Horizon Point Consulting

Category: Recruiting

We know Talent Acquisition. We can help create strategic talent acquisition plans and processes to market, source, recruit, hire, and retain top talent. This category features insights specifically on Recruiting.

  • Is it a Fantasy Draft or is it Talent Acquisition?

    Is it a Fantasy Draft or is it Talent Acquisition?

    Do you know the difference between a snake draft and an auction draft in fantasy football? (If you said no, help is here!) Most people who play have a pretty solid preference for one or the other. I’m here with the unpopular opinion that it doesn’t matter which style you use (gasp!). When you draft a player to your team, snake or auction, what matters is whether that player’s skills match up with your needs in the most strategic, beneficial way. 

    Do you know what fantasy football really is? Talent acquisition. Recruitment and selection. When we evaluate a pool of candidates for a job, we’re looking at both on and off the field performance to find the best match. We’re looking at professional work experience combined with intangibles like work ethic and integrity. We know that the most successful players – on the field and in the office – have equally strong hard and soft skills. So how do we objectively measure fit and decide who to draft? 

    We measure fit by matching values. We assess current employees’ values, and then we use that data to develop an Organizational Culture Profile (OCP). Candidates then take the same assessment, and like magic, we have data to tell us which candidates we should draft for our team based on their preferred OCPs. 

    Jason Mutarelli with Accounting Today talks about using data to make fantasy football decisions in much the same way he approaches his own professional accounting work. We know data is critical to decision-making in the workplace, but we can’t figure out how to use objective data when making arguably the most important decision of all: who to hire. 

    Fantasy football is about having fun and flexing your strategy muscles. It’s about objectively evaluating individual technical skills and team-based performance to build a roster of players that will bring you a win each week. Don’t we want a roster of players that will bring us wins in the workplace? We win at work when our values match. Start assessing values and you just might win the league!  

    See the original post of “Is it a Fantasy Draft or is it Talent Acquisition?” by Jillian Miles on thematchfit.com here.

  • 3 Ideas to Help Your Recruiting Efforts

    3 Ideas to Help Your Recruiting Efforts

    In our last post, we discussed strategies for retaining talent in a difficult labor market.  Hopefully, you’ve focused efforts there, but most likely, you also need to figure out the best ways to recruit talent.

    Here are some ideas for doing so:

    1. Expose Yourself! Exposure is a key problem in attracting talent, especially for B2B companies.  Developing programs that expose people in the community to your company and jobs are important. We aren’t all Apple and Google.

    You can do this through partnership with schools in your area, marketing campaigns, involvement in community and charitable endeavors and by giving your employees tools to talk about your company in the community in a positive way.  An employee referral program may be a good strategy related to this.

    Work with your marketing department to create a communications plan for exposure in your primary geographic area(s) for recruitment.


    2. Look for talent in all the “wrong” places.  Explore looking for talent that you may not have ever considered before.  Here are a few areas to consider and resources and ideas to connect with these populations:

    • Individuals with criminal records.  There is a significant national movement to hire those with prior backgrounds.  Many organizations fear doing this, but there are multiple reasons do so in the right context.  Check out these resources:

    Getting Talent Back to Work

    70 Million Jobs

    • “Stay-at-home” moms or moms that have left the workforce to raise children and are now wanting to return.  This could also include people who have left the workforce to care for people other than their children.

    The Mom Project

    JPMorgan Chase ReEntry Program

    • The “retired” or “semi-retired”.

    AARP Resources  

    • Outsource. Contractors, consulting firms and/or freelancers may be the best way to get work done.

    72 Best Freelance Sites

    Oftentimes when you connect with diverse talent pools, you see that you need to think differently about how jobs may be structured.  Not everything requires a traditional FTE. Some of your best and most productive workers just may be a shift in mindset away.

    3. Reevaluate your wages.  More on this here. I’ll be speaking on this at SHRM19 in Las Vegas at 10:45 am on Tuesday, June 25th, so if you’re there, come join me for an in-depth dive on this.

    What is one thing you can do today to boost your recruiting efforts?

  • Are We Taking the Human Out of Human Resources?

    Are We Taking the Human Out of Human Resources?

    My first job in HR was with a Professional Employer Organization (PEO) in Virginia. It was a great opportunity for me to learn about the HR field very quickly and I loved it. But there was one thing I absolutely hated about my job, and that was having to terminate employees over the phone. We managed clients in the 48 continental states and whenever a client needed to terminate an employee, that task fell to me. Imagine a manager half way across the country pulling an employee into an office and saying “I have HR on the phone to speak with you” and then me sitting in Virginia saying “I’m sorry but we’ve got to let you go.”

    There was no personal connection there. It was a very sterile way of conducting those terminations, and I dreaded it every time, regardless of whether it was related to their performance or something else.

    I recently read an article about Amazon’s employee tracking system. It tracks productivity, automatically creates and issues warnings, and determines when an employee should be terminated for performance issues. In one facility alone the system led to the termination of 300 employees in one year! Granted the manager makes the final termination decision, but does so without having been present for the events that led up to that termination recommendation.

    AI in HR is a huge topic these days. And I definitely believe that HR needs help in automating some of our processes. But it needs to be used in a way that compliments the HR function, not one in which it eliminates it.

    Take for example recruiting. Many applicant tracking systems now have the functionality to scan resumes for key words in order to weed out those candidates who do not meet the skills requirements of the job. A candidate has six seconds to impress a recruiter and convince them to dig deeper into their qualifications. That doesn’t sound like a lot of time, but when you have 300 applicants for a job that time adds up. Being able to eliminate those candidates who don’t meet the basic qualifications without even having to review their resume can be a huge time saver. It can also help you determine those candidates who are the best match and allow you to focus on their applications first.

    But what if AI in recruiting went a step further and an automated system conducted prescreens or took the candidate through the entire hiring process and made the hiring decision for the organization? Think it couldn’t happen? Well, let me introduce you to Tengai, the robot interviewer.  

    So at what point does AI become a hindrance to HR instead of a help? When it takes the human out of human resources, as in the examples with Amazon and Tengai.

    Amazon’s performance management system doesn’t account for human factors. What led that person to perform below the standards? Do they have something going on in their personal life, do they have an undisclosed illness or disability, or maybe they are struggling to learn the job. You find these things out by speaking with the employee, not by producing an automated warning or write up.

    Tengai conducts the interview then creates a text of that interview for a human to review. That human bases their hiring decision solely on the text provided to them. But hiring decisions aren’t based solely on what a candidate says, they are also based on those non-verbal signals an interviewer provides during the process. If you’re hiring someone for a sales role, you watch them during the interview to see if they appear confident, make eye contact, cross their arms, or even fidget a lot. Tengai isn’t picking up on these non-verbal cues, only what the candidate says. It’s also not picking up on how it is said, which can also be an indicator to an interviewer.

    Limited AI can be very helpful to HR, but as with technology in general, it easily has the potential to eliminate the human aspect. How many times have you seen or heard people complain about self-check out lanes at retailers (personally I LOVE self-check out) or the self-order kiosks at McDonalds. AI in HR has the potential to have that same effect for organizations. People want, and need, human interaction and AI unchecked can easily take that away.

  • The Most Popular Emerging Employee Benefit is…

    The Most Popular Emerging Employee Benefit is…

    I remember thinking, how am I going to do this?

    I had just started my first full-time job out of college, and I was getting married that year.  I had been given two weeks of vacation for my first year that I had to earn throughout the year.

    If I wanted to take a honeymoon and be off a day or two before the wedding, I really had almost no time left to take off.  And a couple of my good friends were getting married that summer too, and I was in their weddings out of town.

    Was I going to have to lie and fake sick to be able to take enough time off to be in attendance for these events (since sick time was a separate time off bank at the time), or was I going to have to choose and miss something in order to be at work?

    And these decisions did not take into account whether I even needed to be present to get work done.  I could actually report to work missing something important to me, and quite possibly not have much work if any, to get accomplished if I was wise with my time and worked efficiently.

    According to a survey out by MetLife (click to download the full survey for this information), the most coveted emerging employee benefit is unlimited time off.

    Seventy-two percent of those surveyed said that unlimited time off is the emerging benefit they are most interested in.

    I could understand this in my early twenties when a benefit like this would have been unheard of, and I can certainly understand it now with my life involving time off needs that don’t just revolve around me but also the needs of a growing family.

    The survey states: “Emerging benefits help employers create the kind of culture that demonstrates a deeper level of care for employees, communicating that their needs are valued and their employer is committed to their success.”  

    In addition, and possibly more importantly, unlimited time off communicates trust to employees.  Trust that they know when and how much is appropriate to take off and for the right reasons.

    It also demonstrates a level of trust in leaders who are managing employees’ time to be able to utilize this benefit in a way that leads to company and individual success.

    So in a day and age where unlimited time off is an actually possibility, would it be your most coveted benefit offering?

    And if you are an employer with the ability to provide this benefit, what keeps you from doing so?

    Full disclaimer:  We offer unlimited time off at Horizon Point, and I have found that our people have never abused it.  If anything, there is not enough time taken off when needed.

  • What Does Your Candidate Experience Say About Company Culture?

    What Does Your Candidate Experience Say About Company Culture?

    I follow a number of HR groups online. It’s a great way to expand my HR knowledge, see how different companies manage their HR functions, as well as to share my own knowledge and experiences with others.

    Recently, while scanning through one Facebook group, I came upon a question that stood out. “Do you think it’s ok that managers are consistently late for interviews and leave candidates waiting for 15-20 minutes?”

    Reading through the comments, many respondents addressed the base issue- No, you shouldn’t make a habit of being late for interviews. But none addressed the impact that doing so could have on the organization and its reputation, or in other words, how candidates viewed the company’s culture.

    The candidate experience is critical to any organization in order to hire and retain top talent. And it starts as soon as a candidate clicks on a job posting. Here are some questions to ask yourself about your candidate experience and how it reflects your company culture.

    1. What does your job posting say about your company culture?
    2. Is your application process quick and simple, or do you require candidates to fill out screen after screen of information that you can probably pull from their resume?
    3. Once an application is submitted, do you send a “Thank you for your application” response? How quickly do you review and respond to applications? Do you notify candidates in a timely manner if they are not selected?
    4. When the candidate arrives for an interview, how are they greeted and are the interviewers prepared for the meeting? Are candidates left waiting on a regular basis?
    5. If, after the interview, you decide you like the candidate and want to continue to move forward, do you give them a tour and introduce them to other employees?
    6. You’ve made an offer and they’ve accepted. Now what? Is there contact between the time they accept the offer and their start date? That may include sending them pre-hire paperwork, providing them with their orientation schedule, or simply having a few members of the team they will join reach out to introduce themselves.

    The candidate experience is a great reflection of an organization’s culture. If the experience is a great one, candidates will think highly of the organization and want to join that culture. If the experience is a bad one, you will not only lose that candidate to another organization (maybe even a competitor) but you’ll earn the reputation of a company that doesn’t value candidates, and in turn, employees.

    Does your candidate experience reflect your company culture?