#HRHappyHour 162 PODCAST - 'RPO and Talent in 2013'

This week the HR Happy Hour Show/Podcast is back with a fresh episode recorded earlier this week -'RPO and Talent in 2013' with guest John Wilson, Founder and CEO of the RPO firm WilsonHCG (you can follow John on Twitter as well - @wilsonceo).

It was a fascinating conversation with John - as the founder and CEO of a leading RPO firm, he had lots of particular insight around the key talent acquisition challenges facing all kinds of organizations today. John shared some interesting and relevant ideas about how organizations are having success in today's competitive enviroment, how much (or little) companies are looking to temporary or contingent markets to find talent, and when and why RPO makes sense or is a good fit for an organization.

You can listen to the show on the show page here, using the widget player below, and of course on iTunes - just search the podcasts area for 'HR Happy Hour'.

Listen to internet radio with Steve Boese on BlogTalkRadio

 

In a HR Happy Hour Show from earlier in 2013, industry legend and thought leader Gerry Crispin talked about the increased use of RPO by small and midsize firms to be one of the most important trends to look for in talent acquisition in the next 1-3 years. As Gerry described then, and as you will John talk about as well, when done right, RPO arrangements do offer customer organizations a compelling mix of service, access to technology, and understanding of broader industry and market trends that can certainly augment internal recruting teams. So check out the podcast, let me know what you think and please connect with John as well.

Thanks to John and the folks at WilsonHCG for taking the time this week - and a shout-out to HR Happy Hour Show co-host Trish McFarlane, who was on the road this week and could not make the show.

NOTE:

Finally, for listeners of the show a quick reminder. For the next little while anyway, Trish and I will be doing the HR Happy Hour Shows more as a traditional podcast - recorded in advance, perhaps a little shorter than the live shows were, and hopefully posted to the site every other week. With our schedules and lots of travel on the horizon this year, doing the shows 'live' on Thursday nights has become increasingly challenging. Trish and I hope that by changing how the shows are produced it will allow us the opportunity to continue doing the show/podcast in a way that will work with our schedules as well as our future guests.

Have a great weekend!

Big Oil and BYOD as a recruiting strategy

This short article, 'Shell plans to move 135,000 staff to BYOD' about the internal IT strategy at the giant Shell Oil company in about 300 words manages to highlight probably the two most significant trends driving big enterprise IT today.

Trend #1 - The Cloud (and it is kind of past calling this a 'trend' anymore, it's now just reality.

  From the Shell piece:

Two years ago, the firm adopted a cloud-first policy, which means that any new applications have to be in the cloud unless there is a business case for them to be on-premise.

Trend #2 - BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) - the tendency of employees wanting to use their device of choice to accomplish their work, rather than being forced into some kind of corporate device standard that often is inferior to the technology they prefer to use in their 'real' lives.  Again Shell's take on BYOD:

Shell is undertaking a huge bring your own device (BYOD) project which will see it supporting around 135,000 devices picked by users rather than dictated by the IT department. The BYOD scheme is a major undertaking. Shell has 90,000 permanent employees, and an additional 60,000 on a contract basis so the company is managing 150,000 clients, from desktops to portables to tablets. 

Part of the decision for the BYOD drive is around recruitment and staffing. “In about five to 10 years, 50 percent of our staff worldwide will retire,” (Shell's) Mann explained.“We’re going to have a lot of people turning over, and we want to be able to attract and retain talented and young staff. They don’t want to come into a locked corporate environment.

Neither of these decisions by Shell is really all that newsworthy excepting for the fact that these same IT strategies and philosophies were until fairly recently only undertaken by smaller firms and start-ups. When massive, entrenched, and hierarchical industrial titans like Shell start sounding like 15-person tech start-ups, you know that there really is no turning back. Big companies might not hold sway over how a technology achieves popularity in the macro-sense, but their signing on to a given IT approach tends to validate what the market is saying on a smaller scale.

Also, I don't know for sure if the recruiting angle to the BYOD strategy at Shell  is really that important or not - while I tend to agree that people don't want to use inferior equipment in the workplace, I don't think that point of view is limited to 'young' people. (Anyone reading this that is doing at least some of their 'work' email in Gmail because their corporate Outlook mailbox keeps going over capacity will be nodding in agreement right now). And while using lousy technology at work does kind of stink, I also think lots of people want to keep their personal technology, well, personal. 

Not everyone wants to be reading work email on their iPad when they are chilling on the sofa at night.

Right?

The Applicant Tracking Number

Last week I had a post about the limited differential and competitive advantage that most companies can realize from the implementation of commercial off the shelf software solutions that are readily available (and often implemented) by their rivals as well. The premise was (and still is) that if and when all the largest firms in an industry segment implement the same ERP or Supply Chain or Applicant Tracking System, then it is generally likely that none of them will have executed so much better than their competitors that they gain a meaningful advantage.  What would an application history look like?

The point of the piece was that real and lasting advantage and long-term value comes from actually using technology to create something entirely new and not easily reproducible by competitors or by the software companies themselves, that would just try and sell this innovation to all the firms in the space. The example I used to try and make this point was the FedEx shipment tracking number - the concept, the associated software and hardware, and the popularization as both an internally and externally valuable data point that was pioneered by the shipping firm over the last few decades. With the package tracking number suddenly the shipping business was transformed - every concerned stakeholder could know the current status and history of every package at all times. Amazing.

Why revisit last week's post? 

Because in the comments the Recruiting Animal made a tremendous observation, (repeated below)

Steve, are you saying that big companies should give applicants a tracking number for their resumes? Sounds like a great idea.

I actually wasn't thinking about a tracking number for applicants, similar to the FedEx shipment tracking number, but it is an obviously great idea from Animal. Sure, most ATS at this point provide a way for applicants to log in and get a 'status' about the state of their application, and some even provide email notifications about status changes, but these are almost never as detailed and informative as they could be. They will let an applicant now their application is 'received' or they are in 'first interview' status or if it is 'no longer being considered', but those statuses or stages can be pretty broad and vague.

But what actually happens to an application is much more rich, detailed, and nuanced. Applicants are screened, they are reviewed by potentially a dozen people, and for varying amounts of time. Their details are forwarded, they are classified or tagged. Then if they interview, notes are taken about them and shared. References may be called and a background check might be done. These processes will sometimes kick off more notes, tags, and internal conversations. An offer could be extended, a counter offer made, and additional data points created.  You get the idea, in an active and thorough process lots more data is created than what is shared (and not even always shared), with applicants.

But if as Recruiting Animal suggests, a job application had a tracking number similar to the FedEx shipment number, and the organization was brave enough to make the applicant tracking data visible and available to applicants, then questions, doubt, and the basics of candidate feedback would be solved. Just like you know where your books from Amazon are at any point in the process, and who participated in the process, and how long it took for each step, an applicant tracking number could let the applicant know when their resume was opened and reviewed and forwarded. The applicant would now truly know how long from the time of resume submission to when their credentials were even assessed, and how long after that the first critical 'Yes/No' decision was taken by the recruiter.

Remember the famous 'recruiters look at a resume for 6 seconds' story? Well with an applicant tracking number potentially we'd really know how true that was.

They would know just about everything they would want to about the process. And all it would take would be a clever application of a new kind of tracking number technology - meant for candidates and not just stuff bought online.

What do you think? Does anyone actually do something like this today?

Or is it too transparent for most organizations to consider?

Follow-up: Big Data for HR - what do you make of this?

Yesterday I took about 550 words to say essentially this : Once your CEO decides that 'Big Data' is the next big thing to upskill your organization's talent level it is on you as an HR or Talent pro to make that happen. (It was in the Times you know).

One of the ways, besides the more obvious ones like 'Invest in some new technology' or 'Take a statistics course' is to challenge yourself to starting thinking differently about information and data (and not the typical data you might be used to considering) and what it might or might not mean for your organization and your talent game.

Here's an example of what I mean pulled from a recent Business Insider piece on some data around student loan debt load and default rates by State, (and let's assume for the purposes of this exercise that college recruiting and hiring is an important part of your workforce planning).

Chart 1 - Average Student Loan Debt

Dang, that doesn't look good anywhwere, but student debt loads seem particularly high in certain states and regions. Let's take this one more step.

Chart 2 - Average Student Loan Delinquency Rates

Interesting - not perfect alignment between the states with the highest average student loan levels and the highest default rates. But nevertheless, there are some pretty large sections of the country with average default rates at 15% or more. So the exercise is this - what, if anything would or should you do with data like this, (incomplete as it is, bear with me, it's just an example to make us think).

What if you are recruiting college grads or soon-to-be grads in the parts of the country with the highest debt loads and default rates?

Would that change your approach at all to things like signing bonuses or retention schemes that have an element of student loan repayment built in?

Would you formulate a plan for more strategic counter-offers for your younger talent that is likely to be much more receptive to make a jump to a competitor for even a small bump in salary?

Would you consider overpaying in the first few years for the best college grads knowing that some or even most of them have pretty significant financial worries outside of work?

Would you make access to a financial planner or accountant part of your signing package?

Or would you do nothing at all?

The point to all this is not really the student loan data, but rather to raise just one possibility of the potential and challenge that big data holds for you as a Talent pro, and to try and illustrate that using data to your advantage is likely going to require not just technical skills, but the ability to think differently about what drives your business.

And like we established yesterday, since it hit the Times, you can't pretend it doesn't matter for much longer.

Big Data for hiring - now everyone knows, (including the CEO)

While it can be cool to say and think that old or traditional media is dead or at least dying, (witness CNN's Keystone Cops-like coverage of the Boston Bombings and their wall-to-wall coverage of the Carnival 'poop cruise', interesting only to the people on the actual ship), it is still pretty remarkable to witness, at least in our little HR and HR Tech corner of the world, the sheer power to drive conversation the big, mainstream outlets still wield.

The latest example? The NY Times piece over the weekend titled How Big Data is Playing Recruiter for Specialized Workers, that did admittedly a fine job of covering some HR Tech startups like Gild, TalentBin, and Entelo, and how data, algorithms, and smart machine learning are combining with traditional sourcing methods in attempts to help organizations make better hires faster, and less expensively than in the past.Robert Rauschenberg, Yoicks 1953

It is a good piece and I recommend you checking it out, if you follow this space at all chances are you have already read the article, as it seemed to me over the weekend everyone Tweeted out the link (I did too). Even though these solutions have been out for some time - I just wrote about Gild myself here - once news like this hits the mainstream, you can bet you'll have some explaining to do back in your office about how you and the HR organization plans to leverage this kind of data in hiring and talent management decisions. Let's face it - even though people like me have written about these new technologies, and some of them have been featured at the HR Tech Conference, it's still the rare CEO or COO that has heard about them.  

But drop a feature about these cool new technologies in the Times, on the weekend no less, when Mr. or Ms. CEO is kicking back over brunch with their iPad and has a few minutes to read and think about a piece like this - well some of you are getting an email (maybe it already arrived, 'sent from my iPad') from the CEO with the link and a question along the lines of 'What can we do with this? or 'Are we using Big Data in hiring?'

It is pretty fun to stay on top of the latest trends and catch demos or webinars from the coolest new technologies. It is also fun to be sort of 'in the know', to be the only one in your office or in your local HR community to have some insight and savvy about the latest solutions and tools. You (mostly) get respect and cred from just knowing about them. 

But that position of 'person who knows all about the technology' will only take you so far once everyone else starts catching on too - especially the C-suite types that really only take notice of something until it hits the Times of the Wall St. Journal.  And that is happening my friends.

We're coming up fast to the point where 'awareness' is simply the ante that lets you play in the game. Your bluff is about to be called, by a CEO in a fancy suit, and iPad, and a link to the Times article.

Stay thirsty my friends...