Your Recruiting Problems Are Getting Bigger

A recent survey of students showed some astonishing results: 79% of students said social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter were the key to engaging them in the idea of working for you.  But they don’t just want you to push out your jobs on social media, they actually want to engage with you.   42% said social media was the ideal platform for you to communicate your employer brand.  You know, two way communications.  Like people do.

OK, so that’s the upside of using social media in your recruiting efforts.  Big deal.  It’s a recession, they should be happy to get an interview with you.  (Until the recession is over and these very same people now have that ideal 3-5 years of experience you are always looking for…but hey, that’s a problem for later right?)

The immediate downside that affects you right now is that almost half of students use social media sites to verify if you are being authentic:

• They want to know if the reality of working there is the same as what you portray in your job advertising and social media outreach. 
• They listen very carefully to the interview experiences of others.  That’s right.  How you treat people during the interview is now becoming an important part of your employment brand. 

That’s why I say your recruiting problems are getting bigger.  Are you sure your recruiting process is really up to that kind of public scrutiny?

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?

HR Pros: Don’t be a Twidiot

Most HR professionals are swamped right now. The new COBRA rules are a mess. Lawyers say you better plan your union avoidance strategy now before the EFCA bogeyman gets you … and of course you heard that from your lawyer recently because you had to call them after one of your managers botched a termination. Yeah, business is great lately … for employment attorneys.

Oh, and don’t forget, benefit plans should be cut or kept the same or changed or something depending on your finances or your strategy or something. 

And oh yeah, your employee morale is tanking as your employees trade rumors and worry about losing their jobs instead of working full throttle to keep them. 

So in the echo chamber of the social media crowd, everyone asks why you don’t waste spend more time on social media. Heck, even Oprah is now on Twitter … but wait, didn’t some clever soul poke fun at TV news people, calling Twitter a  “gateway drug to full-blown media  narcissism?   Yup.

But so far, I found a couple of hundred people around the world who inspire me, who challenge my thinking, who share smart strategies to thrive in the recession, and answer questions.  I’ve followed hundreds of links to great articles and resources – more than I can keep up with – an astonishing flow of information.   In fact, I started a job seeker blog just to share all the good ideas I’ve seen. . . on Twitter.

Twitter has grown explosively to about 4 million users in the US – but, as Steve Boese astutely points out, that’s only about 3% of of the people employed in the US, so you are not too far behind the curve … yet.    Hey, I sometimes feel twidiotic even mentioning tweets, and the lingo some tweeps use to talk about Twitter can be twidiculous -really twagic.  And Facebook also has it’s own language, as does LinkedIn and bloggers.  It’s like you need to be a rookie many times over, but you’ll soon learn the rules and norms and etiquette for each.

And yet, and yet, and yet, busy overworked HR pros … engage you must - and begin to learn the social conventions of social media or you will surely become just like the last person posting ads in print newspapers 5 years after the job boards came out.  You’ll be the last person to type your resume on a typewriter instead of a word processor.  And you’ll be using that resume when you are the last person in line for your next job, but of course you won’t even be in the line because you submitted your resume by mail instead of online, and you heard about it too late because you never set up a news feed for jobs.  And you never used an insider connection to get an interview, because you never built your LinkedIn connections.  And if your future employer did happen to check you out, a quick Google search would reveal no online references or profile, so it was assumed that you were not a leader in your field anyway.  And that’s a twagedy you can avoid.

HR pros, on top of all your other work – your employees and your future employees will all expect you to understand social media.   I don’t know if Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn will even exist in 5 years, but something like them surely will.  The rules are new, you cannot learn it all in a weekend, it takes time to build, and the people who are engaging right now will have a HUGE advantage over you if you wait to get started.  And if you don’t learn the game soon, you really will look like a twidiot - an unemployable twidiot.

At the Staffing Alliance of Maryland Employers – Project SAME - I’ve been running meetings all year long on how HR can use Social Media. We’ve already drawn standing room only crowds for Kelly Dingee and Jessica Lee.  In May and June we’ll have  Mark Stelzner and Ben Gotkin coming to speak.  I’m on a mission to raise awareness of how much more effectively you can do your job if you learn these tools.

Not to worry, if you try, you’ll catch on,  just like you learned how to use Careerbuilder, Google, Outlook and MS-Word.  Soon this will be just another tool in your toolkit.  By the way, Jennifer McClure did a fine job providing a social media starter kit in a recent presentation/blog post “Social Media for HR Professionals Beyond LinkedIn.”    Be sure to check it out.

Recruiting Using Social Media – Lessons From the Obama Campaign

As I learn more about using social media in our recruiting efforts, I like to pass along ideas that make sense to me.  So if you are considering using Social Media in your recruiting efforts, perhaps you will also find this useful. 

Take a few lessons from how the Obama campaign used social media to win the election.  In a recent Fast Company article, Chris Hughes notes that detailed execution is at least as important as strategy.   He makes a few excellent points:

• Don’t set up a network just to exploit it; let it mature.
• If your competition is using a medium, you better know how to use it too.
• Take your customers’ online feedback very seriously.
• Authenticity is priceless.

In a recent Businessweek article,  Steve McKee notes that advertising follows many of the principles of networking at a cocktail party - he calls it “The Cocktail Party Test for Advertising.”    (Just replace the word “advertising” with the words “social media recruiting”).  

“Focus on one person at a time. Make eye contact. Listen. Don’t talk about yourself. Find what they’re interested in and make that the topic of conversation. Most of all, don’t be arrogant, boorish, or annoying. Following these simple rules will increase your odds of starting an interesting new relationship and decrease the chances you’ll be perceived as someone to avoid.”

All this rings true to me, but what do you think?  What is working for you?

Talent Management Blogs Worth Reading

There are many excellent Talent Management blogs out there.  But rarely do you get to see them all competing so hard for your attention.  By the way, you look great today, have you done something new with your hair?

Fistful of Talent has harnessed the spirit of March Madness competition to give you a chance to sample the best of the talent management blogs and then vote for your favorites (like mine).   Please vote today, as there is a limited time to vote and it is highly possible that you are my only blog reader.   (Seriously, have you ever seen anyone else reading it?  Then you have to consider that I might be right about this).

No matter what you choose, it’s a great way to sample your options.  Oh, and please vote for me in Game #13 because, as my only reader, I’ll know immediately how you voted.

R U Digital or Do you Live in the “Real World?”

I’ve heard that it only takes about 40% of your productive capacity to keep the boss off your back.  So, if you are an employer and you want the REST of your employees’  productivity, you have to be more inspiring…like a Yahoo Community. 

A couple days ago, I mentioned an HBR article that discussed the need for management theory to evolve.   HBR threw down the gauntlet and made a good argument for why our concept of management needs to change, but they stopped short of suggesting exactly what to do.

Yesterday, Kris Dunn moved the ball forward a bit with a great post about “Why Your Company Needs to Think Like a Yahoo Community.”   Kris suggests that we employers use less command and control management and instead think more like an online community.  (Those communities get really smart people to engage and work for FREE after all).  Kris advocates a more modern approach to management, a “secret sauce” of “part praise, part visible scorecard, and part future career promise” for people who make a difference.  It’s a good start, a place to look for inspiration…and sadly, wholly divorced from the reality of many HR professionals and executives.  A recent study by the Human Capital Institute found that “hardly any” HR professionals (2%) have a deep understanding of how social networks, you know, actually work.

What fascinates me is the wide gulf between the social media adopters and the people who are still living in “the real world.”  Many “real world” people think Twitter is a waste of time, and perhaps it is.  But like it or not, social media will have an increasingly powerful impact on how work gets done.  Although some managers believe social interaction at work is a time waster, some studies show that social people are actually MORE productive.  In fairness, the study looked at people with both digital networks and face-to-face networks (and face-to-face networkers were more productive than digital, but BOTH outperformed the anti-social hermits).

As someone who built a pretty decent network of old-school, face-to-face connections (formerly called a rolodex) I really marvel at how many digerati are not well regarded in the “real world” and how many dinosaur “real world” people are (virtually) ignored by the digital folk.   Hmmm, it sounds like that (r)evolution in management theory might take a while.

How Important is Effective Recruiting, Really?

We’re working with a client to solve a problem with their talent pipeline.  They have a steady (if slightly unpredictable) need to find one or two very expensive, very “hard to find” people every month. 

I live to solve problems like this.   Ask me about FMLA or the tax implications of a Flexible Benefit plan and I’m utterly adrift.   But talk to me about a systemic recruiting problem and I’m all over it.   (If you are like me, your mind is already working on the problem and you are thinking of where to find pockets of candidates, thinking of what outreach strategies to use and figuring out how you might use various social media strategies to engage them in a conversation?  Ok, well, maybe that’s not you and just the voices in my head talking…)

Anyway, it’s a great gig.   The CEO totally “gets it.”   He knows that the candidate experience needs to be consistent from awareness building, through initial contact, through cultivation, through the entire recruiting process, through the offer/acceptance/onboarding process, through the performance management /compensation process, through the employee referral process.  One cohesive, authentic experience that conveys “You are important to us a person, you are important to our success, and your personal success is important to us.” 

When we get the recruiting strategy right, he wins.  Get it wrong he loses.  Because the right people are at the very center of his growth plans. 

The CEO knows his current uncertain, unpredictable talent pipeline means several (very bad) things to this firm long term:

• His first line managers are tempted to settle for mediocre people because the flow of good ones is so uncertain.  So senior managers have to watch hiring much more closely to avoid the mistakes that come from settling for Mr. Right Now, instead of Mr. Right.
• More time is wasted in the interview sequence because managers are currently choosing from the “best of the worst” instead of the best of the best.  
• Work piles up, deadlines get missed, teams get stressed and customer service suffers as positions go unfilled longer.
• Managers are very reluctant to manage performance tightly because everyone is so hard to replace.
• The sales team is not emboldened because “yes but how will we staff it?” lurks in the back of everyone’s mind.
• Teams are burdened with low performers, because, well, someone is better than no one right?  And loyal top performers pick up the slack without complaining…up to a point, and then they start to look around…and the death spiral of lowered expectations starts in earnest.
• Employee referrals are a tiny fraction of what they could be, because, nobody asked, and well, you don’t want your friends to be put off by a lousy, uncertain hiring process, and burdened with slacker teams now do you?
• Oh, and millions of dollars ride on the outcome. 

So yeah, my client and I both think effective recruiting is really important, and its’ importance is not diminished one iota during a recession.  Because great people never line up around the block to work for anyone.  Someone needs to know exactly who they are looking for and draw them into a conversation first.

An excellent framework for thinking about the recruiting pipeline  is Doug Davidoff’s recent post about The New Marketing Funnel.  While not written with recruiting in mind, I think it’s a great contribution to the ROI of Social Media debate. 

We HR blogniscenti love to debate active vs. passive job seekers, social media vs job boards, xraying Linkedin  using boolean searches, cold calling techniques, etc..  It’s a great education and a spirited debate, but for me, it’s only entertainment until I can apply that knowledge to solve a real world problem for a CEO who “gets it”  and have a transformational impact on the success of his firm.

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: 

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?

Search Firms Must Innovate, But Will They?

This is my third recession in the staffing business, and this one is different.  The search business has arrived at what Andy Grove would call a  ”strategic inflection point” – where the fundamentals of its’ business are about to change.   Costs simply must come down, way down.  I saw alot of search firm repositioning in the last recession – mostly tinkering with their pricing models, but not fundamentally changing  who they hire and how they deliver services. 

The largest search firms got crushed in the last recession – some laying off 40% of their staff.  Of course they got into trouble because they gorged on the dot com bubble.  But they learned their lesson, right?  Wrong.   Good times returned and then they used the same inefficient business model to gorge on the financial services bubble and surprise!  now they are now laying off again.  Note to my investment advisor:  The next time any major national search firm earns a third of their revenue from any business sector…that’s the very definition of a bubble – a whole business sector not paying enough attention to costs.

Now the blogosphere is lit up with comments about “disruptive innovation” in the recruiting world.  Most of the comments are about technology and social media, but the same market forces apply to search firms.  One of the most thoughtful is David Manaster’s ERE post – (R)evolution.  In another must-read article, John Sumser bluntly counsels that HR “should be hammering its vendors for cost reductions.  Get the same for less money.”  John refers to a brilliant article in The Economist about the flip-side of Moore’s Law:

“Suddenly there is more interest in products that…provide a particular level of performance at an ever-lower price.”

Here is the problem. 

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:

Using Social Media in Recruiting

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn – some predict that HR professionals not using social media to communicate with candidates will soon be roadkill.   To avoid that grisly fate, perhaps you might want to join us on Thursday, February 12th, when Sourcing Researcher Kelly Dingee will speak at the Staffing Alliance of Maryland Employers (Project SAME).  

Newbies and experts alike are all welcome, and the meeting is free.   Come find the answers to your most pressing questions.  Will it help me get better recruiting results for less money?  Why bother with it?  If I have to pick just one place to start, which one is most worth the time?  How do I learn more about it?  What does it really cost?  And, of course, why are “social media elites” saying I will be roadkill if I don’t?

The meeting will be held from 3-5 pm at the Rockville campus of Montgomery College.   For more details and to register, visit the Project SAME website.

HR Pros, Help Yourself First, Then Pay it Forward

If you have a job, then one thing is certain.  You are increasingly being contacted by people who want a job.  So if you want to be helpful, you can either spend a LOT of time meeting job seekers for coffee or lunch (warning, this may adversely affect both your waistline and your productivity) OR you might try the lower calorie option of encouraging the eager job seeker to invest some of their time and energy in social media. 

Kelly Dingee recently did both for a friend and led the way on this topic back in November with a generous and smart blog post called “Paying it Forward as a Recruiter in a Down Economy.”  She inspired me to create a short handout to share with social networking newbies (and HOLY COW there are a lot of them out there).    Kris Dunn just wrote a disturbing post on “The Coming Social Media Test for HR Pros” – his observation?  Social media usage among HR pros is “very, very low” and that people who don’t soon engage will be “roadkill” – he forecasts that the day will soon come when social media tools are “as ubiquitous as Outlook.”  

Sadly, I have to agree with Kris.  I started an email newsletter to share HR jobs during the LAST recession and have been sending out my free “HR Jobs to Share” newsletters at least twice a month ever since.