Gotta Stop Bashing Monster...At Least for Today!

I know what you must be thinking...what the heck is super recruiter Earl talking about??  He must have lost all of his talent acquisition marbles.  Okay, I have to admit it.  Yes, as noted in previous articles most professional recruiters these days have transitioned over to LinkedIn as the TA tool of choice when laser targeting their searches (especially with very hard to fill positions).  And like those other talent acquisition teams throughout the country, we here at Toyota Financial Services (as of April 2012) have also implemented LinkedIn Recruiter and have used it extensively during the past 1 1/2 years with some significant successful hires.

However, what's been a huge thorn in my talent acquisition side, is the continual challenge of identifying qualified CPA's with Big 4 external audit backgrounds who are willing to hear my pitch to take a look at Toyota as their potential future employer.  The sweet spot issue for me, is the Senior Accountant/Accounting Supervisor level roles at ($80-100,000) base salary.  And wow, are my LinkedIn response rates horrendous (2-3% at best!!).  Compared to my other candidate pools, my statistics for this challenging group SUCKS!  Inmail after inmail is sent out, using different variations of messages, sent to candidates at varying times during the week and different times during the day (and spaced out in 3-5 month increments)...and still with no success!  

With our OPEX goals in place (which means I need to be extremely conservative with TA dollars being spent on ads, travel, and the dreaded AGENCY support), things have been looking rather bleak lately.  So instead of throwing up my hands and giving up, I did what most recruiters these days either forget to do or just won't do thinking it won't help.  I flash backed to 2006/2007 and fired up my old Monster username and password and did some boolean searching.  Not only that, with little success using their Power Search capability, I went super old school and tried searching with their Classic resume mining function.  

And guess what...BAM?!!, I was able to bring up a perfect Big 4 CPA/Master's in Accounting resume within minutes, and had a phone interview scheduled that same afternoon with the candidate.  In addition, a Big 4 CPA who's a current Accounting Manager at a Fortune 500 company was also identified for future roles that are sure to open up here at our headquarters in Torrance, CA.  Thinking outside of the box, going against the current recruiting norm, and taking a chance on a supposed dinosaur talent acquisition tool with no value, helped me reaped benefits that could amount to a $20,000 to potentially $50,000 savings for the company. And within just 30 minutes!!     

Glad we still keep some past user accounts ready and waiting.  I'll stop bashing Monster for now...

Will My ATS Upgrade Help Me Target Better Candidates?? Got the Whole Summer to Find Out!

After 6+ years of in-house talent acquisition work here at the lending division of Toyota Motor Corporation, and countless frustrating hours spent digging into our Taleo (which we aptly names TalentLink internally) applicant tracking system sourcing for resumes, we are finally upgrading to version 12.0 next month (let the ooohhhsss, aaahhhs and hurrays! be heard from miles away).  Thanks to Monster (in the first 2-3 years) and LinkedIn (in the latter 2-3 years) my sourcing activities have been rather fruitful at times using very focused boolean searching criteria to hone in on the "right" talent out in the marketplace.  Oh and by the way, utilizing the Toyota brand name on my phone calls to candidates didn't hurt either :)

What's been ghastly missing with Taleo 7.5 has been the ability to utilize those same boolean tools (that are a staple within those off the shelf external resources) within our in-house ATS to source the vast array of candidate resumes (and significant number of them high caliber) numbering in the tens of thousands who have applied to one of the many Toyota affiliates/divisions over the past few years...we share our system with both the motor sales and manufacturing affiliates/divisions.  The fact that I put in a very general position name in the job title field, hit Search, and only come up with 3 candidate profiles has always been baffling to me!!

I've always been taught by my talent acquisition mentors from the past, that the number rule when starting with a large company that has a robust ATS, is to first mine the resumes that are already in the system of people who have shown an interest in the company.  It's in-bound recruiting at its core.  If your running 20-30+ requisitions at a time, it's probably your best sourcing tool, especially if you do not have focused sourcers on your team who can be in LinkedIn all day sending out hundreds of in-mails to prospective applicants.  At companies prior to Toyota, I relied on this method especially when I was new to an organization, and just learning about the "hot buttons" to push when I was sourcing outside of the system.

We have day 2 of our Taleo upgrade training tomorrow, so I'll be asking a whole bunch of questions when we go over "advanced candidate querying" during the morning session.  Hopefully, I'll be pleasantly surprised with all of the new boolean capabilities the new system has in place!  I can then spend the summer looking for those "A" players who have shown a propensity for Toyota.

Morale of the story is to tap your ATS for candidates first, make sure you have the right querying tools, and build upon your in-bound recruiting skills for maximum impact.

Toyota Annual Bonus Time...Have the Outside Vultures Targeted their Prey??

 

This is the time of year at Toyota (and specifically the division I work at, Toyota Financial Services) where we not only receive our raises/merit increases, but also the bulk of our annual bonus is paid out...YAY!!!! (although as you all know that bonus amount is heavily taxed at the supplemental rate, arrrgghhhh :( 

However, as a talent acquisition professional the anxiety starts to set in, since with an annual bonus there usually comes a potential for a spike (and maybe a really big spike) in turnover.  As we've seen in recent years during the build up to this time of the year the vultures (competitor companies) start their yearly targeting of our highest performers in mission critical areas of our organization.  We've already seen one Hi-Po (high potential, high performer) get swept up just a couple of weeks ago...and that was BEFORE the bonus pay out!!  Who knows which ones are next.

Revv your recruiting engines and let the pipelining begin!  In reference to Dr. John Sullivan's article on RINO's from Ere.net earlier this month, we professional recruiters (or those who aspire to be ones even though we have the title) need to put on our sourcing hats 24/7, stop with the administrative hullabaloo and pick up those phones and ping the Non-actives (I guess the term "passive candidates" is SOOO last year!).

LinkedIn, gathering referrals, and oh no Cold Calling here we come.  Can't rely on the post and pray job boards anymore.  If you're reading this and thought you'd never be tempted to look at another opportunity while we're still crawling out from that "recession" rock, you may just get a call from this non-RINO "professional recruiter".

Til next time.  

LinkedIn is Definitely the New and Improved Monster!

We've been utilizing the LinkedIn Recruiter tool here at Toyota Financial Services for the past year, and we're still learning how to best get potential candidates to respond to our messages.  I have the worst time with my hard to fill accounting positions, that require Big 4 experience and a CPA.  I guess they have too much focus on their audit engagements than to open up my LinkedIn inmails...arggghhh!!!!  My message acceptance rate is atrocious, 4-5%.  So you can imagine how many messages I need to send out before getting interested accountants to start an employment conversation with us.

Barring all of this, I've been able to identify quite a few professionals who have already been hired or are in the final stages of the interview process.  It's been our most useful tool by far, and our agency spend has decreased by $400,000 compared to last fiscal year.  Our senior leaders have been quite impressed with the quality of candidates along with the expense reduction.

Hoping to have many more LinkedIn successes in the future...