Hiring an employee is one of the most crucial decisions that you will have to make as a business owner. Not only do you need to hire someone that you can trust with all of your business endeavors, but you will be spending a lot of time with this person too, so it is imperative that you can work well together. Since this process can be overwhelming and stressful, here are a few tips to keep in mind when hiring employees:

(1) Set Clear Expectations
In order for you to hire the absolute best possible employee, it is important to have clear, direct job descriptions, policies, procedures, expectations and goals written out ahead of time. This will help ensure that everybody is on the same page right from the start with regard to the various aspects of the job and allow you to find an employee that can meet (or even exceed) those expectations. If everyone knows upfront what is expected of them and who is responsible for what task, then everyone will be working towards the same goals and milestones of moving the business forward. This is critical for hiring the right employee.

(2) Find the Holes
Write down every single task that needs to be completed in your business. Then, figure out which tasks are the best uses of your own time- the tasks that you do well. After you do that, you should be left with the holes that need to be filled by your employees- those are tasks that you don’t do well or aren’t the best use of your time. While it’s important that your new employees share your goals, vision and values, they don’t need to share the same skill set. Finding the right employees that can fill those holes will help move your business forward much faster.

Continue reading… Business Unplugged

By Carol Roth

The post Hiring Employees: 4 Great Tips appeared first on The HR Gazette.

We have all felt at one time or another that someone who should have never been hired- much less promoted, has gotten ahead of us in our career. Sometimes, that person is our boss. Or that really annoying co-worker, whose messes you end up always having to clean up. But they are not the problem.

You are.

This whole issue of incompetence is a problem with perception, and may have little to do with the reality of the situation.

You see, the problem is, YOU think that they are incompetent. Because of what YOU see. They don’t think that they are incompetent. So who is right? To answer that question, we have to ask the people that matter- that person’s boss. Because really, in this situation, their opinion matters the most.

Chances are, they are probably doing a lot more right than you think they do- but for the ‘right’ people.

Here are a few reasons why ‘incompetent’ people get hired (and promoted):

They know and obey the rules. They are not mavericks. They colour between the lines. They do just enough to stay under the radar. You probably don’t. And whilst sometimes the high flying risk taker gets noticed and admired, this does not work in all organisational cultures. Let’s face facts, some organisations prefer obedient sheep.

They know how to get others to do their work. This is a good one. I know of instances where co-workers feign ignorance, because they know that the ‘know it all’ (i.e. you), will jump at the task. And take the fall if/when it fails. Its not that they can’t do the job- they would just prefer to watch you do it.

They focus on the decision makers. They work really hard when it matters- when the right people are watching. They don’t need to impress you. But they know when the VP of Marketing is in the office, and when that proposal needs to get done. And though they may not do much towards getting it done, they sure know how to make it appear like they did.

The culture supports them. This goes back to organisational sheep. Some companies are built this way. They hire this way. In fact, you are the anomaly- the misfit. Where do you get off being all efficient and effective?

But this isn’t your problem. It is an HR problem. When the HR function has a peripheral role in Recruitment and Selection and Performance Management, the incompetent among us can sail on through to the boardroom.

So the focus really has to be on building a competent HR Team- that knows the business, understands the strategic direction and can hire based on those facts. And once the employee is on board, their performance is measured against clearly defined objectives and targets. Those things make it difficult to hide.

I believe that there are really very few genuinely incompetent people in the workforce. Lazy, yes. Conniving, sure. But sitting in the lunch-room grousing about it surely won’t improve the situation; nor is deciding to become incompetent yourself by withdrawing your enthusiasm from work.

For those of you who are entrepreneurs, or contemplating starting your own business, this is of particular importance. The last person you want to hire in your growing business is someone who is accustomed to ducking work. References can play big role here.

We need to put the focus on where it belongs- on the Human Resource department, and making sure that the required competence levels reside there. That will fix everything else.

Jeremy was last seen wondering if an HR Officer writes an HR policy in the middle of the work-week and no one reads it- is it still relevant?

photo credit

The post Why incompetent people get hired (and promoted) appeared first on The HR Gazette.

News flash: Hiring managers are human.

Just like all people, they’re prone to misjudgment because of internal biases and being influenced by emotions and past experiences. Also, there is an innate human tendency to avoid mistakes instead of achieving success.

And this is bad for hiring.

Because of this hard-wiring, deep rooted in survival instincts and human psychology, it’s impossible to be objective and accurate in our perceptions. This pertains to every aspect of our life and becomes heightened when we’re dealing with other people.

Second news flash: The biggest psychological issue we have as humans is dealing with other human beings, not our cat or our stuff.

Key influences to consider

Consider this:

• We have a positive bias towards people who are similar to us.
• We have a negative bias towards people who are different than us, though we often need someone very different in a job candidate.
• If we find a quality we like in a person, we unconsciously tend to assign a positive bias to attributes we know nothing about, a phenomenon called “the halo effect.” We do the opposite when we don’t like a quality.
• We filter our present through our past and make too many unconscious assumptions as a result. For example, if I had a “negative experience” with a person who worked at ABC company in the past, a candidate who currently works at ABC company is starting off negatively with me, if only subconsciously.

Since dealing with other human beings is the biggest issue of human psychology, how can it not be a key influencer in hiring? Every issue we have is triggered when meeting another person.

continue reading… TLNT

by Brad Wolff

The post The Psychology Of Hiring: Liking Someone Doesn’t Predict A Good Hire appeared first on The HR Gazette.

To the uninitiated, the recruiting world looks like a supermarket: When you need something, you simply go to the right part of the store and select from your pre-packaged options.

But for those in the know, recruiting behaves more like the stock-market: it’s fast-paced and varied. You are never sure whether the skills you need will be available at the price you want. Like a stock market trader, the successful recruiter needs a balance of experience and data to land great talent.

Too often, recruitment success is gauged by time-to-fill quotas or cost-of-hire numbers. All these numbers do is tell you how quickly you hired someone at the lowest possible price. These metrics just won’t cut it in a place like Silicon Valley, where skills and expertise (quality) trumps fast and cheap.

William Tincup, one of the leading thinkers in HR, expressed the “recruitment paradox” well with this tweet:

Do we recruit who we want to retain? If not, let’s fix that.

— William Tincup (@williamtincup) July 8, 2014

Often we focus on what can be measured. Instead, we need to focus on what should be measured: whether we are efficiently finding the skills and expertise at the right time and for the best price.

Here are five indispensable metrics that will help you determine whether you are finding top quality hires who will move your business forward — In short, whether you are actually recruiting people you want to retain. I will also outline the red flags you should be acting on to refine your recruitment process.

Remember: For all these metrics there is a spectrum in terms of success. The more critical, complex or hard-to-fill the role is, the tighter the target should be:

Must-have recruitment metric #1: Qualified applicants-per-requisition

Why you need it: The qualified applicants-per-requisition metric indicates whether your sourcing practices are delivering what you want: people who can do the job effectively.

How to get it: To calculate this metric, follow these steps:

1. Start at the end of the period you want to analyse
2. Count all of the qualified applicants you have for the requisitions that are still open or were closed during the period
3. Count the number of requisitions that are still open or were closed during the period
4. Finally, divide the number of applicants by the number of requisitions to calculate your metric

You can further refine your numbers by looking independently at the requisitions that are closed and the requisitions that are still open. You can look for flags that indicate whether specific roles or geographies are seeing more or fewer qualified applicants per requisition.

Red flags to act on: If you see that your qualified applicants-per-requisition metric is declining over time, then you need to tweak your sourcing activities. For example, you may need to post job openings in new locations or revamp your referral program.

Continue Reading.

First published on Talent Culture by Ian Cook

The post Recruitment Success and the 5 Metrics to Measure It appeared first on The HR Gazette.

Every company seems to have a well thought out marketing strategy, but why don’t they have an equally well thought out hiring strategy?

For companies that are hiring, especially startups, there appears to be a kind of willful blindness when it comes to their hiring strategy. Perhaps because founders believe so strongly in their company that they think everyone would want to work there, hiring managers often act like hiring is just a process of going out to the candidate tree to pick out a few top performers.

Here’s what I mean. When I ask companies what their marketing strategy is, business leaders articulate a smart, strategic plan that considers their resources, their presence, their available time and what their target customers care about. What I almost never hear is something like, “I’m going to release my beta and then I’ll call the 5 biggest customers in my industry and get a deal done within 2 weeks”.  Try pitching that in an investor meeting!

Yet somehow this is basically the hiring strategy of most startups. I’ll hear: “When I start hiring, I’m going to post a job on a job board and I’m expecting many of the top people in my industry to apply. Then I’m going to start interviewing them in a couple weeks and I’ll make a decision on who to hire within a month”. Sorry but that’s insane. It might work 1 out of 100 times but the most common result is a frustrated hiring manager or the hiring of below average employees with the mistaken belief that you’ve hired “top talent”.

If you want to hire real “top talent” without paying massive recruiter fees or looking for 6 months, then you need to be working on your hiring strategy all the time, just like your marketing plan. You have to consider your competitors for top candidates. A good hiring strategy is exactly equal to a good marketing strategy.

You need to ask yourself:

1. Who are we hiring? Someone Senior? Junior? Are they motivated by the same things? Why should they work at our company versus all the other companies they could work at? You need to know this because you have to sell your company and the job you’re hiring for
2. How are we going to reach these people? Typical job postings? Sorry, but top performers are not Googling “jobs in (city name)”.

You need to:

1. Market to the people in your industry and let them know that you exist. Don’t assume people know who you are (unless you’re Google or Coca-Cola).
2. Market that you are a great employer.
3. Let people know that you’re hiring. And I don’t mean that you have a single posted job opening, I mean let people know that you’re a growing company, because growing companies are hiring!

In Part II, I’ll offer some ideas and strategies to help you develop a hiring strategy that will help you attract phenomenal candidates.

The post Could you pitch your hiring strategy – Part I appeared first on The HR Gazette.

Every year it bemuses me to see just how many articles are published predicting the future of recruitment. They always appear around this time of year too. It’s as though the transition from one year to the next is going to somehow miraculously produce a seismic shift in the way that recruiters operate. Of course it’s not.

What I find more compelling is to look at the pain points and undeniable trends we can see in the market right now – and then project forward what these mean recruiters will be most anxious to address in the coming year.

From the conversations I’m having with recruiters and recruiting leaders around the world, three things stand out as issues that our industry will be desperate to address in 2016:

1. Mobile apply has become business critical

The first major concern for recruiters is undoubtedly the issue of converting mobile job seekers into actual applicants. For a number of years now, it’s been predicted that there would come a time when more job seeking activity would take place from a mobile device than from a desktop computer. In many Western countries that moment is now upon us. But while there has been much focus on producing career sites that render well on a mobile device, there has not been nearly as much focus on actually ensuring those candidates convert into actual applicants.

With traffic from both Google and social media increasingly being of the mobile variety, it has become an absolute business priority to ensure that candidates are not lost once they have browsed to a careers page, because there is no simple “Mobile Apply” option on the site. Companies that have addressed this are seeing far higher application rates from mobile candidates and this is a competitive recruiting advantage that other companies simply cannot afford to leave unaddressed.

Expect the coming year to see “Mobile Apply” become one of the most pressing projects that recruiting teams want to have addressed.

2. Increasing competition on social media demands investment to stand out

A second issue that recruiters have really been waking up to this last year is the rising competition to attract and engage with candidates on social media. Those of you who rely heavily on LinkedIn have of course been afflicted by this for at least a couple of years. Who hasn’t seen that the volume of InMails you need to send to generate adequate response has inexorably risen over the last years?! This is nothing more than the law of diminishing returns and we can expect to see exactly the same phenomena play out across social media in 2016.
continue reading… Jobvite

The post Recruiters, don’t let 2016 be the year you dropped the ball appeared first on The HR Gazette.

If you’re out looking for a job it usually feels like you’re being judged on every little thing you do, have done or potentially will do in the future.

Interestingly enough, a Harvard professor discovered you’re actually only judged on two things. From a story on Yahoo:

People size you up in seconds, but what exactly are they evaluating?

Harvard Business School professor Amy Cuddy has been studying first impressions alongside fellow psychologists Susan Fiske and Peter Glick for more than 15 years, and has discovered patterns in these interactions.

In her new book, Presence, Cuddy says people quickly answer two questions when they first meet you:

• Can I trust this person?
• Can I respect this person?

Psychologists refer to these dimensions as warmth and competence respectively, and ideally you want to be perceived as having both.

Interestingly, Cuddy says that most people, especially in a professional context, believe that competence is the more important factor. After all, they want to prove that they are smart and talented enough to handle your business.”

Getting the most out of an interview

Trust and respect. I’ll add that these are probably the two things you’re being judged on immediatelyfollowing the judging that gets done on your overall appearance, which is almost instantaneous! Let’s face it, we like to hire pretty people.

continue reading… TLNT

by Tim Sackett

The post There Are Only Two Real Criteria To Judge Job Seekers On appeared first on The HR Gazette.

Can organizations hire for ‘fit’ without sacrificing diversity? Many organizations tout diversity and inclusivity all over their websites yet many shy away from bringing in people with a fresh perspective. If we emphasize cultural fit, we end up selecting people “like us”, with diversity and inclusivity as collateral damage. Values are at the core of diversity; it’s about who the candidate is, not whether the candidate is like us.

The phenomenon of “fit” usually has three components: job fit, team fit and organizational fit. Job fit is a matter of skills, abilities and experience, while team fit and organizational fit are based on working well with others and blending with the culture. What’s often missing from the equation is values – the core beliefs and goals that all members of an organization should share, regardless of background and what they look like. Great teams tend to consist of people with different talents but similar values, driven by the same goal or ideal.

Job fit is the easy part of recruiting. Team fit and organizational fit are harder to determine. What it often comes down to with team fit is: do the team members like you? Organizational fit is more of a broad stroke and tends to include unwritten rules and codes. This can be an obstacle to hiring great talent, as we’re stereotyping people for fit into an organization.

continue reading… LinkedIn Pulse

by Evert Akkerman

The post The Hiring Challenge: Fit or Diversity? appeared first on The HR Gazette.

Building a Hiring Strategy

In Part I of Could you pitch your hirning strategy, I broke down why posting a job on a job site is not a hiring strategy. Now I’d like to offer some ideas and strategies for developing a hiring strategy that will help you build a phenomenal team.

There are three parts to a hiring strategy:

1. Determining your employee target market
2. Figuring out how to reach your employee target market
3. Figuring out how you’re going to convert leads into applicants, and then into hires.

1. Figuring out your employee target market:

To determine your employee target market you need to ask: “Who do we want that also wants us?” Hiring managers already spend a lot of time thinking about who they want, so you’ve probably got that covered. The next step is to take that total set of people the hiring manager has described and figure out which of them would be attracted to the job you’re offering.  If your job doesn’t appeal to your target employee, you’ll need to change the job or your employee target market.

Here’s an example. Say you need a C++ developer with 8+ years experience for a C++ developer job you have. You can’t go after every C++ developer with 8+ years experience because some of these people want to be managers after 8 years. So, you need C++ developers with 8+ years of experience who don’t want to be managers. This is a high level example. You’ll need to think much deeper about your hiring needs.

2. Reaching your target market:

About 25% of people are active job seekers and will regularly visit job sites. If active job seekers are part of your employee target market, job sites are a good place to start. However, posting a job into a sea of other jobs means you can’t be assured your targets will see your job posting. There is software out there that works on “matching” qualified candidates with jobs, but I still regularly get “matched” jobs sent to me for CFO positions so I have my doubts.

For the 75% of people who are not actively looking for a new job, you need to find marketing tools for letting people know about you as an employer. Things you can do to promote your employer brand include keeping an active presence on social media (because 90% of Millennials are on social media daily) and blogging. It`s also a good idea to sponsor local networking events where you can speak to people and people can see you.  

You can also use networking websites like Jobhubble which allow you to connect with people through the content channels they already subscribe to, and to their personal networks via candidate referrals.

3. Converting leads

After you’ve established your employee target market and begun marketing your employer brand to your employee target audience, the next step is to convert these leads into candidate applications and eventually into hires.

First, you need a kick ass career page. Career pages are a chance to have a conversation with potential candidates. Not having a career page leads to a much lower conversion rate of visitors into motivated candidates. So invest in a great career page. Pictures of team members are an absolute must and ideally they’ll be smiling Even better, they’re smiling at an offsite team building event. So if you don’t do any offsite team building events, start planning some. They are an invaluable tool for employee retention, boosting employee morale and hiring new employees.

Second, make sure your website has responsive design (meaning it`s optimized for mobile browsing). This is especially true if you’re hiring developers. If people can’t view your website on their mobile device, they’ll think you’re “behind the times” and top performers will not apply to your jobs.

Third, make your job description fun and exciting. Job descriptions don’t have to be boring, they’re actually a great opportunity for you to stand out from the crowd and speak to your target employee.

Finally, after you’ve put in all this work, don’t lead your interviews off with the tough technical interview. Round 1 should be as much about cementing the positive image the candidate has about you, as it is about learning about the candidate. It is better to begin the interview process assuming that every candidate is someone you’ll want to hire. That way, when you finally interview the candidate you want to hire, you’ll be assured you handled the process correctly.

If you’re getting too many candidates that are “wasting your time”, don’t change your interview process. That’s like treating the symptoms.  Go back to the beginning and ask “why are we not attracting better candidates?”

The post Could You Pitch Your Hiring Strategy? Part II appeared first on The HR Gazette.

The days of posting an ad on the various job boards and receiving hundreds of resumes is long gone.  And if that is how you are still trying to find your next employee, then here is some insight into why it is taking so much longer for you to fill a position than even five years ago.

Today’s job search is all about “networking.”

While HR technology, such as Applicant Tracking Systems software (“ATS”), has been a great way for companies sort through resumes received based on qualifications and build a database of possible future candidates, it is not as welcoming to today’s jobseeker.  In fact, the frustration that having to apply for a job that uses an ATS has caused most jobseekers to seek ways to “get around the system”…and that has led to them taking a more direct approach to trying to find their next job.

Some jobseekers will cite the reason being many companies’ ATS requires too many questions to be answered that are already available on their submitted resume that will be scanned and parsed into the database anyway.  Others have concerns that the filtering methods put in place with an ATS will result in them being “passed over” for consideration of a job that they would otherwise be deemed qualified.

The result: Jobseekers have put more of their focus on networking.  They have joined industry organizations, networking groups, LinkedIn groups, Twitter “chats”…any way they can possible meet Hiring Managers, Recruiters or just Influencers in their field to help uncover potential openings or get them directly in front of the person trying to fill an open job.

What should companies do to find today’s top candidates?

Simply put – You need to go to where the candidates are and not just wait for them to come to you.

– Join in on Twitter or LinkedIn “chats” in your industry.  See who joins in and what they offer to the conversation, and connect with them.

– Attend industry “networking” events that jobseekers are going to and mingle with them.  It’s the easiest way to get some “first interviews” with potential candidates.  Some may not be actively looking for a job, but most will be open to hearing about new opportunities.

– Make sure your company is profiled on LinkedIn and create “groups” that people can join.  You may even find some of your alumni may join and could be open to coming back.

– Get your company involved in community events.  Many of today’s jobseekers support various causes and put an emphasis on volunteering.  They are looking for companies that embrace the same values they have, which will make your company someplace they will want to work.

Those top candidates are still out there.  Meet them halfway…before another company does.

The post Where Have All The Good Candidates Gone? appeared first on The HR Gazette.

Employee turnover — especially in the first three months of a new hire’s tenure — costs organizations thousands of dollars per year.

Think about it: you spend time and resources looking for the right candidate, hire the person you think will succeed, and lose money until that new hire is performing at 100 percent productivity.

This can be especially frustrating in front-line industries like hospitality where, according to results from CompData’s 2014 edition of their annual BenchmarkPro Survey shared by Compensation Force, turnover in 2014 was 27.6 percent.

When you’re losing one in four new hires, your own time and resources go to waste. What’s the worst part? You have to start all over again.

How do you get it right the first time? Here are five reasons you’re losing new employees and how to fix them:

1. Your sourcing strategies are out of date.

If your organization is sourcing most of its potential employees from job boards, classified ads, job fairs, and other out of date sources, it’s hurting the chances of finding a quality hire. Unfortunately, emphasizing recruiting and sourcing from these outlets keeps your organization from developing a strong pool of qualified candidates.

The solution: Focus on online sourcing and creating an employee referral program that keeps your talent pipeline full of qualified candidates. Sixty percent of recruiters from Jobvite’s 2014 Social Recruiting Survey cite referrals as the number one way they find the best candidates.

It’s simple. Since your current employees understand your organization better than anyone, they’re the best source for finding quality candidates that will be a good fit.

2. The new hire isn’t actually as skilled as you thought.

Look, we’ve all been there. A candidate with “that special something” talks about how they’ve done similar work in the past, is proficient in the systems your organization employs, and has used the skills necessary in other positions. They get the job, underperforms, and you have to let them go.

The solution: Job simulations. Putting potential employees through simulations that measure specific work-related skills and competencies is a reliable way to gauge their skills.

In front-line positions like sales, hospitality, and customer support, job simulations can help your organization measure candidates’ communication skills, along with their ability to multi-task and think on their feet. These skills aren’t always easy to assess during an interview.

3. Your intuition tells you who to hire.

Many hiring managers rely on instinct and casual observations about a candidate to make important hiring decisions. While sometimes you get lucky, more often than not this method results in hiring candidates who aren’t quite the right fit.

The solution: Take advantage of the data your organization generates and incorporate it into your screening and hiring decisions. Use data analytics to develop hiring models and then continuously test them to ensure they are valid and improving your hiring and retention metrics.

For example, keeping track of which sources produce the best hires or the impact that an onboarding training program has on performance can help you make decisions about how to make new hires the most successful.

4. The candidate isn’t clear about expectations.

Many employees who leave in the first three months do so because the position was simply not what they expected. Either the hiring manager inflated the role to make it more exciting, or the candidate had different expectations of the role.

In both situations, the responsibility is on the organization to clearly define things like work hours, responsibilities, and the part the role plays in the organization’s success.

The solution: Review your organization’s job postings and make sure the roles and responsibilities being described match the realities of the position. During the hiring process, it’s a good idea to distribute a “roles and responsibilities” checklist to candidates so they are aware — from the beginning — what the job requires.

5. You’re only hiring for skills, not job fit.

In a recent study of more than 500 CEOs, managing directors, hiring managers, and other decision makers in various industries, Hyper Island found that 78 percent believe personality is the most important aspect of hiring.

Yes, a good candidate will have the skills and abilities necessary to be effective at the job, but if the candidate’s personality doesn’t fit the position — or your organization’s culture — the odds of them leaving in the first three months dramatically increase.

The solution: Pre-hire personality assessments. Combined with hiring simulations that measure work skills, job-related personality assessments can help you determine if the candidates you’re interested in have the right personality for the job. More importantly, they can help determine if a candidate will mesh with your organization’s mission, values and culture.

If you’re having issues with turnover in the first three months, think about whether or not your organization is making some of these mistakes. Fix only one, and you’ll make your hiring process more efficient. Fix all of them, and you’ll be on your way to lower turnover rates and increased productivity.

How do you measure a candidate’s likelihood to stay in the first three months? What strategies does your organization employ to reduce turnover in the first three months?

Photo Credit: pixabay.com

The post How To Stop New Employees Leaving In Their First Three Months appeared first on The HR Gazette.

Everyone can be forgiven for thinking candidate volume from a paid job posting matters. It sounds like it should matter. More candidates mean a higher chance of success, right? Just like if you’ve lost 10 times in a row on the roulette wheel, you’re more likely to win the next spin because you can’t lose forever… 
Just one problem, neither is true. Here’s the math to prove it.

Let’s keep on the roulette example. Each spin of a roulette wheel is called an “independent event”. That’s nerd for: one spin has absolutely no impact on any other spin. It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the last spin. Each spin is its own event.

You can probably see where I’m going with this…

Each candidate is also an independent event because each person is a separate person. Having me apply to a job makes no one else more qualified to get the job. Think about it. If I tried out to play professional football, my tryout doesn’t make Tom Brady a better or worse quarterback.

Where this gets confusing is that it is also true that you can’t lose on every spin of a roulette wheel forever. Each spin of the roulette wheel does have a probability of success that you can calculate. Just like each randomized candidate has some chance of getting the job. If you’ve studied statistics, you’re familiar with the term “standard deviation” which basically describes the idea that there is a probability that the “odds” will do what we expect them to over a given period of time. For example, flipping “heads” on a coin has a probability of 50%. With a high probability like 50%, we get a standard deviation of 3.5 on 50 coin flips. So, 68% of the time we’ll see 21.5 to 28.5 heads. 90% of the time we’ll see 18-32 heads.

For things that have a lower probability, the standard deviation has a much bigger impact. A single number on a roulette wheel, let’s say 23 (for Michael Jordan), has a 2.6% chance of hitting with a standard deviation of 1.13 on 50 spins. So, 68% of the time we’ll see 0.17 to 2.43 hits of 23 over 50 spins. 90% of the time, zero hits will happen commonly.

For a paid job posting on a job board, anyone can apply so each candidate application should be considered “randomized”. And the odds of a randomized candidate getting a highly skilled job is very low. I would argue far worse odds than betting 23 on a roulette wheel. So it’s not only easy to get 50 candidates and hire none of them, but it’s actually a normal outcome. That’s why this has probably happened to you if you’ve done enough hiring. You need hundreds of candidates before you can say, “I’ll be surprised if a hire isn’t within this huge candidate pool”.

That’s why candidate referrals are so important and yet still undervalued. The odds of a candidate referral getting hired are much higher because they aren’t randomized candidates. They have a selection bias that favors getting hired, but I’ll save that for another post.

So how do you then evaluate potential vendors for job postings? After all, job postings are still a low-cost option for sourcing candidates when compared to dozens of labor hours sourcing candidates.

If you’re already using a set of job posting vendors, look at the number of candidates that have made it to at least the second round of your interview process, then divide by the cost of that job posting. That’s your per unit price for a relevant candidate. For example, if you had 1 candidate get a second interview, and 2 others made it to the offer stage, that’s 3 candidates that made the second interview round or later. If you paid $300 for the job posting, you paid $100 per relevant candidate. ($300 / 3 candidates = $100 per relevant candidate)

If you’re looking at new job posting vendors, what you should be looking for are page views and job shares. Aim for higher page views and more job sharing. Why? Remember I said you would need hundreds of randomized candidates for a hire? Well every page view is kind of like a potential candidate and page views are priced far cheaper than candidate applications. This allows you to more cost effectively select your vendors and drive better results. As an example, a posting vendor that gives you 50 page views and 50 candidate applications is very bad. You want something closer to 500-1000 page views, regardless of candidate applications. If the vendor targets your target employee audience that’s even better.

Job sharing is also hugely important because firstly, it leads to more page views and secondly, it also leads to more page views in your target employee audience. People in tech are more likely to share jobs in tech and less likely to share jobs in hospitality (and vice versa). Increased job sharing will drastically improve your average candidate quality and help you reach passive candidates not accessible through most job boards. So, look for job posting vendors that can help you increase your job sharing totals and increase your page views.

Don’t bet your hiring plan on vendors that have given you a lot of candidates you weren’t interested in, but seemed “due” to pay off.

The post The Candidate Volume Fallacy – A Mathematical Debunking appeared first on The HR Gazette.

Almost every time I see the word CV mentioned online, it seems to be in the context of either a broad-ranging criticism through to an all-out assassination.

Is the CV perfect? Definitely not. However, we should consider not only what the viable alternatives are, but whether we have really optimised the value that a CV can bring.

The articles I have read tend to focus on a few main objections:

The CV doesn’t tell a full story

No it doesn’t. But was a CV ever intended to be the full story? Curriculum Vitae can loosely be translated (from Latin) as “Course of my Life”. Like any journey with multiple stopovers on the way to a final destination, the CV lays out the stopping points. If a recruiter finds them to be interesting, then they can invite them to give more details about the journey – that’s the interview.

A CV doesn’t take into account someone’s personality

I disagree. The format and length of a CV certainly is an indication of someone’s underlying capacity for organisation, creativity and ability to be concise. Of course, this isn’t a comprehensive measure of someone’s personality, but shouldn’t be discarded altogether. More dangerous, is the idea that personality over skills and experience must be the best way forward. The concept that you can analyse personality and match people to jobs on that basis alone might have some merits in certain cases, but ignoring skills and experience at the outset is illogical. However, the reason given for assessing personality first is often the following.

People lie on their CV

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but people also lie in person, to your face. However, in my view, you shouldn’t begin the hiring process from the negative angle of trying to weed out the dishonest few. If you put yourself in the shoes of someone who really needs a job and has experienced the isolation and hopelessness of the modern day job search, is it surprising that a few people “enhanced” their experience to get a foot in the door? Instead of framing the CV as a carrier of untruths, perhaps we can look at the typical Job Description to find the reason for much of this “exaggeration”. Instead of a couple of bullet points on duties and responsibilities, followed by a “degree holder” and an “organized and efficient individual” as the main “requirements”, perhaps companies can move towards outlining the actual objectives that someone being hired into the role would be expected to achieve. Indeed, there is no reason not to outline what the benchmarks for success in the role would be. That is of course unless the company doesn’t yet know, in which case, back to the standard job description then!

So the good old CV (Curriculum Vitae) seems to steadily offend more and more people as time goes by. Perhaps this could also be a case of bad workers blaming their tools and instead of pointing their finger at the CV as the root of all evil, critics may want to examine ways in which they can work more smartly to benefit from the information a CV can offer.

The post Replacing the CV is like Reinventing the Wheel appeared first on The HR Gazette.

There is plenty of information on how interviewees can make the best first impressions. There are countless articles on how to interview well, give the perfect handshake and follow up accordingly with hiring managers.

However, with unemployment being at its lowest point in ten years, it is time for hiring managers and recruiters alike to rethink their own interview etiquette and strategy. The application and interview process is no longer necessarily in the favor of a hiring manager. Follow these tips to make the interview process less mysterious and daunting for everyone involved.

Remember that candidates are not just resumes or cover letters

Once a position is posted on the job boards, it is not uncommon for a hiring manager or recruiter to be inundated with dozens (or even hundreds) of resumes and cover letters. As an applicant, it can feel as if your resume and carefully worded cover letter is floating in a deep abyss.

While it may be unrealistic to touch each resume personally, consider a game plan for the applicants you do contact. If you contact an applicant, give them a sample assignment or invite her to come in to interview, you should have a process set up to keep in contact with (at least) these applicants until the position is filled. Keep in contact with these applicants regardless of whether you decide to hire them or not.

Communicate A Time Frame

Some positions need to be filled right away. Other positions have a support team built around it that allows for an ample amount of time to pick the perfect candidate. Communicate the timeframe you have for filling a position. This can make a world of difference for an applicant who is currently unemployed, looking to relocate or in another unique situation.

Consider this scenario. Your first interview with Sally goes magnificently and you are enamored with her However, in the interest of due diligence, you interview another dozen applicants over the next two or three weeks. In the end, Sally was the best interview and you are confident with your decision to hire her. You call Sally and offer her the job. Sally, however, thinking you were disinterested in her, has already accepted a job elsewhere. To sum it up, a little extra communication can go a long way.

Know The Candidate Beforehand

A huge turnoff for hiring manager is a candidate who walks into an interview knowing nothing about the company. How rude! This small amount of research should go both ways.

Read up on your interviewee before the fact. Find out where she went to school or what her role was where she worked previously. Not only will your interview questions naturally be more thoughtful, but the applicant will sense the mutual respect and consideration that is crucial when entering a business relationship.

Follow Up (No Matter What!)

One rule of thumb to employ here (no pun intended) is, if you shook hands with the person, follow up with them! Every person has had that experience of death gripping their phone until they hear whether or not they “got the job”. Don’t make it so painful for each applicant. Communicate with everyone you interviewed once the position.

There are many polite ways to let a candidate down if they did not get the job. If you particularly liked one applicant but they were slightly edged out by another, communicate the fact that you were very interested. Encourage the promising applicants to apply for other jobs in the future or let them know that you will follow up in the future if any appropriate positions open.

Remember that you looked for a job once, too. Try to put yourselves in the shoes of each applicant that walks through your office doors. It is a nerve-wracking, stressful time for a candidate. Hiring managers and recruiters should do all that they can to make the experience as smooth and as clear as possible.

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It happens all the time: You land a new position and find that there are other open positions that maybe your previous co-workers would be interested in.  You tell your new supervisor and, on your recommendation, they give you the “green light” to reach out to them and ask.  Nothing wrong with that, right?

But when do you go too far?

In the recruiting world, its typical for a recruiter to reach out to a client’s competitors to try and steal away their employees.  After all, its easier to find someone who is already doing the job you are hiring for AND in the same industry that will be able to plug in right away.  We call that “business.”  And if an employee is happy at the job they currently have, no amount of wooing will be able to change that.

And it would seem to be perfectly acceptable to use a new hire to do the same type of scouting that would happen if you hired a recruiting firm.  Let’s face it – they know exactly the environment these other employees are in and what may be the reasons they would entertain leaving.  But, there is a point of crossing the line.

I recently had an employee move on to another opportunity with a competitor who began to reach out to his former co-workers to see if they would be interested in leaving and coming over to his new employer as well.  We’re not talking one or two employees….he reached out to at least 5!  Each were key employees in their own departments.  Where this former employee “crossed the line” and has now left a bad taste in not only his former employer’s mouth but that of his former employees, is he began to harass these employees.  And when employees wouldn’t respond or take his phone calls anymore, he turned them over to his new boss to try calling them…to the point that one of their targets came to ask me if we could somehow get them to stop calling him.

Now we’ve crossed into the unprofessional side…An employee determined for vengeance.

Just as we tell jobseekers not to bad talk your past employers during a job interview, seeking vengeance against a former employer leave create a reputation for you personally…not the company.  This can be particularly harmful to you when it’s a niche industry and the power players all talk to each other.  Competitors in the marketplace doesn’t always make them enemies.  Word will get around if you go down the “vengeance” path that can come back to reflect negatively on your new company and you as an employee when you go to move on to another employer.

This can be particularly dangerous for small businesses who don’t have a strong reputation to fall back on, not to mention to potential for legal issues involved from cases of slander to non-competes.  It may seem like an easy and cost-saving tactic to use, but its not always the smartest.

Keep it just business by taking yourself out of the equation.

There is a reason why recruiting firms exist and sometimes the “smarter” approach to poaching as a tactic is to use them to carry it out.  They can approach your desired candidates from a point of confidentiality and feel them out to see if “jumping ship” is really something they would consider.  Remember, just because you perceive an employee as unhappy at their current job doesn’t mean they have the same desire to leave that you did.

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Find yourself hiring the wrong people? It may be time to rethink those resumes.

Advertise a job vacancy and you’ll get at least 250 résumés.

Time to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Your biggest challenge is to not get bamboozled by the padding and outright lies. According to Grad School Hub, 40 percent of those surveyed admitted to lying on their résumés and job applications, while 78 percent said their résumés are “misleading.”

And then there’s the danger of disqualifying people who may have all the qualities you’re looking for but don’t look good on a résumé. Maybe they have unorthodox backgrounds or simply don’t know how to market themselves on paper.

Résumés may tell you how well a person performed a previous or current job. But unless you’re looking for someone to do the exact same job he or she had in the past, a résumé won’t give you insight into how the person will perform in the future.

Résumés are useless.

After making all the hiring mistakes and looking into the research and best practices, I’ve decided to do away with résumés altogether.

The best way to assess a person’s suitability for a job is to get a good picture of him or her through multiple perspectives.

Pretend They Have the Job

Instead of asking for résumés, I ask candidates to fill out an online application, which has questions and tasks that simulate the job. For a student coach job, for example, the application could ask, “How would you respond to this question from a student?” For a writing position, I would give a short writing task.

The application form can also include behavioral questions such as “Tell me about a time you took initiative at work.” Questions like that help me see, first, how the candidate frames the question, and second, how he or she demonstrated a specific quality in previous jobs.

These simulations let me know which candidates have the technical proficiency to get the job done. I can easily make a shortlist based on actual performance. It also discourages those who don’t have the required skills, so they eliminate themselves from the process.

More complicated jobs may require more elaborate simulations. I may pay a shortlisted candidate to take on a project. Or I may hire someone on a contract basis for a few months to test the waters before extending an offer.

To get a more holistic view of each person, I use other data points.

continue reading… Inc.

by Danny Iny

The post How to Hire Without Looking at a Single Resume appeared first on The HR Gazette.

One of the hottest topics at SXSWedu has been how to prepare students for the workplace. Or, in the case of one panel I went to, how to prepare employers for the next generation of students. In a panel called “Diplomas Optional: Jobs of the New Century,” employment experts from LinkedIn, the Markle

Foundation, and Maricopa County Community Colleges weighed in on the current gap between education and recruitment. The Markle Foundation shared with us their new initiative called Skillful. This initiative is intended to bridge the education and recruitment gap in order to help employers find the right talent in a skill-based economy.

The Markle Foundation’s Skillful initiative will establish a new platform to provide transparency into the skills required for mid-level work. The aim is to put an end to ambiguous job postings requiring extensive degrees and experience. According to the panel, these job requirements were traditionally the employer’s most concrete method to determine the skills a candidate has. “So many Americans have great skills, but for too long we’ve valued the college degree as the primary path to success, even though 70% of Americans don’t have one,” says Wan-Lae Cheng, Senior Director of Education and Employment at the Markle Foundation. “This has left many middle-skill Americans—those with a high-school diploma and some college experience but not a four-year degree—with fewer paths to opportunity, while at the same time many employers struggle to fill open positions.”

But What If There Was A New, More Innovative Way?

What if we quantified the specific competencies required for the position and developed the means for candidates to demonstrate these competencies without a diploma? The results would be truly disruptive to the higher education industry, requiring tiers, single-skill classes, and sub-certifications. And these opportunities are already emerging through badge systems and other initiatives across the online learning space. Employers need only to pay attention to these innovations and adapt their processes to suit. The Skillful initiative hopes to facilitate this by raising awareness and enhancing communication between all parties.

“With Skillful, we are building a set of online and offline tools to connect middle-skill job seekers with employers and educators so they can advance their careers,” says Cheng. “Skillful focuses on the key skills and training needed for each job, rather than just on degrees or certificates. It marries the online platform with on-the- ground engagement to build a grassroots effort to reach jobseekers in their communities.”

The work of the Markle Foundation is echoed here in Canada with Magnet’s Universal Language Project. Magnet is a not-for- profit social innovation founded by Ryerson University with a mandate to help connect people with jobs and enhance the economic strength of communities. With so many organizations focused on bridging the gap between higher education and employment, the future of recruitment looks very different, but very bright.

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In the hectic world of hiring and firing, it was technology giant Intel’s planned layoff of 12,000 people that grabbed recent headlines and added to a list of job cuts by US tech companies including IBM and Microsoft.

On top of the large number of redundancies, a Dice Company analysis of the latest turnover data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, showed voluntary resignations in the first three-quarters of 2015 were the highest since 2002.

However, not everyone is saying it’s all doom and gloom. In fact, according to Computerworld’s 2016 IT Salary Survey, 44% of IT managers said they expect to expand hiring of IT staff this year.

So, in summary, there are lots of companies looking to hire. However, could this be in large part because they need to replace employees who are walking out the door to a “better” opportunity?

If this is the case then how should we start to define a “better” opportunity? The evidence points to one main thing. Cold, hard, cash!

Online career site Glassdoor Inc. has stated that technology firms currently make up 20 of the 25 highest-paying companies in the U.S.  This is the result of multi-year gains in total compensation within the industry, and the trend seems set to continue. Computerworld is predicting a 3.9% increase in total compensation (base salary plus bonus) for 2016 according to its polls.

There seems then to be a real battlefield emerging in the tech sector when it comes to hiring talent. On the one hand, there is demand to hire and retain talent, meaning that businesses are constantly increasing salaries and making higher and higher bids to attract the best. On the other side, many tech companies are being forced into cost related lay-offs.

This has led me to wonder whether this “one-upmanship” when it comes to compensation is actually causing the turnover problem across the technology industry. Whilst companies are simply prepared to raise basic salaries and acquiesce to the monetary desires and demands of the existing talent pool, the odds of a true long-term employment perspective ever developing remain slim.

However, at some point, companies might decide to invest their dollars in skill development and training to increase the supply of talent for hiring. Or, they might simply find a market level ceiling on salaries so that finally prospective employees will no longer be holding all the cards and the chances of building more stable, productive and profitable businesses will be increased. Until then, in this survival of the most liquid scenario, there are going to be many companies left battered and bruised.

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I think HR is in denial.  Denial about what, you may ask? Denial about why new hires fail and why they are struggling to attract talent.

In our 2016 McQuaig Global Talent Recruitment Report, we found that a third (34%) of HR professionals around the globe are finding it harder to fill openings now than they were one year ago. The survey responses gave us lots of really interesting insights into why that was, what companies were doing about it and, this year, what impact leadership was having on those efforts. The result that caught my attention, and the one I think our respondents may be in denial about, is why new hires fail.

Let’s break down the numbers and see if you agree with the story I think they’re telling.

In our survey (which you can download here) just 6% of HR professionals said the reason a new hire doesn’t work out is due to a personality conflict with their manager. The overwhelming majority (53%) puts the blame on the candidate and the fact that their personality wasn’t suited to the role. This is huge, because consider that lack of skills only came in at 20%.

So, in more than half the cases in which a new hire fails, it’s either the new hire’s fault or just a case of a bad cultural fit. We did have 62% of people say that finding cultural fit was hard.

But wait a minute, that feels a little too convenient to me. I’ve always heard that most people quit their boss not their job. In fact, a 2015 Gallup poll found that about 50% of adults surveyed left a job to get away from their manager.

So, are we in denial? Are we pointing the finger at the person no longer here to defend themselves, when we should be taking a hard look at the quality of our managers?

I think that’s part of it. I also think something else is going on. I think we’re underestimating the importance of a personality fit in that manager/employee relationship. As a result, I think we’re spending time and effort trying to solve the wrong problem.

The manager/employee relationship is the most important relationship an employee has and a lot of companies don’t really give it any thought. How can I say they don’t give it any thought? Well, here are two reasons.

Reason number one: we don’t support our managers. If you acknowledge that relationship is critical, then why are nearly 40% of companies providing no leadership training to new leaders? That’s what our survey respondents said. Managing people is hard. Coping with different personalities and figuring out how to effectively coach and manage them is really difficult.

These folks need support and tools to help them develop self-awareness, awareness of their staff’s personality, and how to adapt their style to each person. Without that support, they’ll fail and people will get frustrated and leave, either voluntarily or because their performance suffers.

Only 42% of those hiring managers have had any interview training. So, their ability to make the right hiring decision is also in question, but that leads me to my next reason.

Reason number two: we’re putting too much faith in a hiring manager’s decision. I think we’re relying on the fact that one or two interviews will allow everyone to get a sense of whether this relationship is going to work.

Look at what our survey tells us:

• HR professionals believe that 72% of the hiring decision is based on the interview
• Only 40 agree that their hiring managers are “excellent interviewers”

So, the interview is the most important part of the hiring process and 60% of our managers aren’t very good at it. And they’re not likely to get any better if only 42% of them are getting any interview training (another survey result).

But here’s the real head scratcher for me. The HR professionals in our survey are telling us the interview is critical to the hiring decision. They’re telling us their hiring managers are not that good at it. And yet, 63% told us their hiring managers have the skills to assess candidates.

This is where I pause for effect … I struggle with this one. I think we’re putting way too much faith in people without the proper training, possibly without the tools to support them, and then blaming the hire or a culture mismatch when things don’t work out.

I think we may be trying to solve the wrong problem. What if it’s not the candidate or a better way to find a cultural fit that we need to look at? What if it’s the hiring manager/employee relationship?

What if we gave those hiring managers support in the form of interview training, leadership development, and behavioral assessments to equip them to understand themselves, other people, and the impact of their actions?

Would that help that 34% finding it harder to find talent find it a bit easier? Would that increase your retention rates so you didn’t have to fill as many roles? Would that make finding A-level talent easier because word spread that your staff liked their bosses so much?

I think it might.

The post Is HR in Denial? appeared first on The HR Gazette.

Hiring is competitive, and competition drives up costs. Finding, attracting, and retaining talent costs money. Depending on your talent needs any or all three of these things might be your specific hiring challenge.

Sports teams face the same challenges and their talent acquisition strategy directly affects their ability to win. While some teams don’t have the same tight budget you have, they do however have salary caps that limit what they can spend on salaries, which has the same effect as a tight budget.

In order to gain a competitive advantage through talent acquisition, the best teams have learned 2 valuable lessons:

1. Qualifications cost money.
2. More qualifications don’t necessarily improve total team productivity.

I’m not saying you should hire unqualified people, I’m saying there is a way to redefine what qualified means.

How? The best sports teams have built execution strategies around a strong small core team that allows the surrounding team members to be highly productive with fewer qualifications.

Let’s look at a few examples. In the NBA, the San Antonio Spurs have done this really well. They have a small group of core All-Star players and these people are so good that they ask the other players to do a few things only. And because they ask them to do fewer things, they can look for people who only do those things well. To the rest of the league, these are players with deficiencies. Take Patty Mills: before signing with the Spurs, he had previously been playing in leagues in China and Australia, and in a developmental minor league. It’s safe to say he was available to the rest of the NBA for quite a while before the Spurs signed him for very little money (relatively speaking of course). As a member of the Spurs, Patty Mills became a contributing member of the team and won a championship in 2014.

In the NFL, most teams need their pass catching receivers to be very tall, very big, and very fast. But the New England Patriots use a system where most passes are thrown a shorter distance which lets them play receivers that are much shorter and smaller. For example, Julian Edelman is only 5 feet 10 inches which is small for an NFL receiver. Because of this Edelman wasn’t even invited to the NFL draft combine, but the Patriots drafted him in the 7th round (232nd overall). Edelman has become one of the Patriots’ primary receivers and won a championship in 2015.

The Spurs and Patriots have proven it is possible to build extremely productive teams while simplifying “hiring” and lowering salaries!

Smart team building strategies paired with smart execution strategies that allow you to reduce required candidate qualifications, can help any talent acquisition plan reduce costs and improve team productivity.

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