Job Fit

• Link to the map/directions page of your company website when sending an interview invite to an applicant.
• Link to a document that sets forth an applicant's agenda for an upcoming series of in-house interviews.
• Link to an external site where an applicant may complete paperwork such as a background check waiver.
• Link to a new job posting on your Search Jobs Page when emailing past "A Player" applicants, and invite them to reapply to more recent job listings.

• mid-to high- energy level - I like to multi-task and I'm not the most patient person around
• mid- to high-assertiveness - competitive and achievement-oriented
• high sociability - conversational (surprise, surprise)
• lower accommodating - I won't necessarily follow the group just to get along with others

1. "We educate as much as we evaluate. We realize that throughout the entire recruiting process we must continue to show the value of the opportunity, the potential for personal growth, and future direction of our company.  The candidates are interviewing us as much as we are interviewing them.
   

2. Be honest with the candidates.  We talk about the specifics of the position, the requirements, and what our expectations are for performance.  False expectations on either end will end in disappointment (on either side).

3. If a candidate is not a good fit for the position, we will try to help them network with others that might be a better fit.   We have done this with several individuals and helped them find the right position (with another company)."

I am positively euphoric this week after watching my Butler Bulldogs bring a juicy Final Four bone home to their own backyard! As a member of the very first “Barry’s Bad Dogs” student cheering section more than a decade ago (now known simply as the “Bad Dogs” since Barry Collier is the AD while Brad Stevens has the coaching reins at Butler), it is amazing to realize what my alma mater’s team has accomplished in the last ten years.

There’s a lot of talk about The Butler Way. While it has certainly been defined, anyone familiar with the style of Butler basketball knows that it is a distinct, disciplined, collaborative way of playing the game, grooming the players, and emphasizing athletics and academics. It is a culture in itself.

With any culture, as values are increasingly well defined, individuals involved in the group enjoy a synergy and understand how to work in a way that promotes the most efficiency and success for the group. If an individual’s behavior, skills, cognitive ability and personality are a natural complement to the group culture, he or she is sure to achieve his or her full potential and contribute to the success of the group.

The Bulldogs’ continued effort to recruit players that subscribe to their culture is paying off in a big way. But in your organization, do you have a clear vision of your culture and how it translates into bull’s eye job fit for your employees and future hires? And if you do, great, but how do you then measure and assess an individual’s likelihood of superior job performance? You use employee assessments as part of your talent management process.

Sure, you think you have done a decent job of screening and hiring successful employees without assessments so far. Most of your hires work out, some don’t. I challenge you to think about whether your current caliber of teammates and talent acquisition processes would barely qualify you for the NCAA Tournament; or, would you make it to the Final Four and win the championship in your industry?

To win in your industry by recruiting players with better job fit, contact ExactHire at www.exacthire.com. Go Dawgs!

Libby Sartain, Chief People Officer at Yahoo says that “What makes a great employer brand is how it serves to attract and retain and engage talent.” It seems like we are all trying all sorts of ideas to do just that. Ms. Sartain, along with Mark Schumann, has completed a book entitled, Brand for Talent, a sample of which can be read here.  There were a couple of issues that caught my attention. They were how a talent brand must “be the strategic tool for a company to attract and retain people and survive Social Media.” Connect to article here.

In the book, the authors emphasize that there is a new “consumer of work.” This consumer is what we used to call job seekers. While the leaders of this new shift are members of Generation Y, it can just as easily be those well before Generation Y. It is not as much the age factor that is working here as it is a comfort level with and reliance on technology. These are people who see no reason to shift their reliance on technology when looking for a job. 

If these new “consumers” are not totally engaged in the organization, they will continue to look for opportunities even after they have taken a position with your company.  Their overall job performance will likely suffer if technology isn't central to the duties of the job.  Therefore, it becomes even more important to begin that engagement process at the earliest possible moment à from the time they view your application process(including addressing the social media piece) to how you ask your interview questions to how you onboard them.

This means using HR software as a cornerstone to your recruiting and human capital management processes is critical.  Applicant Tracking Software is the first interaction most of these "consumers" will have with your organization.  You want to utilize a solution that  provides the tools you need to be user friendly, technology savvy, and offers a way to express your company brand effectively.  In addition, the solution must provide multiple ways of using  social media to get your brand and job opportunities visibility in the employment marketplace.  Finally, this applicant tracking software should offer a way to ask those critical interview questions right on the application that can help ensure that a person is going to fit within the culture of your organization. This most definitely contributes in a positive way to ensuring the engagement of these "consumers of work" and their long term commitment to your organization.

Visit our website at www.exacthire.com to learn more about how our applicant tracking solutions can help you better acquire the right consumers of work for your organization.

Most of us will do more shopping in the months of November and December than we do all year. Have any of you left a store and wondered what process the company used for hiring the associates you just had to interact with.

Have you wondered if your customers ask the same questions about your staff and your company?

While we as owners and key managers feel we know how to treat customers and prospects the truth is that most of the time it is not us that interacts with this key group. So our job is to hire  people that have great Job Fit and will have great employee engagement to make a difference.

When I explain great customer service to my staff, I tell them that it is not complicated. "How does the customer feel when they hang up from talking to you?" That is how customer service is defined, and they measure it every time they interact with us.

If you want help figuring out who will be great in this crucial area of your company visit our website. In short order we can show you how to make changes in your company that will return significant results.

Visit us at www.exacthire.com to learn more.

At ExactHire, we believe that picking the right employee for the right job is the most critical part of the hiring process. Making sure there is a fit can make the difference in whether you keep a customer or not. And, keeping the customers you have and gaining more leads to financial success.   While we all agree with this line of thinking, let me share a story as to how this has been statistically proven to be more than just a theory.  

In 1997, Anthony Rucci, then Chief Administrative Officer at Sears, wanted to test a theory. The theory was that the leading indicators that predict financial performance were employee attitudes and whether customers saw their stores as fun places to shop.

They went to Claes Fornell International Group, an organization made up of

econometric statisticians at the University of Michigan and asked them if they could help prove this theory. CFI took years of data that Sears had collected on customer satisfaction and work-place questionnaires and put it into their causal modeling technique. The result was that the CFI modeling told Sears that two key components, employees’ attitudes about the job and attitudes about the company, predicted their behavior in front of the customer. How employees behaved in front of customers predicted the likelihood of customer retention and customers recommending Sears to others.  In turn, this directly predicted financial performance. 

Here is the real key: They built an “empirical model that says unless you have a trained, literate, motivated, competent work force, and give them decision-making authority, you don't get satisfied customers no matter how good the merchandise is. The right work force creates customer satisfaction, and that produces superior financial performance.” (http://www.cfornell.es/resources/articles/sears.pdf)

Your chances of keeping these most valuable human assets begin with selecting the best ones in the first place. That means using the best applicant tracking tools, assessments for job fit and making the onboarding process as seamless and informative as possible. Visit: www.exacthire.com and learn how we can help you produce superior financial performance.

If you work in HR you believe, with all your being, that good human capital management leads to better productivity and better product quality. But, sometimes it’s so hard to prove, especially to a CFO who wants to see short-term financial improvements.   As one top HR professional put it, "A financial person is concerned with taking money out of the organization. HR should be concerned with putting investments in." Well, now there is some research to support the connection between successful applicants and product quality.

One of the leaders in this effort is Betty Lou Smith, the vice president of corporate HR at Hunter Douglas. She began investigating the connection between employee turnover and product quality. Divisions with the highest turnover rates, she found, were also those with damaged-goods rates of 5% or higher. And extraordinarily, 70% of employees were leaving the company within six months of being hired. 

Visit: http://www.fastcompany.com/node/53319/print . This is a fascinating article that also focuses a great deal on why others in many organizations don't care for human resource planning and talent management in general.  While most of us might disagree with some of the points made in the article, it is thought-provoking.  
 

Effective Applicant Tracking Software and assessments can be the first steps in finding those with the right Job Fit. Creating thought-provoking key questions right on the application can save a recruiter time and help focus the search on only those that meet the very highest standards. Using employee assessments can validate those first impressions.

At ExactHire, we love creative HR managers who are ready to use every resource at their disposal--Applicant Tracking, Assessments, Human Resource Management Systems-- to get to that perfect Job Fit. We believe, like you, that putting investment IN an organization will produce the value that makes taking money OUT possible. Check out our new website for more information: www.exacthire.com. 

SHRM did a survey of employees to determine what was important to them. The rating used a 4-point scale to indicate what was “very unimportant” (that’s a 1) to them or “very important” (that’s a 4).

The percentages below indicate how many people gave the item a 4, meaning “very important.”

The 601 full- or part-time employees were randomly selected from a U.S.population.

63%  Job security 
60%  Benefits
57% Compensation/Pay
55% Opportunity to use skills/abilities
54% Feeling safe in the work environment 
52% Relationship with the immediate supervisor 
52% Management recognition of employee job performance
51% Communication between employees and senior management 
50% The work itself
47% Autonomy and independence 
46% Flexibility to balance life and work issues
45% Meaningfulness of job
45% Overall corporate culture 
42% Relationships with co-workers
39% Contribution of work to organization’s business goals
35% Job-specific training
34% Variety of work 
32% Career advancement opportunities 
31% Organization’s commitment to corporate social responsibility 
30% Organization’s commitment to professional development 
29% Paid training and tuition reimbursement programs  
22% Career development opportunities
17% Organization’s commitment to a “green” workplace 

Besides the expected answers that relate to pay and benefits, notice how high the rankings are for how they feel about their job and their supervisors.

The key here is not only hiring people that have Job Fit but also making sure you have the right supervisors in place.

When it comes to Job Fit, Job Performance and feedback for HR Management--we'd like to hear what your issues are.  We would like the opportunity to help you imrprove your organization.  Check us out at www.exacthire.com

Human Resource Planning---Talent Acquisition

Keeps You Ahead of the Competition!

There is a higher chance that your competition can replicate your product easier than they can replicate your human capital. So why not invest in the best human resource tools? This does not mean large dollar amounts. What it does mean is investing in highly effective applicant tracking software and career personality tests that can make you the best in human resource planning and management.

The key to staying ahead of the competition is managing your human resource tools to create better employees. If you use effective applicant tracking software that asks applicants for key, job related, information you will increase your ability to create a world class team that can build, market and sell your product far better than your competition. 

You spend money and time to protect your product or service secrets, why not find out what little it takes to create the best human resource tools? Even if you have the same product, you’ll win every time with an applicant tracking system that increases the quality of your talent acquisition.

Don’t risk losing your best human capital to your competition. ExactHire can help you. Go to www.exacthire.com.