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.
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.
Whether you subject to OFCCP / EEO reporting regulations or not, preparing your data for an Affirmative Action Plan is an essential component of your overall compliance strategy. We found this presentation by Dr. Stephanie Thomas and Carla Irwin informative and very relevant. Their presentation focuses on how to prepare your hiring data. Specifically, they highlight the types of data required, and talk about how and why bad or missing data can render a data set useless for analysis purposes. Simple techniques for data scrubbing are presented, and the webinar will concludes. with a summary of common data validation tools. Next time we’ll have to give them access to Newton, our popular applicant tracking software that features a great OFCCP / EEO reporting functionality.
Kris Dunn, Founder of Fistful of Talent, the popular and influential blog devoted to human capital, recently sat down with Newton Software Co-Founder, Joel Passen. The interview uncovers the “HR Mafia”, Joel’s recovery and a recruiting methodology that Kris and Joel agree to agree on, “the funnel”.
I caught up with Joel this afternoon and asked him about the interview. “Kris Dunn is one of these guys in the industry that flat out knows his stuff. He’s been in the trenches. To have him say that ‘he respects our game’ is flattering and encouraging to say the least.”
Read more about the origins of “the funnel”, “the truth teller” and how Newton’s applicant tracking software is built to work the way the best internal recruiting work. Oh yeah… and about the rumor of this HR Mafia…..
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.
CIO.com recently published a very informative article titled “Social Networks: A New Hotbed for Hiring Discrimination Claims.” The article gives an in-depth perspective into the world of corporate recruiting, in particular how recruiters are using social networks more and more to evaluate potential hires.
Social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter give recruiters and hiring manager the opportunity to peer into a potential candidate’s everyday life, work habits and personal information. More and more, recruiters are using information gathered from social networks to determine whether a candidate is a good fit for their company. However, using this information as the basis for a hire can lead to a bevy of discrimination claims against the company.
In this recent article, CIO.com spoke with HR consultant Jessica Miller-Merrell about some of the risks involved with using social networks to make hiring decisions. She outlines potential legal risks including the niche demographic breakdown of specific social networks as well as the necessity for concise affirmative action reporting for government contractors.
She goes on to talk about how using someone’s personal information to determine their qualifications can be problematic: “if you make hiring decisions based on protected information that a candidate provides on the Internet—if you decide not to hire someone because you find out they’re Muslim, pregnant or their child has a health condition—these are hiring decisions that can get you in hot water.”
There’s been a growing trend of more and more claims of workplace discrimination getting submitted over the past several years, and the addition of social networking as a hiring tool is bound to only increase the rate of claims. Every year, companies face an uphill climb to follow confusing regulations that require them to provide detailed reports to various federal agencies.
These are the very factors Newton took into account when we decided to build EEOC / OFCCP compliance features into our recruiting software. We realized that companies already face a great risk in regards to complying with the U.S Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (and the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs for government contractors.) Bad or ignorant hiring practices and decisions can sink a business due to costly litigation battles over wrongful discrimination.
Newton’s EEOC /OFCCP Compliance tools make sure that all the right information gets collected, stored and tracked regardless of the source of the data. Voluntary self-identification surveys, reasons for non-selection, hire/offer logs, minimum qualification questions and flow logs (EEO1 reports) are just a few of the tools that can help recruiters and human resources professionals keep track of all the mandatory information. Newton makes EEOC and OFCCP compliance a seamless part of the hiring process, so that when the time comes, a company doesn’t need to scramble to deal with a problem.
While we haven’t yet seen a pervasive precedent set regarding social networks and social recruiting, experts agree that it’s just a matter of time. As more companies are learning to use social networks as recruiting tools, there will be a social media recruiting precedent before you know it. For now, our advice is to seek guidance from counsel especially before using social media to vet applicants and to always have a consistent, compliant process in place when distributing job related information to social networks.
Citations
Levinson, Meredith. “Social Networks: A New Hotbed for Hiring Discrimination Claims.” CIO.com. April 18th, 2011. http://www.cio.com/article/679830/Social_Networks_A_New_Hotbed_for_Hiring_Discrimination_Claims_?page=1&taxonomyId=3123
Having run corporate recruiting programs for nearly 10 years, we began developing Newton in 2004 after becoming frustrated with existing commercial recruiting platforms. Until the advent of Newton, there wasn’t any recruiting technology that facilitated the fundamental activity key to all recruiting programs: decisions making. Sure, we wanted something that would make rolling out, ramping up, managing, and improving hiring programs easier. And we wanted something that offered a more collaborative recruiting experience. But, we needed something that would intuitively drive the decisions that both recruiters and hiring managers are asked to make every day. Essentially, we needed something that would make saying yes or no simple.
It’s undeniable, over the years; hiring processes have become more complex. But, one day, we asked ourselves why does it have to be this way? Then, the “Newton apple” fell on our heads and we realized that recruiting is just a series of sequential waterfall tasks that are defined by a series of yes / no decision events. It became clear that the hiring process doesn’t need to be complex. In fact, if we could simplify the process, we could eliminate wasted activity (or inactivity) that can slow it down, confused people, and lead to bottlenecks and failures.
Newton, our popular applicant tracking software, is designed to move applicants through each stage of the process in a systematic, orderly, and continuous manner and to eliminate periods of inactivity (waiting) between each stage. Our intuitive, patent-pending workflow is native to Newton and doesn’t require weeks of customization to leverage. On the same token, it’s also not designed to allow users to add unnecessary steps to hiring that complicate the process
We’ve built years of practical recruiting knowledge into Newton, offering our customers an easy way to drive the decisions that drive recruiting. When you choose Newton, you get a recruiting platform that’s designed around a proven, fully optimized workflow that promotes decision making, collaboration, captures critical data for compliance, and provides game-changing analytics. It’s not just a tool … it’s an infrastructure for making decisions.
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.
