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. (more…)

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: (more…)

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. (more…)

Among the other issues, according to the report: (more…)

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? (more…)

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. (more…)

Some naysayers use the legal angle as their excuse for maintaining the status quo. (more…)

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 (more…)

Some examples:

The Cliquishness (more…)

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:  (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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 (more…)

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 (more…)

Big Improvement (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

I started my professional career in recruiting when I was hired at a Native American casino to run the recruiting team. There was considerable consternation when I showed up because my boss had told people that I was an Indian, which had been interpreted to mean that I was Native American (I did wonder just how smart one has to be to think that someone with my last name was a Native American). Hiring Native Americans, especially for senior positions, was a goal of the casino and we were supposed to show preference in hiring to Native Americans. This was no easy task and my team was constantly berated for not hiring enough. Native Americans represent about 0.8% of the population, and of the ones that were qualified for senior roles had their pick of jobs.

This was when I learned just how much of a premium the claim to minority status can provide to a candidate. I had noticed that some of those who we hired didn’t look much like Native Americans, but more like Native Irish or Native Germans. Our only basis for classifying them as Native Americans were their personal claims about their ancestry, and apparently any claim was acceptable. I suggested that we ask anyone claiming Native American status for some proof, such as a tribal membership card, but was told that candidates would find this insulting — it was never explained why — so it went by the wayside. One of our managers was an African American individual who claimed that one of his ancestors, six generations back, was Native American. There was obviously no way to validate this and even if it was true it only made him 1/64 Native American but that was good enough for management and it got them off my back, so I didn’t complain.

The Diversity Dilemma (more…)