Human Capital Analyst Reports – how to get them read by more HR decision makers
I got really excited last week when one of our marketing/PR services team members (Adriana Saldaña) forwarded me the executive summary for the new Bersin & Associates talent acquisition study titled Talent Acquisition Systems 2010: Facts, Practical Analysis, Trends, and Provider Profiles.
I highly recommend you check it out just like I highly recommend you check out the HR tech reports from the human capital analysts at Gartner, IDC, Forrester, Bersin & Associates and Aberdeen.
When you can afford it, that is, other than being a paying member of the analyst firm.
The Bersin TA report is $995 for non-members. Not a shocker and pretty much in line with most analysts charge for their industry reports.
But I'm not buying it. Granted we're not an analyst firm by the traditional definition, although we've got a pretty good finger on the HR marketplace pulse and our marketing/PR services team has done a great job in analyst relations this past year on behalf of our HR supplier clients, we also do our own supplier/buyer research every year that's pretty solid.
So we've got that covered. Would I like to read the human capital analyst reports? Absolutely.
I'm sure the HR decision makers and influencers out there would like to as well, but most never do. Bill Kutik confirmed that earlier this year (and I agreed with everything he said in the article).
Smaller to mid-size firms don't have IT directors or CIO's (chief information officers) who historically have been the folks to buy these reports or be members of these analyst firms and get the reports as part of their service.
Member costs are huge annually depending on the level of service - $20K, $30K, $50K, etc. Keep in mind that I'm not saying the value of analyst membership isn't worth it for buying firms or the suppliers themselves. It's just a lot of frickin' money in an already flattening world of accessible information online.
The reports themselves can be invaluable to large organizations shopping for talent management, performance management or learning management software systems.
But why not expand on the Aberdeen model and allow supplier sponsors to subsidize the cost of the report and give it away to their prospects?
Really, why not? I don't have any stats on what kind of revenue these reports generate, but based on what I do know, membership is where the bank is. As it should be. There are a lot of very smart people who work for the analyst firms, especially the analysts, and their services have been invaluable for many enterprise-level customers in the HR marketplace.
That's why so many investment-funded HR software suppliers clamor to get in the reports and/or buy services from analysts.
We already get there's some conflict of interest in analyst firms when it comes to reviewing who the paying suppliers are and who the paying buyer firms are. It's inherent in the model. As Bill Kutik wrote in his analyst article, "I feel comfortable about their objectivity, and you should, too."
I do, because they're really smart people who know HR tech and software systems, but the value of the reports could reach so many more buyers and influencers in the HR marketplace if the reports were used in content marketing to generate publicity, traffic and leads:
- And either subsidized by sponsoring suppliers and given away - for an indefinite amount of time or until the next report.
- Or just given away by the analysts to reach a broader HR buying/influencing audience.
Wouldn't that in turn increase their annual services revenue and market share on both sides of the buyer and supplier food chain?
Nearly 6 million companies say so.
Post by Kevin W. Grossman (join me on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn - and now join HRmarketer on Twitter!)
Candidate Pipelines vs. Just-In-Time Recruiting Part 2
In Part 1 of this series, I explored and challenged the practice of traditional candidate pipelining.
Some people may have interpreted my last post on the subject to mean that I don’t believe in any form of proactively building candidate pipelines. That would be incorrect. Anyone that really knows me knows that I am not a black/white, either/or kind of guy.
What I am is the kind of guy that will tell you that anyone who says there is only 1 way to do something is ALWAYS wrong, because there is always more than 1 way to do anything. I’m also the kind of person who wants to find the BEST way of doing a thing – I am not satisfied to do things “the way they’ve always been done,” nor will I blindly accept what other experts tout as best practices.
There is always a better way.
The comments I received from Part 1 in the series were fantastic! They gave me significant insight into what many of the industry heavyweights think – and it’s obvious that traditional candidate pipelining is alive, highly valued, and practiced often.
At the end of Part 1, I mentioned that the ugly truth is that proactively pipelining candidates ahead of need has many intrinsic limitations and hidden costs that no one seems to want to think or talk about.
So let’s talk about them.
The Hidden Costs of Pipelining Candidates
No one seems to attach a value to all of the time and effort it takes to develop and maintain Work-in-process (WIP) candidate inventory – a pipeline of candidates that have been sourced, screened, evaluated, and “kept warm” through ongoing relationship management.
But don’t kid yourselves – there is a heavy cost associated with all of this work!
Building and maintaining a traditional pipeline of candidates requires quite a bit of time and effort. First you have to source well qualified candidates who closely match the forecasted/projected requirements – this often means a mix of phone sourcing, internet sourcing, social recruiting, and network/referral recruiting.
Then you need to screen and evaluate the potential candidates to verify that they are in fact good at what they do. After that, you’ll have to stay in regular contact with them to maintain a relationship and stay abreast of any changes in their situation and motivators.
Multiply this effort X 20, 50, 100+ candidates and simply the relationship management aspect of recruiting becomes the single largest time consuming aspect of pipelining candidates.
There must be some value being provided by all of this work being performed to proactively find, screen, and build and manage relationships with candidates for whom you don’t currently have a need, right?
From the comments I received on Part 1 in this series, I can tell many seasoned recruiting veterans certainly know the value that candidate pipelines generate for them.
However, the real question is what value is a recruiter providing to their customers – both candidate and client (hiring manager) – by all of this pipelining activity?
That question is trickier to answer than most people think. It’s actually a pretty deep question, and it can’t be answered by you. Value can only be determined by your customers – both candidates and clients. I’ll be dedicating a whole post to this concept in the near future.
Waste
I think that a large percentage of the time and effort associated with proactively building WIP candidate pipelines (candidates that have been found, screened/evaluated, and kept “warm”) is pure muda.
Muda is a Japanese term for an activity that is wasteful and doesn’t add value or is unproductive. One of the key steps in Lean production and the Toyota Production System is the “identification of which steps in a process add value and which do not. By classifying all the process activities into these two categories it is then possible to start actions for improving the former and eliminating the latter.”
It’s been a LONG time since I’ve written about my theories of Lean Recruiting – I honestly worry that it’s not a topic most people are interested in reading about because it is definitely “outside of the box” of traditional recruiting. However, I feel that Lean production concepts (including JIT sourcing/recruiting) will be a big part of the future of recruiting and staffing.
“Lean production is a practice that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful, and thus a target for elimination. Basically, lean is centered around creating more value with less work.” Now can you see why I’m such a Lean nut?
And remember – we’re not talking about the value to YOU, we’re talking about the value to your customers – candidates and clients.
The 5 Deadly Wastes of Candidate Pipelines
The activities associated with proactively building and maintaining work-in-process candidate pipelines involve 5 of the 7 wastes identified by Lean/TPS: overproduction, inventory, defects, over-processing, and waiting.
Overproduction
This happens each time you engage more candidates than needed to deliver to your customer. Proactively pipelining candidates ahead of need almost always leads to overproduction. Chances are you’ve never looked at it this way.
Inventory
A proactively built pipeline of WIP candidates is inventory and requires time and effort to maintain. Sitting in the “relationship maintenance” phase does not provide a real value for the candidates or clients, and what happens when the positions you pipelined candidates for never get approved or never become available?
Defects
According to Lean, a “defect” is something that does not conform to specifications or expectations.
I’m not suggesting that the people themselves are defects. However, candidates that are proactively sourced, contacted, screened, and with whom a relationship is maintained that do not ultimately match the actual hiring need are defects of the pipelining process. Defects arise whenever job specifications/requirements change from forecast, rendering pipelined candidates no longer qualified, or when candidates are no longer interested, available, or when their motivators change change away from your opportunity.
Forecasts are never perfect – they can’t be. Positions and requirements change, and people don’t stay interested or available forever.
Over-processing
Over-processing occurs any time more work is done than what is required by the customer. Screening and building and maintaining relationships with candidates that will never be submitted to a client/manager can be seen as performing more work than necessary. Are your customers (candidates and clients) requiring you to maintain relationships with a large number of people who will likely no longer be available or interested or even qualified when you actually have a need?
Waiting
Whenever candidates are not being advanced through the recruiting and hiring process, they are waiting. In most traditional recruiting processes, a large part of a candidate’s life is spent waiting to be moved forward in the process. Maintaining relationships with candidates is not moving forward – it’s a holding pattern, which for many candidates, is permanent.
This is What I’ve Got vs. This is the Best Candidate
One of the biggest issues with building candidate pipelines/work-in-process candidate inventory is quite insidious.
What does a recruiter do when they’ve built a deep candidate pipeline and a specific hiring need finally becomes available? They will go to their candidate pipeline of course.
At first glance, this seems like the logical thing to do – they’ve spent all of this time and effort building their work-in-process candidate pipeline – so why wouldn’t they start there? However, when recruiters do this, what they’re essentially doing is going through their inventory – what they happen to have on hand – which they produced not in response to this specific and “real” need, but a more general forecasted need.
Does this sound like a process designed to produce the best candidate at the right time?
I’ve watched many recruiters push their inventory. In many cases, after sorting through their candidate pipeline and determining who is still available, interested, and who actually fits the opening(s) – they may have had some candidates to submit to a client/hiring manager. However, the probability that the “best” candidates in their pipelines were still available and interested was low.
The issue here is pushing candidates just because you have them, without asking the critical question of whether or not they are actually the best candidates you can find.
Opportunity Cost
One of the opportunity costs of developing traditional candidate pipelines comes in the form of spending time and effort following up with candidates and checking to see if they are still available, interested and qualified rather than simply going out and finding the best candidates available.
When that position finally opens up for which you’ve been pipelining for – your first order of business is to make contact with everyone in your pipeline to see who is still available, who’s still interested, and who actually fits the job specifications. This can take a lot of time and effort – time and effort that could arguably be better spent simply going out and finding the best candidates you can, rather than checking your inventory.
And what happens when none of the best candidates in your pipeline are available, interested, or even fit your current hiring need?
Perhaps the reason why many recruiters seem to have too little time to find more and better candidates is because they’re spending so much time maintaining relationships with their candidate pipelines rather than trying to find the right people.
The Alternative to Work-In-Process Inventory
Now that we’ve taken a critical look at traditional pipelining – proactively building work-in-process (WIP) candidate inventory – let’s take a look at another way of viewing candidate inventory.
If you recall, work-in-process inventory is comprised of candidates that a recruiter stays in routine contact with, without a specific and current need. This is what many refer to as the relationship maintenance phase. It’s called “work-in-process” because they’ve been “processed” (sourced, contacted, and screened to some extent) and they also remain “in-process” as long as the recruiter maintains routine contact with them.
So could there be a form of candidate inventory that is not “in-process?”
Yes – I’m glad you asked!
Raw Material Inventory
I believe that resumes and/or candidate profiles (ATS, social networking sites, etc.) that sourcers and recruiters have access to and have the ability to retrieve on-demand are essentially candidates in their “raw material” form.
A raw material is something that is acted upon or used by human labor to create some product. To paraphrase Merriam Webster’s definition, raw material is material that can be converted by processing into a new and useful product: broadly – something with a potential for improvement or development.
“Raw material” candidate inventories consist of readily accessible resumes and/or relatively detailed candidate data (ATS solutions, resume databases, LinkedIn, etc.). These are people who have been identified as potential matches for current and/or future hiring needs based on their candidate data, but no time or energy is spent in an effort to build and maintain a relationship with these potential candidates prior to actual need.
Now, before you go thinking that I am commoditizing people – I’m not.
Remember, the resumes/candidate/social media profiles are the raw material – NOT the people they represent.
So What’s the Alternative to Traditional Candidate Pipelining?
I know it’s not easy getting people to question “the way it’s always been done.” That’s why I’ve spent so much time thoroughly exposing some of the intrinsic issues associated with traditional candidate pipelining.
Now that I’ve shown you a different way to look at candidate inventory (WIP vs. raw material), in my next post I will explain Just-in-Time sourcing and recruiting, under what conditions it can be achieved, and why it’s superior to traditional candidate pipelining.
I’ll also reveal what I believe is the ideal method of pipelining candidates.
Yes, I know that it might come as a bit of a shock to hear that I do believe in building candidate pipelines, especially after the thrashing I’ve given to proactively pipelining candidates ahead of need. However, the method of pipelining I’ve used to be highly productive and to provide maximum value to both candidates and clients isn’t traditional pipelining. 
Speaking of value – In my next post I’m thinking of exploring what the true value is that recruiters provide candidates. Here’s a hint - it’s not pipelining. Because when you really get down to it, pipelining primarily helps YOU, not the candidate.
But more on that next week.
Human Resources weaves the safety net for victims of intimate partner violence in the workplace
There really weren't any resources for my mother in 1972. She volunteered and then worked as a secretary for the local school district where I grew up, and every time my birth father beat her, there was full clothing to cover the bruises, avoiding others stares and conversation, absenteeism when it was really bad, and more.
There were no domestic violence or workplace violence programs, no employee assistance programs offering counseling or shelter referrals, no assessment and action plans from human resources.
Don't ask, don't tell. The fear and shame that comes with abuse and intimate partner violence is overwhelming enough (intimate partner violence another name for domestic violence) - you don't want your employer to know for fear of losing your job. Employers don't want to know for fear of potential violence in the workplace.
For my mother and countless others it was faith and prayer and finally the personal strength to get out of the violence.
It still is, although today there are thankfully so many more resources available and more and more companies have workplace violence and/or intimate partner violence programs and/or EAPs.
HR can and should take the lead in providing these programs.
But consider these:
- A recent survey of CEOs found that most believe domestic violence to be a serious issue, yet 71% did not believe it is a problem in their company. (The reality is that approximately 21% of fulltime working adults report being a victim of domestic violence.)
- Over 70% of United States workplaces have no formal program or policy that addresses workplace violence.
- Of the approximately 30% that have formal workplace violence policies in place (usually binders on shelves gathering dust), only 13% have domestic violence in the workplace policies and only 4% provide training on domestic violence in the workplace (Bureau of Labor Statistics from 2006).
Only 4%. Seems like one helluva short trip from 1972.
And consider these EAP obstacles:
- The most common reason women didn't contact their EAP for intimate partner violence is that they didn't think about it or didn't think appropriate.
- Employee utilization of intimate partner violence EAP services is very low.
- The number one concern of battered women before contacting an EAP is confidentiality -- they’re afraid employee will find out.
- Most EAPs don't have standardized evaluations or codes for intimate partner violence.
But even considering there's much work to be done, human resources, security professionals, EAPs and workplace violence non-profits have all made huge strides in working together to address intimate partner violence and workplace violence.
One organization in particular - the Corporate Alliance to End Partner Violence - is the only national organization of its kind founded by business leaders and focused on the workplace. Check out some the companies that are members. I came in contact with this organization earlier this year and was fortunate enough to participate in a few of their S2 - Safer, Smarter Workplace webinars. I was also fortunate enough to interview its Executive Director, Kim Wells (that'll be the next HR Market Share podcast after Thanksgiving).
Amazing employer resources come from the CAEPV. Download Six Steps to Creating a Successful Workplace Program here. Also, great list of dos and don'ts here.
EAPs play a critical role as well. One of our clients - Corporate Counseling Associates - recently released a white paper titled Healthy Organizations Mitigate the Risk of Violence that includes several ways to reduce the threat of violence in the workplace:
- Communicate a zero tolerance policy & develop ongoing employee communications to reinforce the message.
- Set up company procedures for reporting incidents of violence.
- Create a Threat of Violence (TOV) Team, involving members of the following departments: Health Services, Human Resources, Security, EAP, Legal, Facilities Management, Corporate Affairs, and Public Relations.
- Establish organizational mechanisms to prevent violence.
- Constantly monitor and identify “weak spots” in management practices and/or development programs.
- Educate senior management on the warning signs and symptoms of violence-prone individuals, and the environmental pressures that can trigger incidents.
- Train the TOV team to ensure a disciplined execution of strategy.
- Learn how to de-escalate aggression and improve conflict management skills. Run crisis scenario simulations.
In fact, the latest S2 webinar was all about Addressing Domestic Violence in the Workplace: An EAP/Employer Partnership. (CCA wasn't a part of this webinar, however.)
We have come a long way from 1972. With all the organizations like CAEPV, CCA and many other EAPs, HR weaves the safety net for victims of intimate partner violence in the workplace.
More on this to come. We're organizing a roundtable virtual discussion on workplace violence for early in the new year.
Post by Kevin W. Grossman (join me on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn - and now joinHRmarketer on Twitter!)
Book Review: Getting More From Your Training Programs
We are in the process of identifying and selecting some training programs for various departments at HRmarketer.com.
Research over several decades indicates that only between 10 to 20 percent of employees apply what they learn in training programs to achieve business results.
Ouch.
So when I saw this recent e-book announcement from HRmarketer.com member RealTime Performance on “Getting More From Your Investment in Training: The 5A’s Framework” I was interested.
I downloaded the first two chapters (this was their content offer - very nice).
The e-book, authored by Dr. Stephen J. Gill and RealTime Performance CEO Sean P. Murray, addresses the internal organizational roadblocks to effective learning and guides managers through a framework to help them get more business impact from their every dollar invested in training.
The "framework" outlined in the book, called the 5A's Framework, offers a description of the factors that lead to a learning culture and outlines steps to ensure that training investments will produce desired business results. The areas (5 "A"'s) include alignment, anticipation, application, alliance and accountability.
It's a pretty good read. Check it out.
Our Newest Blog – HRVendorNews.com. And Other Helpful Resources.
HRmarketer has launched a new blog called HR Vendor News. This replaces an older - and award winning - blog titled Breaking HR News.
The quick facts..........
Blog Name: HR Vendor News
Blog URL: www.HRvendorNews.com
Feed: http://www.hrvendornews.com/?feed=rss2
Description: Selected press releases from human resource vendors - updated daily.
Some other "news" sites, content sites and blogs from HRmarketer that HR vendors may be interested in include (all are free):
- HR Industry News: This weekly newsletter includes about 30-40 news stories relating mostly to HR vendor news. A great way to keep up with what is going on in the space. View archives here or subscribe to the newsletter here.
- News for HR: This newsletter gets distributed to over 80,000 opt-in HR decision makers. To submit your content for consideration please send to newsforhr [at] hrmarketer.com. Advertising is also available. The archives are online here.
- HR Buyers Guide: Our HR Buyers Guide, located in our HR Directory, includes detailed profiles for over 700 human resource vendors - and growing daily. If you do not have your profile, create one (its free). We'll be adding some very cool features to this buyers guide soon including the ability for HR decision makers to initiate RFPs and communicate with vendors online. Thousands of human resource professionals visit our Directory each month giving your company increased exposure to this important audience.
- White Papers +: Also located in our HR Directory is our White Papers + database where over 3,000 HR white papers, articles, case studies, podcasts, research, webcasts and more can be found. Once you have a Profile in our Buyers Guide, you can add content to your "Content Syndication" section on your profile so your company will be listed more often in our White Papers + database. You don't need to upload the content, just the URL of where it is on your web site which will improve your SEO. An example of how this can be used can be found at the Profiles for Buck Consultants and Accurate Background.
- HR Marketing and PR Downloads: As many of you know, HRmarketer produces lots of great white papers, articles, podcasts and other resources to help educate HR vendors on best practices in marketing to HR. All are free and all are located here.
Enjoy.
