March Madness Proves The Need For Background Checks!

Every year from March 20th through April 7th, millions of basketball fans are glued to their television sets watching the playoff progression of 64 starting college basketball teams that are eventually whittled down to one victor that is left standing at the end. This is the NCAA equivalent of the NFL’s Super Bowl. However, instead of just one big game in the case of the Super Bowl, there are 63 “Super Bowls” over a 3-week period to decide the NCAA men’s basketball champion.

Additionally, this is major executive recruiting event for colleges seeking a new head coach to improve their basketball fortunes. As a result, their management recruiters regularly scour through coaching accomplishments to uncover the best candidates for their needs. Then, they aggressively recruit the hottest prospects with offers of more money, better facilities and an increased chance to win the championship.

Steve Masiello was hoping to improve his status during this process. He thought he had finalized a job offer to leave his current head coaching position at Manhattan College for a more lucrative one at the University of South Florida including a significant raise to $1 million per year. Unfortunately, he not only lost his new opportunity, but also may have lost his previous one as well. A background investigation uncovered that Masiello had not graduated with a degree from the University of Kentucky as he had offered and the official bios on the University of Louisville and Manhattan College (his last two employers) websites had listed.

Lying about coaching credentials is a problem that has occurred previously in major NCAA sports. In 2001 Notre Dame’s executive search team recruited George O’Leary away from George Tech to become the head coach of their men’s football team. Unfortunately, a few days after he was hired, inaccuracies were discovered in his published biographical sketch and he was forced to resign. For example, he never earned a master's degree from “NYU-Stony Brook University”, which in fact was a non-existent institution and actually two separate institutions over 50 miles apart. Furthermore, he had taken only two courses at SUNY - Stony Brook, and never graduated!

Dishonesty about academic credentials is not isolated to NCAA coaches. In fact, many engineering recruiters, scientific recruiters, R&D recruiters, IT recruiters and technical recruiters regularly encounter this problem during searches for engineers, scientists, R&D, IT and technical talent. That is why as I recommended in a previous article at “Hiring Errors Prove the Need for Thorough Background Investigations!” to take an investigative approach to interviewing. As part of this approach, I recommend at least four investigative checks:

1. Criminal records.

2. Civil records (e.g. bankruptcies).

3. Educational credentials.

4. At least three thorough reference checks.

This is the case because past behavior is the best predictor of future job performance. Therefore, you should thoroughly investigate all job candidates before hiring. This will help you avoid mistakes like Steve Masiello or George O’Leary when you are recruiting for an important position at your company.

What is your opinion on this subject?

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3 Steps to Uncovering the Best Candidates for your Technical and Manufacturing Jobs

Despite last month’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report of the smallest jobs increase in the last three years, American manufacturing is scrambling to find qualified workers. Unlike service sector jobs, which offer only menial pay, manufacturing pays very well and offers a lot of benefits!

After a decade of jobs declines, the U.S. manufacturing sector is booming, including the auto industry, which is experiencing its best year since 2007. Furthermore, growth in manufacturing has extended to key suppliers. As a result, many skilled workers including fabricators, machinists and CNC operators are in high demand and short supply. This shortage has also carried over to engineers, scientists, IT and technical personnel with Six Sigma, Continuous Improvement, Kaizen, Lean Manufacturing, JIT and industrial automation expertise. All are highly desired skills in today’s exceedingly automated manufacturing environment.

Unfortunately, several factors have contributed to skilled workers shunning manufacturing, including the allure of Silicon Valley startups and the misperception that manufacturing is dirty, dangerous and not as rewarding as other fields. As a result, our technical recruiting firm recommends three steps to improving your technical recruitment prowess in manufacturing.

Step 1: Promote

Your company needs to engineer a unique and decisive public relations campaign to persuade potential hires that your job openings are stable and rewarding. This does not have to be too extensive or costly. It can be as simple as developing a short video touting the virtues of your company. Then hand out the DVD at job fairs and during interviews. Include as many of your top workers in order to help convince prospects that yours is the company of choice.

Step 2: Brainstorm

Include key internal technical personnel and management recruiters from your company and external executive recruiters. Focus on: a) ways to streamline the interview process b) key evaluation metrics and c) unique selling propositions or USP’s that your company has to offer versus your competitors. Work and rework your ideas into a top five list. Then after reaching consensus on the top five, codify them into a one-page sheet to distribute to all hiring managers to ensure synergy in the recruiting process.

Step 3: Training

Train all your hiring managers on your top five key recruiting attributes developed in step #2. Use videotaped mock interviewing and recruiting sessions to ensure there is consistency among all members of your executive recruitment team. This will ensure fewer mistakes and better executive recruiting efforts. Especially in securing technical, scientific, manufacturing, IT and engineering talent that is in high demand and short supply in America’s growing manufacturing sector.

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5 Tips for Successful Job Recruitment

Whether you are making your first hire or recruiting multiple employees to fill vacant positions, if you have not thoroughly planned out ahead, then the recruitment process might be long, arduous and even fail! Taking essential steps before even posting a job or interviewing increases the probability that you will quickly find the right candidate for your needs.  

I recommend 5 essential steps to ensure that your next recruiting assignment goes very smoothly and increase the likelihood that you uncover the right candidate for your needs:

1. Write An Explanatory Job Description – This details the key tasks and elements required of your position. This not only helps the candidate to better understand what is expected of them, but also assists you in better screening out unqualified candidates by forcing them to verify their skills per your job’s requirements.

2. Specify Candidate Profile – Detail what type of profile you are looking for. This can include: years of experience, education and all the criteria that are important for the job. Study past excellent job performers to uncover what profile they possessed. Also, research the current job market place by viewing job boards like Career Builder to see what types of jobs and skills your competitors are recruiting for. The caveat is you may be seeking a certain job skill, but it may be in very short supply and high demand by everyone in the jobs market!

3. Quantify Your Chosen Criteria – Whenever possible calculate the essential tasks of the job. For example, 30% C programming, 45% digital hardware design and 25% testing. This will not always be easy, but whenever you can quantify your job tasks, it will allow you to more quickly identify those candidates who possess all the qualities and abilities necessary to accomplish your job profile and add value to your company. It will also assist you in the interview process to better screen candidates per your most relevant interview criteria. For example, “What percentage of your last job was devoted to C programming?”

4. Thoroughly Develop An Interviewing Strategy – It is extremely important that you develop a detailed plan your interviews in order to gather the maximum amount of information from candidates in the least amount of time. Research shows that open-ended questions tend to elicit the most information possible. For example, “What did you accomplish at your last position?” Also, try to incorporate the “quantifying” as mentioned in my 3rd tip. For example, “break down for me by a pie chart what your job activities looked like in your last position?” Finally, meet your entire interview team in advance of the actual interview to cover your detailed strategic interviewing plan. Make sure that all interviewers are clear about: a) what information you desire from a given candidate? b) Which interviewer will ask what questions? And c) what metrics you will be using to determine whether a candidate is qualified or not per your job requirements?

5. Get The Word Out – Use all sources at your dispose. Start with all your contacts. Then employ your candidate’s contacts including searching their social media contacts list and networks. This can benefit your company in two ways: a) it can provide you valuable, hidden information on the candidate and b) it can increase your sampling frame of viable, qualified candidates for your job.

In summary, I have shared five proven tips to help you increase your batting average in employee recruiting for your business. They will help you to streamline your recruiting and interviewing process and increase the probability that you will more quickly secure the most qualified candidates for your job requirements. 

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Falling Economies, Rising Disengagement Rates

The United States, as we all know, is the strongest and most developed nation on earth. However, with falling economies across the globe, some shocking figures might just throw you off guard and open your eyes wide enough to understand and accept that all that glitters is not gold. I’d like tossed light on hidden unemployment in the U.S., which is not always apparent to the media, government officials or the masses.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics is an autonomous body and the main U.S. government agency that keeps a complete record of labor and job trends on a regular basis. They provide complete statistics and detailed data that inspire most labor policies enacted by the U.S government. Every month they calculate the number of new jobs created both nationally and within individual states. Although these figures are always delayed by a month, they provide a true, clear and concrete picture of the labor and job trends prevalent in the country. Hence, based strictly upon the most recent BLS report released on November 8, 2013, one might be pleased that 204,000 new jobs were created. Furthermore, if we sum up the jobs numbers for the last six months, we get a whooping figure of 1,053,000-jobs created, which sounds really enticing considering many of the government’s policies over the last several years have run contrary to jobs creation. Unfortunately, those figures only focus on those “purely defined” as unemployed.

However, digging more deeply into BLS figures, we unearth that 21.7 million workers in the U.S are either a) unemployed or b) underemployed (people who are not left with an option but to work part-time because they cannot find a full time job) or c) having just given up looking for a job! When those figures are added to the unemployment numbers, the rate explodes from 7.3% to almost 16%! That is 1 in every 6 people you meet on the U.S. streets!

A lot more needs to be done to create jobs. Especially to assist small companies, which is the traditional engine of jobs growth. Many of my clients are small business owners and they regularly convey to me that they wish to add new personnel. Unfortunately, they are afraid of the current government climate including many new regulations that will add a lot of necessary burden to them. Instead, government should lessen the regulatory load on small businesses so we can further expand the jobs market in the U.S.!

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A Strategic Search in the Chicago Job market

What you call employment agencies, are actually “talent hunters”. Don’t you agree? How long is the technical position at your office lying vacant? Are you still looking for the best professional for your R&D department? This is the common issue with all companies, regardless of whether they are small or big. And a recruitment agency is the complete solution for all these hiring needs.

The growing job market, created a wide gap between the employees and the employers. In appropriate advertising procedures and most importantly in accessibility in reaching the prospective candidates slowed down the recruitment drive of various companies, which in turn affected their overall economy. Hence it became inevitable for a recruitment agency, to handle and manage the recruitment drive. And in these moments of crisis, emerged new paraphernalia in the job market: recruitment agency.

If you have an exceptional corporate office and are looking for equally talented professionals, it would be a very tedious process to go through the stereotypic procedure of advertising, screening, interviewing and finalizing job candidates. The job market is flooded with budding talents, and it is quite impossible to separate the best from the rest, unless and until you are a savvy recruiter. In this regard, recruitment agencies are a savior! These agencies are thoroughly aware of the occupational demand within a particular geographical area. Be it in the Engineering job sector or that of R&D, these agencies have a vigil eye on the status of the job demand. They can provide a much wider (and genuine too!) spectrum of prospective target candidates.

Find the right talent with a recruitment agency

Recruitment agencies concatenate the vast market of employees and employers. But they actually work for the employers. They help the employers in finding the right candidates by employing effective search strategies. The most important search strategy employed by them is networking.

Generally networking is done in two ways:

1) Face to face meetings with people.

2) The recent trend, e-networking.

The former one is a traditional way and is not as promising compared to the latter one. Agencies employ e-networking to reach a maximum number of prospective candidates. Use of the proper keywords for attracting the traffic of candidates and giving detailed information about the company are the major aspects of their business portfolio. In other words, they are time savers. Just imagine the total business working hours a company would have wasted in posting jobs, advertising them, scrutinizing hundreds of applications and conducting interviews.

It’s an Endeavor to make the recruitment process much easier and justified too!

They analyze the skills of the candidates and weigh them against the job requirements. In many cases, they also conduct workshops and training sessions for polishing these skills. Apart from this, they also perform a thorough background investigation of the candidates. They examine the employee records for any sort of criminal and civil records such as sexual offences, bankruptcies, lawsuits, DUI (driving under influence) cases.

If you are climbing the corporate ladder, you must have definitely understood the vitality of a recruitment agency (they are even known as placement or employment agency). So wait no more, contact your local recruitment agency and find the right talents for your organization.

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