Chris Russell (10)

Chris Russell

Recruiting

10 Recruiting Metrics to Watch

Recruiting metrics are a vital measurement of the effectiveness of a talent acquisition program. They speak to the performance of individual recruiters as well as that of the entire recruiting group. They guide the development of recruiting strategies and help talent acquisition professionals learn where they get the best results from their marketing spend. While large staffing teams track dozens of metrics, no recruiting group, no matter how small, can afford not to measure the most basic of them. Time to fill, cost of hire, source of hire, candidate diversity, and applicants per opening / per hire are among the most essential metrics and the ones most commonly used by recruiting teams. Ask any group of recruiters and you’ll quickly get a dozen more metrics, all of them valid, useful and critical. Several years ago, Jibe, a recruiting technology company since acquired by iCIMS, surveyed recruiters about the metrics they most used. In addition to the ones we mentioned, the others that made the top 10 list were: candidate experience, retention, offer acceptance rate, quality of hire and vacancies vs. positions filled. As much as these metrics might seem like a rock-solid, objective measurement, the reality is that they are each subject to some interpretation. At many companies, the cost of hire metric is what is spent advertising the position and any travel expenses as well as background checks and other direct costs. The more sophisticated measurements include recruiter salary and office overhead, the loss of productivity attributable to the vacant position and other indirect expenses. A decade ago, the Society for Human Resource Management developed a set of specifications for calculating cost per hire so thorough it runs three dozen pages and is an ANSI standard. How ever your team calculates the various metrics, as long as you do it consistently, they’re as essential to the recruiting function as financial reports are to investors. Common Recruiting Metrics Here’s a brief look at the other nine most commonly tracked metrics and the percentage of recruiters using each, according to the Jibe survey: Source of hire (57%) – Knowing where your hires are coming helps you make better decisions on where to spend your recruiting budget. Time to hire (50%) – Not only does this provide insight to the overall efficiency of the hiring process, it lets you know, which positions take longer so you know where to place an emphasis in building our talent pipeline. Applicants per opening / hire (42%) – These two measures work with the source of hire metric to evaluate the effectiveness of individual job postings and sites and recruitment marketing campaigns. Candidate experience (41%) – More than ever, the impression applicants have of your recruiting process – from the job posting through the interview process – is essential. A bad experience can damage the company’s brand and negatively impact the quality of candidates who apply. Measuring this is done by surveying candidates. Retention (38%) – This may not be an obvious performance indicator for the recruiting group, but it offers insights into the quality of the selection process, the accuracy of the job description and visibility into other aspects of hiring. Most often retention is measure for the first several months and up to a year after hire. Offer acceptance per hire (37%) – When the percent of candidates accepting an offer is low or is declining, it’s a signal that there may be a problem with the comp package. When examined in conjunction with the time to fill, it may show that the candidates you want to hire are accepting other offers because the hiring decision is taking too long. Quality of hire (36%) – LinkedIn last year found this the most important metric., used by 48%. The reason should be obvious: the best and most talented hires have a disproportionate positive impact on productivity. It’s also the most difficult to measure, taking months or even longer before it’s clear how good a new hire actually is. However, it’s worth making the effort, because great hires make hiring managers happy and demonstrate the value of your recruiting process. Vacancies vs. positions filled (36%) – This is a measure of the productivity of the talent acquisition team. The sooner positions are filled, the lower the percentage. Fewer vacancies mean lower costs for the company and better productivity overall. Diversity (25%) – The LinkedIn survey found 34% of recruiting professionals today track the diversity of candidates and hires and 56% declare the metric will very useful in the coming years. In addition to the strong social value of a diverse workforce, studies show the positive impact diverse teams have on innovation and revenue. This list is just a sample of the wide variety of metrics recruiting teams used to measure their performance. If the Jibe survey were to be conducted today, there’s no doubt many of these measures would still make the top 10. As the LinkedIn survey demonstrated, the percentages of talent acquisition teams that monitor them would change. LinkedIn’s Future of Recruiting report says the two most significant metrics in today’s world are quality of hire and sourcing channel effectiveness, a measure like source of hire. Knowing where the top talent was sourced, doesn’t just improve the recruiting process, as LinkedIn notes, “It speaks to the long-term business impact of new employees — and your recruiters.” ### John Zappe, Reporting ###

Continue reading

Chris Russell

Recruiting

Dealing with Today's Recruitment Challenges

What are employers thinking when it comes to the recruitment challenges of today’s crazy job market? A lot of companies are scrambling to fill positions and so they have started to resort to desperate measures, now offering free tuition (Wal-Mart, Target etc) to big signing bonuses of $1k-$2k-$3k or more. Eric Smith, CEO of applicant tracking system TalentCare told me this on my podcast recently. “We tell people today that you need three things with one thing underlying in order to compete. One is you have to know what’s competitive in terms of compensation that changes quickly. Sometimes it’s going up, but pretty soon when things level off and go back down. So if you don’t have a mechanism to understand what local compensation for this role, that location is, you need to get one fast. The second thing that we say is that you really need to invest in your brand in today’s markets. Retention comes with having a clear story, but having that brand laid out is critical to attracting applicants.” Boost Your Recruiting Speed He also said employers need to look at the underlying data. “It gives you the ability to make recruiting process much, much better, right? So people don’t always think of recruiting as a process, but data can inform how you can make that better. So, as an example, I ask people all the time, do you have a report that tells you every time a new applicant comes in, it looks like good applicant qualified. meets all the criteria. Do you have a report that tells you whether your hiring manager or recruiter reached out to that person within two hours by texting you guys, if you don’t have that report, then you can’t possibly know if you’re meeting best practice, that’s best practice in today’s market. So recruiting processes is something that people overlook.” T-mobiles Director of Talent Acquisition Sheri Ratliff told me over Zoom that they are trying new channels. “We’re getting very creative with the marketing, with the places we are finding talent. That includes looking at new talent communities specific to underrepresented talent with just sites and marketplaces that we haven’t gone before… even apprenticeships. Those are things that we probably wouldn’t have considered or not moved as quickly on, but we are now because we know there’s talent that does want to work. We just need to find them.” Get Creative with Recruitment Marketing Gina Alioto from Symphony Talent points to recruitment marketing. She told me on my podcast that “we know that technology, particularly recruitment marketing platforms and CRM is a significant investment for organizations, and it’s not only the cost of the platform itself, but also all of the time and resources that it takes to implement. And then on top of that, if it’s not the right system or not implemented the right way, the costs of having to go back and change all of that plus missed opportunities, all the while are huge.” “No matter where you are in your journey, we’re all experiencing change to some degree. And we also know that top of mind for all of your listeners right now probably is that there are over 10 million jobs open, which means there are about 1 million more jobs open than active job seekers. So for everyone it’s very challenging, more than ever to find, attract and retain talent right now. And technology is going to help you do that better. In fact, 74% of organizations, the spend for HR tech increasing, but technology can also significantly complicate already complex situations. And adoption seems to be a barrier to achieving all that the technology has to offer. Um, in fact, 82% of organizations are struggling with adoption challenges”, Alioto added. Tough Challenges Ahead By most estimates the labor shortage isn’t likely to abate anytime soon. In iHire’s latest talent retention report we see a peek at why; 1.) Voluntary employee turnover is up 6.5% year over year. 31.4% of employees left a job voluntarily in the past year, compared to 24.9% who said the same in iHire’s 2020 Talent Retention Report. While 6.5% is not a staggering jump, resignations are occurring at a greater rate than terminations or layoffs – 20.2% of survey participants left a job involuntarily in the past year. 2.) Workers are changing careers. 21.1% of respondents said they’ve made a major career change in the past year (i.e., they left a job to pursue a completely different industry or career path versus simply changing their place of employment). This trend is likely propelled by employees in industries most impacted by COVID-19 who are reevaluating their career goals and eyeing sectors promising greater stability. 3.) Salary is the top motivator for leaving (and staying). 70.9% of survey participants said they would leave a job due to unsatisfactory pay, while 77.9% said a pay raise would convince them to stay with their employer if they received a better job offer. For this report’s third consecutive year, salary is the No. 1 factor in leaving or staying at a job. Suffice to say these are challenging times to be a recruitment marketer. Employers must remain vigilant to the latest trends, speed their hiring funnels and cultivate every channel they can find for talent.

Continue reading

Chris Russell

Recruiting

So You Want to Be a Recruitment Coordinator

In the world of talent acquisition, recruiters are the ones getting all the attention, but the heart of a busy department are the recruitment coordinators. Recruitment coordinators, sometimes called staffing coordinators, are the ones keeping the proverbial trains running on time. They juggle so many tasks that the top requirements you see on a recruitment coordinator job description are organizational skills and good time management. Not far behind are excellent communication skills, multitasking and teamwork. Not that long ago, most of what a recruitment coordinator did was clerical and administrative. They screened job applicants, scheduled candidate interviews and arranged their travel, and tracked open job requisitions. As newer, AI-enabled applicant tracking systems and candidate relationship management tools took on some of the routine clerical tasks, especially such time-consuming ones as scheduling, screening and candidate tracking, the job of a recruitment coordinator broadened. While today’s recruitment coordinators still have responsibility to ensure administrative functions are being handled, the role is likely now incorporate planning of recruitment strategies and campaigns. Recruitment Coordinator Tasks At companies hiring dozens or more workers a month, a recruitment coordinator may work with HR business partners and hiring managers directly to anticipate openings and update job descriptions to stay ahead of developing skills and talent needs. They may be charged with analyzing recruitment data to track the department’s progress toward meeting its goals. As part of that responsibility, a recruitment coordinator may be expected to identify and report on the key performance indicators (KPIs). Ensuring government required reports, such as the annual EEO-1 survey to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and compliance with company and government hiring laws and policies may be delegated to a recruitment coordinator. Historically, the job of recruitment coordinator was a stepping-stone to an HR generalist or recruiting job. It still is. Recruitment coordinators routinely are called upon to help source and recruit candidates, especially passive candidates and assist in building talent pipelines. Frequently, they manage those pipelines, staying in touch with the candidates there by newsletter and email. Particularly at smaller companies, a recruitment coordinator may find themself making job offers, handling the onboarding paperwork of new hires and sometimes even conducting new employee orientation. It’s not unusual for a recruitment coordinator to also be an event organizer. For a company large enough to hold its own job fairs, it’s often recruitment coordinators who plan, arrange and oversee the event. They are as likely to do the recruiting at job fairs and on campus as schedule them. Because of the breadth of responsibilities, most recruitment coordinators have at least an undergraduate degree. According to the job board Zippia, 73% of recruiting coordinators have a bachelor’s degree; 10% have a masters. ZipRecruiter says a degree in HR, psychology, business administration or related field is preferred. Recruitment Coordinator Salaries The salary range for the job is broad. Payscale puts the median at $50,246 with a high of about $67,000. At the lower end, around $37,000, the job is largely, but not exclusively, clerical. So far in this article we’ve discussed corporate recruitment coordinators. That’s where most of the jobs are. However, a few sports teams and many college athletic departments have recruitment coordinators. A college athletic recruitment coordinator shares many of the same responsibilities as a coordinator in a corporate job. But instead of recruiting employees, the job involves working with college athletic prospects, helping to identify promising young players, arranging their campus visits – and their parents’ visits – monitoring recruitment practices to comply with the school’s policies and NCAA rules and budgeting. SportsCareerFinder says a college athletic recruitment coordinator is “among the hardest working members of the staff and commits very long hours to the job. Responsibilities range from on field coaching to evaluation of talent.” It can also be particularly lucrative. At the largest schools with top teams, the job is exclusively about recruiting and carries a six-figure salary. Written by John Zappe

Continue reading

Chris Russell

Recruitment Marketing

Job Aggregators - The Big List

Back in 2004 Indeed and SimplyHired launched our industry’s first job aggregators. Since that time, numerous players have emerged to take advantage of this trend. The end result is that jobs are now everywhere. Heck even Google got into the market back in 2017 with the Google for Jobs service. And Indeed eventually bought SimplyHired to remove them as a competitive threat. In between, there are seemingly dozens of so called job aggregators that want to help employers find talent. We’ll cover some of the biggest in this blog but let’s take a look at the difference between job boards and aggregators. Job Aggregators vs Job Boards Traditional job boards are marketplaces that simply allow employers to post jobs related to a certain niche: MarketingJobs.com, SupplyChainCareers.com etc. A job aggregator has always been a search engine first by indexing all the jobs from their client base and sometimes other job boards. Many aggregators now allow employers to post individual jobs in an appeal to small business owners. Job boards also now can scrape your jobs and are often backfilled with listings from players like Ziprecruiter. So the two channels have certainly merged features and functionality over the years. So should you use job aggregators. The answer is usually yes but here’s some reasons why; Comprehensive Search: Job aggregators server ever part of the job market not just a niche like a typical job board. They are a huge database of jobs. More Efficient: Job seekers love aggregators since it makes their search more efficient vs having to go to multiple sites. More Jobs: Because aggregators list so many jobs candidates can discover jobs they normally may have missed. It levels the playing field for small businesses. See Who’s Hiring: Aggregators are also a great research tool for staffing firms to see’s who’s hiring. Indeed even has a trend section to see which job keywords are trending. Top Job Aggregators Here is a list of the largest and most popular job aggregators: Indeed is the largest job aggregators in the world (by a large margin). Ziprecruiter is a ubiquitous player in the space that does a ton of advertising in order to generate traffic. Juju.com has comprehensive search results for millions of jobs found on thousands employer career portals, recruiter websites, job boards, and other employment sites all over the Internet. CareerJet.com is also similar to Indeed, but is available in more countries and in more languages than SimplyHIred. LinkedIn Jobs is more than a career social media site, it also aggregates job postings. GetWork (formerly Linkup) is an aggregator that pulls jobs exclusively from company websites. Talent.com is a global job aggregator with sites in 60+ countries around the world. Upward.net will post your jobs to 100+ other job sites. Jooble is an international job search website used daily by millions of people in 71 countries. Adzuna is another global player in the aggregator world. Also big in the UK. Maximizing Your Job Aggregators There are certain things you can do to maximize your use of these sites. Keep your job titles simple and use the right keywords. List your keywords multiple times throughout the description. Ensure your ATS has the proper XML feed so aggregators can scrape your data properly. Get listed on Google for Jobs (its free)

Continue reading

Chris Russell

Human Resources

HR Job Requirements: Business Knowledge

What does it take to get a job in human resources? What are the HR job requirements? Surprisingly, there are many paths to landing a career in HR. Unlike other professions where a college degree in the practice area is almost obligatory, HR job requirements vary widely the Society for Human Resource Management tells us. “There’s not a clear path because HR’s so broad,” Catherine Preim, an HR manager, says in a SHRM article about landing an entry-level HR job. Though HR job requirements depend greatly on how a company views the human resources function, the one nearly unanimous requirement is a college degree, but not necessarily in human resources. A degree in a related field such as business, industrial-occupational psychology or finance may open more doors, especially when accompanied by classes or a minor in HR. What You Need to Land an HR Job Besides a degree, HR job requirements typically include work experience. An internship or two is usually enough for an entry-level HR job. For higher-level positions, on-the-job experience as an HR generalist or assistant is required. The exception is for HR specialist roles as in compensation, benefits or talent acquisition. Even then, “a talent specialist with a generalist rotation is far more valuable,” says Marc Effron, founder and president of The Talent Strategy Group, an HR consultancy. HR job requirements for managers and certainly for directors give the edge to those HR professionals with an advanced degree. There’s little evidence that a PhD is helpful. A master’s degree is. And it’s even more helpful in landing an HR leadership role if that master’s is in a business discipline. “Increasingly the trait that determines who gets promoted is a demonstrated, intimate knowledge of the business,” write HR consultants Michelle Vitus and Patty Woolcock. Notes HR consultant Sarah Daren, “You don’t need to know everything about running a business, but HR has its hand in every department in an organization. Having a working knowledge of how a business is run can really help you to be more effective in human resources.” Top HR Job Requirements The HR job requirements for a manager position will also want 3-5 years of HR experience. Indeed.com, the world’s largest recruitment marketplace, says some companies prefer a candidate with management experience. That could come from being a team lead or lower-level supervisor. Among the other HR job requirements for managers, according to Indeed, are the ability to communicate and listen well, leadership and a strong grasp of basic employment law. An advanced degree is not always necessary for this first-level management position. The next step is HR director. At a modest sized company, the HR director is the top people manager, usually reporting to a vice president, often in finance. For a director, as for an HR VP or a CHRO, an advanced degree is one of the key HR job requirements. Some smaller companies will promote an experienced and effective manager with only a four-year degree into the director role. But to move to a larger organization, an advanced degree should be considered a necessity. For the top HR jobs, not only is broad and extensive experience in human resources necessary so is astute business acumen and the ability to think strategically about the role of talent to improve business outcomes. “HR leaders coming up through the ranks these days are more commercially minded, not just tuned into talent management but business strategy as well,” says executive search leader Mark Oppenheimer. Speaking with HRCI, the Human Resources Certification Institute, Denise Caleb, executive vice president and chief transformation officer at Talent Plus said, “It is critical that HR professionals advance their business acumen, as well as teach and demonstrate to the business how to best care for their employees, who will in turn better service their customers, clients and/or patients.” Adds Effron, who places senior HR leaders, in today’s HR job requirements, “There’s strong demand for the type of strategic, influential, practical talent leader that creates a true difference in the business.” Written by John Zappe

Continue reading

Chris Russell

Recruiting Technology

Mining Your Applicant Tracking Software for Talent

There’s gold in your applicant tracking software. It’s called talent. Disguised as silver and bronze, these are the job seekers who almost got hired the last time. They were edged out by a candidate with a bit more experience, an extra skill or maybe because they had a firmer handshake or were an internal referral. Now a year or two later, these runners-up have more experience. They’ve enhanced their skills and picked up others. They’ve tackled new and likely even more challenging projects than when they were first interviewed. And you know they wanted to join your organization. Especially in this tight labor market, they should be the first candidates to be considered. But they won’t be. Most recruiters never search their applicant tracking software, so they’ll never find the gold candidates waiting there. Several years ago, a survey of some 8,000 companies discovered that the resumes in their ATS might as well have gone into the trash. Not only did two-thirds of the companies have no idea how many candidates were in their applicant tracking software, a shocking 98% never made a hire from there. Rediscover Your Talent If that survey were conducted today, the percentage of recruiters who search the ATS for candidates would be higher. Credit that to the intense competition for talent and, at the largest companies, the candidate pipeline building. Still, at most organizations recruiters never think first, or at all, of searching the ATS. Why is that? Habit, born of the difficulty of searching applicant tracking software. Without training and at least some search skills, recruiters find it easier to send a job posting to job boards and the company career site. Applicant tracking software may have become more versatile over the years, but searching the candidate resumes takes time and, for most systems, a good grasp of what it takes to search with precision. Sending a stock job description out into the world takes seconds. Writing about the search shortcomings of applicant tracking software, recruitment author and marketer Travis Scott said, “They’re pretty awful for nearly everything except being a database.” Yet, as he notes, that database is “a gold mine of candidates that could become a valuable competitive advantage. Most companies won’t leverage this resource. Not because it’s impossible, but because it’s difficult.” Fortunately, today’s applicant tracking software now has artificial intelligence designed in. Instead of being limited to searching by titles, years of experience or keywords, AI enabled systems can extract all candidates matching a job description. If interview scheduling and reporting are part of the applicant tracking software – a feature most systems now include – finding your runners up is easier than ever before. Search Your Applicant Tracking Software There are also third-party AI tools that will search the entire web and your ATS, compiling profiles on the candidates they source and scoring each. As powerful as these tools are, they’re only as accurate as the information they find. If the resumes of your silver and bronze runners-up haven’t been updated, they may get missed in a search. This is why Scott and Jennifer Roeslmeier, senior digital marketing and brands manager at Automated Business Designs, say staying in touch with the best candidates is so critical. Talent acquisition professionals agree that building pipelines of candidates should be something every company does. Segment them by skills or job function so you know which pipeline to tap when an opening arises. Keep them engaged by regularly sending newsletters of useful company and industry news and periodically having them update their resume. Candidate relationship management (CRM) software allows you to automate the workflow and will schedule mailings into the future. Applicant tracking software can do some of this, though a CRM makes the process simpler and more automatic. Developing pipelines and staying engaged with your best candidates, especially those who almost got the job, gives you a competitive advantage. This talent rediscovery helps you win the war for passive talent. Says Bennett Sung, a recruitment technologist and marketer, “You are sitting on a metaphorical goldmine. Without a strategy for candidate rediscovery, segmentation, and engagement, you will never know its full worth. In today’s tight talent market, employers can’t afford to lose out on any candidates — especially not those already in their pipelines. “By combining the right technology with a curated content strategy that accounts for candidate segments, you’ll be able to keep the pipeline flowing.” Written by John Zappe

Continue reading

Chris Russell

Human Resources

Annual Reviews Aren’t Worth the Effort

The season of good cheer and annual reviews is fast approaching. And that may be the last time you see those two phrases in the same sentence. No one ever looked forward to the annual review ritual. Not managers – 95% of them are dissatisfied with the way they are conducted; 58% say they serve no purpose. Not HR professionals – 90% believe them inaccurate. Nor employees — 87% find them ineffective; 55% say they have no effect on performance. Even CEOs agree. Only 6% think performance appraisals are useful. Since so few believe the annual review process is effective or serves a valuable purpose, why do so many companies still conduct them? The short answer is because they always have. Annual Reviews Need a Reboot Formal performance reviews began with the military for promotion purposes. Business adopted the concept, tying raises to worker performance. Since annual raises most often took effect in January, performance reviews became an end-of-year ritual. Once nearly ubiquitous, in the last decade companies have been rapidly abandoning the annual review. In 2016, Work Human found 82% of employers conducted annual reviews. By 2019, that percent was barely a majority at 54%. Over the last 20 years, and especially since Adobe became the first large company to give up on the annual review, corporate leaders have come to accept they aren’t just ineffective in improving performance, they too often have the opposite effect. Studies show even supposedly positive rankings can have a demoralizing effect. Among the myriad of reasons why the annual review is falling out of favor, the most obvious is that they deal with past performance, surprising employees who learn for the first time in November or December the work they’ve done all year long is not as good as they thought. Megan Krause, director of content at the performance marketing firm Investis Digital, told the Society of Human Resource Management, “I’ve found annual reviews to be, by nature, one-sided and nerve-wracking for the employee. Their pattern is typically, ‘Here, let me review everything about you and your work performance for the last 12 months. We have one hour.’” Annual Reviews are Prone to Bias Because most of us have trouble remembering what we did last week let alone 10 months ago, the ratings and evaluations in annual reviews rarely reflect an entire year’s efforts. This recency bias causes managers to give undue emphasis to performance in the last few months, which may undervalue or overvalue an employee’s actual contribution. An article in the Harvard Business Review puts it this way: “With their heavy emphasis on financial rewards and punishments and their end-of-year structure, [annual reviews] hold people accountable for past behavior at the expense of improving current performance and grooming talent for the future, both of which are critical for organizations’ long-term survival.” Annual reviews are also prone to another type of bias. Management consultant Marcus Buckingham says the “Idiosyncratic Rater Effect” influences the annual review ratings to such a large extent that the process effectively is more about the manager than the employee. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, leadership expert Samuel A. Culbert said that despite the appearance a numerical rating scale is objective, “In almost every instance what’s being ‘measured’ has less to do with what an individual was focusing on in attempting to perform competently and more to do with a checklist expert’s assumptions about what competent people do.” Despite their shortcomings, few propose eliminating performance reviews completely. Instead, most HR leaders and management experts now embrace more frequent “check-in” meetings between managers and workers. Adobe replaced the annual review in 2012 with quarterly check-ins that allow both manager and employee to give feedback, discuss expectations and plan future development. Deloitte, Accenture, Microsoft, GE and dozens of other companies followed suit, substituting formal monthly or quarterly meetings as well as more frequent check-ins; Deloitte insists on weekly check-ins. The results of what is sometimes called “continuous feedback” are generally positive. WorkHuman found that at companies where check-ins and feedback meetings are held at least monthly, three-quarters of workers are engaged. With weekly check-ins, 47% are highly engaged. The transition, as Gallup notes, isn’t necessarily easy or without problems. Managers need to be trained in how to conduct effective one-on-one meetings. It’s also not enough to provide feedback. Managers must be able to mentor and coach their team, helping each member achieve the goals they set in these check-ins. “It can be challenging for some managers to transition to this new style of management, and moreover the continuous style of performance review requires more time and energy from managers long-term,” says the HR technology company Cornerstone. Though “No evaluation system can create great managers and engage employees on its own,” says Gallup. But, better than the annual review, “They lay the foundation for a great conversation.” Written by John Zappe

Continue reading

Chris Russell

Recruiting Tactics

Employers Using Social Media for Hiring

Social media is so pervasive today that it is seeping into many aspects of the hiring process. While at the HR technology conference last week I even discovered a new social media background check company called LifeBrand that wants to help your employees clean up their social media posts. They offer a service as benefit to help your employees remove cringeworthy content from their social media pages easy and safe. But we know social media and hiring goes deeper than that. Many employers use it to screen and vet candidates. ModernHire an enterprise hiring platform recently released new research revealing that social media is not a valid or predictive hiring tool, cautioning recruiters on the risks of incorporating it into their hiring practices and platforms. Risks of Hiring with Social Media A recent whitepaper, What Does the Science Say: Social Media in Hiring, features a study conducted by Modern Hire’s team of advanced-degree industrial-organizational psychologists and data scientists, who set out to understand the validity of social media as a hiring tool by investigating whether any relevant information from a candidate’s LinkedIn profile is related to on-the-job performance. Specifically, Modern Hire’s study focused on job candidates in sales positions, measuring success on the job with employees’ sales performance metrics. With few exceptions, Modern Hire’s research results suggest that an employee’s LinkedIn profile elements are not strongly correlated with their sales performance metrics, meaning using LinkedIn profiles for candidate selection and vetting is not shown to be predictive of candidates’ on-the-job performance. “Social media is increasingly being leveraged in the hiring process without much policy or guidance around it,” said Eric Sydell, Ph.D. and EVP of Innovation at Modern Hire. “Our latest research demonstrates that, at least at this time, using social media in the hiring process offers little to no scientific value, and can even have an adverse impact on candidates during the recruiting and hiring process.” Social Media Hiring Bias While using social media as a hiring tool can be an innovative way to engage with candidates, it can also introduce bias into the hiring process. Many social media platforms contain protected class information, and as a result, using social media for anything beyond identifying prospective candidates –– especially when it comes to the evaluation and selection stages –– increases the risk of unconscious bias and adverse impact in the hiring process. Additionally, many candidates are not aware that their social media posts will be used by recruiters and hiring managers as part of the hiring evaluation process. With the exception of LinkedIn, prominent social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram were built for personal –– not professional –– use, and it is not clear whether candidates intend for potential employers to use this information in hiring situations. As an alternative to leveraging social media in the hiring process, Modern Hire’s research suggests that recruiters should focus on using unbiased hiring practices that start with quality data, as well as predictive hiring tools that are validated and fair. “It’s difficult to predict what the future may hold for the use of social media in hiring,” said Mike Hudy, Ph.D. and Chief Science Officer at Modern Hire. “With the rapid, constant evolution in social media functionality and user preferences, practices that may be fair and legally defensible today could become outdated virtually overnight. It’s important to choose hiring strategies and technologies that are scientifically proven to improve hiring experiences for candidates and results for companies.” From Tik-tok to Twitter, employers need to proceed with caution using these tools to evaluate candidates. Similarly employees need to be aware of what they post on these channels so a tool like what LifeBrand is offering employers might be an interesting benefit to give your employees to help them avoid a bad social media reputation.

Continue reading

Chris Russell

Human Resources

The Role of the HR Business Partner

You’ve heard the term HR business partner. You may even have that role at your company. But what is an HR business partner does and how is the role different from other HR professionals? The Society for Human Resource Management describes an HR business partner as “responsible for aligning business objectives with employees and management in designated business units.” A simpler definition comes from SHRM columnist and HR author Martin Yate who says an HR business partner is “a senior individual contributor who supports and collaborates with one or more of the organization’s managers.” Where other HR professionals handle all manner of administrative tasks like compensation, benefits administration and company policies, an HR business partner is tasked with helping individual departments and their leaders and supervisors with managing and developing their team to best achieve the business goals of the company. The role combines a high degree of strategic thinking with the ability to craft and implement solutions to talent management challenges. An HR business partner doesn’t have a supervisory role, instead works collaboratively with managers, coaching them and providing performance management advice. They also evaluate skills, anticipate future needs and help to retain and hire the best talent. What do HR Business Partners Do? In some ways the role is similar to what HR generalists and managers do. There is overlap, especially in smaller organizations where generalists wear multiple hats. The difference is that HR generalist and managers spend most of their time focused on operational matters and managing the HR staff. Business professor and HR thought leader first suggested what became the HR business partner in his 1997 book Human Resource Champions. He argued that human resources has four roles: Administrative Expert; Employee Champion; Change Agent; Strategic Partner. An individual might fill just one role, more often they would fill multiple roles. At the time, HR was still emerging from its “personnel office” past. The notion of being a strategic partner to the company and more directly to individual units and managers was innovative and appealing. Large organizations took the suggestions literally, creating the business partner role, supported by HR specialists in a center of excellence and service centers to handle administrative matters. Ten years after the book was published, Ulrich wrote in HR Magazine that “Being a business partner may be achieved in many HR roles.” He explained, “Instead of measuring process (for example, how many leaders received 40 hours of training), business partners are encouraged to measure results (for example, the impact of the training on business performance).” Since that article was published, Ulrich says the role of HR business partner has evolved so much it should now be thought of as HR business partner 2.0. He list 13 “pivots” in the job. For example, in describing who HR’s customers are, he says, “HR stakeholders have evolved from internal (employees, line managers, organization) to external (customers, investors, community).” Ulrich’s pivots can be seen in organizations of all sizes. Even in smaller organizations the HR generalists recognize the need to take a holistic view of the company’s needs. HR’s Reliance on Business Partners Large organizations have expanded their reliance on HR business partners, though many, as a McKinsey analysis found, still “get dragged into transactional and operational issues. In large measure, this occurs because most HRBPs retain some operational role.” To achieve the strategic influence and success Ulrich first proposed more than 20 years, HR business partners need to access all the tools of an HR professional and have the business acumen to understand financial reports and balance sheets, market challenges and customer needs. McKinsey, a global business consultancy, proposes renaming the job “Talent Value Leader” to emphasize the “different set of responsibilities and accountabilities.” Whether they’re a talent value leader or HR business partner, McKinsey concludes that the job today must “blend talent, business and financial experience to be able to identify which talent levers can yield the most business value.” John Zappe Reporting

Continue reading

Chris Russell

About Emissary

Emissary is a candidate engagement platform built to empower recruiters with efficient, modern communication tools that work in harmony with other recruiting solutions.

Book a Demo

Stay in the loop!

Subscribe to our bi-weekly newsletter and keep up to date with the latest Recruiting and HR tips and trends.

By clicking send you’ll receive occasional emails from us.

Ready to speed up your hiring process?

Start texting candidates and get better results today.
Book a Demo