Tag Archives: Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce

The Chicagoland Conversation with Hireology

Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down on behalf of the Chicagoland Chamber with Adam Robinson, who is the Chief Hireologist of Hireology. Previously, Adam was the co-founder and CEO of illuma, a leader in high-volume recruitment outsourcing solutions as well as the creator of the Ionix Hiring System, a full suite of interview and assessment tools.

Hireology is a company that specializes in interview guides, applicant tracking, candidate assessment and selection. Just this year, the company was featured in Entrepreneur Magazine, Crain’s Chicago Business and Fox Chicago, where it was profiled as a “tech company to watch.”

Adam, on your website, you describe Hireology as a company that was 13 years in the making. What do you mean by that and what inspired you to start Hireology?

AR: My last company was an outsourced recruitment provider and through the course of my time there, what I learned was that most companies are terrible at hiring. Fewer than 10% of companies know how to conduct an interview. It’s a coin flip whether it works out or not.

Why? The company doesn’t think far beyond next week or next month with that person and instead just focus on the fact that they have a hiring need.

So at Hireology, we’ve used technology that helps correlate behavioral tendencies to a person succeeding in a given job. We work through that data to see if it’s a good fit with an easy to use online tool that incorporates an applicant tracking system, interview guides, online skills tests, background checks and more. All within one interface.

Can you speak more to how that science occurs? Is there a real criteria behind it all?

AR: We’ve analyzed 1000’s of interviews across hundreds of companies to come up with the 67 Elements of Success™, traits that, when present in a candidate, enable us to predict his or her likelihood of success in a specific role.

What type of training and tools do you provide to managers on how to evaluate a candidate?

AR: The manager logs in and runs their entire hiring process from our website. Thousands of potential questions get customized based on requirements into an interview guide. The manager receives questions that are perfect for their hiring scenario, which makes their life tremendously easier.

We’re increasingly giving people the tools to help find the right candidates. When you put a job in our system, you get a unified URL for that given job. When you’re no longer hiring for that job, you turn off the product. Hiring spree? Turn it back on. There’s no contracts or math. It’s $24 a month.

What’s a good example of a company that needed your services at Hireology and prospered from hiring you?

AR: A woman in the medical space recently turned to us because she was having difficulty attracting the right kind of candidates. She posted on Craigslist, did flyers and it wasn’t that organized of a search. Then she talked to us about activating a full account with our processing tools. She couldn’t be happier and she’s able to scale her growth with this tool.

Is there an ideal company that hires you at Hireology?

AR: We really work with all kinds of companies from industry associations and healthcare systems to franchises and small business owners. No matter what, we want to work with people who will embed our platform into their hiring process rather than handing a confusing binder off to a hiring manager. There’s no reason to do that when we can set up the system in literally 60 seconds. You pick the plan you want and it’s a 14-day trial. It just works. And it works for a lot of people.


Dan is speaking at the Chicagoland Chamber Nov. 3rd!

What are you doing on the morning of Thursday, November 3rd before 9:00am? If you’re free and near downtown Chicago, I think you’ll walk into work energized and with a fresh perspective on how what you build internally can do a world of good externally in terms of your customer relationships.

I’ll be speaking at the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce along with my colleague, management consultant Rob Jager, on:

Building The Brand Within:
How To Deliver Unexpected Surprises For Your Customers 

It’s a look at how content marketing can help you position your company as a thought leader in its industry, how to logistically put your people in a position to be better aligned with the company’s true mission, how to identify the best content providers within and what turning employees into brand ambassadors means for team loyalty and a healthier culture. If you’re a small business owner or department leader, I think you’ll get a lot out of our hour spent together.

7:45a.m.: Registration & Networking 
8:00a.m.: Presentation 
9:00a.m.: Q&A 

Location: Chicagoland Chamber, 200 E. Randolph, Suite 2200

Pre-registration for this FREE event is required on the Chicagoland Chamber’s website here:
http://www.chicagolandchamber.org/wdk_cc/events/eventDetails.jsp?cc_event_id=8afbc90d-a2de-473a-9ebc-8a026cd3e6b5

Memo to a Mayor: Make Chicago the most socially connected city government

A couple months ago, I heard Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce President Jerry Roper tell a story of how Mayor Richard J. Daley (that would be Chicago’s first Mayor Daley for history buffs) used to instruct staff members closest to him to always carry a pad of paper with them. That way, when they saw something in their daily lives such as a pothole in need of fixing, they would jot that down and give it to the Mayor. I’d like to think the pothole in question then got promptly fixed.

I can also remember Newark Mayor Cory Booker speaking on Piers Morgan’s program on CNN about how he successfully used Twitter this past Winter to quicken emergency response times toward those residents trapped by a snowstorm.

Some say these examples are from long ago or apply to a smaller city than our own. But really – is the notion that Chicago be the most socially connected city be a pipe dream? No. I don’t think so. In fact, I believe we have the tools and resources to make this possible. And I think a relatively new Mayor in Rahm Emanuel is the perfect opportunity for renewed advocacy and accessibility with governmental leaders.

Let’s start with the ground level.
If someone sees a pothole, we may complain about it and say, “somebody should fix that.” Or we could snap a picture of it and tweet it to an alderman or City Hall with the location of where it is. At the end of this post, I’ll give you their Twitter handle if they have one. Easy enough? You know it is. You have time to use your phone for good in between games of Angry Birds.

Getting City Council More Social
Every Chicago Alderman should set up with a Twitter handle so they can be sent questions in the form of tweets from their constituents and respond in kind. Or use it to listen to relevant conversations going on among Chicago’s most passionate citizens. Currently, only about 1/2 of the 50 Wards have Twitter accounts and several of those are poorly updated (but glad to see my neighborhood’s Alderman, Tom Tunney, doing a good job with the tweets – @AldTomTunney). For more in-depth postings that incorporate pictures and video, having a Facebook page is not the worst idea, particularly since most constituents are likely on Facebook if they are not on Twitter. All you need once you’re set up with an account is to be responsive to the people who most likely live in your designated area – which is, after all, what you were elected to do, right?

Town Hall meetings
What works for President Obama can work at the very localized level too – broadcast Town Hall meetings or other types of monthly discussion meetings on YouTube to bring together roundtables of citizens with their Alderman to discuss topics that need to be raised. Now, I understand that the content at times may be no more thrilling than C-Span, but I didn’t say this has to be recorded in its entirety either. Taking the most useful snippets that are then posted on the Alderman’s site can help convey quick answers to questions that are very top-of-mind for the neighborhood.

Civic Investment
As funding from the private sector is important to help grow our city, each of our Aldermen should also be set up with a page from the leading B2B website, LinkedIn. I’m not merely talking about creating a page, however. I’m talking about creating an outlet for connections between the politician and corresponding C-level executives as well as associations can occur. It takes no time to create this and establish connections. Besides, LinkedIn also has a Polls application and no matter how much they say they don’t look at them, politicians can gain some significant insight and goodwill from polling their constituents on a variety of local issues.

“How do I do this?”
For the politicians: It’s incredibly simple to be set up with the right tools to engage your electorate on a daily basis, including all the ones I’ve outlined above and then some. It’s smart for your visibility, accessibility and yes, your election or re-election efforts. The main point is that what I’m suggesting is a small but important opportunity to improve communication between City Hall and its citizens just a little bit better. The upside is worth the investment of time.

For the people: Courtesy of the people at Progress Illinois, here’s a Chicago Aldermanic Twitter Directory. If your Alderman is on this list, connect to him or her and make the link to government in Chicago just a little bit closer. Don’t forget to follow our Mayor while you’re at it – @RahmEmanuel.

For those who may question the effectiveness of being the most socially connected city…do you really find the traditional way of getting things done in politics marvelously efficient?

That’s what I thought. Let’s give this way a try now.