How to Give a Really Bad First Impression of Your Company

You know the drill.  You post a job ad and 300 people apply.  You know, at best,  there are five qualified people in that stack of resumes, so what’s the fastest way to find them?   Some employers ask job seekers to jump through a hoop before committing any time to them.   The hoop  might involve a pre-employment test, performing a work-related task like writing something, or even asking something really time consuming like developing a business plan in order to apply for a job. 

Except here is the problem.

It’s rude.  

And it drives away many of the most talented people you really want to talk to. 

By asking for something before you have committed anything you convey that your time is worth more than theirs … that they are just one of thousands and you are too busy to talk to them.   Except top performers don’t see themselves as mindless drones, as one of thousands.  And remember, there were, at most, only five of them in that big stack of resumes -  but in your haste to save time, you just gave those five the same bad experience you gave everyone else. 

Think about how you feel when a company treats you that way.   I went to Home Depot this weekend, only because my local hardware store was already closed.  I detest going to any retailer who is not staffed and managed appropriately to deliver actual customer service.  Heck, even the self-checkout process was poorly designed.  Sure, they got my money, but it was frustrating and dehumanizing … just like the first impression you are making on everyone who answered your ad.  

Don’t misunderstand me.  It is smart to ask for extra information, it’s even a great idea to test people, but please mind your manners and do those things only AFTER you have first spoken with them.   After you have spoken with someone, you are welcome to ask for something else.  To save time, I think a phone interview makes a lot of sense.

OK, so if  my “mind your manners” rant was not compelling enough for you … Steve Boese wrote a great post on your real first impression with job seekers.  No, it’s not your offices – it’s your web presence and what people say about you.  It’s what happens long before they apply to your ad.   Google is your first impression, followed by your website, corporate job site, and then what other people who interviewed with you reported about their experience.  (InsideJob on Facebook for example). 

If your hiring process feels like shopping at Home Depot, these experiences will surely make their way into the online conversation about your company.  Then your first impression on Google will be working against you, and your recruiting problems will grow ever larger. 

Oh, and forget about those 5 good people, they all dropped out long before you got around to interviewing.

How to Solve Your Recruiting Problems Long-Term (but it won’t be easy)

You pay to post jobs on a job board, but then you don’t like the candidate pool.  You pay more to search the resume databases of the job boards, but you still don’t find anyone you actually want to hire.  Search firms incessantly cold-call you,  offering to fill your jobs for a fee of 30% of annual salary, but you can’t afford that, and besides, you really wonder if they aren’t just sending you the same people you saw on the job boards.  So how do you break out of the vicious cycle?   How do you solve your recruiting problems long term and break fee of the cycle of job board disappointment?

You turn to Seth Godin.  His post on the reality of new media is so simple it’s revolutionary.  Admittedly, his post discusses marketing and never mentions recruiting, but when you read it you’ll see exactly what I mean:

• In marketing, we used to “rent” an audience from old media companies (TV networks).  In recruiting, the old media giants are not TV networks, but job boards like Monster.     And of course, when you “rent” an audience, you don’t have to treat it very well (just like a rental car).  Who cares what happens to the portion of the audience you were not interested in?  No sense even sending them a rejection letter, right?  You’ll never talk to them again…
• But in new media, you don’t have to rely on someone else’s disgruntled, beat up, poorly maintained rental audience.  You go direct.  You build your very own private communications channel and invite the good people there.  It’s yours, so you invest in them, lavish attention on them with a Facebook fan page,  Twitter account and maybe even a job seeker blog.  You show them what it’s like to work for you with videos.   (Check out  The Sodexo job seeker blog, RSM McGladrey on Youtube, and Comscore on Twitter) .
• As you invest and your audience grows, you eventually bypass the job boards entirely because you have attracted an audience of candidates on your own.  You started your own conversation.  You built your own community, and because you treated them right, they are eager to hear from you. 
• It’s cheap, but it’s not fast and it’s not easy.  It’s an investment, but the benefits are yours and yours alone.  And when you invest in building and maintaining a platform – your own media channel – you will have a powerful, sustainable competitive advantage over the “renters” who have to share someone else’s audience.  Your community of people wouldn’t dream of looking there for a job – they have you.   

One recent study showed that job seekers spend an average of 5 hours a week on social media sites each week.   Another study showed that internet users overall have tripled the percentage of time they spend on social network and blogging sites just since last year.  Clearly the time for action is right now.

So here’s the real question.  The tools exist, the audience is ready.  Do you want to solve your recruiting problems and gain the first mover advantage now by building your own channel?  Or do you want to keep renting and be shackled to that familiar recruiting problem for just a little while longer?

Are Job Boards Dead, or Are Your Job Ads Just Deadly Dull?

Look around and you’ll see quite a bit of debate about the ”death of job boards.”  Many question the hefty prices they charge, saying that  free is the wave of the future for job boards.  Some question whether they attract great candidates - here, here, here and here for example.   I’ve certainly been bitterly disappointed by the performance of some job boards in Washington, feeling my money was completely wasted. 

Similarly, candidates often feel like their time is wasted reading job boards.

But the great job board debate often overlooks one big thing - the ads themselves. Rarely do I see recruiters ask a different question.  “What would make our recruitment advertising more effective?”  

Recruitment Advertising Executive Jeff Perry just did that in his post on ERE.  Here are two key points:

• Five times more people read the headline than read the ad – meaning, your lead-in matters.  Jeff says you have about 10 seconds to capture your reader’s attention (but I think he overstates that by about 9 seconds)
• Think about what the tone of your ad conveys about your company – serious, committed, playful, creative -what?  (Just a guess here, but right now, it probably conveys that you are pretty dull because you are probably using the soul crushing language of the job description).

Job boards are not dead (not yet anyway).  While many are simply awful, we have a few that we find are consistently cost effective.  I know for a fact that you can judiciously use job boards to your advantage for very cost effective recruiting.  You just can’t be dull.

For more on what you can do, see my previous post bad ads attract bad candidates, and the companion post: good job advertising gives you leverage. 

What has your experience been?  Have you given up on the job boards entirely or are they still working for you?  Inquiring minds want to know.

Hiring in Washington DC

New clients often ask me why recruiting great people in Washington DC remains stubbornly difficult.   One of my favorite job aggregator sites – Indeed - explains why in a very simple graphic that compares unemployed people relative to job postings.   (9/15/09 Note:  Indeed updated this chart recently).

Washington and Baltimore have 1 job posting for every unemployed person.  This is the best performance of any major city listed.  Other cities,  like New York have a ratio of 2 unemployed people for every job posting.  But poor Detroit comes in last with eighteen unemployed people for every job posting.  

The graphic illustrates that recruiting is essentially a local business.  Hiring difficulty varies widely from city to city.

By the way, it’s also a good reminder, that if you want to hire better people (at least in Washington), you have to write a better job ad.  Something I have been ranting talking about for quite some time.

Why is the DC Job Market so Irritating?

Employers - here’s more bad news:  The DC job market is showing signs of returning to “normal.”  While hiring for some jobs is easier now, “normal” for DC means that employers will have an increasingly difficult time finding highly qualified people to fill every critical opening.   

The daily drumbeat of bad economic news that has pummeled us all since November is slowly letting up.   Government recovery plans are taking shape, and government money will soon be flowing (yea!)   Layoff notices are not coming quite so quickly.   And a once in a generation hiring opportunity is slowly beginning to slip away from you.  You are now missing one of the best chances to upgrade your workforce that you may ever experience.

I know hiring managers find this hiring difficulty both astonishing and really, really irritating.  They want to upgrade to better people, they really do, but most just don’t know how.   HR professionals (who are often short-staffed themselves) are hearing managers bitterly complain about their internal recruiting efforts:   

“Are you kidding me?  In the midst of the worst recession in twenty five years, we can’t find better candidates than this?”

“I can’t believe I have to pay a search fee in a recession?  Seriously.  Where are the good people?”

“Are you telling me that we received 300 resumes from our ad on Monster and only three are worth interviewing?”

So why didn’t this huge financial calamity, this Near Great Depression, this global fiasco make hiring easier for ALL of us here in DC? 

Well the recession did make hiring easier, if you were looking for people to work in Detroit.  Or if you were looking for construction workers, auto workers, or Wall Street types.  But you aren’t looking for those people, now are you?  No, you are looking for the same skills everyone else is, and those skills are still in relatively short supply, because very few firms in our area had big  layoffs of people with really hard-to-find skills.  (Circular logic, I know, but it’s still true.)

So what evil forces are conspiring against your recruiting efforts?   Why are you still missing out on this once-in-a-generation hiring opportunity? 

First, don’t confuse national unemployment rates with local unemployment rates.  We are deeply fortunate to work in the strongest job market in the country - our unemployment rates for most occupations never really spiked.  But to take it a step further, don’t confuse the macro unemployment rate with the number of highly qualified job seekers who have the skills you need to thrive in a recession.   It’s a darn shame that thousands of unemployed auto workers don’t make it easier for you to hire your next CFO, but they don’t.

 Second, “post and pray” job advertising does not work any better now than it did before - you just get 300 desperate unqualified people instead of 100 or 150.  Sure you get a few gems in there, but not as many as you would expect, given that everyone tells us this is the worst economy they have ever seen. 

But the biggest reason you are not seeing great people lining up to take your jobs, is you haven’t thought enough about who you want to hire yet.   When you post a job without first taking the time to think hard about it, everybody who reads your ad can tell right away.  And the person you want?  That hard charging, no excuses, high achieving, go-getter who gets results in a recession?  They are results oriented, so when they know you are not seriously thinking about your business, they do not even apply.

In the past few weeks I have had a dozen clients tell me the same thing, almost verbatim:  ”We’ve been trying to hire someone on our own for several months now, and with the economy so bad, I really expected we would have filled it, but all I’m doing is sifting through resumes and nobody jumps out at me – I just don’t have time for this and I can’t afford to leave this critical position unfilled any longer. 

Hey DC, welcome back to your “normal” irritatingly familiar ways.

Reaching Candidates with Social Media

Are you incorporating social media into your recruiting efforts?  Smart use of social media (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) might be the key to improving your results and reducing your costs.  And new options are emerging almost daily.

60% of Baby Boomers are avid consumers of social media like blogs and forums – up from 40% last year.   Almost 25% are active in social networks, up from 15% last year.  For insight beyond the stats, read Jeremiah Owyang’s article about How Baby Boomers Use Social Media. 

When CPA Trendlines surveyed where CPAs spend time online, Facebook was a huge favorite.  CPA adoption of social media is astonishing, and I wonder if it is equally true for many other professions who generally hire introverts, like engineers.  (Please excuse the gross over-generalization there, just asking a question).

Social networking site Plaxo, has recently formed a partnership with SimplyHired.

And LinkedIn Groups now has free job postings.

I’d like to note that every article I just referenced was sourced from Twitter.  So is Twitter a waste of time?  Perhaps, but not for me.  I find it to be a very effective way to stay current with the rapidly changing recruiting landscape.   Hmm, now I just wonder how will I find time to see which of these new options work best for my clients… 

So how do you plan to use the power of social media to reduce your recruiting costs, improve your relationships with qualified candidates, and build your employment brand?

10 Suggestions for the Job Seeker

My niece’s roommate was a miserable, depressed,  unemployed, self-absorbed wretch of a recent college graduate.  Slept till noon, never left the apartment, never saw friends.   Then a couple weeks ago she “caved” and took an unpaid internship in her field.  Got up early, got dressed, went out in the world and did some work.   Within days, her mood brightened, she made some new friends and reconnected with old ones.  She reengaged with life.  So yeah, work matters.  And while you are looking for work, you need to find ways to engage and connect with others . . . and there are A LOT of new ways to do that.

I’ve been there.  Looking for work is scary, lonely, emotionally draining and can feel much harder than actually working.   It’s inefficient, uncertain, and there is no guarantee of success (just like, you know, having a job in these turbulent times).

But if you are a job seeker listen up.  I talk to A LOT of you.  And almost all of you make at least two serious mistakes when you look for work.  You either expect recruiters to find you a job, or you expect your friends to sympathize with you  and agree with you that your approach to job hunting is fine.  Both expectations are wrong.   

First, please realize that search firms don’t exist to help people find jobs, we exist to help companies find self-reliant people.   Heck, even career counselors don’t exist to help you find a job – they exist to teach you the skills you need to find a job on your own.  Most people are simply terrible at looking for work, and even if you did it before, the way to look for work now is different than it was before.  It’s not just about resumes and cover letters and meeting people for lunch and coffee to network – you need to do MORE. 

Your approach to job search is NOT fine, and I won’t tell you it is.   I will, however, happily share with you some tools and resources you need now, to help you on your path toward self-reliance.  If you take these actions, I will be terribly impressed with you and absolutely delighted to help you in any way I can.    So here are my top 10 suggestions: 

Slash Your Recruiting Costs AND Your Turnover

When was the last time your job advertising eliminated 80% of your employee turnover? 

I’ve written about how bad job ads tend to attract only desperate candidates, wasting your time and money.   But let’s face it – candidates from job boards still fill a lot of your open jobs.  So for most companies, improving the performance of your recruitment advertising will have an outsized impact on your ability to attract top performers, control your recruiting costs, and hold down the cost of employee turnover.  

When I refer to the ”performance” of your advertising  I am not referring to how many resumes you get – more is not necessarily better, and often worse.  No, I’m referring to your ability to reliably, predictably recruit the calibre of people you need, exactly when you need them, at the lowest possible cost.

Great ads give you leverage – once they work,  you can use them over and over again, keeping your candidate pipeline full, and dramatically reducing your downtime (time-to-fill) between hires. 

We helped one of our clients eliminate agency fees, cut employee turnover 80% in a critical job, and build a very low cost candidate pipeline for people with specialized skills. . . simply by improving their online advertising:

• Turnover in the position in 2006 was 27 people. 
• Turnover in the position in 2007 was 21 people. 
• We developed and ran the new ad for them in late 2007, resulting in 5 hires from the initial slate of of 8 candidates.  The client then ran the ad on their own a few times in 2008, resulting in an additional 5 hires. (10 hires that year from the same ad). 
• Turnover in the position in 2008 was just 5 people – an 80% reduction.   Also, agency fees in 2008 were eliminated. 
• Managers who formerly lived in fear of turnover are finally free to manage employee performance courageously,  knowing with certainty that if someone is not working out, they can be replaced quickly and at low cost.   

That’s the kind of leverage smart online outreach can give you.

Bad Job Ads Attract Only Desperate Candidates

All online advertising attracts some bad candidates, but poorly written job ads seem to attract only desperate candidates.   Bad ads look like all the other ads:

 ”XYZ company, located in Washington DC, is the foremost widget maker in the region.  We are seeking a Controller.  Responsibilities include… blah blah blah”

Research shows that job seekers look for jobs using the title they have, or the title they want.  So for fun, I took a common job – controller – and I went to Indeed (where all the candidates are going these days) and looked at the first 10 non-agency ads for a controller in my zipcode.  I cut and pasted all the job descriptions into a fun site called wordle that gives you a visual representation of the words you are using - you can see the word cloud here  – it’s a very cool representation of some really dull ad copy.  (For a bit of contrast, this is the word cloud for what this blog is about).

Time will not permit me to cover all the things wrong with the ads, so I’ll just give you the highlights (lowlights?). 

Recruiting Myths: Good People Don’t Look for Jobs in a Recession

One of the many reasons I like to blog is to gleefully disagree with conventional wisdom.  I don’t know if “good people don’t look for jobs during a recession” qualifies yet as conventional wisdom, but it does meet my four criteria:  It’s widely repeated, simplistic, unexamined, and outdated.  Therefore you can gain a serious competitive advantage by challenging it.    

In every recession, a few search professionals advance the argument that “top talent does not look for jobs during economic downturns” (so presumably employers need to hire those same search firms to find the “A players”).   The concept is that in a bad market good people with good jobs become risk averse and hunker down – you practically have to dynamite them out of their chairs - and only a silver tongued headhunter with uncommon skill can recruit them away.   The theory is that good people will rarely answer ads, and mediocre recruiters (or what Josh Letourneau hilariously calls  “Big-Box Publicly Traded Candidate-Grinders”) will never be effective.  As with most conventional wisdom, this is all partly true (naturally it’s the part that’s not true that I think about).

Quite a few blog posts have been written about wooing passive candiates in a recession (Look here and here). I’ve heard variations of this argument from people I really respect in the industry (all vaguely implying that “active” candidates are somehow inferior to people who are not looking).     Finally, the cherry on top of the conventional wisdom sundae -  is the advice that you have to a pay a huge salary premium to get someone to “take a risk” on a new job – see “How Much Cash Does it Take to Steal a Passive Candidate?.   Perhaps I’ll revisit the whole “passive candiates are better than active candidates” myth in a future post, but probably not.  It definitely meets my 4 criteria for conventional wisdom – but Ronald Katz already did a brilliant job of eviscerating it in his post “What’s So Great About Passive Candidates.”  (For balance, be sure to read the comments -  the people who disagreed with him also made some decent points).

Ok, so why am I convinced that great people look for jobs in a recession?  Well mainly, because we’re talking to them every day.  Lots of them.  They are migrating to DC in droves. 

Recruiters: Be More Like Amazon and Less Like Kmart

Even with the right skills, even in a good job market, job hunting is a miserable experience.  In difficult economic times like these, small changes in your recruiting process can pay huge dividends.  Oddly, common courtesy is now a competitive advantage.

Powerful forces have forever changed how consumers get information to make purchasing decisions.   Before the internet, companies controlled most of the information.  There were very few ways to learn about a product or service, except from a salesperson.   If you wanted to buy something, and you did not know anyone else who already owned it, you had to read the company catalogue or talk to a sales rep … but that has all changed.  

Now that information is freely available, buyers are more in control and they like that, a lot.    College students wouldn’t consider selecting their classes from a syllabus; they go to RateMyProfessor to read what other students say.  Easy grader?  Engaging teacher?  It’s all there.   (Based upon 10 other student comments, my daughter already knows she can skip one of her classes this semester, as long as she keeps up with the reading). . . Yeah, it’s a whole new world.  If your buying experience is not on a par with Amazon, your buyers assume you just aren’t trying very hard. 

Sales reps used to be a good source of information, but now their ”information” is greeted so skeptically, they almost get in the way.  Buyers reduce their risk of making a mistake and feel more in control by reading unbiased sources of information that are outside the control of the seller.  We all visit consumer-focused websites to read customer reviews before making major purchases and often arrive at a showroom knowing more than the sales reps.   Why do we all do this?  Because we have all had the experience of trusting the sales rep,  getting burned,  and walking away saying “never again.”     Sadly, there is a reason old jokes like this one keep being told:  ”How do you know when a headhunter is lying?  His lips are moving.”   Marketing guru Doug Davidoff puts it this way:

“ Value is binary. If you are not creating it, you are reducing it. . . Every activity has a cost, whether it’s time, attention, opportunity or money. Any time a customer or prospect interacts with your company and they don’t feel they’ve received more benefit than what it cost them in time, they feel cheated.”  (Read more here)

So how does this apply to recruiting?

Job Search is Fastest Growing Online Category

comScore, the “Neilsen ratings” of the online world,  just released an analysis showing that job search is the fastest growing content site category in 2008, growing an astonishing 51 percent.

Careerbuilder, HotJobs, and Indeed led the way with site visitors, each growing more than 75% vs. December of last year.  In their analysis, comScore also did a demographic profile of the visitors to the job boards.  Usage among people under 25 and over 50 actually went down, but people aged 25 – 49 were up almost 5%.

In other news, Google reported that their 4th quarter earnings were up 18% over last year, so I’m going to go way out on a limb here and suggest that maybe this whole internet thing just might catch on…so to celebrate my gutsy prediction, here are some fun stories that came across my desk today:

If Staffing Looks so Easy, Why is it so Difficult? (1 of 2)

In a tough economy, every employee really matters, otherwise they would not still be around right?   Well, not really, because most organizations do not manage performance that tightly – but we’ve already discussed that at length in previous blog posts.  So in this 2 part series, let’s talk about your critical new hires, the ones who really count extra now – the really critical new hires that still get approved despite your ”hiring freeze.”   These are hires the CEO has to approve, like when your CFO or Director of Development quits exactly when you need them most.  Hiring freeze or not, when someone absolutely essential to your future existance  quits – you are going to replace them.  And, odds are, you are going to make some big mistakes in how you hire that new person you can’t live without. 

The only reason to hire is to get business results. If you didn’t care about results, you wouldn’t need employees – so, if staffing is ultimately about getting business results, why does it so often fail to deliver them?

Tolstoy observed, “Happy families are all alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Similarly, every company that becomes unhappy with staffing becomes unhappy in its own unique way. Although staffing appears to be a routine, traditional business practice on the surface, it is actually one of the most daunting and complex tasks facing today’s executives.

Why is staffing so difficult? Let’s break it down. To regularly find and select candidates who can rapidly contribute to business results, you must always succeed at all of recruiting’s critical tasks. First, you need the business acumen to clearly identify the business results you want and how you expect someone to achieve those results. Next, you must identify the precise competencies an employee requires to drive the results you expect. Next, you need to identify exactly what it would take to attract the right person to each job for the right reasons. Next, you need a recruiter who knows how to access a large pool of qualified job candidates, present your opportunity in a compelling way, generate interest, and get the right people to apply. Then, after all the candidates have been fairly evaluated for competency and cultural fit, you must narrow the field and make a job offer. If the candidate you select has not already accepted other employment and accepts your offer, (s)he can finally begin to apply his or her skills to getting the business results you expect. If along the way, you make even one misstep, you end up unhappily starting all over. It’s no wonder that so few recruiters actually measure themselves by the standard of getting specific business results from their recruiting efforts.

In reality, the situation is far worse. Almost every aspect of traditional recruiting stopped being effective over 20 years ago, but nobody seems to have noticed. Let’s review some of the most common hiring mistakes and the very understandable reasons people make them.