Tag Archives: Data Point Tuesday

April 2, 2013 · 4:30 am

Background Screening: Not So Fast

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Well, not so fast, my friend, as Lee Corso likes to say. A new survey results report from EmployeeScreenIQ, Employment Screening Practices & Trends: Not so fast, my friend (Lee Corso)The Era of Heightened Care and Diligence, brings up some important issues and is interesting on several fronts.

First, from a regulatory perspective, it would seem that employers aren’t paying a lot of attention to the relatively new EEOC guidance on criminal background checks that was released in April 2012.  According to the survey, of the almost 70% of respondents who said that their organizations have reviewed the EEOC guidance, only a little more than half of them have not made changes to their screening policies as a result. More interesting, though, is the 32% of respondents who either weren’t familiar with or haven’t reviewed the guidance. Huh.

Second, more than half the respondents report that only 15% or less of job candidates distort their resumes to the extent that they aren’t hired. This is surprising given the perception that distorting resume claims is the best way to be disqualified from employment opportunities. Surprisingly, these survey results may reflect that employers see resume distortion as a minor factor in the screening process. Huh.

EmployeeScreenIQ Resume Distortion Impact

Third, and most interesting to me, is the impact of the legal uncertainty for using social media as a source of background screening information. This uncertainty appears to have scared the you-know-what out of employers. Huh.

Actually, I’m not sure I believe the data here. Or rather, the survey questions may not have been posed to the right people.

EmployeeScreenIQ Social Networking Sites

Really? Only 36% of employers always or sometimes check social networking sites for background information? Huh. Here’s what I think is happening. Those corporate folks responsible for filling out surveys like this – in the recruiting function – know the legal quicksand that is forming around the use of social media for employment screening and are clear that their formal guidelines restrict the use of Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, blogs, etc. in this way. This doesn’t mean that hiring managers aren’t doing it anyway. In fact, I think it’s a fair bet that although many employers are specific in excluding social networking sites for candidate background screening, as reported in this report, hiring managers do it anyway. All. The. Time.

That’s why the next survey question’s answers seem highly suspect to me.

EmployeeScreenIQ Why Not Social

Don’t have time? Right.  Not relevant? Please.

I guarantee that hiring managers make the time because they think checking out “social” behavior is extremely relevant.

This report brings up some great questions for recruiters and hiring managers and shows the need, I think, for greater communication between these two groups. Staying on top of EEOC guidance is, of course, a critical part of HR’s regulatory and risk mitigation obligations. Evaluating the impact of resume distortion is part of the recruiters’ responsibility. And staying current on the evolving legal decisions in the employment/social media space is a critical new high impact area of contribution for the HR and recruiting functions.

One might not think that the arcane world of background screening would present such an interesting opportunity for HR pros. Think again.

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Filed under Background checks, Candidate Experience, China Gorman, Connecting Dots, Data Point Tuesday, EEOC, EmployeeScreenIQ, Employment Screening, HR Credibility, Talent Acquisition

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March 19, 2013 · 5:00 am

Sources of Hire: Is Perception Reality?

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Along with Quality of Hire, Source of Hire is starting to take center stage in the talent acquisition world. The annual report tracking and analyzing Source of Hire from CareerXroads is out today.  Sources of Hire 2013:  Perception is Reality contains truly interesting data – understandable and actionable.  And the authors ask some really important questions about B2D (Big Bad Data) and how to measure the pre-application talent supply chain.

Early in the whitepaper, Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler, the principals at CareerXroads, show the following chart of source of hire data from 1997 – collected by SHRM and EMA (now part of SHRM).

Sources of Hire 1997

Talk about a blast from the past! Newspaper ads generated the most hires at 28.7% of hires and Agencies – both contingent and executive search – generated 12.5% of hires. My how the world has changed.  Here’s the 2012 data:

2012 Sources of Hire

Print has fallen from a combined (newspaper and trade journals) 32.9% to 2.3%!  “Internet” has grown from 2.1% (had Al Gore even invented the internet in 1997?) to a combined (career site, job boards and social media) 44.4%!

There is a lot in which to be interested in comparing these two charts, so have fun.

There nuggets of pure gold in this whitepaper.  Two in particular stood out to me. The first is the expectation for increased hiring in 2013.

Total Hires 2013 Source of Hire

If true, we’re about to see a whole lot of domestic hiring!  The national hiring figures are trending slowly upward, but at the same time we read in the press that the implementation of the new health care rules is retarding hiring in the small business sector, the sector credited with being the job creation “engine.” This will be interesting to watch. Will the need for growth overcome the risk and costs associated with that growth?

The second nugget is the reminder that the source of the majority of hires is the pool of existing employees.

Internal Movement Source of Hire

The whitepaper accurately points out that internal movement and promotion are higher during difficult economic periods – and this is evident in the graph above.  However, a steady increase in this category may also be due to the perception of a growing skills scarcity in the outside talent market.

Enjoy the whitepaper. And begin to ask yourself some of the questions posed by Gerry and Mark.  Questions like…

  • How comfortable are you defending the 2013 plan for your budget, recruiters, technology tools, partners, vendors, training and your sources to your peers and colleagues?

  • How much should your 2013 recruiting strategy include improving your collection and analysis methods?

  • Are referrals the best source of hire?

  • What “Sources” interact with each other the most?

  • How can I collect Source of Hire data?

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Filed under CareerXroads, China Gorman, Connecting Dots, Data Point Tuesday, Gerry Crispin, Hiring, Hiring Difficulty, HR Data, Mark Mehler, Quality of Hire, SHRM, Source of Hire, Talent Acquisition

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March 12, 2013 · 4:30 am

The Tip of the Engagement Spear

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BlessingWhite’s Employee Engagement Research Update has recently been released.  It’s an update to their massive research published in 2011. Measuring engagement is tricky – from gaining consensus on terms and definitions, to crafting survey questions that generate useful answers, to identifying key findings, to agreeing on recommendations – it’s all very tricky.

BlessingWhite does a good job managing the trickiness.  But truthfully, there’s not a lot of difference in engagement scores globally since their 2011 findings.

Here’s what caught my attention, though, as it did 2 years ago, as I read through the report:  a greater percentage of the workforce trust their managers more than they trust the executives in their organizations.

This makes sense, right? Managers have day-to-day interaction with their colleagues and can get to know them in personal ways. Executives, on the other hand, rarely have one-to-one interaction with the majority of the employees their organization. And the survey results show the difference in trust levels.

I trust my manager BW 2013

I trust senior leaders BW 2013

It’s a good thing that employees in North America trust their managers more than they trust their senior leaders because there’s a high correlation between engagement and trust in managers. Or maybe it’s the other way around.  Either way, BlessingWhite points out that while engaged employees have other factors that motivate them – like interesting work, a sense of contribution and career aspirations – less-engaged employees are far more dependent on knowing their manager personally to reach higher levels of engagement.

This makes managers the tip of the engagement spear. And why we spend so much time focused on managerial effectiveness in almost every category of performance.

Not so with senior leaders, which is understandable because they don’t have the ability to interact personally with every employee, as BlessingWhite points out.  But they do have the responsibility to set the direction of the culture, communicate that direction with a “clear line-of-sight” throughout the organization, and create a culture that fuels engagement and business results. In other words, set the managers up for success in engaging their teams in more personal ways.

The CASE model, reviewed briefly at the end of the report, focuses senior leaders to fulfill four key workforce needs in building and leading their cultures:

  • Community for a sense of belonging and purpose
  • Authenticity  as a basis for trust and inspiration
  • Significance to recognize individuals’ contributions
  • Excitement to constantly encourage – and raise the bar on – high performance

It’s a good message for executives. It’s a great message for managers. It’s a call-to-action message for HR to know how to help executives drive performance and grow their culture while supporting managers to make more personal connections.

Engagement isn’t the answer to every organizational challenge. But it does seem clear that highly engaged workplaces are more productive than less engaged workforces. And almost every organizational challenge I can think of gets solved more effectively and faster with an engaged workforce working the solution and being led by managers who are personally leading the way.

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Filed under BlessingWhite, China Gorman, Connecting Dots, Data Point Tuesday, Engagement, HR Data, Managerial Effectiveness, Workforce Management

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March 5, 2013 · 4:30 am

From the Archives: Memo to HR

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Until last week’s post about Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer’s decision to end telecommuting, the post below from March 18, 2011 was the most read of all my posts.  Interesting.

TO:                         HR

FROM:                  China Gorman

RE:                         News flash!

Date:                     March 18, 2011

Guess what?  Your CEO probably gets it.

I know HR pros like to kvetch about the C-Suite in their organizations:

  • “My CEO doesn’t get it.”
  • “The CEO and CFO run the business like people are widgets.”
  • “I can’t get the C-Suite interested in cutting edge HR solutions.”

Those days are over, friends.  I’ve met and talked with a number of CEOs lately.  CEOs from Fortune 200 companies, medium-sized companies and start-ups.  I’ve been struck by the conversations we’ve had.  Because in each case, these CEOs exhibit many of the behaviors HR pros are looking for from their CEOs.  Here are some of the signs:

1.       Talent acquisition/development comes up early in a conversation about their top challenges.

2.       They have done reading – or in some cases, writing – about corporate culture and are actively involved in leading a change in their organization’s culture.

3.       They have embraced the research of an OD or culture expert/guru whose work they are integrating into their culture and language.

4.       Succession planning is among the top issues on which their leadership team is working.

5.       Employee engagement is critical to them.  They know the scores of their organization’s most recent employee attitude survey and are peering over the shoulders of their operations leaders to ensure the opportunities for improvement are moving forward — in line with the culture change work they’re leading.

6.       Supervisors/managers are measured by how well they manage the performance and development of their people.

7.        Diversity/inclusion enters the conversation early when talking about culture.

But here’s the thing, HR.  This is a trend.  We’re going to see more and more of these behaviors from CEOs as we experience the pending generational shift in the ultimate C-Suite in organizations large and small.

So here’s the big question:  Are you ready? Are you ready to be evidence-based in your leadership?  Are you ready to base organization and business solutions on current research and analytics?  I hope so.  Because the next generation of CEOs – as well as some in the current generation as my experience indicates – while  they’re beginning to focus on what HR would say are the right issues, they’re still the CEO.  They’re still all about the numbers.  Outcomes.  Growth.  Quality.  They still need fact and data to support their decision making.  That’s not going to change.   And if they don’t get that fact and data from HR where are they going to get it?

CEOs don’t really make critical decisions much by “gut feel” and that probably won’t change.  Ever.   Sure, some may be more spontaneous than others.  Some may be more extroverted than others.  And some may actually sound like HR professionals.  But they’re still CEOs.  They still have to deliver top and bottom line performance this quarter and next.  And they have to have a plan for the longer horizon – a plan that is based on real data and supported by the current set of facts.

Where would the average HR professional begin to source useful research data and analytics?  SHRM, CIPD, ASTD, WorldatWork – all the large HR-related professional associations are investing more and more into their research capabilities.  They all conduct and publish top notch research in every aspect of the people domain in organizations. They want their members to embrace more rigorous and sound methodologies.  Heck.  They’re pleading with their members to be consumers of relevant research because they know the day of reckoning is approaching.

Other organizations like The Conference Board, the Corporate Executive Board and Bersin & Associates all publish extraordinary research that enable HR to make fact-based decisions and to get HR metrics aligned with financial metrics.  Free sources of actionable research-based data include the SHRM Foundation, the U.S. Department of Labor,  the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and innumerable non-profit organizations that cover the waterfront of issues and functions.

Since more and more CEOs are “getting” the fact that people and culture are critical to business success, is HR “getting” that in order to respond to this CEO movement in their direction, they need to be making movement into the fact and data-based world of the CEO?  I surely hope so.

It’s past time to get comfortable with research and analytics — and making them actionable.

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February 26, 2013 · 4:30 am

Candidate Experience vs. the Black Hole

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A couple of months ago I shared some data from an Aberdeen Group report about benchmarking quality of hire best practices here. It’s a great benchmark list of outcomes.  But how about the inputs?

More specifically, in terms of quality of hire, how about benchmarking the quality of the candidate experience? Call me crazy, but it seems to me that a higher quality candidate experience translates into a higher quality of hire.

As background, The Talent Board was formed in January 2011 to assist recruiting organizations in understanding and evaluating the experiences of their candidates.

“While there is an inherent dissatisfaction that comes with rejecting employment candidates, the Talent Board believes that it is possible to:

  • Treat all employment candidates with professionalism and respect
  • Shrink the recruiting “blackhole” effect on candidates.”

The Talent Board founders, Gerry Crispin, Elaine Orler and Ed Newman and their colleagues have just produced the 2012 Candidate Experience report from their survey and awards program.   In its second year, the research was based on survey responses from 90 companies (up from 57 in 2011) and more than 17,500 completed candidate surveys (up from 11,500).

To be clear, that’s 17,500 candidates for employment answering questions about their experience as an applicant in four defined phases of the talent acquisition process:

  1. Candidate attraction
  2. Expression of interest
  3.  Candidate dispositioning before the finalist stage
  4. Candidate evaluation & selection

The report gives data from the employer questionnaire as well as from the candidate questionnaire.  As examples, here are two such questions.  Interesting to note the differences between employers and their candidates.

CandE Emp #34 Cand #20

But for most, the topic of most interest is the infamous “black hole” – that old familiar experience of applying for a job by filling out an application on line, attaching a resume to an online application or email, or using snail mail to send in a resume … and never getting a response.   Worse, the black hole could happen after a phone interview.  Or after a face-to-face interview.  At the entry level.  At the professional level.  At the executive level.  Yes the black hole is everywhere. In every industry, geography and size of company.  We’ve all experienced it. And we’ve all derived meaning from it.

The 90 employers that participated in the Candidate Experience Survey last year are paying attention to the black hole.  And while a boilerplate email message from a “do not reply” address notifying an applicant that they won’t be a candidate is only a smidge better than the black hole, bad communication is better than no communication and it’s a baby step in the right direction.  The report goes on to show guarded optimism that while some employers are beginning to provide feedback to disposed candidates when asked, not many are making it a standard practice.

But here’s the kicker:   fully one third of candidates from employers who care about the black hole were provided no specific feedback about their application. And nearly half received a standard email template with no specific information.

CandE Candidate Question #36

One third got no feedback. Zero. Zip. Nada. That’s a massive black hole, right there. And think what meaning is derived from it about the employer’s brand, culture, management, products and services. Connecting those dots isn’t hard.

So.  While a few employers are connecting the dots between quality of hire and quality of candidate experience, it’s clearly not enough.  If your organization is beginning to look at quality of hire metrics, don’t forget the candidate experience.  I’m not sure you can improve one without improving the other.

And check out the process for participating in the 2013 CandE Awards program.  You can’t improve future performance without a clear understanding of current performance.  That includes quality of hire – which surely includes the candidate experience.  Time to get rid of the black hole!

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Filed under Black Hole, CandE Awards, Candidate Experience, China Gorman, Connecting Dots, Data Point Tuesday, HR Data, Quality of Hire, Talent Acquisition, Talent pipeline, The Talent Board

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March 13, 2012 · 8:59 am

Data Point #2: Quits vs. Layoffs/Discharges

The unemployment rate is 8.3%.  Better than a year ago, but still 8.3%.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that there are 12.8 million unemployed workers in the United States.  Most believe that the real number is closer to 18 million – the difference being those who have been unemployed so long that they’ve given up hope in finding a job.

There’s no doubt that the economy is showing signs of improvement.  However, last Tuesday the Dow lost more than 200 points – the single biggest one-day loss in 2012.  Gasoline averages $3.80 a gallon and is predicted to top $4.00/gallon by summer.  Fears of the European economy tanking and taking the U.S. economy with it are still strong.  And the anticipation of a myriad of tax increases hitting businesses and individuals on January 1, 2012 creates enormous uncertainty.

Job satisfaction in the U.S. continues to decline and the percentage of workers who report being engaged is less than 33% by some measures.

So this next data point is somewhat astonishing, and cause for concern by HR professionals everywhere.  According to data released today by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the numbers of workers who are leaving their jobs voluntarily continues to grow and outpace the number of workers who are leaving their jobs involuntarily.

The graph shows that during good economic times the number of workers who leave their jobs voluntarily is larger – significantly larger – than those who are involuntarily terminated.  It stands to reason.  If they don’t like their boss, if they don’t trust their CEO, if their work isn’t meaningful, if another company offers more money – they resign.

It also stands to reason – and the chart shows this clearly – that in bad economic times the number of workers who quit voluntarily drops precipitously. Leaving your job in a really bad economy– without a new one to go to — defies logic.  And unless the situation is unbearable, most people are logical when it comes to their employment and cash flow.

Most would agree that the economy is still bad.  There are still millions of workers looking for jobs.  The economic and political environments are shaky.  Yet the number of people thinking “I can’t take it another day – there’s got to be something better than this:  I quit” is  growing.  In this economy.  With these uncertainties.

     What does this say about the level of dissatisfaction and disengagement within our workforces?

     What does this say about the cultures of our organizations?

     What does this say about our ability to retain the talent that we need?

Well, if you’re an optimist like I am, this is what you think:

     What a great opportunity we have to create a differentiated employee experience!

     What a great time to start strengthening our culture!

     What a great time to start recruiting!

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Filed under Bureau of Labor Statistics, Data Point Tuesday, Employment Data, Engagement, Talent pipeline, U.S. Department of Labor, Uncategorized

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March 6, 2012 · 9:32 am

Data Point #1: Unemployment Rate vs. Layoff Data

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics published a mixed bag of news week before last.  While the unemployment rate fell from 8.5% in December to 8.3% in January, the number of mass layoff events in January grew by 50 over the previous month.  (A mass layoff event  involves at least 50 workers from a single employer.)  The total number of employees involved in these events, however, was reduced month-over-month by 15,728.  So while more employers were downsizing in January, fewer employees were impacted.  Good news, right?  Maybe…

Looking at the trend lines in the chart below, HR professionals may scratch their heads and wonder what is different in January 2012 from April 2008?  The number of initial claims are similar:  128,643 in April 2008 vs 129,920 in January 20102.  But the unemployment rate is significanttly dissimilar:  5% unemployment in April 2008 vs. 8.3% unemployment in January 2012.  What’s going on?

Clearly, the lagging effects of the economic downturn which began to gather steam in the 3rd and 4th quarters of 2008 are still being felt.  The resulting embedded base of unemployed workers continues to weigh heavily on the U.S. economy and the unemployment rate despite the falling numbers of layoff events and impacted workers.

So how is this data useful for HR professionals?  Simple.  Putting the long-time unemployed back to work has to be job #1 in our organizations and our communities.  As your organization plans to grow its employee base — whether with contract, temporary or full-time employees — what are your plans to target the long-term unemployed for inclusion in the talent pipeline?

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Filed under Bureau of Labor Statistics, China Gorman, Data Point Tuesday, Employment Data, HR, Talent pipeline, U.S. Department of Labor, Uncategorized

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February 29, 2012 · 7:31 pm

New feature at ChinaGorman.com!

Data are ubiquitous!  Particularly when it comes to the management of people in organizations.  But although data are everywhere, it’s hard to find useful information.  And it’s hard to find free useful information.

And so today I’m introducing a new feature at my blog:  Data Point Tuesday.  Each week I’ll post a data point and briefly discuss it.  My intention is to provide HR professionals with sources of free data that can help them be stronger participants in the strategic leadership of their organizations.  And if you’ve got a great free source of data or information that is helping you be smart in your HR job, share it here.  We’ll all get smarter together.

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