On Talent

It's Clearer Than Reading Tea Leaves

Last week the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its employment numbers for April. The summary is as follows:

Employment rose in April, and the unemployment rate was unchanged at 5.2 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. Nonfarm payroll employment increased by 274,000 over the month. Job growth was widespread, with gains in construction, mining, and several service-providing industries.Total employment grew by 598,000 in April to 141.1 million, and the employment-population ratio--the proportion of the population age 16 and over with jobs--edged up to 62.6 percent. The civilian labor force increased by 605,000 in April to 148.8 million; the labor force participation rate, at 66.0 percent, also was up over the month.

These numbers exceeded most estimates substantially with increase in total employment and total civilian workforce both exceeding industry observer's estimates.

What does this signal for staffing organizations. This is the part that is easier to read than tea leaves--the pool of easy pickins is getting smaller. It is time for staffing organizations to begin (or return to) innovative recruiting, and maybe even more importantly sourcing, techniques to woo candidates. The active candidate population is dwindling and we are closing in on sub 5% unemployment. It will become tougher and tougher to find candidates to fill open positions in the coming months.

All of us need to begin to get creative.

Dreamers...

Channel surfin this weekend between the yard work and the errands, I caught a show (forget the channel) about transportation. The show focused on a few inventors - Talent - who have dedicated their lives to finding new modes and methods of transportation.

The inventors had a common theme, personal air travel...think George Jetson and the flying car he used on the air ways that took him to 'Spacely Sprocket' every morning for work. Could it be that we are on the verge of turning an animated future into our daily reality?

Read on.

As reported by John von Radowitz, PA Science Correspondent Feb 2005

'NASA System Could Make Flying Cars A Realiity'

A “highways in the sky” system developed by Nasa could be the first step towards turning Hollywood’s vision of the flying car into reality.

Later this year Nasa will demonstrate the Small Aircraft Transportation System (SATS) before an invited audience of engineers, scientists and members of the public.

The event at Danville Airfield in Virginia may “one day be viewed as one of the most significant milestones in aviation history,” according to The Engineer magazine.

Nasa will have plans in place by the end of 2006 and the race to design the flying car of the future is on. Fueled by the fuel crisis (no pun) finding new, less environemntally intrusive ways to travel may be in the offing. Notice I didn't say cheaper....darn!

But very interesting. One inventor is a former Bell Helicopter Engineer with a shop in Olney, Texas and he's built a prototype helicopter, airplane that holds two, flies anywhere and lands any way. He has plans for the next beta to have wings that fold up turning the flying car into a land machine. And there were at least 6 other designs. The show had me walking outside looking up in the sky excited at the technology aspects and wondering about the future value of land under open skies and bright stars.

The other thought went to our space...not outer....talent. Who are the 6 inventors in our space? Who is taking us from the highway to the sky? And I'm not talking social networks. Who's out there thinking about the next wave?

Future Shock in the late 70s was a great book at forecasting the future. It's time for our industry, the talent industry to do more than go out on a limb. It's time we took technology to the next level and really added value. I don't need to go into all the reasons why we don't today....do I?

OK, said it before, you've heard it before from more than me...we store resumes and contact people later...usually much later. In a world of immediate response and communicationm when how we are treated on the Internet matters sending in resumes and waiting simply is not the way to fly.

So, I have ideas...some I keep to myself and some I share. Mine are likely not quite pie in the sky. But someone out there has pie in the sky notions. And I'll bet that soon, very soon someone is going to rock our world.

I can't wait!

Candidate Segmentation

I've heard it a lot more in the last few months than ever. Customers and prospects are talking about candidate segmentation. Again the (lagging) parallel between marketing and sourcing is producing an increased interest in market segmentation and personalization in sourcing. This is especially important in passive candidate sourcing. Identifying the wants, needs, and hot buttons of particular candidate groups and then tailoring the candidate experience will greatly aid in the attraction of those candidates to the right opportunities. Getting passive candidates to make the move requires that they see a compelling reason. This won't happen by posting a job description on a job board.

John Sumser said it well in today's post. Here is an extract:

...candidates must always be at the center of all of your employment marketing decisions, their influence radiating out to every point of contact you have with them. It's up to you to know their behaviors and preferences and tailor your employment marketing strategies to cater to their needs. Companies who recognize this and build their strategies around retaining and deepening their relationships with their potential employees are the ones who will succeed.

This kind of "micro" segmentation and personalized targeting have been the subject of good marketing for a few years. As we enter an economy where control of the recruiting process is shifting from the employer to the employee, this precise targeting, messaging, and candidate experience will mark the winners in the recruiting battle. The Talenteering Manifesto calls out this kind of personalized communication.

 

More March Madness

There was an interesting comment posted last night to my first "March Madness" post from *Joe* (I think Joe is an alias because the email address posted was bogus, but that's OK I'll reply to anonymous comments:-)

Joe's whole comment can be read here. This extract captures the gist of it:

For you to compare what HR/staffing folks do to a “college recruitment” campaign is insane.

When your out in the field talking to clients/prospects, you constantly here that cost/cost containment are important, in fact always top of the list.

Ask the college coaches about cost………laugable, they are given open ended $$$ and creative folks to almost prey on young kids…….yes kids……17-18.

I still think there is a lot to learn from recruiting practices of sports recruiters--sorry Joe, but that's my opinion. They do several things right (and yes they certainly aren't perfect or in some cases even model citizens) to land the best talent they can for their teams.

First--they are proactive. They don't wait until the end of the season and the day after signing day to start identifying their targets. If they did they would certainly NOT have a good recruiting year. This would be the analog of waiting for a requisition to open to start identifying candidates on the corporate side.

Second--they build relationships with their targets. They reach out using many communications channels to develop a relationship with their recruits (the kids) as well as other influences (parents and coaches). Developing relationships with potential candidates ahead of demand is a good practice.

Third--they create a positive recruiting experience. They get the recruit to feel "moved in" during the recruiting process. IMHO, this is an area where many staffing teams fall short. And I use the team here intentionally because during the interview/assess/select stages of recruiting a large part of the process lives with the business unit and hiring manager. The talenteer has to do a good job of facilitating the visit, and preparing the hiring team for the visit if the candidate is going to have a good experience. Many companies do the reverse--the candidate that is all fired up for the position has a negative experience at the time it matters most--the end of the process. This is sort of like the waitperson who takes great care of you through the entire meal and then disappears at the end after leaving the check--right when you are about to decide how much to tip them. See my previous post on experiential talenteering.

As far as cost containment, I too hear that but I think it makes a very strong statement that staffing is being treated far too tactically. The right metrics should be focused on staffing proficiency and return on talent investment. Jeff Hunter's post on this topic is very eloquent and should be read by all HR executives.

As far as fantasy--I fully realize that corporate recruiting is vastly different from sports recruiting, and can't be executed in the same way. Can we learn something from their best practices? Damn straight we can! If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you always got. I welcome further discussion on this topic.

March Madness: Where Does Experiential Come In

Like many people I spent a good portion of last weekend watching college basketball's March Madness. The opening rounds this year produced some of the best games I remember in a long time in both the men's tournament and the women's tournament. And how about the number of low seeds winning?!

Watching the games this weekend got me thinking about one of the keynote speakers we had last fall at HireWorks: The Hire.com User's Conference. The speaker was Jody Conradt, hall-of-fame coach of the University of Texas women's basketball team. Jody spent an hour over lunch one day discussing the talenteering involved in sports recruiting--particularly for a major program. There are a few points Jody made that apply to corporate recruiting as much as they do sports.

1. Create the experience. Jody talked about how they turn the campus visits of key recruits into a full-fledged UT experience for the recruit. They work with the communications and media colleges to create a multi-media experience that is tailored for the recruit. They create life size stand up photos of the player in UT uniform that welcomes them to their visit to Erwin Center--UT's basketball arena. Their name is in lights on the scoreboard. They take them to the dressing room where they "stage" the players locker--full gear laid out including a jersey with the recruits name and number hanging in front of a spotlit locker. They want them to feel the Texas experience. Do you treat recruits this way? Do you have the experience your company? If so is it a good experience?

2. They stay in constant communication. Jody talks about how her assistant coaches, student assistants, and even some of the players find ways to stay in touch with recruits personally. This might involve IM or chat sessions late at night, or email conversations. They want to stay top of mind. They want to continue to reinforce the Texas experience, and to be there to answer any questions or deal with objections proactively. Sports recruiting is cutthroat. So is corporate recruiting. Do you stay in touch with recruits before and after the interviews? How about after the offer and before they start? This is an easy time to get cold feet or to consider another offer.

3. Recruiting is broader than just the recruit. In the case of UT, they are recruiting high school students--so the parents are clearly a big piece of the recruits decision process. Jody and team accommodate this by appealing to the parents wishes as well. Tell them about academic programs, student affairs, and other concerns the parents may have about their child attending the university. They make sure they feel part of each step along the way. This too applies to corporate recruiting. Outside factors like a spouse, a significant other, and even parents can weigh in heavily on a career move. Do you factor in these outside factors in your talenteering efforts? Do you provide information to make them more comfortable as well? Many companies do some of the this for relocations, but it is just as important for local hires.

As talenteers, we can all learn a lot from sports recruiting. Many of their processes have been honed to a science. But those practices could help you win the next key sales hire, or engineering hire, or nursing hire. Learn experiential hiring.

Talenteering -- Online Recruiting 2.0

Jason Goldberg has a great post from yesterday on the Jobster blog on Online Recruiting 2.0. The thesis is a direct hit with my talenteering manifesto. Jason makes some great points in his post--read it.

I am a firm believer that recruiting must move to talenteering and begin to develop more targeted, segmented views of the market as well. Automation will help to refine targeting, identify top talent ahead of demand, and use those talent relationships to facilitate a flow of candidates that is more about quality and less about quantity.

Corporate Career Site: Destination or Source?

While catching up on some back feeds I ran across the research summary posted by Gerry Crispin at Career Crossroads Annex. You can read the full  post here. I found both the full report and the summary chock full of interesting factoids.

From Gerry's blog summary:

- 61% of all External Hires can be attributed to just two ‘Channels’- Employee   Referrals & the Internet.

My 2 cents: This number continues to grow. Many observers are crediting the job  boards with the majority of the  Internet candidates, but I believe that number is shrinking relative to the total number of Internet candidates as candidates in increasing numbers are seeking direct relationships with companies they are interested in.

- The Internet and expanding referral networks continue to put pressure on traditional forms of recruiting.

My 2 cents: This especially true of the expanding referral networks. This phenomenon goes beyond traditional employee referrals and is now augmented by formalized relationship networks using the power of the Internet and relationship mapping. Products like Spoke which has a network access to ~27 million people and the ability to leverage enterprise referral knowledge add a new accessibility to passive candidates. Jobster is set to come out of stealth mode with something  rumored to be relationship networking specifically for recruiters. Savvy talenteers have a whole new toolkit to use for sourcing.

- While the percentage of hires attributed to a company’s staffing pages is still inflated (we believe), evidence from a parallel study during January 2005 with CareerJournal.com suggests that “Virtual Walk-ins’ do indeed exist. Job seekers will go to company sites for reasons other than a job and find themselves drawn to openings and then to applying for them.

My 2 cents: By taking a more proactive approach to developing talent pools, not job applications, a far greater number of "virtual walk-ins" gets captured. This is the opportunity to start talent relationships with potential candidates who were interested enough to click on the career page link but may not find a job to be "drawn" to. This is the classic "coincidence hiring" syndrome:  it is a conicidence that the right candidate goes to the career site at exactly the time a job is open and applies. Odds are slim that if that job is not open, they won't come back for quite some time. Give them a way to create a job agent or profile of the ideal job without the position being open or applying for a job. That is sourcing ahead of demand and could increase the registration rates for virtual walk-ins by 10X to 20X.

- Hires attributed to the ‘Company Website’ (considered by us to be a ‘Destination’ and not a ‘Source’) have declined from 67% (of Internet Hires) to 54% this year.

My 2 cents: Gerry's parenthetical hits the nail on the head. The company career page(s) should not be purely a source, or simply a company job posting board--it should be a destination. All sourcing programs should direct candidates to the company career site destination. Better yet, the career site should consist of multiple destinations tailored to the unique needs of specific candidate types (engineers, sales, call center, field service, college, etc.) to offer a compelling candidate experience for each and every candidate. I guarantee that if companies took this talenteering approach to considering their career website as a set of experiential destinations, and notified matching candidates when interesting jobs became available, that the % of qualified applicants from the corporate career pages would increase and so would the quality of candidate.

 

Collaborative Hiring

Talenteering means think proactively. Talenteering requires collaborating with hiring managers to anticipate what their talent needs will be 3, 6, even 12 months down the road. Why (you ask)? Because getting ahead of demand allows you to build a better supply, and building a better supply makes you the preferred supplier. With this approach you can help build a better business by hiring better people.

Think about it. As a corporate recruiter--soon to be a talenteer--you have insider information that no other talent source has. Early access to the very people who will be creating the demand. By being proactive you can understand  their future business goals, challenges, and mission. Working with the business units you can create a talent plan that becomes an integral part of their business plan. And by being proactive in seeking out the business managers before they bring you an emergency requisition ("we don't need no stinking requisitions" thanks Jeff Hunter) you are able to create a sourcing strategy that can go beyond reactive, active candidate only sourcing. You, as a talenteer, just became an integral part of their business plan, and more importantly an integral of the business.

This is the heart of the Talenteering Manifesto. Plan--find out what the business will really need, and find out ahead of demand. Mapping--develop a targeted strategy of where the ideal candidates can be found. This might be targeted companies, associations, web profiles, relationship networks (real and digital), and any other sources you can dream up. Since you are being proactive you have time to cast a wider net. Develop a compelling message--your company has to appeal to the best of the best as a great place to work. Reach out to them and let them know why you are a great place to work in a language that is relevant to them--engineers and marketers don't speak the same language! Engage them in a personalized candidate experience--again by being ahead of the game the experience can become a dialog. You can use multiple channels to reach them email, RSS, create a blog for specific types of candidates, microsites with news and information relevant to them not just corporate wonk talk. Basically stay in touch.

Now when the positions open--yes the ones you were able to anticipate by collaborating with the hiring managers early and often--you will have a good flow of interested and interesting candidates to present to the hiring manager. You have become the preferred supplier by becoming an integral part of the process. This is an insider advantage that you have over staffing firms and agencies, recruitment advertising agencies, and job boards. They can all be resources to your staffing plan, but you are in the drivers seat.

That's talenteering!

(BTW. There is a great post on recruiting.com that was a collaboration between Jason Davis and Jeff Hunter that hits the nail on the head here too. It is also a great read on a very closely related topic.)

Metrics Mania

It seems like metrics are the hot topic amongst talenteers today. I've been with several customers and prospects late last week. They are all wanting to improve the way they prove their strategic value to their respective organizations and believe (and I agree) that metrics are crucial in that prospect. While I was on the road last week Randall Birkwood from T-Mobile wrote and excellent ERDaily article on the importance of effectiveness metrics. Jeff Hunter has been extremely eloquent over several posts in the last week, even engaging in a very lively blog dialog with Dave Lefkow on the topic of Jeff's "strike zone" metrics.

One thing is very clear to me from all of these sources--staffing metrics have to become better measures of effectiveness as apposed to today's efficiency metrics. It is difficult--let's make that impossible--to prove strategic value to an organization without being able to demonstrate business impact. That means metrics that can be used to prove return on talent investment. Reducing opportunity costs, faster time to revenue, creating a new product line all have business impact ramifications. Tying those actions to talenteering is the challenge and is making us think about a whole new set of metrics. Instead of cost per hire, we should be thinking about production from staffing investment (this is what Randall's article mentioned above was nibbling around the edges of) and requires a feedback loop from the hiring organization to measure the impact of the hire. Instead of time to fill we should be thinking about time to productivity, or Jeff's strike zone.

I hate to overly simplify the case here, but it really is time to get strategic or get outsourced--and that is at the heart of talenteering. Become more aligned with the business and help build a better business by bringing the right hires.

Just Exactly What Are We Measuring?

Sorry for being dark for a couple of days. I made a trip to the northeast on Monday and got trapped in the "surprise" blizzard coming home last night.

As I continue to talk to customers--both existing customers and prospects--I continue to be puzzled by just how stuck many companies are in yesterday. It manifests itself in the obsession with process caused by the candidate glut of the past 3 to 4 years. It manifests itself in the naivete of the belief that high volume produced by job board posting equals recruiting productivity. And it manifests itself in the meaningless ways that staffing organizations measure themselves. The two primary metrics used today are cost-per-hire and time-to-fill, and occasionally hiring manager satisfaction gets thrown into the mix.

These metrics are outdated and meaningless. And in many cases they are either manipulated or outright wrong. For example, a lot of staffing organizations manipulate the time-to-fill metric by moving the position in and out of a "hold" status. Buyers of ATS functionality want to know if the time-to-fill reports are taking this manipulation into account to make the number look better. Is that not manipulation? A more meaningful measure would be time to deliver qualified candidates, and percentage of candidates delivered that fit the job description. Or as Jeff Hunter called it his recent  post, the "strike zone" metric. After all isn't the point of talenteering to build a better business by hiring better (or the right) people. By being proactive the time to deliver should be improved, but if it isn't are we going to hire someone fast just to make the metrics look better? Of course not, or at least I hope not--thirty days of opportunity cost to hire the right person is a lot cheaper than hiring the wrong person fast! In fact I think I even remember a home page tagline on Unicru's website at one point that said something like: "what's so great about hiring the wrong person fast?"

And cost-per-hire is also meaningless. Most of the time all of the costs are not figured into the cost numbers because they lived in another budget anyway. What is probably more important here is source effectiveness. Which sources produced the best candidates (producers) most economically.

Net-net of this discussion is that we need to move away from artificial efficiency measures and begin to define effectiveness measures that show how staffing is impacting the business with good return on talent investment. I don't purport to have all of the answers, but I do observe that many organizations are stuck in yesterday's metrics and are not focused on the what the objective should be--RESULTS. Producing the best results possible for the company at the optimum investment. That's the talenteer's approach. I would be interested in comments and ideas about the right talenteering metrics.