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

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Perhaps it was the fact that more important things are going on at the time but I am surprised to see a near-complete lack of recruitosphere commentary on soccer super-celeb David Backham's 5-year, $137,000 per day contract to play for the Los Angeles Galaxy.

As a case study in recruiting and talent management it is an interesting move for both Beckham and the Galaxy. I'm just guessing here, but I'd bet a round at the local pub that Backham's annual $50m could pay the annual salary of an awfully large part of the entire US soccer league as we know it. It has to be a bet-the-pot move for the team, and to some extent professional soccer in the US at large.

It is an equally dramatic move for "Becks and Posh," who are moving to a country where what everyone else calls football arguably ranks with professional bass fishing and Texas Hold 'Em in popularity. Granted, they're moving to the global capitol of the cult of celebrity devotion and not someplace like Boston, where some Japanese guy no one ever heard of until a few months ago could well outshine them, especially if he delivers. Beckham now needs to show whether he can re-create the personal brand that made him a household name in countries that use the metric system.

Therein lies one of the most interesting details in the whole story from an HRM perspective. After an enormously successful run with Manchester United, Beckham moved in 2003 to Real Madrid with much fanfare and thence proceeded to stink up the joint. He's been starting most games on the bench, which is the sporting equivalent of having an employee who is invited to meetings on the condition he doesn't speak unless spoken to. When you spend tens of millions you expect a bit more.

If companies are just beginning to think beyond the culture of superstar employees, it's a long-known fact in pro sports that past performance does not guarantee future results. Superstars build up great individual stats as their teams flounder, while clubs full of middling players sometimes find magical harmony and wallop better-pedigreed competitors.

But for the Galaxy, recruiting Beckham is arguably less about winning on the field than it is about attracting interest. I live in a largely Latin American neighborhood and I trust a Brazilian to know when he says that many of the American teams are quite decent. The problem is that no one aside from those Brazilians is watching. So while Beckham's ability as a player is hardly tangential, his greatest asset is the tabloid-friendly lifestyle that made him the only soccer star who stands a chance of being recognized on the street in most of the US, and that's largely due to his wife, who managed to cross the Atlantic successfully a decade ago.

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permalink  |   ( 2.9 / 676 ) 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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