Resources
Recruiting Technology
3 min read
How to Make Google For Jobs Work For You
With the majority of job seekers beginning their search on Google, no employer can afford to ignore the opportunity to post their openings to Google For Jobs. Its been said that up to 80% of all job searches start on the search engine. This free job listing tool gets as many as 150 million searches each month. And that’s just in the U.S. Indeed, which is the most heavily trafficked job board in the world, counts about 250 million monthly job searchers worldwide. The numbers alone are a reason for employers to submit their jobs to Google. Casting a wide net in this competitive hiring environment only increases the chances of attracting candidates. The phrase ‘jobs near me’ is actually of the most popular searches on Google. But more than just numbers, Google’s emphasis on user experience and its search prowess make it simple for job seekers to zero in on exactly the jobs they want. That benefits companies because the candidates that apply have targeted the job and the company with a precision few other job boards can match. When Google For Jobs was launched in 2017, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai said the goal was to “better connect employers and job seekers.” To that end, Google added search filters to so finely tune a search that job seekers can narrow down openings by the length of the commute. A search that might start as generically as “retail jobs near me” can be filtered for only certain companies, location, title, skills, date of the posting, and whether the job is 2 miles, 15 miles or anywhere. That level of filtering and search matching, unrivaled by most commercial job sites, makes Google For Jobs as useful for employers with only a few jobs as for large enterprises with thousands of openings a month. So valuable is Google for Jobs that with the exception of Indeed, job boards and staffing companies send their listings to Google. To make searching even more job seeker friendly, Google For Jobs is prioritizing listings where job seekers go directly to an application without an intermediate step to register. In announcing its “directApply” feature, Google also said it won’t allow content from career sites that spam their pages with obstructive text and images, excessive and distracting ads, or content that doesn’t add any value to the job posting or is grammatically incorrect. ATS vendors should take note because Google may penalize you after October 1st 2021 for not letting candidates apply immediately rather than forcing them to login or go through other hoops before they can submit a resume. Participating in Google For Jobs requires an employer or other contributor to code their job postings according to Google’s specific formatting requirements before uploading them. Complying with this schema can be complicated. However, most of the leading applicant tracking systems now do this automatically. Job boards also do the same, hoping to benefit from the additional job seeker traffic Google For Jobs sends. As attractive as Google For Jobs is, the tricky part is getting a job to place high up in the search results. That’s where search engine optimization is important and Google’s famed algorithms come in. They take into account a number of factors including how many of the schema’s properties are included and how specific the posting is. The ability for a candidate to directly apply for the job will rank a job much higher than a similar one without that capability. Even with a high ranking in the search results, there’s no guarantee an employer’s career site will be listed among the places a candidate can chose to go to apply. Since it’s common for a job posting to be distributed to several sites all of which may send it to Google, those from sites that best comply with the editorial content guidance are most likely to be listed as an application destination. That means Google won’t just look at the job posting, but will also weigh the value of each site submitting a job. Employers who want to benefit from the job seeker traffic and the visibility Google For Jobs can provide should do whatever housecleaning is needed to comply with the editorial guidance. Improving the candidate experience on your site not only will aid your chances of ranking high up on Google For Jobs, but it will make you a more attractive employer to candidates no matter how they get to you. ### John Zappe Contributed
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Recruiting Tactics
3 min read
How to Host a Virtual Career Fair?
Well before the Covid pandemic, virtual job fairs were gaining on their live counterparts. Since Covid, these events have surged in popularity, so much so that Brazen, a leading provider of virtual recruiting events, says there are now five times as many virtual job fairs each week. And why not? The only difference between a live hiring event and a virtual career fair is the buzz from other interviews and the handshake and eye contact between recruiter and job seeker. More than making up for that is the convenience and cost effectiveness. No traffic and parking hassles for candidates who can “drop in” when they want and interview from home. For employers, the advantages are even greater. Virtual hiring events are far less expensive to host. They can run over multiple days and many more candidates can be accommodated. When you have multiple jobs, a virtual hiring event helps fill them fast. So how do you host a virtual career fair? It’s never been easier. Dozens of companies offer career fair platforms that range from the simple to highly sophisticated ones that let you customize interview “booths,” post videos, schedule and pre-screen candidates and deliver resumes and candidate leads to your ATS and CRM. Step one is to have a hiring plan. That will help you narrow down your choice of platform. You need to set goals and know how many different jobs you’ll be hiring for. How many recruiters and hiring managers will participate? This will let you know how many booths or chat rooms you’ll need. Will candidates be pre-screened? Most career fair software enable pre-screening questions with the successful candidates scheduling an interview slot or going immediately into an interview. Do you want to include videos? They’re a good way to give candidates a preview of the work place and introduce them to the company culture. A career fair is a branding opportunity. You also need to consider candidate registration. Some platforms provide a registration landing page. You can also use an event registration platform like Eventbrite or incorporate a registration form on your career page. Step two: Become comfortable with the technology you’ll be using. Practice as if you’re conducting a live event. Have employees act as job seekers interacting with your recruiting team. Be sure to get their feedback. You want the candidate experience to be positive, which means having everything run smoothly. As Brazen’s VP of Marketing said, “The last thing you want to do is invite a candidate to chat with you in a virtual event and then not have anyone available to chat.” Step three: With your goals spelled out, your plan in place, your platform selected and your dates set, promote your event widely. Choose your media based on the audience you want to reach – entry-level, blue-collar, specific job types, etc. If you have a talent community, email them and post to your group on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. Niche job boards are a way to reach specific types of job seekers. Step four: As the date approaches, be sure to send reminders. You want to make sure your registered job seekers show up, so remind them. The more sophisticated career fair platforms will automate these reminders, sending them out as email or text messages. Augment these reminders with tips on how to prepare and what to expect. A day or two before, send registrants details on how to navigate the virtual career fair. Have them upload their resume before the event. Your team also needs to have their interview questions in mind and have created and customized their individual booths. Review the criteria for sending candidates to hiring managers and how the team is to rate candidates and leave notes. You’ll also want to decide what metrics to collect and how you’ll follow-up with participants. At a minimum, you’ll want to know how many job seekers registered, how many showed, how many interviews were conducted and how many offers or hiring manager referrals were made or how many candidates will go on in the hiring process. Step five: On career fair day, launch early to test all systems are working and that your team is in place. Have one person assigned as a troubleshooter. Make that their only job for the day. They can also fill in should someone need to step away from their booth for a while. Step six: Follow-up with all the candidates. Separate the no-shows sending them an email encouraging them to directly apply or to become part of your talent community. Thank all those who did interview and invite them to stay in touch. Virtual Career Fair Followup Debrief with your staff and get feedback from the candidates. A survey to all participants will help you improve your next virtual career fair. Include open-ended questions in your survey so they can offer suggestions and let you know what they enjoyed and what needs work. How many jobs were filled and candidates in the hiring pipeline may be the most important measures of a successful virtual career fair. But don’t overlook the importance of the candidate experience. A net promoter question will tell you what they thought of the overall event. A candidate who may not have gotten an offer this time, but who had a good experience is more likely to refer others and return again when a job that’s a better fit may be available. John Zappe contributed.
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Recruiting Technology
2 min read
What is Resume Parsing?
Resume parsing is one of those behind the scenes technology most recruiters never see in action. The job of a parser is to analyze a resume, then extract the candidate’s information into a database using the proper fields for each piece of data such as job title, past employers and contact data. Once completed the recruiter can then search that data via keywords and filters within the ATS. Some resume parsing tools even include semantic search which adds content to search terms with the goal of understanding user intent to provide more relevant results. Without resume parsers all of the resume data ever collected would not be organized. Resume parsing software provides employers an effective tool to identify skills and keywords in order to sort through large amounts of applications to identify the best applicants. It’s also a time save for recruiters since it removes the burden of hand reviewing each application. Parsing Isn’t Perfect According to Wikipedia, Resume parsers have “achieved up to 87% accuracy, which refers to the accuracy of data entry and categorizing the data correctly.” But challenges still remain since not all resumes are created equal. Interpreting what a candidate says on their resume can be problematic. So resumes are bound to fall through the cracks when it comes to being found in an applicant tracking system. Language is ambiguous, and some words can have multiple meaning. The key to a good resume parser is being smart enough to interpret the language properly. Optimizing for Resume Parsers Job seekers are often faced with the complications of resume parsers. Who among us hasn’t encountered a job application form that did not properly import our resume data, thus forcing us to go in and re-type our entire employment history? A frustrating experience that happens too often. But there are things you can do to optimize your resume for this experience. Candidates need to design their resumes with parsers in mind if they want to be more discoverable inside that vast resume databases that employers guard so closely. First piece of advice, use simple fonts and text. Don’t get fancy. Fancy means un-parsable in many cases. Write your name in the filename of your resume Save resumes in .docx format for best parsing compatibility Use the same font throughout the entire document, don’t mix them Avoid tables and columns at all cost Avoid using images in your resume Resume Parsing Vendors Only a handful of resume parsing tools actually exist today. They are Rchilli, Sovren, Daxtra, Hireability and TextKernel. These platforms are typically built into job boards and applicant tracking systems as a feature but you can also use them individually though an integration. Future of Parsing We can expect parsers to extract more structured data from around the web including things like LinkedIn profiles and other unstructured data graphs. As the internet explodes with more and more information about people, parsers should be at the forefront of capturing this data and putting it into readable context for searchers. You can also expect more features like OCR or Optical Character Recognition to be more widely used. Rchilli is using OCR currently and says the benefit is that any formatted resume can be scanned, eliminating missed candidates.
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Recruiting Trends
3 min read
Talent on Demand - Top Sites for Temporary Help
Talent on demand is the hottest, new old trend in workforce management. It’s hot because organizations and individual workers are embracing talent on demand like never before. We say it’s an old trend because freelancing and moonlighting have existed for decades. It’s new, because instead of purely being a way to supplement an income or take on odd jobs during periods of unemployment, talent on demand – more rightly called “gig” work – is becoming an accepted career choice. Well before the Covid pandemic, the gig economy was growing briskly. Between 2014 and 2019 the number of workers taking on short-term jobs at least part of the time grew almost 8% to 57 million. Covid accelerated the trend as businesses were forced to shut down or have their employees work from home. The latest survey by the gig work site Upwork says 59 million Americans now participate in the gig economy to some extent. Last year, they earned $1.2 trillion. Millennials and Gen Z workers are driving the growth, aided by an increasing number of retirees. While many turn to freelancing out of necessity, the majority of talent on demand workers adopt it for the benefits it offers. The flexibility of working where and when they want tops their list. Many also cite the variety of projects and clients; not having to answer to a boss, and the ability to earn more than they would in a traditional job. Businesses now are also more open to contracting for specific projects and tasks. Many see talent on demand as a way to supplement their workforce without adding to headcount. Others find they can get the expertise of top professionals they might not otherwise be able to hire. Behind the growth of the talent on demand economy is the internet and the gig work platforms that match freelancers to jobs. The three largest – Upwork, Fiverr and Freelancer – have millions of remote work projects, tasks and assignments among them. Other sites, like TaskRabbit and Wonolo, offer in-person gig jobs. We’ve compiled a list of 10 of the better known, general work sites. Besides these, there are dozens of others, like 99designs, that specialize in specific professional services. Upwork One of the world’s largest networks of freelancers and contractors, publicly held Upwork is global in scope. All work is virtual and goes through its proprietary platform. Businesses post their project needs and freelancers on the network bid for the work. The platform includes ratings, freelancer portfolio, contracts and billing. Fiverr Similar to Upwork and also publicly held, Fiverr’s focus is more on low-budget, short-term “gigs” with quick turnaround times. The key difference is that freelancers offer their services, rather than bid on specific jobs. Businesses select the contractor based on reviews, portfolios and service levels. All arrangements go through the Fiverr platform. Freelancer The business model is similar to Upwork. Contractors and freelancers bid on projects posted by businesses. (It also has a direct hire feature.) The service buyer selects the contractor from online ratings and portfolios. The commission charged to freelancers varies with the type of project. Amazon Mechanical Turk Part of Amazon, businesses (called requestors) post “Human Intelligence Tasks” that are typically simple, repetitive and can be performed remotely by multiple Turkers. Survey taking, processing photos, identifying images, confirming details, or cleaning or completing databases are among the typical tasks. Minimum fee is 1 cent per task. Toptal Toptal promotes itself as offering high quality, full vetted professionals in software development, design, finance and product and project management. It’s most effective in the tech sector. Businesses are matched with talent appropriate for their specific need or project. Engagements typically are for weeks or months. Toptal’s costs are among the highest. Guru This marketplace operates much like the larger Upwork and Freelancer. It has fewer jobs, with the largest number in programming and web development. Employers can post jobs free. Work is performed in Guru workroom. Guru charges freelancers a 9% commission on work. Craigslist This well-known, highly trafficked global classified’s site may be the oldest online place for hiring gig workers. Though it’s lost much of its luster in recent years, Craigslist still has a strong following. Depending on the locale, the gigs section may get dozens or hundreds of new listing daily, many of them seeking in-person immediate, temporary help. Freelancers can post their services. No commissions, but small posting fee. Taskrabbit Owned by Ikea, this labor marketplace is for small, short-term jobs that require an in-person presence. Typical jobs are help moving, house cleaning, furniture assembly, pet walking and minor home repairs. Used by small businesses and individuals. Freelancers set rates by the hour, but are highly negotiable. Only available in major urban areas. Wonolo This virtual staffing firm provides hourly workers in a limited number of job types, many of them in logistics, clerical, food handling and events. The jobs are short term. Workers are pre-screened. Wonolo will background check workers. Workers opt-in to posted jobs or are matched to employers and begin work immediately. FlexJobs Not exclusively for gig work, the site has a mix of part-time and project work. All jobs are flexible, remote or both. Employers can post a limited number of jobs free and receive applications as they would on other job boards. Contribution by author John Zappe
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Recruiting Trends
3 min read
Job Ghosting Prevention Tips
So you’ve been ghosted, but your company is not alone. There’s a lot of people just like you that have been ghosted in today’s crazy job market. Sometimes candidates complain about getting ghosted when there’s low unemployment. And there’s a lot of jobs around the corner. But this post is about recruiters and HR leaders being ghosted…and what you can do about it. We’ve definitely come full circle when it comes to job ghosting. Candidates have been complaining about it for years, hence the term ‘resume black hole’ that has persisted forever. In a world where you can apply for a hundred jobs a day using those Easy Apply buttons, it’s made it worse. Recruiters can sometimes not keep up with the amount of applications. But that’s not the case today when applications are few and far between. So let’s talk about preventive measures to avoid job ghosting. Here’s when it happens, They ghost you in the initial outreach. They ghost you when you set up a time to talk to them. They also ghost you when you set up an interview with the hiring manager. They ghost you on the first day of work. The last one is especially tough to swallow. They’re still a candidate at this point because they never became an employee and they simply don’t show up. Or worst of all they stop coming to work with no communication ever as to why.. Suffice to say there’s a lot of ghosting going on there. A better way to frame this issue however is to reverse your thinking. Instead of saying, “How can I reduce the amount of ghosting that’s going on for my recruiting team because it’s impacting us?” ask yourself this question; How do I get these people to ghost me faster? You want them to ghost you earlier in the process where the stakes and the consequences are less than when I put them in front of a hiring manager or when I’ve set up the time to do a phone screen with them, or their first day of work. Employers must do more to let candidates self-select out of your hiring process. You want them to ghost you faster. That should be every talent acquisition professionals mindset. How do you do that? First be upfront about the job and working conditions. Make sure recruiters tell candidates upfront what’s expected (this goes for the job description too). Don’t play around, tell them what it pays. Tell them what the hours are, tell them what the bad and the ugly of the job is in your first communication with them. The truth is your friend. Give them bad stuff well in advance of any interview so they ghost you right then. If you don’t give them enough detail, and downplay the role, they’re going to ghost you at some point. You want them to ghost you in stage one. Another great way to cull the ghosters in your funnel is to let them take the initiative. Don’t hold their hands. If they want to work for you, give them the ability to self schedule the phone screen. But if you make them go out and actually take an action, some people will self-select out of the proces. Then remind them like crazy about next steps and time/dates. Texting them reminders along the way is one of the most effective tools in your toolbox for that. Remember that you control the candidate experience. If you’ve reached out to somebody passively, gave them a data dump and talked about how fabulous your culture is or the work or the job. And then they go to your website and see everything you’ve said is BS, they’re going to ghost you. What did your recruiter say to the candidate during that first initial call? Were they on point? Were they on brand? Were they just reciting the same script so they could get somebody hired? Employers have to look internally at some point on what are the things they can control, what are the things we’re missing before we just say it’s simply a COVID problem. So give these ideas some thought and re-adjust. Ghosting will always happen but you can prevent a certain portion of people from doing it by being conscious of that candidate experience and letting them ghost you much earlier in that process.
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Human Resources
2 min read
Interview Feedback - How to Make it Useful
Interview feedback is one of the most important parts of the hiring process, yet it tends to be the one part most often overlooked or seen as a chore. The feedback we’re talking about in this article are the notes and written impressions interviewers make of the candidates. There are other types of interview feedback including feedback from candidates about the hiring process and interview feedback given to candidates to let them know how they did and how they might improve. Interview Feedback Essentials For the hiring team, feedback from each interviewer is essential to fairly evaluate candidates. Well written interview feedback forms provide a way to compare multiple candidates and to know why each interviewer scored a candidate as they did. This is equally true when only the hiring manager is conducting the interviews. Most of us have a hard time remembering what we had for lunch yesterday, let alone what a candidate interviewed a week or two ago said. Though most of us would agree that interview feedback is valuable, it has to be detailed and specific to be useful. A feedback form that recommends against hiring a candidate because “they don’t seem to be a good fit” is of no help to other members of the hiring team because it lacks a basis for the impression. Should a legal issue arise over a rejection, that lack of specificity could be seen as suggestive of bias. Writing good interview feedback doesn’t have to be difficult. Many organizations use standardized interview forms. Standardizing the Interview The Society for Human Resource Management has a sample interview evaluation form online that includes a scoresheet covering multiple areas of inquiry. A numerical rating is a quick, but perhaps too easy, method of scoring candidates. It’s tempting with that system to skip the details, which, most recruiting professionals agree, is where the emphasis should be. While there’s no lack of advice online about what should be covered and how to compile interview feedback, there’s no disagreement about the key points. Backed up by extensive research, HR leaders say structured interviews yield the best information and make for the most valuable interview feedback. Structured interviews are more effective in evaluating candidates and they make it easier to compare candidates, since all are asked the same important questions. That also makes it easier to craft an interview feedback form. Pulling from a broad variety of sources we’ve distilled the best advice to the five most important steps in crafting effective interview feedback: Take notes during the interview on what the candidate says in response to your key questions. If you use a numeric rating, give it to each question or category during the interview. Be sure to make a note why. Immediately after the interview, detail your impressions and the specific reason for each. Update and expand on the notes you took during the interview. Review the job description to compare what’s listed there to what you learned from the candidate. Set the notes and comments aside to give you time to process the interview. Most interview professionals suggest coming back to craft the actual interview feedback document the next day. In the meantime, avoid conferring with other members of the interview team. Don’t let someone else’s opinions influence yours. In writing the interview feedback, be specific and give examples. Focus on their professional attributes. Include your impressions only when you can back them up with concrete examples. The final interview feedback should have a clear decision about moving forward or not with the candidate with a summary of why you reached that decision. Indeed.com, the job search site has a brief guide to writing interview feedback that includes dos and don’ts and an example of useful feedback. The recruiting technology company Workable has several samples of how to provide specific feedback. And a Harvard Business Review article about removing bias from the interview process explains the value of structured interviewing in scoring candidates and creating fair and unbiased interview feedback.
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career progression planning
2 min read
The Benefits of Career Progression Planning
A decade ago, before Honeywell bought Sparta Systems, the company embarked on an aggressive growth program. With so many new hires and the tech company’s desire to keep its org chart as flat as possible, workers were understandably worried about their career advancement. To keep them engaged, Sparta Systems launched an equally aggressive career progression planning program that promoted lateral movement opportunities to round out future leaders and enable others to master new skills and explore new jobs within the company. This career progression planning involved customizing training and learning to meet not just the needs of the organization, but also the aspirations of each employee. In just a few years, the company’s annual loss of the talent Sparta didn’t want to lose plummeted to 1%, while the turnover rate fell below that of most of the rest of the industry. Modern Day Career Progression Planning Career progression planning, often called career pathing, used to mean the rungs on the corporate ladder. Today the process is broader, encompassing not just those expecting to become company managers and leaders, but those who want to improve their skills, take on new challenges or become subject matter experts in their current role. “Well-administered career progression [planning],” says The Croner Company, “is an effective means to help retain and continue to motivate key employees.” “The underlying mechanism of all such plans is the orderly movement of employees, either vertically to positions of greater responsibility or horizontally to positions encompassing a breadth of company functions.” A study by The Work Institute found a lack of career growth and development opportunity was the leading reason for voluntary turnover. It accounted for 21% of all reasons employees changed jobs in 2017, which was the 8th consecutive year it topped the list of the reasons for worker turnover. Four years later, it still led all other reasons for turnover. Leveraging Retention Retention of your best people is not the only benefit of career progression planning. When employees have opportunities to develop and grow in their skills and expertise, engagement improves and the more engaged workers an organization has the higher the productivity and the more competitive it is. Of equal benefit to the organization is having workers trained to move into the new jobs of the future. In the past, career progression planning was a time-consuming process that involved inventorying the skills and competencies of each job in the organization, then building development plans around each. Employees opted-in or were invited to participate in the program. Now, AI-enabled technology analyzes job roles and resumes and identifies next role candidates. The technology also builds the career path, detailing what skills each employee has and what they need to learn or improve for the next step, whether up or lateral. Writing in Forbes, Mahe Bayireddi, CEO of Phenom, a vendor in AI-enabled career pathing, explains, “By doing much of the heavy lifting, AI can efficiently match employees to suitable next-step positions based on their profiles.” All career progression planning must involve front line managers to encourage and coach their team members to investigate opportunities. Development programs must take into account the needs and strategic goals of the organization but be tailored to what employees need and want. “As career opportunities increase,” the Work Institute says, “Employers must take steps to understand the needs, preferences and goals of their workers or miss out on opportunities to keep workers that they need.” Bayireddi concludes his Forbes article with this: “Effective career progression plans will soon be the expectation, not the exception.” Contribution by John Zappe
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Recruiting
2 min read
Recruiting KPIs to Improve the Talent Funnel
Recruiting KPIs — key performance indicators – are how organizations measure the effectiveness of their talent acquisition process and the performance of individual recruiters. KPIs are not exclusive to the recruiting and HR function. All departments and businesses have KPIs, even if they call them by some other name. Retailers, for example, measure “sales per square foot” and “customer retention,” among other KPIs. Restaurant KPIs include “revenue per available seat hour” and “table turn rate,” a metric that tells the manager how often new customers occupy a table. Typical Recruiting KPIs As with all other company operations, recruiting has multiple KPIs to measure different aspects of the talent acquisition function. The most familiar and most often used among them are these: Time to fill: The time from the point at which a recruiter receives the job requisition to the day the hired person starts work. Time to hire: The time from when a candidate first applies to the time they accept an offer. Cost per hire: The cost of making a hire. Quality of hire: How well the hire performs in the job. Diversity: The number of diversity candidates hired and as a percent of all hires. Source of hire: How did the person hired find out about the job. There are literally dozens of other KPIs. The larger and more data-driven the organization, the more likely it is to also include candidate and hiring manager satisfaction, conversion rates (the number of job seekers who after clicking into a job posting go on to apply), offer acceptance rate, and first months retention. Individual recruiter KPIs are similar to those for the entire talent acquisition function. In addition to the first four on our list, companies increasingly are including an individual diversity KPI in judging recruiter performance. Typically this includes the number of diverse candidates sourced, presented and hired. Recruiter KPIs also include individual productivity and effectiveness measures such as the number of open jobs each recruiter has on average, the number of interviews to offer and also to hire, and the number of jobs filled by the recruiter. What are the most important recruiting KPIs? Ask a dozen talent acquisition leaders and all of the ones we’ve highlighted will be on their list. Each will also have a number of other KPIs reflecting their importance to their organization and its strategic objectives. Companies looking to measure the effectiveness of their various recruitment marketing channels will want to know more than just the source of hire. They’ll look at where the applications are coming from and which of them yields the highest percentage of candidates selected for interviews. That KPI will be a source conversion rate. Other companies will want to evaluate the candidate experience. That KPI may be built around a measure of improvement in candidate satisfaction. Visier, the HR data analytics firm, lists KPIs to show the direct impact of talent acquisition on a company’s strategic goals. Such KPis as “revenue per employee,” “new hires that become innovators and top performers,” and the “dollar impact of recruiting on the business” require a high level of data sophistication, but are powerful tools for recruiting to demonstrate its importance to the organization. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it,” said management guru Peter Drucker. KPIs make it possible to measure an organization’s recruiting effectiveness and help improve it. By comparing an organization’s KPIs to those of others in the industry and to businesses generally, they serve as a scorecard, showing where the recruiting team is performing well and what needs improvement. Contribution by John Zappe
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Human Resources
2 min read
Internal Mobility Is Now More Critical Than Ever
Employers waste millions of dollars each year recruiting when the best people for the jobs are often right under their nose. Deloitte tells us it costs a single large company upwards of $400 million in recruiting costs, training and lost productivity to replace workers. An internal mobility program would save $31 million by shaving just one point off the organization’s 13% turnover. The cost of turnover due to a lack of career development and internal mobility to just an average-sized company is $49 million, says Gartner, the global research and consulting firm. Retention and the savings it offers is a powerful incentive for companies to have a strong internal mobility program. In 2015, as recruiting talent was getting ever more difficult, Korn Ferry’s Futurestep found 87% of 1,189 corporate executives that a strong internal mobility program would “definitely help with attraction and retention efforts.” Remarkably, fewer than a third admitted their company had an internal mobility program. Fewer still use some kind of internal mobility software. If saving on recruiting new workers was the only benefit, that would be reason enough for every company – big or small – to have an internal mobility program. The benefits of a program are far greater than that. Dozens of research studies and surveys, and the experience of companies with robust internal mobility programs like Cisco, Ingersoll Rand and Vanguard, prove beyond a doubt that career development improves engagement, increases productivity, reduces turnover and enhances the employer brand. One of the seminal studies of internal mobility vs. external hiring found internal hires outperform external hires and stay longer. Ironically, those hired from within are paid 18% less than those hired externally. Cisco and the HR advisory and research firm Future Workplace found internal mobility programs improved: Employee engagement by 49% Productivity by 39% Employee teamwork 39% LinkedIn reported in in its Global Talents Trends 2020 that on average, employees stay 41% longer at companies that regularly hire from within. The Society of Human Resource Management says the retention benefits extend to workers who made a lateral move as well as those promoted up the ladder. With these kinds of benefits why don’t all companies have an internal mobility program? Deloitte says, “Creating a strong culture of internal mobility isn’t just about posting positions on an internal job site. It involves all leaders encouraging and supporting employees to develop the skills that prepare them for their next role, and creating a matching career plan. All too often, such efforts are largely absent.” The culture at more than a few companies discourages managers from hiring internally, seeing it as poaching rather than career development. Managers, too, resist losing their best workers. “While it’s hard to believe,” says Deloitte, “There are organizations where recruiters are told they cannot reach out to the employees within the company about a different role.” Even where an internal mobility program does exist, it’s often managed by HR functional areas such as learning and development, succession or career management. When talent acquisition is not included, recruiters may not think to look inside to fill a job. Josh Bersin, a globally recognized leader and analyst in talent management, says the worker shortages of the last several years and the pandemic that forced companies to do business differently and redeploy people into new or different jobs made internal mobility more critical than ever. “It’s time for companies to provide employees with agile, personalized mobility that helps them move their careers into the right direction while meeting organizational needs with talent from within their own walls.” Contribution by John Zappe
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