HRMDirect President Colin Kingsbury writes on the latest in recruiting and technology.

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Employee referral programs (and products to drive them) continue to have no end of ink spilled on them as we open 2006. Which is why I really enjoyed Anthony Meaney's contrarian take over at recruiting.com:

Why are referrals touted so highly? Are they really that effective? No they just make our lives easier. Look if I have a choice between hiring someone that is recommended by an employee or going through the whole rigamarole of advertising, reading tons or resumes, spending money on recruiters etc., of course I am going to choose the referral. It is a lot less work.

But is it more effective? Doubtful.

Read the whole thing.

If Anthony is right, the implications of this are significant for companies covered by the OFCCP's recently-adopted rule on handling of "Internet Applicants," which to judge by some commentary, threatens to be the Sarbanes-Oxley of the recruiting world.

Like the best-selling book Freakonomics, Anthony is flipping a rock over and asking us if things are as they seem. My belief is that referrals suffer from decreasing returns to scale, as employees move from referring the one or two truly awesome people they know, then to their cousin Jim who they see every year at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and finally to some guy they met in the bar after golf last weekend.

The new OFCCP rule complicates this by essentially requiring companies to start the process by giving everyone who sends you a resume fair consideration. At the very least you'll need to entertain those other applicants before hiring cousin Jim, and if Anthony's right, that might eliminate much of the benefit of the referral in the first place.

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permalink  |   ( 2.9 / 600 ) Great article at BusinessWeek on the number one frustration among jobseekers: the "resume black hole:"

I thought I had heard it all, until a friend in Silicon Valley wrote me with her story of having made eight -- eight! -- visits to an employer, to interview with people on the management team. After that many interviews, you would expect a phone call if you hadn't gotten the job, wouldn't you? No such luck -- she got no call, no letter, not even a boilerplate e-mail brush-off. No communication whatsoever, after eight visits during which she had made friends with the receptionist and met half the managers. How could a company rationalize that kind of shoddy treatment?

Hat tip: Jason Goldberg

How the "Mushroom Treatment" Costs You Candidates
Nothing will influence candidates' perceptions of your company as trongly as their interactions with it after sending their resume. If you give them the "mushroom treatment" (kept in the dark and fed a lot of ....), they will begin to think this is how they would be treated as an employee.

Recent research shows that changing jobs is driven more by "impulse" than rational calculation. How many times have you lost a good candidate because someone else made an offer to him or her first? And how often do you think you could have offered a better opportunity?

How Open Could You Be?
Instead of hitting you with more slogans on how to reduce time to hire, I want to take an alternate route: be more open with candidates about your process. Tell them where they stand: are they on the "A" list or the "C" list? How long will it take before the next cut occurs?

When you tell people nothing, they assume the worst. They may like the idea of working for you more than the other guy, but when the other guy is getting to them faster, he's going to beat you. But, give those candidates meaningful information like, "You're very strong and we'll decide by the end of the week who we want to interview," and you may just keep them interested enough to tell your competitor they're not quite ready yet. While software like our applicant tracking system can certainly make this a lot easier to do on a day-to-day basis, all you really need to get started is a spreadsheet and an email account.

You Get What You Give
About a month ago, we decided to put the pricing for our products right up on our website. Most of our competitors do not, and some will not quote a price until they've played 20 Questions with you first.

We decided to put our pricing up in public as a way to foster trust. By putting a piece of such valuable information out in the open, we demonstrate to customers that we have nothing to hide. We had a lot of debates about this internally and it made many people here uncomfortable, and t he feeling is always that you're "giving something for nothing" at first. But as we go out and talk to future clients, many tell us, "we like that you guys don't play games with this stuff" and you realize that there is a payoff.

Prospects candidates will recognize and respect it when you share valuable information with them. While some of it will work to their advantage (just as we probably could charge some clients more than the list price), in the long run you will come out ahead as you bring more, better people on board AND make their first impression of the company a strongly positive one.

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permalink  |   ( 2.9 / 329 ) This is a followup to Thursday's post on how screening questions will prevent top candidates from applying. Today I'm going to describe how they can fail even when applicants fill them out.

Transparency
Probably the most common use for screening questions is to filter out applicants who don't meet the minimum requirements for the position they apply for. A typical example is a Programmer-Analyst position that specifies, say, five years experience with Oracle.

If you add a screening question, "How many years of experience do you have using Oracle," you should be able to easily filter out anyone who says "less than 5," right? The problem in this scenario has nothing to do with the technology, which is stupid simple.

The problem is that no one will answer "less than 5" because the screening process is too transparent. Applicants will rationalize reading a newspaper article about Oracle five years ago into the necessary five years of experience. At best you will filter out the people too lazy to read the job description.

The "Fake Good" Problem
But even this comes at a price, and in this case it can be high. The "Fake Good" problem occurs when your process favors resume-padders over applicants who give honest responses. Let's say 25% of the people with at least 5 years of real experience pad that to the "7-10" category. Your ATS will let you sort the applicants based on their responses, and you will proceed to review them from the top down, thus favoring the fabricators over the honest people with the same experience.

As with resume padding, jobseekers are going to learn about the mechanics of screening questions and treat them similarly. In the end, even many normally honest people will inflate their accomplishments out of concern that "everybody else is doing it." And if your hiring process--which can have enormous life consequences for the people who go through it--is based in large part on such simple questionnaires, can you really blame them?

Part 3: How and When to Use Screening Questions: Coming soon.

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permalink  |   ( 3 / 275 ) Read Part 2 on Screening for Minimums.

If you ask a vendor how their ATS improves productivity, one of the most popular responses is "screening questions." In my experience, it's also one of the more popular features among recruiters, albeit one that people buy and fail to use to the extent they expected. Today I want to explore the problems with this approach and how it can hurt an employer's recruiting results.

ATS-driven screening questions are typically presented to the applicant when they want to apply for a job on the employer's website. Before the applicant can submit a resume, he or she is required to fill out a webform which contains the questions. Many recruiters I speak to see this process only in a positive light: as a way to weed out all those plumbers who apply for electrician jobs, or kids one year out of college who think they're ready to be the director of marketing.

The Cost of Information
But you can never obtain information without a cost. Online application forms (as opposed to emailing a resume to an address) have a very powerful impact on the experience of the jobseeker on your website. At worst, the use of such systems will actually reduce the quality of applicants because the best people will simply go away.

Think about it: when you go walking through a mall, do stores require you to prove you have sufficient cash or credit to make a purchase before they let you in and take up their precious clerks' time? We may all have stories of scruffy rich uncles who got the cold shoulder at a Mercedes-Benz dealer but the moral of such stories usually turns out to be that the one salesperson who gave the scruffy guy respect got the deal.

The Internet is the world's ultimate shopping mall, and no matter who you are, you're competing with hundreds of other companies for the applicant's attention. You're not just a jewelry store in a mall, you're a jewelry store in a mall with nothing but thousands of jewelry stores.

Customer Service or Customer Deflection?
In many ways, screening questions are like those interactive telephone systems that your credit card company uses to make sure customers never talk to a human. They can get away with systems built for their convenience because you, the customer, have very little choice in the matter. If you could click a few buttons and switch your account to someone who promised a human at the other end of every call, things would be different. And that's just how easy it is for a casual jobseeker to click to another site.

The bottom line is, you can't do customer deflection if your customer has any kind of power. That's why Tiffany's lets hundreds of people in every day who aren't qualified to purchase their products. Implementing a labor-intensive application process will definitely reduce the volume of junk, and recruiters will feel that right away, and perceive it as a success. But what you won't notice, because you never measured it before, is that it will also reduce the number of really awesome applicants who say "@#$! this" and move on.

Read Part 2 on Screening for Minimums.

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permalink  |   ( 3 / 271 ) First off, we're on Joel's side on this one: pure speculation. But if it did it would be an earthquake, and not just for the job advertising business.

An acquisition is often played up in the press as a "touchdown" for the company doing the buying. The narrative of Smith Widget "gobbling up" Jones Wadget after years of competing is too easy to avoid. And of course that's the story Smith Widget wants to convey: strength, preeminence, market domination.

But it's really a confession. When Oracle bought PeopleSoft and then Siebel it was a confession that they couldn't develop applications on their own. When HP acquired Compaq it was a confession that the PC market was headed downhill. When you can't build products or acquire customers yourself, you buy them. Either way, an acquisition is all too often an admission that you have more money than ideas.

If Google bought Monster, it would certainly cause some to seriously re-think the "Google world domination" meme that currently underpins their public identity. Their strategy as best as anyone can tell is to penetrate markets from the bottom up via search. This is promising but remains largely unproven. Buying Monster would for many be a very public admission that it won't work where there's a pre-existing market.

It will happen eventually, and the world is moving faster. The Dutch East India Company lasted two centuries. Ma Bell made it a little over a century. Microsoft wasn't 25 when Netscape had the Street talking about the end of Bill's Billions. Google turns 8 this year.

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