ERE.net

The ranks of passive jobseekers are growing as workers decide now is not the time to look for a new job.  Many, in fact, are considering taking classes to improve their job prospects, while 41 percent told pollsters they intend to stay in their present job until they retire. Another 38 percent said they expected to hold onto their current job for at least another year.

Wise decisions, considering that only 23 percent of the companies surveyed intend to add full time workers in the next three months.

These are some of the findings reported in CareerBuilder.com and USA TODAY’s “Q4 2008 Job Forecast” released today. The report was based on a survey of more than 3,000 hiring managers and HR professionals and over 6,100 workers in private sector companies nationwide.

keep reading…

“Happiness is an emotion associated with feelings ranging from contentment and satisfaction to bliss and intense joy.”
“Wikipedia.

Do you have problems keeping your internal clients happy? Do you arrive at work first thing in the morning dreading e-mails and phone messages from certain hiring managers? Do you ever have the urge to chase some of your internal clients around the office with a blunt instrument while screaming something like, “More candidates? I’ll give you more candidates you miserable &*%&*,” as they scatter in fear of their lives? Does any of this sound familiar?

If this charming reality is even a part of the story of your recruiting life, you can change that story by adopting a radically innovative mindset and you can do it today. I urge you to consider the following fact: it is not your job to make your internal clients happy. Never was and never will be. You might have thought it was because we were all trained to think that way, but that is not our goal from a business perspective. Our real objective is to present them with two or three qualified candidates who could be hired. End of story. If your internal clients are not happy after that, the problem is theirs, not yours, because you have done your job.

Let’s take a closer look at this concept of “happy.” Consider the following words: “profit, objective, performance, leadership.” The omission of the word “happy” in that group of words is not accidental. That is because those are business-oriented words, whereas “happy” is an emotional state of being. As recruiters, making people happy is not our job. Good, proactive, and effective recruiting is our job. Locating, attracting, and presenting candidates for the positions we are trying to fill is our business, and that is the only business with which we are involved.

Taking it one step further (Sorry I’m on a roll…) Keeping internal clients “happy” is a fool’s errand. Recruiting is difficult enough. Crazy expectations, poor response time, and un-communicated changes in requirements just scratch the surface of the recruiter’s typical day. We roam the halls with this creepy feeling that a good many of our internal clients are not happy. We struggle to do the best we can; we locate and present qualified candidates; yet, we still have this sinking feeling that they are not happy. Forget happy. Just do your job as a recruiter and that will have to be good enough.

With that in mind, let’s see how we can execute on this new way of doing business.

keep reading…

I wrote a rather controversial article last week comparing Obama vs. McCain using our 10-factor evidence-based assessment system. The stated purpose of the article was to propose that Presidential candidates should be vetted just as rigorously as any candidate for any job.

The underlying purpose was to demonstrate the point that many important decisions, especially hiring decisions, are based on invalid assumptions, false impressions, personal beliefs, and lack of objective data. (Join this Ning Recruiters Roundtable network to submit your views.)

With this article as a starting point, let me offer some expert advice on how to make really bad hiring decisions:

keep reading…

In the quest for quality hires, talent acquisition leaders often spend considerable time extracting DNA from the company’s top performers in hopes of cloning the outstanding workers. After reviewing performance goals and synthesizing multiple data inputs, line managers and recruiters collaborate to craft tightly honed hiring profiles for each position. Next, it’s up to the recruiter to source the candidates, which is a critical step in the process, because sourcing plays a vital role in achieving quality of hire (a topic explored in depth in the October Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership).

Targeted sourcing is the second step in hiring top performers, as shown in this chart (click to enlarge) illustrating the complete quality of hire process, from Taleo Research.

Most recruiters instinctively return to the same source when searching for candidates, because historically the source has produced a quick response from a large number of prospects with the required skills. But a deeper dive into employee turnover statistics and performance ratings might result in some surprises about the quality of the candidates secured through each source, according to Andrew Carges, vice president of worldwide talent acquisition for Success Factors.

Carges says that he found first-year turnover was high for employees sourced through agencies, during his experience at SuccessFactors and in his previous roles as a talent leader. A closer review as to why those employees left revealed that many had a history of job-hopping, and he concluded that employees represented by recruiters were frequently hunting for new opportunities and had easy access to other positions. Now he evaluates source effectiveness and its impact on quality of hire.

“To drive quality of hire, compare the employee’s first-year performance rating to their hiring source and the cost of hire,” says Carges. “It’s something every company can do to evaluate the effectiveness of the hiring source in delivering top performers and value.”

(See the example of hiring-source analysis provided by SuccessFactors.)

Managers frequently request candidates with previous industry experience because they believe it’s a predictor of on-the-job success. That hiring criteria often limits the sources recruiters can tap to find experienced prospects. A review of the employees’ actual performance ratings and the competencies possessed by top performers might be the first step in shifting the hiring paradigm, which in turn opens the door for new sources of hire.

At R.L. Polk & Co., a review of the company’s top performers revealed that previous industry experience had little correlation to job performance, according to Jay Marshall, manager of talent acquisition. In fact, the requirement accelerated the cost of hire because candidates came from a boutique industry and often had to be enticed with higher salaries.

And at the same time, industry dynamics were changing, forcing employees into more business-facing roles that required different skills. As Marshall dug a bit deeper into what was really making employees successful, an entirely new profile began to emerge.

“When I looked at the behavior behind the performance, it was driven by teamwork,” says Marshall. “The bottom line is that it really altered what we were looking for, and now we look for team players with strong business acumen. That opened up many new candidate sources, and our average cost of hire has dropped $10,000 in the last 24 months.”

Today, Marshall says he no longer worries about how long it takes his team to hire new employees or how much a new hire costs, because by focusing on quality of hire, he has improved all the recruiting metrics at Polk.

I’ve always used a multi-factor approach to ensure candidates evaluate career opportunities across multiple factors, both short and long term. These typically included things like job stretch, impact, growth opportunities, learning, benefits, and compensation.

The idea here was to increase the likelihood the candidate would not overvalue compensation as the primary decision criteria when selecting one job over another. Since compensation was rarely ideal, broadening the selection criteria this way was a very effective recruiting and negotiating tactic. This week I learned how to make it even better – have candidates rank order the criteria when you first meet them.

As I began to consider this and try it out, I ran across a study prepared by WFD Consulting in a consortium with some major U.S. corporations. Their findings revealed that employees and candidates have varying needs that change over time depending on where they are in their career and family life-cycles. While many companies have addressed these issues in terms of retention, few have incorporated them directly into the recruiting process.

keep reading…

I’ve been around a lot of years, and I can’t remember a time when recruiters, recruiting managers, hiring managers, HR executives, and company leaders didn’t complain about the lack of good candidates. When the Internet and job boards came along, we were promised the solution was at hand.

But more than a dozen years later, the problems in finding talent have gotten worse, not better. I’m going to suggest that sourcing is not the problem, and that much of the solution has nothing to do with seeing more candidates.

I equate hiring top performers as a business process similar to manufacturing. My early industry background was in high-volume consumer electronics and automotive components, so this comparison is easy for me to make. In a factory when you have excessive scrap you need to either buy extra raw materials or reduce the scrap rate. This is not rocket science, but somehow the obvious seems to be overlooked when it comes to hiring.

(Note: in this article substitute prospects or candidates whenever you read the term “raw materials.”)

When sourcing is viewed as a factory, with prospects coming in at the receiving dock and accepted offers coming out of shipping, you quickly notice two problems. One, the raw material is incorrectly specified or over-specified, and two, the process used to convert the raw material into accepted offers is based more on emotion than science.

In a factory, excessive scrap is usually due to a combination of bad material specs, inconsistent processes, and weak controls. In hiring, these are equivalent to weak job descriptions, managers who evaluate the wrong things incorrectly, and the lack of metrics.

This requires recruiters to find more raw materials than necessary. This becomes problematic when recruiters over-rely on boring advertising and unsophisticated selling techniques to attract a diminishing supply of coveted raw materials.

keep reading…

Having talked to countless hiring managers, one of their biggest frustrations is not knowing what is going on with a particular search. They post a position, talk to their recruiter, and then wait for candidates to come their way.

While many recruitment organizations have created service level agreements that define the recruitment/hiring process and each parties’ (hiring manager and recruiter) responsibilities, many do not define and establish a “time-to-first-submittal” SLA. This SLA is what I believe to be the most important.

We (and others!) call this SLA: Requisition Received to “First Submittal.”

keep reading…

First, some interview rules:

• Hiring managers have a bigger fear of failure (making a bad hire) than the person being interviewed, and the consequences of making a bad hire is greater than making a poor employment decision.
• Most hiring managers are excellent at making widgets but they are terrible at conducting interviews.
• 80/20 rule: 80% Compatibility/20% Skill Sets. At the beginning of the interview, skill sets are important, but once the interviewer is confident that candidate’s skill sets will help them sleep better at night, compatibility becomes the primary hiring motivator.

So you have just spent months networking to uncover a highly marketable candidate. You have screened, interviewed, evaluated, checked references, and created a stellar marketing campaign. Because of your efforts, your candidate gets the ultimate compliment: an invitation to interview with your client. You do your standard candidate interview prep: Company, Job Description, and Interest in the job. So why is your sendout-to-hire ratio still low?

Very few recruiters understand that making a hire in this market is more about “risk” assessment than “skill” assessment. Candidate interview preparation should not only be about helping the candidate understand their strengths within the job description; it should also be about helping them understand the psychological battles that hiring authorities go through just to present an offer of employment.

If you want to increase your sendout-to-hire ratio, share the following with your candidates during the interview prep.

keep reading…

Dating and recruiting have a lot in common. Learn how to improve your recruiting efforts by applying the most common dating rules.

Dating rule #1
First impressions are critical.

Recruiting application:
Differentiate yourself. Resist the “I have a great position for you” especially if you have never spoken to them.

keep reading…

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:

1. When did it happen and how long did it take to finish?
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. What was the actual impact you made? Please provide specific details and facts.
5. 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.
6. Describe the technical skills you used and those you learned. Give me some examples of how you applied these.
7. Give me two to three examples of initiative, where you went the extra mile, or where you exceeded expectations.
8. What did you like most and least about this project?
9. 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.
10. 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.

keep reading…

Mickey Silberman, the ubiquitous Jackson Lewis attorney with a gift for gab and an encyclopedic knowledge of the U.S. government’s online recruiting rules, offers employers who must comply with such rules three questions to ask themselves.

By asking themselves these questions, he says, you can reduce the number of people considered “applicants.” This can help employers better comply with the rules. (If you can show that you hired 20 women out of 25 applicants, that’s generally better than saying you hired 20 women out of 25,000 applicants.)

Anyhow, the three questions:

keep reading…

Recruiting campaigns can be broken into two types: individual recruiting and group targeting.

A less-known alternative, the group targeting approach focuses on attracting a specific group of individuals who share something in common (i.e., Hispanic software engineers or fabric patent holders). Group targeting is common in political campaigns and product advertising but is rarely used effectively in corporate recruiting.

Convert Teachers Into Corporate Employees

There are several large groups of employed persons who are routinely interested in a major career change, including nurses, soldiers, and yes, teachers. However, there is no more highly qualified group of potential employees to recruit than teachers.

Before you howl about the social impact of “raiding schools” and hiring away all the teachers, remember that you can opt to limit your recruiting to retiring baby boomers, those recently laid-off, or teachers who have determined they no longer wish to teach.

There are no “hands off” groups in recruiting. It is a recruiter’s job to target everyone who is interested, qualified, and available. Yet corporate recruiters have avoided targeting teachers, which is perhaps the largest group of potential recruits simply ignored.

keep reading…

Are your candidates reluctant to provide a reference until they have received an offer?

Do you outsource the reference-checking process to a third party or your administrative staff?

Are you asking “legal” type questions (eligible for rehire, dates of employment) and a few innocuous “Can you tell me the strengths and weaknesses?” type questions?

These old-school reference practices do little more than irritate the reference you are contacting.

If you have the correct reference contact and the appropriate information, you can get do better.

How?

keep reading…

While U.S. recruiters debate the value of text messaging, one of the largest franchise operators in the Middle East has jumped in with enthusiasm.

“From now on,” says Nic Beesley, a senior HR vice president with M.H. Alshaya Co., “All jobseekers applying for Alshaya vacancies will henceforth know exactly where they stand. Whether they are short-listed or called for an interview, every candidate will receive real-time SMS updates, regardless of which part of the world they live in.”

The company operates some 1400 retail outlets for brands such as Starbucks, Estee Lauder, Mothercare, Foot Locker and Pearle Opticians. More than 14,000 people work for Alshaya in 15 countries, mostly in the Middle East, but also including Poland, Russia and the Czech Republic.

keep reading…

An automated e-mail response, which roughly translates to: “Don’t call us, we’ll call you,” is the only communication most applicants receive after they’ve spent 15 to 30 minutes online filling out applications, questionnaires, and experiencing the frustration of pasting their resumes into boxes, (only to find the plain text version looks like it’s been encoded for secret transmission by the CIA).

The fact that most companies now acknowledge applicants by sending a generic e-mail is actually a significant improvement, according to the CareerXroads 2008 Mystery Job Seeker Survey, because some companies still don’t reply to applicants at all.

keep reading…

Over the past 30-plus years, I’ve been involved in thousands of searches, worked with hundreds of hiring managers, trained 3,000 to 4,000 recruiters, and worked closely with dozens of major companies. Following are some of the common threads among the best techniques, processes, and tools that I have seen and used.

Collectively they add up to a business process for hiring top people. While Performance-based Hiring provides a simplified high-level summary of these, it’s in the details and execution that will ultimately determine your personal success.

Following are the six core aspects of hiring top talent. A couple of key themes stand out. First, offer and recruit the best people based on career growth if you want to attract the best on a consistent basis. Second, allow people to just look and explore, rather than require them to apply for a job. This prevents them from opting out before you even see them.

If you can address these two issues, you are well on your way to hiring top people every time.

keep reading…

Understanding human behavior can help you recruit more passive candidates.

When filling a job order, most recruiters search through virtual stacks of resumes hoping one stands out, matching most of the skills and experiences listed on the job description. When calling a person, the recruiter attempts to gain this same information by first describing the job and then asking the person to describe his or her background. If there’s a fit, the selling process begins.

If you want to hire more top performers, this is exactly what you shouldn’t be doing.

A little understanding of human nature and solution selling offers some guidance on how to approach passive candidates and quickly get them more interested in what you have to offer. If you follow the instructions closely, you’ll even be able to get two to three great referrals on each call. You’ll want these, especially if you decide you’re not interested in pursuing the candidate.

In the last sentence, pay notice to who decides to move forward or not. It should be the recruiter, not the candidate. If you’re letting your candidates decide if they’re interested in your opportunity, you’re not recruiting, you’re just box-checking and order-taking. Making this decision is the first part of the applicant control process essential to good recruiting.

For the sake of brevity and making a point, let me narrow the passive candidate recruiting process down to two small, but critical, first steps. The first relates to a candidate saying they’re not interested in considering your opportunity, even before you’ve told them anything about it.

The second relates to those who don’t say “no” right away, but instead ask about the comp, title, and location.

I’m sure you would agree that getting past these two pivotal points will dramatically increase the number of top candidates you put into your pipeline.

keep reading…

We’ve all heard of the perfect candidate flaking out at the 11th hour. Reasons can vary from the infamous counteroffer, a surprise month-long vacation, or the candidate accepting another offer you never knew they had.

Like it or not, any time you are blindsided by your candidate, you’ve lost control of the recruiting process. This negatively impacts your client, your organization, and it directly reflects on you as a recruiter.

keep reading…

A good measure of recruiter performance is placements per month, with sendouts (interviews arranged with hiring managers) per month and sendouts per hire being the two key performance drivers for this.

For third-party recruiters, add fee per placement to obtain total billings per month as another critical performance measure.

keep reading…

I have been writing on the need for increasing the speed of hire for nearly a decade. During that time, many corporations have begun to realize the benefits of fast hiring. Unfortunately, too many rely on a single time-to-fill metric as their way of measuring hiring speed.

There are many reasons why you should hire quickly in certain cases, but there are also problems related to using an average time-to-fill metric as an exclusive measure of hiring speed. Fortunately, there are several alternative measures which can better help you understand precisely when and where an organization should emphasize fast hiring.

keep reading…