The Hiring Site
Move Your Recruitment Strategy Forward by Taking a Step Back
Is your recruitment process based on what you know about job seekers…or what you think you know about job seekers?
If there’s one thing over 15 years of in-depth research on job seeker behavior and perceptions have taught us, it’s that now, more than ever, experience matters when it comes to the ability to drive quality candidates to apply for your open positions.
A recent CareerBuilder and Inavero study revealed that top talent wants to engage with prospective employers and experience what it’s like to work for their company before they decide to apply to a position – and they’re increasingly utilizing emerging technology to do it.
How do job seekers really see you? Three questions to ask
If you’ve never taken a step back to consider the experience you offer candidates – from their perspectives – it’s time to do so now. Below are three forms of emerging media candidates utilize today to find opportunities and research potential employers. In effect, they also provide employers the opportunity to interact with and engage with job seekers on their terms. The following exercises will help you see the experience you’re providing candidates – from their point of view.
No More Bad Hires: Business Expert Shares Tips to ‘Hire With Purpose’
Earlier today, while you might’ve been busy vowing never to eat again, voting for your favorite Muppet (Swedish Chef, anyone?), or shopping for that very special Jaleel White fan in your life… Nationally recognized small business expert, speaker and author Jay Goltz was discussing small business hiring trends and best practices for a free webinar titled Hire With Purpose.
In case you were busy with any of the aforementioned activities – or simply want to hear it again – lucky for you, we’ve got two ways to make sure you don’t miss out on the webinar’s great content: Simply download a recording of Hire With Purpose here or keep reading to check out some of Jay’s best sound bytes on the following topics:
On why hiring the right people is crucial…
- “If you want to have a great company, you can’t do so without great people.” Seventy-five percent of management is hiring the right people in the first place, Goltz says. Unfortunately, most small businesses don’t have a hiring protocol, which can be dangerous, when, according to Goltz’s estimates, only 1 out of 10 applicants will be a great hire.
- “People might forgive bad service, but not bad attitude.” Case in point for why you need to have great employees – they are the face of your business. You can’t always account for things going smoothly in the world, but when you have great people in place to deal gracefully with occasional mishaps, your business will be all the better for it.
Problem Employees: Worth Saving? Author Talks ‘Managing the Unmanageable’
Anne Loehr is a nationally recognized management coach and author of the award-winning book, A Manager’s Guide to Coaching: Simple and Effective Ways to Get the Best of Your Employees. I recently spoke with Loehr about her new book, Managing the Unmanageable: How to Motivate Even the Most Unruly Employee, a collaboration with workplace communications expert Jezra Kaye. She discussed some key takeaways from the book, including how to identify when an employee is worth holding on to and when it’s time to walk away.
How do you define an “unmanageable employee”?
We call an unmanageable employee (UE) an employee who exhibits constant, repeated, unproductive behavior. Everyone has a bad day, a bad week, sometimes even a bad month, depending on what’s going on in their life. But we’re talking about someone who’s constantly, repeatedly – on a fairly long-term basis – unproductive. This book is about helping managers uncover what they need to put UEs back on track.
The majority of organizational challenges are because the goals, the roles, and the processes are not clear. So people will say, for example, “Gosh, Mary’s driving me crazy, do something about Mary.” And I’ll go in, and I’ll do some work and then I’ll say, “Well, you know what? It’s not actually Mary – it’s never Mary – it’s Mary’s behavior that’s not working, for one. Two, she’s doing this because she actually thinks it’s her job, and you think that’s your job, and that’s the problem there.”
Benefits of Un-Banning Social Media at the Office
As anyone who has found themselves knees-deep in a friend’s tagged photos can tell you, social media sites can be addicting. So it’s no surprise that this newer medium scares the pants off of many companies, causing them to block sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube at the office.
In fact, according to a 2010 survey by OpenDNS, Facebook was blocked by 23 percent of the provider’s business users, making it the most blocked website last year, beating out Playboy and Limewire.
This trend comes in stark contrast with the 2011’s projected $3.08 billion in social media advertising revenue from companies screaming, “I want to play, too!” And it’s making me think something here is amiss.
When stripped down, isn’t business simply all about communicating? Advertising the features of your latest product, talking to potential employees about job opportunities, fostering relationships with clients and vendors – it’s no wonder social media is the new forefront; it enables this communication to take place in a much more organic way. But companies need to harness its power internally just as much as they have begun to embrace it externally.
GUEST CONTRIBUTOR: Authored by Lisa Orrell. Orrell is known globally as The Generation Relations Expert. She is the author of the top-selling books Millennials Incorporated and Millennials into Leadership. In the final part of this three-part series, Orrell further explains the importance of training your Millennial employees for leadership roles – and shares practical tips for teaching your employees that crucial leadership skill: problem-solving.
As a consultant, I often hear employers tell me that one of their main challenges – and one they feel their Millennials struggle with – is problem solving. With that in mind, I’d like to share the following tips for problem solving, which you can share with your Millennial team members as you continue to groom them for leadership.
12 Problem-Solving Tips to Teach Your Gen Y Future Leaders:
- Leaders First Envision Success: Leaders know that every problem has an answer; it just needs to be found. Worrying about the problem gets you nowhere, while working towards the answer will get you everywhere. Leaders control their attitude and focus on results.
- Leaders Clarify the Problem: Leaders determine what’s wrong by cutting through clutter and noise, and by focusing on the issues that are at the core of the problem.
- Leaders Get the Facts: Leaders collect all the facts about the problem because they know that some problems are not as big as they seem. Fact-finding is an analytical, rather than an emotional task, so it is useful in other ways, too. When a follower comes to a leader with a problem, a good leader will start asking questions and gather the facts, rather than engage in an emotional discussion. Fact-finding is a process and you may have to dig deep to get to the real problem. Leaders are great at asking the right fact-finding questions. They’re also adept at listening to the answers and “hearing” any sub-text that could illuminate the situation.
Content strategist Mike Loukides recently wrote, “The future belongs to the companies who figure out how to collect and use data successfully.”
While he may have been referring to marketing data, he could easily have been referring to recruitment. After all, recruitment essentially is just another form of marketing. Why do advertisers create focus groups? Administer surveys? Study consumers? They take the time to gather information on their consumers, analyze it, and use it to inform their marketing strategy and ultimately keep them ahead of the competition in the eyes of their target audience.
When it comes to recruiting, the importance of data to inform key decisions is no different. It is crucial that hiring managers and recruiters understand their target audience – who they are, what they value, how they approach their job search – in order to ensure they are reaching this audience with the right messages, at the right times and through the right channels.
Gone are the days when recruiters and hiring managers could get away with simply putting a job ad in a local paper, hoping people apply. Today, recruitment – that is, the efforts that attract, engage and retain the highest quality of employees – requires a strategy, and the key to that strategy is data.
I See London, I See France: Preparing For a More Transparent Hiring Process
I remember once walking across my college campus and noticing several groups of people snickering. I looked up to find the target of their stares: A girl walking ahead of me. She was wearing a flouncy miniskirt (which was very cool at the time) and she was completely unaware of the attention of the groups of people around her — attention brought on by the fact that the back half of her skirt was accidentally tucked into the waist of her underwear for the entire world to see.
Similarly, many organizations today are completely unaware that they are exposing their hiring “underwear” to the world.
There’s no real “getting away” from the public eye now; just ask any celebrity who just been caught picking their nose in public, only to have a picture of it published in the media that very day. Still, companies need to be much more aware of what is going on around them and how their actions are viewed by others before getting out into the public eye.
The Internet power shift
9 Ways to Teach Gen Y Employees a Leadership Mindset
SPECIAL GIVEAWAY: See how you can get a free copy of one of two best-selling leadership books! See contest details below!
GUEST CONTRIBUTOR: Authored by Lisa Orrell. Orrell is known globally as The Generation Relations Expert. She is the author of the top-selling books Millennials Incorporated and Millennials into Leadership. In the second part of this series, Orrell shares nine ways to teach your Millennial employees how to adopt a leadership mindset now – regardless of their current position within your organization.
In the leadership workshops I conduct for Millennials, one of the key points I emphasize is that even an entry-level management position IS a leadership role. I also explain to them the need to understand the difference between a leadership mindset and a manager mindset from Day One of their first professional job. After all, they are judged on everything they do and say – and everything they don’t do and don’t say – from the very beginning of their career.
As their supervisor or employer, your goal should be to help your employees understand this concept; however, I know many upper managers who still struggle with it themselves, so it’s important to remember the following (which you can then pass on to your employees):
Even if you just manage one person, you are also a leader. Yes, you may be considered a “manager” on paper, but you are leading, too. And even though your current position may not be one that “sets direction for the entire company or a department,” you are still a leader. Furthermore, even if you currently don’t manage anyone, you can take on leadership roles (e.g. heading up a project, volunteering to plan a company event, etc.).
Workplace Bullying and Your Employees: What Can You Do?
Workplace bullying has been getting a lot more attention in the media lately after some high-profile bullying cases have come to light — but the issue is unfortunately not a new one. After all, the Workplace Bullying Institute has been around since the early 1900s for a reason, and many states have been in the process of trying to pass legislation against workplace bullying since 2003 (none yet with any success). But for as long as workplace bullying has been happening, it doesn’t appear to be stopping. A just-released CareerBuilder survey among 5,671 U.S. workers reveals that more than one in four (27 percent) workers have felt bullied in the workplace, with the majority neither confronting nor reporting the bully.
The most common bully? The boss.
According to survey results, 14 percent of workers felt bullied by their immediate supervisor, while 11 percent felt bullied by a co-worker. Seven percent said the bully was not their boss but someone else higher up in the organization, while another 7 percent said the bully was their customer.
Bullying reports by gender and age
- Comparing genders and age groups, the segments that were more likely than others to report feeling bullied were women, workers ages 55 or older (29 percent), and workers age 24 or younger (29 percent).
How Has the Recession Shaped Career Attitudes of Millennials?
It’s dangerous — and often inaccurate — to generalize generations’ workplace preferences and behaviors. Many hiring managers, however, are still clinging onto generational stereotypes, particularly of the oft much-hyped Millennial generation (those workers born between 1980 – 1995) — stereotypes that Millennials themselves have moved well beyond since first entering the workplace in the last several years.
In How the Recession Shaped Millenial and Hiring Manager Attitudes about Millenials’ Future Careers, Alexandra Levit and I examine various research initiatives to determine how the attitudes of Millennials toward their career paths have changed as a result of the economic downturn, how these attitudes compare to the way hiring managers view Millennials’ career paths, and what hiring managers can do to better understand this generation of workers. Many of our report conclusions have been drawn from The Future of Millennial Careers research study, which was commissioned by the Career Advisory Board, presented by DeVry University, and conducted by Harris Interactive among 500 Millennials age 21-31 either employed or planning to seek employment, and 523 hiring managers age 18+ who interact with Millennials at work.
While Millennials and hiring managers can generally both agree that Millennials tend to have certain commonalities, like digital comfort and impatience with certain established processes, there is also much disparity between how Millennials view themselves and how they are viewed by their bosses. This can result in a frustrating situation for both parties — but by learning to truly understand Millennials, hiring managers can create a smoother workplace environment for the multiple generations currently working within it, as well as improve one-on-one relationships with their valuable Millennial workers.
Pre-recession to the present
6 Ways to Retain Your Generation Y Future Leaders
GUEST CONTRIBUTOR: Authored by Lisa Orrell. Orrell is known globally as The Generation Relations Expert. She is the author of the top-selling books Millennials Incorporated and Millennials into Leadership. In the first of a three-part series, Orrell discusses not only how to better manage and retain your Millennial talent, but also how to groom them to be effective leaders.
Why do companies – large and small – spend so much time worrying about how to retain Millennials (a.k.a. Gen Y)? It’s basically a matter of math.
According to the Employment Policy Foundation (EPF), our country is at the beginning of a labor shortage of approximately 35 million skilled and educated workers, which is estimated to continue over the next two decades – especially now that Baby Boomers are starting to retire at an estimated rate of 1 every 8 seconds.
Out of necessity, Millennials – many of whom may only have one to three years of career experience – are moving into management roles much sooner (and younger!) than the generations before them did – and are expected to perform in these roles successfully.
While it’s entirely possible to groom this next generation of professionals to be effective leaders, you must first be able to retain them (otherwise, grooming them for leadership won’t even matter!). For the first of this three-part series, I’d like to share six effective tips to help employers and managers effectively retain Millennial talent.
6 Ways to Retain Your Gen Y Employees:
Turnover RX: What’s Ailing Health Care Workers?
As we just discussed here on The Hiring Site, the hiring outlook for this past month was the strongest it’s been in three years — which is great news. BUT (c’mon, you knew there’d be one), while in some industries, employers have plenty of candidates to choose from, in the health care field, the demand for services is rising so quickly that there aren’t enough health care workers to fulfill the growing demand. And this year alone, the first wave of more than 70 million baby boomers will turn 65 and 30 million more Americans will be will be insured, adding to the need for jobs like nurse practitioners. So, how are companies dealing with this challenge? A newly released CareerBuilder study of more than 1,000 health care workers gives us some insight into the job challenges these workers are facing, and includes advice to help organizations continue to retain top talent. You can also download the survey report in its entirety.
What did health care workers tell us?
1. A lack of career advancement opportunities is the top challenge health care workers face in their current positions.
What’s most challenging for health care workers — a) the sometimes-stressful environment? b) The lack of time for lunch breaks? c) The scrubs they must wear? Nope — none of the above. In reality, more than half (51 percent) of health care workers cited a lack of advancement opportunities as the top challenge they faced in their current job. As patients are workers’ first priority, and as work overload was second in line as far as challenges, with 40 percent saying it was their biggest challenge, workers need management to help them make career advancement a priority as well. With so many balls for health care workers to juggle, it’s important for health care organizations to provide career advancement programs and opportunities, to make those opportunities known, and to support workers’ efforts to take advantage of them by making it easier for them to do so.
Employment Branding the Gold Crown Way: Lessons from the Former CMO of Hallmark
Last month, Jim Welch brought his 25 years of management and leadership expertise to CareerBuilder, hosting a special webinar, Real World Employment Branding: A Blueprint for Success. Welch discussed his experience as Chief Marketing Offier of Hallmark, where he played a leading role in the creation and implementation of the company’s successful employment brand strategy. Below are some of the major takeaways.
“What I’ve Learned…” Employment Branding Lessons from Industry Expert Jim Welch
- Size doesn’t matter. “You can implement a successful employment brand strategy, regardless of your size and also regardless of your budget,” Welch emphasizes from the start. To cap his point, he later offers the following tips to help you develop your employment brand:
- Ask your employees first. Employee surveys are critical for understanding your employment brand as other see it (i.e., as it truly is). Asking questions like, “What single thing do you value most about your company?” and “Would you recommend our company to your friends as a place to work? Why or why not?” will help you find your organization’s critical points of difference.
Recruitment Trends: What Else Will We See in 2011?
Shane Creamer and Simon Parkin of Granite Consulting, a recruitment consulting firm based in Canada, spoke at February’s HRPA 2011 conference, Canada’s conference and trade show focusing on HR issues and trends, about 10 recruitment trends businesses can expect as 2011 progresses. So, what, according to Creamer and Parkin, will many businesses, particularly in the U.S. and Canada, see more of as this year continues?
Labor Market Trends
Creamer and Parkin started by sharing their observations on labor market trends in Canada. Canada currently has a 7.8 percent unemployment rate, and they discussed the effects of an aging population on a constantly changing workplace (something U.S. businesses can identify with as well); over 50 percent of the Canadian workforce is 40 years old.
We know companies are hiring again; as Creamer and Parkin put it, “the ice is coming off the market” and the economy has gained back jobs lost in the recession. As we’ve discussed here on The Hiring Site, employee morale should not be a trend, and the recession has made many candidates and workers less loyal and trusting of employers. Many employees, Creamer and Parkin said, are continuing to feel uncomfortable with their current employers, but aren’t willing to trust any new organizations recruiting them.
Most Employees are Loyal (…is What Most Employers Like to Believe)
If you’ve seen the recent reports that more employees are quitting their jobs as the economy improves, then hearing that employee loyalty nationwide is at a three-year low should be about as shocking as hearing that Charlie Sheen is getting a reality TV show.
I mean, we all saw this coming, right? (Well, maybe not all of us…See below.)
Today, MetLife released a new study indicating that, not only is employee loyalty at its lowest point since 2008, but some employers evidently aren’t aware of this fact. (Awkward!) According to the study, 47 percent of employees report feeling a very strong loyalty to their employers, while 51 percent of employers said they felt employees were very loyal.
You can read the details of the study here, but below are some of the larger implications that you as an employer need to consider:
Certain benefits matter more than you think: While employers are generally correct in thinking that salary and wages are the biggest drivers of employee loyalty, many underestimate the role retirement benefits and non-medical benefits (such as dental, disability and life insurance) play in employee satisfaction, too.
