HR Big Picture

Here's an article on the business hiring process employed by a large majority of Corporations and even the Federal and State governments.The following is a creative solution found on Forbes:
A recent column: "Is LinkedIn Cheating Employers and Job Seekers Alike?" triggered good dialogue on this blog and in lots of other media outlets about how companies recruit and hire people. Job seekers rightly criticized middlemen like LinkedIn, CareerBuilder and other database-driven job boards for mindless automation that does virtually nothing to help make good matches between employers and job seekers. In fact, the statistics I presented in the article strongly suggest these middlemen make it harder. Costly marketing campaigns try to convince us these systems are worthwhile and necessary, but that's just putting lipstick on the keyword munching pig.

Yet that's just the tip of the problem. Recruiting and hiring in America are a disaster of epic proportions, not because there's a talent shortage, but because the employment system itself is fundamentally broken.

A recent New York Times interview with one of Google's big data crunchers, Laszlo Bock, delivered these indictments of widely used candidate evaluation methods. Employers can't afford to think about interviewing or hiring without considering what he has to say (emphasis added):

• "Years ago, we did a study to determine whether anyone at Google is particularly good at hiring. We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship. It's a complete random mess..."
• "On the hiring side, we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time. How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan? A complete waste of time. They don't predict anything."
• "One of the things we've seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.'s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless,no correlation at all except for brand new college grads, where there's a slight correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.'s and test scores, but we don't anymore, unless you're just a few years out of school. We found that they don't predict anything."

If I were a human resources executive, I'd be scrambling for cover, and if I were on a board of directors, I'd be voting to freeze my company's HR spending until I got some explanations for why this system persists.

In general, employers are really bad at picking people to fill jobs. The entire employment system today is based on gathering useless big data to indirectly assess what a person might contribute to a business. "No correlation," says Google. The trouble is the employment system starts with the wrong premise: If we define the jobs, we'll find people we can jam into them.

Marketing guru Seth Godin once said, "Don't find customers for your products; find products for your customers."

Employers need to adopt a similar mindset: Don't find people for your jobs; create jobs for talented people.

There's far too much focus on jobs and matching people to them, and not enough focus on cultivating and developing the talents of capable people. There is not enough of building companies from personal interactions between managers and their professional communities, and too much of stuffing job requirements and keywords into databases.

Companies should stop recruiting to fill jobs, and start recruiting to fill their ranks with the best, most talented people they can find. Managers need to learn how to meet and mingle with the best talent in their professional communities, and design jobs around them to produce value and profit. What a concept: Start with the people. It might even require some management effort.

Imagine if a company's recruiters stopped trolling the job boards for resumes whose keywords fit job descriptions. Imagine if those companies instead sent their managers out to find the very best talent in their industries and actually recruited those people.

Today, businesses invest billions of dollars to translate complex business needs into strings of keywords to be processed by database algorithms. Job listings and resumes are bought, sold, rented and traded in a bizarre struggle to avoid actual interaction between companies and the capable people they need to hire.

Should companies really hire people without having a specific job to match them to? Why not? True talent can ride a fast learning curve without falling off. Invest in improved training, give people a bit of time and pay them well, and they will amaze you. Smart, motivated people will figure out how to do profitable work, not a narrowly defined job, just like a skilled entrepreneur knows how to create a great new product without anyone handing over a blueprint. And that talent will probably do the "out of the box" thinking that HR claims it values.

Employers make "Ten Stupid Hiring Mistakes" that isolate them from healthy, personal recruiting. They recruit for a single position by thoughtlessly casting a net into an ocean of millions of job hunters. Godin tells us that model no longer works in marketing. But nor does it work when hiring.

If you're a manager: Does your company invest more in automated recruiting than in meeting and building relationships with lots of smart people? Is your company building and capitalizing on the best people assets, or is it trying to find pegs that fit empty holes?

Rather than acquiring and deploying their most valuable asset ,talented people, to work out the profit equation, employers are dumpster diving in job-board databases, snarfing up meaningless keywords. Then they quiz applicants, whom they don't know from Adam, with silly interview questions. Google's Laszlo Bock has sounded a warning about these candidate assessment methods: They don't predict anything. But the employment system suffers from far bigger structural failings than "Why are manhole covers round?"

It's time to turn the employment system upside down and to focus on hiring smart people who can think, learn and work profitably, and to let them loose. How much worse could they do than the employers who can't pick the right shaped pegs?

The Working Resume

I will be taking this challenge and you should think about it to next time you're looking for a spot in a company. This is the second article from Nick, enjoy!

Resume Blasphemy By Nick Corcodilos,

I've looked at resumes every which way, and I just don't like them as a job hunting tool. They're just too static. They get lumped in with all the other thousands of resumes an employer receives and they provide too many reasons for an employer to turn you down. More important, they don't offer an employer any solutions, because resumes are purely historical. Who cares what you did two years ago, if you can't convince me you can do this job now?

So, I've invented The Working Resume™. It doesn't list your academic credentials or any of your prior employers. It doesn't show any of your past experience and it doesn't list any jobs you ever did. No accomplishments, no achievements or awards. So, what do you put on it?

• A clear picture of the business of the employer you want to work for.
• Proof of your understanding of the problems and challenges the employer faces.
• A plan describing how you would do the work the employer needs done.
• An estimate of what/how much you think you could add to the bottom line.

Now, there's a customized resume! I call it The Working Resume because it requires you to do the job, not just apply for it.

You could use this resume only once, for one employer. You would need all sorts of information before you could write it -- it would take a lot of research, investigation and careful thought. You would have to really want that job and know you can do it. Or, why invest the effort to produce The Working Resume? If the job is worth wanting, it's worth doing.

Sound like a lot of work? Well, so is the job you want. If you're not prepared to demonstrate your ability to actually do the job, why should the employer bother to interview you? (Hint: it helps if you Put a free sample in your resume.)

And guess what? The Working Resume is also the perfect script for your interview -- The Working Interview™, where you provide the employer with just what he or she is looking for: proof of your understanding of the work that needs to be done, proof that you can do the work, do it the way the employer wants it done, and proof that you can do it profitably.

In fact, once you have produced a Working Resume, you will likely have done the kind of research and made the kinds of contacts that will probably make a resume entirely unnecessary, you will already be "in the door". (That's the point.)

I challenge anyone to write such a resume and send it to me via email, mail@asktheheadhunter.com.

Imagine. Any takers?

Hiring Mistakes: A Consultant's View

Here is one of my to date favorites on HR hiring. This article will give you insight on a HR consultant's view of HR so you can look at more than just the hiring process.

Ten Stupid Hiring Mistakes By Nick Corcodilos:

Employers make lots of mistakes in the process of recruiting, interviewing and hiring new employees. I've seen some of the worst. I hope this article helps your company ratchet its own hiring practices up a notch or so. If you've got cautionary examples of such problematic practices, I invite you to submit them. I also urge you to share hiring practices that reveal your company to be a cut above the rest. I'd like nothing more than to publish a column of the ten smartest hiring practices.

So without further ado, here are ten culprits that make hiring a problematic experience for lots of companies.

1. Overly-narrow job specifications
Every manager is in a rush because his project is behind schedule and unanticipated problems have cropped up. When a manager needs to add staff, it's usually because he needs the right help and he doesn't have time to baby-sit whoever he hires. The manager needs specific skills now.

This attitude is at the root of overly-narrow job specifications, and it can spell doom for the manager, for the new hire, and for the work.

People are thinking and problem-solving machines. They see, they analyze, they learn and they marshal their skills, abilities and knowledge to tackle and do a job. This is what you're paying for when you hire a good worker: his abilities, not his specific knowledge of a technique or a tool. Almost by definition, a good worker can learn to use any tool you hand him, and he might even introduce a few tools you were unaware existed. When a person lacks some specific skills, a little guidance and a stack of manuals go a long way.

You need specific expertise now? The odds that you'll find it are small, especially in a tight market. The cost of leaving the work undone until you find exactly what you want grows by the minute. The value of hiring a talented worker and giving him the space to learn while he works increases with time, from the first minute he is on your staff.

There's nothing wrong with clearly defining the work you need to have done. Just don't make the mistake of overly-narrowing your definition of who can do it, and don't make the mistake of turning a project management problem into a hiring blunder. A manager who hires narrowly may be viewed as one who doesn't understand the broader requirements of the technology and products he's working with -- and enough hiring blunders can cost him his own job.

2. Human Resources does the recruiting
Consider that the person who first talks to a prospective hire is your company's front line of communication with your professional community. What does an HR representative -- even the best one in your company -- really know about the work your department does?

As an example, if your company is in the electronics industry, an engineer needs to see your company's technical and management credibility immediately. The closer to the recruiting process the engineering manager is, the more powerful is the attraction for the engineer. Don't make the prospective technical candidate step through bureaucracy before you have a chance to make your pitch. In today's market, you could lose him to an employer who makes a full-court press from the onset of the recruiting effort.

What does this mean to your recruiting process? Turn your managers and team members into recruiters. Let them be the people who make the first contact with the candidate. Let your team create the candidate's first impression of your company. Show the candidate that hiring the best people is as important a function to your team as designing the best products.

3. Hiring "what comes along"
The traditional recruiting and hiring process is based on a faulty selection model. When you run ads and hold job fairs, you create what's referred to in the research world as "selection bias". That is, the process you use biases the outcome of your search for new employees. You get to hire only the people who come along, not those you would like to hire.

Since when is your company's motto, Hire What Comes Along?

When you retain a headhunter, you change the nature of your hiring strategy. You pursue the best workers who are most suited to your needs; you're not restricted to "what comes along". Of course, regular readers of this column know that there's no mystery to "being your own headhunter" so this is not an advertisement for headhunting services. The message here is that you should be keenly aware of the consequences of the process you use to recruit and hire. You're probably limiting yourself more severely than you suspect.

A special caution: today we're told the best job candidates are part of a "hidden candidate pool". That is, they're not looking, but they're available. The popular oxymoron applied to these rare folks is "passive job hunter". In trying to describe that group of talented workers who are not actively looking for new jobs, the media imply that these people really are available through conventional means, and that they're the right people for you. All you need is access to their vitals, which just happen to be in a data base which you can use for a fee. The problem is, these data bases, no matter how specialized, introduce the same selection bias into your hiring efforts.

Bottom line: either you are identifying and pursuing those individuals you would like to hire, or you're shooting at the fish that are conveniently, and rather naively, swimming in a little barrel. So, run ads if you will. But, be aware that employers who identify, hunt down and entice the workers they really want have a jump on you.

4. Failure to prep the candidate
The typical job candidate arrives at the job interview knowing only what's printed in the want ad, and what your HR representative told her. What a great way to evaluate a prospective employee, make it as much a "blind date" as possible! If she asks to speak with the hiring manager in advance of the interview, tell her "that's not done" and that "the manager is very busy, you'll learn all you need in the interview". In fact, when she asks the name of the manager she'll be meeting next week, you might as well do what a lot of companies do: decline to give it to her.

What nonsense. It's in a hiring manager's best interest to help the candidate prepare for the interview, at least to the extent the candidate is interested in doing so. In fact, a candidate's lack of interest in the prep material or information you offer should signal that this is probably the wrong candidate to devote interview time to.

What kind of preparation should you offer and encourage? That's up to you. But consider this: a candidate who makes good use of whatever resources you bestow prior to the interview will likely make as good use of the tools your department provides once she's on the job. It's a very telling test.

Here are some suggestions for prep materials. Prior to bringing the candidate in for an interview, offer her non-confidential information about:

• your products and technologies
• relevant but not so obvious web pages that might be useful
• the problems and challenges your team is facing
• industry issues that impact your business
• the tools your team uses
• methods you employ in project management
• competitors and vendors you deal with
• articles about your company that illuminate how you run the business
• historical information about your products and your company's growth
• organizational information about how various departments work together
• financial and profitability data, if your company is public (or maybe even if it's not)
• the names and telephone numbers of members of your staff (why not?)

Treat the job interview as an open-book test, and give the candidate the book before the interview. Let her talk with you on the phone; let her talk to some of your team members; let her ask questions in advance. If you offer and she doesn't bother, you've learned something important. If she takes advantage of the information, imagine how fruitful the interview could be. You could talk about things that really matter, like how the candidate can use what she has learned to make your business more profitable.

5. Failure to leverage the interview into other useful contacts
Human resources reps sometimes ask job candidates to recommend or refer their professional associates for other possible jobs; but it's different coming from the hiring manager. Hiring managers should learn to do this all the time.

Here you are, meeting with a member of your professional community "from out there" in the industry. This is a person who knows lots of other sales reps, programmers, technicians, accountants, engineers, productions workers, lots of the kinds of people your company is seeking to hire. If you're not discreetly mining this information, you're wasting a valuable opportunity in the interview.

Suggestion: don't just gather these names. Invite the candidate and his buddies to your next company event. Don't have an event coming up? Start having them. Lots of them. Whether it's a barbecue, a picnic, a bag lunch featuring a presentation by a company expert, a hospitality suite at the next product fair, or beers at the local watering hole after work on Friday, this is how you enlarge your circle of professional contacts. And it's how you identify more of the kinds of people you want to hire before you need to hire them.

6. Talk, talk, talk
The single biggest mistake to make in an interview is to spend it all talking. Talk is cheap, and it's a waste of time by itself. Instead, take the candidate on the company tour. Introduce him to other employees. Explain how the marketing manager does his job and let the candidate chat with him. Tour the manufacturing floor and let the candidate demonstrate how he would inspect the production line. Show him the tools he'll be using if he's hired. Ask him to show you how he'd use a particular piece of equipment, or ask him to draw some pictures on your whiteboard showing how he'd plan his day and how he'd tackle a project.

You've heard of "the behavioral interview"? It's one of the biggest jokes in the HR community, because "the behavioral interview" is all talk. What I'm suggesting to you is a Working Interview™.

A job is about doing, not talking. Make sure the interview is about doing the job. Take this all a step farther and learn about The New Interview™, and learn how to hire right.

7. Inadequate reference checks
In too many companies, reference checks are entirely inadequate. HR usually conducts them, using a carefully orchestrated, one-sided protocol. Yes, there are legal issues, and these must be addressed. But it's the hiring manager who should conduct these checks, after being taught how to do it right.

A reference call from one manager to another is very different from a call from an HR rep. Managers can delve into more detail, and they have both the expertise and the prerogative to pursue lines of questioning that HR lacks. Peers are more likely to be open and blunt with one another.

There's one critical question that comes across as much more profound when the hiring manager asks it, at the end of the reference call: "If you could have Joe work on your team again, would you hire him?" While the answer matters, it's the hesitation or the enthusiasm of the respondent that's critical. Manager to manager, this one question can reveal more than any other kind of reference check.

When you're hiring, don't pay lip service to the importance of reference checking. Involve the people who will work with the new hire.

8. Unreasonably long decision process
Headhunters know something that job candidates hate, and that most employers are too busy to think about. The longer an employer takes to make a decision about a particular candidate, the less likely the candidate is to be hired. The advice I regularly give job hunters: judge the company on how it sticks to the decision schedule it gives you. If they fail more than once to meet the notification deadlines they themselves have set, start talking to other employers, because there's likely a profound management problem that you can't see.

Companies lose good candidates when they hesitate to make decisions. Granted, the interview and decision process takes time. But there is no excuse for not having a decision schedule and sticking to it. The price you pay for treating your hiring process indecisively and your candidates disrespectfully is a bad reputation.

Set a hiring and decision schedule and stick to it. If you can't decide on a candidate, then call the candidate and tell him you have no plans to make an offer at this time.

Bite the bullet. Be honest. Be responsible. Afraid you'll lose the candidate? Then, why are you hesitating to hire him? Don't blame bureaucracy or other factors: either you're ready to hire or you're not, and either this is the right candidate or he's not. Hire him or cut him loose on schedule. You'll keep his respect.

9. Unreasonably long job offer process
If your company does not have a streamlined, fast-track job offer process, create it! Time and again Ask The Headhunter readers have shared stories of promised job offers that took weeks to come through. I'll let an ATH reader say it:

"My #1 pick went along [like this]: interviews scheduled, then cancelled. The manager wants to see you, then he does not need to. An offer is coming. No really, we mean it. We want you to work for us! We will have the offer to you soon. And so on.

"Personally, I took this to mean the HR section of the company was mired in bureaucracy. Since they were hiring me to a position where I would be hiring others I took this as a bad sign.

"Rather than let the lining of my stomach erode any further I talked once again to one of my other two choices. They had a solid offer in my hands in 2 hours, $5,000/yr less than the mythical offer from the other company. I took the job without hesitation.

"I am glad I made the decision I did. The company I work for is smart, nimble and ethical. When I need to hire people I can have an offer to them in a day or so and get them into work the day after that!"

When you drop the ball with one of your customers, it costs you the customer, it costs you your reputation and it costs you revenue and profit. So, you go out of your way to be a responsible vendor. If you're not managing your hiring process at least as well as your sales and customer service, you're slitting one wrist while bandaging the other.

Were you "company #1" in the scenario recounted above?

10. Leaving your team out of the loop
Before I send candidates to interview, I coach them to request meetings with members of the team they'd be working in; with managers of departments they'd be interfacing with; and always with the heads of marketing and service. Why? Because a candidate's ability to succeed in the job depends intimately on the way these people act, think and work. No worker, and no job, is an island. Why treat them that way when hiring?

Time and again, people who have just started a job share tales of woe. "The rest of the team is quitting one by one. There's no cooperation between departments. Sales aren't what they said they were.The job isn't what I was told." Within weeks if not days, the new hire is interviewing for another job with another company.

As a manager, you're not hiring a person to work on an island. His work, his behavior and his attitudes will impact everyone in your department, and everyone he interfaces with throughout the company. Given the opportunity, each of these "interfaces" will reveal aspects of the candidate you would never see yourself. Don't leave them out of the interview loop.

It's not necessary to schedule formal interviews for the candidate with all these people. You can easily engage in a little "interviewing by wandering around". While on the cook's tour of the facility, arrange a little "face time" in relevant areas throughout the company. Leave the candidate to chat for a few minutes with the people you encounter on your tour. Arrange a product demonstration, or let the candidate sit in on a project meeting for a few minutes -- and have the other team members ask his opinions. Make it easy and casual, but make sure the people you involve in this process are prepared to conduct mini-interviews and report back to you.

Eliminate one blunder
Is your company making some of these mistakes when hiring? If it is, don't plan on changing the system overnight. Eliminate one blunder at a time and enjoy the payoff as you move on to improve another part of the process.

The Thank You Note

Here's a well written article on the importance of following up via thank you note by Forbes Contributor Lisa Quast:

As she walked out the door of the office building where she had just finished a job interview, “Jane” (name changed) wanted to jump in the air and dance across the street. Her interview had gone so well she was sure they’d offer her the position. Or so she thought. Unfortunately, Jane didn’t bother to follow-up after the interview with a thank you note.

“Many job seekers believe that the interview is over once they step out of the office, but that’s simply not the case,” said Amanda Augustine, job search expert for TheLadders. “Based on my decade-long experience in conducting interviews, I can attest first-hand that failure to follow-up can be the deciding factor in rejecting a candidate who is otherwise a great fit.”

How you follow up after an interview depends mainly on the culture of the company. Typically, this means sending an emailed thank you note later that day. An Accountemps survey revealed 87 percent of hiring managers now view email as an appropriate way to express thanks after a job interview.

If the company culture is a bit more traditional or formal, a handwritten or typed (and mailed) thank you note sent within 24 hours is still acceptable. While a telephone call is also an option for thanking a hiring manager, it’s not something I recommend. I say this because, as a hiring manager for many, many years, the last thing I wanted was a candidate to interrupt my busy day to thank me for the job interview they just had.

The least appreciated method of thanking a hiring manager is sending a text message. According to the Accountemps survey, only 10 percent of hiring managers viewed texting as appropriate. Thankfully, I’ve only had this happen once, when a candidate texted, “Thx for the intrvw!” While texting might be convenient, it’s not appropriate for job interview thank you notes.

What should you include in your thank you note to the hiring manager? Here are my recommendations:

• The hiring manager’s name
• The title of the open position
• Something specific about the interview or important items discussed
• Your interest in the position
• Your appreciation for their time (the “thank you” part)
• Your recognition of the next steps in the hiring process
• Your contact information

Still not sure what to write? Here’s an example:

Dear <insert hiring manager name here>,

     Thank you for your time today to discuss the open position in your department, Customer Call Center Manager, Job ID #2727. Both the interview and the tour of the call center made for an exciting visit. I was impressed with the teamwork and positive spirit among the employees I met during the tour.

     Your description of a “day in the life” of the Manager position helped me gain a better understanding of the daily job responsibilities and I appreciate your openness in sharing your key goals for the department. I’m excited about the possibility of using my call center background, specifically my expertise in process improvement and people management, to help you achieve the department objectives. The interview reinforced my interest in becoming a part of your team.

     I look forward to hearing from you next week after you’ve interviewed the remaining two candidates. Thank you again for the opportunity to interview for the Customer Call Center Manager position. Should you have any additional questions, I may be reached at (222) 222-2222 or Name.Name@TBD.com.

Sincerely,

Your name here (and contact information underneath)

Data released by CareerBuilder shows 22 percent of hiring managers are less likely to hire a job candidate if they don’t send a thank you note after an interview because they believe it shows a lack of follow-through and that they aren’t serious about the job opportunity. Don’t be like “Jane” at the beginning of this blog – take the time to send a customized thank you note as a way to differentiate yourself from the other job candidates and to reinforce your interest in the position.

Hidden Jobs

Most jobs getting filled these days aren’t even advertised. Instead, they’re typically part of the hidden job market, millions of openings that never get formally posted. It is estimated that these positions account for up to 80% of hires.

Most employers prefer to fill positions without advertising. It saves money and time. Managers who do the hiring often believe the most suitable candidates are people who already work for their firms and referrals from staffers. The only way to gain access to this hidden market is about connections.

(note: I rewrote the following)

6 Ways to Find Hidden Jobs from Nancy Collamer
Here are six smart strategies to help you find out about “hidden jobs” by improving your networking skills, leveraging technology and expanding your reach.

1. Change the way you network If you want to crack the hidden job market, you’ve got to be smarter about the way you connect with people with inside knowledge about unposted openings.
First, make networking a habit, not something you do only when you need a job. By including this practice in your normal routine, you’ll automatically increase your chances of hearing about opportunities. So make a point of staying in regular touch with former colleagues and always adding new LinkedIn connections.

Second, remember the cardinal rule of networking: Give before you get. Forward articles you think could be helpful to people you know and pass on job leads you’ve heard about. Networking is about building genuine relationships, not asking for favors.

Finally, make it easy for people to help you find a job. When you’re talking to contacts who might be valuable for your search, tell them about the kinds of positions you’re looking for and the employers or fields that interest you. Then follow up with emails so they’ll have handy takeaways summarizing what you discussed.

End your networking conversations by asking: “Who else should I be talking to?” That question will, in turn, lead to introductions.

2. Join a professional networking group Your fellow job seekers can sometimes be the best resources for learning about employers who are likely to hire. Most are eager to share their knowledge, knowing that others in the same boat will share in return.

3. Contact employers directly I’m continually amazed by how rarely people reach out to people at places they’d like to work unless they see positions advertised there.
I know it takes effort to craft a compelling request for an interview. But smart managers are always interested in meeting professionals who can help their employers make or save money. So figure out who the hiring manager is and be bold. Email or call to introduce yourself and explain how your background and experience would be useful there. This way, even if the place currently has a hiring freeze, you’ll be top of mind when positions do open up.

4. Sign up for Google News Alerts One of the best ways to learn about hidden jobs is to stay up-to-date with prospective employers. This way, you’ll be among the first to know when one, say, leases additional office space, signs a big partnership deal or receives a new round of funding — all signs that the firm or nonprofit might soon be hiring.
Google News Alerts make it easy to do this. Just go to the Google Alerts page and type in which employers, decision makers and fields of interest you want to hear about. Then you’ll start receiving emails with the latest news Google has turned up.

5. Attend a conference Trade shows and conventions are ideal places to mine the hidden job market. They’ll let you make new contacts who can tell you about unposted openings, help you get interviews, provide access to influencers with hiring power and discover employers in growth mode who are likely to be looking for staffers soon. You may be able to reduce or even eliminate the cost of attending a conference by offering to work there as a volunteer.

6. Finally, if you like your current employer but not your particular job, snoop around at work There could be a terrific opportunity in another department. Remember: Internal candidates often get preference over outside applicants when positions need filling.