Archive

Take the Guesswork out of Social Networking Recruiting: How well do you know your professional network? Well, the folks over at MIT probably disagree with you. New research, conducted by Ray Reagans, Associate Professor of Organization Studies at the university’s Sloan School of Management, suggests that you may not have the grasp on your network that you think.

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Get More out of Candidate Data: You are sitting on a wealth of recruiting and competitive intelligence. But, if you’re like most recruiters, though, you’ll never have the opportunity to use it. The prevailing pattern of behavior is myopic and costly. Recruiters focus on filling the req. And when the task is completed, they move on to the next one. There’s little time put aside for learning the many lessons that can be gleaned from filling each position.

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Is Regulatory Compliance Dragging You Down?: Compliance measures take time. You have no choice in the matter. Documents must be stored, checklists have to be reviewed and reports have to be prepared and filed. It’s the nature of the human resources environment today, and it comes with seemingly unavoidable cost. Most corporate recruiters do their best to streamline compliance processes, hoping that they can minimize a cost that comes with no identifiable return. At worst, they sometimes avoid recording or misreport required data. With this perspective, it’s inevitable that a good chunk of the average corporate recruiter’s time will be spent on activities that minimize risk but otherwise create no talent ROI for the company.

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Proactive Candidate Outreach Means Getting There First: An increase in demand for a particular skill set or competency means that any opportunity for a competitive advantage is lost. You and your competitors wind up chasing the same superstars, losing time and employee productivity while paying more for critical talent than you need to. This is economics 101. Demand increases, and it carries prices with it. Now, if you could make the right hires before the market is looking, you could preserve budget, hire faster and put more distance between you and the competition. To do this, you need to think ahead.

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Five Reasons Why “Close Enough” Is Best of All: Slogans are great, bt they don’t reflect reality. Companies talk in superlatives, but in the real world, they have to act from a position of pragmatism. Do this properly, and it can actually become a competitive advantage. When sourcing, interviewing and hiring candidates, being too picky can cost you time, talent and even some skills and experience that you may not have expected. Narrow searches can exclude the interesting candidates who could inject new life into your company. Take a broad view, and your company may reap many unexpected rewards.

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What Happens after the Merger?: Mergers and acquisitions are inherently disruptive. Two companies come together, and the profound feeling of uncertainty that the transaction brings can affect employee interest and performance. While most people think that M&A translates to layoffs, there is often a corporate recruiting implication as the dust begins to settle.

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Did LinkedIn Just Make Your Recruiting Job Harder?: LinkedIn is pretty much the premier social networking platform in the business world. In addition to calling it home for resumes and professional contacts, not to mention endorsements from clients past and present, LinkedIn offers plenty of job ads and postings – and makes it easier than ever for a job-seeker to reach a hiring manager or corporate recruiter directly. Of course, this could exacerbate one of the greatest challenges already faced by the world’s hiring infrastructure: over-communication.

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Four Ways to Make Recruiting Administration Easier: If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a hundred times – You need another report? When? Admit it: the administrative side of corporate recruiting chews up your time and dilutes your effectiveness. Since close to 70 percent of your time is spent on tasks and not directly related to cultivating and securing talent, you’re clearly leaving value on the table. So, how do you get it back? Partner with KGTiger, and you can reclaim much of that time and put it to better use for your company. Here are four ways to use the KGTiger BYTE service to make your efforts more powerful within your organization.

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Corporate Sleuth: Four Ways to Find Candidate Information in Social Media: Corporate recruiters are spending more time on social media sites, checking the identities and activities of their top candidates. It’s a great way to get an unfettered view of a person that is unlikely to arise in an interview. Of course, every time a recruiter gets an edge, candidates come up with a way to get around it. The latest is to play with their names in sites like Facebook and Twitter to protect their personal lives from the prying eyes of potential employers.

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Make the Most of Your Corporate Recruiting Instincts: What do you do when your instincts conflict with your approach? No doubt, you’ve been in this spot before, when you have a great candidate on paper and through the interview process … but something just doesn’t seem right. The candidate feels somehow “off.” Maybe his answers are too perfect, or her responses to certain situations seem canned. Whatever the reason, you now need to choose between what you know and what you feel.

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Take Everyday Risk out of Your Interviews: Sometimes, life just gets in the way of your next great hire. Flat tires, bad directions and spilled coffee can make promising candidates late for interviews. Even if the excuses are valid, the process nonetheless begins on an awkward note, and it’s tough to get past it – for you and your candidate. Something like traffic, essentially, can cost your company short- and long-term value. Remove these minor threats from your interviewing and hiring process, and you stack the cards in favor of you and your candidate, making merit the driving force behind your next hire.

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Four Keys to Recruiting for Emerging Skills: Most open reqs come with a known benchmark. If you’re interviewing to hire an engineer, a marketing exec or a human resources professional, you know what you’re looking for. Even as times change, the skills and competencies forthese positions evolve and are familiar to hiring managers. And there tends to be a pool of people with the characteristics that resemble the position description. Some positions, however, don’t offer an easy reference point. Today, it’s social media consultants. But we’ve seen it before. In the early 1990s, for example, there were many web-related positions that few understood.

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Why Your Workday Needs a Visual Soundtrack: The internet and TV seem to go together. Call it the work habit of the twenty-first century, but more people are using both at the same time. Add to that a mash-up of work and life, which has many of us plucking away at Blackberries and iPhones to keep pace with the office while on vacation or at the dinner table, and it’s clear that the television is becoming an essential component of our workforce.

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Financial Firms Get Hiring Bump: As the employment market flirts with recovery, look for entry-level positions in the financial services industry to show plenty of potential. This summer, new hires for these junior positions are expected to surge between 20 percent and 50 percent relative to the same period last year. Even if this is based on the depressed employment levels of 2009, it is nonetheless an impressive growth rate – and one that will put a considerable strain on corporate recruiters in the financial business.

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A New Recruiting Opportunity with LinkedIn: Competition in the social media space benefits everyone in the talent supply chain – candidates, hiring managers and corporate recruiters. As the major platforms compete for users and look for ways to increase their traffic, they’ve been rolling out new features. LinkedIn, in particular, has been pursuing this agenda rather aggressively, and its latest enhancement speaks directly to increasing action on its network for the talent market in a tough employment market.

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Scarce Talent: Learn Your Alternatives: Unemployment doesn’t always equate to available talent. For highly specialized positions, an economic downturn does little to alleviate the pressure on corporate recruiters to source candidates with unique, coveted skills. The only solution is to have what amounts to a succession plan for key roles in your company, not just for the executive suite. Fundamental to this effort, of course, is to know every corner of your market. If you know the intricacies of the talent market for scarce skills, you’ll have an advantage when it’s time to fill open reqs.

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What Motivates Job-Seekers?: There’s a lot of talk about social media and the job hunt these days. A combination of new channels and a still high rate of unemployment have made job-seekers more resourceful and hyper-sensitive to any opportunity to catch a corporate recruiter’s attention – however small it may be. For recruiters and candidates alike, this creates as much challenge as it does opportunity. I’ve covered the increase in application volume at length already, so this week, let’s take a look at perception – and the candidate techniques that recruiters will have to learn to see through.

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Three Wrong Assumptions About Candidates: Social media-savvy job-seekers don’t come in only one size, shape or color. They can have any number of demographic or lifestyle characteristics. So, don’t think that because you connected with a candidate on Facebook or Twitter that he or she is of Generation Y. According to Mashable, a small focus group yielded social media super-users ranging from their 20s to their 40s and sporting varied educations.

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Sniff Out Reality: Social media users who have a specific objective in mind – from selling a product to landing a new job – are often exhorted to be “authentic.” The goal is to convey “the real you,” which often becomes a synthetic task, ironically. So, your job is to (a) identify real authenticity, particularly in regards to relationships, and (b) sift through faux authenticity to get a real sense of the prospective candidate.

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Plugged in or One-Trick Pony?: Social media is still so new that the meaning of “savvy” still hasn’t emerged. Even absent generally accepted principles, there are still ways you can gauge whether your social media-savvy prospective candidate is truly plugged into the social media space or is just a single-platform power user. Instead of looking at numbers of friends, fans, followers or connections, you need to think about content.

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Unplanned Vacancies: Five Ways to Take the Sting Out of the Unknown: Recruiting for key positions can be tough enough, especially when competition is fierce, even when you know what’s coming. Add the element of surprise to the mix, and the time and effort you need to fill an open req increase exponentially. Unexpected vacancies are a part of professional life, especially for important positions (particularly those in the C-suite) where the top talent may be well known and highly coveted. If your superstar is poached, you may have to do the same to another competitor – or find the next household name while he is still undiscovered.

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New Rules for Corporate Behavior: As employees, we’re told to think before we act. The standard has always been: Would you want what you say (or do) to wind up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal? That’s good advice, of course, especially in an environment in which businesses have to cope with new levels of unanticipated transparency. It’s so easy for inside information to get out that the pressure to behave is greater than ever. You’d think that this maxim would apply to businesses as well. Strangely, managers and executives haven’t picked up on the fact that transparency goes both ways.

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Emerging Markets Moves Require Local Executives: When a large, established company enters a developing market, it’s almost standard operating procedure to transplant an executive from an established economy. But, this approach works only rarely. Local talent is always a better alternative, but back at headquarters, it’s hard to shake the anxiety of trusting a new venture to an unknown quantity. The risk becomes easier to accept, though, if you understand the local talent market.

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Airline Hiring: Three Ways to Fix the Flight Attendant Recruiting Process: What makes the flight attendant talent market unique? Well, you have a large pool from which to recruit – for both entry level and experienced hires. And, demand is high for a relatively small number of positions, despite the fact that compensation is fairly low. As a result, every open req involves a large group of highly motivated candidates, some willing to chase up to 18 positions before finally getting an offer. For the airlines, this means having to sift through an enormous amount of candidate information and navigate slight differences in candidates in order to find the handful who will eventually be invited to don the uniform.

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Four Ways to Make Lean Recruiting Work: Talk of running a lean corporate recruiting operation isn’t new. Human resources functions have always felt disproportionate pressure to do more with less. Doubtless, an unemployment rate of 10.4 percent may cause “lean” to be pushed to new extremes, and for corporate recruiting departments, it’s just more of the same. These days, the big challenge is finding ways to go leaner without cutting into muscle. Even if you lose budget, your responsibilities are unlikely to change – and you’ll need tools to help you rise to the challenge!

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Plan for Talent Ahead of the Economy: It’s still a bit early to tell, but it looks like the economy is finding its legs. As this trend continues, businesses will become more comfortable making larger strategic investments. The game-changing initiatives that get the green light are likely to have talent implications, and corporate recruiters should be ready for a new kind of action.

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What Makes You a Great Corporate Recruiter?: You’re at the top of your game: no open req is too difficult to fill. Even in a tight market, you can find several viable candidates for the toughest positions. There’s nothing in the corporate world that you can’t do. So, what’s the secret to your success? Chances are it isn’t what you spend most of your time doing.

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 Take Control of the Talent Supply Chain: I’ve been told by hiring managers over and over again, “I have so many good candidates I can now invest my time and energy selecting the best of the best and leave little to chance or desperation.” If only it were that easy …

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Five Expensive Corporate Recruiting Mistakes: There’s a lot of sensitivity in corporate recruiting departments about being a cost center. Like most HR functions, recruiting doesn’t bring in revenue, and the role it does play in attracting the talent that does is often overlooked. Absent a revenue angle or risk avoidance any corporate recruiting analysis by the finance department or C-suite comes down to cost. The way corporate recruiting tends to be conducted – a model that really hasn’t changed in more than 30 years – offers plenty of room for improvement, especially since there are so many “mistakes” currently being made.

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Part I: Introduction: If you can convince the CFO of the value of an investment, life becomes a lot easier. Unfortunately, this level of comfort isn’t always easy to attain. CFOs are professional skeptics, tasked with weeding out the prudent from the frivolous. Even a great idea, if not expressed correctly, will fall victim to this executive’s budgetary scythe. Human resources investments are particularly susceptible to this fate, as the department tends to be perceived as pure overhead. You can change the image of the HR function – corporate recruiting, especially – as long as you learn to speak the CFO’s language.

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Part II: Generating Recruitng ROI: Process improvement projects are pitched to CFOs all the time, often with inflated (even absurd) ROI projections. So, it’s no surprise that these executives tend to be wary. Too often, these investments are nothing more than veiled attempts to increase headcount or decrease workload without regard to any meaningful industry benchmark. It’s no wonder that CFOs are uneasy about these projects.

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Part III: Win Critical Talent Fast: Corporate recruiters haven’t had to worry too much about the availability of talent for a while. Even with the unemployment rate in the United States down to 9.7 percent, there is still plenty of talent on the market. In addition to those who have been laid off, there are “survivors” struggling with increased pressure and heavier workloads who are on the lookout for new opportunities.

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Part IV: Look Before You Leap: No major strategic initiative gets the green light without the CFO’s approval. In addition to requiring a significant resource commitment, these efforts may call for the raising of capital, which entails an extra layer of finance department involvement. So, if launching a product line, entering a new market or making an acquisition is on your company’s agenda this year, you should be ready to communicate the talent management implications of the plan to your CFO.

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Multitasking Hurts Corporate Recruiters, Too: It’s not just corporate recruiting: everywhere, the charge is “do more with less” is increasing workloads and robbing employees of the chance to focus. Multitasking, once considered a rare talent, is now an essential skill … but it comes at a price. As employees juggle tasks – and take this into their personal life, checking devices while pushing grocery carts and ordering dinner – they are paying with pain. Fortunately, there is a cure for what ails you!

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Five Expensive Corporate Recruiting Mistakes: There’s a lot of sensitivity in corporate recruiting departments about being a cost center. Like most HR functions, recruiting doesn’t bring in revenue, and the role it does play in attracting the talent that does is often overlooked. Absent a revenue angle or risk avoidance any corporate recruiting analysis by the finance department or C-suite comes down to cost. The way corporate recruiting tends to be conducted – a model that really hasn’t changed in more than 30 years – offers plenty of room for improvement, especially since there are so many “mistakes” currently being made.

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Overcome Information Overload: Most employees spend their days trying to keep up with the information that’s thrown at them. They check e-mail on vacation to avoid returning to an overflowing inbox, scan several blogs and maybe even read a newspaper. And then there are the meetings, hallway discussions and every other interaction. It’s no secret that employees are drowning in information and that the cause stretches beyond the usual suspects.

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Three Talent Revelations You May Be Missing: Do you know how well your company’s investment in talent is performing? Up in the C-suite, there are many measures used to gauge this, including revenue per employee, top- and bottom-line trending and even some sophisticated approaches around market capitalization created on a per-employee basis. You can get as creative as you want … but what are you really seeing? There’s no substitute for getting your hands dirty!

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Refine Your Business Acumen: For corporate recruiters, “business acumen” – i.e., quickly understanding and dealing with a business situation – is usually limited to interviews and filling reqs. In order to make a larger contribution to the company, though, business acumen needs to be applied on a broader scale. Think of the major strategic initiatives that corporate recruiters support, such as new market entry and product launches, and how your insights could be used to drive a more effective outcome.

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Five Expensive Corporate Recruiting Mistakes: There’s a lot of sensitivity in corporate recruiting departments about being a cost center. Like most HR functions, recruiting doesn’t bring in revenue, and the role it does play in attracting the talent that does is often overlooked. Absent a revenue angle or risk avoidance any corporate recruiting analysis by the finance department or C-suite comes down to cost. The way corporate recruiting tends to be conducted – a model that really hasn’t changed in more than 30 years – offers plenty of room for improvement, especially since there are so many “mistakes” currently being made.

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Professional Services Recruiting: How to Beat the Lag: Accounting, consulting and law firms tend to hire talent when the need is pressing. In fact, this is a common practice among all professional services firms. Only when the market has clearly recovered will they begin to add headcount. As client work rolls in, they rush to find talent, bring it in the door, often pushing them out to client projects very quickly. In a people-intensive business, you can’t have well-compensated professionals sitting on the bench for too long.

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The Corporate Recruiting ROI Case You May Have Missed: Did you know that nearly 70 percent of a corporate recruiter’s time is spent in labor-intensive, low-value activities? Think about it: how much time is invested in reviewing or re-formatting resumes, pulling together data for reports or trying to make confirmation calls or schedule interviews? These are not the activities that allow a corporate recruiter to shine, yet they dominate your workday.

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Baby Boomers Look at Company Websites: The high rate of unemployment right now is leading many candidates to pursue jobs through as many channels as possible. But, looking to the future, the dynamic is bound to change when the job market recovers. This means that job-seekers will settle into the venues in which they are most comfortable. For members of the Baby Boom generation, who are likely to resist full retirement, corporate website job pages will become increasingly important.

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Generation Gap: The Looming Challenge: Today’s workforce is comprised of four generations, each of which has a distinct way of looking at the world and approaching its careers. Rapid advances in technology over the past 40 years have done more than change the tools of the office – they have fundamentally altered how people interact, which in turn has shaped worldviews. The gradual progression that preceded the PC revolution (and the internet revolution after it) is now a relic, and corporate recruiters and hiring managers will have to develop the skills necessary to connect with a variety of candidates who prefer specific styles and even use vastly different language.

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