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Recruiting Trends
3 min read
Job Engagement Trends - Emissary.ai
A new survey reveals that nearly a third of workers report decreased engagement with the connection that they feel to their work. This isn’t a new trend but it foretells ominous signs for talent retention in the coming years. Remote working is not the only culprit. The Conference Board survey said recently that work location—whether on-site, remote, or a hybrid blend of the two—has no impact on self-reported engagement levels. But some people do feel decreased engagement more than others: Women, Millennials, and individual contributors report lower engagement than men, older generations, and executives. The survey also finds that even though more workers want to quit, few have actual plans to do so. Perhaps the perception (real or imagined) of a recession next year has them thinking twice about quitting. This might be a temporary respite for employers that have been steadily losing the balance of power to candidates. Additionally, having a caring, empathetic leader increased in importance to hybrid workers (56 percent) and remote workers (50 percent) more than those in the physical workplace (44 percent), perhaps a reminder to leaders to be more intentional and inclusive for those who are remote at least some of the time. Leadership has to step up! The latest workforce survey from The Conference Board polled office workers last month. Respondents weighed in on workplace culture, work location, compensation, and benefits. Here’s what they said; Many employees are less committed, but they’re working hard anyway. How do you feel now about your engagement and level of effort compared to how you felt 6 months ago? 30 percent say their level of engagement at work—the commitment and connection that employees feel to their work—is lower than six months ago. Lower engagement isn’t necessarily affecting effort: Only 18 percent say their level of effort has decreased in the last six months. 50 percent say it’s the same; 31 percent say it’s increased. More women, Millennials, and individual contributors report lower engagement and effort than their counterparts. Engagement levels decreased for all workers regardless of work location/schedule. How do you feel now about your engagement compared to how you felt 6 months ago? Engagement decreased for 30 percent of fully remote workers, 31 percent of workers with a hybrid work location, and 30 percent for fully in-office workers. More workers want to quit… How do you feel now about your intent to stay compared to how you felt 6 months ago? 37 percent say their intent to stay has decreased in the last six months. More women and individual contributors say their intent to stay has decreased than their counterparts. Decreases in intent to stay were similar among generations. …but few have firm plans to leave any time soon. Have you voluntarily left your organization for another job since the pandemic began? Only 12 percent are actively planning to leave in the next six months. A looming recession has some workers thinking twice before quitting. Given the economic slowdown, are you more or less likely to leave your current organization in the next six months? 29 percent say the economic slowdown makes them less likely to leave their job. “While these results show that a likely recession may slow some of the high turnover we’ve been seeing, engagement is eroding for many of those who remain,” said Rebecca Ray, PhD, Executive Vice President of Human Capital at The Conference Board. “For businesses to truly thrive, they should focus on improving employee engagement, no matter the employee’s work location or schedule. Especially during challenging times, previous research from The Conference Board has shown that it is important for leaders to reconnect all workers to the mission and purpose of the organization, as well as to lead with compassion. For workers who are remote or hybrid, this may mean being more intentional about making time for connection.” A majority of workers now work a hybrid schedule—some days in the office, some at home. What best describes your current working situation? 55 percent say they have a hybrid work schedule, an increase from 43 percent six months ago. 16 percent say they are hybrid with a schedule that varies week to week. 31 percent of workers are remote, a decrease from 48 percent six months ago. Only 14 percent are in the physical workplace full-time. More women work remotely than men (33 percent vs. 27 percent). Few businesses are requiring staff to return to the office full time. How has your organization addressed the shift to remote work and the return to the workplace? Only 6 percent say their companies required all employees to return to the workplace full-time. 35 percent say their companies made working remotely full-time an option. 32 percent of workers surveyed say their companies allow flexible work hours. “Many workers have reevaluated their priorities since the beginning of 2020 at the outset of COVID,” says Robin Erickson, PhD, Vice President of Human Capital at The Conference Board. “Employees are not only demanding to retain the flexibility they gained from being required to work remotely, but they expect genuine and transparent communications to continue from their leaders as well. That’s not to say that pay no longer matters—it’s just not the only thing that matters, or even the most important thing. Now, when looking for a job, workers are weighing a variety of factors unique to them and their needs.” It is a new era of job engagement brought on by a number of workplace trends. Employers (and their C-Suites) need to listen more closely to what workers want. Those that can improve engagement levels will have a better chance at becoming an employer of choice for today’s job market.
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Recruiting
2 min read
Effects of Pay Transparency in Recruiting - Emissary.ai
With each month, more states are joining the trend of passing pay transparency laws. Primarily, these laws require job postings to include pay ranges publicly. As of January 1, 2023, Washington and California will join the fold, widening the number of employers responsible to pay transparency laws. With laws already passed and likely more legislation to come, employers need to consider how to be ready for changes in the law. Compliance with new regulations will help employers remain at low risk for future legal action. Employers outside of current pay transparency laws may consider reviewing their current policy and adopting an official approach to remain attractive to candidates in the current job market. One thing is true, all employers planning to implement a pay transparency policy need to consider the ramifications and construct a compliant plan. Identifying Gaps in Pay Employers facing pay transparency requirements must address existing salaries and examine gaps, considering how transparency could affect employee morale and sentiment. Employers should remember that employees discussing salary amongst themselves is considered protected activity. Executives may want to hire a compensation expert to conduct a pay audit. A subject matter expert from a non-biased third party could help identify where perceptions about unfair pay may lie. Following the identification of potentially unfair gaps, market benchmarking should be done for the positions. Understanding where the minimum, maximum, and mid pay range stands for the local job market assists in pointing to whether current employees are over, under, or averagely paid. Of course, other factors are at play and should be considered including tenure, skillset, and value to the organization when conducting a compensation review. Address Pay in Recruiting Process In a recent survey by Indeed, 75% percent of 1,500 job seekers say they would be more likely to apply for a job if the salary range was listed in the job posting. Depending on the state, there may be different requirements when it comes to pay transparency for job postings. Many states require employers to be transparent if a job seeker asks for salary information during the application process while others require it to be made clear in the job posting itself. Some states require additional information to be posted including benefits, retirement plant, bonus structure, and other company offered perks. Job seekers have the ability to be more selective now than ever before. As employers strategize on how to attract top candidates, they should consider how being transparent about pay will impact the candidate perception of the organization. Organizations providing clarity up front with salary ranges can send a powerful message about company culture and show equity as an important value. In today’s competitive market, showing candidates from the start of the hiring process that the company values treating employees fairly when it comes to pay not only widens the hiring pool, but it can result in longer tenure. Pay Transparency Communication is Key Keeping the doors of communication open when it comes to a new policies or changes to hiring practices is vital. In order to build trust with employees, share with them who will be affected, when changes are taking places, how decision were made, and why the change is occurring. Planning a communication strategy is often an after thought when it should be at the forefront. Employees headed towards disengagement, recently coined ‘quiet quitting’, often start down that path with some form of feeling distrust. When organizations trust their employees and communicate openly, their workforce is empowered to engage in a meaningful way. Stephanie Mauney is a freelance writer and content curator specializing in Human Resources
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Recruiting
8 min read
Great Ways to Attract Healthcare Talent - Emissary.ai
When I first took over talent acquisition of a large health system, I was shocked at how traditional the recruitment process was for nursing and other ancillary healthcare roles within the health system. I had come from another industry that was at the forefront of recruitment technology and recruitment marketing, and I felt like I had taken a time machine backward! My systems were dated, my processes seem antiquated, and I was surrounded by hiring managers who felt like they were entitled to talent. As in, talent should be begging them for the job, not the other way around. Because of this perfect storm of awful recruiting practices, we were spending millions of dollars on agency nursing and Locums. The first thing I did was call my CFO and scheduled a private meeting. I was prepared to ask for an enormous increase in our talent acquisition budget, more than double the previous year. I had all the data and charts and I walked in confidently. I sat down and before I could say anything, he said, “Tim! Thanks for coming, I was going to set this meeting up myself to go over your budget with you for next year! We need to find a way to cut 15%!” I felt sick to my stomach! It’s classic healthcare. There’s a mission to save lives. You don’t save lives by spending money on non-life-saving expenses. Or, this was how it was traditionally looked at across all non-revenue healthcare functions, and still is at many healthcare systems across the country. Thankfully, though, we are also seeing many examples of modern healthcare systems that understand the value of having an amazing talent attraction engine, and how being world-class at Talent Acquisition can actually save a healthcare system valuable dollars that can be spent on patient care. I’ll be honest, the CFO and I became very good friends. I found in him a partner who understood if we are paying agencies millions of dollars to properly staff our health system, we are paying a super-premium to have that done. If we do this properly ourselves, we can save 30-40% of that cost which is simply agency profit. The problem we had was a leadership team that didn’t trust that Talent Acquisition could do that! Healthcare Talent Acquisition Pro Tip #1 – Find an executive champion that “gets it” when it comes to the value proposition great talent acquisition can bring to an organization. The first thing I had to do was fight to get properly funded if I wanted to change. Working harder is not a sustainable talent acquisition strategy for success! But, it’s the main strategy used by the majority of healthcare talent acquisition teams. The problem isn’t that you can’t work harder, it’s that it still only gets you so far, and eventually, you just burn out your best people and you end up worse off. I found my “extra” money in the spaces where we were having to spend more money because we weren’t able to recruit well on our own, then my team and I had to prove that little by little we could make a dent into our agency spend, by having better processes, better technology, and utilizing modern recruiting strategies. Healthcare TA leaders will understand, though, that unit managers don’t want to give up their agency folks! It’s a crutch that they’ve come accustomed to relying on over time and those agency resources are hard to give up. Healthcare Talent Acquisition Pro Tip #2 – Start small with the leaders that have the most pain. Don’t try and eat the elephant in one bite! I had to use a bit of informal leverage and a little formal HR power to get a couple of nursing managers to play along with me. With my new CFO champion, I called a meeting with two nursing leaders to “propose” a test “we” were going to try with their units to eliminate agency spend altogether by properly staffing their units. Of course, they were skeptical because it had never happened before, but when the CFO and HR guy are sitting across from you, it’s hard to say “No!” The key was that we weren’t eliminating agencies first and leaving them short-staffed. We were first going to “overstaff” them while they had agency and allow them to properly onboard and train, and then little by little ween them off of agency. We had to prove to them we could get them the “permanent” corporate staff first, allow them to transition, and show them the value of having full-time staff versus agency nurses. In the first year, moving unit to unit, in “test” mode. We were able to eliminate half of our agency spend, while only increasing our TA budget by a few hundred thousand dollars. We saved well over a million, we spent about two hundred thousand. The CFO and CEO were super happy. Talent acquisition had the resources we needed, on an ongoing basis, and we continued to go after the rest of the agency spend. The goal was never zero agency spend, as there will always be some capacity, short-term needs for agency. The problem I see in every health system, is we are using agency for full-time staffing, not emergency staffing. Healthcare Talent Acquisition Pro Tip #3 – >Set a laser-like, narrow vision of what you want to do, measure it, and report the outcomes widely. Make sure everyone knows what you are doing and why. We had a culture where leaders in the health system just assumed that talent acquisition couldn’t help them, so they ran to agency to help them with their needs. Again, working with finance, we put a stop to the ability of leaders being able to request agency assistance. The only way an agency would get its invoices processed is if they were approved by talent acquisition. We had to know where the money was being spent and why! We had to know where we were failing in talent acquisition, no matter how hard it was to see. This one simple process change, while not popular with leaders, immediately gave us great insight into where and how much was being spent on agency and where our biggest problems were. We also found out that roughly 10-20% of agency spend had nothing to do with talent acquisition failure, but because we had leaders who had fallen in love with their agency resources and didn’t want to give them up! We had candidates for those jobs, but leaders were telling us “No” simply because they didn’t want to lose their trained agency nurse. I often speak to talent acquisition leaders in healthcare who will say, “Tim, I don’t have the capacity to take on agency!” and my reply is always, “yes you do!” It’s a giant bucket of money being spent and the majority of that spend is a direct correlation to talent acquisition failure! It can’t be ignored! Plus, every single dollar you can cut from that spend is a TA win! How did we cut agency spend and hire more nurses? First, I’m using “Nurses” as the main role, but let’s be honest, this is about all positions we hire for in healthcare. It’s just that nursing makes up such a large portion of the hiring we do, but all of the strategies and tools I talk about work across healthcare roles from salaried to hourly. #1 – We used our Recruiting Super Power! We immediately ramped up our “Alumni” and “Boomerang” hiring. Roughly 30% of new hires, across all jobs, leave within six months. It’s for all the reasons you can think of around fit, culture, etc. This is about the grass isn’t always greener on the other side, and we were going to welcome our past employees back with open arms. In fact, not just welcome them. We were going to pursue them with vigor! No one was going to love them as much as us. While we wouldn’t get them all back, we were going to some of them back! We used a combination of mediums to message our former employees. We texted them updates about new stuff going on at the health system, promotions, projects, awards, etc. We all love hearing the “gossip” of our former employers, and we played into this desire to want information. We sent emails, send snail mail to their homes, we made periodic phone calls. We built an entire communication plan around keeping in contact with former, high-valued employees. The greatest superpower a recruiter has is to make someone feel wanted. We made our former employees feel very wanted! #2 – We started texting nurses! When I first started at the health system none of my Nurse Recruiters would text a nurse. They only sent emails. When I asked them why don’t you text these nurse candidates, they chuckled and said, “Tim, you don’t understand, nurses don’t want to be texted!” So, we went on a field trip! That field trip over to one of our hospitals and visited one of our Med-Surg Units and spoke to actual nurses who worked for us and I asked a few questions: Tim: “How much time do you get to sit down and check email throughout the day?” Nurse: “OMG! Almost never. Maybe a few minutes and then it’s only my work email.” Tim: “Yeah, I know you guys are running constantly! If I had to reach you, during your shift, what would be the best way to contact you?” Nurse: “Oh, just text me! That’s really my only communication all day I get.” End of the field trip. Nurses are very busy people with full lives. They don’t check LinkedIn. They rarely check their email. If you want to reach them, you have to reach them in the way they communicate and that’s by text message. #3 – We turned on the Programmatic Job Advertising engine. Marketing works. We all get marketed to non-stop all day long. When we are online. When we are watching TV. When we are watching TV and online at the same time!/p> It turns out, most of us in talent acquisition isn’t very good at marketing and job advertising. We tend to just post jobs in the same places we always have, regardless of how great they work or don’t work. We do this primarily because we don’t know there are other options. This is how you were trained, so we just keep doing it. Traditional job advertising is fairly inefficient. You post a job on a job site, hoping a candidate you want will visit that job site and see your job and apply to that job. Only about 15% of people are actively looking for a job at any time, so 85% of people are not actively looking, meaning they probably aren’t going to job sites. Programmatic job advertising is basically letting artificial intelligence put your job ad in front of candidates where they are on the internet versus where you think they might be if they were looking for a job. An example of this could be a Nurse is reading an article on a site about a new nursing technique and innovation and programmatic technology would serve up your job ad to this nurse on that site the moment they just happen to be reading that article! It’s amazing and scary technology all at the same time! We see healthcare organizations that test programmatic job advertising spend less and get more applicants than what they were doing prior to using only traditional job posting methods. #4 – We owned the Nursing programs in our area! We made the conscious decision that no other health system was going to do as much as we would at our local nursing programs, pharmacy programs, doctoral programs, physical therapy programs, etc. We were going to donate resources, time, etc. We were going to be the flagship partner for these educational institutions so when students thought of where they wanted to go work, it was going to be us, every time. We sponsored Nursing school awards programs with scholarships and funding for ceremonies, etc. Besides sponsoring we made sure our nursing executives showed up and mentored. We worked with school staff to help them get our nursing leaders as frequent speakers for their classes and programs. We also instituted two programs to show our commitment to new grads. We would sign up nurses prior to graduation and pay for tuition, etc. And we also started a tuition repayment plan. Both plans were built on the same premise. Come work for us for a certain period of time, and we’ll pay for your school. Of course, the health system can only take so many entry levels, but we wanted to get in early and get our pick of the best and brightest. #5 – We did some gorilla marketing! Sometimes you still have to go old-school when it comes to marketing to candidates and we put up billboards around our competition with our employment branding messages and easy text to apply messages. I wanted to let every healthcare worker in our area know, constantly, they had another option after a long, hard, frustrating day. And we were that option! We hired rolling billboards on Nursing Week to drive by their campus with messages of appreciation of their efforts and profession, with us highlighting our “Nurse of Year” professionals, etc. I wanted them to think, “why doesn’t my health system appreciate me like that?!” We worked with our young nurses to support after-hour networking and wine parties where they could invite former classmates who worked at other systems to stay connected. We offered up awesome speakers for continuing education where we of course invited our nurses but also sent invites out to “all” nurses in the area to learn and grow. Recruiting nurses and healthcare workers, in general, is always hard, and it’s extremely hard now and what looks like will be hard well into the future. We can no longer just post our jobs and pray and hope someone will apply. We must actively pursue candidates and show them there are great options for them to prosper and succeed. We do this through great messaging and marketing and having the tools that will allow us to reach healthcare workers in the way they want to be communicated with. There is no one silver bullet when it comes to being great at nurse recruiting, but when we use all the silver bullets we have together, we can be much more effective in attracting and hiring great talent.
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Recruiting Tactics
8 min read
7 Recruiting Strategies for Hourly Workers - Emissary.ai
If you clicked on this link it’s safe to assume you probably are feeling some pressure right now to hire more employees. This information is purposely designed to focus on hourly workers, but some of these ideas and strategies work across all levels of worker. Unlike, our salaried workforce, though, hourly workers tend to actually be more difficult to find. They most likely don’t have a profile on LinkedIn, or a resume on a job board database. Hourly workers usually fill out applications and as of 2022, no one in the HR tech space has really figured out the secret sauce of building an hourly recruiting technology that attracts the massive workforce that is hourly that is similar to what we’ve been able to do around the salaried workforce. So, I’ll just come out and say that one thing that we all feel, but we sound silly if we say it out loud – “Hiring Hourly Workers Is More Difficult Than Hiring Salaried Workers!” at least when we get into ultra-low unemployment environments like we have right now. TL;DR, Blah, Blah, Blah, just give me the silver bullets! That’s what it’s all about. We need to hire and we need to do it fast, please don’t give us some kind of mathematical formula to solve! Not to worry, like you I rip open the Oreo cookie and just get to the good stuff right away! My Top 7 Hourly Recruiting Strategies! Don’t let your current workers leave! Okay, we are not saying to lock them into your place of business! That’s illegal, don’t do that! The best hire you’ll ever make is the one you don’t have to! Yes, we need to desperately need to hire more workers, but simultaneously we need to stop the out flow of workers leaving us. You will not be able to stop everyone from leaving. Hourly workforces are transit by nature, but if you can reduce your turnover by 10-20% it has a giant impact on your ability to hire. We tend to discount feedback of workers that leave. It’s a very normal psychological response to do this. We feel like if this person has decided to leave then they are no longer part of the “family” and we basically give up on them. But, if we start to really gather this data/feedback and look at it all together we will begin to see trends and common issues that we can work to change and make better. I love to ask location managers this one question: “If I gave you $100 per employee, what would you do to increase their experience and retain them longer?” What we know as HR and Talent Acquisition professionals is $100 to keep an employee is literally nothing in the greater business scheme. We pay way more than $100 to hire the replacement of each worker that leaves us on average. The actual average cost of an application in the hourly world right now runs anywhere from $30-60 per application, not hire, just getting an application! When we work on this question of what would a manager do, it’s never “Oh, just give each worker the $100.” Because we all know that would have limited impact in retaining a worker. What we find is managers come up with all kinds of low-cost and no-cost ideas to show workers they are appreciated throughout the year. Sending them handwritten thank you notes to their homes, sending or giving them small gifts of appreciation, posting pictures of them with words of thanks on social media, etc. All of which adds up over time of letting our hourly workers know that you care about them more than someone else will, and you should never underestimate the power of that feeling in retaining your workforce! Turns out, Marketing works! On average right now, organizations are spending 5-10X the amount on job advertising that they were pre-pandemic. Meaning, if you spent $500 a month running job ads to attract workers, you will need to spend $2500 to $5000 just to get the same amount of applicants! Still, this is the primary applicant attraction strategy that organizations still use to hire hourly workers. We post our jobs on job boards, social media, etc. and we hope someone will apply. For those who are spending about the same amount as we did two years ago, that is basically all you have is hope! Many organizations are beginning to use Programmatic Job Advertising tools. Programmatic Job Advertising is a sophisticated way to say we are letting the robots run our job ads, we aren’t making the decisions anymore! Turns out, the robots actually do a wonderful job at running job ads! Actually, programmatic technology has been around for decades but we’ve just recently started using it for job advertising. You know how you got to Nordstrom’s and look at a pair of shoes, but you’re not ready to buy. So, you then go to another site, like Facebook or something, and there’s an ad for those exact same shoes you just looked at! That’s programmatic, and it’s very powerful at getting you to buy. It works the same way for candidates. Programmatic puts your job posting in front of them where they are on the internet, not just at job sites, so your job posting gets viewed by many more possible candidates. On average we see organizations saving around 30% on their job advertising by using programmatic job advertising technology. Communicate with Hourly Candidates Their Way! We tend to build hiring processes around the way we work. If I’m a corporate recruiter, I’m sitting in front of my laptop or desktop all day. I’m comfortable working in that “environment”. 90% of our hourly workforce only access the internet, thus your jobs, from a mobile device, their phone. Yet almost all hourly application processes are built around desktop apply, not mobile. I ask recruiters, HR pros, etc. to constantly do one thing for me. Go over to the nearest McDonalds and just park in the lot. Logon to their free WIFI and then go apply to one of your jobs. What the vast majority find, is that is sucks! It’s difficult to navigate and takes to long to load, etc. This is exactly how your potential applicants feel as well. And they give up. On average, organizations lose about 60% of applicants to give up on trying to apply to you because the process takes too long or is confusing on mobile. I recently was working with a large manufacturing facility where the General Manager was forcing applicants to come in and fill out an application. This person had their organization’s best interest at heart, he really did! His feeling was, we have them walk-in, fill out the application, and we’ll immediately talk to them and offer them a job if they’re good. But, what many of us know who have GenZ or young Millennial kids know, almost none of them would ever walk into that building to apply. But, if you put a sign out front that said something like “Text – Hire Me to #897654” all of them wanting to work there would do that! In fact, we were able to show this GM just that when they went from having about 1 application a day to having 15-20 by just giving people an opportunity to communicate the way they want to through text messaging. I commonly tell groups I speak with that if you are not currently using text messaging to recruit candidates, you should be fired from your job. Across the board, not just with hourly, text messaging gets exponentially more response rate at every level of employee. You can tell me any kind of employee you try and hire, and I can show you that the response rate from email to text messaging is 7-10 times more for text messaging. From $15/hr hourly workers to $250,000 executives! Let Your Great Employees Hire for You! Sure, we all know that employee referrals are the best! When we take a look at source of hire statistics, and cost of hire statistics, employee referrals will always be in the top 3 of all companies. Employee referrals, on average, make better hires and are cheaper to hire then almost every other kind of hire. Now, the challenge is how do we do more of this? Yeah, we all have an employee referral program and for the most part we all think our employee referral programs suck. They are stale and boring, and no one really pays attention. Here are two recruiting strategies on how to make them better: Employer Brand Advocates – instead of having all of your employees be a part of employee referrals, create an exclusive team of employees who will help you get more hires. We find that most organizations can start really small, just a handful of employees who you would say “love” working at your company. You then feed them messaging they can share on their social feeds, and with friends and family. Instead of rewarding the final outcome of a referral, reward the behavior that leads to referrals. If an employee gives you contact of someone who might want to work for you, pay them $20 or a gas card. If that person shows up for an interview, pay the referring person $100. Etc. What I find is paying the behavior leads to far more employee referrals and your employees love the immediacy of the reward, which sparks other employees to get involved. Focus on Local! 80%+ of hourly hires live within five miles of their place of employment. This means we have to focus our recruiting efforts hyper-local! Billboards, yard signs, canvasing local schools and places of worship, etc. A best practice is to start in one-mile circumferences from where you need to hire someone and keep going out by one mile, looking for every possible place you might find a worker. Then figure out how do we let the people know we want them? Your success of hiring and keeping hourly workers has as direct correlation to how far and how long it takes for them to commute to your place of business. I recently spoke with a head of HR for a manufacturing company that paid to have a billboard put up directly across the street from a newly built Amazon warehouse. They knew Amazon was attracting so many people to come to work for them and spending a lot of money to get that traffic. They also knew Amazon can go through a lot of employees, so why don’t we let folks know they have other options. Hiring hourly workers is very hard, but we also sometimes over think it. Hiring someone that has to walk across the street to come to work for you versus someone who has to take three buses and a train, well, we all know who is probably going to be more consistent in making it into work! Let recruiting technology work for you. Make sure you are experimenting with conversational A.I./chatbots. At best, you might have someone focusing on recruiting 40 – 50 hours a week. When an hourly worker comes to apply to your website and has a question or a problem, there’s a great chance no one will be there to help them, and they’ll just go apply somewhere else. Having an always on chatbot on your website will increase your apply rates and capture contact data that will allow your recruiters to text these candidates the next day they are in the office. What I find is that most organizations actually don’t need more applicants. They just need to actually engage every applicant they have without bias. When we do testing where every applicant gets a full engagement and interview, we find that most organizations need about 50% of the applicants they have to fill their roles. One of the most valuable sources of applicants is the same database we ignore in our ATSs. Your ATS database might be the most underutilized resource for hiring that you have! We done a bunch of testing with organizations where we’ll take a list of one hundred previous applicants that applied but didn’t get hired and send out a nurture campaign using text messaging. From these campaigns we consistently see people coming back who are still interested and it creates high quality hires. The first step is to dig back into our databases and give some of these applicants a second chance! Start Swimming in some Different Pools! We all have some conscious and unconscious biases. When I dig into hiring data with an organization, we often see some common applicant pools we’ve just given up on. Sometimes it’s older people, sometimes it’s a minority or females in male dominated fields, we almost always see people with a prior record being ignored, even well after they paid their debt to society. It never works for force a manager to hire someone they don’t want to, but also we are often dealing with an “unconscious” bias. The manager doesn’t even know they are not selecting certain people. It can be difficult having these individual conversations, but it’s something we need to do. I find if we are not accusatory but use data to show that we have a gap in hiring, we can often to get managers to see the world in a different light and begin to open up their hiring pools, and most are pleasantly surprised by the talent they find. What we know is that doing the same thing we’ve been doing for the last decade, or longer, is not working. Every market, every industry will have continued challengers over the next few years to try and figure out how to fill their hourly roles. The organizations that continue to try new recruiting strategies and test out new and evolving technologies will have a foot up on the rest in this hyper-competitive talent world.
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Recruiting
3 min read
Broadening the Hiring Pool - Emissary.ai
The hiring pool is the group of candidates that become applicants for a job requisition. When the applicant pool is small, it can be challenging to find a quality hire out of limited options. Employers in the current strained market may often face that disappointing moment when following up on a recently posted high-priority position. The job has been published across a few job boards, on the company website, and shared on LinkedIn. All the typical sharing methods have been utilized, but applicants are not flooding in even after several days. Hiring managers may wonder how they can begin to attract a wider audience of qualified talent. There are a few ways in which employers can re-evaluate their hiring methods in order to engage a broader range of job seekers. Skills Based Hiring A transition to skills based hiring removes several barriers to candidates that do not meet minimum levels of education or years of experience. Learning to transition the mentality of hiring can be transformational for recruiting efforts. Thinking about what the job requires in terms of skills reaches candidates that are capable of completing all functions of the job, but don’t meet base level requirements leading to them being filtered out of applicants. For example, even a small change such as considering those who have a four year degree OR equivalent experience. This opens the jobs to all those who didn’t necessarily complete a bachelor’s degree, but have many years of well-developed experience making them qualified for the job. Hiring managers should also review potentially transferable skills that would allow for a star candidate to be successful in the role. Consider an exiting teacher as an example; they may be highly organized, detail-oriented, and have excellent high stress management skills-all extremely valuable skills for many types of jobs. Employers should analyze the core skillsets that meet the needs of functional job duties. Listing these skillsets opens up the position to those applicants looking to make a career transition Re-Evaluate Job Requirements Coupled with a transition to skills based hiring, organizations can expand the applicant pool by re-evaluating job requirements for technical skills, software knowledge, and certifications. Limiting applicants to those that hold advanced skillsets or particular certifications leaves candidates with untapped potential out of the pool. Are there ways to offer on the job training? Can candidates agree to complete courses or obtain certifications after starting? A candidate that meets 75% of the job requirements, but lacks one missing skill could hold long tenured potential, especially when realizing that the company is willing to make a longtime investment in their professional development. Offer Flexibility In today’s hiring world, remote and hybrid jobs are what almost every candidate is seeking. Of course, there are those trade, entertainment, service, and hospitality jobs that require in person work. Those employers must find other ways to offer flexibility. For those employers that are able, they should continue to review the ability to allow employees to work remotely. Offering a job remotely immediately widens the hiring pool extensively. Without geographical limitations, the number of potential candidates instantly expands exponentially. Offering the job regionally, nationally, or globally can have benefits in bringing not only more candidates, but a candidate pool of diverse applicants. Bringing diversity to the organization by drawing in employees from other cultures and areas has benefits that go well beyond successfully filling the role. Get the Word Out It is proven repeatedly that one of the best and most successful ways to fill an open role is with an internal referral. When employees refer their networks to the role, they come with an internal employee already vouching for their ability to do the job well. When traditional job boards, recruiters, or social media campaigns are not proving successful, employers should consider offering an employee referral bonus program. Encouraging already engaged employees to do recruiting within their own network can often draw in top talent. Employees hired from internal referrals tend to have longer than average tenure than the typical hire and are less expensive to hire. Broadening the hiring pool is a challenge. It can be difficult to get key leaders behind a change in the hiring procedure, but the benefits far outweigh the barriers. When competing with a competitive market within a low unemployment economy, it is vital for employers to get creative in hiring practices. Widening the candidate pool with these tips is one way to draw in additional resumes for consideration. Stephanie Mauney is a freelance writer and content curator specializing in Human Resources
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Product News
1 min read
Emissary Text Recruiting Platform Now Available on SAP® Store - Emissary.ai
By integrating with SAP Success factors, text recruiting functionality from Emissary helps customers deliver better candidate experience. New York, NY — Emissary Software today announced that its text recruiting solution is now available on SAP® Store, the online marketplace for SAP and partner offerings. Emissary’s solution integrates with SAP SuccessFactors® and delivers a more efficient candidate experience and communication platform to employers. Speaking about the new integration, Brendan Cruickshank, SVP at Emissary.ai said “Adding our text recruiting tools to SAP SuccessFactors® helps further the advancement of candidate communication as well as enhancing the experience for applicants. Candidates want faster, easier communication in the hiring process and delivering that is our core mission.” With built in texting and automation for recruiting and HR communication, SAP customers can increase candidate response rates and decrease response times. Here’s what else to expect from the platform: Texting/SMS delivers open rates of 95% and response times up to 60X faster. Message from directly inside SAP candidate profiles or any other web based tools including LinkedIn, Indeed or any CRM. Transcripts auto-sync to store all text conversations to SuccessFactors candidate profiles. SAP Store, found at store.sap.com, delivers a simplified and connected digital customer experience for finding, trying, buying and renewing more than 2,000 solutions from SAP and its partners. There, customers can find the SAP solutions and SAP-validated solutions they need to grow their business. And for each purchase made through SAP Store, SAP will plant a tree. Emissary Software is a partner in the SAP PartnerEdge® program. Built on SAP Business Technology Platform and integrated with SAP SuccessFactors®, using Emissary fuels customers to become intelligent enterprises. The SAP PartnerEdge program provides the enablement tools, benefits and support to facilitate building high-quality, disruptive applications focused on specific business needs – quickly and cost-effectively. About Emissary Emissary is a text recruiting platform built to make candidate engagement and recruitment automation easy. Our AI recruiting software empowers recruiting teams, HR departments and staffing firms with efficient text recruiting tools that work in harmony with any ATS, HRIS or recruiting site. # # # Emissary Software products and services as well as their respective logo are trademarks of Emissary Software, LLC. SAP and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP SE in Germany and other countries. Please see https://www.sap.com/copyright for additional trademark information and notices. All other product and service names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective companies. For more information, press only: marketing@emissary.ai
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Recruiting Tactics
3 min read
Early Career Recruiting - Emissary.ai
On a recent episode of my RecTech Podcast I talked with CollegeRecruiter.com CEO Steven Rothberg about the early career recruiting space. He’s been helping employers recruit in this space for more than 20 years. I wanted to ask him his advice on how companies should approach recruiting in this critical segment. So here’s the question I asked him. If you were starting a college recruiting function today, instead of a large employer, how would you set that up? His answered surprised me. “So I wouldn’t set that up that way. If I was working for say, a Fortune 1000 company, a government agency, some employer that’s hiring at scale, I would not actually create a college recruiting function. And if I came in there and there was a college recruiting function, I would get rid of it.” They should have an early career or early talent function. Simply by naming it that way, and then setting up the goals or the rocks for that organization, you inevitably deemphasize the school, you deemphasize the major, and you start to become more inclusive of people like military veterans, people who went to boot camps, people who graduated from high school without good grades, without good standardized test scores, but who are just fantastic at software development or architecture or something, whatever that skill it is that you’re looking for. If you are CarMax, big car dealership company, and you’re hiring thousands of college students and recent grads a year to work as mechanics, to work as salespeople, et cetera, why do you care what school that person went to? Why do you even care if they went to college? You should be hiring them based upon what they’re likely to do for you. And you shouldn’t have to anymore look at the school or the major as a proxy. You can use assessment tests. There are plenty of really good ones out there. You can build one on your own for very little money. You’re looking to hire a mechanic? Bring somebody in and have them do something for 15 minutes. It’s like, “Do you know how to change a spark plug?” Well, I don’t, and they’d see that very quickly. And they’d say, “Get the hell out of here.” But Chris, if you know how to change a spark plug and you can tell them, “Oh, on this car, this is the catalytic converter” and blah, blah, blah, it’s like, “Okay, I can see that you’re probably well qualified to be a mechanic.” What difference does it make if you went to school for that or not? If you know how to do it, you should be able to do it. If you were in the army for four years and working in the motor pool, wouldn’t they rather hire you than if you just went to some trade school for a year and never actually had done the job other than outside the classroom? So I think that we’re starting to see this with more organizations. It’s a rapidly increasing minority of organizations are renaming their college or university recruitment departments as something to the effect of “Early career, early talent”, and I am really excited about that. I think it’s going to lead to much better matches between the organizations and the candidates. Early Career Recruiting Mistakes What mistakes do you think employers make today when it comes to recruiting students and grads? One of the mistakes that they make is that they are… especially the ones who are focused on on-campus recruiting. This is not all of them, but it is too many of them. They’re focused too much on the process and not on the outcomes. And what I mean by that is a lot of employers that are specifically targeting college and university students and recent grads, equate the school and the major with quality. And the data shows it’s just not the case. Now, certainly, there are some majors that are required in order to be in that profession. So you want to be a nurse, you have to have a nursing degree. You want to be a teacher, other than now, apparently in Arizona, you have to have an education degree. You want to be an engineer, you have to have an engineering degree. So hey, if you’re recruiting engineers, it does make sense that you’re going to be looking at engineering majors and not fine arts. But for almost every job out there, your major’s actually pretty irrelevant. Employers have come to understand that soft skills are far more important than hard skills. Ernst&Young, years ago, probably 5, 6, 7 years ago, one of the top recruiting people there, they were quoted as saying that, “We can teach you how to read a balance sheet, but we can’t teach you how to think critically.” Well, do you know who does teach you how to think critically? Your liberal arts or fine arts or whatever undergraduate program. You spend two years or four years learning how to think critically. And so the smarter, the better employers, like the E&Y’s of the world, they look at those students and they’re looking at, “Is this person likely to be productive?” And they’re not using proxies like, “Did they happen to go to Carnegie Mellon? Did they graduate with a computer science degree?” The better employers now are far more interested in, “Oh, okay, you’re applying to be a software engineer with us, show me some of the work you’ve done. Have you and your buddies built an app so that you can beat everybody at fantasy football? If so, you’re of a hell of a lot more interest to us than somebody who got a bunch of A’s on exams because we’re going to be paying you to build apps. We’re not going to be paying you to take tests.”
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Recruiting
3 min read
Social Media Recruiting - Emissary.ai
Are you recruiting on social media? If not you are probably missing out on a recruiting channel that can help you hire. A new study conducted on behalf of CareerArc by The Harris Poll among more than 2,000 U.S. adults ages 18+ who have ever had a job, reveals some interesting data points about the state of employers and social media. Younger jobseekers are turning to social media to find work: 58% of jobseekers search for information about potential employers on social media and 48% of both Gen Z (ages 18-25) and Millennials (ages 26-41) with work experience have applied to job opportunities they found on social media. The research further showcases how jobseekers interact with social media in the recruiting process as well as employees’ involvement in sharing their company’s social media content on personal social channels. “With US employers adding 528,000 jobs in July – surpassing economists’ forecasts and returning to pre-pandemic levels – the war for great talent and how organizations are recruiting continues to be at the forefront of business goals,” said Jim Bramante, Chairman and CEO at CareerArc. “This data presents a clear picture of how critical a tool social media is for today’s jobseekers and the companies trying to recruit them.” Social media is an important resource for jobseekers The data found that more than 2 in 5 jobseekers (45%) say social media is very important to their job search. When breaking down how candidates search for jobs by generation, Boomers (ages 58-76) with work experience are the least likely generation to have discovered job opportunities on social media (12%) with Gen Z (62%) and Millennials (56%) being much more likely to have discovered job opportunities on social media and Gen X (ages 42-57) sitting in the middle at 31%. Further supporting the use of social media for job searching by younger generations, Gen Z (48%) and Millennials (48%) with work experience are vastly more likely to have applied to job opportunities they found on social media than Gen X (24%) or Boomers (7%) with work experience. Aside from discovering and applying to jobs found on social media, about half of Gen Z and Millennials with work experience use social media to tap their networks for the best opportunities: Gen Z (48%) and Millennials (47%) with work experience are more likely than Gen X (23%) and Boomers (8%) with work experience to have connected with recruiters/employees through social media and/or employees of prospective employers on social media (e.g., Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn), and 49% of Gen Z and 47% of Millennials with work experience have reached out to peers on social media for job leads. Social media recruiting attracts diverse candidates When surveying how job seekers interact with social media by race/ethnicity, the data showed that Hispanic and Black Americans with work experience are far more likely than their White counterparts to say they have discovered job opportunities on social media (49% and 46% vs 28%). Additionally, Black and Hispanic Americans with work experience are more likely than their White counterparts to say they’ve used social media to apply to job opportunities(42% and 39% vs 21%), connected with recruiters and employees at prospective employers(42% and 35% vs 21%), and reached out to peers for job leads (42% and 37% vs 21%). Employees are open to participating in social media-based employee advocacy programs With this many jobseekers turning to social media as a major tool in their job search, the way organizations present themselves on platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook – and the extent of their reach with jobs and career-related content – is central to their success in recruiting top candidates. When it comes to getting employees involved in social media, half of employed Americans (50%) say they would share their company’s social media content (e.g., job postings, employee spotlights, team events, news articles) on their personal social channels, with nearly a third of employed Americans (30%) saying they already have. That number skyrockets by generation with Gen Z (66%) and Millennial (67%) employees far more likely to say they would share their company’s social media content on their personal social channels than Gen X (43%) or Boomer (19%) employees. “This begs the question of how organizations can do a better job of encouraging employees to share employer content and be active participants in their talent acquisition strategy,” said Bramante. The survey found that 26% of employed Americans say they would be more likely to share their company social media content on their personal social channels if their company (e.g., my manager, senior leadership) simply asked them to. In addition to this, 24% say they would be more likely to share company social media if they had a direct connection to the content (e.g., open position in their department, business update for the work they were involved with). Furthermore, just over 1 out of 4 Gen Z (27%) and Millennial (27%) employees would be more likely to post their company’s social media content if their company made it easier, such as by providing the content and/or templates. “The value candidates are placing on a company’s social media content and presence makes social recruiting and employee advocacy more important than ever,” said Bramante. “It’s clear that when it comes to hiring, Gen Z and Millennials are turning to social media, whether it’s to find job openings or to assess what your company culture is like, and they’re willing to get involved in company social media if employers simply ask.” Employers can check out the full report here. The stats above prove that companies should take a fresh look at their social recruiting strategy. Creating content for these channels that resonates with potential candidates is a must have in today’s competitive hiring environment.
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Human Resources
3 min read
Talent Retention Tips - Emissary.ai
Talent retention is at the heart of the great reset happening in today’s workplace. According to recent results from a study by Pew Research Center over the last year; Workers who changed jobs experienced a real increase of 9.7% or more over their pay a year earlier. Meanwhile, the median worker who remained in the same job experienced a loss of 1.7%. Another survey by Gartner suggests the coming days may see an increase in turnover by up to 50-75%. What does this mean for employers facing a competitive job market? It means those who want to see top performers stay on for the long haul must focus on talent retention. How can human resource professionals form a successful talent retention strategy? Show Them the Money It is vital for HR professionals to understand how they bring value to their organization. Low talent retention is costly. High turnover ultimately leads to lost revenue as positions remain open due to it becoming increasingly difficult to attract talent. Pressure to fill open positions can cause hires to be made hastily that do not meet the desired standard of quality leading to low performance. Through well documented analytics hiring leaders should demonstrate to business decision makers the vitality of focusing on talent retention and the ultimate negative trickle-down effect of not doing so. Identify Gaps in Satisfaction In order to form a successful talent retention strategy, an analysis of where dissatisfaction stems from is a necessary first step. Identifying gaps in job satisfaction requires getting employees to be honest. Regularly scheduled anonymous employee surveys or conducting stay interviews are potential ways to identify dissatisfaction early on. Exit interviews often provide the most telling information about where gaps in satisfaction are occurring with current employees. It is not likely that exiting employees with complaints are unique in their perceptions. The key to making information gathered about employee dissatisfaction matter is what happens following the identification. If no change occurs, it was a moot point. Action should always follow identification. Open Communication Employees want to see transparency from their organization. Keeping an open line of communication with employees can go long way in making them feel a valued member of the company. This could come in many forms including conversations between managers and direct reports, updates from the CEO, or maintaining financial transparency. One important way to keep communication with employees open is to have talks with employees about career goals. Employees may have ambitions the employer has no idea about. Opening these conversations lead to the possibility for professional development and the potential for employees to see where their career trajectory leads. Building Community Employees want to work somewhere that not only gives a sense of purpose and a hope for professional growth, but, as all people seek, a feeling of belongingness. The occasional pizza party or hosting food trucks in the parking lot do not cut it anymore when it comes to impressing employees or building a positive culture. Creating socialization opportunities for not only tenured employees, but also new hires is important. Helping new hires learn the company through connection and being embedded into the company culture builds that feeling of belonging and purpose that keeps people at a job long term. Evaluating Pay and Benefits When employees can leave to a competitor for a 10% salary increase at minimum, it should be obvious that pay and benefits cannot be overlooked in a talent retention strategy. Evaluating average and top level benefits, even those that may seem non-traditional, can be what sets apart an organization. Benchmarking current pay grades helps keep track on where the market stands. It may take a compensation re-structure in order to maintain levels with current market trends. Being at least average, but preferably above average in pay and benefits could be considered one of the most important ways to retain talent. Consider hiring a Employee Retention Specialist With the long list of existing duties and the day -to-day responsibilities, focusing on specialized talent retention projects may not be in the bandwidth of current staff. A rising trend for employers is to hire a staff member dedicated to retaining staff. If hiring for such a role can be worked into the budget, the payoff could be exponential. Employers face a difficult reality when it comes to retaining talent amidst a competitive market. It’s going to take a mindset shift for many organizations to make the changes necessary to keep top talent from leaving for the next best opportunity, but it can be done. Stephanie Mauney is a freelance writer and content curator specializing in Human Resources
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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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