Recruiter Chicks

Did you start the new year off with a renewed sense of what Talent Acquisition professionals contribute to society?  I did!  Every New Year I feel more confirmation that I am in the right field doing exactly what I love to do.  Then, I come back to work, start up my PC and think about the progression in thought leadership in our field overall, yet the lack of innovation as it relates to the tools we use that should allow for more time to focus on the meat and potatoes of recruiting.

Most companies and recruiters are happy with their Applicant Tracking Systems overall – it allows the company to store and track data.  It also organizes the information and spits out shiny reports.  The ATS is a vital part of the great work we do.  While most of us love our ATS, we also love to hate it or wish it had this functionality or that functionality.  Today, I like my ATS but I sit and reflect on tweaks that could enhance it for the masses.

Our firm uses Sendouts and while we don’t use all of the functionality, we use the meat of it.  They have managed to do a good job of integrating basic Social Recruiting but the candidate search function could use a facelift.  I am by no means a Glen Cathey (Boolean Black Belt), heck I’m not even a green belt at Boolean.  I just want to find the data I need using the terms I know and quickly.  The keyword search revolution is over and I’m anxiously awaiting the new revolution – standard built in intelligent search.  I had not really seen a system that could provide accurate data using layman’s terms until Monster.com updated their search capability to 6Sense technology.  I had an opportunity to catch up with their VP of Product Management, Javid Muhammedali and through discussion and several follow up questions I think they have found the ‘secret sauce.’  They listened and came back with the technology recruiters are looking for.  Monster’s SeeMore Recruiting platform gives even the most inept Boolean user a fast and user-friendly interface that is ideal for focusing on finding great talent that’s likely hiding deep down in your ATS.  The gold that I wrote about in this previous post.  Frankly, it’s something so game-changing that it’s at the forefront of the intelligent search revolution.

Let’s face it, there are a million seminars, training sessions and webinars that we can attend as TA professionals.  At the end of the day, I want to be able to focus on finding amazing talent and recruiting them to my organization’s client companies.  I was not destined to be in this great profession to figure out the latest X-Ray search string, boolean logic or the 10 million ways I can search for an engineer using words besides engineer.  Recruiting compliance, employment law updates, jobs report trends and overall efficiencies – yes!  Needless to say, this is the very reason my ATS is driving me crazy.

I absolutely love my job, I have known that I was born to be in this field since I was a teenager.  Now, let’s continue to push the envelope, get the right people on the right bus and make all of our lives easier and most importantly, efficient.

Part 1:  Using Data to Drive Decisions
Part 2: Data vs. Knowledge

As promised, for the final part of this series on elevating or Supersizing your recruiting function, I will step through a past hiring project as a case study on how data and knowledge were used to fund and drive a successful recruiting project.

Let me set the stage.  In consulting, people are your product – so your target headcount number is extremely important to achieve your revenue numbers.  As such, we knew from a recruiting perspective what we needed to hire above our current headcount number to achieve our planned book of business.  However, we also had a group of third party consultants that were being subbed on projects to cover increased demand for services – which offered us an opportunity save $2M YOY in costs that affected our margins – direct $’s to the bottom line — if we replaced them with full time employees.  And of course we still had to cover attrition that had occurred or would likely occur during this process.  Lastly, we didn’t have a lot of time to do it.  Shocker, I know.

Our Exec came fully prepared, and even expecting, to have to pay costly third party fees to achieve this goal – especially a very hard to find skill set — in a very tight time frame.  My job at this point is to tell them if this “project” was doable, what it would take, and what it would cost.  Guessing should not be an option – and it doesn’t need to be.  The data doesn’t lie – and I needed it to not only give me these answers, but to help me tell the story.  This is business – I can’t rely on guesses, my credibility, my charm, or even my good looks (*smile*).

Armed with my “story”, I demonstrated what we needed to invest and where – and where/how our recruiters time should be spent.  I also looked at all types of data, metrics, and measures and derived knowledge around how to make the process better and faster, more effective and efficient, and provide on target, higher quality candidates.  Things like:

• Job profiling workshops with hiring teams to create an agreed upon profile (by all involved) for recruiting as well as the assessment criteria, for which all parties would be held accountable.  No finding out at interview debriefs what they were really seeking (and increasing time to fill)…
• Baseline interview training for all interviewers  (understanding assessment criteria and how to use interview process to make informed decisions)
• Pre-screening questions (knockout, rankings)
• Behavioral assessment testing to gain predictive data and insights into candidates behavioral tendencies and motivations to be used with our profile
• Pre-scheduled and staffed interview dates and debriefs
• Predefined offer approval and delivery process (if certain candidate process scores and salary ranges were met – boom)
• I looked at source data for “quality” candidates (Tech-screened – meaning a manager reviewed/selected –to hired; Performance)

And not just how the “Sources” (Boards, Referrals, Direct Sourcing, Agencies, internals, candidate pools, pipelines, etc.) performed, but what their capabilities were — and what opportunities there were to make them perform better too.

This is business intelligence 101 – its not just a history lesson – it is decision support.  This is how the plan was formulated and sold.  I admit, they were skeptical – our leadership, and frankly, I think even the recruiters — but I had the data to help me tell my story.  I am not going to show you the data as it is lengthy — and proprietary — but the story it told me was:

1. Search our database and push a personalized email out to selected candidates telling them a little bit about our opportunity and why it might be of interest to them – inviting them to read more via a link to the job on our website.
2. Purchase a “national” job posting on our highest performing job board.  We used carefully crafted verbiage based on messaging geared to the profile of people we were seeking and utilizing high performing keywords we extracted from job board vendor data – also based on the “ideal candidate profile”.  The national scope of the posting – while very costly – allowed for our job to appear where appropriate — regardless of location searched by prospective candidates.  It was still about the same, maybe even a touch less, as one agency fee.
3. Hold a special “hot skill” referral contest for this profile/role only

These three things were geared to drive candidates from our top sources for this role – Employee Referrals and yes, Job Boards (or really just one particular job board in this case).  But most importantly, our own database — which represented no one particular source, but was obviously a huge pool of previously identified talent that already had knowledge of or interest in our organization.

To cover ourselves with any particular doubters, we did also open the search with two of our valued vendor partners.  I was fully comfortable that in this case, based on the data we had (historical, market, capabilities, etc.), that it would not make much of an impact on our recruiters, for redundant efforts or candidate duplication.  We had a vendor portal that they could submit their candidates through, which did a dupe check of our database immediately.  If a candidate was already in there, it would not allow the candidate to be submitted – and we would be none the wiser – eliminating any potential conflict over how a candidate was surfaced.  As it turned out, they were not even a factor.

In each of these cases the candidates were directed to our website to apply – which also had brief screening questions – to help aid the recruiters prioritize the candidates to be reviewed and ultimately screened as appropriate…

As active or “motivated” candidates came in from these marketing efforts, our recruiters could focus on screening them.  Then use the searches they set up initially for the ATS  marketing effort, to focus on direct calls to the hottest candidates surfaced.  This process can also be repeated within Linkedin, referrals, and other sourced candidates.  Using the process we outlined above to get the candidates through the process, we knocked this project out of the park — on time and under budget.  We were able to do what we set out to do, achieving the results we predicted the way we predicted being able to do it.  We met our book of business and saved the company $2M YOY direct to the bottom line.

The success of that project, along with many others, demonstrated our ability to go beyond being order-takers, facilitating butts in seats — such as

Hiring projects and programs
Workforce planning
Succession planning and executive hiring
Talent management/career development
Due diligence during M&A projects and merger integration projects
Scouting new office locations – domestic and global (talent market conditions, availability, trends)

…even determining product lines to offshore.  How can Recruiting know what product could be done in a particular location(s)?  By knowing how many we could realistically hire based on our bandwidth, budget — and the availability of talent, at what we were willing to pay, and other outside factors such as brand awareness in the marketplace.  If you want to elevate –  collect the dots, connect the dots — tell stories with your data, your knowledge — and help drive the business forward.

There’s data and there is knowledge.  Data is what it is…facts, numbers, or text, not necessarily yet useful on its own, it’s just data.  But data can be collected and put together such that it provides answers and meaning — this is knowledge.  This is Part 2 of a 3 part series on Supersizing your Recruiting function — it’s a bit lengthy, but I hope it illustrates why and how we can elevate our profession beyond being order-takers, facilitating butts in seats…

Part 1:  Using Data to Drive Decisions
Part 2: Data vs. Knowledge
Part 3: A Case Study

DATA

Before we can have Knowledge we must take the time to identify and collect the Data first — that is before we can connect the dots, we must collect the dots.  Half the battle will be identifying the data we need — and knowing where to find it in our world of disparate systems and data sources.  Ask yourself the following questions to help with this identification process :

What do you need?
What is important to you, your team, and your organization?
What will help you, your team, and your organization make decisions?
What do you need to provide?

There is data we could collect within our own organizations, such as:

* Experience, Expertise
* Education (where, degree, gpa, test scores,… – who knows what can be important)
* Performance & Development
* Engagement
* Time
* Costs
* Retention/Attrition
* Productivity
* Demographics
* Social

Even data that exists outside of organization could be useful, such as

* Job market data/trends
* Job reports
* Social

I remember  last year, Eric Winegardner, from Monster, absolutely astounding an audience at a Recruiting SIG meeting of TAG (Technology Association of Georgia, a large technology based professional association….) with job market data and trends.  Not just data and statistics, but what it meant and how they could help their organizations prepare – and drive better decisions.  I know it probably set some sort of download record that rest of that week at Monster’s site — and if they were smart they got on the email list for the monthly Monster Employment Index reports – or at least some source of regular job market data.

There really could be sources of very valuable data within your vendor partners as described above, where you least expect it.  I was completely blown away at a briefing I did at SHRM National, back in June in Atlanta, as part of the Press team with a company called TALX (now Equifax Workforce Solutions)…a provider of HR, Payroll, and Tax Management Solutions.  What struck me as fascinating when speaking with their President, Dann Adams, is that outside of the valuable services they provide to their customers, the data they are sitting on is off the chain and they get it.  They are actively looking for ways their data can help arm their HR customers with knowledge to drive better business decisions for their organizations.  For instance, we can tell our leaders we need different or better benefits…but what if you could actually show them that if they offer X, the results would be Y.

KNOWLEDGE

Exercise:  First understand your corporate objectives — then outline by each objective, how does what you or your team do match up?  Now you have focus…

Searching the data

You have your collection of data now – hopefully.  How will you search or extract it?  Make sure you understand how your search tool works – all the ins & outs.  If it doesn’t work well – or you don’t know it, get it in a tool that is better or you know better.

Telling Stories

Interpret – What happened?

I love this line from a post done by Jean Paul Isson:  “Business intelligence (BI) has exactly the same objective as the employment selection process: interpreting past data to forecast results and drive business decisions”.  BI is the heart of what we should be providing to elevate our value to the organization — Tell what happened.

Analysis – Why?

Now that you know what happened — you must look for why.   That is where analysis comes in – so you can then figure out what needs to happen to make it better.  This is where you can start to bring in your historical or performance data as well as information such as market trends, job reports, and any other data that will help…

Forecast/Predict — Like…

* Find/target more and better quality candidates
* Improve candidate assessment and recruiting processes
* Make better hiring decisions

More and more organizations are using assessment tools to help gain insights into a person’s personality, behaviors, work style, motivations, energy, etc – all in an effort to predict performance, fit, even the ability to retain.  And no discussion of this nature would be complete without the implications of Big Data and what impact it will have as time moves forward.  That is for another post, but I will leave you with one recent article to reference, courtesy of the
WSJ online called “Meet the New Boss: Big Data” about companies replacing hunch-based hiring with computer modeling — just to whet your appetite.

Making Decisions

To illustrate this point, I will use a story…

Let’s look at Starbucks – is it the best coffee?  I don’t know… it’s pretty darn good… But have I had better?  Sure.  Have I had worse?  Oh hell yes.  The point is there will always be someone who can take what you have done — product or service — and do as good, maybe better.  But what makes them different?

Their people — you usually have a consistent experience by knowledgeable, well-trained baristas.   I know there are always exceptions, but for the most part their people seem happy, my order never gets screwed up, they have never been out of what I wanted, etc.  Why is that?  Their ability to manage information.  They don’t hold their data and analytics up in their IT depts — or in their C-suites, making unilateral, top down decisions.  No — they push that information down into their cafes, so that their managers can make informed decisions on hiring, staffing, ordering/stocking, etc. based on their unique locations and needs.

Making Improvements

Another example to illustrate this point — Talent shortages are kind of a hot button for me.  But to address, first we have to improve on how we define and target talent.  We can’t make more people magically appear where there are few to be found — especially for most of us who may not have the biggest name, salaries, benefits, etc to compete for that talent against those that do.  To address those shortages or shortfalls — we need to open ourselves to what talent we should be seeking.  This new type of talent may be from a tier 2 or tier 3 school, and they may not have any experience in your industry, or in some cases, any experience at all. If you are trying to grow your  team, use the knowledge you have amassed to create your own definition of talent, identify the traits that they need, and hire and maybe even develop people who fit the bill.

Next Tuesday in Part 3, in the final part of the series, I will actually step through a past hiring project as a case study on how these concepts were used to fund and drive a successful recruiting project.  See you then…

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting super psyched for the 2012 SHRM Annual Conference in Atlanta June 24 – 27th! As I start preparing for the conference, I most often think about what i need to carry onsite as I walk the halls of the Conference Center. I thought I would share my chick must haves for my purse during #SHRM12.

It is important to point out that I do realize I will have the “classic HR chick” purse and there will probably be many others like it. I’m an HR Chick, I got over the whole cookie cutter Coach handbag thing years ago. You should to!

Below I’ve listed the must haves for my purse along with the specific brand/item I use. Let’s move along, shall we…

HR Chick Must Haves for #SHRM12

1. Pressed Powder compact WITH mirror – MAC Cosmetics Studio Careblend/Pressed Powder

2. Retractable Powder Brush – Sephora Brush #52

3. Longwear lipstick or lipgloss – Buxom Big & Healthy Lip Stick in Milan + Nivea Lip Care

4. Pen

5. Business cards

6. Cell Phone

7. Debit card + Drivers License – my Case-Mate cell phone case holds these in the back compartment

7. Travel size Anti-bacterial gel

8. Faux Pearl earrings (back-up)

9. Fresh breath spray – Listerine Pocketmist

10. Travel size hair brush

These chick must haves can be a lifesaver when you’re running around from room to room and making your way through the massive Expo Hall. You’ll also have your SHRM badge, I typically put my business cards in the badge holder.

HR Chicks grab your Coach bags and get ready for the big show in Atlanta! The Recruiter Chicks will see you there!

Chris Havrilla appeared on Business Transformation Radio with Todd Schnick and Todd Youngblood to talk about the upcoming SHRM-Atlanta Annual Conference.  Chris is the VP of Social Media for the chapter and was delighted to spend some quality time dishing about SHRM with Todd and Todd.

In her appearance on the radio show, the centerpiece was the Atlanta Chapter and the 22nd Annual SHRM-Atlanta Conference which takes place Tuesday, March 13th and Wednesday, March 14th at Cobb Galleria Centre in Atlanta.

Chris also spoke about the importance of joining an organization like SHRM-Atlanta and engaging with other members.

Check out the show here: http://transformation.dreamlandinteractive.com/2012/chris-havrilla-shrm-atlanta-2012/

Chris and I will both be in attendance at the SHRM-Atlanta Conference and we’re looking forward to networking with the best!