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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…

A study by Deloitte estimates that companies will spend more than $4 billion annually on talent management technology this year. Because the HR technology industry is …

• Dominated by a handful of large players such as Taleo/Oracle, Kenexa/IBM, and Success Factors/SAP
• Also heavily represented by hundreds of smaller specialty tech companies who are agile and focused on growth, most of whom have been in business less than 10 years
• And changing rapidly changing in response to technological innovations (such as mobile computing and the cloud) as well as evolving reporting/compliance requirements

… buying decisions can be extremely complex.

At talentRISE, we are all too often contacted by clients who have made a less-than-optimal technology purchasing decision and are now seeking a post-purchase “fix.”  So, in this post, we want to share a few “lessons learned” to help others seeking to replace or upgrade current systems — whether an ATS, a comprehensive talent management system, or an HR Management System make the best buying decision possible and avoid buyers’ remorse.   keep reading…

About a month ago, I was at ERE and a session caught my attention: “A Framework for Improving and Measuring Quality of Hire.” I was delighted. Would talent management be ready for it? Would this be the turning point for the profession? My skepticism has been high; over 10 years ago I wrote one of the first, if not the first report on quality of hire when I was leading Taleo Research, and more recently we organized a roundtable with leading organizations from the Bay Area, but did not see much progress in between. Are we at a crossroads, at the tipping point? Are we at that place when finally talent acquisition will see themselves as more than just filling requirements? keep reading…

Informatica, the company for which I work, deals in big data challenges every day. It’s what we do — help customers turn their data into actionable business insights. When I took the helm as VP of global talent acquisition I was surprised to learn that the data within the talent acquisition function was not up to the standards Informatica lives by. Clearly, talent acquisition was not seeing the huge competitive advantage that data could bring — at least not the way sales, marketing, and research were viewing it. And that, to me, seemed like a major problem, but also a terrific opportunity!

This is the story of how Informatica Talent Acquisition became data-centric and used that centricity to our advantage to fix the problem. keep reading…

Futurestep has quietly been developing a tool called “Foresight” it will be rolling out to its clients, a dashboard meant to make heads and tails out of the recruiting information global companies have stored in their many databases.

Futurestep (a recruitment outsourcing company owned by Korn/Ferry) started thinking about this about a year ago, and has had an internal technology team working on it. It’s “high-end, graphical, display analytics,” Bill Sebra says.

Sebra is Futurestep’s North America president. He says the company’s global clients wanted more data — more real-time data. You may have “the people in China running something different from the folks in North America” when it comes to HR software, he says. “If you’re the chief talent officer, it becomes very difficult.” This challenge can be multiplied if you’re a company with, say 8-10 different firms you bought, all around the world. keep reading…

During the newly reinvigorated and exciting ERE conference, two attendees posed related but powerful questions to me. The first was “What advanced topics should be on the agenda of recruiting leaders at elite firms?” Or as another put it “What should Google be planning to do next in recruiting?”

At least to me, future agenda items are an important topic. Because after visiting well over 100 firms, I have found a dramatic difference between the agenda items that are found on 95% of the firms (cost per hire, ATS issues, req loads, etc.) and the truly advanced subjects that only elite recruiting firms like Google, DaVita, Sodexo, etc. would even attempt to tackle.

So if you have the responsibility for setting agendas or recruiting goals, here is my list of truly advanced recruiting topics that elite leaders would find compelling but that most others would simply find to be out of their reach. If you want to be among the elite, you should select a handful for implementation. However, even if you are currently overwhelmed by your current agenda, you might still find them to be interesting reading.

25 Advanced Recruiting Topics for Bold Corporate Recruiting Leaders keep reading…

About a year ago, I was participating in a series of team meetings when I noticed that one question kept resurfacing: “How can we demonstrate the value of talent acquisition?” While the discussion moved to other topics, this question remained unanswered.

Cost, quality, and speed have underpinned the value proposition of the talent acquisition function for many years. It has been defined by metrics such as productivity, process and channel efficiency, full/sub-cycle time, and the results of satisfaction surveys. Yet, it has become clearer to me that value in talent acquisition is no longer being adequately communicated and translated to our customer base. We need a new way to demonstrate value beyond the walls of our own function. We need to better articulate how and why talent acquisition contributes to the overall worth of the organizations we work for.

Here, I make my case for a new kind of value mapping that centers around talent acquisition first and foremost. Value mapping talent acquisition can deliver better results, with more focused associated costs and impactful communication.

Value: A Simple Definition keep reading…

While confusion seems to reign among recruiting leaders on how to build effective sourcing strategies, Donna Quintal at Sears Holdings Corporation has been able to craft a powerful set of analytics over the past few years to help predict where hiring will occur before the requisitions appear and what sorts of candidate communities should be cultivated to meet expected needs.

What Donna has done anyone can do — she started small, made a business case for what she did, and because of her practical and business-focused approach was able to get additional resources and expand the usefulness of her analytics.

It is not necessary to have sophisticated analytic tools or exceptional expertise. These are useful, but they are not necessary to get started. Even simple data can be powerful, and is often more useful in the beginning because it is easier to see the connection between the data and the results that business leaders respect.

Donna started with simple tools — just an Excel spreadsheet and Survey Monkey. She gathered basic data from surveys created in Survey Monkey. She gathered data about the needs and issues the hiring managers had, especially from areas where there were problems. Once she had this data, she was able to look for common issues and target areas for improvement. This was then shared with recruiters and HR for action.

I have laid out a simple model of how you could begin to set up a sourcing strategy that is both effective and that does not require great expertise. keep reading…

HR should be every company’s ‘killer app.’ What could possibly be more important than who gets hired…” — Jack Welch, ex-CEO of GE 

I wish more CEOs and their respective CFOs agreed with the statement above. The companies that do follow this mantra seem to prosper (GE, Google, Facebook, Mayo Clinic, Starbucks, and others that invest in hiring and developing talent.) Quality hires impact a company’s ability to execute its mission, reach its milestones, be profitable and ultimately increase shareholder value.

I’m going to talk here about how to measure this quality. keep reading…

Google has the only HR function on the planet that is managed based on “people analytics”

Larry Page — the CEO

If you haven’t seen it in the news, after its stock price broke the $800 barrier, Google moved into the No. 3 position among the most valuable firms in the world. Google is clearly the youngest firm among the leaders; it has surprisingly been less than a decade since Google’s IPO.

Most on the top 20 market cap list could be accurately described as “old school,” because most can attribute their success to being nearly half a century old, having a long established product brand, or through great acquisitions. Google’s market success can instead be attributed to what can only be labeled as extraordinary people management practices that result from its use of “people analytics.”

Continuous Innovation Requires a New Kind of People Management  

The extraordinary marketplace success of Google (and Apple, which is No. 1 on the list) is beginning to force many business leaders to take notice and to come to the realization that there is now a new path to corporate greatness. keep reading…

Aurecon has C-suite buy-in

The term “employer brand” has been around for a while, but the branding game has changed radically in recent years.

It has been said many times on ERE that in days past, employer brand meant one-way messaging pushed out to the marketplace, while now it’s the highly social, public reverberation of what people think, feel, and share about a company as a place to work.

So who’s minding the “talent brand” store? keep reading…

In every recruiting process, metrics are key. And the most measured are time and cost. But have you considered the most important business metric of all, top-line revenue? You only need to evaluate some of these critical stats to understand why accelerating top-line revenue is one of the only metrics with which senior executives are concerned. keep reading…

Quick quiz: Your job postings for customer service reps on average get 28 applications each. Is that good or bad?

If you answer is along the lines of “I don’t know,” CareerBuilder has a solution for you. Any employer with a job posting can now see how well their ad performs against every other similar ad in the CareerBuilder network. Free.

That alone is pretty cool, since knowing your ads for customer service reps draw fewer applications than your competitors get is important business intelligence. But as the cliche goes, “Wait, there’s more!” Besides the raw counts, CareerBuilder’s new Recruitment Performance Portal tells you at a glance how experienced they are, how educated, as well as ethnicity, gender, and a fairly broad range of other details. keep reading…

All across the U.S. retailers this month are doing something you should be doing. They’re counting stock and taking inventory.

They do this for a number of reasons. One of the biggest is to know what’s selling, what’s not, and how fast. Scan codes and computerized inventory management keep track of things day in and day out. Hand counting verifies the data.

Now is a good time for you to do likewise and verify your data. No doubt you know the number of hires, the time to hire, hopefully the source of hire, and likely the full cost of hire. Those are the kind of metrics every recruiter should monitor regularly.

The inventory I’m referring to here is the performance of the company career site.

Just what do you know about how well it is performing? If you were an e-commerce vendor, you would absolutely be tracking visitor counts (and repeat visitors), bounce rates and conversion rates, and abandonment rates. To see where you’re losing customers, you would want to know exit pages. To know how visitors found you, you would be checking the entrance pages and the keywords they plugged into search engines. 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…

This week, I thought I’d throw out a bunch of recruiting related questions that I’m curious about. Some may be easy to answer (and I’m just to lazy to do so), some hard, and some may have to be re-stated/re-defined.

Do you have any answers? keep reading…

Talk is cheap. Proving the real value of something is often an exercise that requires intention, dedication, focus, and effort. When it comes to demonstrating value, data and money are among the best pieces of proof one could ask for.

Clearly showing the value of hiring remains a perpetual challenge for those in the staffing game. While it is easy to talk about all of the great things we are doing, it is much harder to turn this talk into the hard proof that business leaders expect (i.e., money).

My research and experience clearly demonstrate that organizations fail to take the proper steps to evaluate the impact of their hiring processes. This is especially true when it comes to the use of pre-hire assessment tools. In fact, the proper evaluation of pre-hire assessments is actually the exception rather then the norm. This is unfortunate because a lack of effort in this area can keep a company from realizing its potential while costing it big time.

The reason most companies consistently fail to evaluate the impact of their pre-hire assessments is both simple and complex. The simple answer is that many companies just don’t care enough or aren’t willing to put in the effort it takes to make it happen. We all know that proving the value of your hiring process is not easy, but what things of value truly are?

The complex answer has to do with to the geeky side of things — specifically the methodological issues that accompany “test validation” and the science of hiring (for a through discussion of this see here).

Validation is important because it is the avenue via which staffing practices demonstrate value.  While there are several types of validation, the most effective type for demonstrating real-world impact of the hiring process involves a systematic investigation of the relationship between pre- and post-hire data. This is known as “criterion related validation” — an analytics-driven process that is essentially business intelligence applied to the hiring process ). We I/Os have been doing this type of work for a good five decades now and have found results we can really be proud of.

Despite our success with it, validation is tricky and presents some inherent difficulties that can obscure its value and therefore its popularity. These include: keep reading…

There’s no better way to start out a new year than to take one or more strategic actions. On the surface, selecting a new strategic area may seem to be difficult because at established firms, it would seem as though all of the important talent management areas would have already been addressed (i.e. with a full-time leader, a written plan, a permanent team, a yearly budget, and a set of metrics for assessing its strategic impact).

However, I have still been able to identify 10 potentially high business impact strategic areas in talent management where almost no firm has a permanent company-wide strategy, plan, and team. The fact that almost no firms do these things isn’t because they lack a potential impact (most agree it could be high), so the lack of action must be because either no one has been trained in the area or because the strategic area is highly complex or highly political. Even if you don’t have the bandwidth to take action in any of these areas, review the list to see if you see the potential for a high business impact.

The Top 10 Strategic Talent Management Areas That Firms Ignore keep reading…

I recently got one of those year-end surveys asking about the significant developments in recruitment in 2012 and trends and predictions for next year.

My inclination was to ignore it; I’ve got enough to do keeping track of today, let alone trying to figure out what next year will bring. As for 2012, without the perspective of time, it’s hard to tell tell what will turn out to be significant in the long run. A few developments, though, will undoubtedly make the survey.

Social media for recruitment will be there, as will the drive to mobile. My list includes growing buzz over “big data,” even though it’s nowhere near clear how it will eventually make a difference in hiring and workforce management.

Vendor consolidation also makes my list. So too does the changing composition of the traditional workforce composition. By that I mean specifically the use of temps and contractors as a strategic component of the workforce, coupled with the growing cadre of professionals who, having turned to contract work (consulting, to put it politely) out of necessity are finding it suits them and provides a work/life balance companies mostly just talk about.

However, after thinking about my list, I realized that it’s the mergers and acquisitions that will have the biggest impact and will come to be seen as one of the more significant industry developments since the recession forced all of us to completely rethink and restructure what we do.

Much of what went on in 2012 was evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. And this is certainly true of the consolidation of the talent acquisition and HR management system vendors. It has been going on for some time now, though the setting was on simmer. But then SAP’s acquisition of SuccessFactors, technically a late 2011 event, turned up the heat. In short order Kenexa and  Taleo got bought up. And later, Bullhorn picked up Sendouts and MaxHire. There were also smaller deals that kept the pot boiling throughout the year.

The significance here isn’t the transactions themselves; it’s what’s behind them and, even more so, what it means for the future. keep reading…

In the movie “The Matrix” there’s a scene where Laurence Fishburne says to Keanu Reeves, “The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work … when you go to church … when you pay your taxes.”

That’s basically the premise of big data, where the potential in recruiting is in getting good candidates to respond. keep reading…