PeterCosgrove

For certain skill-sets there is a lack of supply of good people, here are 5 things that employers regularly fall foul of, so even when they have the candidates they often cannot find the right person.

Job specification:  All jobs require there to be some sort of a job specification as this is what helps the prospective candidates understand the role. Many job specs are out of date, do not really highlight what the job entails and are often written by someone who is not close enough to want the job is – line managers should sign off on all their own job specifications as they truly know what they need,. A line manager needs to be fully involved in the hiring process and not leave it to the HR Department.

References – the amount of times I receive a reference check and it is a tick-box exercise where you can hear the other person who is regularly not the prospective boss asking standard questions. It amazes me that one of the best ways to find about a person is the three year interview they just did at their last company. Despite the fact that more companies are not giving references, it is critical to find out as much as you can about the person at their last job – this is information you cannot easily gauge at interview .

Lack of awareness of the company brand – interviewing a candidate is not all about your company. Guess what - just because you believe you are a great company to work for does not mean everyone else does. What will help is a strong first impression, a passionate interviewer, a company that seems to care about the person they are interviewing and one who actually interviews that candidate. Good candidates want to be interviewed and challenged, they want to feel they earned the job so give them a strong interview and a great first impression.

Wanting a replica of the person who has just left – “We want someone like Bob” is a well heard phrase. Try to think about your vacancy, what you really want is Bob from three years ago, as Bob today knows everything about the job and is leaving, so you will not get someone like him. If the person can already do the job, then they should not and most likely won’t want it.

Assessing the candidate: Interviews are poor indicators of the quality of the hire, a Belgian survey highlighted that an interview had about a 25-30% success rate whereas an assessment centre brought his up to 63%. It makes sense that if you test someone through psychometrics, see how they perform in a group, give them a task to perform in a live environment and also interview them , you are more likely to get the person you want – but only if you know how to set these assessments up fairly and appropriately.

Great people are very hard to find – don’t make it harder by not doing the basics right.

So we all love social media, internet, 24 hour connectivity, smartphones, apps, blogs and even the old fashioned media still get a look in – the problem being – there is too much DATA!
Having read 100’s of articles and blogs over the last 6 months I thought I would highlight 3 links that I think are really relevant to recruiters – so forget trawling for new articles read these three and give yourself time to do it – it will save you in the long run:

1. Top 10 Candidate Sourcing Best Practices, by Glen Cathey

Many of these may seem obvious but this like most advice it may seem obvious but are you and/or your team implementing these practices…

http://www.sourcecon.com/news/2011/01/10/top-10-candidate-sourcing-best-practices/?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=Jacco+Valkenburg

2. Two killer questions great recruiters ask every time, by Greg Savage.

These two questions if asked on every role would probably double your fill rate if open jobs…are you asking them

http://gregsavage.com.au/2011/06/22/two-killer-questions-great-recruiters-ask-every-time/

3.  High-Impact Social Recruiting Errors — The Top 30 to Avoid, Dr John Sullivan

This will highlight what recruiters are doing wrong and may help you answer that question “if my recruiters keep telling me that social media is the future, why am I not seeing more hires?”

http://www.ere.net/2011/02/07/high-impact-social-recruiting-errors-the-top-30-to-avoid/

My tip for these articles is to print them and read while you are traveling/in transit. While mobile technology helps us access data only you have the power to choose what you read. Print these and read them when you have time to think and ideally implement the learnings. Forget the newest article read the best articles on recruitment. These are just some I would choose to read, re-read and try to implement the advice.

beKnown, Monsters new facebook app has been created as an easy way for job seekers to search for and apply for roles without leaving Facebook. Once you have set up a BeKnown profile, you'll be able to make connections, search for and apply for jobs, see featured jobs that are matched with your profile, view company information, get endorsed, and apply for jobs directly from the app.

You'll have an online version of your resume, which can be printed as a PDF and you will be automatically matched with jobs, based on the information in your BeKnown profile.

An important feature of BeKnown is that it separates personal from professional.  Your BeKnown profile is separate from your Facebook profile and it stays that way. You don't have to worry, any more than usual, about your personal life and what you post on Facebook overlapping with your work life Users can connect on BeKnown with professional contacts as well as with their Facebook friends, or leave their friends out of the mix.

It is designed for all levels and types of job seekers. You don't need to be a professional business person to use BeKnown. BeKnown provides networking opportunities and job search tools on Facebook, regardless of the type of job you're seeking. In addition, with availability in 19 languages, it's a truly international networking tool.

For companies, Monster explains that BeKnown:

·         Access to a vast source of potential global talent on Facebook – Facebook’s estimated 750 million members span ages, income levels and ethnic groups

·         Creates new recruitment opportunities and extends job posting reach in a high engagement environment

·         Increases engagement with so-called passive job seekers, as BeKnown users follow company job and network activity

While a professional online profile is a good idea, Monster makes a point to note its app allows Facebook users to:  

·         Easily invite contacts from other social networks to expand their BeKnown network beyond their existing Facebook friends

·         Keep social activity with friends and family separate from work-related activity with professional contacts

·         Can see who among their professional contacts on BeKnown is connected to a company or job opportunity of interest

·         Connects professional networking to Monster’s job search and browse tools and import their Monster profile to BeKnown from right within the app

 "An estimated 700 million people globally live their lives through Facebook and 97% of the Fortune 500 companies turn to Monster to find talent. BeKnown now gives people and companies the ability to utilize that vast network for professional gain by tapping into the power of Monster and Facebook." Darko Dejanovic, global CIO and head of product at Monster Worldwide.

 Like all new social network ideas, many feel we have too many already. I think the difference here is the link with facebook, if facebook continue for world domination this may become a player. While jobseekers use Linkedin when looking for a job, people use facebook everyday regardless of whether they are jobseeking.

Early signs point to a positive response albeit with some teething tech issues which hopefully they can resolve quickly – there is nothing like twittersphere to let you know what works and what doesn't!

I recently spoke to the candidate who had turned down a job opportunity but had sent a thank you note to the prospective employer. The prospective employer was so taken aback in a positive way by this that he called the jobseeker to highlight how impressed he had been. It is incredible the effect a thank you card can have however only if done correctly so ensure you think about the following:

·         Choose good quality thank you cards, buy them in advance so you are not searching for one when you have the need to write a card.

·         Ensure you thank someone specifically. Like Ken Blanchard’s comments in the “One Minute manager” around praise he highlighted that you praise the behaviour not the person. With thank you notes, be specific about the thanks and be sincere.

·         Do not be self-serving – write the thank you card to thank, not to thank …and ask. That is the same as “Sorry…but” type apologies.

·         Do not let Hallmark speak your words– if you have gone to the trouble of getting a card, a stamp and taken the time to handwrite a card – do more than just write one line. I personally hate getting cards with just a signature – why bother!

·         Use a stamp not a franked mail – its more personal and secondly its from you not the company.

·         Finally, if you are under the age of thirty and were never forced to write a thank you card to your Aunt Mabel and you don’t know what I am talking about – just for once don’t text, email or facebook a response, don’t even use an emoticon, just take up a piece of paper and try it.

Thank you cards work because it shows you took the time to appreciate someone else’s time and effort and it absolutely makes you stand out. We all love to be appreciated but we really love to be appreciated and noticed for what we actually did well – so be specific with your thanks!

As a famous Irishman once said:
The smallest act of kindness is worth more than the grandest intention.  ~Oscar Wilde

Your cv is yours sales tool and it has one role – to get you an interview. There I have said it, plain and simple but yet 95% of those I see suffer from the same few problems:

1.    A jobseeker writing down everything they want as opposed to thinking what a prospective employer would like to read

2.    Writing down a list of responsibilities/ duties, basically highlighting what they have done BUT not what they have done well

3.    Poorly spelt, formatted, grammatically incorrect which perhaps should not immediately consign their cv to the bin but I personally still get annoyed when people use ‘pacifically’ instead of ‘specifically’ in a sentence so maybe I am a tough audience.

But even with a perfect cv, it is still just a piece of paper and an employer wants to meet you not a piece of paper because In today’s economy the thing we really really want is hard work, persistence, perseverance, resilience and all those qualities that you will struggle to pick from a cv.

A great story I head recently was a girl who had applied to 4 recruiters and had not heard back from any of them. She subsequently attended a recruitment conference and met with owners and managers in Recruitment Agencies who could not believe she was attending this conference even though she was not currently in the industry. She received four offers for interview and one job offer on the spot (after a 10 minute conversation). The interesting point being that she had applied to 3 of these companies already and had heard nothing back. What changed? She differentiated herself, she showed a willingness to learn and came across well at a networking break.

 
Networking is not easy so go to more events and practice what you need to improve, as Sam Snead the Golfer said  “It is only human nature that wants to practice what you can already do well, since it’s a lot less work and a lot more fun, sadly it does not lower your handicap”

So if you want a job, know where your prospective future bosses will be attending events, look the part, be confident and get the job that they really want to fill but they do not have time to wade through 100 cvs. That’s how I want to find my future employees and I am hiring!

The myth of where to find “great candidates” is not too hard to decipher. If you work in a recruitment agency and your company has been around for more than five years with a good track record you have all the “great” candidates that you need.

 Let’s start with the common assumptions:

1. That you do not have a Rolls Royce database and it has duplicates, bugs and is not perfect
2. In-house recruiters are getting better at mining job boards and social media
3. Great candidates are really hard to find and you have to go through so many candidates just to get to that great one

Firstly, stop searching for that one candidate for one job, look at the area you search. Take the three most common skill-sets that you hire  e.g. “business development”, “account management” and “solutions sales and begin to create a list of the following:

All roles that were worked by someone in your company that involved one of those skill-sets”; take your time to build all the jobs that were created against this. Then build a list of all candidates you sent to a client that they decided to interview. This will take time especially if you have a "challenging" database but it can be done!

 If you take this candidate list, you have essentially taken out a huge amount of the legwork in identifying a “good” candidate. Our biggest challenge can be reliability of a candidate, how they come across, can they work in the country, do they interview well, do clients agree with our sentiments. The above list takes a lot of those problems away from you. You have created a list of previously screened candidates that the recruitment agent thought was good to send to a client and that the client concurred with and interviewed.

I am not saying this is the only way to search but next time you say I cannot find any good candidates, what you mean is I could not be bothered to go through the 1,000 candidates who were interviewed in the last number of years for the types of role that I hire for.

 This is your competitive advantage as a recruiter in a recruitment agency as everyone has access to the job boards and the social media platforms. You need to be recognised for an ability to find “hard to find” candidates in a specific function or sector. Clients engage with recruitment agencies to help them find those candidates they cannot find themselves. They do not have access to a database of previously successful candidates – so go mine the database!

Presenting with the learned Professor Ian Robertson, a renowned neuroscientist the audience in the Science gallery were presented with some very interesting ideas on how the brain does work and how we can use this information to our advantage – here are three points of interest:

First Impressions

I said – the importance of four core things – eye contact, firm handshake, smile and what you wear as we automatically take this in as an interviewer and often are not aware that it gives s a positive or negative bias

Prof Robertson highlighted the importance of memory in terms of how we remember and highlighted that we remember most about what was said first and last and remember a lot less about the middle. So if you are part of an interview process, try to either be first or last (Recency and Primacy are the technical terms).

Stories

I said – the importance of telling stories as it was firstly easier to recall for the interviewer, secondly “facts tell and stories sell” and thirdly we come across more positive when recounting a story rather than facts

Prof Robertson highlighted that stories become embedded memories and you are less likely to have that horrible moment where you freeze and forget something if you have committed it to a more permanent memory, so he suggested firstly to practice aloud and commit to memory and secondly to have stories linked to examples. He highlighted that we will remember  words such as  cow, milk, door much more than abstract words such as fear, despair, anger,  as you can put a picture against them, so if you have an abstract idea, link it to something practical so the interviewer remembers it.

Age/ Experience

Finally – I talked about our attitude to age and often we may not get the role as we think we are too experienced or not experienced enough. We heard the example that in China old people are still generally revered for their wisdom and “old age” does not have the same negative connotations that it does in the West. A Harvard study on Chinese vs Americans saw no different in their memory capability in young people but far better abilities from older Chinese vs older Americans as older Chinese had a much more positive outlook on ageing.

For the clip on George Hook with myself and Prof Robertson, you can listen here:

http://bit.ly/dOiRxf

for the slideshare presentation - here it is: http://bit.ly/geV4eK

This was the simplistic example he gave which you can do on your friends: http://www.abestweb.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7709

I am speaking next Wednesday alongside a neuroscientist on the whole topic of “being memorable at interview” and have had to do a little reflecting on the whole concept and what makes someone memorable.

The first thing that strikes me is that in one sense it is amazing that so many companies rely exclusively on interviewing to find the right candidate given so much is still based on emotion as opposed to objectivity. I know I will get told about the scientific merits of competency based interviews (CBIs) however the most thorough research ever done on the subject highlighted that the best probability of success for the right hire was assessment centres (69%), while CBIs never got above 30%

That said I was thinking about how we do make up our minds at interview and despite our best intentions we often still fall foul of subjectivity. Things that we find memorable for the right or the wrong reasons:

The First impression  - do they smile, look you in the eye and have a firm handshake (how often have you got a limp handshake and that has coloured your view from the start).
Appearance – do they look the part (how often do our own, not the companies views on appearance colour our view).
Attitude – as Zig Ziglar puts it – “it is your attitude not your aptitude that defines your altitude”; do we get more interested in someone who is energetic, passionate etc despite the fact that this may just be them being a good interviewer and potentially not a good candidate?

I am speaking about this at the Science Gallery link below, free to attend. The more I think about it the more I believe we continue to interview on instinct and emotion and not based on empirical evidence (not that we do not look for this).

When I hear people saying:
We only take people from multinationals or blue-chip organisations – are they not immediately ruling out a huge amount of candidates who have yet to get into a company like this.
When I hear a person say about a recent interview “ oh, they were brilliant , they blew me away” , is this based on how they answered the questions or an emotive response based more on subjectivity

The more I learn the more confused I get, join the debate next week in the Science Gallery http://bit.ly/fyiIsk