Small Employer Recruiting Challenges

As you might expect, LinkedIn does some research on job seeker behavior. And their findings are pretty interesting.

22% of fully-employed people are not open to new opportunities. 16% are not actively looking, but network with friends about jobs. 44% are open to considering jobs, but only when someone contacts them first (typically a recruiter).

Only 18% are applying to job postings.

OK, small employers. If you run ads, you can at least hope to get some good people in that 18% … right?

Well, as I mentioned in my last post on this topic, your job ads aren’t doing as much good as you thought they were. If you are not on Indeed, and if you are not mobile friendly, and if you are not easy to apply to, that 18% gets whittled down pretty fast. Your job ads are only giving you a tiny fraction of the 18% now.

These are just a couple of the slides from a presentation we have on this topic. Contact me if you want to know more.

Job Seekers Went Mobile, and Left Small Employers Standing Still

Where do you think most job seekers begin their search for a new job? Most recruiters will tell you that candidates start by searching on the big job boards like Monster, Dice and CareerBuilder.

And those recruiters will be wrong.

Ten times more job seekers start their job search on Google than anywhere else.  (Update: I have not been able to verify this statistic elsewhere, and it clearly uses global information, not just the United States.)

Where do small employers post their jobs? When I ask HR managers where they post their open jobs, they usually rattle off a list of job boards. But they almost never mention Indeed. Yet three recent studies found Indeed to be the number one external source of hire for employers in the US.  (Not coincidentally, all three surveys were from companies that provide Applicant Tracking Systems that integrate seamlessly with Indeed: iCims, SilkRoad and Newton Software.)

How did that happen?

It’s simple, comScore research shows that two out of three searches of any kind originate on Google. And Google job searches often lead job seekers to Indeed. See for yourself. Type your own title and location into the Google search bar and see what comes up. The first few jobs you will see are probably posted on Indeed. Consequently, Indeed has three times more unique visitors per month than CareerBuilder (80 million vs 24 million). (UPDATE: In January Indeed had 100 million visitors)

But the bigger threat to small employers long term is not Google upending the job boards, it’s mobile and social.

According to comScore, more than one out of every three minutes spent online is now spent “beyond the PC” on smart phones and tablets. Already 30% of Indeed’s total candidate visits are mobile. They encourage it. Both Indeed and CareerBuilder have mobile apps that let candidates apply to jobs from their phones with minimal effort … as long as the employer enabled the mobile-apply functionality. But very few small employers make their job ads and career sites mobile friendly … because many small employers don’t have a career site.

In a 2012 study by potentialpark, 77% of recent college grads expect to see a company career site and 94% go on to say that in addition to the career site, employers should present themselves on at least one social or professional platform. 61% expect employers to have a Facebook career page, and more than half expect a company page on LinkedIn. And if you disappoint them, they will be vocal about their job search experiences. 92 percent say they discuss their job search experience with others, both in-person and through social media.

So let’s sum this up. Only 4% of job seekers start their job search with a specific company in mind. So if your ads are not in the right place to be seen, you won’t be considered. And if somehow candidates do see your ad, 34% will not apply if your application process is too much of a hassle. And if they do apply, and don’t enjoy the experience, they just might leave a bad review about your company on Glassdoor or Indeed, scaring off everyone else who might consider working for you. (I called this trend, “The Amazonification of Recruiting” in a post on The HR Examiner.)

Employers, this is your wake up call. In the past 3 years, almost everything you took for granted about job advertising has changed.

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(To see more research on recruiting, visit my online library of articles.)

DISCLOSURE: This is not an endorsement of any vendor. I am not paid by anyone mentioned in this post. I am however, a client of Careerbuilder, iCims and Indeed.

How To Interview An Innovator

Clients often engage us to help them find an innovator for a strategically significant project. They need people who have taken something entirely new and gotten it off the ground, which is all too rare.

So that means we need to help them find a way to interview innovators and distinguish the poseurs and pretenders from the Real Deal Innovators. The world is full of one-hit wonders who, like Forest Gump, happened to be present once at a successful time in history. Their false confidence and hubris will stand in the way of your innovation as surely as their inflated salary requirements will impoverish your new initiative.

As it turns out, it’s not that hard to separate the pretenders from the doers. I consider you the Real Deal if:

• You spend more time innovating and putting your ideas into practice than almost anyone in your peer group (which accelerates your expertise far beyond everyone in your field).  You have earned the respect of a few industry  insiders, but you are probably not famous or widely known. (This is widely misunderstood. Being famous is a reverse predictor … it takes time and effort to build fame. Time that could be better spent on innovation.)
• Unlike the famous people who speak at all the cool conferences, you have the tyranny of daily results driving your innovation. You measure yourself against hard metrics. You don’t come up with ideas and then spend time giving speeches about it. Trying to look smart. Leading to the inevitable decline of your actual skills as you progressively lose touch with reality and spend more time with sycophants.
• And you probably don’t work in a place where your ideas have to be approved by a committee. You don’t spend all day in meetings. And you certainly don’t spend all day reporting on your results instead of producing them

No, when you are the Real Deal, you spend the vast majority of your time in the trenches. You know that most ideas don’t survive contact with reality. But parts of them do. So you try things, fail, learn, refine, and improve. Constantly experimenting, and constantly challenged by the imperative of producing results. Genius physicist Neils Bohr said “An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.”

It’s bloody hard to be on the bleeding edge of innovation. Creating the future is always uncomfortable and from day to day it usually feels like failing … until you look back from time to time and see how far you’ve come. (I am collecting a series of the most useful articles on this topic here: http://www.scoop.it/t/driving-innovation. Scott Berkun’s classic book The Myths of Innovation is also a must-read for innovators.)

So how do you interview an innovator?

• Listen for the daily grind of it.
• Listen for the experimentation, the risk, the failure and the grit and resilience to try again.
• Run from people who describe it as a big success with no moments of uncertainty.
• And then ask yourself, “Am I really ready to put up with a Real Deal Innovator?”

The Daily Grind of Innovation

We’re constantly developing recruiting approaches that get better results and keep costs down for our clients. Someone I respect in the executive search business looked at one of our latest process innovations and proclaimed, “Once again you are about 100 years ahead of us.”

But, as science fiction writer William Gibson observed, “The future is already here–it’s just not evenly distributed.” Like you, we’re just trying to keep up with the pace of change swirling around us. So as we leap ahead in some areas, we find ourselves falling behind in others.

This week I happened to look at the well-oiled machine that is our job posting process. We find most of our candidates through direct recruiting, but we still advertise on job boards …  just to be sure. Years ago, we optimized the daylights out of our job postings. On CareerBuilder for example, we still get three times more applicants to our job postings than the average (yeah, they have reports for that).

But when we looked this week, disturbingly, we noticed that a significant number of ads on CareerBuilder have become more visually attractive than ours (as employer branding has become more commonplace). We could no longer count on our ads to be interesting because they are well written. The context of our ads changed. In a visual world, a text ad looks dull when you place it next to other ads with pretty graphics. This is not an immediate problem (it barely registers in our statistics yet) but inevitably we will see a decline in our ad effectiveness. (Naturally I spent an hour on the phone with CareerBuilder to find a solution).

Innovation is a daily grind.

Ten years ago, a big recruiting innovation would create a competitive advantage for years. But now, with a faster pace of change, we find the need to revisit almost every aspect of our search process every 12 to 18 months. Our Operations Manager put it this way,  ”Keeping our processes current is more like polishing the silver than painting the house.”

 

Job Descriptions, Made Interesting

Job Descriptions, Made Interesting

Everyone knows that most job descriptions are dull and rarely worth reading.

Which is a problem when you want to be interesting to potential candidates.

Well-written job descriptions dramatically outperform dull job descriptions…but they are still just a long string of text.

Until now.

We are beta testing a new tool that transforms job descriptions into infographics. (Go ahead, click on it, you know you want to…)

Right now we can only show you a fuzzy picture of the functionality, but in a few weeks you will be able to interact with it.

And when you do, you’ll realize that recruiting is about to take another big step forward.

(Intrigued? Look at what the Gates Foundation is doing with infographics. Text will never be the same.)

Reinventing the Executive Search Firm (Part Three: Being Digitally Approachable)

Many years ago, you could judge an organization by the professionalism of their sales force and the quality of their marketing documents (“Hey nice suit, and gosh that’s an impressive brochure!”)

Now, nobody wants a sales call and nobody reads brochures. Buyers do their research, gather recommendations from people they trust, check out the organization online and make their purchase decisions before they ever pick up the phone. (This is true for both candidates and employers).

Google is the new business card … and brochure … and sales force. Your reputation is now your digital reputation–whatever shows on the first page or two of the search results.

An engaging website with great content is expected by everyone. Authentic, online testimonials are expected by most people. A healthy social media community is important to the social media savvy people. A quick Google search should reveal a blog or a book or an interview that reflects well upon you and conveys how you view the world. Oh, and it doesn’t hurt to have something else impressive pop up on page one of the Google results, perhaps an an award or something… 

And what about online reviews? With an empowered consumer, advertising  is giving way to online reviews. Yelp drives significant candidate flow to some staffing firms (and away from others).

Which brings me to executive search.

Why are so many executive search firms still operating with a bare-bones online presence? I can tell you from experience that it takes years to develop enough content to support a robust online community, and whoever gets started earliest often gathers the most attention.

In every sector of the economy, almost every organization is working diligently to make their marketing and communications efforts more social media friendly.

But when you look around, most executive search firms are still woefully behind the curve. Firms that are not gaining experience in social media and firms that have not invested in becoming “digitially approachable” will find themselves falling further and further behind.

You can read Part Two of this series here.

Reinventing the Executive Search Firm (Part Two: Contacting Candidates)

Many years ago, the most effective way to introduce yourself to a busy professional was to call their office.

Now, phone calls are an interruption and voicemail is a black hole. Many people consider it rude to simply call someone without making some sort of introduction first. Good manners now dictate that communciation is asynchronous–the recipient gets to choose when and where they would like to be contacted. I’m finding that even welcome calls, like employers who want to engage my services, usually start first with an email. 

Many years ago, an effective way to recruit good people was to call good people and ask who they knew.

Now, all those calls go to voicemail (see “black hole” above). The most effective way to find good people is to identify the online communities where they gather, to carefully identify potential candidates from their “digital footprints” and online profiles, and then to share an authentic, compelling message with rich detail via email or social media.

Candidates can’t be kept in the dark about details, or talked into anything, they simply want to be trusted with the facts and then invited to share the opportunity with whomoever they wish, and when and how they see fit. In this way, friends share opportunities with friends, and good recruiting messages are socialized organically, without expensive cold-calling or advertising.

Pushy sales reps and voicemail cannot do what good messaging, email and social media can.

Many years ago, it would take time and a trip to the library to research an organization. So the search firm would know a great deal more about a job opportunity than the candidate would. The recruiter would always have an information advantage.

Now, candidates can tap into their social media connections to find people in their network familar with an employer, and anyone with an internet connection can be reasonably well-informed within a few hours.

Which brings me to the executive search business model.

Executive search firms need to stop hiring cold-calling sales professionals, and stop paying them steep commissions in an attempt to talk people into jobs. This business model is increasingly out of step with the times.

In the modern world, search firms must be able to:

• Craft an authentic, compelling message that’s interesting enough to be shared.
• Find the right people to contact, and get the message out in a respectful and efficient manner.
• Trust the candidate to decide what is in their own best interest.

In our comparison tests, we’ve found that interesting messages, properly socialized,  significantly outperform cold-calling.

The executive search industy will inevitably adapt to the forces reshaping every other industry, and we welcome the change.

Read Part One of this series here.