#SHRM12 Session Preview: Is Social Recruiting Really Working?

Dispatch #2 from the SHRM Annual Conference and Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia, where the coffee, bus, and bathroom lines remain long, the temperatures remain hot, and a drop-in to Atlanta from President Obama threatens to muck up travel plans for many a conference-goer.

Today's effort is a bit of shameless self-promotion for 'Is Social Recruiting Really Working?', the panel discussion I will be moderating at the big show, tomorrow, Wednesday June 27 at 11:30.

The session features a stellar panel consisting of Glassdoor.com CEO, Robert Hohman, industry analyst and legend John Sumser, and Jeremy Langhans, who leads Global Brand and Talent Attraction for Expedia.

In the session, the panel will walk through some basic, fundamental issues and questions surrounding social media and social recruiting and challenge the audience to think a little past the hype, buzzwords, and confusion to try and get to the reality of what social recruiting is today, whether or not it is truly being effective for recruiting in the real world, and what the future might hold for social media in recruiting.

The slides with the questions we plan to ask and discuss are included below, but certainly the slides themselves don't offer much in the way of answers, you'll have to come and see us on Wednesday, June 27 at 11:30.

Is Social Recruiting Really Working?

View more PowerPoint from steveboese

Many thanks to the entire team at Glassdoor.com for all the fantastic work helping to organize this session and for asking me to participate.

See you at the session!

Fun with job requirements: How many ways can an object be moved?

I have a friend in a job search and last week he forwarded to me an online posting for a position he was considering applying to, and wanted some feedback from me about the job, the organization, and whether I felt it was a potential fit for him. I took a quick look and it mostly seemed pretty standard, a technical system admin-type job working on company systems, some different programming languages they were looking for, working on-site in the company offices, etc. Again, nothing really noteworthy or quite frankly interesting about the listing until I got to the end.But can you do this?

This 'requirement' is taken word for word from the job description in the 'Physical requirements' section of the posting:

"Primarily sedentary work with the need to exert up to 10 pounds of force occasionally to lift, carry, push, pull or otherwise move objects."

For some reason, this requirement just about made me spit coffee all over the keyboard, if nothing else for its surface absurdity, but also the thought of someone sitting down, perhaps even having a conversation with a colleague or the hiring manager, when it came time to draft the language for this requirement.

Perhaps it went something like this:

HR/Recruiter -Ok, we have the skills, education, job duties down. How about any special physical requirements for the job?

Hiring Manager -  Well, it is a computer admin job. Just normal work on a computer, you know, typing, working a mouse, that kind of thing.

HR/Recruiter -Would the person have to lift or carry anything?

Hiring Manager - Not really, I mean the occasional report or print out. Maybe a technical manual now and

then.

HR/Recruiter -Ok, so lifting and carrying are needed.

                         How about pushing or pulling? Any pushing or pulling involved?

Hiring Manager - Uh, I don't know. Maybe. Sometimes we move the chairs and tables in the conference room around for meetings. 

HR/Recruiter -Ok, I better add pushing and pulling too.

                          Anything else?

Hiring Manager - I can't think of anything. I mean, how many different ways can an object be moved?

Classic. Maybe I am being too hard on the HR person here, maybe the conversation went the other way around and the Hiring Manager insisted the nonsensical requirement made the copy. Either way, the idea at some point, a conversation like the above might have actually happened was enough for me to take notice. Good times.

I'll sign off with this question - Lift, carry, push, pull - what other ways can an object be moved? 

Have a great Tuesday!

Recruiting Technology Innovation: Mystery Applicant

A couple of weeks back I had the honor of serving as a member of the judging panel for the Recruiting Innovation Summit's first ever recruiting technology startup competition, held in conjunction with the Summit at the Computer History Museum Mountain View, California.

There were six innovative and interesting solutions in the competition; Goood Job, a solution for empowering employee referral programs with social network connections; Lab of Apps, a mobile-only app for more efficient and effective mobile recruiting; ONGIG; a recruitment marketing solution that enables interactive and multi-media job advertising; trait perception; a platform for candidates and employers to solicit and receive thorough rankings of skills and virtues; Venturocket, a skills-based marketplace designed to match talent with opportunity; and finally the ultimate winner of the startup contest, Mystery Applicant, a solution to capture, measure, and report on candidate experience with the organization's application process, a topic that continues to grow in relevance and importance.

Mystery Applicant, a startup from the UK impressed the judging panel and the audience at the Recruiting Innovation Summit with its simple to deploy, elegant, and powerful solution that cuts directly to a real business problem that many organizations are experiencing, namely, a poorly designed or inefficient application process and experience that is likely turning away as many good candidates as it captures.Mystery Applicant Recruiter Dashboard

Mystery Applicant integrates with an organization's Applicant Tracking System, and knows when someone has applied. The candidate is then asked for their feedback about the recruiting and applications process. The organization can also request similar feedback at the end of the recruitment process.

The system collates all of the responses and presents aggregated information to the recruiter via a dynamic and filterable dashboard. The organization can immediately see how they are performing across the entire organization, or if they prefer at a more granular level. Ideally, the organization can take this data, examine the candidate feedback and the trends over time, and make the needed adjustments to systems, processes, communications, recruiter strategy, and more in order to improve the overall candidate experience, and strengthen the organization's employment brand.

If you are one of the many organization's interested in how your employment brand is perceived, and what candidates and applicants really think of your company, the process, and the interactions they have with your recruitment staff, then I do encourage you to give Mystery Applicant a look. They do represent a real innovation in the recruiting technology space, and even better, one that can have direct and immediate impact to help address a real business problem.

Congratulations to Mystery Applicant's founders, Mike Cook and Nick Price, and the entire team. And thanks again to the Recruiting Innovation Summit for letting me participate in a fantastic event.

Playing a different game than the rest of the league

A few weeks ago I had the good fortune to attend the Human Capital Institute, (HCI), Talent Acquisition Strategies event in New York City. One of the highlights of the event was the closing presentation given by New York Mets executive, Paul DePodesta, who you may remember from the Moneyball book and movie. DePodesta was an assistant to Oakland A's General Manager Billy Beane during the years profiled in the book and film, (in the film, the Jonah Hill character was based on DePodesta).

With the success Moneyball, both book and film, plenty of opportunity and time has been spent on analyzing the process that Beane and DePodesta undertook to determine some less well understood keys to winning baseball games, and then to find and recruit undervalued (by the rest of the teams), talent to help them execute their competitive strategy. As I am sure you know by now, the A's were very successful for a period of years, though they fell short of winning the ultimate championship, despite a relative lack of resources compared to the traditional league powers like the Yankees or Red Sox. If you have somehow been under a rock for the last few years and are not familiar with Moneyball, I highly recommend the book, and sort of recommend the movie, (the book was better).

I don't dredge this all up again to try and re-tell the Moneyball story, or try to wax philosophical about how some of the ideas from Moneyball can be applied in the workplace, or to talent management, (lord knows we have had plenty of that), but rather to share a comment made by Mr. DePodesta during the question and answer portion following his presentation at HCI. An audience member asked, essentially, since Moneyball, and the concepts, process, methods utilized by Beane and himself were now widely understood and copied, thus diminishing (or eliminating), the competitive advantage that the Moneyball approach provided, what did DePodesta think would be next, i.e. the logical successor to the Moneyball method, that perhaps would also offer significant and important advantage to the team that could figure it out, (and exploit it).

DePodesta paused just for a moment, then replied, (I am paraphrasing here), that the successor to Moneyball, which was at its core a different way of analyzing prior outcomes, or what has already happened in prior baseball games, and applying the analysis of that data to evaluate players and to form a team, would be a new and better way to predict which players would eventually grow into high performers. Baseball players are typically drafted and signed as young as 17 or 18 in the USA, and even earlier in many of the foreign countries where baseball teams recruit talent. Many of these players require 3, 4, or ever 5 years of seasoning before they are even ready to start playing in the Major League. Making more correct talent assessments of 17 year-old high school players than the next team is often the difference in building and sustaining a successful franchise, (and saving your job).

DePodesta would not really get into what specific traits or attributes he was thinking about that would be a better predictor of performance some years out into the future, but suffice to say that he and the Mets are spending time and effort in working out new, more, and better predictive models.

What if anything does this have to do with you, Mr. or Ms. Talent Professional?

Just a reminder that like Moneyball, most corporate secrets don't last for long, and the advantage that comes from being better than the competition at analyzing what already happened eventually whittles away to nothing. Every team, (or most anyway), eventually get in on that game. And a Brad Pitt movie makes sure of that.

Knowing what is going to happen next, or at least what is likely to happen next - that's when you are playing a different game than the rest of the league.

WEBINAR: 5 Ways to Use Video to Raise Your HR and Recruiting Game

The merry band of misfits over at Fistful of Talent are at it again, ready for another classic no-holds-barred, (Really, you're probably asking, are there truly no holds barred? What about the Sleeper? Or the Figure 4 leglock? The Boston Crab? Trust me, even those holds are fair game.), free webinar designed to share information, insight, and real, actionable strategies and tactics all delivered in the trademark FOT style. This time the crew will be tacking video, and more specifically, how video is and can be used more effectively in HR and recruiting.

Here are the particulars:

You’re a progressive HR and recruiting professional (that’s why you’re reading this), and you know that video is more than a lame feature of bad compliance training.  You get that video transcends quirky YouTube videos that go viral or running Netflix/Hulu on an iPad.  You get that mobile video is the trend that will change the way your department works in the coming years, but you’re just not sure where to start…

That’s why Fistful of Talent created their latest webinar – The Future of Talent: 5 Ways to Use Video to Raise Your HR and Recruiting Game. Join us for this webinar, and we’ll give you the 411 for how to think about video within your HR or recruiting practice and a road map to get started in the following areas:

•    Employment Branding
•    Recruiting
•    Role Play for Mangers
•    Training Shorts Delivered via Mobile
•    A “How To” Guide to Get Started with Video in Your HR/Recruiting Organization

This webinar comes with the Fistful of Talent guarantee:  60% of the time, it works every time.  Join the FOT crew as they break down the video scene and brainstorm about the best way to build video chops in your HR or recruiting practice.

Compelling stuff, right?

Seriously, I promise it will be worth your time to check out the webinar, the FOT style and approach to webinars is not at all the usual boring, '45 minutes of some guy reading slides' method that you are used to.

It will be fun, informative, and relevant - and you'll walk away with at least a few practical and actionable ideas for video that you can begin to work with right away.

Register here, (did I remind you it is FREE?), and to learn more visit here.