More than 20 years into the age of the World Wide Web, online recruiting long ago replaced the print newspaper help-wanted ad as the venue of choice for recruitment. But many employers are still struggling to figure out the optimal way to use the Internet and the fragmented world of job boards, job “aggregators” and social media sites so they can source the best candidates at the least cost. Recruiters and consultants experienced in these spaces suggested some answers in a series of interviews in late 2015 conducted by Bloomberg BNA.
With all the weeding that goes on in the hiring process, I’m surprised more recruiters aren’t prize-winning gardeners. But sometimes companies might be letting great candidates get away in their need to weed.
It starts with the cover letter, résumé and, nowadays, dozens of answers from the company’s applicant tracking system.
It’s not uncommon to hear things like, “This guy can’t even spell IBM and he wants to work here?”
Spelling and grammar mistakes are a common reason to reject candidates. I once thought I had an interview with a major magazine publisher, but it turned out to be more of an opportunity for the hiring manager to teach me a lesson by berating me for misspelling his last name on my cover letter. I knew I was done for when he showed me a collage on the wall of all the mailing labels he’d saved where someone misspelled his difficult-to-spell name.
Lesson learned.
For the few candidates who do make it in the door for an interview, there’s always weeding going on. Focusing on “What did the candidate do wrong?” and “What red flags were raised?” tend to trump examining all the good qualities a candidate possesses.
And sometimes strong applicants do dumb things in interviews. I know I have.
It was a few months after I graduated college. I had left a terrible internship where I spent most of my time faxing and photocopying and took a job as a waiter so I could have my days free to interview. Coincidentally, when you’re behind and overwhelmed in your serving duties, it’s known as “being in the weeds.”
There were many Friday and Saturday nights where I was in the weeds.
As a waiter, you meet lots of different people from fiendish to friendly. There’s the guy, for instance, who scolded me for not putting his slice of pie down with the tip facing “either at 5 o’clock or 7 o’clock.” But I also met nice people, too.
One regular customer was a man in his 60s who worked in the publishing industry. We talked quite a bit, and I told him about my background and career aspirations. After a couple of months, he pulled me aside and told me he knew of a book publisher that was looking for an assistant editor. He told me to send the hiring manager my résumé and that he had already put in a good word for me. Sure enough, I soon got the call to come in for an interview.
I thought it was my big break. Surely his good word would be as good as gold in getting me the gig.
It might have been if it weren’t for my dumb move.
Before the interview, I had copied all of my best college clips and neatly arranged them in a nice-looking portfolio to show off my work. But then it dawned on me that this was an editing position, and not a writing job, so I needed to prove I could edit.
Light bulb!
At the beginning of my advanced editing class in college we were given a really hard test. I don’t recall many people doing very well on it, but I did particularly bad on it. OK, really bad on it. There must have been more red ink on it than a Peter Max “Blushing Beauty” poster. But as a way to prove to us how much we’d learned in the class, the professor gave us the exact same test as the final. I don’t think I aced it, but I did much, much better. I was proud of how much I’d learned about editing in that one semester.
The problem was he never gave us our finals back, so all I had was the original test. “Aha,” I thought. "I’ll bring the test to the interview to show the company how difficult it was and then explain how well I did on the final." "It's foolproof," I thought.
More like proof I was a fool.
While you’re never quite sure what someone thinks of you during an interview, I felt it was going really well. The conversation was free and easy, I don’t recall any stumbling blocks, so I was ready to close the deal. I pulled out my original test, and started to explain how hard the exam was and my vast improvement on the final.
Of course, I didn’t have the test to prove it.
You can’t always pinpoint the moment when you blow an interview, but I blew it and I knew it, even if I didn’t want to believe it. I tried to do damage control, but the interview ended shortly after.
I don’t recall if I got a rejection letter, but the customer at the restaurant who got me the interview came in a week or so later with the bad news. He had talked to his contact at the company and she told him they were hiring someone else. As I rightfully suspected, the test had scared them away.
I can’t say I blame them. It was a dumb thing for me to do. Hindsight, ya know. And maybe the person they did hire was a better fit anyway, but perhaps they missed out on a great candidate who made one boneheaded mistake.
Weeding is essential in the hiring process, but sometimes companies do tend to focus too much on the few cons rather than the many positives. It’s good to remember that there are some weeds you don’t have to pick because they’d actually look good in your garden.
If you’re like most companies that interview and hire professional-grade talent, you’ve lost control. Your interview process has morphed from the reasonable to the absurd.
Why? Because more and more companies are conducting interview processes that resemble a game of survival. Candidates are asked to return four and five times for subsequent stages of interviewing.
Is that fourth round of interviews necessary? Hell, no.
If you’ve had the feeling that your hiring process is slowerthan ever, some new research actually quantifies that your gut feeling was right. Data from CEB recently showed that the average time to fill positions in the U.S. is at 63 business days — 21 more days than it was five years ago.
Part of that number might be the improved economy, but I’ll guarantee you the majority of it is the inefficiency of the recruiting process.
We’ve tricked ourselves into believing that taking longer and involving more “stakeholder” or “hiring decision influencer” types is the path to better selection. We believe that, by having four or more interviews, we can better determine things like cultural fit.
If you don’t trust the hiring manager’s boss, you should insert yourself into that process, interviewing finalists as well.
Simply put, it’s not true. Using a longer process and more stages/interviews implies that some key selection competencies — namely interviewing skill and feedback assimilation across multiple interviewers — are healthy enough to contribute to better selection.
Unfortunately, fourth rounds of interviews aren’t used to flex incredible organizational skill at interviewing or breaking down the merits of candidates. They exist to give more people “veto” power.
Let’s say you’re like most companies and your hiring managers are mediocre at best when it comes to interviewing and selection. You don’t have the time, budget or organizational discipline to do an intervention and significantly improve interviewing skills, right?
If that’s the case, your best path is not to let a four-round interview process muddy up the already chum-infested waters; it’s to allow that hiring manager’s next-level boss to contribute to the process and grow the hiring manager over time.
Inexperienced hiring managers interview multiple candidates. They bring back two or three candidates for final interviews with the boss, and that person breaks it down and decides whom to hire. It’s called mentoring.
If you don’t trust the hiring manager’s boss, you should insert yourself into that process, interviewing finalists as well. But you don’t need additional rounds of interviews with others in the organization that cost time.
Of course, many companies circulate those candidates for additional interviews outside the department in question to gauge “cultural fit.” The problem with that is most of the companies taking this course lose out on diversity of talent by allowing people to decline candidates who aren’t “like us.”
If cultural fit hasn’t been defined from a selection perspective, you’re just letting people veto candidates based on nontangible items. That’s going to kill you over time.
Finally, conducting three to five rounds of interviews to get to the offer stage on any candidate implies you unlock the selection horsepower of all those interviews by having a disciplined candidate breakdown process.
If you don’t demand that all interviewers spend at least 15 minutes together being led through a feedback process designed to compare and contrast views on candidate strengths and weaknesses, you’re wasting your time.
Conducting more than two rounds of interviews is killing your recruiting operation. You can make those two rounds as in-depth as you would like and get multiple people involved, but additional rounds are fool’s gold.
What’s that? You need stats? OK, nerds. CEB further outlines in its report on recruiting efficiency that for every week you shave off your time-to-fill by eliminating additional rounds of interviews, you save $2,000.
You think that fat recruiting process is free? Turns out, it’s not. The time spent in interviews combined with the opportunity cost of having a job open for longer than it needs to be has real costs for your organization.
You can unlock those savings by approaching your recruiting process with common sense.
If your company has a cumbersome process, take the offensive and tell them your time-to-fill problem isn’t about HR or recruiting; it’s about the number of interview rounds.
Stop the five-round interview madness. Do an initial round of interviews and involve as many people as you’d like. Bring back two candidates, have them work through final inbox exercises, interview with the skip-level manager, etc. … and MAKE A DECISION!
You raise an interesting question, especially at a time when many manufacturers are short-handed and hoping simply to find someone with enough related experience to perform the basic duties on the job description. Your question shows that you believe there is a ROI for digging deeper to select someone with a close match to the “ideal” job requirements.
In fact, the more closely the person you hire matches the “ideal” profile, the more confident you can be that the employee will learn job duties quickly, enjoy the type of work performed, and adapt readily to the personal and interpersonal aspects of the job.
Understanding the job is the first step in a successful hire, and creating a position benchmark — an outline of the “ideal” personal characteristics that lead to successful job performance — is the easiest way to gain that understanding.
Here are the steps in developing a job benchmark:
Step 1: Select the position and three to seven subject-matter experts (SMEs) who have a handle on the job’s key accountabilities.
Step 2: Facilitate a discussion with the SMEs to identify, rank and weigh the Key Accountabilities. This will ensure that you have a consistent picture of the position and its impact. Ask questions like:
What is the purpose and objective of this position?
How does this position affect the delivery of the product or service to the customer?
How does the effectiveness of this position affect the company’s bottom line?
How does staying abreast of industry knowledge impact the success of this position?
What results reflect superior performance?
Do these results explain why the job exists or how the job is done?
How might we measure these results?
What obstacles hinder creating these results?
Are the results significant to the organization?
Are the results dynamic, motivating and in alignment with the organization’s values?
Who are the position’s internal and external customers?
Step 3: Then, keeping in mind what the SMEs said about the role, determine the personal characteristics that will be needed to be successful in the position. In addition to related job experience and education, your list may include individual preferences for working with people, or ideas, or tools and equipment. It may provide insights into the personal style characteristics, learning agility, motivations, values and communication style of the ideal candidate.
If you are able to integrate pre-hire testing into your process, to make the benchmarking process easier, look for an assessment that automates the benchmarking process, such as Prevue Assessment, so SME responses are automatically compiled into a profile of the ideal personal characteristics for the job.
Then, use a variety of selection tools — including pre-hire screening and testing, as well as multiple interviews and job simulations — to help you to identify the person who is best-qualified.
While some employers will opt for the quick route, using gut instinct, by taking the time to develop a solid job benchmark, and matching candidates to the benchmark, the trade-off will be lower turnover, higher performance, and happier customers.
The U.S. Labor Department has been working for years to overhaul a decades-old standard of providing advice for the defined contribution industry. But even after receiving more than 900 letters and conducting a weeklong hearing with 75 panelists this summer, the agency may not be any closer to something everyone can live with.
At issue is the fiduciary rule, which had a revised version released in April. It aims to broaden the definition of who is and isn’t a fiduciary — essentially someone who is responsible for acting in the best interest of another person, party or group — when providing investment advice. The Labor Department is trying to better protect plan participants from getting conflicted investment advice from a provider selling a product or service that would benefit them more than the end user.
Financial advisers registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission must abide by a best interest or fiduciary standard for their clients, but sales-based advisers — often called broker-dealers — need only give suitable advice for a person’s situation; that advice can skip the fiduciary standard and include a fee that benefits the broker-dealer more than a similar investment with a lower fee.
The problem occurs frequently. The White House Council of Economic Advisers estimates that conflicted advice costs retirement savers about $17 billion a year and could snatch $210 billion out of individual retirement accounts over 10 years.
“It is hard enough to save for retirement. Conflicted investment advice should not be one of the barriers that millions of Americans face as they work to save for retirement,” David Certner, legislative counsel for the AARP told the Labor Department.
To open the week of testimony in August, Phyllis Borzi, the assistant secretary of labor for the Employee Benefits Security Administration, or EBSA, explained that the first fiduciary rule was created before 401(k)s and other participant-directed retirement accounts existed. Workers had no need to worry about investing because it was handled by a plan sponsor. Now that providers help workers figure out how to invest retirement dollars, the Labor Department wants to make sure they are acting in the participant’s best interest and not their own.
“There is no GPS that an individual can rely on to reach their retirement goal,” Borzi said. “We want to create an enforceable best interest standard that requires advisers to put their customers’ best interests first. That is our North Star.”
Numerous industry experts testified that the proposed definition swipes too wide a path and would wind up limiting provider choices, restricting access to information and ultimately increasing costs. Several argued the changes would discourage lower-income workers from participating in plans.
“I believe this proposal will result in fewer employer plans, fewer participants in retirement savings accounts and lower savings overall,” said Juli McNeely, president of the National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors. “I know that is not what the department has intended.”
Several letters and panelists concluded that the rule would extend to service providers like call centers (which take retirement questions from plan participants), company human resources executives who typically provide general retirement education and other wide-ranging retirement information sessions geared to help participants with basic understanding of how their plan works and what is available.
Greg Burrows, senior vice president for retirement and investor services with Principal Financial Group later told Workforce that call centers get all kinds of questions, like what to do with accounts when retiring, investment options and more. The proposal would require a contract to be signed saying the call center is acting in the client’s best interest before answering such questions, he said.
“Today we are able to have a good conversation to educate a person,” Burrows said. “In the new world, that would trigger a very complex contract between worker and financial institution before we could have a conversation.”
Retirement law expert Kent Mason told agency officials that even carve-outs like the best interest contract to allow advice would be unworkable.
Providers “are already telling plan sponsors that the call centers are not going to answer questions on distributions,” because that kind of information would trigger fiduciary status, said Mason, a partner at the law firm Davis & Harman.
Tim Hauser, deputy assistant secretary of operations for the EBSA pushed back, saying that it’s natural for the financial services industry to resist changes that would affect them. The department would be open to clearing up ambiguities in the proposal.
“We ultimately are very interested in trying to fix operational problems,” Hauser said.
The issue you raise is not uncommon — in fact, as the baby boomer retirement wave builds steam, the number of organizations challenged with succession planning issues will grow exponentially. Here’s how to think through such a challenge:
The first thing to do is define the requirements of the most critical senior jobs, including the CEO and the members of the executive team. Identify the responsibilities, challenges and performance expectations, as well as the knowledge, experience and personal characteristics needed in each role. Since this needs to be linked to your strategic plan, it’s important to take into account what will be needed 5-10 years from now, not just today. Doing this well takes a lot of work, so focus first on the enterprise jobs with the highest impact. Current incumbents are the primary source of this information, but the CEO and board members will have ideas as well.
Next, identify the people who are 1-2 management levels below each of the target jobs — specifically the best performers who have the potential to move up to bigger responsibilities. Conduct a formal talent review, where each person is measured against the experiences, knowledge, and characteristics needed across the jobs in the succession plan, using the people inside the company who are in the best position to judge. Include personal characteristics in your evaluations that are important both from a strategic and cultural perspective (e.g., bias for action, learning agility, being a team player).
Then, examine your vulnerabilities. You want to have 2-3 people who can be ready to move into each key job, but few organizations have such a deep talent pool. Are there gaps that are too big to fill with people inside your organization? Knowledge or experience can be gained through assignments, exposure, and education, but you may need to hire from the outside for personal characteristics. Do you have a few people who could fill many jobs? If so, this means that you don’t have as many successors as you think for a given position. Is there enough diversity in the talent pool? If not, look beyond the “usual suspects” to find diverse candidates whose development could be accelerated. And don’t assume that a designated successor actually wants that next job. Simply asking if this is part of his or her career game plan can easily avert this vulnerability.
Lastly, build talent review and development into your business planning process. Growing future leadership talent requires at least a ten-year horizon, starting with identifying of high-potential employees early. Focus on developing them through a series of assignments marked by increasing levels of difficulty, including jobs in different functions/divisions and “pivotal jobs” known to have great developmental impact. Appoint a group of senior executives to manage the process, as only they can make key development assignments available. Finally, be prepared to adjust the process as business conditions change and new opportunities and challenges emerge.
SOURCE: George Klemp, Cambria Consulting, Boston, Sept. 16, 2015.
Creating valid and relevant competency models can be a tedious, time-consuming and expensive process. In my experience, few organizations are equipped to do it effectively. They often take shortcuts and end up with models that create inconsistencies between competency-related expectations, organization strategy, job demands and workplace culture, leaving both supervisors and employees confused and frustrated.
An alternative to implementing an all-encompassing competency-based management approach is to use competency models primarily for making employment decisions and guiding personal development while leaving the management of competencies to the individual. Instead of attempting to track and rate employee competency use and proficiency, managers focus on managing overall individual and team results. This avoids many of the pitfalls common in competency-based management schemes.
However you choose to apply competency-based programs, an excellent resource is the book “The Art and Science of Competency Models” by Anntoinette Lucia and Richard Lepsinger. In it, you will find a step-by-step guide to creating your own valid competency profiles for each job. Once you have performed the research needed to lay the groundwork upon which you will build your competency model, you may use any number of tools and competency lists to select job-specific competencies. Lominger, a Korn/Ferry acquisition, for example, provides excellent competency card sorting tools and a flexible 360-degree competency assessment instrument.
I also encourage you to consider the following to help you avoid common mistakes of competency-based management:
The competencies you identify will directly influence workplace culture and, subsequently, organization effectiveness. So how will you select competencies consistent with your organization’s people strategy?
How will you know you captured all essential tasks and behaviors for each job when you select competencies and that you haven’t missed anything important?
Assuming your competency lists are complete and correct, how will you determine the right competence levels you need employees to perform at?
Validation procedures are expensive and often rely heavily on all too subjective performance ratings. How will you accurately assess each employee’s current competence assuming you are confident you know the competence level required to succeed?
Competency profiles have been known to undervalue high performers such as when leaders score low in an approved competency like “drive for performance”but compensate by using an unapproved competence like “team building” to get the job done effectively. How will you account for employees that succeed using unapproved competencies for the job?
Though common, long competency lists are impractical for trying to hire employees or manage annual employee development goals. How will you avoid creating long lists to define each job?
Detailed competency lists by their nature encourage supervisors to over-manage and emphasize compliance over commitment. How will you prevent them from stifling innovation, creativity, and intrinsic motivation in the workforce?
Before implementing a competency-based management system, first determine how prepared you are to face the considerations discussed here and your ability to access expertise and resources you need to do it properly. Mostly, make sure that whatever system you implement will support, rather than frustrate, employee engagement.
SOURCE: Kevin Herring, Ascent Management Consulting, Oro Valley, Arizona, Aug. 16, 2015.
The recently retired Dallas Morning News reporter and columnist explained to his former colleague, Cheryl Hall: “When your knees pop and your mind doesn’t, it’s time to go.” But it took the 91-year-old Miller 64 years on the job to come to that conclusion.
Just read that number again: That’s a six and a four scrunched, not added, together. Wow.
If 64 were his age, it’s the number at which a young Paul McCartney thought he’d be an afterthought grandfather hoping for a birthday greeting and a bottle of wine. Yet Miller didn’t see it that way. He carried on with his daily duties under his assumption that his career would end only when he was “carried out.”
But as life goes on, of course plans change, and 64 years of tenure is pretty much unheard of, although not unprecedented.
According to Guinness, the record for tenure belongs to Thomas Stoddard, who started his career as a “mail boy” at Speakman, a plumbing pipe-fitting company, in 1928 and retired as a board member in 2008. In all, Stoddard who died April 8, 2014, at the age of 102, worked at Speakman for 80 years. That's about a year longer than the current average life expectancy in the United States.
While Miller and Stoddard may be the exception to the rule, logic says the men stayed because they were happy where they were at, and, of course, the companies were happy with them. Indeed, Laura Jacobus, The Dallas Morning News’ assistant business editor, told Hall, “I’ve never known anyone who enjoyed his job more” than Miller. Can’t beat fun at the old job game.
But the workforce has changed; that’s for sure.
While companies used to take a paternal approach to their employees, offering great benefits, like pensions, to entice them to stay for their career, those are rarities in 2015. I’m no economist, but it’s pretty clear that current economic conditions wouldn’t support yesterday’s paternalistic ideals. Although, even though some dispute the findings, it does give one pause to read reports that CEOs of the largest publicly traded companies make 373 times as much as average production and nonsupervisory workers, especially when average annual salary increases for nonexempt workers have been averaging about 3 percent.
Beyond compensation issues, as Patty Kujawa writes in our upcoming feature on financial “wellness,” companies are realizing that they probably should rethink their current laissez faire approach to workers’ retirement and help employees manage their 401(k)s. And health care has changed, too. Twenty years ago, no one knew what a consumer-driven health plan was. Now young workers in particular can’t remember a time when companies flipped most of the insurance bills.
It would be naïve to think that we will return to the days of paternalism, but that doesn’t mean companies can’t look out for workers in other areas. I really liked what Daniel Andrew, founder of Trademark Tours, wrote last year about allowing staff to work from home, flexibility with time off and listening to employees’ ideas. Those types of things make people happy.
If you’re looking to keep workers for the long haul — and you should since finding new employees is really expensive — it pays to be nice even if your company can’t afford to pay a nice wage.
So let's congratulate Mr. Miller on his retirement; he earned it.
Companies may have big plans to grow their workforce this year, but there is an ongoing war for top talent, and companies need better tools and strategies to secure the best recruits — especially younger candidates with high expectations for the recruiting experience.
According to CareerBuilder, one-third of employers have plans to add full-time staff this year, which is a 50 percent increase over 2014; and Glassdoor Inc.’s 2015 Recruiting Outlook Survey shows talent shortage is the No. 1 hiring challenge today.
“Recruiting as a business strategy is going to get relevant much quicker than people expect,” said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president at Constellation Research Inc. If companies don’t adapt their recruiting process, they aren’t going to be able to fill these roles, especially as seasoned baby boomers head toward retirement. “If you can’t find the right people, you can’t grow your business,” he said.
Fortunately, recruiting technology vendors are here to help. This segment of the human resources tech sector is full of innovative young companies eager to help customers add speed and efficiency to every aspect of the recruiting process, from marketing jobs via social media and building talent communities to simplifying and streamlining the application, interviewing and onboarding processes.
Hot List
Source: Companies
“All of the HR tech trends around big data, mobile, social and cloud, started with recruiting,” said Derek Beebe, director of HR technology for HR consultancy Towers Watson & Co.
And the biggest innovations are coming from the smallest vendors. “The pace of change in this sector is outpacing the big providers’ ability to keep up,” Beebe said. “The smaller, nimble organizations are the ones on the leading edge.”
Join the Community
One of the most popular areas for innovation in this space is around social media. Beebe points to tools like iCIMS Inc.’s Social Distribution, which helps companies leverage social media sites through employee referral networks and automated job publishing. “ICIMS has nailed the social component of recruiting,” he said.
It appears that iCIMS isn’t alone. Bullhorn Inc., Jobvite Inc. and Newton Software Inc., and other applicant tracking systems vendors are fleshing out their own social media engagement tools to provide customers with more holistic ways to connect with passive candidates online.
They are also beginning to build features that allow customers to create “talent communities,” where recruiters can track and stay engaged with candidates who might one day be a good fit for the company, even if they aren’t looking today. This is part of the larger trend of companies curating their own social networks of candidates, said Ivan Casanova, senior vice president of marketing for Jibe, a cloud-based recruiting software company. “Talent networks will differentiate how well organizations market themselves and build their brand within the talent pool.”
It may also give them a new way to entice passive candidates, who appear to be growing weary of cold calls from recruiters and networking sites — Glassdoor’s survey shows more than half of hiring decision-makers say their passive recruiting efforts have grown less effective in attracting highly qualified candidates, and nearly half say that candidates respond to emails and phone calls at a much lower rate than they did in the past. “The old methods of recruitment and job search just aren’t working well enough,” said Steve Roop, general manager of Glassdoor for Employers, in a news release. “Potential candidates are researching opportunities through new, interactive channels, and hiring decision-makers are planning to invest more in these channels to attract more qualified candidates.”
Going Mobile (But Not There Yet)
This shift in how companies use technology to connect with candidates reflects a broader effort to make the application experience less frustrating, said Kathy Kalstrup, an executive vice president at Aon Hewitt.
For years vendors have focused on how they can make the recruiter’s job easier and more efficient. But as the demand for talent quickly outweighs supply for many critical roles, vendors have shifted their thinking, Kalstrup said. “Today it is all about making the candidate experience as easy and seamless as possible.”
A big part of this transition is occurring through the adoption of mobile recruiting apps and mobile-optimized career pages. The bigger HR tech players, including SuccessFactors, Taleo Corp. and Workday Inc. all offer mobile tools to support recruiters on the go, and Workday even took a “mobile first” approach to building its recruiting software.
Data Bank
Source: Indeed
Smaller vendors are equally mobile-focused as they strive both to meet the needs of recruiters and to accommodate candidates where they spend most of their time. According to LinkedIn Corp.’s Global Recruiting Trends survey, 28 percent of companies report that candidates applied for positions using mobile devices in 2014 (up from 16 percent in 2013); and 34 percent say their career site was mobile-optimized in 2014. This is also up from just 20 percent the previous year, but still suggests that a large majority of companies are still struggling to adapt to the mobile trend. These companies are looking to industry vendors to help them close this gap.
For example, Sonoco Products Co., the global product packaging company headquartered in Hartsville, South Carolina, is working with a handful of independent recruiting tech vendors to address shortcomings in its recruiting technology. The company, which has 22,000 employees worldwide, relies on Tweetmyjobs to generate traffic and market new opportunities via social media; iMomentous to build out its mobile job application process and to collect data on its talent pipeline; and Async Interview to conduct video interviews of candidates as a way to streamline its screening process. “It’s a piecemeal approach, but we’ve seen solid results,” said Keesha Moore, Sonoco’s talent acquisition specialist. The tools are helping her reach a broader candidate pool and shorten the hiring process, and it gives her a chance to test new recruiting technologies for a relatively low investment.
“Our next step is to find a vendor who can help us with predictive analytics for workforce planning,” she said.
Recruiting Analytics: Just Getting Started
She’s not alone. Workforce analytics continues to be the holy grail for companies that are trying to figure out where the best candidates come from, how much time and money it takes to find them, and how successful their recruiting processes have been. “Companies aren’t just interested in how many people they hire; they want to understand the quality of their hires,” said Amy Wilson, vice president of human capital management product strategy at Workday.
Smarter Recruiting, Smarter Technology
Software that monitors and audits equal employment opportunity and affirmative action data is a must.
In today’s day and age, technology has become part and parcel of the workplace, and what better use of technology than to let it help you manage your workforce and recruit the best talent available in the marketplace. Recruiting software automates the sourcing and hiring process through a stand-alone program that can be incorporated into the company’s pre-existing human resources management software, integrating payroll, talent management and compensation management. Here’s a look at how recruiting software can help you as well as the potential legal pitfalls you should consider.
A More Efficient Hiring Process
The primary function of recruiting software is to provide a searchable database whereby you can track all of the applicants for your company, allowing you to easily identify where an applicant is in the hiring process, manage correspondence with the applicant, update an applicant’s information and status, schedule interviews, process background checks and manage the transition from applicant to employee once hired. Some software may also allow you to create automated procedures for screening out unqualified applicants, route qualified applications to the appropriate recruiter or hiring manager, manage the requisition and acquisition of applicants, generate reports, and track the sources of your best hires.
Legal Considerations of Recruiting Software
As part of equal employment opportunity, or EEO, regulations, a company must follow certain guidelines for collecting, storing and reporting information that is gathered from job applicants. In order to be compliant with EEO laws, you should make sure the recruiting software program that you use requests voluntary EEO information from each applicant, automatically records the reason for rejecting every applicant, automatically records the minimum qualifications for each available job, creates logs of the hiring process for each job and applicant in case of an audit (e.g., data received, name, position, job group, race and sex, veterans status, reason for rejection and date of hire) and can generate reports that show the company captured the vital information for each applicant. (Note that you cannot force an applicant to provide EEO information, and this information must be kept confidential and not be made available to a hiring manager).
Finally, you’ll also want to monitor and regularly audit your EEO and affirmative action data, so make sure to use software that allows you to view this information online and generate custom reports.
—Richard Y. Hu
Fully 64 percent of global talent leaders say they are not doing a great job tracking return on investment on sources of hire, according to LinkedIn’s global recruiting survey. Though again, the vendors are doing everything they can to make that happen.
All of the recruiting technology firms, from the startups to the enterprise giants, are trying to build better, easier and more robust analytics tools to help customers improve and measure their recruiting efforts. But it is still a work in progress, said Jibe’s Casanova. “Using analytics to enable data-driven recruiting is a big trend, but we are only at the very beginning.”
Most vendors offer some version of an analytics dashboard and/or metrics to track where candidates come from and basic measures around quantity of candidates and time to hire, though they are far from delivering on the promise of predictive analytics. Casanova predicts that the real benefit won’t be seen until these tools become a seamless part of the recruiting workflow — like the dashboard in a car. “Until the technology is integrated into the recruiter’s life, there won’t be mass adoption,” he said.
While that vision may be years away, there are some interesting innovations already in the market. Mueller points to Work4 Labs, a social media recruiting vendor that uses analytics to post job openings to social media sites where the most attractive candidates for the job spend most of their time. “It’s a more intelligent way to search,” he said.
Similarly, HireVue Inc.’s new Insights tool provides companies with analytics to analyze their internal hiring processes, including how good interviewers are at making the best hiring decisions. “This is something no one else is doing,” Beebe said.
Forget the Résumé
Vendors are also coming up with more innovative ways for recruiters to assess a candidate’s fit, for both the position and the culture, said Forrester Research analyst Claire Schooley. “We are moving beyond the résumé,” she said.
For example, video interviewing tools from vendors like Async and HireVue allow managers to see applicants in action before scheduling face-to-face meetings; HackerRank lets companies assess the skills of tech professionals by giving them programming challenges to solve; and vendors like BrandAmper and Match-Click help companies market themselves and their corporate environment to candidates who are looking for a place where they will find a good culture fit. “It’s an interesting time in the recruiting space,” Schooley said. “Everyone is focused on building relationships and making sure a candidate is a good fit for the company.”
Prepare for Another M&A Frenzy
Despite all the exciting innovations that are coming from small stand-alone vendors, the big HRMS players still have a powerful value proposition to offer because their recruiting tools tie into the broader talent management systems. Workday’s Wilson noted that one of the biggest things its client advisory board is interested in is the ability to recruit internally. “Recruiters want access to both internal and external candidates, and they want to be able to compare them side by side,” she said. That’s more likely to be accomplished if you are using a single HR management system because it holds the end-to-end data necessary to provide that level of candidate transparency.
And it is likely that most of these stand-alone vendors won’t be independent for long. Analysts across the industry predict that the big firms are going to begin another buying spree as they eye the accomplishments of these independent recruiting tech firms. “Over the next 12 months we will see another wave of acquisitions where the upstart recruiting providers will get swallowed up,” Beebe said.
It isn’t something customers need to worry about, but they should keep it in mind. “You want to choose tools that will solve your problems today, while keeping an eye on the future,” he said. “There is a great wave of innovation going on — but you don’t want to sign any five-year contracts.”
A hostile work environment is hostile for one of two reasons — the alleged misconduct is either severe (overtly offensive), or pervasive (repeatedly offensive). The more severe the misconduct is, the less pervasive it has to be.
In this context, consider the following from Satterwhite v. City of Houston [pdf], in which the 5th Circuit affirmed the dismissal an employee’s retaliation claim:
Satterwhite asserts that he engaged in two distinct protected activities: (1) making an oral report to human resources that Singh used the phrase “Heil Hitler” in a meeting, and (2) answering questions in connection with the OIG’s investigation of the “Heil Hitler” incident. While Satterwhite’s actions could qualify as opposing …, for his actions to be protected activities Satterwhite must also have had a reasonable belief that Singh’s comment created a hostile work environment under Title VII.
No reasonable person would believe that the single “Heil Hitler” incident is actionable under Title VII. The Supreme Court has made clear that a court determines whether a work environment is hostile “by ‘looking at all the circumstances,’ including the ‘frequency of the discriminatory conduct; its severity; whether it is physically threatening or humiliating, or a mere offensive utterance; and whether it unreasonably interferes with an employee’s work performance.’” Furthermore, “isolated incidents (unless extremely serious)” do not amount to actionable conduct under Title VII. We have accordingly rejected numerous Title VII claims based on isolated incidents of non-extreme conduct as insufficient as a matter of law.
Thus, in Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, “Heil Hitler” is “non-extreme conduct” (insert Southern joke here).
Two points to make.
Some harassment shouldn’t be in the eye of the beholder. (Warning, offensive language ahead). Nazi jokes/comments should be sufficiently severe to raise the specter of Title VII’s protections against religions harassment. Similarly, utterances of overtly offensive terms like “nigger,” “kike,” or “cunt” should, in nearly all cases, suffice to state a claim under Title VII. There is no excuse for this stuff in the workplace. Period.
If you have any doubt about point number one, it’s time for some harassment and EEO training in your workplace (which is a good idea annually anyway).
