director of recruiting

The most impressive recruitment marketing campaign in the history of the world

If you do one thing today, read this:

http://senzee.blogspot.com/2007/02/red-5s-pitch.html

Wow...

Be on the look out for the May edition of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership. I wrote a piece describing how you can conduct a SWOT analysis of your recruiting department to gain strategic insights about how it relates to your company’s external environment. The SWOT analysis is a tool used to audit an organization and its environment. While typically used by marketers, I reveal how this simple instrument can easily be applied to planning in the talent acquisition marketplace and provide clarity on which key issues or areas of improvement to prioritize.

In the article I go in depth on what questions to ask about your recruitment organization to identify strenghts, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, and what other factors to consider when creating a SWOT for decision support. There's even an illustrative  "fictitious example."

 

BTW - if you are contemplating "going global" - in the March issue I wrote about establishing an International recruiting practice so if you are coming to ERE San Diego be sure to pick up a copy of that one as well.

Cheers,

Shally  LinkedIn | Bio | MSN | Skype

Click here to connect with me on LinkedIn

P.S. Join me April 11, 2007 11:00 am PST as I talk with 2,000 staffing leaders about what forward-thinking companies are doing to remain competitive with their recruiting processes at this free Innovative Internet Recruiting Strategies webinar sponsored by Trovix!

There is no such thing as an employer brand

Very often, companies spend thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in pursuit of the impossible: coming up with a single employer brand value proposition.

Why is this impossible? Because the differences between what makes one person work at a company vs. another are typically greater than the similarities. In addition, an employer value proposition is much more than the actions of a company (such as HR policies, pay, benefits) - it's really more about the individual and what motivates them than anything the company does.

Think about a software engineer, who wants to work with the coolest, latest programming languages to advance their skillset; who wants to build the most cutting edge consumer applications that will reach and potentially change the lives of millions or even billions of people; and just wants to come to work barefoot and with dog in tow. Now think about a top salesperson, who wants a product that's easy to sell once you get in the door with the buyer; wants an aggressive compensation plan; and wants nothing more than to purchase those maple cabinets for his or her house. And there are countless other examples of this in action, from accountants and lawyers to customer service and senior management professionals. And all of these people work under one roof. This is why I was glad to see provocateur-in-residence Dr. John Sullivan's article on Employment Products on ERE, one of the rare pieces I've seen on audience and career segmentation in employer branding. Approaching the challenge like a product management function is truly a novel but needed approach - nice going, John.

Recruitment advertising agencies - most of whom are currently engaged in large-scale research and employer branding initiatives designed to uncover something that I don't believe really exists - might not be happy to hear all of this. But underneath it all, this is actually an opportunity for them rather than a threat. Rather than just focusing on one broad swath at creating a value proposition, this actually gives them the opportunity to work on several and increases their opportunity to add strategic value for their customers.

I welcome your thoughts.

New technology alert: IntelliTXT

While trolling the Web the other day, I saw a relatively new technology that I believe has some applications in the recruiting world: IntelliTXT.

What is IntelliTXT? In their own words:

IntelliTXT in-text advertising allows words and word phrases across the internet to become opportunities to engage. IntelliTXT is delivered in a user-driven format allowing you to engage with your audience while they are reading content that is relevant.

Imagine that you're on a blog or website that is displaying content that you're very interested in. Suddenly a word or phrase - like Internet sourcing - catches your eye. You notice that it's green and double-underlined, and when you roll over it, a highly relevant offer is served up to you for a company in your area that is looking for Internet Sourcing talent. Ads can be served up in a number of formats including text links, pictures or even video - check out an example here:

http://www.intellitxt.com/casestudy_eidos.html

The real question here is will people really choose to be advertised to and actually roll over the text to see what's beneath it? For companies like Microsoft, Ford, Sony, Charles Schwab, Johnson & Johnson, McDonald's, Nike, BP and Warner Bros. that choose to use this form of advertising (their marketing departments, not recruiting as far as I know) the answer is yes. And even if the answer is no for a majority of people, with the average click through rate for a banner campaign being less than 1%, the economics of such a campaign may still be attractive given the highly targeted nature of this form of advertising.

I've started to see this type of advertising pop up in all sorts of places, so it merits watching from a recruiting perspective if a company will (or already has) decided to corner the market on specific in-demand keywords and skillsets. If anyone has tried this, please let me know by posting a comment below or emailing me at dave@talentsparkcreative.com.

Who will own performance management, redux

Last week I posted a question about performance management - who will own it and why? The answer has profound implications on the future shape of the human capital management landscape. There are so many different categories of vendors (talent management, HRIS, compensation, etc.) out there with their own take on this question that I thought it would be appropriate to get some other voices into the mix.

Here's a quick digest of some of the thoughts:

• Morethanaliving suggests that you buck up and own your own performance management.
• Donald Taylor chimed in from the other side of the pond and thinks that without integration with the organization's existing processes, the value is lost.
• SystematicHR says that talent acquisition vendors masquerade as talent management vendors, and that talent management departments do in fact exist (although are not prevalent).
• Incentive Intelligence argues that the tail is wagging the dog here, i.e. that managers own the performance of their people and they should be dictating what tools are most valuable to them.

The discussion that ensued highlights the real scope of the problem - too many silos, too many disjointed processes, too many stakeholders with a piece of the same pie and vendors only thinking about the business problem from one audience's point of view. Paul Hebert's response on SystematicHR's blog was more in line with my way of thinking:

What I think separates good from great (to borrow a phase) is when you begin to blur that ownership across multiple functions/departments/divisions. In other words there are no silos of ownership but peaks of focus that are connected by valleys of communication that connect those peaks (weird description but that’s the best I can do after spending 9 hours in airports today.)

If the vendors have their way, your company will have tools that only solve one set of problems for one group of people. Yes, you own your own performance management, and you also own the types of tools that will be at your disposal and the right ways to use them in your organization. Speak up. 

Google's new ad model - and what it means for recruiting

Check out the New York Times article today on Google. Apparently, they're experimenting on a small scale with a new ad model - cost per action. In other words, advertisers are only paying for results. Don't make a sale? You don't pay. Simple as that.

Simple is an overstatement here, of course. The article goes on to say that publishers like Google have shied away from this model because it would add complexity to their business. Yet for the customer this is so much of a win that it would probably be worth significantly more money. This is the holy grail for marketers (da Vinci Code vision of this aside) - and I can see them being willing to pony up to participate in the same way that they offer referral fees to consultants and resellers, usually in the 10-20% range of sales. If this works, I can see a day where advertisers will have their choice of who advertises on a given site and will make their decision based on the size of the sale and probability of success rather than the reverse of this model that exists today, where advertisers who pay more get the impressions regardless of their probability of success.

By comparison, recruitment advertising is still in the Stone Age. We're looking under rocks on Monster.com, pounding away at leather hides with crude tools on Hotjobs, and praying to the sun-god on CareerBuilder. Vendors like Indeed have started to experiment with cost-per-click, but it's going to be hard to build a sizeable business with an audience that professes to want less applicants rather than more by charging them every time someone applies.

So what's the evolutionary leap here? Cost per hire. Yes, this adds complexity to any vendor's business model. For example:

• A hire is not a hire is not a hire - the cost for a customer service hire should not reasonably be the same as the cost for a security cleared engineering hire. 
• Tracking this is not as easy as tracking an immediate payment since it could take months before someone is hired.
• Some people may not be hired for the job they applied for, making tracking even more difficult.

Despite the above, I don't think a cost-per-hire model for a job board is outside of the realm of possibility at all, actually and companies would actually be willing to pay more for the hire than they would for a $400 posting - just look at the $38 billion search industry, which charges 20% of first year salary. Granted, companies are more price sensitive with recruiting costs than sales costs - the goal is not to spend 10-20% of salary - but many do, as evidenced by the sheer scale of the staffing firm industry.

Today there are technology companies like H3, BountyJobs, JobThread, Blue Chip and others that are charging based on hires and leverage more than just traffic by engaging recruiters and non-recruiters in the search process, potentially increasing the odds of success. None of them seem to really be pushing for a consumer presence and making the investment necessary to get there, however. I personally think this is a big opportunity if they can nail and scale their business models and make the successes customers they have had more repeatable (although one is usually a function of the other).   

There's a big market out there for the taking for a publisher. Just like the quest for the grail, the reward is great but the road is treacherous.

Is there anyone bold enough to embark on this adventure? 

Who will own performance management?

Authoria, Vurv, Taleo, Kenexa, SuccessFactors and others think it starts in talent management departments - which, for the most part, don't exist - that want to create repeatable processes around attracting and retaining top performing talent while reducing turnover.

HRIS vendors like Oracle, SAP and Lawson think performance management is a general HR, organizational development or even an IT project designed to make more equitable decisions about who to promote.

Salary.com thinks it's the compensation analysts that want to create a performance-driven compensation culture.

Meanwhile, lots of companies are buying talent management suites with performance management capabilities, but not a lot of them addressing the people and process components that will drive maximum value from the technology.

Can anyone make sense of all of this? Dubs? Jeff?  Bueller?

Today's sign that the apocalypse is upon us

Video-avatar resumes: www.myresumepal.com

Innovative Internet Recruiting Strategies

If much of the success of your company is tied to its talent, how can your company evolve their recruiting practices to remain competitive in a tightening labor market? The strengthening economy is making recruiting harder and harder. Trovix invited me to do a Webinar (no cost to attend) and discuss forward-thinking Internet recruiting techniques. If you are interested please join me (did I mention free?) for an hour to learn how forward-thinking companies are leveraging technology and automation to remain competitive in talent acquisition.

Date and Time:	Wednesday, April 11, 2007 11:00 am Pacific Daylight Time (GMT -07:00, San Francisco)
	Central Daylight Time (GMT -05:00, Chicago)
	Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -04:00, New York)

Follow this link to register:

https://trovixevents.webex.com/trovixevents/onstage/g.php?d=660043895&t=a&SourceId=homepage

Cheers,

Shally  LinkedIn | Bio | MSN | Skype | ERE

Click here to connect with me on LinkedIn

Pssst.. The new Blog Search CheatSheet is almost here!

Why no one is happy with their ATS

Twice in the last two weeks, on two separate occasions, I heard the following from directors of staffing:

"I've sat in a few conferences about recruiting technology, and no one is happy with their ATS."

I'm here to tell you why this is. I actually was at one of these conferences a couple of years ago, where everyone went around the room and complained that their ATSes weren't working the way they wanted it to. What's funny is that I knew which systems each company in the room used and how severe their problems were from a management, a recruiter/hiring manager user and candidate perspective because I had worked closely with each of them.

Even though they said the same exact thing - "I hate my ATS" - their problems were actually much different and on a very big range of scales. The range of problems included:

• Company 1: "Feature-creep," or the company requiring so much of a system in their RFP that one that met their requirements just didn't exist. This tends to happen in a lot of tech companies. The end result: a custom system built by a company with little to no knowledge of the ATS market that didn't do 1/10th of what the off-the-shelf systems that others in the room used, and a lot of the basic functions (resume search, reporting) just plain didn't work.
• Company 2: Misaligned expectations about what the off-the-shelf system actually did.
• Company 3: Recruiters had never embraced or adopted the system because they never went through proper change management processes - recruiters are people too, and people just don't want to change their behavior if they can avoid it - leaving 90% of the system untouched and unused.
• Company 4: There was no actual plan or strategy in place to realize the value that had been promised by the ATS vendor in the sales pitch.
• Company 5: There were technical problems on the vendor side, but they didn't come close to comparing in scale or scope to the first problem.
• Company 6: Implemented their stripped down HRIS's ATS module (what I like to call the red-headed stepchild module), and were left unable to automate or scale critical staffing processes (like employee referral submissions)

I suggest that you cover your ears the next time you get in one of these discussions - or at least take everything with a large grain of salt. Compared to the other companies, the Company 1 had the most severe problems. Yet the fact that other companies were not pleased with their systems left them feeling like there "was no silver bullet" or anything that could solve their problems, when in reality, the majority of their problems were solvable.

Selecting an Applicant Tracking System is a big decision with many pitfalls. I do recommend benchmarking with other employers, but at the end of the day, the fact that someone else is not happy has no bearing on whether you need to move quickly and decisively to solve your own (sometimes much bigger) business problems. You also don't have to settle on something vanilla or mediocre in an attempt to make it fool-proof - you'll quickly learn that nothing in the technology world is.

With the right technologies, processes and people (and not necessarily in that order) in place, a significant competitive advantage for talent can be realized.