recruiting – Workforce

October 21, 2020June 29, 2023

Progressive Insurance gives interns an entry-level lesson in the new reality of office work

interns, internship, Progressive Insurance, remote work, remote workforce

A well-run internship program often enables college students to gain skills they wouldn’t otherwise attain in a university classroom.

Typically interns draw a new perspective on work while in a structured corporate environment, learning the processes, strategies and plans that lead to organizational and personal success. If properly executed, an internship can provide experience, inspiration and potentially an entry-level job as they embark on their budding career.

Perhaps the most valuable aspect of an internship is building relationships with mentors and executives while observing an organization first-hand from the inside. But since the pandemic took hold, many internship programs have been suspended or even eliminated.

Rather than abolish its internship program, Progressive Insurance Co. gave its interns a dose of corporate reality in a pandemic-stricken global workplace. Rather than intern inside its corporate offices, the insurance giant quickly created a program of remote out-of-office-terns.

Going to a virtual platform

Mayfield, Ohio-based Progressive employs some 40,000 people and like many organizations immediately pivoted to a largely remote workforce in mid-March. Gabe De Leon, Progressive’s program manager for collegiate and MBA recruiting, said that their approximately 100 hourly interns were among those suddenly cast into a remote-work environment.

Also read: Enrich your employee onboarding experience and say goodbye to paperwork

“We needed to spend extra time ensuring our interns felt like they were a part of the Progressive family given these circumstances,” De Leon said.

Time was actually an advantage since the new round of summer interns hadn’t yet come onboard. Executives made the remote work call with interns in mind, De Leon said. “Our interns were thrilled to know that we were going to honor our commitment to their internships,” he said, “albeit, 100 percent virtual.”

Progressive’s summer internships run from May through August to mirror university schedules with roles in data and analytics, IT and accounting business groups, De Leon said. Progressive interns are there to do more than just get someone’s coffee or stuff envelopes, he added.

“Our interns are assigned unique and necessary problem-solving projects that allow them to work closely with company leaders and foster their professional development.”

Learning to use remote technology

Emily Holroyd, who studies actuarial science at Ohio State University, recalled the uncertainty as she transitioned to being a remote student at Ohio State University and simultaneously finding out her summer 2020 internship in Progressive’s claims department would be fully virtual as well.

“Going into the summer it was very clear that my internship was going to be virtual, but I do remember being a little nervous about what this was going to look like,” recalled Holroyd, a data analyst intern. “I was hearing stories left and right from my peers about losing their internships or even just having weeklong programs as a substitute. I knew how important to my career this experience was going to be, so I was relieved to hear that Progressive was going to allow us to partake in the full 12-week program virtually.”

Case study: COVID-19 causes Radial’s 25,000 seasonal hires to practice safe shipping

De Leon said that interns typically get the opportunity to work alongside industry professionals, receive career advice and mentorship, and attend educational, networking and social events. They also incorporated virtual events including a roundtable with Progressive President and CEO Tricia Griffith.

Interns received a working experience as if they were on site, De Leon said. Besides one-to-one mentorships and networking with peers as if they were in an office, they learned the new realities of working during a pandemic.

“Our interns learned new virtual technology to accomplish their job responsibilities,” he said. “Learning how to navigate a large remote conference call is also a valuable skill.”

Remaining in a remote environment

The vast majority of Progressive employees will remain remote until 2021, De Leon said. Still, the internship program’s future is bright. The fact that they bring in qualified candidates through their recruiting process even in the middle of a pandemic is reassuring, he said, adding that they have made some adjustments and created a robust virtual college strategy for the fall recruiting season.

And some interns, like Holroyd, who never set foot inside Progressive’s offices, are offered full-time positions as their internship ends. Holroyd is set to begin a full-time position in the analyst development program beginning in June 2021.

“I quickly learned that I was only going to get out as much as I was willing to put in, and this motivated me to try and talk with as many other analysts as possible,” Holroyd said. “I think the fact that I was able to submerge myself into the Progressive culture, even remotely, speaks volumes about the people that work for this company. This year has thrown a lot of curveballs with school and work, but I hope to look back on 2020 warmly as I remember my internship at Progressive.”

What will Holroyd’s “I remember when …” recollections be decades from now about her pandemic-influenced internship?

“My story will definitely be, ‘I remember when I spent an entire summer working for a Fortune 100 company from the basement of my parents’ house.’ ”

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February 20, 2020June 29, 2023

How to create a formal onboarding program

Brad’s Deals didn’t always have a formal onboarding program. New hires would have meetings with the hiring manager and HR, but there was something lacking that could improve the employee experience, said Jessica Adams, vice president of people at Brad’s Deals and 2018 Workforce Game Changer.

“You spend a lot of time trying to find the right fit for your organization in a really competitive recruiting environment,” she said. “So you need to work to make [new hires] feel welcome and incorporated as a team member as soon as possible.”

Employee engagement starts at the beginning of the recruitment process and continues through onboarding, said Jennifer Duff, co-founder of Totem Consulting, which has built many onboarding programs for its clients. These experiences that happen early on set the stage for the way in which employees will engage with the organization moving forward.

New hires partly assess their new job by asking themselves if working at this company was really what they were promised during the recruiting process, Duff said. This is why employees should think more broadly about onboarding, past the basic HR tasks like signing forms. Consider “whatever you want your employee experience to look like as an organization and your employer brand, and then weave that into your onboarding,” she said.

If employees are sold on a company through the recruiting process and then their onboarding experience does not live up to their expectations, there may be some negative impacts for employers, she said. Employers may see high attrition rates because new employees leave after a few months.

To avoid this, employers have the power in those first few months to shape a new hire’s employee experience during onboarding rather than letting other parties set the tone.

“If you’re not managing that conversation up front and if you’re not owning that conversation, that conversation will get owned through water cooler conversation, and that can undermine what the employer is trying to do in terms of the employer brand or the employee experience they’re trying to create,” she said.

Your Onboarding Timeline

Brad’s Deals’ onboarding process has changed over the years through a process that allows for actionable feedback and constant improvement.

Also read: 5 easy onboarding strategies for small businesses

Before a new hire starts, they receive at least three phone calls or emails from HR about how excited the team is to have them on staff, what time they should come in and how to dress on their first day, Adams said. Meanwhile, before the employee’s start date, the head of each of the organization’s eight departments sit down and decide, based on the role of the new hire, the most important people they should meet in each department during their first, second and third weeks.

The questions people have in their first week versus the end of the first month are very different, Adams said. While they tend to have more general questions at first, the longer they’re at the organization, the more focused their questions are based on what they’ve observed about their job or around the office. This is why meeting with people from each department on a weekly basis is valuable.

Jessica Adams, Brad’s Deals

In addition to these meetings, Brad’s Deals does check-ins with new hires after week one, week two and week four through online surveys. Questions include: How are you doing? Who have you met? How else can we support you? And, what questions do you still have?

New hires also have face-to-face meetings with their manager after three months and after one year, Adams said.

“Traditional literature says that someone is considered a new hire for three months, but I think there is also some benefit to looking at someone as a new hire for their first year,” she said. “Every company has their busy season, [and] they have their slower season. You want to give that new hire the opportunity to experience the entire cycle your organization goes through each year.”

Brighid Courtney, client leader at Wellable and a WELCOA Institute faculty member, built Wellable’s first onboarding packet and procedure, and she also included a well thought-out timeline.

In their first two weeks, Wellable’s new hires have “highlighted meetings for the day” in which they meet with the different departments and learn about what they do and how they contribute to the overall goals of the company.

Then, the new employees receive a task for the day, based on these meetings. For example, a new project management hire meets with the customer support team one day. They may sit in with support employees and learn about some of the user issues people have with a type of software. Then, their task would be to answer some user tickets to help them further understand the user experience.

Also read: Onboarding tips HR leaders can adopt from the first day of school

“As you’re looking to build a collaborative environment, it’s important for people coming in to be able to build those relationships early on to make sure they can always go there for help or for resources,” Courtney said.

The company also makes sure to space out these meetings and tasks so that the employee is not overwhelmed with new information, she added.

Value of Constructive Feedback

While employee feedback is valuable to any process, it’s especially important when an organization is starting something new, Courtney said. There’s room for growth, and tweaking anything that needs improvement will help the program grow in the right direction.

Brad’s deals uses its regular new hire check-ins both to make sure the employee has their questions answered and to get feedback on where there’s room for improvement in the onboarding process, Adams said. But the company also uses feedback from candidates who did not receive job offers to make improvements.

“Getting feedback from people who were not hired is valuable to us to ensure that we are being clear, authentic, and realistic about the projects and the opportunities and our expectations of someone in the role,” she said.

One time, the company received feedback that a candidate had to wait 15 minutes for their second interviewer to come into the room. Learning this, Brad’s Deals was able to ensure that they could improve the process and not make any candidate have to wait anymore.

“Onboarding is so greatly impacted by the preboarding phase and the recruiting phase that you really have to keep it in mind before someone’s even walked through the door of your organization,” Adams said.

Big Picture Guidance for Employers

While this process may seem overwhelming to employers who are creating their first formal onboarding program, Duff recommends that organizations try not to take on too much, overextend themselves and underdeliver. The best thing an organization can do is create small improvements consistently and iteratively over time, she said.

Practically, how this might pan out is that once every month, the organization makes one change in the onboarding process. That might mean something as manageable as starting to have the CEO send a welcome email or regularly send a simple pulse survey.

“People get daunted easily by overhauling a program, and I try to encourage my clients to look at it through small impactful changes, because it gets people used to seeing [that] small things can be done, and you can implement feedback quickly,” she said. “It’s about building small wins.”

Creating a flexible timeline is one of the most important parts of making a formal onboarding program, Courtney said.

“For anyone with a limited budget, time is such a valuable resource,” she said. Organizations must make sure they give new hires enough time to work on the tasks they need to complete. It also helps if there is room built in their schedule to make adjustments and change the timeline, if necessary.

She suggests that employers carefully plan out that first month with flexibility in mind and come up with the most vital objective and goals for new hires to reach in that time frame.

Using consistency to help with retention and attrition rates is a major part of Brad’s Deals overall strategy, Adams said. Their process in which new hires meet with people in every department ensures that every new employee has the same meetings that last the same amount of time and gets the same information. The importance of consistency starts well before these meetings, though.

“If we’re not level-setting with someone during their interviewing process, they’re going to be surprised or they’re not going to be happy when they get here,” she said.

And as HR professionals, we know the worst thing is for an employee to be surprised about what they’re experiencing or the message they’re getting.”

February 12, 2020June 29, 2023

Ready staffing: The growing influence of RPOs

Sector-Report-RPOs-Do-More-Than-You-Think-8b38574

Since its founding in the early 2000s, recruitment process outsourcing companies have expanded their services and are now used as less of a tactical approach for ready staffing and more strategically for company growth.

With that in mind, organizations with ready staffing needs have a choice as RPOs have evolved to become much more agile.

The Recruitment Process Outsourcing Association defines RPO as “a form of business process outsourcing where an employer transfers all or part of its recruitment processes to an external provider.” RPOs essentially serve as an extension of the human resources department with solutions that organizations can customize based on their ready staffing needs and resources.

However, RPOs should not be confused with staffing agencies. Unlike staffing agencies, RPOs take ownership of the management and design of recruiting processes, are responsible for the results and they promote the client’s brand instead of their own.

Jesse Silkoff, co-founder and president of MyRoofingPal, an online marketplace for residential and commercial roofers across the United States, said that his company switched from a staffing agency to an RPO because of the lack of results.

“They filled positions, but in a way I couldn’t engage with. And once the position was filled, they collected their payment and disappeared into the ether until we needed them again,” Silkoff said in an email statement. “They offered no help beyond the things we could have honestly done ourselves.”

After switching to an RPO, Silkoff said that he felt like the company had hired their best talent. “It took about twice as long to fill positions before, and now they’re filled at a lightning fast pace by quality professionals who are interested in the future of the company,” Silkoff said. “While there might come a point where I no longer need that partnership, right now it’s been invaluable.”

The RPO industry looked much different 10 years ago as using virtual assistance to fill positions was only an emerging market. Daniel Ramsey, founder and chief executive officer of real estate virtual assistant company MyOutDesk, LLC, highlighted the evolution of RPOs as he said that today, the applicant pool is almost limitless.

“This has allowed for true global businesses and an ever increasing workforce,” Ramsey said in an email statement.

Ready staffing not only has been serving an increasing amount of small and large businesses, but has also proven to be beneficial to small businesses in particular, according to Ramsey.

“A good RPO can find the right person for every business, regardless of the position or the size of the business,” Ramsey said. “This ability has opened up so many possibilities for small businesses to afford growth they might otherwise not be able to afford due to lack of time and money to interview and research potential new hires.”

Companies should also consider the size of the RPO firm, their service structure, cultural fit and cost before deciding which RPO to partner with. Courtney Cook, vice president of RPO strategic development at management consulting company Korn Ferry, said that establishing cultural alignment and trust is critical for mutual success for both the RPO and the buyer.

“Your RPO program and the overall talent acquisition process, from high-volume recruiting to professional hires and executive search, should fit together seamlessly,” Cook said in an email statement. “Instill a rigorous and regular meeting rhythm to measure performance, bottlenecks, best practices and market insights to drive continuous improvement.”

According to Joseph Quan, co-founder and CEO of HR software company Twine Labs, RPOs are not a one-size-fits-all solution. While RPOs can bring expertise around how to set up a recruitment process, help define a plan for how to analyze recruitment efficiency, and implement technology solutions that increase efficiency, Quan also said that they cannot change the culture of the organization.

“Lack of institutional support around the importance of recruiting, lack of executive buy-in or unclear internal expectations around hiring aren’t things an RPO can solve,” Quan said in an email statement. “We often see RPOs fail due to this mismatch in expectations.”

The companies that Quan sees getting recruitment right are the ones that have “true alignment from the CEO on down that hiring is a core competitive advantage,” he said. “Hiring managers are bought in to the importance of hiring and spend a substantial amount of time on it. HR teams are forced to be data-driven, not only looking at metrics like cost per hire but analyzing every element of their recruiting funnel, optimizing for efficiency and assessing true impact metrics.”

However, for those companies that find outsourcing their ready staffing to be the most beneficial option, there must be an understanding of each others’ core values, mission and vision, said Cook. “It really depends on the unique needs of a specific company, their culture, openness to partnership and their level of talent maturity,” Cook said.

“RPOs can be a viable long-term solution for organizations if you partner with the right one,” Ramsey said. “After all, if an RPO is sending you quality employees, saving you money and understands the needs of your business, why do it yourself anymore?”

January 29, 2020June 29, 2023

Cultures of cohesion connect employees with engagement

It’s time employers stop focusing on employee engagement and start focusing on cohesion, according to Troy Hall, chief strategy officer for South Carolina Federal Credit Union.

“More often than not, leaders fail to embrace the type of culture that places an emphasis on the employee,” said Hall. “When organizations claim employees are their greatest assets, one would expect to experience the type of thinking and see actions that correlate to that end.

“Far too often that is not the case because leadership has been taught for the past two decades to put profit before people.”

A “cohesion culture” is a work environment where employees have a sense of belonging, understand their value and commit to both self and desired organizational outcomes, he said.

Hall has spent 14 years working with the South Carolina Federal Credit Union’s leadership team to create a cohesion culture. He does it through an approach he calls the talent retention model, which he describes in his book “Cohesion Culture: Proven Principles to Retain Your Top Talent.”

“Cohesion is a causal phenomenon, engagement is not,” said Hall. “When cohesion is present, it has a positive impact on performance. Cohesive team members produce better results. Cohesion can be measured, engagement cannot.”

Engagement is an arrangement to do something with a specified period of time, he added.

“We think of engagement as leading to commitment, loyalty and going the extra mile. In fact, the type of engagement that leaders seek is fueled through cohesion.”

Today’s workforce requires transformative leaders who value people beyond the courting process, said Hall.

“Employees want to work in an environment that makes them feel like they belong, have value and can commit to both personal and corporate desired outcomes,” he added.

Hall’s strategies have worked, leading the credit union to be named one of Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work in 2019 and 2020. In 2017, it earned a No. 2 ranking on a national list of best credit unions to work from Credit Union Journal and Best Companies Group, which identified companies that have excelled in creating quality workplaces for employees.

Employees offered praise for the financial institution, citing its “fantastic” 401(k), time-off policies, an option that offers free health care, management’s ability to “keep things fun and keep motivation high” and how “they make you feel special, appreciated and give lots of opportunities to grow.”

Hall shares his organization’s success stories and methodologies with others’ top management and HR directors worldwide to help transform their cultures and retain top talent.

The war for talent must transcend merely attracting talent to focusing on retention strategies, said Hall.

“With 63 percent of the current workforce seeking opportunities for advancement or new roles, employers will need to focus on retaining that talent or it will become a revolving door between acquisition and retention,” said Hall.

It costs 25 percent of the employee’s salary to replace the organizational intelligence that walks out the door, Hall said.

Hall’s doctoral dissertation at Regent University in global leadership and entrepreneurship focused on group dynamics and cohesion.

“My assertion to focus on retention is based upon what we are seeing as trends in the marketplace and understanding how to create a culture that is self-fulfilling and sustainable,” he said.

It is critical for CEOs to lead the charge for talent retention, said Hall. His boss, Credit Union CEO Scott Woods is a prime example.

“CEOs who are self-aware inspire a cohesive spirit within their company and align individual wants, desires and goals to those of the organization,” Hall said.

The smallest of actions can have a ripple effect, said Hall.

“A misplaced comment or the unexplained absence of the CEO from a major organizational endeavor sends confusing signals,” he said. “It is up the CEO to ensure the leadership team is on board with the culture and that they work in tandem to represent one voice.”

Aligning employee goals to organizational goals maximizes the bottom line, said Hall.

Within the cohesion process, the element of commitment is more aptly fulfilled with leaders who support employee development first, then move toward organizational goals, said Hall.

December 23, 2019June 29, 2023

Artificial Intelligence Is a Double-Edged Sword. Here’s How HR Leaders Can Properly Wield It

Unemployment in the United States stands at a 50-year low. The quit rate of workers hovers near an all-time high. And the number of open jobs continues to outpace the number of unemployed individuals.

Workers have reaped the benefit of this employment boom, through more job options and bigger paychecks. But it has ramped up pressure on HR departments grappling with recruiting and retaining top talent.

To help overcome these challenges, many are eyeing a double-edged sword: artificial intelligence. AI holds immense promise.

Technology that mimics human thinking by making assumptions, learning, reasoning, problem-solving or predicting, AI helps humans figure out who to hire and how to keep them. Such benefits for HR have already outweighed any setbacks.

But if HR departments wield AI without a proper understanding of it, they risk playing with peoples’ lives and their company’s brand. Indeed, a flawed AI program, or one used without the proper safeguards, could lead to hiring the wrong person, missing a deserved promotion, or systemic bias in the hiring process.

Few HR departments fully grasp AI’s potential and limitations. And that’s understandable. After all, AI’s role in human resources is still relatively new. HR departments being first and foremost people-focused often trail behind other departments in learning the latest technological innovations. Furthermore, HR now can benefit from the combination of AI technology maturing and the high volume of accessible data that powers AI. In recent years, the availability of data has increased exponentially.

So avoiding AI’s pitfalls and seizing on its opportunities first means knowing what they’re dealing with.

Today, some HR departments experiment with fairly basic forms of AI. For example, using platforms that scour thousands of online résumés to uncover and rank candidates against specified job requirements.

But the more advanced forms of artificial intelligence — programs that become more autonomous and smarter over time — will require greater caution. Imagine a training platform akin to Netflix’s recommendation engine, suggesting customized development resources and shaping a tailored employee learning path. Or think of a compensation program that monitors employee performance against real-time market trends to suggest the timing and size of pay increases for maximum retention.

It’s a tantalizing vision but one rife with peril. Even tech-savvy companies have run into problems. One retailer took the well-intentioned step of using AI to enhance its recruiting, but when the software developed systemic bias, they had to pull the plug. Trained on the data of past hires — predominantly men — the AI quickly “learned” to penalize female candidates, downgrading attendees of women’s colleges, for example.

This does not mean that organizations should shy away from AI. The technologies now coming online may truly revolutionize HR’s ability to find, hire, engage, and develop but only as part of a coherent plan with vigilance from the top.

To realize the gains and avoid the dangers, organizational leaders should:

Identify HR processes that could capitalize on a combination of machine and human intelligence — with the former’s computational muscle augmenting the latter’s judgement. Machine intelligence can analyze more data, more rapidly, than can humans. It can also spot patterns or correlations between factors that a human analyst might miss. For example, AI tools could recommend coaching topics that would accelerate time-to-productivity for new hires in a specific role.
Collaborate with other functions to determine how to best use AI in the company. As content experts, HR should lead the process, identifying areas that could be automated or where AI could be leveraged. IT should be an initial partner, but legal, risk management, data protection, data security, communications and even corporate social responsibility may also play roles.
Employ AI to “fix” AI — and humans. Tools like IBM’s Watson Recruitment suite already use systems that detect unseen bias from hiring data and natural language processing. According to IBM, it can spot whether past bias patterns are being reproduced — and fix them. AI scientists hope to increase transparency so that they, as well as skeptical auditors, will be able to see what’s going on inside. This will help them root out latent forms of bias and monitor the stability of their models over time.
Create new roles that facilitate the adoption of AI. AI-for-HR is likely to lead to new or expanded human resources roles. AI expert Tom Davenport suggests three clusters of such jobs: trainers who will teach cognitive technologies about capabilities; explainers who explicate the process and results, and sustainers who ensure the systems are performing well from an HR perspective.

In the coming years, the United States will continue to experience a tight labor market. Seismic demographic shifts will persist, including the exodus of baby boomers from the workforce and insufficiently small batches of new entrants replacing them. Such trends will only perpetuate the challenges to those charged with hiring and retaining talent. HR professionals will need to employ AI — carefully and intentionally.

Amy Lui Abel is the vice president of The Conference Board’s Human Capital Center.

December 9, 2019June 29, 2023

When You Tell a Job Candidate, ‘You’re Probably Not Going to Like This Job’

When hiring is brisk, it’s easy to rush the process and end up with mismatched employees. So it’s important to know what motivates them — not just how they behave, but why they do what they do. With today’s labor market, finding the best match for performance and retention pays for itself in retention alone.

A majority of Fortune 500 companies use assessments for selection and companies of all sizes can benefit from emulating the practice. To ensure the best talent selection and long-term match, HR should go deeper than personality types and behavior.

With assessments that determine what motivates candidates, HR can be more assured in choosing — or passing on — any individual.

“Selection is very different than just hiring,” said Brett Wells, chief science and consulting officer at Talent Plus Inc. “Selection means you’re making a sound judgement based on validity and science, based on what’s the very best in a role or an industry and how they will respond versus what you think your gut reaction should be. It’s predictive.”

It’s a Good Time to Be Choosy

“People can answer interview questions very well,” said Alison Nolan. “People are fantastic at answering interview questions, but it doesn’t always tell you the truth.”

Nolan is HR partner for the public health NGO, FHI 360. Previously, she did the same job with Volvo Group Trucks. With her 18 years of talent acquisition experience, she recommends an assessment-based hiring process.

“With an assessment, if they’re trying to fake it, it shows up,” said Nolan. “It’s very clear if they’re trying to skew the answers. If you’re honest it just gives you so much more insight. It saves the employer and the employee.”

In Nolan’s experience, only about 25 percent of employees who are put on a performance improvement process end up keeping their jobs. So why not make it a goal to avoid performance improvement interventions?

Right now, two competitive factors make it more important than ever to assess and understand employee motivation in hiring so great performance is the norm:

Near full employment. With full employment, talent acquisition is more about who you don’t hire than who you do hire, because you want to be selective and find people who will thrive in your organization. And once they’re hired, retaining those employees also becomes a competitive necessity in a tight labor market.
Career trends. People have become more selective about what jobs they take. Once upon a time, job seekers considered just getting a job a societal responsibility. Today, they are more attracted by intrinsic factors — in other words, corporate culture and corporate responsibility — than the need to simply find a steady income or a job for life.

Personality assessments that identify motivation can make all the difference in matching candidates with the jobs in your organization.

For Wells, who researches and builds assessments, carefully matched talent has never been more important for retention.

“With a tight labor market for candidates, the world is their oyster right now and ‘fit’ is key for retention,” said Wells. “If they don’t have that fit for the role or the organizational culture, they will leave. If they’re in a role where they’re not getting that intrinsic satisfaction they’re at risk for being disengaged and, again, at greater risk for leaving.”

Finding a Motivational Match

When you’ve done the work to accurately assess candidates, you can honestly say to those who aren’t a match, “You’re probably not going to like this job.”

How come?

You can answer, “Well, you’ve got the work ethic and the skills to do the job, but after a year, you’ll be exhausted because this job is all about engaging with clients daily in a strictly established corporate structure and you’re more motivated by thinking outside the box and coming up with new ways to accomplish tasks.”

On the other hand, for the candidate who assesses as a good fit, you can offer the job with assurance and negotiate as necessary to get them on board: “I really think you would love working here.”

Nolan has seen how this can be a positive experience for people who are not hired as well as the company.

“They get to hear why they didn’t get selected and they get that review,” said Nolan. “They have something tangible to walk away with. And sometimes, we say, ‘Hey we have this other position where you’d be a great fit.’ ”

You’ll know this because you’ve used a scientifically valid instrument that goes deeper than simple behavioral traits to find out things like:

Do they like to develop their own way of working or do they prefer to have it laid out for them in a prescribed manner?
Would they rather help others succeed or do they prefer monetary incentives?
Can they focus on their job with no environmental distractions or do workspace aesthetics energize them?

There are no right or wrong motivations. It’s all about congruency between what your organization needs and what it can offer the candidate.

When you assess a person’s motivation, you gain a deeper understanding of them so you can either lead them into a fulfilling and satisfying position or honestly wave them off, so they don’t take a job that will ultimately frustrate them and send them looking elsewhere.

“This is where that motivational piece comes in,” said Wells. “We often see potential wasted because they’re in roles spending time just doing things that they’re excellent at, but they don’t necessarily enjoy it.”

For Wells, it’s about talents versus strengths.

“A strength is something I’m good at, but I might not enjoy doing it, e.g., balancing a checkbook,” said Wells. “A talent is something I have the potential to do with excellence and is something I’m going to enjoy doing.”

The Perils of Using Gut Instinct

Outside of HR, not all managers are believers. Or maybe they’re just not aware.

“With some hiring managers, it can be them saying, ‘Okay, I want this person’ even when it didn’t make sense from the assessment to take that person,” said Nolan. “And nine times out of 10 they would end up on a performance improvement plan since they could not do the job, because they were not motivated by what it took to do the job.”

The best way to bring hip-shooting hiring managers into the fold of scientific talent selection is to give them the assessment that’s being used, including the feedback session. They’ll see how in-depth and revealing it is, firsthand, and they’ll be inspired by what can be achieved with a more careful hiring discipline.

Nolan has worked with managers who have a certain feeling and until they’re proven wrong — and it could be a hiring mistake that ends badly and could be costly — the task becomes how do you convince a hiring manager.

“I gave my hiring mangers the assessment and told them to take it,” said Nolan. “With them taking it, it was an eye-opener. Like someone peeking inside of you. They do it themselves and see how accurate it is.”

Why Touchy-Feely Matters

Assessments differ, but terms like “harmonious” and “altruistic” are common. This may strike old school hiring managers as a little too soft-skill or “touchy-feely” to be practical.

What does it matter if a worker cares about the number of windows and art installations in the office? Or if they’re indifferent to status and recognition?

Plenty, according to most science on the subject, but it’s also basic psychology. People function at their best when they’re at ease. If an organizational structure or a particular job aligns with motivational preferences, the employee will be more comfortable and more able to do work in a way that gives them fulfillment.

People need to be able to be themselves at work. You can fake it for a few months in a mismatched position, but not for long.

And outside-the-box thinker isn’t going to be happy if they have to support the status quo. A person who puts himself first, will burn out in a customer service job where altruistic motivation is more valued. An employee who is highly receptive to new ideas won’t fare well in a position that demands adherence to a standard process.

A motivational assessment gives you a reliable picture of what situations are best for any job candidate.

Behavior is easy to assess. If you’ve been in talent management or training for a while, you’re probably pretty good at determining a person’s way of doing things without an assessment and through good interview questions.

Motivation, however, is deeper and you’ll need a sophisticated assessment instrument to divine it.

Motivation as a metric goes back to the work of Eduard Spranger who identified six types of motivation: theoretical, utilitarian, aesthetic, social, individualistic and traditional. Today’s motivational assessments adapt this taxonomy with more workplace-specific terms.

First Step: Assess the Job

Knowing a person’s motivational make-up won’t help if you don’t know the motivational realities of your organization and the specific jobs. So, it’s important to document the chemistry of your company first.

What is the work environment like? What are the workday demands — strict office hours, telecommute, work from the field? What are the job categories? People focused? Process focused? Creative driven or analytical?

Doing this homework will allow assessments to work as talent matchmakers.

“At Volvo, we interviewed a lot of senior buyers in our purchasing group and we benchmarked what our needs are for this job,” said Nolan.

This included requirements such as working independently, working with vendors all day long, negotiating pricing, giving presentations, and being driven by metrics in working with other people.

“Once we did the interviews, we would give the assessment and it would show us how good of a match are they for the position,” said Nolan.

Wells says it’s absolutely vital to baseline the culture before assessing talent.

“In any organization there are likely pockets of success or teams that are very successful and also pockets or teams that are struggling. With a validated assessment and research process you can discern those reliable patterns, thoughts, feelings, behaviors that drive success vs. failure in those roles,” said Wells. “So, bringing those to the forefront and making them part of your selection process will help replicate that success, selection after selection, and mitigate future failures.”

Wells recommends starting with the company’s mission statement, vision statement or a competency model, then mapping out what behaviors the company rewards, ignores and punishes. And ultimately, who gets promoted.

It’s a process of defining the culture and identifying what it takes to thrive within it. Once this is known, any number of scientifically valid assessments can be used by talent professionals to dial in the optimum profile of the candidates to hire.

Finding the Right Assessment

Once an organization knows “who it is” the process of choosing an assessment can begin.

Fortunately, the assessment industry has evolved to a point where there are many accurate, reliable and powerful instruments from which to choose.

Across the board, Wells advises that there are three basic factors to always evaluate:

1) Reliability: How consistent are scores over time and across situations. If I test you today, if I test you five years from now, am I going to get roughly equivalent results?

2) Validity: How strong is this assessment result in predicting something I care about that’s going to impact my business?

3) Fairness: To what extent do individuals from protected classes perform on the assessment compared to their majority group counterparts?

Nolan has a couple of preferred assessments and both have multiscience features that include what metrics of what drives the candidate, along with a DiSC component, and have been proven over time.

It’s always been important to match employees with positions that suit their personalities. However, now it’s more of a competitive advantage than just an employee satisfaction exercise.

In the current talent market you can afford to be more selective, which will pay off in worker retention.

As younger generations redefine why we work, there’s a little more care and feeding of talent we have to accept as employers.

Matching talent with positions by motivation helps assure success on both fronts.

November 19, 2019June 29, 2023

A Pox on Ban the Box

I am a podcast fanatic. It’s the best way to spend time on my daily commute and to fill the speakers of my car stereo, I have an unending list of podcasts to which I subscribe.

They run the gamut from music related (“Wheels Off With Rhett Miller”), human interest (“Terrible, Thanks for Asking”), travel (“Bittersweet Moment”), and technology (“Reply All”). But my favorite is “Ear Hustle.”

“Ear Hustle” is a podcast about “the daily realities of life inside prison shared by those living it, and stories from the outside, post-incarceration.” One of its recent episodes discussed the realities and difficulties the incarcerated face trying to find employment upon their release from prison.

Bottom line? Once an employer finds out you committed a felony and spent time in prison, your employment prospects drop dramatically. And most learn of this information by an applicant checking the “Yes, I’ve been convicted of a felony” box on their employment application.

Earlier this year, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an injunction that blocked the EEOC’s guidance on criminal background checks as unlawful and banned its continued implementation or use.

That injunction is significant for many reasons, not the least of which is that the EEOC’s guidance opined that employment applications that ask whether an applicant has ever been convicted of a felony violate Title VII on their face. Why? Because blacks and Latinos are incarcerated at a rate that is statistically significantly higher than whites.

The movement against employers asking this question on job applications is called “ban the box” — cleverly titled after the box applicants are asked to check if they’ve been convicted of a felony. Nationwide, 35 states and over 150 cities have adopted ban the box laws.

So what’s wrong with laws that are intended to give those with felony convictions in their background a chance at getting past the application stage of their employment search? The laws don’t work.

As illustrated on “Ear Hustle,” ban the box merely moves the criminal background check from the application stage to the formal background check stage. Employers that are predisposed not to hire felons are not going to hire felons. They will just ding them later in the hiring process — after the expense of a formal criminal background check. These laws aren’t changing employers’ minds or attitudes. They are just giving felons false hope.

Moreover, according to two recent studies, ban the box laws are causing more racial discrimination by improving the hiring prospects for whites, while making them worse for blacks and Latinos. The conclusion drawn by these studies is that when employers can’t see who has a criminal record, they still avoid people they think are likely to have criminal records by resorting to guesswork.

As a result, racial discrimination against black and Latino job applicants (especially men) replaces discrimination based on criminal record. In other words, banning the box doesn’t just fail to help those its intended to help, but it also might hurt anyone who happens to be black or Latino.

Thus, if ban the box laws either create a more damaging reliance on unconscious racial biases (as these studies suggest) or push the consideration of criminal backgrounds to later in the hiring process, where employers will still use them to disqualify candidates (albeit with higher transaction costs in the hiring process), why do we have them?

If ban the box laws aren’t working toward their intended results of opening job opportunities for ex-cons, then what should we do to achieve this laudable goal? I suggest a three-pronged approach:

• Job training within the prison system to provide the incarcerated with transferable real-world job skills and a certification they can provide to a prospective employers upon their release.

• Tax credits to incentivize businesses to hire these felons.

• A privilege from negligent hiring and other liabilities for employers that hire certain felons for certain positions (i.e., We still don’t want sex offenders working in schools, but they might able to work in a manufacturing facility if they are otherwise qualified and sufficiently rehabilitated).

We need something to break the cycle of crime, and that something is jobs. Stable employment and steady income will help stem recidivism and keep people from returning to crime as a means of support.

If ban the box isn’t working toward this goal, then local, state and federal governments need to abandon ban the box and look for other solutions to this problem.

November 8, 2019

Symphony Talent Debuts New Composition With Acquisition of SmashFly

Symphony Talent’s acquisition of SmashFly Technologies is being called one of the most significant HR technology deals of 2019. Industry observers note the combined company will serve an estimated 750 companies out of the gate, including a number of Fortune 500 and multinationals.

Symphony Talent announced the transaction Nov. 1, though it didn’t disclose financial terms.

On the surface, the deal brings together two complementary offerings. Symphony Talent is known for its employer-branding and creative services, while SmashFly is regarded for its recruitment marketing and candidate relationship management tools.

In an interview with RecruitingDaily, Symphony Talent CEO Roopesh Nair said the combined company “can really help practitioners create their strategy and accelerate their brand across touchpoints, across channels and audiences.” Among other things, he added, customers will benefit from “a more unified and consistent approach” to talent acquisition.

Ben Slater, vice president of marketing for recruiting platform provider Beamery, said the deal underscored the importance of technology to today’s talent acquisition strategies.

“It’s not enough to have career site and brand collateral. You need functionality for building and nurturing talent pipelines, managing events and campaigns,” he said. “In short, you need a platform to do the heavy lifting once you have developed your employer brand strategy.”

Strategic or Tactical?

Nikki Edwards, principal research analyst at industry researcher NelsonHall, said the acquisition will strengthen Symphony Talent’s market position. Introducing SmashFly’s technology into the company’s mix will result in “a more complete service/tech offering,” she said.

“Service providers are increasingly leveraging technology to deliver a better service, but those service providers are experts in their own field first … and usually experts in technology second,” she observed. In a market crowded with companies offering sophisticated platforms and tools, “it makes business sense for service providers to partner with or acquire companies with the intellectual property they need.”

For Symphony Talent, making such a move is particularly important, said Chad Sowash, an industry consultant and co-host of the recruiting podcast “The Chad & Cheese Podcast.”

In recent years, he explained, the company has struggled with a number of organizational, operational and marketing issues. Symphony Talent “hasn’t done a great job when it comes to letting the market know who the hell they are,” he said. “SmashFly has done a better job.”

On a tactical level, Sowash thinks Symphony Talent acquired SmashFly with its eyes squarely fixed to compete with TMP Worldwide Advertising and Communications. Since January, TMP has purchased social media firm Carve, recruitment tech company Maximum, programmatic recruitment platform Perengo, and employer branding and recruitment marketing firm CKR Interactive. “Symphony had to do something and I think they had to wait to be able to do the right thing,” Sowash said.

In this case, the right thing was not just to acquire SmashFly’s technology but also its customers, revenue and “the engineers who are building SmashFly for the future.”

Having such expertise in-house will be critical to Symphony Talent’s success, Sowash said. However, that success is by no means assured.

“I think this is going to be the point where we either say, ‘This is where Symphony Talent actually took off from the launch pad or it blew up on the launch pad,’ ” he said. “This is all about execution. They have all of the tools, all the connections to be able to make this happen or to fail miserably.”

November 7, 2019June 29, 2023

Reports of the Death of the Job Board Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

The old-school job board model, where employers pay a website to post open positions and hope that qualified candidates will find and apply for them, may not be as flashy or talked about as some of today’s bright, shiny Generation Z gig-worker marketplace products. But since the dawning of the job board as we know it some 30 years ago they appear to remain a viable business model with plenty of life.

In 2018, online job advertising companies earned a total of $22 billion, according to Staffing Industry Analysts, an increase of 15 percent. And while many companies offer advanced services such as programmatic job advertising or social media tools, the leader in many markets “is a traditional job board that makes 70 to 80 percent of its revenue from job postings,” said Jeff Dickey-Chasins, principal of the industry consulting firm JobBoardDoctor LLC.

That doesn’t mean the industry has been complacent. Especially in markets like the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union, job boards have been exploring new revenue models, new technology and new features. They have little choice, observers say. Recruiting practices are changing, the use of data has become more sophisticated and the demands of job seekers are continually evolving.

Also, the very culture of “being online” has changed. It’s now anytime, anywhere and includes multiple channels such as websites, email, social media and chat. That dynamic can work either for or against the job boards, said NelsonHall Principal Research Analyst Nikki Edwards. Those job boards that have mobilized their platform, integrated with social media, and incorporated other channels “will have greater audience reach, and are more likely to survive, than those who do nothing to adapt or who rest on their laurels.”

It seems like a far cry from the industry’s early days, when job boards were essentially “the old newspaper classifieds,” said Gerry Crispin, founder of CareerXroads, a recruiting-technology consulting practice. “Certainly, a lot of changes have gone on, but the fact of the matter is job boards are essentially the 21st century extension of classified advertising.”

Technology Draws a Circle

Initially, online job searching was relatively simple: Candidates searched, clicked on a job and applied to it — all without ever leaving the job board. Because applicant tracking systems were just gaining traction, companies around the turn of the 21st century relied on job boards to attract candidates while job seekers used them to deliver their applications to employers. Then, as ATS technology gained traction and more organizations built their own candidate databases, job boards began serving as gateways to corporate career sites.

However, “we’ve come full circle,” said Chad Sowash, a talent acquisition consultant and host of the recruiting-focused “Chad & Cheese Podcast.” Today’s corporate career sites, he said, are often clunky and not particularly attractive.

That encourages job boards to work harder to retain traffic. Rather than charge for how long a post remains online, pay-per-click plays a larger role in their business models. That, too, incites job boards to create simple, effective user experiences.

On another level, the evolution of the ATS changed many job boards from hunter-gatherers to sourcers. “There’s always been that component where if a company wants to source candidates instead of advertise jobs, they could go and look through a résumé database,” said Dickey-Chasins. “There are now job boards whose primary focus is sourcing candidates.”

As an example, he cites Hired. Founded in 2012, Hired offers seekers free profiles designed to match them with employers looking for a particular set of skills and experiences. It then screens those profiles to match a company in, say, Chicago with developers who’ve known the programming language Ruby for 10 years and previously worked at a video game studio. “They’re essentially doing what recruiters used to do, but they do it at a lower price point and in a more automated fashion,” Dickey-Chasins said.

Hired also illustrates how creating the right experience for recruiters is as important as attracting the right candidates. “We have to make sure that we have a seamless experience for the recruiter because they can’t be going to 12 different websites to look at stuff,” Sowash said. “What we need to do is integrate those platforms into whatever your core system is — if it’s an applicant tracking system like iCIMS or a CRM like SmashFly.”

Given the sophistication of today’s data-management systems and application programming interfaces, or APIs, “there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to funnel all of these vendors into one core piece of technology,” Sowash said.

The term “job board” has become a bit of a misnomer. For instance, Indeed describes itself as an aggregator that compiles jobs from a number of sources. BioSpace, which focuses on the life sciences industry, says it’s “a digital hub for news and careers.” LinkedIn is “an online professional network.”

These and other companies offer services designed to streamline their customers’ talent acquisition process, or at least portions of it. Such features include diversity products, job-advertising packages, employer-branding packages and other features that get folded into annual subscriptions, Dickey-Chasins said. LinkedIn Group Product Manager Kevin Chuang said his company is testing a short-form skills assessment to help it uncover more accurate matches.

Rise of the Lifestyle Platforms

Among the most fundamental drivers impacting the job boards’ landscape is the ever-changing dynamics of technology products, experts say. When sites like Monster.com first appeared in the mid-1990s, not only did the ATS not exist but the mobile phone was still a large plastic brick and the internet had yet to squash America Online.

Today’s world looks a lot different: Smartphones are ubiquitous, Amazon’s Alexa looks up recipes on command and Google’s Nest manages temperatures and monitors for smoke in homes around the world. Because of this, features like convenience, ease of use, speed and mobility count toward a job board’s success more than they ever have before. In particular, improved usability has become critical as candidates — who are essentially consumers — have come to expect simpler, slicker user experiences, Sowash said.

Advancing technology also spurred the rise of what Sowash calls “lifestyle platforms” — sites like Google and Facebook that fundamentally changed the way consumers regard online communications. “As soon as we roll over in the morning, we jump into them,” he said. Job boards can’t make the same claim because consumers “aren’t looking for a job every single day of their life.”

Job boards, then, must look for ways to leverage both consumer technology and lifestyle platforms.

“If you’re a job board today, you have to realize that people aren’t waking up in the morning thinking, ‘I’ve got to go to Indeed or I have to go to whatever your brand name is,’ ” Sowash said. “They’re thinking, ‘I have to go to Google, I have to go to LinkedIn.’ ” As a result, job boards “really have to think much smarter than they ever, ever had to before.”

For the industry’s big names — like Indeed, LinkedIn and IT-focused Dice — that’s meant building suites of talent acquisition tools, facilitating messaging between candidates and recruiters and aggressively developing AI-based search mechanisms and data-visualization features. At the same time, a number of startups are at work trying to solve different talent-acquisition pain points of specific industries.

Not only that, said Chuang, but the process of job searching has become more social and thus more personal. Social networks, for example, allow candidates to connect with workers at prospective employers or ask for referrals. “The job post itself has become one step in the overarching process of the job search,” he said.

“Job boards that are still exclusively focused on job postings and a singular product versus a [fuller] solution are the ones that are really struggling right now,” said BioSpace CEO Joshua Goodwin. “They’re not experiencing the uplift that we’re seeing from this labor market because of a very simple business principle: It’s about really understanding your customer’s pain point and their end goals. Our customers are about trying to hire the right candidates and not about trying to post an individual job posting.”

The Beauty of the Niche

With that thought in mind, niche job boards like BioSpace often focus their product development efforts to align with the behaviors and habits of their audience. Sites that serve truck drivers or skilled tradespeople tend to lean heavily on mobile-first approaches along with texting and universal application models, Dickey-Chasins said. “They try to do things like text-based assessments, to fit the way these people work,” he explained. “In certain sectors it’s super hard to find people, so you basically do whatever it takes to pull those people out.”

Goodwin agrees. “We tell clients that job postings are foundational,” he said. Besides posting open positions and publicizing them, he believes effective job boards provide solutions suites that help companies proactively identify and contact candidates on platforms they might frequent.

That’s particularly important in a job market like today’s, where the candidate pool is small and the most desirable workers are often “passive,” open to opportunities but only the right opportunities. Because those candidates don’t, to paraphrase Sowash, wake up and surf to a job board, sites must think of themselves more as what Goodwin calls “recruitment web sites” that offer “a lot more than job postings.”

On his site, that “a lot more” is content. BioSpace was founded in the late 1980s as a life-sciences media firm. Today, around 700,000 unique visitors access the site each month, mostly to read domain-related content. “They want to know about what’s happening in the industry. They may not necessarily be looking at jobs,” Goodwin said. However, BioSpace’s specialized information provides employers with a launching pad from which to reach candidates.

Successful niche boards, adds John Sumser, principal analyst for HRExaminer, succeed not because of better technology but “because they understand the niche that they’re operating in and they don’t go outside of it.” The moment they attempt to expand beyond their core market, “things fall apart because their expertise is narrow.”

September 24, 2019June 29, 2023

Google Hire Is Fired

Applicant tracking systems providers breathed a small sigh of relief in September when Google announced it was officially shutting down Google Hire, the cloud-based applicant tracking system that the search-engine giant launched barely two years ago.

It’s a fitting end to a product that was never a good fit for Google’s portfolio of solutions, said Othamar Gama Filho, CEO of recruitment marketing automation platform Talentify. “I was more surprised when they launched it than when they ended it.”

Google Hire promised to simplify the hiring process for recruiters. By utilizing Google’s powerful search capabilities, open API environment and G Suite tools, including Gmail and Google Calendar, recruiters would be able to more easily find and communicate with candidates, and schedule interviews. At least that was the pitch.

But in reality it didn’t offer a lot to make it stand out in an already crowded market. “The global ATS market is small compared to what Google is used to,” Gama Filho said. It’s projected to be a $2.34 billion by 2026, which may be exciting for a burgeoning tech startup, but is hardly worth the attention of a company that generates billions of dollars in revenues every year.

Google also never explained how the global platform would accommodate the unique data privacy regulations in every country where it was offered. Gama Filho noted that Google is already facing antitrust investigations in the European Commission for its Google for Jobs app, which could have chilled its interest in the recruiting space all together.

The real truth is Google Hire never found it customer base. “A lot of ATS platforms integrate with G-Suite, so there was not a lot to differentiate the offering,” he said.

It also wasn’t a good fit for Google’s business model, said Holger Mueller, vice president and principal analyst for Constellation Research. “Google never does anything in business apps. They can make a lot more money attracting the HCM SaaS vendors to their platform than competing with them.”

Mueller also points to Google Hire’s origin story as a potential harbinger of its early demise.

Google Hire was originally developed at Bebop, a startup tech firm led by Diane Greene, which Google acquired for $380 million in 2015. As part of that acquisition, Greene was brought in to head up Google’s cloud business.

Greene was lauded as a veteran of the enterprise software marketplace, and Google leaders believed she could help them compete with the likes of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

They were right. During her four-year tenure (she left earlier this year), Google Cloud increased its revenues to $1 billion per quarter. While it is still third in the public cloud marketplace, it’s closing fast on Amazon and Microsoft.

What does that have to do with Google Hire? Many believe buying Bebop was just Google’s way to get Greene onboard. “But they still had to show stakeholders that they didn’t waste the acquisition,” Mueller said. So they kept it on the books for a few years, used it to showcase how their technology could help recruiters. “But never really did anything with it.”

For customers of Google Hire, the good news is that it won’t be officially shut down until September 2020, giving them almost a full year to find a replacement. Google has also generously agreed to keep it running for no additional fees.

The lesson to be learned from the rapid rise and fall of Google Hire is that nothing lasts forever, Mueller said. “Especially when comes in the cloud.”