How Google Can Change Recruiting

We’ve long been trained against asking personal questions in the process if interviewing candidates, even though we’ll accept it if offered.  At the same time, we move into a more open world with Facebook, Twitter, blogging and other types of social media.  For some reason, many managers, even in HR, don’t take the simple step of examining a candidate’s online presence during the interview process.

This is potentially the richest source of information on a candidate.  Are they insightful, presenting new ideas in their chosen discipline, investigating potential avenues of learning more about their work?  Or are they disruptive, combative, or even just rude?  People are more themselves when they think they are anonymous, even if put their name at the end of their post.  It’s a different world than just a few years ago, and indicators of a candidate’s personality are now available in the public space for your perusal.  So why aren’t we using it more?

Regardless of readership levels, I know that if I search on myself, I’ll find this blog, my LinkedIn profile and Lean For HR LinkedIn group (feel free to join!), and several online discussions I’ve held on work relevant topics.   But this rarely comes up in conversation with outside recruiters.   

To me, that work is more indicative of my thought process and outlook on key tenants of HR than anything on a CV.  Between your CV and your online presence, I can get a handle on not just what you’ve accomplished, but how you did it and how your personality is likely to fit in with someone else’s culture and team.  Why wouldn’t we use that to its full extent?

I suspect, or at least I hope, that we will dig into this at the HR Technology Conference.

5 Ways to Reduce Waste in Your Recruiting Processes

Talent acquisition is rewarding, but can be a painful process for both the recruiter and the applicant(s).  Here are some suggested methods for cutting waste and improving the overall recruiting process...

1)  Online applications.  Most companies are either in this game or going there, but many that use an application tracking system also have paper applications.  In some cases, they require both.  Not to mention the redundancies of having a CV or resume, then the online application, then the paper application.  Don't waste you applicant's time with rework, and don't waste your own in dealing with reams of unnecessary paper.

2)  Incentives your externals the right way.  The best system I've seen offers their external recruiters a bonus payment if the first candidate they present is hired.  This gives them incentive to really learn the culture and position to give you a great candidate the first time.  If you think of the wasted time and money in looking at multiple candidates, it's a small price to pay.

3) Cut your interview to offer time.  Sometimes the bottlenecks are simple ones to reduce, once you realize that time is not a free resource.  One team I worked with waited until the end of the process (meaning post-acceptance) to perform the background check and drug screening.  It added 5-10 days to the end of the process.  The cost for each round of checks was about $50.  Once I asked them if the position added more than $10 per day of value, it became an easy decision to move it.  Now they perform those checks on the final three candidates just before the last round of interviews.  Results don't come back until after the interviews and (generally) the decision is made, but the delay in getting the offer and acceptance in greatly reduced.

4) Create a pull process in staffing.  Recruiters will tell you there is a limit to how many searches that can do at once before you start to lose quality.  Ten seems to be the average.  If you are using an online talent system, hold the requisitions back until one of the ten they are currently working is closed out.  This also allows you to track your staffing levels and know if you have the right number on the team, too many, or not enough.  Speaking of which...

5)  Centralize your staffing team.  Just like a call center, shared staffing resources allow you to handle the peaks and valleys of demand across your business without over- or under-worked people (as well as often needed fewer recruiters overall).  Rather than have a staffing person for each location/department/business leader, build a central team that can take requests from across the business and triage them for best responses.  Within that team you can still have specialists as needed, but you reduce your risk of losing an expert recruiter because their knowledge can be more easily shared. 

And the unnumbered bonus tip is, of course, get really good at talent retention and development.  It will help keep the recruiting needs to a minimum, which is the best way to reduce the waste in the first place.

Pick a skill!

Let's pretend you are adding one person to your staff.  You have several qualified applicants, but each has an "extra" skill set that doesn't translate directly to the role (whatever it may be; the role isn't important here).  The "extra" skills are:

Sales experience
Second language fluency (though not one that will be useful for their client base)
Statistics/Data analysis
Non-profit group grant writing/fund raising
Stand-up comedy experience

Which skill would you most likely add to your team, and why?