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

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This week we are proud to host Gautam Ghosh, an OD, HR, and blogging consultant based in Hyderabad who needs little introduction around the recruiting blogosphere. His post offers some great advice on simple ways to make an ATS (or really any kind of system) rollout go more smoothly, no matter what size your organization is.

Making the Benefits Clear

I've never been a recruiter, but have worked in three organizations that were trying to implement Applicant Tracking Systems within their Recruiting organizations.

Like all change, implementing an ATS is fraught with issues around Change Management. So the process which could have been smoother caused a whole lot of heartburn and took a lot of directive prodding that could have been avoided.

Here are my learnings from these implementations, from a distance:

1. Benefits of the system should be make explicit from the very beginning. A recruiter loves sourcing and shortlisting and interviewing. Any time he/she would be spending not doing any of these should be clear why. Case studies should be shown on benefits of using the system.

2. Most of the ATS rollouts were done because of a global system changing. Nobody in India knew all the answers to point 1. Hence a change champion who has implemented this change across similar countries should be present in person to address fears and discomfort. The real thing is not "explicit questions" but the "implicit ones"

3. When systems are in a state of turmoil then introducing a system gets the pushback much more vigorously. When India is amongst the only countries hiring in new numbers, ATS rollouts might make sense for the global Online Recruitment boss, but not for the recruiters and hiring managers in the country.

4. User training and coaching should not be a "check-box" activity. When a training is called for a new software system, most people who are laymen come out of it glazed. ATS and other software tools must have a "play and test" system with dummy data to make users comfortable with the new system. This needs a champion within the team to take up the role.

5. Sometimes even third party recruiters and testing vendors need to be trained, after analysing a local country/locations specific hiring needs. If they can't be accomodated the whole system becomes cumbersome.

If the above points are kept in mind by firms before rolling out ATS systems, then they would not generate the amount of negative energy in recruiters and hiring managers than they do right now.

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permalink  |   ( 2.9 / 797 ) Commencement of Week 4 of the Blog Swap approached. Attention to the fact was noted in my email account reminders area. As with any good consultant, it was a fact that the one thing most necessary before approaching a new client or situation is to learn more about them, research them, make certain you understand what they're about. So I began surfing HRMDirect's blog site in order to learn Colin's "voice" and principal focus. And I wanted to learn how long he's operated not only HRMDirect but also maintained his blog.

Clicking through the archives was time consuming. But that clicking yielded fruit. There on April 27, 2006, Colin spoke of Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day and the importance of preparing those seeds of our future for the real workplace in meaningful ways. "We speak the same language!" I emoted, "We share the same passion!" And I decided that the contribution I made to HRMDirect would focus on (as I have spoken about in the past) our responsibility for future workforce preparation.

An alternative to development of our future workforce was a more generic and germane topic, leadership development, with an emphasis on "leadership."

But I stopped turning over these ideas as I realized I was going off track with what Colin's site is about. It was time to march back over and examine the site more carefully. It was time to read the posts in detail in order to understand the "voice" and business focus of HRMDirect. A good consultant stays on track, keeps focused on the essentials of their project, and demonstrates discipline by knowing how to pull themselves back to what they are <b><i>supposed</i><b> to do. In returning to examine the site once more, the realization that HRMDirect is about ATS applications became more obvious (as it was initially) and I was going off topic with all of those other peripheral discourses.

Meanwhile, Week 3 came and went. A client's real-world, onsite work came up and took me away from the goal of writing in Colin's voice and on his theme. But perseverence is another mark of a good consultant. New starts at the post were made. The drafts were saved and stored to the hard drive in their proper folder as time ran out. And Week 4 drew to a close.

We are now in Week 5 of the Blog Swap and I am dedicating this time to completing Week 4's post in Colin's voice and on his theme. It is now that the collection of these endeavors starts to take shape and evolve into a picture of what Human Resources in The New Millennium and Web 2.0 means. It is about all of the things that were considered, succession planning, human capital planning and preparation, Internet maximization, software utilization, innovation, tools, communication, keeping track of projects and promises and contracts, knowing laws and regulations, compliance with laws, and much more.

While I am not the ATS software guru that Colin and his team are, there are some things about HR management I do know as a consultant. It takes using a very powerful tool to help keep things on track in order to be the most effective and efficient human capital professional for one's organization. To the extent there is one cost-effective tool that will allow maximizing tasks such as communication, contract stages, onboarding, and the other multitudes of HR dynamics, it is worth one's effort to identify it in order to save the time and dollars as time passes. It's important to have a tool that will evolve with your organization. Each system allows input and calling of resumes. Not all systems offer identical features. So it's important to, once again, assess what's important to your organization, research what's on the market, analyze the features, determine the potential return on investment not only in terms of dollars and cents but also in effort and redundancy of software
presently residing on your hard drive, and ease of integration into your overall system.

The reason I was so scattered is because those are all the same dynamics that impact HR on a day-to-day basis, including the forgotten commitments that need to be attended in order to keep the business.

~~~~~

<b>About the Author:</b><br>
Yvonne LaRose is a California Accredited Consultant whose office is in Beverly Hills, California. Her practice focuses on two general areas: Organizational Development and Career Coaching. Her column, Career and Executive Recruiting Advice was created in early 2000 and then moved to its own domain in mid-2002. She now blogs from The Desk.

Blog Swap

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permalink  |   ( 2.9 / 736 ) Do not adjust your vertical, do not adjust your horizontal... It's still me, presenting this week's Blogswap posting from Frank Mulligan of Recruit China. Frank picks on some of my earlier criticisms of screening questions and makes some great points about how they can be used well... which is why we added them to our feature list a few months back. We continue to advise our customers to use them thoughtfully, and Frank's post has some excellent suggestions on how to do so.

Disagreeing with Colin
Taking part in the Blogswap has proved to be a job of work for many of us because we have to post on sites that are focused areas other than our own. But the differences have often proved to be the agent of the muse. The results can be better when you have to work at the writing.

And so to Colin Kingsbury's blog. For me it's like looking in a mirror. Where are the differences between us? Few. What can I tap into I ask myself? Not much. What is obviously different is that we are on opposites ends of the world but the nature of the things we do turn out to be much the same. The components of the recruiting process in China is much the same as in the US.

On his blog I find that Colin offers a leading-edge Applicant Tracking System that does away with many of the problems that are inherent in manual systems. We are in agreement 'cause I got one o' those. Colin's blog is on recruitment and technology. My blog is on the nexus (nice word, eh?) of recruitment and technology. Colin spins off into interesting areas that catch his attention and I do the same but probably more often and to less effect. We even read the same books for God's sake!.

Agreement is the death of creation so I searched for something that we disagree on. It took a while and even this starts with an agreement.

Colin agrees with me, or is it me with him, that most ATS offerings are over-featured and as a result don't get used as much as they should, if at all in some cases. That's why HRMDirect built their own offering. But one feature that Colin doesn't very much like is screening questions. I love 'em and I will tell you why.

In my ATS the screening questions are not there to be answered by the candidate during his online application. Instead they are used after his Resume has been evaluated by a real live in-house recruiter. No automated screening for us, thank you very much.

The recruiter starts with the candidate's Resume and makes a judgement that the candidate is worth further effort, or not. If yes he does a Phone Screen. At the Phone Screen he cleans up the candidate's Resume and asks him the screening questions. These questions have been created by the line manager for that specific position. (With standard positions the questions can be previously agreed upon but for most positions they are part of the job set up.)

Since we began using this method we have found that client sendouts ratios, the number of people the recruiter sends the line manager divided by the number of people he hires, has gone down significantly. If you imagine the line manager asking the recruiter why he presented someone who does not even hold a driver's license, or who does not know how to use APQP, you can see how this might be the case.

Line managers are notorious for not telling recruiters these things until after the candidate has been presented. They never tell you enough unless you ask them. So the ATS pushes the recruiter to talk to the line manager and demand the screening questions. There is a little script in the job setup to say that the questions are for screening out and screening in etc., but the rest is impromptu.

The primary benefit is that allowing recruiters have this kind of conversation with line managers greatly improves the knowledge base of recruiters. Fast. They really get to know what the line manager wants, beyond the motherhood statements about '5 years experience, mechanical engineering degree, deep knowledge of product design. If anything, the ATS is set up so that recruiters must have this conversation with line managers.

There. I did it. I disagreed with Colin, sorta.

I feel better now.

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permalink  |   ( 2.8 / 709 ) Why did GM continue to crank out gas-guzzling SUVs throughout 2004 and 2005? Because customers kept on buying them. As I wrote in When Bad Features Feel Good, customers often say they want a bigger salad bar but order the spaghetti carbonara.

Yankee Group analyst Jason Corsello writes about a conversation with a CEO who said, "you aren't a SaaS vendor unless you require zero training." Jason commented that "at least in today's enterprise environment, his statement is more utopia than reality" and went on to say that,

Recruitment-centric (otherwise known as ATS) vendors, in particular, have struggled with this concept in that most of e-recruitment/ATS products today have been over-engineered and continue to struggle with enterprise use and adoption.

This statement is factually correct as far as it goes but it leaves out the primary cause of the problem: customers keep on asking vendors to build SUV-style applications.

When we launched our applicant tracking system in early 2005, it was a model of economy and simplicity. Every feature was right where you'd expect it and training sessions or demos took perhaps 30 minutes if you went into detail. Every screen was bright and beautiful. Everyone commented on how easy the system was to use and how they couldn't imagine needing any sort of training.

But there was trouble in paradise. More often than not, the demo and pitch would go over perfectly, but the prospect would give us the kiss of death in the followup call, saying something like, "You guys have built a really excellent, simplistic system." No one ever argued when we said that we had 80% of what you needed and we did that 80% better and easier than anyone else. They all just said that they absolutely needed some particular feature in that remaining 20% and bought a kitchen sink system from one of the competitors and told us to check back in a year or two. So we learned our lesson.

Over the next year, our feature count roughly tripled. From a sales perspective this has been an overwhelming success, as our customer base grew over 100% between March and May of this year, and will likely double again by sometime next month. But it does come at a price: even a 90-minute demo is going to leave out one or more major areas. In terms of training, we are about 1/4 of the way through producing four hours worth of Flash videos in order to reduce the need for in-person training, which is as inconvenient for customers as it is expensive for us.

Customers still compliment the beauty and well-thought-out design of our system. They still say we're the easiest to use system they've looked at. The added complexity is all calculated: simple things are still relatively simple to do, and the system now handles complex tasks it previously did not touch. But simple tasks are generally speaking more difficult than they used to be, because each advanced feature adds a little overhead to other processes. And in the end, 90% of what customers use day-in, day-out is what we launched with a year ago.

In the end, buying an ATS is not unlike buying a car. Sure, you will need to transport six adults and all their skiing gear once or twice a year, but the rest of the time it is going to be you and the groceries. After a year of $3 gas, people are starting to realize it makes more sense to buy a compact car and go to Hertz for those other occasions. Similarly, one of the patterns we've seen is that we do great whenever we talk to a director of recruiting or VP of HR who implemented one of our competitors at a previous employer. They know all the costs that come with the bigger systems and realize that we're still simpler and simpler is definitely better.

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permalink  |   ( 2.9 / 640 ) My contribution to this week's Blogswap is up on David Kippen's excellent blog on branding and recruiting. It's about transparency and how recruiters can use blogs to engage their candidates and clients in more productive dialogues.

We've always believed very strongly in transparency here, which is why we put the pricing for our applicant tracking system right there on our website where anyone can see it. One of these days maybe a law will be passed requiring vendors to put prices on their website so consumers can make a fair and objective comparison. Until then I just have to ask--what does everyone else have to hide?

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