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:
When did it happen and how long did it take to finish?
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.
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.
What was the actual impact you made? Please provide specific details and facts.
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.
Describe the technical skills you used and those you learned. Give me some examples of how you applied these.
Give me two to three examples of initiative, where you went the extra mile, or where you exceeded expectations.
What did you like most and least about this project?
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.
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.
Job boards? Social networks? Search engines? Wikis? Blogs? Microblogs? The list could go on and on. What are you using? Some of the above? All of the above?
Recruiters and sourcers have a wealth of options at their fingertips to find, reach out, and connect with active and passive talent. Every recruiter and sourcer has a different set of sites, tools, and communities that they use to find their talent. This is what I like to refer to as the “recruiting portfolio.”
A recruiting portfolio can be comprised of countless sites and tools.
For months (and years) I’ve wondered what the number of monthly searches was for job-related keywords on Google. I always knew it was a big number, but I was shocked to see it was over 100 million searches just in June — with June being the “dog days” of recruiting and job searching. The average month is more around 124 million searches.
Historically, the search engines haven’t shared numbers on how many specific keyword searches there were for targeted keywords, but recently Google has changed its external keyword research tool to show us the search numbers for the previous month and the average number of searches for exact keywords. This helps to shed light on exactly how much job- and career-related search activity is happening monthly on Google.
Anyone can access this free tool at Google by typing in this URL to view how many people are searching for jobs in your locations and/or hiring need areas:
Some interesting facts, which you can validate using the tool above:
TOP CAREER AREAS: (Monthly) • Sales jobs – 2.2 million searches • Customer services jobs – 1 million searches • Administrative jobs – 823,000 searches • Accounting jobs – 673,000 searches • Human Resource jobs – 673,000 searches • Nursing jobs – 673,000 searches • Finance jobs – 368,000 searches • Legal jobs – 301,000 searches
TOP LOCATIONS: (Monthly) • Georgia jobs – 2.7 million searches • Illinois jobs – 2.2 million searches • Arizona jobs – 1.5 million searches • Massachusetts jobs – 1.5 million searches • Michigan jobs – 1.5 million searches • New Jersey jobs – 1.5 million • Jobs In Chicago – 823,000 searches • Dallas Jobs – 673,000 searches • San Diego jobs – 550,000
A great recruiter should have the same skill sets and qualifications of a great salesperson. All of the great sales visionaries including Zig Ziglar and Tom Hopkins have taught these steps to sales professionals around the world, yet few recruiters today understand or use any of these available resources.
So much emphasis has been placed on prospecting or sourcing potential candidates that recruiters are not taught the basics of the sales process that follows the sourcing function. Having listened to thousands of third-party and corporate recruiters over the past 15 years, my sense is that less than 10% of recruiters understand basic sales principles.
Although the terminology may differ, the following are the critical steps to every successful sales professional or recruiting professional.
We are the piece of any corporate HR function that can show our business hard and fast data around spending and savings. We can show you, Mr. Hiring Manager, how much you spent last year per hire, how quickly we filled your need, the quality of those candidates, and exactly where we found them, plus about 37 other data points. Wow. We’re good. Recruiters, not usually a shy bunch, will market our successes to you relentlessly. We run staffing like a business and we like to make sure you get that.
So, how is it that we measure every molecule of a full-time hire, and continue to drive down cost per hire, but know little about the “other” side of staffing. I present to you contractors. Shady sort. And a little scary, if you remember the Microsoft fiasco a few years ago. Co-employment is not your friend. This uneasy feeling may have something to do with our lack of touch on them, or their price tag. But, you can’t really run a business without them.
It used to be that once a contractor requisition was approved, it was automatically distributed to our vendors. We chose these vendors based on information they provided that they (a) could provide us the best rates while (b) guaranteeing excellent quality ( c) from their “unique” databases where they’d have access to people no one else could find. Cool. Except that we spent $7M last year on contractors. Not cool.
You probably know of Working Mother magazine for its annual list of “100 best companies” that actively recruit and retain those multitasking wonder women known as working moms.
But the magazine for career-committed mothers, which reaches two million readers, also has an annual award to honor companies committed to diversity.
The magazine’s new list honors 20 companies that require manager training on diversity issues and rate manager performance partly on diversity results, such as how many multicultural women advance.
Just when it seems that recruiters are shunning the power of Web 2.0, along comes perennial hot employer Southwest Airlines.
The company is chatting with you, your neighbor, and your potential next star candidate about lots of Southwest-related things in a new blog, aptly titled “Nuts About Southwest.”
On the blog, the company notes that “we want to build a personal relationship between our team and you, and we need your participation. Everyone is encouraged to join in, and you don’t need to register to read, watch, or comment. However, if you would like to share photos or videos or rate a post, among other things, you will need to complete a profile.”
Some people I talk to generate dang-good results from their employee-referral programs without shelling out much money — some not even spending a penny.
Tom Mazzocco, for instance. He’s the VP of HR for the San Diego Convention Center. The center recruits from Jobing, Craigslist, Monster, CareerBuilder, military bases, and other sources (like when it needed a Greek-speaker and just headed over to a local Greek restaurant and talked to the manager about bringing one of his employees onboard for a while). Anyhow, the convention center brings in about 40-45% of its hires via referrals, which isn’t bad when you consider it pays nothing for a referral.
And then there’s AmTrust Bank, one of the ERE award-winners this year. The more I look at AmTrust’s three-year employee-referral increase (graphed below), the more I’m wowed. AmTrust pulled out all stops to increase referrals (something that’s explored in-depth in the May Journal, by the way), including donating money to charities for employees (such as recruiters) who provided referrals but aren’t eligible for money, as well as giving time off to the first team of people to reach 100% participation in the referral program. AmTrust pays up to $5,000 for the hardest-to-fill jobs.
So many companies, so little time! I probably didn’t make it to half the booths in the expo hall at the Web 2.0 Expo last week in San Francisco. But several of the companies I did get to speak with had new tools that will certainly be of interest to those of us in research, sourcing, and recruiting.
I had many opportunities to speak with start-up entrepreneurs who were attending with hopes of gaining venture capital support. This conference was a great venue for many to talk with established technologists and business owners about their ideas, and an event called Launch Pad was held. Six new companies had the opportunity pitch their business for five minutes on stage, in front of the Web 2.0 Expo audience and a panel of VC judges. The six finalists, who were chosen through submission and panel review before the conference, were Acquia, Chirp Interactive, JobScore, Oortle, TradeVibes, and Triggit. Each company received feedback on its presentation right then and there from both the VC judges and the audience, and the VCs were given the option to offer these applicants non-binding term sheets for financing.
Following Launch Pad, I was able to spend about an hour chatting one-on-one with Dan Arkind. He has a rich, hands-on recruiting background and is one of the co-founders of JobScore (profile). Those of you who attended the start-up session at ERE in San Diego will remember JobScore — a new product targeted at in-house recruiting teams that “breaks down the walls” between different companies and empowers them to working directly with each other.
It’s still a bit daunting, but hopefully it’s easier to download.
The recruiting-costs spreadsheet mentioned earlier “contained a flaw in the calculator related to the macros,” according to MTS.
We’ve loaded up a new version, and buried it under those same words “Excel File” where the old version was. Hopefully it’ll fix the flaw and help those people who had trouble downloading it from the get-go.
Businesses big and small convened on San Francisco last week for the Web 2.0 Expo, all with different agendas — to launch new products, to gain VC funding, to keep an eye on the competition, and over all to celebrate this thing we call Web 2.0. I had the absolute pleasure of attending the conference due to the generosity of Dave Manaster at ERE Media (you can read the story about how it all came about here) and had opportunity after opportunity to meet some fascinating people.
During the course of the week, I met a variety of attendees, from technology directors to marketing folks, from CEOs of brand new companies to engineers from industry giants. In talking with many of these people, I found that several of them had attended the conference with the goal of finding talented people to come work with them.
So naturally, since I was attending representing a recruiting resource (and being an advocate of making strategic networking connections), I offered to help them out by bringing some of their needs to the attention of the ERE audience. You can check out some of the folks in this video I’ve made.
In lieu of doing a complete recap today, I wanted to share some great information about a brand new way Yahoo! has come up with to use its search engine, called SearchMonkey. Yahoo! had talked about this new way to show search results a couple months ago, but it was showcasing it today at the exhibition hall at the Web 2.0 Expo.
Basically, it takes Yahoo’s search engine and allows you to see into the data on the results link without having to click on the link:
Yahoo has combined “a free, open platform with structured, semantic content from across the Web.” SearchMonkey “gives all Web site owners an opportunity to present more useful information on the Yahoo! Search page as compared to what is presented on other search engines. Site owners will be able to provide all types of additional information about their site directly to Yahoo! Search. So instead of a simple title, abstract and URL, for the first time users will see rich results that incorporate the massive amount of data buried in websites — ratings and reviews, images, deep links, and all kinds of other useful data — directly on the Yahoo! Search results page.”
MTS Driver Recruiters wanted its customers to know just how much goes into hiring someone. Actually, how much work goes into not hiring someone. While corporations may think MTS is watching Oprah all day, it’s actually trying to find the one to three people out of 100 applicants who will end up being hired.
At least that’s what it’s trying to say with this impressive Excel file. It works, though some of it is confusing and overwhelming. Again, that’s all by design, as it gives MTS the chance to talk it over with prospective clients.
The next time you’re dealing with difficult talent management issues and think, “What would Peter Cappelli do?” consider heading to Harvard’s latest smarty-pants co-operative.
No, not the one in Cambridge that offers way too many crimson hoodies and emblem-heavy coffee mugs.
This new co-op is of the RSS-feed variety, an attempt by Harvard Business Publishing to put its wealth of resources at the fingertips of its users to offer perspective on both new research and “classic” works to make better business decisions and drive improved performance.
Some words of wisdom from Ed Davis, star VP of staffing, leading a workshop today from the ERE Expo in San Diego on competency-based interviewing:
On the 80-20 rule:
Find out what the most critical 20% of jobs in your company are. “The 20% the CEO is really concerned about, that sweet spot. You have to be great at producing top talent in that sweet spot and good at everything else.”
It’s less than a week until the April 1 filing date for fiscal year 2009 H-1B visas. Do you know where your petitions are?
If you’ve been tasked with finding new foreign employees at the managerial level or with a highly specialized knowledge, you’re probably keenly aware that the demand for H-1Bs is exceeding the current supply of 65,000 annually.
But are there alternatives available, and if so, how do they work?
Your role as a recruiter is continually evolving, says Knowledge Infusion, which is on the hunt for real-world industry trends and best practices.
Knowledge Infusion has teamed up with ERE Media for a new survey, which will study the use of existing and emerging technologies, additional responsibilities for talent management decisions, and the use of metrics to gauge success.
“Recruiting is no longer an independent function, but a critical piece of integrated talent management that must be looked at holistically,” says Jason Corsello, vice president of the Knowledge Infusion Center of Excellence.
How do you make your employee reward program succeed? New research says it comes down to simple implementation, and nothing more.
Philadelphia-based consulting firm Hay Group, out with its annual America’s Most Admired Companies list in partnership with Fortune magazine, finds that successful companies on the list haven’t stumbled on a “silver bullet” for making employee reward programs work more effectively.
“They are simply able to execute more successfully on a number of basic HR best practices, and tend to have a cultural understanding and recognition of the value brought to their organizations,” says Hay Group consultant Mark Royal.
The construction-focused law firm Scholefield Associates calls itself an unconventional law firm, due in part to its efforts to break free from “archaic” hiring practices.
The firm is actively seeking a sales-hungry new associate, a rainmaker with a solid sales background, something that borrows from the corporate world.
Unlike at most law firms, where a senior partner would take on the “rainmaker” role, the San Diego-based law firm wants to let its new hire run free to bring in new business, unshackled by billable hours and copious legal writing and research.
