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In upgrading its benchmark survey, OPM aims to help upgrade Fed workplace culture and recruiting

2010-03-08T21:27:11Z

There are several new wrinkles in the OPM government employee survey currently being distributed to your agency’s workforce. Among its most significant enhancements is timeliness: OPM is increasing the distribution frequency of this mainstay tool to every year, rather than every two years as before.

The survey also has a new name. Formerly the Federal Human Capital Survey (FHCS), it’s now the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, a rebranding that reflects an expanded emphasis on employee engagement and other morale factors. At the very top level, engagement denotes the degree to which federal employees identify with their agency’s mission and with the concrete ways in which their agency manages its workforce to support that mission.

But it’s clearly more complex and nuanced than that. A tried-and-true—very broad and basic--metric for gauging employee engagement is job satisfaction. The central question here: does a given employee feel included and appreciated by colleagues, supervisors, and managers for his or her talents and contributions? By and large, a disengaged team member usually falls somewhere on the scale between mildly cynical and entirely alienated. And you can be sure a disengaged team member is anything but fully productive and supportive of agency goals.

But what’s the connection between employee engagement and success at recruitment, an all-important element for both OPM and our TMP Government team? The tie-in is direct. As OPM helps agencies create workplace cultures that attract the best and the brightest, its survey results are core progress assessment tools. And they also form the basis for the Best Places to Work rankings from the Partnership for Public Service, which in turn directly influence many government job-seekers during the application process. Similarly, if engagement findings (and Partnership rankings) are favorable, they boost word-of-mouth enthusiasm among an agency’s own employees--in itself a powerful recruiting asset.

But will all these survey enhancements advance OPM’s stated objective of making the government “America’s model employer for the 21^st Century?” That’s an extraordinarily ambitious goal, certainly, but the energy and discipline that the OPM team is pouring into all its programs—not just the employee survey--gives this commentator some reason for optimism on this score.

If you’re interested, I can point you to an online copy of the survey instrument. But please wait to ask me until after the data gathering closes in mid-March.

Another viral gem from OK GO

2010-03-02T15:54:02Z

This is absolutely nuts. OK Go, made famous for their original stair climber viral for "Here we go again" has made another great video that is sure top go into viral land. No this has nothing to do with jobs, but has everything to do with great social content. Check it out.

Crowdsourcing: Win-Win or Lose-Lose

2010-02-23T19:40:51Z

One of the more popular social activities between companies and
consumers is crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is relatively straightforward:
It's the online distribution of certain tasks to crowds of experts and
enthusiasts. Companies use this activity to connect their brands closer to
their consumers. Involving them to the point where they almost take
ownership of the brand.

For recruitment agendas it is an effective tool for both companies and
candidates to assess fit. It can be a win-win situation, or it could be a
lose-lose. If not done carefully, it could backfire.

Let's start with one basic principle. Nothing is really free. There needs to be some return on the invested time/brains that are contributed even if it is in the form of exposure and accolades. There are some professions out there that rely on their brains as the product or service
they have. Yet crowdsourcing can be abused and be perceived as a cheap way
to get free ideas. There are online communities out there in the creativity
field where hard working designers, artists, marketers throw free work
(spec) out to posted projects from companies looking to "crowdsource" their
need out to the masses. If there was any point in which the value of "trust"
within social networks is tested, it's here. At the least authenticity and sincerity.

Crowdsourcing works when there is a benefit for both the participant and the
host company. There needs to be a genuine commitment from both parties. The
host company that is running the crowdsourcing strategy must be clear,
upfront and most of all responsive to all the submissions from the
community. The community should be able to see the clear benefits of
participation, and should not come away feeling "used." Their submissions
even if they are not the top selection should result in some return of
value. Whether it is exposure, job leads, etc.

There are many types of crowdsourcing techniques out there. Many that you
may not have been aware of. Actually those types are the most effective. The
ones in which you are participating without realizing you are participating.
Those happen because of the extremity of relevance. The content is of
extreme relevance for you and you are passionate about it. If it's not
something that you are passionate about chances are the value will be too
weak for you to take time to participate.

The crowdsourced job description.
Last July you may have remembered the viral postings on the Barry Judge blog
that stirred the networks. Basically they already had a crowdsourcing
strategy in place that involved consumers directly into their brand and
products. Well, they had a need for a Senior Manager of Emerging Media. So
they posted the job description only to find out that people had other ideas
on what the job description should be in order to move the company forward.
This became a natural progression to allow people to help write the ultimate
job description for this role. After all, the candidate they were after
should be able to construct the ultimate job description that describes who
they are and what they will do. They were also extremely clear upfront of
the expectations in what you as a participant will get back in return. Not a
job…no the legal hounds would be having press conferences as we speak. The
winner is the job description with the most votes. And they get…exposure. In
result, the twittersphere and blogging networks cluttered the web about a job at Best Buy. A great example that demonstrates that a major ingredient of a successful crowdsourcing campaign is in direct relevance to the strength of the social activity.

And lastly, we can't forget the fact that companies need crowdsourcing approaches internally to foster a healthy collaborative culture. The difference is that the relevancy is aligned to the overall mission and goals of the company, and the payoff goes without saying how it can be tied to employee incentives and a highly successful organization.

So think about what your latest contribution of intellect or skill was. Why did you participate?

Why don’t metrics matter more to Talent Acquisition?

2010-02-23T00:57:54Z

Having left the talent acquisition arena nearly 11 years ago, at a time when it was first coming into “vogue” for an HR organization to show their ability to positively impact the bottom line of their organization (vs. just spending money on benefits, sourcing, etc) I find myself wonder why the needle seems to have moved so little when it comes to caring about and measuring accurately the return-on-investment (ROI) of a sourcing strategy, the opportunity cost of open positions and the overall value of the talent acquisition organization.

Even back in the not so distant recruiting days of the newspaper ad response cattle call - where my trusty black filing cabinet was my ATS – I somehow managed to employ the most rudimentary of formulas to calculate the return I achieved from my efforts and the opportunity cost of not filling those open positions in a timely fashion.

So I did some exploration intowhat is driving this lack of interest in how we actively spend (or indirectly waste) the company’s money and I’ve stumbled on a few recurring challenges that seem to plague organizations large and small, domestic and global.

1. HR / Talent Acquisition is still not viewed as a “player” at the table – Although this has been changing rapidly over the last decade with ironically, advances in metrics and ROI that have given HR the ability to show its value to the bottom line, many C-suites still do not recognize the impact a strong talent acquisition function can have on the success of a company. I truly believe that any organization that really looks at the opportunity costs of losing, and having to source, recruit and replace just five key positions in their company would make a mad dash towards implementing some workforce planning as well as strategic, proactive and measurable sourcing strategies. Staffing.org publishes an annual Recruiting Benchmarks and Performance Report that outlines many of the metrics critical to the process of defining, benchmarking and achieving success in this area.

2.“I like talking to people, so I’d make a great recruiter” – Suffice to say there are many, many career changers out there (I’m one of them having gone from HR to advertising myself) but we do these folks a disservice when we welcome them to a talent acquisition organization from a functional area but forget to tell them about all the “other” aspects of the job. We often make the mistake of thinking that all it takes to hire great engineers is another engineer, or great nurses another nurse. It is so much more than that. Recruiters are more often than not a tightly rolled combination of salesperson, counselor, multiple ball juggler, and savvy politician. The really good ones care not only about the conversation but about the candidate, the company, the bottom line and the metrics.

3. Technology & infrastructure – My guess is you won’t find too many companies of any real size significance manually cutting payroll checks, running background investigations or conducting banking activities without a strong technology foundation – which makes me wonder why it is that I still encounter talent acquisition organizations with limited technology resources and employees gravely unhappy with the technology that is in place (even when it is solid). A few reasons - first talent acquisition software (ATS, CRM) tools have often been just an add-on to a payroll or HRIS system purchase. Not giving the actual users the opportunity to define system needs and requirements for their organization and have a seat at the table in that purchase can lead at best to a system that simply doesn’t sync with the way talent acquisition does business and at worst can create an ineffective process for recruiters and candidates that negatively affects morale, candidate perception of your company and sourcing ROI. Another common mistake around technology is the hope that by putting a system in place – processes will automatically fall into line and broken techniques will fix themselves. This could not be further from the truth – if you have any hope to change the way your staffing function conducts business – you must do it the hard way – by changing the attitudes, perceptions and ways your team works – only then can you deploy a technology solution to support and measure the new way of doing business. Lastly – in some cases, HR has simply not raised their hand when it comes to asking for their fair share of technology investment. Technology has been a long missing link to HR’s credibility with the C-suite so now is the time to ask for your fair share if you haven’t already.

4. Hiring managers – I used to say (jokingly, but only half so) that I could be a much better recruiter if only I could eliminate that middleman – the hiring manager. Alas – these folks are pretty critical to our jobs and rather than living in a state of constant conflict or stress over how to deal with them – we must learn to engage them as active partners in a successful sourcing process, and measurement and metrics can help us do that. Here are some of the most common hiring manager challenges and how metrics can help you combat them.

Their job is the only job – We’ve all felt this pressure to elevate one position over another either in time or resources put toward it. Having measured the success of sourcing/recruiting tactics by position type and/or geography can allow you to immediately kick off a strategy using techniques that will provide results and make every hiring manager feel as if they are your number one priority.
Hurry up and wait – So you scramble to get your hiring manager resumes and then you never hear back from them – either because no candidate is “just right” (see bullet four for more on this) or because of other business challenges (ironically enough often caused by having a missing staff member). Calculating the opportunity cost of an open position to the bottom line (and if you can to that hiring manager’s specific bottom line) can help bring things into perspective and give them the push they need to make filling the job a priority.
“I want you to advertise here”– Again, utilizing your successfully measured sources with ROI metrics can help educate your hiring managers about the target audience from which the right candidate for the job is likely to come. Hiring managers often make the mistake of seeing themselves as the target audience and projecting their preferences onto the sourcing strategy rather than taking the time to figure out if it is really a correct fit. Unbiased, real results can help educate them and help you eliminate unsuccessful tactics that contribute to high opportunity costs, long time-to-fill and frustrated hiring managers.
They can’t let go of the past – If the employee you are working to replace was any good – chances are you have a hiring manager who will want exactly what they had before and who will reject any candidate whose skills, experience or background are even slightly out of line with what they had before. Fearing a change to their team dynamic – hiring managers will naturally gravitate to trying to make as minimal as possible the impact a new team member will have. By measuring the quality and retention of employees and tying it back to the media from which they were sourced – you can encourage hiring managers to look beyond the individual and to the broader scope of resources that can help find quality talent that will fit the organization successfully and in a repeatable fashion.

5. Marketing & HR live separate lives – Many of the principles we engage to help our customers measure their sourcing success are also used by marketing organizations who wouldn’t dream of placing an ad campaign or implementing a customer acquisition strategy without measurement tools in place. Unfortunately, in many organizations we the agency are the first ones to bring marketing and HR together in a room. Involving marketing doesn’t mean HR has to relinquish control of their strategy, messaging or the vendors they engage with- but you might be pleasantly surprised by the collaboration and understanding that can achieved when everyone is singing from the same song book. The marketing team is a valuable ally to secure visibility with IT, Finance and the C-suite if you don’t already have it – and help to evangelize the mantra that “job seekers are consumers too” – and the way they behave as a consumer is often reflective of how they behave as a job seeker. Although a simple conclusion to draw when awareness is raised, you’d be surprised how many organizations don’t often recognize how valuable B2C or B2B marketing techniques translate to the recruitment space.

You are probably not surprised to learn that after digging deeper I have to admit, my initial assumption that organizations are not interested in measuring their success and developing solid metrics is wrong. Rather than a lack of interest – there are simply numerous distractions that challenge and pull on talent acquisition professionals – preventing them from giving attention to this very important topic. But the hopes of this self-professed “data diva” and budding statistician have not been dashed. I sense a new passion and groundswell focused on metrics and measurement in our industry each and every day, whether listening to Jason Whitman of Indeed talk the basics of metrics to his clients, encouraging them to demand better tools and technologies for measuring success or reading the latest CareerXroads Annual Source of Hire study. The economic downturn and the “doing more with less” mantra of the last eighteen months not withstanding – talent acquisition professionals need and are beginning to make noise and demand the tools and resources they need – from their own companies and the vendors that service them - to accurately measure and ultimately evolve their success.

It’s the law

2010-02-19T20:27:35Z

For those of you who remember elementary physics, you may recall that Isaac Newton’s famous laws all have to do with motion. One states that a body at rest stays at rest (I have a relative who is proof of that one), and that a body in motion stays in motion. (Newton had devised some more obscure laws too, like whoever arrives at the pub last picks up the tab, and, if you call me “Fig” more than once, I get to punch you, but neither of those really caught on in the scientific community.)

Anyway, the point is that not only does the economy obey Newton’s first law, so do our models of employment – yes, both are always in motion.

Allow me to illustrate (with actual illustrations, no less).

Model 1: One company for life
Characteristics
-   Lifetime security in return for lifetime commitment.
-   No interest in, or perceptions of, what it’s like to work somewhere else.
-   Little pressure on company to provide an exceptional employment experience.
-   Generation: expected by Matures, remembered by Boomers
-   Employer brand only impacts entry-level opportunities.

Model 2: Free agents
Characteristics
-   Expectation to work somewhere else.
-   No promise of security.
-   Company needs to provide a signature employment experience to retain top talent, maximize engagement, and minimize attrition.
-   Generation: embraced by X, adapted to by Boomers
-   Employer brand differentiates employers.

Model 3: Distributed employment
Characteristics
-   Work for multiple organizations simultaneously on discreet tasks/projects.
-   Relationships are “as needed.”
-   Guilds and other affiliations fill voids (social, benefits) left by loss of traditional engagement
-   More virtual interaction increases difficulty of employers to provide a signature employment experience.
-   Employer brand shifts from constructed to organic platform as distributed network conversations become primary focal point for development of perceptions.

Right now, we are at the beginning stages of the third model. The degree to which this model takes hold is in question. The degree to which we have to be ready for it is not.

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You Tube Interactive

2010-02-11T19:04:28Z

Now companies are finding newer ways to make You Tube more interactive. With a bit of flash magic and Brand Channel features, watch how you can control the video and even see more unseen video the more you watch. Somewhat linear but pretty soon most videos will engage you to participate with it's contents rather than just be a passive observer. Annotations have been around for quite sometime but not a lot of companies using them to their full advantage.

What this means is that as we strategize video content, we must take into consideration viewer participation. Get your audience deeper into your story by allowing them to manipulate, change, own the content even in video.

Social media surges as an agency branding tool: three cases to consider

2010-02-11T17:11:07Z

Judging by their efforts, the most pro-active practitioners of social media outreach in the government are turning enthusiastically to the mobile web, Facebook, and other Gov 2.0 modes as they strive to expand their respective agencies’ prestige and audience reach.

For those of us who are focused on recruitment, it’s a little surprising that most of these initiatives don’t begin with the intent of attracting new hires. Still, these leading agencies are building their brands and that, done well, results directly in more informed and enthusiastic recruits.

Here are three examples of federal organizations that are demonstrating a sophisticated understanding of the power of social media, although each emphasizes a different aspect of the challenge:

the U.S. Army’s IPhone application,
the White House’s use of video on its Facebook page, and
the EPA ‘s development of guidelines for its employees’ use of social media.

The Army has released an IPhone app that allows access to a vast store of materials, including content from the Army’s Facebook and Flickr pages, as well as all the video products on its Web site. Released in mid-December, the app achieved more than 20,000 downloads in its first month alone, soaring to a Top-25 ranking for free news sources at the iTunes App store. Take note of its Find a Recruiter facility if you need evidence of the app’s more direct contribution to recruiting. You can find out how to download the app at www.army.mil/mobile/.

Best Practies case number two is the White House, which recently posted a seven-minute video on its Facebook page. The video is a professionally produced mini-documentary about the White House advance team’s trip to an Ohio town to prep for a presidential visit. From a branding standpoint, this slice-of-life coverage, complete with jiggly hand-held camera work, reinforces the authenticity and appeal of everyday activities by the team. Other agencies—particularly those with a more urgent mission to recruit employees actively—can find a polished model here. This is exposure to on-the-job reality at its best, an indispensible tool for reinforcing the appeal of an agency to the community of potential recruits, which is almost always more expansive than agency human capital planners imagine.

My last case is not flashy in any way, but underscores an emerging need in federal social media use: how to ensure that overenthusiastic employees don’t go overboard with the tools at their disposal. EPA’s guidelines are judicious and prescient. Among agencies that encourage informed employee/brand ambassador use of social media, this is a first. In the hope that other agencies will emulate it, I’m reprinting EPA’s handy flowchart below.

Preparing a pipeline: A civil government ROTC

2010-02-09T16:24:00Z

In my last post, The State of Optimism in 2010: Opportunities for Genuine Changes, I talked about the large numbers of candidates applying for jobs and the challenges and opportunities at each stage of the hiring process.

Here is some insight on the potential pipeline from a civil government ROTC.

The present economic crisis has highlighted education and training gaps: unemployed individuals who lack the qualifications for open positions. Government-like industry is especially lacking a stream of qualified entry level candidates with the appropriate educational backgrounds to match positions. For example, many agencies seek Science Technology Engineering and Math (STEM) majors, which trends up and down among undergraduates. The Roosevelt Scholars Act (HJ.R. Bill 3510), introduced on July 31, 2009 and presently in Committee, seeks to establish a scholarship program that assists graduate students with their education in exchange for a commitment to federal service.

If passed, the legislation would create a civilian ROTC program by offering scholarships in mission-critical fields including science, engineering, public health, information technology, foreign languages and law, in exchange for a federal service commitment on completion of their degree.

Look for an increased emphasis on other ways to tie education to government service: internship and fellowship programs, forgiveness of student loans and the use of relationship with college departmental heads to recruit.

Whether or not sweeping change is on the horizon, there is certainly reason for optimism in 2010.

Mobile web vs web; should you develop 2 sites?

2010-02-02T15:18:26Z

As the smartphone market increases, the demand for mobile content increases as well. And not just smartphones, but wireless devices all together. The question isn't if companies should have 2 sites; one for mobile and the other for desktop. The question is what content will people find valuable to interact with via mobile versus their desktop? I would also add the question what is the environment that the audience will be interacting with the mobile site?

There are numerous conversations around whether or not you should develop your site to be mobile enabled versus developing a separate mobile site altogether. On one side it involves a little more investment to develop 2 sites; one for the desktop and one for the mobile device. Creating 2 databases and file structures has been argued to be cumbersome, duplicative and costly. But there is a clear difference between mobile content and web content and that should be weighed into the consideration.

Let's take into consideration what people will and will not do on the mobile. Are people ready to apply to jobs directly off their phones? Not quite. The tools are starting to get there to facilitate the mobile resume, however user confidence of submitting a mobile resume to represent who they are to a prospective employee is not quite there yet. And simply sniffing out the mobile browser accessing your career site and then feeding them a mobile version of the same content proves to have problems.

The mobile web is content driven
Most smartphones (including the iPhone) cannot read flash content. That kills a lot of specific feature areas that are developed for websites. This includes social platforms like Facebook. (Take a good look and compare Facebook mobile to your Facebook on your desktop. Notice Facebook mobile doesn't have FBML components). However going back to the question of what content people want on the mobile, the behavior is completely different. The content they want is more linear, quick, simple, and transactional. So if your careersite relies on a major flash component on the homepage, you will need to rethink the mobile interaction design for the mobile user. This is a process of mobile development that takes into consideration the needs, behaviors, mobile environment of the user designed against overall site goals. The major areas of difference are dictated by user behavior.

In developing for mobile:

• The copy is edited down to easy digestible segments
• Overall content is organized to be simple, and linear
• Content driven; the 90/10 rule applied to content vs. graphics
• Transaction based for quick benefits
• Mobile SEO

Establish your mobile strategy
So before you ask yourself if you need 2 sites and that your careersite should be mobile enabled, make sure that you have a mobile strategy in place first. Mobile strategies include specific goals and objectives that mobile will deliver against. It outlines who and how your audience will interact and even find your mobile content, and how it will deliver against your overall strategic goals.

Salary Quote, Please

2010-02-01T23:25:27Z

Have you ever lost a hire because no one was around to give you a salary quote? Did you ever interview a candidate that wanted to know up front what the salary would be? Most recruiters have probably experienced both of these scenarios. The lucky ones are those recruiters utilizing a consistently smooth and efficient process to quote salaries.

When applicants finally interview and are excited about the possibility of employment, what is your procedure for discussing dollars? There are two factors to consider in developing a salary quote process: the first being identification of a decision maker and protocol to dictate salary. The second is how you share this information with the candidate. Even though we work diligently to streamline and expedite the hiring process in sourcing, screening and interviewing, oftentimes determining salary is overlooked – causing a definite delay in employment offers.

Salary quotes are determined based on several variables; experience being the primary factor. How do you count years of experience at your organization? It matters a great deal if a candidate is working full-time, part-time or per diem and the salary quote must reflect his/her experience appropriately. Another consideration is the environment in which the applicant is currently working. Should outpatient and inpatient positions carry the same weight? If the open position is for an acute care facility, how do you count experience in long-term care, office settings or other areas? All of these factors should be evaluated and determined by your organization in order to calculate a salary quote with consistency.

Many positions require a specific degree while others offer flexibility in “preferring” a certain degree combined with experience. The level of education is typically the next most heavily weighted determinant for salary. These are factors that must also be considered. In the case of nurses, do you pay Associate’s degreed and Bachelor’s degreed candidates differently? All of these variants play an important role in determining the correct placement of the candidate’s salary quote within the pay range.

Additional schooling, the acquisition of specialized certifications and advanced skill levels may warrant an additional “bump” in compensation. Other pay variances will also determine a candidates overall salary such as shift differentials, weekend differentials and other specific organization pay programs.

A key consideration in determining a salary quote for an applicant is internal equity. Once a candidate’s education and experience levels place them in a salary “bracket,” compare the quote with salaries of existing members working in the same department. This often presents a problem when an organization increases pay ranges for incoming applicants but does not award department-wide increases to current employees. This situation results in the new applicant receiving a higher salary quote than existing staff with the same level of experience and more tenure -- fostering a situation of inequality in the minds of your employees. For this reason, internal equity issues must be resolved as they definitely increase turnover.

Each organization must also select a representative to calculate the quote. Oftentimes, this is done by the compensation department. Another method calls for Compensation to establish a standard grid value, providing the recruiter and/or hiring manager with the ability to quote salary. Either of these systems will prove successful as long as each quote is: timely, accurate and consistent. If this process is delegated to only one or two eligible people, unnecessary delays in hiring could result. There must always be several qualified people to quote salary.

Once the salary is determined, the next step is identifying who will share the salary quote with the applicant and when will that occur. Sometimes, it is appropriate to communicate this information up front during the time a recruiter is interviewing the candidate and other times the hiring manager discusses salary during a later interview. Once again, either way works as long as the guidelines for your process have been determined, agreed upon and communicated to all concerned.

After an organization moves through the candidate assessment phase and salary quote determination – the quote must be documented. This will assist in averting issues of having two different people quoting two different salaries leading to candidate confusion and poor public perception/reputation in the hiring pool. Once all these issues have been discussed and guidelines have been established, the end result will be a process that is consistent and fiscally responsible – and promotes a positive brand image.