Shally Steckerl"It's easy to find a needle in a haystack. Just use a magnet. But finding a needle in a stack of needles can be very challenging." Shally Steckerl.
Sourcing evolves so rapidly that if you aren't watching closely, you'll be left behind. As the Internet grows in both sophistication and complexity, it becomes more difficult to cut through the clutter and arrive at best practices that really work. In our latest podcast, Shally outlines the recruiting challenges organizations are facing In 2011.
Shally Steckerl is a talent acquisition consultant, strategist, and speaker originally from Colombia, South America, now residing in Atlanta, Georgia. He is the Founder and Chief CyberSleuth of JobMachine, now Arbita ACES (the premier provider of sourcing consulting services and workforce development). Early in his career Shally realized that as a contingency recruiter he could beat the competition by finding people who were not available in mainstream sources. Since then, he has been instrumental in building numerous world class sourcing and research organizations.
Because of his passion for the Internet as a recruitment tool and his continually innovative methods, Shally has developed a reputation as one of the most respected authorities in passive candidate research and talent pipeline development worldwide. A pioneer in recruitment Internet research, accomplished author and celebrated speaker, he is a regular contributor to many industry publications.
"What's new about sourcing is there's just a lot more data. What's the same about sourcing is we still have the same challenge of, somebody needs to interpret the data and information becomes knowledge when you apply it. Knowledge becomes actionable intelligence when you put it in context and analyze it and have some sort of eureka moment, right? So it's still a very much thought intensive process. Research is much more about analytics. It's much more about interpretation. Sourcers, although there is a lot more of us now than the last time we talked, sourcers are in desperate need of some form of thought leadership to drive them towards the right interpretation of that data, because systems and software can only get you so far."
TotalPicture Radio Shally Steckerl transcript
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Welcome to an Inside Recruiting Channel podcast on TotalPicture Radio. This is Peter Clayton reporting from ERE Spring out in San Diego, California. I am really delighted to have back on the show today, Shally Steckerl who did a whole master class here on sourcing and all the cutting edge methods in future technology that recruiters are using. So if you're a recruiter, listen up. If you are in the job market, listen up because you're going to hear how the real world goes out and sources candidates. If you are just graduating from college, this should be some great information for you. Shally is the Chief CyberSleuth and Executive Vice President of Arbita.
Shally, welcome back to Total Picture Radio.
Shally: Awesome to be here Peter, thank you.
Peter: Tell me, what's going on in sourcing today? What's new? What's the different? What are some of the hot topics that were discussed in your workshop?
Shally: Gee, that sounded like a four-part question to me. Can we pick that apart a little bit?
Peter: Sure. Let's start with what's new in sourcing?
Shally: What's new in sourcing? Well, everything and nothing, both at the same time. That's sort of a philosophical approach, if you will, but what's new in sourcing is by and large the amount of information, just the sheer volume of information that's out there makes it apparently – or on the surface – makes it easy for people to find stuff, especially for recruiters to find information. That's what people are claiming; that's what they feel.
But the reality is that when you have excessive amounts of data, the attainment of that data, the harvesting of information, although it may not be difficult, becomes a big challenge.
So where maybe the challenge for sourcing in the past was looking for a needle in a stack of needles, now it's looking for a needle in a ginormous… not even a stack, but like a huge vast underground mine of needles and they are all different in sizes and qualities. People talk about finding a needle in the haystack, that's pretty easy – just use a magnet. No big deal there right? But when you're trying to find one needle in a stack of needles, which was our challenge before, it was difficult just to be able to sort through all the data. Now, with the shear amounts of data, it's just difficult because we don't have any way to automatically or through systems be able to summarize that data in a way that allows us to make intelligent decisions.
What's new about sourcing is there's just a lot more data. What's the same about sourcing is we still have the same challenge of, somebody needs to interpret the data and information becomes knowledge when you apply it. Knowledge becomes actionable intelligence when you put it in context and analyze it and have some sort of eureka moment, right? So it's still a very much thought intensive process. Research is much more about analytics. It's much more about interpretation. Sourcers, although there is a lot more of us now than the last time we talked, sourcers are in desperate need of some form of thought leadership to drive them towards the right interpretation of that data, because systems and software can only get you so far.
That's where we are today.
Peter: What's the difference between a sourcer and a recruiter?
Shally: Well in the realm of recruitment, you have really five key principles, or five key concepts or contexts. I would say: Find Attract Engage Manage Lead.
The find piece is almost exclusively the realm of the sourcer or recruiter with sourcing ability, or a recruiter who's also a researcher. How you define a sourcer can be a ton of different ways. Think of it as the ability to find talent. So it's searching for the needle in the giant mine of needles. So that could be through internet research, that could be through telephone research, that could be through social media, that could be through acquisition of research that already exists and so on.
The attract component is in great part recruitment marketing. One of Arbita's strengths and a few other companies have sort of followed suit since we coined the term 'recruitment marketing' and put it out there. The attract piece has always been done in different ways – advertising. Hell, go back to the back to the beginning of time when people would use their word of mouth. If you knew anybody that can work at my store and then there was help wanted signs at the front of the store and help wanted signs in newspapers and at the postal exchange, and then it became help wanted signs on the internet. It's evolved quite a bit, but attract means get people to come to you versus find means you go to them.
Then engage. Regardless of attract or find, engage is that conversation that happens – the two way conversation between two people that have a similar goal which is to put the right person in the right job. If you're the candidate, you're putting yourself in the right job. If you're the recruiter, you're trying to find the right candidate for the job. Engagement is something that's done by recruiters, typically not by sourcers, except for sourcers with a social media background or interest. In that case, those sourcers are also sometimes considered recruitment marketing managers, social media leads, talent community. There are sourcers that sometimes do a lot finding and a lot of research simply to identify the talent pool and then they do a lot of nurturing, developing and building of the policies, procedures, systems, practices. They go into a talent community whether you build it yourself or utilize something that's already preexisting like a Facebook or Linkedln group or something like that.
I guess to summarize, the sourcers realm starts with find and may go a little bit into engage. Sometimes may touch attract in the social media space. The recruiter's job although sometimes touches find because that's part of their job. Many times what they do is really attract and engage and often time their focus is on the engage.
Now manage and lead is a little bit different. Soucers manage expectations with hiring managers with recruiters, with clients, with candidates. They manage processes. They manage information. We talk about information overload. They manage systems. So it's systems administration in a way. It's management of procedures, management of processes. They also lead in thought leadership; they lead as subject matter experts in their organization in support of recruiters that are trying to learn and understand how better to work with sourcers, how to apply some of the key sourcing principles so that they can better utilize sourcing services. Or simply how to fend for themselves and be able to find some leads so that they don't have to rely on the sourcer externally or internally for everything. They do a little bit of that.
The recruiter, of course, also does a lot of management of the candidate, of the process, of the internal hiring, of the offers, of the hiring managers and so on, and of course a lot of leadership. If you're a staffing director, staffing manager, whether you're a sourcing director or sourcing manager, you'll do manage and lead.
So I think the best way to describe it is the sourcer is on the lead side of find and the recruiter is on the trail side of find. Sourcers are sort of in the engage and recruiter are also in the engage.
Peter: Matthew Jeffrey who's the conference chair this year who's from the UK, gave a really interesting keynote this morning. He was talking a lot about Recruiting 1.0. I think most people who are in the job market, who are not recruiters, who aren't in this industry, recruiting 1.0 is how they think recruiting is done today. You place an ad on a job board or you go out and you hire a third party recruiter, then you just sit back and what the term is post and pray, right?
Put the job out there on a job board and you just sit back and you wait till all of these résumés come flying in the door and then you go through and you see if there's anybody there that's a fit. I know in covering this industry now for 5 years, that's not the way it's done today. Can you explain to us how a tactical recruiting is done? When you're out, you're looking for what they refer to in the industry as purple squirrels, really high performers, the people that a number of organizations are trying to recruit.
Shally: There's really no one single way. There's no simple template or solution set for recruitment. In recruitment, the art and science of bringing in candidates into an organization has always been a moving target, which is why there's not a lot of structure around the role and there is not a lot of definitions. So you have some people that call themselves staffing consultants or talent acquisition specialists or recruiters. I can probably come up with a dozen of different job titles and I bet your listeners are going to be like, "Oh, you forgot to mention this one." So there's a lot of that. The job description varies greatly. You have some organizations that define recruiting as just an administrative function where they post and pray and that are paper pushers, if you will.
Peter: There are still organizations that recruit in that way which I find kind of unbelievable but true.
Shally: Or they still utilize an HR generalist who's got recruitment as part of their initiative and is also bogged down with all kinds of other processes and does employee relations… maybe even handles payroll issues or concerns, and handles questions about benefits and everything. You go from the extreme generalist that does a little bit of everything, all the way to the extreme specialist, which is somebody who is a dedicated internet only researcher that does nothing but search streams on search engines, and that's the spectrum.
There really is no one considered ideal model for recruitment. There are brick and mortar companies that are extremely advanced and sophisticated in workforce planning and identifying needs ahead of demand and planning sourcing activities for pipeline candidates that they know they're going to be hiring. There are brick and mortar companies that still take walk-ins. That's all they do – is depend on people literally coming to their front door and asking for a paper application. They exist. And there's everything in between. You have high-tech companies that still don't have applicant tracking systems – super high-tech.
Peter: You got to be kidding me?
Shally: I am not kidding you. As a consultant and adviser, my job is to be a partner to the staffing leader and I'm brought in as an extension of the team, very often moving around behind the scenes. Everything that happens happens because the recruiting leader that brought me in puts it in place. I'm simply an adviser. My experience allows me to be able to pick things out that may or may not work, try things that I think would be worth trying that have never been done before. I tell them about what best practices may be customized.
I encounter this a lot and I've been through some clients, some organizations that still have not implemented an applicant tracking system. They have relied on somebody else's. For example, they had an RPO who had an applicant tracking system. They're fine with that; they're just using the RPO's applicant tracking system. Or they rely on search firms and the search firms have an applicant tracking system. They simply just wait for the candidate to come from the search firm and they don't worry about any of the other tracking.
There are brick and mortar companies with extremely sophisticated ATSs. There's highly sophisticated software companies with no ATSs, and you can imagine the confusion wherein there's really no defined role.
I would say that as recruiters do and what we don't talk about much but what we really do, regardless of what you call yourself, whether you're a talent acquisition or human capital or whatever, it doesn't really matter; I think the language that we use is really unhealthy and broken in a lot of ways. Talent acquisition is just nasty. We don't acquire people. Human capital makes people feel like there a piece of equipment.
Peter: Head count.
Shally: Head count, exactly. If I'm an asset, does that mean I depreciate? Am I being depreciated by accounting on a four year or five year basis? These are terrible words.
I think at the end of the day, really what we do if you look up on Webster's the definition of recruitment in a corporate setting, the definition of recruitment is to refresh, renew the ranks. It's basically to bring people into the organization to renew or replace or refresh the ranks. I think that's extremely powerful and we forget that that's really what we do as recruiters no matter what. If we're managers or directors or VPs of staffing, our job is to refresh the ranks if the organization is losing people. If they're leaving for whatever reason, we have to replace them. If we're growing, we have to bring them and to add to the population of talent at the organization.
At the end of the day that's our job. The hiring manager is only going to care about quality people coming in the door. They're not going to care about the source. They're not going to care about the title or the process. We do need to care about the process because we have to track it for compliance reasons. We have to assign budget. We have to decide on where not to spend money. So we do have to care about that.
At the end of the day, the net result is a company bringing in the right people to get the right jobs done at the right time and hopefully answering the questions of time risk and money. Do it fairly quickly so we're not losing to our competition. Do it fairly cost effectively so we're not spending too much money on something that we could be spending less money on. Do it in a way that we're not exposing our company to risk from governmental scrutiny or from public scrutiny or from ethical quandaries or simply from a competitive point of view and not getting our rears kicked by our competitors that are faster and less expensive in their recruitment process.
Whatever it is that you do, whether you post and pray, or you use a search firm or you use an RPO, that's what you need to remember. As a recruiter, our job is to bring people into refresh and renew and grow the ranks.
Peter: I want to circle back to a term that you used earlier which is engagement. There's been a lot of talk at this conference about candidate engagement. I would suspect that five years ago that term was not being used in relationship to sourcing and to recruiting.
Shally: It wasn't. Not in that context. Engagement has always been used as a recruitment marketing communication even before we coined recruitment marketing, it was still used as a marketing and communication term. But like a lot of other things that the recruiting industry adopts because of advertising that's being done, we sort of misinterpret the terms. So what's being talked about today, a lot of times when people talk about engagement is really just advertising
Peter: Right. Its companies who have decided we need to have a Facebook page, and they use that Facebook page basically just to repost their job openings and nothing more, right?
Shally: Correct. That's really no more than advertising. I'm not diminishing the impact of the advertising. Advertising is absolutely important and critical in recruitment marketing. But it isn't engagement. Advertising is broadcasting. So you're in radio and maybe you've done some TV as well, I think in your background. When you broadcast a signal on the radio and you broadcast a signal on TV that is not engagement; that is broadcasting. You're sending a message out. If you take a poll and accept feedback which sometimes happens and good shows do that, there's a little bit of that's feedback but still not engagement.
Really, engagement is a conversation. It's a two-way conversation. The recruiter speaking with the candidate is engagement. If you're doing engagement through social media, you're actually interacting live on that Facebook page. You're not just simply spewing volumes of information. Whether it's job postings or marketing rhetoric, it doesn't really matter. Whether it's your canned branding message, or your job posting, or even your blogs feed, it's still just simply another channel to distribute your broadcast.
Engagement on Twitter isn't posting your jobs feeds. It's actually responding to people and actually asking questions and answering questions and participating in other people's conversations. It's okay to jump in on somebody else's Twitter conversation because that is also part of engagement. What recruiters often talk about when they talk about engagement really is just simply getting the word out, which is maybe perhaps viral marketing, maybe advertising, certainly not engagement.
We do need engagement and there some thought leaders that are talking about engagement in the correct way, in the way of let's have a conversation with our candidates. But it really hurts and it's really hard work. So we avoid it a lot of times when we can because it's painful. Because if you really open yourself up and engage with your candidates, you're going to think and hear things that you really don't want to hear.
People are going to tell you what they don't like about you and what they don't like about your company, and you need to listen to that, and you need to respond, not react. Respond. You can have your own opinion. You can disagree with what they're saying, but you need to express that and you still need to participate in the conversation. If we just simply just try to control the conversation, it doesn't work. Social media doesn't really allow for that. In fact, those who seek to control the conversation are going to be defeated by those who are really actually inspire and engage and motivate and participate. They're going to be left behind. So companies that get into social media thinking "Oh, we're going to have Facebook page and that's going to be our engagement. We're going to make our marketing department give us content to put on our Facebook page. But whenever anybody says anything bad about us we're going to delete their comment."
No, that's not engagement. You leave the comment up there and you let your fans respond. You let your staff respond. You have a conversation around that. The conclusion might simply be "Hey, you know what, we agree to disagree" or the conclusion might be "You know what, you're right, we're going to change this" or "sorry, but you're absolutely crazy." That can be the end result. But if you pretend that that's not happening or try to delete it or try to censor it, that's not engagement.
Peter: Since we're talking about engagement, there's also employee engagement which a hot topic today. Because the latest statistics I've seen from the Wall Street Journal is about 45% of employees are disengaged in their jobs. I know you must hear this when you go out and speak to people at conferences like this. A lot of recruiters and a lot of HR professionals are just scared to death as soon as the economy just turns around a little bit more, their best people are going to be out the door.
Shally: You do read and hear a lot about that. I've been thinking about that for quite some time, because for the last three years, the economy has really beaten up a lot of companies in our space. My clients, my partners, my vendors, it's certainly the topic of conversation. Behind close doors is how much of a beating we've all taken because of the economy. I'm not whining, it's not just my industry. I think we all can sort of feel the pain there and your candidates that are listeners are also feeling the pain. I don't mean to be sound pathetic here. That's not the point. The point is that I've been talking and thinking about this for a long time, at least three years. What I like to call it is musical chairs, and this is what I think is actually already happening. That is people who have been in a position where their teams have been shrunk down to maybe they're the last one standing or the last one of several that are still standing and they're doing all the work that was being done before by a larger team. They've got to do more with less. They've got less budget. They've got less staff. They've got less resources. They simply don't even have the time to evaluate all the new technology that's coming out. There might be technology that can help them but they can't even get their hands on it because there's running around so crazy. Their salaries haven't been increased, their bonuses haven't really been fulfilled. So they're in a position where they kind of tired and the promises that were made were broken not through the employer's fault, but because like I said, we've all taking a beating.
So those people are looking at the horizon and they're being approached by companies that are starting to spend money and that are early adopters and are eager to bring in people ahead of this sort of surge, the talent churn that you were talking about, the jobless recovery that people talk about. What's happening is that they're really considering these jobs and they're looking at it as "Hey, I've been here for three years haven't got a promotion or a raise or a bonus and this is kind of my payback. I'm going to take that other job, get the promotion, the raise or the bonus." And that leaves a really important role unfilled because they're leaving… think about it, they're the last one's left.
Peter: That's right.
Shally: There's really nobody left anymore that has that.
Peter: The reason that they're the last one's left because they were the best ones, in many cases.
Shally: They might have been the best ones, they might have been the hardest working, they might have been the most dedicated, they might have been the most connected, but all of those are dangerous. Now you have a spot where the connectors gone, where the most dedicated person is gone, the hardest worker is gone, the smartest person is gone… whatever. I mean, it doesn't have to be any one of those, but any several of those and you've got a really bad vacancy and that has to be filled by somebody who is just like that person one role below somewhere else. That's going to create an incredible need for organizations to get smart about finding the right people. Simply throwing somebody into that job to see if it sticks is really not an option.
Peter: You have mentioned several times the term recruitment marketing and that's what Arbita is all about. Can you unpack that for us a little bit; what does that mean, what does recruitment marketing mean for your organization and how do you go in and assist your clients?
Shally: A number of different ways. Recruitment marketing, I think, is a combination of processes or initiatives or products or services that already existed. But it's the synergy, the integration of all of these in a cohesive way that has changed. In 2010 – and I don't remember if you and I talked about this on a separate interview – but my three keywords every year, I pick three things as my New Year's resolution, if you will; I pick three things that I'm going to make that year about – the core context of everything that I do in that year. For 2010, my three words were integration, convergence and portability. That was my 2010.
Recruitment marketing is a great part, a result of integration, convergence and portability.
In 2011, my three words are minimalism, focus and simplicity. Basically, if you think about everything that happened in 2010 to bring systems together, a lot of these systems existed. Some of them didn't talk to each other. What we do now with recruitment marketing is employ sourcing services, sourcing outsourcing (which is our SOS product) contract sourcing or consulting services, training and workforce development, and traditional recruitment advertising job distribution, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, micro sites… we put it all together into a package with a little bit more or less of each one of those components that solves the 'we can't find the talent' problem for our customers.
The answer used to be pretty obvious. It used to be you can't find people then you need to advertise better or more effectively… more or whatever, right? Now it's well, yeah but where and how? That advertising has changed. Do we advertise on social media? Is placing an ad on Facebook is the same as placing the ad on Monster or on LinkedIn or as effective? The answer is maybe. That's part of the mixed is trying to figure out where your audience is.
So part of what we do is an audit on where is your target audience. Where are the candidates hanging out that you want to attract and then coming up with the solution set. We do this in a consultative way by going through a pretty traditional consulting process. It starts with the diagnostic. We utilize a recruitment marketing version of the traditional marketing SWOT - the marketing Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. It's a specialized adapted version of the SWOT that we do with the collection of questions that we ask in an audit sort of an informal audit format.
We have community of practice and key stakeholders that we identify from a variety of sectors within the company and also externally to answer the internal and external questions around the SWOT. Then that results in us being of to do some sort of a gap analysis – not a traditional gap analysis. You can look at this as a PT or PEST or PESTL approach. There's a bunch of different ways to do this. If you went to B-school, you probably know some of these. I like the SWOT for its sheer simplicity and the ability to, at the end of this, come up with 5 to 10 key initiatives. Those key initiatives are part of that recruitment marketing suite.
Maybe you have identification or a find problem. Maybe you have an attract problem and maybe you have a manage or lead or engage problem, maybe that you have a really tough time engaging because you're not finding the right people. That combination is what the end result of that diagnostic process is.
The design phase then of that is you put together a roadmap that puts all of those pieces into something that's cohesive that can be brought to the organization in a global vision. By global, I don't mean multinational, I mean just system wide. That plan, that roadmap, becomes the design that we deliver. So our deliverable may come in a written format, it may come in a variety of different formats or we might have meetings to feed that information back to stakeholders in the community practice and give them "Here are the key initiatives, and here's why these key initiatives are important. Based on our audit or diagnostic, we know that if you'd fixed these areas with these best practices that are adapted for your particular environment…" a side bar to that is you can't simply just apply best practices. Best practices are really nothing more than a collection of mistakes that an organization made as they arrived at what worked for them. So we have to sort of do that. But what we do with this process is shortcut that.
Some companies that arrive at best practices that become really important industry changing best practices arrived there through a series of really bad lumps. They took a lot of falls and they took a lot of hits and the staffing leaders are torn, tattered, bruised and wounded and now they're breathing a sigh of a relief because they actually got it to work. That's very rare. You can't then just take that and cookie cutter it into another company. It simply just does not translate. But you can learn from it.
So what we do as consultants and having worked with hundreds of companies this way is we absorb all that information, synthesize it and during the diagnostic start thinking about how to put the design together. So we come back and say "Look, here are some of the things that have been successful before and we can adapt them for this particular problem in this way and let's try it." We start with a pilot program typically and now we go into the implementation or delivery phase of the consulting. So we've got diagnostic design delivery.
In the delivery phase, we collaborate with the organization. We cannot do it for them. It has to be done internal. Any good consulting firm will tell you that the delivery of this new design has to be done by internal champions.
Change management has to come from within. As an adviser, we are there to provide support in a lot of different ways. In writing, through workshops, through facilitations, through coaching, through mentorship, but we cannot do the work. All we can do is act as architects and advisers if we are the one's that are doing the work, then that's really truly outsourcing. That's a completely different business model.
The final phase of this is measurement which is basically taking a look at from the initial diagnostic through the finalization of the implementation or the delivery, the before and after pictures. So take a picture of what were things like during the audit, what we found during the audit, and now take another sort of different audit, but still looking at the same things and where are we now - the past state versus present state, and looking at the difference for the delta between those two. That's the metric phase.
Customers sometimes works with us on 1 or 2, 2 or 3 or 3 and 4 or 2, 3 and 4 and sometimes all 4 in different phases and sometimes simultaneously. The diagnostic and the design can occur almost hand in hand. There's a bit of diagnostic that needs to happen upfront before we go into the design but before the diagnostic is finish, the design may already start.
The delivery or implementation can start while we're still continuing to build the roadmap, because we start the pilot programs that have been designed before the full system has been designed. Sometimes that happens.
Then of course, usually measurements happens through out, but ultimately the measurement is did we meet our goal? So during the design phase, we set a goal – here's the problems, here's the things that we want to fix, and then during the measurement is did we fix those.
Peter: What I'm hearing is there's no one right answer to this because LinkedIn for instance just passed a hundred million users. LinkedIn, especially in the recruiting circles for quite a while has been thought of as the one place to go to get on those LinkedIn groups and to start engaging with people. But what you're saying is that you really need to go on an assessment and find out where that talent is that you're trying to recruit hangs out, right?
Shally: Absolutely. I think that is the one most critical mistake that we as people in the talent management industry in general – I'm including more than just recruiting there make – is the assumption, the prejudice that the people are where we think they should be. We make a decision that we think that our candidates should be there. Whether it's an arbitrary decision or we listen to a speech or we bought a product or whatever; we are now just basically expecting the people to be there. If you build it, they will come model of recruiting marketing in social media and engagement simply doesn't work. That is the biggest mistake. We think we know where they are. We make assumptions and we don't test them. We just jump right in to it.
Another way to look at this is the whole ready, aim, fire and you've probably heard this before. I don't know exactly where was that I heard it but I'm sort of a little bit of a military strategies geek. That rung really true with me. In recruiting, we seem to do a lot of fire, ready, aim. Let's go get them and then we get there and then we're like let's get ready and then we're like, okay now let's take aim. Wait a minute, shouldn't we have gotten ready before we took aim and shouldn't we… So we do a lot of that. It's the single biggest mistake. It is an organizational killer. This is something that will bring down a large organization and even a very strong organization is making a mistake of investing in going out and identifying talent in a community or whatever it is that isn't there.
We've done this for many, many years. It's not just social media. It's not just the internet that's brought this about. We did this before by simply placing a classified ad in the wrong paper. Or placing the help wanted sign in a wrong post office. I don't know how far back in history it goes, but back before newspapers, we had a town crier. Remember that? I don't know if you studied that in history and there aren't any more… there might be town criers these days but the town crier was the local paper. It was the person that sat in the square in the middle of town and yelled out the news. They were the news anchorman.
Even back then, people would slip them a dime or whatever to advertise the such and such a company or such and such a store is looking for people. That's how far back this goes. If you gave the wrong town crier the penny, you might end up with the wrong audience, or the wrong part of town. This goes back to the beginning of time. I don't think this is a mistake that internet or social media has created. It's just something endemic in recruiting.
What I'm trying to say here is we need to really just answer the question – Where are the people really? Let's answer that question. Let's audit. Where are the people that we want to find first? Then, and only if we only have the answer to that, then we can decide whether we build it or utilize something that's already been built.
In the LinkedIn's, and Facebook's, and Monsters of the world, find out are your people on LinkedIn, are your people on Facebook, are your people on Monster? If yes, then the next step is do we use LinkedIn, Facebook or Monster? How much are we willing to spend to get to those people? How much of the people that we need are really in there?
If you look at the general consensus of what most companies will tell you is their number source of hire, it would be referrals. In some companies, they've actually measured this to employee referrals.
I had an interesting conversation with a gentleman – I can't tell you the company because he didn't tell me it was okay to talk about it – but he told me that in his company, they found that employee referrals are actually either the second or third largest source of hire. They're the second or third worst quality, which I was shocked.
Peter: Really? Yeah, because normally you hear just the opposite.
Shally: You do. He showed me statistics where he said, this is really interesting because what we're finding is that the people are referring their friends and they're trying to get them in the door, and they're sort of pushing them in the door. Then they get here and they turn out to not to really have been really a good fit. Not that they're bad people, they just weren't a fit for the skill set. So that's what they're finding.
Now that may not be true in a lot of places, but those are the kinds of questions that we need to be asking. Now that we have the data, now that we've arrived at the place where we have this sophisticated analysis tools, the competitive intelligence, the systems that support us to be able to do that research, we ought to be able to ask these questions, and we should be asking these questions.
Now that you know where your people are, the next thing is how many of them are you going to get from that? When you go out fishing, you have a plan. I'm going to catch X amount of fish. If you catch a fish that's too big that you can't bring back on your boat, that was equally as unsuccessful as not catching any fish. If you can't fit it in the boat, or you can't bring it up on your line… before we go out and decide whether we want to use LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter, or Monster, or anyone of the other partners or search firms, or whatever, what's the kind of hires that we're going to expect from them? What number? Maybe we can satisfy most of our needs from one place and not another. So we need to spend more or less. That's the question that a consultant can help you answer and assistant can help you answer. But most people simply don't even know how to go in and ask the questions. That's the stick right now where we are, where we are stuck. That's where we're stuck.
The next thing after that, once you've decided that you definitely do want to go on whatever the tool is, LinkedIn, Facebook, whatever, then the next thing is how do we use it?
Here's another mistake that people make in our industry is they go on LinkedIn and then they think "I bought LinkedIn, I'm done." "I bought Monster, I'm done. I've got a Monster license, we're good to go." But if you're not utilizing it, it doesn't matter what the tool is, whether you bought the world's most sophisticated fishing equipment and the most sophisticated lines… I'm a huge scuba diver. I can tell you that I'm a master diver. I'm not diving master. I don't teach. I'm not an instructor, but I'm a master diver with over a thousand times. I've got some pretty basic equipment. My things are scratched up and jagged. I don't use them very much. I've got BCD, or a vest that's pretty much as basic standard stuff. It works, it's rugged. I've got a really basic belt. I've got a nice mask that's not frilly but it's got my prescription on it, a nice snorkel that I hardly ever use, and I've got a dive computer that's not the best in the world, but it's smart enough to tell me that I've got dive charts when my dive computer dies. I can pretty much figure it out. Drop me off just about anywhere in the world. Maybe give me a Topo map, an oceanic map, and I can pretty much figure it out.
I can't tell you the amount of dive trips that I've been – and I haven't been to it in a while but I can't tell you the amount of dive trips I've been on where the buddy that was assigned to me was a complete buffoon, and had the world's top gear of diving computers and super sophisticated NASA inspired fins and BCD's that compensated on their own. They brought two or three back up knives, and five flashlights. They spent ten thousand dollars on dive gear, and they can't find their butt with both hands in the dark. So they're down there, with all this gear that they bought, and they think, I bought the gear and I'm the world's greatest diver. I'm telling you, it's really not about the tools; it's about the craftsmanship.
That's true in everything. But in recruiting, we seem to think, "I bought the tool, now I'm going to get the results." It doesn't really work that way. The tools are good. LinkedIn is fantastic. A hundred million people that are all there because they want a professionally network with other job seekers or not. Wow, I mean, that's awesome! But so is Monster. These are people who are active candidates and they've got their résumés. They're telling you they want to work for your company. Most recruiters don't even know how search the Monster database. Monster even teaches them, and they still don't take the class. It's a free class you can get. If you have a Monster account or a LinkedIn account, they'll teach you how to use the tool and a lot of people just don't even attend those meetings. They tune them out, they participate with half an ear, half an eye, and they don't really pick up on it, because they think, "I'm in here. I'll type in two keywords in the search box and get results."
Listen, typing stuff into a search box is not a strategy. That's just a technique. In fact, it's not even a technique; it's just an activity. To have technique, you need to know how to apply it. To have strategy and you know why you're applying it and what you're expecting to get – we don't do that, no matter what the tool is generally. The one's who do are really good. They'll tell you, "This is how I use LinkedIn." Everybody that looks at them using LinkedIn or Monster or whatever is going, "Wow, why are you doing that? I didn't even know you could do that. That's incredible! Can you teach me how to do it?" They figure it out on their own. But that's what separates the really, really good 'hunters' from what you were calling the post and pray, the ones that are just kind of sitting around and waiting.
It's really just a matter of changing the mindset, ask the right questions, train, teach people how to ask the right questions, and really think it through. It's critical thinking that's missing. We're just not, "Hey I'm here!" It doesn't mean I know how to do it. I'm on LinkedIn it doesn't mean I'm a good networker. There is hundred million of people in LinkedIn. There are not a hundred and million good networkers on LinkedIn. You see what I mean?
Peter: Absolutely.
Shally: So that's key.
Peter: Well Shally, thank you so much for taking time to speak with again, here on Total Picture Radio. It's always great to see you.
Shally is the Chief CyberSleuth and EVP of Arbita, which is Arbita.net.
The long tail lives! An interview we recorded with Shally in 2009 continues to be popular!
About Peter Clayton
Peter Clayton, Producer/Host, is an award-winning producer/director of radio, television, documentary, video, interactive and Web-based media who has created breakthrough media for a wide array of Fortune 100 clients.
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