HRE Column: On Recruitment Marketing

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.

This month, in the aftermath of the recent Talent Acquisition Technology Conference and thinking about all the innovative and potentially disruptive HR and talent acquisition technology solutions that continue to appear in the market, I thought about how much I have heard and seen lately about the concept or category of 'recruitment marketing.'

Both at Talent Tech and at the recent Smashfly Transform event, the strategies, tactics, and technologies that HR and talent acquisition leaders are employing to define and communicate their unique employer brand and value proposition, as well as find, engage, and convert their targeted candidate communities were on full display. This field or category of recruitment marketing has seemingly emerged from the combination or confluence of a tight labor market, powerful and purpose-built technologies, and HR and talent acquisition strategies that are leaning heavily on consumer marketing precepts and concepts. 

It is a really exciting, interesting, and fast-moving time in this new recruitment marketing space, and I thought it would be fun and hopefully valuable to share with HR Executive readers my thoughts about this new and emerging space. I came up with a few observations for my latest HR Executive column.

From the HRE piece:

One of the highlights of the recently concluded Talent Acquisition Technology Conference was the emphasis on recruitment marketing as an emerging new recruiting discipline. The definition of recruitment marketing is pretty straightforward: "the strategies and tactics an organization uses to find, attract, engage and nurture [sought-after people] before they apply for a job, called the pre-applicant phase of talent acquisition." (As an aside, you know a new concept has "arrived" when it has a Wikipedia page for its definition.)

In some ways, recruitment marketing is just the natural extension of the widely discussed "HR should act more like marketing and/or sales" argument that has become popular in recent years. While that argument has indeed proven durable, it may not always be appropriate in all cases, as George LaRocque from HRWINS, one of the conference speakers, pointed out. LaRocque correctly showed that, while most consumer marketers serve only their ultimate external customers, recruiting leaders and recruiters often serve several kinds of customers: candidates, hiring managers, and even HR and organizational leaders.

But even if there is not a perfect analogy between recruiting and sales/marketing, many progressive organizations and talent-acquisition leaders are successfully using consumer-marketing strategies, tactics and approaches to more effectively "market" their organizations and employment opportunities to potential candidates. This discipline of recruitment marketing has indeed emerged and grown more prominent in just the last few years and since not all HR leaders might be completely familiar with the concept and approach, I'd like to explore at least a few important points and share some thoughts on how HR and organizational leaders can begin to incorporate these ideas into their talent acquisition strategies.

Why is recruitment marketing different than just posting job ads?

In her closing keynote at the conference, Stacy Zapar presented a comprehensive review of the many strategies organizations can and perhaps should employ to more effectively define, communicate and market their unique employer brand and employee value proposition to the candidate marketplace. While posting specific job ads on the company careers page and ensuring these ads are distributed to additional outlets such as Indeed or LinkedIn are certainly part of most organization's candidate-attraction strategies, Zapar correctly emphasized that these efforts are only a small part of the optimal overall recruitment-marketing strategy.

Read the rest at HR Executive online...

Good stuff, right? Humor me...

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Have a great, long Thanksgiving weekend!

VIDEO: "Alexa, I hate my boss"

Earlier this year I blogged about and Trish McFarlane and I did an Episode of the HR Happy Hour Show loosely based on the annual Internet Trends Report by famous analyst Mary Meeker. In the most recent report, a fair bit of time was given towards the increase in capability and use of 'voice interfaces', e.g. tools like Siri, Cortana, and Amazon's Echo device.

Check out the video below from HR Tech provider ZipRecruiter on what an HR/Recruiting use case of the voice interface might look like incorporating Amazon Echo, (and it's 'Alexa' persona), and ZipRecruiter's database of open jobs. The video is really short, take one minute to check it out, then some closing thoughts from me after the clip. (Email and RSS subscribers click through).

Pretty cool, right? I admit it is kind of a simple, almost too simple example of the voice interface, (and I grant that this may even be 'real' functionality, just kind of an example), but I still was intrigued by the possibilities and potential of voice interaction with smart applications like Alexa to facilitate finding information and effecting interactions.

You could pretty easily imagine this video continuing with Alexa alerting the job applicant that her application is being considered, and suggesting a few times for an interview with the recruiter or hiring manager. Or maybe even the pre-screening type questions could just be 'asked' by Alexa right after the application is received, and the applicant can just have the conversation with Alexa rather than a HR phone screener.

At any rate, I thought the video and the application was very cool, I am not aware of any other HR tech provider working on something like this, so cheers to ZipRecruiter for thinking about the future and how technology will change the way we interact with talent and talent technologies.

Happy Wednesday.

You might not like 'Time to Fill' as a recruiting metric, but it matters to candidates

A few weeks ago I wrote about how the latest data shows that in the US it has never taken longer, (in terms of business days), to fill the average open position. Here's the chart backing up that statement, in case you want a little bit of a refresher.

After I ran the post I got a couple of emails and a few comments on Twitter that more or less said the same thing - 'Time to fill' doesn't matter. It is not important to the C-suite, and is getting less important to hiring managers'. Most of the comments ended up saying something along the lines of 'It is better to take longer to find the 'right' hire' than simply trying to find the 'fast' hire - the kind of strategy that would negatively impact time to fill.

And while I do grant that there is probably some truth in those sentiments, I also think that like most of the reasonably difficult challenges in the talent game, the real truth is somewhere between the extremes. Does 'time to fill' matter in all cases? Certainly not. But are there some circumstances where it matters a lot? Absolutely. 

Let me share some details from a recent piece from the BBC about how giant consultancy KPMG is adapting their recruiting practices, at least in one important area, all around the idea and realization that their recruiting process has to move more quickly, thus reducing time to fill measures.

From the piece:

Accountancy firm KPMG has changed its graduate recruitment process to suit people born between 1980 and 2000 - the so-called millennial generation.

Instead of conducting three separate assessments over several weeks, it will now combine the process into one day.

The firm says the change will mean applicants will find out if they have got a job within two working days.

It made the change following research suggesting millennials were frustrated by lengthy recruitment processes.

KPMG said its survey- conducted among 400 of this summer's new graduates applying for a graduate job at a UK firm - found that more than one-third were annoyed about how long they had to wait to hear the outcome of an interview, and how long the recruitment process took.

At first read the changes that KPMG are implementing seem totally aimed at improving the candidate experience and adapting to meet the expectations of the newer generation. And that is definitely part of the story. What was not stated in the BBC piece but what certainly must be true was that KPMG was losing out on desirable new hires because their process was simpy taking too long. 

In-demand new university graduates likely have lots of options for employment once they leave school, and rather than wait weeks for KPMG to make a decision, some, if not many of them were just moving on to other, more agile companies. By implementing these process changes, KPMG hopes to both improve the overall candidate experience and reduce the number of candidates that 'get away' to competing firms.

And guess what else happens when the time it takes for KPMG to make offers and execute hires for new university graduates is reduced from weeks to days? 

Time to fill all of a sudden goes down - way down. And while that metric might not matter to you or to your CEO it means something to the these university graduates who make up the talent pipeline for KPMG. 

And it means plenty to any candidate who has options. Time to fill is just code for 'Make sure you can move fast enough to not lose out on the most sought-after candidates.'

Have a great week!

It's never taken longer to fill the average job in the US

Job openings as tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the JOLTS report hit an all-time record high of 5.8 million in April 2016. 

And what I suppose could be considered a kind of perfect storm for recruiting, at the same time as job openings are at a record level, the average time it takes to fill an opening has also never been higher.

Check the chart below from the latest DHI Group report, the DHI-DFH National Mean Vacancy Duration, which has been tracking average time to fill for about 15 years:

The average job now takes 29.3 working days to fill, up from 27.7 in March, and represents an all-time high time to fill for the data series.

Should you or we or anyone care about this? After all, time-to-fill as a singular recruiting metric is kind of flawed, and some would argue that it is not important at all at an individual job level. 

But others (and I think I am one of them), that increasing time-to-fill duration means something, and in the aggregate, (across the entire organization or in a major job function or industry group), that it can tell you quite a bit about the effectiveness of recruiting strategies and technologies.

Because for me, when thinking about the massive amounts of investments made in technologies that are designed (at least on paper), to make recruiting, (again, in the aggregate), more efficient and effective, this all-time high level for time to fill suggests that we are all contributing in some degree to a pretty massive fail. What other industry or major business process can you think of that has actually gotten less efficient, despite hundreds of millions of dollars of investment over more than two decades?

Again, I know time-to-fill taken by itself and out of context might not be the best way to judge the health and success of technological investments for recruiting, but I think even the most cynical would have to at least admit that at a macro level that time-to-fill should not be increasing to all-time highs if organizations and their technology partners were actually functioning as designed or promised.

Shouldn't recruiting be getting easier? Even just a little easier?

I'd love to know what you think. 

Am I off-base to even be thinking that time-to-fill really matters? Most organizations would happily trade a few days to fill in order to make the 'right' hire. But shouldn't technology and process have evolved to the point where making that tradeoff should happen less and less?

This issue was on my mind way before this latest set of statistics has come out, and I am even putting together a general session at the upcoming HR Technology Conference in October to talk about it.

Two decades, millions and millions of dollars spent, and yet at least by this measure, we are not getting any better at putting people in the right jobs.

It's baffling to me.

RECRUITING OPPORTUNITY: The Hotel Gym at 6AM on a Wednesday

Quick take from the road on a busy Wednesday, (note to self, this should have been a 'Notes from the road' post, but I digress). 

Tried to do the 'stay relatively healthy' bit early this morning by hitting up the Hilton gym at about 6AM or so today and walked into probably the most packed facility I think I have seen in weeks on the road. There were easily 40 or so folks already grinding out a run on the treadmill or faking their way through some pull downs on the lat machine.

In fact, the place was so crowded, I noticed six or seven folks enter, look around, and then leave since pretty much every available piece of cardio equipment, (and most of the weight machines), were being used. This was at 6:19AM on a Wednesday.

Now this may not seem all that remarkable, the hotel is pretty large and there are three or four different events and conferences going on here this week, so packing 50 people into a gym may not be as big a deal as I am making it out to be.

But if you subscribe to the notion, as many folks do, that industry meeting and conferences like the ones going on at this hotel this week are great places for networking and recruiting then it stands to reason that at least some of the 'right' kind of folks you might be looking for can be found in the gym at 6 in the morning.

The 6AM gym folks are (at least trying) to go the extra mile (pun intended), to keep their s%#% together while on the road - which isn't easy at these kinds of events where the overwhelming tendency is for folks to spend hours and hours sitting in hotel meeting rooms, hitting buffets for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and hitting up the endless open bar each night.

There are almost certainly recruitable and desirable candidates at every event.

It could be the most recruitable ones are on the treadmill at 6AM. 

Are you going to be there to meet them?