WEBINAR: Top 10 Ways To Use Glassdoor For Good (Not Evil)

Some time back I wrote that I thought Glassdoor was one of the most interesting companies in the HR and HR Tech space. I believed that back then, and I think it is probably even more true today. 

Ask yourself (and be honest) - If you were considering joining a new company is there any possible way you wouldn't check out their Glassdoor ratings, reviews, and interviewing tendencies?

Of course you would - you would be a fool not to. And that same logic is being applied by I bet 95% of the candidates you are trying to pluck from your competitors too. Like it or not, (and plenty of CEOs probably don't), Glassdoor and other employer reputation sources are now too big, too influential, and too much of a 'given' as a source for candidate research for you as and HR/Recruting pro to not be engaged with them on behalf of your organization.

But how to get in the Glassdoor game if you are a little late to the party? First step - close that MySpace account. And next? 

Sign up for the latest installment of the FREE Fistful of Talent webinar on September 17 at 2PM EDT titled Top 10 Ways To Use Glassdoor For Good (Not Evil), where the FOT crew will hat’s why we’re going deep on reputation sites like Glassdoor.

Topics to be covered on the Webinar include: 

How the the Yelp-ification of America—the trend towards consumer-based reviews in almost every area of our economy—is changing the way employees and candidates think about job search and employer brands. It’s second nature for your employees to rate a restaurant, a book or a movie online. That means that employees of all types (not just the ones who want to complain) are more willing than ever to participate in your brand through user review

The 5 Biggest Myths about company reputation sites like Glassdoor and tell you which ones are completely BS and which ones you actually perpetuate by not fully engaging on sites like Glassdoor. We’ll hit the usual suspects here: “The only comments are from the bad employees”  and “The salary data out there isn’t factual,” and tell you why things have changed. More importantly, we’ll cover how you actually may make the myths a reality by not fully engaging on reputation sites.  Think about that last sentence: You’ve got to be in the game to influence the game

A 10-step playbook on how to engage on reputation sites and become more of a Marketer as an HR/Recruiting Pro.  It’s true—you wouldn’t have read this far if you didn’t want to learn more about how to use reputation sites like Glassdoor to maximize your company and your career. We’ll help you get started.

The FOT crew always delivers the goods, I highly recommend you get your push to the end of 2015 going strong and check out the Top 10 Ways To Use Glassdoor For Good (Not Evil), on September 17 at 2PM EDT.

TALENT ASSESSMENT TIP: Watch out for 'soft' eyes

The NBA Draft is tonight!  Aside, if you follow me on Twitter at @SteveBoese, be forewarned that there will likely be a flurry of NBA Draft tweets starting at about 8PM ET tonight.

As I am sure I have previously covered on the blog here and over at Fistful of Talent, professional sports drafts offer up extraordinary amounts of interest and intrigue and insights about recruiting and talent management that remain relevant for HR/Talent professionals everywhere.

Team management, coaching staffs, and professional talent assessors all spend months evaluating the top playing prospects coming out of college and the European (and other) professional leagues. The teams spend ages watching the players in game video, measure all manner of player's physical attributes, (down to things like hand size), and often will schedule in-depth personal interviews to try to get a better feel for a potential player's likelihood for success in the NBA.

But even after all of this analysis of the player's actual performance in actual games, their 'measurables' like height, speed, jumping ability, etc., and 1-1 interviews, AND in a sport that has embraced advanced statistical analyses more so than any other in order to assess performance and shape strategy, there remains some let's just say odd ways to judge talent.

On one of the many sports talk radio shows I listened to in advance of tonight's draft, one of the network's 'expert' basketball analysts warned against drafting one particular prospect, a 7-footer from Latvia named Kristaps Porzingis. 

This expert's objections to a team using a high draft pick on Porzingis didn't mention lack of ability to shoot or to pass, didn't mention some specific physical limitation the Latvian has that would make him unlikely to succeed in the NBA, nor bring up anything at all related to how data and statistical review of his game led to this negative assessment.

No, the main objective of this particular expert talent evaluator was, according to him, that Porzingis has 'soft' eyes. 

The host of the show was a little taken aback by the comment, and asked the expert to elaborate. The expert said, and I am paraphrasing here, was that when he gazed at Porzingis he doesn't see a look that convinces him that Porzingis will want to work hard and compete at the extreme levels of intensity the NBA requires. In other words, Porzingis didn't have the proverbial 'Eye of the Tiger', but rather he had 'soft' eyes, and thus will never make it in the NBA.

The host of the show, still a little dumbfounded by this kind of talent assessment, eventually let the point go and moved on, but you could tell he remained unsure of the predictive ability of the expert's 'soft' eye test.

The relevance of this little tale for the rest of us?

That you may have a sophisticated candidate assessment tool, a success profile you have developed from analysis of top performers, and a structured and sound interviewing process designed to consistently identify the best candidate for a position.

You may have all of that, but if you run into a decision maker with their own version of the 'soft eyes' test then all your data, and process, and structure could be in jeopardy.

It will be interesting to see where Porzigins and his soft eyes end up getting selected tonight. With my luck, the 'expert' will be right in his assessment and Porzingis will end up failing for my Knicks. 

WEBINAR: 5 Ways To Build a Recruiting Function Your CEO Will Love

Summer is a great time to kick back, take it a little bit easier around the office, and spend at least half your time plotting how you are going to (plausibly), skip out of work on the next 12 Friday afternoons in order to get a head start on some sweet beach action.

Or, it is a great time to take advantage of the slower pace to really dig deep into some important or problematic part of your business and take the time to study, design, and implement some improvements so that when the C-suite gets back engaged around Labor Day the one thing they will notice will be how you 'fixed' things over the summer.

So maybe your dilemma is in Recruiting. Maybe you are having a hard time finding and attacting the right candidates, and even when you do, the team isn't strong enough on the close to cement the deal.

Well, never fear, the gang at Fistful of Talent is here to help you get a reset via our roadmap for building a high performing Talent Acquisition/Recruiting function. Join FOT's Kris Dunn and RJ Morris for our FREE June webinar (sponsored by the recruiting experts at CareerBuilder) on June 24th at 2pm Eastern (1pm Central) entitled, Moving Past Smile and Dial: 5 Ways to Build a Recruiting Function Your CEO Will Love, and they will hit you with the following roadmap to help you build the perfect recruiting machine.

1. The Front End: There's never been more competition for the attention of candidates, so you've got to look GOOD.  We'll help you understand the value of front-end items like a robust Careers Site, Talent Networks, Job Descriptions that don't put people to sleep, and ATS messaging designed to make people smile---not cringe.  We'll also give you a roadmap for how to use Social Media in a way that makes candidates feel like your company gets it.

2. The Back End: The worst enemy of any recruiting function is disorganization, so we'll cover critical elements of your back office like ATS functionality, the mission critical nature of having your own searchable candidate database as a strategic advantage, automated job distribution/postings and more.  Your recruiting function is only as good as your back end, so we'll help you understand how to build it out.

3. Building Your Recruiting Strategy: How many recruiters do you need?  How do you calculate your investment in recruiting?  What should that investment be?  How do you measure the effectiveness of your Recruitment Marketing Spend?   Good questions. We've got the answers in this strategy section.

4. Creating a Coaching Culture in Recruiting and Measuring Your Success: You can do all of the things listed above well, but if you don't actively coach your recruiters, it probably won't matter.  We'll give you some benchmarks for recruiter performance goals and walk you through how successful recruiting managers treat recruiters like salespeople – ultimately wanting filled positions but coaching up and down the recruiting funnel/

Whether you're a Recruiting/HR Leader looking to remodel your recruiting function or an up and coming recruiter looking to understand the strategic side of the recruiting business, join FOT for Moving Past Smile and Dial: 5 Ways to Build a Recruiting Function Your CEO Will Love on June 24th at 2pm Eastern (1pm Central) to get ramped up.  As a bonus, we'll also provide a FOT Checklist – 10 Things To Do Today to Maximize Your Ability to Attract Great Talent – to all who register.  This checklist is a great tool to cross off what you've already done well, then use it as an avenue to show what you're missing when asking for more budget for your recruiting function.

Custom Form:

By the time you catch Google as a 'Top Place to Work', it may already be too late

Here's a quick note of caution for any employers chasing 'Top' of 'Best' of 'Most Amazingly Fantastic' organizations to work for lists - the kinds of lists that are almost always topped by legendary companies like Google, courtesy of a recent piece on Business Insider titled In terms of 'prestige', Google is now a 'tier-two' employer, says recent Comp-Sci grad.

A quick excerpt from the piece, then some comments from yours truly, (it is my blog after all):

When Google offered a recent grad from a top CS program a job, the new grad said no.

That despite monthly compensation of $9,000, including a housing stipend.

Why?

In an email, the engineer gave us four reasons:

• "Lower pay after tax. Housing stipend is taxed more, and several places pay more than Google. That being said, Google is still very competitive. Google's full time offer is very average (105k starting salary) and the best startups pay more."
• "Less interesting work. It's a large tech company. The impact I'd have is minimal."
• "Lower prestige. Outside of tech, and maybe within average CS students, Google is the place to go if you're one of the smartest engineers. However, within top CS students, it's not considered that great. Probably tier two in terms of prestige and difficulty to get an internship. I have lots of friends barely passing their CS courses that are interning there. Saying you intern at Google just doesn't get you that much respect."
• "Less upside. For full time specifically, you get equity at a startup. If it IPOs, you make millions if you're one of the first 100-1000 employees.

Lots to take in there but the gist is pretty clear - at least according to this Comp-Sci grad, even one of the most highly lauded top companies in the world isn't immune to being 'topped' by competitors for the best, most sought after kinds of talent. If Google, with it's history, success, mythos, and bucketfuls of cash is getting beat out (at least in the perceptions) of top recruits, it reminds everyone that while chasing companies like Google might seem like a great strategy, it eventually is a failing one, since Google can't even keep up with Google, if that makes sense.

But there is also one other nugget in that quote worth teasing out a little and that is the way this Comp-Sci grad talks about how he and his peers think about and talk about companies and workplaces. From the quote, there definitely seems to be an odd kind of peer pressure and one-upmanship going on with these recent grads. The desire not just to get a great offer and work on great tech and projects but to be able to brag to the other kids in Comp-Sci is pretty high on the list of desires for this group.

Interesting stuff it seems to me, and a great reminder that no one, not even Google, is immune to competition, changing values, and the need to constantly be moving forward and re-inventing their value proposition in order to keep their lofty status on whichever 'Wonderful' Place to Work list you subscribe to.

Have a great weekend!

In Soviet Russia, (and America), Job Finds You

For a 'don't believe anything you read on the internet' April Fool's Day, I submit for your consideration a really interesting, (and totally not made up), conclusion about how people in the United States find jobs courtesy of a recently published Economic Letter from our pals at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

Let's start with the researcher's money line first, then we will try and unpack it a little bit:

More than three-quarters of workers who switched employers did not report active job search in the previous three months.

Did you take a second to process that statistic? 

Of all the 'new hires' that the researchers examined, 77.6% of them had not reported being in an active job search in the previous three months. And we are not talking about internal job transfer types of moves here, these are employer-to-employer job shifts. So the vast majority of job-to-job transitions do not follow the standard interpretation of a labor market that matches workers who are actively seeking out job openings with the positions that are posted by employers.

So essentially, according to this research, over three-quarters of hiring is coming from direct recruiting/poaching, referrals, and informal networks.

Probably not a great surprise/finding for experienced HR/Talent pros, but a good reminder for folks who are still out there beating down doors in an active job search. Here's a summary of the data from the research, then one last point before we sign off.

The researcher's data shows that while 77.6% of hires are coming from employed folks who were not searching for a new job, that still only constitutes about 2% of all employed people. Translated - your recruiting/poaching/referral processes are still only nabbing less than 2% of folks out there, underscoring how hard it can be to identify, engage, convince, and finally hire people out of existing jobs into new ones at your company.

Net-net: At least according to this research, most jobs find people, not the other way around.

Have a great April Fool's!