An application of ‘Quantified self’ in HR

I’ve been thinking about this Quantified Self movement for some days now, after reading the phenomenal post from Stephen Wolfram, The personal analytics of my life. Today I had an idea of what could be an interesting application of it in the HR world.

Let’s say that in a company we get to find some volunteers to quantify themselves. It’s not about controlling them (like this kind of application does) but instead it could be a different way of measuring success of several HR programs or to gather insight about employee necessities. Examples that come to mind:

  • We want to subsidize public transport for our employee? What happens if one of them can analyse how that change affects his/her life based not only on personal feelings but also on number of emails and daily distribution, average walking distance per day, number of meetings and phone calls, keystrokes, etc.
  • How do all of those metrics get affected when an employee has a child? Can this help us design better work-life balance programs?

It’s definitely a amazing trend and I strongly believe that well applied in the work place it could take us to new levels of knowledge and employee satisfaction.

Personal productivity methods of a recruiter

Little is being written about personal productivity in recruitment blogs, although I personally consider it a very hot topic. Most of the times that I discuss the matter with friends and colleagues and bring up my methods they kind of treat me like a pointless nerd.

My point? If I were a surgeon I’d have to master all the tools that I use for work and my experience would let me know all the relevant tricks to get the most out of every technique. Well, as a recruiter our main tools are a computer and the internet, right?

What are the things that raise my friend’s eyebrows? Well, just a sample:

  • Keyboard shortcuts on google mail.
  • Email management rules (my system is kind of a loose GTD).
  • Speed dial on the web browser.
  • Keywords for bookmarks on the web browser.
  • Specific method to control which tabs should remain open or closed on the web browser.
  • Template texts in one single document.
  • Clipboard manager application.
  • Folder and file shortcuts at hand.
  • To-Do lists application.
  • Startup text file with immediate to-dos.
  • Some ver important global keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl+C Ctrl+V Ctrl+Z Ctrl+A Ctrl+P.
  • Use of several desktops on my computer (this one is very recent, acquired thanks to a great colleague).

I’ll develop on the details of my methods in further posts. Meanwhile, any feedback, tips and tricks from others will be highly appreciated. 

Recruitment reporting: Recipients? Level of detail? Format?

When talking about reporting, a recruitment manager usually needs to make some very relevant decisions:

  • Recipients: Who are we sending it to? Just the CEO?; only the Business Unit manager?; one for each hiring manager with their own positions only?; or to all of them at the same time? Knowing who should be the natural recipients of the periodic reporting is not a trivial decision to make. It’s important to note that in some cases those relevant recipients don’t even know they are so, therefore the recruitment manager needs to take the lead and decide for them.
  • Level of detail: As with anything nowadays, this is a crucial decision to make. If correctly handled (see appropriate recruiting software here), the amount of information at hand is not scarce any more. How much should the recruitment manager include in the standard recruitment? The more recipients there are, the more exposed to always having someone complaining about the amount of detail (too much or too little). The decision about the level of detail is obviously very much influenced by the other 2 and viceversa.
  • Format: This one is very related to the level of detail, but it’s really a different twist. There’s a large number of data visualization tools out there. We may have a spreadsheet or some pie charts, whatever. But another visualization is always possible. If the hiring manager is able to find a format that is both attractive and quick to look at where it’s possible to squeeze all necessary level of detail, then that’s a win! As always, this decision is highly influenced by the recipients and the amount of data to be included in the report.

A reporting that nobody reads/understands is one that fails it’s purpose. Moreover it’s a waste of time (It’s better to not send a bad report and save that precious time).

A good recruiter screens a CV in 15-20 seconds

Perhaps it’s shocking for the average employment seeker, but it’s true. When screening CVs, a good recruiter only needs this much time to form a mental picture of the candidate’s profile (their whole life, really).

This is an important piece of information to bear in mind when crafting one’s CV, both in terms of layout and length.

Try to avoid the hiring manager coming back with the ‘why is this taking so long’ line

Keeping the hiring manager informed and updated on what is going on with his/her recruitment is a very important part of the job of a good recruiter. It’s about being on top of things. 

A recruiter that lets this kind of reporting slip off the daily schedule will quickly loose the hiring manager’s trust. When they come back with the dreaded ‘why is this taking so long’ it’s because trust level is already critical!

The higher the qualification of the position, the more important to hold relaxed chats about other stuff

When hiring highly qualified people for high responsibility positions it’s not just about whether the person can do the job. In those cases things such as communication style, openness, attitude towards leadership and authority, ability to take risks, general curiosity about life and more of the like gain importance.

You may be able to find a good CTO that knows the stuff today. But if this person is not able to get passionate about your company/product/services or if they just don’t care about new trends and updating themselves, you’ll find yourself in trouble very soon.

To a good observer, the amount of things that can be observed in a couple of relaxed coffee breaks and a meal is pretty big. Especially when the topics discussed are not precisely work or recruitment based, but anything else.

Take your candidates to coffee, talk about the weather and the kids and the internet and business and whatever. All that information, coupled with everything gathered more formally at the recruitment process will give you lots of interesting insight.

Sticking 100% to the Job Description is like putting all eggs in one basket

It’s a classic situation, hiring managers focus on the job description and will just reject anybody that doesn’t perfectly fit = doesn’t comply with each and every requirement.

A recruiter must by all means fight this kind of attitude. One sign of a healthy and innovative organization is the fact that it accepts diversity and adapts and is able to find new interesting competencies that they were not initially looking for.

Having said this, it’s not about imposing just about any candidate to the hiring manager just because. It’s about truly knowing the organization and the department that you’re hiring for in order to really help them find talent that will make them be more successful.

A recruiter must have a structured keyword searching method

Define the keywords > decide the places where to search > define which languages for each keyword  > decide the order of the search > write it all down » And then execute that macro and note down the results! 

***

Say I’m looking for a skilled software engineer that knows object oriented programming, has experience building web applications, and is located in Europe. An example could be:

  • Keywords: engineer, java, C++, web development.
  • Places to search: Linkedin, xing, github, stack overflow, about.me, flavors.me
  • Languages: English, Spanish, German, Italian, French
  • Order: For each site, one word at a time in all languages.
It’s a lot of work but if as a recruiter you have a method similar to this, then:
  • You don’t have to burn your eyebrows and it do it all in one day.
  • You don’t miss out on any interesting profile!

A recruiter that doesn’t know the company top to bottom is just a monkey

Because at any given interview you might be asked about anything concerning the company at any level. And you need to give out some useful information or otherwise the candidate will feel that you’re not the right source of information at recruitment time.

Some might believe that a recruiter needs only to know about the mechanics of recruitment and not about what is going on in the company at all levels and to the maximum level of detail possible. I think they’re wrong.

A recruiter must be as good information finder as a librarian

A big part of the job of a recruiter nowadays is sourcing on the internet. And that means a lot more than just inserting a candidate’s name or some keywords in Google’s search box. A good recruiter must understand how indexing works, should be up to date on what new services are out there that can help them, and above all has to be able to utilize a plethora of different search tools and combine and cross-reference the results of all of them.

Google, Yahoo, Bing, Linkedin, Xing, Twitter, directories, github, stack overflow, yellowpages, glassdoor, slideshare, google alerts, socialbro, socialmention… The list is just endless.

Where innovative companies are scarce, good recruiters are the glue that keeps the ecosystem together.

Usually you need some critical mass in order to be more an ecosystem of innovative companies than just a few disconnected interesting companies.

In a defined area, a good and specialized recruiter can be the glue that keeps this little bunch connected and acts a bit like catalyzer, a helper in the process of converting that little thing into the desired ecosystem.

Recruitment is the act of planting an idea in the candidate’s mind: ‘this is where I want to work’.

It’s like in this Inception movie, the recruiter must be smart enough to not ‘convince’ the candidate but rather to gradually make the person believe that the decision is his/hers.

It’s a subtle and difficult job!

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