WEBINAR: Engaging, not stalking - or how to make eye contact without looking like a maniac

It is pretty easy to toss around phrases like 'HR is the new Marketing' and 'Recruiting is really just sales'. Those chestnuts have been the topic and title of many a blog post, conference presentation, and yes, webinar. But it is a lot harder to think, act, and execute like a marketer that has to find, attract, nurture, and close prospects than it seems on the surface. But fear not my friends, help is on the way to help you amp up your talent attraction efforts and get you executing like the best Madison Avenue big shots.

The gang at Fistful of Talent are back, this time with my friends, (and 'Awesome New Technolgies for HR' selection), from Jobvite for the latest FOT Webinar titled '5 Easy Ways For Recruiters to Engage Talent Pools – Without Looking Like Complete Stalkers' to be presented on October 3, 2013 at 1:00PM EDT.

Sign up for the FREE webinar and the gang at FOT will hit you up with the following:

• A simple definition of what a talent pool is, how you organize it in your ATS, and how to manage the concept of “opt-in” to the people you include in that talent pool.  The definition of who gets included and “opt-in” is important, because you’re gong to broadcast a bit over time– which will feel different (in a good way) to candidates included in the talent pool.
• A checklist of information you already have access to in your company that those passive talent pool candidates would love to hear about.  It’s a checklist!  All you have to do is go find the info we list and you’re golden.
• Data on best practices in thinking like a marketer (do you use email, LinkedIn, snail mail, text, etc.) to engage your talent pool – without looking like a stalker.
• Grand Finale, we’ll deliver the top 5 ways to engage talent pools – and for each engagement method, we’ll list what the communication looks like, where to find the information and why doing it the way we recommend is the best practice

And as a Special Bonus the crew will give you a monthly calendar of what to do and when to do it related to our list of 5 ways for you to engage your talent pool. It couldn’t be simpler than that.

It’s time to make the talent pools you’ve built in your ATS actually like you and your company.  Join FOT and Jobvite on October 3, 2013 at 1pm EST, “5 Easy Ways For Recruiters to Engage Talent Pools – Without Looking Like Complete Stalkers” and they will show you how.

REGISTER HERE:

Please tell the robot where you see yourself in five years

Note: I warned you on Monday - it is unofficially 'robot week' here on the blog. Bail out now if this is not your kind of thing. Don't worry, I won't know if you did. Probably.

Researchers and engineers have long identified manufacturing, warehouse operations, and even more 'advanced', complex, and interactive processes like patient and elder care as potentially fertile ground for the further automation and robotization of the economy and society. While each new encroachment of these increasingly better, smarter, cheaper, and more reliable pieces of technology, many of us pause to take stock of just how near or far we see our own roles and jobs from this impending and inexorable onslaught.

And also increasingly, the answer to the question of 'Just how close is my job to being replaced by a robot?' is 'Closer than you think.'

For the folks who read this blog, mostly HR and Talent management professionals, 'basic' kinds of automation have mostly made our jobs better, easier, simpler, and allowed us to spend more time on complex and higher order activities. Instead of endlessly keying and re-keying data on dumb terminals, we have our employees process their own transactions on their iPads. Instead of calling up references for soon-to-be-hired candidates, we send the references a link to an online survey and have some software send us any red flags or exceptions. You get the idea. 

Automation in HR has no doubt helped make our operations much more efficient, reduced errors, and with the latest batch of exciting new technologies, given us insight into our organizations that would have only a few years ago been impossible to see.

But will automation in HR ever go even further and reach into one of the 'essential' HR and Talent functions - the actual assessment of a candidate in the traditional interview setting? Some researchers at LaTrobe University Business School in Australia are betting that the answer to that question is 'Yes'.

Check this excerpt from a piece on the Australian Financial Review site, 'Interviewed for a Job by Sophie the Robot':

With big eyes, a feminine voice and some interesting dance moves, Sophie is rather cute but don’t let that fool you.

Sophie could soon be conducting your toughest-ever job interview, monitoring not just what you say but tiny twitches in your eyebrows that give clues about how you really feel.

Sophie and her fellow “human-like” robots Charles, Matilda, Betty and Jack plus two as yet unnamed robots are the product of a research joint venture between La Trobe University Business School in Melbourne and global electronics giant NEC Corporation in Japan.

NEC provided the robots and La Trobe is adapting them for use in recruitment, health care and as “emotionally engaging learning partners” in Australia. Rajiv Khosla, who has been driving the project since its inception, says the robots are a “world first in the area of recruitment”.

Sophie was already involved in trial interviews of candidates for sales jobs, asking 76 questions about selling.

“She captures their [candidates] cognitive verbal responses and captures their emotional responses by monitoring changes in their facial expression,“ Khosla says.

Khosla insists robots will not replace humans conducting later stage interviews or employers making final hiring decisions.

Sure, the interviewer robots are just here to help the process, that is all Mr. or Ms. HR Director. There's no way a robot for gosh sakes would be better at assessing the validity, truthfulness, accuracy, and the like of a candidate's responses.

There's no way a robot would be able to compare, in seconds, and with astonishing precision the information provided in the interview with a candidate's resume, LinkedIn profile, social web exhaust, old resume from five years ago they forgot was still on Monster.com, and so on.

There's no way a robot would be able to sense subtle eye movements, increase in respiration, body temperature changes, as different questions get asked and answered.

There's no way a robot could, in fractions of a second, compare and contrast dozens of candidates' answers to the same questions and produce detailed analyses on quality and accuracy, and perhaps truth across these answers.

There's no way a robot could also compare the new candidate's responses and reactions with the last persons hired into similar roles, and how the successful and not so successful hires reacted in similar circumstances.

There's no way a robot could conduct dozens and dozens of interviews across a high volume hiring period for retail or food service without getting tired, crabby, maybe even a little forgetful.

Nah, no way a robot can do all that. We need people for all those things.

Happy Wednesday.

Time heals all wounds, just not fast enough if you've lost a job

I caught a really interesting piece in the Wall St. Journal online recently titled After Divorce or Job Loss Comes the Good Identity Crisis, a look at some interesting research that examined just how long it takes the average person to get past, get over, and move forward from a dramatic life event such as a divorce or a job loss.

We've all heard and perhaps even advised friends and colleagues that 'time heals all wounds', the key question for the wounded is often 'How much time?' John McLaughlin, Untitled, 1963

Turns out it may be as long as two years for folks to get it back to 'normal' following a major life change.

From the WSJ piece:

Whether you've lost a job or a girlfriend, it won't take long before someone tells you, Dust yourself off. Time heals all wounds. Yes, but how much time?

Experts say most people should give themselves a good two years to recover from an emotional trauma such as a breakup or the loss of a job. And if you were blindsided by the event—your spouse left abruptly, you were fired unexpectedly—it could take longer.

That is more time than most people expect, says Prudence Gourguechon, a psychiatrist in Chicago and former president of the American Psychoanalytic Association. It's important to know roughly how long the emotional disruption will last.

Once you get over the shock that it is going to be a long process, you can relax, Dr. Gourguechon says. "You don't have to feel pressure to be OK, because you're not OK."

Oh, so don't feel pressure to be OK because you're not OK. Thanks Doc - that helps bunches if the traumatic life change involves the ending of a romantic relationship, where no one is going to force you to jump back into the dating scene before you are good and ready. Heck, maybe you never get back in the game. Sure, that kind of stinks, but again there are worse things that can happen. Like...

Like having the traumatic event be the loss of a job, especially if it was a good job and if you didn't see the axe coming - whether it was a layoff or even a term for cause that you should have seen coming but were blind to what was about to happen.

If the WSJ piece is right, and getting over the loss of a job might take up to two years to bounce back from, then that might be one of the reasons for the increased difficulty that many out of work job seekers have experiences in getting back to work in the last few years.

In this recovery period after losing a job, people are likely to feel depressed, anxious, and distracted - just the kind of feelings and 'tells' that will pretty much destroy a job seeker in the interview process. No one wants to be the hiring manager that signs off on taking on board the guy who was an emotional wreck in the interview.

Two years to get over a big loss, including a job.

Important to try and remember when the guy across the interview table, who suddenly found himself on the job market unexpectedly, has only had two or three months to process everything that has been happening to him.

He's tense, he might be getting depressed, and the pressure that is mounting on him at home is only getting more intense by the day.

Hard to 'get over' the trauma of a job loss under any circumstances for sure. And probably almost impossible when with every day that passes without a new job that  the 'two year' time frame doesn't seem to get closer to ending, but rather just keeps moving into the distance.

Ford is desperate for talent - what should they do?

There has been plenty of interesting news about venerable auto manufacturer Ford this week. In the same week as the company reported an outstanding quarterly earnings report, ($38B in revenue and more than $1B in profit), it also indicated its plans to hire as many as 3,000 new engineers and other professionals this year.

You might think that for a well-known company like Ford, one that is currently enjoying a run of improving business prospects and results, and in a time where there is still comparatively high overall unemployment and low labor force participation rates in the US, that filling these 3,000 positions would not be terribly challenging. But at least according to comments from some Ford execs, you would be wrong. Check out what they had to say about their hiring challenges:

“It’s much more difficult getting the right people” than it was in decades past, laments Felicia Fields, group vice president of Human Resources for Ford, reflecting a shift in “the type of people” the automaker needs in an era when high technology systems have become as much a part of today’s vehicles as traditional, mechanical devices.

“It’s more difficult, more complex,” she says, and not just because of the different skills workers may need in today’s auto industry. The problem is that Ford is no longer just competing for talent against the likes of GM, or even Volkswagen or Toyota, but also against consumer electronics firms ranging from Apple to Google to Dell.

Ford has to convince some skeptical prospects that the auto industry can offer as much of a challenge as Silicon Valley, while also trying to promote Detroit as an appealing home base – something that can be particularly challenging at a time when the Motor City is in the midst of the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history.

It sure is a bit of a recruiting quandary that Ford is facing. At the same time when growth, a rebound from the lows of the recession, and an aggressive and optimistic strategy calls for expansion, (and more talent to power these plans), they are also faced with competing for talent against foes they are not familiar with, and for many of these positions, having to lure people into a geographic area (greater Detroit), that is less than enticing, (to be charitable).

Yep, having to mix it up with Google and Apple, convincing people that the auto industry is cool, and selling Detroit at the same time? That is a challenge for sure.

So faced with this situation what should be the play for Ford?

Play up the auto industry rebound and a chance to be at the start of that?

Sell the lower cost of living, lifestyle, and I don't know - the Pistons (who are going to be better this year), to the technical talent that would normally head to Silicon Valley or New York?

Raise the comp and ben and perks packages to get them closer to what the talent can demand, (and likely expects) in order to level the playing field with the Valley tech companies?

Something else?

Why is this interesting or relevant to the average HR/Talent pro?

Because today this talent challenge is Ford's problem to solve - tomorrow it may be yours too. 

So what should Ford do?

25 slides on recruiting, no pictures, lots of bullet points, read it anyway

If you are having problems explaining the recruiting process, process step participants and owners, the overall goals of the recruiting program, and even the desired outcomes to your team, your hiring managers, or even your leaders - then I think you would do a lot worse than to share and walk them through this simple, 25-slide deck from legendary Silicon Vallley VC Daniel Portillo. (the slides are embedded below as well, email and RSS (are there any of those left?), will need to click through).

Recruiting: Good to Great from Daniel Portillo

The money lines from my point of view (assuming you are way too busy to look at 25 slides) with some SMB comments after each point

Slide 5 - The goal of recruiting is more than just a repeatable process, it is about crafting an overall experience.

SB - Definitely needed, and definitely requires that you have the time to take a step back and be really thoughtful and mindful of the overall process/experience. This is more than 'we should treat rejected candidates well', in fact it is probably more about how to treat highly desired and hard to find candidates in a way that respects their time and career aspirations.

Slide 7 - When 'setting up' the candidate, make sure you understand what will the person work on the first 3, 6, 12 months? Why is it interesting?

SB - If you can't 'sell' what is interesting about the job, no one with a decent other option, (including staying at the job they have now), will give you a second thought. If the job isn't inherently interesting, then there had better be some other compelling factors you can push to the center of the table, (insane comp, telework, lots of stock, etc.).

Slide 9 - Who are the decision makers? Parents, wife, kids, etc…

SB - Does anyone, I mean anyone, take a new job without at least talking it over with someone close to them? Do you factor that in at all? You probably should.

Slide 15 - When in the 'evaluation' stage - Make sure you ask:  'When have you gone out of your way to do something or learn a skill that wasn’t required?'

SB - Probably my favorite line of the deck. Speaks to curiosity, ambition, engagement  - all the things we say are important to organizations today.

Slide 17 - 'Don't hire someone to be the weakest person on the team.'

SB - I like this one too, and have never seen it before. But you have to think about any new hires impact and effect on your existing team before bringing someone new on board. Being the new guy/gal is hard enough - if the team figures out that the new hire is also not all that talented then you have a flame out waiting to happen.

Slide 22 - On what kills the candidate experience? One thing is 'People who don't know what the hell they are talking about.'

SB - This one cuts right to the candidate feeling that their time is being wasted. Everyone you put in front of the candidate should understand the process, the role, and why this candidate in particular is being considered. This is a by-product of companies simply including too many people in the process in what is usually a CYA move set up by someone.

Slide 25  On compensation for tech talent that have lots of options - 'Companies are essentially paying 2 years ahead of current experience.'

SB - This one is really simple, but bears repeating especially for 'non-tech' companies that do need to bring in engineers and developers from time to time. You have no shot at competing for the 'top' talent if you don't raise the comp to what everyone in your shop will consider is overpaying. That is just the way this market works right now.

Ok, that's it from me on this. Take a look at the deck if you are interested and let me know what you think. 

I'm just happy to see a simple, plain, boring deck full of words and bullet points still be so interesting and compelling that it didn't matter how simple and boring it was.

Happy Wednesday.