AROUND THE BLOCH

Candidate as Customer

100 of us passengers sat on a Delta plane for an hour last week waiting for it to leave the gate.  The problem?  Paperwork not properly filled out!  We would have been really pissed, but something strange happened.  The pilot slowly walked back through the entire plane...stopping at each row and talking to anyone who was interested.  He started with "Hello.  I apologize for the delay. Thanks for your patience."  It wasn't his fault of course.  But that didn't matter to him.   We realized it was a selfless act and that meant a lot to us.

I wonder how often we forget to treat candidates with a similar level of care.  We can't spend time with every candidate.  But a little extra effort goes a long way to change how recruiters are often viewed (see "10 things to hate about recruiters" in ERExchange bloglines blog). 

Sharpen your recruiting skills during the free Talenteer Challenge tomorrow (and you might even win an iPod!).

Influencing Hiring Managers

 

“How do we get our hiring managers’ to follow a consistent process and care more about candidate experience?”  This summarizes a question posed to me yesterday by a Staffing Director whose COO has been hearing too many stories like “the candidate waited alone in the cafeteria for two hours because the next interviewer on the schedule didn’t show.”  Combine that experience with interview schedules of 17 interviewers over multiple weeks and you can understand the concern.

Unfortunately, most companies have similar challenges.  Here are some things that have worked for me in the past at Cadence and Cisco:

1. Get executive level awareness of the problem and their commitment to help enforce change.  Sharing a handful of stories like above will help. 
2. Gather data, at a minimum for each hiring manager: # days between when a candidate is contacted for first interview and offer, # interviews a candidate goes through before receiving an offer, candidate satisfaction survey data about their interview experience (especially for candidates that weren’t hired).  This may need to be a manual process depending on your recruitment technology.  If so, even doing it for a 60 day period will provide enormous momentum for change.
3. Have recruiters rate their hiring manager’s performance on three things: responsiveness to submitted candidates, effectiveness of managing interview team, offer decision decisiveness.  A simple weekly rating of “green, yellow, red” for each of those areas works best. 
4. Report the above data to each hiring manger on a weekly basis and to the executives on a monthly basis.  Use both a carrot and a stick.  Hiring managers will quickly strive for better performance if you offer prizes for best scores (carrot) and when they know their management is watching (stick).

If you have any questions about making this work, feel free to contact me at jbloch@hire.com or 770-575-0770.  

Evolution of Recruitment

The way recruiting is being done is definitely shifting.  It’s causing some companies to outsource parts of their staffing organization and others to restructure staffing roles and change how they find candidates online.  Dave Lefkow and I are putting final touches on the our free webinar this Tuesday: Reaching hard-to-find professionals: Recruiting industry's shift to "Online Recruiting 2.0". We’ll discuss market trends, new online recruitment techniques/technologies, and their impact on recruitment.  Hope you can join us!

Dichotomies and Lobotomies

I woke up a year older today and that always seems like a good time to contemplate my navel.  I started today with the simplest of questions: “what is my real purpose in this world?”  Now there’s a mind bender I’m sure none of you have tried!  This question quickly pulls me into dichotomies.  Exit now because it’s going to get deep… 

As I contemplate “my purpose” I end up stuck on the problem of “me” versus “we”.  I believe we are not really separate but “all one”.  However, to experience anything there must be more than “one thang” to compare it to.  So, we’re put on this planet with a secret our soul knows (“we are all one”) but a mind that thinks we are all separate.  No wonder Paxil, Wellburtin, Prozac, Serzone, Zoloft and Riddlin are “running through our veins”!  What's really wrong with lobotomies anyway??

Corporations aren't sent up for "we are all one".  There “purpose in life” is “profits for shareholders”.  Not just some profits, but always more.  Never enough, always more.  Our careers and lives often mirror this “always more” mindset.  We live as if more will make us happy, but what really makes us happy is appreciation of the present moment and what we already have.  Dichotomies: “can’t live with them, can’t live without them”. 

                                 

Let's tie this back to recruiting.  I’ve always liked Hank Stringer’s mantra of “gracious recruiting”. To me it relates to the above.  A recruiter that focuses too much on “always more” will miss the deep satisfaction that comes from treating candidates, hiring managers, and yes even HR weenies as “we are all one”.  Gracious is another way of saying “treat others as you would like to be treated” or “how may I serve”.  The daily pressure of “more is better” comes with the territory.  The counter balance is living from a mindset of “we are all one”.  Satisfaction in recruitment comes from knowing you did a quality job, not a quantity job.

The Power of Referrals

Layne Buckley, Staffing Manager of Plantronics sent me an email yesterday about his most recent digital marketing campaign (emails sent to potential candidates about job opportunities at Plantronics):

“Our Open-to-Sent Ratio was 191%.  That means almost twice as many people who received the email actually read it.  For that to be possible, that means it had to be forwarded by the original recipients to other people.  From a company trust and branding standpoint, these are EXTRAORDINARY RESULTS!”

In other words, for every 100 emails sent, 191 people opened the email.  How’d they do that?  Layne enticed the recipient to respond AND to pass it along to friends.  In addition, Layne’s “click-through” percentage was 45.01% and their Action Rate (applied/register) was 9.45% (1-2% is typical).  An example of their digital marketing campaign was shown on our free webinar with Spoke Software last month. 

Kudos to Layne for setting new records yet again (he won ERE “Most Strategic Use of Recruitment Technology” award last week).  Its innovative customers like him that help us find new ways to apply recruitment technology. 

Step into my home-office for some vlogging!

Google announced it's trying a new complimentary service, video blogging.   Is vlogging the future?  I hope not.  Blogging is best done at night in pajamas, don't you think?  Besides, we all know whose really writing our blogs for us...

Solve the labor shortage through human cloning?

Yea, that’s not going to happen any time soon. So what’s a girl to do?  HR and Staffing hold the key to solving the labor shortage.  Let’s try not to be all thumbs this time, okay? 

Here’s the key:  Getting people into the right jobs, before they mentally check out of their current jobs.  Think about your closest friends.  Chances are many of them don’t love what they do, and in some cases don’t even like what they do.  They are living Dilbert lives.  Not because their dumb or lazy.  Dumb and lazy isn’t genetic; it’s produced like a fine wine…over years of aging...in this case in a dead end job.  We don’t need more skilled workers.  We need to get people in jobs that they are passionate about and that challenge them.  I’d take 3 highly passionate and inspired employees over 5 bored ones any day, wouldn’t you? 

So, here’s my Top 10 list of ways recruiters can overt human cloning disasters, and help their fellow candidates reach career nirvana:

10. Find out from your hiring manager why someone should get excited about their job opening.

9. Educate yourself on the social and business relationship networking phenomena (www.linkedin.com, www.spoke.com, www.jobster.com, etc.).  They are the rolodex’s of our generation.  The more networked we are, the quicker we can get people into their dream jobs.

8. Spend a few extra minutes with your applicant’s getting to know what they are passionate about.

7. Practice gracious recruiting.  You don’t have time to talk to every candidate, but have processes that quickly tell people if you’re not interested in them.

6. Write job descriptions that are real: What’s in it for the applicant’s career?  What’s tough about the job? What’s unique about the environment?  Applicants should be able to pre-screen themselves in or out based on the job description details.

5. Get to know employees in the hiring group.  They are a great source of information about: the department, the management and the +/-.  Also, ask them what websites they surf, associations they belong to, hobbies they have (all clues to where you’ll find more like them).

4. Educate your hiring teams on effective interviewing and selection. 

3. Learn what HR is doing to help with retention and career advancement. 

2. Make your own education part of your daily routine.  Spend 10 minutes a day reading blogs listed at this site and others specific to your industry.

1. Mind your thoughts.  Whether you think you are just a “cog in a wheel” or a “dream weaver”, you’re right.

Salespeople and Babysitters

Recruiters often feel like salespeople because of how their results are measured: how many people did they hire this quarter.  Have a dismal quarter, get a warning.  Have two, get the boot. 

   

HR Generalists often feel like babysitters:  Keep the children (employees and management) from fighting. And don’t let them break anything on your watch (like the law).

During the recession, many companies fired their expensive recruiters and gave their HR Generalists dual roles.  Even HR Directors were presented with an “opportunity they couldn’t refuse” to manage the recruiting organization.  Not really the career advancement they were hoping for.  With increased hiring demand this year, companies are trying to put humpy dumpy back together again.  Unfortunately, hiring manager satisfaction and confidence has eroded while HR/Staffing was playing musical chairs.

How does HR/Staffing regain the respect of their customers?  First, learn a new language, their language.  What are they being measured on this quarter and this year?  Revenue?  Earnings Per Employee? First to market? Number of  new customers? Market share? Earnings?  You can be damned sure that every executive in your company knows exactly what they are being measured on and that’s what you need to talk about.  Then they’ll listen.

The process:

Step 1) Identify top initiatives of key hiring groups.

Step 2) Find out from individual contributors what are the obstacles to meeting those initiatives.

Step 3) Decide what you could do to help.

Step 4) Speak in their language and be heard!

Example:

Step 1)  You find out that the VP of Engineering’s top initiative is to deliver the TurboBlast 9000 product by January 2006.

Step 2) You talk to the developers about obstacles to meeting the deadline.  They tell you: two key architects have recently resigned; they also have a shortage of UI designers; and the Quality Assurance needs three months lead time to test the product before production.   You also find out from Finance that a one month delay in product delivery will mean $2M of lost revenue.

Step 3) You figure out how you can help: replacing the key architects and hiring UI designers is number one priority.  Also working with HR to identify internal candidates to shift over to QA as needed.

Step 4)  You approach the VP explaining how you can help overcome these obstacles to meeting her delivery deadline.  You ask her for short-term sourcing dollars to help fill the urgent positions, and long-term support on getting better recruitment technology to source ahead-of-demand in the future.

You’ve just positioned yourself as a business partner that can impact the bottom line revenue of the company.  Congratulations!

Warning: Severe Weather Alert

Today’s local forecast: Rising attrition this morning, followed by rejected offers this afternoon.  Tomorrow, increased chance of hiring manager dissatisfaction, followed by possible outsourcing. Long-term forecast: Hot market with severe competition spreading globally.

Tuesday’s gathering of 28 staffing “meteorologists” at the Silicon Valley Talent 10 Regional Staffing Thought Leaders Conference described “The Perfect Storm” above.  Add Kevin Wheeler’s data on global labor force trends and you might feel like heading for the basement.

Cisco, Adobe, Siebel, Kaiser and 15 other “players” shared their challenges and strategies.  Last year they were saying things like:

• “Staffing has almost no budget now.  It’s all been decentralized to business groups.   They spend it sporadically.”
• “We need to overcome fragmentation of staffing.”
• “I’m being asked to influence global staffing without additional resources.”
• “Self-service model…removing recruiter from low value processes”
• “We’re worried about being outsourced.”

This year, the comments had a different tone:

• “We are adding dedicated sourcers and building a research department.”
• “Attrition, rejected offers and multiple offers are on the rise.  Job titles are becoming big issue.”
• “We are using agencies because we have to, but the quality from them is getting worse.”
• “I’m trying to decide what pieces of staffing make sense to outsource.”

Jeff Hunter's scenario was right on about running your staffing org like an outsourced RPO. Hiring is heating up and staffing directors who want to stay employed better be building and nurture talent communities now.  Waiting until you feel the storm will be too late.    How’s the weather in your neck of the woods??

Let The Revolution Begin!

It's been almost three years since this devil went down to Georgia! Not sure Georgia was ready for me after 17 years in California (or Californication, as they call it in the Bible belt). It's been a great move and luckily Hire.com has me traveling back to the "land of fruits and nuts" often for Talent 10s and other cool stuff. (You just passed the "Talent 10" exit that will soon drive some great content for this blog. Continuing on the road below will only give you more of my meaningless "blah, blah, blah").

I vaguely remember taking the "red pill" from Morpheus (John Chambers) when I joined Cisco staffing in 1999. Cisco grew from 14,000 to over 30,000 in just a few short years. Cisco staffing also grew during that time from 100 people to 700+ worldwide (as Archie Bunker sang, "those were the days"). And then the bubble burst.

Switching from corporate recruiting to the vendor side in 2002 has been extremely interesting. I don't miss the weekly floggings (a ritual Staffing Directors face when they try to report metrics...Randall, my friend, I shared your pain!). I do miss the adrenaline rush of finding and hiring Big Kahunas. I have great admiration for all you recruiters on the front lines every day. You are the lifeblood of your organizations! Namaste.

Okay, to the point of this blog. It's a forum for: Talent 10 participants to share their learning, Talenteers to help recruiters out of the resumess, road warrior stories from "the vendor files" and other staffing wisdom to help us move this wacky profession up the food chain!