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.
Last week, I was doing a presentation for a prospective customer and the question came up: how can we hire a great recruiter? I’ve been thinking about this topic for nearly 15 years. I’ve been a recruiter. I’ve hired and trained dozens of recruiters (agency and corporate). Today, my company builds applicant tracking software for corporate recruiters. Recruiting is a hugely popular profession and everyone has their own ideas on what makes a great recruiter (most of which I tend to agree with). Over the years, I’ve developed my own formula for what makes a great recruiter, and since the economy has shown clear signs of improvement, our customers are hiring recruiters again. So, I’ve decided to share my insights on what makes a great recruiter.
My formula was cemented 10 years ago, when I was running a high-end, technical recruiting agency in Silicon Valley. I wanted to hire people based on their potential vs. their actual experience. I knew I could teach a talented, motivated person to be a recruiter. And, I was tired of guessing if people were going to be successful. So, I tapped an industrial psychologist to develop a selection methodology for choosing recruiters with the greatest likelihood to succeed. First, we had to figure what qualities to look for. This proved to be one of the most enlightening processes of my entire career. The psychologist’s team conducted a series of tests to distill the traits that made our top performers tick. We learned that in our environment (fast-paced, high volume and technical) self-confidence, flexibility, and the ability to stay focused were the top three traits that all of our best recruiters had in common.
Self-Confidence
Flexibility
Focus
Working with the psychologist proved invaluable. Together, we developed an agenda for our interview teams to follow and each person on the team knew their role. We created interview score cards and mapped behavioral interview questions to each of the traits making our roundtable sessions efficient and decisive. In a matter of weeks, we improved our interviewing techniques and consequently started hiring people that stayed longer and produced more.
The system and the science worked. I still firmly believe that self-confidence, flexibility, and focus are the top measurable qualities that best predict the potential success of a professional recruiter. But, there’s something that’s always nagged at me, something that makes a great recruiter that I’m not sure you can learn from an interview or even a test. I’ve been trying to put “this” into words for a couple of years and last week during the meeting it came to me.
The best recruiters that I’ve worked with can empathize with the behavior, intentions, attitudes, and feelings of their contacts. They have the ability to identify, assess, manage and control their own emotions and to use this information to guide their actions. Top performers develop a finely tuned heuristic engine that’s constantly processing information to find an optimal solution. And finally, they have the ability to empathize, control their emotions and solve problems while being bombarded with massive amounts of information.
Hiring a great recruiter is as important as ever. As the economy continues to gain strength, talent will increasingly become harder to attract and hire. Hiring a recruiter for their network or because they have been a recruiter for decades should take a backseat to looking for the person with the right traits. A great recruiter will have the self-confidence to become productive almost immediately, the flexibility to be successful in a dynamic environment, and the ability to focus on getting the job done at all costs. And while it may be hard to determine whether or not a recruiter has an evolved heuristics engine that ultimately may improve their performance, it is well within reason to assume that you can determine whether they are empathetic and possess a fair amount of self control. Remember, great people attract great people. You have every reason to take the time to hire a great recruiter.
EEO and OFCCP regulations are confusing enough. Choosing applicant tracking software to automate your recruiting program and ensure EEO and OFCCP compliance can be a daunting process. This is a guide designed to help you ask the right questions when choosing applicant tracking software. And, remember take the time to see the features in action, live, so you really know how everything works. This is important stuff; don’t just take the salesperson’s word for it.
Also, we decided to share some secrets that most applicant tracking software vendors won’t. It might not make us very popular with them but, they’re not buying our software.
Poor candidate experience remains one of the biggest missed opportunities in corporate recruiting. Companies don’t intentionally treat applicants poorly. Many organizations just don’t have the resources to create a positive experience for job seekers. So, how can companies improve how they treat job applicants and, at the same time, convey a positive brand image despite limited resources?
We’ve got a couple of ideas. Here are 3 tips to help you improve how you treat applicants. And, we’ve included a short video detailing our Thank You Letter feature now available in Newton, our popular applicant tracking software.
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.
Over the last few years, the recruitment outsourcing industry has experienced significant growth, which stems from an ever-expanding market demand for scalable, flexible and cost effective recruiting solutions. Today, new clients not only expect RPOs to fill jobs but to help them build better process along the way. With recruitment outsourcers facing more complex assignments and more competition than ever, RPO’s must select and leverage technology that’s specifically designed to address their most common business challenges. This technology must facilitate the attraction of new customers, allow them to manage existing accounts better and must help them increase their overall customer retention rates.
Managing an RPO isn’t easy. On the hook to monitor the activity of multiple recruiters, thousands of jobs, hundreds of hiring managers and hundreds of thousands of candidates, RPO’s operate in a complex environment facing huge challenges both internally and externally. Using applications like spreadsheets and email or worse, selecting just any recruiting software will severely limit an RPO’s performance, scalability and ability to retain customers. To ensure that your RPO is successful and continues to attract new customers while keeping your existing customers happy, you must leverage technology that is designed specifically for recruitment outsourcing.
Until very recently, finding a technology platform that’s specifically designed for outsourcing engagements has been difficult if not impossible. There are still few applications available today that are specifically designed for RPO’s. But there is good news. As the recruitment outsourcing market continues to become more sophisticated, demand for specialized RPO platforms is increasing, and a handful of vendors are responding with modern technology to address the challenges faced by RPO’s.
A little advice to start
So, what should you be looking for? Here is a list of things that you need to consider and questions to ask when evaluating software for recruitment outsourcing.
My first piece of advice is to really focus on your “must have” features, the knockouts. Focus on what you really need right now, because as you expand and optimize your RPO business, your “nice to have’s” are going to change. For example, 5 years from now you almost certainly are not going to need fax integration (I hope you don’t need it right now)-this type of feature shouldn’t be a deal killer in your buying decision. It is always better to learn to walk before you try to run. And, remember, choosing any kind of business software is all about managing trade-offs.
My second piece of advice is that you take the time to see your “must have” features in action. This starts with a demo, but you should also move at least some of your recruiters on to this platform. Take full advantage of the free trial (most vendors should offer this, it’s 2010). Don’t use fake data and don’t just test the system for an hour here and there. Use it to manage a customer, or 2, or 10. If it fails at managing a small portion of your business, it will certainly fail at managing a large one. Remember, this will be the lynch pin of your business, your platform; don’t just take the salesperson’s word for it.
What Questions do you ask of your RPO software vendor?
Does this RPO software enhance our brand?
Selling an outsourced recruiting solutions is a hard. You’re truly selling the invisible. Before software, the buyers of recruitment outsourcing solutions had little more to go on than a sales pitch, an SLA and some promises. Today, with the right RPO software you can gain an incredible advantage during the sales process: proving that your solution is more complete, more modern and more efficient than competing solutions. Your software should enhance, not detract, from this message. Choose software that your stakeholder is going to be proud to roll out to their team, something that will make them look good. Make presenting your technology solution the buyer’s first win.
If I were an RPO customer, would I use this software?
No software platform is magic. Some users will love it. Some users won’t. But, choosing RPO software that increases your chances of getting more users will result in higher margins, and reduced customer turnover.
Obviously, every hour you spend training and every week you spend implementing RPO software is money from your bottom line. The harder your recruitment outsourcing software is to use, the less likely your clients will be to use it, and the more work you’ll have to do manually. Simply put, the easier your recruiting technology is to use, the less work your recruiters have to do, and the better your margins will be.
There are other benefits as well. The more users you get, the better off you’ll be as you’ll capture critical information that you’ll use to diagnose and solve problems. Solving minor problems before they become major headaches keeps customers happy. Pick the right technology and it will become the hardest working part of your solution. When you customer periodically evaluates other solutions, they’ll realize that you provide not only a valuable service but, a valuable technology.
Will this allow us to be more valuable than just the last resume we sent?
Unless you choose technology that allows you to show all of your work, your client will continue to judge you on one thing – the last resume your team sent. How else are customers going to feel any ownership of the service you’re providing them? Without the right technology, all the work that your team is doing, except for the last resume sent is invisible to them. If your customer just wanted resumes, they would have hired a contingent agency or signed up with another job board. When companies hire an RPO, they want hires and they want problems fixed. They want visibility and they demand accountability. Provide technology that you can build around, a platform that will enable all those best practices that you talked about in the sales meeting. Choose technology that will tackle the tactical and create the opportunity for your firm to be strategic.
Will your technology vendor continue to be innovative?
Ok, you’ve narrowed down your options, done the demos, set up some users and wrestled pricing information from the vendors. Now, you need to ask what the vendor has in store in the coming 6-12 months. What’s on their roadmap? Are they adding features just to add features, small things to win a customer here and there? Or, are they designing critical enhancements that will help you overcome your biggest challenges? Select a vendor that is constantly innovating and looking for ways to make your team more efficient. Select a vendor that has been on your side of the table, a firm that has employees that have actually worked in an RPO or at least a recruiting environment. They’ll provide the most innovative platforms, ones that work the way you work.
Finally, you’d probably expect that RPO software, the technology that’s going to power your business is going to cost a pretty penny and is going to be a major headache to implement. Not the case, it’s 2010. 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 be affordable and will scale as your business scales. So, get educated, ask the tough questions, kick some tires, do the demos and choose modern recruiting software that will accelerate the growth of your recruitment outsourcing practice and make your clients happy.
