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‘Get Me to a Human:’

When and where human judgment gets better results

Key Recruiting Functions that Still Require People

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‘GET ME TO A HUMAN:’ KEY RECRUITING FUNCTIONS THAT STILL REQUIRE PEOPLE

12015 CareerBuilder survey, 2015 Candidate Behavior Job-Seeker Data. Leading causes of frustration with application process: 57% said “process is too automated, no human contact”; 51% said “It is harder to differentiate myself from a sea of candidates”; “51% said “I have no idea where I am in the process from lack of communication”; and 41% cited as the leading reason for frustration “resumes are vetted by computers.” Elsewhere in the survey, 39% said job search experiences are difficult are “needing a personal connection to someone already working at the company as applying only online is pointless.”

2 Walker, Jack, et al., “Watch What You Say: Job Applicants’ Justice Perceptions from Initial Organizational Correspondence,” Human Resources Management, 2014 Wiley Publications.

3 Kammeyer-Muteller, John, et al., “Support, Undermining, and Newcomer Socialization: Fitting in During the First 90 Days.” 2013, Vol. 56, No. 4, 1104-1124. “Early support and undermining had more significant relationships with work outcomes assessed after 90 days of employment than did increases or decreases in support and undermining over that time period, suggesting early support and undermining may lay a foundation for later work outcomes.”

Veteran recruiting executives know human resources and recruiting are moving more and more rapidly into the technological space. Whether applicant tracking systems (ATS), vendor management systems, background screening applications, and automated reference checking, to name just a few – automation offers assistance in more and more recruiting functions.

The new technology generates a lot of buzz, and rightly so. However, key players in the marketplace, in their excitement, can easily lose sight of the more essential, human element. And companies may do so to their detriment:

• Job applicants often feel trapped in a recruiting algorithm, and find the lack of a human touch and human judgment in the hiring process as leading reasons application processes are difficult. Four of the top five reasons in a recent survey on the topic describe frustration with automation in the initial application process.1

• Candidates make a judgment about the fairness of the organization, and thus their enthusiasm, early in the process2. It’s called a “fairness heuristic” (a rule of thumb about fairness based on the limited information available to a job candidate during recruiting), placing a premium on humane, equitable treatment early in the recruiting process. And that often means feeling they are heard, speaking with someone.

• New hires either get early support or undermined in their first 90 days from colleagues and co-workers—and a lot hangs in the balance. Early support from colleagues and supervisors shows a strong relationship with performance outcomes later3. That early support starts at the very beginning of the recruiting process, starting from sourcing, to screening and interviewing.

Bottom line: It’s the human element that can make or break the talent acquisition process, from sourcing, screening and interviewing through to onboarding. This is particularly true with “people-centric” organizations that rely heavily on interpersonal skills of frontline employees to set the right tone with customers. You need people to find the best people.

INTRODUCTION

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The recruiting stakes are high, says Human Resources thought leader Dr. Beverly Kaye, author of numerous books including “Love ’em or Lose ’em: Getting Good People to Stay.” The personal touch is necessary at every level of recruiting and onboarding: It enables companies to create a memorable candidate experience that translates into engaged employees who perform well on the job – and stay with the company.

“The job market is hot,” says Kaye. “Highly-skilled people are being sought and poached. The employee experience nowadays is very transparent. You go on Glassdoor and you see whether or not the culture is what the person who just interviewed you said it was.”

Delivering a good candidate experience starts with preparation, and that means sourcing: Identifying the best places to find candidates that will fit an organization’s needs and culture; posting job notices; searching social media and reaching out to promising candidates; it also involves networking and formal recruitment programs, such as job fairs in colleges or community centers.

Handling job postings and social media is time-consuming, so companies often seek to automate it. But the effort to make tracking applicants easier for the company may alienate potential candidates. People experience high levels of frustration with the complexity of applicant-tracking systems4.

“If you have ever tried to apply for a job at any company that has an ATS on their front end, it can be very intimidating,” explains David Lesniak, CEO of Personiv, a global business-process outsourcing company. “In some cases, it can actually reduce the pool of potential candidates because the process of getting your profile input into their system is very time-consuming, difficult and tedious. People just fall off.”

Personiv provides recruiters who source and screen candidates for a client’s recruiting team. One client, Michael Manzo, senior manager of talent acquisition, Brinker International restaurants, whose brands include Chili’s and Maggiano’s, agrees that the human element is crucial to successful recruiting.

“At Chili’s, our turnover for management is one of the lowest in the industry,” explains Manzo. Industry standard is 33 percent; Chili’s is 22. “We always ask ourselves why our turnover is so low compared to the industry. And it’s because we’re people-centric. Our philosophy is we have to make everybody feel special. And that’s not just our guests, but everybody that works around us: those within our company, our vendors, those we do business with.”

Bottom line: “Technology helps people organize what is important,” says Lesniak. “But technology should help us do our jobs rather than relying on it to do the job for us – particularly when the task-at-hand benefits from human judgment.”

4 2015 CareerBuilder survey, p. 23.

SOURCING CANDIDATES1



The next step where people are necessary is screening. An initial issue falls under the category of “garbage in, garbage out.” Candidates may seek to game the ATS, generating false positives about their qualifications, and will have to be filtered out later, one way (during an interview) or the other (struggling on the job).

“There’s an inability of applicant tracking systems to programmatically identify candidates who are qualified--in many cases, the ATS just spits out people who’ve done the best job of stuffing their resume with right keywords,” says Lesniak. “It requires human judgment and an initial candidate screening to find people that technology may have missed or excluded.”

Similarly, person-to-person communication between hiring managers and recruiters is needed to properly screen candidates. Cheryl Rose, Director of Marketing for Personiv, says that ongoing communication is necessary even to properly identify the search terms that will pull the best candidates from a database.

“There’s a lot of technology out there now where you can set up a Boolean expression, click on ‘recurring’ and it spits out resumes every day. You could be missing out on candidates because one missed keyword took them out of the initial search parameters.” Regular check-ins between hiring managers and recruiters keeps a ‘live vibe’ in recruiting, and prevents the talent pool from getting filled with candidates who become less of a fit as hiring needs change.

Michael Manzo of Chili’s says his company wanted to go beyond “blast emails” and automated searches. They wanted sourcers to take initiative in reaching out and start relationships.

“We wanted to get a personal touch,” says Manzo. “We wanted somebody to do resume searches and contact these people – and have a real conversation about our company, who we are and what we’re looking for. And from the candidate perspective, that makes a big difference. Candidates are a bit flattered that they’ve been called because what we’re seeing in their background seems to be a good fit for us, and we start to build a relationship.”

The Personiv sourcers “do a wonderful job making candidates feel good. And these are cold calls. When we bring in candidates, we ask them, ‘Hey, how did you like that call?’ We ask them about their first experience with us and we always hear, ‘Oh wow, they were just so nice, they were informative and they really spiked my interest for Chili’s.’”

Cheryl Rose adds that the personal screening element strengthens the relationship between recruiter and hiring manager. “It’s not about a machine or a computer spitting out data. Hiring managers want to know that you’ve picked that phone up, you’ve talked to a candidate, you’ve built a relationship with that candidate and now you’re committed to endorsing the candidate with confidence. You’re building a lasting relationship.”

Bottom line: “If there are 50 different tracking systems out there, you’ve got potentially 50 different ways for that candidate funnel logic to be programmed, and none of those will ever have the quality of human judgment that an experienced recruiter would have,” says Lesniak.

SCREENING CANDIDATES2

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5 Levashina, Julie, et al., “The Structured Employment Interview: Narrative and Quantitative Review of the Research Literature.” Personnel Psychology 2014, 67, 241-293.

Top recruiters usually cite their ability at interviewing as one of their most effective skills. The research has confirmed structured interviews are usually effective at identifying quality candidates, and offer consistency and legal defensibility5.

And where there is structure, usually there is an attempt at automation. Automated video interviews and phone interviews act as a screening tool, to be reviewed later. Job candidates have the advantage of completing the interview on their own schedule, but at the cost of answering questions from a computer, instead of a person.

“There’s no back and forth,” says Personiv’s David Lesniak. “At some point you need to speak to a person. That person-to-person connection is a critical aspect, and at multiple levels – whether an initial interview, or a phase 2 or phase 3 interview.”

Brinker’s Michael Manzo offers an example that highlights the effectiveness of person-to-person interviewing, and more important—why as a client he finds it so effective. The Brinker and Personiv recruiting teams discussed how they were going to generate excitement among the candidates being interviewed by the Personiv recruiters.

“We talked about our passion for the business, being in hospitality,” explains Manzo. “We talked about Chili’s in particular and its history. We’re forty years old and we’ve had some of the best years ever the last five years. We told them our stories about why we love this brand, why this brand is so successful and why other folks, other candidates out there would be a good fit if they felt the same way about the brand—if they had this ‘hospitality gene.’

“Personiv wanted to know everything about our company, our philosophy, and what we enjoy about working here. It was funny—we brainstormed and the Personiv recruiters laughed and said, ‘Gee, we almost want to come and work for your company!’ They felt the passion. And we told them, ‘That’s what we want everyone we talk to, to feel.’ We want them to feel like this is a special place to work because there are restaurants everywhere, on every corner. What makes us special is we’re forty years old having some of the best years ever. Brands don’t often last that long and we’re still in one of the top brands in the industry.”Manzo said Personiv was able to transmit this enthusiasm to the candidates, and pick the right people for Chili’s.

“They weren’t just taking information to share information. It wasn’t a ‘here are the facts, let’s share the facts.’ They understood how we felt about the company and we could hear it in their voice. That’s what we needed them to share with candidates and they were able to do that.”

Bottom line: Automation has its place, but people still need to generate enthusiasm that translates into effective hires.

INTERVIEWING CANDIDATES3



Note: Don’t forget onboardingStudies6 have consistently shown onboarding matters. In the broadest sense, onboarding includes candidate experience from first contact; in the more specific sense, it starts on the first day on the job and moves until the person is engaged. The first 90 days are crucial in establishing relationships, both with colleagues and supervisors. Employees with friends on the job are more likely to remain with a company. Technology can help with onboarding—particularly signing up for benefits and training, but this can also be impersonal.

“I think it’s important to make a personal connection with an individual,” says Lesniak. “There’s a lot of money being poured into HR technology solutions that take the personalization away. I still think you need a human to make that first connection and get people started off on the right foot.”

For example, “There are technology solutions out there that allow companies onboard without a human involved. And I think that taking the personal aspect out of the initial onboarding of somebody gives a first impression that’s too clinical.”

Bottom line: Effective onboarding will require making the new hire part of the community at work. A warm greeting and assistance from people goes a long way in creating a lasting first impression.

6 Kammeyer-Muteller, p. 1104.

CONCLUSIONCompanies are competing for talent in an increasingly complex marketplace. Sourcing, screening and interviewing can be time-consuming and overwhelming—there may be hundreds of openings and thousands of candidates.

Further, the recruiting picture may change day-by-day as new openings become available and other ones are filled, and as market needs change. Companies may not have the budget and the internal recruiting team to properly address the talent acquisition function, and may struggle with effectively addressing the rapidity of hiring changes.

Technology can fill some of those gaps – but most tools go only as far as improving efficiency and organization. All of the tech tools must be in the service of human judgment. Recruiting still requires people to find the best people, get them excited about career opportunities with a specific company, and establish relationships that can lead to satisfied hires and long-term engagement.

ABOUT PERSONIVPersoniv has a 30-year track record of innovating scalable, reliable, and trusted business solutions as a global business process outsource (BPO) provider. Our full suite of services includes recruiting support (RPO), graphic and web design, inbound and outbound customer care, search marketing, and back office support.

Our client list includes companies large and small, who have trusted us with their business processes for years and in some cases, decades.

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