Recruiting Takes a Lesson from Wartime Logistics

Recruiting Takes a Lesson from Wartime Logistics

One of the most often misunderstood aspects of fighting wars is the importance of logistics. You can’t fight for long without food, fuel, ammunition, and replacement troops. 

In warfighting, logistics are pretty much everything. General Dwight D. Eisenhower put it best, “You will not find it difficult to prove that battles, campaigns, and even wars have been won or lost primarily because of logistics.”

We save the accolades for brilliant tactics and strategy. Tactics and strategies, however, were assured success by boring, old logistics. In WW2, for example, only 3 in 10 US soldiers actually served in a combat role. The rest were truck drivers, deckhands, mechanics, radio operators, and a myriad of other support roles which might have never seen the front line. And yet their contribution decisively won the war.

Ok, so why does this matter in the talent acquisition world?

No CEO ever got accolades for incredible recruiting. Their bonuses are based on their profits which they can quickly pad to look better by cutting costs and laying people off. They have little incentive to improve recruiting processes or repurpose existing personnel rather than lay them off. Such measures might stave off shareholder pressure, but it won’t build a long-term successful business.

In business, we hand out accolades for brilliant marketing, winning sales, and shiny products. We don’t hand out the accolades for hiring the people that make all of the success happen. And yet every winning company recruits well. They know when to recruit and when not to, how to recruit, and how to keep and train up the people they have.

Now that we are in the talent shortage that all the academics predicted would happen (even without COVID), maybe it’s time to re-evaluate how to succeed. Maybe it’s time for CEOs and COOs to start looking at Talent Acquisition, Recruiting, or whatever you call hiring people as the best way to create winning business strategies. Success comes with consistency, and you won’t achieve that without a strong backbone to support the people in your company.

 

Hiring for Attitude

Hiring for Attitude

 

Mike and Athin Cassiotis delve into the importance of setting a growth mindset in business and life, business coaching and mentoring, developing your company and personal brands, and hiring for attitude in this job market.

Athin’s Process with service-based businesses

Ramping up service-based businesses is relatively quick, but you must ensure you provide an excellent service. Athin helps business entrepreneurs manage whether they need to adapt their model to be more sustainable (e.g., recurrent revenue vs. one-off jobs or changing their marketing and sales strategies). 

 

Differentiating your business and your personal brand

“People buy from People”  and how you position yourself and your brand affects prospective clients’ decision to do business with you. Someone will buy based on trust and connection if there are a few options with similar offerings. It’s very compelling to understand and utilize these methods when running your business. 

Touchpoints: 

We get distracted very easily. Gone are the days when you could cold-mail people or just ask them to buy from you. It takes more for people to trust a business and several touchpoints before they’ll buy from you.

The importance of Mindset

It’s what’s between your ears that will determine your success. People sometimes have beliefs that are holding them back. Understanding yet questioning those beliefs can unlock your ability to succeed. 

A great explanation of this is by Robert Kiyosaki in his book “Rich Dad, Poor Dad.” In it, Kiyosaki speaks of how many of our parents taught us that money is the root of all evil; however, the flip side argues that not having money creates a lack of freedom. Putting a proverbial mirror on yourself to uncover limiting beliefs and updating your actions takes effort and happens over time. It’s easier for someone from the outside (a mentor or coach) to help uncover and help change business direction. This shift in beliefs changed Athin’s life exponentially. 

A new type of hiring challenge

In the US, people are slowing growth. It’s just hard to hire right now. What are the biggest challenges in Australia?

  • Australia is a country of mostly immigrants, and many people come from overseas, especially for tech.
  • Skills shortage, tech or otherwise, makes it hard to find good people.
  • Great Resignation: employees are rethinking what is essential for them. Remote work vs. office vs. hybrid is an example. Clear work options will make it easier for employers to retain and attract new employees. 
  • Culture: Being clear on business purpose, mission, and values.

Hiring For Attitude

To fill openings, you might have to rethink what makes someone qualified. You can’t wait 60 days to make a hire. Employers must quickly decide if someone is a good fit for the role and the team culture. 

What do people need to change the most about hiring?

  • Do you have to have that person as an employee? Some roles might be well suited for people who are contractors if it’s challenging to find people? Being flexible in this regard can go a long way. 
  • What are you actually offering to people? There are a lot of opportunities out there. How do I make it more enticing for them? Work arrangements and benefits, why would I join my business versus another company.

The Biggest Takeaway in Recruiting

Hiring should be based on values, attitudes, and behaviors

  • It’s unlikely that you’ll get someone with all the skills you’re looking for, especially with the skills shortage we have right now. You can train someone on the skills they are missing, but the values, mindset, attitudes, and behaviors are usually deeply imprinted into somebody. While it’s possible, using coaching and other methods to change attitudes and mindsets can take a long time.
  • Know the things that should be required and, know the things that can be taught, be realistic about it. 

What are the most important questions to ask?

  • With language awareness, prospective employees are likely to touch on their values and attitudes, allowing employers to learn about their motivations.
  • Learning what people have gone through in their lives. Learning about their grit, discipline, and the challenges they’ve overcome. What did they do growing up? Playing an instrument, a sport, or doing martial arts shows that someone has discipline and commitment. 

Final thoughts

The big lesson in business and life: be yourself; it doesn’t work if you try to be someone else. Whatever you’re doing (business or otherwise, always have a growth mindset. If we’re not growing, we’re dying. Put yourself in uncomfortable situations, and learn new things. Think whether getting a coach and mentor to know how to do things better would be beneficial. Time is the only resource we have; learning from someone can cut down on time needed to succeed.

Learn More

Athin Cassiotis

Athin hails from Adelaide, South Australia but has lived in Sydney, Australia, for over ten years. He started his first business about 5yrs ago: Waste Management Consulting, and it’s been about 2 ½ yrs since he began consulting and mentoring service-based companies.

Podcast: Business Growth Show → Insider Secrets and great feedback on Business with entrepreneurs and celebrities. If you can ask great questions of the people around you, you can get great answers. 

Favorite business book: Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill (Fundamentals of business mindset, being curious and delving deeper to set yourself up for success).

Favorite movies: Jim Carrey’s Ace Ventura and Eddie Murphy’s Beverly Hills Cop series. (having a good laugh and being different, be you; it’s a key lesson)

 Athin’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/athincassiotis/?originalSubdomain=au 

 

Mike and PivotCX:

Mike’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/indymike/ 

Pivot2First Podcast: https://pivot2first.com/

PivotCX: https://pivotcx.io 

Speed Wins in Recruiting, Every Time – Kyle Roed on Pivot2First Ep. 7

Speed Wins in Recruiting, Every Time – Kyle Roed on Pivot2First Ep. 7

 

Speed Wins in Recruiting, and when it comes down to it, not all HR professionals recruit at the ideal speed. Mike Seidle and Kyle Roed discuss recruiting strategies CEOs can bring back to their team to get ahead in the competition for talent. 

What are the most common out-of-date practices you see out there?

There are a lot of people who still manage people with 40-year-old processes. Examples range from attendance policies to recruiting. However, the world is speeding up, and the expectations of our employees, applicants, candidates, and hiring processes need to get faster. Speed wins in recruiting, every time. Even if an employer comes out with a great job, but there’s a prolonged part of the process, or there are people who halt progress, it makes it hard to hire great people.

Policies and culture can also be stuck in the past. Instead of flyers in the breakroom or 50-page handbooks, people want to access information on-demand from their devices. Moreover, today’s employees want a company with a social media presence they can be proud of, inclusive, and willing to change, listen, and confront issues society-at-large faces these days.

Another issue companies face is a low application completion rate and even HR resistance to change for fear of not being compliant. Applying for a job should be as easy as buying something online. Most of the time, today’s applicants are willing to invest more time in a lengthy application only if they have built some rapport with a business. 1-click applications help counteract this issue. All HR needs to start the recruiting process is an applicant’s resume, and applicants can fill out an extended application after the first phone screen or an onsite interview. 

What should CEOs be asking about their Recruiting practices?

In business, we talk a lot about sales and customer experience funnels. It’s the same in recruiting; it’s a funnel and an experience. The product is your company, and you’re trying to get someone to buy into it. It’s the same KPIs as sales, skewed slightly for HR. 

  • Candidate Experience: Can a candidate apply easily and go through the hiring process smoothly? Having a fast candidate experience is a competitive edge. You’ll win the war for talent if you can do this regularly.
  • Quality of Hire:  Can we keep hires? What’s the new hire turnover rate? Companies should have sound structures to select candidates. Yet, businesses need to be agile enough to adapt to changes and talent acquisition strategies that enable them to make good decisions in hiring. 
  • Candidate Flow: How many candidates are we funneling? How many candidates does it take to hire one person?  Recruiting is a unique skill in HR; not all HR professionals are adept at recruiting, and your best recruiter might not be an HR professional within your organization. 
  • Market development: Who are we reaching out to? Are there other groups/demographics we’re not reaching out to? Organizations with more diversity, equity, and inclusion have a diversity of thought, and they have intensional, inclusive cultures that allow those ideas to bubble up. This is the right thing to do, but it’s good for business too.

Learn more about Kyle

Kyle Roed is the Vice President of Global HR at CPM Companies, Cofounder of DisruptHR, and host of the “Rebel Human Resources” podcast. He fell into HR and fell in love with everything about people practices. In his almost 20 years in HR, he’s discovered that things in HR are ripe for innovation and has sought to challenge the way the HR community thinks about the world of work. 

Transformational Book: In a professional context, Good to Great; has been a true north since college. 

Favorite Movie: Shawshank Redemption; it’s a great story of triumph.

Rebel HR Podcast: Everything innovation in the people space www.rebelhumanresources.com 

Kyle’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyle-roed

Learn more about Mike and PivotCX:

Mike’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/indymike/ 

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Workforce: Rethinking Talent Models

Workforce: Rethinking Talent Models

Originally published by

Deloitte Insights 

Not only have workforce demographics changed over the last 30 years—collectively making the workforce older and more diverse—but the very social contract between employers and employees has altered dramatically as well. Organizations now have a broad continuum of options for finding workers, from hiring traditional full-time employees to availing themselves of managed services and outsourcing, independent contractors, gig workers, and crowdsourcing. These newer workforce types are available to solve problems, get work done, and help leaders build more flexible and nimble organizations (figure 2). Alternative workers are growing in number; currently, 35 percent of the US workforce is in supplemental, temporary, project, or contract-based work. This percentage is growing as well—for example, the freelance workforce is growing faster than the total workforce, up 8.1 percent compared to 2.6 percent of all employees.

As labor-sourcing options increase, it opens up the possibility for more efficiency and creativity in composing an organization’s workforce. But with more options often comes more complexity. Employers should not only consider how roles are crafted when pairing humans with machines, but also the arrangement of their human workforce and what type(s) of employment are best suited to obtain the creativity, passion, and skill sets needed for the work at hand. Orchestrating this complex use of different workforce segments might require new models. It could fundamentally change our view of the employee life cycle from the traditional “attract, develop, and retain” model to one where the key questions are how organizations should access, curate, and engage workforces of all types (see the sidebar, “Beyond the employee life cycle”).

Organizations have an opportunity to optimize the organizational benefits of each type of talent relationship while also providing meaningful and engaging options for a wide variety of worker needs and motivations. However, making the most of the opportunity could require a complete rethinking of talent models in a way that allows organizations to carefully match people’s motivations and skills with the organization’s work needs.

Access. How do you tap into capabilities and skills across your enterprise and the broader ecosystem? This includes sourcing from internal and external talent marketplaces and leveraging and mobilizing on- and off-balance sheet talent.

Curate. How do you provide employees—ecosystem talent—and teams with the broadest and most meaningful range of development? This includes work experiences that are integrated into the flow of their work, careers, and personal lives.

Engage. How do you interact with and support your workforces, business teams, and partners to build compelling relationships? This includes multidirectional careers in, across, and outside of the enterprise; and for business leaders and teams, providing insights to improve productivity and impact while taking advantage of new ways of teaming and working.

Deloitte Consulting LLP – © 2021

Imagine being able to engage your applicants within five minutes of application, then engaged in human-to-human interaction starting in seconds. PivotCX can make this process happen. See our 90-second video explaining how PivotCX can help you get to the right talent fast so you can Pick First.

Webinar: Reactivating Passive Candidates

Webinar: Reactivating Passive Candidates

Overview

Many employers are experiencing a labor shortage. The previously inexhaustible pools of active candidates have been drying up. Now is the time for many of them to tap into their reserves to reactivate passive candidates.

Mike and Ric will talk about tapping into employers’ hidden market of previous applicants and reactivating passive candidates. Life happens and  the timing might not have been right when they first applied, but right now could be the right time! Refresh your talent pipeline and spark new interest in your previous applicants to fill your current openings.

Our Moderators

Mike Seidle is a serial entrepreneur and software developer with deep experience in HR Tech. Mike heads up product operations and product development for PivotCX. He brings over 30 years of experience in marketing, software development, product and user experience design, and a proven track record of leading technology-driven teams.

Ric Basso has over 30 years of professional sales management experience, 13 of which have been in the HR Tech space as one of the first 50 employees at Monster.com. As Vice President of Business Development, Ric is a passionate sales and partnerships leader with the personal mission of bringing people together to advance their lives.