Posts belonging to Category recruiting

All’s fair in love and recruitment.

Robert Mellwig, SVP, Really Cool People, Destination Hotels & Resorts/Lowe Enterprises, offered no apologies for his company’s “shameless” search function, external referral program and other outreach efforts.

Mellwig was part of a panel that offered a variety of tips to HR professionals at the HR in Hospitality® Conference & Expo in Las Vegas.  Other panel members included Dina Barmasse-Gray, SVP, HR, Cheesecake Factory; Rebecca Henry, VP, People Services, Allegiant Travel Co., and Diane Turek-Pire, SVP, HR, Wyndham Hotel Group. Bruce Tracey, associate professor, school of hotel administration, Cornell University, moderated the panel.

Members had plenty to say about how their HR function operated. Henry explained that HR contacts its alumni group (former employees) several times a year for referrals, connects its HR system with its ticketing system to drive efficiency and spends 80 percent of its efforts on the top 20 percent of the company’s highest performers. Barmasse-Gray discussed the company’s video café, featuring employee videos addressing work tips, and how diversity is never taken for granted but is no longer a “top strategic imperative”. Turek-Pire mentioned a move from individual toward constellation or team awards and that HR was shifting its focus from employee engagement to trust, which builds loyalty.

Surprisingly, no one seemed concerned over Obamacare. Henry said the biggest needle-mover was getting spouses or adult children involved in healthcare. “People have the highest level of dissatisfaction when they don’t understand how it works,” she said.

Mellwig appeared to be the rebel of the group. He said HR awards employees for their contributions, not tenure, and ignores routine raises. “We believe in wild (salary) swings that are performance-driven.  It creates controversy but we get better results.”

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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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How much of a role does social media play in shaping perceptions of your company?

Depends on who you’re asking, according to a recent poll. 

The study of 225 HR managers and 2,035 employed adults, conducted by Harris Interactive for Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.-based Spherion Staffing Services, found some significant differences in how employers and employees see the importance of a company’s online reputation.

In the study, nearly half of workers (47 percent) said they “strongly agree” or “agree” that, when considering new employment, a company’s online reputation is just as important as the offer they’re given. Just 27 percent of companies, however, said they believe social media outlets are influential in how a candidate views their organization.

Some other findings suggest a connection between companies’ online cachet and satisfaction among existing employees, but declining employer interest in using social media to recruit, retain and rally the troops.

According to the survey, employees who are highly satisfied with their employer’s online reputation are nearly four times as likely to have high job satisfaction (76 percent) than those who are not satisfied with their organization’s online reputation (20 percent).”

However, fewer employers (6 percent) reported using social media to motivate and retain existing employees in comparison to its 2010 study, in which 20 percent said they relied on social media for such purposes. Companies also appear to be turning less to social media as a recruiting tool, with 28 percent of respondents using social media to find new talent; a 16 percent drop from 2010.

Employers would be well-served to reverse this particular trend, says Sandy Mazur, division president of Spherion Staffing Services.

“Organizations must become socially engaged in order to drive key business outcomes such as talent attraction, engagement, satisfaction and positive brand awareness, and reputation,” according to Mazur.

Decisions, including whether people want to work for your organization, stay with your organization, and sing your praises socially are all highly dependent on your ability to be socially engaged and socially adept.”

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Interesting piece posted by Liz Ryan on Bloomberg Businessweek’s The Management Blog yesterday, in which she laments HR’s lag in keeping up with hiring trends:

It is strange that even though every hiring manager knows that the sharpest candidates don’t stay on the market long, corporate recruiting processes don’t change. They don’t get nimbler or faster. They don’t get less burdensome or bureaucratic. You’d think that employers hungry for talent would innovate, making their recruiting processes easier and more human.

Ryan, an expert on the new-millennium workplace and a former Fortune 500 HR executive, goes on to add that the worst part about “effectively useless corporate recruiting is the notion that the best-qualified candidate for a job is the one willing to climb over the most piles of broken glass to get the job.”

The whole encrusted recruiting process (not to mention unfriendly, robotic auto-responders and the unending stream of honesty tests, writing tests, and other recruiting hurdles) makes it easy for organizations to hire drones, and it makes it hard for them to hire the brilliant and complex people they need to solve their problems.

Click here to read Ryan’s tongue-in-cheek list of six ways that recruiting processes “conspire to keep great people out while pulling in docile and wan candidates,” including this gem: “Take weeks or months to get back to people to schedule job interviews. At the interviews, keep them waiting in the lobby, ask them idiotic questions like ‘What is your greatest weakness?’ and get offended when they inquire about the actual state of the team and the company.”

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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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As an HR professional, you’re no doubt familiar with that dull sensation brought on by seeing too darned many buzzwords in resumes and employee profiles. As you probably know, overuse of buzzwords may indicate lack of confidence in the buzzword-er and prompt exteme eye-rolling in the buzzword-ee–and that’s just a buzzkill. LinkedIn wants to help you–and the people who may be applying for jobs at your company. In particular, it wants everyone to stop larding their LinkedIn profile with overused, trite and meaningless buzzwords like “creative,” “analytical,” “innovative” and “problem solving.” Stop it now, says Nicole Williams, LinkedIn’s career expert: “Millions of professionals say they’re ‘creative’ … . Pointing to concrete examples of the creative work you’ve done is more convincing than simply stating you are a ‘creative professional.’ ”

LinkedIn has just released its annual study of the most prevalent buzzwords found among the nearly 200 million profiles on its site. “Creative” was the top overused buzzword this year, as it was in last year’s study. In the inaugural 2010 study, “extensive experience” was the No. 1 buzzword. In this year’s study, “creative” was followed by “organizational,” “effective,” “motivated,” “extensive experience” and “track record.”

Of course, Americans are far from the only ones who like to use buzzwords: “Creative” was also the favorite term among LinkedIn users in Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden and Singapore. “Motivated” was the most-used in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and the United Kingdom, while “Responsible” dominated in France and Italy. In fact, it seems as if the only truly creative folks are residing in Brazil, where “experimental” was No. 1. Interesting …

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Kathy Bayert should be a sought-after candidate for any recruiter: She holds an MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School, plus stints at IBM and PricewaterhouseCoopers. There’s a catch, however: Like many women in the workforce, she took a few years off to spend time raising a family. When these women decide to restart their careers, they face an uphill battle. Bayert was lucky, however: Even though the economy was in the doldrums when she began looking for a job at age 42, she found a “returnship” at Sara Lee Corp.–basically, a six-month paid position designed for a professional who’d been out of the workforce for several years. Bayert applied, was accepted and six months later was hired as a senior manager of organizational effectiveness. The program was “critical as a springboard back into the workforce,” she said.

Bayert’s experience is profiled in the November issue of the Harvard Business Review in a piece penned by Carol Fishman Cohen. Cohen is cofounder of iRelaunch, a company focused on return-to-work issues. Returnships are an ideal way for companies to screen experienced talent who, in many cases, have already put the stages of taking breaks from work to have children behind them, she writes. Although most participants in these programs are women, some are male and — considering the growing number of men who are taking time off to help raise children — that number will likely continue growing. In her piece, Cohen offers a few tips for HR leaders who are considering starting a returnship program:

• Keep it small: it’s easier to get buy-in and build a successful track record that way, she writes.
• Identify some internal champions: At Sara Lee, CEO Brenda Barnes, who had taken some time off for child-rearing, was a champion of the program
• Model the returnship on your existing internship program
• Introduce hiring managers to participants: managers are often reluctant to consider people whose skills they fear may be outdated; face-to-face meetings between them and returnship particpants can erase those fears, Cohen writes.
• Expand campus recruitment to include returnees: when recruiting for interns, make it clear that all ages are welcome, she writes.
• Partner with an academic program:Some universities and graduate schools have begun offering short-term skill-building programs for professionals looking to get back into the workforce.

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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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The social networking sphere is supposed to be the domain of the young, right?

It’s fair to say that Generations Y and Z have led the way in making new verbs like “Facebook me” and “tweeting” a part of our everyday language. But, there’s no shortage of data showing that older generations—particularly baby boomers—have begun to plug into the social network as well.

And, boomers are doing much more than posting pictures and sharing mundane details of their daily routines, according to a recent poll conducted by Millennial Branding, a Boston-based research and consulting firm, and Beyond.com.

The survey of 5,268 job seekers actually found that more baby boomers (29 percent) report using social networks as part of their job search than members of both Generation X (27 percent) and Generation Y (23 percent).

If that statistic surprises you, you’re not alone.

“I was very surprised, for the obvious reasons,” says Dan Schawbel, founder and managing partner of Millennial Branding. “It’s interesting. A lot of people would suspect that it would be a very small number of boomers using social networking.”

A key contributing factor, says Schawbel, could be the large numbers of older job seekers using LinkedIn, the well-known networking site for people in professional occupations.

“For boomers, [LinkedIn] is just easier for them to use. All their connections are using it.”

Indeed, studies put the average LinkedIn user age in the mid-40s, with a mean salary in the six-figure range, he says. “So [many of these users] hold, or are looking for, executive- and director-level jobs.”

So, while most large companies already use social networking for recruiting purposes, this knowledge may help HR professionals make more efficient use of their time when recruiting for the types of top positions typically filled by boomer-age candidates, says Schawbel.

The reality is, if you’re an employer, you have to use all the top social networks. You can’t avoid Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. But this finding shows you that you may use most of your time on LinkedIn for executive recruiting. Recruiters have less and less time these days. So this report tells them where they should spend their time and how.”

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