HRE Column: On Recruiting and the Technology Transformation

Here is my semi-frequent reminder and pointer for blog readers that I also write a monthly column at Human Resource Executive Online called Inside HR Tech that can be found here.

I kind of liked this month's column, (I suppose I like all of them, after all I wrote them), but felt like sharing this one on the blog because it touches upon what has been in the past a pretty popular topic with readers here - the kinds of transformations that organizations can drive via the application of modern HR technologies.

Here is an excerpt from the column, The Recruiting Technology Transformation:

Technology continues to fundamentally transform how, where and when work gets done, and the ways that HR leaders can drive improved business performance. In the HR tech world, recruiting technology is helping to drive that transformation and is making the recruiting function perhaps the most transformed of all HR disciplines.

This phenomenon was on display at a recent event I attended, HireVue’s Digital Disruption in Park City, Utah. At the event, numerous HireVue customers—spanning a wide variety of industries, including banking and finance, airlines, publishing and national retail chains—shared how technology has impacted and, in some cases, radically altered their talent-acquisition efforts.

Just a few of the examples from the event reveal the potential benefits of adopting modern talent-acquisition technologies for organizations of all types and sizes:

Educational and general-purpose publishing company Houghton Mifflin Harcourt adopted a three-pronged approach to improving its ability to identify, engage and hire inside sales staff. That approach resulted in increased quality of hire, faster time to fill their open sales roles and improved business results, which were measured in how many new sales-team members were attained.

By redesigning the process to better identify the candidates most likely to succeed through a combination of a statistically validated online assessment, video interviews that replaced the former recruiter phone screens and consistently applied behavioral-interviewing techniques for the candidates who passed the assessment and video screen, HMH was able to show top-line and bottom-line ROI.

The general lesson from this story is this: Applying modern tools and technologies to the talent-acquisition process, particularly for revenue-generating roles, provides HR and recruiting leaders with one of the best ways to help drive organizational results. In this example, HR could show how it was a significant contributor to sales and profits, and not just an administrative cost center....

Read the rest over at HRE Online

Good stuff, right? Humor me...

If you liked the piece you can sign up over at HRE to get the Inside HR Tech Column emailed to you each month. There is no cost to subscribe, in fact, I may even come over and wash your car or cut the grass for you if you do sign up for the monthly email.

Have a great Wednesday!

VIDEO: Does your LinkedIn profile sound like this?

It is Tuesday, it is not quite Summer yet but you are thinking about vacation, and it is probably a little tough to get it going today. What you need is a break. And a laugh as well. 

So take 5 minutes and check out the hilarious 'LinkedIn OUT LOUD!' video (embedded below, email and RSS subscribers will need to click through), and marvel at what some, (hopefully not your), LinkedIn profiles actually sound like when read aloud by comic actors:

Awesome, and all too true as the source material comes from actual LinkedIn profiles. 

It was worth the 5 minutes right? Now you can go back to being a results oriented, customer-focused, global operator.

Happy Tuesday.

The culture of performance and firing by form letter

Super look at just one of the ways that a 'performance is the only thing that matters' culture that is professional American football manifests itself over at Deadspin last week in the piece This is the the letter you get when you are cut from an NFL team.

Take a look at a typical player termination letter from one of the league's clubs, the Houston Texans:

A couple of things about the letter, and then i am out for the rest of a summer Monday.

1. First up, in a really hands-on job like 'NFL Player', physical ability to perform issues are number 1 and 2 on the 5 possible termination reasons. For the rest of us who are not NFL players, this could equate to keeping up our skills, learning new ones as business and technology shifts, and importantly, not 'faking' it in terms of what we say we can do.

2. Reason 3, and the one that this example from 2006 shows, says basically, 'You are just not good enough, i.e., the other guys on the team are better'. No details, no wordy explanations or nuances. Just a cut and dried 'You're not good enough.' That's cold, but again, completely aligned with the organizational values and culture. Performance trumps everything. Want a high-performance culture? Then you have to be ruthless in trimming the organization of people who don't meet the standard. And you as a leader can't let it bother you too much either.

3. The organization also has a broad right to terminate you for 'personal conduct that adversely affects or reflects on the club'. Heck, that could be just about anything, since it is the club who gets to evaluate the 'impact' of your behavior. In other words, we (mostly) care about your physical condition and your performance, but we can fire your butt for just about anything we want at any time. Heck, that sounds a lot like many of the places us 'normals' work too. Employment at will is a great deal for sure. Until you get fired, well, just 'because.'

Hiring, promoting, rewards, and even terminations all play a big role in defining, supporting, and communicating an organization's values and culture. If you are going to go all-in on high performance, well, you need to remember the dark side of that decision too.

And firing by form letter is one example of that.

Have a great week!

PODCAST - #HRHappyHour 214 - Catching up with QUEsocial

HR Happy Hour 214 - Catching up with QUEsocial

Recorded Wednesday June 3, 2015

Hosts: Steve Boese, Trish McFarlane

Guest: Josh Schwede, EVP, QUEsocial

Listen to the show HERE

This week on the show, recorded live from the HireVue Digital Disruption Conference in Park City, Utah, Steve sat down with Josh Schwede, EVP from QUEsocial, named one of 2014's "Awesome New Startups for HR" at the HR Technology Conference. QUEsocial has created an innovative platform for delivering employer branding and recruiting content to an organization's recruiting team and employees, enabling organizations to ensure branding consistency, increase reach, and to ,monitor and measure results. Josh gave us an update of what has been happening since last year's HR Tech Conference, shared how some QUEsocial customers are leveraging the platform, and also shared his perspective on some of today's HR Tech trends.

Additionally, Josh and Steve talked some Chicago sports - Blackhawks and Bulls mainly, and how (of course), just about anything you need to know about HR and Talent Management can be learned from sports.

You can listen to the show on the show page HERE, or using the widget player below:

Check Out Business Podcasts at Blog Talk Radio with Steve Boese Trish McFarlane on BlogTalkRadio

This was a fun conversation with one of the coolest guys in HR Tech - hope you enjoy the show!

Remember: You can find and subscribe to the HR Happy Hour Show on iTunes and on all major podcast player apps on Android. Just search for 'HR Happy Hour' to add the show to your podcast subscriptions.

CHART OF THE DAY: Which job candidate gets the most attention from hiring managers?

Quick answer - It is Candidate #4.

Some back story on that conclusion...

Recently researchers at Old Dominion University published a study called 'How quickly do interviewers reach decisions? An examination of interviewers' decision-making time across applicants' in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology. They found that hiring manager decision-making takes closer to five minutes for the first interviewee, and reaches closer to eight minutes by the fourth applicant. After this, however, the time hiring managers take to reach a decision begins to decrease with each additional interview.

Here's a chart from the study:

From the researcher's conclusions on this data:

Interviewers tend to take longer to evaluate applicants near the beginning of their interview schedule and take less time to evaluate applicants near the end of their schedule. This may prevent applicants who appear later in the schedule from having a full opportunity to perform. Organizations may benefit from limiting the number of interviews an interviewer conducts in immediate succession to around four, which may decrease reliance on more automatic information processing strategies.

What conclusions can we draw from this data, and what changes might we need to consider to make sure we are not falling into the 'Candidate #4' trap?

Well, the first step is just being aware of this potential tendency. If you have to set up an interviewer or a hiring manager for a day-long set of candidate interviews, make sure you schedule some breaks such that they are not seeing a dozen people in a three-hour block. Chances are everyone after Candidate #4 are not getting a fair look, and we are wasting hiring manager time as well. 

Next, if you are brining in a smaller set of short listed candidates for a second round of interviews, don't slate them in the same order with every interviewer they have to meet. Mix up the order across the interviewing team to try and reduce the effects of 'interview fatigue' adversely impacting any single candidate.

And last, keeping this data in mind should make us be more careful about tracking more data around interviewing and interviewers - how much time they spend per candidate, how much does the 'Candidate #4' efffect exist in the organization, and how can we use data on these processes to get better.

Data is our friend. Use wisely.