Inventables, an online bazaar and veritable Disney World for product designers and engineers, knows how to get great hiring results.  A glance at a recent posting for a UI/UX Designer illustrates what great companies do when hiring:

How to Apply:

Send an email to uiux@inventables.com and tell us about yourself. Please include your name and GPA from college in the subject line. Keep the message fun: consider telling us a story, drawing us a picture, writing a haiku…be creative! In addition, please outline your interest in Inventables, how you heard about us, and what your favorite material is (and why). Please also include a link to your online portfolio and a picture of at least one three-dimensional object that you have built. Do not attach your resume (we’ll be interested in looking at it later).

What happens next:

1. We will read, review, and reply to every single email we receive (on a rolling basis).
2. Then will create a shortlist of a few standout candidates who we’ll speak to on the phone.
3. If all goes well, you’ll be invited to complete a two part “Inventables Design Challenge”. If you are invited to complete part 2 you will be paid.
4. We will select a group of finalists who we’ll invite into our Chicago office for in-person interviews.
5. Finally, we will choose a candidate to join our team!

Why does this process work so well?

1. It clearly defines the process.  Meaning, they have one.
2. They make commitments to candidates, which inspires confidence in applicants.
3. They ask candidates to complete a work simulation.  Even better, they pay people for their time.
4. Their job posting reflects the personality, culture, and values of the company.

What top-notch UI/UX designer wouldn’t want to at least try to be a part of this company?

Take a look at your hiring process, and put a little Inventables in the mix.

That’s where your knowledge of your marketplace (or lack thereof) plays a critical role.  What do your competitors pay for similar work?  Do they hire for similar roles?  How do you even know?

The quickest way to find out is to check the Careers Page of your competitor’s websites and look at the job openings.  It’s amazing what you can glean from these nuggets of competitive information.  Are your competitors hiring?  If so, are they hiring salespeople?  Support personnel?  Executive staff?

An additional source of information is Job Boards like Monster and Careerbuilder.  Go to these sites and do a search for all jobs by Employer Name, using your competitors’ names.  Look at the job descriptions that pop up, and look for salary details.

Salary.com is a good resource for everything from high-level salary information across broad categories, down to “what should I pay my administrative assistant” type inquiries.  The broad information is either free or relatively inexpensive.  The job-specific information carries a bit more cost, but may be well worth it if you’re facing a decision that swings $5K or more.  They have a small business section that’s spot-on for a lot of what you might need.  I send a ton of people here as a good starting point.

If you want to get ultra-ninja with this type of research, consider hiring a market research or recruiting firm to uncover this information.  These service providers aren’t tied by the industry relationships that keep you from raiding your competitor’s employees and soliciting salary information.  They can tell you what employees at your competitors are making, and what the prevailing salary trends in the market should tell you about your pay rates.  It’s information you can’t afford to be without.

What most managers do is wait until the offer stage to “see what the candidate wants.”  That’s a huge mistake, in my opinion. That’s like walking onto a car lot, telling the sales guy that you absolutely have to have that last red convertible, and then asking how much it costs. Think you’re going to get a good price?

The point here is to emphasize the importance of knowing who’s competing for talent out there.  Recruiting, like real estate, is a local operation.  Salaries for the same role will vary by state, city, and even ZIP code.

Know the market rate for an employee in the role you’re trying to fill, and budget accordingly.

I like to think about it this way – what aspect of the company does HR own that truly impacts every other executive’s business operations on a day-to-day basis?  Employee benefits management is critical, but the VP of HR’s executive colleagues aren’t thinking about employee health care benefits when they wake up in the morning.  Conflict resolution is high-impact, but it’s a less-frequently needed contribution.  Succession planning is a big one, but it’s a multi-year process.  Performance reviews are once, maybe twice a year.

But when the VP of Sales has five open sales positions, and HR can’t seem to deliver great candidates, and search firm spend is breaking the budget, and sales numbers are being missed due to inadequate staffing levels.well, let’s just say that HR can’t wait to unload recruiting onto someone else.

Human Resources executives face a nearly impossible task.  CEOs tell them to train new employees, pay them, make them happy and healthy, rate everyone’s performance, retain the best ones, plan for their retirement, and then provide a roadmap to staff the company for the next five years.  Oh, and by the way, hire 90 people next year with a recruiting budget of under $50,000.

The HR function is typically great at maintaining the people systems at companies.  Benefits, payroll, training…all in good shape.  But recruiting is almost always a sore spot, lagging behind expectations.  The root of the issue lies in the fact that HR, as a general rule, is an overseer of administrative functions.  Maintaining programs.  Keeping things running.  Ensuring that processes are in place.  Managing people. 

Recruiting, however, is a sales function. When you have an outward-facing, go-get-em operation like recruiting run by an administrative function like HR, then you have, well, a poor-performing sales operation.

To see how similar recruiting is to sales, let’s look at how recruiters do what they do.  The recruiter first mines their databases for people who may be a good fit for their open position, just like sales and marketing folks mine the CRM system looking for leads.  Recruiters then cold-call or email candidates with a job proposition, just like a salesperson cold-calls a prospect.  In either case, it’s work that requires one to check their ego at the door, because you get 9 “no’s” for every one “yes.”  Recruiters then pitch the company to a candidate, just like a salesperson has their first phone meeting with a prospect.  If the candidate (prospect) likes what they hear, then they come in for another meeting.  At the final stage, the recruiter makes an offer to their candidate, who either accepts or rejects it based on their other options.

How many HR staffers do you know who crank out 100 cold calls a day?  How many administrators have you worked with who enjoy the rough-and-tumble of convincing someone to buy something?  If you’re going to run a world-class recruiting operation, you need to call it what it is – a sales team.

Would you, as the head of your company, allow HR to run the sales operation?  Of course not.  Why, then, do you have HR managing the selling of your company to new prospective employees?

Recruiting is a sales function.  The companies that understand that fact will win the war for talent.  Those that don’t will overspend on recruiting and still come up short.

The candidate sits down at the conference room table, and the entrepreneur is off to the races. They talk to their candidate about their business, and how great it is, and how many great people work there.  They talk about the growth prospects, and they talk about their client list, and they talk about how they made the Inc. 500 last year.  And then they tell the candidate how much they’d love working there.  The candidate, meanwhile, simply sits there, smiling and nodding, and listening to them gush on and on about their amazing company.

Inevitably, the manager will stop, look at the candidate, and say, “So, enough about us.  Why do you want to work here?”

The candidate then repeats back everything the entrepreneur just said, citing growth and entrepreneurial environment as their main reasons.  Entrepreneur and candidate banter back and forth for a while, and then time runs out.  The candidate leaves, excited about the company, but not sure exactly what the job entails.  The entrepreneur leaves, excited about the candidate, but without a clue as to how the person would perform in the role.

The entrepreneur extends an offer, the candidate accepts it, and six months later the entrepreneur and the candidate are both frustrated because neither one understood or managed expectations.

Does this scenario sound familiar?  When we work with entrepreneurial businesses to train their management team, the most common issue we find is what I call the “conversation mindset.”  Most people are nice, and most people want to connect with others.  Entrepreneurs are accustomed to informality and that informality translates directly into their interview style.  The result is an interview approach that goes a long way towards building rapport, but falls way short of eliciting information that predicts candidate success.

To correct this problem, we teach Hireology customers to enter what we call the Talent Mindset.  The Talent Mindset is the hiring manager’s version of “being in the zone.”  It’s a mental preparation that readies you, the hiring manager, for having an engaging and productive interview with your candidate.  How do you know you’re in the Talent Mindset?

You’re prepared. The first step in creating a Talent Mindset is preparation.  If you have to fumble around for the right questions to ask, then you’re not going to have a good interview.  By contrast, if the only thing you have to do is ask questions and listen, then you’ve set yourself up with an ideal situation.

You’re comfortable. Most of us don’t like judging others.  Fight the urge to be everyone’s friend – it will destroy your ability to conduct a solid interview.  To get into the Talent Mindset, you have to be ready to render judgement on the abilities and accomplishments of another human being.  It’s hard for many of us to objectively find fault in others, especially if they’re likeable.  Understand that your mission is to determine whether or not this person will have a high likelihood of success in your open role.  We’re not choosing friends.  Hiring mistakes cost a lot of money.

You’re protective. It takes years to create a company culture, but it only takes one bad hire to throw it into total meltdown.  Many of us have had the experience of knowing on a new employee’s first day that you’ve made a hiring mistake, because two or three of your employees are visibly annoyed when working with them (and perhaps have even told you so).  Being in the Talent Mindset means guarding your company’s amazing culture like the irreplaceable asset that it is.  If you’re going to create a company full of superstars, you can’t let a single bad apple into the barrel.  Protect your company’s culture as if it were the most important part of your job, because it is.

Before you conduct your next interview, walk through the following questions for determine if you’re in the Talent Mindset:  First, am I prepared for this interview?  Second, am I ready to pass judgement on another human being?  And third, am I approaching this interview as a guardian of my company’s culture?

If the answers are yes, you’ve set yourself up for hiring success!

Okay, now what?

The job offer stage is where a lot of entrepreneurs stumble, for a variety of reasons.  For starters, the reaching the offer stage of the hiring process is a lot like reaching the closing stage of a sales process.  If the salesperson has been consistently uncovering facts, exploring buyer motivation, understanding the hot-button issues, and trial-closing their prospect all along the way, then the “uh oh” moments where the sales process runs off the road into a ditch are few and far between.  However, if the salesperson has failed to uncover and handle the multiple objections that lay beneath the surface of every prospect’s buying decision, then the, “You know, Bob, we’ve decided to go with another supplier” conversation happens just when everyone feels like the sale is in the bag.  In recruiting, that’s the “I appreciate your offer, but I’ve decided to go in another direction” conversation.

Time to call your board and explain why your top candidate for sales VP just rejected your offer. Bad outcome.

There are a few basic guidelines to follow that will make for smooth sailing during the offer stage:

Know the hot-button issues. How far will your candidate have to commute every day to get to your job?  Does this candidate want to work from home whenever they feel like it?  Will this candidate balk at overnight travel?  What about weekend travel?  What benefits – health insurance, dental coverage, 401(k) match – are most important to this candidate?  What mix of base + incentive compensation is acceptable to your candidate?  If you haven’t uncovered the answers to these and other  very basic questions, then you’re setting yourself up for a surprise rejection.

Know where you stand. Does this candidate have other job offers pending?  Other interviews scheduled?  Where does your job opportunity stand in relation to the candidate’s other options?  Don’t wait until you get a rejected job opportunity to realize that your top candidate had your job ranked as their backup option.

Use verbal trial-closes to keep the process moving. The “trial close” is a sales tactic that is used to feel out a prospect at various stages prior to the actual “sign here” conversation.  Good recruiters use trial closes to feel out their candidates after each step of the recruiting process.  “Nancy, let’s say that we get through this process and agree that this is a great mutual fit.  Assuming a base salary of X, with on-target earnings of Y, and a benefits package of Z, is this a position that you would feel comfortable accepting?”  The key here is to probe for specifics, no matter the answer.  If there is any hesitation on your candidate’s part, there’s something you don’t know.  Find out.

Issue the offer verbally before issuing a written offer. Do not email an offer to a candidate and have it be the first time they’re reviewing numbers and terms.  When you’re ready to issue an offer, call the candidate.  Once you get them on the phone, tell them that you’re pleased to inform them that they’ve been selected for the position.  Thank them for their persistence through this lengthy but thorough process.  Tell them that you’d like to take a moment to walk them through the offer verbally before sending the formal offer to them.  After you’ve walked through the offer, ask them if they have any questions.  Answer them.  Ask them if they have any issues or concerns.  Address them.  If you feel like there are any loose ends, do NOT make the written offer.  You have no idea whether or not this person is going to accept it.  Wait until you have addresses all issues to the candidate’s satisfaction, and then send the written offer.

Use a standard offer template. Don’t recreate an offer letter from scratch every time you hire someone.  A good offer letter is as much a marketing document as it is a statement of facts.  Is it readable?  Does it have a professional appearance?  Does it touch on the major points?  Additionally, your standard offer template should set a time certain at which the offer expires.  It should also tell them to sign and fax/scan the offer letter back to you by this time certain (72 hours is my standard recommendation) in order to indicate their acceptance of your job offer.   Do not make an open-ended offer, because you’ll lose the ability to dictate tempo.

If the candidate asks for an extension, ask them why.  90% of all candidates asking for an extension on an offer decision do so because they’re waiting for another job offer to come through.  That’s okay, but you definitely want to know that.  The other 10% of candidates asking for an extension really do want to talk it over with their spouse.  I never grant extensions longer than a week.

Follow these straightforward guidelines to improve your offer acceptance rates, and to eliminate surprise offer rejections.

The flat performance was down sharply from a revised 85,000 gain of jobs in July, the Labor Department said Friday, and was far below a consensus forecast by economists of 60,000 new jobs. The unemployment rate stayed constant at 9.1 percent in August.

The nonfarm payrolls numbers were unchanged after a prolonged increase in economic anxiety in August that began with the brinksmanship in Washington’s debt-ceiling debate, followed by the country’s loss of its triple-A credit rating, stock market whiplash and renewed concerns about Europe’s sovereign debt.

The jobs figure, a monthly statistical snapshot by the Department of Labor, appears slightly more negative than it is because it does not include 45,000 Verizon workers who were on strike when the survey was taken but who will reappear in next month’s report.

Economists blamed both sluggish demand for goods and services and the heightened uncertainty over the economy’s direction for the slow pace of job creation, saying political deadlock was in effect creating economic paralysis.


Government continued to shed jobs, but the bulk of the loss was in local government, which lost 20,000 positions. State government actually posted a gain of 5,000 jobs.

Two of the bright spots in the economy over the last year, manufacturing and retail, lost steam, falling by 3,000 and 8,000 jobs, respectively. The health care sector added 29,700 jobs in August.

The number of long-term unemployed — people out of work for 27 weeks or more — remained about the same as in July, at 6 million, as did the median duration of unemployment, at 19.6 weeks compared with 19.7 weeks in July.

The general unemployment rate, which counts only people who looked for work in the previous four weeks, held steady at 9.1 percent. But a broader measure that includes people who have looked for work in the last year and people who were involuntarily working part-time instead of full-time, fell to 16.1 percent from 16.3 percent. The percent of working-age adults who were employed, already at its lowest rate since 1983, ticked down from 58.6 percent to 58.5 percent.

Would you ever consider forking over hundreds of thousands of dollars for a house based entirely on what the selling agent told you? (“Of COURSE the house is mold-free!“) That’s why we have home inspections. Yet, nearly every entrepreneur I work with is more than willing to fork over fifty, eighty, or a hundred-thousand dollars (or more) for someone that they’re hiring based entirely on the belief that this person hasn’t embellished or inflated a single thing about their stated accomplishments or experience.

Faith in people is a good thing, but it’s “trust but verify” time when you’re hiring new employees. Here are three tops tips for conducting reference checks that tell you what you need to know about your candidate:

Conduct the reference checks yourself. It might save you 15 minutes, but if you’re not doing the reference checks yourself, you’re missing out on a critical opportunity to learn things about your candidate that you’ll never get from someone else’s written report.

Approach the reference call like you’re about to make a $500,000 buying decision. I find that most managers who conduct reference checks blow through the call in about 5 minutes. “What can you tell me about Jim? Any performance issues? Well, great! Talk to you later.”

Let’s say you’re hiring a $50,000 a year resource for your growing company. The general consensus is that hiring the wrong person costs you 10x that person’s base salary after you factor in salary, benefits, lost customer opportunities and other opportunity costs. That means that you’re making a $500,000 buying decision when hiring a seemingly “inexpensive” resource. Treat it like it’s a half-million dollar decision. It is.

Clue into the nuances of the reference’s responses. The answers to the test are buried in the subtleties of voice inflection and tonal qualities of the reference’s answers. Does it sound like the reference is holding back on something negative? Are you getting stonewalled on your questions? Just scratching the surface? Getting nothing more than one-word answers? If you think any of these scenarios are the case, simply say, “Tell me more about that.” Push that reference to give you the second, third, and even fourth layer of detail. That’s where the reality of your candidate’s performance history lives.

Remember the most important question in the world: “If given the opportunity to hire this person again for a similar job, would you enthusiastically rehire them?” Any answer other than some version of, “Absolutely!” is the manager telling you that hiring this person was a mistake. If it sounds like this person would be even the least bit hesitant to rehire your candidate, take heed. If they qualify their answer, take heed. It’s for a reason. Seek clarification, but don’t try to convince yourself that you should hire someone whom you know is getting a lukewarm rehire reception from a former manager.

The reference check is the most important part of the interview process, because it’s the first time that you have someone other than your candidate talking about that candidate’s performance. Don’t rush through this final screening step!

Recruiting for an open position doesn’t have to be an exercise in crisis management.  Improving your recruiting results begins with planning, and these simple tips can greatly improve your recruiting results…and decrease stress.

Have someone else find you candidates. As a manager, the last thing you need to spend your time doing is posting jobs on Craigslist and wading through 400 resumes a week.  But someone needs to be sourcing candidates on your behalf, because that’s 80% of the hard part.  If you have positions that are either high-turnover (sales, customer service) or certain to become open in the near future (90 days), hire a company that specializes in candidate sourcing and screening to do this work for you.  That way, you only spend time  interviewing people who are qualified, interested in your role, and available for your job.  And no more mad scrambles to find candidates.

Set aside one hour a week for resume review. When you have an outside firm conducting candidate sourcing, resumes of qualified candidates will begin to pile up unless you allocate time for review.  I can’t tell you the number of entrepreneurs I’ve worked with who wait three or four weeks to look at a stack of resumes that have been accumulating.  Consider this:  the shelf life of a qualified candidate is approximately 3 weeks.  And if you don’t contact a new candidate within 5 days of receiving their resume, your chances of successfully wooing them are less than 30%.  Block out resume review time.  You’ll be glad that you did.

Create standing “interview times” on your calendar. Block off two hours on your calendar each week to be used exclusively for telephone or personal interviewing.  And when you have an open position and are actively recruiting, that number should be more like six to eight hours a week (yep, a whole day).  With truly top-notch professionals in such short supply, you can’t let a full calendar keep you from talking to your next quota-carrying sales star.  Pre-scheduling interview times ensure that you can take full advantage of opportunities to grab great talent.

These tips sound simple, because they are.  Yet, so few managers I work with enact these three low-hanging improvements on a consistent basis.  To improve your recruiting results, start with the basics:  outsource your candidate sourcing, set aside 1 hr a week for resume review, and create standing interview times on your calendar.  Simple solutions that yield dramatic results.

I can’t tell you how many times over the past month I’ve heard: “We just want to ‘personality test’ all our candidates so we know who will be a fit before we interview them.” Sounds good, right?

Sure, personality tests can be easy to administer, require almost no time on your end, are relatively inexpensive, and possess the alluring appeal of revealing your candidate’s nature – their traits – which you may not ever know without spending two months working at their side. But, before you decide you’d like to invest in a personality test as a part of your selection system, beware:

Research shows that while personality tests are a great tool for understanding people and improving management, they are far less effective at predicting how well someone will perform at their job.

In fact, personality tests, on average, are just slightly more valid (accurate) in predicting job performance than recommendation letters. Cognitive ability tests (intelligence tests) tend to be the most predictive, but come with big legal risks associated with adverse impact. By far, the next most effective tool for predicting job performance is structured interviews. Structured interviews ask the same questions every time, and are based on the behavioral components of your job.

That being said, I want to offer a suggestion to our customers who want a quick way to sort resumes and who also want to understand the inner workings of their new hires:

1. Conduct a Job Fit survey as a regular practice before bringing someone in for an interview: Job fit surveys are different from personality surveys in that they ask about a candidate’s past experience and usually relate to the job at hand. Hireology offers a SmartRank survey that is automatically customized for your job, and sent to candidates after they apply.

2. Conduct structured interviews with your best candidates: Did we mention Hireology offers a suite of job-specific, customized structured interviews that predict success in your job almost every time?

3. Conduct personality tests on the candidates you’ve already decided to hire: Personality tests can be extremely valuable when trying to understand the motivations and work styles of your new employees. Have your candidates take personality tests after you’ve already made them a job offer. Better yet, have your new employee’s manager take the test as well. They’ll know how to work well together, right off the bat. Hireology will offer DISC assessments (In our opinion, one of the best personality assessments out there) through our interface in the next two months.

[this article authored by Margot Baill, Product Development Director at Hireology; reposted with permission |  original post URL located here.]

The gain comes one week after claims had slipped below the 400,000 level, seen as a threshold for improvement in the labor market.

The gain in claims was higher than expected. Economists surveyed by MarketWatch had forecast a slight increase to 400,000.

Claims in the week ended Aug. 6 were revised to 399,000 from the initial estimate of 395,000.

Claims have been at or above 399,000 for 19 straight weeks.

Steve Ricchiuto, chief economist at Mizuho Securities, said the inability of claims to improve shows the economy is mired in a sub-par 1.5%-2.5% growth trend.

The four-week moving average of new claims, which smooths out weekly volatility, fell by 3,500 to 402,000.

Labor said the number of people who continued to receive state unemployment checks rose by 7,000 to 3.70 million in the week ended Aug. 6.

In a separate report, Labor said consumer prices rose a hotter-than-expected 0.5% in July. The core rate rose a more moderate 0.2% in the month.