Mergers & Acquisition Archives - HR Talent Management (HRTM) by Argosight

Salary.com Returns to Their Roots

January 6, 2016 by Brent Kleiman Leave a Comment

At the start of the new year, Salary.com—a leading technology provider of employee compensation data, software, and services—announced new changes with some old faces. Kent Plunkett, Salary.com’s former CEO, bought back the company from IBM and is returning to his previous position.

Salary.com provides compensation software to help both businesses and individuals manage pay and performance. The company aims to win the war on talent by empowering their customers with actionable data regarding compensation, thus simplifying the connections between people and pay.

From 1999 to 2010, Plunkett was the original founder of Massachusetts-based Salary.com, which went public in 2007. As CEO, Plunkett was responsible for building an organization of over 500 employee partners that drove hypergrowth without venture financing. He also built a customer base of over 4,000 subscription enterprise accounts and 10,000 small and medium sized business accounts.

In 2010, Kenexa bought Salary.com for $80 million, which was bought by IBM in 2012 for $1.3 billion. At that point Plunkett became CEO at Intronis, a SaaS leader in cloud backup and recovery software. From there, he founded DreamFund, a crowdsourcing company focused on helping people save for their personal dreams.

According to Salary.com, their new team has decades of experience in the compensation industry.

“The new Salary.com will provide the type of world class service our compensation data, survey, and software customers have come to expect,” Salary.com’s website says. “We will invest in development of the next generation of product features, and expand our data sets to provide even more value to our customers. The people you work with every day will still be available to help make this a seamless transition for our customers. We won’t be missing a beat.”

Five Ways to Use Reference Checking to Set Your Organization Apart

July 23, 2015 by Guest Leave a Comment

This post has been contributed by Rob Bennett, Vice President of Channel Alliances at SkillSurvey. If you’d like to be a contributor, please contact us.

This is the second in the two-part article by Mr. Bennett. The first part, entitled Transform Reference Checking into a Strategic Asset, can be found here.

Here are five ways to transform reference checking into a strategic advantage for your organization:

#1 Speed time-to-fill and increase recruiting efficiencies

With unemployment rates declining across key industries, time-to-fill rates are soaring—hitting an all-time high of 27 working days in early 2015. In key industries like healthcare, it takes an average of 42.8 working days to fill a position; the technology industry is not far behind, averaging 37.5 days.

On the one hand, that’s good news for staffing and recruiting agencies, as more companies turn to you for your expertise. On the other hand, staying competitive means finding any edge you can to work more efficiently and beat those time-to-fill averages.

Online reference checking is one way innovative firms can gain new efficiencies. By automating reference checking—and eliminating time-consuming phone tag—you can increase the number and quality of the references you receive and get the information you need—often in less than 2 business days. That fast turn-around time means you’re more likely to fill a position while your competitors are still waiting for a call back. And because your candidates are more carefully vetted, your hiring managers are less likely to have to perform additional screening—which puts your organization at the top of the list when clients begin to grow their operations.

#2 Be a more strategic business partner

Staffing and recruiting is a relationship-driven business. And to build better relationships with your clients you need to prove the value of your service. Most of your competitors claim they have access to top talent. But the truth is, access to social networks like LinkedIn and other online databases has leveled the playing field. By adopting an automated, online approach that leverages job-specific surveys, you can deliver insights about the candidates you’re placing that other agencies and firms simply don’t have access to and differentiate yourself from the crowd

Scientifically validated online reference assessments use position-specific surveys to solicit information about a candidate’s past performance to help you and your client make hiring decisions based on data-driven insight versus “gut” instinct. Solutions like these provide feedback on the soft skills that make a candidate successful—things like work ethic, professionalism, leadership, attention to safety protocols, or the ability to work in a team environment.

Armed with deep insight about the candidates you’re placing, you can provide your clients with the tools they need to make great hiring decisions. You can pass on information from reference reports to help hiring managers ask more pointed questions during the interview process or even develop onboarding and training plans that address areas a candidate might need to improve on, which will strengthen future performance and help reduce turnover.

#3 Build a talent pipeline

Building a network of active and passive job seekers is critical to keeping ahead of the game, but it’s arguably one of the more difficult aspects of your job. As more companies seek a more proactive approach to recruiting—using networks like LinkedIn to identify the top talent in their industry—staffing and recruiting firms will need to find new ways to provide “just-in-time” services.

One way to do that is to build a database of warm leads. That requires identifying potential candidates, verifying that they’re interested in a change, validating that they’re actually good at what they do, and engaging them consistently and authentically.

Great people tend to know other great people. With automated reference checking tools, you can turn references into future job prospects. You might, for example, invite your references to become members of your talent community—because you already understand their industry, their position, and something about their expectations of direct reports, colleagues, or supervisors, you have a targeted pool of interested candidates.

Even if you don’t formally invite references to join an established talent community, having up-to-the-minute and confirmed contact information and critical job details of those references means you can build a passive database of potential candidates. With a broader network at your fingertips, you can spend less time hunting for candidates with the right skillset and more time building your referral network and making new connections.

#4 Burnish your brand

There’s a truism about brand that’s worth remembering: brand isn’t what you say about yourself, it’s what your clients say about you. Online reference checking can help you get your name in front of potential new clients. After all, chances are the references interacting with your system will need to do some hiring of their own in the future. And by transforming your reference checking process, you’re sending a message that you are a forward-looking company ready to embrace new strategies to get the job done. It’s a message that references—and potential new clients—will hear loud and clear. In a recruiting environment where talent analytics are quickly gaining traction, that can be a game changer.

#5 Champion diversity

Today, organizations can’t afford to speak in a narrow voice to a limited audience. To remain competitive, even local companies are embracing a global perspective. Look for an online reference checking solution that helps you reach beyond language barriers to discover and hire a capable and talented workforce.

And of course gender, age, race, ethnicity, and Americans with Disabilities are all protected classes. Unfortunately, some reference checking strategies can be blunt instruments. Ask for evidence that your reference surveys—whether online or scripted—meet EEOC statutes and guidelines to ensure compliance. In the event of a compliant, you must have evidence that the skills being assessed are related to job success. Surveys unrelated to specific job-related criteria are often targeted in lawsuits.

Reference checking doesn’t have to be a waste of your time. Online and automated reference checking can be the secret weapon you need to differentiate yourself from competitors, speed time-to-fill, and improve client satisfaction.

Photo credit: Flazingo Photos

Transform Reference Checking into a Strategic Asset

July 22, 2015 by Guest Leave a Comment

This post has been contributed by Rob Bennett, Vice President of Channel Alliances at SkillSurvey. If you’d like to be a contributor, please contact us.

This is the first in the two-part article by Mr. Bennett. The second part, entitled Five Ways to Use Reference Checking to Set Your Organization Apart, can be found here.

As competition for top talent gets more and more fierce, staffing and recruiting firms, including Recruitment Process Outsourcers (RPOs), contingency and temp-based services, niche-focused recruiters, and executive search firms—need to act more quickly than ever before to find talent, reduce time-to-fill, and stand out in an overcrowded industry where innovation, efficiency, mobility, and service will be key differentiators.

Staffing and recruiting firms can gain a competitive edge by leveraging new data-driven approaches to build recruiting efficiencies, reach new clients, build a strong candidate pipeline, and provide the kind of deep insight into candidate performance that will keep your clients coming back for more.

Unprecedented Challenges

The staffing industry is growing, but the talent pool isn’t. By 2020, employers in the world’s richest nations will be short as many as 18 million college-educated workers. And with baby boomers set to retire in record numbers over the next 10 to 20 years, the situation will likely worsen. That means successful firms will have to think creatively to gain market share and stay viable in the talent acquisition space.

Demand is also on the rise. Corporations are poised for growth in 2015 and their need for talent will continue to grow. In high-growth fields like engineering, IT, and healthcare, finding talent with the right skillsets can be particularly difficult.

Reference Checking as a Strategic Advantage

For most organizations today, including staffing and recruiting firms, reference checking is a perfunctory, low-value task typically carried out after hiring decisions have been made. Even for those organizations that mandate reference checking, it can be a slow, ineffective, and tedious process of phone tag. When you finally reach a reference, the feedback you receive is little more than verification of your candidate’s employment.

Moving reference checking online can help speed the reference process by automating reference feedback. It is also important that a solution meets today’s growing mobile demand. At a recent conference, LinkedIn’s VP of Mobile Products reported that on the LinkedIn.com flagship mobile app alone, users view a total of about 1.5 million job postings and send out more than 44,000 job applications per day.

But online reference checking solutions do even more by using job-specific surveys to target the positions you are hiring for. They can help you evaluate a range of criteria so that you can deliver deeper, more predictive insights about a candidate to assure a better fit with your clients’ needs. They can also provide professional, detailed candidate reports that can be passed on to clients to help them make better hiring decisions and plan on-boarding and training needs. And the best automated reference systems can do all that in record time, giving your staffing and recruiting firm a competitive edge in a crowded market.

Photo credit: Flazingo Photos

Alexander Mann Solutions Helps Clients Focus on Quality over Quantity

June 24, 2015 by AJ Hughes Leave a Comment

Movie theaters can significantly bolster their income through popcorn sales, and the person behind the concession counter has a huge impact on how much popcorn is sold. This is the illustration that Jerry Collier, director of global innovation for Alexander Mann Solutions, gives as the main focus of his company.

“We align our activity to business outcomes,” says Collier of Alexander Mann Solutions, a London-based HR consulting and outsourcing firm with a wide range of clients in 82 countries.

“The key is retention of staff,” Collier states. “All clients are keyed on business outcomes, and they want to react. Through consulting, we align our activity to business outcomes.”

Attrition continues to plague many organizations, and it’s for this reason that hiring (and retaining) the right people is paramount. Collier speaks of the ease of hiring 2,000 people, but of the difficulty in making each hire a quality one.

Businesses also need to offer competitive compensation and shift schedules, he says, as well as adapt to what customers want and need. To further illustrate his point, Collier points to the role of a banker and his or her impact on mortgage advice.

“What if a mortgage or bank customer wants advice on a Sunday night?” he asks. “The future demands a mix of flex-time, full-time, part-time, and freelance workers, giving customers 24/7 access. We help companies recruit all of these types of workers, constructing the right mix and right talent. That’s our point of differentiation—we align our services to those business efforts, not just fast and cheap.”

According to Collier, success for Alexander Mann Solutions and its clients depends on matching the right talented people with organizations that fit them. The task of recruiters is to find qualified candidates who are both interested and available, and increasingly, technology is making it easier to do this.

Alexander Mann Solutions uses Joberate technology to find out who is available, while other technology pinpoints who is qualified and interested.

“In the future, technology will allow us to do this research at the push of a button,” says Collier, who stresses that recruiters still need to sell candidates on jobs once they are identified.

“The system’s not foolproof, but that’s going to change quickly,” Collier says, comparing modern recruiting to Airbnb and Uber. “All of this digital movement is coming. The workforce is very digital-savvy.”

Alexander Mann Solutions also utilizes its own SourceCloud technology, which gives client companies access to extensive data on a wide variety of candidates from social media web sites and other Internet resources. Its range of consulting services targets areas such as diversity, operations and technology, assessment, supply chain, and more.

Evolution of Job Ads (and How to Ensure Your Ad is Effective)

June 22, 2015 by Brent Kleiman Leave a Comment

With the sheer quantity of recruiting methods and advertising platforms, both on and offline, it is hard to imagine hiring any other way. But we have been placing job ads long before the internet. In fact, we have been hiring others as long as there have been jobs to do. Perhaps even cavemen had processes and standards when seeking new members for the tribe, as this humorous skit on BBC One by The Armstrong and Miller Show depicts.

Whether you are interested in a quick sixty-second review of the history of advertising or an in-depth white paper on the evolution of job ads, you are sure to uncover truths about how we arrived at some of the methods we have today for finding the right candidates.

But why, really, do people post job ads? It’s not simply to fill a position; that would be easy. Anyone can fill a spot. No, we post job ads in order to find the ideal candidate, that one candidate who fits perfectly into our organization. One that has the right education, experience, and qualifications – and fits within the culture. He requires no training and is loved by all. He’s a sharp dresser with an appropriate sense of humor. He may even bring donuts to meetings without being asked. He is a shining star of the workforce and he is sought by all hiring managers and recruiters.

There are different options that recruiters use when seeking this ideal candidate. They can post the job and wait or they can go out and search for that individual.

Posting a job ad

When posting a job ad, there are many variants to consider. Does your hiring manager simply list the job description and requirements and hit “post”? Where do you place the ad? When do you post it? Did you proofread it? Did you describe your company?

Market the open position

When your company advertises a product or service, what is involved? Your marketing team probably brainstorms ideas, writes and re-writes ad copy, develops various angles, and creates catchy logos or slogans. It is this marketing push that helps sell the product or service.

Human resources professionals should consider an open position to be something that needs sold to that ideal candidate. Brent Kleiman, CEO of Argosight, believes that hiring managers have gotten too lax. From the title all the way down to the last sentence, job advertisements are unclear, sometimes include typos, and poorly written. “You wouldn’t let a marketing piece out like that; why should you let a job post?” He states that job ads make an impact on the company brand and should be treated as such.

Bright.com reviewed over a million job ads and found that the same words appeared to be misspelled by posters on a regular basis. They include common words such as “eligiblility” and “enviroment.” What does this say about your company? If a company cannot ensure perfection in a job ad, how can they require perfection in the candidates who apply?

What to include in an ad

A job ad should not only include information about the ideal candidate, including skills and requirements, but should divulge details about the organization, the position, and the company culture.

Michael Overell, co-founder of RecruitLoop, explains to Inc.com that it is important to distinguish between a job description and a job ad. “The two things have a lot in common, but they’re not one and the same,” Overell says. “A job description is usually an internal document created to clarify what the role will do and to outline reporting lines. A job ad’s primary purpose is getting the right person to click ‘apply.'”

Overell also explains that the job title in an ad should be searchable and does not necessarily need to be the actual title which the new hire will have. “The analogy is the marketing email subject line,” Overell states. “It’s the only tool you have to get someone to click on your message.” It is necessary to understand how top candidates are searching for similar positions and which keywords to optimize in order to get your job ad seen.

When to post an ad

Timing does matter with job ads. According to Kazim Ladimeji, experienced recruiting professional and Director of The Career Cafe, early in the week is best time to post an ad. Ladimeji points to a study by eQuest, which noted the following trends based on candidate activity on one million job postings over a three month period:

17.5 percent of candidate activity took place on Monday
17.8 percent on Tuesday
18.1 percent on Wednesday
16.8 percent on Thursday
12.3 percent on Friday

The study also showed that peak job searching time was at lunch and right before quitting time (11:00 am – 1:00 pm and 4:00 – 5:00 pm).

Brendan McCartin, Senior Project Lead at Argosight who formerly worked with the global online employment company Monster, agrees with those statistics, stating that “On Monday, people are getting back into the groove of things. By Tuesday and Wednesday, disgruntled workers are ready to continue their job search.” He adds that Thursday and Friday are also bad days to post help-wanted ads, because people tend to be focusing on the upcoming weekend, not reading the classifieds.

Where to post

While it may be tempting to simply post your job ad on the largest or most popular job board, that may actually be counterproductive to your hunt. While your ad may be seen by a large number of potential candidates, you may find that you are overrun by resumes which do not fit your needs. Shibani Peterson, Senior Project Lead at Argosight, says that “Often people don’t read the job description. They look at the must-have requirements and qualifications. Some people are under-qualified but still apply to everything.”

Instead, Overell suggests that hiring managers should research the job board which will reach the audience with the skills you are seeking. Take the time to search for the best sites for the position you are posting. Intuit Quickbooks lists ten helpful places to post job ads, including your own company career page.

Hunting for the Ideal Candidate

An alternative to posting a job ad and waiting, which, according to Kleiman, “may result in a lot of noise without ever finding the best candidate,” is to actually search for candidates.

Many job sites – including LinkedIn, Monster, and Connectifier – offer hiring managers the option of searching resumes and profiles to find candidates. Yet another increasingly popular choice for seeking qualified individuals and passive candidates is through social media. Studies show that 92% of companies use some sort of social media in their hunt for talent. Interestingly, according to a study by GlassDoor, nearly two-thirds of employees are unaware of how their employer uses social media to promote job openings.

Again, it is necessary for hiring managers to do research on which sites provide the best opportunities for results. In 2013, iCIMS analyzed over 60,000 jobs posted on social media outlets. “It was very surprising that job candidates were not engaging as much on Twitter as recruiters are,” Susan Vitale, CMO of iCIMS, said. Behind the obvious choice of LinkedIn, at 65%, job seekers search Facebook (17%) and Google Plus (16%), with only 1% of candidates looking for job ads on Twitter.

Conclusion

Recruiting professionals need to understand the changing landscape of job ads in order to effectively locate the perfect candidate. With the constant growth of technology and online opportunities, hiring managers must do their research and sell the position in order to ensure that they reach the right talent for the job.

Whether you choose to place an ad or search for the ideal candidate, there are certain requirements which will allow your job opening to stand out in a marketplace rife with organizations fighting for the best of the best. Just as recruiters judge candidates by their resumes, top talent will judge a company by its job ads.