The Bidding War for Talent - When Motivation is More Than Money.

The war for talent is a term coined by Steven Hankin of McKinsey & Company in 1997.  It has since become a cliché. It's used as both a rallying cry and a cause for concern for HR and recruiting professionals everywhere.  Whilst the "war" metaphor is overused and without appreciation of the nuance of hiring it has become popular to look upon hiring people as either winning or losing.

In the current labour market certain skill-sets are at a premium.  The current demand for developers/programmers/software engineers, call them what you will, in both the tech giants and the smallest of startups has led to an increase in the cost and the style of hiring.  Scarcity or the perception of scarcity has meant that salaries have increased.  This is even happening to the point that certain programming languages become annually fashionable, "Ruby was so last year darling! It's all about Python now!".

In support of the notion of that scarcity a raft of tools have begun to appear and enabled a new breed of recruiting professionals - the Sourcers.  In the new paradigm more weight is given through the sifting of information and "finding" is the goal, occasionally it seems, at the expense of hiring.  The market seems to support this as more companies are created to solve the "problem" of talent discovery. In turn salaries rise and more tools appear.

I am in favour of developers being paid a fair wage for their work.  I'm even more in favour of the more skilled coders be paid better.  In my time as a recruiter so far I've personally hired developers on basic salaries as low as £25,000 to as high as £2,000,000 (really!).   However, there's a problem in how the industry is accessing this skill set.  Increasingly, recruiting departments facing the need for volume have dehumanised the very people they are seeking to attract to the point of commodification.  This seems to have affected developers even more so as the traditional HR departments demonstrated their lack of understanding of their technical staff.  In the climate of scarcity and increased demand the recruiting industry has responded by shifting the easiest lever to pull, money.

This seems to make sense at the surface level.  Surely people will be more motivated to apply for a new job if the salary is higher than their current remuneration?  The latest aberration of this mindset is the online auction for talent, Hired.com.  Here recruiters effectively bid for the opportunity to interview candidates. There's even urgency injected in the form of a time limit on the "auction".  Here's the real problem for me, any tool that changes the behaviours of an organisation it is being utilised by is also changing or at least reflecting a different culture.  For the candidate who is looking for a role having a rabid pack of companies compete for you may seem flattering but the truth is in this eBay of humans the "product" being sold is the very people Hired has ostensibly been set up to help.

Edward L. Deci is a Professor of Psychology and Gowen Professor in the Social Sciences at the University of Rochester, and director of its human motivation program.  Deci has conducted a multitude of experiments on human motivation and uncovering the "why" of why we do the things we do.  Far from agreeing with the prevailing thought that explicit financial reward was a motivator for increased performance he found the opposite "When money is used as an external reward for some activity, the subjects lose intrinsic interest for the activity".   The basic certainties we hold about labour and "work" haven't really been updated since the industrial revolution.  The initial boost of productivity offered in response to the external motivation of money soon wears off - to hold interest and that increased productivity there has to be something more.

Employers who base their attraction strategy solely on a financial driver are missing the opportunity to attract potentially better suited candidates to their roles.  Whilst is may be true that working in a larger organisation may offer a higher financial reward this may come at the cost of other areas of reward - the ability to make a personal impact on the product, recognition or even a sense of personal pride.  As an employer who competes only on price you always run the risk of being priced out of the market yourself.  A developer role at a games company may be fulfilling and a passion project for someone, a larger games studio can afford to pay more and cherry pick individuals, however when those skills suddenly become important to an investment bank with even deeper pockets individuals motivated by money can be further tempted away.

Corporate recruiters have blindly accepted that the way to engage the job seeking community is the price tag and minimal description of the role or why it matters to the larger organisation.  As recruiters we are taking away some of the best ammunition we have in this "War for Talent".  If you can communicate what a candidate will be doing, who they'll work with, why that's important and how they'll go on to contribute to the future of the company you might just see a greater engagement from those that see the ad.

If winning isn't just ownership of the "resource" but winning the engagement of a person, the "hearts and minds" if you will how can we compete?  The answer is to know your true value proposition.  You might even want to consider talking to your current employees and asking what made them join. Tell your potential hires why they might like to work for you, not just that you have a spare desk and have priced their skills in relation to your competitors.  Venues like auction sites are not the answer for true long term engagement, for that we need to make sure we are creating roles that people would love to do - that they are paid fairly in relation to their peer group and rewarded for the value they add should be a given.

“You can only become truly accomplished at something you love. Don’t make money your goal. Instead pursue the things you love doing and then do them so well that people can’t take their eyes off of you.” - Maya Angelou

The Mis-Match of Algorithmic Recruitment

It's the not so distant future.

A mobile app linked to a wrist mounted wearable wakes you, at precisely the right moment.  It monitors your sleep patterns and pulse rate and greets you each morning with a chipper "Go get 'em!".  You dress and get ready to leave the house, the fridge has emailed to remind you that you'll need to buy milk on your return.  You lock the door behind you with a swipe of your cell phone, keys are no more.  Outside, you step into a self driving car and take a different route to the usual commute - the car knew about the traffic before you did.  You arrive at work and boxes are moved into the previously vacant office next to yours.  You weren't aware of a new co-worker. There were no interviews. They were algorithmically selected from the passive talent pool.  Kept warm on a diet of Pinterest photos of the office and Youtube videos of kittens selected to be the most humanising for the Mega Corp you happen to work in...

As far as predictions of the future go the vision I offer above is hardly advanced.  The technology exists for the wearables, the Internet of Things and the self driving cars, it's just that last part that seems incongruent.

In the growing adoption of technology for HR departments seeking to differentiate their sourcing efforts, the idea of algorithmic matching is seen to be the magic bullet in the "War for Talent".  Beyond the clichéd war metaphors and gullibility of HR Tech buyers is the future of recruitment to be left to the robots?

Technology has made the discipline of talent acquisition better.  We've moved far beyond the data entry and green screen databases of a decade ago.  As a modern workforce migrates to online services so their digital footprint increases making them all the more easy for the new breed of sourcers to find.  Now the future, according to some, looks set to be the automated addition of new workers and a touted increase in the skill of selection.  I'm no Luddite but I can't help thinking this is a version of a technological utopianism whose primary supporters are those that seek to benefit financially from the adoption of the technology in question.

So many of the products available that claim to have solved matching are the same providers who don't recognise some of the fatal flaws that their products exacerbate. The primary example of this is the reliance on the quality of data on both sides necessary for a match.  The majority of matching systems are parsing CV's and then matching against a job description analysed in the same way.  This is exactly the limited key word matching that these systems say is so weak.  Even when other data are relied upon to beef up the input, suggestions of LinkedIn profiles and even LinkedIn endorsements are laughable. Especially in the case of unverifiable LinkedIn endorsements like mine for "Midwifery" and "Cheese Making".  Of course I'm totally brilliant at both of these things...

Even the more advanced of the matching algorithms that incorporate some elements of semantic search (context of search, location, intent, variation of words, synonyms, generalised and specialised queries, concept matching and natural language processing) are constrained both by the data the candidates provide and the job description or criteria the employer matches against.  Anyone who works in recruiting will be able to quickly see that both of these sources of data are flawed and subject to constant change.  Data in both these areas can be knowingly falsified, incomplete and always out of date.

This data is inherently flawed because people themselves are inherently flawed.  Candidates will always seek to portray themselves in the best light, hiring managers will always add some extra "nice to haves" or even make the work of two people into one mythical job description.  A matching algorithm is forced to make sense of too many moving parts and results will suffer.

In moving towards this style of recommendation the people in the processes are reduced to the status of commodities.  Subtle nuance is lost and the chance for innovation curtailed by inelastic parameters.  People are not a product.  When Amazon presents you with a book based on your buying preferences it has only to reckon with your fickle, transient tastes.  A book doesn't reject you because it feels it's too far to get to your house, or because the other books on the shelf don't feel your reputation is strong enough, a book doesn't want to work from is own home or have a counter offer from a series of rival readers...people do.

Recruiting is a constant stream of edge cases.  Whilst a matching engine might work for less complex roles at large numbers, it won't help you compete in winning that all important "War for Talent" you were so desperately spending your way out of.  The current level of technology is no match for the ability of a good recruiter.  This is not an indictment of the technology, it's an acknowledgement of the greater problem that exists in the institutionally flawed HR departments and Recruiting processes the world over.  Using a tool like this to gain another datapoint to inform decision making is a valid use - it's the shame of HR Tech that every new tool is paraded as "the answer".  If the industry could wean itself off it's obsession with the novel and shiny we might be able to tackle some of these issues at the root cause and realise that the skills we learnt whilst toiling at our green screens might not be entirely redundant.

"They'll buy anything" - 10 steps to selling terrible software to Human Resources Departments

There's so much investment in HR and Recruiting tech at the moment there's never been a better time to monezite your confirmation bias, join the chorus of "Recruitment is broken!" and release a tool that ignores the "human" in Human Resources!  

Now all that stands in your way are the shadowy, purse-string wrangling HR directors.  How can we get past them?  Here are ten things you can do right now to start up, cash in, sell out and bro down!


STEP ONE - Say "It has an algorithm".

First of don't worry if you don't know what an algorithm is, neither do the majority of buyers of HR software.  What they will know is that the internet services and companies they have heard of all have algorithms.  They all use Google and the more savvy amongst them might use terms like "matching" or "ranking", in these cases it's best to just keep saying that your new tool has an algorithm and to look knowingly at them.  Remember it's always good practice to use the strength of your algorithm to cover up horrific design choices.  If a prospective customer is thinking about buying another tool be sure to belittle it and claim that the ugly, clunky interface you preside over is "hardcore computer science".


STEP TWO - Hold them to a lengthy "implementation period".

Remember the good old days when we all sold databases and they had to buy hardware and software to make it (sort of) work? Sadly the wealth of better software in other areas has made HR buyers expect more before signing those contracts.  Help indemnify your company against any expected or promised service levels by insisting on a lengthy "implementation period".  In almost every other discipline software is now sold as a service, like a utility with data stored on servers in the cloud.  Tell your buyers this is insecure and "a risk". The mention of "risk" is the kryptonite of the HR department.


STEP THREE - Don't have a API - Make them pay extra if they want to use their existing data or integrate with another tool!

After you've held your buyer to the customary length implementation period it's time to deliver half of the functionality they originally requested.  Be sure to leave out any particular features that they liked when they saw the software as these can be added later as "modules" and priced accordingly. Similarly if they'd like to import their existing candidate or employee database make sure that you charge for this.  Remember - Compatibility is for wimps! Why would you want to let them use another tool that's better than yours? Make exporting that data just as difficult as importing it was!


STEP FOUR - They'll want "analytics" - Add a graph!

If you've been to any of the conferences you'll have heard that "Big Data" is the next cool thing to have.  You should start by dropping into conversation that your tool/app/rebranded ATS has a "Big Data approach".  Don't worry about getting called out on this, like "algorithm" it's one of the #HRTech magic words.  You will however have to ensure that you provide some "analytics" to your users.  It's important to either not measure anything that will encourage the user to ask more questions or to make generating a report on the data so impregnable and counter intuitive that the user will rely on the templates included and not be encouraged to expect anything that is of real use.


STEP FIVE - Advertise it as "White-labelled" - Allow them to upload a low resolution jpeg of their logo.

"Culture" is so hot right now. When selling to HR and Recruitment buyers tell them that your software can help them "differentiate" themselves and "level the playing field".  For most of your buyers "culture" will probably boil down to them uploading a photo of their office and a logo.  Let them do this and maybe even let them link to their Pinterest page.  If your buyer talks a lot about their unique culture remember to always refer to candidates and applicants as a "talent pool" they'll love it.


STEP SIX - Copy a competitor's tool.

There are so many products available for recruiters and HR professionals out there at the moment that there will undoubtedly be a tool that does the same thing as the software you're selling, probably better too.  It's not enough just to rely on buyer ignorance or indifference.  In some cases it will be prudent and ensure the sale, to implement a "sort of" feature that does "almost" the same thing.  Don't worry that it's not as good as the original tool you've copied you'll still hit the requirement on the buyer's checklist and there won't be any comeback as they are invariably not the ones who'll have to use it!

The best thing about these MSF's (minimum saleable features) is that with enough of them you can call the resultant Frankenstein's monster a "platform" and make even loftier claims.  Whilst the most prudent recruiters will use the right tool for the right job it will pay you to remember that the buyers aren't the users here and if you can sell them the dream of seamless interaction they'll be nice and blinkered later on when the reality is a cobbled together hotchpotch of "almost tools".


STEP SEVEN - Say it's "Social".

The "social" bandwagon is still trundling along nicely and whilst the forerunners have already realised it takes time and a personality to be truly social, there's still money to be made from those wanting a shortcut.  A link to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn should be enough, remember the best thing is that "social" can't be owned by a service provider, instead it relies on the user investing time and authenticity - if it fails it's never the tools fault! Brilliant!

It's important as a vendor to only talk about "social" in very broad terms, HR departments are a flighty bunch and it was only last week they had all banned the use of any social media at all now the other extreme is true and all their current "social tools" spit out and reiterate their job postings to the few that follow them.


STEP EIGHT - Reinvent the wheel - take a free tool they are already using and make them pay for it!

When adding features it's important to monetize tools that HR and Recruitment currently use for free. Skype and Google Hangouts are both free and been in wide usage for years by interviewers all over the world, cost benefits abound and these are saleable.  Of course you'll have to argue that Skype and Hangouts are of inferior quality or use value to your shiny new tool, you can do this by adding weird functionality like recorded responses. Video interviewing is great because is allows a human connection, let's get rid of that and have people record their answers to posed questions! Thus robbing the emotional interaction and reducing the tool to some voyeur's delight and reducing the recruiter to a passive couch potato condemned to watching the worst reality TV show ever imagined...


STEP NINE - Force the customer into your workflow.

Despite their protestations that they all want to be unique and different, it's never stopped a vast number of companies forcing their candidates into redundant form filling and duplication of effort.  As the software provider you should only care about the buyer, candidates should be made to apply in triplicate if it so pleases the bill payer.  Remember you'll only actually reveal the absurd workflow or user interaction after the buyer has signed, users may end up doing insane things like emailing resumes to themselves but after you've got your money that's their lookout.  Regardless that the client will be wanting to differentiate themselves to prospective employees it's less time and hassle to make them all leap through the same hoops.  If your tool does include candidate contact feel free to include some email templates - it's best to make these non-editable and send at random points just for fun...


STEP TEN - DO NOT talk to anyone who will actually use the tool during requirements capture.

This is the most important step.  Before you sell anything to anyone, before you even start to build any software, don't under any circumstances talk to a user from HR or Recruitment.  Most people who will eventually use your tool will actually want to be saved from repetitive tasks or data entry, they'll want a tool that enhances their abilities, they'll have a list of workarounds that they currently endure with existing tools and they might even have ideas of their own.

Whilst these would result in a more useable tool they won't necessarily be attractive to the buyers in HR (who won't be using the tool you're building), the potential investors who will want to buy your tool or even confirm your own bias as to why "Recruitment is broken". It's best to completely disregard potential users of your software and applicants/those who will be used by the software.


Armed with this sage advice you'll be well prepared to produce a tool that will garner a lot of attention and sizeable investment whilst adding almost nothing to an organisations ability to hire or retain people.  Remember there's no individual or human interaction that can't be successfully repressed or ignored by a well implemented process or tool!

The Talent Hacker's Manifesto

Nick Marsh of Makeshift recently introduced the term Talent Hacking.  His contention was that hiring was broken and there existed a movement towards a new way of thinking.  How did it come to this?  Why is it that the world of recruitment can be called out as broken with no argument to the contrary?

Long ago in the mists of time and still the case at some less progressive organisations, recruitment was owned by HR.  From behind the dull-warmth of privacy screens and bloated software that referred to people as resources, recruiters began to stir.

Often regarded as the "noisy ones" on the HR floor, recruiters slowly began to emerge and be recognised as having a legitimate skill set.  A skill set that was distinct from their agency counterparts and yet not in keeping with the silo'ed silence of HR departments.   Moreover it was a skill set that was distinct from those of the HR generalists.  Over time the recruiters in more progressive organisations moved further away, diversified further and were allocated distinct budgets.  The dual pressures of speed from the business and for frugality from the finance department meant that in-house recruiters had to adapt the way they worked and began to become introspective - there wasn't just one skill of recruitment but many.

The role of a recruiter has been split in many organisations and so to reflect this and also to highlight there particular skills there are now many different job titles in use - from Sourcer, Headhunter, through Talent Acquisition Specialist, the Orwellian sounding Staffing Officer to Talent Scout there seems to be a new way to describe yourself each day.  So is "Talent Hacker" doomed to become the next in a long list of buzzword-like titles?

I hope not.

Hopefully we can avoid the pitfalls of buzzwordism if we make a clear distinction as to what a "Talent Hacker" actually is.  Firstly, I don't believe it's a job title at all.  Talent Hacking is a methodology.  At best it's a philosophical stance taken by a recruiter to adapt and experiment and at worst it's the sharing and usage of a number of disparate tools to expedite hiring.

In Nick's original article I was quoted as saying that “Hiring is still waterfall in an agile world”.  What I meant by that is that a "traditional" hiring process is slavish in adherence to accepted dogma. A job description is produced, it's disseminated through advertising channels, resultant applications are pushed through a pre-defined process and those lucky enough to have impressed will be hired.  In this process, there is no feedback, no learning and no space for creativity...worst of all there is no scope to delight the candidates.

With the Agile/Waterfall divide in mind, I propose that the Talent Hacking outlook can be formalised by borrowing (stealing) from the Agile Manifesto.  The Agile Manifesto is a statement of values for software developers, reinforcing those elements that are of greater value when developing software.  Similarly we can list those things that we feel are important when hiring, like this...

While there is value in the items on

the right, we value the items on the left more.

Hires over Processes

Too often in large recruiting organisations the pressure to maintain robust process and measure the performance of recruiters in the organisation means that we lose sight of the reason we're all there in the first place.  Measuring and rewarding things like number of candidates contacted or the number of contacts who made it to second stage is good practice but if the team isn't hiring it's all just "busy work".  A robust and fair (free of bias) process is important. Processes are ways of doing things that are more efficient - they must make a workload easier to complete or faster, you can think of them as collections of efficiencies.  If they do not add benefit they are no longer of value.  A lot of larger organisations hang on to process as though it was a life raft in a rising ocean of change, once the process is no longer effective (which you should periodically test for) abandon it and find a new more effective process.  A point here on "Best practices", to paraphrase Mary Poppendieck, author of "Lean Software Development" - Best practices are solutions to other people's problems that you may not have.  So much of the processes of recruitment are done simply because "it's how we did it at x company" or worse still "it's how I've read x company do it".  Process is great to ensure a level playing field and to expedite the flow of a candidate towards being hired - if it isn't doing either of these things it should be questioned and if found to be lacking changed.

Data over Anecdotal Evidence

The Talent Hacking approach loves data.   Sourcing, screening and shepherding a candidate towards being hired calls for a lot of decision making.  Decisions are better when supported by data.  Even if you cringe or break out in hives whenever someone says "Big Data" there is little doubt that the digital exhaust trails that people now leave behind them have made them easier to find.  Ask a tame recruiter you know if they can find your email address, I'll bet they can and it won't be from anywhere you remember writing it... Data supports a hiring plan, salary benchmarking, advertising response rates, recruiter performance, process improvement - it's all around us as recruiters.  Building a living breathing data set from which you can answer the future unknown questions will be one of the best investments for success as a recruiter.  Even better, a recruiter's standing in the business can be improved from the simple provision of the raw data.  The Talent Hacker will go further and provide insight to hiring managers - affecting change and having a direct effect on the success of the business.  It is the data that will enable the wider business, as consumers of the recruitment service, to answer the all important "Why?".  Why do we value this more than our own anecdotal evidence?  Anecdotal evidence is only ever the outcome of a single case, often it informs a bias or shapes action in a way that may have been right in a prior instance but not for the current one.  A Talent Hacker loves to hear the anecdotes of others because in unpacking them you can ask those questions that reveal what is "true" to an individual. They do have value, but I'll take the data.

Candidate experience over Corporate Responsibility

Beyond external marketing and websites, a recruiter is often the first human interaction anyone has with a company.  When they are doing their job well they are exemplars for the brand - impassioned spokespeople it's their enthusiasm that will bleed through in both their communication and deeds. So many recruiters at large organisations are a product of their environment they hide behind turrets built from template emails, missed phone calls and a fear of feedback.  An in-house recruiter walks a tightrope between advocating for the candidate and for the company at the same time, straying too far in one of these directions will not be beneficial.  A Talent Hacker takes a third position.  We must be aware that the talent war is over and that talent won.  Too many recruiters want to take an aloof position leaning towards the institutional arrogance that permeates some companies - "we don't have to provide feedback", "you're only worth a bland template email", "we have hundreds of candidates".  I'm sure this was a perfectly reasonable stance to take...until it wasn't.  You only have to look at Glassdoor.com to see reviews of interview processes that call out companies for their broken internal communication, ignorant recruiters and interminable, arduous processes.  For the Talent Hacker reading Glassdoor reviews is like a family owned restaurant being reviewed on TripAdvisor, scary as hell and a potential powder keg.  A recruitment process should feel like a personal service, the realisation that organisations are no longer all powerful and that bad reviews will stop people from applying hasn't fully permeated a lot of companies.  As humans we love to share, and embellish, a juicy story of bad service and this penchant for negativity can be mitigated by a recruiter doing their job well.  Recruiters should protect their employers they do have a duty to them, but if it comes at the neglect of hundreds of individuals whose only crime is to have applied for a job then it might be wiser to limit the damage and stop recruiting altogether.  

Responding to change over Following a plan

In life there are always events that are outside of our control.  As a recruiter we are often either privy to insider information or at the mercy circumstances outside of our control.  From hiring freezes, through acqui-hires to redundancies there are many business events that impact a recruiter.  The Talent Hacker must be aware of this and work hard to ensure that all parties, hiring managers, team, wider business and candidates are given the information where appropriate.  Working at the coal-face of recruitment often turns up interesting information that could be of great use to other areas of the business, if you don't forge these feedback loops you are effectively losing out.  It can be simple things like competitor hiring strategy or market rates rising in demand for a particular skill, however it can also be large and impactful learnings that should be used to adapt and change strategy - mass redundancies at a competitor, a new product launch or even rumours of mergers and acquisitions, candidates reveal a lot of information that could be useful - not listening to this let alone not reacting to it is missing out.  Change can be a valuable tool and resistance stemming from traditional models of yearly planning can only leave an organisation exposed to risk.  A company I once worked for lost 32 senior developers within three months - did they stick to a static hiring plan?  Of course not! ...but the changes shouldn't have to be that drastic to trigger a period of re-evaluation.  The Talent Hacker doesn't seek to control but instead knows that change will happen, they are not wedded to alternate contingencies but rely on experiences to suggest different paths to follow if the need occurs.

I like the appreciation of a new wave of recruitment thinking.  There have been pockets of genius in the underbelly of the people hunting game that have been hidden for too long.  From the boolean greats who sift through data to find that one unknown diamond of a candidate to the recruiters who do so much more than their remit, trusted advisors to candidates, hiring, housing and relocating their candidate's families and pets as they go.  Perhaps the Talent Hacker flag is one we can all unite under,   recruiters and candidates might be all the better off for it.

This manifesto is by no means an exhaustive list of what is to be a Talent Hacker and I welcome input to clarify the definition further.  By offering a definition we can at least trigger the debate and hopefully give the label more meaning.  

What Developers Want - A Data-Driven Approach to Writing Engaging Adverts

When writing job adverts recruiters are often left to rely on a brief chat with the hiring manager.  They sometimes get input from one of the friendlier engineers and pair this with an old job description that has been slowly rotting on their  careers site for the past year.  The output of these less than ideal circumstances is a rehashing of the old job spec.  Some added promises of an exciting "culture" and an oblique reference to some new technology you may or may not get to use.  The advert is posted in the normal places and with little fanfare proceeds to garner a lacklustre response from candidates. A talent pool that is already bombarded with competing offers.

There must be a better way.  What if we could write a job description using the same words and phrases that our target audience are looking for?  If we could ask a large enough group of people what they are looking for then we could pull themes and even individual words from this dataset to create and advert that was engaging. Better yet, we wouldn't have to resort to the cliches and stock phrases from all the other job descriptions.

Coming by this dataset isn't easy, few people have the time to go out and interview the hundreds of prospective candidates needed to make it representative.  Even if an employer did this the data would likely be skewed by experimenter bias.  If only there was a way of reliably collecting this data from developers who felt free to say whatever they wanted.  Recently I discovered a way to do exactly this. Better yet the data was already captured for me.  

Hire my Friend is a new sourcing tool aiming to address the need for talent in the world of startups. Aiming to not expose that talent to unscrupulous recruiters or the volumes of spam they would receive on other sites.  Additionally it has some cool recommendation features, which made "endorsement" meaningful again.  I care more if a developer rates another developer highly than if the same assurance of expertise came from a colleague in sales, a school friend or their mum.  

On looking at the tool I noticed that candidate profiles, though anonymous and containing all the usual information, also asked one important question.  "What are you looking for?".  Suddenly I had impartial answers to that question from 13,000 (and growing) Engineers, Marketers and UX Designers.  After running a search for Ruby developers in London I had the data I needed, I pasted the answers into one long document and made that into a word cloud.  The larger the word the more frequently it occurs in the responses.

What Developers are actually looking for...

So what does this tell us?  Firstly that Hire my Friend's users are very much on target.  The majority of users are looking for work in small, startup teams.  It's the the details here that are more interesting for me.  I have always said that offering a job that is both rewarding and challenging is attractive, i.e. referring to actual problems to solve.  This is borne out by the answers given, the words problem, challenging, learning, solving and knowledge feature heavily.  The second biggest takeaway for me is the importance in stressing the "why" of the role you're hiring for.  Why is the work important? How will it impact the larger team and the rest of the company?  In describing the work we should ensure that we stress those elements that are "creative", "fascinating", "exciting" and "cool".

So given these answers how can we measure a job description against the data?  The same process can be used to evaluate our own job descriptions - here's mine

From the advert

For me the obvious difference here is between the active and the passive.  The job description has some of the same elements but still has some scope to be a better match. In a passive sentence, the subject of the sentence is acted upon rather than performing the action.  For a potential candidate this could mean that they are left with a sense of being used like a resource or that their individual importance in being downplayed.  What job seeker wants to be part of a massive swathe of hiring to become a cog in a machine? None I'd want to hire.  As William Zinsser says in his book On Writing Well, “active verbs push hard and passive verbs tug fitfully" a job advert should be a compelling call to action.

I'm going to use the Hire my Friend data to write different adverts and do my own A/B test.  It will be interesting to see if matching the word choice and elevation of individual over the companies own needs makes the difference I think it will.  I'll let you know how I get on.

Metrics that Matter

Firstly apologies to those of you that aren't quite as geeky about the numbers of recruitment as I am, I'll be back to ranting about the misuse of Pinterest for recruitment soon.  As I promised previously I wanted to give a little insight into those individual statistics that go to make up the metrics I use (or those I like to see) when recruiting.  Gathering this information isn't about producing a report simply to prove effort.  It is only the most unengaged stakeholder who can take solace in knowing that candidate and recruiters are somewhere in the building...  Gathering this seemingly disparate data points, in a consistent format (more on this later) is about creating a dataset that is alive and available to answer questions that may arise later... regardless of what those questions might be...

So what are the basics?  Those elements that you have to capture and whether that's in an ATS, a spreadsheet or typed up and popped in one of those old-timey filing cabinets.

Name, gender - All of your candidates will have a name, even if they have just one like a Brazilian footballer or Madonna they still have a name.  You should decide in advance on a format for writing these names capitalization, hyphenation etc this is to facilitate later use of names in mail merge or batch operations - candidates don't want to receive an email for "MAtthw BUCKLAND" so spell it right and you won't have to change 1000 name spellings at a later date.

Gender as a metric is of particular interest to me.  I've always worked in technical recruitment and it's an industry where females and transgendered people are under represented.  This metric can be combined with source to know which sources are productive for diversity goals and with the date ranges to know if and where candidates excel or fall down in your recruitment process.  This can facilitate later discussion and provide great evidence for changing processes later.

Role - the role the candidate applies for...this one really is basic to be able to slice numbers of total applicants by role, I hope everyone does at least this.  If not I guess they just tie CV's to the back of kittens and let them lose...

Gate Dates - Not Match.com for Farmers, this is the notation of the dates that a candidate moves through the hiring process.  Date of Application, Date of Phone Screen, Date of First On-site Interview all the way through to Date of Offer, Verbal Acceptance, Written Acceptance and Start Date.  GET ALL THE DATES!  So why track all these dates?  These date ranges can be used to answer a multitude of questions.  With values in these ranges reports can be compiled that show total length of process, drop-out ratios, expose bottlenecks in the process, expose waiting times and hold-ups, track notice periods... basically everything.  The date ranges and days elapsed are the bread and butter of recruitment reporting.  Do you currently know the average length of your interview process?  Does it vary a great deal?  Why is that? It's the interrogation of these dates that will give you those answers and perhaps when you have enough of an historical dataset predict time to hire of for future capacity planning... all for putting some dates in a spreadsheet or clicking those little calendar icons in your swanky new ATS!  Brilliant!

Source - Again a simple one, but it bears repeating, the source is how the candidate arrived in your recruitment process.  This should break down the source into broad categories that can tell at a glance what is a good source (a lot of quality candidates) a weak source (few candidates) or a bad source (lots of irrelevant candidates).  Example sources should differentiate between the "How" of the source too e.g. not just "LinkedIn" correct reporting should be "LinkedIn Search" and "LinkedIn Advert", this will enable you to distinguish between an active candidate application versus a directly sourced passive candidate.

Secondary Source - Some sources may require extra insight, you might need to know more for a later report.  If you have a primary source as "Event" this could be the particular Meetup, conference or pub you met them at.  A primary source of "Agency" might have the secondary source of the agency's name, for referrals it could be the refering employees name... remember they all have one...

Country of Residence -  I also like to track where a particular candidate is based this has multiple reasons, one might be for immigration purposes to highlight to internal teams where visa constraints may be an issue or delay a start date, a second reason could be to track individual sourcing efforts from a particular country... best of all most reports can include a lovely map showing where candidates came from...the prettiest metric :)

Contact Details - This should be the most obvious but still I see people finding value in the wrong things.  We all should know that a direct contact is better than a message delivered through a third party.  Simply put a telephone call or a direct email address are better than a LinkedIn Inmail.  If you only use LinkedIn to contact candidates and leaving it at that you're doing it wrong.

Last Employer - Want to know your pulling power?  Doing some competitor analysis?  Then you'll need to know where your candidates are currently working.

Recruiter - Who found the candidate and who is shepherding them through the process?  It's important that I'm not noting this to provide a productivity report for managerial consumption.  Unless all the members of the team are hiring for the same role in the same geography there is little to be gained from a direct comparison.  Raw numbers alone, stripped of context are not an aid.  They are a great example of one of the great flaws in gathering data - quantity isn't always preferable to quality.

Date of Last Contact - One of the consistent complaints and killers of candidate experience is the lack of timely feedback.  Even giving a candidate a short "no news yet" will pay dividends if you later wish to offer against a less communicative rival.  To overstate, if you track the last date you contacted a list of candidates you can very easily automate an email letting them know what's going on and when they'll get feedback.

Status - Decide on a glossary of terms that best fit your process, get the hiring managers involved in this process too.  Phone Screen, First Interview, Second Interview..etc.  Have as many of these as you feel you need.  Counting each of these each week will give you a very rapid view of the overall pipeline.  Hiring managers will love this, full on warm and fuzzy feelings.  Too often the work of the recruiter can look like a dark art - they go and stare at a screen and people magically appear for interviews - a weekly pipeline report just illustrating the numbers of potential candidates at each stage will calm even the most rabid of hiring manager.

There are more things to track of course and when real value can be derived from the collation of this data you'll find it quite addictive.  Best of all, when you start to move on from thinking the collection of data is just to describe the current status to instead thinking that you are creating a living, growing dataset that can be used to answer questions that haven't yet been thought of... you'll start to see why metrics really do matter.

The Itchy Security Blanket of Recruitment Metrics

The rise of more intuitive technology enabling the recruitment process has made for an interesting corollary - a rise in an organisation's ability to collect and report data connected to the recruitment process.  The increasing data driven programmatic approach to recruitment can do much to aid in the design and selection of a recruitment strategy.  Seemingly small changes can be tracked to measure their impact on the success or failure rates of a decision.

The growth in our ability to collect these metrics has been matched by a hunger within the stakeholder set as a whole.  Once a hiring manager has seen a report that gives seemingly scientific insight into the hiring process it will be almost impossible to revert to something which grants them less insight.  I'm not advocating that we take away metrics for these managers rather than we give them the access and supply the relevant context.  The greatest danger of data collection lies not in the information, but in its interpretation.  

So what metrics are appropriate to measure? What metrics can offer us certainty without falling into the the traps of selection or confirmation bias?  There are already a lot of hyperbolic blog posts like "The Top 10 Metrics You Must Have" or "7 Recruitment Metrics to Win" these miss the point.  The metrics of recruitment are best used for experimentation - tied to the continuous improvement of the team.  If you are producing metrics that will sit unopened in a spreadsheet to appease a hiring manager you are guilty of security blanket metrics.  Whilst you will feel all warm and fuzzy because you can prove that some *thing* is happening they will be of no real practical value, like butterflies pinned to a board underglass, nice to look at but not useful.

So whats the alternative?  When done correctly the term "metrics" is a misnomer.  The gathering of data around recruitment will give you a dataset which you can apply to provide insight into historical performance and to measure impact of the specific efficacy of projects the team undertakes.  In this way it's possible to see results in real time - does that new advert copy lead to more applications? You can see that! Which website is best to advertise on? You can test that! Did that rival companies announcement affect your response rate? You'll be able to see!  Did adding that photo of a cat to your website make it better?  Of course it did! You don't need metrics to tell you that!

What can't metrics do?  Predict the future.  In many of the articles I've read about recruitment metrics I've seen a large number of lofty claims about prediction.  All the while these claims are made without noting the limitations of the dataset we have access to.  It's the measurement of this dataset that will be the most effective use of business value not on fortune teller style inference of outcomes.  Statements like "we had 1000 applicants in 2013, so this year we will have 1500" are always going to be more wishful thinking than informed prediction.  Metrics can help in planning for the future but knowing the limitations of the basis of those predictions is key.  If we aren't aware of the limits of prediction we risk undoing the good that data can do and reaching for the crystal ball.  

In a future post I'll list the what and why of the metrics I like to measure.  Both for tracking team and individual performance within the team.  Hopefully you'll recognise it's a list high on building a dataset with experimentation in mind and low on fluffy feel goods and blame dodging.