mentality. It is expected that what I can do on my laptop, I can also do when using my phone. This includes job seeking.

Mobile optimized recruiting does not just mean smartphones anymore. It means any web-capable device. To give the best possible candidate experience, it is important to allow them to apply from the devices they feel most comfortable with.

Here are 3 things to consider when improving your mobile recruiting strategy:

Mobile Ready Career Page: Having a mobile ready career page is not just about size. The ideal page will be easy to navigate through with the optimum amount information given through a minimum amount of clicking. Include a search box so potential new hires find the job information they are looking for. Combine this with the ability to apply with LinkedIn and you are golden.
Mobile Recruiting System: Candidates are not the only ones who want an easy mobile interface. Recruiters want to recruit from their phones as well. Not to fret, Darren Bounds, Breezy HR’s founder and CEO gets this loud and clear. Breezy HR was built with mobile optimization in mind. “Mobile is an important part of the recruiting lifecycle and any tool or feature that allows hiring team to make better decisions sooner is important,” Bounds said.
Video Interviewing Capability: When hiring, you are looking for a great candidate that can meet your needs. Unless you are looking for a great resume writer, take what you see on paper as the first step of the interview process. Everyone can look great on paper but what about in person. By using video interviewing, you will be able to see the person behind the resume. Always remember, just because a resume looks good, it does not mean that their personality will mesh with your company culture.

If want to learn more about Jobvite, check out Katrina Kibben’s article: Wild & Crazy Kids: Millennial Hiring Trends Every Employer Needs To Know.

Mass Marketing For Candidate Attraction

If you’re looking for a series of confused and questioning glances from sourcing and recruiting professionals, tell them you’re starting a search on a job board. After their initial glares, you’ll find that whether recruiters will admit it publicly or not, most of them start their search on job boards and I actually believe that in most situations, this should still be the case. Yes, even as a social recruitment trainer, I still believe this to be true. The proof lies in this recent survey published by the International Association of Employment Web Sites which suggests job boards are still the largest contributor to people finding new jobs.

The reason for the looks from recruiters is because regardless of rebranding, job boards are the “old school” in a world where new, now, and next are best, even if we don’t have big data and dashboards to prove their value. We’re giving all the credit to social recruiting and every other “next big thing” in hiring, and job boards have been getting a bad rap as the red-headed step child of recruiting; unfair judgement if you ask me, especially considering that’s where most candidates start their search and ignoring candidate behavior comes at a cost to you.

Bad Board News: Behavior of Top Talent

The same survey also highlighted that although job boards remain the most effective source of new employment opportunities, their impact has significantly declined. That means more eyes, less applies. And it’s our fault.

I can hear that “what did I do’s” and here’s the deal. While job boards are great if someone is actively seeking a new role, in today’s talent-short markets, good candidates aren’t openly active. They don’t post their resumes before the recruiter gives them a call, a friend refers them to get that sweet hiring bonus or, most importantly, the thought ever crosses their mind that they should search for a new role.

So we source, now that our traditional go-to marketing strategy isn’t delivering the elusive purple squirrel. But, while sourcing is very effective, marketers would say it has an achilles heel; sourcing is compeltely reliant on one-to-one contact. And paying attention to particulars so you can source, when compared to posting a job board ad, is time intensive even for the most skilled sourcers and recruiters.

Consumer Career Marketing

Consumer-focused marketers, on the other hand, are reliant mostly on campaigns with broad reach rather than one-to-one contact. From the tops of buildings down to branded t-shirts and spinning signs on street corners, these traditional marketers are constantly looking at ways to hit a more broad audience on a day-to-day basis and become part of their consumer’s psyche – sneaking into your browser history by buying a site wrap on your favorite blog or placing an ad on your Spotify dashboard.

The good news for recruiters is that these marketers have paved the way and measured the results to figure out what channels can be effectively utilized to promote anything, including your employment brands, job opportunities and the perks, reaching people irrelevant of their job search status and managing advertising costs that are based solely on campaign performance.

Conversion Considerations

Now, building out a consumer marketing strategy for candidate conversion requires leveraging some key considerations marketers have mastered but we recruiters don’t typically ponder.

Audience Analysis: This is the most important part of any marketing project. Without a detailed understanding of your audience demographics, everything else will be purely based on beginner’s luck. Once you have a clear idea of your audience demographics, identifying this groups’ typical interests, hobbies and social activities helps to further refine your approach and choose the right channels. Which leads me to my next point..
Marketing Channels: You have plenty of options when it comes to marketing channels, however, you need to avoid the bandwagon options and rely on the data. Use the information you collect from an audience analysis to match your typical hiring profile. For example, if most successful candidates for your banking role are male and between the ages of 35 and 50, you shouldn’t be using Pinterest.
Marketing Content: Having an account means nothing if you’re not using it (or using it incorrectly). This includes now only knowing how to use the various advertising platforms, but more crucially the type of content that is likely to work best. Often content that works on one platform will fail on another because unlike traditional job boards and advertisements where the sole purpose is to get people to apply to a job, marketing channels don’t have one utility to a candidate.
Landing Page: If you have ever clicked an online advertisement, you’ve seen a landing page. The point, of course, is to convert your interest into a sale or to capture your details; they’re trying to drive action. These are the most important tools in a marketers proverbial toolbox yet for recruiters, it’s typically the weak link, due to most job pages being text heavy content that also requires a significant amount of user information in order to apply. Model your own apply pages after marketing templates – streamline!

About The Author

Chris South is a Social Recruitment Trainer and Recruitment Marketing Consultant with Prominence.co and has been fortunate enough to spend considerable time getting to know the inner workings of three very different recruitment sectors in two equally different countries.

Most recently, whilst recruiting high-end oil and gas roles Texas, Chris was exposed to one of the most challenging labour markets in the world. The sourcing solutions he learnt to apply were far ahead of those that he had previously been exposed to in New Zealand. On returning to New Zealand he established Prominence with the objective of sharing these insights with the local recruitment marketplace. Although always a recruiter at heart, Chris now considers himself to primarily be a marketer, consulting and actively speaking about a wide range of social recruitment techniques and the use of online media for marketing purposes.

Chris can be found on Twitter @findsouth.

5 Ways to Recruit for a Company That Sucks

Don’t judge but, I was a cheerleader. A Texas cheerleader. At cheer camp, a camp counselor asked us, “What do you do if your football team is the worst in the district?” The answer was to cheer anyway because that is your responsibility. In fact, you have to cheer louder and bigger to motivate the team, the spectators, the alumni, and the students.

A recruiter is a cheerleader for the company. You are trying to recruit the best team, and encouraging them to join because you know that this position at this company is a possibility of a lifetime. So how do you recruit for a company that at one time had the reputation of being as “The 11 Worst Companies to Work for in America!”

Read Between the Lines

During the discovery process, candidates will give you the answers to the test. When during your screenings, are you noting the red flags? Did you check references? While there are always exceptions, here are things that candidates bring up that in my experience has always turned out in disaster for companies with poor reps:

Asking about vacation and benefits before asking about the company or the position. (Don’t get me wrong: benefits, especially health, are extremely important, and should be discussed early, but not earlier than the company and the job.)
Candidates who have not heard of your company or have not done any research on the company culture or employees
Candidates who come in with a plan to revamp the entire company before starting.
Desperate, I-will-do-anything candidates.
Candidates who want work/life balance. In crappy companies, there is either no balance or their policies are too lax (aka no one seems to be working.)

Stop Recruiting Bad Candidates

As a recruiter, you are of the reason people think the company you work for sucks. Think about it, aren’t you the one submitting crappy candidates to hiring managers? Your job as a recruiter is to find the perfect candidate for your company. Skills are 25%. The other 75% falls under soft skills, personality, work ethic, environment, and whether or not the candidate would be a good cultural fit. Stop trying to force square pegs into round holes. Once you hire enough candidates who actually fit in with your company culture, the attitudes of employees and the external perception will change.

You Lied to Me!

Be honest. The odds are the reputation of your company is no big secret. When you are an agency recruiter, you can tell them what you have heard on the streets. When you are a corporate recruiter, you hear about it (and take it) every day. Let candidates know that you know what the reputation is, and if possible, let them know why you think it exists. The worst thing you can do is sweep it under the rug only to have the employee you just hired leave with contempt toward the company.

Let candidates know the situation as best one can, and allow them to make their choice with their eyes wide open. The candidate who did not get the all of the information necessary to make an educated discussion before joining your organization could very well prevent you from getting your next opportunity. Hell has no fury like an employee scorned!

“Papa Was a Rolling Stone”

Look for candidates with a consulting background. Most consultants cannot stand being in an overly structured environment. Consultants go from company to company fixing what internal employees could not achieve on their own. They are used to going into crazy environments who are crying out for help. Companies with bad reputations are looking for a hero! Get a candidate with the right fit and you are both heroes!

How Come You Never See a Headline Like “Psychic Wins Lottery?”

How do you know that potential candidates will not want to work there? I learned early in my recruiting career not to try to be a psychic. Who am I decide that you won’t like the position being offered. They could love the company! There are people who thrive on stress and chaos. Make sure they have the information but if they say they would love it, let them.

At the end of the day make sure that when someone leaves the company, it isn’t because of something you tried to hide. We are dealing with people’s livelihoods here. If the candidate who you find only has the skill set, but none of the other important factors needed to succeed, keep recruiting. Recruiting is a verb. Keep recruiting until you find the ideal candidate for your company.

If you Don’t Know, Now you Know

Make sure you have an environment that invites employees to share their opinions, both positive and negative. If possible, have the CEO or other top executive address the concern in the company newsletters.

Don’t forget retention! You should be getting updates on how employees feel while they are still engaged, not
when they are walking out the door. (By then, it is too late.) Have candid conversations with top performers. Find out why people are staying and work that into your pitch. Have your story ready. If the company stinks so badly, why did you accept a position there?

Take a look at Glassdoor and other websites where employees review where they work, but take it with a grain of salt. See what is being said on the street about your company, but realize that these are anonymous reviews mostly done by people ask to leave the company being reviewed.

The top things that people complain about are:

The Money Sucks
The Commute Sucks
Their Boss Sucks
The Chances of Getting a Promotion Sucks
Their Co-workers Suck
The Work/Life Balance Sucks
Their Office Space Sucks
No cafeteria or nearby food options ( OK I made this one up…)

There is only so much you can do to change the reputation of your company. Stick to your morals and principals. Don’t sell you soul to the devil. Be honest and the truth will set you free. Just keep recruiting.

You Go First, the Salary Negotiation How-to.

You Go First, the Negotiation How-to.

The topic of salary negotiations seems to be all over the media lately. The U.S News & World Report is sharing what the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team teaches us about pay equity, Fast Company is asking if men negotiate more aggressively with a female boss and lifehacker is telling us the biggest salary negotiation mistake is not doing it.

It’s not glitzy or glamorous, salary negotiations that is. It’s not one of the most popular buzzwords in recruiting content today, like candidate experience or big data. There aren’t a bunch of how-to’s and top 10 lists. Everyone isn’t writing about it all the time, even though if we’re doing our jobs, we’re talking about it every day.

We talk salary negotiations with almost every person we interact with in our day-to-day work including hiring managers, candidates and our peers yet learning the how part of that equation inevitably falls to the school of the hard knocks. We have to lose a few great candidates before we start to seek out the information. Turns out, negotiating doesn’t come naturally to most of us.

As recruiters we tend to have a bit more experience in negotiation than most but that doesn’t mean we have all the answers. When is the “right time” to approach the salary conversation? Do you really lose by going first?

Attendees will learn:

Dealing with a candidate who won’t commit to a number
How to make the candidate your ally in the negotiation war
How to arm yourself with data for both candidates and HMs

How to Engage Tech Talent like a Pro.

Tech Talent stands apart as it’s own unique beast in recruiting. In the tech talent market programmers and developers often have multiple offers at the start. They can leave employment and start back up at will, and receive pitches for new employment daily during their tenure working for you.

Tech-related buzzwords and business terms evolve every day.

Nowhere is this phenomenon more evident than in word choice within job listings. As of today, we’ve recognized over 50,000 distinct phrases that impact the quality, quantity and diversity of applicants. Through such a seemingly superficial change as the language recruiters use to attract top talent.

With this in mind, we took a look at our job listing data over the last 12 months to find out the biggest winners and losers when it came to speaking the language of top tech talent to effectively drive applicants and convert candidates from job ads.

Learning to successfully connect and engage with these workers and candidates is a necessary skill if you are going to be an effective tech recruiter. Join us for a special webinar with Amy Ala, Staffing Consultant at Microsoft, as she shares all the tips, hacks, and best practices to engage the top tech talent.

Attendees will learn:

Which Form of Engagement Returns the Best ROI
The Ins and Outs of Referrals
What Really Matters to Developers

And most importantly –

How to Close the Deal.

Social Recruiting: You’re Doing It Wrong.

Here’s the thing about being a recruiter. If you want to sell a job, you’ve got to sell a story. Hell, it’s a working life that often feels like something out of some weird fantasy novel, some esoteric world of weirdos and outcasts. That’s why when I tell a story, I always feel like I have to point out that it’s true – as a recruiter, some things are just too weird to put out there without putting out a disclaimer.

But I’m not going to lie to you – even though, I am a recruiter, as we’ve established. In fact, I’ve got to say on those particularly hellish days where you’re dealing with a particularly hellish hiring manager, I think I should just pack up shop and write a workbook, as it were.

The way jobs get created is one heck of a fable, and you probably wouldn’t believe it even if I told it to you, which is why I’ve decided to stick to sourcing and screening instead of storytelling. Besides, it’s not like anyone cares what I have to say – who the hell am I? Frankly, I wish I knew, but that’s a tale for a different day.

The Social Recruiting Saga: Our Tale Begins.

“Speaking on behalf of candidates, social recruiting involves two way engagement with candidates before they ever submit a resume or access a career site. Without two way engagement, ideally in real time, it’s just regular old recruiting using the latest cool toys.”

— Karen Siwak

This is a true story about social recruiting. It should serve as a cautionary tale at best, a warning at worst, but hopefully you come away with the moral of it all, which is that if you think you’re doing social recruiting right, you’d better think again. A lot of people think it’s trolling on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram or Facebook.

If you’re one of them (and you know who you are), you need to look away from the computer screen and take a look outside at the world around you. Because it’s beautiful out there, and the thing about social is it’s nothing if not nasty.

The thing I worry about is, the more time we spend on social media, the less social we all seem to become.

It’s like being alone, together.

I know this sounds weird, but I just did a little digging to see what all was out there on social recruiting, and instead of milquetoast statistics and stuff, I found a hotly debated, hate filled stream of solid rage dedicated to this admittedly esoteric subject.

Hell, there are full conferences out there dedicated to social recruiting and every single one of them has a bunch of so called “thought leaders,” most of whom have never had an actual thought in their lives, much less led them (or a life, come to think of it). And these “Influencers” (always a capital I, you know, the kind that isn’t in ‘team’) spout out a bunch of complete crap that has nothing to do with social or recruiting – it’s really just a bunch of thinly veiled product placement mixed with some shitty superficial charts and graphs. Inevitably, these innovative technological feats of recruiting futurology rely on PowerPoint, which means the future doesn’t look great.

But forget the future of social recruiting for a second. I want to figure out if there’s actually a ‘present’ present, presently. So, I did what anyone would do. I went to Google “social recruiting definition,” and summoned my sourcing powers to find this take, which obviously is completely objective because, well, it was crowdsourced on the internet and happened to rank at the top of the page. The world makes me sad.

Anyway, here’s what the Internet has to say about social recruiting:”

“Social Recruiting (“social hiring” or “social media recruitment”) is recruiting candidates by using social platforms as talent databases or for advertising. Popular social media sites used for recruiting include LinkedIn, Facebook, Viadeo, XING, Google+ and BranchOut.”

Right. First off, what the hell is a Video, and secondly, is it contagious? Also, BranchOut? Really? I had forgotten that was even a thing. Just goes to show you that social recruiting is one fickle mistress, frankly.

Social Recruiting: The Legend Continues.

You know what anyone – recruiter or not – does these days when they need an answer to something? They search a database – it’s called Google, or, I guess, Bing, for those 4 of you out there who might by some chance be reading this. Alternatively, if you’re a good recruiter, you work your database, be it Boolean, Semantic or old fashioned guess work (which always seems to work). When you find a name, you figure out the best way to get in touch with them.

What the hell is social about that? For that matter, if that’s not sourcing, what is? It’s just stalking people on the internet who might be good for any particular job order you happen to be working on.

If you really, truly want to be a social recruiter, then do me a favor and shut your laptops now. Thought not. But really, there’s a great big world out there beyond your computer – and unlike social media, it’s actually, well, social.

Sometimes, I power down Facebook and LinkedIn and venture out there, and I can safely assert that the networking functions and industry events I’ve been known to turn up to – in person – have seen their attendance dwindle as people concentrate on what’s going on in their networks without understanding how networks really work in the big picture.

I’m going to make a controversial claim. But the truth is, not every candidate you’re looking for can be found on the internet. I don’t know why I’m telling you this, because your proclivity towards avoiding actual human interaction is making a killing for those few of us who turn off and turn up in real life. Don’t believe me?

Let me tell you a little story about social recruiting.

A Little Story About Social Recruiting

A long, long time ago, when I was still working in the agency and we were still using stuff like fax machines and telephones (where the hell are my pipe and cardigan?) to actually go out, find and feed our account managers the resumes of qualified, interested, available and more or less preclosed tech candidates in Phoenix.

This wasn’t a big market, at least not compared to some technology hubs, but it was big money, or at least more than most recruiting gigs. Which meant we could live a little larger than the average desk jockey, who in those days was still using industry directories while fervently dialing through switchboards. Suckers.

As young recruiters making good money, we of course were totally subtle and classy, which meant that once a week, our team meeting consisted of going to lunch at one of the swankiest steakhouses in town and basically filling our faces while indulging ourselves in whatever libation happened to be next. Damn, I miss those days.

I admit, when I joined the firm, I still had to get used to this bougie boozefest, because I was not too far removed from having been one of the have nots in the not all too distant past, and it was a memory that was never far from the front of my mind.

Besides that weekly steak on the company card, I discreetly hid my brown bag special discreetly in my desk or else slipped out to the nearby Taco Bell, where you could fill up quick on the .99 cent menu. It was an odd double life, those days back in the day – when going out on a date and springing for a twenty five buck dinner at Houston’s seemed like splurging one night, and the next day, it’s all red meat, red wine and retreating from reality.

I made it a point to be there every week, obviously – but there was one time where one of my clients just. would. not. shut. up., and made my account manager Mike and I too late to tuck into a T-Bone. So, dejected, we went over to the McDonald’s next door (don’t judge), and did the only thing a man who’s just missed out on a good meal over a shit account can do to feel better: stuff his face with a Big Mac and Fries. I’m telling you.

But like I said, I was frugal (cheap, if we were romantically involved), and there was no way I was going to spring for anything more than I had to, since I hadn’t brought my normal brown bag with me and therefore had to do something different than my normal PB&J. Hey, it takes a minute to build a book (or did, in the day), and before that first placement check, it’s a struggle to survive. Which is why so few recruiters make it out alive, I’m pretty sure.

Social Recruiting: The Great Treasure Hunt

The added bonus in that Mickey D’s run, besides the extra value, of course, was that it meant while all our colleagues were gorging themselves on good food, we were back at the office getting a running start on those 10 help desk reqs our client needed closed, like, yesterday. And was willing to pay a premium to make sure that happened.

Besides myself and Mike, there were two other recruiters working those reqs, and it was kind of like the recruiting version of the Hunger Games. Game on – and good luck, because there aren’t a ton of these type of people stocking the database of most tech recruiters, although we’re smart enough to know that somehow figuring it out is going to somehow be far easier than finding the everyday engineer, which is what most of the profiles piling up that sourcing stockpile were made up with.

I felt better at least knowing that if I was going to be cold calling, I’d probably get an answer if I was looking for customer service reps. If only I could make it through the damned line – I was still a half dozen people deep into the lunch time rush, and I was losing time. The other recruiters would probably be moving onto creme brule before I even moved forward, back before I fulfilled my Mac Attack.

What the hell? Figured I’d pull out the job descriptions (this was in the days when we actually printed the damn things out and carried them around with us, like a smart phone, but neither smart, nor a phone. Still worked).

Mike and I stood with those positions that we had just gotten (bad client, hell of a result), and knew that this might mean big business, which meant we’d need to come through big time. Even though this kind of role was, well, not exactly our kind of role. I’m not going to lie, we prided ourselves on only working with the best talent in town, and these kinds of people, at $18.50/hr to pick up the phone, didn’t exactly fit the bill.

Which left us having to look outside our database, something every agency recruiter hates. Even the best pipelines require some just-in-time once in a while.

And so I trudged ahead with the line as another McCustomer was served. I was probably another billion off by this point, which left plenty of planning time. Mike and I talked first, naturally, about going after the job boards – but we realized it was a lot like waiting in that damned fast food line on a simmering day in the Sonoran. We were going to get nowhere fast, and frustrated even quicker.

Besides, we’d have to take our turn behind every other recruiter out there looking for an easy, convenient way to satiate their immediate hunger, coming away with nothing more than some empty calories and a whole lot of regret. Man, I really wanted that f-ing Big Mac, already.

Social Recruiting: Under the Golden Arches.

Finally, after what would have made me around $18.50 were I one of the hourly customer service guys I needed to get back to the office and get after, I made it up to the counter. And I eyed that menu board, savoring the smell of grease and meat and salt and America.

Of course I knew what I wanted. Two burgers, special sauce, and as soon as possible. I told the guy behind the counter my order…and then, the system crashed. The register screen faded to black after a few bleak blips. And it didn’t look like it was coming back.

There I was, having survived the arduous march to the counter, only to have my Big Mac all but ripped out of my hands. Needless to say, that Mike had chosen the line next to me and was ordering with glee while I was yelled at by some kid not to cut trying to edge in behind him, made it all the worse. I was alone in my despair. Mike went off with his tray to fill up those little ketchup cups. Asshole.

I lost it. I mean, we’re talking tantrum level – don’t mess with a recruiter who’s late, hungry and being held up by some outdated technology. Slammed my fists on the counter, demanded to see a manager – the whole privileged white dude routine. Then, out of nowhere, from somewhere behind a fryer, came a guy with a name tag that said Carlos.

He was dripping in sweat, but had an odd smile, and that spark in his eye that said, “Oh, man. This again.” Clearly, I wasn’t the only guy to lose it in a McDonald’s, but at least I was in good company – only I guess Michael Douglas had a shotgun, so at least he got his damned breakfast.

Carlos wiped his hands with some napkins, leaned over the clunky tower of circuit boards and wires that used to power even the simplest of systems back then, and opened the machine. “Give me just a second, I’ll get it working.” Sure, I thought, as the fry cook slipped out the mother board. He looked at it and leaned down. Yeah, I thought. The best way to reboot the system is literally by greasing it up.

But wouldn’t you know it? Within seconds, the screen blinked to life. Carlos stood up, wiped his hands, tipped his cap and casually walked back to the fryer. The cashier, bless her heart, smiled and asked me to repeat my order. I was, frankly, astounded. What in the McHell just happened?

How did freakin’ Carlos – back there lowering a bucket of frozen Ore Idas into a tub of lard, know how to configure the hard wiring of an enterprise POS system? That used to take like an army of consultants with a couple of electrical engineering degrees a couple hours to do, and Carlos had it back up and running in no time.

It was like Luke Skywalker back toiling away his talents in the barren lands of Tatooine. This guy clearly didn’t belong here, flipping burgers for minimum wage.

I had that feeling of having discovered something, some innate talent, completely by accident, like Alexander Fleming discovering penicillin, Marie Curie finding radium (although hopefully with far better results), or figuring out that people actually paid you to find people willing to work in decent paying, somewhat prestigious jobs. Dumb luck is damn lucky, sometimes.

I went to Ketchup Island, where I knew just by looking at Mike’s face he’d somehow seen Carlos’ unexpected miracle play out. We realized we had hit the motherlode – the fry cook who could both calm down a wired up customer and rewire a downed system simultaneously. So, we did the only sane and logical thing any recruiters would do. We waited for Carlos to go on his break. Which, by some miracle, he did before we had even finished our fries.

A Most Unexpected Journey. With a Side of Mayo.

We cornered Carlos, who was sitting down for a well deserved few minutes off his feet, and asked him about what he had just done. He shrugged it off – no big deal. He looked at us like we were crazy for bringing it up.

But not nearly as crazy as, after a few minutes of small talk, I handed him my card and asked him to send me his resume. He gave me that, “whatever, Mister – leave me alone now?” kind of look, tucked it into his front pocket and tucked into his burger. I figured at least we’d tried.

Adios, Carlos.

But sure enough, later that same afternoon, an e-mail appeared in my inbox. Carlos had just gotten off his shift, he wrote, and his resume was attached. If there was any job I knew of that didn’t involve coming home smelling like frying oil, he’d be interested – but I figured with that kind of attitude and aptitude, I could at least make a placement.

That is, until I opened his resume. It was, as you might expect, pretty rough – and, after calling him to talk through the help desk role (and audibly whistled when I told him the starting salary), I set out rewriting the damn thing, word for word. I hate reading resumes, much less writing them, but somehow Carlos had become kind of a passion project.

I finally finished polishing his resume, added a cover letter to my client about how this is one candidate no employer could do without, added a bunch of superfluous adjectives about how awesome he was, and submitted my first ever fry cook for a third party search. I wasn’t sure if it was crazy smart or just crazy, but it sure was different than the same old candidates from the same old job boards, picked over and passed on by every other recruiter out there.

I felt good about myself after I pressed send, knowing if I could just get Carlos an interview, I could maybe give the guy a shot at changing his life. I even went the extra step of calling Carlos to let him know I’d sent him in, and, after his first recruiter encounter, actually responded by asking if I was open to referrals.

Turned out, he had talked to some of his friends from school who were stuck in similar McJobs, and all of them asked for an intro. I asked if they could do the job we had talked about. He promised me they could, and since we had 10 roles open, it couldn’t hurt. Besides, the client needed them to start ASAP.

He sent his friends my way, I talked to them, I submitted them. Within a few days, Carlos not only had a new job in customer service, but so did 8 of his friends – out of the ten total hires we needed on a project we’d gotten only a week before. I mean, you’ve got to feel good about that – I got my placement fee, and eight people got a new chance to get a new start.

I’m not going to lie, that felt pretty damn good. It was a moment of triumph – but then Carlos started his new job, I started a new req, and like any agency recruiter, I soon forgot about that temporary passion project once the placement had been made, the invoice collected, the client satisfied.

The Once and Future Candidate.

It was nothing against Carlos, really; it’s just that I didn’t really normally deal with candidates for roles like customer service. It wasn’t my specialty, certainly, and was about as far from our normal high end search model as you could get.

I guess, looking back, I really didn’t see a pervasive need to keep in touch with Carlos after he had started (ostensibly successfully, since he made it through his 90 day guarantee), and other than the referrals I had already placed into those roles, I didn’t think there was likely much more he could offer me – or really, that I could offer him.

We’d done our business, and then business moved on for both of us. Or so I thought.

Fast forward a year. The phone rings – I pick up and the front desk receptionist lets me know that there’s some dude waiting for me in the lobby. This wasn’t necessarily out of the ordinary, since under company policy, I brought in all of the executive candidates I was working with for an in-person prior to sending them off for active searches.

While we told the candidates the reason for this was to coach them on presentation skills and specious shit like that, it was really a policy in place specifically so that we could press the flesh, look them in the eye and pre-close them if we thought that there was a shot in hell there might be an offer coming in down the line. Most of the time, it worked like a charm. So, I expected to see one of my CIOs or PMs sitting there, but as I walked into the lobby, there was a familiar face waiting for me. Like I said, it had been a while, so it took me a minute before I realized I was looking at the same face that once looked back at me from behind the counter at Mickey D’s.

But other than the face, I was looking, more or less, at a changed man.

Carlos was sitting, legs crossed, impeccably dressed in an Armani suit (I knew it was Armani because I had been looking at the same suit just a few weeks earlier, but decided against buying it due to its prohibitively expensive price tag). His hair slicked back, he looked like a cross between Gordon Gecko and Pat Reilly. Only Carlos still had that same infectious half grin slapped across his face as the first time I met him.

“Hey, man. What’s up? How are you? Did you change your number?” I asked, feeling instantly guilty that I hadn’t spoken to him since collecting the fees for him and his friends. He laughed and shook his head, and told me the reason he stopped by is that he wanted to see the man, to use his words, who “changed his life.”

Whoa. Wait, what?

Carlos proceeded to tell me what had happened in the months since we last spoke – and it was one hell of a story.

There Be Dragons: Mapping An Uncharted Career

Carlos went on to tell me that since taking the customer service role at my client, he had been promoted twice, and in a relatively short period of time had risen from front line support to overseeing a team of 10 direct reports, responsible for managing the company’s help desk center for an entire department – no small job, even for someone with a ton of experience. Much less for a guy who, not too long ago, happened to be cooking fries and flipping burgers.

He went on to tell me about how happy he was, how much he loved his job, and how much he owed me – me – for making it all happen.

I just sat there, stunned for a minute, muted, not quite knowing what to say. I hadn’t kept in touch, not sent a single e-mail or follow up call, and now suddenly this guy shows up out of the blue to thank me for a search I’d already forgotten about? I felt grateful, I felt guilty, and most of all, I wondered why, you know, he didn’t just shoot me an e-mail like everyone else.

Carlos went on to explain that he had come because he had been given yet another new career challenge: he was tasked with starting up a new team within the organization, and, because sometimes the full cycle comes full circle, he desperately needed 10 new help desk support professionals placed as soon as possible.

His requirements were as unique as his background – he was looking for people who had no experience, but like him, were hungry, so he could work with them closely and ensure that they, like him, would be able to beat the odds and become an unqualified success, even if it was “only” in the customer service group.

And he knew just the recruiter for the job. Which is why he was suddenly standing there in reception, asking if I could take on the search and go out and find him 10 people to pay forward the opportunity that he’d been given, and leave a McJob for an actual career. Most recruiters, he explained, wouldn’t be able to see what I had seen. They were too inside the box, too unwilling to ignore prerequisites and look for potential. Given our history, he told me the job orders were mine if I wanted them.

Unsure how to respond, I excused myself and went back to grab Mike and the owner of the agency. Figured as long as a new client was in the building, it might make sense to do a formal meet and greet – particularly since technically, this was Mike’s account, and the account management duties ultimately rolled up into him.

Carlos listened to this explanation that he’d have to work through Mike – it was our policy, after all, to commit to clients and preempt internal poaching. Carlos said he understood, but then, as politely as possible, insisted that the only person he wanted to – or would be willing – to work with was me.

After all, I was the one who had taken a chance on an eight dollar an hour fry cook who now looked like he’d stepped out of a GQ ad. It was a Cinderella story, and I guess Carlos saw me as his Fairy Godmother, someone who could work magic because, well, that was the only way to explain what had gone down in our previous experience working together.

Carlos, whose job used to be asking, “Do you want fries with that?” actually laid out his terms very plainly and politely to the agency owner, and said that if we wanted his business, we were going to have to make an exception to our policy. After all, he said, no one else would be willing to go out of their way to just help give someone a first chance at a second life. “Derek was the only person who actually gave a shit. So I don’t give a shit about your policy. Those are my terms.” His words. Whoa.

The owner quickly agreed to make an exception. Mike looked at me, shook his head, then shook my hand. We were in business.

The Moral of the Social Recruiting Story

It took me less than two weeks to fill those 10 jobs – in fact, I was so inspired by this Dickensian tale I’d perpetuated that I didn’t work on anything else. I was working for more than a placement fee; the agency owner, after that meeting with Carlos, had informed the firm that we were going to switch up our business model to start aggressively going after “lower level” kinds of roles.

All this because of a broken computer, a chance encounter, and the fact that I was actually social when I actually recruited a candidate by simply talking to him and taking a leap of faith.

How did this happen? How did I turn a trip to get a burger into a cash cow of a client? I did it by – wait for it – being social.

All recruiting is social – it always has been – but it’s got nothing to do with Twitter, or Facebook, or a talent community, or anything anyone could do online. It comes down to who you know, sure, but at the end of the day, you’ve got to actually get to know your candidates and customers, and that’s something social media will never, ever be able to do (at least not independently).

The moral of the story: you’re not going to find every candidate you place in your database, or even on the Internet, no matter how complex of a Boolean string you can string together. Hell, the only tool any recruiter really needs to find talent is an open mind – because doing the same thing as every other recruiter out there and relying on technology makes you as much of a tool as any sourcing or social solution out there on the market.

If you think recruiting is a 9-5 job, you’re sorely mistaken – and probably suck at recruiting, come to think of it. If you logged off Facebook or shut down Twitter long enough to pay attention, you’d realize that all around you, humans are doing what they’ve always done: met people and made connections at bars, restaurants, conventions, pick-up basketball games, hell, even in line at McDonald’s.

You never know who you might meet, but you’ll never meet them if you’re not willing to pound the pavement and press some flesh. That’s the real social recruiting, and it has nothing to do with trolling people on Twitter.

I’d like to finish this post by doing something I’ve never done before – I’d like to dedicate this post to a few key people who made this a true story worth telling – and who make a huge difference to our industry and our collective reputation. The first shout out is for the people who actually took the time to read this post, and all the other stuff I put out there – I know it’s blather, but it’s my blather, and it still stuns me that people take the time to read it. But a lot of you do, and I appreciate you more than you’ll probably ever know.

The final shout out is to one of those readers in particular. Her name is Karen Phong, and she just started out in this crazy little business of ours as a new recruiter not too long ago.

While Karen lives half the world away in Singapore, somehow she stumbled across my stuff, and shot me an e-mail saying – and I shit you not – that my posts gave her some hope in what she had considered to be kind of a hopeless business. That gives me hope that somehow, I’m still making a difference – even if I’m not changing lives like Carlos, at least I might be helping a few recruiters out there learn the lessons I had to figure out the hard way.

Social Recruiting: Happily Ever After?

For the first time in a long time, I’m actually optimistic about this industry, because as long as these conversations keep going, it means we might live happily ever after, after all.

Karen isn’t the only person who’s sent me similar sentiments, but I pick her in particular because she’s just beginning to write her social recruiting story, and I’m hoping that you’ll join me in reaching out to Karen (click here to say hello to her on LinkedIn) and showing her what social is really all about in recruiting.

Social isn’t a source of hire. It’s not a “candidate engagement platform,” nor is it a “talent community.” It’s a way of reaching people and building relationships with the Karen Phongs of the world, who, even though they might not work in your market or industry, are helping write the next chapter of our industry.

And for those of us who have seen it all, you probably already know you never know what might come out of the most random of connections – that is, if you scrap the media and just be, you know, social.

After all, you never know where your next Carlos might just happen to be hanging out.

The End.

About the Author: Derek Zeller draws from over 16 years in the recruiting industry. The last 11 years he has been involved with federal government recruiting specializing within the cleared Intel space under OFCCP compliance. Currently, he is a Senior Sourcing Recruiter at Microsoft via Search Wizards.

He has experience with both third party agency and in-house recruiting for multiple disciplines and technologies. Using out-of-the-box tactics and strategies to identify and engage talent, he has had significant experience in building referral and social media programs, the implementation of Applicant Tracking Systems, technology evaluation, and the development of sourcing, employment branding, military and college recruiting strategies.

You can read his thoughts on RecruitingDaily.com or Recruitingblogs.com or his own site Derdiver.com. Derek currently lives in the DC area.

I Can’t Stand It No More: Breaking All The Rules of Interviewing.

Looking back at it now, when I was 23 years old I was what my friends affectionately referred to as a “late bloomer.” Which is to say, I had already fallen behind in life, or so it seemed, and I hadn’t really even started yet.

But there I was – nervous, sure, but feeling prepared for the moment, now that it was finally here.

I had, after all, done a fair amount of furtive reading about it, and of course, had spent the last several years indulging in secretive conversations with my girlfriends who all, it seemed, had actually experienced this rite of passage.

But the time had finally come, and there I was, an absolute wreck; my heart was beating a mile a minute, and I was sure that despite all my preparation and practice, I’d forget the basics, like the order in which you were supposed to do things.

I was sure I was going to screw up and ruin everything. As I went to the door, I adjusted my navy blue skirt, cast a critical glance down at my stockings to make sure they were straight (wouldn’t want to send out any subtle suggestions, even though we both knew what was going to happen), and took a swig of liquid courage. Anything I could do to fortify myself, I thought, as I made my way to the door to beckon him in.

As I opened the door, I turned up my lips in a well rehearsed smile, the kind that I’d practiced in the mirror for more times than I care to admit. I had pretty much perfected it by now, or so I thought – that look that was both welcoming and confident, yet not too welcoming or too confident – a little coy, maybe, but also one that tried to show I was in control, even as the butterflies fluttered in my stomach and a blush washed over my face.

“Hey, John,” I somehow managed to stammer. “Won’t you come in?”

There was no mistaking that invitation, and with those simple words, ladies and gentlemen, John became my first. And it was, well – it was good. For both us. Even now, I smile thinking about that day where this late bloomer’s flower finally blossomed.

I had finally interviewed my first candidate. Even better, after the act, John ultimately scored a job. He might not remember me today, but me? Well, you never forget your first.

I’m In You.

That first time, as our small talk segued into something more, well, substantial, the adrenaline coursed through my veins and my interior monologue was somewhere far from our conversation, wracking me with self-doubt. Was I doing it right? What if I didn’t remember some critical part of the process? What if I forgot what he told me he wanted, and what he was looking for?

Was it at least OK for him, or did my lack of experience betray me? What would happen after we were done? Could this encounter actually turn into a long term match?

I mean, really. What did I know about any of this stuff? My only previous experience was solo – doing it with myself in a mirror or at least taking a few practice runs with one of my pillows standing in for the subject.

Plus, it wasn’t like I had a whole hell of a lot of experience on the other side, either – I had only had exactly eight previous interviews in my entire life, and for the most part, those were done by people who fumbled and faked their way through the act worse than I did.

They were all quickies, felt oddly formal and rushed, and I left all of them thinking that there was no way in hell after that I’d ever get anyone to call me back. Which is all I really wanted – knowing it was satisfying enough for them to at least want to get to know me a little bit better. Even if it took a second or third time.

My very first ever interview as a candidate was for a high school gig with Spencer’s Gifts at the local mall; you know, the place where the inventory consists of a weird mix of drinking accoutrements, adult accessories and novelty T-Shirts. I think they asked about my experience running a cash register, but all I remember were the eerie purple glow of black lights shining against the Peter Frampton posters hanging on the wall, which was covered in red shag carpeting.

It was exciting for a teenager to even think about being trusted to sell such precious wares as Lava Lamps or Pink Floyd t-shirts – but like Peter Frampton himself once sang, “I’m in you, you’re in me, cause you gave me the love, love I never had.” And they also gave me a few bucks an hour, which was a pretty killer perk, too. Spencer and I got along, but you know how it is in high school – things change, people move on.

I Wanna Go To The Sun.

I held three jobs during my college years, and while I’m sure they interviewed me, I don’t remember a single detail of a single one. I imagine the “hiring managers,” such as they were, were primarily concerned with my availability to cover evening and weekend shifts as well as my ability to show up on time and not provoke customers into fist fights.

Which is how I ended up starting my career with a string of prestigious, high impact positions such as ringing up orders at Burger Chef, overseeing the sign in sheet at the University’s Athletic Department, and keeping the stiff drinks and superficial conversation flowing while doing my requisite duty as a barmaid (I was particularly good at this job, frankly).

But I knew that I wanted more than a few drunks asking me for my number or being constantly surrounded by the stench of fried food or wet towels, so, naturally, Interview Number 5 was for a professional, post-college gig at a staffing agency.

I quickly realized that I was uniquely qualified, based on the above experience, for a role that was more or less a glorified coordinator responsible for administering typing tests to clerical candidates and operating a fax machine. And so I, like so many of us, somehow fell into my career in HR when they realized I not only knew how to fill out a cover page, but I could work my way well north of 90 WPM myself. I was on my way.

Interview 6 came at the branch of a local bank, where I had found another job when I got tired of playing secretary, Gal Friday and test proctor for temp workers, albeit doing much the same sort of work, but with bankers, who, turns out, were far more professional and easy to deal with than agency recruiters. I stuck around long enough in my HR Assistant role to apply for a promotion, and interviews 7 and 8 were with the VP, HR and SVP of HR for a newly opened in-house recruiter role. Hey, I thought, anyone can be a recruiter – why not me?

And now here I was with John, the very first candidate I’d found, courted and picked up for a date all by myself.

Show Me The Way.

Thing is, I didn’t approach this interview with John the First completely naive, unprepared and totally uninformed – I knew where jobs came from, after all, and wasn’t some Pollyanna or a Duggar daughter on her wedding night.

Although I hadn’t directly run a desk or placed temps into the contract roles that came across that infernal agency fax machine, I had, after all, worked at that staffing agency for a year, during the course of which I had seen my fair share of interviews.

Thankfully, that meant that unlike many first time recruiters, I wasn’t going from side hugs and no kissing to full out intercourse just because I finally had a job that actually required me to talk to candidates and figure out whether or not they were placeable, or where they fit best.

It wasn’t like mere hours before my first kiss at the altar, I was handed an IBLP pamphlet by my mother and told to just close my eyes and think of Jesus.

Nope. I was eager, sure. But this girl came prepared for getting down and dirty.

Thankfully, in those times long ago when I first had the recruiting reins handed to me, my boss spent a considerable amount of time teaching me about the birds and the bees of behavioral based interviewing, from theory and process to discussing legal stuff and how to prevent unconscious bias. He was grooming me, to be sure, and went so far as to give me homework and, when the mood was right, some role-playing of stressful or unexpected interview scenarios.

I sat second chair (he was Jack McCoy! I was Claire Kincaid! It was Law & Order!), shadowing him while he conducted several interviews, then finally let me take the lead on several more, which he observed and provided a litany of post-interview feedback, challenging my post-interview assessments and decisions. Sure, those first menage-a-trois could be frustrating. I knew I was ready. He wanted to make damn sure I was right.

He was, in short, a total hard ass. I learned a lot.

Do You Feel Like We Do?

I was fortunate to have been given such thorough on the job training, but in retrospect, so too was my employer (at least in my estimation). One could safely assume that had the big boss man gone with some outside candidate who already had years of recruiting experience, he wouldn’t have had to spend an excessive amount of time preparing him or her to make sure that I was ready for my first time before turning me out on my own.

Had he hired someone with several years of experience in recruiting and/or staffing, he probably would have expected her to hit the ground running and start filling requisitions as soon as possible. He never would have questioned whether or not she was ready, “how” she conducted interviews or what level of interpersonal skill and situational savviness she brought to this most basic of applicant interactions.

The time he spent with me was not only valuable for my own professional development, but it gave me a model that I’ve since replicated at numerous organizations throughout my career. When I ultimately became an HR leader and was tasked with building my own team and department, with responsibility for hiring recruiting and HR practitioners on my own, I always – always – took the time to train them with the same rigor I myself had found myself subjected to.

It worked, after all, and no matter which employer happened to be employing me, I’ve found that training both new hires and new hiring managers with these same techniques creates a shared level of understanding and competency. I can’t imagine letting someone interview without knowing they knew how – even if they had the other side of the desk down cold. But I know I’m something of an outlier on this issue.

Think about it – how did you learn to interview a candidate before your very first time? Was it trial and error? Practice? By watching a bootleg DVD from Sweden with some impossibly attractive and nimble ‘entertainers’ just waiting to show off their ‘greatest assets?’

What about your hiring managers? Whenever we promote from within (“Bill exceeds all expectations as an individual contributor – hell, it says so on his performance review. Must be manager material!”) or hire someone from the outside (“Susie has three years of experience managing direct reports – she’ll have no trouble managing ours!”) we just don’t spend a whole hell of a lot of time actually training them – in depth – on HOW to interview, much less how to make the most effective selection decisions.

We don’t set baselines or benchmarks, nor do we really use any sort of protection whatsoever – we just toss Bill a handbook or Susie a process map and call it a day. We trust their instincts and our own faith that they will, in fact, have what it takes to make an important hiring decision. It’s a trust that’s too often betrayed, but a bad hire is, like a transmittable disease, easily prevented with a little education. Even if it might seem a bit awkward at first.

Baby I Love Your Way.

Recruiting and HR practitioners need to be the proverbial lube in the process to ensure that there’s a minimal amount of friction between talent pros and hiring managers during the interview process, and preempt any associated pains that come with finding out whether or not someone is actually a fit.

You know what I mean? We both share the same goal of scoring that perfect candidate, so we need to realize that we need each other as a wingman (or wingwoman) if we ever want to close the deal with someone who does it for both of us.

One way that we can do this, of course, is by actually taking the time to fully prepare hiring managers for every step of the interview process, letting them know what to expect and making sure that they know what they’re doing. This means going beyond a simple intake meeting and hoping for the best; it means going past just spelling out the workflow or explaining their role in the process and where they should send feedback. It even goes further than having a discussion to clarify the desired KSAs and benchmark the recruiting budget and required compensation associated with any given requisition.

Instead, we must, if we’re truly doing our jobs and proving that HR Business Partner is more than a buzzword or oxymoron, that we’re responsible for educating and teaching our hiring managers about not only the why of interviewing, but the how, stressing the importance of consistency and how to actually hire for job relevance or provide more meaningful feedback than, “we seemed to click.”

It’s taking the time to discuss interview format, assist our hiring managers in developing and standardizing interview questions aligned with specific competencies, and making suggestions to that they can actually ask meaningful behavioral based questions and dive deeper into answers to figure out what a candidate’s done, not just taking what a candidate says they’ve done at face value, as we’re too often wont to do.

Yeah, I’m a fan of behavioral interviewing, but that’s because, well, in my experience, the best way to predict future performance is by looking for patterns in the past, and this approach has consistently worked throughout my career (and we’re talking a pretty long past, frankly).

In our role as educator and enabler, we can point out what an incomplete or incoherent answer looks like, and the dangers associated with allowing candidates to give theoretical or anecdotal evidence in lieu of actionable answers and tangible evidence.

We need to make sure our hiring managers have the tools to not only gather the right raw data from an interview, as it were, but to interpret those answers in a way where we’re using interviews not just as process formalities, but instead, as predictive intelligence designed to preempt bad hires and uncover high potential performers. Every company interviews, but the question is: are you getting any bang for your buck? Because if not, you and your hiring manager are probably going to pay.

This approach takes time, and sure, it’s kind of a pain in the ass. But our job is to enable our people to find and hire the best people, and this requires being part teacher, part coach and part consigliere. It also means saying to the newly promoted manager (or hell, even the most experienced managers), “I want you to be successful in this process. What can I do to help make sure you’re comfortable and fully prepared?”

While the talk swirls around enforcing competencies and credentials through creating some form of “National Recruiting Association,” let’s not forget that one of the most basic ‘tasks’ that any recruiter or HR practitioner, or the hiring managers we support, must have is actually interviewing and selecting candidates.

Sure, we can add in a bunch of technology, like video capabilities and matching algorithms, but until the robots completely take over, a National Recruiting Association won’t compensate for the fact that interviewing isn’t just a recruiter’s job, nor a hiring manager – it’s everybody’s shared responsibility, and no one gets off from doing their part in what’s inherently a group activity, not a solo exercise. When we make a hire, it’s because it feels right for everyone involved – and everyone can walk away satisfied.

So, whether it’s your first time or you’re like the Wilt Chamberlain of interviewing, let’s make interviewing a pleasurable experience for everyone.

Now, any chance you can spare a cigarette? I’m spent.

For more for Robin, check out her blog, follow her on Twitter@RobinSchooling or connect with her on LinkedIn.

What Employers Are Missing with Employee Wellness Programs

As employment opportunities abound and workers aim to find life balance, corporate wellness programs (and those companies that offer them) are gaining appeal for job seekers. Google offers EnergyPods, which encourage employees to stay well rested. IBM annually compensates healthy employees with $300 rewards. American Express offers on-site medical care and examinations. Though many companies aren’t able to offer resources like these, wellness programs are well on their way to becoming an expected employee benefit.

Luckily, the benefits of these programs are not one-sided: Employers greatly benefit too. In fact, studies have shown that effective wellness programs result in lower attrition rates than in companies without them. These programs are designed to not only make for happier and healthier employees, but also increase productivity and the bottom line.

According to Gallup-Healthways, the five essential elements to wellbeing are purpose, social, community, physical and financial. Yet, “in the U.S., 28% of adults aged 18 and older are not thriving in any of the well-being elements, while 7% are thriving in all five. So for every adult who is maximizing his or her well-being potential, there are 13 who have significant room for improvement in one or more elements.” With the average full-time worker clocking almost 50 hours per week, employers have the opportunity to significantly improve their employees’ wellbeing.

Workplaces naturally offer a sense of purpose and community, while many corporate wellness programs focus on physical and social health. The missing element, then, can often be financial health. Feeling in control of their finances and navigating unexpected expenses, workers are given a sense of security that lowers stress, increases health, and leads to higher productivity.

Show Me The Money

Fortunately, there are ways companies can help alleviate monetary strain among their employees without having to dole out frequent raises and bonuses. Here are five often untapped resources that employers can provide to foster financial health among their workers:

Short-term compensation withholding options

Regardless of income, putting away money can be difficult for anyone. Once money hits a person’s bank account, it’s there to spend. However, employers can aid in employees’ saving efforts by withholding specific amounts from every paycheck per the employee’s request. For instance, if an employee is planning a family vacation in December, she can request that $50 of every paycheck is held back for her vacation fund, which she could choose to access only shortly before her trip.

Pre-tax flexible spending accounts

When employers offer a Flexible Spending Account (FSA), employees can set aside earnings in order to pay for various expenses, including medical and dependent care. The advantage to employees who use an FSA is that the earnings accrued in the account are not subject to payroll taxes. Previous to the Affordable Care Act, any unused funds would be lost at the end of the year. However, now employees are able to roll over up to $500 from their account into the following year. That means major tax savings for workers.

Financial planning workshops

Navigating saving for college, buying a house, and planning retirement can be stressful. Financial planning workshops give workers access to resources that help them meet their personal financial goals all while maintaining their current salaries. Try offering optional workshops to your employees every quarter, each with a new topic. To encourage attendance, host these sessions during the lunch hour and cater food in; your employees are much more likely to attend if it doesn’t require staying late or coming in early.

Flexible payment access

$1 trillion worth of earnings are temporarily held up in the payroll system every year. Giving workers access to that income allows them to manage and improve their finances both by dodging potential bank fees and by allowing them to make strategic investments. Low earners are often hit with late fees and overdraft fees while their money is held in the payroll system. With access to their pay, workers can not only retain more of their earnings but also have the opportunity to invest those earnings and increase their take-home pay. Companies can encourage employers to use free tech tools in order to do this.

On-site personal financial advisement

For many employees, meeting the asset minimums and paying the high fees associated with personal financial advisement is impossible. However, educating employees on their financial options is an easy way to increase their long-term earnings without increasing salaries. Bringing advisors on-site takes the guesswork out of finding a trusted source for financial advice. Therefore, it is in the best interest of a company to leverage their employee base and work with experts who can help them make educated personal financial decisions.

As June’s Employee Wellbeing Month is behind us, it’s important to note that wellness among workers is something that can and should be promoted year-round, and that the most effective wellness programs will go beyond gym memberships and nutrition workshops by offering resources to improve workers’ financial health as well.

About The Author:

Ram Palaniappan is a financial tech entrepreneur who previously ran RushCard and pioneered direct deposit onto prepaid cards as an alternative to check cashing. Under his leadership, RushCard helped more than a million Americans deemed “unbankable” by the U.S. financial system. He took the company from being an experiment in an emerging industry to a mature business with private equity investment. Ram is onto his next venture – Activehours – which is building an innovative new way for workers to get their pay.

How to Use Stories to Make Your Employer Brand More Interesting and Believable

Using stories to communicate your employer brand will dramatically increase the effectiveness of your recruiting efforts. When you use stories your message becomes more distinct, believable, and compelling.

Stories that illustrate your core values and the overall personality of your organization help separate you from others. Rather than be like all the other employers who shout: “We are a great place to work…come work for us!,” you can distinguish yourself by giving inspiring, charming, and enticing examples of WHY you’re such a great place to work.

Don’t be like your competitors. Instead, use examples and stories to make your claims believable and memorable.

In this webinar, you will learn how to:

Translate the drivers of talent attraction for today’s most desirable employees into examples and stories that speak to their requirements.
Translate the core cultural values that you want to communicate to the labor market, into examples and stories that make them come alive and make them more believable.
Collect and curate employee and customer stories that everyone involved in attracting and recruiting talent can use when talking with potential candidates, whether in formal recruiting contexts or informal networking contexts that are ideal for employee-generated referrals.

So, Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want

Think Different: The Great Divide Between HR and Recruiting.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

Imaginationland: Life in The HR and Recruiting Neighborhood

Neighborhood Watch.

3 Things Your HR Lady Cares About.

Like A Good Neighbor…

Selfie-Awareness

Mobile Recruiting: Press 1 for “Duh.”

A Handy Dandy Mobile Recruiting Checklist.

Push It Real Good.

Cell Counts.

What did you say?

Where are you?

What do you want?

Attention Recruiters:

Five Ways Visual Storytelling Drives Recruitment:

About The Author

Bad Board News: Behavior of Top Talent

Consumer Career Marketing

Conversion Considerations

About The Author

Read Between the Lines

Stop Recruiting Bad Candidates

You Lied to Me!

“Papa Was a Rolling Stone”

How Come You Never See a Headline Like “Psychic Wins Lottery?”

If you Don’t Know, Now you Know

You Go First, the Negotiation How-to.

How to Engage Tech Talent like a Pro.

The Social Recruiting Saga: Our Tale Begins.

Social Recruiting: The Legend Continues.

A Little Story About Social Recruiting

Social Recruiting: The Great Treasure Hunt

Social Recruiting: Under the Golden Arches.

A Most Unexpected Journey. With a Side of Mayo.

The Once and Future Candidate.

There Be Dragons: Mapping An Uncharted Career

The Moral of the Social Recruiting Story

Social Recruiting: Happily Ever After?

I’m In You.

I Wanna Go To The Sun.

Show Me The Way.

Do You Feel Like We Do?

Baby I Love Your Way.

Show Me The Money

How to Use Stories to Make Your Employer Brand More Interesting and Believable

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