The Staffing Strategy Connection
CareerXroads®Update
January 2013
By Gerry Crispin, SPHR and Mark Mehler
mmc@careerxroads.com
2013: Back to The Future
We are avid fans of crystal-ball gazing and enjoy uncovering clues to the future. Despite our penchant for guessing what is around the corner, however, it is actually more interesting (and worthwhile) to simply ponder the possibilities we see in the present and report on them. That's what we typically do with our Update and the Colloquium Bellwether. The bigger problem this time of year is that predictions (including ours) succumb to two fatal flaws:
1. Stating the obvious. How hard is it, for example, to examine the data surrounding the exponential sales of smartphones and tablets with the fact that only 10% of Fortune 500 firms have mobile-enabled their career content and conclude there will be change? (Open to discussion is whether 15%, 25% or 35%+ of the Fortune 500 will have developed mobile-enabled career platforms by the end of 2013. Go ahead, pick a number.)
What prognosticator worth his or her salt would ignore similar changes in Work Analytics, Sourcing, Branding, Social Media, Candidate Experience, and Measurement? Is there an unintended consequence of a trend we all know is happening? (We did make a $1 bet four years ago with one VP of Talent Acquisition that at least one city bordering the ocean (my pick was Miami) would 'go under' within five years from a natural disaster as a result of global warming. We almost claimed a win after Oct 29 with NYC being lost but didn't push the claim.
Our point was that if natural disasters are on the rise then what is your [Business/HR/Staffing] Plan B to keep your business afloat? Could you ramp up to recruit and replace any critical function lost to such an event? And do it so much faster than your competitors it would give you an edge?
But we digress - - -
2. The second flaw is timing. Nothing happens in a year. Even ten years is questionable. To illustrate, in 2002 we wrote and published a lengthy, fictional story about just one person in the year 2012, Jaime Beth, a passive job seeker and highly valued employee who encounters a situation where she begins considering a job change for the first time.
Here are some of the headlines from that 2002 article along with our comments about what we were trying to get across in describing the future of 2012. We gave each prediction a (+) or (-) indicating our success.
Technology promises new solutions but only if we own the original problem. We believed in 2002 that within 10 years individual stakeholders, especially the job seeker, would be well-educated in career mapping concepts and have a clearer long term plan for themselves in the context of their life goals. Unfortunately job seekers are generally as clueless as ever and employers have yet to map the expected outcomes they plan to achieve for EVERY stakeholder in the process. Until we know what they are it will be impossible to measure the recruiting function's success or failure. (-)
Knowledge Management is creating paths to follow in a forest of data. We described our story's heroine, Jaime Beth following a stream of text she didn't understand (a confusing company policy) and noted that she was able to 'click' on it and instantly connect in real-time [audio and video] to an [HR] person she 'knew' who understood the context of her inquiry on several levels. (+)
High-tech without high-touch can raise the bar a notch. Together, they change the bar itself. This was a description of such a high level of customer service (how an internal HR person managed to engage one of the firm's pivotal employees) that we doubt we will see anything similar for another ten years, if ever. On the other hand, the renewed interest in candidate experience gives one hope (-)
Baby Boomers will trigger (once again) the changes that lead to the reinvention of work. Self-evident despite our 'excellent' rationale. (+)
Selecting someone for a job is not the same as fitting the job to the person. We still don't know how to describe a job properly let alone adjust it to the needs of the individual in the context of a group. This will wait for computers to become smarter than humans, perhaps sometime around 2035(-)
Employee Referrals will remain the core source of new talent. Self-evident. (+)
Diversity is simply a description of how we make use of everyone's capabilities. In this part of the story, a meeting, held totally online, included a team member in another country who was deaf. She participated with technology aids in such a way that no one noticed she was deaf. The focus was on achieving a solution (and the technology converting voice to text and vice versa was flawless). We've come a long way but definitely on a global basis neither the technology nor the acceptance is without flaw. (-)
Ongoing career management services are critical to the success of educational institutions and professional associations. This segment of the scenario speculated that trusted sources of career connections (i.e. alumni and professional associations) would develop services for their members to help protect privacy and improve the timing when details about certifications, grades, accomplishments, etc. could be disclosed - sort of a professional registry) (-)
Retention and employment are linked. Privacy and disclosure are linked. Data collection, data analysis and planning will drive staffing processes all centered on communication with targeted talent and those who influence them. An individual's data cannot be warehoused without permission to access it each and every time. These elements reflected our thinking that HR would predict a spike in the risk that they might lose the employee (who was now a job seeker) based on her searches, inquiries about policy, etc. and, since her 'value' to the firm was high the HR system would 'initiate' a requirement to solve an inferred problem. Way out but hey it was 10 years ago. (-)
The most successful companies will develop strategies that emphasize candidate choice not company selection. Still working this one. See The Candidate Experience Awards (-)
We finished the story in 2002 stating three rules governing the evolution of recruiting:
- Follow the Job seeker;
- Network to build community with your prospects; and,
- Measure everything you do.
All that being said, one of the more interesting and worthwhile posts we've read around 2013 predictions is John Sumser's, Five Links: The Unevenly Distributed Future. Just remember to adjust for the two flaws we noted earlier.
Interlude: Some Recruiter That I Used to Know
This parody of the song Someone I Used to Know is hilarious - - - and pretty much on target.
Firms Press to Hire Young Veterans
We enjoyed seeing the recognition firms like GE, Lockheed, JPMorgan and many others deserve for their commitment to military hiring. One valuable new player, the US Chamber of Commerce was noted in this WSJ article: " - - - the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over the past 18 months has been organizing Hiring Our Heroes job fairs around the country. So far, the chamber says, it has held about 300 fairs, at which more than 10,000 veterans and their spouses have found jobs."
Kudos.
Can You Recognize This Recruiting Model?
"Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't." ~ Mark Twain
See if you can place who uses this staffing model without skipping to the end.
You are responsible for an organization that has thousands of openings to fill. For you, big data is an everyday part of your operational initiative. Everyone (and we do mean everyone) who could possibly join your organization is known to you. Access to the details about them has been acquired through partners and is very cost-effective (about $.35 per). More than just a qualified lead with the necessary skills, knowledge, and experience, you also have access to other demographic characteristics (bio-data) about each and every lead that relates to your organization's 'fit' and it all can be uploaded into your tracking system.
In fact not only are ALL (100%) of the potential pool of candidates known but your analysis of the factors that predict success for any one of these individuals can be calculated. So, without you ever meeting them, without their having ever heard of you, selection and assessment is moot for most. It is like finding a mine with the entire world's supply of a given metal in a ready to use state - as long as you can acquire it.
And therein lies the rub.
The bad news is that this universe of pre-qualified prospects has been getting smaller for some time (and, in fact, industry-wide is 4.5% smaller than just four years ago). There aren't enough to go around and your competitors' prospects, having worked out similar algorithms for success, overlap your prospects. In some cases your competitors are even more desperate to engage these prospects and get them to join their organization over yours. After all we can calculate their value to the organization's future performance.
You know, and your leaders tell you often, that organizations that are not competing successfully for this diminishing pool are already going out of business. Sometimes quickly, because they are not compromising their standards and thus failing to get enough prospects to convert or, more slowly, as they attempt to make do with lesser quality candidates and are outperformed by organizations who get more than their share of quality candidates.
Engaging the most qualified, highly desired prospects into this industry's supply chain is a serious business. To compete, successful organizations realized some time ago that there is only a small grey area where you need to spend additional time assessing a candidate. Most prospects that you've been able to convert to candidates (by getting them to apply) are essentially all capable of succeeding. Selection (by the candidate) is now the key to recruiting and your strategy focuses on combining sourcing, branding and measurement to influence the qualified candidate's choice at every step - from making them aware to giving them reasons to apply and, of course, closing the deal.
A few successful strategies that you have developed in this climate include:
- Heavy investment in collection and analysis of data. You invest upfront in acquiring qualified leads, i.e. individuals who can succeed and will likely choose your organization based on a profile of characteristics about the individual, as well as a competitive analysis of how desperately your competitors are wooing them and your investment in the candidate's experience. You have validated this factor-analytic approach during the last decade. You constantly tweak it and can confidently predict the likelihood that a candidate will select you.
- Mass-customized messaging and media. Based on your analysis, you typically message large numbers of highly attractive prospects multiple times in a varied but planned out series of scripts across every medium, measuring the results - often in real-time. Your well-documented, carefully researched and constantly self-correcting algorithms demonstrate that the combination of message + medium + incentive = higher rates of return leading to > engagement then application then joining. It's not about social media or mobile-enabled platforms. It's about constantly exploring and measuring what messages in which medium cause a quality candidate to take an action - and in what time frame.
- Leveraged, face-to-face high-touch interactions. As one of the most competitive organizations, you are also leveraging the awareness and interest you are building from the relatively low cost initiatives noted above with a high-cost, high-touch strategy of deploying a platoon of recruiters into the field. You send these recruiters where concentrations of the best prospects currently live, to meet, greet and develop relationships face-to-face. As a result, your organization has an increased number of highly qualified prospects applying so you can select the best of the best.
- Reduced supply chain friction. Organizations like yours are making it simpler and easier to move prospects through their pipeline. Having already acquired the information you need to select them you can move much faster when their interest has peaked. In some cases where the predictive correlation with future success is particularly high, prospects can be accepted without application, interview or other requirements.
One unintended (but inevitable) consequence of your recruiting model is that your methods and especially your success are transparent to the entire world. Since your organization's long-term performance is so clearly and directly dependent on the number of quality candidates you can interest in joining you, independent agencies have emerged to evaluate your recruiting function as one measure of the health of your organization. These organizations examine the ratio of the total number of qualified candidates (those who have applied and are fully qualified) to the number of openings you are projected to fill based on your business plan needs. The agency publishes a list of the top 100 organizations in several categories, in part, based on this ratio. (For example if you have 45,000 fully qualified applicants for 5,000 openings you are ranked higher (9/1 versus 2/1) than an organization with only 10,000 fully qualified candidates for the same # of openings).
Their rankings for you and your competitors are published periodically and impact your firms' investors as well as future prospects. Your leadership reads and reacts to these rankings - big time.
While in the past, it was common to have 100 applicants for every job, someone forgot to point out that 2/3 of those (estimated) were not qualified. Today we can easily show the total available pool, the number of times prospects in the pool have been touched, the number of qualified and vetted prospects who have applied and the ratio of qualified applicants to hires necessary to meet plan. Now assume you are pressured to share it publicly as a predictive measure of your future success or face stockholders pulling out.
Oh, welcome to the world of college admissions! This article in the Wall Street Journal: Colleges Rise as They Reject, essentially describes everything detailed above.
Are You (Candidate) Experienced?
Lars Schmidt, NPR's Senior Director of Talent Acquisition, offers practical suggestions in his blog, Amplify Talent, about meeting the challenges of improving the Candidate Experience. We especially liked his thoughts on getting a base measure from candidates.
It's increasingly clear that employers who ask for feedback about the experience they are creating need to think their messaging through carefully and decide how deeply into an operational definition to go - when to tell candidates that they didn't get the job, what message will best engage a candidate who didn't get the job to respond constructively, etc.
In Lars' case he is using a variation on a customer service approach by asking if the candidate would be willing to 'refer' someone in the future. We think these are important considerations and they tie in to some of the data collected this fall via the Candidate Experience Awards. Stay tuned for that to be released by the end of January.
Sometimes It Is Who You Know
Most Employers' ERPs ask their employee "Who do you (employee) know outside our firm?" As Dave Zielinski learned in writing this article for SHRM, it may be just as important to build tools that ask prospects, "Who do you (candidate) know inside our firm?" and then help them to connect.
You Get What You Pay For
This Wall Street Journal article, Airlines Face Acute Pilot Shortage, attempts to analyze the reasons why pilots are retiring in record numbers without good replacements in line. In our opinion the article fails miserably. Nowhere in its puzzlement over why interest among US citizens to learn to fly commercial airliners is down 30-40% is the notion of pay ever brought up.
Pilots entering the field and typically 25-35 years old will make about $24-$36k per year. Granted these entry level pilots are probably not the primary pilot but hey, they've got us sitting in one of those seats and, given the skill level we expect to ensure our safety, we're not sure they should be paid the same as someone in an entry-level mall retail position. Maybe we should take up a collection.
