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Every staffing manager is concerned about the candidate quality and quality-of-hire metrics. These are very hard to measure. But if you have sourcers, recruiters, and candidate specialists who know what they’re looking for, and who know how to ask the right questions of the candidate who they’re talking to, then you vastly improve the quality of candidate, which in turn, improves the quality of hire.

If we don’t understand the technical functions of the job, then whole hiring process will be wrong, from start to finish. Here are the four problems that can occur: keep reading…

I strive to be the world’s most prominent advocate of employee referrals simply because there is no more powerful tool in recruiting. Well-designed referral programs not only identify top prospects that are not in a job-search mode but they also require employees to assess candidates for skills and fit and to sell them on the company and the job. Taken together, this identification, assessment and selling feature make referrals superior to any other source.

If your corporation is not getting close to 50% of your hires from employee referrals, I have gathered 10 compelling numbers that should change your perspective. keep reading…

Excellence matters, and technology advances so fast that the potential for improvement is tremendous. So, since becoming CEO again, I’ve pushed hard to increase our velocity, improve our execution, and focus on the big bets that will make a difference in the world. Google is a large company now, but we will achieve more, and do it faster, if we approach life with the passion and soul of a startup. — Google CEO Larry Page

With these powerful words, Google’s CEO Larry Page demonstrates that as Google grows in size, it must take actions in order to maintain its speed and startup-like attributes. If he fails, Google will slide into what I call “the Great to Good downward spiral.” It has already happened to notable firms like Kodak, Xerox, AOL, HP, 3M, Sears, MySpace, and Yahoo. In part 1 of this article I covered the 25 factors that can be used to identify if your organization is already in a bureaucratic slide. This Part 2 covers potential action steps that corporate leaders can take to prevent a slide at newer firms or to turn it around at more established firms.

20 Action Steps for Stopping or Preventing a “Great to Good” Slide Into Mediocrity keep reading…

Most organizations need to work on how they develop and articulate their employer brand strategies. Just over half of employers claim to have an employer brand strategy (51%), a fifth (19%) are in the process of revising one, and 24% are working towards one. That’s what Bernard Hodes Group learned from our new research, called The Growing Value of Employer Brands.

Of those employers that claim to have a strategy, the average age of it is 4.3 years. The results suggest that many employers are using strategies pre-dating the Great Recession. Relying on an old strategy is a recipe for disaster given the changes in workers’ attitudes wrought by turbulent labor markets and the rise of new channels such as social media.

The survey polled 175 employers across the U.S. in a spectrum of industries from education to manufacturing. About 240 employees were surveyed and were not necessarily employed by any of the participating employers. When comparing the two sets of data, there are some stark disconnects (see the graphic in the upper right). Some of the most noteworthy include:

• Only 25% of employers indicated that compensation is one of the most important attributes of an employer brand, compared with 64% of employees.
• Job security was ranked highly by 41% of employees, but only 21% of employers.
• Just 15% of employers felt that recognition is important in attracting new hires, while 33% of employees ranked it highly.
• Nearly half of employers (44%) felt career growth and advancement opportunities are important to attracting talent, while just over a quarter of talent (27%) agreed.

Looking at the data, one gets the impression that many employers may have lost common sense. keep reading…

There are fewer sad things to observe than a once-great firm sliding into mediocrity. You might not be accustomed to hearing the word “sad” and “business” in the same sentence, but I really do find it sad when great startup firms lose their energy and eventually become lumbering giants.

If you’re familiar with the legendary business book by Jim Collins, Good to Great, you already understand the concept of how firms can move from merely being good to becoming great. You might not be as familiar with it, but there is a similar shift that occurs when once great firms become simply … good firms. I call this slide “the Great to Good downward spiral.”

If you’re curious about the factors that cause this tragic downward spiral, or if you feel that your current firm is headed downhill, please read on. 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…

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…

How good are the people who work for your company?

An honest, objective answer to that question would likely have you describing a statistical bell curve: Some top performers; a big middle, and a few at the bottom. As an HR professional, your performance management mission is to raise the overall quality of the workforce. Your yardstick for measuring success? The metrics of your top performers.

But how do you know your top performers are really top performers?

This is a question that professional sports scouts and college recruiters wrestle with all the time. A high school star might end up a bench warmer in college. A college standout might not make it out of training camp.

It’s now a question global assessment firm SHL is able to help businesses (at least) answer.

“We provide people intelligence,” says Caroline Paxman, chief customer officer. What that means is that SHL clients not only, now, can learn about the talents, behaviors, and skills of their own workforce, but can compare them to others in their industry, and get as granular as they like. keep reading…

For the first time in the history of the profession, human resource practitioners now have a uniform way to measure and compare one of the oldest metrics.The American National Standards Institute has accepted the profession’s proposal for determining cost-per-hire.

Enshrined alongside such venerable standards as those that gave us the first computer languages, and set the size of paper at the local office supply store, the new cost-per-hire standard now allows one company anywhere in the U.S. to compare this element of recruiting efficiency to those of others, elsewhere, including among its own divisions and branches.

“The approval of this standard as an American National Standard establishes a milestone for the HR profession. It affirms that HR has indeed a ‘technology’ that its professionals must apply, improve, and preserve,” said Lee Webster, SHRM’s director of HR standards. “The HR profession and its stakeholders can now begin to make business decisions based on credible, transferable, and inter-operable human capital analytics.” keep reading…

If you have a current or upcoming major retention problem at your firm, review your probably “rusty” current program in order to identify where it needs improvement. If you consider retention to be a major business problem, you need to decide if you’re willing to go the extra steps necessary to develop a true world-class retention program.

After over two decades of researching and implementing retention programs, I have found that there is a significant difference between the average program and an excellent or world-class one. Most HR executives don’t seem to have the time or interest in moving beyond the simple answer “yes, we have a retention program.” But if you need dramatic improvement in yours, you will find this easy-to-scan checklist to be a valuable tool in assessing where you are and where you need to be in retention. keep reading…

Never before has the time been riper for recruiters to make a real difference to the profitability of their firms. The differentiator between profits, innovative products, and long-term success is, very simply, the quality of talent.

As gatekeepers, your function is far from trivial. You are key to finding the best talent and therefore ultimately a core player in corporate success. But we continue to act like our job is about as important as sorting screws or stocking shelves. We are rarely influencers or early adopters of technology.

Influencers are noted for focus, their ability to make a case for what they want that is backed up with data, and for empowering others to act. In many cases, they also use the latest tools to raise awareness and efficiency.

If you want to be an influencer here are some ideas, concepts, and provocative moves you can use to transform your recruiting function.

Narrow the Field

Most recruiters have too large a scope and hence spread themselves very thinly, pleasing no one. keep reading…

What would you do if the person interviewing you fell asleep? What Irwin did turned out to be worth $100. You’ll find out more if you read through this week’s roundup. And, as a little incentive to make it to the very end, there’s a link to some nifty free marketing analytics tools.

One suggestion: You might want to keep a glossary of acronyms handy. Those of you who can correctly identify ANSI, ATS, SaaS, and SMB — you are excused from the glossary requirement.

Freshening Stale Resumes

When a resume is stale, but the skills and experience are just what the hiring manager ordered, what do you do? You call, you email. You don’t hear back. Or if you do, you find out they’re perfectly happy in the new job they started six months ago.

There goes your time-to-fill right down the drain. keep reading…

As we prepare for a new year, and as I look forward to preparing for a metrics panel at the Spring 2012 Expo, I have been pairing a series of thoughts on metrics and measures that are important to talent acquisition.

For the past several months, my team has reviewed dozens of articles, blogs, and white papers that outline foundational and basic aspects of “How to do Metrics.” There is a tremendous resource available by simply using search engines to find information on metrics.

I am encouraged by the amount of content that is dedicated to subjects such as what metrics can be tracked, the quality of hire conversation, the candidate experience, and how metrics can serve as a stepping stone to a real relationship with business leaders. I will also admit that the meat behind many of these blogs, articles, or white papers is pretty lean, but there are exceptions. Shout out to Chris Brabic at Smashfly for his tutorials that break into some of the detail.

As I prepare for the metrics panel for the spring ERE conference, it occurred to me how statistics and analysis tends to not be standard training for recruiters. There are some recruiters who were engineers, programmers, or MBAs, and as such they would have some basic to intermediate statistics training. But it is likely that statistical analysis or training is likely reinforced by using Excel with tables, pie charts and graphs — not using the actual definitions, architecture, and structure of true statistical analysis.

Which brings me to this post, and the danger of correlation and causation. It is not new to hear that metrics, when pulled together and compared to each other, tell a story. Much of that story has to do with correlation. As an example, if you spend more money (increase cost per hire), you may reduce your time to fill. Well, sometimes that is true. Sometimes.

That relationship may not be a causal relationship: One does not necessarily cause the other. The dependence that we wish was there is actually not there in the strength that we need it to be, or even at all. There is a common scientific and statistical concept that states “correlation does not imply causation.” I find that to be very true in recruiting and talent acquisition metrics.

We try so hard to find how one metric impacts the other. Technologies, branding companies, consultants, and so on use metrics to drive home value — and they should. We all try hard because we just really want to sort out why things are happening and what can we do to change what is happening, and that is a worthy endeavor.

However, I caution trying to correlate metrics together in order to force causation. It is more likely that two or more metrics correlate and have less of a causal relationship then having a causal relationship.

As you review your metrics and measures for 2012, I encourage you to: keep reading…

What’s surprising about a new analyst report from Aberdeen is that in 2012 HR professionals still need to be reminded that talent management is as much a strategy as a tactic they should be captaining.

“HR still struggles to become a ‘strategic partner’ with the business, engaging employees and aligning integrated talent management initiatives with overall organizational goals,” write the authors of an Aberdeen Analyst Insight about developing a “Talent First” culture.

Drawing  from an upcoming Aberdeen report, analysts Madeline Laurano and Mollie Lombardi say HR’s day-to-day work and the lack of support and buy-in from other business leaders and senior management stand in the way of developing the strategic approach that HR leaders say must be a part of their skill set.

Yet there’s some sort of disconnect here. The analysts note that in Aberdeen’s Quarterly Business Review, the 1,300+ business leaders in the survey named workforce and talent concerns in half of their top 10 business challenges. However, 35 percent of the HR leaders participating in the forthcoming HR Executives Agenda 2012 complained of a lack of buy-in from their senior management. keep reading…

Note: I’m writing this “think piece” as part of a series of articles designed to expand your thinking about strategic HR.

HR and talent management leaders are constantly striving to become more strategic. But more often than not it seems that when they are presented with a strategic alternative that really breaks new ground, they retreat and stick with the status quo. However, if you are serious about making a strategic impact and you take a minute to reflect, it’s hard to think of many things that could have more of a strategic impact than increasing corporate revenues.

This is because increasing revenue or “topline growth” is on every CEO’s agenda and it is also almost always a top corporate goal and an executive success measure.

Other business functions like marketing, sales, supply chain, and product development have become corporate heroes (and are richly budgeted as a result) because they have demonstrated that they have a direct and measurable impact on this critical strategic goal.

HR has historically focused exclusively on cost cutting, but realize that increasing revenue is a far superior goal. That is because almost anyone can cut costs using an arbitrary number. However, in order to generate more revenue in the marketplace from your customers, you must meet a much higher standard, which requires that you be competitive in every aspect of the business.

Now if you are an HR traditionalist or someone who is happy to maintain HR’s status as a service/overhead function, you are probably already thinking that a strategic goal to impact revenue is a ridiculous idea. However, you would be wrong. We know that HR can directly increase revenues because several firms have already succeeded in demonstrating to their CFOs that they could directly increase revenue. At least take a minute and look at a quick example where HR has increased revenue. keep reading…

Two recruiters meet at a conference:

• Laura gets 30% of her hires from referrals, has used only one headhunter in the past six months, and has a 42-day average time to fill. She filled 11 jobs last month.
• Jerry gets 20% of his hires from referrals, uses headhunters regularly, and has a 65-day average time to fill. He filled eight jobs last month.

Is Laura better than Jerry? Does Jerry suck?  keep reading…

Four years (give or take) into recruiting’s embrace of social media, it turns out that job boards are the most productive source of new hires.

Where social media sources register a barely discernible 1 percent of all hires, job boards produced 19 percent. That was matched only by internal transfers; even referrals came in lower — 16 percent.

These are among the surprising, and not so surprising, bits of data developed from a survey of 414 employers conducted by HR consultants Bersin & Associates. Compiled into the Talent Acquisition Factbook 2011, and authored by principal analyst Karen O’Leonard, the 100 page volume offers details on the recruiting metrics from employers as small as 100  workers to those with more than 10,000.

Josh Bersin, founder of the eponymous firm, said the genesis of the factbook came from the company’s clients and conversations with many others since Bersin launched his talent acquisition practice a few years ago. keep reading…

The New Year is an opportune time to “raise the bar” by doing something strategic in talent management. In many corporations, new plans and budgets take effect at the first of the year, so the holiday period preceding the New Year is an ideal time to review the potential strategic actions to put in front of your team. Unfortunately, many talent management leaders are risk adverse, and although they constantly talk about the need to “be more strategic” they all-too-frequently find excuses that indefinitely postpone those dramatic and strategic actions.

The leadership set aside at least half the day for the team to identify upcoming problems and opportunities and the resulting strategic moves that need to be made. This article is merely a checklist of the strategic talent management actions that I have found that the very best corporations should have on their potential to-do list.

The Top 15 Potential Strategic Actions to Consider in Talent Management

If you’ve decided to stop fighting fires and to do something major with a strategic impact, here is a list of possible programs and actions that you should consider. keep reading…

Moneyball teaches us that when there is too much information (no sport has more data than baseball), it is time to rethink what and how we measure success. Success in baseball is winning; success in sourcing and recruiting is hiring. And like the journey to winning in baseball, the path to hiring as viewed through the eyes of data will help us determine what activities lead to success.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

It’s always better to be prepared than surprised.

By definition, being strategic requires that you look forward — identifying trends, opportunities, and threats. With the December lull looming, now is a great time to plan for the future. I’ve listed the “top 10 talent management trends” I foresee that require your attention. keep reading…