Try and get people excited about reference checks. Go on, I'll wait.
How did you get on? Tough crowd, right? Reference and background checks are not high on most talent agendas. They're seen as administrative grunt work. They're not "value add". They're "just a compliance headache". I will admit to feeling the same. So you can imagine my joy when referencing landed in my lap as one of things I have to get my arms around during 2012.
But it's turning out to be more interesting than I thought...
My "patch" at work now consists of 60 incredibly diverse countries, and not surprisingly they've all got their own take on what acceptable reference checking looks like.
Some countries don't do any checks; Others do incredibly extensive checks.
In some places references are secured well before an offer is made. In others, job offers are made "pending satisfactory references".
In some countries it is entirely acceptable to call someone from the candidate's current company to find out if he's "a good guy". In some places that would absolutely be crossing a line.
When I mentioned to some of my European colleagues that our US colleagues routinely conduct Drug and Alcohol tests as part of their pre-employment screening, the horrified looks I got told me that policy would definitely be filed under "a step too far" in Europe!
With such different views and cultural norms, is it going to be possible to come up with a standard approach? I'm not sure. It's certainly not going to be simple.
Naively or not, I generally trust candidates to be upfront and for recruiters to root out discrepancies well before we get to offer territory. But I also have a duty of care to my employer to minimise risk and I know that there are plenty of people who "creatively embellish" their CVs. A balance needs to be struck:
Things I think are perfectly reasonable to check: Employment History Verification, Right-to-Work, Professional Quals, Educational History
Things that make me twitchy: Character References, Criminal Records, Drug/Alcohol Screening, Credit Checks, "Reputation Assessment" (?), Social Media Screening, Medicals
I should say that "twitchy" doesn't necessarily mean bad (except for character references which I do believe are utterly bogus). But I think if we go down those particular avenues, we have to be absolutely clear that the checks are justifiable.
We also need to be clear about what a "fail" looks like, and what action we'd be prepared to take in the event of a "fail"? What exactly would it take to rule someone out of a job? A less than perfect credit rating? An arrest for possession of a joint 4 years ago? Padding of employment dates to cover a period of unemployment? A claim to have an B in GSCE Chemistry, when it was really a C? What do we actually care about? Is all falsification/exaggeration wrong, or are there degrees of acceptability?
Call me old fashioned but even in the age of the internet, I still believe people have the right to privacy. I genuinely don't want to know what people get up to in their personal lives. I don't want to know their credit record or their medical history unless it's absolutely necessary. If we have to poke around into people's personal lives, we better have very good reasons to do it. We need to do it with their informed consent, and we need to be very clear about what happens if the results aren't exactly what we'd expect.
I've been confined to my bed today, but in between fever-induced naps, I've had one eye on the goings-on at #trulondon.
Is the CV dead? Why doesn't recruitment sit with marketing? What are the next Big Things in social recruiting? What is the value of talent communities? How can you use Twitter for sourcing? Why aren't more people investing in mobile? Is there an Applicant Tracking System that doesn't make you want to poke your own eyes out…?
Yeah, yeah… I know. There's nothing new under the sun. But I'm a recruitment geek, so I can happily talk about this stuff until the cows come home…
But one thing struck me. And it's not a criticism; just an observation.
Most of the track leaders were consultants, vendors, strategists and industry reps. There weren't that many practitioners. There was certainly a corporate contingent present, although they seemed to lean towards HRDs and TADs - or people like me who used to be recruiters, but now work on project roles around branding, technology, assessment, etc. The Twitter stream reflected the same.
Lots of specialists. Not many actual recruiters.
Presumably they were back in the real world taking briefs, sourcing, screening, assessing, hiring and onboarding new people. They were likely to be busy coaching hiring managers to help them make good decisions, designing assessment centres, providing feedback to candidates... not engaging in debates about whether the CV is dead.
I love the concept of #trulondon. But like most of the other recruiting conferences I've tracked for the last few years, the conversation seems increasingly disconnected from the day-to-day realities of being a recruiter.
When you've got 30 open reqs, from 30 different managers, across a variety of skillsets/countries - and every manager thinks their vacancy should be the No.1 priority, you don't really care whether you should be reporting to the Marketing Director.
You're busy. Really busy. And at least 50% of your role is old-fashioned, heavy-lifting stakeholder management. It doesn't leave much time to be pondering the pros and cons of using Pinterest as a sourcing tool.
I'm not saying we shouldn't be debating these sorts of questions. Of course we should - engaging influencers and decision makers in these sorts of topics is essential.
But there is only one group of people who will make a real difference to the efficiency and effectiveness of our recruiting practices - and those are the people on the front line that actually do it every day. I'd like to hear more from them, and the hefty dose of reality they bring to the table...
Essentially a charity did some research to determine whether there was racial discrimination at work during the recruitment process - and how it compared between candidates that used recruitment agencies versus those who chose to apply directly to employers. Their headline finding was... well the title of the article sums it up. It made for pretty depressing reading, and the comments below are very disheartening.
Racial discrimination in recruitment is definitely a problem that needs to be addressed.
But I'm not sure this article helps.
I don't know whether it's the methodology or the interpretation, but something doesn't feel quite right about this research. The "success rate" was 29% for both White and BAME* candidates when they applied directly to employers. It was also 29% for BAME candidates applying through agencies. The big outlier was the stat for White candidates who applied via agencies, who were successful 44% of the time.
What conclusion I am supposed to draw from this? That agencies discriminate against BAME candidates, but that corporate recruiters discriminate against everybody?
I honestly find the whole thing quite bizarre. I don't think recruiters (whether they're agency or inhouse) are any more or less racist than the public at large. Basically, we like filling jobs, so we're not in the habit of turning away perfectly qualified candidates because we've magically devined from a CV that they might be from a BAME background? That seems like self-defeating behaviour. But it's impossible to deny that there is a problem.
Unsurprisingly after being called "casually racist", the agencies came out swinging. A few agency comments pointed out that they have to reject lots of candidates because of "right to work" issues, and that would account for the differences in their stats. But corporate recruiters have the same challenges there, so I'm not sure that stacks up as an argument.
A few agency folk also pointed out that they are giving the clients what they want - and they won't put a BAME candidate in front of a client if they know the client won't be interested. That one doesn't fly with me. Firstly, why on earth would you want to associate your recruitment business with such ethically bankrupt clients? Secondly, it is your role as a Consultant to present the best candidates and sell them to clients who might be unsure. And finally, the corporate stats in the study don't seem to back up the notion that it's the clients that are inherently rascist. Apparently, we just hate everyone.
All things being equal (and I know they rarely are), I would expect the percentage of BAME candidates who apply, to be broadly the same as the % that are interviewed and the % that are hired. So if 15% of applications are from BAME candidates, then about 15% of your interviewees and 15% of your hires probably should be too. Any massive deviation from those numbers would suggest something odd is going on...
But without forcing all applicants to confirm their ethnic background (illegal and rightly so), how can we ever really know how we're doing?
*According to the study, this means "Black, Asian, Ethnic Minority". I don't know who came up with this acronym, but I really don't like it.
I haven't posted for a while, and here's the reason. January was a weird month, and I’m not going to lie – I was very happy to see it end.
My boss, Rick, spent the month in hospital in a very poorly state.
Not having him around has been horrible. Not just from a work perspective (although that hasn’t exactly been easy). Mostly because he is a good friend and I’ve been worried about him.
To my enormous relief he is now on the mend, and will be returning to us once he’s fully recovered. The tension I've been carrying around like a deadweight has dissipated, and I’m looking forward to welcoming him back with a big hug.
In a previous blog I described us as the Batman and Robin of PepsiCo recruiting. I was only partly joking. We’re good foils for each other. He’s the laid back, relationship-driven diplomat. I’m the feisty, facts-driven analyst.
I haven’t relished the idea of stepping (even partially) into his shoes. Instead, my colleague Shelby and I picked up his workload, and tried to apply the WWRD (“What would Rick do?”) principle. Hopefully we haven’t got into too many scrapes as a result.
The overwhelming lesson over the last five weeks has been the realisation that I’m very happy in my behind-the-scenes role. And since I'm a West Wing junkie, and tend to see everything in Sorkinesque analogies, here's one sums it up neatly: I don’t want to be “the guy”. I want to be the guy “the guy” counts on.
I don't like appraisals. I hate the forced, artificial nature of them. Everyone think's they're an evil plot thought up in the smoke filled rooms of HR, but you know what… I'm a HR person and I think they're totally bogus too. Employees hate them. Managers hate doing them. HR hate the administration that is generated by them. And the pain might be worth it if they actually improved performance, but I don't believe they do. So nobody wins, but we'll still go through the charade until someone comes up with another way of managing performance that relies more on regular feedback, and less on form filling and distribution curves. But enough of that... let me hop down from my soapbox.
I had my year-end performance review on Monday. I'm very lucky because I love my boss to bits. We have a very open and honest relationship - and we're on a similar wavelength about most things, so we don't have to dress our opinions up in fluffy language. We only see each other in person about once a fortnight, but we talk about five times a day. So if there was a problem with my work, or if he was pleased about something I'd done, I'd like to think he'd bring it up at the point he noticed it, rather than storing up a list and laying them on me in December. And he does.
Happily, he also knows how cringeworthy I find these exercises, so this year he let me do most of the talking - probably safe in the knowledge that I'm harder on myself than he would ever be, and that he'd be able to swoop in and do a restorative pep talk after I'd beaten myself up.
But there was a twist this year. For once, the list of things I was pleased about actually outweighed the things I'm frustrated by. For me, this is progress! And whatever the eventual outcome of calibration sessions that will now go on behind closed doors in Geneva, I feel pretty good about where we've netted out the year, and feel comfortable about taking my fair share of the credit for that.
Rick deftly steered the conversation to the lessons I've learned this year and how I can use them to my advantage as we roll out our plans for 2012. Huge changes are coming our way. Once again, we're going to be turning things on their heads, both internally and externally. From a blog perspective, it'll be manna from heaven, so I'll occasionally down tools and share some of the interesting stuff we're doing - and will ask some of my team-mates to contribute some guest blogs of their own.
So what's on my to-do list in 2012? Well, it won't surprise some of you to hear that Candidate Experience is at the front and centre of our plans. Capability is also a big issue - our own, and that of our Hiring Managers. We're going to be scrutinising our approach to Assessment design and validation. We also need to "Europeanise" (my word) our employer Brand, and really bring it to life internally and externally. But for me the overall theme is Connectivity, or How Things Join Up. How can we make all the bits of "The Process" more streamlined for everyone involved? How does Talent Acquisition connect with Talent Management, to improve forecasting, maximise our existing talent, and ensure we maintain a strong bench, particularly in business critical roles? How do we stop recruiters from fixating on their local turf, and start thinking about talent on a European and a Global scale? And how do we work more closely with our colleagues in North America, Latin America and AMEA? What can we learn from each other?
These are all exciting things for a recruitment geek like me. But I'm going to take some time off over Christmas so I can take a deep breath before diving back into the fray. I hope you have the opportunity to do the same.
Have a Merry Christmas if that's your thing. If it's not, then have a bloody good December. See you next year.
Recruiter Capability is a topic that is close to my heart. (And for once, I'm not talking about agency recruiters!)
The pace of doing business doesn’t really give in-house recruiters much professional development time. Most of our learning happens “on the job” (as it should!). But that tends to work best for incremental learning. What if you want to radically change the way things are done? What if you want your recruiters to rethink their own roles? And when the TA landscape is changing so quickly, how can recruiters keep up if they’re always locked into Delivery Mode?
When it comes to learning, my team has unoffically adopted the medical student mantra of “See One, Do One, Teach One”. And while that approach has merits, it’s hardly best practice. I want to shift our approach to “Understand it, Practice it, Improve it”.
I’m a little uncomfortable coming down the mountain on this particular topic. I don’t claim to be a shining beacon of recruiting excellence (far from it, actually). But along with my European TA colleagues, and our global team-mates… Well, I think it’s safe to say we have some skills! Actually, that's an understatement. We’ve got some world-class specialists, not just in operational recruiting, but in exec hiring, branding, social media, sourcing, high volume, campus… You name it, and we have at least one person who is ALL over it.
What we haven’t been brilliant at is sharing all this expertise. We get so focused on “execution” (a term I hate), that we’re not necessarily bringing everyone with us. Having formal or informal Centres of Excellence is great, but only if their main goal is to share knowledge.Isolated pockets of genius are not terribly helpful.
So in October, I started mapping out a more structured learning curriculum, specifically aimed at our front-line Recruiters.
My initial idea was a Boot Camp: some immediate, tactical, hand-on, training over three days. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that this wasn’t going to be enough. Even if I could tear the TA team away from their day jobs for three days (and even that would be a stretch), we’d only be able to cover a fraction of what we needed to.
So what started as a short, snappy training intervention, has morphed into something much bigger: a long term Recruiter Academy Programme, with a combination of intensive multi-day workshops on core skills, and regular modules on specialist topics. And while our initial focus is on upskilling our European team, we’re aiming to keep 90% of the content generic enough so it can also be used by our global TA teams.
You might be thinking, "Well yeah, but I bet you've got a big shiny budget for this sort of thing". Er, no. This wasn't part of our budget proposal for 2012, so I have a grand total of ZERO dollars to make this happen. Even if I can ringfence a little bit of discretionary spend, this is going to be L&D on a shoestring. The content will be designed and delivered by in-house teams. And I'm fine with that. Why buy in expertise that you already have?
It’s very early days for this project, and I suspect it is going to consume a big chunk of my life. But I’m excited about it – because it’s the right thing to do for our own people, for our candidates and for our business.
If any in-house recruiters have done something similar, I would LOVE to have a chat with you.
When I grow up I want to be an experimental physicist. That is my main conclusion from my visit to Geneva this week. On Friday, the recruitment team at CERN put on what James Purvis described as an “accidental conference”. They had hoped to get representatives from 12 organisations around a table to share ideas and best practice. They ended up with nearly 60 people from all over Europe sitting around a very hi-tech, UN-style suite, which was barely big enough to hold us all.
What made this conference a little different from some of the many (MANY!) recruiting conferences that go on? Well, CERN has some USPs that no other location has. But more of that in a moment. What made this conference particularly different was its concentration on Europe and focus on organisations that I tend not to see on the conference circuit. They included big multinationals like L’Oreal, who had challenges that I could completely identify with. And they included International Organisations, like the European Personnel Selection Office (they recruit for all the EU institutions) who made my jaw drop when they explained that their time-to-hire had been 2 years, but they had managed to get that down to 5-9 months. Or CERN itself, whose recruitment team have to deal with the widely held misconception that they only hire people with three PhDs. They’re obligated to advertise their roles in multiple countries (CERN is publicly funded), which means they deal with around 900 applications per job. It was genuinely fascinating to hear about the unique challenges these organisations face. And very different to the corporate world I’m used to!
So back to the CERN USPs…
The first is that CERN is where they invented the World Wide Web – and James has asked Robert Cailliau, the co-creator of the web along with Tim Berners Lee, to kick off the day with the story of how the web developed and some fun commentary on what he thought of the way it evolved. He was utterly charming, and his thoughts on Facebook were particularly interesting (he’s definitely not a fan!). He even stuck around afterwards to listen to the other presentations, although that probably made things a little uncomfortable for @steveevo who had to follow him – particularly as his session was about using Facebook for recruiting!
The second USP is that CERN is the home to some groundbreaking research projects, several of which rely on a famous bit of kit: the Large Hadron Collider. After lunch, the conference adjourned, and we were taken over the border to France for a tour of one of the facilities. I’m not going to bore with you my newfound LHC facts. But it can be neatly summed up in one word: Whoa…
While we were there, the news broke that CERN had replicated the results of an experiment that proved that some things move faster than light – turning an established scientific truth on it’s head. It seems fitting that while we were learning new things about our area of expertise, the scientists nearby were doing the same. Albeit with much bigger implications!
Thanks to James and the team at CERN for inviting me along. It really was my favourite event of 2011 – and eye opening in many different ways.
I occasionally worry that my little blog is a series of rants and grumbles, and that I must come across as a miserable grump.This isn’t strictly true.Don’t get me wrong: it’s rare that people confuse me with a ray of sunshine.But there are lots of things (besides the obvious things like friends and family) that make me happy. I was on a bus at the weekend, so started jotting a few of them down to pass the time...
White roses; Haggis; Watching puffed up male pigeons trying to woo lady pigeons; Nat King Cole’s voice; Highland Cows; Having a cat fall asleep on my lap; Tentsmuir Forest; Kinshaldy Beach; The West Wing; Dr Zoidberg; Jane Eyre; Driving somewhere really dark to look at the stars on a clear night; Marylebone High Street; Long train journeys; Twitter; JK Rowling; Toffee Apples;
Ghostbusters; The Muppets; Diet Pepsi; Maya Angelou; Chickpeas and anything made of chickpeas; Mint Chocolate Chip ice-cream; E45 lotion; Reading the papers on Sunday mornings; My Macbook; The White Album; Going for Balti in Birmingham; My friend’s puppy, Rufus; Playing boardgames; Public libraries; Bobbing in the Carribean Sea; Really cold, sunny winter days; Chicken soup; Guinea Pigs; Kayaking; Manatees; Quoting lines from Casablanca; Eddie Izzard;
Father Ted; Professor Brian Cox; Christmas trees; Feeding the birds; Cosmopolitans; Asterix comic books; Phillip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy; Walking along the Thames; the Forth Bridge; Planning holidays; Giraffes; SimCity; Going to super-camp Broadway musicals; Singing the soundtrack to super-camp Broadway musicals; Bow Bridge in Central Park; Oban Harbour; Picnics; Daisies; Cold beer on hot days; Sir David Attenborough; The Empire State Building;
The retro animations from Sesame Street; Lego; Stockholm; The IT Crowd; Firefly; Neil Patrick Harris; Reading in front of an open fire; Lillies; Trees that are older than my grandparents; Leonard Cohen; Crappy 80’s power ballads; The smell of vanilla; M&S’s Footglove range; Pixar films; The boardwalk at Santa Cruz; Polar Bears, Empire Apples; Buying and wrapping gifts; Carving pumpkins; Ortak jewellery; Going on a boat of any size; Riding in a yellow cab; Scotch Eggs;
Barack Obama; Giant rabbits; Watching trailers at the cinema; the Edinburgh Festival; Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata; Watching NHL games; Gulfoss; White water rafting; Being bamboozled by Derren Brown; Playing Pooh-sticks; Cooking from scratch; Big American Fridge-Freezers; Rhubarb crumble; Meals on Wheels; Stephen Fry; Lying in bed listening to the rain battering against the window; The Rocky Mountains; The Tate Modern; Getting lost in Paris; Ellen Johnson Sirleaf;
Berry picking; Ear muffs; Crazy golf; Charlie Brooker; Pink Lemonade; The Natural History Museum; Seeing old couples holding hands; The Marlborough Sounds; David Ford; Paper Aeroplanes; The Merchant of Venice; Griselda Hill Pottery; Hay Bales; Bill Bryson; The Poppy Campaign; Mini Cheddars; Big Band Music; Getting a hotdog from a cart in New York; Dinosaurs; Bill Murray; Shreddies; Jack Donaghy… and countless more (and some that aren’t suitable for publication!).
Just scribbling down my list made me happy. It occurred to me that other people must have done it too – and they have. I stumbled upon http://1000awesomethings.com/ which has done it SOOOO much better than me. I spent an hour reading it, and I had a big smile plastered across my face the entire time. If you’ve got a bad case of the Mondays, I highly recommend it.
October is Recruitment Conference season.I follow lots of recruiters on Twitter, so I tend to get a constant stream of conference news and gossip delivered directly to my eyeballs. And there is one conference topic that has been cropping up regularly, and it refuses to die:
Should in-house recruiting teams report to HR, or some other business function?
I can’t tell you how much this pointless non-topic annoys me.It has a simple answer, and it’s this:
If your recruiters know what they’re doing, it doesn’t matter who they report to.
There is a vocal contingent who think that Recruitment should to move to Marketing.There are also arguments that it should sit with Corporate Affairs, Finance or Procurement.I even saw someone suggest that Talent Acquisition should report directly to the CEO.
Personally, I don’t care either way.
Recruitment is a multi-disciplinary job.It’s not exclusively about HR, sales, marketing, comms, PR, occupational psychology, procurement, legal, IT, customer service or finance.It’s about all of those things combined – that’s what makes it so interesting.It isn’t easily boxed up, and doesn’t fit neatly in one particular function.
My team report to HR.If PepsiCo announced tomorrow that my team was now going to be part of Marketing, I’d shrug and carry on doing my job.I’m not going to be suddenly endowed with magical brand management powers just because my boss is the Chief Marketing Officer.Nor would the CMO suddenly develop a deep interest in the details and mechanics of talent acquisition.My new Marketing colleagues might be able to advise me on the finer points of brand activation and campaign management, and give me tips on writing great copy.But, here’s my point:They already do that.We don’t have to report to them.We work with them all the time.
But let’s go along with the move to Marketing for a moment.Let’s say they’re helping us raise our game on branding and engagement.Fantabulous.But sadly, lots of our other recruiting issues are bamboozling our new Marketing overlords:executive search, recruiter and hiring manager capability, design and validation of selection tools, employment law, diversity, campus strategy, sourcing, applicant tracking systems, onboarding, data protection…The Marketers generally get that its all important, but they definitely have better things to do that discuss the pros and cons of integrating our ATS with our HRIS…or brokering a deal to move a hi-po Finance candidate from Bangkok to Paris.
Put more simply:Recruitment is not exclusively about Employer Branding.
I think the subtext of this weird campaign is the belief that HR doesn’t have strategic and political power, therefore:
(a) Talent Acquisition doesn’t always get the high profile it deserves and is just seen as “another HR Process”
(b) HR don’t understand the importance of Employer Branding and are unwilling to invest in it; and
(c) HR is fundamentally conservative and lacks the creativity and innovation needed to deliver a world-class Talent Acquisition service.
If that’s the case in your organisation, you've got much bigger problems than working out where your recruiters should sit. You need a whole new HR team.
Talent Acquisition can probably help you with that.
