Recruiting

flickr: Oskars

Some possible answers at ERE.net.

"It is taking so long because it took you four weeks to finalize the position profile [job description].

"It is taking so long because you take forever to respond to the candidates I submit.

"It is taking so long because you do not get back to me after candidate interviews. Having the candidate die of old age waiting for the manager to think, discuss, compare, contrast, evaluate, reflect, confer, plot, map out, or my personal favorite, "sleep on" is pitiful. Once again, 24 to 48 hours to make a decision. Do you want to move forward or not? (A client once told me he had to "ponder." I hate ponderers.)

"It is taking so long because you change the position profile twice a week."

Again, managers don't often like hiring. (View proof, from "Jobs That Don't Suck") So it's no surprise that they often take a long time to "ponder" or whatever it is, keeping tons of qualified people hanging.

The ERE.net Social Recruiting Summit today in NYC will be streaming live starting just before 9:30 a.m. You can check it out at ERE.net. If you're at all in the recruiting space or if you're a jobseeker trying to figure out how the new breed of recruiters thinks, you'll want to sit in on this conference.

On the agenda: remarks from Laurie Ruettimann, Fred Wilson, Jessica Lee, and much more.

Harsh! An internal recruiter was trying to extend a job offer to Candidate A. Candidate A had a similar name as Candidate B. Guess who got the job offer?

Oops, writes HR Store. "All that was required from you was to mail an offer to a candidate. Just how tough is that? You are right about feeling terrible for sending out an offer to the wrong candidate!...Here's exactly why recruiters end up among the most hated folks on everyone's list."

This happens quite a bit, actually—and we've heard anecdotal evidence to back up the stats. E-mail is just too easy to screw up.

So what do you do in this situation? According to HR Store, call *and* e-mail Candidate B explaining the situation in as few words as possible. Consult a lawyer. And pray Candidate B hasn't already quit his old job.

The daylong Social Recruiting Summit from ERE.net is Monday, November 16, so just ten days away.

At the summit you'll hear from industry leaders on building social talent pipelines, debate the merits of Facebook fan pages and Twitter accounts, with time for networking before, after, and between the sessions.

On the agenda: talks with Jessica Lee, recruiter for communications firm APCO Worldwide (and editor of Fistful of Talent), venture capitalist Fred Wilson, and social media strategists at all kinds of companies—Sodexho, Microsoft, and others.

The last summit—this summer in Mountain View, CA—sold out, so reserve your spot today if you're a recruiter trying to wrap your head around this stuff.

By the way! If you're into social recruiting, you totally need to register for next week's Social Recruiting Summit in New York City, held by ere.net.

So. You're a recruiter with a limited budget. How do you demonstrate to the higher-ups that you should be spending it on Facebook, not on CareerBuilder?

John Sullivan at ERE.net compiled a list of the benefits of social recruiting, as well as a step-by-step tutorial of how to to try on your boss.

We're not going to run through the whole set of instructions here as there are quite a lot of them.

But here are some of the "highly compelling" benefits of social media recruiting:

* Hire quality — the program may result in hires who perform better on the job and have higher retention rates.
* Candidate quality — those who frequently use social networks may be the highly desirable early adopter; this source may identify higher-quality candidates who can then be presented to hiring managers (including those who are more technically savvy and more innovative). Note: even the simple act of listing the primary source (that generated the resume) on the top corner of every resume will, over time, educate hiring managers and eventually lead them to demand that recruiting shift their emphasis toward the sources that appear most frequently on top of the resumes that end up on a hiring manager's short list.
* ROI — the dollar value of the program's benefits may far exceed its cost, and the resulting ROI may be significantly higher than other recruiting programs.
* Vacancy days — because of the high usage rates and the short response times on some social network communications channels, revenue-generating, and key positions may be filled faster, resulting in fewer costly vacancy days in key positions.
* Higher offer acceptance rates — using social networks to attract and communicate with candidates may result in higher offer acceptance rates among finalists.
* Hidden candidates — it may identify qualified candidates who cannot be found or successfully messaged using other sources.

For "often compelling" benefits, click the jump.

continued...

A study in the Psychological Bulletin conducted a decade ago but recently brought to light shows that the methods companies use to determine whether a potential employee is a good fit...may not be the best methods.

To wit:

Out of 19 methods for essentially predicting how well an employee will be able to do his/her job, like interviews, data points on a resume like years of experience or years of education, which topped the list? None of these.

flickr: SOCIALisBETTER

"Structured" interviews came in third, though an unstructured interview ("Tell me about yourself...") came in ninth.

A job knowledge test (a written theoretical test rather than a hands-on test like the work sample) was the fifth most effective method, and a job tryout was seventh, both more effective than unstructured interviews.

Years of experience and years of education came in 14th and 16th, respectively; age came in last.

A couple of questions.

One: would it be a good thing if more companies adopted this approach? We see both sides. It would be great to see hiring companies paying less attention to the resume, since that attention is often paid arbitrarily, but making prospective applicants take tests is time-consuming for both hirer and hiree.

Two: Are there more factors at play here than the applicant's simple ability to do the job? Cultural fit is important, and you won't get that from a test, just an interview. Personality is important, as new hires who can't stand their managers are not likely to get far. Is that why companies have shied away from more skills-based methods of evaluation?

(h/t The Staffing Advisor)

A full seventy percent of job applicants—to any job at any company—are dissatisfied with the hiring process, according to Staffing.org. And 25 percent of those who are hired for jobs regret it after a year, according to consulting firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas.

These are two of the "five ugly truths" about recruiting on ERE.net. John Sullivan puts the stats in another light:

"Almost any senior executive would be alarmed upon learning that users were dissatisfied, failure rates approached 50%, and a significant percentage of your customers regretted their decisions.

"Obviously, if the numbers listed above came from an important profit-impact function (supply chain, finance, customer satisfaction), everyone would be screaming for a complete rethinking of the entire process."

But recruiting? No big deal, right? If you ignore/mistreat one potential employee, hey, there will be three hundred more.

Except that ignoring these numbers, Sullivan says, also means missing out on hiring the top guy, or putting a great candidate in a poor position, or losing a high-performing employee, or just plain ol' hiring the wrong person.

He doesn't prescribe certain tactics, just measurement. Use mystery shoppers, rely on data, and be objective, not subjective. Then you'll be able to answer the question that, when Sullivan asks recruiting leaders, he gets back a blank look 99% of the time: "If you hired 100 people, what percentage would turn out to be failures?"

If you don't know, why not?

Can a candidate being contacted by a recruiter sue for invasion of privacy or harassment?

Short answer: There are no reported cases in the history of American law where a recruiter was accused of harassing a passive candidate, writes placement law expert Jeffrey G. Allen at The Fordyce Letter.

Long answer: Putting personal info on LinkedIn or Facebook appears to imply consent to be contacted (Allen's exact words: "Anyone on Linkedin or Facebook wants publicity"), though implied consent isn't necessary to get out of legal trouble.

For an ultra-watertight legal defense, get a non-work e-mail address or phone number from the candidate. "If you get one (or even a personal email address), the candidate is estopped (stopped) from asserting that you violated her rights. She impliedly waived them."

!
We're not lawyers and this isn't legal advice; check with an attorney if you're worried about these issues.

Jessica Lee brings us a social media recruiting success story this Monday morning @ Fistful of Talent. It happened just last month.

September 17th, 9:13am. I put out a tweet using my personal account and it's pretty harmless. I say I'm going to be looking for some entry level folks interested in health policy/healthcare comms. That's all I wrote. I didn't include a link to a job posting. I just made the statement.

flickr: Spencer E Holtaway; no derivatives.

September 17th, 1:08pm. I receive an email via Facebook from someone interested in the health policy role. It turns out that her friend follows me on Twitter, saw my tweet and told her about it.

They go to this blog which is linked to my Twitter profile. They find a link to my Facebook account which is linked to on the blog. And then I received the email. And then I asked for her resume.

A few interviews later and she has the job. Turns out the friend who saw the initial Tweet found Jessica when a competing recruiter namedropped her as someone in the industry to follow.

"Community matters. Networks matter. Relationships really matter. And—there was no cost to this hire except for the investment of time and effort I've made to be a good, contributing member of the social media community. That's it."

The lesson here for recruiters? It really works. It doesn't cost much.

The lesson for jobseekers? If you see something that sounds interesting, jump on it. Note the time elapsed between Lee posting "I am going to start looking for someone for this position" and the jobseeker getting her resume in. Less than four hours. Don't wait. Go.

Two new posts on Fistful of Talent make the claim that most of the time, HR reps don't want to see a prospective employee's credit report.

Kris Dunn starts off by saying that credit reports are subjective, not to mention TMI. "One person ran up 3 credit cards to Macy's and never paid them off, and one person owes Barnes and Noble 5K. Who's worse? I have no idea...

flickr: AlphaTangoBravo / Adam Baker