Resources
agile
2 min read
Agile Recruiting On a Budget
Agile work processes may be best known because of their association with computer software development, where changing requirements, speed of development and uncertainty are the norm. These same principles can also be applied to recruiting. In a business world where change is constant, recruiters need to adapt quickly. In the new world of work where job seekers, let alone top candidates, are in short supply, agile recruiting means accelerating the hiring process. Rather than a dance that begins when a hiring manager turns in a request and ends weeks (sometimes months) later with an offer, agile requiring is a sprint. Instead of gathering resumes, screening the candidates and finally forwarding the best fits only to have to start the process over when the hiring manager rejects them, an agile process begins forwarding the best resumes as they come in. “The beauty of agile recruiting is not having to wait until the very end of the process to get feedback. So presenting candidate profiles / resumes to hiring managers and getting their feedback is done more often,” explains Luwam Samuel who blogs at HR Talent IQ, Agile recruiting methods are effective for every organization, but for smaller teams and those working with tight budgets adopting agile techniques will fill jobs faster and less expensively. Smaller organizations will need to modify some of the steps an organization with greater resources will follow in developing an agile process. Still, the fundamentals of agile recruiting are the same: Make tasks management; set schedules Divide projects in small pieces by assigning priorities to the tasks. Agile recruiting calls these “sprints.” Harver, a provider of volume hiring solutions, says, “By breaking projects into tasks and sprints, you can determine which parts of a recruitment project can be allocated to specific team members. The same goes for setting timeframes for each of these projects and tasks. “This enables you to better assess which tasks to prioritize and which take the longest.” There’s a sample sprint plan on the Harver site. Leverage your resources You can often find great candidates just by asking. Before spending to post jobs, ask the hiring manager and the relevant employee teams for the names of potential candidates. At a small organization the personal touch is often most effective. So connect with these teams in person. Don’t ignore the candidates in your pipeline. These are the candidates who have an interest in the company. Some may have been runners up for the very job you’re now trying to fill. So before spending on pricey job postings, check the ATS. Because they’re targeted, specialty websites – the niche job boards – can be highly effective and less expensive. Get feedback and communicate Earlier we said getting feedback from the hiring manager is a key part of agile recruiting. Once you begin to identify potential candidates, have the hiring manager give you a read on how good a match they are. This needs to happen early in the recruiting process, so time isn’t wasted and your recruiting effort is more productive. It may take some prodding and training, especially for managers unfamiliar with the idea of agile recruiting. But, once they discover how much more quickly they get the people they need, they’ll be sold. As you implement agile recruiting says Samuel, “You will see a difference not just in your relationship with hiring managers and your delivery, but also in the way your own recruitment team works together.” However you choose to modify the basic agility recruiting principles for your needs, the essential ingredients remain the same – speed, feedback and adaptability.
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cold texting
2 min read
Cold Text Recruiting Tips
Texting candidates is becoming more pervasive in the recruitment world. We see it everyday here at Emissary. Our clients use us for scheduling interviews, onboarding as well as marketing communication, such as promotion of recruitment events. Our texting platform can also be used for internal coordination with employees for example to remind them of upcoming deadlines like open enrollment or to send an important company message from the CEO. But what are recruiters actually saying when they text a candidate. I thought it would be useful to ask recruiters to send me their exact messaging techniques. Some basic advice. Don’t be too wordy. Less is more. Some recruiters use texting to manage relationships rather than cold outreach. That’s fine too. Here’s what else they told me; Hi, Joe, this is Tom Lindsay, 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? I get about 50 percent response on the first send, and a little lower on follow ups. I had great responses, IMO using mass text messaging. If they don’t want to receive text messages they’ll definitely let you know and you fix it by opting them out of future texts. Now you have your audience narrowed down. Those that won’t answer a phone call but love texting will think you’re the best thing since sliced cheese. I experimented and changed it up. Some people will reply to messages worded one way while others will respond to the same message worded differently. 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?” instead. Keep it short and casual…MUCH SHORTER than an email. Use punctuation and emojis as you see fit. Candidates want to work with relatable people, not “headhunters”. Lots of success with “are you interest in a ____position in (city)? – my name, staffing agency/company ..I get a lot of replies that turn into interviews and beyond! Use it to start relationships/conversation rather than getting the meeting straight away. Treat it the same way you would meeting a prospect in real life. Don’t just go in for the kill. Ask questions see if there’s an interest there first and lead them down a path. Once you’ve got their challenges then you can say “we can help with that, would you be open to having a quick telephone conversation about it” Definitely recommend very plainly asking if they are interest in a (insert job title) position in (insert city)? If they reply no- “thanks! Let me know if I can help in the future!” If they reply yes- “great! When is a good time for a quick call to ask a few questions? Super informal ” (*emojis and wording based on audience) 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! If you can’t do cold out reach you can’t Source. If you don’t want to text that’s fine I’ll get to the candidate sooner. 90% of all text messages are read within 3 minutes of being sent. Hey, Joe. I am intrigued by your XYZ skill. And your stability at Company ABC is impressive. I am helping an entrepreneur in the XYZ domain to recruit for this xyz position. So I am checking to see if you are open to discussing this opportunity in detail. Number, Email. Thanks. Regards. Text recruiting is more art than science. Be creative but keep it simple. Candidates can simply respond any time with “stop” or “unsubscribe”. When this happens inside the Emissary platform, it will block you and anyone else in the company from being able to text that number in the future. When you click on that phone number in the future to text it, instead of being highlighted in green it will be in orange to indicate that the candidate opted out.
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Recruiting Tactics
2 min read
Job Training as a Recruitment Tactic
Worker demand for skills and development training has never been greater, which is why so many companies are using job training as a recruitment tactic. “For employers looking for an edge in 2022, investing in training and development could make the difference in competing in the war for talent,” said Richard Wahlquist, president and CEO of the American Staffing Association (ASA). 80% of working adults told The Harris Poll they consider an employer’s development and training offerings an important factor when accepting a new job. Across all generations of workers interest in employers job training and career development was strong, according to the survey commissioned by ASA. At 84%, Millennials felt the strongest about the importance of an employer’s training program, yet only 50% said they were getting the skills training needed to maintain or grow their careers. The percentages were far lower among Boomers (31%), Gen X (33%) and Gen Z (37%). Job training for Recruitment This is clear evidence there’s an opportunity for companies to use job training as a recruitment tactic. In fact, because the pandemic is accelerating the rate at which many skills are becoming outdated and even obsolete by as much as 70%, workers are even willing to trade pay for training. PwC, the global consulting firm, says, “Job seekers are willing to trade an average of 11.7% of their salary for training and flexibility — and that figure rises to 12.4% among those who work in in-demand fields like technology.” So important is training that 37% of candidates told PwC they’re willing to take a pay cut to learn new skills. When companies use job training as a recruitment tactic, it’s not just the employees that benefit. Multiple studies and research leave no doubt that training pays dividends to the organization in a variety of ways including improved worker retention, higher productivity and the ability of workers to step into new roles. Job Training has Multiple Benefits In addition to those benefits, the job search site Indeed lists eight others, among them is improved worker mobility, an especially important benefit in light of the worker shortage. “When an organization needs professionals with new or specific skills, they don’t have to go into the labor market to employ new professionals from outside sources,” says Indeed. One overlooked benefit of training is its value in increasing a company’s diversity. Ryan Carson, CEO of an online technical coding school, told the Society for Human resource Management, “Upskilling is a powerful way to improve diversity.” Pointing out that diversity is most common in low-level and entry-level positions, the SHRM article says training, “Can provide workers in those positions a path to higher-paying jobs while increasing diversity throughout the organization.” Job training as a recruitment tactic is more than just another tool for recruiters to leverage when filling jobs. Research by Gartner says Covid has caused the need for recruiter to change their strategy. Says Garnter, “To effectively shape the workforce, recruiting functions must consult on the skills acquisition decision, source from the total skills market and leverage labor market intelligence to drive the EVP’s (employer value proposition) responsiveness to candidates.” As candidates have become more selective about where, how and for whom they work, Gartner says organizations “need to rethink what they have to offer.” Job training as a recruitment tactic therefore has appeal not just to attract candidates to fill jobs now, but as a long-term practice for all companies. Contribution by John Zappe
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Recruiting
2 min read
You’re the Blackberry of Recruiting!
I remember the first time I got my first Blackberry phone! I was so excited, it was such a corporate status symbol! My first one was the Blackberry 5810 with the full keyboard where I could send emails from a phone! It was so awesome. My last Blackberry was the Pearl with the trackball! I loved that phone! Then came the iPhone and Blackberry died before it even knew it. Blackberry refused to believe that anyone would want more than what they were delivering with their phones. Power cell phone users are business people who only want and need office-type functionality. Super secure email. Texting. Calendar. Notes. Who the heck would want to search the world wide web on a phone!? Play games? Apps? Take pictures and video? Blackberry didn’t see the future. They were the market leader and only saw the past. By the time they figured out their error, it was too late and Apple and Android passed them by so fast, they could never catch up. You are the Blackberry of Recruiting! You died but you don’t know it yet. What are some ways to know if you are the Blackberry of Recruiting? You post and pray. I mean posting and praying is your primary recruiting strategy. You post a job and basically pray someone will apply. You refuse to believe that “your” candidates will respond, or even prefer, a text message over email. (Pro-Tip: Every level of candidate and salary range, prefers texting recruiters by a lot!) You have great talent in your ATS database, but every time you get an opening the first thing you do is post the job to see what “fresh” candidates are out there. You believe that a candidate should be willing to jump through your hoops “if they really want the job!” Any of this sound familiar? If it does, you might not be long for this recruiting world! How do you make sure you don’t become the Blackberry of Recruiting? First, you can’t ever get comfortable believing you have it figured out. Just because you get a lot of candidates doesn’t mean you’re great at recruiting, you might just have a great consumer brand. What happens if and when that fails? Or maybe you have a ton of applicants but the best talent isn’t applying. Great, you’re great at attracting the walking dead! Constantly question your process and test new ways you think might make it better. Can you change something to decrease the candidate drop-off rate? Is there a way to increase the number of applicants you’re getting from your best sources of hire? Make sure you are always reaching out to candidates to see how their experience is with your process. Blackberry’s biggest failure was not listening to their buyers and thinking they knew better. Right up until they lost their buyers! Don’t lose your buyers, your applicants, because you refuse to listen to them. Look into the future. Demo recruiting technologies on an ongoing basis. Stay on top of what the newest trends are, and how you can add those into your recruiting technology stack. Copy what others are doing that is working, don’t get caught up in making it your own way. Copy. Make it better. Repeat. I LOVED my Blackberry, right up to the moment that I didn’t. That is your candidate dilemma you must constantly be concerned with. They love you right now, but will they love next year when something better comes along?
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Recruiting
4 min read
The Talent Acquisition Process Explained
The talent acquisition process may be the most important of all an organization’s human resources functions. As every CEO knows, having the right people in the right jobs is the most essential ingredient for success. Yet building a talent acquisition process that consistently delivers the right people is far from easy. It’s a process with as many parts that need to work together as smoothly as a fine watch, and it can be just as delicate. In the broadest sense, these parts fall into just a few key steps: marketing, recruiting, qualifying, interviewing, selecting and onboarding. Depending on the size of the organization, each of these steps will have multiple parts. Yet every talent acquisition process starts, or should, with a strategic plan and objectives, as the Society for Human Resource Management describes in its A Guide to Understanding and Managing the Recruitment Process. MARKETING YOUR JOBS The goal of recruitment marketing is to stimulate job seeker interest in the company, a job and often both. Employer branding gives potential candidates a look at the company’s management style and what it might be like to work there. Sometimes described as sourcing or lead generation, at its simplest, this step in the talent acquisition process involves advertising available jobs by posting them to the company career site and externally to commercial job boards. Recruiters will also seek referrals from company employees and may also search online networks like LinkedIn and resume databases find candidates. Prior to launching a search, a recruiter will meet with the hiring managers to learn what skills, experience and other attributes candidates should have. During this step of the process, the recruiter and hiring manager will also discuss the type of personality that will be a good fit with the team. RECRUITING PROCESS While it’s common to refer to the entire talent acquisition process as recruiting, increasingly it is considered a distinct step. It overlaps with marketing to the extent that the employer brand plays an important part in enticing candidates to apply. The recruiter’s job here is to sort through the applications to identify those that best meet the job requirements and interest them in the opportunity. Compensation, benefits, the company culture and other factors, such as whether the job is remote or on-site all play a role in getting those candidates to move on to an interview. Recruiters will hold an initial phone call – a phone screen, sometimes done by wideo – with each of their top choices. The purpose is to assess their interest, clarify or supplement their resume and get a sense of how well they are likely to fit in. At the same time, the recruiter will also be “selling” the company and the job to the candidate. QUALIFYING THE CANDIDATE Qualifying a candidate before scheduling an interview can be as simple as ensuring they have the required licenses and documentation for the job. Or it can involve testing, completing sample assignments, job simulations and other objective methods of ensuring a candidate has the necessary skills. Many companies also include personality tests as part of the qualifying process. Thousands of different tests and assessments are available from dozens of independent companies, nearly all of which are offered online. Testing is especially common for software and related technical jobs. Many customer service jobs require potential hires to participate in a simulated customer calls. INTERVIEW PROCESS There are many different types of interviews. Most often, hiring managers will meet one-on-one with candidates. However, there are also interviews with a panel, sequential interviews that include a candidate’s future colleagues. Since the pandemic interviews have become more common, particularly for remote jobs. A company’s talent acquisition process may require structured interviews in which each candidate is asked the same questions, then scored on their responses. This reduces the possibility of bias in the selection process and makes comparisons easy. Behavioral interviews help an interviewer discover how a candidate is likely to act in the future, based on specific examples of what they’ve done in current and previous positions. Recruiters rarely participate in interviews, though they may help hiring managers and interview panels with questions and methods. In most cases, they also debrief interviewers and will review the responses and interview scores. Recruiters will also connect with the candidate to get their feedback and reaction. At this stage, it’s not uncommon for a candidate to drop out. SELECTION PROCESS The last step before making an offer is to check references. The goal is to get a candid appraisal of the candidate’s performance, teamwork and working style from their current employer. This step in the talent acquisition process can be especially challenging because so many companies limit the release of information Where a hiring manager has a personal connection, they may be the ones to do the reference check. A previous employer may be more willing to offer an assessment. Choosing from among the group of finalists is rarely easy. It often happens that two or three candidates are all highly qualified and each is an excellent choice. With labor in short supply, some companies will make an offer to each, rather than lose them to a competitor. When making an offer to only one, wait until the offer is accepted before notifying the runners up. Candidates often will reject an offer, choosing to accept a counteroffer from their current employer. You talent acquisition process should plan for this possibility by having the recruiter and hiring manager keep in close and regular contact with each finalist. ONBOARDING NEW HIRES This is the final step in the talent acquisition process, and one of the more crucial. It’s also the one most frequently taken for granted. Too many companies see this as a formality, limiting the involvement of human resources to having the new hire fills out all forms, signs up for benefits, scheduled raining and similar administrative details More progressive organizations see onboarding as a long-term strategy for the success of the new worker. With these companies, onboarding has managers meeting weekly with new hire for the first two or three months to discuss their progress, set goals and to provide coaching. ANALYZING YOUR TALENT ACQUISITION PROCESS No talent acquisition process can be considered complete without a regular review of metrics. This is an ongoing profess, rather than a separate or distinct step. There are dozens of measures recruiters use to track the success of the recruiting program. Time to hire, cost of hire, source of hire, offer acceptance and retention are just a few of the more common metrics. One of the newest and arguably the most valuable, is tracking the performance of a new hire. Together these metrics don’t just report on the success of a talent acquisition process, they inform the strategy for improvement. The steps we outline here are just the basics of what is required for a strong and successful talent acquisition program. Each step has multiple ingredients. What’s right and works for one company will almost certainly be different for another. The best will reflect the needs and strategic goals of their organization. Contribution by John Zappe
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Recruiting Tactics
3 min read
Talent Acquisition Strategies for 2022
Talent acquisition in 2022 is going to be more challenging than ever. That’s why your strategy for attracting candidates needs to “get real” about putting together creative strategies that can move the hiring needle. There is essentially a new normal when it comes to recruiting. The 2022 Hiring Trends Report from Modern Hire offers some insights for hiring practitioners in what they define as the “next normal” in talent acquisition. They have identified several trends that will be most important to hiring teams this year. Adjust your talent acquisition strategies accordingly. Set up for long term agility in hiring. Organizations can’t expect today’s labor shortage to solve itself; rather, staffing needs to change to adapt to the market to remain competitive. Recruiting teams need efficient, agile, responsive recruitment and hiring technology to deliver a winning model for hiring performance today and in the future. This includes AI and predictive analytics to enable data driven hiring decisions and the tracking and measurement of outcomes necessary for continuously improving hiring. Hire for potential over current skill. Unquestionably, technology today advances faster than ever before and as a result existing skillsets become outdated much quicker than in past decades. To combat this, organizations are wise to focus more on candidate potential than current skill. Job relevant competency-based assessment tools using advanced technology can help employers narrow the candidate pool quickly to those who will be able to learn and adapt to meet the challenges of your organizational future, while also having a more positive impact. Focus on the job in the candidate experience. By combining the right technology with human touch, recruiters can create personalized hiring experiences that effectively represent their organization. Giving candidates a realistic preview of the job enables them to be informed and engaged in the process, promoting a positive hiring experience, and encouraging employees to be their true selves. This includes providing job relevant information as opposed to games that don’t clearly connect to the job, and personality tests that aren’t predictive of on-the-job success. Organizations that paint an honest picture of the job are more likely to hire candidates who will stay for the long haul. Continued adoption of AI tech. Forward thinking hiring teams are already using AI-powered tools to anticipate hiring needs, identify internal opportunities, reduce hiring costs and turnover, and measure the progress of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. In 2022, AI-equipped hiring solutions will be essential to enabling data-driven hiring decisions and for tracking and measuring outcomes necessary in the ever-changing job market. Recruitment teams will look to advanced, science-based AI solutions that include predictive analytics, automated interview scoring, and natural language processing to further boost new-hire performance, retain employees, and increase efficiency. These tools will be the clear differentiator for delivering ROI. “We will likely continue to see unprecedented recruitment and hiring challenges in the coming months which can only be met with a continued focus on impartial, efficient and effective virtual tools and data-driven techniques in 2022 and beyond,” said Borchert. “Enterprises must take action to modernize their hiring processes to ensure more personal, improved experiences for candidates and hiring teams, ultimately increasing hiring performance for greater success.” That quote pretty much sums it up for 2022. But I would add a few more talent acquisition strategies to this list. Bigger Focus on Mission/Purpose Today’s candidates are looking for more meaning from their work. The pandemic has changed the way look at their jobs. Employers must adapt to this by changing their messaging that leads with mission driven elements. Some experts are calling it the ‘great reset’ because many workers are taking stock of how, why and where they work. Your messaging will need to resonate with these job hoppers. Becoming a Remote First Company Some say remote first companies will eventually outpace their rivals. Maybe, maybe not. But what you can be sure of is that the 9-5, ‘in the office every day job’ is just about gone. In its place is flexible or ‘hybrid work’ that allows your employees to determine how and where they want to work. In person work will be relegated to just 2 days a week on average in my opinion. We’ll also see an increase in quartely all company meetings where the entire company can come together in person for a week. So get ready for another bumpy ride in the world of recruitment. It’s going to be interesting to see how companies talent acquisition strategies adapt in 2022.
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Recruiting
2 min read
Quality of Hire Should Correlate to High Performance!
We have an obsession in talent acquisition about Quality of Hire (QoH). We try to tie everything we do to the fact if we do “this thing” it’s going to increase our QoH. If we just use this one source more, our QoH will be better. If we use this one assessment our QoH will be better. If we interview better our QoH will be better. Sound familiar?! The problem is, most of us don’t even really measure our quality of hire! We’ll measure our 90-day turnover and call it quality of hire, but just because someone stays for 90 days has zero correlation to whether they are actually a good hire or not. They just stayed around for 90 days! Our reality is quality of hire actually correlates to high performance. Meaning, if you hire better, the better higher, on average, should have higher performance. So, the only true way you can measure quality of hire is to correlate the performance of an employee to their hire, source, etc. This means you really don’t know your quality of hire until you have some sort of measurable performance from an employee you hire. Do you really mean Quality of Applicant and not Quality of Hire? What I find is most organizations actually mean Quality of Applicant, but use the term Quality of Hire. Quality of Applicant can be measured by a simple metric of what percentage of the applicants you forwarded onto a hiring manager does the hiring manager choose to interview? Example: A recruiter screens ten applicants and passed them onto the hiring manager. The hiring manager decides to interview five of the applicants. The QoA measure would be 50%. I get asked a lot about what level of QoA should an organization or recruiter strive to achieve. In my mind, if a recruiter is good at screening and has a great relationship with the hiring manager, that QoA should be 90%! There really should be very many reasons a hiring manager doesn’t interview someone I send them if we are both doing our jobs at a high level. As a recruiter, if I know the job and the type of candidate the hiring manager wants, and the hiring manager has told me everything I need to know, there really shouldn’t be any reason for them to turn down a candidate I send them. The problem is, most recruiters and hiring managers aren’t giving each other what they need to be successful at a 90-100% level. Quality of Applicant is a Recruiting Measure, Quality of Hire is Not! In most organizations, a Recruiter does not make the final candidate selection and that same Recruiter does not manage the onboarding, training, and performance of the employee. Thus, Quality of Hire is a Hiring Manager metric, not a recruiting metric. Almost all organizations get this wrong. Quality of Applicant is by far a better measure for recruiting and for measuring the recruiting function effectiveness. As a recruiter, if I’m sending candidates to a hiring manager that they don’t want to interview and hire, I’m not doing my job very well. QoA is a direct measure of how well a recruiter is doing. Okay, I hear you, “but, Tim, what about a recruiter who finds great candidates but the hiring manager is just super picky!?” You are still not doing the job! Part of the job of recruiting is not just finding great talent, but having a relationship with the hiring manager so you are not wasting valuable resources of the company. The better relationship you have, I guarantee you the fewer misses you’ll have when sending applicants to that hiring manager. What did we learn today? QoH correlates directly to employee performance, but doesn’t correlate at all to recruiter performance! QofA directly correlates to recruiter performance. Recruiter performance also correlates rather high to the positive relationship they have with the hiring managers they support.
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Human Resources
3 min read
Relocation Benefits Less Attractive in Remote Era
Just as Covid is changing the nature of work, it’s caused workers and their employers to rethink the meaning of employee relocation and just what kind of benefit it still is. Before 2020, relocation meant geographically reassigning workers as part of a promotion, or because they had special skills needed elsewhere, or to grow the business, or some combination of these. Relocation for new workers meant covering moving expenses and maybe some additional help with housing. Especially overseas relocation was a plum benefit that could be counted on to attract and retain the best talent. Fewer Workers Willing to Relocate Since the pandemic, some of the luster of relocation has worn off. The relocation benefit in a time of labor shortage and remote work isn’t as exciting a benefit as it was just a few years ago. For many workers, accepting a new job across town or across the country doesn’t have to mean relocating and insisting on it could be a deal breaker for the company. According to the 54th Annual Atlas Corporate Relocation Survey, 60% of companies had workers refuse a relocation om 2020. A third of respondent report the number of workers turning down a move has increased from previous years. Why, is hardly a surprise – Covid. “The COVID-19 pandemic eclipsed all other factors impacting relocation last year,” the survey report said. “In 2020, the most frequent reason given by employees declining relocation was health concerns/illness/the COVID-19 pandemic, both overall (52%) and internationally (44%).” That doesn’t mean workers haven’t been relocating. Since the pandemic and increasingly in the last year, workers are relocating on their own, bypassing corporate relocation benefits and policies. Meanwhile, cities and towns, states too, have jumped at the opportunity to lure workers by offering their own relocation benefits. Hints of this can be seen in the Atlas survey. It found a sharp decline (from 52% to 32%) in the percentage of employees declining corporate relocation because of the employment of their spouse or partner. “This shift downward may reflect the impact of higher unemployment levels during the COVID-19 pandemic (fewer dual-income households), as well as flexible work arrangements (telecommuting/work from home) being leveraged by many companies during this time.” Mobility, the relocation trade association’s magazine, pointed out that, “Workforce mobility is no longer just about the relocation of employees. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the shift toward more remote work, which has become a key aspect of mobility and requires the use of technology to facilitate that increasing aspect of the industry.” The impact of remote work on the relocation industry and corporate relocation benefits was a key topic at the trade association’s conference last fall. “How does the rise of remote work affect who needs to move and why?” was key discussed topic at Worldwide ERC’s Global Symposium. As the relocation industry wrestles with the changes accelerated by the pandemic, companies are worrying about a different type of relocation. Call it remote work’s do-it-yourself relocation benefit. A Harris Poll survey in March 2021 found 11% of the US population moved during the first 12 months of the pandemic to take advantage of options afforded by remote work. “Among those recent movers, three quarters (75%) say they moved for positive reasons, such as being closer to family or friends or living in an area they’ve always dreamed of,” reported Zillow, the digital real estate company that sponsored the survey. Most did that without help or even the knowledge of their employer. That’s causing headaches for corporate managers, says the Society for Human Resource Management. When companies relocate workers they know where they are going and when and how they’ll work. With DIY relocators, companies learn this only after the fact, if at all. “Managers need to know where their employees are working and when they are working, so they can stay in compliance with the laws of the jurisdiction where the employees are doing their,” says the SHRM article. Given the current labor shortage, companies are casting a wide net to attract workers. For many candidates, dangling generous relocation benefits is not much of a lure and may even be a negative. Instead, companies are promoting jobs as being remote; no need to relocate. The number of jobs advertised on Indeed.com doubled in the first year of the pandemic and continues to rise. Cities Now Offering Relocation Benefits Cities, towns and some states are taking advantage of workers newfound mobility, paying them $10,000 or more to relocation. The AARP listed six areas of the country – including the entire of West Virginia – offering relocation benefits. So eager are communities to attract well paid, remote workers that they’re sweetening the deal with all sorts of perks. Move to southwest Michigan and the Move to Michigan program will give a worker $15,000 toward the purchase of a house. And an annual memberships at fitness clubs. And a membership at a driving range. And a coworking space and free car service to the airport. In northwest Arkansas, relocating workers get the $10,000, membership to local cultural organizations and their choice of a bike.
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Human Resources
2 min read
Remote Work is Changing Performance Evaluations
Performance reviews are no one’s idea of fun, as useful and valuable they may be when done well. But since the Covid pandemic they’ve become a critical tool and a difficult challenge as entire teams are now working entirely remotely. The continuing pandemic has forced companies to adopt new ways of managing workers and maintaining some semblance of corporate culture. Techniques like the famed “management by walking around,” in-person check-ins, stand-ups and informal team lunches and meetings have been radically adjusted if not abandoned in the face of a dispersed workforce connected only by technology. In this new world of work, performance evaluations of remote workers require a different, more consistent, and more frequent approach. Instead of an annual or quarterly review, “Systematic, frequent, and brief reviews focused on task performance, effective feedback and coaching, and guidance in wise decision-making will replace it in organizations that want to survive and thrive in the post-COVID world,” writes behavioral economist and author Dr. Gleb Tsipursky. His advice and that of writers at Fobes, the Harvard Business Review, Reworked and elsewhere echoes what companies have been hearing for years: Performance reviews should be frequent and focused on coaching and goals, and less on critiquing. Remote work has made this more essential and put far greater emphasis on communication and cultural reinforcement. Remote Work Is Killing Old School Reviews “Performance evaluations are one of the strongest anchors and artifacts of your corporate culture,” says Mark Mortensen, associate professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD. His point is that managers need to communicate the company’s long and short-term goals as part of the evaluation process. “What leaders do and say now in these times is going to be remembered,” he insists. Communication, frequent and both formal and informal is how to hold together a team. Regular communication with every employee was always important. But without those impromptu “water-cooler” conversations, managers must make an intentional and deliberate effort to speak regularly with each of their reports. “Don’t allow remote workers to operate within an information vacuum — you might need to communicate (or even over-communicate) far more than you did previously. Remember, the goal of a performance review is to improve performance by influencing behavior,” says Paycor’s Guide to Conducting Remote Performance Reviews. The tendency is to still think of a performance review as a formal, once a year structured event documenting (almost always imperfectly) a worker’s performance, often by assigning numeric scores. That old school approach didn’t work so well when workers were mostly all in one place. Gallup made that clear reporting, “Traditional performance reviews and approaches to feedback are often so bad that they actually make performance worse about one-third of the time.” Remote Work Check-ins With a distributed workforce toiling off site, the traditional approach is replaced with short, frequent conversations as brief as a 15-minute weekly check-in. That shouldn’t be the only conversation of the week, but it should be the one not sacrificed for convenience. “Schedule uninterrupted time without distractions to ensure the employee knows he/she is the priority during that window of time,” says Jennifer Preston, HR consultant at FlexHR. If this advice about performance evaluations for remote workers sounds so much like basic good management, it is. It’s effective even for organization that still cling to the practice of annual reviews. Managers who regularly communicate with their team members, check in with them formally, and note their achievements and accomplishment will have a strong record to rely on when the yearly evaluations are due. But even better, they’ll also have a successful team of remote workers. Contribution by John Zappe
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