Chris Russell (17)
Recruiting
What are the 7 stages of recruitment?
The different stages of recruitment comprise a workflow familiar to even the most entry level recruiter. They include prep, sourcing, applicant conversion, selection process, the interview, reference checks, and onboarding/hire. Employers that want to attract the best and brightest need to ensure their process is running at peak efficiency. To do that, you need to break down the different recruitment stages and optimize for each. There are several options based on your level of need, frequency of hiring, complexity of process, etc… You can outsource the process to a consultant, you can hire an experienced Talent Acquisition leader, or you can just implement some basic internal structures on your own with your current team. If you’re keen to give it a go on your own because you don’t have the budget or the hiring volume to support the cost of adding headcount, here are some of the things they would likely implement or advise you to implement. 1) Prepping for Your Ideal Candidate Just as important as getting applicants to your job by posting it, is getting the RIGHT candidates to apply. Volume without quality equals a lot of time spent on unproductive administrative work, and either no hire or the wrong hire. Spend some time sharpening your axe before you start chopping at a tree. Develop an ideal candidate profile first. Otherwise you’ll be doing what is called “post and pray.” Ask yourself what makes up an ideal candidate profile? This is the person who has the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) to achieve the goals of the position. In other words, based on those KSAs, process, how do you write the job description? What niche sites or organizations will you market and network in? Where do they hang out (virtually or in person)? Who/what are they likely to follow? What are they most likely to be interested in and respond to? How can you best attract them with outreach and marketing messaging? Once you define what those are, you can use that candidate profile for effective targeting, outreach and attraction. 2) Sourcing and Attracting Talent This stage is about being resourceful and focusing on the candidate experience. Don’t frustrate candidates by not responding to and communicating with them, by taking too long to make a decision, by creating too many hoops to jump through, or by having unrealistic expectations. Develop a process that is efficient, communicative, standardized, and reportable by investing in a modern Applicant Tracking System (ATS) There are several basic low-cost ones out there to choose from, and you can work with one of their representatives to set it up and configure a workflow. At the very least you should leverage automated screening to knock out unqualified applicants and automated emails to communicate application status and let them know where they stand. You’ll also have the ability to disposition and communicate with people in bulk using pre-written email templates. You’ll also need a sourcing strategy that allows you to proactively find talent through various online sources. If you have the budget perhaps a LinkedIn recruiter seat is in order. Or you could go with a lower package and augment it with a sourcing tool such as Hiretual or Seekout. Sourcing is a time consuming function however so having a dedicated sourcer on staff to uncover names will certainly improve your chances of filling roles faster. 3) Converting Applicants On a very basic reporting level, you can evaluate your process by looking at what are called conversion rates, or click through rates. This is the number or percentage of people that move from one step to the next. If you have a step that has high fallout or no fallout, you may be getting too few or too many out the back end. If a step has high fallout, you can re-evaluate if the step is screening out too many people unnecessarily. If a step has little to no fallout, what value is it providing? Maybe get rid of it. You can also evaluate your process by looking at the overall time to fill (from position opened to filled) and also time in each individual step. If your hiring process is taking too long, which step is the bottleneck and why? All of this process management will help ensure a quality candidate experience, which will help get the good candidates all the way through the process to hire. Some of the best metrics to track are the number of clicks your job postings get vs the number of people who apply. If your conversion rate is 10% or less your apply process needs a lot of work. A good ATS will convert applicants between 30%-40% based on my experience. 4) Selecting and Screening Candidates When it comes to the selection process its important to be diverse and set expectations. Explain the full hiring process to each candidates you speak with, so they know what to expect, what the steps are, who they will speak with, how long it will take, and how to prepare. Be as respectful of their time as you’ll expect them to be of yours. Additional note on position requirements (KSAs) and screening: Define your must-haves and your nice-to-haves. Your must-haves are the bare minimum requirements or qualifications to be able to perform the job. Nice-to-haves are the extra over-and-above qualifications that would be ideal to have. An automated pre-screen with a recruiting chatbot is a great tool that can knock out or disqualify all who don’t have the must-haves. If you also add the nice-to-haves in your prescreen (without knocking anyone out on these), you can quickly get to your short list. 5) The Interview Process Focus on efficient convenient scheduling. Speed really counts in this step. Eliminate the time and effort of going back and forth to coordinate phone screen or interview dates and times by using a calendaring app like Calendly or go a step further and purchase an interview scheduling tool. You set aside blocks of time that you or your team can be available and allow candidates to self-schedule into into any of the slots that work with their schedule. It’s a good idea to offer slots during lunch time or outside of normal working hours to accommodate those who are currently employed. 6) Reference Check Don’t dismiss top contenders until you have an accepted offer with all conditions met and a start date (salary/schedule accepted, references checked, background check/drug screen complete). Know that anything can happen and often will. Candidates will change their mind, accept a counter-offer, or fail pre-employment testing. When that happens, you’ll want to have your backup candidates warm and ready to go. Keep in touch with them, even just to let them know you don’t have any updates yet, but they are still actively under consideration. Once you reject them, it’s harder to bring them back. 7) Onboarding Lastly, onboarding! This area is frequently overlooked and your best opportunity for all that hard work to go to waste. It’s kind of like a murky grey area that is the handoff between Recruiting and Operations. If you don’t make sure that you have a strong onboarding program that involves training, mentorship, information, and necessary resources, you will wind up with hires that feel not welcomed, not trained, and in a job that is not what they were sold. I recommend digitizing all parts of onboarding especially now that most of us are working remotely. Let candidates receive and sign their HR paperwork electronically. They will certainly thank you for it. Having a recruitment process that is well thought out to meet the specific needs of your organization and structured in a measurable platform can help you evaluate and continually improve your hiring plans, and eliminate or revise non-value-added steps that eat up time and may eliminate good candidates needlessly. It will also ensure you cover all important steps, creating a standardized experience for all candidates, and reducing the opportunity for bias.
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Recruiting Tactics
What is a CRM for Recruiting?
CRM traditionally stands for Customer Relationship Management. The first CRM platforms were focused on retaining customers and driving repeat sales. Typical names in this space are Siebel, Oracle, and of course Salesforce. But for recruiting purposes, many recruiters simply refer to it as Candidate Relationship Management. It is a software platform that allows recruiters to communicate with prospective candidates in order to engage them with the employer and/or get them to apply to jobs. The purpose behind a recruitment CRM is about treating candidates like customers. A good recruiting CRM enables you to communicate effectively through email or text to your candidates and see what emails have been opened and if those opens led to clicks on your career content. A CRM is used at the top of the funnel and its best use case is for candidates who have expressed an interest in your company but have not yet applied to a job. Several major ATS vendors have created built-in workflows and automations with CRM like functionality. A modern ATS, or recruitment CRM, allows users to manage every aspect of the candidate relationship, from initial sourcing through to the job offer stage. Employers today need the ability to attract talent not just manage them. A good CRM can engage candidates and guide them throughout the hiring process. Features of a CRM for Recruiting The key features for a recruiting CRM platform include the following: Creating and segmenting a pool of candidates according to skill or job type Sending personalized emails and texts to prospective candidates Creating engaging email campaigns that reflect your company brand and important news and updates Conducting candidate surveys to get their feedback on their experience with your process Candidate relationship management analytics such as the ability to track open rates and clicks to your career site. What a CRM for Recruitment can help you do: Make communicating with candidates much easier. Build a strong talent community from a single database that can be searched. Engage, attract, source, and manage candidates from apply to interview. Facilitate hiring workflows – automate recruiting emails, automate job offers, interview scheduling, background checks, etc. Analyze and measure your recruiting activities through a dashboard (generate reports) Some CRMs can also be used to collect applications (just like an ATS) but generally speaking they are more for job marketing purposes rather than an ATS which is used to store their data and make it searchable. The ATS is not a good replacement for a recruiting CRM. The CRM can replace an ATS however. Why use a recruiting CRM? Candidates are twice as likely to accept cold emails from recruiters if they have interacted with your brand before (source:OfficeVibe). So it will make your job easier if you use it to increase your employer brand so more candidates know about it. If you have thousands of candidates in your ATS you’ll need a tool to organize, manage and engage those people. Much of a CRM can be automated. For instance you can setup an automated email campaign to contact job seekers on a monthly basis. If they don’t open your email you can set up the CRM to automatically email a reminder to those candidates who haven’t opened your first email. Not only will it make your job easier, you can use campaigns to drive more applications to your open jobs. So how do you know if a recruiting CRM is right for your company? If you… Actively source candidates a CRM can help you establish relationships with them through content and messaging. Still use a spreadsheet to manage candidates you can become much more efficient with a CRM Have more than one person recruiting a CRM can empower each one on your team to market your employer brand more effectively. Have hard-to-fill jobs a CRM can help you build a pipeline of those candidates overtime and let them express an interest in youropening even if they are ready to move. Hold virtual job fairs a CRM can be used to effectively capture those attendees so you can later market your openings to them. Recruiting CRM systems let you automate the majority of the marketing process and administrative tasks that take up valuable time, and let you get back to the important efforts like building rapport. Another way to think of a CRM for recruiting is as a candidate “nurturing” tool. Employers can use it to nurture talent much like a sales person nurtures a lead in the sales lifecycle. Recruitment CRMs are a talent ecosystem, full of passive and active candidates. The best recruiters know how to optimize and manage this intelligence tool to get the most out of it. Running a CRM for recruitment certainly takes effort. It’s best to assign a full time person to the role, someone who understands marketing as a core function. But don’t correctly, your own CRM can help you recruit more efficiently while providing an awesome experience for those career seekers who interact with you.
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Recruiting Automation
Will AI replace recruiters?
When it comes to AI in recruiting, there are those who define it as ‘assisted intelligence’. They may be correct in that definition. Automation is taking the boring stuff out of the recruiting process so recruiters and hiring managers can spend more time with people. So if you adopt the technology in the right way it can make your organization more transparent, and build a better candidate experience. Where Recruiting AI Fits Best AI features work best for two types of recruiting scenarios. First there’s the high volume hiring organizations, where a manager does most of the hiring. Secondly, there’s the high value corporate side, where a recruiter is driving the process. Both scenarios have different problems that yesterday’s technology is trying to solve in the same way. Technology is trying to help the candidate through the engagement process…help the hiring manager automate pieces that allow for the human decision making to come through, in a faster way. Implications of AI in Recruiting One of the easiest ways AI can help is in the answering of questions from candidates. A lot of recruiting tech is able to speed up the interview process from doing the chase process where recruiting coordinators, trying to coordinate with their managers, can take care of that in minutes, rather than hours or days. The end result is shortening the time to hire. Which part of the recruiting process can’t be automated? The interview process is the biggest one that is really weird to automate. It’s hard for a machine to shortlist and choose the three best people for a job. It’s so much more complicated than dating which is an often used analogy. The nuance of the interview is so complicated you wouldn’t want to automate that aspect. But everything else is fair game. How should employers think about AI? Some mistakes we’ve seen before are employers who think automation is the ultimate goal. The reality is you should probably start with why you’re doing what you’re doing. Are you trying to hire great people to have your company be more competitive? Are you trying to build a better recruitment process? For example it’s maddening if you go to a career site and as an executive candidate or sales exec or other type of role and be presented with the same experience. We should be able to work out who these people are. We should put them through different types of processes because a different job is going to require a different type of AI based automation. What Recruiters Say About AI Here’s what some recruiters told us on a recent Facebook thread about AI’s future in recruiting. Their responses are enlightening. “Yes, a company eHarmony-type algorithm will be more effective than a recruiter’s opinion, by far. You just need to collect the right data points and feed the system.” – Andy Riabokin “Automation, intelligent matching, scheduling, and other non-relationship activities that can be done by “AI” will allow employers and staffing companies to do more with fewer recruiting staff. Recruiters are not going to be programming decision trees in chatbots. So, eventually, yes, that is the promise and the hope that the software vendors are selling. We’ll see.” – Craig Fisher “Having observed the practical implementation of conversation and conversational AI coupled with HR Ontology, the NLP Applied Scientist is continuously informing the engine about new use cases and definitions so it can comprehend the complexities of the human language to the best of its ability. The complexity of understanding linguistics informs me that AI will never replace the entire hiring cycle managed by the recruiter.” – Bennet Sung “AI can automate processes better but it may not replace it anytime soon.”. – Sagar Kommula “Don’t think so as there still are recruiters headhunting for cold candidates. Maybe it will help with some mass recruitment as a part of filling a pipeline, sending messages and feedback, but for high level recruiting people will still want to be ‘hunted’” -Lena K. “Recruiting is a people business. When you are affecting the life and future of a human being, as well as all the people at your clients’ business, it requires empathy, compassion, intuition, caring, and emotional intelligence to do well—-something no machine or algorithm will ever replace adequately.” – Eric Wentworth “As much as AI tries to replace recruiters by matching key words and years of experience, they can not match a good human recruiters ability to read between the lines and find a diamond in the rough. That’s a human job. And many recruiters do that very well.” – Melanie Erler “Maybe for some IT engineering jobs where just looking for cookie cutter type people that are closer to robots anyway but will never replace sales recruiters as 90% or more of sales is personality and things AI just can’t duplicate.” – Andrew Chase “AI will improve and extend its hands towards better sourcing, identifying and selecting candidates for recruitment and recruitment is again done by a recruiter.” – Syed Azaz “Yes, all those who were only taught to keep calling until they could get the bell to ring are already disappearing. Those who have upskilled to develop broader workforce planning strategies, who can debate ‘buy’ versus ‘build’ options with business leaders and who can audit the bots as well as their hiring managers with the same ruthless resolve to ensure candidates perceive the recruiting process as ‘fair’ will own TA and might even be called ‘recruiter’…although I doubt it.” – Gerry Crispin Can AI replace Recruiters? There’s an interesting line being drawn between automation and actually providing true engagement and care for the candidate. Recruiting vendors are trying to balance that line. If their technology can take out 80% of the busy work and actually free up hours, a better, more respectful recruiting process is in reach. That reality is closer than it appears. Ai will certainly replace recruiter tasks but the job of recruiting will evolve over time.
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How Virtual Work Is Changing Recruiting
Companies that want to remain competitive in the midst of a global pandemic are pursuing creative ways to stay agile to maintain continuity. This includes providing for new work-from-home (WFH) or ‘remote work’ arrangements, not only to maintain customer service, but also to retain employees. But these changes have consequences, and ripple effects in all directions. This includes recruiting. Generally speaking, work from home has been good for attracting talent but lets dive deeper into the impacts of a remote workforce. COMPETITION Supply and demand analysis are the cornerstone of any good sourcing and recruitment program. Supply: What does the local market look like? What is the approximate size of the talent pool? When sourcing talent for a role that is, or has the option to be, virtual you are no longer looking at just the local market. Your talent pool has now expanded nationwide, or even globally if you desire. With the size of your talent pool amplified exponentially, your sourcing and screening strategy requires adjustment. You can now significantly broaden the scope of your recruitment marketing, and consequently, you’ll need to add a high-volume screening process that will most likely require some form of text recruiting software, ideally coupled with an AI recruiting chatbot. If you don’t have a high-volume, text recruiting centered process that is efficient at weeding out low qualified talent and isolating top quality talent, you can get buried in an unmanageable level of applicants. If your process is not automated and communicative, you can, in effect, nationalize or globalize a poor reputation for your company, creating disgruntled job seekers all over the globe. Demand: How many companies are hiring for the same role in your local market? Who are we up against and what are they offering? Not only has your talent pool expanded geographically, so too has the size of your competitive landscape. Job seekers who work in remote-friendly roles are no longer limited to finding work with your local competitors. Their job prospects have now expanded nationally or globally, and your advertised job opportunity is now competing for talent on a hugely greater scale, making it all the more difficult for you to stand out. You are challenged more than ever to up your marketing and engagement game. COMPENSATION Companies have typically determined salary ranges, based on a combination of the role itself and of the cost of living in individual geographies. There is much circulating debate on how to handle this in a work from home world. Which one will prevail? Pay people what the level of skill and responsibility is worth? Or pay people according to their local cost of living? There are varying schools of thought, each of which should be considered carefully when setting salary ranges and making offers. For some candidates, compensation is not the primary deciding factor, but for many it is. I’ve seen some recent studies that say job seekers are willing to take a lower salary in exchange for working at home exclusively. PERKS & BENEFITS Consider your employer value proposition (EVP). What are you touting? Do remote workers care about on-site perks like ping-pong tables, free snacks, gym, childcare, or dry-cleaning service? Absolutely not. It’s time to rethink what you can offer to attract top WFH talent. What do they want? Things like good technology to perform their roles and stay connected with a dispersed team and flexible schedules to work around childcare, particularly while waiting for schools and daycares to reopen. Benefits will certainly become more important over in person perks. TIME ZONES & TRAVEL This is something that you may want to address in your candidate screening process, and also something you may want to consider from a cost perspective. What will be the impact to the candidate of working outside their local working hours? Is it ideal for them because it allows for them to take care of personal commitments during the day, or is it something they would hope to adjust to? How will team members communicate and collaborate with them effectively, since in person conversations aren’t an option… text messaging, Slack, email, Zoom, phone calls? Beyond salary, what will be the level of need for this person to spend time with the team in the office or to visit clients? What will be the cost to travel this person at the needed frequency based on their home location? Some companies are requesting that remote candidates at least live in the same time zone and I expect that requirement gaining traction going forward. COMMUNICATIONS WFH also now requires a new mindset when it comes to communicating with your talent. Zoom and Teams are now ubiquitous but how will you communicate with your staff about the smaller details that need to be addressed each workday? This is where tools like Slack and texting come in handy to help cut through that clutter. I’d rather get a text message from HR or a team member than an email any day, so be prepared to leverage the new ways of communication if you want to maintain a good digital experience for your staff. They will expect their next employer to offer a great employee experience using the latest and greatest messaging tools. WFH PERSONALITY For some, work from home is new, while others have been virtual workers for many years. Some love it, some tolerate it, and some hate it. Hiring virtual workers that thrive in a virtual environment is going to be critical to success. What are some of the aspects of a strong WFH personality? Self-motivated to stay on task, disciplined to hold themselves accountable for results, flexible to balance home and work commitments, and maybe a bit introverted. When virtual work started becoming more of a thing around 10 years ago, some fell in love with it vowing to never go back, while others missed the close direction, structure, face-time, and social connection of the brick-and-mortar workplace. If you’re recruiting for a position that is work from home eligible, you’ll likely want to consider, not only is this person a good fit for the role, but are they a good fit for a remote work arrangement? Conversely, if the role is able to be done virtually, but your company is not opening a WFH option, not only will your talent pool be reduced, but you may also be at risk for turnover as your current employees seek out that option. Some say recruiting is recruiting, and that the same strategies can be employed regardless of the role, industry, market or economy. To some degree, that basic concept is true. But those employers who achieve the most success examine and adjust their strategies to the evolving nuances in the ways those things change. The remote work revolution has begun. Now it’s time to adapt to the new reality.
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Recruiting Trends
Future of Work and What It Means for Recruiting
Remote enablement company Citrix recently undertook a year-long study of global work patterns and trends, to understand how work will change and the role that technology will play in enabling people to perform at their best. Their conclusion: “driven by flexible models and intelligent solutions that remove the complexity and noise from work, employees will be more engaged and productive and fuel innovation and growth like never before.” They also say that robots won’t replace us. But they will make us smarter and more efficient. Most respondents believe that in fifteen years, artificial intelligence will significantly speed up the decision-making process and make workers more productive. You can include recruiters and HR professionals among those workers. I’m sure candidates will experience that evolution as well by benefiting from a speedier recruiting funnel. Work Becomes Flexible Technology that allows for seamless access to the tools and information people need to collaborate and get work done wherever they happen to be will fuel flexible models that the future of work will demand. 67 percent of professionals (business leaders and workers combined) believe that a “platform” model – which creates value by facilitating exchanges between groups or individuals using digital technology – will dominate work in the future. 60 percent of workers believe permanent employees will become rare by 2035. 80 percent of leaders believe that technology platforms will provide instant access to the highly specialized, on-demand talent required to power future organizations and accommodate rapid changes in business and customer needs. 39 percent of leaders believe that in 2035, the majority of high-value specialist workers will be on-demand and freelance workers. What’s interesting to note among these numbers is the one about permanent employees becoming “rare” by 2035. The gig/freelance job market has been growing for years and shows no signs of stopping its upward momentum. There may be a day when a full time job becomes an exception rather than the norm. The growth of freelance marketplaces like Upwork, HR Lancers and others is certainly contributing to that trend. Productivity Gets Major Boost More than half of professionals they surveyed (51 percent) say technology will make workers at least twice as productive by 2035. Among the solutions they believe will be commonplace will be things like AI assistants, AI reminders, Wearable technology and AI that anticipates and performs tasks based on your habits. Technology, closely integrated with humans, will drive step changes in productivity as workers are supported by solutions that enable them to perform at their best. “AI-ngels” – digital assistants driven by AI – will draw on personal and workplace data to help employees prioritize their tasks and time and ensure mental and physical wellness. These worker augmented assistants will, for example, schedule meetings to take place at the most effective time based on factors ranging from the blood sugar levels of participants to their sentiments at different times of day. And while the meetings are taking place, they will monitor concentration levels and attitudes and adjust as necessary to drive optimal outcomes. Employees Become More Engaged As technology and AI takes over time-consuming, mundane tasks, work will become more strategic by enabling low-value, mundane tasks to become automated. It will also allow for better upskilling of workers creating more career advancement opportunities for them The global pandemic has forced leaders to reimagine they way their organizations work and recruit talent. The savvy companies, the ones who embrace automation technologies will be the ones that the best candidates flock to in the future. Your company will want that recruiting edge. Automation in all phases of operations is the key to gaining that advantage.
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Recruitment Marketing
Employer Branding for Changing Times
2020 memes. I’m sure you’ve seen them all across social media, making light of the horror show that this year has been for most people, from pandemic to murder hornets to race, class, and political warfare. Toss in things like layoffs, furloughs and professional struggles, and traditional employment branding can seem tone deaf or out of place. Priorities have shifted for customers, employees, and job seekers. Who cares about ping pong tables and free donuts when if everyone works from home? Who cares about how many awards your company has won when your employees are turning over and customers or not renewing? Who cares that you offer competitive pay if workers are more concerned about stability? People are not moved by dry technical copy or compliant corporate-speak. Nor are they influenced by superlatives like “exciting,” “cutting-edge,” and “dynamic.” It takes more to stand out to a society with so much being thrown at them. This is really difficult to do in the digital age of political correctness, and so there is the understandable tendency to want to play it safe. But safe and proper are not what drive people towards a common goal. The branding that gets results today takes a stand on a specific set of values and is shamelessly, vulnerably authentic. Here are a few ways you can shift your branding strategy from what used to work to what works now: Old way – promoting how great a place it is to work and how happy people are. New way – talk about your challenges. Dostoevsky said (and I’m liberally paraphrasing here), that if you gave people everything they wanted and everything was perfect all the time, the first thing they’d do is smash something, just to have something unexpected or interesting happen. We are adapted as humans to require some security, but we are most alert and alive when we have one foot out in the unknown and are working to attain something. Talk about where you’re headed as a company and what problems need solving. Old way – culture and work environment are unknown or misperceived until after people are hired or decide not to pursue employment. Potential employees have no idea what it’s like to work for your company unless they know an insider. They are otherwise relying on maybe a statement or video on your career page, asking the Recruiter or Hiring manager, or checking out Glassdoor reviews (and then crossing their fingers). New way – Have your employees promote your culture and work environment on social media, company website and hiring ads. Give top candidates an insider to connect and interact with, and the ability to have an informational interview that is not tied to judgment of their qualifications for the position. If you’re afraid to do it, maybe your culture isn’t worth promoting. Old way – creating a website and social media pages, using them passively and leaving hiring ads to the Recruitment team to post. New way – doubling down on efforts to get brand recognition. Get your name out there with strategic SEO, partnerships and collaborations with other companies, and increasing your number of brand ambassadors to include as many employees as possible doing all of the things above. Employer branding is an evolving message that needs to be calibrated for shifting times. Hopefully these tips give you an idea of where to start. QUICK TIP 5 ways for enhancing your employer brand through texting. Send potential candidates news about your Great Place to Work Award. Push out ‘day in the life’ content about what its like to work there. Alert them of the latest job opening via opt-in subscription. Break down your top perks and benefits for working there and share those. End your messages with your EVP (employer value proposition) to reinforce branding.
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Recruiting Tactics
Instagram Recruiting: How to Search & Source
Few employers recruit on Instagram, even though it is one of the most popular social media platforms in the world and represents a great opportunity for recruiters to source candidates. Although you are limited as far as search parameters, Instagram’s scale lends itself to being a huge pool of talent waiting to be found. According to Statista, “With over 1 billion monthly active users, Instagram belongs to the most popular social networks worldwide. The social photo sharing app is especially popular in the United States, India, and Brazil, which have over 130 million, 100 and 91 million Instagram users each. In the United States, the number of Instagram users is projected to surpass 130 million MAU (monthly active users) in 2022.” Another interesting fact… over two thirds of total Instagram audiences are aged 34 years and younger, meaning that they’re even more likely to be glued to their mobile phones and text messaging apps than the rest of us already are. Sourcing Instagram Bios Most people search Instagram by hopping from hashtag to hashtag, but that’s not really ideal for sourcing people. If that’s how you are doing your Instagram recruiting, I suggest using the site: search function on Google instead. Here’s a query for “software developers” AND Boston”. Site search works pretty well in this case. To reuse this string just replace the job title and city with your own. Feel free to add in negative keywords (ex. -nursing) to help you filter out certain profiles. Google search query: site:instagram.com “software developer” AND boston Messaging You can send messages (from within the app) to someone even if they don’t follow you. Tap in the top-right corner or swipe left from anywhere in Feed. Tap in the top-right corner. Select people you’d like to send a message to, then tap Next. Type a message. You can also tap to take and send a disappearing photo or video, or to select a photo or video from your library. Tap or Send. If you send a message to someone who doesn’t follow you, it’ll appear as a request in their inbox. If someone allows your Instagram recruiting message request, your future messages will go directly to their inbox. Since they probably aren’t expecting to hear from a recruiter on Instagram, try looking them up on LinkedIn if you don’t want to engage directly on Instagram itself. NOTE: Instagram also lets you send photo and video DMs from your PC. Instagram still won’t let you upload posts to your profile from your computer (unless you have a tablet with a rear-mounted camera). But now, you at least can send photo and video as direct messages from your desk using the Windows 10 app. One other sourcing tip to mention is hashtags. Searching for career related hashtags can also help to uncover hidden talent and recruit on Instagram more effectively. Let’s say you were looking for nurses. Check out the hashtag #nursinglife to see real world nurses chronicling their work day.
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AI in Recruiting
HR Automation is the New Normal
For some time now the move to remote work (aka work from home) has been evolving as the digitization of HR takes hold in the corporate world. But the global pandemic has accelerated that trend forcing employers to adapt to the new way of work. For some this transition has been easy. For others, not so much. Covid has forced working life to change overnight, as teams become distributed resulting in schedules having to become more flexible. HR has had to adapt quickly. The new normal means that to maximize the talent pipeline and keep the employee base supported/engaged, employers need better insight into their workers’ performance. But if you ask HR professionals most say they are not succeeding in the new normal. In fact, a study by Sage People says that only 18% of leaders in HR believe they have been successful in making HR interactions more employee centric. 86% of these leaders also say that it will take 8-10 years to fully achieve that goal! Thankfully HR process automation is here to help. Apps, HR texting software, AI chatbots, and the cloud now allow you to create a more self-serve focused, digital experience for all employees. HR Automation = Speed Now that we are entering into a recovery phase, many employers are beginning to plan for a return to the office and the pace of hiring has picked up a few ticks. But, companies must remain vigilant in case of a surge in COVID-19 cases. Human resources teams are on the frontline of this new landscape and find themselves at the center of an enormous change in how employers manage the workforce. A significant part of this focus is now on the health and well being of employees in order to keep them healthy and productive. But if you have legacy systems and processes in place, they become an impediment to the speed of work. Today’s employees need fast and easy access to data and communicating with each other over distance. Furthermore, if your team can’t extract your human capital data quickly, they won’t be able to help in the transformation to better, more automated HR systems that make their working life easier. People Want Automation The acceleration of HR automation trends means that human resources leaders must quickly learn to maximize productivity for their organizations. If you are still suffering through mundane, repetitive daily tasks, you are losing ground to your competitors and limiting your organizations ability to respond quickly in a crisis. It is wasteful to have a team member approve a vacation request if HR automation software can do it for you more effectively, leaving your team free for higher priorities. HR process automation is the solution and the people want it whenever possible. Adding AI and automation to the employee experience means freeing up valuable HR time and doing more with less resources. Going back to the vacation request example, these types of transactions can be automatically approved through software as long as the employee meets the parameters set by a manager or company HR policy. Or, if you need to collect feedback from workers, automated surveys sent via HR texting software and administered and aggregated by an AI chatbot can be executed with the click of a button. Employee FAQS can and should also be automated using AI chatbots and made available by text message and on the web. A self service approach works well in these circumstances leaving your HR team freed up for more value added activity. Plus HR automation also reduces cost and avoids costly human errors that happen too often. After all, you don’t want your new hire to lose his/her onboarding paperwork when it can be handled & signed digitally. Today’s HR is all about being agile and adapting quickly to a rapidly changing environment. Yet for many, navigating the new normal is challenging if you can’t see the forest for the trees. As an HR professional, you have a tremendous opportunity to leverage the latest in AI and automated HR tools to emerge as a leader in these uncertain times. HR automation is your friend, and can make a real difference in the daily lives of your employees as well as impacting your company’s bottom line.
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Best Practices for Recruitment Communications
In the age of instant gratification among consumers and the next generation workforce, it’s all about ease and speed when it comes to your recruitment communications. These are the keys to keeping prospective candidates engaged and responsive while inside your hiring process. The three most common ways recruiters typically use to communicate were email, text and phone. Now we can add two more channels to the mix, AI recruiting chatbots and video. With technology changing the way we communicate so rapidly, let’s review some of the best practices when it comes to chatting with and keeping your applicants in the loop. EMAIL Every recruiter should have a great signature that not only contains their contact info but also your company’s social media links and potentially your logo and calendar link. Using that space as a promotional tool will help you get more followers and encourage them to reach out when needed. In addition your ATS probably comes with a set of templated emails that get triggered when the applicant workflow changes. If you have yet to customize those templates to reflect your company brand, now is a good time to revamp that messaging. Take a look at the employer branding and words used to communicate the message. Make a point to personalize them and soften the tone so that it doesn’t sound like a robot wrote it. In short, put some thought into what it says. TEXT RECRUITING SOFTWARE If your company isn’t using text recruiting software to communicate with candidates yet, then it should be at the top of your shortlist of things to implement next. Millennial job seekers want ease of use when communicating about a job and texting is their preferred way to do that. It’s also attractive for recruiters as well since the response time is almost immediate. According to a CTIA study, the average email response time is 90 minutes, but only 90 seconds for a text message. Plus text recruiting is a better option when it comes to reaching people at work. They are much more likely to reply to a text than answer your call since an SMS is private and let’s them engage on their own schedule. The speed of a text recruitment message is such a killer feature in today’s job market. Remember also to first get their permission, keep all text messages professional and consistent with your employment brand and have a clear objective in mind when sending them. RECRUITING CHATBOTS & AI AI Recruiting chatbots are an important feature offered by top tier recruiting software vendors (Emissary included), especially those focused on recruitment automation. A number of studies have indicated that a majority of job seekers like interacting with them because it makes the process more efficient and puts the candidate in control. Plus a recruitment chatbot is available 24/7 and never takes a day off. If a candidate visits your career page at 10pm at night, they easily ask an AI chatbot a question and get an answer instantly. When it comes to the wording inside your recruiting chatbot, there are a few things to keep in mind. First, be as brief as possible with the answers to the preset questions that you create… remember that efficiency enhances the candidate experience. Two, avoid asking for open ended responses, unless it’s truly necessary and three, set expectations that it’s an automated process, not a real person. Think of your chatbot as an AI powered automated recruiting assistant that acts a bit like an ATM in that the user should prefer the automated tool over live assistance, at least for basic transactions. Recruiting process automation can be a major boon to your recruitment communication strategy when implemented with care. PHONE When it comes to the phone we are mainly referring to the phone screen. That time honored tradition of qualifying a resume that looks interesting. Best practices start by making sure the candidate knows what to expect. Let them know how the process will unfold and set their expectations up front. A typical phone screen should last no more than 20-30 minutes. Therefore you’ll want to focus on the most important questions such as; Why are you leaving your current role? What type of opportunity would make you switch jobs right now? How did you hear about this opportunity? Which core skills are you really good at? On a scale of 1-10 how would your last boss rate your performance? What are your salary expectations? Any questions for me? VIDEO As video interviewing takes hold during the pandemic some recruiters have struggled to use it properly. In my experience it just takes repetition and some attention to the small details that will make you look good on camera. You’ll want to have good lighting and a camera that fills the screen with your face and shoulders. I have seen too many people on a Zoom this year with half the video feed showing more of the ceiling than the person. That is easily corrected by tilting your camera down until you fit in properly. Also invest in a good microphone and be sure to wear your company swag or have a backdrop with a company logo to provide an employer brand boost. Remember that every interaction with a job seeker is a candidate experience that can’t be redone. Make all your recruitment communications, no matter the channel, a good one so every candidate experience is delightful.
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Emissary is a candidate engagement platform built to empower recruiters with efficient, modern communication tools that work in harmony with other recruiting solutions.
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