Author: Susan Govea

I am hearing more creative recruiting ideas than I have ever before. Gift cards, recruiting fairs in malls, incentives, referral games with prizes, it's amazing to see where the state of recruiting is today versus just 12 months ago. There were murmurs of talent shortage, and where is it today? Very evident in healthcare for specialized (professions, nurses, PAs, surgeons, technicians, in skilled labor ( welding, CNC machine operators, press operators) and in vertical professions - SALES SALES SALES! "MY KINGDOM FOR A GOOD SALESPERSON!" is this month's battle cry. Financial firms are tripping over each other trying to position themselves in front of good candidates.

HOWEVER, the majority of corporate recruiting execs are not doing anything particularly innovative to attract candidates. Instead, more money is being spent on traditional advertising - and traditional advertising is being blamed for 'not working as effectively". There hasn't been a marked decline in the number of candidates in the resume databases on the job boards, so why is the extra expense not driving the expected extra candidates?

Before you blame the job board, look at your own recruiting system. If 25 people apply for a job, there must be 200 who see the job and of those, 100 decide it's not for them, 50 who 'self-disqualify' themselves and don't proceed, 25 who abandon mid-way through the process, and another 25 who have technical problems completeing the lengthy application process.

Spending more money on candidate sourcing won't bring you more candidates if your system is working against you. Audit your own process by going through it yourself, or enlist a professional friend ( who works elsewhere) to go through the process and report back the experience to you. At the very least, you will get a glimpse into the experience your candidates are experiencing when considering whether or not to work for your company. And as important as first impressions are for candidates to make on a job interview, so they are for your company to make on potential employees!

What information do you need from Active or Passive Job Seekers to include them in your recruiting process?

I am sometimes amazed at the online job application forms I see on the Internet. If they were any longer, I know I’d need a magnifier to see the scroll bar on the right of the page. A couple of years ago, these sorts of applications might have been okay, because we had way too many applicants, and we could afford to have a high abandonment rate because we would still have an overwhelming number of applicants. But can we still afford to just turn people off and turn them away from our recruiting efforts, given the current lack of talent we’re seeing?

Why do we put people through the wringer like this? Is it that we only want people to apply who have the grit and determination to answer 406 questions and then (at the end of the form, for maximum exasperation value) give us a freeform reason why we should consider them? I wonder how many put  “I spent 90 minutes filling in this stupid form”. Most websites can generate stats that tell you which page of your site people abandon, and I reckon that form might be the most popular place for people to click off.

It is time for us to stop putting barriers and hoops up for people to have to jump over and through, just to tell us they are available as a candidate. The job landscape is changing, and people are going to be able to choose between companies and offers. As a company, why would you handicap yourself by giving people who have an interest in you a lousy experience at the beginning?

Of course, if you really have too many applicants to deal with, then barriers are absolutely right to have. I can also recommend making your careers area really difficult to find on your website, writing every link in 6 point type so that you can save the cost of the eye test till later, and then have the system hang up when they submit the information so they never know if you got it or not.

For a master stroke, please make sure that if the application gets through, the auto-responder from the Applicant Tracking System looks tacky and says ‘if you don’t hear from us, take a hint - don't call us, we'll call you’

My all time favorite is the company that gets application on a Saturday (when nobody’s there), has a knock out question, and the system sends the rejection 24 hours later (to the minute), so that it looks like it has been ‘considered’ and arrives back to the applicant on a Sunday (when nobody’s there).

So how much information do you need for somebody to be included in your recruiting efforts?

Name and Email, and maybe a little about what the candidate is interested in, but that's it.

Why? Because recruiting is more than filling vacancies. It’s about building a pool of people that you can look to when you have a vacancy. If the right person is in the pool, you just saved yourself time and money and effort.

If you have somebody’s E-mail address, willingly given, you can advertise your jobs to that person, personally. You can collect more information about that person, you can give that person a positive experience of your company. You can ask that person for help with bringing other people to your talent pool and for feedback. You can invite that person to your recruiting events. You might even make a customer out of that person.

We need a change of mindset, here. Move recruiting up to the company level. Does the U.S. Army advertise individual jobs? It may, but I think it recruits by talking about what being a part of the Army means, then figures out what job gets done by whom a little later.

Take a hint from the master recruiters in the military. Your company is not merely a collection of jobs. It is an environment, with an identity, a mission, and most importantly, a collection of people. Recruitment should be about collecting more people.

Please make it easier for people to get to know you. Don’t make people go through hell for no reward. They won’t do it when they have a choice to go somewhere the experience is better from the get-go. Make forms easier and shorter, and welcome minimal information when it’s offered. It’s time that we made more effort than the applicants do, and offered more in return, because we need to.

Author: Susan Govea, VP Marketing

Business technology fad, or true innovation? How do you tell the difference? 

Investors always have their noses in the air – and not because they make more money than the rest of us, but because they are keenly trying to detect the scent of money on the breeze….money trailing after the next great technological development that is going to revolutionize __________  (insert market segment here) ______.

Sometimes, watching the noses shift direction can look something like a school of goblin shark frantically competing for the scent of prey.

Some companies exist purely to churn out ‘advanced technologies’, which are really repackaged goods in disguise. After all, who among us realizes that a German inventor named Paul Nipkow developed the first version of a television to transmit pictures over wire in 1884 called the Nipkow disk? And you thought it was George Sony. (apologies to anyone actually named George Sony)

And if you thought Charles Seeberger invented the escalator, HA! It was actually a redesign of Jesse Reno's original steam-driven novelty ride at Coney Island! But, it was Charles who saw the possibilities and knew to take it to Otis Elevator company. But, Reno patented his escalator. But, Seeberg patented HIS escalator. Oh, who cares – Otis Elevator company bought BOTH patents anyway!

And so it goes today, still, with ideas being born, stolen, re-packaged, re-positioned, re-sold, and re-dundant, it’s difficult just to be aware of the latest version of what makes one product better than it’s nearest competitor cousin, let alone keep up with it on a timely basis. These days, it’s “He with the loudest bullhorn, the highest platform shoes and the most venture capital shall be the proclaimed most advanced technology available today, and shall be the standard of advancement by which all other would-be or had-been inventors shall set and wind their watches”. Who’s to argue with that, especially when your argument is inaudible above the hype?

So, what are we to believe about technology that’s over-hyped? Under-hyped? Not-At-All Hyped? How does a customer evaluate a technology to know if it is the BetaMax or the VHS? OnStar Vs. Kit Car (Hello, Michael…) Blue-Ray Vs. HD DVD??? And, does it really matter anyway? It does, if you want your investment to be more than a trophy prize indicating your ability to swing your nose with the best of them – and end up as useless as a trophy on the shelf, doing little more than collecting dust, just like your electric pulsing ab-reducing belt, or the leg-warmers hanging over the gigantic inverted-gravity machine in your basement (that was supposed to stretch your back muscles, but all it did was give you acid reflux). 

Here are 5 ways to determine if you should consider adopting new ideas into your business, or stand back on the platform and let that train pass you by:

1) Get closer to innovative people – and get to know innovation Innovation is not merely change. It is what makes people laugh out loud and look sideways at you because the idea is so crazy.

2) Apply the ideas laterally.
You’ve heard people say “let’s think laterally”, but, especially in business meetings, it tends to pertain to pointing to the left (or the right, depending on who you need to blame). In how many areas of your business can you implement this innovation? Is it one that has many touch points? Or can it form the basis for an entirely new company standard?

3. Quantify the value that implementing the idea into your business will achieve.
Will it change an existing process? Exactly how? Will redundant work be removed?  Will it differentiate your business?

4. Quantify the effect that implementing the idea will have on your CUSTOMERS.
Here is where the rubber meets the road. Because if the results of this analysis are not terrific, then forget it.

5. Does it complement your business, or is it a distraction?
The last thing to consider is a more personal one, because an innovation may add up in all the other areas, and bring immediate return, but may be taking you too far away from your core competency and cause long term brand dilution, or damage to other pre-existing business structure that would suffer from a sudden shift.

In our business, the business of Recruiting and Hiring, we are seeing some remarkable changes coming around. People are finding that the recruiting process is broken, and are actually looking for different ways to reach out to the right people. Recruiters are starting to be allowed to recruit to a plan, rather than by the requisition, and all the established suppliers are realizing that the game is changing. There are good new products out there, there more so there are repackaged products dressed up as innovation. Innovation or Fad? Does it actually change the process – cause a little disruption? Ruffle feathers? Great – it’s probably innovative. Now what will you do with it? Answer that question for yourself, and you will have the confidence beyond simply adopting the innovation – that will be a no-brainer – your confidence will spill into other areas that will empower your organization into a completely new era of competitive advantage. And that’s something you can’t base on a fad.  MORE ON THIS COMING NEXT WEEK...... and you can read the full version of this as an article Here

Author: Michael Sproul, President, eBullpen, LLC Date: July 11, 2006

Last time, we talked about Talent, what it means in our environment, and how, the improvement of the economy and demographic changes are taking us in the direction of a talent shortage.

This time, I am going to talk a little bit about personality and its impact on companies.

Personality tests have always fascinated me. They ask a bunch of questions and are then able to sum us up as people, our attitudes and our values. They can give you the results as colors or text, or letters. The most famous, and in my humble opinion, one of the best personality tests is the Myers Briggs Type Instrument (MBTI). It sums us up in 4 letters (I am an INTJ). If you care to dig deeper, the research can tell you how you will get along with another person, whose four letters you also know. (Just ask - if they’ve ever done the test, they’ll tell you) I am prepared to bet that the first person you would check out would be your significant other, and the second would be your boss. A lot of companies actually use the instrument in team building exercises, because it is useful to know for everyone, and it’s actually a lot of fun and kind of affirming to have a system tell you all these things about yourself and others.

The buzz lasts for days, while everyone goes around, checking out everybody else, and it certainly promotes interaction.

Personality has also become a factor in the very hiring of people, and it adds value to the recruitment process, because, properly administered and understood, it lets the company know how well (or badly) somebody may fit in with the team they are joining. I read that 46% of companies now use personality testing as one of the factors in selecting a new hire. Our own research says that 58% of companies believe that personality is a critical factor in hiring, second only to skills, and ranking higher than experience and even drive – Pretty important.

However, most of these hiring personality tests are administered towards the end of the recruitment process, I think, because of the costs involved. Companies use this as a sort of final check-mark to make sure that what they thought during the interviews is correct and this person seems to be a fit. I am all for it, because the more we do in terms of adding to the information gleaned at the interview, the better our chances of making a good hire. A resume and a single interview yields a 1 in 7 chance of a good hire. Adding a background check gets you 1 in 4. Adding a personality test makes it 1 in 3.

At last count, $140 billion is wasted every year on people who are not good hires. Not for them, and not for the company. They leave or are let go, and the recruitment process starts again, with fingers crossed that the result will be better this time. But that’s really not good enough. There’s a scale, of course, but with replacing a wrongly hired senior manager costing as much as three times that person’s annual salary, there has to be a better way. Few companies will take the long view and pay huge sums of money for a big battery of tests to make sure that the hire is right, though there are vendor companies out there who reckon that they can get the success rate as high as 3 in 4. I believe them.

So let’s assume you are not working at one of the organizations that is prepared to spend the same amount of money on the process of employing somebody as they do actually paying the person when they come to work. What do you do?

Well, my advice is to filter early, when filters are cheap. Think of talent as your water supply. Does the water company come and stick a filter on your faucet and feed untreated water to that filter, or does it filter the water in bulk and send clean water to your home? Does the oil company give you gasoline at the pump or does it delivery crude oil to your car, which tows around its own little refinery? The examples are ludicrous, of course, but the principle is sound. If you can filter talent on the front end of the recruiting process on more dimensions, you can save time in the process and get a better end product.

Stay tuned and I'll tell you how...

Author: Michael Sproul, President, eBullpen, LLC Date: June 29, 2006

Hello, and welcome to the TalentPen Blog. My name is Michael Sproul, I am President of eBullpen LLC, the company which created TalentPen, the one and only job matching system that includes personality. I should say, upfront, that my background is in managing companies, so if the ideas expressed here are a little counter-culture, or heretical, I'd love your feedback. Michael.sproul@ebullpen.com is the address. 

So…. This blog is all about Talent. We all know Talent when we see it, wish we had it, and could get on American Idol to show it off. Actually, that’s not really that kind of Talent we want to talk about, though our own talent pools may include some excellent actors, jugglers and tap dancers, of course.  What I mean is the word that we use to describe real people that might possibly want to come and work for us.

When we think about it, it’s that pile of resumes in our Applicant Tracking System, or filing cabinets that we add to when we get a new job to fill.

When we really think about it, talent is also the workforce we already have, and these days, the talent has started to realize that the times they are a-changing. There are good jobs to be had in companies that seem, well, really nice, actually. Only a year ago, the Talent would have looked up and around and realized its best bet was to keep the head down, not be naughty, and sit out the economic Winter.

Today, I talk to recruiters who have a whole new set of problems. A year or two ago, they needed a way to get through several hundred resumes per job posted. Today, apparently, good quality talent is getting hard to find, and harder to hang onto. The Talent River is drying up, and we’re going to have to find people who already have jobs, and may not be looking.

Drat. We may have to sell them on our company. Not so bad, if our company is GE, but a little harder if we are short on iconic status. A thankless task. Calling up people who already have jobs, and talking them into considering a new experience with our company. The good news is that apparently half the talent in the country is looking for a change, so our timing on the call is good. The bad news is that if another recruiter is doing it better, you’ll lose.

So, life is going to be a little different from now on. I love it. More of this good news, bad news stuff to come.

Newsletters and Promotions Archive Recipes For Recruiting Success  Dec 2006