Many HR professionals don’t realize the on-boarding process begins when a candidate applies for a position or is sourced by a recruiter and not on an employee’s first day. These first interactions between the candidate and your organization set the tone for how they perceive your employer brand.  It’s vital to get off on the right foot!  Two important factors contributing to on-boarding during the hiring process:  the length of time it takes from a candidate’s initial application until an offer/rejection is made and how informed the candidate felt during this time.  To help effectively on-board employees, the hiring process must be as quick and painless as possible. If candidates wait forever for an interview or job offer, their level of engagement will start to drop off before they’ve even entered your organization.  Just as important, candidates must feel special and “chosen” to maximize their engagement.  Newly hired employees will not feel this way if they sat by the phone pondering the status of their application.  It’s detrimental to your organization’s retention efforts if new employees show up with a negative impression even before first day.  Therefore, it’s imperative to evaluate your hiring process in order to properly on-board your new hires.

To enable an optimal hiring process, your organization may already have an arsenal of metrics to evaluate recruitment staff. Most typically, companies look at metrics only in terms of how they impact the bottom line.  It’s important to realize these metrics also indicate a candidate’s experience in the hiring process.  Both recruiters and hiring managers need to be held accountable for how long it takes to fill an open position.  By establishing base-line metrics for both recruiters and hiring managers, they will be incentivized to streamline the process, becoming more efficient at sourcing, pre-screening, interviewing and hiring qualified employees.

HR professionals often rely on days-to-fill as their metric of choice for measuring recruiters’ and hiring managers’ performance alike.  However, days-to-fill is too generic a metric. There are too many factors outside of both recruiters’ and hiring managers’ control for the days-to-fill metric to properly identify sticking points within the hiring process.  For recruiters, variables outside their control include: hiring managers dragging their feet in terms of interviewing, making a decision and offering the position.  Hiring managers are not able to control if recruiters adequately source candidates, present them in a timely manner and effectively pre-screen the candidate.   

To further evaluate and assess bottlenecks within the hiring process, break the process down into phases and hold recruiters and hiring managers accountable for the phase in which they are most crucial.  Recruiters should be held responsible for the time it takes for them to present a candidate to the hiring manager.  In holding recruiters to a baseline “time-to-present-candidate” metric, it alleviates many of the factors that are out of their control and truly measures their performance. The time-to-present metric accounts for recruiters’ abilities -- such as the time it takes to source a candidate and how quickly they are able to pre-screen.  In a perfect world, recruiters would always select and present only the utmost qualified applicants to their hiring manager.  However, we don’t live in a perfect world so it is also important to establish a baseline “quality-of-candidate-presented” metric for recruiters.  This prevents recruiters from artificially decreasing the time-to-present-candidate by advancing ill-qualified candidates to the next step in the hiring process.  Also consider establishing a baseline “number-of-candidates-presented” metric.  This will discourage recruiters from bogging down hiring managers with an onslaught of mediocre candidates and help ensure only the best and brightest advance.

Hiring Managers should be held accountable for the time it takes for them to present an offer or reject the candidate after they’re presented by the recruiter.  Establishing a baseline “time-to-present-decision” metric for hiring managers will incentivize them to set aside time to interview candidates in a timely manner and make filling their open position a top priority.  This will also encourage them to come to a decision as to whether the candidate got the job or not in a timelier manner.

However, it’s important to realize that evaluating the hiring process can’t end with just quantitative data.  Monitoring the time-to-present candidate and time-to-present decision metrics will provide useful insight along with other baseline quantitative metrics. Adding qualitative data will help you gain a broader, more accurate picture of the hiring process as a whole.  Remember, it’s essential to keep candidates well informed during the pre-employment phase (not to mention the entire employment life cycle) to most effectively on-board them.  Survey newly hired employees and ask them to evaluate their recruiter and hiring manager based on their communication during the hiring process, how the process could be improved and how your organization compares with that of your competitors.  By honing in and optimizing your hiring process, you’re paving the way to properly on-boarding employees and extending their tenure as well as having them recommend your organization to colleagues and friends.

As I pointed out in my last post, now may be the best time to shape up and tighten down all aspects of your HR programs, and particularly your approaches to retention and recruiting. In the days to come, agency HR is likely to face challenges on all fronts—from Congressional measures to limit the size of the government workforce to aggressive competition for talent from corporations emerging lean and hungry from the recession.

Our team at TMP Government has been wrestling with the implications of this long view, and we have identified several areas where your agency can get the most bang for the buck in holding steady amid the disruptions to come..

Let your workplace culture shine. Of course you want to attract the best and the brightest with your employer value proposition, but you should also make sure that the work environment you provide has comparable staying power with the top performers you already have on board. Don’t be naïve: other agencies, pressed by attrition and scarcity on the recruiting front, will be looking to poach not only your stars but your supporting players too. Take pains to keep all your valuable performers satisfied that your agency’s culture meets all their needs for support and personal development.

Fortify your employer brand. What’s the net recruiting value of making the top tiers in the Partnership for Public Service’s “Best Places to Work” ranking? It’s certainly high today, and will likely skyrocket amid tomorrow’s inter-agency competition for the best talent. Qualified students and other potential recruits who are inspired by the public service ideal are still out there, although admittedly not in the high numbers of a year or two ago. Ask yourself how well your agency stacks up against others as a potential employer in the eyes of an intelligent and discerning candidate. Then let a frank assessment of your existing brand guide you in a good faith effort to refine it—i.e., to make the reality of your workplace match the promise of your branding.

In recruiting, engage the most promising individuals at the right moment. Although ‘targeting’ may sound a bit harsh, it’s exactly the right idea when it comes to identifying the segments of candidates most likely to advance your agency’s mission and at the same time thrive in your culture. Smart ‘audience’ research is the key to productive engagement; the more precision you achieve in this task, the more successful and cost effective you’ll be in engaging and on-boarding recruits likely to stick around for the long haul.  Focus the same precision approach on choosing outreach events and media. Not all online and/or social sites will be equally productive for all agencies or for all circumstances. Study and refine your results on the fly. Don’t just shoot from the hip.

While you have time, spend it on supercharging the efficiency of your HR processes and systems. Chances are that the next few years will be marked by shrinking resources in government HR departments. The agency that can make the most of what it already has will have the advantage. Focus right now on getting your systems and processes up to snuff. Agencies that can bring successful candidates on board quickly will have an edge. Increased online communication and interactivity among recruiters—and among recruiters and interested candidates for that matter—will help the best HR departments keep a handle on recruiting quality individuals as fiscal and operating restraints tighten.

Not one of these countermeasures is in itself a solution to the challenges you face, but, implemented together, they should help you steer a straight course through the gale warnings on the horizon. 

Considering looming trends in Congress and attitudes reported to be widely held among Americans, it makes sense for Federal HR strategists to start right away with contingency planning for a significantly altered recruiting and human capital environment. And I don’t mean Band-Aid solutions. The atmosphere that’s taking shape is likely to impact recruiting in the government for the next several years at least.

The political trends—not to mention the drift of public opinion—are clear. Certain current and incoming members of Congress have put the size and salary structure of the Federal workforce on the legislative agenda. Recent (and mutually contradictory) surveys on government compensation compared to that of the private sector—characteristically amplified by the media—have raised the visibility of both the salaries and the sheer numbers of Federal workers in the public eye. And let’s be honest with ourselves: the salad days of high enthusiasm for government service among young job seekers—approaching a peak barely two short years ago—appear to be gone for a while.  What’s more, the dreaded retirement exodus—admittedly overhyped in the press for a decade—can still exert some destructive force on the Federal workforce and on the embedded experience and know-how your current agency team embodies.

The impact of these and other emerging conditions on how your team manages the work of your agency can be substantial and, in the worst case, disastrous. So, as I said at the top, it’s not unwise to plan for the worst case—i.e., a shrinking workforce and parallel restrictions on compensation and on how many recruits you can bring onboard to handle your agency’s mission. Given these impending threats, your future could be all about competing to attract and retain the best talent available, and doing so with limited resources. And remember, you will be competing on two fronts:

• First, with a corporate sector emerging from a recession and playing human capital catch-up, and then
• with other Federal agencies that need to retain and replenish their workforces under the same bleak conditions that you will be facing.

All this seems to promise a bumpy ride for Federal recruiters, managers and planners alike. So get ready. In my next post, I’ll bring forward a few suggestions about dealing with this potential nightmare for the agency manager and human resource specialist.

As I hope you have noted from my last post, my TMP colleagues and I have lately been thinking hard about how diversity recruiting in the federal government might be improved. Don’t misread my meaning here: fed human capital strategists have chalked up many exemplary achievements in recruiting and retention, most notably their outstanding record with African-American candidates over several decades.

But what we’ve really been puzzling about is why we haven’t seen similar large-scale advances among the Hispanic-American community, the country’s fastest growing minority. While our company has enjoyed solid success in helping a number of standout individual agencies with their recruiting of Latino-Americans, our agency-specific success has contributed only modest advances in the government’s efforts to increase Hispanic numbers in the fed workforce as a whole.

As OPM’s recent report reminded us, the overall numbers are disappointing, to say the least: Hispanic-Americans comprise about 13% of the population, but only 8% of the fed workforce. And as I reported in my last post, in 2009 the feds hired even fewer Latinos, by percentage of new hires, than they did in 2008. 

So maybe it’s time to adjust the standard approach before the government loses seen more ground. My TMP colleague John Bersentes and I have attempted a logical analysis of the challenge in “How can the federal government improve its programs for recruiting and retaining Hispanic-Americans?” In this newly-released TMP Government white paper, we suggest a few reasons why Hispanic participation in the government workforce is lagging. Among our key points: it’s essentially a new kind of problem, different in many ways from the government’s earlier challenge in recruiting African-Americans.

In the second part of “How can the federal government improve its programs for recruiting and retaining Hispanic-Americans?” we advance a few bold suggestions for making progress on this front. Among the most far-reaching: Deputize OPM to create and administer a government-wide program for recruiting Hispanic-Americans. Individual agencies would participate as partners in a common-cause initiative, rather than contending with each other as rivals for Latino talent. We need to break this negative cycle. We suggest that only OPM has the charter, the reach, and the reputation to get this important initiative back on the rails.

Give our piece a read and let me know what you think. 

This month saw the publication of the Office of Personnel Management’s annual progress report on efforts to increase the number and seniority of Hispanic-American employees in the federal workforce. Once again the news is not good. Overall, the percentage of Latinos in government service remained flat (at 8%) compared to last year’s numbers. But here’s the really distressing part—Hispanic-Americans’ share of the total number of new government hires dropped from 9.3% last year to 7.3% this year.

You can read all this for yourself in OPM’s “Ninth Annual Report to the President on Hispanic Employment in the Federal Government.”

If you’re looking for a bright side in all this, you might draw some encouragement in the revelation that, overall, Hispanic-American participation in the federal workforce is up… from nearly 138,000 in mid 2008 to just over 144,000 when last measured in 2009. Presumably this is because retention rates among Latino feds have improved a bit.

Still, when you consider that Hispanics make up about 13% of the total U.S. workforce—and that the Latino community, according to the Census Bureau, will constitute fully a quarter of the U.S. population by mid-century—there’s more than a little room for a hard look at how the government goes about recruiting and retaining members of our fastest growing minority.

My colleague John Bersentes and I attempt just that in “How can the federal government improve its programs for recruiting and retaining Hispanic-Americans?” a new TMP Government white paper. The paper, adapted from an earlier article John and I authored for The Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, is available at the White Papers section of the TMP Government web site.

This economy has given us one thing for which to be grateful—some of the lowest vacancy rates in the last 30 years. New RN graduates can’t find jobs because older, experienced RNs have stayed on the job long after they had planned to go PRN or retire. Other healthcare professionals have been afraid to change employers because just last month (October, 2009) 700 jobs were eliminated in acute care settings in the United States and the sense of uneasiness is palatable. Entry-level workers, who averaged tenure of 4-6 months before the recession began in December, 2007, now stay on the job an average of 16 months, in large part because there are no other jobs to be had.

Healthcare continues to be the only sector to gain jobs overall—29,000 in October—but the majority of the jobs are being created in long-term care, physician offices and urgent-care centers. Overall 559,000 new jobs have been created in healthcare since the recession began while over seven million have been eliminated in all other sectors.

But things are beginning to change. In October, healthcare was the only sector but not the only area, to claim job creation. The first harbinger of employment recovery is growth of temporary jobs and last month, for the first time, temporary jobs increased by 34,000. Even the most conservative economists agree that job creation will begin sometime in the first two quarters of 2010. Slow creation at first and then much greater movement within the next two quarters and healthcare should lead the way.

We will all be grateful for the economic change that will drive new jobs, but it will also mean that Human Resources will almost overnight go from being able to actually breathe and hire logically to facing frenetic hiring patterns. It won’t be one thing that will drive the chaos but several, including:

• A rush of resignations resulting because a spouse or partner secured a job and employees feeling they can look at other opportunities without the worry of being laid off or left with no job at all within a family.
• Additional movement will result when Baby Boomer employees feel they may  retire as planned or at least reduce hours or go PRN.
• Healthcare professionals look for new opportunities at much greater numbers during the last week of January, February and the first week of March than any other time of the year. After the holidays and with the kids back on a schedule, the female driven healthcare workforce, grab the time to make a career change. There is almost always a spike in resignations at this time, but with the economy turning that spike will be greater than average.
• Non-healthcare specific positions for which healthcare recruits, will continue to drive not hundreds of applications, but thousands due to the economy, and  the associated work will continue to be time consuming and challenging.

But, two of the biggest reasons for an increase in resignations will be the fact employees are outraged at how they have been treated during the economic downturn along with their expectations once the economy turns around. According to a study by Glassdoor.com, 57% expect “a raise, promotion or bonus” for having gone without pay increases, working longer hours and increasing their productivity. Nine out of ten employees questioned in the survey believe the worst is over and that the economy is on the upswing. Additionally the majority of those believe their organization could have done more to make them feel secure when times were the most difficult.

“My nurse manager knew how much I needed my job and it was like she enjoyed grinding me down” said an ICU RN from a Dallas hospital recently. “I always knew I was just a commodity to her and not really valued. As soon as I can get out from under her dictatorial management style, I am out. It was as though she enjoyed her new found power over everyone and she let us all know we needed to do what we were told period. I can’t wait to let her hear from HR that I resigned. I’m not even going to tell her.”

Managers continue to be the most important element in keeping employees content and productive. For the first time ever in 2008 the most important reason employees gave for staying or leaving a job was having a clear career path. Always before, the number one reason was having a good relationship with an immediate supervisor. But most healthcare facilities have clear career paths that range from internal transfers to tuition reimbursement. Nonetheless the only way employees can take advantage of those paths is to have a supervisor who allows a direct report to grow professionally even if it means losing a top performer from the department but not from the facility.

Communication and trust from the supervisor is also vital in limiting the resignations. All supervisors must be trained on how to provide those all important elements along with how to treat all employees with dignity regardless of the turmoil around them because of the economy.

It is also very difficult to manage the expectations of employees when things begin to look better and it takes careful communication to paint a realistic picture of the economy and what that actually means to the bottom line. In healthcare, the economy may improve, but it will be a long time before that improvement will mean “raises, promotions and bonuses”. It is best to start communicating that now before the expectations build developing an impossible to attain situation and instigating feelings on the part of the employees of being duped by management.

The fact that Generation Y is the largest group of employees, having eclipsed the Baby Boomers in 2008, will also play a vital role in the changing employment situation. Generation Ys don’t stay on the job the way Baby Boomers have and they also don’t have the desire to stay with an employer against all odds. Generation X, a much smaller, but vital employment group, will also resign as soon as they feel the opportunities and trust have evaporated for them personally.

All of this creates a potentially disastrous recruitment and retention situation for 2010 within healthcare. But organizations can limit their exposure for employee loss if they remember that regardless of generation or type of position and skill set there are things that are important to all employees. These include:

• Fairness—allowing employees to be involved, informed and respected on the job and within the organization’s culture.
• Stretch—having a steep learning curve with tools to do a great job.
• Community—having a sense of purpose and feeling able to contribute to something bigger than themselves.

There is no other working sector that can provide these three basic elements better than healthcare. Consequently healthcare will continue to create jobs at a higher rate and hopefully the individual facilities will be able to quickly develop a practice environment, driven by trained and compassionate supervisors and senior management, that will remember that employees are human and vulnerable and desiring to do a great job and stay with an employer who treats them well and provides them with the tools to feel good and safe.

You’ve certainly seen Best Places to Work lists in business magazines like Fortune, and maybe in the niche publications that publish their own rankings for narrower constituencies. What you might not know is that Washington’s Partnership for Public Service regularly produces a similar government-wide ranking of federal departments and agencies (http://data.bestplacestowork.org/bptw/index).

It’s all based on what a couple hundred thousand government workers tell the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) in its bi-annual survey. The Partnership, in concert with American University's Institute for the Study of Public Policy Implementation (ISPPI) and The Hay Group--and with support from TMP Government--collates and submits OPM’s independently gathered results to strict statistical analysis. The outcome is a detailed side-by-side comparison of how federal organizations rate with their own employees across a range of criteria, from teamwork to training to perceived leadership competencies. The rankings also compare OPM’s employee responses—again agency by agency--by demographic segments, including gender, ethnicity, and age.

A benchmarking tool for agencies. If you’re looking for insight into your agency’s authentic employment value proposition, this compilation is a remarkable source, provided you’re willing to spend some time exploring its capabilities.

Both OPM’s own survey report (www.fhcs.opm.gov/) and the Partnership/ISPPI rankings allow you to see how your agency measures up in the eyes of your own workforce. But the Partnership/ISPPI compilation makes it easy to compare your results directly with those of virtually every other government agency. What’s more, the Best Places comparisons provide you with a statistically sound benchmarking tool for improving or refining key attributes in your own workplace culture. It can help immeasurably in refining your programs for employee engagement, inclusion, organizational development, succession planning, retention, and a host of other human capital focal points.

And when it comes to recruiting, is there a more resonant and authentic jumping off point for your agency’s employment brand than the characteristics where your own workforce tells you that you excel?

A resource for job seekers. For the federal job seeker, these rankings are indispensable, cutting through the recruiting noise to core workplace characteristics. While this certainly should not be the only comparative tool a candidate uses, it does represent a marvelous starting point and useful set of job search benchmarks for federal candidates at all levels of experience.

So...which agencies are the leaders of the pack? I leave that to you to discover. If you’re serious about how your team’s collective view of your workplace stacks up against other agencies, go here: http://data.bestplacestowork.org/bptw/index.

Speaking generally, the federal government has significantly improved its track record for hiring and retaining minorities over the last few decades. Even so, there are two minority classes that have lagged far behind: Hispanics and the disabled . Last summer our team released a white paper on recruiting and retaining the latter group; you can find it on TMPgovernment.com.

The low proportion of Hispanics in the government’s workforce is less widely known but equally troubling. In spite of being the nation’s fastest growing minority population, and in spite of comprising 12.7% of the U.S. civilian workforce, Hispanics make up only 7.8% of all federal employees. What’s more, Hispanic men and women represent only a scant 3.6% of individuals at federal senior pay levels—a proportion that drops to 2.5% when you take political appointees out of the calculation.

One more note in what could be a much longer litany of discouraging statistics: research by the Partnership for Public Service reveals that Hispanics attending college are more interested in working for the federal government than any other student segment they surveyed.

So how do we account for the government’s less-than-perfect track record on this metric? Our team at TMP Government is studying this issue in detail right now, and we will issue a white paper on the topic in just a few weeks. We won’t be delving as deeply into the why of this sad circumstance as into practical solutions for correcting the imbalance.

If you have been following my commentary in this blog, you may guess that our prescription for improvement will include niche branding, internships, mentoring, Web 2.0 approaches, workforce planning, career modeling, and a raft of other proven as well as emerging engagement techniques.

In the meantime, if you want to weigh in on this topic, suggest solutions, or point out Best Practice exemplars in government and out, don’t hesitate to contact me.