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Catfish Candidates: Top 5 Recruiting Red Flags.

Have you ever watched the show Catfish? In short, for those of you who don’t watch too much bad reality television like I do on Sunday mornings, Catfish is a docu-series on MTV that airs real life stories of people who have found love online via Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

The catch?

They’ve never seen the person in real life or via a video stream. The show tags along as a person discovers who their online love really is and typically (unsurprisingly), they don’t pan out to be the person they portray online.

A “catfish” is a commonly used term for a person who creates fake profiles on social media sites using pictures and bios they’ve found online, pretending to be someone they’re not. These “catfish” usually intend to trick an unsuspecting person (sometimes quite a few people) into falling in love with them.

Now, as I’ve watched this show, I can’t help but wonder why these people haven’t done a little sourcing of their own to figure out if their cyber lover is real.

Master Baiters.

I’m sure you’ve run into a few of these catfish candidates while sourcing on LinkedIn, since everyone from Abraham Lincoln to Jesus Christ has a profile on there, not to mention the likely millions of fake profiles proliferating the site (follow @FauxLinkedIn on Twitter for some of the best of the worst).

I’m a member of quite a few recruiting groups who love to share these really entertaining (and sometimes scary) profiles. The profiles that ask to connect with you out of the blue and aren’t even complete. Or the ones that look too good.

On the other side of the spectrum, recruiter’s jobs are made even harder connecting with candidates because they’ve been catfished by recruiters with fake jobs. It’s a mess. I’ve even seen recruiters get catfished – which, frankly, isn’t hard to do.

Just check out this discussion over on the RecruitingBlogs forum.

Nobody actually knows how many fake profiles exist on LinkedIn, of course, because no one at LinkedIn would ever admit it. I’m sure they have numbers deep in the bowels of their “data scientists” but publicly, we’ll never hear them admit it. One article made an estimate based on Facebook’s reported fake profiles that 5.5% – 11.2% of its members are fake. Now, here comes the scary part.

“If the same ratio applies to LinkedIn’s 300 million-user base, we’re talking between 16.5 and 33.6 million fakes.”

Eek.

The Online Walk of Shame.

That’s why the times, they are a changin’. According to a brand spanking new CareerBuilder study released just today, more than a third of hiring managers are less likely to even interview applicants if a web search about them brings up no results – that is, fully 33% of hiring managers won’t even consider a candidate if they don’t have some sort of digital footprint.

We talk a lot about the liabilities associated with online personal information, but turns out, not having one at all could be deleterious to your career, too. Bottom line, recruiting and hiring stakeholders don’t want to get catfished any more. And if you’re asking me, that’s a smart move.

We shouldn’t be wasting our time on candidates that aren’t qualified. The purpose of the internet is to make us faster and smarter, after all.

What Happens In Vegas Stays On Google.

But what happens when you find stuff that’s uh.. not so flattering? It’s one thing to have no reputation at all but it’s another thing entirely to get shut down for putting shit out there that’s just plain old offensive to a recruiter.

Because let’s face it, if you’re qualified- whatever you post online has to be pretty bad for a desperate recruiter or hiring manager to turn you down completely.

The Careerbuilder study touched on what some of those offenses may have been so of course, I put my own spin on things.

1. Provocative or Inappropriate Photographs (46%):

2. Information About the Candidate Drinking Or Using Drugs (40%):

3. The Candidate bad-mouthed a previous employer or coworker (34%):

4. Poor communication skills (30%):

5. Discriminitory or offensive comments related to race, religion, gender, etc. (29%):

You know what the really scary part is? As I read this list and think about what I write and post (see above), I fully expect that at some point someone’s going to hate on my style and won’t hire me for talking about all the douchebags I run into online posing as “thought leaders,” or posting GIFs that even hint at racism without first disguising it as “diversity and inclusion,” first, like every other blogger in this space.

And you know what? That’s cool, because that, my friends, is what culture fit is really all about. I don’t want to work at a company that won’t let me be me, or judges me for just doing my thing – which is why I’m so happy at Recruiting Daily, although, in fairness, my boss is responsible for committing every single one of the above offenses, so I know I’m in good company at a good company.

But when I look for another job – and, let’s face it, happy as I am, I don’t expect I’m going to be retiring with a gold watch from an online content destination targeting recruiting and HR, much as I’d like to – then this is the kind of research that seems to me like it’s going to be a no brainer.

And if you want to attract candidates who are really cool, innovative and all those other attributes that always seem to pop up in job descriptions, then you’re going to have to get that stick out of your butt and give candidates a sign that your crappy career copy and employer brand isn’t just giving lip service to a bunch of buzzwords while operating like some draconian bureaucracy straight out of a Dickens novel.

If you want to get social recruiting right, be social – but don’t look like you’re just another employer using employer brand bait to catfish new hires, or else any new hire you reel in is unlikely to stay committed to a long term relationship with someone who isn’t what they seem online.

Because that duplicity becomes part of your digital identity, too – and one that’s just as hard to hide as those pics of you with a bong or double fisting Fireball. Only those employee reviews aren’t going to make you look nearly as much fun.

About the Author: Katrina Kibben is the Director of Marketing for Recruiting Daily, and has served in marketing leadership roles at companies such as Monster Worldwide and Care.com, where she has helped both established and emerging brands develop and deliver world-class content and social media marketing, lead generation and development, marketing automation and online advertising.

An expert in marketing analytics and automation, Kibben is an accomplished writer and speaker whose work has been featured on sites like Monster.com, Brazen Careerist and About.com.

A graduate of Pennsylvania State University, Kibben is actively involved in many community and social causes – including rooting for her hometown Pittsburgh Steelers.

You can follow Katrina on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

Comply or Die: A Recruiter’s Guide To Internships and Employment Law

Every year, as millions of college graduates scramble to score jobs and start working their way out of the six figures of debt they incurred earning that newly printed diploma, millions more will take their first tentative steps into the professional workforce in what’s increasingly becoming a rite of passage for the right to open the door to the right jobs: the internship.

With summer just around the corner, many workforces are already beginning to see the seasonal swell that comes with the inevitable intern influx.

For many employers, however, the initiation of internship initiatives has a somewhat more sinister side, as some of the world’s biggest brands gamble millions of dollars on unpaid internships, a practice that represents a significant compliance issue that many organizations wantonly ignore, despite the obvious risks involved in this endemic practice.

But be warned: if your company maintains an unpaid internship program, you’re playing with fire. And this year, more than ever, you’re likely to get burned.

The crackdown on unpaid or underpaid internships has significantly escalated over the past few summers – and even organizations with the most sophisticated HR functions have found themselves caught in the non-compliance net.

Head of the Class (Action)

Consider the case of media giant Viacom, which owns such properties as Comedy Central, MTV and Paramount Pictures, who recently found themselves the latest mega-corp to enter into a costly settlement agreement with former interns.

While the company has not publically admitted wrongdoing, Viacom ultimately ended up agreeing to pay out over $7 million to members of a class action, including interns employed across subsidiaries in both their New York and California offices from 2007-2013.

This sum, of course, far exceeds the cost of having actually complying with internship compensation guidelines to begin with – and defeats the purported purpose of having interns to begin with, as these six years worth of top talent represented in the class action suit are probably unlikely to be continuing their careers with an organization that burned them before they were even full time employees.

So, if you’re recruiting or managing interns this summer, or work for a company with an internship program, take heed. The days of enterprise indentured servitude, the exchange of credit and experience in exchange for free sweat equity, are long past. This development has been a long time coming.

Internship Programs and the FLSA

In 2010, the U.S. Department of Labor published Fact Sheet #71: Internship Programs Under The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), whose stated purpose is to “provide general information to help determine whether interns must be paid the minimum wage and overtime under the Fair Labor Standards Act for the services that they provide to “for-profit” private sector employers.”

That information must have been quite, well, informative, considering it catalyzed a wave of lawsuits and internship related litigation filed by former interns throughout the private sector – lawsuits which targeted some of the most blue chip brands and biggest employers in the U.S. Multiple multinationals, including Condé Nast, NBCUniversal, and Elite Model Management were forced to agree to pay out millions to former interns, most of whom were compensated with college credit while working alongside (and often performing identical job duties) with paid employees.

Much like classifying independent contractors, comparing the work interns perform to that which is expected of actual employees of the organization is a major factor in determining if the minimum wage and overtime provisions of the FLSA apply. In other words, if an intern looks like an employee, acts like an employee, quacks like…well, you get the picture.

Making Internships Pay Off: 6 Keys to Compliance

So, before taking the gamble and rolling the dice on recruiting unpaid interns, talent acquisition professionals might want to consider reexamining their own policies and reminding hiring managers or HR leaders of FLSA provisions – if for no other reason that if a requisition for an unpaid internship hits their desk, that recruiter assumes liability for a potentially costly compliance violation.

Which, if you like your job, is probably a position you don’t ever want to be in.

Here are some quick guidelines every recruiter or hiring pro needs to know to make sure that their intern recruiting targets the top talent at the head of the class while heading off any class action lawsuits:

The internship, even though it includes actual operation of the employer’s facilities, must be similar to the training that would be given in an educational environment.
The internship experience is for the benefit of the intern.
The internship does not displace regular employees, but works under close supervision of existing staff.
The employer that provides the training via an internship program derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the intern; on occasion, the internship might, in fact, actually impede said employer’s operations.
The intern is not guaranteed, nor necessarily entitled, to a paid position at the conclusion of the internship.
The employer and intern mutually agree that the intern is not entitled to wages for the time spent in the internship, and this understanding is established prior to the initiation of an internship.

If that req fails to meet any of the six factors outlined above, forget any aspirations you might have of having some starry-eyed college kid grabbing your coffee or being your gofer all day for free. As Katrina Kibben predicted in her post from earlier this year, “The Top 15 Employment Law Trends For 2015,” this is one of the biggest compliance issues facing employers today, and as the lawsuits keep stacking up this year – as do the massive settlement amounts employers must pay out to settle them.

This is one trend that’s not going anywhere. If, as many predict, the next major development is an actual enforcement action on unpaid internships by the Department of Labor itself, those already rising settlement numbers are going to look like chump change by comparison.

So, if you’re thinking about recruiting unpaid interns, think again.

For more information – and to make sure you’re protected, check out this Flash Training on Paid vs. Unpaid Internships or the FLSA Reference Guide.

About the Author: Nicole Greenberg, Esq. serves as Managing Director at STA Worldwide, a global professional services firm specializing in IT staffing, project management and consulting services. A licensed Illinois attorney and member of the American Bar Association, Nicole has over a decade of experience in talent acquisition and recruiting strategy.

Recognized as “the world’s only lawyer with a focus on sourcing,” Nicole is a highly sought after public speaker, presenting on compliance, sourcing and technology topics to industry audiences around the world, and her writing on these subjects has been recently featured by top publications like SourceCon, Recruiting Daily and HRExaminer.

A lifelong native of Chicago, Nicole is a graduate of Lake Forest College and received her Juris Doctor from the John Marshall Law School. Follow Nicole on Twitter @NGSEsq or connect with her on LinkedIn.

Work on the Beach this Summer! Nimble CRM Software

OK, I really have no authorization to allow you to work on the beach, but if you have the updated Nimble Smart Contacts App, technically you could be up and working on the beach in no time!

Nimble, as we know it today, is an “intelligent” Customer Relationship Management System that will gather all the information for all of your contacts across your smartphone, social media and email applications. But wait, there’s more! Nimble then gathers company and social media information that you may not have researched yet (I mean who has time for that?) With all of this new and important information, you can create smarter marketing campaigns for your clients and potential customers where they are.

Some of the cool stuff you can look forward to is:

While surfing, Nimble will build a Live Profile with critical details: who people are, where they work, location, hometown, company size, year founded, revenue, industry, CEO details, social profiles, contact info and more.

No matter where you are – Gmail, Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook or even a Forbes article – you only need one click to pull info from emails and web pages and enrich contact records.

Stay relevant and authentic with always-current information. Nimble revolutionizes how you gain insights by updating itself daily with social details like company name, title, location, experience, education, shared relationships, mutual interests and more.

The Smart Contacts App also saves you time and effort with new profile suggestions from apps including Twitter, AngelList, Linkedin, Facebook, Google+, Foursquare and Instagram which you can then easily add to your records.

Nimble’s app gives you the necessary information to prepare you for pivotal actions with your contacts. Let the app find the important people and companies for you, and then organize with tags, log notes about a meeting and schedule tasks to follow up at a later date.

Nimble’s new intuitive design helps your social selling efforts and provides more insight into your customers needs, wants and dreams!

https://vimeo.com/125829655

About the Author: Jackye Clayton is recognized as a people expert who puts the Human in Human Resources. An international trainer, she has travelled 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.

Why Your HR Lady Hates Social Media.

Once upon a time (1991, to be exact, the same year Bryan Adams assured us Everything I Do, I Do It For You, Anthony Hopkins ordered up some fava beans with a nice Chanti and The Dude found out that nihilists believed in nothing), Jan the HR Manager issued a memo detailing the company’s new policy for vacation scheduling.

Naturally, as this was the same year where the internet first came online, this memo was printed out on a piece of paper and sent out via interoffice mail, lovingly delivered by the Mailroom Guy who used to be a staple of almost every workplace in those halcyon days before the World Wide Web went world wide.

The policy, naturally, was written in that dense legalese still en vogue in HR today, meaning that no one could decipher what the hell it actually meant.

Even when employee handbooks were still actual books, the ubiquitous “wherefores” and liability limiting use of the word ‘may‘ were liberally sprinkled throughout these documents, because that’s how HR folks are taught to write stuff.

Despite Jan’s carefully worded memo admonishing employees to address any related issues or specific situations with their managers, she not only received numerous phone calls from confused employees, but was also “rudely questioned” (as she later recounted to her gal pals over wine coolers at Bennigan’s Happy Hour) by an employee who actually had the nerve to stop her in the hallway and ask her for some clarity on this confusing new directive. Without making an appointment, even.

Who the hell did they think they were, having the gall to even question the wisdom of their HR professional, much less straight to their face?

That sort of insolence, of course, is why performance improvement programs were created, thank goodness, but even with decades of distance, Jan still hasn’t fully forgotten the nerve frazzling trauma that memo caused all those years ago when she was just starting out as a 25 year old HR manager, challenging her steely resolve and everything she’d learned while studying for her SPHR (back when that acronym actually meant something).

Oh, Jan.

Flash forward to today, and Jan has climbed the ladder and is now the head of HR at the same corporation, leading the minions toiling away in her organization’s talent management function.

A lot has changed, of course, but her hairstyle, wardrobe and worldview really hasn’t since she first started in this business back in the early 90s – and she continues to hold fast to her firm belief that any news or directive HR now disseminates will inevitably inform or influence a behavioral change among workers, since what HR says goes (like it or not).

In her nod to technology, she’s finally been persuaded to disseminate these directives via e-mail, but ultimately, the expected outcome remains the same.

There is no need for discussion – if she deems a policy worthy of implementation, it’s a done deal. She is the corporate version of Judge Dredd – she not only creates the law, but is the sole arbiter and enforcer, too. This, of course, is the kind of control that HR takes for granted, policing policy with absolute impunity, just like they’ve done for decades.

Jan has a personal philosophy, like so many of her colleagues, that has been honed to perfection in her quarter century career as an HR professional: “Employees need to shut up and suck it up.”

If only it were still so simple.

And Along Came Social…

Back around the time Barack Obama was running for his first term on a platform of change we could believe in, and we actually believed him, HR professionals the world over began to receive an ever increasing deluge of invitations to webinars, seminars, SHRM chapter meetings and CPE classes that caused their little hearts to flutter.

Employment attorneys, knowing their audience all too well, took to the road and began spreading an apocalyptic message that, for HR, the end was nigh, presenting sessions with sensational titles like, “The Dangers of Social Media: What You Need to Know NOW!” or “Monitoring Your Employees: How To Protect Your Company From Social Media.”

With absolutely no experience or interest in actually learning about any of these said social channels, HR gals (and guys) took swift action to preempt this worrying new development.

They feverishly crafting policies, frantically started blocking employee access to specific social sites (“no YouTube for you!”) and actually met with their IT Departments for the first time to find out how they could beef up their policing of employees’ online activities.

These efforts were akin to writing and enforcing a policy about Workplace Harassment with absolutely no conception or understanding of what quid pro quo actually means.

And Jan? Our fearless corporate HR leader, who we’ve already met, made a decision and drew a line in the sand. She was never, no way, no how, ever going to allow employees the ability to access any tool, channel or technology where they could have an opportunity to actually state an opinion or ask questions or communicate with each other without having to use HR as an intermediary.

Shut up and suck it up, remember?

A Few Brave Souls

At about that same time, a handful of brave and intrepid HR professionals decided to buck conventional wisdom and actually become pioneers, trying to settle the vast wasteland of “social HR” by tackling the daunting task of figuring out how to actually leverage these new technologies for the greater good instead of an unnecessary evil.

And those early adopters started actually trying to educate other HR practitioners about social media – no easy task in a business where the status quo is so seemingly static.

For the next five years or so, every SHRM conference or HR themed event offered some sort of session on “Social Media 101″ geared to helping provide talent practitioners and leaders actually understand the strange world of social beyond simply preempting it with policies and procedures.

I, for one, was one of the early outliers who took the social show on the road and tried telling numerous audiences about the positive benefits and potential applications of social media in HR and recruiting.

It was, frankly, exhausting.

The Struggle Is Real.

The end result of all these thousands of hours myself and others spent teaching HR practitioners about social media was a mixed bag, at best.

Once social became seen as an inevitability instead of simply a liability, HR made a frenzied rush at online brand building, mostly choosing Twitter for its ease of communication and integration into their HCM systems, with these new features from familiar vendors offering some sort of validation – and a feeding frenzy to catch up with the very same platforms they previously poo-poohed.

Most of these eager HR ladies created their first Twitter account at one of these Social 101 sessions at a state SHRM conference or HRCI approved event, sending 5 tweets over 3 days from their newly minted handles, feeling super cool when they figured out what a hashtag was and vigorously retweeting any sound bite or statistic they could find on the conference stream.

Then, when the event ended and they went back to the office, these HR practitioners promptly forgot that their accounts existed and let them languish, unused and unopened, until they went off to the next SHRM event in 6 months time, in which case, they added another handful of specious tweets to their timelines before promptly abandoning them yet again.

The few who kept them up in the interim, of course, showed up at the next conference feeling a bit like Twitter rock stars, giddily sharing updates to their network of 49 followers and adding an ampersand to their name tags so everyone would know they were meeting an HR Twi-lebrity.

Bless her heart.

Some Social HR Straight Talk.

The sad thing is that people who rely on accessing and engaging on social networks to do their jobs continue to face an uphill battle for buy-in from their HR teams.

I recently had a conversation with a recruiter for a major multinational employer (one with over 2500 open requisitions, to give you a sense of scope), who told me that the company’s in-house legal counsel, with the blessing of HR, of course, had informed the entire TA team that the much maligned edict prohibiting engaging with candidates or posting job content to any social channels would remain in effect indefinitely.

Yeah. In 2015.

So much for “social recruiting,” hey?

I’m going to be straight here. If you’re stuck at a company with Jan (or her ilk) overseeing your corporate HR function, it’s going to continue to be a challenge to win her heart and mind when it comes to social media. She’s still terrified at the very thought of an employee having a drunken Facebook conversation after hours, lest they make a mention to their jobs or professions even in passing.

How To Get HR To Stop Worrying About Social.

But you have the opportunity to get her on your side by approaching it, in my estimation, in one of two ways.

1. The productivity issue. Your HR lady is convinced that employees are screwing around and wasting time on social media. Do you know why she thinks that?

Because she, herself, is spending 2 hours every workday sharing motivational quotes on Facebook and playing Farm Heroes Saga.

I know this because a sizable number of my Facebook friends are HR ladies and I see this crap from them all day long. So if you want to make your point by being a bit passive-aggressive see if you can troll her Facebook feed and then present your case by sharing a few artfully captured screen shots showing that she posted about Princess Charlotte Elizabeth Dianna at 11:13 AM on a workday. Busted!

2. The engagement issue. Take advantage of your HR lady’s desire to be on the cutting edge of business and pepper your conversations with the buzzwords she sees every month in HR Magazine. Show her that you’re on her side by tossing out words like engagement (the reigning buzzword champ) and onboarding (coming in strong at #2).

While I don’t want you talking about talent communities (networks, mailing lists, whatever), the concept of which will just make her head explode, I do want you talking about supporting the workplace community and socializing onboarding. This will set you up for success!

You’ll be speaking her language rather than coming in there with all your fancy chatter about social search and sourcing and digital marketing strategies.

Maybe one day your HR lady will learn to love social media. Just probably not as much as she loves chocolate, Harry Connick. Jr., and Tory Burch shoes.

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.

The State of Candidate Experience in 10 Statistics

With hundreds of employers voluntarily subjecting their hiring process to the intense scrutiny involved in being adjudicated by nearly 95,000 applicant responses, the 2014 Candidate Experience Awards did more than just open the recruiting books up at some of the world’s biggest brands.

It also generated a ton of useful information for a cross-section of candidates – and the recruiters responsible for hiring them – at companies running the full gamut of industries, verticals, markets and talent needs, the sheer sample size serving as something of a microcosm for the job search of today.

Talk about big data.

10 Candidate Experience Statistics Every Recruiter Should Know

If you are in recruiting, math probably is not your thing; if it were, the statistical odds of filling most of your open roles would look so slim you would probably have already found another line of work.

We get that every pie chart pretty much just looks like Pac Man, or that you instantly ignore any grid that is filled with more confusing numbers and stats than a sports book.

That is why we have dug deep into the data, looking for data diamonds in the rough, which is rough. So too was narrowing down this list from the fire hose of awesomely insightful information generated by this year’s CandE Awards.

This list of 10 takeaways represents a statistical snapshot of where candidate experience is at today – and what must be done to improve it tomorrow.

1, Career Sites Count.

64.5% of applicants found career sites helpful when researching a company. Compare this to 19.9% who said that review sites like Glassdoor were helpful marketing materials, and an even lower score for social recruiting (3.8% for Facebook, 1.9% for Twitter, and the much vaunted talent communities at 5.9%).

This is great news for recruiters, since it means that candidates turn to the platform where they get to control the content.

Of course, any candidate these days also knows that this is the best resource to prepare for an interview and figure out what the organization looks for in candidates, but interestingly, prefer this information directly from an employer instead of hearing it from current and former employees.

But they do not want to hear it on social media – the abysmal numbers suggest that employers are best off abandoning these resource intensive platforms in favor of building a great careers site with a candidate-focused, clean UX/UI and great content that’s optimized for search engines and mobile.

For job seekers, search is clearly beating the pants off social.

2. Your Values Are Your Employer Brand.

14.4% of candidates stated that the most important marketing material influencing their decision to apply was the company’s values, more than awards like Best Places to Work Lists (12.7%) or corporate social responsibility (13.8%).

This means that generating the candidates an organization is looking for would be better served focusing their efforts on stating their values instead of the more complex and resource intensive marketing efforts employers currently utilize to demonstrate those values in action. This outcome is counterintuitive, at least from a marketing perspective, but well beyond the margin of error.

This outcome, however, translates into a great opportunity for recruiters, since adding consistent, succinct value statements to stuff like job descriptions can make them a whole lot more effective for not a whole lot of extra effort.

Of course, those values ultimately have to resonate, so do not ditch any of the great work you have done just yet – those awards, workplace honors and philanthropic efforts might not make the biggest difference prior to applying for a job, but just might represent the difference between an accepted offer or a rejected one at the end of the process.

Also, please note that dead last was anything related to gamification (a paltry 1.8%), proof that this is one fad that should fade away fast (and rightfully so – every job search is a game, and you win when you get hired).

3. Forget Big Data.

75.4% of candidates were never asked about their experience by an employer prior to filling out this survey – which means that despite the fact that both big data and candidate experience are trending topics, fully three-quarters of employers have absolutely no analytics to even create basic benchmarks around how candidates perceive their process.

Based on the 73,000 responses this question generated from real job seekers to real employers, it is pretty obvious that you will get enough responses to start generating some actionable analytics.

Get the numbers before worrying about what you’re going to do with them.

4. Don’t Get High on Your Own Apply.

43% of candidates spend 30 minutes or more on the average online application. An even 10% spend an hour or more. Think about this for a second. On the one hand, you’re placing a premium on passive candidates who are fully employed, but expect them to waste up to an hour of their life filling out your stupid forms? Forget about it.

Even the best recruitment marketing or HR technology can’t fix a broken process – so stop adding complexity and start focusing on simplicity. Most candidates start the online job search process with a search engine like Google – which means that their expectations for user experience going in are pretty high.

Want to improve candidate experience (and recruiting results pretty much across the board)? Keep it simple, stupid.

5. Interviewing Is Candidate Experience’s Greatest Weakness.

Only 38.2% of candidates received any information prior to their actual interview, other than ostensibly a date and location.

And while that fraction seems tiny, the winning response to the question of what kind of “communication and preparation” employers gave before their interview was just getting the name of the interviewer.

Pat yourself on the back, recruiters. Almost 4 in 10 of you are letting people know the names of the hiring managers they’ll be meeting in advance.

Speaking of great experiences, 26% of you are providing candidates coming in for interviews with detailed agendas, the same percentage as escorted your candidates between interviews.

This means that you are not only making candidates find their own way, but you are not telling them where they are supposed to go. Talk about the blind leading the blind.

6. Silence Is The Most Damning Form of Rejection.

5.5% of candidates were given feedback that they found even moderately useful from employers when notified that they were not selected; of that, a scant 2.6% of candidates received “specific and valuable feedback.” Of course, candidates were lucky to receive any feedback at all; 55.9% reported not receiving any feedback in the first place. Another 20% of those that did were provided “general or limited feedback.”

What’s more, while the minority never heard from you again after spending an inordinate amount of time filling out your overly complex online application, only 13.1% were encouraged to apply again.

This evidences that for all the talk of building pipelines and talent communities, referral networks and professional connections, almost all recruiting is done just in time, and closes the door on candidates when closing out requisitions.

Clearly, when it comes to candidate experience, second place truly is the first loser. At least they are in good company, statistically speaking.

7, Candidates Have A Pretty High Threshold For Pain.

Only 10.5% of candidates had stressful or negative enough experiences to definitively count you out as an employer, answering “definitely not” if asked if they would apply again after a first employment encounter; furthermore, only 20.4% said they were unlikely to consider applying again, but would not rule it out entirely.

Repeat business is, from a best practices standpoint, the best indicator of success, and by this account, employers are actually winning at candidate experience, even if they are widely ignoring it. 32% had good enough experiences to definitely apply again, and 37.1% said they were likely, given their previous experience was “efficient and fair.”

Not exactly the words most would use to describe recruiting, but still, this means almost 70% of all candidates are going to proactively continue to apply, with or without your encouragement or any modicum of engagement or communication from the employer.

8. A Bad Candidate Experience Will Cost You.

23.8% of survey respondents stated that a positive candidate experience with an employer made them more likely to increase their relationships with employers’ respective “brand alliances, product purchases or networking.” 25.4% were encouraged to continue to maintain a relationship with an employer even after applying for a job.

While only 11% had poor enough candidate experiences to cut all ties with a company, that still means, since candidates are customers, the majority have their purchasing decisions or brand sentiment impacted directly through candidate experience.

This translates to a lot of potential revenue dollars (and goodwill), and proves why candidate experience just makes sense.

9. Job Boards Still Work.

Social media and employer branding might be trendy, but if you are looking to get some bang for your recruiting buck, turns out old school is still in. 62% of candidates reported utilizing job post aggregator Indeed in their job search, with 51% and 47% of candidates reporting using CareerBuilder and Monster, respectively.

Compare this to Facebook (11.9%), Twitter (4.3) and YouTube (1.8%), and you will see why new is not necessarily better when it comes to reaching talent.

If you are looking to convert job content into warm leads and actual applicants, focus on writing great job descriptions and spending your time fishing where the fish are – and where today’s candidates are concerned, the resource they use most continues to be job boards.

10. Candidate Experience is Your Only Chance To Make A First Impression.

47.7% of applicants had no previous relationship whatsoever with a company before applying for a job there, compared to around 15% for both referrals and existing customers. This means that for many candidates, the experience they have is the first exposure they will ever get to your brand.

This means that focusing on candidate experience literally is putting first things first – and the initial impression potential customers and clients will have of your brand. That is a pretty compelling business case right there.

To download a complete copy of the 2014 Candidate Experience Awards report or to learn more about how you can get involved, click here.

Import.io to Plot.ly – Scraping Data That Makes Sense

Scraping data is a massive time suck. Plotting that data to make any sort of sense of it is an astronomical time suck. As a recruiter this is the area that we often spend significant time wishing had chosen a different career. It’s a necessary evil to be successful, but as we all know this task can be a royal PITA.

The Tools I Use To Scrape Data

There are many tools that I use to scrape and organize my data, however the two that I want to share today have made my job easier and more enjoyable. As stand alone tools these are great, but the true power of Import.io and Plot.ly together can really show some cost effective value.

Import.io

Import.io is an easy to use, lightweight app that allows you to scrape data from any website into a sortable, searchable database. It’s a tool that allows you to simply copy the URL in the Import.io browser, search and scrape away. You can export the scrapped data into an excel sheet and make your magic happen.

Extracting data from a website is not a new thing, so what makes this tool worth evaluating? I love their plethora of features, most notably the extractors, crawlers and the ability to combine multiple data sources into one cohesive data set.

Here’s my take:

[youtube url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rJhDucUBjI&feature=youtu.be” width=”500″ height=”300″]

Plot.ly

Plot.ly is data and visualization tool that allows you to combine ht power of graphing, analytics and stats from your data sets to use for collaboration and decision making. The tool itself has a scientific background focused on data analysis and visualization.

There are many use cases on Plot.ly that you can Google but check this scenario out for how you might use Import.io and Plot.ly together in recruitment.

How does Plot.ly work?

[youtube url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mh8FLlhbjw” width=”500″ height=”300″]

The Import.io and Plot.ly Recruitment Scheme

The case study we found on this is pretty deep and requires a full read. You can see the full case study on Import.io’s blog but here’s the cliff notes. It’s a great read and certainly one that we’ll be looking at to share more with you all on.

The questions asked / covered in the case study are:

Ever wondered which city has the most arts jobs? Or recruitment openings? Will your career be better off in NYC or SF? Turns out you can answer these and many more questions by doing some simple data analysis. Using three awesome free tools (import.io, MonkeyLearn and Plot.ly) we can obtain, categorize and visualize all the data we need in just 10 minutes!

About the Author: Dean Da Costa is a highly experienced and decorated recruiter, sourcer and manager with deep skills and experience in HR, project management, training & process improvement.

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

Connect with Dean at LinkedIn or follow @DeanDaCosta on Twitter

Will Work for Weed : Recruiting for the Marijuana Industry

Currently, twenty-three states and the District of Columbia have laws legalizing marijuana and more are sure to come. This super niche market has created thousands of new jobs to be filled. The government along with business owners targeting the marijuana market are searching for an efficient way to find candidates to meet their hiring needs. Likewise, technology and software companies are scrambling to create new recruiting tools to address the needs of this emerging market.

Recruiting for the Marijuana industry is tough but don’t worry, there’s an app for that.

Enter Weedhire.com: Weedhire has a mission to “…help clients hire the most qualified individuals and to help individuals find the best job opportunities in their respective fields in legal marijuana. WeedHire.com provides cannabis jobs such as Physicians, Growers, Budtenders, Dispensary, operators, Security, Lighting, Delivery, Testing, Marketing, Government jobs

The specialization of WeedHire benefits site visitors by being specific to employment within the legal marijuana industry. This is just brilliant. They even launched an Android app in August 2014 and an iPhone app this past March.

Weedhire is not the only player in this space

Ganjaprenneur
420careers
Cannajobs
THC Jobs

And yes, I will be reviewing these tools soon. (The job sites, not the products.)

Even though 23 states have legalized pot in some form, all states are unique in what exactly is legal and what isn’t.

This makes things especially hard for the software developers looking to create the best recruiting tool to manage this these types of businesses.

The Northeastern Institute of Cannabis (NIC) has a specialization in aiding governments that are creating marijuana departments. Robert Knapp COO of NIC stated, “The policies being set up by the state, we’re putting them into play,” said Paul VandenBussche, NIC General Manager in Maine said, “ We moved from paper driven because there were too many issues, such as whether the paper was valid or real. We strengthened it by making it fraud proof.”

Attention Software developers. If you are not working on new recruiting tools for marijuana businesses, now is the time. Don’t believe me? Check out Weedhire’s Cannabis jobs report. They compiled data from the traffic on their site. The report highlights the demand for legal marijuana jobs increasing more than 50% in the areas of sales, medical, administrative, & dispensary operations. The demand for qualified dispensary workers alone is up 90%.

Adam Bierman, the managing partner of MedMen, a consulting and management firm serving the licensing, design and management needs of the legal marijuana industry, weighed in on hiring in this market as well. “Because of the nature of the business, we can’t attract top talent,” Bierman said.

CannaSearch LLC saw the need for top talent early and jumped on the need for talent by having the largest cannabis job fair in history, CannaSearch. Co-founder of CannaSearch, Todd Mitchem said, “We are offering five times more jobs than last time, proving that CannaSearch™ is becoming an amazing conduit for people who want to work in the cannabis industry and the companies who want to hire them. If all these jobs are filled quickly, we will add over $15 million in annual income to the cannabis industry. That’s exciting.”

So there you have it. Get to work. Remember:

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.

Get Smart: How Hiring Success Management Transforms Talent Acquisition

You’ve heard it before, but even though it’s become so overused it’s almost a cliche, the fact is that hiring is broken – and the evidence is everywhere.

From resumes overloaded with self-reported (and therefore, fairly worthless data) to job boards overloaded with outdated, unappealing or unreadable postings, you don’t need to dig too deep to find proof that looking for work is often more work than it’s worth.

The problems with hiring today are more than mere frustrations: they’re serious obstacles that stand in the way of a company’s success.

If you want to produce a great product, you need great people. If you want to create an efficient, well-run organization, you need great people.

But great people tend to be already employed, heavily recruited, and hard to hire. According to a recent Deloitte study, businesses are pouring more money than ever into talent acquisition, yet they still can’t find the right people fast enough to satisfy their needs.

That’s the way it is now, but not the way it has to be. Enter a smart, technology-fueled approach to talent acquisition: Hiring Success Management (HSM).

Why Every Company Needs Smart Hiring

The need to hire smarter has never been greater. For most companies, the hiring process is complex, expensive, and time-consuming. In fact, recruiters today spend approximately 80% of their time on low-value, non-strategic, menial tasks that don’t speed up the hiring process.

If you can’t hire fast, you can’t grow your company. You can’t ship on time. You can’t keep up with – and hopefully stay ahead of – the competition. And most important, you can’t innovate or develop new products without the brainpower needed to conceive them in the first place.

But even though you need to hire faster than ever, you can’t do so at the risk of choosing the wrong person for the job. The cost of a bad hire is huge: on average, these “F Players” cost organizations at least three times their annual salary, according to a recent Dice report. And that’s not even counting the huge hit to company morale, productivity and reputation that comes along with these recruiting mistakes, too.

HSM: Recruit Smarter, Not Harder.

A typical talent acquisition solution requires manual data entry that’s subject to human error and contains siloed information that’s quickly out of date.

Talent acquisition employees are overburdened with the unrealistic task of wading through an immense (and ever-growing) amount of prospect and candidate data.

Recruiters spend most of their day doing low-value, menial tasks like manually sourcing prospective candidates, reviewing resumes from job board databases or spending hours sifting through social profiles.

This requirement takes time away from recruiters’ ability to focus on the human side of hiring and important strategic work like building a rich talent pipeline, nurturing relationships, and creating a strong employer brand.

Luckily, we’re at a tipping point. Where previously the influx of data and technology has actually made recruiters’ job more difficult, we’re now seeing a transformation due to the emergence of ‘Smart SaaS’.

By combining data science, consumer-friendly technologies, and predictive analytics, Smart Software-as-a-Service (Smart SaaS) is fundamentally changing software as we know it. And when it’s applied to recruiting, Smart SaaS revolutionizes the game and fuels Hiring Success Management (HSM).

With HSM and the power of automation, there are solutions that can sort through millions of resumes and job sites, so recruiters and hiring teams no longer have to. Prospect profiles are automatically updated – even when prospects move, change jobs, or add new skills. Data science and predictive analytics can forecast when someone is likely to make a career move and proactively alert recruiters. And behavioral analytics and machine learning can help the software get smarter the more it’s used.

How HSM Transforms Talent Acquisition

As hiring software gets smarter and takes over those tedious tasks that make hiring such a painful process, recruiters can reassess their priorities and shift from processing transactions to driving real strategy (and value).

They can stop scouring job boards, stop searching for and entering contact data, and even stop manually scheduling interviews. They can also stop losing nearly three-fourths of their prospects because they’re simply too slow to hire.

Instead, HSM lets hiring teams and recruiters do what they do best: focus on those high-value, strategic, personalized activities that require a human touch: relationship-building and high-level planning.

HSM makes hiring rewarding again. It transforms a recruiter’s role from scavenger to strategist, drives better results, speeds up the entire hiring process and makes it more effective, and ultimately makes companies more successful.

And according to a recent report by The Aberdeen Group, 94% of companies think talent acquisition is critical to their ability to execute on their business strategy in 2015 and beyond. No Applicant Tracking System can do that. You don’t need to be a genius to figure out that smart hiring just makes sense.

About the Author: Sheeroy Desai is the co-founder and CEO of Gild; with over 25 years of experience, Sheeroy is a technology industry veteran who has guided a number of innovative companies in transforming markets to deliver exponential growth. Gild is Sheeroy’s third startup, which he co-founded with Luca Bonmassar.

Sheeroy is responsible for driving the company’s strategy, vision and culture. Sheeroy was a founding member of Sapient (NASDAQ:SAPE), a global services company that helps clients transform operations, marketing and technology. Sheeroy served as Sapient’s Chief Operating Officer from 2001 through 2007.

Sheeroy started his career in 1987 at Cambridge Technology Partners (CTP), a pioneering systems integration firm focused on client-server technology. CTP went public and was eventually acquired by Novell. Sheeroy holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. When not working Sheeroy enjoys biking, skiing and cooking.

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

TalentBin by Monster Released to Asian and Middle Eastern Markets

I know this may come as a shock, but finding top technical talent is a global issue. Recognizing this, Monster conducted a survey trying to gain insight into what obstacles are affecting hiring niche talent in the Middle East and Asia. After getting respondents from about 250 companies across multiple industries, it was found that T over 50% of companies feel it is either difficult or extremely difficult to find top niche candidates. Monster’s answer? Launching TalentBin by Monster ® in Asia and the MiddleEast.

“We are focused on fulfilling the void which existed in the market,” Sanjay Modi, managing director of the India/Middle East/Southeast Asia/Hong Kong regions at Monster, said in an interview with Khaleej Times.

“Our survey indicates 87 per cent of respondents agreeing that there is a need for disruptive technology to find relevant talent. We need to look at augmenting how recruitment is approached,” Modi added. “The social web is a critical element of today’s recruiting best practices. Our TalentBin by Monster has a specialized communication template assembling candidate profiles from publicly available online sources.”

TalentBin is a great resource in the finding of purple, pink even plaid squirrels (on a unicorn) of the world by leveraging aggregated candidate profiles found on social media and web-based recruiting tools around the world. TalentBin by Monster has already been launched in the U.K., Ireland, and the service claims to add an additional 100 million potential candidates to their already robust database.

Sanjay Modi added, “The social web is a critical element of today’s recruiting best practices. Our TalentBin by Monster is a solution to this evolution of online and web hiring. It has an intuitive and specialized communication template assembling candidate profiles from publicly available online sources, limited to professionally relevant information. It is going to surely make the ‘unfindable’- found.”

Want to learn more about TalentBin, Read Matt Charney’s article on RecruitingDaily: Monster Acquires TalentBin, Goziak; Signals Shift Towards Social

About the Author: Jackye Clayton is recognized as a people expert who puts the Human in Human Resources. An international trainer, she has travelled 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.

Why Marketing Shouldn’t Own Your Career Site.

Two years ago, I applied for a job at a very well-known retail company. I was applying for some web or marketing job, and I had to run the hour-long ATS application gamut. The futility of having to re-type my resume into a system (again!) – hoping that it wouldn’t fail on some level, that I wouldn’t have to re-re-type every word – made my job search process feel like an ordeal.

But at the thank-you page, instead of getting bland pabulum about how super-excited this brand was to review my resume, I got something completely different.

I got a marketing message asking: now that I had filled out a job application, would I like to go shopping? They even included a 10% off coupon.

How effective do you think it was to pitch a sales message at someone who just survived the ATS application? It seemed to say to me, “Hey, you’ve just wasted an hour of your life with us, so why don’t you spend some money now as well?”

Tone deaf doesn’t even begin to cover it.

But this was a site in which the marketing department clearly owned the career site and called all the shots. It was an extension of the corporate store. And while marketing can do an excellent job driving buyers to a store or e-commerce site and convincing them to buy, it’s simply not the same as what you need your career site for. Where marketers want to convince a browser to spend some money, you need to convince them to change their life.

So when people ask me if marketing should own the career site, or if the career site should be part of the corporate site, that’s the story I tell. But there are other reasons why you shouldn’t let marketing own your career site.

There’s A (Job) App for That.

People who are looking for product information are looking for two things: information about the product and reasons not to buy the product. Unless they are buying an expensive watch, a car or a home, they assume that the research and decision process will take a few minutes to complete.

How much time do you need to select a robe, a book, a vacuum, a drill or a yoga mat? Ecommerce sites are geared towards getting people to see the information they need to make a decision as fast as possible so that they don’t lose momentum.

Compare that to a career site. Only entry-level applicants will value “speed of application.” All the rest of the people are looking for a compelling reason to apply.

The shopper came in inclined to buy, but the higher up a career ladder one goes, the less that’s true of prospects. Valued prospects need to understand what they are getting into, the pluses and the minuses, before they hit apply. They wouldn’t be valued prospects if that wasn’t true.

Look at the silver bullet of marketing. You can drive significantly more interest and more sales by launching and promoting a 50% off coupon for your store, product or service. It’s not that there’s no corollary within talent acquisition; it’s that such thinking is counterproductive. Talent managers want fewer but better applications, not more.

Clearly, how Marketing and Talent approach issues are not only different, but nearly at cross-purposes.

Marketing Doesn’t Care About Your Career Site.

Having been born into the marketing tribe (yes, my parents left me in a basket by some nice marketers in the woods to raise me), I know that most marketers prize three things: sales, awards, and buzz (usually in that order).

You’ll notice that Talent Acquisition has no bearing on those goals. Driving more applicants will not drive more sales, the awards for best career site are not in any of the magazines they read, and people simply don’t get excited about a great career site.

Consequently, HR and Talent Acquisition’s needs fall far down the list of things Marketing cares about. This shows when you need an update to your site. When you make a change, does marketing learn your publishing cadence, or do you have to work within theirs?

This also means you won’t get the best and brightest eyes and hands working for you. You’re far more likely to get the “the new guy/girl” who hasn’t been brought up to speed on the rest of the site or brand. HR becomes the training wheels for them to learn what works.

Please note that no one has ever won the Tour de France (or any bike race) while still wearing training wheels.

Get Down With EVP.

How many of you have an Apple device? An iPad or iPhone or even a Macbook? Based on Apple’s most recent filings, it is now one of the biggest companies in the world, building products desired by people all over the world.

The clean and easy-to-use look and feel influences the computing, telecom, electronics, music and film industries. Some new cars are clearly influenced by the work Jony Ives and his design team have done in recent years. People who like Mac products aren’t just preferring them – they fall in love.

Compare that to Apple’s more complex employer value proposition, which knows that such amazing devices are the product of long hours and late nights. While they might be in love with the outcomes, they may also find that love tempered by a lack of home life.

What a consumer thinks about a brand and what a prospective employee thinks about a brand can often be two different things.

And if marketing is going to lean towards highlighting their consumer or brand messages, that means employer brand messages get pushed down or even out.

The power of a strong employer brand doesn’t just drive the number of applications, but the initial interest and engagement with the brand. A strong employer brand means that you will be able to offer less money to a candidate in order to convince them to come on board, that you can shorten the time to hire, and lead to lower turnover.

Marketing doesn’t value these key performance indicators, meaning their site will be designed to drive their own KPIs (sales, length of visit, repeatability, etc). Having marketing own the platform doesn’t just have your KPIs relegated to second-class status, but that there may not even be a process by which to measure them.

Career Sites: When UX & Candidate Experience Collide

Have you noticed that most corporate and brand sites, when they link to the career site, usually do it in the footer – in the most out-of-the-way place they can think of? And would you rather ask people to type in jobs.brand.com or brand.com/departments/hr/career?

From a very logistical and tactical level, hosting the career site within the larger brand site is a great way to get missed or forgotten.

Passive candidates, or at least less active ones, can’t be expected to jump through hoops in order to find jobs. It’s up to the career site to provide the shortest path between a candidate and the material that will compel them to apply.

Forcing them to wade through corporate messaging and platforms just gives that valuable passive candidate an excuse to leave without applying.

Clearly, letting marketing own your career site means you lose control of your own destiny. You can build a site that abides by marketing’s brand look and feel, but having it held within the marketing department not only makes your job harder, it can actually be counterproductive.

Read more at Meshworking from TMP.

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

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

Follow James on Twitter at @TheWarForTalent or connect with him on LinkedIn.

Learn more about TMP Worldwide at www.tmp.com.

Bill Boorman Joins Forces With RecruitingDaily; Matt Charney Named Partner

RecruitingDaily today has announced that Bill Boorman has joined the company as Managing Director, Technology and Innovation. In this newly created role, Boorman will focus on leading the global expansion of RecruitingDaily, helping drive strategy, operations and recruiting industry reach in Europe, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific.

“This isn’t about building an event company,” Boorman said. “For me, it’s about enabling people to run their own recruiting events anywhere in the world, share and set their own agenda. I’m inspired by TedX, and would like to see #Tru have a similar impact on our small corner of the world.

He will also continue to oversee #TRU (The Recruiting Unconference), a popular series of recruiting-related events that take place almost every week in cities around the world.

“RecruitingDaily has always had the philosophy that great content and conversation is all about connecting our community,” said Noel Cocca, CEO of RecruitingDaily. “Bringing Bill on board gives us a way extend our mission as a community focused destination offline, and grow that community by reaching new markets and recruiting readers.”

The move comes at a natural time for RecruitingDaily, with overall traffic, impressions and active monthly users surging by nearly 300% in the past 18 months alone, much of that growth driven by readers in markets outside North America, particularly in the European and Australasian markets. The company has grown revenues over fourfold in the same time period, evidence of a booming global economy and red-hot HR technology market.

“I’m really excited to be partnering with someone I consider to be one of the most influential and connected insiders in the recruiting industry,” said Matt Charney, Executive Editor of RecruitingDaily. “As a company whose culture is all about experimentation, innovation and pushing the envelope, you couldn’t ask for a better fit than Bill.”

RecruitingDaily Names Matt Charney Partner

RecruitingDaily is also announcing today that Charney will join Cocca and Ryan Leary as a partner in RecruitingDaily, and will assume an ownership stake while continuing to serve in his role of Executive Editor.

“I’m excited to be able to continue doing what I really, truly love, which is bringing together a bunch of really smart people, giving them a little nudge and watching what happens,” Charney said. “With RecruitingDaily’s team, reputation and resources, I think we’re going to be doing some very interesting things very soon.”

About RecruitingDaily: RecruitingDaily, LLC (dba RecruitingBlogs.com) is the #1 online media resource for today’s recruiting world, offering a signature mix of content, news, webinars, podcasts, videos, eBooks and white papers that develop professional best practices. RecruitingDaily.com reaches a global audience ranging from entry-level sourcers to strategy-level corporate executives in the human resources, talent acquisition, recruitment marketing, compliance and diversity and inclusion professions globally.

RecruitingDaily.com is the fastest growing community of over 70,000 talent acquisition professionals. Their conversations seek to expand recruitment past the status quo of thoughts, practices and technologies being used today to breakthrough the fear of change and lead to innovation and a new way of thinking.

RecruitingDaily.com mission is to provide its members the opportunity to network with fellow talent acquisition professionals while introducing the companies, ideas and industry trends that matter most.

Recruiting Software Review – Homerun

As a recruiter, I hate wasting time. You get a new job order or position to recruit for. Awesome – what next? – The dreaded job posting. This was the biggest time suck of my day. I need to spend time recruiting, not developing recruiting software and job boards. While, I didn’t think it was necessary to post every job; I did need a place for candidates to apply for positions. I dreaded creating “pretty” job postings and application pages. Homerun, takes the time-suck out of job posting and replaces it with simplicity and fun!

Product Name: Homerun

Headquarters: Stadhuisplein 9-15 A06 3012 AR Rotterdam, NLD

What it does: Homerun is a recruiting software that helps you to create job postings with style and personality all while analyzing job post effectiveness, team collaboration and workflow.

The Sizzle: Way easy to configure. You can easily add personality and warmth to the usually boring job post. Simple social media interface. They are working on a feature that actually allows you to ad a reward to those who refer candidates to your position. Homerun has a ton of well thought out features that I didn’t even know I needed!

The Drizzle: There is not a feature to upload resumes or attach resumes to manually entered candidates. 19 Euro (About $21.00 USD) per job per month. Maybe I am cheap but that could get expensive.

My Rating: Triple Play (3/5)

As far as recruiting software goes, this is a great product. They even made working for an insurance company look sexy! (Check out careers.policygenius.com).

If the normal job postings are a handshake, Homerun offers a hug. Homerun allows you to showcase why people want to work at your company. Add pictures of the team, the office building or even your awesome break room!

Hate having to email back and forth with team members to discuss candidates? No problem! Homerun offers a “Review board”, that allows team members to rank candidates. There is also a “Leader board” that allows you to sort all of the candidates by the team rankings. Candidates that don’t meet a certain rank and all be emailed with the click of a button. Lastly, there is a “Status board” which easily allows you to see what the status of a job is as well as candidate status.

Dealing with a ton of job orders and a huge pool of candidates? Never worry about forgetting about them because with simple configuration, you can set up a weekly email to send you updates on the job and candidate standings.

Wondering how your job board is doing? Use the “Review Statistics” feature to see where your candidates are coming from, see the percentage of candidate that are not completing your application, how many people have looked at the site and more. They are working on giving the ability to show how many visitors looked at your job board and how long they are staying on the site. Oh yeah – all of these features are fully responsive for candidates applying from a mobile device including tablets.

Once a candidate hits “Apply Now” they are greeted with, “Nice to meet you. Let us get to know you a bit better by sharing your basic info.”Candidates have the choice of applying through LinkedIn or manually entering information. It is optional but you can even add a profile picture. Ask the candidate weed out questions upfront like, “Why do you want to work here?”

All of these steps really help you weed out potential “mass appliers” and also helps you to see how serious they are about working for your company. Normally, I would say that this is too much for a candidate to handle but the look and feel of Homerun makes this process enjoyable giving the feeling that the company really cares.

I love this product. Super easy to use and the end product is VERY professional. What I would like to see however, is the integration with video interviews, the ability to use a resume rather than LinkedIn or copy paste to populate empty application fields and the ability to attach resumes when manually adding candidates. The good news, from what I can tell, is that Homerun recognize their limitations and working hard on enhancements to the Homerun product. Overall Homerun has knocked it out of the park!

Follow Jackye on Twitter @JackyeClayton or connect with her on LinkedIn.

(Recruiting Daily has a good article on why Job Boards are still important. Check out, “Think Job Boards Are Dead? Think Again.“)

The 3 Biggest Myths About Millennials.

Much has changed since I was fresh out of college, looking for my first design job. Back then, getting a job was as easy as graduating from college, which wasn’t easy, per se, but if you’d done it, you could count on it leading to a decent job in your field.

For me, “back then” was the late 1990s. The economy was different. Booming, even. Fast-forward nearly a decade, to the mid-late 2000s. The economy and the jobs environment—especially the entry-level jobs environment—had transformed dramatically.

Since then, from a time when many Millennials were barely teenagers, they have seen their older peers struggle to get a job. And now that the time has come for them to find a job, that struggle is theirs.

Struggling to get a job is all they know of employment.

Gen Why: A Millennial Reality Check

Much more is at stake for Millennials than for their predecessors, and not just because landing a job has become less of a given. Millennials are in debt. Deeply. They have lower employment levels and are earning less money.

They’re living with their parents later into their twenties and staying on their healthcare plans. Not much of this is by choice.

In fact, I’d say it’s quite the opposite. Because of Millennials’ lot in life, because they came of age during an economic crash, they’re doing the best they can with what they’ve got.

It’s Not Entitlement, It’s Survival-ment.

What we’re seeing today is not a generation of entitled, arrogant freeloaders, but rather a generation of hungry, savvy young people who are looking for their first break.

Millennials are what I call ‘youngry’—young and hungry. They are as naive as any person from any generation was at their age. But en masse, they are not entitled.

No more so than Gen Xers are cynical slackers or Baby Boomers are out-of-touch technophobes. When will we all outgrow our labels? When will we stop placing them in the first place?

Exposing the 3 Biggest Myths about Millennials

Millennials may seem to focus more on how they’re going to get a raise, but remember that it’s not due to entitlement, it’s because up until now they’ve only been able to land minimum-wage-paying internships.

Or because they’re paying four figures a month in student loans. They’re under a lot more pressure to make ends meet, not to mention existing in a more competitive workforce.

So see the bright side: top-performing Millennials are actually quite driven, motivated, and willing to learn. Wouldn’t you rather hire a person like this who has drive than one who is comfortable with the status quo?

Before I reveal the number-one trick to managing and retaining the best and brightest Millennials, let me begin by debunking a few myths about the largest generation to date.

1. They’re inexpensive.

Millennials may be more strapped for cash and more willing to take a lower paying job to get the experience, but keep in mind that if you’re paying them less, you’re likely getting less.

Millennials have much to offer: they are our first digitally native generation. Because they grew up with technology, they are fast, familiar learners when it comes to your platforms and systems.

If you want to take full advantage of their knowledge, pay them what they’re worth to you and your company.

2. They can’t contribute immediately.

Like I said before, top-performing Millennials are youngry. They thrive on curiosity. They want to ramp up fast and mostly, they want to impress their managers.

Understand them and give them the tools they need and the guidance they crave and you will get performance right away.

3. They don’t listen.

This is the number one myth about Millennials. Every aging group says this about the generation that succeeds them, but with Millennials, it’s particularly not the case. They actually crave mentorship.

While it may be true that they will not listen to everyone (and they certainly won’t listen to managers who assume them to be entitled and unmotivated), they are eager to listen to and learn from managers whom they trust with their careers.

How to Really Manage and Retain Millennials

I’m often asked, “How do you manage and retain a performer these days when it’s so common for young people to leave a job after only a few years or less?”

It’s simple: Be their mentor.

Mentorship is the number-one way to mold Millennials, helping them grow and succeed while at the same time helping you get the most out of their growth and success.

Long gone are the days when you got your foot in the door at a leading firm, worked your way up to senior management, and retired with a gold watch 40 years later.

Today, both Millennials and their managers are more likely to leave a job after a year or two. So show them you care about their future, not just their current role. Invest in their learning and growth.

Here are a few ways to do so while also earning their trust and loyalty:

Make them feel integral to the business; invite them to a high-level business lunch or meeting
Introduce them to other coworkers who can augment your mentorship
If their next logical promotion is your job, teach them how to be successful like you
Most of all, always talk with them as if you expect to be working with them for a long time

Once you’ve earned their trust, teach Millennials to be more candid and direct. It’s difficult to be frank with someone if they’re apt to dismiss you, so starting with trust is imperative.

One technique I like to use is to tell young employees what they need to do and then ask them to repeat it back. The focus here is not on ordering someone around. It’s actually a great way to check yourself as a teacher and leader.

Have you communicated clearly? Did you use an unfamiliar acronym that you need to define? Are you giving enough of yourself to this person that they’re comfortable asking you to clarify?

Remember, their success is your success. If they don’t feel like they can ask you for help, that’s your fault, not theirs.

The Future of Work Starts Today.

As managers, our responsibility is to mature Millennials as fast as we can because they are our future workforce. Our frustrations with Millennials is really our inability to mentor them.

They’re still moldable minds. They’re still new to the workplace, whether that’s a large organization or an evolving startup, and they’re naive about traditional practices and protocols. They need our direction and, despite generalizations, they’re very willing to receive it.

Mentorship is mind control from the right side of your heart.

If you want to attract and retain top performers, be a mentor to youngry Millennials and show them what you already know their potential to be.

About the Author: Don Charlton is the founder and CEO of The Resumator, a venture-backed recruiting software company that helps more than 3,000 employers optimize both how and who they hire. He is considered a pioneer of cloud based recruiting software, defining the now-standard features in modern recruiting tools.

A graduate of Rochester Institute of Technology, Don is a UX designer turned software engineer, startup evangelist, entrepreneur, writer, and thought-provoking public speaker.

Follow Don on Twitter @Dontrepreneur or connect with him on LinkedIn.

HR Technology: One Platform To Rule Them All, One Platform To Find Them.

Every year in the US alone employers spend $72 billion — that’s billion, with a B — on recruiting services, staff and technology. For some perspective: $70 billion will buy every franchise in the NFL, MLB, NHL and NBA with some extra cash leftover to buy 25 personal jets.

The latter purchase would probably yield a better return on investment than most employers are getting out of their recruitment spend — so why do companies continue to spend so much?

The short answer is that the stakes have never been higher for recruiters vying for talent and, according to a recent CareerBuilder survey, it looks like most of the market out there still has no idea where to start when it comes to fixing the most persistent problems plaguing our industry. From mobile recruiting to candidate experience to measuring even the simplest of metrics, recruiters are increasingly relying on technology – which can help, but only when utilized properly.

The investment is only the first step. Then, the success or failure of any system or software is all going to come down to how end users actually use it.

A recent study suggests that 57 percent of companies plan to make a major HR technology purchase in the next 18 months, and recruiting is the most commonly cited focus for the big-ticket purchase. Within the talent acquisition category, most HR leaders say that the ability to analyze and interpret data is their biggest decision driver for recruitment technology investments.

Gone are the days of just-in-time hiring, where time-to-fill was the only metric that really mattered to front line recruiters.

HR Technology: An Unexpected Journey.

Since institutional knowledge shortage seems endemic, enterprise talent technologies must now capture terrabytes of available candidate data. Equally important, they must also make those numbers add up to a compelling business case with functionalities that are inherently accessible to the average recruiting end user.

Still, nearly 40% of employers still say that they’re unable to have accurate enough source of hire data to do their jobs effectively, which you’d think they’d figure out before they started investing in heavy duty enterprise analytics solutions.

That’s why advances like federated search and dynamic profiles, which aggregate disparate databases into one single system while capturing and standardizing candidate information and documentation, are critical first steps in solving the data dilemma.

By having all potential sources of hire in a single destination on a single pre-hire platform, employers also, in effect, have a single destination for collecting actionable data and analyzing the numbers to make better talent decisions.

The Return of the King: Why Integrations Rule HR Technology

The ability to simultaneously compare job posting performance and efficacy across all sources is imperative for maximizing and optimizing recruitment spend. For example, one of the nation’s largest private hospitals recently consolidated its recruitment advertising platforms and databases — integrating these sources and associated workflows directly into an applicant tracking system.

For the first time, the hospital was no longer reliant on candidate and recruiter self-reporting to track how well individual sources of hire were performing. Now it could track individual applicants, candidates and recruiter activity to finally know where its applicants — and hires — were actually coming from.

This healthcare employer, which had historically spent heavily on premium recruitment advertising sources like paid job general and niche job boards, was able to see that while only 17 percent of its overall active external job postings were posted on paid job boards, these actually accounted for a whopping 80 percent of overall job description views and, ultimately, 70 percent of incoming, qualified applicants.

This information enabled the organization to change its focus from relying significantly on external agencies and proactive direct sourcing to driving search engine traffic with increased paid job postings, which also helped boost its organic SEO. This shift lead to another 39 percent increase in job views while achieving significant cost savings throughout the organization.

HR Technology: The Fellowship of the Recruiting Ring

Recruitment advertising is just one example of why systems integration is an important first step to unlocking the power inherent in big data — and the decisions it enables.

Since the information collected by resume and profile parsing becomes standardized, so too does the associated data, allowing visibility into what’s working — and what’s not — in talent acquisition across the enterprise.

In fact, according to a recent survey for CareerBuilder, 78% of employers prefer to have one overall platform from a single vendor because it’s “convenient.” 69% reported placing a premium on the ability of a system to find and rearrange current candidates in their system, an efficiency only created by the consolidation of disparate databases into a single destination.

The integration and consolidations of systems not only makes it easier to get a better view of the return on recruiting resource investments, but also optimize that resource allocation for future tools, technologies and talent. With $72 billion dollars a year on the line, you don’t need to do the math to see how it all adds up when it comes to finding, attracting and engaging top talent.

Buying a pre-hire platform is a big decision that can revolutionize the way you recruit. Let us help you do some due diligence for you. If you’re ready to address your biggest recruitment pain points today, it’s time you met CareerBuilder1.

Click here to learn more about the easiest way to integrate all your recruiting technologies into the industry’s most comprehensive (and powerful) pre-hire platforms or click the button below to schedule your CareerBuilder1 demo today.

Disclaimer: Recruiting Daily was compensated by CareerBuilder for this post. But their data and action items are actually pretty priceless, so in this case, the facts and opinions contained herein do, in fact, represent those of the publisher. Because we’re all about making candidate experience better, too.

How Employers Can Make Paying It Forward Pay Off

From setting aside a day for talking like a pirate to celebrating the Golden Ratio every 3.14, it seems like pretty much the entire calendar has somehow been co-opted by some sort of commemoration or cause. April 30 is no exception.

Today, people all around the world will mark one of the most inspiring and important of these annual events: “Global Pay It Forward Day.”

11 US states, 6 provinces and countless municipalities have joined with countless individuals in 70 countries to officially recognize this grassroots effort, which encourages people to perform three good deeds for others without asking for anything in return.

Instead, recipients of these random acts of kindness are instead encouraged (although absolutely not required) to pay it forward by repaying the favor to three other people, creating a ripple effect with a potentially enormous impact.

The philosophy of paying it forward (hereafter ‘PIF,’ for brevity) is rooted in antiquity, with selfless acts celebrated in the culture and traditions of societies throughout the entirety of human existence – the Hebrew Torah, in fact, recognizes ‘anonymous charity’ as the highest form of good deed. Even the phrase itself has been around for quite a while, now, with “pay it forward” first appearing around the turn of the 20th Century, a slang term whose staying power suggests just how universally important this idea is embedded into our ethos.

The idea of a global day dedicated to PIF has a history of its own, too. The idea originated with Australian Blake Beattie, who was inspired by the novel of the same name by writer Catherine Ryan Hyde, who, in turn, based the high concept for the story on a popular aphorism that began as a bumper sticker campaign concept: “Think Globally, Act Locally.”

Which, of course, is good advice for employers, too.

Why Employers Should Pay it Forward

It’s not hard to see the impact an individual can make when performing three good deeds for strangers, starting a PIF snowball that exponentially spreads the love from those original three people, who do something nice for 9 people, who then do something kind for another 27 more, and so on. Now, imagine the effect this would have if entire organizations started to implement this idea, starting with their own workers.

Yeah, I know, it sounds nice, but probably a little overly optimistic and maybe a bit cheesy, even.

After all, thanking your employees just for doing their jobs sounds suspect to many organizations, but putting energy into creating a PIF culture should be a challenge every employer embraces for two simple reasons:

Paying It Forward is the right thing to do.
Paying It Forward is Easy.

That’s a business case that’s pretty hard for anyone to argue with, particularly since PIF can pay off big.

5 Easy Ways Employers Can Pay It Forward

The first reason on that list seems pretty self-explanatory, but as far as easy goes, here are 5 surprisingly simple, unexpectedly easy ways to make paying it forward part of your company culture today.

1. Prioritize Positivity.

If you want employees to have a positive experience, then it’s important to foster a company culture that embraces positivity, too. An example of one employer doing just that is Austin, TX based retailer Whole Foods, a company celebrated for its core values, which are at the heart of its widely celebrated corporate culture.

The core value statements used by the company include words such as “celebrate,” “love,” and “joy,” which shows the extent to which the company is committed to creating a positive environment for employees and the customers they encounter every day. These value statements are taught and reinforced to every worker – and make accentuating the positive just part of what it means to work at (or shop) at Whole Foods.

If your mission statement, vision or values don’t pack the same powerful punch or send a similarly positive message, then it might be time to consider refreshing these to focus on expressing this value – and plan out how each area of your business can get the most value from those values.

Regularly ask employees to share stories related to these upbeat attitudes, and make sure to showcase the best of these in employer branding collateral and internal communications – it’s a great way to show the value of PIF in action using real stories and real employees.

2. Ban After Hours Email

In today’s constantly connected world of work, sometimes the greatest gift employers can give their workers is the gift of silence. Many companies are increasingly putting policies in place prohibiting managers from e-mailing their direct reports or even checking their business accounts after the business day is done. This simple step lets employees and staff recharge and reduces many work related anxieties and stressors due to the fact that everyone knows that there’s no expectation for answering work e-mail after hours.

The German employment ministry is leading the way on instilling this best practice by banning its managers from calling, emailing or requiring any work of staff after hours whatsoever except in the case of true emergencies. This policy has been adopted by several other major German multinationals, such as Puma, BMW and Volkswagen, where worker productivity actually increased as a result.

3. Pay On Demand.

Forget those bi-monthly pay periods of the past; instead, consider giving your employees access to their salary as soon as they complete their work. This act of gratitude costs nothing from a P/L perspective, and is easier to implement than most employers might think.

It also makes a huge impact on the daily lives of your workers, who no longer have to worry about making ends meet while they wait on a check for work that they’ve already done. They’ve earned it, after all – why not give it to them as soon as possible?

Companies like Mixt Greens and Kennedy Painting are among many employers who have instituted this payroll policy; in these cases, these companies rely on specialized software to manage these programs, a growing category that makes this simple step even easier as this trend continues to grow thanks to new tools and technologies that are inexpensive to implement but make on demand pay pay off every time.

4. Offer VTO.

Sure, most companies give employees Paid Time Off (PTO) as a rule; this is typically accrued in annual increments, and can take a year or longer to take effect. That’s why you should consider offering Volunteer Time Off (VTO) to all new hires as a perk that kicks in immediately. This not only gives workers an inspirational way to recharge by giving back, while also reinforcing your company’s commitment to corporate social responsibility and community outreach.

VTO could be used for things like incentivizing employee turnout at a community event or giving them a few hours off to volunteer at a local non-profit of their choice – or getting every employee involved in an enterprise wide initiative so that these can activities can help build community internally, too.

By giving employees time to give back without giving up PTO to do so, VTO has proven a great recruiting and retention tool at companies like Caesars Entertainment, whose employees paid it forward by distributing energy efficient lightbulbs on Earth Day, to a division of Honda whose book drive proved so popular that it spawned an entire VTO program which allows employees to take time to go read these books to local elementary school students, too. And they all lived happily ever after.

5. Create Your Own Pay It Forward Day.

If you’re a little late to participate in today’s International Pay It Forward Day, don’t wait until next April 30 to start promoting this concept to employees and planning for next year’s big day with a few practice runs for employees in the interim.

Promote these days in official HR and employee communications like handbooks and calendars, on collateral in company breakrooms and communal spaces, or share the link for workers to register and be officially counted as participants so you can see how your PIF efforts over the next year pay off. You’ll be surprised.

Bonus:

OK, so it’s the right thing to do, and easy to do, too, but a side benefit many employers realize from creating a PIF company culture is that it actually increases long term business and bottom line performance, too. The aim of PIF sounds soft, starting a ripple in kindness and productivity, but various research studies Wharton School of Business, University of Warwick, University of Michigan) have shown that kindness and positivity have a direct, measurable impact on employee productivity.

Which is pretty powerful proof that paying it forward pays off.

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.

Follow him on Twitter @Ram180 or connect with him on LinkedIn.

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