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

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. (more…)

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 (more…)

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 (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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? (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (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…)

Do you have any answers? (more…)

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: (more…)

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 (more…)

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. (more…)

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

At least that’s what you glean from job-distributor eQuest, whose data indicates a lot of U.S. job-seekers are hunting on Wednesdays, as well as Tuesday and Thursday. It studied more than a million jobs posted online to see when candidates searched and sent in resumes.

It found: (more…)

The end of the year is also a time where many individuals are reevaluating their current work and life situation and planning for the future. You may be skeptical but in this article I provide more than 20 reasons why corporate recruiting leaders should actually ramp up recruiting during the holiday season.

The Top 20 Reasons Why December Is a Powerful Time to Recruit (more…)

a Google sandwich bar

Whether you follow politics or not, there are many important lessons that leaders in talent management and HR can learn from the recent presidential election.

Before you dismiss the relevance of this learning opportunity out of hand, spend a few minutes to consider the following lessons from the election that may be valuable to leaders in HR and talent management.

4 Key Lessons for HR and Talent Management Leaders (more…)