The job security quiz will help judge how long you’ll end up at your current job and what will become of you.

1. The boss appears at your cubicle and finds you playing FreeCell at your desk, you…

A. Swear to take the game off your hard drive forever, but first make a copy for his kid.

B. Inform him that you’re planting a virus in the program so that everyone who plays it on company time will get reported to Human Resources.

C. Tell him that whatever he wants will have to wait until you’ve finished the game you’re on.

2. There’s a cushy job opening in the mail department, stuffing envelopes with free samples. It pays twice as much as your current position. What do you do?

A. Meekly suggest to your boss that transferring you might improve the morale of everyone who’s been working with you.

B. Politely ask your boss for a transfer and offer to split the salary increase 50/50 with him.

C. Barge into your boss’s office and demand reassignment so that “You won’t have to work under someone who should have retired before he became a laughingstock.”

3. When your boss throws a party and invites everyone in the office except you, what do you do?

A. Stay home and watch ‘I Love Lucy’ reruns.

B. Show up at the party anyway, with a really expensive bottle of wine and a briefcase full of small, unmarked bills.

C. Go over to your boss’s house after everyone has left and throw rocks at the windows, shouting obscenities.

4. Your boss criticizes your work unjustly; what do you do?

A. Listen politely, and then apologize.

B. Blame someone else.

C. Climb on top of your desk, and hold up a piece of paper on which you’ve written the word “union.”

5. When the CEO parks his car in your spot, you…

A. Wash and wax it, then leave your business card under the windshield wiper.

B. Key it … then tell the CEO’s secretary you saw your boss near it, loitering suspiciously.

C. Key it … then proudly tell the CEO’s secretary that you did it.

6. Your boss asks you to play Kooky the Clown for his kid’s fifth birthday party, what do you do?

A. Offer to pay for the costume rental and cake, too.

B. Agree to do it, then, blackmail a co-worker into doing it while pretending to be you.

C. Agree to do it, then show up as yourself and tell the children that Kooky is dead.

7. The boss accuses you of not keeping the office clean; you…

A. Clean the office while he supervises.

B. Tell him that you delegated the job, then, fire the underling you supposedly gave the job to.

C. Clean the office again, but this time, you use your boss’ face.

Scoring this test-
Mostly A’s: You have nothing to worry about. They’ll never fire you because you’re a doormat.

Mostly B’s: You’re not just going to keep your job, with your complete disregard for other people’s feelings you’ll positively shoot up the ladder of success. Congratulations! You’re a real jerk.

Mostly C’s: You are a career kamikaze. The boss would have fired you long ago, but he’s terrified of what you might do.

In Part 1 of this two-part Blog, The Sourcerer provided ideas and suggestions concerning the kinds of information you might want to collect and assess from candidates applying on-line to an open job.  Once the data you need has been identified and collected from each candidate, it becomes necessary to weigh the information provided from the candidate to determine who most closely matches the credentials of the “ideal person” for your position.

To handle this correctly, you need to indicate the relationship of each data point you collect against the answer you have judged as “ideal” for the candidate you want to hire.  For example, if you indicate that a college education is “required” for this position, every candidate with a college education is judged appropriate for the job, while any candidate with less than a 4-year degree would not receive credit for this specific attribute. 

 For every educational need, every skill, every past job or industry request, every type of background or past working experience you believe to be important, the candidate applying needs to be automatically judged, against your needs and against all the other candidates who are applying.

 If you have a number of “desired” attributes, you need to provide your screening system with a score (use of a 1-10 scoring with 1 equaling “Not Very Important” and 10 equaling “Extremely Important” works very well).  Candidates who score close to or above whatever number you select are rated higher than candidates who score less than the number you chose.

 As the candidates’ responses are weighed and scored by this automated screening system, they should be available to you for viewing with those who most closely match your criteria appearing first.  Every time a new candidate applies, the system must “re-shuffle” the results so the candidates appear in order from most to least qualified based on your criteria.

 When you have an “avalanche of candidates” for a job opening, the scoring and listing of every candidate who applies from closest to least close match can save your HR Staff a ton of time by significantly reducing the need to read unqualified resumes.  Reviewing the answers to text questions of the candidates who are strong matches can totally eliminate tedious, time-consuming per-screening calls.  

 A high-quality on-line screener should have additional options available as well such as:

• Ability to ask “Yes/No” questions such as “Are you currently legally able to work in the United States?”
• Option of asking questions that require text answers so you can get an idea of the candidate’s ability to express him/herself in writing.
• Ability to ask every candidate about behavioral traits and to rate themselves on any specific trait, using a 1-10 scale to help determine the candidate’s potential cultural fit in the job and/or in your company
• Option of attaching a resume for the prospective employer to review
• Ability to review each candidate’s submissions in summary or in detail
• Ability to print and forward candidates to others in the company for further review
• Ability to place candidates into folders for further processing
• Option to select and send follow-up e-mails to candidates singularly or in groups

 There is a great deal of thought and planning that must be part of a comprehensive screening system to give the user maximum flexibility and a tool that will service the requirements of the company regardless of the job that must be filled.  And to perform these tasks at a cost that most small to mid-sized companies can easily afford.

In previous Blogs we’ve discussed:

• How to Make Your Career Site a Talent Magnet – A outline on how a carefully crafted Career Site can cut your recruiting expenses by 50% or more and significantly reduce the time your staff currently invests when you have jobs to fill.
• Six Do’s and Don’ts for Sourcing the “Right” Candidate- A plan you can apply to sourcing candidates that will insure you hire better candidates faster while reducing hiring mistakes and recruiting costs.
• Selling your Job – It’s the Sizzle that Counts  – An article that outlines how to give truly qualified candidates all the information they need and all the reasons why they should want to apply to your company.

Now it’s time to examine what happens when you’ve followed all these suggestions and you occasionally become inundated with candidates when you post a job opening.  Handling a glut of unwanted and unqualified applicants can take a heavy toll on the time and the resources of your HR staff…you need a way to cope. You need an automated candidate screener.

Stepping into the realm of candidate screening can be a little like falling down the rabbit hole in “Alice in Wonderland”…you can end up in some very strange places, examining a multitude of choices that won’t get you what you want. 

There are a lot of choices available.  There are software selections that can look good but are in fact so inflexible that you must adjust your needs to the vendors’ definition of  screening criteria.

There are candidate screening options with modular pricing that when totaled can put a very nasty crimp in your budget and may represent “overkill” in what you really need. 

The best way to avoid making an errant choice when it comes to candidate screening is to first give serious consideration to what you want and need…and what you’re willing to pay for.

If your using an online screening questionnaire to collect candidate information, be sure the software you select gives you the flexibility to define both your required as well as the desired characteristics you want and need for each open position.  Be certain that you have the ability to use your terminology rather than having to select from a pre-set list of choices.

The candidate screening method you choose should allow you to select the  educational level and, if necessary, the major you wish the candidate to possess.  You should be able to ask about specific skills, experience, industry and/or job experience including minimum years of experience.  And as importantly, the candidate should be able to address these questions by answering multiple choice and “Yes/No” questions so one candidate’s answers can be weighed against others responding to the same job and questions.

You may also want to ask whether or not each candidate possesses specific behavioral traits that will help the person “fit comfortably” into your company’s work environment. You may need to know if a candidate is legally able to work in the United States or what type of work visa the candidate has.

And in addition, you might want to include questions that require text answers so you can judge how well a candidate responds in writing.

Finally, you will need to allow the candidate to attach or upload his/her resume for your review.

And once you have collect all this data…you need candidate screening that can match the candidate responses to your specific needs and display the results in a format that is easy to read and easy to use…but we’ll cover all that in my next Blog

Bye for now…The Sourcerer

A new customer just sent us a testimonial and among many very nice comments the Corporate Human Resources Team Leader said the following: ” I have already recommended Talmax to a few companies. Talmax is an intuitive candidate management system that has enhanced our ability to source, screen and manage applicants efficiently. It was easy to integrate Talmax into our existing process and the automatic feeds to Simply Hired and Indeed.com create instant value for our organization. Best-of-all Talmax is an affordable solution for an organization of our size!”  (Perry’s Ice Cream, Akron, NY)

But, you want to know the very best part of these comments?  The author actually made 3 excellent suggestions that would provide additional features within Talmax that would enhance the usefulness of the software.  Because everyone today whether customer, vendor, candidate or supplier is so very busy, it’s often very difficult to get a written testimony about your product,

To receive such a complimentary testimony AND a thoughtful list of suggestions makes The Sourcerer sit up and listen because this is obviously a customer who cares.  I’d love to have a hundred customers just like Perry’s Ice Cream.  Great relationships in business are very special!

This time it is The Sourcerer who has a question and could use your input.  Is Social Media interfering with your business?

I haven’t been involved with the use of social media for recruiting candidates and business relationship building  for all that long now (Talmax does now automatically feed to both Facebook and Twitter).

I think the idea of using the relationships that exist on the social media sites to “touch” people who might not be currently looking to change jobs is an extremely useful idea.  It can save an employer a ton of recruiting dollars and identify candidates not available through traditional recruiting methods.

I think that the use of social media sites to develop additional business contacts works very well…perhaps too well.

I think that’s great, and useful and smart and… here’s my problem… since I’ve become more active in the use of social media , my inbox has been “attacked” by a multiplicity of people and vendors trying to get my attention, promoting everything from logo hand-outs to accounting software.

My inbox is becoming so inundated with e-mail, I’m missing the really important messages I WANT to read and I’m spending over 2 hours a day wading through messages and not having the time I need to read those publications I really want to follow.

If that’s true for The Sourcerer, I’m pretty certain others are experiencing the same problem. And that says nothing about the enormous number of e-mails that go directly to my SPAM and Junk Mail boxes.

Partially because I’m in the developmental stage of business with Talmax and partially because I’m still attempting to learn more and more about social media, I don’t really want to ignore a message if it might contain useful information.  And so, my Blog readers, I’m asking you for solutions that might help alleviate this problem.

Is social media interfering with your business?  If so, what are you doing about it?

I was recently referred to a website, “tjntiy” http://www.tjntiy.com which stands for “they’re just not that into you”. I know the name seems a little strange, but the website was great.  It contains lots of real life stories from candidate interviewers as well as from the job seekers themselves.  Here’s a couple of examples:

•  I once had a guy challenge me to an arm wrestling match for the job.
• I had an interviewee who was an older gentleman. He was looking for a collections position. As I was walking him back to my office for the interview he stated, “I don’t know what I’m doing here. I’m just wasting my time.” He repeated this three more times within the first five minutes at which point I stood up, stretched my arm out for a hand shake and said, “You know what? You’re right and we don’t want to waste any more of it. Thanks for coming in and have a nice day.” And I showed him the door.
• I once fortuitously blew my own chances during an interview. I had asked the headhunter what the attire was at the company, and he said, “Business formal”, so I showed up in a suit. Whoops! I was the only person in the office wearing a necktie, let alone a suit. Then it turned out I had over a decade’s more experience than their most senior developers, and my in-depth answers and questions about their products seemed to unnerve them. I had a co-worker at a later job who had previously worked for that company, and he told me many reasons I was lucky to have escaped getting a job there.

I liked these and a whole lot of the other stories on this site so you might want to check out “tjntiy” if you get a chance or better yet, share with the readers of this Blog your own story about an interview that made you smile, laugh or…simply grimace.  

Meanwhile The Sourcerer hopes you all have a great Independence Day Holiday!

It occurred to me that I might have led you astray. I recently wrote a blog on the use of Posting Pages to attract candidates by “selling the sizzle” about your company and the job you have available.

In the article, I plainly said that getting candidates to go to your career site was “not all that difficult”. A number of readers disagreed and said quite the opposite.  They found it very difficult to get qualified job seekers to go to their career sites.

Therefore, instead of following my plan and writing about candidate screening (and how it can save you lots of time while reducing your recruiting costs), I am going to discuss non-traditional ways to drive talented candidates to your career site. 

In a previous commentary, I gave you a long list of the more traditional methods of candidate sourcing from internal job postings to the use of third party recruiters. You can review that list by clicking on:

http://www.talmax.com/sixdos/

The purpose of the next few blogs is to give you a number of “non-traditional” ideas to attract the talent you want to hire. Each of these ideas requires a little thinking “outside-the-box”.

Leverage Relationships with your Vendors

Ask yourself if the candidates you want to respond to your job opening might now be working for a competitor. If so, who are the companies that sell to you and may sell to your competitors?  Chances are someone at one of those suppliers may know a potential candidate who matches your requirements.

Finding a list of these suppliers is simply a matter of reviewing your supplier list and using a little internet research to identify their competition. Once you have a number of companies who currently sell either to you or to your competitors, go to the website of each of these companies and look up the names and e-mail addresses of any of the sales people you can find.

Yes, this takes some time; however, if you are not getting the response to your job opening that you need, why not take the time to do a little investigation? You can either do this yourself or spend thousands of dollars having a third party recruiter do it for you.

Next, create an e-mail (I have included a sample for you) and send it to every sales person on the list you have created. Provide a description of your position (if you read my article on Posting Pages, you will know how important a well-crafted job description is when attempting to attract the right candidate). Ask each person you contact to forward your e-mail to anyone they know who may be qualified and interested.

This process is not hard to do and it can help you find referrals who are potentially great candidates for your job!  Will it work every time…No, but it is definitely worth trying anytime you cannot attract the talent you need.

I have included the following sample e-mail for your use:

Subject Line: Do you know anyone who may be interested in this job?

Dear #Contact Name#,

We are attempting to locate a suitable candidate to fill a key position with our company.  I believe you sell to our industry and I thought you might be aware of someone (perhaps a friend or business acquaintance) who might be both qualified and interested.

So that you can review the position in detail, click the link below or simply copy and paste the URL into your browser. 

Enter posting page URL here

 If you know of someone who might fit our need, please forward this e-mail to him/her for review.

We would be most appreciative of any help you can offer.

Regards,

Your Signature
Your Company

I’ll have more suggestions for you in my next blog.

The Sourcerer got to thinking recently about how much complaining people do.  We complain about our health (and our health care), we complain about the weather, the cost of everything from groceries to golf, government  being too invasive or not invasive enough and we complain a lot about our jobs.  That last complaint is the subject of this Blog.

If you’re one of those people who complain about their job, maybe you can do something about it.  I know a company that used to have high turnover problems.  The work was hard, the boss demanding and the customers (like all good customers) could often be a pain-in-the-a- -.  Here’s what the company did to put a halt to the complaining and the turnover.

They had a brainstorming session with their employees to create a list of activities that would alleviate stress, encourage group participation and open communication on a completely new level for staff and management. They then set a schedule that allows everyone to participate in one of these events each quarter. The company closes early on the day the event is scheduled so everyone can attend.

They’ve done everything from volleyball to LazerTron.  Bosses and staff participate on an even footing.  The events are fun and often very funny.  When everyone is back at work, well, the work is still hard, the boss is still demanding and the customers…well, they never really change.  But you know what has changed?  The turnover…it’s nearly non-existent and the complaining has dialed-down to barely a murmur. And best of all, the company’s revenues have increased significantly since this program was introduced.

If you have too much complaining at your place of business, why not try a tactic like this and turn your workplace into a better, more productive and less stressful environment?

Talmax has an announcement that will help you find qualified candidates faster and can truly lower your recruiting costs. 

Effective immediately when you use a Talmax Career Site to list your current openings, your jobs will not only automatically feed to Indeed and Simply Hired, they will now also feed to Facebook and Twitter allowing you recruiting access to both these very popular social media sites.

This new feature is convenient, it’s automatic and it’s included every time you list a new job on your career site.

Occasionally you receive a piece of information that just makes you feel good, about yourself or your company or in this case…both.

The following is a testimonial I received today that  I wanted to share because it made me feel good about the 4 years that went into creating a product called Talmax. The struggle was worth the result.

“As the Human Resources Manager for Niagara Thermal, my initial experience with Talmax was a little different.  I was a candidate, looking to relocate.  I found the job I currently hold on Indeed and in order to apply for the position, I had to go through the Talmax online application process.  I was very impressed.  It was very streamlined and allowed questions to be asked of me as an applicant that gave me insight into the company’s personality.

 Now that I am the HR Manager at Niagara Thermal, I regularly see how our Talmax Career Site and the Talmax candidate screening tools help us identify and screen people for jobs at all levels in our company.  I like Talmax because it works, it helps me lower our recruiting costs and it saves my staff a whole lot of time while increasing the efficiency of our operation. 

 If you have any specific questions about Talmax, just give me a call.  You can reach me at 716-297-0652 x242 during regular business hours (EST).”

John Grubb, Human Resources Manager, Niagara Thermal Products