The art and science of diversity recruiting

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

Diversity management is fairly straightforward once people are employees. Diversity reports show how successful (or unsuccessful) companies are. Most are only moderately successful at best, not because they do not want diversity, but simply because they use tools that prevent them to recruit for diversity. The current talent acquisition process is a transactional playing field designed to process resumes and not to hire people. And diversity hiring is all about people!

Building up a consistent diversity initiative requires the ability to create live talent pools that enables you to:

• Decouple candidate attraction and engagement from specific jobs.
• Design diversity circles that provide candidates with the ability to declare themselves as members of a given group (or multiple groups).
• Dialogue with your talent community.

Decouple candidate attraction and engagement from specific jobs

This is what proactive recruiting is about. Do not wait to have job openings to look for candidates! We all know how ineffective reactive recruiting can be... It's a catastrophe as far as diversity is concerned. Build your talent pool through your branding efforts and invite candidates to join your talent network. You will deal with human beings and not simply with resumes. This is the starting point to get any insight on the populations you attract versus the groups you would like to attract. Once you have attracted candidates, you can search your talent pool to identify the best matches for your needs.

Design circles of interest enabling self-declaration

You cannot ask personal questions, but you can offer people the ability to tell you who they are! Using TalentCircles you can segment your community into branded groups of interest like "Veterans", "Students," "Flex-time," "LGBT," "Women in STEM," etc... Then, it's up to the candidates to subscribe to one or several of these groups. Each time you will post an event, any information, a blog post or a job in these groups, your candidates will be automatically notified and thus, continuously be engaged. It is the opportunity for your company to also showcase what it is like for your diverse employees to work in your organization, associate them effectively to your diversity efforts — and give a new breadth and depth to your initiative. Employees are your best spokespeople. Diverse employees who are happy with your diversity management efforts will be your most amazing evangelists.

 Diversity recruiting using TalentCircles

Dialogue with your talent community

So you decouple candidate attraction from any specific job, you offer candidates to declare themselves and now you are in the perfect situation to interact with people: via live video conversations with one or several members of your talent community, invite them to webinars, invite them to write blog posts for you, invite them to in-person events, etc... Building up diversity is all about getting to know people, conversing with them... and proactive recruiting is all about the artistry of looking at people for both aptitude and attitude.

So, just stop saying you care about hiring diversily while show unconvincing results year after year, just do it. It's truly only a matter of selecting a technology that makes it possible and easy!

Sourcing: What It Was, What It Is, What It Could Be (Part 3 of 3)

By Bryan Chaney

We recently looked at what sourcing used to be, and then examined how it‘s evolved. But it could be so much more, and it will.  Let’s peek into the crystal ball of the not-too distant future of sourcing.

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Candidates as Customers

As much as some of us may not like to admit it, we spend most of our cognizant lives as consumers. We buy products and services, and trade money, time and energy in exchange for items of perceived value. This is also true in the world of work. Many of our clients and employees as well as our prospective clients and employees are all connected to each other in a myriad of socio-economic circles. The sooner we realize this, the better the candidate experience will become. Sourcing is becoming more and more a part of that experience.

Tools

In any modern sales organization, we don’t think twice about paying for a Client Relationship Management or CRM platform. But candidate relationship management is generally considered a luxury in talent acquisition today. These tools, or at least the functionality of these tools, I predict will become mandated and mainstream in the next 3-5 years.

Talent Communities/Networks/Pools

Whether branded, unbranded, user-generated/moderated or managed by an organization, our prospective candidate lists are becoming more organic and dynamic, and less of a static spreadsheet or database. This is taking the form of talent communities, or networks like TalentCircles.

Now, this isn’t your 1999 “talent community” which was basically a glorified database. We’re talking about interaction and discussion, knowledge sharing and distribution. A place where people can actually have conversations and learn about the real employee experience, via private and public messages or video chat. More and more, these platforms will offer a way to foster relationships regardless of geographical distance, over the span of a few months or years during a candidate’s career.

Just remember that a micromanaged community will look like a predatory watering hole near the Serengeti. And an unmanaged community or network will fall as flat as a dance club without a DJ to keep the crowd moving. The ideal balance is somewhere in the middle, depending on your audience.

Fit over Function - Soft Skill Sourcing

With the skills gap ever yawning, the emphasis will continue to be on attitude, personality and train-ability over specific skills. But how do you source for someone who thinks like a pirate, without the term “eye-patch aficionado” in your search string?

The answer is technology that interprets the meaning and intent behind text-based content and social behaviors. More companies like eiTalent will develop algorithms for core values and driving motivators. This will help us determine a better fit on the front end of a search, rather than an assessment right before a hire is made. Not to mention the positive implications of getting a recruitment marketing message *just right* for your targeted prospects. You do want the right people responding, don’t you?

Social Validation - fraud prevention

As sourcing becomes more of the forefront to talent acquisition, the teams and leadership are being tasked with intelligent checks and balances. I spoke to an industry colleague recently who was looking for a way to verify employment information in a candidate’s resume and social profiles. The reason? A prominent executive was hired with a completely fabricated employment and education history. I’m sure there were hundreds of thousands of dollars…lost.

This is another example of one bad apple changing a recruiting process. My recommendation? To leverage ZoomInfo, Hoover’s and social aggregators like Klout and Kred, for the double and triple-check.

Teams

Sourcing will grab more of the spotlight as recruiters have to tackle research and lead generation. They have plenty of applicants for open reqs, but the appropriately qualified applicants are harder to reach.

As candidate generation becomes a necessary skill set, I can see corporate Community Managers turning into Talent Advocates. After all, a good brand knows it has to nurture relationships with clients as well as candidates. Which means blended roles for both marketing and recruiting/sourcing professionals. They are all brand ambassadors and soon those that haven’t admitted so yet,  will learn to act accordingly.

Tactics

To truly build a relationship, you have to focus on engagement. Marketers understand this, and build calendars of targeted, relevant content, to start conversations with their prospects. Why?

They know that if your messaging is only about the sale, then it will be one-note and turn off the audience quickly. The same is true for recruiting and sourcing.

Imagine a world where candidates get invitations to join a passionate network of similarly minded professionals. Not to look at a job or push an agenda, but to talk about what makes their creative or analytical engines purr. That’s engagement.

Now imagine that network plugging into their social graph, to determine who they interact with intimately, as well as their professional acquaintances. As a sourcer, you will be able to call out specifically who is connected to the right circles of influence in that niche. You will also see who would make an ideal referral, instead of asking the ubiquitous “who do you know?” question.

The future of sourcing is indeed social, predictive, and growing by popular demand. And as someone who started my recruiting career as a sourcer, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

About Bryan Chaney: Bryan Chaney is a Talent Branding and Attraction Strategist. He most recently led employment branding and social media for corporate recruitment at Aon. Previously, he developed the recruitment marketing arm of a Texas based RPO provider that serves SMB and Fortune clients. He serves on the board of Social Media Breakfast in Austin and founded careerconnects.org, a community event platform, to gather niche recruiting and HR professionals with candidates to share career strategies. The Huffington Post recently named him one of the Top 100 Most Social HR Experts on Twitter. Connect with Bryan for consulting and speaking availability at Bryan Chaney.