CareerXroads®Update - August 2012

By Gerry Crispin, SPHR and Mark Mehler
mmc@careerxroads.com

Why Hire Vets? We Hope You Know By Now

Philip Dana at Amazon shared this well-written paper by Chris Hitch at UNC, "Ready to Serve: How and Why You Should Recruit Veterans". If you don't need it - having already developed excellent military hiring initiatives - pass it on.

Sourcing Talent at the Olympics

At least one company, Cirque du Soleil, probably has its sourcers watching the Olympics as a part of their job. "Some 50 current and former Cirque performers have competed at the Olympics, including stars from the 2008 Games like American gymnastics silver medalist Raj Bhavsar and 24-year-old American synchronized swimmer Christina Jones," according to this WSJ article.

The $1 billion Montreal-based company has some of the most unique and interesting challenges in hiring talent for its many productions. We would love to job shadow one of their specialized recruiting teams for a week.

Candidate Experience Myths

CareerBuilder collected info from 800,000 applicants during the fall of 2011 and spring of 2012 and teased out the following:

  • Myth: The failure to acknowledge a job application won't impact the company.
  • Fact: 44 percent of workers who didn't hear back from an employer when they applied for a job said they have a worse opinion of that employer.
  • Myth: What happens in the recruitment process stays in the recruitment process.
  • Fact: 78 percent said they would talk about a bad experience they had with a potential employer with friends and family. 17 percent said they would post something about their negative experience on social media and 6 percent said they would blog about it.
  • Myth: Just hearing from an employer in a tight job market is enough to keep the candidate's interest.
  • Fact: When asked to assess the recruiters who contacted them, 21 percent reported that the recruiter was not enthusiastic about his/her company being an employer of choice. 17 percent didn't believe the recruiter was knowledgeable and 15 percent didn't think the recruiter was professional.
  • Myth: The top reason why workers apply to a job is salary.
  • Fact: Location was the number one reason candidates submitted an application (45 percent), followed by desirable industry (33 percent), reputation of the company (25 percent), interesting assignments (23 percent) and advancement opportunities (22 percent). Competitive compensation ranked sixth for why candidates said they applied to a job.
  • Myth: The top reason why workers don't apply is content in the advertisement.
  • Fact: Good content in a job ad is critical, but technical issues are more often the culprit. Workers cited a link that wasn't working and computer/Internet problems as the top reasons for not applying to a job. The application being too lengthy rounded out the top three.


And the conversation continues.

The Candidate Experience Awards

The 2012 Candidate Experience Awards are on track. The application phase closed mid-July (although the UK CandEs are open until September 7). More than 80 firms have applied this year (versus 58 in 2011). Sponsors have stepped up to keep the award process free to employers and we expect that the August effort to get thousands of candidates from these firms to respond to this year’s survey will go smoothly.

Sources of Hire Revisited as a Lab on Error Analysis

Our February study and slide deck on sources of hire were the subject of a recent ERE Webinar, Sources of Hire: Channels of Influence. Both our current slides and audio presentation as well as Q&A are archived but our conclusions haven’t changed much over the years.

Firms need to take the following actions to bring data collection into the 21st century era of ‘big data’

  • Stop attributing a single source to define how a prospect becomes a candidate. Openings aren’t filled without the influence of multiple pipeline elements. It’s in the influence of how one source leads to another that better investment decisions lie.
  • Stop trying to find a single silver bullet for how the data should be collected. The channel will not be better served by eliminating self-report in favor of last IP address and the ability to insert cookies by slick vendors. Serious flaws exist in all methods and it’s only in the comparison of multiple methods that confidence about the quality of data can be raised. Improve 2-3 methods and compare.
  • Start pushing software vendors (your ATS and HRIS) to integrate with each other; to allow easier bolting of external sources of data; and, to design source of hire tools, reporting and analysis that are more robust and configurable.
  • Start hiring data geeks into HR and Staffing.

“Our Employees Are Our Most Valuable Asset”

This cliché is repeated over and over by the world's public employers in their most valuable marketing piece, the Annual Report. We know it's BS. You know it's BS and so does everyone else. The reason is that no one ever backs up the statement with more than an anecdotal story. That could change.

What if we all agreed on a couple of the metrics that differentiate between how employers manage their workforce and those who are simply engaged in a creative writing exercise? (And, god forbid, what if we discovered that those companies in the former group performed better!) Public firms walking the talk might want to share more of those measures to attract their fair share of investment.

There is, amazingly, a methodology for obtaining agreement [call it consensus]. It was developed by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), a body recognized by (and sitting at the table of) the International Standards Organization (ISO). For the last four years, with SHRM as sponsor and underwriter, literally hundreds of professionals involved in every aspect of HR - researchers, vendors, consultants, practitioners, educators, etc. - have been debating incessantly over dozens of fundamental HR terms, measures and practices with an eye to creating an agreement or two and, eventually hundreds of standards. And we're not talking about a standard that everyone must use but, instead, a voluntary standard that people would want to use, adopt or comply with because of the imbedded logic of the agreement.

It takes time however - two to four years for each standard - so the work isn't for the faint of heart, those easily frustrated or for the folks with lots of opinions and little else to back it up or for folks frustrated by folks with lots of opinions and little else.

Take cost-per-hire (CPH) as an example. It may not be a true measure of staffing efficiency or productivity but it is one small component in developing such an ROI. Everyone thinks they know what it is but there are dozens of definitions being used in the workplace. No two software applications calculate it the same way.

Arguably some would say we should not be measuring CPH at all because we tend to place too much emphasis on it. But, if we are going to measure it, why not agree on what IT is. Then, we can emphasize its appropriate uses from a common base.

It took three years of public and private debate to reach consensus on CPH but as of February 2012, there is, in fact, an ANSI approved definition of Cost-per-hire. Employers now have a comprehensive document that covers the subject. Hundreds of academics, practitioners, educators etc. have agreed on it. Vendors, including most notably ADP, have already adopted the standard and reconfigured their software to comply with it. Next stop ISO.

Time to up the ante. So now back to the subject of HR Investor Standards.

The person who led the workgroup under the SHRM/ANSI Staffing and Workforce Planning Standards Taskforce that obtained consensus on CPH now heads the HR Metrics Standards Task Force established in 2011. This newly formed Task Force created a workgroup on HR Investor Metrics and volunteers were sought. They came and debated and even engaged colleagues in Finance and Investment communities to participate. Their initial thinking (in what is likely a two to three year process) was posted in Public Review for comment this spring.

And all hell broke out.

That a few noses were out of joint is an understatement. To catch up we refer you to the July 23, Businessweek article entitled HR Group Creates Workforce Metrics and Kris Dunn's HR Capitalist/FOT blog, HRPA to SHRM: We Don't Need No Stinking Standardized HR Metrics.

For those looking to create some real disruption over the next few years, we encourage you to join the standards movement. Our manufacturing colleagues get it - few firms fail to comply with ISO 9000 and similar standards. You can argue all you want that HR is different but there will then come a time when an HR equivalent of ISO 9000 is adopted and we may know whether your employees are your firm's greatest asset and what to do to make it so.

(Sooner, rather than later there could even be voluntary standards for the treatment of candidates. What a radical notion that would be! #stilltiltingatwindmills)

What Extreme Succession Planning Can Teach Us

In his article about the “Most Powerful HR Department in the World”, Peter Cappelli, one of Wharton’s more visible professors of management, contrasts the way U.S.-based corporations used to handle talent management and the way the Chinese Communist Party does now.

Noting just how important succession planning can be in China, Peter states, “the successor to the president of China is set a decade before they take office. The term of office is 10 years, and a new successor is appointed each time a new president takes office.”

We visited China several years ago with a SHRM delegation of HR Leaders and had an audience with the head of the country’s ‘Personnel’ officer. He spoke [at length] about China’s rapid shift to a Market economy model from its ‘Planned Economy’ approach (except for a small part of the workforce where jobs, compensation, succession, roles, etc. were predetermined. We asked what the size of ‘small’ was, it was about 120 million workers.)

Klout, Kred and Peer Index May Be Useful - Just Not For What We Think

This blog by Tom Webster about What Klout Really Measures is the best article we've read on how these scores may be helpful in the recruiting process.

The author quickly claims that these so-called 'influences' do not measure influence and never have. But, "because of that it is easy to be dismissive of the entire category of influence measures with their ridiculously reductive scores and easily gamed mechanics. Influence is swaying someone else to produce a change in state, and there is no demonstrable evidence that a higher Klout score gives you that magical power."

We agree, but we also agree with Tom that it does measure something and he eventually draws on another friend's comment which triggered a light bulb: "These [influence] scores measure your ability to move content - to spread a message throughout a system."

Just as we once relied on advertising via print and then Internet job boards to ‘spread the message,’ we may soon have the means to identify groups of individuals whose networks get the word out about our opportunities. Perhaps the Klout scores of our employees would give some indication of how robust our referral program really is in penetrating the groups of prospects we seek.