ERE.net

Cost has always been central to recruiting. One of the most popular (though not the most useful) metrics is cost-per-hire.

But demonstrating the value of recruiting is difficult. The reasons are simple enough — recruiting costs are tangible; the benefits less so. It takes time for new hires to become productive, and their contributions are difficult to measure with any precision. Furthermore, it is impossible to attribute an employee’s performance to the recruiter’s skill at getting the right fit, in the right place and time. Consequently, tying recruiting results to cost is nearly impossible. Few even try. So recruiting managers usually find themselves under pressure to “manage” costs better — which usually means do more with less. Some companies have just given up trying and handed over their recruiting to an RPO vendor.

RPO has its own issues, but one benefit of RPO may just be that recruiting managers begin to understand costs, and how to manage them to their advantage. I don’t mean “manage” as in “limit” (although that’s a very fine thing), I mean structuring costs to maximize flexibility, leverage in-house expertise, and limit cutbacks during down cycles. This is the “manage” they teach in B-school.

keep reading…

No. It is not a typo.

My misplacement of capitalization in the above heading is intentional. LinkedIn spells itself with a double capital so I decided to play along.

There’s been alot of brouhaha over LinkedIn lately. Every conference, convention, and seminar I attend has a LinkedIn workshop. LinkedIn Webinar invitations land in my email inbox semi-weekly.

Here LinkedIn. There LinkedIn … everywhere LinkedIn.

I don’t get it. Is it just me?

Sure, I have an account. And yes I get invitations to “join my network” each week.

I find LinkedIn is little more than an annoyance for the following reasons:

keep reading…

Everyone in recruiting and employment branding strives to demonstrate to potential candidates the excitement that can be found within their organization. Most rely almost exclusively on “words” in paid advertising, brochures, and websites, but words are “so last year.”

Each month, fewer and fewer people read newspapers and books, and more of us get our information from moving media, including online videos, film, and TV. Why? Because videos require little effort to watch but still provide a powerful message. Written “words” are weak tools for quickly transmitting the energy and the passion that your employees have for their work. A better alternative is pictures, but they too can be limiting.

If a picture is worth a thousand words…then a video must be priceless. Recruiting videos can excite by allowing potential recruits to better “see, feel, and hear” the passion and the excitement at your organization. Videos allow an outsider to “meet” your employees, to see your technology, and even to tour your facilities.

However, for some reason, despite their incredible power, videos are the most underutilized powerful electronic recruiting tool.

Let’s face it, most traditional recruiting tools are waning in power. Brochures are time-consuming to develop, hard to distribute, expensive, and seldom read. Still pictures and narratives posted on corporate websites have value but they seldom stimulate or excite the visitor.

keep reading…

For most recruiters the make or break moment comes at the end of the process, when it’s time to negotiate the offer. A successful negotiation means that the process concludes with a hire, and the recruiter rides off into the sunset.

But a successful negotiation doesn’t mean coming out on top with a low-ball offer that gets accepted. That can cause the candidate to get turned off and in the worst-case result in the candidate walking away. Even if accepted, it could leave the candidate with a sour taste in the mouth and essentially starting off with a negative attitude toward the employer. An overly generous offer on the other hand is a waste of the employer’s resources and can upset internal equity. Getting it right is not easy as few recruiters are trained in negotiating.

The number of books that have been written on negotiating can fill a large room — several thousand are in print. But an easier approach can be discerned from recent research at Northwestern University. A study by Prof. Adam Galinsky and his colleagues suggests that a powerful way to influence the outcome to be closer to a win-win situation is to view the situation from the candidate’s perspective — also know as the perspective-taking approach.

What this means and how it works is explained below, but the research has demonstrated that recruiters using such an approach consistently achieve the highest level of economic efficiency, without sacrificing their own material interests. They produce a better overall outcome for both sides.

Getting Inside the Candidate’s Head

The perspective approach means try to get inside the candidate’s head. To achieve an understanding of the candidate — their motives and likely behaviors — consider the world from their viewpoint. Basically, put yourself on their side of the table. This is not as ridiculous as it may appear. The research demonstrates that recruiters adopting such an approach achieve the best possible outcome close to half the time.

To be able to do this well recruiters need to do their homework before arriving at the negotiation. First, have an understanding of the likely issues. These always fall into three categories.

keep reading…

First, some interview rules:

• Hiring managers have a bigger fear of failure (making a bad hire) than the person being interviewed, and the consequences of making a bad hire is greater than making a poor employment decision.
• Most hiring managers are excellent at making widgets but they are terrible at conducting interviews.
• 80/20 rule: 80% Compatibility/20% Skill Sets. At the beginning of the interview, skill sets are important, but once the interviewer is confident that candidate’s skill sets will help them sleep better at night, compatibility becomes the primary hiring motivator.

So you have just spent months networking to uncover a highly marketable candidate. You have screened, interviewed, evaluated, checked references, and created a stellar marketing campaign. Because of your efforts, your candidate gets the ultimate compliment: an invitation to interview with your client. You do your standard candidate interview prep: Company, Job Description, and Interest in the job. So why is your sendout-to-hire ratio still low?

Very few recruiters understand that making a hire in this market is more about “risk” assessment than “skill” assessment. Candidate interview preparation should not only be about helping the candidate understand their strengths within the job description; it should also be about helping them understand the psychological battles that hiring authorities go through just to present an offer of employment.

If you want to increase your sendout-to-hire ratio, share the following with your candidates during the interview prep.

keep reading…

Two weeks ago, I wrote an article about an imaginary Willie who was faced with some challenging issues.

He heads recruiting for a large construction company where business is good and hiring strong. There are many open positions for experienced, senior-level people and there will soon be many more as a large number of boomers are approaching retirement. He is being urged by some on his team to begin using Web 2.0 techniques and to develop a more exciting and interactive Web presence in order to get ready for both current and projected needs.

So Willie is wondering….would a social network be useful for his organization? Would it give him any return on his invested time and money? Or would it just divert attention from more urgent recruiting challenges? Is it worth investing in today or should he wait for some commercial applications to arrive (if they ever do)?

What would you do if you were Willie?

Here is one of the first responses that I received from a reader:

“I would suggest Willie fishes where the fish are. Web 2.0 is fun, new, different, exciting and sexy, however the fish he is looking for are not feeding there. 45-55 year old engineers and project managers are not on social sites on the Web. . .”

There is certainly a lot of merit in this argument. While a recent Pew study suggests that a very large percentage of people over 50 are using the Internet, it is likely few of them would use the Internet to find a job.

keep reading…

A candidate interview with Celeste O’Neil of the Biondo Group is not your typical interview. While many companies rely on technology to conduct candidate screening and interviews, Celeste takes a more personal approach with her candidates. In some instances, her interviews are scheduled around morning walks or family dinners at the CEO’s home. After hearing Celeste’s story, I was intrigued to find out more. I decided to invite her over for a non-traditional interview at my parent’s house in Milford, PA, to discuss her non-traditional interviewing.

keep reading…

I have a 10-month-old granddaughter. She just started crawling. What happened in the beginning was interesting to watch. The task at hand was to get her knees up under her and her backside lifted. Watching this was a comedy of errors and a lot of fun. A week or so of this and she gathered enough strength in her hip area to assume the takeoff position.

Sure, at first she’d rock backwards and plump back down on the floor, ever determined to get back up. When she finally was at the point where she was steady on her hands and knees, the first thing that happened was that she went backwards! Like a train that has to roll a little backwards before it can go forward, she’d push back a couple knee-steps and then she’d lurch forward, falling awkwardly flat sometimes with the momentum. Up though she’d get, rock unsteadily, trace a knee-step or two back, and then off she went like a whirling dervish!

There’s a sourcing reason in this grandparent reporting. Sometimes on a sourcing job we have to trace backwards a few steps before we can move forward. And this is never as true as on a job that is giving us a lot of difficulty. The fact of the matter is, a job that is presenting a lot of difficulty may have been set up wrong. What do I mean?

keep reading…

Back in 2006 I wrote an article discussing the integration of assessments into job boards. It was an example of the continued movement toward the inclusion of assessments into the mainstream of recruiting and hiring products and systems.

In this article, I praised the progress being made in understanding the value of quality assessment products in the modern hiring process.

I strongly believe that the words I wrote in 2006 are as relevant today as they ever were; in fact, they are more relevant now than ever. The days of the big job boards and their keyword matching strategies are numbered.

keep reading…

From the online-recruiting grapevine:

–(You heard it here first): NewmediaHire is going live with a redesign of its site today. If it looks familiar, it’s because it’s based on a platform called “Ning,” popular for building websites. The video-blog-discussion-heavy site is aimed at creating a sense of community — more than just job-hunting — and is aimed at an international audience (the site has a corresponding LinkedIn group and perhaps half of that group is based in the UK, Australia, Canada, Africa, South America, and elsewhere outside of the U.S.) An Indian company helped NewmediaHire build the new site.

–A new site, moneybackjobs.com, is offering employees a “5% to 7.5% bonus for accepting a new job that’s posted on our website.” Employers pay $50 to post, and 10-12% for each candidate they hire. There are incentives for employees to be exclusive, and to take their resumes off of other sites (“trust us, we have ways of finding out,” the company says) as well as big incentives for employers to only post on moneybackjobs. Smart.

–From ThinkPanmure’s Nate Swanson: “We are hearing that several large BrassRing customers are unlikely to renew their contracts when they expire late this year or early next year, but have yet to make a decision as to whether to use their existing ERP vendor or that of a best-of-breed vendor.”

Quality of Hire Measurement
Reporting and metrics is always a hot topic for recruiting, but so few companies do it right. In my research over the years, most companies measure time-to-hire and cost-per-hire but ignore quality-of-hire. Lisa Shapiro Mendell is an exception. She is interested in adding this key performance indicator to her recruitment metric dashboard and wants to know what other companies have done the same.

Ravi Subramanian recommends hiring manager surveys and assessments. Michael Chernesky asks a very relevant question…who is accountable? Bonita Martin says recruiters and Steven Yeong says hiring managers. Joshua Letourneau offered some great insight based on his experiences. While many of his clients do measure quality of hire, their process often fails because of one of three problems. They don’t measure quality of hire beyond the first day; the hiring manager survey turns into a game since “recruiters are incentivized to make the survey look good”; or feuds spark between HR and the hiring manager. Josh’s solution to overcome these challenges lies in performance assessments that measure expected versus actual performance. Anyone out there having great success measuring QOH? Share your story; we would love to hear it.

Wednesday’s Question of the Day
Anna Patterson’s latest Internet search engine, Cuil, is backed by $33 million in venture capital and expected to outshine Google. I read negative reviews of Cuil and wanted to know if anyone is using it and seeing results. Glenn Gutmacher, Sourcer extraordinaire, is not a fan…it is slow and produces poor quality results. Without launching an alpha or beta version, Glenn believes they “set high expectations and they ‘way’ underdelivered.” T Tallis agrees. Amanda Blazo is more optimistic. She acknowledges Cuil’s shortcomings but encourages us to give it time.

Phone Screening Candidates
Diane Propsner wonders: before a third-party recruiter sends a resume to a corporate recruiter, How much time should he or she spend on phone screening and what questions should be asked? She gave us an overview of her process and the questions included. Andrew Stone agrees with Diane that 10-15 minutes is not enough time for building a relationship with a candidate. Tania Murray recommends “tailoring your cover sheet to your client to focus on just what they (candidate) told you is important to them.” According to Tania, it is critical to know the candidates goals and motivations. Joy Naui offers a different approach by suggesting that third-party recruiters first contact the hiring manager. The phone screening should include key points based on that conversation. Questions should include more than technical skill questions. If a candidate recognizes that you are genuine about finding them the right job, they will agree to answer more questions.

Thursday’s Question of the Week
After hearing Dr. Wendell Williams’ Selection and Assessment webinar on July 23, an attendee wanted to know if behavioral or situational screening questions are better and why. I thought I would ask you. Joe Payne is in favor of behavioral questions since they are a good indicator of past actions and can allow interviewers to dig deeper. Matt Cooper brings up an interesting point that most candidates are too prepared for behavioral questions with the amount of information available on the Internet including examples and preparation tools. Interviewers need to be creative and get more specific. KT Connor agrees with Matt and also cautions against self-reporting assessments instead recommending objective decision tools.

Are Job Boards Becoming Obsolete?
This is a hot topic of debate, check it out!

Despite the slowing economy, more employers are requesting proposals for recruitment process outsourcing services. The CEOs of Hudson Highland Group and Spherion commented that RFP activity and the new business pipeline for RPO deals remained strong during each company’s second quarter earnings conference call.

Both CEOs also acknowledged that some existing RPO customers have ceased hiring or have opted to take recruiting back in-house, causing a decrease in RPO revenues for both companies during the recent period.

Despite what he called a severe pullback from two clients, one in telecommunications and the other in the airline industry, Spherion CEO Roy Krause said the company will continue to invest in RPO, adding that while proposal activity has increased, it’s taking longer to close new deals.

keep reading…

Talent acquisition leaders are used to working under pressure, but there’s little doubt that the guy in the hot seat is Joe Abbott, director of National Recruitment Human Resources Management for U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

In May 2006, President Bush committed that he would curtail illegal immigration and improve border security. A key part of his strategy included adding 6,000 new border patrol agents by the end of 2008. Abbott agreed to head up the agency’s recruitment function and take on the challenge of sourcing 180,000 applicants to meet the hiring quota of 6,000 new agents.

Abbott’s story sounds like it has all the makings of the first reality television series featuring the survival strategies of talent acquisition leaders.

keep reading…

Kenexa (profile; site) earned $9 million or 39 cents a share for the quarter ended June 30, beating Wall Street’s estimate of 35 cents and joining Taleo and Monster in reporting better than expected results.

The company’s $56.4 million in revenue was an increase of 25% over the $45.2 million for the same period in 2007. The company provides full life-cycle talent management software and multiple additional products including assessments and RPO services.

Kenexa’s CEO Rudy Karsan did a little crowing in the financial announcement, which was released after the market closed Monday. “The combination of solid sequential growth and integration of Quorum International enabled Kenexa to become the first independent talent management vendor to pass the $200 million in annualized revenue level during the second quarter,” he said in the typical, curbed enthusiasm of the financial announcements of publicly-held companies.

Quorum International was a London-based RPO provider to Europe, Africa and the Middle East. The company was purchased for an undisclosed sum in April.

Kenexa told investors and analysts that it expected its current third quarter to come in at between $57 million and $59 million, which is about $10 to $12 million more than during the third quarter of 2007. After expenses, that translates to 38 to 39 cents in earnings, the company said. Analysts were expecting 40 cents a share earnings on $61.7 million in revenue.

The best recruiters I know execute the fundamentals of recruiting well and have developed good “habits” within each step of the recruitment process.

One simple, but powerful referral sourcing technique is closing each recruitment cold call with the question: “Can you do me a favor?”

As we all know, much has been much written about overcoming the objection “I am not interested…” or “I am happy; thanks, but no thanks…”

But in reality, you will not be able to turn a “no” into a “yes” in many (if not most) of these situations.

Yes, they might listen to your message (or pitch) but in the majority of cases, they won’t be interested or, they won’t be qualified.

Of course, when this happens, it is your job to network with this person to get referrals. Your ability to extract referrals and/or leads to help you with your search depends on many factors; including (among others):

keep reading…

A significant part of my work involves giving presentations around the world on the hottest recruiting topics. It is an aspect of my work that I truly enjoy because it affords me an opportunity to continuously learn about where our profession is headed.

Through speaking, I not only help companies understand the latest recruiting trends, but I also learn from hundreds of professionals about what they see as hot topics, emerging trends, and how they are approaching them. I wanted to take this opportunity to share my thoughts on what recruiting trends will top the agendas of Global 500 recruiting managers in the next 12 to 18 months based on my interaction with more than 300 organizations around the globe this year.

The Latest Trends in Corporate Recruiting

Based on conversations with recruiting leaders, questions asked during seminars, advisory requests, and best-practice research, expect to see an increased emphasis in:

• Upgrading employment branding. Nothing is hotter around the globe in recruiting than employment branding. Firms throughout Asia, in particular, are increasingly adopting employment branding as a wildly important activity for 2009. The success of Google, a firm that has built the world’s strongest employment brand over an amazing five-year period, has led others to focus on this impactful long-term strategy. Key focus areas include increasing media coverage, increasing visibility online, building your “green” brand, and countering your “negative” employment brand. Firms to watch: Facebook, Google, Yum Brands, Tata, E&Y, Enterprise, U.S. Army, and Sodexo.
• Reinvigorating referral programs. Despite the growth of career-related Internet sites, the highest volume and quality candidates still come from well-designed employee referral programs. While heavy adoption was initially hampered by cultural issues around the world, today such programs are proving highly effective everywhere. Key focus areas include proactively approaching key employees for referrals (program targeting), leverage non-employee referrals, making reward systems more comprehensive, immediate, and visible, and last but not least, helping employees leverage social media to restore relationships, make new relationships, and build stronger relationships. Firms to watch: AmTrust Bank, Edward Jones, Whirlpool, and Amazon.com.
• Renewing the focus on quality of hire. As a result of strong research by organizations like staffing.org, recruiting leadership has begun to refocus its efforts on identifying factors that increase the quality or the on-the-job performance of new hires. Key focus areas include improved quality of hire metrics, calculating the performance differential between average and quality hires, and identifying sources that produce high-quality hires. Firms to watch: Aimco and Wipro.
• Reinforcing the business case for recruiting. As budgets tighten and slow economic growth continues, recruiting budgets will face constant constraints. Instead of whining, many leading talent organizations are seizing the opportunity to reposition themselves as non-transactional organizations. When the focus in recruiting is placed on non-transactional, more systemic issues, such organizations can work with the CFO and risk management to demonstrate the importance of supporting recruiting even during times of reduced hiring volume. The key focus areas include predictive modeling, dollarizing recruiting results, and showing the dollar impact of vacancies in revenue generating positions. Firms to watch: Aimco, DFS, Wipro, and Google.

keep reading…

Jonathan R. Hefferlin, managing director at MRI Dana Point, a former radio commentator and a prescient observer of economic trends, gives his weekend take on Friday’s jobs report. keep reading…

You need to become a better interviewer than your clients if they’re excluding good candidates even before they meet them, or if they’re not too good at assessing competency. This was the reason I developed the one-question performance-based interview, just to prevent having to do searches over again. Here’s how it works.

After you complete a work-history review, ask the candidate to describe a significant major accomplishment. Then ask these follow-up questions to better understand the person’s actual role and the significance of the accomplishment:

1. When did it happen and how long did it take to finish?
2. What was your specific role and who was on the team? As part of this, please draw a work chart describing the people you worked for and those who worked for you. Also, describe those you worked with, inside and outside your department, or company.
3. Describe the environment and culture. I’d like to know how decisions were made, the systems you used, how your boss managed the team, and what you liked and didn’t like.
4. What was the actual impact you made? Please provide specific details and facts.
5. What were the two to three biggest challenges you faced on this project? Walk me though step-by-step how you handled the most difficult one.
6. Describe the technical skills you used and those you learned. Give me some examples of how you applied these.
7. Give me two to three examples of initiative, where you went the extra mile, or where you exceeded expectations.
8. What did you like most and least about this project?
9. Give me a specific example of the biggest problem you had to solve, whether it was handling something technical, a team issue, or meeting a tough schedule.
10. What recognition did you receive for this?

While these questions can take at least 15 minutes, they provide the interviewer great insight regarding the candidate’s abilities to handle significant accomplishments. Then ask the same questions for a few more accomplishments over different periods and connect the dots. By repeating the questions for different accomplishments, the interviewer can quickly observe the person’s consistency, performance, and growth over time.

To increase assessment accuracy, have other interviewers use the same questioning process, but have them focus on different job factors and time frames.

keep reading…