We had some interesting conversation at the last Supper Club about ATS systems so I decided to ask my friend Sylvia Dahlby is a Rainmaker at SmartSearch the world’s best applicant tracking system. (tongue planted firmly in cheek) what she thought.  Here is her reply:

“Hi Connie, Thanks for thinking of me and the invitation to guest blog for your HR newsletter and website.

“Which ATS is the best for small companies and which for large?”

Interesting question, I hear it a lot. There certainly are a lot of different ATS choices for different size companies in biotech R&D. When anyone asks me what ATS is “the best” the answer is always the same – it depends.

Like buying a car, ATS selection should not be a popularity contest. It’s a mistake to to compare product-to-product; products always need to be measured against requirements. The Toyota Camry is the number one best selling car in America, and Ford F-150 truck is number two. Are either of them “the best” car for you?

The comment that “if you learn one of them, you know them all” is valid.

There’s a big difference between a family sedan, a sports car, pick-up truck or SUV,  but you can drive any of them once you learn how to drive.

Your choice of car will depend on your driving habits, personal preferences, and what you need to get out of a car in terms of practicality & Performance. Budget is a big consideration of course, and you may want that ultimate driving machine but the Camry is the best choice for your wallet.

There’s also the question of “drive-ability” – are you comfortable behind the wheel? Will the car take you where you want to go? Do you want to drive it every day – now and in the foreseeable future?

 With many ATS vendors insisting on a multi-year experience with a particular system, the service contract is extremely important. There are differences between BMW engineering & service than a Ford (I’m not knocking Ford, just saying).  

Everyone needs a reliable car – and dependable customer service.

Hope this helps answer the question.

One of my associates Rob Mayers has worked in the San Diego biotech space as a corporate recruiter. He would agree that many systems can be far from ideal, or even awful.

The ATS landscape is ever-changing, volatile, and tricky to navigate. Easy to get confused, or distracted by the “shiny object” or flavor of the month. A large company – or a small start up – may  be well advised to retain an expert consultant to lead product evaluation, selection and even implementation.

Your “Supper Clubs” for HR people in Biotech sounds divine, will take a rain check for next time I’m in the Bay Area & will let you know if either of us is ever up your way.

Thanks again for the gracious invitation. Aloha, Sylvia”

She has also allowed us to have access to one of her presentation on ATS systems.  You can access it here

ERE.net has recently published a post “The 17 Things to Think About Before Picking an Applicant Tracking System”

And Sylvia suggests these links as well:

Applicant Tracking System Selection

Capterra

How To Avoid the Top 3 Mistakes Organizations Make When Evaluating and Implementing Recruiting Technology Solutions

Experts offer Tips for Selecting the Right Technology for Your Business

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Tallent community

What is a talent community and how can a small biotech develop one?

Marvin Smith of ERE.net has written on “Talent Communities”. His comment most relevant to small biotech companies is: “The second method is the popular approach of build a following and community around a career at a company with the fans of its brand. This branded talent community showcases the organization’s employment value proposition, as well as what it like to be a member of the team. This approach to community works well if you are the market leader or rising star in a particular business segment. The very nature of this type of community requires a constant supply of new members, as interest in a job with a certain company is intermittent at best.”

I disagree that the focus should be on just one job or career. In the biosciences industries, the most exciting thing is not each job, but the science the company is focusing on.  This is your “secret sauce” and what you need to be promoting.

Social media and building your company’s own particular community can be time-consuming at best, but it is well worth putting in place at least a few steps:

• Have a LinkedIn Company page where you post regular updates and use the Jobs tab there as well.
• Write and post what is good about working for your company. Get input for this from your employees.  Post it on the LI Company page, your career page, and any other Social Media property your company has.
• Offer ways for outsiders to interact with your insiders.  Have your most social media savvy employees post occasional “brags” or updates.  Or ask for emails from your employees and copy and paste into your updates.
• If you want younger, less-experienced people, put together a Facebook Page for the company.  Post the same things here that you would post to your careers page and your LinkedIn Page.
• Get your marketing consultant or department involved. You may want to check with your Legal team to make sure that you are not giving away IP.
• Engage with the people who want to work for your company, even if you don’t need them right now.
  • Offer links to training resources, associations your team belong to, events your team is attending, etc.
  • Invite people to social events, meet and greets, job fairs
  • Ask the manager of the department closest to hiring to write a short description of what the department is working on (no proprietary details)
  • Ask the people who engage to offer suggestions for what is being worked on

What are you doing?  Do you need to develop a plan?  Is this something that is just too much for your time?

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The 4 Biggest Social Media Trends in HR Right Now

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• Why on earth would HR need to be on Social?

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Connie Hampton Principal Consultant510-601-1343 (w) 510-409-9675 (m) 549 Aileen St Oakland, CA 94609 United States Website Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Please join us for the May BioHR Supper Club May 14, 2013 6 pm We have a table for 8 at Tomadachi Sushi Bistro24123 Hesperian Blvd  Hayward, CA 94545 (510) 940-3800 RSVP to connie@hamptonexecutivesearch.com by 4 pm on May 14th. no sales, no presentations, no notetaking Just good food and great conversation Best wishes, Connie

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We all know that referrals are the best way to get a good new employee, but sometimes you just have to post the opening.  Since a job posting is an advertisement, but it is HR which is usually in charge of writing and posting job openings, how much do you know about marketing and advertising in particular? 

You can tell how good your marketing skills are by the percentage of job seekers who send you a resume just because they want “a job, any job!”. 

Do you use the keywords, skills and descriptions of expertise that the qualified job seeker uses for the work they do? 

You don’t have to be the scientist or the marketing expert, but you do need to know how to use LinkedIn’s great tool – the Skills and Expertise pages.

You can put the title or department or desired skill into the search box on the Skills and Expertise page and get related skills, a definition, some of the people who have used this skill in their profile, three charts about the relative growth of the term, the number of people on LinkedIn who use it, the age of the people who use it, related companies, other jobs currently posted on LI for this term, locations where people who use this term are located and LinkedIn Groups where these folks hang out.

Your job posting, whether you post it on LinkedIn’s paid site or not, needs to use these keywords and be seen, read, and attract these (and other similar) people. 

How can your posting be more attractive than the ones currently posted on LinkedIn?  Where else will you post it?

One especially good place to post is in the job discussions in the Groups listed.  Of course you have posted it to your company’s career page on your website.  What other places would appeal to these particular specialists?  Where else do they visit online and off? 

Do you have a spreadsheet for the job posting sites for each of your departments? 

Do you have the keywords for each department?

How could I help you with this?  H&A Scientific and Executive Search Services can do any piece of the recruiting process that you need, including putting together these spreadsheets for you. 

Please do give me a call – (510) 601-1343 or Skype: connie.hampton or connie@hamptonexecutivesearch.com

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by Richard McMunn

People don’t always realise that interviewers need as much training, practice and preparation as interviewees. It is a tough task to use a very small amount of information to come up with the best probing questions designed to find out the most amount of information about an individual. One can never be 100% certain of a candidate’s suitability for a job but the successful interviewer will be able to take a mix of premeditated questions, and on the spot thoughts to get the best picture possible.

To start putting the best foot forward, the prepared questions need to be well thought out and clearly structured. Many people take different approaches to this but there are some questions which unavoidably need to be put forward in every job interview.

Dedication to the Company

However this question is worded, it is vital that all candidates are asked to demonstrate how much they care about working for the company. In today’s modern workforce, training and skill sets can be found in many applicants but what really sets people apart is the way they show why they are so keen to join the organisation and equally how well they can convince an interviewer that they are committed to the long term.

Desire for growth

The ideal response to this style of question will depend very much on the type of role that is being filled. If the position is such that a candidate needs to grow and develop into higher positions with more authority, a question will need to be formulated that delves into how keen the person is to achieve this. Equally, their competence to do so must be ascertained. On the other hand, if the role is more of a steadfast cornerstone that doesn’t need change, the question will have to ensure the responding person is aware of the static nature of the job and keen to make the role their own without getting bored or restless after a period of time.

Honesty

Outside of the remits of the job, the candidate’s ability or any other aspect specifically related to the position is the question of integrity. Many would say that such a characteristic may not be easy to analyse from just one question, but there are some which can do just this. The importance of putting this indirect question forward is essential because without honesty, nothing else about the candidate really matters.

Trust plays a big role in any position at an organisation and it is widely accepted by recruitment experts that first impressions tend to turn out to be the most accurate. In the event that an applicant is unable to suitably assure a potential employer of their honest resolve in a certain situation, even if they are suitable for the job, the question looming over their head will inhibit their ability to work with the manager or team in the long term.

There are many different styles of abstract question used by interviewers which are designed to indirectly test initiative, knowledge, integrity and many other key characteristics. They are cleverly worded and fun for the applicant in allowing them to creatively showcase themselves. However, it seems that when it comes down to the one essential question that must always be asked, simple is best. There is nothing like plain, direct language to get to the heart of an issue and reveal exactly what is needed to be known.

About Richard McMunn: Richard is the author of this article and founder of How2become.com, the UK’s leading training and recruitment website for public sector careers. The focus is on providing applicants with the knowledge they need to prepare for and pass selection processes for careers in the police, fire service and ambulance service . The website currently offers over 150 different titles. You can also find How2become on Facebook

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There may be plenty of people out of work but in the bioindustries it can still be very difficult to find the right person with the right skills in the right location who wants to work for you.

Make it easy for that person to know your company, like what you do and what you stand for and be willing to trust you with his or her name and contact information. 

Take a look at your career pages and website.  What can you do without any investment other than time to make it more visible and attractive?  Can you make the changes or does it have to be your webmaster or an outside consultant? Do you know who the person is in your company who is responsible for the website?  Usually HR uses it the most, if you are not selling things from it.

If the website is not easily changed, does your company use the Page that has been set up in LinkedIn for you?  These are free and easily changed and updated and now offer the ability to post updates, marketing materials, etc. as well as open positions.

Does your company have a Facebook page?  A Pinterest Page?  A YouTube channel?  A Twitter page? How are you leveraging all of these to present your company to the people you would like to employ?

You or your Mar-Com person can create branding that should be the same across all of these sites with your company colors, fonts, etc. 

The content you post on these sites should allow the people looking for you to know who the company is and whether they would fit in. 

The smart people who are considering working for you do check you out and they have some criteria:

Where are you?  Would their commute be reasonable or are they willing to relocate to work for you?

What, exactly, does your company do?  What are you working on? What therapeutic area are you in?

What stage is the company in?  Pre-IPO?  Private? Public?

What stage are your products in? Research only?  What phase?  Clinical Trials? Launching? On the market?

Does your regulatory agency like you or have you had “letters”?

Do you have enough funding to pay them for at least 4 years? (Most jobs only last about 4 years.)

Is there a career path for a new hire?  Or are you just hiring “for now”?

What is the public buzz about the company?  Can you counter it?  Why would a potential hire be worried?  Can you assuage that?

What kind of company culture do you have?  Is it all about work?  Do you have fun together? Are you focused on cutting edge science? Do you present at conferences?

Even if you are not comfortable with this level of transparency, the really good candidates are going to look for answers to these questions.  They will check Glassdoor.com and the Vault.com.  Are you there?  They will check on Yahoo Finance and they will certainly Google you.  Do you want to be the one to give them the answers they need or will they look at sources over which you have no control?

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“These days, anybody can headhunt” was the BloomsbergBusinessweek article (1/21/13) on the changes in the recruiting industry and in large companies. Many large companies have hired away experienced people from recruiting firms to start their own, in-house, executive search teams. The skills and expertise gained from consulting with many companies in their industry is valuable. These large companies want to avoid the 30-40% fees charged by the well-known retained search firms.

These large companies have found that these new in-house teams are even more successful – new hires are less likely to quit, they have found more diverse candidates and have been faster than using large external search firms. As a result, large, “name brand” search firms are getting fewer and more difficult searches and have started to offer management consulting as well as their core skills in headhunting.

Smaller companies with less need (GE had 25,000 openings in 2010, 10% of which were for executives and senior professionals) also want to control spending on recruiting but developing a full team in-house simply is not cost-effective for companies with fewer openings to fill.

So what does this mean for smaller companies?

This article shows just how important it is for whoever is doing the recruiting to know your company and company culture well. He or she must really understand exactly what/who you are looking for and can do the recruiting with the skills and expertise of a trained recruiter. This can be a real dilemma – hiring managers know the company and the skills the next hire needs to have, but are not expert in recruiting – sourcing, writing a persuasive position description, “selling the job” and persuading the right person to send in a resume, pre-screening, etc. HR, if there is an HR team, is usually quite busy with other priorities and tasks and may not have the 120 hours available to do the job.

Most start-up companies use networking first – they already know who they would like to have join the company. What happens when those names run out? What do you do next? Is posting the job the default next step?

Do you just “post and pray”? Some studies have shown that only 20% of jobs are filled by job postings. Is this true for you or do you fill more? Do you even have time to keep track? The 20% number is from a small selection of large companies.

Where do you post? When I asked this question before, the answers were: our career page, Craigslist, BioSpace and Indeed.com. Some were also using LinkedIn Jobs. Were the results better on one than others?

What results are you getting from postings, especially for those executive and senior professional jobs? Are your hiring managers satisfied with the quality of the applicants? Are you satisfied with the specificity (a high ratio of possibly acceptable applicants to completely unacceptable ones (those who “want a job, any job”)?

How long do you wait for the postings to provide the right person? Do you have to renew the posting? Most hiring managers don’t request a new position until they have already needed someone for some time. How quickly can the role be filled?

The post Are you GE, Coca-Cola or Pfizer? appeared first on .

By Connie Hampton
Hampton & Associates, Scientific & Executive Search Services

No company hires unless they have a problem that can’t be solved by the people they already have working.

The boss may try to solve it him/herself but finds that he/she simply does not have the time to do it, so he asks his people.  They may say, “which if these other priorities shall we downgrade in order to solve this one?”  And the boss may decide that those are all important as well and find that the group simply does not have the man-hours available, even though they have the skills.  Or it may be that the problem requires skills that the team simply does not have and they don’t have the time to acquire them.

So the boss thinks about who he knows who might be right for the role, but does not know anyone – he has already hired all the people he knows who can do the jobs he needs to have done.

So the boss asks his people, “Who do you know?”

About 85% of all jobs, from individual contributor to CEO are filled this way.

If the team doesn’t know the right people (or they are all tapped out), then the hiring manager asks the office manager or the HR person to post the job on the company website and possibly other sites. The HR person writes up the job description and posts it. The job gets picked up by spiders and web scrapers and posted all over the place.  Many (or few) people respond.  Most are not really a fit, but 10-20% of jobs get filled this way.

Contingency search firms, whom you may or may not have worked with before, may pick up the posting and contact you with possible candidates who may or may not be a fit.

Or you may choose, for reasons I’ll describe below, to hire a retained executive search firm.

A search for someone to fill your open position is not rocket science, but it requires time and effort and using a well-thought-out and creative method. This will yield a number of people who are ready, willing and able to talk with you about the role, have the skills you need and are interested in working for your company.

The first step is to have an excellent description of the skills and person you need, written in such a way as to entice this person to consider changing his/her life to come and do the job you need to have done.  You need this if you are posting the job or if you are using a recruiter.  You might want to get your marketing people to help write the description about what is great about your company and what is great about the job. This would greatly improve your posting results as well as shorten the time it takes for a recruiter to fill the role.  A recruiter can help you write the position description if you need it.

The next step is to get this excellent and exciting information to the right people – people who are either already doing the job for one of your competitors or possibly one of your industry’s vendors or clients or who may be working for this person and ready to step up.  It may be that the job is in a function that does not require quite the industry knowledge that another function might.  Then it may be a matter of geography.  But you still need to have the right people know about your opening.  Where are they?  Who are they?  How can you get this information directly to them?  These are the tasks of a recruiter.

The last step is to get the right people who are interested to meet with you, decide which one you think can do the job best and get them hired.

There are different kinds of recruiters and they have different levels of experience in your industry and different ways of working.

The contingency people will only be paid if you hire the person they present.  This puts all the risk on them to find you the right person but also means that they will not put a great deal of time and effort on any one position – they compete with their fellow contingency people for the right people and for the quickest placement, so if your opening is not “hot” and they don’t have the contacts already in hand, they may simply “pass” on the search.

Retained search people will expect to be the only search firm working on your open position, will be paid a retainer and will guarantee to work on your search, will pre-interview and then present you with a small number of candidates, walking you through the interview process and helping you with salary negotiations, relocation and “on-boarding”. They will guarantee the placement for up to a year, doing it over if the person you hire leaves within a certain amount of time.

There are also unbundled or modular scientific and executive search services firms who will do all of the work of retained search firms up to the point of presenting you with all of the qualified, interested candidates.  They will also present you with all of the “who is where and what do they think” data that they develop in the course of the search.

Some companies think that they can just hand a recruiter (contingency or retained) the job description developed in-house for compensation or performance review purposes and expect to receive the “right person” with no other input.  This can seriously slow down the process and may result in less than satisfactory results in the end.

The more thought and work you put into the front end of the search, the quicker the process and the better fit you will have in the end.

How to find the right recruiter:

• Decide how quickly and urgently you need this hire
  It takes 3 minutes to cook a 3 minute egg
• Decide what you need to have this soon-to-be-hired person do and why
• Decide what the title and compensation will be
• Decide if you can afford to relocate this person
• Decide if you will ever hire someone with any of these qualities again or if the information from this search might be useful to another part of your company (sales, procurement, etc.)
• Decide what you can pay for this process and what guarantees you need.

For candidates at the individual contributor level who do not have very specialized skills or if you problem is lack of man-hours, post on your website and locally (craigslist) and/or work with a temp to perm staffing firm, developing your relationship with them so that you can trust their knowledge of who you are and what sorts of people you need. Or respond to contingency search people who call based on your postings, again making sure that the search person understands exactly what you need.

For specialized individual contributors and management decide between contingency recruiters, modular search services or retained firms.

• Choose a firm which works in your industry, or often enough in one close enough to yours, that you feel comfortable with their ability to grasp the structure and problems of companies in your niche.
• Decide how much attention you need on the search for your open position. If you want exclusive attention and extensive support choose modular search services or retained.
• Understand the scope of work and guarantees you will get from your recruiter.

If you choose contingency – do choose someone who has found the same title recently so that his/her network is still usable as the most successful contingency firms rely on their networks.

If you choose retained or modular search services, they do not have to have found the exact person you are looking for as recently as contingency because their method will account for that. But they do need to know your industry and who your main competitors, vendors and clients are.

How to work with the recruiter you choose:

•  Having the hiring manager and the HR person meet with the recruiter or search researcher for 20 minutes to an hour, either in person or by phone, individually or together, at the start of the search will allow the search to be well focused.
• Go over exactly what you need, both the required skills and the “soft skills” and “fit”, as well as what you expect this person will do for you in the first year and what the problem is that you want this person to solve.
• Click here to get an outline of the questions a recruiter should ask you.
• Knowing and telling your recruiter who your closest competitors are, which vendors and customers may have the right people will jump start the process.
• Agree on the deliverables, fees, and timing.
• Decide how many qualified resumes you want to see and how long you want the position to remain open.
• Commit to reviewing the resumes as they come in and to giving timely feedback.
• Commit to an interview time frame.

The fees for contingency and retained searches are somewhere between 20 and 33 1/3% of the annual compensation (including incentives) of the person hired.  Search services fees are usually less than half of that.

Please do contact Hampton & Associates, Scientific & Executive Search Services for searches in the Bioindustries – Life Sciences, Diagnostics, Therapeutics (both Biopharma and Pharmaceuticals) or Medical Devices when you need that extra bit of manpower.

Related articles

• The Advantages of Working With An Executive Search Firm In Asia

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     What kind of recruiter can the company afford to use for this search?

How urgent and important is the search?
How well-defined is the role and is it a realistic search (meaning – does the person you need exist within the parameters of the search – geography, experience, etc.)?
Is this a rather generic role? Do you need a number of people with the same title or is this a single, but important, position?

Choices:  Contingency, Retained, or Unbundled Search Services                            

Contingency searches are zero cost up front and only paid when you hire this recruiter’s candidate.  You receive the selection of candidates the recruiter thinks fits. The risk is the possibility of no or sub-par candidates or a recruiter who “gives up” and wasted time. This is most useful for lower level searches or multiples.

Retained searches are paid 1/3 up front, 1/3 upon presentation of candidates and 1/3 after the candidate has been hired and working for a set number of days.  The risk is a failed search if none of the candidates please the hiring manager.  This is best for very senior searches where the name of the search firm will make an entre for talking with the candidates.

Unbundled Search Services are paid on a project or hourly basis. You receive all information developed in the search.  The risk is that there may be no one who meets all of the requirements of the search if the hiring manager is not willing to be realistic.

Which recruiter specializes in this function, role or industry?

There are generalist recruiters, but wouldn’t you rather have someone with experience in finding similar people from your industry?

Which recruiter is better known and what is their reputation?

Have you asked your colleagues?  Checked the web?  Looked at their LinkedIn profile and recommendations? Asked your employees if they know of this person?

Is she/he able to deliver consistently?

Solid candidates that meet or beat the qualifications for the job               
Creative approaches to sourcing and identifying the best candidates (not simply posting on job boards)
Timely reports and results

Can he/she listen to feedback and modify their process, targets and results? 

Dealing with change in the middle of the process can be difficult, but does she work hard to really understand what you need upfront?  If the hiring manager sees some resumes and decides to “tweek” the position description, can she change directions without drama?

Can he/she keep the process running professionally and smoothly?

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