Recruiting: In order to sustain development and intellectual property it’s important for a leader to be a great recruiter. Being able to source top talent is extremely important for any organization that wants to be seen as a leader. Being able to hire top engineers or marketers to fine tune a product is essential for a company when their #1 goal is to become the best, or be bought. The War for Talent speaks highly of the challenges companies face in an economy where top talent is few and far between and those who are able to capture that talent will succeed.

Skill Development: When someone is put in a position of power or leadership it’s usually because they have acquired the right skills to lead an organization into the future. It’s important for these leaders to serve as mentors to those under them in order to make sure the company grows exponentially instead of relying on a core group of people to carry the innovation. Mentorship is one of the most important aspects in cultivating an environment that is poised to become a top player in a specific industry.

Operations: Operations is an area that can easily be sidetracked by focusing on sales and the growth of a business. In order to successfully grow exponentially, a leader must possess great operational skills. It’s one thing to increase sales, but Fortune 500 companies don’t get where they’re at without processes in place. It’s important that a leader is able to understand that while sales and growth is a top priority, unless they’re able to grow with processes in place things will only get worse down the road.

Engagement:  The Open Door Policy was created by many top companies to cut through the red tape and destroy the idea that a manager or leader isn’t able to hear the concerns of entry-level workers. A great leader knows how to engage and participate with their staff in ways that boosts morale and encourages employees to stay engaged. This practice heavily ties in with mentorship and leadership styles.

Leadership: Its importance seems obvious, but it can’t be stated enough. A good leader shows a balanced leadership approach. The third leadership style that Lewin spoke of was participative leadership. He concluded that the democratic approach found in participative leadership was the most effective. A leader that expresses this style encourages group members to participate, but retains the final say in the decision making process. As a leader it’s important to take a role in each decision that is being rendered, but it is equally important to empower others to make sizeable contributions to the direction of the organization. This type of environment fosters productivity and creativity, which will end up increasing the efficiency of your organization.

These five structures or practices are essential for a leader to grow and retain their position with the industry. Without a great leader your company will fall by the wayside due to lack of direction, morale, and operational development.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media.  She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs, Huffington Post and SmartBrief. When she talks, people listen. Photo Credit MarketPlaceLeaders.

SmartRecruiters is the Hiring Platform. Everything you need to source, engage, and hire top talent.

In order to truly understand something, we must start at the beginning. It’s the reason that anthropologists focus their life’s work on different fields like culture, archaeology, biology and linguistics when it comes the history of the human being. The past, our history, gives us insight into our thoughts, desires, mistakes and successes.

I see myself as an HR or workplace anthropologist of sorts. In a very short time homo sapiens sapiens has slingshot forward mainly because of technology. Think about the use of computers, mobile phones and other essential resources we cannot even think of living without. When it comes to the field of human resources and recruiting, our worlds are changing, evolving and traveling at the speed of light as we work to enhance our employee population’s productivity, their quality of life and the business results of the company’s we support. This is where the story of human capital begins with workology.

Workology is the intersection and study of art, science, culture, work and technology, specifically when it relates to our workforce and employees. It also happens to be the name of my new blog where I discuss senior level human capital trends. Here are three trends shaping the future of HR and the future of workology.

• Leading Technology. The marketer’s shouldn’t get all the fun. HR and workplace technology like SmartRecruiters is truly revolutionary. The technology we use now is shaping how our manager’s and leaders engage and respond to our employee’s in real time. Let’s starting leading the way in trends, tools and resources available to our employees.
• Moving Faster & Forward. Long gone are the days where we discuss policy and procedure behind closed doors. In the new workplace, we must act quickly to respond to the viral marketplace and the internet. The conversations of employees and customers often take place on social networks and the world wide web. Are you listening?
• Employee Centric Workplace. Once upon a time employees and employers were loyal like a marriage that lasted nearly an employee’s lifetime. Things changed and employers had options treating their workforce like day old casserole. The war for talent is real and employers that engage, develop and show their employee’s a little love make for longer tenured relationships and more productive employees.

The key to this movement and change happening in HR doesn’t start with me. Like you, I’m just a cog in the wheel of work. It starts with practitioners, technologists and employees, working to shape the history of our future workplace. It starts with workology.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media.  She’s an author who writes at Workology, Huffington Post and SmartBrief.

SmartRecruiters is the Hiring Platform. Everything you need to source, engage, and hire top talent.

1. Consider Pre-Employment Skills Based Testing: One of the most common practices in the Human Resources profession is to implement pre-employment testing. Whether you’re looking for a specific skill set or personality each test can be tuned to fit specific needs of your company. Knowledge is power and the more knowledge you have about a potential candidate can make the difference in a long-term hire versus a mind-numbing zombie.

2. See Them in Action: I call this technique Shopping for Employees. Learn to think outside the box on this point. In the past I have gone out and essentially headhunted new recruits for the position I was trying to fill. If you’re hiring for a retail job, head out to your nearest Wal-Mart or competitor at 2 am. Find the nicest, most customer-service prone employee and flip them your business card, let them know you’re hiring and give them a few reasons why they should come work for your company as opposed to their current employer. Sometimes seeing candidates in action will give you a real idea of how they interact with complete strangers when no one is looking.

3. Phone Screening: An unscheduled phone interview gives you the surprise advantage. You’ll get the best reaction from a potential candidate when they’re not expecting your phone call. This will allow the recruiter or human resources manager to gain better insights on the initial reaction to how a potential candidate treats a stranger. We all hate bill collectors and telemarketers, but the ability to treat everyone with respect even through the telephone shows a lot about a candidates demeanor.  Hit them with a double whammy and use a unknown number to really get a sense of how they treat anyone and everyone on the fly.

4. Situational Interviews: Pose them with situations that they might’ve been involved with in past jobs and see how they would respond. A lot of companies already do this, but in order to get someone who is willing to stay for the long haul really drill down exactly what you are wanting in an employee then hold them to those exact standards upon hiring.

5. Leave Out the Closed-Ended and Probing Interview Questions: What do these situations really tell about candidates? Asking hypothetic questions that aren’t relatable to the job won’t tell you a whole lot about the candidate besides how well they’re able to BS an answer. Instead, use situational questions and get down to the real facts behind how a candidate will act in real-life situations that happen in your company. These types of questions will tell you much more then probing/closed ended questions will tell you.

If you follow these five easy suggestions your department will soon find their quality of hire on the rise and the number of zombie employees on the decline. How does your company hire better quality employees?

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media.  She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs, Huffington Post and SmartBrief. When she talks, people listen. Image Credit Ely Tran.

SmartRecruiters is the Hiring Platform. Everything you need to source, engage, and hire top talent.

In order to keep our employees engaged, we must go beyond skills gap training by creating an environment where they are appreciated, encouraged and actively sought after by internal leaders, as opposed to just our external recruiters, hiring managers, and contemporaries. We must create an internal war for talent, a fierce company competition in order to retain and expect the best from our managers as well as our best employees.

By taking the war for talent internal, we encourage higher performance because employees know there are more options for their career development within your organization. The chance to become a leader within the organization is for the taking. Creating a competitive internal talent marketplace focused on developing an employee’s career at a single organization – instead of going through the motions like we often do with the employee – is the smart move because a little healthy competition is a very, very good thing.

Sport psychologists have demonstrated for years the effects of competition on enhancing performance. Think about the Olympics where world records are broken in competition as others push you further than you ever have performed before.

Taking the war for talent and competition internal won’t be easy. You’ll loose some B players as they realize that average is no longer enough. Managers will resist and employees too because the competitive marketplace brings out the best and worst in people, but maybe it’s the type of organizational and culturally cleansing your company really needs.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media.  She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs, Huffington Post and Smart Brief. When she talks, people listen.

SmartRecruiters is the Hiring Platform. Everything you need to source, engage, and hire top talent.

The saying, Candidates are Customers too, should be hung over every wall of Human Resources departments across the country. Sometimes we forget that each candidate that goes through the HR department will most likely influence a future purchasing decision of your product/service. There are some exceptions to the rule, but know, word of mouth spreads like wildfire and if a candidate is treated wrong, their friends and their friend’s friends will hear about it. Recruiters and hiring managers need to look beyond the old ‘recruit-to-hire’ experience and put on our new corporate hats. Purchasing decisions are made based on the aggregation of every little experience the company has with the market. Read below for the 3 methods to treat every candidates as well as customers.

According to the Candidate Experience Results over 21% of candidates said they were or have been customers to places they applied. As buying power increases in our growing economy it’s becoming more likely that those who are applying for jobs are customers. The idea that negative feedback travels faster than positive couldn’t be truer in this scenario. Even if a candidate isn’t qualified for a certain position, treating them as a customer goes a long way in making sure their experience is a positive one. There are multiple ways to achieve top results when recruiting, here a few that have helped in the past:

1. Invest in Candidate Relationships. This should be the ‘no-brainer’ bullet point for any recruiter. In order to successfully recruit top talent it’s essential that you’re investing in the actual relationships and not the end result of hiring. The goal in this part of the hiring process is to not be a pushy salesman, but show each candidate, regardless of qualifications, that they’re important. Building communities that show the focus on these relationships will engage and keep the customer beyond the candidate process. Talent Communities, LinkedIn Groups, Facebook Groups, even email marketing solutions, and other types of communities are out there, you just have to find which one fits your company best.

 

2. Don’t Upset Your Applicants. There has been a lot of discussion on the transparency of the HR department and the black hole of the candidate process. If you’re a larger company and receive thousands of applicants a year it’s sometimes impossible to return each call or follow-up with each resume. Many job descriptions carry the disclaimer that not everyone will receive some type of feedback due to volume. Although communication is not required for every applicant, there are some instances where the job status should be communicated. The cost of no communication could be loss of sales, referrals, which leads to less money in the bank.

 

3. Think Like Marketing. Recruiting is not just about filling an open position any longer. Recruiting is another form of marketing and the only way for employer branding to survive the hiring process is to create a candidate-centric approach that prioritizes the candidate experience. As recruiters you promote your company, which helps bring candidates into the hiring funnel while maintaining an ongoing relationship. This is the foundation in building up the candidate experience to not only keep the customer, but also find the best talent out there for your company.

There are numerous benefits to treating a candidate like a customer. When it doesn’t happen sometimes there are no consequences, but all it takes is one angry person to spread negative feedback. Each candidate interaction affects your brand. There are multiple sites out there that anonymously rate companies on their interview processes, you don’t want to be one of those with 0/5 stars. To combat this, make sure each applicant is treated like you would treat a customer making a purchase. The life of a HR professional isn’t an easy one and the candidate experience is hard to perfect, but with these steps you should be on your way to achieving better practices.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs, Huffington Post and Smart Brief. When she talks, people listen.

SmartRecruiters is the Hiring Platform. Everything you need to source, engage, and hire top talent.

After I went to the resumes’ funeral I no longer spent hours shuffling and sorting through hundreds upon hundreds of paper filled with embellished qualifications. I no longer had to sort out previous job descriptions and determine the qualifications based on what an applicant said they had accomplished at their previous job. I no longer had to store paper copies for 7 years in a filing cabinet in a warehouse, nor did I have to suffer the unbearable paper cut. After I went to the resumes’ funeral I suddenly had more time in my life.

No longer does the resume satisfy an employer’s needs when it comes to conducting a thorough evaluation of a candidate. Employers are now focusing more on a candidates’ web presence, social profiles, Google search results, recommendations on LinkedIn, candidate assessments and much more. Candidates are no longer able to cram information into a resume and use that as the sole piece of information to be hired from.

The resume as we know it is dead – and quite frankly – has been dead for a few years now. Not only are creative job roles forcing candidates to think outside the box, but also they’re asking for a more interactive application to complete the process. One great example is Heineken’s quirky and out of the ordinary job interview process (see below). They took three candidates and put them all through a serious of weird interview stages eventually rewarding one of the candidates with a job in their marketing department. These types of viral interview techniques are on the rise and the traditional resume keeps getting nails put in its coffin.

Fortune 500 companies have managed to integrate all aspects of social media into their recruiting function. Recruiters, HR Directors, and Chief Human Resource Officers are rebuilding their entire strategy as it relates to hiring.

Candidates, now more than ever, are developing both creative and innovative ways to get their own personal brand out there in hopes to land their dream job. From creating blogs specific to job opportunities to the famous “Hire Me” campaigns. These recruiting practitioners are now able to build out communities, develop relationships with an actual person and no longer rely on a piece of paper to tell them everything about a candidate. Recruiting, as we know it is no longer the same and won’t ever be the same.

The funeral of the resume is one of the most significant developments in the recruiting industry and companies are popping up everywhere to help foster a relationship with an actual person instead of a piece of paper. Recruiters aren’t waiting for candidates to foster innovation, but they’re requiring innovation to be hired in the first place. So instead of crying at the funeral of the resume, I rejoiced and became ready to tackle the new age of recruiting.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media.  She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. When she talks, people listen.  Image Credit Ely Tran.

In 2012, SmartRecruiters saw the number of candidates who chose to attach a social media profile to a job application jump from 22% to 40%. Tune in to our CEO sounding off on the death of the resume:

Job seekers are spending ridiculous amounts of time on Facebook and by ridiculous, I mean upwards for 400 minutes a month poking, sharing and commenting among their most trusted friends and brands. So how do recruiters fit into this picture? Up until recently, Facebook’s search made it difficult, lessening Facebook’s worth as a candidate mining database. Then Facebook’s Social Graph entered the picture.

Facebook’s Social Graph makes sense because the job search is becoming way more casual. Job seekers quickly move from passive to active and back to passive again. We continuously fall in and out of love with our work but spending time on Facebook, that remains the same. The social network is the wild west for recruiters. Facebook Social Graph Search opened the doors for recruiters by allowing improved search of friends’s data and better access to public information.. There’s lots of open air, not much recruiting competition, and the smell of opportunity.

Social Graph Search by Name, Company & Location

I can easily search by job title, company name and location for friends and those connected around me. For example, a graph search of my friends using, “My friends who work at Geico” provided me two results. I can message my potential candidates immediately or ask for position referrals immediately. Imagine the possibilities.

As a recruiter, I can target my specific network by location. I can look for geo location check ins and search for potential candidates by city in a cleaner and more visual way.

Social Graph Search by Photos

One of the major enhancements to search is the use of the social graph for photos sorting through tags, locations, and other important information. This is a powerful addition to the recruiter’s social recruiting tool belt especially since 1.1 billion photos were uploaded to Facebook on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day just this year. Imagine the possibilities.

Quickly searching on Facebook’s new Social Graph Search, I entered in the keywords, “Photos of SourceCon” which is a popular recruiting and internet sourcing conference held twice a year. Thousands of photos immediately popped up on my screen for me to choose from. Look who’s there! And remember to pin down your search by adding a location or year to narrow your search results.

Social Graph Search by Brands We Like

Tap into events and brand pages that can help you better understand where engagement and opportunities lie. A search of “My friends who like SXSW” provided a list of interesting results where I can tap into my network especially if they are a fan of a brand or a competitor company who is hiring. To really take your social graph search to the next level, try to search for “My friends of friends who like SXSW” and see your results.

While still in it’s infancy, Facebook’s Social Graph Search provides recruiters some interesting insights into their potential candidates. I like where it is heading. The key for companies who are hiring and recruiting on Facebook is to create a formalized process to source talent in a smart and fair manner.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media.  She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. Photo Credit Jessica Miller-Merrell.

SmartRecruiters is the hiring platform with everything you need to source talent, manage candidates and make the right hire.

Occasionally, the difference between good and great can be small. But often times, “Good is the enemy of great. And that is one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great,” begins Jim Collins’ best selling book, “Good to Great.”

The fact of good versus great and bad versus average are somewhat subjective in determining an individual’s success, accomplishments and traits. Once you have defined those metrics of success, it becomes clear how truly valuable great hires are to your bottom line. So the question bares, what qualities and characteristics separate a good recruiter from a great recruiter?

• The Ask Questions and Anticipate Needs.  I’ve always been a proponent of being prepared.  Great recruiters are prepared before the job opening is available.  They have a relationship with the hiring manager, having their fingers on the pulse of their recruiting trends and responsibilities. Great recruiters don’t simply ask questions, they research, learn and absorb because they understand the company and its ecosystem through experience, learning and their dedication to the hiring managers they serve.

• They Take a Consultant Approach.   Great recruiters take notes and take a consultant and partner approach to filling a position.  They use a job requisition checklist in addition to meeting with the hiring manager to understand the role they are looking to fill. Consultants are training, developing and teaching other recruiters as well as their hiring managers.

• They Care About the Full Employee Life Cycle.  Great recruiters look beyond simply filling the position.  They continue relationships with their hires and placements long after they have finished employee orientation and onboarding.  Great recruiters understand that employees hold see their recruiters as brand ambassadors who serve as the first point of contact with their new company.

• They Share Their Secrets with the Team.  Recruiting is sometimes seen as a secret society and industry where good recruiters are often hesitant to share their sourcing or recruitment secrets because they believe doing so eliminates their competitive advantage. Great recruiters take the time to share best practices and secrets making the team stronger and improved performance for everyone.

• They Focus on the Candidate.  Great recruiters focus on relationships not only with the hiring manager and their hires but serve as a resource for job seekers who didn’t receive a job opportunity.  Great recruiters realize that staffing and building candidate pipelines is a long term strategy and that providing value lends in building a community and a network of candidate referrals that are invisible and intangible to the average or even good recruiter.

The differences between good recruiters and great recruiters is in their holistic approach to recruitment and hiring. Execution determines the success of your business‘ big picture vision. Great recruiters just make smart moves that create less risk and more success because they see recruitment – not as an individual placement – but as an entire body of work.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media.  She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs.

SmartRecruiters is the hiring platform with everything you need to source talent (including a recruiting agency management feature), communicate with candidates and make the right hire.

Sometimes working as a recruiter is a thankless job where the search and job requisition load never ends.  That requisition load is growing with Fortune Magazine reporting that the 100 Best Places to work have over 150,000 jobs to fill.  What makes a good recruiter is important as they can anticipate needs and use their network to find top talent making the job look easy.

• Good Recruiters Ask Questions.  Good recruiters ask questions about the role they are looking to fill.  Good recruiters realize that a job description isn’t always a comprehensive list of the job responsibilities or serve as a laundry list of qualifications. Good recruiters ask questions of the hiring manager as well as the candidate.  They dig deeper and take pride in their work.

•  Good Recruiters Experiment and Take Risks.  One of the things I love about social media recruiting is how innovative and exciting it has made the industry.  Good recruiters take the time to hone their skills and try new and experimentally things.  Equally important, a good recruiter knows when to walk away.

•  Good Recruiters Build Relationships.  Whether it’s with the recruiter, hiring manager or new hires, good recruiters focus on leveraging connections and building new contacts that lend results in the long term.  They are deepening their connections from online platforms such as LinkedIn by making phone and in person contact.

•  Good Recruiters Focus on Efficiency.  Good recruiters are numbers driven and look at hiring metrics like cost per hire or time to fill.  They understand that the economics of hiring demands the highest quality candidates at the least amount of cost. A good recruiter should be able to explain while this candidate is a fit and why the cost and time to hire is a great market rate.

• Good Recruiters Take Pride in Their Job.  Good recruiters take failure personally, looking to learn from their mistakes and improve their quality of hire and procedures.  Recruiting is an art as well as science that takes a combination of traits and talents in which to excel.

Good recruiters are thankful.  They’re humble and willing to learn. Good recruiters juggle the tasks of talent sourcing and candidate management to make great hires in a timely manner.  Collaborating with good recruiter could be the difference in your talent acquisition strategy.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media.  She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs.

SmartRecruiters is the hiring platform with everything you need to source talent (including a recruiting agency management feature), communicate with candidates and make the right hire.

Now that the Super Bowl is over, we take a look back on the human resources and recruiting trends, what has driven hiring and engagement innovation, and what’s in store for HR for 2013 when it comes to HR Tech and collaboration.

I’m taking an unconditional approach to workforce predictions and trends because when we speak of trends, untrendy stuff are the things that are actually trends in the industry we work, life and maybe even love. HR is not sexy and yet it is so important in the future of our business in being competitive, healthy, and successful.  Trends for actual HR practitioners is not a trend.  It’s the reality we are living now.

In 2013, HR tech and recruiting technology will shift to mobile, make relationships more real, leverage big data, and empower HR to be more than cogs in the machine:

• A shift from mobile recruiting to mobile work & life.  This trend isn’t really about having a mobile recruiting website so much as it is that the candidate and employee audience is moving to a multi-device and option-filled lifestyle.  In addition to a mobile careers page you should be interacting with candidates on their most popular apps, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. We are working while living and that happens while doing many things at one time.  Television has become interactive as we tweet (over 24 million tweets during last nights Super Bowl), watch videos and check our email on the same device or multiple ones all at the same time.  Your recruiting and employee engagement strategy should be interactive and engaging on the many channels of life.

• Making relationships real.  Moving from automated relationships and the candidate experience to focusing on the actual relationship and the long-term aggregate benefit of educating, helping, and assisting job seekers even if they don’t work for us right now but possibly at a future point in time.

• Focus on data, data, and more data.  As practitioners in the industry we know the value of our role in the organization.  We often view this measure or metric as elusive for our industry.  With all the buzz surrounding big data, companies and talent departments should be focusing on understanding the business and finding ways to articulate the benefits of what they do in a way that our senior leaders understand.  Numbers are just numbers until we put real meaning behind them.  That’s part of what improved technologies and efficiencies will help us do in HR.

• Technology that makes us more than cogs in the machine.  I feel like there is a belief that HR and recruitment technologies will completely end the need for human resources and recruiters.  Automation helps us focus on the human elements of our most valuable business resource, the employee.  This technology should help elevate the human element taking us away from viewing employees as replicable cogs in the hiring machine to employees with lives, experiences, and personalities you can’t automate.

What other trends are you seeing when it comes to technology, recruiting and the human capital industry?

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media.  She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. When she talks, people listen. 

SmartRecruiters is the hiring platform with everything you need to post a job, manage candidates and make the right hire.