Lying on your resume is bad. Embellishing your bio could be more expensive.

Posted May 12th, 2012 in blog_news, For Employers, For Job Seekers

Yahoo’s new CEO was forced to step down.
He may also have to repay $7 million.

This week, Yahoo’s CEO of just 4 months was asked to leave the company, after an apparently disgruntled shareholder discovered that his official corporate bio wasn’t accurate: Thompson’s bio said that he’d graduated with a degree in accounting and computer science, but in fact his degree was only in accounting.

The ‘degree in accounting and computer science’ line has been following Thompson around for years, at least since his time as President of PayPal.  Did the line get added by a headhunting firm – or by Thompson himself – in order to make him seem more appealing to a high-tech company?  It seems odd that someone who is apparently so successful – think what you will about Yahoo as a going concern, becoming the head of these two high-profile organizations means you’ve done something right – would deliberately lie and continue to lie through any number of vetting meetings and SEC filings that are required for the head of a public company.  Surely he could have cleared up the computer science ‘inaccuracy’ at any point during the vetting process without everyone suddenly deciding he was the wrong guy for the job.

Thompson has tried to pin the blame on a headhunting firm, who he says ‘embellished’ his bio with the computer science information years ago and it simply went undetected for 7 years, but I think this misses the point:  No one is saying that Thompson was incompetent or incapable of doing the job; none of the coverage of the fiasco so far has indicated whether or not he ever took any computer science courses during his time at university.

The problem here for Thompson – other than the disgruntled shareholder, who seems to have made it his mission to get rid of Thompson, for reasons unclear to me – is that Yahoo has a strict code of ethics, which Thompson has breached.  He may be a fantastic CEO, a smart guy, and otherwise completely ethical, but to leave him in place when he’s been so publicly exposed as a ‘liar’ not only leaves Yahoo exposed to shareholders, but also to morale problems with employees who feel it’s unfair to be held to higher standards than the CEO.

The consequences for Thompson may also prove to be financial: Depending on how he and Yahoo decide to handle the departure, he may have to repay the $7 million in upfront compensation he received for leaving PayPal to take on Yahoo.

I just heard a commentator on BBC radio taking a very hard line about Thompson and his lies; I find myself less convinced of his implied inherent lack of morals.  (I have enough credits for a political science degree, for example – even though I ultimately got a degree in English – and if I’d ever been up for a job where those credits would have given me an advantage, I might have highlighted them on a resume or bio, and never worried that I was really doing anything wrong.)  However, the story is a good lesson for everyone:  In these days where biographical information is easy to double-check, we should all err on the side of caution.

 

Managed Solutions: Putting the people piece first

Posted May 2nd, 2012 in blog_news, For Employers

People can be the most complicated part of an insourced managed solution.
But they’re also the most critical.

When companies talk about implementing managed or insourced solutions, they’re often excited because they’re transitioning to a new model, process or technology, and they think that this new technology or process will be the ‘magic bullet’ they’ve been looking for to improve the bottom line, customer service ratings, or performance. I understand this feeling: After all, it can be tempting to think that if we just install a new enterprise technology system, or establish a new set of process directives, all our problems will be solved.

Except that the data shows that more than 75% of the budget and resources of a managed solution is spent on the ‘people’ portion of the equation. And that begs the question: Shouldn’t we be spending more time on people than on the process or technology?

People have the most potential to affect success of a managed solution

We do a lot of work in the IT insourcing/managed solutions space, where the emphasis is often on specific metrics: Speed to Answer, First Call Resolution, Ticket Resolution Time, CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) scores, number of tickets opened/closed per day/week/month, etc.   It’s easy to get caught up in the data.

But the biggest influencers of that data – and whether a particular model, process or technology actually works – are the people who are involved in the process.  Ensuring that  you have the right people in the right roles, and that their performance is effectively managed will ultimately have the most effect on the success of a managed solution.

Here’s how to make sure that the people component of your managed solution is set up for success:

1.  Choose a model that fits existing resources

When it comes to managed and insourced solutions, one size does not fit all.  Most organizations have existing staff who will be retained regardless of the solution model (because they have unique skills or knowledge, or to provide a seamless bridge from the existing function to the new one), and it’s important to take this into account.

2.  Choose a model that will blend well with existing corporate culture

Not so long ago, ‘outsourcing’ the helpdesk function was considered a hallmark of smart business decisions.  But many organizations found that a pure outsourcing model caused internal backlash, declines in service standards, and decreased morale – all of which contributed to lowered productivity and meant the solutions failed to achieve the desired efficiencies. Managed solutions can bypass these issues – but only if you work with existing corporate culture and expectations.

3.  Recruiting should be as important as it is for the rest of the organization

Attracting, screening and recruiting the right people for a managed solution is just as important for a managed solution as it is for the rest of the organization.  So when you’re choosing a managed solutions partner, ask about their strengths in recruiting, employment brand building, and assessment.

4.  Performance management is more than just data

As we mentioned above, when it comes to IT-related managed solutions, it’s all too easy to get caught up in key metrics and scorecarding. Yes, these are important measures of success – but people perform better when they’re recognized as more than a list of monthly metrics.  Your managed solution will deliver better results over time when performance management also includes ‘soft’ metrics like leadership, innovation, initiative and career growth for top performers.

5.  Make sure the transition process addresses the impact of change on employees

Humans are hardwired for homeostasis: A big organizational change – like moving to a managed solutions model – can cause anxiety even in your best employees. By taking the time to acknowledge the impact of the change on employees affected, and addressing it with communications, training and support, your managed solution initiative will happen more seamlessly and deliver better results, faster.

 

BranchOut: Do you need to care?

Posted April 20th, 2012 in blog_news, For Employers, For Job Seekers

Some call it ‘The New LinkedIn’.
But did we need a new LinkedIn?

I don’t know about you, but in the past few days I’ve had a whole bunch of invitations to connect to people on BranchOut, the “#1 professional network on Facebook“.   It’s strange, because after an initial flurry of invites when BranchOut launched last summer, I hadn’t heard much about it, from job-seekers or recruiters.

According to yesterday’s media release, however, BranchOut has just raised $25 million in funding, has 25 million registered users, and is signing up new users at a rate of 3 per second.  So someone thinks this application has potential.

BranchOut is supposed to make it more easy to connect to professional contacts by leveraging your Facebook contacts, and by providing a more ‘sexy’, user-friendly interface than LinkedIn.

There’s no question that BranchOut’s look and feel are more appealing than that of LinkedIn, and if you’re the sort of person who has a lively Facebook profile, it’s easy to import/invite your friends to your network:

(I borrowed this screenshot from this website.)

But…

That’s still a far cry from LinkedIn’s 150 million users.  More importantly, it’s not clear what BranchOut offers that LinkedIn doesn’t.  Yes, there’s a theoretical efficiency in having your professional network connected to your personal network, instead of having to visit Facebook and LinkedIn separately.  Except that:

  • Until everyone in your professional network switches from LinkedIn to BranchOut, you’re still going to have to use both
  • Lots of people are uncomfortable with merging their personal (i.e. Facebook) and professional (i.e. LinkedIn or BranchOut) networks
  • Facebook doesn’t have a great track record when it comes to privacy.  Even if BranchOut is a ‘separate’ application, the fact that it’s contained within Facebook makes many people nervous

Some bloggers have suggested that BranchOut may make it easier to access professional information of friends – people you often interact with via Facebook but not via LinkedIn – but that seems a limited use at the moment, given the disparity in numbers.

What this means for recruiters and job-seekers

If you’re a recruiter who specializes in recruiting social media and communications specialists who tend to be early adopters of new social media channels, BranchOut may prove useful – but not to the exclusion of LinkedIn, at least at the moment.

If you’re a job-seeker, well, BranchOut says that they have 3 million job postings. And I’m all for spending an hour or two populating a profile, because you never know when a recruiter may be searching BranchOut for someone with your skills and experience.

But overall, I think it’s safe to say that BranchOut’s status is a lot like Google+’s status at the moment:  Keep your eye on it, but don’t feel compelled to spend a whole lot of time there, because they just haven’t achieved critical mass yet.

 

What your email address says about you

Posted April 3rd, 2012 in blog_news, For Employers, For Job Seekers

Okay, we borrowed this from The Oatmeal, where I think it was supposed to refer to people in general.  But to be honest, it’s a good outline of what recruiters think when they look at the email address attached to your job application.

Are employers really demanding social media passwords? Not so much.

Posted March 27th, 2012 in blog_news, For Employers, For Job Seekers

The media loves a juicy story, but employers aren’t as obsessed with what you’re doing on Twitter as you think.

In the past week or two we’ve seen a whole lot of media coverage of a supposed new trend:  Employers demanding access to the social media profiles of job-seekers as part of the ‘vetting’ process for new hires.  It’s gotten so bad that Facebook, in a somewhat ironic defense of personal privacy, issued a statement reminding users that sharing usernames and passwords was actually a violation of their Terms of Use.

But is the practice really so widespread?  According to a new study by Employee ScreenIQ – and, frankly, our own experience – employers haven’t suddenly started demanding Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter passwords:

  • 52% of employers say their screening process never includes social media channels
  • Only 9% say they always use them
  • That 9% doesn’t mean ‘asking for passwords’ – it could mean just doing a Google search or checking a public LinkedIn profile for accuracy compared to a resume

In Canada, particularly, recruiters have to be concerned with PIPEDA (privacy laws) and the Human Rights Code, which prohibits discrimination based on race, religion, gender or sexual orientation.  A recruiter who spends a lot of time researching a candidate on social media and thereby learns that a candidate is GLBT or a person of colour could find, when they don’t hire that candidate, that they are accused of discrimination.

The exception: Social media on behalf of an employer

Where things get a little tricky is when an already-hired employee is responsible for managing social media channels on behalf of an employer.  If you’re the Sales Manager for an organization, and spend a lot of paid work time building a large LinkedIn network of sales-related contacts during the course of your employment with that organization, it’s possible that when you leave, the employer could ask for those contacts.

If you’re the social media manager for an organization and spend a lot of paid work time building a Twitter following that is associated with the company, who owns that Twitter account when you leave?

These questions are a little tougher to answer – and probably won’t be, definitively, any time soon.  Best advice?  If your employer asks you to start tweeting on behalf of the organization, open a new account – don’t just do it from your own personal Twitter account.

 

Our Core Values

Posted March 25th, 2012 in blog_news, For Employers, For Job Seekers

A few months ago, we sat down and articulated our Core Values – the things we stand for, the qualities we value, and the goals we strive for.  I thought we’d share them with you.

There’s a whole booklet that accompanies these, but I think this probably speaks for itself.  (If you’re interested in reading the booklet, just send us a message on Twitter @PolyPlacements!)

Do you really know how candidates are finding you?

Posted March 17th, 2012 in blog_news, For Employers

Asking candidates – or even tracking – how they applied to your position may be giving you a misleading picture.

A couple of weeks ago, CareerXroads released the results of a study showing the sources of external hires:

Now, most recruiters will tell you that they’ve long known that the best source of new hires are referrals, so it’s not surprising to see them at the top of the list.  However, given the long-heralded demise of job boards, and the long-heralded power of social media for recruiting, it’s surprising to see the former coming in second while the latter is a bit of a blip.

The first thing we need to acknowledge is that the sample size here was only 36 respondents – not nearly enough to know how accurate the results are.

However, what may be more important is that recruiting is hardly ever this simple or one-dimensional.

How many touchpoints does it take to generate an applicant? How many to generate a hire?

99.9%, when organizations are tracking where a new hire came from, they’re (a) asking candidates to specify how they came to apply in the first place and (b) looking only at the most proximate cause.

And sometimes it really is that simple:  Candidate A is in the market for a new job, so s/he goes online and looks for opportunities, sends applications to anything that looks promising, and then hopes s/he will get an interview.

But most of the time it’s much more complicated than that.  For example, Recruiter Sally needs to hire a senior manager.  She posts the job on the company website, puts feelers out on LinkedIn, calls a few contacts in the industry, and sends an email to internal employees to ask for referrals.  She includes the link to the company website posting in emails to potential referrers and her LinkedIn status, and tells internal employees to direct their contacts to the company posting but to make a note on their covering note that they’ve been referred by someone.

She eventually makes a hire via a contact on LinkedIn, who has applied via the company website after having been referred by a former employee.

When the new hire is asked “How did you apply for this job?”, s/he says “I applied on the company website…” – when in fact the ‘source’ of this hire was a combination of social media (LinkedIn), referrals (via the LinkedIn contact and employee alumni network), recruiter initiated (getting the buzz going), and the company website (which facilitated processing).

It may be time to stop thinking about ‘single source of hire’ and start thinking about ‘engagement process required to make a great hire’.

 

INFOGRAPHIC: When it comes to social media, size isn’t everything

Posted March 12th, 2012 in blog_news, For Employers

Turns out, smaller networks produce more applications per follower

You know I love a good infographic, especially when it confirms what I think I already know.

According to this infograhic by Bullhorn, having a lot of Twitter followers doesn’t mean you’re getting a whole lot of candidates.

I recognize that there are flaws in this kind of reasoning, but it’s still kind of interesting…the recruiter with 10,000 Twitter followers isn’t necessarily the one who’s going to do the best job.  Maybe because they’re spending too much time on Twitter…

 

The Remarkable Employee: Nature or Nurture?

Posted March 6th, 2012 in blog_news, For Employers, For Job Seekers

As the world prepared for life under Google’s post-apocalyptic privacy policy, I chose not to spend my last free moments writing to loved ones or reconciling my thoughts on the afterlife.  Waiting for our new Orwellian overlords to inform me that, based on my recent search history, my cholesterol was too high and my first child would be a girl named Prudence, an article on Inc.com caught my eye:  8 Qualities of Remarkable Employees.

The general sentiment of the article seemed to be that truly remarkable employees – those that breathe the rarefied air reserved for captains of industry and thought leaders – are driven by something deeper and more personal than anything that could be put in a job description.  Remarkable employees embrace the spirit of the job rather than the letter of the job, defining success in terms of how well they advance the discipline, not how well their performance compares to what’s listed on their job description.

At the risk of oversimplifying, the 8 qualities lend support to the old adage that fortune favours the bold, in that an inquiring mind and healthy irreverence can not only help an employee achieve greatness in a given role, but also have a positive impact on their co-workers and organizational culture.

The idea that a little eccentricity can add flavour to an otherwise vanilla organization has gained popularity in the past few years, but when we appreciate how delicately these 8 factors must be arranged in order to achieve the desired result, one wonders just how often the dish tastes a little…funky.  There’s a gestalt element that needs to be recognized.  Without a balance, you may find a misguided employee squirting ketchup on the company ice cream.

But let us return to the article.  Are the 8 specified qualities meant to help us identify potentially remarkable employees, or are they the sort of things one can cultivate in order to become remarkable?

Depending on where you fall on the nature/nurture scale, it could be that the unique makeup of The Six Million Dollar Employee cannot be learned – it’s a set of innate traits that’s coded into our DNA.  On the other hand, surely it’s possible to teach employees numbers 4, 5 and 6 (“They publicly praise”, “They privately complain” and “They speak when others won’t”).

The challenge, again, is balance:  It’s funny how ‘eccentrically’ blue hair becomes more palatable when it’s sprouting from the head that just invented your killer app; ‘speaking when others won’t’ isn’t so attractive when the speech is always “It sucks”.

Without all 8 qualities acting in harmony, it’s a short trip from ‘healthy irreverence’ to ‘preening windbag’.  The line between Future CEO and Impatient Malcontent can be easy to cross.

For the record, I’m pretty sure the piece was meant as a field guide, not a how-to guide.  But I’ve always been more interested in minutiae than in general conclusions.  Whether or not it actually delivered sufficient protein, ’8 Qualities of Remarkable Employees’ certainly provided some food for thought.

Guest post by Geoffrey Gilbert, Poly Placements recruiter and aspiring eccentric.

Social media in the workplace: Infographic

Posted February 8th, 2012 in blog_news, For Employers, For Job Seekers

What companies are doing and saying about social media in the workplace.

Companies may not be explicitly telling employees that they can’t use social media in the office, but an awful lot of them are actively blocking social media sites. Hello smartphones…

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