1. It’s about them. Using a mobile phone and a mobile phone application, Offner says, have to be a no-brainer or people will bail. “Make it easy. Let’s capture them and not let them go to waste,” he says, referring to potential employees using smart phones.
2. There are two Internets. There’s the web and the mobile web. Says Offner with a grin: “You either suck on one of them and are pretty good on the other, or you’re pretty good on both.”
3. Know your audience. “You have one today,” he says. “Start catering to them.” Hertz, he notes, gets the importance of mobile marketing when it comes to consumers, and should extend that effort to recruiting. “I love that site,” Offner says. “I can rent a car in a minute. I just can’t wait to rent cars because it’s so easy. They need to apply that same technology to recruitment. Anyone who rents a car could work for them.”

With all that in mind, Charles Purdy, from Monster, speaking at a conference on mobile recruiting a few minutes ago in San Francisco, gave some advice for those corporations looking to put career information on smart phones:

Purdy also shared a few stats from Monster that it’s learning from its smart phone users.

• The most common keyword for job searches is “sales.” That’s followed by the keywords marketing, IT, manager, retail, healthcare, and accounting.
• Mobile users of Monster’s iPhone app behave differently from those who go to Monster.com. Visitors to Monster’s mobile app visit 42% more often than visitors to Monster.com. But they spend much less time (66% less) in the app than on Monster.com. (I think Sodexo’s finding something different in some early data it has on its mobile job-seekers, who are spending more time during mobile visits than the main career site visitors do.)
• As compared to Monster.com users from computers, mobile users are a bit more likely to be male, earn $75,000-99,000, are likely to be employed and thus more passive candidates, and more likely to have graduate degrees. Purdy notes that these stats are likely to change — fairly quickly.

I’ve had a few briefings, and gotten plenty of PR about what’s to come. So far, no moon shot, but there are some slick new releases. Mobile apps seem to be high on the list, followed closely by improvements in service integrations, SaaS-based tools, and even a few new entrants, who promise a better mousetrap.

In advance of the show, Lumesse, the former Stepstone Solutions, introduced a mobile app for its TalentLink recruitment management software. Lumesse Mobile is available for customer smartphones or tablets in the Android, Apple iOS and BlackBerry app stores.

The company says the app is “optimized for both slow and fast mobile connections and designed to deliver an individual, highly-personalized, enjoyable user experience with data and functionality specific to the role of the user.”

Achievers Still Loves Rewards

The company formerly known as I Love Rewards renamed itself in September. It’s now Achievers, but it still specializes in employee rewards and social media recognition programs. It also relaunched its website.

That’s big news for any company, (just ask SHL, which had been SHL/Previsor since the merger in January, but has now dropped the Previsor). However, Achievers made bigger news this week with the announcement of a $24.5 million C-series financing round. It was lead by Sequoia Capital, with participation from its existing investors.

The announcement says the company will use the money to “scale our culture, partner with more customers and execute on our mission.” Fortunately (at least for we HR Tech attendees), they’ll spend a few dollars on a reception they’re sponsoring jointly with Jobvite and Starr Tincup Monday night at the Mandalay Bay.

TalentWise

The assessments and screening company TalentWise, winner of a boatload of awards just this year, spent the summer launching several new products including TalentShield,a resume verification service, and an automated I-9 solution. It also has new social media screening solutions.

To make sure everyone knows who it is and what it has to offer, TalentWise has launched what it calls TalentWise Across America.

That does it for the HR Tech connection. However, there are a few other announcements, entirely unrelated to the show.

Resoomay

No, this is not a really bad misspelling of the word resume. It’s a new company, launching in public beta. You use resoomay to screen applicants using customized pre-recorded interviews.

Avue Adds Social Media to Fed Jobs Postings

Avue Technologies Corporation, a talent acquisition and recruitment management vendor to federal agencies, has added a social media job posting capability. In addition to posting jobs to over 1,600 .edu and .org sites, Avue can now push federal government job information to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Note: Todd Raphael, ERE’s Editor-in-Chief contributed to this post.

Burnett emailed to say: “The digital world is globally moving at a huge pace to mobile Internet. The explosion of the smartphone and tablet is taking over the pockets of the world and will over take desktop web in 2013. The recruitment industry took 15 years to migrate from printed media to Internet media. Recently the impact of social media has provided innovation in recruitment and a new level of community driven and web-driven hiring outside of the traditional job board. Disappointingly employers have failed to maximise the mobile web and mobile apps.

Given the intrinsic partnership between social media and mobile web, employers around the world must recognize the value being missed on mobile. The attached infographic illustrates the opportunity and the failure to adopt mobile recruiting solutions.”

Burnett’s with me at a mobile recruiting conference up in San Francisco.

If you’re curious, by the way, about the stat you see about 8 out of 100 corporate careers sites — that was a study to see whether the corporate career sites of the Fortune 100 determine if your browser is on a mobile device, and then serve you up mobile-optimized content. It’s a 1-5 scale, and Burnett says that “the fact that the observed average score is so low means that virtually all career sites are designed specifically for people sitting behind a desktop with a broadband connection.”

How did I know? Dunkin’ Donuts and CareerBuilder told me. The two of them teamed up again this year to survey workers about their coffee habits. Among other things, they found that HR benefits people are among the professionals who say they most need that cup o’ joe to get through the workday.

Now why would they do such a survey? Well, today, besides being Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, it’s also National Coffee Day. Spend a little money doing a fun survey about coffee, kick it out to us coffee-drenched writers (we rank 4th on the most-in-need-of-coffee list), and voila, a little PR for the two companies.

Why CareerBuilder? It knows a ton about jobs and workers. Why Dunkin’ Donuts? It actually has decent coffee and donuts, the staple of employee meetings everywhere.

As much meaningless fun as it is to know that scientists and lab technicians are at the top of the professions most in need of their coffee, the survey is actually scientific. It’s done by Harris Interactive and has all that statistical percentage probability and error calculation, which you can find here, should you care.

Among the little nuggets is the revelation that 61 percent of workers drink two cups each workday; 28 percent drink three. Hotel workers and lawyers and judges are most likely to take theirs black. HR professionals and personal caretakers take it with cream and sugar. That somehow doesn’t surprise me, but I can’t say why.

One more thing especially for the Millennials: 36 percent of workers 18-24 say drinking coffee has helped their careers because it gives them a chance to network with their co-workers. I’m presuming that happens as they stand around the coffee maker, waiting for the next pot to be ready.

Should CareerBuilder and Dunkin’ Donuts (I’m using their names again, since “mentions” are one metric by which PR and marketing people — 2nd on the most-in-need of coffee list — measure success), should the two companies do the survey next year, one thing I’m hoping they’d look into is why is it the person who takes the last cup never makes a fresh pot?

Screw the channel.

Manage the present for optimum performance.

Reinvent the future.

The equivalent for recruiting goes something like this:

Screw sourcing.

Maximize quality of hire.

Become a great recruiter.

The point: hiring great talent is not about great sourcing; it’s about great recruiting. And if you continue to chase the next sourcing silver bullet you’ll wind upexactly where you are today in 5-10 years from now. In fact, those of you who have followed the “chase-the-sourcing-silver-bullet” strategy have not improved quality of hire in the past 5-10 years. The only companies who have shattered this fundamental truth in the war for talent have been those who have a great employer brand. For everyone else, improving quality of hire requires great recruiters.

In a nutshell, here’s my secret formula for hiring great talent:

Great Hires = Good Sourcing plus Great Recruiting

If you follow this formula you’ll be seeing and hiring far better people. Here are some ideas on how to reinvent the future of recruiting:

1. Don’t post job descriptions. These only work for those who have an economic need to apply. A great ad that leads with the EVP and emphasizes the impact of the actual work involved will increase your response rate at least 5X. There is no law, even the OFCCP’s, that says your postings have to be boring. Here’s an article for more on this important topic, but the key is to attract as many good people at the top of your sourcing funnel and then making sure you keep the best ones engaged from beginning to end.
2. Bridge the gap. The criteria top people initially use to engage with a recruiter is not the same as that used for deciding to accept an offer. Most people, especially if they’re fully employed, always ask about the compensation, the company, the job, and location when first contacted by a recruiter. These are very short-term tactical issues. When these same people decide to accept an offer, they consider different things, typically the growth opportunity; the impact the job can make; what they can learn, do, and become; the compensation and work-life balance issues; and the company and the mission. These are long-term and career strategy issues. Good recruiters know how to finesse the conversation to shift the discussion away from the short-term to the long-term in the first five minutes. As a result, they increase their opt-in rate on every call and contact. If you don’t know how to bridge this gap, you’re then forced to find more candidates. That’s why recruiters who can’t pull this off look for more new sourcing techniques to find more candidates rather than recruit the ones they already have.
3. Follow the 80/20 rule for passive candidate sourcing. Passive candidate sourcing is all about networking, not name generation. You need to get 1-2 pre-qualified referrals on every call to anyone on LinkedIn, then spend 80% of your time calling the best of these people. The payoff: they’ll call you back and they’ve been prequalified. That’s why bridging the gap is such a critical technique. Developing a relationship with a top person takes about 10 minutes, at least. If the person is not appropriate for the job then the process of networking can begin. As a minimum this consists of connecting with the person and then asking about their first-degree connections by cherry picking the best of them.
4. PERP your ERP. The new big thing in sourcing is auto-connecting your company’s open jobs with your employees’ LinkedIn and Facebook connections. LinkedIn, Jobvite, and Jobs2Web (among others) are now offering this important capability. This auto-connecting ability is getting smarter day by day and will represent a huge opportunity for those who know how to take advantage of this and target passive candidates. One way is to proactively seek out your employees’ best connections using the cherry picking mentioned above. This is the P in PERP: proactive. To turbo-charge your PERP and to lead the effort for reinventing the future, get your employees to connect with the best people they’ve worked with in the past. Then, sometime in the future, when you open a new requisition, the best people will be immediately identified through your employees’ LinkedIn network.
5. Minimize your opt-out ratio: aka, plug the leaks in your sourcing bucket. Top people don’t look for new jobs the same way average people do. They have different needs, they use different criteria for applying and accepting, and they move at a far different pace. Designing your sourcing processes around the needs of top active and passive candidates, rather than average candidates, will maximize the percent of top performers who ultimately apply. To get started on this, conduct a complete process review of your entire sourcing, interviewing, and hiring process. At each step, ask yourself if this is the best way to engage with a top-person who is not looking. After about an hour, you’ll have figured out the 4-5 things you need to do immediately to increase your end-to-end yield.
6. Defend your candidate from dumb decisions. If you do all of the above well, you’ll have 2-3X as many top candidates without having to do much else. Even better, you’ll have gotten out of the trap of “chasing the next silver sourcing bullet” mentally. However, if your hiring managers tend to overemphasize skills and/or aren’t very good at assessing candidate ability and/or aren’t very good at recruiting the best people to work for them, then you’ll need to coach them every step along the way. One way to do this is become a better interviewer than your hiring managers. You’ll never be able to out-yell a hiring manager, but you can out-fact them. Providing specific in-depth details about the candidate’s past performance can often override a biased or superficial assessment. If you do this often enough, find stronger candidates whom you’ve recruited and can close more top people without giving away the farm, you’ll soon be recognized as a true co-equal partner in the process.

Stop chasing the next sourcing silver bullet. Instead become a great recruiter, design your hiring processes around the needs of top people, offer careers instead of jobs, and partner with your hiring manager clients. As Steve Jobs would say if you asked him about recruiting:

Screw sourcing.

Maximize quality of hire.

Become a great recruiter.

Neither of those were particularly noteworthy except that the townhaller was hosted by LinkedIn in Silicon Valley, with 80,000 people watching a live feed of the event.

During the hour-long meeting, Obama pitched his jobs bill, and fielded a variety of questions, most dealing with his plans to boost the economy, with others expressing concern about the future of Social Security and Medicare.

From a recruiting view, what was particularly interesting was the significance of the event for LinkedIn. If anyone had any lingering doubt that the business networking site was laser-focused on recruiting, the town hall meeting swept that away.

The White House hand-picked LinkedIn to host the jobs forum, at which the company’s CEO Jeff Weiner moderated. In a post-event interview, Weiner said, “We’re first and foremost very appreciative to the President and to the White House for recognizing the platform as a way to get the word out there.”

The San Francisco Chronicle‘s report on the event quoted a public relations consultant who called it “a coup of enormous value to the company and its brand.”

After last night’s bit by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, that value may be just a bit less enormous. I won’t spoil the clip for you, but Ill tell you it’s hysterical, particularly the part about how LinkedIn “helps” people find jobs. Enjoy.

What happens when your manager — who goes out regularly after work with a group of employees to scarf down chicken wings — has a hard-core vegan show up in the lobby for an interview?

That’s where “fit” comes in. You’ve heard it at conferences and read it here and most everywhere else people talk about hiring: you should look not just for hard skills, but hire for fit.

But, then again, you’ve heard the opposite: that you should seek out diversity, diversity of thought, people who bring different ideas, experiences, and perspectives to your organization.

Carol Schultz and I talk about this these two ideas, and whether they are contradictory, in the approximately 13-minute video below.

Last week, at Facebook’s f8 developers conference, Monster said it was tightening the integration between its BeKnown networking app, and Facebook, on which it built the professional network. The enhancements will make it easy for BeKnown members who update their business profile to add those updates to their more social Facebook profile.

In the weeks before, Monster released smartphone apps for the iPhone and Android devices, allowing members to update their BeKnown profiles, send messages, make connections and, naturally, search Monster for jobs. Now, European members of the BeKnown network have the same capabilities. An Android version was released in Europe previously.

With the sweeping changes being made to Facebook, Monster’s decision to build its network-in-a-network on the social site seems almost prescient. Despite the current roil by the users who will have to get used to the changes Facebook is making, they eventually will. As they fill in their new Timelines, some of it will spill over into their BeKnown profiles. As Monster’s announcement last week noted, the opposite will also happen.

Sure, this is going to take some time. My colleague, Lance Haun, has an insightful post on TLNT about the furor over the Facebook changes, which, incidentally, makes for an excellent case study about change management. But once over the angst, and using some of the new Lifestyle apps, Facebook members who now number somewhere around 800 million, will find the frictionless sharing of their lives to be second nature. That is, assuming (which is far from certain) that Facebook can resolve the growing, and righteous concerns about user privacy.

Monster, which like all job boards that host resumes, has broad experience with privacy and security issues. So when it launched its BeKnown app (it’s an app; it’s a network; it’s all the same), it built a wall between users’ social Facebook friends, and members of their professional network. BeKnown users control what is shared across that wall.

Now when BeKnown launched, it pulled in data from LinkedIn, as well as Facebook. But LinkedIn shut down the Monster connection (and some others);  an obvious move to protect its own growing recruitment profit center. For now, that matters. But with Facebook’s “frictionless sharing,” much data will flow to the site without the need for users to actively post it, and, even, when users log out of Facebook. (That’s a whole privacy controversy already underway.)

Still, I suspect users will want to add some things to those Timelines that are rolling out now, and among the first and simplest will be to add employment information. On BeKnown you can fill in the employment blanks and leverage the connections there when it comes time to job hunt.

Is it possible that the Facebook changes, along with the apps that are coming, will make the lack of a LinkedIn connection irrelevant for Monster and BeKnown? The short answer is “maybe.” But with what Facebook is doing — and the way Monster is staying up with the changes — the case for BeKnown to succeed as a professional network grows stronger.

Different companies are involved in different ways. Dow and J.P. Morgan Chase, for example, are involved in funding/allocating money. Google will be developing a program to recognize the top 5% of STEM teachers. The American Museum of Natural History “will prepare 130 certified science teachers for high-need schools by 2015; each teacher will commit to teach in those schools for at least four years.” Also, the museum will be involved in teacher onboarding/retention efforts.

Information on joining the effort is online, along with some frequently asked questions.

So anyone wielding such a powerful tool should be certain of its validity and of their skill in using it. The EEOC considers the interview to be a selection test, and requires that it be validated before use. Yet, I would guesstimate that few interviews are validated at all, and the ones that are may not be delivered consistently or by a competent, trained interviewer.

Research has consistently shown that the typical unstructured interview is pretty unreliable. It does not consistently ensure that the most qualified person gets a job or that the person will perform any better than another candidate chosen with less care. In all the studies that I have looked at, the validity of choosing candidates by only using an unstructured interview process is about the same as simply picking someone at random.

Interviews are rarely done consistently from interviewer to interviewer or from candidate to candidate. Yet, we typically consider all the interview inputs for a candidate as if they were done in the same way. Therefore we are comparing apples to oranges, and the hairs we split and the time we spend agonizing over a small detail or a particular answer to an interview question is wasted.

No wonder that candidates often roll their eyes at the absurdity of the interview process.

Assessing candidates is highly subjective, and is based on whatever assumptions (prejudices) the recruiter or hiring manager has, their mood, and the chemistry between them and the candidate. Even factors such as physical appearance, tone of voice, or time of day can impact the interview.

I often ask recruiters to think about what would happen if they selected two candidates for a job who each had the same qualifications and who had known the questions that were going to be asked and had prepared the same answers. If another recruiter interviewed them, would they both receive the same score on the interview, as they should?

DDI and other respected selection organizations offer excellent tools to improve the reliability and validity of interviews, and everyone who does interviewing should be trained in these methods and use them consistently. These well-constructed, validated, and structured interviews given by a trained interviewer can increase reliability by a significant amount, yet they are still only a little more reliable than simply picking a “winner” at random from your final pool.

Carefully constructed interviews, where the questions are directly related to measureable skills, competencies, or past experiences, take a lot of time to prepare and, to be most effective, have to be delivered in a similar way (ideally exactly the same way) to each candidate for the job. This alone would eliminate most of the interviews I have had personally. From my experience as a recruiter and candidate, these rambling, unstructured interviews were far more common. The interviewer ranged over a wide variety of topics, dipping into my resume here and there to ask a question or ask me to validate something they already expected and wanted to hear. In most cases, I could manipulate the interview in subtle ways to make sure my strengths were showcased. In other words, a sophisticated candidate can game the system in many ways to tilt the deck in their favor.

Another Way

On the other hand, there are many tools available to recruiters that could improve their ability to reliably select and recommend candidates that have the depth of skill and aptitude the positions calls for. These tools can save endless amounts of time and free up a recruiter to spend more time sourcing, selling, and ensuring that the candidates are informed and engaged.

These tools include a multitude of screening and testing tools: validated realistic job previews, simulations, aptitude. and skills tests, as well as simple things like asking candidates to actually do something relevant to the job: edit an article, write an advertisement, critique a circuit diagram, locate an error, etc.

Internships are another great way to assess a candidate’s fit into an organization as well as their motivation, interest, and ability – both professionally and to work within a team. While they can be difficult to set up and take time, once they are underway an organization has an almost steady stream of good candidates under assessment.

And still another excellent way to get feedback on past performance and character is to conduct a reference check. Using a tool such as Checkster, you can get anonymous and wide-ranging feedback from many people who have worked with the candidate.

I know many of you use other tools in your evaluation, but I also know you always conduct interviews — often many of them. If the interviews are used to establish a human connection, market the organization or position to the candidate, and are not the primary source of gathering the information to make a decision, I have no issue with them. When they are used as a selection tool — and particularly when we are proud of them as a selection tool — I get concerned. There are many better way to select candidates than the interview, and we should be using them more and more.

Recruiters who now use Facebook exclusively or mostly to push out jobs will become even more marginalized by the increasing emphasis the social site is placing on engagement. Those who actively invest in courting their Facebook “fans,” offering content of value, and real conversations, will reap even greater rewards than they do now, earning their brand a place on user’s forthcoming Timelines, and the ability to broaden and measure their reach as visitors “Share” content with their own FB friends.

One of the consequence of these and the other changes Facebook is rolling out, is that it will be harder than ever for employers to compete for attention. Even before last week’s f8 conference, when the company’s most profound changes in years were announced by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, routine updates such as a “like” or a me-too comment, and job postings, were being moved to a ticker-style activity window on the profile page. Even more is likely to appear there as Facebook’s standards of what’s worthy of being a top post, and thus rising to the top of a person’s wall, become more stringent. (A good summary of the announced changes is available here.)

In fact, the new Graph Rank will govern positioning of content in both the Timeline and ticker. Facebook didn’t share any details of the algorithms Graph Rank will use in deciding worthiness, but engagement will undoubtedly play a prominent role.

MediaPost, in an article today on the implications for marketers of the sweeping changes, says, “One initial takeaway is that while the new features could create more opportunity for users to interact with brands and products, an increased volume and velocity of updates on Facebook could also make it harder to break through the clutter to reach consumers.”

Until now, the most significant Facebook metric for employment marketers was the number of Fans. Soon, the number of times an item was “shared” and the number of times a connection was made to a Facebook timeline will be even more important measures.

That someone now “Likes” your post is another current measure of interest. With the changes though, you’ll be able to offer them a more active engagement, so they can tell their friends they are “reading” your post, or “applying” for a job. Employers can create their own action-oriented apps to supplement Facebook’s three default Lifestyle apps: “reading,” “watching,” and  “listening to.”

Analyzing the potential these changes will have for marketers, 3601, a top-ranked digital marketing agency, said:

The features that Facebook announced …  reinforce the notion that engagement matters more than ever. Brands must continue to create and share relevant content, experiences, and applications on a regular basis. A core objective for marketers remains becoming a part of consumers’ personal stories in a shareable way.

The meaning of these changes will take time to be fully sussed out. And user reaction to the changes already implemented — the news feed and ticker, most prominently — which have been mostly negative, may result in some adjustments.

The broad strokes, however, are clear. Facebook is saying that engagement is what counts. Those of you, therefore, who have a Facebook page that is rarely updated, or which consists of job listings and nothing else, you’re wasting your time. That’s not a social media program now, and once Timeline and the other changes are pushed out to all 800 million users, you may discover that not even those few people who are your “Fans” remain.

For everyone else, now is the time to take another look at the content you post and the breadth of your online conversations. While it looks like it’s going to be a matter of trial and error to learn how Facebook’s Graph Rank works, the opportunities to be a part of the activity stream and to consider what Lifestyle apps make sense need to become a part of your social media strategy.

It’s easy to say, of course, that the content you post needs to be useful, valuable, and interesting in order to engage your fans and others. What specifically that content should be, however, is another matter. As you think through the implications of the forthcoming Facebook changes, take a look at past content that promoted comments and reposting. Your visitors and friends and fans, by their Likes and discussion, have already pointed at what they find valuable.

The marketing agency, 360i, in its report, talked about the marketing challenges posed by the changes, which it said “should generate a tremendous amount of additional content on Facebook.” “Brands,” the agency said, “will have to be even more strategic, creative, and relevant to their fans to stand out.”

"Why join the Navy, if you can be a pirate?"

Want to impress your CEO? Few CEOs wouldn’t mind having the innovation track record of Apple, so there is probably no quicker way to become an “instant hero” then by learning how Apple’s talent management practices have contributed to its success and applying those practices relevant to your organization. In this installment of the case study, we’ll look at internal branding, employer branding, and recruiting.

Internal Brand Encourages Fighting the Status Quo

Steve Jobs and the management team at Apple have worked tirelessly to build a unique internal brand image at Apple that positions employees (at least mentally) as revolutionaries and rebels. Many years ago the organization influenced this internal brand by challenging employees to think how much more exciting it would be to be a pirate, rather than someone who followed the formal protocol of the regular Navy. It even flew a pirate flag over its corporate headquarters. The tradition of being revolutionaries is upheld even today with many supportive slogans including “Part career, part revolution.”

Apple is well known for using T-shirts, parties, and celebrations to build cohesion and to reinforce the internal brand as a ragtag group of revolutionaries. By getting employees to view their role as attacking the status quo, it helps to spur continuous and disruptive innovation. It has been successful in maintaining that internal brand image despite the fact that the top-down approach and intense secrecy run counter to its hatred of bureaucracy and all things “too corporate.” The external image further supports the internal brand.

You Can Have a Strong External Employer Brand Without an Employer Branding Program

Many among us dream of working at Apple, but unlike Google and Facebook, it’s pretty difficult to find out what it’s actually like to work there. A quick search on the Internet reveals that apart from a few alumni, most who have roamed the halls are pretty tight-lipped about their experience. While that silence is probably largely driven by Apple’s widespread use and vigilantly enforced non-disclosure agreements, even the corporation itself is relatively mum. You won’t find a great deal of employment advertising or find the Apple name on any one of a dozen or more best-company-to-work-for lists covering the technology sector, even though competitors like Google, Microsoft, and Intel are regularly listed.

Despite the silence, most would agree that Apple has a great “employer brand image”; Universum ranks Apple No. 10 among global engineering companies. The lesson to be learned is simple: use management practices that support your desired brand and elaborate brand management work will be unnecessary. Get your potential applicants to admire your firm for who and what the firm does by being the admirable firm.

Your Product Brand Should Serve Double-duty as Your Employer Brand

Instead of spending millions on building an employer brand, Apple lets its product brand do all the talking. Apple works hard on building and maintaining its product brand, which is ranked as the #1 global brand according to BrandZ ranking. Although product brand messages are intended primarily for customers, the messaging which emphasizes innovation and thinking differently also hasa major impact on potential applicants and employees. The logic is that if your organization lives up to its product promises, then it is natural to expect that the company’s jobs would also live up to the firm’s brand promise. In their minds, potential applicants make the connection between great products and a great place to work. In addition, because Apple’s products are talked about by everyone, there is a lot of brand association power lauded on those who work at Apple.

This public awareness and admiration can, coupled with a strong employee referral program, make generating a high volume of quality applicants easy. That same attention and curiosity will also enhance a firm’s retention rates because your employees will realize that the public sees them as collectively changing the world. Having employees believe that they are likely doing “the best work of their lives” is a powerful situation that most companies can’t easily mimic.

Being a Most-admired Firm May Be Enough

Apple does receive some notoriety in the press as the world’s “most admired firm.” In fact, Apple has been No. 1 for four years running on the list. That is an amazing feat. Apple dominates this list by being ranked first in eight out of the nine possible ranking factors. Those eight categories include factors that impress potential applicants, including people management, quality of management team, innovativeness, and social responsibility. The most admired list is based on the perceptions of business people and executives, something that Apple excels at managing. Having your firm admired garners enormous publicity in addition to increasing employee pride, engagement, and retention. The lesson to be learned by other firms is that if you don’t offer great benefits (which Apple doesn’t) you can get the same or even larger impact if you manage the perceptions of executives at other firms.

We want our people to be on the leading edge, so that everyone wants them… and then we must treat them right so they will stay, no matter what offers come along! –Apple Senior Manager

Aggressively Recruit the Best From Other Firms

The pirate-raiding mentality at Apple certainly carries over into recruiting. Apple has a long history of recruiting away top talent from other firms. In fact, the development of its iPod probably wouldn’t have occurred if it wasn’t for importing external talent from firms that didn’t appreciate the value of this new technology. Steve Jobs himself has been known to get directly involved in recruiting top talent. Apple has a top-grading type philosophy in that it targets top performers. Jay Elliot, its former VP of HR, cites one of Apple’s core principles as: ”Always… hire the best  ’A’ people. As soon as you hire a B, they start bringing in Bs and Cs.”

Apple’s recruiting approach is evolving because it has recently imported a team of recruiting leaders from Electronic Arts, but historically, despite the aggressive philosophy, its recruiting methods were pedestrian. It uses job boards and has an employee referral program that has paid up to $5,000, but its candidate experience is far from perfect. Glassdoor users rate Apple interviews 3.0/5.0 with regard to difficulty. Its college recruiting effort isn’t exceptional, with the exception of using recent college hires to help recruit the new crop. The key lesson for other firms to learn is that you can generate huge volumes of high-quality applicants if your firm is highly admired and if potential employees believe that they will be working on leading-edge products that everyone will be talking about.

In the retail group, there are two notable recruiting practices. The first has been the naming of the “Genius Bar,” where technical support is provided. Many applicants and employees in the retail area seem to be willing to put up with the relative drudgery of retail work simply for the opportunity to someday work their way up to becoming certified as a “genius.” The second is the use of employee referral cards that are well-designed and powerful. They reinforce the companywide focus that originated with Steve Jobs on recruiting the best from other firms. Recruiters and employees who witness great customer service at other retail and customer service outlets hand the card to those few individuals who provide impressive service. The front of the referral cards say “You’re amazing. We should talk.”

The back praises the individual and their work with a near perfect narrative … “Your customer service just now was exceptional. I work for the Apple store and you’re exactly the kind of person we’d like to talk to. If you’re happy where you are, I’d never ask you to leave. But if you’re thinking about a change, give me a call. This could be the start of something great.”

Next week, Part 4: Apple’s approach to training and development, management, leadership, and other difficult-to-categorize talent management lessons to learn from.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

Williams’ paper is basically an analysis of the data provided by the Bureau of National Affairs, a private company that publishes information and analysis for business and government. Believe it or not, the BNA offers paid access to a database called Employment Discrimination Verdicts and Settlements that can be searched to identify each and every employment discrimination case filed with the EEOC and OFCCP. This database is a literal gold mine for anyone who wants to know why companies are being sued for their hiring practices. It represents the reality behind all of the conjecture around what will get you strung up by the feds when it comes to hiring practices, and it’s data should serve as a good way for companies to gauge their level of risk.

What Was Analyzed

Williams’ paper analyzed the nature and outcome of legal proceedings involving the EEOC and OFCCP, including all cases related to external hiring (not promotions) that were settled both in and out of court during the time period between 1998 and 2010. The findings reported cover two key areas:

1. Issues with a particular type of selection measure or test including: unstructured interviews, structured interviews, biodata measures, cognitive ability tests, psychomotor tests, and “other tests.”
2. Issues with the way the selection tools were used within the hiring process, including the following key issues: lack of documentation, inconsistent process, quota for affirmative action programs, recruiting source violations, violations of the 4/5th rule, and “other” process issues.

Findings

I don’t have room to present a detailed review of the findings from Williams’ study in this article. Those interested in a full list of the findings should obtain a copy of the article itself (email her at mailto:kate.zaner.williams@gmail.com). However, a brief run through of the highlights still provides a ton of useful information and presents an excellent picture of what not to do when building a hiring process.

A total of 224 complaints were identified. Within this total 109 were settled out of court (73 by the EEOC and 36 by the OFCCP). Of the 224 total complaints, only 78 of these actually went to trial. Note that when examined over the 12 years covered by the study, the total of 224 cases breaks out to about 19 per year. The total number of cases that end up facing legal challenges is very small when one considers the massive number of hires made each year in the U.S.

Issues with Selection Measures

Of the 52 complaints about a selection instrument, a bit over half (52%) were settled before trial.

Issues with selection measures almost exclusively involved either interviews or cognitive and psychomotor testing.

Interviews

No cases involving complaints about interviews were settled out of court. In all cases employers decided to take their chances in court and prevailed more often with structured rather than unstructured interviews.

Of the cases that went to trial involving interviews, structured interviews held up better than unstructured, with only 13% of the structured type being ruled discriminatory and 50% of the unstructured ones being ruled as such.

The bottom line here is that if you get challenged on your interviewing process, you are likely going to court, and if you follow best practices and take the time to develop a structured interview process, you are more likely to prevail. If not, it is going to cost you big time. This makes sense given the fact that structured interviews create consistency across interviewers and usually provide excellent documentation of the rationale behind the interview scores that contribute to hiring decisions.

If you are not using a structured interview process, you have a problem. You should make every effort to move out of the stone age and adopt this easy and painless upgrade to your hiring process.

Testing

Two types of tests (cognitive ability and psychomotor tests) ended up accounting for almost all of the challenges related to testing. This makes sense given the fact that these tests consistently demonstrate adverse impact while also having some of the highest levels of validity (i.e., ROI). Welcome to the crazy, mixed up world of testing, where the most effective tests can land you in the most trouble!

Completely opposite of the results for interviews, all of the challenges related to cognitive ability tests and two-thirds of those related to psychomotor tests were settled out of court. This is likely due to the fact that if a test cannot be shown to be job related by the plaintiff, there is no possible way they can win a challenge. Cases that are settled for the plaintiff almost always relate to a failure to demonstrate the job relatedness of a test that demonstrates adverse impact.

For example, in EEOC vs NationsBank of Tennessee (2001) a cognitive ability test discriminated against Hispanic employees by requiring English proficiency, a competency that was not required on the job.

Cases related to psychomotor tests that were settled also showed serious issues with job-relatedness. For example, in EEOC vs. American Airlines (2002), the company used a pre-employment test for meter readers and janitors that had adverse impact against females and measured skills that were not required on the job.

The issue of job relatedness and adverse impact can be a bit complex, but the bottom line is that failure to demonstrate the job relatedness of any sort of test can land you in big trouble. Doing so with cognitive or psychomotor tests will significantly increase your risk factor because these tests are most likely to cause issues with minority score patterns.

Process Issues

While selection devices are a common source of litigation, this study shows that the legality of the selection process is a much more important factor. Cases that went to trial around selection devices were decided for the plaintiff only 28% of the time, vs 68% for those related to the selection process, meaning that process issues are more likely to land an employer in hot water.

This table (click to enlarge) summarizes the reason for legal challenges related to discriminatory selection processes.

The data clearly demonstrates that the most common reason for process cases is inconsistency in the hiring process. Cases related to inconsistent process accounted for the largest percentage of all process related cases and over half of these were settled prior to court. A whopping 91% of all inconsistent process cases were found to be discriminatory.

Some examples of process related cases that were lost by the plaintiff include:

In Dennis v Columbia Colleton Medical Center (2002), the U.S. Court of Appeals described the hospital’s selection process as “a peculiarly informal process” because their explanations for not hiring the plaintiff were different from the written job description, giving the decision “a flavor of post-hoc rationalizations.”

In Dunlap v Tennessee Valley Authority (2008), the court determined the company’s hiring process was discriminatory because they found 70 counts of manipulating test scores and changing interview and test scores in candidate rankings.

ERE readers should know that issues related to the selection process include the source of candidates and the way positions are advertised. In Allen v Tobacco Superstore (2007), the company relied on word of mouth to publicize open positions and had no consistent procedures for advancement; employees simply asked a supervisor to be considered. The court found the word-of-mouth hiring and promotion process — which resulted in a company-wide dearth of Black store managers despite operating in communities with large Black populations — was discriminatory.

Hiring processes must be standardized in terms of the information that is used to make employment decisions. Informal practices or doing an end-around and ignoring the documented process can lead to a heap of trouble. Those who think this is just a silly little nuisance should be sure to read on.

Costs of Legal Complaints

Settling out of court resulted in average fees per case of $590,266 for EEOC cases and $668,785 for OFCCP cases.

Cases that were settled by individual plaintiffs rather then a government body averaged $12,292,492. In comparison, cases that went to trial and were found in favor of the plaintiff cost organizations an average of $13,306,346.

Settling out of court is a much cheaper way to go when faced with a challenge to a selection process or tool. Complaints about selection processes can be very expensive and greatly outweigh the costs of taking the time to do things correctly.

Concluding Remarks

The most interesting thing I gleaned from Williams’ article is how much employers’ thinking about hiring practices reminds me of the Ford Pinto. Most of us are old enough to remember Ford’s exploding car bomb and the fact that Ford’s bean counters knew about the risks related to using faulty components in its fuel system, but decided that the estimated cost of litigation was less than the cost of fixing the defective parts.

Like the Pinto, while employment litigation or challenges can be expensive, the numbers show that it is highly unlikely that an employer will have to pay the price, making this an issue of risk tolerance. The odds are in the employers’ favor that they will get away with poor practices and as such the threat of legal action is not enough incentive to force them to action.

The good news is that there are two wonderful reasons to use job-related tests within a consistent and standardized process. The first is that companies have a moral and ethical obligation to do the right thing and treat all applicants fairly. The second is that the two key issues here — job relatedness and standardized process — are directly related to ROI. That’s right, folks: doing the right thing is also a direct path to profits!! We I/O psychologists have decades of data to support this fact, and almost every vendor out there can produce dozens of case studies to support this fact.

So it’s time to flip the risk equation and realize that doing the right thing can also lead to excellent profits. Use your hiring practice to build a Prius, not a Pinto!

The financial and business site posted its list of the 100 most valuable digital startups today. Not surprisingly, Facebook is #1. According to Business Insider, Facebook is worth $80 billion, up from last year’s $50 billion.

(After today’s product and feature announcements by CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the company’s f8 conference, who knows how much the company will be worth.  A Huffington Post article calls the changes “profound,” putting Facebook “at the forefront of a paradigm shift.”)

While none of the other companies on the list even remotely approach the lofty valuations of Facebook (#2 is Zynga at $11 billion), Business Insider says Indeed, the job search vertical, is worth a cool $450 million, ranking it 37. TheLadders it values at $225 million, placing it at 59.

I emailed both sites asking a version of that penetrating reportorial question, “How does it make you feel?”

Alex Douzet, president of TheLadders, wrote back to say, “I find the list entertaining.” He had more to say, but the comment sums up the list’s relative significance.

Whether an eight-year-old company like TheLadders should be considered a startup is debatable. As is the criterion used in the rankings. There’s a robust discussion of that by readers on the Business Insider site.

Since few privately owned companies detail their finances, establishing a value is shooting in the dark, or at least by candlelight. So I asked about the reliability of the Business Insider numbers. Here’s what Douzet had to say:

All these companies are privately owned. So there is no market for these shares yet, therefore this exercise is very speculative (on the upside and the downside). Private company valuation is a tricky exercise. One thing that is different for TheLadders.com compare to other companies on this list is that we have not raised any money since 2004, making our current valuation a very speculative exercise since we do not disclose revenue or profits to the public.

Haven’t heard back from Indeed, but from previous conversations with CEO Paul Forster, I imagine he’d say the same thing.

In the case of TheLadders, Business Insider adopted the value established by SharesPost, an online marketplace for the sale of privately held securities. Prices based on private sales, though, don’t reflect what an arms-length transaction might yield, which is why, Douzet said, “I won’t believe in any of the values until these companies either become public or get acquired.”

So to help clear things up, I also asked about company revenues. Said Douzet, who has a good sense of humor, “More than $1 but less than $1 billion.”

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

“Most partnerships don’t end up in court.

Most friendships don’t end in a fight.

Most customers don’t leave in a huff.

Instead, when one party feels underappreciated, or perhaps taken advantage of, she stops showing up as often. Stops investing. Begins to move on.

No, I’m not going to sue you. Yes, I’ll probably put my best efforts somewhere else…”

Five things happened recently — three in the last week — that reminded me of the price we pay for thoughtlessness.

Since I’m always asking: “Is there a lesson here for the workplace?” when reflecting on experiences that happen in everyday life, these made me think also of the price managers — and employers as a whole — pay for:

1. Taking people for granted.
2. Forgetting basic courtesy, like not returning phone calls, not acknowledging time-sensitive information emailed to them (especially when someone asks you to confirm you received it), or not following up like they said they would.

First, a friend of mine told me how he helped a colleague’s son with his resume as a professional courtesy. This is something he does for a living — he normally charges for it. Neither the son nor the colleague bothered to thank him.

Second, a health practitioner I see, who does amazing work, is shy about marketing herself. In an earlier conversation, we had talked about a particular niche for her work, and how she could reach them. Because I care about her and want her to prosper, I wrote a testimonial letter she could use as a marketing piece. I sent it to her, and didn’t hear back. In a conversation about setting up an appointment, I asked if she received it. “Oh, yes, I did. Thank you so much,” she replied.

Third, more than a month after speaking at an event which went very well, according to program evaluations, I still hadn’t received payment. I emailed my primary contact, a colleague I had known for years, to find out if my check was being processed, since it was overdue.

She didn’t respond to either emails or voice mails.

I called her admin, who said she knew my contact had received my invoice and my messages. She suggested I call the main office. There, I reached someone who expressed appropriate dismay that I had not yet gotten paid and expedited payment.

However, the colleague who brought me in to speak never demonstrated any concern about not meeting their basic contractual obligations, nor did she apologize for the fact they (she?) had dropped the ball.

If you had brought someone in to work with your organization, and they hadn’t been paid on time, wouldn’t you be mortified, or at least distressed enough to call that person and apologize? Wouldn’t you immediately get into gear to take care of it?

I found myself thinking, If this is how she treats me, someone I know she respects (according to a colleague who knows her well and used to work for her), how does she treat her employees?

It also made me wonder, if this level of indifference to basic courtesy and accountability is the standard operating procedure in her organization, what price do they pay in terms of diminished employee engagement?

If employees feel this level of care from management, how much do they care about helping management — about going the extra mile?”

Fourth, I read Seth Godin’s blog post Not Fade Away which includes the lines at the top of this post.

Aren’t they true?

Think of a time you felt unappreciated or someone with whom you have a relationship with treated you thoughtlessly. You probably didn’t say anything, did you?

Because it would feel awkward and it had the potential of becoming extremely uncomfortable, you chose to remain silent.

You also probably felt a little less “into them,” a little less interested in them and their well-being.

If it happened in your primary relationship, perhaps you made them a little less important to you, whether consciously or reflexively. Perhaps, to protect yourself from feeling hurt or continually resentful, you hardened your heart a bit and numbed out, so you wouldn’t feel those uncomfortable feelings.

Fifth, I recently read Mel Robbin’s column Silent Scorn in Success magazine, where she describes an experience of thoughtlessness she and her 6-year-old son experienced. Her son’s cousin was supposed to come over for dinner and a sleepover.

After waiting on the porch for over an hour (think “excited little boy”) while providing a buffet for a hungry hoard of mosquitos, Mel finally texts her sister-in-law to inquire about her ETA. Her sister-in-law texts back that her daughter is freaking out with separation anxiety so she will be staying home.

When Mel tells her 6-year old boy the news, he responds: “What? Why didn’t she tell me? I’m getting eaten alive out here!”

How is it that the 6-year old boy gets it that an “update phone call” early on would have been the civil, thoughtful thing to do and the adult didn’t?

She goes on to write:

Each of your actions or, in this case, inactions, carries significance in someone else’s day.

You impact other people. It’s easy to forget to call or you run late or simply not show up at all. I’ve certainly been guilty at times. Right now, people are waiting on you. When you change your mind, reverse course or drag your feet on a decision, it impacts other people. Even for something as insignificant as a sleepover with your cousin. Procrastinating or bailing not only creates havoc for you, but for others, too. And your silence sends a loud message: This is not important.

Sixth: (This is not a recent thing, but as a comparison to Scenario Two). I have a dear friend who is outstanding at what she does. Both because I love her and want her to thrive, and because she’s so good at what she does, I’ve referred a lot of business to her over the years. She jokingly has told me that just about every bit of work she’s gotten since coming to Maine has come from me.

She is always letting me know how much she appreciates how I’ve looked out for her and go out of my way to help her. Because I love helping people—especially those I care deeply about—it brings me great joy to see how happy it makes her. So I’m always on the lookout for opportunities to help her, and then feel happy to see her happy.

I’ve reflected at times how much more focused I am on helping her than other people.

It’s because she makes it clear that she appreciates it. She doesn’t take it for granted.

When I’ve asked myself “Are you doing it because you want the appreciation? Is that what’s motivating you?” the answer has been “No.”

I’ve had a number of situations where I’ve secretly given money to people or done things for them and found out indirectly how happy it made them, and I felt just as happy—even more so—than when someone knew it came from me and thanked me.

It’s about the good feeling of knowing that what you did helped another person. It’s about knowing that what you did made their lives a bit easier or brought them joy.

When we take for granted what others do, we tell them: “Your act is insignificant. It made no difference.”

Doing this steals from the other the joy that comes from knowing you made a difference in the life of someone else, that you helped someone.

It also makes it likely they will care a little less about helping us in the future. It’s not just about being taken for granted, it’s about feeling “If what I do doesn’t matter, why bother?”

Applying This

When I connect these disparate scenarios, it makes me think of how the way we treat others influences how much they care about us, how much they care about helping us, and whether they want to go above and beyond for us in the future.

When I’m working with management teams, one of the questions I ask them is: “Are you bondable?” — meaning: “The way you treat others, does that lead them to bonding with you, and therefore wanting to do a great job because they care about you?”

To help you think how you might apply the lessons from these scenarios in your life, here are three questions:

1. Do You Take People For Granted? Are there people who have helped you, or whose work makes your life easier, whom you haven’t bothered to thank? Have you let them know how much their help or their continually doing a great job means to you? If so, you can let them know now. You can even apologize for having taken them for granted. Now, if they say “Oh, don’t worry about it,” that doesn’t mean it didn’t matter. It means they’re being gracious and giving you some slack.
2. Are Their People You Blow Off? Now, I’m not suggesting that you should feel obligated to respond to every email or voice mail from strangers. But, ask yourself if there are people you work with, who you don’t bother getting back to, even after they’ve made multiple attempts? When we do that, we don’t just communicate “You are insignificant,” we build ill will, and we model incivility, increasing the odds that they will treat others the same way. Practice asking: “What response would I appreciate in this situation?” and consider how you can be a force for mindful, considerate behavior.
3. How About Being on the Lookout for Opportunities to Model Appreciation and Thoughtfulness? We each have an opportunity to make our corner of the world a better place. You can do that by looking for opportunities to express appreciation and practice thoughtfulness. How about identifying a couple of people and situations in which you can do that right now, and then do it by the end of the day.

Following close behind, Facebook unveiled some sweeping changes of its own, rearranging its News Feed and adding a real-time update ticker to profile pages.

The nearly simultaneous announcements, probably just a coincidence, are nonetheless evidence of the escalating competition between the two powerhouse companies.

Ever since Google+ launched in June (growing quickly to 25 million users who had to be invited to join), Facebook has aggressively added, enhanced, or otherwise changed key features of the site. Hangouts, which lets Google+ users video chat, was Google’s one-up on Facebook. Not even two weeks later, Facebook called a press conference to announce a partnership with Skype and its own video chat service.

When it launched, one of the more compelling Google+ features was its “Circles,” allowing users to organize connections as they see fit. Different messages can be sent to different circles.

Facebook’s one-group approach didn’t allow for different levels of connectedness; lists were available, but so clunky to create and manage that few people used them.  Last week, Facebook addressed that shortcoming, improving Friend Lists. Now, not only can users easily create lists where photos and posts are in one place, but the Smart Lists features automatically assembles groups based on common interests. The latter feature is optional to use.

At the same time as the lists improvements, Facebook also introduced a Subscribe button, letting users choose what they want in their news feeds and to get updates from non-friends.

Now Facebook has gone a step further still, rolling out a reorganized news feed. Instead of presenting status updates in chronological order, Facebook will present what its algorithms decide is the hottest or top news from your friends and people to whom you’ve subscribed. The more frequently you check Facebook, the more recent the posts. But if you visit only every so often, your top news item might be days old. Top news items are marked with a blue corner.

Perhaps needless to say, since every Facebook change seems to be met with resistance, user comments are mostly negative. The Baltimore Sun offers a collection of some of the funniest of them. If you have any doubt about the growing number of Boomers among Facebook’s 750 million users, here’s one of the comments on the Sun’s page: “Zuckerberg apparently hired the genius behind New Coke to run Facebook.”

Meanwhile, Google, which used its heavily trafficked search page to promote Google+, began offering a mobile version of Hangouts. Now users with Android-powered phones with front-facing cameras can hold video chats. An iPhone version is coming, Google promised.

The other improvements to Hangouts (the 100th was the public launch of Google+) include screen sharing, Google Docs integration, and a broadcast feature it calls Hangouts On Air, which makes recording and broadcasting of a session. Not all of these are fully available, but they are on their way.

The interest in the competition between Google and Facebook is evidently high. New features and enhancements in services will usually get a mention in the tech blogs. But the Facebook changes and the Google+ public launch has garnered wide interest. Event the Christian Science Monitor has weighed in with a post it headlined “Facebook changes vs. Google+: Who made the best updates?“

“We’re Different.” Almost every agency says they have a special/unique process for reviewing resumes, sourcing candidates, and access to candidates that sets them apart from their competitors. From my experience I’ve not really seen the impact of their “unique” process in the candidates they’ve submitted. Additionally, most agencies don’t appear to have a thorough understanding of their competition. At some point in almost every vendor meeting someone says that they don’t push paper like “everyone else.” I would encourage vendors to have a much more in-depth understanding of the competitive landscape before they make such broad sweeping indictments of their competitors.

“We Build Relationships.” Every vendor I’ve ever sat down with has said they build meaningful relationships with managers and they “get” our business unlike any other vendor in town. As a result they tell me they have the ability to make a cultural fit for our organization. To this statement I like to ask: “Give me an example as to how you screen for cultural fit.” I’ve been underwhelmed by all responses to this point.

“We Have a Proprietary Database.” I’ve heard this one a million times. Vendor ABC has a database of millions of qualified/ interested candidates at their beck and call to fill contract needs. I don’t doubt they have a long list of former contractors they’ve placed, but in my experience most contractors don’t feel the same level of loyalty to their staffing agency. Most contractors are more interested in the type of work, the end client, and compensation. And before you rebuke, I will concede there are notable exceptions to this point, but overall, it’s correct.

Overall my experience is that candidate screening is indeed not that different; that staffing agencies do not have a special candidate database (why, then do I get the same candidate submitted by different vendors all the time?); and your partnership with me is not that strong. In fact, too many vendors treat me as someone to work around than to work with.

Here are my suggestions.

Talk about your recruiting process: In the end, aren’t we hiring a staffing partner to do something we aren’t/can’t do internally? It drives me nuts to see agencies post client requisitions on job boards. This is NOT a value-added partnership. I can purchase a Careerbuilder posting and screen the candidates who apply. More recently I’ve really pushed vendors to talk in depth about their recruiting process. The responses are truly varied. I will absolutely select a staffing vendor based on the depth of their recruiting process.

What actually makes you different? In 15 seconds tell me why you are a truly different partner (without emphasizing any of the three items I mentioned above) and why I would be insane NOT to work with you as a staffing partner. Give me a truly compelling case. If you can’t, then you aren’t any different than the other 10 agencies that will be calling me this week.

Don’t over-promise: Not a lot more to add to this, but on my side of the fence, this is a continually painful part of vendor interaction. If you can’t fill the role, or it’s not something you’ve worked on before, tell me. I’ll respect your honesty, and in the long run you’ll get more work.

Turnover: I want to deal with the same person each and every time I call. Additionally, I do not want to have to re-train my account rep every six months because you have retention issues. This leads to a second challenge: too many newbies. Most recruiting agencies fill most of their recruiting positions with new college grads and then do not support their development appropriately. In short, these new recruiters don’t know how to recruit OR maintain relationships (reference my previous challenges). As a result, I now ask to meet everyone who will be working with my team to fill external needs. I want to meet the manager, account rep, and recruiters that my managers will be talking with.

We do value relationships (on our terms). My last point, is that I truly do believe staffing agencies can add tremendous value to the talent acquisition landscape of organization. I value true experts who do real recruiting and respect my role in the process and organization.