Jason Blais: From the Recruiting Front Lines

You just gotta love the connective power of the internet. I recently exchanged thoughts regarding employment branding with a recruiter in India, through the LinkedIn space. While that in and of itself is pretty amazing to anyone over 30, who grew up in a world without the internet and cellular phones, it’s the content of our conversation that I thought was more interesting.

This recruiter had asked a question about how you find good talent to work for companies that don’t measure up to the industry standards in regards to things like employee benefits, compensation, appreciation, etc.

This is a question and challenge that I face daily. Even in India, this recruiter is able to get the employer to understand the theory behind building an employment brand, and how that affects their ability to attract top talent, though when it comes to implementation…. well, let’s just say the theory loses its importance and shine. I have spoken to many employers across New England about this very same issue, and have seen the very same wall put up when it comes time to actually create and develop the employment brand.

Ultimately, the idea that a company has to promote its strengths specific to the employment market in order to attract the right type of candidate is well accepted. Unfortunately, and somewhat surprising to me, most employers don’t put in the time and energy necessary to create, develop, and communicate this employment brand. While I can preach about the value of attracting better candidates- increased productivity, increased customer relations, decreased turnover costs, decreased customer service complaints, decreased employee dissatisfaction, decreased cost of employee retention programs (if you attract the right people, you don’t have to pay as much to keep them)-, I cannot FORCE employers to put branding up on the priority list, and assign the necessary resources to make it a reality.

To the recruiter from India’s point, how do you expect to get good talent if you don’t keep up with industry standards? Well, there actually is a way to do this. In fact, it’s as easy as understanding your own employee’s engagement to your company, understanding EXACTLY what kind of employee is best for your company, and communicating in the right spaces with the right message to reach the right people and motivate them to apply. If you don’t pay as well as other companies, but you have a very good mentoring or training program, you’re ideal candidate will be different from someone who has the best pay in the industry, with no real mentoring or training program.

What we see from many employers is that they don’t take the time to really assess the profile of their best potential candidates. It’s easy to go with the flow, and say you want someone with the best skill level, best education, and teamwork attitude. But is it true? Does your business need someone who works great in a group environment… or do you really need someone who can be left alone to get their job done reliably and without interruption? Do you need to attract people with the very best skill level… or would those people FEEL overqualified and uncomfortable in your milieu if they were hired- can you train those hard skills? Do you really want the person with the best education, or will that person disrupt the current environment in your workplace?

I always remind employers that the person they hire tomorrow will have to work with the people they employ today. That sounds elementary, but there is much more to consider in that statement than you might first think.

I’d love to hear your comments on how you identify the best candidates and attract them to hire, if you don’t offer the best salary or best benefits, etc. Click HERE to add a comment. Thanks for sharing!

If you’re in the majority of businesses out there, you handle most or all of your recruiting in-house- no recruiters or staffing agencies in your hip pocket… or wallet. That is, you write your own job postings or advertisements, you research and make your own media buys, and you handle the pre-screening and interview process. If your company attends career fairs, you and your team conceive the design for your displays and staff the booth in hopes of meeting your next great hire.

If you look around, you’re likely to find numerous tips and suggestions to help you attract and hire the best talent available. In fact, you’ll probably find volumes of ideas from various sources, organizations, and experts.

Often, I’ve heard it said, success can be achieved not by only doing the right things, but also by avoiding doing the wrong things. For example, you could write a tremendously powerful and engaging job posting, place your ad in the top media resources, and attract quality resumes, but if you make one of the following mistakes, you are sure to meet with failure in your hiring efforts.

Here are my Top 5 Ways to Fail at Hiring:

5. Treat every candidate equally. Okay, so as far as the protected statuses go, you do need to treat each application equally, but you can’t afford to treat the best qualified applicants with the same attention and efforts as the marginal applicants. The very best candidates will likely have many opportunities to choose from, and everyone wants to feel wanted. Make sure you let the top candidates feel the love!

4. Accept more resumes than you can handle. Consider this: the most qualified candidates are likely already employed. While it’s impossible to know what their motivation is, it’s is reasonable to assume that their window of interest may be very small. Maybe last week was a bad week. Maybe your posting came when their horoscope advised to be open to new opportunities. Maybe another opportunity will come along next week that is closer to home. Maybe another employer will hire them next week. The point is simple: if you’re serious about attracting the best candidates, be sure to limit your exposure and only accept as many resumes as you can handle in a speedy fashion. That may mean taking down your online posting for a few days while you catch up with your screening. DON’T EXPECT GREAT CANDIDATES TO STILL BE WAITING FOR YOUR CALL 3 WEEKS AFTER THEY SUBMIT A RESUME.

3. Use Salary Requirements to Screen Candidates. While this sounds like a reasonable idea, it’s another sure way to overlook GREAT talent who may be undervaluing or overvaluing their skills. Remember, people come in all shapes, sizes, colors, and psychological profiles. Some incredibly talented individuals may not fully understand their market value, and may post salary requirements below what you would think is appropriate for the right person. Conversely, and maybe more common, the right person for your company may identify inflated salary requirements in hopes of taking that next step in their earning potential. If you weed out applicants based on salary requirements, you’re potentially ignoring great hidden gems while limiting your ability to “sell” the candidates on the other great perks and benefits that may offset higher salary desires.

2. Include Lots of People in the Hiring Process. There is a school of thought that when making a decision about new personnel, it’s best to get multiple parties involved, so as to ensure you’re bringing the right candidate on board. What ends up turning in to reality more often than not, is that ALL of the people you want involved can’t be available to meet with ALL the top candidates. What ensues is a tug of war over candidates that have not had equal exposure to your staff, and may turn into a drawn out interview process that sees top candidates withdraw themselves from consideration. If you’re truly looking for the best possible candidates, you have to understand that they may see this as a convoluted or disorganized procedure. Instead, meet with all interested parties prior to interviewing, and take the time to understand EXACTLY what traits are going to be accepted, valued, and appreciated by your current personnel.

1. Place More Emphasis on Hard Skills than Soft. Okay, so most of you will begin writing you job ad by thinking about what hard skills your candidate must have. If you think of it, and have enough space, some of you will even include some of those soft skill terms like: teamwork, communication, detail-oriented, self-motivated, etc. The hard truth of our human experience is that soft skills are much more difficult to learn than hard skills. If you look into your crystal ball, and see the next 10 years of your company’s future, what hiring decisions today will help you be more successful in the next decade? If we just look at the extremes, for an illustration, here’s the point: If you hire people who are a 10 (in a scale of 1-10, 10 being best) in their hard skills and a 1 in their soft skills, you’ll have disgruntled employees who lack engagement, resulting in higher turnover (and don’t forget a rule of thumb that the cost of turnover is generally 200% of the annual salary). You can invest a great deal of money in training and development and appreciation, but if they don’t want to be engaged or involved, this money will be wasted. If you hire people who are a 10 in the soft skills, and a 1 in the hard skills, you’ll have happy employees who can’t do the job. HOWEVER, if this were the case, you can train these types of employees, those who are eager, motivated, engaged, enthusiastic, driven, etc, to provide them with hard skills. YES, you’re right. You cannot possible ignore the necessary hard skills that the job requires, but just remember, it’s much cheaper and easier to train up the marginal hard skills for people who want to grow with your company, than it is to change the personalities of people who have the best hard skills.

So that’s my top 5 Ways to Fail at Hiring. This blog is intended to be shared and generate dialogue and thoughtful consideration. Please feel free to email this post to a friend, or, if you’re a blogger, please include links to this blog in your posts. Good Luck and Happy Hiring!

STEP UP YOUR GAME

While organizing 4 job fairs in different states this month, I’ve been keenly aware of our need to differentiate our events from the rest. When it comes right down to it, all that really matters is that local job seekers find good opportunities, and the local employers who exhibit connect with high quality local candidates. Sounds simple, hunh?

Actually, it really is. When we hosted events earlier this year and last fall, we were able to get a much higher quality of job seeker than we usually see at other fairs. We send out tips to seekers to ensure they have access to the info they need to be prepared, and we make sure we only allow real employers at our events, no multi level marketing or up front investment opportunities.

We also collect have job seekers pre-register and have them fill out surveys to help us, and the exhibitors, prepare to make the event special. We provide this info to the employers in a ppt, and ask them to be sure to pay attention to this information to best prepare for the career fair.

I just got an email from one of the job seekers who we sent updates to, and this person raised a very good point. He, I don’t have the name in front of me, but I think it was a he, had recently gone to another event, where he travelled 90 miles round trip to find opportunities. He was surprised that there weren’t actually any decision makers staffing the booths- only lower level employees. That’s a very important point. The people staffing the booths, promoting these companies as the employers of choice, and trying attract the best possible talent, were lower level inexperienced employees for the most part.

Wow. That doesn’t seem to make sense does it? If the whole point is making face to face connections and prescreening candidates why not send the hiring managers? I’m throwing this out to the blogosphere- have employers become so jaded of face to face events like this, that they merely use it as a way to collect resumes only? Is this the best practice?

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Mission of the Recruiting Front Lines Blog

J.Chasse.Blais

If you haven’t read this book, and you operate an ad agency in any capacity- stop reading this blog and go to Amazon and order it. Okay, that sounds like I’m making money on it. I absolutely am not, and don’t know anyone involved with the book either. I do consider it, along with a few others including Good to Great as bibles of organizational dynamics and business management. Casting for Big Ideas of course is much more agency specific.

Basically, the book speaks to increasing the value, and revenue, of intellectual capital and creative ideas. The shift in media is squeezing out “agency rates’, in some cases eliminating the % margins on ad buys. To stay whole, agencies need to place more value on the ideas they have, rather than relying on buying media to generate income. good book.

SO… that’s just my intro to really start this discussion: How do you pitch the value of advertising to smaller companies in times of economic hardship? With the economy where it is, are you finding it difficult to get new companies on board, or even get old customers to keep drinking from the well?

Maybe no one will want to share their feelings or thoughts on these issues- which I can understand. I am not in advertising directly, but work with HR Ad Agencies, who create employment ads for companies. It’s easy to work with agencies, because they understand the value of advertising resources, and make good logical decisions based on good data.

I think I’m seeing fewer companies being represented by HR Ad Agencies- is it simply due to the downturn in the economy, or is there more to it?

First, please join me in sending your thoughts and prayers to the hundreds of thousands of people who are without power, and the two million who were displaced by Hurricane Gustav. As Americans, we can sometimes be a people that idolize extremes in the world, and I hope that the survivors of Gustav get as much assistance, empathy, and attention as is appropriate to such an event. Consider for a moment, wherever you are sitting right now, what your day would look like if you got the call to evacuate with 2 million of your closest neighbors- imagine what the roads were like, the stores, the sidewalks, the bus stations. And tomorrow, if you decide to come back, you’ll find windows missing, or holes in the roof that allowed the downpour to flood your home, or your beautiful landscape you worked all summer on ripped from the earth. Of course, you may not have power either, so cleaning up would be a task straight from history.

There are more storms coming- in the form of hurricanes, or forest fires, or blizzards, or tornadoes, or floods… Despite our best efforts, we can never insulate or isolate ourselves from the enormity of earth’s environment. Natural disasters, as these are called, and social disasters, including poverty, homelessness, disease, crime…, affect great swaths of our world, our nations, our communities, and our lives. The effects ripple through our families and values, our economy, and our social ego, and can be lasting for years to come.

OK, so I don’t mean to bring everyone down first thing on Friday. So, what exactly can HR professionals, recruiters, and job seekers do to help out when disasters like this arise? How can we help our fellow Americans in a time of need? What special skills can we provide that will make a difference?

The company I work for hosts a Louisiana-specific internet job board, and ideas were floated yesterday to see what could be done. I thought I’d share what we are trying to do, along with some other thoughts on what we can do in times like these. Our first thought was that there would be a substantial need for volunteers and assistance in the clean up efforts. We are reaching out to the parishes and community centers that have phones and electricity and offering to post those needs at not cost on our sites. Of course a primary obstacle that we are facing is that many people in the region may not have access to the web, including the government centers. If you are in, or know of anyone in a position to take advantage of this offer, please have them contact the company. Our thoughts were that we could help find and mobilize those who were looking for work, but also cared about helping the community.

As HR professionals, recruiters, advertising resources, and job seekers we all have roles we can play to help out. Below are just a couple ideas that came to me, and I’d love to hear your comments on other ideas you may have.

• Advertising resources: Give freely of your inventory. Go out of your way to reach those who can be reached and find out what information or call for assistance needs to be broadcast. Offer special rates WHEREVER YOU ARE to companies and send a % to the relief or rebuilding efforts in the are. This is a great opportunity for you to join in what Bill Gates discussed in the July 31 issue of TIME- Creative Capitalism.
• Recruiters: Know people who are out of work right now? Blue collar, white collar, or no collar makes no difference- find out what efforts require volunteers, get the details, and pick up the phone to call your candidates. If they are not starting a job today or in the next few days, give them information on how they can put their time to good use. It’s not only good for the people in need, but good for the emotional and psychological state of those out of work- and can be a strong resume builder. Use your vast networks to raise money for any relief efforts that you are comfortable with.
• HR Professionals: Make it your job to know what support those who are affected by the disaster need. Communicate it to your company, and give detailed instructions on how they can help. Consider suggesting a one-time donation be made today, or give workers transportation to Red Cross stations to donate blood, if money is not an option. Connect with local HR professionals in the area, and start a sister HR partnership to help support any local efforts.
• Job Seekers: Invest in your self and the country by volunteering to assist with any clean up or rebuilding needs. You don’t need any special skills aside from the desire to help. Look for ways that you can help either in the area that is affected, or in your own home town. Give Blood. Help load food supplies at food banks. Help answer phones at crisis relief centers. Be involved in crises that affect or country. Doing good plants seeds for goodness to come back to you. Volunteerism is an amazing experience and can help refocus your career choices, and help you build your resume.

Those are just a couple of my thoughts. I hope you’ll share your ideas via the comments links. Thanks for taking a moment to take a look at the scenes from the recruiting front lines in the gulf coast.

As I spend more time focused on the processes and strategies that the best local businesses use to attract the best local talent, and how the best local talent finds the best local career opportunities, it’s clear to me that a face time is one aspect of the recruitment process that is absolutely vital, and cannot be replaced with technology- no matter how fancy, shiny, user friendly, or cutting edge.

That being said, I also see more and more people relying more heavily on the internet and placing less emphasis on this valuable face time. Face Time does not include video conferences, as a two dimensional image cannot substitute for three dimensional body language. So, if we generally agree that the most valuable form of connecting with other people and identifying the right fit for ourselves and our companies, why this decreased engagement with on-site or in-person career events?

There are some very good reasons, actually. Many feel that job fairs only attract a certain demographic, and if the jobs you have aren’t in that demographic, it’s perceived to be a waste or time. On the job seeker side, many people see the “same old” companies represented time and again at career events and job fairs, which normally consist or larger national organizations with larger recruiting budgets. Rarely will you find a career fair filled with great, small to mid-sized, privately owned, profitable, growing organizations from a variety of industries. I certainly understand these objections and concerns, and am willing to acknowledge their validity on some level. So, how do you attract the right kind of candidates to fill your current needs, increase your pipeline of talent for future important placements, and identify the next wave of hires for any revolving positions you have?

How about hosting your own career fair or open house at your organization. This practice, once reserved for only the largest employers with a variety of current openings, can be the best way for any business (yes, you’re business too!) to find great talent, and actually create the opportunity to share the company’s vision. This type of event can be used to truly market what makes your company special in the labor market- your unique employment proposition, if you will. It also allows you to generate interest in your company’s service or products to all the attendees that you don’t hire.

Job Seekers, whether active or passive, can also reap great benefits from attending such events. This gives you the opportunity to more thoroughly assess the employer as your next destination, and a forum to ask questions and meet employees. Also, because you aren’t broadcasting your resume, or attending a larger scale event, there is less likelihood that your co-workers will find out about your wandering eye.

If you haven’t executed this type of event, however, there are some very tricky steps and important pitfalls to take note of. When launching an employer hosted open house, the best practice is to include employees from every department in your company (or in the physical location, if you are part of a larger company), so that you can attract a strong group of candidates from all fields. You’ll also want to make sure you’re screening attendees in advance, so you can plan your time at the event. Communicating the open house is a puzzle as well, as you don’t want to rely on any traditional broadcast media. Traditional Broadcast Media can be a good thing for some types of advertising, but it does have its limitations. One, of course is the cost. If your budget only allows for one TV station, or 2 radio stations, then you’re limiting your reach to only the people who watch or listen to those stations. There are better ways to reach a wider array of employees.

I have a couple questions that I’d love comments on, and hope you’ll also answer the new poll question above.

That’s the way it looks to me from the Recruiting Front Lines. Good luck and happy hunting!