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.

So I, much like many of you I'm sure, am frantically trying to complete my holiday shopping for friends and family. As much as I try to finish this daunting task in the early Fall, every year there are a few people on my list who cause me much angst to find that perfect gift and stretch my creative process.

As I began tackling this year's holiday gifts, I found myself thinking about overhauling my "gift process" to better leverage assisting technologies. Crazy, perhaps…or perhaps you think I just need to get on the band wagon? My husband thinks I'm obsessive with my whole approach to holiday gift sourcing and tracking and perhaps he's right. But with 30+ people to shop for, if I'm not careful, December 24th will be here before I know it, and rather than finding that perfect gift I'm excited to give, I fear I'll end up getting close family a holiday sweater, or worse yet, a re-gift…

So, what's my process now? It's what I'll call an organized mass of spreadsheets:

1. I've got my spreadsheet that tracks the family and friends to shop for, their interests, and potential gift ideas,
2. Our overall budget and expense breakdown by person and gift,
3. And the status of each gift in the process - drop down menus to eliminate confusion if the gift is on order, shipped, arrived, or wrapped.

With the onslaught of highly beneficial technology available, I need to consider moving my offline flow to a more efficient, productive technology for managing my efforts. A quick search online, and I am easily shown that my painful spreadsheet tracking can be laid to rest with some automated tools designed to enhance my productivity and reduce my manual efforts. An obvious recruiting correlation here that you might think I’m stretching for, but work with me… it's here!

• Sourcing: Finding that perfect gift, like finding that perfect candidate, can easily be facilitated with sourcing technology. Check out this site where I can define profiles and personality traits for my gift recipients. A pre-defined list can be generated: http://www.gifts.com/profiler. 
• Tracking: Like losing a resume in a paper pile, I am at risk of one-off-post-it notes with gift ideas that don't make their way to my spreadsheet. Centrally stored data for tracking gift lists and wish lists would reduce my manual tracking. Some great options here: http://lifehacker.com/5700124/five-best-gift+tracking-tool.
• Organizing: Like the tracker, staying organized and well informed with all of my gift/recipient – or key candidate – data in one accessible location is ideal. Amazon's Gift Organizer is just the ticket: https://www.amazon.com/gp/gift-central/organizer?ie=UTF8&%2AVersion%2A=1&%2Aentries%2A=0
• Reporting: Whether you're an HR Professional looking to pull recruiting metrics or a gift-obsessed holiday shopper like myself looking to stay on budget, reporting technologies are key to success.

So it's clearly time to replace my old, faithful spreadsheet and embrace technologies that can improve my efforts. I will let you know which one rings in as the favorite. So stay tuned faithful shoppers and good luck in all your holiday efforts!

According to a recent SHRM Report March 2010 shows a net total of 21.3 percent of HR Managers who reported an increase in hourly hiring for the month. While the job market still has quite a way to go, an increase is always good news. As the economy prepares for more and more hourly positions, it is a good time for Recruiters and Hiring Managers to evaluate their hourly hiring process.

Hourly employment often sports a notoriously high turnover rate, and thus, it may seem difficult to ease the hiring process. Think again! Start by evaluating how well you find quality candidates. Finding top talent is important not only for worker productivity, but for worker retention. Sourcing workers willing to dedicate themselves to the job will bring you one step closer to an optimal hiring process and a lower turnover rate. As obvious as the following may be, here are three questions to ask yourself:

1. Are you utilizing the data taken from your Workforce Planning Analysis?

Regardless of if your business has pressing seasonal hiring demands, planning is quite important. Analyze your past hiring trends either through a computer program like Excel or more advanced talent management systems, as past data may be the key to preparing for future hiring surges. Highlight which months see a rise in turnover and which months see a lull in candidate engagement. By doing so, you will be more prepared to proactively source top talent. You will be one step ahead of the rest and your company will be able to hire top talent before your competitor does.

2.  Where are you posting your open positions?

Post positions where your target candidates will see them. Hourly candidates usually apply to jobs that are located within a five mile radius of their home. Therefore, post appropriately. Utilize local print publications, post on local web-boards, use social media sites and of course, have plenty of applications available for walk-ins.

3.  How long is your application process?

Simple is better. By having a straight-forward, concise application process, candidate engagement is likely to improve. Higher candidate engagement=Larger talent pool=Easier to source top talent. Go one step further and make your application an automated process. Nowadays, many hourly hiring businesses are utilizing applicant tracking systems to create an entirely web-based application process. Additionally, for those who have a lot of walk-in candidates – install online application kiosks in-house. Candidates are more likely to fill out an easy-to-complete application; and bonus for the manager: candidate information is stored on a web-based location so you no longer need room for employee data storage. Efficient and effective hourly hiring process means fewer headaches for the recruiter and hiring manager.

Your company could be next in the SHRM hiring analyses; therefore, start evaluating your hiring process today. Be proactive and begin building your quality workforce!

What are some other good ways to ease hourly-hiring processes? Does anyone else have any suggestions?