EMPLOYER CENTRAL

Why Recruit Passives?

Put 100 recruiters in a room and ask them to identify the best talent in the workforce, and 99 will point to passive job seekers. The problem, of course, is that passive job seekers aren't job seekers at all. At best, they are prospects. They don't act like active job seekers, nor are they motivated in the same way. More often than not, they have to be dragged kicking and screaming into our recruiting processes. And then, they have to be persuaded and cajoled into even considering our openings. In short, they are a colossal pain in the neck to recruit. So, it's appropriate to ask why even bother with them? Why not focus on people who really do want to come to work for our employers?

While acknowledging just how difficult passive prospects can be, I think we must not only recruit them, we must make them our priority. Why? There are at least four reasons.

First, passive prospects represent the majority of talent in the workforce.
A recent survey sponsored by Yahoo! reached over 3,700 people aged 18-64. It found that just 17% of the population-fewer that one-out-of-five people-were actively seeking a job. This finding correlates well with an earlier study attributed to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. It found that just 16% of the population were active job seekers. In other words, somewhere between 83% and 84% of American workers are passive prospects. There are four times as many of them as there are candidates proactively applying for our openings.

Second, passive prospects generally represent a higher caliber of talent.
Are active job seekers also qualified? Of course. But passive prospects are passive largely because they are already employed and, therefore, presumably making an acceptable or better contribution to their employers. Data collected by the Yahoo! survey tend to support this view. It found that the average experience level of passive prospects was 18.4 years, with over half reporting more than 20 years in the workplace. The average for active job seekers, in contrast, was 14.9 years of experience, with slightly more than a third reporting more than 20 years on-the-job. In addition, if pay is a measure of a person's perceived value to an enterprise, then passive job seekers are viewed as significantly greater contributors. The average annual salary for passive prospects is $66,100, while the average for active job seekers is over 10% lower at $54,583.

Third, passive prospects make more stable employees.
The attrition rate of passive prospects is lower than that of active job seekers. Said another way, active job seekers tend to be active more often than passive prospects. According to the Yahoo! survey, those who described themselves as "passive" changed jobs every 5-10 years, while those who self-identified as active job seekers were switching employers every 2-5 years. As a result, employers have longer to reap a meaningful return on their investment in the higher quality talent delivered by passive prospects.

Regardless of your measure of merit-availability, quality or loyalty-passive prospects are the better candidates, even if they are difficult to recruit. Which begs the question, what is the best way to turn them into active passive prospects? Since most passive prospects will elect to make a career enhancing move from time-to-time, the key is to mirror their behaviors when they do. Here again, the Yahoo! survey provides some interesting insights that run counter to some of today's conventional wisdom.

According to the passive prospects in the survey, when they do decide to look for a job, they will use the following resources or methods:

• Local newspaper (cited by 56%)
• National job board (cited by 41%)
• Local newspaper Web-site (cited by 37%)
• Phone or in-person networking (cited by 36%)
• Professional/industry Web-site/publication (cited by 26%)
• Corporate Web-site (cited by 25%)
• Search engine (cited by 25%)

This list of resources and methods is clearly imperfect. While there were other answers that respondents could pick, the total set was incomplete and unbalanced. It ignored, for example, niche job boards altogether, while it listed the local newspaper and the local newspaper's Web-site separately, but combined professional/industry Web-sites and publications into a single answer. Be that as it may, however, the findings do offer at least two interesting insights.

1. The mix of resources and methods selected by passive prospects is not the same as that identified by the active job seekers in the survey. In other words, passive prospects "shop" for employers in a very different way than do active job seekers. For example, almost three quarters of active job seekers (74%) would use a job board compared to 41% of the passive prospects who would. Does that mean, it's not worth using job boards for passive prospects? Of course not. If passives make up 83% of the workforce, then 41% of that population is still three times the size of the active job seekers group. The secret is in knowing which job boards passive are most likely to use and how to write a job posting that will overcome their inherent reluctance to move.

2. Contrary to what we may assume, the media choices among passive prospects cut across generational lines. For example, a startling 56% of Millennials said they intend to use their local newspaper when they decide to look for a new or better job. In fact, the local newspaper was their second most cited resource, trailing only job boards. No less important, at least some of the Millennials and many of the other passive prospects are also likely to use the media they selected for job search when they aren't looking for a job. That habit makes career portals (job boards that support career advancement as well as job search), newspapers, professional sites and publications and search engines effective platforms for brand as well as recruitment advertising. They are the perfect place to promote the value proposition of your organization as an employer so that when passive prospects decide to become active, it is already top of mind and pre-sold.

Passive prospects may be a pain in the neck, but they are also a powerful source of talent for your organization. If your tailor your sourcing strategy to their behavior when they do decide to look for a job, you'll likely reduce the pain and enhance the yield you recruit.

Thanks for reading,
Peter

Lights, Camera, Action

There's been a lot of discussion recently about the emergence of video resumes. Will they catch on? Are they helpful or hurtful to candidates? To employers? Do video resumes take online recruiting and job search to the next level-the vaunted Web 2.0-or are they simply yet another Internet fad that will fade away when the marketing dollars run out and the media moves on?

All of those questions are important, I suppose, but I think they detract us from the larger issue. What's that? How can video be used in recruiting? Certainly, crafting personal resumes is one way, but it's by no means the only option. In fact, I think there's a far more powerful way to deploy visual images and sound in the War for the Best Talent online. I believe video is the key to a whole new genre of employee testimonials.

Employee testimonials have long been recognized as a key recruitment communication and marketing tool. The best talent are good consumers. They don't take organizational claims about employment brands at face value. They look for proof. And, some of the most persuasive proof is the testimony of their peers. In employment collateral and in the Career area on corporate sites, what employees have to say-as long as it's not sugar-coated or lackey-like-more effectively shapes candidate perspectives about an employer than any other single factor.

Traditionally, employee testimonials have been presented as text statements often accompanied by a picture of the individual. Done well, they provide a window into the organization that ratifies its claims about what it's like to work there. They put a human face on the organization which makes it easier for a candidate to relate to the employer and, no less important, to those who will be their peers.

Text-based testimonials clearly get the job done, but I think testimonials presented in a video format could have an even more powerful impact. Now, just to be clear, I'm not talking about marketing videos that introduce the organization. These have been around for several years and are increasingly common on corporate Web-sites. There's nothing wrong with them, but they are not employee testimonials. They may include an employee statement or two, but they are basically about the organization.

Video-based employee testimonials, on the other hand, are about the people who work for an organization. They use visual images and audio to tell a story-their story-about what it's like to work for their employer. They will sell the organization, but only if they are engaging and credibly describe (or suggest) the nature of the individual's employment experience.

Two recent examples will illustrate my point. They are imperfect, but still intriguing. Both were created without "corporate involvement." In fact, they are nothing more than lip synching coupled with some group pantomiming and crude sets. However, each in its own way says something that is especially engaging about the culture of an employer and the pride felt by its employees for the work that they do.

• You'll find the first testimonial here. (For those who are squeamish about lyrics, please be warned.) It was created by a group of employees in a single take one day after work. Without so much as a marketing phrase or formal endorsement, it makes a bold statement about the employment experience the company offers. Does the video work? It was posted on a video sharing site and quickly became one of its most popular (i.e., viewed) shows. Here's what some of the viewers wrote in response (with a little editing from me): "I would rather work there over any other job." "Would even move to another country to get a job with people like you guys ..." "O.K., two questions: Where do you people work? Can I have a job?"
• The second testimonial is posted here. It was created by an intern at Yahoo! who simply wanted to tell his friends about where he worked and what he did. He rewrote the lyrics to a popular rap, rolled some video and posted the result on a video sharing site. It doesn't earn universal acclaim, but 16 viewers gave it a heart, indicating they love it.

What can we learn from these first generation video testimonials? I think the following are the key lessons:

• Video testimonials work best when they are positioned to be viral. That means they should be posted on video sharing sites as well as in the Career area on corporate Web-sites.
• Much more than their text-based counterparts, video testimonials depend upon authenticity. They should not be staged corporate productions, but rather individual (or group) creations that express the essence of an organization's employment experience.
• A video testimonial is not simply a film of a text-based message. Rather, it is a visual presentation that draws on sound and motion as well as images to deliver a persuasive and memorable confirmation of an organization's employment brand.

Thanks for reading,
Peter

How Are People Finding Jobs?

How are people finding jobs? It's an important question, of course, because answering it correctly enables you to make smart decisions when selecting recruitment advertising venues and, as a result, upgrade the quality of the candidates you are able to recruit.

Traditional "source of hire" surveys turn to us, the recruiters who interact with job candidates, to answer the question. It's a reasonable approach, I guess, but one that has at least two serious problems:

• First, we rely on our applicant tracking systems and the data they collect from candidates to provide the answer. Many of these systems, however, force candidates to identify their source of information about an opening by selecting from an often incomplete and out-of-date list and thus are notoriously inaccurate.
• Second, source of hire surveys normally sample a very small population of employers and collect the data they report as averages. They then establish an overall set of results by averaging the employers' averages, an approach which can overemphasize data trends and minimize important data anomalies.
  

To avoid these deficiencies, we at WEDDLE's launched a Source of Employment Survey last year. This study has the following benefits:

• First, it acquires information directly from working men and women. As a consequence, it avoids the distorting filter of applicant tracking systems and the inaccuracies of their data.
• Second, it samples a huge population. WEDDLE's 2007 report is based on responses from over 11,500 people. The data were collected between January 1, 2007 and July 31, 2007 at the WEDDLE's Web-site, www.weddles.com.

Our 2007 survey confirmed some previously reported trends and yielded a couple of interesting surprises. As shown below, the five largest sources of new employees were online job boards, staffing and executive search firms, tips from friends and family members, networking in a business context, and two methods that have been pooh-poohed recently by the cognoscenti of employment: career fairs and newspapers.

• The #1 source of employment: answering ads and posting a resume on job boards, reported by 13.22% of respondents;
• The #2 source of employment: a call from a headhunter or staffing firm, reported by 11.3% of respondents;
• The #3 source of employment: a tip from a friend or family member, reported by 11.1% of respondents;
• The #4 source of employment: networking at work or at a business event, reported by 10.5% of respondents;
• The #5 source of employment: a virtual tie between career fairs and answering an ad in a newspaper, reported by 5.8% of respondents.

As you can see, these five sources accounted for almost six out of ten (57.7%) of the positions that people took during their last job search.

What were the least helpful sources of employment, as reported by our survey respondents? Beginning with the least effective, they were:

• Networking at a social event;
• Answering an ad in a publication of their professional association;
• Using a social networking site;
• Sending a resume directly to an employer; and
• Responding to a notice posted in a store.

What can we learn from these results? First, while social networking sites and social networking, in general, obviously have their benefits, one of them is clearly not finding a job or, by extension, connecting us with viable employment prospects. Second, while associations serve a number of important functions, many are apparently not meeting the employment needs of their members and, by extension, our requirements in recruiting. And third, many of our own employers aren't faring much better. In a War for Talent, such crude recruiting tactics as placing placards in a window are the functional equivalent of using a bow and arrow. Equally as important, the technology we've deployed to fight that war-those applicant tracking systems so many of our organizations have purchased-are letting us down. They've created a black hole experience out of resume submission that turns off and turns away the best and brightest.

What should we do about these findings? I have the following suggestions:

• Devote more time to online or e-networking. This activity enables you to leverage the job seeker's confidence in networking while capitalizing on the productivity benefits you can achieve online. I'm not suggesting that you forego traditional telephonic and face-to-face networking, but rather that you augment those more labor- and time-intensive methods with the Web's capacity for efficient mass 1:1 relationship building.
• Invest in multimedia advertising. Regardless of what you may have heard about the demise of newspaper advertising, it's clear that job seekers still turn to that medium as a trusted and useful source of employment. You can capitalize on that view by creating relatively inexpensive "teaser" classified ads that connect job seekers to more fulsome and persuasive job postings online. However, don't make candidates laboriously search a job database (on your own corporate site or on a commercial job board) to find the opening in which they're interested. Instead, include an alphanumeric code in your print ad that will return the exact job they want to see and do so without any effort on their part.
• Expect more out of your applicant tacking system.Re-read the text that's included in your system's auto-responder. If it's something only a lawyer could love, change it so that it reflects the attributes of your employment brand and delivers the courtesy and respect that applicants deserve. Also check the functionality the system is using to identify the source of candidates. Some of the better systems are now using a form of tagging, but most still rely on simple drop down windows with a list of options for job seekers to select. If that's what your vendor is providing, make sure its list is up-to-date and that the vendor has an effective way to help you keep it that way.

The WEDDLE's Source of Employment Survey will be reported here in my newsletter each year in September. We hope it helps you to maximize the return you achieve on your investment of recruiting time, effort and advertising money in the War for the Best Talent.

Thanks for reading,
Peter

Treat Your Career Area As If It Were a Catalog

Career areas on corporate Web-sites are no longer a novelty. They are so important to waging the War for the Best Talent effectively that almost all employers now have them. And that’s the rub. With so many of these areas now in operation, it’s increasingly difficult to create a Career area that truly stands out.

There is actually no secret at all to creating a top notch Career area. Ironically, all you have to do is visit Amazon.com. They provide more information to sell a $40.00 book than most employers provide to sell a passive, high caliber prospect on taking a full time job with their organization. In other words, most Career areas fail to stand out because they provide so little information to help the employer stand out.

What kind of information should a top notch Career area include? Let’s use Amazon’s promotion of my 2007/8 Guide to Employment Sites on the Internet to answer that question. The site isn’t perfect, but it does provide some useful insights in the following areas:

Finding the information you want.When you visit Amazon, you’re offered a drop down window at the top of the page (yes, we humans read from top to bottom) and a tool bar at the left hand margin (yes, the English language is read from left to right), both of which use an intuitive link—Books—to connect you directly with the information you want. Unlike with many Career areas, you don’t have to scroll to the bottom of the page to find the appropriate link; the link isn’t so small you need a magnifying glass to read it, and the link, itself, avoids obfuscating or confusing terms (such as About Us or Our Company).

The title of the book and its ISBN. Once in the Book area, you can search for a specific publication directly from the first page. The results of your inquiry will always include both the book’s full title (e.g., WEDDLE’s 2007/8 Guide to Employment Sites on the Internet: For Corporate and Third Party Recruiters, Job Seekers and Career Activists) and its industry tracking number or ISBN (e.g., 1928734421). Unlike with many Career areas, you don’t have to register or build a customer profile to search for a book, and when the results of your search come back, you get a detailed description of the opportunity rather than just some unintelligible internal position title (e.g., Legal Secretary III, Intermediate Systems Analyst).

A picture of the book’s cover. The most successful retail outlets recognize that different consumers shop in different ways. Some are motivated by text-based detail, while others respond to images. For that reason, Amazon.com includes a description and a picture of almost every book it sells. It indicates whether the book is a hardback or paperback, the size and number of its pages, the language in which it’s written and even its weight. Unlike with many Career areas, you don’t have to imagine what the product (i.e., the employer’s workplace) looks like and you aren’t left in the dark about the kind of physical experience it will provide.

What will happen when you place an order. Amazon.com always tells you exactly how many books it has on-hand and whether they are new or used. It will also tell you whether or not it stocks the book in its warehouse and how long it will take to arrive after you order it. Unlike with many Career areas, you can quickly determine its inventory of items (i.e., how many open positions it is posting in a particular career field), the status of each item (i.e., whether a posting is new or old), and exactly what to expect when you make a purchase (i.e., how long you will have to wait before you will receive what you want—an offer—or hear back from the vendor with information on your situation).

Supplemental descriptive information. In addition to all of the above, Amazon.com also provides more detailed information organized into logical sections to help the consumer make an informed decision buying decision and do so quickly. There are Book Description, About the Author, and Product Detail sections as well as prominent invitations to tell a friend about a book and/or write your own review of it. Unlike with many Career areas, Amazon.com tries to answer the questions of the buyer (i.e., the passive prospect who has choices) before they ask them, works to leverage the viral network of the buyer with every purchasing opportunity (i.e., within the content of each job posting), and creates an experience in which the buyer can actually contribute to the site and thus feel as if it’s ownership is shared (i.e., with them).

The War for Talent is, in many respects, a sales challenge. We have to convince top performers who are almost always employed someplace else to do the one thing nobody wants to do: change. We have to sell them on switching from the devil they know—their current employer, boss and commute—to the devil they don’t know—your employer, a new boss and a different commute. As Amazon.com has proven, the best way to close such a deal is with a catalog full of well organized and compelling information that makes it easy for the customer to find what they want and decide that they want it.

Thanks for reading,
Peter

To "B" or Not to "B"

The War for Talent, a report produced by McKinsey & Company in 1997, was a seminal document in the recruiting profession. Not only did it underscore the importance of the work that recruiters do in the modern enterprise, but for the first time, it calculated the monetary impact of that work.

McKinsey studied a number of organizations to determine if the quality of recruiters’ yield really mattered at the bottom line. Now, you have to wonder why it took a study in the 97th year of the 20th Century to figure that out, but we’ll explore that question on another day. Anyway, McKinsey found that the differential financial impact of high performers was not only measurable, but profound. No matter what metric is used—sales closed, products manufactured without defect, or customer satisfaction scores—“A” level performers are 50 to 100% more productive than “C” level performers. Hire the best and most capable in each profession, craft or trade for which you recruit, and you will give your organization a clear competitive advantage that even the CFO will be able to recognize.

Now, some will say that this push for the best quality is overblown. Even professional sports teams, they argue, can’t afford to hire All Stars at every position. It’s an interesting point, but a misconceived analogy. Any sports team that is truly trying to win a championship also tries to hire the best players it can find for each and every position it has to fill; the Yankees haven’t won twice as many World Champions as any other team because they go out and hire “C” players at a position or two. Accepting less than the best is asking to be mediocre … whether it’s on the baseball diamond or in the global marketplace.

Indeed, that is the ultimate finding of the McKinsy report. Whatever the position you have to fill, you should try to hire the person who will do it best. Not the first qualified person you can find, but the best qualified person there is. That’s obvious in the professional and managerial ranks, but it’s just as true among trade and hourly workers. If your organization needs another retail sales person, then you want to recruit “A” level candidates in sales; if it needs a mail room clerk, then you want to hire the best mail room clerk you can find; and if it’s a janitor, then go out and recruit an “A” level janitor.

But here’s the rub. The McKinsey study ignored a whole class of workers that we would do well to consider. Between those “A” level performers at the top and those “C” level performers in the mediocre middle, there are “B” level players who are the invisible candidates of the labor force. And, according to recent work by a scholar at Harvard, they deserve better treatment.

“B” level performers are typically every bit as talented and capable as “A” level performers, but they bring different motivations to work.

• “A” level performers - These employees work for huzzahs. They want to be known as the best in the organization. They are good, and they want everyone else to know it. They crave being recognized by promotions and bonuses and the attention of their boss. They may be the only employees who actually look forward to performance appraisals. Their motivation is Brand Me.


• “B” level performers - These employees work for what one writer called “mental chocolate.” They are very good at what they do—in fact, many are recovering “A” level performers—but they do it for the intrinsic reward of a job well done. It’s not that they don’t care about awards and bonuses, but they aren’t driven to stand out or to stand above their colleagues. Their motivation is Brand Us.

Said another way, “B” level performers have a balanced view of work and life, and because they do, they often go unnoticed (witness the McKinsey report) and underappreciated by their employers. In many respects, however, they are the backbone of an organization. They are the workers you can count on in a crisis; they are the people who will quietly but competently step in to help cover for an absent co-worker. And they are, as a consequence, people we must recruit.

How do we do that? As I’ve suggested in previous columns when discussing “A” level prospects, we have to find out exactly what will attract “B” level performers to our organization and focus on those factors in our job postings and the Career content on our Web-site. One of the best ways to acquire this insight is to borrow a tactic used by our colleagues in marketing. We should hold focus groups among the “B” level employees in our organization working in the fields for which we are recruiting. They are the perfect surrogate for the “B” level prospects we want to recruit and can tell us precisely what it takes to get someone (just like them) to “buy” our organization as an employer.

The basis for this research, as our marketing colleagues have learned, is customer segmentation. We must recognize the differences among the potential “customers” of our organization’s employment value proposition and shape the expression of that proposition to attract the customers we most want. The McKisney and Company report provides the justification for focusing on “A” level performers and their unique needs. To achieve full success as recruiters, however, we should also determine what attracts “B” level performers and source them, as well. When we do, we give our organizations both extraordinary performers and those who add something extra to the ordinary performance of everyone around them.

Thanks for reading,
Peter