Job Search 2010 (or “why are you treating me this way?”)
I’ve recently begun volunteering with a group of professionals who are under or unemployed and looking for work. Wow, what an insight to “job search 2010”. Let me be clear, these are educated, experienced professionals who can read, write and solve problems as well if not better than anyone reading this blog. I’m talking about engineers, certified project managers, HR professionals, M&A Accountants – you name a profession and these are the folks I’m talking about.
First of all, they are exhausted.
No wonder. Job searching in the digital age is a labyrinth of dead ends and bogus directions. I’m getting some amazing perspective on the “advice” these folks are being given on a daily basis. Not by their dry-cleaner, but by so called “experts”; resume writers, outplacement firms and even corporate recruiters. My conclusion?
We have to do better by these people.
This is a call out to all of us “so-called-professionals” – we MUST do better by these people. Why? Because the “buyers market” we are enjoying today will not last forever and soon enough the tables will be turned and we’ll be begging these people to come work for us. When the job market turns (as it always does) these same people who are being given the royal shaft by US will be in the driver’s seat and all the employer-job seeker karma we are tossing out there will come back three fold.
DO BETTER #1:
Stop treating these people as commodities. See them for what they are, human beings. Dads, Moms, Husbands and Wives who have committed to providing for their families and promised them a bright future. They are not “widgets”, they are not “applicants”, they are not “candidates”. They are first and always, humans. If you don’t have the time to treat them with the respect they deserve, you need to get out of the HUMAN resource business. If you are bombarded with applicants and don’t have time to treat each one well – stop advertising your jobs like a desperate love seeker on every online dating site. Attracting job seekers only to treat them like crap is THE NUMBER 1 DO BETTER. If you can’t do better you shouldn’t be in the human resource profession.
Okay, so that’s a little harsh but in reality there are only a few reasons this terrible disservice to job seekers exists:
1. Recruiting Department laziness. Instead of working like headhunters, developing networks of talent and strategically tapping that talent – we post jobs. It’s so lazy it’s laughable. Ask any business owner how she built her business and I’ll give you $5 for every one of them who says “I put an ad in the paper and waited while customers bullrushed my store.” Post and pray is a huge suck of resources, money and time and fails to accomplish the business’ objectives. It just makes recruiting easier. Lazy.
2. Over-zealous interpretation of DOL laws. I’m going to call out the legal and compliance teams as well as HR and Recruiting on this one. There are NO laws that say you have to post your jobs on Monster, much less on Monster and Careerbuilder and eFinancial Careers, and The Ladders etc. If you are a company over 50 employees you have to get your jobs to disadvantaged people and you can do this for $25 at JobCentral and be covered for your DOL requirements. Don’t blame your “post happy” habits on your legal and compliance teams. How about becoming an expert on OFCCP yourself and advising YOUR legal and compliance teams on recruiting requirements. Don’t have time? See #1 above.
3. Horribly written job descriptions. I conducted a free webinar earlier this year on writing creative, targeted job descriptions to reduce the number of applications while increasing the quality of them. I had a company that is doing this with amazing results present their data and it was shown that with a small investment of time you can STOP the flood of unqualified applicants. I had 20 people attend. Clearly this demonstrates the lack of interest or understanding (or both) of the affect a job description has on flow and quality of applications. My only conclusion is that recruiting departments would rather focus on the cool and topical (for example social media – where I got 175 people to attend a webinar in February) than the simple and effective. Look in the mirror before you argue. How much energy is your department putting into social media today vs. fixing one of the largest, most consistent problems facing employers and job seekers?
Ok, so in my dream world, our recruiting department is being run like a headhunting firm (with time devoted to typical HR ’stuff’ we have to deal with in-house) and when we DO have to post a job we’ve put accurate, honest and well thought out job descriptions onto our career sites and are getting less but better applicants. Now onto another key thing we have to STOP.
DO BETTER #2:
STOP telling job seekers how to “game” the system. Even worse, STOP giving job seekers “tips and tricks” that we all know don’t work!! Here are some examples of what the “experts” are telling these poor job seekers that, although keeping them busy, have no tangible effect on their ability to get a job:
1. Join our Talent Community by filling out a general application in our ATS so we can find you when we have the right job. POPPYCOCK! Seriously folks, if you are saying this to ANYONE today, please stop it. It’s a dirty little secret of recruiting that I’m exposing to every job seeker I talk to – companies DO NOT search their ATS. (Ok, argue if you want to but before you do, produce facts about how many hires you get from searching your ATS, how many previous candidates for jobs from last year you found in your ATS and hired for a new role – I’m serious, I’d really like to hear from you.) If recruiting is a ‘black hole” this is the most hungry black hole we create.
2. Go in and change a couple key words on your resume in our system to keep it fresh and findable. Wow, could there be a larger waste of time? See #1 above but beyond that, whoever gives this advice to candidates has clearly not been unemployed in the last few years. My job seeker friends apply to 10-50 jobs A WEEK! Now you are telling them to go back to each of those applications or ATS systems and edit a word or two and THIS may help you be found? Why do we put the onus on the job seeker to make themselves findable in our ATS? Because #1 above and even if you DO search your ATS (still haven’t heard from you…) – it’s a crappy search engine because it was never designed to be a search engine. An ATS is a “cover your ass” tool devised in a dark dingy room by lawyers and over-zealous HR weenies. But I digress.
3. You should have a professional Resume and Cover Letter written. Of course you need a resume and yes it should be professional but not “professionally written” necessarily. Like job descriptions, resumes should be a highly accurate description of your history, skills and competencies and the impact you’ve had on your past employers (not touchy feely impact like “won the 5th floor bake sale 3 years on a row” but business impact – revenue or cost savings) and should cause enough of a pause to anyone scanning (not reading, recruiters don’t read resumes they scan them) it to make them email or call you. Ask a room of recruiters how many cover letters they read in a day – the answer ZERO. Ask a room full of hiring managers how many cover letters they read – the answer less than 10% have read ONE. Ask resume writers how many recruiters and hiring managers read cover letters – the answer EVERYONE! See what I’m getting at. Once you are in a final interview or next to final interview and you want to put a summary/cover letter whatever together go ahead, print it on bond paper in gold leaf if you want because you’ll be handing very few of them out.
I realize that this is uncomfortable for some to read – the truth is often more painful than the lie. But you have to trust me that when I say these things to job seekers, they are shocked because the prevailing wisdom is in direct contradiction to what I’ve said here.
Whether you agree with anything I’ve written or are writing me off as a quack, please do a very simple thing and commit personally to treating job seekers with respect, kindness and dignity – it’s all they really want if they can’t work for your company and it’s what they EXPECT if they eventually DO.
Psst, there’s a party at my ATS tonight….
It may label me as a “geezer” but I went to High School before the Internet was invented. OK, once you stop laughing I’ll make my point.
In “my day” – OK, now I’m officially a “geezer” – when my folks went out of town and left me alone at my house I would tell a few friends to come over and hang out and get some pizzas and yes, drink some beer! But that “few friends” always turned into a larger group of 20 – 30 and I’d find myself at my front door allowing some people in and telling most to go home. These people were typically angry and may have TP’d my house or shaving creamed my car the next week. I hope some of you can relate to how simple those times were.
Today, if you leave your teenager at home and he has the same idea that I did, it could potentially turn into a dangerous mob and a police scene as hundreds of kids show up to your house as evidenced by this recent story at ABC News:
“Social Media Leads to Home-Wrecking Party”
Home damaged after teens spread word of raging party through Facebook and texts.
The major difference between my “geezer” experience and the danger of today:
-Social Media
Continue reading
Your 2010 Talent Acquisition Dictionary
This year, as you listen to pundits, experts and talking heads tell you about all the changes that need to be made in recruiting to bring respect and admiration for our profession (overhaul your process, embrace every new technology, restructure your department, add a sourcing team, etc.), you will no doubt be intimidated by the scope of these recommended changes in the face of flat or reduced resources. It is my assertion that this “recommending the extreme” has stymied our growth as an industry.
However, sometimes the biggest changes can occur by simply changing the words we use both internally (within our departments) and externally (with our candidates/customers and hiring managers). Many a book has been written about how changing words leads to changes in perception, performance and promotion. For example:
What does the word “overwhelmed” represent?
- “I have little or no power at the office”
- “My problems are bigger than I am”
- “There’s no hope for relief and it will never change”
What would you be saying and thinking if you switched to saying “In Demand” instead?
- “I’m important”
- “I’m needed”
- “I’m choosing where to give my time and talents”
- “I’m proud”
Yes, words matter, so here is your 2010 Talent Acquisition Dictionary. Start with this and see what changes come simply by changing the words you use every day.
Old: Pipeline
2010: Talent Pool
The word “pipeline” has been many a recruiter’s enemy. Hiring managers consider a pipeline to mean a bucket of interview-ready candidates you simply toss a net into and pull out a never ending supply of candidate choices. The word “pipeline” begs the question “who else do you have?” from a hiring manager. A Talent Pool represents a group of people from which you may be able to find a candidate or two based on the quality of your ongoing relationship with them.
Old: CPH
2010: QOH
Cost-per-hire is a meaningless statistic to anyone who understands the nuances of recruiting. What goes into this measurement is of great debate and a high CPH is not a bad thing if you are hiring key talent, just as a low CPH is not a good thing if you are keeping costs low at the expense of quality. QOH is harder to measure but significantly more meaningful to the business. Simply put, higher quality is better than lower quality regardless of price or time (which is coming next). If you reward your recruiters on QOH instead of CPH the department will flourish.
Old: TTF (I told you it was coming!)
2010: ROH
Time-to-fill has run its course and is no longer (if it ever was) a meaningful measurement to anyone but a recruiter being measured on it. ROH (Retention of Hire) actually means something to your business partners. This should seem self evident yet when you talk about retention with recruiters they are very quick to point fingers at managers, culture etc. (all of which a good recruiter knows about and screens applicants for by the way!). So let me put these in context; if my recruiters have a very low TTF and the “company” has a high turnover rate, why are we measuring TTF? Any business person understands that taking longer to hire the RIGHT person (who stays, performs and is promoted) is significantly preferable to hiring the wrong person (who gets trained, complains and quits or is let go) faster. Really? You want to argue this one?
Old: Applicant (or Candidate)
2010: Customer
The world is flat. No, I didn’t write it, but it’s true. It’s also true that you no longer control your employer brand. Sure, you can pay for awards (remember, I’ve spent 18 years in this business, I know what “branding” means in most recruiting organizations), publish logos from organizations on your career site and talk a great game, all the while, treating people applying for jobs, interviewing for jobs and even getting jobs like cows in a production dairy farm. Guess what? People talk, twitter, Facebook, blog, etc. at increasing rates and what are they talking about? Your terrible “candidate” experience. This one is simple – treat every “applicant” (cold call, networking call etc. for you sourcers out there) like a potential customer of your company and all the above is still true but the talk becomes positive. Again, this one is a no brainer but way too many recruiting departments are “too busy” to attend to the applicant pools they attract and are hurting their companies – watch it, marketing will find out about this as will sales and the C-suite.
And the final entry for today:
Old: Customer (is the hiring manager)
2010: Customer (is the candidate)
In any process development or improvement methodology (I use Tatham) the first step is to define the customer. Same holds true when you start a business – “who is your customer?” is a fundamental step 1. Step 2 is that you CAN NOT have more than one customer! So if you have an existing recruiting process with the “customer” defined as your hiring managers – you cannot be successful in recruiting top talent. This is a simple fact that, once explored with an open mind, becomes obvious. Now let me calm your nerves and tell you that I built my career in Corporate America so I understand the idea that recruiting supports the business units they are assigned to. But let’s not confuse “support” with the definition of “customer”. Yes, you support the Marketing group in their recruiting efforts but if the marketing team is your “customer” then you must have a process that revolves around their needs and wishes, even if those needs and wishes tie your recruiting efforts to the post.
Ok, you need an example. Here’s a poignant one from one of the most respected recruiting leaders in the country today. At this person’s company, the Sr. Leadership was clamoring that they weren’t seeing enough candidates from one of their top competitors (company A) and the pressure was on for the whole recruiting staff to up the ante in pilfering this competitor of top talent. However, my well respected colleague took the initiative to do some research and discovered that in the recent year, of the candidates from Company A that were presented, only 22% were actually hired. And of those, 78% turned over in the first year! So, if this recruiting leader allowed his department to serve the Hiring Manager as customer, his team would be viewed as a complete failure (especially using our new “words” above). Serve the candidate as customer and align your hiring managers as partners and you’ll find more success than you can imagine.
Ok, now simply try using some of these new words in your meetings, discussions and plans in your department and the change that so inspired dread in you as you read the pundits’ advice will come much easier this year.
Silver Bullets
Most of you are familiar with “Silver Bullets” – whether you are a fan of The Lone Ranger (who used them) or of folklore where silver bullets were the only way to kill a werewolf, witch or other monster – everyone knows what silver bullets are.
But today, I’ll be using the idiomatic definition as defined in Wikipedia:
The term has been adopted into a general metaphor, where “silver bullet” refers to any straightforward solution perceived to have extreme effectiveness. The phrase typically appears with an expectation that some new technology or practice will easily cure a major prevailing problem.
This is a fitting definition for folks in recruiting departments across the world. I’ve not run into a Recruiter or Sourcer this year who didn’t look at every technology as a “silver bullet”. First the internet, then Google, Linkedin, and now social networking – you name it and chances are that the hopes and fears of recruiters will have rested on it at one time.
I’m not sure why our profession is always in search of “silver bullets”. I wonder if surgeons are always looking for a silver bullet – that technology or practice that will miraculously make their jobs easy and stress free? Maybe construction folks thought the pneumatic nail gun was their “silver bullet” – after all, no hammering – hooray! No nail pouches around my waist? YES! Finally, my job will be a breeze. And then on Monday, they are back to crawling around 2×4 beams in freezing weather and they finally realize “hey, my job is hard – sure this new tool makes one part of it easier but overall, my job is hard.” There are no silver bullets in recruiting. Recruiting is hard work.
I believe that recruiting should be hard work. Somewhere, with all the technology silver bullets we have at our disposal, the concept of recruiting being hard work got lost on many recruiters. I know of “Recruiters” who harvest applicants from their ATS or simply get finalists referred to them by the hiring managers, process offers, put together hiring packets and move to the next one. Recruiting? I think not. Somewhere we’ve blurred the lines of the verbs “recruiting” and “hiring”. If you are taking pre-packaged applicants and simply moving them through a process to on boarding – you are NOT a recruiter, you are a staffing person or recruiting coordinator or some other version of an HR person. Sure your job may be busy but it’s not hard.
A true recruiter works very hard for their money. Not frantically hard like, “I’ve had to process over 20 offers this week” but rather emotionally hard like, “I spoke to my candidate’s husband last night and he grilled me on the career path his wife would have should she accept our SVP offer” or mentally hard like, “I cold called 27 candidates and got 25 “no’s” before I found my two candidates”. Recruiting is and always will be a unique mix of art and science and those people who do it and do it well will attest to it being hard work.
As always, the genesis of the movement to processing rather than recruiting lies solely in what the organization measures and rewards in their staff. What you measure you promote. Measuring and rewarding recruiters on time-to-fill, number of hires made in a year etc. drive processing. To drive recruiting, you need to measure and reward things like quality-of-hire, retention and business impact of hires.
Measuring quality-of-hire, retention and business impact of hires is “hard” you say? No Silver Bullets – I told you, recruiting (and managing recruiters) is hard work!
Unfriend
Today the word “unfriend” was announced as the Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year (WOTY) for 2009. How fitting.
For those of you living in a cave for the greater part of this decade, “unfriend” is what you do on Facebook to remove a connection to someone else; you “unfriend” them.
If you had money invested with Bernie Madoff – you probably “unfriended” him this year.
Sarah Palin probably “unfriended” Levi Johnston this year – you get the drift.
What strikes me is that to “unfriend” someone from your network is probably the rudest thing you can do in social networking. Unfriend on Facebook and “unfollow” on Twitter mean that you originally wanted to be connected to this person and now find that connection so negative that you are dis-inviting them from your life.
OUCH!
So not only is our WOTY (word of the year) a really negative one, it shines a light on the whole social networking/public facing world the internet has created. One in which we scamper like chipmunks to “friend” everyone we ever knew (and a bunch we don’t know but who know someone who knows someone we know or had dinner once with someone who knows someone we knew in college – Jeez!) C’mon people. Is this really the way of the future?
The internet lives we lead today have so completely removed us from relationships that we now do stuff to each other on the internet we’d NEVER do to each other in person. And through this layer of protection, we now have created words that never existed to describe how rude we can be to each other.
Seriously, here’s a glaring example; you are having a Thanksgiving Dinner party and one of your friends asks if they can invite someone they know to dinner at your house. This person shows up and drinks all your good scotch, eats the last dark meat and sucks whipped cream from the can – you are disgusted. But do you ask this person to LEAVE? No, you don’t, you wouldn’t. You’d be gracious, you’d be kind and you’d never see that person again. You’d talk about it and probably laugh about it later.
But today, we are accepting friend invitations, followers and LinkedIn connections from people we don’t know and some who we probably don’t want to know – all in the name of social networking.
“Old networking” used to be about a mutual exchange of value, either professionally or personally. People in your network mattered and there was benefit to having a network and being in one.
Today, with our newest word of the year, I doubt the value of your network is much or that you consider adding value to your network (telling everyone on Facebook that you had a great cup of coffee is NOT adding value – no it’s not.) on a regular basis.
I think the Oxford Dictionary needs to come up with a new word for “networking” in today’s world. One that actually describes what we are doing. Maybe “friendgathering” or “Followstalking” or “Linkifinity”. She with the most connections wins. Wins what?
Consider this. We’ve lost our ability to communicate effectively face to face because we now do everything on the “net”. We apply for jobs, we update our families, we find old friends (but don’t call), we send invitations, we send Christmas letters, we order pizza, we get educations etc, etc.
The Oxford Dictionary defines FRIEND as;
Friend:
-Noun
1. A person attached to another by feelings of affection or personal regard.
By doing all of our connecting electronically, aren’t we “unfriending” everyone?
T.O. of CEO is OK!
For those of you seeking some GOOD news about the economy and the job market, it’s time we started paying more attention to some of the interesting indicators that things are actually getting better.
I read an article on MSN Money that shows there are quiet but measurable signs things are getting better. It’s an upgrade announcement of two major Executive Search Firms, Heidrick and Struggles and Korn Ferry International from “neutral” to “buy”. This is based on a shift from a 0.6 decline in revenue in August to a 2.6 GAIN in revenue in September. Another factor was the reduction in financial sector job losses from 40,000 last December to 2,300 in August to just 700 last month (Heidrick’s #1 segment).
One of the analysts in the article made an interesting statement:
“Our view is that a resumption in executive turnover rekindles growth exiting a recession, which is spurred further by global economic growth in the second half of an expansion,”
So the takeaway is that the job hopping of executives (remember how prevalent it was in 2004-2006?) is a GREAT indicator that business is growing and jobs aren’t far behind.
Don’t be too upset if your CEO or CFO announce they are leaving the company. It may simple be an indicator we are finally pulling out of this recession.
Who Cares?
Just not a nice question huh? Ask someone a question and when you get this response you just feel bad – like they are brushing you off.
Yet this is the response I get most often (verbally, physically) when I ask recruiters about the candidate experience – especially the candidates who apply but are not qualified or have clearly applied for the wrong job.
But my answer is always “you need to” and apparently The Gallup organization agrees with me. A 2008 study in The Gallup Management Journal (surveying a targeted U.S. sample of 1,376 adults aged 18 and over who were seeking a job – The sample consisted of those who are currently unemployed and seeking a job as well as those who are currently employed full time or part time and have searched for employment in the past six months) found that if you don’t care and aren’t treating all candidates like customers, you may be significantly harming your recruiting efforts. Continue reading
Job Board Logic
I remember in 1992 when the “world wide web” (the term internet had not been invented yet) was touted as a game changer for recruiting. And it was true…..for a time. There was Monster, then Careerbuilder but two was not enough, the job board industry realized that they could carve up the universe into bite sized pieces and convince recruiting departments that they had to be part of this movement in order to get closer to the talent they seek.
And millionaires were made.
Today, we’ve seen a proliferation of niche job boards (to the tune of over 45,000 available) and the promise of the web (automate and create efficiency) has all but gone by the wayside.
Allow me to explain via example: Continue reading
Zero Sum Game
One of the systemic errors that I see corporations and Recruiting departments making is that they are treating hiring as a “zero sum game”.
The name comes from the fact that there are some games where the sum of the player’s payoffs at the end of the game sum to zero. Poker is a good example. Imagine you and I play head’s up poker. If at the end of the night I’m up $20 then, by definition, you are down $20. Our payoffs, plus $20 and minus $20, sum to zero. The point being that in zero sum games my wins define your losses (and visa versa). Continue reading
A Brand or a Temporary Tattoo?
Ok, I’m from the west. Born in Boulder, Colorado and raised in ski country so to me, a “brand” is a borderline cruel way to mark your livestock – and mark it PERMANENTLY.
You’d never find a steer branded “rocking H” wandering the stables at the “lazy M”. A brand means something very REAL in livestock. It means commitment.
And in Corporate life, a “brand” can mean commitment; commitment to quality, commitment to innovation, commitment to community etc.
But come down another layer to the “employment brand” the whole subject gets pretty “squishy”.
All of a sudden, the term “brand” means more of an aspiration than a commitment. You would never see a steer not living up to it’s “brand” and rarely do you find a company not tied inextricably to it’s corporate brand but in “employment branding” there is way too much gray area. But why?
The essence of employer branding is to attract talented individuals and ensure both they and existing employees identify with the organization – and its brand and mission – to produce desired outcomes for organizations.
The discourse occurs when image triumphs over substance and what is publicly proclaimed is in conflict with reality. Here, employees both tenured and new find the organization lacking in “brand” integrity.
So how do you avoid the “temporary tattoo” employer brand? Simple. Be real. Inspect your brand; what keeps your star employees at your company and what attracts new ones? What causes game changers to leave? Do the analysis, be willing to be challenged and then set programs and culture changes to fix what is broken. In short – live up to what your brand IS, not what you want it to be. In the end you’ll attract and retain the talent you can and not the talent you think you should be.
