Own a Ferrari, but can’t drive stick. Twittering and Googling never out-corner a well trained hiring manager.

/1 Comment/in , /by

That’s right. All the googling, hunting, twittering, blogging, myspacing, linkedin-ing (that one is hard to say) in the world is not going to close a hire for you. But guess what – neither did the cold calling, Monster crawling, careerbuilding, or yahoo-ing (this is getting fun). All these processes and tools just identifies the candidate.

People take jobs for ALL kinds of reasons. But its rare that it has anything to do with how they were found. Its about how they are treated. 

Yes – unemployment is up. But guess what – more people are holding on to their jobs more than ever. If you think there are people “available” now – wait until 18 months from now. When the people who are holding on to a job are at their wits end and the economy recovers. Do you really think that a candidate is going to be impressed because you connected them via Twitter? Because your company was crafty enough to find them on Facebook because they forgot to change their security settings? I am sure they will be impressed right until you tell them that job is a lateral move. Or further impressed when the manager is late for the interview. Or when the manager asks “are you pregnant?” Yeah – I just had someone tell me that war story.

These behaviors and other like them, are happeningmore now than every. Why? Maybe we got lazy. Maybe people are out of practice. Maybe we stopped hiring and let go our recruiters. Funny thing is that most companies are getting more traffic than ever before. Call your recruiter and see if the conversation goes like this: “Are we getting more resumes…..yeah…..uh huh…. We are huh?….. Well, who is respond….oh, we let her go huh…..ohhh…they are getting a standard reply via email….”

See what I mean. That will make you stand out. One of 300 auto reply messages that candidates are getting daily. That’s their feedback. That is about as exciting as deals I get in my spam box.

Not to worry – candidates will be impressed with one key item. They will be impressed with the ease and ability to tell everyone via text, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, blogs and so on that your employment process is weak. There is no fury…like a poorly treated candidate with social networking skills (I know – not as catchy as the other phrase). Do you really want people to think NOW that you don’t care about them? That you think you are all high and mighty and you don’t need to give them feedback? That you were not organized? That your interview questions sounded canned or like the ones they heard 30 minutes ago from the interviewer next door? That you didn’t even look at their resume before the interview?

NOW IS THE TIME.
This is such a fantastic time to focus on the fundamentals of recruiting, and why people take jobs in the first place.

NOW IS THE TIME.
Control your brand. Control yourself. Don’t get sloppy – get lean. Contrary to popular belief there is not more talent out there. Why are we saying that? Because more people are out of work? Because companies are going down? Because bonuses are being skipped? Guess what – those people were there. They had their heads down, and were working. There is this myth that in October of 2008 we created a bunch of people in a lab, and they are on blue light special at KMart. They are just talking to you now because they have to – not necessarily because they want to.

NOW IS THE TIME.
Ask yourself why you are working at your company, and make sure that you can explain that better than anyone. Tell each and every candidate you know. Better yet, tell everyone. For every resume that comes across your desk, make sure that person gets a “thank you”. That they are taken care of. That they remember that even though they did not get the job, they were treated with decency. It will come back to you 7x over.

Fireside Chat:
In order to make that “Ferrari” (all your twittering) turn like its on rails, rather than stalling on the hill, review what people tend to consider when taking jobs in the first place. View this diagram that help walk you though the “four corners” of an employee value proposition. Take these into consideration and have strong points of view on each. You will inevitably create better jobs, be able to provide more value to the interview, create a better experience when interfacing with candidates, and likely make better decisions about a hire.

Companies Taking Similar Recruiting Approaches in Down Economy

/0 Comments/in /by

On March 20, 2009, I moderated a panel of recruiting leaders in Chicago about how this economy has affected their processes and the techniques they use in order to lead effective recruiting organizations. The Human Resources Management Association of Chicago was kind enough to ask me to facilitate. Prior to the questioning the panel in front of 75 leaders in staffing and HR, I spent about 90 minutes with each panelist reviewing their practices in staffing, so we could build a robust presentation.

The panel included David Meija of Pepsi Americas, Darcy Zulpo of Citadel, and Melissa McMahon of CDW. 

Preparing for the Panel
Realize that as I moderated the panel, I wanted to keep the panel and audience engaged. I really wanted to get our panel to share as much as they could about transforming their organizations, while having the audience heard. Keeping a robust discussion was important, as my conversations with staffing leaders recently have had overtones of concern and confusion around maintaining value when requisitions are low. This has rung true even more in organizations where supporting functions like HR, finance, and IT have a weaker strategic position. I really have not seen any trends on “Recruiting’s value” based on the size of company or an industry – it’s the mindset of the company that has been the common trend. That observation proved true with these panelists and their organizations, as each had varied in industry, size, and design, but clearly all three leaders have influence within their organizations, and the respect (and ear) of executive leadership.

This Review…
With the permission of our panelists, I have taken the liberty of paraphrasing the answers to the questions that I asked during the panel, and offered some takeaway action items and suggestions. I have added some commentary throughout that reflects insights that I have seen from other companies and also reflects the discussions that I had one on one with each panelist.

Post Article…
A word of advice before you start moving the chess pieces internally – think of change management as a boat that needs to be turned. To drive this analogy home, realize that recruiting may be behind the wheel, but is rarely the captain of any ship and never on a boat alone. You can turn the wheel, but your turn has to match the mindset of your passengers (and how fast they can tolerate a turn), the size of the ship (and how fast it can turn without tipping over or be deemed an emergency), and how the captain and first mate think the turn has been executed. If your company is a cruise ship and you spin that wheel too fast, an alarm goes off, passengers lose balance, and the officer core starts asking questions quick. If you are a speedboat, that same wheel turn could be expected, admired, and even applauded.

Thanks to the panelists, HRMAC, and the attendees for making this a great event. We are doing it again on May 19th, with the staffing leaders from Sara Lee, Exelon, and Career Education Corporation.

(Open the PDF to this lengthy article…)

Economic Recovery Demands High Value Recruiting

/0 Comments/in /by

Recruiters Must Become Indispensable while Co-Sourcing Flexible

During this economic downturn, recession, slump – pick your phrase, we have seen more contract recruiters and search companies take a hit. Not a surprise. Less hires, and thereby less to outsource to third parties. As I talk with third party recruiting organizations, many are trying desperately to branch out into other industries, get new accounts, and market. Many are changing terms and offering discounts. This behavior was expected, and as with the time after the Internet boom, and there are a percentage of these staffing companies that just won’t make it through. There are a number of contract recruiters that will also want to go inside.

Our US economic situation may not allow for it. HR transformation (defined as increasing the percentage of HR specialists in recruiting, compensation, OD, and other HR disciplines) has been a trend for several years. Companies that decided to have internal recruiting organizations or use RPO have likely already done so. The out of work contract recruiters, those working for RPO that were laid off, and executive search associates are going to find that their brothers and sisters in corporate recruiting are also being let go, so how is there possibly room for them inside, let alone getting transactional business? Hundreds if not thousands of corporate recruiters have their goals and objectives tied to open requisitions and certain activities that assume the company is hiring.

How did we get here? How did we so closely link the entire function to transactional work? Why did we not align recruiting to business objectives like other critical functions such as procurement, finance, and information technology? We had the opportunity to transition to organizations that were built with strategic leaders and rely on partnerships and flexible staffs (aka not headcount) to do the variable work. As staffing experts, we should have known better.

We should have learned from our manufacturing teams, who eliminated part time workers and outsourced shift labor in exchange for efficiency, quality, and safety experts. From our IT colleagues, that stopped doing programming in house and got business analysts with MBAs to sit with the business and solve problems. But what done is done. We have lots of recruiters with no jobs to fill, and thus no need for recruiters. So what is a corporate or commercial recruiter to do?

Short answer: Our HR and executive leaders need to retool the function to be staffed to a certain headcount level that does NOT regard the number of positions.

What? You want me to build a recruiting organization but not use the number of hires that we have as an indicator of how many people should be on the team?

Exactly. For years we have been measuring time to fill, cost per hire, and all these different metrics, and benchmarking ourselves against companies. Google does this, and Microsoft does that. Honeywell does this and GE does that. Well now we have no reqs open (or 75% less) and we have a bunch of managers looking around saying “what are you doing?”

Let’s admit something here – most companies don’t have brands like Google or Microsoft, and many don’t have the HR / project management excellence of Honeywell or General Electric. So why do we continue to try to mimic their every move? All that has done has put us in a position to talk about operations and now we have no operations, so we are expendable. We became the manufacturing plant that needs to be shut down because nobody is buying cars.

In this economy, we need to focus on one thing as recruiter leaders: making sure that the team we have is indispensable – regardless of the number of hires. We need to focus on making sure that the core group of employees that remain are deemed highly valuable. The work that they do is absolutely necessary, and their existence is not simply related to the number of requisitions they carry. Our economy is likely going to go up and down for a while, so we don’t have the luxury of staffing full time employees up and down with the Dow and S&P 500.

Take this time to look at your remaining group and re-think. Here are some steps to get you started on building an indispensable team, and one that will retain employees in the new economy:

1. EVALUATE THE TEAM
Figure out if there are team members in your organization that were hired based on the simple fact that they can handle managers and fill reqs when open. This group may need some training. Get them trained up on project management, special initiatives, and communicating with managers regularly and regardless of hire. They are likely already targets for dismissal or may already be looking at industries that are hiring now and ready to make a switch when the flood gates open.

2. TALK TO LEADERS ABOUT THEIR PLANS
Get a handle of the attrition and retention rates of your company historically, and ask the CEO and executive suite what the real plans are. Are you letting people go? Acquiring? Divesting? Get a handle on the new volume – not so you can divide up the reqs, so you can create a service organization that can enable the business. You need to plan on some hiring eventually, and your team needs to be customer service oriented, and ready for anything in this new economy. Now is not the time to start adding hiring managers to each member of your team – its time to have each hiring manager get MORE time with each recruiter.

3. PREPARE FOR MORE WORK
Assume that it will be harder than before to perform staffing. The talent marketplace may have increased, but that does not always mean it is easier. Look at the facts – we were already on track for talent shortage with the baby boomers retiring, and that generation lost 40% of its net worth. You think they are retiring now? NO – they are staying put, and likely not moving around. With real estate in the tank, few can sell their house. With more dual income families than ever before, having the spouse leave the other job is going to be difficult. We already have more applicants applying per requisition, meaning more to go through. We are having more conversations with managers about hiring the unemployed or the underemployed and what that means. There are more people on LinkedIn, CareerBuilder, and Monster than EVER before. BTW – we stripped our recruiting down to the bone, so all this extra work has to get done by less people. So plan accordingly – use technology, outsourcing, and flexible staff to get the extra stuff done.

4. KEEP DRIVING INITIATIVES
Lay out all the projects that need to get done in the next 24 months and assign with retention in mind. ATS upgrades, university relations programs, interview training, etc. Assume that you are staffing at full bore – what areas need improvement? Start now. Figure out how long it will take and how much your team is capable of doing. If you can do it all – great. Likely you can’t. I may live in a house, but it does not mean I can build one. Use your vendors, partners, consultants, and contractors to augment where your need. Push your team to projects that teach them something, and stretch them, but don’t wear them out. Indispensable means you can’t throw them away, but also means you can’t dump on them either. Figure out who is working on what, and get the OK from management, and make those goals and objectives bonus driven.

5. BUILD FOR SCALE
Some of your new core organization will never touch a requisition. Some may have to, so build that in. Now go and get the flexible team to surround your core team. Maybe they are full time – maybe not. Could be internal or external. My advice is make it easy to turn them on and off, and make the ROI justified. You want an internal sourcing group using search strings and blogs to save on search fees? Fine. Make sure you can still justify it. If you are not hiring executives or have been able to attract executives without hard core sourcing in this economy, then your justification for a full time internal sourcing team may no longer be valid (or have changed). Remember there is tons of great contractor talent out there. $100 per hour may be expensive, but part time work for 60 hours a month @ $100 / hour is cheaper than a full time sourcer at $75,000 in salary, overhead, and management.

The watchword is now (and always has been) VALUE. We are under pressure now to drive value in recruiting and prove our existence. It will look different in the coming months, but with planning we can be much better off than where we were.

Is Your Recruiting Partner Sustainable?

/0 Comments/in , /by

Offered By Andrew Gadomski, Founder & Northeast Advisor

As we know, partners in recruiting are so critical, as they provide core competencies that typically do not reside within a corporate recruiting function. Partners are not limited to those that provide human capital (like RPO, executive search, or contract recruiting). Partners include any third party that you engage for a service to add value to your recruiting process. Employment advertising and branding companies, ATS providers, and CRM systems are partners as they execute tasks that are not performed by the recruiter.

So what is a “Sustainable Partner”? The word sustainable has several meanings, but in Green Recruiting, it refers to how your partners perform their work with a minimum long-term effect on the environment.

Recruiting requires a lot of energy (sometimes more than we all would like). Specifically though, the actual hiring of an employee can produce a tremendous amount of carbon emissions and nonrecycled waste. Companies can make changes with their own practices as well as their partners without negative impact to results. In fact, incorporating this type of thinking tends to yield improvements, as processes are reviewed and changes are made.

An opportunity for sustainability is how the partner delivers work product to you, and markets to you. Maybe they send you a nice brochure once or twice a year and a few mailers about new products. Maybe your executive recruiter prints up beautiful candidate profiles in a binder and send via FedEx. As nice as all that looks and feels, realize they are probably doing that to several hundred times over. How much waste does that produce? Companies with a practice of creating a simple brochure with about a dozen pages and a few slicks a year kills 1 tree, wastes 727 gallons of water, create 27 pounds of solid waste, releases 75 pounds of CO2 into the air, and burns 311 kilowatts of energy.

In comparison, that is equivalent to them keeping a low flow showerhead running for 8 hours straight, throwing 7 large trash bags of waste into a landfill, and keeping a 60W lamp on for about 6000 hours. Ask them to send you a PDF version, and don’t print it. Request to be off the postal mailing list. Make sure they use online tools, downloads and docs to communicate. Many firms have already made that leap – but the question is “have yours”?

Here are other questions you should ask. Remember, the partner is working for you, and helping your company acquire talent, so their efficiency has a direct impact on the results of your staffing. When in doubt, go local, virtual, and recycle as much as possible. 

  • What technologies and virtual tools does my partner use? What practices have those tools replaced?
  • Do my executive recruiters use local offices or videoconferencing, or do they get on a plane?
  • Do they use public transportation within their cities to interview candidates?
  • How do my relocation partners conduct business? Is it environmentally friendly?
  • Do my realtors focus on getting my employees into energy efficient homes? Sustainable neighborhoods?
  • Does my company have an energy efficiency policy about new home builds? Do we have a partner?
  • Does my relocation policy / company offer incentives for LEED compliance in a build or move in?
  • Do we / our relocation company offer incentives for buying a home versus building?
  • What percentage of the candidates provided by recruiters are local so we can reduce relocation?
  • How efficient is our travel agent? Do we do direct flights or connections?
  • How many times does our recruiting team (external or internal) have us flying in candidates or managers
  • What is the sustainability policy of the hotels and transportation companies we use for recruiting?
  • What facilities do all my partners use? Are they energy efficient?
  • Do we use virtual or home-based partners?
  • How does my partner operate? Is it efficient? Do I even know?
  • How many of my partner representatives can I see in the next 60 minutes? Are they local – can they be?
  • How does my advertising agency use / recommend virtual tools? Paper tools? Why?
  • How do I get support? Online? In-person? Locally?
  • How does my ATS or and on-boarding process reduce printing and candidate travel? Does it at all? Do I use it?