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In a recent ERE article I made the contention that if you wanted to convert a corporate recruiting department into a competitive internal executive search group, you had to first develop the hiring process recruiters would use, before you hired the recruiters. This is primarily attributed to the fact that the external executive search business model and most of the processes they use are fundamentally different than, and often in conflict with, a corporation’s.

With this “ process first” mindset, the solution to this dilemma is to start with a process that maximizes QoH and then find recruiters who are fully capable and motivated to implement this process. keep reading…

As might be expected from the pickup in overall hiring in the U.S., college seniors are looking at the best job hunting season in at least three years. And a new popularity monitor from AfterCollege is offering insights into where the students will be hunting.

A survey out last September from the National Association of Colleges and Employers predicted employers would increase their 2011 hiring of graduating students by 13.5 percent.

So far, that prediction seems to be holding. Though down seasonally from November, December’s monthly NACE Index, which tracks hiring intent and recruiting activity, was solidly on the positive side. The Index, based on a survey of NACE’s 111 member companies, was substantially above where it was a year before. For the December survey, 46.5 percent of the respondents said they expected to do more college hiring in 2011 than in 2010.

Those numbers track well with the September prediction that had 47.7 percent of the NACE respondents expecting to do more college hiring. keep reading…

I had lunch with a colleague a few weeks ago who is the author of a book called “The Paradox of Excellence: How your great performance can kill your business.” He had been CEO of a midsize public company for many years and more recently a consultant for several well known Bay Area tech firms. He told me there are indicators that can be evaluated and fixed before companies or people in business fail.

I’ve taken the liberty of interpreting the questions he asks company CEOs and translating them into recruiting terms.

The core questions are the same. keep reading…

For those who attended my session at the ERE Fall Expo, you heard first-hand about CACI’s Predictive Staffing Model and were the recipient of a “secret recipe” which when prepared correctly will make you a “talent hero” at your company. CACI’s Predictive Staffing Model is a proactive, forward-looking talent approach driven by this secret recipe which was concocted in the hollows of Wild and Wonderful West Virginia, which I’m proud to say is my home state. The secret recipe for your success is simple and has three key ingredients: keep reading…

With access to and leverage of talent playing a more critical role in an organization’s ability to succeed than ever before, it should come as no surprise that the financial analyst community would start evaluating talent management capability when rating organizations. The fact that analysts historically haven’t paid much attention to factors like an organization’s ability to recruit, develop, or retain top talent has allowed HR to operate pretty much “under the radar,” without standardized analytics.

The OMG moment for talent management leaders is coming. keep reading…

It’s time to rethink how recruiters are being assessed, throwing away many traditional metrics, Linda Brenner said today at her pre-conference ERE workshop in Hollywood, Florida.

Brenner advocated what’s called an “assessment center” approach. Originally developed in 1956 for AT&T for hiring/promotion screening, assessment centers are intensive, multi-part testing and evaluation processes.

To make them work, Brenner says you’ll need several things.

Linda Brenner

You’ll want to have a clear understanding of the core competencies required for success in the job, whether it be for a recruiting coordinator or a director. You’ll have to have the ability to simulate those competencies, and to objectively evaluate the range of performance from fair to poor. Lastly, you’ll need to go in with the intention of taking action based on the results of the assessments.

One participant in today’s workshop said her recruiting department used an assessment-center approach, and realized that some results surprised her — and some did not. The people she thought were the “good sourcers” did indeed turn out to be good, and the “bad sourcers” did measure poorly. Across the board, however, among many of the company’s recruiters, interview skills fell surprisingly short.

How Time’s Spent

Brenner said that figuring out how recruiters spend their time (a topic she has written about before), and whether that’s creating the results you’re looking for, is a good thing to start thinking about when examining your metrics and moving to an assessment-center approach. keep reading…

Quality of hire is always a subject of much debate. Some argue that most of the measures in use actually measure the quality of the hiring process versus the quality of the actual hires made. We agree that some of these hire-quality measures are more process oriented, but one thing that cannot be disputed is that the vast majority of models in place today ignore the total workforce (all forms of labor that execute work in the organization’s name), focusing instead just on regular employees.

The significance of the contingent workforce is ignored in a wide variety of places. Whether you believe it is true or not, the statistics tell us that, regular employees are comprising a smaller percentage of the modern enterprises workforce. In the United States it is widely reported that between 8-10% of the workforce is contingent, but like most government-supplied data, that figure is flawed. keep reading…

A SHRM task force is readying what could become the first U.S. standard for calculating “Cost Per Hire.”

A draft standard is currently circulating among members of SHRM’s Staffing and Workforce Planning committee. Eventually, after the comments have been reviewed and any issues that turn up get resolved, the proposal will be submitted to the American National Standards Institute.

There, it will go through a review and a public comment period before becoming an official standard. When that happens, employers conforming to the standard will have confidence that they are comparing apples to apples. Equally important is that as the number of standards grows — and SHRM is already working on others — HR will join other business units in having a uniform set of metrics by which to measure and be measured.

The Cost Per Hire standard itself is fairly straightforward. Chances are you already are taking into account all or most of the elements the draft standard says you should. In that case, the standard validates your process. It also will serve as a checklist to make sure you’re not missing anything. keep reading…

HR Tech introduced six companies to a comfortably large gathering of HR professionals and techies Thursday afternoon who gathered to see the “Awesome New Technologies for HR,” as the session was billed.

While there was a “gee whiz” factor to some of them, I don’t know how many  achieved the session’s goal, which was “to blow your mind.” But then, each of the presenters only got 10 minutes for their show and tell.

SocializedHR, with it’s cool (OK, awesome) iPhone app, managed a little buzz, even if the ResuReader app is a solution in search of a problem. As demoed by Peter Levy, CEO of parent company Veechi Corp., a recruiter at a job fair, on a college recruiting visit, or elsewhere who is handed a paper resume need only snap a picture and submit it. The SocializedHR backend parses the data, fields it, and can hand it off to an ATS. Meanwhile the recruiter can rate the candidate, make a few notes in text or voice (or both), snap the candidate’s picture, and have it all integrated into a single profile. keep reading…

“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” – Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Not being Valentine’s Day, nor the 24/7 romantic, some of you might be confused. Of course, in this case I’m referring to quality of hire. It’s a worthy topic, but like a cloud, it’s hard to get your arms around. When should it be measured is as difficult to answer as how. “Why” adds another set of variables to the mix. I’ve just volunteered to help HR.com develop a curriculum for a new Quality of Hire educational program it’s launching, so I figured it might make sense to get some discussion going on this important topic, starting with what, when, why, and how. My viewpoint follows, but don’t hesitate to add your own to the conversation. keep reading…

One of Jobvite’s strengths has always been its ability to track an “invited” candidate back from the application to see how they came to learn of an opening. Now, Jobvite is adding more depth and breadth to its tracking, giving recruiters data about their job postings and the effectiveness of their own career site.

Announced today, the real-time recruiting intelligence can tell you how many people saw an an ad or visited your career site, what they did and, if you have Jobvite Hire, which includes an ATS, what you did.

For instance, if you distributed a job through social sites, sent a Jobvite to your employees, and posted it to traditional job boards, the recruiter intelligence part of the Jobvite dashboard can give you the number of visitors to each page where the ad appeared; how many then opened it; how many of them applied, and how many were interviewed, and, finally, if a hire was made, from where. keep reading…

This is a real dilemma for me. On one hand, corporate recruiters clamor for metrics, but when I tell them what is necessary, their eyes glaze over. My advice to them is to be careful: you just might get what you wish for. You see, metrics attract attention. When competent people have competent metrics at their fingertips, they know what to do with them. Incompetent people just get confused. Depending on your competency, hiring metrics will attract attention that can either work for … or against … you.

About Metrics

The only reason to collect metrics is to make informed decisions: am I doing well? What do I need to improve? Are my activities helping achieve organizational goals? And, so forth. Metrics are not the “cool” thing to do, nor are they an interesting thing to play with. Metrics should provide specific feedback in specific areas that are actionable. keep reading…

Metrics have become and will continue to be an indispensable tool when it comes to managing any corporate function strategically. Unfortunately, like many things in life, not all metrics deliver the same value. In part one of this series, I discussed five differentiators that set exceptional metrics initiatives apart from average ones and offered up a number of ways that you could improve your efforts with formal planning and a compelling presentation format. In this part, my attention turns to improving the visibility, relevance, and emphasis of your efforts. keep reading…

It has taken many years to get to this point, but almost everyone in recruiting has come to understand the necessity of metrics. Unfortunately however, the vast majority of metrics in use today have little impact because they were not designed to effectively “get the attention” of executives.

The issue isn’t metrics in general; at firms like Microsoft and Google, executive team meetings are often referred to as the equivalent of “math camp.” While other firms may not be as “geeky,” metrics rule the boardroom. The lack of interest in HR metrics also cannot be attributed to HR being an overhead function, as that state is true for both finance and supply chain management, neither of which fail to garner attention.

The real issue few pay attention to HR metrics is a simple one: most simply are not compelling. Let’s face it: HR is rarely a strategic priority, and due to years of bureaucracy and failure to meet expectations, it is something that most managers and executives would rather deal with less rather than more unless it is immediately relevant to their business. keep reading…

The quality of those not hired is the most valuable recruiting metric that you have never heard of! It informs you how often your organizations is failing to hire the highest quality applicants.

A few years back I was advising a Fortune 100 firm that had a painfully slow and somewhat arrogant hiring process. To demonstrate the negative impact of their process I had to prove to a skeptical senior manager that they were letting top candidates get away. I asked a manager hiring for an important job to rank, in order of quality, 100 applicants who had been sourced for the role. The chosen rank was discretely written on the back of paper copies of the candidate’s resumes. Months after the role had been filled, the manager was asked if they were satisfied with the hire. He was, and felt quite certain that he had successfully hired a “top 5” candidate. After hearing of his satisfaction I had him look at the initial rank he had provided the candidate who was later hired: 75. keep reading…

Taleo officially joins the ranks of the repositioned today, declaring that its “next era of talent management” shall henceforth be known as “Talent Intelligence.”

In a word, what that means is analytics, or, if you prefer, metrics.

What’s so special about that, you may be asking, that it merits more than a mention? If it was merely a rebranding of talent management (and it is partly that), it probably wouldn’t. However, it is part of an industry-wide effort by vendors to educate employers, especially those with a “C” as the first letter of their title, to the value that lies within their HR systems.

Where the first wave of TM products were positioned as electronic assistants, providing easy storage and retrieval of employee records, products have now matured so far that they can be valuable tools in managing the business.

As Taleo’s VP of Product Marketing Ashley Stirrup said last week, companies spend billions ($100 billion according to the Taleo demo) buying and operating their ERPs, CRMs, and SCMs. When it comes to people management, Taleo says the spend is 2 percent of that.

With the pie chart showing those numbers up on our WebEx screen, Stirrup observed, “It really highlights how little companies know about their employees.”

One reason for that is that except in a few areas — sales comes to mind immediately — quantifying performance is difficult. Another reason is that it has only been the last few years that the software systems have become sufficiently sophisticated and integrated to allow managers to extract relevant employee information and link it to operational and production data.

HR hasn’t done enough to promote these capabilities and show the CFOs and CEOs how to use the power of these systems to advise their business decisions. For that matter, line managers and directors barely know about this. In fact, there’s a better than even money chance that most HR professionals themselves don’t know how to use their systems for business intelligence. keep reading…

Recruiting history was made this month. You may not be aware that last week marked the culmination of the most sophisticated recruiting effort executed in this century, one that will go down in history as a case study on how to recruit “game-changers.” The approaches used and the lessons to be learned are almost without comparison. If you want to recruit the best to your organization, don’t miss this opportunity to learn how “game changer” recruiting differs dramatically from typical recruiting.

“Game Changer Recruiting” Is Needed in All Organizations

You do not have to be a sports nut to realize that for the last two months numerous NBA teams have been pulling out all the stops and spending unlimited amounts of money to recruit basketball star LeBron James to their team. Simultaneously, almost-as-intensive recruiting efforts have targeted other game-changing stars including Dwyane Wade, Amar’e Stoudemire, and Chris Bosh.

Sports teams and corporations alike need all the game-changers (individuals who can change the entire direction of an organization) they can get. While you might think that sports recruiting is not comparable to corporate recruiting, that notion would be erroneous. This sports-superstar recruiting effort is ultimately an illustration of world-class “game-changer recruiting.” keep reading…

We talk about “top” talent and “top” performers, but how do you know you’ve reached the “top”? Is there some kind of altitude marker? A sign that reads “Welcome to the Top”? Unfortunately, no. But of all the recruiting metrics in your talent capital toolbox, one indicates a recruiting job-well-done above the rest: Quality of Hire.

Every CEO, manager, and corporate investor knows that hiring the best people is what ultimately drives an organization’s long-term success. Yet the recruiting metrics most companies employ evaluate efficiency rather than quality. Metrics like “time-to-fill” and “cost-per-hire” only tell us about the process, not its impact.

What matters most is how new hires perform and how much they contribute to your organization’s growth and goals. “Top” performers can exponentially increase your productivity and profitability, while those with lower standards can damage your bottom line and plummet your reputation. Those numbers far outweigh how much time it took to fill their position. Yet the question remains: How do you evaluate the quality of your hires?

Determining Quality of Hire: Across Your Organization

If you were to deduce a formula for calculating how well your organization is hiring overall, it would look something like this: keep reading…

Tens of millions of searches are conducted on the job boards every month. These are the active job seekers, drawn to one or another or, as is usually the case, more than one job board because, as Willie Sutton never said, that’s where the jobs are.

But for every active seeker, there are many more who, if they learned of the right opportunity, might just be convinced to kick the tires. Reaching those millions of others in order to find just that one, perfect candidate, is a recruiting goal best described as a quest.

For years, now, the job boards have been in hot pursuit. They’ve partnered with newspapers — CareerBuilder is mostly owned by newspaper publishers and Yahoo’s network is hundreds of newspapers deep — they power niche sites, buy keywords on search engines and traffic from social media, and have built networks of hundreds, even thousands of blogs, content providers, hobby sites, professional associations, and others.

In most cases, the networks and traffic deals simply broaden the distribution of job postings. Some, like the programs run by SimplyHired and Indeed, offer publishers the ability to choose what types of job ads to display. It’s a rudimentary type of targeting based on the content and nature of the site.

Monster’s Career Advertising Network is more sophisticated in that it targets ads to the user based on their browsing and job search behavior. Come across an ad that catches your attention and you click into the posting on Monster.com.

But recruiters are looking for more; instead of simply collecting apps, recruiters, influenced by social media, want to build relationships with candidates and bring them to the corporate career site. keep reading…

Anyone who has been in management of HR or recruiting has struggled with the issue of measurement. To be taken seriously in a business world ruled by numbers, we have to get our own numbers right. But, despite all of our hard work gathering data and calculating ratios, it doesn’t seem that HR’s numbers ever have the credibility that measures from finance or operations do. To help rectify this situation, use the following three questions as you develop your metrics.  keep reading…