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Employers of hourly labor in industries including fast-food dining, retail, and contact centers often struggle with high turnover, and the associated costs of constantly hiring and training new employees. A common screening technique used by recruiters is to weed out “job hoppers” — those candidates who have held many short-term jobs. But a recent study by Evolv’s analytics team found that work history is a poor predictor of future job tenure.

The study analyzed applicant data and employment outcomes from more than 21,000 call center agents drawn from five major contact centers to determine the relationship between previous work experience and future employment outcomes. The results show zero correlation between the number of positions employees have had in the recent past and how long they’ll last on their next job. A candidate who’s had five jobs in five years is no more likely to quit than someone who’s had one job for five years. In addition, the study reports people who are unemployed when they apply for a job also have the same expected tenure as any other candidate.

Job-hoppers and the “Perpetually Unemployed” keep reading…

This article, along with my previous article, Your Relationship and Reputation Credit Score: How You Earned It and How It Affects Your Relationship Karma, is designed to help you help the people you serve, whether you are in the recruiting or career development field.

In the previous article, we explored how the way we treat others creates, metaphorically speaking, a credit score that affects whether people want to do business with us, help us, or … hire us. This score also affects whether people trust and respect us. While it affects every aspect of one’s professional life, a person’s “Relationship and Reputation Credit Score” plays an especially central role in one’s job hunt and career trajectory.

Enjoying the positive career benefits of a high Relationship and Reputation Credit Score requires emotional intelligence, especially in the dimension of self-awareness. It requires cutting through the self-absorption brought on by busyness and preoccupation with one’s projects and agendas. It requires not taking liberties with the position power we have, and thinking that small acts of disrespect — like repeatedly taking calls or texting during meetings with “subordinates” — go unnoticed and leave no emotional wake. It requires becoming mindful of the many Relationship and Reputation Moments Of Truth which, depending on how we handle them, build up or diminish our Relationship and Reputation Credit Score over time.

Becoming More Mindful of Relationship and Reputation Moments of Truth

Here are a few examples of what I mean by Relationship and Reputation Moments Of Truth that affect our score: keep reading…

HR professionals have designed, built, torn down, and rebuilt many things to enhance talent acquisition: processes, procedures, metrics, sourcing channels, more metrics, and even more sourcing channels.

Looking back over our careers, we can see that great things have been created across the recruiting landscape. On Earth Day, however, we are thinking about how we can reduce, reuse, and recycle to contribute to a healthier “candidate planet.” With all the “stuff’ which has been created, we believe we need to replenish and restore our overall candidate experience. Here are a few of the ideas we’re pursuing now: keep reading…

A few weeks ago on these pages, I suggested that the ERE Expo wasn’t as progressive as it could be in bringing the most important trends to its recruiting audience. My concern was lack of focus on these areas:

1. Limited (if any) discussion on the development of talent strategies, when the supply of top people is less than the demand. Everyone seemed more enamored with learning about ways to weed out the weak rather than attract, recruit, and hire the best.
2. Too much on sourcing and not enough about recruiting and closing.
3. Little on how to engage hiring managers fully in the process. This is odd since they make the decision on who to look for and who to hire.
4. No emphasis on the unspoken 83% of the labor market who will not respond to your posting or apply online, regardless of how cool your Facebook page is. Of course, these are the passive candidates.

So in my own small way, I’ll use this opportunity to address the last three points above, by introducing “The Golden Rule of Passive Candidate Recruiting.” Using a high-tech, high-touch approach I believe it is now possible for a talented recruiter to build a slate 3-4 of top-notch passive candidates in as little as 72 hours from taking the assignment. keep reading…

Recent research confirms that top performers ranging from managers of major league baseball teams to customer service reps on the store floor have one thing in common: they are Deciders. And there are plenty of them out there just waiting to be recruited.

In the last decade, renowned industrial psychologist Timothy Judge at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza School of Business has discovered a set of four characteristics that are found in high performers in virtually every industry, every job level, and every variety of circumstance from boom to bust. Together these four characteristics make up a sort of super trait called a “core self-evaluation.” As Judge describes it, the core self-evaluation is a person’s fundamental bottom line evaluation of their abilities. That self-evaluation has an enormous impact on their job performance.

The Decider Advantage keep reading…

Bullhorn Reach recently published the results of a survey of more than 35,000 recruiters in its user network, tracking their use of social media. The survey focused on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

The findings are surprising. Only 21% of Bullhorn recruiters are using all three social networks. In fact, 48% are using only LinkedIn! Apparently these recruiters haven’t seen the study from Jobvite that showed that, in 2011, 50% of job-seekers used Facebook to find a job, 25% used Twitter, while only 26% used LinkedIn. Why aren’t recruiters fishing where the fish are? keep reading…

1. Treat ALL people like gold

2. Hire for personality and culture fit

3. Hire for a skill set that drives results

4. Communicate like no other

5. Onboard like a champion

They say it takes a village to raise a child — a proverb that I have recently learned translates to recruiting physicians, clinicians, and administrative associates for our new hospital. Nemours Children’s Hospital is currently recruiting 600 new associates for its 95-bed facility, which anchors our 60-acre, fully integrated pediatric health care campus. And, we have taken an innovative approach to interviewing potential candidates that gives our most important stakeholders — patients and families — a voice in hiring the best possible health care providers and administrative leaders.

The Idea

As human resources professionals, we are continuously searching for ways to enhance our ability to recruit superior employees for our organizations. Traditional recruitment tactics have focused on pleasing internal stakeholders. We evaluate a candidate’s skills and experience, as well as behavioral qualities to ensure the candidate is both technically qualified and a fit for our organization’s culture. Is the candidate willing to perform services in a way that we think is best for the patient? Sure. But, it’s almost never asked if the candidate is willing to perform services in a way that the customer feels is best for themselves and their child.

Nemours Children’s Hospital tasked the human resources team to challenge the status quo and create a new method for the recruitment and selection process that would forge a direct partnership between our customers and the hospital. keep reading…

Or why HR metrics need to focus on helping managers to improve their people management decision-making

For at least the last decade, HR departments around the world have been pouring tons of time and money into developing HR metrics. Unfortunately, that effort has largely led to continued levels of frustration and, at best, a large number of what I call “so-what” metrics with little strategic impact. It doesn’t matter whether your HR metrics were provided as part of the software that you purchased or if they came from a major HR consulting firm; the results have been the same: dismal at best. After three plus decades of thought leadership and research in HR metrics, I’ve concluded that the current approach is an abject failure and that HR simply can’t continue on this current painful path.

The time has come to completely disregard today’s approach and to look to other functions that have had significantly better luck influencing executives with their metrics (i.e. customer service, supply chain, branding, and finance, to name a few). Even if you are currently happy with your metrics, this article should provide you with sufficient reasons as to why you should rethink your approach and to shift toward what I call “people management decision-making metrics,” a far superior approach that focuses on helping managers improve their people-management decision-making.

The Top 20 Major Faults With Most HR Metric Approaches keep reading…

I met with a client today who made me smile — a Cheshire-Cat-Eating-Grin Smile, as a matter of fact.

He said, “Heather, I need to invest in the screening phase to figure out if these candidates are a good fit for our culture and our clients. That way, I don’t have to give up resources when I fire them later.”

DUH! 

After I wiped the grin off my face, I told him I was proud of him and glad to hear it. (I refrained from reminding him I’ve been preachin’ that for years.)

Pay now or pay later … either way you’ll pay. 

If you are a recruiter, HR professional, supervisor, or leader who wants to fill the seat, there is no need to read more of this post. Good luck to you.

However, if you want to fit someone with your organization and have him stick, read on. keep reading…

ERE.net began as a place for discussion about recruiting, and our roots as a place for conversation run deep. Over the years we’ve grown and evolved, and those conversations have evolved as well. They have migrated away from our blogs and discussion groups, and found a new home in the comments on the articles on the main site (like this one with 220 comments), the new ideas that we share in articles, and in the free-wheeling conversations that continue in our LinkedIn group.

Our history makes this a tough decision, but we have decided to shut down the blogs and discussion groups on ERE.net, effective April 30. This will allow our team to streamline the site, and concentrate on what you have told us is most important to you here at ERE: delivering great original content and putting on world-class events for recruiters.

keep reading…

I have worked with hundreds of organizations over the years to help them with the care and feeding of their assessment programs. The starting point for my client dialogues are often vastly different. In some cases I am assisting I/O psychologists who are working on cutting-edge innovative programs. In others I am helping to clean out low-quality legacy vendors who have long ago lost their support base, but somehow continue to exist.

The proper use of assessments is not an easy proposition. Doing it right is something that takes dedication and hard work, and even the most advanced companies must continually make improvements. But these same companies will tell you that the results to be obtained are well worth the effort.

The good news is that it has never been easier for companies to reach a relatively mature state with their assessment programs. Accessibility to quality assessment tools has never been better. As I continue to talk to and work with companies to help them with various aspects of their assessment programs, I have developed a rough set of guidelines to help me evaluate the company’s maturity level with using predictive hiring tools.

The following is a brief list of the key markers across three levels of maturity. keep reading…

In more 10 years in the staffing industry in various operational, managerial, and corporate roles and in different countries, I have interviewed, coached, and trained hundreds of recruitment consultants from all over the world. Though local differences must be taken into consideration, the characteristics that make you a top performer in Salt Lake City also work in Singapore or in Paris. Based on what I saw, heard, and learned, here is my quintessential list of the 5+1 habits that make a top-performer in any economic cycle or market: keep reading…

the Marriott in Kaua'i, Hawaii

Candidate selection and assessment is one of the most conservative processes in all of talent management. Many think the topic is not worth a detailed examination, but a weak assessment or interview process can be the primary cause for not hiring top candidates. For decades, the majority of firms have relied heavily on the basic trio of resume screening, interviewing, and reference checks to choose the best candidates. Fortunately, the growth of metrics, the Internet, and technology in HR is now challenging these traditional approaches.

Over the last couple of years, a significant number of new approaches have evolved, and as a result, recruiters and hiring managers now have a wide range of alternative approaches to consider. This article is designed to make you aware of some of these alternative leading-edge candidate assessment approaches that firms have tried. If you are bored with interviews, you should enjoy reading about these new approaches.

A Long list of Alternative Candidate Assessment Approaches to Consider keep reading…

We started measuring quality of hire a couple of years ago. What started out as a simple exercise to see how we were doing turned into an interesting experiment. We realized in order to save the company money and increase productivity, we needed to measure quality of hire and sources of hire together. The results were interesting, and in one case the result was actually surprising.

There are a few hire-quality formulas out there, and you can make it as simple or as complicated as you deem necessary. In our case, we took the simple route.

Quality of hire is defined as the percent of new hires who pass their one-year anniversary and score at least “meets expectations” on their first review. For example, we grouped together all the new hires from the first quarter of 2010. We then ran a report dating to the last day of the quarter a year later, 2011. We determined what percent of those hires were still employed and were not on performance improvement plans, etc. We did this on a quarterly basis.

This is simple but effective. It doesn’t matter whether the employee was a poor performer, an excellent worker who was disillusioned, or a job-hopper.  Ultimately, the business is negatively impacted if it loses talent in the first year, or is dealing with a poor employee.

The results of our experiment have been illuminating. keep reading…

There are plenty of whitepapers and blogs that attempt to define and describe the candidate experience, but can we go further? Can we find a way to make it part of a holistic recruitment approach, and think of it more like a product, or a “deliverable” item?

Granted, it is hard to imagine that the candidate experience can exist independently of a talent acquisition strategy and vice versa. Instead, we need to refine the entire recruitment strategy to ensure the candidate experience is pre-targeted and delivers real value to the customer.

So, What’s the Product?

Recruiters are always looking to enhance, differentiate, and sell their products, but what exactly is the final recruiting product? Some may say it’s the job offer, but if we think about the way recruitment tools and strategies have evolved, this definition alone cannot capture it.

All of the recruiting and talent resourcing efforts that use interactive media sites — creating user-friendly career pages, blogs, communities, etc. — are designed to draw in and gain candidate interest. They hope to entice candidates (as much so as hiring managers) to “buy” into a recruitment process in the hope of obtaining a job. But, if the product is only the job on offer — and this can only be given to one person — this would leave most of the customers who applied with nothing to show for their “purchase.” If we say that the final product is the company job offer, we are bound to have many unhappy customers.

Instead, we can argue that the one thing all buyers can receive from an organization is a candidate experience. Whether they actively apply for a position or they are approached, and regardless of whether or not they are offered and accept the job, the experience is the one thing each applicant can receive.

From the moment the first connection is made, be it a click on a site, an email or a telephone call, the experience begins. keep reading…

In part 1 of this article I highlighted the many reasons why prioritizing positions, employees, and business units was necessary, and how it could dramatically increase business results. In the following sections, I will highlight the methodology and steps that HR leaders need to take in order to prioritize HR’s customers and programs. keep reading…

Today at the ERE Expo in San Diego, Mary Wright, general counsel at Ogletree Deakins, and Michael Nader, also an Ogletree attorney, took a stab at some of recruiters’ top-of-mind legal issues. Here are some of the ones that came up in the open discussion, and some of Wright and Nader’s thoughts. keep reading…

Why HR Must Prioritize Its Internal Customers

Prioritization is one of the highest-ROI practices available to HR leaders, but unfortunately most in HR have failed to take advantage of it. It takes very little time or money to prioritize your internal customers, but the results can be dramatic. keep reading…

In the first two parts of this series, the two-question performance-based interview was introduced. The first question involves asking candidates to describe some of their most significant business accomplishments in great detail. While it’s only one question, it is repeated multiple times to ensure the person can handle all of the critical performance aspects of the job, using a performance profile to define the work, rather than using a generic skills-based job description.

The second question involves asking candidates how they would handle one or two of the most critical job-related challenges defined in the performance profile. This is more of a give-and-take type discussion to get at thinking, planning, and the ability to visualize job-related problems.

These two questions in combination with the performance profile, and an in-depth review of the person’s resume looking for the achiever pattern indicating that the person is in the top half of the top half, is all that’s necessary to accurately assess a candidate across all job needs.

Using this information, the candidate can then be assessed using the following formula for hiring success, ranking the person on a 1-5 scale for each factor:

Hiring Success = (Talent + Management + Team (EQ) + Problem-solving)*Motivation²

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Organizational Fit

While the Performance-based Hiring process is an easy way to assess a candidate, you still need to  recruit and close the candidate on equitable terms. On this score, most managers, and too many recruiters, think recruiting is selling. You get far better results if you make the candidate sell you. Here are three ways to do this using the two-question interview: keep reading…