Here are two short videos from them, one telling a short story about package deliveries, and what is says about the hiring process; the other about the tooth fairy. (more…)

While it obviously doesn’t include the level of detail and nuance to design the perfect new hire experience, it will give you guidance and a framework.

The first list will help you assess whether your onboarding process accomplishes what it’s designed to accomplish. The second list will provide you with specific recommendations for onboarding your new hires “faster, smarter, and better.”

Eight Outcomes An Effective Onboarding Accomplishes (more…)

Corporate executives are beginning to learn the high value of innovators, which can be 5 to 300 times the value of an average employee. If a company doesn’t have enough innovators, a primary option is recruiting them. In a previous related article, I highlighted how you can successfully hire innovators. But that knowledge alone isn’t sufficient because you have to constantly work to retain these individuals who are constantly being targeted by recruiters from other firms. It should be obvious that if your firm successfully recruited them away from their existing employer, there is a high probability that another employer could do the same thing again and recruit them away from you.

Unfortunately, 95% of all retention approaches can best be described as marginally effective for the average employee, which makes them useless when you’re trying to retain an individual innovator who doesn’t have the same needs and expectations of the average employee. Therefore, if you want to keep the best innovators, provide your managers with a toolkit of bold, aggressive, and data-driven retention approaches that are tailored specifically to your innovators.

Many of the practices that work to retain innovators are also effective in increasing their productivity. In this two-part article I will highlight the most effective retention practices that are specifically targeted toward retaining innovators, game-changers, and top performers. After over 20 years of retention research and practice, I can also assure you that each one of these 30+ tools is effective.

6 Characteristics of Effective Retention Efforts for Innovators (more…)

“It really brings me hope to see people doing excellent things,” one judge wrote to me, about the industry’s leading awards for talent acquisition.

We made a few changes since last year’s ERE Recruiting Excellence Award winners and finalists were announced. For the first time we have an onboarding category. We split the “department of the year” into large and small companies. We altered the “careers website” a bit to encompass more than just a company’s own site, but social media and similar sites as well. And, we added an “innovation,” award, which will be announced at the upcoming Recruiting Innovation Summit.

The other winners will be announced at the ERE Recruiting Conference & Expo in San Diego, where the finalists will up on stage in a perennially popular q-and-a session for the audience.

Here are those finalists in alphabetical order within the categories: (more…)

Advanced recruiting tools and approaches (more…)

If you are currently dissatisfied with your recruiting results, you must adopt a more aggressive approach and begin to “push the limits” beyond the use of traditional recruiting tools. If you are a bold recruiter and you want to try something aggressive, I’ve compiled a long list of bold high-impact recruiting tools for you to consider. Each one has proven to produce results. The toolkit is broken into five categories, including sourcing, referrals, recruiting at events, college, and advanced recruiting tools.  (more…)

I was recently reminded of the need for failure analysis while researching the extensive recruiting problems of oil and gas firms in the booming area around Alberta, Canada. I’ll be presenting my recruiting solutions at the Talent Hub Conference, Metropolitan Centre in Calgary, on Wednesday, September 19, 2012. But if you’re not involved in the petroleum industry, don’t worry because the same failure identification and prospect research processes can and should be used in any industry.  If you’re unfamiliar with the term “prospect research” it is a form of market research which involves the use of surveys and interviews to identify what worked and what didn’t work during the recruiting process and precisely what factors attract and turn off top prospects.

Prospect Market Research Is Required (more…)

• JobVidi is a “social network for jobs.” It’s explained here, and allows people to log in using their LinkedIn profiles. JobVidi’s James Brookner says via email that “70% of recruiters are using their LinkedIn status to promote job updates — JobVidi is the first platform to enable recruiters to post directly from their LinkedIn status onto another platform. We also have a candidate value tool which can be used to engage passive job seekers. So candidates who are just seeking to find out their value and marketability in a certain market can submit requests for advice and career management to recruiters specializing in a certain sector.” Based in London, JobVidi has £100,000 of angel investment from Nabila Sadiq, who used to head temporary recruitment at the recruiting agency Joslin Rowe. (more…)

“I went in just having fun,” she told the Seattle Times. She made oxtail stew in a wine sauce made with sadza, a cooked corn meal that is a staple of traditional Zimbabwe diets. Alas, it fails to impress the judges and she was sent back to Seattle sans the apron that denotes a MasterChef semi-finalist.

Get Thee to a Gym

Boss been a monster lately? Then boost those endorphins. We mean the boss, though a little more exercise all around couldn’t hurt.

Turns out that abusive bosses can be tamed (though we doubt domesticated) by some time in the gym. There’s real science behind this. Three researchers experimented on 98 workers and their bosses and found “that increased levels of supervisor-reported stress are related to the increased experience of employee-rated abusive supervision.” Okay.

But here’s the biggie: “We also find that the relationship between supervisor stress and abusive behavior can be diminished when supervisors engage in moderate levels of physical exercise.”

So next October 16, instead of taking up a collection for a lunch, or cookies, or those soon-to-be-extinct party balloons, buy the boss a gym membership. (more…)

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

This leaves people to fend for themselves and attempt to adjust to their new organization and role essentially on their own. It will negatively influence their productivity and personal experience. It will lower your new employees’ perception about your company, and ultimately your top talent will leave. They will leave because they have options. Employees want to feel important, and they want to feel that they have been given a good opportunity to integrate into their new organization.

As the recruiter, your job is to find high-potential talent. You seek candidates who are well suited to your organization both in qualification and fit. People with a high potential for talent have a lot of opportunities, as clearly seen with technical and clinical people, making the race and “fight” for these employees especially challenging. What your company offers in terms of integration, both into the position and into the company, can be, if done correctly, a competitive advantage. (more…)

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. (more…)

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

 You can be proud to work here.

That is one of THE most important messages your new employee orientation program should communicate.

This is so crucial because people of the caliber you want to attract and retain place a high value in working for an employer of whom they can feel proud.

So, make sure you communicate to your new employees — both explicitly and implicitly – that they can be proud to work at your organization.

You communicate the message “You can be proud to work here” implicitly by conducting a well-designed, well-organized, effective onboarding program. They see by the way you deliver the onboarding experience that your organization does things right. Conducting a high quality onboarding program engenders both pride — “I’m part of a great organization” –and respect for management — “They know what they’re doing here.”

You communicate the message “You can be proud to work here” explicitly by sharing stories that demonstrate why your organization is worthy of pride.

“Pride Story” Themes You Can Draw From

These include stories with the following themes: (more…)

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

We were talking about their need to upgrade their onboarding, and she was describing her concerns about the effects of a poorly executed process.

While she listed the typically cited negative costs of sloppy onboarding — increased turnover, longer time to productivity, etc. — she hit on one of the biggest prices employers pay for a shoddy, sink or swim, unwelcoming onboarding process:

You take someone who is initially excited and even starry-eyed about working for you, and rapidly turn them into a cynical, skeptical, eye-roller, who does not respect or trust management and their employer.

I experienced this harsh reality with the one and only corporate employer I worked for. I remember wondering why my new co-workers would roll their eyes whenever we got a directive from management and say “That’s insert name of insurance company here for yah.”

It didn’t take me too many weeks to realize where this cynical attitude came from. (more…)

It’s a mistake you want to ask yourself if you’re making.

The story speaks to how often employers waste time, money, and creative horsepower when it comes to attracting and retaining talent because they put their attention in the wrong place.

So here’s the story …  (more…)

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. (more…)

Every recruiting leader wants top candidates, but the standard approach used by most recruiters simply doesn’t work. A more precise data-driven approach that leverages complete understanding of the attraction factors can give you a competitive edge. Market research can reveal: (more…)

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