Recruiting programs create an immense amount of information. Deciding what recruiting metrics to measure and analyze is daunting. If your organization is just beginning to look at recruiting performance or, if you’re trying to improve your existing recruiting analytics program, it’s best to start with the issues that affect performance the most – the basics.
I suggest starting with the fundamentals, the metrics that will help you immediately improve the service you provide your stakeholders. Take the “crawl before you walk” approach if you’re just getting started. And, if you’re already tracking data but not necessarily getting the most out of this information, perhaps it’s time to get back to the basics. Focus on using the information to improve the business function of recruiting.
Since May 2006, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) has been enforcing a landmark ruling that sets explicit regulations on the collection, storage and reporting of Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) data for internet applicants. It also defines internet applicants, identifies electronic data collection methods, creates basic qualification standards and establishes recordkeeping requirements for compliance.
While OFCCP regulations are specifically for companies with federal contracts, it is the responsibility of every employer to eliminate discrimination in their hiring process. It is not enough to just consult an attorney (which clearly should be step 1). In today’s world, where applicants can easily apply to hundreds of openings with a few mouse clicks and each job attracts hundreds of candidates, using a spreadsheet to track all of this information is possible (maybe) but ensuring its accuracy or drawing any insight out of this information is impossible. Regardless, manually tracking this information has gotten increasingly more cumbersome and maintaining the integrity of this data has been riddled with human error (transcribing information from one form to another) as the volume of recruiting data continues to increase.
To help ensure that your company remains compliant with these types of government regulations, your organization should be storing, tracking, and analyzing hiring information with a solution that can handle large amounts of data while minimizing the need to copy information from one form to another. As such, this solution must have these 4 critical capabilities: ask every potential employee to identify their EEO info, capture the reasons why your employees have chosen NOT to hire someone (every time), continuously analyze this information in real-time and be able to create reports that you can use for compliance reporting.
But there is good news. Tracking the information that can help your company stay in compliance, perhaps even reduce hiring discrimination, has really never been easier….as long as you choose the right recruiting software vendor. Be careful, shop around and ask the right questions because not every vendor understands these regulations (and most have incomplete applications that will cause you to have gaps in your program).
What questions do you ask of your ATS vendor?
So, what should you be looking for? Here is a list of things that you need to consider. My first piece of advice is when choosing applicant tracking software make sure you not only ask the right questions; also take the time to see the feature in action, live, so you really know how everything works. This is important stuff; don’t just take the salesperson’s word for it.
Request EEO information for every job from your careers page. Just about any applicant tracking system will include a feature that requests voluntary EEO information from applicants during the online application process. If it doesn’t, don’t buy it. A good looking, fully-branded careers site, that displays your EEO disclaimer and asks for voluntary EEO/AA information should be easy to set up and simple to manage without support from IT.
Automatically capture “reasons for non-selection” for every applicant. Here’s where the rubber really meets the road. OFCCP regulations require employers to capture a reason for non-selection for every candidate they receive. When evaluating recruiting software, you MUST determine how it will capture reasons for non-selection. This information is critical and most legacy applicant tracking systems have no way of capturing this data. Those that do, often require you and your team to take time consuming extra steps and force you to enter loads of data manually. Choose a system that enables everyone in your company to easily, accurately and automatically capture pre-selected reasons for non-selection without creating extra steps in your recruiting process.
Ask minimum qualification question for every job. Asking minimum qualifications is best accomplished during the online application process. When applicants do not meet a job’s minimum qualifications the government does not require you to track them as an applicant. Choose recruiting software that allows you to automate this process, and you’ll save time by ensuring that you are processing only the applicants that are qualified for your jobs. A smart recruiting system will store each applicant’s minimum qualification answers with their record and will allow you to remove candidates of this type from your applicant flow logs automatically.
Create applicant flow logs automatically for any job. Every federal contractor must generate applicant flow logs that record all the information required by the OFCCP regulations for conducting an adverse impact analysis. If an applicant tracking system is already tracking all the relevant information that comprises a flow log (data received, name, position, job group, race and sex, veterans status, reason for non-selection, date of hire), generating a report should be simple. Ideally choose recruiting technology that’ll allow you to export applicant flow logs into the same form that you’ll send to the OFCCP.
Create Hire/Offer Logs instantly. The purpose of this report is to record each hire or job offer made by your company during the reporting period being analyzed as part of your affirmative action plan. Again, you’ll want to select software that automatically tracks all the required information to fulfill the OFCCP’s requirements (date of hire, date of offer, job title, job group, gender, ethnicity, race, veterans’ status). Creating a report should take one or two clicks, and should allow you to export the report to Excel.
Audit your EEO statistics anytime from an online dashboard. Now, it’s up to you to monitor and regularly audit your EEO/AA data. Proactive assessment and management can prevent costly litigation. Purchasing software that allows to view EEO data online and to generate custom reports is essential and is a good way to take preventative steps against risks. Make sure that you have access to all of your EEO/AA data, so you can ensure that your company is indeed an equal opportunity employer.
Finally, you’d probably expect that recruiting software that will capture, track and report EEO/OFCCP data automatically would be expensive and difficult to implement. But, thanks to new delivery methods and even newer business models, there’s technology available that you can set up in a matter of days and will only cost a few hundred dollars per month. Compared to the cost of a discrimination lawsuit, this is a no-brainer. So, get educated, know what you need to track, kick some tires, do the demos and choose modern recruiting software that can turn your OFCCP headache into nothing more than just another thing you’ve got under control.
Six months ago, one of our software engineers at Newton asked, “Why are you guys so obsessed with this EEO/ OFCCP compliance stuff? Is it that important?”
The answer was straightforward. We’d done some homework. The EEOC received more than 95,400 charges of job bias in the private sector in 2008, up 15.2 percent from 2007 and 26 percent from 2006. Given the number of layoffs, the amount of Federal stimulus pumped into the economy, the increasing diversity of the workplace and the EEOC’s new litigious administration, this is a issue facing employers of all sizes.
Last week, the 2009 EEOC report was published. They announced that 93,277 workplace discrimination charges were filed with the agency in 2009. That’s an average of nearly 256 claims filed every day. The 2009 data shows that private sector charges alleging discrimination based on disability, religion and/or national origin hit record highs while age-based charges reached the second highest level ever. You can read the entire report here: http://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/release/1-6-10.cfm
Statistics don’t generally lie, the trends are clear. And, with the appointment of Jacqueline Berrien as head of the EEOC, employers should expect a U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that is much more focused on enforcement and litigation. Some experts are even concerned that her administration may push the commission further in an anti-employer direction. None of this bodes well for companies that are still ignoring EEO/ OFCCP compliance issues.
“Please contact support.” Makes you cringe, doesn’t it? At Newton we encourage people to contact support—by email or phone. No, I’m not kidding.
We call it “Support Driven Design”. I’ll explain this concept in just a bit, but first I’d like to give you some background on how we came to believe that free technical support results in better recruiting software: it makes it easier to use, faster to deploy, and paradoxically, makes supporting your customers cost less (which in our case means we can sell our hiring software for less money).
In the beginning providing free technical support, like we do at Newton, appeared to be purely a business decision: giving away support makes the buying decision easier for people. We also didn’t have the time to build a big FAQ on our site, so we were pretty much required to do this personally anyway. On top of this, we also don’t like paying for support, or reading online help, and felt that we shouldn’t make our clients do something we don’t like to do. Today we think it was a good business decision, and an even better product one.
Of course we were warned. The “old-school” software folks, whose advice we openly take and whose success we jealously admire, told us that providing free technical support was a bad idea. “You’re going to have to charge for it sooner or later because it will eat your margins,” “support is a profit center,” they’d say. We’ve always had a problem with authority…
Design the Question Out of the System
One of the first things we tell any customer at Newton is, “If you don’t understand something, no matter how small, it’s our fault, not yours. Let us know.” We ENCOURAGE technical support emails and phone calls. Again yes, I am being serious.
As a result, and contrary to what you might think, we are hardly ever asked to provide support. The net result of Support Driven Design has been that today we get less than 1 support question per year per customer, or about .01 questions for each user per year, a group of business users can be trained in 5 minutes, and a recruiter in a mind-numbing 30.
In the beginning, and still today, our product managers, i.e. the people responsible for designing Newton’s applicant tracking software, did all the walkthroughs, customer training, and provided all support. Without knowing it, we had started a “Support Driven” design shop. When we’d get a question from someone, we didn’t add it to the user manual, we’d think about how we could redesign Newton in such a way so that we didn’t have to answer the question again.
I think this has been more than a modest breakthrough for us. Instead of teaching people how to conform to our recruiting software, instead of an online hiring FAQ, we take each question and “design the question out of the system”.
For example, early on we had this bad “More Info” button that people overlooked. Since all support email came through my desk, as it does today, I answered the same question three times in one week, “Where do I find this <something>?” One of our customers actually apologized for asking me a “silly question”! Have we come this far? Do software users really think that it’s their fault for not understanding something? Clearly, it didn’t look like a button, and clearly it was our fault. That week spelled the end of that button. Support questions: 0. Easier to use: 1.
The Tail Wags the Dog
Since we’ve never charged for support we’ve learned to appreciate that if we design a confusing feature we’re going to pay for it later. Since we don’t force people to an FAQ page, we know immediately when something isn’t working. The tail of support wags the dog of design: if you can’t charge for it, you better make it work right out of the box.
As a result, we often design a feature and say to ourselves, “we can’t do this, it will create support tickets.” This approach is not for everyone (especially for companies that get paid for making confusing software). It puts tremendous strain on our design process, and is the single greatest reason why it takes us 4 times longer to design (i.e. mockup, whiteboard, wireframe, etc.) a new feature than it does for our development team to build it.
The output of this also means that we can provide free training. We don’t like losing money any more than anyone else and if it took us 4 hours to train our customers, or 40 emails to answer their questions, we’d never be profitable. Free support: design the question out of the system + design rigor = easy training.
Maybe paid support is why one of the more common questions asked in an RFP is if we have an online FAQ. Think about that. Buyers are actually asking if you have a way NOT to help them. Our answer is simple, “just call us.” You might counter with, “well, I would like to just figure it out myself, without contacting support.” Tail wags the dog: you need an FAQ because the software is confusing, it is confusing because instead of designing your question out of the software, it was built into a support guide.
I think it is worth noting that people aren’t accustomed to this business model. People actually apologize for “bothering me”. One of the things we try hard for at Newton is to change this behavior, to “re-train” people (in 5 minutes or less, 30 minutes for recruiters <wink>) into believing that we aren’t doing them a favor for answering their questions, they’re doing us a favor by asking one. I think it speaks to just how far software has moved away from the user, and how far it has yet to go towards providing real productivity.
So the net result is that free support has led to less support. Like I mentioned before, we get about 1 support email per year, per client. I can’t imagine that Newton will ever have a technical support department that’s not run by our design team. Unfortunately, it’s gotten rather lonely over here in the support department. Can someone please contact support? Have I mentioned it’s free?
To say we think a lot about recruiting and hiring is an understatement. Before starting a company that builds recruiting software, we ran recruiting companies, consultancies and corporate recruiting departments for the last decade. In addition to helping countless other organizations hire, we’ve had to build a lot of our own teams along the way.
Ten years ago, when we were starting our first company, we were wisely advised to develop a selection process. We’ve always operated in very competitive markets and we needed a framework to evaluate our own applicants quickly and thoroughly. Over the years, with the help of an industrial psychologist, we’ve honed our interview and selection process. We’re still using the same process today at Newton. It works.
Interestingly, we’ve noticed that most, if not all of Newton’s customers, are in tough markets when it comes to hiring good people. Good information workers -techies, sales people, marketing folks, product people, etc., are hard to find. And, with the economy slowly starting to recover, the margin for error when recruiting A-players will continue to get smaller.
What can you do to make hiring run more smoothly? Well, aside from signing up to use our applicant tracking software, start interviewing smarter. Since finding the right people is becoming increasingly difficult, a modern workforce strategy should look not only to increase its hiring throughput, but also look to increase retention and develop lower-skilled employees into higher-skilled and more valuable ones. A well-run interview process won’t just reduce the risk of a bad hire it can also reduce the complexity and number of hires needed in the future.
When we interview we are trying to create a hypothetical environment to mimic a real-world situation. This simulation will hopefully enable us to reduce the risk of making a bad hire by giving us a fair estimation of the candidate’s performance in our real-world environment. What measurements will give us the best prediction of performance? The three critical measurements are:
Ability: “Can the person do the job they are interviewing for today?” Talent: “How well does this person fit our long-term objectives?” Character: “Do we want to work with this person?”
Ability First
Only after the interview process has determined the ability level of a candidate is adequate should we focus on the more costly measurements of talent and character. If the person can’t do the job there is no reason to confirm whether they can grow with the job or if they fit the corporate culture. The interview is over. Perhaps this sounds strong. But for both candidate and company alike, spending time in interviews that test for cultural fit and growth potential before we know if they can do what is required of them day-one is a waste of everyone’s time. Thus, the first step in the interview process should be to gauge ability level; it is the easiest and cheapest to identify and a “must-have” requirement.
Talent Next
“How well does this person fit our long-term objectives?” This is an appropriate way to correlate talent’s importance to interviewing and hiring. Every company has immediate needs, and those immediate needs, like tax preparation or Java coding, are what we look for in ability – skill set. Talent optimizes these abilities and it should also map to long-term corporate objectives, like managing teams or launching an office. Talent is most accurately measured with behavioral and problem-solving questions.
Always Character, but last
Someone can be very skilled, but if they are difficult to manage then the value of their skill is reduced. Character also maps to broader human capital objectives in that it closely aligns with employee retention. If you hire disagreeable people your turnover is likely to be higher than average.
Character can be measured by behavioral interviewing questions and psychological testing. It is often not just the response that’s important, but the way the response is given. An answer that says “yes” but has associated body language that is contrary to the answer is a character “red flag”.
You can use the best candidate acquisition tools, systems, and process available, but recruiting will always fail if your interview process is broken or worse, non-existent. There’s a balance to strike with interviewing between thorough assessment and efficiency. Finding that balance is difficult. It requires a plan, a little training, feedback, and of course, some good advice.
Many will agree, it appears the economy is defrosting and we’re seeing the first green shoots of a recovery in the recruitment outsourcing industry. Recently, I’ve read several optimistic blog posts written by firms and individuals that offer hourly and project based recruiting services. While obviously still cautious, all are indicating a recent uptick in their businesses. Some even claim to be busy.
Recruiting outsourcers were among the hardest hit last year when the economy officially stalled. “It was like someone flipped a light switch last October”, said Michelle Rich, a Bay Area technical contract recruiter who is currently working 7 openings. “The work just dried up all of a sudden.” For those of us that survived the implosion of the tech bubble earlier this decade, this pattern comes as no surprise. Unfortunately, contract recruiters and recruiting outsourcers are historically the canaries in the coal mine.
The upbeat outlook of hourly recruiters appears to be substantiated. September figures published by the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC) and KPMG showed the first rise in new starts for permanent hires in 17 months. Temporary and contractor hours, often seen as a barometer of the health of the recruitment industry, are up nearly 30% since the beginning of the year. At Newton Software, we’ve added more customers in the last 6 weeks than we did the first 4 months of the year. Many of our new customers, nearly 40%, employ either an individual contract recruiter or some sort of hourly recruiting service to manage their recruiting process. And, more and more, we are hearing about our friends and contacts in the contract recruiting sector landing new assignments, a trend that we hope continues into the holidays and beyond.
So, what gives you ask? Why are the recruiting outsourcers seeing increased activity? Jonathan Chenard, GM of the Union Hill Group, a client of ours that provides hourly contract recruiting services sums it up pretty well in his most recent blog post .
Employers don’t want to commit to a full time recruiting resource – yet.
HR is getting hammered with resumes and now that there are jobs to fill, they need recruiting support.
Employers are looking to do things as inexpensively as possible and hourly recruiting is a cost efficient and often effective solution.
Jonathan also points out that HR groups have gotten lean over the past year and are being asked to do more with less. Hourly recruiting services offer more flexibility and cost controls to HR folks looking to manage recruiting programs that are as dynamic as ever.
I’ll be the first to admit, times aren’t great yet. Many predict that the recovery will be jagged and slow. But, there are signs, both anecdotal and data driven, that show the worst is most likely over. For the recruitment outsourcers, it appears the growth cycle has begun and if history repeats itself, they will be the first in the recruiting industry to fully recover.
"We were not able to identify your contact e-mail address. Your login e-mail address will be used as your contact e-mail address instead. Please be aware that this contact e-mail address will be used to contact you."
The message above was sent to a prospective candidate from an applicant tracking system -not ours. This system is managing a fortune 500 company’s careers site. Yikes! It can hardly be debated that enterprise software is way too complicated and for the most part, pretty thoughtless when it comes to user experience. The message above is a perfect example. The expensive applications that businesses use to run their human resources are some of the least friendly, most difficult systems ever committed to code. If you work at a company that uses buinsess software or you’ve ever had to do something that should be simple, like apply to a job — or, heck, even look at a job on a corporate careers site — then you’ve probably encountered some really annoying user experiences.
How did we get here? Part of the problem may be that the people using enterprise software just don’t demand anything better. They think all business software has to be complicated - it’s all they’ve ever known. People have just been dealing with poorly-designed technology for so long that they internalize the flaws. Maybe it’s that a lot of these systems, applicant tracking software particularly, are built for “power” users so thoughtful, consumer-like, usability concerns are sacrificed for massive amounts of options that ultimately “sell” the technology. In the end, buyers do compare features and typically the software with the most features wins. But, the question that constantly nags us is - Does the user win? We think not.
Clearly, the real topic here, the usability of enterprise software, is a huge can of worms and I’m only scratching the surface of an increasingly incendiary topic. I can tell you this though; the “error” message above actually encourages us. It’s evident that a majority of our peers that develop recruiting software ignore design / usability. We don’t. It’s also clear that buyers of software are increasingly eager to find well designed software that improves usability and ultimately makes their lives easier. We like this trend, it plays to our strengths.
Finally, we want to make a public promise. We will NEVER send another human a message that doesn’t make any sense. It’s the least we can do.
Newton is fully featured applicant tracking software designed to be intuitive and powerful. A new release improves Newton’s real-time performance monitoring capabilities to give users access to answers in real-time.
Human resource and recruiting professionals are always looking for answers to fundamental questions that arise in corporate recruiting, questions like:
Are we getting applicants to interview for our open positions?
Are we acting on applicants?
What are our best sources of applicants?
How long does it take us to hire?
Are there places that we can make improvements?
Everyone wants to run a high-performance hiring program. Newton’s performance management dashboard is designed to give you information in real-time so you will get the most out of your resources. With easy-to-read interactive charts and graphs, you will zoom into areas that interest you to surface information and drive conversations. Use Newton’s online dashboard to provide status updates or to run interactive staffing meetings. Your business partners will love how easy it is to log in and get an update. And, best yet, giving access to your stakeholders is 100% free!
With Newton, real-time performance monitoring is now a reality allowing people to detect events or even patterns of events as interactions from all users are collected in the system. Newton gives you the power to develop insights and make evidence based decisions about your recruiting program. Now you can be proactive by pinpointing bottlenecks and identifying issues before they become larger issues. With Newton, you’ll always be prepared to answer the tough questions about your recruiting program.
See Newton’s performance management capabilities in action.
We get a lot of requests from people that want us to send them more information about Newton, our applicant tracking software. We’re not complaining! This is a good sign. The word is getting out. While we realize that fact sheets and feature matrices are ok for comparison’s sake, we believe videos are better at conveying how technology really works. So, we started to put together a series of videos that we can forward to people.
Joel Passen, interviewed by Bill Vick, one of the recruiting industry’s top influencers, talks about Newton Software and emerging trends like social recruiting and mobile. Joel also discusses the trend towards enhanced usability and some of the issues that are catching his attention in the applicant tracking software space.
Six months ago, one of our software engineers at 
“Please contact support.” Makes you cringe, doesn’t it? At Newton we encourage people to contact support—by email or phone. No, I’m not kidding.
Many will agree, it appears the economy is defrosting and we’re seeing the first green shoots of a recovery in the recruitment outsourcing industry. Recently, I’ve read several optimistic blog posts written by firms and individuals that offer hourly and project based recruiting services. While obviously still cautious, all are indicating a recent uptick in their businesses. Some even claim to be busy.