[NOTE: Please take my short survey on recruiting trends from last week's article. The whole process will take you less than 10 minutes, and I will report on the results in future columns.] Do you know that recruiting remains one of the least efficient processes in an organization? Transaction costs (cost per hire) are large, and there is almost no effort being made to connect that cost with delivering value (quality of hire). At conference after conference, I hear the same old measures being touted proudly: cost per hire, time to fill, number of interviews to offer, and so forth. It seems like no one is measuring the effects of our recruiting activities. Senior executives are starting to ask what value we are delivering to them, and sadly few of us have any answers. Recruiting is one of the few functions that has not examined in-depth what it does and how it could begin to do things differently. To meet the challenges of time, quality and cost it is going to be necessary to blow the whole enterprise up and start reinventing it from scratch. There is no time left for evolutionary tweaks. I know that many recruiters feel that there are too many things they cannot control to contend with, including fickle hiring managers, rigid compensation schemes, corporate culture, and geography. But that’s true of managers in other functions as well. Manufacturing managers have had to learn the discipline of keeping costs at rock bottom, while improving quality and increasing output. And they do this against a backdrop of highly variable customer demand, supplier uncertainties, and the impact of national and international disasters. Finance, too, has transformed itself over the past decade, reducing the cost and time it takes to close the books each quarter, enforcing better cost accounting measures, and moving everything to the computer. For decades, recruiters have been using the same techniques for finding, enticing, assessing, and hiring people. All of these steps are based on a number of assumptions. While I have identified more than a dozen commonly held assumptions, I think these five I outline below are the most dangerous. I contend that all of these assumptions are either plain wrong or need to be challenged for their relevance in an information- and Internet-based world. Let’s look at each one in more detail. Next week, in the second part of this article series, I will begin to outline how a new process for recruiting, built on technology, can impact each of these. 1. Passive candidates are the best. I have never understood why we believe that a person not actively looking for a new job is “better” than one who is looking. Those who are looking may well be the ones with initiative and curiosity. They also may be the ones who have the foresight to explore new careers or move to a more stable organization. Many passive candidates lack the initiative to look for another job and are waiting for a new position to find them. Obviously there are excellent performers who are content in their current position that we would like to hire. But, even if we succeed in luring the person out of that job and into our firm, will she stay and perform as well? Whether a person is an active or a passive candidate should make no difference at all. What should always matter is whether they have the skills and qualifications to perform effectively for your organization, and whether they fit your corporate culture and share your organization’s passions. People who are lured away by money or titles may not be the ones you really want. 2. It is not possible to keep people as candidates for more than a short time. While we can get into long (and often legally-oriented) discussions about what a candidate is, I use a simple one: anyone who expresses an interest in working for your organization and who has the basic qualifications and skills for some function within it. Your goal ought to be to build a talent pool of interested and qualified people who can be tapped instantly when a position is open. People who have expressed an interest in you and meet minimum requirements are like jewels. As our economy picks up and talent becomes scarcer again, you will be very glad to have these people in your network. Most people like to be kept in the loop and informed about potential openings, even when nothing is available at the moment. Simple communication tools and a collaborative attitude can keep most people interested in your organization for a long time. Nothing is worse than the bounce-back email and the black hole where most people end up. Talent pools are distinctively different than resume databases, and offer more value to both the candidate and the organization. 3. Most candidates want to apply with a resume and don’t like online screening. Did you enjoy writing your resume? I know it is one of those chores I dread and have fortunately only had to do a few times. The assumption that people like to write resumes is just plain wrong ó most people don’t have a current resume at all. Even if they do, they often have not included the things you really want to know anyway. There are better ways to get information about a candidate, including online forms and questionnaires. The data collection can be done in creative and interactive ways that make it much less painful to the candidate and yet give you the information you need. I will discuss many new approaches to this next week. 4. Each candidate has to be interviewed in person. This is also plain bull. Interviews are very poor predictors of success or performance. A good behavioral interview may improve the prediction by a bit, but still not raise it much above chance. While it is in human nature to want to meet and like a person we are going to work with, this meeting should not be equated with skill or ability assessment. There are hundreds of excellent, legal, affordable tests available for more accurately screening candidates. These tools, combined with a website also designed as a screening tool, can greatly improve your ability to select candidates who have the capability, the motivation, and the skills to perform. It is possible to entirely skip the interview and get better quality candidates than you do today. 5. There is no way to show a direct correlation between the sourcing and interview process and the eventual performance of the candidate. If this is really true, we should all start circulating our resumes for new positions. We will have to begin showing how what we do adds to the output of our organizations, or our functions will be outsourced to those who can. Recruiters have put too much focus on measuring activity, and not any on measuring outcomes. In the end, how a candidate performs and how much they contribute are the only criteria that matter. Quality can be measured in a dozen ways: how quickly a new employee can perform the job, how much capacity she has to take on new functions, how many sales dollars she brought in, or how much money she saved us. These can be tracked against source, qualifications, and recruiter. More on this, as well, in next week’s column. If you think there are other assumptions that are dangerous or wrong, send me an email. I’d love to know what you think they are. Let’s all pledge to start blowing recruiting up and reinventing it for the 21st century! p.s. Don’t forget to take my short survey on recruiting trends!
Archive for March, 2004
Corporate Staffing: It’s a Risky Business
Staffing professionals are faced with risk daily. Risk comes from a variety of sources, and can be a strong motivator. What are some of the specific risks facing a staffing professional, and what steps can be taken to mitigate those risks? EEOC Risk The most directly identifiable risk is from potential legal liability. Illegal hiring practices and selection processes that exhibit adverse impact expose a company to tremendous legal liability. Class-action lawsuits filed against a company can result in millions of dollars in damages awarded against the company. These suits are expensive to litigate, tying up significant corporate resources. Corporate resources are also required to mitigate non-compliance. In addition to the financial penalties of defending in these actions, there is considerable damage to a company’s “Employer of Choice” branding, which negatively impacts the ability to attract quality candidates in the future. There is also a negative impact on the company’s brand in the eyes of the public and the company’s customers. Recently, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) issued an interpretation for how the uniform guidelines on employee selection procedures apply to recruiting in the era of the Internet and corporate candidate databases. You and your organization need to be sure you are conversant with and able to respond to this pronouncement. Risks of a Bad Hire Another area of risk in staffing lies in making the wrong hiring decision. A bad hiring decision occurs when the staffing process either screens out a candidate who would have met or exceeded the hiring manager’s expectations or fails to screen out a candidate who does not meet the hiring managers’ expectations. In addition, a bad hire may occur when the staffing process does not react fast enough to hire the candidate who best meets the hiring manager’s expectations, before he or she finds employment elsewhere. The risks and potential losses from making a low quality hire stem from poor productivity and a reduced quality of output. Low quality hires may also result in poor customer service, which leads to revenue loss and even loss of market share. A workforce with a lower overall quality of worker takes longer to bring products to market, resulting in lost competitive advantage. The cost of goods sold is also higher, as the company has to contend with lower productivity. The costs of poor quality are sensitive to the position, increasing dramatically for key positions. The wrong hire may also cost the company hundreds of dollars in employee theft, or millions of dollars in a liability suit. Having made the wrong hiring decision, a company may seek to cut its ongoing losses by replacing the worker. Replacement costs, including sourcing costs, administrative and processing costs, and lost productivity for the hiring manager, all become part of the cost of a bad hire. The cost of a bad hire for a software engineer can exceed millions of dollars, while the wrong choice of a CEO may result in the loss of billions of shareholder value. In short, the costs of a bad hire stem from:
- Loss of productivity
Recruiting Top Performers: It’s Your Job!
article by Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett This past Friday (March 26, 2004), Lou Adler penned an article for his ER Daily column entitled, Why You Must Hire Top Employees, Not Top Candidates. The title of this article is something akin to an absolute truth in my book. In philosophical terms, an absolute truth is an idea or notion that cannot be discredited by any line of thinking. I have come to the belief that the words in his title area the truth not only because I am a diehard capitalist who firmly believes in measuring performance over effort, but also because it is the message I hear most from CEOs, COOs, and CFOs. Hiring Top Performers Is Your Job As recruiters, you do not directly hire anyone in most organizations; that’s generally a decision left to the hiring manager, as it should be. However, you do control all of the processes and procedures responsible for generating the short list of candidates that hiring managers actually see, except in the cases where managers take actions into their own hands and pursue candidates by working directly with third-party recruiting agencies and via direct referral. But as masters of the recruiting process, and the selected representatives of the profession, it is your responsibility to make sure that the processes you put in place and the criteria you use to select candidates doesn’t weed out the very candidates your senior leaders want most. Lou Adler was dead on when he indicated, as a number of studies confirm, that the bulk of criteria used in most recruiting organization has absolutely no correlation to on-the-job performance post hire. Success Is an Attribute Granted To You By Others, Not Yourself In my dealings with numerous recruiting organizations, both domestically and abroad, it has become apparent that most recruiting organizations thoroughly believe that they can determine when they have been successful, and when they have not. But contrary to every self-help book on the market, the notion that you can brand yourself as a success is false. Success is an attribute that others grant you based on the degree to which you have performed to their expectations. The key phrase in that last sentence is “their expectations.” Most recruiting organizations measure their success using bland, generic, and absolutely useless efficiency metrics that have absolutely no correlation to line managers’ and senior leaders’ expectations of the recruiting function. This is a practice that has to change. Recruiting Top Performers: Your Process Doesn’t Work, No Matter What You Say Every time someone has approached me with a story of how they have built a recruiting process or system that hires the “right” person at the “right” time, a short evaluation has shown that all they have really done is repackage the same old process, adding even more tools or criteria that have absolutely no correlation to on-the-job performance. Just a few weeks back, I received an email from a publisher in Australia. The gist of the email was that one of their readers was outraged by my article, How Many Turkeys Do You Hire? This reader boasted that his newest system was 100% effective in determining which candidate is the “right” hire. The email made me laugh. No system is 100% accurate; that’s why we have terms like margin of error, error rate, Six Sigma quality improvement, etc. We are human, we make mistakes, and, because we are the architects of the systems we use, our systems make mistakes. The goal isn’t to eliminate mistakes, but rather to minimize them. Recruiting top performers doesn’t require elaborate online assessments, grueling multi-part interviews, background checks, or even resume element verification. On the contrary, all it requires is simplicity. Top performers are almost always employed, unless they opt not to be. In most organizations, they are respected, and in a select few, even rewarded appropriately. They have neither the interest nor the drive to sit through the cumbersome, often painful, process many recruiting organizations have installed to weed out candidates with absolutely no chance of being hired. Such systems are built around averages, or the lowest common denominator by which candidates are considered potential hires. By definition, top performers are not average. What Works: Steps In Hiring Top Performers If you and your organization are really serious about hiring top performers, here are the steps you need to take:
- You must find the names of the best without any help from them. They won’t actively apply for jobs, so getting their names (and resumes) takes some work. It should be the manager’s job to know the names of the best and what makes them better than the rest. Use your current “A” employees to help you identify other “A” players.
Why You Must Hire Top Employees, Not Top Candidates
[Note: Someone sent me a note recently with the observation that there are frequently two themes in my articles ó one obvious and one hidden. This person also suggested that I should reveal the hidden theme, so people would get more out of the articles. As a test, I've decided to reveal the second idea in this article at the end. You might want to read this article with that in mind, and see if you can guess the second theme before completing the article. To make it even more interesting, I've added a third, less obvious theme in this article ó tied to a contest. If you'd like to win a free autographed copy of my book and two guest passes for any of our upcoming public workshops, just send in your ideas, with some justification, to info@adlerconcepts.com or post a review in the ER Forum. I hope this makes the article more interesting. ó Lou Adler] If you do things better, you’ll get a nice raise, a pat on the back, some recognition, maybe even a promotion. If you do better things, you’ll become famous. While I believe strongly in Six Sigma process improvements, one thing I’ve noticed of late is the relentless focus on doing things better, rather than on doing better things. For example, if you reduce the time it takes to review resumes, automate interview scheduling, and interview six to eight candidates, you can improve recruiter productivity by 20% to 30%, maybe even 50%. But if you cut the number of candidates seen in half while increasing their quality, you can increase team (i.e. sourcer, recruiter, manager, other interviewers) productivity by 200% to 300%, while at the same time improving company performance. One of the best ways I’ve seen to achieve these macro-level changes (doing better things) rather than the more typical micro-improvements (doing things better) is to understand the difference between top employees and top candidates. As you’ll soon discover, this shift in perspective will force you to question everything you’re now doing. Imagine that a top candidate comes in for a interview, and within five minutes you know you have a star sitting across the desk from you. What are the “wow!” factors that excited you? (Pause and reflect before reading further.) Aside from a good resume, they probably include many of these traits: positive first impression, great appearance, articulate, enthusiastic, affable, prepared, on-time, assertive, inquisitive, poised, and confident, with a strong handshake and great eye contact. What did you do next? If you’re like most interviewers (especially hiring managers), you relaxed a bit, believing this would be an enjoyable interview, and gave yourself a mental high-five, knowing you’ll get a pat on the back from your client. You probably became less discriminating, and unknowingly started over-talking, under-listening, and maybe doing a little too much selling. Now, fast-forward six months and you’re giving your new employee his or her first review. It’s not necessarily the person described above, but a truly outstanding person most likely found through some great networking technique or proactive employee referral program. What traits does this person possess if they really are a top performer? (Pause and reflect before reading further.) Most likely the person has many of these traits: extremely competent and highly motivated to do the work required; extremely effective working with, motivating, and managing other people; courageous enough to take initiative and implement change; strong in the face of adversity and tough challenges; great at problem solving and decision making; committed to goals and deadlines; great growth potential; and a balanced ego. With these two people in mind, who would you rather hire ó a top employee or a top candidate? The right answer is the top employee. Now consider this: Are all top candidates also top employees? My direct personal experience in over 1,000 different hiring situations (and many more indirectly with my clients), and in reading Peter Drucker (The Essential Drucker) and too many Hunter and Schmidt research articles in the Journal of Psychology, clearly indicates that top candidates are not the same as top employees. Top candidates make great presentations, yet great presentations don’t correlate with top performance (even for salespeople). On the other hand, great employees are frequently not great candidates. The overlap is about a third of the time. So if you hire based on presentation, two-thirds of the time you’ll be wrong. While hiring errors caused by undervaluing performance and overvaluing presentation are a significant issue (indications of this problem include hiring people who are competent but unmotivated, or hiring people who talk a good game), this is really just the tip of the iceberg. The real problem is that the hiring processes at most companies are designed to find and hire top candidates, not top employees. So even if you to want to hire top employees, you won’t be successful if you assume top employees and top candidates look for and accept jobs the same way. Top employees, for example, are more discriminating. They want more information. They won’t waste their time. They want a better job, not another job. They decide with others, and they don’t want to be sold during the interview. They want a chance to be heard and challenged. If your hiring processes aren’t designed to cater to the needs of these top employees, you’ll never be able to consistently hire them. For validation, consider some of the really top people you’ve recently hired. How many needed some special hand-holding, extra consideration, or went outside of your company’s normal hiring practices in some way? For more proof, consider how many top employees now apply for your current openings. If you’re not seeing enough top people, you might want to redesign your hiring processes to meet their needs rather than the needs of top candidates. This is what is meant by doing better things, not doing things better. Here are some ideas to get you started:
- Make it as easy as possible to apply. This means no upfront questions, no application process ó just a cut-and-paste resume, at most. You must use technology to determine if the person is strong rather than a questionnaire.
Building a Better ATS? Part 2
This the second part in my article series on the limitations of applicant tracking systems. Part 1 provided a global perspective on some of the major issues impacting ATSs. Here in Part 2, I’ll focus specifically on some of the current limitations in the way applicant tracking systems are handling key areas of the hiring and talent management process. Identification of Talent Needs In order to accurately identify recruiting and talent needs, an organization must:
- Determine the talent and skills it needs to meet its corporate objectives
What’s Happening in Our World?
For the fourth year in a row, ER Expo was held in San Diego last week before a vibrant and re-engaged crowd. It seems pretty clear to me that things are getting better: people were excited and ready for new challenges, there were lots of vendors with great new products, and the speakers were, as always, future-oriented but practical. Futurist Alvin Toffler gave a speech on the future that keeps on stimulating new ideas for me. ERE’s president, David Manaster, and his team did an outstanding job of putting this conference together and making it seamless.
How To Get the Best Work out of Your Advertising Agency
In the advertising industry, certain clients consistently drive us to do our best work. You’ve seen this work before in the innovative technology that you decided you had to have immediately, or in the sleek design work that made your jaw drop, or in the words and images that were so powerful it nearly moved you to tears. What do these clients have in common and how are they able to consistently get the best out of those of us in advertising? They get it. Inside the advertising industry ó regardless of the agency or type of industry an agency services ó there is one ultimate compliment that can be paid to a client. At some point during a presentation or strategy meeting, a creative director may turn to another member of his or her team and say something to the effect of, “they get it.” Clients that “get it” don’t always have the most money to spend, the coolest projects to work on, or the toughest recruitment or marketing challenges to solve. But the work that is done for them consistently wins awards and the recognition of their peers, regardless of the scale. They allow their ad agency to create the innovations that other organizations try (and often fail) to duplicate. Some vital principles to “get” that will drive the best work out of your advertising agency include recognizing the importance of the following areas. 1. Truth. At its core, there is a definite promise implied in your advertising efforts. If you say one thing and do another, word will travel very fast. This is especially true in recruiting, with the focus on employee referrals and networking. Some exaggerated but not-too-far-from-true examples of this: You say you have cutting-edge technology to work on, but most employees use an operating system that’s over six years old and a dot-matrix printer that sits in a different building. You say you’re committed to diversity, yet anyone in a management position is a white male. You reference an exciting, collaborative culture ó which turns out to be a cubicle farm with five people to a cube. Employer branding is definitely not a place to “put lace on a pig” (Midwestern-speak for the futility of trying to dress up a bad situation). This is why the best branding consultants speak of “uncovering your brand through research,” not creating it. The more believable your promise is ó backing up your messages with recognition, awards and facts ó the more effective your advertising will be. False or misleading claims may get people in the door, but the door will be revolving if you can’t back your promises up with the actual work experience. 2. Differentiation. What truly sets you apart as an employer? This is often called a unique selling proposition (USP) or “the WIIFM” (What’s in it for me?). Think this through very thoroughly before you meet with your agency to discuss any creative strategy. Here’s a simple test to see if what you think makes you unique really does. Think of your unique selling points as an employer. Was it excellent benefits? A collaborative culture? A team orientation? Now go to your favorite job board or to Google and type in those terms. If you got a million responses back (like all of the selling points above would), you might want to try again. This time, don’t be afraid of taking a risk. This may seem frustrating at first, but it creates a huge opportunity: in a sea of undifferentiated employers, it will be easy to stand apart once you discover what makes you truly different. 3. Checking your assumptions at the door. Very closely related to the point above, target audience research is the most essential element of almost every successful campaign. Why? Because our assumptions about what makes our organizations unique or appealing are very often wrong. Continuing along the lines of the WIIFM concept, your advertising has to appeal and be relevant to a specific target audience that you are probably not part of. You may deal with the target audience every day in your recruiting efforts ó and these experiences are essential to helping drive a creative strategy. But the best judge of whether your audience will like red or blue, polka music or hip-hop, is the target audience themselves. Without research, this judgment may happen too late, as members of your target audience decide your company is not worth pursuing. Ideally, research will simultaneously focus on the challenges you need to overcome and the things about working at your company that would be most appealing to the target audience. 4. Creative freedom. Anyone who has recruited or worked with creative talent will understand this statement: in order to do their best work, creative people need room to play. The creative mindset is one of imagination, of thinking about things in different ways than others. The more this imagination is limited, the less imaginative (read: creative) the end result will be. 5. Passion. If you don’t have a passion for what your company does and what recruiting does for your company, then your branding work will probably never excite or motivate anyone to join you. Your own personal level of enthusiasm about your organization is something that inevitably comes through in your advertising. In general, the best creative is as much a function of the company driving the work as it is of the creative talent that actually follows through on the work. With an understanding of the principles above, some of the most innovative, most creative work you’ve ever seen will flow out of your agency relationship.
Stop Holding Us Back! Problems and Roadblocks in Recruitment
Twice a year, corporate recruiting leaders from around the world converge for several days of learning, sharing, networking, and good times at the ER Expo conference. As usual, I was at the most recent ER Expo, which took place on March 15 and 16 in San Diego. While the program is always invigorating, this year’s schedule included a town meeting on the subject of current problems and roadblocks impacting recruitment. What follows is a listing of problems and roadblocks as identified by attendees ó your peers in the recruiting profession. If you were unable to attend, use the ER Forum to respond to this article with your current issues ó and hopefully with solutions that have worked for you with regards to the problems identified. As an advisor to numerous corporations, I know that that a good cross-section of the ERE membership is struggling with the same issues. Leverage each other, the solutions are out there. Problems and Roadblocks Identified by Corporate Recruiters
- 43% identified lack of visibility and credibility among executive leadership. The perception of recruitment as a tactical execution role versus that of a knowledge worker was seen as a major problem.
Don’t Let Tactics Drive Strategy
[Note: Don't forget my Defend Your Desktop ATS survey today, Friday, March 19, 2004, at 4 p.m. EST (1 p.m. PST). I'll be revealing the names of the best systems based on my external and internal surveys, so you won't want to miss this. You'll need to go my ATS survey page to obtain the phone number. If you haven't taken the survey, it's not too late. Our conference line only holds the first 50 people who call, so get there about 15 minutes early. You can use the extra time to complete the survey.] Moral of today’s story: Don’t let tactics drive strategy. Don’t mistake activity for progress. But let me begin at the beginning. Many, many years ago (when I worked for a living), I was on the corporate staff of a Fortune 100 company. My job was to flip the slides during the monthly operations reviews where the CEO, CFO, and COB (among others) would throw tantrums at the division presidents for missing their plans. This wasn’t the actual purpose of the meetings, nor my real job, but it seemed like that’s what invariably happened. At one of those meetings, I remember watching the corporate CFO stand up, look at one of the division presidents, and sternly state, “You must never let tactics drive your business strategy!” He then walked out of the meeting in disgust. This was prompted by some lame excuse about why the quarterly sales and revenue forecast was missed. (I’ll tell you the excuse later.) This past week, I heard some things which brought back that long-forgotten memory. What’s your take on the following? How many of you have, or would have, walked out in disgust? Or do you merely tolerate the current state of affairs?
- A recruiting department didn’t want to run better ads since they had too much work to do, and better ads would just increase the number of bad resumes to review.
25 Telltale Signs of the Wrong Candidate
There are a lot of ways to tell when you’ve got the wrong candidate in front of you ó when presenting that candidate would be a quick step to career suicide. Some are blatantly the wrong choice at first glance. Others will sneak through all the way up to the offer or even a few months into being on the job. Telltale signs of the malady they carry will pop up like daisies in a field. Unfortunately, you’ll just keep overlooking them while telling yourself it was just a slip, an aberration, and you should pay no attention to it. But red flags go up for a reason. Whether you like it or not, you need to pay attention to those red flags. Here are a few worth talking about:
- No one on your support staff likes the candidate.
Turnover and Lost Productivity: Links to Weak Hiring Practices
Question: What are some common symptoms of bad hiring and promotion practices? Answer: Turnover, low productivity, and high training expense. It is really common sense. Suppose you offered competitive jobs, competitive wages, and competitive benefits. Why would an employee who was fully qualified, highly motivated, and well managed under-perform or quit? They wouldn’t, right? Well, then why do employees turn over, under-perform or fail training? Could it be because they don’t have the right skills? Because they’re poorly motivated? Badly managed? This is not rocket science. Poor hiring practices always show up on the job. In fact, most people readily admit their hiring manager had no clear idea whether they could do the job or not when they were hired. Think about that: when pressed, most employees readily admit their hiring manager had no idea whether they could do the job before they were hired! So much for interview accuracy. Diagnosing Performance For a moment, let’s assume the employee’s manager is 1) smarter than a bowl of creamed corn, and 2) does everything he or she can to help the employee excel (yes, I know that’s a stretch, but give me a break here). We just want to look at employee performance. There are three phases to being employed: learning the job, performing the job, and finding satisfaction in the work. Of course, all three phases have some overlap, but let’s tease them apart for purposes of discussion. Learning the Job Learning the job usually makes heavy demands on a person’s cognitive ability. Not only is an employee expected to learn new information, he or she is expected to make job contributions. Information arrives fast and furious. It takes brainpower to process all this information. For example, one client of mine was experiencing a 20% technical training pass rate (even though applicants passed interviews and background checks and graduated from technical training courses). This was a clear sign that mental ability (MA) was not being measured in the hiring phase. When we added an MA test and balanced adverse impact against test scores, pass rates increased to 80%. We could have set the pass-point higher, but 80% met their planning goals and kept the applicant pool open. Don’t Burden Me with Facts Have you ever hired promising salespeople who (after being hired) brushed off the need to learn the product? They don’t seem dull, but these folks just cannot seem to understand that “selling” involves more than talking. I don’t know about you, but I expect a salesperson to help solve my problems, not dump a load of nonsense on my doorstep and leave. This kind of salesperson’s credibility vanishes like beer at a ballpark when prospects fire tough questions. It is a situation where both motivation and mental ability needs evaluation pre-hire. Finally, consider this. A large company that specializes in finding in your yard hidden gas pipes, electrical lines, cable, and so forth, has a 50% technical training failure rate. It costs them about $3,000,000 annually in hard cash. We tracked the problem to mental ability and motivation. The field was clamoring for help, but the VP of HR was immobilized with terror about using anything other than the “tried and true” interview. The problem went unresolved. Any reasonable person might wonder: 1) what kind of company has so much money they can blow $3 million each year? and 2) why was the HR manager not booted? Knowing What to Expect How many organizations talk fast, “sell” the job, and hire candidates before anyone changes his or her mind? What if the candidate does not like the nature of the work? The recruiter might be happy he or she made hiring quota, the hiring manager might check off another item on the to-do list, but the new employee will probably quit as soon as a better offer comes along. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to predict that people who love their work almost always produce more than people who don’t. Anticipating job dissatisfaction requires showing the candidate a realistic job preview of the job. If a hiring organization says, “We can’t tell them that. They’ll never take the job!” then they had better pay premium wages, because unless they are the only employer in town, unhappy people tend to quit! Doing the Job I am amazed whenever I hear someone tell me their company does not use simulations. “Hmmm,” I think. “Does that mean you have no idea before you hire them whether salespeople can persuade, whether ‘service’ people can provide service, or whether managers can coach?” Applicants for any job with a major interpersonal component need to be evaluated for these. If managers tend to fail because they cannot coach subordinates (and they do, I can assure you), then why don’t organizations put applicants through simulations that evaluate coaching? The same can be said for selling and servicing. Fifteen years of observing managers, salespeople and customer service people participate in simulations has shown me:
- Managers often destroy subordinate morale because they are either autocratic or “wimpy” (a technical term for refusing to confront a problem).
Getting a Seat at the Table: A Radical, Yet Logical, Approach
In order to understand where HR is today, it is important to understand a bit of our collective history. Human resources evolved from the “personnel” department. In those days, business was far less complex, and personnel acted as a low-level and somewhat isolated bureaucracy. Its overall function was to deal with the clerical aspects of signing up new employees, to keep employee records confidential, and to interact mostly with other personnel people. It was not uncommon for a hiring manager to hire a candidate, offer a salary, set a starting date, and tell the person to report to personnel in the morning to get on the payroll. The idea of a senior-level manager going to personnel with a major issue relating to an employee was unthinkable; the bureaucracy added no value to the problem at hand. Sadly, personnel was as far from a seat at the executive table as one could get. Make no mistake; we’ve come a long way. As business became more complex due to the evolvement of government regulations, automation, technology, competition, and the realization that employees a valuable asset, personnel disappeared and human resources emerged. Specialties such as compensation, benefits, OD, ER, recruiting, and HRIS evolved, all adding great value to the function of HR. To varying degrees, we became partners to the line and senior management in many companies. We should be proud of the progress we’ve made. But here is the rub: being a partner to senior management, even to leadership at the highest levels, still does not put us in a seat at the executive table. We may be close, but in this case a miss is a good as a mile; you are either there or you are not. If we ever intend to integrate into the executive team and have the kind of value that C-level executives bring to the table, we must adjust how we think, how we see the nature of what we do, and how we conceptualize our very purpose in the workplace. For most HR people, this will be the most dramatic shift in thinking they have ever encountered. But for openers, let’s look at things we do that will never get us that coveted seat at the table:
- Striving to become a better HR/recruiting professional. Although admirable in purpose and intent, becoming better at what you do produces less ROI over time. Although it might provide you with incremental added value as it relates to partnership competencies, it does not address the key issue.
Offshoring: Reasons For Failure
Offshoring has become a major topic of conversation lately as more and more firms look to leverage the economic benefits of lower labor costs and availability of skilled labor abroad. While politically many see offshoring in slow economic times, when jobs for U.S. workers are scarce, as taboo, for many firms currently considering or utilizing offshoring, it is the only option to remain competitive in the global marketplace. Offshoring helps firms shore up their labor force with knowledge and skills that are in short supply locally, but great supply elsewhere. Offshoring also helps firms compete globally on the basis of price by leveraging the pay differentials between different countries to keep labor costs down. Combined, these two issues enable firms to grow and compete while continuing to provide the margins investors have come to expect. Recruitment Offshoring Offshoring started with manufacturing jobs, and only in the last decade has it grown to encompass professional areas such as IT, finance, and HR. While offshoring in HR has been primarily limited to call centers, a number of offshore vendors now provide everything from centralized sourcing to full lifecycle recruiting. Offshoring part or all of the recruitment process does pose many legal issues for firms doing business with the federal government, but for the vast majority of U.S. firms, offshoring can provide a substantial return on investment. While I am against offshoring all of HR, I am for offshoring areas that provide low ROI and for which external vendors can provide service as good or better at lower cost. Offshoring Still Problem Ridden It seems that for every success story about offshoring, there are two corresponding stories of catastrophic failure. In recent months, several large corporations have pulled back from offshoring due to customer service and consumer privacy issues. Because offshoring is a relatively new business model, it is expected to go through a painful period as problems emerge and solutions develop. While getting into professional-level offshoring at this time would still make you one of the early adopters, several firms have already experienced a number of problems that your firm can learn from, which will help your firm strengthen its plans when offshoring or using an onshore vendor that relies on offshoring. Whether your firm manages offshoring itself or uses a vendor that does, problem are almost certain to occur, including the following:
- Underestimating the difficulty of maintaining privacy in offshore locations.
ATS Survey Results: Why You Must Defend Your Desktop
This is an experiential and interactive article. Another first, but that’s not the real point. Stay with me on this, if you can. We’ll be having a live discussion of this article next week. But you have to take the survey to attend. On Friday, March 19, 2004, at 4 p.m. EST (1 p.m. PST) we’ll be having the first of many conferences discussing the results of my mini-massive ATS features and satisfaction survey. Go to our ATS survey page to obtain the phone number. If you’ve already taken the survey, you’ll still need to go there to find the phone number. Now, once you get to the sign-on page, you’ll then have to fill in a questionnaire to see if you’re qualified to attend the survey. Then we’ll ask you to submit your resume by cutting and pasting and inputting data into twenty other data fields. Someone will review this application and get back to you to see if you’re still interested. By then, of course, the survey will be over. This is obviously an idiotic way to treat people. But it’s one thing our survey revealed: we make it too hard for candidates to apply. If just the idea of this application process aggravated you, imagine how a strong candidate feels when applying for a position with your company. Instead, why not just click here and find the phone number for the conference call. While you’re there, take the survey. I suspect many of you opted-out already before you even read down to this part. Too bad. It’s an important survey and it’s going to be a great conference call. Moral: Are your ads compelling enough to keep good candidates interested throughout the application process? If not, make the application process super easy and make your ads more compelling. This is one of the key items revealed in our survey on ATS design requirements. You’ve just experienced a little of this negative process yourself. Now for some more positive results. Key Findings: The Critical “80 Percenters” These are the critical “must have” features of applicant tracking systems that 80 percent of the respondents indicated were very necessary or vital necessities.
- Recruiter friendly. The results: 92% want it but only 30% have it. Ease of use is a critical feature. Corporate recruiters have too much to do. Applicant tracking systems should make the recruiter’s job easier, not harder. While this category covers a lot of features (managing and accessing data; intuitive; simple updating), it was very clear from the survey that most tracking systems fall short in this area If you’re a corporate user, you might want to ask your ATS vendor what they’re doing to improve this area. If you’re considering a new system, make sure you test drive it thoroughly. Be super cynical. Use lots of real data to make sure it’s recruiter friendly. The good news: There are five ATSs that are very good and getting better. You’ll discover who they are at our conference call.
Annual Online Screening and Assessment User Survey Results, Part 2
Towards the end of 2003, I invited ERE readers to participate in my second annual Online Screening and Assessment User Survey. The goal of this year’s survey was to pick up where last year’s survey left off by continuing to identify important trends in the usage of online screening and assessment tools and by providing data confirming that usage rates for online screening and assessment tools are on the rise. I’d like to say thank you to all of the ERE readers out there who were kind enough to spend some of their valuable time completing my survey. Thanks to you, I was able to collect a wealth of information. In fact, the survey provided so much good information that we had to present the results in two installments. To provide a quick recap, a total of 78 persons responded to my survey. They held a variety of staffing-related jobs and were spread relatively evenly across organizations of all sizes. Their responses revealed the following trends:
- Almost all organizations are using the web as a part of their staffing process.
Let’s Assume No Job Growth, Then What?
Let’s face it. We’re not in a growth industry anymore. Although many of us built our careers on the volume side of this business, it’s a different set of skills that will keep us employed. Last month the U.S. economy essentially created no new jobs, adding just 21,000 people. This almost mirrors January, when only 1,000 jobs were created. Economists and politicians debate back and forth on what has created a unique confluence of productivity, people, and cash. We have organizations that are more productive than ever, with fewer employees, and with piles of cash that are increasingly hard to put to profitable use. To some degree automation and job redesign have contributed to the productivity rise and the need for fewer employees, but the global economy has also contributed. Moving jobs and work used to take considerable skill and cost a great deal. Equipment tended to be large and required sophisticated support systems and supplies. Communication systems were usually limited to the telephone and travel was time consuming and expensive. Trade restrictions and import tariffs made the transfer of goods a tax expert’s dream. Languages and different cultures imposed costs on productivity. Today none of these remain true. Equipment, while more complex than ever, is more robust and requires less maintenance. Some of it can be serviced remotely via the Internet, and a worldwide network of supplies and technical assistance is readily available. The Internet and email have made communications easy and virtually free. The WTO has worked to open markets and remove tariffs, which has made moving goods or services easy. A large cadre of U.S. or Western-educated managers is eager to take over and manage the language and cultural issues. And finally, the educational systems in China, India, Thailand, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Singapore have produced a wide variety of skilled and semi-skilled labor willing to work for low wages by U.S. standards. Anyone who has had an American or Western upbringing can understand why companies will always go to where the labor costs the least. Any incremental amount spent on education or training will be small compared to the basic cost of that service in the West. This means that the people who are in demand in the United States and in the West in general will have to be highly skilled and possess the talent and ability that cannot be readily purchased for less elsewhere. We see this in the IT world where systems architects remain employed, while common programmers find their jobs outsourced to India. We see it when skilled nurses are in short supply and easily employed here, but x-rays are read by radiologists in China or India. American firms will no longer have to do high volume hiring here in the U.S. There will always be the need to replace retirees and those who leave for greener grass, and there will always be some hiring to do for new developments, additional services, or for an incremental growth. But the volume of hiring may remain low for a long time. The recruiting equation is shifting from an emphasis on volume and cost to an emphasis on speed and quality. It is also becoming a more complex equation. We are adding new variables, including internal promotions and movement, entry-level hiring, and development as a sourcing strategy. None of these are new but they should be thought about very differently. Recruiters normally have played very little role in the internal movement of employees. They have facilitated the process, posted jobs internally and may have even done some interviewing of internal candidates. However, most of the time the hiring manager and HR played the key roles in internal transfers. Likewise, professional recruiters often had no role in college hiring, leaving the process to college recruiters who were frequently junior recruiters. Nor did they have a role in employee development. I know of only a half-dozen or so firms where there is a deliberate effort by recruiters to encourage the development of people to fill expected open positions on a regular basis. But today’s successful recruiter has to be an integrator of these elements. A recruiter needs a deep understanding of the current talent marketplace, both inside her own organization and in the world economy. She needs to be able to discuss skills in the context of the global labor pool and assist management in making the best decisions on outsourcing, based on value and quality and speed. Unfortunately, most recruiters work in micro-worlds. These micro-worlds are made up of their close personal network and their usual sources for candidates, and rarely are broad enough to be useful in a global context. Successful recruiters will find ways to leverage the new social networking tools and build and maintain worldwide talent pools. This recruiter also needs to have the skill, insight, and information to understand the direction the organization is heading and be able to project talent needs and looming gaps. Done well enough, this recruiter can recommend internal development programs designed to lessen the needs to recruit externally and improve retention. She also needs to see when talent is no longer going to be needed and have plans to redeploy that talent ó either internally or externally through her networks. But the recruiter cannot be successful without the help of human resources in general and without the help of management. The role is increasingly one of integrating and bringing systems harmony to a process that today is full of noise and activity, but does not produce efficiently or smoothly. Recruiting costs are still too high for the quality delivered. Selection is far from scientific, as ERE’s own Wendell Williams frequently points out, as recruiters are often much more comfortable with their gut than their head. The traditional resume-based applicant tracking system (ATS) is inadequate and old fashioned. The integration I am talking about will occur on the backbone of technology which includes the Internet, social networking software, interactive web sites, online selection and screening, e-marketing, and on the use of candidate relationship management tools. Your new role will be as a talent guru for your firm ó the voice that knows the talent market internally and externally, can tap into it as needed, can recommend development when it makes sense, and deliver or redeploy quality people quickly.
Dead Recruiter Walking
Folks might remember the movie “Dead Man Walking.” For those who don’t, this is a term given to a condemned convict walking toward the execution chamber. It is oxymoronic: a person about to die, walking down a hallway. Kind of makes sense. “Dead man walking” is also a very appropriate metaphor for today’s recruiting business. Both internal and external recruiters are shuffling toward the edge of a cliff. Savvy folks suspect something is wrong, but what that is isn’t easy for them to articulate. The profession won’t totally disappear, mind you, but is on the verge of being decimated. You doubt? Read on. I few years ago, I wrote an ERE article about the death of Internet recruiting (Internet Recruiting Is Doomed). Aside from the voluminous slings and arrows hurled my way after it published, most people just thought I just craved attention. That was during the height of the dot-com trend when programmers set their own hours and job qualifications were secondary to having a heartbeat. Recruiting had more of a “find a body” philosophy than a “find a highly skilled employee.” Life has changed, yes? Well, that was only round one. Get ready for round two. Here are some trends to watch:
- ASPs. Web-enabled products and services that provide automation but not thought leadership will stagnate. It is not good enough for ASPs to respond to user requests; they must be one step ahead of their clients. Clients expect this, and even though they may not be able to articulate their needs, they will inevitably wake up one morning and wonder who that stranger is beside them with morning breath and bed head.
The 2004 Recruitment Boom: An Interview with Dr. John Sullivan
As an author and corporate advisor, I receive several hundred questions a week from firms looking for advice, direction, and assistance on recruiting issues. Recently, I was contacted by a firm who posed the following questions after reading article I had previously written on preparing for the second installment of the War for Talent. They were interested in sharing these responses with their senior and line management If you are looking for a way to strike up a dialogue about transforming your staffing function into a world-class one, you might consider the following topics as a good starting point. Why do you think recruitment will boom in 2004? There are several factors that indicate an upturn in corporate hiring is near. The first, and the one most referenced by economists, is an upturn in key economic indicators such as corporate sales/profits, production and inventory turnover, and money stock and debt measures. Movements in these economic indicators serve as precursor warnings that economic growth is afoot. But the indicator I place the most faith in is one that is quite subjective and much less scientific: what actions leading corporations are currently taking. Knowledge of these current actions is the key “insider” indicator. At this moment, many leading U.S. corporations are retooling their recruiting departments. They are evaluating current leadership, trading up talent, and replacing key players in roles that were eliminated during slower times. Once the recruiting departments of these major firms finish rebuilding their recruitment engines, it is only a matter of time until they are fired up and put to use rebuilding the talent base of the organization in other growing areas. The capital required to rebuild the recruiting engines would have never been made available if financial stewards inside the corporation were not predicting growth that would require headcount expansion. In which sectors in particular will recruitment boom? Many industries grow in cyclical spurts ó high technology and pharmaceuticals are good examples. However, changing workforce demographics around the globe will force the historical cycles that have driven healthcare-related industries to get shorter and shorter. I predict that in the coming year we will see moderate hiring and expansion in consumer technology, biomedical, corporate and personal security, telecom, and defense. I look for the most aggressive growth in developing regions such as China and India. Recruiting follows corporate and consumer spending. Why are employees now less loyal? In short, employees are less loyal because companies have been less loyal to them. During the late ’90s, many employees became more comfortable with changing jobs more frequently. This practice was seen as one of the few options available to increase their compensation, garner promotions, and in general advance their career more quickly than they could internally. By allowing avenues for advancement outside the corporation to succeed internal avenues, corporations literally pushed their employees out the door. In addition, many employees learned through the latest round of layoffs that, no matter how mission critical they were to a product or service, they are always considered expendable in the eyes of corporate finance. Layoffs have become so common that companies are no longer reluctant to perform them out of fear of harming their image. I could also add that the Internet makes it quite easy to look for and apply for jobs, anytime and anywhere. Now that relevant jobs can be automatically emailed to any individual, top performers can be teased literally every day with new opportunities. What type of employee will be looking for a new job? Anyone who can! Top performers and above average professionals have been stuck in their jobs for the last few years due to the economy. Once openings begin to occur, current studies suggest that between 20 and 40 percent of the current labor force will begin looking. Most managers are unaware of this “tidal wave” of turnover that has been predicted. If they don’t act quickly, they won’t be able to avoid being impacted by it. Why will employees be searching for new jobs? Because they learned in the late ’90s that they can advance their career much faster by leveraging growth opportunities outside their current employer. They also learned that they can leverage the talent shortage to their economic benefit by increasing the frequency of changing jobs. What things will they be looking for in a new job? Most will just be seeking some kind of change because they have been stuck in the same job for the last three to four years. In a rapidly changing world, employees are no different than customers; they have grown to desire and expect change. They will once again gravitate towards fast-growing industries, because top talent always does. How can companies stop their employees looking for other jobs? Companies can’t legally or physically stop anyone from looking, but they can act now to make the value proposition of staying with them better than what competing firms can provide. Many firms approach this from the angle of implementing financial punishments for leaving, but unfortunately punishments can be made easily irrelevant by financial rewards offered for accepting a new job elsewhere. Instead, managers need to identify what motivates and frustrates individuals, and then “re-recruit” them with jobs that increase the motivation factors and decrease the frustration factors. The key is to make the best opportunity come from inside the corporation as opposed to outside of it. Instead of ignoring workers, managers need to pay attention to them. What problems will this new “disloyalty” throw up for companies? Managers will have to pay more attention to key employees, and once again manage. Many managers have become nothing more than glorified workers who spend just a small percentage of their time doing administrative management. Managers will have to become experts in identifying signs of unhappiness, in motivating employees, and in eliminating things that frustrate employees. What problems will it throw up for search/recruitment firms? War for Talent II will be much different than the last one. There will be a shortage of recruiters. External recruiting firms will need to revise their business plans and recruiting strategies. Smart recruiting firms will also act as advisors to management so that they don’t make the same mistakes that occurred during the last boom ó over hiring and subsequently having to do lay offs. Unfortunately, HR has learned very little from the boom of the late ’90s and the bust of the early 21st-century. Workforce planning is the key to preventing this boom-and-bust cycle.
10 Outside-the-Box Wacky Ideas for Hiring Better People
[Note: Don't forget to defend you desktop. You can now help design the next generation ATS system. Take my survey and determine which features are most important. If you're now using an ATS, you can also rank its performance against this new "best in class." Preliminary survey results will be published next week. We'll also be having another instant conference on this topic, so stay tuned. Your future is at stake. ó Lou Adler] Over the past few years I’ve made some pretty wild assertions on these pages about how to hire better people. While they have caused quite a stir, and despite the inevitable nay-saying, they’ve all proved out to be extremely effective. Here are my choices for the top 10 wackiest ideas on how to hire better people.
- Recruiting processes must be designed to hire great employees, not great candidates.
Building a Better ATS?
Applicant tracking systems are somewhat unique in the level of frustration and dissatisfaction they engender among users. The churn of clients between ATS vendors ó and the inability of any vendor to establish serious profitability or grow much beyond the definition of a small business ó is indicative of the fact that the industry has a long ways to go before it emerges from infancy. Applicant tracking systems have been around for some twenty years now, but they have failed to deliver on their promise of revolutionizing recruiting. These systems were supposed to make recruiting a more effective and strategic function. Unfortunately, much of this has not happened ó and based on current trends, it seems unlikely to occur. Why hasn’t this happened? The reasons can be grouped into ATS vendors’ shortcomings in three areas: vision, expectations, and standards. Vision Vision, or the lack thereof, is the principal problem facing most ATS vendors. ATS vendors have demonstrated an utter inability to expand the definition of an ATS beyond what the name requires them to do ó applicant tracking. Applicant tracking systems are essentially process management and reporting tools. Admittedly, recruiting is a lot about process ó but automating these processes does little to improve recruiting on its own. True, applicant tracking systems bring efficiency to the process. But they don’t bring much in the way of effectiveness. Gains through efficiency can only go so far. A floor is reached quickly, beyond which any improvements in time or reductions in cost are minimal. Also, this does nothing to improve quality. The industry in general, and some vendors in particular, would have users believe that adapting concepts such as supply chain management, client relationship management, etc., through their technology improves recruiting. This is mostly hype, as even a cursory examination of the claims would establish. Case studies of the value provided by an ATS, trotted out as proof, are little more than exercises in creative writing. The “results” are based on assumptions that make most theories in economics look like hard science. Further, the concept of “value” would not be accepted in any business. One manifestation of this problem is the recent emphasis on “sub-optimization” ó a convenient excuse designed to highlight a system’s presumed value by blaming under-utilization on users. With every new release, ATS vendors simply prove that they are afflicted by the “Microsoft Office disease.” Changes in functionality are sometimes interesting but are largely designed for demo value. Functionally, they are worthless for the most part. The undisputable fact is that almost no ATS delivers functionality beyond a very small aspect of recruiting. Though this myopia on the part of vendors is hard to explain, it is very prevalent. For example, in 2000, the INS (now Homeland Security) started a pilot program to allow employers to verify employment eligibility electronically. Given the volume of hiring taking place through applicant tracking systems, it would seem that supporting this service, even at a fee, would be an obvious way for an ATS to expand its value (and the vendors’ revenue streams). Yet not a single ATS vendor participated in the pilot program. Expectations The ATS industry and its clients together are a textbook case of misaligned expectations. There’s plenty enough blame to spread around to both users and vendors. The industry is partially to blame for having created expectations that are impossible to deliver on. With software products the temptation is always to over-promise and under-deliver ó but the ATS industry has plumbed new depths in this. The industry would like users to believe that their products are a silver bullet aimed at the heart of all recruiting problems. The problem is that recruiting is a far more complex process than most realize. The principal functionality in applicant tracking systems is centered on managing workflows as if they were linear, with predictable inputs and outputs. But as any recruiter will attest, recruiting is anything but linear. The inputs do not behave like so many components on an assembly line, and the outcomes are usually far from certain. With no hope of delivering anything that even comes remotely close to the promise, the industry has little choice but to put the best possible spin on what it offers and continue the illusion that the value provided is far in excess of the reality. But it takes two to tango. Users share in the blame for the misalignment. Few users grasp just how complex an activity recruiting really is and what needs to happen for it to become an effective, strategic function. Given the tangle of laws, corporate policies, the unpredictability of candidates, communication problems, and data requirements, it is extraordinarily difficult to create technology that can allow a user to effectively navigate through the complexity. Compounding the problem is the fact that recruiting is a profession still considered by many to be more of an art form than a discipline. Technology for such needs is difficult to engineer, but that does not deter users from believing that products can be developed to satisfy all their needs. Vendors can hardly be blamed for trying to fill this void between expectations and reality with their claims. The temptation to hype the value of products is made greater by the fact that there are few significant differences between products. Just as the success of Microsoft Office has little to do with functionality, the success of applicant tracking systems is more dependent upon positioning and marketing than it is on any intrinsic value. Shootouts at industry shows don’t count. As anyone who has attended one will attest, winning a shootout has more to do with the person working an application than the application itself. And of course, as every vendor knows, there will never be a long-term study comparing the effectiveness of their product against others. Standards The industry has no standards, period. Much of the dissatisfaction of customers could be addressed if the industry were to make its products compatible with other applications that support aspects of recruiting not supported by any particular ATS. Standalone products do exist to support most activities associated with recruiting, from sourcing to on-boarding. But the lack of technology standards, particularly for data exchange, makes it difficult if not impossible for these products to work together. Just establishing a stable link to move data from an ATS into a payroll system is a struggle for many vendors, as legions of customers will attest. Despite the clamor from customers to change this situation, the industry is strangely reluctant to do anything about it. Many vendors have actually made the situation worse by creating proprietary standards, as the many flavors of HR-XML that have been developed (and mercifully discarded in some cases) prove. HR-XML is an effort with some promise, but its acceptance has been limited. Many pay lip service to the concept by getting “certified,” but do little thereafter to have their products support the standard. Certification itself is largely meaningless, since it is simple to obtain and imposes no obligations on the vendor being certified to continue support for the standard. The result of this lack of standards is that customers end up with Rube Goldberg implementations involving a host of products, if they ever hope to expand support for their recruiting activities beyond process administration. What is perplexing is that virtually all shortcomings of ATS products are well known and have been for a long time. Postings in forums, blogs, comments at user groups, and speakers at HR conferences all lament the inability of the industry to move beyond a very narrow feature set. Yet there is no evidence to suggest that the industry plans to do much about expanding what it has to offer. Obviously the situation will improve (if only because it’s hard to see how it could worsen) with the advent of web services and a likely shakeout among vendors forcing the survivors to truly differentiate themselves. In two future articles to follow this one, I will address the specific limitations of applicant tracking systems and offer a few of my own suggestions on how the situation can be improved.
