Tim Sackett

Tim Sackett

Recruiting

Great Ways to Attract Healthcare Talent

When I first took over talent acquisition of a large health system, I was shocked at how traditional the recruitment process was for nursing and other ancillary healthcare roles within the health system. I had come from another industry that was at the forefront of recruitment technology and recruitment marketing, and I felt like I had taken a time machine backward! My systems were dated, my processes seem antiquated, and I was surrounded by hiring managers who felt like they were entitled to talent. As in, talent should be begging them for the job, not the other way around. Because of this perfect storm of awful recruiting practices, we were spending millions of dollars on agency nursing and Locums. The first thing I did was call my CFO and scheduled a private meeting. I was prepared to ask for an enormous increase in our talent acquisition budget, more than double the previous year. I had all the data and charts and I walked in confidently. I sat down and before I could say anything, he said, “Tim! Thanks for coming, I was going to set this meeting up myself to go over your budget with you for next year! We need to find a way to cut 15%!” I felt sick to my stomach! It’s classic healthcare. There’s a mission to save lives. You don’t save lives by spending money on non-life-saving expenses. Or, this was how it was traditionally looked at across all non-revenue healthcare functions, and still is at many healthcare systems across the country. Thankfully, though, we are also seeing many examples of modern healthcare systems that understand the value of having an amazing talent attraction engine, and how being world-class at Talent Acquisition can actually save a healthcare system valuable dollars that can be spent on patient care. I’ll be honest, the CFO and I became very good friends. I found in him a partner who understood if we are paying agencies millions of dollars to properly staff our health system, we are paying a super-premium to have that done. If we do this properly ourselves, we can save 30-40% of that cost which is simply agency profit. The problem we had was a leadership team that didn’t trust that Talent Acquisition could do that! Healthcare Talent Acquisition Pro Tip #1 – Find an executive champion that “gets it” when it comes to the value proposition great talent acquisition can bring to an organization. The first thing I had to do was fight to get properly funded if I wanted to change. Working harder is not a sustainable talent acquisition strategy for success! But, it’s the main strategy used by the majority of healthcare talent acquisition teams. The problem isn’t that you can’t work harder, it’s that it still only gets you so far, and eventually, you just burn out your best people and you end up worse off. I found my “extra” money in the spaces where we were having to spend more money because we weren’t able to recruit well on our own, then my team and I had to prove that little by little we could make a dent into our agency spend, by having better processes, better technology, and utilizing modern recruiting strategies. Healthcare TA leaders will understand, though, that unit managers don’t want to give up their agency folks! It’s a crutch that they’ve come accustomed to relying on over time and those agency resources are hard to give up. Healthcare Talent Acquisition Pro Tip #2 – Start small with the leaders that have the most pain. Don’t try and eat the elephant in one bite! I had to use a bit of informal leverage and a little formal HR power to get a couple of nursing managers to play along with me. With my new CFO champion, I called a meeting with two nursing leaders to “propose” a test “we” were going to try with their units to eliminate agency spend altogether by properly staffing their units. Of course, they were skeptical because it had never happened before, but when the CFO and HR guy are sitting across from you, it’s hard to say “No!” The key was that we weren’t eliminating agencies first and leaving them short-staffed. We were first going to “overstaff” them while they had agency and allow them to properly onboard and train, and then little by little ween them off of agency. We had to prove to them we could get them the “permanent” corporate staff first, allow them to transition, and show them the value of having full-time staff versus agency nurses. In the first year, moving unit to unit, in “test” mode. We were able to eliminate half of our agency spend, while only increasing our TA budget by a few hundred thousand dollars. We saved well over a million, we spent about two hundred thousand. The CFO and CEO were super happy. Talent acquisition had the resources we needed, on an ongoing basis, and we continued to go after the rest of the agency spend. The goal was never zero agency spend, as there will always be some capacity, short-term needs for agency. The problem I see in every health system, is we are using agency for full-time staffing, not emergency staffing. Healthcare Talent Acquisition Pro Tip #3 – >Set a laser-like, narrow vision of what you want to do, measure it, and report the outcomes widely. Make sure everyone knows what you are doing and why. We had a culture where leaders in the health system just assumed that talent acquisition couldn’t help them, so they ran to agency to help them with their needs. Again, working with finance, we put a stop to the ability of leaders being able to request agency assistance. The only way an agency would get its invoices processed is if they were approved by talent acquisition. We had to know where the money was being spent and why! We had to know where we were failing in talent acquisition, no matter how hard it was to see. This one simple process change, while not popular with leaders, immediately gave us great insight into where and how much was being spent on agency and where our biggest problems were. We also found out that roughly 10-20% of agency spend had nothing to do with talent acquisition failure, but because we had leaders who had fallen in love with their agency resources and didn’t want to give them up! We had candidates for those jobs, but leaders were telling us “No” simply because they didn’t want to lose their trained agency nurse. I often speak to talent acquisition leaders in healthcare who will say, “Tim, I don’t have the capacity to take on agency!” and my reply is always, “yes you do!” It’s a giant bucket of money being spent and the majority of that spend is a direct correlation to talent acquisition failure! It can’t be ignored! Plus, every single dollar you can cut from that spend is a TA win! How did we cut agency spend and hire more nurses? First, I’m using “Nurses” as the main role, but let’s be honest, this is about all positions we hire for in healthcare. It’s just that nursing makes up such a large portion of the hiring we do, but all of the strategies and tools I talk about work across healthcare roles from salaried to hourly. #1 – We used our Recruiting Super Power! We immediately ramped up our “Alumni” and “Boomerang” hiring. Roughly 30% of new hires, across all jobs, leave within six months. It’s for all the reasons you can think of around fit, culture, etc. This is about the grass isn’t always greener on the other side, and we were going to welcome our past employees back with open arms. In fact, not just welcome them. We were going to pursue them with vigor! No one was going to love them as much as us. While we wouldn’t get them all back, we were going to some of them back! We used a combination of mediums to message our former employees. We texted them updates about new stuff going on at the health system, promotions, projects, awards, etc. We all love hearing the “gossip” of our former employers, and we played into this desire to want information. We sent emails, send snail mail to their homes, we made periodic phone calls. We built an entire communication plan around keeping in contact with former, high-valued employees. The greatest superpower a recruiter has is to make someone feel wanted. We made our former employees feel very wanted! #2 – We started texting nurses! When I first started at the health system none of my Nurse Recruiters would text a nurse. They only sent emails. When I asked them why don’t you text these nurse candidates, they chuckled and said, “Tim, you don’t understand, nurses don’t want to be texted!” So, we went on a field trip! That field trip over to one of our hospitals and visited one of our Med-Surg Units and spoke to actual nurses who worked for us and I asked a few questions: Tim: “How much time do you get to sit down and check email throughout the day?” Nurse: “OMG! Almost never. Maybe a few minutes and then it’s only my work email.” Tim: “Yeah, I know you guys are running constantly! If I had to reach you, during your shift, what would be the best way to contact you?” Nurse: “Oh, just text me! That’s really my only communication all day I get.” End of the field trip. Nurses are very busy people with full lives. They don’t check LinkedIn. They rarely check their email. If you want to reach them, you have to reach them in the way they communicate and that’s by text message. #3 – We turned on the Programmatic Job Advertising engine. Marketing works. We all get marketed to non-stop all day long. When we are online. When we are watching TV. When we are watching TV and online at the same time!/p> It turns out, most of us in talent acquisition isn’t very good at marketing and job advertising. We tend to just post jobs in the same places we always have, regardless of how great they work or don’t work. We do this primarily because we don’t know there are other options. This is how you were trained, so we just keep doing it. Traditional job advertising is fairly inefficient. You post a job on a job site, hoping a candidate you want will visit that job site and see your job and apply to that job. Only about 15% of people are actively looking for a job at any time, so 85% of people are not actively looking, meaning they probably aren’t going to job sites. Programmatic job advertising is basically letting artificial intelligence put your job ad in front of candidates where they are on the internet versus where you think they might be if they were looking for a job. An example of this could be a Nurse is reading an article on a site about a new nursing technique and innovation and programmatic technology would serve up your job ad to this nurse on that site the moment they just happen to be reading that article! It’s amazing and scary technology all at the same time! We see healthcare organizations that test programmatic job advertising spend less and get more applicants than what they were doing prior to using only traditional job posting methods. #4 – We owned the Nursing programs in our area! We made the conscious decision that no other health system was going to do as much as we would at our local nursing programs, pharmacy programs, doctoral programs, physical therapy programs, etc. We were going to donate resources, time, etc. We were going to be the flagship partner for these educational institutions so when students thought of where they wanted to go work, it was going to be us, every time. We sponsored Nursing school awards programs with scholarships and funding for ceremonies, etc. Besides sponsoring we made sure our nursing executives showed up and mentored. We worked with school staff to help them get our nursing leaders as frequent speakers for their classes and programs. We also instituted two programs to show our commitment to new grads. We would sign up nurses prior to graduation and pay for tuition, etc. And we also started a tuition repayment plan. Both plans were built on the same premise. Come work for us for a certain period of time, and we’ll pay for your school. Of course, the health system can only take so many entry levels, but we wanted to get in early and get our pick of the best and brightest. #5 – We did some gorilla marketing! Sometimes you still have to go old-school when it comes to marketing to candidates and we put up billboards around our competition with our employment branding messages and easy text to apply messages. I wanted to let every healthcare worker in our area know, constantly, they had another option after a long, hard, frustrating day. And we were that option! We hired rolling billboards on Nursing Week to drive by their campus with messages of appreciation of their efforts and profession, with us highlighting our “Nurse of Year” professionals, etc. I wanted them to think, “why doesn’t my health system appreciate me like that?!” We worked with our young nurses to support after-hour networking and wine parties where they could invite former classmates who worked at other systems to stay connected. We offered up awesome speakers for continuing education where we of course invited our nurses but also sent invites out to “all” nurses in the area to learn and grow. Recruiting nurses and healthcare workers, in general, is always hard, and it’s extremely hard now and what looks like will be hard well into the future. We can no longer just post our jobs and pray and hope someone will apply. We must actively pursue candidates and show them there are great options for them to prosper and succeed. We do this through great messaging and marketing and having the tools that will allow us to reach healthcare workers in the way they want to be communicated with. There is no one silver bullet when it comes to being great at nurse recruiting, but when we use all the silver bullets we have together, we can be much more effective in attracting and hiring great talent.

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Tim Sackett

Recruiting Tactics

7 Recruiting Strategies for Hourly Workers

If you clicked on this link it’s safe to assume you probably are feeling some pressure right now to hire more employees. This information is purposely designed to focus on hourly workers, but some of these ideas and strategies work across all levels of worker. Unlike, our salaried workforce, though, hourly workers tend to actually be more difficult to find. They most likely don’t have a profile on LinkedIn, or a resume on a job board database. Hourly workers usually fill out applications and as of 2022, no one in the HR tech space has really figured out the secret sauce of building an hourly recruiting technology that attracts the massive workforce that is hourly that is similar to what we’ve been able to do around the salaried workforce. So, I’ll just come out and say that one thing that we all feel, but we sound silly if we say it out loud – “Hiring Hourly Workers Is More Difficult Than Hiring Salaried Workers!” at least when we get into ultra-low unemployment environments like we have right now. TL;DR, Blah, Blah, Blah, just give me the silver bullets! That’s what it’s all about. We need to hire and we need to do it fast, please don’t give us some kind of mathematical formula to solve! Not to worry, like you I rip open the Oreo cookie and just get to the good stuff right away! My Top 7 Hourly Recruiting Strategies! Don’t let your current workers leave! Okay, we are not saying to lock them into your place of business! That’s illegal, don’t do that! The best hire you’ll ever make is the one you don’t have to! Yes, we need to desperately need to hire more workers, but simultaneously we need to stop the out flow of workers leaving us. You will not be able to stop everyone from leaving. Hourly workforces are transit by nature, but if you can reduce your turnover by 10-20% it has a giant impact on your ability to hire. We tend to discount feedback of workers that leave. It’s a very normal psychological response to do this. We feel like if this person has decided to leave then they are no longer part of the “family” and we basically give up on them. But, if we start to really gather this data/feedback and look at it all together we will begin to see trends and common issues that we can work to change and make better. I love to ask location managers this one question: “If I gave you $100 per employee, what would you do to increase their experience and retain them longer?” What we know as HR and Talent Acquisition professionals is $100 to keep an employee is literally nothing in the greater business scheme. We pay way more than $100 to hire the replacement of each worker that leaves us on average. The actual average cost of an application in the hourly world right now runs anywhere from $30-60 per application, not hire, just getting an application! When we work on this question of what would a manager do, it’s never “Oh, just give each worker the $100.” Because we all know that would have limited impact in retaining a worker. What we find is managers come up with all kinds of low-cost and no-cost ideas to show workers they are appreciated throughout the year. Sending them handwritten thank you notes to their homes, sending or giving them small gifts of appreciation, posting pictures of them with words of thanks on social media, etc. All of which adds up over time of letting our hourly workers know that you care about them more than someone else will, and you should never underestimate the power of that feeling in retaining your workforce! Turns out, Marketing works! On average right now, organizations are spending 5-10X the amount on job advertising that they were pre-pandemic. Meaning, if you spent $500 a month running job ads to attract workers, you will need to spend $2500 to $5000 just to get the same amount of applicants! Still, this is the primary applicant attraction strategy that organizations still use to hire hourly workers. We post our jobs on job boards, social media, etc. and we hope someone will apply. For those who are spending about the same amount as we did two years ago, that is basically all you have is hope! Many organizations are beginning to use Programmatic Job Advertising tools. Programmatic Job Advertising is a sophisticated way to say we are letting the robots run our job ads, we aren’t making the decisions anymore! Turns out, the robots actually do a wonderful job at running job ads! Actually, programmatic technology has been around for decades but we’ve just recently started using it for job advertising. You know how you got to Nordstrom’s and look at a pair of shoes, but you’re not ready to buy. So, you then go to another site, like Facebook or something, and there’s an ad for those exact same shoes you just looked at! That’s programmatic, and it’s very powerful at getting you to buy. It works the same way for candidates. Programmatic puts your job posting in front of them where they are on the internet, not just at job sites, so your job posting gets viewed by many more possible candidates. On average we see organizations saving around 30% on their job advertising by using programmatic job advertising technology. Communicate with Hourly Candidates Their Way! We tend to build hiring processes around the way we work. If I’m a corporate recruiter, I’m sitting in front of my laptop or desktop all day. I’m comfortable working in that “environment”. 90% of our hourly workforce only access the internet, thus your jobs, from a mobile device, their phone. Yet almost all hourly application processes are built around desktop apply, not mobile. I ask recruiters, HR pros, etc. to constantly do one thing for me. Go over to the nearest McDonalds and just park in the lot. Logon to their free WIFI and then go apply to one of your jobs. What the vast majority find, is that is sucks! It’s difficult to navigate and takes to long to load, etc. This is exactly how your potential applicants feel as well. And they give up. On average, organizations lose about 60% of applicants to give up on trying to apply to you because the process takes too long or is confusing on mobile. I recently was working with a large manufacturing facility where the General Manager was forcing applicants to come in and fill out an application. This person had their organization’s best interest at heart, he really did! His feeling was, we have them walk-in, fill out the application, and we’ll immediately talk to them and offer them a job if they’re good. But, what many of us know who have GenZ or young Millennial kids know, almost none of them would ever walk into that building to apply. But, if you put a sign out front that said something like “Text – Hire Me to #897654” all of them wanting to work there would do that! In fact, we were able to show this GM just that when they went from having about 1 application a day to having 15-20 by just giving people an opportunity to communicate the way they want to through text messaging. I commonly tell groups I speak with that if you are not currently using text messaging to recruit candidates, you should be fired from your job. Across the board, not just with hourly, text messaging gets exponentially more response rate at every level of employee. You can tell me any kind of employee you try and hire, and I can show you that the response rate from email to text messaging is 7-10 times more for text messaging. From $15/hr hourly workers to $250,000 executives! Let Your Great Employees Hire for You! Sure, we all know that employee referrals are the best! When we take a look at source of hire statistics, and cost of hire statistics, employee referrals will always be in the top 3 of all companies. Employee referrals, on average, make better hires and are cheaper to hire then almost every other kind of hire. Now, the challenge is how do we do more of this? Yeah, we all have an employee referral program and for the most part we all think our employee referral programs suck. They are stale and boring, and no one really pays attention. Here are two recruiting strategies on how to make them better: Employer Brand Advocates – instead of having all of your employees be a part of employee referrals, create an exclusive team of employees who will help you get more hires. We find that most organizations can start really small, just a handful of employees who you would say “love” working at your company. You then feed them messaging they can share on their social feeds, and with friends and family. Instead of rewarding the final outcome of a referral, reward the behavior that leads to referrals. If an employee gives you contact of someone who might want to work for you, pay them $20 or a gas card. If that person shows up for an interview, pay the referring person $100. Etc. What I find is paying the behavior leads to far more employee referrals and your employees love the immediacy of the reward, which sparks other employees to get involved. Focus on Local! 80%+ of hourly hires live within five miles of their place of employment. This means we have to focus our recruiting efforts hyper-local! Billboards, yard signs, canvasing local schools and places of worship, etc. A best practice is to start in one-mile circumferences from where you need to hire someone and keep going out by one mile, looking for every possible place you might find a worker. Then figure out how do we let the people know we want them? Your success of hiring and keeping hourly workers has as direct correlation to how far and how long it takes for them to commute to your place of business. I recently spoke with a head of HR for a manufacturing company that paid to have a billboard put up directly across the street from a newly built Amazon warehouse. They knew Amazon was attracting so many people to come to work for them and spending a lot of money to get that traffic. They also knew Amazon can go through a lot of employees, so why don’t we let folks know they have other options. Hiring hourly workers is very hard, but we also sometimes over think it. Hiring someone that has to walk across the street to come to work for you versus someone who has to take three buses and a train, well, we all know who is probably going to be more consistent in making it into work! Let recruiting technology work for you. Make sure you are experimenting with conversational A.I./chatbots. At best, you might have someone focusing on recruiting 40 – 50 hours a week. When an hourly worker comes to apply to your website and has a question or a problem, there’s a great chance no one will be there to help them, and they’ll just go apply somewhere else. Having an always on chatbot on your website will increase your apply rates and capture contact data that will allow your recruiters to text these candidates the next day they are in the office. What I find is that most organizations actually don’t need more applicants. They just need to actually engage every applicant they have without bias. When we do testing where every applicant gets a full engagement and interview, we find that most organizations need about 50% of the applicants they have to fill their roles. One of the most valuable sources of applicants is the same database we ignore in our ATSs. Your ATS database might be the most underutilized resource for hiring that you have! We done a bunch of testing with organizations where we’ll take a list of one hundred previous applicants that applied but didn’t get hired and send out a nurture campaign using text messaging. From these campaigns we consistently see people coming back who are still interested and it creates high quality hires. The first step is to dig back into our databases and give some of these applicants a second chance! Start Swimming in some Different Pools! We all have some conscious and unconscious biases. When I dig into hiring data with an organization, we often see some common applicant pools we’ve just given up on. Sometimes it’s older people, sometimes it’s a minority or females in male dominated fields, we almost always see people with a prior record being ignored, even well after they paid their debt to society. It never works for force a manager to hire someone they don’t want to, but also we are often dealing with an “unconscious” bias. The manager doesn’t even know they are not selecting certain people. It can be difficult having these individual conversations, but it’s something we need to do. I find if we are not accusatory but use data to show that we have a gap in hiring, we can often to get managers to see the world in a different light and begin to open up their hiring pools, and most are pleasantly surprised by the talent they find. What we know is that doing the same thing we’ve been doing for the last decade, or longer, is not working. Every market, every industry will have continued challengers over the next few years to try and figure out how to fill their hourly roles. The organizations that continue to try new recruiting strategies and test out new and evolving technologies will have a foot up on the rest in this hyper-competitive talent world.

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Tim Sackett

Recruiting

You’re the Blackberry of Recruiting!

I remember the first time I got my first Blackberry phone! I was so excited, it was such a corporate status symbol! My first one was the Blackberry 5810 with the full keyboard where I could send emails from a phone! It was so awesome. My last Blackberry was the Pearl with the trackball! I loved that phone! Then came the iPhone and Blackberry died before it even knew it. Blackberry refused to believe that anyone would want more than what they were delivering with their phones. Power cell phone users are business people who only want and need office-type functionality. Super secure email. Texting. Calendar. Notes. Who the heck would want to search the world wide web on a phone!? Play games? Apps? Take pictures and video? Blackberry didn’t see the future. They were the market leader and only saw the past. By the time they figured out their error, it was too late and Apple and Android passed them by so fast, they could never catch up. You are the Blackberry of Recruiting! You died but you don’t know it yet. What are some ways to know if you are the Blackberry of Recruiting? You post and pray. I mean posting and praying is your primary recruiting strategy. You post a job and basically pray someone will apply. You refuse to believe that “your” candidates will respond, or even prefer, a text message over email. (Pro-Tip: Every level of candidate and salary range, prefers texting recruiters by a lot!) You have great talent in your ATS database, but every time you get an opening the first thing you do is post the job to see what “fresh” candidates are out there. You believe that a candidate should be willing to jump through your hoops “if they really want the job!” Any of this sound familiar? If it does, you might not be long for this recruiting world! How do you make sure you don’t become the Blackberry of Recruiting? First, you can’t ever get comfortable believing you have it figured out. Just because you get a lot of candidates doesn’t mean you’re great at recruiting, you might just have a great consumer brand. What happens if and when that fails? Or maybe you have a ton of applicants but the best talent isn’t applying. Great, you’re great at attracting the walking dead! Constantly question your process and test new ways you think might make it better. Can you change something to decrease the candidate drop-off rate? Is there a way to increase the number of applicants you’re getting from your best sources of hire? Make sure you are always reaching out to candidates to see how their experience is with your process. Blackberry’s biggest failure was not listening to their buyers and thinking they knew better. Right up until they lost their buyers! Don’t lose your buyers, your applicants, because you refuse to listen to them. Look into the future. Demo recruiting technologies on an ongoing basis. Stay on top of what the newest trends are, and how you can add those into your recruiting technology stack. Copy what others are doing that is working, don’t get caught up in making it your own way. Copy. Make it better. Repeat. I LOVED my Blackberry, right up to the moment that I didn’t. That is your candidate dilemma you must constantly be concerned with. They love you right now, but will they love next year when something better comes along?

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Tim Sackett

Recruiting

Quality of Hire Should Correlate to High Performance!

We have an obsession in talent acquisition about Quality of Hire (QoH). We try to tie everything we do to the fact if we do “this thing” it’s going to increase our QoH. If we just use this one source more, our QoH will be better. If we use this one assessment our QoH will be better. If we interview better our QoH will be better. Sound familiar?! The problem is, most of us don’t even really measure our quality of hire! We’ll measure our 90-day turnover and call it quality of hire, but just because someone stays for 90 days has zero correlation to whether they are actually a good hire or not. They just stayed around for 90 days! Our reality is quality of hire actually correlates to high performance. Meaning, if you hire better, the better higher, on average, should have higher performance. So, the only true way you can measure quality of hire is to correlate the performance of an employee to their hire, source, etc. This means you really don’t know your quality of hire until you have some sort of measurable performance from an employee you hire. Do you really mean Quality of Applicant and not Quality of Hire? What I find is most organizations actually mean Quality of Applicant, but use the term Quality of Hire. Quality of Applicant can be measured by a simple metric of what percentage of the applicants you forwarded onto a hiring manager does the hiring manager choose to interview? Example: A recruiter screens ten applicants and passed them onto the hiring manager. The hiring manager decides to interview five of the applicants. The QoA measure would be 50%. I get asked a lot about what level of QoA should an organization or recruiter strive to achieve. In my mind, if a recruiter is good at screening and has a great relationship with the hiring manager, that QoA should be 90%! There really should be very many reasons a hiring manager doesn’t interview someone I send them if we are both doing our jobs at a high level. As a recruiter, if I know the job and the type of candidate the hiring manager wants, and the hiring manager has told me everything I need to know, there really shouldn’t be any reason for them to turn down a candidate I send them. The problem is, most recruiters and hiring managers aren’t giving each other what they need to be successful at a 90-100% level. Quality of Applicant is a Recruiting Measure, Quality of Hire is Not! In most organizations, a Recruiter does not make the final candidate selection and that same Recruiter does not manage the onboarding, training, and performance of the employee. Thus, Quality of Hire is a Hiring Manager metric, not a recruiting metric. Almost all organizations get this wrong. Quality of Applicant is by far a better measure for recruiting and for measuring the recruiting function effectiveness. As a recruiter, if I’m sending candidates to a hiring manager that they don’t want to interview and hire, I’m not doing my job very well. QoA is a direct measure of how well a recruiter is doing. Okay, I hear you, “but, Tim, what about a recruiter who finds great candidates but the hiring manager is just super picky!?” You are still not doing the job! Part of the job of recruiting is not just finding great talent, but having a relationship with the hiring manager so you are not wasting valuable resources of the company. The better relationship you have, I guarantee you the fewer misses you’ll have when sending applicants to that hiring manager. What did we learn today? QoH correlates directly to employee performance, but doesn’t correlate at all to recruiter performance! QofA directly correlates to recruiter performance. Recruiter performance also correlates rather high to the positive relationship they have with the hiring managers they support.

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Tim Sackett

Recruiting Tactics

Subject Lines Guaranteed to Work

As recruiters, we love a great subject line! We love them because we have this belief that the subject line of our email or another type of message will get a candidate to open and reply. And actually, that’s true! There’s a lot of marketing research around why someone opens a message. The chart below shows why an individual makes the decision to open a message: This data makes complete sense, right? If you know the person, you are much more likely to open a message, and after that, the next main reason is what is being told to you in the subject line. The subject line should tell the recipient exactly why they should open the message or quickly just delete and move on. Scientifically based on the data above, I think I’ve created the most responded to subject line of all time! But it only works for me, I’m doubtful it would work for you! What is it? “Sackett” Yes, my last name in the subject line is by far the best subject line for a response that I use! Why does it work? Well, if you know me, then the data gives me a 45% shot you might open it. Also, if you don’t know me, someone just sent you their last name, which makes you think like you probably know me, but you forgot! Either way, the response rate I get with this super simple subject line is over 80%! Does this work for straight recruiting? Yes, but not at the same level as I’m getting, but it is worth you testing it out. This simple subject line works because it’s probably the opposite of what most people send. We put so much thought and effort into the subject line that often they sound like a recruiter or marketing or sales or mostly just something too close to spam! What are my other favorite recruiting subject lines? “Go Green!” – Okay, I’m a Michigan State Spartan fan, so if someone sent me a message with “Go Green,” I would 100% open it. So, “Go Green” isn’t really your subject line. It would be something similar for whatever college or sports team your candidate supports. How do you know what team they support? You do a bit of recruiting due diligence and figure it out! “I’ve got an outstanding career opportunity for you!” – Just kidding, this subject line sucks! Never use this! “This job pays $87,000” – This one works because even if the person makes more than $87,000, our curiosity wants to see who is paying this salary and where it’s at because we might know someone who isn’t making that much, and we want to pass it on to them. Famous song lyrics, movie quotes, etc., that the candidate would most likely recognize. – Again, takes a bit of recon work, but let’s say your candidate is a Star Wars fan. Use the subject line, “Do or do not. There is no try!” “I was referred to you by “pick a name” – Okay, this isn’t my favorite of the favs, but it works! Again, a quick social search of a candidate and you can easily come up with some names of friends, family, co-workers to make this a bit more personal. But, only use first names. So, “I was referred to you by Tim” can be really effective if they have a friend or associate named “Tim.” Now, when the person asks, which “Tim” referred you, you just say, “Oh, Tim in my office, a fellow recruiter I work with, found your profile.” Personalization is the key to great subject line open rates! It takes a little more work, but great recruiters put in a little bit of extra work to get great candidates to respond!

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Tim Sackett

Recruiting

You only have one job as a Recruiter!

As recruiters, we really only have one job. That job is to get a candidate to tell us “Yes” or “No.” Yes, I’m interested, please tell me more, or No, I’m not interested in the job you have, but here’s what I would be interested in if you ever have it available. When you break recruiting down to this simple premise, it doesn’t really seem that hard. The problem most recruiters run into is that they believe a non-answer is “No.” But it’s not. A non-answer is nothing. It’s neither yes nor no. It’s you better keep trying until I give you a real answer! The best recruiters I’ve ever worked with keenly understood this concept. The average recruiter gives up trying to contact a candidate after two tries. I sent Candidate A a text message and an email, and she didn’t reply, so that must mean they are not interested! What we’ve found is that top recruiters will go as many as 9 attempts to contact candidates they truly want to get to Yes or No. NINE! At nine attempts, the Yes or No rate jumps to around 90%. Now, imagine you have a list of 25 potential candidates. You force rank them for most desirable to least desirable. You do your “average” outreach of two attempts, and you get 3 out of the 25 to reply to you. The ranking of the three that replied is numbers 7, 15, and 24. You screen and send them on to your hiring manager with the belief, “we only hire the best talent!” Actually, you are trying to hire 7, 15, and 24 because you gave up on numbers 1-6, who were your best possible candidates, but they didn’t respond! The best recruiters in the world won’t stop until they’ve gotten around 70% of their top candidates to tell them they are either interested or not interested. Why, as recruiters, do we stop trying to contact candidates? We stop because we believe it’s rude. It’s rude to keep trying to contact someone who “clearly” isn’t interested if they didn’t reply back after two messages. This obviously is wrong, but it’s a giant psychological barrier for average and below-average recruiters. Now, before my European recruiting friends lose their minds, there are also cultural barriers as well. In Europe, especially, almost no recruiters go past one or two outreaches to candidates, as culturally the norm is we’ll try you once, and if you don’t respond, you must not be interested. By the way, I tease my European recruiting friends about this as well because I think this concept is very dated. My experience has been that for every candidate that we contact up to nine times who thinks we are stalking them, and there is another candidate who thanks us profusely for continuing our efforts. Out of one hundred candidates, the vast majority don’t have any issues and will eventually tell us, Yes, or No, a couple will tell us to stop stalking them, and a couple will thank us and apologize for not getting back sooner. This really all comes down to our belief within our recruiting departments do we really hire the best talent, or do we just hire the talent that responds to us. If you hire the best, you must truly go after the best and actually see if they are interested or not. If you just take only those who respond on your first or second outreach, you really aren’t hiring the best talent.

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Tim Sackett

Do Candidates Love to Get Text Recruiting Messages?

In the past ten years, there hasn’t been a bigger advocate, publicly, for text messaging candidates than myself. When recruitment text messaging software first hit the market I was all-in from day one. At this point, the data speaks for itself. As compared to other forms of messaging (email, LinkedIn Inmail, snail mail, smoke signals, etc.) text messaging gets at least 5-10x more open and replies than any other form of messaging. So, the answer to the title question has to be, yes, right?! Not so fast, my friends! At the beginning of 2021, I was struggling with a lot of the data around candidate experience (CX). While we’ve been focusing on CX for the better part of a decade, we haven’t really seen the numbers consistently in a productive way, and recently we’ve even seen candidate experience numbers drop. My thought was, maybe we are focused on the wrong thing. Maybe it’s not about their “experience” but simply about the “communication,” we deliver. We reached out to every single candidate we interviewed in 2020, thousands, and got over 1500 responses from these candidates. One of the basic, foundational questions we asked was “What form of communication do you prefer to receive from a recruiter about a potential job, as the first outreach?” Again, I assumed we would get very high response for “Text Message”, but in fact, over 85% actually said “Email”! Wait, what?! Yep, turns out, candidates actually don’t want you to text message them as a first response. Why? That was our immediate question when we saw the data, so we actually did some interviews to find out the “why”. Turns out, especially amongst GenZ and Millennials, text messaging is a very personal form of communication. “Hey! I don’t want you jumping into my DM’s if I don’t know you!” Basically, candidates were telling us until I know who you are and I’ve given you an indicator that I want to play along, you texting me seems like an invasion of my privacy! But, this just made me more perplexed because we all know what the data says about response rates. So, candidates tell me they don’t want me to send them a text message about a job, but even my own data shows that as a first outreach my own candidates overwhelmingly respond to text messaging to every other form of communication. What gives?! What we say and what we do, are often two different things! Yes, candidates claim to prefer email as the first form of contact, but they respond ten times more to text messaging than email as the first form of contact! Now, what are we supposed to do!? First, you keep doing what works! For mass outreach, my own team still sends text messages, but we also will A/B test emails at the same time. As you can expect, in 2021, text messaging still wins out by a large margin! But, we did find out that when we are reaching out one-on-one. So, recruiter to one candidate, for the first time, something even better works. For the first outreach to a candidate, when it’s one-on-one, a personalized email and personalized subject line get a higher response rate than a blind text message. It’s all about personalization. Starts with a great personalized subject line. I’m a Michigan State fan, so someone could use “Go Green!” and I’m most likely taking a look at that email. But, you can’t just stop the subject. You must personalize the entire message, and that is very time-consuming, but also, very effective. When can I jump into a candidate’s DMs?! Here’s the thing, once you have first contact, candidates actually prefer you text message them by a wide margin over every other form of messaging. And that desired form of communication doesn’t stop all the way up to the offer stage! It’s all about them feeling comfortable and giving you permission. I’ve been saying for a couple of years that if you do not use text messaging in recruiting you should be fired! I still stand by that, but I now have to make a small clarification around when and where is the best time to use text messaging. While it’s still the most responded to regardless of time, how you what to establish that relationship with hard-to-find talent, in the beginning, is key to text messaging success. Tim Sackett, is the CEO of HRUTech.com and author of the best-selling recruitment book, The Talent Fix. You can also read Tim at timsackett.com and fistfuloftalent.com. And listen to him on the HR Famous Podcast.

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Tim Sackett

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