Leveraging a Resume Mining Firm as part of your overall Recruiting Strategy. A White Paper for Corporate Recruiting Leaders

Transcription

1 Leveraging a Resume Mining Firm as part of your overall Recruiting Strategy A White Paper for Corporate Recruiting Leaders

2 About Velocity Resource Group Velocity Resource Group specializes in providing low cost, highly effective internet-based candidate sourcing services. USA: International: Riviera Advisors Riviera Advisors is a recruitment management consulting firm that helps companies improve their internal staffing functions. USA: International: Acknowledgements Thank you to the corporate recruiting leaders who shared their time, experiences, and insights, including: Beth Tong-Miller, Global Recruiting Manager, Eaton Ann Quackenbush, VP Recruiting Solutions, Fair Isaac Corporation Judy Brooks, Senior HR Specialist, Dominion Brian Washington, Manager, Sourcing Solutions Recruitment, GlaxoSmithKline Gina Martin, Director of Sourcing, Motorola Melanie Villapando, (Former) Staffing Director, OfficeMax Jim Siakel, Director of Staffing, Wolters Kluwer Author John Vlastelica, Principal, Riviera Advisors, Inc Redmond, Washington john@rivieraadvisors.com

3 Table of Contents Introduction...4 What does a resume mining firm do?...5 When does a resume mining firm make sense?...5 How 5 real companies use resume mining firms today..6 Quick Quiz: Is a resume mining firm right for me?...9 Pros and Cons of using a resume mining firm.9 20 Questions to consider when selecting a firm 10 5 keys to successfully partnering with a firm..11

4 Introduction Challenges in Corporate Recruiting Today Corporate recruiting leaders face a number of challenges today. They must not only lead provide the strategy that will address the pains and opportunities that their business leaders face, but they must also manage in the most complex, operationally demanding environment our industry has seen. Beyond leading their recruiting team and interfacing with executives, they must select and maximize various recruiting technologies and tools, drive process improvements, creatively address candidate supply issues, manage various vendor relationships, and measure and justify the return on investment from almost everything they do. It s a big job. Focus and Speed is Key to Your Success Every one of the corporate recruiting leaders interviewed for this white paper discussed a common need to focus their time and resources on the right things, and move quickly. Yes, cost and quality always matter. But more and more, the businesses they support need their hires yesterday. And a recruiting leader s ability to plan for speed and focus their limited recruiter resources on the highest value-add work is one of the keys to recruiting success today. Leveraging Vendors/Outside Partners Almost every corporate recruiting department leverages outside vendors. These vendors have traditionally included search firms and background check companies. Over the past few years, more and more HR leaders have looked at where their organization delivers the most value, and find that outsourcing pieces especially the more administrative pieces of their function allows their limited internal resources to focus on the most critical strategic issues. The same thing is happening in recruiting. And it s happening more often than you might think. In the March 2006 Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, a study was referenced that showed 22% of corporate recruiting departments currently outsource staff sourcing. And 39% of Information Technology functions in the companies surveyed said they were actively discussing the opportunity to outsource staffing to third party firms. Where Does My Team Add the Most Value? With limited recruiter headcount, and great recruiting talent harder and harder to find and retain, corporate recruiting leaders are inspecting their own departments and teams, and asking themselves: Where do my recruiters add the most value in the recruiting process? If I m going to hire and leverage top recruiters, how do I ensure I don t pay them top salaries to do lower-value-add, administrative work all day? How do I deliver qualified candidates to the hiring managers we support more quickly? What parts of my recruiting process do I need to keep in-house, and what parts can I outsource to another firm who might be able to offer me the same quality, only faster and cheaper?

5 Exploring the Case for Engaging a Resume Mining Firm This white paper will explore the opportunity corporate recruiting leaders have to leverage an outside vendor to assist with a core piece of their recruiting strategy: Candidate Generation (or Sourcing) from the Internet. We ll specifically discuss how an external resume mining firm may be able to complement your internal sourcing activities, and free up your recruiting team to focus on the higher-value-add activities. What does a resume mining firm do? They find resumes on the web At the most basic level, they find you quality resumes. They are not a search firm, however, who may employ recruiters skilled in direct sourcing, with huge pre-existing candidate networks and contacts. Instead, you pay a resume mining firm to mine the job boards and the web to find you resumes. Then, your internal recruiting team makes decisions about which resumes to screen, and which ones to pass on to hiring managers. Real people find and filter the resumes they present to you Resume mining firms, like Velocity Resource Group, leverage technology and people to find you quality candidates. After the project manager gathers your requirements over the phone, those requirements will be passed to the sourcing team, who employs advanced internet recruiting techniques to identify the available resumes that match your specific profile. They have access to all of the major job boards and many niche sites. Once they calibrate the resumes against your requirements, and have your candidate profile locked down, they find and load the quality resumes into your account on their webbased tool for you to access and review or load the resumes directly into your Applicant Tracking System (if you give them access). They re a lower cost alternative Most resume mining firms either charge an hourly fee to source resumes for you a fee that s the same or less than a contract recruiter, or they charge a project fee - usually just several hundred dollars more than the retail price of a posting on a job board like monster.com. There s no guarantee of a hire, but the good firms usually guarantee your satisfaction, as measured by their ability to deliver resumes that match your criteria. When does a resume mining firm make sense? Where does your recruiting team deliver the most value? Corporate recruiters often have too many open positions too many reqs to effectively do all of the planning, sourcing, screening, selection, selling, data entry, hiring manager account management, and reporting that s required for each of their openings. They get overloaded with s and bombarded with unqualified resumes. So, they have to make tradeoffs, and focus on the areas where they deliver the most value to their business. Additionally, many HR and recruiting functions run lean; they are rarely staffed with enough recruiters to please every part of the business.

6 In response to this limited capacity, many corporate recruiting leaders are refocusing their internal recruiters on the areas where they add the most value, which include: building sourcing strategies, targeted sourcing and networking, convincing quality candidates to consider their company and jobs, managing candidate relationships and creating a great candidate experience, consulting with hiring managers and managing those relationships, operationally executing the strategy and process. We do high volume, professional level recruiting. We were spending too much time searching the job boards for active candidates, doing the low hanging-fruit work. I needed my recruiters on the phone, getting quality candidates interested in our positions, and managing the process. With 40+ reqs per recruiter, we didn t have time to do everything internally, and there was no way we d want to outsource the candidate-facing and hiring-manager facing work. That s where my team really adds value. So, we hired Velocity Resource Group to mine resumes from the job boards for us. We ve been using them for 2 years, and it s worked extremely well. They re an integral part of my recruiting strategy now. - Beth Tong-Miller, Global Recruiting Manager, EATON Making time to source Corporate recruiters must make time to find great candidates. Unfortunately, posting an advertisement on a major job board often generates hundreds of unqualified candidates that must be sifted through and disqualified in a company s applicant tracking system (ATS). And, while building effective search criteria and sourcing from internet job board databases tends to yield better quality candidates than job postings, it s still very time consuming work that s hard to squeeze into a typical day for a full-life-cycle recruiter or HR generalist. However, ignoring internet sourcing is not an option; it s clearly a critical source of hires. A February 2006 Booz Allen Hamilton Recruiting Trends Survey of over 70 companies found that 26% of all 2005 hires came from job boards and social networking websites. Is your firm a good fit for this type of relationship? When researching how companies leverage resume mining firms, we talked to companies that hire thousands of people every year, and companies that hire hundreds. We interviewed individual contributor recruiters, heads of central sourcing teams, and top recruiting leaders. Each company, with its own unique structure and priorities, found a way to leverage a resume mining firm as a way to save time and money.

7 How 5 real companies use resume mining firms Motorola, a Fortune 100 company that hired 7,000 people in the U.S. last year Gina Martin, Director of Sourcing, owns all external candidate generation for the U.S. Motorola businesses. Her team hired about 3,000 people last year. She uses her resume mining firm to help with critical requests that her team doesn t have capacity to support. My team still handles the difficult positions. It s not realistic to think a resume mining firm is going to be successful finding niche candidates who aren t out on the job boards. But, when we get a request from one of our recruiters for a project that we don t have capacity to handle, we look at the position spec, and decide whether or not it s something a firm like Velocity can help with. What s really nice is that we ve integrated Velocity s services into our ATS (Peoplclick), so that once they filter through the resumes, they can directly assign them in our system right to the recruiter s open requisition. They re like an on-demand contract recruiter, that we can turn off and on as needed. It s worked really well. Wolters Kluwer, an 18,000 employee company based in Amsterdam Jim Siakel, Director of Staffing for Wolters Kluwer, hired 1,600 people last year. He uses his resume mining firm as an extension of his recruiting team. While his team is driving the aggressive, direct sourcing efforts from his target companies, he uses a third party firm to cover the job boards. I want my people building an internal agency. They need to be on the phones networking, sourcing, and building quality relationships with candidates. It costs me too much to have them surfing the job boards all day. We need to spend time on the things that will differentiate us from the competition on the things that agencies would be doing. That s how I save money, get great hires, and get the real ROI down the road. It s a waste of time for us to spend time on the stuff Velocity does for us. They can do it faster and cheaper. And my team is free to do what we do best. Fair Isaac, a 50 year old company based in Minneapolis Ann Quackenbush, VP Recruiting Solutions, will hire about 800 people this year. She uses her resume mining firm for focused projects, when she needs to quickly ramp up hires in key markets.

8 We ve moved to an event recruiting model for some key positions. We had Velocity handle all candidate generation for a recent event. Once they generated the quality resumes, my recruiters did the higher value-add screening work, so that the candidates that our hiring managers interviewed were on target. That was a good use of our time, and a good use of a resume mining firm. We got 25 interviews from their efforts, and 10 offers. It was a fantastic partnership. We re now repeating the same process in new cities. GlaxoSmithKline, a 100,000 employee pharmaceutical company with operations in 116 countries Brian Washington, Manager, Sourcing Solutions, leads a central sourcing team that supports full life cycle recruiting account managers. He uses his resume mining firm as an alternative for recruiters who want to post ads on the job boards. Our recruiters have reqs each. They have little time to source candidates on the internet or filter through and act upon all of the resumes that come in when we post a job on a major job board. In fact, we looked at our yield from job board postings, and we see quality resume matches from less than 5% of the people who apply. So, now, when they do request a job board posting, we often offer them an alternative. We suggest they use a 3-day resume mining project with Velocity instead. Now, instead of getting overwhelmed with a ton of unqualified candidates from a posting, and waiting up to a week for all the candidates to apply, they can get a quick batch of on-target resumes from the job boards in just a few days. OfficeMax, a leading office products retailer with over 1,000 superstores Melanie Villapando, who was formerly the Staffing Director at OfficeMax, found real technology and cost advantages when using her resume mining firm for the exempt-level corporate roles and large-market sales roles her team needed to hire. We didn t have a recruiting database, or access to as many job boards as Velocity had, so we not only saved recruiter time by outsourcing some of the candidate sourcing to them, but we also leveraged their investments in technology, too. Why not buy a pure technology solution? There are certainly pieces of technology that corporate recruiting leaders can purchase to improve the productivity of their recruiters, and get more candidates. Many companies are looking at tools which leverage spider-technology to scour the web and job boards for ontarget resumes. There s no question that these technologies can save time when compared to the time it might take your recruiters to generate all of the appropriate search strings, logon to each job board and niche website to run those searches, and then stack rank all of the resumes based on keywords. However, many corporate recruiting leaders compare that to a resume mining firm, which 1) employs real people who profile your job, 2) calibrate the initial batch of resumes, then 3) use your feedback to filter down the hundreds of key-word-matched resumes to the 20 or so you ll want to pursue, and they say it s night and day better to use people.

9 These web spider tools like AIRS Oxygen or Infogist have their place. But, they often don t help address the fact that we ll still get back 500 resume matches for many of our jobs. My recruiters just don t have the time to go through that many resumes. How am I going to get hundreds of resumes narrowed down to the 20 or so I should spend my time on? We use Velocity s eyeballs to filter them. That s what I m paying for, and that s how they really help my team. They save us a ton of time. - Beth Tong-Miller, Global Recruiting Manager, EATON Quick Quiz: Is a resume mining firm right for me? Ask Yourself: Is a resume mining firm right for my situation? If you answer True to several of the questions below, you may want to consider using a resume mining firm as a complement to your sourcing strategy and team. True or False My company makes hires from the job boards. My recruiters don t have enough time to screen through 100 resumes to find the 5 quality candidates we want to screen and present to the hiring manager. My recruiters have been trained in AIRS-like internet sourcing techniques, but rarely have the time to use these skills. My recruiters need to spend more time managing candidate and hiring manager relationships, and less time tied to their computer. I m paying my recruiters well, and can t afford to have them spending time on low value add, administrative work. I need my recruiters sourcing efforts focused on networking and following up on leads and referrals. I can t afford to build and hire my own central sourcing team. I need sourcing help, but not all of the time. I would benefit from a resume mining service more than a contract recruiter because I can more easily ramp up and ramp down a third party vendor. Pros and Cons of using a resume mining firm Pros: Free up your recruiters to focus on higher value-add services Much cheaper and faster than search firms when we you have an urgent need Faster, more on-target results, and only slightly more expensive than a posting on a major job board Can be easily turned on when demand grows, and turned off when your internal recruiting team capacity grows Real people review the resumes against your criteria before sending you a resume, so you get more on-target resumes than many technology solutions You get access to all quality candidates they present (not just the top 3 a search firm presents) May offer services that can help you comply with the recent OFCCP ruling that requires much more detailed tracking of internet sourcing activities and candidate pools

10 Cons: If you already actively mine the job boards on a regular basis, they may return mostly duplicate candidates It s a relatively new type of service, that may need some selling internally before it s adopted by internal recruiters The resumes they or anyone finds on the web or on job boards are not always screened for availability or salary requirements Will not work for every level and type of position No guaranteed hire All work is done over the phone, via , or via the firm s resume portal they are not down the hallway 20 Questions to consider when evaluating a resume mining firm Low cost resume mining firms have found a place on the recruiting leader s radar only in the past 2-3 years. When evaluating a firm to partner with, you ll want to be sure to go beyond the basic sales pitch and reference checks. Below is a list of questions used by many of the companies we talked to when choosing a firm. It s not just about their products, their pricing, or the technology they use. It s all about their customer service. If they want to partner with me, I need to know that they ll respond quickly. And, I need to know that they re flexible. In the beginning, we found some of the tools they wanted us to use to be inconvenient. They listened, and they made changes. That s what s critical listen, and respond. - Judy Brooks, Senior HR Specialist, Dominon Core Services and Pricing 1. What do you consider your core offerings? What do you consider out of scope, or not your area of expertise? 2. How do you price out your projects? What kind of quantity discounts are available? 3. What are your standard, included services, and what would I pay extra for? Process and Timelines 4. What s your process and timelines, from the time I give you an order, until I see resumes, until we consider the project complete? 5. Do you use Service Level Agreements (SLAs) between your internal departments and/or with customers, like me? If yes, please walk me through an example SLA. How often are you meeting your targets? What do you need from me, the customer, to make sure you hit these SLAs? Quality 6. Walk me through the process you go through to understand the job and learn more than just the keywords. 7. What process do you have in place to calibrate the resumes you generate initially? 8. Will I be charged if you don t find any (or only a few) candidates that meet my profile? What s your guarantee? 9. What metrics if any do you track to show the return on investment from a project?

11 Tools and Resources 10. Which job boards and internet sites will you use to find my candidates? Do you have access to [industry or job specific site that I have had success with]? If no, will you get access at no charge to me? 11. How does the way you deliver the resumes to me make it easy for me to review and give you feedback? Can you only resumes? Can you only present resumes using your web-based tool (what if I want them ed?)? 12. How much can/will you customize your process to accommodate my process? Give me some examples of how you ve adjusted your process to make it work for a client like me. 13. Please demo your system for me now. How many clicks does it take for me to login and get to the resumes I need to review? Will I need training to learn how to use your system? 14. Can you integrate your technology with my ATS? Customer Service and People 15. Will I have a dedicated account representative that I can reach when I need them? What kind of work experience does my account representative have? 16. What s the average response time when I call or send you an ? 17. Who will I contact if I need to escalate an issue? 18. Will there be more than 1 sourcer working on my project(s)? What kind of experience do your sourcers have finding the kind of candidates I need? Track Record and References 19. Who are some corporate recruiting leaders from companies who face similar challenges to what my company is facing that would provide a balanced, business reference for you? 20. How long have you been in business? How long have you been providing services like these? (If they have other business focus areas, ask how these services fit in with the other part of their business. Is this a core focus, with strong leadership and commitment, or is this one of many focus areas?) 5 Keys to Partnering with a Resume Mining Firm What you must do to make the relationship work Resume mining firms like any vendor must be set up to be successful, to be successful. Every company we talked to identified the important role the recruiting team plays in partnering with their resume mining firm. Here s 5 keys to making the relationship work. 1. Make sure everyone s on the same page. Everyone on the recruiting team must understand what the firm will and won t do to find and filter resumes. They are not an agency, they are not a research firm, and they are not a contract recruiter. 2. Focus the firm on jobs they ll be able to find on the job boards and through intermediate-skilled web mining. They look for active candidates, and are not priced or staffed to do the aggressive direct sourcing work that your team or an agency may do. 3. Give the firm more than just a job posting. They need more than key words and company buzzwords. To be successful, they need to understand target companies, core skills, and the must-haves versus nice-to-haves. Sample on-target resumes work even better to help the sourcers visualize your need and calibrate with you.

12 4. Make time to calibrate. This relationship won t work if you don t make the time to give specific feedback on the initial set of resumes that come in. Once calibrated, hold them to a high standard. Until they re calibrated, expect some resumes to come in that are not good matches. 5. Make time to contact the candidates they present. If your team is too busy to follow up on the resumes they generate, then both parties are wasting time and money. Good candidates that are out on the job boards are contacted quickly by aggressive companies. You must move fast.

13 800 W. 5th Avenue, Suite 202 Naperville, IL USA P.O. Box Long Beach, CA USA Copyright 2006 by Riviera Advisors, Inc. and Velocity Resource Group. All rights reserved. This document may be reproduced and distributed without modification within the context of professional learning provided that the reproduced materials are not in any way offered for sale or profit. Cover art designed by J. Morrison Group