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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 5^th 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

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?

The Message is Now Mainstream

For the last year, I’ve been writing on, quoting, tracking back to etc. any hints that the “candidate is customer” message may be getting the attention it deserves in Recruiting.

While AllianceQ is making great gains in membership and therefore the message is getting out, having it written about in the New York Times means that the message is finally mainstream:

In this new world, candidates’ correspondence to companies is rarely acknowledged. Calls are seldom returned. Status updates are not routinely provided. Rejection decisions are not consistently communicated.

I highly recommend that you read Jon Picoult’s article.  Job seekers will be expecting more civilised treatment now that word is out.

Just in Time to Just Right

Just in time vs just right.  Reactive vs proactive.

I’ve always liked the analogy of recruiting and dating.  The stages are the same, notice, invite, woo, date, move forward or break up.  Clean and everyone can understand – been there done that.

So in looking at paradigm shifts in recruiting, it’s only natural that I venture into this analogy to make a point about where recruiting is going.

Old way of dating:

1. go to a crowded, busy bar night after night, putting your best face forward and hope to meet the perfect match
2. Repeat night after night (week after week?), having coffee or lunch with a few people but really not making amazing connections
3. become despondent, bored and willing to settle and choose a “close match” for a longer term commitment.
4. break up and start again.

Wow, that was depressing.  See how it mirrors our current “just in time” recruitment process?  We conduct the best search we can, find the best “available” talent (by the way, availability is NOT a skill set) and choose the candidate who matches most closely with our requirements and requires the least headache to close.  Hope and pray it’s a good decision but more often than not, end up repeating the process in 24 – 36 months.  Ouch.

New way of dating:

1. Complete a profile on one of the scientific matching software systems – tell it what you do and don’t want, what you will and won’t accept.
2. Only be notified when someone matches what you require.
3. Connect by phone or email, do some quick due diligence and then meet for coffee or lunch.
4. Find a lasting relationship.

In essence, what we’ve done is move about 25% of the work from the back end (really bad dates) to the front end (setting up our profile and search requirements) and free ourselves from the other 75% so we can focus on other things (like living life!).  For the recruiting analogy, the percentages are the same.  If you can move about 25% of your effort the the beginning of the process, you’ll save about 75% on the back end.  You do this by using new tools (newer than Boolean searches on the web) and shifting your energy from sifting through results to creating them.

The point of all this is that there are NEW  ways to do about everything today including dating and recruiting.  For those of you out there on a really bad date today or reviewing your 100th resume of the day – why are you living in the past?

Fill vs Find – The Politics of Measurement

Coming off of ERE, there are always some very interesting articles as the organization awards best practices and innovative strategies.

One of the most interesting was Todd Raphael’s piece on “Fill vs. Find”.  In it he quotes Steve Lowisz from Qualigenceand Tony Blake of DaVita (Recruiting Department of The Year Award winner this ERE!) as saying that a better metric than “time to fill” is “time to find”.  Great stuff and I couldn’t agree more.

However, there are challenges inherent in measuring “time to find” and even more challenging, using it with your client groups.  I’ll explain.  Tony defines “time to find” as;

This is the time beginning when a job request comes in, ending in the time the recruiter sends the candidate to the hiring manager.

I prefer “time to submit” for this definition or even better as my friend Todd Noebel commented on the ERE article, “time to slate“.  Basically you start the clock when the requisition is approved in the system (not when the hiring manager says, “hey be on the lookout for ___ I may have an opening” – this is usually when the hiring manager starts their clock!) and measure until you have a slate of qualified, interested and attractable candidates. STOP. 

This is “time to slate” and should be used to measure your sourcing effectiveness and nothing else.  Why “time to slate” vs “time to find” or “time to present”?  Because you can submit your first candidate at day 3 and then not another one until day 10.  Using 3 days as “time to find” isn’t truly representative of your sourcing effectiveness.  “Time to Slate” means you are done sourcing and are moving to the interview process.  By agreeing up front what constitutes a “slate” you can now stop the clock on the sourcing and move to the next phase of the process.  Now you can effectively measure your interview process effectiveness and this is where recruiting departments start to waiver on separating the two measurements.

Why?  Because measuring the interview process means measuring and holding your hiring managers accountable!  I’ve advocated hiring manager scorecards in organizations and promptly been tossed out of meetings.  For some reason most recruiters and recruitment leaders shudder at the prospect of telling a hiring manager that the reason they lost their #1 choice of candidate was because they dragged the process out for a month or so (usually needing to see “more” candidates right?) and they took another job. 

Follow me here;

My hiring manager and I agreed a “slate” was 5 QIA candidates.  I delivered the 5 (which she accepted) by day 10 and we went to the interview process on day 11.  Her candidate accepted an offer on day 45.  The difference between “time to slate TTS” (10 days) and “time to fill TTF” (45 days) measures only one thing – how effectively are we moving candidates through the process which is “time to hire TTH” (35 days).

TTF(45) = TTS(10) + TTH(35)

So in our example, the interview process took 35 days.  Now whether this is good or bad depends on a multitude of factors but only by measuring it can we uncover it and coach our hiring manager if necessary.

I think the best thing is that Tony and DaVita clearly are into measuring those things that are important and give you vision to your process.  Congratulations Tony and thanks for bringing this to light.

Revolutions are Uncomfortable Things

After hearing that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ceased operations yesterday to become the 12th major newspaper to shutter its doors I began looking into this momentous change we are experiencing.

On the website “Newspaper Death Watch” (http://www.newspaperdeathwatch.com/) (yes, I don’t like the name either) an article sums up the situation for newspapers:

The game is over for newspapers. Nothing can save the business, so it’s pointless to try. We’re in the middle of a revolution and revolutions are uncomfortable things because “The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place.”

The newspaper industry, like the automotive industry and the financial industry, is an institution in the United States.  Even 5 years ago no one would have imagined that we could be facing a time when major cities were “newspaperless”.  So what is happening?

Web sites like Craigslist have been to classified ads what the internal combustion engine was to horse-drawn buggies. The stock prices of most newspaper publishers have dropped more than 90 percent from their peaks.  Couple this with an amazing amount of debt taken on in the last 10 years as major publishers bought up smaller competitors and viola’ – the death of an industry.  Maybe.

Monster and Careerbuilderbattled over who would run the newspapers’ employment sections and traded the honor witheach other but for what?  It seems that even with big board names behind the employment sections, people were relying on them less and less.  While people were running from classified employment ads, they were running TO Linkedin and other ‘new’ ways to find work.  Revolutions are uncomfortable things.

I believe this is the next “revolution” we’ll see.  At least I’m hopeful that we will.  Just like no one wants newspapers to completely disappear (after all it IS where most of the serious reporting and reporters still reside) I’m not advocating that the big boards  disappear.  But like the newspapers, the days of “post and pray” recruiting would be a desired victim of a job board revolution.  The big boards have their place in an overall strategy but for too many recruiting departments that place takes up too much precious budget money to prove truly valuable.  Remember that a large percentage of Recruiters report getting a LOT of candidates from big boards but less than 20% of all employees actually report finding employment through the big boards.

If Craigslist can automate, facilitate and communicate better than your old classified, is it not too far fetched to imagine that a technology is coming that can do the same to “post and pray” recruiters?

It is all a question of “value” and who can provide the value faster, easier and with less cost.  If the road from consumer (Hiring Manager) to product (candidate) can be streamlined by taking out the middle person who adds little to no value to the process then the “revolution” is for the better.

The only way to reduce the discomfort of revolution is to find a way to add value to a process.  As we are seeing with the newspaper industry, if you are not adding value, you are not going to survive.

Stress Test Your Employer Brand

Living in Charlotte, I can’t help but be engrossed in the banking crisis.  Afterall, we are the second largest financial center to NYC in the country and my property values are directly tied to these firms making it and not going under!

The recent conversations have been about “stress testing” each bank.  Here’s how McKinsey describes what that means;

to identify, proactively, the bad assets on bank balance sheets, using financial models to project future loan values and loss rates under different economic scenarios.

Using this methodology, couldn’t a company determine if their employment brand was set up to credate future “values” vs. future “losses” in human capital?  Yes, it might sound far fetched but let me run with it for the moment.  Here are some steps to take to Stress Test your employer Brand:

Step 1: Know what it is. 

• Seems simple but many companies have no idea what their employer brand Actually is.  They might know what they WANT it to be, but testing reality takes courage AND tenacity. 
• Survey  new hires “what brought you to XYZ Co.?”, survey at first year anniversary and each year after “what keeps you here at XYZ Co.?” 

Step 2: Distill the brand message to values instead of losses.

• Now take those answers and cross reference them with performance reviews.  What do you find?  
• Are your low performers are telling you they love free soft drinks in the break rooms and the 40 hour work weeks.  Is your brand mistaking this for “work/life balance” in your message and therefore attracting low performers? 
• Are your top performers telling you they love the challenging work and opportunity for advancement?  Is your brand messaging inclusive of these aspects of your culture or are you afriad this message will scare people off?
• Adjust your employer brand message attract the top 1/3 of your performers (based on what they are telling you), not the masses.

Step 3: Get it out there.

• Once you are confident your brand message is targeted at the TOP performers in your company you are ready to get the word out.
• Many people confuse “branding” with “advertising” and they are not the same.  Your brand is a living thing, your company’s DNA and you can’t create an advertising campaign to get the word out, your employees need to be getting it out.
• Corporate blogs, The Vault, Facebook, Linkedin etc.  It’s a social networking world and if your top performers are getting the viral word out that your company is a great place to grow and expand yourself the message is more believable than if your marketing department puts it out.

What do you think?  Have we Stress Tested our employment brand via the McKinsey description?

to identify, proactively, the employer brand messages in use by our company, using competency models and employee feedback to project future human capital attraction rates with a focus on quality under different messaging scenarios.

Hey it’s Friday, what else do you have to think about this weekend?

Cheers!

It’s a Hard Job

How do you view the profession of Recruiting?  Grab a mirror and get your “Stewart Smalley” on because we’re about to search your soul as a Recruiter.

In my travels to companies as Director of AllianceQ, I often hear this objection when we present our solution;

How is your system going to help me find my double PhD, Biomechanical Nuclear Physicist? (or fill in any other absolute needle in a haystack profile for your industry)

My answer is always the same;

How do you find them today?

Answer: research lists, cold calls, lots of networking and hard core headhunting

Then THAT is how you are going to find them in the future.

It seems that many Corporate Recruiters are searching for easier ways to source difficult profiles and that search will always be in vain.  You see, Recruiting is a HARD JOB, or at least it should be.

Before the internet, the only way we found anyone was through a very tough and arduous process of cold calling, phone book research and faxing job descriptions.  Then the internet and eRecruitment was born and I think many recruiters have come to rely on the “ease” of internet recruiting to their ultimate demise.

If I ran the world (which I won’t because frankly I’d rather be sailing) Recruiters would be as revered in an organization as the top sales people are.  Why not, their job is just as tough and they contribute as significantly to the bottom line right?  Well, in “Phil-land” they would.  Here’s how.

I’d create a pyramid picture of the roles my department fills every year.  The broad base at the bottom are those repetitive, high turnover roles.  For every industry these are different but they are there in EVERY industry.  Then I’d move up to the next level where we are looking to fill the roles regularly but less frequently and then up to difficult and frequent then to impossible and frequent and then to impossible and infrequent and so on.  You get my drift.

Now anyone with a “Recruiter” title would never touch the bottom few job families in my world.  Instead, I’d find a way to automate that process (yes, it can be done) and allow my Recruiting Assistants to process these people.  I’d then take my now freed up Recruiters (who are dying to get on the phone and pull that needle out of that HUGE haystack) and make them heroes in the company by doing what Executives believe only Korn Ferry and Heidrick and Struggles can do.

I may not have slashed my headcount spend because what I’d save in not paying a bunch of low level Recruiters, I’d redistribute to my now Rock Star Recruiters in the way of retention bonuses, organizational impact bonuses etc. and I’d have a team made up of the best in the country because I’d be paying them like headhunters.

Many of you believe this can’t be done.  I’m not sure why.  Perhaps it is because you came into the industry after it was made easy by the internet, perhaps you believe that “recruiting” is a noun and not a verb.  Either way, these are times of change and I hope you’ll find the courage to re-create Recruiting, not just as a verb but as a very hard job occupied by really great salespeople who love the fight and can sell your company to your biggest competitor.

Recruiting will hopefully be a hard job again one day soon.

Job Seeker “Bill of Rights”

Seems the Universe is sending messages about the idea of a job seeker “Bill of Rights”.  I just finished watching the HBO series “John Adams” (highly recommend it) where the story of the original bill of rights was told.  Then I hear a caller on a radio show speak of how she wished our forefathers had also written a “bill of responsibilities” in exersizing these rights.  Really good idea.

So I wrote previously of a job seeker’s bill of rights and now I’m going to add a bill of responsibilities. 

2009 Job Seeker Bill of Rights

1. WE have the right to know if the position you have posted is an open, viable role and that you are currently recruiting and interviewing candidates to fill the role.
2. WE have the right to apply for a job and not get spammed with junk email offers for garbage jobs and poorly disquised get rich quick schemes.
3. WE have the right to know if we are being considered for the position to which we applied.  If not, simply tell us but don’t leave us hanging.
4. WE have the right to know why we weren’t selected.  If you didn’t consider us for the job, we just need to know why. 
5. WE have the right to disagree with your decision.

2009 Job Seeker Bill of Responsibilities:

1. We have the responsibility to honor your decision to pass on our application even though we may disagree with it and move forward in our job search without attempting to dispute your decision. 
2. We have the responsibility to NOT adjust our resume to fit the job description.  This wastes time and money and the truth always comes out in the interview process.
3. We have the responsibility to educate ourselves on the company and position we are applying to.  Not knowing the basics about a company when invited for an interview shows lack of earnesty.
4. We have the responsibility to only apply for jobs we are qualified to do.  Applying to jobs with a lack of qualfications is never a way into a company.
5. We have the responsibility to use the full array of tools availble to us in a job search.  Applying to jobs online is only ONE of the many tools and if we rely solely on this method our search will stall.

All rights come with corresponding responsibilities that must be adhered to to protect those rights.  If job seekers conduct a job search adhering to the responsibilities, it is our responsibility as Recruiters to ensure their rights are protected.