Have you hired a candidate who looked great on paper, possessed stellar references and the new hire just didn’t pan out?

As I often say, “putting a butt in a chair is one thing, acquiring top-shelf human capital is a whole different ball game.”  Unfortunately, few organizations have mastered the art form of human capital acquisition.

It’s not about finding a candidate, but uncovering the RIGHT candidate that remains a mystery for many employers.

So the million-dollar question is, how do you unearth the RIGHT candidate?

Many employers look to personality assessments, technical tests, and psychological exams to optimize their candidate valuation process.  There is certainly nothing wrong with embracing these tools (which can get quite expensive) as long as they don’t become your exclusive or prime means for applicant evaluation.

Furthermore, to enhance candidate alignment to your organization, they need to blend well with your company culture, as well as share a common value system (or career “DNA”).  This will ultimately result in a longer-term hire, better performance and the reinforcement of the fabric of your company culture.

Understanding these attributes requires in-depth, probing questions which can uncover what is important to a candidate, their likes, dislikes as well enabling you to detect any potential red flags.

Your candidate evaluation process should reveal three critical aspects; hard skills, soft skills and value system.  Most employers’ candidate evaluation process usually uncovers 1-2 items.  Leverage this competitive gap; honestly assess your process to ensure you’re identifying the RIGHT candidate for your organization.

Happy Hunting!

Generally speaking, in the 1980’s and 1990’s, an IT organization was a large entity that resided centrally within an organization.  However, as technology and business transformations began to occur, IT sectors became smaller, more nimble and further involved in the business processes.

As these progressions continued to widen, so did the necessity for technical workers to mirror these transformations.  In other words, “hard skills,” became just one part of the equation; an increased need for customer-interfacing skills, enhanced business acumen and an ability to translate complex technical requirements to non-technical users and customers have become a significant value proposition for the new breed of technical workforce.

Is there an understanding and sensitivity of the business impacts, to technological integrations or upgrades? 

Can you have a complex technical discussion with a CIO, then pivot and translate those same objectives to someone who understands very little about technology, and the business impacts (or value propositions) of that technology?

The demands and expectations of a technical workforce to possess rich soft skills/people skills will continue to soar.  Continue to expand your core proficiencies, but also develop your business knowledge, people skills and patience for those who may not share the same understanding or perspectives about the impacts of technology on an enterprise.

Don W. Gee, Project Leadership Associates

When an employee resigns, that can cost your company 1.5 -2 times of the vacated salary. The hard and soft cost can include time and money spent on refilling the position, advertising fees, agency fees, employee development and training. Other risks variables can include lower productivity, company morale and the impact this has on your customers.

If your business is in the fortunate status to be hiring, minimizing employee attrition starts on day one. There should be a formal onboarding program for new hires, which include orientation, training and a transition plan (or ramp up plan). When orientation and training conclude, a transition plan ensues which will allow new hires to reach productivity as efficiently as possible.

Here are a few items that can noticeably improve your employee retention efforts.

Employee Communication

Considering the nature of the economy, if workers aren’t in danger of losing their position, they can still feel vulnerable. Vulnerable employees make less productive employees, and if they continue to feel vulnerable, they’ll eventually depart.

Communicating with employees can accomplish more than meets the eye. Keep your employees up to date with company news, key new hires, significant accomplishments and other news to keep your employees in the loop. Informed employees can have a greater sense of ownership, a sense of ownership ushers a higher level of employee engagement and with higher engagement yields higher productivity….so on and so forth.

Benefits

Ensure you’re providing a good benefit and vacation plan.

Awards

Recognition is another way to raise performance. You can have awards for “Best Employee Award,” or “Best Turnaround,” or whatever highlights your company culture. If you want to tie in a bonus to this award, that can further compel individuals to exceed expectations, but not necessary.

On Going Training

Offer employees opportunities to further their respective skill sets through training. You can offer paid training programs as well as tuition reimbursement for employees who’d like to further their education.

Once it is determined that a position need to be outsourced, vendors need to be held accountable to maintain their status as an approved vendor.   Metrics can be implemented to ascertain a eminent activity level.   Taking into account there is an investment of time and resources that occur before a hire, vendors should be measured on pre-hire, on boarding and post-hire metrics.

Measuring Criteria

How many requisitions has the vendor been awarded?
How many submissions for each requisition has the vendor provided?
How many resources have been interviewed for each requisition awarded?
How many times has vendor double-submitted a candidate?
Specifically, has the agency submitted the candidate after they have been presented by another vendor or the candidate submitted themselves directly?
How prepared was the vendors candidates during interviews?
How many resources have been hired by the resource?
What is the average tenure of the vendors’ resources?
How has the vendors hired resources performed?
What are the vendors’ fees?
What are the vendors’ guarantees?
How many 90-Day Exits (candidates resign or back outs)
How many no-shows (for phone screens or face to face interviews)

Prime Vendor

Outsourcing certain or significant hiring to a Prime Vendor may enable you to appoint one vendor to manage the entire human capital process.

Outsourcing the entire process can relieve you from having to maintain staff dedicated to vendor management. A prime vendor assumes responsibility for managing all hiring done with any agency and allows a company to ratchet up their hiring capability at will without the cost of internal staff.

Don W. Gee

For every 100 positions that are outsourced the hard cost of agency utilization can run in excess of $1.4 Million.  Add the soft cost of agency attrition, which averages 20-25%, the total cost of agency utilization can exceed $2.2 Million.

Most organizations don’t do enough to scrutinize the competency of their vendors. Outsourcing hiring needs to an ill-equipped staffing agency can be a fiscally disastrous option.

Diminished Capacity

If your internal recruiting/HR capacity has been scaled back due to market conditions, your vendors (new or existing) may be experiencing similar reductions as well. Before you outsource your positions, you may want to re-evaluate your current vendors’ capacity to ascertain they can deliver.

To read about how you can evaluate your current staffing providers capacity and methodologies, you can view my article at:  http://dongee.typepad.com/my_weblog/how-companies-should-measure-their-current-staffing-providers/

Evaluation Criteria

During the evaluation (or re-evaluation) process, it is imperative to understand how an agency administers their candidate screening methodology.

What is the Vendors internal candidate screening and evaluation process?

Has the firm worked in your industry/domain before?

How many recruiters will be working on your positions?

What is their experience level?

Does the Vendor offer a specialization based on your needs?

Can the vendor provide references?

Lastly, what is the agencies recruiting personnel attrition?  If a vendor asserts to be authorities in the human capital business, however, their internal recruiting experiences significant turnover, question their business model and quality.

Vendor Performance & Accountability

Once it is determined that a position need to be outsourced, vendors should be e held accountable to maintain their status as an approved vendor.

If you’re seeking a new position, a way to maximize your search during a slow market is to consider consulting (contract) opportunities.  During a softening market, employers may be more prone to hire temp workers instead of burdening their payroll with employees.

If you have never consulted before, how do you calculate your hourly rate?

Here are a few tips to calculate an approximate hourly rate

Whatever the market bears for a full-time employee (in reference to yearly salary) contracting should enable you to make 15-25% more as a contractor.  So if you’re currently making or bearing a market value of $75,000 as a FTE (full-time employee) contracting should enable you to make approximately $86,250 – $93,750.

To determine a “ballpark” hourly rate, take that number and multiply it by 2080 hours (number of work hours in a year) $93,750/2080 which will equate to $45.07 an hour.  If you want an easy (not exact) way to calculate a ballpark hourly rate, just take the first two numbers of the yearly salary $90,000 (90) and divide that by two = 90/2 = $45 an hour.  $100K = $50.00 an hour, $120K = $60.00 an hour, so on and so fourth.

Verifying Your Market Worth

If you want to verify or get an idea of what your skills should be bearing, Salary.com provides basic compensation information.  You can do a search by zip code; job title (and level) of which job description best depicts you then the results of your query provides an approximate salary framework.

If you desire to take your research a step further, Salary.com provides a paid service which will request various details such as; industry, size of company, advanced degrees, specific skill questions and a report is generated that will outline compensation, benefits and tiers (based on a bell curve).

Marathon panel interviews, personality profile tests, handwriting analysis, extensive background investigations, credit score verification, reference checks and booklet sized employment applications….

Sound familiar?

Employers should take necessary steps to evaluate potential hires; however is there an equal opportunity for job seekers to obtain scrupulous and thorough information about a potential employer?

Asking probing questions during your interview along with your own research to ascertain a company’s financial solvency, competitive standing, company culture and BBB rating can enable you to assess a potential employer’s reputation, character & integrity.

After all the research and work you’ve done, it can be overwhelmingly frustrating to learnafter the fact the company you joined isn’t what it’s cracked up to be or claimed to be.  If you’re working with a recruiter/recruiting firm, have they provided valuable insight to compliment your research?  Or have they simply lined up an interview without providing a detailed account of what’s “under the hood?”  There are allot of good recruiting firms out there, however I’ve heard numerous stories over the years from candidates that have been told just about anything from a recruiting firm to just close the deal.

Some of the most dependable information you can acquire on potential employers or recruiting agencies is first-hand feedback from friends, colleagues, or people that are intimately familiar or have worked for the company or recruiting firm you’re considering or working with.

I’m looking into launching a group/forum which will allow candidates to exchange feedback and input about employers & recruiting firms.  The goal is to provide a collaborative online community which people can share thoughts, suggestions, input about employers & recruiting firms.   This is not intended to be a bashing forum, but a place which people can exchange insight, suggestions and non-biased input about potential employers & recruiting firms.

I’d like to hear your candid thoughts, suggestions and input about a forum like this. What are your thoughts?

You have a vacant position (or several) which you’ve been unsuccessful in fulfilling.  Next step: outsource the position(s) to your staffing suppliers or broadcast them via your Vendor Management System.

After the position description has been dispensed, a few hours later you stumble across one of your suppliers’ job descriptions on the web, which appears quite familiar.  The closer you examine, you realize this is the EXACT job description you sent out a few hours earlier.   What provides validity to your suspicions is your staffing supplier has literally COPY AND PASTED your job description word-for-word on various job boards.  In fact, you notice that this position is closely nestled to your same job announcement as advertised a few days or weeks previous.

Question: With this scenario in mind, let me ask you this: is this supplier truly adding value to your efforts?

Do you have insight of your suppliers’ overall methodologies?  If they’re taking short cuts with variables clearly seen, chances are their taking other short cuts with variables unseen.

Are your staffing suppliers providing a strategic, value-added approach to candidate capture and engagement such as; direct sourcing, referrals, networking and utilizing other business intelligence tools to uncover difficult to find candidates for your organization? Or have they adopted an all too common body-shop model by machine-gunning numerous resumes with the hopeful expectation you’ll concede and settle because you’re desperate for resources?

I once over heard an executive for a national staffing company proudly refer to his organization as “plasma pushers,” and no I’m not referring to TV’s.  Are you utilizing a “Plasma Pusher,” or a partner who truly understands what it means to add immeasurable value by providing the most preeminent human capital in the marketplace?

Don’t compromise, you’re paying top dollar for these resources.  Demand more from your vendors!

When a Recruiter/Recruiting Agency introduces your resume to an organization, how or where is it presented?  Is your resume submitted directly to a decision maker or is your resume uploaded into a VMS (Vendor Management System).

A VMS is a web-based procurement application that enables companies to manage the process of outsourced temporary and permanent staff from providers such as Beeline, WorkCard, Peopleclick, eBid, IQ Navigator, etc.  Over the past several years this has become an increasingly popular trend for many organizations.

However for the candidate, the advantages are very little.

Certain VMS providers (by default or design) create agency anonymity, meaning the end client may not know the identity of the recruiting agency representing candidate #1234. With that in mind, the authenticity of the relationship between the agency and client becomes irrelevant.

People are what make or break a company; however, through a VMS landscape candidates become commoditized.  The driving force becomes price, instead of the quality of the human capital.

Questions to ask your recruiter

How long has this position been open?
If a recruiting agency presents your resume to a position that has been open a while, your resume may end up on the bottom of a large stack of resumes and the chances of your resume being seen are slim to none.
Is my resume being presented directly to a decision maker or is it being uploaded through a VMS?
This will enable you to ascertain expectations. If it will be presented through a VMS, chances are likely the process will take a while.
Will my resume be presented to one position or multiple openings?
With organizations that allow the same candidate to be presented to different positions (from the same vendor) this might increase your chances of success.

If you decide to move forward through the VMS route, understand the recruiting firm will have limited influence, feedback will be limited or non-existent and the process may take a while.