For Employers And Recruiters

At a recent conference on the recruiting industry, there was an interesting consensus amongst the attendees and presenters. Simply, that the most critical and overlooked failing of most employer's recruiting & hiring processes involved overlooking "candidate experience." This is an incredibly broad area, covering everything from the impressions of the the passive candidate who visits your corporate hiring Web site just to poke around, to the candidate who fills out your application forms and goes through a battery of interviews.

This is huge. Worthy of an entire blog on its own. I just want to highlight two aspects of it.

The first point worth noting was well covered by employment industry expert Gerry Crispin who started with a remarkable story about his experience with a well known company that had recently gone to extraordinary lengths while fulfilling a $2 mail in rebate. Gerry asked a question that really deserves an answer: if companies can and are willing to go to such great lengths to keep a customer "in the loop" over a $2 coupon, how can we possibly justify the indifference and disrespect that most candidates experience from most potential employers?

His point is valid. Thanks to the web and other technologies, incredibly powerful and customized "one to one" marketing and communication has become relatively accessible and economical. It can be done. It is really unbelievable that it isn't being done.

But, what a great opportunity for an employer to differentiate themselves! Which leads me to point number two. Which predictably (if you've read my other postings) is about employer branding. Here's the thing. Candidate experience informs word of mouth, which is the primary channel through which your employer brand (good or bad) is being disseminated. You can give candidates a really terrible experience to share with everyone they talk to. Or, you can give them an extraordinary experience to tell everyone about. Or, of course, you give them a mixed experience that they just won't much talk about at all.

Some employers think that the candidates they don't hire aren't worth worrying about one way or another. I really question that assumption.

I recently became familiar with a unique staffing firm here in Milwaukee (headquartered in Chicago) called Brill Street. Rather than explain what makes them special, I'll let co-founder and Executive VP Nancy Lerner tell you more in this brief interview. Before jumping in, I'll just share the comment that my experience with undergraduate interns has left me convinced that it's an underappreciated, underutilized talent pool.

What differentiates Brill Street from other staffing firms?

We are a niche staffing company dedicated to bringing together high performing college and graduate students with thriving businesses of all sizes to get real work done throughout the year and on flexible schedules. Currently, we are the only staffing company solely focused on current students as a viable talent pool.

In your experience, are college students genuinely capable of the same caliber of work as more seasoned workers?

As emerging professionals, students are capable of different things than experienced professionals, so to utilize them to their full potential, employers must evaluate college and grad students by different criteria than seasoned workers. First, they should be evaluated by what they have the potential to do, not by what they have already done. Second, students have a different mindset than experienced workers they are learning and acquiring knowledge/experience, which makes them flexible, adaptable, curious and productive. They have not yet developed bad habits or attitude. They are driven by a desire to prove themselves, to please, and to learn from others with more experience. Students perform best when they are mentored, not managed, which requires a different set of skills and expectations on the part of the supervisor.

How do you screen for top talent and maturity?

Through our extensive campus outreach activities, we attract top students, screen them rigorously, and place them on projects and assignments with client companies.

On the recruiting front, Brill Street builds strategic alliances with top colleges and universities in local markets by working directly with Career Services staff, faculty, and campus student groups. Our recruiting efforts are also fostered by word-of-mouth referral activity from engaged, satisfied Brill Streeters. Once we attract top students, we screen them rigorously through our online application, face-to-face interviews, review of academic records, and review of (a minimum of) two letters of referral/recommendation.

Aside from the obvious ­ freeing up resources ­ what are the advantages for an employer of working through Brill Street rather than developing and managing their own intern program?

In addition to enabling a company¹s experienced staff to focus on higher-level tasks, partnering with Brill Street:

• Introduces downstream recruiting to identify potential permanent hires by working on a trial basis
• Addresses resource shortages on demand quickly and affordably
• Allows companies to outsource their campus recruiting and customized internship programs efficiently and cost-effectively
• Gives back to the community by cultivating a pool of emerging professionals through experiential learning
• Brings energy and new ideas to a company¹s culture

Another dimension of Brill Street¹s offering is our ability to consistently deliver high performing students to clients in need. We are:

• Currently the only staffing company specializing in the student workforce niche
• Connecting with millenials sooner than other human capital companies
• Bringing F-1 visa holders to the marketplace for the first time to the advantage of both students and clients
• Building an exciting, do-good-for-others culture that resonates with students, clients and our own employees.

If employers have positive experiences with "Brill Streeters," are they able to hire them? What would the financial arrangements be?

Our primary delivery model is based on billing Brill Streeters at affordable hourly rates to our clients; as the employer, we take care of taxes and payroll.  If a client chooses to hire a Brill Streeter upon his/her graduation, there are no conversion fees, providing the Brill Streeter has worked a prescribed number of hours. If clients choose to hire Brill Streeters before they graduate, or if they hire Brill Streeters who have already graduated, we charge a very reasonable fee that is a fraction of the typical fees charged by third-party recruiters.

For more information, contact Nancy Lerner at 312.421.2122 or nlerner@brillstreet.com

I'm pleased to share this guest posting, from Steven Rothberg, on a very relevant topic!

Much is written about the top employers for mothers, college students, recent graduates, minorities, and other demographic groups. Yet how useful are these lists?

Candidates should look at three factors when deciding on which jobs to go after: their competencies, interests, and values. What are you good at? What do you like to do? And what is important to you? It is unlikely that a list of the biggest employers of college students and recent graduates such as the one at
http://www.CollegeRecruiter.com/weblog/archives/2006/01/top_500_employe.php
are going to shed light on the first two categories, yet many candidates look to these types of lists and blast off their resumes just to the first listed. Other candidates will define their career goals around their skills, and not consider that they may be good at something but not be interested in it. For example, I would probably make a pretty good accountant as I'm good with numbers and very detail oriented. Yet I love selling and business development so being a stereotypical accountant would not be a good fit for me.

Other candidates focus on what is of interest to them and neglect to consider their values. A good friend of mine graduated from law school and was doing securities work for a large law firm. He said that he loved his work but hated what it was doing to him as he was always working. In his first two years, he took five days off and that included weekends. Yet he's a guy who loves to bike and canoe in the wilderness. You can't do that from behind a desk at 10pm on a Saturday evening.

Once you've made lists of your competencies, interests, and values, look at industries, organizations within those industries, departments and divisions within those organizations, and job opportunities with those departments and divisions to see which opportunities best line up with you. We all spend far too many hours working to be stuck in a job that we have, and you will hate your job if it does not line up with your competencies, interests, and values. Even if it is with one of the top employers of college students and recent graduates.

-- Steven Rothberg is the President and Founder of CollegeRecruiter.com at
http://www.CollegeRecruiter.com, a leading career site used by college students who are searching for internships and recent graduates who are hunting for entry level jobs and other career opportunities

At a recent web 2.0 conference, the speaker digressed onto the subject of employment, and told his audience that the impending war for talent means that employers will have to accept the newest workers on their own terms. He went on to specify that this included the channels of communication they preferred. He expanded on this point, saying that employers better prepare for an influx of workers who expected to be able to surf the web recreationally, IM with their friends and hang out on MySpace while at work. My first reaction was disbelief, even anger.

But I see his point, and I see evidence that he's right among the younger workers I know. They really do seem to expect these things. I'm lucky enough to work with younger employees that try their best to toe the line when it comes to company policies and expectations to stay focused on work when they are at work, but clearly they struggle. If and when opportunities come along that offer unfettered access to these things, how powerful will the attraction be?

For that matter, how will employers react when they are interviewing a promising young candidate who suddenly asks, expectantly, "I will be able to IM at work, right?" Or a promising young candidate who just assumes that he or she will be?

The speaker who brought this up went on to talk about a company he worked with, that allowed employees to spend as much time as they liked blogging every day, on any topic they liked. When he asked them about it, they told him that as long as employees were productive (produced the expected volume of high-quality work) they didn't care what else they did. That's a remarkable paradigm. I consider myself pretty progressive, but even thinking about this radical idea makes me vaguely uncomfortable.

I wonder how much the tables will turn when job seekers really have the upper hand, as many predictions suggest will happen soon. I wonder what the impact will be on businesses, not to mention on how today's managers adapt.

In my last post, I mentioned Improved Experience, a company offering a service that I think is invaluable to employers. It supports employer branding, which is incredibly important. It recognizes that the ultimate measure of your employer brand is no more and no less than what candidates think it is. (A point lost on many companies, even those who recognize the importance of employer branding and spend a lot of money on it.) Finally, their service helps make your employer branding efforts measurable.

I figured the best way to further explore Improved Experience's unique services was to talk to  them. Following is a recent interview with Alise Cortez, PhD, and Claudia Faust, two of the founding partners.

Tell me a little about your background, how and why it led to starting up ImprovedExperience.com?

Alise:The business concept was born of Claudia's brain. When she shared the idea with me about a year ago and asked if I had any interest in toying with it, I couldn't resist. I have been in recruiting since 1998 and with an earlier background in consultative sales have always understood the importance of the candidate perception in the recruiting process. After all, not only are candidates potential employees of a company, they are also potential customers who consume the company's products. Whether or not they are hired by the business, they still wield an incredible amount of influence over that company's success because they tell other people about their all of their experiences. It's critical to know how they feel about your company and what they're saying.

Claudia:I've been recruiting since 1995, and feel fortunate to have participated in a variety of recruiting environments - from executive search, to contract placement, to corporate. My last role in a corporate setting was as a recruiting manager for T-Mobile USA in Seattle; the company was in wild, rapid growth while I was there, and there were no safety belts for the ride. It was during this time that I really began paying attention to two primary drivers for Improved Experience: how to understand job seeker perception as an employer, and how to better articulate recruiting results back to the business. Improved Experience is more than just a tool I wish I'd had as a manager; it's an expression of my belief that perception is reality for the individual, and that understanding the perception of others is the foundation of all great relationships.

Give us a little bit of perspective here. In the grand scope of employer branding, where does your product/service fit?

Claudia: Funny thing about employer branding; it's a bit like a handshake where the employer says, "Hi, I'm fabulous," and the job seeker says "wow - I want a fabulous job!" The problem is that there is a disconnect between candidates and employers when it comes to feedback. So employers interact with job seekers with the best of intentions but no real understanding of how their message is being received. Candidates and employees, on the other hand, have lots to say about painful job searches - but rarely get heard by the people who could generate positive change in the companies they try to connect with. Improved Experience simply closes that loop, and in the process we give companies a fundamental understanding of how they are perceived as employers. This means that they can strategically plan, execute and measure the brand that they want representing the business on the street.

Alise: Further, in a tangential way, Improved Experience contributes to positive employer brand by virtue of a company simply employing our services. By giving candidates an opportunity to participate in a survey from Improved Experience - a company they've retained for that one purpose only - our clients are telling candidates about their priorities. They are saying "your interaction with us and your perceptions of us as a result are important." And this subtle message positively enhances employment brand.

What's the payoff - succinctly, what do you offer employers?

Claudia: Improved Experience captures perceptions of people at all stages of the employment life cycle, and helps companies to understand the link between those perceptions and better business performance. Our flagship product is called Get Better Hires (GBH), which focuses on candidate experience. GBH is a patent pending, online "feedback portal" with two distinct components: an automated survey tool for job seekers, and a business intelligence tool for the company. We balance the job seeker's need for anonymity with the company's need for actionable information in some very unique ways. For the employer, this means a comprehensive view of company culture, pay and benefits, job opportunities and other relevant topics -plus a chance to slice and dice the feedback, and consistently benchmark performance against other companies competing for the same talent.

Alise: Improved Experience is the mouth piece for candidates, whose microphone is aimed back at the very companies who have requested the feedback and desperately need to know its content.

Let me play devil's advocate here. With the exception of the small percentage of job seekers who they would want to hire, why should an employer care what job seekers think as a whole?

Claudia: Well this is a brilliant argument for the omniscient - those who know long in advance the precise identity of each person who will be hired to a business. For the rest of us, the process of attracting, selecting and retaining talent is a bit more complex; we don't really know who we want to hire until we get to know them. So making the case that experience only matters for some is more than a little short-sighted: you don't know who you're disengaging until it's too late - and in this day and age of viral networking, you don't know who that person knows, either. It is a dangerous game to play. This reality is merely compounded when supply and demand for talent shifts toward the candidate side; suddenly a company finds itself in the position of working harder to bring the same talent onboard. The ramifications of this go straight to the bottom line; efficiency saves resources, which impacts profitability.  The most compelling argument for caring about the perceptions of the entire talent pool is summed up in these four words: right of first refusal. This means that regardless of the candidate's relevance for hire in a specific position, you have provided an experience that gives your company the right to say "no thanks" before the candidate does. In fact, the candidate's experience is so good that you've turned them into a friend - and friends become good referral sources in the recruiting realm. It is a circular argument.

Alise: I couldn't agree more.

The "war for talent," we've been told, is coming - and businesses need to make significant changes to effectively compete for talent. Where does your product/service fit into that?

Alise: Some companies are already doing so many things right when it comes to competing in the "war for talent," and it's interesting that those companies have been some of the first to show an interest in our products and services as a way to make themselves even stronger competitors. At the same time, we've had occasion to speak with other companies who are only just beginning to take notice of their recruiting strategies but know they need to start somewhere.

Claudia: Whether or not you choose to call it a war, the laws of supply and demand for talent are being enforced on a global playing field today. We compete for talent, of course - but why? So that our products and services generate revenue, market share, return to the investors. Technology has made it possible for business to compete without borders for customers; that competition shapes strategy, which drives growth, and ultimately propels hiring - hence we need the very best talent available to feed the curve. The old model of hiring isn't quite fitting the new environment. So is change necessary to keep up? If you want to stay in business it is. If perception is reality for job seekers, then it follows that they will make choices about working somewhere based on what they believe is true about that employer. By helping companies to explore how they are seen by the talent they attract and hire, we help them use their resources most efficiently when fixing broken processes, creating or improving outreach programs, and articulating employer brand. It is again a circular argument.

Clearly the point of your product/service is that each employer has its own unique issues to address. But if I asked you for one universal piece of advice, based on what you've learned in working with a variety of employers what do you have for us?

Claudia: Simply this: If you break the hiring equation into its most basic elements, both parties are just trying to make a good decision - to answer, in effect, "How does this relationship meet my needs?" Transparency with job seekers is the next great competitive differentiator for talent, because it sends the message that you think about what's in it for your talent, too. This builds trust with those you want working for your business, and trust impacts retention. There is no perfect place to work - just places to work that are perfect for the talent they keep.

My blog makes it pretty clear that I think that the way you treat employees, ex-employees and anyone who interviews with you but doesn't get hired (or accept an offer) is a critical and often overlooked aspect of employer branding. So I was delighted to find an upcoming company that focuses on precisely this facet of employer branding. Let's call it the synergistic effect between employer branding and hiring. ImprovedExperience.com offers tools and services that help employers measure, benchmark and improve this important aspect of their employer branding.

The government continues to enforce fair hiring practices. Recent OFCCP rules are an example, and many businesses are ramping up their recruiting practices to eliminate those which may have an adverse impact on hiring "protected classes" (race, gender, etc.) A different way of describing this is that employers are reengineering their recruiting practices to ensure that all candidates are treated equally.

As a result, one practice in jeopardy is networking. The concept is widely understood, but for the sake of this posting, let me suggest a definition. When I talk about networking, I'm talking about candidates who bypass standard recruiting channels and come in to directly meet with senior executives and hiring managers through some sort of social networking. (They know someone at your company, or they know someone who knows someone, etc.)

Allowing certain candidates to bypass standard HR/recruiting channels because they "know the right people" ... smacks of elitism and favoritism, to say the least.

At the same time, it is widely recognized by smart job seekers that networking is an effective technique for career development and job seeking. Deliberately cutting off this wellspring is a very dangerous move for any company that wants to continue to attract top job seekers.

Some companies have tried to solve this by treating candidates who come to their attention through networking just like they would any other job seeker — asking them to apply online, having them fill out employment applications before engaging in meetings (even "informational interviews"). This is a dangerous solution, insofar as it is likely to scare off top candidates. So called "passive candidates," who may be willing to meet with your company to explore career possibilities, but are not in such an open state of "job seeking mode" that they will fill it forms or tolerate much in the way of HR red tape.

To me, the bigger context here is employer branding. Companies can (and do) develop reputations as actively encouraging smart people to cultivate connections with their organization — whether or not there is an immediate payoff for either party. Or, as bureaucratic organizations that maintain a set of staunch, protective hiring practices that force everyone to jump through the same hoops. I can think of several Fortune 500 companies here in Milwaukee that have terrible reputations of the latter sort. I wonder if they realize that?

I'm not sure what the legally defensible solution is here. Candidly, the key to encouraging high caliber job seekers to meet with people within your company is to provide a form of preferential treatment. Is there a legal way to do that? I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know. But I do know that networking is a critical recruiting practice.

Postscript: Legalities aside, there is one major risk associated with networking, from an employer's perspective. Insofar as like attracts like, excessive reliance on networking can lead to a homogenous workforce. Not just from a demographic standpoint, for example, but in many ways. The solution to this, I would suggest, is for an employer to proactively reach out to (and participate in) a variety of forums where they can encourage a diverse selection of potential candidates to explore career opportunities with them.

You probably know a lot of people who are dissatisfied with their jobs. Stressed out, frustrated, unhappy. You may have employees who you sense fall into these categories.

At first glance, their issues may seem quite diverse -- a lot of people, in a lot of different types of jobs, facing a lot of different problems.

There's one common denominator that encompasses the vast majority of job-related stress and dissatisfaction, though: responsibility without authority.

Insofar as job satisfaction impacts retention, morale and productivity, this is a huge. How can your organization make sure that every employee has the level and type of authority commensurate with their job responsibilities?

It always amazes me to hear an employer comment about not finding enough qualified candidates, and then tell me that diversity recruiting isn't a priority for them. This article does an exceptional job of explaining the value of diversity recruiting!

Once again, Seth Godin cuts through years of accumulated "wisdom" to question a time-honored tradition. He suggests that the job interview, as we know it, is either too much or too little, depending on the job in question. I don't see traditional interviewing changing any time soon. Too bad though -- I have to agree with Seth on this one!