Not too long ago, we published a blog post: How to Hire a Great Recruiter. It’s a topic that we’ve been thinking about on and off for nearly 16 years and it’s recently resurfaced in a big way as the economy continues to show signs of improvement. Currently, as executives at a leading corporate applicant tracking software provider, we come into contact with hundreds of organizations that are looking for internal recruiting support. Literally, a day doesn’t go by that our team doesn’t get asked to refer a good corporate recruiter.
Unfortunately, too many companies make costly mistakes by not vetting their recruiters properly. This leads to inefficiency, wasted time, wasted resources, diminished status within the corporate hierarchy, etc. It’s not surprising. In recent years, recruiting has gotten more sophisticated. Once closed networks are wide open. Today, it’s less about processing people and more about leveraging technology, relationship building and managing information. Now more than ever, it takes talented corporate recruiters to find talented employees.
So, what’s the fundamental formula for hiring a successful corporate recruiter? Here is a guide that will help distill the characteristics so your organization has the best chance at hiring successful corporate recruiters. These must-have attributes have been developed with the help of an industrial psychologist who administered a series of tests benchmarking top performing corporate recruiters over the past 4 years. We encourage individual organizations to use this guide as a foundation. We’ve intentionally kept the rationale broad so this guide can be used by a wide variety of organizations.
About this guide
The following is an interview guide for hiring a successful corporate recruiter. The key traits are listed in bold. A list of behavioral interview questions is provided to help screen for each trait. Take a few minutes and reflect on your conversation with the candidate and compare your observations against the high/low probabilities listed after the questions.
Every corporate recruiting process is full of iterative tasks that require consistency and focus to complete. With the amount of information created in a corporate recruiting processes, it’s not good enough to just be ‘good with people’ anymore. Successful corporate recruiters must be disciplined, organized and efficient.
Key questions:
What is your style of work – do you prefer a sustained pace or working in bursts while taking breaks?
Where do you waste most of your time (when you do)? Do you get distracted easily?
How do you organize your typical day? Describe a typical day. What tools do you use to organize your time?
What is the most irritating part of your current / last job- the part you wished you could have delegated? Why? How did you end up handling these tasks?
Give me a recent example of a situation you faced that needed your immediate attention. What happened? How did you handle it?
How do you prioritize tasks? When do you find time to do those iterative tasks that we all do as recruiters like search for candidates and post jobs?
High Probability of Success
Low Probability of Success
Task Oriented
Social Orientation
Purposefulness
Flighty
Need to Complete Tasks
Need to Relate
Intense
Easily Distracted
Serious
Frivolous
Prepared
Winging it
Need for Achievement
Disorganized
Confidence
Recruiting can be a pretty thankless job. Often times, recruiters take the heat when jobs go unfilled whether it’s their fault or not. When jobs do get filled quickly, a recruiter’s job or contract can be in jeopardy. And, in many industries, recruiters face steady diet of rejection that is often due to factors like intense competition, lack of hiring manager respect, etc. As such, successful recruiters must be self-reliant, assertive and highly confident.
Key questions:
Please give me an example of a time when you’ve faced a contentious situation at work with a peer or hiring manager and describe how you solved it.
How soon could you learn this job, our space, our company well enough to be productive?
What kind of criticism have you been given by your managers and peers in previous positions? How appropriate is that feedback?
We all have our ups and downs. What typically can pull you out of a “funk”? How to you manage your “attitude adjustments”?
What is one of the biggest disappointments you have experienced professional or personally? How did you weather it?
Tell me about the most challenging internal customer you’ve ever had and how you were successful in building a working relationship with that person.
Rating yourself on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being low and 10 being high, how would the people you work with rate you as a recruiter”? How would you rate yourself? Why?
How do you prefer to receive critical feedback?
Tell me how you deal with a candidate when they reject a job offer? What do you do after a candidate has rejected your offer?
High Probability of Success
Low Probability of Success
Emotionally Secure
Insecure
Self-Assured
Needs Praise
Even-Tempered
Emotional
Believes in his / her abilities
Self-doubting
Self-Accepting
Self-depreciative
Weathers Disappointment
Pensive
Optimistic / Positive
Negative / Pessimistic
Resourcefulness
Heavy req-loads, low budgets, lack of modern tools, highly nuanced jobs and unresponsive managers are just a few of the challenges that corporate recruiters face every day. A successful corporate recruiter must be the MacGyver of the company, an independent, uber-resourceful soul able to make use of the most limited resources to solve any problem with little or no support. Additionally, given that recruiting has almost entirely shifted online, recruiters must now be “digitally resourceful”. A notebook and spreadsheet doesn’t cut it anymore. Recruiters have to be technically competent. willing to adopt new technologies and ready to jump into the deep end – head first.
Key questions:
Provide an example of a time when management would not allow you to take necessaryaction, even though you felt it was necessary to do so. (For example, a chance in process.)
Have you worked in an organization that did not provide all of the tools to do your job successfully? How did that impact yon and what did you do to overcome it?
Give me an example of a time when you were given tasks to accomplish without advance warning or proper tools. What was your approach?
Give me an example of a time when you had to learn a new system, process or tool on the “fly”. What was your approach?
How would you rate your ability to learn new technical / internet tools. Give me an example of a time you were asked to use a new tool. How fast were you able to come up to speed?
What are your three favorite recruiting tools? Describe how you use these tools every day? What do you think are emerging recruiting technologies and why?
How do you stay on top of trends and innovations in the recruiting industry? What recruiting centric news do you read? What are you favorite recruiting content websites?
High Probability of Success
Low Probability of Success
Adaptable
Staid
Thinks Well “On the Fly”
Inflexible
Need for Autonomy
Formulaic
Unconventional
Dependent
Entrepreneurial
Conforming
Tech-Savvy
Not Tech Savvy
Intellectually Curious
Uninspired
Hiring a successful corporate recruiter is as important as ever. As the economy continues to gain strength, talent will increasingly become harder to attract and hire in nearly every industry. Hiring a recruiter for their “network,” because they have been a recruiter for a decade or because they have experience at a hot company should take a backseat to looking for the person with the right traits. A successful corporate recruiter will have the focus to be successful in a dynamic environment, the confidence to become productive immediately, and the resourcefulness to get the job done.
As a part of our blog series “HR and Recruiters the New Marketers“, I want to share practical ways HR and recruiting professionals can put real marketing concepts to work to improve corporate recruiting programs right now. Now, I am not advising everyone to run out and spend tens of thousands of dollars on full-blown employment branding initiatives (if you want to, we have a great partner for that). Rather, I am suggesting that while the year is young, HR and recruiting pros should consider creating (or revamping) a marketing framework to optimize recruiting communications. Here is where to start.
Create / refine your corporate recruiting story
The company that provides candidates with the most information almost always ‘wins’. Remember, when people look for jobs, they are simply assessing risks. Relevant, well organized information mitigates risks and assuages fears. Your organization may not pay the most. You may not build the sexiest product. You may not provide free organic juices or host foosball tournaments. But, if you provide opportunities that truly leverage people’s strengths, reward hard work, have flexible working hours, provide good benefits, allow people to work from home, you absolutely need to communicate this and highlight your unique attributes as part of your corporate story.
When building or refining your corporate story you need to really think about your audience. Who are you trying to appeal to? Next, think like a marketer and build a framework to organize your message. The story needs to be personal, genuine, compelling, and delivered with commitment and consistency (we’ll get into the delivery in a bit). Below is a framework that I’ve used to build and organize Newton Software’s corporate recruiting story. When you create this think Twitter not War and Peace.
Mission statement: short company history, clarify our purpose, who we serve, how we provide value
Key differentiators: what makes our product exceptional in a market of mediocrity
The culture: how we treat our employees, why people choose to work here, what to expect
Select and educate your ambassadors
Anyone who has the opportunity to interact with a potential employee has the privilege to tell the corporate recruiting story. Keep in mind, interview processes should be bi-directional exchanges. It’s critical to choose interviewers that will not only effectively assess skills,talent and character but are willing and able to convey the right message. Additionally, it’s imperative that anyone that will be exposed to candidates is a trained ambassador for your recruiting brand. Everyone’s behavior has a direct impact on each candidates’ perceptions about the organization. This is easily and often forgotten.
To take this further,think about this concept in practice. You’re a job seeker. You’ve spent a couple of hours preparing for an interview. You arrive at the interview and are greeted at the door (yes, this should be part of HR’s plan) by someone that is expecting you. Throughout the interview process, all the actors know who you are, everyone has a consistent message and they are clearly prepared to spend time with you. Whether you loved the content of the job or not, your impression would be that this company has its act together and they took the process seriously. More importantly, they took you seriously. That goes a long way. The bottom line is that HR and recruiting teams must build the message and everyone that touches the recruiting process from beginning to end. Error to the side of being a control freak.
Personal Note: While I haven’t been a job seeker in a long time, I do visit lots of businesses that are interested in our applicant tracking software. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked into a company and stood around looking for someone to help me find the person that I am supposed to meet. My first thought: is this what happens when people come in for interviews? Probably.
Create a customer experience.
As our service economy has evolved, recruiting isn’t just about processing people anymore. To attract the quality of hire necessary for modern businesses to grow, we must build relationships with candidates just as we would with potential customers. As HR professionals and recruiters, our marketing responsibilities now include creating an experience for our candidates that mimics how we treat our customers.
Professional candidates spend countless unpaid hours preparing for interviews. They research our companies on LinkedIn and Glassdoor. They build up expectations. Unfortunately, all too often, they are met with an experience that is disappointing at best. Many candidates are still subjected to disorganized, disjointed, uncommunicative and even adversarial recruiting experiences.
By creating a recruiting process that provides candidates with a great experience – a customer experience, you put your company in a position to make the decision as to whether you want to hire the candidate or not. Some would refer to this as being in the driver’s seat. Think of it this way, it’s a lot easier to hire applicants when they want to come work for your organization. Furthermore, if your recruiting process is disjointed, inconsistent, unfriendly or all of the above, you’ll not only lose the opportunity to hire top talent, you’ll lose other hugely important hiring by-products like employee referrals, repeat candidates, word-of-mouth candidates, etc.
Some closing thoughts.
There is no better time for HR and recruiting professionals to build and refine marketing communication programs to support the initiatives that we own – like hiring the best people. Find time, no matter how painful that sounds, to take a step back and reflect on how your organization communicates with candidates. Examine your interview processes and find out what’s being said and how candidates are being treated. Ask yourself if you’d be excited about the opportunities being presented by your firm. I’ll bet you’ll find some things that surprise you and that you’ll want to adjust. And, I guarantee that even small changes will make a difference and allow you to be in the driver’s seat more often.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the intersection of human resources and marketing and how critical it is these days for HR and Recruiting professionals to think like marketers. Admittedly, I didn’t invent this concept. Rather, I was turned on to the idea by a London-based recruitment firm Dylan. With help from Tom Fishburne, a.k.a the Marketoonist ( by the way, a friend and former co-worker of my wife’s), the notion that HR’s role as marketers is brought alive in a speech that he gave earlier this year in London.
During his talk, Tom points out that one of the ways that we as HR and recruiting practitioners can start embracing our roles as marketers is to avoid silos. That is, we can’t operate under the pretense that marketing is not our responsibility. Marketing is everyone’s responsibility. As employees we all need have the ability to concisely communicate our corporate story. And, as HR and recruiting professionals , we of all people, need to be the ambassadors of our employment brand able to convey our organization’s unique qualities, advantages and mission expertly. After all, our job is no longer just to ‘process’ people. Our job is to ‘influence’ people.
Improve your job advertisements by Newton Software
1. HR and Recruiting professionals need to be the Chief Marketing Officers for jobs.
Write concise, narrative job descriptions that tell the story about the position. Some employers are still inclined to advertise job requisitions designed to screen candidates by listing every skill, requirement and degree imaginable. It’s time to get more scientific and strategic about job advertisements. Put emphasis on the word “advertisement” and tell your story. Avoid the obligatory laundry list and get higher click through rates. That’s right, make your job ads interesting and more people will read them.
2. Emphasize unique qualities that show you appreciate employees.
Tell applicants what makes your company a great place to work. Free flowing artisan coffee and all you can eat snacks are nice. Gaming areas and nap rooms fine too but in many circles, these “perks” aren’t really that unique and furthermore, they aren’t things professionals look for in a job. It’s time to tell applicants about the meaningful things that you do well. Maybe it’s an education stipend, some sort of special training, great benefits or simply flexible hours. The key is to share the unique and valuable qualities that let applicants know that you care about all of your employees. Above all, job seekers want to know that they will be treated well, compensated fairly and appreciated. Tell them.
3. Make the transaction easier.
Creating a cumbersome application process is restrictive and ineffective.For example, requiring applicants to create a user name and password to apply for a job not only presents a barrier but it also predicates that the applicant will come back and apply for other jobs, check on the status of their application or update their profile with new skills, degrees or certifications. They won’t. Very few companies have the brand equity to command this type of interaction with top applicants. People have too many other places to update their professional profiles these days to expect them to come back to visit your careers “portal”. And, while this may make me wildly unpopular with some of the HR crowd, when was the last time you hired someone that applied to 6 jobs at your company or came back to update their original profile, resume or application? Top applicants aren’t going to come back and “login” and they don’t knock twice.
4. Less is better.
Tailor your application process to capture the information that will allow you to assess applicants.In short, an online application behind a job ad is NOT a true application for employment. Employers shouldn’t ask for date of birth, social security number and other sensitive personally identifiable information (PII). Most applicants won’t provide that type of information. And, more importantly, why collect risky information from every applicant you receive knowing that you won’t even speak with 90% job posting respondents?
Ask for information that will allow you to better access applicants’ skills and experience to determine if they meet the minimum qualifications necessary to be successful for the job. And, remember, there’s still no better initial assessment tool than a resume.
Streamline you application process this year. The shorter your application process the better. Our research shows that every step added to the online application process diminishes completion rates. Use applicant tracking software to make your online application process leaner, smarter and faster.
5. Communicate with every applicant.
Whether an applicant is a go or a no, employers are obligated to communicate with every applicant. This is especially true for consumer brands, nonprofits and any other employer whose applicants can be their customers. The application process doesn’t end when the applicant clicks the submit button anymore. This isn’t 1990. We don’t have to send applicants a rejection letter via the USPS. A simple email goes a long way and there are applicant tracking tools available that make the entire communication process nearly effortless.
Aside from doing the right thing, employers that notify applicants about the status of their candidacy mitigate risks and protracted inefficiencies by reducing duplicate applications and follow up calls to HR and hiring managers. And, in our age of social media and the overall democratization of public sentiment, it doesn’t hurt to treat others like you’d want to be treated.
The annual HR Technology Conference and Expo is a lot what the “Speech From the Throne” must have been like during the middle ages when the reigning monarch would lay out the condition of the nation and decree the agenda going forward. Read into this opening however you choose. All politics aside, this is an important event and really does serve to illuminate the trends and trendsetters in the HR Technology industry.
This year I attended the event specifically to connect with partners, to strengthen alliances, and to meet new people. And, while I didn’t have a lot of free time, I did get a chance to wander the expo floor, mingle in the press room for a bit, and towards the end of the show, just sit in the hall, observe and listen.
What happens in Vegas never really stays in Vegas. Here are some of my takeaways from this year’s conference.
On the lighter side
1. Viva Las Vegas. Ok, I personally both fear and loath “The Vegas”. It’s not a place for those of us with little self control. But, it is the perfect venue for an industry conference. It’s designed to get in and out of easily. It’s relatively inexpensive and there are plenty of places to meet, greet, eat and be entertained. The accessibility of the venue allowed me to cram in more meetings than I thought possible. Step into a lounge or a semi-quiet corner (there is no silence in Vegas) and you could get a private 30 minutes with that important someone.
2. Free Wi-Fi or rather Wi-Fi free. This is one of my only logistical gripes about the event. The availability of public Wi-Fi was a joke. I couldn’t get an email in or out over the free Wi-Fi brought to us by ADP (clearly not ADP’s fault) let alone try to demo Newton ( our applicant tracking software). If I were ADP I would have been steaming mad that I sponsored free internet access and it ended up being a huge failure. Given that just about every product at this year’s show is delivered over the internet, the organizers should have ensured that there was a big honkin’ pipe running to the conference.
3. You are What You Schwag. I am still sort of amazed by conference schwag. I guess I don’t really believe that vendors are going to lure, or even start a conversation with their next customer by offering free Smarties and flashing key chains. If you do feel schwag is still necessary, why not raffle off an iPad or Kindle Fire? Give away something that won’t end up as a chew toy or as instant landfill. For more on the state of schwag, read William Tincup’s most recent contribution to Fist Full of Talent.
The meat.
4.Get Ready for the Suite wars. I read one analyst’s review of the conference this week in which he predicts that suite adoption is in the “very early innings”. I agree. However, this space is definitely going to get more interesting over the coming months and years.
I detected a sense of urgency amongst the traditional suite vendors as many are gearing up for a multi-front war. The talent management vendors have gone on the offensive and are quickly encroaching on the more traditional HRIS vendors’ turf. Where they were once partners, now many camps are leery and concerned that they may be sleeping with their enemies. I predict competition for the same seats is going to get really heated as more vendors start extending their functionality in order to address the middle of the talent chain.
5. OnConsolidation: the Writing is in the Cloud. There was quite a bit of talk and speculation last week about M&A activities in the HR Tech industry. I believe this will continue to be driven by the aforementioned suite vendors and their fight to compete across the talent chain. It’s clear that several vendors have realized that they only have a few core modules that are in their suites that are complete features. And, they’ve realized that in their race to claim “we have that too” (I saw one group wearing shirts that said this) they’ve shipped some pretty “thin” modules.
More specifically, I predict that there will be strategic acquisitions made in the talent management space as most of the major suite vendors are pretty lean on both the very front (talent acquisition/recruiting) and late stages of the talent chains (secession planning). Given the target customer size of many of the suites( mid to upper-mid market), I am guessing that the most demand will be for talent management (performance, review, retention) applications that come later in the talent chain. Plus, as companies like Successfactors close in on the middle of the talent chain and gear up for a full confrontation with the HRIS establishment, the suites will continue to look for opportunities at the beginning and end of the talent chain (ATS and Performance respectively).
Finally, I want to give a special shout out to our partner OneSource VHR, the exclusive reseller of Workday for the mid-market. Thanks for letting me hang around your booth. You make the Newton team feel like part of your team. We are grateful.
Newton is modern, easy-to-use applicant tracking software designed to organize and improve internal recruiting programs for small and medium sized businesses (30-3000 employees). Newton features best-of-breed dashboards that create unparalleled visibility and transparency. And, Newton is the only ATS designed to drive the decisions that drive hiring taking into account all users in the corporate recruiting workflow. Industry leading adoption rates (+90%) ensure easy collaboration and powerful performance driven metrics allow HR and Recruiting users are always in control.
Here’s an interesting fact about Newton. All of our 300+ customers use the exact same core workflow. Yeah, that’s right, Newton customers don’t customize the core recruiting process. Why? Because they don’t have to and no one ever really complains. The reason that customization doesn’t come up is because Newton works. We designed the platform to work the way recruiting works. Our customers don’t have to tell Newton how to do recruiting. In other words, there is more than just a little recruiting DNA in the product. A native understanding of corporate recruiting is a huge advantage of Newton’s and our customer’s.
A recent blog post by Steve Boese, a popular HR technology product strategist, instructor, blogger and HR community leader got us thinking about the topic of customization. In his post, Steve writes,
“While choice, options, and freedom to adapt technology are all necessary components in the modern enterprise and consumer software age, let’s not forget there is quite a lot to commend software and hardware solutions that simplywork. Turn them on, activate them, answer a few questions in configuration sure – but the sooner solutions can start solving business problems and delivering positive impact to users, without asking users to morph into armchair software developers is really the hallmark of a great solution.”
We couldn’t agree more. When applicant tracking software integrates into your day to day without massive customization only then does it really live up to its potential. And, when you deliver customers a product that’s designed to address a specific set of business functions, (in our case corporate recruiting at small and medium-sized organizations) there is immediate impact, little support required and it’s easy to teach others how to use it.
Newton Software, the developers of smart, corporate applicant tracking software, just revealed another key feature aimed at helping human resources and corporate recruiting departments in the creation and improvement of their online requisition approval process. The new feature empowers organizations to better control recruiting resources with an automated, email-driven job requisition approval tool.
Job requisition management isn’t t just for large companies anymore. Now small and medium sized businesses can leverage Newton to create user friendly, effective job requisition approval processes. Designed by recruiting industry experts (like the rest of our product), our latest feature enhancement is our answer to the rigid, nonintuitive requisition management tools prevalent in most applicant tracking systems.
Our products team has been working on this feature for over a year and they’ll be the first to tell you that Job Approval Management is a full product in itself. Those of us on the marketing side of the house are proud of our product team’s effort and congratulate them on shipping their 4th major release of the year – unheard of in the HR Technology industry. And, they’re not done. Rumor has it (hint) they’ve started working on Newton Mobile and a host of other useful features that we know will be equally elegant and thoughtful.
Here is a preview of Newton’s Job Requisition Approval Manager.
Newton Software develops corporate applicant tracking software for small and medium sized businesses (SMBs). Unparalleled usability, industry leading user adoption rates and exceptional customer service set Newton apart.
UK-based Dylan, a marketing recruiting agency, collaborated with Tom Fishburne (a.k.a The Marketoonist) from San Francisco to create this comic. When we saw it, we couldn’t help but think about all the dollars that organizations poor into corporate recruiting and how few resources are actually spent cultivating a culture around retaining talent.
Apparently, Fishburne, who frequently speaks about marketing, is preparing for an event with Dylan where he’ll focus on how the best brands and businesses “market from the inside out”. His premise is that the HR Director is the new Marketing Director. Fishburne goes on to say, “recruitment is as important to how a brand is marketed as creating a marketing plan”.
Unfortunately, I don’t think our team will make it to London for the talk in September. Something tells me we’ll be in San Francisco hammering our new mobile functionality for Newton, our award winning applicant tracking software. Hopefully, the nice folks at Dylan will record the presentation.
Not too long ago, we published a blog post: How to Hire a Great Recruiter. It’s a topic that we’ve been thinking about on and off for nearly 16 years and it’s recently resurfaced in a big way as the economy continues to show signs of improvement. Currently, as executives at a leading corporate applicant tracking software provider, we come into contact with hundreds of organizations that are looking for internal recruiting support. Literally, a day doesn’t go by that our team doesn’t get asked to refer a good corporate recruiter.
Here’s an interesting fact about Newton. All of our 300+ customers use the exact same core workflow. Yeah, that’s right, Newton customers don’t customize the core recruiting process. Why? Because they don’t have to and no one ever really complains. The reason that customization doesn’t come up is because Newton works. We designed the platform to work the way recruiting works. Our customers don’t have to tell Newton how to do recruiting. In other words, there is more than just a little recruiting DNA in the product. A native understanding of corporate recruiting is a huge advantage of Newton’s and our customer’s.
Newton Software, the developers of smart, 