Don’t Be Afraid of “Why”

I had a chance to catch up with a friend this weekend, a friend who is a corporate recruiter for a good sized company.  After congratulating each other on our roles in the Ohio State victory, he posed an interesting situation to me.

The bulk of the hires he and his team make are for outside sales professionals (about 70%) the remaining 30% are corporate positions or leadership positions in their warehouses.  They are getting tremendous pressure to reduce the time to hire for their sales positions, which is currently at 33 days from a time to fill of 21 days.

They have a very stream lined hiring process, the fact that hiring managers cover multi-state areas adds time to interview, and 21 days from opening to offer isn’t bad for a time to fill.  However, my buddy says that want it reduced even further and the company is struggling to figure out cut days from the process, and that’s what he wanted to know from me, where best to cut days.

I probably shocked him when I took a different approach, ignoring the question of time to fill and time to hire, I asked him why is it so important to make any reduction?  He gave me the standard line about every day a sales territory is empty costs the company X dollars.

I get that, that’s Sales 101.  I told him I agreed, it’s important to minimize empty territories.  So I asked my next question, why were the territories open?  Were they new territories?  Was it turnover?  He said that they were seeing steady turnover.

Voluntary or involuntary I wanted to know?  Voluntary.

How many folks a year?  He said nearly half of the sales force turned every year.  That’s a pretty significant amount.

Is it vets, newbies?  He told me they were losing the majority of their new hires within the first year.

That frightened me.  That’s not a good thing.

My next question flustered him a bit: How is reducing the time to fill, going to decrease turnover?  He stammered for a moment, and said that’s not his problem, his problem is reducing time to fill.

I know a lot of recruiting professionals that lament recruiting being part of HR, but this situation illustrates why it makes sense, and why recruiting is an HR function.  The situation above is my friends problem, whether he wants it or not.

My advice to him was to lead from the front.  Work with the field HR Managers to assess what the root cause(s) for the turnover are, and move forward from there.  I told him to be prepared, if the turnover is quick, then there is a good chance he and his team need to do a better job of assessing candidates and ensuring fit.  If it is later in the year, then it may have little to do with recruiting and more to do with compensation, work conditions, or management, and if that’s the case his team can reduce the time to fill by 50% and it’s still not going to help the company’s bottom line.

I let him know that real issue that he had to face was the passing of problems.  When all aspects of HR don’t work together, people have a tendency to shift problems.   We know this in recruiting, because we are usually the last stop on this train.

So my advice today is don’t accept something if you don’t understand it.  My friend was willing to accept the fact that he needed to reduce time to fill, even though he didn’t understand why.  My role in the conversation was to be the voice of “why.”   Once you know why something is really important, then you can build and deliver a solution that solves a real problem, not do something that only acts as a speed bump on the road to the inevitable.

Fan Friday

I admit it, I go a little crazy this weekend.  This is Ohio State/Michigan weekend.  My house will be swathed in scarlet and grey.  I, myself, will look like Brutus Buckeye threw up on me.  Ohio State has already won the Big 10, they are already assured of a trip to the Rose Bowl, but this game means the world to Buckeye fans around the world.  It’s one of the most storied rivalries in all of sports, and a game that has high emotional value to the fans of both teams.

My pregame rituals, my eyes glued to the t.v. during the entire game, my prospects for an evening of celebration or of melancholia, have all been a part of my life since I was a child.  I know they are all irrational.  When I hang my Muck Fichigan banner, I know it’s irrational, and I know that I have no ill will towards the people of Michigan (except that one dude in the Red Dodge Magnum that stole my parking space two years ago at the Detroit Auto Show.  You know who you are, and you know I don’t like you).

It’s so amazing how fanatical we get about our teams.  They give us joy (and pain), but they don’t give us money or attention.  Our loyalty is unconditional, no matter how many times they break our hearts (yes, I’m also a diehard Browns fan).

What are you fanatical about, and why?

Keystone Metric

I had a conversation, over beer, with @MNHeadhunter about metrics.  That’s right, there’s nothing better in the world than sitting at a bar talking metrics!  Well anyway we were chatting various recruiting metrics and how recruiters can best use them.

The challenge in the discussion was that there are so many metrics, it’s hard to know where to start and what to do with the info.   I’ve blogged about several metrics in the past, but this was an interesting question.  If you are a recruiter, where do you start your metrics journey?  I didn’t have to think long.  There is one metric that we’ve already discussed here that should be your starting point, Send Out to Hire Ratio.  This is the number of candidates you have to put in front of a hiring manager for each hire.  Many third party agencies can operate profitably at a 10:1 or greater ratio, best internal recruiting functions will operate at 4:1 or better.

Why is this your starting point?  Every other metric is build around this.  If you know how many people you need to send out to get a hire, you can work backwards and determine how many people you have to interview per send out, and how many people you need to have in your pool to qualify for an interview.   Knowing this helps you manage your time effectively, and establish things like your tipping point.  It also is the tool to identify issues with customers (internal and external).  If your send out to hire ratio is high consistently, then either you or your customer/hiring manager isn’t getting something.

Remember the metric won’t tell you what wrong, just that something is.

As a leader, one of the first questions I ask a recruiter I’m thinking about hiring is what their Send Out to Hire Ratio is.  Good recruiters know this numbers without thinking.

I’ll be at the MNRec event in December, so if you are going to be there, and want to chat metrics let me know.   I can be reached at whatsapufnstufATgmail.com.

Why Search Engines Are Replacing Job Boards

Yesterday in response to my blog post about the Death of Job Boards, one of the readers @meredithelaine asked a question about how someone would do an job search on Google that is effective?  It’s a great question, and a common question.  It’s also a question, we in HR and Recruiting need to help our customers understand as the dynamic shifts away from the job boards.

So here’s a super simplified description of how it works, and why candidates are increasingly moving away from the job boards.

The vast majority of U.S. companies have web sites.  Those companies generally post their jobs on their own web site (and often simultaneously with the job boards).  These postings on their site being part of the intergoogles wind up getting scraped by aggregators (such as Indeed or SimplyHired), and indexed by the search engines.  These tools don’t discriminate, meaning that they grab everything that is out there.  Most companies will post all public positions to their own website, and pick and choose which postings to post to the job boards, and when they choose job boards, they often select one or two pay sites only.

Now couple this evolution of technology and company behavior, with our new cultural search mentality: “I have a question, therefore I will Google for an answer.”   Google has not only become a verb in our language, it has become our default tool for searching the web (if you are a BING fan, substitute Bing for Google in the preceding sentences – but know “Bing” should never be a verb).  When you need something, you go to Google, so why not use it to find a job?  Simply enter your criteria, say sales jobs Chicago, and what you’ll get is a myriad of jobs.  Some will be on the boards (they pay an inordinate amount of dough to get their results listed high on Google), some will be on aggregators, some will be on free sites, and some will be from company sites.  The point is, they are all in one place!  No longer do you have to search Monster, and then Hotjobs, and then craigslist.  They are all indexed in one convenient place, your Google search results.

The huge shift that is occurring now is that companies are optimizing their own job boards so that their results will show ahead of the job boards on search.  This means unless there is a huge, fundamental shift on how they do business, the job boards will continue to bleed revenues on job postings.

I hope that provides some insight!

Death of Job Boards Part II

As you know I wrote earlier about the Death of Job Boards, and I don’t think anyone out there is questioning the “if”, but rather the “when.”

We just met with our job board vendors for final contract negotiations.  We came into the negotiations with greatly reduced spend, as we see our organization transitioning completely away from them in the very near future.  For the past year we had used two of the three big boards (for the sake of discussion A and B).  The decision had been to use A for professional positions and B for high volume sales positions.  Company A performed well, company B was O.K. but was: 1. Significantly more expensive, 2. Extremely deceptive in reporting, 3. Uninterested in following instructions (i.e. trying to sell unneeded postings to individual managers in the field – they use the same pool as everyone else, convincing a manager to spend $50K on a facebook page – 31 fans in 1 year an awesome achievement, etc.).

We also invited Company C in, whom we hadn’t used for years, but wanted to learn what they had to offer.  After our first pass with each vendor, they all confirmed that they in fact are the largest job board on Earth, and that the competitors who made the same claim were using bad information.  Company A was working on some new tools, but couldn’t show them to us yet, Company B wanted to up what we were paying for the same service, and Company C came in and undercut the competition. 

We took this info back and began comparing the data and the costs.  We also took into account source effectiveness.  We let the vendors know what features we felt we liked most overall and the price point we were adhering to (we communicated that this was a “hard” number and could not be exceeded), and invited them back for final visits and presentations.

Company B contacted me a week beforehand and clearly didn’t understand that this was no longer a negotiation, final bids were due at the meeting.  They then claimed they understood.

The day of the event began, Company A was now able to show us the tools (new search technology), which were impressive, but sadly not currently OFCCP compliant, I’m not sure why you would develop a search technology and not ensure OFCCP compliance from the outset, but they did say it would be compliant by end of Q1.  The product was a knock out, we did some difficult searches, and with the tool (searches we ran the day before on Company B’s platform) and turned up excellent results.  They also came in with competitive pricing below our hard number for a strong suite of services. 

Company B came in and their first proposal was over twice what we could spend, which was mind blowing, since they had been informed no less than 10 times where our threshold was.  The other packages that fit our price range were not sufficient to meet our needs.  Company B’s approach was to sell their “awesome” customer service and how much better it was than the competitors.  What Company B never asked was whether or not we were pleased with the service we received from the competitors (we are very pleased).

Company C came in with the same very very competitively priced offer, but in order to take advantage of some of the features, we would have to resort to a very large scale manual effort. 

At the end of the day, we chose Company A for the lions share of the contract, with Company B we will retain one resume seat license, and Company C will provide a limited amount of postings as a trial run to compare with our other vendor.

Not surprisingly, when we informed the vendors, at that point Company B asked to price match Company A.  However, the suite of tools that Company A provided could not be matched by Company B at any price.

The best part is that in 2010 we will have significantly increased value added tools we have through the vendors, and have reduced our spend by over half of ’09.

How have your negotiations fared?  Are the rest of you out there seeing these same things

Obama Administration to Host Conference on Unemployment – HR Need Not Attend

The Obama administration announced that a White House conference would be held in December focusing on the unemployment crisis in the U.S.  Invited to the conference with be Corporate CEO’s, Small Business Owners, Non-profit executives, Economists, Financial Experts, and Labor leaders.  Do you notice a conspicuous absence?  Anyone?   Yes that right, no Human Resources representation.

China Gorman has noted that SHRM is trying to get invited, but no guarantees.  Although I’m happy to hear that an effort is being made, that happiness is completely overshadowed by the fact that they weren’t invited in the first place. Since we don’t have a King in America, that means that not only the President, but none of his advisors felt it important to involve the people that focus on the nation’s human capital had anything to add to the conversation.

So I have two questions for you today: 1. Should HR, as an expertise, be involved in the conversation?  2.  If so, what should SHRM do to get an invite?

Traveling

Traveling today, new post tomorrow (Wed)

Organizations That Rock

There’s been a great deal of discussion on the blog this week about a certain organization.  I wanted to continue to talk about organizations and how we can benefit from being united.  So today I’m asking you what organization, club, civic organization, etc. are you a member of that you feel you personally get the most out of?

Myself, I’m a Freemason, which I find very rewarding.  We as a fraternity do a great deal of work within the community.  In Minnesota we raised and donated the money for the Masonic Cancer Institute at the University of Minnesota, we also provide scholarships for returning veterans.  There are also other (appendent) organizations you can join as a Mason that do wonderful work.  I’m a Knight Templar (that’s me holding the flag, p.s. we are changing the uniform soon in our Commandery, I’m not a fan of the hat), and we support a great deal of eye health research, and my friends the Shriner’s maintain free hospitals throughout the world (did you know that those hospitals have no billing departments?).  On top of the great services we provide to our communities, there’s the education, mentoring, and fellowship, all of which means that every member can get something out of the fraternity.  I can tell you if I spent 100 years as a Mason, I’ll never feel I’ve been able to give as much as I’ve received, and to me that’s when you know a large organization is doing it right, when there results exceed the sum of their parts.

So again, what groups do you belong to that rock?

What If No One Knows You Do a Great Job?

Thanks to everyone for their active discussion over the past couple of days in regards to my opinion that SHRM is not living up the expectations of its members, or potential members. I really appreciate the participation of China Gorman, whose knowledge, class, and passion brought so much to the discussion. Thank you as well to twitterverse for spreading and adding to the discussion. If you would still like to participate in the discussion, please feel free, I think there is still much to say and discuss over both the near and long term. Also, if you completely disagree with me and would like the opportunity write a blog counter to my ideas on the topic, please contact me at whatsapufnstufATgmail.com. I will certainly give anyone that opportunity. Well I’m sorry there wasn’t a new post yesterday, but I wanted to give folks a chance to continue to comment on Tuesday’s topic, and I really did a number on my back, and thanks to the pain there were only random periods of lucidity yesterday. There are a couple of themes from the discussion that I’m going to pick up on over the next several posts (however I do promise another metrics post next week – I’m just to sore to do math right now . @Corey Feldman brought up a brilliant point: “Where I think SHRM has failed is in that it hasn’t risen to a critical level a public consciousness. SHRM members can and do see your efforts, but the public and corporate leaders seem mostly uninformed and/or uninterested in SHRMs efforts.” This really got me thinking, not just about SHRM but about the nature of success in general. Savvy leaders know the value of perception, the concept of “brand value” is a concept based on perception. Credibility is given or taken based on perceptions. My question is this: What adds more value, doing good things that no one is aware of; or doing good things that everyone is aware of? It’s an interesting conundrum, I know. My thought is the value created through public knowledge and awareness (that entry into the public consciousness) in all that we as individual do, is huge, in a good way. Unless you are satisfied with where you are and feel that what you are doing is sufficient to meet your needs, then to grow, advance, expand, whatever, then others outside of your immediate circle HAVE to be aware of your existence and value. For large organizations or communities, that entry into the public mind has the potential for exponential benefits: new membership, new support, new expertise, ect. To me it’s a win/win. What do you think?

Failure is Spelled S-H-R-M

I checked my office mail box yesterday, and once again there was an opportunity presented to me to re-join SHRM.  I picked it up, opened it, and actually thought about doing it.    For those that know me, you know that was a major leap, even taking a moment to consider it, was the closest I’ve come to endorsing SHRM in years.

Well, I looked at it and I thought about it, and in the end, it went right into the recycle bin (you can be angry and still be green).  Why?  Well in my mind, this was a year where the stars were aligned for SHRM to rise from the ashes of mediocrity and become a true leader.  There was effusive love after NOLA about a SHRM that was poised to be dynamic, focus on the latest and greatest tools and thoughts, led by dynamic game changing leadership that everyone could get behind. 

That was great to hear and read.  There was a sense of excitement that was sweeping through the ranks of HR, during a period when they needed something to feel good about.   But over time the failure of SHRM materialized.  The failure driven most by their silence.  This year has offered two huge opportunities for SHRM to take center stage and contribute to society as a whole, and we’ve heard not a peep (and if we as HR pro’s haven’t heard a peep, then think what our colleagues have heard from our lead association?):

• Unemployment and the Recession – 10% unemployment is about to become a reality, HR exists to help companies profit through strategic utilization and management of the workforce.  Shouldn’t the premier HR organization have some access to expertise to formulate some sort of opinion on how to best keep America working?  Shoot, the country is looking for guidance on this very topic, what a great opportunity to step in and show what HR has to offer, but that’s not what has happened and the silence of SHRM has been damning. 
• Health Care – here’s another one that is in SHRM’s wheelhouse.  Companies and individuals are confused on health care reform and how it could impact them.  This is an opportunity for SHRM to step forward and say “We as the HR community feel  ____________  is the best route forward.”  SHRM could help lead the way one way or another, but instead chooses deafening silence as its response.

I dare any person to show me where “Silence” is a prized competency in a leader.  The time for silence has long passed, the time to step forward and speak is upon you SHRM.  Either your goal is to be a leader in our HR community, or simply to be another racket out there designed to fleece its members not only of their money, but also of their hopes.