For Employers And Recruiters

Candidate Experience

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.

A Different Kind Of Staffing Agency

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 [email protected]

How Will Younger Workers Change The Workplace?

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.

Employers, Networking & A Legal Conundrum

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.

Job Stress & Dissatisfaction: The Common Denominator

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?

Recruiting For The Future

When it comes to the latest recruiting techniques, Zoë Goldring and Gretchen Ledgard of JobSyntax are about as hip as it's possible to be. It's pretty cool to have Zoë contribute a post to my site as part of the Great Recruiting Blogswap.

There’s a lot of talk out there regarding the “war for talent” in America. George himself commented on this phenomenon in his recent post on creating a global talent pool. The thing is I think most people view recruiting and “solutions” to recruiting problems in a short-sighted manner. In fact, many of the suggestions I hear on solving issues are really only band-aides or stop-gap measures. Nothing proposed has been targeted towards the root cause of these shortages.

And what is that root cause you may ask? Interest. That’s right, kids these days just aren’t as interested in the jobs that have the highest demand for skilled employees; chemistry, computer engineering, nursing, teaching… and the list goes on. You can raise salaries, increase benefits, provide telecommuting options and outsource all you want, but the fact of the matter is unless you create a healthy supply of future employees you’re just robbing Peter to pay Paul.

What creates interest in kids varies from generation to generation. I’m not saying I know what these interests are today or how to answer them, but what I do know is that in these critical talent shortage areas, it’s going to take a village to get folks into these careers and they need to start early. Companies, professional associations, schools and parents all need to work together to present compelling story for different career paths.

One fine example of this is the American Plastics Council. They’ve been running TV, print and radio ads since 1999. This campaign is memorable to me because of the TV spots with the tag line, “It’ll be a miracle if he makes it to…” Not only does this particular add speak to parents raising children, but also the longevity of the child safety concerns that they may have. Additionally they run spots that are funny, up to date with current trends and make you want to go to their website. When you get to the site, there’s lots of great information on how plastics can effect your everyday life from the food you cook to the car you drive. On top of which they provide topics for teaching plastics in the classroom. The message here is that plastics are an interesting area to become involved and there are many applications in various career paths. If I were a kid and someone was teaching me about how the bike helmet I wear protects me, but also is made of a space age material that I could be part of creating, heck yeah I’d be interested.

So what I am proposing here is instead of thinking just about the short term, let’s take a long view approach to the supply and demand issue. In fact I say dedicated a portion of your recruiting not only to what your needs are today, but what your needs might be in 10 years. The data is there to support you. All you have to do is invest.

On that note let me leave you with one final question; what are the activities and events that you or your company support today to ensure an adequate supply of future candidates?

Schrödinger's Cat & The Myth Of Passive Job Seekers

Have you ever read something that doesn't really spark your interest until you think about it later? Sometimes, then you can't stop thinking about it. I read a great critique of the popular concept of "passive job seekers" recently. It was very thought provoking (in a delayed sort of way) and I wish I could remember where I read it.

Following is a summary of that author's thoughts, as I remember them, with extra commentary by yours truly.

Ever since I first heard about "passive candidates," everything about the concept has bothered me. The idea itself and the label. Let's start with the label. At best it is misleading (or, at least, an oxymoron) to apply the word "passive" to an allegedly superior class of job seeker.

Moreover, the concept is misleading -- it's like dismissing people who don't want to date you as "antisocial." And it's just lazy thinking. The artificial distinction between "active" and "passive" candidates obscures a variety of reasons why a job seeker may be "passive" with respect to any given job opportunity. Many of which, contrary to the myth, do not make "passive" candidates better.

Here's a short list of issues with some commentary. Again, credit belongs to the mystery author who started me down this path.

1. A job seeker who is called "passive" because they are happily employed elsewhere is a dangerous employee to recruit. It will likely take a great deal to get them on board, and you may well be setting yourself up to have an unhappy employee, sorry they left a job/company they loved.

2. If the job seeker isn't happy where they are, but is "passive" because they are too complacent or unmotivated to actively seek alternate employment, why would this be the sort of person you'd want to recruit? Apathy/laziness isn't the same thing as loyalty, and is hardly a virtue.

3. Any job seeker is open and receptive ("active") to alternative employment opportunities when approached the right way -- it's just a question of what the right way is. Case in point: I don't know of anyone who loves their job so much that if a good friend started telling them about a great opportunity, they'd stick their fingers in their ears and start humming. It's not like job seekers are binary circuits, either open (active) or closed (passive).

4. If you haven't figured out how to reach a specific candidate, or type of candidate, referring to them as "passive" completely obscures the recruiting issues you face and need to overcome to widen the recruiting net you're casting.

As the popular myth stands, it ignores or obscures whether a job seeker is "passive" because he or she is unreachable, unavailable, unrecruitable, disinterested, etc. Pretty significant differences, so I'm not just splitting hairs (or philosophical cats, Herr Schrödinger).

In Praise Of Interns

I know a local business owner who believes, and I do quote, that "interns aren't worth the space they take up." Great! In this geographically finite job market, that's one less employer to tap this exceptional talent pool.

Interns can be a phenomenal investment, for so many reasons:

1. Eager to learn and eager to please, good interns can master a variety of tasks and be quite productive in staying on top of them. You may be surprised at both their capabilities and their work ethic.
2. Like your own "farm team," they can provide a ready pool of talent to bring on board full-time as needed. When hired, unlike other new employees, they bring knowledge of your company and the job. And, you have better sense for what you're getting.
3. Treated well, interns can become your best campus-recruiting PR tool.

My, how the world has changed. When I was in college, studying abroad was far more popular than internships. Summers were for jobs like house painting, and during the school year I rarely looked off-campus for work. This is one change that benefits employers enormously ... those who tap into it anyway.

The Other Side Of The Search

There's a story I love, from the world of web marketing, relevant to recruiting (which is, of course, a form of marketing).

The story is about a marketing expert who was hired by a huge web-based lending firm to do a search engine optimization project. The company wanted to make sure that when web users entered the word "lending" into a search engine, that their web site would be listed at the top of the search results. Although he accepted the project, the expert immediately felt that there was something fundamentally wrong with this strategy. It took him a while to figure out what was wrong, but finally it hit him. The company was interested in "lending." Potential customers (the ones using search engines) weren't: they were interested in "borrowing."

How often do we fail to see things from the other side of the search?

Bad Recruiters... And Good

When I talk to job seekers, and the subject of recruiters comes up, their reaction tends to be pronounced. Those who have been recently successfully placed by a recruiter are very up on recruiters. The rest ... let's just say their reaction is a bit cooler.

Although there are many nuances to the gripes that most job seekers express about recruiters, when I filter out the unreasonable ones, the rest have one typical common denominator. Most recruiters leave most job seekers feeling expremely disrespected when they interact.

Generally, it's the result of overt opportunism. Consider this rather extreme example. A friend was recently contacted by a recruiter, who introduced himself and quickly described an opportunity. My friend told him that she didn't think she was qualified. He persisted -- "let me just ask you a few questions." After 5 minutes on the phone, he said "you aren't qualified" and hung up on her. He then emailed her the next day asking if she knew anyone who was in fact qualified.

Unfortunately, this type of incident not only generates bad karma for the recruiter in question; it's the sort of memorable disrespect that gets remembered and communicated, and it hurts recruiters collectively. As obvious as that is, it's amazing how many recruiters make no effort to hide a very short sighted agenda: either a given job seeker has immediate, practical market value to them, or they're an unwelcome waste of time.

Ironically, as I was writing this, I received a call from a recruiter who successfully placed me some years back. He called just to wish me a happy anniversary (one year on the job) and to say hello. This timely call from Gary, of DPI Recruiting (specializing in IT recruiting in SE Wisconsin) was a nice reminder that not all recruiters are cut from the same cloth.