Link to article

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

Link to article

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

Link to article

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

Link to article

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

Link to article

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

Link to article

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

Google comes up with 222,000 references for a search on the keywords: “job board”, dead OR dying.

Yet, for all that, the number of job boards is proliferating and there are still plenty of believers in the model ready to launch more. A good part of the recent debate over the .jobs domain expansion was about DirectEmployers Association’s plan to launch tens of thousands of more job boards.

What’s keeping job boards in the game is their ability to deliver candidates and their ability to incorporate recruiter trends without mindlessly following the pack.

Without a doubt, there are plenty of skeptics to both of those claims. In the first instance, Eric Shannon, a job board founder himself, offered evidence to show that the hiring of candidates from job boards has been growing over the years, as has the number of job boards themselves. His reference to CareerXroads 2010 Sources of Hire study points out that after employee referrals and a company’s own career site, job boards provide the most number of external hires.

The second reason job boards have survived is their evolutionary behavior. Each time a new killer app or trend has come along, the job boards have morphed, co-opting it or integrating it.

Since last year we have seen pretty clearly how the job boards are responding to the surge of interest in social media recruiting. In fact, just since the summer began Dice.com and its sister site, ClearanceJobs.com, have aggressively imitated some of the best of the social media elements, creating a Dice Talent Network on its flagship IT site and Cleared Network on its security clearance jobs board.

Dice, incidentally, is one of the job boards using multiple social channels to promote itself. It has its own You Tube channel and its own DiceNews video service.

CareerBuilder a few months back added several new features, including a Talent Network service that helps recruiters build their pipeline by identifying where the best candidates can be found. Its hireINSIDER is aimed at job seekers and lets them see how they compare in experience, skills, and education to others pursuing the same job.

Smaller job boards — in traffic and resources — have been no less aggressive in adding function and interest. Among other improvements, AfterCollege.com has overhauled its company profiles, converting what industry-wide has been a dreary corporate factsheet into a much more interesting presence that borrows liberally from Facebook. Beyond.com, by no means small cumulatively with 15,000 or so sites, has introduced applications for smart phones and has jumped into video with a YouTube presence.

And, like the major national job boards, many, perhaps most, now distribute their job postings via Twitter, Facebook, and/or LinkedIn.

These changes — and plenty of others — are how the job boards have maintained their position as one of the most effective means of sourcing candidates. The September issue of The Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership details the integration of social media by the job board industry and offers snapshots of what some of them have done.

The article also looks ahead at the next-biggest job board move, one that has been underway for a few years, but which is about to accelerate even faster than it did following the introduction of the first iPhone.

As noted recruiting authority and executive director of the job board industry’s trade group, Peter Weddle  says, mobile ”is the next big thing.”

That we are in the dog days of August? That we’ve been in the summer sun too long? That I’m being Punk’d?

Turns out the press releases about these ventures are for real.

The LeafBuilder clothing line is an assortment of T-shirts that you use to flaunt your recruiting prowess. The number of maple leafs on the shirts corresponds to your placements — and the price. The entry-level T with a single leaf (corresponding to between 1 and 1,999 candidate placements) is $21.95.

Make it into the agency ownership ranks and a seven leaf, long-sleeved version will set you back $293.95. Somewhere on the site there’s a product that will run you over $1,500.

Founder John Sudds (I’m not kidding about his last name, but you can understand why I thought I was being punked) insisted recruiters will spend the money and wear his stuff because of the pride in their accomplishments. “It gives recruiters something to shoot for,” he tells me during our conversation. “It gives the industry a sense of inspiration.”

After that, it was TalentHole, and that line about removal services, that inspired me to think of those  few people from my past life I wished I could have had removed. Permanently. If you catch my meaning.

So I was a little disappointed, though not unexpectedly so, to discover that TalentHole.com’s idea of removal really means outplacement. Its founder, an independent recruiter who wants me to call him Carlos, sees this project of his as something of a holy mission.

“There are so many bad employers now and they are asking employees to work their — I’ll use “behinds.” Carlos had a different noun — off, that I wanted to do something to help,” he says.

And then there are employees with attitudes that would scare away Atilla the Hun, but whose work quality is good enough to keep them from getting fired. “A person is a Talent Hole, when he or she makes everyone else miserable by the very nature of their actions and in-actions.” It says that right on the website.

Tell TalentHole about them and maybe Carlos can help them find another job.

He works splits, fills reqs, sources candidates, and might just be able to facilitate the divorce in a way that is speedy and amicable.

If he earns a placement fee, great. He doesn’t charge otherwise.

But Carlos, I asked him, what recruiter wants your loser candidate with the bad attitude?

Reasonably enough, he explained that not every worker who wants out has an attitude problem. Many just don’t fit the company or the boss. “75 percent of the time,” he says, “that Talent Hole, somewhere else, is a super star.”

Maybe. Me, I’d ask questions if a Carlos from Santa Monica were to pitch me a candidate. On the other hand, if my boss is a Talent Hole, I’d at least be comforted to know I have a champion in Carlos at TalentHole.

However, over time, we’ve come to learn that these programs also represent a vital component of our company’s journey to build a diverse and inclusive workforce.

The Beginning of an Evolution at Sodexo

Like many companies, Sodexo’s diversity initiatives have evolved over time.

We created a diversity and inclusion framework that was based on measures of accountability from the CEO down, tied to incentives and performance goals. We established a consistent and transparent recruiting and selection process and provided training in compliance in such areas as EEO/Affirmative Action to ensure that all our managers understood the legal environment.

And, we built a comprehensive diversity sourcing strategy, focused on best practices, and using technology and new communications media to identify and connect with top diverse talent. We required all of our recruiters to become AIRS-certified diversity recruiters. We also focused on the importance of building relationships with top talent. From recruiting at colleges and universities that have highly diverse populations, to diversity-focused professional associations, to positioning our company as a top employer of diverse talent, we worked hard on the front end to attract and hire. But, we realized that all of these efforts would be meaningless without a work environment that let our employees thrive.

Embedding Diversity and Inclusion Into our Corporate Culture

Encouraging all employees — from senior staff to front-line workers — to embrace diversity and inclusion values can be can be daunting for an organization our size, with more than 6,000 individual operations across the U.S. alone. Our company created this cultural shift by literally embracing the words of Mahatma Ghandi: “We must be the change we want to see in the world.” Through diversity-focused training, to the establishment of vibrant employee network groups and mentoring initiatives, over time, diversity and inclusion have become a part of our company’s DNA. This value is so deeply embedded in our culture that it is viewed as a distinct competitive advantage. In fact, we’ve even been recognized this year by DiversityInc as the #1 overall on their top 50 list of diverse and inclusive companies and #1 for Recruitment and Retention. In 2008, ERE recognized Sodexo as #1 in diversity recruiting.

Why Internal Mobility?

The short answer is that our employees are our greatest asset!

We know from our candidate surveys and our company engagement survey that our employees want to stay in a company that provides a range of professional opportunities and career paths where they can grow their career. So, if we can leverage the opportunity to promote and hire from within the company, we may be able to retain existing diverse employee populations.

The Challenge

Like any large organization, our challenge lies in the existence of multiple market segments all within our one company. It can be difficult for individuals to plan, identify, and compete for promotional opportunities — especially when those opportunities might be in a different market segment.

Meanwhile, we see an opportunity to stimulate employee creativity and innovation by introducing employees who may have different business perspectives. They bring a fresh perspective to existing work plans and can stimulate process development and productivity.

Blazing the Path for Internal Mobility

Thus we launched our internal mobility initiative with the goal of helping our employees achieve their career aspirations, and, ultimately attempting to influence the engagement and retention of our top and diverse employees..We began with “soft” internal sourcing: sharing jobs with our employee network groups and sending e-cards internally to individuals on our succession plan. As we progressed, we learned that just sharing information with our employees was not enough. We needed to help them to overcome organizational barriers that make it difficult for our employees to post and compete for positions outside of their markets.

So, we took a more consultative approach to our challenges. For example, we engaged our executives in panel discussions and held focus groups on internal job opportunities and barriers. We looked for ways to focus on competencies vs. organizational experience when looking at talent, and considered developing partnership programs to team with other company initiatives to more explicitly focus on helping our top and diverse employees achieve their career aspirations.

Team Effort: Engaging Multiple Leadership Levels to Drive Results

Buy-in from the executive level is critical for cross divisional movement to be successful. To assist in driving success, our talent acquisition group launched three vodcasts with messages from senior leaders in support of internal mobility to be used at team meetings throughout the organization and with recruiter training.

Additionally, our talent acquisition group formed and now leads a cross-divisional and cross-function team that is systematically looking at program enhancement opportunities and ensuring that proposed solutions will fit within our company framework. Early results from these efforts show that on average, 10% of our internal management hires have been cross-divisional transfers. And the information from our 2010 Employee Engagement Survey is especially encouraging in an environment where most companies have seen the engagement of their employees drop (as reported by the 2010 Hewitt Study). We have succeeded in increasing ours by a strong 7%, with 85% of our employees reporting that Sodexo is a better employer than the competition.

More Than Just Another Hire

While Sodexo has been recognized for implementing best practices in diversity and inclusion, we know that our journey is not complete. We are continually looking for new ways to take our programs to the next level.

To be a competitive employer for top diverse talent, we need to be able to do more than simply source and hire. We need a corporate culture where employees thrive and are able to achieve their career aspirations. As such, we believe that our current focus on internal mobility is an important initiative to increase retention of top diverse talent. It completes the circle: sourcing, hiring, and retaining top diverse talent.

Let’s Continue the Conversation at the ERE Expo

Will you be at the ERE Expo this fall? If so, I invite you to join my keynote session. I would love to continue the conversation, share with you some of what we at Sodexo are doing to take our diversity journey to the next level, and also learn from you the best practices at your organizations.

In either case, your team can benefit from persuading recruiters to eliminate the five time-wasters below. By streamlining their work, recruiters will have more time to focus on the most valuable aspects of the hiring process. The results will be:

• Better hiring decisions
• An improved candidate experience
• A more cost-effective approach to talent acquisition

Working Outside the ATS

Applicant tracking systems offer a robust way to manage applicant flow, communicate effectively with candidates, ensure compliance, and report analytics. But only if you use the system.

We all get accustomed to doing things a certain way, and for some recruiters, it’s just too cumbersome to use the ATS instead of their own spreadsheets, email templates, or reporting methods. If this is happening in your organization, make some changes right away. The time it takes to get recruiters ramped up in how to use an ATS pales in comparison to the hours wasted by working outside the system.

Recruiters bypassing the ATS also diminishes the value of the reports the tool can generate automatically. These reports provide real-time information about how efficient and effective the hiring process is at any given time. But without timely (or accurate) inputs from recruiters, the data is bad, the team’s credibility can be damaged, and the quality of the hiring process usually suffers.

Practice using your ATS on a real-time basis. This will help you do three things:

1. Learn the system better
2. Prevent the duplication of work, such as re-entering information into the system
3. Keep details like candidate correspondence from falling through the cracks.

Beginning a Search Without the Right Information

“Pay now or pay later” has never been more true than when dealing with the hiring process. When recruiters don’t get the right information upfront, it costs them time, energy, and even money, later. But it’s not usually the recruiters’ fault when the hiring manager doesn’t have time to answer questions or discuss the job in detail.

But it is the recruiter’s job to make the hiring manager understand the consequences of kicking off a search with nothing more than an old job description or the previous posting. What are the consequences?

• Days or weeks of back and forth questions, answers, and follow-up questions
• Sourcing candidates who aren’t a good match
• Frustrating candidates who are interviewed, but later considered “not right” for the job
• Costing the company by extending the time that positions (sometimes critical, revenue-generating positions) remain open

What should a recruiter do? When a job opens, the recruiter and hiring manager should meet live — either by phone, Webex, or in person — to discuss the position in depth. Key questions might include:

• What are the key responsibilities of this job?
• What kinds of decisions will this person make?
• What key accomplishments must be achieved in the first year?
• What’s the best thing about this job?
• What’s the most difficult part of this job?
• What experience and education is a must-have for candidates?
• What qualifications are nice-to-have?
• What companies do you feel hire well for this role?
• Who are direct reports to this role? Dotted-line reports? Supervisors? Key stakeholders?
• Who will interview the candidates?

If your company doesn’t already have a template for guiding the discussion during intake meetings, create one — and adapt it over time — so recruiters can drive consistent conversations with hiring managers.

Not Using Questionnaire Functionality in the Applicant Tracking System

Recruiters often spend hours doing something the applicant tracking system is equipped to do in a matter of seconds.

Recruiters can be much more efficient — and improve their results — by taking the time up front to create job-specific questionnaires in the ATS prior to beginning a search. With good questionnaires in place, the ATS is able to automatically screen and sort candidates as they complete the online application process.

When job-specific questionnaires aren’t used, recruiters have no choice but to review each candidate’s background, one by one. And if there are more than a few candidates on a req, it simply might not be possible to review each one — so recruiters might review only those who most recently applied.

Again, you can invoke the “pay now or pay later” mantra. Taking the time to create a job-specific questionnaire based on the outcome of the intake meeting will result in the most qualified candidates showing at the top of the list — in real time.

Taking a Passive Approach to Scheduling Interviews

Identifying who will be on the interviewing team — and when interviews will likely take place — should be agreed upon during the intake meeting between the recruiter and hiring manager.

When recruiters know the days and time slots the interviewing team has available, candidates can be scheduled on the spot. This type of proactive planning improves the candidate experience, speeds the hiring decision, and helps ensure that the best candidates stay in the process.

Producing Manual or Customized Reports

We all know people who are energized by running reports and reviewing data. And by its nature, talent acquisition is a target-rich environment for data-hungry people. But if we objectively assess the standard reports that most applicant tracking systems offer, we’ll find that — more often than not — 80% of what we need to assess the effectiveness of talent acquisition is there.

Would more reports — or different reports —  be interesting to see? Undoubtedly. Would they help us drive better results? Arguably no.

Talent acquisition leaders should strive to build a set of standardized reports that meet the most critical reporting needs of the function. This will also allow everyone, but particularly recruiters, to focus more time and energy on sourcing and selecting candidates, instead of tracking numbers.

When managing requests for additional data from senior leaders or other stakeholders, talent acquisition leaders should ask: “What will be done with the information once we get it?” and “How will this new data help us achieve our goals of faster, better, and more cost-effective talent acquisition?”

Taking steps to address these five areas can drive significant improvements, quickly, for your talent acquisition team.