Hiring Exchange - A HotGigs blog

Talkin' bout your generation

Recruitnik has an interesting post on how, as a member of Generation X, she ends up bridging the gap between Boomers and Gen-Y candidates:

Boomers have a comfort level to ask me internet related questions without feeling out of touch. Asking “What is an avatar?” is not a silly question. It is valid to me but probably not to a millennial. To them it is obvious because I believe they were born with one assigned to them. Gen Y’s look at me as old enough to have a clue but more for validation or praise but definitely not about the technology.

Gen Y’ers (AKA Millennials) live in the 2.0 world. They don’t know life without cell phone, personal computers, the internet and information at your fingertips for all.

Allison Boyce, a sourcing manager at Deloitte Services and another Gen-X recruiter, weighed in with a more detailed assessment of Gen-Y candidates on ERE.net:

Generation Y candidates actually require a chance to have fun. They can't imagine all work and no play because they don't perceive that they need to work very hard. They have productivity tools, they are connected, and they are loaded with options that let them do whatever they please.

Boyce offers some practical advice to Boomer and Gen-X recruiters as to how to properly manage expectations in terms of salary, promotions and time off, all of which they feel entitled. She provides strategies for turning around the conversation, starting by acknowledging what's important to them -- time, money, promotions, and a sense of fun -- and then asking questions that serve to, in her words, "turn the conversation into something manageable and scalable".

Penelope Trunk  offers a different insight into the inner workings of Gen-Y'ers: that they are in fact, inherently  conservative in their lifestyle and approach to their careers:

Gen Y are really hard workers. They have been working harder in school than any preceding generation. And the pace that they sift and synthesize information puts the skills of their elders to shame. So why complain about the demands of this generation? They are great at work and they want to have work that is meaningful and challenging.

And this is exactly what everyone else wants from their work as well. These demands are not new. It’s just new to hear them from an entry-level worker. But in fact, it’s reasonable and fundamentally conservative since these are the values this generation has been taught to live by.

The jury is still out as to whether we are facing a labor shortage in the coming years. If the most dire predictions prove to be true, then Gen-Y will be increasingly in the driver's seat in terms of how companies attract talent. And even should those predictions prove to be overblown, the Gen-Y work style will increasingly dominate the workplace, and -- given the continued growth in the contingent workforce -- the staffing and consulting industry as well.

A new approach to managing preferred vendors

Guest post by Joe Golemo

One large local financial institution recently decided to dramatically revamp their preferred IT vendor list. They had issued an RFP to about 60 vendors and after 7 to 8 months of cogitating, decided to significantly reduce the number of preferred vendors -– in fact the number on the new list is exactly 12 –- 5 on the first tier and 7 on the second tier for each region of the country!

Word has it the IT organization put this plan in place for some very specific reasons:

• Develop common pricing for each position – a smaller number of vendors is easier to manage, but its even easier still when you issue a rate sheet to the vendors as this company did.
• Eliminate pass-throughs – why pay gross margin to two vendors when you don’t have to?
• Assure each preferred vendor does enough business to reach the higher levels of the revenue-based discount schedule. 

Here is how the process is supposed to work:

1. The Hiring Manager enters a position description into the VMS system.  If he receives at least five resumes from the first tier vendors and at least one person is qualified, the hiring manager must hire one of these consultants.  If the Hiring Manager doesn’t get five resumes or gets five from the first tier and none are truly qualified for the position, he must go to the second tier.  However, when goes to the second tier, the first tier vendor gets a dink in the helmet and with enough dings, the submitting vendors are in danger of being thrown off the list.
    
2. In order to enforce the no pass-through rule, hiring managers cannot even speak with IT firm that are not on the approved list.  If one of the approved firms is approached by a hiring manager or by an unapproved consulting firm with a pass-through deal, they are required to inform procurement about the situation so the hiring manager can be reprimanded.  If they don’t, they risk being thrown off the list.  If procurement finds out they did a pass-through anyway, they will be thrown off the list.
    
3. BTW, Account Executives (AEs) from the approved vendors are encouraged to create an on-site office and to meet directly with each hiring manager in order to understand specific and on-going needs, etc.  None of that “all communication must go through the central VMS system” for this company.  Although in this case, the AEs might welcome this rule as the volume of openings is overwhelming.  This company told the preferreds they will receive hundreds of openings per month!!  Over 400 consultants rolled off during the first few months of this new system due to their policy limit of 12-months of billable time per consultant.
4. The preferred vendors are evaluated every week and the many metrics are closely watched.  The first tier firms must have a placement for every three resumes submitted.  And, most of their consultants must be W-2 employees – they can only have a low percentage of 1099.
5. This is definitely a higher volume, lower margin approach and clearly, there are great long-term rewards for performing and following the rules and great risk for the opposite.

What do you think of this approach?  Will the IT department's stated goals be met?  Or is this whole thing just an excuse to make it so difficult to find local talent that IT managers decide to take the work offshore, as the rumor mill states?  Let me know what you think -- leave me a comment below, or email me.

--Joe Golemo

Joe Golemo is vice-president of business development at Charter Solutions, a Minneapolis systems integration firm, and a seasoned business development and management executive with more than 25 years of IT industry experience.  He has been a manager and vice president in companies such as IBM, BORN, Connect Computer Company, and is.com, starting as an IBM engineer. He has a BS in chemical engineering and an MBA in finance and strategic planning and currently serves as board chair for Starbase Minnesota, a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to get disadvantaged youth interested in science, math and technology.

Road rules: Minneapolis Recruiting Roadshow recap

On Friday July 20th, more than 100 HR and Recruiting professionals from both companies and staffing firms showed up at Best Buy headquarters in Richfield, MN to attend a half-day Minneapolis Recruiting Unconference (and apparently costing Steven Rothberg, CEO of CollegeRecruiter.com five bucks).This event was the initial stop of a Recruiting Roadshow under the auspices of Recruiting.com.

The theme of "Intergenerational Recruiting", and included presentations from keynote speaker John Sumser on changing workforce demographics; Steven Rothberg on recruiting on social networks like Facebook and MySpace; and Doug Berg and Nicole St. Martin of HotGigs on incorporating Web 2.0 techniques to transform underperforming career sites into candidate magnets. Additionally, there was a panel on blogging, including myself, JobDig President/COO Toby Dayton, Derrick Moe of SelectMetrix and Josh Kahn of Accenture HR Services. Lunch was graciously provided by Don Ramer of Arbita.

Photos of the event can be found here. Our fearless "Cruise Director" Paul De Bettingnies has more details at his blog, MN Headhunter/Nerd Search, as does his "wingman" Nicole St. Martin (who may have single-handedly saved Paul from a nervous breakdown), and newbie MN blogger Katie Tierney.

Kudos to all who worked hard to make this a great event. Let's do it again soon, and make it a full day (so we won't have to talk so fast!).

Are your job titles hurting your recruiting?

The answer: definitely. To find out how, read "Wouldn't you love a job as a P2 Fld Comp Sup?" by our own Doug Berg, currently on the front page at ERE.net.

Do you hire with your head?

You might think you do, but until you've read Lou Adler's book Hire With Your Head you will discover what you are missing, and how to fine tune your recruiting strategy.

I've been in recruiting for over 18 years now, and there are only one or two authors or speakers that still grab my attention, and Lou is one of them.  In my opinion, nobody has organized the art of recruiting into such a mind grabbing yet practical approach like Lou has.  It's changed my recruiting behaviors and resulted in dramatically different results.  There are "aha" moments on nearly every page for both beginner and veteran recruiters alike.

Anyone in recruiting (especially in the agency or staffing side of the business) should read and digest this rare new book - which will help you serve your clients and managers better than you can imagine, and help you to work with candidates in ways that you hadn't thought of before.

I would encourage you to get a copy of this new version of Lou's book and keep it close by as a reference guide, as you'll re-read it many times over the weeks, months, and years to come.

Hire With Your Head: Using Performance-Based Hiring to Build Great Teams

This up-to-date and fully revised edition of Hire With Your Head features an in-depth look at the biggest changes in the hiring arena since the introduction of the personal computer.  Social networking sites, such as ZoomInfo, LinkedIn, MySpace, and others have eliminated any secrecy in hiring and recruiting.

Full of invaluable tips and helpful exercises, as well as useful checklists and revealing benchmarks, Hire With Your Head is the indispensable, hands-on guide every manager needs to hire the right person every time.

Get your copy today

Cheers,

Doug

Doug Berg is the co-founder of HotGigs and current Chief Gigster.

Do you re-recruit past applicants?

I continue to be amazed when speaking with hiring companies as to how few of them will search their current applicant tracking systems for previous candidates when starting a new job search.

In some cases, companies have literally tens of thousands of previous applicants in their ATS that they have spent thousands of advertising dollars to acquire, but they don’t re-access them for future searches. When I ask most recruiters "Do you mine your current ATS when starting a new search?" they mostly respond with "No…"

The common process when new jobs come into the recruiting group is to get them out to the job boards
– and spend more money – or burn up your job posting allocations to try and drive new candidates to
apply, and only process applicants as they come in.

Here are some of the reasons that companies we've spoken with don't pursue previous applicants:

1. Most ATS systems have horrible candidate searching abilities.

a) The keyword searching functions in most applicant tracking systems are rudimentary at best and don't support even the most basic capabilities. Recruiters come to find that pinpointing a candidate who came into the system within the past year and has a specific skill and/or education level may not even be possible – so they just give up.

2. The assumption that previous applicants were bad.

a) Most recruiters think that any previous applicants must all have been turned down for positions, and are therefore are bad candidates. This couldn't be further from the truth. 80% or more candidates aren't considered for certain positions because they didn't match a particular set of job requirements, which could mean they didn't have the specific skills, or were over/under qualified for that particular job only.

b) Also, many great candidates are on and off the market so quickly that most larger companies just couldn't get them through their hiring cycle fast enough – and lose out on hiring those great candidates. This shouldn't mean that you stop marketing to those candidates however! Candidates' situations can change rapidly within just months of taking new positions at different companies, and a tap on the shoulder down the road would impress the daylights out of a top candidate - that is, if companies were to take a more strategic approach in communicating with these candidates.

3. Searching, matching, and communicating with candidates is hard work.

a) Even if a recruiter was able to search and find a list of possible candidates, going through the process of building a list of candidates for a job, building an email introduction/catch up message, and sending it out to candidates can take a lot of time, which most recruiters frankly just don't have. That's why they just post new positions, and assume that the job boards will have all the currently active candidates in the
market apply for their jobs - but unfortunately those active candidates are applying to everyone else's jobs at the same time.

b) Most ATS systems don't have the ability to build group lists of certain candidate types – so building ongoing marketing lists within the ATS to quickly broadcast a certain type of job or position is very difficult.

c) In some cases – candidates won't want any future calls or communication from a hiring company – but the ATS makes it hard to flag candidates (or enter notes) regarding avoiding future communication.

4. Companies are afraid to look desperate if reaching out to candidates.

a) Most companies think that re-recruiting candidates for certain jobs might make them look desperate (which most of them are...but like to hide it) which would turn off candidates.

This couldn't be further from the truth. Most candidates are impressed with companies that actually remember them, and inform them frequently about opportunities at their company. The best companies not only communicate job information, but updates on their employment culture via newsletters and important updates within the company – which could be easily communicated to their candidate community.

How re-recruiting can recapture previous candidates.

The irony is, I think most candidates assume if they’ve applied one time to any company, that they are "on file" with that company, and should there be future interest in them – then the company will call (even though we know that companies aren't using their ATS in this way.)

This will certainly prevent them from applying for future positions – and to assume they will remember your company months or years from now – and revisit your career site to search for jobs and re-apply isn't a good assumption.

However, should a previous candidate get an email from your company with a matching job 10 months after they applied – inviting them to re-apply for a new position, and things aren’t going well with the company they decided to take their current job with instead of yours, bingo – you are now on top of your re-recruiting game, and leveraging your past applicants to become future candidates and employees with your company.

--Doug