by Jennifer Hart Yim | Dec 12, 2016 | Blog, Strategy, Talent
Posting open positions to job boards don’t work for job seekers, and they create more busy work for employers. So why do companies still use them?
This guest post comes to us from Argentus Supply Chain Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm specializing in Supply Chain Management and Procurement.
Every year, recruitment technology evolves. Skype comes along and offers an approximation of in-depth, in-person job interviews. New Applicant Tracking systems make the job application process more humane or, depending on your luck, more arduous, albeit efficient for hiring managers. New social media sourcing techniques allow recruiters to tap into networks of people they couldn’t find before. New websites and hiring tools emerge, claiming to be “talent networks” and insisting — when advertising themselves to recruiters — that they “aren’t job boards.”
For good reason. Whether you’re a recruiter, or a candidate looking for your next opportunity, or a company looking to hire, job boards don’t get you the best results.
In our opinion, it’s time to ditch them once and for all.
Job boards don’t work for job seekers
If you speak with a frustrated job seeker, you’ll inevitably hear that they’ve applied to dozens of jobs and never heard anything back. This is a symptom of the culture of job boards more than hiring managers’ indifference to any single applicant. The fact is, if you apply using a job board, your resume is going into a black hole among hundreds of other resumes. If anyone reads your resume at all, it’s likely a junior HR person doing the initial culling who doesn’t necessarily understand the nature of the job. A junior HR person who has 400 other resumes to review. A junior HR person who might get distracted by a phone notification, or a daydream, or a co-worker telling them there are cookies in the break room, and not even pay attention to your carefully crafted resume because there are just so many more to get through. Tons of jobs end up on job boards because the company wants to show that they’re reviewing outside applicants, even if they know they’re hiring internally. Beyond that, tons of jobs never even make it to job boards in the first place.
It’s easy to criticize job boards for being an impersonal way to assess hires. The thing is, that would be okay if job boards worked. But for most job seekers, they don’t.
So why do companies use them?
Don’t be part of the problem
A big part of it is the convenience: Job boards let companies adopt a “set it and forget it” mentality. It lets them post a job description, sit back and wait for the candidates to roll in. Easier than sourcing candidates, looking for referrals, working with external partners, right? Except that you’ve created a a ton of busywork for your team, and now they have to scan through tons of irrelevant resumes. You have to respond to those applications (and let’s be honest, many companies don’t) or risk taking a hit to your company’s reputation. You can ignore the irrelevant applications and contribute to the black hole mentality, making finding a job seem even less personable than it already is. Then you’re part of the problem, and what HR department wants to be part of the problem?
No one does. The paradox is that the easier job boards become to use, the less relevant the applications become. Once you can apply for a job with a single click (like on LinkedIn’s job postings), you can easily apply to hundreds of jobs that you have no business applying for. The mismatched resumes proliferate, and so does the busywork.
Thinking of hiring in terms of opportunity cost
One of the most difficult things to assess in business is the opportunity cost of decisions. Perhaps the biggest opportunity cost of using job boards is that you completely ignore the passive candidate market — people who aren’t looking for jobs, but would be open to a move. Any HR department or hiring manager worth their salt will source passive candidates in addition to using job boards. But if you rely on job boards entirely, you’re passing up what are the best candidates around.
For these and other reasons, we decided to stop using job boards a few years ago and haven’t looked back. As recruiters in a high-demand industry, we needed to focus on our own network and passive talent, and we think companies and candidates should do the same thing.
While it’s certainly still possible to find a job using job boards, or to find a great candidate using job boards, it’s one of the more inefficient ways of connecting people with jobs — short of attaching a resume to a camel and hoping said camel makes it all the way across the Sahara Desert to an employer. So it’s time to ask — is it possible to do better?
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by Jennifer Hart Yim | Nov 29, 2016 | Blog, Talent
The stigma around boomerang employees is disappearing, and that’s good for companies open to rehiring talent that previously left.
This guest post comes to us from Argentus Supply Chain Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm specializing in Supply Chain Management and Procurement.
Here’s another one of the myriad ways that the world of work is changing: more than ever, people are returning to companies they’ve left in the past. Just as the stigma against changing jobs and careers has been vanishing in recent years, new data shows that companies are less likely to say “you’re dead to me” when an employee leaves, and more willing to rehire them if they want to return.
Time was, you’d leave a job and never look back. Now it appears that more and more employees are considering returning to companies they’ve left for a myriad of reasons — and companies, rather than taking a previous departure personally, are more and more likely to rehire them.
A changing workforce
We liked a recent article by Brendan Browne, LinkedIn’s VP of Talent Acquisition, about this dynamic, which is something that we’ve seen in some of our recent recruitment efforts. Browne offers some interesting stats about these so-called “boomerang employees” that say a lot about changing attitudes towards workplace loyalty:
- While companies used to hold a stigma against people who left their organizations only to want to later return, 76 percent of HR managers are now open to “boomerang employees” returning to previously held positions, or a different position at the same company.
- Employees, too, are becoming more likely to boomerang. Half of millennials would consider returning to a former employer, as compared with about a third of gen Xers and baby boomers, suggesting that the generation emerging into the workforce has a different attitude about “boomeranging” back into an old employer than previous generations.
The changing concept of “loyalty” in business
The hallmark of a successful, stable working life used to be staying at one company for your entire career. It’s possible that the stigma against rehiring past employees is a holdover of that mentality. What it comes down to is a changing attitude towards the concept of “loyalty” in business.
More companies are recognizing that many people leave jobs not because they’re completely unsatisfied, but because they have ambitions, dreams, and responsibilities elsewhere. Maybe they want to launch a start-up. Maybe they need to take time to care for a sick relative. Maybe their spouse got a new job and they moved to another city. Maybe they want to get experience in another industry, or a different market. Maybe a new opportunity has opened up within the company that they’ve always had their eye on.
Companies are realizing that employees aren’t always boomeranging because they’ve “failed,” and that those employees don’t necessarily see it as a step backward.
The benefits of boomerang employees
In short, companies shouldn’t take it personally when employees leave — especially if those employees have made the effort to avoid burning bridges — and they should think about the benefits of bringing them back if and when they want to return.
- For one, a “boomerang employee” will come in with a solid understanding of the company’s culture.
- Because you’ve shown a willingness to let them pursue other opportunities, and they’ve chosen to return, they’ll be a very loyal advocate for your company’s employer brand.
- They’re a known quantity. You’ll be able to save on training costs and the time it takes to get a brand-new employee situated, which means they’ll contribute to the bottom line sooner than a conventional hire.
- A boomerang employee might also be able to bring new experiences, new skills, and even new customer contacts to bear on the job — broadening the company’s horizons while also offering these other benefits.
It’s important to note that companies should put these “boomerang employees” through the same rigorous hiring process they’d apply to a new hire. You want to make sure that they’re still effective contributors, and you want them to be able to offer a compelling reason for returning. But if they can pass this test, they can be some of the best employees around. If they made an effort to maintain the relationship when leaving, there’s no reason to hold sour grapes when they want to return.
French journalist Alphonse Karr once said, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” And we don’t think there’s anything wrong with someone applying that maxim to their careers!
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by Fronetics | Mar 18, 2015 | Blog, Strategy, Talent
Here’s why paying out actually pays off.
Contract buyouts within the sports and business worlds aren’t exactly a novel approach to making personnel changes. But what about paying employees — employees who don’t have contracts and haven’t yet earned further compensation — to quit? It’s a move that’s finding ground in the business world.
Take Zappos for example. The company pays employees $4,000 to quit. Yes, the company shells out $4,000 to employees who say just two words: “I quit.”
Here’s why it is a great idea.
All Zappos employees must participate in a four-week training program when they are hired. When they complete the four weeks, they are given a choice: They can continue to work for Zappos, or they can quit. Those who quit will be paid a bonus of $4,000.
Essentially, Zappos is putting their money where their mouth is when it comes to cultivating its company culture. Zappos leadership believes an employee who is not happy after participating in the training program or is not excited about the company and its culture won’t be a good match. By offering such employees an out, Zappos can quickly and effectively weed out employees who are not a good fit within the company’s culture.
This may seem crazy, but the reality is that when unhappy employees leave the company within their first four weeks of employment, the financial implications are much, much lower than the cost of unhappy employees who are likely to be uninspired at work and quit in less than a year.
Why does Zappos do this?
It wants to attract and retain great talent. In his book Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh says: “Your personal core values define who you are, and a company’s core values ultimately define the company’s character and brand. For individuals, character is destiny. For organizations, culture is destiny.” In short, Zappos is big on company culture. This focus has made it successful — very successful.
So how many Zappos employees take the money and run? You might be surprised to learn that only between 2 to 3 percent of people quit and take the $4,000.
Another example of front-end hiring processes from eBay
During his time as the COO of eBay, Maynard Webb also employed front-end hiring processes to determine if a candidate would be a good fit within the company’s culture. To assemble a solid team, he recommends asking the right questions during the hiring process. He gives as an example of a question he would routinely ask job candidates to determine fit at eBay. “If something breaks at 2 a.m. but miraculously resolves itself before anyone understands it, is it okay to unplug and go to sleep? The answer should be no.”
With the U.S. Department of Labor currently estimating the average cost of a bad hiring decision to be as much as 30% of an individual’s first-year potential earnings, a single bad hire with an annual income of $50,000 can equal a potential $15,000 loss for a company. It might actually pay to create a company payment system that is designed to weed out new hires who reveal themselves to be less-than-stellar prospects for long-term employment.
What do you think about the idea of paying your employees to quit? What processes do you have in place to detect personnel issues up front?
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by Fronetics | Mar 18, 2015 | Blog, Strategy, Talent
Here’s why paying out actually pays off.
Contract buyouts within the sports and business worlds aren’t exactly a novel approach to making personnel changes. But what about paying employees — employees who don’t have contracts and haven’t yet earned further compensation — to quit? It’s a move that’s finding ground in the business world.
Take Zappos for example. The company pays employees $4,000 to quit. Yes, the company shells out $4,000 to employees who say just two words: “I quit.”
Here’s why it is a great idea.
All Zappos employees must participate in a four-week training program when they are hired. When they complete the four weeks, they are given a choice: They can continue to work for Zappos, or they can quit. Those who quit will be paid a bonus of $4,000.
Essentially, Zappos is putting their money where their mouth is when it comes to cultivating its company culture. Zappos leadership believes an employee who is not happy after participating in the training program or is not excited about the company and its culture won’t be a good match. By offering such employees an out, Zappos can quickly and effectively weed out employees who are not a good fit within the company’s culture.
This may seem crazy, but the reality is that when unhappy employees leave the company within their first four weeks of employment, the financial implications are much, much lower than the cost of unhappy employees who are likely to be uninspired at work and quit in less than a year.
Why does Zappos do this?
It wants to attract and retain great talent. In his book Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh says: “Your personal core values define who you are, and a company’s core values ultimately define the company’s character and brand. For individuals, character is destiny. For organizations, culture is destiny.” In short, Zappos is big on company culture. This focus has made it successful — very successful.
So how many Zappos employees take the money and run? You might be surprised to learn that only between 2 to 3 percent of people quit and take the $4,000.
Another example of front-end hiring processes from eBay
During his time as the COO of eBay, Maynard Webb also employed front-end hiring processes to determine if a candidate would be a good fit within the company’s culture. To assemble a solid team, he recommends asking the right questions during the hiring process. He gives as an example of a question he would routinely ask job candidates to determine fit at eBay. “If something breaks at 2 a.m. but miraculously resolves itself before anyone understands it, is it okay to unplug and go to sleep? The answer should be no.”
With the U.S. Department of Labor currently estimating the average cost of a bad hiring decision to be as much as 30% of an individual’s first-year potential earnings, a single bad hire with an annual income of $50,000 can equal a potential $15,000 loss for a company. It might actually pay to create a company payment system that is designed to weed out new hires who reveal themselves to be less-than-stellar prospects for long-term employment.
What do you think about the idea of paying your employees to quit? What processes do you have in place to detect personnel issues up front?
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