With all the buzz around talent communities in social media recruiting, a logical next question is where to source experienced talent in a space that’s still so new that it’s hard to know who does it well. My sourcing recommendation would be to start with those doing it as their full-time job.

To that end, earlier this year, Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter Group and an assistant compiled a fabulous (and growing) list of social media community managers at companies.

If you’re still working on a job spec (or want to benchmark), he also describes a report you can get free, which covers the attributes, background, and experience needed for this role.

The post was updated to include a link to a spreadsheet that lists related people’s Twitter handles, and a list of community managers working at non-profits, too.

By his own admission in one of the comments (yet more talent listed there) below the post, Jeremiah hadn’t thought about the recruiting angle of community management. So the people listed don’t necessarily have a recruiting focus to their work, but it’s likely part of their mandate in many cases (though surely subservient to product marketing / customer service / branding).

Nevertheless, if you’re sourcing this kind of talent or want to benchmark, you’ll want to check out all of the above!

P.S. Anything else you want to know about sourcing that I can cover in a future post? Ping me at glenn at arbita dot net or add a comment!

Original post: ERE.net Community

First the good news: many companies are hiring again. Now the bad news: if your company is among them, you’re probably looking at too many requisitions and too few hands on deck to fill them. And, even if you’re not in that boat, you’re probably feeling the pressure to do more with less.

In either case, your team can benefit from persuading recruiters to eliminate the five time-wasters below. By streamlining their work, recruiters will have more time to focus on the most valuable aspects of the hiring process. The results will be:

• Better hiring decisions
• An improved candidate experience
• A more cost-effective approach to talent acquisition

Working Outside the ATS

Applicant tracking systems offer a robust way to manage applicant flow, communicate effectively with candidates, ensure compliance, and report analytics. But only if you use the system.

We all get accustomed to doing things a certain way, and for some recruiters, it’s just too cumbersome to use the ATS instead of their own spreadsheets, email templates, or reporting methods. If this is happening in your organization, make some changes right away. The time it takes to get recruiters ramped up in how to use an ATS pales in comparison to the hours wasted by working outside the system.

Recruiters bypassing the ATS also diminishes the value of the reports the tool can generate automatically. These reports provide real-time information about how efficient and effective the hiring process is at any given time. But without timely (or accurate) inputs from recruiters, the data is bad, the team’s credibility can be damaged, and the quality of the hiring process usually suffers.

Practice using your ATS on a real-time basis. This will help you do three things:

1. Learn the system better
2. Prevent the duplication of work, such as re-entering information into the system
3. Keep details like candidate correspondence from falling through the cracks.

Beginning a Search Without the Right Information

“Pay now or pay later” has never been more true than when dealing with the hiring process. When recruiters don’t get the right information upfront, it costs them time, energy, and even money, later. But it’s not usually the recruiters’ fault when the hiring manager doesn’t have time to answer questions or discuss the job in detail.

But it is the recruiter’s job to make the hiring manager understand the consequences of kicking off a search with nothing more than an old job description or the previous posting. What are the consequences?

• Days or weeks of back and forth questions, answers, and follow-up questions
• Sourcing candidates who aren’t a good match
• Frustrating candidates who are interviewed, but later considered “not right” for the job
• Costing the company by extending the time that positions (sometimes critical, revenue-generating positions) remain open

What should a recruiter do? When a job opens, the recruiter and hiring manager should meet live — either by phone, Webex, or in person — to discuss the position in depth. Key questions might include:

• What are the key responsibilities of this job?
• What kinds of decisions will this person make?
• What key accomplishments must be achieved in the first year?
• What’s the best thing about this job?
• What’s the most difficult part of this job?
• What experience and education is a must-have for candidates?
• What qualifications are nice-to-have?
• What companies do you feel hire well for this role?
• Who are direct reports to this role? Dotted-line reports? Supervisors? Key stakeholders?
• Who will interview the candidates?

If your company doesn’t already have a template for guiding the discussion during intake meetings, create one — and adapt it over time — so recruiters can drive consistent conversations with hiring managers.

Not Using Questionnaire Functionality in the Applicant Tracking System

Recruiters often spend hours doing something the applicant tracking system is equipped to do in a matter of seconds.

Recruiters can be much more efficient — and improve their results — by taking the time up front to create job-specific questionnaires in the ATS prior to beginning a search. With good questionnaires in place, the ATS is able to automatically screen and sort candidates as they complete the online application process.

When job-specific questionnaires aren’t used, recruiters have no choice but to review each candidate’s background, one by one. And if there are more than a few candidates on a req, it simply might not be possible to review each one — so recruiters might review only those who most recently applied.

Again, you can invoke the “pay now or pay later” mantra. Taking the time to create a job-specific questionnaire based on the outcome of the intake meeting will result in the most qualified candidates showing at the top of the list — in real time.

Taking a Passive Approach to Scheduling Interviews

Identifying who will be on the interviewing team — and when interviews will likely take place — should be agreed upon during the intake meeting between the recruiter and hiring manager.

When recruiters know the days and time slots the interviewing team has available, candidates can be scheduled on the spot. This type of proactive planning improves the candidate experience, speeds the hiring decision, and helps ensure that the best candidates stay in the process.

Producing Manual or Customized Reports

We all know people who are energized by running reports and reviewing data. And by its nature, talent acquisition is a target-rich environment for data-hungry people. But if we objectively assess the standard reports that most applicant tracking systems offer, we’ll find that — more often than not — 80% of what we need to assess the effectiveness of talent acquisition is there.

Would more reports — or different reports —  be interesting to see? Undoubtedly. Would they help us drive better results? Arguably no.

Talent acquisition leaders should strive to build a set of standardized reports that meet the most critical reporting needs of the function. This will also allow everyone, but particularly recruiters, to focus more time and energy on sourcing and selecting candidates, instead of tracking numbers.

When managing requests for additional data from senior leaders or other stakeholders, talent acquisition leaders should ask: “What will be done with the information once we get it?” and “How will this new data help us achieve our goals of faster, better, and more cost-effective talent acquisition?”

Taking steps to address these five areas can drive significant improvements, quickly, for your talent acquisition team.

Here is the original post: ERE Articles

My younger brother Barak got married August 12, 2010. When we were growing up, the thing I knew for sure was that I hated him. It was the “hard fact.” There was no way around it. I hated him. Every time he said something I wanted to kill him (and obviously the other way around is true), and this picture is one of the few that I found when we were smiling and hugging. Later I seem to have managed to always have someone stand between us (quite like I see with my own kids these days).

But that’s brothers/sisters for you.

Today he’s my best friend; we consult with each other on every new direction or thought, from big to small. We support each other on a daily basis.

I thought of him this morning, about our relationship, and the fact that in the distant past I was so confident that I’ll never want to help him, thinking that I hated him — for me was at the time, a “hard fact.” Something no one could argue with.

This morning, thinking of him and how things have changed during the past approximately 20 years, connected me to my conversations with many recruiters in Israel about their relationship with their corporate partners — usually from the U.S.

“They Would Never Agree to this”

I’ve been training thousands of HR recruiters and managers during the past four years regarding online recruiting. When I ask local recruiters about their progress in implementing social media tools and online recruiting in their company, I usually hear the same sentence: “We’re in a unique position, representing a U.S. corporation in Israel, and they would never agree to that…”

“They” is the U.S. based corporation. ”That” is usually one of a few things that “they” usually don’t agree to:

• Enabling the local international site to open a local website, in the local language, even in a different “look and feel,” adapted to local expectations and habits.
• Enter the social media independently, not only under the “umbrella” of the U.S. corporation.
• Give publications, articles, and blogs a independent online presence, focused on the potential local candidates.
• Have U.S. corporate people train local international professional recruiters on using the different tools.

What’s the Impact?

I’ll share with you the latest in Israel, following our HRD March 2010 sourcing survey of corporate recruiting departments, and some of the results that I see following the fact that companies representing U.S. corporations are not receiving support:

• Higher cost of hire. Placement agencies and job boards are one of the three top sources of hire.
• Lack of use of online tools. Only 5% of the organizations use their corporate website as a main source of hire; only 45% use online social media tools for recruiting.

How can you improve your work with international sites?

My top five recommendations for U.S. corporations on how to support their International sites are:

• Teach new technology as soon as you learn it
• Allow them to act local
• Trust the local sites; delegate
• Learn from them (maybe they’ll bring new ideas that you can use)
• Benchmark for a worldwide set of best-known-methods, and share them

The value that these changes will bring your company:

• Save money and shorten time to hire in the company
• Build a stronger worldwide brand
• Align corporate recruiting processes
• Enable diversity and new ideas generated by worldwide sites
• Let worldwide sites feel more connected to the corporate

What needs to change? You can help!

The reason why I thought about my brother and me in relation to this conversation is the way we saw it at the time as the “hard fact.” Something that we just couldn’t imagine that would change in our lifetime.

For a few years now I’ve been telling recruiters in Israel that all they need to do is start the dialogue with their corporate partners, and maybe things will change in the future. This year I decided to try and make a bigger difference, and I’ll be presenting my thoughts on this delicate partnership between U.S. corporations and local international sites at the coming ERE Expo.

As part of my preparations for it I need your help:

I’ve prepared a very short survey that will take not more than five minutes of your time to answer. It is intended for HR and recruiting teams of both U.S. corporates and their local international sites. Please help me with filling it out and forwarding the link to your partners around the world in the different local sites.

I’ll be more than happy to share with anyone who fills the survey its results.

To answer the survey please click here.

Original post here: ERE Articles

John Sullivan wrote about the cost of a bad hire. Reading through the list, I thought it was extremely comprehensive … someone must have done their homework.

Sure, we should plan ahead, forecast hiring trends, and develop candidate pools. This is just good business sense. But, assuming hiring managers and staffing folks are doing the best they can, that is not enough. If we do not abandon old ways of thinking and adopt new tools, articles like this will continue into the future. Let me begin by restating a few obvious facts:

• Interviews range from highly structured to ROTFL. Although they get better with structure, interviews are still tests.
• Job requirements are almost always taken from an old position description. Questions are delivered orally and answers are delivered orally. Scores are almost always based on personal opinion.
• In the end, interviewers usually compare candidates with each other instead of to the job.
• No one intentionally hires someone who cannot do what was expected.
• People promoted based on performance as individual contributors seldom become good managers.
• A poor hiring program leads to a shallow promotion pool.

If sports franchises used organizational hiring practices to hire players, they would hire golfers, send them to soccer workshops, manage them as if they were fly fishermen, and reward them based on their ability to play badminton.

We can cite more facts, but the obvious question is not whether or not we should do a better job hiring and measuring candidates, but how can we start doing it?

Think Outside the Box

There is an old training problem where people are asked to connect 16 dots arranged 4X4. They are told to use only four straight lines and to keep the pencil on the paper at all times. The task is impossible without going outside the box; so is fixing the low-performer problem. Going outside the box with employment means: 1) doing a better job defining how a job is to be done; 2) using tests that measure “hows”; and, 3) following up on specifics. And, guess what? The good part is that’s what the Feds want you to do anyway!

Clear the Competency Cobwebs

Start by tossing-out junk competency definitions. Unless the old job is exactly like the new one, the only competencies that reliably can be used to bridge skills from one job to the next are technical knowledge, cognitive abilities, planning skills, behaviors, and motivations. I’ll leave physical skills for another article. In short, you need to know if the employee is smart enough to solve problems in the new job, knows the right things, can effectively plan and organize work, has the right interpersonal skills, and wants to do what’s required. It’s really so basic that some people have trouble understanding it.

You see, asking about results is the part that gets our attention. Asking “what have you done” is much easier than asking “how did you do it?” And, asking “how did you do it?” is easier than knowing if the candidate is telling you the truth. And so it goes. Even while our human nature keeps telling us how important it is to get to know the candidate, our job responsibility is to get to know whether the person has the skills to do the job. I know I don’t have to cite examples. We all have an abundance of them.

Start by understanding how a job should be accomplished. That is the secret of what you are looking for. And, while you are at it, ask a few people who actually do the job. You would be surprised at what you can learn.

Master Your Tools

Interviews are quick, flexible, cheap … and inaccurate. If they are the only tools you use, abandon any idea that you can improve hiring quality. It will save a lot of frustration. Of course, adding structure to your questions without adding job analyses data or standardized scoring may make you sound more professional, but not knowing what to probe for or how to evaluate it will still fall short of your goals. Get to know as much as you can about hard-to-fake tests such as simulations and ability-type tests. If you don’t know how to use them, learn.

Avoid the Junk

I really feel sorry for someone who seriously attempts to navigate today’s test market. It is filled with so much junk and misleading information that it is almost impossible to make a well-informed decision. In general, avoid any test that claims it is approved by the EEOC, does not have adverse impact, states it can “help” you make the right hiring decision, has special occupational norms, and so forth. These are red flags. Even if you don’t get sued for hiring discrimination, you won’t be so lucky defending a wrongful termination charge or an internal discrimination challenge. Of course, there are all those bad-employee expenses that John Sullivan cited in his article.

Playing the Odds

Every hire is a gamble, and no system is perfect. Your only choice includes whether to continue using non-predictive interview techniques or learn better processes that screen out a greater percentage of unskilled employees. This is called validation. Nothing in the organization’s arsenal delivers the same ROI as a good hiring system. Just imagine instead of having a typical organization staffed with 20% top producers, 20% bottom, and the rest in the middle, what it would be like having 70-80% top producers.

Of course, you could always continue complaining about the high cost of low performance.

Original post: ERE Articles

A long time after the rest of the world, I finally saw the movie Avatar, and I was thrilled. Not from the 3D or the big story, but from the fine details. These, in my mind, made the difference, leading millions around the world to believe there is such a planet like Pandora (or that we’ll find one in 150 years time — in 2154, as James Cameron wrote).

I believe these details can help recruiters reach a huge success, especially if they use the social media.

But I’ll start at the beginning.

How Do We Convince People That Something Illogical Really Exists?

This was in my mind, one of Cameron’s biggest challenges. He did create, of course, the big story: a fictional world, on a different planet, so we have a great story that he needed to “sell” to the viewers. I wanted to touch one piece of it — the emotional connection to the world he created.

If you haven’t seen the movie yet, I’ll add a short explanation (the long version’s available on Wikipedia). The story folds in a planet named Pandora: a lush, Earth-like planet. Pandora is inhabited by the Na’vi, a 10-foot-tall (3 meters) blue-skinned species of sapient humanoids. My point begins with the fact that the Na’vi live in harmony with nature.

After seeing the movie, while reading of the background behind Cameron’s research for Avatar, I learned that movies like “Pocahontas” and “Dances with Wolves” inspired Cameron in the making of the Avatar (it was fascinating to read how he took a small piece from each movie or book and together created a new world). I wasn’t surprised.

There’s a direct line between what I read and saw during the past few years in movies depicting the connection the Native American people have with the land and the life on it and what Cameron showed about the Na’vi’s harmony with nature. There is one main difference.

During the movie’s three hours, Cameron makes us believe in something that dozens of movies regarding the Native American culture didn’t always manage to make us believe.” The harmony with nature in Avatar is presented through a physical connection between “Humans” — the Na’vi, and the plants and animals around them.

Cameron’s Na’vi have long hair and in it a group of nerves leading to the brain. Their hair is typically braided, and when they ride their local “horse,” the rider’s hair (connected to their brain) connects to the horse’s hair. This way they control the horse’s movement by the power of their thought alone. In the same way, when connecting to the trees around them, to their ancestors’ spirits in one of them, they do it the same way — connecting their hair to the tree.

The Power of a Physical Demonstration

This was the one detail didn’t leave me even after leaving the theatre. I tried to figure out what was so strong for me in this connection of human and nature. The idea of “human/nature connection” wasn’t new. The new piece was the physical demonstration that I couldn’t “wave off” and say, that’s B.S. I saw a physical connection between men, women, and nature. As soon as you see the connection, it’s much easier to understand how the man “thinks right” and the horse runs to that direction. Or how the movie’s star manages to control the Great Leonopteryx (Toruk in Nav’i), an accomplishment that no other has before.

The main difference between the old Native American movies and Avatar, was in the fact that Cameron created a physical connection that we could see, understand, and believe. I didn’t need to be convinced that there’s a harmony with nature. I saw it physically happening in front of me.

What’s the Connection to Recruiting Employees?

When we recruit employees (like many marketing processes) we want to create the best employer branding we can … our organization is the best place for you to work in. The marketing parallel statement is of course: our product is the best for your needs. Many organizations find perfect candidates, but they can’t “pull them in” to the hiring process. At times, the candidates don’t go past the first step: arriving at the first interview or agreeing to a phone interview. They take a peek into the company’s website or remember what they heard about it and pass. This is true especially with “passive” candidates: they’re working, satisfied from where they are. Recruiters constantly need something strong to use to pull them to the organization.

Showing Clearly With Vivid Colors: Through Social Media

Like Cameron in Avatar: show the candidates as vividly as you can, why they should come and work with your organization. Show something that is clearly demonstrating the fact that your organization is the place to work for. Enable them to personally connect to it. Your challenge is to liven up the professional and social life in the organization for someone who is still not in it.

I’ll Agree — It’s not an Easy Task

I do believe though that social media tools can give you the answer if you use them correctly. Take “Best Buy” and its Twelpforce — the collective technical support team formed last year to give help through Twitter. The company’s staff answers questions (from customers or others) within minutes. Any candidate interested in Best Buy’s Service Department can just watch this magic of the crowds, inside the company. It comes from a body of people that focuses not only on customers, offering help to anyone that needs assistance. If there are candidates who don’t like this way of work, they probably won’t hand in their CV. I’m sure that for Best Buy that’s excellent — focusing only on those who want to be part of this “support team spirit.”

Another great example is Microsoft and its blogs network, that worldwide, through all of Microsoft’s sites, enables employees to speak freely with interested partners and readers. The blogs of the engineers themselves exposes candidates to the “real” life in Microsoft. Uncensored, clear, and focused, out there for all to see.

It Takes Guts

It takes a lot of guts and courage from organizations, willing to leave the “fait” of the organizations’ branding and marketing in the hands of the employees, with no censorship on every word coming out of the employees. There is clearly no one simple way, one route to follow, where the perfect candidates fall in your lap.

There is, however, something in the world of social media that makes me feel like it’s closest to Cameron’s physical demonstration in Avatar. It is the power of the crowd of employees in the organization. Use the voice of your employees through social media tools, and they’ll get your message through.

Let your best employees talk and they will demonstrate it to the right candidates.

Source: ERE Articles

Without question, having a large LinkedIn network is a competitive advantage for any recruiter working on hard-to-fill positions and hard-to-find candidates. This advantage is lessened dramatically with LinkedIn Recruiter, since it includes complete visibility to the 70mm+ people in their network. Since this full-visibility product is off-limits to TPRs, it levels the playing field somewhat for corporate recruiters. But this is not as significant a disadvantage as it would seem to those of us who have to find top candidates the old-fashioned way — networking. Getting pre-qualified referrals from people who will call you back is the real secret of recruiting passive candidates.

With this in mind, I’d like to offer a few of my favorite passive candidate recruiting secrets.

Networking Secrets of an Old-time Headhunter

1. Network in 3D. While the names on LinkedIn are great to have, getting the names of their best connections is even better. As you begin your quest for great referrals, don’t just consider peers. Consider those who these people have mentored, who mentored them, who they most likely worked with on cross-functional teams, and who they regularly work with outside the company, including vendors, customers, and consultants.
2. Track your effectiveness. Don’t waste your time. Networking is not about dialing for dollars. Instead, track how many people call you back, how many are interested in talking about your position, how many are qualified for your opening, and how many referrals you get per call. If you’re not tracking this daily, you can’t get any better, since you won’t know what to work on. If you do track these metrics, you’ll soon discover that great referrals from well-respected people can increase your productivity 5-10X. That’s why the first name found on LinkedIn is not nearly as valuable as a referral from one of these people.
3. Get three referrals on each call. The most important metric you can track is how many high-quality referrals you get on each call. You need to become adept at getting these names. Make sure you highlight the fact that you don’t want to know anyone who’s looking. Instead, ask the person for the best person they know who’s absolutely not looking, but would be open to discussing a potential career move. Thinking in 3D helps here. For example, I’ve called buyers at major retailers looking for salespeople, product marketing people looking for engineers, ad agencies looking for product marketing people, and CPA partners looking for CFOs. The key is not to hang up until you have three great referrals if the person you called isn’t appropriate for the job at hand.
4. Don’t call people who won’t call you back. Great people will call you back if you mention the name of another great person. That’s why step three is so important. Track your callback rates. If you make sure that 80% of the people you call are warm, pre-qualified referrals, your call-back rate will be 75% or better. If you just make outbound cold calls, your callback rate will be closer to 25%. This is a huge difference in productivity.
5. Only call people who are worthy. While getting people to call you back is important, if they’re not worth talking to, it’s a waste of time. That’s why it’s important that you pre-qualify the referral. Just ask the person giving you the name why the person is a top-performer. As far as I’m concerned, a worthy person is someone who is either qualified for the job or knows someone who is.
6. Leave professional and career-oriented messages. Whether it’s a voicemail or an email, suggest you’d like to enter into a discussion regarding what could potentially be an important career move for the person. You must include some substantive proof as part of the message, not hyperbole. For example, “You might have heard that we just merged with XYZ Resources, and are looking for a product manager to lead the first integrated development project. I’d like to chat with you to see if this could offer a significant career move for you.” If you can mention the name of the person who provided you the referral you will more than double your callback rate. Hyperbole — “the greatest position in the world” — will cut it in half.
7. Create instant careers. If you’ve asked the person if they’re open to discussing a possible career move and they answered yes, don’t tell them much more about the job; instead, get them to first tell you a little about them. This is essential. As you quickly go through the highlights of the person’s work history, look for gaps in the candidate’s background your job fills. This could include staff size, scope of the project, impact the person can make, exposure to management, and the like. Mention these as reasons to proceed in the discussion. Of course, if the gaps are too big, or non-existent, smoothly switch your focus to getting three referrals.
8. Don’t take “no” for an answer. In addition to doing everything described above, you also need to be adept at overcoming objections. These cover the range from I’m not looking, what’s the comp, I’m happy where I am, to I’d don’t like the industry, your company has a bad reputation, and I don’t want to relocate. It’s impossible to put 20 years of advice into a single paragraph, other than to say that persistence is the key here. If your position represents a true career move, you owe it to your hiring manager, yourself, and the person on the phone not to give up until the person has the information needed to compare your job to what they’re doing today or whatever else they’re considering. Don’t give up until they do. Even if the person decides it’s not a true career move, you’ll still be able to get your three referrals.
9. Recruit first, network second. You’ll increase your networking productivity by directly recruiting the person first, rather than calling the person on some “networking” premise. To me this later approach should only be used when calling someone who clearly is not a candidate for the job. Recruiting the person first allows you to find out about the person’s background before revealing much about the job. This allows you to determine if you should recruit the person or get referrals. You also establish a different relationship once the candidate has shared some confidential information with you.
10. Become SWK (someone worth knowing). Top prospects want to stay connected with top recruiters who handle important jobs. To become SWK you must know the job, the hiring manager, your company, your industry, and your competition. You need to be seen as a reasonably objective career counselor who is only willing to proceed if the job represents a true career move. You know you’re SWK if you get unsolicited referrals from top people in your area of expertise who want to work with you and give you other top referrals.

What’s great about LinkedIn and its Recruiter product is it gets you in the major leagues on day one. This is an invaluable gift. Regardless, since everyone will soon have access to the same information, your ability to convert a list of names into hot prospects and great hires is the real difference-maker. In my mind, this is the essence of great recruiting.

Here is the original post: ERE Articles

The quality of those not hired is the most valuable recruiting metric that you have never heard of! It informs you how often your organizations is failing to hire the highest quality applicants.

A few years back I was advising a Fortune 100 firm that had a painfully slow and somewhat arrogant hiring process. To demonstrate the negative impact of their process I had to prove to a skeptical senior manager that they were letting top candidates get away. I asked a manager hiring for an important job to rank, in order of quality, 100 applicants who had been sourced for the role. The chosen rank was discretely written on the back of paper copies of the candidate’s resumes. Months after the role had been filled, the manager was asked if they were satisfied with the hire. He was, and felt quite certain that he had successfully hired a “top 5” candidate. After hearing of his satisfaction I had him look at the initial rank he had provided the candidate who was later hired: 75.

You can imagine his shock when he realized that the hiring process had somehow let every single one of the top-ranked applicants that the firm had prided itself in hiring “every single time” slip away. Clearly the quality of the people who they didn’t hire was significantly higher than the quality of the one that they did.

Selecting HR Metrics Is Unfortunately Not a Scientific Process

Most organizations adopt metrics based on those covered by benchmark reports or that can be easily enabled via their technology providers, instead of determining what they need to discover or prove. As a result, many organizations are burdened with data and reports that offer little in the way of guidance helping them improve their effectiveness. One metric often not fully taken advantage of is quality of hire, which I estimate less than 40% of organizations even attempt to use. Even fewer use the quality of hire derivative, quality of those not hired, because it can very quickly demonstrate how poorly a process performs.

Determine Where Your Recruiting Problems Are Occurring

During an advisory conversation with a recruiting leader at a well-known social networking firm experiencing difficulty achieving hire diversity, I asked “at what step or stage is your recruiting process failing?” I wasn’t surprised when he responded “we don’t actually know, we just know that the overall recruiting process is not producing the results we need.” Like many organizations, this organization lacked well-thought-out metrics that enable both performance reporting and process diagnostics.

Recruiting processes fail because either they do not attract enough top-quality candidates up front, or they fail to accurately identify, assess, and sell those attracted on the job at later stages in the process. Most organizations focus heavily on measuring sourcing effectiveness, but ignore the later stages of the process altogether. One benefit of using a “quality of those not hired” metric is that it focuses exclusively on the back end, where I estimate at least 50% of those organizations not meeting their goals have problems. If you doubt that the problem is post-attraction, ask your favorite agency or executive recruiter what percentage of qualified candidates are lost due to slow or ineffective actions on the part of hiring managers and corporate recruiting processes.

One of the purposes of the quality-of-those-not-hired metric is to force organizations with a high percentage of quality hires slipping away to identify where in their process the talent opts out or gets dropped. There are six post application stages where firms lose top candidates, including:

1. Resume screening process — the ATS, a recruiter, or a hiring manager mistakenly screens out top applicants.
2. Telephone screen — top applicants rank poorly on their phone screens or their screen cannot be completed, so they are dropped from consideration.
3. Interview scheduling — they get frustrated over the number of interviews and dropout or they cannot complete them in time because of scheduling conflicts.
4. Interview assessment — they voluntarily drop out before the interviews can be completed, or the interview process mistakenly rates them poorly.
5. The offer process — either the process fails to include most of the top applicants on the list of finalists, or they reject the offer.
6. Reference checking — even though they are high-quality candidates, they somehow fail the reference/background check.

Since the goal of a good metric is to help you identify what is not working, carefully select and implement at least one metric that can point out failures occurring during the latter stages of your recruiting process.

Focus Only On the Top Candidates

A quality-of-those-not-hired metric can become cumbersome if it attempts to categorize the quality of every applicant who doesn’t get hired. In order to save time and money, narrow your focus to the strategic issue of “what happened to the cream of the crop?” Out of 50 applicants for a single job, there might only be three who were so qualified that a hiring manager would actually regret failing to hire them. I call these individuals “regrettable misses,” and it is these folks that the quality-of-those-not-hired metric aims to highlight.

Action Steps for Developing a “Quality-of-Those-Not-Hired” Metric

If you decide to implement a quality-of-those-not-hired metric, there are several action steps to consider, including:

• Setting goals — I recommend that you set goals for the use of this metric that include: accurately identifying the top three to five “regrettable” candidates; determining what percentage of top candidates become finalists for the position, and determining what percentage of new hires came from the top candidate list.
• Select an evaluation range — this metric should focus solely on reporting the progress of “the very top applicants” who senior managers would regret not hiring. To limit the scope of evaluation, preselect what size of candidate slate will be evaluated. For most jobs, three to five top applicants would be a sufficient number to track. You can also use a set percentage of all applicants (i.e. top 10%) to define what you mean by top.
• Determine when to identify top applicants — identify the top applicants early on in the hiring process so that you will have time to address any issues that emerge before a final hiring decision is made. If you are conducting an audit post hire, you need to make sure that the person doing the initial selection isn’t aware of which individuals were finalists and who was hired.
• Select methods for identifying top applicants — the best method for identifying the top applicants is to have multiple evaluators select a finalist slate that is then merged to create the sample that will be monitored. An alternative approach involves using the profile matching capabilities of your ATS to produce a listing of top applicants. A third possible list segments applicants who come from high-value benchmark firms.
• Report the metric in percentages — the best way to report the quality of “those not hired” metric is in percentages. For example: 66% of all finalists came from the top-ranked list, and 47% of the time a top-five-ranked candidate was hired.
• Identify the stage where top talent slips through — for high priority and mission-critical jobs, after the hiring process is complete, identify at what specific stage in the recruiting process did a top applicant opt out or get dropped from consideration. You can then use that information to improve that stage.
• Identify cause for top candidate removal from consideration — if a significant number of top candidates opt out or are dropped from consideration without becoming finalists, follow up and find out why. If your process screened them out prematurely, recruiters and hiring managers must be questioned to identify what knockout criteria is being applied. If the candidate dropped out on their own, they need to be questioned to see if their early withdrawal could’ve been prevented.
• Keep in touch — separate from the process of calculating the metric, the organization should keep in touch with and build a relationship with the high-quality applicants who you regret missing. Building this relationship will help to ensure that they will favorably consider another opportunity with your firm in the future. Develop an alert system so that the star applicants can automatically receive e-mail alerts whenever a relevant job opens up.

Sample “Quality of Those Not Hired” Report

Here is a sample report illustrating what a recruiting leader or hiring manager might see.

Job Family: ASIC Engineer

Report Period: Q3 2010

Hire Volume: 53

Recommended Actions

Candidates reported that more often than not interviews would need to be rescheduled because times initially proposed were no longer available upon confirmation. Many candidates reported that it took recruiting coordinators longer than a week to confirm meeting dates and times. Solution:

1. Allocate dedicated time slots to recruiting activities that cannot be booked by other activities more than 24 hours in advance.
2. Establish service level agreements that call for manager response to scheduling inquiries within four business hours.

Final Thoughts

If you were a competitive fisherman participating in a pro fishing tournament and you repeatedly landed prize-winning fish, you would be justifiably proud. However, if you repeatedly caught prize contenders but lost them prior to tournament completion, wouldn’t you want to know exactly where and why you kept losing them? That is exactly what the “quality-of-those-not-hired” metric tells you. It reports how often you successfully land a great applicant, but fail to convert them to employee. Your organization can’t attain the highest level of new hire on-the-job performance (quality of hire) if your process allows the highest-quality applicants to be missed.

The original is here: ERE Articles

As a recruiter, how would you describe the culture at Apple, Microsoft, AT&T, or at your own organization? Being able to distill the essence of an organization’s culture into a few well-thought-out adjectives is worth a lot. Sometimes I ask a wide variety of people to come up with a few adjectives that describe a company and then use a tag cloud technology such as Wordle or TagCloud to generate a tag cloud map. This will give you a pretty good idea of how people feel about an organization’s culture.

For example, Apple might be described as perfectionist, controlling, modern, and demanding, while Microsoft might be described as Yuppie, Gen X, brash, or arrogant. IBM as stuffy, old school, traditional.

Customers form opinions about an organization from its brand image, its presentation and packaging of products and services, but most of all from their contact with employees.

We often call the collective personality of an organization its organizational culture.

Many recruiters recognize the value of understanding the organizational culture and finding people who are good fits for it. However, until the specific traits that make up this culture are articulated clearly, it is very hard to know who the right people are.

Taking the time to define and understand the talent philosophy of your organization will enhance your success and improve the productivity and retention of the people you hire.

While you and hiring managers may instinctively tend to hire people who act or think in ways that are compatible with your organization’s culture, we often make mistakes and even misjudge what the culture really demands. And hiring managers often hire people who reflect their own style rather than that of the organization. We all know how disruptive it can be to hire someone whose personal style is at odds with that of the rest of the team.

Employee Treatment Reflects Your Philosophy

One of the surest ways to begin defining your talent philosophy is to ask how employees are treated. Many organizations have evolved philosophies that are easy to understand. IBM had a philosophy of hiring young people, usually right after college, and promoting them internally after a rigorous internal development process. They hired for certain traits: people who wanted to have a career, who were eager to learn and continue studying, who were open to new opportunities, who were willing to wait for promotion, and who were going to play by the “rules” of IBM. Whether or not IBM hired deliberately for these traits I do not know, but they were certainly reflected in the kinds of people who stayed and who thrived there.

Other organizations have philosophies that are much more difficult to decipher either because they have not really defined a common philosophy or because they have many sub-cultures within the organization. This is particularly true of newer firms who have not yet had the time to evolve a distinct personality. But, even in these firms it is possible to see some basic traits that are emerging.

What Is Real and What is Wish?

Frequently I work with organizations that have developed a talent philosophy that is attractive to candidates but not reflective or what they really do. It is often more a statement of what they want the philosophy to be rather than what it really is.

It may state how the organization is committed to employee development and internal promotion, yet they almost always hire new people from the outside. Or it may contain statements about work/life balance when in reality everyone works 60 hours a week.

A talent philosophy is very hard to create. It is generally an outcome of who has been hired over time and what those folks, collectively, believe, and how they act. It is very hard to change without the highest level of internal support.

Talent philosophies are complicated things. They are a mix of individual traits and a set of overarching beliefs and practices that usually have evolved over time. They are based on assumptions about how people behave or about what they want from the workplace. For example, it is typical to assume that everyone wants a long-term career when, increasingly, today’s young people want opportunities for advancement and learning and don’t care too much about a career in a single firm. Knowing what your assumptions are is essential for successfully defining your talent philosophy, yet it is very hard for those in an organization to determine those assumptions.

Very often it is necessary to bring in an outside consultant to help, but here are a few questions that you can use to help in the unraveling process. By setting up groups of people, maybe incorporating customers or others from outside the organization to help, and by trying to answer these questions in an unbiased way, you can make a good start at clearly defining what assumptions you are making and what critical traits new employees should have.

Ten Tough Questions to Answer

1. What single characteristic is considered most important by hiring managers in a potential candidate?
2. If there are two equally well-qualified candidates for a job, what determines the final choice?
3. What are the personality styles, traits, and habits of those who get promoted or seem to be the most highly regarded in your organization?
4. If an employee were asked what adjective most accurately described the best employees’ personalities, what word would they choose?
5. If a customer were asked to describe the culture of your organization, what would they say?
6. How do you deal with poor-performing employees?
7. Who is considered the most valuable employee in your organization? What distinctive traits or characteristics does s/he have?
8. How do major decisions get made? Are they made by consensus, a majority viewpoint, or a single person?
9. What do you expect a good employee to have as general career aspirations?
10. What does an employee have to do/demonstrate in order to be considered for a promotion?

A truly honest understanding of your assumptions about people and their careers and a solid analysis of what common traits employees should have will go miles in improving the quality of the candidates you bring to the table.

The original post is created by: ERE Articles

It has been interesting to note the recent re-emergence of referral recruiting ventures and ideas. Duh, everybody knows that (employee) referrals have been the No. 1 source of hires forever (as indicated by CareerXroads), and that according to professor Granovetter’s groundbreaking research in the early 1990s, close to 60% of people say they have found their current job through some form of referral. No-brainer, especially with the adoption of social networks like facebook, LinkedIn, etc., right?

However, between the late 1990s and today, many companies have tried to automate/extend/improve the referral recruiting process: refer.com, jobster, h3.com, zubka, YorZ, KarmaOne, Jobvite, and dozens of others both in the U.S. and Europe. All have failed or moved away from any referral recruiting focus, and in the process perhaps as much as $100m in VC money has gone up in smoke.

Why? No doubt many of the new entrants will back-up their fund raising efforts with the proverbial “But this time it’s different…” statement, so let’s pause just for a minute and consider why I think to date a lot of smart people spending huge amounts of VC money have failed to crack so obvious an opportunity.

Here are some of the key lessons learned from all that cumulative failure:

I — Perhaps the wrong opportunity was targeted: rather than trying to make everybody a productive “referral recruiter” we should have focused on boosting output of existing referral recruiters.

• You can take a horse to the water, but you cannot make him/her drink. Only 4% of people are actual “connectors” (see Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point), perhaps proven by fact that fewer than 4% of LinkedIn’s members are in “500+” category. No wonder that in traditional ERP programs only a fraction of employees actually take part and score (multiple) rewards. It’s great that hundreds of millions of people have a LinkedIn or Facebook account, but 96% of them will never become successful networkers regardless. So all these referral recruiting solutions are wasted on the majority of employees/people.
• “Dude, where’s my network?” Even though most people would never consider making referrals for total strangers, they do expect a referral recruiting solution to come with a large built-in network of high-impact connectors! Crazy? Most people have never heard about Dunbar’s Number, which simply means that in spite of boasting to have 7,000+ LinkedIn connections you still only can have meaningful relationships with about 150 people. Referral recruiting solutions which broadcast referral reward opportunities to the Web will not yield (good) referrals, as people only make referrals for people with whom they have at least a minimal relationship or strong affinity. Successful users need to have a good network plus networking skills to start with. Your own network plus your own social standing will always outperform any hired or public social network.
• Unfortunately, in most corporations recruiters are part of the HR organizations (and not procurement, where they should be). HR organizations are often more focused on risks rather than opportunities, and hence worry too much about allowing non-employees to make referrals/earn rewards, about recruiters doing cool stuff on Facebook etc. Why worry endlessly about a $5,000 reward to fill $100,000 job when after 30 days you’re going to give the job to contingency recruiters anyhow and pay a $20,000 fee?  The real opportunity for referral recruiting solutions is with hiring managers in organizations without HR departments, as they don’t worry about all the silly stuff. Think about it: 6 million U.S. companies do not have an HR manager, vs. maybe 125,000 companies, tops, which employ HR staff?
• Maybe as much as 70% of all jobs filled by the $8 billion executive search/contingency recruiting industry come from referrals, so one could argue that search fees are in a way referral rewards being paid to the middle-man and not the actual referrers. Given that headhunters usually are excellent networkers and true connectors, if they had embraced these new referral recruiting solutions, these solutions would have been wildly successful in improving their productivity and thereby making their customers even more dependent on them. But do the reluctance to perhaps share a modest portion of their fees with their networks, and fear that referral recruiting solutions could make their customers also good at referral recruiting, make them stay away from referral recruiting solutions?

II — Perhaps the psychology of the actual referral process was not fully appreciated: it’s not about money. It’s not about technology. It’s not about being cool.

• Real “connectors” make incredibly prudent and balanced decisions when it comes to referring a job or a candidate: they will only make a referral if they truly believe they’re doing the right thing for both people on each side of the referral. Whereas a financial reward can certainly add urgency to a referral request, money will not corrupt their decision, as we saw at h3.com where $10,000 rewards never resulted in resume spam and never yielded bad candidates. It’s not about financial rewards; it’s about prudent people carefully managing their social credit balance sheet to first of all help people whose relationship they value.
• Though it’s not about the money, creating the “right” referral reward is quite important. Employees/people who make referrals have a pretty good idea how much money they’re saving the employer.  Five to ten percent of the annual salary with a minimum of $5,000 seems to work best for a position over $50,000 salary. Offering a wrong reward is worse than asking for free referrals.

III — Perhaps back-office issues were not fully appreciated.

• If we accept that only a small fraction of a company’s employees are true connectors, and in the same light that only a fraction of our personal networks are true connectors, then it’s obvious why referral recruiting solutions advocate that non-employees should be able to make referrals and earn or share rewards. Resulting back-office issues should not be underestimated, and indeed are a genuine concern for HR managers: W-9, 1099 IRS reporting, etc.
• The perennial complaints about ERP programs has been about the tracking of referrals, transparency for referrers and candidates, plus the adjucating of disputes as to who brought in the winning candidate first. If you reach out to the right number of connectors in a particular labor market segment, it’s quite likely that the same candidate will get referred by more than one person. (Shally Steckerl experienced this in his wildly successful H3.com search, outlined in a 2006 H3 white paper). Sophisticated tracking of referrals across multiple degree social networks is essential. (H THREE Inc./H3.com actually owns a portfolio of four patents (one issued and three still pending), and while at one point there were a dozen companies who appeared to be infringing the patent, startups do not have the funds to pursue such alleged infringements. Hence investing in patents is not useful for startups.)
• Referral recruiting solutions will always be one of multiple recruiting tools which are deployed simultaneously, which means that all candidates will end up in an ATS system, where they will end up being treated the same way as candidates from any other source. This is wrong and upsets both referrers and referred candidates. Since referrers personally vouch for their referrals, both referrers and referred candidates should always be treated with extra courtesy.

What’s Next?

Innovation is all about keep trying to find solutions for problems, and once we realize that the problem is not how to enable all employees to become productive referral recruiters, but how to increase the recruiting yield from the true connectors we have among our employees, somebody will crack this quest for the silver bullet and create great ROI for his/her investors.

Personally, I think Selectminds and LinkedIn have good chances of getting it right, because both can enable the connectors among our employees to easily and in perhaps a semi-automated way use their networking skills, their positive social credit balance sheet,s and their large meaningful or affinity-based networks.

As a result, there will be employees in the future who maybe have a salary of $75,000 but who make another $75,000 a year or more in referral rewards, and please let’s hope there will no longer be short-sighted employers who will put a cap on the maximum reward money employees can earn in a year, as exists today. What’s up with that?

Here is the original: ERE Articles

Imagine that an executive search that you've been conducting hits the wall. The CEO or Hiring Executive calls you in for a full accounting. You walk into the office. He closed the door behind you.