The Staffing Strategy Connection
CareerXroads®Update
June 2013
By Gerry Crispin, SPHR and Mark Mehler
mmc@careerxroads.com
An invitation to compete for the CandE
The opportunity to better define, measure and bench your candidate experience practices has never been better and is now available at the CandEs Website until the end of June. It's free and, whether you compete to be among the 2013 award winners honored in October at the HRTechnology conference or, simply benchmark with those who do compete and win, you are contributing to the evolution of recruiting as a function that considers the business value of all of its stakeholders' needs.
Facebook's Open Graph Search: Next 'Must Have' Sourcing tool?
Ric Klinger, a Colloquium member at Walgreens, noted this Johnny Campbell video describing the basics of Facebook's Open Graph Search. Johnny is an Irish entrepreneur with a flair for online recruiting training.
The real question here is whether this tool, as it develops from its current Beta version, will add an entirely different perspective around search. At our Genentech-hosted Colloquium in May, Jim Schnyder at PepsiCo shared some of his insights - and a few of the challenges in using Facebook in search rather than campaign mode.
Using social media to find/drive prospects is growing but does 'screen and select' enter into the equation?
SHRM's latest Whitepaper on Social Networking Sites and Recruiting/Selection includes a great deal of the obvious e.g. "77% of firms use social media to find candidates" but don't let these Johnny-come-lately conclusions fool you because there are plenty of useful nuggets buried in th 35-slide deck summarizing the whitepaper.
The underlying value in this highly valid and representative sample of US employers is in the speed of adoption. These same questions have been asked over the last 5-6 years and it's the change year-to-year that should galvanize anyone not taking full advantage to do so immediately.
Perhaps the most interesting unresolved issue, reflected in slide 25, asks respondents about their policies that allow (or don't) the use of social media (2008-2013) to screen/select candidates. Judge for yourself what camp your firm finds itself in these days.
Quick Quiz #1
Social Media was attributed as a Source of Hire in what % of hires in 2012 by the firms responding to CareerXroads' survey?
a) 10%
b) 8.1%
c) 6.3
d) 2.9%
Answer at the end of this newsletter.
Intuit: Sourcing Internal Candidates
Imagine the profiles of all your employees were available to you. Would you automatically include them in developing your applicant pool? What if they didn't meet your 'one-or-two-year-in-the-seat' restriction? Can you still source them?
This online interview by Peter Clayton at Total Picture Radio of [Colloquium member] Intuit's Gail Houston and Leslie Mason entitled Managing the Social Media Madness: How Intuit's Social Recruiting Strategy Is Evolving, covers much more territory but raises some interesting issues over this key challenge of sourcing internal vs. external candidates.
Sourcing Mother Load or Recruiting Irony?
As Sourcecon noted, the National Security Agency recently released a 646 page Spy Guide to Sourcing the Internet developed for internal use. We haven't read it but we're expecting a NYTimes book review sometime soon (or maybe not).
Maybe they do want to stay. We just don't give them reasons to do so.
In the article titled Gen Y's Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, China Gorman, ex-COO of SHRM, offered some insights from data collected and published recently by Accenture's 2013 College Graduate Employment Survey Findings.
China's point that new grads are in need of some training before they can get up to speed in a 21st century business enterprise probably isn't all that new. Unfortunately, too many firms still expect their new hires to 'rock and roll' on day one and seldom supply what's needed.
The real surprise is that the data surrounding the myth that the age cohort entering the workforce is reluctant to commit to work and prefers to change jobs every year or so is just that - a myth. 2/3 expect at least a three-year run with their first company. As China put it, "We expect these youngsters to be gone in the career equivalent of sixty seconds. And sometimes they are. But it's important to know that that isn't what they want! This isn't what they expect!"
Quick Quiz #2
Mark Mehler moderated a panel of Staffing Leaders at last April's EREXPO conference. One of the panelists instituted a 'buddy' system for each candidate to make them feel more comfortable during the interviews. It measurably reduced turndowns and made the finalist stage more candidate friendly. The company was:
a) GE
b) ESPN/Disney
c) AT&T
d) Microsoft
Answers at the end of this newsletter.
Third Party Spam: Take it, Leave it or Push Back
If you've never had your time wasted by a third-party recruiter who broke through the firewalls, vendor management modules and everything else to pitch those extraordinary candidates just waiting for you on the other side of the transom, then you've probably not had a company recruiting position. The challenge to manage third-party vendors has grown in proportion to the hiring needs, exacerbated in the digital era with emails that slip the spam filter and LinkedIn Inmails as well as some ugly efforts we've seen recently via social media [now former] friends.
Susan Slater, formerly with Marriott, tackles this issue in her recent blog, Tech Shoppers Beware: Don't Buy Candidates from This Guy, and describes her own experience and concerns. Actually, we think this is an important blog for even more reasons. If the mass mailing reach a firm that actually considers the candidate's resumes but fails to use the third-party candidates as a source for jobs such as these, then those candidates are, for all practical purposes, tagged for an indeterminate period of time going forward as sourced by agency. (Effectively blackballing them from work for a year).
We can debate the right and wrong of both sides but it is the candidate who eventually needs to learn to participate in this process as an equal and demand several things from any third party that represents them. Among the demands:
- For how long will you represent me, and is that in writing?
- For what real and currently specific job am I being represented? To what company and position will you pitch me? As a candidate I would want to personally opt in to each one separately.
- What is the history/relationship of that third party to the specific firm I'm being represented to (addressed by Susan above)? Operationally I want to know how many people this person's firm (and specifically how many has this person) actually placed there in the last 18 months. I want to talk to one of the placements and I want evidence that their firm is even approved to do business with the company to which they plan to represent me.
Some would argue that few job seekers will stand up and act on this. However, more are learning to do it every day - especially the ones who would be the best candidates. Those most desperate will feel compelled to work with recruiters using this 100 year old mass mailing approach of throwing as much paper against the wall to see if anything sticks (digitally speaking). Technology has unfortunately enabled them to disguise the mass of their mailings by making each one appear as an individual but it still goes to an un-targeted audience of small company recruiters and generalists without proper vendor management resources or practices.
There are plenty of great vendor management tools. There are also thousands of solid third-party recruiters who act as trusted advisors for their candidates and manage a network of clients but it is hard to find them when the fly-by-night folks who have no cost-to-entry as recruiters are out there doing more damage for every company dumb enough to hire one of their "perfect" candidates. #anothereasonforvendormanagementsoftware
Branding: Start With Why
This TED talk may be about how great leaders inspire action but at its core is the real truth behind an employer of choice. Simon Sinek takes the audience through the difference between seeing What a company does and Why it does it. The lesson for recruiting is how we share the Why in all our messaging and in each stage of that talent supply chain from researching to onboarding.
Quick Quiz #3
MIT's Business School had more students accept than it had openings. What did MIT do?
a) Offered students a Mercedes to enroll a year later.
b) Offered a trip around the world with $5,000 spending $$$.
c) Offered first $15,000, then $20,000 for students to defer one year.
d) Offered a one year internship with pay at the alumni company of the student's choice.
Answers can be found at the end of this newsletter.
Job Matchmaking: In search of Big Data solutions to the inefficiencies of the job market.
The recent Bloomberg article authored by Aki Ito, Algorithms play matchmaker to fight 7.7% US Joblessness, is more fantasy than reality despite the best efforts of several of the individuals and services mentioned throughout the piece. Steve Rothberg, in the comments section, hits the nail on the head when he notes that there are numerous flaws in the data employers collect that feed the system.
A similar article in the NYTimes, How Big Data Is Playing Recruiter for Specialized Workers, covers similar ground and from our perspective offers a more disciplined approach to replicating the insights of a sourcer trolling the Internet for prospects. The data collection problems here are less obvious because the technology focuses inward on individuals at the cutting edge of same technologies.
These pieces offer a very attractive big data vision of the world, where access to individuals' preferences and history are all accessible and serve up interesting and viable prospects as well as alternatives for candidates. The authors however seemed to us to be adding to the hype rather than focusing on how far we need to go before these tools and services really impact the market inefficiencies.
For example, assertions that it is sufficient to match positions to current job seekers based solely on the job seeker's past history and the history of (demographically) similar prospects are only half the problem. Ignored is how the employer's description of the job (like the candidate's resume) will impact the quality of the individual's decision. Missing from the mix is an equally essential history of how previous incumbents have fared, where they are now or just how helpful the hiring managers were in their subordinate's successes (to name a few pieces of data that might match up to the candidate side). Transparency on the candidate side must be matched with the equivalent data on the employer side and we're quite far from that.
As long as selection involves two parties, Big Data matches must be equally deep on both sides of the equation. Otherwise the only equation that is relevant is GI=GO.
Quick Quiz #4
What % of the Fortune 500 allow a job seeker to apply for a job using a smartphone or tablet?
a) 5%
b) 10%
c) 18%
d) 26%
Answers at the end of this newsletter.
How Jobseekers Read Job Ads
According to a Wall Street Journal article about job description research done by The Ladders you have about 1 minute and 15 seconds to get your message across - and that is if the prospect finds it relevant in the first few seconds. Increasingly it is within most employers reach to build a heat map showing how your prospects read your message and that is exactly what the Ladders did here.
This article suggests employers reverse engineer their job ads from the prospect's viewpoint and attention span because:
- You have a single moment connecting the job title but it's where the eyes go first.
- You have only 14.6 seconds on requirements.
- Prospects take 25 seconds just trying to understand the description
- and another moment looking for - and not finding - the compensation for the job.
Workforce Planning: Big Data, Bigger Deal
A better focus for Talent Management analytics than matching just might be getting a better handle on predicting the loss of skills knowledge and experience leaving your workforce because of retirement, competition etc. etc. and then assessing the new mix of needs with a heat map of the pool of people that can meet them. This article from Workforce is a great case study of how one firm assessed the future pool of talent for critical positions and found several work-arounds.
It is why we see the most successful Talent Acquisition leaders becoming the top candidates for adding Talent Management to their portfolio.
An Unofficial Address to the 2013 College Graduates
Peter Cappelli, Wharton's well-known professor of management and an extraordinary historian of recruiting practices, offered the following in his monthly HR Executive column.
- This is the worst job market for college grads in 75 years
- Worse even than when he graduated in 1981
- 40% of this year's class will not have jobs although the government figures say 13%
- Most of those with jobs are working in positions usually filled by High School grads (almost none of whom will have a job)
Quick Quiz #5
New Hires to this Fortune 100 Best Company can delay their start date by six months while receiving $10,000 to volunteer at a nonprofit organization. Which firm is it?
a) REI
b) Boston Consulting Group
c) Bain Consulting Group
d) Blackrock
Answers can be found at the end of this newsletter.
How is Recruiting Like Dating? (We'd rather not think about that if you don't mind.)
e-Harmony figures it has been so good at matching people in relationships that matching folks up for a job might be a snap.
Sarah Halzak, writing in the Washington Post, answered the question about whether eHarmony might be up for defining that perfect fit in her article: e-Harmony has helped you get a Date. Can it Help you get a Job? A blog post from Joel Cheesman responding to this notion was not far behind. With a little wit and some data about previous efforts that made similar claims we will see what the future holds.
Specialized Search: Candidate-Initiated Referrals
Adzuna is a UK job board that searches on behalf of the candidate for jobs at their friends' companies. No friends. No jobs.
This raises an interesting point about whether candidates would prefer customized searches beyond the obvious job title, function and location parameters offered by Job Boards. Forget the "Match" approach which (with a few exceptions) we would argue is a basic need AFTER the candidate limits their search.
The question here is whether candidates would prefer to limit their job search to i.e. The 100 best companies in America to work for or the 100 most admired companies or the fastest growing companies or, god forbid, the companies offering the best candidate experience.
Does Candidate Debt Impact your Ability to Hire?
If your company compensation plans are not industry leading you may be turned down in some cases because the candidate's debt is just too high to work for you. This NBC News article offers some insight into just how serious the problem is and suggests that some candidates might be attracted by benefits that aid them in paying off student loans. Who knows, there might be an employer tax incentive or two buried in this idea.
Could you Select a Candidate from a CV Limited to 140 Characters?
According to a WSJ article, Enterasys can and did. The company, "a Boston network-infrastructure firm, decided to exclusively recruit for a social media marketing position using Twitter. The firm promoted the position via tweets and only accepted candidates who tweeted their interest using the hashtag #socialCV. Among the requirements for candidates: More than 1,000 active Twitter followers."
While we can see the logic here, the article, The New Resume: It's 140 Characters, is clearly pandering and misrepresenting Twitter's value in the recruiting process. (The authors of the stories don't write the headlines but they should). Fortunately, the article itself includes content and stories supporting more appropriate uses of the tool.
Quick Quiz Answers
Answers Q1:d (but 75% of all the other sources list social media as important to its success)
Q2:a
Q3: c
Q4:b
Q5:b
