iCIMS Hire Expectations™

Sharlyn Lauby, SPHR, CPLP is the HR Bartender, whose blog is a friendly place to discuss workplace issues. When she’s not tending bar, Sharlyn is president of ITM Group, Inc., which specializes in training solutions to help clients retain and engage talent. Her off-hours are spent searching for the best hamburger on the planet, fabulous wine that cost less than $10 bottle and unusual iPad apps.

Years ago, I learned about metrics the old-fashioned way (translation: the hard way). Each week at our department manager meeting, I would watch with frustration as my peers’ new ideas and projects were fully supported and funded. But when I shared my ideas, they didn’t quite get the same response. 

I finally figured out what was wrong in my approach. My colleagues talked in terms of numbers and ROI. I talked about what made the employees feel good. And while employee happiness is important, when I could attach a number to it, my ideas got approved too.

Reasons for Recruiting Metrics

The organization will use your numbers not only as a gauge of performance but as the benchmark to take action. For example, let’s say that your company plans to open a new plant.  Metrics will determine when to begin recruiting efforts, how much or how little to spend on recruitment advertising, scheduling initial training efforts…just to name a few.

Groups outside the company will be equally interested in your metrics. Using the example above, if the plant you are opening will bring a lot of new jobs to the area, then maybe you can apply for workforce grant dollars to offset some expenses.

Getting Started

It’s critical to show a connection between your numbers and the operation. Otherwise, it’s like cooking a great meal and not serving it. Metrics must be tied back to business objectives.

The SHRM Metrics toolkit can be a valuable resource for metrics calculations. Listed below are a few common calculations that can be used as a starting point.

Practical Example: A consulting firm needs to know the cost of hiring new positions for a contract they are bidding on. Cost per hire will tell the company how much they need to spend on recruitment once they’re awarded the project.

*Cost to terminate includes severance, unemployment, exit interviews, legal fees, temp replacements, etc.

Activity: Once you’ve determined turnover cost, have managers multiply the cost by the number of people they’ve hired in their departments during the year. 
Trust me, they will be surprised. When I’ve done this activity, I found managers gained a greater understanding of the investment the company makes into an employee. And they became better at weighing the cost of training versus terminating an employee.

Please note:  Define the employee statuses it makes sense to monitor. It might not make sense to track on-call, seasonal or temporary employees. This could skew the statistics for your full-time staff and lead to false conclusions. 

Practical Example: Let’s say it takes an average of 3 weeks to fill a job requisition. In addition, once a person is hired, it takes another 2 weeks of training for them to become fully productive. This sheds light on when human resources needs to know about the job opening. In this example, a department could be without a fully productive employee for 5 weeks. 

Compiling Data

As you begin to define the metrics to calculate, think about the best ways to collect data.

• Decide who will be responsible for collecting the data. Talk with that employee and get their buy-in. They need to know the “why’s” and “what for’s” in order to make this effort a success.
• Determine the infrastructure that is necessary to collect the data (i.e. log sheets, computer systems, etc.)
• Establish a starting point for the metrics. It can be a daunting task to go backwards in time to capture historical data. Don’t let that hinder the metrics initiative.
• Choose a frequency for distribution (weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually)

The key in reporting data is to find out what your managers want to see. This is an opportunity to demonstrate value. Make your initial reports easy to read. One human resources executive I know puts a ‘red light or green light’ next to metrics, so managers can quickly interpret the results.

It’s really not that hard.

Metrics are a necessary part of business. If you start simple and align your numbers with the business goals and objectives, you are sure to get results. 

For as long as I can remember, industry experts claimed that the healthcare industry was basically guaranteed to remain a consistent and strong job market forever. The thought was there will always be patients and patients will always need healthcare providers.  Now, I see that rationale is not quite as sound as we all once believed. 

The Federal Sequestration, automatic budget cuts implemented on March 1, 2013, included a 2% reduction in Medicare payments to healthcare providers. If you don’t think 2% is all that significant, you are sadly mistaken.  For many hospitals, for example, Medicare is the largest single payer, at times accounting for more than half the facility’s total revenue. In those terms, 2% is a monstrous reduction. 

A joint study by the American Medical Association, The American Hospital Association, and the American Nurses Association predicted that the Federal Sequester would undoubtedly result in a decline in healthcare job growth. The impact will not only affect hospitals and physician’s offices, but will have a trickle-down effect including other healthcare vendors, such as suppliers and IT providers. 

Unfortunately, we are already seeing the predicted downturn. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, healthcare made a “relatively weak” contribution to the job market in both March and April 2013. Further, the American Hospital Association thinks it may get worse, estimating that these budget cuts could lead to 766,000 fewer healthcare jobs by 2021.

All this at a time when healthcare reform hurtles forward and an estimated 32 million new patients will have access to healthcare in 2014. In short, more providers, supplies, and ancillary staff will be required to address this massive influx of patients at a time when Medicare reimbursement will be significantly decreased. CFOs in healthcare are worried, and with all this in mind it is no surprise. This means, every department, in every healthcare organization, will be required to cut costs.  Human resources and recruiting departments will be no exception. 

Today more than ever, healthcare recruiters need to take serious action to reduce the costs to fill job vacancies. For any newbies reading this post, I am referring to a standard metric, or measurement, called cost-to-fill. The costs-to-fill are the cumulative total of costs associated with recruiting, such as time dedicated to sourcing, sifting through resumes, and interviewing as well as direct costs associated with travel, relocation, costs of employment advertising, and onboarding. In addition to this, one must consider the cost of the vacancy itself. When a job is vacant, either someone needs to pick up that slack in the form of more expensive overtime or the vacancy simply results in additional losses in revenue. In short, vacancies are expensive. 

No matter how you slice it, the key to bringing down costs-to-fill is automation. If healthcare providers want to survive, even thrive, they must eliminate the inefficiencies associated with humans performing processes that can be easily automated such as sifting through hundreds, even thousands of resumes to identify the a particular skill set. Unfortunately, healthcare has always been notoriously slow in terms of adopting information technology. The growing acceptance of electronic medical records, however, does seem to indicate that healthcare is beginning to warm up to technology. Still, automating processes in order to create efficiency does not end in the exam room. 

Automation through recruitment technology is the key to reducing recruitment’s cost-to-fill. For example, automated candidate screening reduces the number of unqualified candidates that a recruiter reviews in order to find those that meet the organization’s needs. Other features include social recruitment and automated job board posting to healthcare specific job boards that broaden and target the recruiter’s reach. At the same time, recruitment technology facilitates and streamlines the communication between recruiters, candidates, and hiring managers.  The combination of broad, yet targeted reach through employment advertising and improved communications ultimately reduces time-to-fill, which subsequently impacts cost-to-fill. 

Gone are the days when email folders and filing cabinets could be considered as viable systems for searching and screening candidates. Operational efficiency is among the best ways to improve an organization’s bottom line and remain competitive. Manual recruitment techniques, filled with high resume volumes and no effective way to accept, review, and manage those resumes is a dangerous inefficiency. Without recruitment technology in place, a healthcare organization cannot maximize human capital efficiency.

If you would like to dive deeper into this topic to learn about the costs associated with manual processes and the return on investment associated with automation, download our Free Whitepaper titled: Healthcare Recruitment: Facing the Sequester.

As we reflect back at last year’s hiring data, iCIMS wanted to provide a glimpse at where our clients were finding their most qualified applicants across the different sourcing tools available today. In order to provide the most current and comprehensive data, we analyzed our 1,500+ clients’ source effectiveness reports. These reports assess recruitment advertising sources and the volume of candidates coming from each. Additionally, the report highlights the quality of such sources by displaying where candidates were in the recruitment process by source (ie: Did a lot of candidates come from a given source, but all were automatically disqualified?). On the flip side, the reports show if certain sources produce candidates who move farther along in the hiring process. We took the calendar year of 2012, and compared that to our previous study done in of 2011.  The results were accurately tracked by leveraging the automated source tracking feature of the iCIMS Talent Platform. This feature takes away the risk of candidates falsely identifying their source by automatically locking in the true origin of a candidate to ensure accurate reporting. The organization’s that benefit from the iCIMS platform range in size from companies of 10 employees, to global corporations well over 100,000; ensuring our report was applicable for a full range of organizations. In total, the data provided insight from over 1.5 million job postings, 30 million applicants, and 400,000 hires.

Of the 400,000 hires, 25% came from external sources (highlighted in the graph below) ; the other 75% came from referrals, internal hires, company career sites, and undefined sources. This data is very similar to the data collected last year (29% and 71% respectively), and confirms that iCIMS clients are better leveraging the tools at their disposal to make jobs visible via their corporate and in-house portals, as well as through employee referrals to bring in qualified applicants.

Though we are thrilled to see a high number of new hires coming in from these types of sources, the data also reveals the impact of external sources in the hiring process. Of the identified external sources of hire, Indeed.com, CareerBuilder, Monster, Craigslist, Linkedin, and Simply Hired, emerged as the top branded external sources of hire with sources such 3rd party recruiting agencies,  job fairs, and campus recruiting also making the list. Indeed alone accounted for more hires than all other branded sources combined and stood far out from the pack, delivering 27% of all external hires. Career Fairs also saw substantial uptick from last year leading us to believe that the economic climate is beginning to look up, and more recent graduates are finding jobs from these sources.

As we look back at where new hires came from in 2012, a few things are clear. The first is that our clients have continued to utilize the tools that are available through the iCIMS Talent Platform to effectively source out and recruit the best candidates. The second is that the external sources that were being used last year are still being used today, but in higher volumes, and lastly the sources may be the same, but the number of new hires has increased by over 25% leading us to even further suspect that many companies are starting to expand their recruitment strategies.

Talent acquisition is a top priority for all companies, no matter what their size. To get the job done, you need the right person to do it. End of story. But with so many options now available for sourcing talent, where should employers focus their time and energy?

In the recruiting world, there has been a lot of talk about social recruiting--i.e. utilizing social media outlets like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter--to find active and passive candidates. Additionally, the nature of employee referrals is evolving, as these social channels allow current employees to post vacancies on their own personal social profiles.
As a result, the recruiting world is changing rapidly. Whereas sourcing and hiring was once under the exclusive, almost despotic, purview of the HR department--the experts who held the keys to the metaphorical employment castle--social channels have democratized the entire process. Everyone now has a voice. But determining which voices should be heeded, and which forums garner the most appropriate candidates for the job, is becoming more difficult as recruiters are overwhelmed with options.

To help navigate the evolving recruiting landscape, you need to know where you should focus your efforts. Are job boards still your best bet? Or does your company’s career page funnel excellent resumes into your inbox? Should you focus more time and energy scouring through profiles on LinkedIn? On Facebook? There are so many questions recruiters must now ask themselves to stay on top of their game.

In order to help HR departments and recruiting agencies prepare for a future that will undoubtedly be affected even more by technological innovation, Software Advice has prepared a survey to help determine which recruiting channels deliver the greatest bang for their buck, as well as provide employers with a clearer picture of the recruiting landscape as it stands now--and where it’s going.

However, we can’t answer these questions no our own. We need your help. And to make it worth your while, not only will we email you the results, but if you take the short seven-question survey, you can enter to win an iPad Mini!

The first impression a new hire has of a company is based on their experiences from the date they accept an offer to the first couple weeks of employment.  New employment is a HUGE deal and often becomes the conversation starter for most individuals.  How many times after you inform a close friend or family member about your new position did you hear, “How is your new job?”  Most often, the answer to this question is formulated based a person’s experiences during the first few weeks of training (also known as onboarding). The answer might not be so positive if a person spends the first week with no computer and fills out paperwork. However, a much different impression can be made if they are able to get right down to business and learn their new role with other employee and manager engagement.

Engagement begins the moment the new hire accepts a position with an organization.  Seamless integration with the recruitment process should allow the organization to create the employee profile, assign tasks, and send a personalized welcome e-mail that introduces the new hire to the company and lets them feel engaged prior to their first day of employment.  Ideally, new hires should be organized and segmented based on new hire characteristics.  A centralized theme for their onboarding process can be based on their location, job type, or department just to name a few.  Each theme should create a personalized experience that can include department videos, informational documents or introductions to management or other employees.

The ability to completely personalize the new hire experience is the key to success for the retention of each new hire.  Each new hire should be treated like a top level executive that the organization could not continue without.  Personalized messaging, images, and videos centralized to the theme of their department, location, job type etc. can help create this positive perception.  In addition, tasks required to complete the process should be targeted to the new hire and ONLY what that specific new hire is required to complete.

A task can be anything from an online W4 Form to instructions for the IT department as to what equipment is needed for the new hire.  Keep in mind that new hires are not the only ones required to complete paperwork and tasks before starting, there are internal stakeholders involved in the onboarding process as well.  Allowing these stakeholders to access the information they need to complete their required task as well as creating a simple way for them to communicate back to the process owner that it is complete is extremely important. Task progress by the new hire and internal stakeholders should drive the process from one step to the next. Transparency and consistency in communication between all parties gets the onboarding process done as quickly and efficiently as possible.

I strongly believe that decreasing the new hire time to productivity while providing them with a great first impression to the organization is an easy way to ensure strong employee engagement and retention.  A great onboarding experience not only provides efficiency gain, but will also create positive word of mouth and perception for any organization. Who knows, maybe even employee referrals will go up!

When you think of recruiting in retail, you need to think about customer experience first. The entire success of a well-oiled retail machine comes down to the shopping experience. Of course, price, product and store location are parts of the equation, but nothing beats a great customer experience. Unfortunately, for brick and mortar business, recruiting is extremely challenging. High employee turnover, which means that many employees leave voluntarily, can reach 100% is some cases. In fact, the department of labor reported that 570,000 separations took place in the retail sector during September 2010; which is insane! As you can imagine, there are many reasons for such turn: pay, management, job duties, etc.  So right now you may be saying “Poor HR;" not so fast! The real pain is felt with the VP of Store Operations.

The VP of Store Operations wears many hats. Ultimately, their job is to carry out the strategies formulated by the CEO to meet corporate goals. There are many KPI’s that help determine whether or not a store is passing or failing, which falls directly on the VP of Store Operations. The largest metric is Same Store Sales. Same-store sales is a business term which refers to the difference of revenue generated by a retail chain's existing stores over a certain period (often a fiscal quarter or a particular shopping season), compared to an identical period in the past (usually in the previous year). Most of the positive or negative impact of this metric relies on the staff at the store level. For instance, higher average purchases and/or more frequent customer visits; cross selling into a broader product range or upselling to more expensive ones cannot happen without a great team. Now you know why staffing keeps the VP of Operations up at night more than anyone else.

So the next question is what can be done? The good news is that Talent Leaders within this sector are forward thinking and constantly preparing for this scenario.  Obviously, the most common strategy is to have evergreen positions posted everywhere your budget allows. I know the argument here is quality vs. quantity. I’m a big believer in this case, the more candidates, the better. We have also seen in-store kiosks work and now the emergence of social media will certainly help get the word out. In my humble opinion, I firmly believe a strong employer brand is the most important component when it comes to store recruiting. Most people may not view retail as a career path, so to be able to communicate the company’s image as seen through the eyes of its associates to potential hires will ultimately determine success. Since many customers can qualify as potential employees, I think a task force comprised of Internal Marketing (those chasing customers) and Talent Acquisition (those chasing candidates) is the perfect combination to deliver the perfect message. After all, no customers, no sales….no staff, no store experience.

One of the first things that a job seeker will do in their quest to find their dream job is to simply run a Google search of their desired job title, plus a location. If you were to perform a search like this, there will be too many results to go through (Googling marketing jobs in New Jersey yields about 40,100,000 results).  Most of the results on the first page are populated by job board sites and websites such as Craigslist. These websites use a technique called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to increase their page rankings to show as the top results in Search Engine’s Results Pages (SERPs). With Google only displaying 10 results per page, competition for these spots can be very intense.

Ranking high in the SERPs has a few distinct advantages. The first is that it makes it much easier on your company’s recruiters if the job applicants are finding your company. If a person is looking for a job similar to the one you have open, they can find your position on Google and not be distracted by filters and other positions available on a job board site. Then, a recruiter can look through those who have applied and find the most qualified candidates. A second important advantage is that being featured in search engines is a free service. Instead of paying to be featured on job boards, you can organically drive traffic to your careers page and hire candidates free of charge. A third advantage is that positions that used to be difficult to fill are now simpler to find a perfect match for. If you have a job opening, there is a perfect match for the job out there, and there is a pretty good chance that they use Google. Therefore, by making your job optimized for Google searches, you have a better chance of that particular candidate seeing your open position.

Many people wonder how Google decides what websites to put in the top results for a specific search. One important factor is the text embedded within the URL. A URL with a lot of code and no keywords will not rank well in the SERPs, (ex. /OA_HTML/OA.jsp?page=/oracle/apps/irc/candidateSelfService/webui/VisVacDispPG&akRegionApplicationId=821&transactionid=1807264944&retainAM=Y&addBreadCrumb=S&p_svid=2023686&p_spid=2076008&oapc=7&oas=dYL4lUX5GPZ70dNkn--a1g), because nothing in that URL was typed into Google. If your URL looks like this, “jobs/2172/marketing-associate/job”, Google can easily see that this is a job for a marketing associate.  A URL strong, such as this one, is more likely to show in the top 10 results in Google because the webpage URL has been optimized for SEO.

Another key factor in SEO is the on-page content of the page. If the job is titled, “155412- Mkt. Assoc.”, Google will have trouble indexing it. On the other hand, if you were to title your job “Marketing Associate in Your Town, New Jersey – 155412”, Google would easily be able to identify that text and help make your page rank higher.

Are you able to effectively capture a candidate searching in the search engines? Customers who purchase iCIMS Recruit coupled with iCIMS Career Site SEO are in a better position to achieve the top spots in the SERPs. Customers can purchase packages of 5, 10, 25 or more microsites to drive highly relevant and high quality candidates to their open jobs. Allow your jobs to be visible to more potential employees by utilizing Career Site Search Engine Optimization.

If you have not already heard the buzz, state requirements for E-Verify are growing by leaps and bounds. E-Verify has been required nationwide for the employment of federal contractors and subcontractors for a while now. Many states also require E-Verify for new hires made by large employers.

Other states are implementing laws that expand on existing requirements. For example, as of December 1, 2012 Virginia joined the list of states with mandatory E-Verify requirements. In January 2013 four more states, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee, are implementing or expanding E-Verify requirements. Further, many congressional Republicans are calling for E-Verify requirements covering all businesses in all states – public and private.

To see a color coded map showing the latest state-by-state E-Verify requirements, click here.  

Perhaps, we should step back. If your firm does not do any federal contracting and is not in a state with expanded requirements, maybe you do not really understand E-Verify. Perhaps, you don’t think E-Verify is something about which your firm needs to worry. There, you are wrong. E-Verify is definitely something all employers (large or small, with or without government contracts, public or privately held) need to keep on their radar!

What is E-Verify?

E-Verify is an electronic database maintained by the Department of Homeland Security that compares employee’s I9 information to information maintained by the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration. 

According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services:

“The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 prohibits employers from knowingly hiring illegal workers. To comply with this law, employers must collect information regarding an employee’s identity and employment eligibility and document that information on Form I-9. An employee must provide certain information on the form, such as name and date of birth, as well as present supporting documents.

While Form I-9 requires employers to collect information, there was no way for employers to verify that the information employees provide is valid or that the documents presented are genuine—that is, until E-Verify. E-Verify offers employers a powerful tool in protecting themselves against those who try to cheat the system.

By adding E-Verify to the existing Form I-9 employment eligibility verification process, a company can benefit from the peace of mind of knowing that it maintains a legal workforce”.

Beyond just peace of mind, the number of states requiring E-Verify for all employers/employees is growing each day.

How Can I Prepare for E-Verify?

E-Verify is not something any employer can ignore. Even if E-Verify is not effecting you today, it will soon and you need to prepare now. Here are some things you can do to begin preparing now: 

• •         Consider proactive voluntary E-Verify enrollment. Think about the costs and benefits associated with proactive enrollment and consult your corporate council to help make a decision that meets your organization’s needs.

• •         Assume E-Verify will happen and plan now: Create a formal E-verify implementation project plan that includes a company-wide roll out with updates to policy and procedure guides, updates to your onboarding software, manager and HR staff training, etc.  

• •         Audit your existing I9 Records: Auditing your existing I9 records will help you to identify areas of weakness and early take action to correct any problematic processes related to compliance.

• •         Weigh the benefits of using an electronic I9 and E-Verify Software: An I9 and E-Verify software will keep your records organized while streamlining compliance with features like error checking, audit trails, reminders, remote hiring capabilities, instant E-Verify responses, and more.

• Watch E-Verify news for all states in which your company conducts business: This is not as much of a challenge as one might think. Google Alerts are a beautiful thing! If that does not satisfy, you can also find valuable information on I9 and E-Verify News page provided by iCIMS’ I9 and E-Verify partner, Tracker Corp.

With the rate at which E-Verify requirements are expanding, even employers not previously impacted by E-Verify must take a proactive approach and begin preparing now so you don’t get caught off guard when the time comes. Remember, too, iCIMS and our partner, Tracker Corp., are here to help as you navigate the complex waters of employment compliance.

As a Talent Acquisition professional, I am acutely aware that career fairs are a beacon of Top Talent.  However, the career fair is the “grand finale;” there is a magnitude of preparation required to run a successful exhibit. 

First, it is important to identify universities, organizations, or professional groups that align with company requirements.  By leveraging programs that cater to your company’s needs, the fair will draw Top Talent candidates.   Also, asking the organizer for analytics of attendees can prepare the recruiter for positions in another office or branch of the company. 

Secondly, each fair is an opportunity to brand your company and showcase the company culture.  Each organization has a culture that is built on the relying of employees to contribute to the culture positively. At each career fair, the potential candidate is experiencing your company for the first time.  For this reason, it is best to bring as much of the office vibe with you; it will source the right culture fit.

Lastly, follow-up, follow-up, follow-up! In having a tight back-end recruitment process, where each candidate can be connected, is key.  Once you have met a potential candidate, it is imperative to realize that they have just experienced many companies in a short period of time.  Reconnect with all of the candidates.  This puts faith in the candidate that their resume was considered, and may encourage candidates to check back for the right opportunity. 

This process of attending career fairs hinges on the ability to cast wide net, engage potential candidates, and stay in touch.  As the process moves forward, the recruiter can bring onboard the Top Talent for the open position and feed their talent pool with engaged Top Talent for future opportunities.  Progressive and positive employment branding will lead to a better candidate experience and more engaged new hires.  

The intent of the HCAHPS (Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems) initiative is to provide a standardized survey instrument and data collection methodology for measuring patients' perspectives on hospital care. This initiative in healthcare recruiting has become an essential part of our hiring practice. If ever there was a time to hardwire a culture of excellent patient care—to ensure that your organization is meeting its mission, protecting its bottom line, and enhancing its reputation—that time has clearly arrived.

Identifying the right skill set is not always the most important factor in hiring the right candidate. What is important is asking if this candidate will fit into one’s culture. Will they change the way a patient receives care?  Identifying the right behaviors that attribute to higher HCAHPS scores become the challenge today. Competences like ‘compassion, adaptability, multi-tasking, and flexibility’ are important behaviors to evaluate for HCAHPS, especially when it comes to nursing candidates.

The Studer Group released an article on “Four Reasons Why Those 27 Survey Questions Will Change Healthcare Forever.”

• HCAHPS provides accurate “apples to apples” metrics.

• Results are tied to quality and clinical outcomes.

• It gives consumers an easy way to compare hospitals.

• HCAHPS pay-for-performance is coming

Identifying these competencies allow a recruiter to screen candidates in a way that hiring managers will understand the true value you deliver to them during an interview process. Hospitals need employees who understand the importance of patient centric care.

To be at your best as a top Healthcare recruiter, you must understand how to impact the HCAHPs scores indirectly. Here are a few bullets to help link these together.

•  Take the time to learn what is measured. 

•  Know your organizations scores and where you are falling short. 

•    During your candidate screening, ensure you are asking questions that revolve around specific survey questions. For example: How do you treat patients with courtesy and respect? Give me examples of how you’ve changed your communication style depending on the patient/situation? How do you explain medications and treatment to patients and their families?

•  Communicate your strategy to peers, hiring managers, and executives

•  Always share your success

The question now lies, how will HCAHPS scores transform the way you select top talent?