Don’t Let Recruitment Get Buried in the Sand

Over the years I have encountered several HR Pros that are focused on everything but strong recruitment/talent strategies.  They get bogged down in the details, focusing on paperwork, policy compliance, and everything else that (for the most part) does not add as much value as finding ROCK STAR employees. 

Ever heard of the Rock/Pebble/Sand example for time management from Steven Covey?  If not here is a YouTube video link to explain more.  Anyways, I like to apply this same principle to HR main accountabilities (This applies to generalists not specialists):

·         ROCKS

o   Attract

o   Reward

o   Retain

·         PEBBLES

o   Strategic Recruitment Strategies

o   Compensation/Reward Programs

o   Employee Relations

o   Talent/Employer Branding

o   Payroll Strategies

o   Training/Development

·         SAND

o   Paperwork

o   Posting Positions/Requisitions

o   Keeping up on Social Media

o   Putting together offer letters

o   Planning a Leadership Training

o   Etc…

So think of it this way, if we spend most of our time focusing on those things that are necessary but do not add overall value to our organization, than we do not have time for the things that do.  Susan Heathfield writes in her article The New Roles of the Human Resources Professional on About.com, “The role of the HR manager, director, or executive must parallel the needs of his or her changing organization.  Successful organizations are becoming more adaptive, resilient, quick to change direction and customer-centered.  Within this environment, the HR professional, who is considered necessary by managers and executives, is a strategic partner, an employee sponsor or advocate and a change mentor.”  In order to be strategic, and truly partner with senior leaders in your organization, spending time on the non-essential, non-value added tasks can be devastating to your ability to be viewed as a valuable member of the organization. 

This may be a long winded approach to explaining why truly focusing on strategic recruitment is important, but I honestly believe if you do, and if you focus on building talent pipelines, and building strong on-boarding processes you will add more value than most anything else. 

Anthropology of a Lazy Recruiter

*Originally featured on HRPayrollSystems.com.

Yes, I know… you are sitting there scratching your head wondering what in the world I am going to talk about. Here’s the deal, what is up with the recruiters that post positions to all the normal spots, and then wait?

(Insert Jeopardy theme song here).

Yes, I understand since roughly 2007 it has been easy to have ginormous (Yes I know this is a mash up of giant and enormous) candidate pools for pretty much any opening. This approach to sourcing candidates is BORING and completely ineffective waste of time!

Why you ask? Well, because someone (likely you) will have the painstaking task of going through each and every one of those resumes to look for the right skills and qualifications. I would venture to bet that about 70% are not even really qualified for the role, and out of the remaining 30% there is only a small handful who are worth your time.

Dr. John Sullivan said it best in his blog post on ere.net in 2005 “The “you find us” category is the most commonly used, where a firm essentially posts a notice that it is looking for someone to hire and then sorts through those individuals who respond. The more proactive category, however, is the “we find you” approach, where a firm instead attempts to identify the names of top performers as individuals and then contact them directly. The first approach almost by design attracts “the masses”, while the other is more targeted to minimize the volume of applications and maximize the quality of the applicants.”

Get off your bum! Find the perfect person for the role you are recruiting for. Research them, reach out to them and do your homework. Here are a few simple questions you can ask yourself.

1. Are they the right fit for the culture?
2. Do they have the right skills?
3. Will they work well on the team that is already in place?

I know, hopefully to most this sounds basic but you would be surprised! I have networked with other industry recruiters at SHRM events and they start complaining about this really difficult to fill position and I ask “So what strategies have you used so far?” The answer that I receive EVERY SINGLE TIME is… “Well, I posted it on Monster, CareerBuilder, Craigslist and the local newspaper. My eyes start to glaze over and then my mind goes to “local newspaper…hmm… interesting.”
We need to wake up and realize that the economy, albeit slowly, is getting better and while it will mean a short influx of great candidates because they are feeling more comfortable about safely transitioning jobs—that will not last forever. Post-n-Pray is not, let me repeat, not an actual recruitment strategy—or at least not a good one.

Need some ideas? I am happy to strategize with you—send me a LinkedIn message and we’ll chat.

Shotgun Recruiting: Possible with Preparation

It is Friday afternoon at about 4:30 p.m. I am finishing up screening my new resumes for the day, responding to the emails from my regional leaders and getting ready to enjoy a nice summer weekend. Then, my phone rings… let the race begin!

The call was letting me know that we needed to fill 25 positions, from line to mid management-level by Tuesday. I know, you’re thinking there is no way you can do that successfully. However, it is possible and I do it all of the time.

How do I find great people, quickly, that fit our culture, core values, qualifications, etc. with as little as a few days lead time? Preparation…ladies and gentlemen…preparation.

By being in constant communication with business leaders, keeping an eye and ear on where the organization is headed and trying to foresee what will happen next is the absolute only way to be successful in this type of situation.

Here’s another lesson on preparation. In September of 2011 I start hearing rumors about pending acquisitions in Texas, Nevada, and Maryland but was told not to worry because it was unlikely. I feel like there should have been a devilish laugh at the end of that sentence. These were new states to me so I felt compelled to research the current candidate pool in these locales—within and outside my industry.

So let’s talk about what this challenge really encompassed. It included finding mid-level leadership positions, sales professionals, trades (maintenance) professionals, laborers, and even senior-level leadership positions.

I scoured social media (LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter) and researched similar companies to my own to find out what the most successful ones were so that I could keep an eye out for that on resumes. I sourced through job boards (CareerBuilder, Monster, Indeed and Craigslist) and started connecting with leaders that may be interested or know someone who was interested in the potential opportunities and just kept pushing forward to find a strong pool of candidates.

Long story short, I received a call very similar to the one described at the beginning of this blog. “Hey Julie, we will need to fill 70 positions in 4 states and we have 30 days.” If I had waited, and played the odds I would have been toast!

However, I didn’t wait I decided it was better to be over-prepared and not need the candidate pools than to wait and see. The result is that I filled 70 positions in just under 3 ½ weeks and have only about a 15% turnover rate from the initial 70. Beat that!

So my goal in sharing this with you is to impress upon you that nothing is impossible with preparation. There are great candidates out there and it is possible to find them quickly—you just have to be constantly sourcing before the actual job opening. I know, you might be thinking you’re too busy for that but it really it saves a ton of time on the back end.

Kyle Lagunas - HR Market Analyst

Hello All,

I would like to draw your attention to a wonderful blog post by Kyle Lagunas, an HR Market Analyst that provides software advice.  

He writes about the "4 Benefits of Successful Socialized Talent Management Technology".  

He writes that the 4 benefits are:

1. Enabling Open Door Policies - "By showing employees that their feedback results in real changes, they've seen a spike in employee engagement"
2. Connecting Experts - "Today's enterprise social technology has turned traditional employee directories into a strategic tool for both employees and leadership"
3. Improving Performance Visibility - "Using the same signals that indicate an employee’s daily activity and contribution, leaders can monitor and evaluate a new, more dynamic set of performance metrics along with the old."
4. Motivating Career Management - "This highly social product, which launched a free version today, brings new energy to career management by keeping employees focused on growing within their organization"

It's a wonderful read!  You can see the full blog post HERE or go to http://blog.softwareadvice.com!

Top 2 Social Recruiting Aggregator

As many of you know, you can use Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to find quality candidates by either sourcing or directly posting on them.  Did you know that there are other useful tools that will do the same thing, but will allow you to post on one site, and then they will aggregate out for you?

If you haven't used this functionality before, here are the 2 sites that I HIGHLY recommend!!! I have provided both a free (or for the pro version, nearly free), and paid (but worth every penny) options.

• Bullhorn Reach - Awesome, Awesome, Awesome site... you can set up a free account that will allow you to post 1 job.  However, if you invite other recruiters to sign up through the website, then you receive an additional job slot for each person that completes the registration.  I am currently up to being able to post 7 jobs at one time!  All you have to do is put in the job information, your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn login information, and what the posting frequency is for each and you're good to go.  For example I have a Regional Sales Director position posted.  Below you can see how many times it has re-posted it for me on each website, and all I had to do was put it it 1 time.  

• Broadbean - This is a paid service that will aggregate your postings out for you.  The kicker for this one is that once you are set up with them you can have your postings automatically post to just about any job board that you can think of!!!  We are beginning to use them, and so any position we have set up it will disseminate the posts to over 50 other job boards.  BIG TIME SAVER, AND WORTH EVERY PENNY.