Horizon Point Consulting

Category: Talent Acquisition

We know Talent Acquisition. We can help create strategic talent acquisition plans and processes to market, source, recruit, hire, and retain top talent.

  • The Candidate Experience Influences The Brand

    The Candidate Experience Influences The Brand

    Branding is an important marketing topic. Some organizations invest heavily in a brand strategy that reaches many audiences, including the job seeker. A great brand attracts job candidates to an organization. As a marketer and HR professional, I have a unique perspective on this topic.  The marketer side understands the importance of brand equity and the HR side values the role it plays in talent acquisition.  Some organizations fail to make this connection. Other organizations offer poor candidate experiences, which cast a negative image. As a result, it harms the brand while turning away potential talent.

    Over the years, I have heard candidates’ horror stories of bad encounters, which diminish the job seekers value of an organization.  A few of these experiences were so negative that it impacted the candidate’s use of the products and services. Most job seekers desire an organization that aligns with their values and where a connection can be made to the culture. The candidate experience is an extension of the brand strategy. It expands beyond the talent acquisition strategy.  Recruiters are often the first human contact a job seeker has with the brand. Having a marketing orientation is vital to recruiting, since they are brand representatives.

    A negative candidate experience has a lasting impact. Talent acquisition influences brand equity.  Designing a marketing-focused talent strategy can create positive candidate experiences. Collaboration between marketing and talent acquisition is beneficial in driving the strategy.  Every encounter is exposure to the brand, so make it exceptional.

     

     

    About the author: Steve Graham serves as Vice President for Marketing, HR Business Partner, and college instructor. He holds graduate degrees in management and higher education. As a life-long learner, he has additional graduate and professional education in executive & professional coaching, health care administration, and strategic human resource management.

    He is a certified HR professional with The Society for Human Resource Management, certified coach with the International Coach Federation, and a Global Career Development Facilitator. His professional memberships include: The Society for Human Resource Management, the American Society for Healthcare Human Resources Administration, Association for Talent Development, and International Coach Federation. LinkedIn.com/in/hstevegraham

  • The name of the game is FREEDOM: How innovative companies motivate, get, and retain the best…

    The name of the game is FREEDOM: How innovative companies motivate, get, and retain the best…

    “The competition to hire the best will increase in the years ahead. Companies that give extra flexibility (freedom) to their employees will have the edge in this area.” Bill Gates

    I can’t neglect (since I missed the window over the 4th) to make sure to make a point about freedom during our nation’s birthday month. And as by coincidence or actually, by what really makes a whole lot of sense, you can’t talk about what drives innovation without talking about freedom. America is a country that was built around the concept of freedom.

    Despite a presidential campaign grounded on “Making America Great Again,” it is the most innovative country in the world as measured by producing goods and services that people value (as measured by GDP). It is also still a country where many desire to immigrate, and though I’m not citing fact now, I will venture to say that many of them desire to come here precisely because they will have freedom, including the freedom to innovate.

    And, since I can’t resist the urge to make a slight political commentary here, a country grounded in freedom is what gives Mr. Trump the freedom to say that America needs to be great again and gives citizens the right to show their support of this by their vote. This is precisely what makes America great. Not the idea of building a wall.

    And freedom is what grounds innovative organizations.

    Why? Because giving people freedom leads to this cycle:

    1. Trust. Freedom is the way you behaviorally demonstrate to people that you trust them.  When people are trusted, they feel free to:
    2. Experiment. A/B or split testing is something the most innovative companies do all the time.  Because everything can’t be known, trying it more than one way and seeing what works better- what the customer prefers- leads to better results.
    3. Fail (more often than not). If I saw anything across the literature that was vital to innovation it was room to fail because it leads people to:
    4. Learn. As the Innovator’s Dilemma emphasizes over and over again –  “The strategies and plans that managers formulate for confronting disruptive technological change, therefore, should be plans for learning and discovery rather than plans for execution.” Learning can also come from getting it right instead of failing, but often the biggest breakthroughs come through some kind of failure in the beginning.
    5. Grow. Growth occurs at the individual level and then collectively at the organizational level in terms of profits.

     

    Freedom1

    Much of the literature uses the word “autonomy” or “flexibility” for “freedom” and this autonomy, as you see in Drive couples with finding mastery and purpose in the workplace to create motivation.

    So how do we create this freedom in the workplace that allows for this cycle to take place, leading to innovation?

    Here are some ideas to create freedom from some of the best innovation hubs:

     

    How do you allow for freedom in the workplace?  What results have you seen?

    What scares you about giving people freedom in the workplace?  Why?

     

     

  • What You Pay Does Matter

    What You Pay Does Matter

    “$11.32 an hour,” she said. “That’s what many people can earn sitting on their couch. How am I supposed to encourage them to get off the couch when many of the jobs they qualify for don’t pay that?”

    This statement came from a frustrated state career center worker tasked with getting individuals off federal and state assistance through a job placement program.

    I could turn this conversation into a political post, but I won’t go there.  Instead, I’d like to focus on how it illustrates a basic premise of motivation.

    I’m going to spend the next few weeks talking about how to give people what they really want out of work (motivational factors) through performance management and maximization practices, but let’s face it, when I do this, I’m making the assumption that a basic living wage, or even a wage that is competitive with the wage someone could go across the street and earn with the skill set they have, (a hygiene factor) is provided in all workplaces I’m addressing. I can talk all day long about how meaningful work leads to performance maximization, but if that meaningful work doesn’t meet basic needs, or if basic needs can be met by, well doing nothing, then people are going to turn to being unproductive or turn to walking across the street for the higher wage. They are going to sit on the couch either literally or metaphorically by the way the show up to work and well, do just about nothing, or by taking their skills and going elsewhere.

    It goes back to one of the basic premises of workplace (or well really any place) motivation that drives behavior:  hygiene vs. motivational factors. Thanks to Herzberg, we have this tried and true theory that tells us if you really want to get the most out of people, you need motivational factors in the workplace like challenge, autonomy, creativity, etc.- basically all things that lead to meaningful work- to actually have the power to truly motivate someone.

    However, hygiene factors keep people from being dissatisfied. And a lack of dissatisfaction is necessary for the motivational factors to work. Someone may be overwhelmingly content with the work they do, but if you don’t pay them enough to meet a certain standard of living, that oftentimes they compare to others around them that are doing the same or similar work, the motivational factors won’t work at least in the long run.

    So before you go giving someone autonomy and meaning in their work and assuming that will keep people satisfied at the least or motivated at the most, look at how much you are paying. Get out your local wage survey and examine if your wages are competitive with the competitor across the street and around the world.   Goodness help us all when the competitor across the street ends up being the federal assistance program (okay, maybe I did have to get a little political).

    When was the last time you examined your wage practices?

  • Could it Simply Be Your Generation?

    Could it Simply Be Your Generation?

    There is a lot of hype out there today, and there has been for quite of a few years, regarding generations in the workplace. It has become one of the key topics to focus on when it comes to interoffice dynamics and diversity issues in the workplace. And its fun to talk about it and classify people as such.

    While it is obvious that different events and cultural norms shape us all and these things can help define a generation of people (for example, who is dumb enough to think that 9/11 and the computer haven’t shaped the thought processes, ways of working and ways of interacting and communicating with others as clutch things of the millennial generation) it is also obvious that many of the things we chalk up to generational differences are quite plainly, age differences, not generational differences.

    Take for example this quote from Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee’s much anticipated second book that was released this past summer:

    “Alexandra was not amused. She was extremely annoyed. She could not comprehend the attitudes of young people these days. Not that they needed understanding- young people were the same in every generation- but this cockiness, this refusal to take seriously the gravest question of their lives, nettled and irritated her.”

    This quote addresses Aunt Alexandra’s (Scout’s aunt, Atticus’ sister) feelings regarding Scout’s take on her marital prospects and priorities. The book is set in the 1950s, and Scout at the time was 26. She would be labeled a “Traditional” by generational standards, born before 1945, yet she is taking on the generational characteristics much like those we would see people complaining about today as millennial. Her aunt is serving the role of the traditional, traditionalist.

    Is it generation or is it just simply a product of age?

    A more personal story might help illustrate this dynamic. I used to run quite frequently with my dad. Full disclosure, he was born in the 1950s and therefore part of the Baby Boomer generation; I was born in the 1980s so I’m a part of the millennial generation.  On one morning run, I asked him about a friend of the family who had just started work fresh out of college at a government contractor.  I asked if she liked her new her job.  To which my dad replied, “Well her dad said that she doesn’t really like it all that much, but if I were her, I’d tell her to stick with it. Government jobs have great retirement and in 25-30 years she is going to need that.”

    To which I replied, “Yeah, always wise to stay in a job you hate for 25-30 years just to have the retirement package that may or may not be there 25-30 years from now.”

    You could chalk this dialogue of ours up to classic generational differences and it would make a lot of sense. That’s why people love all the generational stuff. However, if you stop and think about it, when I run with my now four year old and/or one year old 30 years from now (which I hope I will be doing), could the same conversation play over again and I have the response of my dad and they have the response I have? If so, that’s not a product of generation, that’s straight up a product of age and what is important to people given the certain “season” they are in in their life not the time period in which they were born.

    So before you go blaming your next workplace squabble on generational issues (or any one, single factor), stop and think about what combined factors shaped the person that you are disagreeing with. You may see generations at play, but you may also see a host of other factors at work (no pun intended).That’s why it is best to focus on training that captures the heart of all the sources of our differences and challenges as a framework to focus on the important takeaway: capitalizing on those differences by turning them into competitive advantages that create more productive and passionate workplaces.

    What do you blame on generational issues? What could you be doing to capitalize on these differences?

  • 7 Steps to Implement a Realistic Job Preview

    7 Steps to Implement a Realistic Job Preview

    Last week  we discussed why it’s important to do a realistic job preview.  So how exactly do you do it? Internships and co-op programs are long-term realistic job previews. This set up can provide a company with an opportunity to screen candidates without a making a permanent hiring commitment, but it may take too long.  For tips on starting a job shadowing program, click here.

    In the absence of setting up an internship or co-op program, you can do a realistic job preview in a day or a week. The ultimate goal is to simulate the work and the work environment in a way that helps you assess their fit and ability to perform the work and allows them to decide if the opportunity is the right fit for them.

    Steps to Implement Realistic Job Preview

    1. Select a set of work that this person would be doing if hired. This should be real work, things the company needs to get done anyway. You are just assigning this work to this person for the time period you’ve selected.
    2. To protect any proprietary information, since you are assigning them real work, get them to sign a confidentiality agreement.
    3. Give them the basic information and knowledge to success, but don’t show them how to do everything. Provide them with any basic internal knowledge they need to get the work done and introduce them to people that they will need to work with or through to get the tasks done.
    4. Bring them into the office (or if the work is virtual, let them work virtually) and give them the amount of time you think would be needed to complete the work to get it done.
    5. Let them go and do the work.
    6. Pay them the rate they would be getting paid for the amount of time they worked.  This adds to the realistic nature of the exercise.
    7. Assess how well they did the work, how needy they are in relying on others to get the work done and how well they interacted with others in getting the work done. Ask those they interacted with what they think. Creating a rubric of key criteria that corresponds with a scoring mechanism is a good idea. This helps to eliminate subjectivity and allows for better comparison across candidates.

    Because a realistic job preview is somewhat involved, we suggest doing it towards the end of the process with your top 2-4 candidates.

    Have you ever done a realistic job preview? How did it help you make a better hiring decision?