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…
INHABITANTS WANTED: Mars One, the Dutch-based, nonprofit space travel organization, is recruiting a few brave men and women to colonize the red planet.
I’m a skeptic of the Mars One mission. In fact, I think Mars One’s interplanetary initiative is based on more nonsense than facts — a publicity stunt at best (or worse, a Ponzi scheme.) Will Mars One explorers ever get off the ground, given the scope of this unprecedented scientific and technological undertaking? I doubt it.
Still, as a staffing professional, I am astonished by the early success of Mars One’s astronaut recruitment efforts. Believe it or not, nearly 80,000 video applicants have paid up to $75 for a chance to explore the heavens. While many question the motives of this so-called boundary-pushing space mission, employers can’t deny that Mars One’s unique recruitment process provides some fascinating takeaways. keep reading…
It’s no secret that many organizations are moving away from the traditional hierarchical and functional way of working, toward a more matrixed structure where people report to multiple bosses and work on multiple teams with colleagues in different functions and locations, if not different time zones and cultures.
While this model can be effective, it’s by no means simple. In fact, it’s a much more complex way of working. Competing goals, influence without authority and accountability without control are the norms.
For recruiters, let’s look at the implications of this shift, and whether we need different types of people and different skill sets to succeed. keep reading…
The San Antonio Spurs have a keen eye for talent. They do a lot of things right and a lot of those principles are applicable to how we in corporate America recruit and retain employees and run our organizations.
Starting with recruiting, the Spurs have a keen eye for talent. They do not chase super-flashy, high-priced free agents. Rather, their approach has been to travel the globe and find players who fly under the radar with superb talent and who are overlooked, like Tony Parker, Manu Ginobili, and Gary Neal, and then to develop those players into superstars. When they do sign a player, that player has to fit the profile of the organization, which typically means possession of a team-first mentality, selfless in actions, good person, and willing to buy into the system.
Looking at retention and starting at the top, their coach Gregg Popovich has been the head coach of the Spurs for 17 years and with him several of his assistant coaches have long tenure. This tenure of coaches has been vital to the success of the team, as tenured leaders come with knowledge, credibility, trust, and a strategic outlook. keep reading…
U.S. Cellular is helping employees losing jobs in the sale of some segments of its business to Sprint by setting up a transition portal.
A recruitment advertising/communications agency called Shaker helped develop the portal, aimed at 765 “associates” impacted; Kensington International, an outplacement firm, also partnered.
U.S. Cellular is also working with a group called Skills for Chicagoland’s Future. It’s a non-profit that provides placement and training services.
Back to the portal: it includes information on negotiation strategies; resume and cover-letter tips; interviewing assistance, and social networking guides. Let’s take a brief look inside. keep reading…
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Remember George Costanza from the old Seinfeld show? He had problems with jobs and women, which makes sense to anyone who believes job seeking is like dating, which is pretty much most everyone who has done both.
For you doubters and naysayers, proof is on the way from none other than eHarmony. Late next year, the company, which insists it takes a “scientific approach to matching,” will launch a career site employing the same principles as its dating site.
A company executive told The Washington Post, “We have 29 dimensions that we match on for marriage. It would not surprise me if we have even more for a worker relationship.” Relationship-seekers answer about 200 questions before eHarmony computes a profile and does its magic. Not coincidentally, among the questions are a number related to work and career.
With eHarmony jumping into the job matchmaking business, it just goes to show you what intimate lifestyle site Lelo said about a healthy sex life making for a healthy career. keep reading…
Talking about millenials is a hot topic. Whether it’s how to hire them or ways to work with them, love them, or hate them, analyzing gen Y seems to be an area of continual fascination. And now thanks to Time, this issue is in the spotlight once again with this week’s cover story titled “The Me Me Me Generation,” which features the provocative subtitle “Millennials are lazy, entitled narcissists who still live with their parents. Why they’ll save us all.” As a member of gen Y myself, I was curious to find out what the article, written by Joel Stein, had to say. Although it points out some troubling statistics, overall the verdict was optimistic. Here are three thought-provoking ideas: keep reading…
Hard-to-find talent isn’t interested in submitting resumes or engaging with career sites. These are busy people, deeply focused on a project or idea. Reaching them is not only difficult — it’s often next to impossible.
Many do not have an online presence. Most will not respond to emails, Tweets, or phone calls — if you are able to find them. They are known to their circle of friends and colleagues only, and participate online primarily in technical forums, professional sites, and through emails with associates.
An engineer I know is top in his chosen field. He is highly sought after by a small circle of technical experts for his depth of knowledge and experience. He has no LinkedIn profile, no Facebook page, and does not Tweet. He only answers his phone when he knows the caller personally. Yet, he regularly changes jobs depending on how interesting the project offered. He has never spoken with a recruiter (other than me as a friend). He finds his projects through his narrow but powerful network of fellow engineers.
How would a recruiter ever find him — or the hundreds of others who are similar? keep reading…
Practices: The return of talent agents; HR owns M&A; and hiring without degrees
Anyone who tracks advanced trends in talent management knows that many of them originated in the Silicon Valley. However, you probably also know that many of the publicized practices that start in the Silicon Valley are so unique and even outrageous (like the free Sweets Shop that is part ice cream parlor and bakery at Facebook), that no firm outside of the Valley ever copies them.
The three Silicon Valley practices that I am highlighting today probably won’t require immediate action at your firm, simply because they are so bold and outrageous that conservative talent managers will not even consider them. As a result, I am labeling them “leading edge practices that you should simply be aware of.” keep reading…
The concept of “corporate coworking” is among the boldest corporate people management concepts of the decade. If you’re not familiar with the concept, it varies from traditional coworking, which is a well-established concept where a group of startups and entrepreneurs share a facility that supports their getting launched.
There is a new model, which I call “corporate coworking,” where the employees of a major corporation share a facility that also houses startups and/or employees from another corporation.
The primary goal is not to save real estate costs, to provide space for expansion, or to provide remote work options. The objective is to generate and test new and innovative ideas.
On the Surface, it May Appear to Be a High-risk Approach keep reading…
One reason I get a kick out of reading business books is because their themes frequently come to life and smack you right in the nose at work the next day. Recently I read “The Energy Bus” and underlined this passage: Negative people often tend to create negative cultures whereas positive corporate cultures are created by positive people.
It’s almost a ridiculously obvious statement, but how many companies act like this isn’t true? When the corporate higher-ups get word employees are complaining, they’ll email an all-employee survey, post motivational quotes on bulletin boards, roll out a new contest, and maybe even treat the team to lunch.
That would be like your plan to slim down for the summer centers on wearing vertical stripes while you keep eating your stash of Twinkies and Ding Dongs. You’re masking the problem instead of actually solving it.
One company with an amazing culture is regional supermarket chain Wegmans, who regularly appears near the top of Fortune Magazine’s annual 100 Best Companies To Work For list. Wegmans has the friendliest staff I’ve ever encountered while pushing a cart, and their attitude has little to do with formal training. First and foremost, Wegmans seeks to hire friendly people who are inclined to help others. Its people smile a lot because they can’t help it, not because of some corporate edict.
Experiencing a positive atmosphere when shopping for bananas is great, but more gratifying is interacting with upbeat people Monday through Friday at your workplace. Before I describe one method to hire positive people, let me share with you some specifics about Connor, a sales rep we hired less than a year ago. 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 21st 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 21st 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…
A retention toolkit for innovators
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 keep reading…
Take notice: If what you do produces only average results … prepare to be eliminated!
We are witnessing a visible revolution and shift in corporate focus. The public visibility of this shift is unusual because strategic changes in the corporate world are normally slow in coming. In fact, the majority of corporate leaders typically fail to identify or even grasp it when what is known as a “strategic inflection point” has been reached.
So in case you missed it over the last two weeks, I’m announcing here that the long-established corporate goal of maximizing productivity or efficiency has lost the battle for supremacy and it has moved down into second place. The winner and now champion for at least the next decade is the corporate goal of … dramatically increasing innovation! If you can bear with me for a minute, I’ll give you some quick examples to illustrate this dramatic and revolutionary shift. keep reading…
Remember how it felt the last time your boss told you “Thank you” for a job well done? Here’s an opportunity to spread that same feeling around with your direct reports.
Today is Employee Appreciation Day, which gives you a great reason to take a few minutes to tell your staff, individually, and face-to-face, thanks for the great work you do.
That small gesture means far more than you might think. Globoforce, whose business is employee recognition, says workers who are regularly recognized for the work they do work harder, are more productive, and jump ship much less than those who rarely or never get feedback. The last survey Globoforce did, it asked workers if they planned to look for a new job. Among those who said they felt appreciated, 20% said they would look. Among the group reporting they felt unappreciated, 60% were going to look. keep reading…
Google has the only HR function on the planet that is managed based on “people analytics”
Larry Page — the CEO
If you haven’t seen it in the news, after its stock price broke the $800 barrier, Google moved into the No. 3 position among the most valuable firms in the world. Google is clearly the youngest firm among the leaders; it has surprisingly been less than a decade since Google’s IPO.
Most on the top 20 market cap list could be accurately described as “old school,” because most can attribute their success to being nearly half a century old, having a long established product brand, or through great acquisitions. Google’s market success can instead be attributed to what can only be labeled as extraordinary people management practices that result from its use of “people analytics.”
Continuous Innovation Requires a New Kind of People Management
The extraordinary marketplace success of Google (and Apple, which is No. 1 on the list) is beginning to force many business leaders to take notice and to come to the realization that there is now a new path to corporate greatness. keep reading…
As a recruiter, one of the main problems I face with prospective and actual clients is unrealistic expectations of who they can really hire. For a variety of reasons (which have been gone over many times before), there seems to be a sense of entitlement that the facts don’t bear out … “The very best of the best should beat a path to our door and be dying to work for us.”
I can think of one particularly relevant example of this. keep reading…
Have you ever been stuck using a painfully slow and inefficient computer because it still worked?
Just a few weeks ago, I emptied my garage and office of over a dozen CPUs, printers, and monitors. The cargo area, back seat, passenger seat, floors of my SUV were filled with equipment and components. During the short drive to the local computer recycling center, I was struck by a strange thought: the similarity between these still working working-but-outdated computer hardware and many employees in jobs whose best days have passed.
The simple truth is these functional, reliable, and hard-working computers were no longer able to keep up with the tasks I needed them to do — and when they did, it took too long. Booting up took 5 to 10 minutes, sometimes longer. The operating systems — you know the Windows “stuff” like Windows 98, Vista, and even XP — kept crashing. The CPUs took too long to process information. They couldn’t handle new software upgrades. The hard drives were full and the boards couldn’t support new ones. The modems needed to be replaced because good, consistent high-speed connections required new versions. And let’s not forgot the 15-inch black-and-white monitors. Need I go on?
That same resourceful philosophy for many of us, my friends, doesn’t stop with computers. Many workforces today are filled with loyal, dependable, hard-working employees whose skills don’t match the needs of the organization anymore. keep reading…
You’re at a social event, catching up with an old friend or meeting someone for the first time, and the conversation turns to your career. You say “I’m a recruiter.” Their response is likely, “Oh, like a headhunter?”
If you are a headhunter, then the conversation moves on and everyone understands each other. But if you are a corporate recruiter, your response is typically “Well, not exactly; I am a recruiter for (Insert Company Name Here). This is typically followed by a quizzical look in the other person’s eye (especially if you don’t work for a company with a household name).
If your initial response was “I’m a sourcer” or “I’m a contract recruiter” or “I’m a recruiting manager,” or something along those lines, then you’ve likely just confused the other person even more.
Sound familiar? keep reading…
There’s no better way to start out a new year than to take one or more strategic actions. On the surface, selecting a new strategic area may seem to be difficult because at established firms, it would seem as though all of the important talent management areas would have already been addressed (i.e. with a full-time leader, a written plan, a permanent team, a yearly budget, and a set of metrics for assessing its strategic impact).
However, I have still been able to identify 10 potentially high business impact strategic areas in talent management where almost no firm has a permanent company-wide strategy, plan, and team. The fact that almost no firms do these things isn’t because they lack a potential impact (most agree it could be high), so the lack of action must be because either no one has been trained in the area or because the strategic area is highly complex or highly political. Even if you don’t have the bandwidth to take action in any of these areas, review the list to see if you see the potential for a high business impact.
The Top 10 Strategic Talent Management Areas That Firms Ignore keep reading…
