LEAN, Just-in-Time Recruiting!



Archive for the ‘Recruiter Top Gun’ Category

How Does Your Email Look on a Prospect’s Phone!?

Wednesday, August 10th, 2011

Given the fact that a majority of people:

  • Don’t pick up the phone unless they recognize the phone # (myself included :( ).
  • Are addicted to their mobile media device (aka – smart phone)!

I would bet a good majority of your candidate prospects are receiving your “first contact” on their smart phone while at their desk, sitting in a meeting, at the coffee shop, etc. 

During a session on Monday, I received a great question from Ryan that honestly . . . I haven’t spent a ton of time researching.

“When sending an “Attention Grabber” email (Crafting and Delivering an “Attention Grabber”), how does it look when it is displayed on your mobile phone?”

My colleague (and our self-proclaimed resident “recruiting geek”), Mike McLean, had some excellent advice that I thought I would share with you all:

That is a great question. Having a uniform email that will display exactly the same on all smart phones would be extremely difficult (due to personal configurations, overrides, system setup/parameters, etc.). But there are a few things you can do to ensure that your emails will look the same to as many folks as possible: 

  1. Write all of your emails in Arial.  Arial is the default font for most applications and most people don’t change their settings off of it.   The 2nd most popular is Tahoma but not as many applications use it as a default.
  2. Compose your emails in Rich Text Format (also known as RTF) or HTML not text. RTF is the most common language used in word processing software so this will cause the least amount of issues.  If you are sending an email as HTML it is being sent just as it would present/look on a Webpage whereas if using RTF your email would look the same whether it was an email, word doc or webpage etc.  This means that an email in RTF is less likely to have its formatting changed when being read on different formats.
  3. Always send a test email to yourself and check it on your phone as well.

If you have any other great advice to share on this topic, please let me know!

‘Two cents’ from the road

Wednesday, April 20th, 2011

As I have mentioned in the past, I am one lucky “recruiting guy” because I get to interact with talented recruitment professionals throughout the world on a daily basis. 

With our Solution engagement, I also get to become a ‘teammate’ of many recruitment organizations!  With our Benchmark Study, I have intimate interaction with many, many more!

This unique opportunity always provides me with many thoughts/observations/insights! 

Some  recent “Lean, JIT ‘Elite’ Recruitment Thoughts” from the road:

Discipline, sense of urgency, and self-direction are a few of the most important ELITE recruiter competencies you can possess.

  • The busier you get, the more time you need to plan your perfect day. If you are not planning at least 30 minutes a day . . . I bet you are 10-50% less productive than those that do!
  • You can plan all you want but . . . if you are not “true to your schedule”, if you do not commit to crossing off your TO DOs (ETFs, MTNs), starting/stopping meetings ON TIME, etc., IT IS WORTHLESS!

Trust is also very important.  If your hiring managers don’t TRUST that:

  • You understand their business
  • You have an eye for the talent they want/need
  • You know how to find top talent
  • They will continue to:
    • Ask to see all resumes before setting up interviews
    • Always want to “see more”
    • Not listen to your salary/offer recommendations, etc.
  • To earn trust, you must learn their business by attending staff meetings, learning from employees/candidates AND become an expert at performing intake sessions and setting SLAs

A strong ability to solicit interest is equally important.  With technology, social media, it is much easier to FIND passive candidates . . . but still very difficult to SOLICIT THEIR INTEREST.

While there are many facets to recruiting, if you:

  • Are able to plan for, and execute more Perfect Days (with passion :) )
  • Have earned the trust of your hiring managers via knowledge and engaging/executing flawless intake/SLA sessions.
  • Have mastered the ability to engage and recruit top talent.

You are pretty darn ‘elite’ in my book!

My ‘two cents’ from the road . . . Please share any of your ‘two cents’ from the field!  :)

I hope you have (or had) a good spring break!

The 80/20 Rule

Wednesday, April 13th, 2011

Author: Karen Antrim – Lean Human Capital  

Years ago, my boss said to me “this place has too much of the 80/20 rule.”  “80/20 rule?” I asked.  “It’s when 80 percent of the work gets done by 20 percent of the people.” he answered.

In my real life, when I’m not sourcing or teaching sourcing, I’m a mom.  I volunteer at my kids school, at our church, and for little league.   I often observe the 80/20 there.  You’ve probably noticed this in your real life too.  80 percent of the work is done by 20 percent of the parents.

Weekly, I read about a new tool, technique or process that is going to change the way we source.  Or, I get an email for a class on how to improve and write better Boolean strings to find resumes or lists on the net.  I’m all for constant learning and constant improvement.  It’s the mantra our firm is based on.  However, I work for recruiters who have very little time and a mountain of openings to fill.  So my ability to get them accurate prospective candidates in a short time is a priority.  My sourcing techniques must provide the biggest return for the effort.  They must adhere to the “80/20 rule”.

The principle applies to recruiters who do their own sourcing. They have even less time for each activity in the recruitment process without a sourcing staff to assist them.  The “80/20 rule” should become a guiding principle.

Simply put, the 80/20 rule is how to get 80% of your candidates with 20% of the tools and processes of sourcing.

Let’s take some specific examples.  We all know that Linkedin.com has the largest community of profiles of any social professional network.  If you have time constraints on your recruitment process, why use any other network?  Get 80% of your prospects, build 80% of your network, start 80% of your conversations in LinkedIn.

Here is an inverse example.  I understand the appeal of long and sexy Boolean search strings.  As a Boolean geek, I dig‘em.  But as a person who must be pragmatic in her practices, they do not return enough bang for the buck.  They don’t adhere to the 80/20 rule.  For example, the popular string (Intitle:resume OR inurl:resume OR intitle:cv OR inurl:CV  OR etc..) generally finds resumes that have been posted on a personal website or perhaps a university faculty bio. There just isn’t a large population of these out there.  One can spend a great deal of time playing with keywords in this string and not get a large return for their time investment.  This is an example of the 20/80 rule.  20% return on 80% of the investment.

Pick your top 3-5 successful sourcing activities, and stick with those.  Mine are:

  1. Site command to harvest linkedin.com
  2. Subscription resume database such as Monster
  3. My ATS
  4. Finding associations and membership lists
  5. Target companies to raid with call campaign

As a recruiter, you may change out #4 for working your own existing network.

Regardless of whether you’re a recruiter doing your own sourcing, or a sourcer supporting recruiters, putting 20% of your time in these activities will produce 80% of your prospect list.  That leaves a whole lot of time for other tasks, such as candidate interaction, building your network, or branding yourself and your organization.

Happy Sourcing!

Managing Your Hiring Managers, Part Two

Wednesday, October 6th, 2010

Last week we posted the first part in this series on Managing Your Hiring Managers.  We discussed how to understand what your hiring manager’s want (or just as important – need) through voice of the customer (VOC).

A key to building a consultative partnership with your hiring manager is by getting to know them personally and building credibility with strong functional knowledge of their organization, business unit and staff.  

How do you accomplish this? The following questions will help guide you so that you can become recognized as a true staffing partner with your hiring managers.

Knowing Your Hiring Managers & Building Credibility – Self Assessment!

  • Do you have strong, personal relationships with your hiring managers? Do you know where they are from, their hobbies and interests?  You don’t need to be best friends.  But, you should have some basic knowledge of your customer and who they are. 
  • Do you know their administrative assistants or other support staff well? Often the most important contact you’ll have is the Administrative Assistants and other support professionals aligned to your hiring manager.  They can be your best ally to ensure you’re given access to the hiring manager’s schedule and they always have an ear to the inner workings of the hiring manager’s department.
  • Who are their top performers?  Do you have a relationship with them?  If you’re trying to build a business for your hiring manager, you should always look at their leadership team.  From the successor of the department to the top performers, the traits from these team members are what the hiring manager is seeking to build in his/her department and what you should look for when courting talent.  Also building relationships with these leaders will ensure your opinion is vetted throughout the key influencers in your hiring manager’s world.
  • Do you have a strong functional knowledge of what they do?  What does the hiring manager actually do every day?  You should have a basic understanding of how they spend their time.  They should also know how you spend yours. :)
  • Do you keep up with the industry?   Sure, you should be reading Workforce & HR magazines, but you should also be reading up on the latest trends in your industry. Whatever the industry (i.e. healthcare, banking, home building), you should stay abreast of trends there.
  • Have you visited the department or met their staff?  If you have the ability to make a visit in person do so.  One of my clients within the insurance industry conducts site visits once a month to make sure they have a face tied to the name.  
  • Do you understand the career progression for each department?  How do people move up, or transfer out of their department.  This can be a key selling point if this particular manager has a track record of creating star performers for your organization or system.
  • Do you meet with your managers quarterly to quantify your performance/ROI?  As part of a quarterly touch base (or onsite visit), do you present meaningful data to your hiring manager to show what you or your function has done for them in the past 3 months?

We have added this self-assessment tool to our Good to “Elite” competency/skills self assessment library (see below).

Click here to participate.

If would like a copy of your (or your team’s results) results, please email us.

Join us for our final installment next week when we’ll focus on how to effectively manage the hiring manager relationship.

Have a great week!

Compelling Time to Fill (TTF) data — It can be misleading

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010

In a recent blogcast, (Time to Fill – Are You Managing A Key Metric You Are Measured On?), we discuss how time to fill can be misleading and . . . not a good indicator of hiring manager satisfaction and overall “responsiveness” to the truly critical hiring needs of the organization.

While most organizations might be able to track TTF by job category, they only report the overall average to key stakeholders. Unfortunately, this statistic becomes a “blended” rate of all positions regardless of priority, cost of vacancy, criticality to organization, difficulty to fill, etc.

And if an organization is not structured to truly support priority, critical to fill, or difficult to fill positions, there often is a big gap with respect to TTF between what we call Business As Usual Req’s – (AKA – BAU’s – repetitive positions that most often are filled by active, internal or referral candidates) and  priority/critical/difficult to fill ones. 

Some very intriguing data from one of our healthcare clients illustrates this point.

While there overall TTF for Q2 was 33 days (very, very good especially compared to our benchmark median of 41 days.

  • 300 positions were filled in an average of 23 days
  • While 49 positions took on average 89 days to fill!

This provokes the questions:

  • Do you have the right organizational structure to support BAU and priority/critical/difficult to fill positions?
  • Do you have the right process to support these distinctly different types of positions?
  • Do you have the right resources to effectively screen through the active pool of candidates while proactively sourcing top talent not found in those circles?

If you haven’t done so recently, I would slice your TTF data by BAU and priority/critical/difficult to fill categories and analyze how well you are performing. 

If your data is similar to the organization outlined above, then seek to develop strategies, processes, etc. to improve timeliness on the positions most critical to your organization!

I hope you’re having a good week. 

Recently Published Study Indicates Hiring to Pick Up to Pre-Recession Levels — Are you ready?

Wednesday, August 25th, 2010

Just over half of large, recently downsized U.S. companies plan to boost staffing and reach pre-recession levels by 2012, according to Accenture’s recent High Performance Workforce Study.  The survey included 674 senior executives worldwide from companies with revenue of more than $250 million.

Investment in hiring for the U.S. based companies is expected to increase from 24 percent today to 37 percent within the next 12 months.  The study also found that only 13 percent of executives said that they plan to reduce their employee base over the next 12 months. 

Yet as we all know, the planned growth won’t come easily. If a hiring ‘boom’ is imminent, highly skilled workers will come at a premium again as companies seek to grow.

The focus would soon shift from cost reduction to proactive staffing resource planning required to address spikes in hiring needs.   

Questions you might ask to decipher if you are in for a hiring boom:

  • Does your company have a strong balance sheet with cash to invest in a growth strategy?
  • Is your workforce already stretched thin?
  • Are you using contractors to supplement fulltime staff to get the work done today?
  • If there was a hiring “spike”, do you have the resources to get the job done?

If you answered YES to the first three questions and NO to the last, then it probably is time to start to develop a contingency plan in the event it DOES happen!

Be realistic but THINK POSITIVE about the future!  Most important, be prepared.

I hope you enjoy the last few weeks of the summer.

Interesting data from ‘Elite’ Recruiter Competency/Skills Assessment Study – some advice to share!

Wednesday, August 18th, 2010

We are proud to announce that we have had over 1500 recruiters participate in our ‘Elite’ Recruiter Competency/Skills Self-Assessment Study!   If you haven’t participated, we encourage you to do so! It is free! :)

It is interesting to see that outside of normal areas that recruiters always seem to rate themselves “low” (areas for improvement :) ):

  • Use social networking tools to source qualified, passive candidates (rating of 2.94 of 5)
  • Engage and recruit passively-looking top talent candidates (3.20 of 5) 

The next two lowest scores were related to managing the search process:

  • Sets Service Level Agreements with hiring managers: 3.22 of 5.00
  • Manage and control the staffing lifecycle efficiently: 3.39 of 5.00

We have written articles/posts on this subject that have received positive reviews I thought I would share: 

The Most Important Service Level Agreement

When are you available versus what do you think about this candidate?

Do you have credibility with your hiring managers?

We have also helped many organizations implement an “easy to use” one page Service Level Agreement document to be used when qualifying a new position (especially when it is a new hiring manager). If you would like a copy – please email us!

The scores above point to a skills gap with respect to a consultative approach to managing the search process. If you think this is an area where you need/want to “sharpen your ax”, I hope some of the information provided will be of value!

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me!

Time, Tenure and Trust

Wednesday, August 4th, 2010

We have recently published our first annual Healthcare Recruitment Benchmark study. A core piece of the study was measuring/benchmarking key process efficiency metrics of the staffing supply chain.

Through this initiative, we found the average Route to Hire Efficiency Metric to be 6.7 to 1.

That is, it takes 6.7 candidates routed to the hiring manager to achieve 1 hire.  While this actually is pretty darn efficient compared to studies we have done in other industries, Best in Class organizations (representing the average of the top 25%) Route to Hire Efficiency was 2.48 to 1! 

Basically, the Elite, efficient organizations required half as many candidates (routed) to get 1 hire! 

Or course there are/were many things they did differently to develop a Lean, efficient staffing process, but something all systems had in common was this concept of Time, Tenure and Trust.

  1. Time – All Elite organizations spend a considerable amount of time on:
    • The intake session with the hiring manager. They made sure they clearly understood the need, how to market the opportunity; define clear service levels for service, etc.
    • The pre-screen process. Whether they used an automated assessment tool and/or some combination of phone interview, they spent enough time with the candidate to ensure they were someone that was worthy of consideration and should be interviewed by the hiring manager.
    • Discussing candidates with managers and proactively setting interviews.

While all these steps might seem obvious to some experienced recruiters, many recruiters/organizations still struggle to INVEST the time required in these three steps.  The usual results include routing too many candidates to managers that they in return reject to be interviewed/considered.   This is clearly evident in that the average Route to Hiring Manager efficiency was 43% while the Elite organizations efficiency was 80%!

  1. Tenure – Most Elite firms agreed that they had many ‘tenured’ recruiters on staff that had built rapport with their hiring managers, taken the time to understand the business unit they supported, etc.  All firms agreed that you can overcome short tenure by investing the time in the three steps above.
  2. Trust – Elite recruiters have the trust of the hiring managers and they respect them as staffing consultants. 
    • They interview the candidates the recruiters send rather than scrutinize!
    • They ask for their opinion when deciding on making an offer (or not).
    • They respect their input on compensation discussions.

While I don’t want to over simplify how the Elite organizations have become hyper efficient, I don’t want to lose the forest through the trees either!  Time invested up front can quickly turn a non-tenured recruiter into a staffing consultant that garners a ton of TRUST FROM their hiring managers. 

Some food for thought on a Wednesday!

PS – If you are a healthcare organization that wants more information on our Healthcare Recruitment Benchmark Study, please contact us!

Time to Fill – Are You Managing A Key Metric You Are Measured On?

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

We are excited that we had over 50 participants in our inaugural Healthcare Recruitment Benchmark Study .  We had the pleasure of presenting our initial findings at the National Association of Healthcare Recruiters Annual Image Conference in Las Vegas last week.  The conference, as always, was Five Star!  And we were overwhelmed (and humbled) with the interest in our Lean, JIT recruitment principles and our actual study.

One metrics that surprised us (especially in our flat economy) was the percentage of positions that had been open over 60 days. 

While the overall average Time to Fill (TTF) was trending around 46 days (which is good compared to years past and benchmark data from sources like Saratoga.org), 38% of the participants current open positions were trending over 60 days.

Further analysis provided some conclusions:

  1. Recruitment teams are pretty good at filling what we call Business as Usual Req’s (BAUs) with internal or active candidates that apply to postings, especially since most are rewarded (and measured) on how many positions they fill.  While we didn’t track this particular data element/segment in the study, our qualitative analysis indicates that the average TTF for these positions is 20-30 days.  
  2. Most organizations continue to struggle with filling difficult/critical to fill positions (CTF).  These positions are still trending at 60, 90 days + TTF.

So while on the surface, most organizations feel pretty good about their overall TTF metric, under the surface managers are still concerned about their recruitment teams’ ability to fill CTF positions. Even more important, the inability to fill these positions JIT is often costing organizations millions of dollars (Cost of Vacancy).   

We believe the three primary reasons that 38% of the positions are trending over 60 days are as follows:

  1. Not managing/monitoring your over sixty days report:  It is very easy for a recruiter carrying 25, 30, 50 req’s to forget what their top priorities are, which positions have been open over 60 days, etc.  It you do not stay on top of your openings (and if managers aren’t pounding down your door, positions can creep past this milestone very fast.
  2. Recruiters either don’t have the time to source for quality candidates or . . . are NOT carving out time.
  3. Recruiters don’t have the skills/competencies (or both) to find high quality talent for their CTF positions.

Some solutions to reducing the percentage of positions trending over 60 days old:

  1. On a weekly basis, have a team meeting to specifically discuss positions trending over 60 days.  Position on hold? Close it.  Candidates to disposition and get over to manager? Do it. One of our clients has recently implemented a Monday morning “huddle” to specifically discuss positions trending over 60 days.  By making it a priority, they have cut these down from 25% to 13%!  
  2. The “time” issue is a little more problematic.  It takes relatively no time to “source/pre-qualify” an active, internal or referral candidate.  Literally, this process is a few minutes. On the other hand, it might take hours to source and pre-qualify one passive/top talent candidate.  Most organizations do not factor this when developing recruitment resource plans!  They don’t dissect which positions are BAU’s, which are CTF and . . . how much sourcing time needs to be dedicated to filling these positions.  With our staffing optimization model, we take that into consideration when identifying the number of resources needed to manage the corresponding hiring needs.  You should investigate this when developing your resource plans.  
  3. The 3rd reason is probably the easiest to fix.  Assuming the recruiter has the competencies of an ‘Elite’ recruiter , they probably can be taught the skills to source top talent.  At the very least, you could assign sourcing activities to those in your organization that enjoy and are good at sourcing or outsource part of the sourcing activities, such as name generation to allow your recruiters more time to cultivate relationships (and ultimately recruit) passive candidates.

If your organization measures you on TTF, I would ensure that you are deploying best practices to manage it!

Any questions, please contact me!

LinkedIn + Persistence + Phone + Respect = Success – Don’t stop until they say, “NO!” – A TRUE STORY

Friday, June 18th, 2010

My colleague (Kristine) recently received an executive level, ‘niche skill-set’ search opportunity from one of her clients/hiring managers.  As many savvy recruiters do these days, she developed a targeted sourcing strategy and:

  • Identified all competitor companies and companies that employed people with the skill set she was looking for.
  • Then defined all the different titles that this person would/could be called within these target companies.
  • She then started to seek potential candidates and individuals she could network with in this market (the client didn’t want to relo if possible) via LinkedIn. 

Armed with this intel (and a compelling Value Proposition Statement/Attention Grabber) about this opportunity, she made contact (via Inmail or directly via business/personal email) with all the potential applicants/networking professionals. 

While this is a very common practice among thousands of recruiters, her subsequent actions are often not.

  1. She sent two to three electronic messages out to each and every candidate.  While her response rate was good, she didn’t receive feedback from many and most importantly . . . she did not connect with the A+ talent her client demanded and deserves.
  2. She didn’t give up. While most recruiters would give up on these “prospects” in search of others, she identified phone contact information (this is part of her normal process) for all candidates that had not yet responded to her Inmails/emails and started an out bound telemarketing campaign. 

Covering all bases and having resilience:

She caught one individual around 7:30 am (knowing she was a manager, she called before meetings started – - usually around 8).  Her brief discussion that morning led to a subsequent discussion that led to . . . . an interview, offer and hire for a critical to fill position with interface with the COO, CMO and CEO of a Fortune 500 company!

One day after the candidate (now new hire) accepted the offer, she sent the most wonderful email to Kristine.

“Kristine, I can’t thank you enough for being persistent and making contact with me.  Honestly, while I was intrigued by your emails, I probably wouldn’t have called you back simply because I get so busy during the day with work, life events, etc..  Your persistence has allowed me to find an unbelievable opportunity for me and my family.  I am grateful for your efforts!”

WOW! 

Morale of Story:

  • Don’t assume that no response means they don’t want to talk, won’t help you network, etc.  Remember they are as busy as you! (Are there calls or emails that you have NOT responded to because they are not urgent or of top priority?)
  • Emails, texting, social media tools, etc are awesome and a quick way to reach out to a targeted group of people quickly.  But don’t fall into the trap of ONLY communicating via this method!  A targeted sourcing strategy including emails, texts, and PHONE CALLS is the key to successfully recruiting passive candidates.
  • Your compelling message, your tonality when calling, and the time you actually call are . . . all key ingredients to successfully engaging top talent.
  • Don’t stop until they say – “No, not interested and . . . can’t help with networking” (objection handling on this topic is for another day!)

While I am sure all of you have heard this before and/or follow a similar strategy as a matter of practice . . . I thought this was a wonderful story to share to ensure you are practicing it NOW!

In this age of electronic communication, I think it is easy for even the savviest recruiters to fall into the trap of “email & pray” on occasion! :)