I'll take ten of them, in purple!
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We're growing fast here at HRMDirect and that means we need more people to help us take our renowned loving care of existing clients and assist in bringning new customers on board. This is an exciting position and would provide a great growth opportunity for a recent graduate or for a junior recruiting/HR staff member who'd like to make the switch to the software industry. This is a multi-functional role which will be shaped in large part by the skill set and interests you bring into it.You can view a full description of the opening at:
http://jobs.hrmdirect.com/employment/view.php?req=1711
This is a work-from-home position, so candidates from around the US are welcome, though we would especially like to meet people in the greater Boston metro area.
Also, we are pleased to offer a $500 referral bonus for this role. If you know a great person, you can send their resume to this address:
1711-CS-563@jobs.hrmdirect.com
All applications are confidential and will be reviewed personally by yours truly. If you have questions, please feel free to call me at 617-938-3801 or send an email to the address above.
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Why Applicant Tracking Stinks, Part III
One day you're wrapping up a demo with a customer, and you think to yourself, "my, that WebEx is a tasty and delicious product. I wonder if they might have any openings for a salesperson like me." So, you go to their website, find an opening for a Senior Sales Representative in your area, and click the "Apply" button. At which point, you get something like this, which makes a Form 1040 Schedule D look user-friendly and welcoming by comparison.
You can get someone excited in a chocolate chip cookie if you put it in the right kind of box. But the opposite is just as easily accomplished. Think about the message it sends to a candidate when the first step in the recruiting process is to fill out a stack of forms: This is a test. If you can put up with this counter-productive and bureaucratic application procedure, you just may be enough of a sheep to tolerate working for a company like us.Forget about the OFCCP, the piles of junk resumes you get from job boards, and all the other inside baseball only HR departments care about, even if they are important. Candidates don't care, and in the end neither do hiring managers. If the company is really lucky, a good candidate will be so sold on your company that he or she will take David Perry's advice and go over and around the HR department and go straight to the hiring manager, making the recruiter look like a do-nothing bureaucrat. Now I don't think that's what you are, but it's not me you need to convince.
But what if you're lucky, and this great candidate actually goes through your whole process anyway? This is where it gets really ugly.
Assuming someone awesome does apply, how long will it be before you actually read it and realize that you'd be crazy if you didn't call this person right away and beg them to come in for an interview? All too often, the same tool which is designed to hold the mongol horde of unqualified applicants at bay also buries those great applicants beneath a pile of process. The result is that it can take weeks before a recruiter even knows this person applied.
It's not that applicant tracking processes don't serve necessary purposes. At some point the i's and t's need to be dotted and crossed. Systems have by and large been designed to deal with these issues and many of them do a serviceble job of it. But the problem is that most applicant tracking systems are too dumb to know when to get out of the way.
Consider the costs. A great candidate is worth tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands more than an average or mediocre one. A req filled next month costs you thousands in lost productivity versus one filled this month. Most companies spend anywhere from $5,000-$50,000 per year on their ATS. If that tool causes you to miss the boat on even one good candidate, it is blowing you and your ROI right out of the water.
What We're Doing About It
A recent survey of HRMDirect clients showed that it was taking them anywhere from two to six days from the time a resume was received to when it was actually read by a recruiter. That includes weekends, so the actual count is probably a bit lower, and I think that's pretty respectable number compared to averages. I'd attribute this to the fact that our system is easy and intuitive to use so it's not a pain to review candidates manually.
But from my perspective, it still was not good enough. I've always said that if a person who worked at one of our competitors sent us a resume, that I would want to know right away. So we came up with a deceptively simple feature that I expect will quickly become a must-have feature: keyword alerts. You define a list of keywords (like the names of competing companies) and when someone applies with any of those keywords in their resume, our system will automatically send you an email alert containing that candidate's whole resume, within one hour, so you can go straight to the phone and show that person some love. It's like having an assistant to read every resume for you as they arrive and make sure the important ones go straight to you right away.
It's not that we don't think that applicant tracking systems can't make you more productive. But sometimes the most productive thing they can do is to disappear. Does yours know when to get out of your way?
Cross-posted to RecruitingBloggers.com
Read parts I and II of Why Applicant Tracking Stinks
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In the mid 90s two important and controversial books came out from roughly opposite sides of the political aisle and both came to roughly the same conclusion that the US was becoming a meritocracy, and that barring something unusual, it would become more and more meritocratic with each passing day. For those of us that struggle each day with bumbling management, this does not sound like such a bad thing at first. But writ large, the implications become more ominous.
Read the full post at RecruitingBloggers.com
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Quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur.
If you want to know why corporate HR functions are so systematically weak, compare the way they operate to sales. Salespeople are generally the highest-paid employees in companies, and the reason is simple: they are very good at measuring the value they generate*. Good companies will invest almost unlimited amounts of money in sales people, sales training, and sales tools because the results can be measured.
Rajhav Singh spends a good nine paragraphs winding up to his point of today's featured article on ERE, "Measure What Matters." It's a pointed and amusing rant against know-nothing gurus and self-promoting analysts, but he finally gets to business when he writes,
Most recruitment metrics, from cost-per-hire to time-to-fill, measure the process. Satisfaction measures are marginally better but still not much use. Being able to show that recruiting makes more money for the company is unambiguous proof of effectiveness.
And therein our author begins commission of the very sins he just sermonized against....
Process Metrics Deserve Respect
Lately there seems to be a meme that 'process metrics are useless' making its way around, and it needs to stop. Cost-per-hire and time-to-fill can be compared to cost-of-sale and sales cycle time, and when the CEO and the SVP Sales sit down to talk, there's a good chance these two metrics will be on the agenda. In fact, uber-entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki says sales cycle time is one of the four most important things to know before starting a business (see item #12).
In fact, I'd argue that most recruiting organizations don't have nearly enough process metrics. How long on average does it take for you to respond to a qualified candidate (and I don't mean for your ATS to send an auto-reply)? How many candidates withdraw mid-process, how long on average does a candidate sit in the pipeline before the withdrawal happens, and how many desirable candidates are at risk of dropping in the next week if nothing changes? How many offers are rejected, and why?Chances are that most recruiters have a solid idea of the last item, some sense of the second, and a wild guess on the first. But they all matter, some would say equally--after all, the amount of time it takes to get someone on the hook will affect how much time you have to revise a rejected offer before another company closes the deal. You can't ask to be taken seriously at the macro scale if you haven't got the process tight at the local level first.
Measuring the Bottom-Line Value of Recruiting
Singh wants a metric which can demonstrate the direct financial impact of the recruiting function, much as revenue growth does for sales and marketing. He proposes a method outlined by Barber and Strack, which can be casually approximated as dividing the amount of profit by the number of employees. Singh writes,
This is a global metric for the recruiting function. There is no point trying to measure it for each individual job. That's because so many positions do not produce revenue directly. Productivity and costs at the individual level can only be guessed at for positions that do not generate revenue.
The first problem with this statement is that this metric in and of itself says absolutely nothing about recruiting. Let's compare Wal-Mart to Target: $13k vs $17k. That Target generates almost 25% more profit per employee is quite interesting, but the story it tells is so large that it's impossible to say what part of it belongs to recruiting or even to people for that matter. Even if you say it means Target is more efficient, I could respond that Wal-Mart's earnings are four times larger, so maybe their model is better on the whole. That doesn't mean this isn't a good place for HR professionals to open a dialogue with bottom-line managers, but it's little more than an ice-breaker. If any recruiters or HR folks have had this discussion, I'd love to hear how it went.
But the part I have a real problem with is "There is no point trying to measure it for each individual job." Recruiters and managers measure it every time they discuss salaries. They measure it by comp scales, salary surveys, and mostly, by gut feel. For everyone but sales people and top managers, comp plans today are often little more than horoscopes with numbers attached to them.
But don't just take my word for it--here's what Barber and Strack say:
Finally, people can't be effectively managed in the absence of relative performance information—information that can and will be acted upon. It's astounding how little of this exists at many companies.
To say this is challenging is one thing. But to wave it away is to miss what is by far the largest--and perhaps the only--opportunity for an HR professional to take on a truly strategic role.
For a great view of what a truly different organizational structure, look at the database vendor MySQL AB, which has 400 employees in 25 countries, only 30 of whom work out of the company's main office. This article in Fortune details how they manage such a potentially-chaotic organization, and one comes away with the impression that the result is in fact far more results-aligned than your average all-in-one-building company of the same size. You don't need to suggest that your company give up its headquarters and start hiring people over the phone to adopt some of the techniques described in the article.
Recruiting becomes a strategic function if and only when it can demonstrate alignment with and accountability for the overall direction of the business. Doing so will require more accurate means of measuring performance at the individual level, and measuring the processes which were used to select those people. To be fair to Singh, these are difficult problems that no one has come up with the definitive solution for just yet. But, that is also the point. The HR and recruiting professionals who answer these questions are the ones who will find themselves sitting at that table everyone keeps talking about.
* And about those salespeople...
One point on which I agree with Singh is that sales performance is often the product of a lot more than individual virtuosity. The problem is that the price of salespeople is determined by the market, so until we figure out ways to sell products without salespeople, they remain a great investment. They key challenge for recruiting is to tell which candidates succeeded because they really are good and which got lucky with a fat territory or some similarly happy accident.
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