As Recruiting professionals, we’ve likely all experienced the dreaded back-channel reference that goes south. You’ve sourced and engaged a candidate where there’s a unanimous “yes” from the interview team and then the hiring manager completes a back-channel reference.

After hearing mixed feedback the hiring manager wants to cut ties and move in a different direction.

These back-channel references provide a great deal of information, that in many cases can derail the recruiting process and send you back to the drawing board.  Hear what recruiters should and can do legally and some tips on how to handle these situations.  After all, it’s a small world.

Join Jason Buss, VP of Talent Acquisition at MongoDB, and Kate Bischoff, Employment Attorney & HR Consultant at tHRive Law & Consulting for an exclusive webinar to hear what recruiters should and can do legally as well as some tips on how to handle these situations.  After all, it’s a small world.

This webinar will be held on Thursday, July 13th, 2017 at 10 am PST / 1 pm EST. Register to attend the webinar here!

The Back-Channel Reference [Webinar]

The Back-Channel Reference [Webinar]

If you’ve watched TV shows like “Criminal Minds,” you’ve seen FBI agents analyzing crime scenes, searching numerous government databases and interviewing both suspects and witnesses to solve a case.

With advances in technology and new streams of data available to employers on an almost daily basis, it doesn’t take an FBI profiler to figure out who would make the best candidate for a specific job opening. As we spend more and more time online and on our smart phones, we’re generating unprecedented amounts of data, leaving behind digital breadcrumbs that can be mined for talent identification purposes.

New analytics technologies are empowering HR leaders with the data and insights needed to help attract, hire, manage and retain the talent they need to drive business success. By combining internal data with behavioral analytics and other technologies, employers can better predict who would be the best fit for a particular role, and even gain insight into how to elicit that candidate’s best performance.

I recently attended a Harvard Business Review webinar that touched on some of the fascinating ways our digital footprints are being translated into talent scores that can help employers compare large pools of candidates worldwide.

These are some of the interesting points I took away on new methods used in identifying talent:

Mining Facebook “Likes” – According to research conducted jointly by Stanford University and the University of Cambridge, mining Facebook “Likes” using computer-generated algorithms may predict a person’s personality better than most of their friends and family. After analyzing the videos, articles, artists and other items a person “Liked”, the computer was more accurate in identifying psychological traits such as agreeableness and conscientiousness than in-person interactions. While social media analytics can be used to identify traits that may predict a candidate’s suitability for a job, it’s important to note that there are laws and regulations which may govern who should analyze an applicant’s social media profile and who should not.

Tapping internal Big Data – Another interesting concept is that critical benchmarks for talent and performance can be derived from existing organizational data. The premise is that by measuring everything people do at work you can infer how they will perform in the future. For example, an employer can map how groups interact and how ideas spread throughout the organization. The data collected can help identify the most suitable teams for certain projects, and which individuals are essential resources based on their strong connections with colleagues.

Applying gamification – When taking assessment tests, the user experience can be shortened or jazzed up by applying techniques from the video game industry. For example, companies like VisualDNA profile people using visual personality quizzes which reveal psychological traits such as openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. The quizzes couple questions with images of people doing things to trigger a rapid emotional reaction from a participants’ subconscious to reveal their personality makeup. Keep in mind that it is a best practice for employers to ensure that any tests/assessments applied within their workforce are job-related and do not expose protected characteristic data.

Employing digital profiling – Digital interview providers such as HireVue mine around 80 million data points from a 20-minute interview. The data is then linked to personality and performance analytics to infer relevant talent signals derived from the interview.

While some of these methods may sound a bit futuristic to HR professionals, the employment world is moving toward an environment where intuition and references are but starting points to profile job candidates. One day hiring talent may be as easy as finding the person in the closest proximity with the right skills for the job similar to Google Maps showing what businesses are nearby. In the meantime, employers should continue expanding their evaluation methods in their recruiting activities and, to stay competitive, they should embrace analytics to help better inform their talent management decisions.

This article was written by Amit Jain, Division Vice President, Strategy & Business Development of Major Account Services at ADP.

4 New Ways to Help Analyze Talent Pools

4 New Ways to Help Analyze Talent Pools

The first days and weeks on the job for new employees are crucial. They can literally make or break a new employee’s impression of your company and determine whether or not they want to stay.

Based on recent data from the ADP^® DataCloud, a Big Data platform that allows business leaders and HR professionals to generate actionable insights from the workforce data embedded in their ADP HCM solutions, more than 25% of employees left their jobs within the first 60 days.

These are pretty startling statistics and constitute a real challenge for recruiters. That’s why after successfully attracting and recruiting talent into your organization, a positive onboarding experience is the next step to ensuring you retain them.

All too often, new employees are emailed a packet of intimidating forms to fill out and told to come back when it’s completed. Today’s workforce expects more and the talent you invite into your organization deserves a better experience.

Organizations should strive to create an onboarding solution that incorporates the latest best practices and trends, emphasizes employee socialization, increases engagement, and speeds the employee’s ability to contribute to your organization’s success, as well as their own.

A Fresh Approach to Onboarding

Every organization has its own version of the complex process of onboarding, but introducing the latest technology can benefit companies across the board.

If your onboarding experience is not using technology to the fullest, consider incorporating these four popular techniques:

1. Simplify. Make the onboarding experience easy and enjoyable for new hires. Use technology to communicate regularly and boost engagement. Enhance the user experience and simplify the process to make completing the required forms easy instead of tedious. Most importantly, seek feedback and continually work to improve the process over time.

2. Build Connections. Tap into social tools to introduce new hires to their team members and help them feel connected even before Day 1. No one is better suited to teach new hires about your organization, culture, and roles than their new colleagues. Facilitating relationship building early on will help them feel comfortable and bring them up to speed in record time.

3. Remove Friction. Ensure that onboarding is the beginning of the employee journey where information flows to the HCM system to avoid hours spent on repetitive data entry by HR and employees. The less time spent on data entry and paperwork means more time for assimilation, network building, and productivity.

4. Assume “Mobile-First.” According to the Nielsen^® 2014 Digital Consumer Report, nearly two thirds of Americans own a smart phone and use it for everything from getting directions to online shopping. Today’s workforce has high expectations when it comes to accessing information at their fingertips. Developing a streamlined, intuitive onboarding processes with forms and social tools that can be easily read and accessed from a smart phone should be a major initiative.

Going beyond technology innovations, an overarching theme of any effective new hire experience is that onboarding is a continual process throughout the journey of work, not a single event. Bringing a new employee into an organization or on to a new team goes beyond a week of orientation and should include several conversations over time to allow the new hire to fully assimilate to their role and to the organization. Take time to clarify the company culture; check in often over the course of the first year of employment to ensure your new hire remains on a good path, and establish a follow-up plan to monitor how they’re faring.

Convert New Hires to Engaged, Productive Employees

Your organization gets one chance to do onboarding right, so go all-out to make it a meaningful experience for your employee. With the importance of recruiting and retaining talent at an all-time high, business leaders must understand that effectively integrating new hires into the organization is an important step to ensure their success.

Above all, the onboarding experience is a personal one. If new employees are treated as valued contributors from the start, it increases the probability that they’ll be engaged, and remain engaged, as they disperse throughout the company.

This article was written by By Dave Imbrogno, President of National Account Services for ADP’s Global Enterprise Solutions unit. He is responsible for many of the company’s Human Capital Management solutions, including Human Resources, Payroll, Time and Labor Management, Comprehensive Outsourcing Services, Talent Acquisition and Talent Management.

Transforming Onboarding to Help Maximize Success

Transforming Onboarding to Help Maximize Success

The benefits of working remotely can go on and on – avoiding the dreadful rush-hour traffic, saving commute costs, balancing work and life and more. It is no surprise that Forrester predicts almost half (43%) of the U.S. workforce will be remote by next year.

But there is one major drawback. As convenient as working remotely can be, it often leads to a lack of culture that prevents it from becoming a truly desirable option. Working at home just does not deliver the firsthand experience that many people tend to seek – fun and lively ping-pong sessions, team bonding excursions, gourmet catering or even simple happy hours.

Companies big and small are investing heavily in culture to recruit technology talent, as demand for staff has surpassed supply. A recent Boston Consulting Group study found that the demand for software developers has outpaced supply by approximately 35,000 positions and is predicted to increase six fold through 2022. Culture has even been correlated to a company’s bottom line. In fact, companies with “performance-enhancing cultures” raised 682% in revenue growth and companies that did not have a culture only grew 166%, according to a research study conducted by Kotter International and Harvard Business School professor, James Heskett.

Understanding the importance of creating a sense of camaraderie for my staff, I knew I had to find ways to build culture at Unveillance, my first startup. The problem? We had a fully remote workforce. Given these unusual circumstances, it was no easy task – I had no idea where to start. However, after taking the time to get to know my employees, here’s what I’ve found to work over the years:

Bring the water cooler conversations online

The lack of face-to-face interaction can strip any kind of personality from the collaboration between team members. That’s why I started a Slack messaging channel and populated it with random articles, videos and humorous finds for the team to share. This affords us all a few (albeit remote) laughs during the day, an experience that would usually be reserved for the “water cooler” at a conventional company.

Game play: The new happy hour

If you know your technology teams enjoy video games, then encourage a weekend or off-hours virtual session to foster bonding beyond work and relieve stress. This sends a message to your tech teams that you care about their interests and genuinely want them to be happy working at your company. If your first off-hours gaming session is successful, expand it to other teams, providing employees of all kinds with opportunities to engage virtually with their coworkers by participating in activities they all enjoy.

Say goodbye to micromanagement

There is no way to micromanage remotely, so you might as well allow your team to manage their own time according to what works best for them. For example, if employees prefer to take longer lunch breaks and then clock in additional hours after 5 p.m., let them do it! You’ll likely find that your work force is more relaxed, more refreshed and more motivated to work while they are online. If you do not trust them to do great work at their own pace, why did you hire them in the first place?

Invest in face time

Having a remote workforce does not mean you should limit yourself to communicating only via Skype, GoToMeeting or other virtual meeting platforms. Every once in a while, invest in the time to meet key team players. These meetings can reset expectations, strengthen bonds and help you obtain feedback from staff to make the company culture better.? When you take the time to meet with your teams, they know that you value them and will, in turn, feel more motivated to do above and beyond for the company. In the end, nothing truly replaces the firsthand social experience of meeting up in person.

Acknowledging the importance of culture has been a key factor in my success to date – it has helped me increase productivity in a remote work setting and retain brilliant talent who played an integral role in the acquisition of Unveillance.

Now, I continue to focus on culture at my current startup, Tagspire, a social commerce platform that allows anyone to earn cash incentives when the products they “tag” have been purchased. Like at Unveillance, Tagspire has full-time remote staff working from all over Texas and the world, and I have found that a commitment to culture has been paramount in cementing our mission even further.

At the end of the day, there is no magical formula to crack the culture code in remote work. It is instrumental to pay attention to staff’s lifestyle choices, get to know their hobbies and come up with unique practices that will effectively build a culture that your staff will embrace.

This article was written by My Say from Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Talent HQ is a premier information channel empowering professional development for recruiting and HR communities through regional events including Denver Recruiters, Wisconsin Recruiters, Oregon Recruiters and California Recruiters.

Remote Employees: Cracking The Culture Code

Remote Employees: Cracking The Culture Code

Who says you can’t go home again?

I’m talking about returning to work for a former employer. There’s no time like the present to remind jobseekers of yet another avenue that’s often overlooked when it comes to landing a new job.

If you’re like most people, when you part ways with an employer, your instinct is to brush your hands together, move on and don’t look back.

But hold your horses. Sometimes circling back can be a win for everyone.

Last week, I spoke to David Almeda and Dan Schawbel, a career guru whose WorkplaceTrends.com worked with the Workforce Institute at Kronos to release a new study: The Corporate Culture and Boomerang Employee Study. Schawbel’s also the author of Promote Yourself: The New Rules to Career Success. David Almeda is the chief people officer at Kronos. I will get to our conversation in a minute.

According to the duo’s study, there’s “a changing mindset about boomerang employees, someone who left an organization, for whatever reason, and then rejoined that same organization at a future date, and the organizations they once left.”

In the national survey of more than 1,800 human resources (HR) professionals, increasingly alums are returning to the fold and being greeted with open arms.

“You have a better chance now than ever of getting into company where you formerly worked,” says Schwabel. “Maybe your original job was not a good fit. Something new may have opened up since you’ve been gone that’s a better position for you and your current skills.”

What’s changed? Based on survey results, nearly half of HR professionals claim their organization previously had a policy against rehiring former employees – even if the employee left in good standing – but 76 percent say they are more accepting of hiring boomerang employees today than in the past. Managers agree, as nearly two-thirds said they are more accepting of hiring back former colleagues.

While only 15 percent of employees said they had boomeranged back to a former employer, nearly 40 percent said they would consider going back to a company where they previously worked.

In the past five years, 85 percent of HR professionals say they have received job applications from former employees, and 40 percent say their organization hired about half of those former employees who applied.

When we spoke, Kronos’ Almeda identified “four flavors “of boomerang employees:

1. Those who left to further their career. These are folks who worked for an employer for a number of years, but saw an opportunity to add new skills and progress and then came back at a higher level and higher pay, he says. They may have been gone three to five years.

2. Folks with a career itch to scratch. They’d been at a company a fairly long time. Their colleagues may have moved on to do something different. They saw an opportunity they couldn’t pass up. Or they came to the conclusion to try something different, maybe an opportunity to change industries or follow a passion. They thought, ‘if not now, when am I going to do it?’ Sometimes that works out well, but sometimes it doesn’t. “Whoops, it looked better on paper, or in my head then when it got to be reality,” he says. So they circle back and reach out to their former boss and say, humbly, ‘I’d like to come back if opportunity arises.’ And the dance begins.

3. A life event forced them to leave. A spouse may have relocated, which required them to leave their job, or they took time off to take care of sick parent. Now they want to return as a contract worker, or work remotely with some flexibility.

4. Those who boomerang on purpose. Almeda calls these, “See you next year workers.” Periodic planned boomerangs are increasingly popular, particularly with “retired” boomers, think seasonal workers, who take on positions at National Parks, ski mountain resorts, or even amusement parks. They routinely work a season, and then return the following one. Snowbirders also fit into this category. I identify several of these kinds of jobs in my book Great Jobs for Everyone 50+

Why you should consider boomeranging. Boomerang hiring makes perfect sense to me. Sending a resume blindly out to job postings where you have no connection to the employer is, generally speaking, a futile and frustrating effort. I pull my hair out when I hear jobseekers telling me how many resumes they have zapped off to faceless hiring managers, computer program scanners, or HR gate screeners once removed.

Yes, there are now intermediary firms hired by employers to screen applicants via online and virtual interviews, so you’re one step removed from the decision maker from the get go. It’s daunting and demoralizing, and oh so impersonal.

In truth, landing a job these days is not all that different as it used to be. Employers hire people they know, or people they know know. Simply put, it’s less risky for them and it’s all about rolling the risk.

What’s the attraction for employers and employees alike: For you, its knowing what you’re getting into, so it removes the fear of the unknown, plus for both you and the employer, it’s an easier training ramp up than if you’re a brand new employee. And on some level, the employer, too, has less worries if you already past muster the first go-round.

Here are some things to consider if you’re job-hunting right now… or think you might be before too long.

Join employer alumni groups on LinkedIn and Facebook. According to the Kronos Workforce survey, HR practitioners say they use several strategies for keeping in touch with former top employees, including alumni groups (27 percent). Facebook is the platform of choice for alumni groups according to HR professionals (42 percent) and LinkedIn (33 percent) close behind. Comment on posts from others and add your own. It displays your expertise to prospective employers.

Keep an eye on former employer job postings. If you had proven yourself at a company, you’re a commodity coveted to rehire, says Almeda. In other words, step on up. Don’t shy away from reaching out to a former manager, or someone you know at your ex’s place, if there’s a position that catches your eye.

Make graceful exits. Never burn a bridge. If you’ve parted ways on good terms, you have no reason not to check back in with an ex. Moreover, if you’re considering leaving a job right now, remember, always depart in the right way and establish relationship that will allow you to return. If done properly, no one is going to kick you out of the family. I’ve resigned from five jobs during my career. I’m still regularly hired to work as an expert columnist and writer for former employers and bosses from my previous staff positions, and I love it.

Do you know an insider at the company where you want to work? Current employee referrals are a key pathway in the door. According to CareerBuilder, a whopping 82 percent of employers rate employee referrals above all other sources for generating the best return on investment; 88 percent of employers rated employee referrals above all other sources for generated quality of new hires.

And an analysis of over 441,000 job interview reviews posted on Glassdoor since 2009 reinforces the idea that “employee referrals have long been a preferred hiring method among employers, allowing companies to tap the personal networks of current employees as a talent pool for recruiting,” wrote Andrew Chamberlain, chief economist for Glassdoor in a blog post on the research.

“Of the six job interview sources we examined, employee referrals performed best, boosting the chances of a successful job match by a statistically significant 2.6 to 6.6 percent.”

Dig deep into you Facebook and LinkedIn contacts and search out who you know currently working at the firm that interests you, or who someone you know who might be connected to someone who does, and ask politely for an introduction to him or her. (For more advice on how to do this delicately, check out, my new book, Finding The Job You Want After 50 for Dummies).

Checkout open positions with a former client or customer. According to the Workforce Institute at Kronos survey, 75 percent of HR professionals say that customers have also applied for positions at their organization, with 60 percent saying they have hired at least one former customer.

Network like crazy. Boomerang or not. It comes down the human touch. Networking, as I like to say, is just one letter off from not working. If you don’t establish any personal connection to the company, you’re probably wasting your time even applying.

This article was written by Kerry Hannon from Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Talent HQ is a premier information channel empowering professional development for recruiting and HR communities through regional events including Minnesota Recruiters, Wisconsin Recruiters, Oregon Recruiters and California Recruiters.

Welcome Back: Hiring Boomerang Employees On The Rise

Welcome Back: Hiring Boomerang Employees On The Rise

Recruiters skim resumes in seconds and still glean enough information to decide on a candidate. I have found this to be true across industries, positions and levels. I have recruited for a variety of industries (financial services, management consulting, tech, media, non-profit), positions (client-facing, administrative, strategy, creative) and levels (unpaid interns thru multiple six-figure hires), and my recruiting colleagues and I always skim. With multiple jobs open at any one time and hundreds of resumes to review, it’s simple math that each resume gets seconds of attention. Here are five items on your resume that recruiters notice first:

Brand names

The names that get attention are top schools, Fortune 500 companies, household brands, and hot start-ups. Your employers and schools screened you and selected you over others. Recruiters weigh the competitiveness of that filter. Recruiters’ preferences will depend on the search. For an executive-level position, top schools still carry weight but not as much at this stage of the career as recent companies. For a recent graduate with less information, the school brand matters more. If the role is for a fast-growth newer company, a history with successful start-ups may be preferred over even Fortune 500 companies. However, if the search is specifically to find a large-company executive then the Fortune 500 names will carry the day.

Make sure you put as many brand names as possible. If your employer is not a household name but is a leader in its field, put a one-line sentence to indicate this (e.g., largest textile manufacturer in Japan). If your employer is not itself a brand name but serves brand names, make sure you mention this. If your start-up is gaining traction but is not widely known, include something that indicates success—for example growth figures or media mentions.

Keywords

Many recruiters don’t just look at every resume that comes in. They do a search for specific keywords. It might be a brand name – in the above example of the fast-growth company, the recruiter may search for competitor names experiencing a similar growth trajectory. Other popular keyword searches are technical skills like software or programming languages, certifications like the CPA or PMP, and functional skills like direct response for a specialized marketing search or regression analysis for a data analyst position. Just because you apply for a role does not mean you will be considered for that role. The recruiter may pull up resumes based on keyword, rather than who applied.

Make sure your resume includes detailed keywords even if you think your title makes it obvious. If you are a direct mail marketer by title, you should still elaborate on the direct response, segmentation, and other specific campaigns and analyses you did, even if you think it’s redundant with your title. First of all, recruiters may not ever see your title because they won’t see your resume if you don’t get pulled up in their search. Secondly, recruiters are often generalists who search across a variety of positions, and the one working on the direct mail/ direct response/ email marketing search may not know what your role entails just by its title. Finally, titles vary across companies – do not assume that what you do is obvious.

Chronology

Recruiters zero in on gaps, short tenures, and lack of progression. Depending on how recent the issues are and other competing factors, the chronology in a resume may be a deal breaker. A gap in the middle of an otherwise solid career is less of an issue than a recent gap. A shorter gap (less than six months) is a non-issue. Multiple jobs with a year or less of tenure raise suspicions that the candidate has no staying power – either they can’t commit or the employer doesn’t want them. If this occurs earlier in the career and recent positions show longevity, it probably doesn’t matter. If there is longevity but no increase in responsibilities, title or results, then this shows a lack of progression.

Review your own resume just by dates and tenure. You may need to include shorter stints that you planned to omit but they fill in gaps. You might unnecessarily have short stints listed because one of your employers got acquired so it’s really a name change, not a short tenure, or maybe you moved from one subsidiary to another, each with different names, so it’s internal movement, not separate short stints. Make sure you group these experiences together, so you show continuity. Write your position descriptions to reflect progression especially for roles you have held for a number of years.

Mistakes

Spelling and grammar mistakes jump out. The candidate looks sloppy, unprofessional, uncaring. If proper names are misspelled (a company listed as a client, a software listed as a skill) it raises doubt as to whether or not the candidate really worked at the company or knows that program.

Spell check is the first line of defense, but homonyms and names won’t get caught there, so you still need to copy edit line-by-line. Led versus lead is the most common mistake I see – the candidate means to write in the past tense (“led a team”) but instead spells it as it sounds (“lead a team”).

Potential

This is not one specific item on a resume but the feel across the entire resume. Brand names, relevant keywords, longevity and progression, and no mistakes all contribute to the message that, yes, this candidate has potential. In addition, the body of work – skills plus experience plus specific industry or functional expertise – also point to whether there is a potential fit to the opening on hand. The aesthetics of the resume – layout, readability, conciseness of descriptions – signal professionalism and attention to detail. The emphasis in the resume – the summary on top, the first bullet of each job, the results that are quantified – point to what this candidate feels is their value proposition. Does it match what the recruiter needs for the role?

Give your resume to someone else, anyone else to read. Someone who doesn’t look at resumes all the time will not be able to skim it in a few seconds, but it shouldn’t take that much longer to form an opinion. What jumps out at them? What do they think you do? What job do they think you’re applying for? Once you have all the facts down on your resume, edit it for potential – make sure it’s easy one the eyes and that you’re highlighting your value.

Remember that a resume is the start of a discussion, not the close. You are trying to get a meeting or interview, not a job outright. Don’t feel like you have to put every detail of every project. Put enough information – brand names, relevant keywords, longevity and progression, error-free presentation, potential value — so that you are clearly in the ballpark for the roles you want, but it will never be all the information you have. Your resume as an invitation to get to know you further.

This article was written by Caroline Ceniza-Levine from Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Talent HQ is a premier information channel empowering professional development for recruiting and HR communities through regional events including Minnesota Recruiters, Wisconsin Recruiters, Oregon Recruiters and California Recruiters.

5 Things Recruiters Notice First On Your Resume

5 Things Recruiters Notice First On Your Resume

It’s easy to see what makes a great job. A great job ad is one that gets people excited about working for you, and then makes it easy for them to learn more. Most job ads fail on both counts.

Most job ads start off by telling job-seekers about the high opinion your company has of itself. They don’t give any evidence for the opinion — they just tell us “With a long history of excellence, XYZ Inc. is a leader in its industry.”

Big deal! Anyone could say that. What makes your company a great place to work? That’s what inquiring minds want to know.

The most obnoxious job ads don’t even speak to the people who are reading them. They speak right past their readers, using the third person like this:

The Selected Candidate will possess twenty years of search-engine optimization experience, the ability to play the trombone while riding a unicycle and excellent Greek skills (ancient Greek) plus a current taxi driver’s license.

When you talk past the job-seeker in the third person, referring to The Selected Candidate instead of “you” the way any other kind of ad would do, you’re saying “We don’t know who The Selected Candidate will be, but we can say for sure it won’t be your sorry ass!”

That’s a horrible way to try and attract smart people. Anybody with a teaspoonful of self-esteem is going to zip right past your job ad and go to work for somebody else — and can you blame them?

The best job ads tell you why the job will be fun and interesting. Lousy job ads skip that part entirely. They drone on and on about the Essential Qualifications that a job-seeker has to bring to the party, in order for the  lofty company to stoop to notice him or her.

What will that kind of ad — a boring, insulting boilerplate job ad – bring you?

It will bring you mojo-depleted, desperate job-seekers who will be happy to kiss your feet and bury their own needs and personalities in order to get a job. Don’t expect much in the way of innovation or fresh thinking from those folks!

If you hate innovation and new ideas, you should be very happy with your sheeplike new hires, at least until shareholders start asking why you aren’t making any money.

5 Ways To Improve Your Company’s Search For Talent

It’s easy to write a job ad with a human voice in it. Here’s an example:

My grandfather started Acme Explosives in 1955 to get coyotes the stick dynamite they need for their projects, and now we’re going strong with manufacturing on three continents.

We’ve just gotten approval to ship modular, assemble-on-site stick dynamite products through UPS and trucking firms and we’re launching our first e-commerce site. We need an E-Commerce Operations Manager to run the online sales and marketing part of our business and coordinate with Production and Purchasing.

The job will be fast and furious and full of new adventures as you design our back-end operations to support our e-commerce business. You’ll work closely with our inside and outside sales folks, Marketing and everyone else on our team.

Who will love this job? It might you if you like creating new processes, love to juggle projects and know something about e-commerce and online merchandising.

If you think this $70-$75K assignment might be right for you, please write to me at chuck@acmegoboom.com and tell me why in 300 words. Include your LinkedIn profile url in your message and skip the resume.

One of us will get back to you within 48 hours of receiving your message or the next business day.

Thanks for checking out Acme Explosives and wishing you a dynamite day!

It is hard to write a job ad this way? No – it’s simple. Chuck Jones is the CEO of Acme Explosives and he’s ready to read 300-word messages for a week or two to find the right person for his needs. He’s ready to reply to everyone who responds.

What’s special about Chuck? Only that he cares about talent, instead of saying that he cares when he really doesn’t the way most medium-sized and larger employers do.

It’s a new day in the talent marketplace. Either you learn how to bring great people into your firm and keep them there or you’ll die. The good news is that it’s easy to make any workplace a Human Workplace.

You just have to give up the delusional belief that the company is in control and the employees are interchangeable. Make that one mental switch, and watch your results go boom!

This article was written by Liz Ryan from Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Talent HQ is a premier information channel empowering professional development for recruiting and HR communities through regional events including Minnesota Recruiters, Wisconsin Recruiters, Oregon Recruiters and California Recruiters.

Are Your Job Ads Attracting Talent – Or Driving It Away?

Are Your Job Ads Attracting Talent – Or Driving It Away?

That I think the odd mixture of capitalism and free markets that we have is pretty much the best system humans have yet devised is well known. That I also rather play down the ways in which companies and producers abuse this system is also pretty obvious. But that people really do abuse the system has been obvious at least since Adam Smith pointed it out in 1776. And that real abuse needs to be dealt with and dealt with hard. Thus my welcoming the conclusion of the Silicon Valley wage fixing scandal, where the perpetrators, Google, Apple, Intel and Adobe, are going to have to pay $415 million in compensation to the people they cheated. That a lot of what others see as market abuse or manipulation I see as perfectly honest business practice does not mean that I am actually in favour of laissez faire. We do not need to work to make sure that markets are fair but we do need to be vigilant to make sure that they are free, free of cartels.

The news itself:

A U.S. judge on Wednesday granted final approval to a $415 million settlement that ends a high profile lawsuit in which workers accused Apple, Google and two other Silicon Valley companies of conspiring to hold down salaries.

The plaintiffs alleged that Apple Inc, Google Inc , Intel Corp and Adobe Systems Inc agreed to avoid poaching each other’s employees, thus limiting job mobility and, as a result, keeping a lid on salaries.

The basic story is that the tech giants (Facebook was a notable standout from joining the arrangements) agreed that they wouldn’t try to hire engineers away from each other. There was at the time, still is in fact, a shortage of seriously talented engineers. And of course one solution to wanting more engineers in the face of such a shortage is to make really good job offers to the people who are working for your competitors. This annoys your competitors no end and of course it annoys you when they return the favour. So, it ended up with a general agreement that Google wouldn’t poach engineers from Apple and Apple wouldn’t from Google and so on.

The problem with this is that it’s illegal: it’s quite obviously a cartel. It’s a cartel of the employers against their own employees. Because if there’s a shortage of skilled engineers then the pay of skilled engineers should be bid up.

It was another classical economist, Karl Marx, who got this point correct (lifted, as with all the other bits he got right, from either Ricardo or Smith). It is this sort of bidding up of wages which leads to raises for the workers in general in fact. If there’s unemployment about then a factory owner doesn’t have to raise wages to gain more labour. And if his current labour starts getting a bit bolshie, asking for more of the profits of their labour, then he can fire them and go hire the unemployed. It’s only when there are no unemployed people around that the employer must start to share those profits with the workers: and that’s what makes wages go up in general.

So, a cartel that prevents job poaching in the face of shortage short circuits this process. And we really, really, don’t like that happening. So much so that I think that the penalties on these companies should have been rather higher. This is the civil suit settlement being announced today. The criminal stuff was sorted out several years ago and the fines paid were trivial given the size of the companies and the manner of their behaviour. I welcome this settlement, but would argue that those criminal penalties should have been a lot, lot, higher. Over here in Europe they could have been as much as 10% of global revenues of the participants. That might be too much but the basic point still remains. Yes, I think that there’s less market manipulation and monopoly around than most other people do. But when there really is this collaboration to create a cartel then the authorities really should come down on them like a tonne of bricks.

This article was written by Tim Worstall from Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Talent HQ is a premier information channel empowering professional development for recruiting and HR communities through regional events including Minnesota Recruiters, Wisconsin Recruiters, Oregon Recruiters and California Recruiters.

#Tech Giants Will Pay $415 Million In Poaching Settlement

#Tech Giants Will Pay $415 Million In Poaching Settlement

By Dave Imbrogno, President of National Account Services for ADP’s Global Enterprise Solutions unit.

As mobile job-seeking gains popularity, today’s candidates increasingly want tools that leverage the latest social and mobile technology — from mobile-enabled job alerts and postings to the ability to apply via smartphone to tracking applications, viewing job postings and reading job-related blogs, forums and articles.

According to its 2014 Social Recruiting Survey, recruiting software platform specialist Jobvite found that mobile continues to be a burgeoning channel for candidate engagement and they caution that recruiters who don’t leverage mobile will risk losing talent to the competition. The survey revealed that 55% of recruiters use or plan to use a mobile career site to support recruiting efforts. But, interestingly, the study also showed that despite 43% of job seekers using mobile in their job search, 59% of recruiters invested nothing in 2014 in mobile career sites.

Additional research conducted by the ADP Research Institute^® reveals a similar disconnect between the tools recruiters and job seekers use to find each other.

For example, the research found that 44% of recruiters listed LinkedIn as “extremely” or “very” useful in their pursuit of new talent. Yet, only 19% of job seekers felt the same when looking for a job. Recruiters’ and job seekers’ perspectives on the usefulness of other social media sites during the recruiting process — including Facebook, Twitter and Google+ — showed a similar disconnect, with recruiters consistently viewing the social platforms as more useful than job candidates did.

As we’ve grown accustomed to the simplicity of online shopping, we increasingly demand a similar experience from the systems we use at work. Yet, many core business systems, including human capital management (HCM) platforms, haven’t kept pace with the trend toward more consumer-centric user interfaces. Meeting this growing candidate and employee expectation is critical to recruiting and retaining top performers. Once a candidate is hired, it makes it easier for them to do their jobs and manage their HR information anytime, anywhere.

For HR leaders, these trends have clear implications.

Accommodating the user expectations of candidates and employees requires modern HCM systems that leverage the latest technology innovations to deliver a highly intuitive user interface akin to the mobile apps we use in our personal lives. And the HR systems of the future should empower employees with visual, personalized dashboards that give them a single point of entry to their benefits, payroll and other HR information. HR systems should also include built-in decision-support tools tailored to both employees — such as for annual open enrollment — as well as managers, to drive better decision-making, based on actionable insights regarding talent and performance. The end result will be a more satisfied, engaged and productive workforce.

This article was written by By Dave Imbrogno, President of National Account Services for ADP’s Global Enterprise Solutions unit. He is responsible for many of the company’s Human Capital Management solutions, including Human Resources, Payroll, Time and Labor Management, Comprehensive Outsourcing Services, Talent Acquisition and Talent Management.

Recruiting and Retaining Talent Takes Mobile-enabled Sites and Consumer-Centric HCM Platforms

Recruiting and Retaining Talent Takes Mobile-enabled Sites and Consumer-Centric HCM Platforms

The jobs report from last week was disappointing. Economists expected employers to create 217,000 jobs in August; we got only 173,000. And more adults are simply calling it quits — they don’t work and they’re not looking. Labor force participation is at its lowest in almost two generations.

The news wasn’t all bad. Unemployment hit a seven-year low and the economy is adding jobs at a decent clip, 212,000 a month on average so far this year.

Falling unemployment sounds good, but it doesn’t count working-age Americans who have dropped out of the labor force. Last month, the share of adults working or looking for work held at a 38-year low. Typically, labor force participation is around 68 percent, but it’s been at 62.6 percent for three months now.

“You have a big segment of the working-age population that’s shut out of the labor market. That lowers demand for goods, services and investment,” Redfin Chief Economist Nela Richardson said. “Without demand, we can’t get robust economic or wage growth. The economy gets stuck.”

Maybe some of those labor force dropouts won the lottery and are just living large. But a lot of them simply have given up. In the end, the reasons why they’ve checked out don’t matter.

“Whether it’s by choice or not, we’ve been in a really low productivity cycle,” Richardson said. “The economy in the first half of the year grew at only 2.2 percent. We’d expect at least 3 percent growth by now.”

So what? Today’s report sends no clear signal on the Fed, which will decide this later this month whether to raise interest rates.

“The evidence tells you two different things. You have to pick which part of the chart you want to focus on,” Richardson said.

While the central bank doesn’t control your mortgage, its actions do affect the economy and financial markets, which can affect the cost of a home loan. For now, we expect mortgage ratesto stay low.

This article was written by Lorraine Woellert from Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Talent HQ is a premier information channel empowering professional development for recruiting and HR communities through regional events including Minnesota Recruiters, Wisconsin Recruiters, Oregon Recruiters and California Recruiters.

August Jobs Report: The Good and Bad in One Chart

August Jobs Report: The Good and Bad in One Chart

Just 173,000 jobs were added to the U.S. economy in August, according to the latest release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics out Friday morning. That’s well below market expectations as well as the 12-month average. However, with the unemployment rate coming in at its lowest level since April 2008, seemingly for the right reasons, and solid revisions to prior months’ payroll count the situation may not be as lackluster as the August figure suggests.

The count for June was revised up to plus 245,000 from the latest reading of plus 231,000 jobs. July’s figure was also revised up to plus 245,000 from an initial reading of 215,000. Net total employment gains in June and July were therefore 44,000 higher than BLS previously reported and in line with the 12-month average of 247,000 monthly jobs added.

“Look past the August payroll number at the upward revisions in June and July to get a true sense of this report,” advises Greg McBride, chief financial analyst at financial data site Bankrate.com.

PNC Chief Economist Stuart Hoffman wrote in a note, “The August preliminary payroll jobs number is notorious for understating the final revised data by a huge average of 78,000 jobs in the past three years so there will be upward revisions to the 173,000 gain in the next two months.”

The sectors that added the most jobs were: health care and social assistance (56,000), professional and business services (33,000) and food services and drinking place (26,000). Conversely, manufacturing and mining lost jobs (17,000 and 9,000 respectively).

At 5.1% the unemployment rate, which is drawn from a different survey, was down from 5.3% in June and July. Up for debate, however, is whether people are leaving by choice or because they have determined opportunities do not exist for them.

Currently 8 million Americans are unemployed, down 1.5 million year-over-year, about half of the reduction from the long term unemployed. In August there were 624,000 discouraged workers — i.e. people not currently looking for work because they don’t believe jobs are available for them and therefore are not considered unemployed — which is down by 151,000 from a year ago and down by more than 40,000 from last month.

The labor force participation rate was also steady at 62.6% for the third month in a row, remaining at its lowest level in almost four decades. Previously the rate has been remained in a narrow 62.7% to 62.9% range. The U-6 rate, which measures under-employment, came in at 10.3% in August versus 10.4% in July and down from 12% a year earlier. The employment-population ratio was little changed at 59.4%.

Average hourly earnings rose by 8 cents to $25.09 last month. The 12-month wage growth rate is therefore 2.2%. Pre-recession normal year-over-year wage gains were between 3% and 4%.

McBride points to the steady participation rate and employment population ration combined with the revisions to conclude the unemployment rate is lower because more people are getting back to work.

“We have been saying for months that we want to see more people coming back into the labor market, but at this point it looks like they may stay on the sidelines,” notes Tara Sinclair, chief economist at job search site Indeed. ”If this is the new normal we need to start getting comfortable with it.”

Equity markets futures were in the red Friday, with the S&P 500, Dow Jones Industrial Average and Nasdaq Composite all down about 1% in the first 20 minutes following the release. The question on investors’ minds is what this all means for the Federal Reserve, which has indicated it would like to nudge interest rates from near zero if economic conditions allow.

“There is nothing in there that would deter the Fed from raising rates this month. The decision is ultimately going to come to what shape financial markets are in mid September,” says McBride.  Markets have been suffering a bout of drama in recent weeks the Vix volatility index soaring and the Dow declining close to 9% for the year. “The Fed wants to raise rates or at least get the process started. They need to restock the cupboard in order to having something to serve up” next time the economy gets into trouble.

“With the unemployment rate falling to within the range the Fed has said is consistent with full employment, and labor force participation showing no sign of picking up, it may finally be time for the Fed to call this economic recovery stable and raise rates,” says Sinclair. “Wages are rising, and inflation is nowhere to be seen, so although we would hope for stronger numbers there is an argument for a September rate hike.”

This article was written by Samantha Sharf from Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Talent HQ is a premier information channel empowering professional development for recruiting and HR communities through regional events including Minnesota Recruiters, Wisconsin Recruiters, Florida Recruiters and California Recruiters.

U.S. Jobs Report: 173,000 Jobs Added In August, Unemployment Rate Down To 5.1%

U.S. Jobs Report: 173,000 Jobs Added In August, Unemployment Rate Down To 5.1%

A new market has emerged: Employee feedback apps for the corporate marketplace. These tools are powerful and disruptive, and they have the potential to redefine how we manage our organizations.

As the economy grows and the job market gets hotter, employee engagement and retention have become a top priority. As I discuss in Why Culture is the Hottest Topic in Business, most CEOs are bending over backwards to make their company a “great place to work.” Free food, unlimited vacation, yoga classes, and lavish educational benefits are becoming common… and in some cases, even wages are starting to rise.

As attention shifts toward the health and happiness of staff, employee engagement remains surprisingly low. Gallup tells us that only about 1/3 of employees are actively engaged, Glassdoor data shows an average engagement of a C+ (3.1 out of 5), and Quantum Workplace believes engagement is at its lowest level in eight years.

If we look at employee ratings of employers as a whole, we find that performance follows a bell curve. I’ve analyzed data from Glassdoor, a website which lets employees rate their employers, and you can see the distribution below. While some companies are doing very well, many are doing quite poorly — and the data shows no easy-to-spot patterns.  The highly engaged organizations are all shapes and sizes:  all industries, all sizes, and all ages.

Why is there such a wide variation in employee engagement and retention?

The answer is clear: building a highly engaged workforce is difficult.

As described in the Deloitte University Press article Simply Irresistible, there are 20 distinct factors that contribute to employee engagement, ranging from the quality of the jobs to the quality of management, career progression and opportunity, learning culture, and level of recognition. So these highly engaged companies are doing a lot of things right.

And the problem is getting harder. Today employees are more empowered, mobile, and demanding than ever.

New research by MRInetwork shows that 90% of recruiters surveyed believe that “candidates are now in charge” – the highest this metric has been in five years. So if you aren’t thinking about how to keep your people happy, they might pick up and leave (or even worse, stay and undermine you).  Research shows that unhappy employees who stay can be a bigger problem than those who leave – they have an oversized negative impact on everyone else.

What can we do? How can a CEO, manager, or even HR team keep up with everything everyone needs?

The Solution: Employee Feedback as the Killer App

Our research shows that a new approach has arrived:  open, anonymous, employee feedback.

Just as customer feedback has transformed the customer experience, employee feedback is transforming the employee experience.

Consider what feedback and ratings have done for our lives as consumers. We can “like,” “rate,” or “evaluate” almost everything we buy – leading to a better shopping experience, better customer service, and products that more quickly adapt to our needs.

In the case of employees, the tools being unleashed are likely to change the way we run our businesses, totally redefining the way we think of “employee engagement.”

Redefining the Term “Feedback”

Let’s talk about the word Feedback.  At work the word often has a negative connotation. When a manager has a problem with someone, they often pull them aside and say “hey, let me give you a little feedback.” And most likely our heart starts to flutter and we immediately get worried and defensive.

In this new world we have to redefine this word and look at Feedback as a positive, constructive concept that can unleash innovation, solve problems, and create empowerment in the organization.

As one consultant put it to me, we should use the concept that “Feedback is a Gift.”

• Feedback is a gift to give (i.e., we should give it kindly and with respect) and
• Feedback is a gift to receive (we open it carefully, take it with respect, and thank the giver).

If we think about Feedback in this way, we can open the floodgates to constructive suggestions – and find a myriad of ways to run our operation better.

Is it scary to think that employees can give us their opinion any time they want?  Of course it is – but that horse has left the barn. People now post information about their workplace on a variety of online sites (Glassdoor, Facebook, and others) or share information privately with their friends.

Learning From The Ratings Economy

To better understand this trend it’s instructive to look at the consumer marketplace.

Today we live in a Ratings Economy – we can rate almost anything. (Even the US Postal Service now uses Yelp.)

On Uber, for example, you rate the driver and the driver rates you. This helps Uber find problem drivers, but also lets the company find problem customers. (Uber drivers have told me that riders who are rated poorly actually have a harder time getting rides – I haven’t confirmed this but it certainly would make sense.)

eBay  pioneered this idea by letting buyers rate sellers and sellers rate buyers. Anyone who has done business on eBay knows how effective this system can be, and many consider eBay one of the first trusted, quality-oriented, and service-centric marketplaces.

NetPromoter or NPS has become a major force in the ratings economy. With one question (“How well would you recommend this product to others?”) we can evaluate any product or service.  In the case of the employee experience, vendors have created an eNPS (employee net promoter score) as a single measure. The eNPS simply asks “how well would you recommend this company to a friend?”

This Ratings Economy has encouraged many companies to let people rate managers, programs, courses, and internal systems. Laszlo Bock, in his book WorkRules, describes how Google encourages employees to rate their managers, for example.

As the ratings economy has expanded, we’ve learned more about how to optimize the feedback mechanism:

• As ratings and text feedback comes in, people can often Upvote or Downvote others’ comments, creating a “double-loop” dynamic. The organization can see which suggestions are highly regarded, helping to prioritize input and which actions to take.
• You can often “Rate the Ratings.” Yelp, for example, lets you rate reviews as “useful, funny, or cool.” This lets raters gain greater credibility, and raises the bar for “useful feedback” from others.  Amazon.com lets us see the “most helpful reviews,” by letting readers evaluate the usefulness of reviews.
• Systems let you self-rate your own comments. One vendor lets employees rate their employer in categories and then asks them to go back and prioritize each answer – forcing the employee prioritize his or her input.
• Social systems now “Rate the Rater,” a mechanism which shows what kind of evaluator you are. People who write highly valued ratings in Amazon, for example, become “Hall of Fame Reviewers” – making their voice more credible than others.
• Sentiment analysis and text analytics tools can monitor and help censor unsavory comments. If someone is abusive, releases confidential information, or swears, the software can find this behavior and remove it before it appears in public. Several vendors (Kanjoya  for example) offer such tools and others (such as Bettercompany.co, Getthememo.com,  Glint, and TinyPulse) monitor and police comments for abuse or let an administrator review comments before they are publicized.

So Feedback is not a new idea and the mechanics are generally well understood. As these systems grow and evolve in the consumer marketplace, they have now entered the corporation. If you think about the Feedback Economy in the context of business, it feels more like an “always-on” suggestion box.

The Need for Anonymity

We can’t talk about feedback and ratings systems without discussing the issue of anonymity.

While ratings in a consumer website may or may not be anonymous, at work anonymity is critical. In the consumer world, if you poorly review a restaurant or “down rate” a driver, there are likely no major consequences to you – in fact it can be a good thing, because the company can get back to you to address your problem.

At work, however, the ramifications are different. If you “down rate” your boss or say something critical about the company (even in a constructive way), you may be labelled a “trouble maker,” which now reflects poorly on you.

In our prior company (Bersin & Associates) I always valued people who complained a lot, it taught me what I needed to do better. In large companies, however, this kind of behavior is often not appreciated- so people who “speak up” often take career risk.

In some cases the issues are highly sensitive. If people point out process or workplace problems then they are likely to bring up safety issues, sexual harassment, management dysfunction, process inefficiencies, and other problems which could embarrass a manager or create legal risk for the company. So if you know who the complainer is, there may be a natural tendency to retaliate or even suppress their ideas.

The answer is to make the system anonymous, and assure employees that the company absolutely will not know who they are. (This is the approach seasoned HR managers take with any investigation.)

While most employees don’t really trust that surveys are anonymous (after all, they did arrive in my email inbox!), these new tools work hard to assure people that they are (more on that topic below). This means that you, as a business or HR leader, may have to bend over backwards to make sure you never let the system expose anyone’s identity and that the tool you use aggregates data in a fair way so people’s responses can never be traced back to an individual.

Should you “censor” or “approve” feedback to share?  Absolutely yes. Despite best efforts to make these systems constructive and business focused, we’re going to find people who have an axe to grind, may have been treated unfairly, or perhaps are just vindictive by nature. It’s important to manage these systems well so we don’t let insulting, abusive, or confidential information flow through the company.

It’s also important to realize that some comments may open legal issues. Some union contracts, for example, prohibit employers from surveying their people – or they require the union to approve. If an employee opens a workforce complaint, some states may put the organization on notice, so HR has to monitor some comments.

Remember, however, that these systems are freeing real employee comments, so as they grow leaders have to ready to listen, ready to respond, and ready to learn.

My experience with these systems, and I have now talked with dozens of companies using them, is that organizations that create a “listening” culture can gain a competitive advantage over their peers. These companies can open a deep well of innovation and ideas, giving people a sense of empowerment and ownership.

Removing Friction: The Importance of Simplicity

You may say “we do employee feedback surveys already” or “we have a suggestion process in the company now.” Well that may not be enough.

One of the things we can learn from the ratings economy is that great feedback comes when the process is incredibly easy. If we remove friction from the process (make feedback easy and in the flow of work), the feedback becomes richer.

New feedback apps now let you mouse over a five-star box to give something a rating. Modern pulse surveys appear in your email and let you answer inline without clicking a link or opening a survey.  Vendors are starting to attach their ratings to emails or other systems, letting us give feedback in the flow of work.  (Think about a feedback box attached to every presentation, email, or document we receive, for example.)

And the questions they ask are simple and short.

A question like “how are you feeling about work?” is enough to give useful trending information. The Japanese app Niko Niko, for example (borrowed from Japanese manufacturing quality programs), lets employees give their boss a “smile, flat, or frown” face at the end of each day. This simple tool gives managers an instant sense of how things are trending, pointing to potential problem areas. Vendors like Trello (an online productivity app) embed this functionality right into the daily flow of work.

Fig:  Niko Niko Board Gives Immediate Daily Feedback

A recent article in the Washington Post shows that even the TSA is now implementing “real-time feedback” kiosks to let people give instant feedback on their service. The website, http://www.feedback.usa.gov tells it all.

Not Surveys, Simple Questions

We don’t need to develop long surveys with long questions. Think about questions like “what was one thing that went well for you this week?” or “what is one thing that wasted your time this week?” These simple questions, asked regularly, help companies and managers gain immediate feedback and see trends.

A national food service company implemented a pulse feedback system and discovered that the drive-thru service window was causing operational glitches in staffing. (People were running back and forth between the drive-up window and the in-store window, rather than having someone dedicated to drive-thru.) A store employee found a fix and within weeks this “suggestion” became standard practice around the country.  Think about how many such “fixes” you probably have in your company.

A sales and marketing executive at a fast-growing software company told me he pulses his sales people with one question every week.  (The questions range from “How well did the week go?” to “What got in our way this week?” – their vendor provides the bank of questions.) He told me that he can now predict the following week’s sales based on the results of last week’s pulse survey.

I just finished a meeting with an HR services company and we brainstormed a feedback app that could help leaders make meetings more effective. The app would let you rate each meeting you attend and immediately provide feedback to the meeting organizer on the utility of the session. We could then rate and rank meeting leaders, look at which meetings should be shorter, and… well you can imagine the possibilities.  (One particular app, Waggl.it, is designed specifically for this type of usage.)

Do These Tools Work? Yes, When Designed Well. 

Wait a minute. Aren’t we already over-surveying people? Aren’t they already “surveyed to death?”

Perhaps, but remember these and similar apps are not surveys, but feedback systems.  One version of them is the “pulse survey,” but ultimately they can do much more. They are not long surveys.

The software executive I mentioned above told me that 85%-90% of people respond to his weekly pulse survey — primarily because they know that management is listening and the survey takes only a few seconds to complete.

Earls Kitchen and Bar, a fast-growing Canadian and now US-based restaurant chain, uses pulse surveys to stay in touch with their staff in every restaurant. As any of you who have worked in food service know, there are hundreds of things that can get in the way of efficient service in a restaurant. Employees in the stores see what’s really happening and they often have the best suggestions on what to fix. Mo Jesse, Earls’ CEO, credits his company’s financial turnaround with the detailed feedback they receive directly from employees.

As Mo put it, “I could have redesigned the menu, hired new chefs, or redesigned the facilities… but rather than try to decide what to do, I let our employees tell me.” He created a  ”listening campaign,” and dozens of good ideas emerged. I won’t give away their secrets, but the results have been significant.

People Analytics: A New Source of Actionable Business Data

One of the hottest new areas of HR (and business) is People Analytics:  mining employee data to understand ways to improve business performance. Well this data stream may be one of the most valuable you have.

Remember that feedback data is like the canary in the coal mine: it tells you that something is wrong, even if you’re not completely sure what it is.

A Swiss investment bank, which has been studying its employee data for years, told me that the single leading predictor of  business unit profitability is “employee engagement.” Imagine what they could do with more current and actionable data.

And Feedback goes well beyond employee happiness, by the way. Once you implement a feedback app you will get help with business performance, turnover issues, theft and abuse, compliance violations, customer service issues, and a whole variety of other operational issues. When sales productivity is low, turnover is high, quality issues arise, or you have theft or compliance problems, the feedback and comments from people should alert you immediately to the problem.

Will you get “noise” and “junk data” in the system?  Of course you will, so it’s important to set standards. Tell people that personal comments, discriminatory and inflammatory statements, and other types of disparagement are not permitted.

Disruptive to the Engagement Survey Market

This market is new, growing fast, and likely to become a billion dollar market over the next few years. Today companies spend more than $1 billion on annual engagement surveys, and most tell me these are not getting the value they want. While the annual survey has become an institution in many organizations, I believe they will be replaced by these pulse and “always on” systems in the next few years and the incumbent engagement survey vendors will have to adapt.

One of the reasons the traditional engagement survey market is under so much pressure is that the concepts and principles of employee engagement have really changed. As I discuss in It’s Time to Rethink the Employee Engagement Issue, annual engagement metrics are not actionable enough for most managers. Being a “Simply Irresistible” organization is an everyday topic, and managers should constantly think about ways they can make work easier and more enjoyable. Employees today are like volunteers, always willing to tell you what we can do to make the business better.

We just need to give them the right opportunity to speak up, then listen and take action.

The Impact on Performance Management: Let Employees Rate their Managers

One of the biggest issues facing HR departments today is the need to redesign the performance management process. Not only are many companies doing away with ratings and simplifying the process as a whole, they are now realizing that the manager-led process has flaws. If managers are here to help and coach their people, shouldn’t the employees also rate the managers?

We know managers are biased. Research shows that 61% of a “rating” is based on the bias of the boss (not actual employee performance), so it makes sense to let employees rate the boss for a more balanced perspective. If a manager is particularly hard on his or her people, this feedback loop helps balance the system.

The performance management market software market is picking up on this.  A new breed of performance management systems enables managers to check-in with employees on a regular basis and lets employees rate the manager on a regular basis (displaying aggregate data, so employee identity is protected).

The theme is to reduce the unilateral power of managers, and opening up decisions to a larger group. (Google, for example, does not let managers unilaterally rate employees or decide who to hire because managers act in their own self-interest. They bring these decisions to a higher level to make sure major people decisions focus on the entire organization rather than only a single workgroup.

Vendors like TMBC, Reflektive, Engagedly, Workday, SuccessFactors and others are embedding ongoing feedback right into their performance management tools – redefining the multi-billion dollar market for performance and talent management.

(I personally believe team feedback will become a standard feature set in all performance management software soon.)

The Vendor Marketplace Today:  Four Emerging Categories

Let’s talk about the marketplace. Innovation is rapid and there are dozens (perhaps hundreds) of startups entering the space. They tend to fall into four broad categories.

1. Next Generation Pulse Survey and Management Feedback Tools

The first category is what I call “next-generation” pulse survey tools.

These companies, like CultureAmp, TinyHR, Glint, Perceptyx, BlackbookHR, Culture IQ, OfficeVibe, Waggl.it, GetHppy, Impraise, ModernSurvey, VirginPulse, and Thymometrics have developed efficient systems to rapidly survey employees with short, easy to take surveys. Traditional survey vendors like Gallup, IBM (Kenexa), CEB, Sirota, Qualtrics, and others are likely to produce these tools.

The startups are winning over customers because their tools are easy to use, inexpensive, and designed for mobile  use. They use a variety of methods to engage people (some are surveys, some are online dashboards), but their #1 focus is making it feedback easy.

The tools are also designed to let managers send quick surveys directly to their team, so for example the VP of sales (per the example above) can easily pulse his or her sales team on what’s bugging them each week.

While these companies provide various types of surveys and measurement dashboards to view results, they also have other features that can be useful for performance reviews, management assessments, and other feedback events.  For example:

• Reflektive lets employees provide feedback to other employees or teams directly in Outlook, so you can provide “feedback” to a person or a team while sending email.  SmallImprovements, TinyPulse, and StandOut by TMBC are other tools that are moving in this direction.
• 15Five and Trello sell tools that combines task management with feedback to integrate how you feel with what you do each day.  Slack is now offering this as well.
• Waggl.it is designed to enables pulse feedback after a meeting, presentation, or other business event.

Since the market is so huge, vendors focus in different segments. Some (like Glint, CultureAmp, TinyHR, Blackbook, CultureIQ, Qualtrics) are specifically targeting the enterprise corporate engagement survey space.

Others are focused on “fast multi-purpose feedback” (Thymometrics, Waggl.it, Impraise, TinyHR), and some of their clients use them as complements to an annual survey. Thymometrics, for example, plots and visualizes team “mood” over time.

In time we will see these tools embedded into work management systems. Think about work productivity tools like Slack, Jira, Basecamp, Huddle, Trello, and Sharepoint. These are each effective platforms to embed “feedback” as well. While they may not be anonymous, there are many benefits to commenting on a project or a meeting right in the flow of work.

As I talk to corporate HR managers, most are starting to experiment with these tools and many expect to replace their annual engagement survey over time. The new vendors are building standard questions, producing industry benchmarks, and creating enterprise reporting to meet this need.

2. “Open Suggestion Box” and Anonymous Social Network Tools

The second category is a more radical new set of technologies I’d call “category busters” – tools to enable anonymous social networking and ongoing discussions among employees. These are startups trying to build the “YikYak,” “Whisper,” or the “Secret” of business.

A History of Anonymous Social Apps

Anonymous social networks are not a new idea – in fact the very first social network, MySpace, was anonymous. With the advent of mobile apps, such anonymous networks have re-emerged with a vengeance. Over the last few years history has taught us a lot: these systems are complex and hard to predict, they need to be purposeful in their design, and they need strong privacy protection.

Secret, which published its mobile app in late 2013, rapidly became a phenomenon in Silicon Valley and turned into an “online chat room” which many used to publish rumors, disclose confidential information, troll for sex, and generally bash or complain about anything that bothered them. The tool was hacked a few times and people were never sure if their identity was truly anonymous, creating buzz around the tool’s lack of security. Several major business rumors and sexual harassment issues were surfaced on Secret, and as a result the founders shut the system down around the end of 2014.

Whisper, which continues to function, was accused of spying on its users, but later “proved” (through legal and senate hearings) that the company has put in place barriers to prevent anyone from identifying the IP address or phone number of a user. The issue of whether or not posts on Whisper are really confidential continues to be an open topic of debate.  (Every mobile device has a unique identifier and can often broadcast an IP address which does identify the owner, so confidentiality can be considered not only a technical issue, but also one of business process.) Whisper uses photos as its paradigm for sharing information, and it is often used by students. It has a lot of personal and relationship-related traffic, but enables its users to downvote or report abuse to help keep the site clean.

YikYak, which is a similar system but focused more on young people and university students, continues to grow, now enabling people to post photos and create group chats on various topics and themes. It enables upvoting/downvoting and also lets individuals “peek” into groups that others have joined. It lets you identify your location so you can see “Yaks” from people close to you (often used for hookups and dating). While the app has been criticized for cyber-bullying, it appears to be quite popular among young people and students.

A work-focused social network, however, is there to help the organization get better – so it’s important that a system enables confidentiality when information is sensitive. We are in new territory here, and many of the vendors in this space are experimenting with ways to keep the conversation positive.

One in particular, Bettercompany.co, focuses particularly on helping users create a “circle of professional friends,” albeit anonymously. While the app is still new, it appears to have created a very positive and constructive environment filled with support and advice. Another, Getthememo.com, lets users see comments on any company posted and then “follow” companies other than their own.

We can learn more about these systems by looking at the history of Facebook. Before Facebook there was MySpace, a social network which let people create anonymous identities and post whatever they wanted. Facebook proved that by requiring people to identify themselves, they could help create a more “friendly” and real environment for communication.

These vendors should be careful. Since it is illegal to slander people, disclose confidential information, or even disparage products and services in a vindictive way, vendors that open up its system for “anonymous feedback” take a risk that they will be asked to disclose their participants (or censor information) if it turns out to be slanderous or confidential.

Will these types of tools take off?  I believe they will in time. While no HR manager wants to see flaming vitriol flowing through the company’s email system, business leaders want to know how people feel and that’s why practices like “management by walking around” are often so important.

Think about the challenges we have with information in companies. When people reach management or senior status in organizations, they start to get filtered information. In fact, the problem of “Groupthink” and “filtered news” is one of the biggest challenges many CEOs and other senior leaders face. While some leaders have “moles” in the organization who share information about what’s going on, even that communication channel is inconsistent and unpredictable. On the employee side, people always have reactions to things going on, but they ask themselves “should I say anything?”

The startup founders in this space believe, many passionately, that work will never be “good” until people can be open with their feedback and get managers to listen. Remember that Millennials (more than half the workforce today) grew up with instant feedback so they tend to see these apps as natural parts of their working life.

I talked with Christopher Mims from the Wall Street Journal about this a few months ago and he wrote an article called “Anonymous feedback tools for Bosses.”  It turns out many of these apps can be used to discuss almost anything: workplace safety issues, workflow inefficiencies, wasted time in meetings, and suggestions about food, benefits, or employee services. Ideally we should be getting a steady stream of this kind of feedback; we just need tools that can help us safely unleash the flow.

By the way, sentiment analysis technology is getting better. A recent article discusses how a consulting firm uses this technology to mine Starbucks’ Glassdoor ratings and found six common employee issues the company faces around the world.  Vendors like Kanjoya and Glint are building sentiment analysis right into theirs platforms, and it’s probable that this trend will continue.

Right now there are a variety of tools in this market, including BetterCompany.co, Memo (getthememo.com), Hyphen, Canary, Hinted – and many of those listed in category 1. Many of the pulse survey vendors now offer “open bulletin boards” and open text boxes that enable anonymous feedback, so they cross into this segment. And as sentiment analysis software becomes more and more ubiquitous, we can likely expect “open feedback” to become standard in feedback applications.

3.  Culture Assessment and Management Tools

The third category in this market are tools designed specifically to diagnose, monitor, or improve organizational culture.

As I described in Why Culture is the Most Important Topic in Business, Culture is a matching bookend to Engagement. A strong and consistent culture helps people perform well and it also can help organizations decide whom to hire, ways to assess leaders, and what leadership values they want to promote.

Culture is not “one size fits all.” Every company can have a different culture and still perform at its best. Culture vendors and culture tools have various models which show how culture varies, and some of the dimensions are simply decisions on how to run a business.

For example, one company may have a “risk-taking culture,” encouraging people to try new things, innovate, and often make mistakes in front of customers. This company may have many innovative, groundbreaking products, yet its customers may also know that some of its products are experiments and won’t always work the first time.

Another company may be a “fast follower” or “value deliverer,” who produces products which are highly tested, very reliable, but perhaps lower in cost and targeted toward customers who are more conservative in their desires. This company would not tolerate risky, early products in the market and as a result, its engineers, marketing, and product management team would be more conservative as well.

I won’t try to describe these tools in detail, but I see them as complementary to the tools above, because they provide evaluative models which assess personality traits and organizational behaviors that can help define culture, point out inconsistencies, and illustrate where culture is problematic. Many of these tools also include personality assessments (similar to Myers-Briggs), where individuals and managers can assess themselves, assess their teams, and gain insights and tips on how to better get along or “fit” into the company or team.

Some of the major tools in this category include RoundPegg, Culture IQ, Deloitte’s CulturePath, Human Synergistics, Kanjoya, Denison, and Ceridian’s new Related Matters, now part of LifeWorks.

Remember, Feedback can be applied to individuals, teams, or the organization as a whole. So tools that can assess individual personalities, as well as the many individual assessment tools, will likely cross into this area.

4. Social Recognition Tools

The fourth category is a big one:  tools that help people give others thanks, recognition, and even gifts (or points). While this is a slightly different category (many of these systems are really rewards points and rewards programs), it crosses into this market because whenever you give someone “thanks” you’re also providing feedback.

We studied this category a few years ago when we wrote Secrets of Effective Employee Recognition, a major research study that looked at these tools and their potential impact on business performance. What we found is that respondent companies that practiced a “high-recognition” culture have 30% lower voluntary turnover than average, and tend to outperform their peers in a variety of other metrics.

If feedback is the killer app, then “thanks” is the gorilla in the market. When you unleash the ability for people to easily say “thanks” to their peers (and give them points or other rewards), an enormous new network of information often starts to flow. Leaders can suddenly see important people who they may never have noticed, and the culture of helping others can start to grow and improve.

Our research also found that saying “thank you” is an important part of building strong employee engagement. Physiological studies show that thanking someone actually makes people feel better, through the release of Oxytocin, the “trust hormone.”  (Read this article for more detail.)

How do these fit into this market?  These systems help capture feedback, comments, can be tagged with company values, and produce another vast amount of information about how the organization works, who is performing well, and what types of relationships people have.  They are typically not anonymous, so they tend to focus more on positive comments than negative – but nevertheless, many companies tell me that these tools unleash enormous amounts of positive energy and can help people understand even better who and why certain behaviors and people are valued highly.

Vendors in this market include Achievers, GloboForce, iAppreciate (by OC Tanner), TemboSocial, Workstars, Kudos Now, and many more.

Is Feedback a Feature, An App, or a Platform?

As an analyst, I always wonder whether a new set of capabilities will become a market, a set of features, or simply a set of practices companies implement internally.

Why, for example, couldn’t I just use an off-the-shelf survey tool to do all this myself?

The answer is becoming clear: this is a complex new area of software and the right features and workflow dynamics are just being developed.

The new vendors in this space are rapidly going down the learning curve on how to design their tools, what questions to ask, and what kinds of feedback loops are going to work the best. So for the next few years I believe companies should look at this as a major new market to explore for HR and employee-related applications.

Consider how innovation often occurs in software. “Slack,” one of the fastest-growing software companies in the world of internal communications, is not just another version of a “chat room.” It offers a collaboration and messaging technology that aims to radically change the way we work. The company’s growth is occurring because it has learned how to simplify its tool, make it easy to use, and build an ecosystem of partners to make it better.

The feedback and culture vendors are doing exactly the same thing. They are inventing new user experiences, creating new workflows, and building new mechanics that facilitate feedback in exciting new ways. As the market grows and features become proven, more of this capability may larger HR systems, but I think it’s more likely these vendors will grow and later be acquired.  Companies like Medallia, for example, have built a robust business about customer experience management – we can expect a similar trend to take place in the area of employee feedback.

The larger HR vendors like Workday, SuccessFactors, Oracle, CornerstoneOnDemand, ADP, Saba, and Ceridian are also investing in these tools, but right now the startups are moving faster, and the real “Gorilla” of this space has yet to emerge.

A New Tool for Management has Arrived

Feedback is not just a fad, it’s a major trend.

These new tools have the potential to fill the gap between what managers need to do and what people really want. They give leaders immediate feedback on the programs and actions they take. They unleash new ideas, and open the door to new work practices, and help us engage our people.

But before you jump in, I have a warning. As you embark on this journey, get ready for some unfiltered information, be humble enough to listen, act on suggestions, and thank people for their input, regardless of its nature. And as a recent Wall Street Journal article points out, if you set rules for decency and confidentiality, people will respond.

The market is young, but it’s growing fast – I look forward to hearing your feedback on this important and rapidly growing marketplace.

This article was written by Josh Bersin from Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Talent HQ is a premier information channel empowering professional development for recruiting and HR communities through regional events including Minnesota Recruiters, Wisconsin Recruiters, Florida Recruiters and California Recruiters.

#Employee Feedback Is The Killer App #HR

#Employee Feedback Is The Killer App #HR