Issue #4 — November 2007

In This Issue:

Previous Issues:

Using Qualifying Questions to Improve Recruiting Results

Louise Bijesse, Director of Recruitment, Compass Group, North America

If you’re like many other companies today, you probably have a hard time filling your open positions. After all, there is a war for talent, and you’re competing with everyone else for the best people out there.

But there’s a related problem. With the ability to post positions more broadly, you may be attracting too many candidates. Unfortunately, the majority of these candidates are not qualified for the position. As a result, recruiters spend too much time sorting through a mountain of applicants trying to find the best candidates.

My own organization has experienced this situation. But, we’ve been able to overcome the challenge of too many unqualified resumes with one simple, yet highly effective tool – internal and external qualifying questions in Authoria Recruiting. By consistently asking the right questions, our recruiters have been able to get a sense of candidates’ strengths and weaknesses before we even talk to them. Not only do we find better candidates more efficiently, but our recruiters save time, improve productivity, and can now dedicate more time looking for the single best candidate for our open positions.

Finding the Right Employee for the Job

We ask qualifying questions both of current employees looking to transfer positions as well as external candidates. We’ve found that by asking the right number of questions (10-15) and the right types of questions, we can significantly improve our results.

What’s working for us? Questions for internal candidates are carefully designed to help us begin to qualify the employee as well as help us comply with specific corporate hiring policies. For example, we start by asking questions about their length of service, past performance, and current status in the company. We continue to go a step further by asking, “Is your manager aware that you have applied for this position? Does he/she realize that we’ll be contacting them?” We’ve found that by asking these questions now – before a recruiter actually talks to them – we’re able to prompt ineligible employees to opt out of the process, so recruiters are able to focus on the most-qualified employees. All of these internal qualifying questions help us determine initially if the employee is even eligible to apply for the position.

Looking Outside the Organization

We also get a lot of value by asking effective qualifying questions of external candidates. When used to their full potential, these questions give us useful additional insight into a candidate’s qualifications.

For example we use a free-text comment box for many of our questions and will often look at a candidate’s answer to assess overall writing skills or to look if they included certain industry buzzwords. While we don’t make decisions based on this information, we have discovered that it is a valuable way to assess their overall strengths, and how familiar they are with our company and industry.

Asking the candidate detailed questions enables us to gain more information to gauge candidate’s qualifications more specifically. For example, we’ll break out questions rating the candidate’s proficiency with specific computer applications. An example would be, "Rate your ability at MS PowerPoint with one having no ability, five being average and ten being expert."

We rely on our recruiting solution to pose these types of questions as part of our application process. We set them up so we can collect data in six different ways: free text, a number of questions, true/false, a multiple choice range, a number range, or comments. Our recruiting technology also lets candidates set up agents, search jobs, receive emails and more.

All of this has led to positive results for us. We’ve found that by consistently using effective qualifying questions, our recruiters have been able to save time in the process. More importantly, they’ve been able to develop better candidate pools – each and every time – bringing in better results for the company.

Why Your Jobs Need to Be Google Ready – and Why They Probably Aren’t

Peter Brasket, Co-founder, HotGigs, and leader, Jobs2Web

Organizations typically place a lot of emphasis on recruiter performance, instead focusing on such metrics as “placements made” and “time-to-fill.” But the performance of the company’s career website and its impact on these metrics is largely overlooked, if not ignored.

So there’s no question that your recruiters should be working hard, but are your jobs contributing to your overall recruiting performance?

Let’s start with a basic metric: Over 30 million job-oriented searches are run monthly on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other major search engines. Not surprisingly, these search engines get 25-30X more traffic (i.e., potential candidates) than the mainstream job boards.

Unfortunately, chances are your jobs didn’t show up in these searches.

Need a quick example? Go to Google and do a search for any open position at your company. Tip: include location + position title + job (e.g., Chicago Nursing Jobs).

Scroll down the results pages, and all you see are job boards. Employers account for less than 2% of the first 100 search results. As the saying goes, “90% of success is just showing up.” The sad truth is that most employers aren’t.

Here are the two main reasons your jobs aren’t visible in search engines today:

Your ATS – Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) are designed for effective candidate processing, workflow, and reporting after the applicant has reached your career site. But by design, they block the spiders search engines use to index and inventory the jobs on your career site. The upshot: your jobs are invisible to a typical job searcher on Google, Yahoo or MSN.
Your job titles and descriptions – Even if your jobs could be indexed, they are not optimized for search engine rankings, because most organizations don’t write their job titles or content with search engines in mind. These acronyms and abbreviations may be useful corporate shorthand, but candidates don’t search using these job titles, resulting in little to no candidate flow.

This untapped flow of talent represents a significant opportunity that has been long overlooked. After all, search engine optimization (SEO) – the art of getting your content found in Web searches – is a specialized skill that is more likely to be found in your marketing department than in HR.

The Web-Search Solution

To help employers tap into this pool of talent seeking jobs through Web searches, services such as Jobs2Web are becoming available. Jobs2Web overcomes the two key challenges noted above and permits an employer’s jobs to be found on major search engines. It addition, Jobs2Web also distributes employer jobs to the key job aggregation sites such as Indeed, SimplyHired, and GoogleBase.

Jobs2Web also integrates seamlessly in Authoria Recruiting, which allows candidate traffic to flow directly into your apply system. Because it’s a service, it happens without IT involvement and without changing your recruiting workflow.

In addition to transforming your career site into a magnet for job seekers on the Web, Jobs2Web has the added capability of capturing passive candidates using easy email subscription functionality and job feeds in RSS, the widely used format that makes it easy to share and distribute your jobs to other websites.

These features integrate into your career site, and help make it “sticky.” More than 90% of first-time visitors to your career site don’t apply – they typically leave without a trace. Adding RSS and email opt-in features to our clients’ Jobs2Web sites helps build that deferred candidate pool significantly.

Top recruiting performance is not just about finding the best people; it’s making sure the best people can find you. Making your jobs “speak” the native language of the Web helps ensure that your employment brand shows up in all the right places.

Executive Commentary: Quality of Hire

Peter Cohen, VP of Product Marketing, Authoria

Speaking at a panel at this year’s HR Technology Conference, an HR executive at a large financial services company put it bluntly: “My CEO does not really care about the average age of the workforce. Data like that, by itself, has no impact on the business.”

Other forward thinking HR executives are echoing those same sentiments. Traditional metrics like “time to fill,” “cost to hire,” or “percentage of employees receiving performance reviews” may be relevant to HR, but they are not relevant to the CEO. They measure HR output, but not business impact. If HR wants to have an impact on the business, gain the ear of the CEO, and play a strategic role, they need to focus on the correct metrics.

If you adhere to the business adage, “you can’t manage what you can’t measure,” you’ll also find truth in its corollary: “inappropriate metrics yield irrelevant results.”

In the matter of recruiting, the most appropriate measure of business impact is “quality of hire.” It measures the performance of people hired into the company, and connects that information to the recruiting process. Using this quality of hire data, firms can determine, for example:

Which pre-screening questions are most helpful in identifying high-potential candidates.
Which competencies and skills should be specified in seeking high performers for particular roles.
Which sources yield the highest performing employees.
Which agencies and recruiters deliver the top performers.

With this kind of information, companies can improve both the efficiency and effectiveness of their recruiting efforts.

Recruiters, who are under constant pressure to quickly find quality talent, benefit by focusing on the most effective sources and the candidates with the highest likelihood to perform well.
HR executives, who need to optimize their recruiting budget and fill critical positions, benefit by allocating their recruiting budgets to the most effective sources, whether referrals, website, agencies, college recruiting, job boards, etc.
Hiring managers, under pressure to meet strategic business objectives, gain from hiring high quality employees who contribute to the success of the business.

Measuring and implementing quality of hire requires a process the connects performance data to recruiting data. This process is well supported by integrated talent management solutions that span multiple applications and draw on shared data. Silo’ed applications, built on separate data sources, cannot easily measure quality of hire.

Progressive HR executives recognize that their success depends on their ability to deliver results that have strategic business impact within their companies. Producing HR outputs alone are not enough. To elevate themselves into this strategic role requires a different approach with a focus on different metrics and with support of different technologies. Technology solutions that focus only on “faster and less expensive” are no longer enough. To meet the needs of strategic HR executives, these solutions must deliver “faster, less expensive, and higher quality.”