Blog about online recruitment solutions and services

Friday the 17^th May TalentPuzzle hosted its’ Recruitment Best Practice forum at 76 Portland Place. There were 30 attendees and 5 speakers. The day kicked off at 9am and TalentPuzzle’s own Ben Fletcher opened up proceedings with an introduction to TalentPuzzle and how the day would progress.

The first speaker, Roger Philby from The Chemistry Group opened for us with a very energetic and immensely interesting perspective on reducing the cost of recruitment. He postulated that the biggest cost of recruitment is in hiring the wrong people. Addressing the issue of wrong hires would involve re-training the HR managers to concentrate on what they wanted from an employee and subsequently select candidates based on that; which would ultimately reduce the cost of mis-hire.

Susan Keyes, Director at People in Business, followed with ‘Creating and maintaining a strong Employer Brand’ Susan talked in great detail about how important it is to be aware of your Employer Brand (EB). The EB is essentially what people most associate with you as an employer. Your employer brand is in many ways affected by your Employee Value Proposition (EVP)- what you want people to associate with your organisation. The key things mentioned were how important it is to establish what your brand is and to be realistic about what you want the brand to be. This is essential when it comes to recruiting for your organisation.

After a brief intermission and some chitchat over light snacks and beverages we all got talking about the talks and discussed how to implement them into a recruitment strategy…. I spoke to Kate Parkyn just before she took the stage. She was all nervous and trembling and after some well wishes from the table she got up and presented on how she has had to handle recruiting for Sporting Index and its’ new Tech start up Sporting solutions.

Recruiting for the two companies has been an on-going battle for Kate as the tech industry in London is fiercely competitive. Attracting the right type of candidates is something she has been actively working on. Some of the difficulties she’s having is with external recruiters, ‘they are selling jobs and not careers’. Kate went into more detail on how she developed her internal ATS platform, which is geared towards candidate satisfaction.

Susan Couper from Harris and Hoole (a start-up coffee franchise) followed Ms Parkyn to discuss the difficulties of running recruitment for a brand new start up and being the only person in charge. Working at a busy and quickly expanding start up is ‘like surfing on the edge of chaos’. Harris and Hoole have a 10-week expansion plan, which involves opening up one shop a week for 10 weeks. With Susan running the whole of H&H recruitment she has found that recruiting creative arts and theatre students has been most successful for the H&H brand. The recruitment strategy is a 16 question questionnaire and if successful an audition to follow. The recruitment strategy is to have an answer for the candidate within a week of application. It’s all very ambitious, and exciting! We wish them the best of luck!

To end the day we had Matt Alder a Social Media guru from Metashift; who gave us a ‘Social and Mobile Snapshot’. Matt gave us the latest ways for HR managers to utitlise social media to garner potential candidates. HR managers should have open talent communities, Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter pages, with a regular stream of updates. Matt also extolled the virtues of optimising your career site for mobile. Everyone and their grandmother appears to have a smartphone and Gen Y is relying heavily on their mobile to meet their needs. Shifting into mobile optimisation is definitely worth the investment.

Being the ‘newb’ here at TalentPuzzle I personally found the day extremely informative. The attendees were also impressed and they were certainly left with a lot to ponder when the session was over. I’ll be writing a few more detailed entries about the day for anyone that is interested in the intricacies of what was discussed.

By Imriel M.

We recently did a UK wide survey asking Recruitment Managers about the means used to find and select recruitment agencies. Now, this question might seem funny to you, as – no doubt – you get hundreds of calls every week from agencies advertising their services. However, those pitches go in one ear and right out the other. And who says they are any good anyway?

When you come to having to use an agency, 75% of survey respondents actually turn to HR peers to ask for recommendations. The second most popular source is LinkedIn. This shows how important it is to get a trusted recommendation when choosing your supplier.

TalentPuzzle would like to build on this trend and become the UK’s first trusted site for recruitment agency recommendations. We have collected thousands of data points on the performance of 500+ agencies over the year on our marketplace and we have hundreds of user reviews which for the first time we are making publicly available http://www.talentpuzzle.com/Public/Recruiter/FindAgency.

The aim is for employers to use TalentPuzzle as their trusted recommendation platform to select the best agencies and to easily engage with them without having to negotiate fees and terms. More to come on this topic…

It’s a “niche role” or “difficult to fill position” are usually the immortal words uttered to a recruitment consultant once an employer has begrudgingly admitted defeat in the hiring process.  It is often a way in to a company for a recruiter; but what tactics should an in-house team of recruiters put in place to help fill the roles they know will be notoriously difficult to hire for?

Here are 5 short tips to help with the process:

1.   Know the job. It sounds simple enough but to really be in a position to fill any role you need to understand what you are looking for.

2.   Have a skill set in mind. Sometimes a role is hard to fill because of a lack of suitably experienced candidates, or candidates who for whatever reason, are not moving jobs in that industry. If you have a series of competencies and skills that you know are needed for the job, but are not necessarily exclusive to that profession then advertise based on the skills more heavily than the relevant experience of the candidate.

3.   Keep an open mind. Could the role be evolved or modified to accommodate candidates if they demonstrate enough of the criteria you are looking for.

4.   Succession plan! This really starts before the recruitment process, but if you have areas of your business where you know you struggle to find the right candidates why not nurture them yourself from within your business. This way you can avoid the stresses of not finding suitable candidates when you go out to interview.

5.    If you can’t find them yourself, log on to TalentPuzzle and let the network of 1600 strong recruiters do the searching for you. You control the cost and only let the best recruiters work on your positions.

Hopefully by following a competency based recruitment process with a detailed job description and person specification, as well as an open mind, you should be able to fill those difficult vacancies.

TalentPuzzle, the UK’s first and largest recruitment marketplace, today launched their new website taking a twist on its original business model. Describing its service as an Agency Comparison Website, TalentPuzzle follows the recent trends in the travel and insurance industries, where companies such as TripAdvisor and GoCompare have become industry standards helping consumers navigate the maze of different suppliers. TalentPuzzle’s promise is to help HR – and everyone else with a recruitment need – to identify the best recruitment agencies at the best price.

Based on data collected from its platform, TalentPuzzle is able to recommend the recruitment agencies who are most likely to fill a specific vacancy. Amongst the data collected are interview and placement statistics as well as more subjective reviews from other users. Employers will be able to work with the best agencies, get better matching CVs and reduce overall time to hire. Recruitment agencies will also benefit by building a track record and gaining access to more business. The better they are, the more business they will win.

“It is TalentPuzzle’s aim to bring transparency to the recruitment sector,” said Virginia Nordback, CEO and founder of TalentPuzzle. “The market is very fragmented with thousands of suppliers. What is missing is an independent benchmark with information on the performance of different agencies.”

TalentPuzzle’s agency recommendations are based on unique data not available anywhere else. Over the past three years, TalentPuzzle has had thousands of vacancies posted worth over 6m in placement fees. More than 15,000 CVs have been sent via the platform and have contributed to objective data on transactions between employers and agencies that form the basis of the comparison data now available to HR.

About TalentPuzzle

TalentPuzzle is the UK’s first and largest recruitment tendering platform. TalentPuzzle enables employers to anonymously advertise vacancies to a network of rated and reviewed recruitment agencies. Employers set the fee they are prepared to offer on hire. Recruitment agencies tender for work and ratings and reviews enable employers to engage with the best agencies.

TalentPuzzle was launched in May 2009 with the vision to improve the efficiency and quality of the recruitment process. TalentPuzzle guarantees that a fair, market-clearing fee is paid. TalentPuzzle is based on a success-only fee, so no money is exchanged until a successful placement is made. More than 500 employers including FTSE 250 companies and over 1,600 recruitment agencies are currently working through TalentPuzzle.

www.talentpuzzle.com

Building revenue and generating profits are two of the key goals in most businesses. But they don’t come without hard work, dedication, and most importantly, the right people in charge of the process.

This is because the right kind of people within a business can increase revenue and sales, whereas the wrong kind of people can decrease it.

In that case, one of the most important functions within a company starts with the hiring/recruitment process. A great hiring process will bring about great revenue benefits, and seeing as both are closely related, I thought it would be quite interesting to understand how hiring can impact revenue.

Here are a few points to take into consideration:

●     Hiring people who perform well will have a positive impact on revenue.

●     Hiring better performers into revenue producing activities will increase revenue. i.e. sales which have a direct result on revenue.

●     Hiring people who are natural trend-setters and innovators will increase revenue. Worthy and unique ideas will generate new products and services that will have higher margins because they are distinctive.

●     Hiring productive people who stay longer within the business will increase revenue.

●     Hiring great executives will increase revenue. While hiring exceptional people for key positions within the company is very important, hiring good executives in the lower end of the managerial spectrum will increase revenue as they are essentially the soldiers of the business. A strong army will win battles.

●     Leaders at all levels will increase revenue. Good leaders will bring along good leadership skills which include better planning, prioritizing, decision-making and team building skills, which will in turn increase revenue.

●     Hiring key people from your company’s competitors will decrease their revenue as they lose key talent. It will on the other hand give you a gain in new ideas and performance.

●     People who work more and work longer hours will increase your revenue. A vacant position for even a fraction of the day is a position not generating any revenue.

●     Hiring individuals who demand less salary will increase overall revenues. Hiring people who perform at a high level but work for a lower average salary will give you salary savings, which if used to hire more talented employees will end up generating more revenue.

●     Hiring low maintenance employees will allow managers to concentrate on generating more revenue.

The primary goal in recruitment should not be to fill every position at the lowest cost possible. Rather, it should be to make sure that every new hire produces the maximum positive impact on business services, results, and revenue as possible.

The CIPD 2012 Annual Survey Report states that 59% of organisations with over 5,000 employees report that they have lost potential talent due to the length of their recruitment process.

Long fill times lead do higher costs whether it means teams lack the right expertise, projects are delivered late or there is increased burden on other staff.

A year ago we published the average fill times we see on TalentPuzzle. Our system gives us access to data that shows what the average times to hire are for many employers across different sectors and allows us to track how they change. We regularly monitor time to hire as we consider it an important KPI for the success of our own offering.

We have seen a decrease in the average time to hire of 29 days from job post to offer. Individual sectors however vary; IT has increased from 19 days to 28 days illustrating the talent shortage for developers. Sales has decreased from 29 days to 24 days.

We thought we’d share some of this data with you as it may give you a useful benchmark for your own recruitment process.

Recruitment is a team effort.  It requires a certain level of commitment from three parties: the recruiters, the candidates and the hiring manager. If any of the three underperform, the recruiting process suffers. It sounds simple enough, but many in the business world agree that it’s actually a complex process that can cause a lot of headaches. Let me explain.
Recruiting entails that candidates know a minimum about the companies they are interviewing at, the hiring managers know the job specs of the vacancy they are recruiting for, and the recruiters are on top of any problems that could arise between the two. The performance of each individual,  and the success of the recruitment process, relies on the fact that people do their job properly.

In some cases, the process proves to be quite smooth and fuss-free. A job is posted, recruiters work on it, correspond with the employer accordingly, submit CVs, go through the interviewing process and a lucky recruiter will make a placement.

But in most cases, the process is more complicated. The tos and fros of correspondences between the recruiter and the employer can be tiresome. Frustrations can arise and the submissions of CVs can come to a standstill. This can be due to a number of reasons; job being put on hold, found a candidate directly, recruiter not finding suitable candidates, or vacancy being scrapped. Sometimes, there is no wrong doer or wrongdoing. Recruiting is simply tough. What’s likely to have happened is that someone in the process was not doing, or not given the opportunity to do their job properly.

Fixing this is nearly always possible. But prevention is better than cure and starting off on the right foot is always a plus. So here are a few pointers on how the recruiting team can ensure harmonious performance:

1. Recruiters should know about the job as soon as HR Managers are aware of a vacancy that needs to be filled. A job done under pressure will not necessarily be a job well done so recruiters need to be given appropriate time to find suitable candidates and be set realistic expectations of when a candidate should be placed.

2. Feedback can give people an idea on how they have performed and where to improve their work. When recruiters ask for feedback, HR managers who don’t tend to be responsive find that those recruiters don’t perform well. Informing your engaged agencies on your thoughts about CV quality, candidate fit and interview behaviours can shape the type of candidates they put forward to you at a later stage. Recruiters should also respond accordingly, and try to improve the quality  of their work where necessary.

3. Hiring managers need to be responsive to candidates CVs. Good candidates have a short shelf life, and it is really hard to find top talent. If you fail to follow up and reiterate interest in a candidate that you’d like to see in for a future interview, the candidate won’t wait. Good practice implies recruiters are informed of how their candidate faired during the process. If the process is taking a bit longer than expected, get the recruiters to keep the candidates warm. If the fit isn’t right let them know so they can focus on other endeavours.

4. Interview well. Although you might interview several groups of candidates before finding your rockstar talent, you do need to treat every single interviewee as if they were your one and only focus. This applies to both the hiring manager at the actual job interview, and to the recruiter during the initial assessment interview. Candidates of today are prospective clients of tomorrow so if an interview is misconducted in any way there will be bad blood in respect of the company you are representing.

5. Remember, the candidate is also interviewing you. If you think you’ve just landed on a good candidate, chances are others will have thought the same too, and your ideal candidate will have multiple job offers. The offer he decides to take will depend on a number of factors -one of which will include how you conveyed the company culture and message during the interview and how suitable he feels he would fit within it.

It seems that often the key measure of success in recruitment is to reduce the cost of hire as far as possible. Cost of hire is easy to measure, and as the saying goes, what gets measured gets managed.

On the other hand if you speak to anyone in a business, from the CEO to managers and including the recruitment department, they will say that quality of hire is the critical issue. So why do so few organisations have a clear measure of quality of hire, and why are even fewer able to link the quality hires back to the recruitment process?

Although you can argue that the actual hire is decided by the manager, and therefore is somewhat out of the control of recruitment, I would suggest that if the quality bar should be set so that the hiring manager only sees people of the right quality, and therefore the onus still rests on the recruitment department.

The ideal is to have a clear definition of what quality looks like for your organisation across a range of factors (intellect, values, motivations and behaviours) and test for them as part of the recruitment process.  Once you have set the quality bar you can optimise your processes to deliver hires as fast as possible and at the lowest cost – but you have to recognise that cost and time to hire are secondary factors to quality.

Alternatively you can track the performance of the candidate hired (using performance appraisals) back to the recruitment process that found them. Then you will be able to see whether the recruitment department, or even a particular channel is producing the right quality. You might find, for example, that the people you hire from job boards are cheap but perform badly – if you know this is the case you can change that channel.

This second approach introduces a delay between the use and the assessment of the channels, so I would generally favour the first approach – if you can get the business to agree a definition of what good looks like.

So ideally you have a clear quality standard you are recruiting to and you are assessing candidates at the point of hire and as they progress through the organisation. Then all you need to do is measure the cost. This is also a tricky issue. Cost of hire calculations often, for reasons of simplicity, just look at directly measurable costs such as advertising and recruitment fees. However, this is to omit some of the much larger costs relating to mis-hires: the costs of remedial training, under performance and employee churn.

To properly measure the effectiveness of your recruitment team, you therefore need to have a much more detailed approach than just looking at cost of hire. You may also find that in order to deliver the right quality the upfront costs increase but the overall cost of hire, once you factor in the post-hire costs, falls. Doing it right is difficult, but ultimately rewarding.

Companies succeed or fail according to the quality of their staff, so if there’s any department that it’s worth investing in assessing, it should be the recruitment function.

People are the tools that make companies work. A great and smart bunch will contribute in moving a company forwards, generate profits and have them re-invested wherever necessary to create more opportunities, while a less skilled group might keep a company afloat without issue, but at a stagnant level. So isn’t it in everyone’s best interest to hire great quality staff to make companies thrive?

The truth of the matter is that finding great people to hire is like trying to find gold dust. And have you ever tried to find gold dust? (I sprinkled some gold glitter on the floor the other day and found it quite difficult to handle…). So, if you want to hire people who will give the company more potential, how do you go about finding them?

Traditionally, hiring managers and recruitment consultants have gone about the hiring process in a way I like to call the “old way”: they match previous experience in candidate’s portfolios to job descriptions, see who best matches what job, and put forward the candidates who fit the overall package. But this method is flawed. Let me expand.

By solely taking into consideration experience and behaviour as key criteria to position a candidate within a job, recruiters are only taking into consideration half of the ingredients necessary in a quality hire. Experience and behaviour (which form a group we call Capabilities), believe it or not, are not everything. In fact, some might go so far as to say that previous capabilities are the least reliable predictors of future performance, as they are static, and will never change. So, at the risk of shaking up the recruitment model we’ve all trusted as golden so far, what is the other half of the recipe to quality hires?

Simply put, hiring managers and recruiters have been forgetting about Potential. It encompasses the following three qualities: intellect, values, and motivations.

Now I won’t go into a discussion about defining these qualities and assessing what they are in exact terms (that is what Wikipedia is for, right?).  I just think this is a good little point to mull over for a while. Potential differs with each and every candidate put forward for every job. Yet it is what will determine how well a candidate will perform in his or her employment. Capabilities may have been good at some point within past positions, but they will not determine if the candidate will be good in the future and faced with a different environment. Potential qualities act as the foundation to great quality individuals, and therefore, great quality candidates.

I’m not saying to overlook the candidate’s past experiences and behaviours when they come in for an interview. I’m simply saying that the candidate with plenty of experience may sometimes not be as good a fit for the vacancy as the candidate with less experience but more potential.

A little mathematical equation to sum up what has taken me 7 paragraphs to write:
Quality Candidate= Capability + Potential.

Having skills count. But are they the only quality candidates and employees really need to guarantee abundant job prospects?

I’ve been reading this book lately that claims it will teach you about the one asset that people really need to win and keep the job they love. The first few pages make the reader jump into thoughts of what it takes to succeed in employment, secure a job in a company you like, and enjoy the work you have to produce. The authors put it down to a quality that is often overlooked by many in favor of skill set: mindset. Let me explain.

Skills are the tools people use to navigate through life . Certain jobs require specific skills that employers test during the interviewing process in order to make a hire. How proficient candidates are in their skill-set plays an important part in how likely a candidate is to land the job.

But relying entirely on skill can backfire. First, skill set can grow old. What I mean by this is that a computer expert in 2000 could not be a computer expert in 2012 if he’d not re-developed and/or updated his skill set since then. Second, from a candidate’s point of view, the recession has affected many businesses and there is a massive source of experienced candidates looking to work for a fraction of their previous pay as a result of being made redundant. So if a candidate relies solely on his skill set in hopes of landing employment, he or she is competing against a giant pool of other trained and skilled applicants. What it takes to distinguish each candidate from the herd is is the right mindset.

Mindset is what sets candidates and employees apart. A right mindset will be the tool that will enable a candidate/employee to move forward in employment and employability. It equips people with the ability to thrive where others fail, and allows them to continue competing and working hard when harsh realities and difficulties come to play. It distinguishes between the types of people who want to continue learning to improve their abilities and those that settle on the confined knowledge of their skill-set -which can get outdated or need further improvement with time. Mindset works in such a way that it acts as a lens through which people choose view the world and choose to act upon what happens inside of it. A person with the wrong mindset will choose to let the blur or defect in the lens confine his or her abilities to do certain things and will tend to give up when facing dead-ends, while a person with the right mindset will not let the blur restrain them from doing what needs to be done and rather try to work around the difficulties.

A little statistic to provide more food for thought: when employers are given the choice between someone with the desired mindset who lacks complete skill for the job, and someone with complete skill set who lacks the desired mindset, 96% chose mindset over skill set as the key element in the types of candidates they chose to seek and retain.

Interesting stuff, what’s your take on it?