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

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

In a business world that is increasingly dominated by social media, it simply makes sense to hire individuals with extensive social networks and the ability to communicate with and influence others.

The major players include Klout, Kred, PeerIndex, and Empire Avenue. Klout and PeerIndex scores index to 100 while Kred scores reach 1,000. Empire Avenue is a stock-market simulation type game in which participants (stocks) earn virtual income based on social network activity and investments in others.

Using such measures as a screening tool helps identify talented people who have demonstrated skills relevant to a number of professional jobs. When you hire an individual who uses their network effectively, you have the potential to benefit from the collective knowledge and skills of the network, not just the individual.

Look Beyond the “Score” for Transferable Skills

“Buying influence” by recruiting someone based on their extensive contacts and their ability to influence others is not a new approach, but tools like those mentioned make it much easier to identify the level of influence that you are recruiting. Obviously, the use of social media analytics make the most sense when you are recruiting for jobs that are primarily focused on creating and managing a firm’s public-facing persona, but the skills involved in effective social networking extend much further into the professional landscape.

Individuals who are effective on social media become successful because they have a wide range of skills and capabilities that often lead to success in sales, customer service, communications, branding, and even analyst roles. Smart recruiters and hiring managers should look beyond the actual score that an individual has achieved and focus on identifying and assessing the skills the individual used to build or maintain their audience.

The 10 skill sets and capabilities that are generally required to effectively gain social media influence include:

1. Communications – they have shown that they are effective and frequent communicators
2. Relationship building — they are successful at attracting and building relationships with others
3. Influencing – they have the ability to influence others and to get others to read and spread their messages
4. Reputation — their reputation, credibility, recommendations, and ability to produce “Liked” content means that they will be listened to
5. Reach – their extensive contacts, friends, followers, and subscribers means that any messages they send will reach thousands
6. Branding – individuals with high social media scores have demonstrated they know how to build a personal brand and that knowledge may be transferable to product branding
7. Crowdsource solutions — their extensive network means that they will be able to quickly “crowdsource” answers to problems that they encounter
8. Writing ability — individuals who have a long blog history have demonstrated both their writing style and ability
9. Knowledge of technology — they have demonstrated that they are on the leading edge of social media technology
10. Adaptable – they are capable of continually adapting to the rapidly changing social media environment (if they have maintained their scores over a period of time)

Social Media Influence Assessment Is Not New

Although Klout/Kred scores may be new to you, using the Internet and social media to assess prospects is certainly not new. It is now quite common to find, assess, and do reference checks on candidates using Google searches, LinkedIn, and Facebook profiles, and the assessment of work samples that can be found online. In fact, a Microsoft-sponsored survey conducted by Cross-Tab found that 79% of HR and recruiting professionals responded that they currently use online reputation information as part of their hiring process.

Influence Scores Are Still in Their Infancy

Recruiters should be aware that while social media analytics are hot, the emerging “influence scores” are far from perfect. Each provider has weaknesses in their approach and all of them can be manipulated to some extent (just as search engine optimization can manipulate web page rankings). As a result, I recommend that they never be used as an elimination screen, but instead be used as one part of a multi-pronged assessment approach.

Recommended Action Steps

Before you select one to use, recruiters need to do their research so they understand the strengths and weaknesses of each provider’s approach compared to the needs of your firm. Obviously, the scores should be applied first to the jobs that require a high degree of social media savvy and where extensive contacts are essential to job success.

If the scores are to be passed along to hiring managers, the managers need to be provided with some information as to what conclusions can be fairly reached from these scores. And finally, if you have some time, identify the scores of your top- and bottom-performing current employees. Then use simple statistics to see if within your firm, there is a measurable positive correlation between social media scores and an employee’s on-the-job performance.

Final Thoughts

If you want to find your own individual score, it is easy and free to sign on to any of these services. If you are an applicant, adding your Kred or Klout score to your resume at the very least will let the recruiter know that you are aware that one’s online influence/exposure can be measured. If you are a corporate recruiter or recruiting leader, begin examining the pros and cons of these continually evolving tools. Although they still have many shortcomings and issues, some variation of them will become a standard assessment tool in the not-too-distant future.

The crux of this “Big Break” as it’s called is a reality-TV-style day of speed interviews, a videotaped Q&A session, and a presentation. It starts with an online application to become part of this process, which is a partnership between the non-profit Ochsner Health System and an agency called Intellect Resources, which has been tweeting about this. Candidates “advance or face elimination” based on their “professionalism, presentation skills, communication skills, poise, attitude, teamwork and ability to think on their feet.”

The winner (winners, actually — 200 of them) will be a $20-25/hour trainer, teaching people the use of an electronic medical records system for at least a five-month contract.

“American Idol merged with a career fair,” is how this is all described on a recruiting video.

The online application is open through January 19, with the big audition day held on the 21st at the International House Hotel in New Orleans, and the job starting February 6.

This isn’t a Sunglass-Hut-style lavish affair; in other words, travel expenses aren’t paid, so Ochsner prefers locals.

“NO HEALTHCARE IT EXPERIENCE REQUIRED,” a Facebook page emphasizes. The same is said below by Chad Jones, an Ochsner executive.

The question is: why haven’t these tools and technologies made any significant difference?

If we look at other professions, it is clear that technology is not what makes the real difference. Take building as an example. Using only primitive hand tools, carpenters and masons from Roman times on crafted buildings that are enduring and emulated. The construction methods they used are studied and copied, while their tools gather dust in museums. Chinese accountants used abacuses to keep their books and sailors had glorified rowboats to explore the world’s oceans. It turns out that knowing how to do something is a far more critical skill than what tools are used to do it. Tools do not cause change and transformation, but methods and processes do.

The skills involved in building, accounting, or sailing are what make the difference between success and failure and often between life and death. Those who have improved the methods of building — the ones who figured out how to build skyscrapers and elevators — have contributed more to our progress than have the tools they used.

Technology saves labor and time and often lets us do things we could not do with our own muscles or brains, but it is not a substitute for core knowledge or for understanding how to do something or for human behavior.

And that is most likely why recruiting has not changed. While recruiters have many new tools, they are using traditional processes and methods without much innovation. This is most likely because, despite the hype about a talent shortage, there is really not a major problem finding talented people. If fact, most recruiters would be bored if their job became too easy — and many enjoy the hunt. Innovation usually occurs when there is an unsolvable problem or a major problem or a crisis, and recruiting has yet to run into any of those.

But what could be is still interesting. What would an efficient, updated recruiting process look like? Here are a few ideas that I think might work.

If anyone has already tried them or plans on giving them a try, I would like to hear from you in the comments section.

Idea 1: Stop any branding activities and focus totally on referrals. If you are in a nationwide or global firm with a known reputation, branding is a secondary concern. You already attract people because of your product or service brand and most likely have a pipeline of good candidates. Whenever you have an opening, just let employees know and ask them to use their networks to bring in any additional people you might need.

Referrals are free, fast, and effective. Incentives are not really needed and may actually cause employees to reach out to less-than-optimal candidates in the chance of getting whatever reward your offer. Instead give the employees who refer the best candidates, whether they are hired or not, a title such as “Preferred Referrer” or “Trusted Referrer,” and give anyone they refer priority consideration. This will incentivize others to become a titled referrer and raise the bar on the type of candidates you get.

Idea 2: Use online assessments and reduce interviews. Forget screening interviews, meet and greets, and extensive resume reviews. Instead invest in developing one or two screening tests that can be given online, are scored instantly, and provide both you and the candidate with feedback.

These kinds of screening tools can reduce your workload, improve the candidate experience, and result in much better candidates. The challenge is to develop the right tests that actually screen for the characteristics that are important for the job or for the organization.

There may need to be several tests for different positions or levels, but none of this is more costly or time-consuming than endless phone screens and interviews. I would go so far as to say that recruiters should never interview anyone in person. By implementing online screening and eliminating face-to-face interviews, you could potentially expect a recruiter to handle 20-50% more open requisitions.

There are many firms who can do this for reasonable costs, and the online testing and screening business is growing rapidly. Charles Handler, one of the other writers on ERE, has just released a book cataloging and commenting on most testing services available today.

Idea 3: Use video interviews heavily. Video interviews are a powerful and effective way to do more with less and improve legal compliance.

Video interviews are no longer taboo, and many candidates find them much more effective and less stressful than face-to-face interviews. Face-to-face interviews are expensive and time consuming and most of the time lead nowhere. Probably 75% of all interviews do not lead to an offer because of poor screening and poor candidate qualification. By conducting one live interview that is recorded, many people can view the same interview and evaluate the same responses. This leads to consistency, the lack of which is the greatest legal issue with multi-person, live interviews. By recoding the interview, there is proof that the interviews were done legally and that no discrimination occurred.

Idea 4: Train recruiters and hiring managers thoroughly on closing candidates. Make sure every recruiter and as many hiring managers as possible know how to identify potential acceptance issues and how to overcome objections.

Most acceptance failures are because someone — a recruiter or a hiring manager — did not pick up on signs that a candidate had reservations or issues that would be difficult to overcome: perhaps a reluctant spouse, a nagging doubt about the organization or the project, a desire to stay at their current employer, and so on.

It takes practice and training to notice these things and many recruiters are not well trained to not only notice the potential problem, but to deal with it. I often recommend that recruiters take a traditional sales training class where these skills are and the methods to overcome them are taught.

Idea 5: Communicate with mobile technology and via social media. Getting feedback to candidates regularly and fast is one of the ways to differentiate your organization from other and to get first-mover advantage with a candidate.

Most candidates today are more than willing to receive feedback and updates via their Facebook, LinkedIn, or other accounts. Email is fine, but experiment with other methods that cut down the time you spend and get the word out faster. Hiring managers should consider interviewing candidates using Skype or other tools. You could develop a mobile app to provide feedback or updates.

There are probably at least a dozen more ideas that you could try that would lower costs, improve speed, and provide higher quality candidates. But, then again, by doing it the way we always have, we ensure job security — for a while.

A year later, we’re not done yet. At least one new site is hoping to join the bunch. Called “Better Weekdays,” it is being built behind the scenes, with one major player in the company, who’d rather we not use his name, telling us it’s about five months off from launch.

The site has an abbreviated website up, in addition to a LinkedIn page and Twitter feed. It’s looking to hire recruiters or other recruiting-industry insiders. Better Weekdays hopes to use a combination of tests already built and used in recruiting, along with some of its own “secret sauce,” as one of the site’s founders says. People’s skills and “personal culture” — what’s important to them — will be captured and matched with companies looking to fill jobs with MBA graduates.

Better Weekdays is working on its site and on spreading the word among potential customers. But, unlike the “Mystery Applicant” site we mentioned, it’s not focusing on applicant tracking systems right now. The company doesn’t want to deal with the issues involved in integrating an application with those systems. And, it sees its sweet spot to be mainly hot, growing, small and medium-size companies, not as much Fortune 500 firms.

Those small/medium companies, Better Weekdays figures, are less likely to have much of an HR department, and could use Better Weekdays to hire someone, probably with a pay-per-hire model, rather than a pay-per posting.

“Hasn’t this all been tried before?” I asked my contact there. “Yes,” he says, “but still no one’s cracked the code.”

During my first corporate recruiting position I felt that my role was as a “service provider” to my managers, so when they said jump, I did. Looking back on that now I realize how many opportunities I missed to set myself up as an expert in my profession of recruiting because I lacked the confidence to command a meeting and initiate a true partnership during the beginning of that relationship.

During my time as a recruiter I have run across several different types of managers and most can be intimidating. Below are some of the most common personality types that I’ve run across and ways that you can forge strong relationships with them despite some of their traits.

The “unemployment rate is so high you must have candidates banging our door down” manager: This particular breed of manager needs to be better educated on what is really out there in the market. The unemployment rate rising doesn’t always result in a rise in the actual candidates who you need for a given opening. Websites like the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and Wanted Analytics are great starting points to use, and they’ll be able to arm you with some statistics on how many candidates for that job are actually out there. Be prepared for your first meeting with this manager by painting a realistic picture of the market from the very beginning of your search so that you set expectations correctly in the beginning.

The “I am an executive and feel I am better than you and want to hire an agency” manager: Oh my, this is my least-favorite manager, and there is always at least one in every company! Some managers no matter what your success rate is want to use an outside source just for the purpose of using an outside source. Try and compile a list of agencies that your company has worked with in the past and rate their success rate against your own, and how many hires have they made for your company vs. how many you’ve made. What has the success of those employees been in terms of tenure?

When I worked at Mike’s Hard Lemonade, I had an executive who just so happened to be best friends with a particular agency that he gave the exclusive to on everything. I wasn’t able to get him to stop using that firm on my first search, but I was able to see the candidates that agency was submitting and how easily they were finding them by pulling up the same candidates on Monster or LinkedIn. When you can illustrate that the 25-30% agency fee is only getting you a 10-minute Monster search, executives tend to listen a little more closely. With time I was able to convince that manager to allow me two weeks for a search before it went out to an agency. Over time my track record spoke for itself and I was able to gain trust and create a good partnership with this manager.

The “I don’t have time for hiring” manager: About half of my managers fall into the category of not having any time for recruitment, yet hiring and staffing their team is their No. 1 priority. These managers can be difficult to get any information out of, yet they assume you’re able to leave a five-minute meeting and produce a perfect candidate in a matter of days. The reality is managers need to be educated that the more information they provide to you and more information you get upfront, the less painful and slow the process of staffing for their team will be. I worked with a manager at Cobalt several years back, who was notorious for missing my meetings. So when I received a position from him I would do as much pre-work as possible, knowing from experience that I was only going to get yes and no answers from him, and that our first meeting about this position would most likely be our last.

Be prepared in that first meeting with candidate profiles. You most likely won’t get more than a job description from this manager, so use that to find some profiles and review them on the spot. Even hearing a yes or no on a profile can provide you with a sense of the type of candidate that they are looking for. Come prepared to the meeting with companies in your area that are hiring similar profiles so that you can provide the manager with a list of companies to pull from instead of expecting him to have that available for you. Ask if there is a lead or manager on their team who can assist with the candidate screening in an effort to save them time.

The “in an effort to look engaged I am going to ask for status updates on everything you do” manager: Some managers just like to micromanage the process and want to know everything you’re doing, including how many resumes you’ve seen, how many candidates you’ve rejected, etc. I try to be as proactive as possible with these ones and ask in the first meeting what kind of metrics they are looking for, and will create a weekly report for them. Most ATS’s have reporting functionality that you can use to build out custom reports without a lot of effort needed on your end. I use Jobvite, which has a custom report functionality that works great for this, and also allows for managers to go into the system and run their own reports at any given time.

The “even though I am a VP of _____ I am also an expert in your field and will tell you how to do your job” manager: You gotta love managers who know everyone in the industry, exactly where to find people, and how you should go about starting your search. While having a manager be networked and engaged is usually a blessing, sometimes it can go to the extreme and become a curse. Managers who know everyone in the industry and therefore start rejecting candidates based on rumors, hearsay, or reputation alone will really narrow down your pipeline. Use their knowledge to your benefit. If there are associations and groups that they’d like you to network in, ask if a member of their team can assist you as well so that you’ll have time to not only run your own search but also incorporate the ideas of your hiring manager without running yourself ragged.

The experience was exceptional.

I was impressed with the high level of professionalism.

Very professional interviews that provided me an environment in which I could be myself.

It made me want to work there even more.

Let’s hope that’s what your candidates are saying about your organization. Let’s hope that’s what they’re saying about your recruiting processes. But they may be saying stuff like this:

The worst and most unprofessional experience I’ve had.

You’ve yet to follow up with me.

The interviewer had absolutely no idea of what the position called for.

The reality is that candidates are probably saying things that cover both ends of the spectrum about your organization. What’s important is whether the first set of statements is more prevalent, or the second set is – and what you are doing about it.

There’s a lot of focus in our industry on finding and engaging passive candidates, developing a strong employment brand, using social media, and building talent communities, but a poor candidate experience can derail and minimize the impact of each of those efforts. My company did something about the problem.

We’re going to be talking more about this at the Spring Expo (March 28-30 in San Diego), but first things first. I think we’ve all heard of the so called “career site black hole,” and I have talked to many a candidate who has a story about moving through a company’s interview process, moving all the way to a final stage, only to never hear from the company again one step short of the finish line. Less anecdotally, CareerXroads publishes a survey every year about how a “mystery candidate” is treated by the top 100 Companies to work for as listed by Fortune. The results are eye opening. It reports that 79% of candidates who apply to a position expect that there will be some sort of feedback, but only 19% of the top 100 companies to work for let the mystery candidate know they were not going to get the job. The apply-process itself has become a barrier between job seekers and organizations, with only 48% of the organizations in the study having a process that takes less than five minutes to complete.

Anyhow, we came out of a two-day recruiting meeting last spring with a long list of to-dos, and at the top of the list was to improve the candidate experience. The key for us was developing a “Candidate Commitment,” and then develop processes to support the commitment. Our commitment is quite simple actually, and focuses on four main areas that are part of the candidate experience: Education, Application, Screening, and Interviewing.

Education: we have used social media channels, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Tumblr (blogging tool) to provide candidates with a closer look into our organization. We make a point not to use these channels as another way to just promote our job postings, but rather to provide content that a candidate may not find on our corporate career site, such as recruiting team activities, corporate events, relevant business news, candidate tips, and so forth. We’ve used video to provide a more in-depth look at some of the functional areas we do a lot of hiring for, as well as to provide a look at the lighter side of our culture.

Application: we worked with our ATS partner to reconfigure our “apply now” process. Now, we only require three fields to complete our process — first name, last name, email address — the minimum it takes to create a profile. Amazingly, almost every candidate includes a resume as well, but you get the point: we went back to the bare basics, and the result is a process that takes less than two minutes to complete for a first-time candidate, less for returning candidates.

In addition to improving the candidate experience, it also improved the ROI for our job board investments. I know it is not a very hip thing to admit these days, but the boards are actually still quite useful for us and an important part of our overall recruitment strategy, resulting in about 19% of our hires. Have you compared the data you get from your job board partners regarding traffic sent to your site with what actually lands in your ATS lately? I was shocked by the drop-off rates, and when I talked to two major boards recently about things, they informed me that our numbers were actually pretty good. Both stated that anywhere from a 50%-80% drop-off rate was typical! No wonder the job boards are talked about so negatively. Our industry may only be realizing 20%-50% of their potential because of the hurdles we create to completing our process.

Screening: we committed to following up with all of our candidates in a timely manner. For us that is 1-20 days. This may be a phone conversation or a “thanks but no thanks” email template, but we do not want anyone to experience the black hole. You may be able to commit to something quicker than 20 days, or longer than 20 days, but the point is to set an expectation and then meet it. It is fairly easy to develop strong communication templates. Every commercial ATS out there has functionality that allows you to send mass messages to your candidates that feel at least semi-personalized.

Interviewing: we work closely with our hiring managers to ensure there is a solid interview plan in place, and that the interview will be conducted in a balanced manner, allowing the candidate to interview us in addition to the information we seek from them.

Three weeks ago I had the privilege to accept one of the first annual “Candidate Experience Awards” on behalf of the Sage NA Recruiting Team. In talking with many of the other winning participants, clearly everyone recognized that we all have a long way to go. I am hopeful that the industry as a whole embraces the challenge to improve, and I am particularly excited to compete for the award again next year.

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

In short, employers are using the site to offer “challenges” to job candidates. CodeEval’s community — the “ecosystem” I mentioned earlier this year — now has more than 5,000 developers in it. If an employer wants to hire an engineer, they can use CodeEval to have them solve a puzzle, and interview them if they like their answer. The company’s still trying to fully settle on a pricing model, but right now it only charges if you make a hire. Six people have been hired thus far using the site, including at Milo (part of eBay) and Lolapps.

About 20% of companies choose to make their own challenges on CodeEval, rather than use one the company has off the shelf for them. About 19,000 challenges have been done by techies on the site — some just for fun or learning, more as passive candidates than active.

The above is essentially sourcing: the challenges are a way of engaging some of these 5,000 folks, and hopefully, for employers, getting candidates to solve a challenge to take a look at candidates’ thought processes. CodeEval also has a screening tool, and that’s what’s now free. So if you’ve got your own folks ready for a challenge — say, five people you’re looking at for a job — you can run them through a challenge on CodeEval at no charge.

What happens when your manager — who goes out regularly after work with a group of employees to scarf down chicken wings — has a hard-core vegan show up in the lobby for an interview?

That’s where “fit” comes in. You’ve heard it at conferences and read it here and most everywhere else people talk about hiring: you should look not just for hard skills, but hire for fit.

But, then again, you’ve heard the opposite: that you should seek out diversity, diversity of thought, people who bring different ideas, experiences, and perspectives to your organization.

Carol Schultz and I talk about this these two ideas, and whether they are contradictory, in the approximately 13-minute video below.

Let me explain. Yesterday, Forbes, TechCrunch, and some others detailed the beta launch of Identified. This is a startup that connects to your Facebook profile and assigns you a score that in the words of the company’s PR “shows people how their professional brand is perceived by the world.”

Identified assesses your work history, education, and your social network, crunches it together, and voila, a score. Since this is supposed to be a recruiting tool — it’s billed by the founders as the “World’s Largest Professional Search Engine” — companies can use Identified to search for candidates with certain qualifications, plus a score range. And just so everyone knows they really are using Identified, there’s an activity box that lets you know “Levi Strauss & Co. has viewed profiles of candidates with scores from 16 to 77.”

Some very smart people have poured a bunch of money into Identified; $5.5 million from the likes of Bill Draper, founder of Sutter Hill Ventures and Draper Richards; Alexander Tamas, partner at DST; Chamath Palihapitiya, a VP at Facebook; and from Innovation Endeavors, a VC founded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

The founders say Identified is an alternative, even a competitor, to LinkedIn.

The problem with LinkedIn, founder Brendan Wallace told Forbes, “is it just outputs a lot of data. We’re really a search engine that delivers professional information in a professional way. You get the best results at the top.”

Ranking candidates is nothing new. ATS vendors and job boards have been at it for more than a decade. Their method is to rank candidates against the description of the job for which they’re being considered. Even the least sophisticated match keywords, ranking candidates on the number of matches. Better systems take a semantic approach, looking to concepts and context as much or more than the frequency of keyword matches.

Identified weights the breadth and quality of a person’s network. Says Wallace:

We saw that companies cared as much about a person’s network as they did about their education and work experience. So we built Identified to show people how they appear to world based not only on what they know, but who they know.

Forbes addresses some of the obvious issues with the Identified approach, including what it calls the “philosophical question” of reducing a person and their contacts to a score.

For recruiters, though, there are bigger issues with Identified. The biggest is that Facebook itself says that less than half the 700 million users enter any of their professional information. How many, like myself for instance, provide a minimal bit isn’t known. That skews Identified’s scoring. For people who really care, Identified encourages you to fill-in the missing information to improve your ranking.

Even with some detailed work and education background, the other part of the system can skew the results. Like so many social networkers, I use LinkedIn professionally, and Facebook socially. My Facebook friends have an eclectic assortment of professional experience and education. Most don’t bother with those categories.

My business colleagues are almost exclusively part of my LinkedIn network.

So I’m a zero on Identified because I chose not to provide much professional and personal background and few of my friends do either. As a recruiter, how valuable is that?

And I thank you in advance for not taking the obvious opening provided in my first paragraph.

SeeMore is Monster’s newest 6Sense product. Introduced today during a group demo for bloggers, consultants, and HR tech writers, SeeMore applies the 6Sense search power to candidate databases stored in the cloud, producing a ranked list of qualified prospects.

That brief description, however, hardly does it justice. More broadly, SeeMore makes sense of the thousands of resumes that lurk in every ATS. Instead of writing impossibly long Boolean strings, or entering a bunch of keywords and getting back hundreds of results, 6Sense knows, for instance, that an audit manager must have certain skills and experience.

Power Resume users already know that with that job title and a few other parameters — years of experience for instance — 6Sense will scour Monster’s database for qualifying candidates. You won’t get CFO resumes just because there’s a keyword match. (If you haven’t tried Power Search, you can read about it here.)

Speaking to Fast Company, Monster’s CIO and head of product Darko Dejanovic said “traditional search technologies couldn’t determine if, for example, a candidate had Oracle software experience, previously worked at Oracle, or played an oracle in a university theater troupe. SeeMore brings the power of our 6Sense search to the cloud environment and applies it to talent pools beyond Monster.”

SeeMore clients can upload their entire database into the cloud, search it, search Monster, or other uploaded database to source candidates.

It’s slick and easy to use. Candidates from the various DBs can be merged into a single database or sorted into folders. SeeMore’s analytics are nimble enough to track candidates in just about as many different ways as you can think of.

Monster’s senior director of product management, Javid Muhammedali did the demo. Muhammedali showed a few useful analytics, pulling up the candidates for a sales engineer job to show where they came from, then another view showing how many candidates of all types are coming from competitor companies and what skills they have.

I said at the start of this post that SeeMore is more than a useful recruiting tool, and it is. Muhammedali pointed out how SeeMore can sort through an employer’s workforce (assuming it had been uploaded to the cloud) to find in-house candidates. That same 6Sense technology can also be used to identify staff with specific skills, or find those with a certain background, or even help spot shortcomings in the talent inventory.

SeeMore allows you to, well, see more than you would with a typical ATS and even with rudimentary workforce management tools. It’s certainly not going to replace an HCM, but it certainly can enhance one. Monster may not have started out building SeeMore as a planning tool, but by foraying into cloud-computing, it’s venturing outside its proprietary walls.

That’s why I said SeeMore is evidence that Monster is at least thinking of a future beyond the traditional job board revenue model. SeeMore can be used to search Monster’s resume database, but you don’t have to. Pull resumes from anywhere and once in the cloud, 6Sense will search them.

The starting price is $20,000 for an annual, one-seat contract. Not inexpensive, but still within the reach of mid-sized employers, and a bargain if it turns up just one or two of those diamonds buried amongst those resumes every candidate is promised will be kept on file.

Muhammedali, at the beginning of the demo, called SeeMore  “a transformation of the 6Sense technology.” He was speaking of the move to the cloud, but he could just as easily have been meaning a transformation, a small one to be sure, but a step away from the walled garden.

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

That’s according to Richard Hadden, who’s a speaker, writer, and coach specializing in leadership and employee engagement. In the 9 1/2-minute video below, he and I talk about some of the most common ways employers screen out candidates. Topics covered: credit-rating screening, filtering for industry experience, as well as knowledge of certain software or technologies.

There are hundreds of stories like this. Candidates with great education, experience, and who have worked for all the right companies often fail miserably because they don’t fit into the culture of the company.

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, believes his success has been in finding the right people — the ones who fit comfortably into the corporate culture. So do a growing number of recruiters, hiring managers, and CEOs.

Ten years ago we didn’t hear very much about fit, although it has always been a concern and a part of the decision on whether to hire someone or not. But recently it has become the most important concern, often overriding technical skills or experience. As we move to flatter organizations, more team and project work, and increasingly collaborative work environments, finding people who get along with others and fit into corporate culture are essential to success. They keep harmony, they build community, and they create trust, all important ingredients for success in innovative global and competitive environments.

Personal fit should be an integral part of your candidate assessment process. Fitting into a culture, organization, team or job is not always easy. Some people feel more connected and more included than others, and those who feel the most connected and involved tend to be the ones who perform well and stay. People who feel that they belong to something important — something that engages and excites them — make organization more successful.

Candidates experience the corporate culture almost from their first contact with the organization. They see it in how they are treated, how diligent and caring the employees are, and what the work environment is like. As soon as they meet the hiring manager, they are assessing his or her style and values. When these are in alignment, good performance follows.

Likewise, recruiters and hiring managers are subconsciously assessing candidates from the moment they meet. That gut feel we frequently have about a candidate is probably based largely on how we see them fitting into our team and how well we think we will get along with them. This is often partly based on people who have similar interests or hobbies, who have had similar experiences, or who have known the same people. The more common connections with a candidate, the more likely they are to fit into our culture.

But the first step in more objectively assessing culture fit is to articulate what makes up the culture of your organization.

Know Your Culture

Most firms do a poor job of figuring out what makes up their culture and whether candidates would be comfortable in it or with a particular manager. Many factors make up the corporate culture. Some of those are as basic as work schedules and travel demands, but perhaps more significant are the ethics and values the organization believes in, the style of everyday management, and how communication takes place.

Take the time to understand what the ingredients are of your true culture, not the espoused one, and then you will be able to assess candidates with far greater success.

Four Ways to Assess Fit

Here are four ways to determine whether or not a candidate fits your culture.

Realistic Job Previews. Some firms rely on realistic job previews, where candidates get a glimpse of what it would be like to actually do the work. The Shaker Consulting Group has created these for firms such as Key Bank and Starbucks. Previews allow candidates to select themselves “out” of the interview process and also, when combined with testing, allow organizations to determine the potential quality of fit of a candidate. The downside is that but often candidates overlook potential mismatches and move forward.

Use Referrals and Internal Connections. Referrals have been widely written about here on ERE and elsewhere. They can be a gold standard for cultural fit because current employees, or even those who may not be employees but know your organization well, typically choose to refer people who will fit the culture. You can simply ask employees to focus on people who would be a good fit, rather on people with high skills levels or experience. The downside of referrals is that you can overuse your network and run out of good candidates, and it is always hard to get referrals consistently. It often requires a “push effort” to get people motivated and once the push goes away, effort falls back to low levels.

Use Social Networks. Social networks are a potentially highly effective way to determine cultural fit or at least to see whether or not a potential candidate communicates and interacts in a way that fits. By developing a Facebook or LinkedIn page and then engaging candidates in conversations, recruiters can learn a great deal about communication skills, language ability, and motivation. The downside is that these require time and effort; often, more than an average recruiter has available. However, it is probably true that candidates who have joined your network and participate in conversations at all are a better fit than those who do not.

Fit Testing. There are many tests of cultural and personal fit that can streamline assessment and that add a quantitative dimension to the selection process. These tests have been around for decades and have a solid track record when used properly. Of course, the downside of testing is the candidate’s acceptance and the time needed on both the candidate side as well as on the recruiters to interpret the results.

But whatever method or combination of methods you decide on, making sure candidates will be comfortable in their work environment and with their hiring manager should be a key consideration.

By getting candidates who are aligned to your culture, you will experience faster time to productivity, deeper involvement in problem solving, greater innovation, and less turnover.

This confirmation of what most of us intuitively suspected comes from StartWire, a job search networking collaboration service launched six months ago by Chris Forman, formerly of AIRS, and his partner Tim McKegney, also an AIRS alum.

As part of the research and testing for StartWire, Forman collected hiring information from employers across 10 industries. Cumulatively, the companies shared data on 6,600 hires. From that emerged the correlation between speed of response and hiring.

What Forman and StartWire found was that almost 50 percent of the hires the companies made had applied within the first week a job was posted; 27 percent of the hires applied within two days. And three-quarters of those hired had applied within the first three weeks.

Forman says it sort of a “duh” revelation, but since he’s never seen a study that examined the matter, he decided it might be interesting. In the aggregate, the conventional wisdom about applying early improving a candidate’s chances is correct, he notes. On a job-by-job basis though, it might not be so.

“It’s all a function of supply and demand,” he points out. A security cleared, experienced Java developer can expect to hear from a recruiter regardless of when they apply. A customer service rep needs to get the application in on day one.

“Getting to the front of the line is important if it’s a long line,” adds Forman.

The study, however, has some potential OFCCP implications for recruiters. If the majority of your hires are coming from the applications submitted within the first three weeks, what, then, does that say of your candidate pool?

Online job postings can linger for weeks or even months. And many corporate careersites pull their listings from an ATS, which keeps a listing alive until the req is actually closed. Under OFCCP regs, a job seeker becomes an applicant by submitting “an expression of interest,” having the necessary qualifications, being “considered,” and not withdrawing.

Forman’s study implies that within a week or two of a job being posted, the future hire’s resume is likely already in the in-basket. Job seekers applying after the third week have a much lower likelihood of getting the job. With so many ATS’s not only searching for the basic qualifications, but also ranking candidates — an assessment, of sorts — the paperwork compliance provisions come into play, even if the short-list interviews have already begun.

Since OFCCP regs apply only to federal contractors and subcontractors, this may not be a major issue. But it does suggest that including a time limit on applications might be useful. Placing limits is an approved practice. The OFCCP FAQs say: “if there are a large number of expressions of interest, the contractor may limit the number of individuals it considers by using random sampling, absolute numerical ceilings, or other data management techniques, provided the sampling procedure is appropriate.”

In some respects, what the recruitment tech vendor offers is just another — if more clever — screening variant intended to weed out resume spammers. Interesting, but no game-changer as I told Jobaline founder and CEO Miki Mullor.

What did catch my attention, though, is that Jobaline also attempts to rank applicants on their “seriousness.” An elusive concept to be sure, Mullor says “People who are more serious about a job will take more time on the website.”

Mullor wouldn’t detail everything that goes into the Jobaline mixer, but the amount of time a candidate spends responding to questions is one of the measures, as is the number of jobs a candidate has applied for. Out of the crunching comes a score Mullor says suggests the candidate’s level of interest in the job.

Before we go any further, some background.

Jobaline launched a few months ago on the premise that it could cut the time recruiters spend reviewing resumes, yet still find quality candidates. It does this by having recruiters and hiring managers mark up their job postings so candidates have to provide specifics for the most important of the requirements. Jobaline codes these posts, which can be placed anywhere: corporate site, job boards, etc.

Both sides can come up winners here. The employer flags the most important requirements, while the candidate can amplify what’s in the resume, or offer details that might not be in the resume at all. These micro-resumes, as Jobaline calls them, can prompt some candidates to opt-out and resume spammers aren’t very likely to start filling in response boxes.

However, it’s hard to see how that would compensate for the work involved in reviewing all the extra information. Heck, if you read my post yesterday about recruiters not even reviewing the resumes of those they want to phone screen, it’s evident that the last thing recruiters want is more to read.

Perhaps needless to say, Mullor makes the point that by reviewing just the responses to the tagged requirements recruiters can quickly build a short list. It’s the second piece of this, though, that’s particularly intriguing. Jobaline ranks the candidates on their seriousness.

The obvious question is whether this score has any significance. Neither the content of the responses nor the candidate resume are considered. Pure and simply, Jobaline looks only at the mechanics of the process to create a behavioral score.

It doesn’t take an I/O psychologist to wonder about the validity of the score. Mullor acknowledges that Jobaline is too new to have enough data to be able to say what or even if there is any correlation between the seriousness score and candidate quality or interest. Anecdotally, he says, some of the clients who are testing the service are reporting good results. (Recruiters themselves can affect the score, as they review the micro-resumes.)

What I find interesting is that Jobaline is part of what seems to be the cusp of an emerging trend to adapt behavioral marketing — and search — concepts to recruitment. It’s probably not just coincidence that Jobaline and Bullhorn partnered a couple months ago.

Bullhorn, a dominant force in the staffing and sourcing world, not long ago introduced Reach. Among its many features is a predictive formula that looks at a recruiter’s LinkedIn network and lists those who may be preparing for a job search. It, too, takes its cues from search and marketing, looking at such behaviors as profile updates and new recommendations.

Intuitively, what Bullhorn Reach does makes sense. The more time I spend getting my profile in shape and posting content, particularly if this is a change from what I’ve been doing in the past, then it seems reasonable to say something is up. Whether I’m preparing for a job search or simply making good on my New Year’s resolution is still up in the air. It will require validation to establish the degree of correlation. But for not now, Bullhorn Reach simply raises a flag that a recruiter might want to pursue.

With Jobaline now available to Bullhorn users, Mullor points out that it adds a second data point for recruiters. Bullhorn scores resumes on keyword matching and other elements to create a ranked list of applicants. Jobaline, Mullor notes, is “an additional layer of scoring.”

Does it make a difference? It will be sometime before Jobaline is able to collect enough data to know. Even so, it’s an indicator that vendors are beginning to adopt behavioral measures for talent acquisition.

Some years ago, Yahoo! HotJobs talked about doing this very thing. By analyzing both the profile activity of its members and their Yahoo! search behavior, HotJobs was thinking it could predict who was about to become an active job seeker. I don’t know if it ever went beyond a thought exercise, although something similar was tested for predicting car-buying behavior and it turned out well.

suitability matrix

Technical screening is testing candidates in order to identify those with particular characteristics listed in a job description. This can be done in order to avoid the unnecessary cycles of presenting several candidates for interview who are rejected either because the job description was misunderstood or the candidate screening process was ineffective, or a combination of both.

I get into this more in an upcoming Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, but wanted to give you a taste of all this concept today.

During a training session with technical recruiters, we reviewed a C# Developer job description that was posted on their corporate website. The job description was seeking a mid-level developer with 1 to 2 years development (C#, ASP.NET, SQL Server, and Web Services) and analytical experience, who also had experience in SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) and SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS).

On reviewing the job description, I saw bright red flags and proceeded to explain.

First the notion that a mid-level developer would have 1-2 years experience is not entirely correct. Mid-level experience is closer to 4-6 years. The second flag is the requirement for the mid-level C# developer to have experience in SSRS and SSIS. It is very possible for a mid-level C# developer to have experience in SQL Server, but not to the extent of having experience in SSRS and SSIS. After highlighting other mismatches in the job description, it was very apparent to me that the hiring manager was looking for a SQL Server Developer with C# development experience and not a C# Developer. No sooner had I finished that sentence than a recruiter in the session informed me that the candidates sent to interview with the hiring manager were rejected, and that the hiring manager later informed the recruiter that the requirements and title of the position were to be changed to SQL Server Developer instead of C# Developer. The hiring manager had found out during the interviews that their need was for a SQL Developer instead.

This was a case of a misunderstood job description. For the issue of ineffective candidate screening, Kerri, a technical recruiter with 11 years’ experience asks “How do I validate technical skills to know if the candidate really has the skills or not?”

The answer is simple: Technical Screening. It involves three steps:

• Evaluate the Job Description
• Review the Resume
• Create Technical Screening Questions

Job Description Evaluation: Job description review is where technical screening and skills matching starts to either come together or fall apart. The first thing to do is to ensure that all the skill sets and technical terms are understood, i.e. what they mean and how they are used in the context of the job. The second is to find and answer all the questions that arise from the job description with the help of the hiring manager.

Resume Review: Aside from matching the technical skills of the requirements with that of the candidate’s resume, there are other aspects of the position and its technical environment that affect the compatibility of a candidate to a job. These are the pace of development/work, the project team makeup, type of organization, etc. Review the resume to find questions and answers that either complement or are inconsistent with the job description.

Above, the graphic in the upper right (click to enlarge), is an example of disparity between a candidate and hiring manager after a job description and resume review. It becomes clear that this may not be a good match, irrespective of how compatible the resume is with the job description.

Technical Screening Questions: At this point screening questions should be building up from reviewing the job description and resume. What can we find out about this candidate that will be attractive to the hiring manager (vice versa)? What makes this candidate tick? Looking at a SharePoint Developer (.Net) job description and resume, these are some questions that may be asked.

Background

• What is the makeup of your development, testing, and production environments? How many servers do you have in each environment?

Specific to Job Description

• How did you start your career in SharePoint development? Am I correct to say you have about five years (interject the years of experience you’ve heard the candidate say) experience in SharePoint Development?

Specific to Resume

• Could you tell me about the MOSS and .NET based Enterprise Content Management System — what problem did this solve?

The great thing about technical screening questions is that the answers can be verbiage used by the recruiter to create captivating candidate profiles that describe key strengths to the hiring manager. The most important of all the advantages of this screening process is that the recruiter is able to recognize (with supported information), if the candidate has the characteristics listed in the job description.

Using the tips outlined above, you see that the screening process starts with understanding the intent of the job description. Every minute spent learning more about the job description helps boost a recruiter’s confidence and ability to validate technical candidates for a successful match. When you continue to do this on a regular basis, don’t be surprised when three things start to happen: a) your clients request your recruiting services on an on-going basis, b) your candidates send you more referrals and c) you are able to do more in less time.

This is similar to what many employers do when recruiting: rejecting candidates for reasons completely unrelated to any ability to do the job.

With social media it’s very easy to do so now. Over 80% of recruiters consider personal data posted online when evaluating a candidate and look up social-networking sites, photo- and video-sharing sites, personal web sites and blogs, and even sites like Amazon, eBay, and Craigslist. This seems hypocritical since we’re supposed to make hiring decisions using job-related information assessed as objectively as possible. But most personal information collected online doesn’t meet those criteria. Much of it is unverifiable, and there’s no reliable way to know how it will impact the candidate’s performance on the job.

Keeping it Professional

There are some aspects of any candidate’s personal life that should get them rejected from the hiring process — convictions for violent crime or clear demonstration of illegal behavior — but most personal behavior doesn’t fall into those categories. I recently read an account of a hospital that rejected a well-qualified physician candidate because of some apparently embarrassing pictures found on her Facebook page. The explanation was that they didn’t want patients finding those. I wonder if a lot of patients go looking up their doctor’s Facebook page, and if they do are they going to refuse treatment based on what they find? Did the hospital administration think they were going to get calls from patients saying, “Hey, I can’t accept this diagnosis. Have you seen what’s on her Facebook page?”

How much of a person’s personal life is truly relevant to the job? Obviously even a single instance of some behaviors is completely unacceptable, but until it’s established that candidates actually demonstrate those, it’s foolish to reject them based on some arbitrary moral standard. CBS justified Charlie’s firing citing the publicity around his “dangerously self-destructive behavior.” That behavior didn’t have any negative effect on his show’s ratings. Before rejecting a candidate, think if customers or others the candidate will come in contact with really care — like the example of the hospital above. If they don’t, then does it really make sense to reject a candidate based on personal information?

The simple fact is that it’s near impossible to link most personal behavior to job performance in an objective way. Any attempt to do so requires uncertain judgement applied inconsistently. A candidate that changed the privacy settings on their Facebook page could hide any examples of inappropriate behavior and get hired while one who didn’t do so may get excluded. If a candidate’s Facebook page suggests he likes drinking, then it doesn’t prove that he’s in the habit of showing up for work drunk. Until someone completes a study showing job performance scores have a strong correlation with Facebook pictures of drinking it’s foolish to assume they prove anything.

Some suggest poor writing and bad grammar in Facebook profiles and in blog entries can raise a red flag about communication skills. That may be true, but blog-writing tools and Facebook lack spelling and grammar checkers, and the posts are examples of casual writing. How many people would show the same limitations if Word lacked those features?

The Charlie Sheen Standard

Using personal information to evaluate candidates is getting to be the norm. In Maryland the state recently suspended a policy that asked job applicants to provide their Facebook login and password. What they expected to find was never clear, but lacking a coherent policy any employer should consider the following when evaluating personal information.

• Is it well established (by industrial psychology, behavioral science, or medical research) that people displaying a certain behavior in their personal life also repeat it in their professional lives?
• Can the behavior that’s objectionable be defined? That’s not as easy as it may seem; take drinking, as an example. Drinking what — beer, hard liquor, wine? How much? Over what amount of time? How many examples of the behavior have to be displayed before the candidate is rejected? One? Three? Ten?
• Can the behavior be measured through the medium being used? What would have to be mentioned in a post or picture to show that a person has been drinking? Is holding up a glass of colored liquid proof enough? This is why assessment tests are validated before being used.

Will customers or others who work with the candidate suffer any harm because of the personal behavior?

If the answers to the above questions aren’t “yes,” then candidates are being rejected based on personal prejudices and intangibles that have no link to job performance. Even if there were an objective way to measure inappropriate personal behavior, any “test” of the same may not be much use. Drug tests, considered highly objective, miss most drug users. About 8% of Americans are estimated to use illegal drugs, but a Federal Government drug testing program found only 153 employees testing positive out of 29,000 tested — about 0.005%. The Feds have a workforce most representative of the population, so it’s the test that’s failing. When something as precise as a drug test produces so many false negatives, just how likely is it that an evaluation of candidates based on personal information will be accurate?

I know several recruiters who rationalize their decisions by saying “I know it when I see it” or “I can always tell.” That’s right up there with the hiring manager that claims “I can judge a candidate by their handshake.” That kind of thinking has no place in a good recruiting process. Using the logic demonstrated by some in assessing people based on their personal lives this guy would be unqualified for the job he’s got.