But something interesting happened in the latest job report from the US Department of Labor – total payrolls in the United States grew by 336,000, which came as a surprise to many.

(Just in case you’re wondering – yes, some of those numbers in 2020 are literally off this chart. If you must know, March and April 2020 saw job losses of 1.4 million and 20.5 million respectively, followed by bouncebacks of 2.6, 4.6, 1.4, and 1.7 million for the four months after that ending in August 2020.)

There are many other surprises in store as well. Let’s look at the three metrics, and bring some fresh insights to the table. Ready? Let’s roll!

How we’re looking at data

We’ve adopted two methodologies in how we look at the Hiring Pulse dataset. For Time to Fill and Candidates per Hire, we’re measuring each month using the average of 2019, the last “normal” year, as a baseline index of 100.

For job openings, we’re taking a different route – simply, the average number of job postings per company. This gives us the opportunity to gauge overall recruitment activity and whether that’s going up or down.
Want a more detailed methodology? Jump to the end and check it out.

As always, we look at the worldwide trends for three common SMB hiring metrics:

• Time to Fill (TTF)
• Total Job Openings (JO)
• Candidates per Hire (CPH)

Let’s start analyzing!

Main highlights

The three main highlights for this month’s Hiring Pulse are:

• Candidates Per Hire is still on a meteoric rise
• Job postings are climbing rapidly, with a big chunk of that in small businesses
• The “September Surge” has data to show for it

1. Time to Fill

For this report, Workable defines “Time to Fill” as the number of days from when a new job is opened to when that job opening is filled. It’s important to understand that definition: jobs that are still open as of the end of September are not included in this graph as they don’t yet have an “end date”. Only the jobs that are filled are included here.

Quick clarification, because people are asking: the data in this chart shows the trendline against the 2019 average as an index of 100, not the actual number of days in TTF.

Got that? Good. Let’s have a look at the monthly TTF trend through to the end of September against the average of 2019, based on jobs that have been filled:

At first glance, this looks like another month-over-month (MoM) drop – but look deeper, and you realize that it’s actually inconclusive. A change from 82.9 in August in the TTF metric to 82.6 in September is nothing to write a long letter home about. That’s really just a blip.

We talked a lot about stabilization in this metric in previous months – this shows more of the same. We’ll file this one as a “non-story” for this month at least – if for nothing more than to jump to the real stories in this month’s report.

2. Total Job Openings

Total job openings represent the total number of job openings activated across the entire Workable network.

As stated above, we’re displaying this as an average of job postings per company in the network. And because this is not contingent on job opened/filled dates like TTF and Candidates per Hire, we can simply look at the raw job open numbers up to the end of September.

Now we are seeing some very interesting things here compared with previous months. Ultimately, the average number of job postings per company is up by a full half-job across the board, from August’s 7.4 to September’s 7.9.

What makes it more compelling is the drop in average job postings for enterprise-level companies (with 200 or more full-time employees) from 17.4 new jobs per company in August to 16.5 in September. That’s nearly an entire job less per company in September – which strikes us as odd because you’d expect the so-called “September Surge” (read on to learn more on that) to affect larger companies that follow a more consistent seasonal rhythm in their processes, including in budgets and employment.

So where is the job growth happening? At the other end of the size spectrum – small businesses (the 1-50 FTE bucket) posted an average of 6.5 jobs in September, up from 5.6 in August. That is a huge number – that’s a 13% growth in the actual employee base for companies that do have 50 employees.

And for companies with 25 employees – also included in this size bucket – bringing in six or seven new employees is going to have a pretty significant impact. It’s hard enough to run a smooth engine with your existing workforce – imagine onboarding and training a whole pack of new hires all at once when your existing teams are already busy doing their thing.

And, again, this is just the average for companies with anywhere from one to 50 employees. Some of these companies may be looking for just one or two new hires in the month, while others are hiring upwards of 15 or 20. And some of those companies may have just five full-time employees and looking to triple in size, while other, larger companies may not be hiring at all.

It’s a lot to unpack, to be sure. Now, let’s look at the CPH metric.

3. Candidates per Hire

Workable defines the number of candidates per hire (CPH) as, succinctly, the number of applicants for a job up to the point of that job being filled. Again, remember, this is a trendline using the 2019 CPH average as a baseline of 100, not the actual number of candidates per hire.

Now that Let’s look at what’s going on here through September:

If there weren’t real people involved in this, we might say this is getting a little bit boring now. Every time we say “We’ve reached a new high!” or “We’re seeing a new normal in hiring!”, our dataset comes back and hits us with… another new high.

This time, the CPH trend has risen again, to 183.4 for September. That’s 83.4% more candidates per job compared with the average of 2019. And that’s 9.5 points up from just two months earlier.

Does this mean more and more people are out of work or returning from extended leave, or turnover is high? No, we won’t go with those theories this time. We actually have tangible insights which you can see in the next section.

Meanwhile, we can tell you that the industries most actively hiring *and* seeing huge CPH numbers are in SaaS, hospital & health care, and media & entertainment.

The sectors not quite seeing as many candidates despite posting a high number of jobs are in retail and consumer services. Great Resignation is perhaps still a reality for retailers.

OK, enough of that – let’s get into the conclusions.

What’s going on here?

September, of course, is traditionally a time to return to school, and also, the end of summer months. It’s ultimately a time for change for many people in our society.

LHH Recruitment Solutions head Laurie Chamberlin said as much. “I feel like September is more of a New Year’s philosophy than New Year’s … September is like back to school, back to work, back to ‘what am I going to do everyday?’ It’s like New Year’s for the workforce and education.”

“September is like back to school, back to work, back to ‘what am I going to do everyday?’ It’s like New Year’s for the workforce and education.”

Zapier recruiting manager Bonnie Dilber tells HuffPost that it’s also to do with the summer slowdown:

“Hiring slows down over the summer due to lots of vacation time for job seekers and candidates ― this makes scheduling tricky and can often lead to lengthier processes,” she says.

September, of course, marks the end of summer, and a “let’s get back to business” mode.

It’s also about budget, Laurie says,

“If there’s funds in their budget, that they’re not going to get the FTE add in 2024, but they have it in 2023, they’re looking to hire. If they’re looking at revenue, and they need [a] head count to make that revenue achievable…they need to onboard those people right now to hit their 2024 goals.”

That, in short, is the “September Surge”. This is the term given to the rise in job and jobseeker activity that traditionally happens in this month. Says Laurie: “I’ve been in the recruiting industry since ’99. And it is very real.”

We see this in our data as well.

This means you’re not only seeing more candidates coming through your hiring pipelines, but more competition in landing those A-list employees. So, you’ll probably want to understand what workers prioritize in a job right now so you can highlight those in your value proposition.

We did the homework for you. We asked 1,250 workers to understand their wants and needs at a high level, and the result is the Great Discontent for 2023. Give it a good read (both the US and UK versions), and incorporate what you’ve learned into your candidate attraction strategy.

Enjoy, and see you next month!

Thoughts, comments, disagreements? Send them to content@workable.com, with “Hiring Pulse” in the subject heading. We’ll share the best feedback in an upcoming report. Watch for our next Hiring Pulse in May!

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

Because one of the three metrics (Job Openings) is different from the other two metrics (Time to Fill and Candidates per Hire), we’re adopting two very distinct methodologies.

To bring the best insights to small and medium (and enterprise-level) businesses worldwide, here’s what we’re doing with the Job Openings metric: we’re taking the number of job openings in a given month and dividing that by the number of active companies in our dataset, and posting that as an average. For example, if July 2022 shows the average Job Openings per company as 7.7, that simply means each company posted an average of 7.7 jobs that month.

For the Time to Fill and Candidates per Hire metrics, we’re comparing a specific month’s trend against the full average of 2019, and we show the result using that 2019 average as a baseline index of 100. For example, if July 2022 shows an average Time to Fill of 30 days for all jobs, and the monthly average for all of 2019 is 28, we present the result for July 2022 as 107.1 – in other words, 7.1% higher than the average of 2019.

And we chose 2019 as the baseline because, frankly, that’s the last normal year before the pandemic started to present challenges to data analysis among other things.

The majority of the data is sourced from businesses across the Workable network, making it a powerful resource for SMBs when planning their own hiring strategy.

The post Your Hiring Pulse report for October 2023 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

This month, we have a look at the three metrics again with this in mind, and bring some fresh insights to the table. Ready? Let’s get started!

How we’re looking at data

We’ve adopted two methodologies in how we look at the Hiring Pulse dataset. For Time to Fill and Candidates per Hire, we’re measuring each month using the average of 2019, the last “normal” year, as a baseline index of 100.

For job openings, we’re taking a different route – simply, the average number of job postings per company. This gives us the opportunity to gauge overall recruitment activity and whether that’s going up or down.
Want a more detailed methodology? Jump to the end and check it out.

As always, we look at the worldwide trends for three common SMB hiring metrics:

• Time to Fill (TTF)
• Total Job Openings (JO)
• Candidates per Hire (CPH)

Let’s start analyzing!

Main highlights

The three main highlights for this month’s Hiring Pulse are:

• We’re in a “new normal” when it comes to Time to Fill and Candidates per Hire
• Technology may be a huge factor in both
• Seasonal and sectoral hiring are potentially impacting job opening trends

1. Time to Fill

For this report, Workable defines “Time to Fill” as the number of days from when a new job is opened to when that job opening is filled. It’s important to understand that definition: jobs that are still open as of the end of August are not included in this graph as they don’t yet have an “end date”. Only the jobs that are filled are included here.

Quick clarification, because people are asking: the data in this chart shows the trendline against the 2019 average as an index of 100, not the actual number of days in TTF.

Got that? Good. Let’s have a look at the monthly TTF trend through to the end of August against the average of 2019, based on jobs that have been filled:

In short: the time it’s taking employers to fill open roles is still at a historically lower point. Sure, it took a relatively dramatic jump from May’s 80.5 to June’s 84.4, but it’s coming down again.

In last month’s Hiring Pulse, we noted how the TTF trend seems to be stabilizing when compared with previous years – this is still happening. What’s interesting is that the stabilization is happening at a much lower level. Cliche alert: this may be the new normal in hiring.

In short, while the undulations of the TTF trend are normal, the actual trend itself is much lower than years past. Two thoughts happening here: first, there are far more candidates than ever before meaning it’s easier to find the ideal candidate for a job.

Second, the added bandwidth due to the deluge of candidates is easier to manage because HR professionals and hiring teams are using software to optimize their processes (yes, that’s a cheap plug for Workable!).

Now, are we seeing the same trend in job openings? Let’s have a look.

2. Total Job Openings

Total job openings represent the total number of job openings activated across the entire Workable network.

As stated above, we’re displaying this as an average of job postings per company in the network. And because this is not contingent on job opened/filled dates like TTF and Candidates per Hire, we can simply look at the raw job open numbers up to the end of August.

Last month, we pointed out a surprising drop in job postings across all companies from June’s 7.6 to July’s 7.1, which turns out to be anomalous when compared with previous Junes and Julys.

July to August this year is a little different – rising from 7.1 new job postings per company in July to 7.4 in August. In 2022, the change was just an increase of .1 of one job, and in 2021, it was a drop of .2.

But when we look at the size buckets, the differences start to stand out. Companies with 200 or more full-time employees (FTEs) posted 17.4 jobs in August on average, up from July’s 16.9. Small businesses (50 or fewer FTEs) also saw growth – from 5.4 to 5.6.

The big story this time is in the mid-sized businesses (51-200 FTEs). Averages in this size bucket went from 5.0 in July to 5.8 in August – moving it higher than the average for small businesses for the first time since May.

There are two stories here:

First, this jump in general which marks nearly a full new job per mid-sized business in August.

And second, that companies with 51-200 FTEs were hiring less than their smaller cousins for three months in a row from May to July.

Why? One theory is that it’s seasonal. June, July, and August are traditionally big-travel seasons and that puts a lot of pressure on a hospitality sector that’s already struggling to fill gaps in their teams. The triple-whammy of surging tourism numbers after COVID, the Great Resignation (which hit restaurants hard), and of course the traditional tourist season all lead to an increase in demand for short-term workers ahead of time.

Perhaps it’s not so much that medium-sized businesses slowed their hiring – it’s more that small businesses increased theirs. According to BLS, the leisure and hospitality sector has gained an average of 61,000 jobs per month over the prior 12 months ending in August 2023, making it one of the fastest-growing sectors in terms of hiring in the United States. And that sector has many small businesses.

Now, let’s look at the Candidates per Hire trend.

3. Candidates per Hire

Workable defines the number of candidates per hire (CPH) as, succinctly, the number of applicants for a job up to the point of that job being filled. Again, remember, this is a trendline using the 2019 CPH average as a baseline of 100, not the actual number of candidates per hire.

Now that Let’s look at what’s going on here through August:

What we said above about a “new normal in hiring”? This is another example of it. The highest the CPH trend ever reached in our dataset before 2023 was in October 2020, when the index reached 140.3. That was also the only time it had reached more than 140 – in other words, 40% higher than the monthly average for 2019.

Now? It’s gone upwards of 140 for five straight months – and above 170 for the last three months. It’s got to come down to earth at some point once the job market stabilizes, but what interests us is that job openings aren’t coming down at all during the course of 2023. You’d think there would be a direct correlation between fewer job openings and more candidates per jobs – but not here.

This is likely a fallout of the Great Resignation. Many people dumped their jobs over the last couple of years to the tune of more than 4 million quits every single month from June 2021 to December 2022 – and that number is steadily falling throughout 2023 reaching 3.55 million quits for July, the lowest for a single month in the United States since before the pandemic. And in pre-COVID times, 3.5 million quits was pretty normal for a given month.

All these people who left their jobs and not moving on to new ones – some of them launched freelance careers, others started their own business, and others still just took off to a cabin in Maine to live the rest of their lives in solitude. And – we mentioned this last month as well – it’s either not working out so well for them, or they miss the old daily grind and the social life that can come with an interesting day-to-day job. So, back to the job hunt they go.

Combine this with the increase in layoffs this year (482K layoffs from January to July compared with one-third of that in the same period in 2022), and you have a situation where there are many more candidates looking for jobs. Hence, the rise in the CPH trend.

What’s going on here?

Whatever your experience may be in terms of hiring, you’ve got one thing at the top of your mind: find the absolute perfect candidate for the role. Yes, it’s nice to have a growing candidate pool because it means you have the pick of the crop – but is that necessarily the case? Just because you’re now getting 120 applications for a job compared with 80 for the same job last year doesn’t mean you now have 30 ideal candidates this year compared with 20 last year.

When you have a growing pool of candidates, you run the risk of saturation. There’s also desperation – on the side of candidates. There are those who are returning to work after an extended period of time, and there are those quickly trying to land on their feet after losing their job in an unfortunate reorg at their previous company.

We made a side reference to HR technology up there and how it’s helping hiring teams better manage the recruitment pipeline and that’s speeding up the process to a filled job.

Well, technology does cut both ways – candidates also have the benefits of HR technology and now have one-click-apply and resume parsing options when applying for jobs.

Add AI to the mix; candidates can just plug their resume *and* the job description into ChatGPT or Claude and tell it to create the perfect cover letter for that specific job. The AI will even calibrate the resume so it best fits the opportunity.

So, as it becomes easier to go through hundreds of resumes a day, it also becomes harder, because the applications are becoming more plentiful and sophisticated all the time. It reminds one of the old Stephen Wright joke about putting a humidifier and dehumidifier into a room and letting them work it out.

Back to the plot: you want to focus on finding the *right* candidates, not the *most* candidates. That distinction is very important. To attract the *right* candidates, you need to understand what would compel them to apply for a role with your organization.

There are tools to help you out here – including custom application forms and knockout questions  so candidates self-select out of the process, candidate search functionalities, and of course Workable’s AI Recruiter.

And guess what? We already asked 1,250 workers to understand their wants and needs at a high level, and the result is the Great Discontent for 2023. Have a look, and package what you’ve learned into your careers page and your job descriptions – and reap the rewards.

Thoughts, comments, disagreements? Send them to content@workable.com, with “Hiring Pulse” in the subject heading. We’ll share the best feedback in an upcoming report. Watch for our next Hiring Pulse in May!

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

Because one of the three metrics (Job Openings) is different from the other two metrics (Time to Fill and Candidates per Hire), we’re adopting two very distinct methodologies.

To bring the best insights to small and medium (and enterprise-level) businesses worldwide, here’s what we’re doing with the Job Openings metric: we’re taking the number of job openings in a given month and dividing that by the number of active companies in our dataset, and posting that as an average. For example, if July 2022 shows the average Job Openings per company as 7.7, that simply means each company posted an average of 7.7 jobs that month.

For the Time to Fill and Candidates per Hire metrics, we’re comparing a specific month’s trend against the full average of 2019, and we show the result using that 2019 average as a baseline index of 100. For example, if July 2022 shows an average Time to Fill of 30 days for all jobs, and the monthly average for all of 2019 is 28, we present the result for July 2022 as 107.1 – in other words, 7.1% higher than the average of 2019.

And we chose 2019 as the baseline because, frankly, that’s the last normal year before the pandemic started to present challenges to data analysis among other things.

The majority of the data is sourced from businesses across the Workable network, making it a powerful resource for SMBs when planning their own hiring strategy.

The post Your Hiring Pulse report for September 2023 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Top 3 takeaways

1. Job clarity is more important now, up to 22.5% from 16.8% two years ago
2. Career advancement is growing as a job attractor from 28.3% to 37.8%
3. Compensation is still the top consideration for a job across all scenarios

You can’t have a thriving garden if you don’t give your flowers the opportunity to blossom and your plants to grow.

Such is the same when it comes to running a business. Career growth is climbing in importance for UK workers when they’re thinking about applying for (and accepting) a new job opportunity.

According to our new survey in 2023, 37.8% of UK workers considered this a significant factor in what they’d find attractive about a new job, up 9.5 points from 2021.

Clear as the daytime sky

Also growing in importance is clarity about job expectations and responsibilities. That’s cited as a major decision factor for 22.5% of all UK workers in 2023, up from 16.8% two years ago.

This suggests greater dissonance in the workplace over the last few years leading to worker frustration about what they’re expected to do in the jobs they’re hired to do. And moreover, the increased uncertainty in the overall social and political fabric specifically in the United Kingdom (thanks to Brexit, prime minister turnover, and of course, COVID-19), and it’s understandable that a UK-based worker will find clarity in their job to be refreshing. At least something is clear!

Show them the money – and then some

Even with all of that, compensation still reigns supreme. Be it in the form of salary, perks, or benefits, what a worker gets in exchange for their work is number one in the list of job attractors in the UK with 68.8% citing that as a deciding factor in a career move. That’s only down slightly from 70.1% in 2021.

That’s not much of a change, right? Wrong. For those workers who are actively looking, we asked them why they’re actively looking. There’s a huge increase in active jobseekers citing more money as a reason – 66.4% now compared with 53.5% in 2021. That’s a phenomenal 12.9-point increase.

But tangibility doesn’t mean everything. Those actively in the hunt for new work are also putting greater value on “meaning” in their job – 23.1% cite that as a priority in 2023, up from 16.6% in 2021.

Workers today want clarity in their work, and they want to feel like their work means something to them. Add greater compensation and the three top-growing priorities are very clear in the mind of those working in the UK.

What can you do?

1. Promote the opportunity of the work

As career growth grows in importance, employers should promote the real value of working for them – in short: if you work with us, you’ve got a bright future.

This can be demonstrated by showcasing longer-tenured employees and their accomplishments, the strong company history, and a pipeline of future projects.

2. Highlight clarity and meaning of the job

In a world of seemingly unrelenting change, the least an employer can offer is stability and clarity in the job itself. And make it really mean something.

Ensure that your job expectations, responsibilities, and overall OKRs crystal clear from the get-go, and promote the value of the work beyond mere pounds.

3. Keep your salaries competitive

Compensation remains key. Employers should ensure their compensation packages remain competitive, encompassing not just salary but also benefits and perks.

This can demonstrate a company’s commitment to rewarding new employees who sign up for the long haul.

The post UK workers want clarity and growth, not a hard day’s night appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

However, as organizations seek skilled employees to assist their organizations in properly incorporating AI tools into their operating environments, the types of skills and employees needed are broader than one might think. AI is not a single monolith.

There are many tools, categories, and branches of AI which an organization can leverage to solve problems.

As a result, understanding the job to be done and the types of AI tools that exist is an essential prerequisite to help organizations identify the right skills they may need to support their goals.

In fact, a recent survey on AI in the workplace and higher education indicated that understanding the nuances and different capabilities around AI is an opportunity area.

There are several different skill areas that organizations can look into on a global basis that will help staff their teams to support the wave of advancements that companies can benefit from with the AI boom. Let’s look at those now.

1. Data science and programming

Two almost universal skill areas that organizations need to invest in if they want to leverage AI capabilities are in data science and programming, and foundationally these skill areas come from having good mathematical backgrounds.

Data science skills

Ultimately, the majority of AI models are consuming and responding to data in some way shape or form. The stimuli, data format and consumption pattern of the AI model may differ, but the output of AI decisions and responses depend on data.

Individuals skilled in data science, and the principles behind it, are essential to identifying and implementing the right kinds of methods to solve organizational problems using AI.

Programming skills

Equally important are individuals that are skilled in programming languages that support AI such as Python, Julia, and R. To build tools suited to solving the problems organizations have, there is a need for skilled programmers to build and enhance these tools to be aligned to the organization’s goals and consumer’s needs.

Although several off the shelf AI tools and programs can potentially be incorporated into an organization’s infrastructure through application programming interfaces (APIs), many organizations find having talented in-house programmers remains important to customize output and results to match organizational needs.

As organizations specify the type of AI branch or approach they want to lean on to solve their problems, this may require the organization to specify the types of specializations they want their data science and programming talent to be versed in (i.e. machine learning, neural networks, pattern recognition, etc.), but the general need for data science and programming resources will be consistent.

2. UX/UI and front-end developers

Data science and programming resources are essential in creating working AI tools and algorithms that help solve the problems an organization may have, but they are only one part of the equation of getting these tools in the hands of employees or customers to achieve their intended results.

To do this organizations need skilled employees that are well versed in UI/UX design and front-end developers that can bring these designs to life.

UX/UI design skills

Although it may be a benefit to have UX/UI designers that understand coding and programming in some organizations, this is not essential when searching for skilled UX/UI designers.

Additionally, when looking for the best UX/UI resources to support the implementation of AI into your customer or employee-facing tools it is also important to recognize the difference between UX (product effectiveness to solve the job to be done) and UI (product aesthetics to guide digital user behaviors) skills as both are needed to create the most effective synergy between AI tool and intended user outcome.

Front-end developer skills

To get the designs of UX/UI resources into the hands of users it is important to have front-end developers. In a sense, the data scientists and programmers that create the AI models and tools could be considered the back-end development team.

Front-end developers, on the other hand, are experts in using web applications or similar tools to bring the design principles and back-end AI code into a format that works for general-user consumption.

Although both of these roles and skill set areas may not get as much focus as compared to AI programming and data science roles, they will be an essential part of incorporating AI tools and products effectively into the customer experience. This could influence adoption rates and product sustainability long term.

3. Skills to support adoption and effectiveness of AI tools

Two things that stand out concerning AI are:

1. The goal of AI is to use tools to replicate human-like behavior and thoughts
2. AI represents a large change for how we will approach work and tasks in the future

With these concepts in mind, it shouldn’t be surprising that skills in these areas are also helpful to organizations that are looking to leverage AI into their infrastructure.

Given that AI tries to replicate components of the human experience, individuals that are balanced in critical thinking, verbal, linguistic, and problem-solving skills are needed. In fact, some organizations are specifically looking for individuals that have strong writing skills and experience interacting with AI tools to support their organizational efforts.

Organizations should keep a keen eye out for those who understand human behavior and can interact with AI tools effectively, as skills in these areas can assess the value and/or get the most out of AI applications.

Change and adaptability skills

The incorporation of AI into our lives and the workplace also represents a big change for many, and there is some trepidation around this. To offset these fears organizations may also seek talent that is well-versed in change management principles.

The best fusion of AI into the job environment is to use it to unlock the talent of our human capital to focus more on complex and engaging tasks for them and leveraging AI as a peer that can remove roadblocks from reaching this state by having AI run through time-consuming or staid activities.

Experts in change management can help organizational cultures pivot to an adoptive rather than adversarial stance with the implementation of AI and so resources in this area should be considered.

Skills in critical thinking, linguistic, and change management areas may not be top of mind for many employers as they seek to leverage AI into their companies; however, organizations that look at skills that go beyond the functional aspects of just building AI protocols and algorithms may find they have a competitive advantage over others.

AI-relevant skills will continue to evolve

The conversation around the impact and level of disruption that AI will cause continues to evolve, but if there is one absolute truth about AI, it is this: AI will change the way we work and how much time we spend on certain functions over others.

Because of this, the modern organization needs to prepare for these changes by looking at skill-set needs on a holistic basis that focuses on implementing AI, but also critically, on the responsible use and adoption of these tools to meet organizational goals and results to improve productivity and products.

Marc Booker, Ph.D., is Vice Provost of Strategy at the University of Phoenix. 

The post AI skills in the workplace: what hiring teams should look for now appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Top 3 takeaways

1. Job security is more important now, up to 38.6% from 32.1% two years ago
2. Career advancement is growing as a job attractor from 15.8% to 22%
3. Compensation is still the top consideration for a job across all scenarios

Job security is always important, of course – people need to put food on the table and to pay their bills, so they’re reliant on that employer-employee arrangement where they provide their services in exchange for compensation. It’s the basic structure of labor.

Naturally, it would follow that one side of that equation would have leverage over the other. One may have a luxury of choice that the other may not have. In the last few years, we saw employees exercise their leverage by pushing for higher salaries, more flexible working arrangements, and better working conditions.

But now, things have shifted again. Job security is growing in importance for US workers when evaluating the value of a new job. In 2021, 32.1% considered job security as a significant factor in what they’d find attractive about a new opportunity – and this climbed to 38.6% in 2023.

This suggests a desire for stability and predictability among workers who are rattled by the weird chaos of the post-pandemic economy. Workers now want to be able to count on a reliable income stream for the foreseeable future.

The percentage of workers looking to move to another job overall is also dropping. Why fix what ain’t broke, right? When workers would rather stick with something they already have rather than go into the wild blue yonder looking for new roles, that suggests they’re valuing stability over opportunity. It’s another effect of the uncertain times we’re living in right now.

What else is growing in importance for workers who are looking for new opportunities? Career advancement. In 2021, 15.8% of workers in the US considered this a major factor in changing jobs – that’s since climbed to 22%.

But it’s still mostly about the money

Money still talks. No matter how you look at it, compensation in the form of salary, perks, and benefits is still the top priority for all workers regardless of the situation they’re in – whether they’re looking, whether they’re staying in their current job, or anything else.

Comp is also growing in terms of attractiveness when potential candidates are being wooed to a new job – from 62.2% in 2021 to 68.9% now.

Interestingly, we asked active jobseekers why they’re looking for a new opportunity, and we found that compensation dropped in terms of importance from 63.4% in 2021 to 58.5% now. What’s growing in importance for those who decide to start looking for a new job are, yes, career advancement opportunities and meaningfulness of work (25% now compared with 20.8% two years ago).

Job security in itself is valued hugely – that much is clear. And compensation is part of that security – when a worker gets paid more, that’s security in the form of personal finance.

Even a focus on career advancement can be indirectly related to workers’ desire for greater security – people don’t want to be just mercenaries brought in to do a specific job with an end date to that job. They want to flourish, grow, and evolve in their existing role. They want to be invested for the long haul.

Today’s workers are looking beyond the financial aspects of a job, seeking roles that offer intrinsic satisfaction. Plus security and stability, too.

What can you do?

1. Promote job security

As job security grows in importance, employers should communicate the stability of their organization and roles during the recruitment process.

You can demonstrate this by showcasing a strong company history, financial stability, and a reliable pipeline of future projects. Your careers page is a great opportunity to show off all this stuff about you.

2. Highlight growth opportunities

With career advancement becoming more important to workers, employers should highlight opportunities for career growth in their organizations.

This can be communicated by promoting examples of career progression within the company, mentoring programs, and opportunities for ongoing professional development. Again, put this in your careers page in the form of employee testimonials and workplace videos.

3. Keep your salaries competitive

Despite the growth in importance of job security and career advancement, compensation remains key. Ensure ensure your compensation packages remain competitive, encompassing not just salary but also benefits and perks.

This can demonstrate your commitment to rewarding and retaining your employees – leading to a happier and more productive workforce in the end.

The post Don’t rock the boat: stable and secure is the way to float appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Top 3 takeaways

1. Seven out of 10 are now working full time, compared with 55.3% in 2021
2. Those “not working” is down from one in five to one in 10 – more due to choice than extraneous factors
3. One in two workers are now only passively open to other opportunities, up from 37% two years ago

In 2023, nearly seven out of every 10 respondents (69.2%) in the United States reported that they are working full time. That’s up from 55.3% in 2021.

Meanwhile, the percentage of those who say they aren’t working dropped from 20.8% in 2021 to 9.9% now.

In short, the US job market is healthier than it’s been since pre-COVID. There’s more work out there, and it shows.

But it’s not just the raw percentages that tell the tale; it’s the reasons behind them. When those respondents were asked why they’re not working, they point to personal choices rather than job scarcity or financial pressures.

For example: the top two reasons cited by US workers for not working in 2023 are family priorities (31.1%) and health priorities (25.7%). That’s up from 30% and 18.8% respectively in 2021.

Also, it seems to be largely due to choice rather than simple necessity: the percentage of those who aren’t working because they’re focused on personal and professional development also more than doubled to 8.1% in 2023 from 3.8% in 2021.

And they’re hardly looking

Those who say they’re actively looking for new opportunities dropped from 33.4% in 2021 to 22.6% now – regardless of whether they’re currently working or not.

For those who are working, this suggests that workers in the US are now more content to be in their current work situation.

But does that also mean they’re not interested in other roles? Not necessarily. Those who say they’re passively open to new opportunities – in other words, they’re open to a conversation or are curious to see what’s out there, but not actively hunting for new roles – grew significantly to 51.1% from 37.3%.

What does that mean for hiring teams? Well, for one, the talent availability out there isn’t limited to those who actively apply for your open roles. If you open a new job and aren’t seeing those star candidates showing up in your inbox, rest assured that they’re out there. You just have to reach out to them and initiate the conversation.

What can you do?

1. Prioritize your employees’ happiness

The increase in job stability means employers should focus on enhancing retention strategies.

This could involve prioritizing employee satisfaction, job security, and providing opportunities for growth and development within the organization.

2. Allow your teams to be flexible

As personal reasons, i.e. family and health priorities, are leading factors for not working, employers need to consider flexible work policies that accommodate personal needs.

This might include offering remote work options, flexible hours, ease of commute, accessibility, or increased family and health support.

3. Market yourself as a great place to work

With more than half of the respondents only passively open to new opportunities, employers should work on making their company stand out as an attractive option.

This could involve marketing the unique benefits and opportunities of their organization, showcasing strong company culture, and emphasizing their dedication to employee well-being and personal growth.

The post 69% employed and 51% passive: Working hard & hardly looking appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

“I have so much on my plate; I can’t afford to take time off right now.”

“I have a hard time relaxing and fully disconnecting from work.”

“What if everything falls apart when I’m not here?”

“I feel like I’m expected to be available all the time – even on my days off.”

“There’s no one who can cover for me while I’m away.”

Sound familiar? You’re not alone. Taking time off has become a stressful process. Paid Time Off or what I like to call Paid Time Out – and the anxiety associated with time away is real. And the stakes are high – for employees and their leaders and the cost for not taking a ‘time out’ is dangerous for productivity and wellness.

Related: Working Hours, PTO and Vacation policy template

Anxiety Before PTO

With so many employees experiencing overwork and overwhelm on a regular basis, even just the thought of taking time off can be a stressor. Fear and anxiety may arise from the idea of requesting time off, particularly if the absence may inconvenience others or if the workplace culture does not support work-life balance.

Not knowing how it will be perceived can lead to concerns about job security or job loss, ultimately holding some individuals back from taking time off.

Unfortunately, many employees feel that they have too much work or too many responsibilities to even take time off. Worries about the tasks that may accumulate during an absence are common.

We sometimes even feel pressured to stay and work if there are ongoing projects or if there is inadequate coverage. Many of us feel guilty and don’t want to burden our colleagues by adding to their workload.

What you can do as a leader

Leaders have a key role in cultivating a safe, supportive, and accommodating work environment for everyone. A company culture that values work-life balance and promotes self-stewardship and the use of PTO can help to address some of the barriers and ensure that everyone is taking the time off that they need and deserve.

Creating an open dialogue around concerns and anxieties about taking time off, assisting in finding coverage, and being flexible and willing to redistribute tasks can alleviate a lot of undue stress. This can also help shift our mindset from “I” to “we.”

Anxiety During and After PTO

The truth is that some people may struggle with disconnecting from work during their time off. We are so used to being busy that it can be hard to slow down. In a survey conducted by Elvtr of 2,300 workers from the U.S. and Canada, 46% reported struggling to switch off from work while on vacation and 68% admitted to working on their time off.

We have grown so hyper-connected that it can be difficult to set boundaries, avoid checking emails, and resist the urge to stay involved with work.

Anxiety about re-entry after PTO can closely resemble the Sunday Scaries (anticipatory anxiety and feelings of dread experienced on the eve of a workweek) but on a much greater scale depending on the amount of time taken off. The full inboxes, tasks, and responsibilities that await can be overwhelming.

With feelings of being behind or out of touch with ongoing projects, paired with the belief that we need to prove our dedication or productivity upon return, it can be challenging to know how to effectively get back on track. Readjusting to the work routine can take some time.

What you can do as a leader

It is important to be mindful of the shadow cultures and narratives in our workplace. If we are answering emails on our days off, it can send the message that our team members are expected to as well. We need consistency between what we say and what we do. By modeling a healthy work-life balance and respecting the boundaries of others, leaders create the invitation for others to do the same.

Being aware of the expectations and pressures we are putting on employees is also important. To ease anxiety upon an employee’s return, leaders can allow time for them to adjust gradually, take time to check in, and make clear the support that is available.

Encouraging PTO

We are seeing people in the workplace doing too much for too long. They are exhausted. I can tell you that sacrificing our own health and wellness is not sustainable. The cost will become much higher. Burnout is a real condition that happens when there is nothing left in the tank, and we go into debt with our own self-care.

In a 2023 survey conducted by Pew Research Center of more than 5,000 working Americans, 89% of workers reported it being extremely or very important that their employer offers paid time off for vacations, doctor appointments, and minor illnesses.

Related: What is unlimited PTO and how does it work?

In the same survey, 46% said they take off less time than they are entitled to. Despite the importance placed upon having this PTO available to them, this means that nearly half of workers are not taking all of their PTO.

You want to encourage your teams to take the time they need to take care of themselves so they can continue to do the good work that you hired them to do. Your wellness and company success depends on it.

You want to encourage your teams to take the time they need to take care of themselves so they can continue to do the good work that you hired them to do. Your wellness and company success depends on it.

Even framing PTO as a ‘time out’ is often helpful. Knowing that you need to rest, recover and get back into the work pace is essential. You cannot realistically be ‘game ready’ every single day. Take the rest and re-enter with more focus, energy and clarity, which is only possible when you take that time out first.

People feel valued and respected when they feel as though their workplace supports employee well-being. Companies that promote and encourage team members to take their PTO foster a positive workplace where individuals can prioritize self-care and enjoy a healthy work-life balance. This can improve team morale, contribute to higher job satisfaction and employee engagement, and help prevent burnout.

Research consistently shows that taking regular breaks and vacations is essential for our physical and mental health. One nine-year study found that there are cardiovascular health benefits of taking more frequent annual vacations. Taking a step back from work can allow us the space to rest, recover, recharge, and return to work with renewed energy and motivation. When we feel well-rested and less stressed, our mood, focus, and productivity tend to improve.

The reality is that these restorative effects of taking time off can present themselves whether we are away for two weeks or two days.

In this fast-paced society that praises productivity, busyness, and the relentless hustle-no-matter-the-cost mentality, it is important to remember that we are all human beings, not human doings at the end of the day.

In this fast-paced society that praises productivity, busyness, and the relentless hustle-no-matter-the-cost mentality, it is important to remember that we are all human beings, not human doings at the end of the day.

While the constant doing offers a sense of accomplishment and supports a belief that our lives have meaning and value, it’s not okay for us to be doing the work at the cost of our health and wellness. The time, space, and attention we give to our being can have a profound impact on the quality of our doing.

We need to take care of ourselves and our teams in a way that allows for a healthy integration of ‘being and doing’. Then we will see our people showing up as their best selves where and when it matters most.

There are plenty of time-off management tools to assist you in this direction.

Robyne Hanley-Dafoe is an education and psychology author, scholar and educator. Her newest book, Stress Wisely: How to Be Well in an Unwell World, was published in June of 2023.

The post The importance of ‘paid time out’: why it matters so much appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Predictably, it’s the Scandinavian countries who set the standard for equality in parenting. In Norway, 9 out of 10 dads take at least 12 weeks of paid paternity leave. Fathers in Sweden can use a minimum of eight weeks before they are allowed to transfer the rest of their 32-week paid leave to their partners.

The United States stands somewhere in the middle. Both moms and dads can use 12 weeks of unpaid leave for parenting. But the “unpaid” part of that, when added to other social barriers, makes it difficult for fathers to use it. In fact, in a 2014 study, 8 out of 10 male employees stated they would not use paternity leave unless they were paid at least 70 percent of their wages.

So is a paternity policy really needed? Its social benefits are consistently supported by research: from evening out male-female relationships to helping children to perform better at school. If you’re looking into the business case for an official paternity leave policy, here’s five reasons to get on it:

1.Work/life conflicts are a reality for men too

The notion that only women care for children is outdated. As fathers’ share of parenting increases, they experience similar difficulties to women: their job and family duties begin to clash. It is natural that fathers’ productivity is influenced by their ability to care for and bond with their children — especially in those first months. A paternity policy is a conscious effort to alleviate the increasing struggles of working fathers.

2. Be a more desirable place to work

The retention of the workforce has been indicated frequently as a benefit of parental leave policies. But it can go further than that by helping you attract the best people in the first place. In a survey of about 1,000 working fathers, nine out of ten of them said that they would consider the existence of a paternity leave policy as an important reason to choose a new employer. This is especially important for small businesses that may not be able to offer the higher wages larger companies do. Shaping an official paternity leave policy can help you in recruiting and retaining top talent.

3. Equality cuts both ways

Many businesses these days talk a good game on diversity, with a ton of research showing the business benefits of diverse teams. Yet research has found that policies that support a diverse workforce may make members of some privileged groups feel threatened thus affecting their overall performance and productivity. This is a reason why a maternity leave policy should never stand alone in a business. A paternity leave policy is a necessary step to avoid male employees feeling excluded and is a definite step towards establishing equality in your company.

4. Encourage more men to take paternity leave

Taking unpaid paternity leave may easily bring financial difficulties to a family. Hence, it’s not surprising that nine out of ten men are back to work in less than two weeks after the birth of their child. Even though this is when mother and baby begin to really need help. Part of this is down to cultural bias with dads seeing themselves as breadwinners. But an official paternity leave policy and procedure, correctly communicated, can ensure your employees will take the leave. It works! As a study in Norway showed, once one man has taken paid leave, his colleagues are much more likely to follow suit.

5. Remove the stigma for women

The progress towards gender equality in the workforce has been profound. Yet, maternity may still have an adverse effect on women’s careers. Many of those who have taken maternity leave have less job security in the long run. The “motherhood penalty” appears on their wages and they are far less likely to be promoted. A paternity leave policy can help remove the stigma from women. A study in Sweden showed that for every month the father took for paternity leave, the mother’s earnings increased by 7%. A similar finding of a research of Quebec’s family leave program supported the importance of the “daddy quota” (leave that can’t be transferred to the mother). Mothers were more likely to be employed full-time. Their earnings also increased by 25% when their partners utilized paternity leave. Helping to close the gender gap and promote equality in the workplace is a significant benefit of paternity policies.

6. Bonus: It’s not as costly as you think

Naturally employers worry about what such policies will cost. Employees who aren’t working and are still getting paid may seem a burden to a business. Evidence proves that this is not the case. Findings of surveys in almost 250 firms in California showed that the policy of the state mandating paid leave “had minimal impact” on business operations. Additionally, 9 out of 10 employers indicated that there was a neutral or positive impact to the profitability of businesses, as well as productivity of employees.

These statistics make a point that parental leave policies don’t just sound good in theory. They make sense on a business level, a fact of which many companies, including your competitors, are becoming increasingly aware. If you’re ready to put a policy and procedure in place, use Workable’s customizable template for your company’s paternity leave policy.

The post 5 reasons you need an official paternity leave policy appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

The typical employee lifecycle in a company often involves transitions, restructurings, developments, new product releases, changes in strategy, and many other aspects that impact one’s day-to-day work processes.

All of these require an ‘onboarding’ if they want to continue to succeed.

Let’s look at the various situations that can benefit from onboarding planning. Keep in mind that all of them can have the same goal at the end: to prepare an employee for something new.

1. New hires

This is the most common type of onboarding plan. It’s designed to introduce new employees to the company’s culture, policies, procedures, org charts, and ultimately their own role in the organization.

Typically, this plan includes orientation sessions, one-on-one meetings, job-specific training, training on tools and softwares, introductory lunches, and so on.

The objective is to help new employees feel welcome and integrated into the team, and shorten the ramp to full productivity.

2. New project launches

Often, a company will launch a new feature, product or service that will involve new campaigns, processes, strategies and so on to get that out into the marketplace, introduce it to existing/new customers, and bring in new revenue.

This involves onboarding the various teams and employees who will be a part of that launch – and this includes details such as project goals, timelines, roles and responsibilities, and even learning the new product or service itself.

3. New sales strategies

Whether it’s due to the launch of something new, a restructuring of the sales function, a new market penetration or a sales kickoff, sales teams will need to be updated on new strategies so they can be set for success.

This can involve trainings on new sales techniques, product/service knowledge, customer research and market trends – all of which can be conducted through classroom or virtual sessions, role-playing, or one-on-one coaching.

4. Training and development

Learning & development is fast becoming a staple of any human resource strategy. L&D can be focused on new hires and existing employees alike – with a focus on both intangible and tangible skills growth.

Examples include trainings on diversity, equity and inclusion, effective communications, compliance assurance, and any other form of employee growth and development that can be carried through with an effective onboarding plan.

5. Acquisitions and mergers

Often in business, you’ll see acquisitions of other companies or technologies, or mergers with the same. When two divergent groups of employees or technologies come together, this necessitates an onboarding plan to ensure that they work together without losing traction.

This can include training on how to use and integrate new technologies, how to work with others, what the “other” company’s focal product or service is, familiarization with new policies and procedures, and understanding new systems, processes and tools.

Keep the eye on the prize

Let’s tie all this back to the core concept of “onboarding”. It is, ultimately, familiarizing an employee with an area with the goal of setting them for success.

Whether that’s getting a hire acquainted with their new job and company or building up an existing employee’s repertoire of skills, the end result is the same: they are getting the knowledge and resources they need to do their job better.

And, of course, if your employees are better at their work, your bottom line benefits.

The post 5 types of onboarding plans: it’s not just for your new hires appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

And, of course, your hiring team is leaning on you to ensure the onboarding and orientation process goes absolutely perfectly.

But, there’s a but: Miriam is one of two dozen new hires starting that week because you’re scaling operations as a company. That puts you in a bit of a pickle. You just don’t have the bandwidth to ensure a smooth onboarding for Miriam and all her new colleagues – so you’re looking at potential problems in the future: Miriam gets thrown to the wolves in her first week on the job, gets disgruntled and frazzled, and starts tuning out pretty quickly afterwards.

Next? She turns to Glassdoor and starts looking again – and even gripes anonymously about the poor experience she had when she was initially pumped about her new job. And that goes for many of the other new hires as well.

Cue frustrated hiring managers, understaffed teams, and an overall stressful working environment for your existing employees who then hit burnout at a time when it could have been avoided.

How do you avoid all that? As an HR professional, you’re always searching for innovative ways to improve the onboarding process. With all the new technology out there, have you considered adding virtual reality to the mix?

Virtual onboarding

VR is no longer the stuff of science fiction and it hasn’t been for a long time. Also referred to as “immersion technology”, VR can be a real boon to your onboarding process. Think about it – rather than plunk Miriam in front of a laptop and telling her she needs to watch a series of videos, you’re putting her in a virtual working environment to get her familiarized with the job before she’s actually doing it.

Those interactive experiences help new hires like Miriam feel welcomed and better informed about the work they’re going to do for you.

The power of information retention

Those first few weeks for a new hire can be overwhelming. As a new hire, you can be bombarded with all kinds of information – you’re meeting new people, learning new systems and entering a new culture. You’ve having meetings one after the next, training with different teams, and reading up on numerous policies and best practices.

This can lead to information overload at a crucial time where you want to ensure new employees retain all that information if they’re going to succeed. That’s where VR can be useful. Immersive learning has been found to be more efficient in terms of memory retention – a University of Maryland study found that VR learners demonstrated an 8.8% higher recall accuracy compared to those using a two-dimensional platform.

Improved retention also means better job performance. A PwC study revealed that employees trained with VR were up to 275% more confident in applying learned skills, and were four times faster in completing training than those in the traditional classroom setting.

A holodeck for training purposes

Star Trek’s holodeck is a perfect example of how immersive technology can be used to train new hires – in Star Trek, it’s used as a safe environment for combat training and scientific simulation. The same thinking applies to VR’s capabilities to create realistic job simulations for your new employees.

And while Star Trek is science fiction, there are real-life examples of this. For instance, retail giant Walmart has embraced VR to train over one million employees across its stores.

Andy Trainor, Walmart’s Senior Director of Walmart U.S. Academies, is a fan of virtual onboarding. “The great thing about VR,” he says, “is its ability to make learning experiential. When you watch a module through the headset, your brain feels like you actually experienced a situation.”

You’ve probably heard about Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year in the United States. It’s an intense time for customer support representatives, especially newer, inexperienced ones. To counter the challenge, Walmart has a VR training scenario simulating that environment to prep new and existing employees ahead of time.

That controlled and risk-free environment helps employees practice customer service, problem-solving and safety procedures without fear of consequence, ultimately making them better at the job when the time comes.

Likewise, Farmers Insurance developed a VR training program for their claims adjusters. The program immerses trainees in a virtual environment simulating real-world situations, such as inspecting damaged properties.

This approach to training has enabled Farmers Insurance to accelerate the learning process, improve knowledge retention, and better prepare their claims adjusters for the challenges they’ll face on the job. By leveraging the capabilities of immersive learning solutions, your organization can also unlock the full potential of VR technology in onboarding and orientation.

Being the ‘new kid’ isn’t easy

Working is often collaborative. Consequently, it’s a priority for many hiring teams to build strong working relationships from the get-go.

But for the new hire like Miriam, being introduced to all those unfamiliar names and faces (and roles) can become overwhelming during an already stressful first few weeks on the job. Couple that with the drive to make a strong impression, and it can be a highly anxious time.

VR can address that even before the first day on the job. Immersing the new hire in a virtual working environment which includes ‘introductions’ to their new colleagues helps a new hire familiarize themselves ahead of time. Ice is broken, new connections are built, and new relationships start forming even before they physically arrive for work on the first day.

It’s a virtual solution

As an HR professional, incorporating VR tech into your onboarding and orientation processes can boost the new employee experience.

By offering immersive learning, realistic job simulators and connectivity boosters, you’re priming your new hires such as Miriam to hit the ground running more quickly. That’s more valuable especially in sectors where you’re onboarding in large batches or hiring for higher-stress working environments.

There’s just one caveat – don’t let VR do all the work. There are two balances to bear in mind: first, as with all technologies, you still should maintain the all-important human touch as you scale your tech stack. Second, keep your tech evolution in tandem with your organization’s specific needs and objectives. Don’t let one get ahead of the other.

With the right approach, virtual reality can transform the way you welcome and integrate new employees into your team, creating a more engaged, connected and confident workforce. Newly hired prodigies like Miriam will realize their full potential quicker than before – and your company will reap the benefits.

The post Use VR in onboarding and set your new hires for success appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Here’s the thing: a recent LinkedIn poll by Hung Lee of Recruiting Brainfood posed an intriguing question to recruiters – have they ever encountered a ‘no white men’ policy? The results are eye-opening:

In short: one in five respondents say they have received explicit instruction for a ‘no white men’ policy. Another one in five say they’ve been implicitly instructed to follow this kind of a policy.

When nearly 40% indicate explicit or implicit experience in being discouraged from hiring from a specific demographic group, that becomes a conversation we need to have. Obviously, it’s more nuanced than a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

In the comments that followed, some did call it discrimination – and explicitly so:

“There are large corporations that are prohibiting white applicants from access to training or promotion, basically sanctioned discrimination. It has been ongoing for a long time. Definitely an issue.”

Others pointed to the good intentions in establishing balance in the hiring process – but called out the legal challenges:

“Yes, we do want to diversify the talent pipeline. No, we do not have a ‘no white men’ policy. But it is extremely hard to create opportunities for women in a male-dominated profession, especially because we operate in a male dominated industry. So how to communicate in a legal way ‘We want more female engineers cos we think it’s gonna be really good for the business and all.’ without being discriminative? ”

“How to communicate in a legal way ‘We want more female engineers cos we think it’s gonna be really good for the business and all.’ without being discriminative?”

Other commentators suggested that policies are not the way to ‘solve’ gender imbalance – instead, they noted the challenge of diversity hiring in specific sectors and industries:

“Positive discrimination is still discrimination. Just hire based on skills. Whether you’re male or female, should not matter. And it just happens so that men tend to like certain professions/sectors more than women and vice versa.”

Another noted that the existing imbalance in the talent market should be addressed at the grade school level, not in the hiring stages for a company. Ultimately, it’s about the long game and it’s not something employers can realistically solve:

“We’ve got to be realistic, you can’t strive for a 50:50 split for male and female engineers in your organisation until the number of engineers in the industry is evenly split. We need to take a medium-to-long term approach and encourage our female engineers and our engineers that are ‘non-white’ to go back to the schools they went to, not universities or colleges, but the schools they went to and talk about engineering as a career there. Until we have an equal amount applying to colleges and universities for these courses then the numbers will be always skewed towards the white male candidate.”

One commentator suggested focusing on fostering equal representation in the form of allyship – and having strategies in place to ensure that:

“There’s a difference between explicitly excluding groups versus making efforts to promote diversity. I have worked for a company that mandated a shortlist [that] had to have at least one ‘diverse’ candidate. Nobody was excluded, but extra efforts were made where necessary to ensure that the slate presented to the hiring manager had at least 1 qualified person who was from an under-represented group. This was only a part of the organisation’s drive to increase diversity, there was also focus on developing internal talent and succession planning, and leadership and HR focus on teams and managers that were not meeting the organisation’s own internal benchmarks for diversity.”

Ensuring a diverse range of candidates was also highlighted as an important strategy:

“I always recommend recruiting strategies that enforce diverse pools (beyond just race; inclusive of experience level/similar skillsets or industries/internal talent etc) before proceeding with final interviews. This intentionally creates space for a wealth of experiences and perspectives for the interviewers consider in making their decision, while also avoiding favoritism for one group or demographic over another.”

And finally, diversity is nuanced beyond gender and race:

“I’m a white male. I’m also a diverse candidate when it comes to several parameters (neurodiverse, bisexual and no longer living in the country I was born). I never say that to pick in a spot for other diverse candidates, because I’ve had it easy. But in the hope it makes people think differently about diversity, what makes us different and how we can talk about diversity.”

How do you establish diversity, then?

So, when your organization emphasizes the importance of diversity and it falls on you as a recruiter to make a difference, what can you do? The many nuances and variations in hiring strategy already are a lot to unpack, and it gets more complex when diversity enters the picture.

Let’s agree on one thing from all the noise in LinkedIn: most do think that diversity is important. Not only is it a clear moral imperative, as 50.6% of respondents in a recent Workable survey say, there’s also a clear business case for diversity, particularly in leadership according to McKinsey.

But, obviously, an up-front ‘no white men’ policy isn’t going to cut it morally or legally. That beign said, you can still progress with good intentions and results if you establish some clear guardrails. Let’s look at a few of those now.

What you CAN do as a recruiter:

Embrace diversity: Prioritize hiring from various backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives without sidelining any group. Focus on the actual diversification – not on restrictions.

Blind or anonymized screening: More firms are moving towards this model, where personal identifiers are removed to combat unconscious bias. The Canadian government, for instance, saw a measurable increase in screen-in rates for minorities via an anonymized recruitment pilot project.

Continuous learning: Just as the workplace evolves, so must our knowledge. This means L&D for inclusive leadership, unconscious bias trainings, and other initiatives designed to establish a more level playing field.

What you CAN’T do as a recruiter:

No blanket exclusions: It’s unlawful to exclude a group based on race, gender, religion, etc. EEOC regulations are no joke.

No strict quotas: While targets can guide, hiring solely to fill a quota can be both ethically and legally problematic.

No assumptions: Every candidate is unique. Making assumptions based on background or identity is counterproductive.

We’re all in the game together

Championing diversity does have a consensus across the board – 93% of respondents say DEI is important to them, according to the above-mentioned Workable survey.

But Hung Lee’s poll shows us the complex quagmire we’re working through right now. While diversity hiring is not necessarily a new concept, it’s not matured to the point where we can all agree on best practices (yet).

One thing’s pretty clear, though – no group can be sidelined, regardless of whether they’re overrepresented or not. It’s a mess you don’t want to get yourself into.

Instead, focus on the big-picture goal – and establish a recruitment process that’s fair, transparent, and beneficial for all involved.

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Top 3 takeaways

1. Seven out of 10 are now working full time, compared with 60.1% two years earlier
2. The percentage of those working part-time or for themselves is down
3. Those not working are due to health or government benefits

In 2023, nearly seven out of every 10 respondents (68.8%) report working full time, a significant growth from the 60.1% recorded in 2021. This shouldn’t come as a surprise – the data in 2021 was fresh off the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic which saw considerable job loss across numerous sectors. And of course, Brexit made for further complications in the system.

The percentages of those in part-time and self-employed work are also down in 2023.

This ultimately means we’re seeing relative stabilization of the UK job market after those two horsemen set foot on British soil – more full-time workers means greater security, after all.

Big differences between UK and US

The percentage of those who aren’t working hasn’t changed at all – it’s 10.4% in both 2021 and 2023 – this is interesting because in the same survey in the United States, that percentage is half of what it was two years earlier (9.9% now, down from 20.8%).

Meanwhile, those actively looking for new work also didn’t change much, from 29.5% in 2021 to 29.1% now – again, markedly different from US-based respondents (22.6% now vs. 33.4% two years earlier).

What did change in the UK job market over the two-year time period is the reason why those not working aren’t actively working: it’s more due to health and government benefits now. A full third (33.3%) cited “health priorities” as the reason they’re not working, up from 26.9% two years earlier – and “government benefits” also grew in importance fro 15.4% to 22.2%.

What can you do?

Retain your employees by supporting their health

The increase in employed workers means employers should focus on enhancing retention strategies. And the emphasis on health as a reason to not work highlights the need for that kind of support in the workplace.

Allow your teams to be flexible

As personal reasons, i.e. health priorities, are leading factors for not working, employers need to consider flexible work policies that can accommodate personal needs. This might include offering remote work options, flexible hours, ease of commute, accessibility, or increased family and health support.

Market yourself as a great place to work

The higher rate of employment combined with the increased emphasis on government benefits points to the latter as being potentially by choice rather than by necessity. If you market yourself as a great place to work via more generous compensation, supportive environments, flexibility, etc., you may inspire those not working to reenter the workforce.

The post Full-time’s up in the UK – but not much else is changing appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Some employers choose to take out group short-term disability insurance for their employees as a benefit. While short-term disability laws in the US protect employees from losing their jobs in the event of a prolonged absence on medical grounds, these laws don’t protect their income, unless that absence was caused by something that happened on the job. Short-term disability leave is guaranteed by the Family and Medical Leave Act if the disability occurred off-the-job (and 95% of disabling injuries and illnesses are not job-related). It provides 12 weeks of unpaid leave to qualified employees, usually after they have used up their sick leave and or vacation days. Even these legal protections only apply to companies with more than 50 employees.

Some other countries are more generous. In the UK, employees are entitled to fixed statutory sick pay (roughly $125) for the first 28 weeks of leave related to short term disability. A significant percentage of the workforce will be in need of short-term disability leave and US law (with the exception of six states) doesn’t guarantee any compensation. By having an employer short-term disability policy a part of your overall company policy handbook can make all the difference if and when something does go wrong.

Still not sure it’s worth your while as an employer? Here’s three reasons why it might be a good idea:

1. Productivity and retention

Nearly two-thirds of all personal bankruptcies are attributed to medical problems, according to a 2007 report. Although many may have been cases of sole-proprietors, many will have inevitably included employees. Aside from the human tragedy, this translates into a costly loss to the workforce. Employment benefits have been identified as a good way to power up efforts at reinforcing and retaining a productive workforce. By providing your employees with paid short-term disability coverage, you will give them added peace of mind. This may be a great contributing factor to having happier employees who will want to stay with you longer and work better.

2. An opportunity to attract top talent

Nearly half of all educated professionals have no short term disability coverage, according to a 2015 report. The proportion of uninsured employees in less qualified positions is even higher. This imbalance offers a great opportunity for an employer who is willing to invest to gain competitive advantage. By taking out insurance and having a good short-term disability policy you can reinforce your claims to being an employer who cares and provides for the well-being of their employees. The cost for access to short-term disability coverage has an average of $0.15 per hour for all workers, according to the bureau of national statistics. This is a cost that could be easily covered by the bump in performance typically associated with a secure and qualified workforce.

3. A way to provide maternity leave

Statutory paid maternity leave is non-existent in the US. Employers may choose to compensate their employees by drafting a maternity leave policy, thus building a more engaged and happy workforce. Conveniently, the definition of short-term disability in the US is quite broad to the point that it includes pregnancy and childbirth. Hence, short-term disability insurance policies may cover six weeks of pay after childbirth; longer in cases of complications. By having this provision, you can offer payment to your employees at a time they need it. Also, a policy will ensure maternity leave pay is consistently paid to all employees. Otherwise, you may be tempted to pay a more valuable employee more money to retain them, and that way you are risking a lawsuit.

The post 3 reasons to get a short-term disability policy appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Zappos, an online shoe and clothing retailer owned by Amazon, and Medium, a digital publishing platform, switched from a conventional management hierarchy to Holacracy. Initially at least, they struck public relations gold. The move generated a blizzard of headlines about doing away with managers, flattening hierarchies and tearing up job descriptions. The future of management had arrived, we were breathlessly told, and it was “radical”, “bold” and “revolutionary.”

So far, so hyped.

Within the space of a year both firms ran into serious difficulties with implementation. Medium was the first to cave, concluding that Holacracy asked more of the company than it was giving. In a style now known as the “confessional” blog post, Medium said a warm no thanks to a system they had found unworkable.

Zappos stayed the course but only after its CEO, Tony Hsieh, drew a much-publicized line in the sand — offering all employees the option to remain and buy into Holacracy or leave and accept a fat severance check.

The publicity pendulum now swung the other way with equal vigor. Holacracy was “utopian”, “impractical” and a “failure.” Nothing much to see here, most observers concluded, move along.

Is there an overlooked approach to Holacracy that lies between these extremes? Yes, because at almost every step Holacracy has been dogged by serious misconceptions.

First up is the ahistorical assertion that it is entirely new. In fact, Holacracy belongs firmly in the tradition of self-management that has been around since British coal miners adopted self-managing teams in the 1950s and sent productivity soaring.

When similar ideas jumped the track into other businesses they created their own jargon from “innovation task forces” in the U.S. to “participatory management” in Europe. They were adopted on both sides of the Atlantic with Volvo, in Sweden, and Fedex in the U.S. both enjoying notable productivity gains.

By the 1980s the management scholar Warren Bennis noted a broad shift towards what he called “adhocracy” — flexible, informal management structures. In all instances the goal was to free effective teams from management that slowed them down or dulled their adaptability.

Eventually what had been tried with teams was trialled with entire chunks of organizations.

In the Internet age we’ve had developments like the open-source movement, agile and scrum methodologies which have profoundly influenced how companies function. It’s more useful to see Holacracy as an iteration of these existing ideas rather than an entirely new “operating system” for organizations as it was proclaimed.

Secondly that it was democratic. Steve Denning, a consultant deals well with this misconception: “It’s not democratic; decisions are autocratic, with every employee holding a different authority to make certain decisions. So it’s not a big consensus system; it’s just more distributed.”

Holacracy was “birthed” in 2007 when Brian Robertson codified the management lessons he had learned as founder of a Pennsylvania software company. Drawing on the ideas of writer Arthur Koestler, whose 1967 ‘Ghost in the Machine’ introduced “holons” — units that are both autonomous and part of a whole.

Seeking to rectify what he saw as “messy power relationships in our organizations”, Robertson started to conceive of an “order without bosses.”

Fond of speaking in metaphors, Robertson compares his system to the natural order, saying nature’s way of scaling comes through distributing autonomy through every level. Holacracy, he explains, is a “distributed authority paradigm held in a rule system.”

Holacracy has become fraught with misconceptions that make it hard to separate the actual system from the imagined one.

In this new order organizations identify multiple nests of circles (teams) that contain sub-circles (smaller, more specific teams) and are all part of the General Company Circle (the organization as a whole). Getting all of this to work without a traditional boss setting tasks and telling everyone what to do is about getting the right set of rules, Robertson maintains.

“It’s not about throwing it out and going to chaos it’s about a better emerging order,” he says.

So far, so reasonable. Problems arise when the jargon intensifies. Holacracy, we’re told is a “social technology” akin to democracy, although not democratic. In one popular TEDx talk, he compared Holacracy to nature, democracy, constitutional monarchy and a brighter light bulb.

This brings us to one of the problems with Holacracy, which is the relentless ineloquence of its architect. His regular substitution of nouns for verbs — such as “obsoleting” — can be tiring. When the Financial Times reviewed his ‘Holacracy: The Revolutionary Management System that Abolishes Hierarchy’ they pointed out that the “book on alternative management system may be a setback for the cause.”

Putting aside the verbiage, there is a useful concession in the penultimate chapter of the book that Holacracy can be adopted piecemeal. The main reason for Robertson’s reluctance to mention this may be due in part to his business model being based on selling licenses for the comprehensive version.

Medium’s experience is revealing. Andy Doyle, their head of operations admitted that crude media coverage had largely confused what the system was: “Holacracy has become fraught with misconceptions that make it hard to separate the actual system from the imagined one.”

The system’s requirement that all every job require a fully-defined role and that every role required a comprehensive set of responsibilities became burdensome, he explains: “codifying responsibilities in explicit detail hindered a proactive attitude and sense of communal ownership.”

The end was nigh when Medium realized that Holacracy had “begun to exert a small but persistent tax on both our effectiveness, and our sense of connection to each other.”

Worst of all, for a system based on separating the professional development side of an organization from the getting work done side, Doyle writes that Holacracy was “getting in the way of the work.”

At Zappos meanwhile, 150 departmental units had evolved into 500 circles. And its 150 team leaders surged to 300 “lead links” — Holacracy’s closest equivalent to managers and the people who connect the circles to super circles.

Just as the “Zapponian” shoe-sellers were feeling the strain, the fearless CEO Hsieh threw more philosophy at them, this time in the form of colors. Frederic Laloux, a consultant whose 2014 book ‘Reinventing Organizations’ is proving influential, ascribes colors to companies according to their level of evolution. The next development stage, characterized by self-management, is teal.

“Teal is the goal; holacracy is the system,” cheered Hsieh.

Then came his ultimatum. Nearly three in ten of its employees opted for buyouts or left outright and Zappos dropped off Fortune’s List of Best Places to Work where it had been an evergreen presence.

When the Harvard Business Review got four writers, including John Bunch, a former poker player turned Zappos lead on Holacracy implementation, to evaluate the system they concluded that its suitability depended on organizations’ balance between reliability and adaptability. This is, of course, a scale not a binary question. So the answer can be partial Holacracy.

“We’d be surprised if more than 20% of the Global 1000 looked ‘teal’ in 2030, to use Frederic Laloux’s term for ‘whole,’ evolutionary, self-managing organizations. But we’d also be surprised if more than 20% didn’t significantly draw on some of the techniques within their corporate frameworks,” the quartet wrote.

It’s worth remembering what the original purpose of bureaucracy was meant to be. In the same way we now associate cubicles with conformity but their design was originally utopian; bureaucracy was conceived to liberate rather than shackle us. Bureaucracy was meant to end the tyranny of mercurial bosses by imposing a depersonalized, standardized structures and rules. An organizing principle that may be overdue “de-obsoletion,” as Robertson might put it.

The post Holacracy after the hype: lessons for business appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

To answer that question at Software Advice, where we review recruiting software, we have compiled data collected after speaking to thousands of companies thinking about purchasing new applicant tracking systems. For each potential software buyer, we recorded the company’s pain points and reasons for upgrading to recruiting software. The report below analyzes this data, and provides answers to key questions, such as:

• What method do the majority of buyers use to track applicants before purchasing recruiting software?

• Where are recruiters looking for candidates?

• What are the top reasons for purchasing new applicant tracking systems?

Guest post by Erin Osterhaus
Managing Editor
Software Advice

Related: How to maximize user adoption of your ATS

Considering an ATS? See how Workable compares to other applicant tracking systems, like Lever and Greenhouse.

The post Recruiting software: why companies buy applicant tracking systems appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Hootsuite has a point of view on hiring. Do you?

.@Hootsuite rolls out the red carpet for candidates who believe that social is changing the world. #HRTechWorld #missiondriven #hiring

— Workable (@Workable) October 27, 2015

Creatives, 'out loud' thinkers, mentors, constant learners. These are the people we like too! #hrtechworld  https://t.co/dcz4aCpsJE

— Hootsuite Careers (@HootsuiteLife) October 27, 2015

Richard Branson was the headliner for today’s closing session — and it’s always great to hear him talk — but it was Hootsuite’s approach to hiring that caught our attention. They know exactly who they want (people who believe that social media is changing the way the world works) and what they can offer. Ambrosia Vertesi, Hootsuite’s VP of Talent, says the company is especially committed to developing the rising generation of talent with mentorships and other career growth opportunities.

“Active disengagement” is an epidemic

Active #disengagement at companies is epidemic – Yves Morieux @bcg at #HRTechWorld pic.twitter.com/ntnBaqqxeK

— Minter Dial, Professional Speaker #Heartificial (@mdial) October 27, 2015

Take note, leaders! Here's Yves Morieux's 6 rules for fostering #cooperation. #HRTechWorld #management #leadership pic.twitter.com/teJAitOGfn

— Workable (@Workable) October 27, 2015

According to these stats, one in five of your employees may be “actively disengaged.” The term, coined by Gallup, refers to people who are actively working against the interests of your company. Yves Morieux of BCG says this toxic situation can be fixed through cooperation. Note that cooperation isn’t about making sure people like each other. It’s about giving everyone the support and skills they need to succeed so that the entire team can devote more time to actual productivity.

How involved should hiring managers be in recruiting?

Some best practices for using hiring managers to recruit. @vlastelica #HRTechWorld pic.twitter.com/CQcfWzVCBj

— Andy Headworth (@andyheadworth) October 27, 2015

@vlastelica speaks about partnering with the hiring manager for more recruitment success #HRTechWorld pic.twitter.com/CMYjeNCJrH

— Martijn Hemminga (@martijnhemminga) October 27, 2015

4 Brilliant examples of comps who drove recruiting thru gr8 hiring manager engagement #HRTechWorld pic.twitter.com/9oZaNfOgzj

— SocialTalent (@SocialTalent) October 27, 2015

Third and last step: best practices in the area of Partership @vlastelica #HRTechWorld pic.twitter.com/51Yaf42f48

— Cecilia Spanu (@CeciliaSpanu) October 27, 2015

Hiring managers at some of the world’s top companies (Amazon, Yahoo, T-Mobile, eBay) have a massive impact on recruiting. At Groupon, candidates are three to five times more likely to open LinkedIn emails from hiring managers. At Yahoo, hiring managers devote a week of their time to “sourcing sprints.” To celebrate hiring wins, great hiring managers at Amazon are recognized on the intranet. At eBay, they get a cocktail party. Thanks, John Vlastelica, for the ideas.

The post Three winning recruiting tips from HR Tech World appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

When the first shot was fired, the war for talent was said to be about competition inside and between companies. The theory, posited in a study in 1997 and followed up in a book of the same name four years later, was that smart companies needed to aggressively hire, promote and reward talent, while ruthlessly culling those perceived to be less talented. The main point here being aggression. In fact, you can delete the rest of the sentence and just leave the word “aggressive” and you still get the point.

Later research — not carried out by McKinsey — found that this first war for talent was not only nonsense but damaging. The Darwinian approach actively undermined collaboration and fomented conflict at work. As early as 2001 Stanford professor, Jeffrey Pfeffer, skewered the war metaphor when he wrote that it “sets up competitive, zero-sum dynamics that make internal learning and knowledge transfer difficult… and create an attitude of arrogance instead of an attitude of wisdom.”

Rank and yank

Oddly enough the way that McKinsey defined both leading companies and talent could be best summarized as “companies like mine” and “people like me”. It was nectar for the management narcissists. The theory found its fullest expression at Enron where its principles came to be known as “rank and yank”. If that sounds like some kind of hellish frat party which ends with everyone being arrested then think about what happened at Enron.

The devotees of the current version of the war for talent — which emphasizes conflict between rather than within companies — will tell you that hiring has never been so competitive. If you check your Twitter stream you’re likely to find several of them breathlessly tweeting to this effect right now.

It’s more zero-sum thinking in which we’re engaged in a vicious battle for the diminishing human resources or talent. Since 1997 there have been huge economic peaks and troughs, periods of near full employment and slews of lay-offs. Through it all the discourse of scarcity continues and the war drums are beaten relentlessly.

It’s tough out there in the trenches we dug ourselves

Back at McKinsey, a 2012 report gave their old idea new currency. Ramping up the scarcity rhetoric they predicted a worldwide shortfall of 18 million qualified workers by 2020. The result was another rush of “global war for talent” headlines.

According to this view of the world an economic recovery and lower unemployment are not good news, they are rumbles from the frontline of an intensifying war. It is this kind of hysteria and the way it has come to dominate thinking around recruitment that is largely responsible for some of the sillier hiring stories to emerge recently.

Snapchat’s use of a geo-location filter to target Uber staff at their offices was a standout. When employees at the taxi-hailing  tech company took a photo using Snapchat a filter would appear asking them: “This place driving you mad?” The photo filter, contained a link to Snapchat’s careers page and showed a ghost (the brand’s trademark) driving a cab and pulling miserable faces.

Quite apart from being untrue on a theoretical level, the first victim of the war for talent was language itself. At Workable, we took a conscious decision not to talk about our product as a weapon in the war for talent.

Evolution not an arms race

Recruitment is as important as it can be hard. And we’re in a period of evolution in which the tools and practices which were previously the domain of larger organizations are now within reach of ambitious companies of all sizes.

There’s always more to learn and we believe in sharing good ideas. Rather than a weapon, we’re a place where people can learn and improve. This learning and sharing approach assumes there is a broader benefit to be derived from improving the way prospective employees and employers find each other.

The alternative is a cascade of hostility and misleading promises to reveal “secrets,” identify “enemies” and sell “weapons”. The one certainty with a militarized metaphor is that it leads to ever more breathless escalation.

Publisher’s Weekly warned of the original book back in 2001, that: “McKinsey’s name along with extensive publicity will help initial sales, but the boilerplate content may not maintain them.”

Sadly this sensible review was largely ignored. As the business writer Lucy Kellaway puts it rather well: “the market for bullshit knows only one phase: the bull phase.”

Peace.

The post Ending the phony war for talent appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

This is not an argument against personnel decisions being made with a systematic approach to measuring employee performance. Most organizations need a review process to compensate employees, identify areas of improvement, set new goals, support succession planning and a lot more. It also allows time for managers and team members to sit and talk without the interference of everyday tasks.

But the traditional model has been losing ground and some companies like Adobe abandoned annual reviews altogether. Whether you’re ready for this radical shift or you would like to make your existing process more efficient, you can give some thought to the format, frequency, tools or culture of your performance management process.

Here we provide some fresh ideas on how to improve performance appraisals and make them more effective:

Rethink the system

Adobe found that their annual performance review process wasn’t delivering. When the dreaded time came, managers were overloaded, team members dissatisfied and opportunities for improvement were being passed up. A radical change was in order. Other companies like Accenture, Deloitte and Netflix also made a shift away from this approach. Even General Electric, once a strong advocate of the traditional system, recently substituted the annual review with an app for regular feedback.

Think about whether your employee reviews really work. There are some things that should characterize every performance appraisal system. Do employees know what’s expected of them? Only half of them do, according to a recent survey. No matter what system you want to use, make sure to start with the basics: clearly defined employee performance goals.

What does performance appraisal mean to your company? It’s common practice if, once a year, a manager sits down to score all their team members according to a determined grading scale for different traits. Then, they may compare team members with each other and use forced distributions. They identify the top 15% who may get a raise. They hold a meeting which usually involves a one-way conversation where employees may be disgruntled by negative feedback they weren’t expecting. Seeing the flaws in this system is easy.

Frequency

The first thing you should consider is whether once or twice a year is enough. Assessing past performance after a year or six months doesn’t help to identify performance issues before they become a problem and provide timely resolution. Mistakes or accomplishments from the beginning of the year may have long been forgotten. When it comes to constructive feedback and employee development, sooner is better.

Think about how often your company changes its operational goals or sets new ones. If you’re a startup or undergoing radical change, schedule frequent meetings with employees to make sure everyone stays on the same page and works towards the right goals.

Format

The performance review’s format is another story. Companies like Semco partners in Brazil, have attracted much attention for their innovative management approach. A democratic workplace doesn’t need performance appraisals at all; there are no standardized goals and self-managed teams can work on their own terms.

If you don’t feel ready to follow Semco’s footsteps, make a move towards improving your process. You can base your performance appraisal on meetings between manager and team member, whether they’re scheduled periodically or after a project’s completion. Those meetings should be informal two-way conversations and should be more focused on employee development rather than assessment. Don’t talk about career plans but performance improvements. Introduce effective coaching sessions that address the employee’s needs.

For formal appraisals, you can use formats such as 360 feedback. This kind of assessment doesn’t only include the manager as a source of evaluation but also peers, subordinates and even suppliers or customers. It’s deemed more objective and can have bigger motivational effect. Additionally, since superiors, peers and customers have different requirements, it allows for a more complete picture of how the employee is performing. Despite its drawbacks (e.g. it’s often time-consuming and difficult in administration), it’s worth considering as an alternative format.

You can also provide people with opportunities for self-assessment. People usually know their strengths and weaknesses. If there are differences in the way they see themselves and how their managers perceive them, a counseling meeting could help them resolve this.

Generally, the most effective performance review alternatives focus on employee development. Managers and team members should frequently seek each other to talk about the fulfilment of goals. Conversations shouldn’t focus on past performance but on how the future can become brighter for employee and company alike.

Find useful tools

A challenge of performance reviews is that they take too much out of manager’s time. So much so, that managers may find it difficult to complete other duties and therefore begin to doubt the value of the whole process. Luckily, technology provides many solutions. Tools like Asana allow for frequent monitoring of task completion and serve as reminders of objectives. For complete performance management, you can look into a wide variety of tools to find one that suits your company and can better serve your needs. Workable uses Small Improvements which helps in keeping track of performance, goals and valuable traits or noteworthy incidents. Getting rid of paper documentation is always a great benefit.

Related: 17 effective candidate sourcing tools

Work on the culture

Whatever decision you make regarding your performance evaluation system, you need to be aware that employee attitude and company culture matter for success. You may have to deal with managers that don’t take performance management seriously because it interferes with their everyday duties. You may also have to deal with employees who care more about getting a perfect score at the end of the year than they do their job.

The key to every new system’s implementation is communication. Make sure you communicate the purpose and goals of a revised approach to performance evaluation. Try to dissociate reward and punishment from performance reviews. Employees should understand that you place great value in them developing their strengths and dealing with their weaknesses. Managers will be the main facilitators of this process, even more so, when they see the benefits in the way they’ll be evaluated by their own superiors. Training sessions can help in improving their performance management and leadership skills that are essential for frequent coaching. Understanding what the employee wants from their job and what motivates them is vital.

The post Performance review alternatives to the traditional approach appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

“Anybody who thinks there’s a level playing field in tech is insane” says Aline Lerner. Aline is the co-founder and CEO of interviewing.io, an anonymous technical interviewing platform. She doesn’t think ‘meritocracy’ is a dirty word. But she understands why some people think it is, particularly in the tech recruiting world.

Aline used to be an engineer but she saw an opportunity to make a bigger impact as a recruiter. Being a recruiter in the Bay Area has convinced Aline that technical recruiting is broken. Finding good coders isn’t easy. Coding merit should matter more than anything else. But recruiters are missing out on great technical candidates because pedigrees and degrees don’t reliably signal coding ability. Aline wants to re-engineer the top of tech’s recruiting funnel by replacing resumes with merit.

Here’s how Aline thinks about tech’s recruiting problem and her advice for recruiters who want to fix it:

Resumes are the biggest barrier to entry in tech

Traditionally, resumes sit at the top of tech’s recruiting funnel. But they’re terrible. When Aline started recruiting in 2012, there were very few recruiters in Silicon Valley with technical backgrounds. As a former engineer, she stood out in a competitive crowd. She knew how to spot good coders and found herself working with candidates other recruiters “wouldn’t even touch,” based on their resumes.

“When I started recruiting there was still a huge emphasis on pedigree. Even the smallest startups with no brand insisted that everyone they interviewed came from 1 of 5 top schools, or 1 of 10 top companies. That left out a huge long tail of candidates who were, arguably, just as capable.”

The industry’s insistence on pedigree frustrated Aline. As a coder, she found almost no link between candidates’ school pedigree and how well they could code. In her experience, resumes don’t identify the best candidates. They just act as barriers for non-traditional candidates.

Based on her analysis of hiring data, Aline found that “lack of relevant experience” was the number one reason both recruiters and engineers gave for rejecting candidates’ resumes.

Aline acknowledges that experience can be important. But she thinks that most of the time “lack of relevant experience” is a euphemism for something else. Often it means:

I don’t think this candidate is smart enough

People can couch their rejections in excuses. But a lot of the time, they’re just being elitist. It’s easy to spot a candidate with a Stanford degree. It’s harder to spot raw coding ability. Nobody likes to think they’re an elitist. Making blanket assumptions about candidates based on social signals is easy. But it isn’t a good way to source the best coders.

There’s a resume-recruiter catch-22

Despite ample evidence that resumes are fatally flawed, they’ve proved difficult to kill. Resumes are an easy filtering option because they’re non-technical. Most recruiters aren’t coders, so they rely on non-technical filtering options. Aline argues that it’s unrealistic to expect all technical recruiters to have technical backgrounds. But, without technical knowledge, it’s difficult for recruiters to assess coders’ abilities. So, they have to rely on proxies like resumes. This is a specific example of a general recruiting problem:

As a recruiter, it’s really hard to tell if someone will be good at a job you have no experience doing.

According to Aline, technical recruiters face another, thornier problem that nobody likes to mention:

“Getting respect from engineers is one of the toughest things for a recruiter to do. You’re set up to fail, out of the gate. Every time you speak to an engineer there’s a window in which you have to prove yourself. Everybody knows it. It’s just the nature of the beast.”

So, what should an ambitious technical recruiter do?

Here’s what Aline recommends:

Get a feel for coding basics

Knowing some coding fundamentals can help recruiters gain respect and empathize with candidates. That doesn’t mean technical recruiters need to code well. Aline recommends reading The Non-technical Guide to Web Technologies by Tommy Chheng and taking a short ‘intro to coding’ class through Udacity or Coursera.

“Coding experience can definitely be a big advantage” says Aline. “But ultimately, recruiting is a sales job. It’s better to be a good salesperson than a good coder.”

If you’re reading resumes, know what matters and what doesn’t

To find the right candidates to sell (and sell to), recruiters need reliable shortcuts or ‘signals’ to filter candidates with. If they have to rely on resumes, they should know what to look for. Aline ran some data analysis, based on 300 technical interviews, to see which resume signals indicate how well candidates can code. Here’s what she found:

What doesn’t matter

• GPA
• A degree from a top computer science school
• Side projects (at least, not as much as coders expect)

What matters

• Experience working at a top company
• Whether candidates’ resumes make their previous job responsibilities clear

What really matters (way more than anything else)

• Typos and grammatical errors

So, contrary to popular perception, companies that hire coders from no-name schools aren’t ‘lowering their bar’ because schools aren’t a good measurement of bar height. Typos are a better measurement. And they’re usually easy to spot.

Ask for a writing sample

Despite the common stereotype of techies who can’t write and writers who can’t do math, the two skill sets aren’t mutually exclusive. In Aline’s experience, good coders are good writers. To assess writing skills, resumes and cover letters aren’t the best options. They’re formulaic, generic and constrained by strange customs. It definitely helps if you can actually tell what candidates did at each of their past jobs, though. Here are two resume writing samples Aline highlights on her blog:

She argues that the second sample is clearer and less jargony. It’s a lot easier to tell what the second candidate achieved and what the scope of their project was. In general, well-written resumes focus on teamwork and candidates’ actions. Badly-written resumes focus on technology and industry jargon.

It’s even easier to tell how well candidates can write if you ask them for a specific writing sample, aimed at non-technical readers. Aline recommends asking candidates to describe a project they worked on recently. If a candidate can explain their project to a non-technical audience, they’re probably a good communicator, a good thinker and a good coder.

Consider anonymous technical interviews

Ultimately, Aline advocates for blind technical interviews. Blind interviews remove many of the pedigree prejudices that resumes are rife with. Interviewing.io tracks how candidates do in practice interviews and then uses aggregate past performance data to identify the strongest candidates. Using this approach, over half of interviewing.ios’ candidates make it to onsite interviews at top companies, indicating that anonymous interviewing is a much better candidate signaling mechanism than resumes.

Anonymity allows companies to judge candidates based on the strength of their coding performance. Not their name, gender, race, degree or anything else. Aline doesn’t advocate for stripping candidates of their identities, though. Candidates’ identities matter—but they shouldn’t be a hurdle to getting interviewed. On interviewing.io, interviews focus on performance, not prejudice. Candidates can unveil themselves as they progress through further rounds of interviews.

Anonymity isn’t immune to problems, though. Aline discovered an unnerving gender gap in her beta user base. Men were advancing to the next round of interviews 1.4 times more often than women. So she developed a real-time voice masking feature to see whether hiding interviewees’ genders could help.

Blind technical recruiting is one piece in a large puzzle

Aline recently released the results of her voice modulation experiment. They were surprising. Contrary to what most people expected, masking gender had no effect on interview performance. Confused by these findings, Aline went back to her data to see what else could be causing the gender gap. She discovered that women were leaving interviewing.io roughly 7 times more often than men after doing badly in an interview. Women were self-selecting out based on their self-perception, not their actual performance:

“At least in these findings, it’s not about systemic bias against women or women being bad at computers or whatever. Rather it’s about women being bad at dusting themselves off after failing, which, despite everything, is probably a lot easier to fix.”

Even if women’s self-perceptions are easier to fix than societal oppression, fixing them isn’t going to be easy. Aline realizes that she can’t fix all of tech’s recruiting problems single handedly. Let alone society’s. The ‘top’ of the recruiting funnel starts early. Education, income, gender and race influence who gets to the top of anything, especially competitive funnels and fields. Lots of organizations, like Khan Academy, Code2040 and The Level Playing Field Institute, are working hard to fix other parts of the opportunity pipeline.

For now, we can combat recruiting’s meritocracy problem individually. We can ask questions, analyze data and challenge society’s perceptions. These steps may seem small. But they’re the only way the world has ever been changed.

The post How can we fix tech recruiting? appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

If you have ever heard someone at work say:

We don’t want to have done A in vain…
We need to get all our money’s worth from B…
We already have technology C in place, we don’t want to waste that investment by changing to technology D…

Then you have seen the sunk cost fallacy at work.

What are sunk costs?

Sunk costs are costs we have already incurred and cannot recover.

In our personal lives, sunk costs include:

• Non-refundable concert tickets
• And terminally-unhappy multi-year romantic relationships.

In business life, sunk costs include:

• Investments in training and developing staff
• And annual contracts with technology companies.

Once we spend sunk cost money (or time), it’s gone. No amount of rationalizing can bring it back.

What is the sunk cost fallacy?

If we make decisions that rationalize our past investments, instead of maximizing our future gain, we succumb to ‘the sunk cost fallacy.’ Sunk costs are irretrievable, so we shouldn’t let them influence our future decision-making. But we do. We allow our past investments of time and resources to continue to commit us to bad decisions. We throw good time and money after bad:

• We stay in the wrong jobs, out of inertia.
• We stay in bad relationships, out of habit.
• We go to concerts, even if we no longer want to.
• And we stick to legacy technologies, even if they’re not meeting our company’s needs.

We do all these things because we worry about wasting time and money that we have already spent. And we don’t want to admit that our past decisions were bad ones – especially if we made those past decisions at work, as managers. By trying to ‘save face’ and avoid waste, we waste more time and money than we sunk in the first place.

In our personal lives, the sunk cost fallacy can be a benign waste of time, driving us to play Farmville for hours on end. But at companies, sunk costs can morph into a culture of rationalized management that hampers growth.

How companies succumb to sunk cost culture

Companies succumb to sunk cost culture when managers:

• Are not aware of the the sunk cost fallacy
• And are not rewarded for identifying (or combating) sunk costs.

These management problems evolve at companies that:

• Reward employees for facetime instead of results
• Don’t offer useful management or business training
• And treat management as a status symbol instead of a business function.

How companies can combat sunk cost culture

The easiest way to combat a sunk cost culture is to:

• Educate employees about the sunk cost fallacy
• And remind managers that good management isn’t about saving face, it’s about getting results.

The best way to do that is to admit that you’ve been doing things wrong and cut your losses.

This is, of course, easier said than done. But starting to think (and talk) about the sunk cost fallacy at work is the only way you’ll be able to solve it. Sharing this article with someone at work could be a good way to get started.

The post How companies succumb to sunk cost culture appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

1. Because it was there.

Like George Mallory climbing Everest or finding a couch that smells just a little like raccoon on the side of the road and taking it home, “because it was there” seems to be the prime reason for keeping an outdated ATS. It’s been in place so long that no one is responsible for it anymore and people keep using it. Though they will all curse it at every opportunity and keep multiple spreadsheets—because even Excel has usurped it in terms of usability. Using a massively outdated ATS also means you’ll get instant sympathy anywhere that recruiters gather. In certain circles just mentioning you use a particular ATS will either have you marked as worthy of pity or a masochist. At least they’ll probably buy you a commiseration drink.

2. Because you’ve inherited it.

Shakespeare left his wife his “second best bed.” Working in HR, much like being the wife of a 16th century playwright, can make for some lousy inheritance. With average employee tenure being less than the average Mephistophelian sales contract it’s no surprise that there are often a few “leftovers.”

Inheriting software that you had no role in choosing, but that is central to your daily role, can be galling. If an organization divides departments and they aren’t closely aligned, you can quickly end up with some great accountancy software with a free ATS thrown in. While this type of rudimentary workflow software might not cost you much financially, it does tend to snatch a little bit of your recruiter’s souls with each use.

3. Because everyone else doesn’t want it to change.

For some HR and Recruiting departments the relationship they have with their ATS is less a happy codependency and more parasitic.

While the software was once shiny and new, the passage of time has left it needy for resources. In turn, other systems have been built on it and other departments have become dependent on outputs that are in turn dependent on hasty, hacky workarounds that the system was never meant to be used for.

The ATS has become a precarious monolith at the center of a web of dependencies and now becomes untouchable. Talk of removing it is shot down quickly and new members of the team will learn to only mention it again in hushed tones. It’s time to realize you aren’t using the software anymore. The software is using you.

4. Because you’re in charge now, so why not?

So you landed that new job? Got a shiny new title and raise? Time to distance yourself from the last guy and make their achievements ring hollow in comparison to your new glorious reign. Where first to mete out justice in your new kingdom? In the Talent Game of Thrones what better way to lay the ghost of your predecessor than with the Valyrian steel of a new ATS?

It’s often very little time after a newly minted Head of Talent joins a company that the need to change a system arrives. This could be due to a number of factors; the will to replicate previous successes, the will to try a system they weren’t allowed to before (even to get to make the decision for themselves), the will to express control to fill the gap that a little imposter syndrome has made… This is an anti-pattern of behaviour, it gives the buzz of the new without having to assess (or praise) the previous incumbent of your current Iron Throne.

5. Because if you remove it, it will all fall down.

Before the current generation of usable HR and Talent software existed, we often made do with add-ons to ERP systems. They were the offspring of logistics software so naturally they treated candidates like packages to be shipped around. Some thinking that arose around the same time, largely due to hardware constraints, was that having one tool to do everything was better than having finely tuned, purpose built tools to perform the tasks you needed. Like having a massive, expensive, four month deployment plan, sledge-hammer over a perfectly formed set of watchmakers tools each crafted to do their job perfectly.

People liked this for a while and the software manufacturers responded by expanding their offerings into ever increasing silos of the businesses they sold to. Bloatware took over and all the while the cry of “integration” rang out. Some people are still forever chasing a mythical form of “integration” like meditating towards their own enlightenment. Meanwhile, for everyone who’s made the switch already, there’s flexibility, better candidate and user experience and an API.

6. Because you fell in love too fast.

They say “the grass is always greener” but if they were about to make the decision on which ATS to buy they might fall into the trap of thinking there was one particular spot that was even more than green. These are the thankfully few who fall so totally in love with a new feature they’re willing to bet the whole hillside on that one perfect picnic spot.

As buyers of software, we get marketed to a lot, and some of that marketing is bound to hit a particular sweet spot. In these instances it’s easy to get swept up and blinded by something that a salesperson wants to show you. The newer, shiner something gives us a little amnesia for the benefits of the current system. The truth only rearing its head when the contract is signed, we suddenly realize that it now takes 24 clicks to do what previously took three, or that the button marked “Reports” leads only to the upgrade page because you forgot to buy the add-on and now the budget is spent. Tell “them” to keep their adages about grass and be sure to look before you leap.

7. Because you were bribed.

“So did you enjoy the drinks/dinner/golf day/television/big bag of cash? Made a decision on that software yet?” There are sometimes darker reasons that a deal may have been done. It’s fair to say that some reasons are less than above board. If your decision making process comes with a decision on which perk to accept for choosing a particular vendor, chances are the decision making process might not be as lily white as others might have hoped. There are dozens of motivations for making a purchasing decision but if it’s based on the fact that your brother works for the supplier or the software comes with a free helicopter ride it might be a case of the software buying you, not you buying the software.

8. Because they really got me…

In a market with a lot of players there’s pressure for vendors to differentiate themselves and appeal to the current fixations of their buying audiences (in some cases with very little real correlation between marketing claim and product reality.) Company marketing is able to make ideological claims in the hope of garnering both attention and dollars. Talking authoritatively about a current topic is one thing, but shoehorning in some irrelevant product in the hope to convince a readership that their product is beneficial in these areas is at best disingenuous. Vendors might be telling everyone that their “mobile-first one-stop cloud-based marketplace collaboration app for unconscious bias reduction” is the “next big thing” but those claims have to hold up to scrutiny.

This goes beyond technical claims and attempts to be the market leader for a whole area of an audience’s concern, like diversity for example. In these cases buying the mistakenly-marketed tool is seen as doing enough to satisfy the end goal. “Use this tool and your onboarding will be seamless and perfect”, But these claims hide a truth that’s harder to confront. Real change will take more than these tools and believing the hype will mean you end up wondering why the magic wand you purchased doesn’t quite do the trick.

9. Because it was expensive.

So you have an ATS. You made the decision in good faith and can’t understand why the team don’t love it. After all, it was so expensive! This version of the sunk cost fallacy with a little hidden buyer’s remorse thrown in for good measure is remarkably prevalent in HR and Recruitment teams. When faced with a purchasing decision and unable to make a qualified discernment between options, there are a number of ways to get some more insight. Some are rational, “I’ll ask for a customer reference.” Some less rational, “This one is more expensive so it must be better.”

This irrationality may sometimes be credible in the face of a lack of information or other financial or time constraints. Even after the purchase is made, there can still be irrational thinking that is linked to the reputational cost on the behalf of the decision maker. The purchaser of a “not quite as advertised” system is forced into a position of advocacy for the software in order to justify the purchase. This is particularly hard on teams who come under greater scrutiny or even blamed for the poor performance of a new software tool. It’s an uphill struggle for the user of a tool to convince the purchaser (who only ever saw a sales demo) that it might not be all it’s cracked up to be.

10. Because you were afraid.

Finally, fear. Fear of being left behind. Fear of missing out. Fear of exposure. There’s an ATS-o-phobia that can creep into the decision to purchase a new system that will both hold responsibility for being the gateway to your business for new staff, and also reflect on you directly. For many people, choosing a new software system will be core to their business. The ATS is almost unique in that it’s rarely confined to one department. Its user base is cross department, and can include the more senior people in an organization. It’s a buying decision that has to be justified repeatedly, surviving the foibles and nit-picking of hiring managers from every angle.

Making the case to buy and implement a new hiring system is big decision—and there’s little doubt that it can be a daunting choice. The key thing to remember is to be aware of the compromises you’ll be making.

A software tool should aid efficiency rather than force the hand of its purchaser. If an ATS is changing the processes you’re currently using, be aware that this is also changing the way a candidate is introduced to your company culture.

A great system won’t just bend you to its will. It should support your current style and have clear areas where it visibly improves both candidate and your own experience. When evaluating systems, a little fear might be a good thing. But better to dial it down to “caution” and keep your guard up.

More Resources:

• How do you know it’s time to purchase recruitment software and what are your tips for success?
• How to make a business case for recruiting software

The post Terrible reasons for choosing an ATS appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Career prospects can be attractive particularly for salespeople who might feel stuck at the samxe entry-level job for a long period of time. To explore the importance of career development in retention, we asked for first-hand insights from two people with extensive experience in sales, including former Workable sales and business development manager Paul Mathieson, and current Workable account executive Olivia Spector. They both confirmed that it pays to invest in career progression in order to create a happy and productive sales team.

For Paul, building a sales career path starts early. How early? Even before hiring. “I like to explore candidates’ professional goals during interviews,” he said. ”I’m curious about what drove them to sales – because, usually, my team members come from diverse backgrounds – and where they want to be in a few years.”

Giving this conversation an early start encourages candidates to accept the job offer and put their best selves into the job, as Olivia explains. “During the interview process, I was told that there are career paths inside the sales team, new roles are being designed, and within one year, I could get a new position. This was definitely a winning point.”

This also prompted Olivia to be up-front with her new manager, to express her professional interests and acquire new skills and knowledge on the job.

How do you build a successful career path in sales?

There’s more than one way

Much like the sales process itself, if you try to be everything to everyone when building career paths, you’ll probably fail. Every person is unique, and therefore is on their own individual career path. To keep development plans as customizable as possible, Paul highlights the importance of having a range of functions in a team: “When there are sub-teams within the sales department, you can assign employees in the team that best fits their personality and strengths. This way, you’ll be able to hire people for the position they’re the most qualified for.”

Paul adds some examples: “Someone who’s good at building relationships could start as an inbound salesperson and later move to an account management role. Someone who’s tech-savvy would be more suitable as the go-to person for prospective customers who want to get down to the nitty-gritty of the product.”

Pave the way

Even if you’re building different career paths for different team members, you need to set up an action plan each time. “You can’t just go one year or two years after a person got hired and say, ‘now it’s time to move you to a new role’”, says Paul. “These things don’t happen instantly or automatically. It needs a lot of prep work. I want my team members to have career progression in the back of their minds.”

Paul continues: “And the trick for them is to not get lost in the big picture. Set smaller goals; milestones you want them to achieve. Get them to think about the direction they want to take.”

Olivia agrees. “I’m thinking of the next step in my career and what it takes to get there. What should I get better at? What new skills should I learn? My manager will help me develop those skills. And the manager of the position I’m aiming for will walk me through the role, so that I can understand what it entails.”

Shadowing current team members is also integral to success, Paul adds. “It’s important for employees to get first-hand experience of the role. What the day-to-day is. What the new tasks and responsibilities are. Which common challenges people in this role face. This way, they’re prepared for them for when they arise.”

Career paths don’t have shortcuts

Success stories are always nice to hear. For example, imagine a recent graduate, Alejandro, who was hired in a junior sales role. He showed that he was passionate about sales, so he moved to account management within his first six months on the job. Or, perhaps there’s Cassandra, who had never worked in sales before – but her dynamic personality led her to a team leader position in only her second month at work.

Are these scenarios ideal, though? Or even realistic? “No”, Paul says. “It’s important to go step by step if we want to build a successful sales career path. We have to figure out the training needs of each person, identify their strengths and cover any knowledge gaps, but without overwhelming them.”

Olivia notes that it’s precisely the smooth transition from one role to another that has made her good at her job. “The sales career path worked for me because it’s all about building off one skill to another,” she says. “There’s never a situation where you can forget what you learned in a previous role.”

Even a path lined with rose bushes has thorns

So far, we’ve been looking at a happy scenario. A good employee is working hard and gets promoted. In reality, there might be obstacles along the way. The key, according to Olivia, is to stay positive: “When you don’t get the role or promotion you want, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not qualified for it. There could be a different, more suitable position for you down the line. As long as you keep doing your best job, you’ll have the chance to pursue the next great opportunity that comes up. And, just like in my case, it could be a new career move!”

“It makes a difference when employees are proactive when it comes to their self-development”, concurs Paul. “Sales is not like anything else. It’s always changing and that’s what employees should be doing too. They should reflect on their performance and identify areas of improvement.”

Paul has also found that a mindset of continuous learning is a common trait among successful salespeople. “Listening to a podcast once in a while. Picking up a book. Those who do these things are the ones who are going to progress faster.”

It’s about the journey, not the destination

Of course, not all employees can get promoted at the same time. You have one job, but multiple candidates. Or, you have an overachiever ready to take on more responsibilities, but no open role at the moment. What do you do in these cases?

“Career development is a great motivator, but shouldn’t be the only way you keep your team members engaged,” explains Paul.

He offers more ideas: “Encourage self-development activities, organize group outings or create internal competitions with small prizes and shout-outs for the winners. Depending on the culture of your team, find ways to create a healthy work environment, a place where your salespeople will be continuously learning.”

The post Sales career path: A way to attract and retain salespeople appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Engineers who build AIs need data to train the machines, and they also need more information to determine what works or not. And this is where organizations can contribute because they have access to data and they’re in a position to actually test technology in the field.

This topic was part of my conversation with Matt Alder, the reputable British HR thought leader and host of the Recruiting Future podcast. During an hour-long phone conversation, we discussed possible actions on how businesses can play their part in shaping a world using powerful recruiting AI tools.

See also our discussion on the state and future of AI in recruiting and whether machines can really take recruiters’ jobs.

Technology in our own image

The data we use to train our machines is essential to a successful AI-driven recruitment strategy. If the data is inaccurate, incomplete, skewed or one-dimensional, the machine’s “intelligence” will suffer.

So, we need to choose our data carefully. This is tougher than it sounds because sometimes we don’t even realize we’re looking at biased or incomplete data samples. Because we’re only human, we have inherent difficulties to identify our own shortcomings and the wrong data causes machines to replicate our biases, opinions or behaviors. The old adage of “garbage in, garbage out” applies readily here.

One example is the apparent apathy, evasion, or occasional positive response of virtual assistants Siri and Alexa when faced with verbal sexual abuse from users. They were programmed to respond in certain ways to various forms of harassment that human creators might have thought were “OK” (they’re not). This is something companies that make these AIs are trying to tackle, as Quartz reported.

In the recruiting world, automated tools don’t make final hiring decisions, so how much does bias matter? There’s an interesting caveat here. Matt discussed this in a recent Recruiting Future podcast when he interviewed Miranda Bogen from Upturn, a non-profit think tank promoting equity and justice in the design and use of digital technology.

Upturn recently published a report on the bias of hiring algorithms. Based on that report, Miranda explained that, while AI in recruiting doesn’t decide who gets hired, it can decide who won’t get hired – and that may often be people with certain characteristics. An example of this is Google’s algorithm which showed ads for higher-paying jobs to men only because it thought men were the most likely to click on these jobs. This way, it effectively precluded women from learning about these job opportunities. Upturn’s report also mentions that this bias persists even if you obscure attributes like gender and race when training machines. That’s partly because the datasets we have available are inherently correlated with systemic biases.

So there’s a legitimate philosophical question: could we really create technology that doesn’t replicate our limitations and biases? Well, we have done so in other branches of tech: for example, our naked eye can’t see details far away in space, but our telescopes can. Intelligent machines could work the same way – complementing and enhancing our abilities.

How we can do that is less clear. Matt reflects on this:

“I think this is perhaps the biggest dilemma over the next few years; how do we actually make technology be better than humans?”

When humans are the designers, therein lies the challenge.

We need to go smarter

As Matt emphasizes, the first step in building machines for purely objective rather than subjective recruiting processes is to consciously understand our own biases. That not only involves the ‘what’, but also the ‘how.’ “If we’re going to make HR technology that doesn’t share human bias,” says Matt, “then we need to understand more about where that kind of bias comes in.”

Recruiting professionals are probably in the best position to identify these issues in the hiring process. Monitor your hiring metrics for patterns. Gender and race bias, for example, can be identified by measuring the percentages of female or non-white applicants who apply and are moved through the hiring process. Also, regularly communicate with your hiring teams about what criteria they use to make decisions, and be on the lookout for criteria that aren’t strictly job-related.

Once you have started collecting this type of data and insights, make a systematic effort to mitigate biases wherever they appear. For example, you could try out more objective hiring tools, like structured interviews, and train your interviewers to overcome their unconscious (and occasionally conscious) prejudices.

Also, it’d be useful to participate in the discussion with fellow recruiters in forums or in person to exchange information about existing biases and possible strategies to deal with them. Our collective knowledge and awareness of biases can help companies that make AI in recruiting tools design their products more effectively.

We also need variety

When it comes to AI in recruiting, one of the problems is that the data we’ve used hasn’t been very creative, as Matt points out:

“I think the problem is we still work off CVs which are hopeless in actually telling you what someone’s performance is going to be,” Matt says, “which is why we’re seeing more of other data points coming in, whether it’s facial recognition or tone of voice or various assessments. A CV isn’t going to give even the cleverest form of artificial intelligence enough information to make proper decisions.”

This relates to cases like the Amazon AI recruiting tool which reportedly rejected female candidates because it was mainly trained with resumes of men – in other words, Amazon’s attempt at AI-driven recruitment failed because of an overreliance on past datasets. If we train models using multiple data points, we might avoid those biases and inconsistencies that come with a single dataset.

So if your company makes AI in HR or you’re in close collaboration with an AI vendor, consider using various hiring methods (including assessments, video interviews, etc.) that can help you enrich the types of data used for training AI tools.

Also, you can contribute in making sure we model what’s meaningful for our purpose. “It’s modeling around what high performers look like,” says Matt. “If we’re modeling their facial expressions, is that going to give us the right match? So we’re modeling their behaviors, their attitudes, their values, but what aspect are we looking for? What aspects are actually repeatable in terms of finding someone who matches what we want?”

Trial and Error

Experimenting is how we learn. And that’s perhaps the most important aspect in which a company can contribute to the overall methods of training machines: with real-life data. Try out AI tools and measure results systematically. That way, we’ll soon have more evidence on whether something works or not.

To start experimenting with AI in recruiting, consider these four steps:

1. Understand your current process

In addition to identifying biases in your hiring process, dissect your existing hiring strategies. “I think a lot of it is about understanding current process,” Matt says. “How does it work? Where are the problems with it? What’s the experience like? In a large business, it could be really complicated. There could be [many] stakeholders and moving parts and people might not fully understand exactly what’s going on.”

Audit your recruiting process, and find the stakeholders and their roles. Use recruiting metrics to identify issues and bottlenecks. Then you might have an indication as to which aspects might benefit from a level of automation or AI tools.

“Gaining that understanding and that self-awareness of what’s going on within the organization is a good place to start,” says Matt.

2. Feel the pulse

Another aspect is to understand the environment. Matt clarifies: “Understanding what the technology can or can’t do, looking at companies that are trying [AI in recruiting] and looking at their results is equally important.

“And then it’s about matching the two together. How can this technology realistically solve our niche problems? And if it can, how do we implement it in a way that actually works?”

3. See what AI in recruiting is available

Since you’ve delved into your hiring process and follow what other companies are doing, look for available tools. “Understanding what’s available and what’s out there is important,” says Matt.

“Look into the market and see what can now be done. Someone could have created something that’s the answer to all your problems and you just don’t know it exists,” he says. “And that’s […] confusing and difficult because there’s so much noise out there. But actually having a good view of what’s available is critical.”

Of course, when vendors mention that their AI tools are completely unbiased, be sure to take their claims with a grain of salt. As Miranda Bogen said in the Recruiting Future podcast: “As predictive tools have access to more and more data, there’s more risk this data is closely associated or even a proxy for protected categories [which tools shouldn’t take into account in order to be bias-free].”

If you’re already using automated tools, work with vendors to test and validate them regularly.

4. Remember the candidate

Candidates’ reactions to AI in recruiting are just as important as the effectiveness of tools themselves. “Do the people I’m trying to hire actually like being interfaced with automatically in this way?” asks Matt. “Because if they don’t, and my competitor is taking a more human approach, then I might miss out on some great talent.”

As Matt mentions, there may be cases where implementing automation will be welcomed by candidates; for example, communication about the status of their application will improve. “The biggest complaint candidates have is the black hole that comes through recruitment, where they just don’t know what’s going on, what stage they’re in the process, what the next steps are, what people think of them. And I think technology can fill that gap.”

Sometimes though, candidates may be confused as to the role of technology in the hiring process.

“There’s maybe some fear and misunderstanding about how technology is used to screen out and select people,” says Matt. “And certainly some of the publicity that has come out recently around bias isn’t good. I tend to find that people overestimate how much AI in recruiting is actually responsible for whether they are chosen or not.”

People are wary that they’re being screened out for a job by a faceless machine, and a human isn’t having the chance to consider them.

And that can be especially true with tools like face-recognition software. “It’s very easy to get carried away and think ‘the expressions on my face is how people are going to decide whether I’m going to be a high performer in this job or not.’”

This brings us back to the importance of multiple touchpoints of data in AI in recruiting to lessen dependence on one single area, Matt reminds us. “[Face-recognition software] is just one data point amongst many other things.” Hiring can rarely be reduced to a single decision anyway, as Upturn’s report stresses.

Things are already happening

“There are some businesses where people are effectively being hired with an automated process,” says Matt, “and they might not go actually talk to someone until their first day. It’s a really interesting time. I think that we don’t really know what the answers are going to be in all of this, and a lot of it is experimentation and feedback.”

Matt mentions some companies are trying out automation for volume hiring and graduate hiring. For example, replacing multiple interviews with one video interview at the start reduces the number of candidates you’ll have to meet in person, and candidates wouldn’t have to go through as many hiring stages as before. It’s an effort to improve the efficiency and overall candidate experience.

“Now again, it’s still early days,” Matt reminds us. “Will they revisit that in three or four years time and say ‘the people we hired weren’t as good as the people we used to hire when humans did it’? But still, it certainly makes sense in terms of recruitment and selection process improvement.”

And actually having some real-life examples and data will bring a revolution in how AI in recruiting is made and applied, and this benefits organizations in many ways. Matt reminisces on another time when new technology was tested:

“I remember back in the late ’90s, early 2000s, when recruiting on the internet became a thing. There was a huge amount of mistakes, and horrible things happened, but that didn’t mean that online recruitment wasn’t going to be big. It just wasn’t perfect straight away.”

Matt adds, “Several companies experimented and stuck with it, and contributed to the debate, and gave feedback, and helped shape what the vendors were offering. They’re the companies that benefited the most in the long term.”

So, don’t be afraid to open up to new technology. If you’re an early adopter, you’ll also be the first to benefit when AI technology becomes a smoothly operating aspect of the mainstream recruitment process. Matt reminds us that automation is already widely used and you can find many tools to apply to your recruitment efforts. Experiment with them.

“Be very critical, very analytical about what the results actually are and whether they’re what you want or not.”

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But guess what? Your ATS (applicant tracking system) sucks. As you walk back to your desk (admittedly thankful that this long-winded meeting is finally over), you realize the nightmare that lies ahead: the crappy UIs, the broken buttons, the numerous clicks you have to endure to hire just one person – all that is about to be multiplied by 50.

And the person who has the decision-making power to bring in a new ATS just can’t be bothered, for whatever reason. The guys in IT are blocking it. Finance is slammed at the end of the quarter – that’s enough for you to not even knock on their door.

You know you’ll have to do more than give another lunchtime rant to your boss about the clunky ATS to make a switch happen. You open a new blank document to make your case. But the blank screen is as intimidating as those stern faces in Finance.

So where do you start?

To understand how to make an effective case for new software, it’s good to learn a bit from Product Marketing. That’s right, Product Marketing. This will help you understand why your boss doesn’t and, to an extent, shouldn’t give a shit that you don’t like your ATS’s clunky UI.

You’re probably familiar with the idea of “speaking someone’s language” when trying to persuade them to come around to your way of thinking. But knowing the underlying theory of why that’s important means you can make a more powerful case. It will also help you personalize any “Convince Your Boss!” marketing collateral you’ve received from ATS vendors you’ve spoken to.

Another way to think about this is to think like a technology vendor. Vendors spend a lot of time thinking about how to sell, position, and talk about their product. This is the responsibility of Product Marketing, and it’s those folks we’ll learn a bit from now.

One of the key roles of Product Marketing is understanding a few simple ideas:

• Who are the buyers of the product?
• Why do the buyers start looking for the product?
• What process do buyers go through when evaluating and selecting a new software like this?
• What is important to the buyers?
• How do we position our product to appeal to those buyers?

In some cases, only one person (“buyer”) is involved in a buying decision, but usually there are more. By and large, in Product Marketing, these buyers are categorized into three groups according to the Pragmatic Marketing Framework. Each of these groups have different priorities:

Economic Buyers

• Hold the budget, sign the check
• Care about costs and ROI
• Request reports from the team to present to management
• Not necessarily users of the product

Functional Buyers

• Users of the product
• Care about features and ease of use
• Create reports for the boss

Technical buyers

• Care a lot about security, compliance, contracts, terms and conditions, access controls, technical details, nitty-gritty of integrations with other business tools in use, etc.
• Not necessarily users of the product
• Often includes legal, IT, operations, finance departments

Know who your players are

Knowing which “buyer bucket” the interested players in your company fall into is essential to the success of your business case for a new ATS. Let’s take a fictional company, Albion Inc. – relatively large, and in the exact same situation as you are: getting ready for hypergrowth for the upcoming year. Let’s meet some of their staff:

Jenny

Jenny is the HR Generalist who, as part of her role, looks after recruitment. If you were at Albion, you’d probably be Jenny.

Beth

Beth, the VP of Human Resources, is Jenny’s boss. She is responsible for all aspects of HR including budget management and planning.

Alex

Alex is the Sales Director. Albion is doing well and his team is growing fast, so he’s always hiring. In this case, he’s the hiring manager.

Georgina

Georgina is the Director of Operations. She doesn’t have any responsibility for hiring, but she is responsible for the maintenance, seamless integration, and security of Albion’s internal IT and tools — in other words, Albion’s tech stack.

Know their pain points and motivations

Now, let’s look at how each of them factors into the overall decision to purchase a new applicant tracking system:

Jenny

Jenny’s the one who just got out of the aforementioned “We’re growing by 50% this year” meeting. She is, to say the least, unhappy with the ATS Albion is currently using. It’s clunky, outdated and hard to use, and it’s slowing her down. She feels like she is spending more time on admin than on recruiting. Jenny still has to do big chunks of recruiting herself that she is sure software could be handling, such as interview scheduling or advertising on job boards.

The headache doesn’t end there: she’s also feeling overwhelmed because she cannot stay organized and spends too much time chasing hiring managers, like Alex, for feedback on candidates. She’s simply given up on trying to get them to use their ATS at all.

Beth

Jenny has brought this up several times with her boss and decision maker, Beth, without much success. Beth, whilst understanding of Jenny’s frustrations, doesn’t see – yet – how a change to the ATS can be feasible. To some extent, Jenny is the victim of her own success. She’s made the bad software work OK up to now by using workarounds and a lot of extra sweat and tears. But Jenny knows this current setup will no longer work with the big growth plans. She’s at the end of her tether, and, just as she should be getting excited about the growth of the company, she’s looking down the barrel of a frustrating and stressful year.

Alex

Meanwhile, around the corner, Alex isn’t happy either. He needs to hire fast and he doesn’t feel like he knows what’s happening. Where are his resumes to review? What happened to that great candidate they spoke about last week? Did Jenny even follow up with the ones that Alex referred her to? He loves Jenny as a colleague and as a friend, but he’s always been a little tripped up by her ad-hoc approaches to the hiring process with all the workarounds and little fixes. It was fine when hiring just a couple people here and there, but 50 new people, nearly all at once? How is all that going to work? Lining up his own interviews, the countless trips to and from Jenny’s office at the other end of the building, not to mention trying to hire people remotely? Never mind the fact he’s just been told to boost sales by 50% by EOY – he’ll have to work harder than ever to make that happen.

Georgina

And Georgina over in IT has been working hard to build a seamless integration of all the different technologies used in Albion. The current ATS was a real beast to install and implement. Educating countless people on how to use it (and how not to) took up a lot of her time. The learning curve felt insurmountable, even for a seasoned tech veteran such as herself. Now that it’s finally in place, she’s happy and she doesn’t want to rock that boat again.

Know what type of buyer they are

Now that you know what drives the players at Albion – and what drives them crazy – let’s categorize them by type of buyer:

Economic Buyer:

Beth is Albion’s economic buyer. She holds the budget and signs the checks for software purchases in HR. She gives final approval to all this stuff. Without her say-so, no decision can be made.

Functional Buyer:

We have two functional buyers at Albion who actually use the ATS. Jenny is the main user, and Alex uses it extensively as his department’s hiring manager.

Technical Buyer:

Georgina is Albion’s technical buyer. She’s simply interested in making the software fit comfortably within the existing system, and ensuring it’s compliant with security standards. More on Georgina later.

All of those players are part of the decision to start looking for a new ATS and which ATS to select. You need to get all of them on board, and you need to know how to convince them.

For instance, as an Economic Buyer, Beth isn’t going to be convinced by Jenny’s “it’s clunky and hard to use” argument. It’s not that Beth doesn’t care — she’s probably been in Jenny’s shoes in the past — but Jenny needs to make an actual business case for a new ATS in a way that is more aligned to Beth’s professional goals and motivations, and ultimately, Albion’s.

Know how to convince them to try a new ATS

By knowing the players in each category, Jenny now knows who she must convince. To do that, Jenny needs to know their drivers, what is going to convince them to make a switch. What is it that drives Beth, Georgina and Alex?

Convince the economic buyer

So what are the drivers of Economic Buyers when it comes to recruiting software? Well, each company is different, but it mostly boils down to two factors: budget and timeline.

Staying within budget:

• Do we have the budget for this?
• Will the new tool be more expensive?
• Will it save me money elsewhere in my budget, e.g. salaries, turnover, agency spend or advertising spend?

Staying on schedule:

• Do we have the time for this?
• Will implementation/learning of the new ATS delay the hiring plan?
• Will the new ATS optimize and speed up the hiring process, meeting goals ahead of time?

Whether you’re simply starting a conversation about getting a new ATS, actively deciding which one to buy, or making a case for the ATS you’ve decided is the best one for the business, you want to be ready to address each of the above questions and any similar concerns on the Economic Buyer’s mind. You want Beth to sign the dotted line and be able to sleep that night. You want her to know that targets will more likely be met with the purchase of this new ATS.

Instead of anecdotal arguments, here are some of the impacts we hear about Workable from the mouths of “Economic Buyers” who were involved in selecting Workable:

• “We’ve reduced our agency spend by 50%”
• “We’ve increased employee referrals by 33%”
• “We’re getting better quality applicants than before using Workable.”

See, no mention of ease of use. Economic buyers care about it, but it’s not the main driver in their decision making; just part of it. They simply have to balance this with other priorities that have been placed on them.

It is these reasons you need to take to your ‘Beth’ to help her understand the benefit of bringing in a new ATS in her “language”. Align your case to her goals and the strategic goals of the company. For instance, why is the existing ATS going to make it impossible to hit that 50% growth hiring plan, and why would a new tool make that possible?

Convince the functional buyer

Clearly, there’s not much convincing needed here. Jenny is the one pushing the case for a new improved ATS. You’re likely Jenny (or Alex) in this case, and you’re here because you want to press your case. So, let’s consider this part completed.

Convince the technical buyer

I mentioned earlier that we’d learn more about Georgina. And this is Georgina’s time to shine. Georgina is powerful. She can veto any software decision Jenny, Beth and Alex make – in fact, she can veto any software purchasing decision at Albion. She’s not the enemy – rather, it’s her job to make sure all the business’s tools work together nicely, are compliant and secure. If she’s not sure a new tool is secure or compliant, you’re back to the drawing board.

Georgina may not be involved in the decision to purchase a new tool, but once that decision has been made, you’ll want to make sure you know her requirements early on so you don’t get a nasty surprise just before signing a new contract. So, stop by her office to talk to her about what boxes she thinks the new software should tick.

Know that everyone cares – just about different things

Now that you have everyone on board – you, your Beth, your Alex, and your Georgina – you can write up that business case or an RFP (which will help you gather information about different recruiting solutions) and move forward in your plan to optimize the hiring process. Circle back to the start: you’re in that big meeting or in a follow-up meeting putting a concrete plan into place, and all heads turn to you when it’s time to talk about the hiring plan. You smile, because you have everyone on board for your new ATS, and you’re ready to show your game.

Shameless plug: Yes, Workable can help you meet those goals. Sign up for our demo and learn about what we can do for you. To learn all the things you need to know about an applicant tracking system and were afraid to ask, read this.

If you still have cold feet in regards to picking the right ATS for your business, this list of best applicant tracking systems in the market can help you make the right decision.

The post Need a new ATS? No one cares, unless you speak their language appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Spyros takes a clinical and objective approach to his recruitment and management strategy. He’s realistic about the fact that there’s no perfect solution:

Every structure and every process has its pros and its cons. The thing you need to do is organize it to eliminate the cons as much as possible.

Seeds for engineering team growth

Spyros founded Workable with CEO Nikos Moraitakis in 2012 and now presides as the company’s Chief Technology Officer. The groundwork for Workable was laid in Spyros’ previous capacity as a Software Development Director for another company, hiring 20-25 software engineers in a short time.

He found that hiring so many on such a tight schedule posed a challenge without the right recruitment software.

“I had interviewed over 100 – probably 200 – people and I was not happy at all,” he says. “Maybe it was the implementation we had done, maybe the [recruitment] software was not good – it doesn’t matter. The bottom line was that the tool was very difficult for the hiring manager.”

Even while using an ATS, and therefore not having to resort to spreadsheets and emails, Spyros had his problems in logistics. Picking 20-25 engineers from as many as 200 top candidates, with multiple people in the hiring team coming in at different stages in the process – that’s a recipe for a logistical headache.

“For instance,” he says, “if you were the manager of the person who was the hiring manager, you didn’t have access to the profile of a candidate. So the candidate was coming for the final interview with me, and it wasn’t easy to print their resume – I had to ask the HR assistant of the office to go to the hiring manager and have them print out the resume of the candidates.”

He grins at the memory. “Things like that.”

Every problem has a solution

A popular, yet uncredited, quote goes as follows:

Always look at the solution, not the problem. Learn to focus on what will give results.

Spyros has applied that philosophy to his work from day one.

The desired result he focused on was to fill more positions with better candidates in a shorter time. Not only was it helpful for him to have a solution that delivered that result, it was a huge business opportunity for him and Nikos.

“You know the story after that,” Spyros says. “It kind of took off and then I had to start all over again and build a new engineering team for Workable. This time, fortunately, it was with a better tool in my hand.”

That tool – the Workable software – ultimately evolved into today’s hiring platform used by thousands of companies around the world. Of course, Spyros used it to build a team of about 100 engineers today from an initial team of just three – Spyros himself being one of them.

Too much talk, not enough action

The growth over the span of just a few years – at one point, growing from those first three in 2012 to nearly 50 a few years later in 2015 – meant new challenges. With so many people in one department, Spyros soon learned, new problems surfaced in the management of that engineering team: using up valuable time and resources in meetings and not enough in the actual building of the product itself.

“With 15 people in the same room just [for each] to give a status update, it took almost an hour and you were only there to speak for a few minutes but had to stay for the rest of the update,” Spyros says.

“So, we were wasting a lot of time in meetings. The whole process was slow.”

Again, Spyros focused on the desired outcome, not the problem: spend less time in meetings and more time dedicated to the job at hand.

At that point, we decided to make big changes, and change the structure of the team. Instead of having one big team, we broke it into smaller teams.

He introduced a system where each team would have a product manager and designers. “And then we started hiring for all these different teams.”

So, how many people for each team?

“In theory, the magic number is seven, and in my experience, that’s accurate,” he says.

Cogs in the big machine

A huge positive of working in a startup is the chance to be part of an exciting new idea and work with others in bringing this idea to reality. Startup employees can share in the success of the company and be proud of their own role in that. Growth opportunities are as ripe for the employee as they are for the company itself, and that’s also a huge appeal of working in a company that’s surging out of the gates armed with fresh funding.

But when a company such as Workable grows rapidly, particularly in one department such as Spyros’ engineering team, there’s the danger of a “cog in the machine” feel for employees – particularly when it’s in developing software, an area that often requires extensive collaboration without much room for variance from the task at hand.

Ultimately, you have to organize the creative brains behind the software – your engineering team – into smaller teams, to keep them stimulated and engaged. “Otherwise,” Spyros says, “you become one of these big companies that move slowly and don’t innovate at all.”

Spyros recognized that problem as his own team grew. “I believe we crossed a second threshold a few months ago. We’re now at almost 100 people. And even the previous scheme of having five smaller teams was not working anymore.”

As before, he started working on a new solution: He added another layer to the existing larger team based on Spotify’s agile engineering model, which has been lauded as a pioneering solution for the problems facing many fast-growing startups. The Spotify model emphasizes breaking up departments into teams, squads, and tribes with emphasis on autonomy while remaining aligned at the same time. More so, employees remain engaged at a high level and stick around for a longer time.

Spyros applied this model to his own process. “Now, we have teams of teams in the engineering department.” Workable’s engineering team now has four tribes with two to three squads of 7-10 engineers each.

Each squad has a visual designer, UI designer, a product manager, two front-end developers and two back-end developers. That’s the ideal team structure in my opinion.

That helps break down the jobs between specific engineering squads and helps in the planning of the product road map. “Let’s say we have a tribe working on recruitment marketing. We have smaller teams and squads that do a very specific part of recruitment marketing.”

“Yet,” he adds, “they essentially belong in the same family of features.”

In essence, instead of being a seemingly insignificant cog in the machine, they can take pride in their individual contribution to the company’s overall success.

Engineers can then see the project from beginning to end – in direct contrast with Henry Ford’s once-innovative assembly-line structure designed for mass production of his automobile. Those engineers then have ownership of the work. This allows for greater and deeper focus on specific projects with smaller teams for each – giving individual engineers an opportunity to feel greater ownership of their own work, giving their role more meaning than if they were working in a factory environment such as Ford’s.

“It’s good for team morale,” says Spyros. “They know what they’re building, why they’re building it. [The squads] work together for long periods so you don’t change projects every few weeks.”

And you have this feeling of fulfillment when you deliver something. Those are very important aspects of the work.

Now the engineering tribes have different uniforms

Of course, that solution above meant another challenge. In this case, Spyros saw new issues in the collaboration across teams – again significant when you require a healthy blend of dedication to arcane details with innovation and creativity in software development. How do you solve this?

In short: consistency is the key.

“You want engineers to be independent and have the flexibility to do their work,” Spyros says, emphasizing that it’s those engineers who know best how to do what they think is best for the product they’ve built. “But at the end of the day, they are all part of the same platform, so you want them to have some consistency in the way they use programming languages, frameworks, tools, and so on.”

So, again referring to the Spotify model, you also need a horizontal structure, Spyros says, where everyone of a single specialty – for instance, front-end or UI developers – are part of a “loose” team that doesn’t have a very specific road map to deliver. Rather, they meet once or twice a month to make sure that knowledge is shared and to discuss how things should be done regardless of which squad they belong to.

“And then, you need to deliver some features that require the collaboration of more than one squad,” Spyros explains, citing the team behind Workable’s Facebook advertising feature as an example. “This team needs the help of the data science team to build the algorithms that do the right targeting, that helps them create liquidity that targets the right audience, and so on and so forth.”

To pull all that together, there needs to be another layer of regular meetings. This, he says, is where all the team leaders meet regularly to coordinate the work across teams.

“Now you have this matrix organization with the squads and chapters, and all these things add some level of complexity.”

Yes, it’s more meetings, Spyros admits, but they’re more focused and results-oriented. “You do that in order to achieve the ultimate goal, which is to have the core of your software engineering team as self-sufficient and as flexible as possible.”

A solution for every problem

So, every step of the way, Spyros has found a solution. When recruitment was a challenge because he couldn’t get all the people or information onto the same page, he joined forces with Nikos and started Workable. When rapid hiring led to too-large teams and monotonous meetings, he learned about Spotify’s model of splitting those up into squads and tribes. When that led to poor communication and collaboration between teams, he established a new strategy of meetings.

But with such a rapid growth over the last few years, Spyros hasn’t lost sight of the importance of a strong hiring strategy. At the heart of a successful hiring strategy is to remember that every new hire is a human being who can bring their very best to the company.

“What hasn’t changed at all since day one,” Spyros says, “is that for every new addition to the team, you should make it as if it was the first hire you make. We’ve put a tremendous effort to hire the best for the team we have. We take into account skills, personality, culture fit, everything – but for every single hire we make, we do our best to find the best.”

Spyros notes that it’s easy to forget that spirit in a rapidly growing organization; “What I’ve seen now in bigger companies, as the team grows they tend to believe that they just need extra hands to do the job.”

“But,” Spyros warns, “it doesn’t need to be like that.”

If you manage the team as a team of 80 or 100, then yes, you’re hiring one out of 100. But if you have this small squad of, let’s say, seven people, then you’re actually hiring one out of seven. It’s as if it’s still one of the first hires in your new startup.

Even with 300 employees in offices in five different cities across four countries, that hiring strategy hasn’t changed at all.

“Even as a CTO,” Spyros says, “I still interview the shortlisted candidates in our hiring process. We have a very thorough process – we discuss it a lot with the team leader, the VP of engineering, and the recruiter, and we put a lot of effort into always picking the best.”

The post Building a winning engineering team: Workable CTO tells his story appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

So, what if your company implemented a new policy where employees get the opportunity to work for a set number of months in a specific country or region if they’ve been with the company for one full year? Here are four reasons why the benefits of remote working for employers can be significant:

1) Boost your talent attraction

As a recruiter, you can market to a pool of people who otherwise might not be interested. It’s a method of talent attraction for different types of companies, whether you’re at an office park in a suburb, in a tech hub in a mega city or in a small town. You can’t compete with the recruitment marketing of the Googles and Amazons of the world — but this is one benefit where you can get ahead.

In the same way a student might choose to study abroad in college or do research in a foreign country while in a graduate program, employees can live abroad or immerse themselves in a new culture while continuing to work effectively at their jobs. It might not be as easy as having an employee in the office where their engagement can be regularly monitored, but for tough-to-fill markets, it’s a strong way to attract candidates.

2) Improve engagement and retention

Many millennials and Gen Zers dream of being able to live abroad but don’t want to put their career on hold. According to a survey from Graebel Companies, 81% of U.S. college seniors want to work abroad. The Gen Z population is keen for work-abroad opportunities and this group of people will continue to take over a larger proportion of the workforce over the next few years.

There’s a burgeoning market of startups looking to capitalize on this trend, such as Remote Year and WiFi Tribe. Their slogans expand on the desire to continue to grow professionally while experiencing the global world, with Remote Year’s “Keep your job. See the world” and WiFi Tribe’s “Design your life.” These organizations are working to make it feasible to continue building one’s professional self while abroad and at the same time keep employers comfortable.

Having such a policy in place in your company can do wonders for employee engagement and retention, especially among the younger crowd.

3) Strengthen your expansion strategy

Imagine you’re at a 50-person startup in Boston, primarily composed of millennials. Your company has just received funding with the impetus to expand your business and build a European customer base. You already have leads, but you’re missing an essential ingredient: locally based talent in that region of the world. Consider the issues that arise:

• Your product requires hands-on onboarding
• Your support team’s hours are US-focused
• Your company doesn’t (yet) have that deep understanding of European markets

So, what can you do? You could hire local talent, but it takes time to onboard new employees and you want to hit the ground running. You can, instead, give your existing employees the chance to work abroad, act as an ambassador for your brand in the new market, and build a local network while your company establishes its presence. Another benefit is the chance to gain a deeper understanding of other cultures so your business is better positioned to expand to that location when the time comes – and moreover, remotely placed employees can help train new hires locally until they’re fully productive on their own.

In short: a policy that allows employees to move to a destination office for a fixed term opens up new opportunities to bring businesses closer to their expansion and new-market goals. Add to that the potential for round-the-clock support if you have offices around the world.

4)Boost your diversity and inclusion efforts

Imagine a scenario where a new immigrant joins your company. They’re more likely to feel included when they have colleagues who have worked in that immigrant’s home country, speak their language, and/or understand their culture. Additionally, the various challenges of traveling and living abroad open employees to experiences that take them out of their comfort zone, and that’s when they learn to think from different perspectives when approaching a situation or problem.

Shane Snow in Harvard Business Review draws the connection between living abroad and business:

Traveling a lot – or, even better, living for extended periods in foreign cultures – tends to make us more willing to revise our viewpoints. After all, if we know that it is perfectly valid to live a different way than we do, it makes sense that our brains would be better at accepting new approaches to problems at work.

Consequently, one of the main benefits of remote working for employers is that employees who temporarily work abroad can bring their new learnings back to the office and your business now has a team that is more multilateral in their thinking processes (diversity) and are more accepting of one another (inclusion).

One size doesn’t fit all

What works for one company might not work for another. For temporary international remote placements to thrive, you need to first understand where your company currently sits in its growth, what your goals and your employee’s goals are, and align all of these towards an overall vision.

It’s important to recognize that your company’s needs and the expectation of your employees in terms of relocation may not necessarily align; for instance, some employees sign up in the hopes that they’ll indeed get to work in sunny Thailand but end up being sent for a three-month stint in a mid-sized German town in the midst of winter – this alone can lead to disengagement and the opposite of what you hoped to gain in implementing a temporary remote-work policy.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution. You need to first understand whether you can offer this option, and what it is you’re trying to achieve by bringing in such a policy. You’ll also want to consider the usual variables of where they’ll work, for how long, what they’ll be doing, etc. – these can differ drastically based on company, market, goals, and so on.

That’s not to say there aren’t services available that can help your initiative. However challenging a work-abroad appointment can be, there are options that provide reliable WiFi and comfortable rooms. Instead of going the route of a fully built-out program, you can look at coworking and coliving opportunities. There are global organizations such as WeWork with coworking locations around the world, and Roam, which designs hybrid coworking and coliving spaces. GCUC, the Global Coworking Unconference Conference, reports that as of 2017, there were 14,000 coworking spaces globally up from 14 in 2007, and predicts that number to rise to 30,000 by 2022. Harvard Business Review emphasizes the meaning behind this growth, as people continue to want to work remote, coworking spaces offer professionalism, credibility and community.

The choice of how to approach this is up to the employee and you, the management at the company. Instead of seeing people leave in order to pursue travel, this type of work situation keeps good employees at the company and provides them with a unique opportunity to grow their skillset and their diverse approach to the global world.

While spending six months with penguins in Antarctica might sound enticing, they’re still working for you and the onus is on you to ensure they’ll have access to WiFi, a workspace, and a general smooth transition that works for both you and the employee.

Ultimately, having such a policy in place can make you a more attractive employer that’s willing to build trust with employees by allowing them to work remotely in such a way. Your company can also benefit from the added skills that employees bring back to your office, and you can retain great employees who can now scratch that travel itch or resolve their need to go abroad while keeping their job with you. In an increasingly competitive talent space, the benefits of remote working for employers can put you ahead of your competition.

The post The work-abroad dream: 4 benefits of remote working for employers appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Here at Workable, we directly address recruiting challenges, as spearheaded by our two founders, and those challenges are the driving force behind our platform and content. This time, I wanted to get insight from someone who combines the experience of founding a company and recruiting for a living.

Hung Lee, experienced recruiting expert and curator of the popular newsletter Recruiting Brainfood, is also the CEO and co-founder of workshape.io, a recruiting platform for software engineers. In a recent conversation, we talked about talent acquisition from the CEO perspective. Drawing from his own experiences, he indicated five common recruiting challenges of CEOs:

1. The transition to external recruitment

By “external”, we mean hiring complete strangers – people you’ve almost never interacted with.

In the early stages of a company’s life, hiring happens from within the company’s network. For CEOs, especially, it’s not just good practice to harness the power of their network – it’s practically a given at this stage. As Hung Lee mentions, investors probably factor in the connections of a CEO before they make an investment decision. But, this type of recruiting isn’t going to work for long.

Of course, the benefits of referrals cannot be underestimated – they’ve regularly been cited as one of the top sources of hire. And it’s normal to want to employ people you know. Hung did it himself when he founded workshape.io. But, he adds:

Where it becomes problematic is when your company scales to a certain point where the CEO or the founding team runs out of suitable people they know for the positions they need to fill.

That’s a critical tipping point. Because CEOs have been accustomed to hire people they already have a “bond” with, they’ll apply the same strategy when hiring complete strangers. They still tend to trust their instincts and want to feel the same confidence with candidates they’re not familiar with.

“Well, guess what, buddy?” retorts Hung. “You’re not going to feel that confidence with people you don’t know. It’s a fundamentally non-scalable way to recruit.”

What could be done?

First, you need to recognize this as a CEO. “Often, CEOs misattribute the failure to feel confident about a candidate to other reasons,” says Hung. “They’ll blame the recruiters for not giving them the right candidates, or they’ll blame the market for not producing these amazing people anymore.”

The key is a change of mindset; you must shift your recruitment strategy and rethink the way you make decisions. It’ll be difficult – Hung admits he still struggles with this. But, he also says, it’s a great opportunity to introduce the art and science of recruitment into your company.

2. The trouble with HR

The trouble with HR is that it’s usually on the sidelines. CEOs may struggle to hire great people, yet don’t prioritize the building of a dedicated recruiting department. For example, a recent (otherwise brilliant) article featured in Hung’s Recruiting Brainfood advises leaders on when to hire their executive team depending on their company’s ARR – and completely excludes a VP of HR, or similar roles. Hung commented on this: “That’s probably some evidence of the relative lack of status of the people function.”

Case in point: he shares a personal example of how sometimes the people function is overlooked:

I had a conversation with a fellow CEO a month ago. Super smart guy, running a great business. But then he needs to hire a VP of this, VP of that, and so on. And he’s got no recruiter doing it, and I’m thinking, “What are you doing?” You’re going to a recruitment agency, potentially paying thousands for each one of those senior hires, while you could definitely use somebody internally to help you.

If you don’t bring in adequate help, it’ll ultimately hurt your bottom line. It means more costs, more effort and not necessarily good results. If you struggle finding the people you need, or if you’re just too jammed to dedicate enough time to interviews, maybe you really need someone who really excels in the people function.

What could be done?

The right time to hire the first person for your recruitment team is just before you’re ready to transition to external recruitment. In the words of Hung Lee:

“[T]he moment to hire a recruiter is just before you run out of people you know. It’s like an epoch change; the end of the dinosaurs, here come the mammals. That’s when you need to have someone in your business as a Head of Talent who’s going to organize [your hiring].”

So prioritize building the recruiting team, and all those other big hires will follow. Your network is of utmost importance here; you probably know a great HR pro or you know someone who knows them.

3. The unbearable lightness of delegating

You know the motto, “if you want something done right, do it yourself”? Well, at the founding stages of a business, CEOs inadvertently follow this. They do almost everything – from fundraising and public relations to marketing and, of course, hiring. As mentioned above, CEOs may find it hard to accept that, at some point, another person should be in charge of the hiring process. The amount of delegation needed – despite freeing up their time – is often unbearable. Hung specifies:

Take Steve Jobs, the classic example of a CEO who never really relinquished control over certain aspects of the business. Some CEOs will persistently be there on the hiring side, too. [..] I was speaking with a friend of mine who’s a CEO; he’s still involved in interviews for everyone coming into the company, a 250-people business already.

But, CEOs don’t tend to be experts in recruitment – usually, the area of expertise that brought them there is in sales or operations. This presents a problem. Never mind the sheer added burden of the recruitment-related workload on top of everything else – it’s difficult for your recruitment team to schedule interviews and move the hiring process forward when they’re reliant on your direct input for each relevant step of the process.

“What you sacrifice there is speed and scale,” says Hung. “You will not scale easily, if the CEO is the bottleneck in the hiring process.”

What could be done?

Hung emphasizes that CEOs aren’t alone in their struggle (or the necessity) to learn how to delegate: “We all interact with others in our work and we need to trust them to a certain degree to deliver for us.”

Of course, character traits might play a role in the ability to delegate. A perfectionist would probably struggle more with delegation that others. But, as Hung says: “We’re all flawed in our own ways, and the key is just to know what our flaws are and understand that there’s another choice.”

So, learn to delegate, and then actually do it. Often, those you’re delegating to will do the job better, the recruitment process will speed up, and you’ll have more time to focus on those other important CEO tasks.

4. Humans are biased – CEOs, too

Do you ever feel that you’re seen as a superhero who can do no wrong? Well, unless you’re a hopeless egomaniac, you know that’s not who you are. Some of our evolutionary traits – unconscious bias, stereotyping, and the almost omnipresent emotional factor in decision-making – make all of us flawed. And that includes CEOs.

Hung elaborates on a common misconception about recruitment specifically: “The [hiring] philosophies, the techniques, the tooling, are designed with the idea that everyone makes rational decisions based on what’s best for the business.

“But actually, that almost never happens. There’s divided loyalties, there’s misalignment in objectives in every stage of the process, there’s all kinds of complexities. I think the myth of rationality needs to be expunged.”

And it has been – but maybe not fully for those at the higher levels of management. People who work for you might see you with a mix of fear and admiration, and they’ll inevitably trust that you always make carefully calculated decisions based on facts and logic.

This means CEOs must be extra careful in how they make decisions, because those decisions will likely not be questioned. “’Oh, he’s worked for Google. Therefore, he must be smart,’ or, ‘Oh, she was a designer for Instagram, she must be amazing at UI,’ are things you may say,” notes Hung. And few will argue with you even though you don’t have enough information to make an informed decision.

What could be done?

Hung emphasizes the role of technology:

There’s no question that technology has a huge part to play. In my view, one of the most valuable contributions of products like Workable is to reduce the stress levels involved in recruitment. If a system could help you handle the recruitment planning and logistics effectively, that can remove a lot of the rushed decision-making that increases the number of mistakes.

Self-awareness also has a big role to play, too. Think about what prompts you to make a decision. What’s your main motivator? If it sounds like a disputable argument, take a step back and try to apply objective hiring methods throughout your hiring process. Having a recruiting software with built-in capabilities to help you evaluate candidates can help you be more objective.

Also, it pays off to build and maintain your team with people who aren’t afraid to tell you that you’re messing up.

5. Formulating a culture

The concept of company culture has been around for quite a while – and it’s getting more and more important. A recent survey from Glassdoor indicates that three-quarters of job seekers consider mission and culture before they apply to a company, and half of them consider culture to be more important than salary when it comes to job satisfaction. So, culture is one of those things that you need to have pinned down because candidates will ask about it.

But, what is culture, really? It’s shrouded with debate. Should you even actively try to shape it? Our own CEO, Nikos Moraitakis, was skeptical about the way culture is defined and promoted in the corporate world: “Culture is an emergent property, not the materialization of a manifesto,” Nikos says.

Hung Lee agrees, but he adds that the culture of a company and its services will inevitably be based on the axioms that founders accept. “There’s no question a CEO has a huge impact on what the culture is. Axioms are in the DNA of the business, and if they change, the company will change, for good or bad.”

So, yes, culture isn’t rigid. It’s being shaped and changed and defined by everyone in the company. You don’t need to make a list of values and hang it on the wall. But, be clear about the axioms that make your business unique, as Hung clarifies:

Not a hundred axioms, but you might want two or three that will become your north star, the guiding compass of you and your business as you navigate this future. If you have some of these values, it keeps you at least with a philosophy as you progress. Cultures are dynamic, yes, but can you influence the dynamism? Do you want to shape it? Those are the questions I think a CEO needs to answer alone.

What could be done?

In a blog post, Jocelyn Goldfein, formerly VP of engineering in VMware, shared a lesson from her then-CEO: “Culture is the behaviors you reward and the behaviors you punish.” Hung mentioned this as a good measure of what culture is. “How does an axiom manifest itself?” he asks.

So, let’s say that one of your ‘values’ is inclusiveness. You really want to build a company that’s open to everyone with talent no matter their characteristics or background. It’s useful to go further and ask:

• Have I thought about what a transgression looks like? What does it mean if someone doesn’t behave with inclusiveness?
• What are exemplary embodiments of inclusiveness? Have I thought about a scenario where someone has embodied inclusiveness?

Go deep, and “find what makes the values real; turn them from words on a board to actual behaviors that you stand and live by,” says Hung.

Of course, he doesn’t forget that these things are dynamic: “Human beings create a new thing almost every time they interact with each other. And every axiom you try to establish is a roll of the dice. Companies have burned down because of flawed axioms.”

Moving onward and upward

So, these are just five major recruiting challenges of CEOs. There are lots more, but if you learn to look at your own shortcomings as an impromptu recruiter, bring in a recruitment expert, delegate those crucial tasks, and be aware of your own biases and your company’s culture-defining moments, then you’re well on your way to overcoming those challenges. Go forward, onward, and upward!

The post The top 5 recruiting challenges CEOs face in a business appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

But what talent acquisition technology is there and what can we expect in the future in terms of TA automation? And how can all these tools help you solve your 2020 recruitment challenges?

To get answers to these questions, Workable hosted an hour-long webinar on Dec. 5, 2019, with the title “The Tech It Takes To Find Candidates in 2020”. In this webinar, we discussed tech in recruitment with two of the most renowned experts in the field:

• Hung Lee: an industry professional with over 15 years experience as a recruiter, head of talent and strategic advisor. He’s also the curator of Recruiting Brainfood, a weekly newsletter with around 18,000 subscribers.
• Matt Alder: a strategic consultant and a globally recognized talent acquisition thought leader with 20 years of experience. He also hosts the Recruiting Future podcast which currently has a monthly audience of 30,000.

Our own VP of Partnerships and former recruiter, Rob Long, moderated this discussion with the two experts, who shared their insights on how to use tech to find, engage, manage and evaluate candidates in 2020.

(By the way, Rob also asked our webinar viewers to vote on their biggest challenge in the year to come and the winner was – surprise, surprise – finding and attracting candidates). Here’s the full video:

If you’re more the reading type, here are six important questions Hung Lee and Matt Alder answered during the discussion:

• First, where have we come from?
• How do you approach the challenge of finding and attracting candidates?
• What technologies help us engage candidates?
• How do you build long-term relationships with candidates?
• What’s the state of assessment tech?
• What are the biggest takeaways from 2020?

1. First, where have we come from?

Matt Alder opened this discussion: “The best way to understand the future is to learn a little bit about the past.” He showed us a helpful diagram he created:

The post The future of talent acquisition: Two experts talk about recruitment tech in 2020 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Well, we’ve got good news for you. Recruitment tech is more evolved than ever and can free up your bandwidth in many ways. And while digital transformation sounds like just another buzzword, it’s worth exploring the impact that it could have on your job in recruitment.

What do we mean by digital transformation of recruitment?

First, let’s define digital transformation. For some companies, digital transformation means disrupting business by completely changing how they operate (internal) or how they interact with customers (external). In most cases, though, digital transformation is acquiring tech and data solutions, such as applicant tracking systems, to simplify or eliminate admin tasks and increase operational efficiency in and across departments and hiring teams.

So, what does this mean for you, as a recruiter, again? Less time buried in spreadsheets and paperwork, and more time eliminating your company’s recruiting process gaps.

There are some challenges in implementing a digital transformation recruitment plan. Getting buy-in on the plan and budget with stakeholders and executives and training employees on new tech platforms are just a few of them. But the gains of digital transformation far outnumber the losses.

Technological solutions, such as AI and automation, boost operational efficiency, product quality and customer retention. Let’s tie this to recruitment: all these assets translate into faster hiring processes, happier candidates and employees, and a more polished employer brand. Still doubting? Let’s dive deeper into how digital transformation of recruitment impacts business.

1. Better productivity and time to hire

Digital tools help you speed up daily processes in various ways. For example, you can automate administrative tasks, such as keeping records of applicant documents or scheduling interviews. Recruiters who use an ATS will be able to screen candidates faster, because the ATS will present all necessary candidate information in one place. They won’t have to read a resume and then open a different file to see the candidate’s cover letter, portfolio or assessment; it’ll all be on the same page. And if this sounds trivial, think about all the time you’ll be saving if you have 5 or 10 or 20 open jobs at the same time and you have to screen 50 candidates for each one of these roles.

And, it’s not only recruiters who save time via digital transformation. Candidates will also be able to apply faster with auto-filling application forms and one-click apply buttons. Not to mention that when the candidates receive a more personalized communication, with feedback or follow-ups, they have a more positive experience and are more likely to stay engaged or get back to you.

2. Improved metrics and efficiency

Gathering and analyzing data on your own can be time-consuming, and even inaccurate in some cases particularly if it’s dependent on human processes. Luckily, most recruiting platforms will automatically collect metrics (such as a current pipeline report). With a snapshot of your hiring process, you can identify and eliminate bottlenecks in the pipeline and also capitalize on the most lucrative sources for candidates in a specific job opening.

With this type of data, you can identify gaps and experiment with solutions before they start affecting time to hire and cost per hire. For example, you may figure out that many candidates withdraw at the assessment phase. Perhaps that’s due to a time-consuming assessment or it measures what the candidate sees as irrelevant skills. You could, then, try shortening the assessment and make it more targeted, and see how applicants respond to that.

Remember, with great data comes great efficiency – and great responsibility, too. So, before you start basing your hiring process on data, make sure you check all compliance boxes – a good applicant tracking system will help you do that, too.

3. Easier candidate evaluation

Digital transformation can also add value to candidate assessment. First off, AI solutions and digital tools help screen applications faster with the use of filtering options. After that, there are loads of assessment tools you could use with shortlisted candidates, like game-based or video assessments. For example, if you’re hiring salespeople, you can use video assessments to evaluate their presentation and negotiation skills before inviting them to an in-person interview.

With features like video interviews and video assessments, you can also evaluate candidates remotely. No need to travel long distances or limit yourself to local talent. Hiring teams can also use those recordings in order to avoid multiple interview rounds and, this way, reduce time to hire.

4. Greater access to talent

Finally, tech recruiting solutions help you find candidates faster than mainstream sourcing techniques. With Workable, for example, you can post your job ads to multiple job boards with the click of a button. Job advertising includes the places where job seekers usually hang out, i.e. Facebook and Instagram. You can also benefit from AI-based functionality (check out Workable’s AI Recruiter and People Search features) to reach out to people you wouldn’t meet otherwise.

To sum up, when things change, in this case digitally, it’s not only uncomfortable but also risky to stick to your same old techniques. Start adopting simple tech solutions and track what works for you best. Your recruitment process won’t change drastically overnight – you’re still in the pilot seat after all – but equipping yourself with a vibrant and modern recruitment tech stack will save you a great deal of sleepless nights because you can now tell your boss: “No problem – I’ll get those numbers to you by end of day!”.

The post Digital transformation of recruitment: How can you benefit? appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

But what is digital disruption and why do companies fail in digital transformation? Digital transformation is all about bringing new, innovative tech into your organization, be it AI, chatbots, AR/VR applications, etc. Doing so, you can boost productivity, optimize internal processes, reach new markets and gain competitive advantages – ultimately cutting down on operating costs and overall benefiting the bottom line.

Changes in tech are exciting, but can become confusing, or even disturbing. Remember that unfamiliar feeling the first time you used a touchscreen smartphone? Or that time when your favorite app went through a complete makeover – completely changing what was familiar and comfortable to you.

The fear of change is real

Now, let’s scale this up: instead of just you trying to figure out how to type in your new smartphone, picture how it is for an entire department at your company trying to get used to a new tool. Or, how difficult it is for all the staff to go from pen, paper and post-it notes to a centralized, company-wide project management system. That’s a pretty big ask especially when you need your entire team on board for the initiative to be successful.

But there are greater risks beyond the normal period of adjustment to new tech. There’s a pitfall in rushing to be an early adopter without considering consequences. There are privacy and compliance issues – such as GDPR and CCPA – you need to tackle. And there’s the risk of using data that this new, shiny software is providing you, in a wrong or inefficient way.

Does this mean that you should not bother with digitizing your company? Absolutely not.

Resisting digital transformation is equally dangerous

In 2018, Lush, the cosmetics company, admitted that they underpaid 5,000 employees because their manual and outdated payroll system could not support their growth. As a result, the company had to launch a $2-million backpay scheme and invest an additional $1.5 million to establish a system that will help them calculate repayments correctly. That $3.5-million hit to the pocketbook doesn’t even include the amount of time spent to identify and fix those payroll mistakes or the inevitable damage control.

Digital transformation is not just about avoiding such mistakes; it’s also about being up to speed with customer needs. Slow-loading websites cost retailers $2.6 billion in lost sales each year. At the same time, an omnichannel approach is usually preferred, meaning that consumers are expecting to interact with brands in various channels beyond the traditional ones. 44% say that they’ve used three to five different customer service channels, with 15% of those aged 18-34 saying they’ve used chatbots.

Falling behind might cost you customers as well. You could also be missing on opportunities to increase profitability. 56% of CEOs say that digital improvements have already increased their profits, while digitally mature businesses are 26% more profitable than their peers and achieve 12% higher market valuations than other large firms in their industries.

There’s a risk in bringing digital transformation to your business too fast and there’s a risk in not bringing it at all. The tricky part is how you can strike the balance between the two extremes. So, how can you make sure that your digital transformation initiative doesn’t fail?

Success lies in change management

As David D’Souza, HR expert, highlighted in a recent interview on the future of work: “Just because a technology exists, it doesn’t mean that it will be implemented and utilized straight away.” Before rushing to be an early adopter, make sure you have a plan in place:

1. Build a digital transformation framework

Decide on:

• What is going to change
• When the change is happening
• Why you want this change

You don’t have to do everything at once. You might want to start with one department that has outdated systems or one process that needs to be automated. But you need to take into account how one change affects other areas inside your organization. For example, if you’re going to update a system and that system is integrating with other tools you’re using, you have to ensure that you don’t cause any disturbances.

It’s also important to set goals and expectations for your digital transformation. The “why” will help you get buy-in from senior management, board of directors, or other stakeholders, but it’ll also help you explain the reasoning behind it to those whose day-to-day work is affected by the change.

2. Prepare for and communicate the change

Now it’s time to add a missing puzzle piece to the aforementioned framework: the “who”. These are the people who are going to lead the change across the organization. Internal stakeholders are an integral part of a successful digital transformation program. In other words, someone must own the digital transformation strategy. The way they will communicate why and how change is going to be implemented can make or break the entire process.

Don’t underestimate or try to rush this step. Josh Vickery, CTO at SquareFoot, a US-based commercial real estate agency, notes that this step might actually take up a significant part of the entire project:

“It takes less time to build the technology than it does to convince people that they should change their ways – for the better.”
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Don’t limit yourself into thinking that stakeholders are just the tech-savvy among your company. To initiate a successful digital transformation, you also need:

• C-suite executives who shape the strategic vision
• HR who can manage change and handle concerns on a company-wide level
• Line managers who reinforce changes and provide support on a team level
• Executors who apply changes and can share feedback on best practices and results
• IT who will ensure integration with existing processes and required security compliance

You need all those aligned if you want to see your digital transformation project succeed.

3. Test, then implement

When large-scale changes happen, you can’t predict everything. But you can avoid some pitfalls. Use a demo environment to run tests safely before applying changes. Also, consider consulting external partners who’re specialized in digital transformation – they’ll be able to help have a smooth transition to the digital era. Finally, plan for some necessary downtime or inevitable lag in production as you set up and implement a new system.

Emad Georgy, CTO of Georgy Technology Leadership, a consulting firm leading digital transformation in $100M plus-revenue companies, explains that no matter how thorough your strategic planning might be, ultimately a strategy is a hypothesis.

“A hypothesis needs constant testing and validation. We need to ensure we have feedback loops at all levels of granularity in the organization that answer basic questions such as: ‘Is our strategy working?’, ‘Are we on pace to meet our goals?’, ‘What is blocking us today from doing that?’”

During the test phase and after implementation, adopt an agile methodology. Don’t be afraid – in fact, be prepared – to redesign your processes if you find inefficiencies. It’s those constant feedback loops that allow teams to get back on course quickly. An interesting report from the 2018 Digital Transformation Index shows that CEOs are the top reason why digital transformation might not progress. Having a flexible senior management team should be your top priority in order to be able to adjust to ever-changing business needs and market changes.

4. Train and support everyone involved

Perhaps the phrase “digital transformation” sounds a bit misleading. It doesn’t necessarily refer to a robot revolution or a situation where automated systems replace jobs and humans. “It really is more about the processes than the software,” says Kevin Grice, Director of Digital Transformation at Trace Solutions, a UK-based property management SaaS company.

“The objective is to create processes that are faster, simpler and better than existing ways of doing things.”

But people – especially employees – often tend to be resistant to change. So, when you think about implementing new tools, you should not just worry about the technical aspect of it; your emphasis should also be on people. Learn what kind of digital challenges employees face and give them all the resources they need to adjust to new tech and new processes. Some might be less familiar with tech, so you need to train them on new skills and have them ready to adopt emerging technologies. Others might prefer to stick to the old ways they’ve been working with, so in this case it’s not just about technical training, it also calls for a shift in mindset.

5. Develop a digital-savvy workforce

Digital transformation is not a one-time event; it’s a strategic decision to use emerging technology to solve performance issues, to automate manual tasks and to innovate. You will always need people to be your willing companions on this journey if you want to sustain the business gains you get from digital disruption.

This doesn’t mean that every employee must learn how to code or how to write a machine learning algorithm. But we can’t ignore the fact tech is changing the way we work. Yet, only a third of workers are given many opportunities to develop digital skills outside their normal duties, based on a survey from PwC.

While you’re looking for tech to disrupt your business, it’s important to ensure your people don’t stay behind. And this goes beyond strictly technical skills. It’s also about learning how to embrace change, how to be resilient and resourceful and how to make faster decisions. After all, the new tool that you just installed might be obsolete next year, or simply might not be covering your ever-changing business needs. In this case, adaptability wins over know-how.

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What is business agility?

Business agility, also known as organizational agility, is the capability of a business to be adaptive, flexible and creative through a changing environment. Agile businesses respond quickly to opportunities or threats, whether internal (e.g. failing business operations) or external (e.g. shifts in trends or competitive markets).

“Success today requires the agility and drive to constantly rethink, reinvigorate, react, and reinvent.” – Bill Gates

Other core characteristics of agile organizations are:

• They are customer-centric: They tailor their services and products to customer demands. Agile organizations are eager to restructure resources and operational systems to adapt to customer needs.
• They reinforce stable team dynamics: They emphasize on building well-coordinated teams that respond collectively to crises and changes. They achieve that by promoting clarity in task division and responsibilities, and by creating stable internal systems and processes.
• They nurture a growth mindset: They welcome failure as part of learning and don’t label it as a hindrance to their progress.

“Fail early, fail often, but always fail forward.” – John C. Maxwell

The COVID-19 crisis has posed numerous challenges to businesses. Many companies are already financially impacted and the global economy is predicted to be hit to the tune of $1 trillion according to the World Economic Forum. To overcome all these burdens, employers are becoming more agile. When the COVID-19 outbreak evolved into a pandemic, companies took drastic measures to protect employees on very short notice. Provided that most businesses take a long time to make a decision and then act on it, this was a desperate call for greater agility on very short notice. The emphasis of agility is – and will continue to be – in three areas: employee needs, customer expectations, and economic uncertainty.

Addressing and responding to employee needs

What are the biggest needs of employees amidst a health crisis? Staying healthy, feeling safe, and being close to their loved ones are definitely their biggest priorities. That’s why employers search ways to adapt to these needs and protect their employees’ wellbeing.

These are some examples of how companies have altered their policies and practices to respond to these needs so far:

• They have created COVID-19 crisis management teams
• They have crafted COVID-19 policies with office rules to avoid spreading the virus
• They have adapted or built work-from-home policies to respond to current circumstances
• They have expanded their virtual tools to transition smoothly to a fully remote workplace

In cases where working from home is not a realistic option, such as in production or retail services, companies have introduced other types of alterations to existing policies. For instance, Walmart and Starbucks, at the beginning of the pandemic, offered a more generous sick-leave package to their employees, showing that they prioritized their health and security. Also, Facebook and other companies restricted office visitors to limit the spread of COVID-19 in the premises.

As the events evolve, companies enable new measures; this situation unfolds so quickly that regulations and precautions become quickly outdated and require reconsideration. By remaining flexible and agile, and available to listen and help, employers will be able to identify future employee needs and act fast upon them (e.g, new policies, safety regulations, etc.).

Understanding customer needs and expectations

The ongoing socio-economic crisis has also affected consumer behavior. Most physical stores are closing until further notice and many companies, for example in the hospitality or entertainment sectors, have “frozen” their services to respect the rules of social distancing and self-isolation. In response, some businesses are offering digital solutions or are altering their services. Some of them are moving their customer support to online, with live messaging and/or video-calling options. Others, for example in retail or supply sectors, have started to expand and adjust delivery services to meet and adapt to customer expectations.

Also, some companies responded quickly to customer needs and gave some of their products free of charge to support customers in these uncertain times. For example, Google is offering its premium feature Hangouts for free until July 1 to help companies continue their meetings via video-conferencing.

Based on the type of services and products your business offers, here are some tips that can help you stay aligned with your customer needs:

• Listen first, fix second: Reach out to your customers and listen carefully and empathetically to what their problems are. Once you’ve heard their stories and concerns, consider what you can offer them, and how you’ll make it happen.
• Restructure your resources: To be relevant and helpful, you might need to tweak some of the services you provide, re-allocate your budget, or redistribute tasks to employees from scratch.
• Nurture relationships with customers: Even when you have to close your stores or pause operating for a while, stay in contact with your customers and build honest relationships with them. This will enable you to sustain a good brand reputation and motivate customers to be around when the crisis is over. The same advice applies for vendors, suppliers and other partners. Remain available and stay connected.

Surviving the economic turmoil of a crisis

The adverse financial effect of this ongoing crisis on businesses has already started to show itself. Some companies, especially in the travel, hospitality, and entertainment industries, are hugely impacted and forced to take difficult measures, including layoffs or reducing quality in product or service, in order to survive. But decisions such as these – while beneficial in the short term – can severely hurt your employer brand and customer satisfaction in the long term.

There is no perfect formula to predict the future of each sector; business leaders can picture the next day based on each company’s unique characteristics. What is the current cash flow and how will it change? Are the offered products or services useful to consumers during – and after – the crisis? If not, can you transform them and make them more relevant?

Business agility has a crucial role here; being able to consistently evaluate all necessary information to adapt to current effects is essential. So is foreseeing trends of the next day, month, quarter, or year. After meeting with your financial team, shareholders, and vendors, and with a clear overview of the company’s financial status – including current cash flow, credit situation, revenue and expenses, etc. – on hand, here is what you can do to reinforce agility:

• Be active: It all starts with your attitude; if you perceive it as a challenge and not as a threat, you’re more likely to have a positive approach. Find the silver lining between sustaining and innovating. You might need to adapt some of your products or services; be available, listen to customers, and explore new territories.
• Be competitive: Observe what your competitors do and get ahead of them. Remain aggressive; bring your marketing and sales onboard and get your best services out there. Keep your brand reputation strong. Your customers will appreciate that in the long run and you’ll benefit from their loyalty.
• Be resilient: The next step after business agility is safeguarding organizational resilience – the ability to recover and learn from failure and loss. Use this experience to understand your operations’ pros and cons, and what you can improve in the future to thrive.

A final note: the ongoing crisis is just a large-scale reminder that businesses are constantly facing changes that threaten their bottom line – some minor, some major. Being agile, flexible, and resilient will better position you to overcome these challenges as they surface, with minimal impact to your business.

The post The importance of business agility during the COVID-19 crisis appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

The style of “working remotely” has brought up challenges (distractions, barriers to productivity, etc.) that many employees have suddenly come face to face with for the first time over the past few months. As a result, new and existing skills have been brought into the spotlight.

The ultimate question arises: What are the best skills for remote work?

Workable employees – operating in a fully remote environment over the past few months – recently filled out an internal survey to help us gain insight:

Here are the resultant top skills for working remotely in an efficient way, and how our peers ranked them:

• Personal skills
• People skills
• Organizational skills
• Strategic skills

Personal skills for remote workers

Resourcefulness & Versatility

Have you ever hit a dead end in a project and rolled your chair towards your teammate to ask for some help? What if you didn’t have that convenience and you had to figure it out yourself? How would you do that?

That’s where resourcefulness and versatility come in. Being able to maneuver your skills and knowledge to learn new things and break down all kinds of challenges – even IT stuff – is a process that you face almost every day when working remotely. In a Workable employee’s own words:

“Resourcefulness – I think this is important in a remote work setting as you do not have someone sitting next to you who you can ask every question to. Being able to find information on your own is an important skill to work efficiently while working remotely.”

Self-efficacy

In the field of positive psychology, self-efficacy is defined as “the belief we have in our own abilities, specifically our ability to meet the challenges ahead of us and complete a task successfully”.

But why do remote workers need self-efficacy? Things are quite simple.

This particular measurable skill comes along with self-control, motivation, confidence, resilience and discipline. Since remote workers are “alone workers” most of the time – especially in an asynchronous environment – this skill set is the main ingredient to maintain internal focus towards completion and success.

“Self-efficacy and time management are by far the most important soft skills for a remote worker (which are also difficult to learn too). They both help the employee to focus on the tasks at hand and execute upon them.”

People skills for remote workers

Communication, Επικοινωνία, Comunicación, Comunicação, Kommunikation

Imagine being at the office, walking down the hallway to ask Steve for clarification about the project you are working on. You find him, share your thoughts, and now you’re ready to get back to work. Great!

Now, what if Steve was not at the end of the hallway, but at the other side of the world, just getting ready to dive into deep sleep? Of course you’ll write down all the questions and thoughts you want to share and send them over – fingers crossed you don’t forget anything – but you will probably not get your answers until a few hours later. So delivering to-the-point messages is crucial for a distributed team with an asynchronous model of communication.

Now let’s make it a little more tricky: Your virtual office will probably have multinational people, which means you won’t speak the same native language, nor share the same culture.

And here is where cross-cultural literacy comes aboard. When it comes to communicating, being understanding, patient and open to diversity are major remote work skills.

As another employee put it:

“Respect. Time sensitivity. (I am respecting my colleagues’ time, do not schedule useless meetings that can be discussed in a Slack channel). Introvert at times. No need to discuss too much in order to get things done.”

Teamwork

As a remote worker, you may physically work alone, but at the end of the day, you are still part of a team spread all over the world – well, at least sometimes – and it is quite easy to forget that you are part of a broader group of people with a wide range of cultural backgrounds.

And you are not to blame!

Sitting alone at your desk at home is the polar opposite of being in an office with busy hallways. However, you are not alone, and teamwork not only boosts productivity, but also works like an invisible chain holding the company together.

One employee highlighted teamwork as one of the best skills for remote work:
“Top skill is to be a team player, always sharing information with your team about your current/future work, blocking issues, etc, as well as proactively help and guide your colleagues.”

Organizational skills for remote workers

Adaptability & Flexibility

Adaptability and flexibility represent the ability to easily adjust and bend to changes. Whether this is a strategy turnaround, or simply the fact that your dinner table becomes your office spot for some hours per day.

A recent Upwork survey on remote work found that 32% of respondents said that increased distractions at home have impacted performance. Even though some circumstances, in fact, cannot be totally controlled – such as parenting at home – being adaptable and flexible are major assets for dealing with and breaking daily walls.

“A lot of it is about discipline and mindset. It’s easy to go through the ritual of getting up, getting dressed, having breakfast, go out the door and into your commute to work,” one Workable employee said. “Working remotely means you don’t have to do any of these things (apart from breakfast). The sudden shift from kitchen/breakfast to your office setting and getting into ‘work mode’ is sometimes jarring – so you have to somehow be able to make that shift in your mindset as you do it.”

Time management & Multitasking

The clock is ticking and each tick brings you closer to two crucial deadlines, your upcoming big meeting, the arrival of that delayed package you’re expecting, and your daughter’s volleyball practice that you will have to drive her to. Can you handle all these in a way so as to sign off at 7 p.m. as scheduled?

Time management and multitasking is all about combining and organizing tasks and being on time – if not ahead. Working from home enables you to add more family time and household chores to your daily routine, but you have to be able to manage all these, along with your workload.

Being organized with time was a popular subject in our survey:

“Time management is the number one soft skill required to work efficiently whether working remotely or in the office. Understanding that even though you’re at home, you have to manage your work day and accomplish everything that you would be expected to accomplish in the office is important”

Another employee highlighted the value of multitasking:

“I am able to juggle several conversations/tasks. An asynchronous work style often bleeds from the macro into the micro, so being able to address a peer’s questions while working on a project while also digesting a previous meeting is a common occurrence during a typical workday at home. Being able to separate and juggle concepts (and knowing when to do which), has allowed me to get more done more effectively.”

Strategic skills for remote workers

Critical thinking & Decision making

These two skills do apply to physical workplaces as well, but that does not mean that they are less needed in a remote workforce.

In fact, both critical thinking and decision making are skills that help remote workers:

• Examine available options
• Manage difficult situations
• Take action effectively

Managers won’t be available the whole time. So being able to analyze and make the right decisions quickly are two of the best skills that any remote employee should have.

One employee said it as much, when asked to highlight an essential skill in the remote worker’s toolkit:

“Independence: because you do not have your coworkers and especially your manager close by for the ‘little things’, you have to make decisions and believe in yourself to make progress.”

Problem solving

Consider this challenging scenario: Your manager values your skills and assigns you a task which is quite new to you. After providing some guidelines of what you have to do, your manager signs off for the day.

You plan your approach to the task at hand and start working on it.

Suddenly, a problem pops up and no one is there to help get through it – at least not for the day.

You slump back in your chair, rubbing your eyes. What do you do?

The above scenario is not as rare as it may seem at first sight. As a remote worker you will have experience with that feeling of not knowing what to do and not having someone to assist you at the time needed.

Who or what can save the day?

Your problem-solving skills, says one employee:

“In a remote environment, it’s important to be able to solve problems on your own. You might not be able to walk up to someone’s desk and ask them a question, so being able to figure out things on your own is very important.”

Bedtime story

Working remotely might be a challenge for some, but it is a great opportunity to gain valuable experience and skills, you think while brushing your teeth before bedtime. At the end of the day what matters the most is evolving, both personally and professionally, whether you’re working remote or not.

And to be sure, having all of those skills will get you a full good night’s sleep and a fresh start to another day of remote work in the morning – after your coffee and breakfast, that is!

The post Company survey: What are the best skills for remote work? appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

• What are the biggest hiring challenges during COVID-19?
• What will be the biggest challenges in hiring remotely after COVID-19?
• What skills are good for remote work?

When operating remotely, unique issues surface particularly in recruitment. Finding the right people to fill those much-needed roles is crucial to business success and survival; imagine doing that entirely via your laptop. So, we asked respondents about that in our New World of Work survey.

For those continuing to hire during COVID-19, a whole new set of challenges surfaced. Remote onboarding/training challenges (37.4%) and hiring in a remote environment (33.1%) are top of mind among respondents, with uncertainty among candidates about job security (31.7%) and economic anxiety within the business (30.6%) also listed as major concerns.

In regards to challenges of remote hiring and remote onboarding as well as training, perhaps the lack of remote experience indicated in the previous graphs is a factor. The recruitment process – so familiar to entry-level and veteran recruiters alike – looks very different in a remote environment. For recruiters and hiring managers, this can be a steep learning curve.

So, we asked respondents what they thought the biggest challenges of remote hiring would be going forward. The top responses were candidate engagement (51.7%), candidate onboarding (49.7%), and candidate evaluation (42.4%), easily doubling and even tripling any tech-focused concerns such as insufficient tech stacks and lack of buy-in/adoption.

So, evidently, the problem isn’t technology itself – also shown in previous graphs where tech adoption or availability lagged behind other challenges in shifting to remote. Rather, the problem may be worker know-how in conducting standard recruitment/HR practices in a virtual world. As above, recruiters need to relearn large parts of their work. This places a greater value on soft skills around adaptability and willingness to take on new skills.

“I think it will be vastly different depending upon the sector. My company is in the technology sector so I expect there will be minimal disruption to productivity and team engagement (if the past few months are any indication) but other sectors that are not so conversant with technology may have a much more challenging experience in shifting to new models of work.” – Survey respondent

In fact, our respondents highlighted these soft skills when asked about what the most valuable traits they would be looking for in new hires. Adaptability and resilience (67.4%) and self-motivated/self-starter (54.2%) led the way as sought-after traits.

One custom response in the “Other” category put it succinctly: “Ability to work remotely with limited supervision”.

This suggests that respondents see an uncertain road ahead, that requires plenty of pivoting for businesses and their employees – in a remote environment, no less – and so, they will look for candidates who thrive in that new world.

Recruiters are themselves also operating in that ambiguous, fast-changing environment. But there are many tools available that empower hiring teams to find, evaluate, and hire candidates in the new world of work.

Want to learn more? Navigate to:

• Chapter 1 on the impact that COVID-19 had on business and processes
• Chapter 2 on the magnitude of the shift to remote work
• Chapter 3 on the challenges of remote working and why
• Chapter 5 on the role of technology in remote work going forward
• Methodology and firmographics
• A collection of open-ended responses from those we surveyed.

The post Challenges of remote hiring: Tech isn’t the problem appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

What is data-driven recruiting?

Data-driven recruiting is when you use tangible facts and stats to inform your hiring decisions, from selecting candidates to creating hiring plans. Recruiting teams that use data are more likely to be efficient, reduce costs and improve their hiring.

Here’s a guide on why and how to embrace a data-driven recruiting strategy:

How data-driven recruiting can help hiring teams

Using data in your hiring process increases your quality of hire. Data-driven recruiting also helps you:

• Allocate your budget. For example, to wisely spend your budget, track source of hire to determine which recruiting channels bring in the most qualified candidates.
• Increase productivity and efficiency. For example, track how many emails members of your hiring team exchange with candidates to see if there are specific stages where you can speed up your time-to-hire.
• Unearth hiring issues. For example, review your application form conversion rates to determine if you need to tweak your questions or redesign your page. Same with diversity: look at candidate demographics to see if you are unwittingly discriminating against protected groups.
• Benchmark and forecast your hiring. For example, recruiting yield ratios can show you how many applicants you typically need to make one hire. If you have too few applications, consider sourcing or re-advertising the role.
• Reach more objective (and legally defensible) hiring decisions. For example, selecting the best candidate based on assessment scores and structured interview results is an effective hiring method.
• Make the case for recruiting process improvements. For example, if you know that your company needs to invest in a referral program, you can present data that shows the effectiveness of this method to solidify your argument.

How to incorporate data into your hiring

Here’s what to do to shift towards data-driven recruiting:

Choose the right data and metrics

Start by selecting a few important hiring metrics to track. All companies benefit from measuring quality of hire, since this metric shows the overall effectiveness of your hiring processes. Other common metrics include:

• Cost-per-hire (Try Workable’s cost-per-hire calculator)
• Time-to-hire
• Source of hire
• Candidate experience scores (e.g. application conversion rates, candidate feedback)
• Job offer acceptance rates

Different companies may pay attention to different types of data. To determine what matters most, meet with senior leaders and ask them which data they care most about. Ask hiring managers:

• What do you wish you knew about your hiring process?
• What data do you use (or would like to use) to become more productive when hiring?
• What hiring problems/ bottlenecks do you see often?
• Which recruiting sources/methods do you trust, but aren’t able to prove their effectiveness with data?
• Which recruiting sources/methods do you consider unreliable, but don’t have the data to prove it?
• What recruiting data would help you build reports for your managers?
• What does a successful hiring process look like to you?

Collect data efficiently

Data collection is often time-consuming. Aim to make it as painless as possible. Here’s how:

• Use software to your advantage. Your applicant tracking system (ATS) may already have reporting capabilities that will do your work for you.
• Find different ways to collect data. Some data can easily be gathered via Google Analytics (e.g. careers page conversion rates) or via simple surveys.

Act on the data

One you’ve collected your data, determine what you will do with it. Here are examples of common recruiting issues that data will help you uncover, along with ways to address them:

Long time-to-hire

If your time-to-hire is consistently greater than your industry average, examine which stages of your recruiting process lag. Here are some common bottlenecks:

• Sourcing: Consider diversifying your sourcing methods with social recruiting or using a sourcing tool to help you reach more candidates faster and build talent pipelines.
• Screening: Include qualifying questions on your job application forms and prepare effective phone screen questions before you start screening applicants.
• Interviews: Consider using software that will help you effortlessly schedule interviews with hiring managers and candidates across multiple calendars.
• Job offers: Write winning formal job offer letters that encapsulate your positions accurately and entice candidates to accept.

Low job offer acceptance rates

Having your best candidates turn down your job offers translates into higher costs and positions remain vacant for longer. If you find that a high percentage of your job offers gets rejected, consider a few fixes:

• Create more competitive job offers. Do more thorough research on benefits and salaries through sites like Glassdoor and PayScale.
• Gauge candidate interest in the position early on. Ensure you communicate effectively with candidates during phone screenings and interviews (e.g. discuss their motivations and concerns) about the role.
• Ensure your candidate experience is positive. Make sure your team treats candidates properly (e.g. gets back to them on time, makes them comfortable during interviews.)
• Write job offer letters that reflect candidates’ expectations for the job. For example, if you’ve told candidates during interviews that a job requires 20% travel, and the job offer mentions 50%, candidates will be unlikely to accept.

High new hire turnover

New hire turnover reflects the number of employees who leave shortly after they were hired. Here are two common remedies when your new hire turnover is too high:

• Communicate well with candidates about the job. Ensure candidates understand the job duties, requirements and team and individual performance expectations, well before they receive your job offer. If your new hires feel you misinformed them about the role, they may leave.
• Create an effective onboarding process. Welcome your new employee with an email. Ensure your new hires feel welcome, receive appropriate training and are given opportunities to do meaningful work right from the start.

Know the limitations of data

• Data won’t tell you why something happens. You can get in-depth insight by combining different types of data, but you still need to interpret your findings.
• Data can’t solve your problems. Data indicates what your teams do well and where there might be problems to solve, but what you choose to do with that knowledge is at your discretion.
• Data isn’t always objective. If people on your team are creating the data, be prepared to take results with a pinch of salt. For example, if candidates’ assignments are graded by a software, the results will be more reliable than if a person grades them.

Use data to evaluate the past and plan for the future

Even if your hiring teams are used to making decisions based on intuition, they will find a stronger ally in data. Data will help them see what worked and what didn’t in past hiring processes and improve their future hiring decisions.

The post Data-driven recruiting 101: How to improve your hiring process appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Starting your salary discussions from of a place of respect is crucial. As a hiring manager, making these offers strategically is important to the long-term success of your business and this role. What are the most important things to keep in mind when you are extending a salary offer? These salary negotiation tips for employers will advise you on making a fair offer for both yourself and your potential hire.

1. Establish salary ranges

For each position you’re hiring for, be sure to have a lower and upper band to orient your approach to the salary negotiation. Your lowest offer should still be in line with industry standards and be attractive to your candidate. Industry standards can be found from government resources like the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or private survey sites like Glassdoor or Salary.com. Know that your candidate will be using these resources to determine their salary requirements and negotiating salary as well.

2. Be transparent but not to your own detriment

Candidates want to be clear about how much they’re worth, and how much they can accept that’s fair to you, and more than fair to them. How can you address these requests, while still being true to the constraints on your company financially? “Ask what the candidate is looking for or expecting in terms of comp,” says Molly Howard, Director of Operations at Ovuline as her top salary negotiation tip for employers. “This sounds silly, but ends up avoiding a lot of the uncertainty down the road. And, surprisingly, most people answer.”

3. Put people first, numbers second

How can you appeal to your candidate’s wants and needs before even beginning a salary negotiation? By understanding what’s important to your candidate — compensation, vacation, health benefits, flexibility. One of our hiring tips for employers is to create a package that is more than just competing for the best number. Create a package that makes both you and your candidate feel good. Many of these other parts of compensation, like work-from-home, can come at little cost to your company. Howard suggests asking “what else are you looking for in a comp package?” before negotiating salary. “This gives me insight into how a candidate is thinking about comp — if it’s all about $, or if there are other things that are important.”

4. Additional monetary compensation

Other advice for employers to create a compelling offer without sacrificing base salary include a signing bonus, performance bonuses, or shares in the company that accrue at various milestones. Howard suggests leaning into these options early in your salary negotiation, so that your candidate can evaluate the full value of their package. “Talk through stock options preemptively, if that is part of the comp,” she says, another of her salary negotiation tips for employers, “so that the candidate can evaluate the amount of worth and value they have before they have dug in a particular number. I like to do this by talking through the offer in a call just after I send the offer letter, when possible.”

Other advice from Howard includes giving some time for a candidate to consider what you’re presenting to them. Being a resource for your candidate during this time will give them the opportunity to ask questions and adjust the offer.

“Give people time to process the offer and don’t be too pushy at the get go if it seems like there is hesitancy on the candidates part,” she says. “I say something like, ‘I know this is a lot of information at once. I’m here for you during this process. Why don’t you go home/think on it and we can connect in a few days.’”

The post 4 effective salary negotiation tips for employers appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Here are some simple ways to welcome a new employee with warmth:

Communicate early and often

Start welcoming your new employee before they arrive. The more your new hire knows about your company and your plans for their first few weeks at work, the less nervous they’ll be for their first day. Check in with them before they start and let them know how to prepare and what to expect. Here’s what each employee should know about before their start date:

• Your company dress code
• Their team’s normal working hours
• A tentative schedule for the first week of work
• And what time they should arrive on their first day

To make them feel even more prepared, it’s a good idea to share:

• A list of your tech tools (like Slack, Asana, Google Docs or Trello)
• An overview of your company policies, benefits information and onboarding checklist

Prepare a welcome kit

An employee welcome package or ‘fact sheet’ is a simple gesture that can go a long way. It can include all the normal HR paperwork, company policies, employee handbook and stationery, but it’s a good idea to customize it to fit your new employee’s role. At Workable, we welcomed our new editor with a copy of Josh Bernoff’s ‘Writing Without Bullshit’ book to introduce her to our team’s editing philosophy:

What a warm welcome from @Workable on my #firstday! So happy to be a part of the team! #contentwriting #onboardingswag #hiringdoneright pic.twitter.com/4eBOmNKZCz
— Rohma Abbas (@Rohma_Abbas) December 13, 2016

Both local and remote workers can also benefit from a curated neighborhood guide as part of your welcome kit. Helpscout welcomes their employees to their Boston headquarters with a map of their employees’ favorite places to eat, drink and run errands:

Send a new hire announcement

Not everyone is confident enough to start introducing themselves and socializing from day one. It’s a good idea for the new hire’s manager to send an introductory note to the team on an employee’s first day. Even a simple Slack message in your company’s #general channel, or a short department email can make someone feel welcome:

For big and fast-growing teams, there are two main issues that complicate new hire welcomes. New employees have trouble remembering lots of names and faces. And current employees mightn’t be able to keep track of all their new colleagues. To combat these issues, you could try:

• Sending a new employee announcement email to introduce your new hire and include information that’ll make good talking points.
• Organizing a group activity that involves talking to people from different groups, so that your new hire gets to know people early on.
• Planning an out-of-the-office casual meeting (e.g. for lunch) where team members can get to know each other better.

Related template: Welcome new staff email

Assign a work friend

Managers usually oversee their new team members’ onboarding processes. But pairing a new employee with a colleague can help to make them more comfortable. Colleagues are the best people to share obscure office details and customs, like which copy machine needs a reboot before it works, which local coffee shop serves the best espresso and the unwritten rules of meeting room booking etiquette. That’s why assigning each new hire a ‘buddy’ or ‘mentor’ can be a good idea. IBM and Qualcomm acknowledge that onboarding isn’t a one-day affair, so they provide new hires with mentors for a longer period of time (30 days and one year, respectively.)

Have a clear work plan

After the first introductions and a tour of the office, it’s time to get down to work. Schedule product demos or other presentations that will help them understand your way of working. It’s best not to overwhelm your new hire from their first day, but don’t leave them wondering what they should do next. Prepare their first week by giving them simple tasks to complete and an industry reading list, or a set of presentations to fill any downtime they may have between tasks. This way, they’ll familiarize themselves with their job duties and their new company’s competitive landscape while getting a sense of what you expect of them.

Onboarding should be an ever-changing process. As your team gets bigger, your needs will change. So, frequently review your onboarding process. Ask your newest employees about their first days at work. What did they like? What would have been more helpful? Use this feedback to improve your onboarding for new hires in the future.

The post How to welcome a new hire appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

The most innovative recruiting teams are always on the lookout for the best online recruiting tools or recruitment software. These innovative recruitment methods can support every step of the hiring process, from sourcing candidates and posting jobs to managing resumes, to interviews. Additional tools can help you revolutionize your approach to your referral policy, referral systems, social media recruiting tools and onboarding as the final stage of an effective recruitment process. There are tools just for managing your recruiting email inbox.

Here we provide 24 modern recruitment techniques and tools, that can help recruiters and managers raise their hiring game:

Sourcing and recruitment tools

Reddit

Reddit is a community messaging site with a user base running to hundreds of millions. If you’re active in the community, your fellow members may give consideration to your job ad more easily. Its informal tone and the ability to reply to comments from interested people gives you a head start in creating strong relationships with a candidate pool. There are also those who are actively looking for a job through Reddit.

Github

Github is a popular platform among developers for working individually or collectively on projects. Being able to see the work of talented professionals gives recruiters a better idea of who can add value to their business.

Facebook Graph Search

Posting jobs on Facebook is already a popular practice among employers. The Facebook Graph Search, though, can also be very useful in sourcing candidates. This innovative recruitment method allows you to conduct searches that include certain criteria (job titles, education, locations etc.) to reach a talent pool that’s relevant to your needs.

Meetup

Through Meetup, employers come into contact with lots of professionals in a specific field. A few hours among talented people and you’re bound to find someone to catch your eye. Even if you don’t have the time to attend an event, an innovative recruitment technique is seeing which people are interested in a particular event and contact them if they’re worthy prospects.

Snap.hr

Snap.hr operates in London and only for developers, but their innovative approach warrants our attention. Developers that want to speak with companies can sign up and ask for the arrangement of interviews. It’s worth being connected to a great pool of interested candidates.

Networkmonkey

Networkmonkey uses a systematic approach to find talented candidates who may be interested in your position. They monitor social media activity according to your criteria and use predictive analytics to determine whether someone is looking for a new job, pulling their contact details afterwards.

1-Page

1-Page finds the most relevant candidates for you. You only have to let them know what you seek and they’ll search according to your criteria. It’ll provide you with recent information and contact details.

LinkedIn/Twitter

Both modern recruitment methods are very popular as social media recruiting tools. Most people are familiar with their functions and recruiters use them regularly for sourcing talent and making more targeted searches for candidates who are interested in a subject or field.

Referrals

Zao

Zao is an employee referral software. It provides an easy-to-use platform for managing referral rewards and incentives as well as social recruiting. The interesting part is that it does all this using innovative gamification technology.

Download our free sourcing guide to help you craft an effective referral program.

Job posting

Indeed

The most popular job board among job seekers, this mega-aggregator offers a simple pay-per-click model for job posting. Additionally, if you write compelling job ads with the correct keywords, Indeed will find them more easily and display them in relevant search results automatically.

Stackoverflow

Chances of finding great candidates for a position are significantly higher if you post your job opening in niche job boards. Stackoverflow is an online community for programmers. According to your needs, you can also find job boards for startups, internships and many other options.

Jobs2Careers

Jobs2Careers is one of the few job boards that use the pay-per-applicant model for job posting. It can be very cost-effective in certain instances and, with 1.2 billion monthly job searches, it’s certainly worth considering.

Candidate management tools

Workable

Workable is an applicant tracking system (ATS) that automates and streamlines your recruiting process. It has tools to write job ads and post them to a variety of free and paid job boards. When resumes start pouring in, it helps you store them, search them, move candidates across the hiring pipeline and write comments and evaluations. Adding other features such as reporting or bulk actions (e.g. sending rejection letters) and an intuitive user interface, it can be one of the most useful recruiting tools.

Task management tools

Trello

Trello’s interface makes it easy to track processes, tasks and even candidates. The ability to move around entries from one stage to another and assign them to specific people can promote easy collaboration within an innovative recruitment and selection process.

Selection tools

SparkHire

SparkHire is one of a number of companies who specialize in video interviewing. This innovative approach makes things easier for interviewing remote or busy candidates. You can create templates of questions that candidates can answer in their own time or have fully interactive interviews over the platform. The video is recorded so you can review it at a later time with your team.

HireVue

HireVue is a major player in digital interviewing. They pay very close attention to quality of video and audio. Their product is complemented with evaluating interviews through predictive analytics and useful reporting features.

Gapjumpers

Gapjumpers offers a method to hire “using blind auditions” avoiding harmful biases when screening and evaluating candidates. Their technology is designed to help you make decisions according to performance and talent.

Codercred

Codercred has also an innovative approach in hiring coders. Employers can create challenges and invite coders to participate. Codercred will score them so hiring managers can make an objective decision.

HackerRank

HackerRank provides a platform for coding challenges like Codercred. It has a library of coding challenges and offers the ability to customize your own. Additionally, it holds public challenges (“CodeSprints”) that you can sponsor and includes a tool for video interviewing.

SurveyMonkey

People use SurveyMonkey’s templates for a lot of reasons. For recruiting, it’s sometimes helpful to create pre-interview questionnaires to screen out candidates who aren’t a good fit before you spend time and effort in interviewing them. SurveyMonkey is highly customizable, and can be used for proprietary and creative recruitment strategies.

Onboarding tools

Kin

Kin is one of those innovators that ensure you won’t neglect your onboarding process. Through its technology, you can manage paperwork and create individual onboarding processes and checklists for each new employee.

Namely

Onboarding is only one function of Namely’s complete HR platform. Along with functions for payroll and benefits, it helps you create an effective orientation process where paperwork and signatures are digital.

BambooHR

Like Namely, BambooHR offers a complete HRIS solution. Their onboarding function is full of interesting features such as “get to know you” emails for introducing employees and preparing new hires for their first day.

More: 21 HR tools and techniques designed for growing companies

The post Innovative recruiting tools and techniques for modern HR teams appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

They’re there for a reason – to keep the books aligned. The person in charge of finance is an empathetic, patient person with enough organizational skills to ensure that everything is as much balanced at year-end as at year-beginning, and with enough contingency planning in place to allow the company to successfully navigate even the rudest awakenings that befall organizations.

That’s where Craig DiForte comes in as Workable’s CFO. He’s been in the finance biz since graduating with an MBA in Finance from Boston University Questrom School of Business in 2002 and has been managing Workable’s money since 2016.

So, he’s seen a lot in his work. He also knows what costs money and what makes money, and to take it to another level, he knows where money can – and can’t – be spent in order to have it reflect on the bottom line. And mostly, he knows how to make sure it all ties together into a nice bow.

So, according to Craig, here are seven ways you can optimize the recruitment pipeline without getting hit too hard by the actual cost of hiring staff:

1. Communicate, communicate, communicate
2. Measure the process regularly
3. Remember, timing is money
4. Consider different timing processes
5. Plan for the inevitable turnover
6. Implement clear processes
7. Keep checking in

1. Communicate, communicate, communicate

“The one thing you have to make sure that you’ve done,” Craig says, “is that you’ve effectively communicated the plan to all of the hiring managers.”

He explains, using an example: everyone – including the hiring managers – needs to be fully informed on how many they can or need to hire that year. “If your VP of Sales doesn’t know that she only has the budget to hire 20 heads,” he says, “and she opens up a requisition for 30, you’re immediately going to have a problem.”

That scenario is a lot of things, but it’s especially a problem for Finance. This planning conflict will throw the books out of whack because your VP of Sales has put a process in place for something that your budget won’t allow for. Ten additional heads being hired means 10 more salaries than you’ve planned for. And 10 more interview processes that are a time and resource suck for your hiring team. And, of course, there’s the expensive damage control in rolling everything back to the original 20. All of these things cost money and force Finance to move things around to accommodate.

You don’t want that to happen in your company, so you need to make sure everyone is on the same page for absolutely everything. This means meeting regularly, keeping communication channels open and keeping everyone together in the loop as to where you are and where you’re going in the hiring plan.

“You need to make sure that this hiring plan is communicated,” Craig reiterates. “You want to be sure that the plan has been communicated out, and that you’re now executing on it.”

2. Measure the process regularly

You must continually check the pulse of your recruitment process at regular stages, and measure where you’re staying on plan and where you’re going off plan, Craig says.

“Your [hiring] plan basically comes down to the question: ‘Have I hired the people that I meant to hire, at the time that I meant to hire them?’ There’s a timing variance you need to think about.”

Measurement doesn’t just apply to timing and scheduling – true to Craig’s background, he reminds us to look at the actual money being spent on payroll: “Did I hire them at the right salary that I thought I was going to hire them at?” he asks as an example. Again, a slight variance in salary for multiple roles can add up, creating a fresh headache for Finance.

Salary differences isn’t the only flux in the cost of the hiring process: measuring also means looking at reports and identifying the areas where you can optimize the recruiting process.

For example, Craig asks: “What are the savings related to cancelled hires?” Once that’s in place, he says, “then you can have a net hiring plan adjustment number, where you can say; ‘OK, the original hiring plan has 100 people, but we added 15 and took out five, so now we’re really at 110.’”

“The extra cost of doing that is Y, whatever Y happens to be. That’s one metric you want to be able to track,” he says, because you’re going to want to measure your anticipated outcome against your real outcome. “You want to be able to ask, ‘How am I doing against the original plan? And what are my variances?’”

When you look at reports regularly, and identify opportunities for optimization, then you’re tightening up the process and making it move more effectively – making things more cost-effective. You’re not just saving money, you’re also making your existing money go further.

3. Remember: timing is money

Drilling down deeper, Craig says that looking at the savings opportunities in the hiring plan isn’t just about looking at salaries. When you’re looking at the cost of hiring staff or hiring ahead of schedule, you also have an opportunity to cut back costs.

Craig says, “Hiring people too slowly can be a bad thing from a performance standpoint, but it can save you some money because you thought you were going to fill a role in January and you didn’t fill that role until March. That might be a problem from a company performance standpoint – but from a headcount standpoint, you just saved two months’ worth of salary.”

It’s just one example of many, but the intricacies of the many moving parts of the recruitment pipeline are such that money will always play into the overall equation. It’s not so easy to budget for a hiring strategy, particularly since you’re often accounting for unexpected events and benefits.

Crunch those numbers: learn how to calculate recruitment costs for budget planning in our new tutorial.

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking timing alone is a valid criterion. For instance, you may need to speed up the hiring process and hire someone earlier than originally planned – despite the cost of doing so – if this means you’ll hire an exceptional candidate who may not be available later.

Or, in some cases, it makes sense to offer a higher salary because of the higher productivity that new employee can bring to the table. You’re not necessarily costing your company money if you paid a higher salary than a competitor – you’re recruiting better talent who will ultimately boost productivity.

In short, keep an eye on timing (when you open up a new requisition and when you hire a new person compared to when you need them), but also factor in these other qualitative and quantitative gains.

Craig explains further: “You need to be able to find the mechanism to take all of those things into consideration to determine; How much am I saving on my hiring plan right now? Or how much am I costing myself more? Because if I’m hiring everybody fast, and I’m hiring them at higher salaries than I thought, I’m costing myself too much money.”

“But maybe,” Craig notes, “I’m making myself more productive. There can be a benefit.”

4. Consider different timing processes

You also have to think about onboarding schedules for new hires and upcoming projects that you’re hiring for. These both take into account the type of roles you’re filling for.

“For instance,” Craig says, “if they’re salespeople, there can be a great benefit to hiring early because they start ramping faster and they’re going to get to full productivity earlier.”

The impact to the bottom line is easily tangible for sales: with more salespeople – particularly if commission-based – you get more sales, and your company is more productive.

But what about engineers? “If you’re hiring an engineer for a certain project that you’re going to work on, but the project doesn’t start until April and you hire them in February, that might not be the best early hire; depending on the project, and the skills of the person you’re hiring, the ramping time can be different in each case.”

Whether you’re hiring ahead or behind, Craig says, it’s a strategic decision based on the role you’re hiring for. You don’t want employee salaries burning a hole in your pocket when they’re not contributing anything to your bottom line or producing anything.

5. Plan for the inevitable turnover

“You’re going to have something come up during the year,” Craig warns. “The ubiquitous backfill. Some people will leave – there’s no getting around it. You’re going to have to replace them.”

Of course, turnover is a real fact of business. But there’s something else impacting the cost of the hiring process: “One of the things that you need to make sure of in your plan is that when you backfill, you’re not adding an extra position.”

This could happen if, for example, “Jane tells you she’s leaving, but gives you a month-long notice and you say, ‘Well, Jane is very important. She has to be replaced.’ So you open a new request for Jane’s replacement while Jane’s still there.”

Which is fine, until: “A month later, Jane actually leaves. Then if you’re not watching your hiring plan, somebody might open a new request for Jane’s replacement because Jane has actually left now,” Craig says.

“That’s how one position turns into two positions. You want to make sure that you have a good process for managing your backfills and how they go into your hiring plan so that you don’t double-count them.”

6. Implement clear processes

“You could have created the greatest budget in the world, and within a month or two months depending upon the industry that you’re in, it will start to go sideways a little bit,” says Craig. “You’ll find out that either because certain people leave or because you come up with new initiatives, or because something changes the economy or the market, that you need either more or less people than you thought you did.”

So, you need to have a procedure in place from the get-go for removing or canceling hires and requests in the hiring plan. You’ll also want to open up some resources – be it time, money, or otherwise – to accommodate unbudgeted hires.

And what’s more, Craig says, you have to have a clear approval process in place. “What’s your process for making sure those [new hires and cancellations] get approved? Sometimes people forget to get approval on both sides of that – they know they need an approval to add a new hire, but they forget they need an approval to remove one.”

And communication, again, is key. “Sometimes they’ll remove one, and then the manager will think they still have a request in place and they’ll try to hire for that role.”

Check out here how GCC Services fosters a more inclusive hiring process with Workable Video Interviews.

7. Keep checking in

We come full circle here: in the spirit of communication, keep checking in with each other on a regular basis. “You need a clear communication and approval process for making sure everyone’s coordinated on how you put in new positions and how you take out positions you decide you don’t need anymore.”

Once you have those kinds of changes, you’re adding another level of complexity to your reporting where, Craig notes, you want to measure, for instance, the added cost of unbudgeted hires.

Again, communication is key, Craig says. And this involves everyone who’s involved in the hiring plan, including HR, Finance and hiring managers. “Plus, the hiring manager should understand clearly what’s happening with their respective teams so people know where they are.”

In the end, your hiring strategy for the upcoming year should be run like a business within the business. Have regular meetings and check-ins with everyone who’s a part of the whole process. “Make sure that you have policies and procedures in place to handle changes to the plan, which could be additions, subtractions, cancellations if you will, or backfill positions. You need to have processes for all three of those.”

And then make sure you have the numbers crunched regularly. “You want to know: what are your metrics and what are you reporting against in terms of total cost-to-hire, total time-to-hire. Then, there’s the other more nuanced pieces that we talked about; that is, how many are you hiring early? How many are you hiring later? What’s the net effect of that on your numbers for your total cost?”

Craig smiles, knowing this is a lot to take in if you want to run things smoothly with an outcome as optimal as possible. What if you don’t have the time to incorporate all of that into your hiring process? Well, he has an answer to that, adding a joke about shamelessly plugging the Workable product: “That’s one of the reasons the Hiring Plan module in Workable is incredibly useful, because everybody has access to the same platform and can check in and see what’s happening at every step of the way.”

That’s a sure-fire way to get Finance on your side in the hiring process. Your work life will be a lot easier in the end, and the bottom line will thank you.

Want to figure out what’s normal and what’s not in your budget calculations for a hiring plan? Check out our tutorial on how to do that.

You can also see Craig and Matt Buckland – who was Workable’s VP of Customer Advocacy for two years – on planning a strategy for high growth in this webinar:

The post Devil in the details: The cost of the hiring process and what you can do about it appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Here’s a list with five thoughtful presents that can be ideal resources for recruiters and talent professionals:

1. A library of templates

Anyone involved in the hiring process knows how much time is spent on writing job descriptions, composing emails to candidates or crafting lists of interview questions. So, for this holiday season, give a recruiter a library of templates for every purpose, from job ads and offer letters to interview questions and Boolean searches.

How do you present this gift? If you want to add a touch of holiday spirit, you could send it as a card. Use a relevant service or create your own card using a tool like Adobe Express Card Maker. Here’s one I created with Spark within 10 minutes:

2. A book on modern recruiting

Recruiting has grown exponentially from the time of newspaper job ads, and it’ll keep evolving and changing. Forward-thinking talent professionals who stay updated on new techniques and technologies will be the big winners in the recruiting game.

So why not give a new, exciting book to a recruiting professional? Here are a few great options:

• Culture-Driven Recruiting by Lee-Anne Edwards (the first-ever book on the topic)
• Smart and Gets Things Done by Avram Joel Spolsky (an oldie-but-goody “concise guide to finding the best technical talent”)
• Exceptional Talent: How to Attract, Acquire and Retain the Very Best Employees by Mervyn Dinnen and Matt Alder (a guide on using modern technology, methods and media to hire and retain great employees).
• Writing Without Bullshit by Josh Bernoff (an easy-to-read, comprehensive guide to better written communications including emails, announcements, and reports)

As for presentation, nothing too fancy is required. Get some festive wrapping paper and you’re all set!

3. A cool subscription

For recruiters, receiving new knowledge frequently is important – you can grasp new techniques, find hiring methods that work and discover new recruiting strategies, just by keeping abreast of the buzz in the market. But how would a recruiter do that easily, when they’re already so busy with everyday tasks?

One thing you can do is to choose a fun, interesting and reliable newsletter/podcast they don’t already subscribe to, and sign them up or send them a link (you can include a card to make it more of a gift). Here are a few ideas:

4. A new Applicant Tracking System

Yeah, I know, shameless plug of our own product. But the truth is, we wouldn’t be making recruiting software if we didn’t think of it as a definite game-changer. If a recruiter doesn’t have an ATS, or uses an ATS that’s clunky and inadequate, you could address this in the new year. That’s especially so if you’re part of the recruiting team or one of the decision-makers at your company.

What you can do is conduct some research on ATS vendors and sign up for a demo or free trial. Then, invite the recruiter to sit in demos or explore the different software solutions along with you. You can also share an RFP template with them to help in their hunt for the perfect ATS.

5. Recruiting swag

Swag is less useful than the other options on this list, but things that cheer us up and boost our morale are always welcome. For recruiters, you could choose a funny slogan (for example: “Keep calm and call that candidate,” “Trust me, I’m a recruiter,” “Talent superstar”) and print it on a mug or a T-shirt.

You could also go straight to websites that sell swag for recruiters, like Etsy, Cafe Press or Zazzle:

You might even look for a stuffed purple squirrel or a mug or T-shirt that has one on it. Recruiters will probably get the reference!

The holiday season and New Year go hand-in-hand for many people. If that’s the case for you, too, then check out our list of 5 New Year’s resolutions for recruiters.

The post Resources for recruiters: 5 fun and useful presents appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Putting down your ping pong paddle for a moment, you might be tempted to ask whether this is necessarily a good thing?

Offices are as prone to fad and fashion as every other aspect of our life and work. And yet without fail, each revolution in our workspace is presented as the future; the inevitable destination for all smart companies; the end of working history.

Fire, steel and telephones

I blame Catherine O’Leary. An Irish immigrant who kept a few cows in a wooden barn in Chicago in 1871. She can’t have known what would follow when she is alleged to have left a lantern too close to the hay on that fated night. The Great Chicago Fire razed an area four miles long and a mile wide in what had been the center of the growing city. The blaze and the blank space it left behind came as developments in the manufacture of steel changed what was possible in architecture; and the economy tilted from blue collar to white collar.

The result was the construction in Chicago of the first recognizable American downtown dominated by grids of tall office blocks. It also came just as Alexander Graham Bell was patenting the telephone, and the typewriter was replacing handwritten ledgers. Now it just needed someone to work out the best way to organize the massed ranks of office workers that the new template and the new economy demanded.

Enter Frederick Taylor, the original management consultant and the villain of Nikhil Saval’s excellent chronicle of the office, Cubed. Taylor, whose theories were later dubbed “scientific management,” wanted the turn-of-the-century office to work like a factory, and white collar workers to be as efficient as manual labor was becoming. This called for massed ranks of desks for the clerk-class, cubicles for managers and plusher, more personalized offices for the boss-class.

The influence of Taylorism has been stubborn. Despite setbacks like the time in 1912 that the US Senate banned his methods at the Watertown Arsenal in Massachusetts after a string of angry strikes, it was only after the Second World War that a different office came into view.

The coming of the furniture-makers

The next big ideas didn’t come from engineers, like Taylor, but furniture makers. Two competing notions, one of an open office from Europe and the other a series of semi-enclosed mini-offices from the US, would shape the working lives of millions of people in the decades to come.

The Burolandschaft, or office landscape movement, was born in the delightfully named Hamburg suburb of Quickborn. It was there that brothers Eberhard and Wolfgang Schnelle gave expression to their idea of creating a more humane and collaborative workspace.

Thought by some to be a reaction to Nazism, Burolandschaft called for an organic office with desks grouped in swirling pods, lines of sight interrupted by indoor plants and sound-proofed screens. Sound familiar? It pretty much describes Workable’s current engineering floor in Athens, Greece, and many other tech companies besides.

First it took Europe by storm, then in 1967 it crossed the pond to the US starting with the Dupont headquarters. It was around this time that the ideas of a brilliant designer at the office-furniture company Herman Miller crystalized. Bob Propst took a long look at the American office as he saw it, and as we’ve seen it in shows like Mad Men, and this was his conclusion: “It saps vitality, blocks talent, frustrates accomplishment. It is the daily scene of unfulfilled intentions and failed effort.”

Shrinking the Action Office into a cubicle

With the benefit of hindsight, his answer may surprise you. He invented the cubicle, not that he envisaged it that way. What he actually invented was the Action Office and its cheaper sequel, the Action Office II — a highly flexible, affordable furniture system designed to democratize the privacy a personal office offered. For Propst the vision was of an office that was capable of frequent modification to suit the changing needs of the employee, without the need to purchase new furnishings.

Seen from today’s perspective the cubicle conjures up a very different image. When Mae Holland, the heroine in Dave Eggers’ dark satire of Silicon Valley, The Circle, begins her first day at the Googlesque workplace, she is shown to a burlap cubicle as part of a practical joke. Her horrified reaction is pretty typical of contemporary attitudes to the groundbreaking work of Propst.

Things looked different back in 1985, when the World Design Conference named the Action Office as the most successful design of the previous 25 years. Before Propst died in 2000 roughly 40 million Americans — and many millions more elsewhere — were hard at work in more than 40 different versions of his design. Remarkably few of them were happy about this though.

From monks to submariners

Despite the hype there is little that hasn’t been tried before. Monasteries were the earliest pre-cursors to the office and monks used standing desks to write and illuminate manuscripts. An 1856 report commissioned by the British government found that separate rooms were required for the cerebral employee who “works with his head” where as more mechanical work was best done in concert with other clerks in the same room. Even the 1980s fad for “hot-desking” was, in fact, borrowed from war-time hot-bunking where submariners time-shared their bunks.

The steel girder offices of Chicago with their sky-high ceilings were too regimented and alienating; the open offices conceived in Quickborn too noisy and distracting; the cubicles with their promise of flexibility and customization turned out to be just another way of packing as many workers as possible into the smallest space possible. As Propst’s former colleague Joe Schwartz told Fortune Magazine: “They kept shrinking the Action Office until it became a cubicle.”

Furniture, however cleverly designed, is no match for dysfunctional hierarchies and the downright arbitrary nature of power in most business settings. There is something of Mikhail Kalashnikov in the story of Bob Propst and his gradual realization of this. He would end his life as disillusioned with his own creation as the Russian gun-maker was with his lethally popular assault rifle.

“The dark side of this is that not all organizations are intelligent and progressive,” Propst said shortly before his death. “Lots are run by crass people who can take the same kind of equipment and create hellholes. They make little bitty cubicles and stuff people in them. Barren, rathole places… I never had any illusions that this was a perfect world.”

The post The future of work has been foretold appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Not everyone agrees how big a business has to be before it stops being small. We like to keep things simple, so we go with the US Small Business Administration, which puts the mark at fewer than 500 employees.

This means that nine out of ten Workable customers are small businesses. We’re exceptionally proud of this. They include family-owned distributors like Comer, health centers like Sandy Hill, nonprofit organizations like Crisis Textline and travel agencies like Much Better Adventures, to name just a few.

Workable was built for them, and thanks to businesses like these, we have the fastest growing hiring software in America. In the United States, small businesses fuel economic growth and account for two-thirds of the country’s new hires. In Europe and elsewhere they make a similarly strong contribution.

Great reasons to support small businesses

Supporting small businesses (SMBs) is a powerful way to invest in your community and in the economy. In October 2015, small businesses created over 80% of all new jobs. One in two working Americans is employed by a small business. Compared to large companies, they’re likelier to hire candidates who face employment challenges, such as long-term unemployment, or part-time workers. SMBs also invest in the training and development of their staff, improving their future job prospects.

Hiring remains a hassle

All this growth leaves hiring as one of the top business challenges. Finding skilled candidates is the greatest hurdle that small businesses face. A hiring team that is often one person, the lack of an employer brand, inadequate tools (email and spreadsheets) and leaner hiring budgets make it challenging for small businesses to compete with larger companies for great candidates.

The good news is that cloud computing and the business software that has come with it is helping to level the hiring field. With tools like Workable, small businesses can get set up with their own careers page, begin to develop an employer brand, get advice on writing a great job ad and get that ad seen by talented applicants.

Big growth for small businesses

2015 was a good year to be a small business, which is why they’re hiring so much. Energy prices were low, which reduced costs for small businesses and encouraged consumers to spend more. Construction, primarily a small business-driven industry, got a boost this year. They’ve been busy with single-family home construction reaching levels not seen since 2008. Small businesses also benefited from the strength of the US dollar this year because they do all their business within the US.

In 2015, most small business owners felt that their business was operating successfully. Most small businesses are also planning for growth in the next five years. The number of SMBs have increased overall and the number of small business failures has declined.

The post The state of small business hiring in 2015 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Tech companies like Basecamp, Buffer, Stack Exchange, and Trello have mostly taken the lead, but it’s not difficult to imagine other industries adopting this setup, as long as employees did not have to work on-site with specialized equipment (e.g. construction, healthcare, hospitality industries).

But can you really get away with no office? Automattic, Mozilla, and Soundcloud, the three massively distributed companies profiled below, have done so. They share key aspects that contribute to their longevity and continued growth. First, all three companies have defined shared values and make hiring decisions that help them keep that in their culture as they scale. Second, distributed teams must communicate, even over-communicate, in order to keep the gears of collaboration and productivity running smoothly. Finally, great tools are the bread and butter of any distributed team. If your team can’t meet in person, you should pick good options for face-to-face communication, getting quick feedback, recruitment, project management and more.

Case study: Automattic

The most fascinating thing about Automattic isn’t their size (400 people), their success (Automattic is valued at 1 billion dollars) or their staying power (10 years and going strong). It’s their organizational design—the backbone of the company, the idea that supports everything else.

The company is a champion of the open-source movement and a major contributor to WordPress, which now powers one in four websites. Open source advocates believe that software that anyone, anywhere can use for any purpose makes the internet a better place. According to their CEO, Matt Mullenweg, “This mirrors the meritocracy that makes Open Source great and treats people on the quality of their ideas and their work whether they’re in San Francisco or Argentina. (Or if they started in San Francisco and moved to Argentina.)”

Mullenweg considers the opportunity to work from anywhere to be the single greatest perk that Automattic provides. Being a distributed team enables them to compete with traditional tech giants like Facebook for the very best job candidates. At Automattic, a range of communication tools have replaced the traditional office. These include the P2 (a WordPress tool), Slack, Trello, and Github. Instead of paying rent for office space, Automatticians go on team hackathons and summits in far-flung places like Hawaii, Mexico and New Zealand

Case study: Mozilla

Mozilla, the nonprofit organization behind the Firefox browser, has 13 global offices and people working in more than 30 countries. Mozilla also supports any employee’s decision to work from home. Despite their decentralized structure, this company has succeeded tremendously in building an inclusive culture.

Here’s what that looks like in practice: Employees can join any meeting by calling in, and can talk to anyone at the company via video conferencing and IRC. Improved collaboration is a great byproduct of such a culture. “There are pretty low barriers to cross-pollination. If wandering down a rabbit hole leads you to a bug elsewhere in the code: fix it. Barriers to ‘hacking in other people’s turf’ are low,” writes Johnathan Nightingale, VP of Firefox, in his Quora response. This extends to hiring. “There’s little to no distinction between contributors who pop out of nowhere, contractors, and employees. Mozilla is the community,” says Brian Bondy, a software engineer at Mozilla.  People who want to work at Mozilla are encouraged to join their community and contribute as volunteers.

This is related to their other core value, transparency. It’s important to build trust with people you don’t see on a daily basis. At Mozilla, they build trust by taking information out of silos. “For example, if you want to know how you may get a raise, you can look up this information including data sheets, considerations, processes, and tools,” says Bondy.

Case study: SoundCloud

Like Automattic and Mozilla, Soundcloud stresses that the key to a productive distributed team is constant communication and transparency. “Communication at SoundCloud directly links to one of our core values: #open. We believe that being open creates better results, that information needs to flow like an undercurrent to enable velocity.”

SoundCloud, a leading audio platform, has over 300 employees in Berlin, London, New York, and San Francisco. That’s four time zones. To ensure that they don’t miss a beat, they hold weekly All Hands meetings. Having a theme for these meetings keeps conversation focused and productive. The inclusion of remote employees is especially prioritized with high-quality video streams. “IT is basically producing a full, hour-long TV show,” says David Noël, SoundCloud’s VP of Community. High production quality is a priority as it increases engagement among their employees.

SoundCloud has also built a world-class internal communications hub. Their intranet, Opus, prioritizes community-building features and is designed to look and feel like a SoundCloud product. In addition to purely functional company memos, it’s packed with engaging content, in such as Opus Questions, a “Reddit-like Q&A tool where questions can be voted up or down.” Despite being a distributed company, several employees report seeing messages multiple times–a strong indicator of their system’s efficacy.

The post How to scale your distributed team appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Hiring is one of the most complex and challenging aspects of running a business. It’s the inevitable partner of growth and success, and yet most companies struggle with it. There are a lot of moving parts, a lot of coordination, and a lot of very human elements. So you would think we would use specialist tools for recruiting? Well, not really. Not yet at least.

We use software for accounting, for sales, for messaging and marketing but all too often we think we can muddle through our hiring needs with a mess of email and spreadsheets. Applicant tracking systems (the wonkish name for hiring software) have been around since the early 1990s. They used to be known, and still are to some, as a candidate management system. While they were long thought of as systems for larger organizations, they’re increasingly being adopted successfully by smaller businesses looking to improve their hiring.

Here are ten signs that you need to try out an applicant tracking system or candidate management system:

1. You’re spending more time than ever submitting the same job ad to multiple job boards

Especially when hiring for tricky to fill positions you want to cast the widest net possible. This means getting your job ad on a variety of the best job posting sites. There are a host of excellent places to post jobs for free and a growing number of premium job boards and niche job boards, many of which can help you get the qualified candidates you need in a hurry. All of them have different posting mechanisms and even with a dash of copy paste this takes time. The better ATS and candidate management systems enable you to post to multiple job sites with a single submission. When you need a handful of job boards this is a cute time-saver but when you’re posting to 15+ job boards, it’s a lifesaver. In addition to saving time per hire, it can also save you money, as the best applicant tracking systems offer discounted job posting on some of the most popular job boards like Monster, Indeed and Career Builder.

2. Irrelevant applications from unqualified candidates are choking your inbox whenever you’re hiring

This is the number one headache in hiring. The advent of online job boards has been a boon in terms of getting the word out far and wide that you’re hiring. The problem is that the message is often received and misunderstood by people who aren’t even close to being qualified for the job you’re hiring for. This means precious recruiting time is lost sifting dozens of irrelevant resumes. An applicant tracking system, or candidate management system, can help in two ways. Firstly, the best applicant tracking system options have customizable application forms where you can include screening questions that focus on your core requirements. If you need a relevant degree and related work experience you can add a screener and avoid a large percentage of the unwanted applications. Secondly, a best-in-class ATS is built to deliver structured information about all applicants making it quick and simple to disqualify applicants who aren’t going to be considered.

3. You want a better careers site but you can’t find the resources to get one made or you’re not sure how to maintain it

Your careers site is the shop window through which prospects see your open jobs and get an idea what it’s like to work for your company. Two-thirds of all job seekers will go straight to your careers page when they’re interested in working for you. It makes good business sense to have an up-to-date and attractive careers page, it’s also the foundation of your employer brand. Building and maintaining an effective careers page in-house just isn’t an option for all companies. And it can be daunting to get the development resources. One huge applicant tracking system benefit is that it’s easy to create a branded careers page with no coding required. Hiring tools, like Workable, offer an online editor that gives you the tools you need to create a flexible design that’s always up to date with a list of your latest positions. PS… Attract the right candidates by providing a real sense of the environment they’ll be working in, as well as the team they’ll be working with. Don’t just stick your company logo on it, use photos of the office or a video of your team.

4. You were tracking your hiring efforts in a spreadsheet and using email to communicate with your team and the candidates but it’s starting to get overwhelming

Let’s get this out of the way now. Spreadsheets are great at so many things, they were life-changing when Dan Bricklin invented them. But spreadsheets suck as a hiring tool. If you’ve ever wrangled multiple Excel tabs, while mining down seemingly endless email threads trying you’re not alone. This is the most likely sign that you need an applicant tracking system. At its simplest and most powerful, an ATS brings together job posting and sharing in all forms with the ability to track candidates, build a shortlist, schedule interviews and make new hires. A best-in-class ATS should enable you to browse rich profiles of candidates, compare them easily and work effectively with your hiring team on a platform that keeps your notes, communications, feedback, schedules and analytics all in one place. No one who has used a good ATS goes back to spreadsheets and email.

5. You’re using external recruiters for mid-level hires to save time and admin hassle

External recruiters are — and in our opinion will remain — a vital resource for recruiting. But they should be a tool that gets used when you have a high-level or a super tough role to recruit for. If you find you’re reaching for your favorite recruiter every time you’re hiring, whether it’s for the C-suite or reception, it’s a sure-fire sign that you find hiring a headache. You do not need to spend the big bucks on low and mid-level hires. The tools needed to attract great candidates and get from job ad to job offer are more affordable and more effective than ever before. What you need is a process that works. One of the great benefits of a properly designed ATS is that it comes with that process built in. An applicant tracking system should deliver you an easy-to-use hiring pipeline. At Workable the default pipeline looks like this:

Source > Applied > Promising > Call > Assessment > Interview > Exec Interview > Offer

While this is customizable, you get the idea. A pipeline makes sense as it gives you the structure to keep moving qualified candidates along and disqualify those who don’t make the grade. For a fraction of the cost of a recruiter, you can expand your reach without overwhelming your capacity to run an organized hiring process.

It’s time to take control of your hiring process. Sign up for a 15-day free trial of Workable and start hiring better people, faster.

6. Your hiring team is having problems coordinating feedback on candidates and making decisions

This covers a little of the same ground as the email and spreadsheets previously. When you run a one-person hiring process it’s your inbox that tells you it’s not working. When you’re part of a hiring team working without an ATS, you get the message from all directions. Sharing notes, feedback and evaluations of candidates over email, forwarding PDF resumes and running multiple calendars, it’s an invitation for a headache. An ATS does all this in one place. Everyone’s notes, feedback and evaluations on the same candidate profile, together with their resume, application form answers and relevant history. With the right ATS, a new member of the hiring team can jump in and catchup on what’s happened so far in less than an hour. With no ATS forget about it.

7. You know you saw a potential star last time you were hiring but the position wasn’t right. Now you’re hiring again you can’t find them

We’re all guilty of being over-reliant on our email. For most of us the inbox is the heart of our working life but it relies on us being able to remember a name, an email or a date, in order to retrieve what we’re looking for. A well-run hiring process is not just about hiring for one open position, it’s about meeting prospects for future jobs — referred to by recruiters as a “candidate pool”. Don’t have a call or an interview with someone great only to lose track of them six months down the line when you’re hiring for a position that would suit them. An applicant tracking system keeps an entire record of everyone your hiring team has considered. Advanced ATS options, like Workable, also allow you to tag promising candidates, which makes them easier to pull up later when you have a more relevant position.

8. You’re about to go into an interview and you can’t find that all-important piece of feedback

This has happened to most people who conduct interviews, especially at a senior level. You know that others on your team have assessed the person you’re about to interview but you can’t find their feedback. You’re in a hurry so you head into the interview without vital preparation. There maybe little you can do about being busy but you can fix this. With a best-in-class ATS you get a mobile version, or a native app, which means that even when you’re on the move (or taking a laptop into an interview is not an option) you can pull up a record of every interaction with the interviewee. Nothing gets lost.

9. You want to take stock of your hiring efforts but you don’t have any real data to work with. You’d like to have some benchmarks to measure your efforts against

For many companies, especially SMBs, hiring comes in waves. The hiring needs come at you, crash over the bow and then everything you learned drains off the deck. The loss of all this hiring experience is one of the main reasons why hiring processes so often differ from one job to the next, even inside the same company.  A good applicant tracking system stores and then unlocks substantial data about your hiring process. The discussion around recruiting metrics has become really lively and the recruiting industry hasn’t settled on universal metrics yet. But a candidate management system can track the source of your most qualified candidates, and find out how long it takes to make the correct hire. It should deliver hiring reports that can be exported to CSV or Excel, and help you to make clearer, data-driven decisions with your team.

10. You’ve been asked to come up with a hiring plan but you don’t have solid data to base your budget of time and money

Recruiting metrics aren’t only there to optimize against. Hiring is affected by a host of external factors from the economy and labor market, to location and industry, as well as job function.  One of the main functions of proper recruiting is to give you a realistic measure of your hiring process. Key metrics such as “time to fill” (The number of days between the publication of a job and getting an offer accepted) exist to inform accurate business planning. You won’t always be able to reduce these numbers but you can use them to budget more effectively when you have the data a candidate management system or ATS provides.

Here is what Tim Sackett, one of the most respected recruitment experts in the world had to say when we asked him who should be using an applicant tracking system:

We moved into this space in our history where recruiting technology has never been so affordable, meaning organizations no longer have an excuse not to have it. Great tech is so cheap now that if you don’t have it, you’re making a personal choice to stay in the dark ages of recruiting! For SMBs this has never been more real. SMBs can now have even better recruiting technology than their enterprise peers. While enterprise folks get big, vanilla based recruiting technology, SMB shops can move faster to integrate the latest and greatest tech on the market. It’s such an exciting time to be in talent acquisition, the availability of world class technology is transforming how we all recruit on a daily basis.

The post 10 signs you need an applicant tracking system appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Our own dataset, however, finds that compensation remains a leading motivator when looking at career opportunities. A US-based respondent from our other survey report on the same topic puts it perfectly:

“Employees will go where the money is. And where they’re treated respectfully and valued. But, mostly, it’s the money.”

Money above all

As stated above, a vast majority of respondents are open to new opportunities, whether they’re passively open or actively looking. When we asked those respondents to choose from a list of top reasons why they’re open to new opportunities, more than half (53.5%) selected “I need to make more money” as a major reason.

Closely following in second place is “I need a fresh challenge”, with 43.9% citing that as a reason.

The need for more meaning in work is a distant third, at 21.9%.

We also asked respondents what would lure them from their present job to a new one, again choosing from a list of popular attractors. Again, compensation tops the list, with 70.1% of UK respondents citing that as a leading motivator when deciding to move to a new company.

Work flexibility (43.5%) and job security (39.5%) are the second and third-most popular attractors in a new opportunity.

One UK respondent noted their disappointment at their current employer cutting corners on compensation:

“The company pays less as we are touted as ‘independent contractors’, they can seemingly bend the rules.”

We know there are nuanced differences between what someone might be hoping to get in terms of a new job at a different company, and what they might want to see improved in their current capacity. It’s the difference between being ready to leave and being satisfied – albeit not 100% with one’s current working situation.

So we asked that question separately: what could be improved in your current job for a better employee experience?

Again, compensation is the number-one area where their current employer can improve, with 60.7% picking that as a top area in need of improvement.

It’s worth noting another comment from the US, on the importance of keeping salaries proportionally balanced throughout a company – especially when a company is growing and accumulating wealth:

“As a business owner, I understand that you can not cave to every whim your employees have, but instead of prioritizing balloon money bombs for executive persons, make the wealth of the company available to the people that make it happen. Smaller executive bonuses in favor of increased bonuses / benefits / perks for the workers/moving parts of a successful company.”

The different types of compensation

Now, compensation doesn’t necessarily mean only a base salary. It can also mean paid time off, paid vacations, bonuses, incentives, extra perks and benefits, company lunches, team outings, tuition or mortgage reimbursements, pre-tax benefits, and many other things.

Intangibles can include company-wide recognition, advancement potential, the ability to work remotely and on flexible schedules, mentorship, network building, and so on.

Even those intangibles – while still valued – aren’t worth as much as raw compensation. Support from their employer, whether it’s in the actual day-to-day work or moral/emotional support are at the bottom of both lists. This suggests that the traditional core elements of having a job (i.e. compensation, career opportunities, job security) remain paramount for workers.

The motivators are clear – the working population in the UK want and need to make more money. Full stop.

There’s just one little intangible that deserves a much deeper dive: work flexibility, which ranks highly across all these lists. We’ll take a deep dive into that in the next chapter.

The post How valued is salary in the UK? Quite a bit, actually appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Need help with your COVID-19 company policy? We’ve got you covered with this template.

We reached out to those who either went fully virtual well beforehand and are in a good place now or are doing it in a pinch. What we quickly learned is that going fully virtual, with WFH and remote work policies in place, was not just as a result of the coronavirus pandemic but for other reasons altogether.

For instance, Anh Trinh of the online review publication, Geek With Laptop, said it made financial sense to do so:

“I wanted to cut costs. I was tired of paying rent for my office as well as commuting daily to work.”

Simon Hansen, founder of a website focused on “lesser-known sports”, Best Sports Lounge, looked at it as a positive for business and overall health rather than a mitigation of cost:

“I opted to go fully virtual because I believed that it made me more productive, and the option gave me more time to spend time with my family and take care of my health.”

Great. Combine that with the sudden urgency due to the pandemic, and you have good reasons for going all-in on a quick virtual transformation of your workplace. But let’s be aware of the pitfalls, some of which you may have thought about already.

Some challenges are inevitable

One aspect of business success is being able to monitor productivity and engagement. That’s easy to do when you can look over and see your colleague or direct report doing what they do best. Reminders of “Hey, how’s that project coming along? Think we can deliver for Friday?” are loaded with nuance, so those benefit from in-person delivery.

Mark Lee, CEO of Splashtop, a remote-work and WFH SaaS provider headquartered in San Jose, California, is pragmatic about that missing element in a fully virtual environment:

“Employees walking over to a group, asking a question to whoever seems available at that time, water-cooler discussions – it’s so different than communication with a virtual employee.”

Anh, who also has distributed teams, notes:

“One of the biggest problems was the well-being of my staff as well as their productivity. I didn’t know if they were doing their jobs or not. I couldn’t see them personally so I really couldn’t tell.”

Simon agrees:

“It’s harder to communicate and motivate your workforce with such limited methods, making it more difficult for you to ensure your workforce’s productivity.”

Mark echoes the same sentiments, adding that it impacts teamwork as well:

“Productivity of teams being impacted is the biggest worry. It is hard to ‘see’ team activity at a glance. Some of it can be captured in dashboards but it’s hardly ever the whole picture. Potentially reduced collaboration and its impact is another worry. Despite multiple collaboration tools, it’s hard to replace the ease and efficacy of face-to-face conversations.”

Matthew Barton, Operations Director at Virtual Internships – with offices in Philadelphia, London, Shanghai and Brisbane, connecting interns with companies online – noted a more significant hurdle: the employee buy-in and adoption of tools.

“Some of the biggest challenges in being fully virtual for us would be making sure that all employees are fully attuned to virtual ways of working and understand the full capability of the tools that we use to collaborate.”

So, herein are the challenges. Productivity, communication, collaboration, monitoring, tracking, buy-in and adoption, the whole bit. To help you in your short-term digital transformation efforts, we share with you five digital workplace best practices as you go fully virtual in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic:

1. Equip your employees with tools and best practices

Let’s face it. Not everyone in your team is going to be fully versed in using tech. Some will, of course, but others may be accustomed to a certain way of doing things at work. Changing that on the fly can be a big ask for some employees, especially when it’s tech-oriented, as Matthew says:

“There are … residual feelings towards the underperformance of technologies and networks that people are concerned about.”

Also, when people are accustomed to meeting in person, they may not be wholly familiar with online meeting etiquette. Peter Arvai, CEO of the presentation software company Prezi, with offices in Budapest, San Francisco, and Riga, has plenty of experience on how to maximize productivity in virtual meetings. He recommends sending the presentation to attendees in advance, to give them time to digest beforehand. Another suggestion is to cut down on the number of meetings, most of which are status update-driven and brainstorm-focused and may not be as required as meetings designed to sync teams.

Also, Peter has recommendations on how to best connect with busy colleagues, such as your boss:

“If your boss’s schedule is booked or they are traveling with a fluid schedule, send them a video of your thoughts [using a webcam, voice mail, etc.] and let them decide if you need to talk. Usually, they’ll be able to answer your question based on the one-way video.”

Mark at Splashtop suggests some quick solutions:

“To ensure remote employees don’t miss out, we set up a Teams channel [e.g. in Slack or another chat software] for such ad-hoc conversations so everyone’s included. We encourage calling and chatting with remote employees for quick discussions, just like you would discuss with someone sitting next to you in the office.”

Help them understand why

It will also be helpful to address your employees on the “why” of it. It’s not because you want to have a check-in, check-out policy – it’s more because teams operate better when we’re all in sync with one another and we all know what everyone else is doing. That’s easy in the physical office – but with the aforementioned tools, you can succeed virtually as well. Helping your employees understand that and know how to use the technology you equip them with will go a long way.

Mark emphasizes that:

“With a bit of extra effort from everyone to over-communicate, distributed working becomes much more effective. Setting aside time for individual 1:1s with remote workers as well as regular team meetings to sync up on activities is important. There also should be a mindset to continually see what is working well and what needs improvement.”

Mark also attests to the importance of a shift in thinking – out of sight does not mean out of mind:

“There needs to be a mindset change that colleagues who are not in sight are just as available as a colleague sitting next to you in an office.”

He also clarifies the importance of making sure each employee has all the physical tools they need:

“We also made sure each employee had the right setup to work from home. This includes computers, headsets, right tools/software installed natively for real-time communication with team members.”

If there’s concern from employees about not being in the same physical space and losing connection with colleagues, you can reassure them by explaining that tech can be a powerful human connector – citing examples such as using WhatsApp, Skype, or Google Hangouts to socialize with distant relatives. Any parent who’s seen their kids animatedly conversing with their grandparents through a laptop can attest to that. It doesn’t need to be different at work.

2. Show trust in your employees

While using tech to track productivity is an understandable solution, sometimes you need to turn to other measures to ensure your workforce stays motivated while working remotely. Simon at Best Sports Lounge focused on the value of positive affirmation:

“I realized that the best way to go around this issue is to establish open communication that’s focused on reward and appreciation. Making sincerity and concern for progress evident in short messages is bound to motivate and inspire your time.”

Matthew agrees:

“I think things such as productivity and engagement are always worries when people discuss virtual, however, managers and leaders will have to adapt to this and give greater trust and empowerment to their employees.”

To succeed in this, transparent and effective communication to your employees is an absolute must. Not only do you need to have clear WFH and remote-work policies in place, but you also need to be clear about your expectations of employees in the actual work. For instance, you might shift your emphasis to a results-driven working environment, as Matthew explains:

“We encourage employees to be task-oriented and deliver results rather than be overly concerned from where they are delivering those results, being a lean team and spaced out around the world means we have to be prepared to deliver virtually.”

Yes, there will be some outliers in your workforce who delight at not having a boss breathing down their neck from one minute to the next, but the majority will respond positively when you show that you trust them to really deliver results for your company. Not only does that reap rewards in the short term for maintaining productivity in the midst of an upheaval in work processes, but there are also long-term boosts in engagement and retention when your employees realize you’re confident in their abilities to deliver.

3. Learn from other experiences

If your company has multiple locations affected to varying degrees by the spread of COVID-19, you can look to those offices that were impacted earlier and learn from their experiences.

Mark of Splashtop speaks to this firsthand:

“One of our offices is in China. After the Chinese New Year holiday, all the 25 employees there worked from home for a month. This measure was taken for the employees’ safety from coronavirus. The office was productive even though virtual. Only last week employees began returning to the office gradually.

“We are now testing in the other offices to make sure everyone can be productive virtually. Right now, employees coming face-to-face with each other, as well as with customers poses a risk to their well-being.”

The scale of response across different companies varies widely, but it’s also worth looking at what other companies are doing – and what they’re sharing about their own experiences.

For example, Boston-based marketing and sales software service HubSpot went fully remote for a week and shared their insights and experiences.

Also, programmer Q&A site Stack Overflow has valuable tips on successful remote work including assigning a remote-work point person, ensuring awareness of and adherence to compliance measures, and even holding regular ‘bev bashes’ to bring colleagues closer together.

4. Share WFH tips and tricks

Let’s face it, not everyone is fully experienced in the art of working from home or across distributed teams in different locations. Some – many, actually – are accustomed to the standard commute 9-to-5 grind, and often don’t have laptops that they can carry around at will.

The other aspect of it not knowing exactly how to get set up in the home. You can quickly train your staff on best WFH practices. For example, certified professional organizer Darla DeMorrow – who has been working out of a home office since the 1990s – suggests organization above all else.

“The objective is to create an upbeat office that minimizes distractions while honoring your taste and style. Gather your supplies in one place. Not everyone has a room dedicated solely as a home office. You can turn an alcove, a loft, a corner of your bedroom, or a section of the kitchen island into an upbeat home office.”

While working online and in the cloud, it’s easy to be distracted and scattered in your work processes – it’s more so when you’re at home and more susceptible to those non-work distractions.

Darla suggests a quick fix which applies anywhere, even for those still in the office:

“Close down browser tabs and apps: Keeping apps and tabs open is like leaving an electrical circuit open just in case. It drains brain resources. Every time you glance at that open tab, you briefly think, I have to get back to that, and there’s the possibility of being distracted. When you finish the work on a subject or task, close the tab. This goes 10x for social media like Facebook and Snapchat.”

5. Ensure security and compliance

Online security and compliance are key to the success of your short-term digital transformation strategy. Breakdowns in IT security are commonplace and can be expensive, with the average cost of a data breach worldwide being $3.92 million according to IBM Security. You don’t want to be one of those victims, especially when you have numerous computers operating via various outlets and different internet providers. Add to that the numerous increased risks for data breach via an employee working on their own home computer.

Mark attests to this challenge in his own company:

“We … have different office locations across the globe that work with each other closely. Additionally, we work with a few business systems which although are web-based, we lockdown to trusted IP addresses for security. We remotely access these on a regular basis, i.e. we remotely connect to a computer that’s secure on our office network to access these systems.”

Will Ellis, the founder of IT privacy consultancy Virtual Australia, agrees that security is paramount, encouraging pre-testing as a precautionary measure:

“We have started to see companies start to test their VPNs as one of the security procedures. VPNs will add a level of security for employees (and the business) who work on a Wi-Fi connection that others might be able to connect to. This will ensure that data can’t be obtained by cybercriminals and keeps this data safe.”

Will, however, notes the issue of a widely dispersed network that’s not contained to a single office or internet outlet:

“Management of different desktop securities, anti-ransomware and anti-malware on each PC, prevention of phishing scams, etc. Security might be a big challenge for companies to focus on, as they may now need to move funds into those areas, but it is worth it to use those funds to keep the business safe rather than having to deal with the implications of a breach of security.”

Wait a sec. VPNs? Anti-malware? IP addresses? Don’t worry. Go to your IT department – and if you don’t have one, bring in a consultant – and put them to work. Also, Gartner has released a helpful and actionable resource for CIOs who need to implement a quick digital transformation strategy in light of the outbreak, speaking specifically to supply chains, security considerations, technology leverages, and other valuable tips.

There’s gain in the short-term pain

Driving costs down is usually a motivator in going fully virtual or remote. But if you’re forced to take the steps in a quick turnaround time, it’s hard to assess how it impacts your bottom line. You can take some relief in knowing it can actually benefit your business in the long term. You might be surprised at the increase in your workforce’s output, says Mark:

“We have all read multiple reports that virtual employees show increased productivity. It’s true. Many employees can focus on their tasks due to lesser distractions. In places like Silicon Valley, traffic oftentimes results in long commutes, which is eliminated for a virtual employee. That way more time is spent on work-related tasks.”

And yes, this affects hiring

Anh noted that a virtual work environment enables him to widen the net when it comes to recruiting:

“I can also cut costs by hiring people from different countries which is a big help in expanding the business. [… Having remote workers makes it easier to expand my business since hiring new staff won’t cost as much as well.”

Matthew also supports this perspective:

“Long term virtual working can help to drive down facilities costs and open up companies to the best talent available, not just the best talent available in their location.”

Recruitment is a huge element of a company’s lifeblood. Not only is turnover a reality in any business, bringing in new employees is also an offshoot of changing priorities, expansion and growth, new market penetration, product launches, and so on. This means a great deal of hiring – and if you’re going fully virtual, guess what? That means your recruitment will have to keep up with that trend by adopting the most up-to-date recruitment technology.

Mark Lee has already stepped ahead of the curve:

“[Splashtop] is expanding and actively hiring. We haven’t begun it yet, but we are set up to conduct interviews virtually. We also hired senior members in remote locations where they are going to start new offices. We heavily incorporate remote work and collaboration in our day-to-day activities, and this can be easily extended to hiring processes as needed.”

In crisis, there’s opportunity

The old adage of “technology giveth and technology taketh away” may ring true to some extent, but perhaps it’s more accurate to say, “technology taketh away, and technology giveth.”

Matthew notes it’s a new reality that we can willingly embrace.

“I think we will be increasingly more virtual given the type of colleagues that we work with as it is important to us and them to have freedom to organize your day, work, and life in a way that suits them and not necessarily be constrained by the need to be co-located in the same location every day of the week.”

For many, going fully virtual is here to stay. Perhaps we can’t hold the dam forever. Banks are giving way to fintech. Shopping malls are giving way to e-commerce. And perhaps physical offices are giving way to fully digital environments.

Anh’s pragmatic about the realities of going virtual and staying there, and it’s not just because of the coronavirus pandemic:

“I think the coronavirus is a catalyst for this trend. People have been shifting to remote companies way before the coronavirus was spread. However, the spread of the coronavirus might convince more companies in the future to go online.”

He sums it up:

“I’ll be staying virtual because this is where the future is at.”

The post COVID-19: 5 short-term digital workplace best practices appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Also, when recruiting, you’re not only competing with other companies for candidates. You’re also competing with candidates’ life priorities. People now want work that aligns better with their personal lives – whether that’s family, passion projects, personal plans and ambitions, or something else outside of the daily grind.

Want to see all the data in one place? Check out the full infographic below or download it for your own files.

Yet, many employers don’t seem to be especially attuned to this. A Future Forum Pulse survey in Oct. 2021 finds a major disconnect between decision makers and employees when it comes to return-to-office plans.

In all of this is an emphasis on flexible working in the UK. UK workers want it, according to Workable’s Great Discontent survey:

This is especially true for those identifying as a woman:

But it’s not as simple as offering flexible work as policy. Well – it is that simple, but the idea of flexible work itself is a little more nuanced. Flexible work is actually comprised of two very different things under one umbrella: flexibility in schedule (working hours) and flexibility in location (remote work).

And one can exist without the other. As it happens, both are valued – but one much more than the other:

Now here’s where it gets interesting. A significant chunk of respondents in the UK think their employer will return to the way things were before the pandemic.

Are you one of them? Perhaps there’s a need for on-location work or on-time work in your industry or sector – which is fully understandable. But perhaps there isn’t – and the only thing holding you to the traditional on-location, 9-to-5 grind is because you’ve always done it that way.

When you have workers who do think they can do their jobs remotely or on their own schedule, perhaps it’s time to evolve your value proposition as an employer.

So, is there a candidate shortage? Maybe not. There’s potentially an employer shortage – in that not enough employers are offering flexibility in the workplace.

This is your opportunity. Adapt and update your policies to support your employees to bring their full selves both to home and the workplace, and you’ll find more candidates knocking at your door.

We hope these insights are helpful to you. You can also learn how to implement flexible working hours into your workplace and use our flexible working hours policy template to get started.

Also consider updating your careers page and fine-tuning your job descriptions so they engage a potential candidate’s best interests. 

The post INFOGRAPHIC: Flexible working and talent priorities in the UK appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Also, when recruiting, you’re not only competing with other companies for candidates. You’re also competing with candidates’ life priorities. People now want work that aligns better with their personal lives – whether that’s family, passion projects, personal plans and ambitions, or something else outside of the daily grind.

Want to see all the data in one place? Check out the full infographic below or download it for your own files.

Yet, many employers don’t seem to be especially attuned to this. A Future Forum Pulse survey in Oct. 2021 finds a major disconnect between decision makers and employees when it comes to return-to-office plans.

This is especially true for those identifying as a woman:

Or as a minority:

But it’s not as simple as offering flexible work arrangements as a company policy. Well – it is that simple, but the idea of flexible working itself is a little more nuanced. Flexible work is actually comprised of two very different things under one umbrella: flexible work schedules and flexible working by location.

And one can exist without the other. As it happens, both are valued – but one much more than the other:

Now here’s where it gets interesting. A significant chunk of respondents in the US think their employer will return to the way things were before the pandemic.

Are you one of them? Perhaps there’s a need for on-location work or on-time work in your industry or sector – which is fully understandable. But perhaps there isn’t – and the only thing holding you to the traditional on-location, 9-to-5 grind is because you’ve always done it that way.

When you have workers who do think they can do their jobs remotely or on their own schedule, perhaps it’s time to evolve your value proposition as an employer.

So, is there a candidate shortage? Maybe not. There’s potentially an employer shortage – in that not enough employers are offering flexibility in the workplace.

This is your opportunity. Adapt and update your policies to support your employees to bring their full selves both to home and the workplace, and you’ll find more candidates knocking at your door.

We hope these insights are helpful to you. You can also learn how to implement flexible work schedules into your workplace and use our flexible working hours policy template to get started.

Also consider updating your careers page and fine-tuning your job descriptions so they engage a potential candidate’s best interests. 

The post INFOGRAPHIC: Flexible work arrangements and US priorities appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

But how do you get them to apply to your open roles? As anyone in sales knows, getting someone’s attention is easy enough. But getting them actively interested is another thing altogether.

Before interacting with them, you need to understand what would excite them about a job in your company. We’ve already done that research for you. Let’s dive in!

Want to see all the data in one place? Check out the full infographic below or download it for your own files.

The law of attraction

Think about passive candidate attraction in terms of magnets. For them to move to you, your company’s “magnet” needs to be stronger than their existing company’s magnet.

So, what are the primary properties of a company magnet that would pull a passive candidate into a new direction? Let’s take a look.

Job attractors

Passive candidates would be very attracted to jobs that offer work flexibility and have plenty of day-to-day logistical support. Oh, and compensation is big as well. They don’t care as much about training – if they do, they’re likely already actively looking.

Employer attractors

And what about companies themselves? Passive candidates can be attracted if your company is transparent with employees, possesses a healthy company culture, and has great leadership.

The law of retention

Now, let’s look at their existing company’s magnetic qualities. Not everyone wants to move to a new job. They’re fine with where they are, but there are some “nice to haves” that would make a difference in their loyalty to a company.

You do have an opportunity here: when talking with passive candidates, target those “nice to haves” and promote them as already existing in your own company, and you might attract them to your open roles.

So what are those “nice to haves”? Let’s have a look:

Job retainers

If your company actively supports its employees at work and offers job security and advancement potential, that’s a positive attractor as many passive candidates wish they had those in their existing role. Salary, perks and benefits are of course big as well.

Employer retainers

Passive candidates aren’t loving their current company’s social and environmental positioning, or even reputation. They’d also like to see better leadership, transparency and overall company culture where they currently work.

We hope these insights are helpful to you. You can also read more about passive candidates and how to source them. Personalizing your outreach is very important as well.

Also consider updating your careers page and fine-tuning your job descriptions so they engage a potential candidate’s best interests.

Check out our other infographic to understand who these candidates are and where they’re actually working. And what about passive candidate attraction in the UK? We have that covered too.

In the meantime, you can save time and resources using powerful AI-driven tools to source the best candidates for your company. For instance, Workable’s AI Recruiter automatically sources the best 50 candidates for every job from a diverse pool of 400 million-plus potential jobseekers worldwide.

The post INFOGRAPHIC: How do you lure passive candidates in the US? appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

There’s gotta be a better way, right?

The better way happens when there’s an actual hiring plan. Strategic hiring plans are about more than just headcount. They make business leaders stop and think about next year’s goals and whether or not the organization’s existing talent meets its needs.

From the Talent Acquisition side of the bench, annual hiring plans help me answer:

• What are our company goals for next year?
• What are our strategic initiatives?
• Do we have the human capital to meet those challenges next year?
• When should we fill these roles next year? (Q1,2,3,4)
• Can we adequately fund these roles?

Here’s some advice on how to plan your recruitment next year:

How to build a hiring plan

My conversations about hiring plans are always tied to budget. I need to know my financial resources before I can start building next year’s people resources. Here are some common questions and answers about the process:

What is a hiring plan?

The hiring plan itself is a spreadsheet with accompanying financials and headcount (budget for each role and department.)

Who builds the hiring plan?

All members of the leadership team are stakeholders in this process, as are their direct reports — specifically, those who own people leadership and budget. Hiring plan meetings are an opportunity for these teams to calibrate overarching business goals against existing resources.

How does the hiring plan process unfold?

Often times it runs parallel with the performance evaluations process which gives you an idea of what you may or may not need for each team in the upcoming year.

Here are some quick tips and steps on how to build your hiring plan:

Get everyone together in one room. This sounds overly simplistic, but I’ve found it’s actually one of the most challenging parts of the process. There’s a lot that comes to a head around year’s end: vacations, performance reviews and annual revenue targets. Start early. Get everyone on the calendar as soon as possible.

Determine the financial picture. Hiring plans are predicated by revenue. The G&A team should prepare the financials (spreadsheets, broken down by cost center) for next year. Use these to guide your budgets for each line of business.

Set company goals. This is the leadership team’s responsibility. The goals are always going to be financial. For example, the sales team might set revenue targets to close $X million in annual contracts next year. The hiring plan should help the VP of Sales accomplish this goal (for example, by hiring new account executive positions in Q2 and Q3.)

Learn your headcount. This is the most important metric for Talent Acquisition because it will drive your workload next year. Here’s what a hiring plan template for headcount looks like:

Perform skills gap analyses. If you’ve had turnover during the year, this is a good time to take a look at any skills you need to acquire through hiring. Or, consider succession planning strategies to fill those gaps.

Determine how your CEO will be involved. CEOs likely won’t be involved in all planning meetings at big organizations (more than 1,000 people) but will want a seat at the table early on at smaller businesses and startups.

Learn how you can boost your hiring plan with Workable!

Talent Acquisition’s role in the hiring plan process

As Talent Acquisition manager, I need a seat at the table during strategic hiring plan discussions because:

I help create more accurate hiring budget forecasts.

I am more in touch with what the market for compensation is, because I’m constantly talking to candidates. And benchmarking doesn’t always align with what’s going on in the market. For example, HR and hiring managers relying on benchmarking data might think they can recruit a marketing manager in Boston for $X, when I know that candidates expect $Y salary.

I need to know headcount to get the job done.

Hiring plans dictate the velocity at which I and my team need to recruit. Let’s say we’re planning to grow by 100 people next year. I need to know that I’m going to be positioned for success and that I have all the resources I need. We’d look at the plan and ask:

• What are the roles and what type of velocity could I handle?
• How many hires can I deliver in one quarter?

For example: my career-high is 15 hires in a quarter. But if the goal is 100 hires, I alone will not get us there. So I might make the business case to hire a contract recruiter, a talent sourcer and scheduler to better streamline the workflow.

Use hiring plans to power your recruiting strategy

Hiring plans are much more than numbers on a spreadsheet. They’re an opportunity for me to shape recruitment strategy by influencing and educating hiring managers and leadership as to how we’ll reach our ambitious goals together. In absence of an actual document, you have no platform from which to work, nor the ability to measure success or failure.

The post How to build a strategic hiring plan appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Want to see all the data in one place? Check out the full infographic below or download it for your own files.

And there’s a lot of them out there. Our recent Great Discontent survey of UK workers found that 45.1% are passively open to new opportunities.

But, before reaching out to passive candidates, let’s first understand who they are so you know who you’re dealing with.

So who are these passive candidates?

Passive candidates by sector

Let’s start with where they’re working. If you’re hiring in tech, logistics / supply chain, education, or healthcare, passive candidates are your opportunity to get ahead.

Interestingly, no sectors showed more active than passive jobseekers in the UK.

Passive candidates by company size

The larger the company, the more likely they’ll have far more passive than active candidates. Although all company sizes showed more passive than active candidates, those in the 500-999 FTE range showed the most even balance between both.

Now, let’s look at their actual jobs:

Passive candidates by function

Those working in product, service / customer support, and operations are more set in their roles but they’re open to talking about a new job.

Those working in recruitment are the polar opposite – they’re very much actively looking!

Passive candidates by job level

If you’re hiring for senior positions – especially VP level – the majority of those are actively looking, as well as those at the entry level. Managers, directors, individual contributors, and executives are much more passive.

That last group also includes owners – perhaps they’re happy to take on a job rather than deal with all the hassle of running a company, but not actively looking (yet)?

Passive candidates by job status

Full-time workers and those working for themselves are the most passive of all job statuses – likely because they’re in a good situation at the moment.

But to the previous point about owners, perhaps those working for themselves are likewise open to taking on a full-time paid position so they don’t have to run their own operation.

And finally, their demographics:

Passive candidates by age

The most passive age group in the UK job market is in the 50-59 year range – in other words, those likely to be already established in career and life and nearing retirement, but perhaps still open to one more job jump.

Meanwhile, the youngest adult cohort is more actively hunting for new work opportunities.

Passive candidates by minority status

One of the demographic questions we asked in the survey was; “Do you identify as a member of a minority group (be it race, ethnicity, language, religion, country of origin, sexual orientation, gender, or another characteristic)?”.

We found that those identifying as a non-minority are more likely to be simply curious about other jobs but not outright applying. And those identifying as a minority are more actively looking and far less settled in their existing roles – perhaps because they’ve decided their current situation is no longer acceptable or tenable.

Passive candidates by gender

Those identifying as male are far more likely to be passive than active candidates than their female counterparts. Females are either more actively looking or not looking at all.

And importantly, the reason why they might be open to new work:

Workers who are looking for a better balance between their work and home lives are far more likely to be passive candidates. The same rings true for those interested in career progression and those who see more work opportunities out there than in hte past.

The opposite is true for those who need more support in their work – those candidates are much more likely to be actively looking.

We hope you found these insights helpful. You can also read more about passive candidates and how to source them. Personalizing your outreach is very important as well.

Check out our other infographic to understand what would attract these candidates to a job with you. And what about passive candidate identities in the US? We have that covered too.

In the meantime, you can save time and resources when utilizing powerful AI-driven tools to source the best candidates for your company.

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But when you sit down with Jozef or Sally to talk to them about moving up the ladder, you see their faces scrunch up a little bit. Sure, a promotion to manager does have its perks. If you’re a manager, you’re a bigger deal. You have more say-so in decisions and can even lead change. It’s a huge step forward in your career arc. Your paychecks are a little fatter, too.

But there are drawbacks in their eyes: once you become a manager, your calendar is mercilessly packed with endless meetings. Your job no longer involves actual coding, blueprint drafting, or innovating technologies for LEED-certified buildings – all that stuff you live for is now in the rearview mirror. You’re just supervising employees to do all that on schedule while meeting quality standards.

Sometimes, though, there’s a reality in today’s workplace that’s hard to ignore, says Workable CEO Nikos Moraitakis.

“To build anything that matters at a certain scale, you need to cooperate with others and take advantage of the work of others in the good sense,” Nikos says. “No matter the size of the organization or your individual talent or contribution, ultimately, in most professions, you need to work with others.”

And this requires leadership. Someone needs to organize all that stuff, and successfully too. It’s a crucial aspect of growing as a company.

“I’m not saying that the only way to progress is to be a manager,” Nikos stresses. “But every so often, even for professions like engineering where you may be coding yourself, at some point, in order to be able to do bigger interesting projects, you need to be able to coordinate others to do it.”

Management is an opportunity, not a challenge

Of course, it’s not the only way. If Jozef or Sally would rather deepen their talents as an individual contributor, that’s absolutely fine. That’s their prerogative, and it’s in their right to do so. More so, you want them to be happy, because happy employees stay and they contribute hugely to your company – in fact, many successful businesses have comprehensive career maps for those who wish to remain as makers and individual contributors.

But, perhaps, through your discussions and interactions with Jozef and Sally, you’ve recognized that they just might be open to management, but they’re focused so much on the negative aspects of it (meetings, supervision, etc.) that they don’t see the opportunities. So, you want them to be ready and prepared for the move up (otherwise, you’ll fall into the infamous Peter Principle trap) and especially be motivated to take on their new responsibilities. Again, it’s about making sure they’re happy about a career change to management.

That’s on you, as their employer, to start a new discussion and have a chat with them about specifically that, so you both get what you want: they feel confident and positive about their new position, and you now have your strongest, most capable star employees spreading their wealth of talent to others in your organization. Everyone wins.

Here are four things to help you assure Jozef and Sally – again, through open communication – that welcoming this kind of employee promotion to manager could be the best thing they could do for their careers:

1) You still do what you love, but at a deeper, broader level

Let’s get down to brass tacks: a common misconception about management is that you’re no longer doing what you love, and instead, you’re just directing others to do it.

“Of course not – you’re still doing it,” Nikos says. “You are doing it through others. Making things is not only valid if you make them by hand yourself. It’s equally valid if you train others to do a good job at it.”

By becoming a manager of a team and coordinating the work of others, you’re afforded the opportunity to expand your skill set, Nikos stresses. “You’re actually learning at a deeper level how this is done.”

A carpenter, for example, is growing their knowledge exponentially beyond cutting wood and building furniture: “Don’t you think a good carpenter spends time looking at designs and modern trends in interior design or architecture, and ordering the best materials, and building relations with the suppliers? Of course. Isn’t that part of the job?”

And in turn, knowing the work in greater depth means broadening that knowledge throughout teams. In short, your expertise has expanded. Nikos explains: “All the things you were doing on your own, you can codify them so you can teach them to others, and you can actually check if others are doing it well, and you can help them develop.”

In addition to the powerful validation of hard work and skills, being tapped to manage a team means your knowledge is worth sharing with others. The company wants to replicate those successes throughout the team, and you’re being put in charge of that. So, you’re not “just” directing others to do the job. You’re still doing the work, but at a higher, more meaningful level.

2) You can’t build skyscrapers on your own

There are limits as to how much you can do as an individual contributor. For example, as Nikos indicated above, there’s only so much you can accomplish in an eight-hour day or a 40-hour week. To accomplish more, you need teams, and you need people to lead those teams.

“In the beginning, you can only do a small piece of work, then you can do a large piece of work, and at some point, you can even dictate how this work is broken up. Or,” he adds, “you can teach others how to do it, and manage a lot of people doing a larger piece of work. You could be building small houses, or you could be building skyscrapers. It’s the same profession, but if you’re not willing to manage other people, you’re not going to build skyscrapers on your own. Never.”

If you ask for extra time so you can finish the project on your own, that’s not a very feasible option, Nikos says. You’re actually selling yourself short in your career in doing so.

“It’s like someone saying, ‘Sure. I know how to build a skyscraper here. I could, if you gave me a thousand years on my own. I just don’t want to be involved with others.’ Sorry, but being involved with others is certainly a part of building this.”

Nikos’ message is clear: “The ability to deliver something good should not – and cannot – be limited through your individual skill and individual capacity.” To take on larger, more significant projects – even skyscrapers – you need to lead a team.

3) You can build a legacy

In describing the importance of management, Nikos takes it to another level: “What did ancient civilizations do the moment they devised the art of management? They built huge structures; pyramids. Why? It was a demonstration of the power of management for them. It’s like saying, ‘You know what? I can get and coordinate a thousand people into doing this.’”

If that seems like an exercise in power, Nikos clarifies that that isn’t necessarily the case. It’s about heading up influential, successful, long-lasting projects like the Egyptian pyramids. “In order to be able to complete big projects and sustain bigger civilizations, humanity had to discover how to break down their work, to organize it, and to coordinate a lot of people into doing this.”

Let’s take modern examples of so-called pyramid-building. For instance, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak didn’t build Apple all on their own. They led a large team, and ultimately, an electronics empire that transformed many facets of modern society. Elon Musk wouldn’t have been able to build his SpaceX rockets or his Tesla cars on his own – he ultimately had to assemble a team of superstars to see those rockets and cars through to completion on a mass scale. And they didn’t succeed by accident – many years of hard toil were spent in garages and on couches in the office before they started to accumulate and lead large teams to make their visions a reality.

In fact, in a 2018 interview, Musk highlighted the importance of working with others to attain larger success: “If you are a manager or leading at any level at SpaceX, we stress that your team is not there to serve you. You are there to serve your team and help them do the best possible job for the company.”

Now: imagine if Jobs and Musk had decided they couldn’t work with others – let alone manage others – and instead tried to drive a project to completion (yes, we’re still talking about smartphones and rockets) as a one-man gang. Their expansive knowledge and skills may never have seen the light of day beyond their own heads. There would have been no Apple, no SpaceX, no Tesla.

Nikos asks us to imagine this scenario: “If somebody says, ‘Oh, I just know how to build those houses. I can’t tell you how. I just know it.’ Well, the moment this person dies, we’re done. Okay? We have to learn it all over again.”

4) Yes, you’re still in the trenches

One of the biggest pushbacks against transitioning from employee to manager is that you’re no longer in the trenches, working shoulder to shoulder with your colleagues. But, according to Nikos, that’s not necessarily the case in many professions. He addresses me – Workable’s Content Strategy Manager – as a good example.

“Your job is a good example,” Nikos tells me. “I find it really hard to imagine that in a journalistic environment, the chief editor does not do any writing, any research, or does not do their own reading. Most good editors are the ones that are fantastic writers on their own, and they write the editorials. They’re probably one of the best writers on the team. Yes, they manage others as well, but they’re also individual contributors. So this player-coach set up is really good in some professions.”

Not to mention, a good player-coach can inspire someone else to excel – which raises the profile of the entire team.

“This is how the establishment gets built. So in our mini-world, in all the things we do at the office, we are trying to replicate that to a certain extent.”

Becoming a manager is just doing the same work at a higher level. “I do not distinguish between the manager and the individual contributor in this sense. The manager is just a different stage of evolution of a professional,” Nikos says.

The art of managing managers

A major motive of business is overall output and the bottom line. To grow both exponentially, you want your best employees to develop and share their expertise with others. It won’t do simply to promote them to that position; the onus is on you, as the employer, to ensure your individual contributor is ready and, especially, willing to take on that task. Communication is the key to that.

Fittingly, that itself is a crucial talent of a successful manager; to enable and motivate your employees to become good managers themselves.

So next time you talk to Jozef and Sally about transitioning from employee to manager, you can assure them that it’s not a punishment for their hard work. Quite the opposite; it’s an incredible opportunity for them to build skyscrapers. In terms of employee development, that is a success, and your business will benefit as a result.

Related:
Promotion letter to employee email template
Internal promotion announcement email template
Employee promotion policy template

The post ‘Employee promotion to manager’ time: 4 tips to inspire your stars appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

But how do you get them to apply to your open roles? As anyone in sales knows, getting someone’s attention is easy enough. But getting them actively interested is another thing altogether.

Once you have an interaction with a passive candidate lined up, you need to first understand what would excite them about a job in your company. We’ve already done that research for you. Let’s dive in!

Want to see all the data in one place? Check out the full infographic below or download it for your own files.

The law of attraction

Think about passive candidate attraction in terms of magnets. For them to move to you, your company’s “magnet” needs to be stronger than their existing company’s magnet.

So, what are the primary properties of a company magnet that would pull a passive candidate into a new direction? Let’s take a look.

Job attractors

Passive candidates in the UK would be very attracted to jobs that offer work flexibility and competitive compensation. If they care about training, they’re likely already actively looking.

Employer attractors

And what about companies themselves? Passive candidates are interested in companies that have a strong moral and social foundation – company mission / vision / values and social / environmental / DEI engagement and action rank very high among passive candidates. Company culture is big as well.

The law of retention

Now, let’s look at their existing company’s magnetic qualities. Not everyone wants to move to a new job. They’re fine with where they are, but there are some “nice to haves” that would boost their loyalty to a company.

Here’s your opportunity: when talking with passive candidates, highlight those “nice to haves” and promote them as already existing in your own company, and you might attract them to your open roles.

So what are those “nice to haves”? Let’s have a look:

Job retainers

If your company promotes the potential for advancement within its ranks, that’s a huge attractor for both passive and active candidates – but the biggest difference is seen in those who cited compensation as something that could be better in their existing job.

Employer retainers

Passive candidates aren’t loving their current company’s level of transparency or responsiveness to individual worker concerns. The same holds true for overall company culture, executive leadership and social / environmental / DEI engagement and action, all of which could play a role in attracting them to your own company.

We hope these insights are helpful to you. You can also read more about passive candidates and how to source them. Personalizing your outreach is very important as well.

Also consider updating your careers page and fine-tuning your job descriptions so they engage a potential candidate’s best interests.

Check out our other infographic to understand who these candidates are and where they’re actually working. And what about passive candidate attraction in the UK? We have that covered too.

In the meantime, you can save time and resources using powerful AI-driven tools to source the best candidates for your company. For instance, Workable’s AI Recruiter automatically sources the best 50 candidates for every job from a diverse pool of 400 million-plus potential jobseekers worldwide.

The post INFOGRAPHIC: How do you pull passive candidates in the UK? appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

You nod. Because Joe is (was) an incredible performer, this is a big loss for the company. Not to mention, it means you’ll have to set aside some extra work to pull together all the resources and people needed to fill this position quickly.

Why quickly? It’s not just because Sally needs to fill the position, like, yesterday. It’s also because the overall impact to your company’s bottom line is such that you really need to take action right away – as Workable’s SVP Finance Craig DiForte describes in detail. Replacing an employee is a process, but the cost of replacing an employee makes it worse.

Consider these scary statistics, for instance:

$14,936

According to SHRM, the average monetary impact of a hiring process was $4,425 in 2017. Think about it: when an employee leaves, is fired (that’s worse – see below), is promoted, or anything else that opens up a vacancy that needs to be filled, your business has to spend nearly five grand to fill that new position.

There are numerous costs associated here: advertising the new position, interviewing, background checks, skills assessments, and all of the work hours invested in each step of the hiring process. Not to mention, for every single day that passes, a business is losing the value that the previously filled position has brought to the bottom line, plus all the tangibles and intangibles of onboarding, getting them comfortable in their new position, getting others into a comfortable working relationship with the new hire – those metrics aren’t even taken into account here.

This, of course, depends on the role and skills of that position. Low-skilled positions are quicker to fill and are not as costly, while highly skilled positions customarily have a longer time to hire. And with the higher salaries and values that come with a higher skill set, the costs grow: the same study finds that the average cost of filling an executive position is $14,936.

94 days

Statistics show that time to fill can be as long as 94 days for highly skilled workers such as scientists and researchers. That’s a long time without someone who’s absolutely integral to your business operations and, ultimately, your bottom line. Skilled production positions in manufacturing can take an average of 70 days to fill. The list goes on. People don’t fill positions within a few days – that just doesn’t happen.

You may be saying: “Well, that’s just in manufacturing. I’m not in manufacturing, so I don’t have to worry about that.” Consider that you might be wrong. The average time to fill, globally, for a tech-based position is 62 days. The average time to hire a hospitality worker is nearly 21 days, with that number growing to 45 days for those in the finance sector.

That’s a long, long time for a vacancy. A long, long time to go without your head engineer, your master chef, or even your general accountant. For a smaller business, the effects can be debilitating.

14 calls and interviews

Globally, the average number of calls and interviews per tech role hire is 14. That’s 14 different times you’ve interviewed potential candidates before hiring one. That doesn’t even account for the cancellations and no-shows. Nor does it include the time and energy that has gone into organizing an interview with multiple parties – never mind with people in different locations – only to have it delayed again and again.

That’s a lot of logistical organizing on the part of everyone in the hiring team. Many frustrating hours are invested by the hiring manager who feels like they’re embroiled in an endless online dating losing game. A lot of questions from colleagues: “Any luck getting a replacement? Think we’ll have a new manager soon?” Add all that to your own lost work hours that could be invested in other HR things, and you get the idea of how that adds to the cost of replacing an employee.

One hundred million dollars

No one is perfect. Not even the candidate you’ve hired after a lengthy recruitment process in which they passed the skills assessment with flying colors, wowed hiring managers with their charisma during a number of in-person interviews, and presented a resume stacked with amazing academic and professional qualifications.

The reality is, bad hires happen, for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the job description wasn’t absolutely accurate. Maybe some crucial questions were omitted – like the candidate’s managerial and problem-solving capacities. Maybe they’re just really good at looking good, but not that great at actually doing the job.

So… you get rid of that underperformer and fill the position with, hopefully, a better performer. Forget the costs associated with the recruitment process: consider the costs associated with a bad hire. It’s pretty high; like $840,000 high. Let’s maximize the scariness of this: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh famously said in an interview that the cost of bad hires had dinged his company to the tune of $100 million. That’s the kind of money that most companies don’t even see in their lifetimes.

Imagine if you had hired the right person instead of the wrong person for the job. The only cost of replacing an employee, then, would be the first statistic in this list: ballpark $5,000 for the whole thing.

?????

Yes, those five question marks are intentional, for good reason. You could take all the rulers and measuring devices in the world, but you still wouldn’t be able to accurately measure some of the consequences of a job vacancy. We’re talking about the overall impact a vacancy can have on your remaining staff.

Consider: when someone like Joe leaves, and it takes 94 days to replace him, that’s three months where your colleagues in the office are left wondering what’s going to happen. That’s three months of your colleagues picking up the extra work or rushing to fill the power vacuum left behind by Joe, potentially fostering a toxic work environment. Three months of potential overwork, leading to sick days, burnout, disillusion and low staff morale – which has the compounding effect of leading to other departures.

Look at Brenda, for instance, who had been working alongside Joe for years, but now was asked by Sally to pick up Joe’s work “just for a while, until we get someone new”.

Wait a minute, Brenda thinks, why am I not being considered for Joe’s job? Plus, she has been assured time and time again by both Sally and HR – yes, that’s you – that the position will be filled very quickly. And now, she’s entering her third month of all that extra work without extra pay, and she’s getting fed up and feeling like her company doesn’t value her contributions.

So, ultimately, Brenda puts in her notice. Sally walks into your office again, and plops herself into the well-worn seat across from you. “Cassie, I’m in a bit of a pickle here. Brenda’s going to the competition.”

Now you have to find someone to replace Brenda, on top of all the efforts you’re trying to put into finding a replacement for Joe.

That’s going to be expensive. You need to fine-tune your process – not only to speed up time to fill, but also to find good candidates who will stay loyal to your company in the long run – in short, reducing employee turnover.

That calls in a whole new set of challenges: onboarding, employee engagement, employee retention, learning & development, on-the-job training, etc. And all the while keeping your leaky staff ship afloat.

What are you going to do? Consider Workable’s recruiting software, for starters. Whenever you’re in a bind, wanting to find qualified candidates fast and evaluate them effectively, there’s a Workable feature to support you, from our range of sourcing options, including targeted job advertising campaigns and built-in interview scorecards. And if you want to make the business case to your boss, we’ve got you covered too, including this guide on how to calculate the ROI of an ATS. Your company – colleagues, bosses, and bottom line all together – will thank you for it.

Bora Kim, Workable’s Corporate Strategy Analyst until 2019, contributed to this report.

The post The cost of replacing an employee – it’s more than you think appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Keep an eye out for the following red flags of dwindling employee engagement:

1. Referral requests fall on deaf ears

Employees who aren’t engaged aren’t likely to refer candidates for open positions. If you’re actively asking for referrals but never receive any, your employees may not be engaged enough. Actively disengaged employees might even use social media to discourage others from applying.

Applicant Tracking Systems can be a big help with referral programs. Workable allows users to encourage employees to refer people for positions. And with the system’s report feature, you can keep track of who’s referring.

2. Customers aren’t satisfied with employees

Tracking customer reviews is always useful. When customers give low ratings to an employee who usually performs well, it might indicate faltering engagement. Of course, customers aren’t always fair, but they can give valuable insight.

Sometimes, targets are unrealistic. Even if employees try hard to meet them, they’ll slowly give up. Other times, the bar may be set too low. Employees won’t feel challenged or stimulated by their job. Try to find the best recipe for each employee.

3. Employees don’t really talk to managers

When employees trust their direct supervisors or senior management, they communicate their problems and ideas. If employees aren’t engaged, you may notice that they interact minimally with management and when they do, they lack spontaneity and rapport. If employees seem to rely more on gossip than official announcements and guidelines, you could have a case of low engagement on your hands.

This symptom is serious because it can be contagious. If people don’t express their problems to management, they’re unlikely to solve them. They end up complaining and inflating issues, spreading frustration and low morale to their peers or team members.

4. Managers don’t praise their team members

You can ask managers and supervisors: what did you do in the past month to reward or praise your team members? If you’re met with silence or hesitant answers, you might have an engagement problem. Employees who don’t see their work being recognized are unlikely to be motivated or engaged.

If employees feel undervalued, managers might be facing problems too. A few of them might just be bad leaders. But others could be disengaged themselves. It’d be difficult for them to praise the work of others when they can’t find meaning in their own.

5. Employees complain consistently

Unhappy employees are unlikely to openly complain that their job has no meaning or that they’d rather be anywhere other than the office. But, they will probably file all sorts of other complaints about their supervisors, their colleagues or their office conditions. These complaints aren’t necessarily unfounded; you need to investigate them. But, if you notice a pattern with specific employees, it’s worth delving deeper into their motives.

6. Employees are always at odds

Disengaged employees aren’t interested in solving problems and making progress. Often, they express their lack of engagement through open frustration and aggression. These employees will always be at odds with someone and will resist new initiatives or their manager’s instructions. Their negativity can be very damaging for overall morale.

It’s important to tell the difference between a disengaged employee and an ‘office jerk.’ Usually, a disengaged employee doesn’t cause problems at first, but becomes more argumentative as time passes. They’ll probably display other symptoms of disengagement too.

7. Employees spend too much time not doing their jobs

It’s natural to see employees chatting briefly when passing each other or moving around the office occasionally. It’s actually a good way to build team spirit. Problems arise when this kind of socializing and wandering becomes excessive. Imagine an employee who has, for the most part, a computer job. If they’re rarely at their desk but are seen wandering in the hallways instead, then you know something’s up.

If employees spend too much time not doing their actual jobs, managers might be guilty. By assigning tasks that are unrelated to an employee’s actual job or skill set, they’re opening the path to low job satisfaction and engagement. They should also talk to their team members if they spot idleness before it becomes a problem.

8. Employees are late

This is a well-known red flag. Disengaged employees don’t rush to work in the mornings. Most of the time, a delay of up to 15 minutes is excusable, especially if employees clearly try to make up for lost time. But, it’s more serious if employees are very late, leave the office at random moments or take excessive lunch breaks.

If an employee is a little late every day, they’re not necessarily disengaged. They may lack time management skills, struggle with work-life balance, or have differences in culture. In these cases, training, flexible hours or working from home options could help.

9. Employees are frequently absent

Absenteeism is more serious than tardiness. Employees who don’t come to work at all, or who take lots of random sick days are often just sick of work. And, if they seem to consistently ignore pressing deadlines and targets when requesting days off, they’re clearly disengaged.

Sometimes employees are only mentally absent. They come to work, but their minds wander. This could happen occasionally and it’d be fine. But, if you consistently catch employees looking off into space or have to call or message them multiple times to get an answer, you may be looking at a disengaged employee.

10. Employees aren’t trying to improve

Engaged employees see opportunities and seize them. They innovate, they volunteer and they improve processes. If you see your company or department lagging in these aspects, employees mightn’t be engaged enough. Employees who show lack of initiative don’t try to improve the way things are done. They don’t participate in meetings, planning sessions or change initiatives and they rarely share their ideas.

Lack of engagement can result from an unfavorable environment. An employee who’s brimming with ideas and enthusiasm won’t remain engaged for long if nobody seems to listen to them or if they don’t have the tools and resources they need.

11. Quality of work is low

Disengaged employees certainly don’t aim for maximum quality. Actively disengaged employees won’t meet expectations. Or, they may be doing just enough to not get fired. So, if overall quality decreases or stagnates, it may signal low engagement.

Employers should be careful though. It’s better to view subpar performances as one of the many red flags for employee engagement, instead of the defining symptom. Bad results can have diverse causes. Low quality work could be caused by inefficient processes, insufficient resources or unrealistic targets. Look for additional signs that point to lack of employee engagement, so you can dedicate your resources to solving the problem.

12. Employees leave in high numbers

Some industries traditionally have high turnover rates. It all comes down to comparing your turnover rate with your industry and location average, or your company’s turnover rates from previous years. Turnover rate changes may depend on many factors but engagement issues are often to blame. It’s important to know who leaves and why, to decide whether you have a healthy turnover rate. Exit interviews can help you understand potential engagement issues too. So long as they’re not too little, too late.

Related: How companies succumb to sunk cost culture

The post How to spot disengaged employees appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

The idea was to find the poorest people on earth and see what would happen when you gave them money for nothing. When you do this in the developing world it’s called an unconditional cash transfer. It’s an approach that has been pioneered by a charity called Give Directly, that’s well connected to some of the Silicon Valley tech behemoths.

The organizing principle behind the giveaway was that development aid was inefficient, ineffective and ripe for disruption. Devising and monitoring conditionalities attached to this assistance is expensive. Why spend a fortune on foreign aid bureaucracies, development programs and workshops when you can just give $2,000 to the poorest of the poor and let them climb their own way out of poverty?

A similar idea is being touted in rich countries where it’s known as universal basic income and it’s being talked about more seriously than ever. The notion of paying everyone a fixed basic income was put to a recent referendum in Switzerland, pilot schemes are planned in Finland and the Netherlands and a private experiment is being conducted across the bridge from San Francisco in Oakland, with the backing of a well-known tech accelerator, Y Combinator.

Giving away money with no-strings attached grabs attention. Adding to the excitement and the sense that this is an idea whose time has come is its apparent appeal to groups and individuals from entirely different parts of the political spectrum.

There’s little or no common ground between Charles Murray, a U.S. libertarian and polemicist who has argued that all welfare programs fail; and Tony Atkinson, a British economist, the father of poverty studies and a firm believer in taxing the rich to reduce inequality. But they’re both interested in versions of the universal basic income.

They’re not alone. From the left, economist and popular columnist Paul Krugman, and Robert Reich, a former labour secretary who is now professionally anxious about the future of work are considering it; while from the right Yuval Levin, hailed among the most influential conservative intellectuals is also interested.

Mainstream politicians are for the most part still wary of it, which makes sense when one considers the fate of George McGovern, the Democratic candidate in the 1972 election, who ran on a version of this idea. He proposed a $1,000 popular grant to citizens (today worth $5,700 adjusted for inflation). He lost 49 states.

At first glance, the interest from the left in the UBI is more predictable. It’s a straight-forwardly redistributive program. Whether it’s set at $5,000 or $20,000 per year, it would still require the redistribution from haves to have-nots. If a way could be found to pay for it — of which more later — it would in a single stroke end poverty as it’s currently understood.

On the right its support flows in two currents. One is the vogue for simplification that has made ideas like scrapping progressive taxation in the U.S. in favor of a “flat tax” on all income levels. In its American form it would mean a huge shrinking of the federal bureaucracy, a cause dear to conservative hearts and minds.

It’s the second current that is the more interesting though, and it’s where the tech sector comes in. In recent years vast wealth has been accumulated by tech companies without correspondingly vast workforces. The reasonable conclusion that some have taken from this is that mechanization and automation will accelerate this trend. Capital will need less and less labor.

As many as half of our current occupations will disappear in the face of computerization, a recent Oxford University study argued. In this scenario, a universal basic income could help societies adjust to the disappearance of large swaths of today’s jobs in the second machine age. This view has attracted influential supporters among them Martin Wolf, the chief columnist at the Financial Times.

Even here there is a light and dark way of looking at this future.

Reich and others see a basic income as an expansion of the welfare state to battle widening inequality in a future where there are comparatively few winners and a whole gig economy of losers and flat-out unemployed. This is essentially a tech pessimistic left who believe labor is losing (or has already lost) its leverage over capital, and want to sue for peace before everyone realizes.

Sam Altman, the president of Y Combinator, who also believes that traditional jobs will be eliminated by technology while massive new wealth is created, is predictably more optimistic. He eschews conservative fears about a society of loafers getting by on the minimum. Many expect the Oakland research project the accelerator is paying for, to bring back data to back the hunch that recipients create more economic value than they receive.

“50 years from now,” says Altman. “I think it will seem ridiculous that we used fear of not being able to eat as a way to motivate people.”

Albert Wenger, a venture capitalist with Union Square, is one of the entrepreneurial tribe who believe that people, freed of the need to earn a basic income to survive, will use this freedom to invest in the “startup of you.”

Appropriately the ideas that are now gaining currency have been anticipated in science fiction. One author popular with libertarian thinkers is Robert Heinlein, whose 1938 “For Us, The Living,” anticipated over-production and a guaranteed basic income. Although he is much cited, this work was only published after his death in 2003.

Iain M Banks’ Culture novels, begun in 1987, are set in a post-labor future in which artificial intelligence has liberated humanoids from work and non-sentient machines run the economy, leaving people to indulge their passions or hobbies.

While it sounds futuristic the original idea of a universal income is quite old. Thomas Paine argued in an essay in 1797 that in return for respecting property rights a tax should be paid by its owners to “create a national fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling.”

There are some solid reasons why nearly 220 years later, a universal basic income remains an idea not a policy. Chief among them is cost. When the Swiss were asked recently whether they would like to pay everyone a monthly income of $2,500 at a cost of 30 percent of GDP, more than three-quarters of them said no.

James Tobin, an economist and adviser to the ill-fated McGovern, devised a formula for estimating the cost of a UBI. Working from the basis that existing essential spending on education and policing requires taxing national income at 25 percent, he calculated that a UBI equivalent to 10 percent of the average income would require another 10 percent tax burden.

Poverty, as the residents of Lake Victoria know well, is relative. On Tobin’s scale eradicating relative poverty, defined in the European Union as beneath 60 percent of national median income, would mean an income tax of 85 percent. This is way above the taxation levels that even Scandinavian societies have been able to bear, let alone Britain or the U.S. where it’s currently 27 percent. Whatever the economic arguments mustered in its defense the political economy of this doesn’t look workable.

Before planning for life after the job-killing revolution it’s worth noting the dissonance between the reports of the gig economy and its actual scale. As Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute puts it: “evidence of an exploding gig economy is showing up everywhere but the data.”

Modern welfare states with their ugly scar tissue of incremental reform cannot possibly match the compelling elegance of a universal basic income. It’s harder to love the “earned income tax credit” but it may be worth trying. Essentially a subsidy for low-income working families in which the amount received rises alongside earnings until a fixed point where the credit reaches its maximum. The EITC achieves the tricky balance of rewarding participation, while directing dollars to those in the most need. A substantial proportion of U.S. economists favor expanding the credit but it’s a harder standard to rally to. In other words, testing and other forms of conditionality have not necessarily had their day.

In Koga village in Western Kenya there was no welfare state to reform or invest into. In this case early research showed that unconditional cash transfers worked. They didn’t create an army of layabouts addicted to handouts, the poor were less feckless than some imagined. Undoubtedly the same would be true of the poor in wealthier societies. The problem for the no-strings evangelists is that conditional cash transfers, with all their attendant messiness, have been found to work even better.

Conditions, such as tying payments to parents vaccinating children, can deliver public and private benefits simultaneously. The roots of poverty are as important as the imperative to alleviate it. There will always be a debate on the balance between the cost of administering conditions and the benefits of the outcome. And we will always be drawn to elegant solutions but the reality of poverty reduction is almost always messy.

The post Money for nothing: are we ready for universal basic income? appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

‘Best practices’ are like fad diets. If you’re an Atkins enthusiast, Atkins is your hammer and the world is a carb-shaped nail. Companies, like dieters, have individual needs, goals and lifestyles. They don’t need ‘standard’ solutions. They need tailored ones.

Su Joun, the former VP of Talent, Inclusion and Diversity of the health insurer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts (BCBSMA), advises new HR leaders to abandon general ‘best practices’ for a more tailored approach:

Learn your organization first. Lead it later.

Here’s how she advises HR leaders to approach a new job and learn what their organization needs.

Look beyond HR

According to Su, HR teams are often incredibly disconnected from their businesses areas and divisions. And that’s how they fail. It’s natural for VPs of Talent to think that the HR team they’ve inherited already know their organization well. But they may not. HR employees tend to just know the same 20 to 50 people in their organization and assume that they know everything because of that.

There’s a danger of getting a year or so into a HR role, looking up and realizing, “I never actually spoke to people in the organization about what they wanted and needed. There are just a few people I talk to all the time and I have no idea what the other people are thinking.” That’s how mistakes happen. That’s how a program gets launched that nobody uses. And that’s why people say “The new VP of Talent doesn’t know what’s really going on.”

Su acknowledges that it’s difficult to step back and get to know an organization, especially during the first few months in a new job. But, in a VP of Talent, or other HR leadership role, you need to be the person who meets more employees than anyone else. Otherwise you won’t be able to understand their needs or build the correct programs.

• Interviewing candidates for leadership roles? Visit our leadership interview questions.

Listen to as many people as possible

“Nothing beats talking and listening to people,” says Su. She advises new HR leaders to build relationships all over their organization. When it comes to relationships, there are no shortcuts. In the beginning, it’s easiest to start with a sampling approach. Meet at least 3 people who work at different levels in each department:

1. Meet department heads
2. Then meet people in middle management
3. And then meet a ‘ground troop’ worker.

See if they’re saying similar things. Even with a sample size of three, you’ll be able to get a feel for how people are working together. Go to team meetings to understand what some of the topics are. The more meetings you attend and people you meet, the better.

When Su first joined the HR team at BCBSMA, she made a commitment to meet 300 new associates a year. By the time she left, she had met around 1,100.

Building relationships doesn’t have to involve lunch meetings or drink dates. It means listening. There’s something incredibly powerful about just listening to what it is that they’re going through, good or bad.

When it comes to seeding change, it’s easy to be the first person to voice an idea. But it’s hard to convince people to follow. If you don’t listen to people first, they’ll be unlikely to follow you—even if you try to convince them by talking about ‘best practices.’

This post is the first of a series of posts focusing on how newly-minted VPs of Talent, and other HR leaders, can succeed in a new role. 

The post How to succeed as a HR leader: forget ‘best practices’ appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

If you’re working in hospitality, you know that it takes more than a good menu and nice decor to keep the customers queuing for a table. You also need employees – front of house and kitchen staff – who do their best to provide high-quality customer service.

But that’s easier said than done. The restaurant space is notorious for its exhausting work schedules, high-pressure environment, low wages and even some toxic behaviors. These factors have traditionally made candidates turn away from the hospitality industry when thinking about their career. Even if these scenarios don’t necessarily hold true at your own restaurant, it’s still not easy to overcome the stigma in the ongoing drive to attract and retain good employees.

The numbers, too, confirm that the restaurant turnover rate is a big challenge for employers and recruiters in hospitality. Data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the Accommodation and Food industry regularly sees one of the highest churn rates in the country. Another survey that digs a bit deeper indicates that there’s both a high number of hires and a high number of job openings in hospitality. Add to that the industry’s overall high turnover rate, and you’ll come across the challenge: employers in hospitality need to attract and hire even more candidates if they want to cover their business needs and replace those who quit.

It seems that challenges in hospitality recruitment center around three pillars: finding, hiring and retaining restaurant employees. Let’s see how industry experts tackle these challenges and get some tips on how to combat employee turnover in restaurants:

1. Finding employees: when you order from a limited menu

That stigma associated with work conditions in hospitality translates into few applications. Companies struggle to find good employees because they don’t receive enough resumes. But the issue here is more about quality and less about quantity. You don’t need hundreds of resumes clogging your inbox; you just need to connect with those job seekers who are genuinely interested in a restaurant job. And to find these candidates, you need to look in the right places and to be fast.

“In our industry, great candidates get snapped up quickly,” says Kelsey Bleakney, Manager of Recruiting & Employment Brand at Joey Restaurants. “If you’re a good server, bartender or chef, you’ve got options. We know that.”

So, it’s not only about finding those great candidates; it’s also about luring them to your side against your competition. A slow hiring process, where job seekers apply for a role and don’t hear back from the company for weeks, costs you good candidates. This has a long-term impact as well, because poor candidate experience reflects negatively on your employer brand and hurts future job openings.

The solution, according to Kelsey, is to organize your hiring and to track important recruiting KPIs. This way, you’ll know what sources (e.g. specific job boards or career fairs) are traditionally bringing you the most successful candidates and you can put your emphasis there instead of posting jobs randomly and hoping for the best.

“From my dashboard I get a snapshot of each pipeline and can quickly see where we have enough applicants and where we don’t,” says Kelsey. “I can refocus resources where they most matter, improve our ROI and build better hiring strategies for the future.”

Surely, the job ad itself plays a big part. You can’t expect to attract candidates if you’re being vague about the role or if you sugarcoat the job. At best, you’ll attract candidates who don’t have a realistic overview of the job when they sign in. As a result, when they see what the job entails, they’re more likely to quit, which explains why the restaurant turnover rate is consistently high. Candidates want to know important and specific details, such as work schedules, salary, bonuses and benefits. A transparent job description that also speaks of your company culture will go a long way.

Do you need some inspiration to create your own job ads? Here are the best job ad examples we gathered from the Workable job board, including one from a restaurant chain.

2. Hiring employees: when you order the chef’s choice

As a recruiter, you’re not the decision maker. But the decision maker (a.k.a. the hiring manager) is not a full-time recruiter. That’s true in every industry. In restaurants, though, there’s an extra challenge. The hiring manager, who is often the store manager or the head chef, has a time-sensitive job in a hectic work environment. A head chef can’t book an hour or two to quietly screen resumes while cooks are preparing meals. Likewise, a restaurant manager needs to look after guests at peak hours, supervise servers and be on top of everything front of house.

Inevitably, recruiting tasks are completed in between regular tasks. But, when hiring managers rush the process and don’t properly evaluate candidates, they risk choosing people who lack necessary skills or who’re not a good culture fit. These people won’t stay for long, making your restaurant turnover rate hurt even more. Soon, you’ll have to look for new employees, and that’s how hiring falls into a loop.

Louis Blake, People and Performance Coordinator at Fonda in Australia, notes how the HR team can support busy hiring managers: “We have pretty extensive interview guides that help inexperienced interviewers to structure their interviews. We are also always available to join a manager in an interview if they want some extra support or feedback. We do a lot of the initial screening ourselves so that the managers can just focus on the good candidates.”

On the other hand, Kelsey explains that if hiring managers don’t prioritize hiring and rely on ‘post and pray’ methods, then the whole process gets delayed: “Our hiring managers couldn’t track where quality candidates were coming from and struggled to keep candidates organized, and ensure they were contacted in time. This ate up sponsorship dollars, lost us some good hires, and reflected badly on the business.”

Prompt communication with candidates, with respect to hiring managers’ busy schedules, can be a huge game-changer, Kelsey adds: “Most of our computers are deep down in a basement office next to the kitchen. Using Workable’s mobile app, our restaurateurs can look at their phone as they’re checking sections. They can contact candidates with one click, pop the phone back in their pocket and continue on their floor.”

3. Retaining employees: when you order more than hors d’oeuvres

OK, so you’ve managed to find and hire great candidates. Now you need to make sure you retain them. Because as your business grows, you want to put your best employees in senior positions; those who’ll lead departments, get more responsibilities, train new employees and even help open more stores.

But how do you convince employees to stay in the long run, particularly when they have to handle a work environment as stressful as the kitchen? “There isn’t a doubt in my mind that people stay because of the friendships they make while working with us,” Louis clarifies. “Every single cultural survey that we’ve ever done has highlighted how much our staff like the people that they work with. I think we’ve even had two or three marriages after people met at Fonda.”

Good relationships among coworkers is not a coincidence – employees are more likely to get along when you’re dedicated to building a healthy, collaborative environment and when you hire the right people to begin with. But measuring culture fit is no easy feat; team spirit and empathy are rather intangible traits.

There can be some indicators during interviews, though. “Firstly, I like to see someone who’s taken some time and effort putting together their application. A well set out resume or a non-generic cover letter immediately tells me that this person has gone above the bare minimum when applying and is more likely to have the same attitude when landing the job,” Louis explains what he’s looking for in future hires.

“In a similar vein, I love to see that an applicant has been promoted, or can articulate how they’ve taken on extra responsibility in a previous role. It doesn’t need to be relevant to the role that they’re applying for, I just want to see that they’ve worked at a standard that merited some sort of extra responsibility.”

Yes, turnover is a thing in hospitality. And, no matter how hard you try to attract people who will stay with your company for many years, there will always be some employees who see their restaurant job as a temporary solution. But, as the saying goes, if you can’t beat them, join them. In some cases, it’s worth fitting inevitable turnover into your hiring strategy and turn this into a win-win situation:

Cook with what’s in your fridge

Louis explains the role that the location plays in their hiring and retention strategy: “We want each individual site to have a great internal culture rather than all to be exactly the same. Our Bondi store, for example, is staffed pretty much exclusively by travelers, whereas some of our sites in Melbourne are staffed by predominantly Aussies in their early twenties starting out at university.”

At a neighborhood restaurant where locals hang out, it makes sense to have permanent staff so that customers see familiar faces. Or, at a college area, you might prefer to hire students who can relate with customers. But, at a vacation spot, it’s normal – or even desirable – to employ people who come from different areas and who speak various languages, so they can better interact with tourists. And it’s also easier to find these candidates, as they seek to combine work with leisure.

In Australia, people with a working holiday visa can stay with the company for about six months, Louis says, “so we try to hire these people during the busy summer months.” Recruiting people with holiday visas instead of only looking for permanent staff can speed up the hiring process in this case – and doesn’t hurt your employer brand, either, considering it’s a vacation spot mostly aimed to cater for tourists.

Hospitality is indisputably a tough space. While chefs perfect their cooking techniques and learn to create masterpieces on a plate, they still haven’t found the secret sauce to attracting and retaining employees. The hospitality turnover rate remains high. Each location, each restaurant or food chain has its own unique challenges. But, hiring needn’t be that much of a burden. A streamlined application and interview process, an investment in career development and being a good and fair employer overall; these are the absolutely necessary ingredients to successful hiring in an industry as challenging as hospitality.

The post How to improve your restaurant turnover rate appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

If you’re a recruiter, rapid scaling may be a creative challenge for you – nevertheless, it’s still a challenge. But, if you’re a hiring manager and need to grow your team fast while maintaining your regular workload at the same time, the burden can be heavier.

Whether you’re a small startup on a growth track or a company taking on a large project, this scenario can be all too familiar. Scaling a sales team (or any team) is like a race: you need to attract, find and evaluate candidates fast, without sacrificing on quality.

We sat down with Georgios and Athina to learn about their own experiences in doing so, and they walked us through how they managed to turn what seemed like an impossible task into a successful recruiting process.

Plan before you act

When you’re scaling a sales team fast, the key, according to Athina, is to have an intake meeting at the beginning of the hiring process. In their case, the two hiring managers, the recruiter and the HR manager, sat down together to discuss:

• Qualification criteria: What’s the profile of our ideal candidate?
• Hiring process: How will we evaluate candidates?
• Roles within the team: Who’s responsible for each of the hiring stages?

Athina notes that this simple, yet important, process ensures that everyone is on the same page and saves a ton of needless back-and-forth communication later in the process.

“Of course, we have catch-ups in between hiring stages to make sure everything goes as planned,” she clarified. “But it’s never about ‘Hey, did you see that application?’ or ‘How did your interview with that candidate go?’ If we all know our roles and responsibilities, we don’t have to spend time sending emails to each other, asking for interview feedback or scheduling meetings.”

Georgios emphasized the importance of planning the hiring process as early as possible: “For us, this was translated into an impressive conversion rate:”

We hired one person for every 20 applicants.

“Think about it; if you don’t discuss what kind of skills you’re looking for and if you don’t craft a job ad that reflects these exact requirements, you’ll get candidates who don’t fit in your role. And then you’ll have to screen their resumes, realize they don’t qualify and reject them. You can save all this time with a carefully planned hiring strategy.”

Expand your candidate sources

So, how are we going to find these candidates? That was one of the main concerns across the team. It’s easy if you want to hire one person and you don’t have a tight deadline, because you can rely on a ‘post and pray’ method. But that’s rarely the case for most hiring teams. Never mind a scenario where you need to find – and hire – more than 10 people in a single month.

That’s when you realize that you also need to look in different places for your candidates. “Job boards are the number one place you go to hire,” Georgios said, “but that’s not enough when you’re scaling fast.”

We find about half of the candidates we need through job boards. This means that the rest of them are using different channels for their job search.

The following graph shows how the team used a mix of sources to find qualified candidates:

_Notes:

_{1. Job boards include both popular job sites (e.g. Indeed and Glassdoor) and applications from other websites, such as Google}

_{2. Sourcing includes Facebook campaigns, job fair recruitment and reaching out to passive candidates}

_{3. Employer branding includes applications through Workable’s careers page}

_{4. Referrals include candidate recommendations from current employees}

From word of mouth…

“We tried out employee referrals. We’ve always encouraged our colleagues to recommend good candidates,” Athina explained, “but, this time, we organized it a bit better. We used Workable’s Referrals platform to make it easy for everyone to refer someone they know. They don’t have to do much: a link to the candidate’s LinkedIn profile is all it takes. And then we’ll do the rest.”

Referrals give you exposure to new, untapped talent, according to Georgios. Candidates who come via referrals are often people who might have not been actively searching for a new job through job boards or people who wouldn’t consider a career in sales unless they knew someone who already works in the company.

We wouldn’t find these [referred] candidates otherwise.

Employees refer good candidates because they want to work alongside smart, competent people. But sometimes you need to give them an extra incentive. That’s why Workable’s sales team decided to add a cash bonus for successful referrals that motivates employees to look into their network and find people who’d fit in the team.

Athina gave an example of how a referral bonus can result in a pool of great candidates: “Some employees now refer three or four people, because they know they’ll win too if some of them get hired. This means that they may have shared the job ad with 10 people in total. That’s the benefit of this digital version of word of mouth. Even if these people are not interested now, they learn about our company and job opportunities and might apply in the future.”

“Or, if we take it one step further,” Georgios added, “one employee shares the job ad with 10 people, each of those 10 people knows 10 more and so on. Somewhere among all those people, is our next hire. Even if they’re not a direct referral, it’s our referral initiative that got them to our doorstep.”

… to social media dominance

Social networks bring you closer to numerous potential candidates, particularly those who don’t visit job boards or those that you can’t physically meet at a careers fair if they’re currently in a different location. Facebook and LinkedIn are places where you can find them.

But the power of social media – the large number of people who are online every day – can also be a disadvantage for hiring teams. How will you make sure you’re not casting a wide net? How will your job ad stand out?

“We can’t approach social media just like job boards – i.e. share our job ad and hope that interested candidates will see it,” Georgios said. “We need to be more strategic. So what we do is target candidates who have relevant skills and display our job ad only to them.”

Athina added that widescale social media posts are incredibly helpful for hiring large-scale teams in such a tight schedule.

“This is a time-saver,” she said. “Both for us, the hiring team, because we reach out to people we know they have the skills we’re looking for, and for candidates, too, because they can apply with one click.

“And this makes the entire process move faster. When candidates can apply in just a few minutes and without leaving the “space” where they are (call me Facebook), this means that we get their applications sooner and we don’t lose those great candidates to competitors.”

Get your team together

You can’t hire on your own. That’s a fact. But you can’t hire at this speed even with a team, unless all members are synced together. “Synced” doesn’t necessarily mean meeting every day or every other day. In fact, in Georgios and Athina’s case, it was quite the opposite:

“We didn’t talk unless we had something to say,” Athina admitted. “This doesn’t mean we didn’t know what’s going on in the hiring process; on the contrary, at any given time, we had access to the candidate database, we could see the hiring stages with all the relevant information such as how many candidates were in each stage, if we’ve been in touch with them, etc. This way, I could get the information I needed at the time I needed it, without having to reach out to Georgios who might have been at a meeting or out of office.”

Georgios also noted the importance of having visibility and keeping everything in one place: “For example, if I see that Athina has scheduled five interviews on Monday, I know that if I log into Workable on Tuesday, I’ll find feedback on how these interviews went and I’ll instantly decide on next steps. When your time to hire is limited, you want to save time anywhere you can.”

Don’t give up quality over quantity

Often, there’s an easy way to do things: you could post a job ad to the most popular site, schedule interviews with the ones who meet the bare minimum requirements and hire the best of them – or at least the ones who’ll accept your offer. There you go, you’ve hit your hiring target. No sweat, right?

Georgios disagrees. The ‘easy way’ isn’t always the right way, and he made that clear. “We don’t want to just fill positions. We want to hire the best; those who’ll like the job and be good at it, will help us reach our business goals and stay with us in the long run.”

If you don’t evaluate candidates properly, you’ll soon find yourself having to start the hiring process all over again – particularly as candidates come to realize that you weren’t a good fit for them either. So, how do you thoroughly evaluate candidates when you’re short on time? And it gets even more challenging, considering you’re scaling a sales team, where you don’t necessarily pick candidates based on typical requirements and traditional career paths.

“It’s important to use the right assessment methods,” Athina said. “Each step of the hiring process should teach you something new about the candidate, something that’ll be definitive about their ability to do the job. You need to dig deeper into candidates’ skills and professional interests if you want to make sure you hire people based on job-related criteria and not on personal biases.”

But that’s the tricky part, according to Georgios, who explained how you can be objective when you evaluate candidates, and fast at the same time.

“We’ve found one-way video interviews very effective in our case: candidates present themselves and answer a few basic questions that’ll help us identify dealbreakers. We can review those videos in our own time which gives us the freedom to organize our schedule as we want. For in-person interviews, we share our calendar with candidates and they book a convenient time for themselves, so we don’t have to do this manually or send back-and-forth emails for every interview.”

Not only is it a major convenience for the hiring team, having such a smooth and speedy process also boosts the candidate experience, as Athina explained:

“We know that candidates are turned off when they don’t hear back from you promptly or if you seem disorganized,” Athina said. “But, it’s a lot to take when you’re hiring at this scale. It’s not uncommon to forget to send an email or to show to an interview unprepared when you have back-to-back meetings. That’s why we rely a lot on bulk emails, templates and automated notifications.”

Without automation tools, we’d need one person in the team to exclusively contact candidates.

With those handy tools, Georgios and Athina were able to more efficiently move candidates through each stage of the recruitment pipeline without wasting any valuable time on manual tasks – a more impressive feat considering they had to fill 14 positions in a short time from a total pool of 362 job applicants:

Athina added that having an ATS to keep everything in one place was a huge asset to the process: “We have access to all candidate information (resume, assignment, contact details, communication history) at any time.”

Build for the future

Finally, Georgios mentioned that quality hiring means knowing what works for your team and what doesn’t.

“We wouldn’t know, for example, that employee referrals are among our most effective recruitment strategies, unless we measured how many candidates come from each source. We keep track of all important recruiting KPIs and use this historical data for future high-volume hiring rounds.”

“The next time we scaled up our sales team, we managed to hire 15 new team members again in one month, but it felt much smoother, because we knew exactly how to do that,” Athina concurred. “And now, that we’re looking for our new Business Development Representatives, I’m confident I’ll be onboarding my new colleagues very soon.”

The good thing about scaling a sales team at such a rapid pace is that you learn to identify patterns in candidates, you understand which assessments are effective, and which are not, and on top of it all, you build your employer brand. No matter the challenges (e.g. vacation time, tight deadlines, etc.), you know where and how to look for your next hires. With smart planning and with the right tools in place, you have what it takes to grow your teams effectively. And, particularly in competitive and volatile markets, high-volume hiring is something you probably need to get used to.

The post Inside Workable: Scaling a sales team successfully appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

We chose three major tech hubs based on global rankings of the best cities for tech startups – Boston, San Francisco and London – all featured in the top 5. The struggle for hiring and sourcing tech talent is the same in all three: many job opportunities, but not quite the talent. To help unravel and resolve this problem, we spoke to developers in Boston and San Francisco who revealed fascinating insights on how to best hire tech talent.

And now, we complete the puzzle with our most recent event in London where Balderton Capital, a London-based venture capital firm focusing on tech startups, opened their doors for a conversation about luring top talent in the London tech scene. More than 200 signed up for the event titled How to hire: Top Tech Talent, which took place on Wednesday, July 3, 2019. On the panel were:

• Paul Ingles, Head of Engineering at uSwitch
• Rahma Javed, Director of Engineering at Deliveroo
• David Whitney, Director, C#, Agile, technical leadership and consultant, Electric Head Software

Workable’s VP of Customer Advocacy Matt Buckland minced no words in his introduction of the panelists, somewhat tongue in cheek: “These are the people where you’d think twice before hitting send. Just those people, where you’re the little bit the right type of afraid. That’s this panel.”

Tech, of course, doesn’t change dramatically from city to city or country to country. But it was interesting to note the differences in tech recruitment challenges – or more so, what attracts tech talent – between the Boston and London tech scenes. Rahma, whose career spanned IBM and BlackBerry outside of Toronto and Microsoft and WealthFront in the Silicon Valley, alluded to that appeal of working in tech:

“That’s probably been the more exciting or interesting part for me, just to be in different sort of tech cultures, being able to figure out what the strengths and weaknesses are in each of these specific tech cultures. Then bringing that along with myself.”

The ensuing discussion was vibrant, thoughtful, and above all, insightful. Here are our top five takeaways from London’s Top Tech Talent event:

1. Know that there’s a London tech talent community

One theme that stood out was the presence of a London tech talent community. That network is dynamic, said David:

“We all know who’s hiring, we all know what the culture’s like inside companies, because people talk and share. Especially if you go to events or on the speaker circuit, or are just in WhatsApp groups full of people that work at different places. We all talk.”

Paul echoed the same sentiment, that when those in tech recruitment approach him, he’s quick to know about the company simply via their reputation:

“I’ll know through networks whether those companies are in high-growth periods. … I’ll go to meetups and see conference presentations, and get a feel for the company or the technology and stuff. I [put those] together to figure out the high-quality stuff.”

David added that candidates will go to their peers before they go to a recruiter:

“Here’s a life hack for recruiters. Turn up at sponsor events, and actually stay for the whole thing, and stay in the bar afterwards, and don’t pitch. Just make friends.”

He added that he himself often refers candidates: “[Candidates] will come to their network before they come to specific people dedicated to hiring,” adding that he’ll refer them to those recruiters who do show up, who know the market, and interact with others.

The takeaway:

Assume that candidates already know a little bit about you via their research and their professional network. And remember to nurture one of the most powerful influencers in that network: your current employee base. Word of mouth is more powerful than any tech recruitment marketing campaign you set out on.

2. Share details on your existing team

All three panelists agreed that while the job is important, it’s almost more important to know who they’ll be working with and for. Again, your current work climate and employee base become crucial to your tech recruitment strategy.

Rahma cited LinkedIn as a tool to learn about a company: “Oftentimes when you’re interested in companies … you look at who all the other people are based in that company right now. What are their backgrounds? What does this company value versus not?”

Paul shared an anecdote about a challenging assessment that he had to do as part of the candidate process, noting that he was so intensely concentrated on the task at hand: “At one point, I saw a pigeon land on the window, I kind of looked off to the side, and then immediately thought, I’ve totally lost my stack. I don’t know what number was here.”

He realized that every team member must have gone through this initiation ritual and that instantly made him feel close to them. “At the end of it, it made me want [the job] even more, because I felt like if I had to go through all of that, the people I work with had been through the same thing.”

Meeting the team members is also important, Paul added: “[That] demonstrates that you’re entirely comfortable with me meeting people that I’m going to be working with, and get a feel for what problems they’re actually facing.”

In addition to the team members candidates will be working with, the outlook and management approach of senior leadership matters as well. Rahma talked about that factoring in her decision to work at a company:

“Backing and buy-in from senior leadership is so crucial, because otherwise you’re going to be fighting two battles. One is the actual problem you’re trying to solve, and one is the internal battle you’re fighting. You can’t win both.”

The takeaway:

Bring up the tech stack and SaaS features if you will, but play up the team, the work culture, the management, and especially, the challenges and opportunities for the candidate. That’ll speak volumes.

3. Put your best foot forward

If you promise a great job and a great team to work with, that’s almost not enough; you need to prove it to the candidate. Everything you do as a hiring manager or recruiter can factor into the candidate’s decision. Everyone has an interview horror story; don’t be a star in one of those stories.

So, you can step up your game at conferences and events where you’re sourcing tech talent, getting far more involved rather than simply making an appearance. This is important because candidates are at these events as well, so you want to demonstrate an active interest and participation in the industry. Candidates want to work for leaders, not just for those who show up. Paul shared his experiences from the hiring side:

“I would say [when hiring], it’s worked best when we’ve done a combination of sponsoring [the event] and doing something on the side and trying to present us as well. People will come and talk to you [when you have a table full of swag], but I think the cost of it relative to the reward you get is relatively low. I would say it tends to work a lot better if we know that we’ve got two people presenting on topics that are interesting.”

Rahma agreed. “What the company is doing is actually very important. … How are you branding yourself? How do you go and reach the public or the set of people that you’re interested in? … you need to be able to be out there on the surface and be attracting talent.”

But you have the best SaaS in the space, right? Doesn’t matter, says Paul:

“Things change so frequently, the half life of technologies feels like it’s shrinking rapidly. Trying to choose a job based on the kind [or state] of technologies that a team has feels relatively low down the list.”

David agreed: “Right? Nobody cares. Cool, [your tech] might be interesting, but just being a cool new blockchain startup is definitely not enough. Really, really isn’t.” He emphasized what the tech doesn’t tell him about a company: “I don’t know that it’s not run by a bunch of psychopaths.”

The takeaway:

Let’s let Matt take this one: “It’s what people say about you when you leave the room, right? … I think all we can do when we try to do these things as recruiters is try to control that message, or at least shepherd it in the right direction. … You definitely have an employer brand. Make it a good one.”

4. Personalize your outreach

You’re not going to get the candidates if you cold-call them – an oft-mentioned thorn in the side with all three panelists, and quite similar in tone to what was discussed in Boston.

Rahma is put off by those impersonal messages.

“If someone just cold emails me with some generic thing, I’m just like, ‘thank you’. You picked 100 people and I’m part of your spam circle.”

If you’re using LinkedIn, go further than just emailing them about a job. “I just think it’s spam,” David said of LinkedIn-based outreaches – suggesting, instead, that you do the homework to find out the candidate’s actual contact details. “Email over LinkedIn 100% of the time.”

Paul echoed the importance of timing. “One of the interesting signals is people emailing me at like 6 on a Saturday evening. I feel like if somebody’s emailing me for a job at 6 on a Saturday, that they’re kind of up against it, and there’s no way that that’s a good job to take.”

All three panelists agreed Tuesday morning was the best time for outreach, a verified good practice according to multiple studies found online.

Don’t forget to personalize that email, said Rahma:

“I’ve had recruiters put in something really interesting, sometimes even a joke, or just sometimes something really just out of the ordinary. That does capture my attention.”

And don’t be vague, said Paul. “If the entry to that conversation is, ‘Hi, I’m a recruiter, I’ve got an engineering role,’ it would be pretty low down on my response rate.” Instead, get down to specifics, such as: “‘Hi, I’m recruiting for the sales team or some team within Facebook, we’ve got this new project going on. We’re desperately trying to find some director of engineering role for that team. You’ve got a load of experience, blah-blah-blah.’” That’d catch Paul’s eye.

The takeaway:

Lose the generic, impersonal, self-serving spam. Do your homework on the candidate you’re reaching out to. Refer to something specifically awesome in their portfolio. Tell them exactly why you’ve reached out to them, and don’t just say it’s about a job – talk about the job itself and why it could be interesting for them. Oh, and don’t forget Tuesday morning.

5. Don’t do the hard sell

You need to build trust with candidates rather than just bang on their door shouting about a new job opportunity that they’ll just love.

There are so many great jobs at so many crappy companies, David said, reminding those in tech recruitment that tech engineers tend to be fixers. They’re excited about driving change into places and you want to tap into that energy.

“[Tell them:] ‘Look, this is an interesting opportunity, you could turn some of these things around.’ Tell it how it is. Just be honest, say, ‘Yeah, the place isn’t great at the moment, but we need to fix these problems. Here’s an enticing job.'”

Rahma agreed, listing what would interest her in a job. “if you are in a place where you’re not very tech-savvy right now, but you have an appetite to change, I think that’s very important. Second is, how much opportunity or impact do I have? How easy would it be for me to come in and make the set of changes that would gear or guide that company’s direction and the direction that ideally myself and the leadership team agree on?”

And be honest about your needs as a company, David said.

“If you want to be a digital business, legitimately showing an appetite for change is the thing that I’m looking for. … As long as [you say]; ‘Look, you can kind of do whatever you want here. You have carte blanche to change this thing. We want to, we just don’t know how.’”

The takeaway:

Lose the corporate shill and don’t commodify the job so much; you’re not putting butts in seats here. Appeal to the interests of the candidate and get them excited about the job in real ways.

And ultimately, in tech recruitment…

Nurture, don’t sell, and it’ll come full circle back to you by way of reputation. Remember – the candidate is making a significant life decision. You’re not just selling them a TV, you’re building a new working relationship with them where they’ll commit the bulk of their waking hours each week. Even if you don’t get them this time, the positive word of mouth will come full circle back to you via their networks and your active participation in the space.

It’s not going to be easy, but with the right messaging and outreach in your tech recruitment strategy, you should get the kind of tech talent you want and need to bring your business to the next level.

Related: Wooing top tech talent: Recruiting in the Boston tech scene

The post Tech recruitment in London: Luring and sourcing top tech talent appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

It’s scary stuff, indeed. This is a time to turn to the experts for insight and direction on your COVID-19 business continuity plan, so we turned to one-time Workable COO Grigoris Kouteris, who’s been through it before. In 2008, when the market crashed, Grigoris was in a company that was running large scale mobile and digital marketing programs for telecom clients.

He gets straight to the point – the money.

“[The 2008 crash] obviously affected the liquidity of a lot of businesses,” he says. “Cash flow management was very important.”

“We had quite a few projects where we were underwriting the costs and the business risk so we found ourselves with big exposures in terms of open positions. It was a situation of trying to manage the financial requirements of our customers and obviously, internally, the business. Making sure that we had enough liquidity to outlast the crisis and at the same time not losing track of the growth potential.”

The key component here is outlasting the crisis – again, flattening the curve. Every business wants and needs to do that in order to survive. Weathering the storm and coming out the other end in one piece is crucial, and can even have a huge payoff in the end if you hit the ground running once the economy recovers.

With that in mind, Grigoris immediately took action to ensure a smoothly operating machine.

“The measures that we took back then were mostly around optimizing the business,” Grigoris says.

“Streamlining processes, improving the systems and the infrastructure we had in place. Improving business practices set us up for 2010 being our most successful year.”

You can’t predict, but you can plan

Never mind all the predictions from experts. One of the biggest challenges as a business facing an economic crisis is not having a crystal ball handy. Grigoris notes that this was a problem in 2008 as well, and that it’s an issue again in 2020 during the COVID-19 crisis.

“You don’t know when the situation will peak and when we start resolving, so I guess that uncertainty on the timing and the magnitude is difficult to deal with.”

So how do you navigate that uncertainty? Grigoris notes there are two things you can do.

“First of all, make sure that you’ve got a number of contingency plans in place. Work out a lot of different scenarios which you are ready to deploy as the situation evolves.

“Secondly, don’t lose track of the more short-term or tactical objectives. Essentially, make sure that you also have a weekly plan on how you want to manage this.”

The worst thing you can do, Grigoris says, is doing nothing or even trying to predict what might be down the road:

“You shouldn’t be sitting idle waiting for the peak or trying to outsmart or second-guess when that is coming.”

Be agile as a business

Just as a boxer is trained to stay on the balls of their feet and keep moving, a business needs to be consistently in action. There are no ideal solutions. You can only prepare your business to adapt quickly to what may be around the corner.

(Note: Learn more about business agility and why it matters.)

But there’s another thing, too.

“It’s not just risks or challenges that the situation is generating,” Grigoris says. There are actually opportunities presented in such a scenario. Externally, you can identify certain market niches or openings where you can be relevant right now, and fully capitalize on those.

“And internally, it’s a good time to start looking at optimization [in your business], at some of the things that are in the pipeline that aren’t getting done. Now’s a time to set up the right infrastructure and set up the right process in place.”

If optimizing internal processes rather than hunkering down into survival mode seems counter-intuitive, remember that a business doesn’t succeed or fail on the turn of a dime, so to speak – it focuses on long-term results. What you do now can have an impact on what happens down the road. Even if you don’t know the severity of the downturn, Grigoris says, it’s worth thinking ahead and building for that.

“It’s a good time to look at what the next one, two, or three quarters will be once this thing is over.”

Consider the paradigm shifts

Step back and look at the bigger picture as well. The widescale impact of the COVID-19 phenomenon is larger than just your business – numerous business and thought leaders have offered insights on the paradigm shifts that can and will happen as a result of the crisis. Healthier remote-work lifestyles, a reduction in polarized politics, a shift to a more collective rather than individualistic mindset, and other predictions are being reported by many media, based on previous large-scale events such as 9/11 and the 2008 crash. Those, and now COVID-19, are precursors to change.

Grigoris highlights that shift especially as it pertains to employees. “This global drive towards remote working will have a residual impact and it will change behaviors both in terms of how all companies approach remote working, but also employees themselves.”

A shift in personal values can’t be ignored as well.

“This current situation will sensitize a lot of people around the topics of health, sustainability, sanitizing.”

You need to take these into account when you plan as a business – better now than later, to get ahead of the change.

“If, as a business, you can formulate strategies that will support those new behaviors in the new paradigm, then it’s something that should be looked at right now. What will the next day look like and what can you do to be relevant the next day?”

How this impacts hiring

The standard of hiring is generally an online application followed by phone screening, and then a series of in-person interviews, plus assessments, executive evaluations, reference and background checks, and ultimately the job offer. These haven’t changed much over the years but with the emphasis on physical distancing prompted by COVID-19 for an indefinite amount of time, that’s changing rapidly.

This is a microcosm of the large-scale shift in business operations, Grigoris notes.

“I believe behaviors will change a lot more the day-to-day interactions will move to the online domain. So what we’re doing right now [online interaction] instead of having this in the office will start becoming more and more of the norm. Workable with our video interview platform and our collaboration tools, essentially, is enabling those behaviors internally within a company.”

This optimizes the process of building teams and hiring, entirely online. What was once a far-fetched idea – hiring someone you have never met in person – is rapidly becoming the norm, and the COVID-19 crisis may be the catalyst for a quicker shift to the ‘new normal’.

As a business, you need to put the tools and platforms in place to enable that shift to an online world. Workable and other tools can be useful here, Grigoris notes, due to its collaborative capabilities and ease of use in the software for both the hiring team and the candidates themselves.

“In a situation where you have remote working or distant working, Workable provides the infrastructure for the HR department and the recruiting team, as well as hiring managers to collaborate in real-time and using an environment that is conducive to collaboration. Also, obviously, it enables the candidates to participate in a streamlined seamless recruitment process.

“[The solution] essentially attacks on two fronts – internally as a collaboration enhancer, and also connecting the company, the brand, with a candidate. Put those two together, and these are the behaviors that we’ll see more and more coming out of this [crisis].”

Workable’s own business response to COVID-19

So what did Workable itself do as a company to get ahead of this new crisis? Grigoris was quick to answer that, noting two main priorities from the get-go. First, the people in your company:

“Our first response as Workable – and my first response as a C-level executive – was to make sure that our employees were safe. We were very quick in implementing remote work. Our employees had all the tools and infrastructure to be able to adjust to this new way of working and all the support from their managers to continue being successful.”

Once you’ve got that covered, Grigoris reminds us about the deeper impact of the shift to a fully remote environment:

“We want to make sure that our teams are motivated and engaged, that people have things to do. The worst thing you can do to your teams is people just being bored. They’re at home, they’re alone, they’re not in an office environment. A lot of them are not used to it. The worst thing that can happen is idleness. Support your team, keep them engaged at the manager level.”

The second priority? Maintain that strong relationship with the client base and keep that finger on their pulse – they are, after all, the reason your business thrives.

“We understand that the current situation is causing disruption across a number of industries all over the world and we’re trying whatever we can to enable our customers to continue being successful. It’s about being conscious of their current needs and how the situation evolves on that daily basis.”

The light at the end of the tunnel

So, if you were in a coffee shop sitting with another C-level executive from another company, and they were understandably nervous, what advice would you give them?

Grigoris thinks for a moment, and answers:

“Plan for the downside, for the worst-case scenario, but remain focused on the upside coming out of this. You need to plan for the downside, but you need to keep your motivation, your ambition, your inspiration, your optimism to be able to exit this with a good level of momentum and continue being successful despite the impact that this crisis will have on everybody.

“I mean, we’re most likely in a recession, but it doesn’t mean that you have to focus on the negative impact. Plan for that mitigation of damage that you’ll have on your business, but stay focused on exiting the tunnel and continue growing. Continue being successful, because there will be a big gap [in revenue] after the recession.”

Don’t get caught idling

There are three animal instincts in response to a threat or a crisis – fight, flee, or freeze. Freezing is the worst thing you can do right now, even if it’s the easiest response.

“It’s important that you maintain the rhythm throughout this. Don’t be idle. Invest time internally.”

To circle back to the metaphor of flattening the curve – imagine that curve in inverse. You’re at the top of one end of the curve and, as if on a rollercoaster track, about to start hurtling downwards at increasing speed to the bottom of the curve. It’s a terrifying moment – the feeling that you’re headed to your doom. And if you do nothing right now, you’ll hit the bottom and stay there.

Instead, you want to build up your speed. The faster you can get going, the more control you have over your business, the greater your chances of carrying that momentum out of the bottom and back up the other side. And finally, not only for survival, but to set yourself for future success with a solid COVID-19 business continuity plan:

“Understand the market, and plan for what’s about to come beyond the crisis, once it is over.”

The post Your COVID-19 business continuity plan: Tips from a COO appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

What does that mean? Increased DX means an evolution of the workplace. We’re seeing a lot of talk about this out there, including in a new PwC report that specifically highlighted workplace technology as the way forward if employers and organizations want to stay relevant.

Why? In short, it’s what workers want especially in the new flexible workplace. It’s also what businesses want, if they want to see processes made easier for their employees – including utilization of AI, machine learning, automation, and the cloud, according to PwC’s report.

Meanwhile, Gartner’s Senior Director Analyst, Sandy Shen echoed those sentiments about workplace digital transformation:

“The value of digital channels, products and operations is immediately obvious to companies everywhere right now…this is a wake-up call for organizations that have placed too much focus on daily operational needs at the expense of investing in digital business and long-term resilience. Businesses that can shift technology capacity and investments to digital platforms will mitigate the impact of the outbreak and keep their companies running smoothly now, and over the long term.”

“Businesses that can shift technology capacity and investments to digital platforms will mitigate the impact of the outbreak and keep their companies running smoothly now, and over the long term.”

To emphasize: COVID-19 was a wake-up call for orgs to evolve.

And Kate Smaje at McKinsey Digital also notes:

“COVID-19 has only made digital more relevant as companies … have undergone their own massive, overnight experiment in agile, and remote ways of working.”

Honestly, it’s not just about COVID. That was just the catalyst to something that was already in the works for a long, long time.

All that being said, let’s return to our survey and see what our respondents say about DX in the workplace.

DX is the bridge

Many companies updated both their business (54.5%) and customer-facing operations (56.9%) to a more digitally friendly format during the pandemic.

… and that bridge is built to last

Moreover, more than half of all respondents consider the digitization of their business (52.8%) and customer-facing (51.9%) operations to be permanently established in their company.

The great enablement

Meanwhile, when it comes to employee performance, existing technology enabled three in five businesses (58.8%) to move their workforce to a remote-first environment. And two thirds (67.5%) say their colleagues can go remote because there was no viable need for them to be physically present at the workplace.

What does all this tell us?

It’s as if a perfect storm took place. The tech and capabilities were already there; it just took a pandemic to push forward into this new world of work. And the logical next step became further and deeper digitization of business operations and working processes.

What kind of tech?

Now, let’s look at the types of technology that businesses are now using in digital transformation in the workplace.

Collaborative tech beckons

Communications technology – or more specifically, tech to support work collaborations – is by and far the top focal point for respondents to ensure employee engagement, with 75.8% of respondents choosing that as a key to success. Virtual team meetings (46.7%) also ranks high on the scale.

Socially enabling tech, not so much

Virtual coffee dates and / or happy hours (15.2%) registers as the least-popular focal point to ensure employee engagement.

Employee tracking on the backtrack

Time-tracking and / or employee monitoring technology isn’t popular either, with just 22.5% of respondents using that to ensure engagement.

What does all this tell us?

In short, it isn’t so much about connecting your employees socially or personally, or making sure your employees are actually working on the clock. It’s more about minimizing disruption to overall workflow by ensuring that employees are well-informed (as seen in the popularity of regular all-hands) and are working together seamlessly.

Businesses are also ensuring that the lines of communication are open and free-flowing regardless of the environment they’re working in. This is crucial to success.

Want to dive into the full report? Check it out.

The post Is DX evolving in the workplace? Our survey says yes appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Go ahead, hire the chaos muppets

@kris_dunn great slides/5 min presentation at #HRTechConf pic.twitter.com/ZHGfXcC5Mw

— Aliah D. Wright (@aliahwrites) October 21, 2015

Low rules (thrives in chaos) + high details (big picture perspective) = winning combination in #hiring via @kris_dunn. #HRTechConf

— Workable (@Workable) October 21, 2015

According to Salon.com, chaos muppets are internally chaotic. But what if they are actually experts at navigating external chaos? Kris Dunn asserted that the latter type are great people to hire. He said that “low rules” employees thrive in ambiguity and can look beyond the manual to find new solutions. He’s written about this before, but today he added that high-performers are people who are “low rules” but high on details and big picture perspective. What do you think? Do your star employees fit this profile?

Treat your job candidates like your best customers

Eric Winegardner from Monster – Candidates = Customers. We need t o treat them as such. #HRTechConf

— Culture Amp (@CultureAmp) October 21, 2015

A1: Candidates should be treated as customers too #TChat #HRTechConf #recruiting

— Harold Sinnott (@HaroldSinnott) October 21, 2015

Behemoth companies like Delta, IBM, and Marriott are candidate experience obsessives and all three chanted “candidates are customers” at #HRTechConf. The logic is that you want repeat candidates as much as you want repeat customers and so you treat them to a great experience at every opportunity. An easier job application experience (e.g. on mobile devices) was a priority. Is mobile apply just for enterprises? Nope. Workable career sites are mobile-friendly and our mission is to help ambitious companies hire like the big guys.

It’s time to get better at career pathing

86% of ees leave due to a lack of career development and … #HRTechConf pic.twitter.com/mtcdT0qISw

— Aliah D. Wright (@aliahwrites) October 21, 2015

talent banking vs. talent trapping – BRILLIANT @CareerEngager Too many managers hoard talent #hrtechconf JoMillsCEG

— Ms. Michael M. Moon (Levin), PhD (@mikemmoon) October 21, 2015

#HRTechConf #ignite Reimagining career pathing… @CareerEngager pic.twitter.com/SvqlzQb2pG

— MervynDinnen (@MervynDinnen) October 21, 2015

From Jo Mills,  co-founder and president of Fuel50, we learned that 86% of employees leave companies due to a lack of career development, resulting in a serious internal skills shortage down the line. To prevent that, employers should be sharing clear pathways for career growth with their new hires from day one. Also, instead of hoarding talent, managers should be helping employees start conversations with other teams and encouraging lateral moves within the company.

That concludes our recap of day three. Questions, corrections, comments? Get in touch at @Workable.

The post HR Tech innovations for finding star employees appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

“It’s a good time to start looking at optimization [in your business], at some of the things that are in the pipeline that aren’t getting done. Now’s a time to set up the right infrastructure and set up the right process in place.”

We get it: there’s no exact science to how a business can capitalize internally during an economic slowdown. And there will be many organizations that don’t have the cash fund or other luxury at the ready in terms of time and resources – and there will be many who do. If yours is one of the latter, consider these seven tips to take advantage of a business slowdown.

1. Fine-tune your internal operations

Because of reduced demand for your product or service, your business doesn’t have that steady stream to keep things firing on all cylinders. That slowdown can be worked to your benefit – with the freed-up time and resources, this is a good time to go inwards and do a full audit of your internal operations.

For instance, start with identifying and improving:

• Breakdowns in processes
• Slowdowns due to asynchronous tasks and poor project management
• Clumsy handoffs of projects from one task to the next
• Redundancies and overlaps in expenses, job functions and organizational structure
• Breakdowns in communications – both internal and customer-facing
• Lack of integration in tech stack

You can look for, identify and improve on each either from your own desk, via meetings with other upper management, team managers, full teams, or even the entire company in an all-hands. Think of it as optimizing your machine so it can run more efficiently with less drain on your resources.

2. Research your market

You can also use the opportunity to look externally as well as internally. Organize a task force to take a deep dive into the current market and understand it at a much deeper level. Think of it as updating the business plan on which you initially built your business.

For instance:

• Learn about your competition. Look at what they’ve done up to this point and what they’re doing right now.
• Research other companies. Study companies from the past who were in a similar stage as where you are now. Understand the steps they took to go from that point to further success.
• Look at upcoming trends. What’s happening in your industry and what’s predicted to happen in the near future? How can you capitalize on those?
• Look at recent innovations. What’s happened and what’s about to happen in the market that you need to be aware of to stay relevant?

You always want to be thinking on your feet; with the resultant market data at your fingertips, you’ll be better equipped to make quick and impactful decisions for when the economy is back on the upswing.

3. Nurture your existing customers

One of the painful aspects of an economic downturn is the slowdown in revenue. It’s going to be harder – and just as expensive – to try and get new customers, with decreased ROI to boot.

It’s been documented that it costs five times as much to get a new customer than it does to keep an existing one. Not only will current customers benefit you by staying with you now, their loyalty can reap dividends down the road. It’s been found that you get 25% more profit for every 5% increase in customer retention.

So start thinking about your existing customers and how you can retain them for the long term. To strengthen those relationships, you can:

• Help customers through this trying time by extending supportive messaging and special deals (such as three free months to try out a new feature)
• Connect with customers for case studies, testimonials and features
• Partner with customers in cross-promotional initiatives
• Build out relevant content through customer interviews
• Have one-on-ones with customers to understand their existing and future needs and how you can meet those needs
• Shift outbound sales reps to account management to increase interaction with existing customers

Any and all of these can be doubled-down for prospects as well, both now and in future. Plus, if done right, your brand reputation will get a big boost.

4. Update your product or service

Once you’ve gained a stronger understanding of your marketplace and the needs of your customers, you can use your time and resources to think and plan for upcoming new features, releases, evolutions, or innovations in your product or service.

For instance:

• Build out your R&D team to come up with new innovations based on market needs identified in #2 above.
• Assign a team of developers to build out a new integration or add-on for your software.
• Move your existing manufacturing talent to another area to build a stockpile of products slated for release in the fall.

Through some smart decision-making and planning, you can utilize your existing talent to these new initiatives rather than going down the road of mass layoffs only to go through a difficult and expensive rehiring process down the line. Keep the gang together, retain the loyalty of your teams and hit the ground running with something new once the economy recovers.

5. Train/upskill your teams

The phones aren’t ringing nearly as much. The demand for product isn’t as high as it used to be, and may not be for awhile. Your marketing team budget has taken a hit, but you still have a full team.

There will be moments where your teams really are at a surplus for time. There’s a danger of disengagement there. If you have an emergency cash fund in place, you may consider investing some of those funds in training, retraining, and upskilling your teams.

One of the biggest hindrances for training is that you don’t want to pull your talented colleagues off the line – but when there’s not much “line” to work on or maintain, this may be the perfect time to pull everyone into the clubhouse and build up those skills that’ll help your business thrive later on.

Again, this is a long-term opportunity. Think of the ROI in terms of increased employee loyalty and retention as well as increased productivity from better skilled talent. Plus, because they’ve learned new skills together as a team, you’ll have a more refined workforce that’s keen to succeed with their newfound talents. It’ll be better than trying to rebuild teams later after a series of layoffs.

6. Repurpose your teams

If training isn’t a feasible option, why not repurpose some of your talent? This is an opportunity for you to pull those teams together and have a discussion about how they can continue to make a major contribution. For instance:

• Leads and prospects do dry up, meaning less work for sales. So, as suggested in #3 above, underworked sales reps can be moved to account management for a temporary period to nurture existing customers and keep revenue streams alive.
• Hiring freezes are common during this time. Your recruiters can build out future hiring plans (i.e. playbooks), research competing salaries, update their existing interview guides, etc. so they’re prepared for a hiring spree down the line.
• There’s less urgency for developers to jump on bugs or meet unique customer needs. Developers tend to be tinkerers and innovators. So, tap into that energy. Organize a hackathon for them to build out ideas for potential future products.

You can even enact some of this at a team or even departmental level, assigning task forces to jump on #1 (fine-tune internal operations), #2 (research markets), and #4 (update product or service). All these different departments and teams are mini-businesses of their own contributing to the overall business as a whole – and there will be opportunities for improvement, repurposing, and refinement in each.

Another kind of repurposing: In the early days of the crisis, many companies in China shared their employees with other companies more in need during the crisis – for instance, restaurants experiencing severe downturn would lend their staff to supermarkets desperately in need of workers, helping both in the process. Of course, experts do warn of the legal considerations of entering into an employee-sharing scheme – for instance, look at existing worker contracts before you set out to do something like this.

7. Encourage downtime for you and your staff

In these bleak times, it may not make a lot of sense to carry on, but it may be worth doing so if you know you’re able to tough it out and come out the other end in relatively good shape. Perhaps there’s an opportunity for a short-term sabbatical – a spring break, of sorts – for the entire company or for specific teams.

Consider the following scenarios in which you can encourage a fully paid sabbatical for your staff:

• There’s no work-from-home opportunity in the industry where you operate – as is the case for many businesses deemed non-essential during the current COVID-19 crisis.
• You’ve issued a full work-from-home, remote work order across the company and your workforce isn’t fully equipped for such a sudden transition in the short-term.
• In the case that the remote-work transition is smooth, you still have many employees struggling to get work done because they’re home with children, other family members, or roommates – whether they need care or the home environment isn’t conducive for work.

Perhaps a full shutdown of one week or more can be a huge benefit to the company at large. Give express permission to your employees to take that time off on their own or with their loved ones without taking away from their vacation pay or PTO.

Many companies stage an all-hands summit from time to time, Workable included. Even if an actual summit cannot be planned in these times of physical distancing, you can still think of this sabbatical as a kind-of morale-boosting exercise when you encourage people to check in at the same time for a virtual social event regardless of where they are.

Plus, your employees can return from that time off with a refreshed energy and a stronger loyalty to your company. It’ll also benefit your employer brand once others take notice. This can be a boon for your business operations and bottom line.

Consider the long game

Whether it’s operational efficiency, understanding of your market and competitors, a better/different product or service, a more loyal customer base, or a more skilled and motivated workforce, it can better position your business for success when the economy is back in full swing.

Take advantage of a business slowdown. Optimize now, benefit later. Your future business will thank you.

The post Go internal: 7 tips to take advantage of a business slowdown appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

A recent Mercer study proves this lack of diversity in leadership:

The demographics of leadership

• 85% of US-based executives and 83% of senior managers in the survey are white, compared with 64% of those in support and operations.
• 77% of executives and 71% of senior managers worldwide in the survey are male, compared with 53% of support staff.

Seeing these numbers, you’d expect some momentum to increase that diversity at the executive level. There is – but not to the scale you might think.

Contents:

• The demographics of leadership
• Prioritizing diversity in leadership
• Why is diversity in leadership important?
• Diversity in leadership: The payoff
• Diversity in leadership: The initiative
• Diversity in leadership: The action items
• Diversity in leadership: Leaders demand it

Want to see the full infographic? Download it for yourself here. Or read on:

Prioritizing diversity in leadership

In Workable’s survey on DEI at work, 64.8% cited diversity throughout the entire company as an area of priority in their overall DEI strategy.

But when it comes to leadership at the top level, just 25% of respondents included that as a leading priority in their strategy.

So, not only is there not much diversity in leadership, it doesn’t even seem to be as important as overall diversity in the minds of business professionals.

If you can’t point to equal representation at the top level, then how can you really declare real progress in your company DEI strategy? Ticking off that “diversity” box doesn’t mean much when the distribution of that diversity remains uneven.

Why is diversity in leadership important?

So, why should you care? Well, there are three major reasons.

1. Your leadership sets the tone.

Work processes and company cultures are traditionally guided – and influenced – via a top-down approach. If you have a lack of diverse leadership in your workforce, you’re not going to make real progress in the equally essential and more impactful cousins of equity and inclusion. They are all different parts of the whole, after all.

2. Your employees want to feel included.

Think about your employees. If you already feel underrepresented in everyday society – whether you are Black, female, non-binary, etc. – and that underrepresentation is even starker at the top level in your workplace, how can you expect to feel truly equal, included, and understood as an employee?

Related to both #1 and #2: The employee experience is crucial. We’re no longer in a time where there’s a clear separation between personal life and work life. You want all your employees feeling safe, appreciated, valued, and included in the workspace – thus bringing their full selves to work.

3. Your bottom line is at stake.

The payoff can be immense. While there’s no arguing about the moral imperative for ensuring diversity in leadership, doing so actually has a positive influence on your bottom line.

Diversity in leadership: The payoff

The data proves the real and positive business impact of diversity in leadership. Let’s look at the numbers from a McKinsey study:

• Companies in the top quartile for gender diversity at the executive level are 21% more likely to generate higher profits and 27% more likely to have superior value creation.
• Companies in the top quartile for ethnic/cultural diversity on executive teams are 1/3 more likely to have industry-leading profitability.

What’s more, if your leadership is homogenous, there’s a negative impact on your bottom line.

• Those companies in the bottom quartile for both gender and ethnic/cultural diversity are 29% less likely to be above average in profitability.

Diversity in leadership: The initiative

Let’s go back to our own survey, where we asked respondents when they introduced diversity in leadership as an action item. One in five said they did so in 2020. Another fifth say they’ll implement it as an action item going forward.

• 20.8% of companies introduced diverse management and leadership as an action item in 2020
• 19% will do so going forward.

Diversity in leadership: The action items

Do you have leadership diversity in your strategy or do you plan to? More so, what can you do to increase diversity in leadership? It’s no longer about raising a flag in support of DEI – you need to act to make a real difference.

There are many ways to do it – including establishing clear, attainable goals, for example:

“Our executive team will be fully representative of our society’s demographics by June 2022.”

You will also need to define action items to reach each goal.

For example:

“Implement a process to track advancement metrics throughout the organization.”

When you track representation in your hiring, you can establish a baseline and identify opportunities for improvement. You can do that using an anonymous surveying tool such as Workable’s Candidate Surveys.

Another example:

“Utilize tools to reduce unconscious bias in the hiring process.”

Hiring the right people to lead your business is clearly top of mind – but are you also doing so in a fair, unbiased way that treats each candidate equally? It’s possible that you’re unintentionally excluding or disadvantaging certain minorities, as suggested in another Mercer report.

You can reduce that unconscious bias from the recruitment process via anonymized screening where candidates’ names and other identifying features are removed from their applications. There are tools to help you there, such as Workable’s Anonymized Screening.

Diversity in leadership: Leaders demand it

There is a growing call for action from investors, and implementation of new standards and expectations are being set by regulators – including S&P. Some organizations are even seeing leaders stepping down on the requirement that their replacement contributes to a more accurate representation of the overall community.

If you do it right, you’ll be able to have a diversity pyramid that now looks like this:

Company diversity is great – but it’s the equal distribution of that diversity that really counts. It’ll really show your mettle as a business that values employee experience when you have diversity in leadership.

Let’s get to work!

The post Diversity in leadership: Why it matters and what you can do appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

To some it means white collar piecework, to others the wild west of unregulated digital sweatshops. The Undercover Economist, Tim Harford, refers to it as “tiny amounts for tiny jobs” which doesn’t feel adequate when others are describing a connected work marketplace whose value could soon run to tens of billions of dollars.

The Human Cloud

Gigging itself has its roots in the 1920s jazz scene but its current revival is more digital than musical. Mckinsey, so often the source of excitable business language, offers the most sober definition, calling it “contingent work that is transacted on a digital marketplace.”

For its boosters, the gig economy is the beginning of “the human cloud” where employers will be able to overcome skills shortages and liberate themselves from the confines of location. The loudest of these voices are coming from the platforms on which this economy is being constructed, like MBAandCompany, whose CEO Daniel Callaghan recently told the Financial Times: “You can now get whoever you want, whenever you want, exactly how you want it,” he says. “And because they’re not employees you don’t have to deal with employment hassles and regulations.”

The development economist, Guy Standing, sees something altogether different. He has coined the term “precariat” (an unhappy marriage of the precarious and proletariat) to describe a new and expanding underclass. While most economists have fretted about jobless growth since the last financial crisis, Standing looks to the future and sees “growth-less jobs” as the real issue. He foresees the spread of low productivity jobs with basement wages and practically no benefits like health insurance or pensions.

In short, the gig economy is an idea that tends to reflect the prejudices of its observer. A quick look at its emerging hierarchy gives some perspective.

The most solid thing you can say about the gig economy is that it’s smaller than the hype surrounding it. The prominence of companies like Uber, whose fleet of drivers are not employees, and the giant digital lawn sale that is Etsy, where people can turn handicraft hobbies into a side income, has caught the public imagination. The gig economy has already featured in the US election cycle with Democrats attacking it from the left and Republicans lauding it from the right.

Showing up everywhere but the data

But a thorough examination of government data shows little has changed in the last decade, with the percentage of Americans declaring themselves self employed declining. Some 6.5 percent of America’s 157-million-strong workforce were self employed in 2015, down from a high of nearly 9 percent in the 1990s. The proportion of workers with multiple jobs is equally stagnant.

Across the pond in Britain, freelancers make up just 2 percent of the workforce, a figure that is largely unchanged in the last 15 years. It’s possible that the increase in the number of Britons declaring themselves self-employed may contain some gigsters but it could also be explained by more traditional forms of self-employment. The three growth areas in UK self employment are hairdressing, cleaning and management consultancy. Yes, it’s possible that some of these consultants are trading their services on HourlyNerd or one of its competitors but these sectors were growing before anyone said “gig”. Conversely numbers of self-employed taxi drivers are in decline. As Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute puts it: “evidence of an exploding gig economy is showing up everywhere but the data.”

Related: How to hire freelancers

When it did show up in the data it was a false alarm. Most sensible analysts are agreed that when the wonks at the US Governmental Accountability Office announced in 2015 that the percentage of contingent workers had leapt from 30.6 percent in 2006 to 40.4 percent, it didn’t mean much. Their methods were problematic and  their definition of contingent work was so broad it included everyone not in full-time conventional jobs.

The revolution will not be declared

The obvious thought is that official figures are a bad place to go looking. Not everyone declares gig income, especially if the work is done alongside a traditional job. Many people don’t think of renting out their couch or their car as a form of paid work, so they don’t tell census workers about it, let alone the tax collector.

A fairer assumption is that the gig economy is in its infancy and that its growth won’t be linear. The big beast of this emerging economy, Upwork, is cited as evidence of this: the  human cloud platform took 10 years to reach $1bn revenues but expects to grow those ten-fold in the next six years.

To rebut the skeptics, economists like Harvard’s Larry Katz have dug into ‘1099’ filings for evidence. When a business, non-profit or government agency pays someone more than $600 a year in non-employee compensation this is the form they file with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). These filings are on the rise. A deep dive into government data finds that non-employer businesses (sole proprietors) are up from 12 percent of the US workforce at the end of the 1990s to 16 percent in 2013 (no data since). This has prompted some observers to argue that we have a “1099 economy”.

Daniel Tomlinson, from the Resolution Foundation in London, says that: “measuring the gig economy isn’t easy and governments would do well to follow the example of the US Department of Labor who have announced that they will soon be collecting statistics on the status of contingent workers.”

But he cautions against overstating the changes in the labor market and the extent of contingent working: “This isn’t to say that the gig economy is going to stay small; adoption of new technology by existing businesses, disruption by new innovative firms and the National Living Wage are all likely to contribute to the growth of the gig economy in the years ahead.”

21st Century laws

So the rise of the gig economy is real, it’s just not as large or as rapid as some have suggested. But it does pose very real challenges to business and policymakers. We’re seeing the most obvious manifestation of this is the legal battles being waged against Uber. Are their drivers employees or not? The company says absolutely not but some of the drivers take the opposing view.

This is where the work of Alan Krueger, formerly an economic adviser to President Barack Obama and Seth Harris from Cornell University come in.

“There is currently much uncertainty as to whether your Uber driver — or Lyft driver, or TaskRabbit handy man, or Thumbtack personal trainer — will be judged an employee or independent contractor by the legal system,” writes Harris.

The Krueger-Harris answer is to create another category of worker in the gray area between “employee” and “independent contractor” called “independent worker”. Their proposal would allow gig workers to join or form a union but it wouldn’t entitle them to paid holiday or protection from being fired. It would enable firms like Lyft to offer health insurance or pensions as benefits without the worry that the courts would label them employers.

The cynics will rightly wonder how many of the sharing economy behemoths would really want to offer benefits unless legally obliged to do so. Meanwhile, the first job ads have begun to appear for C-level Chief Freelance Relationship Officers. A recent Randstad talent report found that nearly half of HR leaders were thinking about how to respond to the gig economy.

HR expert Mervyn Dinnen says that freelance relationship officer is “a role whose time has come” and foresees more attention being paid to the way companies manage their reputation among freelancers. The Freelancers Union and their #FreelanceIsn’tFree campaign have already shown how gig workers can make themselves heard and gain traction. Our world of work is being reshaped but its final form will be contested.

The post Understanding the gig economy appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

• Melissa Bruno, VP Head of People at Stack Overflow
• Hope Weatherford, Head of Talent Attraction at InVision
• Ryan Malone, Founder and CEO at SmartBug Media

All shared valuable insights on virtual screening and onboarding, and useful tips to promote effective collaboration and positive employee relationships.

Virtual screening methods and tactics

The main difference between hiring remote employees and in-office recruiting is in the interviewing process – interviews are conducted via video and rarely (if ever) in person. Meanwhile, in the application phase, recruiters can follow their existing procedures.

According to Hope, being transparent and clear regarding the application, assessment, and screening phases is essential. This way, candidates know what to expect and prepare properly.

At InVision, the video interview length and interview questions the hiring teams ask vary based on the job position and seniority level. Candidates also get to meet other team members, too. Hope explains:

You can be creative with the screening methods you use. As Ryan explained, SmartBug Media’s hiring team usually asks candidates to self-record a short video presenting themselves. This is helpful especially for customer-facing roles who represent the brand and company. Ryan said:

“We try to make it as easy as possible and we don’t want people to spend two days producing some video. We just want to hear you talk. Are you articulate? Can you convey an idea? Is your space well kept?”

In addition to job-related questions, what other types of skills can you check during the video-screening? Hope noted that it’s not only the job-fit skills that matter. You should also find out if the candidate is the right culture fit for your business and can thrive in a remote working environment.

On that level, Ryan pointed out the role that cultural marketing plays in remote hiring:

“We’ve spent a lot of time focusing on culture marketing for our company to try to illustrate what it’s like here, and the type of family that you join, such that we’re attracting people [who] want to be a part of that.”

Ryan also highlighted the importance of building rapport with the candidates to understand their personal needs, motivators, and strengths:

“At the end of the day, business is done between people. It’s not done between companies and candidates, or applications and approvals. And everybody here [in the company] wants to create a connection. No different than if you’ve met somebody at a cocktail party, and you want to learn more about them.”

Promoting connection and confidence

All three speakers agreed that when onboarding new employees it’s crucial to make them feel welcome and encourage them to build a supportive network within the company. Each of them described the remote onboarding process steps they follow, once they’ve provided new remote hires with the necessary gear and digital tools (video conferencing, messaging app, project management tool, etc.) to succeed.

‘Xenia’ onboarding program: Hope described InVision’s onboarding process which consists of 20-hour sessions. After they manage the pre-onboarding essentials (e.g. equipment, paperwork) they move to the core activities.

In these sessions, they explain InVision’s operating system and the company culture to new team members. They also elaborate on how to use digital tools in an efficient manner. Hope highlighted the importance of making yourself available and being clear to employees in this phase:

“We’re really helping everybody ask the questions that they may not want to ask their manager, [and] learn the tools that we use in a little bit of a different way, in a really safe place. It helps us really break through that virtual screen and really get to that level of productivity.”

90-day ramp up plan: Melissa described the 90-day ramp up plan for new hires at Stack Overflow – nearly all of it virtual. During the first 30 days, Stack Overflow focuses on building connection. They share the company culture and norms and introduce new employees to their teammates and partners. During days 31 to 60, they explain business strategic priorities and give employees their first projects. Over the final 30 days, employees set future goals with their managers.

Melissa emphasized that this plan isn’t rigid across the organization:

“Those are the three pillars that we use across the organization. […] There are areas where we customize for the teams, for instance in technology, to be a little bit different, because they have to take a deeper technical dive.”

80% effective in 60 days: According to Ryan, building confidence is key for new team members. At SmartBug Media, during the first 60 days, they train employees on a specific job responsibility and when they excel at it, they move to a new task. They also meet with customers early on.

In Ryan’s own words:

Nurturing communication and employee relationships

For Melissa, an essential asset for effective remote work is “connectivity”, building personal connections with your teammates. An example would be to create virtual “buddy systems” and help remote employees gain a sense of belonging in their new team.

Ryan highlighted the importance of non-verbal communication to understand how employees feel, and how you can pick up on non-verbal cues and nuances through calls and video conferencing:

“I personally call everybody at our company over a period of time to just say, what can we do to make business healthier? What does your roadmap look like here? And is there a path to see it? Because you don’t have that office kind of chatter that you typically see.”

Hope mentioned that every week they schedule virtual meetings with a rather loose agenda, where employees can jump in when whey feel like it, to socialize:

“I set up an hour every week on our team. We call it ‘Friday fun day’ and we just come in and we just chat about anything and everything; sometimes related to work, sometimes not.”

Leaders play a crucial role in promoting healthy communication and making employees feel valued. The speakers shared some tactics for leaders who manage remote employees. Melissa talked about a nudging system they have that reminds managers that they haven’t spoken to an employee for weeks and catch up with them:

Finally, Ryan advised leaders to do announcements via video instead of sending extensive emails to staff:

“Do an announcement on camera and don’t script it. Just let it rip, because when your team sees your own emotion, your own kind of non-verbal cues on your face, I think it’s really, really impactful to them.”

Just when you thought it wasn’t possible – or easy, even – it is indeed a realistic and doable prospect to manage onboarding fully virtually. Equip yourselves with the right tools and, most importantly, with the right attitude and you’ll be more than ready to tackle this challenge successfully. And of course, you’ll probably make mistakes down the road. That’s OK. Just be sure to embrace them and grow through them.

The post Remote hiring tips for recruiters and HR appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Subscribe to the podcast for more ways to move your hiring forward.

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• Tech buy-in and adoption in hiring teams is a challenge for 22.8% of businesses
• The percentage of businesses citing insufficient in-house capacity to hire as one of their major challenges has increased 84.5% since 2020
• And finally – nearly one in five employers (17.5%) say their existing tech stack isn’t enough to meet their hiring needs

This was all before ChatGPT hopped into the ring with great aplomb. Surely, if we carried out the same survey today, all the above numbers would be higher. And as businesses increasingly incorporate more AI tools into their fold, many will find their existing tech stack is no longer enough to meet their needs. Likewise, employees worry that they’ll become redundant.

Plus, many businesses are exercising financial restraint. Technologies that don’t have a clear tie-back to revenue are being dropped like hot potatoes. Employees are being let go. That double-whammy means teams are limited in their capacity to stay on top of work – including in hiring.

That’s not supposed to bring you down, however. Stay with us here, and let’s go a little deeper:

Gartner’s Senior Director Analyst, Sandy Shen, said this about surviving the pandemic as a business:

“Businesses that can shift technology capacity and investments to digital platforms will mitigate the impact of the outbreak and keep their companies running smoothly now, and over the long term.”

“Businesses that can shift technology capacity and investments to digital platforms will … keep their companies running smoothly now, and over the long term.”

In other words, Jack be nimble, Jack be quick. That same sentiment rings even more true now – businesses that move quickly to AI-driven tech capabilities will stay ahead of the curve especially during these recession-prone times.

We’re seeing rapid adoption already, with a ResumeBuilder survey finding half of all companies are already using ChatGPT and 93% of current users say they plan to expand their use of this savvy AI tool.

Take on that optimistic spirit of early adoption of the tech – not just ChatGPT, but all the AI and digital developments happening in the hiring space – and you’ll see a vastly improved hiring process at a time when your business most needs it.

The evolution of AI in hiring

But what exactly is changing in hiring? A lot, as it happens. ChatGPT is already being used extensively to auto-write job descriptions, interview questions, and many other elements of the hiring process that at one time required a human to create. You’re still the driver, however, and there are many elements of hiring that you can drive with the support of AI.

With that in mind, let’s look at some fundamental aspects of recruitment and the ways in which they’re being digitally transformed.

1. Sourcing and outreach

The rise of advanced search tools, AI-driven algorithms, and automation has expanded the ability to identify and target top candidates. To stay ahead, learn to leverage these technologies effectively, engage with emerging niche platforms, and build meaningful connections with candidates through online communities.

Some of the tech advances in sourcing include:

AI-based candidate matching

Platforms are utilizing artificial intelligence to analyze job descriptions and match them with the most suitable candidates from a large database. Workable’s AI Recruiter, for example, can build a list of top passive candidates for your job openings utilizing our data intelligence gathered from hosting 160 million candidates in 1.5 million jobs.

Programmatic job advertising

AI-powered programmatic job advertising platforms help you target and attract the right candidates by distributing job ads across various online channels. These platforms analyze real-time data to make intelligent decisions on where and when to post job ads, optimizing budget and reach.

Recruitment chatbots

Chatbots help automate initial candidate interactions, answering questions, and pre-screening candidates. These chatbots can engage candidates 24/7, collect necessary information, and schedule interviews, freeing up time for more high-touch interactions.

Talent pooling and candidate rediscovery

AI-powered platforms allow you to tap into existing talent pools by rediscovering candidates who have applied for previous positions. By analyzing candidates’ profiles, these platforms can identify potential matches for new job openings, reducing the time and resources spent on sourcing. A good example is Workable’s Resurface Candidates tool, which does exactly this.

2. Screening and assessments

Technology can revolutionize the way you assess candidates’ skills, experiences, and cultural fit. AI-powered tools and gamified assessments offer more efficient and engaging methods of evaluation. Hiring team members must stay up to date with these tools and ensure they comply with privacy regulations to maintain candidate trust.

Some of those tech advances include:

Pre-employment assessments

Hiring teams are increasingly utilizing pre-employment assessment tools, such as Criteria Corp and Workable Assessments, to measure candidates’ cognitive abilities, personality traits, and job-specific skills.

These assessments help to streamline the screening process and identify candidates who are more likely to be a good fit for the role and company culture.

Gamified assessments

Gamification has been incorporated into the assessment process to create a more engaging experience for candidates. Tools like Pymetrics and Arctic Shores utilize game-based assessments to evaluate cognitive abilities, problem-solving skills, and personality traits.

These provide a fun and interactive way to measure candidates’ fit for a role, while also collecting valuable data to support hiring decisions.

Skill tests and coding challenges

Companies use platforms such as HackerRank and Codility to administer skill tests and coding challenges, allowing candidates to demonstrate their technical abilities in real-world scenarios. These tools enable you to objectively assess candidates’ skills and compare them against established benchmarks.

Virtual reality assessments

Virtual reality (VR) technology is being utilized in the hiring process to assess candidates’ skills and aptitudes in immersive, simulated environments. Talespin and Immerse, among others, are VR-based assessment tools that test candidates’ decision-making, teamwork and communication abilities in realistic scenarios.

Automated reference checking

Automated reference checking platforms such as SkillSurvey and Checkster streamline the reference checking process by collecting feedback from a candidate’s professional contacts. These tools use AI algorithms to analyze the feedback and generate detailed reports, supporting hiring decisions.

3. Virtual Interviewing

Virtual interviewing tools have become increasingly popular, providing valuable insights through AI-powered analysis. Through these technologies, whether carried out synchronously or asynchronously, hiring team members can make more informed decisions about candidates.

Asynchronous video interviews

Asynchronous video interviews enable candidates to record their responses to pre-set interview questions at their convenience. Platforms like Workable’s Video Interviews allow you to review and assess these recorded responses on their own time, streamlining the interview process and eliminating scheduling challenges.

Then, AI-driven analysis of these interviews can help you identify key soft skills and communication abilities – more on that below.

Synchronous video interviews

Real-time video interviews conducted through platforms like Google Meet, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams became increasingly standard during the pandemic. These virtual meetings provide a cost- and time-effective alternative to in-person interviews while still allowing for real-time interaction between the interviewer and the candidate.

AI-driven video interview analysis

AI-based platforms can analyze recorded video interviews to assess candidates’ soft skills, communication abilities, and other attributes. These platforms use natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to evaluate candidates’ responses, providing you with valuable insights and data-driven recommendations.

Likewise, AI-powered transcription services such as Supernormal can then be used to transcribe, analyze and summarize these interviews, providing you with valuable insights and data points for further evaluation.

AI-based sentiment analysis

AI-driven sentiment analysis tools can evaluate the tone, emotions, and sentiment expressed by candidates during video interviews. These insights help you to better understand candidates’ communication styles, emotional intelligence, and cultural fit.

Platforms like RingCentral and IBM Watson can integrate with video interviewing tools to provide real-time sentiment analysis during virtual interviews.

Facial and voice recognition

Advanced facial and voice recognition technologies are being utilized to analyze non-verbal cues and vocal characteristics during video interviews. Realeyes and VoiceVibes are two such tools that can help you identify key traits and behaviors that may not be evident through traditional interviewing methods, offering a more comprehensive assessment of the candidate.

Virtual interview coaching and feedback

AI-driven coaching tools provide candidates with feedback on their interview performance, identifying areas for improvement and offering personalized guidance. This helps candidates to refine their skills and better prepare for future interviews, while also providing you with a slicker pool of applicants. InterviewStream and MyInterview are two such examples of this technology.

4. Onboarding and beyond

The onboarding process is also evolving rapidly, with virtual onboarding tools and personalized experiences driven by data analytics and AI.

Digital onboarding platforms

Cloud-based platforms like BambooHR and Talmundo enable companies to centralize and streamline the onboarding process. New hires can access essential documents, complete paperwork, watch training videos, and connect with team members—all from a single platform.

These tools allow HR and managers to track progress, ensuring that new employees complete required tasks and receive necessary support during their initial weeks.

Virtual onboarding events

As remote work and distributed teams continue to gain traction as a standard in the workplace, companies are increasingly hosting virtual onboarding events to welcome new hires. Organizations use video conferencing tools to conduct virtual meet-and-greets, team-building exercises, and training sessions to help new employees feel connected and engaged from the start.

Personalized learning paths

AI-driven learning management systems (LMS) like Docebo and Cornerstone can create personalized learning paths for new hires based on their roles, responsibilities and skill sets.

By leveraging AI and data analytics, these systems can track progress and adapt training content to suit individual needs, ensuring that new employees are equipped with the necessary knowledge and skills for their roles.

Employee onboarding chatbots

AI-powered chatbots like Talla can assist new hires during the onboarding process by answering common questions, providing relevant information, and guiding them through required tasks.

These chatbots can be integrated into workplace communication platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams, offering real-time support and minimizing the need for new employees to contact HR or managers for help.

Social and collaborative learning

Digital tools like 360Learning and Degreed foster social and collaborative learning experiences for new hires. These platforms allow employees to share knowledge, ask questions, and collaborate on projects, enabling new team members to learn from their peers and build relationships within the organization.

The future of hiring tech

That’s a lot of tech already. But there’s more on the horizon – and ChatGPT and its cousins are really only at the cusp of it. Let’s look at the various other ways in which digital transformation of recruitment is continuing to grow:

Advanced AI-driven candidate matching

AI algorithms are growing to the point where they can predict the success of a candidate within a company based on data analysis of past employees’ performances. This could significantly improve the quality of hires and streamline the recruitment process, allowing you to focus on the human aspects of your role.

Virtual reality interviewing and onboarding

Virtual reality (VR) technology is already revolutionizing the hiring process. Candidates can be immersed in a virtual work environment, interacting with potential colleagues, and participating in real-life work scenarios before they even get the job. This provides you with valuable insights into a candidate’s ability to adapt and perform in their new role.

Augmented reality (AR) enhanced job previews

Likewise, augmented reality can be utilized to give candidates a more immersive preview of their potential work environment, from their desks to the company’s facilities. Candidates can use their smartphones or AR devices to explore their future workplace, interacting with digital information about company culture, benefits, and team structures.

This would allow candidates to make more informed decisions about accepting job offers and help you identify candidates who are genuinely excited about joining the company.

Blockchain-based credential verification

Blockchain technology can play a significant role in recruitment by streamlining the verification of candidates’ credentials, such as education, certifications and work experience. By using a decentralized, secure and tamper-proof system, you can quickly and accurately validate the qualifications of candidates.

This reduces hours spent on background checks and minimizes the risk of fraudulent claims.

Remote workforce management through IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) could play a vital role in managing remote workforces, as companies increasingly adopt flexible and remote work models. IoT devices and wearables could be used to monitor employee health, productivity, and engagement in real-time, providing valuable insights. This data could be used to create personalized support plans for employees, addressing their unique needs and preferences.

There’s plenty more, of course, but that’s just a taste of what’s happening now and in the near future.

Lessons from Michelangelo, Borg and Ford

Let’s step out of that tech rabbit hole for a moment, and consider some real-life lessons to help assuage fears that jobs will be taken over by artificial intelligence including in hiring teams. The reality is, AI can be your friend if you embrace it.

Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel

First, let’s look at one of history’s great painters and one of history’s equally great paintworks. While Michelangelo is famous for his work on the Sistine Chapel, he did not complete the masterpiece alone. He had a team of assistants to help him bring his vision to life. He consulted with them, worked with them to prepare the “canvas”, and so on. He still led the project and directed his teams to set the foundation for what ultimately became his masterpiece.

Likewise, for you, AI can be your assistant. It’ll take care of the other work and help you focus on the human aspects of your role, including fostering a positive candidate experience and ensuring that your teams are highly engaged.

Bjorn Borg and the wooden racket

When tennis legend Bjorn Borg made a comeback in 1991 after years in retirement, he chose to stick with his wooden racket rather than adopting the modern graphite rackets that had become the standard in the sport. His insistence on staying with outdated technology led to disappointing (and even embarrassing) results.

This is a reminder to stay up-to-date with – and ahead of – the latest technologies and trends in your area of work. If you don’t stay on top of your game, you’ll fall behind and miss out on top talent.

Henry Ford and the assembly line

Car titan Henry Ford revolutionized the manufacturing industry with his innovative assembly line, which dramatically increased efficiency and reduced production costs. Ford took inspiration from meat-packing plants and a grain mill conveyor belt to divide the labor into clear steps and to bring the work to the workers, thereby reducing time wasted in moving around and leading to mass production and cheaper cars.

Likewise, you can explore and adopt new technologies that can optimize your workflow and save you an incredible amount of time and hassle – and money.

AI isn’t a threat – it’s your ally

SWOT analysis is a common element of business strategy. Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats – hence, SWOT. Think about what you’re doing at work, and what your company’s doing. What are your strengths right now? What are your weaknesses? And what are the opportunities you can capitalize on to overcome those weaknesses?

The fourth one – the threat – is probably overplayed when it comes to AI. The infusion of AI in hiring need not be seen as a threat to the profession, but rather as an opportunity for growth and enhancement.

Don’t forget that the human touch continues to be a vital aspect of the hiring process, and AI technology is the tool to support and streamline your efforts.

It’s an exciting time. Embrace this age of digital transformation, including in hiring. Learn from the successes of Michelangelo and Henry Ford, and the failure of Bjorn Borg, and navigate this new road. The future of hiring sits squarely in the harmonious blend of technology and human skill. Master that balance, and you’ll do very well.

The post AI, ChatGPT and the human touch in hiring appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

You can dive in and watch the hour-long presentation or listen to the podcast  – which is enrapturing, informative and refreshingly optimistic. But we know not everyone has that time on their hands (after all, HR pros and recruiters have a busy job!), so we’ve broken Josh’s presentation into a list of 10 major takeaways.

1. Lesson #1: The pandemic is just the latest in a series of developments
2. Lesson #2: It all comes back to the people
3. Lesson #3: Leadership styles are changing – and evolving
4. Lesson #4: Human skills are valued more than ever
5. Lesson #5: Employee morale is no longer just about benefits
6. Lesson #6: DEI is big – but action and accountability are needed
7. Lesson #7: A safe space is a decisive space
8. Lesson #8: Develop and grow your people
9. Lesson #9: The internal talent marketplace is growing
10. Lesson #10: HR is at the core of all these trends

Top 10 HR trends for 2021

Wherever you are in the world, your life is likely impacted to some degree by the spread of COVID-19. Under that pandemic umbrella is a smorgasbord of other developments that affect your day-to-day work in HR and recruiting.

This means numerous paradigm shifts and a new, exciting road ahead for those of you in human resources. Here are the top HR trends for 2021, according to Josh Bersin:

Lesson #1: The pandemic is just the latest in a series of developments

It’s easy to think that COVID-19 is the reason for everything we’re seeing in our new world of work. Not so, says Josh. What we’re seeing now dates back to the financial crisis of 2008.

“There’s been a pretty steady evolution of digital transformation, political change, income inequality and job change,” Josh says. “Re-skilling, up-skilling, new job models, new job architectures, new organization models, a focus on the environment, the global climate issues, diversity inclusion equity, Black Lives Matter. I mean, it’s been a ton of stuff.”

He adds: “The pandemic really just accelerated every one of those issues and added well-being and resilience and mental health to that.”

Further reading for you: The disproportionate impact of the pandemic on females compared with males is widely noted – and that’s due to endemic imbalances in the system that existed prior to COVID-19 and will continue to exist afterwards.

Lesson #2: It all comes back to the people

Noted businessman and philanthropist Marcus Lemonis puts it succinctly: “People are the core of every business. Businesses are based on relationships, and relationships are based on people. I would go to an average restaurant run by amazing people over an outstanding restaurant run by awful people.”

Josh emphasized that as another major HR trend for 2021.

“Everything that’s happened in business to make the company more competitive has impacted the people agenda,” says Josh, predicting that this human-centric spirit will become far more mainstream for businesses going forward.

“One way to think about the next year or two is shifting from a business-centered view of your company, where it’s all about the business strategy and the business goals and the business metrics and the business results to the human side of that.”

The same applies for challenges and problems that arise in every business.

“Where our revenue is low, our profits are low, we have an error, we lost an account, we lost a client, we’re not making enough money, there’s always people problems underneath it,” Josh says.

“This has been kind of an exciting year from that standpoint because we’ve been able to talk about the people side of business as really a part of survival.”

Further reading for you: Data shows employee well-being has tangible business benefits. Take care of your employees. Learn how you can do that in your own work.

Lesson #3: Leadership styles are changing – and evolving

Following up on the lesson above, if you’re putting people front and center when thinking about business and human resources, that ultimately means a change in leadership styles.

Josh points out that about a decade ago, one of the most popular topics in HR was to focus on the internal part of work as human performance.

“Well, that went mainstream last year,” he says.”CEOs, board rooms, CHROs have all been focused on mental, physical, financial, emotional health. And this is going to be part of the workforce going forward as is a different way of thinking about leadership.”

The pandemic has a significant role in that, due to the debilitating effects on the work-life balance among other things.

“We’ve learned now in this particular year, especially coming out of last year, that if we aren’t forgiving and kind, and flexible and empathetic, we’re not going to have a company. People aren’t going to come to work. They’re not going to be able to work. So this is a big change.”

Further reading for you: Learn more about what inclusive leadership means, how to identify leadership skills in candidates, and how leaders and managers can foster a more supportive work environment during these stressful times and beyond.

Lesson #4: Human skills are valued more than ever

It’s not just about leadership styles. Human skills are growing in value and coveted more now, says Josh.

“Regardless of the industry or the company you are in, the human skills, the human capabilities to lead, empathize, care for people, sell are organized, inspire are basically all you have,” says Josh. “That really is what your company is.”

He’s quick to point out that there’s an enduring aspect to focusing on human skills – which contributes to the overall sustainability of a business.

“You have intellectual property. Yes, you have software. Yes, you have a brand. Yes, you have products, all that. But those actually decay pretty quickly,” he says.

“If you look at the demand for skills among CEOs, CEOs want human skills. They want power skills, they want skills and the ability to prioritize, to lead, to work in a team, to be flexible, adaptable. Learning agility is a skill, ethics, integrity. These are the things that people really want.”

Josh also shows data that proves the value of those soft skills in terms of compensation – those with a good demonstration of skills in that area tend to earn more.

“If you look at the history of wages by different job categories, the jobs that have increased in demand and increased in wages are not engineering jobs per se. I mean, if you’re in the right engineering discipline, you’ve been doing fine.

“But really it’s what we call high social high math or high social low math management, leadership, project leadership, and people that can do both. People that have technical skills and good human skills.”

Further reading for you: Learn more about soft skills, how they differ from hard skills, and how you can assess soft skills in an interview.

Lesson #5: Employee morale is no longer just about benefits

Another major shift that will continue going forward is the evolution of employee well-being from health to what he terms as ‘total performance’. Josh says there’s been a lot of research on this topic and numerous vendors and services that help in that area – and he’s careful to point out that it’s not just about benefits.

“What really matters is things that help people do their jobs in more productive ways. […] Most people, the reason they enjoy work is they enjoy the work and they enjoy the people at work. And if they can’t get their job done because they’re tired or somebody is getting up in the middle of the night sending them emails, or they don’t have the right skills, they’re not happy.”

“So the well-being agenda is moving from one of cost reduction and insurance costs, which is where it started to focus on total performance. And that’s a really positive thing to me for business.”

He adds that it’s going beyond just work-focused initiatives. “It’s really also reaching into the ideas of citizenship and volunteerism and taking care of society.”

When you look at the data for people under 35, he points out that younger workers are very aware of social issues – and they want to be a part of the solution for that.

“And so, part of well-being at work is also giving people an opportunity to give back, giving people an opportunity to participate in local community events. And so there’s a sort of evolving growth of the well-being strategy and companies to cover all those topics.”

The traditional worker’s contract – i.e. an employee comes to work for a set number of hours in exchange for payment – is no longer sufficient. It goes far beyond that now.

“Purpose and mission really gives people inspiration and energy at work.”

Further reading for you: Learn how companies have built a sense of shared purpose and community during the pandemic.

Lesson #6: DEI is big – but action and accountability are needed

The evolution of diversity, equity and inclusion was a major paradigm shift in 2020, and that will continue in 2021 and beyond.

“The number-one driver of employee engagement is belonging. I feel that I belong at work. I feel comfortable with my team. I feel like people listen to me, that’s really about inclusion.”

Josh emphasizes the importance of taking action, listing five things you can do in HR to create that inclusive culture.

“You have to listen to people. You have to really strengthen HR capabilities. […] You need to make sure senior leadership are committed to a diverse and inclusive business, not just an HR program or a bunch of HR practices. You need to measure it and you need to hold yourself accountable.”

He also shared two examples of tangible action and accountability from the very top, the first being McDonald’s being fully transparent about their diversity metrics – and more so, holding their leaders accountable for diversity via their pay.

“This is what it takes, because this is a business strategy, not an HR strategy,” Josh points out.

He then referenced the Biden administration as an excellent example of what to think about in terms of DEI for the year ahead. He described how they didn’t simply create a program about equity in the United States, but that everything they do in their work is about equity.

Josh described how the administration deals with the transportation infrastructure, with unemployment, healthcare, the vaccines and their rollout, and so on.

“Everything has to be done in an inclusive way,” Josh says. “And we have to look for underrepresented or underprivileged people in an equal way to everyone else.”

He adds that this is what’s really going on in companies. “This is going to be a massive theme continuing through the next year.”

Further reading for you: Learn how to build a DEI strategy in your organization and popular DEI action items to get you started.

Lesson #7: A safe space is a decisive space

A crucial component of DEI – in this case, inclusion – is that of psychological safety. It’s a core element of employee experience (EX) and engagement, Josh says.

He refers to a book by Harvard scholar Amy Edmondson called The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Although a few years old now, Josh says it’s especially relevant right now. He refers specifically to a study of healthcare providers and teams, where Amy determined that the highest patient outcomes were the ones with the most number of problems.

On the surface, he says, that didn’t make sense.

“[But when Amy] got under the covers, she realized, they didn’t have more problems, but they talked about the problems. They expose the problems. They discuss them. They had a high degree of psychological safety. Psychological safety means you can speak up and people will listen.”

In short, psychological safety is described as “a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.”

Josh then points to a quadrant graph from Amy’s book:

“Companies operate in different quadrants here. We have a client who’s in the upper left quadrant where they actually do not have a psychologically safe environment. Everybody is very nice, but you’re not allowed to speak up. And they’re really trying to change that because they have to move faster and they’re evolving into the cloud and some other things.”

This is a huge part of DEI in 2021, Josh says, adding that it “is not just creating a great diversity inclusion program, but making sure that you have a culture where people can speak up and you can get the information you need to make decisions more quickly.”

Further reading for you: Learn how you can build a psychologically safe workplace.

Lesson #8: Develop and grow your people

Again, in the same theme that your company is made up of humans – it’s crucial to ensure your employees and colleagues stay motivated and interested in contributing to your overall mission. Learning and development (L&D) is a key aspect of this, says Josh.

“This is one of the biggest investment areas of HR. Every year, there’s more research on why we have to do more re-skilling and up-skilling.

“Last year, most companies told me they consumed far more learning than they ever anticipated, and people are happier and more productive and more successful when they’re learning.”

He says the reason for this is purely human. People are learning animals. “And when you’re not learning, you’re not happy.”

“So think about learning as much more than a training problem. It’s really part of your entire employee experience.”

What’s exciting about this for HR practitioners is that you as an HR professional can play a larger role in your company’s growth.

“[You] need to decide what the critical business capabilities are for your company, especially if you’re doing recruiting.

“And from them, determine what skills you want to develop or source in people, and you get to decide what the business capabilities are.”

Further reading for you: A recent TalentLMS survey verifies that L&D is booming as a crucial tool in supporting employee experience. You can also kick things off by hiring a dedicated L&D leader for your organization.

Lesson #9: The internal talent marketplace is growing

In tandem with L&D as a surging trend in 2021 is the rise of the internal talent marketplace.

“We learned from the pandemic that we can move people around inside the company pretty quickly, and they adapt pretty fast,” Josh says. “Human beings are very, very adaptable animals. So I think we’ve really gotten sort of a dose of really awakening that the workforce is a lot more resilient than we maybe ever thought.”

Josh points to the growth of a management structure where many employees are actually in management and working at the same time – in effect, being a playing coach. The result is that companies are becoming more dynamic and simplifying their job architectures and job descriptions, making them less specific to accommodate the fluidly changing roles within a company.

“[What this] really turns companies into is an internal talent marketplace. And in a talent marketplace, you as a recruiter are recruiting inside as well as outside.”

Josh doubles down on the message that recruiters and HR practitioners can look inside the company as well as in the overall talent market for those eligible for a job opening. And the positions vacated by those people – those are opportunities for others within a company to move in as well.

Again, there’s value in L&D if you’re recruiting internally. You want to invest in your employees’ development and education. Not only does it strengthen employee loyalty and keeps turnover low, it also makes for a stronger, more resilient employee base that can fill gaps as quickly as they arise within a business.

“That’s really going mainstream,” Josh says.

Further reading for you: Check out our pros and cons of internal recruitment, as well as a tutorial on how to build a successful internal recruitment strategy.

Lesson #10: HR is at the core of all these trends

And you know what? Josh says HR is at the center of all of this. If you’re in HR, your role has become that much more important and will continue to be so going forward. And being relevant means being even more resilient that you ever have been.

“Everything in the area of talent and recruiting and learning and development and pay is changing. And you can’t just kind of go to a course and learn how to do it, and then do it,” he says.

“You need to learn the basics of it and then learn how other companies are doing it and learn about what’s unique inside your company and the culture and business strategies inside your company, and then design something.”

Your own development in HR

This essentially means a re-skilling of your role as an HR practitioner, Josh says, adding that the HR role is evolving to that of a full-stack professional.

“We need to understand the domains of HR. We need to understand how to be good consultants. We need to understand the business and the industry and the competitive drivers in our company. […] And we need to understand how to be leaders, how to interact with leaders and how to develop leaders. And that’s a lot.”

Technology is your friend

This means adding technology to your workflow in order to flourish, Josh says.

“Companies have spent a lot of time and will continue to spend a lot of time on HR tech. And more and more of the energy in the HR tech space is going into this red area, which I call the employee experience layer, making the systems easier to use, making them more intelligent, allowing you to interact with them on a chatbot or by voice, or more recommendations from the system on what you want to do.”

And you needn’t worry about tech taking over your job. Quite the opposite, especially in recruitment.

“You in recruiting are just like everybody else. You’re getting augmented; you’re not getting replaced.”

Josh lists three major areas where tech can be a significant asset.

“Sourcing – most of these platforms, like Workable, can find candidates more quickly and better qualified candidates. […] The second is screening, chatbots and intelligent screening tools can quickly weed out people that are just the wrong fit and they can self-select.

“And the third is in the area of assessments, which is massive.”

Listen to your colleagues

The growth of employee experience (EX) as a crucial element of HR work means establishing a two-way street of communication between yourself and your colleagues.

“We need to listen to people and let them tell us. So, open meetings, surveys, lots and lots of crowdsourcing activities. These are really part of the EX 2.0. […] The EX market has become a market of continuous listening.”

Josh adds that this is something we’ve already been doing with customers on a regular basis – so this practice of listening has grown to include your employees as well.

“I mean, you don’t survey the customers once every 10 years. You try to serve the customers maybe every quarter, if you can, or you ask the salespeople, what are people saying about our products? Or why are they returning them? Or why are they not buying them? We need that data, and we need it in HR too.”

Further reading for you: Well, Josh says it better in the next section, so we’ll let him take it from here on.

Your job is crucial to the company

Josh closes things out in his presentation on HR trends for 2021 by reaffirming the importance of a recruiter role in all this. Recruiting, he says, is the most important thing that happens in a company.

“If you don’t recruit the right people, forget everything else. You can’t just train people that are the wrong fit for your company, the wrong culture fit, the wrong skill set, the wrong background,” he stresses. “Your ability to understand the organization and operate in an empowered way to find the right people is critical.”

Josh shares an anecdote from his research on talent acquisition several years ago.

“I had talked to the head of recruiting at a large oil company. And I asked him just out of the blue; ‘Is there any one thing that you think is the most important characteristic of a high performer when you recruit them? Is it degree, experience, culture, age, personality, intelligence, what is it?’

“He said, ‘It’s the recruiter.’ I said, ‘Why, what are you talking about?’ He said, ‘Great recruiters hire great people.’ I thought, well, that’s actually a pretty good point.”

The post Josh Bersin’s recruiting and HR trends for the future appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Females want more flexibility

First, we found differences by gender identity when asking about top attractors for a new opportunity. Those identifying as male are attracted to more job-specific factors including compensation of course (67.3% vs. 61.8%), clarity of job role (23.3% vs. 19.1%) and especially job security (39.4% vs. 25.5%).

Those identifying as female pointed to factors not necessarily about the actual day-to-day job itself, but rather about the supportive aspects of working life. For instance, if a mother is able to leave work early to pick up her kids or meet other home life obligations – all with the express support and encouragement of their employer – that’s hugely valuable for them.

The data shows this: work flexibility (44% vs. 31.6%) and moral / emotional support from the company (13.6% vs. 9.4%) are more important for females than males.

This is not to suggest that job-specific factors are not important to those identifying as female – rather, these responses indicate that there are other needs that have to be met in order to make their working arrangement feasible and better aligned with their personal needs and priorities.

“With more moms in the workforce than ever, there is flexibility lacking in schedules to accommodate children related needs. Child care is astronomical and salaries are not reflecting that.”

Minorities want more support

One of the demographic questions we asked in the survey was; “Do you identify as a member of a minority group (be it race, ethnicity, language, religion, country of origin, sexual orientation, gender, or another characteristic)?”. A full third (33%) say they do, compared with 61.6% who say they don’t, and 5.3% prefer not to say. So we also looked at responses based on those answers.

We found significant differences in minority status here as well, particularly that compensation is more important for non-minorities than it is for minorities (67.9% vs. 55.1%).

So, what’s more important in a new job opportunity for someone who identifies as a minority? Training & development (18.9% vs. 13.5%) and moral / emotional support from their company (11.4% vs. 6.1%) top the list in terms of how much they differ from non-minority answers.

Likewise, when asked about what their current employer could do to improve employee experience, minorities pointed to career growth (38.7% vs. 28.5%), work flexibility (32.3% vs. 23.5%) and day-to-day work support (21.5% vs. 14.9%) as areas in need of improvement.

Of those who are open to other opportunities, those identifying as a minority are much more likely to pick “I need more meaning in my work” (23.8% vs. 16%) as a reason for doing so.

This isn’t to suggest that compensation isn’t important for someone who identifies as a minority – it, as said above, remains the top factor across all groups. It’s also important to note that the question of “Why are you looking for – or open to – new opportunities?” asked respondents to pick just one reason from a list, whereas for the other questions, they could choose up to three items. So if they must choose one priority and disregard all others, compensation will generally top the list.

Compensation aside, these results indicate that minorities are more likely to want support from their employer in other areas than non-minorities. Plus, there’s a clear need to feel more engaged in their work – likewise something that can be delivered by a thoughtful and empathetic employer as much as the role itself. The overall amplification of voices highlighting DEI in society may be a factor in all that.

Compensation grows with age

Likewise, we found differences across ages. Salary is more valued in older generations, whereas career growth opportunities tend to be more valued by younger generations. Those in the 21-29 age bracket ranked salary significantly less than those in the 40-49 and 50-59 age brackets (51% vs. 67.9% and 69.9% respectively).

Career growth opportunities trends the opposite direction, with those in the 21-29 and 30-39 age brackets valuing that higher than those in the 50-59 age bracket (40.7% vs. 33.1%).

This makes sense, as those in older generations will tend to be past the peak of their career development and starting to migrate out of the workforce, while those in younger generations may see the opportunity to grow in a career as having much stronger long-term benefit than straight-up compensation.

Plus, younger generations tend to have fewer financial obligations than their older, more settled counterparts – and therefore can be more flexible in what they need in a job.

Why is all this stuff important?

Let’s face facts. Money makes the world go around. It’s also a powerful measuring stick when showing the value you place on what someone brings to your company. Also, the correlation between money and happiness has been established in studies, including a widely cited one by Matthew Killingsworth of Penn’s Wharton School in Philadelphia.

And the reason why, says Killingsworth:

“When you have more money, you have more choices about how to live your life. You can likely see this in the pandemic. People living paycheck to paycheck who lose their job might need to take the first available job to stay afloat, even if it’s one they dislike. People with a financial cushion can wait for one that’s a better fit. Across decisions big and small, having more money gives a person more choices and a greater sense of autonomy.”

More choices, more autonomy, more command over all aspects of life. Keep that thought in mind as you proceed in your talent attraction game.

This is an excerpt from our Great Discontent survey report – want to read the whole thing? Check it out here.

The post Not everyone in the US values the same things in a job appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Now, with restrictions lifting or already lifted in many countries – including Denmark – there are questions on best practices for a return to office and a relatively normal standard of work. Since Denmark is ahead of the so-called flattened curve, we sat down with Dave to talk about his company’s approach to a reboarding strategy in the workplace.

These were the main learnings from our conversation:

1. Don’t disrupt the operations

To say the COVID-19 crisis has been disruptive to business is putting it mildly. Small businesses are hurting significantly according to a Business.com survey, and even larger companies are pushing back on or cancelling investments according to a PwC survey of CFOs in early May.

Ørsted focuses on energy, which can’t be scaled back or adapted to a remote workplace so easily as businesses in other industries. So the survival options available to others aren’t as available to Orsted. Dave thinks about this when considering myriad changes to work operations:

“We generate substantial amounts of electricity in the markets we serve and it’s actually making sure that we continue to generate electricity. So [this] is considered [essential] work. Those who are responsible for operating and maintaining offshore wind farms are still working,” David says. “We’re getting quite a bit of work to do, a lot to work to ensure social distancing, good hygiene and these kinds of things as well so those people can carry on working. We make safety our top priority, and that’s remained at the forefront of our minds.”

Also, he adds, not everyone is able to work from home for logistical reasons. Dave is aware of that and takes this into consideration when determining who works from home and who doesn’t in the return to office.

“[T]here are office workers like me who are working from home. [But] offshore wind technicians are still working offshore because their job needs to be done at the site.”

Ultimately, Dave’s keeping his eye on the prize – business continuity. In the energy industry, you have to keep those wheels turning no matter what changes are made in operations.

“Our business has been really clear in saying that the business continues. We don’t stop. We continue what we’re doing. So in many ways, our way of working has changed, but our work hasn’t changed.”

2. We’re learning as we go

The COVID-19 phenomenon and its economic impact has been called largely unprecedented – particularly the impact it’s had on how modern-day society operates. It’s still up in the air how we’ll return to office and some semblance of normalcy – if it even happens – and that’s because we have no experience to draw from.

As stated at ChiefLearningOfficer.com: “Reboarding is not ‘unpausing’ the TV because you shut it off during coronavirus. It’s not the same anymore; the TV show is new.”

Dave acknowledges this reality. We’re not returning to the way things were.

“Even when a country starts to ease out of lockdown, I think the workplace will continue to look different for a prolonged period. Like everyone else, we’re learning as we go.”

It’s about finding a new way to do things. And to make it more complicated, as the saying goes, we’re trying to change the tires while the car’s still moving. Digital transformation is only one part of the equation. There are other challenges and changes coming, according to Dave, who says his company’s looking at new ways of collaboration while managing to continue doing things in a productive way.

3. Health above all

A recent Qualtrics survey finds that two out of three people surveyed in the American workforce aren’t feeling comfortable about the idea of returning to office life, with their health and safety at the core of that concern. What’s more, if they absolutely must return to the office, the majority of those surveyed expect their company to take strict precautions to ensure the workplace is safe for employees – including strict guidelines around sanitation (deep cleanings, facemasks) and an updated sick leave policy.

That isn’t just on Dave’s radar – it’s a major focal point for him.

“I want to make sure that the most important thing is keeping our colleagues safe,” says Dave. “That’s our top priority rather than anything else.”

It’s not just about reducing the risk of infection through sanitizing the workplace and redesigning it to minimize the so-called risks of social contact. Mental wellbeing has risen in importance for many – with significant spikes in stress levels and calls to mental health hotlines being reported.

Above all, caring for your workforce’s wellbeing is not only a good gesture – it also positively impacts business productivity.

4. Introduce strict sanitation protocols at work

Like many other companies also consciously aware of the emphasis on employee health, Ørsted’s implementing new processes and protocols to minimize the risk of COVID-19 in the company’s workforce. Some of it is pretty straightforward stuff, as Dave explains:

“We have certain things where we expected to touch surfaces, things like coffee machines and door handles and photocopiers and that sort of thing. So we will say that if you touch one of those things, we’ll probably turn the coffee machines off, but if you touch a door handle wash your hands, use hand gel, something like that to sanitize your hands.”

Dave’s also thinking about getting rid of the open-office setup and introducing a different kind of desk-sharing system – especially since hot desking is being ushered out as a standard in workplaces, even by law in some jurisdictions.

In the office, social distancing will be the norm. Canteens (eating areas) and shared tables at lunch will no longer be in the workplace. Instead, David says, “you’re all given food in a box, which you can take back to your desk and eat it there rather than all being out in open spaces. When we return to canteens, this will be socially distanced so we can keep our employees safe”.

Physical movement will also be limited within the building – employees will be required to stay at their own floor, using only the bathrooms and other facilities on that floor. Meetings will more often be virtual using video tools such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Google Meet rather than in person, even if colleagues are physically in the same area together.

There’s also going to be a reduction in workplace density, by switching from office-first to remote-first – for the time being, at least.

“The majority of our colleagues will continue to work from home for the foreseeable future. And so we have done it in Denmark on an opt-in basis.”

But, Dave notes, not all workers are able to simply move to a work-from-home model:

“Some of our colleagues have needed to return to the office earlier. Some of the reasons have been that we have people working on critical projects that require certain IT resources and traders who manage our market exposure, so they need particular equipment.”

5. Stagger your WFHs and commutes

When you’re limited to 25% capacity in the workplace according to Dave, that means just one in four of your talent can be physically present at work at any given time. Which brings forward another question: who do you bring back to the workplace first?

For Dave, the priority are those who need to be onsite to work in any capacity. Next are the ones whose options are limited on the home front.

“For some people, their home Internet is not very good, or the work setting isn’t great. So they have to come back early.”

Those with small children are also being considered. Nurseries and daycares are now reopened in Denmark, making return to office easier for those working parents.

But the challenges aren’t restricted to office density or even compliance for that matter. There are other logistics to think about as well for Ørsted in keeping employee health at top of mind.

Avoid the crush

When employees return to office, another reality sinks in: the ‘rush-hour bottleneck’. Dave considers this a major factor in logistics. In Denmark, he says cycling is a popular commuting option – but if everyone, including him, was to start cycling to work, that increased density along bike routes would have to be considered.

So, he’s looking at a couple of solutions to get around that potential glut of commuting cyclists:

“Rather than everyone trying to come to work at nine, some people will come early, some people will come at normal times, some will come later.”

In London, which doesn’t even register in the top 20 most bike-friendly cities in the world according to the aptly titled Copenhagenize Index for 2019 (spoiler: Copenhagen ranks #1), the London Underground is usually the travel option. Dave notes that packing into those trains doesn’t make a lot of sense now especially given London’s huge population, so you have to give your workers some control over making the right decisions in reducing their potential exposure to COVID-19 on returning to the office:

“We would have to find a way in which physical distancing can continue for those who travel by public transportation… We talk about whether they want to go back to the office. Back to work is opt-in.”

And this means HR should inform colleagues to set expectations for being present at work with their managers, and that messaging must come from the top.

“We have regular communications from our executive committee and from our managers and our teams. And there’s already clear communication in the business about [that].”

Dave notes that a number of his senior leadership have already returned to the office, reminding us of the importance of leadership setting an example. “The reason why we want to get some senior leaders back in the office is to send the signal that we are slowly returning to normal.”

Keep things flexible

Flexibility around hours and working patterns is especially important in these times, says Dave. It’s normal for people to work from home one or two days a week in the UK, he adds, whereas in Denmark, it required more cultural adaptation:

“In Denmark it was considered quite unusual [previously], whereas now we see that people can be productive when working from home as well.”

Dave is quick to remind us that flexibility isn’t just about opting to work from home or come to the office – it’s also about working hours, empowering employees to set their own hours and decide what works best for themselves.

6. Tech can solve many issues

Business travel was an Ørsted staple for the longest time – both for Dave himself and for his colleagues. Now, of course, travel has been scaled back significantly – and this has led to a company-wide rethink of priorities:

“I think we are re-evaluating how much business travel is really necessary, and actually how much communication we can do virtually via video,” David explains. “That’s one of the things that we’re already doing; how can we find a way that we don’t always travel face to face and we do more by video, more digitally? We also want to be a leader here based on our green ambitions.”

Hiring and onboarding

Ørsted is a multinational company, with some 6,500 employees spread across eight offices in six countries, so it makes sense that their hiring and onboarding needs to be a multinational effort as well. That pushes the need for digitization of internal operations to a higher platform – including onboarding and introductory trainings, says Dave.

Hiring hasn’t stopped, or even slowed down for that matter, which heightens the urgency to digitize the whole recruitment process to maintain its efficiency:

“That is due to the nature of the industry we’re working,” says Dave, ”and because our company shouldn’t have any changes to its financial performance and shift as a result of COVID-19.”

7. Tech also empowers action

COVID-19 is a serious matter, and it has unearthed many of the issues in the way we operate as a broader society, be it in the workplace or elsewhere. It’s called for changes in our work processes by elevating remote work to be as equally effective as in-office work.

Going deeper, it’s also shed light on the limitations and faults in the way we did things before. The Black Lives Matter phenomenon is not a new one – but it’s been drastically amplified alongside the need for a healthier society. It’s resulted in greater emphasis on diversity in hiring and inclusion in the workplace, and companies worldwide are actively taking steps to make that happen.

The digitization of the recruitment process, interestingly, creates an opportunity to pursue diversity in greater depth, Dave suggests. Hiring and onboarding virtually means you can go broader in your candidate outreach. For instance, Dave’s hiring pool is no longer restricted to Denmark and he’s now able to work with international colleagues as well:

“We have colleagues joining us [from] Taiwan and Japan rather than going to Denmark and then fly back. We want to actually help them find a way to make it really inclusive for everybody.”

Side note: that opportunity to build remote connections was also identified by SmartBug Media in their own efforts to unify teams remotely. Read more about it.

8. Be mindful of the big picture

A more inclusive work culture is just one of the paradigm shifts that could be happening as part of the COVID-19 crisis. Dave is attuned to the fact that COVID-19 is a catalyst for even deeper shifts to happen:

“Our workplace like many other workplaces, is set up pre-COVID-19. So if we needed to talk about long-term changing of working patterns, then the way the workplace looks would be quite different, I think. But, at the moment, we haven’t got to that level of thinking yet.” Dave adds that this is because we’re still in survival mode and implementing stopgap solutions.

So when do we start that ‘rethinking’? Dave suggests giving it a couple of months before making those long-term modifications “For example, we’ve said I counted six desks. One is available for work. Whereas if we said long term, these desks need to be at least two meters apart. We’d have to reconfigure the workplace,” he says.

Great, but those are the easy details. The bigger questions remain: how do we adapt to this new way of working to reflect this new reality, while making sure we’re still building connections with each other?

“That’s one of the biggest learnings; how can we make things less impersonal? And that’s been our biggest challenge, I think, starting from my side. It says how we think about what’s right.”

So what it comes down to in the end is how to adapt to that new world of work. Dave says he’s concentrating on this question: “How do we then support each other in this different way of working?“

That’s the big picture there. We humans are social animals, and physical distancing makes it more difficult for us to work together. Or does it? We have the technology and versatility to continue working together – Dave Vinton and Ørsted have made that clear. With the right kind of thinking and planning in place, we may just get through this yet.

End note: This article is the result of an in-depth interview carried out by Christina Pavlou.

The post The winds of change: return to office in the face of COVID-19 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

7 stats on gender and COVID-19

Here are seven eye-opening stats for you on how women have are uniquely affected, shedding light on COVID-19 and its impact on gender equality.

Jump to the full infographic – or download it for yourself here.

1. Unbalanced scales

4.5% of women’s employment is at risk, compared with 3.8% of men’s employment according to McKinsey – as women work more in industries affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

2. A mother’s burden

Mothers are more likely than fathers to scale back or consider leaving their job during the pandemic, the World Economic Forum reports. They found that 17% of mothers reported a reduction in their work hours, compared with just 9% of fathers who reported the same.

3. Where’s the support?

More black women report that they don’t feel supported by their manager, compared with women and men of other races. According to a report collaboration from McKinsey and LeanIn.org, 15% of black women reported that they don’t feel supported by their manager at work.

4. Burning the candle at both ends

Women in senior-level positions report higher levels of exhaustion and burnout than men, with 54% vs. 41% citing exhaustion and 39% vs. 29% citing burnout according to the World Economic Forum. This is likely due to a greater stress at both ends of the work-life balance as a consequence of the pandemic.

5. A matter of importance

According to Workable’s survey on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the workplace, 96.6% of women state that DEI in the workplace is important to them.

6. Strong leadership

The Harvard Business Review reported that women are rated as being more effective leaders than men during the COVID-19 crisis, with 57.2% of respondents in a survey saying women ranked positively in overall leadership effectiveness ratings, compared with 51.5% for men.

7. … and maybe this is why

Senior-level women are more likely than men to practice allyship at work, including active listening and mentorship according to McKinsey and LeanIn.org.

Important reminder: the pandemic isn’t solely to blame for the gender imbalance. It simply exposed the imbalances that have existed in the system for a long time, and we need to continue the conversation even after the pandemic is over.

We’ve got a lot of work to do yet to bridge the chasm – and it goes far beyond gender and COVID.

Progress depends on persistence – let’s keep at it.

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Related content:

Gender inequality in the workplace: A lack of women in leadership

Gender inclusion in the workplace: Going beyond diversity

Why should employers care about the gender pay gap?

The post Gender and COVID-19: 7 stats on women at work in 2021 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Females want more flexibility

First, we found differences by gender identity. Those identifying as male lean to factors around longevity and ascension, such as job security (43.7% vs. 36.1%) and career growth opportunities (30.8% vs. 26.1%), when thinking about what would lure them to a new opportunity.

Those identifying as female pointed to factors not necessarily about the actual day-to-day job itself, but rather about the supportive aspects of working life. For instance, if a mother is able to leave work early to pick up her kids or meet other home life obligations – all with the express support and encouragement of their employer – that’s hugely valuable for them.

The data shows this: work flexibility (47% vs. 39.3%) and moral / emotional support from the company (13.7% vs. 9.3%) are more important for females in the UK than for males. Day-to-day work support also is preferred more by females – 11.2% choose this attractor compared with 8.1% of males.

The priority of compensation doesn’t differ all that much – both genders ranked it equally high (71.7% for males, 69.5% for females).

This is not to suggest that career growth and job security aren’t important to those identifying as female – rather, these responses indicate that there are other needs that have to be met in order to make their working arrangement feasible and better aligned with their personal needs and priorities.

Minorities want more support

One of the demographic questions we asked in the survey was; “Do you identify as a member of a minority group (be it race, ethnicity, language, religion, country of origin, sexual orientation, gender, or another characteristic)?”. Three out of 10 (30.9%) say they do, compared with 66.1% who say they don’t, and 3% prefer not to say. So we also looked at responses based on those answers.

We found significant differences in minority status when asking about top attractors to a new job. Those identifying as a minority placed less priority on the most popular items than their non-minority peers, particularly compensation (58.7%% vs. 75.2%). We also found significant differences in work flexibility (36.8% vs, 46.8%) and job security (35.5% vs. 41.7%).

So, what’s more important in a new job opportunity for someone who identifies as a minority? Career growth opportunities (35.5% vs. 25.7%) is a big one, followed by training & development (25.2% vs. 21.1%).

Although not a popular overall item, moral / emotional support from their company (14.8% vs. 6.9%) is still a much higher priority for minority respondents than for non-minority respondents.

Likewise, when asked about what their current employer could do to improve employee experience, minorities are twice as likely to want more clarity of job role and responsibilities (28% vs. 13.3%), and more likely to want better career growth opportunities (39.2% vs. 27.6%).

Again, this doesn’t mean that salary isn’t important for those identifying as minorities. In fact, it’s actually more so. When asked to choose just one reason why they’re looking for – or open to – new opportunities, three out of five (59.5%) picked compensation, compared with half (50.6%) of non-minorities.

“I need more meaning in my work” is also a more popular reason for minorities than non-minorities (26% vs. 20%), and “I need more support in my work” is likewise a higher priority (13.7% vs. 6.4%).

On the flip side, non-minorities are more likely to say they don’t feel valued in their present capacity (15.3% vs. 10.7%).

This suggests that minorities in the UK are more likely to want support from their employer in other areas in addition to compensation. There’s also a need to find more meaning in work, something that can also be delivered by a thoughtful and supportive employer who values its people.

Compensation grows with age

Likewise, we found differences across ages among UK workers. Salary is more valued in older generations, whereas career growth opportunities are more valued by younger generations. Those in the combined 21-39 age bracket ranked salary less than those in the 40-59 age brackets did (66.9%-67.9% vs. 71.5%-77.6%).

Career growth opportunities trends sharply in the opposite direction, with those in the 21-29 age bracket valuing that significantly higher than those in the combined 40-59 age bracket (39.3% vs. 24.3%-24.7%).

Younger generations also lean to training and development whereas their older peers are more aligned with the need for job security.

This makes sense, as those in older generations will tend to be past the peak of their career development and starting to migrate out of the workforce – perhaps increasing the need to build up their financial support base as they prepare for retirement.

Younger generations, on the other hand, are heavily inclined towards progressing in their career with training & development being a logical ingredient in that.

Why is all this stuff important?

Let’s face facts. Money makes the world go around. It’s also a powerful measuring stick when showing the value you place on what someone brings to your company. Also, the correlation between money and happiness has been strongly established, including in a comprehensive survey carried out in 2016.

And the reason why, says study author Matthew Killingsworth of Penn’s Wharton School, who carried out a similar study in the US:

“When you have more money, you have more choices about how to live your life. You can likely see this in the pandemic. People living paycheque to paycheque who lose their job might need to take the first available job to stay afloat, even if it’s one they dislike. People with a financial cushion can wait for one that’s a better fit. Across decisions big and small, having more money gives a person more choices and a greater sense of autonomy.”

More choices, more autonomy, more command over all aspects of life. Keep that thought in mind as you proceed in your talent attraction game.

This is an excerpt from our Great Discontent survey report – want to read the whole thing? Check it out here.

The post Different UK workers appreciate different things in a job appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

The post COVID-19 and gender equality: The conversation needs to keep going appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

As an HR practitioner or SMB employer, you’re probably trying to figure out the potential of AI in enhancing human skills and collaboration – especially since this is crucial for staying competitive in today’s rapidly evolving business landscape.

Let’s look at how quickly AI adoption is growing in business. According to a 2022 report by McKinsey & Company, roughly half to three-fifths of all businesses reported that they adopted at least one AI technology in at least one function in annual studies dating back to 2017.

This is probably obvious: this percentage will likely increase dramatically in 2023.

This widespread adoption underscores the growing recognition of AI’s transformative potential and its ability to increase efficiency, productivity and innovation.

But here’s the thing – AI in the workplace isn’t about mere automation of processes. It’s not always about plug-and-play so you can go to the beach.

Rather, when implemented effectively, AI can empower employees to develop new skills, foster effective collaboration and make better-informed decisions. A 2020 report by PwC found that AI could contribute up to $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030, with much of this value stemming from its potential to enhance human capabilities.

So, it’s worth a deep dive into how AI can enhance human skills and collaboration at work.

AI improving human skills

Again, AI isn’t about mere automation and optimization. It’s also going to enhance human skills – including personalized learning and personal development, plus improved decision-making. Your business can leverage AI’s capabilities to empower your colleagues to grow, innovate and shine in their roles.

Personalized L&D

AI-powered learning platforms, such as LinkedIn Learning and Coursera, enable employees to access customized learning experiences tailored to their unique needs and goals. AI can now analyze existing skillsets, job roles and performance data to recommend relevant courses and resources to help employees grow professionally.

This is huge in terms of employee engagement and retention. A 2018 LinkedIn survey found that 94% of employees would stay at a company longer if it invested in their professional development. And a TalentLMS survey in late 2021 found that 62% of US tech workers are motivated by training and learning. The payoff is clear.

More so, upskilling to meet new tech developments at work is crucial for success – a 2020 World Economic Forum (WEF) report predicted that by 2025, 50% of all employees will require reskilling due to the adoption of new technologies like AI. Soft skills such as agility, adaptation and autonomous work are becoming even more important.

Decision-making with data-driven insights

Decision-making is another area where AI can enhance human skills. Business decisions are increasingly data-driven. AI analytics tools, such as IBM Watson and Microsoft’s Azure Machine Learning, can process vast amounts of data quickly and accurately, helping employees more quickly make informed decisions based on lightning-quick AI-driven insights.

The benefits of AI-enhanced decision-making are significant. First, AI-driven operations improves accuracy according to a 2022 McKinsey study, leading to better business outcomes and a more competitive edge. This can have far-reaching effects from optimizing supply chain management to improving customer satisfaction and driving revenue growth.

AI may have some limitations in terms of replicated human bias – more on that below – but when used wisely, it can also promote more unbiased decision-making. It can reduce and even eliminate cognitive biases that cloud human judgment, making for more objective, data-driven decisions including in HR.

For example, AI-powered recruitment tools like Workable ensure unbiased hiring processes. For example, its Video Interviews functionality creates interview questions that autopopulate across all interviews for a uniform experience, and its AI Recruiter surfaces candidates based on qualifications and experience. Its AI-created job descriptions are also free of bias.

AI fostering workplace collaboration

As the modern workplace continues to evolve, effective collaboration has become more important than ever. AI tech can also facilitate communication, as well as streamline project management and workflows.

Let’s look at each in depth:

Communication

AI-powered communication tools are revolutionizing how teams collaborate. AI-enhanced tools like SuperNormal’s AI-driven notetaking functionality can significantly improve communication and collaboration among team members.

For example, SuperNormal features automatically transcribes and analyzes meeting content, making it easy for participants to review, share and reference key points discussed. This capability not only enhances communication but also helps to ensure that remote and distributed workers remain engaged and informed, even if they’re unable to attend a meeting in real time.

Chief CX Innovation Officer Jonathan Shroyer at Arise Virtual Solutions is a huge proponent of AI tools in communications, citing emerging tools include AI support chatbots, repeat process automation, AI agents and big data bots in this Forbes article.

Project management and workflow

Project management is another area where AI-enhanced tools such as Asana, Trello and Jira can streamline workflows and improve team collaboration through the automation of tasks, identification of bottlenecks and future-proofing against project risks.

For example, Asana’s workload feature uses AI to analyze team members’ capacity and automatically allocate tasks, ensuring that work is distributed evenly and preventing burnout. Similarly, Trello’s AI-powered ‘Butler’ automates routine tasks, enabling team members to focus on higher-value activities and collaborate more effectively. Atlassian has incorporated predictive machine learning tools into its Jira and Confluence softwares.

The impact of AI on project management is significant. Harvard Business Review writes extensively about how AI will transform project management. In their article, they say that about $48 trillion are invested in projects annually, but only 35% of projects are considered to be successful according to Standish Group. And according to a Gartner report, 80% of project management tasks will be run by AI by the year 2030.

That’s a lot of money at stake. If AI-driven project management can make processes more efficient and productive, shortening project durations and reducing errors, it’s a no-brainer to incorporate AI and machine learning capabilities to foster team collaboration.

Overcoming challenges of AI implementation

It’s not all roses, though. There are challenges that you need to bear in mind when implementing AI to support human skills and collaboration at work. Concerns about job displacement and ethical considerations are pressing issues that you must address as you bring AI into your everyday operations.

Job displacement

One of the most significant concerns surrounding AI implementation is the potential for job displacement. While AI can automate repetitive tasks and improve efficiency, this automation has raised fears of job losses and workforce disruption. For instance, a new World Economic Forum report finds that a quarter of all jobs will be impacted over the next five years with AI at the forefront of those changes.

Here’s a spin on it, however – that same WEF report notes a net positive in jobs over the next five years due to these new developments. It’ll be tumultuous, but in the end, it’s a shift in jobs rather than a reduction in job opportunities.

However, to overcome redundancy, companies will need to adopt the right strategies and invest in workforce development to ensure they stay competitive in the business landscape. Rather than simply seeing AI as replacing humans in work processes, AI can be viewed as a complementary tool that enhances human skills. By focusing on the opportunities that AI creates, organizations can unlock the technology’s full potential and ensure a smooth transition for their workforce.

MIT’s Paul McDonagh-Smith is a supporter of this mentality, highlighting the merger of technological prowess with human drivers to boost your organizational ‘creativity quotient’. In a recent webinar, he discussed how human and machine capabilities can work in a mutually complementary fashion rather than compete with each other.

So what does that mean? Change does not need to be scary. It can be seen as an opportunity. Employees can be reskilled and upskilled so they’re equipped with the resources and talents they need to adapt quickly to their evolving roles and the technologies that come with them. Those who are agile, prepared and continually learning will get ahead.

Data backs this up. The WEF reports that 50% of all employees will need reskilling by 2025 as adoption of workplace technologies grows – with the bulk of those skills focused around problem-solving and critical thinking.

If you proactively address those needs in your business, you can mitigate those job displacement concerns in your teams. Encourage them to grow and develop, and support them to do so, so your business can be set for success in the age of AI.

Ethical use of AI in the workplace

As AI becomes increasingly integrated into the workplace, ensuring its ethical use is paramount. You’ll want to address potential issues related to employee privacy and algorithmic bias to ensure a responsible and equitable AI-driven work environment.

To protect employee privacy, you should establish clear policies and guidelines regarding the collection, storage and use of personal data. By being transparent about how AI technologies process employee data and implementing robust security measures, businesses can build trust and mitigate privacy concerns.

Addressing algorithmic bias is another essential element of ethical AI use. AI systems can inadvertently perpetuate existing biases if they are trained on biased data or designed without considering potential biases. Amazon’s gender-biased hiring using AI is one of the more prominent examples, as well as the infamous “racist soap dispenser” that made waves online some years back.

To counteract these issues, SMBs should invest in diverse AI development teams and implement bias-detection and mitigation strategies in their AI systems. By doing so, they can promote fairness, inclusivity and diversity in the workplace.

Finally, maintaining human oversight is crucial for the ethical use of AI. While AI can augment human decision-making and enhance productivity, it is essential to ensure that humans remain in control and responsible for critical decisions.

AI is the great empowerer

AI in the workplace will revolutionize how we work, collaborate and innovate. It won’t replace humans – it’ll simply enhance human skills. That is, if we empower employees to grow professionally and adapt accordingly to the changing demands of the modern work environment.

Organizations can also incorporate AI tools to foster workplace collaboration, facilitate communication, streamline project management and optimize workflows. At the core of all this? The human aspect.

There’s a powerful saying that’s making the rounds right now: AI will not take your job, but people who use AI will. Keep that in your mind as you move forward – AI isn’t a threat. It’s a great empowerer.

Humans now get from point A to point B faster using machines rather than horses, and can build more quickly with nail guns and electric saws rather than hammers and hacksaws. You’ll find that with a balanced approach and a well-developed human development strategy that incorporates AI, you can continue to thrive as people and as businesses.

The post How AI can enhance human skills and collaboration at work appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

It was March 5, 2018, when Frances McDormand during her Oscar acceptance speech for Best Actress sent a powerful message: women have ideas and, to put those ideas into action, they need a seat at the table.

This message goes beyond Hollywood and the film industry; women in the workplace today should be equal with their male colleagues. And it’s not just about representation for the sake of it; it’s not about striking gender balance in numerical terms. Of course, that’s a good start. But, to elaborate on McDormand’s point, what’s even more important is to bring gender balance in leadership roles, in the decision-making process and in the strategic part of the business.

With International Women’s Day just around the corner, now seems like the perfect time to further the discussion on gender balance, particularly in leadership. Every year, on March 8, the rights of women in education, equal pay and fair treatment at work are assessed worldwide. And while the battle against gender inequality in the workplace is not a one-day event, this day is still a good opportunity to assess where we stand right now, what has changed from this time last year and previous years, and where we can improve.

Gender equality at work in numbers

The good…

In a Pew Research Center survey, we find out that “today’s young women are starting their careers better educated than their male counterparts.” And as most women now get higher education than their mothers and grandmothers before them, they’re able to bring those skills to the workplace and this has started to show. In other research, we learn that Americans don’t find significant differences between women and men in their ability to run a company, with numbers varying based on sector.

In fact, in certain industries, women seem to have an advantage based on the survey’s findings. 31% think a woman would do a better job running a retail chain, while only 6% can say the same for a man. In healthcare, 19% think a woman would be a better choice as a hospital’s manager, while less than half (8%) would say the same for a man.

Various studies indicate that when women get senior positions, companies become more profitable. (Some examples here and here.) These numbers help investors look towards female-founded companies. They also make business owners consider diversifying their senior management.

… and the bad

Only 23 of 239 VC-backed unicorn companies across the world have female founders, while women are underrepresented in CEO positions, too, with only 4% of US Fortune 500 companies having a female CEO. For women of color, the numbers are even more disappointing, as only 4% hold a C-suite role among US companies. In the same 2018 Woman in the Workplace study, we learn that for every 100 men who are promoted to manager level, only 79 women are promoted and, if we break down the data even more, just 60 black women are promoted.

In a YoY analysis, we can see that women are getting more places in the board, but men outnumber women significantly in all regions. For example, between 2005 and 2014 European companies had 14% women in their boards and this percentage rose to 24% since 2014. In other areas the inequality of men and women is even larger: for example, in Japan, the same metric went from 1% to 2% and in North America from 15% to 18%.

Finally, working women may now get higher salaries than in the past, but they still make less than their male colleagues. Based on data from the US Census Bureau, a woman makes 80.5 cents for every dollar a man earns. And when it comes to the highest incomes, the job aggregating service, Adzuna, found that only 11% of those who earn more than $100,000 per annum are female employees.

Why is there such a gender inequality in the workplace?

Everyone is all about Diversity & Inclusion in the workplace these days. Still, the numbers above tell a different story. It seems like we want to bring more women in leadership, but we don’t really know how to do that.

There’s a long history of gender imbalance

One of the main reasons for this gender inequity is that we’re tied to old habits. Historically, C-suite roles are held by men and in certain industries, such as tech or manufacturing, the discrepancy is even more obvious. Think, for example, an engineering position. Traditionally, there have always been more male job applicants for a role like this, so naturally these male candidates get hired and eventually promoted to managerial roles.

Even if now things have changed and more women choose to study engineering and web development, it’s still tough for them to enter this male-dominant space. And when they enter, they come across a dead end. For men, the career path seems pre-determined; their (male) managers have already showed the way. But how can women compete with their male colleagues who are already in track of becoming managers? Most importantly, how can they advance their careers if no one’s advocating for them and if there are no other female leaders who can set the example?

Unconscious bias is all around us

“Men are more assertive than women, that’s why they request and get a promotion more often.”

“After a certain age, women will struggle to balance family needs with the requirements of a senior position.”

“Women are more sensitive, thus not able to handle the pressure that goes with leadership.”

These are all generalizations and stereotypes, yet they impact the way women are treated in the workplace. We’re inclined to think that women won’t be able to handle their management duties, instead of creating a work-life balanced environment for all employees or instead of building up those necessary leadership skills among our high-potential staff, regardless their gender.

Age discrimination in the workplace is also a common issue specifically for women. They’re often overlooked for a promotion under the assumption that they might get pregnant soon. Or, they’re not easily given a chance to move their career forward and take on challenging tasks once they return at work after a short break.

Bringing more women in leadership

In most countries, more women have now access to high education and they’re performing better than their male students. We’re surrounded by strong females who openly take a stand against inequity and influence other women to do the same. Global movements like #MeToo turn the spotlight on what once used to be a taboo issue. These are all signs that allow for some optimism.

But we can’t truly tackle gender inequality in the workplace just by sitting around and waiting for things to change, or even voicing a desire to make things better. We need to get proactive if we want to achieve gender balance.

Benefit from the ripple effect

The quickest solution to fix the lack of women in leadership roles is to hire women in leadership roles. Affirmative actions will bring you results in the short-term. But they will also have a long-term impact. Simply put: hiring one woman in a senior position raises the total number of females with a senior-level job by one. But in the future, this woman is likely to hire and promote more women too. So, eventually, that number will go even higher.

This happens for two reasons. First, that woman is able to better understand the potential of her peers and can advocate for them. She also understands how her team can benefit from gender balance and knows where to look for new female team members. Second, she acts as a role model for other women who might be otherwise more hesitant to apply for a job at an all-men team. Seeing a woman at the wheel, though, they get the message that this particular team (and company in general) values women and gives them the opportunity to grow.

Along these lines, Rachel Bates, Workable’s SVP of Sales & Marketing, described how – and why – she built a gender balanced sales team as a female hiring manager. And the need to do that was clear after she realized that, when looking for a new job in late 2016, 49 out of 50 times she was interviewed by a man.

Opt for tailor-made support to women

The fact that men outnumber women in senior positions makes the workplace look like a boys’ club. And we’re not just talking about toxic situations where male coworkers engage into locker room talk or female employees get harassed. A “boys’ club” exists when there’s no representation for women in decision-making. Because that’s when female voices are rarely heard and their needs are overlooked.

To change that, we don’t need more discussion on why gender balance in the workplace is good; we need tangible steps. But that’s a hard thing to do when you’re the only woman in your team. Sharing advice with other successful women; having a female mentor; actively participating in women’s groups: these are all ways for women to learn from each other and get empowered in the workplace. Organizations like She Geeks Out do exactly this: create a network, a safe place for women who want to advance their careers. Recently, we collaborated with SGO for an event dedicated to age and gender discrimination and learned what companies can do to tackle these challenges. You can also watch the recording of our event:

Here’s another aspect of that “boys’ club” mentality: 98% of VC funding goes to men. Women with great business ideas still struggle to get financial help. And it’s this exact unfairness that certain VC companies try to address, by funding only female-led startups.

Make a sustainable change

Gender balance in the workplace, and specifically in leadership roles, it’s not a quota you want to reach. Let’s say you actively look for and hire more women in senior-level jobs at your company. If you don’t support those women, then they won’t be able to make a difference in the organization. If you don’t support career growth for the rest of your women who now hold an entry-level position, then soon you’ll face gender imbalance again.

If you want to fix gender inequality in the workplace, you have to fight the problem at its roots. You need to implement company-wide policies that promote equity, you need to train executives and employees across all levels on biases and you need to engage the “privileged” group – men – in discussions on why gender balance is important.

Only when we’ve all realized why equity in the workplace is important and when we’re all committed to fight discrimination, we’ll be able to truly create work environments where every employee has equal rights in leading and thriving. It’s not just the movie industry that Frances McDormand is referring to – it’s the workplace at large.

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Here’s what we learned:

Most of our US respondents say they’re working full-time (55.3%), with an additional 13.5% working part-time.

One in 10 respondents (10.4%) say they’re working for themselves, whether that means they’re a contractor, freelancing, or running their own business.

One fifth of respondents (20.8%) say they’re not working right now.

Those identifying as females are far more likely to be not working (26% vs. 15.3%) or working part-time (17.7% vs. 8.6%) than males.

We also found an equally striking gender imbalance in those who are working. Those identifying as male are resoundingly more likely to be working full-time (68.4% vs. 46.3%, a difference of 22.1 in percentage points).

And for part-time workers, the opposite is true – 17.7% of those identifying as female are working part-time compared with 8.6% of males.

Of those not working, more than a third (34.4%) have not worked in more than five years.

More than a fifth (21.9%) say their current status not working began just in the last six months, with an additional 13.8% saying it’s been half a year to one year since they had been working.

And now, the important part for you, the employer: seven out of 10 (70.7%) say they are either actively (33.4%) or passively (37.3%) looking for work.

This means that when you look at your existing workforce, just three out of every 10 aren’t potentially looking for work at this time.

And many are actually just starting to look at other opportunities. Of those either actively looking or passively open to other work, 54% started within the last half year (28.1% just started now, 25.7% in the last half year).

Employers take note: this means a majority of your people are looking to leave or they’re open to that possibility. On the flip side, if you’re looking to hire or build teams, you have a wealth of available talent to tap into here.

This merits a deeper understanding of who these people are and why they’re looking, so you can evolve your recruitment and people strategy. Let’s dig in.

Minorities are looking

One of the demographic questions we asked in the survey was; “Do you identify as a member of a minority group (be it race, ethnicity, language, religion, country of origin, sexual orientation, gender, or another characteristic)?”. A full third (33%) say they do, compared with 61.6% who say they don’t, and 5.3% prefer not to say.

So we looked at responses based on those answers. Those identifying as minorities are much more likely to be actively looking (42.9% vs. 29.3%) than those not identifying as minorities.

Younger people are looking

While the “passively looking” category is equally represented across age groups from 21 to 49 years of age, it’s the “actively looking” category that is significantly represented by younger cohorts, with 42.8% of those aged 21-29 saying they’re outright looking for new opportunities.

And when combined, the numbers are striking: a staggering 80% of those aged 21-29, 74.9% of those aged 31-39, and 75% of those aged 40-49 are either actively looking for or passively open to work right now.

We know that tenures are usually shorter for younger people. Also younger people tend to be more in rank-and-file positions than managerial/upper-crust positions, and those tend to see higher turnover.

But it also means younger generations in the United States expect more from their employers and are less willing to put up with the current reality in the workplace.

All in all, people are looking

Again, this points to a clear message: seven out of 10 employees at your company have one foot out of the door at any given time. Your talent is ready to leave as soon as they find something better. That’s particularly if they’re younger or if they identify as a minority.

But again, this is a huge talent market right here that you can tap into when hiring. Which raises a new question – how do you attract them to your company?

We’ll cover this in detail in the next few articles, but if you want to read more right now, jump right into our comprehensive Great Discontent US worker survey report right here.

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We all wear rose-colored glasses at times, and when we’re looking for a new job we want to believe everything we’re hearing and seeing: opportunities for promotion, professional development, and work/life balance are often embellished in the recruitment cycle. And we eagerly accept this on face value – we want to believe we’re test-driving a Mercedes.

Read more on the importance of authentic recruitment marketing.

What’s wrong with corporate values?

Almost every company has a set of values that adorn its office walls. There’s much talk of the culture these values underpin, and their virtues are extolled in annual reports and investor briefings. There’s just one problem: it’s rare that these aspirational values actually align with the reality of the company’s culture.

Most often, corporate values are developed to describe the way an organization would like its employees to behave, not how they actually behave. They describe a desirable future state that we should aspire to, yet the leaders of the organization pay little attention to the values day-to-day, and certainly make no attempt to build the culture that they imply.

There’s nothing wrong with having a set of corporate values that describe a desired future state. But to implement a constructive culture that embodies that state, the company’s leaders would have to agree, communicate, and enforce a minimum acceptable standard of behavior and performance.

It’s common for leaders to lose sight of the values when the pressing issues of the day dominate their attention. But, unfortunately, it’s also common for them to speak about the company as if the values are representative of reality – they overstate the role that corporate values play in the running of the business.

Overselling the opportunity

When you’re hiring someone new, you want to showcase your organization in the best possible light, and it’s easy to oversell the opportunity to a prospective employee. You have to remember that your potential hires are quite vulnerable and impressionable during this process. They wouldn’t have applied for the job unless they wanted it, and they’re looking for positive validation: You want the job? Well we want you for the job!

You’ll often find plenty of evidence to support your claims of grandeur, because the board and the CEO create brand collateral to showcase the company in its best light. Many companies produce brochureware to extoll the virtues of their corporate values, the strategic plan, and the positive culture that the leadership has created (oh, and our people are our greatest asset, right!?)

But it doesn’t serve anyone’s interests to bring people into the organization, only for them to become disgruntled and disillusioned when the stark reality sets in.

The Employee Value Proposition (EVP)

As CEO of a major energy business Australia, competition for high quality people was sometimes fierce: but we weren’t in a sexy industry where the best and brightest young graduates lined up each day to fight their way through the crowd and hand us their résumés.

So we decided to take a more methodical approach, and put some serious effort into understanding how to sell the benefits of the organization, without overselling them. This became known as our employee value proposition (EVP).

We started with two key questions:

1. What’s the difference in perception between someone with little knowledge of the company, and someone who has worked here for some time?; and
2. How can we best convey that to prospective employees so that we showcase the organization’s benefits accurately, and enable them to make an informed decision about joining?

In this research, we took time to capture people’s perceptions at different stages of the recruitment process. We surveyed those who had just applied for the job to capture their impressions of the company based on the scant information in the public domain. We surveyed them again at the end of the interview process, whether they were offered the role or not. And for those who chose to join the company, we surveyed them again at various stages during their first six months.

From this, we managed to identify how people’s perceptions changed from the relative ignorance of a first-time applicant to the experience of a person who had ‘lived the dream’ for long enough to form a sensible opinion.

Once armed with this knowledge, we were able to develop our EVP. The main objective was to increase our chances of attracting the best candidates for any role, while at the same time avoiding costly hiring mistakes. But the EVP also became a reminder for everyone in the business about the positive aspects of working for the company, in a way that was both positive and authentic.

Developing an employee value proposition will allow you to accurately and honestly communicate your company’s values and culture to internal and external stakeholders alike.

Where should you start?

Not every company is able to invest the necessary time and effort into developing an EVP. But there are some simple steps you can take to ensure your company’s benefits are represented accurately to anyone who happens to ask.

Start by identifying the gaps. It’s important to understand and articulate the reality of the company culture, as opposed to the aspirational corporate values. People need to know where the company is now, where it’s heading, and what you’re doing to take it there.

Words are cheap, and if leaders don’t focus on driving change every day, the company becomes stagnant. So don’t fret about the gap in the corporate values – just take whatever steps you need to ensure that gap is being reduced every day, as you lead your team to a higher standard of behavior and performance.

Martin G. Moore is the founder of Your CEO Mentor and author of No Bullsh!t Leadership and host of the No Bullsh!t Leadership podcast. His purpose is to improve the quality of leaders globally through practical, real world leadership content. For more information, please visit www.martingmoore.com.

The post Do your corporate values reflect reality? appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Here’s what we learned:

Most of our respondents say they’re working full-time (60.1%), and another fifth (22.2%) working part time. Just one in 10 (10.4%) say they’re not working right now.

Another 7.4% of respondents say they’re working for themselves, whether that means they’re a contractor, freelancing, or running their own business.

One in 10 respondents (10.4%) say they’re not working right now.

But when we looked at the responses by gender, the numbers were more striking. Those identifying as females are far more likely to be not working (14.5% vs. 6.1%) or working part-time (31.3% vs. 13%) than males.

Females working for themselves also represented a much higher percentage than their male counterparts (10.8% vs. 4%).

On the flip side, more than three quarters of males (76.9%) are working full-time, compared with just 43.4% of females, a significant difference of 33.5 percentage points.

Of those not working, nearly two out of five (38.5%) have not worked in more than five years.

Three out of 10 (30.7%) say they last worked within the last year, with 19.2% saying they have not been working for less than six months.

And now, the important part for you, the employer: a vast majority (74.6%) say they are either actively (29.6%) or passively (45.1%) looking at new opportunities.

That’s three quarters of all respondents who might leave you at any time – meaning when you look at your current workforce, just one in four are pretty settled in their current working capacity.

And many are actually just starting to look for other opportunities right now. Of those actively looking or passively open to new work, 56.6% started looking within the last half year (26.7% just started now, 29.9% in the last half year).

Employers take note: this means a majority of your people are looking to leave or they’re open to that possibility. On the flip side, if you’re looking to hire or build teams, you have a wealth of available talent to tap into here.

This requires a deeper understanding of who these people are and why they’re looking so you can evolve your recruitment and people strategy, as Personio’s CEO recommends. Let’s dig in.

Minorities are looking

One of the demographic questions we asked in the survey was; “Do you identify as a member of a minority group (be it race, ethnicity, language, religion, country of origin, sexual orientation, gender, or another characteristic)?”. Three out of 10 (30.9%) say they do, compared with 66.1% who say they don’t, and 3% prefer not to say.

So we looked at responses based on those answers. Those identifying as minorities are also much more likely to be actively looking (41.3% vs. 24.2%) than those not identifying as minorities. And nearly twice as many non-minorities say they’re not looking for new opportunities when compared with minorities (29% vs. 15.5%).

Younger people are looking

Those in the “actively looking” category are more significantly represented by younger cohorts. More than two out of five (41.7%) of those aged 21-29 say they’re outright looking for new opportunities, with that number skewing sharply downwards when looking at higher age groups.

When combined, the numbers are striking: a staggering 79.8% of those aged 21-29 and a significantly higher 85.1% of those aged 31-39 are either actively looking for or passively open to new work right now. This means just one in five of those aged 21 to 29 and less than 15% of those aged 30 to 39 can be seen as quite settled in their current roles.

Interestingly, the top age group passively open to new opportunities is 50-59 (54.1%).

We know that tenures are usually shorter for younger people. Also younger people tend to be more in rank-and-file positions than managerial/upper-crust positions, and those roles tend to see higher turnover.

But it also indicates younger generations in the UK expect more from their employers and are less willing to put up with the current reality in the workplace.

All in all, people are looking

Again, the message is clear: three quarters of your employees at your company have one foot out of the door at any given time. Your talent is ready to jump ship as soon as they find something better. That’s particularly if they’re younger or if they identify as a minority.

But looking at it from another perspective, this also means a huge talent market that you can tap into when hiring. That raises a new question – how do you attract them to your company?

We’ll cover this in detail in the next few articles, but if you want to read more right now, jump right into our comprehensive Great Discontent worker survey report right here.

The post 74.6% of UK workers open to new work, survey finds appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

“I think a lot of organizations are now realizing, they have missed out a whole, big chunk of diversity and inclusion,” says Chikere. “And when they look into their businesses, there is a blatant lack of representation at all levels but especially at mid to senior level – C Suite. So organizations are really sitting up and saying, we need to really address this.”

Data seems to confirm this observation. According to a workplace discrimination survey from by EEOC, 1,889,631 discrimination complaints were filed in the US from 1997 to 2018, and 34% of were related to race, based on an additional report from 2017.

Would those numbers be the same if we educated ourselves more on racial discrimination, diversity and inclusion? How different workplaces would be if we stood up for minorities when needed? Chikere explains how we can become a part of the anti-racism solution, by becoming true allies.

The definition of allies at work

What does being an ally in the workplace mean? Chikere starts with a quick but comprehensive definition:

“An ally is someone who uses their power and privilege to advocate for others. Allies are not members of marginalized groups. Allies support Black, Brown and minority employees, colleagues and friends by understanding what they go through. Allies educate themselves on issues that affect Black, Brown and minority people, speaking out on injustices, educating colleagues, friends and family about being an ally and acknowledging their privilege and being actively anti-racist.”

So how can White employees turn into allies for racial and ethnic minority colleagues? It all starts by acknowledging their heavy loads:

“Allies support and make an effort to better understand the struggle,” Chikere notes. “Allies are powerful voices amongst marginalized ones. And the reason why I say that is more than likely, an ally would have friends and family who look like them, that they can go and talk to about being an ally. And obviously, the key thing is, we need more people to take action and stand up.”

A privileged employee who wishes to make an impact should find the right way to advocate for marginalized groups. Chikere says that the conversation about allyship in the workplace in most cases starts with human resources, team managers or external DEI partners and needs the buy-in of senior leaders. It’s not always easy at first, but this discussion should start as soon as possible. Chikere reminds us:

“If you have minority employees within your organization, talk to them. What do they want? But I think the thing is, not to leave it on the minority employee to lead these initiatives. That is not their job. Their job is not to educate people or lead the initiative.”

The sensitivity of this matter can make those conversations uncomfortable for many, but this is not a sufficient reason to avoid them. We should remember that change happens at the edge of our comfort zones.

How to foster allyship in the workplace

According to Chikere, allyship should start with self-education. Before forming allyship groups, learn what type of struggles and injustices minority groups face at work. This will help you understand their needs and start constructive conversations with them. Chikere explains:

“To be an ally you have to educate yourselves. Listen to Black, Brown and minority colleagues, employees, friends, and voices. Listen to what they have to say. Have conversations with other White people, family, friends, employees, about being an ally and help educate them.”

She also states that to become a good ally you must acknowledge your privilege and be “color brave rather than color blind”. When you realize how privileged you are compared to other people, you’ll feel more obliged to contribute to the change.

It’s also critical to learn other mechanisms that might block the progress, for example, the “bystander effect”, a phenomenon during which people are less likely to address a negative incident, such as an act of racial injustice, if many people witness it at the same time.

One possible explanation on an organizational level is that observers may leave it up to employees of greater authority, with stronger bonds with management to act, and avoid potential conflict. This is an implication that might distract us from being allies and to prevent it, we ought to acknowledge it. Same goes with unconscious biases we might hold against people who look different to us.

Once you accept the blessings of your own privilege and the duty that comes with it to support marginalized groups, it’s time for action. Start by using your exact position to amplify discrimination and make sure to promote racial representantion and inclusion in the organization. For example, if you’re a recruiter, you can start by diversifying your talent pipeline:

“What is stopping you as a recruiter from diversifying your pipeline?” wonders Chikere. “Getting more diverse candidates? Why is it the case that we are hiring the same type of people? That really has got to stop. So I think the key thing is, as an ally, you really have to go out there and educate yourself.”

One way to diversify your talent pool, according to Chikere, is to search for diverse candidates in different places to avoid getting the same type of people. Advertise your jobs through diverse channels, highlight diversity on your website, and teach your hiring team how to avoid biases. These will be proactive approaches to diversity and inclusion.

The difference between performative vs. proactive action

With this suggestion, Chikere makes it clear that being proactive when it comes to allyship and inclusivity is far more beneficial than sticking to performative actions. For example, joining the Blackout Tuesday initiative on social media without introducing any other organizational changes – also known as slacktivism – is performative and not useful in the long run. Chikere clarifies:

“During George Floyd’s murder and the BLM protests, a lot of organizations put out solidarity statements and took to putting up black squares on social media. Great. Amazing. But it’s the case of, what are you doing after that?”

But many businesses decided to go to the proactive direction by introducing drastic changes, such as increasing Black managerial representation or creating DEI advisory boards. These efforts will hopefully serve a long-lasting effect going forward.

Apparently, a leader’s role is crucial in promoting allyship in the workplace. When C-suite level and managers build a psychologically safe environment, minority groups find it easier to express their needs and feel more accepted.

In a nutshell, if you want to become a true ally at work, start by educating yourself more on diversity, equity and inclusion. Learn about racism and injustice and try to empathize with underprivileged groups more. If you are in a leadership position, remember that your responsibility is bigger; as a role model in business, you need to embrace the anti-racism and allyship conversations and solutions at their core.

Below, you’ll find some book suggestions from Allyship BookClub that’ll help you start this meaningful journey:

1. Subtle Acts of Exclusion: How to Understand, Identify, and Stop Microaggressions by Tiffany Jana and Michael Baran.
2. Why I’m No longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge.
3. The Purpose of Power: How we come together when we fall apart by Alicia Garza.
4. White Fragility: Why it’s Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo.
5. How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi.

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That’s something you should be concerned about as an employer, so let’s look at why they’re thinking of leaving and what would compel them to stick around. It turns out that skills development, training and overall growth are high up the list of priorities for tech workers.

For instance, in the same survey, 91% want more training opportunities from their current employers.

And it’s not just training. When tech employees are making a career choice, salary and benefits are by and far the most important criteria when deciding who to work for, with 76% picking that as their top decider.

Workable’s Great Discontent survey echoes this sentiment as well, with 63.4% of US workers saying the top reason they’re open to new jobs is because of compensation.

As a tech employer looking to retain your staff, you also want to focus on a career path structure in your company. That’s because two out of five tech workers say the lack of career progression is the main reason they’re leaving their current job.

Three out of five (58%) also tagged skills development as their number-one motivator in choosing a new company. Likewise, three out of five (62%) say that more training and learning as a part of their job will make them more motivated at work.

To quote from the report: “Combined with L&D opportunities being one of the top criteria for selecting a job, the message is clear: training can help slow down the wave of resignations.”

When we’re seeing four million American workers quitting their jobs every month – including in August alone – it’s time for action. Employers need to step up their game with new recruitment strategies to compel their workers to stick around.

But there’s a bright side to all this

Texas A&M professor Dr. Anthony Klotz, who coined the now-famous term “The Great Resignation”, says these insights actually provide an opportunity for employers to get ahead of the problem of turnover.

“While the percentage of individuals thinking about resigning may be high, the good news for organizational leaders is that many of the top reasons that employees provided for wanting to leave are readily addressable,” says Anthony.

He emphasizes that investing in more opportunities for development and career advancement, greater flexibility, and boosting compensation and benefits are all things that can be quickly implemented in one’s own company as significant talent attractors.

And, he adds, keep that two-way street open with your workforce. For example, you can and should use employee surveys to better understand what’s expected of you as an employer.

“There is an opportunity here for companies to talk to their employees about these issues in the wake of the pandemic, and then trial or implement potential solutions.”

The post Invest in your tech workers – or they’ll move on: Survey appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Predictions are being made left and right as to what the workplace will look like going forward. Some of these look like wild science fiction, but many companies are already pioneering radical new concepts that push the boundaries of technology and humanity at work.

What are those new developments? We’re not looking at next year – we’re going to go to the future of HR in 2030 … and beyond.

Let’s look at a few of them right now and how HR plays a role:

1. AI-augmented talent

We’re already entering this brave new world of AI co-pilots – that much is known. This is where AI assistants (or co-pilots) work alongside human employees to enhance their skills and productivity. At present, ChatGPT, Google Bard, Anthropic’s Claude and other generative AI tools are being introduced in new workplace policies and training to ensure that employees stay meaningfully engaged in their work while partnered with bots.

Imagine the head of HR helping a team of engineers and researchers join forces with AI assistants to speed up programming and testing cycles – not just in coding and other dev work, but physical design and testing. Policies, processes, and oversights will be implemented to facilitate that collaboration.

2. Micro-learning via brain uploads

Remember the scene in The Matrix where knowledge and skills are uploaded directly into Keanu Reeves’ brain? And he opens his eyes and says in his unmistakable tone: “I know kung fu!”.

This is sort of like that. Skills development may involve implanting knowledge and training directly into your memory for rapid reskilling.

Let’s say the chief learning officer at a manufacturing firm needs to upskill 200 technicians across the country for an urgent project. This CLO would analyze existing skills data, gaps, and needs across the team and deploy the most useful ‘brain upload pods’ for individuals and work teams to optimize productivity. Presto, the team comes in Monday ready to tackle that big new job.

3. 3-D printed workspaces

The rapid restructuring of the working world in recent years has its physical impact as well – those huge skyscrapers in the city center may still exist, but office vacancy rates are at an all-time high. And that’s closely correlated with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of the hybrid workplace. Evidently, the traditional workplace just doesn’t work anymore.

Instead of frantically trying to find an existing ideal workplace and locking in a five-year lease, wouldn’t it be great if you could just redesign your office using 3-D printing for increased flexibility, collaboration and even employee satisfaction?

HR can use telepresence robots and AR that engage remote workers with the space, and do it all in modular fashion to make for more robust design flexibility.

4. Supersized virtual workforces

In tandem with the surge in remote and distributed teams, imagine entire networks of remote workers across continents – let’s say Asia or Africa – all accessible within a single platform to scale customized teams for short-term projects.

A head of HR would be able to assemble and manage a team of 50 remote workers for two months – and upload specific knowledge into their brains to speed up onboarding – to tackle a machine learning initiative.

We do have this sort-of ‘talent access’ ecosystem already available in the form of the shared economy (as recruitment expert Hung Lee explains in the following video). We also have agencies that hire out temp workers. Think of it like this, but in bigger, loftier concepts.

5. Exoskeleton suits

Again, we’ve seen this in the movies. Avatar is a good example where exoskeleton technology was utilized to boost performance. Of course real life isn’t a James Cameron movie, but we’re also seeing exosuits in real life in many different forms:

Wearable exoskeletons can prevent injury, increase productivity, and extend longevity especially in physically demanding jobs – boosting retention and ROI in one fell swoop. Procuring office supplies and the like are often a responsibility in human resources – think of exoskeletons as a more advanced form of this, especially when it means greater workplace safety.

6. Workplace biometric monitoring

You likely have a smartwatch and/or a fitness tracker with you at all times – this falls into that bucket. Non-invasive technology can monitor employee health, mood, and performance within the workplace through a combination of biomarkers, wearables and environment sensors. HR would set that up to build real-time big data models (with your express permission, of course) to identify patterns and implement preemptive interventions.

Some of these interventions would be proactive wellbeing initiatives, productivity recommendations, and even workplace changes (which you’d, of course, spearhead using 3-D printed office designs!). That’ll be a huge plus for employee experience – a major focus of HR.

7. ‘Swarm AI’ decision making

Synergy (sorry, we know that word isn’t popular) can be a real pain when you have too many cooks in the kitchen or too many meetings without a single stream of information. That makes for problems when making complex strategic decisions.

You can overcome that by enabling employees across all levels in the company to input anonymous perspectives and votes within an AI system – which then aggregates and synthesizes the ‘swarm’ knowledge into optimized proposals and recommendations.

HR can facilitate this collaborative and democratic decision-making process of tapping into the collective wisdom of the company beehive. This allows the higher-ups to curate divergent perspectives into a few optimized options for discussion – minimizing individual biases.

8. Supersized skill sets

One of the technological shortcomings that’s surfacing in this emerging age of automation and AI is that of human skills such as creativity, empathy, and complex problem solving. These will become ‘supersized’ skill sets that are not easily replicable by AI and therefore become even more crucial.

And it’s HR’s opportunity to capitalize and grow this skill set across the employee base through regular coaching and training sessions that are specifically designed to meet those crucial needs in a company that’s increasingly using tech in its everyday workflows.

And now… to the future

In today’s fast-paced business environment, companies can no longer be constrained by traditional paradigms of space, time, and human capabilities. The future is ripe with tech-volution, and we’re seeing it happen in real time.

And it’s driven by the biggest budgets outside of government – trillion-dollar organizations dedicated to optimization, productivity, innovation, and growth.

Add to that a vast range of pioneering startups, and the reimagination of work is at a pace where the workplace in 2030 may be unrecognizable to us today. The future of work is closer than we may realize and more human than we ever imagined.

The post The wild future of HR: 8 radical concepts made relatable appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.