Anticipate the User Experience in Corporate Recruiting & Hiring

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

When we think about the variety of players involved in the recruitment process, there are multiple stakeholders. Picture the “typical user” when I mention recruitment technology and you may imagine the job seeker.

There is no doubt that the job seeker’s user experience must be optimized to successfully attract and manage the candidate’s recruitment process, from the technology to the overall strategy. However, when it comes to the user experience of the actual recruiter, the interface is equally important.

After all, you, the recruiter, are ultimately the key person sitting in the driver’s seat. Your recruitment strategy is the road map and the technology you have deployed is like the dashboard that provides you all of the key components to move your hiring process forward.

Our tendency to consider the job seeker’s interface as the only user experience that matters can result in a technology platform that is difficult for recruitment team to use. Because the recruiter’s performance and experience directly impacts the job seeker’s, a great user experience for both sides of the hiring process is important.

TalentCircles has a great user experience for both. Visually, the interface is clean with a well organized layout. There are several great features that allow effective flow of communication and professional interaction between the recruiter and the job seeker such as the ability for recruiters to provide a welcome video.

Also, once candidates import their social profiles to the system, recruiters can have all of the necessary information on each candidate that is located in one place and is up to date.

The live online interview feature is robust. It provides the capability to interview one or more candidates at a time, access documents and take notes all from one screen. You can share the candidate videos and have the opportunity to get feedback from your colleagues. There is a brilliant scoring system and report function recruiters can benefit from as they make their selection.

Additional user interface features include calendars and social sharing buttons that allow recruiters to grow their talent network. For example, using calendars to organize webinars is one great way to increase an interest in your talent community. Also, the social sharing buttons that can be added throughout the process provide all users the ability to amplify new job opportunities or other announcements to their own social network.

Overall, the appearance is professional and clean and the use of buttons and tabs make the user interface intuitive. TalentCircles is one of the best technology platforms that provide recruiters with an optimal interface. This is true for the enterprise system used for the desktop as well as the mobile app, TalentCatch.

What I think is specifically amazing is the user-friendly capabilities to easily apply your company’s own brand elements to the app platform. Uploading the particular fields can be done in a snap and the outcome is great for both the recruiter and the job seeker as candidates enter their contact information in person from an iPad.

If you haven’t tried TalentCatch, the mobile app, I strongly recommend it! Here is a link to get you started using the free app for your next job fair or candidate meeting.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She’s is the Chief Blogger & Founder of Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @jmillermerrell. 

How "seasoned" do you like them?

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

I remember the first time I heard the word “seasoned”, I wasn't quite sure why you would say that about a person. My immediate thought was that too much seasoning is not necessarily palatable and aging seasoning is often rancid. Back then, I did not know that "seasoned" had also meant "fit for use" or "acclimatized, accustomed" for centuries. Did I feel much more comfortable with the word? Not really...      

• Seasoned people may be fit for immediate use. They are relevant if the employees that we are looking for are to be simple cogs in a corporate machine or if the task they are assigned is completely defined with no room for change. Yet, do all the positions we have to "fill" follow this exact pattern? Chances are that they don’t — unless an entire company is outsourcing-ready. So we may want to look for people not too ideally "fit for use," but instead, those who are ready to learn, are fit for future use and fit for new purposes.

• Seasoned people may be a great asset if the goal is to always conduct business as usual, i.e. where everything must be done in an ordinary way. Yet, what happens when decisions are to be made because something extraordinary happens? How fast or well do they react? How effective can they become if you need to "rewire the way you work to succeed in the consumer revolution." In other words, give them Brian Solis's great book "The End of Business As Usual," and quiz them about what they think of it before you hire them if your company is competitive and/or on a growth path! 

Yes, we all must be "seasoned" to some extent, but "seasoned" recruiters may be the ones who are capable of deconditioning themselves continuously in order to better read who people are behind the screens of clichés and optimally serve an unremittingly changing business environment.

The unique power of evaluating job candidates as a group (Harvard Business School & Kennedy School Research)

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

If you have never considered evaluating job candidates as a group (rather than one at a time), read this article published by the Harvard Business School: Better by the Bunch: Evaluating Job Candidates in Groups. The first paragraph says it all:  "New research suggests that organizations wishing to avoid gender stereotyping in the hiring or promotion process-and employ the most productive person instead—should evaluate job candidates as a group, rather than one at a time."

The article summarizes a report resulting from the collaboration between the Harvard Business School and the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS): When Performance Trumps Gender Bias: Joint versus Separate Evaluation. HKS Professor Iris Bohnet, doctoral student Alexandra van Geen, and HBS Professor Max H. Bazerman coauthored the document. The report is supported by a thorough scientific analysis whose parameters have been carefully thought-out.  

So now, how can you leverage this? By simply using TalentCircles. With TalentCircles, you can, of course, perform one-on-one interviews with candidates, record these interviews, take notes and send the link to hiring managers, who in turn will be able to give you immediate feedback. What you can also do just as easily is to perform group video evaluation. Here is how you proceed:

1) You send an invitation to members of your TalentCircles network, a subset of this network (that we call "circle"), or to people who have not yet joined your network. You can invite up to 20 candidates for a group video live (inviting more people could be impractical — so you may want to switch to our webinar mode).                  

2) Once the candidates are in the video booths, they can interact via video and also send text remarks. Meanwhile, the recruiter can write notes on what he/she sees.

Candidates in the video both

3) As the conversation unfolds, the recruiter can also check the participants' live profiles in the network and include work history, education, and any other information they have added.

Checking profile information

4) During the conversation, participants can discuss documents that have been communicated to the candidates, as well as documents that are presented in real-time to the participants for instant discovery and analysis.

Discussing a document with the candidates

5) The entire conversation can be recorded and sent to a hiring manager for evaluation.

Joint evaluation is a powerful tool: it encourages judgments based on people’s real-time performance and attitude — both how they answer questions and how they behave within a group. Incidentally, it's also a very cost-effective way to evaluate lots of people at once! Of course, after your group interview is done, you can choose to conduct thorough one-on-one video interviews!

It’s time for a bold new approach to talent networks

By Kevin W. Grossman

That’s the way it begins – change – the movement from one state to another, from a static status quo state to a hopefully more progressive and productive state. Like moving from flat two dimensions to a vibrant three.

The change begins in small groups, the sharing of new knowledge of what can be done that hasn’t been done before and the return of that “change” investment. The new knowledge fills the room, some of it permeating each exposed pore, entering the bloodstream and flooding our brains with possibility.

I recently spoke with a smart group of HR and recruiting practitioners at the Northern California Human Resources Association (NCHRA) Santa Cruz Region Meeting. My presentation was on social recruiting but with a focus on talent networks, the long tail of recruiting and quality over quantity – of change and what can be.

Most of the attendees were from smaller companies in the Santa Cruz area, but what was striking (and not surprising) was the fact that when I shared some recent research on social recruiting that claimed over 90 percent of employers would be engaged in it this year, everyone looked at me as if I just said we’d be riding magical unicorns in the big screen release of “Everybody’s Doing It” in 3-D.

Of course the reality is that while about half the room confirmed they use LinkedIn for professional networking, sourcing and recruiting, only three had Facebook company pages and no one, and I mean no one, used or even understood what Twitter was.

Well, there was one attendee who said he kinda used it. Kinda.

We then discussed the realities – that half the room prohibited most access to social networks during work hours. One HR practitioner even proudly said her company banned Facebook and Pandora during work hours.

Oh, man. Don’t kill my music. Mercy me.

But no one balked at my from-the-hip truths (one recruiter in the room nodded away and winked at me):

• There are a gazillion people on social media today
• Recruiters do source and recruit using social media
• Candidates do use social to search for jobs
• Companies are still mixed as to recruiting value

Companies are still mixed as to the recruiting value of social, which is why I’ve been thinking a lot about online talent networks this past year, writing about them, interviewing various HR and recruiting practitioners and vendors about them, speaking about them, dreaming about them (yes, really), and living and breathing inside one in particular – TalentCulture’s #TChat. (You should’ve seen the looks on the NCHRA attendee faces when I explained Twitter Chats.)

Much of social recruiting and talent network mainstream as it stands today relates to recruiting new employees for a company, but they can and should also form inside of companies with existing employees, and alumni, and their networks, both inside and out — a mass of hub-and-spokes circles within circles within circles that we only dream of maximizing return on.

Most everyone in the meeting agreed that the three-dimensional “unicorn” in the room is the fact that a talent network is only a network when those who belong collaborate, commiserate and connect with one another regularly for what can amount to infinite combination of reasons – but not necessarily applying for jobs outright. This of course can happen in existing social networks, other platforms and software systems that help create talent networks, and combination of all in between.

But the most common reality is that we usually end up with a two-dimensional network model, sourcing active candidates from a smattering of job postings and creating a database of people where occasional, hopefully relevant company and job information is shared with them. There’s just no true “network” inside.

As I wrote in my sandbox analogy nearly a year ago:

Other kids may be running around and around the sandbox, but for those who are in it, for whatever time that is, it becomes an impromptu network where folks aggregate again and again. They’re not coming to the sandbox because you put it there. They’re coming because they want to play with the other kids and parents.

It’s time for a bold new approach to talent networks. It’s time for change.

What, you don’t know what a Twitter Chat is?

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.

Business Talent Networks: The Coming-of-New-Economic-Age Story

By Kevin W. Grossman

In the quirky yet poignant coming-of-age movie Moonrise Kingdom, every single frame of film is like a lovely picture-box where the forced perspective of people and imagery is slanted outward toward the viewing audience, inviting you into every second of every scene. It’s fascinating really. Thousands of film frames, these celluloid picture-boxes, collaborating one after the other to deliver a unified story for all to experience and hopefully enjoy.

But today our intertwined personal and professional lives are fast-forward fragments of these forced perspective stills. We live in snapshots of jobless recoveries and economic downturns and employee dissatisfaction and too many unqualified applicants and business uncertainties and one size fits all no matter how much some blather on incessantly about adaptability and globalization...

These pictures aren’t quirky or poignant or pretty. They’re literal clichés from today’s world of work that doesn’t show much for tomorrow other than flat two-dimensional black and white stills. However, consider this from a recent BusinessWeek article:

From March 2011 to March 2012, [John Deere] customers ordered more than 7,800 different configurations of the 8R. On average, each configuration was built only 1.5 times. More than half the 8Rs were built just once, for a single customer. Thus, the global tractor: One size does not fit all, from Kansas to Kazakhstan.

Yes, John Deere. The riding mower and tractor company somewhere out in the middle of nowhere. The $32 billion dollar global riding mower and tractor company somewhere out in the middle of nowhere, that nowhere being somewhere my wife and her much of family are from. The Quad Cities of Illinois and Iowa right smack dab on the banks of great Mississippi River, America’s heartland, where we’re going soon for a family vacation. Moline, Illinois, to be exactly where John Deere is headquartered. (The picture is my oldest daughter wearing a pink John Deere hat a few years ago.)

Again, that’s 7,800 different configurations on big hardware where each configuration was built only 1.5 times. A true America icon still shining brightly after 175 years, adaptable and global and growing and hiring. This is not the hip and fresh gig from Silicon Valley and the Bay Area and the startup capital of the world, San Francisco. But it’s just as important to the U.S. economy as well as the entire world.

If a large historic business institution can create lovely picture-boxes of innovation and growth, then so can other companies. We don’t have to be stuck with fragmented and bland world-of-work imagery. We can actually create business talent networks of executive management, employees, alumni and applicants who can come together and collaborate, sharing a dizzying array of configurations that give forced perspective a whole new, well, perspective. These vibrant images becoming one fascinating coming-of-new-economic-age story for all to experience, enjoy and thrive in, from the Heartland to hereafter.

Uniting Open Networks and Hierarchy in Talent Networks

By Kevin W. Grossman

"We can walk our road together

If our goals are all the same.

We can run alone and free

If we pursue a different aim.

Let the truth of love be lighted,

Let the love of truth shine clear.

Sensibility, armed with sense and liberty,

With the Heart and Mind united in a single perfect Sphere."

--Neil Peart, The Sphere: A Kind of Dream

Again with the Millennials and Generation Y. Those were the first words out of his mouth and I immediately became polarized to my previous points of Generation Now.

The ones about treating everyone non-generationally and talking with them straight. That being passionate about what you do is one of the most important tenets of the world of work, ever, regardless of when you were born. That today we’re not only loyal and committed to the work that moves and schools us, but also to the people who are part of that committed work — because that’s the work that moves us to do greater things for the world.

That’s the work that makes it easier for startups to start up and for established companies to grow — creating new jobs and replacing some of those lost over the past five years, including full-time, part-time, flex time, contract, and project work, and any combination of those and more that you can imagine. That’s the work that transforms technologies, processes, communities, and the very heart and soul of the world.

At least that’s what thought at first listening to Malcolm Gladwell’s keynote at this year’s SHRM Conference & Exposition in Atlanta. Because he said, “Let’s talk about Millennials.”

But that’s not where he went at all. In fact, speaking of being “moved and schooled” in the end, I certainly was. No, where he went was talking about two generational differences that do exist – and should co-exist.

These are:

• Hierarchy
• Open Networks

What Malcolm explained so eloquently and intelligently is that we've gone from hierarchical, disciplined, centralized social organizations (think Boomers and Gen X) to collaborative, amorphous, organic, open social networks (think Gen Y and Z).

Which isn’t really a good or bad thing, because they’re two very different worldviews that have changed dramatically the way we participate in the world of work yesterday and today. On the one had you’ve got the traditional top-down management structure that according to Malcolm began to break down in the 1970’s when individuals began to demand more ownership over their career aspirations (and paychecks). And then on the tail end of my generation, Gen X, those born in the 1980’s and 1990’s found knowledge and power in the collective, their personal and professional social networks that upended the top-down structure.

But the amorphous nature of open networks versus the structured leadership of a strong few – the differences between the succinct success of Civil Rights movement and the oblique success Occupy movement in the examples that Malcolm shared – tells a tale of two separate states of mind and heart. However, when combined, it’s a force to be reckoned with. Think different. Think Apple – open social networks internally run by a formidable dictator and brilliant business mind.

Apply this strategy to your open talent networks, the ones made up of new candidates, current employees, management and the like – the ones you’re sourcing from for any position current or future. But manage the networks with structure and direction and sound leadership, however you decide to do it.

Embedding hierarchy into open networks makes for magic, uniting hearts and minds. That’s what truly transforms technologies, processes, communities, and the very heart and soul of the world of work.

TalentCatch: Increase your leads by 300% versus a vanity URL!

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

At NACE, Jenn Terry, the Director-Staffing Strategic Initiatives at AT&T and Becky Parson, Sr. Project Manager University Relations discussed Mobile Career Fair Engagement, responding to an interesting question: How do we recruit at an event if we can’t collect paper resumes to ensure full OFCCP compliance? Should you spend fortunes in brochures? Yet, money will never be enough to respond to this question: How do we make the most of our face-to-face events while staying compliant?

High efficiency at your fingertips

AT&T has adopted a proactive mobile approach with TalentCatch, an iPad app created by TalentCircles. TalentCatch allows AT&T to sign up candidates on the fly.

Carrie Corbin, the Associate Director - Strategic Staffing & Talent Attraction at AT&T used it at SXSW on the AT&T booth to attract candidates. At NACE, Jenn and Becky invited the attendees of the room where they were speaking to sign up. Instant success of their engagement offer: nearly one hundred names within the hour. That simple! Subsequently, nobody was to be surprised to hear about their results over time:

It's no wonder that the AT&T approach has been hailed so frequently over the last few months. Productivity pays off! The best buzz always comes from tangible results. Productivity pays off!

Why not you?

A fully branded TalentCatch app with custom fields can be yours in one day. No learning curve. So you can be up and running overnight.

You start an event. New applicants enter standard fields (First name, Last name, Email, ZIP, Phone, Mobile) as well as any custom fields that you decide to include (job category, desired position, availability, etc.). We are speaking of less than one minute per applicant here.

TalentCircles stores the applicants locally and syncs the data with the Talent Network server (and TalentCircles). But you can also operate offline and send all the data later. If you don’t have a Talent Network, you can export your applicant data as a simple Excel spreadsheet, and continue the conversation with applicants by email.

Relationship-based hiring starts here! No business card. No resumes. Just an in-person contact stored in a friendly and easy-to-use iPad app that bears your colors!

For more information, you can contact Sean Sheppard! sean@talentcircles.com

Recruiting still lost in an Escher maze

By Kevin W. Grossman

She took the microphone, paused, then asked, “So how do I get noticed when I apply to a company online and my resume goes into an applicant tracking system with dozens of others competing for the same position with similar qualifications and keywords?”

She feigned a smile, held the mic at half-mast and then handed it back to me. Not just dozens of applicants, I thought, hundreds if not thousands. Not matter how she served herself up, no matter the keywords used and embedded throughout her resume and online profile, she’ll still most likely get lost in the proverbial black hole.

This particular candidate experience has been written about more than most, and unfortunately hasn’t changed much over time. My recent experience volunteering to speak at Hirewire, a local organization to help job seekers in Santa Cruz County with career development and job search advice, verified this sentiment from the woman above as well as over 20 others who attended the monthly event. Multiply that across similar gatherings in municipalities all over the U.S.

According to a recent HR Executive article titled Not Ready for Recruiting, we’re still not improving. In fact, in the 2012 Allied Workforce Mobility Survey from Allied Van Lines highlighted in the article, found two-thirds of 500 HR professionals polled saying they have "extensive" or "moderate" plans for hiring this year, and 80 percent of larger companies – with more than 10,000 employees – plan for "extensive" or "moderate" recruiting. And yet, 52 percent of those respondents consider their recruiting programs to be only "somewhat successful."

Ho-hum, diddly dumb.

Complicate that with the highly competitive IT job market. According to a TLNT article, 83 percent of startups from a Silicon Valley Bank survey said they’ll add IT staff in the next year. But, a Dice survey says that despite the growing competition for tech talent, getting professionals to jump ship isn’t easy. Only 37 percent of the surveyed managers say their voluntary departures have increased this year.

A big disconnect that relates to all this is the fact that although many companies have made progress in creating initial quality user-experience career sites, when it comes to actually applying for the jobs, it’s like trying to traverse an M.C. Escher drawing where you end up where you never started from.

Recruiting is getting more complicated than ever and it’s amazing to me that companies aren’t making the candidate experience any easier to explore career opportunities – and this means new candidates as well as internal candidates. Sourcing, recruiting, hiring and retention should be highly collaborative activities, and yet we’re truly still lost in an endless Escher maze, losing quality hires and internal moves along the way.

The contextual quality of content is what births talent networks

By Kevin W. Grossman

Fascinating. The fact that there are legions of fetal cells that hang out inside a mother for decades after she gives birth – and that they might even help heal her when she's sick or hurt.

But whether they hurt her or not isn’t as simple as it seems, according to research by Dr. Kirby Johnson at Tufts University, which I learned about from a recent Radiolab podcast. At first, when Kirby and his team were analyzing the data, it seemed as though (and they romanticized as such) that maybe the fetal cells were actually helping healing the mother’s liver infection, or bladder infection, or whatever ailed her.

Not the case – in fact, sometimes they fetal cells were actually attacking the Mama’s organs and cells. (The Mama is what I affectionately call my wife, the mother of our lovely two little girls.) There are lots of variables that, depending on context, change the impact on the Mama.

The research continues, but it got me thinking, and you knew that was coming, about how the Mamas in your world of work and recruiting – your company career site, your company referral program, your online social networks, your talent network service, your applicant tracking system – how all of these give birth to your new employees.

Then even after new hires are birthed, there are those fetal cells that remain, meaning those who you didn’t hire. Except now they stay to be healed in a sense, not to heal, and they’ll leave to hurt if there’s no reason to stay (think slamming you on social media, Glassdoor, Vault, etc.). Whether or not they do stay to be healed, well, that all depends on a lot of factors that are based on content and the contextual quality of that content.

For example:

• How much of your true company culture is revealed?
• How much relevant industry content is shared?
• How much career development advice and resources are given?
• How easy is it to learn about other jobs they may qualify for and to apply for them?
• How easy is it to collaborate (and commiserate) with others who have stayed, including those birthed and hired on?

There are many more examples where those came from, but the fact remains that if you want to improve the candidate experience for all who linger and long to be hired, then it’s the contextual quality of content that births those talent networks.

And heals them.