What You Don’t Know Could Be Costly – Eligibility Verification

The forms can be confusing and difficult to complete, and employers often make mistakes that cost their companies thousands of dollars in penalties and sanctions, and even criminal prosecution. Federal immigration officials or the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may ask a company to produce accurate I-9 records and failure to do so constitutes a violation.

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W. Garnett & Associates
Human Capital Management
1-888-884-3910

During the Recession Discriminatory Hiring Practices Increased

Several academic and governmental studies confirm that whether or not current discriminatory practices are deliberate, minorities are facing disparate treatment in the hiring and employment markets. For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the unemployment rate for black male college graduates 25 and older was nearly twice the unemployment rate for white male college graduates 25 and older in 2009.

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W. Garnett & Associates
Human Capital Management
1-888-884-3910

Are You Required to Complete Form I-9 on Domestic Help?

Lawyers, accountants and other responsible professionals never think to prepare a Form I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification on domestic household help.  Form I-9’s are absolutely required for such domestic employees.  Suddenly, my audience realizes they have an important job to take care of at home.  This omission could cause them great public personal embarrassment.

Link to article

W. Garnett & Associates
Human Capital Management
1-888-884-3910

What HR Can Learn From American Idol

I’m not a big fan of American Idol, but like a lot of people, I get sucked into the competitive aspects of taking a group of talented people and publicly narrowing it down until you have a single “winner.”

This got me to thinking: what can we take away from this kind of competition? Have we learned anything after nine seasons of watching a singing champion chosen this way?

Well yes, there are some pretty big lessons we can take away from American Idol — especially if you’re in human resources.

At its core, American Idol is all about finding and promoting the very best talent — something that HR leaders do for their organizations every single day. But, how the show ultimately goes about finding and promoting the best talent leaves a lot to be desired, and it raises some issues that every HR person should think about in their own talent development process.

So, here are three talent management takeaways I gleaned from American Idol:

The highly-competent-but-safe candidate doesn’t always make the best hire.

This year’s American Idol winner — Chicago’s Lee DeWyze — is a solid and competent singer, but he’s not very exciting. Lisa de Moraes in the Washington Post described him as “the franchise’s third consecutive Super-Safe Kinda Beige Rocker Boy winner,” and she’s right. DeWyze is the kind of hire you make when you’re afraid of making a mistake.

And that raises a good question: are you satisfied choosing someone who is “safe” and won’t get you into trouble, or, do you go with the flashier choice who may have not only more upside, but perhaps some downside too? This year’s Idol runner-up, Crystal Bowersox, has over-the-top talent and style to burn, but she’s also is a single mom with dreadlocks and numerous tattoos who doesn’t really “look” the part of an American Idol. People like her can make you look really good, but, not everyone else may agree.

This points to an management truism worth remembering: safe but unexciting choices yield safe but unexciting results. If that’s what you are looking for in your organization, then go to it. But, if you want to push the envelope and stretch for something better, you need to work on overlooking the flaws and quirks that many highly talented people bring to the table. If you don’t, you end up with someone like Taylor Hicks — the safest and most forgettable American Idol winner ever . How hot has his career been lately?

A committee approach to hiring doesn’t always yield the best candidate.

Lots of organizations like to have candidates get interviewed and evaluated by a slew of different managers before everyone weighs in with their opinion. It’s a “safe” talent acquisition approach.

American Idol works this way, too, with the judges and nationwide voters all weighing in on who they believe is best. It’s a time-honored approach, of course, but hiring by committee rarely yields the best candidate. For every superstar like Carrie Underwood and Kelly Clarkson, you get a slew of middle-of-the-road winners like Ruben Studdard, Chris Allen, David Cook, and Hicks.

Idol would do well to limit the nationwide voting until late in the season, letting a smaller group of smart and insightful talent managers — the judges –whittle down the group until the final four or five are left. Doing this would surely help keep more of the highly talented but less traditional candidates in the candidate pool longer, and maybe, give one of them a chance to win.

Your company would also be better served by limiting the vetting of candidates to a smaller group of four to five key decision-makers rather than running potential hires through a gauntlet of managers up and down the food chain. I bet you’ll find this approach not only leads to making better decisions about talent, but is less stressful on the candidates and your organization.

You need to ask yourself — do I hire for competence now or for growth potential down the road?

In most seasons, the American Idol winner reflects someone chosen for solid competence right now over someone who may have more upside in the years to come. That’s why last year’s most talented and colorful Idol finalist (Adam Lambert) was passed over for someone with a lot less potential (winner Kris Allen). Other highly talented but less polished Idol candidates, like Chris Daughtry and this year’s Siobham Magnus, seemed to suffer from this, too.

Except in very rare cases, high potential tomorrow is always preferable to solid competence today, but many HR leaders and talent managers don’t agree. Making the safe choice won’t get you in trouble and may help the organization immediately, but going with the high-potential candidate is likely to yield a lot more if you can afford to be patient. In other words, you won’t build superstars taking the safe road, and isn’t building an organization of superstars what it is all about?

Yes, American Idol is all about top talent winning out, but like a lot of things in life, it’s less about finding the very best talent and more about finding someone who is highly talented and acceptable to a large group of constituents. It leads, in the end, to all-too-many vanilla choices, and while that may be acceptable for American Idol, it’s not the optimum way for you to get the very best talent into your organization.

In other words, you need to hire like Simon Cowell. That’s a tougher way to go, but in the end, you’ll have a lot better talent — and bottom-line results — to show for it.

Mobile & Recruitment: Are We There Yet?

On this week’s webinar, mobile evangelist Michael Marlatt joined us to explain how today’s business world is becoming increasingly dependent on mobile technology. We took a look at the history of mobile, how it has been applied in today’s market, and how harnessing the marketing potential of mobile technology is more important than ever before.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

Play Nice

Have you been kind today? Make kindness your daily modus operandi and change your world. –Annie Lennox

I recently finished reading the book The Power of Nice. I especially liked this book, because not only was it written by two very successful women, it was written by people who work in the advertising industry. I work in the advertising industry, specifically in the niche area of human resource communications.

As I was reading this book, I felt reassured in knowing there are people who do believe that doing right by people and treating them with respect should be a given, and not an exception to the rule. What the two authors, Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval, espouse in their book is similar to something that I read in the book How to Become a Rainmaker. Both books talk about how the importance of being nice is a good thing to do as a respectful human being and how this action can carry over into building and elevating your business relationships. What helped me to truly appreciate The Power of Nice was thinking about the people I have met during my career and the impressions they made on me, some of those impressions were good and some rather bad.

In this same vein is the multitude of comments, articles, and blogs I have read recently describing the way people are treated during the application and interview process.

Personally, I’ve not had the need to hire anyone over the past 18 months, but I do remember a time when I was actively interviewing. My needs were always for the same type of position: account manager. The title “account manager” is one of those universal job titles that transcends across many industries and can mean a multitude of different duties depending on the company and industry. I can remember receiving more than 100 resumes each time the position was advertised. In all honesty, 50-60% percent of the resumes were from people who were either overqualified, underqualified, lacking any relevant experience for the position, or seeking a salary much higher than what was clearly stated in the ad. As the hiring manager, I always felt very discouraged by this, but through this disheartened feeling I always thought about how these job applicants must be feeling. I remember being out of work early in my professional career and how deflating that feeling was. I don’t envy the unemployed.

For the obvious reasons, I wouldn’t hire someone who was not appropriate for the position, but there was something I could do and I made a point of it. That point was to contact each and every person who sent in a resume, whether they were a qualified candidate or not. Not that I relish giving people bad news, because I don’t. Now, I should also point out that my company uses an ATS that has an automated function which e-mails job applicants on their status, including the proverbial “no thank you message,” but having past experience with being on the receiving end of never hearing from a person at the company where I had applied, I made the conscience decision that I would pay these people the professional courtesy of communicating with them. So in between my daily tasks, I would contact the job applicants and hopefully speak to them live. In some instances I did leave a voicemail message, but always left my name and number and a best time to reach me so if that person chose to, he/she could call me back for a more in-depth conversation. Many of the people I spoke with, even when told they were not going to be invited to interview, actually sounded grateful that I called. One person said it was “refreshing to know there are companies out there who care.” Even in the face of rejection, I found that job applicants would rather know and have closure than not know the status of their application.

With all this said, I know that in today’s wacky economy, the number of resumes that are being sent way outnumber the amount I received 18 months ago, so I’m not implying that the HR department is being negligent. This department is doing more with less like any other department. What I am asking is this — HR, could you please take a moment to add a personal touch to your recruiting communications? It would mean so much to the job applicant and enrich the value of your worth to them. It also shows genuineness in that you care about the people who touch your organization, and in return your show of goodwill will reinforce your company’s employment value proposition and strengthen the brand image.

3 Questions to Ask About Candidate Experience

What is the importance of candidate experience to your recruiting process? How do you evaluate your candidate experience to understand its current impact, and how you will improve it? Gerry Crispin, principal at CareerXroads and keynote speaker at recruitDC, talked today about the three key questions to ask about the candidate experience before you evaluate and improve the overall candidate experience:

1. Are all candidates equal?

“Of course not,” Crispin said. Because of this reality, he says, we should not be investing in the same experience for all candidates. One of the primary factors that goes into determining the priority is the scarcity of the skill set that you are recruiting for. He also said that serious industry leaders have to be looking at changing the scarcity of talent in fields that they depend on. This means reaching into educational systems to ensure they have talent for the future.

2. What do you measure?

Crispin shared a poll that showed that 43% of respondents didn’t believe their candidate experience was good enough to spread virally. 28% didn’t know at all. To him, it showed the necessity of having to know what to measure before you evaluate your current stance and how you move forward in your candidate experience process.

He also asked if candidates who have a better experience eventually become better employees. Will job candidates go out of their way to recommend qualified friends to a company that has rejected them? These sort of measurements help bring clarity to your candidate experience process.

3. Do all candidates become employees?

Crispin believes that many recruiters focus on only the selected employee in the candidate experience equation. What he urges recruiters to do is realize that most of your candidates won’t become employees and even fewer are coming on as full-time employees. He argues many more will be added on a contingent or contract basis, and candidate experience is critical for these people as well.

The Recession’s Lasting Legacy for Recruiting

As the nation and the world emerge from the depths of the recession, labor economists tell us that this recovery will be slower and bumpier than most Americans living today can remember. Like the Great Depression of the 1930s, this one will leave its scars on the economy and the national psyche. Employers will feel its consequences rippling through their workforce and their recruiting efforts, with effects lasting for years, if not an entire generation.

What are the consequences for employers? What are the long-lasting changes the recession has wrought on the recruiting and retention of workers? There are several, say industry leaders, vendors, suppliers and individual recruiters.

Foremost, probably predictably, is the need to rebuild recruiting programs. Beyond that, there are almost as many opinions concerning the recession’s impacts as there are people I asked about it. Some predict that the cuts to job board spending will be permanent; others say social media recruiting will become a key sourcing tool, others suspect it will never amount to more than a minor tool; most expect that recruiting will be held to a higher standard of performance and economy.

Out of all the predictions and expectations — those I solicited and those I came across in discussions and blog posts and even tweets — I distilled four broad trends. You can read about these in more depth in the July issue of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership. For now, here’s a brief look at these trends.

More will be demanded of recruiting efforts as employers focus on ROI.

The data shows that worker productivity rose during the recession even in the face of such demoralizing necessities as layoffs, wage freezes, and cut or limited benefits. Recruiters will be pushed to hire more of the kind of workers who can maintain the momentum, and will be increasingly judged on the performance of their hires. The emphasis to control costs won’t abate, sending recruiters looking for alternatives to traditional sourcing channels. Among the beneficiaries will be pay-for-performance job posting, SEO, and corporate career sites.

Reliance on RPOs and staffing firms will grow.

This is a controversial trend in that there’s not general agreement it has longevity. The RPOs right now are flush, as employers who gutted their recruiting departments suddenly find themselves in a hiring bind. Smaller companies, who may have relied on a generalist to handle recruiting, are making first time calls to RPOs. Mary Delaney, CEO of Personified, CareerBuilder’s RPO and recruitment consultancy, says the agency’s revenues jumped dramatically in the first quarter as her 120 recruiters conducted an ever-increasing number of searches.

The question is: can the RPOs hang on to the new business and gain acceptance as a replacement for in-house recruiters, or are the services destined to be mostly supplemental?

Assessment usage will expand as companies struggle to make better hiring choices.

Whether it’s done in house or outsourced, candidates are undergoing reviews that are more rigorous and demanding. And as the stakes get greater, so does the testing. Forbes reported this week that “psychological scrutiny and rigorous simulations are fast becoming a requisite part of the interview process.” The magazine said that a two-day CEO assessment can cost as much as $25,000 per candidate.

Retaining and promoting talented workers will present unique problems as senior staff delays retirement.

Mark Mather, associate vice president of the Population Reference Bureau, says boomers are now expecting to work beyond the traditional retirement age of 65. A Rand study says that the proportion of workers ages 65-75 is expected to rise to 25 percent this year, up from 17 percent 20 years ago.

Profiles: the New Resume?

I’ve been raving for a good while now about the fact that the resume is doomed.

Lets take a quick look at the facts:

• Resumes are highly subjective, and there is a lack of standardization for the information they present
• Resumes are loaded with embellishments and misinformation
• Resumes are hard to deconstruct in a way that helps facilitate automated matching
• Reviewing resumes causes a serious bottleneck in the hiring process that can tax the bandwidth of hiring personnel as applicant volume increases

Of course, resumes do serve an important function in that they provide hiring personnel with a concise package of valuable information. But the fact that they are a calling card that provides a high-level summary of an applicant’s qualifications means that they end up being used incorrectly. Using a resume as a top-of-the-funnel tool on which to base quick judgments about applicant suitability is a source of major error. The value of the resume lies more in its use as one of many sources of information to be reviewed as one deepens the dialogue with a candidate. For instance, a quick resume review is an excellent way to help one prepare for an interview with a candidate.

I am not alone in my opinions. Over the past decade, many of us have looked for tools that can solve some of the noted problems with resumes and thus serve as a viable replacement. There have been many attempts to provide such tools. At the heart of all these methods is some way to deconstruct the information presented on the resume into a set of searchable, matchable parameters. Some have used parsing technology in which information is evaluated using artificial intelligence. While resume deconstruction methods are a good start, they do not really support the replacement of the resume as a capabilities presentation. These methods are really just quick fixes to something that is fundamentally broken. Anyway, AI and parsing has really have failed to catch on in a way that suggests they represent the future.

A more promising approach to getting around the fundamental flaws of the resume is found in technology that involves a more “live” approach in which applicants are asked to manually enter information into fields that represent key types of information found on a resume (i.e., what skills do you have? How many years of experience do you have?). This essentially asks the candidate to parse apart their resume manually based on parameters that are deemed important by the employer. This type of exercise greatly facilitates the ability to match applicants to job openings in an automated way, effectively replacing the resume’s role as a screening tool. I really believe such methods have value, especially for those using job boards and career sites. These methods are still not a suitable replacement for the resume, as they don’t have the richness of information that a resume does.

So where does this leave us?

Enter web 2.0. The rules are changing again. I had a really great talk a few weeks ago with a friend who works for KODA, an interesting new online job seeker community that really captures the spirit of where we are going. We talked a lot about what her company is doing to build a community in which relevant information flows freely between members and potential employers. She educated me about some of the more subtle ways that new broad-based Internet technologies are changing the way people use the web to find and apply for jobs. I combine this discussion with what I am seeing from other new and interesting companies such as Brazen Careerist, a company based on the idea that social networking can change the way people demonstrate their ability to perform jobs, essentially allowing them to provide factually based capabilities presentations. It is clear to me that deep-seated change is on the horizon.

I am convinced that dynamic, interactive on-line profiles are the replacement for the resume. I bet every single person reading this article has a LinkedIn profile and most probably have a Facebook profile too. Let’s take a LinkedIn profile. It has everything a resume has, and more, including a summary of career history with detailed information about accomplishments at each major node in one’s career, and a thorough overview of skills, experience, and capabilities. The online profile is also a nexus for a web of complex, interrelated information giving it some things that a resume does not and never will have, including:

• The ability to verify information presented via input from other community users. This includes reference checking and testimonials.
• It’s dynamic, allowing the user to update info in real time and allowing for links to other relevant info housed in other places.
• It’s community oriented and allows input and commentary by others whose opinion is relevant.
• It’s flexible in that information can be extracted and tailored for specific purposes (i.e., presenting a skills profile or a summary of one’s work values).
• It provides a much richer way to present accomplishments and relevant information (links to an online portfolio for instance).

So, the online profile provides a venue for all kinds of information that can serve to showcase things that are directly relevant for a given job. As a champion for the use of assessment and a futurist, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the fact that I think online profiles also provide a great opportunity to integrate important information about an applicant into their profile. Adding assessment results to one’s profile provides an opportunity to help summarize and categorize one’s values, traits, skills and abilities, providing employers with even richer information about an applicant while also providing a way for applicants to learn more about themselves. Imagine the ability for others to comment on and verify assessment-related information or for employers to quickly access a baseline of standardized, trait-based information describing a job seeker, and you are glimpsing the future!

If one thinks about the key tennants of web 2.0 it is clear that technology has provided the foundation for the phenomenon of social networking. The interconnectivity and access to relevant information about any subject under the sun that is now at our fingertips represents a new way of doing things in almost all aspects of our lives. Technology has had a “push” effect such that people find new ways to use technology to create new products and ways of getting things done. Once these are “pushed out,” the ones with real value are adopted and quickly gain critical mass based almost entirely on their value proposition to users. Why should we believe that the world of hiring will go against this trend and ignore the value provided by new technology? Trust me: it won’t.

We have a long way to go; there are some limiting factors to consider including:

• Reluctance to change.
• Fighting to become the standard provider. This stuff will work best if one company or venue becomes the standard. This will be a challenge as players jockey for marketshare.
• Job seekers are reluctant to pay extra. Many sites that offer upgraded profiles or extra information for a fee have not faired well. Any model in which the costs are not borne by the employer is doomed.
• Technological limitations. For the profile to really work well we will need technology and products that don’t currently exist. For instance, this model really requires the ability to “scrub” profiles found all over the web and repackage information for specific purposes related to hiring

Social networking and dynamic user profiles are still in their infancy. It wasn’t that long ago that you probably faxed your resume to someone. Twenty years ago the world wide web as we know it didn’t even exist. So, if 20 years from now, profiles haven’t replaced the resume; I will gladly eat my hat!! How old fashioned of me.

Help Us Organize Local ERE Recruiter Meetups!

July 13th. Circle it in your calendar, recruiters.

On July 13th, ERE Recruiter Meetups are going to be simultaneously run in cities around the U.S. It’s going to be a great opportunity for recruiters to meet and network with other recruiters in their area.

The Meetups are going to be locally run and organized by the people attending them — crowdsourcing at its best.

This means that we need your help, and here’s how you can pitch in:

• Visit the ERE Recruiter Meetup page and sign up for a Meetup near you. If you don’t see one in your area, start one up!
• If you know a great location (bar, restaurant, office) where your group can meet, add it to the Meetup.
• Help us get the word out! We don’t need a huge group in each city to get together, have a good time, and make great connections. It can be as few as half a dozen, but the more the merrier, so tell all the recruiters in your area about the Meetup!

…And of course, join us!

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