Diversity Recruiting is a Long Term Strategy

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

I’m thankful that diversity is a hot topic especially in Silicon Valley and within the technology industries. Companies are establishing mentorship programs, offering scholarships and focusing recruitment efforts on female and minority candidates especially in STEM. Marylene Delbourg-Delphis, TalentCircles CEO has completed extensive research on diversity recruiting on the subject of veteran and military hiring.

But tackling the topic of diversity at your company can and will not be accomplished with the implementation of a single training program or the implementation of a sourcing platform designed for you to reach female and minatory programs. As I mentioned previously sourcing is only half of the solution and that includes your diversity recruiting and retention efforts at your company.

I want to focus here on long-term candidate pipeline building and candidate targeting through a combination of efforts including digital storytelling and employment branding focused on building a large community of active and engaged members of the diversity community in a variety of areas that provide an ongoing candidate pipeline. The key here is not just focused on the numbers of your talent network or talent community, but the quality interactions and ongoing value you bring to these individuals to help lift up not only your organization but to set the standard in your own recruiting efforts for your competitors and industry.

Companies tend to focus on the short term goals of filling positions that need to be filled, but what about recruiting not only passive candidates, but filling your pipeline with a diverse candidate pool? A company can create a strategy that focuses their efforts on diversity recruiting, but it in to be successful it’s important to create more of a long-term strategy. The long-term candidate pipeline is one that takes nurturing, branding, and digital storytelling.

Nurturing: Creating a long-term strategy consists of nurturing and taking care of the candidates in the pipeline. This means providing content and resources to help build your candidates while your company is not actively pursuing them.

Digital Storytelling: Digital storytelling means that your company needs to tell a story through multiple channels. This might include webinars, blog posts, ads, or word of mouth from happy customers. Each piece of media must play into another and work as an overall campaign in order for your story to be told across the Internet.

Employer Branding: This type of branding is something that practitioners strive to perfect in order to make hiring and recruiting much easier. When a company is able to brand their company as a “must-work” for company, candidates will start flocking without the practitioner having to spend a lot of money filing requisitions.

Being able to nurture, story tell, and brand your company in a way that screams diversity hiring will allow companies to create compelling storylines when it comes to the type of employees that work for their company. Each of these three parts places a crucial role in how a company will be able to hire for their next position. 

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 Recruiters Can Learn From Baseball & Talent Development in the Minor Leagues

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

I’ve mentioned before that talent is the number one priority for CEOs in 2014 from the Conference Board. Two strategies really exist in order to recruiting either you recruit already qualified candidates to your organization or you develop and implement a strategy for engaging and developing raw talent to grow in your organization just like baseball has done and the minor leagues.

I realize that planning and recruiting for the future takes a herculean amount of money, time and effort. But as I mentioned before, insanity is defined as continuing to do the same thing over and over again without any change. That’s exactly what we are doing in putting all our eggs into the action of recruiting already qualified candidates who have the exact set of skills that we need. We need to establish a minor league for our company.

That minor league goes beyond just campus recruitment and entry level hiring efforts. It means establishing a training and development program for highly competitive and technical areas particularly STEM positions. We give these candidates stability, resources, education and experience using a formal program in exchange for a signed contract for time spent at our company.

When candidates fall into a pipeline and are given an opportunity to learn and grow within a company it’s important that they’re given the necessary tools to succeed. Minor league baseball teaches us that practitioners are able to create programs and grow candidates through programs that enhance training and development.

There are two major reasons to create these types of programs with the final result as a signature on the dotted line:

Build education and knowledge for the company/franchise: Within the baseball reference, the idea of the minor leagues allows players the ability to learn the franchise and understand the basics of the game before signing on the dotted line and growing into the major leagues. The same works for the workplace. Understanding how a company operates and the dynamics involved gives candidates the opportunity to learn the industry before being offered the permanent and official position within a company.

Exchange resources and sharpen skills: When a company offers an internship it’s usually to see how they deal with adapting to a current environment with the resources they’re given. Whether it be mentorship or different opportunities within a company, companies are looking for interns to develop their skill set before a final job offer is granted. The minor league in baseball works just like an internship does, but without the promise of making it to the major leagues.

No matter what you’re looking for when it comes to working in the human resources field it’s important to understand the major benefits of creating programs with the idea of having that signature on the dotted line at the end of the program.

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 to Get Unstuck in Recruiting & Hiring

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

Many of us are likely in the middle of building and budgeting our 2015 recruiting planning and strategies. How we recruit, attract and retain our workforce has changed dramatically in the last 4 years. The importance of creating a strategy that drives results is more important than ever especially in this extremely competitive hiring and talent economy.

Maybe as you are building your plan you are thinking about how to get unstuck from your current strategies in recruiting and hiring.

Talk to your candidates and recent hires
In order to understand where your successes and failures happened it’s important to first know what they were. By talking to candidates and recent hires you’re able to get first-hand knowledge on what worked and what didn’t. Recent hires will have a fresh perspective on the process and have nothing to lose when it comes to providing real feedback on the overall process. Practitioners should be able to take constructive feedback and learn from their successes and failures.

Evaluate the successes and failures of competitors

The best way to recruit talent is to not only see what your competition is doing, but to do it better. If there is a certain type of candidate that your competition is continuously getting over you, it’s time to take a look and see why they’re recruiting stronger candidates or a certain type of candidate. Evaluating the successes and failures of your competition gives you data that you’re able to take back and use for your own recruiting and hiring strategies.

Use metrics and reporting to guide evaluate ongoing

What has worked best in the past? What time of job requisition gives you the most candidates? What quarter do you tend to hire a stronger workforce? All these questions and a whole lot more can be answered by the use of metrics and reporting. Understanding the who, what, when, where, and whys of your recruiting strategy will help you recruit stronger candidates in a more efficient manner. Make sure when implementing new strategies you’re able to track and measure the success or failure of a certain campaign. This will allow you to recruiter smarter and faster in the New Year.

Learn from the failure & success of you peers

Although you have an entire team of recruiters or practitioners it might not always be understood that they’re working together. Take a play out of your fellow recruiters playbook and see where they’re succeeding and where they’re failing. In recruiting there is no need to re-invent the wheel when working on recruiting the same type of candidates. Take a look at your co-workers and learn from each of them and you’ll be recruiting better in no time. Working as a team is always better than working as an individual.

With 2015 just a few months away it’s important to take an inventory of your entire recruiting strategies that have worked and those who have not worked and then create a plan involving your most successful techniques. If you haven’t started planning, you’re behind! 

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 to Measure and Understand Your Source of Hire

The source of hire is an important one, and also one that is extremely hard to define for those that believe that a single engagement with a candidate does not often lead to an application for employment by a job seeker. The sources that lead to hiring candidates are some of the most important metrics and analytics recruiters can leverage to build their recruiting strategies.

Source of hire is defined as the point of origin that leads to a candidate completing an application for employment that ultimately leads to them being hired and working as an employee of a company. Your source of hire is the recruitment equivalent of what programmers and the technical community call a source code. It’s the foundational code or programming language that is written to create the framework for your website or technology.

Like source of hire, source code if not written correctly can set the stage for a series of ongoing technical headaches and issues for not only your engineers and programmers but the users of your technology. Sometimes your source code is elusive and is hidden behind excessive script codes, code manipulation and hidden content. In the recruiting and hiring industry, I call this the human touch cycle. In that the last engagement with a candidate who you ultimately hire is not often actually your source of hire, but it is the only one you can directly link to the hiring activity.

The human touch cycle refers to the number of brand touches between the candidate and the recruiting team. Without HR technologies that use cookies to capture website visits and information, it is extremely hard to determine the number of touches it takes to convert a candidate. It is nearly impossible to determine the original interaction that drove the candidate to consider your company for its employment opportunities.

This simple fact is the reason why we rely on the last activity that closes the deal and converts the candidate. It is the easiest and most direct activity to measure when hiring. It is extremely hard to measure the date, time and point of origin where the first contact occurred because it often occurs over long periods of time and using a variety of different websites, engagements and in person activities.

Outside of measuring the last touch that ultimately leads to the candidate conversion, recruiting teams can also conduct extensive research with their own candidate pools and recent hires to understand the activities and frequency that lead to the final candidate conversion activity. Doing so lends to more targeting messaging and strategic recruitment activities that ultimately save your recruiting team time as well as money.

A little work, time and effort up front can provide a positive return on investment and lead to better retention and a higher conversion with future candidates.

Sourcing in Recruitment is Only Half the Battle

The explosion of social media redefined the way we source, recruit and hire candidates. Through social media the ability to engage companies and products, gave rise to the expectation that candidates should connect with recruiting teams directly. And with this increase in social media activity, the human capital industry saw an increase in internet research what is also referred to as online sourcing.

Sourcing is the act of researching for passive qualified candidates within social networks, forums, online databases and communities. These source candidates are then qualified and passed onto a recruiter for a specific open job requisition at a company.

The process is repeated with the same result. Potentially thousands of sourced passive candidates are effectively caught and released back into the mainstream talent pool by a single sourcer at your company. The sourcing activities continue as the immediate need for qualified candidates is great at your organization. Your sourcing team continues researching and combing the internet for talent, and the cycle never ends. Did I mention that the definition of insanity is the process of repeating the same action over and over and over again?

Simply sourcing for talent using a catch and release strategy is a recipe for recruitment insanity.

That’s because sourcing in recruitment is only half the story. Recruitment teams need to focus on mentoring, relationships and engaging those candidates. There should be no candidate release when a qualified passive job seeker is identified sourced for your company. Instead of capture and release, recruiting teams must employ and capture and engage strategy. Capture and engage is a strategy that compliments and enhances your current sourcing and research efforts but is focused on your organization’s long term talent needs.

Sourcing is just one important piece of your recruitment strategy. Building relationships, engaging job seekers who exhibit an interest but might not yet have the skill or experience level for a current open position, is not a reason to turn your back on them. This is an opportunity to establish a relationship and help mentor candidates for future job positions by leveraging your talent community.