Chris Russell (11)
Recruiting
Digital Strategies for Campus Recruiting
“Recruiting with pizza parties is cancelled,” reads a Handshake graphic that cleverly summarizes the state of college recruiting 2021. It’s as much a nod to the impact of Covid’s effect on campus recruiting as it is a statement of how the pandemic has accelerated the shift to digital recruiting strategies. Handshake, the leading college recruiting platform, says 97% of colleges will host virtual career events this fall; 93% of employers will do the same. While that’s largely out of necessity, employers and the students themselves are finding virtual recruiting offers advantages over the traditional in-person job fairs and meetings. Half of the 2,400 students in a Handshake survey said they preferred virtual interviewing. Of those who attended a virtual recruiting event, three-quarters appreciated the schedule flexibility; 71% said it was less intimidating, and two-thirds said virtual recruiting was more convenient. Even after the pandemic ends, 87% of students want at least some recruiting to be virtual; 54% want half of the recruiting events to be virtual. Employers and college career center leaders agree. 79% of employers and 92% of colleges said they will continue to attend and offer virtual recruiting events. Many employers were experimenting with digital strategies in the years before Covid shut down college campuses. They found success with a multi-pronged approach that included a robust career site aimed at Gen Z, a strong and responsive social media presence, video and livestream events and in-person and virtual job fairs. Yello, a recruiting platform provider with a campus specialty, surveyed students and recruiting professionals to discover the most effective digital recruiting strategies. Recruiters said webinars/livestreams and group and one-on-one video interviews produced the best results and helped them meet the most students. Those relying exclusively on campus job board postings and virtual career fairs were less successful and met the fewest candidates. The 1,000 students in the survey agreed that video interviews, livestream events, virtual coffee chats and phone interviews were all effective ways to connect with them. But they also scored email and social media higher than did the recruiters. As the evidence suggests, talent acquisition professionals need to go beyond virtual job fairs to include multiple methods of connecting with students. A well-thought out digital strategy should include at least all or most of the following. Campus Recruiting: Video Nothing beats video for driving results. Both students and recruiters agree video interviews are the most effective part of a digital strategy. Video interviewing is even more valued by students of color, according to the Handshake survey, which makes it a critical part of reaching diverse communities. Video also has an important role in building brand awareness and engaging students in the company culture. Video clips on the organization’s career oages and on its social media sites – Facebook, Instagram and Tik Tock – put a face on the company, giving candidates a look at what it’s like to work there. Campus Recruiting: Webinars and livestreams Colleges are livestreaming events to recruit students. Employers are doing the same, livestreaming company tours, conversations with employees and company leaders, and Q&As on career opportunities and company culture. More narrowly focused webinars that target specific departments or majors engage students by discussing career trends and the job market and industry developments.. One important advantage these two digital strategies offer is the ability to collect names and email addresses of attendees. With students ranking email high among their favorite ways of connecting with employers, this allows recruiters to follow up with students. Campus Recruiting: Coffee chats These are informal conversations that are not interviews. In pre-Covid days, some recruiters would Tweet out an invitation to meet at the local Starbucks to talk about the industry, get career advice and learn about their company. The virtual equivalent takes the same approach. They may be one-on-one or group chats. One effective technique is to hold a post-webinar coffee chat to continue the conversation. Campus Recruiting: Social media A mistake employers make is to use their social media presence as little more than a bulletin board, posting company news and announcing events. A more valuable approach is to engage students by hosting livestreams or live conversations with recruiters. Comment on important developments to show industry leadership. Respond to questions about company culture and discuss training and advancement opportunities. Twitter, Instagram and Tik Tok make it easy to target by the use of hashtags. For Facebook and similar sites consider a separate campus recruiting page. Don’t overlook the review sites like Glassdoor, CareerBliss and Fishbowl. Students don’t. So know what’s posted there and be prepared for tough, even uncomfortable questions. Answer them honestly. The digitally savvy generation Today’s college students are as comfortable using tablets and smartphones as previous generations were using typewriters and fax machines. To reach them, employers were adapting their college recruiting strategy to include a strong digital component well before the pandemic. Now, three cycles into Covid-limited campus recruiting, the National Association of Colleges and Employers found almost 8-in-10 employers are continuing to increase their virtual recruiting options. Digital strategies are still evolving, but as Yello’s survey showed, the most effective recruiting is still personal. John Zappe reporting.
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Recruiting
Meaning of RPO in Recruitment
RPO is a frequent term used in recruitment circles but also brings some confusion. According to the RPOA (Recruitment Process Outsourcing Association), RPO is “a form of business process outsourcing (BPO) where an employer transfers all or part of its recruitment processes to an external service provider.” A company can hire an RPO agency to provide all staff and typically that staff uses the company’s recruitment technology and offices. They are essentially acting as full time staff despite being employed at the RPO itself. It’s very typical for RPO companies to work with their clients for many years, while working to improve their recruiting processes. Should Your Company Use an RPO Provider? RPO has traditionally been used at high volume recruiting organizations. These employers outsource this level of recruiting in order to save on costs. But there are now more flexible options of an RPO company, meaning that smaller companies have started to engage providers such as having them source/shortlist candidates. More RPOs are now offering various strategic solutions to employers to help them compete in the war for talent. How RPO’s Work There are typically three ways you can engage an RPO provider. On-Demand: Based on a specified contract with a defined number of roles and timeframe. Department-Based: This is where the RPO company takes over an entire function such as IT staffing. Full Service: All internal recruiting and hiring is taken over by the RPO firm as an in-house team. And these are the services they usually offer; Strategic Planning: The provider will work with employers to understand their hiring needs and craft a plan to meet those recruitment goals such as forecasting, recruitment process and more. Recruitment Marketing: RPO providers market client jobs through job boards, social media, referrals, and networking to drive candidate exposure to jobs and employer brand (a major differentiator from staffing solutions). Sourcing Candidates: Sourcing talent includes initial reach outs and explaining the employer value proposition to potential candidates in order to keep the pipeline full. Candidate assessments: Providers will also assess candidates at the beginning of the recruiting process to ensure they meet minimum requirements and have interest in the role. Candidate Experience: The overall recruiting process includes how candidates are treated and how easily and enjoyable the experience is. RPO’s will typically “own” this highly critical function because that experience is reflective of your employer brand. Who are the Major RPO’s? The major RPO providers today include companies such as Alexander Mann, Cielo, Orion Talent, PeopleScout, FutureStep and Pontoon.
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Human Resources
What‘s an Intake Meeting?
Every talent acquisition professional knows that one of the most important steps to a successful recruitment campaign – maybe even the most important – is the intake meeting. Why? Because intake meetings accelerate the hiring process by aligning the hiring manager and recruiter on the requirements of the job and the type of candidate that will make the best hire. Yet 55% of organizations don’t require an intake meeting. Many of these are smaller employers where recruiters may have dozens of jobs to fill and lack the training to understand the importance of an intake meeting. Yet these are the very organizations where intake meetings can have the biggest impact in filling jobs quickly. What is an intake meeting? It’s the first step in the hiring process. It’s when the recruiter and hiring manager get together to discuss the skills needed to do the job and the background and experience the manager most wants. Dig Deeper on Intake Meetings But an intake meeting is more than a review of the job description. At an intake meeting the recruiter will dig deeper to understand what the “must haves” are in a candidate, as well as the “nice to haves.” The recruiter will also seek to discover the type of personality and temperament that will make a hire a good fit with the team, the organizational culture and the manager’s leadership style. One of the most important parts of an intake meeting is managing expectations. A CareerBuilder survey found that 20% of the time hiring managers have unrealistic expectations and compensation ranges that are out of sync with the market. Without an intake meeting, there might be little chance of even recognizing these disconnects, let alone resolving them. And that almost guarantees a lengthy search time, candidates that disappoint and an unhappy relationship between hiring manager and recruiter. “It’s important in setting the hiring manager’s expectations for who’s out there and what they’ll require in terms of pay and benefits,” says Rosemary Haefner, CareerBuilder’s former chief human resources officer. Preparing for Intake Meetings Coming to intake meetings prepared with data showing what competitors are paying for the same job and what the talent pipeline is like will help bring a hiring manager’s expectations in line with market reality. Having this kind of data also demonstrates the recruiter is on top of the talent market, which will make it easier to gain acceptance by the hiring manager of other recommendations. Intake meetings themselves are more like a question and answer session or an interview than a free-wheeling discussion. To keep these meetings focused and productive recruiters come prepared with a series of questions covering the nature of the job, the specifics of comp, work schedule, responsibilities, skills, both technical and so-called soft skills, start date, the number of candidates and interviews, and so on. Once these details are covered, the questions should be about fit. There’s no point bringing in candidates who check all the technical and skills boxes, only to find their personality isn’t a good fit with the team. Questions here go to management style, the need for collaboration and teamwork, opportunities and what the manager considers success. There’s no shortage of guides answering the question of what is an intake meeting and explaining how to conduct one. The questions they offer – and there are intake meeting templates available online – may differ in the specifics, however they all agree on the importance of holding an intake meeting before beginning the search for candidates. Hiring managers may be reluctant to take the time to meet. Others may be doubtful of their value. But they’ll come to be believers when they see the results: candidates that more precisely meet their requirements and their expectations, resulting in making better hires in less time. ### John Zappe Reporting ###
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Human Resources
Best Practices for Managing Remote Employees
As more and more companies embrace hybrid work, they’re finding managing remote workers requires more than good communication and collaboration tools. Maintaining the company culture is at least as big a challenge, say business leaders. Employees add training and career development to the list. The experience over the last 18 months has taught us much about effectively managing remote workers. Managers have learned that teams can be as productive – or more so – working remotely, which is an important part of trust, an essential part of successfully managing remote workers. In fact, trust is one of the nine tips the research and advisory firm Gartner offers for managing remote workers. “Managers may be concerned and even frustrated to lose the constant visibility they once had into their employees, but don’t respond by micromanaging,” cautions Gartner. In our list here of some best practices tips for managing remote workers, we put trust first. Its importance can’t be overrated and not just for those working remotely. It is fundamental to building a strong relationship between manager and employee and manager and team whether onsite or working remotely. From multiple sources, we’ve collected the best practices and tips and condensed them into top five with trust being #1. Managing Remote Tip: Communicate in multiple ways It doesn’t matter how you do it – sophisticated tools make it easier –staying in regular contact with your remote workers is critical. Tailor the method of communication to the nature of the message. A tool like Slack is ideal for short and quick notes and reminders. Email is best for longer messages, updates, detailed instructions for a project and the like. Choose video calls for team meetings and regular one-on-ones, but don’t just make them all business. Encourage remote workers to share personal stories – water cooler talk – to build camaraderie and strengthen interpersonal relationships. McKinsey, a global business consultancy, says, “Videoconferencing, which, compared with audio, improves the ability for participants to show understanding, anticipate responses, provide nonverbal information, enhance verbal descriptions, manage pauses, and express attitudes.” Managing Remote Tip: Set clear expectations early and often Even when an entire team works together in an office, misunderstandings and ambiguity about expectations, assignments and policies occur. Remote work only compounds the problem. Setting clear expectations, communicating them regularly, ensuring everyone has heard and understands what they are and getting their buy-in avoids confusion, disagreements or worse. “There will be questions,” a business executive tells the Society for Human Resource Management. “Be accessible and provide clarity on priorities, milestones, performance goals and more. Outline each team member’s availability and ensure you can reach them when needed.” Managing Remote Tip: Build relationships; be transparent This requires good and frequent communication, but goes a step further. With an onsite team a manager will get to know their family, their hobbies and how they spent their weekend just by being around them and hearing people talk. Managing remote workers requires a deliberate effort to learn those details, which are so much a part of building personal relationships. Just as team meetings should intentionally include small talk, every conversation with a remote employee should include this kind of personal connection. Individuals may feel awkward about intentionally sharing even such benign details as their plans for the weekend, so jump start the conversation by sharing first. Set up a Slack or other communication channel for team chit-chat and contribute to it. With members scattered across multiple time zones, rotate the starting time of all-hands calls. Never schedule them solely for your convenience. Be as transparent as possible. Treat each member of the team equally. If there’s company news to share, inform everyone at the same time. Honest and regular feedback is even more important for remote workers who lack the visible and subtle cues of onsite workers. Feedback should be via scheduled one-on-ones as well as employee-driven performance conversations. In these conversations discuss career development and opportunities for training and stretch-assignments. Regular feedback and recognition play an important role in managing remote workers as it lets them know where they stand and how they’re doing. Managing RemoteTip: Recognition is essential Recognize workers and their contributions publicly. Some managers make “brags and praise” a part of every meeting, giving workers a chance to point out their own successes and to call out their colleagues for their efforts. Gartner says, “Effective recognition not only motivates the recipient, but serves as a strong signal to other employees of behaviors they should emulate.” It reinforces the team and organization culture and, as studies and research have demonstrated, consistent recognition improves engagement. In General If these tips sound familiar, they should be. They are the fundamentals of all good management. Managing remote workers amplifies their importance. The lack of personal and often impromptu face-to-face interactions amongst co-workers can easily create feelings of isolation and disengagement if managers aren’t proactive in nurturing a feeling of belonging and team. Especially for hybrid teams, where some work remotely and others are present in the office, it may be easier to assign a plum project to a worker you see every day. That signals to those working remotely that you play favorites and their career prospects are dimmed because they aren’t present. Leaders therefore need to always be aware there’s truth in the old adage that “out of sight is out of mind” and consciously work to stay in touch with their remote workers and treat them equally. Managing remote workers does take greater skill and a different style of leadership. Not every manager is a good fit for leading a remote team. Those who are and those who invest the time and training to learn how, find the successes and satisfaction are every bit the equal of leading a team you can see. ### John Zappe contribution ###
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Human Resources
How to Deal with a Difficult Hiring Manager
Hiring managers can sometimes try a corporate recruiter’s patience. One of the most common complaints I hear is they don’t provide timely feedback of a candidate they just interviewed. So what can you do to prevent such behavior? I’ll get to those answers shortly but consider this scenario which I just read about on social media. A recruiter stated she recently started with a new employer and is the sole recruiter for the company. She currently has 51 requisitions (a huge burden if you ask me) that she’s trying to fill on her own and is not getting anywhere with a few members of upper management. She’s extremely frustrated of course. She goes on to say that her passion for recruiting runs deep and all she wants is to provide a great candidate experience but having to relying on others for that success is getting to her. I feel for this recruiter. It sounds like that company doesn’t have the greatest leadership or cares about her success. If you are an internal recruiter, your number one goal is to develop relationships with your hiring managers. Take them to lunch. Schedule monthly calls with them. Do any and everything in your power to know how their internal teams operate and what your leaders need to be successful. Give yourself time to connect with each one of your internal leaders for no more than 10-15 mins and it will help build a solid foundation moving forward. Hiring Manager Tactics Here are some other tactics to help bridge the divide between you and the hiring manager. Keep in mind you may be walking into a situation where the previous recruiter provided less than ideal candidates, or that let them not respond and did everything electronically, deferring to the managers timetable. Prioritize those that do respond in timely manner. Hopefully word spreads that those that do get better treatment from you. Educate hiring managers that the hiring market is very tough right now, there are (many) more jobs than candidates and therefore you need to make a difference in your overall candidate experience to attract the best talent. Sit them down, try to understand their previous experience and expectations, and begin to teach them the real value of a great Recruiter! Set up a weekly call…don’t give them a choice. If they don’t join, loop in their superior. Hold “kick-off” calls with hiring managers. Review the process, address any scheduling conflicts, set SLAs for submitting and follow up. Have a steady rotation of reaching out Call/Text/Email…perhaps sprinkled with a friendly appearance into their office. Tell them if you do not get feedback on rejects , I can’t work on better quality profiles going further. Template communications for non-responsive HMs Talk to managerBe ready to define/defend how it’s impacted hiring or brand or candidate experience. Created a prioritization matrix – if your role is a top priority / critical position, that comes with certain expectations – such as mandatory weekly touch point with recruiting, 24-48 hour SLA on submittals, etc. Remember that hiring managers are also busy, often drowning in work and just need a steady, friendly nudge every now and then. If the problem runs deeper you may want to talk to your manager to see how they can help. A good rule of thumb is to cover the expectation for feedback in the intake, again when they move to interview and set up debrief calls after the last interview. Then email to request the feedback in writing if that gets you nowhere. Put your foot down and tell them that an offer can’t be made until ALL candidate feedback has been received It’s important to remain compliant with OFCCP standards and to ensure candidates can be declined with the best experience possible. Bad candidate experience impacts the future pipeline when word gets out. Hammer that message into your hiring manager’s brains whenever possible.
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Human Resources
The 4 Most Common Hybrid Work Models
It hasn’t yet displaced the tradition of working in an office for 40 hours a week, but the hybrid work model is rapidly being adopted by companies of all sizes. Here’s some examples of how companies are tackling the issue. Ford is allowing its 30,000 salaried office workers to work from home most of the time, coming into the office for meetings and group projects only when face-to-face interaction is considered essential. Microsoft transitioned to a hybrid work model allowing the majority of its 160,000 workers to work from home up to 50% of the time. Managers are able to hire from anywhere and establish their own team norms, which could mean working remotely most of the time. Google adopted a modified hybrid work model of three days in the office and two days working remotely. Workers can apply to go completely remote based on what they do and the needs of their team. CEO Sundar Pichai said, “60% of Googlers are coming together in the office a few days a week, another 20% are working in new office locations, and 20% are working from home.” These are just a few of the companies that have adopted flexible work policies combining remote work with some office time. While several companies – Slack, Twitter and Spotify among them – have decided to go entirely remote, the majority are adopting a “hybrid work model.” The name can be misleading, suggesting there is one formula when, in reality, there are several. What they have in common is that employees get to work from home at least part of every workweek. Hybrid Was Already in Demand Hybrid work began gaining momentum long before the Covid pandemic made remote work a necessity. Gallup’s State of the American Workplace found that in 2016 43% of workers spent at least some of their work time away from the office. By 2019, 48% said they worked remotely at least one day a week; 30% did so full-time. One of the obstacles was management concern that productivity would slip with too many remote workers. The pandemic proved just the opposite. Workers were more productive. They invested some of the commute time saved in work. With the majority of workers preferring to work remotely at least three days a week, 83% of companies in a PwC survey said they were adopting a hybrid work model. A quarter said they would be fully or mostly remote. Photo: PWC It’s not just U.S. workers who want to work remotely at least part of the workweek. Adecco found workers globally echoing the PwC findings about remote work preferences. Globally, 53% of workers want to work a hybrid week where at least half their work time is remote. What Employees Want from Hybrid Work “The last 18 months has proved that remote work does not come with a loss of productivity, and that a more inclusive and flexible way of working is possible. More than three quarters of workers want to retain flexibility over their own schedule, going back into the office, but on their own terms,” said Adecco. Now, that the discussion has shifted from “Should we do it” to “How do we do it,” organizations are tinkering with various iterations of the hybrid work model. Here are the most common types: Remote focused – In this model, the default is for everyone to work remotely. Meetings are conducted online. Only workers with jobs that cannot be performed remotely will be required to be on-site. This model is most appropriate for companies with knowledge products, such as software development, consulting, accounting and creative services. Office focused – Workers at companies with this model are expected to be on-site, with exceptions determined on an individual or team basis. This model is common where the majority of employees routinely deal with customers face-to-face, such as in retail, consumer banking, food service and hospitality. Companies may provide flexible work schedules and in some cases, are establishing co-work spaces to reduce employee commute time. Professional staff or salaried office workers may be offered more opportunities for remote work. Employee option – This is the Ford model. Employees who have worked remotely during the pandemic can choose to continue working from home. They’ll come into the office for meetings and certain other activities as determined by their manager. Mixed – This is the most common type of all the multiple hybrid models. Employees spend part of the work week in the office and part working remotely, which may be at home or at a co-work space. How many days in the office vs. working remotely vary with the company, though the majority seem to be leaning toward three days onsite and two days remote. All these hybrid models are a work in progress. Each company will experiment with the right mix of remote, onsite and flexible co-working arrangements. The only certainty, as PwC said in its most recent Pulse Survey is that “an all in-person workplace is no longer the norm. “The challenge for leaders: bringing out the best aspects of face-to-face teaming for all employees, whether in the office or not.” ### John Zappe Contribution ###
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Recruiting Tactics
Why You Should Be Posting to Niche Job Boards
Employers who post their openings to just generalist job boards are missing out on a rich source of qualified candidates from hundreds of niche recruitment platforms. Indeed.com, ZipRecruiter, Monster and other generalist job boards attract millions of job seekers each day, so it would seem to make sense to post openings there. But if that’s the extent of your recruiting campaign, you need to know why you should be posting to niche job boards, too. Unlike generalist sites that have every kind of job, niche sites are specialists. They list jobs only in a specific field or industry or geography, or that target certain communities or societies. Instead of getting the 5 or 10 million visitors a day that Indeed gets, niche sites might get a few hundred to several thousand job seekers a month. That’s a good thing, as it eliminates the curious, the unqualified, but hopeful and others attracted purely by the pay or benefits. Even with sophisticated search tools, you can guess what the odds are the candidate you want will find your job among the 2 or 3 or 4 million listings on a generalist job board. 5 reasons to Use Niche Job Boards If that’s not reason enough why you should be posting to niche job boards, here are five more: Reach a targeted audience Because of the specialization of niche job boards, you are much more likely to find just the candidates with the skills and experience you want than on a general job board. Candidates coming to a niche site are looking only for the kind of jobs the site offers. As Susan Vitale, chief marketing officer for iCIMS told the Society for Human Resource Management, “Niche job boards are particularly useful for cutting through the clutter and finding talent for hard-to-fill roles, specialized positions, specific industries — or to tap into unique candidate audiences, such as military veterans.” Candidate quality is higher Niche job boards tend to attract only those candidates who are professionals in the field. These candidates have the specialized skills and relevant background. They’re attracted by the type of work, the opportunity of the job and they are more knowledgeable about companies and culture because of their networking than are the job seekers at one of the generalist job boards. Connect with passive job seekers The best niche boards offer far more than just a collection of job openings. Many, especially those of professional and trade associations, began as a source of news and information about their industry. They built a specialized community of engaged individuals committed to staying abreast of developments in their field and improving their skills. They may not be actively looking for a job, but could be interested if the right opportunity were to come along. Less competitive Instead of being one employer and one job on a generalist site with over a million jobs and thousands of employers, a niche site gives your job far higher visibility. Since most niche sites sell listings on a duration basis (a week, a month or longer), your job is going to show up in a search based on how well it fits, rather than how much you paid for a top position. Opportunities to build your brand Just by posting to a niche site sets you apart from your competitors and shows job seekers you know where the “real” talent goes. Mandy niche sites also offer companies opportunities to reach out to their members directly, sponsor webinars and continuing learning credits and post news of their organization. According to a recent iHire study, overall job board usage is up. 58.9% of employers said they increased their reliance on job boards and online recruiting platforms in the past year. Further, 49.6% said they do most of their recruiting through job boards, and 23.4% said they do all their recruiting through job boards. Just remember that niche job boards don’t have the traffic of the major job sites but they do offer better quality, particularly in some hard to fill industries. So it’s more about quality than quantity. ### John Zappe contributed
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behavioral interviews
What Is a Behavioral Interview?
Despite the widely cherished view that an interview is critical to hiring the best candidates, nearly every study of the question has found practically little predictive value to the usual interview methods. A 2013 research paper bluntly declares, “Unstructured interviews are a ubiquitous tool for making screening decisions despite a vast literature suggesting that they have little validity.” Wharton Business School Professor Peter Cappelli echoes that observation in the Harvard Business Review: “Just winging it and asking whatever comes to mind is next to useless.” Is there an alternative? The answer is the behavioral interview. Defining Behavioral Interviews What is a behavioral interview? It’s a disciplined approach to predicting future performance by evaluating a job candidate on how they handled specific situations in the past. Instead of a free-wheeling interview focusing largely on technical skills or answering hypotheticals, a behavioral interview aims to learn how a candidate used their skills, knowledge and talent by asking for specific examples of what they did to accomplish goals. When structured, meaning every candidate is asked the same set of questions, studies prove behavioral interviews have a predictive value significantly higher than nearly every other method of evaluating performance. What is a behavioral interview like in practice? Here’s an example drawn from a guide published by the Society for Human Resource Management: Interview question: “Describe a situation in which you used persuasion to convince someone to see things your way.” Follow up questions to ask: “Tell me a little more about the situation” “What exactly did you do? “ “What was your specific role in this?” “What was the result?” In this example, the interviewer is probing for how the candidate works in a team setting, how they handle conflict and how they communicate their ideas. How they behaved in the past is a strong predictor of how they will in the future. According to Professor Katherine Hansen of Albright College’s Experiential Learning & Career Development Center, behavioral interviews accurately predict future job performance as much as 55% of the time compared to 10% for the typical situational or conversational interview. To be successful, behavioral interviews require planning to determine the competencies to look for. SHRM’s guide tells us recruiters and hiring managers need to identify the “knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAOs) most critical for success” for the specific job, as well as the behaviors that are important to the organization. This latter point goes to the question of cultural fit. One of the most common approaches to developing the behavioral questions to determining competencies is STAR: Situation, Task, Action and Result. In the example above, the initial question asks about a situation. The second question in the follow-up list asks about the action the candidate took. The third question seeks to elicit details about the task, while the last asks about the result. SHRM’s guide recommends creating a rating scale, and offers a sample template. There are multiple other templates online, many from assessment vendors and colleges. What they all have in common is an insistence that ratings be clearly defined and supplemented with notes and comments in real-time. A rating system allows for easy comparison among multiple candidates and, if multiple interviews are involved, among each of the evaluators. Structured behavioral interviews can reduce bias Besides improving the predictive value of job performance, structured behavioral interviews can reduce bias because all candidates are asked the same questions and all questions are directly tied to the competencies required for the job. For that same reason, candidates will get a better feel for what the job entails. Despite their superiority over unstructured situational and conversation interviews, the relevance of what is a behavioral interview to what it was in the past is becoming less clear. Job seekers can easily find lists of stock behavioral questions, many with suggested answers. Though SHRM’s guide explains how to tailor questions to the specific organization, job requirements and culture, too many organizations will simply choose their questions from these lists. Savvy candidates will practice their answers, using the STAR system to give hiring managers the answers they want. There’s also a suspicion that past performance may no longer be as compelling a predictor of future performance as it once was. Artificial intelligence, globalization of markets, the nature of competition as well as the effect of the Covid pandemic are changing the nature of work dramatically. With workers having to learn new skills and evolve competencies sometimes in months, how a candidate handled a situation last year may be less important than how they will handle something entirely new and unforeseen next year. Rather than walk away from examining past behavior entirely, behavioral interviews may need to include questions about how a candidate would apply their experience to similar situations complicated by today’s changing workplace. As professor and recruiting thought leader Dr. John Sullivan says, “Hiring managers should be less concerned about how someone acted in the past and more concerned about how they will modify their behavior and act differently in today’s completely changed environment at your company.” *** John Zappe Contributed
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Recruiting Trends
The Talent Shortage (and what to do about it)
The talent shortage currently faced by most employers is at a 15 year high according to one report recently published by the Manpower Group. A quick summary of that report shows the difficulty of filling jobs today; “Hiring optimism has returned to levels not seen since the start of the pandemic yet that optimism is being tempered by the highest levels of global talent shortages in 15 years with 69% of employers reporting difficulty filling vacancies. European employers are reporting the most difficulty filling open roles with the biggest impacts being felt in France, Romania, and Italy. In the U.S. employers report their most optimistic hiring intentions in more than 20 years, driven by Hospitality & Leisure as states open up.” And the shortage of talent appears to be here to stay. Korn Ferry says that by 2030, there will be a global human talent shortage of more than 85 million people. It’s happening in part due to demographics. There simply isn’t enough new talent to replace the retiring ones. In this country, the majority of baby boomers will have moved out of the workforce by 2030, but people are having less kids which leads to smaller pool of talent. 69% of Employers Can’t Find Enough Talent The talent shortage, which is generally defined as the disparity between an employer’s hiring needs and what available skills candidates have to offer—has a variety of causes. The global pandemic has become the biggest cause of course, which only exasperated an already tight labor market before it hit. In 2019 Manpower said 59% of employers could not fill jobs fast enough and that number has increased to 69% in 2021. A significant rise in just two years. Throw in the fact that many office workers want to be remote, at least some of the time, companies are struggling to figure out the right mix. In that same report 8 in 10 workers say they want a better work-life balance. Remote work is the best way they see that happening. When LinkedIn proposed more in office hours employees pushed back. They quickly changed their minds over worries of turnover and now allow workers to work exclusively from home. Flexible working arrangements appear to be the most coveted of all employee benefits. But let’s take a look at what else you can do to address the problem. How to Combat a Talent Shortage Boost your brand and make culture more visible. In times like this employers need to rise up above the other employers. You are all hiring so the companies that can create messaging and stories that resonate with active and passive candidates will get more applicants. Give candidates a reason to come work for you and shout it from the rooftops. Use social media, your career site and your job postings to create a unique message that candidates will want to engage with. Don’t be afraid to get creative with your job marketing efforts. Sometimes those experiments can pay off if you think outside the box. Be proactive – start sourcing. Employers need to employ proactive strategies such as sourcing candidates on a regular basis to keep the hiring pipeline full. A number of online services can help you do this such as Visage.jobs or Recruiter.com. Or you can simply go the traditional route and hire recruiters or staffing firms to do the sourcing for you. It’s a time intensive strategy but it works if you make the effort. Empower Internal Mobility. Leverage your employees to fill talent internally. Talent mobility is a big trend in the enterprise world and we are seeing the major software vendors like Workday and others beef up their internal mobility solutions. Providing employees with a career ladder not only keeps them learning but improves retention rates and even acts as a recruiting tool. By showing potential candidates how they can learn and advance in your organization, employers can attract more talent. Make it a point to have your employees skills in some kind of internal database. Maintain a viable employee referral program. Use your employees to spread your hiring message. This is probably the fastest way to increase applicants. By leveraging the social networks of your employees you greatly amplify your recruiting efforts in a way that costs you nearly nothing. Some employers even gasify this strategy by offering rewards and prizes to the employees that do the most sharing. So start creating content and links that your team can easily share and if you need to get some software to help manage it look into some employee advocacy vendors to help you launch that. Automate you’re hiring process. When you ask applicants it’s clear that employer communication is lagging. In a recent survey 46.8% of employers said that “unresponsive candidates” (not hearing back from applicants after reaching out) is a top online recruiting pain point. On the other hand, 48.8% of job seekers said the same about employers – they are frustrated with applying for jobs and receiving no response. Moving forward, both parties will need to commit to communicating with one another and say “no” to ghosting if they want to find the right hires and the right opportunities. Employers need to automate all standard communications and incorporate things like text messaging and interview scheduling to automate as much of the process as they can. Today’s candidates want easier ways to interact with you so take those pain points off the table and automate them. If anything, the global pandemic has taught us that now is the time to re-think how we attract talent. The workers of today want flexible, trusting work environments that help them blend work and home. The skills shortage may continue but those employers who embrace change in talent acquisition will find themselves ahead in the race for talent.
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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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