Welcome to our lecture on external recruitment. This kicks off the core staffing activities section of our class. And I know I'm looking forward to some of the more applied components that are that are coming up here and are in store for us, starting off external recruitment.
So what I'd like to do is kind of walk through the strategic recruitment model that your book lays out for you and breaks down in this chapter. And I think there's a few ways to go about this and what I found most helpful is to actually think of a real organization and pick out a job within an organization and then think through these different steps. So you might want to follow the link to InVision, an organization that helps web developers get through the design and the work flow required to build great websites, helps them get through it as efficient and effectively as possible. So their ideas to design better faster together. Now if you click the link to their web page and scroll down to the section titled ‘our core values' you see that InVision has several core values that they set out for themselves. So I'd like to go through them. The first is to ‘Question Assumptions': "True innovation and problem solving call us to question everything, even our own bias." Next comes ‘Think Deeply': "Good design thinking considers the task at hand as well as all the surrounding systems." Okay so we're getting in the mind of computer programmers here to some degree and designers. Then ‘Iterate as a Lifestyle': "We push for perfection, but never at the expense of progress." Okay so iteration. You can see how that might be very important for web developers. Next is ‘Details, Details', once again important, "Whether you're working with pixels are code, details will make the difference." Their second to last core value is ‘Design is Everywhere': "Everything our life is designed and is the driving force by business and culture." Finally they talk about ‘Iintegrity': "Say what you mean, mean what you say. Work hard regardless of who is or isn't watching." Okay so we can see here InVision house kind of core values, and these core values are linked up to their mission and vision as an organization. Now if I were to choose a job that we might define recruitment goals for within InVision, I could pick from several. And what I find here in in you might see this as well, but at the time the recording, an open jobs is enterprise account executive. So enterprise account executive exists to help sell the InVision product. Okay so this is a business to business sales job. And you can see some of their requirements if you're able to pull this job up, and you'll also be able to see some the benefits they offer. So within InVision it's clear that they're offering highly competitive salaries and a lot of kind of posh options like macbook pro, membership a health club you choice, unlimited books from Amazon, unlimited Starbucks card, half day Fridays. So some real nice are perks here so would appear that if we just go right after what they're looking at, they're looking to get the best of the best, right? They're looking to get top talent here and they're willing to pay a premium for it. So what I'd like us to do then is think about the recruitment goals that InVision might have for this job. And what's important here with the book's going to highlight and what I'd like for you to see the link to is strategy. So strategy is important. If we look back at the core values of InVision, this values to define a company that's looking to add significant value to the customers and probably charge a decent price for their services, right? This is not necessarily a discount operator, but InVision is instead an organization that that clearly wants to set themselves apart as kind of a premier organization when it comes to collaborative web development. They're wanting smart intelligent hardworking people who come in ready to hit the ground running. So if we look at the requirements of the job here, one of the things are looking for is a rolodex of contacts in leadership roles in design, product, marketing, or user research. So they're looking for people that have already have kind of been out there. Specifically they ask for 3 years or more inside sales experience, business to business sales experience. They want a track record of individuals who exceed their quotas for sales. So you can see that they're looking for people who can come in and hit the ground running, and this links up to their strategy. Now we might think through: Alright, we understand there's a person organization, and person job fit thing going on here that's going to link up to the values, the mission, and vision of the organization, but what about some of their goals are about speed? Do they need new employees right away? What are the long term needs? So we can imagine that this is a fast moving company. If they're hiring they probably need people coding, in helping develop their products as soon as possible. So our best guess might be that speed is important. They need new employees right away. If we read through it also find is a lot of venture capital behind this organization. And so clearly there's targets for big growth ahead. So in that regard we might also think about the long term needs: Likely this organization is needing to continue to vamp up they're hiring, especially people who might sell their product. Finally we'd want to think through: What's the timeframe here? Is their hiring kind of opening closed? Or do they always leave positions open? And this is something we want to come back to strategic decisions. So the opening closed hiring might be helpful in order to only collect applications, and have to deal with applications when needs exist but having hiring always open for this position, might be beneficial if the organization sees that this is a position that will likely always be in demand. Okay so we might see here how there's different things to be thinking about, different goals that we'll have to recruitment for a given job, and in the case of enterprise account executives at InVision, we can think through come a strategic decisions in different ways based on the strategy of the organization.
Now in the case of enterprise account executives at InVision, I think the decision between an open versus targeted approach should be pretty clear. You might want to pause for a moment and think about what would be the best approach for InVision to take here? I would suggest a targeted approach is what makes sense for this job, because there are very clear KSAOs, knowledge, skills, abilities and other characteristics, that are linked up to this job. Okay so you might say, "Well the adventures of an open recruiting approach would be that we have a diverse set of candidates and lower cost per applicant." But you might also have very noisy data, where you have lots of data with a lot of unqualified individuals. So, many applicants you can get them easily, but they're not qualified for the job. So that's where a targeted, more narrow in focus approach, is likely going to be beneficial.
So hopefully you're finding some benefit to this walk through of the strategic recruiting model in the book. And we'll continue here with organization and administration decisions. So when it comes organization and administration there several decisions would want to think through. One would be: do we stay in a house with recruiting or go external? And in the case of InVision, we can see based on their website, that they've clearly seen value and staying in house for their recruiting. Their recruitment appears to be occurring just as such through their website. The size of the organization and the resources will really dictate what happens in many cases with whether they stay in house for recruiting or look externally. So again, InVision clearly has a lot of venture capital funding. It is appearing to grow at a fast rate, and they have the resources to at this point do the recruiting in house. We also might want to think through: Do we have a centralized or decentralized recruiting function? In other words, Does the organization that one centralize point carry out or recruiting for all jobs or do different jobs get recruited by different departments? So this case, we'd probably think about how specific are the jobs we're hiring for. The enterprise account executive is at the end of the day a sales job. So it's likely this is a job where there's not such technical expertise that is centralized function couldn't handle it. So I would think here, probably a centralized recruiting function which allows for economies of scale, things like that, would be most appropriate. Next we'd want to think through lead times. So what is the time horizon between when we post a job and when we would need to be filled? Something that should inform our lead time analysis is what we've discussed recently in this class, planning. So depending on the growth that is foreseen to occur, or perhaps, shrinkage for a certain job, we might want to think through our lead times. And so if it takes us four months to go from expressed candidate interest to actually hiring the candidate, then we'd say we've got a four month lead time, and so based on our planning your whatever number of employees we need eight months from now we should probably start hiring four months from now. Finally we want to think through: How do we handle the process flow and how we keep records of everything that's going on with our applicants? So there's various ways we could go about this. There's certainly in house software and enterprise resource systems that can track all of this for an organization. A company like InVision, with strong IT and web development, is likely using their own system to track what's happening with their applicants. But there might also be ways that we can go out and buy an applicant tracking system instead of make it ourselves. So again in this case, it looks like InVision probably has made their own applicant tracking system, but in other cases a company might want to go out and buy it. So I've provided the link here where you can check out an applicant tracking system example. You might want to click around the linked website which will take you to iCIMS recruiting software page. And iCIMS is just one example of an applicant tracking system that's kind of secure in cloud based online where recruits, all their information is kind of carried out through this software. And you can track all the different metrics that you might be interested in that we will talk about later.
Once we've thought through the recruitment goals that we've had that link up with organizational strategy, and we've selected whether we're going to pursue open or targeted recruitment, and then also put into place some of the organization and administration of how we'll work through our collection of applicant information, and the whole recruitment process, we can then think about the potential applicant reactions that we will run into when it comes to recruiting. This is very important because if applicants don't like the way the recruiting process goes, it doesn't take much imagination to think they might just step out of the process and look elsewhere for job. An important thing to think through here is: What are we trying to most sell as recruiters? Do we want to sell the job or the organization? And ultimately we have to so both, right? But it might be that the organization is a stand out organization, a place with a great reputation, kind national status, you could think of a lot of these current tech companies like Facebook, Google, these organizations that attract people regardless of the role, right? So people are very interested in them. So this case the organization might sell itself as much as the job if not more. In other cases though, we might want to really sell the job. In the case of InVision, it would appear that InVision is developing a pretty strong reputation for excellence, and the organization should stand out. A lot of perks are excellent and it seems like there's a lot of things that might interest prospective applicants. So, my call here is emphasized the organization, it's fast growth, it being a special place to work, and all of that. You might think through your own experiences as you've gone through different recruiting processes and what were your reactions to the recruiters? or the processes that you went through? or the organization? Specifically the diversity of the organization, right? Did you have reactions to your perceptions of these things? As HR professionals it's going be important think through the different reactions that applicants will have at each step of the recruiting process.
I wanted to provide a bit of additional information beyond the textbook in regard to candidate reactions. There's a great chapter in the APA handbook of Industrial Organizational Psychology that carries reviews applicant reactions to selection systems. You can see the citation at the bottom of the slide. And so they talk about, there's really if a few major categories of what candidates react to. So the formal characteristics of jobs is the way that the jobs are explained to them and of course there's the inter personal treatment during the recruitment process that they are reacting to. We can break all of these down further, way the data cling together. So you've got these three categories of reactions and then there's effects depending on whether the reactions are positive or negative to each of these categories. And the effects that have been shown to relate are job acceptance, litigation, or lack there of, job satisfaction of hired, and individual's self-perceptions are self-efficacy, how well they think they will end up doing. Okay so what most tempers negative reactions you might ask? It's the job relatedness of measures and of the recruiting process, right? So it's important that along every step of the recruiting process you're thinking through: is what we're doing related to performance on the job? And if we're measuring or testing or selecting on anything that's not job related, it's certainly going to be more likely to drive negative candidate reactions and all the bad things that go along with that.