HiringSmart. The Blog

Do you ever wonder why we don't support résumés in your hiring process?

2010-12-21T11:51:00.000-08:00

It's because the person you gave the job to, probably stopped working when they finished writing the résumé. What does that leave you with?

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In today's competitive landscape, you must offer a portfolio of key strengths that will overcome new challenges in any type of environment. In fact, the candidate who gets the job is not always the most qualified; rather, the candidate with the best presentation will get hired.
We know what employers want, and in the hands of our expert writers, your resume becomes a powerful marketing tool that skillfully conveys the nuances and details necessary to reaching your goals.

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The Second Biggest Threat To Business

2010-12-21T11:43:00.000-08:00

In a survey of 850 executives, two-thirds said that their organization’s inability to attract and keep the best people is the second biggest threat to their business. The biggest threat is competition.

Wait a minute! If your organization consistently had the ability to attract and keep the best people wouldn’t this give you a competitive edge and support solving problem number one?

The only way to compete is with the best people, try some of these ideas to manage and keep the best:

Click Here to Find Out How to Stop the Threat

Can you beat the 80/20 Sales Rule? We can....

2010-12-01T05:51:00.000-08:00

Most everyone has heard of, or experienced the 80/20 rule - 80% of the sales come from 20% of the salespeople. For businesses with 5 or more salespeople, it is very common to discover that the top producer generates 3 or 4 times the production of the bottom producer, and it is pretty obvious that it would be desirable to have more top producers! For businesses with only 1 or 2 salespeople, it's even more critical that these positions be filled with top producers.

While few experienced sales managers doubt the "rule", equally few know what causes it or how to fix it. A study begun in 1997 and finished in 1999, then re-validated in 2000 and 2001 attempted to explain this phenomenon and came to some interesting conclusions.

Find out what we learned...

Our Fit First Philosophy

2010-11-30T07:12:00.000-08:00

The Four Aspects of Job Fit

2010-11-19T05:25:00.000-08:00

We had the opportunity not too long ago to run a nice little ‘live experiment’, testing the validity of the fit-first approach that is embedded into the core of the HiringSmart methodology.

This opportunity was presented to us in the form of an invitation to lead a full-day program for a group of nearly 50 HR Professionals at HRPAO’s offices in Toronto.

The title of the session had something to do with ‘new approaches to recruitment and selection’, which of course we had no difficulty addressing for eight hours. While we had to tread a fine line between presenting innovative ideas and shameless self-promotion (you may appreciate what a challenge that is for one of us), we did manage to build in some exercises that allowed the audience to actually experience the difference between the conventional résumé-based approach and the fit-based first interview we offer.

Of course, we had much debate in the room over the importance of the résumé and the cover letter. We’ve made up so many rules and conventions about what ought/ought not to be in a CV that we’ve lost sight of the fact that most people don’t even write their own, and the degree of ‘embellishment’ renders it next to useless as a reliable tool on which to base the decision of whom to see and whom to set aside. Oh, and God forbid there’s a typo! [We’ve yet to find any correlation between spelling skills and retention or performance in any role (except perhaps copy editor)]… which brings us back to the whole conversation about “best candidate or best performer?”.

In spite of the overwhelming defence of the status quo, this group of seasoned HR pros presented us with a golden opportunity to test the fit-first approach… so we devised a diabolical plan and wove it discreetly into our workshop. We ran it in two parts, mid-morning and early afternoon, so people were less likely to game the exercise.

Our simple assertion was this: Reliance on résumés as the admission ticket actually forces bad choices about which candidates to admit into your pipeline and which to exclude. Our research proves conclusively that there’s nothing in the résumé that is in any way predictive of quality of hire, how good a performer they will be, or how long the candidate will stay.

But we had to let the pros in the room form their own conclusion…

Here’s how we built up the exercise. We dug through our database to come up with six candidates who had applied for a particular Customer Service Manager position with one of our clients. We were able to obtain both the résumés the candidates had been using at the time and the online interview they completed for the role (and yes, of course we changed the names and personal data). There was, of course, some variation in the content and sophistication of the résumés, and while one or two contained minor grammatical or spelling errors, we hadn’t doctored them up. This was a live experiment.

Round One

We had participants form small groups of 5-6. Each team was handed the position description for the CSM role and six résumés. The assignment was to review the documentation and, using their best judgment based on their years of experience, identify the top three candidates whom they would advance to the interview stage. Participants were instructed to form their own conclusions first, then share their decisions within the group and come to a group consensus.

It would be charitable to say the process was ugly. Everything was fine until participants had to share and justify their individual rankings. The room became very loud, tension mounted, and we ended up having to intervene after 25 minutes to force group decisions.

We captured the results on a flipchart (see table below); they truly were all over the map, with very little agreement either within groups or between groups. Everyone, it seems, had a different perspective on how to weigh information in the CV and reconcile it against the position description. Nevertheless, Candidates 1, 2 and 5 received the nod to advance to an interview from more than half the room.

Click Here to see Round Two

Applying The Fit Philosophy

2010-11-16T09:55:00.000-08:00

A Message to Business Owners and Executives

2010-11-02T07:00:00.000-07:00

How to Lie on your Resume (and get away with it)

2010-10-29T07:09:00.000-07:00

Taken From:
http://www.jakeludington.com/life/2009/how-to-lie-on-your-resume-and-get-away-with-it/
(Editor's note: Yes this is a real blog... We couldn't have made this up if we tried)

Comment posted by: Macho Man

"If information can’t be verified, than go ahead and lie. Also (this is very important) look at what the job is asking for, i.e., skills, experience, and so on. I bolded the most important qualities the boss is looking for from a recent job posting: Strong financial background and expert proficiency with all Microsoft Suite applications - Excel, Word etc. Best qualified candidate will be a self-motivated, multi-tasking guru, able to work independently but definitely a team player... Attention to detail is a MUST So, it says self-motivated, try to come up with an example from your past employment that will show the boss that you are self-motivated. Do this for each key word in the job posting. This is the main point, so listen carefully, give the boss what he or she wants. They have a particular person in mind, so try to be that person. Just think about it, and remember, GIVE THE BOSS WHAT HE OR SHE WANTS AND FOCUS ON THE KEY WORDS!

A Case For Change

Understanding The Steps of The HiringSmart Process

2010-05-24T06:52:00.000-07:00

In any organization, it’s a given that the collective knowledge, skills and experience of the people who work there are important building blocks to the organization’s success… but fit is the master key that unlocks all that potential and becomes the catalyst that converts it into performance.If the fit’s not right, nothing happens quite right.

The HiringSmart process has been designed specifically to allow both organizations and job seekers to make their decisions on the basis of fit. The better the fit, the more committed and productive the employee will be, and the longer they are likely to stay.

For our library of vidoes click here

The Key to untapped Productivity is not more Process Improvement

2010-05-16T05:26:00.000-07:00

A guest article by Michael Lee Stallard and Jason Pankau

Declining workforce productivity continues to dominate the headlines in the business press, particularly in Canada. Between that unsettling trend and a strengthening dollar, Canadian business is at serious risk of becoming even more uncompetitive, especially against US exports.
When it comes to engineering ways to improve productivity, most leaders place a heavy emphasis on achieving task excellence. With metrics and programs such as Six Sigma, Lean, and benchmarking, the quality of our work has certainly gone up.

The problem is that focusing on task excellence alone is not enough. Failure to establish and maintain relationship excellence ultimately sabotages task excellence.

Our research has identified a tangible force in organizations that we describe as “connection.” It is a bond based on shared identity, empathy, and understanding. In most organizations, the "insiders"—people with power and influence, those in management, and those employees who are recognized as “stars”—feel connected to one another and to the business. However, the vast majority of employees do not share that feeling.

Over time, these un-connected employees stop caring, stop giving their best efforts, stop aligning their behavior with organizational goals, and stop fully communicating.
When people feel disconnected, "knowledge traps" abound.

Knowledge Traps show up as silo behavior, personal rivalries, and other forms of relationship failure that impede the flow of knowledge and information. A disconnected employee who has information that is contrary to management’s view or the consensus view tends not to take the risk of sharing it. When this occurs, decision makers do not have the information required to make optimal decisions and poor decision making and poor organizational performance can result.

If knowledge traps are the cholesterol of organizations, “connection” is the Statin drug that breaks up knowledge traps, restores "knowledge flow," fosters relationship excellence, and keeps both the social and business environment healthy.

Connection is especially critical during the difficult times we face today. It helps employees pull together through the tough times rather than retreat into a state of relational isolation, fear, distrust, and finger pointing that sabotages performance.

There is evidence across many fields of research that confirm the positive benefits of connection and here are just two from the scientific arena:

Neuroscience research has established that when stress rises, levels of the stress hormone cortisol rise in the human bloodstream and this biological change can make human beings behave in a reactionary or irrational way. We have seen many examples of these reported in recent years.Feelings of connection reduce cortisol levels to help individuals remain calm and rational, even during stressful periods. Neuroscience research has also shown that feelings of connection boost hormones including dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin that make us feel more energetic, more confident, and more trusting of those around us.

From the field of psychiatry, we learn that psychiatrists see a steady and growing stream of people from the business world. These patients commonly report experiencing feelings of boredom and emptiness, and they don’t know why. Many begin to self-medicate by seeking thrills that range from taking excessive business risks or sexual risks, to numbing the pain with substance abuse.

Professor Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries at INSEAD has also recognized this pattern in his research of CEOs (which goes to show that the dangers of disconnection extend to the C-Suite too). Psychiatrists treat these disconnected individuals by helping them bring more human connection into their lives.

The Corporate Executive Board’s 2004 study of 50,000 individuals worldwide established that employees who feel more engaged and connected are 20 percent more productive than the average employee. Just imagine the cumulative effect of an additional day of productivity per week over the course of an individual’s career.

The link between our work and HiringSmart is simple: Connection is all about fit – fit with the manager, the role, the team, and the organization. You can’t have one without the other. Connection moves people to give their best efforts and align their behavior with organizational goals. It engenders loyalty and increases productivity, innovation, and overall performance.

Knowing that, it is completely irrational for any organization not to be very intentional about creating cultures of connection. Being intentional about developing task excellence and the relationship excellence that comes from connection is the key to unlocking large reserves of untapped productivity and corporate potential.

Michael Lee Stallard and Jason Pankau are co-founders and partners of E Pluribus Partners, a leadership training and development firm. They are co-authors of the best-selling book Fired Up or Burned Out: How to Reignite Your Team’s Passion, Creativity and Productivity.For additional information: http://www.michaelleestallard.com./

What is Turnover Costing You?

2010-05-02T05:46:00.000-07:00

What is your organization's Cost of Turnover? Find out at our Cost of Turnover Calculator .

Employee turnover is a huge, almost incalculable, drain to the health and vitality of any business. The direct costs of attraction, selection, hiring and training are sobering enough… but when you layer on the indirect costs that include the additional strain on existing employees of running understaffed, and consider the additional strain on service delivery, the damage to relationships with customers and others… the toll mounts quickly.

Clients and prospects often ask us to build a case for the merits of HiringSmart on the basis of the impact to the P&L of reducing turnover. It’s a bit of a trap, for several reasons.

One, turnover is often a bit of a red herring – and we often find that turnover spikes early on in our work, as people who should never have been hired in the first place decide to move on.
Two, it’s a trailing indicator, the symptom of other problems. You can’t fix turnover by addressing ‘turnover’; you need to be willing to address the root cause.
Three, it’s hard for us not to appear self-serving when our math turns up large, almost inconceivable numbers (and a matching ROI).

Our preferred approach has been to invite them to calculate the cost… but even then, there’s been lots of guessing and second-guessing, with little real buy-in.
We were overjoyed to find this resource on the web. It’s a compilation of other people’s research into the matter, which I’m always more comfortable reading. At the bottom, you’ll find a calculator that allows you to get a sense of what turnover might be costing your organization!

What is your organization's Cost of Turnover? Find out at our Cost of Turnover Calculator .

What is Turnover Costing You?

2010-04-25T14:26:00.000-07:00

Employee Turnover. We all deal with it to some extent, although some industries suffer more than others. Think hospitality and the service sector. And we all lose money because of it. But what are the actual stats? Brace yourself – you may be in for a bit of a shock.

The average cost across independent research findings show that a departing $8/hour employee is $9,523. And the average cost of a departing $80K salaried manager is a whopping $108,963. These losses are tied into the inevitable expenses wrapped up in having to hire new employees.

With the widespread, and we believe, well-founded fear that there will be a surge in employee departures as the economy strengthens, it might be a good time to really assess how much that turnover is going to cost you. Currently, this trend is more pronounced in the States but is beginning to be echoed in Canada as well. Employees who feel they were not treated well during the recession may start looking for greener pastures in droves and that could cost you.

Consider this information, compiled by Bill Bliss of Bliss and Associates, Inc. Bliss has created a comprehensive checklist of items to include when calculating the cost of turnover in any organization. He breaks it down into various categories that include the following, often hidden, costs.

1. Recruitment Costs can include:

■money spent on advertisements, internet postings, or agencies/recruiters
■administrative costs of handling, processing, and responding to the average number of resumes
■costs for hiring department to conduct interviews and reference checks
2. Training Costs can include:

■orientation materials and time for both new employee and employer trainer
■supervisory time spent in assigning, explaining, and reviewing work assignments and output (this is an ongoing cost for at least the first two months)
■the loss of funds invested in training the departing employee, plus the money you'll need to further invest in the new employee
3. Loss of Productivity Costs can include:

■the impact on departmental productivity (who will pick up the work, whose work will suffer, what departmental deadlines will not be met or delivered late)
■after their period of training, the employee contributes at a 25% productivity level for the first 2-4 weeks; a 50% productivity level for the next 5-12 weeks; and a 75% productivity level for the next 13-20 weeks
■co-workers and supervisory lost productivity due to their time spent on bringing the new employee "up to speed"
■mistakes the new employee makes during this elongated indoctrination period
4. New Hire Costs can include:

■administrative costs to add new employee to payroll, establish computer and security passwords and identification cards, print business cards, internal and external publicity announcements, telephone and email accounts, or leasing of equipment.

Surprising, isn't it? Bliss estimates these costs usually total 150% of the employees annual compensation figure and will reach as high as 250% for managerial and sales positions. Assuming an average employee salary of $50,000 per year for any given organization and estimating the cost of turnover at 150% of that salary, the cost of turnover is then $75,000 per employee who leaves the company. For a mid-sized company of 250 employees who has a 10% annual rate of turnover, the annual cost is just a hair under $2 million.

And these are only the direct costs of employee turnover.

Other, more indirect costs, include damage to your brand and reputation, the loss of customers, declining employee engagement and morale, and decreased sales.

While there are many reasons why employees leave workplaces, there are proactive measures that employers can take to retain their workforce. Here at HiringSmart, we believe that a key to retention is "fit" – ensuring that new employees fit with the job, fit with the manager, fit with the team, and fit with the organization.

If the spectre of employees walking out the door and taking their expertise, your customers, and your money frightens you, you might want to consider a new paradigm for hiring that keeps employees happy, engaged, and productive.

You Attract What You Tolerate

2010-04-17T07:04:00.000-07:00

There’s been a steady flow of reports in the media for the last month, focused on how Canada is lagging behind the world in productivity. In the US, reports are sounding the alarm about a jobless recovery, and how we seem to be getting along just fine, thank you, with ten million or more unemployed.

Both streams of thought are reflections of different aspects of the same reality: this is the new normal… and in business, survival depends on devising better ways of doing things than we’ve ever done them before. We’ve often spoken of the Birds of a Feather theory, particularly as it relates to engagement and building high performance, highly productive organisations. That axiom applies here.

I'm not arguing against diversity. Diversity of experience, ideas and viewpoints is every bit as critical to the health and competitiveness of an organization as it is to a society. That’s not what I’m talking about. But it is important to acknowledge that, fundamentally, people will always prefer to be with others who share their standards of performance (top performers hang out with other top performers), their personal values (the same things matter to them), their interests (they are motivated by similar things), and their cognitive ability (they learn, process information, and communicate in similar patterns). None of that has a thing to do with diversity.

Leaders at every level need to pay attention to community of interest when they are staffing departments and teams. It’s a critical component of fit, which is itself a prerequisite to engagement, which is a predictor of business outcomes. You simply can’t have a high-performance organization without a cohesive, engaged workforce with a shared commitment to superior outcomes.

There’s a tough lesson in this for many: whether you’re intentional about it or nor, this birds of a feather thing is either driving or limiting your business, determining your financial potential, and deciding how your brand is perceived by your customers.

In environments where mediocrity is tolerated, where poor-to-middling performance is ignored or excused for any reason, those characteristics quickly become entrenched. People whose standards and capabilities are higher than those of the lowest performer will do one of two things over time – relax their standards and settle for performing just better than the bottom of the pack or they will look elsewhere for people who share their standards.

Poor performers will recognise a safe harbour; good performers will become disillusioned and leave.

If you tolerate and excuse mediocrity, you’ll get more of it. If you accept ‘average’ as okay, you’ll get lots of average (and in so doing leave a lot of money on the table). And if you accept nothing but the best from your people, you will create a magnet for the best talent in the market. Attraction and retention challenges will be a thing of the past.

You attract what you tolerate. If your business results aren’t what you’d like, or if things aren’t running as smoothly as they should… maybe it’s time to raise the bar and do a little research. Look closely at those employees with the qualities you want for your organisation. Learn how to recognise the same characteristics in the recruitment of new employees.

For more information on this topic click here.

Happy Employees are not Necessarily Productive Employees

2010-04-11T05:43:00.000-07:00

An Argument for Measuring What Matters

The AP ran an article recently that raises some interesting questions. The title shouts out Americans’ Job Satisfaction Falls to Record Low. In case you’re wondering, yes that is among Americans who are working.

This article is interesting and a little confusing… and here’s the problem: while we intuitively want to believe that happy employees are a good thing and that no good employer would be happy with dissatisfied employees, there is no – zero – correlation between employee happiness and business performance. Hundreds of studies over the years have tried to find one, and failed. Happy, satisfied employees are not more productive; in fact, there tends to be a negative correlation… some level of dissatisfaction with the status quo fuels passion and drive. It creates a gap between where we are and where we want to be that impels us forward.

On the other hand, there is a direct and well documented correlation between engaged employees and business outcomes. Engagement is the measure of how committed employees are, and how attached they are to delivering the team’s goals and objectives. It stands to reason that the more engaged the group, the higher the business unit’s performance and profitability.

We attended a presentation by the Corporate Leadership Council a few months back… their research (along with that of just about every leading consulting firm in the last decade) confirms the primacy of Engagement as a leading indicator of business performance.

Simply stated, it is engagement and not happiness or satisfaction that sets the stage for sustained high performance.

Interestingly, CLC’s research showed a precipitous decline in employee engagement overall globally in the quarter leading up to the market crash in 2008.

We always talk about engagement as a predictor of business performance in the context of an individual business unit or department… and of course there were other forces at play leading up to the crash. But it does raise the tantalizing question: to what extent was the crash either caused or exacerbated by the lowest levels of workforce engagement ever recorded?

There are clear, tangible, no-nonsense ways to build the engagement of your workforce, and it’s not about better meals in the staff cafeteria and more paid time off. Click here for more.

Learn more about our Partners at Engagient, visit their website Click Here

You Don't Control Your Brand, Your People Do

2010-04-04T05:25:00.000-07:00

Scott Deming is a very successful, very highly rated speaker and author on the subject of customer service and emotional branding. One of his blogs was passed on to us recently; it’s a cute and thought-provoking story about a coffee-stained cup. Notice your first reaction to the story as you read it. It might be to condemn the employee’s low standards. But was it the employee’s fault?

She was probably told that the stains were hard to remove. Perhaps by the person who washes the dishes in the kitchen, perhaps even by a supervisor or fellow employee. She believed that was the “honest” answer. She wasn’t responsible for the stain. Someone else was responsible and she was just telling it like it is.

We must remember that those who speak for us can ruin our reputation no matter how lofty our goals, no matter how good our product, no matter how hard we work. And no matter how good their intentions are.

Your business has more than one distinct brand. You have a public brand, a product brand, a partner brand, an investor’s brand, an employment brand and more. The way your employees and other stakeholders perceive your business is not the same as the public perception.

Scott’s angle is that something as simple as the condition of a cup can enhance or damage your brand. But the story could just as well be about a person – an employee, yours or mine – and how they represent us in each “moment of truth”, in each and every interaction they have in the course of a day, whether they are on duty or off.

We can’t assume that just because they are reliable, hard workers that they understand our brand or care to represent it well. How comfortable are you in placing your reputation – and your income security – in the hands of each and every one of your employees? Maybe it’s time for a cleaner cup.

Here’s Scott’s take:Perception is Reality

I was recently staying in a top level hotel - part of a very well known chain. The overall stay was nice. The room was nice, the people were nice, everything was nice - then I went to the restaurant for breakfast. As I waited for the waitress, I noticed the coffee mug in front of me was very dirty on the inside. I switched it for a clean one on the other side of the table. The waitress approached me and asked if I would like coffee and I told her I would. I handed her the dirty cup saying - “You might want to send this back through the dishwasher. It’s quite dirty.” She said - “Oh, it’s not dirty. It’s just stained. Everyone thinks it’s dirty. You just can’t get the stains off after so many cups of coffee.” Then she put the cup back on the table!

I called the hotel chain’s corporate headquarters and told them this story. I told them about Perceptual Reality. Here’s what I mean. Even though the cup is literally clean, it’s still very dirty. Why? Because that’s the way I and many others perceive it. Here’s another dangerous slope this high-end hotel is now slipping on. The restaurant is independently owned, leasing space from the hotel. However, in my mind and the minds of others, this is a “Hotel” issue. The “Hotel” is dirty. The ”Hotel” doesn’t care if they serve food and drinks in dirty cups and plates. The “Hotel” doesn’t care enough about their customers to clean their kitchenware. The “Hotel” brand is being damaged. Not the restaurant.

What would it cost to throw this cup away and replace it with a new one? A couple of bucks? What will it cost if their reputation gets tarnished and potential overnight quests, or corporate conference planners decide against this hotel and others associated with it because of dirty restaurants? What would it cost if I blogged this story and gave you the “Hotel’s” name? It would cost a lot more than replacing a “stained” coffee cup.

There are a couple of lessons to be learned here. First, know what your customers or clients are thinking. How do they perceive you and your service? You may perceive it one way, but I guarantee you - they are perceiving it a different way. Use their perception as reality, not yours. Second, if you use outside vendors or suppliers to serve your customers, keep them tightly within your brand strategy, brand integrity and service commitment. Anything “they” do is a reflection on “YOU.”

Perception is reality. When you’re dealing with the public, the public’s perception always wins.
The hotel headquarters is now contacting this particular location and hopefully remedying the situation.

You can comment on this blog and others by going to Scott’s website and blog page.

For more about aligning your people with your brand watch our HiringSmart Video

HR Metrics - Getting Your Department to the Next Base

2010-03-28T03:30:00.000-07:00

One of our key themes this year is that when it comes to people and organizational performance, it's critical to measure what matters. Helen Luketic is one of the leading thinkers on the subject of HR Metrics in Canada; she is Manager of HR Metrics and Research at BC HRMA, and she heads a brilliant and innovative benchmarking initiative throughout the province. This is the first in a series of articles we will publish over the course of the year. While Helen freely admits there still remains a disturbing absence of 'quality' metrics, there's still value to measuring and reporting other factors.

HR Metrics - Getting Your Department to the Next Base

What's more important: being known as someone who can hit a ball, or being known as someone who can score a run?

My friend Simon is a big baseball lover. He's constantly telling me things about the sport that I don't really understand, seeing as I'm not a fan. But, not long ago he showed me that baseball and HR are not all that different. He told me the story about Theo Epstein who became the GM of the Boston Red Sox and helped them win their first World Series title in 2004, after 86 years of going without.

Epstein used something called sabremetrics to create a winning team based on some key player statistics. Sabremetrics is the analysis of baseball through statistics. For example, analysis shows that batting average is meaningless in predicting whether a player is a good one. Instead, a stat called "on base percentage" can tell you whether or not a player is likely to score a run and therefore win games. In sum, if you choose a player with good results for all the right stats, you'll have a winning team.

Let's now apply this thinking to our world. It's been widely documented that HR metrics are important and that HR needs to start measuring itself to prove it's relevant and should continue existing within the organization. Now that you're convinced to do it, you're probably wondering:

how to measure HR?
how do you analyze the results?
what do you do when the results are worse (or better) than your gut told you

Step 1
Determine what's important to the organization- is it effectiveness, efficiency, or some combination of both? Typically, HR will need to be as efficient as possible, but some organizations are willing to invest more to be effective. What is the balance or weighting for your organization? Imagine a scale, with efficiency on one end and effectiveness on the other. Is that scale perfectly balanced or does one side of the scale tip further down than the other? Assign a percentage based on the importance of either. If efficiency and effectiveness are equally important, your weighting will be 50/50 and you'll know you'll need to equally focus on effectiveness and efficiency metrics.

Step 2
Consider including effectiveness and efficiency metrics. Remember, you want to show the business you're adding value, so you'll want to stick to metrics that can be linked to the bottom line. Consider the following:

Effectiveness*

Human Capital Return on Investment
Profit per FTE
Cost of voluntary turnover
Customer satisfaction rating Efficiency
HR FTE Ratio / HR Headcount Ratio
HR Cost per FTE / HR Cost per Employee Labour Cost Revenue percentage

Step 3
Start collecting the data at regular intervals (monthly or quarterly) for at least a year. The point being that in a year you'll figure out what needs fixing or scrapping. Think of it as throwing spaghetti at the wall - if it sticks it's done and if it doesn't, keep cooking. Also, after that year you'll get a feel for what the "norm" is and have an internal benchmark.

Step 4
Get benchmarking. Yes, benchmarking is considered by some a questionable exercise because each of our organizations is so unique that it cannot be compared even to the competitors. Here's the clincher about why your executives will always ask you for the benchmark regardless of your opposing opinion; it's not all about figuring out if you have the "right" number or whether or not your organization is doing well or "badly". Instead, benchmarking is about learning the current trends and whether or not your organization is trending in the same way as the rest of the world. For example, if you're seeing turnover increase and so is the competition, and even the rest of B.C., you know that it's highly unlikely that the organization has a unique retention issue.

Step 5
Create a target range for your department that takes into account the internal and external benchmark, and your corporate strategy. Monitor your results against the target. You can make it as easy as colour coding where green is within the range; yellow is slightly out of the range and where red is much (far) out of range.

Step 6
Tell your story effectively. Start by developing a scorecard and analysis template. Your template should always include a cheat sheet so everyone can easily translate the metrics. For example, you might want to describe that Labour Cost Revenue percentage tells you how much compensation spend it takes for the organization to make one dollar in revenue and that it's preferable that this metric stays flat or decreases over time.

Your template should also have a pattern for responses. For example, if the results are within target range, you will want to highlight the work you're doing to keep it there and other challenges you're experiencing. Also be sure to include any threats you see on the horizon.
If the targets are in the yellow or red range, you'll want to describe why you're on alert, what you're doing to bring things back on track and your target date of when executives can start to see results on your action plan. The metric results shouldn't be a surprise to anyone because you've been warning everyone all along, courtesy of your new communication tool, the scorecard.

Step 7
Now you're ready to play ball.

*BC HRMA members can email research@bchrma.org to learn more about these metrics and obtain a copy of the standard formulas.

About the Author:
Helen Luketic is the winner of the 2007/2008 Rising Star award for her significant contribution to the developing field of HR measurement. Helen is focused on sharing this knowledge with HRMA members through a range of activities and services.
Contact: HLuketic@bchrma.org

Are Your Candidates Engaged?

2010-03-19T05:17:00.000-07:00

If the candidate’s not engaged, the employee never will be.

The axiom seems self-evident, doesn’t it?After all, we don’t value that which comes too easily. It’s a quirk of human nature. If we don’t have to work even a little bit for something, we take it for granted. This applies in all aspects of life, including when we are looking for work.

A certain amount of desire is critical to good matchmaking. It fuels the chase and builds commitment – not just to the consummation of the deal, but to making the relationship work in the long term.The principle of engagement is the same, regardless of the market – you’ll need fewer people if you hire those who’ve taken the time to do a little due diligence of their own, who are willing to invest a little time and effort in declaring their candidacy. If they have joined you for the right reasons, they are going to be less likely to leave for frivolous reasons.

If the axiom is so self-evident, then why have we made such a mess of things?In the rush to build systems that supposedly make it easier both for employers to search through vast résumé databases, and for candidates to find the next, better opportunity… we have succeeded in commoditising both talent and work.

Recruiters and the systems they use are designed to check each candidate’s pedigree against a set checklist of criteria in the posting specs, each time asking themselves, “based on their education, credentials and experience, can this person likely do the job?” We’ve created enormous databases and elaborate search engines, the logic being ‘the more résumés I see, the more likely I am to find a candidate who can do the job’. Not the right candidate, necessarily, but one who will satisfy the specs on paper. We are admitting people into the talent pipeline and filtering them out on the basis of information that has no bearing whatsoever on retention, performance, or how engaged they are likely to be as an employee.

Candidates, for their part, have their own tactics for ‘marketing’ themselves in order to make it through the usual screens and filters. It’s also a numbers game for them; we have taught our employees through the school of hard knocks that survival requires the adoption of a ‘free agent’ mindset. Most have learned the hard way not to entrust their best interests to anyone else and, as we saw in the last boom, many very average performers had adopted a ‘mercenary mindset’, repeatedly selling and reselling their skills to the next higher bidder.

In both cases, the rules of the ‘game’ , if you will, are clearly established. The candidate’s objective is to always have their résumé ‘out there’ and to ‘win’ by receiving a range of offers from which to cherry pick; the recruiter’s is to screen and disqualify contenders, but ultimately to close the search and get the open requisition off their desk.

All too often, neither side gives due reflection to whether or not it’s the right candidate or the right job.In this transactional approach, much has suffered over time. For too many, work is nothing more than a means to an end, something one puts up with to meet another need. Both sides of the supply/demand equation lament the absence of loyalty. Relationships are shallow. Work is less rewarding. Stress and conflict are at an all-time high. Productivity, morale, esprit de corps, even organizational depth are at an all-time low.

Both sides are feeling ripped off, and as a result we face an epidemic of disengagement whose cost to lives – not to mention the economy – is staggering.

If you want an engaged employee, you need to engage the candidate.Just stop it. Stop relying on traditional means to find people. Think about it – a job hunter can visit Monster or Workopolis and spam their résumés out to 25 employers over lunch, and still have time for a sandwich.

Systems like CareerBuilder and others will actually send their CV to employers they have never even heard of! You’re getting a raft of names of people who may only marginally meet your specs, but who are totally uncommitted to you as a prospective employer.Stop going out of your way to make it easy for candidates to get into your hopper. One-click resume attachment allows them to play the numbers game and get on with their day. It doesn’t help you.

Stop using education, work history and (God help me) keyword searches as the primary means of filtering people in. That methodology is busted.Perhaps most important, be careful about how you present yourself and your opportunity. Candidates are adept at finding out the truth; in fact they probably know more about what your people are saying about you than you do.

What should you start doing? Start filtering candidates in on the basis of the four critical aspects of fit first, then on the basis of skills and experience. That will require you to do away with the résumé, or at least move it to the side and look at other factors first. Factors that are predictors of retention, performance and engagement. Watch our "A Case For Change" VideoStart asking different questions. Ask candidates questions that will reveal their underlying attitudes and preferences in areas critical to their success, and use those as the admission tickets that determine whether the candidate should advance or not.Our clients have learned that when they adopt a Fit First Philosophy, everything changes.

Allow the candidate to be the first to opt in.We need to trust that, presented with the opportunity, candidates are a pretty good judge of what’s right for them, and what’s not. Very few will consciously invest time in pursuing job or a situation that presents a poor fit.This is where current thinking around employment branding is so critical.

The standard thinking has taken a dramatic turn in the last few years. Gone are the days when polished marketing materials and glowing claims had any appeal; in fact, the opposite is now true: those traditional approaches raise suspicion and doubt, and can actually be talent-repellent. Truth, transparency, respect, openness and authenticity are the new hallmarks of successful employment branding.

The most successful organizations are those that lead with frank information about what it’s like to work there and to be successful. Many have a series of ‘man in the cubicle’ interviews of real employees, unscripted and unrehearsed, saying in their own words why they joined the company, what works well and not so well from their perspective and, more importantly, why they keep coming back every Monday. Others offer blogs, live chat with existing employees, and other features that allow candidates to obtain meaningful, live information about the employment experience.

This approach ultimately conveys respect and gives candidates the opportunity to be the first to opt in or out on the basis of fit.In this way, candidates become engaged early… setting the stage for a well informed, engaged and productive employee.

Articles We Would Like To Share

2009-12-30T05:48:00.000-08:00

Part of our mission at HiringSmart is to be support tool and filter for all things interesting on the web. In our search for HiringSmart thinkers we have come across three interesting articles all published recently at www.ere.net

Determining The Correct Source of Hiring: The First Step in Recruiting Excellence

Improving Interviews by Using Forced Choice Questions to Replace Yes/No Questions

A Pre-interview Questionnaire For Improving Candidate Screening

All the best in 2010 from SmartStuff at HiringSmart

It's How You Learn - Not what you know

2009-12-15T02:09:00.000-08:00

They are all good at what they do. With training and experience, these stars have become masters of what it is they do. Whatever IT is, IT is done well. Now you want to reward them with a move to management to supervise and mentor other stars.Why is it that some people can make the leap from being the “doer” of the work to the leader of the other doers and some can’t?

The answer lies in the prefontal cortex of their brain - the part directly behind the forehead - the centre of reasoning, problem solving, personality, social interactions and planning.Findings published in the August issue of Personality and Social Psychology showed that those who do exceptionally well on tests assessing thinking skills of the prefontal cortex consistently obtain high ratings of managerial competence from their supervisors.Good executive function allows people to manipulate many ideas simultaneously, plan for the future, avoid impulsive actions and to react thoughtfully to novel situations, according to researchers from three major Canadian and US universities.We include an evaluation of thinking style in the HiringSmart Process by using the Profile XT. It gives insight into the potential Executive Function of the candidate, and becomes a tool that enhances a person’s ability to work with each member of the oganization.

Hired The Right Fit - Now What?

2009-12-07T03:35:00.000-08:00

An Article by Cheryl Smith, Founder of Our Coach

If coaching in the workplace didn’t exist, we’d need to invent it.

Think about that. Over the last decade, the way people interact with their work and their employers has altered greatly. Empowerment, continuous change, greater emphasis on leadership and teamwork, and the need for flexibility have all created a workplace where coaching is not only the smart way to manage people — it’s perhaps the only way that works.

It no longer makes sense to command and control people when they themselves are responsible for their results. Nor can job-specific training and rigid procedures help people cope with shifting career requirements. A coach approach to managing in the workplace prepares people to make the most of their skills and aptitudes, to recognize the opportunities that best suit their talents, and moves them from motivation to action.

Coaching is sometimes confused with consulting. A consultant provides skills and/or resources to help the client do what they do more effectively. Conversely, manager-coaches help their direct reports acquire these assets themselves so they become better equipped, more resilient, more “employ-able.” In a consulting relationship, the consultant does the work and takes responsibility for the result: in coaching, the coachee is responsible for their own outcomes.

The Manager as Coach
A prevailing myth is that workplace coaching requires a horde of external coaches or coach-consultants working alongside management. There may be situations in which this is necessary — rapid, tumultuous change, for example — but for most organizations, getting managers to incorporate coaching into their skill set is what works best. Coaching builds on traditional management skills, adding components that encourage personal growth and development, leading to breakthrough performance. It’s become a core management competency in the modern organization.

How do managers acquire these skills? They can learn directly from a coach-mentor or they can take a coach training workshop. Coaching is a comprehensive approach to managing people and it requires a complete re-think of workplace relationships. A hands-on clinic is usually the best way to learn and practice coaching skills.

A word of caution; while many managers think they engage in coaching already, their understanding often comes from the sports world. Although there are many concepts in common, it’s the differences that create confusion and form the distinction between the sports field and the workplace. For example, the sports coach is seen as the expert who likely played the game once and knows the ins and outs of how to play. Whereas the leader-coach is likely not an expert in every job position, but rather knows what outcomes are needed from each player. Coaching in the workplace is not about knowing the answers, but about knowing what questions to ask to support team members to create their own game plans.

Over the years I have worked with leaders in many different countries who believed that coaching is really telling others what to do, how to do it and then sending them on their way with a pat on the back and a you-can-do-it positive attitude. This point of view quickly changes once we start to explore the foundational principles coaching is based on. The first principle I put forward is this: coaching is based on the belief that people hold their own answers within.

Embracing this principle then allows managers to make the paradigm shift needed to fully engage in coaching, vs. simply telling, or being the source of all solutions. Once we get to that place, then the work begins on the skills needed to be an effective organizational coach. Before fully embracing this principle, someone always asks the obvious question: “What if “they”[coachee] really don’t know?” Good question. How would you reply?
Think of coaching along a continuum where the focus shifts from you (the coach) to me (the coachee). In between the coach wears many hats, from manager, mentor, consultant, teacher or trainer. But always returns to the coachee for the commitment or action steps. For example, a manager may teach a direct report how to initiate a procedure or take responsibility for a project. And then return to a coaching question to support the individual to be successful in taking on the new responsibility.

Remembering the first principle of coaching allows the leader to change the nature of the conversation to one that promotes self discovery, solutions and commitments. An effective leader-coach needs to build a repertoire of powerful, open, discovery questions. When you let go of being the source of all solutions, it frees up the conversation to be exploratory and developmental. You could even call coaching the true meaning of empowerment in the workplace.

Marilyn Duggan, director of human resources for Methanex Corporation, has been encouraging managers to develop coaching skills for years. “I think coaching is the key to getting the best from people,” she says. “Coaching helps overcome the disconnect that often happens between people.”

One of the benefits of the coach approach is that managers are better equipped to delegate. Delegation through coaching is about “getting things done through people,” says Duggan. “Not telling, but helping them discover. They feel better, and you can delegate confidently—confident that they’ll come back to seek support.”

Dalhousie Student Union and HiringSmart

2009-12-04T03:06:00.000-08:00

DalStudentJobs.ca

The Dalhousie University Student Union has a challenge. They have jobs on campus that need to be filled. The rumour on campus among the students was that to get the best jobs you had to know someone. Subsequently, many jobs were short staffed because they could not get enough students to apply.

Adding to the challenge: students have other work options. Although the Student Union has a mandate that only allows them to hire currently registered students at the university, the students can work off campus or not work at all. The Student Union has to compete with other employers for the desired students without having access to the young people off campus.

Getting The Message Out

Dalhousie University Student Union has partnered with HiringSmart and set up DalStudentJobs.ca as a central recruitment centre on the Internet. The first wave of activity was to get the message out to the students that the website existed.

A poster campaign was launched throughout the spring exam period. DalStudentJobs.ca appeared in the campus newspaper, electronic information boards and other high traffic locations around campus. Links were placed at Career Services and other websites that students visit. Finally, the existing student employees were encouraged to communicate through facebook, instant messaging and other tools.

Selection is More Than Who You Know
When the Student Union was using the traditional resume system to select which students to hire they all looked the same. They should have! They all were at the same university, they were all taking the same courses on how to write a resume, they all had limited work experience (less than in past years) and they all had scheduling issues with class time and exam/assignment requirements.

Now they are looking at information that does vary by student. The critical information that gets a person through the first stage of the HiringSmart process at the Dalhousie University Student Union is a candidate's attitude towards types of work, types of supervision, co-workers and then availability. The days of hiring someone because they can work Monday at 3PM are over. With all the new applicants who are now completing the online interviews, recruiters and managers can be more selective improving the qualtiy of service provided to campus while reducing turnover and frustrations of the managers.

Thanks to this new approach recruitment no longer needs to be completed by the end of April when the students leave campus for the summer. Communication is open all summer long. Students can complete their on-line interview whenever they want and the Student Union has the tools to communicate with them all summer reducing the stress at the end of August when everyone comes back and expect the services on campus to be fully functioning.

How To Keep Your Best Employees Engaged

2009-12-02T01:57:00.000-08:00

Imagine two doors in your organization. One is labelled ‘Entrance’; this is where recruiting happens. This is where you bring the right people into your organization.

Most companies direct lots of resources at managing the ‘Entrance’ door. Behind this door are all the activities related to finding and onboarding the very best candidates for your organization.

The other door is labelled ‘Exit’. Most companies devote almost no management attention to the factors that send people to the ‘Exit’ door.

How do you keep talent from leaving, or from disengaging but staying? How do you arrange things so that talent doesn’t think that the grass might be greener somewhere else?

There are two kinds of workplace engagement. Macro-engagement is what organizations can do, by way of policies and practices, to create engaging employment experiences. Micro-engagement is what individual managers can do, whether the organization is being helpful or not.

Here are the elements of employee engagement. They each have macro and micro aspects.

Communicate the big picture. Help employees to understand how what they do every day connects to something bigger, usually outside the organization. Companies can promote this through mission and vision statements, and by publishing and openly discussing company values and their behavioural expressions or competencies. In Employee Engagement, I walk front line employees through a process that helps them to indentify the meaning in their jobs. This helps them to rise above the dozens of ‘whats’ of their roles and connect to ‘why’ in a way that is meaningful to them.

Implement flexible working conditions. Employees increasingly want flexibility in where they work, and when and how they get their work done. Technology enables this. Feeing tied to a desk during ‘face time’ hours is disengaging. Employees appreciate being able to occasionally be somewhere else during regular business hours. They don’t mind working at odd hours, but they do mind micro-managing. If you cut them some slack around this, their engagement will increase.

Promote individual learning. Employees understand that to thrive in today’s workplaces they need to remain current, and constantly increase their knowledge and skills – their employability. This is not a nice to have. Around fifteen years ago organizations began to teach employees that, while they didn’t own their jobs, they did own their careers, and employees learned this lesson very well. Employees expect help with training, education, and a variety of challenging and interesting assignments.

Differentiate performance. High performers will not work alongside people who are performing below standard. Have you ever been in this situation? One or more of your co-workers was not meeting performance standards, and management wasn’t doing anything about it. Performance ratings were not differentiated; people received the same ratings regardless of performance. Do you remember how that felt? It’s likely your engagement – and your performance – suffered at least a little.

Remember that head hunters are regularly wooing your top performers; talent is a product that they can move quickly. If your best people are bored or don’t feel recognised, or if they feel their coworkers are dragging them down, the grass will start to look greener somewhere else. Speaking of recognition . . .

Recognize achievements. It never ceases to amaze me that some managers – too many – seem congenitally unable to say ‘thank you’ when someone accomplishes something. The number one reason why employees resign is that they didn’t feel that their contributions were recognized. Ignoring the superior contributions of key employees is akin to escorting them to the ‘Exit’ door and holding it open for them.

Listen. Listening is a skill. Hearing is not; if our hearing equipment works, we can hear. But we’re not born with listening equipment; listening has to be learned. We all know what it’s like not to be listened to. If this happens at work, and you leave a meeting with your manager thinking that you weren’t really being listened to, you experience feelings of disengagement. If you feel that you actually were listened to, that contributes to feelings of engagement. Which feelings do you want your key employees to be experiencing when the head hunter calls?

Coach. The role of a coach is to bring out performance in employees. It’s usually referred to as a discovery process, but I prefer to call it an uncovery process. What the coach does is uncover the potential in the employee’s performance and actualize it. You know that when you’re on the receiving end of skilled coaching, and you hit the ‘aha!’ moment in your learning and/or performance, what an engaging experience that is.

These are the elements that make the “Exit’ door look unattractive. All the skills in the world marshalled at the ‘Entrance’ door will be in vain if the ‘Exit’ door is wide open and no one is guarding it.

Tim Rutledge, Ph. D. is President of Mattanie Consulting. He is the author of Getting Engaged: The New Workplace Loyalty, Mattanie Press, 2005, 2009, www.gettingengaged.ca and Employee Engagement; Get To The Point Books, Dallas, 2009

A New Lesson in Resilience

2009-09-01T04:41:00.000-07:00

by Jan van der Hoop

I had a conversation earlier today that still has me feeling a little unsettled seven hours later. It was with a kid. A young woman, really, of 26 whose career is just starting to blossom. It’s dawning on me that anyone more than 20 years my junior will always be a ‘kid’ in my mind regardless their age. I’m also learning that I need to be careful what else I attach to that label.

Jackie, this kid I was speaking with, is on a spectacular roll. She started and owns several multimillion dollar businesses. She has the ear of the most senior people in the largest, most successful and sexiest technology companies. She rattles off Google, Facebook and Microsoft, and a dozen others less known to Luddites like me… and counts them all as clients. A ‘who’s who’ of business elites serve as her mentors.

Which of her businesses get most of her attention right now? She brokers talent. She takes the very best and brightest students and grads (TOTTs, she calls them – Top of The Top) from Waterloo and the half-dozen very best software engineering schools around the world and helps them find the right job. Let’s put it in perspective: these TOTTs each have around sixty offers to choose from. They earn $80K in a work term. Their starting salaries are north of $250K. These children, not the jobs, are the hot commodity.

So why is the conversation still ringing in my ears? I’m not sure yet; I’m still working it out. I think it has to do with my own resilience. I had my perception of everything I thought I knew ‘altered’ a little.

For the last five years, my business partner and I have been “out there”, pushing the envelope with lots of leaders in the business community. We’ve been missionaries of sorts, railing against the status quo which is so badly broken, and working hard with organizations to change at a fundamental level how they attract, select and engage people. We’ve been constructively contrarian and controversial by choice… and of course in so doing we’ve built a loyal following and turned a whole bunch of people off with our own brand of inconvenient truth. Both outcomes suit us just fine; we’re happy to work only with those who like us.

What rattled me this morning is the sudden realization that all those things we’ve been preaching from way out on a limb are true. Not only are they true… we’ve actually been very conservative and mild in our ‘radical’ message to the business community. In a nutshell, you can summarise our core positioning as follows… the conventional, résumé-based approach to selection is actually an enormous barrier to talent and to the organization’s ability to achieve its business imperatives. The prerequisite to sustained high performance in any organization is an engaged, focused and committed workforce. The prerequisite to engagement is to ensure that the four critical aspects of fit are right. In this model, fit with the manager, with the job, with the team and with the organization are the leading indicators; business performance follows.

The notion of dropping the résumé and using candidate fit as the primary admission ticket is revolutionary… but we take our courage from the knowledge that we can back it up with numerous case studies and testimonials from clients. And on occasions when we’ve felt especially emboldened, we’ve even made the dire prediction that ‘some day in the future’, organizations that don’t staff on that basis will find themselves uncompetitive. I think we might have even wagged our finger at audiences once or twice for emphasis. People over forty can do that and get away with it.

Twenty minutes into the conversation with Jackie, it occurred to me: I’ve worried occasionally about speaking to the world from too far out on the limb. Worried that my claims and predictions about the pre-eminence of fit were too fantastic, too unbelievable. It turns out that I’ve actually been too conservative.

These young Gen X, Gen Y and Gen Z wunderkind that Jackie places are all about fit… and the stakes are high. The companies they go to have no choice but to break the mould to accommodate them. Their managers need to be highly adaptive in figuring out how to set them up in such a way as to engage them and harness their genius. The old rules and conventions about ‘work’ and ‘employment’ simply can’t apply, or the asset is lost.

In the tech sector, only the companies who are adaptive and who place the highest premium on fit are able to attract the very best talent and secure their return on the investment; the rest simply don’t get access to the talent stream and cannot compete. The right stewardship of the right talent is the biggest competitive advantage.

It is no different in your business or mine. The stakes are just as high; things just don’t unfold at the same crazy pace as they do in Jackie’s world. Or is it that they do, and we just don’t see it?
Time for me to edge a little further out on that limb. And the next time an HR manager tries to justify why a Gen Y candidate should be passed up cuz theres a typo in the covr letter (lol), I’ll LMAO and make a point of introducing them and their CEO to Jackie.

The Elephant in the HR Room

2009-07-06T06:26:00.001-07:00

Commentary by Bill VanGorder

When the federal government’s Human Resources Council for the Voluntary/Non-Profit Sector presented a draft of the new “HR Standards for the Sector” to a meeting of senior executives of not-for-profit organizations, HR professionals who work for some larger NFPs and HR consultants to charities and associations last week, I was disappointed but not surprised to see that three key issues were not being addressed. They had missed the elephant in the HR room.

1. Associations and charities should always assess candidates to determine whether or not the prospective employee will have the critical aspects of FIT – fit with the job, fit with the manager, fit with the team and fit with the organization. It is not enough to rely on skills, education and previous work experience. These are not accurate predictors of performance. Good “fit” is much more than cultural fit and diversity.

2. Increasingly, supervisors are being expected to coach their team members; however there must be a standard to assure that supervisors are supplied with good tools and adequate training for as coaches. It is not a skill automatically processed by most managers.

3. Finally, not-for-profits must have a hiring system that helps them learn from the process and provides insight into what aspects contributed to successful hires (and which did the opposite) so that changes can be made to improve the process for future hires.

Charities, associations and other not-for-profits are being severely challenged to improve their workforce planning in theses turbulent times. Demands for their services are growing and finances are tighter than they have been for decades.

Wouldn’t it make sense to apply all the tools available to make sure the right people are in the right jobs to provide the level of service and results that is being demanded?

White Collar Productivity

2009-06-28T05:11:00.000-07:00

Now there is a title that you do not hear much conversation about. When we talk productivity, you typically picture the line worker or production staff and the amount of output they create. We remember how in 1970 it took ninety five men five days to unload a ship full of timber and today it is eight men one day thanks to new tools, equipment and techniques. Now that is productivity improvement.

But times have changed. ninety+ per cent of us, even those working in so-called manufacturing companies work at white collar jobs. Over the summer we are going to explore this topic, present other people's opinions and share our own observations on this topic.

Here is idea #1;

If you manage by budgets, you will not notice the problem.

Think about it. If you are measuring success because you are "on budget" and the budget covers a 30% waste in productivity from the white collar positions you will never notice that you have a productivity issue. Take a look around you at work. Do you see any payroll dollars going to zero return on investment?

have you been to meetings where they were not organized and nothing got accomplished? How much payroll was in that room?

Do you have co-workers who are disengaged at work, producing little or no added value? They are really easy to pick out. When they are not there, no one notices that something is not getting done.

Find yourself working a project that were assigned that does not add any value to anyone?

Are you carrying a sales person on your team that consistently does not deliver?

All these things can be going on, but the budget line for payroll says you are on plan. The only time that these numbers get a second look is when the bottom profit number is not on plan. Profit plan hides sins, but it also limits what the potential of that profit can be.

What to figure out what white collar productivty issues are costing your organization? Watch this short video that will walk you through an exercise for you and your CFO to complete.

Looking forward to hearing more about your observations of white collar productivity issues.

A Bad Hire Is Worse Than You Think

2009-06-09T03:57:00.000-07:00

According to the Harvard Business Review, 80 percent of turnover is caused by bad hiring decisions. These are costly mistakes. The U.S. Department of Labor calculates that it costs one-third of a new hire’s annual salary to replace him. These figures include money spent on recruitment, selection and training plus costs due to decreased productivity as other employees fill in to take up the slack.

But these numbers don’t reflect the intangible damages an exiting employee can have such as lost customers and low employee morale across the rest of the organization. And, turnover costs climb even higher as you move up the organization: mid- and upper–level managers can cost over twice their annual salary to replace.

Interviewing Doesn’t Work

Traditional interviews don’t help you select top talent. In fact, a large study conducted by John and Rhonda Hunter at the University of Michigan on the predictors of job performance found that a typical job interview increased the likelihood of choosing the best candidate by less than 2 percent.

Worse, the traditional job interview is a highly subjective process. Interviewers often have a range of biases that dramatically affect their perceptions of individual job candidates. Despite the best of intentions, interviewers and supervisors have an unconscious tendency to favour people who are similar to themselves.

An interview-only hiring process can create teams that get along reasonably well - but lack the blend of skills needed to excel in business together. To consider an alternative to the traditional hiring process, visit www.HiringSmart.ca or www.HiringSmartAmerica.com. Start with the section called "A Case For Change". With a focus on the four critical aspects of Fit, you will increase revenues, improve productivity while reducing expenses.

Criteria For Selecting Assessment Tools in Hiring

2009-06-08T01:58:00.000-07:00

One way to improve your odds of success is to use an assessment or two to help you learn more about the person, to get below the surface and to put unbiased and useful information into your hands before you make the critical decision to hire a candidate.The assessment marketplace is a complicated one, cluttered with a dizzying assortment of tools. How do you find the right assessment for the job?When we look at assessment tools we are evaluating them against five simple rules. The tools that we recommend for use in selecting candidates must meet ALL five of these criteria;

Does this assessment have a distortion scale that tells us clearly how confident we can be in the accuracy of the information we are reading about the candidate? Knowing this score will give us perspective on what we are reading in the report.

The tool must measure what matters. This means that top performers and poor performers in the same job must consistently score differently. One tool does not work for all jobs or all companies. The tool selected must have some connection to the four critical aspects of fit – fit with the job, fit with the manager, fit with team and fit with the organization.

No tool must ever be used to pass or fail a candidate. The assessment provides only part of the information you should consider when you are evaluating a candidate’s fit. A tool, when used property, should tell you “if you hire this person this is what you are going to get”. Beware of any assessment that automatically advances or disqualifies candidates, purporting to make the decision for you.

A tool is just the first part of the face-to-face interview. Assessments must provide the recruiter with an interview guide or placement report that is customized based on how the candidate answered the questions. A suitable report will not only give the interviewer information on what questions to ask, but should also tell them why to ask them and what to listen for in the response.

And finally, the information collected during the hiring process all too often ends up never being used again after the person is hired. A HiringSmart approved assessment tool provides a coaching report that can be used throughout the employee life cycle to assist with onboarding, future development and succession planning.
There are two broad classes of assessments in the marketplace… Ipsative tools and Normative tools.

Ipsative tools are the largest group, including names you’ll recognise like DiSC, Myers Briggs, Thomas International, Reid Report, LIMRA and others. Many are good instruments, but there’s a critical problem with using ipsative tools in hiring: their basic construct.

Ipsative tools ask candidates to describe themselves from different perspectives and because it’s all derived from the candidate’s perspective of themselves you have no way of knowing how accurate – or truthful – the results of the assessment are. It’s hard to know how much confidence to have in the output.
Normative tools, on the other hand, take a completely different approach. Instead of asking the candidate about themselves, they compare the candidate’s attitudes and core behaviours to those of the general population, essentially telling you how similar or different they are to ‘most people’ in areas that will be critical to their success on the job.

It is this critical difference in construct that gives normative assessments their objectivity and the ability to reliably predict how the candidate will fit with their manager, in their job, with their coworkers, and in the culture of the organization.

2009-06-02T13:26:00.000-07:00

By Jan van der Hoop

I had a conversation recently with a major Canadian retailer that is seriously missing the boat in terms of their response to the opportunity they are facing in this economy. Here’s the gist of the conversation:

Originally met with them in January and they were very keen on presenting us as a solution for better hiring at store level. We scheduled a demo for late February. In the
interim, corporate HR and reps from the field held meetings to plan out their HR/OD
initiatives for 2009

When we came back together in February, I asked about the outcome of the planning meetings – not surprisingly, their focus in this economy is off hiring (seems the doomsday
scenario of skills shortages has suddenly gone away as bankers and brokers are
suddenly willing to stock shelves). No, their focus for 2009 is on Retention.

Cool, I said, we can help with that. We have tools that will help their store
management teams decide which employees they most want to hang on to, and who to
position where in the operation.

“What do you mean?” was the response

Well, you and I both know that every one of your stores has its share of A, B
and C players. Seems to me the A’s are the ones you want to retain at all
cost; you want to develop your B’s and encourage your C’s to move up or
move out.

“Ummm, no”, they said. “That’s not the direction we have been given for
this year”.

Please tell me you’re not going to channel precious organizational resources
into retaining your poor producers!

It was a long and awkward silence… but yes, this is the path they are going
down.

We have loads or research that documents the “cost of average” – the cost
to the bottom line of an average performer vs. a superior one. It’s
staggering.

Those organizations who are holding their own in this economy are those who are
taking advantage of the temporary softening of the labour market and finding
productivity by “trading up” on the staffing front. They are looking for
good people in the wrong job, and placing them where they can shine. And they
are raising the performance bar now, while they can, because they aren’t
being held hostage by average and poor performers and the belief there’s
no-one better “out there”.

Head Office Does Not Think They Have a Problem

2009-05-19T07:00:00.000-07:00

By Jan van der Hoop

I had an “interesting” experience a few months back that I’d like to share with you. Partly because it’s going to be cathartic for me, but mostly because there’s a nagging truth in the story that exists in all too many organizations.

I call the experience “interesting” because no better word comes to mind. ‘Perplexing”, “irritating” and “dismaying” all put too much spin on it when you’re trying to be PC. But how long should one remain PC while stifling an overwhelming urge to pick someone up and shake them back to reality?

The quick background is this: One of our Affiliate partners in the GTA – let’s call her Pamela for the sake of this article – Pamela’s dad is in a nursing home operated by one of the Biggies here in Canada. It’s a very well recognized name, and they have used their marketing dollars effectively to build a collection of respectable brands in that space.

The problem is that Pamela’s dad isn’t having all that good an experience there. Let’s just say there have been gaps in his care that Pam only knows about because she has carved out the time to check in periodically. A succession of bad experiences at the home prompted her to become active on the family advocacy committee, and it was through discussions with the senior management team there that she learned that they have long been struggling with several chronic staffing issues:

· A shortage of staff across the board – not just RNs and RNAs, but at all levels;
· Because of the very small number of candidates to choose from, they find themselves repeatedly hiring the best they could find. “A bad candidate is better than no candidate”. Attraction continues to be a huge challenge, in the unskilled as well as skilled and semi-skilled positions;
· Because of the above, everyone’s stretched and stress is high. Managers are short-tempered, engagement is low, turnover is high… and residents unfortunately pay the price.

Not a pretty picture, and not one that anyone’s happy with, least of all the local management team. So when Pamela talked to them about HiringSmart, she was quickly referred to the Senior Recruiters at Corporate.

Now comes the “interesting” bit.

Pam brought me along. Shortly after our arrival we were ushered into a very comfortable boardroom. We weren’t there to sell any concepts, but rather to give them the background and see if we could get the corporate perspective on what’s working and what’s not.

Just as well, because we barely got a word in edgewise. From where Head Office stands, everything is rosy. Sure they could use more nurses, but who couldn’t? When it comes to hiring for fit and for quality, they have it nailed. The interview questions are all aligned with the corporate vision and values, so how could they go wrong? Turnover? Not here. Stress? Low morale? Gaps in patient care? Not possible – they have reports out the wazoo to the contrary.
It seems they have it all figured out. As we left the meeting Pam and I were both at a loss. Not because we were taking the company off our prospect list, but because it all felt so wrong. There were two big questions we couldn’t reconcile:

· Did the wonks we met in Recruiting really believe the stuff they were feeding us (we hoped for their sake they were deliberately giving us the bum’s rush, but had a strong suspicion they actually bought their own story); and
· What the heck to do with such a glaring chasm between Corporate’s dream and the field operation’s daily nightmare?

We decided to take the high road and just walk away from it all. I don’t know whether Pamela’s dad is still in the same home, and whether anything has changed for him. I suspect not.

So, you might ask, what has prompted me to get this off my chest three months later? Tim, my business partner, began a cross-Canada speaking tour this week that will have him in front of several thousand health-care professionals over the next six months. Yesterday’s stop was in Vancouver. In the rush at the end of the session he received business cards from senior managers at three of this company’s homes, each insisting that he had to help them find some solutions to their problems.

Tim did not refer them to Corporate.

But that’s not the real story here either. To me, a much more compelling question for all too many of us is how there can be such a fundamental disconnect between the story at corporate and the reality in the field… and what will it take to repair it?

2009-05-12T01:57:00.000-07:00

Most managers consider themselves to be excellent recruiters and rave about how great they are at picking the right person for the job; to the point where they will even say that they “will know” if the person is right within the first two minutes of the interview.

So why is it that on average only about 26% of employees in any team or organisation are recognised as being Top Performers?

and….

Why is it that the informal recruitment processes that most managers use, result in less than 20% of employees being fully engaged in the workplace?

The reason is because the screening and recruitment processes used by most managers are completely subjective and unstructured resulting in a 74% incidence of selecting non-top performers but a 100% success rate in selecting someone they like!

Why is more emphasis placed on “like” instead of “fit”? Because deep down the last thing they want is someone who will be difficult to manage.

So what is the answer?

Surprsingly it is a common sense approach that selects top performers based on what makes them top performers with YOUR organization. The answer is to focus to the four critical aspects of Fit - Fit with the Job, Fit with the Manager, Fit with the Team and Fit with the Organisation.

Interested in learning more? check out our website dedicated to this principle at www.HiringSmart.ca

Hiring Does Not Have To Be Scary

2009-05-08T01:42:00.000-07:00

The decision to hire is a scary moment for the person doing the hiring. Not just because they, themselves, have superiors to answer to, and “finding the right person” is a costly process for nearly every business, but also because, “What if I’m wrong?” is a tough question for the recruiter to face.

When hiring, you’re going out on a limb. You’re hoping this person with the quasi-impressive resume and witty jokes is going to be able to do things you don’t have the time or knowledge to deal with yourself. And what if they can’t? Or what if they won’t? Or, heaven help us, what if they sounded great in the first two interviews and then fall off the wagon the first week on the job, start showing up drunk wearing the same clothes they had on before the weekend, and making passes at the gal that drops off the cleaned rugs.

And what is that smell?

Are those someone’s feet?

My God, he’s not wearing shoes.

You see where I’m going. Hiring is scary.

Good managers hire people for their ability to learn and adapt. They want smart people that get things done. They're looking for someone who may already know something about the business (thinking this means I don't have to spend time teaching them) and can learn quickly new tasks and do them the way that you want them done.

The good hiring managers know this, and they want to know if you can keep up. It is not about how smart a candidate is, but rather how they learn. Top performers learn quickly and don't get bogged down with the wrong details. They learn the way we teach/train. How do you measure this in the traditional hiring process? Where is this information in the resume? How do you get this out of an interview?

The traditional hiring system makes you guess at this. What you need is a new process with new tools. HiringSmart provides those tools for you to uncover the information that matters, information to uncover the four critical aspects of Fit in a candidate.

Fish Where The Fish Are

2009-04-28T03:27:00.000-07:00

Odds are, you likely started your career the hard way. Landing your first job meant filling your briefcase with a dozen or so résumés and pounding the pavement, physically visiting the employers of interest… knowing that, at minimum, you could leave a good impression with someone as you dropped off your CV while hoping that just maybe you could land an interview on the spot.

Then when you got home at the end of the day, you scanned the career postings and the ads in trade journals and newspapers, planning the next day’s route.

About ten years ago the internet job boards became popular… and the classifieds went online. The belief (and the marketing hype) was that once they were universally accessible, the world would rely on those boards to manage their upward mobility.

The problem is, though, that less than 20 % of the workforce is using the conventional job boards. Even fewer read and respond to job ads in print media. More importantly, almost none of the people you want to reach rely on these tools and resources for information.

If you want to attract a large pool of quality candidates, you have to reach them where they are, and not where you used to be when you were looking for work.Here are three thoughts to consider:

Multiple Attraction Strategies
The ‘one strategy and one message fits all’ approach doesn’t work any more. People don’t respond to the glossy career brochures and promises… they expect to be engaged in an experience and a conversation that is compelling to them.

The starting point is to be clear on whom you want to reach. Who are the targets? Mechanical engineers with experience in deep-sea oil exploration? Over-the-Road drivers who prefer long-haul and working in a team? They converge in very specific places.

Are you looking for students, new grads, moms looking to fill a few hours a day, semi-retired people too active or too financially dependent to retire altogether? There are lots of pools of talent that are underutilised because they aren’t looking for full-time work.

Once you are clear on whom you want to reach, you will need to find out what they read, how they network, and what communities they frequent… then each will need to be engaged in a conversation that is relevant to them.

Read more at www.HiringSmartAmerica.com or www.HiringSmart.ca

The Courage To Think Differently

2009-04-11T06:54:00.000-07:00

By Jan van der Hoop

Why is it that, even when we know that a particular habit isn’t serving us well and may even be harming us, we still resist doing what we know makes logical sense to avert the inevitable?

What is it about the human condition that allows us to rationalize the patently illogical, and even the irresponsible? This dysfunction shows up in our own little ‘vices’, in the way we treat the world around us, and in the organizations we lead.

For more than a decade, Gallup and a host of other global consulting firms have been reporting on levels of engagement. We’ve all seen them – and they are dismal: less than 30% of the population is fully engaged in their work; another 20% are fully disengaged, and in excess of 50% are in some stage of disengagement.

These statistics haven’t improved over the last decade and a half; if anything they have worsened. And they are reinforced by other measures that point to something fundamental in organizations being critically broken:

· Only 14% of employees are in a role that draws from their strengths most of the time
· 23% of payroll dollars are unproductive because of poor job fit
· Conflict, especially with the manager, is the cause of the vast majority of departures
· Lack of organizational depth is at critical levels – fully one third of workers under 35 are in their first year with their current employer, and another third expect to be employed elsewhere before the year is out
· 94% of 250 senior HR execs globally assert that their workforce is unprepared to help their organization meet its strategic objectives

These statistics aren’t new, and they aren’t improving. And yet, what is it that allows us to read them, grunt or shake our head, and simply move on with our day? Where is the critical thinking, the willingness to step back, acknowledge that something fundamental isn’t working, and to find a better way?

Clearly, the process of matching people to opportunity is badly broken. But where? Today, recruiters and HR professionals have more resources than ever before at their fingertips, including powerful systems that will comb through immense résumé databases looking for the right keywords and combinations. Yet, for all the power in these systems, it’s hard to claim that they are effective unless the main metric we’re relying on is the number of days a position is open. We could concede that these machines are good for matching widgets with holes, but not much more.

The critical flaw is in the very foundation of this approach: There is nothing in a résumé that is predictive of how long someone will stay in their job or how productive they will be while they are there. Look at your very best performers and your very worst: their CVs will be indistinguishable from one another.

Relying on the résumé as the primary admission ticket, and building elaborate machines that filter people in or out on the basis of barely relevant data is the root of the problem.
Isn’t that an inconvenient truth!

So what now? What can we rely on in matching the person to the right job, be they new candidate or long-time staffer? The best predictors of engagement, and therefore performance, productivity, retention, customer satisfaction – and profit – are the following four critical aspects of fit:

· Fit with the manager. Does the manger have the ability and the willingness to set the stage for the employee’s success? Does the employee have the tools and the knowledge to do good work?
· Fit with the job. Is the employee in a role that draws from their talents, strengths and interests? Are they doing work they enjoy and that has some meaning for them?
· Fit with the team. Does the individual feel they belong? Are the people around them as committed to quality? Do they share the same values and work ethic?
· Fit with the organization. As important as values and culture, is this a place where the employee feels they can learn and grow, and where thy can feel like they are contributing to something of value?

These four aspects of fit need to be primary admission tickets; they are much more reliable predictors of success than anything in a CV, and the benefits to the bottom line are astounding.
In what ways is your organization relying on old habits and assumptions that are no longer valid, hoping to deliver the results that are so critical today? What leadership is necessary from you to break free from the comfort of old habits, to create new and more productive ones?

A Case For A New Approach

2009-04-01T18:01:00.000-07:00

80% of the workforce is in some stage of disengagement with their work...rending an estimated 23% of payroll dollars non-productive.

Only 14% of the workforce are in roles that draw from their strengths most of the time.

In 2008, well over 90% of senior HR Officers believed their workforce was was unprepared to deliver on company goals and meet the competitive challenges.

Conflict, especially with the immedicate supervisor, is the leading cause of turnover.

Lack of dept is crippling organizations, placing continuity at risk - 1/3 of workers under 35 are in the first year with their current employer.

The statistics are irrefutable. The conclusion is inescapable. The tools and the approaches we've relied upon in matching talent with opportunity are broken.

Résumés are dead. They have been at the foundation of the hiring process for over 50 years, yet the information they contain - education, credentials and work experience - are the least reliable predictors of how long someone will stay with your organization and how productive they will be.
What factors are reliable predictors of engagement, retention and productivity?

The four critical aspects of fit. We made a 3 minute video to make our "Case For A New Approach".

Skills Shortage Still A Problem

2009-03-31T02:54:00.000-07:00

A Report from The Boston Consulting Group

One third of companies in Europe plan to lay off full-time employees, despite reports showing this cost-cutting tactic does not produce long- term benefits.A report by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and European Asso ciation for People Management (EAPM), Creating People Advantage in Times of Crisis: How to Address HR Challenges in the Recession, indicates that this strategy, while understandable given short-term pressures, could have a serious and long-term impact on a company.

The report states that employee commitment is a key element of an effective culture and how employees are treated in bad times will be remembered by them in good times. Because demographic factors mean that Europe’s companies will face shortages of skilled staff in the near future, the report advised, it is a factor which business leaders should not ignore.“Despite the colossal pressures business and HR leaders are under, they still have choices,” said Philip Krinks, partner and managing director, BCG London. “They can significantly shape the destiny of their compa nies.

During 2009, as well as responding to the pressures, companies have opportunities to prepare for when the recovery eventually comes.”

Attitude Vs Behavour

2009-03-28T06:54:00.000-07:00

"As long as the person has all of the skills, or satisfies enough of theskills requirements, if he has a good attitude, he’s worth his weightin gold. After all, you can teach technical skills!"

Not hard to agree with this statement above that I just lifted from the top of an article at Tech Republic . Here is the part that I beg you to think about. If this is so true, then why do so many recruiters defend "behavioural interview" questions? Behaviour is not in the statement above, Attitude is. Why not ask Attitude questions? For a short 2 minute video on the difference between behavoural interview questions and attitude questions and why the difference, click here

What does an Attitude question look like? The construct is rather simple. Here is an example;

If you are looking to learn about a person's attitude about types of supervision, ask two questions (preferably online not verbally).

1. Who was the best supervisor or manager that you ever reported to? What made them such a strong manager?
2. Think of the worst supervisor or manager that you worked with. What made them such a weak manager?

The questions are not about the individual or an action that can be learned to take, but rather are about other people and other things linked with preference of the writer. Now that gets you attitude.

Tim

The 4 Factors of Success for SMEs

2009-03-15T05:42:00.000-07:00

This blog highlights what’s right with small business and non-profits. So often, attention in the news and in business books is pointed at Fortune 500 and large publicly known companies. In Canada, Statistics Canada reports that 5.1 million employees (48 per cent of the total private labour force) work for small enterprises with fewer than 100 employees. 16 per cent work in medium-sized enterprises (100-499 employees). In total, SMEs employ just over 64% of all employees in the private sector. In the US, the numbers are roughly the same with small business representing 63 per cent of sales and they own 61 percent of the business assets.

It seems that success for small businesses and nonprofits is a function of organization, a system, planning/marketing and the leader's actions that have been developed and maintained. These winners make a conscious effort to ingrain a culture of success, which lasts for a lifetime. From 0ur observations, here are four factors that make SMEs successful;

Good People Who Fit. Top performing organizations have recognized the value of the four aspects of fit, fit with the manager, fit with the job, fit with the team and fit with the organization. They have used this information at all levels of their people development beginning in recruitment and following through with orientation, coaching/mentoring and succession planning.

A System. Success smaller-sized organizations have clean internal systems with little waste. Because of factor #1, they have a team that all follows the system. They have tools that everyone uses not allowing individuals to create their own versions. These systems are simple and uncomplicated. The leaders who succeed have an organization that depends on a system. Not an organization that is dependent on certain people to know how to run the system.

Planning/Marketing. These organizations have put together a strategic operating and marketing plan on paper. They us their systems (#2) to communicate with their people (#1) about the details of the plans and marketing using this as a tool to keep the dialogue open between the leader and the employees. The good ones recogonize they have to get the facts, create a database of knowledge and take time to create steps to future growth.

Leader’s Actions. Leaders are the glue that holds everything together. They are totally committed to the mission of the business and through their actions gain the commitment of the rest of the team. They hold people accountable for their actions, celebrate the success together while balancing their own personal responsibility to their employees.

Working With Kidployees

2009-03-09T09:20:00.000-07:00

An excerpt from the book Not Everyone Gets A Trophy: How to Manage Generation Y by Bruce Tulgan.

An experienced nurse-manager in a busy hospital told me she stopped a new young nurse from administrating the wrong medicine by intravenous drip to a patient. The manager pulled the young nurse aside and explained that this is how patients die unneccesarily. I told her, "You need to check the wrist bracelet, then the patient's chart, then the charge list, then the IV bag. Then you need to check them all again.". Before she was finished, the young nurse interrupted her. "Actually, you are doing this conversation all wrong." she told her boss. "You are supposed to give me some positive feedback before you criticize my work". What did the manager respond? "Okay. Nice shoes. Now about that IV bag..."

The New HR

2009-03-01T06:04:00.000-08:00

By Jan van der Hoop

I don’t think a day has passed in the last three weeks when I haven’t found myself in a conversation with someone – be they HR professional or senior executive – who declared emphatically that the time has come for HR to reinvent itself.

It’s not a new topic, of course. The HR function has been engaged in active handwringing about its strategic role, its contribution, and its ‘role as a full partner at the table’ since at least the late ‘70s when I did my first summer co-op as a Personnel Clerk.

But there’s a certain matter-of-factness to these recent conversations that’s new to me. I don’t know if it’s because of this economic roller coaster we’re riding, or if we’re just plain tired of throwing the same old solutions at the same old problems and hoping the outcome will be less inevitable… either way, I smell change in the air.

Ever since Fast Company published Keith Hammonds’ essay Why We Hate HR (http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/97/open_hr.html) just over a year ago, I’ve been mulling over the question of reinvention more consciously than I had previously. Hard as the article is to read, I have to acknowledge that there is a grain of truth to it. More than a grain.

There’s little point in going into an exploration of why things are the way they are, although I do have some deeply held beliefs that I have been known to share freely with trusted company over a scotch. More valuable, I think, is to offer some thoughts on the way forward.
Here, then, is a draft manifesto for the New HR for your consideration. I’d like this to be an open conversation and welcome all contributions and comments.

HR has one job: business success. Anything else is useless and a waste of time and resources. If it doesn't improve business outcomes (respecting all stakeholders), we're not doing it.

HR isn't the Complaint Department or Corporate Daycare. We're going to hold people capable and accountable, and teach those who need it to grow up and stop wasting our time.

We won't accept mediocrity. Human Resources can no longer be the place people go when they can't find meaningful employment. We want - and demand - the best and the brightest people with solid line experience, who understand business and who value the essential role of people in securing strategic objectives.

Nothing is sacred. We're going to critically re-think everything we do. We are willing to revisit – and challenge – the assumptions behind our systems and processes. Our workforce and our business imperatives have changed dramatically over the last decade; our most basic fundamentals have not. We simply have to stop trying to fix today’s problems with yesterday’s solutions. Truth be told, they weren’t all that effective then either.

We're not in charge of the holiday party anymore. Yeah, that's right. We aren't the social secretaries. We have real work to do. See #1.

Business is gonna want a seat at our table. The time of putting HR at the kid's table is over. People – our ‘human capital’ – are now our only meaningful source of competitive advantage. As we step up to our full responsibility as stewards of that resource, the line guys are going to be coming to us. We can’t let them down, and we can’t shy away from holding them accountable.

Rules are for fools. We're tossing out the rule book. We're not hall monitors anymore, and most policies are written for the lowest common denominator. As we raise the bar and bring in better quality people, most of the ‘rules’ will become redundant. We're going to expect grownups to behave like grownups, or they're gone. Regardless of their title. Any questions?

We're going to make pay-for-performance work. Forgive us if we insist that the best people who make the biggest impact (respecting all stakeholders as in #1 above) make the most money.

No more workarounds to make up for weak managers. Please see #1. Our job is to make our company work most efficiently, not to find ways to convince people to put up with weak, uninspiring leadership. Managers who treat their people poorly will be asked to leave. We won't be making up policies to make up for bad managers, and we refuse to ask people to lower their standards. It's either up or out.

We're going to put the "human" back in Human Resources. They're not numbers on a spreadsheet or "FTEs" that can be treated like a commodity. They're people, with fears and hopes and dreams. And for a few hours a day, they come to our place. We'll make sure that (along with #1) we remind ourselves every day that what we do is about people. Mediocre people = mediocre business. Great people = great business.

Worried About Staying Competitive in a Tough Economy? Stop Leaving Money on the Table

2009-02-22T05:29:00.000-08:00

Back in September the retail business was preparing for the upcoming Christmas season. Steve owns and operates a regional clothing store chain with six locations and has built a dedicated client base over the years.

While Steve was evaluating the merits of strappy sandals and making decisions about what beach wear he was going to bring into the shop for the vacation crowd, media coverage shifted from talking about the fear of finding enough employees with an aging workforce to daily job loss totals and stock market declines.

Words from the advisers, suppliers and customers he contacted rang in the entrepreneur's head: This is the tip of the iceberg, and things are going to get much, much worse. Instead of brushing off those predictions, Steve moved swiftly to counter the coming storm. His action plan was simple.

Step One: Contact all of our clients and thank them for their business.
Thanks to good records, Steve was able to search a database of close to 12,000 customers from the past year and reach out to them by e-mail, regular mail and telephone calls. The goal was to remind them that they are appreciated, and invite them to a special event at one of the stores so give them the opportunity to beat the Christmas rush. Customers were given a gift certificate towards purchases of $200 or more at the event.

"Things just came crashing down. In my 16 years of business I have never seen anything like this. But we're a company that can turn on a dime, and after talking to people and figuring things were likely to get much worse, we just ripped things apart," he says.

Step Two: Map Your Customer Experience.
Take this tip literally: Write down all of the points of experience customers have with you. Then grade and prioritize them. Have your management group complete the Customer Service Perspective Questionnaire from HiringSmart. This exercise will generate conversations about what the customer service levels should be and what a customer in your store should expect to experience. Click here for a complimentary copy of the questionnaire.

Step Three: Ask customers for feedback.
Which factors are most important, and how can you improve them? Which are the least so, and can you get rid of them entirely? For example, if customers say your automated phone system is annoying, either get a new system or consider replacing it with a live person.

Step Four: Take Inventory of Customer Service Team.
Have your Customer Service team complete the Customer Service Profile (CSP) as part of your Customer experience training program. The CSP™ identifies six behavioural characteristics and two proficiencies that are essential to extraordinary customer service. This is the information needed to coach and train your people to deliver your customer experience.

The Customer Service Profile™ measures the behavioural characteristics of Trust, Tact, Empathy, Conformity, Focus, and Flexibility as well as Vocabulary and Numerical Proficiencies. There are four customized versions for different sectors: Retail, Financial Services, Hospitality Services and Health Care.

Step Five: Communicate Strategy.
Executing the strategy happens when everyone knows what the plan is, and how together you are measuring success. Don’t just communicate – over communicate. Make the Customer Experience part of every conversation, reinforcing the training and the expectations.

Step Six: Celebrate the Success.
As the results begin to be realized, celebrate the success frequently. Some successful events acknowledged continually reinforces the program and leads to the larger goals and objectives. For more information about the Customer Service Profile and how this tool can be part of your customer service experience e-mail info@HiringSmart or call 1-800-513-7277.

Oops, Did You Just Lose Another 20% of Your Productivity?

2009-02-08T12:39:00.000-08:00

Jan van der Hoop

I just love our friends at Hallmark cards.

Sometimes they are cheeky, and sometimes they are schmaltzy. But they somehow manage to always have their finger on the pulse of society and popular culture.

Which is why my heart sank when an old client who left State Farm a while back sent me this card after visiting our website and learning more about HiringSmart. Click here for link to card.

In it, two characters in a cubicle village (Hoops and Yoyo) have declared the day I Don’t Care Friday. Apparently it’s the new Saturday – a day when deadlines are ignored in favour of rearranging paper clips and slipping out for three hour lunches. Sure, Chew Our Butt Monday is just around the corner, but this is the day to studiously avoid doing anything the boss is counting on us for.

Why did my heart sink as I watched the clip? Frankly, after a decade of self-employment and working only with clients I love doing work that excites me, I had forgotten just how dismal working life is for so many.

This clip is a testament to the psyche of disengagement and the sickness that permeates life in all too many organizations today. The sad part is that while it’s tongue-in-cheek and designed to elicit a laugh, it’s pretty close to reality in many places I’ve seen.

How on earth did we get into this mess?

There is absolutely no reason why everyone can’t be in a job that interests and engages them, where they click with their manager, their work and their coworkers… and yet this notion is a foreign concept that most dare not even hope for lest they go mad.

And yet, this is the precise reason we do what we do, the thing that drives us: changing at a fundamental level the way organizations bring people together. For everyone’s sake.
So do me a favour. Look to your left, then look to your right. How many of the people around you (including you) are on fire and loving what they are doing, and how many are more like Hoops and Yoyo?

What are you prepared to do about it?

Good To Great Message

2009-01-26T04:50:00.000-08:00

The right people don’t need to be managed. The moment you feel the need to tightly manage someone, you’ve made a hiring mistake.

That was management consultant Jim Collins in the Feb. 2 issue of Fortune magazine. Mr. Collins is the author of bestsellers such as “Built to Last” and “Good to Great,” so he should know something about good talent and great businesses. Here’s more of what he said in an interview with Fortune senior writer Jennifer Reingold:

“The right people don’t think they have a job: They have responsibilities. If I’m a climber, my job is not [just] to belay. My responsibility is that if we get in trouble, I don’t let my partner down.

“The right people do what they say they will do, which means being really careful about what they say they will do. It’s key in difficult times. In difficult environments our results are our responsibility. People who take credit in good times and blame external forces in bad times do not deserve to lead. End of story.”

Bathroom Installer Saves $182,000 using HiringSmart

2009-01-25T06:05:00.000-08:00

This National organization provides bathroom renovations in one day. Finding competent Sales Estimators and Branch Managers for their corporately owned locations has presented both performance and turnover challenges.

Between January 2006 and December 2007 they were experiencing a 16% turnover rate. With growth in the home renovation industry they saw their workforce expand from 115 people to 142 people.

In September 2007 they started to implement the HiringSmart Process. Over the next 12 months, using various attraction strategies including referrals from existing employees they attracted 4,528 candidates to their online first interview portal. 2,809 (62%) of those candidates completed the online interview and submitted their responses to the recruiters. From that total 242 candidates were selected to complete the Step One Survey II assessment and face-to-face interview.

The results of the HiringSmart process were felt immediately. Not only were they spending less time managing the hiring process, turnover was reduced for the year to just 3% with only 5 of the new employees leaving. The most significant savings came from fewer people going through their training program as well as fewer new employees working at a lower productive pace due to inexperience.

To see chart click here

Overall Savings From The HiringSmart Process for 1st year: $182,000

New Year Brings Great Performance Improvement Opportunities

2009-01-18T05:30:00.000-08:00

With all of the miserable outlooks dominating our media reports for the New Year, I feel compelled to raise a cheer to 2009 and remind everyone that this is the perfect time to begin anew! When times are good, companies tend to pay less attention to the basics that truly are the competitive edge. Now is the time to take stock and assess the opportunities that you have at hand.

I happen to believe that companies live and die by the people they hire . . . and keep. In good times, organizations are more likely to avoid the tough emotional decisions of dealing with mediocre performance by just hiring additional people to get the job done, People are not interchangeable legos, and they truly come to us with different strengths and capabilities; also with differences in commitment and dedication. Smart organizations know they have to make every hire, or retained employee, count.

After the Depression of the 1930's, employers were asked what was the most important factor in deciding whom to keep and whom to terminate to keep their businesses going. In a study of 4000 men who were laid off, the employers said the deciding factor was their behavioral traits; not their degrees, seniority, or experience but how they behaved and interacted with others. Behaviors such as initiative, cooperation, attitude, accountability meant more to survival than what we typically see as hiring considerations from the traditional hiring process.

Observant leaders know these traits spell the difference between success and failure today. The good news is, we have exceptional and accessible methods of identifying those essential traits today, and who has them, none of which was available to the leaders during the Depression years. Today we have the HiringSmart process and a suite of assessment tools to assist you with your Strategic Workforce Planning. Any company that has not seriously considered profiling essential success traits, and matching them to candidates and existing employees for best performance, is seriously missing powerful opportunities. These immediate opportunities result in significant and immediate improvement in leadership and management, production, quality, sales and morale. I would challenge anyone to identify any decision or process that delivers more improvement and delivers it more quickly.

Article Source:
http://www.bestmanagementarticles.com
http://production-management.bestmanagementarticles.com

Balancing Out the News For The Total Picture

2009-01-11T02:24:00.000-08:00

An Editorial from the Globe and Mail, January 10th. Konrad Yakbuski has put it all in perspective. What do you think?

Cheer up: Canada's in good shape

Montreal -- The worst economic crisis of a lifetime? Maybe if you were born in 1992.

Job numbers out yesterday - showing a jump in the national unemployment rate to 6.6 per cent - confirm that Canada has followed the United States into a recession. But the odds are that workers here will come through the downturn of 2009 with far fewer scrapes and bruises than they did during the two previous recessions. They'll also - for a change - fare markedly better than their American counterparts.

The Canadian unemployment rate rocketed to 13 per cent in the 1981-82 recession and almost as high in the 1990-91 contraction. In both of those periods, Canada was an economic basket case compared with the United States, where unemployment rates peaked at 10.8 per cent in 1982 and 7.8 per cent in 1992.

So far, almost no economist expects Canada's jobless rate will surpass 8 per cent during this downturn. Most, by far, predict it will peak below that figure. The U.S. unemployment rate, however, could enter double digits.

Even an 8-per-cent jobless rate would have been embraced as practically full employment in the Canada of the '70s or '80s. Yet, yesterday's news of 34,000 job losses in December, and a 0.3-percentage-point increase in the unemployment rate, had politicians in conniptions. It's easy to feel pessimistic when president-elect Barack Obama speaks of "a crisis unlike any we have seen in our lifetime," and the U.S. economist Nouriel (Dr. Doom) Roubini warns that the bubbles "have only begun to burst." But they're not talking about Canada. This country remains an island of relative tranquillity in a raging global economic sea. Our job market, in particular, faces this tempest with storm shutters firmly affixed.

One of the reasons has to do with demographics. The millions of Canadian baby boomers who reached adulthood in the '70s and '80s overwhelmed the labour market's ability to absorb them. Employers didn't have much of an incentive to hold on to workers during tough times, since they could draw on an overabundant supply of labour to replenish their work force when the economic tide turned.

Not now. The prospect of a looming post-recession labour shortage promises to factor into employers' staffing calculations this time around.

"The whole phenomenon of an aging population will act as a brake on layoffs," predicts Desjardins Group senior economist Benoit Durocher. "Businesses will think twice before laying people off because it could be more difficult to find employees when the recovery comes."

Claude Morin, an economic development officer in Quebec's export-dependent Beauce region, agrees, adding that more than a decade of solid growth has left firms with strong balance sheets. Though many of the region's clothing and furniture makers have closed in recent years, most of their workers have found jobs elsewhere in the Beauce.

"Our businesses are well capitalized, which allows them to play for time," says Mr. Morin of the Conseil économique de Beauce. "Morale is good and no one tells me on my visits that things are bad or catastrophic."

The relative strength of Canada's job market also stems from having an older work force than the Americans. While youth has certain advantages, they're not apparent during a recession. Layoffs will figure more prominently south of the border.

At the same time, Canada has largely succeeded in eliminating much of the structural unemployment that plagued the economy in the past. Though pockets of chronic joblessness still exist, they're modest compared with the unemployment rates in excess of 20 per cent that used to be common in some regions.

This shows up in Canada's employment rate - the percentage of those over 15 with jobs. It remains historically high, at 63.1 per cent in December, down 0.2 percentage points from November. In 1982, it was 57 per cent.

"There has been two decades of continued out-migration from places that were pools of structural unemployment," observes Dalhousie University economics professor Lars Osberg. "And Internet job searches didn't exist in [past recessions], so there's a whole new way of matching vacancies with unemployed workers."

Another measure of Canada's relative economic health lies in the so-called misery index, the combined total of the unemployment and inflation rates. It hovered around an excruciating 25 per cent during the '80s recession and about 20 per cent a decade later. Today, it is well below 10 per cent and likely won't surpass that threshold in this recession.

Monetary and fiscal stimulus are two reasons Royal Bank of Canada is predicting this recession will be shorter than the two previous ones. The bank expects Canada's economy to start growing again in the second quarter of this year, following only two quarters of contraction. As a result, the bank predicts the unemployment rate will peak at 7.4 per cent.

Some economists have been warning of deflation, a phenomenon where expectations of falling prices cause consumers to put off purchases. But with unprecedented liquidity being pumped into the financial system by the Bank of Canada, and the federal government promising a spending package that will make it look like Christmas in January, the longer-term threat is that of upward pressure on prices.

"There are risks in terms of the timing of the [stimulus] initiatives," warns Paul Ferley, assistant chief economist at Royal Bank of Canada. "If they leave them in place too long, it could very well sow the seeds for an inflation problem."

U.S. economist James Grant, author of the influential Grant's Interest Rate Observer, has also expressed this concern. Though with doomageddon in vogue, not many people are listening.

As Mr. Grant observed recently: "Frostbite victims tend not to dwell on the summertime perils of heatstroke."

What Happened to the Shortage of Skilled Workers Issue?

2009-01-08T17:08:00.000-08:00

Here is an article that appeared in the Halifax Chronicle Herald
Tim

Worker Worries

Province must address impending labour shortage, experts say
By CLARE MELLOR Business Reporter

Jim McNiven hopes the economic downturn doesn’t distract policy-makers from tackling Nova Scotia’s impending labour shortage.

This downturn is cyclical, but a shortfall of workers could have a devastating long-term effect on the province’s economy, the retired Dalhousie University business professor says in a study released Wednesday by the Atlantic Institute of Market Studies.

"The way we have set things up is because we’ve always had a labour surplus in Nova Scotia," Mr. McNiven said Wednesday in an interview.

"Suddenly, we’ve got a shortage and nobody really knows how to deal with this yet, so we better start thinking it through."

The institute is an independent social and economic policy think-tank based in Halifax.
The shift in the balance between supply and demand is already occurring, as both white- and blue-collar job vacancies keep cropping up in Nova Scotia and the rest of Canada.

This year, the number of people retiring from Nova Scotia’s workforce will probably exceed the number of young people entering the workforce, says the study.

By about 2016, the number of people able and willing to work here and in the rest of the country is expected to be smaller than the pool of available jobs.

It will be the first time this pattern has occurred in a century, said Mr. McNiven, who wrote the study with Michael Foster, president of Canmac Economics Ltd., a Lower Sackville consulting firm. Mr. McNiven also works with Canmac

As the trend continues, by about 2026 about one job in every eight will be vacant in Nova Scotia and the rest of the country.

"It is going to continue to be that (way) as far ahead as we can see right now," said Mr. McNiven, a former deputy minister of development for Nova Scotia and a former president of the Atlantic Provinces Economic Council.

A recession temporarily eases labour shortages, but the problem will resurge once the economy recovers, he said.

"Normally, if you have economic growth you are going to have job growth along with it. What happens if you don’t have any have any people to grow? You can’t have the economic growth."
There are three solutions to the problem: Find more people by encouraging a higher birth rate or increasing migration to the province; boost labour productivity; or encourage people to stay in the workforce longer, Mr. McNiven said, suggesting that a mix of the three might the best answer. The institute first started sending out warnings about a labour shortage about 15 years ago, said Charles Cirtwell, the institute’s executive vice-president.

About 18 months ago, the issue began making headlines and spurred national debate, he said.
"People started to talk about the labour shortage as if it was an important significant issue that needed to be addressed," Mr. Cirtwell said.

"Unfortunately, we then we went into a period of economic downturn and now we are getting the same rhetoric that we have had for the last 30 years.

"If we use old solutions for what looks like an old problem; i.e., an economic downturn, all we are going to do is make the bigger problem worse. We will end up subsidizing industries that need to be downsized anyway. There are not going to be 100,000 or 120,000 people to work on the auto shop floor, for example, in Ontario."

2009-01-04T06:22:00.000-08:00

QUIZ

To select top leaders who will lead in an uncertain business environment, you need to understand what does it really mean to be a good leader in your organization? There are certain things all good leaders do, such as communicating effectively, providing direction, instilling trust, etc. But what does that really mean on a day-to-day basis? Take this short quiz and try to match the 10 Things Good Leaders Do with their practical daily applications. See if you know what it REALLY takes to be a good leader!

LEADERS DO:
Listen to Others
Process Information
Communicate Effectively
Instill Trust
Provide Direction
Delegate Responsibility
Cultivate Individual Talents
Motivate Successfully
Build Personal Relationships
Facilitate Team Success

HOW LEADERS DO IT:
Keeps promises
Is a patient, helpful, effective coach
Solicits ideas, suggestions and opinions from others
Shows consideration for the feelings of others
Identifies the core element of an issue
Creates an atmosphere of team cooperation over competition
Covers an issue effectively without overdoing it
Keeps focus on big picture while implementing details
Gives others authority to independently fulfill responsibilities
Gives recognition to producers of high quality work

Answers to the Quiz
Listen to Others -- Solicit ideas, suggestions and opinions from others
Process Information -- Identify the core element of an issue
Communicate Effectively -- Cover an issue thoroughly without overdoing it
Instill Trust -- Keep promises
Provide Direction -- Keep focus on big picture while implementing details
Delegate Responsibility -- Give others authority to independently fulfill responsibilities
Cultivate Individual Talents -- Is a patient, helpful, effective coach
Motivate Successfully -- Give recognition to producers of high quality work
Build Personal Relationships -- Show consideration for the feelings of others
Facilitate Team Success -- Create an atmosphere of team cooperation over competition

Items for this quiz, “10 Things Good Leaders Do” and, “How Leaders Do It” were taken from the 18 skill sets and 70 corresponding survey items in the CheckPoint™ Management Development System. To learn more about this and other assessment tools that can help with the selection and ongoing development of your future leaders visit us at www.KnowYourPeople.ca

HiringSmart Process

2008-12-28T07:07:00.001-08:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

HiringSmart Process

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

When It Comes To People, We Need To Start Measuring What Matters

2008-12-23T11:17:00.000-08:00

Why has the HR function been largely exempt from the process improvements, quality controls and operational accountability that have been in place in every other corner of the organization?

Lean, ISO, Kaizen, Continuous Improvement… these movements are hardly new. They have been the levers that have moved many companies ahead and allowed them to remain competitive in increasingly challenging marketplaces.

Unfortunately, many HR professionals and other business leaders have lost sight of the distinction between Leading Indicators and Trailing Indicators. The evidence is found in the sheer number of programs, initiatives and dollars that target improving employee retention, engagement and satisfaction.

We have lost sight of the fact that these factors are outcomes, trailing indicators. They are the result of other things done well. People stay in their job, are happy and engaged when they fit with their job, click with their manager, respect and feel respected by their coworkers, and feel like they are contributing to something important. If these four key aspects of fit are right and the supporting relationships are strong, then productivity, customer satisfaction and financial performance (not to mention retention, engagement and employee satisfaction) all trend in the right direction. If the aspects of fit and the quality of the relationships are not right, then the opposite outcome is inevitable.

Trying to ‘manage’ turnover, satisfaction and engagement by throwing money and programs at them is tantamount to standing at the stern of a ship and trying to navigate through the narrows by studying her wake. It’s foolish at best.

Better to aim for the desired outcomes by managing the leading indicators: The four aspects of fit and the quality of relationships.

No One Said it Would Be Easy

2008-12-06T09:16:00.000-08:00

Things were going well, you had a grasp of what your organization’s challenges were, or at least you had a good idea of where you needed to go and how you were going to get there. Then you turned on the news. Depending where you live and what part of the world economy your business depends on for your growth, you are currently feeling like you have entered uncharted territory. We are better at tracking hurricanes and storms than predicting what is going to happen next in the economy.

Consider this:
You are seeing gas prices dropping faster than they went up after having made plans to make lifestyle changes to reduce your fuel consumption You are being told that now is not the time to have debt or to look to borrow money while you watch interest rates decline and everything all of sudden is on sale.

You see the concern about how we are going to keep the people that we have shifted from a discussion about retention to a discussion on down-sizing and hiring freezes. As when a hurricane passes through, we are experiencing brief periods of misleading calm before the chaos continues on its path. In today’s economy, surviving the storm has become an organization’s main priority.

The uncertainty that makes quick changes necessary means organizations must rely on their well-trained employees to carry them through. Hard working, focused and engaged employees working together, aware of the latest weather report and confident that they can trust the people around them to do their part are what will guide you through turbulent times. They can help you navigate out of harms way and offer solutions that no one else has thought of to help calm everyone around them.

It is Always About Your People

Nothing is more critical than having competent people and helping them develop the skills necessary to navigate the storm ahead. As we live through these turbulent times making sure your employees have the talent, skill and knowledge is more important than ever. Here are some key things to do – in good times and bad:

Always Look to Improve Your Team: If you are living under a hiring freeze it does not mean stop improving the quality of the team. Now is not the time to protect non-productive team members. Now is the time to take inventory and look to see what you have. Good people are becoming available and organizations that have a Strategic Workforce Plan know what they are lacking on their existing team and are out filling the holes. Be sure managers take the important steps of recruiting for the 4 aspects of fit: Fit with the job, fit with the manager, fit with the team and fit with the organization. Insist on tools that help recruiters ask the right questions and help them make decision based on science instead of guesswork.

Do not assume anything about your employees. Know them better than they know themselves. New tools are available to tell you exactly who is working for you – their competencies, their weaknesses and their goals. Do not decide that you can apply the same management style to everyone and get the same results. A multitude of faces greet you when you walk into the department. They are likely to include four different generations, both genders, and different ethnicities. In the global marketplace, you will find variations even within identifiable groups. It is imperative that you learn what skills your employees have, the skills they are capable of acquiring and what it takes to keep them motivated.

Check the pulse of your key leaders. Are they engaged? A recent study reveals that more than half of senior executives possess “less than ideal emotional connection and alignment” to their organizations. Re-coaching and re-assignment based on the 4 aspects of fit will pay back with higher productivity and greater business results along with happier employees all around.
Have a Strategic Workforce plan and use it. Do not fear adjusting it as necessary. Traveling through a storm is much smoother and less alarming if you carefully map out your route before you proceed, tweak the course as needed, and make sure you have a team of willing and able employees to make the necessary changes as new unforeseen obstacles arise.

HiringSmart Reading List

2008-11-30T06:47:00.000-08:00

This past week has been a rather interesting one for us here at HiringSmart thanks to an article that appeared in the Business Section of the Halifax Chronicle Herald and then re-appeared in other papers across the country. The reporter from the paper tells me that half of the readership of the paper is now reading it online. That makes totally sense when you consider that the article is about how social media is now being used as a recruitment tool. Thanks again everyone for your kind words about our latest media coverage. Together we are getting the message out there that when 70% of the population is at some level disengaged in their work - we need to look for a smarter way to select and manage people.

Also this past week I was asked to recommend my favourite books on the subject of Social Media for beginners. To understand Social Media and recruitment you need to understand the new world of marketing. Attracting candidates is a marketing function - not an HR function.

The New Influencers - A Marketer's Guide to the New Social Media
Paul Gillin, Quill Driver Books

The New Rules of Marketing and PR
David Meerman Scott

Media Rules
Brian Reich and Dan Solomon

Depending on your knowledge level you will learn somthing new from each of these books. If you are looking to understand how it works, read the New Influencers first.

Tim@HiringSmart.ca

HiringSmart In The News

2008-11-22T05:42:00.000-08:00

Here is an article that appeared in the Halifax Chronicle Herald about Recruitment and the new communication tools.

Facebook creeping in as recruiting tool
By BILL POWER Business Reporter, Halifax Chronicle Herald

The resume is out. Facebook is in.

Employers were urged Thursday to abandon some of their ineffective, traditional hiring programs in favour of advances in web communications that have in the last two years dramatically altered the way people — and potential employees — interact.

"Only last year we were hearing about companies prohibiting their employees from going on Facebook, and today we’re seeing some companies turning to this social networking utility in their hunt for skilled workers and to promote internal communications," staffing consultant Tim Brennan said after a workshop with business leaders in Dartmouth.

Recent turbulence in financial markets has created more pressure for small businesses to recruit and retain talented staff, said Mr. Brennan, a partner at Hiring Smart Canada in Halifax.
The company provides strategic workforce planning for small- and medium-sized businesses.
He said the latest research shows traditional hiring methods are falling by the wayside as companies seek out employees who will be a good fit for their organizations.

The traditional resume and interviewing process has been largely abandoned as innovative employers seek out new ways of communicating with and screening potential employers.
"These are the companies that have learned they must fish where the fish are," he said.
With statistics indicating that as many as 70 per cent of employees are apathetic about their work and with the economy in a sad state overall, the staffing consultant said it is essential that companies consider weaknesses in their past hiring strategies.

"Smart companies and employees are learning the world is communicating differently," said the staffing consultant. "The Internet has brought us more than the ability to download a resume."
Companies with a sharp eye on the bottom line are turning increasingly to web technologies to handle their business data, said Michael Reynolds, a business development manager with Liberated Networks in Halifax.

He said it should be a concern to all employers that in the next 10 years about 70 per cent of small- to medium-sized businesses will experience transition.

"A loss of employees is a loss of critical information without some sort of corporate brain in place, which can be anything from a simple spreadsheet to something much more complicated."

Is University Making Us Smarter, Richer and More Competitive?

2008-11-16T08:59:00.002-08:00

Jim Cote and Anton Allahar from the University of Western Ontario have a new book out challenging this notion. The Ivory Tower Blues, A University System in Crisis argues that the usefulness of a BA is over rated. “You’ve got to distinguish between skills and credentials,” they say. “And a liberal arts education is not job training except for being a liberal arts professor.” Many students find this out the hard way, and enter community college after their BA to make themselves more attractive to employers.

The main effect of higher education has been to extend adolescence and dependency. If 50 is the new 60 for older workers, then 30 is the new 20 when we talk about Kidployees. Instead of an education system producing an unskilled high school graduate, it now produces unskilled university graduatesand causes an epidemic of work unpreparedness. Cote adds, “It relates to being coddled and isolated from adult society. A lot of employers are complaining that new graduates aren’t prepared to pay their dues and put in the hard hours.”

The Game of Life - Thank You Milton Bradley

2008-11-11T12:19:00.000-08:00

Milton Bradley introduced The Game of Life more than 30 years ago. At the beginning of each game you must decide: “Will I take the college route or the career route?” Your attitude to this question will vary depending on how real life was played out in your home. In my house, I was expected to go the college route, and I bought into the belief that in the end I would be well ahead on a career path offering more opportunities and higher pay. In the early 80’s that was a reality.

Does This Sound Like Someone You Know Today?

Rick is a nice guy who’s great at sports and computers, but isn’t much for books. His high school marks were good enough to get him into a “second-tier” university. He finds lectures boring, and his term papers are full of grammatical errors. He struggles to formulate an argument that generates any original thought, but continues to muddle through and collect a degree that supposedly prepares him for the new information economy, whatever that is. Rick’s story ends with him asking “Now what?” Due to the staggering debt he has accrued in four years at university, he crashes at his parents’ house until he figures out what he wants to do next.

What advice do you have for Kidployees in this situation?

Universities are full of people like Rick who are there because they’ve been brainwashed into believing that a degree is essential for success. In the 1960’s roughly 10% of high school graduates went on to a degree. Today, it’s 40%. In Canada, only 16% of jobs require a university degree, yet we are pumping out 4 times that. We have created a scenario with two conflicting stories:

On one side are employers who canot find employees, and who are worried that there is no one to replace retiring baby boomers. On the other side are university grads (with an average debt of $42,000+ at graduation) who cannot find work they’re interested in.

Everything Old is New Again

2008-10-27T12:21:00.000-07:00

By Jan van der Hoop

Life is a funny thing. If you hang around long enough you get to see old things come back as emerging trends. At 47, I have seen wide neckties, the Beetle and the Mini Cooper all peak, die and return from the dead. At least one of them should have been left for dead.

I’m also one of the few HR guys my age who can claim to have been in the HR game since the 1970’s (I squeaked in thanks to a summer internship in the ‘Personnel’ department back in ‘79 before the function’s rebranding)… and while I’ve seen my share of fads come and go, the thing that astonishes and disappoints me is how little we’ve managed to gain control over HR’s perennial challenges.

Turnover, loyalty, training, scarcity of the ‘right’ kind of talent, wage demands, staffing challenges and requirements to innovate and boost productivity were all issues then as now. Pick up a forty year old HR Journal and compare the article headlines to last month’s edition… you’d think we were stuck in a doom loop.

Maybe we are.

Or maybe we just don’t do a very good job of carrying tried and true business practices along with us as we lurch from fad to fad.

Half of Workers Don't Fit

2008-10-22T08:10:00.000-07:00

SURVEY

Half of workers don't fit in

WALLACE IMMEN - Globe and Mail

October 22, 2008

Half of working Canadians have trouble fitting in at work, and one-third find it difficult to concentrate on their job, a poll finds.

The on-line survey of 1,013 workers by Ipsos Reid found that 50 per cent agreed with the statement "I don't always fit in well at work." Twelve per cent went further and said they feel "like an outsider" and 3 per cent said they "hate the culture" in their workplace.

The survey found 31 per cent find it difficult to concentrate fully on tasks in their workplace because they are "dragged down by a negative atmosphere at work."

The finding points to the need for employers to pay closer attention to how well potential employees will fit into the organization, and not just look at their experience and skills, said Gail Rieschi, president and chief executive officer of human resources services firm vpi Inc. which commissioned the poll

Do You Know How To Protect Your Company?

2008-10-19T06:32:00.000-07:00

A large company’s HR director used a headhunter to hire a key person who quickly fast-tracked to the top of the organization. The HR director had lingering doubts because the person had been educated internationally and, while the headhunter had verified by phone that the candidate had attended these institutions, they had no way of knowing if the institutions were accredited. Indeed, the degrees could have been purchased from a degree mill and they would not have been the wiser.

Degree mills are shady outfits that sell degrees and transcripts that are not backed up by appropriate study or examinations. Degree mills are prevalent on the internet where they pose as distance learning institutions, but they tend to operate from a mail drop staffed by a skeleton crew. Many claim to be “accredited” by fictitious agencies or have been able to acquire URLs ending in “.edu” to make them look legitimate.

A credential evaluation from Word Education Services (WES) protects you from hiring someone who has obtained their documents from a degree mill. When candidates enter your HiringSmart Portal to complete the first interview online, the educational history page has a direct link to obtain their certification report from WES.

HiringSmart employers are encouraged to ask international job applicants for a copy of their WES credential evaluation, and that headhunters have all such applicants’ educational credentials evaluated.

Forgetting Freedom 55

2008-10-09T10:15:00.000-07:00

For the past ten years researchers have been warning of the future shortage of workers in North America: The mass exodus of Baby Boomers is going to cripple organizations. On paper this looks very real, but reality shows a different story.

Recent Stats Canada studies show that the threat of severe labour shortages is receding as more baby boomers elect not to flee employment for what has come to be known as “Freedom 55.”

Why aren’t they leaving? Stats Can found that there is an increasing desire among those over 55 to continue working: out of interest or financial concerns, a social shift brought on by a tight labour market, skill shortages and the elimination of mandatory retirement. All indications are that the trend of high percentages of older workers in the labour force will continue.

The service industries are the home to more than their share of older workers - 75% - because they are willing to shift careers and continue to contribute by applying their skills in these less physically demanding and/or responsible positions.

When you are considering hiring older workers, you need to look beyond work history at these HiringSmart characteristics:
□ Do they learn quickly and not get caught up in the wrong details?
□ Do they take personal responsibility or accountability for their own actions?
□ Do they have a sense of humour and know how to use it appropriately to defuse stress and conflict, and engage and encourage others?

Hewitt and Associates released the results of an employer survey giving the types of flexible arrangements available to some or all employees. How many are options in your organization?
□ Flexible work hours
□ Compressed schedules
□ Job-sharing
□ Sabbaticals
□ Virtual Work Arrangements

It's How You Learn - Not What You Know

2008-09-28T15:04:00.001-07:00

They are all good at what they do. With training and experience, these stars have become masters of what it is they do. Whatever IT is, IT is done well. Now you want to reward them with a move to management to supervise and mentor other stars.

Why is it that some people can make the leap from being the “doer” of the work to the leader of the other doers and some can’t? The answer lies in the prefontal cortex of their brain - the part directly behind the forehead - the centre of reasoning, problem solving, personality, social interactions and planning.

Findings published in the August issue of Personality and Social Psychology showed that those who do exceptionally well on tests assessing thinking skills of the prefontal cortex consistently obtain high ratings of managerial competence from their supervisors.

Good executive function allows people to manipulate many ideas simultaneously, plan for the future, avoid impulsive actions and to react thoughtfully to novel situations, according to researchers from three major Canadian and US universities.

We include an evaluation of thinking style in the HiringSmartÔ Process by using the Profile XTÔ. It gives insight into the potential Executive Function of the candidate, and becomes a tool that enhances a person’s ability to work with each member of the oganization.

It's How You Learn - Not What You Know

2008-09-28T15:04:00.000-07:00

They are all good at what they do. With training and experience, these stars have become masters of what it is they do. Whatever IT is, IT is done well. Now you want to reward them with a move to management to supervise and mentor other stars.

Why is it that some people can make the leap from being the “doer” of the work to the leader of the other doers and some can’t? The answer lies in the prefontal cortex of their brain - the part directly behind the forehead - the centre of reasoning, problem solving, personality, social interactions and planning.

Findings published in the August issue of Personality and Social Psychology showed that those who do exceptionally well on tests assessing thinking skills of the prefontal cortex consistently obtain high ratings of managerial competence from their supervisors.

Good executive function allows people to manipulate many ideas simultaneously, plan for the future, avoid impulsive actions and to react thoughtfully to novel situations, according to researchers from three major Canadian and US universities.

We include an evaluation of thinking style in the HiringSmartÔ Process by using the Profile XTÔ. It gives insight into the potential Executive Function of the candidate, and becomes a tool that enhances a person’s ability to work with each member of the oganization.

Unusual Job Interviews

2008-09-21T08:11:00.000-07:00

Executives were asked by Accountemps staffing firm to describe the strangest pitches they’ve heard from potential hires. Here are some of their responses:

“An individual told me he was allergic to unemployment.”

“One candidate sang all of her responses to interview questions.”

“One job seeker said he should get the job because he had already applied three times and felt that it was now his turn.”

“One individual said we had nice benefits which was good because he was going to need to take a lot of leave in the next year.”

“A person said he had no relevant experience for the position he was interviewing for, but his friend did.”

“One person brought his mother to the interview and let her do the talking.”

Recruitment in the Video Age

2008-09-14T10:12:00.000-07:00

Looking to attract people under the age of 30 to your workplace? Welcome to the land of YouTube and the increasingly accessible world of Internet video. Video allows you to show the world what it is like to work in your organization and gives candidates an opportunity to connect and picture them selves fitting in. Thinking about putting your own recruitment video online? From our experience creating our own video at www.HiringSmartCareers.ca, here is our tip list;

Keep it Short
2 minutes is the magic number. After 2 minutes most will move on to something else on your site or leave it all together. We know. Our 5 minute video gets watched on average for 2 minutes.

Let Employees Say What They WantYou can’t edit reality.
Your employees need to be allowed to say what it is really like. In our video we asked each participant these questions and then asked them to use part of the question in their answer.Why did you decide to apply with us?What was it like going through the HiringSmart process with our company?Why do you stay at HiringSmart?In one word how would you describe working at HiringSmart?If you were to ask these questions to your people today, what would they tell you? If it is something that you would be scared to put on the internet then you may have just uncovered your biggest problem.

Show, Don't Tell
Bring in a video camera to the office and let people just pick it up and make their own video of co-workers throughout the day. Take a run through the building and show what it looks like. This is more effective than telling prospective recruits that you have a laid back atmosphere.
Know Your MessageDo you want to emphasize a fun atmosphere, lots of advancement opportunities, or promote particular groups, such as women or minorities?

Do It Right
The cost of a good quality video is cheaper than you think. We used Duncan Moss at Moss Media Productions for putting together the final edited version. A little professional lighting can do wonders for the final look.

Promote it Everywhere
Create your own YouTube Channel, attach the videos into your company’s FaceBook group, link to them from your company website, provide links everywhere.Your video will be part of the employment brand promise that is out there on the web just like your product brand is out there. Some will see themselves in your world and others will decide it is not for them. That is the goal – to have candidates self-select themselves out of the process before you hire the wrong fit.

For great examples of other recruitment videos visit our collection at www.YouTube.com/HiringSmart

Missed Opportunties in Systematic Use of Pre-Hire Assessments

2008-09-07T07:58:00.001-07:00

A Case Study

Seven managers selected for a demonstration program in early January were obviously excited as the training began. The hotels they managed had been selected because of relatively high turnover. These managers were among the best in the company, and they expected to get good results using the proven HiringSmart program for the properties they managed. The managers left the training with positive attitudes, eagerly anticipating the process.

Over the next three months, spot checks by telephone found the managers to be “pleased with the system.” They reported “seeing it begin to work.”

However, an audit of the results at the end of May told a different story. Some of the properties had used assessments throughout the five months, but not for every hire. Three locations had entirely abandoned the process by late March, and one property had never even started using the assessments. (They had the applicants complete the assessments, but they never scored them.)

Reasons, explanations and excuses were plentiful. But ultimately it became clear: In a system where local managers enjoyed a great deal of autonomy, and no clear line of authority existed between corporate HR and the properties, managers would only ensure that the program was applied if they believed it was in their self-interest. HR needed buy-in at a deep level by each manager.

Determined to convince both property managers and senior management that the assessment process would work (and hoping to make it a mandatory part of the company’s hiring), the HR department looked to the data for support. What they found should prove very interesting to senior management with profitability a major goal.

Where the assessments had been used in hiring, the new hire failures (they quit or were fired) were reduced by 36 percent by the end of May. Further analysis showed that at the locations not involved in the study, 51 percent of those hired between January 1 and May 31 had failed by the end of May. For the study properties, those hired without use of the assessments had exactly the same failure rate – 51 percent. For those hired using assessment information, however, the failure rate was only 32 percent. These numbers probably underestimate the potential effects of the process since a larger share of the people hired with assessments were hired early in the year and had more time to fail. Still, a turnover reduction of more than one third represents a substantial opportunity to reduce costs.

System wide, with a calculated cost-per-failure of $3,500 or more, and an annual failure rate of over 141 percent among their 400 employees, the ability to reduce failures by 36 percent is a $714,000 per year proposition. Based on the costs of the proposed program, that number reflects a 1700 percent return on investment!

As the program continues over time, the expected improvement in the employee pool, and gains in customer service and productivity should provide additional improvements in profitability.

Resume Lies

2008-09-02T09:12:00.000-07:00

Why do we at HiringSmart believe that Resumes are B.S.? The results of a recent survey conducted by CareerBuilder.com indicate that folks in the IT industry rank third among those who lie most in their resumes. Here’s a look at the other stats, and some of the more outrageous lies hiring managers have unearthed.

Apparently, the temptation to make their resumes stand out from the crowd is too much for some people to resist. For an article about resume fabrications, CareerBuilder.com surveyed hiring managers and workers and found that:

38 percent of those surveyed indicated they had embellished their job responsibilities.
18 percent admitted to lying about their skill set.
12 percent indicated they had been dishonest about their start and end dates of employment.
10 percent confessed to lying about an academic degree.
7 percent said they had lied about the companies they had worked for.
5 percent disclosed that they had been untruthful about their job title.

Some industries are more prone to resume fabrications than others. The hospitality industry reported the most, with 60 percent of employers reporting lies on resumes. The transportation/utilities field was a close second with 59 percent. The IT sector rounds out the top three, with 57 percent of hiring managers saying they uncovered lies on resumes.

The article also listed some of the most outrageous untruths found on resumes as reported by hiring managers. My favorites are:

Candidate claimed to be a member of the Kennedy family.
Applicant invented a school that did not exist.
Candidate listed military experience dating back to before he was born.
Job seeker included samples of work, which were actually those of the interviewer.

The Future of Recruitment in the Financial Sector

2008-08-23T06:34:00.000-07:00

This past week an interesting conversation was started when someone in my facebook friends asked his contacts if we knew anyone who would be interested in becoming a Financial Advisor. His comment was that they need enthusiasm, attitude and energy. Subsequently I asked a recruiter who works within the financial industry "what is the industry got to offer that others do not?"

Here is his response....

Generally speaking the demographics are working very hard against the insurance advisor channel and unless these guys get their sticks off the ice, the banks will run away with their business. Pure economics…after finally learning to read, Johnny graduates from university with student debt around his neck large enough to choke a small Tasmanian village and keep his offspring eating kraft dinner for decades to come.

Along comes insurance company A who says "Johnny come work for us for 100% commission and all you can eat and steal". If you don’t starve to death you will make millions.

At the next kiosk is Bank B who says,"Johnny is that student debt around your neck or a tumor attacking your goiter?"

"I wish", says Johnny, "but it’s student debt"

"Good", says the bank, "come work for us selling insurance and investments for a $30k base and we will make that problem go away"

… years later Johnny wakes up in a cold sweat realizing he had become an indentured servant to the same people who lent him the money to get his BA. Johnny is miserable but at least with the employee discount VISA card, he can feed his family on Lucky Charms, which apparently are magically delicious.

Special thanks to our friend David the recruiter for sharing his observations. I asked if we could re-print what he said and it said "sure, as long as he retains the movie rights".

Tim

Workforce Engagement Continued

2008-08-21T04:19:00.000-07:00

In my post of Aug 3/08, I talked about how 80% of workers were at some level disengaged, and how the traditional hiring system perpetuates the problem by focusing on getting a candidate into a job, not job fit. Here are things that you can do to save our workforce from this creativity and productivity doom loop:

1. Make it easy for candidates to recognize that you are a possible fit for them by delivering your brand promise and keeping it. Making promises will get you more candidates, but you won’t keep them if you can’t deliver what’s expected.

Select interviewees based on attitudes and values rather than resumes. Using the HiringSmart system, capture online the candidate’s attitudes towards work situations, supervisors and coworkers, rather than just where they worked and went to school. (See Resumes are BS)

Understand their Cognitive Abilities. The most engaged employees are in groups where their coworkers share the same cognitive abilities: how they learn, listen, and communicate with others.

Match candidates and managers who fit together. The number one reason people leave jobs is the relationship with their direct supervisor or manager. Understand them both and put them together logically where you can.

Provide the Managers with a Coaching report on the new candidates. Outline what the manager/supervisor needs to do to keep the new employee engaged and productive.

If only 11% of organizations do this, there will be a huge change in the number of people who are disengaged at work. The spin off benefits to society will be staggering. Take a stand now and be one of the Engaged 11!

Study Looks at Generational Divide and Why They leave Their Employer

2008-08-09T06:47:00.000-07:00

A recent study of 2477 Canadians working in various professions to determine attitudes towards work and the factors that lead to high levels of engagement was presented by David Alpin and Associates. The results showed how these factors vary between Kidployees and the mature work force.

In the study they found that Kidployees want it all. If they don’t get what they feel is fair compensation, they’re ready to go searching for a new job. Employers must understand Kidployees’ expectations before they make an offer of employment. The study confirmed HiringSmart’s view that when you over-promise and under-deliver to Kidployees, they won’t give you a second chance.

The Mature Workers are more concerned with ethical issues. 96 percent said they would leave if asked to do something unethical, or if their company was doing something unethical. Secondly, they would accept an “unexpected job offer” if they were dissatisfied with their current job and salary.

Surprisingly, participants in the study over age 50 were less concerned with their level of compensation than with how they were compensated.

Message to employers - be clear about your employment brand in your marketing. Know who you are hiring before you make the decision to offer employment. It much easier to fire before you hire.

Workforce Engagement is Rare

2008-08-03T06:53:00.000-07:00

“80% of the population is at some level disengaged in their work – This is simply wrong”

How did we get to a place where so many people are in careers where they are just going through the motions with little fulfillment and no motivation? The most interesting thing around them is office gossip. Their strongest motivator is the pay cheque.

We’re in this situation because we’ve built a system that is geared to helping people get jobs – not the right job with the right employer. There are books and courses on writing resumes and cover letters, and on how to score in an interview.

Employers are advertising on Monster and Workopolis right next to links that teach candidates how to sell themselves to the employer. It’s all about the sales job – not the job fit.

It’s not candidates’ fault that they use these tools. We encourage them. We tell them that we won’t interview them if they have typos in their cover letters. So they fix the typos, or cut and paste the cover letter that they purchased from a cover letter writing service.

Let’s be honest: our track record for selecting engaged employees is poor. Much like Global Warming, the solution won’t happen overnight, but we all have to do our part. Change starts small and builds momentum. If 11% of the companies out there focus on hiring for fit and engagement, the momentum needed to reverse the track we’re on will start.

Resume Writer Promotes Herself on Linkedin

2008-07-31T04:40:00.000-07:00

This is an actual Summary from a person that I found in Linkedin that lives in the Los Angeles area. Yet another example of what is wrong with the traditional hiring system that depends on resumes as the first entry point to the recruitment process.

Gallup and other surveys report that more than 70% of the people that we meet each day are at some level disengaged in the work that they do. Do you think that this is because the focus is on how t get hired rather than how to match career/jobs and the right people?

SUMMARY FROM PERSON IN LINKEDIN
I've written over 2400 résumés in all fields, and at all levels; over 90% of my clients get positions they want within the first 25 submissions of their résumés.Experienced fiction editor, providing intensive line-editing and coaching to 200 authors, several of whom subsequently sold their books to publishers.Four of my own books have been published: Two novels, one of which was filmed as a TV-movie; a collection of short-short stories; and a nonfiction oral history, which was nominated for the PEN West USA nonfiction book award.

Specialties:
Career counseling, line-editing and coaching, fiction writing and editing, copy-editing, management and administration

90% of Managers in Survey think they are Among the Top 10% of Performers! Now That is Interesting Math

2008-07-26T02:11:00.000-07:00

We Do Think Highly of Ourselves
Do you believe that you are among the top performers in your office? You’re not alone. According to a survey in Business Week magazine, 90 per cent of managers think they’re among the top ten per cent of performers in their workplace. The number is highest amongst senior executives, with 97 per cent considering them selves shining stars. The non-scientific survey of 2000 managers does not take into account that perhaps only top performing managers read their magazine, but you still have to wonder about how can such a large number think they are all the cream of the crop? I wonder how they would respond if we asked them if they were above average drivers on the road as well? In our non-scientific survey at HiringSmart seminars we found that 75 per cent of the workshop participants believe they are above average drivers. Maybe only good drivers come to HiringSmart workshops. It may all be in the definition of what is good or what do we define as talent on the job.

REDIFINING TALENT
Much has been written about “Winning The Talent Wars”, “Managing Talent” and “Finding Your Talents”. There are as many definitions to describe what talent is as there are books about the subject. For our purpose here we will define talent as those people that embody the core values of your organization’s brand, vision and values. True talent in your organization is your brand to your customers and your workers, to everyone. Talent when managed properly does not leave, it attracts others like them. Birds of a feather do stick together. Talent attracts talent.

Sports teams have people who spend every day on the job evaluating talent. Talent Scouts look for talented prospects in the minor leagues while coaches and analysts track every statistic possible. A team of people tape every practice and game for the sole purpose of understanding talent and potential talent. They then interview the player’s coaches, teachers/mentors, parents and others to determine the character of the individual. The ability to play the game is one thing, representing your self and the team, demonstrating fit with the core values of their brand, mission and vision makes the total package labelled a talent. A true talent is always a top performer, but a top performer may not always be a true talent. It all comes down to what you measure and how they fit. In sales a top performer may not get the business the way that the organization wants it secured. They may ignore the core values of the brand, mission and vision in exchange for instant results. The results look good in the “win” column, but the other players are looking to get out if they have to play with this person much longer. Where will that leave the team in the long term?

Sports teams know where the talent gaps are in their organizations & have a General Managers who are responsible for finding talent and integrating it into the team. They don’t limit themselves to what they have. They don’t wait till the end of the season. They certainly don’t wait for the player to retire. They look over the field and go after the ones they want.
Do you evaluate your organization’s talent like a sports team? Do you recruit like a sports team? How clearly defined are the core values of your brand, mission and vision? How are those core values incorporated into the evaluation of talent in the hiring process?

Are you having problems attracting talent? In baseball, the talent wants to play with talent. Consider the New York Yankees: who wouldn’t want to play for the Yankees, a team that is competitive every year and has won more championships than any sports team in any sport? The Yankees have a brand, a mission and a vision. Wearing the pinstripes of the Yankees means something and attracts talent and talent enjoys playing with others who share the same core values.

What is your team’s goal? Win a championship or finish and go home?

What characteristics separates your talented people from the others in your organization?

Here is my action plan to find out:
1. Profile the individuals that best represent the core values of your brand, mission and vision. Think of these people as your “core competents”.
2. Profile your middle group.
3. Finally, examine some of the people that are the furthest from representing the core values of your brand, mission and vision. We will call them your “core incompetents”.

What characteristics are different among these three groups? In each business where we use this process, we find different combinations of important characteristics. This explains why someone can be a marginal player on one team, then move to another team, fit in better, and have a career season.

A Note About Training
What about training in your organization? Sports teams spend more time training than they do playing the game. Sometimes a player is sent to a farm team in the system for future coaching and development. Sports teams recognize that it’s a good investment to spend dollars on training raw talent if he or she has the right attitudes and characteristics to fit in with the future team.

Have you ever noticed that the top players are not the coaches?

Phil Jackson, coach of the Chicago Bulls (eight championships in 12 years), had it figured out. Phil understood his players better than they knew themselves. He knew the “whole person,” and he knew each player needed to be coached on individual terms. After the championship season of 2001, Jackson was quoted as having said, “coaching is winning people over.” He understood winning them over, one player at a time.

Benchmarking Top Performers Works

2008-07-19T10:46:00.000-07:00

Thanks to new technology, a travel agency has seen significant shifts in how they do business and who their customer is. These changes have created a need to understand which characteristics matter most in the new travel agent.

Study 1: Performance Issues
The travel agency's first study covered a period of nine months. Its intent was to identify trends based on performance data and the relationship of the trends to the overall job match percentage as part of their program with the ProfileXT® assessment tool. The study included 153 sales agents who had finished a trial employment period.

Using a job match pattern developed with the ProfileXT®, the travel agency decided that 76 percent represented a good overall job match score. To arrive at the score, the agency chose top performers based on their weekly sales average. Ten of these top-ranked employees averaged 76 percent on overall job match, or competencies that travel agency managers wanted to see. Ten bottom performers averaged 69 percent. Sales for top performers averaged five times greater than for bottom performers.

Highlights:
•The top 10 sales agents' weekly sales average was $2,648• The bottom 10 sales agents' weekly average was $482• The difference between the two averages is $2,166 weekly. • For every dollar a bottom performer earned, a top performer earned $5.50.• Using the overall match on the assessment, replacing a poor sales performer with a top sales performer would result in a sales increase of $2,166 per week, or 349 percent.

Study 2: Turnover Issues
The travel agency's turnover study covered a period of 12 months and included 181 sales agents. Managers gathered turnover rates throughout the study period. Before the study began, turnover was 28 percent.

Managers developed a job match pattern using the ProfileXT® and found 60 top performers with a job match percentage of 75 or greater. They matched the results of the entire group of 181 workers against the pattern, and then used the same pattern in the employee selection process. At the end of the study period, turnover had dropped from 28 percent to 16 percent.

Highlights;
•Reduction in turnover: 43 percent• Average cost of hiring: $15,000• Cost of 28 percent turnover (51 people times $15,000): $765,000• Cost of 16 percent turnover (29 people times $15,000): $435,000• Savings: $330,000 in reduced hiring costs.

During the study period, the agency hired 181 new employees. Twenty-nine left, reducing the turnover rate from 28 percent to 16 percent and giving the agency the $330,000 in savings.
Summary In both areas of study, the job match pattern proved to be a valid and reliable means of selection and retention.

Job Fit vs Candidate Fit

2008-07-13T03:15:00.000-07:00

What makes HiringSmart different? We call it Job Fit.

Job Fit is the ability to match people based on the critical success attributes of the role, fit with the manager, fit with the job, fit with the team and fit with the organization. Conversely, the traditional hiring process supports Candidate Fit, based on an individual’s experience, educational qualifications, age, gender or race. It does so by screening an applicant’s cover letter and résumé for the same key words found in the job description and requirements.

The importance of establishing Job Fit was best evaluated by the Harvard Business Review when they conducted a study on 360,000 individuals over a 20 year period. There were some alarming discoveries that challenge the current recruitment practices of most organizations, proving that experience and educational qualifications are not statistically reliable predictors of future high performance in a role. The Harvard Business Review stated:

“Experience is usually a principle criterion for making hiring decisions…… Yet we found little difference in performance between these experienced individuals and those with no experience. The person with no experience, given training and supervision, is as likely to succeed as the person with two or more years of experience”

“There is an old saying that 20 years’ experience reflects one year’s bad experience repeated 20 times. Our findings confirm that this is often the case. Too many people cling tenaciously to their unsuitable jobs and do just well enough not to be fired. Thus they accumulate years of “experience”."

“As a value to be cherished and encouraged in our society, education cannot be challenged. The use of formal degrees as the criterion for judging someone’s potential effectiveness in a …job, however, must be challenged….The results of our probing show that people with little education can do the job as effectively and as readily as those with college degrees.”

The study goes on to state:“In view of these findings, an obvious question arises: If these long used criteria are invalid, what criteria can industry use to better predict job performance? The answer is: criteria that make a better match between the person and the job.”

The ability to establish Job Fit by identifying and quantifying the critical success attributes of a role (such as the mental demands, the environment, behavioural traits and the occupational interests), allows organizations to increase the success rate of employing and promoting future high performers by up to 300%.

Candidate Fit is best demonstrated by looking at what current job boards are offering candidates as tools to get hired. The biggest failing of job boards today is that candidates can set up their automated responses to score well and move them to the top of the stack of candidates because they know how to play the game, not because they are the best Job Fit. Look what HCareers shares with candidates to help them play the game;

"A résumé peppered with words like abracadabra, alakazam, hocus pocus, presto-chango, and shazam probably won’t do much to help you make it on to the hiring manager’s shortlist. Even “please” – the magic word your mom probably prefers – isn’t guaranteed to do the trick. But did you know there are some “magical” words you can use in your résumé that are almost certain to make recruiters and HR personnel sit up and take notice? Whether they’re picked up by electronic scanning equipment or by the discerning eye of a human recruiter, judicious use of these keywords in your résumé, cover letter, and other application materials are a great way to make sure you rise to the top in your quest for your dream job."

The traditional hiring practices created this problem and websites such as HCareers are helping the candidates to exploit the failings of the traditional system. This is from the HCareers website help page for candidates;

“Most recruiters and hiring managers have to sift through a lot of ho-hum résumés. When you’re tasked with the responsibility of sorting through a few metric tons of paperwork each week, you tend to rely on a few shortcuts to facilitate the process. Some firms actually use electronic scanners to sort through the piles of application materials they receive. These devices are configured to pick up on the presence of a number of pre-defined words and phrases.”

“Other firms train their HR personnel to identify and set aside the résumés that include certain keywords. According to Pat Kendall, professional résumé writer and job search expert, you can exponentially increase your chances of making it to the next phase of the selection process if your résumé includes the kind of keywords they’re looking for.”

Pay for Résumé Re-writing
Job boards have found a new revenue stream. Job Boards sell employers online advertisements in exchange for quality candidates. To ensure that the employers get quality applicants, job boards now provide a service to candidates to have a professional re-write their résumé for them. Monster has Résumé Expert Martin Buckland of Elite Résumé and Strategic Career RE moderating forums in their new Career Message Boards. Along with how to write the killer cover letter and résumé you can also get coaching on what to say in an interview so the recruiter with pick you over the others.

Another interesting tool that is now polluting the recruitment world is Academic Skill Conversion software. They take a student’s academic history and translate it into transferrable skills that better suit the résumé keyword selection process. Are you seeing a problem here? Key word searches were a good idea at one time, but now they are nothing more than just another tool to be used by the candidate to get to the top of the list. How does that help an employer find the right attitudes and behaviours that create job fit?

They simply don’t. The answer is get rid of the résumé system NOW. From the perspective of the recruiter, the traditional résumé hiring system has been damaged, not enhanced. Time for a fresh approach – Time for HiringSmart.

Why Should Someone Work For You?

2008-07-05T10:40:00.000-07:00

Seven words (or less) that will get you the best employees

In the future, employers will be asked this question more and more because people entering the job market have two characteristics that make it increasingly difficult to find quality employees;
There are more jobs than people of this age group to fill them.

The people who are available are more interested in lifestyle and less likely to “take what they are given”.

It’s a job-seekers market.

How do you compete for recruits? Easy – if you can describe in seven words or less what makes your company uniquely compelling. If you can’t, prospects will be confused about why they should even apply, let alone accept your offer.

Few companies are familiar with the process of answering this question. Those who are know it’s important to focus on what the customer (i.e. the prospect) is buying because that’s the answer. Is it your product, your management approach to learning or the clients they get to work with?

Companies that can answer the questions “Why you?” and “What’s in it for me?” uniquely, in seven words or less, will win the battle for the highest value employees.

The Sport of Business

2008-06-29T02:15:00.000-07:00

Recently, I noticed that every sports channel on cable TV has a program called “The Business of Sports”, or something similar. In the program, they uncover stories behind the scores and statistics. I like to look at it the other way: let’s call it “The Sport of Business”.

Sports teams have people who spend every day evaluating talent. Scouts look for talent in the minor leagues; coaches and analysts track every statistic possible. A team of people tapes every practice and game for the sole purpose of understanding talent and potential talent!

Sports teams know where the gaps are & have a General Manager who is responsible for finding talent and integrating it into the team. They don’t limit themselves to what they have. They don’t wait till the end of the season. They certainly don’t wait for the player to retire. They look over the field and go after the ones they want!

Do you evaluate your talent like a sports team? How does your performance appraisal system work? Does it work to improve the team, or is it just something endured to get an annual raise?

Imagine this: my daughter plays on a hockey team. Their rink does not have a scoreboard, just a clock. When the buzzer sounds, the game is over. The players return to the dressing room, and about twenty minutes later the referee comes in and tells them who won and who lost. Doesn’t this sound silly? How is this different than your appraisal system?

When you think talent in sports, do you think Tiger Woods? How many “Tiger Woods” do you have on your team? Do you pay them like Tiger Woods? Top performers in sports earn four-to-five times more than average performers. Is it like that at your company? Is there motivation to be a top performer or do you have team members who are happy to make what they made last year? Are top performers compensated like the superstars they are?

Are you having problems attracting talent? In baseball, the top performers want to play with the best. Consider the New York Yankees: who wouldn’t want to play for the Yankees, a team that is competitive every year and has won more championships than any sports team in any sport? Top performers enjoy playing with other top performers. What is your team’s goal? Win a championship or finish and go home?

I grew up in Brantford, Ontario - the same community as Wayne Gretzky. I learned something at a young age: some people have more talent than others and some people have a LOT more. Why are top performers top performers? There are many theories...but I am not a big fan of theories. I like action!
Here is my action plan:

1. Profile top performers in your organization.
2. Profile your middle group.
3. Finally, examine some of your poor performers.

What characteristics are different among these three groups? In each business where we use this process, we find different combinations of important characteristics. This explains why someone can be a marginal player on one team, then move to another team, fit in better, and have a career season!

What about training in your organization? Sports teams spend more time training than they do playing the game. Sometimes a player is sent to a farm team in the system for future coaching and development. Sports teams recognize that it’s a good investment to spend dollars on training raw talent if he or she has the right attitudes and characteristics to fit in with the future team.

Have you ever noticed that the top players are not the coaches?
Phil Jackson, coach of the Chicago Bulls (eight championships in 12 years), had it figured out. Phil understood his players better than they knew themselves. He knew the “whole person,” and he knew each player needed to be coached on individual terms. After the championship season of 2001, Jackson was quoted as having said, “coaching is winning people over.” He understood winning them over, one player at a time.What is each player’s role on your team? Coach? Star forward? Fourth-line grinder trying to hold on to the last spot on the roster, hoping someone with more talent is not just around the corner to take their job?

If you are not sure, maybe now is the time to find out.

The SECOND Biggest Threat to Business!

2008-06-24T06:03:00.000-07:00

In a survey of 850 executives, two-thirds said that their organization’s inability to attract and keep the best people is the second biggest threat to their business. The biggest threat is competition. Wait a minute! If your organization consistently had the ability to attract and keep the best people wouldn’t this give you a competitive edge and support solving problem number one?

This month’s issue of Smart Stuff features excerpts from the book, 40 STRATEGIES FOR WINNING IN BUSINESS by Bud Haney and Jim Sirbasku.

The only way to compete is with the best people, try some of these ideas to manage and keep the best:

Build a recruiting strategy that operates all the time - not only when people leave. If you shop for talented people only when you see turnover, you will be presiding over a system where jobs either stay open too long or you hire in haste (and repent later). Remember this equation: Open positions = poor productivity. Poor productivity = both customer and employee dissatisfaction. Jobs left open too long = a financial drain, not a savings. Jobs left open for extended periods also may create even more openings.

Be a matchmaker. Make sure of the person-to-job match from the very start; do not hire someone who "sort of" works and hope for the best. Do not rely on your instincts. Do not hire someone because he or she is charming or just like you. Smart business leaders use assessments to guide them.

Know your employees. Find out what their dreams are, and help them realize those dreams by developing their skills. Knowing what they want starts at recruitment and continues throughout an employee’s career.

Cross-train. When superb workers know how to do many things, you can place your employees strategically. Challenging your best people in this way lets both people and organizations grow.

Find creative ways to reward excellence. If the bonus pool is limited, you can make the award more meaningful by giving it to those whose performance is stellar. Spreading it out equally among all employees, even those that did not perform so well, diminishes the meaning. Your best people expect to be recognized. Also, be innovative beyond financial rewards. If you know what your employees value, figure out ways to see they get it. Some ideas: Extra time off, challenging training for new jobs, flexible hours.

Resumes are BS!

2008-06-24T06:01:00.000-07:00

This past month a question was asked in the social network www.LinkedIn.com by Jennifer Ruano, a recruiter in the Los Angeles area working in the Healthcare and Financial industry:

“As I was sorting through 214 candidate profiles on one requisition (95% of which were not qualified), I rubbed the fog out of my eyes and thought... "whew... that was an hour of my life I won’t get back." But it got me thinking. How many of us scan read a resume and are we as thorough as we should be? Do we quickly dismiss a resume that we should be taking a closer look at? “

Let’s start with the problem of a system that sends Jennifer candidates, 95% of whom are not qualified. This is a marketing problem. Obviously her current attraction strategy is not attracting the right people and she is spending time, energy and resources processing poorly matched candidates. She is attracting the wrong people in the wrong places and making it as easy as possible for the wrong people to apply by allowing them to enter the game by simply sending in a résumé. With most online job boards it is as easy as checking off a number of employment opportunities from a list of thousands and clicking the “Submit Résumé” button. Instantly up to 100 employers now have to process the résumé that was sent with no investment of thought by the candidate.

The second part of Jennifer’s question is “do we quickly dismiss a resume that we should be taking a closer look at?” Just think about it, how often have you been disappointed by someone who had all the right credentials and looked great on paper? The reality is that the content in résumés is at best an exercise in creative writing. All we can learn from a résumé is a person’s education level, skills and experience – the least reliable predictors of success in a job. And research supports this, consistently showing that we hire candidates on the basis of their credentials and experience, and then fire them because they “didn’t fit” or couldn’t be effective in the organization’s culture. The truth is that résumés miss the mark completely on what we need to know in order to hire the right person for our company.

Start measuring what matters

So how do we measure what matters? Instead of spending so much time trying to capture the “WHAT” of the candidate (WHAT work experience they have, WHAT education they completed, and WHAT their accomplishments are) we need to be capturing the “WHO” and “HOW” of the candidate.

We need to understand more about WHO the candidate really is (the attitudes, values and beliefs they live by) and HOW they interact with others (including HOW they perform in a team environment, HOW they deal with customers, and HOW they problem solve). These are the factors that determine fit within a company and that determine job success.

Change your results

So how do we get better results from the people we hire? For starters we need to change the way we attract and select candidates. HiringSmart offers a revolutionary résumé-free, on-line hiring process that helps companies understand "who" they’re hiring and "how" the candidate will perform, so they can learn to better predict "fit" with their organization. Our unique online application makes it easy for candidates to apply and even easier for companies to assess whether the candidates may be right for the job. As companies learn how to hire better people, they also learn how to weed out poor performers, ultimately changing the way people work together in their organization. And the impact can be dramatic - reduced turnover, increased retention and productivity, more satisfied customers and better financial results.

Retired Workers: I Don't Think So

2008-06-14T03:46:00.000-07:00

We are living longer and healthier lives. It is commonly expressed that today's 65 is the new 45! The average just-retired 60-year-old may not want to work 60-hour-weeks any more, but that doesn't mean s/he wants to putter around the garden for the next 25 years, either.Mick Jagger - A role model for the Retired WorkerWhen the Rolling Stones came through our town recently and performed only blocks from our office, lead singer Mick Jagger had just celebrated his 64th birthday. While it might seem amusing that a 60-plus rocker is still going strong - but at a reduced pace - according to the most recent study in aging and retirement, he's not alone.Hart & Associates Management Consultants recently published their annual National Investor, Wealth Management and Real Estate Study and found that 53% of participants in the study expect to work part-time while 6% plan on working full-time in another job when they retire. The study also found that 16% of Canadians intend to spend time volunteering rather than working in retirement and that women are more likely to volunteer than men . Only 24% of the people plan to fully retire and neither work or volunteer.The party's over - go back to workEveryone has a story about why they need to continue working. For some it is that in the late 70s and early 80s an insurance salesman/financial advisor came to them with a plan whereby if they signed up now and put $$$ in a plan that they could retire at 55. Many bought into this notion of early retirement either to find that they were unable to put enough aside, or that circumstances simply made it impossible to continue. Others simply never planned for it at all.Poverty and the single women45.6% of single women 65+ live at or below the poverty line and cannot afford to stop working while for men is much less and issue. Many women raised families with little or no support from a spouse or second income and/or entered the workforce at a later age and had less time to accumulate the wealth required for a lengthy retirement. Housing costs and the unexpected bumps in heating costs, gasoline, healthcare and other essentials has eroded their savings. Another reason that women over 65 are more likely to live in poverty than men is access to pensions. There are different types of pension plans and women fare less well in all of them. Private pensions are tied to employment. Not only are fewer women eligible for pension payments, they receive, on average, slightly short of half the compensation as men the same age do.Some people like what they do. Really.Many retired workers are not ready to retire. They are not bored, especially the late starters who entered the workforce late because of raising their children. Others need and want to get out of the house. Not everyone wants to be a volunteer. For those in your community who are looking for social interaction, want to make a contribution, and are looking for a limited work hours so combine work with leisure time, here are three management tips to follow;1. Work with their needs - understand why they are returning to the workplace and recognize what they are prepared to do and what they have no interest in. You many be surprised what you learn. That 35 years' experience in accounting may be the last thing that they want to use in their new retirement career. This may be the time for them to explore a hidden interest in computers, interior design or Classical music. You never know until you ask.2. Design work hours - Much like the kidployees, retired workers have other things in their lives than working for you. If you can co-ordinate the hours to suit their schedules you will have happy productive team players3. Don't burn them out - It is too easy to see this person as the best producer on your team. They come in early when you ask, and stay late when you need them. Be careful not to fall in the trap of depending on them to fill the gap in your talent pool by overextending them. When the work feels too much like work you will lose them.Finding the Retired Worker in your community -To find the semi-retired or retired worker in your community, go to where they are rather than trying to get them to come to you. Local coffee shops at 10AM are a good start. Those with time on their hands and a need to get out of the house will be with those who share the same need. Activity centers, shopping malls and special events that cater to seniors such as Seniors Expos and other trade shows are great places to meet your next employee. One client of ours has made the plunge into recruiting retired workers with great success in Canada by visiting the local coffee shop and handing out business card size invitations to apply for part-time work on-line at their HiringSmart Web portal.The Silver Tsunami"Oh that is all nice and fine for others, but the people that we are looking for are not on the Internet".Well I've got news for you. In Canada as well as the US Internet usage studies are uncovering some very interesting data that disputes the claim that older workers are not "wired". The numbers in the US and Canada are very similar with Canada having a higher acceptance of the Internet. In the US 58% of 50-64 year olds are on-line regularly while in Canada the number is closer to 70%. There is a wave of people who are slightly younger then retirees and who are vastly more attached to the on-line world. They are unlikely to give up this means of communication and will transform the wired senior stereotype.Of those who do use the Internet the number one activity is e-mail followed by basic transactions that save time, such as travel tickets, books and other gift items. The fear of credit card and personal information being entered into web portals as being a risky proposition have been dealt with and now more than 82% of the seniors with Internet access say that they make purchases on-line. This is higher than the 18-27 age group!Who invented the Internet in the first place?Bill Gates just turned 51. Need I say more?