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

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Howard Adamsky's 2005 article on The Myth of the Passive Candidate was a timely repost on today's ERE. If 2005 was the year of the Passive Candidate, 2006 has been the year of the Employee Referral. It's a good thing it's almost 2007 because I am getting tired of it.

Don't get me wrong: employee referrals can produce great hires, no doubt about it. But I think they're being oversold.

First, you can't escape the relationship between quality and quantity. One of the main reasons why referrals can be so good is that the referring employee truly knows the candidate's abilities, and isn't just going on a resume and interview. What you see is more likely to be what you get. However, most people aren't professional networkers, and the number of people they know at that level is limited. Chances are most people at best know a dozen or so people in the same field well. While it's nice for Bob the sales guy to refer his occasional golf buddy Joe the programmer for that new opening, I doubt that lead is any more valuable than if Joe were found by a names sourcer.

There are cases where this factor matters less. Retailers like Starbucks, for instance, require almost no specific skills or experience, but care plenty about universal qualities like personality and integrity. Generally speaking, the more targeted and specific your searches are, the fewer people your current employees are likely to know, and know well.

Second, making a referral program work is 95% about business processes and 5% about tools and products. Most employees, and certainly the best, are somewhat picky about who they refer, and probably the biggest killer of referrals (and faith in the HR department more generally) are the number of referrals that go down the memory hole or get treated the way the company treats most applicants. When the employee hears from the friend two weeks later that they still haven't heard anything from HR, relationships and the willingness to make future referrals are damaged.

Likewise, there are a few simple things nearly any company could do which would increase their quality referrals significantly. First, every new recruit can give you the names of the top people they worked with in their previous life. This isn't what most people think of as an employee referral program, but these are likely to be some of the best recommendations you'll ever get in quality terms, and you don't even have to pay a bonus for them.

Second, you should make a habit of cleaning out employees' rolodexes two or three times per year. Most of our Outlook contact lists are full of information names sourcers would charge good money for, and it's all company property. Have employees export their contact lists to a Spreadsheet and highlight the people they think are a cut above.

Last, instead of waiting for an opening to occur and hoping for the best, send a survey out to current employees asking them to name a few people they know who they would love to work with on their team, at any level above or below them, and why. This way, when you do have an opening, you don't need to rely on the employee finding out, contacting the person, and the person getting back to you before the process can begin. Obviously you need to be careful and you may choose to not contact any of these people right away, but at least you're in the driver's seat when the time comes.



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permalink  |   ( 2.9 / 617 ) I just noticed this story on ERE's Inside Recruiting news talking about how company career websites seem designed "to keep human contact to a minimum." This just reinforces the point I made last month in talking about how most ATSs serve as barriers to making contact with high-quality candidates.

The ERE story quotes from a vendor study in which 10 "Michael Jordan" resumes were submitted to 10 companies just to see what would happen. The result?

One of 10 resumes submissions yielded a response, and that response was a form email rejection letter.

Ouch.

This is exactly why we developed our Hotlist Alerts feature which allows you to set up watch lists of critical skills, job titles, or the names of your top competitors, and get notified immediately when a matching candidate applies. We'll actually email a copy of the resume straight to the recruiter so you can move on the candidate without any delay.

There are a lot of other good tips in the article, including this one:

Reassess critical information. To make the process less time-consuming for applicants, determine whether you can shorten the initial application process.

Of course, most ATSs require candidates to complete a lengthy application form and go through a registration process. While this is perhaps useful for dealing with serial jobseekers who apply for every job on the website, it is far more effective at driving away the rare highly-qualified people who you really want. It's worth noting that the average TPR, who makes her living from making placements, will almost never ask candidates to do any more than email a resume.

While it makes some sense to dig up a moat around your castle, most companies and ATS providers forget to put in a drawbridge to go with it.

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permalink  |   ( 2.9 / 534 ) What most enterprise software companies sound like to the average human being...



I'll take ten of them, in purple!

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permalink  |   ( 3 / 554 ) 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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permalink  |   ( 2.9 / 684 ) Recruiters are supposed to be in the people business. Why, then, do applicant tracking systems erect so many walls between people, companies, and the people whose job it is to get new people excited about working at them?

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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