ERE.net

It has been an amazing year in recruiting and talent management, despite severe economic hardships, budget cuts, and widespread hiring freezes.

Unlike the economic turmoil following 9/11 and the dot-com bubble burst, many recruiting functions have continued to innovate and stretch the limits of what can be defined as “standard recruiting.”

If you work in an organization that has given up on innovation and instead has adopted a survival strategy, it’s important to realize that many of your competitors are not standing still. If your organization chooses to wait for an economic recovery to begin modernizing their recruiting practices, you may find it nearly impossible to catch up.

One of the challenges in the fast-moving profession of recruiting is how to keep up with the latest evolutions in best practice. In my experience, there’s no better place to learn about practical tools and applications in recruiting and talent management than ERE.net.

Fortunately, ERE Media holds a yearly global competition aimed at identifying the very best “next practices” in recruiting. Each year, ERE receives hundreds of applications in eight recruiting program categories from well-known organizations like Microsoft, IBM, Ernst & Young, Intuit, Accenture, GE, Yahoo!, and from less well-known but equally innovative organizations like DaVita, the American Cancer Society, and Tata.

Fortunately, as a judge for the Recruiting Excellence Awards, I’m given the opportunity to highlight some of these amazing practices that your organization should consider adopting.

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Video resumes and video interviews are here. Yet some employers, afraid of the legal ramifications of reviewing videos of people in the hiring process, are curling up into the fetal position and taking steps to avoid them altogether. Here’s why you should do the exact opposite and fully embrace them.

I recently had a conversation with a director of recruiting at a large organization who said that he had just put a policy in place to reject all video resumes. “And why would you do that?” I asked.

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By now, everyone has heard the praises on employee referral programs and how they can produce outstanding results with regards to cost, speed, and quality of hire. While these continue to be the driving factors behind the rampant adoption of employee referral programs (ERPs), as recruiting tools they also deliver a number of other, often overlooked benefits that should be considered when designing, managing, and measuring the effectiveness of the program. Such benefits include increased new-hire success rates, insights into employee moral and pride (as seen through program usage statistics), and more focused use of recruiter and management time, which is enabled by offloading a portion of the sourcing, screening and assessment load to the greater employee population. Because the number of things a referral program can impact is so large, it should come as no surprise that most ERPs perform well below their potential. The relative poor performance of most programs can be attributed to one or both of the following reasons:

• Poor program design

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There is a question I have been posing to recruiters all over the world that is evoking some interesting answers: What is the simplest recruiting model you could imagine for your organization? What I mean by this is, how minimal could you go and still deliver good people in a reasonable time? Could you get by with no applicant tracking system and no website? What would you keep and what would you toss out if you were given the task of reducing the recruiting function so that it used almost no resources? Why do I care about this? I believe that when you can reduce a function or a machine to its simplest components, you can see more clearly what is essential versus what is a nice enhancement. For example, a car is at its simplest when it consists of a chassis, four wheels, a basic engine with no electrical system, no gauges or dials, a steering system directly connected to the wheels, and a single seat. Everything else is sure nice to have but does not make the car any more functional. Recruiting today has become encumbered by all sorts of bells and whistles that may give us the illusion of better recruiting, but that may also be eroding our ability to do the very basics of recruiting: find the best people, convince them to work for our employer, and make the process simple and fast. It is always healthy to go through a process of simplification, downsizing and streamlining. What emerges is usually a much more effective and efficient operation. Let’s take a look at some things that might be eliminated from our current recruiting practices and what could replace them. Let me make it clear before I jump in here that I am an advocate of using technology and of the tools that make it easier to do our jobs. I am writing this to help sharpen our answers to the questions we are often asked, such as why we spend all that money on an applicant tracking system or what real value we get from the website. By thinking about what they contribute and what would be missing without them, we can be better advocates for them. 1. Forget all Internet interfaces. The Internet is wonderful and I couldn’t imagine a world without it, but is it essential to recruiting? I worked as a recruiter, as did many of you and many of the other ERE writers, well before the Internet was even a twinkle. We were successful. We used our personal contacts, focused on local recruiting, added a lot of weight by taking potential candidates to lunches and dinners, and talked a lot on the telephone. It was time consuming, but satisfying, and it worked. Recruiting could still be done this way. The Internet has also spawned a host of related needs: training in online search, training in how to use a job board and how to post to one, and training in data mining and information gathering to better pinpoint searches. All of these require time and money and need to be perceived as worth the effort. Many recruiters still resist and have been successful. 2. Forget the recruiting website. I know that I am perhaps one of the strongest advocates of having a good recruiting website, but what would happen if you didn’t have one? Very successful recruiting functions, such as that at FirstMerit Bank, which Dr. John Sullivan wrote about earlier this week, have almost no web presence. I imagine that most small companies either have an extremely basic website or none at all. Still, they manage to attract and recruit good people. Websites are merely reflections of branding strategies and plans that have been thought out and executed in a host of ways. Candidates of a certain type may feel that organizations without websites are strange, but I doubt if anyone has stopped pursuing a job because the organization did not have a website. 3. Why bother with an applicant tracking system? For most recruiters the ATS is a sinkhole for both money and time. System can cost more than six figures to install and customize and hundred of thousands more to maintain annually. Many organizations employ IT professionals to support these systems and have additional staff to keep correspondence up-to-date and to enter data that cannot be entered automatically. The fact is applicant tracking systems cost a lot and probably are only really justified when recruiting volume is very high or when an organization has a strong global brand and is a magnet for candidates of all types. Many organizations use these systems primarily to generate reports for the government to show compliance with EEO and other requirements. The number of organizations that have purchased one of these systems is small (maybe 5% of all organizations in the U.S. have such a system in place being used regularly). Many organizations use an Excel spreadsheet or some other simple database. Some just use paper file folders and the telephone. They are far from essential for most of us. 4. Job boards are a waste. Who doesn’t post to a job board? Almost every organization uses some sort of job board, but very few actually know how many candidates they got from them. What we have done is closed some doors to candidates while opening others. In many cases, the same candidate also would have sent you a resume directly or would have called you had that avenue been available. Most recruiters in past decades opened postal mail, picked up the phone, or kept communication open with potential candidates through meetings, social events, and their network. Job boards are relatively expensive; they generate candidates who may not be qualified and reach out to a very broad geography. For most organizations, recruiting is a local activity and candidates come from nearby. They learn about you and your positions from friends and word of mouth. Perhaps job boards, too, are expendable. At this point we’ve reduced your recruiting function to a few people with a telephone doing essential things ó cold calling, networking, selling, building talent pools ó not learning technology and worrying over Internet security or the latest glitch in the ATS. Technology is incredibly helpful, but only when it integrates seamlessly into helping us do these essential things. Take a look at your technology investments and see if they are helping make your recruiting simpler or just adding nonproductive complexity.

The response to my last two articles on the topic of requisitions was informative. Most recruiting professionals who responded via the ERE Forum thought I had missed the point entirely, while those people who wrote me directly expressed gratitude for stating something they struggle with everyday. But everybody’s basic point was the same: requisitions run my life and define my job. Some people seem to like that, some people don’t. No matter where people fell down on the issue though, they all hinted at the next question: “Okay, smart guy. If requisitions are so bad, tell me how you live life without them!” The answer? Integration! This article will explore “integration” the way people with pocket-protectors and broken horn-rimmed glasses mean it, as in, “The integration of multiple subsystems within a heterogeneous compute environment is a necessary condition for end-to-end transactions.” I know, it’s pretty hot. But since this is a family publication I will try to keep such a sexy subject as dry as possible. There is also the metaphor of integration, which is about how you integrate what you do with your client’s business. I’ll address that only briefly at the end of the article, since my main focus is on technology integration. Moving away from a tactical requisition-based environment to the more ideal strategic partnership scenario requires the integration of various technologies that you may already be using inside your organization. In fact, in order to move beyond requisitions you (or your HRIT partner) must work towards making sure that all your data sources are integrated into one seamless information system. Even if your organization doesn’t have the types of systems that I discuss below, they probably will at some point in the future. The technologies that drive workforce planning include workforce planning tools (including project management, resource allocation, new product modeling, and IT governance), performance management tools, contact management and candidate relationship tools, and financial central-planning tools. At present, most of these tools live in their own universes and don’t talk to each other. For instance, if you have a project at your organization that you are staffing, it is likely that the project management team used some form of tool to create a scenario whereby they would need to go off and hire someone. These tools range from the very old (manual spreadsheet analysis) to the very advanced (new product modeling features in resource and project management tools). The project planning tool helps the business leader model some scenarios around staffing: the expected launch of the product, what types of skills are needed on the project, which individuals inside the organization are available to be staffed on a new project, and financial/budget constraints on what the project can pay for any particular skill. The business lead creates these plans and then runs them through various approval processes and checkpoints in order to end up with an approved plan. That plan says, “The company needs to hire these types of folks, with these types of skills and experiences, around this time, for this much money.” The project manager will then typically contact their HR or Recruiting representative to tell them about their needs. Because the HR/recruiting rep wants to make sure that they have the information right, and since they usually don’t have access to the original planning tool to see the various approvals, they must create a requisition to confirm that the need is real, as well as to initiate a conversation with the hiring manager about his or her “actual needs.” But what if the planning tool and the ATS talked to each other? Using the present level of sophistication of integration tools (at EA we use a tool called Tibco, but there are many others out there), your HRIT department can help you create business rules that determine whether a “TBH” (to be hired) has gone through the appropriate authorization channels and whether the proper information is contained in the resource request. Assuming the needs of those rules are met, a virtual requisition can be created in the ATS, which then can trigger the hiring process. The need description, budget allocation, skill requirements, and timing of the request should all be contained within the modeling tool database. Yes, sometimes you will need to go back and double-check the information, or change the job description language to meet a specific geographical or employment challenge. But that is more about the marketing side of recruiting, and less about administration. In other words, integration between the project management tool and the applicant tracking system takes requisitions and moves them from the administrative side of the business process to the communication side of the recruiting/selling process. Of course, this integration won’t solve world hunger or hold back the tides. Recruiters must still be accountable for understanding their client’s needs by specializing in what Kevin Wheeler calls “expert thinking” and “complex communications.” Integration won’t solve for a lack of these skills. In fact, a simple test of how “integrated” a recruiter is with the company’s talent processes is to remark their level of surprise when a new requisition magically appears in their fully integrated ATS. A recruiter who is well integrated into his or her clients’ business planning process will already know the requisition is coming. On the other hand, a recruiter who uses requisitions as a way to avoid hiring managers will continually be surprised when new requisitions appear. Of course, project planning tools aren’t the only source of TBH data. In fact, most organizations are just starting to move towards a “project work model” (as opposed to the functional model of work, where you just repeat a task over and over, but never get to see the final outcome). But all organizations talk money. So often times new hire planning is done in central planning tools, usually in finance. Most companies (and almost all public companies) must provide a budget for headcount prior to the start of the fiscal year. In the post Sarbanes-Oxley era of company governance, headcount is a common metric that Wall Street uses to evaluate the expense risk of a company for the coming fiscal year. You have probably had to deal with this through your company’s budgeting process: how many people, in what types of positions, for how much money, are you going to need for the year? Again, in most companies today, this information is accessed through the finance department during the requisition creation process. In other words, the information is only available to the finance department, because only they have access to the budgeting module of the financial system. So a requisition becomes a way of getting finance to approve something they already agreed to: that a position has budget approval as of a certain date. As we discussed in the previous articles, the approval of a requisition by finance is redundant, because they have to do it again when the offer gets issued. But again, imagine for a minute that your ATS and the central planning and budgeting system are integrated. Your position description (note that this does not have to be a requisition) already has a job code, a department number, and hiring manager number. Guess what? That’s the same information in the planning system! So once you are ready to send an offer out, you can initiate a request to the planning system to check that the position is budgeted and open. This protects the company from making the mistake of hiring someone off plan. It doesn’t require a requisition, and it has successfully automated a manual process. Finally, I would like to reiterate something I brought up at the start of the article, which is that integration is both a technology and a metaphor. From a technology perspective, integration means reducing the administrative workload of the recruiting organization through seamlessly meshing different information sources into one cohesive hiring management system. This will enable recruiters to shift from being tactical administrators to strategic consultants and partners. But technical integration only provides an opportunity for becoming more strategic. The metaphor of integration is the way to maximize this opportunity. Integration as a metaphor means that the recruiter is a seamless part of the business system they are supporting. Moving beyond requisition is the first step from technical integration towards “business integration.”

The continued groundswell of interest in the use of assessment tools brings with it many positive things. First of all, it is really great to see that an increasing number of companies are beginning to experience firsthand the value that a well-planned and properly implemented assessment strategy can provide. What has me even more excited is that the continued integration of assessment with other technology-based hiring tools ó such as sourcing tools and applicant tracking systems ó is an important step in the continued development of a process-based approach to hiring. I really do believe that this is where the future lies when it comes to the intersection of hiring and technology. But while continued interest and advances in both technology and consumer mindset are encouraging, there is still a great deal of hesitancy among potential consumers of assessment tools. While many folks have been sticking their big toe in the water, a large number are still unwilling to dive in. This is understandable, as there are many reasons why thinking about the use of assessment tools can be a bit scary. One of the biggest reasons for this hesitancy is the fact that one of the first steps in using assessment, the simple act of choosing an assessment provider, can be a daunting proposition. Some of the reasons for this include:

• Low level of knowledge. Assessment is a complex subject matter that takes some effort to fully understand. My research has shown that a lack of knowledge about assessment has continually been the main reason for hesitancy to consider using these measures.

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Applicant tracking system (ATS) is a curious name for the software that powers most recruiting functions in Fortune 500 organizations and in many smaller ones as well. One would assume that recruiters and hiring managers would want a tool that assisted them in discovering the right person for a position ó not a tool that just tracked applicants. The name is reflective, though, of what these tools are designed to do. Their primarily purpose is to store resumes, retrieve them through search engines based on keywords, and track a candidate’s progress through telephone screens, interviews, and either an offer or a rejection. In fact, all the most popular applicant tracking systems are designed around the philosophy that the resume is central to recruiting. These systems enable the resume to be stored, retrieved, and matched against a requisition. They are not based on tracking relationships or people unless those people are “attached” to a particular requisition. This means that there is usually no way to gather and retrieve information about people who have not expressed interest in a specific job. There are a few systems, however, that are based on another and more useful philosophy ó that people and relationships are central to recruiting. These systems help recruiters develop and build relationships with people and develop talent communities. Most of the confusion recruiters have about applicant tracking systems is caused by not clearly understanding or appreciating the difference between these two philosophies. The agency world has been using tools that are more aligned to the relationship philosophy for some time now. They use applicant tracking systems that are designed to facilitate relationships, store contact information, and regularly communicate with candidates. These systems include Bullhorn and Prohire (which is built and sold by Recruitmax). The corporate recruiting world has focused almost exclusively on ATS-centered around tracking resumes. The applicant tracking systems most commonly used include Taleo, Webhire, Recruitmax, and Brassring. Some of them can do rudimentary relationship and talent community building, but their strength is around administrative and database functions. These relationship functions have been added on later and are not as seamlessly part of the product as they should be. Corporate recruiters who want to develop talent communities and build relationships are limited right now to a handful of systems. These include Hire.com and Yahoo! HotJobs’ HotHire (developed as a replacement for Resumix by Yahoo! Hotjobs) ó both products built more on the candidate relationship philosophy. Otherwise, corporate recruiters resort to contact management software such as ACT. Contact management software allows recruiters to store vital information about potentially interesting candidates, such as telephone and email data, as well as personal notes about the potential candidate. These systems also store resumes and track them against requisitions, but they are much better at candidate communication, scheduling appointments, reminding recruiters about specific people, and developing talent communities. They often provide candidates with tools to self-manage their relationship with the organization, such as updating their personal information when it changes or even removing themselves from the system when they are no longer interested. The history of how these systems evolved is fascinating and rich enough for several columns. But the core part of the story is that human resources functions are administrative and look for tools that help them store, track, codify and report data. Historically, HR and corporate recruiting had little interest in relationships or in “selling” jobs or people, and more interest in process and the ability to meet legal challenges. The agency world, on the other hand, has been built on relationship development and candidate communication. Recruiters who move from agencies to corporate roles are often surprised to find that they do not have the same tools. Many ex-agency recruiters feel handicapped in the corporate environment because of these differences in philosophy and tools. Agencies make their profits from quickly and efficiently putting good candidates in front of hiring managers. They often do not bother with resume storage, and instead keep track of potential candidate’s contact information and some notes about the candidate to help in their communication and to jog their memory about the candidate. When a need arises, they search through their notes and past communications to potential candidates and, when they find a potential fit, they call the person up, re-establish contact, and request a resume. This is slowly becoming the model corporate recruiters are using. It has many benefits. First of all, this philosophy changes the way recruiters source candidates. Rather than look for the perfect candidate who fits an exact need, they store information on a wide variety of people who may be a fit for some future position. As needs arise, they scan their contact lists, make phone calls and find or are led to an appropriate candidate very quickly. Often by using their persuasive powers, they influence hiring managers to consider candidates who otherwise might have been passed over because they were not exact matches to a requisition. This, in turn, reduces the time to present candidates. In fact, relationship-focused recruiters can often present a candidate in a few hours, rather than in a few days, which is more common. Time to present is becoming a measure of recruiter quality because it speaks to the recruiter’s ability to anticipate hiring managers’ needs and to have candidates ready. Unfortunately, most corporate recruiters spend lots of time looking at resumes of people who are unlikely to ever be hired and storing them. They do this to be legally compliant, to meet EEO guidelines, or just because the ATS requires that it be done that way. Corporate recruiters should learn from the agency model. Hiring managers go outside to agencies because they know they will quickly get appropriate candidates with little need for them to provide a lot of detail. Agencies can do this because they focus on understanding what needs the business has and which competencies will help meet those needs. Then they start to contact the people in their talent communities who have similar competencies. Within a few days, their contacts lead them to the best candidates. They rarely search resume databases or try to match requisitions to resumes. This is a futile effort for the most part, because hiring managers are never sure of exactly what they want and expect to be influenced by candidates and recruiters. In rare cases, hiring managers can even be delighted by the caliber of a candidate they did not expect to see. Matching humans to jobs requires flexibility ó something databases are by design not equipped to provide. A well-executed recruiting model assumes that matches are inexact and that candidates who meet the critical requirements but lack other requirements may be the preferred choice. Tools that provide flexibility in data entry, allow networking and candidate communication, and allow recruiters to make “fuzzy” matches to candidates will emerge as the winners in the overcrowded ATS marketplace.

article by Dr. John Sullivan & Master Burnett To the average human resource professional, it might seem as if everyone in the corporate world is on the verge of information overload these days. No matter where you look, data is being collected, manipulated, and pushed back out. From computer generated reports sent via e-mail to status updates sent to your Blackberry, massive volumes of information are swarming around. Most of this information is utterly useless; after all, it does nothing more than tell you about historical performance according to some oversimplified formula that in reality tells you little about how to do your job more effectively. That said, information in general can be very powerful ó if the type of data collected and the method used to collect it are accurately aligned with the type of decisions you will need to make upfront. Unfortunately, most measurement systems start with what data is easiest to collect. This article is going to focus on world-class measurement related to making corporate employment sites more effective, but the concepts presented here could be applied to almost any topic. Reporting versus Operational Metrics The problem with most corporate recruiting metrics is that they are designed to report up in an organization, not power the day-to-day decision-making process where small corrections are needed to keep a fast-moving organization on track. These types of metrics are commonly referred to as “reporting metrics,” and are most often reported out on a periodic basis versus a timeline associated with operational actions or event-dictated responses. They are great at telling you that something isn’t working, but horrible at telling you why it isn’t working, or where your process to achieve certain results went awry. This results in most reports being deemed not relevant by those who need the information most. Before you go saying that’s not true, think about how many reports get circulated in your organization, and then think about what percentage of them you actively refer to when making a decision. Most data suggests that in an average organization, only 17% of the information made available via standardized reporting gets used! Making Web Measures World Class and Usable The keys to making web measures world-class are pretty much the same as those required to make any set of measures world class. They include:

1. Making the information provided actionable. This edict cannot be repeated enough. To make information valued in an organization, it must be presented in such a way that the recipient can immediately realize how to make use of the information ó and how to act differently.

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It sometimes seems as if recruiters and technology are like oil and water ó almost impossible to mix. I am rarely at a client for very long before the “issue” of technology comes up. Usually, it’s in the form of a complaint. I hear things like, “Our ATS can’t do what?” or, “I wish I could get better metrics, but my ATS can’t create the reports I need,” or, “The recruiters here never bother to enter the right data or they don’t use the system at all.” When I talk with finance groups or engineering departments, technology is never an issue. They seem to live together in harmony, albeit with a few blips here and there. While a few people I know have said that they feel computers are just too impersonal for people-oriented recruiters to be comfortable with, I know many very warm and successful recruiters who are advocates and users of very sophisticated systems. There are several reasons why these systems are hard to sell, poorly utilized, and rarely praised. Poor Understanding of Current Processes No system can do what you want if you don’t know what you want to do. Many recruiters cannot tell me the entire process of getting a new employee hired. When I ask them to pretend they are a candidate or a job requisition and then take me through the various steps to get to a hire, they can only get through those steps they play a part in. Many pieces of the recruiting process are vague or ill-defined, even to those who do them. Often, many people do a small part of a process and no one really knows it all. Just as often, the processes themselves are not efficient. Employees in manufacturing environments have had process improvement goals for years. Consultants and academics have been hired to analyze and probe into every aspect of producing a product, until today we are able to produce products of all types with fewer people and greater quality and at lower cost than ever before in history. The spotlight is now being turned on to the “soft” processes, such as recruiting, and these processes will be examined and streamlined immensely over the next several years. Recommendation: Before even thinking about an applicant tracking system, you have to write down or draw a diagram of every process step the requisition, the hiring manager, the recruiter, and the candidate have to go through to complete a hire. You will ask why the step is necessary and what would happen if it were eliminated. You will simplify and make sure the step is adding value and producing quality. Then you will be able to compare what you need to get done with the capabilities of whatever ATS you are evaluating. This is the first and most important step in creating the RFP or of even talking to a vendor. You have to know exactly what you want and why. Undefined or Unclear Goals for Your System I find that recruiting departments rarely define what they expect the system to do for them. Do you expect it to reduce cost per hire? Maybe you expect it will speed up the time to offer? Or the time to hire? Perhaps candidate quality will improve? Maybe all of these? You also need to have a straightforward answer to the following questions: Why are you buying this system at all? Why can’t you just continue to do it the way you have done it in the past? Recommendation: Have a realistic and clear view of what you can expect. Know what is realistic to expect by asking other organizations what their experiences have been. The ATS vendors should be able to provide you with examples from other customers. Typically, users find that for the first year or so costs may not go down very much as there is a learning curve. You may need to maintain an old system while the new system is being implemented. That is why having a realistic picture is so important. If you have sold the idea of the applicant tracking system as a way to significantly reduce costs, your boss may be very unhappy when those savings don’t show up. Besides, saving money is a dumb reason to buy one of these. It just isn’t a good enough reason and rarely happens anyway. These systems should be purchased because they make you more productive and improve candidate quality or the candidate experience. A Lengthy and Bureaucratic Vendor Selection Process I am always amazed at the RFPs for applicant tracking systems I see from many very large and well-known organizations. They are pages in length and cover so much detail that that the forest is entirely missed for the trees. There are, in my experience, four critical things to know about the vendor and its product. Everything else is nice to know, but not critical. In theory your RFP could be one or two pages long. Here are the four major issues you need to address to devise an effective RFP:

1. Does the system have at least 80% of the features that you think you will need? Can it produce the reports you need? Can it integrate with your HRIS system? Can the vendor give you examples, and will that cost be part of the quote? Obviously, you have to have completed my first recommendation above and know your processes and what you need very thoroughly. You also have to realize and accept that no system will be likely to do 100% of what you want without great expense and customization. Be realistic and work with the vendor you choose over time to evolve the missing elements.

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In my humble opinion 2004, has been a great year for the online hiring industry. I believe this is due to the development of the following trends:

1. The ATS industry has finally started to get it! The jig is up for companies that have promised to increase quality of hire but fail to offer infrastructure capable of fulfilling the promise. Market demand has required that ATS vendors of all sizes begin to evaluate how they can deliver this essential, but often missing, ingredient. To their credit, most vendors have reacted accordingly and are working hard on a new generation of products that provide the substance required to help their customers make quality hiring decisions.

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Every month, I do an article on the state of technology. This month is no exception. While progress is occurring in using technology for improving hiring and recruiting processes, I’m disappointed that it’s not occurring more rapidly. From our investigations, this is more of a problem with the users of technology ó the customers ó than the vendors. For significant progress to be made on the IT front, recruiters and recruiting managers need to become better customers. They quickly need to be better users of technology. By demanding more robust systems, vendors will respond. They have the will and the capacity, but not enough direction. Unfortunately, too many customers demand features that are often unnecessary, counter-productive or poorly thought out. Collectively, this is why technology has not progressed as rapidly in the hiring/recruiting area as it might have. We’re going to change all of that. You’ll have an opportunity to accelerate this trend and become part of a new technology movement. Information on how to participate will be provided at the end of this article. Not all will qualify, but if you’d like to influence the technology product roadmap, it’s something you should consider. For now, let’s just set a new direction. In my opinion, the overall objective of technology is to maximize candidate quality while reducing time to fill and cost to hire. From this perspective, the investment in technology has not had a great ROI. To achieve this maximum quality/shorter time/lower cost objective, here are some of the big areas where technology needs to improve:

1. Handling the needs of less active and passive candidates. For example, recruiters need to focus on job descriptions that are compelling, easy to find, and easy to apply for. The ability to build and manage pipelines of top people with CRM (customer relation management) capability is also important.

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At one time there was a popular folk song called “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” You might remember it (it’s okay to hum along if you do):

Where have all the flowers gone? Long time passing…

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For many companies, employment websites do much more than just collect resumes: they provide a distinct competitive edge for top talent. But whether you’re in a large or small company, whether you have a big budget or a small one, whether you act as an in-house or agency recruiter, there are many lessons to be learned from those who do it best. So what makes an employment website one of the best? Start by thinking of your best recruiters, who:

• Find and talk to people who might not have considered or even heard of your organization in the past ó and not just the people with resumes.

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In the past few weeks I’ve written about two seemingly unrelated issues ó the shift in corporate America to emphasizing the hiring of less-active candidates, and how to assess executive potential in up-and-coming managers. The first article highlighted the need for applicant tracking systems (ATS) to improve the suite of candidate relationship management services companies use. Less active candidates have different needs than active candidates (two examples: more information with respect to how the job ties into the business strategy, and implementing a continuing dialogue of the status of major company hiring initiatives), and a properly designed ATS can automate much of this. The second article indicated that one of the important traits that senior line executives need to possess is the ability to use technology to more efficiently manage and scale business processes. Such business functions as distribution, sales, and manufacturing have been able to use technology to provide profound improvements in performance. HR/recruiting hasn’t seen had the same IT/process improvement benefit. In my opinion, not many HR managers truly understand how IT can impact business performance. This is why few get promoted to business unit management positions and why even the best ATSs are not as effective as they could be. This could be sheer speculation on my part. So to prove the point, I’d like you to take this quick assessment of how well your ATS measures up against the best, and how much it’s costing you every day. A low score across many companies will prove my point that HR/Recruiting and IT don’t mix. One clue you might have a problem: low user adoption rates. If you don’t have at least two-thirds of your recruiters properly using the major features of your ATS, you’re wasting lots of time and too much money. More important, you’re not hiring all of the top people you should be. The ATS Performance Evaluation Where do you stand on these important measures? 1. Recruiter adoption rates

• Good: At least two-thirds of the recruiting team uses most of the features of your ATS, keeping all information current.

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My efforts to stay on top of the online screening and assessment marketplace have proven to be an interesting. This is a very challenging market ó one that is not easy to sum up in a few simple words. The factors that are currently keeping the picture a bit on the cloudy side include:

• Broad scope and fragmentation. Screening and assessment involves a wide variety of different products that are offered by many different types of vendors.

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Almost every day I am confronted with some new product or service that promises to greatly enhance, and often to revolutionize, the recruiting function. I don’t think it has ever been clearer that our profession is evolving and changing more quickly than any of us predicted. The Internet is the centerpiece of most organization’s recruiting tactics and we now have tools to help us at every stage of the recruiting process. Unfortunately, we have a plethora of tools ó but a paucity of wisdom and skill in applying them effectively. Recruiters are confused, as are the senior management teams of most organizations, as to which technologies are essential to winning the talent war and which are fads. I often meet recruiters who equate technology with job boards, or who feel as if Internet searching is the only way to find candidates, or who have no idea as to what is good or bad in technology or what works and what doesn’t work. Tools and services are frequently purchased because the salesperson did an effective job in selling the benefits of their product, or because the recruiter is afraid that they will lose their competitive edge if they don’t have the latest tools. Unfortunately, recruiters rarely have a clear strategy on how to deploy and integrate technology into their recruiting process. In order to steer technology choices, there has to be an understanding of what is happening in the world of recruiting technology and there has to be an appreciation for the evolutionary nature of all technology. The rules of successful technology adoption are as follows. 1. Understand that change is the watchword of technology. Whatever software or Internet application you are using today, it will significantly change or be obsolete within one year. It may be upgraded, it may evolve or merge with some other technology, or it may simply be superseded by a better concept. You always need to understand this when you invest in a technology. Spend money to acquire a solution to a business need ó not because it is recommended by a friend or used by a competitor. Build into your internal sales pitch an understanding of the transitory and rapidly changing nature of many of these tools and the organizations that create them. On the other hand, don’t abandon a solution because of one or two missing features or because of minor technology issues. Switching from solution to solution almost never solves anything and almost always causes more problems. You should plan on three-year minimum commitments to a technology unless something very radical occurs. 2. Develop an overall strategy for your recruiting process. I am always surprised to learn that many (maybe most) recruiting departments really do not have an overall vision for where they would like to go or any plan to get there. But to have a successful technology strategy, you also must have a vision of what you would like to achieve. You need to have goals for performance improvement, quality, speed, and other parameters that are important to your organization. A good strategy requires that you involve stakeholders (hiring managers, new hires, recruiters, management, human resources, and others) in a discussion of where the recruiting function can add value. It requires knowing your organization and your staff well enough to judge its capabilities ó its strengths as well as its weaknesses. Engaging in a strategic planning session reaffirms your value and moves you beyond the tactical. 3. Know why you investing in the technology. As I mentioned above, technology should fit into your strategy and solve a business problem. It should ease your workload, help you improve candidate quality, or allow you to provide better customer service. All your technology acquisitions should take place against a master plan. This plan should list all the areas where you think you can or should apply technology and also list the sequence you would like to acquire and implement them in. The recruiting process can be broken into large “chunks” of processes: workforce planning, branding and marketing, sourcing, screening and assessing, tracking and scheduling, on-boarding, and perhaps retention. No single technology solution can help in every one of these chunks. The applicant tracking system, for example, is frequently the first (and often only) technology solution that is bought, yet it is most effective at the tracking and scheduling parts, and perhaps at the screening phase. Most applicant tracking systems, however, do not help you brand, source, assess, orient, or plan. Equally important, but often neglected, is the recruiting website. It is at the front of your entire process and is often the candidate’s first view of your organization. It’s a powerful marketing tool for your recruiting efforts. There is growing awareness of the need for sophisticated screening and assessment tools and also for better workforce planning solutions. It is important to know what you need and in what order. 4. Evolve your solutions and work for integration. Revolution may have its place, but in our world it is far better to adopt technology at a pace equal to your own, your recruiters’, and your hiring managers’ ability to use it effectively. Start with a single technology solution. When you are comfortable with it, add another piece. Continuously add technology according to your plan, enforce its use, train people to use it, and evolve toward your vision. Some organizations can move quickly; others take more time. But it you move at a pace that is fairly comfortable, you will find that the technology gets used and that recruiters and hiring managers actually begin to reply on it rather then on backup manual solutions. Technology is a tool and needs to be integrated carefully into processes that are evolving and adapting to ever changing business needs and priorities. The 21st century is one that will find many technologies moving into recruiting. We all need to learn how to choose the right solutions for the right problems.

I’ve been following the assessment market for the past 10 years and I am happy to say that it seems like people are finally starting to realize the value that assessment tools can add to their hiring processes. After five years of standing on my soapbox, I am finally starting to feel like I am not wasting my breath. While we still have a long way to go, I am feeling very encouraged lately and want to use this space to take a brief look at what I feel are some of the main reasons for the increasing interest in these tools. This article provides my opinion on the five main reasons for the increasing interest in these tools as well as a discussion of some of the major obstacles to their use. So why is online assessment gaining in popularity?

1. Increased ability to create new and innovative products. Technology has fundamentally changed the world of assessment. Administrative burdens no longer present a barrier to the use of assessments. More importantly, companies on the cutting edge of this market are blending technology and assessment content to create systems in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The rise of companies that are equal parts assessment and technology has resulted in the creation of products that can do much more than the paper-and-pencil products of the past.

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How quickly some things change! The idea of a Walkman sounds positively archaic in today’s iPod world. Your kids (or interns) probably have no idea what an LP is, but say “MP3″ and the know immediately what you’re talking about. So perhaps we can all take some comfort in that fact that, even in our ever-changing world, there are still some terms that have tremendous staying power. In golf, a driver is still called a wood, even though these days it’s often 100% titanium. Coke is still Coke a century later, even if it’s now available in more varieties than its inventor, John Pemberton, ever dreamed of. And the system you use at work to manage your hiring process ó it’s still an applicant tracking system. Or is it? It’s interesting to see that the term applicant tracking system has enjoyed tremendous staying power since the 1980s, even while customer requirements and system capabilities have continuously evolved. It’s not that the term isn’t an accurate description of the raw purpose of the tool. On the contrary, Applicant Tracking System gets right to the primary purpose of these tools: tracking applicants from the point of application to the point of hire. The problem is that as tools and processes have evolved, it has become a limiting term that no longer accurately portrays the value of the tool’s potential ó or our needs as recruiters in 2004. Technology has ushered in new ways of thinking about and executing on talent attraction, selection, and acquisition. Applicants can be processed more efficiently and with greater care. Candidate relationship management, once reserved for top-tier professional applicants, can be realized across every level of job seeker. Proprietary talent communities provide companies with opportunities for targeted marketing and can ultimately reduce time to fill and cost per hire while increasing the value of the employment brand. These benefits provide a foundation for talent management to be in play at a broad and individual level. Don’t be mistaken. If the biggest pain point in your recruiting process today is that you have no way to track applicants electronically, an applicant tracking system may be exactly the relief you’re looking for. If, however, your recruiting challenges are even just a little more complex, applicant tracking almost certainly understates your needs. For example, applicant tracking isn’t about helping to brand your company as an employer of choice. It does not focus on providing a great experience to candidates on your corporate website when they apply for your jobs. It emphasizes administrative processes (e.g., tracking applicants) over process improvement (e.g., automatically screening candidates for their fit with a specific job). It doesn’t speak to providing integrated tools to enhance the efficiency of your recruiters, such as job libraries, correspondence templates, recruiter-to-recruiter communication tools, and reporting modules. In short, a decent applicant tracking system will certainly help you track applicants; it’s just not likely to help you win the best ones, collect the most useful data, or deliver the level of efficiency to your recruiting process that most of us need. And with smaller teams and more limited resources, we need these things now more than ever before. So, what’s better? Well, it may be no match for the cool factor of iPod, but hiring management system isn’t bad. It’s certainly much more descriptive of the requirements many corporate recruiters share today, in a world that’s a little more complex than the days when tracking applicants electronically was truly a differentiator. If applicant tracking has evolved to become something of a commodity, hiring management is still very much a differentiator in corporate America. Hiring management systems facilitate a more complete story of the power and flexibility offered by technology as a differentiator to leverage expectations, performance, and process. Let’s explore a few of the differences between hiring management and applicant tracking, with a goal of helping you to decide where your organization is heading and which approach is the best fit for you. For most recruiters, a basic applicant tracking system, even if it starts as an Excel spreadsheet or Access database, is a key to survival and certainly to efficiency. If anything, the urgency to implement even a basic system has only increased in the past few years, as the Internet has made it so easy for candidates to apply for jobs. If you don’t have an automated way to capture and search for candidate information, your job is going to be defined by performing administrative tasks that consume a significant portion of your available time ó time that could almost certainly be better spent on higher-level activities. The good news is that if you’re just getting started with applicant tracking, there are many good systems available today to fit almost any budget. Hiring management picks up where applicant tracking left off. Tracking your applicants efficiently is no longer a self-sustaining hiring process, and you will inevitably start focusing on the following areas to raise your recruiting process to the next level:

• Tight integration between the hiring management system and corporate recruitment site. This is key, because it is the basis for ensuring a consistent and positive job seeker experience. It’s also the most visible aspect of the online employment brand interface. The hiring management system needs to support the integrity of the company’s brand first and foremost, which, depending on the company, plays out at varying levels of complexity. An intuitive, flexible interface, supported by data capture, provides insight into the job seeker and drives the overall effectiveness of the system.

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Any recruiter worth his or her salt knows that there are three essential elements to recruiting: 1) sourcing or finding names, 2) assessment, and 3) selling the candidate. Most corporate recruiters are weakest at the first stage, which is finding the names and contact information of the ideal candidate (the working professional that has the same job title as your open requisition). Fortunately, there is an easy solution to this candidate identification problem that, for some reason, 75% of the corporate recruiters and 98% of the managers I have worked with have never heard of. It’s puzzling to me that they don’t utilize it, because this solution to finding and targeting candidates is quick, relatively inexpensive, and essentially ends the candidate identification problem. The solution goes by a variety of names including:

• Names research

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Few people nowadays would disagree that recruiting is a business-critical function. Accepting that maxim would naturally lead to the conclusion that the tools used to support something so important (i.e. applicant tracking systems) should lend themselves to the task. Unfortunately, these products tend to be hobbled by low expectations among users and an antiquated approach to recruiting in the organizations that use them. Buyers vs. Users Low expectations are chiefly the result of the fact the “buyers” and actual users of applicant tracking systems are two distinct groups of people. The buyers ó i.e. the people in charge of making the purchasing decision ó are typically HR or IT executives, or a combination of the two. The typical senior HR executive today came up the ranks as a generalist or as a lawyer from the employee relations side. Other specialties ó such as benefits, compensation, or recruiting ó are rarely, if ever, a path to the top. A few enlightened companies move seasoned business executives into HR, but they are the exception to the rule. Unfortunately, a pure HR background does not include much understanding of strategy and talent acquisition. An incident from my own past illustrates the problem well. At the time, I was implementing an ATS for a large company as part of an effort to deliver centralized HR services, including recruiting. The company’s employee relations team produced a 28-page flow chart of the recruiting process that they wanted supported by the ATS. The process ensured compliance at every stage, no matter how irrelevant. The senior employee relations executive put the priorities in perspective: In the event of an audit he wanted to be able to sit an OFCCP auditor at a terminal and provide irrefutable proof of compliance. Considerations such as quality of hire, talent pools, etc. did not even enter the picture. He never even bothered to ask executive management if there might be other goals associated with the implementation of the ATS. At the time I asked if he had computed the risk of non-compliance. This is a relatively straightforward equation: (probability of an audit) X (probability of being found in violation) X (dollar amount of the likely fine or loss) This equation produces a dollar amount that should be compared to the business impact of delays in finding talent or getting poor quality talent. Obviously such a calculation should not be the only justification in deciding on how to value compliance; there are higher goals and ethical considerations that supersede any financial calculation. But these numbers do help frame the debate. Businesses do these kinds of cost/benefit analyses all the time ó so why not apply the same to recruiting? The trouble is that quantifying data to decide on a course of action is not something that HR does very frequently or very well. The situation I found myself in is not atypical. More often than not an ATS is intended to serve as a compliance tool and little more. In 2003, the OFFCP audited 4% of the 192,000+ firms considered to be federal contractors. Of those audited, 1260, or 16%, were cited for violations. Do the math and you’ll see that the odds of being found in violation are about 0.7%. Consider, too, that there are no penalties for failing an audit, other than the risk of being debarred from doing business with the federal government. This is a serious consideration, but in reality it is an unlikely occurrence. Fewer than two hundred firms have been debarred since 1972. Considering that over a million firms have done business with the Federal government over the same period, the risk of debarment is 0.02%. Federal and state agencies would much rather work out a conciliation agreement than debar a firm. Even the most egregious violations don’t necessarily translate into huge risks. In 2003, twelve firms were considered for litigation stemming from systematic discrimination, but suits were only filed against five, resulting in damages of $6.2 million. Using the same formula above, the risk is about $32. Considering the cost of a high-end ATS, that’s an expensive insurance policy to protect against a rather small risk, if that’s the main purpose. If the buyer is an IT executive then the situation is even worse. Now the focus is entirely on factors like support and security. While these are not insignificant considerations, they should not precede functionality and value delivered. Then again, with no concept of value in recruiting, one can hardly blame IT executives for focusing on what concerns them most. Small wonder that ERP vendors find most of the successes for their recruiting modules at organizations where HR has abrogated the decision to IT. At the end of the day, what all this means is that buyers are hobbling users with second- or third-rate functionality. Their best recruiters are stuck with systems that provide support where it least counts. Suborning the creative talents of good recruiters to an administrative process destroys value. The better recruiters lose their ability to stretch their talents. Contact Management Functionality That Doesn’t Deliver Just one example of this limitation is the poor support among most ATS products for networking and contact management. Few ATS products, except for those targeted toward the staffing industry, offer capabilities that allow a recruiter to build and maintain a pipeline of talent. In many ways, contact management products such as ACT or Goldmine are far better as recruiting tools than your typical ATS, given how important networking is to effective recruiting. Even a free product such as Plaxo provides a more robust alternative to managing a network of contacts or candidates. The much vaunted resume database is not an acceptable alternative. There is usually no way to keep it updated with useful information and no tools beyond a search engine to tap what’s in it. Having the ability to just convert it into a skills database would at least be a beginning, but that typically requires third-party functionality. Contact management products like the ones mentioned above give users the ability to enter detailed contact information, cross-reference names, store documents, to view records of changes in the contact’s personal or business situation, and manage and view other useful information. Contact data can also be modified to suit a particular need. Reports can be generated that show the status of a relationship or activities relevant to a need. By contrast, an ATS maintains a candidate profile within rigid parameters, with virtually no ability to customize the profile. Details outside the profile are limited to notes that cannot be meaningfully reported on. The core design of an ATS has missed the point. Astoundingly, virtually all ATS products have glossed over the sourcing component, choosing to lump it in with workflow ó once again exposing the lack of business acumen in HR and IT. The significance of good support for sourcing capabilities cannot be overemphasized. Finding quality talent takes more than just having a career site or access to a job board. To state the obvious, the better candidates are almost always sought after and harder to find. An ATS, with its emphasis on process and treating candidates like so many parts on an assembly line, eliminates any ability to creatively source talent. This approach works for most entry-level jobs where little distinguishes candidates and the supply often exceeds demand, but it does not work well for jobs that require complex skills and extensive or unique experience. The supply-chain model of staffing that gets implemented with an ATS also fails because it assumes that supply will be available and delivered at the point where it’s needed. That may well be relevant for manufacturing toilet tanks or PCs, but it doesn’t apply to recruiting. This is why organizations pay search firms the big fees. The skill set required to find high quality talent is the same, whether it’s with a recruiter employed by a large organization or at small search firm. The recruiter at a search firm is not concerned about compliance and focuses instead on maintaining a network of contacts that can be tapped as needed. Hiring managers know that their in-house recruiters are forced to work within a straight jacket of regulations and compliance, regardless of the cost. Consequently, turning to a search firm is often the only option for filling critical jobs, with the less important jobs left to the in-house recruiters. What is needed in an ATS is a modular approach to functionality ó offering progressively more advanced functionality to the more talented recruiters. Better contact management is one area that needs to be addressed, but another can be simple override capabilities, that is, allowing the better recruiters to adapt a process to their needs. Of course, the compliance brigades would be apoplectic at the idea, but this is not exactly a unique concept. Accounting and financial systems all support overrides for those who know what they are doing. Every now and then that produces an Enron, but the overwhelming majority of users are not on a quest to create trouble or violate compliance requirements just because they have the opportunity to do so. In any event, for the small number of violators that exist, compliance is better enforced by management action than technology. An accident of history placed recruiting in the HR department. This was most unfortunate since HR has little understanding of or much desire to do anything with recruiting. Generalists do not aspire to be recruiters (there is not a single for-credit course on recruiting available at any accredited college or university anywhere in the country). HR is about predictability and stability: paychecks, benefits, and employee relations. HR is among the last bastions of socialism: equity and consistency is more important than speed and quality. Looked at through this lens the recruiting process represents a potential hotbed of radicalism. Left to their own devices, recruiters would simply focus on finding the best talent at whatever price the market requires them to pay, ignoring issues like compliance, pay equity, and that ultimate sacred cow, diversity. So an ATS ends up catering to the lowest common denominator instead of raising the bar. In this respect it’s not just about destroying value but also preventing value from being created. Recruiters working with an ATS are often forced to reach out to external search firms, adding to their organization’s staffing expenses, while depending on a resource that does not have any stake in the success of their organization. Providing a good recruiter with the functionality in a typical ATS is like putting training wheels on Lance Armstrong’s bicycle. There may be value in doing so for the novice or poorly trained recruiter, but they drag down a more talented professional. Anyone who has even average recruiting skills loses their ability to improve on them if they’re straight-jacketed by an ATS.