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Does Wearable Technology Fit Into Recruiting?

Wearable Technology is a huge part of our day to day lives, with everything from 3-D printers, unmanned drones and virtual reality technology quickly developing and reaching maturity. 2015 has long been marked as the year of wearable technology, a concept which is expected to take the working world by storm. With a new era of connectivity being formed, how will this improve working and recruitment processes?

In their recent report, “State of Workplace Productivity”, Cornerstone OnDemand found that 58% of employees would be willing to use wearable tech if it enabled them to do their jobs better, 66% of those being from Millennials. By 2020, 16-34 year olds will form 50% of tech-savvy global workforce brought up on mobile devices and social networking.

Apple’s Watch hit the market on April 24th and many companies have already incorporated these devices into their working environments. Here are some of the key devices we think will really transform the working world.

The Smart Glasses Vision

Smartglasses provide hands-free communication on a range of smartphone-like applications, allowing staff to be more collaborative from a distance. In the world of recruitment, change is fast-paced and having the technology available to adapt to this is vital.

By equipping themselves with a device such as Google Glass, interviewers will be able to record applicant’s responses to questions. These responses can then be kept as data, measured and stored to improve the candidate experience.

These glasses also allow for remote interviewing which could prove useful in a contract environment. Recruiters would be able to set up a Google Hangout, allowing peers to listen in, share notes and send messages to the interviewers, driving the conversation remotely.

With good practice, smartglasses could be revolutionary, providing a tool for continuous improvement on the recruitment process.

Time For Smartwatches to Shine.

With the Apple Watch coming onto the market in the past few days, joining the Pebble, InPulse and Sony smartwatches that are already available, wearable technology is being noticeably led by the ‘smart watch revolution’. These watches are designed to be notification based, keeping you updated without the need to constantly check your phone.

Aside from its uses as a discrete project management tool, these watches could provide employers with physical tracking. Retail employees, for example, could be tracked around their store, logistics workers could be shown how to work more effectively and for staff who are office based, breaks from sedentary behaviour can be encouraged. Applying this to a recruitment context, consultants can use the smartwatch as a way to streamline their workflow. By being able to access their social updates and emails on the go, recruiters will can maximize their efficiency and keep the consultative conversation going.

Future developments include evaluating employee performance through trackers that would allow managers to analyse workflow to improve efficiency and quality as well as pinpoint any problems.

Smart Wristwear.

FitBit, Nike and Fuelband have all devised wristbands that collect and analyse physical data to understand, monitor and maximize physical activity to improve wellness. Within many physical roles, like engineering for example, HR managers would be able to monitor heart rates, alerting them if anybody’s gets too high. In work environments with hazardous substances, dangerous conditions or physical exertion, these biometric sensors could help prevent employee injuries.

Nymi’s wristwear offers another work-friendly solution, giving the user the ability to log in to computers, unlock their car and even check you into hotel rooms. As consultants tend to find themselves managing multiple tasks, this band alleviates any potential additional stress.

Conclusion

The world is changing quickly and technology is the driving force. Wearable technology opens to door for a host of great insightful features for consumers and employees across all industries. Within recruitment, an industry built upon people, wearable technology should be about streamlining workflow and maximising employee wellbeing.

This article originally posted on RecruitingBlogs.com here by the Austin Fraser LTD team.

Feminism Makes Me Sad.

Oh, Ellen Pao. How badly I want to support you. You’ve probably heard about Ms. Pao’s lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins. She’s now interim CEO for Reddit, and has ruled that salary negotiations are off the table for new employees.

Because women suck at negotiating. Or (even worse) if they’re GOOD at it… they’re ball busting bitches who are labeled “greedy”. When I first heard about all of this, I was angry. I mean really, truly pissed off. Now I’m just sad.

One of the things I’m most passionate about (frustrated by?) is crappy advice regarding salary negotiations. I’ve written about here and here.

If you’ve paid any attention to me at all, you know I hate salary negotiations for simply for the sake of negotiation. That said, I have a healthy respect for a candidate who is willing to talk candidly about their worth, expectations, and can back up both with legitimate logic. In my recruiting career I’ve had tough negotiations with all kinds of candidates: young, old, male, female, even a transgender job seeker, once.

Some people are great at it, some people suck, and trust me – asshattery knows no gender bounds. I offer the same advice with situation specific tweaks to anyone who asks me how to negotiate come offer time. As a recruiter and advocate for my candidates, I go to bat for them trying to find that magic middle ground where both hiring manager and future employee are happy. I want people to succeed. I want my candidates to feel like they’ve WON.

Ellen Pao, you’re taking that away from them.

Fighting Feminism: Don’t Lower the Bar. Clear It.

As a kid, I was not an athletic child. I was usually chosen last in schoolyard picks, and once spectacularly lost a kickball game for my team. The runner who came after me whizzed past me standing on second base because I forgot I was supposed to run too.

But this one time… oh this one magnificent field day in elementary school….I won something.

It was the high jump – remember that event? A bar is incrementally raised, while kids run and try to launch themselves over it, usually backwards, landing on a mat on the other side.

As one of the smallest kids in my class, I was generally not very good at this.That’s assuming I didn’t trip over my own shoelaces on my run up to the bar.

I’ll never forget this one field day – I was on fire. I not only made every jump, I won the event! I beat out all the other kids in my class and took home a ribbon. No one had to lower the bar for me. And it felt glorious.

Of course, this runs contrary to a point Pao made in the same interview:

“Men negotiate harder than women do and sometimes women get penalized when they do negotiate. So as part of our recruiting process, we don’t negotiate with candidates. We come up with an offer that we think is fair. If you want more equity, we’ll let you swap a little bit of your cash salary for equity, but we aren’t going to reward people who are better negotiators with more compensation.”

As the mother of two very strong girls, this statement about the state of feminism makes me want to cry.

Here’s a novel idea – how about we stop penalizing women when they do negotiate?

Imagine if I’d been told “Amy, you really can’t jump that high, and when you try you look silly. So we’re just going to lower the bar for everybody.” How would that make me feel? How would I have learned anything, or experienced the euphoria of winning?

Bottom line, I want my girls to feel empowered, not protected. Ellen Pao as a hero of feminism? I think not – how about a REAL feminist, the great Susan B. Anthony herself who said:

“I do not demand equal pay for any women save those who do equal work in value. Scorn to be coddled by your employers; make them understand that you are in their service as workers, not as women.”

Can I get an amen?

About the Author: Amy Ala is a staffing consultant & talent sourcer for Microsoft, where she supports the hardware division as a member of Microsoft’s in-house talent acquisition team.

Amy has over a decade of recruiting experience, starting her career in agency recruiting running a desk for companies like Spherion, Act One and the Lucas Group before making the move in-house, where she has held strategic talent roles for the State of Washington’s WorkSource employment program and Zones, an IT product and services hub.

Amy is also a featured blogger on RecruitingBlogs.com and is a member of RecruitingBlogs’ Editorial Advisory Board. Follow Amy on Twitter @AlaRecruiter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

Recruiting: It’s A Matter of Trust

I know this comment is probably going to date me just a little bit, but hell, I’m not ashamed to admit it: Billy Joel is like, one of my absolutely favorite musicians in the history of ever.

It’s not just that he’s a timeless singer and one of the greatest piano players in the history of rock, but there’s just something about his music and lyrics that seem to speak to some part of all of us.

This is why no matter who you are, you’re going to stop whatever you’re doing and sing along the moment the chorus for Piano Man just happens to come on. Every. Single. Time.

I’m pretty much a fan of everything in his songbook, but the one song that stays with me, even after all these years, and really resonates with me as a recruiting professional – and one that perfectly describes my personal approach with a sentiment that, for some reason, most recruiters don’t seem to get – is his classic, “A Matter of Trust.”

“The closer you get to the fire, the more you get burned. But that won’t happen to us. Because it’s always been a matter of trust.”

This song seems so relevant for the world of recruiting, because, even though it describes a star-crossed romance, it’s actually applicable to any relationship, whether it’s just beginning or coming to an inevitable end.

No matter what your relationship might be, in recruiting and in love, success or failure really comes down to a deceptively simple concept: trust. It’s so easy to talk about it’s almost become cliché, but if you don’t listen to me, listen to Billy the next time you have to deal with a hiring manager or extend an offer:

“This time, you’ve got nothing to lose; you can take it, you can leave it, whatever you choose. I won’t hold back anything, and I’ll walk away, a fool or a king.”

Right on, brother.

What Trust Really Means in Recruiting.

It should come as no surprise that for the great majority of the general public or anyone who’s pretty much ever had the misfortune of looking for a job, that recruiters don’t exactly have a stellar reputation for business acumen or professional excellence.

Instead, we’re often labeled as liars, charlatans, frauds, money grubbing con men or career carpet baggers, and largely, these labels are too often accurate – just search for “recruiters are” on any search engine and the results suggest we have a long way to go to prove that the public wrong about the recruiting profession.

For now, they’re mostly right – and too many crappy “recruiters” will use any means necessary to make placements and get paid. They don’t care what it takes to close a requisition and fill a role, so long as it pads their pocketbooks. These practitioners practice nothing but profiteering, at the expense of all of us in this profession who are actually, you know, professionals.

I know I’m not the only recruiter who’s just as concerned about the means by which we place the right people in the right roles as I am with the ends – how we get to the hire is often as important as making it (at least if you’re doing it right).

The best recruiters out there know this, and always go the extra mile to ensure a great experience for everyone they touch in the hiring process, from clients to coworkers to candidates.

The rewards these recruiters realize from this long term commitment to doing things the right way are unbelievably rich, from increased referrals and internal influence to improved performance metrics for stuff like time to fill or cost per hire. Recruiting runs on relationships, and relationships rely exclusively on trust.

The dictionary definition of “trust” is ‘reliance on another party or entity.’ That is, everyone involved in a relationship needs to work in the others’ best interests, and that doing so will benefit everyone best interests without screwing anyone over. Sounds easy enough, but the truth, obviously, is that it’s one of the hardest outcomes to achieve in business in general, but particularly in talent acquisition.

The immediate response to that reliance the very definition of trust both candidates and recruiters seem to be that each respective side is a bold faced liar, charlatan, cheat or con man. Candidates have a hard time trusting in recruiters after being treated like cattle instead of as human beings during the hiring process.

Recruiters have a hard time trusting candidates because they think that they’ll do or say anything to get an offer (even when their background and references check out).

Part of this is the result of the way we train new recruiters to never take a candidate at face value, to continually question, probe and dig in the hopes of uncovering some sort of dirt, a worst practice most recruiters are guilty of, even if few are conscious of the mistrust by which they commonly approach candidates.

We need to change this, and start treating candidates with the expectation that both sides are going to be upfront, honest and work together if we ever want to hope to have any candidate reciprocate this. Assume that candidates are operating in good faith, and always have it in them until they give you a reason to believe otherwise. This trust isn’t almost always rewarded; it’s also the first step towards establishing an effective, meaningful recruiting relationship.

It might take a leap of faith at first, but trust me: it’s worth it.

Maintaining Trust & Building Recruiting Relationships

As a profession that’s got such a poor public perception, establishing trust in candidates and clients as a recruiter can be a bit tricky at times, to say the least. Most people have a preconceived notion of recruiters born from bad candidate experiences, frustrating job searches and exposure to the bad apples responsible for giving this profession its black eye.

Their vitriol is often, like Vesuvius, bubbling just below the surface of every recruiting-related interaction, waiting to erupt at the most unexpected (and inopportune) or moments. Changing their sentiment – and building their trust – isn’t easy.

But in my experience as a recruiter, I’ve discovered one small thing that makes a big difference in establishing trust, and a meaningful relationship, with every candidate on every single search, one short, simple question that goes a long way.

My secret is that every conversation I have starts out with me asking candidates “How are you today?”

This is a more powerful statement than it might seem on the surface. It sends a subtle, somewhat subliminal message that the conversation isn’t about selling your opportunity, but learning more about them, and that when it comes to candidates, it’s all about what they want and need. This opens up the conversation while establishing a solid foundation of trust upon which to build a recruiting relationship.

Of course, it takes more than just asking how candidates are; you also have to listen to their answers, too. I mean really listen, for 10, 15 minutes or however long it takes to learn about what the candidate is all about, where they’re coming from and what they’re looking for.

You’ll find simply asking how they are once you introduce yourself as a recruiter will inevitably uncover most of this information without having to prompt or pry too much. They’ll happily open up, if given the opportunity to do so – and love you for it. All it takes is shutting up – which can be hard for recruiters, but listening is one of the most critical skills in any talent pro’s professional tool box.

Once you get to know the candidate – and they know you care about them about people instead of just another job seeker – you’ll established the fundamentals required for trust, but maintaining that trust throughout the hiring, offer and onboarding process (and beyond) requires something most recruiters suck at: communication.

Why Trust Is the Most Important Recruiting Currency.

We’re an industry that, like most, requires clear communication to a ton of competing stakeholders to ensure buy-in and drive successful outcomes to an often difficult, complex process.

]ut why we can’t seem to even so much as communicate to candidates something as simple as feedback or job search status is baffling – and a huge barrier for building trust.

Why is it that so many recruiters treat the candidates who they need to do their jobs treat them with so much indifference and disdain? Why do we approach the people we get hired to place as if they were disposable commodities instead of the indispensable assets they actually are to recruiters?

Why, after all the time, energy and resources you’ve dedicated to building endless Boolean strings, screening through mountains of profiles and unending piles of resumes or referrals, sending innumerable e-mails and making countless cold calls, do we choose to suddenly ignore the candidate the moment they stop being considered? Why can’t we just pick up the phone and close them out – if only because it’s the right thing to do? What is it we’re so afraid of?

I’m not sure whether anyone gets some sort of sick satisfaction from leaving candidates in the dark, but the end result of not just picking up the phone and taking a few moments to just close the loop is that you’re leaving a bitter taste in their mouth that’s going to stay with them every time they ever have to work with another recruiter again.

You’re adding fuel to an already intense fire – and forgetting that it’s only because of these candidates you’re not doing a job search of your own. This is something that I really like to focus on the most when I speak or write about recruiting, because it’s something we overlook all too often: at some point, we had to look for jobs, too.

Do you remember what looking for a new job is like? I’m sure you do, and I’m sure, unless you lucked out, it sucked. You remember the alienation, fear, frustration and desperation when the end result of all your work as a candidate ended with the sounds of silence? The hope you held too long as you waited, in vain, just to hear your status, and hearing nothing when even a simple “yes” or “no” would have sufficed.

I’ve been there. We all have. And our own experiences as candidates is something every recruiter should think about every day on the job. In fact, Jeff Newman recently wrote a brilliant piece called Pounding the Pavement: Experiencing the Candidate Experience As A Recruiter that reinforces the fact that if we forget our own experiences as candidates, we’re doomed to repeat them. At the beginning of every day, I look at the blank unemployment application I’ve got hanging on my wall as a reminder that my job is to make sure that no one – myself included – ever has to fill one of these forms out.

Recruiters need to remember that everyone looking for a new job, particularly active candidates are doing so because they’re not totally satisfied with their situation, and many have some sort of pain, stress or struggle they’re dealing with that caused them to start looking to start with.

When it comes to maintaining trust as a recruiter, remember: empathy is everything. Because you never know when you’re going to be on the other side of that desk – and in this business, chances are it’s not going to be long since we’re first in, first out most of the time.

What goes around comes around – that’s what employer branding and referrals are all about, after all.

How Trust Translates Into Recruiting Results.

So, let’s say it all worked out; your top candidate accepted your offer, your hiring manager gave you a pat on the pack and shout out for doing a kick butt job (yeah, right), and your life as a recruiter is all rainbows and gumdrops (humor me).

It’s easy to think that your relationships – and the trust you’ve built – are dispensable at this point, but you’ve got to make sure that an accepted offer isn’t goodbye. FOLLOW UP with the candidate after they onboard – and make sure that they’re doing OK and their jobs are delivering as promised during the hiring process.

I can’t tell you the number of lunches and dinners I’ve had with happy new hires over the years, all of whom tell me the same thing: that they’d never had a recruiter take the time to meet with them after an offer.

Which is too bad, really, since I also use these follow up meetings to get the names of at least three people who they’d recommend as referrals for the company now that they’re actually employees.

What I want is their network, and to impart the fact I want to work with anyone good they know and would recommend – and I almost always get some of my best referrals from new hires who have had a good experience with me and who trust me enough to trust me with their connections and contacts.

With referrals making up between 40-50% of all new hires, depending on the survey or study being cited, why in the world would you waste your time posting jobs and cold calling (not to mention “social recruiting” and employer branding) when you’re not tapping the new hires who you’ve helped solve their professional pain and who know that you’re not one of those recruiters. You’re a professional who cares – and know the exceptional service that you’re passionate about providing each and every candidate, since, well, they’ve lived it.

This basic practice has kept my pipeline well packed and my talent pools stocked for years now, and is a no brainer for filling even the hardest roles in no time flat. Because once you’ve got trust, you’ve got everything you need, really – and the rest of recruiting comes pretty easy by comparison.

After all, as Billy Joel himself knows, the key to relationships comes down to one single, simple fact: It’s a matter of trust.

Trust me.

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

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

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

How To Use Social Media for Employee Onboarding

Recruiters always talk about finding “top talent,” but the truth is, most of the time, it’s damn near impossible just to find even minimally qualified ones, no matter how mediocre that ‘talent’ actually is. A full 54% of employers recently reported that they currently had open positions for which they have been unable to fill due to their inability to find qualified candidates, according to a recent Harris Poll conducted for CareerBuilder.

This surprising statistic underscores just how difficult finding the short supply of in demand talent has become, and the increasingly critical role talent acquisition plays in a company’s bigger business picture, not to mention recruiting’s growing impact on bottom line results.

Unfilled positions, of course, cost a company money – every day that goes by without a butt in a seat costs an estimated $1400-$2300 for experienced or highly skilled roles.

This number doesn’t even factor in the added workload other employees must absorb, but obviously, the price tag is just as steep for indirect costs for unfilled requisitions, such as team and individual employee productivity, satisfaction and engagement. Nor does it factor in recruiting costs like recruitment advertising or agency fees, which add an additional 11 grand or so, on average, to the cost of backfilling an exempt employee.

Of course, that for some reason still doesn’t stop employers from losing candidates because they won’t open their coffers for compensation, which seems stupid when considering the aggregate costs of the alternative; this skills gap is one HR professionals almost unanimously describe as their biggest recruitment challenge.

Here are a few of the easiest, but most overlooked, solutions. These aren’t innovative, these aren’t new, but if every employer were doing just the basics of online recruiting, no way would more than half of them still be having a hard time finding candidates. Now, getting them through the process and closing an offer is another story – and challenge – entirely.

Social Media and Employee Onboarding: 3 Keys for Success

Let’s start at the very beginning. It is, after all, a very good place to start, particularly since so many companies seem not yet to have started doing even the simple stuff when it comes to leveraging social media for onboarding. Start employees off on the right foot with these fundamental (but easy) steps towards ensuring that recruiting does not, in fact, end with an accepted offer.

Because you’ve got to make sure that excitement they have when they officially send sign on the dotted line doesn’t go away when their new job becomes, well, their job. If you’re a recruiter, these should be part of yours, too.

1. Employee Onboarding: Your Career Site Counts.

While it’s pretty obvious when talking about getting applicants into the front end of the funnel, your career site must not only help speak to potential candidates currently in the hiring process, but also those new hires who actually made it successfully through to the other side.

Whether it’s the standard two weeks of winding down a previous job to some global markets, like Germany, where courtesy dictates giving your current employer a full year to find your replacement, chances are that they’re going to be checking that career site frequently when thinking of what’s next, what to expect and reinforce that they made the right decision joining your team (this also applies to current employees, as a matter of course).

While you probably provide candidates with an information packet and probably some literature, think about adding a portal just for employees joining the company, whether that’s before orientation or in the weeks or months after they officially onboard.

Instead of relying on your company intranet or attachments, consider putting things like your new hire manual, a checklist for what to bring on the first day or even things like employees sharing their stories of how they successfully segued into their roles and any inside tips or tricks they’d give new workers. This is obviously effective as recruiting collateral in addition to being an HR document, and also provides a potentially powerful tool for employer branding and conveying company culture.

One company that does a great job with this is Deloitte, who augment what social marketing agency LinkHumans calls one of the world’s best corporate recruiting websites with relevant information for orientation and onboarding for employees, called “Working at Deloitte,” which doubles as a case study in good employer branding.

With a huge workforce that’s decentralized both in terms of geography and business units (not to mention more traditional segmentation like career level and function), Deloitte has more or less built microsites to describe what to expect from orientation, onboarding and on the job itself specifically targeting graduate recruiting, emerging and newer professionals and experienced hires.

These sites are further broken down through market localization, as evidenced by their Dutch careers portal, which is a distinct domain from their counterparts in other markets as well as distinct from the centralized Deloitte global career site. The Dutch site, as well as the dozens of other subdomains representing Deloitte’s online career presence, reflects and augments the firm’s overarching employer brand, messaging, company vision and corporate values.

But instead of just translating that careers content into the local language, the Dutch arm of Deloitte, for example, actually makes this a social experience, featuring market-specific information such as employee and recruiting blog content written in Dutch, testimonials for existing Deloitte employees based in the Netherlands and live chat capabilities, allowing potential applicants and new hires to only interact with talent acquisition professionals in their market and who quite literally speak their language – which beats a big global brand for both engagement and experience.

Now, not every company needs to create a totally different domain for this strategy to work. Instead, you can always consider creating this as a subdomain that’s a section of your primary careers page and let new hires know how to find this information.

Chances are, though, they already looked before deciding to accept that offer – most of Deloitte’s new Dutch hires, for instance (about 80%) report having reviewed new employee information before actually becoming new employees; an even higher amount, or around 9 in 10, new workers reported that they utilized this public site as a resource while onboarding internally.

Of course, these sites are also great places to show internal training, professional development and new career opportunities to those employees when they’re ready to make their next move in the company – and putting it online instead of on a firewalled intranet sends a subtle, but powerful message to candidates that this isn’t only a job they’re applying to – it’s the first step to a long career with a company who treats their “greatest assets” as, you know, assets.

2. Content Marketing Is King For Employee Onboarding, Too.

As Deloitte and many other firms have figured out, relevant blog content segmented by industry and featuring real employees talking about their real jobs using their real voices is really effective at adding value to both current candidates and new hires alike.

For new hires, knowing a little more about a coworker or getting insights into how a function really functions within a company is just as valuable as when they were still in the recruiting process.

Good news is, most blog content can easily speak to both audiences simultaneously, so adding new employees to your target audience doesn’t require tons more work to achieve the same end result.

In some cases, like Samsung, this employee generated blog content is actually used for consumer marketing purposes, as the company mixes in personal perspectives from employees on the consumer electronics industry and how their work helps drive the cutting edge of the technology industry.

In short, Samsung sells products by selling the people behind the product – which, as it just so happens, has been an extremely effective vehicle for recruiting new talent into the organization, given the significant readership from tech buffs and industry insiders who come to the blog as consumers, but just might end up as candidates, too. New employees are encouraged to get involved as contributors as part of their orientation process, and are given training on how to share, source and get involved with these initiatives even if they’re not creating the actual content.

That whole brand ambassador thing works – and is a big reason why Samsung has seen a huge spike in qualified referrals since starting these programs, most coming directly from contributors whose content actually is compelling enough to entice their professional colleagues and personal contacts to ultimately become candidates, too.

If you can’t control your marketing content (and chances are, most recruiters can’t), this approach still works just for talent acquisition initiatives and should be a part of any employer branding and talent attraction strategy. Some great examples of this include Microsoft’s Employee Blog, which features a variety of voices and perspectives that effectively act as a microcosm for the company’s highly diverse, highly skilled and highly passionate global workforce – and provide a great way for new hires to get introduced to future colleagues and coworkers who are being presented (and empowered) as the public face of life at Microsoft.

It also features articles and posts highlighting employee accomplishments, team success stories and individual achievements, providing a very visible (and valuable) place for recognizing and rewarding employees while inspiring and incentivizing new hires by showing who’s making work work best. Which is pretty smart, frankly.

Similarly, for some great employee generated content about hot trends in tech, such as 3D printing or wearable devices, mixed in with company and career news,check out Apple Rubber’s blog to see an example of how this kind of content can be compelling to candidates with the right skills or vertical expertise while still effectively capturing consumers and customers, too.

3. Yeah, OK. LinkedIn Isn’t All Bad.

I’m not going to bore you by talking about how to use these publishing capabilities for recruiting new candidates (hint: don’t bother, statistically speaking).

Instead, though, look at LinkedIn’s publishing feature as an extension of the efforts described above, using the same type of careers related content that you’re already generating but with the added advantage that new hires are already actively using LinkedIn to research their future counterparts, so this is a no-brainer if you’re already doing any of the efforts outlined above.

LinkedIn can also – and I can’t believe I’m saying this – offer a great way for new hires to become an active, engaged member of your online workforce even before they start working just through the same kind of profile mining recruiters take for granted (and why so many have so much love for LinkedIn, for that matter).

By suggesting other coworkers to connect with (generally new hires will be connected with at least one member of the hiring team or, at least, a recruiter), seeing which groups other employees belong to, what discussions they participate in, who they might know in common outside the office (always a good icebreaker) and even which co-workers they want to connect with personally, such as an alumnus of the same college they went to or grew up in their hometown (among other things).

It’s scary being the new face around the office, but in that awkward period before a coworker becomes Facebook friend worthy, LinkedIn goes a long way to helping new hires feel like they at least know a little bit about all those unfamiliar faces they’re suddenly faced with at work.

This sort of due diligence, as a caveat, is really smart when you’re a new hire looking to learn the ropes and get some more insight and information into the people and organization they’ll be working with. If you’re a recruiter, though, and you’re using LinkedIn profile mining as a talent attraction tactic, you’re clearly still figuring out your job, too – which only reinforces why, for once, I think there’s some merit in using this platform as intended.

Because when it’s used as a professional network and not a job board posing behind some basic social functionalities, turns out LinkedIn is actually not half bad. So, if you’re not onboard with social recruiting, that’s cool. But it’s pretty good for onboarding.

Can Robots Predict Employee Retention?

Living in the age of the algorithm, we’ve come to expect that anything that can be quantified will be quantified. The seemingly amorphous things that can be converted into hard data still surprise us, however.

A recent piece in the Wall Street Journal revealed that algorithms are monitoring not only workers’ productivity rates, but also the odds that a given employee will stand up and quit.

The issue of employee retention and turnover have always been important, but in tighter labor markets, like the one we seem to be entering now, especially for jobs within engineering and technical fields, it becomes paramount.

The WSJ reported what HR execs already know well:

Filling a vacated position costs companies an average of 21 percent of a given job’s annual salary.

For a $110,000 engineering job, that amounts to $23,100. And talent executives in the tech industry know that their replacement costs, as in other high-paying industries with a dearth of qualified candidates, are even higher. Head hunters placing senior developers can command commission checks of $30,000 or more.

With so much money at stake, it makes sense that leading companies would attempt to leverage software to claw back some of the money lost to antsy employees. A little change can make big difference: knocking its attrition rate down by one point saves Credit Suisse $75 to $100 million, the bank says. Many of the bank’s trading algorithms likely make less money than that.

To work, of course, algorithms require data. But a person’s plans for staying on at a job are hardly a binary matter. Even if things were that simple, employees can’t be expected to reveal their true feelings on the matter to their bosses. So the algorithms in this case measure a panoply of factors, including time on the job, email and communications patterns, personality tests, geography, relationships with fellow employees, reviews, even the performance of employees’ bosses, a factor that turned out to be quite indicative at Credit Suisse.

These attrition-predicting algos, built by companies like Culture Amp, Ultimate Software, Brand Amper and Volometrix, among others, ingest and crunch through all of this data, and issue what amount to job-quitting odds for every employee monitored by the software. Senior managers treat these employee retention numbers like credit scores. A valued employee whose score indicates a heightened risk of “flight” might be offered a loftier job title and a salary bump.

At Credit Suisse, reports the WSJ, employees who have been judged likely to leave are often given the chance to apply for new jobs within the company—something that leads to higher levels of job satisfaction and increased “stickiness,” according to the bank.

Showing up at an employee’s desk for a chat just on the recommendation of a bot can be tricky. “Our goal is to never say the only reason we are coming to talk to you is because an algorithm told us to do so,” John Callery, director of people analytics at AOL Inc., told the WSJ. The best strategy, of course, is to minimize the number of employees who grow dissatisfied in the first place.

That strategy is on full display in Silicon Valley, where companies like Google, Apple, Facebook and dozens of others stack perks on top of perks—flexible work schedules, free food and transportation, generous vacation policies—to keep hard-to-hire employees faithful and reduce the high costs of employee turnover.

Proactively working to keep employees happy, no matter their profession, is move that not only keeps attrition down and employee retention up, but it also leads to greater company value, a fact that a new Glassdoor study found to be borne out on the stock market. Companies with the happiest employees recently outperformed the S&P 500 by 122 percent.Just as interesting: firms that rank poorly as places to work in the Glassdoor examination underperformed the S&P by 29 percent.

Satisfied employees, it turns out, make everyone richer—no algorithm required.

Susan Underwood is the Talent Acquisition Manager at Glassdoor, the world’s most transparent jobs and career marketplace. In her role, Susan operates in the highly competitive San Francisco Bay Area for top talent, using the unique resources Glassdoor offers its customers to recruittalent through sophisticated employer branding strategies.

Follow Susan on Twitter @susanmunderwood or connect with her on LinkedIn.

The Talent Shortage Survival Guide

If you’re like me, you’re probably sick of hearing so much lately about a supposed talent shortage. Much of that hype has focused on the fact that with unemployment down and hiring demand up, we’re in a candidate driven market (or are at least heading for one).

Of course, I’ve heard it will be a minor blip on the big picture radar, and I’ve heard it will be the biggest deal for recruitment since the invention of the internet, depending on what media report I happen to be watching. When it comes to the topic of talent supply and employer demand, seems everyone has an opinion, but no one really seems to have very much in the way of supporting evidence.

Of those plentiful predictions proliferating out there about this proverbial skills gap, the most dire comes from none other than The Conference Board, who predict labor conditions will remain tight for the next 15 years. Considering the source here are some smart, well-informed people, this should perhaps come as cause for some concern.

Think recruiting is tough now? Seems we’re potentially just scratching the surface.

Mind the Gap: A Big Data Approach to the Talent Shortage

Here at the McQuaig Institute, we recently surveyed 453 global HR professionals to get a better understanding of what the talent market’s really like today, what’s really working and what’s really keeping them up at night.

The results reveal a fascinating look behind the curtain when it comes to how companies are actually being impacted by a talent shortage, and what they’re doing to overcome those critical talent management challenges.

The results provided some really interesting insight, and our survey suggests some critical things that companies who are succeeding in overcoming the skills gap and hiring hard to find talent are doing differently from competitors who might be struggling.

I think that these distinctions – and the results – provide a potentially valuable roadmap for navigating the talent shortage today – and tomorrow.

First, let’s look at some highlights from the survey and see what the results had to say about this supposed talent shortage and whether or not it’s having a real world impact on the way companies find, attract and engage top talent.

chart1 — **Chart 1: How easy is hiring compared to one year ago?**

As the chart on the left suggests, our survey found:

36% of HR professionals say it’s harder to fill positions now than it was one year ago.
56% of HR professionals say it’s about the same as it was a year ago.
Only 8% of HR professionals said it was easier to fill vacancies year-over-year.

A year ago, about the same number of HR professionals felt filling positions was getting harder (up incrementally from 34% in 2014), but in 2014, fully 28% felt they thought hiring was getting easier, versus 8% today.

That’s a pretty significant percentage – and suggests to us that a talent shortage is not only real, but starting to actually have a significant business impact for many employers, particularly in some select market segments.

Solving the Talent Shortage: What The Winners Are Getting Right

I know that for all the people who actually live through this stuff every day, you probably just gave the survey statistics I cited above a collective “duh, dude.” You don’t need numbers to support how hard hiring has become, and for you, it’s not news, it’s something you deal with every day. Fair enough – I probably deserve that response, but at least you know where I’m coming from (and vice versa).

Some of the results told us some really surprising things about the talent shortage; specifically, the results I found among the more interesting uncovered by the survey pointed to not only some very specific things employers are doing to address a talent shortage, but also, what the best ones are doing differently.

To keep my terminology consistent with the language in the report, I’m going to be referring to these two distinct groups as “Winners” and “Strugglers,” respectively.

We asked the HR professionals responding to our survey about what recruiting strategies they were using to compete for, and win, the war for talent.

Their responses showed employers were consistently leveraging three recruiting strategies more or less across the board. Increasing and investing in existing employees (and promoting from within) stood out as the most commonly adopted strategy employers currently have in place for addressing the talent shortage.

We asked respondents to tell us about the recruiting strategies they were using to find quality candidates in this market. We found that companies are using an average of three strategies to help win the war for talent, the top one being looking more inward and investing in existing employees.

See the below chart for a full breakdown of how these steps stack up:

Interestingly, the Winners are much more likely to be investing in training existing employees. 75% of Winners reported adopting this recruiting strategy, versus only 55% of the total survey sample. This could signal that this strategy is already paying off, with the Winners realizing significant returns on this employee development investment.

Employers not already actively allocating resources in their existing workforce should probably consider doing the same and upping their own investments to have any chance at competing at successfully overcoming the talent shortage.

One other result the survey found Winners were more likely to have already adopted as part of their recruiting strategy is offering some sort of flexible work arrangements to their current and potential employees, flexibility that extends to having more freedom to tweak job descriptions and titles than their counterparts.

A Word On Millennials

I know you were waiting for it. So, there’s your gratuitous, but required, mention of Gen Y and how they fit in, but in this case, there’s actually a really interesting connection – I promise I’m not just talking about millennials just because it’s what you do when you talk about recruiting these days.

Our survey asked employers what roles they’re having the hardest time filling. Survey says?

Specialized Technical Roles (54%)
Mid-Management (37%)
Senior Executives (19%)
Entry-level (18%)

We expect to see the numbers for mid managers continue to rise in the years to come as Boomers retire, effectively creating a vacuum within most organizations, as employers just don’t have enough Gen X workers to fill the vacancies left behind. This means that Millennials as the only successor for many mid-level roles, and employers will need these workers to step up if they want to have any hope of success.

The Best Sourcing Channels for Solving the Talent Shortage

unnamed (8) — **Sourcing Channel Usage: Winners vs. Strugglers**

Both our research and anecdotal evidence suggest that Gen Y places a high premium on these internally focused investments, with most Millennials looking for employers offering training & development opportunities, a clearly defined career path, ongoing coaching and continuous feedback.

The good news is, they want exactly what companies increasingly realize they need to be giving them. So in this case, it’s really a win-win for everyone, yet another salient selling point in an already pretty overwhelming business case for internal training.

We could also speculate – and what the hell, I might as well do so – that our Winners ease the pain of replacing retiring Boomers with external candidates by providing effective enough programs and initiatives aimed at developing existing employees to make sure that they don’t always have to look for external candidates for highly skilled or hard to fill positions.

Makes sense internal mobility produces outcomes than relying on such a tight market for filling so many openings.

We also asked employers which channels they most commonly utilized for sourcing, and which delivered the best results and highest quality candidates. This also suggested another key difference between the Winners and the Strugglers: employee referrals. 94% of the Winners report utilizing referrals from existing employees as a key sourcing tactic, vs 83% of the total employer sample.

With referrals, though, there can be too much of a good thing, as the Strugglers were often forced to turn to agencies as their next best bet when their existing employees failed to deliver the recommendations upon which their recruiting process so heavily relied.

The Winners, by contrast, consistently found the same caliber of quality candidates across their three primary sourcing channels, which our survey suggested were employee referrals, online job boards and social networking sites (see chart).

we see that those having more success are much more likely to be using employee referrals (94% vs. 83%) and are getting pretty even results across three channels in terms of quality of candidates (employee referrals, online job boards, and social networking sites), while the Strugglers are heavily reliant on employee referrals for quality candidates and then looking at external agencies as their next best bet.

We all know how valuable employee referrals are, and while they’re like gold, they’re also inherently low volume. This is why it makes sense employers are investing in alternate channels to cast a wider net while increasing the effectiveness of other channels and optimizing those to ensure all sources consistently deliver higher quality candidates. If that is, indeed, what is happening, as our survey suggests – and it does so quite strongly, in fact.

Could Social Recruiting Solve the Talent Shortage?

Some results that were really striking from our survey was the jump in the perceived effectiveness of social media for helping hiring – and the huge difference in results between the Winners and the Strugglers from their social recruiting initiatives stem from very different approaches to these channels.

Take a closer look at how each uses social media differently:

The Winners are more likely to see social primarily as an engagement channel, and focus most of their efforts on connecting with existing employees, connecting with their networks and nurturing passive candidates across multiple channels, targeting qualified talent through dedicated pay-per-click and online advertising strategies – these ads could be simply a posted job description or some sort of rich media content like video or retargeted content.

Strugglers on the other hand, spend their time searching for candidates on LinkedIn. The results speak for themselves. For me, these findings reinforce the fact that the inherent strength of social for recruiting is really in facilitating engagement and building employer brand.

The companies doing it right successfully develop targeted personas and tailored content based on their ideal candidates, enlist employees as brand ambassadors and advocates, and use social to strengthen relationships with passive candidates and find better culture fits. Blasting out job ads and using the search box on LinkedIn aren’t social recruiting strategies.

They’re something that the Winners avoid almost as much as the candidates they’re looking for – candidates who are becoming increasingly savvy, and increasingly selective. After all, as much as the talent shortage stinks for recruiters, it’s a pretty good time to be on the other side of the market. For once.

If you’d like more of the top insights and takeaways from our global survey, click here to download the complete report from The McQuaig Institute. Trust me – these only scratch the surface.

About the Author: Ian Cameron is the Managing Director of The McQuaig Institute®, an International Organization committed to helping companies assess, select and develop talent.

Ian has more than 20 years of Human Resource and Organizational Development consulting experience. Throughout his career Ian’s focus has been on helping organizations realize their goals through their people and helping people live their passion through their work.

Ian has facilitated workshops on implementing organizational change, leadership development and sales and customer service improvement to hundreds of managers, sales and service professionals.

He is an engaging key-note speaker who is always able to help his audience discover how to develop and attune people’s skills, interests and motivation to organizational goals and strategies.

Mobile Recruiting: Why Recruiters Should Care About The Google Algorithm Change

When was the last time you used your phone to search the web? Do you perhaps have a few search windows open right now? With the omnipresence of mobile devices, it can be tempting to pull up your browser at any given moment of the day to immediately find the answer to a problem, the background on a new topic or person, and “how to” do nearly anything.

Using your phone as a search tool has become a natural instinct, and its unrivaled accessibility is quickly making it the first stop in information seeking.

Today, 90% of American adults own a cellphone, 58% a smartphone, and 42% have a tablet device. Google recently updated their algorithm to factor this into its searches. These changes will greatly impact the ability of businesses to reach both desirable consumers and potential employees.

As of today, Google’s algorithm will rank mobile-friendly sites higher in search results – great news for companies who have already made a commitment to a mobile experience, but potentially devastating for businesses who have not adapted their websites for mobile visitors.

If a site is not optimized to auto-adjust to mobile device formats, its ranking can drop from one position to the next or from one page of search results to another – potentially leading to a major loss of web traffic. Conversely, those sites that are already mobile may see a nice bump in rankings while the others try to catch up.

The Business Case for Mobile Recruiting

Beyond basic web pages, employers may find that their entire online hiring process is derailed from the start due to lack of searchability. According to DirectEmployers, leading consultancy in labor market efficiency, there are more than 300 million job-related searches per month on websites like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

We know from iCIMS’ in-platform data consisting of more than 2,700 employers in varying industries and ranging from very small to large enterprise company size that mobile usage among job seekers has increased by 60% in the past year alone.

Furthermore, conversion from viewing a job to actually applying to that job via mobile device has increased by 238% in 2014 from 2013; that’s a lot of potential new talent recruiters could be losing out on due to obsolete technology.

The disruptive force of technology has permanently changed the way people apply for jobs and how employers hire. We see this time and time again with the rise of job aggregator apps, social media, and video usage among recruiters. A recent survey from Glassdoor showed that 9 in 10 jobseekers expect to use their mobile device during the job search process in the next 12 months.

The takeaway for recruiters: if your career site is not already mobile-optimized you’re simply going to miss out on a multitude of potential candidates.

Mobile Recruiting: The Future is Now.

The status quo doesn’t cut it anymore in today’s new normal of job seeking and talent acquisition, and that applies to career site development, too. Considering the change in Google’s ranking methods and the constant connectivity of mobile devices, the online candidate experience including employer career sites, application processes, employment branding content, and recruitment strategies need to be designed with the mobile user in mind.

As a job seeker, imagine the thrill and then immediate disappointment of finding the perfect role online only to click on the link and find that the site is not mobile-compatible. Previously, this was only a turn-off, an inconvenience at most for the candidate. To the employer though, they may risk the job seeker losing interest or forgetting to return to apply to the role from a desktop computer. Now, the candidate may never even see the role to begin with.

As we know, modern innovations in technology have redesigned how candidates look for and apply to jobs – and mobile accessibility is a big contributing factor to this, especially in terms of dedicated talent acquisition software and candidate-facing career sites.

Google’s new algorithm change is further evidence in this revolution in recruiting. The choice for employers is to adapt new technology and strategies for talent acquisition, or they risk behind left behind in the digital shift. It’s time for HR to ditch obsolete technologies and outdated processes, and invest in the future of recruiting.

About the Author: Susan Vitale joined iCIMS in 2005 and serves as the company’s Chief Marketing Officer.

As CMO, Susan oversees direct marketing efforts as well as business development across a network of strategic alliances around the globe. Susan also plays an active role in portfolio strategy, helping to ensure iCIMS’ products, power-ups and services remain on the pulse of the ever-changing HR technology landscape.

Follow Susan on Twitter @Susan_Vitale or connect with her on LinkedIn.

Hiring, Solved: Why Every Sourcer Should Be Using A Recruiting CRM

If there’s one thing recruiters and talent practitioners place a premium on, it’s the tools of the trade. And not a day goes by, it seems, without another “killer app” for recruiting, carrying with them the same hollow promises that they’re somehow going to make the business of hiring easier. “This one is going to solve everything your system sucks at!” “With this tool, you’ll never miss your quarterly goals again!” “This tech is going to revolutionize recruiting.”

Or, my personal favorite, “hire better talent faster,” which is, pretty much, the tagline for every tool on the market – although the proliferation of tens of thousands of these platforms doesn’t seem to have made much of an impact on efficiency and efficacy at most of the employers betting the farm on the next new thing – the one that’s going to change everything.

Recruiting Tools: Same Stuff, Different Day.

Of course, nothing changes – which is why, at this point, with the daily deluge of new product announcements, you can’t help but feel the software fatigue settling in in the industry.

Take CRMs, for example. There are literally dozens of new recruiting focused candidate relationship management point solutions and SaaS suites flooding the market, but despite their efforts to make their offering stand out or seem special, there’s never really anything that’s particularly great (or unique) about any entrants in this category, really.

They all accomplish the same end goal in the same way using more or less the same processes and pricing models, and you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference besides maybe the UI/UX or some unnecessary bells and whistles being touted by product collateral collateral.

Of course, if you’re at a company saddled with legacy, archaic on-premise systems, you still have some sort of way of driving the same end results as the sexiest of CRM software, even if it’s just Excel. The best tech in the world won’t fix lazy recruiting or talent acquisition capability gaps, no matter what tool you use – it’s all marketing smoke and mirrors, really.

For example, almost every employer has a reliable (I didn’t say awesome) applicant tracking system (ATS) or a talent management system (TMS) or a human capital management system (HCM), or some combination thereof. We use and complain about these systems of record daily, but you’d be hard pressed to find a recruiter who could tell you what the hell the difference between these tools is, exactly. No matter how many blog posts or product marketing one sheets they happen to have read.

Of course, that’s just the tip of the tech iceberg. In recruiting, most of the focus and fixation on tools happens before candidates even enter these systems, which is why so many vendors focus on sourcing related stuff like SEO/SEM, semantic search, profile aggregation, talent communities and a bunch of other buzzwords that are more meaningless to most of us than your average Boolean String. Although those, at least, have a little bit of value – not so with most of the “tools” that seem to be monetizing what anyone with a little training and effort could figure out and do for free.

And don’t even get me started on big data – you know it’s a big deal, but haven’t been able to figure out exactly how to make it useful or workable, which is why so many vendors have stepped in offering solutions to a problem that might not even actually be a problem.

That’s the funny thing about analytics – if you’re on the market for a relevant tool, then chances are you’re not going to be able to analyze the efficacy of the business cases or case uses being touted by potential providers. Sucker.

The Real Recruiting Tool: HR Technology or HR End User?

For all the bells and whistles being touted by the average recruiting tool, there are many situations where, even in today’s constantly connected, technologically world of work, where recruiters are forced to go old school – no matter how advanced their systems might be.

Let’s take the example of working a job or career fair, where after a day of standing behind a booth, you’ve gotten a big old stack of resumes, dozens of people signing up for additional career information and probably a handful of cards from some of the other employers in the room, too.

You’ve made the time and resource investment in attending – and it’s paid off with a pool of potential candidates.

But unfortunately, you’ve got nothing but a pile of paper to prove it. The most expedient solution for dealing with this data is by simply sticking it on Excel – putting this info into almost any system is a pain in the butt, no matter how much time it purports it’s going to save you. But even that’s a pain in the ass when you get back to the office, so you probably hand it off for someone else to upload in there – if you do anything with that data at all – and promptly forget all about them, consigning these leads forever into the proverbial black hole of your recruiting system.

Of course, they’re likely already there since, you know, you told all of them if they were interested they’d need to go to your careers site and apply online anyway; problem is, once they get in the system, they’re free to self-select any source of hire, even if you gave a special code or submission URL to candidates at the event. But since they know that a job fair isn’t the most enticing source, they’re more than likely to choose whatever on the drop down menu they’re provided makes them sound the coolest or the most viable for any given opportunity.

Then, when your boss asks you how the career fair went, you tell him that it was pretty good, and you got a lot of candidates – and probably have the spreadsheet to prove it. Of course, there’s no way to track what happens next on a static document like a spreadsheet, meaning you actually have no idea how the career fair went, or how the ROI looks for the resources and budget you invested in attending. Which is kind of a major fail.

Never bring Excel to a CRM fight. You’re going to lose.

If you’ve spent a boatload of money on a system to automate or optimize your recruiting processes, but still rely on stuff like Excel or even your inbox to track submissions, candidate activity and notes outside of your system simply because it’s easier that way, you’ve screwed up. Because you’ve spent so much time thinking about all these tools, and sunk so much money into their false promise of making your life easier, but you’re still stuck in the same manual processes and paperwork as before.

Now, who’s the tool?

The Case for A Recruiting CRM

I’m sure you probably feel the cortisol stressing through your veins when you think about software and systems – for those of you unfamiliar, that’s the hormone that your body releases when it’s under stress; enough of it is potentially lethal.

And judging from the tenor of most recruiting technology related conversations, and the sheer antipathy most feel towards their systems, there’s a chance that HR tech could literally kill you.

The many physical illnesses and maladies directly linked to stress are all caused by bitter, bitter cortisol, and if you’re being stressed by your system, you’re basically punishing your body. And those days when the cortisol really starts pumping in full swing, it actually impairs mental performance, meaning that it’s true – technology actually CAN make us dumber. This seems to be the case when it comes to recruiting tools.

So, how do you get smart and choose the right tools, avoid spreadsheets and stop using paper-based processes even if you’ve got a system of record that’s supposed to handle this stuff? The answer for improving the plan for next time is simple: you need to start using a recruiting CRM.

Avature, Smashfly, Salesforce, Bullhorn CRM – it really doesn’t matter which one you choose, as long as you choose one. The real due diligence is in learning how to get the most and maximize your investment in the tool that you ultimately go with – which provider that is, largely, is irrelevant (as is the case for most categories in HR Technology).

Once you start using one and get the hang of it, you’re going to look like a recruiting rock star – even if you’re not particularly proficient, everyone’s going to at least be enthused at what a great job you’re doing, particularly compared to the traditional results generated by spreadsheets and other manual, paper based processes.

You’ll stop fueling the cortisol and start triggering serotonin instead – the hormonal reward your brain gives you for a job well done. In these cases, HR technology can literally be a drug – and a fairly fun one, at that.

With a recruiting CRM fully up and running, you and every member of your recruiting organization can seamlessly share notes, track candidates, develop and nurture leads and document activity collaboratively and transparently across your entire organization. Initiatives like career fairs or online campaigns can actually be tracked without having to actually do anything – and when your boss asks how an event went the next time, you can bust out the fancy numbers to prove exactly how it performed.

You’ll be able to easily figure out how many candidates or leads you collected, where they are in process and how many hires it created (and how fast those hires happened and what they cost). Now, that’s big data beyond the buzzwords and BS. The best thing? You don’t have to do anything, really – the right CRM is the gift that keeps on giving for recruiting and talent acquisition. Added bonus: you get to kiss Excel goodbye for good.

If you’re having trouble attracting talent, don’t look for tools as a stand alone solution – look at what you’re trying to get these tools to do. If the other recruiters in your organization are total idiots, you can’t source the right candidates to save your life or your compensation doesn’t stack up against the competition, then forget the system – you’ve got bigger fish to fry.

But if your goals are incremental improvements in your recruiting ROI, adding CRM capabilities remains an imperative first step to success.

Gotta Get ‘Em Integrated: Talent Search Engines & Recruiting CRM

So, now that you’ve got the CRM implemented and fully integrated into existing systems and processes, you’re probably proud of your progress – and demonstrable results. In fact, the time savings created by automating and scaling these formerly manual, paper based processes means suddenly, you actually have time to invest in proactive pipeline building and intelligent sourcing. Which is way more fun than spreadsheets, any day – unless, you know, you’re a complete Luddite, Boomer or HR Generalist.

It’s rare that CRM and sourcing are discussed in tandem, but they’re both integral parts of a successful recruiting strategy. That is to say, once you find the leads, you’ve got to have something to do with them. You know, that whole candidate experience thing.

Of course, most of the time, sourcing is just as manual as any paper based process – it’s done outside those expensive systems, is often done manually or in a way that can’t be scaled, and entering profiles or resumes found through sourcing takes just as much work as entering in the ones you find from a job fair (albeit these candidates are much more likely to get hired, since they’re not, you know, totally desperate).

That’s why talent specific search engines, like HiringSolved (or its litany of competitors), are such an obvious solution – and exploding category – for talent organizations today.

So how do you get these two technologies to work together? How do you connect sourcing and CRM? The answer is simple: while it doesn’t matter what CRM you choose, choose one that integrates with your other system, so you have all your results all in one place, actually automated processes and a single, simple way of finding, tracking, engaging and converting top candidates into new hires. A CRM and a talent search engine? Now, you’re cooking with fire.

There’s no reason for these two solutions to be separated – and in fact, you’re doing yourself a disservice by not pointing these point solutions in the right place through the right integration. And the right integration is something that’s already built and ready to plug, play and start kicking some recruiting butt.

A few options for this silver bullet exist on the market, which is why I was so excited today that talent search engine HiringSolved, a people aggregator that gathers data from across the web and filters the most relevant results for sourcing talent, has announced they’ll be integrating with recruiting CRM leader Avature, the first integration of its kind for one of the most widely used tools in this category.

According to the press release announcing the integration, “The move allows recruiters on Avature’s system to instantly import candidate data from an embedded HiringSolved search and use it with their talent management tools without having to leave Avature’s familiar interface.”

That’s a bunch of buzzwords and marketing speak, I know, but here’s the thing. It’s so damn easy. I love it. You will, too. Which is why I really, really think it’s worth checking out – and of course, while I’m a little biased, my background isn’t in recruiting. It’s in technology.

And from that perspective, I promise once you get under the hood, this is one solution that’s pretty bad ass. OK, that’s my sales pitch – but objectively, no matter what software you choose, if you’re not integrating social, search and CRM in a single solution, you’re making your job a whole hell of a lot harder than it needs to be.

And you just can’t excel by relying on Excel.

About the Author: Christopher Murray is a growth hacker at HiringSolved. He’s also a Gangplank Chandler community member and volunteer where he supplies a weekly newsletter and blog. When he started with HiringSolved in November 2014, his knowledge of sourcing, HR, and Recruiting were at first based on frantic Google searches and blog skimming. However, he has since been able to immerse himself in the knowledge of the space and continues to gain insights to help him form opinions.

Christopher has a strong background in freelance writing, hacking, and marketing. His duties at HiringSolved include site content growth, writing patents & press releases, conducting email blasts, and charting their marketing trajectory in the new media landscape.

Quick Hits: Why HR Needs To Stop Worrying About Weed.

I’ve always been acutely aware of the central role alcohol seems to play whenever HR people congregate, and found it oddly paradoxical – and hypocritical – that the same group that spends most of their time policing policy violations, enforcing compliance and managing employee relations is so blatantly reckless, irresponsible and unprofessional in their consumption.

10 minutes after arriving at my first ever SHRM, I saw a CHRO (according to her name badge) stumble, set down a glass of Chardonnay and puke all over her open toed shoes in the middle of the San Diego Convention Center. At 2 PM. Before registration even officially opened.

Jesus, I thought, but I soon learned that this was the rule rather than the exception at these events.

The overriding rule here, and throughout business, seems to be that consumption is OK, as long as it’s not on company time or done at the workplace, and implicitly or explicitly condoned by the very same people otherwise tasked with playing policy police to the most minor of employee infractions.

Hypocracy Now.

Compare this, however, to the prevailing attitude towards marijuana. Just this last year, I’ve seen a drug background screening company giving away frozen margaritas for people stopping by their booth, and then using this as an opening to sell their services. In one case, I saw a lady put down her pinot just long enough to follow up on the product’s efficacy to detect THC. I wanted to punch her in the face. But I realized it’s not her fault.

For some reason, and it’s really got nothing to do with legality given most businesses in jurisdictions where it’s otherwise legal place much more draconian restrictions on weed than other legal drugs like alcohol or tobacco. I’m convinced, more than anything, the hostility to weed in the workplace is more a product of mindset than practical policy.

Similarly, while I feel no need to keep my personal preference for pot on the DL, it’s still a taboo topic among the HR crowd, even at events where every attendee is shitfaced. While you’ll see a proliferation of booths and countless HR-focused vendors focused on drug screening solutions throughout an exhibit hall, you’ll never, see a vendor trying to entice people to stop by and get their badges scanned in return for free weed. Although I’m sure at a recruiting-specific conference, this would probably not be an entirely bad idea, at SHRM, this would be a decidedly terrible decision.

Like A Rolling Stoned (Times, They Are A Changin’)

That I’m actually revealing on a mostly professional blog that’s pretty public that yes, I smoke marijuana, probably strikes most people as dumb, the kind of black mark that will come back to haunt me some day or hurt my reputation in the HR world. I disagree, because I just don’t think it’s that big of a deal, and certainly it has neither prohibited me from being productive at work, ambitious in my career and a consistent high achiever with a relentless work ethic. I’m not the only one, either.

HR has the power to play a leading role in shifting the processes by which we prescreen and preempt candidates for having any THC in their system, and stop the invasive policies of random employee drug testing and mandatory pre-employment drug screenings that are so interwoven into the fabric of the function.

This is one area where HR, in fact, has the power to precipitate real – and meaningful – change in the way that we hire and police employee drug use, because it’s the primary enforcer and arbiter of drug free workplace policies.

While I obviously would advocate for keeping extant procedures in place for roles requiring, say, driving, heavy machinery or anything where there’s some obvious safety concern involved, for the vast majority of jobs, that the person happens to use marijuana outside of the workplace is in no way relevant if it has no impact on their job performance.

Obviously, there are legal and liability concerns, but there’s no law against not testing for marijuana (in most cases) and simply not screening candidates for it, nor subjecting their existing employees to any repercussions from random drug tests finding even trace amounts of THC by suspending this practice altogether, when possible. And it is, at almost every employer out there.

High Time for HR: Getting Blunt About Getting Blunted

The concern over the potential of having a bunch of stoners silently infiltrate and jeopardize your workforce is completely inflated; according to Department of Labor Statistics, in 2013, under 200 workplace safety violations or accidents were directly attributable to marijuana, compared to over 55,000 linked exclusively to alcohol consumption.

And that’s not factoring in HR events, which in your normal calendar year would probably outpace the overall number of weed related mishaps by a fairly wide margin, in my experience.

Marijuana is not only legal in 23 jurisdictions in the US (and counting) as well as a variety of global markets where many multinationals traditionally do business, but sentiment and momentum are decidedly on the side of weed.

Companies worry about how hard it is to recruit Gen Y, but with 65% in favor of legalizing weed and 29% having actually consumed it in the last 30 days, it makes no sense to put up an additional hiring barrier by explicitly excluding (or at least alienating) the majority of this apparently elusive yet desirable workforce demographic.

This isn’t exclusive to this workforce segment, though; an estimated 24 million adults, or 9.2% of the overall American population, have used marijuana recreationally at least once in the last year; between 8-12% are “regular” users who consume marijuana daily. Compare this to the estimated overall US workforce of 120 million – numbers that demographics suggest largely overlap with those of cannabis consumers. That’s a lot of potential candidates lost in the war on talent in favor of the war on drugs, and putting organizations who screen for marijuana as part of their hiring process at a significant disadvantage. It’s largely unnecessary.

I’d encourage HR to look long and hard at its own complex – and pervasive – culture and condoning of alcohol and encourage them to eliminate the double standard which most hold against marijuana – creating at least some measure of parity isn’t only progressive, but also increasingly just common sense for companies who want to recruit or retain the best talent. Plus, given that “creative” and “innovative” are among the 10 most common requirements on job listings, it just makes sense if you’re really looking for the best minds on the market.

But to all of you out there – and I know who you are – who are already part of the solution, all I can say to you is Happy 420.

From Good to Great: How To Become A Badass Recruiter

If there’s one characteristic, a single quality that distinguishes between a great recruiter and simply a good one, it’s attention to details. The best recruiters out there are complete control freaks. We’re not talking about Type A personalities, here – we’re talking Type A++. These are the recruiters who actually sweat the small stuff and do more than find e-mails, names and profiles or simply push resumes.

Great recruiters understand that the only way to exert influence and drive successful outcomes lies entirely in their ability to exert and maintain as much control as possible throughout every stage of the hiring process.

The recruiters who successfully control the process are never blindsided by an interview no show, nor are they shocked when a candidate declines an offer or decides to drop out of the process.

Superfreak: Taking Recruiting From Good to Great

They say the devil is in the details, but so too is the key to becoming a truly exceptional recruiter and talent acquisition practitioner. If you’re looking to step up your game, here are some often overlooked, but absolutely imperative, details that separate the best in the business from the rest of the recruiting pack.

1. Know the answers to the toughest candidate questions.

Good recruiters can find out the answers to the manifold questions that inevitably arise during the talent attraction and offer process, but great recruiters anticipate these potential hiring hurdles and continually remain proactive in alerting and overcoming any red flags well before they’re actually raised.

They accomplish this by asking a single, simple question: “What could prevent this candidate from accepting a position if offered?”

Whether this comes down to relocation, salary, work-life balance or any other dozens of potential hurdles recruiters often encounter when extending an offer, every recruiter needs to ask this question – and know the answers – for every candidate under consideration for every open requisition they work on. One of the simplest fixes for finding red flags is to be as realistic and upfront about the opportunity as possible.

Never oversell the position or undersell the requirements; acknowledge and directly address any candidate concern honestly, and you’ll not only build trust, but also alleviate any potential roadblock for achieving your ultimate goal of placing the right candidate in the right position – and doing it the right way.

2. Walk On By.

A walk on is one of the most important, yet most frequently ignored best practices in any recruiter’s talent toolbox. For those of you unfamiliar with this critical concept, a walk on is simply when a recruiter physically accompanies a candidate to an interview instead of simply sending them on their way after an introductory interview.

By walking the candidate on, you not only get additional face time, but also the chance to answer any last minute questions or address any outstanding concerns the candidate may have while making sure they’re prepared and ready to rock their interviews.

This little bit of time can go a long way in turning you from just another recruiter into a familiar face, and also effectively diffuses some of the anxiety and nerves that so often aversely impact candidates during the interview process.

While preparing for a walk on, proactively think of the little things you can do to help a candidate succeed, from printing a few non-wrinkled copies of their resume to providing them with an interviewing itinerary with the names, job titles and backgrounds of the decision makers they’ll be meeting with, along with a copy of the actual job description so they can easily reference this throughout the day.

Every walk on should end with a hand off – make sure that they not only know where they’re going and what to expect, but also make sure to stay around (even if the hiring manager is running late) and make sure to introduce the two in person prior to taking off. Your primary job as a recruiter is connecting candidates with hiring managers, and this subtly reinforces to both parties that you’re in control – and the ultimate arbiter of successful recruiting outcomes.

3. Keep A Candidate Emergency Kit.

One time, I was walking on a candidate for an interview – I was living in South Florida at the time, and as always, it felt a bit like a sauna outside – you couldn’t walk out the door without becoming covered in sweat.

On the way to meet me, the air conditioning in his car decided to bite the bullet, and, this being South Florida, he did what any sane person would do and tried to fix it himself so that he wouldn’t come into the interview dripping wet (which never leaves a great impression).

Unfortunately, he cut himself and, using a handkerchief as a bandage, abandoned his DIY attempts at fixing the car to make sure he wasn’t late for his scheduled interview (which leaves a far worse impression, to be fair).

So my candidate – who would probably have gotten the job, by the way – shows up for an interview with a gaping gash on his hand and looking like he just stepped out of a sauna. Needless to say, after he didn’t get an offer, I resolved to make sure to never lose another great candidate over these sorts of silly situations that are easily remedied.

That’s why every recruiter should always have a “candidate emergency kit” tucked away in their office, car or workstation (I recommend using a tackle box) that has the following items:

Disposable toothbrush, toothpaste and mouthwash
Disposable comb/brush
Hairspray/gel
OTC headache and pain medicine (think Tylenol, Advil, Aleve)
Travel sticks of deodorant for both men & women
A Stain Stick and/or Wet Ones
Assorted Band-Aids or other adhesive bandages
Breath mints and/or gum
A portable sewing kit with a needle, thread and a variety of spare buttons
An extra tie for men and a spare scarf for women
Extra pens, a black sharpie, a notebook and file folders.

I know this probably sounds like overkill, but I’ve perfected this candidate crisis management kit over the years, and every single one of these items has a story behind it. Buy me a cocktail, and I might even tell you one or two.

But I will tell you this: you don’t want to be in a situation where a candidate might need these basic supplies and fail to have them on hand. You never know what easy, quick fix might be required to make sure a great candidate doesn’t get knocked out of the process for a stupid, silly or superficial reason that could have been easily preempted and prevented.

3. Practice Makes Perfect.

My first recruiting job ever, I worked at one of those huge international recruiting firms, and role playing played a major role in this firm’s recruiter training and development process. I, like most other recruiters out there, hated this exercise; I was afraid not of presenting in public, but rather, of doing something wrong in front of my professional peers or being judged by them.

Eventually, after a lot of role playing, I felt more confident in these exercises, and had the whole thing pretty much down pat, but that didn’t stop me from continually finding new ways to close the candidate or successfully convince a hiring manager that they were worth considering.

Practice didn’t make perfect, of course, but over time, it sure made me and my colleagues a whole lot better when it came to recruiting.

There are always new approaches to experiment with, new things to try, and improving your professional skill set requires relentless pursuit of these possibilities – and relentless practice. No great recruiter is ever satisfied with doing what works – they’re committed to doing what it takes to make that work work even better.

4. Honesty Is Always the Best Policy.

Every time you interact with a candidate or hiring manager, your communication needs to be direct, clear and most importantly, completely honest. Let candidates know as many details as possible about the expectations for the role, the dynamics of the team or business unit they’re interviewing for and the company culture as possible – and make sure that you realistically represent the drawbacks as well as the selling points while selling any opportunity.

If there’s high turnover, or terrible work life balance, or extremely high expectations associated with a role, let them know – any successful candidate will inevitably find all this out eventually, anyway.

Also, make sure that they know the minor details, personality quirks and other insight into the hiring manager as possible. For instance, if you know that a hiring manager loves a certain football team, loves dogs or is particularly passionate about something unrelated to work, let the candidate know, particularly if you uncover any shared interests that could build affinity, drive better outcomes and more accurately uncover a candidate’s culture and team fit, too.

Furthermore, make sure to keep in touch with candidates as much as possible – I tried to talk to the ones I had in process every day, just to keep them warm – and make sure to address any concerns and questions your candidate might have as they work their way through the interview and offer process. This will help the candidate feel more relaxed, build a trusted relationship with the recruiter, and allows you to know a little bit more about your candidate – and alert you to the red flags you might have overlooked or hadn’t yet considered.

5. The Handshake

Nothing kills a candidate’s chances like having a lame ass handshake. So, for the love of all things beautiful, make sure you shake a candidate’s hand and, if it’s lacking, make sure to coach them so that they don’t unintentionally create a bad first impression through a limp shake or sweaty palms or similar icky, painful handshakes when they meet the hiring manager.

If you’re not sure what makes for a good handshake, make sure to check out this great article written by Arlin Cuncic titled “Top Ten Worst Handshakes”. It totally breaks down what to do – and what not to do – when shaking hands (and it’s pretty funny, too). It also underscores what great recruiters know: you can’t seal any recruiting deal without a proper handshake.

Don’t overlook this essential consideration, or you’ll likely cost yourself candidates. Always lead with a handshake when welcoming them, and if you find theirs lacking, make sure to work this into the preparation process – a walk on is a great time to do some last minute work on helping them get a grip, as it were.

At the end of the day, recruiting is all about finding as many facts as possible to help candidates and clients alike make the most informed decision hiring decision possible. If you don’t pay attention to the details or sweat the seemingly small stuff, you’re making a big mistake.

Trust me on this one.

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.

Sourcing Alchemy: How To Transform Your Search Into A Hire

Alchemy is the study of focused transformation. I have always been fascinated by Alchemy because the aim was to take some low value resource, like led and turn it into a high value resource like gold. In a way, a production line is an alchemical process. We take raw material through a specific, repeatable process and we transform it into something more valuable.

Boolean Search: The Raw Material

One of the raw materials of sourcing is Boolean search strings. A good search string can return valuable information. But often this raw material is too difficult refine. The information returned, while valuable, requires too much effort to extract. For example, a search string for attendance list may produce a document with 20 pages of good contact information. There is only one catch. The list is in a PDF file. If you have been a sourcer you know the pain. You have great, detailed information locked in a PDF file. If you have ever tried to extract information from a pdf file and convert it into Excel you will know that the cleanest way to get the information is to manually copy the information into Excel.

We want to take the raw material of a Boolean search and transform it into actionable information that results in our being able to make additional hires. Hires are our gold.

How To Transform Your Search Into A Hire

So how do we transform our searches into hires? First, we create a string that will give us lists of useful contacts. Most sourcers are familiar with how to create a search string that will return lists of information so I won’t go into detail here. However, too often our searches return PDF files. A PDF file and in the past would have most likely been disregarded. However I have created a process to turn the information locked in those PDF files into actionable information. First download the file to your hard drive.

Below is an example of an attendance list in PDF format:

Next you need to find a tool called Tabula. It can be found here http://127.0.0.1:8080/ Upload your PDF file and select the range you would like to extract data from as in the example below

I then select “repeat this selection.” This will select the same selection on every page for the rest of the after the appropriate fields have been selected. Next select “ Download All Data.” This will download the data into an Excel spreadsheet. The data should look something like this.

From this point is it simply a matter of formatting.

Once the data is in this form it can be used to create a mail merge email campaign, uploaded into an applicant tracking system or matched into LinkedIn Recruiter via their data stacking tool that is called talent pipeline. To import the connections into your LinkedIn Recruiter seat simply follow the instructions below.

Lists can have as many as 5,000 contacts. Fill out the required information and select continue.

And Now…

LinkedIn will automatically identify the candidates that already have a LinkedIn profile. You can then tag your list and put the contacts in a project folder. The first name, last name and email should automatically match fields. This will allow you to validate the data you have acquired and it will match the information against a LinkedIn profile. This means that we are not solely dependent on Inmails

Even if you do not have a LinkedIn Recruiter seat you can manually search for the profiles from your personal account. You can the reach out to them via the information you obtained from your search string. From here we can email and call our prospects. Following this sourcing alchemy process we can turn our led Boolan search strings into prospects we can contact and ultimately convert into golden hires.

Mike Wolford has over 8 years of recruiting experience in staffing agency, contract and in house corporate environments. He has worked with such companies as Allstate, Capital One, and National Public Radio. Mike also published a book titled “Becoming the Silver Bullet: Recruiting Strategies for connecting with Top Talent” and also has been featured in blogs like RecruitDC and Mike currently serves as the Sourcing Manager at Hudson RPO. An active member of the Recruiting community, Mike has spoken publicly in an effort to help elevate the level of professional skill. Follow Mike on Twitter @Mike1178 or connect with him on LinkedIn.

Friend or Foe: The Hiring Manager Conundrum

Cats, as TS Eliot once pointed out, are solitary creatures. Much like Stevie Nicks and Fleetwood Mac, they can go their own way – and if the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical is any indication, both will likely do so in spandex, body glitter and slightly disturbing makeup jobs.

I’m not a cat person, of course, which makes me an anomaly in HR and on YouTube, apparently, but there’s a reason the term “herding cats” serves as such an apt descriptor of futility.

Recruiters, similarly, lead a lonely existence as an intermediary between the often competing interests of hiring managers and candidates, a thankless job that’s a lot like being an offensive lineman in football – you only get noticed when you screw up.

With an increasingly intricate workload involving stuff like social recruiting, SEO/SEM and content marketing to add to the already intense demands inherent to juggling literally dozens of reqs, hiring managers and internal decision makers with the priorities of hundreds of active candidates, recruiters increasingly run the risks of getting a penalty flag thrown their way.

Being equal parts content marketer, PR flak, account services rep, brand strategist, career counselor and salesman isn’t easy, but it comes with the territory. Just like having to manage often unmanageable hiring managers, who remain perhaps the biggest thorn in the side of most recruiters – and often the biggest obstacle in an already labyrinthian recruiting process.

It’s All Your Fault.

The fact that recruiters are actually helping hiring managers do their job instead of giving hiring managers another job to do seems like a point that many miss. They blame the recruiter for not surfacing that diamond in the rough, even after submitting dozens of perfectly qualified, interested and viable candidates, and then wonder why it’s taking so damn long to make a hire.

These candidates, of course, have likely been pre-closed and been at least a little sold on an opportunity before agreeing to have the chance to get summarily rejected by hiring managers who have no idea what they’re actually looking for and no idea of what a good thing looks like when they see it.

But until they make their final decision, they keep most of these candidates in limbo in case their first choice doesn’t work out and they have to hurl a Hail Mary.

This puts talent acquisition pros in the awkward position of having literally no news to communicate with candidates desperately seeking some sort of status update while also having to keep them warm – and when they’re not selected, this decision is obviously blamed squarely on the recruiter who, in truth, did what they could to try to get you hired. Let’s face it – our relationships with hiring managers play a key role in making us professional pariahs.

So what, exactly, are recruiters supposed to do to manage a relationship where they have no control and full accountability for driving successful outcomes?

How To Win Candidates and Influence Hiring Managers

Even the best hiring managers can have their bad days – dealing with the worst ones is a torture most of us must suffer with as part of our everyday recruiting reality.

But it doesn’t have to be – there are a lot of small steps that recruiters can take to make a big difference when it comes to partnering with hiring managers to drive optimal outcomes for everyone involved.

Any successful recruiting relationship must be built on the foundation of trust. While that’s kind of a nebulous term, ultimately, trust really comes down to getting everyone on the same page. Once a recruiter and hiring manager, respectively, can agree on what experience and skills are nice to have versus absolutely necessary, we can stop chasing those purple squirrel KSAs and start working together to source, select and onboard candidates.

Finding top talent becomes far easier when each party believes in the other’s ability to fulfill their respective roles and responsibilities.

Building trust with a hiring manager is easier said than done, and sometimes even the best talent practitioners might run into trouble proving that they’re not a mouth breathing idiot from HR they’re forced to work, which is how an unfortunately inordinate amount of our customers and clients perceive recruiters in general.

Fighting that misperception and showing that you’re not only competent, but worth trusting with something as important as finding a future teammate or direct report requires clear, consistent communication – key for ensuring that both parties are always on the same page throughout every chapter of the talent attraction process.

Hiring Managers: Connecting the Dots

My friend Carmen Hudson recently shared an amazing anecdote on a great technique recruiters can use to achieve this seemingly insurmountable process obstacle.

As a corporate recruiter, she was cursed not only with needy hiring managers, but ones who insisted on seeing every resume that came in instead of trusting her to screen and present the qualified ones she and her team were tasked with finding. Faced with the prospect of another meeting with one of these heinous HMs, Carmen came up with a pretty brilliant – and awesome – idea.

The day before the recruiting review with the hiring manager, Carmen’s talent acquisition team gathered to review every. single. resume. in their entire pipeline. Those that were deemed fits for the role received a discrete red dot on the back of their resume.

When Carmen and her hiring manager had their dreaded in=person meeting the next day, the meeting started off as usual, with Carmen forced to patiently go through the fat stack of submitted resumes with her client, one at a time. This, of course, is recruiting’s version of a root canal, and ain’t nobody got time for that – so she finally played her trump card and asked the hiring manager to turn the resumes over, revealing page after page of red dots.

Carmen went on to carefully explain to her hiring manager the prep work that her and her team did prior to the meeting to identify and evaluate the candidates the hiring manager wanted to see without her client also sacrificing hours of productivity for reviewing completely unqualified resumes that would otherwise have been screened out before she was ever forced to even look at them.

Now, having only heard this story second hand, I can only imagine the beam of light shining into the conference room as the clouds parted and the angels started singing as a great big light bulb went off above the hiring manager’s head. But I’m pretty sure that’s what happened, because needless to say, that was the last time she ever had to suffer through another one of those painful and pointless resume review meetings.

I love this story, because it’s a pretty clever and efficient answer to a complex and challenging problem. Now, not every hiring manager conundrum requires such a dramatic solution, but sometimes, you’ve got to prove you’re worth trusting to earn it. And no matter what it takes, it’s that proof of concept that’s such a critical key for unlocking the hearts and minds of hiring managers – and turning them from foe into friend.

If you’re like most recruiters and still struggle with how to build, manage and maintain healthy relationships with your hiring managers, what’s changed about this dynamic in the ever evolving world of work, and how to create sustainable, scalable and successful relationships, we’ve got your back.

Click here to join me and Bill Boorman next week, April 21, 2015 at 2 PM ET for an exclusive webinar just for Recruiting Daily readers, Hiring Manager: Friend or Foe?, presented in partnership with our friends at Take The Interview.

Register now, because seats are limited, and this is one hour full of awesome insights, actionable advice and real takeaways you can really use to really improve the way you work with hiring managers to find, attract and engage top talent.

I’ve been looking forward to this one for a while, and this is one webinar you won’t want to miss.

Trust me.

Disclaimer: the author of this post is on the advisory board for Take the Interview, but was not directly compensated for this post. Hey, speaking of trust, transparency is apparently a pretty big deal these days.

Datanyze Your Sales, Marketing and Recruiting Workflow

What is Datanyze

Datanyze is a sales intelligence platform that helps sales organizations and businesses reveal critical information to Datanyze Logohelp them close deals. It’s a mind blowing data tool that allows you to learn more about your competitors than they know about themselves. It’s true, and here is why this is important.

Smart business decisions are made on data. but not just any data, and no, we are not going with Big Data…. Smart Business decisions are made on data that helps you to predict what the future may hold in your cards. Is the CIO at your target company ready to leave? Is the ATS that Yahoo is using falling apart and forcing the HRIS wizard to move on and ship out RFP’s?

Datanyze will get you to a place that allows you to recognize where and what these triggers are, more importantly giving you the confidence to strike with assiduity that you are having a meaningful conversation.

From Datanyze: “Because we do this on a daily basis, we can see when people start a software trial,” CEO Ilya Semin told me. “So we can tell their competitors, and they can call those companies, and the sales rep can say: “I see you’re checking out our competitor’s solution right now … why don’t you try ours as well?”

Here is a brief video overview

[youtube url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McsKTgCT36Q&feature=youtu.be” width=”500″ height=”300″]

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

Agency Recruiting: Why Size Matters in Staffing

I recently read Matt Charney’s blog post about how the corporate recruiting market is using big data for in-house talent acquisition (great read, and I swear he didn’t even pay me to say that). The relative size of “community,” whether measured in terms of social fans and followers, the number of qualified candidates in one’s database or the overall reach of their recruitment marketing and advertising initiatives, is something that lots of people talk about in the agency recruiting and staffing markets, too.

While many recruiters think that they in fact have done an effective job scaling and sustaining these communities, the reality is, most of these networks are small and mostly insignificant, statistically speaking – teensy enough to give most staffing professionals with any basis for comparison some sort of complex.

In agency recruiting and third party staffing, the term “big data” is seen as a literal statement – it’s about having lots of data, and the erroneous underlying assumption that all this data is good data, not necessarily how relevant or actionable those analytics actually are.

Which kind of misses the entire point, really.

Tiny and Pointless: Big Data and Recruiting Communities

It’s no secret that there is, indeed, “lots of data” out there, but for some reason, many third party recruiting firms still choose to ignore the hard numbers for the soft stuff they’ve always used for measuring success, hoping that good will, a good reputation and serendipity alone will continue being enough to find and place top talent at their respective clients.

The problem with this approach is that its limited largely to leveraging a recruiter’s existing network, and these networks just aren’t big enough to keep pleasuring most agency customers and clients over the long term – at least not anymore, since personal and professional information are no longer proprietary property, communities having been made a commodity by such technologies as search and social media.

Consider the third party recruiter on LinkedIn or Twitter, two of the most commonly utilized platforms for building “communities” at agencies and staffing firms. The “average” recruiter has only 940 connections on LinkedIn and 290 followers on Twitter.

These are literally a drop in the bucket – and while those numbers might look big without a basis of comparison, they’re laughably small by social media standards; consider that fully half of recruiters with Twitter accounts have under 50 followers, and even the estimated 92% of recruiters leveraging LinkedIn have networks that average 14% smaller than their non-recruiting counterparts.

Why is it that a profession so obsessed with social media and volume metrics are suffering from such a persistent and pervasive case of shrinkage?

This is often because:

Agency owners, leaders and managers don’t put much stock in social (# is still a pound sign to most of these ardent cold callers) or care about online communities as a success metric for staffing, thus driving down these statistics. #getonthephone
Neither social nor talent networks are fully integrated or even tangentially interconnected with any part of agencies’ standard workflow, processes or procedures, and most agencies don’t gather or leverage the networks or data easily obtainable through their recruiters’ own profiles. #ownership
Recruiters have no idea what the hell “good” looks like, and have no benchmark for realizing that a community of, say, 1,000 connections or followers on LinkedIn does not, in fact, rock. #sizematters

Now, this isn’t even bringing Facebook, the world’s largest social network in terms of number of users and information shared, into the conversation about communities, since most recruiters still see this as a personal network, and leveraging this professionally represents some sort of giant breach of personal privacy! Of course, my views on Facebook in recruiting are a whole other post entirely, formed mostly around the maxim of ‘get on it’ instead of the standard ‘get away from me’ attitude so many staffing practitioners seem to have.

Of course, individual networks aren’t nearly as large – or potentially powerful – as taking those of every recruiter at any given agency in aggregate. Of course, on social every recruiter’s network – and relative size – is visible. And while you might think that those couple hundred connections are a sign of a pretty awesome community, chances are they don’t stack up to most of your candidates, clients and competitors.

Don’t believe me, just do a quick comparison. Most of you will be surprised at how teensy and insignificant your communities actually are.

I’ll Show You Mine If You Show Me Yours

So, thanks to social, the average recruiters’ community – and its relative size – is on display for the entire world to see. And they’re probably smirking at how small your talent tools really are. Here’s a fundamental fact: who you are connected to directly impacts who will connect with you.

This networking effect is one of the most integral and important things for anyone trying to build a community – on social media or otherwise – needs to understand and anticipate when developing an approach. But looking at just the major social recruiting platforms as a microcosm of this maxim, consider that each has a behaviorally targeted algorithm which utilizes your existing contacts and communications to try to match you with suggested new prospects or connections automatically.

This means that if you’re not doing “the right things” with your social tool, you’re going to have to overcompensate to build a community proactively rather than develop and grow one organically, and this is going to create more work for less reward than someone whose connections are a true reflection of their actual talent pools or available candidates within their existing communities.

Not that this is anything new; this is no different than the previous iteration of agency recruiting, where success was determined by the size of your stack of resumes and CVs submitted for any particular position, and the relationships and connections in those communities that each respective recruiter could leverage on any given search.

The only difference between the legacy Rolodex or little black book of candidates recruiters have always relied on and the emergence of social and online communities comes down, again, to size.

Seeing the Big Data Picture Is Hard When You’ve Got a Bag On Your Head.

Without exception, every recruiter I know actively wants to develop their “personal brand,” digital reach and overall profile to potential candidates and clients online and on social. This is perhaps the closest recruiting practitioners will ever come to a consensus on anything, but all of us seem to know that deep down, this is going to be a critical competitive advantage for sourcing and attracting talent, filling jobs and ensuring repeat business from a loyal base of satisfied customers.

Again, the business model and workflow processes in place at the average staffing firm or third party agency does not align with this objective, nor is it geared up to help recruiters actually grow or utilize their communities.

In fact, it’s more likely that there are policies in place preempting the practice of building online networks and increasing community engagement, the very things most recruiters need to do more of to win today’s top talent.

Fixing this isn’t rocket science; for most recruiters, it really comes down to the basics. Take Twitter, for example, a network that lots of recruiters simply ignore, either out of ignorance, fear or just because they can’t get a firm handle on what the hell a Twitter actually is.

This is why those who are on it tend to automate their feeds into more or less a repository for spamming jobs into a stream that’s got no content other than crappy jobs and crappier careers content. This is because most recruiters have the same Twitter “strategy” that, is in fact, nothing more than another iteration of ‘post and pray.’

Taking a job brief, removing a few words, chucking it onto your website and adding some social sharing functionality, along with #pointless #job and #recruiting #related #hashtags that are both gratuitous and pointless, will not ever lead to any really measurable or demonstrative return on investment. But the opportunity cost of this crap is probably killing whatever community you might already have; the more you turn up this noise, the likelier they are to tune you out.

I still meet recruiters who think they’ve somehow cracked the code because they’ve figured out how to integrate their LinkedIn and Twitter accounts so that they can post to both networks with one update. Sorry to break it to you, this isn’t the rock and roll approach you think it is. Duplicating content on multiple networks doesn’t make worthless crap any more compelling or valuable to the candidates you’re ostensibly targeting.

Fighting Shrinkage in Your Talent Pools

Sorry to be the one who breaks it to you that your community, if you’re at least “average” for a recruiter, is teeny weeny. I don’t want to give you a complex, but even if you’ve got a thousand connections, that’s not going to be wide enough to satisfy most searches, particularly if you’re recruiting for really niche positions (like a lot of my clients).

In fact, these little bitty communities are probably a turnoff to candidates and clients, since the fact is many judge your efficacy as a recruiter by the size of your followers, connections and fans, and this theoretical candidate database is now fully visible for the world to see.

We know in staffing, size matters. In the not so olden days, recruiters used to use the size of their database or networks as a selling point, and business was won based on who had the biggest and most relevant network of qualified talent in their community. At the moment, I’m writing a lot about how recruiters can learn to love their candidate relationship management (CRM) or applicant tracking systems (ATS) as this, for many recruiters, could become a massive unique selling proposition (USP) in a market which suffers from a complete lack of USPs these days.

I truly want recruiters to be able to go back to the days where they could safely point to their networks and say, “you need to pay me for the privilege of accessing my data to fill your positions” or “76% of the placements I made last year were through my own internal systems, na na na na na nah!”

Social is a salve, but these databases are where community turns from a commodity into actual placeable candidates, closed reqs and billable business.

Everyone Knows You’re Faking It.

You can no longer fake or fabricate how big your community really is, which means that size matters more than ever in recruiting. Yes, you can make the argument that you’ve not yet connected to every potential candidate in your talent pool on social, but having to explain your visible lack of connectivity, no matter what your justification might be, is in fact a disruption to your usual conversations and interactions with your clients and candidates.

You’ve got more convincing arguments to make than this if you’re like most agency recruiters I know – and that time and energy is better spent on developing or closing business than justifying your community’s small members.

Recruiters need to get a handle on data – after all, it’s the most powerful currency we’ve got.

But simply seeing big data as “big” rather than appreciating the value those numbers represent means missing out on the potential payoff of mining that data. This means that not only does size matter, but it’s increasingly all that matters when it comes to scoring in staffing or building lasting relationships instead of simply a bunch of one night stands.

Trust me: if your data isn’t big enough, word is going to get around – and you’ll soon see your staffing success shrivel up. Because no one in your talent pool is willing to settle for small when they can work with someone who’s really packing their pipeline.

About the Author: Lisa Jones is a Director of Barclay Jones, a consultancy working with agency recruiters on their recruitment technology and social media strategies. Prior to Barclay Jones. Lisa worked in a number of Recruitment, IT, Web and Operations director-level roles. She is a technology and strategy junkie with keen eyes on the recruitment and business process.

You’ll see Lisa speaking at many recruitment industry events and being a recruitment technology and social media evangelist online. She works with some of the large recruitment firms, as well as the smaller, agile boutique agencies.

You can follow Lisa on Twitter @LisaMariJones or connect with her on LinkedIn.

Candidates Are Not Customers.

There’s been a lot of discussion about the many similarities between customers and candidates, particularly as relates to improving candidate experience. It’s a convenient comparison, sure, but before adopting this approach, it’s important to recognize there are important differences between customers and candidates every employer and recruiter needs to consider.

First, let’s start off with the obvious fact that, as a general rule, companies don’t get the luxury of picking and choosing their individual customers.

If they did, employers would quickly find themselves facing a landslide of litigation, most likely a class action suit since this approach would more or less send a sign to consumers that “we reserve the right not to serve you,” and there’s a pretty pervasive precedent showing that this is, in fact, almost never the case. So, from a compliance standpoint alone, the comparison of candidates and customers seems like a stretch.

Then, of course, there are the business implications – sales and marketing work to touch every lead and potential consumer in their funnel, and work diligently to ensure an appropriate level of service and support for anyone who chooses to buy. Few, if any, companies would ever think to turn away (or turn a cold shoulder) potential customers, obviously quite unlike candidates. The sales and marketing functions accept that they have to target, develop and convert those leads into new business in order to keep doing business, not once, but every time.

The customer is always in charge – and at almost every company, that approach alone is quite literally the bottom line. Customers can get pricing and product information before ever entering the store, and know exactly what it is they’re buying (and, for added peace of mind, are generally given a warranty or a window for returning the item, something candidates can only dream of when considering an offer). The customer knows what their friends, family and other customers think before they decide what to buy and from whom, and there’s no more powerful marketing tool than word of mouth.

That’s why if a customer isn’t treated fairly, if their experience doesn’t meet the expectations set BY them (based on available information, prior experience and ‘branding), they’ll take their business – and probably, that of the same friends and family who referred them in the first place – straight to a competitor. Customers don’t necessarily need you, and they vote with their pocketbooks and wallets – and there’s a lot of power in those purse strings.

Companies tend to want to develop, engage and build lasting relationships with the maximum number of potential and existing customers as they can possibly manage during all stages of the purchasing cycle, before, during and after the actual point of sale. The fact that the power in consumer-company relationships primarily rests with the customer is one of the most fundamental assumptions underlying every organization’s basic business model.

Why Candidates Aren’t Customers (Yet).

Then, consider the case of candidates. Unlike customers, they don’t generally have the luxury of choosing the exact job they want with the exact employer they’re looking to work for.

Sure, they may come across an opening that’s perfectly aligned with their purchasing criteria, but even if they want an advertised opportunity, they have to go through a rigorous application, interview, assessment and referencing process to even hope to ultimately be chosen for an offer.

I’m pretty certain most customers would submit themselves to something similar when buying a product, and almost every company wouldn’t even consider subjecting potential buyers to these sorts of hurdles while actively driving a purchasing decision.

Candidates might be attracted to a particular employer en masse, due to its reputation, culture, mission, vision or values, but even the most informed of applicants generally don’t know much more about an advertised position other than maybe a bullet point list of qualifications and a boilerplate company description.

Seldom do they know any specifics on price (or compensation, in this case), anything about the hiring manager or team, or what it really takes to be successful in the role. Even if they can successfully demonstrate they meet all of the posted qualifications and move on in the process, they won’t know these types of details so imperative to making any sort of informed employment decision until they actually compete for it.

Unlike customers, for whom sales and marketing deliberately casts the widest possible net, employers seldom invest or place any sort of premium on developing relationships with more than a handful of qualified candidates at any one time. The rest, generally, are widely expected to fend for themselves, and there’s an implicit understanding that unlike customers, all control lies with the company, not the candidates. They’re on their own.

Candidates as Customers: The Coming Convergence

Over the past two decades, the explosion of emerging technologies capable of creating, collecting, curating ever larger amounts of data has accelerated the pace of change and driven down costs for everyone.

Employers forget that, just like customers, candidates don’t just have access to an extraordinary amount of information about them, but increasingly, use that information to inform whether or not they even apply.

Candidates have a choice, too.

This data explosion, coupled with the emergence of constant connectivity, real time communication and the ease of sharing information with affinity groups and networks of people with shared personal and professional interests, has effectively worked to slowly, but surely, narrow the gap in the way we define and approach ‘customers’ and ‘candidates’ respectfully.

Truth be told, the needs and agenda of every employer stakeholder, from hiring managers to employees to the frontline recruiters themselves, have become exponentially more visible, increasingly intermeshed and seemingly on an inevitable collision course towards future convergence. It’s only when this convergence occurs that customers and candidates will actually achieve parity instead of just paying this idea lip service.

We tend to refer to the concepts of ‘Customer Experience’ or the ‘Candidate Experience’ as sitting in a silo, but the truth is that the ‘Buying Experience’ or the ‘Recruiting Experience’ have never existed in a vacuum, and every stakeholder has to play a part in these processes to achieve any sort of optimal outcome. This understanding has evolved the way we approach candidates, and ALL shareholders, from executive leadership to third party vendors, recognize the impact of these changes on employee productivity, satisfaction, and overall engagement.

If we can’t provide an exceptional experience when people are first joining the workforce, than we’re setting a standard that seems to set up our people for failure, which is in diametrical opposition to the primary goal of talent acquisition and management.

Key Customer Experience Considerations for Candidates

The tectonic shift in the way we treat candidates, from supplicating peons to partners in the recruiting process and customers of a career purchasing decision is inevitable, and rapidly nearing its next stage.

This next stage will see employers adopt a customer-centric, business results driven recruiting function which treats candidates as educated customers and consumers of work.

A few cutting edge companies have already achieved this, but having this approach be a recruiting rule rather than an exception isn’t far off.

Here are a few key considerations every employer needs to think about to change their approach to candidates today so that they can compete for – and win – the top talent of tomorrow.

Educated customers want to know about the long term implications of the material they’re buying, instead of simply being sold on the short term of a single position or open opportunity with the employer. They want to know how long that position is likely to last, what changes they might be able to expect, and what potential opportunities might be next. Candidates will want to know not just what they’ll be doing in a job, but how people who have held similar roles within the company have benefited their careers by doing their job. They’ll want to get a better sense of history in order to make a more informed decision about the future, asking questions about how long predecessors have stayed in a role, and where they went next, before ultimately accepting an offer.
Educated Customers want to know the source of the materials in the career product you’re asking them to purchase, and want to make sure that it’s in no way tainted, was accurately labeled and manufactured to a certain standard of quality, and that everything under the hood is as advertised. Candidates continue to ask the same questions:

How does this job contribute to the bigger business? How does this company contribute to the communities in which its employees live and work? What kind of training will I be given? What is the quality I can expect from my managers and teammates, and what quality will they expect of me? How accurate and complete is the information I have about the work I’ll do?
Educated customers know that they’re a commodity, and that when they’re looking to purchase an employment product, the simple laws of supply and demand favor top talent. This market means those with the most in demand skills know that they have options, and are selective enough consumers to be alright with waiting for the next shipment instead of being forced to pick over existing inventory. That means employers increasingly need to keep top talent engaged and actively build long term relationships with their candidate pipeline, because those who are in the shortest supply are going to be right, even if the opportunity isn’t ‘right now.’ Recruiting, increasingly, will be a marathon, not a sprint.
Educated customers can decide for themselves what information is relevant, and can assess employers and opportunities through their own perspective instead of relying on the recruiter or generic corporate careers copy. They can research and inform their decision on whether or not to apply to a company or even accept an offer by looking beyond the pretty package presented to them by employers, and increasingly use this screening to do a smarter job self-selecting out instead of as an affirmation for opting in. Candidates are starting to do this, but aren’t completely there yet. That’s why employers have to start educating and providing real value for potential candidates now, so that when they’re actually in the sales process, both sides can successfully close out an offer with as little effort (and surprises) as possible.

Marketers today salivate over the litany of new methods available to measure things like net promoter score, share of voice, customer and market sentiment, leveraging this data’s potential to accurately forecast future sales and growth. They understand that these metrics are critical in understanding where their weaknesses and strengths are with customers, and how to refine their message and experience to drive new business and retain existing customers.

A small, but growing, cadre of employers are hoping to do the same for candidates and quality of hire, using the same predictive analytics and monitoring approach as their customer-facing colleagues to determine the overall candidate market, competitive landscape and quality/source of hire.

Their stories – and what employers and recruiters can learn from these early adopters – can be found on the Candidate Experience Awards website (click here for more).

That we even have these awards, or that some of the biggest brands in the world are putting their money where their mouth is and evolving their approach to candidate experience is an encouraging sign that in business, we’re moving in the right direction, and inevitably building the sort of momentum – and buy-in – to have the customer and candidate experience converge in the not too distant future.

Only a few years ago, even discussing Candidate Experience was largely seen as silly, impractical, and without merit.

Now? I’d say you don’t have to look too far to see that times – and mindsets – are changing. And while we’re not there yet, the progress we’re making is encouraging. But there’s still a lot to do before candidates truly become customers. Good news is, we’re on the right path.

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

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

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