Minnesota Technical Recruiters Network :: Blog

10 Questions to Help You Hire Better People

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

What single characteristic is considered most important by hiring managers in a potential candidate?

If there are two equally well-qualified candidates for a job, what determines the final choice?

What are the personality styles, traits, and habits of those who get promoted or seem to be the most highly regarded in your organization?

If an employee were asked what adjective most accurately described the best employees' personalities, what word would they choose?

If a customer were asked to describe the culture of your organization, what would they say?

How do you deal with poor-performing employees?

Who is considered the most valuable employee in your organization? What distinctive traits or characteristics does s/he have?

How do major decisions get made? Are they made by consensus, a majority viewpoint, or a single person?

What do you expect a good employee to have as general career aspirations?

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.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/erearticles_kevinwheeler/~3/yG3O-EAmEE4/ Kevin Wheeler

Easy In, Easy Out: Keeping Recruiting Simple

How much should we let chance and circumstances define who we hire, rather than continue to invest time in tough screening and many interviews?

In the simplest terms, should (and maybe even does?) randomness play a large role in selection? Is it better to have a loose, easy-in and easy-out hiring practice than a much tighter and thorough upfront screening process?

Many of us have read the book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell where he postulates that chance and "gut feel" may play a bigger role in our decision-making than we imagine. Another book, older and more rigorously researched, entitled Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb also takes a similar position.

It may be that candidates who meet certain basic criteria for a job are potentially able to perform that job equally well and, once those basic skills are determined, the only remaining need is to determine how well the candidate fits in with the hiring manager and, to a lesser degree, with the organization.

What would happen if an organization made a lot of hires quickly and then let on-the-job performance determine who should be kept and who should not?

When I think back much of the 20th century, recruiting was fairly straightforward. Most jobs were filled quickly from a large pool. The demand for credentials and specific experience were closely correlated with the type of work, and it was not hard to see why a specific skill or experience level was needed. Most jobs were filled after a brief interview with a hiring manager, who made his decision based on a candidate having a critical skill or two and on soft factors such as eagerness, appearance, family background, and physical characteristics. Most jobs could be learned quickly, and it was quite easy to see whether a job was being done well or not. It was easy to get rid of poor performers and plenty got fired right away. However, a lot didn't.

There were many things wrong with this approach, but the most obvious was that it blatantly discriminated against anyone who did not fit the stereotype of the hiring manager. Greater awareness of discrimination and new legislation drove the growth of the recruiting profession and removed much of the potential injustice this system perpetuated.

But the recruiting practices had one virtue — they were simple and were built on a belief that attitude and performance were what really counted. Many engineers, doctors, and lawyers were trained in what amounts to an apprentice system right up until World War II. Formal skills training only gradually gained acceptance after the war, when thousands of GIs went back to school on the GI bill.

As we moved into the 1950s and 1960s, these more casual hiring practices were replaced by the development of job requirements: things like minimum levels of education or years of experience before a person would be considered for a position. This was seen as fairer and served as a screen against hundreds of people potentially applying for the same job.

The problem with this approach is that it is very hard to see how the defined requirements connect to actual performance. There was a presumption of fairness because the new requirements eliminated or reduced the ability to screen people out arbitrarily because of race or sex. However, we have learned over the past 40 years that people who qualify for jobs based on their education or experience alone are not necessarily good performers.

We now know that simply selecting people by generic measures like education and experience don't work very well and discriminate against those with the real skills who do not have the required credentials. How many good performers are being denied jobs today because they lack a college degree, for example?

In a world with high unemployment and yet with a need for skilled talent, managers and recruiters are confused as to what is essential in a candidate. Is it better to go with a person who lacks a specific credential or skill, but has the right attitude? Is it best to have broad-based recruiting criteria or more and more specific ones?

So, what will we do?

Three rules seem to be forming around defining new positions as well as for redefining the more traditional ones.

Rule #1: Keep criteria simple

How much do you want to invest in perfection? Define a basic level of competence that most positions require, add on whatever minimum specific skills, experience, or education are really necessary to perform the job, and then decide based on attitude or cultural fit.

Design screening processes to be simple and flexible. Listen to your gut.

Rule #2: Be competency-flexible and teach hiring managers that development is part of recruiting.

Managers will be forced to accept that they will not be able to find candidates with 100% of what they want. Managers and HR will learn that development is a core function of the firm in the 21st century. IBM put in place a development-centered in the 1960s when they began hiring and developing new college grads because there were no people with the skills they needed. Remember there were no programmers when the first mainframes were produced, and so IBM had to develop them. Many companies have used development as a strategic edge; when you have people with skills and others don't, you tend to win. Finding and developing current employees who have some, but perhaps not all, of the skills needed for a job will also become more common.

Rule #3: Have robust performance management systems in place.

By hiring people using broad competency descriptions, as I am advocating, you may hire some poor performers. And that's okay. What is not okay is ignoring that and allowing them to stay in your organization. A good performance management system, based on whether people achieve realistic goals and meet the requirements of their position, is essential to success.

The hallmark of the best 21st-century organizations will be their approach to defining the people they need. Traditional measures of education, experience, attitude, and cultural fit may play a small part, but what will be significantly different is a quick, flexible approach to defining competencies combined with efficient performance management systems. This will result in more fluid and less well-defined jobs, but broader and more multi-skilled employees.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/erearticles_kevinwheeler/~3/d4P0hoIpNJ4/ Kevin Wheeler

Disruptive Recruiting: Rethinking What Recruiting Is All About

They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself. --Andy Warhol

It is time to change the recruiting game. Someone has to reinvent a process that is aged, inefficient, and marginally successful in procuring high-performing employees.

Over the past 20 years recruiters have been given magical tools starting with applicant tracking systems, then the Internet, job boards, recruiting websites, and now an array of social media tools. Yet, it is a sad fact that a single recruiter can deal with no more open positions than he could two decades ago, still feels overworked, and is deluged with unqualified candidates.

It is time to challenge our assumptions and reinvent the entire recruiting process. Let's start by asking dumb questions: why does recruiting exist as a function? Is it to hire people? Surely given our technology, hiring managers could be trained to screen and select the people they need. Is it to screen candidates, schedule interviews? All can be automated. Is it to sell the organization to the candidate? That often happens prior to any recruiter contact through the products and services you offer, through fellow employees, through brand and reputation, and through your location. What the recruiter adds to this is useful, but probably minimal.

So, then, how can recruiters add value?Automation and Process Simplification

The recruiting process is made up of somewhere around 10 sub-processes which include employment branding, communicating with a hiring manager and developing a position description, sourcing, screening, assessment, candidate communication, and marketing (CRM), offer negotiation and presentation, closing, and in some cases onboarding.

Each of these sub-processes need to be examined and assessed for their efficiency and value. You should ask yourself whether that process needs to be done at all, and if so should it be done by a recruiter, and if not, by who? You should also ask whether that step could be automated, even partially, and even if it would be less than ideal. You need to apply the 80/20 rule to recruiting automation: if a tool, system, program, or application can do at least 80% of what a recruiter does, than you should switch to the automated process.

I believe that much of what the average recruiter does can either be simplified, eliminated altogether, or be done by automated systems. For example, is it really necessary to interview all candidates? Why can't you develop and use a screening test of some sort and rely on that alone? Why does every potential candidate need to complete the usual intensive application process when all you need to know are one or two things in order to move the candidate forward? Why can't you develop and use good CRM techniques and processes to ease the communication problem. There is a lot of room for improvement in the basic processes we follow rather blindly. By adopting a simplified and more automated approach, you free up recruiters so that they can really add value and improve the reputation and significance of the recruiting function.

Redefine the Need

Recruiting should not be a reactive function, only responding to the mandates of hiring managers. Recruiting needs to be the talent partner within the organization. It needs to have the labor market and available skills knowledge to help managers make the best decisions of the type of people to hire.

The model recruiting functions should work very closely with hiring managers, human resources, and other internal professionals to redefine the positions most commonly open. One method is to interview good employees, as defined by hiring managers and performance reviews, and then construct profiles of these employees that can, in turn, be used to construct screening questions. Building a profile of success saves hundreds of hours of recruiting trial and error. This process also affirms which roles are really important and which ones may be less so. Less-critical positions can be outsourced or put on a lower priority. Many times this process identifies changes that need to be made in the skills, competencies, or experience required for a particular role. Looking at the positions that you are being asked to fill in a constructive but positive way, adds to your credibility and aligns the needs more closely to the market.

Workforce Planning

The next step has little to do with traditional recruiting and is usually called workforce planning. It the skill of building forecasting capability and ensuring that the organization has, or can quickly get, the talent it needs to achieve its business objectives.

It requires some knowledge of demographic, economic, and business trends. It also requires a deep knowledge of the talent marketplace and familiarity with the level of education and experience available in the appropriate geography. It means collaborating with the internal training function, senior management, compensation, and human resources in general to agree on which talent is best sought externally, which is best sourced and promoted internally, and which needs to be developed by the company, because recruiting them is difficult and expensive. These tradeoffs and discussions have almost never happened in the past, yet they are becoming what differentiate a great recruiting function from an ordinary one.

Predicting who you will need, what skills will be important, or what experience will be best aligned with needs is not possible. What you can do by combing workforce planning with a talent community is build the potential — a capability to meet future needs — that did not exist before.

Building Talent Communities

Following all of this, only then is it productive to start sourcing and attracting potential candidates to a talent community. My article last week pointed out how a community differs from a talent pool or a database, and the distinction is significant. Talent pools are inefficient and in the end leave you where you started — with a large pool of unknown people who need to be further screened and qualified. A true community screens by the way people interact, by how they communicate, and by who they are connected to.

When an organization has a talent community, it has a dynamic and ever-changing pool of talent, skill, and experience to meet almost any need that might arise.

Recruiting is in dire need of change. Disruptive recruiting will showcase technology and apply it in a practical way toward improving and simplifying the processes that make up recruiting. Disruptive recruiting will also mean that recruiters need different skills, including those of networking and community-building.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/erearticles_kevinwheeler/~3/JlqR82PUZe4/ Kevin Wheeler

Beyond Talent Pools: Building Dynamic Communities

Building a social network is only the first step to getting the best candidates. A social network helps you gather potential candidates together and it provides a way to deliver and receive information. But typical social networks tend to be weak at getting candidates excited and engaged about working for you. Part of this is because we have not yet embraced the idea of creating communities rather than talent pools.

We know that one of the ways to improve engagement is to personalize communications and provide potential candidates with the kind and depth of information about the organization and position that they desire. Acquiring the best candidate means you have to sell the organization to her by understanding what she needs and wants. You do this over time by learning about her needs, concerns, and interests. As you learn, you or the community provide relevant information and answer questions.

While we all may agree this sounds ideal, we also know that it is not an easy thing to do using traditional tools and technology. Because we have limitations of time and scope, we can only ever treat a handful of candidates in a personal way. Even with technology, most candidates receive boilerplate and generalized information that is rarely exciting or very informative.

So along comes social networking. Over the past half decade, the popularity of Facebook, LinkedIn and other networks has soared. Almost all large organizations have some sort of presence on one or both of these networks and perhaps on others as well. Many organizations have large talent pools with hundreds or even thousands of candidates, yet we are still challenged to screen them, learn about who they are, and communicate in a personal way. Getting people to join was only the first step to creating a dynamic and useful community that can quickly provide you with the quality candidates you need.

Community vs. Talent Pool

The most important concepts to grasp is the difference between a talent pool and a community. We toss the word community around, but most of us do not have a very clear definition of what makes it different from a database.

A talent pool typically is a group of people with selected data about them attached. It is the equivalent of a filing cabinet and only contains static and most likely out-of-date information about the potential candidate. They are hard to search and the data we have about a candidate rarely give us much insight into what a person is really like. And most talent pools do not allow the candidate to engage with the recruiter or others in the pool.

A community is entirely different. First of all it is two-way: both you and the candidate exchange information and both of you give and get. But a community also has several other distinguishing features:

Collaboration and Sharing

People in a community share information and often work together to solve problems or come up with new ideas. They are organic and alive with conversation and sharing of opinions and thoughts. True recruiting communities would include your employees as well as potential candidates talking about the organization, what it does, how it does it, and who does it. This give-and-take process is the best way to personalize the company and provide candidate with information about what is is like to work there. It saves you the need to tailor responses or have lots of facts at your fingertips; the employees and perhaps even other candidates will provide what you need.

Feeling Included

Being part of something is also a key ingredient in a community. By being with others of similar interests and through sharing ideas, people come to feel part of the team. Good communities make recruiting much easier because candidates already feel like they know people and relate to them. When candidates actually get hired and start work, they have people to talk with that they already have met on line and have shared with.

Similar Values

No one is forced to join or stay in a community. Unlike a database, I can remove myself from the community and move on. Therefore, people who stay in a community and engage in conversation are most likely to have the same values as the people in the organization. This means that cultural compatibility is much higher and it become easy to spot those who aren't really comfortable in the culture your organization has.

Openness

People are looking for authenticity from organizations, and it is within communities that so much can be explained and made available. Employees may bring up issues and discuss how they were resolved, while candidates may also contribute their ideas. Member of communities are much more likely to share their feelings and express their true opinions about issues. Potential employees feel that the organization is open and honest in its communication.

Engagement

And finally, those in an active community are truly engaged and interested. Here is a statement from Richard Long, Deloitte New Zealand's manager of talent acquisition, about its recently developed Facebook community aimed at university students and graduates:

"Our strategy is to create dialogue and conversation with students and engage with them — all the while further developing the page with their feedback in mind — quite an organic process. All through our page we have given students the opportunity to tell us what they want to see and hear. The content of our page is provided by our own Deloitte graduates and summer interns, and the fans themselves. My team really only administrates and develops the site to allow more conversation to happen between the fans and Deloitte grads and interns they are interested in hearing from. The result is we have built a community of students engaged with the Deloitte NZ brand, who are talking to us and have a sense of our culture and how we can support their career aspirations."

This nicely sums up my major points and gives solid evidence that taking your social network to the next dimension — that of turning it into a true community of engaged and energetic people you can tap into whenever you have an opening — is the right way to go.

In a future article I will talk about how to start moving from a talent pool to a community and I will talk about the concerns many of us have over privacy and confidential information. We have a ways to go, but creating communities is the beginning of a new era in recruiting.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/erearticles_kevinwheeler/~3/i8Wgmx4dOlk/ Kevin Wheeler

Why Work for You?

The simple question I always ask myself when I see an organization advertising an open position is: “Why would I work for them?”

The answer to that question is the essence of employment branding, which I define simply as the amount of attractiveness an organization has to an average candidate.

Try this experiment: ask five of your family members or friends to tell you what they think about working for X, and name a few organizations, including the one you work for. My bet is that they will not have a very clear idea about whether any of them would be good or bad. They may have an opinion about the product or service, but not about working there.

When I ask people about working for a particular organization, the answer I usually get is that they have no idea whether it would be a positive or a negative experience. In other words, most organizations have no employment brand at all.

A very few firms have a negative employment brand, probably because of recent media coverage (e.g. General Motors or Toyota) but which quickly fades into neutral territory. Another few enjoy a very positive brand image also because of media coverage or product excellence (e.g. Apple or Google) and which can be short lived as well.

The organizations that have developed and maintained an enduringly positive employment brand over several years can be counted on one hand. From a global perspective they include such firms as IBM, Intel, Disney, KPMG, Deloitte, and Microsoft. Other organizations may have local appeal or appeal to particular career segments , but probably lack broad, global strength.

So what makes a strong employment brand? Here are a few elements, but I would love your perspectives and thoughts to add depth to my thinking.

Time

First of all, the firms with the strongest employment brand have been around for a while. None of them could be called a startup, nor have they suddenly become popular. For example, I have not included Google in my short list because it has not demonstrated whether it will maintain its promises to employees over periods of growth and recession. It may eventually join the ranks of the few. Time will tell.

Hewlett-Packard lost its strong employment brand as it went through mergers, layoffs, and many changes of leadership. It has now stabilized and may be rebuilding a brand that was at the top of list throughout the 1980s.

Promises

So as we have seen, brand is ultimately built on promises — promises given and fulfilled over time, and even when times are bad. Apple promises to deliver beautifully designed, almost flawless products. Coke promises to make you feel good. And as much as organizations fulfill their promises, they become stronger as brands.

IBM is a classic example. Its employment brand was built on at least three promises: (1) long-term employment maintained even during recessions; (2) continuous personal development; and (3) respectful treatment as an individual.

Over the years some of these have wavered, but for the most part it has continuously hired, trained, retrained, promoted, and retained the best people it could. Even those who have been laid off have been treated respectfully and given decent separation packages — even before that was in vogue.

Meaningful Perks

Having a strong brand does not mean just offering lots of perks. Prospective employees understand that perks can come and go as times change. A few years ago internal child care was the rage, but now it is less important, and there is more of a focus is on fitness centers. Free food, entertainment, and other such benefits are nice but will not fundamentally change the impression candidates have of you.

Much more important than how many perks is whether the perks enhance your personal life or add to a sense of excitement or personal fulfillment. Google's best perk is offering time off for charitable work. An employee can do something good for their community and themselves. Sending volunteers to Haiti or tutoring school children are better benefits than dry cleaning services or gourmet meal preparation.

Consistency

One of the most powerful brand builders is consistency. Does your firm offer a few things all the time, and has it picked a few areas where there is unwavering support? IBM's philosophy and practice of developing employees has been a hallmark. Many are hired directly from college with no experience and no strong career goals. IBM manages to help employees find the career that most engages them and that returns the most to IBM. There are many internal training schools, opportunities to become technically stronger or become a manager. Employees can leave one career and start another all without leaving.

This has translated into a strong brand message: we will help you be whatever you want to be. And IBM has maintained this message for decades.

Creating an Employment Brand

Given all the money and time spent on building employment brands, not much real progress is evident. Some firms have earned awards such as a "Best Place to Work" award, which may help them get some candidate attention. A few organizations consciously embark on an employment branding strategy, but more often the brand is the outcome of decisions and policies enacted by leadership over time.

But to penetrate the minds of most potential candidates takes a focused effort, following the steps I have listed, executed over several years. Perks, short-term campaigns, and social media pages can help, but will not replace the hard work required to put in place an enduring employment brand.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/erearticles_kevinwheeler/~3/mrQlru1DuY4/ Kevin Wheeler

How to Get the Most from Your Social Network

Social networks have grown to the point where they now challenge traditional ways of communicating, marketing, and recruiting. One of the measures we often use to determine the success of our networking is to count the number of people in it. But this is not really a valuable measure: I have over 10 million first, second, and third-degree connections in LinkedIn and I get almost no value from that network, per se. I get little value because many of my contacts are active recruiters. As I am neither an active recruiter nor a candidate, not much interaction happens. And this illustrates one of the several criteria needed to make a network really valuable.

Valuable, robust networks need to meet at least four criteria: (1) they need to be focused and made up of people with similar interests and motivations who are seeking the same thing; (2) they need an instigator, a moderator, perhaps even a rebel, who rouses passions and gets people engaged; (3) they need a large enough number of people so that someone is always “there” to respond, comment, and keep the ball rolling; and (4) they need to save time and energy in some way.

They Need to Be Focused and Have Similar Members

Networks are collections, but they are collections of people rather than books or stamps. Successful collectors of anything do not just collect at random. The good ones have a system, a focus, and a rationale behind their collecting. For example, stamp collectors are usually focused on a specific country or on a theme. The same is true for coin collectors. Baseball card collectors concentrate on a team or league or person. Focus is necessary, and is the first rule for successful use of networks because it is so difficult to sift through thousands of anything to find the one(s) that meet your criteria. It is much better to have hurdles to entry that ensure the integrity of those who are admitted. A recruiter, for example, needs to know exactly what type of people they are looking for, and then spend the time to attract only those type, before admitting them to their community of similar people. If you are looking for dissimilar people, it is better to set up a separate network for each type.

There Needs to Be High Levels of Interaction and Useful Conversation

The second rule of getting value out of your network is to create a forum where there is interaction and conversation. You need to foster discussion and get people engaged in issues that shed light on their interests and skills. If no one comments on your posts, agrees or disagrees with your point of view, or adds their own thoughts that you comment on, most of the value is gone. When you think about the topics you discuss, you will probably see that much of it consists of small talk. We chatter about the weather events, books, music, and our kids — not that often about the big issues. And it is through these seemingly innocuous and even mundane chats that we learn what a person is really like. It is through the tweets and comments that we identify with people and come to understand their posture on issues.

It is very easy to think that people who always contribute to a discussion are the best, but I believe that the volume and frequency of communication are not necessarily indicators of quality. The networks where people engage in discussions about relevant issues and have arguments that are based on facts and evidence are powerful, but hard to find. It often requires someone to throw out the contentious statement or ask the tough question to get people interested enough to respond. It is by seeing how people respond that you can gain an appreciation for someone's style and ability to get along with others or influence them.

Have a Number of Community Managers

The third rule is to always have someone ready to engage the network member in conversation, creating an widespread army of volunteers who are willing to monitor your network traffic and comment when appropriate. Nothing is worse that commenting on something or putting in a question and then getting nothing back for weeks. This person might be a full-time community manager. Even better, it could be many people dispersed throughout the organization. Crowdsourcing this role made sense and provides for more timely responses as well as for more variety.

Show Value

And finally you and others need to see that the network is delivering better candidates, better quality, and more hires than whatever you used before. I don't think a social network can overcome the fact that other methods are cheaper or work better simply because it is new. We know enough about how to make them successful to ensure we get the metrics we need.

The number of people in your network is important, but not by itself. Size is important because it allows more network members to be equally engaged all the time, and the larger the network, the better the chances are that someone will be available and ready to engage in discussion and debate. Global reach and broader criteria for membership can help expand the numbers, but it is always a tradeoff between volume, quality, and focus.

If you watch networks for a while, you begin to see how many disappear after a few months. Only a handful remain for more than a year or two. It's generally because they do not meet these simple, but tough to pull off, criteria.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/erearticles_kevinwheeler/~3/cPMnmXCOTc4/ Kevin Wheeler

Why Recruiting is in the Midst of Transformation

This recession is accelerating a trend that was already underway: the tendency of organizations to outsource and decentralize non-core functions. I define core very simply: anything that generates revenue (e.g. the sales team), invents new products or services (e.g., R&D) or deeply touches customers (e.g. consultants, advisors). And, let's face it, internal recruiting functions are not core.

In a world where work was primarily done physically and where there was no ability to spread information easily or communicate on a global scale, centralization and formal structures brought efficiency, speed, and a better life. Formal organization allowed the consolidation of people, machinery, and money, which led to mass production and lower prices. Societies moved from tutoring a small number of elite children to the creation of formally organized and regulated schools that were designed to educate the masses.

For as long as people have lived together, there has been a tendency to centralize and create hierarchy. We have seen the growth of many huge, centralized systems, including government, corporations, schools, utilities, health care, the movie industry, the music industry, and so on. In fact, most of us currently work or have worked in one of these organizations, and most of the recruiting practices that we use have evolved and been shaped by the needs of these organizations.

Even in the creative world, formal organization became important for a while. Movie companies could muster the capital and the equipment to produce complex and expensive movies and distribute them to physical movie theaters. Actors were hired by one production company and signed up for life. This changed over 30 years ago for the movie industry, which is an example of how almost all organizations will be structured and staffed in the future.

Decentralization

The Internet has accelerated the movement toward decentralized, distributed systems, particularly when it comes to breaking up the traditional media distribution hierarchies: television networks, movie studios, music producers and distributors, and newspaper empires. All of these have been battered by the more decentralized, multiple-input capabilities of the Internet. Distribution requires no physical movement of stuff, but only the movement of electrons through space. Then need to centralize has been reduced in almost all cases and eliminated in many. Automation has contributed to this as well by making it possible to produce physical things with fewer and fewer people. This means manufacturing has become smaller and more distributed: a product is designed in one place, prototyped in another, and manufactured somewhere else. Marketing is outsourced, as is distribution, sales, and service.

The Shrinking Corporation

This trend is now moving into corporations, which are sensing what E. F. Schumacher said long ago: that small is beautiful. More organizations are trying to stay small or at least "right-sized" for the goals they set out to accomplish. The idea of growth for the sake of growth is dying, and more organizations are discussing how to spin off business units, outsource transactional work, and simplify their core businesses. There is an understanding that centralization reduces creativity and creates barriers to communication. The largest automobile companies are failing, and the outcome will be smaller car producers, perhaps many dozens of them, innovating on a larger scale than ever.

The people who staff these newer firms are less traditional in how they think and tend in most cases to be open to trying new models of employment. This is partly why we are seeing more contingent workers — maybe making up as much as half the workforce within a few years.

Schools

Schools are slowly following this pattern. With the ability to distribute information through the Internet, they are undergoing significant change. School systems are experimenting with virtual classrooms, and fewer are investing in new physical campus buildings. Online tutoring, individualized learning programs, and project-based lessons are becoming more common and are likely to change the way we think about educating people. I don't see any future in physical classrooms or in most of the pedagogy we have taught teachers.

This means college recruiting will look very different in a few years from today. Articles I have written earlier this year point out some of the changes in college recruiting that are already happening, and others that are on the horizon.

Recruiting

This move to decentralized and smaller organizations means that the structure of recruiting is undergoing change. A few weeks ago I wrote that corporate recruiting was doomed because of this shift, and I underline that this week.

While corporate recruiting won't disappear, it will morph into a very different function. The evolution may take several years for large multinational firms, but is already reality in many small and start-up firms.

Rather than the large functions that many organizations fund today, the remaining ones will be much smaller and will be staffed with broadly skilled and experienced talent professionals who are comfortable talking with senior management, who can build relationships with recruitment vendors as well as internal managers and candidates, and who can contribute to (or even create) strategic talent plans.

But the bulk of recruiting will be outsourced or insourced to firms who specialize in quickly finding and presenting qualified candidates. And even in these firms the recruiters (if we call them that anymore) will need to be highly skilled in multiple areas. I could imagine a recruiter who focused on sourcing and on managing a community of similar people for a specific client. They might be able to do this for multiple clients, given the evolving technology and skills of both recruiters and younger candidates. Another recruiter might focus on career development, candidate assessment, and coaching in order to fuel the pipeline for a talent community. The competencies involved will include sales, relationship building, technical savvy, business knowledge and skills, sourcing and social media skills, as well as the ability to move between these competencies with ease.

At a high level what is going on is the continuous movement from systems that are formally organized by a management team and where entry is closed and controlled to systems that are self-regulating, open, distributed, and filled with individuals making choices about their roles and outputs. It's about the rise of collaboration and sharing of ideas in less structured ways. I wrote about this on The Future of Talent website where I also linked to a very interesting video on this topic that you may enjoy watching, given by Clay Shirky at TED. Clay is the author of "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations," as well as many other books and publications on collaboration, organizations and the changes we are all facing.

No matter whether we like this trend, agree with it or embrace it; it seems that nothing will stop us moving in this direction. The only question is: how fast? You should ask yourself if you are getting prepared, building the right skills, and moving into the right place to be.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/erearticles_kevinwheeler/~3/jjGr2dJVrTE/ Kevin Wheeler

Recruiting Needs to Part of Something Bigger

Strategic workforce planning is a relatively new concept and practice for most organizations. Many firms have a simplified form of workforce planning in place which is focused on replacement of people in current positions and functions. It is a rare experience to find an organization that has thought through its future needs and balanced those needs with a mix of both hiring — internal and external — along with development.

Why the Need

Growth and recession are hard to predict. Neither are typically gradual or linear. There may be a sudden need to add dozens or hundreds of employees in new business areas or in different parts of the world. Or, there may be a sudden shift in products that makes many employees redundant. Economies can suddenly slow and business can evaporate quickly. Replacement planning does not deal well with any of these scenarios. And this is why typical workforce planning is looked on with scorn by many human resource professionals as well as business managers.

Traditional workforce planning (and often recruiters, as well) has made a number of assumptions that are no longer valid and can be grossly misleading. The first and largest assumption is that there are enough skilled workers available to meet current and future needs. The second is that these skilled workers will accept the employment conditions and salaries offered. The third assumption is that universities or other educational institutions will produce the right talent to meet these emerging needs.

While there are plenty of people, only a small fraction of them have the skills and motivation to meet or adapt to emerging needs. And, many who have skills are choosing to start their own businesses or work in small firms where they can have significant influence over working for traditional organizations. This is especially true of Generation Y (those under 25).

American educational institutions have suffered massive budget cuts and loss of staff, and except for a handful of elite universities, are ill-equipped to educate the numbers of people that will be needed — even if they could identify the necessary skills and put in place academic programs and staff in a timely way.

Recruiting the right skilled people has already become a challenge, internal development functions have been eliminated or reduced, and the information most firms have about their current employees’ skills and abilities is lacking. Very few organizations have a comprehensive, current, and searchable database of employees and their skills, abilities, interests, and education. Organizations that rely on the assumptions outlined above or believe that the changes taking place today are nor revolutionary will be unlikely to prosper financially.

The current convergence of political, economic, and social trends, including the decline of large-scale manufacturing, the automation of many activities done by people, the growing importance of the developing world as consumers and inventors, genetic engineering, the rise of educated and childless women, and the gradual shift of economic power and consumption to Asia, and particularly China, means that we will need to re-skill and re-staff every existing organization. New firms will also spring up creating positions and functions that do not exist.

Therefore, the need for a strategic and forward looking talent plan is becoming essential to business success.

Many firms are realizing that it is not enough to just calculate turnover and projected growth and then go recruit people. The whole process of acquiring, developing, and retaining talent requires more sophisticated thinking and tools than have previously been characteristic of the human resources function.

An effective workforce planning process should focus on the following four areas:

Gaining market awareness in order to better understand emerging trends and to do competitive analysis around skilled talent.

Integration of talent planning with business planning so that business needs can be translated into needed skills and abilities and so that an understanding of available skills can be included in the business plan.

Development of a system-level focus on identifying key positions and integrating employee development, internal mobility, succession planning, and recruiting.

The use of scenario planning and dynamic modeling to help focus activity and justify investments in a variety of approaches

Step 1: Market Awareness

Workforce planners need to be aware of business, economic, political, demographic and social changes, and trends. They also need to keep up-to-date on emerging skills needs within their organizations as well as the industry.

For example, the Future of Talent Institute that I founded tries to provide this information to clients. It focuses on identifying emerging trends, sorting the significant ones from the insignificant, and in making sense of the information as it pertains to developing a talent strategy.

Data such as this can be very useful. For example, several years ago Cisco Systems identified the need very early for HTML web programmers. They realized that there were few who had those skills, so they started hiring college grads with backgrounds in music and math and trained them in HTML programming. This gave them a decisive advantage over the competition, leaving the competition scrambling to catch up.

Keeping tabs on who has critical skills and where they are located will be a differentiator in how successful your sourcing will be. It will also provide the inputs you need to calculate whether a development program would be more cost-effective than a recruiting approach or what combination would be most economical and effective for your organization.

Talent supply data is the most difficult information to get today, partly because we have not clearly defined needed skills. It is almost impossible to know how many people with a particular skill are in the market. Social networks, data mining, growing corporate databases, and other tools may improve this situation, but focused effort is going to be required for many years to get the level of knowledge we will need.

Step 2: Integrating Talent Planning With Business Planning

Business planning is becoming talent planning. Any business decision that is made today has to factor in the availability of skilled talent to execute the plan. As we stated above, it is an unsafe assumption to believe that the people you need are available and are willing to be employed. Business planning and analytical tools should be applied to the people side of business to identify skills, find people who have the needed skills, conduct experiments to determine the minimum set of skills needed to accomplish a job — rather to go for the maximum set of skills as is common today.

Step 3: Systems Integration Approach

In a market where certain skills may not exist at all or where they are very scarce, recruiting cannot be relied on as a sole supplier. In many cases, it may be possible to find the skills needed internally or it may make more sense economically to develop internal or external people to meet those needs.

By making workforce planning the highest-level activity and integrating employee development, internal mobility, recruiting, retention activities, and succession planning with it, organizations can begin to acquire above-average talent.

Removing talent supply from being the sole responsibility of recruiting to broader set of functions allows more comprehensive thinking about people.

Whenever the need for talent is identified today, most organizations go immediately into hiring mode. A hiring manager opens a requisition for a new person. There may be a cursory look for an internal candidate, but it is unlikely that one would be found. After several weeks and numerous interviews, someone is hired. Then there is a wait for them to actually start, a learning period before they are productive, and a high probability that they were not a good hire and will leave or be terminated.

Imagine instead that rather than immediately opening a requisition, a hiring manager, along with a talent manager, go through a process of looking at internal talent, modeling the costs and time involved in training someone for the position, predicting the available supply, time to recruit, and the time it takes to train them. They would then decide on an employment model: regular employee, part-time, contractor, and so on, to see which offers the highest benefit and the lowest risk and cost.

This requires an integrated function with data about internal and external data about talent and a desire to find the fastest, highest-quality employment model to achieve the business goal.

Step 4: Scenario Planning and Dynamic Modeling

Although scenario planning is no longer new, having been around since the 1960s, HR has just recently adopted it to look at various potential talent-demand situations.

Scenario planning, sometimes simplistically referred to as what-if planning, looks at a variety of economic and business trends, as well as other factors that have been identified as possibly impacting the supply of talent. Using different sets of factors, scenario planners develop recommended responses to meet the supply challenge.

By including in this process some of the mathematical modeling tools that are available, a talent manager could project, for example, the benefits of training over hiring or of the value of one source of candidates over another based on turnover and time to productivity.

Talent planning will become a critical function within the human resources area and will greatly enhance the ability of the organization to have the talent it needs available when and where it is needed. Recruiting is a vital part of that success, but it cannot stand isolated and alone as it does now.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/erearticles_kevinwheeler/~3/qGPlr3WK_6g/ Kevin Wheeler

Small Companies Can Do College Recruiting Too

As we still shiver with the last gasps of winter, it is hard to think about September and the advent of the college recruiting season. But, now is the best time to decide whether college recruiting makes sense for your business, and if so, where and how you will find the right people.

College students are confused at the moment about their job prospects. They've been told the market is bad and jobs are few. And while it is true that large companies are planning on making fewer hires this year than in the recent past, they are still hiring. All in all, it bodes to be a fairly good year for college students.

So should small companies, those with 50-500 employees, get involved with college hiring?

CEOs, managing partners, and business leaders often ask me if they should even have a college recruiting program.

After all, they may compete with well-known firms, and they will have to work hard to explain who they are and what a career at their company would offer. They don't have connections on campus and haven't been involved in campus groups or sponsored activities.

And to top it off, costs can soar with the fees involved in promoting the company and sponsoring special activities and events to woo scarce finance, engineering, and technical majors.

Yet, organizations that do no college hiring often end up with a workforce that is older and less connected to emerging trends and technologies. I believe that every organization needs to do all that it can to increase the quality, breadth, and age range of the workforce.

Small firms often have to resort to suddenly hiring early career professionals to make up for retiring workers or to fill growth needs. They also tend to have worker populations with little diversity and often don't realize that a college is the only really cost-effective place to get minority talent. There is evidence showing that a broad and diverse workforce leads to innovation and new thinking.

So, smaller firms should seriously consider developing a college recruiting strategy. To do so will take a commitment of time and money, but costs will be quickly recovered by reducing the need to pay agency fees and higher salaries for experienced professionals. Maintenance and incremental growth of a program can be cost reasonable by keeping college recruiting local and by using the Internet.

Here are a few ideas on how to get started. I'd love any of your comments, as well.

Idea #1: Focus locally and small

Find local colleges that have good programs in the areas of your interest. Leave the large research universities and Ivy League schools to the Fortune 500. Competition is heavy and the students from local schools are likely to be just as smart and more inclined to accept your offers and stay. If you are hiring just a few students — say 8-12 — probably two or three schools will be enough.

An internal person should be assigned to put the program together as a part-time effort. Keep it small and focus on getting some results to prove the value of the program and expand it later.

Idea #2: Develop a Longer-term Strategy

Think into the future and include high schools in your planning. Forward-thinking firms will invest in high school programs that encourage students to major in the fields that will lead to employment at their company. They work with colleges and universities to develop programs that make graduates employable immediately and they will keep in touch with students throughout their college studies via email and other Internet-based tools.

The person you assign internally, perhaps a recent graduate themselves, can communicate with selected students regularly, ask them for referrals to other students, and create an online community of students interested in the kind of work you offer.

Idea #3: Use the Internet

Use the Internet to find and communicate with students on campus. Set up a Facebook page for your firm and make sure than you have someone internally manage the content, answer their questions, and stay in touch with the students frequently. Send them literature and promotional information about your company electronically, and start a chat room for college students to talk to employees.

Some firms may want to start an online mentoring or coaching program where volunteer employees offer students homework help, tutoring in math or science, or just provide advice.

Make it a goal to rarely go to campus physically. Develop online relationships with professors. Some firms present case studies to professors to use in their classes or offer to speak to the class using Skype or other video-based system.

Idea #4: Develop an Internship Program

Encourage a few students to apply for internships at your organization. These can be summer internships but there are other possibilities as well. Some internships might be virtual where a student works as part of team to accomplish a goal that can be done from their college computer. Or they might be able to join a team using Skype or WebEx or some other online collaboration tool.

Other internships could be short ones — just a week or two perhaps — during winter or spring breaks or between semesters.

Using imagination and experimenting can lead to many possible ways to develop relationships and also give students practice experience working for you. When it comes time for graduation, you will have candidates ready to go to work for you full time who understand your company, like its culture, and have some experience.

College recruiting virtually has many, many benefits and nicely aligns with the lifestyles and habits of this generation of students. They are all connected via the Internet, they all use Facebook, email, and participate in online life. It only makes sense to tap into the Internet and use it to attract people that have been hard and expensive to attract in past.

Small firms can be far more innovative and experimental than most larger ones as they have less invested. Large firms have developed large internal staffs and have created expectations in hiring managers, professors, and students that they will be on campus physically.

To change this is difficult and takes time. The great advantage smaller firms have is their nimbleness, ability to act immediately, and willingness to try new ways. Virtual college recruiting opens the doors for many small companies and for thousands of students.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/erearticles_kevinwheeler/~3/rEJrzyy-_RQ/ Kevin Wheeler

Why Corporate Recruiting May Be Doomed

Productivity change in the nonfarm business sector, 1947-2009

How different is what you do today from five years ago? Are you able to find and hire top-notch people faster than before? Have you invested in systems, technology, and process improvements to lower costs and improve the speed to find and present qualified candidates? If not, you are clearly lagging behind those who have, and will have a tough time catching up. The corporate recruiting world is soon to be under full assault from the third-party and RPO world.

The evidence shows that increases in productivity significantly lag the investment in tools and process improvements. We normally first use new technologies to emulate what we already do in another way. It's only after significant time that we begin to find new and innovative ways to use the tools and adjust our processes accordingly.

An example is the introduction of the typewriter. In the early days of the typewriter a manager would dictate to a stenographer who would take shorthand and then use the typewriter to create a document. This took two people and three steps. It took decades before we got to the point of eliminating the stenographer by having the manager learn to type and enter the document directly. But when this occurred, the profession of stenographer disappeared (as did shorthand), efficiency went up, and the number of people an office needed went down. While this is a very simple example, it illustrates what I mean: It takes a lot of time from the introduction of a new technology for people to learn how to use it and to adjust processes and structures.

From the 1970s through the mid-1990s organizations globally were investing heavily in computers and software and everyone assumed that because of those tools, productivity would soar. For anyone old enough to remember, that did not happen, and lots of economists called this the productivity paradox. It seemed that no investment in technology, computers, or software caused any major change in productivity. Then, around 1995 everything changed. Suddenly productivity began to climb. It has now settled back into a comfortable 2.4 percent per year growth which is still greater per year than before 1970. The great lesson is that investments in technology and process improvements pay off — but it takes time for that to happen.

Recruiting has seen no surge in productivity, and corporate recruiting functions may even be losing ground as the talent market becomes more complex and employer needs change. Relative to most other functions in an organization, HR and recruiting have made little investment in technology and even less in process improvements. A recruiter from 1970 would be very comfortable in most corporate recruiting departments today except for learning to use the computer.

My concern is that recruiters have been and still are too focused on the short term to see that investments they make today will eventually pay off — and pay off tremendously. If you have not made the investments, you are not only behind, but it may be impossible to catch up. Being able to use technology requires a learning curve that early adopters get from the beginning. Look at how hard it is for a middle-aged person to grasp the power of social media or to fully realize the capabilities of the iPhone compared to someone younger who has been working with these technologies from the beginning of their careers. Time is not our friend when it comes to adopting technology, so early investments pay off the most.

Here are a few ideas on what kinds of investments you should be making:

Invest in software that will increase your ability to interact with candidates. This includes all sorts of things from websites and highly-targeted marketing systems to candidate relationship management tools. Most of you are still focused on the zero-value-add backend systems that do nothing directly to serve your customers: the candidates. Applicant tracking systems may be convenient, but they are the equivalent of order entry systems for salespeople. They are not going to make you better at finding candidates or getting them interested in your clients. You will need to refine how you source candidates and try to reduce the number of people you need to do each step of the hiring cycle. The goal might be for a single person to attract, source, screen, and present a candidate while the administrative tools automatically track everything that is happening and generate the appropriate reports and paperwork. RPOs and agencies have been working on these things for at least a decade and are about to reap its benefits.

Invest time in thinking through how you recruit people today. How many steps, people, tools, and touchpoints are average? How much time does a recruiter spend per hire? What could be done to shave seconds or minutes off that? What would you have to do differently if a recruiter were to deal with twice as many requisitions as they do today? The answers to these questions can form the backbone of an improvement strategy that will pay back high dividends down the road. Several RPOs have made big strides toward integrating automated processing and tools into what they do. This has given them the ability to charge lower prices while maintaining customer loyalty. Over time, they will refine and improve the technology until it will offer them such a large time and cost-saving that very few will be able to compete with older and less technology-enabled methods.

Move on from legacy systems and old technologies. Even if you have not recovered your investment, hanging on to obsolete applicant tracking tools, old databases, and inefficient processes will hurt you. Anything you own or use that is more than three years old and has not been upgraded is a candidate for the dust bin. Most technology has moved into the cloud or is delivered from an ASP. No software sits on your own servers unless your organization is large enough to need its own instance of the software. Almost every kind of software is being delivered as an app that can be installed on your mobile devices as well as your computers. Social media is dominating the sourcing arena and search is becoming easier to do, is likely to be built into applications, and is more powerful than ever. Resumes are being served up along with compilations about the candidates that have been scraped together from many different sources. Candidates are delivering their own “social resumes” that expand the information on the usual resume. You need to be able to accommodate all of this easily and quickly. Recruiting productivity will go up — I think exponentially — very soon. Most of this improvement will come from third-party agencies and RPOs. Unfortunately, the corporate recruiting world is still mired in yesterday and is unable to make the investments needed to move productivity up and to ensure success.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/erearticles_kevinwheeler/~3/pZnLdxCgVrA/ Kevin Wheeler