Recruiter Chicks

Please note:  This is a re-post of an article, “Hiring For Keeps – What Does Recruiting Have to Do With Retention?”, that I originally wrote for the Jobsite.com blog , where I am honored to be a regular contributor!

Recruiting is a Business Function

I don’t think anyone who knows me, sees me speak, or reads anything I write would argue the fact that I love the Recruiting Profession. In business, Recruiting is one of the most important functions that ANY of us do — it is the building of our teams, it is how we achieve our goals, our success.  Unless in your work, you only need to count on yourself, a business cannot be successful without doing Recruiting well.  But what does Recruiting have to do with Retention?  I say it has a lot to do with it.

Why Discuss Retention?

Maybe retention is not one of your MBO’s or tied to your fee, but if you want to be the best, if you want to be different from the rest, if you want to last in this industry as the world changes, you should recruit with retention in mind!

What is On the Line? Having “Skin in the Game”

I remember the first time I introduced retention – keeping employees employed with your company – as a performance goal to one of my recruiting teams and they looked at me like I was crazy. I understood their questions — they had no control, they weren’t making hiring decisions, they weren’t managing them or their environment, etc.  The fact is – no one has total control — or as my friend Ed Newman says, hiring is always a crap shoot. But I wanted them to go beyond what other recruiters did – I wanted them to have skin in the game – and that was exactly my purpose.

Recruiters Need to Own their Work.

I talk a lot about how we elevate the Recruiting Profession to match the importance of the function itself. I believe we do that by truly owning it — and by becoming as much a part of the business as the people we are helping to build their teams.  To do that, we have to know the industry, the business, and even the teams — maybe even better than they know (or want to know) themselves. It is not enough to understand the required and desired skills of the job specs and expect to find the right candidate/fit for the role. You also have to go beyond the resume — get to know your applicants and candidates, beyond the check-boxed skill sets. If you take the time, they will often share more with you, the recruiter, than they will with the hiring manager/team, whom they know are the ultimate decision makers.

So, What Does This Have to Do with Retention?

People don’t leave jobs; they leave bosses or companies that don’t fit. There is so much that has to be uncovered to find a fit. You can take an A-player in one company and put them in a similar position in another company and it could be a disaster. Different environment, culture, players, organizational structure, challenges, objectives, performance measures — shall I go on? As a Recruiter, you should know these things about your organization/teams. Do these things align with what the candidate needs or what motivates him? To know all this, one must take the time, be curious, pay attention, listen, ask questions — as well as having the confidence and credibility to advise and consult those who depend upon your expertise.

What Really Matters -

The simple fact is it does not matter if the company thinks the candidate is a perfect fit for them, if the company is not a fit for the candidate — and vice versa. Unfortunately, neither side (jobseeker nor recruiter) usually takes the time to make sure it is a fit on both sides. The Recruiter can play that devil’s advocate or objective party — that person who is not too emotionally (or conveniently) invested in filling the seat or getting the job. I am by no means saying that this is how it happens — I am simply saying that in order to elevate this profession – that is how it should happen. Where there is fit, there is retention – so I ask, why wouldn’t recruiting be relative to retention?

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…

It is not a product or service that can guarantee an organization’s success – at least for the long term – because your competition will catch up.  It is your organization’s talent and their ability to manage and utilize data/information that can give the ultimate competitive advantage.  Last month at SourceCon in Dallas, I had the opportunity to share my thoughts on how Sourcing and Recruiting can and should differentiate themselves as a critical business function based on these same concepts.  This is part 1 of a 3-part series based on what I presented at SourceCon12.

Driving Better Decisions

Sourcing and Recruiting are vital to the success of an organization, yet the function is often undervalued and underfunded — probably because we have not mastered the art of capturing and/or analyzing the right data to help us or our organizations make better decisions around talent. If we learn how to do this right we can have influence and demonstrate value by

• Finding/targeting more and better quality candidates
• Improving candidate assessment and recruiting processes
• Making better hiring decisions
• Building better business cases (budget, headcount, …)
• Providing decision support for the function AND the organization

Those first four bullets are a bit more obvious — and I think you will find, once you have started to really conquer those areas, your Recruiting function will likely have the kind of credibility to use the data/information we can tap into to help drive other critical business decisions across your company. Like what?  Here is an example of other areas where my past teams have had success…

• Workforce planning
• Succession planning and executive hiring
• Talent management/Career development
• Due diligence during M&A projects and merger integration projects
• Scouting locations for a new development center – domestic and global (think talent market conditions, availability, trends)
• Off-shoring product(s)

Yes — even decisions on what products should be considered during off-shoring discussions.  After working with the head of product development to understand how many developers it would take for each product, I used data to demonstrate what we could realistically hire based on our bandwidth, budget, and most importantly the availability of talent — at what we were willing to pay, and  brand awareness in the marketplace.  As a result, informed decisions were made on what products could realistically be transitioned to off-shore location and when.

Without data, you can’t have knowledge — so next Tuesday in Part 2, I will explore both data and knowledge a bit deeper.  On the following Tuesday, 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.

I would love to hear from anyone that has other example of business decisions you were able to impact or influence!!