it's ALL about the experience

Simple Elegance: Best Recruiting and Business Practices, Courtesy of Godin and Jarvis

What would Google Do?,Elegant Organization,

It seems most competitive organizations now agree that providing a pleasing hiring experience to job seekers is in their best interests of finding the best talent and ultimately retaining it.  Further, many companies have also come to realize that job seekers can be current customers, or at least potential ones, and therefore a precious relationship already exists and should be protected during the course of job-seeking courtship.  Yes, of course, there is the occasional recalcitrant business or HR leader who somehow believes that with today's 10 percent  unemployment that employers have the edge and can afford to be less than courteous to job seekers who need them more than vice versa.  But let's face it -- those people aren't with the competitive, "best places to work" organizations.  And they probably don't have the proverbial "seat at the executive table," either.

What is perhaps less understood or widely accepted is that candidates talk about their experience -- good or bad -- of trying to find a job.  And today they do so in a very public, viral way that can negatively impact the employment brand as well as bottom-line sales for any company.  Take a look, for instance, at the site called GlassDoor - they provide an open format of exchange between job seekers and employers, allowing candidates to vent about the worst interview story EVER all the way to the best onboarding experience that defies even the most creative of imaginations.  Even without such a destination, candidates and job seekers post their tales of job-seeker woe on their blogs and social networking sites for all the world to see.  Ahem, even if you don't care to hire the person who made the not-so-nice comments about you as an employer, you just may be interested in one or two of their several-hundred-fold peer community who now have seen a poor review about you.  So, what's an employer to do?

Hold on to that thought for a moment, while I introduce another.   You may have noticed in other posts that I like to read -- a good combination of business, HR/Recruiting related, and works celebrating exceptional human lives.  Well, my latest two reads have been Seth Godin's Tribes and Jeff Jarvis' What Would Google Do?  Godin stresses the need for leaders to offer something compelling enough to warrant a crowd to willingly -- and even, enthusiastically -- follow. The idea is not far from the concept of encouraging people to opt in to marketing messages as he details in his Permission Marketing book .  Jarvis celebrates the success of Face Book and Google and notes that their secret to success is not in creating or "owning" a community of followers, but rather attracting this group by providing it with an "elegant organization" solution.  That is, these companies are successful because they help already existing communities do something they are doing today, but just make doing so even easier.  In this case, connecting with friends and colleagues in the case of the former, and searching for information in the case of the latter.   

So, picking up where we left off in the previous paragraph, what can employers do with all this conversation among job seekers? The short answer is "plenty."  The longer, more thoughtful one is, "join the conversation AND make the exchange even easier."  I would add, entice job seeking candidates to not only dialog with you about their experience of trying to gain employment, but make them your avid, following fans by having something worth listening to in return.  As we at Improved Experience are an online feedback portal directing anonymous feedback from job seekers to the specific employers with whom they're attempting to gain employment, I realize in reading these two books that we act as "elegant organizers" between employers and job seekers.  That is, we facilitate something that is already taking place -- albeit it in a much more direct fashion.  My question for you is, how much more effective would your Recruiting efforts be if you were facilitating conversations about your employment brand, job opportunities, and recruitment process effectiveness that were already taking place elsewhere? And then, what if you joined the conversation by indicating you were listening, that you heard what was said, and then perhaps posted a progress report on your career website or Public Relations channels.  What a concept -- "you talked, we listened."  Seems the world would be a more civilized place, and the companies that opted in to this ideal would be more efficient, effective, and competitive.  Just a little food for thought, courtesy of our brilliant author friends Godin and Jarvis.

This is Alise Cortez signing out for another week.  In the meantime, consider the notion of transparent communications with your job seekers.  But more importantly, think how employing a more strategic, "tribe-attracting" philosophy could serve your organization while allowing you to make an important professional contribution.  As I've said many times before, the HR/Recruiting industry needs your passion, your innovation, and your quest for improvement.  Don't let us down.

About Alise Cortez:  My day job is VP of Sales & Marketing at Improved Experience where our online feedback portal products provide subscribing HR/Recruiting customers data to make a business case for change or improvement in these areas:  recruitment process effectiveness, employer brand, candidate experience, recruiter performance, early employee engagement, quality of hire, and retention.  What can I say? -- it's fun!

Lessons for HR/Recruiting Leaders from Andy Williams' Memoir

OK, I admit it -- I'm a big resolutions person.  I make a large wall chart of my 30-some resolutions and then proceed throughout the year to track my progress by color-coding goals achieved by category (i.e., Professional, Intellectual, Financial, Family, Cultural, etc.)  So, in late November/early December, I start looking for inspiration from which to formulate new goals for the coming year.  As occurs when you become of aware of what you want, I happened across an interview on National Public Radio between the ever-wise Diane Rehm and the incredible singing tenor Andy Williams.

The realness of their exchange, absent the self-aggrandizement that sometimes characterizes a star's self-portrait, was alluring and made me want to learn more about the life of the now 80-some year old.  (For a perfect example of narcisstic tendency in a self-biography, I suggest you read Katharine Hepburn's memoir, entitled Me: Stories of My Life.  As far as memoirs go, it's exceptionally aptly named.)  As I'm 45 this month, Andy Williams happens to have graced a period before my own.  So, I went on to Amazon and purchaed Andy's Moon River and Me and one of his CDs, Moon River:  The Very Best of Andy Williams.

The very first thing I did when my purchases arrived was to open the CD and listen to the ever-famous song, "Moon River."  What a voice!  And could they harmonize in the 1950s, or what?!  I could see why President Ronald Reagan proclaimed Andy's voice a "national treasure." 

Next, I began to settle into the book. I read at least one business book and one pleasure book per month.  Obviously, Andy's book qualified for the latter -- or, at least I thought so for the first few pages.  I soon discovered, though, that the contents of his book -- or, perhaps my own interpretation of them -- comprise the stuff many business books are made of.  And, I soon discovered that what I was reading had direct application to the HR/Recruiting industry.

I'm about two-thirds the way through the book right now, but here's three points I wanted to share with you, especially at a time when you consider setting and achieving your own goals in 2010 as an HR/Recruiting executive:

1) Find yourself a champion/cheerleader/mentor AND be one to someone else.  Andy was the youngest (surviving) of four Williams brothers.  Having grown up in a small town in Iowa and experiencing some early small stints with choir projects, Andy's father Jay Emerson Williams somehow got it into his head that his boys would not be mail sorters on a railroad train as he had been, but rather professional singers.  Andy's father constantly encouraged, pushed, and prodded his boys to practice.  He believed in their talent -- and probably in the early days, wanted their success, way more than they did for themselves.  Andy's father moved the family several times, each time uprooting his own job, to ensure close proximity to the next bigger radio station.  And he was relentless in his early pursuits to get the Williams boys singing work, often camping out in the lobby of stations or nearly stalking radio station managers until they finally agreed to grant a short audition, heard the boys, liked them, and gave them a paying gig.  Andy dedicated his book to his father, "who had the vision to see a future for me as a singer, and the belief and the relentless determination to make it happen."  Think what you could do personally or at work if you had someone who believed in you like that!  Conversely, think of your years of experience and insight and how they may benefit someone younger or new to the industry who shows a lot of potential but just doesn't know how to navigate corporate America yet.  In the words of Ben Affleck in the movie Pearl Harbor, I dare you to really matter.  (Incidentally, my first real boss, not counting my restaurant-owning father who I began working for at age 11, made a real and lasting difference to my life, so much so that I have kept in touch with him for more than 25 years since I worked for him, invited him to and recognized him at my wedding some 10 years ago, and still talk with him today, especially at the holidays -- but that's the musings of another blog post.)

2)  The importance of hard work.  I realize how cliche and tired this sounds, but I sometimes think in our generally wealthy times (excepting all of last  year's recession, of course) that the art and science of really hard, dedicated work isn't as common as perhaps it used to be -- somebody, please prove me wrong here.  But I digress... the point is that Andy's father instilled an extremely arduous practice schedule for his four boys, and they followed it.  Andy and his brothers didn't see themselves as anything special in the way of talent, nor did their father, but they probably worked harder than most any other child singers did at the time.  Andy mentions he had very little time to date or even do much school work!  Instead, hours upon hours of disciplined practice characterized Andy's youth and high school years.  Now, I'm not advocating you become a workaholic, per se, but being truly great at anything does require a unique focus.  Let us then pay rapt attention to our craft as HR/Recruiting executives this year - and stand out among the crowd.

3)  Face your fears and then blow right past them.  Every single one of us at some point gets scared of our own dreams.  Or, when we get close to realizing them, we can become debilitated and frozen in fear, unable to take the next step and realize the according success.  Andy talks about the point in his career when his three brothers wanted to exit the very successful four-some they had been and pursue some other kind of work.  But Andy, being the youngest and unexposed to anything else, only knew how to sing.  Moreover, he wanted to keep singing, but he was utterly petrified to go it alone, experiencing terrible stage fright the first many times he did so.  But he persevered and went on to great success for many decades afterwards.  Think of what we as a nation or perhaps even the world would have missed out on had Andy not faced his fears, and then just kept right on going.  What are you keeping yourself from doing -- and thus, the rest of us peers missing out on? 

Remember the words of Johan Wolfgang von Goethe:  Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.  Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it."  Inspiration can come from many places. The point is, find your inspiration, be bold, and let's go do great things this year. Our industry needs us to!  Stay in touch and be sure to come back and tell us how you're tracking toward your goals.

About Alise Cortez:  my day job is VP of Marketing & Sales at Improved Experience, where our mission is to capture the voice of experience one job search at a time for employees and empower employers with the metrics of engagement and retention.