Act Like a Recruiter, Think Like a Candidate!

I just saw this blog post title on LinkedIn and was really intrigued because one of the central points I made in a Recruitment Analytics training class recently and it was just that. It is a candidate driven job market right now in the BPO/Call Center industry here in the Philippines.

SO, I was hoping to glean some additional insights that I could blog about. However, it was just a link to a whitepaper. Which of course to get the white paper you have to sign up. And once you do that you get 2 pages and you have to then pay a fee to get the full whitepaper. I absolutely HATE this!

Im all for finding creative ways to monetize social media and digital marketing. I’m of with paying for something if it seems to be of legitimate value, but when the call to action hides the whole story it is one of the biggest marketing turn offs ever.

I’d love to see some data to back up the lost opportunity here. How many people don’t subscribe because they are turned off as well. And then is that loss made up for in the ones who do hit purchase? For a recruiting white paper? I seriously doubt it.

Call me crazy, but the best way to make money off of people online is to be transparent and upfront with costs. Because that builds trust, which builds relationships. Going after money right away just builds a transactional relationship that easily slips away.

Back to my original point… we have entered an era of candidate driven recruiting, meaning we have to go to them not wait for them to come to us. We have to make things personal and have to meet them on their turf if we want to be successful.

So find ways to attract candidates that attract candidates to other things. What’s trending? What’s selling? What’s the big item everyone wants for Christmas? Use that to attract attention.

Once you have their attention then think like they think. They have many choices on where to work. What makes your place special? Why should they pick you? Use that to convert their interest into action.

That’s how I do it in my companies. We are always look for the best and the brightest across our consulting, training and outsourcing lines of business.

HR & Recruitment Analytics – The recruitment and retention of top talent is the biggest challenge facing just about every organization. DMAIPH is a leading expert in empowering HR & Recruitment teams with analytics techniques to optimize their talent acquisition and management processes. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly to learn how to get more analytics in your HR & Recruitment process so you can rise to the top in the ever quickening demand for top talent.

The Secrets of Money Ball Recruiting

http://youtu.be/6MStL5QIyCw

“There are rich call centers, with big budgets and huge recruitment teams. There are poor call centers with small budgets and just a few people. Then there is 50 feet of crap. And there is us.”

I conducted a Recruitment Analytics Training yesterday and shared one of my methodologies. Based on the movie (and book) Moneyball, I talked about how to be successful you need to find undervalued candidates who other call centers have passed on.

“If we try and play like Convergys in here (with our recruitment efforts), we will lose to Convergys out there (on the streets looking for talent)”.

So we need to boil down the recruitment process to the one thing most important for our business in every single employee.

Some of my points:

We spend too much time looking for trainable skills like Good English, Good Communicators and Good Interview Takers.
We need to stop hiring job hoppers and people looking to move up without having paid their dues.
The one skill set we cannot teach, that we need to start making our top priority… is dependability.
Will they show up on time every day for work is the single biggest need we have.

So that’s the one personality trait we are placing at the top of our recruitment process. We need to probe and dig and research, to find out will they be someone who will show up for their shift everyday.

That’s our “get’s on base” metric like in MoneyBall. We can’t help the customer if we are not at work ready to help the customer.

Don’t Be A Recruitment Dinosaur, You Need To Be Thinking Mobile First

Per monster.com… As more consumers set aside laptops in favor of smartphones, iPads and other tablet computers, job seekers expect to be engaged with videos, job notifications and quick follow-up. Many experts say that recruiters must learn to adapt their recruitment strategy to these platforms.

Today’s mobile job seekers have different expectations and look for:

Instant updates about new jobs via their mobile devices
Immediate feedback to their job application
Recruiting videos to watch on their mobile devices
Engaging, interactive content from employers

Recent Facebook data for here in the Philippines shows that as much as 90% of job applicants will apply via mobile for the same job they would pass up if looking at the post via a laptop or desktop.

And according to CareerBuilder’s 2013 Candidate Behavior Study, 65 percent of workers who search for jobs via mobile devices will leave a website if it isn’t mobile-friendly, and – possibly worse – 40 percent walk away with a more negative opinion of the company.

You have to think Mobile first if you want to attract 18-24 year old Filipinos for jobs in the BPO Industry.

Recruitment Analytics: A Simple Classification System

How do you classify the applicants in your pipe line? There are hundreds of ways to separate resumes at the first point of contact by potential job fit. Most Applicant Tracking Tools have this built in and really smart ones will auto separate and classify based on keyword searches.

If you can afford an ATS or have veteran recruiters and/or an optimized process you are probably already doing this. But you would also be shocked to know how many companies are not doing this.

To get started just create 3-4 piles to put resumes in. Its as simple as this:

Pool A is for candidates who have most if not all of the qualifications you are looking for.
Pool B is for applicants who have some of the qualities.
Pool C is for applicants who really don’t have any of the things you are looking for and/or have some fatal flaws that you believe are incompatible with the job.
Pool D can be for resumes who currently don fit, but might in the future.

If you are just using Excel to track your applicant pipe line, it is easy to add a column for general classification. Through in some weighted scoring to rank within each category and you are actually doing better than a lot of small and medium sized companies.

tracking-analytics

Just as an example, In each pool, you can add a rank of High, Medium and Low. High being they should be ready to start day one, medium meaning the will need some training time if they are hired and low meaning they will need some extensive training.

It is really that simple. Starting adding structure to your recruiting so you can focus your time and energy on those who have the most potential to help you right now, but also keep track of those who might be able to help you down the road.

If you don’t have a good ATS, then doing something like this will make a huge difference. You will soon be able to start making more strategic choices on who you spend your time, focus and money on.

Word Of The Day: Cohesive

From Jim Collins, Good to Great, “Organizational Health is about making your business function more effectively by building a cohesive leadership team, establishing real clarity among those leaders, communicating that clarity to everyone within the organisation and then putting in place structures to reinforce that clarity on an on-going basis”

===============================================================================

Full Definition of COHESIVE from Webster’s: exhibiting or producing cohesion or coherence <a cohesive social unit> <cohesive soils>

Examples of COHESIVE

Their tribe is a small but cohesive group.

Religion can be used as a cohesive social force.

===============================================================================

Being more cohesive. That is my goal for January 2015.

Let’s take this team of experienced and well intentioned individuals and mold them into a more effective force for the development of the business.

Lack of structure is can be the death knell of even the best companies.

Our structure needs to be more defined and transparent.

Let us commit to getting on the same page and demonstrating that from top to bottom. After all, Homies help homies, always!

The key challenge is coming up with metrics to measure the cohesiveness of your organization. I have figured that out, so if you need help, connect with me and I will show you how.

Analytics Leadership – DMAIPH specializes in arming the Data-Driven Leader with the tools and techniques they need to build and empower an analytics centric organization. Analytics leadership requires a mastery of not just analytics skill, but also of nurturing an analytics culture. We have guided thousands of Filipino professionals to become better analytics leaders. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly to discuss a uniquely tailored strategy to ensure you are the top of your game when it comes to Analytics Leadership.

The Most Over Looked Metric In Recruiting

Which recruiting metric is most important to you?

This is something I am asked all the time and I generally go back to something I came across awhile ago. I have yet to find a better one…

“I am convinced that the most important metric and the only one I care to follow is; how long did the person I place stay with my client company? Are they still there, or did they leave? Were they promoted? Or were they Fired?”

Source: http://www.recruitingblogs.com/

So, the metric we should be interested in improving is that of the success and tenure of our placements. How long do they stay? How well liked are they? How well do they fit in with the rest of the team? Do they get promoted? This is the true test of “Added Value” which is why companies hire recruiters.

I have hired over 150 people over the past few years and many of the best ones are still going strong, so we must be doing something right. 🙂

If you need help in your recruiting process, DMAIPH can help! My expertise with recruitment analytics makes me uniquely qualified to help you measure your most important requirement metrics.

What Exactly Are Recruitment Metrics?

A general definition of recruitment metrics is something like this, “standards of measurement that HR and Recruitment professionals use to identify, analyze and present important information regarding the hiring process.” Recruitment metrics are extremely important in both assessing the effectiveness of the recruitment process and in looking at the ROI (return on investment).

Traditionally recruitment metrics focus on two areas; cost per hire and time to hire. They are both looking primarily at only the impact to hire someone.

However, those metrics generally do not include a multitude of important data points that decision-makers need to know. For example things like candidate satisfaction and hiring manager satisfaction can help determine wholes in a process.

You can also use recruitment metrics to optimize the hiring process looking at things like distance to work, difficult of commute, and demographic data on what schools and courses provide the best employees.

Another are you can draw psychometric data from for your metrics would be on things like work ethic, career decision-making and employee loyalty to see who is successful in your company so you can find more like them.

The types of metrics you can use in your recruitment process are practically limitless.

Based on a recent survey I saw on LinkedIn, If we use metrics correctly, they achieve the following additional benefits:

Advance the relationship between recruitment and the hiring managers — align the RIGHT objectives
Provide credibility to the recruitment department by displaying that they understand the overall business goals and objectives
Define what is important and expected of each recruiter
Drive consistency in delivery of recruitment services to the organization
Provide a platform to measure recruiter accountability and performance.

Does your recruitment process have actionable metrics that can drive data-driven decision-making?

If you are having trouble with your recruitment metric, connect with me and I’ll help you make sure you are measuring the recruitment metrics that are key to your business.

All I Need To Know About Someone Is What Was The Last Book They Read

I’m not sure where I picked that concept up from, it’s probably a variation of a famous quote whose author escapes me. But for me there is a lot of truth to the statement. When you find out the last book someone read you can tell a lot about them. When you get them talking about it you can gain incredible insight into who they are and what motivates them.

In my case I picked up a book at the airport for my flight and to help me get into trainer mode. The book I picked up was Decisive, a business management and leadership book by the Heath brothers. It was on the top of a lot of 2013 lists and I had heard of it before. Once I started reading it, I quickly saw some key points I could roll into my next analytics training class.

Here are some of the key points:

> Most decision are made in an instant and are often just a choice between two options.
> Although helpful, Pro and Con lists are limited in their effectiveness.
> Most business decisions, when looked at a few years later, were failures.

In the book the Decisive, the authors list four tips to help make better decisions:

1. Widen Your Options by eliminating factors that put artificial limits on our choices.

2. Reality-Test Your Assumptions by taking them out of our head and into the real world.

3. Attain Distance Before Deciding, which means don’t rush and gain other perspective.

4. Prepare to be wrong, the willingness to take risks is a challenge for all of us.

Its a great read, pick it up.

Recruitment Analytics… where both demand and need is greatest

Who’s left? > Reblog from one of my blogging heroes, Seth Godin.
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2013/11/whos-left.html

This is EXACTLY why I have been able to run several successful recruitment analytics seminars in the past year. So many HR and Recruitment teams still approach sourcing talent like this…

“The classified section of the Sunday New York Times used to be more than twenty or thirty pages long. Now it’s down to one.

Part of this is due to the lack of new jobs in the post-industrial economy, but mostly it’s due to job listings moving online. I was fascinated to see some of the jobs in last week’s paper, and confess befuddlement at the thinking of those that ran them.

Here’s one, from Amazon, for a level II programmer in their New York office. Just a mailing address, no online method for contacting or applying. They’re using the newspaper to search for programmers unable to apply online, perhaps the best place to find this sort of programmer, but really, do they want them?

Or the ad from Paul, Weiss, a prestigious big law firm in New York. It’s the biggest ad on the page, and goes into a long, long list of requirements for the job–Magna Cum Laude from a famous law school, more than three years with one of their competitors, etc. Which high-powered New York lawyers are reading the last single page of newspaper classifieds?

And my favorite, an equally long ad for Deloitte that instructs the applicant to go to a website and enter a 15-digit code, including several “1”s, some “I”s and a bunch of letters and numbers. Almost unreadable in the paper, and hard to transcribe. More than a billion combinations… why not just enter NYT1124?

Lots of time and money being spent chasing the wrong people with the wrong ads.

My point, and I do have one, is that if your HR department is run by policies that were established a decade ago, worth a new look. And if you are serious, truly serious, that talent is your competitive advantage, please understand that the way you look for and sort that talent is the highest-leverage way you’ve got to increase what you end up with.”

HR & Recruitment Analytics – The recruitment and retention of top talent is the biggest challenge facing just about every organization. You really have to Think Through The Box to come up with winning solutions to effectively attract, retain and manage talent in the Philippines today.

DMAIPH is a leading expert in empowering HR & Recruitment teams with analytics techniques to optimize their talent acquisition and management processes. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly to learn how to get more analytics in your HR & Recruitment process so you can rise to the top in the ever quickening demand for top talent.

The Current Analytics Talent Landscape in the Philippines – Updated

Updated on 10/26/16

Something I was working on for a potential client, that I thought interesting enough to share.

Here are some of the common characteristics of the three types of analytics talent you will find in the Philippines. Keep in mind that analytics is still a fairly very new concept in the Philippines, but I am convinced its primed for continued growth.

From my experience the analytics talent in the Philippines can be broken into three groups.

Fresh Grads
Entry Level Analysts
Experienced Analysts

For the sake of comparison, I will speak mainly of analytics generalist positions like business analysts and operations analysts. More niche analytics jobs like financial analysts or quality analysts often come from different backgrounds then the bulk of the analytics talent I have worked with.

The first group of analysts are fresh grads. By and large they come from programs like IT, ComSci, Marketing, Business and other related courses. The ones with technical degrees all have some coding skills, know a few programming languages, are very comfortable with Excel and Access and have a general theoretical knowledge of databases, data warehouses and how big data is collected, stored and managed. Generally the business and marketing grads, have less technical skill, but are better prepared for the communication and data sharing side of analytics.

There are several thousand of these graduates entering the workforce every year, but a small % of them are really prepared for analyst careers. Several schools have launched Business Analytics elective tracts, but they are just getting started.

Most fresh grads with analytics talent find jobs in retail or in call centers, many as tech support or IT staff. The ones that do end up with the word analyst in the title are actually more like data encoders or just run reports. They do very little actual analysis.

From this pool, the English and communications requirements of many analyst jobs screen out 75% of the applicants. Fresh grads who start in analyst roles make salaries of between 10-20,000 PHP a month.

The second group of analysts comes the way most people have become analysts… accidentally. They have very similar educational experiences to the fresh grad batch, but started as a CSR or IT or Tech Support and rose above their peers to take on more complex duties.

These analysts find ways to add value to their reports, or have a propensity to solve hard problems or have a tech skill that really stands out. They are promoted to entry level analyst jobs where they are generally used with business lines to do metrics and KPI reporting, assist with process improvement initiatives.

They start to become very skilled, but generally in only 1-2 applications. Their talent is very concentrated and they are not generally pushed to do more. Whether it be working with certain BI or analytics tools, CRMs or other applications, they become very proficient end users but rarely learn the concepts that allow them to move easily between companies. They generally make salaries of about 20-30,000 PHP a month.

However, that doesn’t stop them from hopping around quite a bit. The severe talent shortage for analysts in Metro Manila see a lot of analysts with 1-2 years under their belt get pirated and over a 5-6 year period you see they working for 3-4 companies, each time chasing more money. And rarely does this make them a better analysts as they have a lot of knowledge about a few things, but have not really mastered a competency in anything.

The only training they receive is in-house training on new systems that is generally rolled out from abroad/above. This is one of the biggest difference between analysts in the US and India versus the Philippines. There is little investment in the analyst to grow. There is no encouragement to innovate they get bored pretty quickly which is why they are so susceptible to jump for a little more money.

Based on my observations, maybe 20% of this pool of thousands stick with the same company and rise up to be an experienced analyst in their original company. And you find the ones who stick are generally employed by US, Indian and European BPOs. They make about 25,000 and up PHP a month.

The final group, the more experience analysts are a rare breed. They have the skill similar to what you would expect from an Indian or US analysts with 5 years of experience. They have mastered a couple of disciplines (apps, systems, dbases, etc) and have carved out a good niche. They get paid at least 30-40,000 PHP a month and are firmly established with their employers.

They don’t hop for more money and they tend to be pretty loyal. The best way to pry them away is to offer them something new and different to play with. When you appeal to their curiosity, then they will consider hoping for more money. This is the play the HP, IBM, Google, Citibank, and others who have set up analytics teams are doing. They are trying to entice top talent with both money and new opportunity.

There is also a small, but growing number people in the Philippines who are at the level I was when I left Wells Fargo. Analytics Experts who can offer you a wide range of analytics solutions, understand how complex analytics works and are truly on the cutting edge. A lot of these analysts are now being classified as data scientists. The salaries for these positions can be 50,000 PHP or more a month.

Traditionally data scientist have advanced degrees in statistics, math or some other heavily technical field of study. They generally focus on building models and mining big data using advanced software. They have mastered several coding languages and use predictive and prescriptive modeling techniques. If I had to put a guess on this, there might be a couple thousand true data scientists in the Philippines right now. Hardly enough to go around.

In reality, many of the job postings across the Philippines for data scientists are actually looking for something different. The term is the current hot buzz word and many traditional analyst jobs are being mislabeled as data science jobs. It is very important when hiring someone who has data science in their background to make sure they really have the level of expertise you need.

Bottom line though, if you are looking for someone who is curious, adept at technology, loves solving problems and is data hungry, you can find them in the Philippines.

These thoughts are solely based on my observations and research; I would love to hear others either validate or counter any/all of my conclusions.

If you would like to know about the current state of analytics in the Philippines, please check out my new book, Putting Your Data to Work. The book serves as a guidebook for Filipino professionals to better understand how to get more data in their business. Connect with me and I’ll let you know how to get a copy.

Analytics in the Philippines – The Philippines is at the center of the action when it comes to solutions to the global need for analytics. Blessed with a solid foundation of young, educated and English speaking workforce, companies around the world are look for Filipino analytics talent to fill analytics positions. DMAIPH was set up to facilitate these solutions and bring the talent and the business together. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly so we can help you take advantage of this unique global opportunity.

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