The Staffing Strategy Connection
CareerXroads®Update
September 2013
By Gerry Crispin, SPHR and Mark Mehler
mmc@careerxroads.com
Elaine Wherry's Recruiter Honeypot
Between 2009 and 2011 Elaine Wherry, the founder of a Silicon Valley startup, created a fake online persona named Pete London - "a self-described JavaScript ninja - to help attract and hire the best JavaScript recruiters."
We've seen her describe her journey at two different recruiting conferences and each time were impressed by her insights and suggestions as a non-recruiter regarding what she learned about recruiting. Her blog post, written this summer to summarize her experience offers four quick lessons and 14 tips. We've no doubt a few of these should be daily reminders.
Guinness Gets It
This ad by Guinness is a world-class example of how to incorporate an inclusive message in a company that values collaboration. #EmploymentBrand.
Diversity Game Suggests We Need to Take Stock
Are we so sensitized to compliance over performance that our own ability to communicate is in jeopardy? A Harvard professor devised an interesting diversity experiment. It's a game that replicates elements of 20 Questions. We would make this research a mandatory discussion item in any corporate diversity training program.
Grab a partner (required for the game) and play the game for yourself - then see what his results show.
Employee Referrals: the Candidate's Silver Bullet?
TalentBoard's 2012 Candidate Experience Awards* survey, asking firms to describe their recruiting practices, raised some new questions about whether Employee Referral Programs (ERPs) are missing a critical opportunity.
It's possible that employers are focusing too much of their ERP attention on getting their employees engaged in the program and too little attention on the candidates who need the referral. It is also evident from the data that most candidates are not aware just how much more likely they are to get hired if they obtain a referral.
Half of the participating employers told us that they consider their ERPs a competitive advantage and use it extensively (50.6%). Another quarter consider their ERPs a routine part of their recruiting strategy (28.4%). Only 13.6% of the responding firms had limited the use of ERPs and 7.4% claimed they didn't use Referrals at all.
The CandE employer survey did not ask exactly how many hires they attribute to ERPs each year but CareerXroads' annual Source of Hire study indicates that for the last decade, 1/4 to 1/3 of all openings are attributed to Employee Referrals as the primary Source.
Talentboard also created a candidate survey and among the many questions that were asked was whether the person who applied was 'aware of' and 'used' the employer's referral process. The 8953 candidates answering these related questions also shared whether, in the end, they were hired or not. We would think that if ERPs are the most successful approach to sourcing candidates than large numbers of candidates would be aware of that fact and then ensure they got one. We would be wrong. Our thinking in practice is overwhelmingly one-way.
Let's consider Employee Referrals from the Candidate's perspective:
- Only half of the 8953 candidates who responded to questions about company practices were even aware that the company they applied to had an ERP!
- Of the approximately 4500 job seeker respondents who knew about the company ERP only a third, about 1500, used the program.
We also learned from the Candidate Experience Awards data that while only 17.7% of ALL the candidates were hired, the few candidates with referrals were offered 27.9% of all the jobs.
In this table we calculated the probability of a qualified candidate getting a job w/o a referral [2.8%] from two assumptions drawn from our survey: the average number of actual applications reported per job [85] and the average number of unqualified candidates among them, 50%. What this means to the geeks among us is that by having a referral, a candidate is 10X more likely to get hired!
Employee Referral Program's success rates can hardly be ignored and yet, given the data, candidates are doing just that and possibly limiting efforts of firms to scale this source. We think that while most employers don't ignore the data, they do take the value of their ERPs for granted.
One of the few firms in the US offering a clue about their ERP's importance is TIVO. In the "Common Questions" section of their Careers pages, TIVO tells prospects that 39% of all their hires came from Employee Referrals in the last year - and then tells them how to get an employee to refer them! A candidate reading this cannot help but recognize what they need to do to improve their chances.
It isn't much of a leap to conclude that employers can improve referral programs by giving more attention to candidates, who, with an incentive, a little coaching and a few social media tools, might initiate many more referrals. Candidates should also know how a firm's Employee Referral Program works and how successful it is.
*The Candidate Experience Awards are part of a growing movement, now in its third year, to define and measure how employers treat job seekers from the point at which they are researching a firm and choosing whether or not to apply to the practices surrounding the new hire on boarding process. Some of these firms were willing to go even further and invite their candidates to confirm their practices. That data is slowly but eventually being distributed freely for all companies to use. (Full disclosure: Gerry is a co-founder and board member of Talentboard, a non-profit that does not charge for its research)
College Recruiting Standard Practices
Kudo's to Dan Black at Ernst and Young and other college staffing leaders who volunteered on a yearlong project with the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) to create a comprehensive template for College Recruiting practices. The write up in HRExecutive online which links to this standards document is a great step to raising the bar and should be studied by every firm looking to improve their college entry program.
Leading from the Front
Sue Meisinger makes great points about HR leaders (and other leaders) who avoid creating a profile on LinkedIn. The danger of being invisible, she notes, is that if you aren't personally involved with the tools then when it comes to lead your firm or function in how to leverage the technology at work, you will be perceived as out-of-touch - at best.
We think it is a lesson for staffing leaders who dial back their involvement with emerging technology because it's overwhelming available resources.
The speed with which change challenges all of us is just not going to slow down. We need to find more efficient tools to stay on top of it. Peer-to-peer conversations, crowdsourcing and developing agile internal teams to rapidly assess new tools will help but there is no substitute for devoting a few minutes each day or each week to personally trying out a new application.
