Six Predictions in HR, Recruiting & Your Workplace in 2013

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

2013 HR and Recruiting Predictions 

Over the past few years Human Resources, particularly recruiting has slowly become socialized and professionals are reaching out to contacts in ways never even thought of 10-15 years ago. As I spend time working with vendors who develop provide the technologies for HR and recruiting while also working directly with practitioners every day, I see some exciting shifts emerge. These 6 trends in 2013 that operational managers and HR professionals must look out for in the coming year.

• Telecommuting will continue to grow. The lucrative idea of working from home will become an even bigger reality for the workforce in 2013. Employers continue to look for ways to not only cut cost, but also improve employee health and retention. Allowing for flexible work schedules and telecommuting has shown to increase employee moral. This trend will be on the forefront in order to source the best talent. 

• Video interviewing will increase. In order to find the perfect source of talent, HR professionals will begin recruiting and scouring the entire country looking for the perfect fit. In most cases it won’t be feasible both financially and realistically for a candidate half way across the country to come in for a formal interview, so most HR departments will be doing video interviewing. With this becoming a more popular trend, compliance issues are sure to rise. 

• Recruiting talent will be more local.  Meaning that as the economy improves, companies will and should begin evaluating individual local employment markets to draft hiring strategies that are specific to the local economy of the city you are hiring for.  Post and pray recruiting is no more as companies focus more on long term recruitment strategies and building talent networks.  

• HR will become more data centric. The trend in tracking, compiling, and analyzing data will be overrun in the Human Resources department in 2013. Metrics and measurement for HR will be more important than ever before.  In order to become a successful HR department you must learn to benchmark and hire the right candidate the first time around. It’ll be crucial for HR managers to sync employee data across multiple systems. This trend will be one of the bigger focuses on HR as companies get bigger and rely more on third-party systems for compliance, analytics, and hiring automation.

• HR will become more social. This is almost a “Duh?” type statement. Human Resources will no longer put all their weight in a resume submitted to them, but will scour the Internet to find anything and everything about potential employees. Checking everything from your tweets to what shows up on your LinkedIn profile. As privacy changes are being eliminated from the most popular networks, no one is safe. With everyone online is it safe to say the resume is almost dead? We’ll let you answer that question.

• Beginning of the Crowdsourced Review: As the workplace becomes more social it’s only natural that the employee review does as well. Managers spend one hour a year out of the 2,040 hours employees work to give them feedback that is suppose to last the entire year. As GenY enters the workforce in full swing that amount of time isn’t going to be enough. Crowdsourcing the employee review will create a more dynamic workplace that encourages open feedback and better employee engagement. 

Talent Retention and Sourcing Most Important 

As 2013 is already up in full swing there are trends and new technologies already coming out that HR and recruiting practitioners must stay on top of in order to create an environment that pleases great talent. In order to source the best talent you must be able to make sacrifices in areas that you would never have imagined. What are some trends you see in 2013? Do you agree with the above? Why or Why not?

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media.  She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @blogging4jobs. 

Photo Credit. 

Internal mobility and talent clouds

By Kevin W. Grossman

Mercy, it’s been hot in the Heartland. Scorching hot. Lawns-catch-fire-as-you-drive-by hot. If you live here or you’ve been paying attention to the Midwest drought news, the devastated crops and the meteorological heat danger advisories, you know what I’m talking about. We’re here on family vacation in the Quad Cities where two cities in Illinois and two cities in Iowa bookend the banks of the great Mississippi River.

I know; why would we vacation on the surface of the sun, even if it were by a river? Because of family, of course. And there’s lots of fun to be had, even with the heat. But last night what was more disruptive than the heat has been was the wicked thunderstorm that woke us all up and kept us up for a bit. Much needed rain in exchange for a sleepless night I guess.

For those of us in business today, there have been many sleepless nights over the past five years, and even with record profits and increased productivity for many companies, the qualified talent drought has only just begun. If we want to make it rain inside and out these days, we’ve got to be able to control our talent weather. More precisely, we must be able to understand the molecular makeup of our talent clouds, and how rapidly the combining and recombining of the molecules change the innovative power of our people, as well as scorch the very earth we work on.

Wouldn’t we rather predict our weather than be carried away in the perfect storm? Of course we would. That means having to look outward for talent sunshine, which is usually more costly in regards to attracting, recruiting, hiring, on boarding and training. Necessary depending on who and what you’re hiring for, but more costly.

What we need today need is talent insight on:

• What happened before
• What’s happening now
• What will happen if I move the warm front to the cold front and back again

I’m talking about understanding who we have now who can then help later when we need them then, over here, and over there, and over there. This can include selecting from full-time, part-time, temps, contractors as well as your own customers, partners and competitors.

Internal mobility has been mixed blessing for many organizations because although many would prefer to hire and promote from within, if they don’t have the right insight on their employees and teams, then it becomes difficult making those decisions, especially in such an interconnected global economy, with hot job markets only in specific sectors like IT.

Of course we can open up our position searches to internal folks and compare and contrast them and then hire/promote the most qualified, but that linear thinking doesn’t help when it comes to understand how our internal folks work individually, together, what their value is combined and recombined, and how they impact our business.

In the smaller organizations I’ve worked in, it’s easier to orchestrate our talent clouds. But in larger ones it can become the cliché of the resume database that stagnates like pooled rainwater that then breeds only mosquitos, not mobility. Talent network platforms that can send out virtual weather balloons and forecast where you are and where you’re going – combined with progressive talent acquisition processes, people and systems – can give organizations the tools and resources to better orchestrate their talent weather, although we all know how glacial change management can be. And you can’t always have just-in-time sunshine if you don’t control the talent clouds.

All right – enough with the weather metaphors. Internal mobility done right with talent network insight can help give you the competitive advantage in today’s global marketplace.

What to do with Conspicuous Consummation

By Kevin W. Grossman

You earn the networker and travel badges, post your professional accomplishments and awards, display your peer and previous employer recommendations, share your articles and posts written as well as your speaking engagements spoken at, highlight your education and certification acronyms, share your social influencer scores, and you even share your Twitter stream to those who might want to wade in. You even mix worlds and share your proudest dad-icated parenting moments about your family (like I do).

Based on the economic terms conspicuous consumption and conspicuous conservation, I’ll call the above example conspicuous consummation: the relatively recent phenomenon of engaging in online activities and sharing information that highlights the best professional (and personal) self in order to obtain or signal a high social status.

I’m certainly no economist by trade or training, but I do find the field fascinating, just as I find it fascinating how we show ourselves (hopefully) in the best light online, whether we’re in a job search or just keeping ourselves relevant and marketable.

I started thinking about this more and more after listening to a recent Freakonomics podcast titled Show and Yell. It highlighted a relatively recent phenomenon of engaging in activities that are environmentally friendly in order to obtain or signal a higher social status (for example, buying a Prius versus other hybrid models). This concept was developed and analyzed by a brother and sister team of economists, Steve Sexton and Alision Sexton.

In my ripped off, I mean highly leveraged world-of-work economic concept, conspicuous consummation can be a valiant personal branding effort to get noticed, but is it enough to truly be evaluated on when seeking varying levels of employment and/or business (for the consultants out there)? The obvious answer is no, which is why we have a myriad of screening tools to choose from as employers. Then throw in the interviewing, maybe a scenario-based exercise or two, reference checking, and a few other housekeeping-to-hire activities, and we’ve got ourselves a new employee (or not).

But what if there was a way to show your current employer or prospective employer actual real-time examples of you shining in action? No scenario-based acting models – actual footage of you kicking butt and taking names. We already use surveillance cameras in places of business for preventative measures like crime prevention (not to mention identification technologies that confirm our identities via fingerprints, retinas, breath, blood, DNA…whoa, Nelly!).

Agencies, vendors and companies record external and internal meetings with consent (usually audio but I’d bet more video today too). So why not record day-in-the-life highlights and accomplishments in video?

Crazy, I know. The sheer volume of video to screen and store, the management issues, the logistics and policing and all sorts of other legal nightmares to deal with is enough to make even Google and YouTube pass out. But then there were those who said e-mail and the Internet would grind business to a halt.

Video interviewing and screening has become more mainstream, both in live virtual and recorded formats. Heck, we virtually stream events online as well as babbling industry influencers and thought leaders quite regularly now (and I write that with fondness), much of which is being recorded on the other side anyway by the content consumers.

What I’m suggesting may get the EEOC’s, the ACLU’s and many other privacy advocates blood boiling, not to mention direct supervisors, executive management, IT and legal counsel, but c’mon, we (the people) have already changed the world of work with social and smart phones, complete with still and video cameras mind you.

Talent networks screened in real-time doing real work and making real bottom-line progress could be very cool. Integrate that into our current conspicuous consummation and we’ve got something pretty powerful we’ve never had before.

The Hepcat Closer Detective Agency: Because recruiting is marketing is sales is customer service is retention

By Kevin W. Grossman

I lit my cigarette and took a hit. The Silicon Valley morning was cooler than I thought it would be, even though the sun shone big and bold in the sky. I shivered. Damn it, I thought. Forgot my jacket again.

I looked up and there she was -- a vision of beauty and light in a white jump suit, lit up in the sun's wake.

I hadn't seen her for years, but I tried to keep my cool. I stroked my beard as if I were bored.

"Hi ya', Doll-face."

"Hi ya’ Dickie. How ya' been?"

"Swell but not yet swelling," I said nonchalantly. I took another drag on my smoke.

Doll-face crossed her arms across her chest. "Funny guy as always. I thought I'd find you still puffin' away on those cancer sticks."

"New law; no more smoking inside. Damn health-nut do-gooders. Somethin’ about second-hand smoke."

Doll-face smirked. “Yeah, smoking was banned inside offices about 20 years ago, Dickie.”

I looked at the sky and took a hit.

Doll-face's smirk morphed to dismay. "Dickie, listen, I'm in a pickle. We’re behind on our software development roadmap and we're having a tough time findin’ qualified programmers. The bidding wars are on again. We need help with employment branding ‘cause most of the so-called applicants we're generating are colder than week-old pike on ice."

Week-old pike on ice, I thought. I had no idea what that meant, but I knew it was serious. I pushed my hat back off my forehead.

"Can you help us, Dickie?"

I flicked my butt away and exhaled a smoke ring within a smoke ring within a smoke ring. "Listen Doll-face, if we can agree on my terms, then I'll warm that pike and reel them in for you before you can bat those baby blues."

"Your terms? The last time you said that I lost my shirt, if you know what I mean."

I laughed. "My way or the highway, Doll-face. You know I'll get to gettin' and get it done."

Doll-face frowned. "You know, I could just start using social media more for free and find my applicants that way."

I shook my head. "Ain't nothin' for free, baby, and it takes my hepcat magical finesse to bring ‘em in."

Doll-face pondered this one. I smiled.

"Okay, Daddy-O. Let's talk turkey, ‘cause you're the best Tricky Dick I know," she said, throwing her arms around me.

"I’m the only Tricky Dick you know, Doll-face. They don't call it the Hepcat Closer Detective Agency for nothin'."

[Wink at the camera]

***

And, end scene.

Over the past two weeks I’ve spent quality time with really good recruiting agencies and recruiters, first at the Recruiters’ Hub Conference and then at the ERE Expo.

No, great recruiters. Recruiters who know how to source, cold call, warm up and close a lead with nothing more than a paper clip, a rubber band and a phone. (Oh, and maybe some social pools and a cool new talent network platform to play in as well.)

Great recruiters who get great marketing and sales. Because recruiting is marketing is sales is customer service is retention, remember?

And great recruiting and marketing and sales come to fruition with great detective work, and this is where I pay homage to my father who was a police officer for over 30 years, most of which he spent as a detective in charge of forgery and fraud. He’s been recovering from cancer radiation treatments and is finally on the mend. (His is Richard and his nickname was Tricky Dick when he was on the force.)

In his own words he loved the work because he “chased people across paper” – actually he called them his clients, and he could find them and their wrongdoing with a paper clip, a rubber band, bank records and a phone.

And today, great recruiters and marketers and salespeople chase prospects across social networks as well as paper (still) via:

• ·      Glocal Employment Branding
• ·      Outbound and Inbound Marketing
• ·      Internal Referrals
• ·      Social Network Referrals
• ·      Talent Acquisition Screening and Assessment Tools
• ·      Targeted Talent Networks (whether they apply for a job immediately or not)
• ·      Relationship Building

I’ve been in marketing for many moons myself, and I’ve been helping clients chase buyers across paper and online, using many different marketing tools that help with visibility and lead-gen.

But how many times do we have to talk about the difference between 500 week-old pikes on ice versus 5 highly target qualified applicants we can make offers to?

The sourcing, recruiting and hiring is always in the human touch. Just call the Hepcat Closer Detective Agency. My Dad and I will be right over.

Recruiting, Retention and Playing in the Rain

By Kevin W. Grossman

A few raindrops we ignore. They’re an annoyance, an inconvenience, and we wipe them away with our hands as we hustle through our busy days.

But as the heavens open up and the deluge begins, we become soaked to the bone or we run for cover quickly. Either way the water pools in front of us and we have a choice: rush inside and dry off, watch from under an awning, or we splash through the rushing water together, milk carton boats in hand.

That’s what it’s like with marketing – we want to seep into the mindset of our buyers, and with recruiting that means seeping (and soaking) into the mindset of job applicants. Attracting talented folk to our organizations is an art more than a science – we start with a lot of rain, a funnel and see what squirts out the tiny end.

Then what? The part that’s missing is the middle ground, the engagement, the playing in the rain together before we source and recruit. We hire and we pray (and work hard) for the right fit and employee longevity.

Some voluntary turnover is normal and churn happens, but according to Bersin & Associates, the average cost per hire for all U.S. companies is around $3,500, which can add up. (And for those keeping score at home, this month the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) approved the first American National HR Standard addressing cost-per-hire, the first HR standard developed solely through the sponsorship of the SHRM.)

Whatever your costs are and how they compare compare to other companies, the higher the voluntary turnover rate is for new hires in year one, the more dramatic the cost per hire numbers can become.

That’s a storm no talent acquisition leader or CFO wants to face. And yet, marketing and recruiting don’t play nice together with retaining candidates long term; they don’t run out in the rain to race to the street river, milk carton boats in hand, solidifying the relationship before the hires are made and after.

A recent article by Dr. John Sullivan titled Do You Need a World Class Retention Program? A Checklist of What It Takes, Dr. Sullivan shares “the most thorough and comprehensive checklist on retention that you will ever see.” I highly recommend it. Surprisingly though, there was really no reference to recruiting as retention partner, and there were only three references to CFO’s playing a role in number-crunching the cost of hiring, turnover and retention.

Let’s go back to marketing rain. Marketing brings in new leads that are generated are then passed over to sales to follow up on and eventually close. Some of them at least. Those in the lead pipeline may be nurtured and marketed to so as to inch them along to close.

Then what? Those that do close become customers and are handed over to account management and customer service folk and then – a year later when it’s time to retain their business and a percentage say thanks but no thanks. “Just wasn’t the right for us.”

User adoption correlates tightly with customer retention, and yet, marketing gets them to the door and sales closes it, then marketing and sales sit on the porch and have a few beers, watching the rain and the employment branding and job applicant kids out playing in it. You’d think that an integrated marketing strategy includes a retention investment, but it’s not.

Same with recruiting talent, regardless if we’re talking contingent, retainer, corporate, RPO — but the argument is that, after the final candidates are presented, even closed, “management” leadership takes over and whatever happens 3, 6, 12 months down the road, isn't recruiting’s problem.

But I’d argue that insightful leaders understand that reducing turnover, increasing team retention and improving overall quality of fit with workplace culture are huge initiatives in an ever-changing and highly competitive social talent economy. That means everybody pre- and post-onboarding on your team plays a role in “user adoption.”

Recruiting is marketing and sales. Marketing and sales should be customer service, but it’s not. Marketing and sales should be partners in retention. The milk carton boats must be made, together.

So make it rain and let’s play.