It's been said that good hiring
is an art—to which we’d add, sure, but there’s a science to it, too.
Here is our take on the modern hiring trends as well as a rundown of
nine best practices that will help you go from good to great in your
own hiring efforts.
By Lauren Bielski, senior editor
Best practice tips on recruiting and "onboarding" look at process and technology in balance
“We also think about the candidate experience—are we approachable? Is the process reasonable?” says Migliaccio, noting that the bank’s senior management thinks about its “employer brand.” This could be defined as the vibe it gives off in its messaging and approach to hiring. (The bank even solicits feedback from employees at various intervals in their career with the bank.)
Grace Migliaccio compares her current employer to Disney, a place where she used to work and which influenced her development as an executive. The senior vice-president of human resources for Commerce Bank, Cherry Hill, N.J., says, “Commerce is the Disney of banking in that it wants to create a delightful banking experience.” If “delight” seems too heady a word, think of it in terms of having employees who act engaged, helpful, and useful when interacting with clients.
And, as corporate culture—even a corporate personality—is a key ingredient of the Commerce customer service approach, it is tended to with care. “Our personnel selection process is very defined; likewise, we are looking for certain types of people, typically those who are familiar with working in retail and like customer service,” says Migliaccio.
“We tend to view a candidate from the perspective of cultural fit rather than simply looking at their ability to be a loan officer, teller, or analyst,” she says.
The human resource executive points out that there are people who love the bank’s structured approach to recruiting, onboarding (today’s term for orientation), and training.
“People who feel good about their hiring and orientation process tend to love working here,” she says. “Yet there are people who might bristle under the high-energy enthusiasm of it all.”
Candidate selection, which is increasingly aided by technology, is designed to automate some of the screening and move the evaluation process along, from applying to hiring to getting acquainted during the early days of employment.
But it’s not all about making the process easy for Commerce. 
Referring to onboarding, she explains, “If you don’t like the idea of going through ‘Tradition,’ the program presented to new employees on the first day, or the idea of meeting and knowing senior management as part of getting to know the bank, then this might not be the place for you,” she offers. (CEO Vernon Hill will present his vision of the company during Tradition, and tends to question new hires about their former employers, among other conversational lines.)
When Migliaccio started with Commerce six years ago, the bank’s HR department was still largely paper-based.
Now the department has an automated applicant tracking system, works with electronic job boards, and has an employee website to help orient and inform new hires. Necessary procedures like fingerprinting and background checks will be further streamlined through a single outsourcer sometime over the next year. Today, new hires get a DVD with all the paperwork they need to fill out, so that much of this processing can done at home,
(“Where they are relaxed and can fill it out carefully”) and a manual that is like an FAQ of Commerce basics.
They also are assigned a buddy to help with the familiarization process.
Commerce might be among the leaders in taking a “sophisticated, branded approach to hiring,” but they aren’t alone. It’s becoming more of a must-do at a time when it’s tougher to find the right stuff in the field.
What’s the new norm?
When it comes to hiring tellers, call center staff, loan officers, analysts, or even senior management, what’s changing these days? Well, everything—and not just at Commerce.
Operating just outside Chicago in Itasca, Ill., First Midwest Bank redesigned its recruitment program within the last two years in response to high churn and a sense that a better process could yield a bigger pool of suitable candidates. Part of the new approach involves use of an internet-based prescreening tool and a series of structured interviews created by Development Dimension, Inc., to complete an initial evaluation of candidates prior to meeting with hiring managers, according to Caryn Guinta, executive vice-president, director of employee resources.
“This helped us reach people that met minimal skills requirements, so we didn’t have to take up a lot of training time reviewing those skills. At the same time, we worked out competency profiles for all the job families in the bank. It became easier to assess a candidate fit when jobs were so well defined.”
Still, Guinta points out that while hiring frontline staff is more manageable due to the new process, finding commercial lenders, as an example, is still tough. She and others who spoke with ABA BJ posed the issue that consolidation in the banking industry resulted in a lot of skilled people going elsewhere. Then, de novo banks have created an environment where “there are more banks than bankers,” notes Jim Holly, president and CEO of the Bank of Sierra, Porterville, Calif. To address the issue, Holly’s bank now incorporates the Wonderlic aptitude test as well as the Predictive Index to evaluate new employees and help groom more senior executives for leadership positions within the bank. “These tools help you know your people better and help everyone figure out how to succeed despite a tough environment,” Holly says.
Naomi Bloom, managing partner with Bloom and Wallace, Fort Meyers, Fla., is an HR technology expert as well as a consultant with lots of personnel hiring experience. She agrees that many banks are responding to stiff competition for employees by changing many aspects of the hiring procedure, including screening. Banks, Bloom notes, have always had complex requirements.
“What’s interesting to me about banking is the blend of textures you have,” she says of staffing requirements. “On the one hand, banks operate like any large retailer or service firm, hiring masses of operationally-oriented people, often at a common point in time,” says Bloom. “They would benefit from any technologies and skills that would let them respond to mass interest in a series of positions quickly.” She also recommends participation in job fairs, or organizing open houses and campus recruiting for this class of employee.
“Yet in banking you also have senior people with very different skills, abilities, and expectations of the hiring process,” Bloom explains. “While much of the process for these types of workers should be automated, the technology needs to operate much more in the background. Peer outreach might work better for this group; it needs a stronger personal touch.”
Whatever their level, education, or specialty, candidates are being hired differently in an era marked by Monster, Jobster, and amid sophisticated theories on recruitment and retention.
Candidates have greater expectations of their “hiring and early employment experience,” says Bloom. Yet at the same time, exhaustive legal and compliance and suitability requirements haven’t gone away. “In the U.S, you don’t want to run afoul of the law on the one hand,” notes Bloom, “yet you don’t want to turn off great candidates with a slow or clumsy response or get bogged down with candidates that just won’t fit.”
(Asked to clarify “clumsy,” she offered the example of a junior person responding to an inquiry from a candidate who is much older and more experienced and “who just isn’t communicating with the respect or authority that’s expected.”) As a result, the recruitment process is under scrutiny at many firms.
First Midwest, says Caryn Guinta, now uses 1. a web-based application tracking system called OpenHire from SilkRoad, 2. specialized HR positions (e.g. employee relations specialists and recruiters), and 3. something the bank refers to as “hiring blitzes,” a process triggered when faced with a certain level of vacant positions.
Regarding the latter, Guinta says, “Basically, we’ll pull an HR team together and reach out to a large group of candidates who have expressed interest in the bank. We have their resumes in our database and we set up multiple interviews in a day. It’s got the efficiency of a job fair approach, but it doesn’t feel like that to the candidate, who is simply getting contacted by us, going through some pre-screening, and coming into the office.”
Consider a new set of rules
What should be in place at most banks today, for that matter, at most companies? A strategic, coordinated approach to picking up staff instead of HR and other departments working independently with only intermittent contact binding them.
Said differently, don’t just rely on the luck and uncanny people skills of a few good recruiters, whether they work for you directly or on a contract basis.
If today’s rules were written down, they might look like this:
1. Evaluate your recruiting process, what’s good, what’s bad, what works, what’s ugly. Do you have some sort of end-to-end sense about how you hire candidates and why the process takes the form it does? You should, according to Sue Marks, CEO of Pinstripe, Inc., Brookfield, Wisc.
Pinstripe’s own Requisition-to-Results process is outlined on its website: evaluate, acquire, hire, and engage. Use your mouse to zero in on any part of it depicted on the site and Pinstripe spells out what it offers, from creating an effective recruitment marketing plan to building a branded career website.
Likewise, says Marks, each bank should have its hiring methods defined. “The process should be specific and it should relate to your goals. Good recruiting is increasingly about good process design.”
At Northwest Community Credit Union of Oregon, the process used to be decentralized, with hiring managers handling most of the candidate evaluation, notes Human Resource Information Administrator Sue Slaughter Nichols. Then Northwest Community experienced a labor shortage in Lane County resulting from new employers in the area—including a call center for a cruise line and a technology firm. This prompted the credit union to work with an agency that handled background and drug testing as well as skills assessment. Today, a candidate is first hired as a contract worker, and becomes a full-time staffer after three months. The shift in approach has made a difference. “We’ve found some excellent people this way and we aren’t dealing with the same turnover,” Slaughter Nichols explains.
As a subset of this evaluation, do you have a good position-based selection process? That is, are you clear about the behaviors and habits that produce the best work in tellers, loan officers, branch managers, call center reps? Make sure you can evaluate candidates with useful, position-specific criteria.
Your goals and objectives should be clearly outlined, and your project management skills strong, just as they would be elsewhere in the organization to accomplish any business strategy, says Lori Blackman president and founder of DNL Global, Dallas. “There’s this thinking that because candidate selection involves assessing people, that somehow, the process is more intuitive than doing other kinds of project work. While intuition may be involved, there’s a lot of good insight you can get by evaluating candidates in structured ways.”
Keep in mind, your human resource division wants to build a process that avoids unnecessary steps yet helps their staff make necessary judgments, all of which can benefit the hiring managers. HR also wants to create a process that it can evaluate and measure, often for dealings with senior level management, says Sue Marks. For example, human resource executives should be able to make a statement like this with authority and have data to back it up: “We do [applicant tracking] well; we need outsourcing help with [skills assessment and screening]; we need a faster response time to [initial inquiries about positions].”
Best practitioners know that along with metrics like cost per hire, time to hire, and number of positions filled, they should also begin to think about the quality of the hiring experience for candidates. Is it organized? Is there timely feedback? Do candidates feel in the know or anxious and frustrated?
2. Keep the big-picture trends in mind and respond accordingly. As with all project work, hiring requires a general sense of context to navigate fluctuating conditions.
One trend affecting today’s personnel market has to do with non-bank competition for bank employees, particularly evident in more senior positions. (Of course, banks are also poaching from other industries.)
“Banks need business people with sharp financial sense and business savvy in areas like marketing and sales, and so do many of other businesses,” says Michael Beniaminovich, senior consultant at Towers Perrin. In keeping with this, banks might change job descriptions or rewrite ads to emphasize what comparable marketing or sales experience might work for a position.
Add to this the projected scarcity of talent as Baby Boomers retire, which has been widely discussed among HR specialists and providers. Some say this shortage is already evident in many domestic and international locales and for some job classes, making it in some sense a candidate’s market.
“This is one reason why creating an effective candidate recruiting experience is so important,” explains Beniaminovich. “It can be a differentiator and inspire loyalty.” Solid recruiting practices that show the candidate respect and consideration coupled with meeting certain baseline employee expectations tend to improve retention.
Generation X, or younger, hires present special challenges.
Michelle Newell, senior director of human capital management (HCM) product marketing with Oracle, Redwood Shores, Calif., is familiar with the claim that younger workers expect more from companies as they enter the workforce. Her take on it is that “young people expect a cell phone, an effective, modern website, and ease with orientation.”
They also have some expectation that someone will be measuring their performance and helping them manage their career with training and education, she says of the burgeoning talent management field, an area related to recruiting. “Perhaps it’s not being demanding as much as wanting effective tools, guidance, and support,” says Newell.
A sense of urgency is changing the hiring game, notes Lori Blackman. “Electronic job boards are bringing a pool of candidates in quicker.” And yet, the time to hire extended to 53 days in 2004, notes Dr. Thomas Mahan, CEO and president with The Work Institute, a workforce research firm based in Brentwood, Tenn. “There’s this expectation of speed, but not all firms are set up to respond to candidate interest. You have a lot of frustration out there. Most firms haven’t adjusted their hiring procedures so that they can follow through quickly or retain some kind of contact with the candidate.”
At the same time, there is less tolerance of error or “poor placements,” or “unsuitable candidates.” Think of it as recruitment as viewed through the efficiency lens.
3. Use technology to flesh out and improve key facets of the hiring and retention business process, but don’t hide behind it. Should certain parts of the process be automated? “Yes,” says Naomi Bloom resoundingly. Conducting skills assessments and background checks can’t really be done otherwise. Likewise, just as all banks need “core processing” capabilities like benefits administration and payroll, they should probably automate related tasks like application tracking.
Job boards have also become a mainstay, with recruiters and in-house staff alike relying on them as a channel to the workforce. In addition to general sites like CareerBuilder that advertise many bank positions, there are specialty sites like jobsinthemoney.com. (For more information on job boards, see rileyguide.com.)
In addition to submitting positions to the boards of choice, banks need to think about the employment section of their own websites and whether they can do more than take an application, perhaps supporting preliminary screening.
On the other hand, you’re probably familiar with the notion, “You can automate bad process, but it’s not a good idea,” and this is just as true in recruiting and talent management, notes Brian Platz, executive vice-president and general manager of e-recruiting firm SilkRoad Technology, Winston-Salem, N.C. Technology should be an enabler, but it can’t “do the work” of hiring and cultivating employees, adds Michael George, product evangelist, with Vurv, a full suite talent management company based in Jacksonville, Fla.
4. Make sure hiring managers have good communications with recruiters. Not hiding behind technology means that all parts of the organization are communicating effectively, says Pinstripes’ Sue Marks. Critical conversations should take place in a timely fashion, not when a perfectly good candidate is cooling his heels in the front conference room, many experts emphasize.
Recruiters need to understand the position well enough to evaluate candidates and spell out position requirements to them prior to that first interview with the hiring manager.
The communication needs to be more than a casual e-mailing of a job description, although certainly, accurate and vivid job descriptions should be a foundational element, says Vurv’s Michael George. But what other qualities should the ideal candidate possess? All expectations need to be discussed.
5. Your company should have an interviewing style, and should be up to speed on modern interviewing approaches. Better yet, communicate best interviewing practices to all managers.
Some HR experts have maligned interviewing methods as too reliant on personality, or too easily aced by smooth talkers. They believe that traditional interviews do little to gather information on how the candidate would actually perform day to day.
But others believe there are ways around these pitfalls, including use of behavioral questioning techniques and use of accomplishment-oriented questions designed to get at how candidates have worked in the past, and how that approach might work for your company in the future, notes Mike Kalinsky, president and CEO of Empyrean Management Group, Blue Bell, Pa. “Having a competency with interviewing is a must do. When you get the candidate in front of you, you better be able to ask relevant questions.”
6. Pay attention to your “onboarding” process. It does little good to hire right only to lose a candidate within the first three months of employment—a common problem. What does the new person experience on that first day, or the first week? Is there a structured approach to familiarizing them, including a buddy system or mentoring system to get new hires clued in on what’s required of them? Are forms and processes organized and easy to address, or are they an incomprehensible jumble? Does the employee have a clear idea of his job description and what marks he has to hit in 30, 60, and 90 days?
There’s also the administrative aspect of getting key information delivered and getting an employee “registered in the system,” says Bloom. Technology can help with this, replacing tons of paper on the first day with electronic forms that can be completed prior to arrival. “But then there is the profound aspect of onboarding,” Bloom adds, “which has to do with familiarization and getting an employee productive and feeling part of the team.”
At Northwest Community Credit Union of Oregon, recruiting redesign was coupled with a training program makeover. “We doubled our onboarding program to four days,” says Terry Reich, training coordinator. In addition to hard skills training, the program weaves in a formal tour of all departments, an introductory lunch with all senior bank management, and a buddy system to support the employee throughout the first months.
“I’ve heard the expression, ‘The right culture eats strategy for lunch’,” says Brian Platz of Silkroad, meaning choosing wisely, then telling employees what’s expected, and directing their performance. All of this creates a solid organization that is in a position to execute.
7. Work on your “employment brand.” The brand message to employees communicates some expectation of what it would feel like to work at your bank. To give this concept more real-world heft, think about those lists out there that get published with regularity, the 50 best places to work, top mom-friendly firms, today’s best firms for technologists, etc. However described, these are identities that are sold to potential candidates that are distinct from (although related to) your primary brand.
This variant of branding is an emerging area but a concept you should be aware of because early adopters already make it work for them, says Sue Marks. Everything from how business process is conducted, to how messages are constructed, to quality of job boards, and candidate handling technologies makes an impact on brand. You need to think about how the overall recruiting experience feels to candidates.
8. When it comes to HR technology and service providers, learn your options—you have many. Should you wish to hand over the reins to specialists, you have the option of working with HR business process outsourcing providers that handle part or all of the hiring process. (Forrester lists Accenture, ExcellerateHRO, Hewitt Associates, and IBM as leading human resources BPO providers.)
For an in-house program in need of a digital touch, there are epic numbers of HR vendors to consider, whether the vendor in question offers traditional licenses or application service provider offerings. Aberdeen, Gartner, and Forrester all have published research on HR technology.
One debate worth mentioning here concerns itself with whether the value-added talent wares of enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors like Oracle or SAP are sufficient to flesh out your program or, when moving beyond key administration functions, it’s better to stick with the talent specialists, which offer software with more of a recruiting, onboarding, and professional development focus.
Matthew Parker, group managing director with StepStone Solutions, a European recruiting firm widely praised by Gartner, says that in his talks with bank clients, companies that like the data structures and approaches supported by ERP vendors tend to stick with them as they add capabilities. Others that want a particular employee experience and deeper capabilities, and that don’t mind the extensive integration that can be required to link distinct solution sets together, are going the best-of-breed route.
Naomi Bloom admits that “talent management” is a hot label right now, so much so that many vendors claim the distinction. “You need an ERP system either way,” says Bloom.
“If you feel that your firm needs heavier duty talent management capabilities, I would look to comprehensive providers.”
9. Understand your existing workforce—what types of employees have been successful in the past? Once you start to automate your recruiting process, the next step involves making use of insights gained from performance assessment or incentive management tools that may already be in place. With that insight you can ask: What are top performers contributing? What behaviors contribute to success? What skills does the bank have already? Where are the gaps?
“Best practitioners are thinking about linking their recruiting practice with all the other training, incentive, or employee management systems so they understand better who they have and who they need,” says Tom Kraack, Minneapolis-based managing partner, workforce transformation, financial services, with Accenture.
Oracle’s Michelle Newell agrees that making better use of workforce data is a broader industry trend. Increasingly HR leaders are trying to leverage existing employee information to inform the hiring process. This is partially about automation, partially about HR being able to tap into the wisdom of operational divisions and hiring managers when figuring out who to hire next or how job descriptions need to be revised.
Think of this step as a broad, generalized mapping process: what skills, certifications, and capabilities does the organization possess in aggregate? Where are the vulnerabilities?
You can shape “ideal candidate templates” from that information. BJ

The electronic version of this article available at: http://lb.ec2.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/sb/ababj0307/index.php?startid=30
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