Posts belonging to Category hiring

Succeeding in the social-media space requires an ability to communicate in short, fast and succinct bursts.

If you want to be a digital media manager at Pizza Hut, you’d better be able to adopt this straight-to-the-point, social-media mindset right out of the gate.

Representatives from the Plano, Texas-based restaurant chain descended on Austin’s annual South by Southwest music festival this past weekend, to seek out and interview job candidates for the aforementioned position.

Lots of candidates, apparently: Each interviewee was to be given just 140 seconds (an homage to Twitter’s 140-character limit) to sum up their social-media bona fides, and convince the organization he or she has the goods.

One of the people they’ll need to convince is Caroline Masullo, Pizza Hut’s director of digital and social media. Masullo, who conducted interviews at the SXSW site for four hours on Sunday, explained the rationale behind the 140-second interview to Bloomberg Businessweek:

We need this person to be super-knowledgeable in the social space. They need to be able to communicate with our consumers in fun, quick, concise ways. … We need someone who knows who they are, what they are looking for, someone who’s super-passionate, quick on their feet, able to communicate clearly in a short amount of time.”

Candidates were also asked to bring only their IDs and smartphones, the latter of which would be used for a quick review of the applicant’s LinkedIn profile during the interview.

Ultimately, the 140-second interview is “like an elevator [pitch],” Masullo told Businessweek. “Tell me in 140 seconds why you think you should be the next manager of … . ”

Pizza Hut, which will conduct another lightning round of interviews via Google+ on March 14, is already being lauded for its unique strategy in finding sharp, quick-witted candidates; a tactic that Masullo hopes will net the company someone “on the cutting edge of the social space” that will “keep us at the forefront” of said space.

Time will tell if they find that someone, but you have to give Pizza Hut some credit for taking a novel approach. Just do it quickly.

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Many job seekers like to get a bit creative in making their resumes really pop.

But the candidates behind these CVs, summarized here by the folks at Yahoo! Finance, are taking some especially imaginative (and in some cases calorie-laden) approaches to grabbing HR’s attention.

Consider marketing professional Nicholas, for example. Nick decided the way into hiring managers’ hearts was through their stomachs, and created the “resumebar,” a chocolate bar promoting “credentials that will satisfy any organization’s appetite.”

He even went to the trouble of providing a label with personal facts and a list of skills, or ingredients, ranging from copywriting and brand management to search-engine marketing and revenue generation. This scrumptious curriculum vitae got picked up on Reddit, viewed more than one million times, and helped Nick land a job with LeagueApps, a platform that connects adult recreational athletes.

Jordan McDonnell, a financial analyst seeking more creative pastures, went the anti-resume route. Struggling to gain entry into the marketing industry, he created an “alternative CV” that proudly advertised the fact it was NOT a resume. The Power Point-style slideshow presentation, which neatly encapsulated his professional and personal lives to date, garnered 90,000-plus views in just over a week. Soon flooded with job offers from around the world, McDonnell wound up accepting a position as an account manager with Twitter.

My favorite may be a young finance major’s brutally honest twist on a time-honored tradition. Here’s an excerpt from the cover letter he sent to a New York investment bank in January, seeking a summer internship:

I won’t waste your time inflating my credentials, throwing around exaggerated job titles, or feeding you a line of crapp [sic] about how my past experiences and skill set align perfectly for an investment banking internship.”

The truth, continued this candid applicant, “is that I have no unbelievably special skills or genius eccentricities, but I do have a near perfect GPA and will work hard for you.”

The duly impressed recipient forwarded the frank letter to several colleagues and peers, sparking interest up and down Wall Street and becoming a viral online hit in the process. No word on where the young man will be interning this summer, but his prospects may be looking up.

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” commented one banker at Business Insider, “if this guy gets at least a call from every bank out there.”

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Can a tweet be more important than the all-mighty resume?

According to this USA Today piece, the answer could be yes, and sooner than you may think:

Several tech-forward marketing companies are going where few have gone before: they’re ditching the résumé and the conventional job interview process for tweets. A simple tweet or two — sometimes called Twitterviews — can lead to a job.  In a nation where unemployment stands at 7.9%, how you tweet can now determine how employable you are.

The story mentions a few examples where such a novel hiring process was employed, but cautions that not every position will be available for such a hiring process. Says Jan Melnik, a career coach from Durham, Conn.:

“You won’t see a CEO — or a college professor — hired based on a tweet,” she says. Nor would she hire someone based solely on a tweet.  But, she laughs, “I would hire someone on  Skype.”

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It’s not uncommon for an employee to feel that a job isn’t living up to the lofty expectations he or she had upon being hired. But here’s guessing that isn’t much of an issue at Dalkey Archive Press.

The publisher of fiction, nonfiction and poetry, with offices in London, Dublin and Champaign, Ill., is apparently in search of an intern. To be more specific, the company seeks an intern for whom work/life balance isn’t important. At all.

According to Dalkey Archive’s recent job post advertising an open position in its London office, applicants must “not have any other commitments (personal or professional) that will interfere with work at the Press,” such as “family obligations, writing, involvement with other organizations, degrees to be finished, holidays to be taken, weddings to attend in Rio” and so on. Oh, and the post also offers this not-so-subtle advice for would-be candidates that may not be taking these requirements seriously: DO NOT APPLY if all of the above does not describe you.

Need more proof—besides threatening capital letters—that Dalkey Archive means business? Take a look at some of the offenses the organization deems “grounds for immediate dismissal” during the intern’s probationary period:

Coming in late or leaving early without prior permission.

Being unavailable at night or on the weekends.

Failing to meet any goals.

Giving unsolicited advice about how to run things.

Surfing the Internet while at work.

Failing to respond to emails in a timely way.

Making repeated mistakes.

Yikes. The post was taken down within a few days of its first appearance, but not before making the rounds online, where opinions were divided as to whether the job description was to be taken at face value or with tongue at least somewhat-in-cheek.

Either way, you’d be right, according to Dalkey Archive founder John O’Brien. “The advertisement was a modest proposal,” he told The Irish Times. “Serious and not serious at the same time.” In what he called his “official reaction to the hornet’s nest,” O’Brien noted he “take[s] internships very seriously, and take[s] on only people I think might be a future employee.”

O’Brien also lamented his “very mixed” experience with interns, with “the most common problem being that they aren’t prepared, don’t know what to expect, hope that a job might be at the end of the rainbow, and yet don’t have a clue as to what an employer is looking for. Employers wind up frustrated that they put in so much time, and the interns wonder why a job wasn’t forthcoming.”

Off-putting job descriptions aside, you have to give O’Brien some points for honesty. His eventual intern may not have much of a life outside the office, but he or she won’t have any unrealistic expectations about the job, either.

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Once again, as in previous HR Technology^® Conferences, the union of recruiting and technology — and what it’s going to look like going forward — was the juggernaut for consensus and debate on the 15th annual conference’s final day.

Led by moderators Gerry Crispin, principal and co-founder of CareerXroads, and Sarah White, principal and founder of SW & Associates, this year’s panel of four staffing leaders from Lockheed Martin, Key Bank, PepsiCo and Deloitte took up the still-evolving, often-troubling topic in Wednesday’s session, “What’s Next? What Talent Acquisition Challenges are Seeking Technology Solutions?”

All agreed that, despite great strides in social recruiting, and recruiting technology in general, even their organizations — leaders in this new frontier — have a long way to go.

“I would challenge any one of us to say we are fully prepared and where we need to be,” said panelist Frank Wittenauer, associate director of global talent solutions for Deloitte. “Recruiting is still the last thing that gets defined. When the economy is good, it’s, ‘Let’s go, let’s get the butts in seats, let’s do the background checks after they’re hired.’

“When it’s slow,” he said, “it’s, ‘Let’s do six interviews, six times, and then six more, divide the results by pi … ‘ ” you get the idea. So did the standing-only roomful of chuckling attendees.

The panelists were mixed on whether leveraging new recruiting-technology tools should be a local activity for global companies or a global one. Should companies be allowing their smaller, more remote recruiting teams to innovate and move forward within their own domains and unique sets of circumstances or should they all be aligning under one global-recruitment umbrella?

“It’s OK to let your recruiters have blinders on when it comes to recruiting technology,” said Mike Grennier, senior vice president of talent acquisition for Key Bank.

Crispin cautioned, though, that “there should be some way for that global alignment to take place. They all have the tools to reach across global boundaries,” he said, “but who in your organization is showing them the reach beyond their own domain? We have all that recruiting data, but is anybody really communicating about it?”

Still emerging and highly imperfect, panelists agreed, is the effectiveness of workforce planning as a pre-emptive, proactive social-recruiting tool. At the very least, at PepsiCo, “we ask HR to identify jobs or profiles that are hard to find and then keep [candidates] in store there — in waiting — so there, we’re pre-emptive,” said Sheila Stygar, PepsiCo’s senior director of talent acquisition.

Also fledgling and inadequate, they agreed, are the processes in place for dealing with the plethora and proliferation of new, often smaller, vendors with specific solutions to particular problems, or, as Crispin described them, “small pieces to add to the entire [social-recruiting] function.”

“Where do you have in your organization someone who filters through all the solutions out there?” he asked.

Grennier suggested companies trying to find that “solution-filterer” look for someone with “a real passion” for the social-recruiting function” and technology in general.

Panelists also agreed that, as social recruiting continues to “find itself” as a defined function within companies, recruiters learn to treat it professionally and network with what Wittenauer described as “those go-to people” in the vendor community — people they can bounce all these new offerings and suggestions off of.

“If you don’t have those networks,” Crispin concurred, “you’re not going to be learning in real time.”

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Women at the top of the labor market–lawyers, high-priced consultants, etc–and at the bottom–retail clerks, hotel maids, etc–have it rough, but for entirely different reasons, writes Susan J. Lambert, a University of Chicago professor, in an opinion piece in today’s New York Times.

Professional women in challenging careers are expected to put in punishingly long hours that make it difficult for them to spend time with their families, she writes. But women holding low-paying hourly positions are struggling to work enough hours to support their families, writes Lambert:

Sales associates and restaurant servers might be scheduled for 7 hours one week and 32 the next. Hotel housekeepers might work Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday one week, and then Sunday, Thursday and Saturday the following week. Schedules are often posted just a few days in advance. And women in hourly jobs are likely to have less input than men in determining their work schedules, according to national surveys.”

Meanwhile, women holding professional jobs are typically salaried, with fixed benefits costs–asking them to put in more hours usually does not impact their employers’ bottom lines, unlike their hourly counterparts, she writes, who cost their employers more when they work more hours. Indeed, the onset of the Patient Protection Act may make it even tougher for hourly workers to get in more paid time.

What to do? Lambert advocates reforming the Fair Labor Standards Act to require overtime pay for professionals and guarantee minimum weekly hours for hourly workers. It’s tough to see this sort of proposal being passed into law at this time, especially given the current lousy economy. But there has to be a better way.

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Here’s another wrinkle in the quest toward that perfect marriage between social media and recruiting. Consider it a sign that we still have a long way to go.

Seems an executive recruiter by the name of Tal Newhart, owner of ScreeningInterviews.com, was recently forced to terminate his candidate-profiling service, FacebookComparator.com, because the HR departments and independent recruiters using it weren’t doing so in the way he had envisioned.

“We were informed the Comparator was being used to ‘prevent the hiring of members,’ ” he says in this release. “I can certainly see that.”

The online service, with customers in the United States and Europe, analyzed a job applicant’s self-reporting on large social networks to predict a candidate’s hirability and anticipated job performance. Newhart says ScreeningInterviews will continue using the Comparator technology in its retained assignments and as part of its interviewing services, “but it’s dead as a stand-alone recruiting support service.”

“Too bad,” he says, “since it was a robust performance and retention predictor. I guess too good.”

The problem, in a nutshell, Newhart told me when I called him about this, comes down to the difference between using such a service in a positive way, i.e., the way it was constructed to be used — “to match corporate cultures with candidates” — or using it a negative way, ”to screen out candidates.”

Essentially, members of “a large social-media site were being informed by the network that they were being denied positions because of what was being found on FacebookComparator.com,” he told me. HR leaders, hiring managers and recruiters “were using it to knock people out, not make the match culturally.” (He declined to name or confirm the site, despite the product’s name.)

This hurdle aside, Newhart says, there will be a “place in the future for companies to come in [to such a site] and create a full profile, based on all of their cultural aspects, business goals, philosophies, etc. etc. [and then correlate that] with a job candidate’s social-media presence” to see if there is a match there, if that person will do well there, succeed there, stay there.

That will take a new way of looking at such a service by HR professionals and recruiters, he says. It will require a more positive approach, rather than looking at this type of tool as simply good at finding questionable behavior, beliefs or politics on someone’s Facebook page so they can rule them out based on that.

In the same token, says Newhart, “job seekers need to understand the majority of companies are using social self-reporting, and what you say and show about yourself online is being used to evaluate who you are. … What people don’t understand is that [sharing anything on a social-media site] is self-reporting, and it’s very difficult to ‘game.’ ”

In this news analysis I wrote earlier this year, Don Kluemper, a professor of management who specializes in human resources at Northern Illinois University’s College of Business, provided first-ever academic proof, through his research, that Facebook can yield valuable personality and job-performance information — not just clues as to whether someone parties too hard or has alarming alliances. He did indicate then that the eventual practice was far from perfect.

Just as cognitive-ability tests were first doubted, but then thoroughly tested and vetted for any adverse-impact, “so, too,” said Kluemper, “would social-media profiles as job predictors need to be studied [and vetted] … .”

Newhart would take that a step further:

In the future we’ll see job/candidate matching engines that combine and optimize the individual company and candidate matrices. The result will be dramatically shorter unemployment periods. The underlying technology exists today. It will just be very complicated to get the cloud-based pieces to play together. When done, though, the social impact will be enormous. But for now, just look closely at a candidate’s self-reporting. Everything is right there.”

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Regardless of your political affiliation (or lack thereof), I think most of us who watched it can agree that former President Bill Clinton’s speech at the recent Democratic national convention was effective and memorable. In his speech, Clinton noted that despite the nation’s persistently high unemployment rate, about 3 million jobs remain unfilled due to a scarcity of qualified technical talent.

It’s an astounding number. Even more astounding is the fact that community colleges–of which a huge number of employers have come to rely on to train the next generation of technical talent–are being left to scrape and scramble for funding to try and fill those jobs.

Workforce Training in a Recovering Economy, a new report released by the Education Policy Center at the University of Alabama, includes a survey of 49 state community college directors. Forty-five of them said business leaders in their communities see the schools as primary workforce training providers–up from 34 respondents in a similar survey conducted last year.

And yet, the report notes, funding sources intended to support training programs at these colleges–such as the Workforce Investment Act–have been exhausted, while state funding remains under threat because of the poor economy. As a result, many of these colleges are struggling to provide the sort of technology-rich training courses that most closely correlate with employers’ needs.

Lack of funding isn’t the only problem. The report finds that 31 of the college directors say a significant shortage of faculty in high-cost technical areas exists in their states. So, combine these challenges with the fact that community colleges are experiencing record enrollment rates–in some cases, having to turn students away–as unemployed workers try to upgrade their skills by going back to school, and it’s easy to see why the report concludes on this somber note:

With exhausted training funds and continuing state budget cuts, the ability of community colleges to serve workers in need of retraining, and to build the workforce of the future, is, without doubt, constrained.”

I can’t help but think there’s a role for HR leaders here. What about lobbying state and federal sources for greater support for these institutions? Perhaps arranging for talented technical staff at your organizations to get involved with teaching a course or two at the local community college to compensate for the shortage of qualified faculty? And, what about biting the bullet and convincing your organization’s leadership to pony up a bit of cash to support these schools’ mission? After all, that mission most likely includes helping to train your future workers.

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Not one to peddle books on this site, but one caught my eye today that ties in enough with issues we’re currently grappling with that I thought I’d share.

Jim Roddy, president of Jameson Publishing in Erie, Pa., just wrote this book, Hire Like You Just Beat Cancer, to drive home his newfound perspective on just how crucial it is to hire the right people — gained through his own bout with colon cancer at age 32.

I was especially taken by this excerpt from the book:

Too often, we hire people whose full potential and ambition are invested in performing the jobs they’re hired for. Then, when we need more from them, they’re not able or willing to go the extra mile. Your goal should be to have at all times (or be working toward) at least one employee with the skills, personality, character, mapping, ambition, and technical competence to take over your position right away.”

So happens we’re currently putting the finishing touches on a Sept. 16 Human Resource Executive^® cover story that reveals just how much work is still needed by chief human resource officers to find and develop their own replacements. One survey the writer cites shows a pretty dismal number of CHROs who were developed and hired from within their organizations last year — a pretty clear indication of how few top HR executives are actually selecting and preparing their top subordinates to take over their jobs — tomorrow, if need be.

Roddy’s book contains many of his lessons learned, as spelled out in this release: guiding principles for hiring, interview best practices (such as behavior-focused techniques), recruiting strategies for finding great performers, even emotional outcomes the interview process should achieve: “candidates feel the company is professional, their quesions are answered, candidates were happy to interview, candidates are told of the job’s difficulties,” the list goes on.

As Roddy writes in the book: “The lessons I learned when cancer knocked me down helped build me up as a hiring manager, and I apply those lessons aggressively every time I interview a potential employee.”

Whether you order a copy of his book or not, perhaps it could serve as a suggestion/reminder that your own succession plan and hiring practices might merit a second look, through the more focused and urgent lens of suddenly not being able to report to work tomorrow.

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How would you get an elephant into a refrigerator?

That’s a strange question to ask in any context. But posing such oddball queries is an old trick used during job interviews to gauge candidates’ ability to think fast and creatively.

Interviewers who like to throw out this type of curveball question aren’t necessarily looking for a specific response. The bigger concern is that the candidate doesn’t swing and miss completely; stumbling and stammering while coming up with nothing at all.

Well, a recent survey suggests that a majority of job seekers actually welcome the chance to knock offbeat interview questions out of the park. The poll, conducted by British recruitment firm Michael Page International, found that 66 percent of more than 1,000 respondents said they would feel confident about their ability to answer questions asking which famous person they’d like to trade places with for a day, or why manhole covers are round and not square, for example.

Jobseekers as well as employers stand to gain by occasionally taking interviews off the predictable path, says Dean Ball, a regional managing director for Michael Page.

Weird interview questions can spark interesting reactions from candidates, but they are also an extremely useful way for businesses to differentiate between candidates who have similar qualifications and experience on paper. They give candidates a chance to step outside the traditional boundaries of the interview process and really demonstrate their creativity, ability to apply logic and how they work under pressure. Such questions can also provide a light-hearted moment in what can be quite a formal situation, giving the employer a real chance to see a candidate’s personality and how they might fit into the company culture, so businesses shouldn’t shy away from them.”

Still, be prepared for job candidates who don’t see the value in “interesting” interview questions. Fifty-four percent of survey respondents indicated they would be surprised by an offbeat line of questioning, and 33 percent said they would struggle with it; either challenging an unexpected question’s relevance or simply saying they don’t know the answer.

The bottom line? Proceed with caution when taking the weird interview question route, Ball advises.

If used correctly, obscure lines of questioning can really help employers to build a clear picture of a candidate’s potential, so it’s worth exploring how they might fit into your assessment processes. They can sometimes take candidates by surprise, though, so make sure you take time to think carefully about the questions and what kind of response you are hoping to achieve.”

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