Monday 21 December 2009

Going on Holiday!

No more blogs till the new year for everyone who has read and commented on them in 2009, thank you and I will try and write more in the 2010

2010 is going to be a big year

Thursday 17 December 2009

Are you a Social Recruitment wanker?

If you haven't read the article by the Australian blogger Thomas Shaw you should today!

Its a great summary of the world right now in the UK recruitment, which I was reminded of last night when pitching some new ideas to an existing client.

  • In 2009 the only people you have made money out of the Social Recruiting "thing" are the people who speak about it, either conferences or consultants or web companies.
  • Evidence of it working (however you define that!) is really hard to find but are we looking in the correct place?
  • It uses up time in a recruiters day that we cant track any more (or can we?)
Every time there is a shift in Technology there are opportunities to leap frog your competitors or to create a new product that doesn't exist yet. Social networking/recruiting/sourcing and how it works with recruitment is just one of those shifts! Like
  • the posting of cv's moving to faxing cv's
  • calling candidates at home at night to calling on the mobile
  • faxing cv's machines moving to emailing cv's
  • candidates seeing you adverts in the local paper to you website
  • email cv's moving to cv portals
  • job boards to free aggregation sites
  • cv portals moving to direct XML feeds
  • contacting candidates on IM to using Facebook
It is just another way of getting finding a candidate, putting them in touch with a hiring manager and then doing you job!

However you cannot avoid it as don't be the last people to get a fax machine!!!



Thursday 3 December 2009

Return On Time Employed in Social Networks

I attended and presented at the launch of the new iProfile search tool where I was talking about the Social Media in Recruitment. Whilst time was short I was only able to touch a litte on many areas there were a couple of themes I thought worth expanding upon.

Which Social networks are worth the effort? [I mean only for being used as a candidate sourcing pool not about which you enjoy to be part of] And how do you measure this? I suggest two methods
- Data quality - what is the data you can see that are added to these sites (ie Twitter very low quality and LinkedIn is high)
- Search ability - what tools do you have to search the data on the site (ie Facebook very poor and LinkedIn is high and getting higher)

The combination of these two then allow for you to get a feel for where resourcer's could spend their time more effectively this increasing their Return On Time Employed (ROTE).

Now how do you measure it and what is good and what is too low?

Saturday 21 November 2009

What is your strategy?

Reading a Post from Peter Gold this morning where he discusses the issue I have been struggling with since last Tuesday when I got the demo of LinkedIn RPS and a client meeting the previous Friday.

Where does the recruitment work flow start and how many options do you need to find CV's and candidates as there are loads (ie Daxtra SS2, iProfile, Broadbean Stream, Actonomy, CV Job Databases, LinkedIn RPS, Google, Broadlook and that is just the popular stuff...)

All the cloud based services just make it easier to find candidates but that is not a recordable recruitment activity, Long listing is! So at the point you move from Finding to Talking you need to start the tracking!

Which database will be the first to make it easy to store all this activities OR is it important at all!

You decide

Wednesday 18 November 2009

LinkedIn RPS

Are you going to go for it? Did you see it last night and will it be worth the money?

What am I speaking about? The LinkedIn Recruiter Professional Services!

If you haven’t heard of it you will soon and the sales boys and girls from LinkedIn who never wanted to know you will now be knocking you doors down looking for money per user per year, from what I hear the number will be high (but lots less than a placement, the sales people will tell you!)

What does it do?

Each recruiter get a dashboard, a desktop and 50 Inmails to anyone in the entire 50 million members of LinkedIn, in what I think are batches of 20 at a time (but I may have misheard that). Teams can share project folders and see candidates and Searches they are working on.

I worry as a user of LinkedIn but it was always too good to be true, if you post you details on line and don’t control them then someone will sell the rights to them!

I am still trying to work out how this will fit into many companies but more when I have thought it through, if you haven’t seen it have a look and I would love to hear you opinions.

Tuesday 17 November 2009

Bullhorn Live

I have now been quiet on the Bullhorn implementation for 3 weeks deliberately as we are dealing with the go live issues, I will detail them all in summary soon.

Suffice to say it has been as much fun as every other system I have changed in my 10 years

Tuesday 27 October 2009

Bullhorn implementation in the UK - The Final Week

The last few days have been a blur and it never stops amazing me that it is the little things that catch you out in any Project Go Live. Thanks to the team involved, you know who you are and I am proud of you all.

So now the diary of the Go Live week, boring but true!

Monday T-7 days and Training Begins
- Start face to face training, everyone is getting at least 8 hours of training in 3 or 4 sessions covering Navigation, Resourcing, Perm or Contract work flow

Tuesday T-6 days and Training continues, Data cut off day
- The client made its last changes to their existing system on Tuesday night at 5pm, their existing server is was so slow and the files were 14Gb so we had to take a server on site, copy the data and take it to Kamanchi Towers
- We could run some data cleaning scripts on the system before we initiated the data extraction. We cut back on companies, contacts, jobs and candidates to raise the quality of the data.
- We took about a third of the data out and left the scripts running over night.

Wednesday T-5 days and Training continues and Data checked and sent to Bullhorn - We started the extraction routines at 10 in the morning and by 2pm we had uploaded the data to the Bullhorn ftp site.
- A sanity check by Clint shows that the CV extraction had missed about 38k records.
- A really good spot and with the time working in our favour we sorted it by 1800 and still on track for our upload slot.

Thursday T-4 days and its the last day of training
- The contract work flow in Bullhorn is its weak spot, it doesn't flow well and the teams don?t like it, it didn't help as we didn't have the Contract documents ready in time, so not a good finish to the training. Kamanchi are working with Bullhorn to improve this for the UK market.
- Hand over the system to Clint to extract the data. Issue identified at 22.01 with the Jobs files sent, new version sent over by 22.19 (result)

Friday T-3 days and its training test day and data checking day
- We receive an email at 3am to say the data load is finished and we are good to check it.
- First look only shows 58 records (only 45k short) Oh my god lets wait till Clint gets in, I am sure it is something easy.
- The training test is finalised and then pass mark set at 80% (I only got 50% in the first draft, some words and answers need to be checked). Well done AN for getting the top mark 86%.
- Clint gets in to the office and reruns an index, now we have 45k candidates and the data testing can begin a day earlier than planned.
- By Close of Play we are done and everyone who was going to work the weekend is stood down (except me), the data looks good, the record counts work and it just needs sense checking.
- The biggest issue is with candidate cv's that we cant do anything about where they haven?t populated the preview window in the candidate overview. The document is there and it can be searched fine.
- The PST files from Outlook fail to move over the wire and we have missed our slot, so no email on Monday then.

Saturday T-2 day and no rest for the wicked
- The morning is spent organising offices to be opened, drives to be carried and uploaded to the Bullhorn ftp site so we still have a chance of getting the mail in for Live
- Our UAT at the client is having problems with his Internet connections so, sign off is on the phone. I love a client who trusts us enough to say go.
- Ready for the system to move in to live tomorrow, good job


Sunday T-1 day and a quiet Sunday until....
- I try the live site at 12.43, errors at login! And a candidate search returns no results!
- It is going to be one of those days, its at times like this we all earn our money and at 23.06 on Sunday we are good to go in live.

From Kick off to Live in 12 weeks, from agreed Scope to Live in 7 weeks.

Now we just have to get the client to remember how to use it!

Friday 16 October 2009

Video job adverts to the masses!

Have you been looking at Broadbean lately? Just the same as normal and the same as it has always been well you are wrong!

When doing some testing on the Bullhorn to Broadbean, there was a new field which looked like I hadnt seen it before the

Paste the URL to your video clip here

So that 3d job advert to the masses has taken a step closer and everyone now has the chance to make their recruitment consultants famous!

Pity as I have the perfect face for audioboo....

Wednesday 14 October 2009

Bullhorn implementation in the UK Part2/6

The Planning phase is an interesting time as it is where the Sales agreement meets the Analysis phase and where the extras can appear.

Hank is keen to get the Statement of Work signed off and create a Project Plan, whilst I am keen to work out where this fits in the overall project. You can guess there were a lot of versions of the document before it was agreed and signed off.

Our project has the inclusion of Broadbean integration as part of the commitment and this formed part of the spec. Like may systems very few (and I mean very few, you know who you are) actually track the responses against the advert and the source truly. Most add the candidates against the Job and Bullhorn is no different.

Another part of this phase is the pre implementation training, our recruitment application team jumped on a plane to Boston to get the training face to face. Our 3 staff were very well looked after and a big thank you to Barry and his team for looking after them.

It was at this stage I came across my first ?that will be extra moment? and it was handled very professionally by the European Sales Director and we all learned from it. For anyone else implementing make sure you know how many documents you create from the system and which fields are used to merge into them, as this done by engineers with Bullhorn.

Dealing with contractors professional service companies in CRM systems has never been easy and we spent loads of time at Spring getting this correct, it doesn't exist in Bullhorn really so we worked out a work round till we could design it together after the Go Live and before the Sage integration.

At version 4, we had a signed Statement of Work and a Project plan, we have 7 weeks to go live and we were going to learn a lot together. Roll on 26th October.

Monday 5 October 2009

How much data should I transfer when changing systems?

Just catching on some of my regular blogs and I came up with a beauty by Booleanblackbelt

The topic covers really well from a very simplistic manner the difference between
  • Recruitment by just posting a job to a job board
  • Recruitment using you head

Everyone involved in the industry should remind their consultants that only 14 - 20% of candidates are actively looking at any point and will therefore be looking at the job posting and that everyone thinks they can do a better job than they can!

However as BooleanBlackBelt says today's active candidate is in 18 months a passive job seeker with new skills, so your CRM/ATS has lots of passive candidates in it that already know who you company is.

"I like job boards because they have current candidates in it, I only look for the most recent ones" is something I hear over and over again when I speak to clients about moving data to a new system.

My point is buy the best searching tools your money can find and make sure everyone knows how to use them, then train them again and again. In the market iProfile has changed its model, Burning Glass over Lens Match, Daxtra offer Search Station 2, Broadbean uses Burning Glass in Talent Pod and Actonomy has its own match tools.

Pick the best one for you and train and train again, Linkedin may not always be so open!

Thursday 1 October 2009

Bullhorn implementation in the UK - Part 1/6

We are now at the Testing phase with our Bullhorn implementation, so time to update on the process so far

Bullhorn follow a 6 phase project methodology

[1] Analysis
[2] Planning
[3] Configuration
[4] Data Migration and Build
[5]Testing
[6] Go Live

All seems really simple and you are issued with your implementation consultant, I will call him Hank to protect the innocent and have some fun. I will cover each stage over the next few days.

The Analysis phase kicked off with a whole host of people in Boston on the phone, most of whom, I have not heard from again! The Project Manager/Implementation consultant, the Delivery Manager, the Software Engineer, Business systems analyst (I had forgotten they were there!) a Training coordinator and the link to the UK Manager Sales Engineering.

Had I not been a thick skinned, war torn system implementer this would have been a tough meeting. You could tell you were out of Pre Sales and now the clock was running and everything was budgeted for by the hour. So watch out as its hours not days you are being quoted for.

The first output of this phase is a Business Analysis or Workflow Questionairre, which is a collection of questions that range from the obvious to difficult detail. A good question was

- Is commission information currently tracked in your system? If so, who has access to view and edit that information? Please detail your commission structure/plan.

Now that?s a cracker and I have not in my years come across a CRM/ATS that did this but my hopes were high.

The Second output is a Terminology Mapping document, and this was a difficult stage as Mapping Adapt to Bullhorn is not a like for like match, this document needs thought and allow enough time for it in your planning!

This done we were ready for the Planning Phase!

Friday 25 September 2009

The Firm - Inhouse recruiters to be scared of!

Yesterdays APSCo members meeting was a panel session with the Firm - Forum of In house Recruitment Managers chaired by the Ann Swain and attended by well over a hundred members of APSCo.

It was a compelling listen, where the panelists representing Barclays Cap, Tesco, Pepsi and Symantec gave us recruiters a view from their world. It was not good news, they can do what we can do and probably better.

- Social networks has made Social Recruiting very easy and clients are using it extensively
- In house teams have large databases which they either do or don't manage in line with the DPA
- In house teams have ATS (applicant tracking systems) and will use them to save money
- In house value research (mapping of competitors) more highly than the recruitment service

What the industry needs is a way to be able to pitch a candidate to a client, knowing that they have not approached that candidate for that job, knowing that they wont then come back and say we already have that candidate (rotting) in their ATS or (unkept) in their Talent pool (linkedin group, Twitter followers or Facebook group)

Enter IT and our challenge is to make this happen!

PS I wonder who In house recruiters use to find their next job and how they stop research companies mapping their teams!

Wednesday 16 September 2009

IT Challenges in the Recruitment Sector, Bond v11 and Bullhorn

I stumbled accross a very interesting new blog yesterday who seem to specialises in Adapt v11 and has lively discussions at a very detailed level on the good and less good of Adapt v11. Only disappointment is that the blog is unattributed, so either a clever customer or even an employee. If it you please say hi!

Topics covered so far major on the speed of searching and quick finds and get very detailed level. What we need to remember is that v11 is new and working OK on a large number of small ASP clients for Adapt and is now being installed locally at more.

My point here is every system has its issues and every techie would do it differently but in the whole the good survive and flurrish and the less good stuggle.

Interesting today to see Bullhorn at 67 in the US fastest growing companies. an update on my Bullhorn project will come tomorrow as we are now in the guts of it.

Friday 11 September 2009

Baby Boomer or Echo Boomer in Social Recruiting


The day after McKinsey&Company issued a report on "How companies are benefiting from Web 2.0" where the findings were respondents reported measurable benefits



  • .... have Web 2.0 interactions with 35 percent of their customers

  • ...similar web ties with 48 percent of their suppliers, partners and outside experts


  • and the biggest issue in managing the adoption of Web 2.o technologies was "that the use of these tools be integrated into the flow of users work"

    In my opinion recruitment companies fall into 2 camps

    • "Echo Boomer Recruitment" - You get and an are embracing it, punching above you weight and making money but you don't know how!
    • "Baby Boomer recruitment" - You need a business case or have you head in the sand, think it is a passing fad, are creating policies to deal with it on the candidate side without thinking about the client side
    At APSCo Technology forum, the topic was Social Recruiting and what you need to ready for? If you have never seen Paul Harrison from Carve Consulting, then he is worth the entry money!
    We had 23 technology leaders in the room and Paul and he barely go to slide 3 before the discussion took off, and I mean took off. As usual Linkedin became the topic with such views as
    • we are very hard line on Linkedin, everything belongs to the agency if the network was set up in company time
    • we only allow company email addresses to be used
    • when a consultant leaves we call Linkedin, change the password and trash the connections
    • our policy's don't allow it
    Baby boomer recruiters are the establishment and have succeeded, have the money, the policies and the procedures to manage Social recruiting.
    Echo boomers are new, ambitious and get it. Don't have the business case, don't need one but will become celebratory recruiters, the "Jerry McGuire" of the sector, will be the best connected and the A Lister's for parties
    Which do you want to be? Who is making the decision for you? and it is a Strategy or just an accident? You decide?









    Thursday 3 September 2009

    Get to know your software supplier!

    A great way to kick of a project is to bring all the interested stakeholders together at a high level to eat and drink. I think that champagne is best avoided until you have something to celebrate, so a Breakfast is best.

    Our clients MD, the Founder of Bullhorn, the MD of Saber Analytics and us met near Euston station for bacon rolls, danishes and coffee one Thursday morning in August.

    The discussion was lively and recruitment is a truly small world, issues are the same everywhere and getting return from your investment is always the goal. Project objectives were agreed, timetables explained and business goals understood. Everyone looked each other in the eye and explained that they would do everything they could to make this project a success that we can be proud of.

    I have always found that you need to get beyond the sales chat and get to the leaders in all your providers organisation. I remember sitting in with the MD of Safe Tempest in my Milton Keynes reception finishing the details of the Tempest contract. That contact has been really important ever since, I have twice implemented Tempest since and the MD has always taken my calls.

    If you aim to work in partnership with your suppliers, spend the time getting to know them early not when something has gone wrong!

    Friday 28 August 2009

    Candidates > Clients > Agencies

    I love travelling time in the morning, it clears the mind and some of my best ideas come before 8am on a train/plane or automobile!

    Interesting in the FT this morning, where in an article about media agencies the Head of Marketing for Kraft said "Now...clients are ahead of agencies - and the consumer is ahead of all of us" which got me thinking about the use of Social recruiting and other online sourcing options.

    Largely thanks to Peter Gold the client is being educated to use these sources (Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Xing, Ning, Google adwords) better than recruitment agencies. Right now I believe Candidates are using these well (as part of life!) and Clients are using these (because they are under pressure to cut recruitment costs) and Agencies are struggling with pockets of poor knowledge therefore the equation Candidates > Clients > Agencies.

    Agencies are in the wrong place, we are meant to be in the middle.

    We all need to get ourselves sorted and work out how to build the use of Social networks and Direct ads into our standard recruitment processes. How many people could live without Linkedin? I watched a client search the jobs on Linkedin, then search Linkedin for candidates and headhunt them for the Job that he had just found, then spec the candidate into that job! All very good work but all off system and with no activity tracked (so his manager should be saying what were you doing during that 2 hour process).

    A cheery discussion for a Friday afternoon

    Tuesday 25 August 2009

    Linkedin job applications

    Earlier this year at a recruitment conference, I asked the European MD of Linkedin if they were trying to become a fully functioning recruitment database.

    Todays blog from Linkedin shows how to integrate applications from Linkedin into the client's own applicant tracking system or their website which is a positive sign, I think!

    Implementing Bullhorn in the UK

    I am currently project managing a Bullhorn implementation for one of our clients, an early adopter of Bullhorn in the UK. Part of the commercials was that we blog the project so others can see it as it develops, both good or bad.

    Bullhorn were selected from a shortlist of 7 suppliers, beating eploy in a very close thing. It was the built in email and electronic timesheets that won the client over in the end.

    The project began in August and is scheduled to go live in late October. The timetable includes time for Bullhorn to get its platform ready for the UK with dates, currency, post code searching and Broadbean being added. This project will include the integration of Bullhorn with Saber Analytics using web services as part of the go live too.

    The Kamanchi team are in Boston this week, so look out for weekly updates and feel free to comment on this with questions

    Tuesday 18 August 2009

    Targeting on Linkedin and Facebook

    I visited a client yesterday that reminded me of my old days of mail shotting candidates and clients, they send about 50k mailshots to either clients or candidates each week, each consultant is targeted with 2 a day! (I remember having a stuffer and piles of paper being sent out in my FSS days)

    Which brings me to modern day, the social media version as blogged about by Peter Gold today and some assumptions that are no longer the case

    Client Mail shotting needs a database! or does it - NO not with linkedin, the Linkedin DirectAd offer a whole new world of pay per click modern mailshots.

    Candidate Mail shotting needs a database! or does in - NO Not with Facebook the Facebook advertising offer a whole new world of pay per click candidate advertising

    I am not aware of anyone making them work totally yet in the recruitment sector, but Kamanchi are giving it a go, I will keep you updated

    Monday 17 August 2009

    Sunday 16 August 2009

    Just joined ping.fm and seeing what it does, what do you think?

    Tuesday 28 July 2009

    Another step closer for Linkedin

    My common belief is that Linkedin are creating the biggest and best recruitment database in the world and every recruiter will have to use it and pay for the privilege. I came across the Linkedin Company enhanced Profile, and this moves us even closer.

    The enhanced company page is a only a short step away from being the careers page for you company and will allow passive candidates to find out more and communicate with the company directly.

    Another tool for the in house recruiter, long live Ning!

    Thursday 23 July 2009

    Exciting times for IT Suppliers in the Recruitment Industry

    In times of recession, it is when the great companies make the changes that allow them to out perform when the upturn comes. So rather than see today's conditions as a bad time, I consider it a time where recruitment companies are making changes that I have not seen since the introduction of Job boards and CV parsing.

    Every recruitment consultancy should be challenging their suppliers to become partners, to understand what they do and how IT systems and suppliers must improve to give the consultancy the efficiencies they need to represent.

    Social media is also changing what recruiters will do, how they will interact with clients and candidates and the current IT systems that recruiters have isn't built to deal with it.

    Every supplier needs to step up to the plate and offer value to their clients, those clients (the recruitment consultancies) must also show its clients how it adds value in the recruitment process ahead of Linkedin and dealing with Ad responses.

    Exciting time............