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How to develop a recruiter scorecard for assessing individual corporate recruiter performance

Champions insist that you keep score. If you understand that concept, you will ensure that in addition to function-wide metrics, you will supplement them with a scorecard for assessing the performance of each individual recruiter. Everyone knows that corporations are measurement crazy, so I have found that by not measuring something (in this case recruiters), you are inadvertently sending a message to executives and employees that whatever you are doing is not strategic or even important (because if it was, we would measure it).

So unless you want to purposely send a message that “having top performing recruiters doesn’t matter,” you have no choice but to develop an individual recruiter scorecard. In order to do that effectively, you first need to understand the foundation design principles for individual scorecards and then you must select the actual measures that you will use in your scorecard. In part one, I introduced the concept and provided three examples of what a scorecard might look like. In this part two, I will cover the design details and a list of the measure to consider for your scorecard. keep reading…

The War for new-grad talent has never been fiercer. More and more companies are turning to universities as their main pipeline to build up their workforce of amazing engineers, designers, and quants. However, many companies who haven’t been active in campus recruiting for the past few years may be surprised to find that the game has dramatically changed.

Remember when you thought pizza and soda at an information session was enough? Now, it’s pizza and soda delivered to your dorm room during finals week with a personalized “good luck” note and invitation to interview. More than ever, companies are adapting to, and even embracing gen Y values in their recruiting processes to sign the best students from top-tier schools.

Jane Graybeal wrote a great piece titled “Valuing the So-Called Me Me Me Generation”,  summarizing three key ideas around gen Y. While some companies may work against these “me me me” values, a handful have worked with them to get some of their best hires. Let’s take the three concepts that Graybeal summarized and apply them on a more practical level — specifically on how university recruiting programs are staying competitive on campus: keep reading…

A new contest for the best recruitment advertising in 2013 comes with a twist: the ad being submitted has to focus on hiring women. keep reading…

Talking about millenials is a hot topic. Whether it’s how to hire them or ways to work with them, love them, or hate them, analyzing gen Y seems to be an area of continual fascination. And now thanks to Time, this issue is in the spotlight once again with this week’s cover story titled “The Me Me Me Generation,” which features the provocative subtitle “Millennials are lazy, entitled narcissists who still live with their parents. Why they’ll save us all.” As a member of gen Y myself, I was curious to find out what the article, written by Joel Stein, had to say. Although it points out some troubling statistics, overall the verdict was optimistic. Here are three thought-provoking ideas: keep reading…

photo from Boeing

Diversity recruiting poses a particular challenge for employers in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields. STEM majors are a small group in high demand, and employers are faced with the question of how to differentiate themselves and to attract an even narrower subset of these students: top diversity talent.

The lack of diverse employees in STEM fields in the United States is significant: Although African Americans and Hispanic/Latinos make up more than 27.9% of the total population, they only constitute about 7% of the STEM workforce, according to data from Monster. The remaining 73% is made up of non-Hispanic whites. Since diversity recruiting is recognized as an important business strategy to maximize creativity and productivity, the lack of qualified diverse candidates is a huge problem facing STEM employers.

To respond to the scarcity of diverse STEM majors, many companies are targeting younger age groups with branding efforts, including educational programs designed to generate interest in science among children. Boeing is one example of an employer taking action to begin “recruiting” diverse STEM candidates early on — even as early as preschool. Boeing is a sponsor of Sid the Science Kid, an animated television show on PBS that aims to make science exciting for children. Not only is Sid curious and enthusiastic about learning, but he also comes from a mixed background that is identifiable to children of all ethnicities. Boeing’s sponsorship is a strategic move, getting children excited about science and familiarizing them with Boeing at an early age.

Although these early branding efforts are certainly a step in the right direction, they aren’t always enough. keep reading…

Federal agencies in the U.S. tend to recruit people from colleges with relatively low black populations. That’s one of the obstacles hindering African-Americans in the federal workforce, according to a new study from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Among the other issues, according to the report: keep reading…

Are a few gender-themed words in your job descriptions signaling women, unconsciously, to not apply?

A scientific study of 4,000 job descriptions revealed that a lack of gender-inclusive wording caused significant implications for recruiting professionals tasked to recruit women to hard-to-fill positions underrepresented by women.

This study addressed questions such as: do job descriptions that lack feminine-gender words repel female applicants? Could the lack of gender-inclusive wording in your job description influence women to opt out and not apply? Are there gender bias characteristics in your job advertisements? Could the lack of gender-inclusive words actually be perpetuating gender inequality in your organization? keep reading…

Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, is out with a new book saying that women “leave before they leave,” self-selecting out of certain jobs, careers, or specialties that they feel will hurt their ability to have a balanced life at some point in the future.

Is she right? Or is the larger problem stubborn, inflexible employer policies that make it hard for people to leave and reenter the workforce?

Dr. Cassi Fields, an I/O psychologist, and I talk about this in the video below. keep reading…

For the past 30 years I’ve been on a kick to ban traditional skills- and experience-based job descriptions. The prime reason: they’re anti-talent and anti-diversity, aside from being terrible predictors of future success.

Some naysayers use the legal angle as their excuse for maintaining the status quo. keep reading…

The Top 18 Metrics for Recruiting Leaders

It’s hard to find anything in recruiting that has failed to live up to its potential more than recruiting metrics. For nearly two decades recruiting leaders have poured resources into measuring recruiting success, and in most cases, the best that they have to show for it is being able to say “yes, we have metrics.” If you don’t know what’s wrong with most recruiting metrics, I have outlined in great detail in a previous article “what is wrong with metrics”).

So if you are a recruiting leader and you are frustrated or disappointed with your current metrics, this article will provide you with a list of the metrics that you should be using. I assure you that after reading this list you will definitely question your current metrics. The other possible option is that you may think that the metrics provided here are impossible, but you would be wrong (they are not).

Understanding the Three Time Periods That Metrics Should Cover keep reading…

On the way home from the diversity career fair, while writing job ads for the diversity publications, hiring the diversity consultants — while taking those positive steps forward you may, meanwhile, be doing things that cause you to take two steps back.

Some examples:

The Cliquishness keep reading…

You have staffed your team with all the right people: they graduated from top universities, worked at leading companies, stayed at each company the requisite length of time, and exuded intelligence in the interview process. Yet you see other companies with far less surface talent achieving incredible results and outstripping you. Why is this?

The most likely reason your company is failing to progress is that you still hire based on standard interview processes that have been followed for decades. You focus on qualifications only, and ignore focusing on the individual attributes that will help you find superstars, or game changers.

A game changer is a person who thinks outside the box and approaches problems differently from the rest of us. They approach problems with passion, a unique perspective, and their thinking inspires others to build on their ideas.

With game changers on your team you can move from average to an industry leadership position. Good examples are Apple and IBM, which transformed themselves from fading brands into dominant positions by adopting the ideas of leaders who were game changers. Three football teams have had great success this year bringing in game changers. The Seattle Seahawks (Russell Wilson), Washington Redskins (Robert Griffin III), and Indianapolis Colts (Andrew Luck) have seen vast improvements after they drafted rookie quarterbacks who have the unique attributes of game changers.

An example of a game changer in the music industry is Steven Tyler. In his entertaining autobiography he discusses how he approaches the four elements of writing a song: melody, words, chords, and rhythm.

He explains, “You know right away if a song has that magic. It has to have those extremes — the one thing it can’t be is okay. Okay is death.”

He adds: “Never mind the melody, never mind the chords — no, no, no. You start with infatuation, obsession, passion, anger, zeal, craze, then take a handful of notes, sew them into a chord structure, create a melody over that, and then come up with words that fit it perfectly.”

His diverse way of thinking is completely different from standard music writers, but as a game changer, his unique perspectives have resulted in incredible successes.

If we analyze the way the majority of companies hire, we see a system that is designed to hire okay performers. We focus solely on the tangibles: the candidate’s job history, education, and interview performance. We ignore the intangibles like diversity of thought, work ethic, intelligence, and common sense.

As an example, diversity of thought means approaching challenges using varied thought processes based on personal creativity and different life experiences. If you can combine diverse thinking with a strong work ethic, intelligence, and common sense, you have a game changer. The results of game changers can often transform the way we do business.

To hire game changers, you will need to make modifications in the following areas:  keep reading…

Millennials get a bad rap. We hear that millennials work with their iPods on, want flexible hours, won’t stay in a job long, and they get bored easy. Some of these assumptions are legitimate. But similar assumptions can be held true for any generation of worker.

Rather than fight, not understand, and not accept the behavior and way of the millennial, hiring managers should actively engage with this new generation and learn how to lead, manage, and motivate this new generation of workers.

When it was finally my turn to be put in the situation of hiring a millennial or two, I was a bit nervous, as I’d made all the above assumptions myself.

Thankfully, my first two millennial hires have worked out well. But to get these great hires, it took a keen eye and ear to locate these talented individuals. Let’s call them Kacey and Magi. keep reading…

A mosquito sits down for dinner

We’ve come a long way, baby — but not so far that women are beating down the door for a job that has to do with creepy crawlers.

Yeah, Terminix salespeople, even though they’re selling, not spraying, are mostly men. The company, owned by ServiceMaster, is working with TMP on trying to change that, preparing a campaign that will bring together “girls and bugs.”

We’ve talked about the pest-control business before: it’s not one of those industries a lot of college students, particularly women, say they’re dreaming about working in. Then again, the same could be said for urology, but that has its virtues. And people can surprise you: a car-racing company, for example, found that women were far more interested in clicking on its job ads than it anticipated.

These sorts of issues were what ServiceMaster started talking about around May of this year with ServiceMaster’s ad agency of choice, TMP. On the ServiceMaster side, Andrea Hough, in particular, was interested in reaching more females. After all, it is females of who often are the ones being sold to — the ones who make the decision to have someone douse the garage with something that’ll kill off underground domestic terrorists. keep reading…

As I consult through my business, the Thought Leadership Institute, I am amazed at the speed of how things are changing in recruiting, even though most of us would still admit that we are in the midst of an economic downturn. Despite not hiring at the rates most of us are used to, this is the time period to prepare ourselves for the tide-change we will be going through soon enough.

In this article, I wanted to provide you with a somewhat tongue-in-cheek perspective on some of these game changers; I’ll begin with three today that are more macro in nature and then I’ll hit you up (I just learned this phrase from my youngest son) with three more in the very near future.

In the meantime, if you’d like to get started learning to be more adaptive, you can join me and TLI at our upcoming pre-conference workshop: A Roadmap to Recruiting Reinvention on September 5 as part of the ERE Expo, where we’ll be joined by Tom McGuire of Coca Cola and other great adaptive leaders in Florida.

Trend Number 1:  Helicopter parents/stay-around kids keep reading…

They are the perfect recruiting target because these prospects are currently employed (i.e. passives); they are diverse; it costs almost nothing to get a recruiting message in front of them and best of all; and they already know and like your company and its products. These perfect candidates are your customers.

Even though customers are generally the most-ignored recruiting source, some firms like Google, McDonald’s, Marriott, and Wells Fargo have realized that some of the best recruiting targets are their own customers.

Let’s take Wells Fargo as an example. It literally has millions of customers that use their ATM machines every year, so it only makes sense to try to recruit them as employees. Its approach is simple and cost-effective. It is reaching these customer prospects by merely adding a recruiting message to the receipt printed out by its ATM machines. The message is: “Now hiring. With you when you want a career opportunity that is right for you” (see the inserted sample of a “recruiting receipt”).

Why Customers Are Near-perfect Recruiting Targets keep reading…

Fire Department of New York officials announced this month that a record number of minorities took its firefighter exam this spring. The Fire Department says nearly 46 percent of the potential recruits were members of minority groups. The number of women test-takers also saw an increase this year. Nearly 2,000 women took the test. That’s more than the past three test years combined. That’s a good thing, but it’d be even better if these applicants were even more prepared. More on that in a minute.

Big Improvement keep reading…

Financial and business consulting group PricewaterhouseCoopers captured the top spot on DiversityInc’s Top 50 Companies for Diversity.

Of PwC, DiversityInc said this: “Always cognizant of the war for talent, PwC continuously creates innovative strategies to find, engage, and promote the best and brightest employees, especially those from traditionally underrepresented groups.”

Surprisingly, considering the layoffs and slowdown in hiring that have beset the finance industry, it was well represented on the list. Ernst and Young, Deloitte, Prudential, KPMG, and a few others in the sector made the list.

Tar Heel Cops Needed

The highway patrol in North Carolina is hiring. There are 183 jobs open in its “first recruiting blitz in five years.”

Recruiting Company Lawsuit

The U.S. EEOC says Randstad U.S. LP is settling an ADA-related lawsuit for $60,000. keep reading…

When employers look for senior people — and 31 percent will be, a new survey says — the evidence is they’re all looking for the same qualities. Industry experience is important; so is proven problem solving.

Nowhere on the list of qualities a CareerBuilder survey reported as important to employers was craziness listed. Perhaps that trait was covered by the “Is creative” characteristic that 43 percent of the respondents look for in a new executive. keep reading…