RULE #5
5
BUILD A DATA-DRIVEN RECRUITING ECOSYSTEM
Recruiting is the canary in the coal mine; if I listen to what recruiting feels and hears in the marketplace, I will be wiser, stronger, faster, and better.
The Continuous (and Tech-Savvy) Job Seeker Emerges
Technology is rapidly eroding passive candidates. Conventional wisdom in recruiting is that a small percentage of people are active job seekers and the rest are passive candidates, defined as the pool of happily employed people who aren’t looking for a new job but who might consider a new position if the right opportunity emerged. However, research from Indeed.com, the job listing site, suggests that technology has all but eliminated passive candidates. The implication is that most candidates should now be regarded as continual job searchers, always on the lookout for new gigs—whether full time or freelance. As Paul D’Arcy, senior vice president at Indeed.com, says, “The data shows that far more people are keeping their eye on jobs and applying for jobs.”
The process of continual job searching has been made much easier with apps like Anthology, Jobr, and Switch, as well as proprietary apps developed by employers themselves, each designed to quickly match job seekers’ skills with open positions and introduce job seekers to recruiters—all without alerting their current employers that they are considering a move.
Food and facilities services corporation Sodexo got a head start in this process four years ago, when it launched both a mobile-optimized career site and a smartphone app to pull together all the information about the company’s recruiting efforts into one easy-to-access place. Since then, Sodexo’s, recruiting efforts have increasingly focused on leveraging mobile devices and apps. It was one of the first companies in its industry to mobilize its online presence and offer the ability to apply for jobs directly from a mobile app, Sodexo invested in mobile recruiting as a direct response to the changing ways in which we all use mobile devices. The Sodexo careers job app has become a platform for job seekers to learn about the company’s corporate culture and career opportunities, connect with recruiters, as well as search and apply at their convenience, wherever and whenever they are ready—all on the go.
The results stemming from the careers job app, as recently measured, are impressive: 35 percent of job traffic from potential new hires came from the mobile platform. In the first year, Sodexo’s mobile-app downloads totaled 15,000, leading to over 2,000 new job candidates and 141 actual new hires, at the same time saving the company $300,000 in job board postings. Well over 700 new hires at Sodexo originated from mobile devices.
Recruiting is also taking a page from dating apps where swiping right has become shorthand for liking someone. Swiping right is revolutionizing the way companies find talent. As a generalized example of how these job seeking apps work, users complete a short profile in which they are asked to answer questions on topics such as “Which companies in your field do you admire?” and “What is the next job title and salary you are looking for?” Next, the app examines the answers—looking also at job seekers’ more extensive profiles on LinkedIn or other websites—and they match the data with job descriptions placed by recruiters and hiring managers. The best matches are the ones most closely aligning with the individual’s qualifications and salary requirements. These matches appear as text alerts on the job seeker’s mobile devices as they become available.
What do apps that work like this imply for the future of recruiting? One answer is that mobile is becoming the dominant way to search for a new job. According to research conducted by Census Wide, on behalf of Indeed.com, 65 percent of people are using their mobile devices to do just that. Moreover, this trend isn’t isolated to younger job seekers. While 77 percent of people aged 16 to 34 use a mobile device in their job search, 72 percent of people aged 35 to 44, 54 percent of people aged 44 to 54, and 35 percent of people aged 55 and over also use mobile devices to search for jobs.1 Second, with the job search process now (literally) in our pocket, job seekers can expect relevant jobs to find them via outreach through the same apps. Anthology, Jobr, and Switch represent massive changes in how employers can find talent and how easily job seekers can connect to their next opportunity.
Our own Future Workplace Forecast identified the top seven recruitment methods used by HR leaders and hiring managers both in the United States and internationally. These are outlined in Figure 5.1. In the United States, the method expected to increase the most over the next three years is the use of mobile apps for recruiting. Outside the United States, social media is the top recruiting method expected in coming years. Both findings point to how mobile recruiting and social media recruiting are on the rise with employers.
Figure 5.1 Top recruitment methods
What’s also interesting is that our research found a decrease of 3 percent in usage of professional recruitment firms in the United States and flat usage internationally over the next three years. This contributes to yet another shift: mobile and social technologies will put a significant amount of information about employers directly into the hands of continual job seekers. For employers, this means access to vast quantities of data about prospective new hires. These signals imply employers have a better opportunity to identify the best-suited candidates and employees can find a match for their skills with an employer.
Diving deeper into how companies are tapping social media for recruiting, a separate Jobvite Recruiter Nation survey of human resources leaders and hiring managers illustrates, as shown in Figure 5.2, the various ways companies are using social channels, with Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, Glassdoor, and YouTube being the top five platforms for recruiting on social media. Interestingly, Snapchat, a photo messaging app now used by over 200 million users on a monthly basis, is making headway among employers as a tool for building a company’s employer brand in the recruiting process. For employers, Snapchat allows a company to give candidates access to live events (like an industry expo or your company’s sports day) or to post new job openings to the company’s Snapchat followers first. It is simple, highly personalized, and adds value to the recruiting process. In addition, applicant tracking systems from providers like Boston-based Workable are now capable of automatically aggregating links to candidates’ social media profiles, providing employers with a fuller view into all of their candidates’ social media activity to help source passive candidates and pre-screen job applicants.
Figure 5.2 Recruiting on social media
Now let’s turn to the recruiting ecosystem, as depicted in Figure 5.3. This recruiting ecosystem intentionally builds the employer brand, uses analytics to vet candidates, leverages employees to pursue referrals and communicates in a transparent fashion every step along the candidate experience.
Figure 5.3 The recruiting ecosystem
The Recruiting Ecosystem: Manage Your Employer Brand
As companies search social media sites for potential new hires, they must also realize job seekers are doing the same thing in search of potential new employers. Building a strong employer brand, one that communicates the tenets of your workplace culture, is critical in this increasingly transparent job search process.
Your employer brand is essentially what your business is all about, the “what and why of the things we do at this company.” Organizations that build strong employer brands and focus on culture become magnets for continual job seekers.
GE has transformed its employer brand within the last five years. In 2011, Jeff Immelt, chairman and CEO, made a big bet on the launch of GE Digital to create a cloud-based operating system for the industrial Internet and reposition GE as a digital industrial company. In 2015, GE earned $5 billion in software revenue, and GE Digital has grown from 100 people in 2011 to more than 20,000 in 2016. Hiring digital talent has become a key focus for the company. Leading this effort is Amber Grewal, global head of Talent Acquisition for GE Digital. To help build its employer branding campaign, GE unveiled a campaign called “What’s the Matter with Owen” to create a new employer brand, one that goes beyond being a 124-year-old company to one that is revolutionizing how planes, trains, and hospitals operate. The campaign focuses on Owen, a programmer who has just taken a job at GE Digital and explains why to his friends and family. The videos on YouTube have generated more than 400,000 views to date and the Owen campaign has been credited with an eightfold increase in job applications to GE.
Beyond the Owen campaign, GE Digital is applying software development methods to recruitment to create a new job role known as recruiting scrum master. In rugby, scrum is short for scrummage and refers to a method of restarting a play, where players pack closely together with their heads down and attempt to gain possession of the ball. Similarly, scrum methods are at the heart of implementing an agile recruiting model. This model incorporates the scrum methods used in software development, infusing speed and managing unpredictability in the recruiting process.
Grewal and her team created the role of recruiting scrum master to apply many of the scrum techniques to recruiting employees by breaking down the massive hiring needs into incremental and iterative steps. Through conducting daily scrum meetings, recruiters are able to deliver talent needs within 2 to 6 weeks versus the average of 10 to 15 weeks. The recruiting scrum master also supports and coaches an entire recruiting team.
This approach helped GE Digital recruiters engage and connect with prospective employees—using technology hackathons to source candidates, then connecting with them via open-source code sites on GitHub or interacting with them through gamification. GE Digital has been able to reduce the time to hire by 70 percent for in-demand roles in software engineering and commercial software sales.
How do we know the employer brand is so important? Job seekers tell us so. Recent research conducted by the Talent Board finds 41 percent of all job seekers search for information about a company’s culture and brand before they apply.2 After all, this is where the job seeker starts, by using apps like Anthology, Jobr, and Switch, or by going to sites such as Fortune’s Best Places to Work list, Glassdoor’s Employee Choice Award, and LinkedIn’s Most In-Demand Employers list. They also search online resources to read reviews and ratings about other job seekers’ experiences with a given company. “Candidate loyalty to a brand can be a huge boost if people are willing to recommend their friends apply to the same company,” writes Emily Smykal at Jibe, a company creating data-driven solutions for applicant-tracking systems, regarding Net Promoter scoring.3 “Straightforwardly asking candidates a question like, ‘Based on your experience here, how likely are you to refer others to apply?’ is now recognized as the primary way to measure the performance of the candidate experience.”
Another method of managing the employer brand is to create content that conveys the organization’s culture, says Dan Black, the Americas director of recruiting at EY. The company pursued 13,000 new hires in 2015.
“Online video is kind of where it’s at,” Black says. “We have a whole platform built around being able to see and hear our employees. So that has been big. The other thing that we’ve experimented with is video job descriptions. We ran a pilot this past year to say, OK, when you’re looking for a staff consultant position, in addition to reading the specs, the skills required, the background, you can also click a video and see the hiring manager, and hear what he or she is looking for—hear it in his or her own words. If you are looking to be a manager, you can get a video of an existing manager. You want to know what the job is? You can read about it, but also here’s what I do. I am in this job.”
For Black, the process is also about introducing the recruiting brand in whatever digital spaces job seekers choose to frequent. “It’s not just social media,” he says. “It’s ‘where are they?’ And they are on social media a lot, but they’re also in a lot of other places. Hence, we advertise on Spotify and on ESPN, because that’s where students spend their time.” The idea behind this content is, “Can we create a viable set of media [impressions], through which we can draw people back into the mother ship?”
These examples from GE Digital and EY further reinforce how technology is dramatically changing the ways employers and job seekers find each other. How HR recruits HR is also shifting. New roles in HR are increasingly being filled with a more diverse pool, which include those with expertise in computer science and software engineering, as well as consumer marketing and video production. As recruiting becomes data driven and uses new methods to find the best talent, the mix of professionals in HR is evolving to also include many different non-traditional HR specialties.
The Recruiting Ecosystem: Train Before Hiring
Job seekers and recruiters are incorporating training before hiring into the recruiting process. Algorithms are helping recruiters to create and refine job seeker skill sets. Data analytics also helps employers better understand what in-house skills are needed to develop their company’s teams, achieve their organization’s goals, and successfully fill open positions.
An interesting data-driven approach is under way at Aquent, a creative staffing agency that recently launched a MOOC program it calls Gymnasium. At Aquent, Gymnasium draws on the connotation of the gym as a place for fun, applying it to digital training via a series of “workouts.” The way the program works, with its approximately 56,000 registered users, is to match the employee skill sets that employers say they need with classes offered by Gymnasium. Then Aquent matches standout students with job opportunities. In areas such as Writing for Web and Mobile and Query Building Blocks, the activity and results generated by Gymnasium’s students become analyzable data that the company uses to make empirically sound referrals for both sides of the employer–job seeker equation.
“We pick the courses very specifically based on data that we can see, in terms of evaluating skills gaps, both quantitatively and qualitatively,” says Andrew Miller, program director of Gymnasium at Aquent. “We can also see in our own job data what roles are being sought at different levels, salary groupings, titles, discrete skill sets, responsibilities, names of software packages, and even certain design activities.”
“Our students tell us what courses we should offer, as well,” Miller continues. “It’s not all that surprising that the courses that they want us to offer are the courses that the clients are suggesting we should offer.”
On a qualitative level, talent-acquisition teams can also count on Aquent’s interviewing staff to thoroughly vet candidate students, confirming they not only have the skill sets but also demonstrate the work styles, business ethics, proclivities, and affinities to match their online-course performance.
Aquent is doing all this with real-world practitioners as instructors rather than college lecturers. Following its first year of offering a range of Gymnasium MOOCs, the company saw a 10-times return on the program’s investment.
As Aquent demonstrates, training before hiring transforms employers’ understanding of job seekers. It is a nuanced, empirical, and newly holistic approach. Using training to identify the best talent is the type of smart sourcing that will gain headway as more companies leverage MOOCs to source the right type of candidate for the organization’s skill needs.
The Recruiting Ecosystem: Use Smart Sourcing
Smart sourcing is becoming a crucial way for companies to find talent and predict their success on the job. Identifying and amplifying skill sets among promising job seekers is one aspect of a broad and proactive data-driven approach to smart sourcing. Two companies that are using people analytics in new ways to source talent include LinkedIn and JetBlue. In both cases, smart sourcing starts with data to find optimal candidates—whether the candidate sought is a software engineer or a flight attendant.
Brendan Browne, vice president of Global Talent Acquisition at LinkedIn, works with his team to continually develop and fine-tune the company’s data-driven emphasis on the value of internal employee referrals. One element of focus for LinkedIn, Browne says, is a search for job seeker signals.
“The signals I’m talking about [include the job seeker] publishing data that shows that he or she is a smart, thoughtful person around a key skill such as solving infrastructure problems,” says Browne. “Then I examine the data and ask, Does the job seeker follow my company on LinkedIn, or the one that I’m recruiting for, online? Does she follow companies that would be a proxy for mine; is she smart enough to be following really great companies? And probably the most overlooked easy to find signal is, Does the job seeker know someone of influence at my company—someone I know, from whom I could get a lead on recruiting them?”
In other words, recruiting in the data-driven ecosystem is not just about grinding large quantities of data in pursuit of potential matches; it’s about refining analytical efforts so they generate the best matches. For example, analytics can show not only that a job seeker has 500-plus followers on the LinkedIn platform, but also that a significant percentage of those followers are deeply connected to the kind of position that the company is looking to fill in the first place. Data analytics can next show an even more granular subset of matches that represent just the job seekers who have one-to-one connections with established employees of influence at the recruiting organization—internal referrals to whom talent acquisition can reach out.
Browne says the results of putting such strategies to work are measurable and significant. To follow up on the above example with which he started, response rates during LinkedIn’s targeted search for an infrastructure engineer tripled thanks to the company’s data-driven pilot program. Furthermore, although early iterations of the LinkedIn approach conducted most of this work in a manual way, now the process is increasingly automated. LinkedIn recruiters utilize a new feature in LinkedIn Recruiter, called Spotlights. With Spotlights, recruiters can surface much of the sought-after results without needing to “hand-crank” the analytics each time.
“When you run a search today for infrastructure engineers, Spotlights buckets them by a number of the signals I talked about,” Browne says. “If there are 250 infrastructure engineers, our data shows what percentage are connected to your employees—meaning they know someone at the company. It also shows what percentage of those job seekers you interviewed before. These details drastically change who you go after, and why . . . and now the data is organized automatically with the click of a button.”
Of course, clicking the button still requires making strategic choices. Recruiters leverage tools such as LinkedIn Recruiter, but this is the first step in the process. Recruiters must next create strategies for reaching out to candidates based on what the data tells them. Given a short list of job seekers, these can be arranged on a two-by-two axis with quality on one axis and affinity on the other as shown in Figure 5.4.
Figure 5.4 “Smart sourcing” prospects
Browne suggests a clearly segmented sourcing strategy differs depending on the signal data: “High quality candidates with high affinity to the organization and [thus] most likely to engage would be targeted with focused, personalized, warm introductions—with them, the recruitment process gets fully underway.
“In contrast, candidates with low affinity to the organization and therefore less likely to initially engage would receive carefully crafted content—perhaps a white paper, with a note suggesting the material sent along is relevant and interesting to the job seeker’s current work. Outreach of this second type begins an ongoing conversation, bringing the candidate into the company’s talent community and keeping the prospect aware of the employer brand. This approach creates opportunities to develop the relationship into a potential hire down the road.”
Whether it is LinkedIn’s databases or a similar highly structured set of information, the key to data analytics in recruiting—and elsewhere, for that matter—is not simply to aggregate large quantities of job seeker data. Successful talent acquisition depends on a concentration of curated and structured data. This data is coupled, in LinkedIn’s case, with the aforementioned two-prong approach: on the one hand, high-touch, one-to-one outreach and, on the other hand, consumer marketing–style strategies to other candidates in the mix until they’re ready for next steps.
Recruiting leaders need to shift their mindset to one of leading with data analytics. Applying data analytics to selecting the best talent is what Andy Biga does in his role as director of Talent Acquisition at JetBlue. As Biga explains the importance of finding optimal flight attendants, he says, “You can imagine how important the role is to the company and to our brand. They are literally the face of the brand, and are able to change a regular experience with us to—hopefully—an amazing experience.”
JetBlue receives approximately 25,000 applications each year for the job of a flight attendant and hires 1,000. “Initially, we thought the key characteristic of a flight attendant was ‘being nice.’” Last year, using people analytics and customer data in a study conducted with Professor Adam Grant of the Wharton Business School, the airline found that “being helpful trumps being nice. Being helpful even balances out the effect of somebody who is not so nice.”4
Biga goes on to say, “In addition to being helpful, our data showed us the importance of being a problem solver in this role. This is one of the critical characteristics we now look for in a prospective flight attendant.” The results of applying people analytics to finding optimal talent have been impressive. According to Biga, these results include the ability of a new hire to go through a rigorous flight training program, higher employee engagement and retention after hiring, and a 12 percent decrease in total absences. Attendance is critical in the air travel industry, since a crew member’s last-minute absence can mean a flight delay or cancellation.
The Recruiting Ecosystem: Tap Employees for Referrals
As Brendan Browne of LinkedIn points out in the previous section, quality referrals are key to the recruiting ecosystem. Further evidence indicates that internal referrals in particular are a significant factor in recruiting success:
• Our Future Workplace Forecast showed that 64 percent of recruiters polled plan to tap internal employees for referrals. Over the next three years, this number is expected to jump to 76 percent (as highlighted in Figure 5.1).
• When it comes to the quality of hires stemming from internal referrals, 88 percent of employers surveyed in a recent CareerBuilder study say inside recommendations rank above all other source types.5
• In the area of employee fit and retention, an iCIMS Hire Expectations Institute study finds 60 percent of internally referred job seekers make strong matches with company culture and 59 percent stay with the organization longer than other types of hires.6
With the value of internal referrals in mind, the question becomes how does a company tap internal referrals and importantly how does using this process impact the diversity of the workforce?
As a case in point, data is driving employee referrals at Red Hat. The software company’s recruiting profile is highly active—approximately 8,300 people across 80 offices worldwide, 700 net new hires in 2014, and about 1,000 new hires in 2015. With such a burgeoning workforce, Red Hat incentivizes employees to participate in identifying the best new talent via its Red Hat Ambassadors program.7 The Red Hat Ambassadors program pursues a gamified system of rewards.8 Every referral that leads to a successful hire advances the employee ambassador in rank and confers tiered bonuses and prizes. And it works. According to L. J. Brock, vice president of the Global Talent Group and People Infrastructure at Red Hat, approximately 50 percent of the newest employees were invited to join the company because of internal referrals.
Here’s where technology comes into the picture: Red Hat is using data science and predictive analytics to further amplify its ambassador referrals and recruiting. “Now our team can use multiple systems,” Brock says. “They can look objectively at the data and say, here’s somebody Red Hat should really target—they look relevant, they have great skills. And then they can go back to LinkedIn and cross-reference that assessment and say, ‘Oh, somebody inside the company already knows them: let’s have this person reach out so that we’re getting that first-person benefit of a referral, and we’re driving up our response rate.’”
Furthermore, a Red Hat Ambassador can proactively recommend somebody, and the organization can use data analytics to inspect that recommendation, looking for other connections among job seeker profiles. A more complete, 360-degree profile of the candidate comes into focus. Data fuels referral opportunities; referrals create starting points for new data-driven searches. It is an especially powerful scenario for Red Hat, given that the company is often seeking highly specialized talent and its job seeker population may well be moving within a concentrated network of colleagues and contacts.
“The universe we target is more networked all the time, and one overarching connection that we’ve found using analytics,” says Brock, “is that everybody we hire is almost, without exception, connected at some degree to someone already working here.”
The results of all this analysis, Brock says, are also quantifiable.
“Our data is generally showing us that people we hire from [internal] referrals are more engaged, they’re staying longer, and their performance is very strong,” says Brock. “Anecdotally, I think you can chalk that up to employee advocacy. It’s great to have somebody in there who’s giving you an insight into what life is like and helping you make sure that Red Hat is the right match for you.”
As data analytics glean new insights about how pools of job seekers intersect with internal referrals, companies will need to leverage technology to also broaden their talent diversity even further.
“We are well aware at Red Hat that we don’t want to just keep replicating the same employee population,” Brock says. “So the next generation analytics and predictive tools need to help individuals make their referral populations more diverse than they naturally are.”
Going forward, this means Red Hat’s use of data analytics will need to generate recommendations for new contacts and networks that its employees can explore so they can grow their own personal and professional networks—and the potential of future internal referrals. As they do so, whether Red Hat turns to data to find the best new candidates or encounters new job seekers right from the organization, the referral pool will become larger, more diverse, and perpetually increased in data-validated ways.
Employee Alumni Networks Tap Former Employees for Referrals
It used to be that when employees left a company, managers would wish them well, and both parties would simply move on. However, the employee life cycle now includes tapping alumni and engaging them as ambassadors of the organization. To address this changing landscape, a growing number of organizations are proactive in reaching out to former employees and creating corporate alumni networks.
Many companies in the professional service and technology fields like Accenture, Deloitte, KPMG, and McKinsey, to name just a few, are creating the corporate version of a university alumni function. In fact, many university alumni functions could learn from what the corporate alumni networks are doing to nurture and build better long-term relationships. According to Katya V. Meza-Doyle, director of Global Alumni Relations at Accenture, “The benefits of the Accenture Alumni Network range from building a sense of community, networking, recruiting former employees as potential boomerang employees, engaging alumni to be brand ambassadors and of course, business development.”
Clearly, employees want to stay in touch with their former employer. LinkedIn now hosts over 118,000 corporate alumni groups, including 98 percent of the Fortune 500. Yet surprisingly, most of these alumni groups have little to no relationship with their former companies.
In fact, the majority of alumni networks that do exist are run completely independently from the company. A study from the University of Twente in the Netherlands showed that while only 15 percent of the companies surveyed had formal corporate alumni networks, another 67 percent had employees who independently organized informal alumni groups. Think about that—alumni want to connect so eagerly that they are spending their own time and money to set up these networks.
This should be a wake-up call for companies to explore if there is a volunteer alumni network already in existence and to take the leadership of this and use it for the company’s strategic benefit.
The Accenture Alumni Network is an example of a well-run and tightly aligned initiative. The Accenture Alumni Network, created in the late 1980s, now has over 150,000 active members in 38 countries hosting an average of 150 events, virtual and in person, annually. (Disclosure: Jeanne Meister is an Accenture alum and member of this network.) The network’s vision is simply stated: “Once Accenture, Always Accenture.” As the company has expanded in scope and geography, so has the alumni network, which added a number of interesting features such as allowing Accenture clients to post open positions on the network and exploring a return to Accenture by working with local recruiting teams. According to a study of 1,800 HR leaders, 600 people managers, and 600 employees entitled “Corporate Culture and Boomerang Employees” conducted by Kronos and WorkplaceTrends.com, a subsidiary of Future Workplace, 76 percent of HR leaders indicated they are more accepting of hiring boomerang employees today, while nearly 40 percent of employees would consider returning to their former employer. Research by the Society for Human Resource Management has shown that individuals who return to previous employers cost about half as much to bring on board as new hires. These boomerang employees have specialized expertise and inside knowledge of an organization’s culture and values, enabling them to make an immediate contribution.9 One of the biggest benefits we see, says Accenture’s Meza-Doyle, is to build global brand ambassadors who understand our core values and culture and are viewed as objective third parties for referrals and connections to new business opportunities. We want them to have a lifelong affiliation to Accenture.”
The Recruiting Ecosystem: Be Transparent with Job Seekers
There are two types of transparency that job seekers look for in the workplace: first, potential new hires want to work in a culture that is transparent; second, job seekers want a talent-acquisition process that is transparent.
Ideally, these elements of transparency should form a through line, a complete interview-to-exit experience of open communication and frankness about salary, benefits, promotions, career development, company culture, and the expectations business leaders set for employees around growth, behavior, and work style. In fact, the majority of job seekers today demand this type of transparent candidate experience: a recent 15Five survey of full-time employees found that 81 percent preferred to join companies that promoted transparency as a value in the organization.10
Furthermore, evidence tells us that tech-savvy organizations want much the same thing. According to the Future Workplace Forecast, organizations using the latest social, mobile, and predictive analytic tools are more likely than their counterparts to value the power of transparency.
One organization furthering transparency in the workplace is Glassdoor. Since its launch in 2008, Glassdoor has created and expanded its database of company and CEO reviews to the extent that, as of 2015, more than a third of Fortune 500 companies use the service.11
Glassdoor works with the help of user-generated data. Current and former employees of organizations fill out an online review template, describing in their own words the pros and cons of working for a given company, its salary structure, its interview process, interview questions, and benefits package. They can also offer written advice to senior management. Job seekers then use the Glassdoor website to search for these user-supplied details and reviews about the companies to which they want to apply. Enter an organization’s name and location, and the site matches the query to its resident data. The results are organized somewhat like what users find at sites such as Yelp. In Glassdoor’s case, the company’s recommendation rate and CEO approval score are given as a percentage. It costs job seekers nothing to use Glassdoor; the company makes its money by charging recruiters for job postings. Some 3,000 employers sign up monthly for the opportunity.12
For the job seeker, Glassdoor’s aggregation of data about company offerings and employee experiences is central to the concept of transparency. Says Kirsten Davidson, head of Employer Branding at Glassdoor, “Transparency allows the employer to hire people who are better positioned to come on board and do what they need to do. The more transparent a company is about what’s good and what’s bad, the more open the job seeker’s eyes are, the more they can see what the challenges are in front of them and how willing they are to take those on.”
A key result, Davidson notes, is that prospects who use Glassdoor to research a company and then apply to the organization are less likely to be surprised by information during the process—this is a powerful result, because surprise creates the risk a candidate will withdraw an application.
“A great employer brand not only articulates who you are, but it also articulates who you’re not,” she says. “And it helps to more clearly reach the people you want to reach without pulling in people who get three interviews in and say, ‘This really is not right for me.’ You want to be able to have those people self-select out at the very start.”
Think of Glassdoor this way: it’s Yelp for C-level executives. And while today people can rate a company’s CEO on the site, services such as Glassdoor are well positioned to eventually allow employees to review all types of C-level executives. Imagine interviewing for a new job, one in which you’d report to the company’s chief human resource officer. Your first step might be to see the rating and comments regarding the CHRO’s willingness to be a people developer and how future focused he or she is within the company—and industry!
So what can an HR leader do to create a strategy recognizing the growing importance of Glassdoor among job seekers? First, HR should build Glassdoor into some key HR processes. For example, encourage employees just finishing their first 90 days to go on the company’s Glassdoor page and share their feedback about the company. Next, be responsive to both positive and negative comments about the company. This will show current and prospective employees your company reads these comments and reflects on them. Finally, create a process to regularly share Glassdoor data with the entire HR team, business leaders, and employees. This will likely inform key processes such your employee culture survey, how your company sources new employees, develops them, and engages them. Lastly, recognize that Glassdoor and other employer rating sites are now part of a prospective new employee’s research on your employer brand. You can shape what they will read about you.
In addition to analyzing data on Glassdoor, IBM is leveraging its Millennial Corps, the IBM employee affinity group for millennials and those with a millennial mindset. Deb Butters, former vice president, Human Resources IBM shares how IBM taps its Millennial Corps (the IBM Millennial Employee Affinity group highlighted in Rule #7) for advice on how to improve the recruiting process. “For example, last year, we asked this group four simple, yet powerful questions about candidate perceptions during recruiting and we took their guidance to make enhancements.” The four questions are:
• If you had 30 seconds to sell your friends on why they should work for IBM, what would you say?
• What programs or support should IBM provide to help you build your career?
• What can a manager do to make you more engaged and excited about working for IBM?
• What manager actions or behaviors inspire you to perform your best?
The feedback pointed to new directions IBM could take during the recruiting process, such as focusing more on storytelling, hearing firsthand from recent IBM hires, and creating a differentiated value proposition for each employee segment. Campaigns like #IBMTechTalk and #InsideStory were the direct result of these employee listening campaigns. With this kind of information at the fingertips of the recruiting teams, IBM is able to create stronger messaging to prospective employees.
The intersection of data analytics and talent acquisition provides recruiters with the opportunity to gain deeper insights about their prospective new hires and similarly job candidates to tap into a wealth of data about a prospective employer. Ultimately this level of transparency ensures a solid match both at the point of hire and throughout the future that employees and employers build upon together.
But how do these changes in recruiting impact the role of recruiters? Jill Larson, SVP of Strategic Talent Acquisition, People Planning and Services HR at Cisco, believes “The relationship with the hiring manager is the number one driver and four times more important than any other performance driver.” For Larson, she sees four new capabilities recruiters must build in their skill set, namely, be data driven, possess a deep organizational knowledge of the business and industry they operate in, understand the growing importance of employer rating sites, and importantly commit to become a brand ambassador for the company. Taken together, these new capabilities are needed to transform the role of a recruiter from filling job specs to becoming a talent advisor.
MY ACTION PLAN
Myself
• What skills do I need to develop now to be a next generation recruiter?
• How do I develop these skills?
• Which industries and companies are on a path to developing next generation recruiters?
My Team
• What components of the recruiting ecosystem does our team excel in?
• What areas do we need to develop?
• What new skills does my team need to use a data-driven approach to recruiting?
• Are we fully tapping current employees for recommendations?
My Organization
• What key business results can be realized if we improve our recruiting process?
• What are our competitors doing when it comes to sourcing top talent?
• How could we get to the top job seekers first?
• If our organization wants to train before it hires new employees, what new and innovative approaches could we implement?