Chris Russell (16)
Recruiting
Building a Proactive Talent Pipeline
Awhile back many organizations made a switch from using the term “recruitment” to “talent acquisition”. Talent Acquisition is not only a catchy phrase and continues to gain popularity, but it signifies a different approach because it is an ongoing strategy to find specialists, leaders, or future executives for your company. Building a talent pipeline requires time and effort. Recruitment tends to focus on filling vacancies, being transactional and concentrating on immediate actions and short-term goals. Think of the hours spent reviewing applications received through an open requisition and only using that limited pool of candidates to make a critical hiring decision, versus selecting someone who truly is a great fit. Having the title of recruiter does not mean you aren’t strategic and don’t have a long-term strategy to find talent. However, so many recruiters are burdened with high workloads, administrative tasks and time draining activities that they don’t have enough time in the day to do higher level work. The best recruiters focus on building strong, proactive talent pipelines. It takes time and an understanding of the long-term staffing needs of the organization, but once in place, your organization can reap the rewards of having a proactive recruiting pipeline. It’s what the best executive search firms do, so why not do it within your organization? What is a talent pipeline? Creating a talent pipeline is the process of identifying and engaging with candidates long before a position comes open – they’re not actually “candidates”. Rather, they’re people you are building a relationship with who have the essential skill set required in frequently hired and key positions within your organization. So, when a position is available in a few months or even years, you have a proactive talent pipeline of people who can fill the role quickly and, more importantly, will excel in the role and want to join your company. A recruiting pipeline: Significantly reduces the time to hire. Hard to fill roles typically taking over 3 months to fill can be filled as soon as the position officially becomes open. This can be extremely important in sensitive roles where a project can’t go forward without the people with the necessary skills to do the work. Reduces the aggravations of a standard hiring process such as scheduling interviews with different stakeholders and spending needless time on unqualified candidates, when no one has any extra time. Increases the likelihood of the retention and long-term success of the new hire. During the time you have been building the relationship with someone in the pipeline, that person is also learning about the organization and seeing how they’ll fit in for the long term. So once the position is open, there’s less convincing about why to join, and more of a celebration about becoming part of the team. Talent pipelines require relationship building: Relationships are ingrained in who we are as people. Relationships matter and help people in making decisions. So, if you have taken the time to build trusting relationships with people who have the skills your organization needs, when someone who has a choice to work for multiple companies, they will more than likely choose your organization versus going through a standard transactional recruitment process where the candidate applies, goes through the interview steps and maybe becomes an employee. Plus, the candidate can trust they are making a great decision given you’ve been talking to them professionally for years. Talent pipelines are built over many years. In order to meet people, you need to attend networking events, industry trade shows, ask for introductions, personalize your content to job boards and resume databases, be responsive and accessible. Talent acquisition is a relationship business not a transaction or a metric What’s keeping you from building a talent pipeline? Screening unqualified resumes (typically only 10% of resumes received meet job requisition qualifications). Sourcing candidates for an immediate fill due to lack of applicants to your job posting. Interview logistics. An overload of open requisitions. Not enough time since the task work interferes with the strategic work. How to solve the dilemma? It’s now easier and more affordable than ever, to automate the things that are repetitive, time drains and overwhelming. That’s the beauty of AI (artificial intelligence). AI can easily and more accurately handle the top-of-funnel sourcing, screening candidates and answering common questions. It’s not about taking jobs away so much as freeing up recruiters to do more valuable work, like relationship building! With more time, go to a seminar, network, reach out to people to set up a time to talk and learn more about someone you recently met. Maybe they love their current job and boss and there are no opportunities with your company for them right now. But things can change in a few months. Businesses, organizations, work situations, people are constantly changing and evolving. With a strong talent pipeline in place, you can be ready and in better control for the constant changes in the workplace and talent needs. Use AI to get more time. Then you use the time to be more strategic. That’s how you replace “transactional” with “adding value”.
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Recruiting
How To Measure Cost Per Hire
Knowing the cost per hire is one of the more essential recruiting metrics. It ranks up there with source of hire and time to hire. Like those two, the cost of talent attraction reflects on the efficiency of your recruiting efforts, especially when you compare it against benchmarks for your industry or comparable occupations. In order to provide a reliable yardstick for employers to measure and compare their cost of hire, the Society of Human Resource Management developed a formula that’s become an industry standard endorsed by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). It lists all the possible types of expenses associated with hiring and goes into great detail about how to assemble it all. It can appear intimidating, especially for smaller business, but not all applies to every organization. The standard itself allows for some estimating and says, “While this Standard defines the types of expenses to include, a ‘down to the penny’ reconciliation of costs into the precise buckets… is not required.” Cost Per Hire Formula Calculating cost per hire sounds deceptively simple. Add up the cost of advertising the jobs, typically the cost of posting to a job board like ZipRecruiter or Indeed. Add in any other out-of-pocket costs like travel expenses for candidates from out of the area and there you have it. A surprising number of businesses, if they calculate cost of hire at all – one survey found 17% don’t – assume this is what it costs them to hire a worker. They’re wrong. Even small businesses spend more to fill an open position than they suspect. The out-of-pocket cost for a job board posting is only the most obvious expense. But what about the time it took to write the ad, place it, review the applications, interview the candidates and make an offer? If the business is large enough to have a recruiter, their total comp is part of the equation, plus the infrastructure – desk, chair, phone, computer, etc. – to support them. The SHRM formula for calculating cost per hire is itself straightforward: Internal costs + External costs divided by the total number of hires in a given period, most conveniently (but not necessarily) a year. In a survey a few years ago, SHRM found the average cost per hire was $4,425. Half the almost 500 respondents reported spending less than $1,633. Hiring an executive was much more costly, averaging $14,936. Another survey a year before put the average cost per hire at right around $4,000. What those surveys make clear is that hiring workers is expensive. And keep in mind these are average costs that take into account hiring everyone from an entry-level clerk to a CFO. Let’s take a look at some of the more common costs of recruiting and hiring starting with the ones likely to be easiest to track. These are what the SHRM / ANSI standard calls “external costs.” External Recruiting Costs Advertising expenses: Most commonly job board posting, but also including such sites as LinkedIn and Facebook, etc. Career fairs: The cost to participate for in-person and virtual fairs, plus the travel expenses of recruiters to attend. Agency fees: Costs paid to outside recruiting services. Screening and assessments: These include skills testing, medical screens, background checks and similar Candidate expenses: Interview travel, and travel and relocation costs paid to new hires, signing bonuses and, if necessary, immigration costs. Technology: The cost of the recruiting software. Internal Recruiting Costs Recruiter salaries: Total comp package costs. For companies without full-time recruiters, use the portion of their time attributed to recruiting. Office costs: Office expenses attributed to the recruiting function, include a pro rata share of rent and office equipment. Interviewing: Time spent by hiring manager and others interviewing and selecting candidates. Include any time spent by these to prepare. Once you know the costs, you can – and should — calculate the cost per hire by job type, department, management level and in other ways that make sense for your organization. Having this information allows you to compare costs to identify ways of improving hiring efficiency. If one hiring team routinely conducts multiple panel interviews, it might be possible to streamline the process without sacrificing hiring quality. Candidates will certainly thank you for that. There is one important ingredient missing from the cost of hire calculation and that is what can be called “lost opportunity.” An open position will have economic consequences: a project may be delayed, a sales opportunity missed, a customer who failed to get a deliver on time. No cost per hire formula takes this into account. It’s just too speculative nor is that the purpose of the measure. Still, having an open position has a cost. In large organizations with other workers who can fill-in, the cost may be barely visible. The smaller the business, the clearer the financial impact. The longer it takes to fill an open position, the more significant become those things that don’t get done or have to be delayed. So as you use your cost per hire strategically to measure recruiting efficiency and manage hiring expenses, keep that in mind. Cheaper hiring isn’t always better.
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Recruiting Tactics
High Volume Hiring Strategies
A year into the pandemic and the face of talent acquisition looks very different than in 2020. A recent survey of talent acquisition professionals identified that in 2021 they are: Hiring again – in fact 90% are! Considering talent outside the geographic location of their office spaces (72%) Using new sourcing techniques to increase the funnel of candidates Focusing on diversity hiring Investing in technology to identify qualified talent From health care services to fast foods, companies are hiring. High volume hiring is a big part of that upswing. The need for talent continues. Some companies are overwhelmed with applications and for others applications are barely dripping in. Whether they are receiving hundreds of applications or only a few, everyone is concerned about finding and identifying enough qualified candidates who will thrive and grow in their organization. High Volume Hiring Finding qualified talent is elevated to mission critical levels when your company has high volume needs ranging from hundreds to thousands of open positions a year. The unending demand and growing challenges for employers to attract, hire and retain talent for high-demand, high-turnover roles in today’s labor market are exhausting and intimidating when you don’t have a clear talent acquisition strategy and the correct tools in place. There are actions you can take now to optimize your high volume hiring by innovating your application process and creating a positive candidate experience that will increase the number of candidates applying for the positions while reducing the time spent screening qualified candidates. To help you improve your high-volume hiring process, here’s checklist that you can help you. Create a positive candidate experience for all candidates According to Indeed, 42% of job seekers found lengthy applications the most frustrating part of the application process and many will give up on the application process when they feel it’s too long. 65% of job seekers now use their mobile devices to look for jobs, allowing them to apply for a job at any time. Being mobile-optimized includes a job application site that’s both mobile-friendly and allows job seekers to upload their resume using their phone. Keep the application process short by having relevant qualification questions and time spent applying to a minimum. Efforts to create a fast and mobile application process can tangibly improve the candidate experience. Engage your candidates with a compelling employer brand Communicating effectively is also very important in creating a positive candidate experience. In high volume recruiting, recruitment technology can be especially helpful with communications and engaging candidates. A recent survey revealed that two-thirds of candidates are happy to communicate with a chatbot, as long as it provided them with the answers they sought. Here are things that candidates want to know and that you should communicate: An acknowledgment letting candidates know when applications close and when they can expect to hear from you. Let all candidates, both successful and unsuccessful, know the outcome. Send updates with relevant content about their application and engaging information about the company, its employees and happenings. Increase your talent pool Create and maintain talent pools for future job openings and use it! Talent rediscovery is the practice of mining your existing resume database to find previous candidates for openings. Although many ATS will allow recruiter to search through existing resumes, the results are usually limited and error-prone. As a result, it’s often an unsuccessful effort. A talent rediscovery algorithm will automatically screen every resume in your ATS to find the most qualified matches to a new posting. On average, companies need approximately 180 people to visit their career site to make one hire. With high volume recruiting, if a company has 50 openings, that would mean needing 9,00 views! Plus, you need to have those views be from people who could be great candidates. “Programmatic Job Advertising” (PJA) can help by getting a job posting to appear at places where you maybe wouldn’t think to advertise. A programmatic job advertising platform can help you find the most relevant talent in the shortest time. Speed up your talent sourcing On average, 75% of the resumes a job posting receives are considered unqualified. When you’re hiring for hundreds of open positions a year, this adds up to hundreds of wasted hours skimming through unqualified resumes. Software that uses AI to screen resumes can quickly identify candidates who have the right skills and characteristics to your roles. By automating manual resume screening, organizations such as retailers have reduced their time to hire by 75%. Identify critical soft skills Even with high volume recruitment, you should never compromise on quality of hire. An optimized recruitment process consisting of online assessments and the right interview questions will help you identify the qualified candidates faster and minimize taking the next steps with less qualified candidates. You can teach specific hard skills, whereas some critical soft skills can never be taught. There’s no need to wait until the interview process to get an understanding of your candidate’s soft skills. Increase diversity hires and decrease hiring bias Hiring bias can be imbedded in the preselection process. AI reduced hiring bias by carefully analyzing the algorithms being used in your preselection to ensure there are no hidden biases. Additional measures you can take include: Use assessments to evaluate actual skills, not candidates’ background Base hiring decisions on data evidence, not assumptions Have a consistent and transparent hiring process Provide interview training to all hiring managers Use recruiting metrics to achieve quality hires Recruiting metrics are essential for understanding where process improvements are needed and justifying investments into specific recruiting functions. Especially with high volume hiring, you need to optimize your time and resources where possible. Some recruiting metrics that can help you with high volume hiring include: Qualified candidates per hire Source of hire to optimize advertising spend Offer to acceptance ratio to reduce unnecessary steps and actions Length of time for each stage of your recruiting process to minimize bottlenecks Time to fill to understand how well your hiring team is doing Invest and use technology to save time and money Using an easy mobile application process and having the right tools for job advertising will increase your number of applicants. With the time savings accomplished through AI screening, recruiters can spend on building and nurturing relationships with candidates and moving the process along fasters. Conclusion If you have high volume recruitment needs, you will be lagging behind and missing candidates without a clear talent acquisition strategy and the correct tools in place. The speed to hire and hire right is available by having a high-volume candidate selection platform which: Handles large volumes of applicants Customizes the online assessment experience per role Sets hiring benchmarks Comes equipped with situational judgment tests Creates a branded experience for your candidates Automates parts of your communications
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Recruiting Tactics
Resume Screening Checklist
Screening resumes, especially during a time of higher unemployment and an overabundance of candidates, is a challenging part of the talent acquisition process. Not only is resume screening time-consuming, but most talent acquisition leaders are also concerned about the time spent reviewing resumes of unqualified candidates and missing out on potential superstars. Utilizing an effective resume screening checklist can substantially increase your likelihood of success. To help you identify the best candidates more easily and in less time, here’s a 4-step resume screening checklist that can help you. Step 1: Compile a List of the Job Qualifications The first step in your resume screening checklist is understanding the required job qualifications to be able to do the job, as well as the preferred job qualifications and competencies to excel in the job. The required job qualifications are often a simple listing of the basic work experience, skills and education required to adequately perform the responsibilities listed on the job posting. Preferred qualifications and competencies are the additional work experiences, skills, education, abilities, and behaviors that often lead to someone being a stronger performer. One way to determine preferred qualification is to assess the profiles of your successful employees. Make sure you have a diverse pool of successful employees to ensure there is not any unconscious bias in your determination of what it takes to be a superstar. Thereby compiling an unbiased checklist. Talk to your current employees and their supervisors as well as examine their resumes to find common patterns in: Work Experience Education Skills, Knowledge, and Abilities Behaviors The resume screening checklist also ensures the applicants are compared fairly against the same selection criteria! Step 2: Categorize Each Job Qualification as Minimum or Preferred The second step in your resume screening checklist is deciding if each job qualification is a minimum or preferred one. Minimum qualifications are ones that a candidate must have to do the job. An example of a minimum qualification for a remote customer service associate is being proficient with desktop computer system and have good written and oral communication skills. Preferred qualifications are ones that would make someone a stronger candidate. An example of a preferred qualification is whether the candidate has prior industry related work experience. A good rule of thumb is that a candidate would be unable to do the job without each minimum qualification whereas he or she would be able to do the job without any of the preferred qualifications. For example, a candidate with good communication and computer skills (minimum qualification) who lacks experience in a similar industry (preferred qualification) can be successful as a customer service associate with some on-the-job training. Depending on a job’s workflow, candidates can be screened based on minimum qualifications, preferred qualifications, or both. Step 3: Create a Resume Screening Scorecard for the Job Qualifications The third step in your resume screening checklist is taking the minimum and preferred qualifications and creating a resume screening scorecard. The purpose of this scorecard is to be able to easily rank each candidate based on the job qualifications and shortlisting the strongest candidates. For an Online Customer Service role, your scorecard might look like this: Shortlisting Scorecard: Customer Service Associate Candidate ID Education Industry Experience Online Customer Svc. Experience Communication Skills Total (1=min; 2= desired) (1=< year; 2= a year; 3 = > year) (1=poor; 2= average; 3 = strong) (4-11) Candidate 1 Candidate 2 Candidate 3 Step 4: Evaluate Resume Screening Technology Tools If you’re conducting high-volume recruitment, step four in your resume screening checklist may be the most important: finding and investing in a strong resume screening technology tool. When you’re recruiting for roles that receive hundreds or even thousands of resumes per job opening, you don’t always have the time to manually screen every resume effectively. Intelligent resume screening is software that integrates with your ATS automating steps 1 to 3 of your resume screening checklist. It does this by learning the job qualifications based on the resumes of existing successful employees to automatically screen, shortlist, and grade new candidates (e.g., A to C or Green, Yellow, and Red). For high-volume recruitment, intelligent resume screening is a huge technological step forward. Not only does it save you the time it takes to manually screen resumes, but it also helps you to better predict quality of hires by learning which candidates moved on to become successful employees. Final Takeaways for Your Resume Screening Checklist Many recruiters believe screening candidates is the most time-consuming and hardest part of their job. As hiring volume is predicted to increase in 2021, screening resumes will only become more of a challenge. To help you stay on track and identify the best candidates, follow this 4-step resume screening checklist: Step 1: Compile a list of the job qualifications based on job requirements and current successful employees. Step 2: Categorize each job qualification as a minimum or preferred qualification. Step 3: Create a resume screening scorecard for the job qualifications to shortlist candidates. Step 4: Find a good resume screening technology tool, especially if you conduct high-volume recruitment. Depending on how many people you hire each year, you may want to automate some or all your resume screening function.
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Recruiting
Recruiting Metrics to Measure Success
Management guru Peter Drucker once said, “what gets measured, gets managed.” In recent years, the need for data and analytics has reached its way into the field of recruiting often with fortune 500 companies having a whole sub-department within HR dedicated to providing people and recruiting metrics. Measuring and monitoring these numbers helps a business understand the talent market and landscape relative to their overall operations. What are recruiting metrics? Recruiting metrics are ways to measure hiring success and also to optimize your recruitment funnel. When analyzed correctly, they help talent organizations to evaluate the effectiveness of recruiters and the efforts of their outreach and recruitment marketing spend. It’s important to gauge your recruiting “ROI”. After all, hiring someone who is more suited for the job has the potential to create an enormous return on investment for the employer. Recruiting metrics are best used in looking at the short term and long term view of bringing talent into an organization. The short term view can be average time to hire and turnover. Utilizing average time to hire and turnover together can help an organization build a staffing plan. One would not think to look at turnover when considering average time to hire, but it’s important because turnover drives when an opening occurs. Time to Hire Metrics The average time to hire is important to look at not just at the organization/enterprise level but also across disciplines (IT, accounting, legal, etc.) and countries as different cultures have different professional standards. Oftentimes organizations want the fastest time to hire which is great to have, but getting there takes time. According to data from ATS vendor Yello, average time to-hire across all industries is 3-4 weeks. Of course harder to fill roles will always skew these types of numbers. To really find out where hiring is slowing down, looking at each step of the recruiting process and finding the bottle necks allows an organization to truly reduce this time. Why should an organization perform this analysis? Reducing the time to hire is all about generating a positive candidate experience and helping the organization succeed in the war on talent and delivering on its overall strategy. After all, you cannot deliver on strategy without people! Source of Hire Metrics One of the most popular metrics to track is the source of hire which identifies where your candidates are coming from. Following this metric allows you to track the effectiveness of your recruitment marketing spend by showing you incoming applications from job boards, social media, email campaigns, referrals and your career site. Today job search engine Indeed is typically at the top of the list when it comes to source of hire. LinkedIn is also a top performer. Capturing where candidates are coming from is important because it informs the organization/company where talent pools are located, and it is best viewed on an annual basis to allow time to gather the data. Gathering sources of hire is especially important for diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives when it comes to recruiting. Cost Per Hire Metrics Cost per hire can include several factors: recruiter salaries, cost of job board postings, interview time, loss of production time due to turnover, etc., and it can also vary by industry. Some employers don’t include recruiter salaries in this number so it can be a matter of choice if you just want to track paid spend that converts to hires. Conversion Metrics Talent leaders often overlook their Apply conversion rates. For instance do you know how many clicks it takes from your Indeed spend to generate one completed application? By analyzing this data (clicks divided by applies) one can learn a great deal about which traffic sources perform best. By constantly evaluating these numbers you can adjust marketing spend and ensure you are getting the best ROI for your money. From the data we’ve seen, traffic from Google for Jobs is one of the best when it comes to generating applications and time spent on your site. Quality of Hire Metrics Quality of hire typically includes the overall performance rating of the new hire which is usually only captured once a year in large businesses. For small to medium size businesses, it might include new hire turnover (employees <1 year of service). Sometimes referred to as “First-year attrition”, this key recruiting metric indicates hiring success. If a candidate fails to live up to expectations within the first year of work something went wrong when evaluating them. This error costs companies money. But there are steps you can put in place to mitigate this risk. It might mean revamping your job descriptions to align better with the role you have an opening for. Oftentimes candidates can misunderstand the job description and/or employers can “oversell” the role as something it is not. Taking the longer term view on metrics allows the talent acquisition department to look into the “rear view” mirror to see how the talent delivered that the recruiters brought into the organization. Job Satisfaction Metrics Candidate job satisfaction is a way to measure whether you are meeting their expectations. So it’s important to survey them six months into their work experience. A low job satisfaction rating surly indicates that what the recruiter told them about the role has not played out. This again points to using a more realistic job preview set forth by the job description and hiring manager. Recruiting Metrics & Business Outcomes In reporting recruiting metrics, an organization’s talent acquisition and/or human resources department can drive accountability with hiring managers in regards to generating a positive candidate experience, but it also allows talent leaders and C-suite executives to measure how they are doing against their business strategy. If the strategy includes revenue growth, then having the right sales force and support in place at the right time is critical. Without knowing and/or reporting on recruiting metrics, the business is losing out on valuable data in order to scale and plan both in the short term and long term when it comes to hiring the right talent. There are certainly other recruiting metrics to be tracked such as things like offer acceptance rates, percentage of open jobs per department, recruiters sourcing times and selection ratio, but the metrics mentioned above provide the best baseline for how effective your recruiting process is. Time spent analyzing these numbers will prove to be a win-win for your recruiting team and the candidates they seek.
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Recruiting
Shortlisting Candidates: Best Practices for Recruiters
The shortlisting of candidates has always been one of the most time consuming pats of the sourcing process. That’s why so much rent HR technology has attempted to help automate this process for recruiters. But despite efforts to automate candidate sourcing the challenges of sourcing, recruiting, hiring of talent still remain. A number of industry studies have pointed to the fact that most employers struggle with attracting the right candidates. One stats reveals that 52% of companies said the difficult part of recruiting was identifying and shortlisting enough of the right candidates from large pools of talent. While shortlisting remains a major problem inside talent acquisition departments, there are steps being taken to overcome this hurdle. Namely by building a strong employer brand, nurturing talent communities, and boosting wages and benefits. The more attractive the job, the more people will apply. It is now more important than ever to invest in this pull versus push talent strategy. Defining Shortlisting It’s important to understand where shortlisting occurs in the hiring process and how it’s defined. Shortlisting is often performed by sourcers who search for candidates inside talent and resume databases online. It’s the process of finding people and vetting them to ensure they meet the general qualifications of the job as well as their openness to hearing about your job opening. Shortlisting happens after the sourcing step and comes before the interview. Resumes are screened and assessed for fit before the candidate is contacted. As you screen, the best candidates (on paper) get moved to the shortlist. How Shortlisting Works A balance must be struck when developing the proper criteria between the minimum qualifications you need to ensure a good quality candidate. You can’t be too dismissive of someone if they don’t meet all of your standards so be aware of this going in. Keep your options open. Your criteria for shortlisting can be based on the skills and traits of your best employee currently working in the role. Leave out personal opinion or “gut feel” since these can often be biased decisions that limit your available talent pool. Diversity and inclusion is important to keep in mind, so apply your standards objectively among your candidates. Criteria for Shortlisting; Past experience Education Skillset Personality Training You can also use results of skill or personality based assessment tests. Separating Essential Versus Desirable Criteria Essential Criteria (aka Must Haves) are those you absolutely need to have for each candidate. Are they eligible to work in the U.S.? Do they have the minimum years of experience? These ‘knockout questions’ force candidates into a yes or no bucket, especially if asked during the apply process. The ‘nice to have’ or desirable criteria are things like professional certifications or experience with a certain software. The differences between must have and nice to have can overlap. For instance a hiring manager may insist on 5 years of experience even though 3 would suffice. This scenario happens a lot in hiring circles but is part of the job you’ll have to deal with. Use Scorecards to Shortlist It’s helpful to create a scorecard for candidates to jeep the process fair and your questions on point. It also helps you to visualize their candidacy in an easy to understand format. How Many to Shortlist? So how many candidates will it take to get a successful hire? Most recruiters I’ve ever worked with say it’s probably between 5-10 candidates. Anymore becomes too unmanageable. If you find yourself working high volume roles you probably need technology to help. Tools like recruiting chatbots, screening by text messaging and self selecting apply processes will need to be used. Some surveys peg the average application to interview rate at around 12% which will mean for every one hundred applicants; You’ll need to shortlist at least 12 of them 2-3 of them might receive an offer 1-2 will accept the job offer Shortlisting Resumes Most of the applicants you’ll receive in your ATS will not be qualified. Some estimates peg that number at 75%-85%. So with that many unqualified applicants, it becomes obvious why shortlisting is your most time consuming task as a recruiter. That’s why ATS providers have embedded ways to screen for you through knockout questions and a customized apply process. Those employers that take advantage of these features can greatly affect the number of shortlisted applicants. Summing up Shortlisting We are slowly but surely moving to an era where AI recruiting software will automate at least part of the shortlisting function. Tools now exist that will search for, screen and serve up candidates automatically to recruiters. But in the meantime, use your scorecard to evaluate and judge applicants in a fair and equitable way. The technology will soon catch up to your efforts.
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Recruiting Automation
10 Reasons Why You Need a Recruiting Chatbot
If you shop online you have probably come across a chatbot. You see them on most e-commerce websites because they’re hoping to sell you a product. If you have a question about that item, they want to get the answer in front of you ASAP, so that you don’t leave their site to buy a competitor’s product. In recruiting, the goal is the same. We are essentially selling a role within a company to a candidate. Treating candidates like consumers is the new way to attract and acquire talent. Thats why it’s time to adopt the e-commerce mentality of putting information in front of candidates to provide a better candidate experience. A recruiting chatbot is the perfect tool to do that. Here are 10 reasons why you should implement a recruiting chatbot on your career website. It’s 2021 (finally). These days, we find information we want within seconds from our phones, laptops, etc. Instead of making candidates search your career site for information hidden by countless mouse clicks, use a Chatbot to put the information they want right in front of them, on-demand. Chatbots turn passive candidates into applicants. Chatbots offer text applications. If you are hiring a large number of employees for entry-level positions, in your job postings, ask candidate’s to text “JOBS” to 555-555-5555. Your chatbot will reply asking for their name, email, phone number, anything you want. Whether the candidate applies at that point or not, you have their contact information for future positions. Because we always have our phones, candidates are more likely to send a text to inquire about a position than they are to apply online. Your team will thank you. Chatbots are able to automate your team’s least favorite tasks – including resume review, interview scheduling, and application updates. Chatbots encourage candidates to apply, pre-screen resumes, and allow your team to send a text or email blast to candidates that were pre-screened as a possible fit. The recruiter can simply click a button, triggering a text link to pre-screened candidates asking them to select a time for a phone interview. You’ll save so much time! Chatbots are incapable of showing bias towards candidates. When a chatbot is automating tasks from the top of a recruiting funnel (i.e. resume screening), they will not pass on a candidate because of their name, the year they graduated high school, or the college they attended. Instead, chatbots process responses to questions based on qualifications, time in roles, etc. Chatbots alleviate the risk of biases towards candidates. Chatbots provide data. It is easy to determine if your chatbot is working for you. Some examples of metrics you can pull include user metrics (total users, engaged users, user sentiment), message metrics (total/new conversations, miss messages, which are messages the bot can’t respond to), and so many more. You are always available. Chatbots are available to candidates any time, day or night. A candidate browsing your site at 3:00am can ask questions in real-time. If that candidate is awake at 3:00am because they feel stressed about work, they might ask your Chatbot about work/life balance. Your chatbot lets the candidate know that work/life balance is important to your organization, and now you have an applicant. You’re always on! Chatbots are the future of work. HR functions are starting to rely on chatbots to complete simple tasks. Think self-service benefit requests, employee-facing HR intranet bots, and reminders and follow-ups for onboarding new hires. Teams are getting creative and automating as much as possible – you can get ahead of the game. Chatbots are agile. Chatbots let you know what you don’t know. When a question is submitted and the chatbot doesn’t know how to respond, it alerts the system admin, who should either create a new response for the bot, or, edit an existing response so the bot knows to use it should the question be asked another time. It lets you know what candidates want to know. Branding. Giving your chatbot a personality and setting a friendly tone will make your organization and the candidate experience warmer. By customizing chatbot responses, you give candidates a look into how your company treats employees. If it is fun to work at your company, let a candidate feel that by making your chatbot transparent and fun to engage with. Chatbots integrate with your existing software. You spent a lot of time and money making your ATS work for you; make it better by implementing a chatbot that integrates easily with your suite of software. You’ll get the most out of your chatbot by linking it to your ATS to send candidate info, and with your email calendar for scheduling purposes.
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Recruiting Tactics
Recruiting via Text Messaging
More and more recruiters are using emails and messaging platforms on the web, social media and smartphones to connect with job seekers quickly and conveniently. In an increasingly competitive job market, speed matters. Of these communication channels, texting offers the recruiter the speed they need to recruit faster. In fact, text messages are read within 5 minutes of receipt 95% of the time. So if your talent acquisition teams aren’t using text messaging to communicate with job seekers, you’re already behind the curve. And while mass messaging to candidates can be mis-used, 1 to 1 messages can feel much more personal which is key to establishing relationships with candidates. When it comes to guidelines don’t be too “wordy”. Less is more. Texting candidates after the initial connection is established by email / phone and till the offer is a commonly accepted practice. Texting is also a good option if the candidate is at work and can’t pick up calls. We surveyed recruiters to see how they use texting to recruit. Here’s how they recruit via text. Recruitment Text Message Examples Cold Recruiting Text: Hi this is Ryan. I have an open (role/location & sell). I can call you in (20/30/60 min) to tell you more. Interested? Cold Recruiting Text: I use text constantly. I generally try to call first, then text if they don’t answer. Something along the lines of “Hey its Lara with COMPANY. I called because I saw that you have a ton of experience in X, and I’m looking for a Y. Are you open to a discussion about the role?” If I found a resume online, I usually end with “Are you still interested in exploring new opportunities?” Cold Recruiting Text: Hi, Joe, this is Tom Johnson, a recruiter. I saw your resume on XXXX, and I am working on filling a hot JOBJOB there in CITY. When is a good time for us to talk about it? Cold Recruiting Text: Same thing I would say in a InMail on LinkedIn. Just make it more condensed. Text is king nowadays. Cold Recruiting Text: “Hey Chris! So good to talk today. You’ve done a lot in your time as an HR tech guru! I’d love to keep taking about it this role. What do you think?” I get about 50 percent response on the first send, and a little lower on follow ups. Cold Recruiting Text: My last few placements started out from cold texts… both lead level software engineers in the Bay Area. I was specific to why I was reaching out, how I got their number, mentioned a specific role, referenced the hiring manager and mentioned some things the hiring manager liked about their background. Also my meme and gif game varies or is nonexistent depending on their personality. Followup Text: I didn’t want to do another contract but a recruiter called me, left a voicemail, then followed up immediately with a text and an inmail. I respected his game and here I am, on another contract. Followup Text: Voicemails are outdated. When I call and nobody answers, I hang up and send a text with my profile picture and a short intro. They almost ALWAYS call me back immediately! More Texting Advice From Recruiters Keep it short, direct and casual…texts should beMUCH SHORTER than an email. Use punctuation and emojis as you see fit. Candidates want to work with relatable people, not “headhunters”. Continue to use text to check in post interview for feedback or schedule a quick touch point. Be sure your mobile application process is quick. The last thing you’ll want is a bad mobile apply experience. One recruiter, Stacie Ratliff told me this about her texting efforts. “I use text more often when I have a candidate in process for a position and they are not responding to their emails. I’ll text them to nudge things along. Sometimes they respond faster: “Hi Dave. Wanted to follow-up on my email earlier this week and see what your availability is to do a tech phone screen. We’re excited to take the next step. Look forward to hearing back from you.” She said she rarely ever contacts someone by text that she doesn’t have a pre-existing relationship with. “Some people may find this to be too personal or intrusive, so I tend to stick to email reach outs. Once I’ve met the person, I feel comfortable shooting them a text if I have an opening or want to fish for leads. I keep it short and sweet: “Hi Susannah. How are you? Last time we connected was about 6 months ago. I have an exciting opportunity for a Sr. iOS Engineer at XYZ company that I thought you might be interested in. If you’d like to know more, reply back and I’ll be happy to share a position profile. You can schedule a call with me here: calendly.com/recruiterabc”. Notice the use of the calendar link to make it easy for the candidate to schedule a call with her. Recruiting via text can be a game changer for recruiters if they make it a primary communication tool. Today’s generation of candidates expects to be texted so meet them where they are. Platforms like Emissary exist for this very reason.
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Human Resources
Remote Work Expectations for 2021
The global pandemic is changing what employees want in a prospective job offering. According to a new study from Citrix Systems, workers believe flexible models, digital technology, diversity and inclusion and learning and development will drive the future of work. And they will seek opportunities with companies that share their vision and give them the space and tools they need to succeed and advance their careers. “As the economy gears up again and the job market begins to make a recovery, we’re likely to see a surge in people seeking new roles,” said Tim Minahan, Executive Vice President of Strategy, Citrix. “But the pandemic has forever changed the way employees view and approach work, and if businesses want to attract and retain the talent they need to move forward tomorrow, they must understand their mindset and desires and develop plans to accommodate them today.” In the Talent Accelerator, Citix surveyed 2,000 knowledge workers and 500 HR Directors in large, established corporations and mid-market businesses based in the US. Among the key findings? Workers Want to Be Digital Nomads Now, more than ever, employees want flexibility in where, when and how they work. In fact, 88 percent of those workers surveyed as part of the Talent Accelerator said that when searching for a new position, they would look for one that offers complete flexibility in their hours and location. And 76 percent believe that employees will be more likely to prioritize lifestyle over proximity to work, even if it means taking a pay cut. Other findings: 83 percent of employees and 69 percent of HR directors think that workers will be more likely to move out of cities and other urban locations if they can work remotely for a majority of the time. 78 percent of workers and 67 percent of HR directors predict that the geographical decentralization of organizations will result in the creation of new work hubs in suburban/rural areas in the next 12 months. In addition, the majority of employees surveyed are of the opinion that flexible work models will ultimately become the norm in the year ahead. 83 percent predict that, in response to global skilled talent shortage, companies will leverage flexible work models to reach out to suitable candidates no matter where they live. Yet only 66 percent of HR directors feel the same. “As the global battle for talent heats up, companies will need to embrace more flexible models for work that allow them to meet employees where they are in order to position themselves to win,” Minahan said. “Companies that leverage technology to enable remote work can not only attract hard-to-find talent, but increase employee engagement and boost their productivity. And this research proves it.” Virtual Reality Will Bring Workers Closer While the pandemic and the remote work mandates associated with it have physically separated workers, technology is proving its worth and keeping them connected, engaged and productive. As the Talent Accelerator discovered: 89 percent of employees believe that technology makes workers within their organization more productive. 86 percent of employees and 69 percent of HR directors report that business leaders in their organization are using technology to collaborate effectively and innovate. On average, around two thirds of employees and HR directors say they feel more connected to their direct manager, CEO, senior management team, and peers when working remotely than when working in the office. 73 percent of employees and 72 percent of HR directors think the increased use of technology in the future will break down hierarchies and lead to more open communication with business leaders and senior management teams that may advance their careers. “Organizations that provide employees with digital tools that remove the friction from work and enable them to be and do their best are the ones that will ultimately thrive,” Minahan said. “Because when employees feel empowered by the solutions they use rather than hamstrung by them, they can focus, innovate and deliver value.” Outcomes over Output In the future, companies will need to rethink how they measure productivity because traditional metrics – and views that real work can’t get done outside the office – will no longer cut it. Modern employees want to be measured on the value they deliver, not the volume. And they expect to be given the space and trust they need to do their very best work, wherever they happen to be. 86 percent of employees said they would prefer to work for a company that prioritizes outcome over output, but just 69 percent of HR directors say that their company currently operates in this way. 69 percent of workers say they are more productive – by an average of 72 percent – when they feel their employer trusts them to get the job done without monitoring their progress; while 51 percent of HR directors think that their organization would be more productive as a whole if their employer/senior management took this stance. “Work is no longer about getting the most out of people, but the best,” Minahan said. “Forward-thinking companies recognize this and will focus on designing people-centric experiences that unlock the full potential of their employees and empower them to deliver transformative results.” Diversity Matters to Employees Diversity isn’t just a boardroom agenda item. As the Talent Accelerator reveals, employees and HR directors alike believe it will be a defining feature of the future workforce. 86 percent of employees and two-thirds of HR directors believe that a diverse workforce will become even more important as roles, skills and company requirements change over time. 78 percent of employees and 69 percent of HR directors believe that neurodiversity is increasingly recognized in their organization and will drive competitive advantage in the future. “People want to work for companies where they can pursue their passions and explore, create and innovate alongside individuals with different perspectives to deliver meaningful outcomes,” Minahan said. “And as we progress and create a world where there is more equity and opportunity for all, companies must focus on creating diverse and inclusive environments in which employees can be their authentic and whole selves, take risks and are empowered to contribute to the business.” We live in the most uncertain of times. But as Minahan notes, “One thing is clear: talent will be critical to not only recovering from the pandemic, but emerging stronger and better.”
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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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