Curated Recruiting Blogs for July 2017
In the Midwest kids are already ‘back to school’ next week! So, summer is coming to a close soon and fall is right around the corner. Here in Seattle, school starts in a few weeks (like it should). Nevertheless, in July there were a plethora of solid recruiting and sourcing articles that are worth checking out. We have picked out the articles we think you will enjoy for our Top 10 Recruiting Articles from July. Thanks to the authors for sharing their expertise with us. We’ve included the publication, author, Twitter name, title of the article, and a quick snippet of each article. Enjoy!
Talent Growth Advisors – Linda Brenner (@lindabrennerTGA)
4 Ways to Repel Top Talent with Scarce Skills
Let’s acknowledge that, despite our widespread desire to offer a great candidate experience to every applicant for every role, talent acquisition functions simply aren’t resourced to do so. Like every business and family, we have limited resources within which we must operate. One option for managing this budgeting challenge – the traditional HR approach – is to spread our resources as thinly and as evenly as possible in an effort to achieve some kind of parity or fairness. This usually means making distinctions by level (lots of attention, resources and money spent on executive candidates, less so on professional and few if any on hourly candidates). However, the perceived importance of these levels themselves is a hold-over from, literally, the industrial era. Not only do level-based distinctions make little sense in our knowledge economy, using them as the foundation for your talent-acquisition strategy will repel the very talent that the business most needs to grow – talent that is not defined by the levels we created in the 1930s. Managing talent-acquisition resources the old way – spreading resources thinly and evenly by level – is a sure-fire recipe to repelling the talent you most need.
Talent Culture – Tony Restell (@tonyrestell)
Your Biggest Barrier to Recruiting Effectiveness
It’s time we acknowledged that there’s been a fundamental shift in the recruiting landscape and that the barriers to achieving best-in-class recruitment have moved on. I recently had a conversation with recruitment veteran Marc Hutto of Reveal Global Intelligence. Marc’s been recruiting for decades and espouses a form of “purpose-driven recruiting” that necessitates taking a step back and understanding how the market has changed. What are these seismic shifts and how do they affect you, whether you are an agency recruiter or part of an in-house corporate recruiting team? Well, in a nutshell, we all now operate in a market where:
- Identifying quality candidates is no longer the principal challenge
- Handling volume recruiting will increasingly be automated in smarter ways
- Winning over candidates has become the biggest barrier to recruiting effectiveness
Talent Culture – Meghan M. Biro (@MeghanMBiro)
Four Ways Tech Can Unleash the Power of Your Workforce
We often use the word Power to describe an innovation. Part of its power lies in its novelty – so when the newness fades so does our focus on something’s power. We’ve been focusing on tech for a good reason: Work’s transformation to digital is the essence of powerful. But our work depends on people: their ability to solve problems and innovate, to create, and to think about new tools we haven’t even heard of yet. A Harvard study found that human brains only stay focused on the present for about 53 percent of the time. So, let’s flip the script in the world of work and look at how to best leverage tech to unleash the brainpower of our people. Why now? We’ve already entered what Deloitte calls “the big shift” and are about to transform again as a wave of AI and robotics hits. We’re going to need to fully understand the value of human capital – which we may start calling NI, as in natural intelligence. To do that, we’ve got to let free up some human bandwidth. As our work and our lives become increasingly combined, and as work continues to transform – from centralized headquarters to a constellation of teams, from local to global, from brick and mortar to virtual – we have an incredible opportunity to re-connect with our own humanity. Different isn’t always better, but if we harness the tech that’s changing us, it will be.
Forbes – Josh Bersin (@Josh_Bersin)
Google for Jobs: Potential to Disrupt the $200 Billion Recruiting Industry
Have you ever looked for a job? Of course you have. It’s a daunting process, and one which Google hopes to make easier than ever.Bureau of Labor Statistics show that 20-24% of Americans change jobs every year (ADP global research says it’s 27%), which means more than 41 million people are searching for jobs and being recruited into jobs every single year (in the US alone). Several billions of dollars are spent on job advertising (Indeed, Glassdoor, LinkedIn, CareerBuilder, and others compete for this market) and even after people apply, companies on average spend approximately $4,000 per candidate on interviewing, scheduling, and assessment to decide if someone is right for a job. We estimate that the entire recruitment market is over $200 billion worldwide, and nearly every employer is a participant. For job seekers, the search process can be agonizing, difficult, and frightening. Unlike other searches on the internet, a job search is a very personal thing. You are looking for a position that fits your needs, a job with a company that fits your personality and lifestyle, and an employer that is physically close enough that you can commute or relocate without impacting your family and daily life. All these search “criteria” are important, and almost none of this information is embedded in the job description.
Forbes – Jeanne Meister (@jcmeister)
The Future of Work: Death of the Single Skill Set in the Age of Automation
The future of work is here today, and the nature of both manufacturing and knowledge jobs will never be the same. According to a McKinsey analysis of 2,000 different work activities across 800 occupations, automation will change virtually every job across all occupations. Specifically, McKinsey found that in about 60% of occupations, 30% of tasks could be handed over to robots and bots. “More occupations will change,” the report concludes, “than will be automated away.” Other sources have predicted that automation of professional knowledge economy jobs in the United States will be more than 10 times as large as the number of manufacturing jobs automated to date. Much of the current debate on automation focuses on mass unemployment and rendering entire occupations susceptible to displacement. Instead, we need to focus on what new skills are needed by key job roles and then develop a plan of action to upskill individual employees and teams. So how does one prepare for this volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world of work? I believe by understanding a simple fact: across many jobs there is a “death of a single skill set,” and what has made you employable today will not be enough to ensure you are employable tomorrow.
HR Tech Weekly – Tiffany Rowe
4 Degrees That Take You Far in HR
You have to be smart to work in human resources. You won’t hear this from anyone outside of HR, but it’s the truth. HR professionals balance all sorts of responsibilities, from administering compensation and benefits to settling disputes between employees to organizing weekly, monthly, and annual events. It’s a tough gig, and it takes diligence and intelligence to pull off. Therefore, to advance in HR, you need to be even more diligent and intelligent than your HR peers – which means you need to be better educated than they are. Advanced degrees are known to help the ambitious speed up the corporate ladder, and that’s true in HR, too. The following four degrees are incredibly different from one another, but that’s exactly why they are perfect for those interested in being better at HR. Whether you would be content with a management position or you want access to the C-suite, you should probably earn an advanced degree to move up in HR. The above programs offer the most applicable knowledge and skills, but you can explore other options by contacting business schools or speaking with a qualified HR mentor.
The HR Capitalist – Kris Dunn (@kris_dunn)
Nashville – What Happens When an Employment Market Becomes Too Cool for School…
If you know anything about the Southeast US where I live, there’s a couple of big realities from a lifestyle/work perspective: –Atlanta is the capital –The Southeast is booming in general –There’s no hotter market than Nashville, or as I like to call it, #Nashvegas Since I travel a lot for work, I tend to measure how hot a market is for business, employment and cultural gravity by the general availability/price of hotels in the market. By that measure, Nashville is red hot. It’s hard to find a business class hotel that won’t make you cringe for less than the high $100s or right at/above $200. That’s a lot. Compare to the market to Atlanta, where great rooms can be found from $110 to $140, and it’s clear that Nashville is booming. Because of the boom over the last decade, inventory on the hotel and housing front hasn’t caught up to the demand yet. Why is Nashville so hot? Many would tell you that the growth is a function of multiple factors – including a centralized metropolitan government that generally allows the metro to work together (see more about the government setup here), a unique cultural pull with origins in country music (expanding beyond that taste, but still the flagship) and an emerging hipster dufus vibe ITP (inside the perimeter). Add it all up, and employers have been flocking to Nashville for the last 10-15 years.
ERE Recruiting – Charlene Long
When a Recruiter Should Break Up with a Candidate
It’s not me, it’s you. No really, it’s you! Your candidate just rejected the offer. Or disappeared without a trace during the interview process. How could that happen? Was there any way you could you have seen this coming? Well, maybe there were signs. Red flags. Ok, admit it. You just didn’t want to end it. Not after all the work and time you spent. Most of the time when you lose a candidate to another offer there is nothing you missed or did wrong. The other job was just more challenging or paid more or had a shorter commute or better hours or some other reason you cannot control. However, in a candidate-driven market, especially for positions that are hard-to-fill in any market, it is tempting to overlook – and rationalize – all those issues that ordinarily would make you decide not to submit a candidate in the first place. Don’t ever believe that all those “little” things will be easy to negotiate when an offer is extended because your candidate will be so excited about the job by then and therefore more flexible than they were when you submitted them.
ERE Media Talent Management and HR – Debbie Lamb (@deblam67)
Social Media Can Make the Candidate Experience Great
How do you define “candidate experience?” HR influencers who have discussed the candidate experience share similar views. In a 2013 blog post for the Huffington Post, Rayanne Thorn described candidate experience as, “What a job seeker/applicant/candidate goes through during the hiring process.” With the job market being more candidate-driven than ever before, candidate experience will continue to be a major topic for companies and organizations to come. Candidate experience has a direct impact on business from an organization’s reputation to its profitability. Candidates who had an overall negative hiring experience will take their alliances, product purchases and relationships elsewhere. Negative experiences impact the employer brand and can also diminish their ability to attract the “perfect” new talent for their company. As for the opposite, if a candidate had a positive experience, they will continue to increase a relationship with that potential employer.
ERE Media Sourceon – Elyse Mayer (@ElyseSchmidt)
Is Unconscious Bias Driving Conscious Bias?
I was watching a rerun the other day (OK, it was The Office!), and Dwight was quizzing Ryan on those old-school brain teasers (i.e., A man builds a house with all four sides facing south. A bear walks by. What color is the bear?). If you watch The Office, Ryan knew all the answers, and Dwight was furious. And if you were ever a kid, you likely know the answers to most of these teasers, but one jarred my memory and ticked me off. A father and son are in a car accident. The father dies, and the son is taken to the hospital. The doctor comes in and exclaims, “I can’t operate on this boy.” “Why not?” the nurse asks. “Because he’s my son,” the doctor responds. How is this possible? How is this possible??!! Well, the doctor is, in fact, his mother, a woman. Why is this a brain teaser? Today, it’s shocking that people wouldn’t immediately guess this. But, the truth is, people tend to associate doctors with men, despite the fact that 35% of physicians in the U.S. are women. That this brain teaser even exists is one clear example of how bias is ingrained deep within us, particularly when it comes to gender and diversity.
We hope you’ve enjoyed our Top 10 Recruiting Articles for July 2017!
