ERE.net

How to develop a recruiter scorecard for assessing individual corporate recruiter performance

Champions insist that you keep score. If you understand that concept, you will ensure that in addition to function-wide metrics, you will supplement them with a scorecard for assessing the performance of each individual recruiter. Everyone knows that corporations are measurement crazy, so I have found that by not measuring something (in this case recruiters), you are inadvertently sending a message to executives and employees that whatever you are doing is not strategic or even important (because if it was, we would measure it).

So unless you want to purposely send a message that “having top performing recruiters doesn’t matter,” you have no choice but to develop an individual recruiter scorecard. In order to do that effectively, you first need to understand the foundation design principles for individual scorecards and then you must select the actual measures that you will use in your scorecard. In part one, I introduced the concept and provided three examples of what a scorecard might look like. In this part two, I will cover the design details and a list of the measure to consider for your scorecard. keep reading…

Recruiting is a unique field because it has no entry barriers. Unlike most professions, you can become a corporate recruiter without any formal certification, registration, recruiting experience, or even a college degree in the discipline. Because becoming a recruiter requires no formal qualifications, you probably won’t be surprised to find out that in practice, there is a wide variation in the capabilities of individuals who hold the corporate title of “recruiter.” Many corporate recruiters are truly outstanding, but unfortunately in some corporations, many other recruiters can only be classified as what I call a “Recruiter In Name Only” or a RINO (pronounced as rhino). keep reading…

The National Security Agency has made our jobs easier with the release of a 646-page document called “Untangling the Web: A Guide to Internet Research.”

The document was made public recently due to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Michael Morisy and posted on Muckrock. The document appears to have been created to help government operatives understand how to retrieve information on the web.

Though last updated in February 2007, it contains massive amounts of data that will help sourcers and recruiters as they work to improve their sourcing skills and understand how the Internet works.

While I haven’t had time to read the entire document, sections that caught my eye were: keep reading…

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

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

If you’re beginning to think every one is using LinkedIn to source candidates, you’re close to right.

Nearly every survey on source of hire or use of social media by recruiters shows LinkedIn to be a key part of the mix; often it leads all the listed social media sites. The company itself reported adding 2,400 customers in just the last quarter of 2012, bringing the total to 16,400 organizations under contract.

Now comes a Bullhorn survey to report that of the 160,000 registered users on Bullhorn Reach, 97% use LinkedIn to source candidates. That’s not as surprising as it might seem at first glance. keep reading…

All the major mobile phone platforms today with apps also have advertising capability within the app itself. This doesn’t necessarily mean that recruiters need to become programmers, but it does mean that they have the ability to use mobile advertising within an application just as any other business does.

It may seem like a far-fetched idea to advertise within games and social media posting tools, but many businesses today are doing just this. keep reading…

I was reading an article today about the ferocious talent wars for tech going on right now in Silicon Valley and a sentence caught my eye.

“Whether she is scouring Stanford or Parsons for up-and-comers or more established candidates, de Baubigny says, ‘I am always very open-minded about what good talent looks like.’”

Maybe it’s because I watched a new show this morning called Brain Games

or maybe it’s because I’m a compulsive anagrammer, or maybe it’s my Dyslexia kicking in — for whatever reason when I read the word “scouring” I saw “sourcing.”

I started to think.

Has sourcing become scouring?

I believe it has.

What a few of us began doing (and talking about) in the latter days of the 20^th century and on into the present century has turned into an incessant scouring (for many) of what can be found on the Internet. keep reading…

A problem common to most recruiters and human resources professionals today is a lack of understanding the actual job they are trying to fill. It’s really a fine line a recruiter toes, because understanding the role itself is not only imperative for sourcing talent but is also a huge advantage for closing that top passive candidate. The overall understanding of the role itself starts with the job title. If the job title is not a good fit for what you seek, you are likely in big trouble. keep reading…

Jody Ordioni wrote a prescient view about the ROI of social recruiting which posted Monday morning. Monday night I discovered first hand just how prescient, at a recruiting roundtable that marked the opening of the ERE Recruiting Conference & Expo.

I moderated two separate discussions of social media issues in 90 minutes. ROI concerns were uppermost in the minds of the recruiting leaders who joined our conversation. (More than 25 different topics were available at roundtables set aside in the ballroom of the Marriott here in San Diego where the conference is being held.)

It wasn’t surprising that these leaders who hailed from firms both very large and more modest size struggle with proving the value of social media as a source of hire. LinkedIn, I should point out, was an exception. Most of the 20 or so recruiters at the roundtable, and several others I spoke with later at the evening receptions, were enthusiastic users of LinkedIn Recruiter for sourcing. Most, though, admitted that getting their senior corporate managers and leaders to be active in posting and commenting on LinkedIn Groups is a struggle.

What was more of a surprise, and what makes Jody’s article so spot on, is that I heard emerging among recruiters a recognition that social media is a marketing and promotional tool. The effectiveness of sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, even Pinterest is probably not in the number of hires or even applicants a company can trace directly to one of the social media sites. Instead, as recruiting consultants Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler reported last year, social media is a channel of influence. keep reading…

A common mistake I see LinkedIn users making is not keeping InMail and invitations personal. In other words, don’t use InMail as another direct marketing message. It shouldn’t feel like another piece of spam for cheap prescription meds. If it does, you’re doing it wrong.

LinkedIn with its InMail tool does a good job of allowing you to create targeted, meaningful messages and save them as templates for tracking and future use. The following list will help you craft messages that get results.  keep reading…

New Recruiter Homepage

Sporting a new look and with some new features — including a recommendation engine that ‘learns’ the kind of people a recruiter most want — LinkedIn Recruiter is getting an official relaunch this morning.

The redesign itself is an update of the classic LinkedIn Recruiter look to make it more consistent with the LinkedIn homepage redesign that was introduced last fall.

Parker Barril, Linkedin’s Talent Solutions head of product, unveiled the fresh, new LinkedIn Recruiter at a live and webcast user event — ConnectIn — in San Francisco. As he put it, “the consumerization of the enterprise,” the trend toward making products and services easier to use, “is influencing a new generation of products.” keep reading…

Nowadays, just about everyone is plugged into Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. These social channels have opened up a completely new way for recruiters and companies to find skilled candidates for job openings across a range of fields. Beyond those three leading platforms, recruiters have also seen an influx of new social recruiting tools, like Jobs2Web. These new developments provide substantial evidence that recruiters and organizations are searching for innovative ways to source candidates through new and existing social media networks.

It’s interesting, then, that despite this clear ambition to make the most of available social recruiting channels, recruiters and organizations continue to underuse one prominent social network, Google+.

keep reading…

CareerXroads released its annual source of hire report this week and, as usual, the report is full of information about the broader talent acquisition landscape. We’ll get to that in a moment.

The beginning of this year’s report spells out the demise of more simplistic views about source of hire tracking: that data is easy to get, that it is reliable across the board, and that it is clean (one source = one hire). If you’ve been in recruiting for more than a decade, you probably know that things weren’t much better before the Internet drove so much hiring activity. I remember laughably tracking sources of hire via a questionnaire we asked applicants (online and on paper) and trying to create data based on employee’s recollections of how they came to apply for their job 5-10 years ago.

So no data is perfect but this data is very imperfect. Still, it is the best set of data and analysis we have on sources of hire. With that monster-sized disclaimer out of the way, here are some of the results.

Referrals, Career Sites and Job Boards Top List Again

keep reading…

CEOs are frustrated. According to a ManpowerGroup survey, 34% of companies are experiencing difficulty filling mission-critical positions. Paradoxically, the Department of Labor reports that 12.3 million people are still unemployed. And so here we sit, asking ourselves, why are we struggling to find the talent?

Welcome to the Great Talent Gap of the 21^st Century

In an article for Inc.com, Keith Cline wrote, “The demand for top-tier engineering talent sharply outweighs the supply in almost every market, especially in San Francisco, New York, and Boston. This is a major, major pain point and problem that almost every company is facing, regardless of the technology ‘stack’ their engineers are working on.”

If you’re a hiring manager or a recruiter in the trenches, you’re not seeing a way out of it any time soon  You may need a production manager who knows calculus, or an experienced software developer, or a technology strategist with cloud-based computing experience; and you need them yesterday. Oh and, by the way, you need them at a “competitive salary” (i.e., the lowest wage possible).

To begin to close the gap, we first need to recognize that the talent gap of the 21^st century is made up of smaller fissures. Second, we need to understand the interrelated economic and organizational forces which formed these cracks. And lastly, we need to get started now. keep reading…

Many search engine marketing experts today agree that videos and images drive more traffic in search engines than simple text-related results. In fact, a study done by Socialbakers, a leader in social media marketing and statistics, showed that as of December 2012, image-related posts led Facebook interaction by a whopping 89 percent. In 2012, according to Reuters, YouTube had an average number of four billion views per day.

With a multitude of free mobile image and video posting apps that are available for smartphones today, the ability to reach the public through multimedia has grown significantly, and today many companies take advantage of these major marketing channels. So what does this information mean for recruiters? keep reading…

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

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

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

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

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

Recruiting, as many of us know it, has undergone a transformation in the last few years. In fact, there are recruiters coming in to the workforce now who only source within LinkedIn Recruiter, or who’ve never had to keep a physical (read: paper) file on a candidate. Some of the changes that have rocked our industry over the last six to eight years have been great ones. Some could use a keener eye, but I’m not here to criticize.

What I want to do is point to the things that haven’t changed; I want to talk about getting back to recruiting basics. Because not everyone can afford the fancy social recruiting suites and very few can veto the boss when he says no to a perks program. These are the skills that every recruiter should know and all recruiters used to know. These things obviously work with the new tools and platforms … but they’re effective without them. So let’s get back to the basics.

Here are five things not to forget in the social recruiting fervor. keep reading…

There are many different things a phone sourcer says everyday, but there are some that are said most everyday.

You have maybe three seconds to engage a Gatekeeper.

What you say in those first few, fatal moments will determine in what direction your sourcing call will go.

The following are the most used words and sentences you’d hear if you could sit next to a phone sourcer for a day. keep reading…

Update: SilkRoad says there are errors in the report it published Thursday on which the post below is based. The most significant appears to be charts on pages 8, 11, and 15 and in the infographic on the SilkRoad blog showing some sources produced more hires than they did interviews. A company spokesman said in an email: “The issue concerning the numbers on Craigslist was an error and has been changed.  In regards to the information on page 15, that chart only represents the percentage of interviews and hires as a percentage of all external sources and does not take into account internal or offline sources.” Additionally, “There were no sources in our findings with a larger number of hires over interviews.  The issue with the image on page 11 is with the chart and Craigslist.” Note that as of this update, it does not appear the updates to the charts have been made.

Referrals and the company career site are the two leading sources for new workers hired by the 1,054 companies participating in SilkRoad’s just released study of recruitment marketing effectiveness.

Between them, they produced 40% of the more than 150,000 hires the companies made in 2012.

This is the second year the HR software provider has compiled ATS data from its customers to report on their source of hire. This year, the company included interviews as a measure of effectiveness.

The data set came from companies as small as 100 employees and some larger than 10,000; 60% had under 2,000 employees, 30% fall between 2,000 and 10,000, and the remaining 10% are larger. A company spokesman said the employers represent “the entire scale. We have lots of technology, healthcare, higher education, and several other strong verticals.”

As it did last year, SilkRoad found that job boards collectively yielded more interviews and hires than did all other external sourcing efforts. (For the report, SilkRoad classified corporate career sites and inside recruiter efforts as internal, explaining “they are company resources.” Company sites were included because they are “internally controlled element of job advertising.”)

Among the job boards, Indeed yielded more interviews and hires than any other single site. CareerBuilder was second. keep reading…

LinkedIn didn’t so much beat Wall Street’s financial expectations, it shattered them.

The company earned 35 cents per share on revenue of $303.6 million. That was $24 million more than the average of analysts’ estimates and more than $11 million above the most optimistic projection. The average of their earnings estimates was 19 cents a share.

The numbers released this afternoon show LinkedIn brought in more total revenue for the year than did Monster and its fourth-quarter recruitment revenue alone was 90% above the same quarter in 2011. keep reading…